One of the foundations of the free market is rational choice theory. That theory assumes that private individuals generally make decisions that maximize their profits and utility and do so far better than any collective organization or bureaucracy. Rational choice theory stands or falls on the availability of information. Without the free flow of information, people are unable to make…
Fresh from her tete-a-tete with PA leader Mahmoud Abbas last week, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni instructed her press flack to tell her fellow cabinet ministers to remain mum on Abbas's latest "diplomatic" gambit. In the words of her communications director Shai Ben Maor, Abbas's decision to turn a document written by convicted Palestinian murderers and attempted murderers sitting in Israeli…
Wednesday Canada's National Post published an error correction. Last Friday, the newspaper's lead story reported that the Iranian parliament had approved legislation that would compel Jews to wear a yellow strip, Christians to wear a red strip and Zoroastrians to wear a blue strip on their clothes. The story fomented an international storm. Yet it turned out that the…
If all goes as planned, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert meets today with US President George W. Bush in the White House, several thousand protesters from around the US and Canada will be across the Mall by the US Senate protesting Olmert's visit. These will not be the standard Israel haters from the Left or the Islamist crowd. They will…
You have to give them credit. The Palestinians outdid themselves this week. In the framework of the maelstrom over the presumed financial crisis of the Hamas-led PA, the supposedly "moderate" Fatah organization, led by supposedly "moderate" PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, decided to threaten America and Europe. In a leaflet published by Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza, the group announced,…
Last week, as he presented his new government to the Knesset, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proclaimed that the scattered Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria present a threat to the country and so they must be destroyed. If what Olmert says is true, then no patriotic Israeli or friend of the Jewish state can countenance the continued existence of…
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a long, rambling missive to US President George W. Bush this week. It ended on a somewhat ominous note that seemed to some Islamic scholars to constitute a declaration of war against the US. Ahmadinejad wrote, "Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts…
It would seem that the IDF's General Staff has lost its collective mind. On Independence Day last Wednesday, at the annual ceremony at the President's House honoring outstanding IDF soldiers, Sergeant Hananel Dayan, upon receiving his decoration, saluted IDF Chief of General Staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, but refused to shake his hand. When asked by President Moshe Katzav the…
One of the great advantages of the digitalization of communications is that today, everyone who has a computer has access to information about events occurring all over the globe. A person sitting in their home in say, Jerusalem, can read everything from the Washington Post to the Bellingham Herald from Bellingham, Washington. Sitting anywhere in the world that has an…
Last Thursday Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a friendly gesture to Germany. Speaking on state television, Ahmadinejad said the Germans should not feel guilty because, "a certain number of Jews were killed during World War II." He bemoaned that "today an intelligent people is still a hostage of World War II," arguing that Germany "still doesn't have the right to…