The warships reached the Syrian city of Tartous, northwest of the capital Damascus, after crossing the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea.

The crossing was the second in a year by Iranian warships, Iran’s navy chief said.

Last February, the Iranian frigate Alvand and the supply ship Kharg entered the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, for the first time since 1979.

Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayari told the official news agency IRNA that the latest initiative was to show Iran’s naval power and “deliver the message of peace to the nations of the region and the world.”

… because nothing can “deliver the message of peace” quite like warships.

More and more, I feel like I’m watching the beginning of what will end up being a bad hockey game that’s going to feature more fighting than hockey. Iran and Israel are opposing wingers who are jawing at each other before the puck even drops, trying to goad one another into dropping the gloves. The puck drops, these two clowns go after each other, the refs can’t effectively break it up, and before you know it, even the goalies are swinging at one another at center ice.

I won’t stretch the analogy any more than I already have, except to say that I hope we can find some officials who can put a stop to the nonsense before it really gets started.

In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.

Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.

Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they’ll insist that it does.

That’s new. If you had asked American evangelicals that same question the year I was born you would not have gotten the same answer.

That year, Christianity Today — edited by Harold Lindsell, champion of “inerrancy” and author of The Battle for the Bible — published a special issue devoted to the topics of contraception and abortion. That issue included many articles that today would get their authors, editors — probably even their readers — fired from almost any evangelical institution. For example, one article by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary criticized the Roman Catholic position on abortion as unbiblical. Jonathan Dudley quotes from the article in his book Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:

God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.

Christianity Today would not publish that article in 2012. They might not even let you write that in comments on their website. If you applied for a job in 2012 with Christianity Today or Dallas Theological Seminary and they found out that you had written something like that, ever, you would not be hired.

At some point between 1968 and 2012, the Bible began to say something different. That’s interesting.

Mental health professionals in Argentina have accumulated such a wealth of experience in treating victims of state terrorism that they are now sharing it with colleagues across the country’s borders.

Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, which like Argentina were under the yoke of military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, now have access to the experience of mental health professionals here by means of a growing body of written material on how to provide assistance for survivors of torture and relatives of victims of state repression. 

HT: Flavia Dzodan.

A new article in The Journal of Politics (gated) — ”Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism” (draft 2009, ungated) by Benmelecha, Berrebia, and Klora — examines one of the connections between poverty and terrorism:

This article analyzes the link between economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. While the existing empirical literature shows that poverty and economic conditions are not correlated with the quantity of terror, theory predicts that poverty and poor economic conditions may affect the quality of terror. Poor economic conditions may lead more able and better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact terror missions. Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists who acted against Israeli targets in 2000–06, we provide evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature, and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.

There’s also this piece, posted yesterday by Brad Parks at the Monkey Cage, which looks at another one of the connections between poverty and terrorism:

Since 9/11, the USG has promoted foreign assistance as a useful tool for combating global terrorism. Indeed, the case for foreign aid is often made on the basis of its presumed efficacy inpreventing terrorism. But, until recently, the evidence supporting these claims was rather flimsy.

Formal models of the aid-terrorism relationship suggest that aid may prevent terrorism when it is targeted in ways that promote human capital through education (Azam and Thelen 2008; Buenode Mesquita 2005). However, many of these theoretical arguments have not been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny because of insufficiently granular data.

A recent article by Joseph Young and Michael Findley seeks to correct these weaknesses.  AidData’s detailed activity coding methodology allows the authors to disaggregate aid figures by project purpose. In their analysis, Young and Findley include separate measures of education aid to test the specific argument that aid targeted to education may prevent terrorism. They are also able to examine the potentially substitutable effects of general budget aid, health aid, and aid tied to counterterrorism.

Here is a brief summary of their findings:

Does foreign aid reduce terrorism? We examine whether foreign aid decreases terrorism by analyzing whether aid targeted toward certain sectors is more effective than others. We use the most comprehensive databases on foreign aid and transnational terrorism—AidData andITERATE—to provide a series of statistical tests. Our results show that foreign aid decreases terrorism especially when targeted toward sectors, such as education, health, civil society, and conflict prevention. These sector-level results indicate that foreign aid can be an effective instrument in fighting terrorism if allocated in appropriate ways.

HT: Michael Tofias.