Encouraging the Enemy
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

Are Anti-Semites Welcome in U.S. Politics?
Edward Alexander

The Canary in the Mineshaft
Rael Jean Isaac

Joining Hands
Naomi Ragen

The Real Reason Sharon’s Wall Won’t Work
Steven Plaut

In Memoriam—Moshe Shamir

Mad Cow Disease and Our Militant Media
Jack Engelhard

A Gallery of Rogues
Ruth King

With Friends Like These?

Herbert Zweibon

Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, while Israel has moved forward to become a world leader in such fields as technology and stem cell research, it has moved steadily backward when it comes to fulfilling its basic tasks – securing a safe haven for the Jewish people in its ancient land and maintaining the will to preserve the state .

To be sure the delusory notion that the state could obtain peace for land did not begin with Oslo; in 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, the cabinet made the offer (promptly rejected) to return all territory taken in the war for peace. A decade later Prime Minister Menachem Begin returned the entire Sinai to Egypt for a peace treaty which Egypt soon violated clause by clause.

But as Yoram Hazony has pointed out in his fine book The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, what happened following the Labor Party’s return to power in 2002 was qualitatively different. There was a combined cultural and political collapse with the two feeding upon one another. In October 1992, Shimon Peres, then Foreign Minister of Israel, made a speech to the UN in which one can hear the fantasies that would power Oslo: “The end of conflict is no longer a utopian fantasy….The forces of change have pushed aside the pillars of conventional wisdom, which proclaimed that military power is the source of national strength and prestige.” In a cabinet meeting where the IDF’s head of intelligence argued for greater military preparedness, Peres told him: “There is economics and there is the military, and only a country which goes over to economics will win. Choosing between ten army emplacements and ten hotels, the ten hotels also constitute security.”

Among Israel’s academic, journalistic and cultural elite “post-Zionism” replaced Zionism, which was waved away as a parochial outdated nationalism. It is as if the political and cultural elite of the United States were to throw out the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as useless relics. Hazony quotes Israeli author David Grossman, who argued that the Jews of Israel must not only give up geographical territory: “We must also implement a “redeployment” or even a complete withdrawal – from entire regions in our soul….Giving up on power as a value. On the army itself as a value…. We will discover how we are refining a new existence for ourselves. One which is no longer drenched to the point of suffocation with the myth of our exile from the land, or with the myth of Masada, or with a one-dimensional lesson of the Holocaust.” As Hazony says “the redeployment of which David Grossman speaks is the destruction of the Jewish state in the mind of the Jewish people. It is the return to exile. It is a retreat into the void.”

The cultural collapse has made the political collapse possible, a collapse that was underscored by then Prime Minister Barak’s offer in 2000 to give up almost all the territories and redivide Jerusalem. The collapse has now extended to Ariel Sharon, who has endorsed the Palestinian state he had earlier said spelled the end of Israel. Sharon has gone further than his predecessors in forfeiting territory in anticipation of pressure. He is giving up Gaza with no prospect of anything but more lethal terror. Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon makes the ludicrous announcement that Israel will be equally secure without the Golan.

Abba Eban famously said that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The truth, as we noted in an earlier Outpost, is that Israel never misses an opportunity to give the Arabs a new opportunity. And the Arabs need only bide their time. Each offer to truncate the state becomes the baseline from which the Arabs make new demands. Unless there is a radical rethinking – a return to Zionism, a restored belief in right to the land and determination to defend that right – the future is bleak indeed.

A KOSHER FENCE

In a real life happening outdoing the satirical imagining of a Jonathan Swift, the European Union, in moral-outrage orbit over Israel’s effort to wall out terrorists, is planning a separation fence of its own. The EU wants to build a wall stretching hundreds of kilometers between its new members, Poland and Hungary, and their neighbors, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Why create a new Berlin-style wall? To prevent migrants from crossing the border, in this case in pursuit of economic opportunity in the EU. Even more amusing, Magal Security Systems, the Israeli company that has been the chief contractor for Israel’s security barrier, will be participating in tenders to build the EU’s wall. Notes Daniel Pipes: “European hypocrisy is as rank as it is blatant. And the EU wall is not even for security reasons, just economic ones.”

EU GIVES EUROPE A CLEAN SLATE

Demonstrating what happens when the politically corrupt investigate the financially corrupt, OLAF, the EU’s fraud squad, has issued its report: the PA has not used any EU money to fund terror. What about the records Israel discovered in its 2002 raid of PA offices documenting in detail how EU money was siphoned to a black budget for terror groups? Prior to any investigation, former EU head Chris Patten was quick to dismiss the evidence as “Israeli propaganda.” The EU reluctantly embarked on its investigation under pressure from courageous EU Parliament member Ilke Schroeder who devoted most of her energies in her five year term to demanding it. (Presumably even Schroeder did not anticipate the whitewash to come.)

The European Commission website states that the conditions the EU attaches to its assistance have raised “the Palestinian Authority to a level of fiscal responsibility, control and transparency which rivals the most fiscally advanced countries in the region.” This ludicrous statement can be contrasted with the frank assessment of former PA Legislative Council Speaker Rafik al-Natshe who, in July 2004, described Arafat as the “protector of corruption and the corrupt.” The PA, he noted, did not need foreign aid because it already possessed billions of dollars “but no one knows anything about the funds.”

PEACE PARTNER?

A clause in the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel specified that “the Parties shall seek to foster mutual understanding” and will “abstain from hostile propaganda against each other.”

An especially venomous violation is reported by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute). In Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party’s paper Al-Liwaa Al-Islami, Dr. Rif’at Sayyed Ahmad, director of the “Jaffa Research Center” in Cairo, published a two-part article “The Lie About the Burning of the Jews” which cites revisionist historian cranks like David Irving and Arthur Butz to “prove” that the Holocaust never happened.

A few brief paragraphs suffice to give the flavor of Ahmad’s righteous self-pity in the face of Western “idol-worshippers” impervious to truth.

“No matter what details and proof emphasizing the lie of the burning of the Jews in Nazi crematoria we present, they [the Jew] and the statesmen of Europe who trade in the Holocaust will never believe us. On the contrary – it is almost certain that they will accuse us of anti-Semitism…

“Dozens of Western laws in the European countries have been changed to protect this false myth of the burning of the Jews. Dozens of curricula have also been changed. Today, it is possible to curse the monotheistic religions, but the ‘holocaust’ and its lie are above criticism and above opinion, and in Europe it is unapproachable.

“All this proves that we are standing before new Western idol-worship that requires a genuine cultural revolution within it in order to destroy it – a revolution that will use facts and science against tales ungrounded in true reality and credible history.”

And then there is the recent article by columnist Hussam Wahba in the Egyptian government weekly ‘Aqidati, also translated by MEMRI, on “The Jews Slaughtering Non-Jews, Draining their Blood and Using it for Talmudic Religious Rituals.”

Note that it is to Egypt that the Sharon government looks to prevent Gaza, after Israel’s own ignominious retreat, from becoming a terror base against the rest of Israel!

GERMANS BRING LAND CLAIMS

While it is widely known that after World War II the Czechs ousted Germans from the Sudetenland (they had offered Hitler the pretext for dismembering Czechoslovakia), it is less well known that in 1945 millions of Germans were expelled from 40,000 miles of eastern Germany – land given to Poland in the aftermath of World War II. The Wall Street Journal (August 11) reports that now that Poland has joined the EU, the families of those expelled are bringing a wave of lawsuits to the European Court in the Hague.

Poland asserts that Germans have no right to restitution when it was their country that invaded Poland, starting World War II. Polish politicians say that if these claims are successful they will sue Germany for offsetting damage done to Poland during World War II.

We identify with Poland here, but look at the hypocrisy. Why should German aggression against Poland mean that territory is rightly forfeited while Arab aggression against Israel is to have no consequences? Poland has just claim while Israel has none?

THE POT CALLS THE KETTLE BALCK

Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres is quoted by the Israeli daily Maariv (July 30) as declaring, in a meeting with EU Foreign Affairs chief Javier Solana, that Arafat is “insane.” Sources close to Peres, seeking to tone down the statement (his first seriously critical of Arafat), explained his intention was merely to say Arafat “had gone crazy.”

But how should one characterize the mental acuity of Peres, who proposed putting a computer in the hands of every child in the Arab world on the theory that this would ensure a humane and tolerant next generation. As columnist Ralph Peters points out “the terrorists’ real ‘secret weapon’ has been the Internet, the greatest means of disseminating hatred in history, more virulent by far than even the printing press.”

ANGLICAN CHURCHMEN

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church worldwide, is scheduled to spend the third anniversary of 9/11 praising Islam from the pulpit of an Egyptian mosque in Cairo.

Rev. Williams is of the same cloth as the Dr. Peter Carnley, head of the Anglican Church in Australia, who, at the annual synod of the Anglican church in Perth, held shortly after the bombings in Bali, Indonesia in which the majority of victims were Australian tourists, blamed the massacres on Australia’s support for United States policy in Iraq.

A BBC WATCH REPORT

In its fourth report on BBC coverage of the Middle East, issued in July 2004, BBC Watch has analyzed all documentaries on the subject of the Middle East shown on BBC 1 and 2 since the current intifada began in late 2000. Their principal findings:

The BBC is running a campaign to vilify Israel, broadcasting a documentary critical of Israel every 2-3 months. 88% of documentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict paint either a negative impression of Israel or, in two cases, a positive image of Palestinians. Of 17 programs, only 1 was positive toward Israel

Edward Alexander

Recent books on the resurgence of anti-Semitism center on the Muslim world and on Europe (which, partly for demographic reasons, is itself becoming more and more Islamicized). In both Epicenters of Jew-hatred, the memory of Hitler's war against the Jews plays a key role. The Muslims (especially their Arab branch) envy the "settlement" of the Jewish question that Hitler achieved; but the Europeans feel that the Holocaust had, so to speak, given traditional anti-Semitism a bad name and have tried to reshape it to meet present exigencies. As the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld put it: "there is something very deep in European civilization: the need to demonize us. Because to this day, Europe has not given itself a full reckoning of what happened between 1939 and 1945....Because they haven't made a confession, the Europeans feel the need to say of the Jews that they are no better than them. On the contrary--they are worse."

And what of America? Will its famous "exceptionalism" protect it from the spreading anti-Semitic virus? Werner Sombart once called America "the promised land of capitalism," where "on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie socialist Utopias...are sent to their doom." Will anti-Semitism, "the socialism of fools," meet the same fate?

In America too, Arab/Islamic anti-Semitic propaganda has made inroads, and Islamic schools which teach that the Day of Judgment cannot arrive until "Muslims start attacking Jews" have found students eager to practice what their teachers preach. Nevertheless, as Gabriel Schoenfeld argues in The Return of Anti-Semitism here the main conquests of the anti-Semitic invasion have been in culture (including the "mainline" churches) and education rather than politics. We have the divestment campaign at the universities, the verbal and physical violence that pro-Israel speakers and students routinely experience on the more "progressive" campuses like UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, and the receptivity of English departments--most notably Harvard and Columbia--to scribblers of anti-Semitic doggerel like Tom Paulin. We have also witnessed a growing tendency to assign responsibility for the Iraq war to three mid-level Jewish officials in the government who (according to Maureen Dowd, Michael Lind, Georgie Anne Geyer, and the late Edward Said) conspired to intimidate those shrinking violets named George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell to the point where they formulated foreign policy enentirely on behalf of Israel.
On this matter right and left polemicists use identical language; and it is the language of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the late nineteenth century Czarist police forgery that has fueled anti-Semitic violence for nearly a century. Since 1990, Patrick Buchanan has alleged that Capitol Hill is "Israeli-occupied territory," and on February 5 of this year Thomas Friedman aped Buchanan by asserting that Ariel Sharon "[has] had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval office." Writers in Tikkun, the leftist Jewish journal whose motto seems to be "Nothing anti-Semitic is alien to us," warn of Jewish "conspirators" who run the U.S. government on behalf of "Jewish interests" and--as if this were not explicit enough--refer to "the industrial sized grain of truth" in the Protocols.
The U.S. has also produced a bumper-crop of anti-Semitism deniers, a group parallel in its way to Holocaust deniers. No matter the outrage--boycotts, beatings, torched synagogues, apologias for suicide bombings, calls for Israel's immediate reduction to sandy wastes--such worthies as Tony Judt, Amitai Etzioni, and Judith Butler can be counted on to say "no, it's not anti-Semitic, it's criticism of Israeli policy." Or else--the line taken by journalist Paul Krugman and Professor Martin Jay--the anti-Semitism is justified.
Such scribblers abound, especially among the learned classes. The pressing question of the moment is whether anti-Semitism will find sponsors in the world of organized politics as well. The question is not entirely a new one. In December of 1991 Buchanan challenged President George Bush for the 1992 Republican presidential nomination. Within days William Buckley, in the National Review (31 December), sounded the alarm about Buchanan's anti-Semitic fulminations. He said that Buchanan was a menace to the body politic and should be treated as such by the Republican Party. As late as 1996, Buchanan managed a pretty good roll of the dice as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, but eventually Buckley's view prevailed and by 2000 Buchanan had to shift his presidential aspirations to the Reform Party.

Now, however, it is the Democratic Party that seems to lay out the welcome mat for politicians who have a record of anti-Semitic speech and activity.
During the Democratic campaign for the presidential nomination, one noticed curious innovations in the appeals made by the candidates, appeals not anti-Semitic in themselves but indicative of a powerful desire to conciliate a newly powerful bloc of voters: Arab-Americans, especially Muslims. In Seattle, for example, Dennis Kucinich's campaign managers gene for their little candidate two front-page photos in the Seattle Times: one showed him at the Islamic School (once upon a time home of the Seattle Hebrew Academy) in the south end of town, the other at the mosque in the north end of the city. Howard Dean pranced about at various places in an Arab head-scarf. John Kerry was greeted in Nevada by placards proclaiming: "Nevada Muslims for Kerry." Barack Obama, the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention, went out of his way to appeal to "Arab-American families" supposedly persecuted by the Bush administration.

And there was worse. Among the candidates for the Democratic nomination, treated with unfailing deference, not to say oily sycophancy, by his competitors was the Rev. Al Sharpton. One might have supposed that Sharpton's role in the Tawana Brawley affair as well as his record of blatantly anti-Semitic incitement of the most incendiary (and murderous) kind--in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in 1991 and in Harlem in 1995--would have made him persona non grata to a respectable American political party; but it did not. (Perhaps the party's leadership was grateful for the fact that at least one of the contenders for its nomination was intellectually and verbally nimble.)

In the past the party has been in thrall to Jesse Jackson, the world-class ambulance chaser and shakedown artist. Neither Jackson's description of New York City as "Hymietown" nor his complaint about being "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust" nor his embrace of Israel's most genocidally inclined enemies cost him support from the party's rank and file or its leadership. Among the victors in the July 20 Democratic Party in Georgia was Cynthia McKinney, who served five terms in Congress before being defeated in the Democratic primary of 2002 by Denise Majette. The stridently anti-Semitic character of her 2002 campaign, in which "Jews" were repeatedly blamed for her decline in the polls and eventual defeat, did not deter House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, then Democratic whip, from backing her unreservedly. She remains in good standing in the party.

At the recent Democratic nominating convention Sharpton was a featured and indeed rapturously adored speaker. In the aftermath of Kerry's acceptance speech he was as fixed a presence at the nominee's side as St. Teresa Kerry or John Edwards. And while Kerry and Sharpton were fawning on each other Jimmy Carter seemed to have found somebody whom he liked even more than Fidel Castro: Michael Moore, who sat with Carter and wife. Moore, let us recall, is not just somebody who lies as naturally as other people breathe; he is also a ferocious hater of Israel who has identified it as one of the three epicenters of evil in the world: "It's all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton." Moore has also dedicated his book "Dude, Where's My Country?" to Rachel Corrie, the young woman who gave her life to enable Arab terrorists to murder Jewish children with impunity. And Moore is beloved not just by Jimmy Carter but by the rank and file of the party. In Washington State, for example, Deborah Senn, the (Jewish) candidate for Attorney General, arranged special showings of Moore's latest propaganda film and even sold tickets for it at $25 each.

One may then reasonably conclude that anti-Semitic and fiercely anti-Israel sentiments are no obstacle to influence and success in the Democratic Party. This does not, of course, mean that the party has become anti-Semitic, but that it has given an opening to anti-Semites and shown that espousal of modernity's most successfully lethal ideology--lethal not to Jews alone--does not hurt and may actually help one to rise in the party.

And then there is--once again--the third party candidate, Ralph Nader. This darling of environmentalists, "friends of the earth," "friends of the species," lovers of virtue whose only uncertainty about Nader is whether voting for him might again cost Democrats the presidency, has allied himself with--Patrick Buchanan. The glue of the alliance is their shared anti-Semitism. Just before the Reform Party announced its endorsement of Nader in the impending presidential election, he gave an interview in Buchanan's American Conservative magazine. In it, he returned to a theme on which he had already speechified as follows: "What has been happening over the years is a predictable routine of foreign visitation from the head of the Israeli government. The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington. The Israeli puppeteer meets with the puppet in the White House, and then moves down Pennsylvania Avenue, and meets with the puppets in Congress. And then takes back billions of taxpayer dollars..."

This was meat and drink to Buchanan, who eagerly elicited a repeat performance from Nader: "The subservience of our congressional and White House puppets to Israeli military policy has been consistent." With just a tiny bit of prodding, Buchanan also got Nader specifically to include John Kerry among the obedient puppets of the nefarious Jews.

Anti-Semitism is far from having made the inroads into the American political system that it has achieved in Europe, but certainly there is cause for worry even here--and perhaps for action as well, though that will require the casting off of Jewish political habits fossilized since the Roosevelt era.

Prof. Alexander's most recent book is Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition (Transaction).

Rael Jean Isaac

Since 9/11 Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations has resonated with new force. Some – including Steven Plaut in last month’s Outpost -- have argued that what we experience is not a clash of civilizations but of barbarism against civilization. Yet it may well be the problem goes deeper still, with much of the civilized world itself sinking into what British journalist Melanie Phillips calls “terrifying moral darkness.”

Many have noted the role of the United Nations in fostering moral decline. In London’s Daily Mail of July 21, Phillips is particularly eloquent. She writes: “If the Jews have always been a society’s pit canaries whose fate is an early warning of that society’s wider collapse, Israel is surely the canary in the mine of the world. The way it is being treated bespeaks a mortal sickness. Israel is the victim of a continuing, half-century attempt to annihilate it. Yet its attempts to defend itself are denounced and vilified, its activities are misreported and distorted, it is judged by malign double standards to paint it falsely as a rogue state….This treatment of Israel goes far beyond the fate of that particular region. The obsessive malice with which it is vilified and libeled, and the tacit and even explicit encouragement of the war of mass murder against it, while atrocities in Africa are not only ignored but their perpetrators given a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission, for heaven’s sake, shows that not just the UN but the world order it represents are bust, broken, bankrupt.”

Phillips takes the democracies to task: “For faced with this obscene parody of a world body that is supposed to promote and uphold peace and justice but actually ignores, promotes and upholds genocide, mass murder, tyranny, terrorism and endemic corruption, the democracies of the west not only ignore such evidence but profess to believe that the UN is a moral exemplar without whose imprimatur wars are illegitimate and whose every utterance or action possesses unchallengeable moral authority.” (John Kerry, with his emphasis on winning UN approval for U.S. actions, is an unfortunate example of American elites endorsing this evil fiction.)

“While the world is run by tyrannies,” writes Phillips, “tyranny, terrorism and genocide will of course continued unabated, and the victims of these atrocities will be regarded at best with indifference and at worst demonized as villains in order to protect the guilty. That is the twisted and lethal phenomenon of which Israel is both victim and symbol….Israel is the defining moral issue of our time…because the way the world is treating it exemplifies a global moral sickness in which truth, goodness and the victims of an annihilatory madness are ignored, dehumanized or attacked, while lies, wickedness and their perpetrators are appeased, endorsed and supported.”
Phillips is of course not alone in recognizing that barbarism has become institutionalized and legitimized in the topsy turvy moral universe of the United Nations, where an Israeli fence designed to protect its citizens is treated with a moral ferocity appropriate to genocide (even as real genocide is ignored). Phillips says that the only moral response to the UN would be to shut it down. Others have suggested that the United States take the lead in establishing an alternative United Nations to engage the world’s problems. This body would be confined to democratic countries or “civilized nations” (though heaven forefend such a politically incorrect term be used).

But the problem goes deeper than tyrannies vs. democracies or the hypocrisy of democracies in paying obeisance to a tyranny-dominated United Nations. For we have to ask, suppose an alternative assembly of “civilized countries” were to be formed: would Israel be honored as a moral beacon in a neighborhood sunk in despotism and fanaticism? Or would the majority of the new body continue to curry favor with the barbarians by applying the familiar double standards that lead to Israel’s treatment as a pariah state. As we look at Europe today, the answer is obvious.

Historian of dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or claims that for three decades the European Union “has been completing a slow metamorphosis into the ‘Christian’ arm of the Pan-Arab world, different in religious observation (or lack of same) but united in its views of Israel and America.” In Bat Ye’or’s view this transformation is based on a deliberate policy going back to 1980 when, under French leadership, the European Community (later to become the EU) adopted the Venice Declaration which aligned Europe with the Arab position on Israel. The thinking was that by becoming the most powerful champion of the Islamic world’s great grievance – Israel’s existence -- the European Community would achieve a global weight that would permit it to challenge U.S. power and influence.

Whatever the motivations, it is clearly true that the European Union, in respect to Israel, has become a branch of the Arab League. And while France, like Saudi Arabia’s princes, may be belatedly waking up to the realization that the forces it nurtured may spell its own demise (hence, in France, the outlawing of the veil in schools, the expulsion of the most outspoken imams) this does not portend any change of policy regarding Israel.

From her vantage point as a member of the European Parliament a young Ilke Schroeder – its youngest member, she was elected in 1999 while still a college student – came to conclusions similar to Bat Yeor. “The Europeans” she says “supported the Palestinian Authority with the aim of becoming its main sponsor and through this, challenge the U.S. and present themselves as the future global power.” Schroeder notes: “You have only to see the exhibitions on Israel and Palestine in the European Parliament’s foyer – where Israel is accused of sociocide and branded as an apartheid state – to know which side the EU is on.”

In throwing its weight behind the “Road Map” the United States has made three deadly enemies of Israel arbiters of its fate: the EU, the Soviet Union and the UN. It’s as if the U.S. had joined with Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to judge Israel.

Nor is the Atlantic an invincible barrier to the carriers of the anti-Semitic plague sweeping Europe – those whom Bat Ye’or calls “the spiritual heirs of 1930s Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent.” In this Outpost Edward Alexander chronicles the sources of infection here. Dennis Prager has responded to one source of infection, the Presbyterian Church USA, which voted to “divest” from companies doing business in Israel saying:

“One of the most decent societies, one of the most liberal democracies in the world, is fighting for its life against Islamic fascists who praise the Holocaust and publicly call for the annihilation of Israel – and the Presbyterian Church calls for strangling Israel!….This is one of the morality-clarifying issues of our time. To single out Israel for economic strangulation while that good nation fights for its life is an act of such immorality that holding that view precludes one from the title ‘good’ or ‘ God-fearing,’ for if they are true to God, I am false to Him...If their Bible teaches them to strangle Israel and support Yasser Arafat, I am guided by a different Bible. They have drawn a line.”

It would be comparatively comforting if the barbarians were merely at the gates; they could then be repelled. Alas, the barbarians are firmly established within the gates of the western democracies.

Rael Jean Isaac is Editor of Outpost

Naomi Ragen

The subject of Israel destroying the thriving Jewish communities in Gush Katif in exchange for ---well, no one has quite figured that out yet-- has been on my mind ever since the "plan" was proposed by Mr. Sharon. I read the "plan" carefully, and all I could see was a series of destructive acts against peaceful Jewish communities, without any up side. It didn't promise peace. It didn't even promise better security. In short, there was no logical reason at all to do it. I was even present at an interview with Mr. Ehud Olmert, who staunchly backed the plan, and tried his best to defend it. "If it saves even one life..." he said vaguely.

Did he mean it was dangerous for Jews to live surrounded by Arabs? Dangerous for the soldiers who protect them? If that was the argument, then it held true for me as well, living in Jerusalem, surrounded by Arab villages. And it was certainly true of the entire State of Israel, being as it is in the Middle East, surrounded by Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria etc.

There was no one to negotiate with, and therefore, we needed to unilaterally set our own boundaries and break off from the dangerous Gaza Strip, the next argument went. When they said "break off" did that mean no more Gazan workers coming into Israel every day? And what, exactly, was going to stop Palestinians from turning the area into a terrorist training camp, once peaceful Jewish homes and businesses were bulldozed? What was going to stop the Kassam rocket launchers from being moved even closer, sending bombs into the bedrooms and nursery schools of Ashdod and Ashkelon?

I didn't get answers to those queries either.

So, when it was announced that a protest was being organized that would create a human chain from Gush Katif to Jerusalem, I decided to join hands.

It was an amazing sight. Hundreds of people snaking down highways, lining the streets of Jerusalem. Children, and teenagers in bright orange, waving flags. Mothers, fathers, grandparents. I saw Benny Elon, the Knesset Member. I saw the legendary Geulah Cohen. I saw my lawyer, and women from my synagogue. There were no hate signs. No violence. David Hatuel, whose wife and four daughters were slaughtered by terrorists, was also there. He told reporters:"Sadly, I came alone, but the connection I felt from everyone here on erev Tisha B'Av is quite amazing. This will broadcast to everyone that we have the will to continue to pursue our lives in all parts of the land of Israel," he said.

As I walked through the streets of downtown Jerusalem, I remembered how only a short time ago, they were deserted, a ghost town, people fleeing the silent reminders of shattered glass and human flesh and blood-soaked pavement. Yet now there didn't seem to be standing room. These streets had been claimed once again, I thought, the silence banished. It was an act of tremendous courage. These people, these brave, wonderful people, deserve better leaders, I thought.

And as we joined hands I really did begin to feel hopeful. Perhaps this horrible mistake, pushed forward by a government that has betrayed the democratic process in pursuing useless and harmful policies that were voted out resoundingly by the people who put them into office, could be stopped.

Naomi Ragen is an American-born novelist who has lived in Israel since 1971.

Moshe Shamir was a founder of the Land of Israel Movement, which brought together prominent figures from all parts of the political spectrum to assert Israel’s right to all the territory taken in the Six Day War. A distinguished novelist and essayist, who wrote dozens of books and plays (he was awarded the Israel Prize for literature in 1988) Shamir came from the far left. As a young man he belonged to the Hashomer Hatzair movement, fought in the Palmach, joined the Mishmark Haemek kibbutz and became a member of Mapam.

While Shamir was widely seen as making a sharp break with his past beliefs in 1967, he himself did not agree. Shamir said that over many decades he had become aware of problems in the way Hashomer Hazair defined the situation. Hashomer Hatzair called for class war, but the problem facing the Jews was the hostility of the British and Arabs. Shamir says he found it possible to live within the Movement until the Soviet Union, which Hashomer Hatzair considered its moral lodestar, took an anti-Israel stance. For Shamir, it became impossible to combine Marxist dogma with survival of the Jewish people.

What Shamir all along saw as the positive element in the ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair – its consciousness of the Land of Israel as “one, whole, natural fatherland” destined in its entirely for the redemption of the Jewish people – was what later drew him to the Land of Israel Movement, which had become the proponent of that perspective, now long rejected by the Israeli left.

Shamir was a member of the Knesset for the Likud Party when it staged its surprise victory over Labor in 1977, but left when Begin surrendered the Sinai in the Camp David accords. With Geula Cohen and physicist Yuval Ne’eman, he helped establish, and became a Knesset member for the Techiya Party.

Within Israel Shamir’s most famous novel was the 1948 He Walked in the Fields which was credited with shaping the image of the sabra, rough on the outside, sensitive within. Outside Israel his best known novel was The King of Flesh and Blood, about Judean king Alexander Yanai. His My Life with Ishmael was an intellectual autobiography. His Red Thread, was a devastating evaluation of the impact of socialism on Zionism. His last book was Yair, a historical novel about the leader of the Stern Gang.

Steven Plaut

There is one major issue regarding the "Security Wall" that is being ignored by the media and by Israelis.   Sure, the weaknesses associated with the idea of the "Security Wall" have already been expounded.   The Wall is easy to climb over, dig under, swim around, or blow holes in.  Even worse, there is nothing stopping the Palestinians from shooting mortars, rockets, and missiles over it.  The Wall is much too close to the "Green Line" and signals Israel's willingness to return to its 1949 "Auschwitz borders."   The Wall should in fact be a set of security cages surrounding the large Palestinian towns while leaving open the rest of the West Bank and Gaza for Jews to move freely.    
 
But all that is old hat.  There is another reason why the Wall will fail. Suppose hypothetically Israel were to build a wall 3000 kilometers high, one that could not be dug under or shot over.  Even then the Wall would do nothing to stop the terror and carnage. Why?  Because the Wall does nothing if you let the terrorists walk into Israel through the gates in the Wall!  Israel's policy has always been to allow tens of thousands of Palestinian day laborers to enter Israel freely.   After each terror bombing, a few days later the gates have been opened.   The much-touted Gaza fence, supposedly a role model for Sharon's new "Security Wall", has failed to prevent suicide bombers and other murderers from entering Israel for the simple reason that Israel just lets them waltz in through the gates.   Indeed, one part of Sharon's recent pledge to President Bush was that Israel would continue to let the "day laborers" enter, no matter what.   The US does not allow unrestricted entrance of day laborers from Mexico nor Canada, but wants Israel to agree to allow tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs to enter Israel, no matter how many Israelis get murdered as a result.
  
So never mind that the Wall cannot stop a single Kassem rocket (Kassems are no longer just a problem from Gaza but were discovered this week in the West Bank, and can strike Lod airport and Jerusalem).   

The Chinese Wall failed.  The Roman Walls failed.  Sharon's Wall will fail.    The Security Wall is the latest Israeli attempt to find an alternative to Israeli military victory.  There is no magic solution that can serve as an alternative to Israeli military control of the ground in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  Everything else is wishful thinking and foolish belief in magic.

Steven Plaut is Professor of Economics at Haifa University

Jack Englehard

In this age of One-Hour-Photo, Same-Day Dry Cleaning, Instant Kabbalah, Drive-Through Zohar, While-You-Wait divinity ordination, it's no wonder we lose touch with the meaning of things and pervert the value of words. But words, even at the height of this sound-bite generation, are all we have to separate this from that and that from this.

Words are loaded like hot dice. "Death and life are in the power of the tongue"... King Solomon.

Flagrante Delicto won't stop Sandy Berger as it never stopped his boss, Bill Clinton, master of the two-step smooth-talk.

"Israel Confirms Strike Killed Militant," reads a headline from the Associated Press.

This militant, a Palestinian Arab named Hazem Rahim, seized the head of a slain Israeli soldier and ceremoniously played it for the cameras.
(Decapitation is the number one sport with this crowd.)

Our newsroom worthies cannot distinguish between a terrorist and a militant, and there you have it, even cold-blooded murder is open for deconstruction.

In academic-speak, there are no facts, only interpretations. Or, truth is like the game of Scrabble.

Others, before me, have noted that our enemies have shanghaied our very language. Language, in case we've forgotten, creates facts, even facts on the ground.

Say "occupied territories" or "settlers" and the reflex is to think of Jews sitting on Arab land, not the (truthful) other way round. Which shows how they took our vocabulary and twisted it into Man Bites Dog. That's partly our fault. As they played with our dictionary, we slept.

We're taught that God created the heavens and the earth by "simply" uttering the words. (Let there be light, and there was light...)

Adam was chosen to name the animals with words that pertain to the exact characteristics of each species. A cow cannot be a fox. Finally I understand Gertrude Stein. "Rose is a rose is a rose." Not until recently did I know what she meant, and maybe she didn't, either.

If, from the very beginning, we had taken the initiative and called Arafat by his real name - Thug - maybe we'd have spared ourselves a suicide bombing or two.

For thug is a thug is a thug.

But we call him president, and remember his PLO? No more PLO. Suddenly, it's the Palestinian Authority. Same gangsters, but titled.From a confederacy of violent misfits idling in Tunis came a "Palestine", a Palestinian prime minister, a Palestinian legislature, a Palestinian cabinet.

Thanks again Mr. Peres and Mr. Beilin. Besides titles, you, and other post-Zionists, also contrived to give them 100,000 guns. Smart.

Back here, if we'd stopped those guys at the airport and called them terrorists, instead of passengers, maybe there'd be no 9/11. (The "9/11 Report" pretty much says so.)

Even today, after all that's going on, we still use PC linguistics.

Peaceful religion? Sure. Half of it probably is. Maybe more than half. Who knows? I'm willing to accept 90 percent of Islam as being OK, which leaves 100 million with their blades to our throats. These have become infected with something like Mad Cow Disease.

This has spread throughout the world and afflicted our mainstream news media, who, one by one, show the same symptoms of changing colors as in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros...or, as he called the disease that turns humans into a movement of beasts, rhinoceritis. In our case, then, Mad Cowitis.

The sickness spreads to people (such as the Jeffrey Goldberg/Norm Finkelstein/Richard Ben Cramer Axis) who understand the beast's point of view. ("To understand is to justify.") Unfortunately for us dhimmis, there are no provisions for quarantine against human mad cows, however they mispronounce and misappropriate religion or journalism.

As for the raping and torture and killing by the Janjaweed in Western Sudan, the U.S. Congress named the purely Arab provoked atrocity exactly what it is...genocide. Now there's a word that makes all the difference. But always comes too late. The distance between atrocity and genocide is the same long mile that separates the passive militant from the active terrorist. One is a lie, the other is truth...which they are too twisted or too cowardly to mention.

A word here, a word there, and the world gets turned on its head.

Roosevelt said, "A date which will live in infamy," and Japan Mon Amour.

Reagan said, "Tear down this wall," and down went the Soviet Union.

The words "I love you" change the entire chemistry between man and woman. (Well, nowadays also between man and man, woman and woman, but let's not get started.)

So we say terrorist and they say militant. Fine with me. I'm buying. This used to upset me, too. But I've changed my mind.

In this case we can bend the rules and accept the proposition that a (mad) cow can be a fox.

What I'm saying is that if they (the BBC, CNN, NY Times, AP, certainly Reuters...) insist on "militant," excellent, let it be, as long as we understand that militants are murderers, bottom feeders, the lowest scum of this earth, lower than mere terrorists. Let's buy the vowels, and the consonants, too.

This means that every time they say militant, we say thank you. We get the message. We know who they are, and we know who you are.

The Palestinian Arab who murdered Tali Hatuel and her four daughters, yes, he's a militant and they, the lords of reportage, share the same blood.
They built this Babel. It's for us to confound their tongues.
Language belongs to the people, not to the PC liberal press.

If we're going to win this thing, we've got to win back our language. Our dictionary versus theirs, those are the front lines of this war.

Jack Engelhard is the author of the bestseller Indecent Proposal. His novel The Days of the Bitter End is being prepared for movie production. He is completing a docu-novel on news media corruption, The Uriah Deadline.

Ruth King

In May 2004, fifty-two former United States diplomats, Foreign Service officers and retired military officials (another twenty quickly signed on) addressed an open letter to President Bush protesting the administration's Mideast policy, which, they said, damaged United States prestige and credibility by supporting Israel at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.

As Joel Mowbray wrote in FrontpageMagazine.com the very next day: "Blame for the trouble in the entire region—of which Israel holds less than one percent of the territory and less than two percent of the population—is pinned on "Sharon's extra-judicial assassinations, Israel's Berlin Wall-like barrier, (and) its harsh military measures in occupied territories."

The prime mover behind the letter was Andrew Killgore, who served in Qatar (now pronounced to rhyme with gutter by the talking heads) from 1977 until 1980. He said he was inspired by a similar letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair from 52 former British diplomats. Mr. Killgore publishes the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs whose internet links include worthy organizations such as Al Awda Right to Return, American Muslim Alliance, True Torah Jews-Jews Against Zionism, Birzeit University-Palestine Information....well, you get the picture.

The British diplomats warned that Britain's policies on the Arab-Israel conflict and Iraq were doomed to failure, were "one sided and illegal" and would cost "yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood." The reference to Israeli blood was a bow to public relations; according to an article published in the UK Daily Telegraph on February 2004, many of the signatories were paid by pro-Arab organizations and "hold positions in companies seeking lucrative Middle East contracts, while others have unpaid positions with pro-Arab organizations." They all vociferously denied that their lucrative contracts had anything whatsoever to do with their letter, and they swore up and down that their only loyalty was to queen and crown. And who would not believe these knights of Britain?

But what about Killgore's cronies? Some of them are also unflinchingly loyal to the crowns...of Saudi Arabia and the other oil kingdoms, that is. Like their British counterparts, many are on the take from Arab nations or companies.

Daniel Pipes has made a yeoman effort to expose the diplomats and public servants bribed by the oil kingdoms. In The New York Post of December 11, 2002 (“What Riyadh Buys in Washington”) he quotes Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States: "If the reputation . . . builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office." Among those "friends" the Saudis garnered, Pipes names Spiro Agnew, Jimmy Carter, Clark Clifford, John B. Connally and William Simon.

One of the most reliable Israel bashers to have signed on the letter is former Congressman Paul Findley, Republican of Illinois, defeated in 1983. Findley founded The Council for the National Interest, a "think tank" with Saudi funds. The website states: "Our goals include a total withdrawal of Israel from all occupied territory, a shared Jerusalem, an end to Israeli acts of aggression and provocation against her neighbors, American recognition of the independent state of Palestine, and a reduction of U.S. aid to Israel." One hopes his Arab friends rewarded him handsomely for his speech at a seminar named "Liberating America from Israel:" Said Findley: "Nine-eleven would not have occurred if the U.S. government had refused to help Israel humiliate and destroy Palestinian society." Or, even more outrageous, in February 2002: "it is vivid to most of the world -- the real ground zero of terrorism is in Palestine, not Manhattan." (By which Findley did not mean that Palestinian Arab terror is the fount of world terror -- with which we could agree -- but that Israel, whose very name he cannot bring himself to use, is responsible for world terror.)

Edward Walker, (also a signatory) has served extensively in the Middle East, including ambassadorships to Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. He was also ambassador to Israel, which did not change his perspective. Walker is the president of the Middle East Institute, which he told the Washington Post, received $200,000 of its $1.5-million budget from Saudi donors.

Another signatory, Raymond Close, Chief of Station in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia from 1971 to 1979 resigned a post with the CIA in order to go into business with Arab friends and facilitated the transfer of arms from Saudi Arabia to the Taliban. You have to wonder how he interpreted information for the CIA.

Signatory Eugene Bird, former Counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia, is well compensated by Saudi Arabia, and so is his wife who runs a program which brings two articulate Moslems and one perfidious Israeli to campuses to undermine Israel's claim to a united Jerusalem. Bird is president of the Council for the National Interest, and in a March 17th, 2004 meeting of that Arab front, he said of AIPAC: "The worst effect of having such a powerful lobby has been the shuttering of debate on both policies and relationships with the Arab and Muslim world. Did this lead indirectly to 9/11? Many think so. Did this lead directly to the president deciding to invade Iraq? Many will say so in private." Bird even manages to pin the blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib on Israel: "We know that the Israeli intelligence was operating in Baghdad after the war was over. The question should be: Were there any foreign interrogators among those that were recommending very, very bad treatment for the prisoners?"

Signatory James Akins, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, engages in sycophancy so outrageous he falls into self-satire. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, he declared:" The Arabs have a record of religious tolerance which is not equaled or even approached by any European country."

But according to Daniel Pipes, John C. West set the gold standard when he funded his personal foundation with a $500,000 donation from a single Saudi prince, plus more from other Saudis, soon after he left the kingdom in 1981. West was South Carolina's governor from 1971 to 1975 before becoming envoy to Saudi Arabia under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. In 1977, a British cameraman witnessed the public beheading of a Saudi Arabian princess and her lover. He made a documentary entitled "The Death of a Princess". In May 1980, PBS scheduled the documentary but West went into overdrive to cancel the broadcast.. He was so successful that then Secretary of State Warren Christopher "appealed" to the network and Exxon withdrew support, causing PBS to cancel. As late as February 24, 2003 West called the war on Iraq an "absolute disaster. He went on to add: "Carter understood it very well, that you'll never have a stable Middle East peace until you resolve the Palestinian-Israeli problem, the root cause of terrorism today." Where have we heard that before?

There is one surprising non-signatory, former ambassador Wyche Fowler. Fowler is a former senator from Georgia appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia during President Clinton's second term. He has several consulting contracts from industries doing business in the Middle East and is the new chairman of the board of The Middle East Institute. We could not resist citing him here for his appearance on CNN where he stated: "Whether or not you agree or disagree with the most conservative form of Islam, Wahhabism, it does teach tolerance for Jews and Christians."

The Ambassadors, virtually to a person, describe Saudi Arabia as a peaceable kingdom whose moderate kings are gracious, generous, charitable, charming and hospitable. And, what could be more satisfying than to be rewarded financially for one's pre-existing disdain for Israel and Jews? While Israel bashers such as Robert Novak and Thomas Friedman don't get paid for it (as far as we know) these former career diplomats get big bucks.

Make no mistake, these scoundrels work hard. While the Saudi envoys oil their way around the corridors of power, it is these former American officials who do the fancy footwork. How else can one explain how only 6 months after September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia, where almost all the terrorists were born, bred, educated, funded and encouraged, actually floated a so called "peace plan" for the Middle East. It was nothing more than another do-it-yourself suicide kit for Israel, but the respect, the downright enthusiasm with which it was received is tribute to the efficiency of these and other "Diplorabians" too numerous to name here.

As Matt Welch wrote in a devastating commentary in the National Post of August 2, 2000, "They are the former U.S. ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, and they have carved out a fine living insulting their own countrymen while shilling for one of the most corrupt regimes on Earth."

I cannot end this essay without paying tribute to the late Ambassador Hume Horan who was a noble exception to this disgraceful pattern. A scholar who spoke Arabic fluently, he was a Foreign Service officer in Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. In 1987 he was appointed ambassador to Riyadh, where he incurred the wrath of King Fahd after rebuking the kingdom for the purchase of missiles from China. Fahd demanded that he end his tour after only nine months. Since then, there have been no American ambassadors in Saudi Arabia who speak Arabic. Many years later when speaking to an interviewer Horan said: "They made us kowtow. The American ambassador's influence ended in Riyadh and from then on, the Saudi ambassador in Washington dominated the U.S.-Saudi relationship." Of his colleagues he said: "There have been some people who really do go on the Saudi payroll, and they work as advisers and consultants. Prince Bandar is very good about massaging and promoting relationships like that. Money works wonders, and if you've got an awful lot of it, and a royal title--well, it's amusing to see how some Americans liquefy in front of a foreign potentate, just because he's called a prince." Hume Horan died in July. R.I.P.

What is worst of all is that in parroting the Saudi line that points to the Israel-Arab conflict as the root of international terrorism, these US foreign service officers embolden Israel's enemies and contribute to fostering the great evil of anti-Semitism.

Ruth King is on AFSI’s executive committee.

With Friends Like These?

Below are the actual voting records of various countries which are recorded in both the US State Department and United Nations records:

Percent Of The Time Voting Against U.S.

* Kuwait 67% of the time.
* Qatar 67% of the time.
* Morocco 70% of the time.
* United Arab Emirates 70% of the time.
* Jordan 71% of the time.
* Tunisia 71% of the time.
* Saudi Arabia 73% of the time.
* Yemen 74% of the time.
* Algeria 74% of the time.
* Oman 74% of the time.
* Sudan 75% of the time.
Pakistan 75% of the time
* Libya 76% of the time.
* Egypt 79% of the time.
* Lebanon 80% of the time.
* Syria 84% of the time.
* Mauritania 87% of the time.

US Foreign Aid:

Egypt receives $2 billion annually in US Foreign Aid.

Jordan receives $193 million annually in US Foreign Aid.

Pakistan receives $200 million annually in US Foreign Aid. In 2004 the U.S. wrote off $5 billion of its debt.