Nine wise people?

I am referring to the nine (or in one case eight) Israeli Supreme Court justices who overturned the decision to ban two predominantly Palestinian parties from running in the February 10 elections.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057497.html

In a previous post, I joined many others in commenting that "[g]iven its track record, it is likely (though there is no guarantee) that Israel's supreme court will overturn the decision of the highly politicized Central Elections Committee." I am somewhat relieved that the court had the wisdom to do so, but it is not healthy for an alleged democracy to rely on appointed officials to "do the right thing." In fact, it is one of the factors that leads a democracy to being merely an "alleged" one...

I have pretty much hashed this issue in my January 12 post, so I'll leave it at that. It was just important for me to post an update today.

Technical note

I just realized that the Al-Jazeera RSS feed was not being updated. I find Al-Jazeera to be a crucial addition to the landscape of electronic news media, both in English and in Arabic, but since this particular component of the network wasn't working properly, I changed the RSS feed on this blog to another reputable Arabic network, Al-Arabiya.

For those interested in reading Al-Jazeera, you can always navigate to http://aljazeera.net.