We all learned in high school science that “correlation does not equal causation.” But that doesn’t mean that correlations, especially strong ones, can simply be waved away.

So consider this:

“… as foreign aid to the Palestinians increases, so do Palestinian acts of murder. When foreign aid to Palestinians decreases, Palestinian acts of murder correspondingly decrease.

In fact, the more money they receive, the more murders the Palestinians commit, the less money they receive, the less murders they commit – it is practically a 100% correlation.

The graphs and more information are here.

Here is a sequence of photos I took this month as I left Bethlehem in the West Bank and returned to Jerusalem. (Click on photos for fullsize image.)

The pic above was taken from the Palestinian side of the checkpoint. Driving from Israeli-controlled Jerusalem into the Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem area of the West Bank was unencumbered. Vehicles pretty much breezed right through. The Palestinians have no fear of Israeli suicide bombers coming to devastate their buses or restaurant. After all, there are no Israeli suicide bombers.

Security instructions, in Hebrew (top), then Arabic and finally English. All traffic signs in Israel appear in those three languages.

Palestinian graffitti on the Palestinian side of the security barrier.

More graffitti.

Just inside the Israeli side of the barrier is this mural. Sorry for the oblique angle - when we moved directly in front of it, I was too close to get the whole mural in one shot.

I found the mural ironic, since whatever the Israelis and Palestinians have, “love and peace” ain’t it, on either side.

Most of the entire West Bank is enclosed by a security fence, about 700 kilometers. About six percent of the distance is a wall rather than a fence because of the density of the buildings present. The fence generally follows the “Green Line,” but the Green Line is ill defined in some places. The Green Line, btw, is the ceasefire line agreed to in 1949, at the close of Irael’s war for independence. It is not actually a border of any kind.

This shot of the security wall was taken near the unused Jerusalem airport. Rock throwers shut the airport down some years ago. They threw rocks over the wall above at airliners landing or just onto the runway, the horizontal, flat gray feature just below the wall. Any pilot who may be reading can imagine how eager airline pilots were to land on runways covered in rocks.

Despite the international controversy about the fence/wall, it would be very hard to find an Israeli of any political stripe who would call for its removal. The fence was erected by a government very reluctant to do so, and was opposed by both Labor and Likud. But the bombings of the Second Intifada, begun in 2000, became so severe that the people demanded the barrier go up. Since it went up, terrorist violence inside Israel has fallen by 80-95 percent, depending on the region of the country.

The barrier has made life harder for the Palestinians, who complain that it has degraded their quality of life. The typical Israeli responds, “Our lives come before your quality of life.” Hard to argue with that.

Yossi Klein Halevi, a prominent Israeli journalist, said the barrier should be named the “Yasser Arafat Memorial Wall.”

The man I am sitting with in the photo below, taken in Jericho last Saturday, is Bassem Eid, the founder and manager of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Mr. Eid is a Muslim and a member of the largest Arab tribe in the West Bank.

Right to left: the author, Bassem Eid, Ruth Lautt.

Mr. Eid formerly helped monitor and investigate claims of human rights violations by the Israelis. After the founding of the Palestinian Authority by the Oslo agreements, Eid noticed that no one was paying attention to HR violations by the PA or Palestinian militias. So Eid founded the PHRMG in 1996.

PHRMG’s latest revelations of human-rights violations by the PA and Hamas were released yesterday, entitled, “Fatah and Hamas Human Rights Violations in the Palestinian Occupied Territories from June 2007 to October 2007″ (PDF online).

No one else is doing the work that Bassem Eid and his small number of assistants are doing. He was arrested by the PA in the 1990s, but was held only a day. The fact that his tribe is the largest in the West Bank - and therefore has the most muscle to retaliate against anyone who might harm him - is almost certainly the only reason he is still breathing.

I’ll post a summary of our conversation with Mr. Eid soon.

The news today is that Israel fired missiles into Gaza to kill Mubarak al-Hassanat, a top-ranking Hamas member directly involved with firing Hamas’ homemade Kassan rockets into southern Israel. Hamas has been firing the anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and countryside with regularity for years. I went to Israel on Oct. 15 and returned just tonight. Two days ago I visited the town of Sederot (sometimes spelled Sderot) and nearby Ashkelon. Sederot is a little more than a kilometer from Gaza:

That’s me standing on the southern edge of Sederot. Gaza is only a few hundred meters on the other side of the tree line behind me. Six rockets fell on Sederot a few hours before we arrived. Here are the remains of three of them.

There is a large rack of exploded rockets outside the town’s police station. They have a diagram explaining how the rockets are made.

These are purely anti-personnel rockets. They lack the explosive power to penetrate reinforced buildings. The warhead section is loaded with pellets or small ball bearings intended to do nothing but shred flesh, propelled by only a couple of pounds of high explosive. However, if they do hit an ordinary building (as a rocket did this week) they can damage it substantially:

Israel has tethered three blimps around the northern perimeter of Gaza with automated warning sensors and systems.

The town official who showed us around said it is optically based. When a launch is detected, every warning speaker in the town - there are a lot of warning speakers - announces “red dawn” over and over. Townspeople have only 20 seconds to seek shelter before the rockets hit. The town continues to build shelters such as this one:

On Oct. 22, I took a video of the rack of recovered detonated rockets. This rack shows only six months worth of rockets launched. People in Sederot and surrounding areas have died from these attacks, including children. While “only” six rockets fell the day I was there, 20 were launched against Israeli civilians on Oct. 23, and six more the day after that.

In light of the recent rounds of rocket attacks, Israel is considering sanctions against Gaza in addition to selectively targeting Hamas officials responsible for the attacks.

A committee headed by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai has recommended that electricity supplied by Israel be cut off to northern Gaza during certain evening and nighttime hours. The city of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, and environs, comprise the area from which most of the Kassam rockets are fired. The committee also recommends cutting down Israel’s supply of fuel and goods to Gaza.

“We have no alternative other than to employ these measures,” Deputy Minister Vilnai explained Thursday on Army Radio. “The situation cannot continue in which we supply the Palestinians with all their needs as usual while they fire at us. Gaza is a hostile entity, and this is a gradual disengagement.”

Some 62.5 percent of Gaza’s electricity, and all of Gaza’s fuel, including diesel, gasoline and natural gas, comes from Israel. Another 28.6 percent of Gaza’s electricity comes from Gaza’s power plant, which depends on Israeli fuel.

Before this latest round of rocket attacks, Israeli officials told my group that since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last year, all humanitarian supplies provided to the Gazans have been provided by Israel, except four truckloads that came from Jordan.

Hamas, of course, has explicitly stated that its goal is the destruction of the state of Israel. After the disengagement from Gaza by Israel, the Gazans elected Hamas to rule them. This was less a vote for Hamas than and electoral rebellion against the Palestinian Authority, whose corruption under Yasser Arafat was so complete that after Arafat died, his successors in the PA were forced to campaign against his legacy as much as against Hamas. Fighting broke out between Hamas and the PA, which the PA lost. There is now no PA component to Gaza’s political life.

My group - nine other Methodist ministers, plus one Catholic nun and a Presbyterian pastor - also spent some time inside Palestinian-controlled territories in the West Bank talking to Palestinian figures. More to come. (Linked at OTB’s Traffic Jam.)

One hundred thirty Muslim scholars have sent a letter to Pope Benedict and other Christian religious leaders calling for competition between Islam and Christianity ” ‘only in righteousness and good works.’ “

“If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace. With the terrible weaponry of the modern world; with Muslims and Christians intertwined everywhere as never before, no side can unilaterally win a conflict between more than half of the world’s inhabitants,” the scholars wrote. …

Using quotations from the Bible and the Koran to support their message, the scholars told people who relished conflict and destruction that “our very eternal souls are” at stake “if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony.”

So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works.”

The letter was signed by Muslim scholars from around the world, including the Algerian religious affairs minister, Bouabdellah Ghlamallah, and the grand mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa.

These are very fine sentiments and the letter should be warmly received by the Pope and the other Christian leaders. Let me propose, however, that sentiments (by either faith) will not do the job. Both sides much adopt and teach true “think and let think” habits among their faithful. This will be much more difficult for Muslims than Christians. Freedom of personal conscience and personal religion will have to be adopted by Muslim societies before the sentiments expressed by the scholars can become reality.

Example: while the scholars were writing their letter, the secretary-general of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America (AMJA), Dr. Sheikh Salah Al-Sawy, issued a fatwa declaring “that marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man is forbidden and invalid, and that children born of such a union are illegitimate.” The fatwa says, among other things,

“A person must have some buffer between him and [deeds] that will bring him to perdition. A person about to commit suicide may expect society to intervene in order to safeguard his right to live. This is why shari’a prohibits marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man - because it is the first step towards religious suicide, whether [it is the woman’s] suicide or that of the children she will bear. This [form of] suicide is much worse than actual suicide, which also [involves] the murder of [unborn children]. The woman can expect Muslim society to stand between her and this fate, thereby safeguarding her faith and her salvation in the world to come.”

Not that at least some Christians don’t need to look in the mirror when it comes to intolerance:

Slash-and-burn columnist Ann Coulter shocked a cable TV talk-show audience Monday when she declared that Jews need to be “perfected” by becoming Christians, and that America would be better off if everyone were Christian.

Coulter made the remarkable statements during an often heated appearance to promote her new book on advertising guru Donny Deutsch’s CNBC show “The Big Idea.”

In response to a question from Deutsch asking Coulter if “it would be better if we were all Christian,” the controversial columnist responded: “Yes.”

“We should all be Christian?” Deutsch repeated.

“Yes,” Coulter responded, asking Deutsch, who is Jewish, if he would like to “come to church with me.”

Deutsch, pressing Coulter further, asked, “We should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians?” She responded: “Yeah.”

Coulter deflected Deutsch’s assertion that her comments were anti-Semitic, matter-of-factly telling the show’s obviously upset host, “That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews.”

A transcript of their conversation about Jews appears at the link. It must be read to believed. Ann Coulter is probably the most religiously uninformed public figure I have ever heard of. I do not consider myself a “perfected Jew” as a Christian, nor can I help but gagging at the idea Ann expressed (see transcript) that Christianity is the “Federal Express” way to heaven compared to Judaism. Before Ann or any other Christian starts talking about “perfecting Jews” they need to pay attention to perfecting Christians, for which there is very way long to go.

Foxnews.com has more about the scholars’ letter.

A few days ago the news was released that a High Court in the United Kingdom ruled that Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, may not be shown to school students there unless preceded by court-mandated disclaimers:

… The Court found that the film was misleading in nine respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film.

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Nine inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The inaccuracies are:

* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

James Joyner picks up on Mario Cuomo’s piece in the NYT in which Mario says that Senators Jim Webb and Hillary Clinton are off track when they want Congress to enact law demanding that the president “go before Congress to ask for a ‘declaration of war’ before proceeding with an attack against Iran or any other nation.”

But there is no need for this demand to be put into law, as the two Democrats and their colleagues are seeking to do, any more than there is need for legislation to guarantee our right of free speech or anything else protected by the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 already provides that only Congress has the power to declare war.

Mario has more to say, of course, and James goes on to discuss how the warring powers of the executive and the Congress have been muddied since Thomas Jefferson’s administration.

But here’s the part of Mario’s piece that caught my eye:

Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this mandate was neither erased nor modified by the actions or inactions of timid Congresses that allowed overeager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without making a declaration.

What??? “… the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion…”???

Sure it can, Mario, it happens all the time! The earliest example I can think of was Justice John Marshall’s declaration in Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court could invalidate the actions of the other two branches of government. Yet the Constitution does not grant the Supreme Court any such authority. As Thomas Jefferson complained,

In denying the right [the Supreme Court usurps] of exclusively explaining the Constitution, I go further than [others] do, if I understand rightly [this] quotation from the Federalist of an opinion that ‘the judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the government, but not in relation to the rights of the parties to the compact under which the judiciary is derived.’ If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se [act of suicide]. For intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. For experience has already shown that the impeachment it has provided is not even a scare-crow . . . The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

—Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1819. ME 15:212

So Mr. Cuomo might want to think again.