Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Ehud Olmert, go home! The nation doesn’t need you anymore if it ever did. The Winograd Commission has levelled a staggering blow to your prime ministership in clear, unvarnished language as the NY Times reports:

The commission accused him of having decided hastily to go to war, neglecting to ask for a detailed military plan, refusing to consult outside the army and setting “over-ambitious and unobtainable goals.”

One result, the commission said, was that Mr. Olmert had been responsible for “a severe failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence.”

…”The prime minister bears supreme and comprehensive responsibility for the decisions of his government and the operations of the army.”

I listened to some of Winograd’s press conference remarks today in Hebrew and he made very clear that the Commission entirely disagreed with Olmert’s one-note military response to the Hezbollah attack. It believes that a limited military action combined with a robust diplomatic track would’ve been much more effective in the long run, an opinion I shared.

There can be no more attenuating, no more “yes, buts.” Olmert, your time has past.

Predictably, the U.S. government has lined up squarely behind its toady, Olmert: an “essential figure” in the peace process, blah, blah, blah. What they mean to say is that when we told Ehud that talking to Syria was a no-no, he saluted and followed marching orders. Now, they’re just repaying his loyalty. Thank God, George Bush doesn’t get to hire and fire Israel’s prime minister. Otherwise, they’d be saddled with Olmert for the remaining two years of the former’s presidency.

But the key question becomes: “what next?” As Akiva Eldar noted on NPR today: if Olmert calls for new elections then Netanyahu comes to power. He would be even worse than Olmert (if that’s possible). There is the possibility that a popular internal Kadima figure like Tzipi Livni could assume the prime ministership from Olmert without elections. But her mandate would be a frail one given the disrepute into which Olmert has brought the government and, by extension, his party.

I am sorry to say that Amir Peretz’s career effectively seems to be over. Not just as defense minister, but as Labor Party leader. I thought he had such promise. But I warned in this blog (and others did as well) that accepting the defense ministry post was a disastrous mistake given Peretz’s background and given the bankruptcy of Israeli military policy. Had he accepted the finance ministry he might still be Labor Party leader come the next election.

tags calls-for-olmert-peretz-to-resign, winograd-commission-report-on-lebanon-war-failure

When last we saw our hero, Steve Jobs he had lost a Superior Court case attempting to demolish historic Jackling House in Woodside, California created by famed architect George Washington Smith (designer of many Santa Barbara Spanish Revival buildings). Steve, never one to accept anything that stands in the way of realizing his ambitions, asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal. This week it refused. This means that Jobs has exhausted his legal remedies and must find someone to take the House and relocate it if he [Jobs] still wishes to build his dream house on the property.

Uphold Our Heritage, the preservation group established to save the house has always advocated for a resolution that would allow Jobs to build his new home while preserving Jackling House. Unfortunately, he has persevered in demanding his right to destroy it. The preservation group has found several preservation-minded individuals interested in negotiating with Jobs about relocating the home. Let’s hope that Jobs will see reason and begin negotiations in earnest with one of these potential buyers and the UOH attorney, Doug Carstens.

It never needed to come to this. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal fees, thousands of hours of staff time by the city of Woodside and various judicial venues that heard the case. I guess when you’re Steve Jobs the world marches to your rhythm rather than the other way around.

I get a lot of people coming to these posts who tell me in their infinite wisdom as ‘architectural historians’ that Jackling House looks like a load of rubbish. To them I’ll add a few quotes from the Uphold Our Heritage site:

The Jackling House [is in] the California Register of Historic Places for its association with an historic figure, copper baron Daniel Jackling, and for its exemplary design and materials, the work of master architect George Washington Smith, known as the “Founding Father” of Spanish Revival architecture in this country.

…George Washington Smith is one of only NINE great California estate designers acknowledged in “The Garden Book” (Phaidon, 2002). Smith gets a full page in the book, along with the world’s most important designers of palaces, châteaux, country houses, including Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the designers of the Alhambra, the Imperial Palace and Gardens in Tokyo, and Versailles!

In her book on “The Santa Barbara Style” (Rizzoli, New York, 2001) author Kathryn Masson lauds:

Smith’s masterful interpretation of the architectural vocabulary of vernacular buildings in Andalusian Spain. His use of authentic materials and command of architectural forms convey a romantic Mediterranean atmosphere. Traditional Spanish design is authenticated by thick stuccoed walls that allow for deep window and door openings, heavy overhangs with carved wooden corbels that throw structured shadows back onto the gleaming wall surfaces, and design elements such as hidden gardens, colonnaded porches, and multi-leveled building units with varying rooflines.

On a related subject, I noted that the NY Times business columnist Joe Nocera (TimesSelect required) wrote today about Steve Jobs and the current Apple options backdating scandal. Some of his observations of Jobs’ personality and behavior are amazingly pertinent to his actions in the Jackling House case:

Now let’s look at the other [second] grant–the 7.5 million options to Mr. Jobs himself…

Consider, first, Mr. Jobs’s desire to replace the 20 million options [which were "under water"] with the 7.5 million options. What he was really trying to do was reprice his options without actually admitting that — because repricing would entail an accounting expense. To avoid the expense, he was supposed to wait six months and a day after the cancellation of the first package before Apple gave him the new package.

But he was Steve Jobs, and he wasn’t about to go optionless for six months and a day…

You get the strong impression that nobody dared to say no to Mr. Jobs, a notoriously difficult and abrasive chief executive. One imagines the trepidation of the compensation committee members — or Ms. Heinen [corporate counsel] — in telling him that he couldn’t get a low option price because the stock had risen during the negotiations.

So instead, they found a date in October that approximated the stock price in August — and an underling created phony board minutes.

What is particularly galling is the double standard. You hear from lots of sophisticated investors that it would be terrible if Mr. Jobs were forced out at Apple. How, they say, would that help Apple shareholders?

But lots of other chiefs have lost their jobs because of options backdating, and several have even been indicted. However indispensable he may be, the notion that Mr. Jobs can’t be touched because he’s Steve Jobs is something terribly corrosive.

If the S.E.C. is coming to the view that options backdating is just a peccadillo, as Silicon Valley has claimed all along, it should say so. But if it believes this is serious stuff, then it shouldn’t be making excuses for Steve Jobs, as it appears to be doing.

As for Mr. Jobs, as hard as he’s worked to convey the image of an above-the-fray visionary, that’s not quite the reality, is it? I recently stumbled across this comment from him, circa 1985: “I’m at a stage where I don’t have to do things just to get by. But then I’ve always been that way, because I’ve never really cared about money.”

Yeah, right.

What Nocera notes, and the Jackling House episode confirms, is that Steve Jobs could have close to what he wants, but not quite the whole echilada, if he would just compromise a wee bit with reality in the form of corporate securities law (the stock options) or the California code (preserving Jackling House). But he won’t do it–on self-serving principle. And that’s where he gets himself into trouble. In the case of Jackling House, it isn’t a matter that will bring his empire down like a house of cards. In the case of the options scandal, it probably should but it won’t. Again, Steve Jobs lives a charmed life–one that isn’t earned. And that, as Nocera correctly note, is “something terribly corrosive” of societal values.

Jobs’ behavior concerning both Jackling House and the options scandal betrays his egomania and vanity. What he really wants to do regarding the house is tear it down so he can outdo his other Silicon Valley tycoon rivals who’ve built sumptuous palaces as monuments to their own egos. The irony here is that it’s possible that might’ve been Daniel Jackling’s own motive in originally building the house, since he himself was a copper baron trying to make his mark in the 1920s with an architectural statement. But regardless of whether there was vanity or ego involved in the original creation of this landmark, it has withstood the test of time in its 90 years of existence and is worthy of preservation.

tags george-washington-smith-architect, historic-preservation, jackling-house-saved, steve-jobs-loses-appeal-to-demolish-historic-home, uphold-our-heritage

My thanks to Mary Brandel for taking up the subject of cyberstalking in today’s Computerworld article, Five Ways to Defeat Blog Trolls and Cyberstalkers (for full page version). She interviewed me at length and we had a comprehensive discussion on the subject. This is a topic that internet free speech absolutists and blogging platforms and hosts don’t take nearly seriously enough. Personally, I think we all need to treat this not just as a free speech issue but as an issue of human dignity, respect and rights.

As I mentioned in the article, I appreciate blogging platforms like Wordpress which give their users innovative plugins allowing them to exert more control, if they wish, over the content and tone of their comment threads. Further development of such features should be encouraged by the platforms. Plugin authors are playing a major role in providing the tools to combat blog trolling and other cybermischief.

The latest on my cyberstalker, Steven Plaut. I spoke with Neve Gordon this week about his libel case against the former. Gordon expects the District Court (acting as a court of appeals) to render a verdict in the case which Plaut originally lost. It may come as early as a month from now. I asked Neve whether Plaut had created a fake blog through Blogger as revenge against Gordon’s legal action. As I suspected, Plaut did create one. It isn’t active now, but thankfully it’s preserved through the Internet Archive’s invaluable Wayback Machine. This further confirms Plaut as my cyberstalker fraud blogger since he’s also created a fake Blogger blog about Roland Rance after Rance took an active role in writing the Wikipedia article on Plaut. I find it remarkable that with a pattern of fraudulent behavior such as this that Blogger would continue to stand behind the fig leaf of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

I’ve made clear before here that I understand the importance of Section 230 as a protection for web and blog hosts from third parties who upload illegal material to their servers. But Section 230 shouldn’t give a blank check to such hosts and absolve them of any responsibility to remove vulgar, defamatory material which damages the victim’s psyche and reputation. Just because you’re protected from liability doesn’t mean you aren’t free to use common sense as a host. Bsinet used such common sense in taking down Masada2000. Unfortunately, Blogger takes a more obstinate, unreasonable position.

My brother discovered Google’s public listing of its top five executive officers and one of them, Jonathan Rosenberg, is senior vice president for marketing. I contacted his executive assistant who, on first conversation with me understood the severe annoyance this fake blog caused me and said she hoped there was something that might be done. She asked me to forward all the supporting material to her and she said she’d bring it to the attention of someone at Blogger. Within a few minutes she replied:

…It appears that there is nothing more Blogger can do and you must go after the creator of the website.

Which is of course not true. There is plenty Blogger CAN do; but nothing that it WILL do.

My hope is that if Gordon’s victory is upheld by the Israeli court there would then be a pattern of lawbreaking established. I’ll be querying an Israeli attorney about whether I would have standing to sue Plaut in Israel (or here). If not, we may try to persuade other Israelis who’ve been similarly slandered by Plaut to sue him.

UPDATE: Since originally writing this post, I have learned that an anonymous party claims ownership of the fake blog, furthermore stating that Steven Plaut has not participated in its creation. A reporter tells me Plaut has denied his involvement. So while I have no idea whether the anonymous party is being truthful, it is possible that Plaut is either not involved in the blog, is partially involved, or that the blog claimant is lying and Plaut is fully responsible. I don’t yet know for sure which is the case. My impression of Plaut’s authorship was based on a number of factors, including Mr. Rance’s firm conviction that Plaut was responsible for the separate blog of which he is a victim.

tags Blogger-refuses-to-take-down-fake-blog, computerworld-mary-brandel, Five-Ways-to-Defeat-Blog-Trolls-and-Cyberstalkers, google, masada2000, section-230-communications-decency-act, steven-plaut-cyberstalker-fraud

I’ve been waiting for Haaretz to make a strong statement about the Azmi Bishara case. Thanks to a judicial gag order, it’s seemed that for the last two weeks in which Israel knew the Shin Bet was building a secret case against him that the case existed almost in a media vacuum. Any articles that were published in Israel lacked any specificity or substance whatsoever. The NY Times published approximately one sentence on the case a few days ago. Only The Forward, AP and The Nation published anything substantive outside Israel. And until the past few days, none published with any specificity the alleged charges against Bishara as I did here over a week ago.

Can you imagine if the Pentagon Papers case had happened in Israel instead of here? We’d still be wondering what the hell Nixon was so pissed off at Ellsberg about because Haaretz might never have printed what the Times did. This tells you reams about the level of press freedom and independence in Israel.

But kudos to the editors for finally taking a stand:

…It seems likely that the main charge [against Bishara] - assisting the enemy in time of war, which is the gravest charge possible - will turn out to be a tendentious exaggeration of his telephone conversations and meetings with Lebanese and Syrian nationals, and possibly also of his expressions of support for their military activities. It seems very doubtful that MK Bishara even has access to defense-related secrets that he could sell to the enemy, and like in the [Tali] Fahima case, the fact that he identified with the enemy during wartime appears to be what fueled the desire to seek and find an excuse for bringing him to trial.

…It seems that the case against Bishara is also based more on the justified revulsion against his sympathy for Hezbollah than on whether he actually undermined national security. Hopefully, the gag order will soon be lifted, so that it will be possible to analyze the accusations in detail.

…There is a substantive difference between criticizing him and accusing him of giving information to an enemy in wartime, just as there is a difference between justice and persecution.

The editorial correctly notes that the charges of alleged financial impropriety, if proven, are more serious:

The charges relating to the illegal transfer and use of funds are a different matter, and these are likely to cause the greatest anger among his constituents. It is unfortunate that the state did not focus on the financial violations and opted instead for the security route, which, from the little that has been released to date, seems to be rather weak.

It is clear that the reason the Shin Bet has chosen not to focus solely on financial charges is that corrupt Israeli pols are a dime a dozen. Ehud Olmert has no less than three serious criminal investigations of his allegedly corrupt behavior going on right now. To really get Bishara, they would have to prove more than his personal corruption. They have to prove he is a traitor. And this they probably cannot do.

Haaretz also notes the dubious use of the judicial system to harass uppity Arabs:

The results of the Fahima trial suggest that Bishara’s wariness of the courts is not unfounded. Nonetheless, someone who chose to be a Knesset member and to join the legislature of the State of Israel is not supposed to flee the country when he is in trouble. He is expected to fight the accusations against him with all legal means at his disposal, and these are substantial.

While I agree with this sentiment in principle, isn’t it easy for someone sitting in a comfortable editorial office in Tel Aviv to tell a persecuted Arab politician that he ought to invest potentially years of his life, not to mention hundreds of thousands of shekels to prove his innocence; and if he fails, to go to prison for his trouble. Has that editorial writer ever faced having a kidney transplant and the possibility that he will spend time in an Israeli prison tended by whatever poor quality of medical care might be offered there? I think this paragraph borders on chutzpah.

For its part, the state must release every detail that could contribute to an understanding of the Bishara case without delay, in order to avoid creating the impression that secrecy is serving as a cover for a lack of substantial evidence…The state should also publish his version of events, as given to police investigators during two separate interrogations.

Here, here.

tags haaretz-criticizes-shin-bet-case-against-azmi-bishara, israeli-arab-accused-of-spying

Yesterday, I voted at the Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards site for my favorite progressive Jewish blogs in the annual blog competition. Earlier in the week I’d nominated some of them when I noticed that no one else had: Mondoweiss, OCCUPIED and Sholem Zachary Berger among them. To tell you the truth, this is a skewed competition toward the Jewish right. Unfortunately, most Jewish blogs, as Mobius notes at Jewschool, are far to the right of mainstream Jewish opinion which is quite liberal:

I get riled up because I have a hard time accepting that the Jewish community - which is primarily liberal and progressive - should appear to be so overrepresented by the religious right… The domination of the blogosphere by the Jewish right is a stain on our community and reflects poorly on us internally and externally.’

…My goal…[i]s to help foster a larger, stronger left-wing Jewish blogosphere

He is more pleased with the diversity of this year’s JIBs:

Last year, there were only six politically left-wing blogs nominated throughout the entire JIBs contest, three of which were my own, and one of which was a Jewschool contributor’s blog. I’m very pleased to say that this year, there are 18 blogs nominated in the left-wing politics category alone (in fact, this is the first year a left-wing category was merited)…

While I agree that the competiton has improved markedly, you can still see where left and right wing blogs compete in the same category that the right wing blogs generally gain more votes. That being said, JIB is the best that we currently have and I think it’s worth trying to bend the flow of the river a bit in our direction.

The JIB site doesn’t make it easy to vote in an organized, methodical way. You have to carefully navigate your way through scores of blog choices in multiple entries. But be patient and take your time.

I encourage you to vote in the JIBs. And not just to vote for me or other progressive bloggers, but check out other blogs whose names sound interesting. Widen your world.

I wasn’t sure how gung ho I wanted to be about JIB but this snarky comment from the hardline rightist pro-Israel Soccer Dad published at my ‘old friend’ Aussie Dave’s Israellycool blog (where I’m now officially know as “Nasty Jewish Lefty blogger“) spurred me to promote both JIB and my own blogs’s participation:

And the votes keep rolling in for Tikun Olam. He must be getting stronger, he’s disappeared!

Apparently, he can’t count as Tikun Olam has received 11 votes out of 221 cast thus far in the News/Current Events blog category. And that’s before I’ve even suggested that any of my readers head on over there to vote. It’s Soccer Dad’s generosity of spirit I most appreciate, you know? And I do like being Aussie Dave’s bete noire. I take it as a badge of honor. Too bad you can’t vote AGAINST certain blogs!

tags aussie-dave, jewish-and-israeli-blog-awards, jib-awards, Progressive Blogs

cartoon: Ben Heine The reactions from Israeli journalists and politicians to Azmi Bishara's Knesset resignation provides a sort of Rorschach test for Israeli attitudes toward democracy. The first lesson you must learn about the attitudes of the majority of the 75-80% of Israelis who are Jews is that both the State and its democracy exists primarily for them and only secondarily for anyone else (that is, the Arab minority which comprises 20-25% of the population). And since the State has accorded citizenship to its Arab minority while according them second (or third) class status, one cannot really call Israel a democracy. Israeli political scientists like Yoav Peled have adopted ...

I don't know why Jewish wingnuts like Steven Plaut or Rachel Neuwirth taunt me. They only end up making me stronger and their cause weaker. When they bragged about my S.H.I.T. listing at Masada2000, the site was down within 24 hours. When they created a fake blog to defame me within two weeks I had told the world about their harassment in a front page article in the New York Times, a column in the Seattle Post Intelligencer and a KOMO radio news story. Just after April 26th, a story about their sleazy tactics will come out in Computerworld. But into the breach has come yet ...

Azmi Bishara in Egypt after resigning his Knesset seat (AP) Azmi Bishara, under secret investigation by the Shin Bet for violating Israeli laws against consorting with the enemy, has resigned his Knesset seat. In this chess game, it is hard to tell precisely what the motives are of each side in making the moves they have--but clearly Bishara has removed the protective mantle of parliamentary immunity. This would mean that he no longer has legal protections he would've had previously to shield himself from prosecution. It also appears to mean that Bishara does not plan to return to Israel anytime soon: Bishara explained that he does not want ...

Masada2000's fraudulent caption: "They are cooking up a nice bomb they can put on an Israeli school bus to show Dickie's commitment to Palestinian liberation." I've finally determined that Masada2000 and Rachel Neuwirth are in cahoots in creating the impostor blog, Little Dickie's Diaper Droppings. [Note: At one time I believed Steven Plaut created the fake blog, but the owner of Masada2000 claims credit so until I discover otherwise I will take him at his word] Yesterday, I discovered Mobius' attack on Plaut at Orthodox Anarchist and he linked to Plaut's Wikipedia entry, whose content I found a little too favorable toward Plaut for my taste. ...

Now this is some of the most disgusting, bellicose and irresponsible political rhetoric I've heard from Israel in--I don't know--about a week. But it truly goes beyond the pale. The story in Ynetnews is titled, We Need to Kill Him: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has to be killed. Really be killed, I mean, physically. He should be eliminated, put to death, assassinated, and all those words that serve to say the same thing. Former Mossad Director Meir Amit said this explicitly in a recent interview with the Kfar Chabad weekly (Hebrew). It is indeed a very impolite way to express our disgust with the Iranian archenemy. Government officials, including ones who have retired already, usually merely hint ...