Even though most of my time is spent writing a book, I've been wondering why I'm blogging less, reading blogs less, watching less cable news and listening to less talk radio and more music. I've come to the conclusion that the whole mediasphere signal-to-noise ratio has been out of whack since the election in November. 2008 was such an historic year for news with a groundbreaking election contest vying for attention with a once in a generation economic collapse. For the managers of media outlets to try to sustain that intensity and interest level past mid November was a fools errand. But that doesn't mean they didn't try.

For the right wingnuts the task was easy--"the end of the world as we know it"--go stock up on guns and ammo and get ready for the counter-Obama revolution. But to listen to Glenn Beck spin his paranoid fantasies or Rush Limbaugh sputter on while his ad revenues tank is not even mildly amusing anymore. But I am also finding myself bored by the rantings of Keith Olberman and Paul Krugman. Krugman's attempt to convince progressives that Bank Nationalization was the only way out of a coming Depression are now being slowly but surely walked back into the land of reality. Olberman was so happy playing the lead in his own "Special Comment" version of "Network" ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore") that he misses George Bush more than Karl Rove does.

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Yehuda Mirsky has a brilliant piece in the Jerusalem Post on what crazed Jewish religious fanatics have done to Jerusalem (the Jewish part, anyway). Mirsky is a brilliant scholar and writer, himself Orthodox, so he comes to his conclusion with no animus toward Zionism or Israel. Quite the contrary.

His report begins with Jeusalem's new segregated bus lines (women not just at the back of the bus but on separate lines) and takes is from there.

I've been going to Jerusalem for 40 years. The secular areas are charming but much of the rest is Jewish Taliban country only without the Taliban's sweet sense of humor. (Just kidding).

No humor, no aesthetics, just lunatics in black.

Can't all these black-clad crazies -- of all faiths and delusions -- just recognize their common inhumanity and move to one corner of Asia. How big is the Swat valley?

As for Jewish Jerusalemites who can't stand Talibanization, join the exodus to Tel Aviv
-- it's free, liberal, hedonistic and on the beach.

Today's (Sunday's) New York Times has another story about what the fanatics are up to. They are grabbing up land around Jerusalem -- ostensibly for parks -- but really to snatch up Palestinian-owned lands and properties. It is as if the National Park Service here decided that a good way to push African-Americans out of their homes would be by using eminent domain to build parks. Inconceivable here. It is the reality in Israel. It takes genius to take a concept as lovely as parks and turn it into something malignant.

See Clay Swisher's video report.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has adopted, hook, line and sinkers--the vision of a world free of nukes. It is a vision that has been promoted previously by four very senior statesmen, all of whom made their names during the Cold War. George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn. They have popularized the idea that the best way to protect the world from nuclear weapons is for the United States and Russia to lead--by first reducing their nuclear stockpiles, and eventually moving to zero. This move in turn is expected to inspire other nations to reduce their stockpiles or give up on their ambitions to acquire nuclear arms--and to pressure those so inclined, to desist.

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This week, our nation's armed forces suffered another casualty--the loss of 1st Lt. Dan Choi, an Iraq war veteran and a member of the New York National Guard. On March 19, on the Rachel Maddow Show, Choi announced he was gay. That triggered the Army to begin the process of separating Choi from the military under the current "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

Choi is an Arabic linguist--exactly the kind of critically-skilled soldier and leader his infantry platoon needs if they deploy to a country in which Arabic is the common language. Bluntly stated, his dismissal from the military--and the dismissal of other gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) servicemembers--will put lives at risk.

Our national security is heavily dependent on translators, specialists, and interpreters within the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, and the military. Prior to September 11, 2001 our intelligence community was at only 30 percent readiness in languages critical to national security. The government revealed after the 9/11 attacks that it had a 123,000-hour backlog of Arabic language recordings waiting to be analyzed. The last thing we should be doing is telling Arabic linguists in the military that they are not needed.

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As Gloria points out, despite all the debates about feminism in this country, men and women alike have both basically incorporated the movement's fundamental principals. "[W]e assume women should have equal educational and job opportunities, that women should be able to own property, not be property, and so forth," she writes. "We haven't attained full gender equality, but the values have become so much part of the culture that it is not fruitful to argue about feminism's viability, as some commenters here would like to do."

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I have to welcome a few readers from Talking Points Memo. They are reproducing my posts at least to the extent that they go to explaining banks and the financial crisis to a policy/politics driven audience. Given the purpose of the Bronte Capital blog is primarily to explore investment ideas the policy/politics wonks at TPM might find my posts a little odd. [My purpose is largely to make lots of money.]

Nonetheless I do have things to say which I think are important from both an investment and a policy/politics perspective.

To this end I want to explain why I do not think the American banking system will wind up looking like the Japanese banking system at the end of this crisis - and what the implications of that are both in a policy and an investment sense.

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Reporters are always asking me if I think President Barack Obama would prevail in the oft-predicted "knock down, drag out" fight with the Israeli government (and lobby) over the peace process.

That question is especially relevant following this week's AIPAC conference. Vice President Joe Biden made it abundantly clear that the administration intends to push hard for a Palestinian state. (While Prime Minister Netanyahu is talking about everything except a Palestinian state.) The Israeli media is picking up the signals too. Writing in Yedioth Achronoth, Eitan Haber says that all the signs point in one direction and he's worried. "When Obama roars, who will not tremble?" he asks.

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In 2002 I hosted an Obesity and Poverty conference that was supposed to address contemporary global health crises in terms of class, and especially of the delegation of bad health to the poor and the socially marginal. A psychoanalyst came and talked passionately about middle class girls' body dysphoria (the opposite of euphoria) all over the globe and my first cranky thought was, oh, the anxieties about thinness amongst the middle class hold no candle to the global unhealth of the expanding working classes. Apparently, the middle-class gets to have mental health crises, while the poorer are just bad self-managers. But my second thought was that my own lack of respect for middle-class-white-women-studies was itself a kind of misogyny--not against all women, but some. When we learn compassion for some, we are also learning coldness towards others. When we say, as Michelle does, that people should aspire to "women's equality," what's the relation of the forms of equality we care about and the kinds of inequality with which we remain comfortable?

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As a new Star Trek film enters our cultural landscape once again, I thought it might be interesting to remember what Star Trek meant to some of us, and, to Leonard Nimoy.
In 1991, when Gene Roddenberry died and gay and lesbian characters were just about to join the crew of Star Trek in 24th-Century America, I took the opportunity to think about the cultural importance of Star Trek in our society. This article appeared on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, along with a response by Leonard Nimoy, who responded to what I wrote. Enjoy.

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek," was a visionary; the Starship-Enterprise that he launched on TV has traveled widely through American culture. Now, it will again challenge viewers to boldly go where they've never gone before. This season, gays and lesbians will appear unobtrusively aboard the Enterprise in the 24th Century. They weren't "outed," they won't be outcasts; apparently they'll be neither objects of pity nor draw melodramatic attention. Their sexual orientation will be a matter of indifference to the rest of the crew.

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First off, let me say how much I admire The Means of Reproduction, right down to the clever -- more than clever -- title. It brings together so many crucial strands of recent history and current international politics, and in such a confident, sure-footed way. Plus, it's so well written! It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand our world, from the proliferation of NGOs to the outbreak of fundamentalism around the world, including here in the US.

The Means of Reproduction ought to change the conversation around women's rights. As others have said, atrocities against women and the persistent denial of women's rights reflect a fundamental belief that what happens to women, while sad or regrettable, just isn't that important. It doesn't turn larger wheels -- the means of production, for example, or the fate of nations. It's only recently that human-rights campaigners began to include women's rights in their mission and development experts began to see that the subjection of women -- child marriage, lack of control over fertility, maternal injury and mortality, illiteracy, lack of property rights, domestic violence and so on -- helps keep countries poor and populations ignorant, sickly and in turmoil.

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The death of feminism has been pronounced many times over the years by those who want it to be so. But to borrow a phrase from Maya Angelou, "Still we rise."

Recently I was on a talk show panel with three men, ages appearing to be 30-something to 50-something, each of whom said during the interview, "I'm a feminist, but..." I found that particularly amusing given that so many women say, "I'm not a feminist, but..." The serious bottom line, though, is that both men and women in this country have so incorporated the fundamental principles of feminism that we assume women should have equal educational and job opportunities, that women should be able to own property, not be property, and so forth. We haven't attained full gender equality, but the values have become so much part of the culture that it is not fruitful to argue about feminism's viability, as some commenters here would like to do.

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The turmoil over sex and gender in the developing world, and much of the West too, has a lot to do with the economic and social upheavals of the past century. Pastoralism and subsistence agriculture, and the gender roles that went with them, are unsustainable today, and so are the blue collar jobs that supported a certain family ideal in the West, in which women's lives, and often their fertility, were under men's control. While contemporary education, urban life, birth control, globalization and modern attitudes about women's empowerment have created new opportunities for some, the collapse of traditional economies in the South and the loss of masculine blue collar jobs in the US, have created poverty and social dislocation for many, many more. This poses challenges to the idea of masculinity itself, and makes it easy to mobilize weak-minded men to "put women in their place". This in turn creates opportunities for cynical leaders--from religious zealots who equate birth control with murder, to warlords who use mass rape for political purposes. In the angry minds of their followers, attacking women's rights--and even attacking women themselves--can seem like some kind of "justice."

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You think I can't do this? Post a story so bizarre and then let it stand all by itself, without further comment.

But that is what I'm doing here. Besides, y'all know what I think.

And here is Daniel Pipes, Rosen's employer, agreeing with Rosen.

PS I wonder if the Rosen Espionage Case's not going to trial means that the famous memo Rosen sent me in 1982 ("a lobby is a nightflower. It thrives in the dark and and dies in the sun") is now worth more on Ebay or less. I'll let you know.

Last time I checked, it was worth $15.

Rosen is no Dreyfuss any more than OJ Simpson is Frederick Douglass. But here is an example of an apt historical analogiy Pogroms in Palestine. Now.

Deepali asked, "Why was the response to the Taliban's misogynist rule in the 1990s so slow to come by? Why has sex selection been allowed to take the proportions it has in India before anyone realizes that it is the symptom of a much larger problem? Why should a 16-year old German Afghan girl be yet another victim of an 'honor killing' (in Germany and not in Afghanistan) despite prior knowledge of her severe beatings at the hands of the family?"

I think the answer is depressingly obvious -- because these all seemed like "just" women's issues, and it is quite hard to get powerful forces exercised unless they think there is something beyond mere women at stake.

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The outcome of the "stress tests" will be that the banks needing extra capital will get it from the Treasury. But where will the money come from, now that the TARP fund is almost exhausted and Congress is dead set against providing more bank bailout money? The Treasury will simply swap debt for equity – turning what the banks owe the government into shares of stock in the banks. Presto. Ailing banks will get more capital, and Tim Geithner won’t have to go back to Congress to ask for it.

But by this sleight-of-hand, the public takes on more risk. Much of the money we originally gave Wall Street took the form of senior debt. We were preferred creditors, meaning that in the event of bankruptcy (or some form of it) we’d get repaid first. But as shareholders, we’d get nothing. As we’ve seen time and again during this economic crisis, shareholders lose big.

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First let me congratulate you, Michelle, on writing an excellent and important book. One reason it is important is that it is written by a young woman for a new generation that needs to know this history so that it can continue the slow progression toward greater justice for women in this world.

For me, much of the book was living history, but for those who are younger or were not directly involved in expanding the principles of reproductive self-determination in the U.S. and globally--whether the rationale du jour was population, women's health, or women's rights/feminism--you've documented critical events in the trajectory toward greater justice for women.

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It seems relatively simple.  The proposed federal Employee Free Choice Act would give employees the freedom to form a union when a majority of workers sign cards saying that they want one, avoiding the often months of employer harassment that have inevitably accompanied traditional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election processes. While there is now talk about a compromise of replacing majority signup with some kind of expedited elections, it's worth emphasizing that the EFCA majority signup proposal is not some kind of wild new proposal by labor, but one used by well over a dozen states for groups of public and some private employees.

Ignoring Evidence of Majority Sign-up Success in the States: Yet the anti-union lobby in Washington, D.C. has been churning out propaganda about the supposed horrors of coercion workers would face by unions if the Employee Free Choice Act was enacted.  They inevitably tell hypothetical stories about what could happen -- but studiously ignore the fact that states around the country already allow groups of public and private employees to form unions through majority sign-up procedures without any evidence of the coercion they conjure up.

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It's interesting how the paranoia surrounding communism engineered just about every policy emanating from the west at the height of the cold war. The uninhibited use of the religious radical right amidst the mujahideen groups to combat communism has to a large extent defined the lives of women in Afghanistan today. As you rightly mention that the conflict between tradition and modernity are being fought on the terrain of women's bodies. A conflict situation only makes the circumstances even more precarious for women as they get caught in the cycle of violence both in the public and personal domains.

The controversial Afghan Shiite Personal law is a manifestation of the manner in which women's rights can so easily be used to pit against issues of culture and identity. It is a discourse that tends to be extremely tricky as it positions reproductive rights in the realm of a westernized agenda aimed at, primarily, challenging the value systems of more traditional societies. It is an argument that insidiously creeps into very damaging and intolerant religious politics in a multicultural context, especially in countries of South Asia to defeat the very purpose of women's rights and a women's agenda.

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The current craze in DC policy circles is to create a "systematic risk regulator" to make sure that the country never experiences another economic crisis like the current one. This push is part of a cover-up of what really went wrong and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problem that led to this financial and economic collapse.

The key fact that everyone must always remember is that the story of the collapse was not complex. We did not need great minds sifting through endless reams of data and running incredibly complex computer simulations to discover the underlying problem in the economy. We just needed some people who understood the sort of arithmetic that most of us learned in 3rd grade.

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Social scientists have long used systems theory to point out links that are sometimes overlooked. Such a link now leads to the suggestion that to deal with the crisis in Pakistan and the mounting difficulties in Afghanistan, one should go to, of all places, India. The main reason the Pakistani army is reluctant to take on the Taliban, who threaten to overrun the country, is that the army considers India its enemy.

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Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, wrote a piece Monday morning headlined "The Case Against Sotomayor," a self-titled "indictment" of a woman many believe to be a leading candidate for nomination to the Supreme Court. Putting aside your views on whether Judge Sotomayor is the right person for the job -- personally, I don't know enough to form an opinion -- Rosen's article is a sorry excuse for reporting that does not even come close to respectable journalism. To the contrary, the piece is no more than a collection of anonymously cast aspersions, aspersions that will be distressingly familiar to many women or minorities who have worked their way through America's leading law schools and on to successful legal careers.

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So Arlen Specter told the New York Times that Norm Coleman's defeat means that there are no more Republican Jews in the Senate.

But the situation in the House is even worse for the dwindling ranks of Jewish Republicans. .There are 34 Jews in the House and only one is a Republican. (Shocking. Jews don't join the party dominated by the Christian Right).

And it is even worse than that. The one Jewish Republican in the whole Congress Eric Cantor!!

Now that is something for Arlen Specter to cry about.

From Jacob Javiits to Eric Cantor in a generation.

Eric Cantor! The shame.The horror.

PS If the GOP wants to attract Jews, it's easy. According to the polls of Jewish opinion, all it needs to do is change is views on separation of church and state, taxes, gay rights, social spending, choice, anti-poverty programs, affirmative action, going to war with Iraq/Iran, immigration and a few other issues and then it can compete. And it needs to support Barack Obama who received 78% of the Jewish vote in November.

I keep hearing the White House staff describe the President as a pragmatist. David Axelrod, one of his chief advisors whom I admire enormously, recently called him a "ruthless pragmatist." Soon, I expect, he’ll be called a "take-no-prisoners pragmatist," or perhaps a "remorseless, merciless, and unrelenting pragmatist."

I’m relieved the President is a pragmatist, but that doesn’t let him or anyone around him off the hook for describing what he wants to achieve and why. Being a pragmatist is a statement about means, not ends. It describes someone who chooses the most practical way of achieving a certain goal but it does not explain why he chooses one goal over another.

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While Americans tend to associate Hollywood with glitter, spectacle, and mass entertainment, an upcoming film festival in Washington, D.C. called Politics on Film that's happening this weekend will upend a lot of pre-conceived notions about the movie industry as we know it. To its critics on the East Coast, Hollywood is often caricatured as either the bastion of mind-numbing blockbusters or as the heart of liberal social values and left-coast elitism. But, the festival, which is co-sponsored by the Washington Political Film Foundation and the Bipartisan Policy Center (where I'm a Visiting Scholar), will shatter some of these myths.

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Check it out.

Peter Beinart of Time, former editor of The New Republic, believes that it's time to deal with Hamas. And he wrote his piece saying so before Hamas chief. Khaled Meshal, told the New York Times that he had ended the rocket fire against southern Israel and would accept a West Bank/Gaza Palestinian state (seeming to abandon his call for dismantling Israel in its entirety).

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Vice President Joe Biden told AIPAC this morning today that the administration is not backing down from its commitment to the two-state solution or to negotiating with Iran.

Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel told AIPAC the same thing. Biden prefaced his remarks with the phrase, "your're not going to like me saying this...."

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Who can blame Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke for hoping that the pattern of 1929-1933 is repeating itself and that the United States can somehow look for a rerun of its grand mid-20th century world hegemony achieved by the economic stimulus policies of the 1930s and the global realignment of World War Two? Barack Obama may have a similar hope.

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As you may have heard, the President is now reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a novel about playing cricket in New York, and the American Dream, and so forth. Excellent choice, POTUS. We here at Cafe also love Netherland, and you can check out our book club discussion of it last summer here. Enjoy.

This little column by Hebrew University law professor, Daphna Golan, is not to be missed. While Prime Minister Netanyahu prattles on about Iranian nukes, or the need for Palestinian leaders to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state," the government continues to remake realities on the the ground, utterly confounding the question of what Jewish state is to be recognized. Golan writes:

Israel has long promised there would be no new construction in West Bank settlements...Yet this week, a Jerusalem daily promised that any Israeli factory willing to move to the settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim would benefit in three ways. First is the community's "Ideal location," ten minutes from Jerusalem. The map featured in the ad shows only Israeli communities as recommended sites for factory owners to build in - no Palestinian communities, even those next door to the settlements. The second advantage is accessibility. In case the Americans do not understand,...Israel has built roads for Israelis alone to use, so they can live and work in the occupied territories without having to come across Palestinians. Route 443 was paved for the sake of accessibility to Ma'aleh Adumim...Third, the advertisement promises the same tax deductions as in "National Priority Area A," adding: "Ma'aleh Adumim's industrial park has the largest land reserves in the Jerusalem area.

by Robert Lawrence, guest blogger

Although we call the big three automobile companies they have basically specialized in building trucks. This left them utterly unable to respond when high gas prices shifted the market towards hybrids and more fuel efficient cars.

One reason is that Americans like to drive SUVs, minivans and small trucks when gasoline costs $1.50 to $2.00 a gallon. But another is that the profit margins have been much higher on trucks and vans because the US protects its domestic market with a twenty-five percent tariff. By contrast, the import tariff on regular automobiles is just 2.5 percent and US duties from tariffs on all imported goods are just one percent of the overall value of merchandise imports. Since many of the inputs used to assemble trucks are not subject to tariffs anywhere near 25 percent -- US tariffs on all goods average only 3.5 percent -- the effective protection and subsidy equivalent of this policy has been huge.

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My book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, is about the global battle over reproductive rights. Most people have no idea what I'm talking about when I say that, which is in part why I wrote it. All over the world, there are these huge and hugely consequential fights going on over abortion rights, contraception, population control and women's sexual autonomy more generally. There are big international networks on both sides - one of the alliances I find most fascinating, and most clarifying, is the one between conservative Christians and Muslims who've decided to work together against women's rights at the United Nations. It's not surprising that this stuff doesn't get covered much in the mainstream media -- the reproductive rights of women in poor countries is in some ways as marginal a topic as one can imagine. But there's so much at stake, and, if you look behind the stultifying patois of development bureaucracy and international law, the subject is actually packed with human drama and juicy philosophical dilemmas.

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Investigative journalist Michelle Goldberg joins us at Cafe this week for our latest book club discussion on her new book The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. The subject of the book is the global battle for reproductive rights. But, as Goldberg mentions in her opening post, "Most people have no idea what I'm talking about when I say that, which is in part why I wrote it." This battle includes, but isn't limited to, the decades long legislative and ideological fights over abortion, female circumcision, and women's sexual autonomy.

Joining the discussion are Katha Pollitt, essayist and author of Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time; Helen Epstein, journalist, writer, and author of The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing The Fight Against AIDS in Africa; Deepali Gaur Singh, academic and author of Drugs Production and Trafficking in Afghanistan; Gloria Feldt, women's activist and author of Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles; and Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at the University of Chicago and author of The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture.

Join us.

The media coverage of the auto bailouts has focused on the need for union autoworkers to take big pay cuts, causing them to once again miss the real story. The Fiat-Chrysler deal shows that the pay problem is at the top, not the bottom. At the end of the day, the new Chrysler is still likely to be producing most of its cars in the United States. What the new company will be getting from abroad is technology and top management.

This big story was so easily missed because it runs against one of the main myths that our elites have cultivated about the US economy: that the country has a "comparative advantage" in highly skilled labor. In this story, the United States will continue to lose manufacturing and other "less-skilled" jobs as its economy becomes more concentrated in highly skilled sectors.

This story was convenient for our elites because it meant that the decline of manufacturing was a necessary, if sometimes painful, part of a natural economic progression.

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Why, one may ask, is Obama taking on yet another huge fight by taking aim at foreign tax havens? Yes, it's unfair that multinationals pay an average tax rate of only 2 percent on their foreign revenues, and it's unfair that some wealthy Americans are avoiding taxes altogether by parking their fortunes abroad. But, hey, these have been true for decades. So why take them on now, when the President is also taking on universal health insurance and global warming, and trying to get the economy going again?

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Three weeks ago, my week of postings on the material in the new 2009 edition of Bad Money was truncated by the schedule of my book tour. As a result, I didn't get to my intended last commentary - the dangerous analogies between the 2007-2009 disaster stage of U.S. financialization and the earlier decline-of-empire political economics of Britain, Holland and treasure-galleon Spain.

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Ehud Olmert has been telling anyone who will still listen that he and Mahmoud Abbas were "very close" to a settlement this past fall; that he presented the PA president a deal and map--in his words, a more generous offer than any ever made by an Israeli prime minister, and that Abbas "refused to sign."

Sources close to their conversations have now filled in the essential details of their talks. Journalists take note: If anything about the following account is mistaken, then it is up to Olmert, the putative maker of the offer, to confirm or deny things, point by point. The idea that these are delicate diplomatic negotiations, and must remain secret, is ridiculous. We are not speaking here about two private people negotiating the price of a rug in the bazaar.

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On Sunday night Pete Seeger's 90th birthday was celebrated with a concert at Madison Square Garden.

It was great. Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Ben Harper, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, Rufus Wainwright, Arlo Guthrie, and a dozen or two other headliners performed.

And Pete Seeger, of course.

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While Rush Limbaugh crows over Specter's departure-"take McCain with you -- and his daughter"--he must realize that he now rules over a party that is getting dangerously close to representing only 20% of the American public. Frank Rich got it right this morning.

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This, from David Shulman, his account of yesterday's action at Um Safa:

Pogroms: it's something the Jews know about. I grew up on those stories--Cossack raids on the shtetl, the torture and killings and wanton destruction. My grandmother had a brother. They lived in Mikhalayev, in the Ukraine. One day the Cossacks came, and everyone panicked, and the seventeen-year-old brother tried to hide in a pond, and he drowned. She mourned that young death all her life; the dead don't age, and some wounds never heal.

And now it turns out--who would believe it?--that there are Jews who also know how to carry out pogroms. For the last ten days or so, settlers from Bat 'Ayin in the so-called Etzion Bloc have been paying violent daily visits to their Palestinian neighbors in Um Safa, perched high on the edge of the western ridge that overlooks the coastal plain all the way to the sea. A terrorist from Um Safa entered Bat 'Ayin two weeks ago, murdered a settler boy with an axe, and wounded another. The police caught him soon thereafter. But that hasn't stopped the Bat 'Ayin settlers from repeated rampages to wreak revenge on Um Safa. They've already killed four innocents, and another eleven or twelve have been wounded by gunfire. As if that weren't bad enough, the soldiers have apparently been making common cause with these settlers, opening fire readily at the villagers. Life in this most beautiful of the mountain villages has become a nightmare; not that it was easy before.

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