SENSE AND NONSENSE

By Terence Smith

   Of all the extraordinary numbers that came out of the comedy show/debacle that was the 2024 Presidential election, one obscure statistic caught my eye: 20 percent of Americans — one-in-five, get their news these days from digital news influencers, according to the Pew Research Center.

   Think about that. One in five of us drinking the fire hose of unverified, misleading, frequently vicious, occasionally racist, accidentally comical, sometimes accurate reporting that proliferates online. Much of this appears on the social platform X. Very little of it holds up to scrutiny. But 20 percent of us get our news that way and did so during this election.

   Add to that the hugely popular podcasts like Joe Rogan’s self-indulgent, near-endless ramblings and you can see that the media landscape today bears little or no resemblance to what it was a decade or two ago. Some 47-million Americans listened to all or part of Donald Trump’s three-hour star turn on the Joe Rogan show shortly before voting. Kamala Harris spent hundreds of millions on advertising during her 107-day campaign, and did some social media, but chose to skip Joe Rogan and others. Understandable, but self-defeating when it comes to attracting the votes of younger men.

   So, ours is a world today where Elon Musk on X and others too numerous to mention provide the “facts.” Not The New York Times, not PBS, but influencers. The net result is that the burden of sorting truth from fiction falls upon the the viewer or listener. They become their own “gatekeepers,” responsible for sorting out facts from nonsense. Sometimes they get it right — common sense helps — but not always.

   The consequences can be enormous, as the Pew Research Center and others have concluded.

Herewith, a fresh reminder of how immigration -frenzy can and did go awry. Ken Ringle is an author and journalist.

THE PROFOUND TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRANTS

By Ken Ringle

    The greatest prejudice against immigrants before the present MAGA-fueled hysteria was the West Coast panic against Japanese-Americans  resulting in the internment of more than 110,000 behind barbed wire during World War II. Most of those confined were American citizens. No matter. Because of their race and ethnicity they were suspect as potential traitors in our war with  Japan.

   My father, a  Naval intelligence officer, fought earnestly, if futily, against that internment. His years in Japan and his fluency in Japanese language and culture, convinced him of the absolute loyalty to the United States of Japanese Americans. His “Ringle Reports” to his Naval superiors—and ultimately to President Franklin D. Roosevelt—are prized and regularly cited by historians as evidence of one of the greatest government injustices of the 20th Century. They are available on line.

  But Kenneth D. Ringle was no starry-eyed liberal. After Pearl Harbor he worked with the FBI to round up some 3,500  legitimately suspect Japanese-Americans for whom he had uncovered unquestioned evidence of espionage. But the entire question of Japanese-American loyalty, he insisted, could and should be determined on an individual basis and not on the basis of race or immigrant prejudice. The Nisei—American-born Japanese-Americans—were better citizens than most of the rest of  us, he said.

   Though as a career Naval officer he was insistently apolitical (he and his classmates considered their profession a higher calling to national service than that of any party politician), his basic philosophical and governmental instincts were conservative. In retirement during the 1960s he quietly voiced support for Sen. Barry Goldwater. But his reverence for the nation’s immigrant tradition was always unquestioned. His own German and French ancestors had been suspect in the 1700s as insufficiently grounded in British language and culture, he told me, but they and every subsequent wave of arrivals to this land—Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Latino, Chinese— had enriched and enlivened the promise of America, both economically and spiritually.

   “The thing you must always remember about immigrants,” he told me as a child, “is that the best and truest Americans aren’t even here yet. They are somewhere else clinging passionately to the hope and promise they see in this country and our Constitution. Why do you think we have to regulate our borders? It’s all those people from everywhere in the world who want to come here for a better life. They understand it won’t be easy. They know there will be painful difficulties getting here and no guarantee of success when they arrive. We have to regulate their numbers and help them assimilate. But the energy they give us as a nation is what makes our diversity succeed. Those of us born here too often take our freedoms and opportunities for granted. Immigrants never do. They understand this nation better than we do ourselves.”

  Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, understands this truth instinctively. But she appears reluctant to praise the immigrants Donald Trump condemns. That should change. She needs to remind us that the virtue of immigrants is not just that they don’t commit crimes or eat pets, but that though their hope and optimism and hard work they remind us how much better citizens we can each become.

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Herewith, a droll set of reasons to vote for Donald Trump (or Not!)

by Phillip Kopper, author and publisher

Ten Best Reasons to Vote for Trump (or Not)

1) Approaching 80, if he dies in office (or succumbs to the 25th Amendment) he will be succeeded by a graduate of the Yale Law School.

2) Claiming abuse by Biden’s pesky Justice Department, he will bring the DoJ to heel and show how prosecutory persecution is done.

3) He will pardon the thousand-plus “patriots” convicted of storming the Capitol in order to reduce federal spending (in Bureau of Prison outlays at least).

4) To shrink the federal bureaucracy, he will appoint Elon Musk to disband the regulatory agencies that inhibit his operations.

5) He will impose tariffs in order to grow the GNP by raising prices across the board.

6) He will run the government “like  a business,” applying his own experience as a businessman whose acumen is proved by his six bankruptcies.

          7) Rather than follow the complex “rule of law” dating from 1789, he will simplify governance by suspending the Constitution.

          8) With the economy growing at 3.2%, wages rising faster than inflation, and the stock market soaring, he says America is in decline and boasts “I can fix it.”

9) Speaking in opaque generalities, sentence fragments and random rambles, he continues to relieve listeners from having to pay attention.

10) He will expand presidential power exponentially to compensate for Congress’s dysfunction (thanks especially to the House Republican Caucus).

Bonus) Since America’s motto E Pluribus Unum is in a foreign language, he will replace it with the pithy “So what?”

Ethel Kennedy, R.I.P.

By Terence Smith

    So many memories of so many times with Ethel Kennedy, going back so many years:

    *Aboard The Caroline, the Kennedy family plane, during Robert F. Kennedy’s whirlwind campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1964 — the only campaign he ever finished. Ethel, fussing over us all, even reporters like me, making her husband change his shirt after every raucous, sweaty rally stop.

   * Funny, silly afternoons at Hickory Hill, Ethel the funniest and silliest of us all.

   *Skiing at Deer Valley, Utah, tackling the steep slopes, Ethel  charging down the hill, falling and getting a hairline fracture of one knee, and blaming it on me!

   *A chance encounter in a crowded elevator after a show at The Kennedy Center, with Ethel explaining to her companions: “This is the guy who broke my leg!”

   *Another winter in Deer Valley, when Ethel arrived at a friend’s house with 11 suitcases of ski clothes, most of which she never opened.

   *Playing “I have never…” around a dinner table; Ethel winning by announcing: “I have never …cooked spaghetti!” Everybody else had.

   *Dancing, singing and laughing under a tent at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis for Ethel’s niece Maria Shriver’s wedding to Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

   *At Arlington National Cemetery, on the 50th anniversary of her husband’s assassination, Ethel holding back the tears. Later that same day, drinking wine in the sun-splashed garden of the residence of the Irish Ambassador and telling old stories.

   None of us is going too live forever, of course, but Ethel gave it a try for 96 remarkable years. R.I.P. Ethel.

APPRECIATING DAVID BREASTED


Herewith, a delightful recollection of one sailing friend written by another. Ken Ringle is an author and journalist.

By  Ken  Ringle

  It is said that we only miss monuments when they’re gone. And so it is that Washingtonians of a certain age will greatly miss David Breasted,  monument to an era when journalism in this  city was more flamboyant, more raucous and a lot more fun.

   David, who died last Thursday at 89, was at one level a journeyman reporter who wrote for the old Washington Star, the New York Daily News and other outlets. But in the 1960s and 70s, when many in our trade had a wider and more extravagant range, he was also an accomplished singer, guitarist, songwriter, host, raconteur, chef, ocean sailor and general fixture of press and political life. He was known to everyone from Ethel Kennedy to members of  Alcoholics Anonymous of which he was a proud member for more than 50 years.

  With his Yale education and Ivy League good looks, David slid easily into the Washington  press corps when he joined the Washington bureau of the New York Daily News in the 1960s. He was a perfect fit for the times: an Exeter and Yale-trained grandson  of an Egyptologist who helped open King Tut’s tomb, and whose parents palled around with Roosevelts. With his irreverent  amiability and hearty baritone and guitar, he also became the master of ceremonies of skits and singalongs between stops of numerous political campaigns. He reached his greatest fame on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign train, penning and singing a joyously- received anthem called “The Ruthless Cannonball” sending up the  candidate’s alleged merciless political instincts. Kennedy loved it. 

  I first met David when I joined the Washington Post in 1970 and moved into a famous group house in Foggy Bottom, the lease of which he held. The house at 2146 Eye St. NW was owned by George Washington University and has long since been absorbed into the school’s mushrooming campus. But at the time it was the ideal entry point for Washington. Not only was it walking distance from my work at the Post, it had a Chinese laundry across the street, a grocery and liquor store that delivered, two blocks away on Pennsylvania Ave., plus numerous bars and restaurants within walking distance and even the Circle movie theatre, alas long gone.

More important for new arrivals, it came complete with referrals for doctors, lawyers, bankers, and Redskin tickets and even a celebrity dentist we would encounter at fundraisers for the arts.

   There is simply no way to overstate the place “Heartbreak Hotel” occupied in the journalistic culture of Washington at that  time. It was, among other things,  a halfway house for those traveling to and from new employment and to and from divorce. Among those who lived there for various periods, short or long, were Carl Bernstein, Warren Hoge (later of the New York Times),  Sally Quinn, NBC TV correspondent Douglas Kiker, food  critic Bill Rice and John  McCain’s brother Joe.  Gonzo  journalist Hunter  Thompson was a frequent visitor.  The  house was also centrally located for coverage of the numerous anti-war demonstrations of the day. GW students would hand us their riot plans, police picket lines would parade just outside and we once found an unexploded tear gas grenade in the back yard. Our evangelical Mormon cleaning woman tucked it lovingly into a salad bowl in the kitchen assuming it was a misplaced objet d’arte.

  Amidst all of this, David was a perpetual host, throwing regular dinners and drinkalongs for everyone from The Informed Sources (his own bluegrass  group) to a touring troupe of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was impossible to live in the house with David without involuntarily learning the lyrics to one of his favorite regular vocals: “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight” .

  Though David was a talented cook, chef for most of these events was his live-in girlfriend—Cindy Moran—a recent American University graduate who worked as a reporter for Gannett.  Cindy was one of the highlights of the house—a hysterically funny (not to say indulgent) woman who never quailed when David would arrive home declaring he had invited 26 for dinner. Amid all the hilarity, the real business of Washington was never far away. I remember David being awakened at 2 a.m. one night  by a phone call saying one of the radical anti-war groups had exploded a bomb in a restroom of the U.S. Capitol.

    Like all of us, David had his demons,  but he met some in heroic terms. On New Year’s Eve 1971 (not  long after consuming alone an entire bottle of bourbon I had left in the kitchen) he quit smoking, quit drinking and went on a diet at the same time. He kept those resolutions for the rest of his life. He also quit journalism to go back to finish Yale, from which he had departed a few hours shy of his degree. He later said all the younger students of the time assumed he was a narc.

    Though he kept in touch with his reporter friends, David then moved on to the real guiding passion of his life—ocean sailing. He had crewed in the 1970 Newport to Bermuda race aboard  a Cal 40 owned by his friend Juan Cameron of Fortune magazine, and was a highly skilled technical sailor, ever mesmerized by the challenges of perfect sail trim and the glories of wind and water. But he was also a bit crazy. David suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the intricacies of navigation—particularly in those pre-GPS days—at times drove him a bit nuts. Though he never did anything actually dangerous—OK, so he once insisted I steer a course over the top of Fisher’s Island—he executed celebrated groundings on well-marked shoals in Nantucket harbor and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal  while he was literally arguing aloud with an invisible alter-ego we came to know as Walter.

  None of this affected his infectious charm or the affection in which he was held by almost everyone who knew him. He gravitated to teaching sailing on Long Island Sound (he reported hearing the news of Nixon’s resignation over his boat’s VHS radio—some guy calling his broker, he said) and exercised his skills delivering yachts for various owners, usually between Annapolis and New England.  Off Hyannis he would invariably start telling hilarious Kennedy stories in a Boston accent indistinguishable from JFK, Bobby or Teddy. He also became a yacht broker and found Teddy’s final boat at the senator’s request.

  Over the years he alternated between sailing and attending his beloved bluegrass concerts. His former journalistic cohorts saw him less and less. As his health failed in recent years he became occupied with tidying his affairs. A few years ago he phoned to task me with a special mission: when he died he wanted me to scatter his ashes from the Spa Creek drawbridge in  Annapolis. The reason, he said, was to honor a fellow alcoholic who years before—in a self-destructive haze— had jumped from the bridge in an effort to end his life. The fellow failed, was fished out, sobered up, joined AA and became employed as the drawbridge tender. David thought a life like that should be memorialized. I’m not sure just how I’m going to do what he asked, but it’s a mission close to my heart.

###

GREATER ISRAEL, OR LESSER?

By Terence Smith

   The headline splashed across the front page of today’s (August 16, 2024) Washington Post told the story:

        “ ISRAEL SOLIDIFYING CONTROL OVER THE WEST BANK — AND ITS FUTURE

            Recent Moves by Netanyahu Coalition are Putting Two-State Solution Out of Reach”

   In a thoroughly-reported investigative article that ran two full pages illustrated with photos and a map, The Post laid out the long-standing and thinly-concealed Israeli plan to absorb the occupied West Bank of the Jordan and prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state. “Victory by Settlement,” the right-wing Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich called it. 

   When the United Nations’ highest court ordered Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territory last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded: “The Jewish people are not conquerors in their own land.”

   The article goes on to state that there are nearly three million Palestinians living on the West Bank today and some 500,000 Jewish settlers. It documents a “creeping, decades-long encirclement of Palestinian communities, followed more recently by rapid expansion  and unchecked violence” by settlers. 

   The Post notes that the pace of settler assaults of Palestinians and their homes and fields has doubled under the Netanyahu coalition government’s administration. Scores of Palestinians have been killed in some 1,100 separate incidents in the last year, including one yesterday. Five Israeli settlers have died as well. The United States has imposed sanctions on some of the more extreme and violent settlers, but with little effect.

   With scores of Israeli settlements scattered across the West Bank, the path to a genuine, two-state solution is hard to imagine. 

   It is an old story, of course, dating back to the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel occupied the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem. I covered that war as a young foreign correspondent for The New York Times and remember when the first right-wing settlers moved into a hotel in the West Bank city of Hebron and declared their intention to stay. 

   At a press conference shortly thereafter in Jerusalem, I asked Defense Minister Moshe Dayan what he intended to do about these rump, would-be settlers.

   Dayan scoffed at the question: “If we can solve the big issues, like borders and Jerusalem,” he said dismissively, “the settlers will be no problem.” 

   That was 57 years ago. I’ve wondered since whether Dayan believed what he said then, or simply couldn’t conceive of what was coming.

I UNDERSTAND, JOE

By Terence Smith

Dear Mr. President;

   You made the right decision. 

   It wasn’t easy to give up your campaign for another term, and you fought it as long as you could.

   I understand better than most. I am four years older than you, and know first-hand what lies ahead for you. 

   It is not terrible (in fact, there are unique pleasures,) but most men in their 80’s lose a step or two, forget a thing or two and drop the ball now and then. Not a biggie for most of us, but then most of us octogenarians are not President of the United States.

   You are. And, while I read that you work out five times a week and don’t drink, I can hardly imagine the pressures of  your job. They must be relentless (along with the rewards,) and must increase dramatically during a campaign for re-election. 

   You made the right decision.

   Now, of course, you are a lame duck. That may haunt you for the next six months, but it also offers some rare opportunities. Now you can double down on your most important priorities, foreign and domestic, without fretting on what impact it might have on your re-election chances. You can unload, for example, on Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu on the long-overdue need to end the fighting in Gaza, free the hostages still held by Hamas and create a post-war regime that protects the lives of the beleaguered Palestinians that have survived the horrors of the last 10 months.

   You can redouble the international support for Ukraine, you can continue to enlarge the Indo-Pacific alliances around China, you can do everything possible to balance the inequities in the U.S. economy, you can speak to the racial prejudice that still afflicts this country, you can try, at least, to ease the deep and growing divisions between right and left, white and black, young and old. 

   The opportunities are endless and time is short. 

   Enjoy.

TERENCE SMITH, journalist and author of “Four Wars, Five Presidents, A Reporter’s Journey from Jerusalem to Saigon to the White House.”

ISRAEL THEN AND NOW

By Terence Smith

   I first set foot in Israel in May, 1967, ( a mere 57 years ago,) a newly-minted foreign correspondent for The New York Times, arriving just days before the start of the Six Day War.

    Israel-the-nation was 19 years old (I was barely 10 years older,) and was a vastly different place with vastly different attitudes and politics than Israel today.

   Israel then was largely liberal, progressive and proudly socialist. The Labor Party was in power and would rule for 40 years. The left-of-center Kibbutzim, or collective settlements, embodied the spirit of the nation. Neckties were rarely worn by political leaders; saying “thank you” to a waiter was dismissed as pathetically bourgeois; the national labor union, the Histadrut, represented most of the population and guided its politics. 

   Israel today is something else: largely right of center, with ultra-conservative, aggressive ministers in the government holding the keys to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s increasingly shaky kingdom. The ultra-orthodox population has grown to nearly 13 percent of the total and wields significant political power. Labor is now the smallest party in the Knesset, with just four seats out of 120. The Israeli left, dominant for decades, has withered away. 

   Of course, Israel, now 9.5 million strong, is not now and never will be a monolith. The old cliche: “two Israelis, three opinions” is still true.  You  can find liberal and progressive Israelis demonstrating on Saturday nights against the Netanyahu coalition and in support of the families of hostages still held in Gaza. They are demanding a ceasefire, release of the remaining hostages and new elections as soon as the firing stops.

   Meanwhile, the nearly three million Palestinians clinging to their lands on the occupied West Bank are under daily assault from out-of-control Israeli settlers.  Gaza and Hamas may dominate the headlines, and the risk of full-scale war with Hezbollah on the Lebanese-Israel border looms large, but the real tinderbox in my view, the site of a looming third Intifada, is the West Bank.

   In the Six Day War in June, 1967, which I covered for The New York Times, Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan, the Sinai from Egypt and much of the Golan Heights from Syria. All or portions of the latter two were returned in negotiations, but not the West Bank. The so-called Green Line, which separates Israel proper from the West Bank, remains the effective border today. 

   From 1967, when Israel immediately annexed Jordanian East Jerusalem, to today, a significant and increasingly influential portion of the Israeli leadership and public has publicly acknowledged its intention to absorb the occupied West Bank.

   The official Israeli (and U.S.) policy is that the status of the West Bank is a matter to be negotiated between the parties. For many Israelis, and today members of the Cabinet, it is not. The official policy of openness to a negotiated solution is just that:  official policy. It is increasingly not the reality. The reality is that more and more Israelis intend to keep control of the West Bank and its residents and to block the formation of an independent Palestinian state.

   Beginning with the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977 and continuing to the Netanyahu government today, the notion of giving up control of the West Bank  is mere lip service, a rhetorical convenience, a sop to the U.S. and Western European nations that embrace the two-state solution as the only solution.

   The possibility of an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank was briefly real during the Oslo Accords in 1993, and again in 2000 at a Camp David summit, but withered away in disagreement.

   In recent years, and especially since the savage Hamas attacks of October. 7, 2023, as Israel has moved to the right politically, more and more Israelis are willing to admit to the world and to themselves that they are flatly opposed to Palestinian statehood in the West Bank. They cite security, historical tradition and religion as justification for denying sovereignty to the Palestinians who live on the West Bank. 

   Bezalel Smotrich, the hard-right, ultra-nationalist Finance Minister in the Netanyahu coalition, said as much recently in a taped speech to a group of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The government, he said, is engaged in a stealthy effort to irreversibly change the way the West Bank is governed, to cement Israel’s control over the area and its people, without admitting that it is formally annexing it. 

   Mr. Smotrich’s view of the future of the West Bank is no secret, but having a government minister and key member of the ruling coalition say it publicly was a moment. Nor, incidentally, is it any surprise to the more sophisticated Palestinians on the West Bank. They have known and believed for years that Israel is slowly and inexorably absorbing the area and has no intention of withdrawing from its control.

   So, there it was, in public and on the record and taped at an event that Mr. Smotrich’s aides said was no secret. Tens of thousands of Israelis disagree, of course, and regularly demonstrate their disagreement, but they are not in the Netanyahu government. Mr. Smotrich is.

TERENCE SMITH, a journalist and author, covered Israel for The New York Times, for five years. His memoir is “Four Wars, Five Presidents, a Reporter’s Journey from Jerusalem to Saigon to the White House.”

AFGHANISTAN MADNESS

By Terence Smith

The headline in The New York Times was stark:

                      “AMERICA'S MONSTER

How the United States Backed Kidnapping, Torture and Murder in Afghanistan”

Starting across the top of the Thursday, May 23, 2024, NYT front page and jumping to four full pages inside, it documented how U.S. forces in Afghanistan empowered a local warlord, Abdul Raziq, and encouraged his reign of terror against suspected Taliban operatives in Kandahar Province.
It is a deeply reported investigation into one of the darker chapters of America’s longest war: the 20-year, fruitless attempt to remake the “graveyard of empires” into a modern democracy after driving out Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the wake of the attacks of 9/11. After a full two decades, an estimated 200,000 casualties, including 46,000 civilians, the war left 2.6 million refugees in a broken nation that was immediately taken over by the Taliban in the wake of the chaotic U.S, withdrawal in 2021. We left a failed nation in our wake.
From its inception, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a classic example of the perils of “mission creep.” From a sharply-targeted goal to remove Al Qaeda, the American effort grew and evolved over and again into ill-defined nation-building. By the end, even the commanders on the ground were hard-pressed to explain what they were doing there. The American exit was ugly, but it was unquestionably the right, if long overdue, decision.
To me, Afghanistan was a vivid example of the repeated failure of the United States to project its extraordinary military power abroad. Not since World War II, or maybe Korea, have we succeeded in using our power to achieve clearly-defined, achievable goals at the point of a gun: not in Vietnam, nor Afghanistan, nor Iraq. Nor is there any likelihood we will do better going forward. The harsh reality is that it is the threat of American military intervention that has an impact. The actual commitment is another vastly more complicated task, in which the exit is more challenging than the launch.
Presidents after presidents, from LBJ to Nixon to George W. to Obama have learned the lesson the hard way. George H.W. was criticized for pulling out of Iraq in 1991, but he didn’t pursue a forever war. Too bad his son didn’t get the message.
President Biden may have bungled the exit from Afghanistan, but he got out. More recently, he has avoided putting American troops on the ground in Ukraine and Gaza. He has sent crucial weapons to Ukraine, employed economic sanctions against Russia, revitalized NATO and weighed in diplomatically in the Middle East.
Is it — at long last — a lesson learned?

TERENCE SMITH is the author of “Four Wars, Five Presidents: A Reporter’s Journey from Jerusalem to Saigon to the White House.”

A CRUISE TO RECKON WITH

By Terence Smith

   It could have been a cruise from hell: 17 days from Athens-to-Dubai through three active war zones just as the fighting erupted between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and continued in Somalia and Yemen. Instead, it was smooth sailing, as the newly refurbished Crystal Symphony skillfully glided through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea and east to Dubai.

   Compliments to the Captain, who stuck to the scheduled itinerary despite ongoing civil wars off to port and starboard. The only deviation was off the coast of Yemen, not to avoid the Houthis, but to wisely escape a cyclone hurtling up from the Indian Ocean. By the time the storm lashed the Yemeni coastline, we were rolling just a bit as we skimmed eastward along the coast of Oman, on our way to the capital, Muscat. The only casualty: a scheduled stop at Salalah, the famous home of the Frankincense Trail.

   We even avoided a boarding from the famous Somali pirates, a la the Tom Hanks film, Captain Phillips, who have been known to assault and clamber aboard ships just off the Somali coast and seize their cargo and crew. Crystal had an armed security team aboard equipped with a high-powered laser and strong water cannons to protect us against pirates who never ventured out to meet us. Instead, we were treated to stunning sunsets over Somalia. There was neither sound nor sight of the internecine fighting that has been raging in Somalia for years.

   The cruise departed Athens enroute Dubai on October 9, just two days after the gruesome Hamas surprise attacks in southern Israel that killed some 1,400 men, women and children, most of them civilians. Israel had already launched its heavy and deadly air raids on Gaza in preparation for its major ground offensive. The whole region was heating up with skirmishes on the Lebanese border between Hezbollah and Israel and escalating violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.

   After a stop in Rhodes, lovely Rhodos, where we could see the Turkish coastline a few miles to the east, Crystal Symphony sailed over night to the northern end of the Suez Canal. We anchored perhaps 120 miles west of the ever-intensifying fighting in Gaza, waiting for our appointed time to begin the journey south through the Canal. After dark, I scanned the eastern sky looking for any sight or sound of air action over Gaza. Nothing. In our cabin, we could turn on BBC World News and see that fighting was raging in Gaza. But looking east, we saw and heard nothing.  Nor did we see anything of the two U.S. Navy carrier groups that moved into the Eastern Mediterranean. All was peaceful. Truly bizarre.

   Crystal Symphony raised anchor and headed south through the Suez Canal on schedule early the next morning. We passed Ismailiyah and memorials commemorating the battles that took place between Israel and Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I had covered both wars for The New York Times and, as luck would have it, I was aboard Crystal Symphony as a speaker to share my experiences: old war stories that now seemed much more relevant. I had crossed the Canal repeatedly during those wars, but had never sailed its length before. Now I could appreciate it as the extraordinary, beautiful engineering achievement that it is.

   The only even slightly unusual sight we saw was a single SUV marked “Police,” that motored slowly down the road on the west bank of the Canal, staying just abreast of the ship. That protection may be routine in Egypt, where tourists have been targets, but to us, it reflected the troubled times raging all around us.

   For the next several days, we cruised south and east through the beautiful Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden into the Arabian Sea under cloudless skies. Off to the east, the Houthis in Yemen fired four missiles towards southern Israel; only to have them shot down by a U.S. warship. We heard and saw nothing and only learned of the incident from the BBC. Unreal. Off to thAe west, the Somali civil war raged., out of sight and sound.

   Finally, we docked in Dubai, that megalopolis in the desert, where oil and gas money has been converted into stunning skyscrapers, including the world’s tallest, the 163-story Burj al Khalifa, reaching into the sky..

   Rather than a cruise from hell, our journey turned out to be an undisturbed glide through three active war zones that we never saw or felt.  Totally unreal.