HOLOCAUST DENIERS :Herbert Zweibon

FROM THE EDITOR: Rael Jean Isaac

DEMOCRATIZING THE MIDDLE EAST: Rael Jean Isaac

WHY WORRY ABOUT IRAN'S BOMB?: Jack Engelhard

ARE MOSLEMS THE JEWS OF TODAY?: http://fjordman.blogspot.com

HELLENIC HANGOVER: William Mehlman

ON SPIELBERG'S MOVIE: AN EXCHANGE Ruth King & Edward Alexander

IN MEMORIAM: KAARE KRISTIANSON

OUTPOST
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Herbert Zweibon, Ruth King

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Herbert Zweibon

There has been an outpouring of indignation in the wake of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call in October for Israel “to be wiped off the map” followed in December by his declaration that the Holocaust was a myth and if Europe chose to believe it, Israel should be transferred to territory there. Even Kofi Annan professed “dismay” and, at the idea of bringing Israel to Europe, actual “shock.” European Union politicians weighed in: no less than 25 foreign ministers produced a statement declaring Ahmadinejad’s remarks “totally unacceptable.”

Jewish organizations joined the chorus. The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman took time out from inveighing against the imagined evangelical threat to America to send a letter to the UN (now there’s a useful activity) urging Annan to “take decisive action” in the face of Ahmadinejad’s “scandalous lie.”

It is politically correct to condemn Holocaust deniers. What is more difficult and far more important is to defend Israel and its more than five million living Jews. And here not only have the Jews of the diaspora fallen down but the Jews of Israel, whose lives are immediately on the line. They are engaged in their own lethal form of Holocaust denial — denying the Holocaust-to-be that their neighbors prepare for them. The establishment of Israel was supposed to ensure that never again would Jews go supinely to slaughter, yet today a Jewish government, in headlong retreat, prepares the way for its enemies. Yes, it worries about Iran’s nuclear threat, but as Jack Engelhard points out in this issue, “Why worry about a bomb from the outside when, O Israel, you’re doing such a good job bombing yourself from the inside?”

That Ariel Sharon is likely to win a popular mandate is in itself proof the Israeli public is deep in denial. In the previous elections, the public had no way of knowing what Sharon would do for he campaigned on a platform in direct opposition to the policies he would enact, attacking the Labor Party proposal to uproot the Gush Katif settlements as strategically unthinkable. But now it is clear what Sharon’s intentions are — to continue his nightmarish policy of ethnically cleansing Jews from the Land of Israel, turning over Judea and Samaria to the Arabs who make their intentions equally clear — to use these as launching pads for the total destruction of the state.

The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick points out that Oslo was a terrible policy, based on the fantasy that the Arabs wanted peace with Israel. But although that fantasy was laid to rest when the Palestinian Arabs began their terror war against Israel in earnest “incinerating Israelis at cafes, on buses, at bar mitzvah parties and at Passover Seders,” Glick notes that it has been replaced by another, even more dangerous fantasy, that of disengagement, which is in reality a “disengagement from geographical and strategic reality.” This is the fantasy that Israel can deal with Arab hatred by unilaterally disengaging from the Middle East: “We can hole up behind walls and barricades, turn on the internet and become immediately transported to a world where we will be safe.”

Jabotinsky’s famous words from his 1939 speech in Warsaw have been repeated often, including in this publication. “People behave as if they are sentenced...It is as if somebody made a small group...sit down in a cart and pushed the cart toward a cliff. The cart continues moving toward the cliff and the people inside — some are weeping, some are smoking, some are reading newspapers, some are praying — and it does not occur to anyone to take the reins and turn the cart. It is as if the people are under narcosis. I come to you with a last attempt. I am calling to you. Wake up!”

It is not too late to seize the reins. But If Jews do not act quickly, Jabotinsky’s words will be equally prophetic in the first decade of the twenty first century.

Rael Jean Isaac

A JOYOUS NOBEL

Departing from its miserable choices (Harold Pinter for literature, Mohammed El Baradei for "peace"), the Nobel Prize Committee made Robert Aumann co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics (with Thomas Schelling) for his work on game theory. An Orthodox Jew, Aumann brought 34 family members to Stockholm, including children, their spouses, grandchildren and great grandchildren. They had moved to a hotel close to the hall so they could rush there for the ceremony once Shabbat had ended. Aumann, with his flowing white beard, took the award with a white crocheted kippa on his head, clad in the special suit he had made in Tel Aviv because the standard suit did not conform to the religious prohibition against shaatnes, combining wool and linen.

A refugee from Nazi Germany who moved with his family to the United States in 1938, Aumann went to City College and then to MIT, moving to the Hebrew University math department in 1966, the year after he received his doctorate.

A committed Zionist, Aumann opposed Sharon's "disengagement." Indeed he noted that in terms of game theory, the withdrawal signaled Israel did not know what to do and was merely taking an action for the sake of "doing something." One doesn't need game theory to know the withdrawal was a disaster but the international left went into a tizzy, withseveral hundred academics calling for Aumann to be disqualified on the grounds he favored "oppression of the Palestinian people."

CHANUKAH AT THE WHITE HOUSE

The following is excerpted from an op-ed by Hudson Institute President Herbert London in The New York Sun, Dec. 23-25, 2005:
"On December 6, I went to the White House Chanukah party. Jews from the most to the least observant were present. At the top of the stairs on the second floor, the West Point Cadet Choir sang Chanukah songs in Hebrew....President Bush and Mrs. Bush greeted everyone with their usual cordiality. In fact, the president lit Chanukah candles and proceeded to tell the tale of this celebration. For me, however, the most startling scene occurred at about 8 p.m. Several chasidic leaders noted that it was time for prayer. They sought a minyan, a prayer group of 10 males. Once assembled, these men proceeded to daven....Here in what is ostensibly a Christian country, in a White House led by a born-again Christian, one can find chasidim praying in the Dolley Madison room....My heart swelled; I was simply filled with pride...America is a magical place.... Imagine, if you can, the response to a group of chasidim that wished to pray in the Saudi Royal Palace. Their heads would be cut off before the first words were uttered...As I stood in the second floor corridor, tears were rolling down my cheeks. Yes, I have a love affair with America. I love our history, our tradition, and our tolerance…..there isn't any nation in the world that can reproduce the prayer service I observed on December 6. That was the essence of America."

A PERES GEM

The man who may well be Israel's Foreign Minister (again!) has gone from his customary imbecility to outright incoherence. "Politics is about credit," Peres explained. "Unity is an attempt to put credit aside and put unity in the center. My worry isn't about credit. My worry is my country. It costs, but it's right."

RICE'S LIST

On December 6, speaking in Germany, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice listed the places that had been victims of terror: among those she listed were New York, Washington, London, Madrid and Amman. No mention of Israel, although only a day earlier Israeli civilians had been murdered in a suicide bombing in a Netanya mall.

KADIMA'S FUTURE

Barring Sharon suffering another more serious stroke, his Kadima Party is predicted to win the forthcoming elections. If this indeed happens, in one sense it will be a highly unusual event in Israeli politics. No party that was established to challenge the traditional ideologically based parties (Labor, Likud and the religious parties) has ever received the largest share of electoral votes. Even Ben Gurion, the leader many Israelis thought indispensable, could only muster ten seats (in the 120 seat Knesset) when he broke away from Labor to form his own Rafi Party, this though he took with him many of his party's best known and most popular figures, including Moshe Dayan. Four years later, the Rafi Party was history.

But even if Sharon's Kadima defies previous upstart parties by winning the election, its subsequent trajectory is predictable. In the wake of the public disillusion that brought down the long-ruling Labor government following the 1973 war, The Democratic Movement for Change, a new party led by former general Yigael Yadin on a "good government" program, won an astonishing 15 seats, quickly to split and die. Sharon's party has no program whatever. It is based purely on himself and his plan for self-divestment of Israel’s historic patrimony. Without him, Kadima will disintegrate.

THE U.S. INSPIRED RIOTS

Oliver Roy, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said of the rioting Muslim youths in France: "It is nothing to do with radical Islam or even Muslims...these guys are building a new idea of themselves based on American street culture." If this is the caliber of French "scientific research," maybe more than their immigration policy needs an overhaul.

KRAUTHAMMER LOSES IT

Like many other neoconservatives, Charles Krauthammer lost his former astuteness once he endorsed Ariel Sharon's wicked and strategically insane expulsion of the Gush Katif and northern Samaria settlements. This said, Krauthammer's column of December 9 "Progress in the Mideast: Peace Without Treaties" is still a mind-boggling exercise in self-delusion. According to Krauthammer the intifada is over, defeated by Israel; Sharon has set Israel "on a path to a modest and attainable territorial solution to the century-old conflict;" Israel's regional isolation is easing; once Israel retreats from 92% of Judea and Samaria the security fence willl make it almost impossible to launch attacks into Israel; the Palestinian national movement has matured and with Arafat gone will move from revolution to nation-building.

Where does one begin? This is a farrago of nonsense worthy of Shimon Peres.

BLAMING THE VICTIM

An off-the-wall jury has determined that the chief blame for the 1993 (first) bombing of the New York World Trade Center lies not with those who planted the 1,500 pound bomb, but with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, then owners of the World Trade Center, which, the jury determined, "should have known" the attack was coming and "should have known" to shut down the garage to the public and to its upstairs tenants.

Of course there was no way the Port Authority could have anticipated such a hitherto unthinkable act. This jury is yet another illustration of the extent to which tort law has run amuck, slamming deep pockets (in this case New York and New Jersey taxpayers) with a blithe disregard for genuine responsibility. The jury apportioned the Port Authority 68% of the responsibility for killing six people, injuring 1,000 and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and business disruption. Since the jury attached over half the blame to the Port Authority, the taxpayer will also be on the hook for 100% of any damages for pain and suffering that are awarded.

Rael Jean Isaac

Speaking at the Zionist Organization of America dinner in December, the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick spoke of the government of Israel’s basing its policy, since Oslo, on fantasy rather than reality, i.e. the fantasy of a peace process rather than the reality of unrelenting Arab determination to destroy the state. While it may seem churlish, in the wake of the Iraqi elections, to question the viability of President Bush’s goal of making Iraq a liberal democracy (with freedom of speech, assembly, religion, equality of women, the rule of law, protection of minority rights), this too, given the realities of Iraq and the Middle East, is likely to prove a dangerous fantasy.

The ongoing violence in Iraq has not deterred the President from laying out ever more ambitious goals. In a December 12 speech he declared “the year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East and the history of freedom.” Two days later, at the Woodrow Wilson Center, he declared that “freedom in Iraq will inspire reforms from Damascus to Tehran,” that we are witnessing “the birth of a free and sovereign Iraqi nation that will be a friend to the United States,” and “we will settle for nothing less than complete victory.”

The breadth of these goals has won the President enthusiastic support from neoconservatives. Norman Podhoretz, for example, describes the President’s plan to democratize the Middle East as “the great enterprise on which the United States has embarked in the Middle East” and says Commentary magazine “has enlisted in this great enterprise ‘for the duration’ taking a leading intellectual role in defense of its moral and political rightness.” To Podhoretz those not taking this view are “opponents of the war.”

But one does not need to be an opponent of the war to take issue with roseate views of the malleability of the Middle East. The President’s confidence rests on his belief, as he said in his Woodrow Wilson Center speech (and in many others) “that the people of the Middle East desire freedom as much as we do.” (Political correctness has tied itself into such knots that the notion that all cultures, no matter how much their values differ from our own, are equally valid is accompanied by the conviction that it is racist to claim all cultures do not have the same values we do.)

This writer counts herself among others who supported the war and continue to believe it was necessary. This is not merely because the President would have been derelict had he left Saddam Hussein in power, given the belief of the CIA -- and that of virtually all Western intelligence agencies -- that Saddam had assembled weapons of mass destruction. (He may indeed have had them; recently Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom, has said that Saddam moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started.) Whether he did or not, there can be little doubt that Saddam, once he had shaken off the UN sanctions, would have quickly moved to reactivate his nuclear, chemical and biological warfare programs.

But from the beginning, the removal of Saddam’s regime was wrapped up in “the great enterprise” of transforming Iraq into a Western style democracy — and the rest of the Middle East by virtue of its moral example. And there’s the rub. The whole tenor of the Arab, and beyond that of the Muslim world, is in the opposite direction, toward making their societies more Islamic, rooted in sharia, more intolerant of modernity, of individual or minority rights, including those of Muslims of differing beliefs.

Since they emerged after World War II as independent states free of Western control, the countries of the Middle East have been casting about for some political recipe that will rescue them from their inferior position on the world stage and restore them to the preeminent one they feel should be theirs by virtue of their status (in their own minds) as heirs of the once militarily dominant Islamic empires and because of the superiority of Muslim religion and culture. The defeat of the combined Arab armies at the hands of the fledgling Jewish community of Palestine in 1948 was a catalyst in imparting a feeling of intense humiliation and determination to overcome it.

One supposed panacea has followed another. On December 9 the New York Times ran an article “The Boys of Baghdad College” describing how the three chief contestants in the Iraqi elections all went to the same elite Jesuit school. The personal trajectory of one of them, Adel Abdul Mahdi, sums up this hurtling from one “solution” to another. Mahdi began as a leader in the Baath Party, which was going to restore Arab glory though a pan-Arab secular nationalism that would wipe out the “artificial” barriers between Arab states; disappointed here, he shifted to Maoism; today he heads the largest Shiite religious party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), part of the dominant United Iraqi Alliance.

Democratic politics, with their messy compromises, are not satisfying to those searching for all embracing simple formulas.

“Islam is the solution” is increasingly the watchword of the Muslim Middle East. (It occurs to very few in the region that Islam is a large part of the problem.) Under these circumstances opening up Middle Eastern societies to free elections is likely to advance the Islamists to whom Western style democracy is anathema (although they don’t mind exploiting it to achieve power). In Egypt’s recent elections the officially outlawed Muslim Brotherhood won 20% of the vote. Eli Lake, in The New York Sun, criticizes the elections as “unfree” but had they been more free, the Brotherhood would have won an even larger share of Parliamentary seats. As it is, U.S. intelligence sources believe the effect will be to make Mubarak adapt his policy to the Islamist agenda, including an (even more) hostile attitude by official media toward the U.S. and Israel, a reduction of diplomatic and military ties with the U.S., an increase in the role of Islam in public life and growth of the already considerable Islamist influence within Egypt’s military and security forces.

Even more worrying, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan is shaking off what to Islamists are the shackles of the secular civil society imposed by Kemal Ataturk. As Michael Rubin has pointed out in National Review Online, in June Erdogan addressed the nation not before the traditional backdrop of a Turkish flag and portrait of Ataturk but before a photo of Ataturk’s mausoleum and a mosque. The clear message: Ataturk is dead and Islam lives. Rubin chronicles Erdogan’s steady assault on the rule of law and secularism and the growth of (illegal) Pakistan style madrassas. The party’s daily paper calls internal voices raised against Erdogan’s abuses of power “enemies of Islam.” Not surprisingly, with this comes virulent anti-Americanism in the Turkish media.

The anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon have been widely cited as proof of the power of Iraq’s democratic example, but in their wake Hezbollah has increased its presence in the Lebanese Parliament and executive. This Shi’a terrorist group seeks to create a fundamentalist state modeled on Iran to which it is closely tied. Policy analyst Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, recently testified before the House Subcommittee on Middle East and Central Asia that Hezbollah has increased its influence in Africa, South America and Europe and “according to some government estimates, the threat from Iran’s principal terrorist proxy now equals – or even exceeds – that of Al Qaeda.” (It certainly poses a greater threat to Israel.)

In local elections held by the Palestinian Authority on December 15, the Islamist terrorist group Hamas swept away the Fatah slates and, more significant, exit polls suggested that Hamas might well be victorious in the upcoming legislative elections. Experts believe it is likely to get a major boost from its inclusion of its first female candidate: she is Um Nidal, a celebrity among Palestinian Arabs because she sent three of her children to their deaths in anti-Israel suicide missions. She is filmed saying goodbye to her 17 year old son Mohammed (who went on to murder five Jewish students), ordering him “not to return except as a shahid (martyr).”

Everywhere the Islamist tide has produced greater intolerance, including escalating persecution of Christians. Thousands of Christians have fled the increasingly Islamized Palestinian Authority. In Egypt Christian Coptic communities have found themselves under siege, their members murdered as rumors of “disrespect” for Islam roil their Moslem neighbors. Copts are increasingly pushed out of the civil service and political life – indeed, during the recent elections the Brotherhood declared non-Moslems should be banned from leadership positions.

In a rare break with the political correctness that bans discussion of the topic, Archbishop Charles Chaput of the Denver diocese spoke of the extent of the problem of Moslem persecution of Christians – and the media’s failure to address it honestly. For example, he noted that news reports describe Indonesia’s violence as “sectarian,” as if Moslems and Christian extremists were equally at fault, when “the bloodshed is overwhelmingly provoked and carried out by Islamic militants…hundreds of thousands of persons have been displaced and thousands killed in this anti-Christian campaign of violence.”

In Bangladesh, Jihad Watch’s Hugh Fitzgerald points out “the country is spiraling into complete Muslim fanaticism.” The non-Muslim population is down to a mere 8% as non-Muslims, once 38% of the population, have left in the wake of massacres of Hindus, Buddhists and Christians.

The Bush administration ignores all this, acting as if casting ballots were all that democracy entailed. The President repeatedly avers his mantra that “democracies are peaceful.” But he may soon learn that in the Middle East, ballots and bullets go together.

And what about Iraq? The religious parties have trounced the secular parties, this even in Baghdad, supposedly the heart of a secular middle class. And while the elections were initially viewed as a great success because for the first time the Sunnis participated in large numbers, no sooner did interim numbers suggest they were vastly outvoted by Shiites than they refused to accept the results.

Moreover, the reason the Sunnis turned out to vote was in order to force major changes in the constitution that had been passed in the previous referendum. With the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (despite its dismal record of corruption and incompetence as the dominant party over the last nine months and its close ties to Iran) well in the lead and the Kurdish parties maintaining their strength, the Arab Sunnis are unlikely to achieve their aims. But if they do not, they are likely to decide that combining violence with political pressures will enhance the impact of the latter, especially with the U.S. desperate to stem the insurgency by “political” means.

Nor is the Sunni insurgency the only problem. Iraq is rife with ethnic tensions, religious rivalries, tribal loyalties, corruption and conflicts over identity (e.g. is the state to define itself as Arab despite its large Kurdish minority?) The army and police overflow with recruits who are also members of party-controlled militias, to which they give their primary loyalty.

Steven Vincent was a middle-aged art critic who watched the collapse of the Twin Towers from the nearby roof of his apartment building and determined to contribute to the war on terror. With extraordinary courage he went to Iraq on his own, living independently (no green zone for him) first in Baghdad, later in Basra. He wrote articles for a variety of magazines and newspapers and published a fine book Inside the Red Zone before his murder in Basra at the hands of one of those party militias. Basra is a success story from the U.S. standpoint, largely free of anti-coalition violence, a place where the British have “stood down,” retiring to the outskirts of the city, as the local army and police have “stood up.”

But, as Vincent reported, the once free-wheeling port city (60% Shia, 35% Sunni) is now like Florence under Savonarola, with religious gangs roaming the streets forcing women to cover their hair and ankles, firebombing liquor stores (most have been closed) as well as those selling Western music and DVDs. In a story published in the New York Times three days before his murder, Vincent reported that a young Iraqi officer told him that 75% of policemen in Basra were loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. (In an indiscretion that cost him his job, the chief of police several months earlier had reported to the British Guardian a figure of 50% loyal to the militias).

Vincent further reported that off duty police officers in the pay of religious militias went through the city in a white Toyota death car, and were responsible for the assassinations of hundreds of mostly former Baath Party members that took place in Basra each month. (It would be such a “death car,” according to witnesses, that kidnapped Vincent and his translator.) Vincent wrote that “Basra risks falling further under the sway of Islamic extremists and their Western trained police enforcers.” (Vincent’s account lends credibility to the charge by one of Iraq’s genuinely democratic politicians Mithal al-Alusi that his party officials, threatened by Shiite militiamen, were unable to function in the south.) Administration spokesmen have finally begun to acknowledge the problem is country-wide: everywhere militia members loyal to political parties undermine the viability of Iraq’s army and police as a neutral force protecting all citizens.

Nonetheless the President says in his most recent speech “this new Iraq shares our deepest values,” and Iraqis “are building a strong democracy…that will be a model for the Middle East.” Happy as such an outcome would be, the likelihood must be accounted extremely poor. That means we must face the prospect of something far less than the “total victory” which the President has promised lies ahead. Indeed, we may find that it is the decision of the Iraqi government, not domestic pressures, that forces our withdrawal sooner than the President would like.

If militant Islam, not liberal democracy, gathers strength in the Middle East (ironically, through the democratic process), the United States will have to change its goal from democracy-building to constraining Islam. Given how much the required steps go against our own liberal orthodoxies, it will take nothing short of an intellectual revolution to make this possible. These are a few of the PC-shattering steps that are required:

1) Change our immigration policy to a selective one that keeps Moslems out. The U.S. is fortunate in that unlike Europe, our Moslem minority is still relatively small. What is happening in France, Belgium, Holland, England, Germany and Sweden offers fair warning. If we do not take it seriously, we will pay a terrible price.

2) Embark on a crash program to develop alternative energy sources. This does not refer to pie-in-the-sky solar energy, but to readily available energy sources the religious fundamentalists who call themselves environmentalists hate and have successfully obstructed for decades: nuclear energy, offshore oil (much of it now off-limits to exploration), Alaska oil, to name a few. Drilling in ANWR, as George Will pointed out in a recent column, has been on the drawing boards since the early 1980s; its oil would almost equal our daily imports from Saudi Arabia.

3) Keep Wahhabi mosques out. While the U.S. does not have the huge unassimilable Moslem populations of some European countries, we cannot afford indoctrination of U.S. Moslems by Wahhabi imams courtesy of Saudi funds.

4) Warn Islamic countries of the consequences of embarking on or permitting from their soil attacks on the U.S. Our message: we are not going to occupy you or democratize you or build schools and infrastructure for you. We will punish you, devastatingly punish you.

Is it as improbable that these steps will be taken as that Iraq becomes the President’s vision of a democratic beacon to the region? That may well be. But then, like Israel, we will pay dearly for failing to do in time what can and should be done to protect ourselves, choosing instead to take refuge in comforting delusions.

Rael Jean Isaac is the Editor of OUTPOST

Jack Engelhard

Two recent headlines make sense alone, but not together. One, Ariel Sharon will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. Two, Sharon will take Israel out of the West Bank.

So this is the question. Why worry about a bomb from the outside when, O Israel, you're doing such a good job bombing yourself from the inside?

Israel's leaders are so obsessed about Iran's nuclear intentions that they forget what we all know from this distance here in America, especially those of us who once served over there: Israel has already been nuked, by itself. The departure from Gaza-- what was that? Maybe it wasn't nuclear, but it is nuclear enough to the thousands of Jews who were displaced and misplaced out of Gush Katif and are now living virtually penniless in tent cities.

On Sharon's watch, more than one thousand, three hundred Israelis have been murdered by Arab terrorists, more than ten thousand have been injured and maimed, and Sharon is worried about bombs from Iran? Why bother? The same bombing, in different forms, has been going on for the past five years, and just because it wasn't nuclear, that does not make it less lethal, especially to the dead and to those who still mourn them.

David Hatuel lost his pregnant wife and four beautiful daughters as "sacrifices for peace." Should he worry about Iran's bomb? No. He's already given.

There are two kinds of terrorism; the quick and the slow. We had the quick, 9/11, and Israel has the slow, terror that comes in doses. But there is no difference between these two, except that we awoke (more or less) and Israel is asleep, lulled by deadly attacks that are measured out, in drips and drabs, to avoid nationwide panic and mobilization.

If Israel's leaders, as they proceed to auction off the land at Sotheby's, clear out of Biblical territory, Judea and Samaria, then they will have surely deposited more good Jewish land to be wasted by jihadists, same as in Gaza--and this, too, is hardly any different from a nuclear attack. What's the difference? The fall-out? There's already plenty of fall-out in those tent cities. Visit those places and see what the aftermath of "disengagement" is like.

At this rate, Israel's executive branch, its cabinet, its legislature, its courts (and its news media), are nearly as much of a threat to Israel's security as a salvo of bombs from Iran. Their generosity to their enemies is near boundless, as is their disdain for their fellow Jews, especially if those Jews differ from the agenda of the moment.

Corruption in high places equals a nuclear attack and is sometimes more viral because it makes no big bang. Extreme leftists who dominate Israel's High Court are, in their own way, wiping Israel off the map, certainly its reputation for justice. Thirteen year old Israeli girls still sit in jail for civil disobedience (and nothing more) because from the lower courts to the highest court these youngsters were found to have an "ideology."

Or rather, an ideology that departs from the prevailing ideology. What is to be done with such girls? Shall we send them to "reorientation" camps to be brainwashed, as they used to do in the Soviet Union and as they still do in China and North Korea—and probably in Iran as well?

Israel is indeed a kingdom of priests, certainly in hi tech, agriculture and medical advances. These are good people, a near holy people, living on holy land. No nation of its size matches Israel for creativity and productivity. But all that is at risk, yes, from Iran. But that's tomorrow.

Today's nuclear explosions keep coming from the inside, silently, stealthily, craftily, in the form of high government defilement.

Jack Engelhard's latest novel is The Bathsheba Deadline, running as a serial on Amazon.com. This article appeared on Israel Insider.

http://fjordman.blogspot.com/2005/11/are-muslims-jews-of-today.html

Australian Lawyer Stephen Hopper thinks that Muslims are being dehumanized in the public discourse surrounding terrorism, in the same way Nazis dehumanized Jews before World War II. He's not the only one to see such a connection. Kari Vogt, Norwegian Islam expert at the University of Oslo, has compared Ibn Warraq's book Why I am not a Muslim to the anti-Jewish fabrication The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Professor Bernt Hagtvet, also from the University of Oslo, sees many parallels, but also some differences. There are far more Muslims in Europe now than there were Jews before World War II, and their numbers are rising fast. Swedish historian of religion Matthias Gardell claims that Islamophobia is perhaps the greatest threat to democracy in the Western world today. Swedish writer and leftist intellectual Jan Guillou has stated that the rhetoric employed by the Nazis against Jews is now used to target Muslims. The Nazis thought that all Jews were part of an international conspiracy to control the world and subdue others in their own lands. Guillou thinks the exact same thing is now happening, only this time, Muslims are the victims of this hate.

The curious thing about this mantra warning against "Islamophobia", which is now commonplace in the media, is that very few bother to analyze it properly. If they did, they would discover that the Jews of today are, well, Jews. Jews are suffering attacks across much of Western Europe at worse rates than at any time since the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. In Sweden, an anti-Semitic crime is reported to the police once every three days. The Jewish congregations in the major cities of Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö are forced to spend up to 25 percent of their membership fees on security and hired guards. And most of these hate crimes are perpetrated by Muslims. Even some non-Jews from Sweden say they feel "liberated" when they go to Israel. In Israel, you know who the country's enemies are, and you are prepared to fight for your country and for your convictions. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Sweden is a politically repressed nation, thanks to self-proclaimed guardians of the Multicultural Truth such as Mr. Guillou. No dissent is tolerated, and the few "racists" who try to raise a debate about Muslim immigration are attacked, sometimes even physically.

Jews in the 1930s were a minority everywhere, and had no country they could call their own. Jewish refugees were rejected by many countries even when some of them tried to escape the rise of the Nazis. Muslims today count more than one billion individuals, and constitute the majority in about 60 countries worldwide. In most of these countries, non-Muslims face various levels of discrimination, or even, in some, the continuous threat of physical extermination.

Jews in Western countries do not constitute a terror threat, and never have. Muslims do all the time. Jews do not have a history of more than 1000 years of armed attacks on Europe, India, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Muslims do. Jews do not cut the throats of Buddhist monks in Thailand, massacre Hindus in Bangladesh or stab Christian nuns in Egypt. Muslims do. Jews do not take hostages, decapitate them and distribute videos of their acts. Muslims do. Jews do not gang rape Christian women in Western nations. Muslims do. Jews represent the most prosperous and talented ethnic group in Europe. Muslim in Europe are ranked close to the bottom of all indicators of education and social achievements. Muslims, being 20% of the world's population, have produced only three Nobel laureates in science and literature, whereas Jews, being only 0.2% of the world's population, have received more than 120 Nobel prizes in science, economics, medicine and literature. Jews before World War II filled up Europe's universities. Muslims now fill up Europe's prisons.

In fact, the comparisons to the 1930s make a lot more sense if you compare Muslims to the Nazis. And there was a connection, even during World War II. Adolf Hitler is reputed to have stated his admiration for Islam, and thought it would be a better match for Nazism than Christianity, with its stupid notions of compassion for inferior people. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of Muslim fundamentalists in Palestine, resided in Berlin as a welcome guest of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust.

The Nazi-Islamic love affair remains strong. Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' is a bestseller in Islamic nations such as Turkey, at the same time as Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan wants anti-Islamism to be accepted as a crime against humanity in the European Union. And not a few Muslim leaders state their wish to finish what the Nazis started. A broadcast from one imam in the Palestinian Authority stated that "The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world--except for the Jews. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. ‘The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.’"

In Denmark, professor of Islamic studies Mehdi Mozaffari tells of how he and thousands of others have fled burkas, sharia, blood money, muftis and Islamism in the Middle East, only to witness the same beast rear its ugly head in Europe. And he warns of the consequences: "Historical experience has shown that those whom people fear will win, eventually. We saw this in Nazi Germany. There were too many Nazis, and people were scared. I fear that this is where we are heading, once more." Danish author Kåre Bluitgen had difficulties in getting artists to illustrate his book about Muhammad due to fear of reprisals from Islamic extremists. Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest newspaper, responded by asking 40 illustrators to make drawings of Muhammad, and published twelve. The decision has caused a stir among Muslims, triggered threats against the newspaper and a diplomatic row with many Muslim countries that is still going on.

The most immediate victims of this climate of fear are Muslim women. A Pakistani man in Denmark recently murdered his sister in the street outside a train station because she had married a man against her family's orders.

Perhaps worst is the way the experience of Nazism has been turned on its head and used to promote the ideology of multiculturalism. Any objection to mass immigration or the destruction of traditional Judeo-Christian moral values is deemed as racist, akin to support for fascism. As a result, in the name of multicultural tolerance, we have allowed the creation of the brutal, anti-democratic monster of Islamism in our midst. It is a bizarre paradox that the hysteria over Nazism has encouraged Europe to be swamped by Islam, in which anti-Semitism appears to be an integral part of the creed.

If criticism of Islam causes Muslims to behave badly, then what has 2,000 years of persecution done to the Jews? Surely the Holocaust and other pogroms in Europe would have made Jews start their own Jihad? Then how come Jews don't go on the rampage throughout Europe?

The comparison between Muslims today and Jews 70 years ago is nonsense, and needs to be confronted and dismissed as such. It is an insult to the Buddhists who are beheaded in Thailand, the Christians who are persecuted in Indonesia, the Hindus who are killed in Pakistan and the Europeans who are no longer safe in their own cities. But above all, it is an insult to the memory of the millions of teachers, artists, writers and intellectuals who were murdered in Nazi-controlled Europe.

This appeared in Nov 2005 on fjordman.blogspot.com

William Mehlman

Hellenism didn’t vanish with the Maccabees’ victory over the Seleucids. It was embraced with increasing enthusiasm by several generations of Hasmoneans, the Maccabeean dynasty that ruled Judaea during its brief period of independence and subsequent Roman occupation. It was, after all, Herod the Great, a Hasmonean by marriage, who transformed the Second Temple into a Greek showplace and endowed Judaea with a resplendent Greek theater and amphitheater.

Infatuation with the Hellenic lifestyle wasn’t confined to the Judaean monarchy. The High Priest Jason carried his worship of Athenian culture, if not its polytheism, to the point of declaring Jerusalem a Greek city– “Antioch-at-Jerusalem.”

The ascendance of the Pharisees, forerunners of rabbinic Judaism, as well as the Essenes, was in no small measure a reaction to the general embrace of Greco-Roman culture by the priestly Sadducees and a large swath of Judaea’s wealthy and well-born. Greek speaking, Greek educated, Greek mannered, the Sadducees desperately sought a modus vivendi with the Seleucids, right up to the Maccabeean revolt.

It was Antiochus Epiphanes who threw a spanner into the churning wheels of Hellenization by storming Jerusalem and murdering and enslaving thousands of its Jewish residents on the assumption that they were on the brink of a rebellion against his rule. The “Jewish rebellion” he manufactured (with the invaluable assistance of Jason’s successor, the High Priest Menelaus and a Jewish Hellenized claque) became the Jewish rebellion in fact. All efforts to quell it were doomed by Antiochus’ installation of Zeus Olympius in the Temple, his assault on the Shabbat as an affront to the belief that man (specifically Hellenic man) controlled the world, his ban on circumcision for its alleged desecration of the male body, a Greek icon, and his edict against the sanctification of the New Moon, a Jewish acknowledgement of divinely ordained time that clashed with the Greek concept of man’s control of nature.

With this brutal assault on the very essence of their faith, all Antiochus succeeded in doing was to awaken the quiescent consciousness of a Jewish urban and peasant mass. Its distant admiration of Hellenic culture distilled into hatred, the stage was set for Judah Maccabee and his brothers. Epiphanes’ sobriquet, “Epimane “ – the madman – couldn’t have been more appropriate: those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Antiochus wasn’t the first tyrant to succumb to history’s most enduring siren song – political stability at the expense of a Jewish minority whose ethos is portrayed as a threat to the prevailing culture.

Hellenism’s ghost still haunts us – the idealization of the body divorced from the soul has never been more publicly extolled, the lure of equality with the powers of heaven more ardently pursued, sex, passion, desire more worshipfully glorified--all of what Matthew Arnold memorably described as the “spontaneity of conscience.” It is no longer, however, the Hellenism graced with Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus. Christology might still hold with John’s view of the Word—the Logos–as flesh, but must surely reject, as he would have, science without limits, intellect without a moral compass as the stigmata of the Beast. Athens would have rejected it as the essence of anti-knowledge, a threat to man’s freedom and his dream of touching the stars.

Hellenism didn’t fade away. It morphed into that peculiar philosophy known to us today as post-modernism. The classical scholar Victor Hanson has called this “the marriage of ignorance and arrogance which seems to characterize this generation of…academics, especially in the area of the Humanities… a fashionable mental disorder disguised as pseudo science.”

Post-modernism’s first victim is truth. Since “truth” (always surrounded by inverted commas) is mitigated by language, the post-modernist finds it impossible to determine anything with certitude. In place of truth, he presents us with “narrative.” Where truth, even if it could be defined, is a cold, hierarchical, judgmental exposition of both the beautiful and the ugly, the narrative is warm, communal. sensitive, selective – a tale to be unfolded around the campfire of the vanities with the scary parts artfully excised. In its morphed 21st Century version, Hellenism has reduced us to a “therapeutic “ civilization. Hanson writes: “There doesn’t exist anything real, such as evil. Even death can be mitigated. Perpetual peace is possible. The ‘illegitimate’ sons of the Enlightenment – Marx and Freud – have convinced us that either the State or we, ourselves, can actually change human nature” – given a level of force sufficient to the task.

Ideas have consequences. The 100 million corpses piled up by Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot in their march toward Utopia, Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry in his quest for racial purity all stand witness to those consequences.

What knowledge can we, the anti post-modernist, Zionist camp extract from this disaster that might help us preserve what is still left of Jewish national identity and a dwindling Jewish state? The answer, or a least a clue, might be found in recalling Matthew Arnold’s comparison of Hellenism’s “spontaneity of conscience” with Judaism’s “strictness of conscience.” The Maccabeean revolt was as much a civil conflict between Torah Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism as a defense against Antiochus’ attempt to bleed the life out of Judaism. While there is something to be said for Judaic and Greek culture as joint contributors to Western civilization (the New Testament was a book written in Greek by Jews), Western civilization might have been strangled in its crib without Judaism’s triumphant resistance to Hellenism. Christianity owes its credibility to the stand the Maccabees took 2,200 years ago against a Hellenic tide bent on reducing Judaism’s laws, its traditions, its culture to meaningless parables.

William Mehlman chairs AFSI in Israel

RUTH KING

“I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened. At the same time a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine. There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?”

Who said this? Dennis Ross or Martin Indyk or Yossi Beilin or Shimon Peres? No, they actually might have said something like this but without supporting Israel’s right to respond strongly when attacked.

Steven Spielberg said this to Time magazine when discussing his movie “Munich.” In fact, Spielberg has assiduously avoided lending his support to ads, organizations, divestment moves calculated to weaken Israel. “Schindler’s List” brought Holocaust awareness to millions who knew precious little, if anything at all, about the Holocaust. More important, under his aegis, thousands of survivors gave recorded testimony which serves as permanent refutation of the Holocaust deniers such as Mahmoud Abbas and Iran’s president.

Nonetheless, Spielberg is a chump, hustled by two con men, George Jonas and Yuval Aviv, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad. The latter’s fiction and conspiracy theories were rejected by the families of the victims of Pan Am 103, and Aviv went on to work for Pan Am’s representatives against the parents’ claims. Much more can and will be written about this duo in a forthcoming issue.

Spielberg is also a dolt for collaborating with Tony Kushner, a leftist on record as saying “I wish that modern Israel had not been born." Jonas and Aviv were perfect for Kushner because their anti Israel and anti Mossad “faction” fit in nicely with his existing bias.

I have no intention of touting an objectionable movie or defending its producer, but one has to ponder who is responsible for creating a climate in which a movie can attempt to demonstrate moral equivalence between terrorists and their victims.

In fact, is there a more glaring example of moral equivalency than the Oslo accords which elevated the mastermind of the Munich massacres to the status of statesman? This arch terrorist and murderer of thousands of innocent civilians in Israel and throughout the world became a most favored guest in the White House, was lionized by legislators, the State Department, given a Nobel Peace Prize and legitimated by none other than the Prime Minister of Israel with the fawning approval of assorted academics, writers and commentators in Israel and America.

Yes, everyone rightly laments the martyred Israeli athletes in Munich, but only two decades later, and virtually within weeks of elevating Arafat to a “partner for peace” the Palestinian Arabs embarked on a terror spree killing and injuring hundreds of civilians. The victims were called “casualties of peace” by none other than Israel’s Prime Minister Rabin. When Jewish residents of Gaza, or Judea and Samaria were killed…..well, you see…..they were “settlers” and occupiers….really should not have been there. Obstacles to peace you know.

If that is not moral equivalence what is?

Spielberg pompously calls his movie “a prayer for peace” and goes on to state: “ Because the biggest enemy in the region is intransigence.” Hmm. Where have we heard that drivel before?

From Peace Now and the New Jewish Agenda and countless spineless Jewish members of the media and the academic elite.

In fact, Spielberg goes on to quote Amos Oz: “…..the worst conflicts are those that break out between people who are persecuted.” That explains it. Both sides are persecuted. Oz is one of Israel’s “respected” writers.

In an interview with the Times of London, Kushner declared: “I deplore the brutal and illegal tactics of the Israel Defense Forces in the occupied territories. I deplore the occupation, the forced evacuations, the settlements, the refugee camps, the whole shameful history of the dreadful suffering of the Palestinian people.” Kushner sounds just like the Israeli professor Ilan Pappe or dozens of American Jewish academics or the ladies of Jewish Women for Justice in Palestine.

Spielberg is going with the flow. As I write, Abe Foxman, the director of the ADL, has just announced that he thinks the movie is perfectly dandy.

Too bad that Speilberg’s enablers did not get rolling credits at the end of the movie, but maybe he’ll thank them when he accepts his second Oscar for a movie dealing with Jewish issues.

EDWARD ALEXANDER

Ruth King, to whom we are all indebted for her astute watchfulness, appears to think that although Spielberg's "Munich" film is indeed awful, its awfulness is mitigated by the fact that he shares with other liberal Jews the inability to recognize the full evil of the world and that he has promoted "Holocaust awareness."

But not even the roster of villains she compiles includes anyone who endorsed, as Spielberg does in his image of the burning Twin Towers at the film's end, the current orthodoxy of progressive antisemites, i.e., that Israeli "intransigence" caused 9/11.

As for Spielberg's achievement in demonstrating that, yes, Jews really were murdered by the Nazis, one needs to ask why it is that "teaching Holocaust awareness" has proceeded in lockstep for decades with the intensification of Israel-hatred.

Europeans, after all, are full of this "Remember Auschwitz" business; and they use it precisely to lull Jews into a sense of false security while they paint Palestinian Arabs as "the victims of victims" and depict Israel as the center of the world's evil.

"Teaching the Holocaust" does not help Israel unless you understand--as Spielberg is not mentally equipped to do--what Shmuel Katz has always reiterated: namely, that Israel was founded in spite of the Holocaust, not because of it, and that it was the Jews themselves, not conscience-stricken western nations, that broke down the gates of Palestine.

As Cynthia Ozick said on TV some years ago to an Israel-hater who had just published a book deploring his church's persecution of the Jews centuries ago: "Weeping over Jews long dead means absolutely nothing if you fail to come to the defense of the living ones in Israel."

Edward Alexander is the co-author (with Paul Bogdanor) of the forthcoming The Jewish Divide Over Israel (Transaction Publishers).

In a year when the Nobel Committee again made appalling choices for both the Literature and Peace Prize, we are all the more saddened by the death of a member of the Nobel Prize Committee whose finest hour came in resigning from it.

Kristiansen was one of the few world statesmen who was a consistent, genuine friend of Israel. A leader of Norway’s Christian Democratic Party, Kristiansen was minister of oil and energy from 1983-1986 and speaker of the Odelsting, Norway’s Parliament. He was that best of all friends, an outspoken truth teller in Israel’s defense when this was deeply unpopular and, even more unusual, in criticism of the state when required—and even more contrary to the “Zeitgeist.”

Kristiansen’s most famous action was to resign from the Nobel Prize Committee in 1994 in protest against awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, whom he termed “one of the most renowned terrorists in the world.” Less noted was Kristiansen’s charge that another Nobel Committee member, Norwegian politician Terje Roed-Larsen, had accepted money from Shimon Peres before voting that Peres share the prize with Arafat and Rabin. (That 1994 award was a high water mark of sorts – if Arafat represented the depth of human infamy, Peres exemplified the height of human folly.) Kristiansen continued to issue statements urging the Committee to revisit the award to Arafat. A sign of the corruption of the Committee was that even in 2004 four of its five members told the Jerusalem Post that Arafat deserved the prize while at least three would publicly condemn Shimon Peres for participating in a Sharon-led government.

Kristiansen never let up. In 1997 he led a delegation of Norwegians demanding his country’s embassy be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In 1998 – with Arafat in the next room – Kristiansen had the courage to meet with the Norwegian media and translate into Norwegian the videos in which Arafat, while ostensibly celebrating the fifth anniversary of Oslo’s “peace agreement,” called for Israel’s destruction. In 2004 Kristiansen warned that the optimistic views in Israel’s Knesset concerning Mahmoud Abbas “is a déjà vu repetition of the most complete failure of the Middle East conflict, the so-called ‘Oslo Agreement.’”

Even as he neared the end of his long life, Kristiansen’s love for Israel would not let him remain silent in the face of the destruction of the Gush Katif and northern Samarian communities. Invited to a dinner party sponsored by the Israeli government during the week Israel destroyed these communities, Kristiansen refused, declaring what few said and none put so well: “The Israel government expulsion of Gush Katif Jews is not an internal Israeli affair. It is everyone’s affair. This expulsion is an immoral and illegal act violating international ethical, human, legal and social rights.” In his letter to the Israeli ambassador in Oslo, Kristiansen wrote: “Being neither an Israeli citizen nor a Jew, I have been reluctant to express my opinions publicly in a situation where the expression of such opinions might be interpreted as foreign meddling in internal Israeli affairs. My excuse is love for Israel.”

Would that Israeli politicians had even a portion of Kristiansen’s sense, integrity and love for Israel.