I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 20 sign-ups; 13 cancellations; Total= 7
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
ISRAEL AND HAMAS UPDATES. I've been pointing out various things to various people in blog comments for days, as usual, and I might as well note a few here.
Patrick Belton has been wandering the West Bank and reporting from there for weeks. Check out this bit:
I was surprised when many Ramallah Christians today told me that they, like those of Taibeh, voted Hamas because it was historically Fateh loyalists who attacked their businesses, agitated against the sale of alcohol, and engaged in communal reprisals against the Christian community, as when a Christian butcher stabbed a man in Qalqilya. In the latter instance, it was Hamas members who stopped the Fateh crowd from attacking the Catholic church in Ramallah. And this debt of loyalty was remembered on election day.
Fateh is not down for the count - 2 seats moved to the Fateh column in today's final vote tally, and these were significant votes, as they denied Hamas a two-thirds majority. Lacking it, the other parties will in concert be able to block constitutional changes and deny Hamas the ability to override legislative vetoes by the president.
OxBlog: You yourself are liberal, and a Catholic woman. How do you view the Hamas victory?
JM: Well, it's normal. They're Palestinians, they have their rights. I think the world helped Hamas win, by talking about them. They had a slogan - Israel says no, America says no, and what are you going to say?
Sometimes - corruption is all around, the politicians haven't provided good services for the people. Hamas are not that bad as people see them - they're religious, conservatives, they want people to obey their rules, they have their thoughts and way of thinking, but they're disciplined. They're not that bad. If you look at religious stuff, they are conservative, and that worries people.
OxBlog: And does it worry Ramallah Catholics?
JM: We are 10 per cent Christians in Ramallah. I think Fateh knew this point - that we are Christians, and they wanted a Christian presence to stay in the city because of its history. Hamas - I think everything will be all right, yes. I think Hamas is going to change, after the election. The Palestinians are different than the Saudis and the Iranians - the Palestinians are more open than any other Arab people. In Saudi Arabia, women can't drive cars or walk in the street without anybody with them. Here, it is different.
OxBlog: What are your relations like with Hamas members in the munincipality?
JM: They're very nice people. In the municipality, they gave me their votes for mayor - they knew me, I used to work twenty years as headmistress of the girls' school, they knew my work, I'd taught their wives, sisters, and daughters, and they knew I was a hard worker. Politically, within the council voting, Hamas and Fateh are not close, so Hamas supported me because I was not Fateh.
OxBlog: Do you think Hamas will negotiate with Israel?
JM: Israel? That needs time, for them.
OxBlog: 10 years, maybe?
JM: Maybe two, three years.
OxBlog: Will social changes come to Ramallah, with Hamas's political ascendancy?
JM: Don't think they're going to change the way people dress - maybe they might try to be more conservative for Muslims, but not for Christians. We Christians wear normal clothes, Hamas maybe won't like this, or girls to go to parties, dancing. Restaurants are scared - might not let people sell drinks, that's why people are scared of Hamas. Anyway, we wait and see - we can't say now, maybe in a year. I don't think they're that bad. We'll wait and see.
We in Ramallah are an open city, that respects everyone who comes here. They like it because it's liberal, they can live free here. There are jobs here, with PA, with banks. We need to enlarge the city, take more care to urban planning, and do better with providing services.
A month after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left the public stage and a week after Hamas's victory in the Palestinian legislative elections, an Haaretz-Channel 10 poll reveals Israeli voters remain consistent in their positions and voting intentions.
[...]
Had the elections taken place now, Kadima, which last week presented its impressive Knesset candidate list, would have won 43 seats (one seat less than in the previous week) and Labor would have won 21 seats (no change). The Hamas' victory did not strengthen Likud as predicted, and the party even lost a seat compared to last week (13 seats compared to 14).
No major changes were listed in the situation of the rest of the parties. Green Leaf, which last week almost reached the election threshold is now buried under it and Uzi Dayan's Tafnit, which may have Ehud Barak as its chairman, is nowhere near the election threshold.
Zehava Gal-On, fourth on Meretz-Yahad's candidate list, who last week remained out of the Knesset, returns to it this week. This is good news for the Knesset.
With less than two months to the elections, and after all the turmoil and dramas, the picture remains almost unchanged: Kadima remains strong, the Likud is struggling to get MK Uzi Landau, 14th on its list, into the Knesset, and Labor fails to win an additional seat to the number of seats it had in the 16th Knesset.
The fear campaign against Hamas that Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers hurried to launch did not benefit the party. Labor Party Chairman Amir Peretz's odd statement that the recent development within the Palestinian Authority would erase the differences between Labor and Kadima and clear the stage for a "social agenda" didn't help Labor either.
The Likud wins this week's failure index big time: If Likud failed to win back disappointed Likud voters (21 votes) even after the Palestinian upheaval, what will bring them back home? Certainly not their nostalgia for Uzi Landau.
However, 32 percent of the respondents said that "there is a chance" that they would change their minds by election day. What could change the way they vote, and in which direction, nobody knows.
The freeze in the seat distribution can be explained by the answers given to the following question: "Have you changed your decision regarding which party you would vote for following Hamas' victory?" Only five percent of the respondents - a negligible number - answered this question positively.
Where do we see a certain change? In the public's attitude towards Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who inherited Sharon as Kadima's leader. When the public was asked to score his functioning, there was no significant change to the score he received last week (6.52 compared to 6.47 on a scale of 1 to10). But when Olmert's status is compared to his two rivals, Netanyahu and Peretz, in the question of suitability to the role of prime minister, the data reflects a significant decrease in Olmert's stand, which benefits Peretz: Olmert gets 33 percent this week while Peretz receives 22 percent. Three weeks ago Olmert got 44 percent and Peretz only 13 percent. There is almost no change in Netanyahu's results.
However, Olmert shouldn't be too worried. His status remains strong among Kadima voters.
The survey was carried out before Wednesday's Amona outpost evacuation, so the violent clashes between settlers and security forces are not expressed in the poll, but it is doubtful whether the picture would have changed had the poll been carried out on Wednesday rather than Tuesday.
Kadima is convinced that that polls, which week after week give it over 40 seats, are not lying, and that this would be the election result. In such an event Olmert, who would be elected as prime minister, will be able in a short time to easily form a stable coalition with Labor and the ultra-Orthodox parties, or with Likud and the ultra-Orthodox parties. Such a scenario would enable Kadima to hold on to its three major portfolios: finance, defense and foreign affairs.
A senior Kadima official said this week that in such a scenario Shaul Mofaz would remain defense minister, Tzipi Livni would remain foreign minister and the major fight would be waged on the treasury, apparently between Meir Sheetrit who was finance minister in 1999 and a minister in the treasury in 2003, and between Abraham Hirchson, Olmert's close associate.
All good news, in my book.
The rightish Jerusalem Post reported polling data showing that the Palestinians stay where they've been for quite a while, as every poll consistently has reported for that while: 84% of Palestinians support a peace deal with Israel; 75% of Hamas voters are opposed to calls for the destruction of Israel, although it's behind the JP pay firewall, and I'm quoting this. Since that's not an authoritative cite, see here, and most recently here, though that's dated, as it was almost a year ago, in March, 2005:
The poll examined Israeli and Palestinian preferences concerning the next steps that should be taken in the course of the peace process. 84% of the Palestinians and 85% of the Israelis support a return to negotiations on a comprehensive settlement.
[...]
48% of the Israelis believe that Israel should negotiate also with the Hamas if it is necessary in order to reach a compromise agreement; 47% oppose it. Among Palestinians, 79% support the participation of the Hamas in the negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel compared to 19% who oppose it.
[...]
General support for reconciliation among Israelis has also increased and stands now at 84 percent compared to 80% in June 2004. 81% of the Palestinians support reconciliation today compared to 67% last June. More important however is the consistent across the board increase in support for a list of specific reconciliation steps, varying in the level of commitment they pose to both publics.
· 55% of the Israelis and 89% of the Palestinians will support open borders to free movement of people and goods after a comprehensive settlement is reached, compared to 44% of the Israelis and 82% of the Palestinians who said so last June.
· 70% of the Israelis and 73% of the Palestinians support joint economic institutions and ventures compared to 66% and 66% respectively last June.
· 43% of the Israelis and 40% of the Palestinians will support joint political institutions designed eventually to lead to a confederate system given a comprehensive settlement compared to 35% of the Israelis and 26% of the Palestinians who said so last June.
· 66% of the Israelis and 42% of the Palestinians support taking legal measures against incitement directed towards the other side compared to 61% of the Israelis and 35% of the Palestinians who said so in June 2004.
Total size of the sample is 1316 adults interviewed face to face in 118 randomly selected locations. Margin of error is 3%.
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80% support, and 18% oppose, the extension of the “quiet” period which ends at the end of December 2005. Moreover, a similar percentage (75%) supports, and 23% oppose, the current ceasefire. Percentages of support for extending the “quiet” period and for the ceasefire are larger in the Gaza Strip (86% and 77% respectively) than in the West Bank (77% and 74% respectively).
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82% support and 17% oppose the absorption of members of armed groups from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fateh in the Palestinian security services so that they would become part of the PA. Support for this measure reaches 84% in the Gaza Strip compared to 80% in the West Bank.
While 83% of the Palestinians view the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip as victory for armed resistance and while 68% believe that armed confrontations have so far helped Palestinians achieve national rights in ways that negotiations could not, the percentage of those supporting armed attacks from the Gaza Strip does not exceed 36% while 60% oppose it. Opposition to such attacks increases to 66% in the Gaza Strip compared to 57% in the West Bank. Moreover, 61% of all Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip oppose, and 33% support bombing attacks or the launching of rockets from the Gaza Strip. In the Gaza Strip, opposition to such attacks increases to 68% compared to 58% in the West Bank.
For the first time since the start of the peace process, a majority of Palestinians support a compromise settlement that is acceptable to a majority of Israelis.
More specifically (PDF if you don't have the Firefox "convert to HTML" extension option), well, most of it is in tables, and I don't know how to pull tables/pictures out of a PDF, but a bit of the words summarizing (view the tables youself):
Support for the Tel Aviv suicide attack that took place in March 2005 received the support of 29 percent and the opposition of 67 percent. It is clear that once a mutual cease-fire was instituted, Palestinian threat per- ception diminished, and so did the level of support for violence and suicide attacks. In June 2005, in the wake of Israeli official announcement of plans to build thousands of housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, support for violence against Israeli civilians increased again, reflecting increased Palestinian threat perception. Indeed, the June survey found a significant negative correlation between the belief that more Israeli settlements would be built in the West Bank in the future and a willingness to support collection of arms from armed Palestinian factions: 59 percent of those respondents who believed most settlements would be evacuated supported collection of arms, compared with only 28 percent of those who believed that many settlements would be added.
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Despite the increased support for violence during the second intifada and the increased belief among the majority in the positive utility of violence, support for the peace process among Palestinians has remained strong. Moreover, the increased public support for the Islamists has not diminished the public's willingness to support compromise. The change in views regarding violence and the Islamists does not reflect an ideological transformation toward radical positions. Rather, it demonstrates an angry response to the pain and suffering inflicted by Israeli occupation policies and retaliatory measures, particularly since the start of the second intifada. Indeed, an examination of the views of Hamas supporters during 2003-2004 shows them divided on fundamental issues such as acceptance of the two-state solution (including the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state), the Road Map, the Geneva initiative, and reconciliation with the Israeli people. In other words, once the level of Hamas support increased, the group was no longer homogenous, because many of the new converts maintained their moderate views on the peace process.
[...]
When Palestinian respondents assumed the existence of a Palestinian state--recognized by the state of Israel and emerging as an outcome of a peace agreement between Palestine and Israel--support for reconciliation, between July 2000 and September 2005, ranged between two-thirds and three-quarters. In December, one month after Arafat's death, support for reconciliation jumped to 81 percent.6 Indeed, a majority of Palestinians are willing to accept the two-state solution, even when this entails a formula whereby Palestinians recognize Israel "as the state of the Jewish people" and Palestine "as the state of the Palestinian people." In June 2003, 52 percent supported and 46 percent opposed this formula, and by September 2005 support rose to 63 percent and opposition dropped to 35 percent.
And so on and so forth. You can find bad stuff to point to, as well, but there are plenty of other polls consistently reporting this data, which are the actual facts, rather than what various echo-chambers assure themselves are the facts.
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