Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

We’re on vacation, so things are coming slower this past ten days or so. We’ll be back in force after Rosh Hashanah. In the meantime, things you really shouldn’t miss if you read blogs like this one:

• Bill Clinton explains multiple times that he won’t campaign on the Jewish High Holidays. Yeah, we’re not sure what this means either.
• Yossi Melman of Ha’aretz argues that Russia’s anger at the West is bringing about the collapse of the sanctions regime against Iran. “Russia is strengthening the Iranian regime and signaling to it that the basic, though superficial, international consensus against it has ceased to exist.” Yossi Melman is a clever old hand in this business. His say-so is more significant than some New York Times foreign affairs columnist.
• A great review of an excellent new book on Maimonides.
• Oh, and the universe is, as always, more complicated than we once believed. Scientists have found an unexplained “drift” or “flow” of immense galactic clusters in a single direction, as opposed to motion in all directions as space itself expands. As The Daily Galaxy explains, “A black hole can’t explain the observations – objects would accelerate into the hole, while the NASA scientists see constant motion over a vast expanse of a billion light-years. You have no idea how big that is. This is giant on a scale where it’s not just that we can’t see what’s doing it; it’s that the entire makeup of the universe as we understand it can’t be right if this is happening.”

Archaeologists have apparently located the remains of the capital of the Khazar Kingdom, which famously converted to Judaism sometime between 700 and 900 CE. The site is “near the village of Samosdelka, just north of the Caspian Sea,” according to the AFP report.

“We can now shed light on one of the most intriguing mysteries of that period – how the Khazars actually lived. We know very little about the Khazars – about their traditions, their funerary rites, their culture,” he said.

The city was the capital of the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic peoples who adopted Judaism as a state religion, from between the 8th and the 10th centuries, when it was captured and sacked by the rulers of ancient Russia.

At its height, the Khazar state and its tributaries controlled much of what is now southern Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan and large parts of Russia’s North Caucasus region.

The capital is referred to as Itil in Arab chronicles but Mr Vasilyev said the word may actually have been used to refer to the Volga River on which the city was founded or to the surrounding river delta region.

Itil was said to be a multi-ethnic place with houses of worship and judges for Christians, Jews, Muslims and pagans. Its remains have until now never been identified and were said to have been washed away by the Caspian Sea.

Unbelievable:

US intelligence fears the Kremlin will supply the sophisticated S-300 system to Tehran if Washington pushes through Nato membership for its pro-Western neighbours Georgia and Ukraine.

The proposed deal is causing huge alarm in the US and Israel as the S-300 can track 100 targets at once and fire on planes up to 75 miles away.

That would make it a “game-changer”, greatly improving Iranian defences against any air strike on its nuclear sites, according to Pentagon adviser Dan Goure. “This is a system that scares every Western air force,” he said.

Senior US intelligence operatives believe that Russia is planning to use a stand-off over the S-300 to create a foreign policy showdown that would test the mettle of a new US president.

This sharpens the painful question faced by Israeli and American strategists: Does the West sell Georgia down the river in exchange for Iran? It depends. Is Putin bluffing? Can we afford to test him?

The latest story of a journalist killing in Russia is a particularly chilling one. Magomed Yevloyev, “known for his opposition views” according to The New York Times, was “accidentally” shot in the head while being transferred in a police vehicle from the airport, where he was arrested for suspected terrorist activity, to a police station.

Yes, southern Russia is experiencing some Islamist violence. Yes, the full facts of the case are as yet unknown. But there is something about the ease with which Russian authorities resort to deadly force – for example, that the prosecutor general’s office responded to the incident by opening “an investigation into an accidental death” – that’s frankly scary.

Late, but wonderful. An irreverent take on the whole Georgia-Russia mess:

Georgia Prez: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

So. The Georgians sorta instigated this nutty war but the Russians were apparently looking for any old excuse to swarm in and take charge. The U.S. is stepping up the rhetoric but lord know what we’ll actually do to stop the Russians from toppling the Georgian government. Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili is now waging a second war—a public relations war! He knows one of his better bets is to turn United States public opinion toward his beleaguered nation and against those terrible Russians, so he plays up how Western his country is all the time. They love America! Hot dogs! Johnny Cougar! In this clip, Saakashvili goes off on an incredible tangent about how Georgia once had amusement parks and Dolby Digital movie theaters (seriously!) but the Russians destroyed that, because they hate fun. How can anyone be against surround sound? Those filthy Russians!