Rael Jean Isaac

A Czech Hero

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, displays what is for politicians the rarest form of courage: intellectual courage. At the Heartland Institute conference on climate change in New York City in March, Klaus quoted from a speech he had made a week earlier on the 60th anniversary of the Communist putsch in his country: “’Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical—the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.’ What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism. This fear of mine is the driving force behind my active involvement in the climate change debate and behind my being the only head of state who in September 2007 at the UN Climate Change Conference...openly and explicitly challenged the current global warming hysteria. My central argument was—in a condensed form—formulated in the subtitle of my recently published book devoted to this topic, which asks: ‘What is endangered: climate or freedom?’ My answer is clear and resolute: ‘It is our freedom.’ I may also add ‘and our prosperity.’”

Alas, President Bush shows no similar clarity and resolution. Not content with turning the war on terror into the embrace of terror (in the form of Abbas and the Palestinian Authority), he has now announced he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming. The President claims his legislation will head off a worse regulatory disaster, but by caving in on principle he merely ensures the political triumph of global warming hysteria with its potentially catastrophic impact, as Klaus warns, on both our freedom and prosperity.

Jews Fund Their Enemies

In the September 2007 Outpost we noted that there were glimmers of disquiet with the New Israel Fund. Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University’s Program on Conflict Management had noted in the Canadian Jewish News that a third of the NIF’s budget went to over 20 organizations that “use the money to demonize and delegitimize the concept of Jewish sovereignty and equality among the nations.” To be sure Steinberg seemed to think the NIF did this unwittingly and wanted to discuss the issue with the organizations leaders “to realize our shared goals.”

Shared goals? Seventeen years ago AFSI published a pamphlet on the New Israel Fund aptly entitled “A New Fund for Israel’s Enemies.” We were attacked by virtually every Jewish establishment organization for supposedly defaming this fine charity. Now NIF is acting as a tax-exempt funding conduit for an Israeli Arab NGO that defines terrorist murderers of Israelis as “political prisoners.” It accuses Israel of violating their “human rights” by classifying them as “security prisoners” and separating them from other prisoners “similar to the racial segregation between blacks and whites in South Africa during apartheid.”

More Revisionism on World War II

In last month’s Outpost we wondered if the publication of Nicholson Baker’s revisionist history of World War II might start a trend in upending the consensus that this was “the Good War,” its moral necessity challenged only by anti-Semitic kooks. The answer was not long in coming. Baker has barely beaten Patrick Buchanan to the Barnes and Noble front table: Buchanan writes that his book Churchill, Hitler and ‘the Unnecessary War is due out in May and “Baker uses some of the same episodes, sources and quotes.” In his syndicated column Buchanan gives us a preview of how he goes about invalidating the moral underpinning of the war. He slides over Hitler and his Nazi ideology—which made the war “necessary” if much of the world was not to be enslaved—to focus on its consequences and aftermath. Could a war that produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust be a good war? declaims Buchanan. Was World War II “a good war” for the Polish dead, the defeated French, the British “bled and bankrupt” at its end, the Eastern Europeans who wound up behind the Iron Curtain? Buchanan laments the fate of the “13 million German civilians ethnically cleansed from Central Europe and the 2 million who died in the exodus.”

Presumably humanity would have been a lot better off if Hitler had been allowed to achieve his Thousand Year Reich. Hitler’s systematic murder of the Jews? Not rooted in Hitler’s evil and obsessive hatred, but merely another “consequence” of the “unnecessary” war. Buchanan describes World War II as a war that “advanced the death of Western civilization.” Presumably then, in Buchanan’s warped view, Hitler would have sustained that civilization.

On his recent visit Pope Benedict XVI, who grew up in Nazi Germany, spoke of the long time it took before the regime was recognized “for the monster it was.” For Buchanan it seems that recognition will never come. Which is all the more reason we can be profoundly grateful Buchanan never achieved his goal of becoming the Republican candidate for President and we were preserved from this sick soul in the White House.

Inside the Pentagon

War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, written by Douglas Feith, former Under Secretary for Policy at the Defense Department, is must reading for anyone who wants to understand the way in which the key decisions following 9/11, above all those on the Iraq war, were made. It offers a fascinating insight into the competing perspectives within the administration. Feith shows that much of what has become the conventional wisdom about the nature of the disagreements between the Defense Department, the State Department and the CIA is not only false, but the reverse of what they actually were. What is equally interesting is that the book provides a rare view into the mechanics of policy making in the administration.

There is no effort to even scores (although Feith must surely have been sorely tempted to take a shot at CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, who treated him contemptuously in his own book). The book is scholarly and relies heavily on hundreds of internal documents by the most senior advisers to the President which Feith was able to declassify in whole or in part—some are reprinted in the appendix; many more are available on the book’s website.

Minor to the book but of special interest to readers of Outpost, Feith notes that when State Department officials were urged to confront the issue of “ideology” (i.e. radical Islam) they “would often comment on these issues by arguing that nothing of importance could be done to push back against Jihadist extremism until we resolved terrorism’s ‘root causes’—defined as economic despair and the Arab-Israeli conflict.” When the issue of removing Saddam came to the fore, the State Department’s Richard Armitage objected that in the absence of progress toward Palestinian-Israeli peace, the U.S. would be accused of acting for Israel. In response, Wolfowitz, second in command at the Defense Department, argued that weakening Saddam would further the peace process.
What struck this reader is that no one in the policy loop said that the Arab-Israel conflict was not soluble given that the Arab goal was to destroy Israel, not co-exist with her. This obvious truth was apparently off-limits. But if policy makers are trapped in a fantasy world of discourse, how can they formulate policies with a reasonable prospect of success?

An Important Victory

Rachel Ehrenfeld’s persistence in fighting off Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz’s attempt to silence her has paid off. The New York State Legislature unanimously passed the “Libel Terrorism Protection Act.” It declares overseas defamation judgments unenforceable in New York unless the foreign defamation law provides, in substance and application, the same free speech protections guaranteed under our own constitution.