Is Maxie Blumenthal Sick?

"Sick" as in hateful?

As in irrational and border-line anti-Semitic?

Sure.

Here:

Any doubts?


(thanks to JW)

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Kerry on Peres - From the Graphic Zionism Series

.

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Temporal Disaggregation - Harnessing Social Media

Another academic's attempt to explain what we do:

Using Social Media to Measure Conflict Dynamics: An Application to the 2008–2009 Gaza Conflict by Thomas Zeitzoff, Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA

Abstract

The lack of temporal disaggregation in conflict data has so far presented a strong obstacle to analyzing the short-term dynamics of military conflict. Using a novel data set of hourly dyadic conflict intensity scores drawn from Twitter and other social media sources during the Gaza Conflict (2008–2009), the author attempts to fill a gap in existing studies. The author employs a vector autoregression (VAR) to measure changes in Israel’s and Hamas’s military response dynamics immediately following two important junctures in the conflict: the introduction of Israeli ground troops and the UN Security Council vote. The author finds that both Hamas’s and Israel’s response to provocations by the other side increase (both by about twofold) immediately after the ground invasion, but following the UN Security Council vote, Israel’s response is cut in half, while Hamas’s slightly increases. In addition, the author provides a template for researchers to harness social media to capture the micro-dynamics of conflict.

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How Academics Slant Their Study Matter

A new book has just been published:

DYNAMIC BELONGING
Contemporary Jewish Collective Identities
Edited by Harvey E. Goldberg, Steven M. Cohen, and Ezra Kopelowitz

It's expensive. Hardback copy costs $95.00.

It suggests that "while distinctive Judaic approaches and practices have evolved" in the American Jewish and Israel societies, "parallels also exist". The book "offers studies of substantive and creative aspects of Jewish belonging" and also "explores the fluid and dynamic nature of identity building among Jews".

I am not an expert in all aspects of the book's subjects, by far, so I zeroed in on something I am familar with in Section II: Diverse Attempts at Constructing Jewish Sub-Cultures in Israel and the United States and found this as
Chapter 5.

Fundamentalist or Romantic Nationalist? Israeli Modern Orthodoxy by Shlomo Fischer

Shlomo is a left-leaning Orthodox humanist, connected to Van Leer, who founded Yesodot, which has rejected an educational tool I suggested: the Declaration of the State of Israel as a page of Talmud, with a "Rashi and a "Tosefot" commentaries representing two variants on the religious Zionist approach. I guess no right-of-center outlook is better than sharing.

That one article, among a plurality of Diaspora-oriented articles, is the sole discussion of one pof the more dynamic and robust Jewish identity issues in today's Jewish world.

Academic bias?

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How They Are (Not) Researching Islam

Note the last line there in this article which appeared in Politics and Religion (2011), 4: 203-228:

(Not) Getting Religion: Has Political Science Lost Sight of Islam?

Sultan Tepea1 and Betul Demirkayaa1
University of Illinois, Chicago

Abstract

In this analysis, we expand the debate on the place of religion in political science by using the predictions of Wald and Wilcox as our starting point. Following in their footsteps, we ask how political scientists have studied Islam since 2002 and identify the studies on Islam and Muslims at the flagship conference of the discipline, the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. We evaluate not only the quantity but also the approaches employed by these studies. In order to gauge the balancing of roles (or lack thereof) between the discipline and area studies, we also take a closer look at the Middle East Studies Association, the largest association focused on the Middle East, North Africa and the Islamic world and its annual meetings during the same period. Our findings suggest that, unless carefully addressed, the prevailing patterns are likely to result in a crippling knowledge gap among political scientists.

You know what that means.

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Anger Induction Influence

I found this article Anger, Hatred, and the Quest for Peace: Anger Can Be Constructive in the Absence of Hatred by Eran Halperin, School of Government and Political Psychology Program, IDC, Herzliya, Israel, Alexandra G. Russell, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, Carol S. Dweck, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA and James J. Gross, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA and its abstract describes it so:-

Anger is often viewed as a destructive force in intergroup conflicts because of its links to aggressive behavior. The authors hypothesized, however, that anger should have constructive effects in those with low levels of hatred toward the out-group. Using experimental designs with subsamples of nationwide representative surveys, the authors conducted two studies within the context of the Israeli—Palestinian conflict.

Study 1 showed that inducing anger toward Palestinians several weeks before the Annapolis summit increased support for making compromises in upcoming negotiations among those with low levels of hatred but decreased support for compromise among those with high levels of hatred.

Study 2 showed that, even when a strong anger induction was used just days before the summit, the anger induction led to increased support for compromise among those low in hatred, but not among those high in hatred. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for informing a psychological understanding of conflicts.

If I understand this correctly, given trhe high anger levels among Arabs toward Jews, Zionists, Israel that there is not chance for peace no matter how low out level of hatred would be.

Great. No exit?

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Islam; Civilizing Process; Eccentric Modernity?

Armando Salvatore of Humboldt University, Germany decided to explore a sociological issue and entitled it:

Eccentric modernity?
An Islamic perspective on the civilizing process and the public sphere


The abstract:-

This article engages with Johann Arnason’s approach to the entanglements of culture and power in comparative civilizational analysis by simultaneously reframing the themes of the civilizing process and the public sphere. It comments and expands upon some key insights of Arnason concerning the work of Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas by adopting an ‘Islamic perspective’ on the processes of singularization of power from its cultural bases and of reconstruction of a modern collective identity merging the steering capacities and the participative ambitions of an emerging urban intelligentsia.

The Islamic perspective provides insights into the interplay between civilizing processes and the modes through which cultural traditions innervate a modern public sphere. By revisiting key remarks of Arnason on Elias and Habermas, the Islamic perspective gains original contours, reflecting the search for a type of modernity that is eccentric to the mono-civilizational axis of the Western-led, global civilizing process. While this eccentric positioning entails a severe imbalance of power, it also relativizes the centrality of the modern state in the civilizing process and evidences some original traits of the public sphere in a non-Western context.

Johann P. Arnason is

Emeritus Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he taught from 1975 to 2003, and visiting professor at the Faculty of Human Studies, Charles University, Prague. He has been visiting professor in Paris and Leipzig, and a fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala. His research interests centre on historical sociology, with particular emphasis on the comparative analysis of civilizations. Publications include Civilizations in Dispute (2003) Axial Civilizations and World History (co-edited with S.N.Eisenstadt and Björn Wittrock, 2004), The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (edited with Kurt Raaflaub, 2010).

and you should know:

...Johann P. Arnason's historical phenomenological investigations of the world horizon as a promising starting point. For Arnason, interculturality is an inescapable dimension of the world and the phenomenal field; he elaborates it along relational and interactive lines as part of his emphasis on the trans-subjective - that is, cultural - level of analysis.

Conflict in Space and Time

Predicting Conflict in Space and Time by Nils B. Weidmann, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, and Michael D. Ward, Department of Political Science, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

is that academic article relevant for Israel's situation?

Abstract

The prediction of conflict constitutes a challenge to social scientists. This article explores whether the incorporation of geography can help us make our forecasts of political violence more accurate. The authors describe a spatially and temporally autoregressive discrete regression model, following the framework of Geyer and Thompson. This model is applied to geo-located data on attributes and conflict events in Bosnia over the period from March 1992 to October 1995.

Results show that there is a strong spatial as well as temporal dimension to the outbreak of violence in Bosnia. The authors then explore the use of this model for predicting future conflict. Using a simulation approach, the predictive accuracy of the spatial—temporal model is compared to a standard regression model that only includes time lags. The results show that even in a difficult out-of-sample prediction task, the incorporation of space improves our forecasts of future conflict.

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Is This The Reason for Lieberman's Electoral Success?

This academic study:

Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 53, No. 3, 363-389 (2009)

A New Stress-Based Model of Political Extremism
Personal Exposure to Terrorism, Psychological Distress, and Exclusionist Political Attitudes

Daphna Canetti-Nisim
Department of Psychology University of Maryland, College Park

Eran Halperin
Department of Psychology Stanford University, Stanford

Keren Sharvit
Department of Psychology University of Maryland, Baltimore

Stevan E. Hobfoll
Department of Behavioral Sciences Rush University Medical Center, Chicago

Does exposure to terrorism lead to hostility toward minorities? Drawing on theories from clinical and social psychology, we propose a stress-based model of political extremism in which psychological distress—which is largely overlooked in political scholarship—and threat perceptions mediate the relationship between exposure to terrorism and attitudes toward minorities. To test the model, a representative sample of 469 Israeli Jewish respondents was interviewed on three occasions at six-month intervals. Structural Equation Modeling indicated that exposure to terrorism predicted psychological distress (t1), which predicted perceived threat from Palestinian citizens of Israel (t2), which, in turn, predicted exclusionist attitudes toward Palestinian citizens of Israel (t3). These findings provide solid evidence and a mechanism for the hypothesis that terrorism introduces nondemocratic attitudes threatening minority rights. It suggests that psychological distress plays an important role in political decision making and should be incorporated in models drawing upon political psychology.

Is that clear?

My MA Seminar Paper

My MA seminar paper on the subject of "The Survival of the Temple Mount Protest Movement: A Case of a Rejected and Shunned Group" has been accepted for presentation at the 3rd Annual Graduate Conference in Political Science in memory of Yitzhak Rabin to take place on January 17, 2008 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

This conference will have a rich program with about sixty participants. Only few other countries in the world and few other scientific associations are having conferences for their graduate students and the Hebrew U. is happy to be among the leaders in this regard.

Thank God for Academics

In Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 51, No. 5, 772-792 (2007) I found this article:-

Suicide Bombings and Targeted Killings in (Counter-) Terror Games by Daniel Jacobson & Edward H. Kaplan

The summary reads:-

This article develops sequential game models for key operational terrorist (how often to attack) and government (how often to execute targeted killings) decisions taken during a (counter-) terror campaign such as the second intifada. Key results include the following: The government initiates targeted killings when the marginal number of Israeli civilian lives saved from prevented terror attacks exceeds the marginal number of Palestinian civilian lives lost in such ``hits''; targeted killings are not employed if they are either ineffective or extremely effective at thwarting terror (since terrorists will not induce their use); even after accounting for downstream terror attacks motivated by prior targeted killings, a civilian casualty—minimizing government can optimally order targeted killings over time; and low-level cycles of violence can occur when the government is more patient than the terrorists, but higher, stable levels of violence result when the terrorists are the more patient players in the game.

Amazing.

Amazing, Absolutely Academically Amazing

The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 51, No. 2, 329-348 (2007), published by Sage, contains an article entitled:

Does Democracy Matter?
Regime Type and Suicide Terrorism
by Sara Jackson Wade of the Department of Political Science Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia and Dan Reiter, also of the Department of Political Science Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Here's the abstract and not the conclusion:

This article conducts quantitative tests on the relationship between regime type and suicide terrorism for 1980 to 2003. We present the recently popularized argument that democracies are more likely to experience suicide terrorism and a new hypothesis that mixed regimes are especially likely to experience suicide terrorism. We offer several improvements in research design, including using more controls, the nation-year as the unit of analysis, and more appropriate statistical techniques.

Using both Freedom House and Polity data, we find that in general, regime type is uncorrelated with suicide terrorism. We do find that there is a statistically significant interaction between regime type and the number of religiously distinct minorities at risk (MARs) with suicide terrorism, but the statistical significance of this finding is limited, and its substantive impact is marginal.

We also find that national size, Islam, national experience with suicide terrorism, and global experience with suicide terrorism affect the likelihood of suicide terrorism.

Amazing, eh?

Absolutely academically amazing.