Last night T. and I went to a bonfire with some friends at the treed area adjacent to the Jerusalem theater. Lots of other groups there with their own fires; also a lot of very wholesome looking teenagers.

Anne Bayefsky on Reed Brody and Human Rights Watch:

...What HRW did do was substitute the voices of alleged victims for universal human rights standards.

If leading international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights/Human Rights First, chose not to apply those standards when anti-Semitism stared them in the face, there is little reason to believe their claims that they now apply those standards to Israel in the same way they apply them to every other state.

Bret Stephens on the Israeli left:

...For those of my readers who politically are somewhere on the Left, here's what the Right thinks of you: Deep down, you have no red lines. You'd rather go down as the morally spotless victim than the morally encumbered victor. You'll sell your birthright not for a mess of potage, but for less: the retrospective pity of future generations.

I know this because it reflects my own suspicions. Because when Rabin and Peres and Barak spoke of red lines, the Right knew they weren't really red lines - and they were right. Because Beilin won't shut up about how close he was at Taba. Because I watched Avraham Burg sucking up to Yasser Abd Rabbo at Davos by cracking anti-Israeli jokes and pleading with his hosts to be invited to future conclaves of the great and good....