Saturday, March 23, 2013

Duke's Mason Plumlee reviving an old relic

By Eric Adelson
Yahoo! Sports
March 22, 2013

You read this

PHILADELPHIA – The sky hook is suddenly back in style, and every team in Duke's path to Atlanta should be afraid.

Blue Devil center Mason Plumlee is tough enough to defend, with his muscular 6-10 frame and his quick feet, but on Friday in Duke's 73-61 second-round win over Albany, it looked like he mastered arguably the most indefensible shot in hoops history.

"Plumlee did the best Kareem Abdul Jabbar imitation I've seen in a long time," said Albany coach Will Brown. "He hit three sky hooks. I haven't even seen somebody attempt that shot in my 12 years at Albany, and he hit three of them."

Plumlee scored 23 points Friday, mostly on dunks and layups, yet it was his bit part as Captain Hook that turned the most heads here. Plumlee's version is a running hook, where he scoots across the lane, leaps and lets it go. It's certainly a tricky shot, yet when he has a handle on it, well …

Mason Plumlee scored 23 in Duke's win over Albany (AP)"His running hook, when he hits that, it's impossible to defend," said Albany center Blake Metcalf. "There's nothing you can do."

Metcalf has played against Plumlee since their AAU days, and he said the shot is something the big man didn't have in his arsenal back then. It's become familiar to Duke fans, yet most defenders have no idea what to do with it.

"It's rare," said Albany junior John Puk. "You wall him off and hope he misses."

The bigger question is, why don't we see this shot more? Abdul-Jabbar made a Hall-of-Fame career out of the sky hook, and we hardly find it anywhere in the game today. The release point is so high and far from the defender's reach that the arc to the basket is pretty much clear on every attempt. "It was the only shot I could shoot that didn't get smashed back in my face,"Abdul-Jabbar once told ESPN. "So I learned to rely on it early, and it was always something that I could get off, even in traffic."

[Related: Jeremy Lin among those excited about Harvard's NCAA tourney win]

There's no reason Plumlee can't do the same, although there's a huge difference: Abdul-Jabbar started relying on the shot in fifth grade. Plumlee only uses it on occasion.

"I like coming across the middle," Plumlee said after the game. "I don't know why people don't do it more."

Part of the challenge is athleticism. The hook shot takes footwork that most big men don't have. It requires touch that most big men don't have. And it takes body positioning that most big men don't have. Plus it can look awkward. Shaquille O'Neal once said his father made him practice the shot but he had little sustained interest. "Being a hip-hop kid," O'Neal said. "I didn't want to do it."

Plumlee seems to want to do it more. He's hardly perfected the shot – he joked that Friday's hooks were the only ones that worked all season – yet he's clearly building the confidence to take the shot and make it.

Making matters worse for future Duke opponents is the problem Plumlee poses even without the hook shot. He isn't a beast in the post, but he's developed a burgeoning game in the paint that keeps defenders honest. And that allows Duke's guards to slash to the hoop – Seth Curry had 26 points Friday – and force defenders to make a difficult choice: step out and defend or keep a body on Plumlee. That choice is getting tougher and tougher, especially with Ryan Kelly back from injury. Now Duke has a triple threat – its guards, Plumlee, and Kelly – and so the hook shot is even more of a dagger than it would otherwise be.

"Well, you have to pick your poison," Brown said. "It's hard, especially for us, to double team Plumlee. We were going to play him straight up and roll the dice. They shoot the three so well, and after watching that game against Miami where Kelly had 40, I had some bad migraines."

Tape of Plumlee's hook shot will make the headaches even more severe for Duke's upcoming opponents. He might not be the next Kareem, but he might be close enough.

UNC's Williams Nets 700th Win

In a bit of a switch, it was the Tar Heel players congratulating their coach after Friday's win.

Lucas: Milestones

Release: 03/23/2013

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By Adam Lucas

http://www.goheels.com

KANSAS CITY--Late Friday night in the spacious Sprint Center locker room, Roy Williams had a career highlight after Carolina's 78-71 win over Villanova.

By now, hopefully you've seen the video. The Tar Heel head coach traditionally writes the number of teams remaining in the NCAA Tournament on the locker room white board after each postseason win, a way of reminding his squad how very precious these victories are. This time, for example, it was a "32" scrawled in blue against the white background.

Then, he invited his team to join him in their usual big-game victory celebration, a mosh pit in the center of the room. While players were bumping chests, junior Reggie Bullock made a veteran move and commandeered the marker. With the same savvy he'd used during the game to force a key steal with the game tied at 42 and 13:11 left, he crept behind the bunch of happy humanity and wrote an equally big--maybe even a little bigger--"700" on the board.

When the players finished jumping, Bullock showed the number to his coach and on behalf of the entire team, presented him with a blue Carolina jersey with the coach's name and updated victory total as the jersey number.

It was a nice moment. It also wasn't at all the highlight you suspect Williams will remember most about this night. Seven hundred is nice because it's a round number. But if 701 comes on Sunday, which one are most of us likely to remember more clearly?

Eric Montross played in Dean Smith's 700^th win, a 105-73 whipping of Maryland on January 10, 1991 (current assistant coach Hubert Davis scored 25 points in that game, with the crowd serenading him with shouts of, "Huuuuuuu!"). Montross remembers very little about it. And why would he? This is how much credence Smith, his head coach, gave the mark in the immediate aftermath of the game:

"We shouldn't get into counting coaches' records," Smith said. "I've never been for that."

That's a perfect way of putting it. Smith had never been for that and would never be for that. There are places that hang enormous banners with the victory totals for their head coach. That doesn't have to be wrong, but it's most definitely completely different from what Carolina basketball has been about since the moment Smith took over the program in 1961. He's not for that.

Since coming back to Chapel Hill in the spring of 2003, Williams has also won his 500^th and 600^th games. Both of them were at the Smith Center. Do you remember anything about those games (hint: 500 was against High Point and 600 came against Nevada)? Odds are, you don't, which is exactly what Williams--and his mentor--would prefer.

During the season, Tar Heel coaches have said for decades, it's about the team. After the season, it's about the individual. The same holds true for the head coaches. Right now, that 700 jersey is folded away in a suitcase somewhere. This summer sometime, perhaps, it'll be put in a frame and hung on the wall in Williams's home, where the memorabilia could easily double as a suitable annex to Springfield.

But right now he's watching film of a Kansas team that will be very familiar, since some of the same pieces return from last year's regional final.

Oh, and what about that highlight from Friday night? Perhaps it was P.J. Hairston finally shaking free to hit some big shots? Maybe Marcus Paige continuing his evolution from shaky freshman to the player you want taking big shots late in big games? The Tar Heels recovering from a barren stretch through much of the second half to make just enough shots to send home the Wildcats?

None of the above.

After Bullock had showered and most people had left the locker room, the junior from Kinston was talking about his role in the postgame ceremony.

"It was very important to me to be able to give Coach that jersey," he said. "He was the one who believed in me and willing to welcome me in at Carolina. He's seen how much I've been through with my family. He's told me he believes I'm one of the strongest athletes he's coached because of the way I have fought through adversity."

Bullock thought about the people he considers most influential in his life-his grandmother, his mother, his high school coach, his brother-and then added something else.

Because he coaches basketball, Roy Williams has a job he loves. He is famous. He is wealthy. I believe that Williams enjoys all of those things and also appreciates all of those things.

I also believe he has never particularly chased those things-and he has had some opportunities. But he has chased this, which almost certainly will make it the night's highlight for him over the long view:

"Coach Williams," Bullock said, "is one of the most important adults in my life."

Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and the author or co-author of seven books on the Tar Heels.

Apartheid Week: The Modern Blood Libel

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March 23, 2013

Apartheid Week: The Modern Blood Libel

By Jerrold L. Sobel

For centuries throughout their glorious but tormented history, long before the re-establishment of the state of Israel, Jewish people have been victims of the blood libel. Through an annual rite known as Apartheid Week, this execrable phenomenon has once again reared its ugly head, this time gaining respectability in the halls of academia and on college campuses throughout the United States and Canada. Harvard is a prime example.
In an effort to publicize their vilification of Israel during libelous Apartheid Week, a vehemently anti-Israeli organization within Harvard known as the Palestine Security Committee employed a tactic becoming all too common throughout the U.S.: they posted mock eviction notices on the doors of students claiming their dorms would soon be demolished.
Some inevitably will argue this is just an expression of their First Amendment rights. In reality, it's nothing of the sort. As stated by Robert Trestan, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Acting New England Regional Director: "This tactic is designed to silence and intimidate pro-Israel advocates at Harvard and campuses around the country," He continues: "Free expression has a place on campus; however targeting the dorms of Harvard students lends itself to creating tension, isolating students and fomenting hostility."
Intimidating pro-Israel advocates on campuses around the country is indeed the operative phrase here. Far from a sophomoric stunt, this is part of a nationwide movement on campus which seeks to denigrate Israel while stifling academic discourse. From Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Brooklyn College, Northeastern University and far too many other universities throughout the United States, hatred of Israel and Jews in general is being spewed. Most disturbing, on many campuses this calumny is more than tacitly supported by the administration, most egregiously in Boca Raton Florida at Florida Atlantic University (FAU).
Dead babies, apartheid walls, and once again, mock eviction notices placed on student dorms and calls for Israel's destruction; all part of a troubling pattern of extreme activism perpetuated by the aforementioned anti-Semitic nationwide organization Palestine Security Committee, also known as Student Justice For Palestine (SJP).
FAU is a university with an anti-Semitism problem and an irresponsible administration helping to make things worse. In January 2011 FAU's SJP, along with other chapters from universities around the state participated in an organizing conference sponsored by the American Muslims for Palestine organization (AMP). The objective of the meeting was to have SJP become more effective in its efforts by having experienced anti-Israel activists provide training, and to help regional chapters coordinate with each other and share their resources. AMP is a well-funded, professional organization with ties to Islamic radicals and supporters of terrorism against Israel. It specializes in targeting vital parts of the educational system, primarily libraries, high schools, university curricula, and student organizations. Flown in to lead the conference was one of the leaders of the now infamous Irvine 11, who were convicted of systematically harassing Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren to the point that he was unable to deliver a lecture at the University of California. So much for the free interchange of ideas.
Rather than heed the warnings and evidence it received, Florida Atlantic University's administration applied no scrutiny to SJP as it increased its radical activities on campus. A steady stream of anti-Semites and anti-Israel firebrands have been reaching into campus with the goal of radicalizing the students. As a result, the activities and messaging of SJP have steadily become more aggressive. FAU's indifference to anti-Semitism appears directly attributable to Dr. Charles Brown, the University's Senior Vice President for Student Affairs. Prior to his joining FAU in 2006, Dr. Brown served in similar positions at Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of South Florida in Tampa, two of the most notoriously venomous anti-Israel universities in the country. His time at USF immediately followed the indictment of Professor Sami Al-Arian, who later plead guilty to serving as the American head of the Islamic Jihad Terror organization. Al-Arian and his cronies at USF, including his research associate and now current FAU professor Bassem Al-Halabi, cultivated a culture of anti-Semitic student radicalism that continued to be tolerated throughout Brown's tenure there.
By the spring of 2012 FAU's SJP chapter was fully out of control. Mock eviction notices were posted on the door of hundreds of on-campus residences. SJP brazenly misappropriated the seal of Palm Beach County, which was a violation of law. The Palm Beach County attorney's office immediately sent a cease and desist order. The fake eviction notice also included a seal and authorization stamp from FAU's student housing authority, which were in fact issued by the university. In response to this, Dr. Charles Brown, the school's senior vice president for student affairs, initially misled reporters by claiming that the university had not authorized the fliers. This statement was later retracted when SJP revealed that not only had it been approved, but an FAU employee actually escorted hundreds of notices on dorm rooms and elevators. If this doesn't cross the line of academic freedom into the realm of administrative complicity, what does?
To answer my own question: on Feb. 6, the Tom Trento TV/radio crew attempted to sit in on a public meeting at FAU, where Greta Berlin, a noted Jew/Israeli hater, was to speak. The crew was denied entry into this advertised, public, taxpayer-supported event and threatened with arrest by a Boca Raton police officer, who claimed he was taking his orders from "the building manager." Enough said about constitutional rights when up against a complicit school administration and ignorant civil service employees.
To push back against the administration's anti-Israel/anti-Semitic bent and the actions they are culpable for, a writing campaign of protest has begun to FAU's President MJ Saunders: president@fau.edu. Protests and letters may not stop this egregious behavior at FAU but withholding charitable donations may raise some eyebrows at the school.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Iraq less unwon than other wars

By MARK STEYN

The Orange County Register

http://www.ocregister.com

2013-03-22 11:54:30

Ten years ago, along with three-quarters of the American people, including the men just appointed as President Obama's secretaries of state and defense, I supported the invasion of Iraq. A decade on, unlike most of the American people, including John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, I'll stand by that original judgment.

None of us can say what would have happened had Saddam Hussein remained in power. He might now be engaged in a nuclear arms race with Iran. One or other of his even more psychotic sons, the late Uday or Qusay, could be in power. The Arab Spring might have come to Iraq, and surely even more bloodily than in Syria.

But these are speculations best left to the authors of "alternatives histories." In the real world, how did things turn out?

Three weeks after Operation Shock and Awe began, the early bird naysayers were already warning of massive humanitarian devastation and civil war. Neither happened. Over-compensating somewhat for all the doom-mongering, I wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph that "a year from now Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs." Close enough. Major-General Andy Salmon, the British commander in southern Iraq, eventually declared of Basra that "on a per capita basis, if you look at the violence statistics, it is less dangerous than Manchester."

Ten years ago, expert opinion was that Iraq was a phony-baloney entity imposed on the map by distant colonial powers. Joe Biden, you'll recall, advocated dividing the country into three separate states, which for the Democrats held out the enticing prospect of having three separate quagmires to blame on Bush, but for the Iraqis had little appeal. "As long as you respect its inherently confederal nature," I argued, "it'll work fine." As for the supposedly secessionist Kurds, "they'll settle for being Scotland or Quebec." And so it turned out. The Times of London, last week: "Ten Years After Saddam, Iraqi Kurds Have Never Had It So Good." In Kurdistan as in Quebec, there is a pervasive unsavory tribal cronyism, but on the other hand, unlike Quebec City, Erbil is booming.

What of the rest of the country? Iraq, I suggested, would wind up "at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world, and, at best, pleasant, civilized and thriving." I'll stand by my worst-case scenario there. Unlike the emerging "reforms" in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, politics in Iraq has remained flawed but, by the standards of the grimly Islamist Arab Spring, broadly secular.

So I like the way a lot of the trees fell. But I missed the forest.

On the previous Western liberation of Mesopotamia, when Gen. Maude took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, British troops found a very different city from the Saddamite squat of 2003: in a lively, jostling, cosmopolitan metropolis, 40 percent of the population was Jewish. I wasn't so deluded as to think the Jews would be back, but I hoped something of Baghdad's lost vigor might return. Granted that most of the Arab world, from Tangiers to Alexandria, is considerably less "multicultural" than it was in mid-century, the remorseless extinction of Iraq's Christian community this past decade is appalling – and, given that it happened on America's watch, utterly shameful. Like the bland acknowledgement deep in a State Department "International Religious Freedom Report" that the last church in Afghanistan was burned to the ground in 2010, it testifies to the superpower's impotence, not "internationally" but in client states entirely bankrolled by us.

Foreigners see this more clearly than Americans. As Goh Chok Tong, the prime minister of Singapore, said on a visit to Washington in 2004, "The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail." Just so. If you live in Tikrit or Fallujah, the Iraq war was about Iraq. If you live anywhere else on the planet, the Iraq war was about America, and the unceasing drumbeat of "quagmire" and "exit strategy" communicated to the world an emptiness at the heart of American power – like the toppled statue of Saddam that proved to be hollow. On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, mobs trashed U.S. embassies across the region with impunity. A rather more motivated crowd showed up in Benghazi, killed four Americans, including the ambassador, and correctly calculated they would face no retribution. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, these guys have reached their own judgment about American "credibility" and "will" – as have more potent forces yet biding their time, from Moscow to Beijing.

A few weeks after the fall of Saddam, on little more than a whim, I rented a beat-up Nissan at Amman Airport and, without telling the car-hire bloke, drove east across the Iraqi border and into the Sunni Triangle. I could not easily make the same journey today: Western journalists now require the permission of the central government to enter al-Anbar province. But for a brief period in the spring of 2003 we were the "strong horse" and even a dainty little media gelding such as myself was accorded a measure of respect by the natives. At a rest area on the highway between Rutba and Ramadi, I fell into conversation with one of the locals. Having had to veer on to the median every few miles to dodge bomb craters, I asked him whether he bore any resentments toward his liberators. "Americans only in the sky," he told me, grinning a big toothless grin as, bang on cue, a U.S. chopper rumbled up from over the horizon and passed high above our heads. "No problem."

"Americans only in the sky" is an even better slogan in the Obama era of drone-alone warfare. In Iraq, there were a lot of boots on the ground, but when it came to nonmilitary leverage (cultural, economic) Americans were content to remain "only in the sky." And, down on the ground, other players filled the vacuum, some reasonably benign (the Chinese in the oil fields), others less so (the Iranians in everything else).

And so a genuinely reformed Middle East remains, like the speculative scenarios outlined at the top, in the realm of "alternative history." Nevertheless, in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll-call of America's unwon wars, Iraq today is less unwon than Korea, Vietnam or Afghanistan, and that is not nothing. The war dead of America and its few real allies died in an honorable cause. But armies don't wage wars; nations do. And, back on the home front, a vast percentage of fair-weather hawks who decided that it was all too complicated, or a bit of a downer, or Bush lied, or where's the remote, revealed America as profoundly unserious . A senator who votes for war and then decides he'd rather it had never started is also engaging in "alternative history" – albeit of the kind in which Pam Ewing steps into the shower at Southfork and writes off the previous season of "Dallas" as a bad dream. In nonalternative history, in the only reality there is, once you've started a war, you have two choices: to win it or to lose it. Withdrawing one's "support" for a war you're already in advertises nothing more than a kind of geopolitical ADHD.

Shortly after Gulf War One, when the world's superpower assembled a mighty coalition to fight half-a-war to an inconclusive halt at the gates of Baghdad, Washington declined to get mixed up in the disintegrating Balkans. Colin Powell offered the following rationale: "We do deserts. We don't do mountains." Across a decade in Iraq, America told the world we don't really do deserts, either.

The War on Jobs

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com

March 22, 2013 4:00 A.M.

Senate Democrats finally released their first budget plan in four years this month: It offers nearly $1 trillion in new taxes, an end to sequester budget savings, and almost no new spending restraint. Despite the failure of the 2009 stimulus package, Democrats also want an extra $100 billion to create jobs on infrastructure projects, few of which would be “shovel-ready” enough to hire workers anytime soon.

President Obama won’t release his own budget till April, but he has a golden opportunity to improve on the Senate budget and create real jobs. All he has to do is end his four-year delay in approving the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring crude oil produced from Canada’s oil sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast. It is already “shovel-ready” — portions of it are already under construction. And because it’s being built by private-sector companies, any new pipeline jobs would come at zero cost to the taxpayers and the economic activity created would provide significant tax revenues.

Keystone has been completely scrubbed environmentally. Four government reports have been issued on its impact, all with essentially the same conclusion. The latest came this month, from the U.S. Department of State. It raised no major objections and concluded, as AP notes, “Other options to get the oil from Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries are worse for climate change.” Nor will all the piped oil be Canadian: Keystone will provide a safe, reliable method of transporting 250,000 barrels of oil a day from the Bakken fields of North Dakota to refineries.
A key finding of State’s report is that the Canadian oil fields are so big — the world’s third-largest reservoir of oil — that they will almost certainly be developed. The question becomes whether the oil will be sent south to the U.S. by our friendly Canadian neighbor or shipped west to China and other Asian powers. Estimates show that for every dollar of oil that North America imports, we receive only 10 percent of the economic benefit — the economic activity the oil is used for. The rest of the money stays with the Venezuelans, Nigerians, and Saudis who pumped the oil. In contrast, when you add up oil-production costs, sales, and downstream jobs created by oil production, the domestic benefit from oil pumped from North American sources is roughly 80 to 90 cents of every dollar of oil revenue.
Every one of the governors along the Keystone pipeline’s route now backs the project. They predict that the $5.3 billion project would create 16,000 direct jobs and an estimated 163,000 jobs in indirect employment.

So why is the Obama administration resisting the pipeline? Before the election, Obama punted for fear of alienating pipeline opponents, including environmental donors and the Sierra Club. Since the election, bureaucrats in his Environmental Protection Agency have proposed withholding approval of Keystone unless Congress agrees to some kind of a carbon tax in exchange.

A carbon tax is clearly on the drawing boards of the Obama administration. A series of Treasury Department e-mails obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute under the Freedom of Information Act show that Ian Parry of Treasury’s Fiscal Affairs Department has openly advocated a carbon tax for the purposes of “raising revenue and putting it to good use.” He proposes a carbon tax of $25 per metric ton, which is roughly in the range of the tax proposed in Congress by Representative Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

But Obama faces real pushback from labor unions within his coalition, who covet the many union jobs Keystone would create. Many would be in construction, the sector of the economy that was hardest hit by — and has yet to recover from — the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008.
Last year, a total of 69 House Democrats broke with Obama to support the Keystone project, with the overall bill passing by 293 to 127 — more than enough to override a presidential veto. In 2011, fewer House Democrats — 47 — had voted to defy Obama and back Keystone.
In the Senate last year, Majority Leader Harry Reid used a filibuster to block Keystone. But eleven Democrats broke party ranks to back the pipeline, and other pro-pipeline Democrats, such as Virginia’s Mark Warner, backed the filibuster only after personal pleas from President Obama.

Red-state Democratic senators who will be up for election in 2014 are strongly pressuring Obama to soften his stance on the pipeline. But there is no doubt that Obama’s environmental allies would explode in fury if he retreated. In January, Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune announced that his group would, for the first time in its history, participate in acts of civil disobedience to block Keystone. Sierra’s view of the best U.S. energy future is very clear: In a recent debate on Minnesota Public Radio, Brune supported keeping two-thirds of all of the world’s oil, coal, and natural-gas reserves “in the ground.”

In theory, liberals are in favor of creating jobs, but in reality, even jobs that pass strict environmental-impact reviews are too “dirty” for their taste. They also turn up their nose at the tax revenue those new jobs would create. In the end, liberals evidently believe that only government can create, or provide incentives to create, the “clean jobs” of the future. In the non-clean-jobs sector of the economy, and for workers unlucky enough to have jobs in politically incorrect industries, the government restrictions that liberals support will lead to a low-growth, lower-wage future.
Conservatives need to highlight that opposition to Keystone is demonstrably anti-worker. You can’t promise to create jobs while doing your utmost to kill them. The way to divide Democratic voters from their Washington leadership is to reveal this internal contradiction at the heart of the budgets Democrats are finally putting on paper.
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.

War of Words in the Middle East

Posted By P. David Hornik On March 22, 2013 @ 12:39 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 12 Comments

http://frontpagemag.com

President Obama capped off the substantive parts of his visit to Israel with a speech to Israeli students Thursday afternoon in which he again focused heavily on the Palestinian theme. He repeated the standard, discredited claim that “given demographics,” Israel could only survive as a Jewish and democratic state by creating an “independent and viable Palestine.”
He allowed that: “There is no question that Israel has faced Palestinian factions who turned to terror, and leaders who missed historic opportunities. That is why security must be at the center of any agreement.”
Obama’s stock words, though, about the need to create Palestine drew lusty ovations from parts of a crowd that included a good many Arab students and left-wing Jewish students. Obama has been criticized for declining to address the Israeli Knesset. Claims that he was seeking a more congenial audience of Israeli students seemed borne out by Thursday afternoon’s address and its setting. He went so far as to seem to circumvent Israel’s political leadership by declaring that “political leaders will not take risks unless people push them to take risks.”
It was not hard to see shades of the same, delusions-of-grandeur, world-changing Obama who had addressed a Cairo audience of students almost four years ago, although in a different context and with different aims.
Earlier in the day Obama had gone to Ramallah for a meeting with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. At their joint press conference Obama retracted demands he made during his first term for an Israeli settlement freeze, saying no preconditions should be set for Israeli-Palestinian talks.
Yet, in his Jerusalem speech, Obama went back to making hard knocks against Jewish life over the 1967 Green Line, calling it “counterproductive” while sparing the PA any criticism for problematic behavior like systematic incitement and rampant anti-Israeli violence.
And not only anti-Israeli; Obama’s arrival in Israel on Wednesday had “sparked rage on the Palestinian street, as hundreds of Palestinian protesters rallied in Ramallah and Bethlehem against the visit. The protesters ripped posters of the American president and sprayed swastikas on others.”
It continued on Thursday during his Ramallah visit, as

Around 150 demonstrators chanted anti-American slogans, saying they wanted weapons not presidential visits.
“We want RPGs, not collaboration with the CIA,” they shouted, referring to rocket-propelled grenades….
In the Gaza Strip…Palestinian opposition to Obama’s visit was more militant.
Guerrillas fired two rockets at southern Israel in the early morning, causing only slight damage, in a signal that the world should not ignore them in any discussions on regional diplomacy.
Dozens of protesters in Gaza city smacked pictures of Obama with the soles of their shoes, burned US flags and chanted that the president should “get out of Palestine.”

The contrast between such conduct and his uniformly gracious reception in Israel clearly did not persuade Obama that an enduring cultural difference between Israel and the two Palestinian entities makes grandiose talk of a definitive peace hollow.
Obama’s Jerusalem speech did include resonant affirmations of commitment to Israel, most notably:

those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere. Today, I want to tell you—particularly the young people—that so long as there is a United States of America, Ah-tem lo lah-vahd. You are not alone.

At the same time, Obama’s words on the Syrian crisis were curiously one-sided. Calling on Syrian president Bashar Assad to step down, Obama declared that “America will also insist that the Syrian people have the right to be freed from the grip of a dictator who would rather kill his own people than relinquish power”—seemingly oblivious to the fact that radical Sunni forces now fighting Assad match him in brutality and exceed him in ideological extremism.
The Israeli leadership, of course, is acutely aware of that fact and just as worried about Assad’s chemical and other weaponry falling into radical-Sunni as into Shiite Hizballah’s hands. And the Israeli leadership has, beyond question, raised that concern in its talks with Obama these past two days. That Obama persists in portraying the Syrian crisis as a revolt against a political system—instead of the vicious, tribal, sectarian war it has become—again puts his ability to grasp Middle Eastern reality in question.
It is doubtful, though, that lofty words to students about a two-state solution will have much lasting effect, and whether Obama will return to the one-sided pressures on Israel that marked his first term is something only time will tell.
A possibly more significant moment of Obama’s visit occurred during his press conference Wednesday evening with Netanyahu when he said:

Each country has to make its own decisions. Israel is differently situated from the US. I would not expect that the prime minister would defer decisions on his country’s security to other countries. I would not do that regarding my country’s security.

Many pundits have taken these words as a “green light” for a possible Israeli strike on Iran—and not only pundits. A clearly concerned Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei quickly reacted on Thursday by stating: “At times the officials of the Zionist regime threaten to launch a military invasion but they themselves know that if they make the slightest mistake the Islamic Republic will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground.”
Such bluster aside, Israel prefers in any case not to be the country to remove the Iranian nuclear threat. Obama’s assurances that “options are on the table” are questioned by those pointing to his recent withdrawal of an aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf, letting pointless negotiations with Tehran drag on, and strange choices of defense secretary and secretary of state. Those more optimistic can point to the fact that not only Israel but also Sunni Arab states are demanding that something be done and stressing the severe perils of a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race.
Overall, if Obama’s visit leaves Israel’s leadership with the sense of a friendlier, more sympathetic president, and with a sense that an Israeli decision to move on Iran would not evoke punishment but, rather, support from Washington, then the visit comes out positive on the balance sheet.
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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Happy Birthday, Bobby Orr

By Leigh Montville
http://www.sportsonearth.com
March 21, 2013

orr_1980x1100b — The way we'll always remember Bobby Orr: In action at the height of his prowess. (Getty Images)

The hockey game is a way to get Eddie Coyle out of the house, to set him up for the bullet he will receive later in the night in the back of his head. Dillon, the man who will fire that bullet, now drinks a beer with Eddie as they watch the Boston Bruins play the Chicago Blackhawks from the second balcony at the Boston Garden. Menace hangs in the air, but Eddie doesn't notice. His beer has been preceded by a string of beers.

He also is watching Bobby Orr.

"Can you imagine being a kid like that?" he says as Orr skates, one end of the rink to the other, accompanied by a rising level of crowd noise. "What is he? Twenty-four or something?"

Dillon says nothing.

"Greatest hockey player in the world," Eddie continues. "Number 4, Bobby Orr!"

Dillon says nothing.

"What future he's got," Eddie, the man with no future, finishes…

The scene -- Robert Mitchum as poor Eddie and Peter Boyle as Dillon in 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle,' the 1973 film adapted from George V. Higgins' noir novel of the same name -- probably is the best preservation of the wonder, the energy, the excitement of that time in hockey. Mitchum is dead now and Boyle is dead and even George V. Higgins is dead and the Garden has been torn down and replaced, but this is the way it was.

How good was Bobby Orr?

"Greatest hockey player in the world. Number 4, Bobby Orr."

That was how good.

He turned 65 years old on Wednesday, an uh-oh milestone, the long-time retirement age, but the number seemed to mean less with him than it does to most people. Age has not been a factor in his life for a long, long while. His career pretty much was finished by the time he was 28 due to injured knees. His official retirement came when he was 30. His enshrinement in the Hockey Hall of Fame followed when he was 31. He has been frozen as a hockey player ever since, his abilities sort of caught in a magical snow globe.

Like a James Dean, a Jimi Hendrix, a Marilyn Monroe, an Elvis, his time on the stage was truncated, ended so soon that he never had time to age before his public's eyes. Blink and he was gone. There were no pictures of him in his thirties, close to his 40s, slowed down and sticking around for another year. Blink. Gone.

How good was he?

"My title was coach of the Boston Bruins," flamboyant Canadian broadcaster Don Cherry always says. "Actually, what I did was open the door for Bobby Orr and watch the greatest player I've ever seen play hockey."

He was the wunderkind, Childe Bobby, maybe born in a manger, maybe not, headed for stardom almost from the first time he put on skates. Milt Schmidt, the coach and assistant general manager, went with Bruins scouts to a youth hockey tournament in Gananoque, Ontario in 1961 to look at a couple of players named Eaton and Higgins. Schmidt and Co. stumbled upon this tiny 13-year-old defenseman, younger than everyone else, hockey pants and shirt too big for him, running the entire show. The things he could do were obvious.

"We forgot Eaton and Higgins," Schmidt said. "We saw the guy we wanted."

By the time he was 18, he was in Boston, running the show in the big time. The Bruins were in the final leg of an eight-season stretch where they couldn't make for the playoffs even though there were only six teams in the league and four qualified. Three years later the Bruins -- the Big, Bad Bruins -- were Stanley Cup champions. Two years later, they were champions again.

This kid, this prodigy, was a force that never had been seen in the NHL, an offensive-mined defenseman. He controlled the puck for longer stretches of time, skated wherever he wanted as if he were playing a game of keep-away back home on a pond in Parry Sound, Ont. He became the first (and only) defenseman to lead the NHL in scoring. He did it twice. In a seven-year span, only he or teammate Phil Esposito led the league in scoring. Esposito, a large-size center, did much of his work on rebounds and redirects of Orr shots from the point.

Even better than the kid's scoring was his style. He moved in great loops and swoops, one end of the ice to the other. Defensemen mostly had been restricted in their movements in the past, required always to stay in zones, think about turning back to help protect the goalie. Orr was fast enough, confident enough to get back from anywhere. There were no boundaries. Not for him. The entire ice surface was his zone.

He traveled without a helmet, without a visor, traveled free, easily identifiable in his brush cut and stride. In one classic rush, he took the puck and started moving, even though one of his gloves had fallen off. He reached down with one hand, never lost stride, never lost control of the puck, picked up the glove, settled the glove onto his hand, reached the other end of the ice and scored a goal. That was Bobby Orr.

"He was a star," coach Harry Sinden said, "from the first time he stood in a Bruins uniform for the national anthem."

The 11 surgeries on his left knee, maybe more, ended his career early, but did little to alter his place in the game. The argument can be made -- and made well -- that despite competition from Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux and maybe Sidney Crosby right now, he still is the best player ever to skate in the NHL. The argument also can be made -- and made equally well -- that despite Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski and Bill Russell and Larry Bird and Tom Brady and anyone else, he also was the best athlete ever to play in Boston.

How good was he? Dan Canney, the Bruins trainer in those good times, once told a story about a quiet change that Orr brought to the game.

"The last goaltender left in the league who didn't wear a mask was Glenn Hall," Canney said. "He was in town to play against the Bruins and the day before the game he went to Massachusetts General Hospital to visit our goaltender, Eddie Johnston. Eddie had been hit in the head by a Bobby Orr slap shot during practice. He'd had a concussion, was in kind of tough shape."

Johnston and Hall talked. Johnston described the injury, detailed his condition. It was a nice visit. Hall was in the nets the next night, no mask, as usual. Somewhere in the proceedings, Orr lined up a slapper from the point. Hall reacted at the sight of the wind-up, before the shot was taken.

"I was watching him," Canney said. "He took his catching glove and put it full over his face."

The next game, as the story went, Glenn Hall wore a mask. He wore it from that moment until the end of his career.

Happy Birthday, Bobby Orr.

The First Days of Francis

By Peggy Noonan
The Wall Street Journal
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan
March 21, 2013

It really is quite wonderful, what we’re hearing and seeing from Rome. The plain shoes. The plain watch. The slightly galumphy look as he does his walkabouts. The reason he took his name: “How I wish for a poor church, and for a church for the poor.” The report I received of his taking the employee elevator in the Vatican, not the papal one— “Your Holiness!” exclaimed a surprised Swiss Guard. His kissing of the hands of his “brother cardinals” after they would attempt to kiss his ring. The sweetness of his plunging into the crowds. His stopping the jeep Tuesday morning when he was riding around St. Peter’s Square: He saw a disabled man being held by a friend, and stopped to show affection and gratitude. The surprise walkabout Sunday at church. The surprise phone call he made to thousands of Argentines who held an all-night prayer vigil for him Monday in Buenos Aires: “Thank you for praying, for your prayers, which I need a lot.”

All this can be called mere symbolism but it’s good symbolism, and good Francis knows it is needed.

And some things are more than that. Here is the end of his extraordinary blessing, on the third day of his papacy, to the 5,000 journalists who had converged on Rome. When he was to give his apostolic blessing he made no gestures, no pleasing moves, and simply said, in Italian, “I cordially impart to all of you my blessing.” Then, in Spanish: “I told you I was cordially imparting my blessing. Since many of you are not members of the Catholic Church, and others are not believers, I cordially give this blessing silently, to each of you, respecting the conscience of each but in the knowledge that each of you is a child of God. May God bless you!” Then he left.

That declared respect for the consciences of others, the reluctance to assume or impose—that meant something.

So did the homily he gave at his installation mass, in which he used the word “protect” repeatedly. Power is service, service is protection; a new bishop of Rome must be inspired by the “lowly, concrete and faithful service” of St. Joseph. “He must open his arms to protect all of God’s people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important,” including “the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison.” “We must not be afraid of goodness, or even tenderness.”

In a way this sounds standard—any pope might say it. But Francis’s language is marked by a particular tenderness—even by a repetition of that word. It made me think of Mother Teresa. I have a pamphlet she thrust in my hand 28 years ago, the day I met her. It contains a poem she had written. “Jesus is the unwanted—to be wanted. . . . Jesus is the Beggar—to give him a smile. Jesus is the Drunkard—to listen to him. Jesus is the Mental—to protect him . . .”

That in turn reminded me of Francis’s first Angelus as pope, on Sunday. He spoke to those massed in St. Peter’s Square of how mercy makes life sweeter. “A little mercy makes the world less cold and more just.” We should never despair of God’s mercy. “The Lord never tires of forgiving. . . . It is we who tire of asking forgiveness!”

* * *

I am thinking of John Paul II as the pope of freedom, in both the spiritual and the political senses. He went home to Poland and told the Soviet Union that it could not stop God and could not hold the people from him. And of course freedom in the deeper, more crucial sense of finding one’s truest freedom only in belief in God. He liked to quote St. Augustine: “To the extent to which we serve God we are free, while to the extent we follow . . . sin, we are still slaves.”

I am thinking of Benedict XVI as the pope of reason and intellect in a world abandoning both for sensation, stimulation and sentiment. I read last night in John Thavis’s “The Vatican Diaries” of Benedict’s informing a crowd at a World Youth Day mass that Holy Communion can be compared to nuclear fission—the Eucharist is an “intimate explosion” that sets off a series of transformations. Benedict was an intellectual and somewhat abstract: It was hard for him to be fully heard, fully understood.

But Francis in these first days—this pope seems to me the pope of sweetness, not of a shallow or sentimental kind but some deep sweetness that has to do with words like tenderness, and mercy, and protection.

The church the past 35 years in the post-Christian West has attempted to reimpose the urgency of its presence, meaning and belief, and to present those things fully to the rising nations.

John Paul and Benedict were bringers, givers, teachers. But Francis seems like a summoner, an inviter. And this seems just right for the world right now.

Anyway, I am finding it impossible not to be interested in what he is doing, and what he will become.

* * *

Book Review: 'The Power of Negative Thinking' by Bob Knight

BOOKSHELF
March 20, 2013, 4:23 p.m. ET

Sometimes, Throw a Chair

Bobby Knight on why good referees are priceless, what athletes and stockbrokers share and why 'losing is abnormal.'

By FRED BARNES

The Wall Street Journal

http://www.wsj.com

Bobby Knight isn't for everyone. If you're a basketball fan, you're likely to regard him as one of the greatest coaches of all time. He is the guy who took the "hurryin' " out of Indiana University's "Hurryin' Hoosiers" brand of racehorse basketball (as his fast-breaking predecessor at IU, Lou Watson, often pointed out). He stressed defense, at least four passes on each offensive possession and what he calls a "mistake-avoidance strategy." He won 11 Big Ten titles and three NCAA championships at IU and coached the U.S. team—Michael Jordan was on it—that captured the gold medal at the 1984 Olympics.

Mr. Knight coached like a drill sergeant. He didn't let the players choose the team captain. He did. He rejected the idea of putting players' names on the backs of their jerseys. "You're playing for the name on the front on the jersey," he said. He detested losing. He told his players: "You're not here on scholarship to lose. I didn't recruit you to lose. Losing is abnormal; losing is unusual; losing is unacceptable. That's not what we're here for."

After 43 years of coaching, Mr. Knight retired in 2008. But as college basketball's March Madness begins this week—three weeks of high-voltage playoffs leading to a national champion—Mr. Knight remains for millions the prototype of an iron-fisted coach. He has many disciples, most notably Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, who played at West Point during Mr. Knight's first head-coaching stint.

If you aren't a basketball fan, you are less likely to admire Mr. Knight. His reputation for yelling at players, sometimes grabbing them angrily, and quarreling with referees is well-known. He once threw a chair across court while fuming over a referee's call. His disdain for referees lives on. The blind leading the blind? "I've seen it happen," Mr. Knight writes in "The Power of Negative Thinking," "and both had whistles." Good referees are priceless, he adds, "as all rare things are."

There's more to "The Power of Negative Thinking" than referee-baiting and basketball strategy. The book's conceit is that Mr. Knight's lessons from coaching apply to other fields. "The principles I established and followed in coaching carry over perfectly to the way I think leadership works best in business or any other area of life," he writes. Often they do, but not always.

The Power of Negative Thinking

By Bob Knight
(New Harvest, 223 pages, $25)

"The smart, cautious athlete is doing in a split second what an investor may have to do in the split second of watching a stock market tape—consider the risks, calculate the best alternative, and then commit to it totally," according to Mr. Knight. This is a stretch. The player operates on instinct nurtured in hundreds of hours of practice. The investor relies on knowledge, his own and others'. Mr. Knight likens an organization's "human resources," or employees, to a basketball. Both are "limited" resources. Neither should be used wastefully (with a basketball, that would mean shooting it too quickly). But avoiding waste is a general rule that applies to nearly everything, not just employees and basketballs.

This isn't Mr. Knight's first book—his autobiographical "Knight: My Story" was published in 2002—and it won't be the book by which he is most remembered. He gave sportswriter John Feinstein near total access during the 1985-86 season at IU, and Mr. Feinstein produced a classic, "Season on the Brink," that immortalized Mr. Knight as one of the smartest and most domineering figures in sports.

What distinguishes "The Power of Negative Thinking" is that it is fun to read and wise, in its way. Mr. Knight isn't kidding about the value of negative thinking. He defines it as "recognizing, addressing, and removing obstacles to winning." For Mr. Knight that includes preparation and the elimination of mistakes. "Having the will to win is not enough," he writes. "Everyone has that. What matters is having the will to prepare to win." Victory, he insists, "favors the team making the fewest mistakes."

Mr. Knight lists "always worry" as the third of his Ten Commandments of leadership. "If you can't think of a thing to be worried about, worry about being overconfident," he says. The ninth commandment is "never talk too much. Get yourself a degree from Shut-Up School and remember it when talking about your competitors." Mr. Knight himself never obtained that degree.

Mr. Knight has put together a historical roster of those he believes succeeded through negative thinking. It includes Washington, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Shakespeare, Sun Tzu, Stonewall Jackson, Leonardo da Vinci and . . . Pogo. On his list of overconfident failures are Thomas Dewey, Robert E. Lee, Napoleon and Hitler. "Hitler must not have read Tolstoy," Mr. Knight says, or he wouldn't have invaded Russia.

Roughly half of "The Power of Negative Thinking" is simply about basketball. That Mr. Knight focuses on his three NCAA champs and the gold-medal Olympics team is understandable. But his coaching quirks are more interesting. He doesn't like to call timeouts, preferring to let his teams play through tough situations. Even in the waning seconds of a game, his advice is: "Do not stop the clock and let [opponents] set up their defense." A top goal for his teams was always "to make more free throws than our opponents shot."

Mr. Knight, now 72, reveals that his wife, Karen, a former high-school basketball coach, warned him against "being too negative." She urged him to be quick to praise players when they did well. "Now I may surprise you with this thought," he writes. "Amid all those firm negatives that bring things into line, a coach or any other kind of leader should never overlook a chance to be positive." Good as that advice is, it won't be a big part of the Knight legend. But winning 902 games and throwing that chair will never be forgotten.

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard.

A version of this article appeared March 21, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Sometimes, Throw a Chair.