A Defeat for Israel and the U.S.
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

The True Disproportion
Rael Jean Isaac

U.S. Aid to Lebanon Will Go Straight to Hezbollah
Debbie Schlussel

The Importance of Seeming Earnest
Hugh Fitzgerald

Another Such Victory
J. R. Dunn

Beheading Nations
Fjordman

Epilogue
Ruth King

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

Outpost is distributed free to
Members of Americans For a Safe Israel
Annual membership: $50.

Americans For a Safe Israel
1623 Third Ave. (at 92nd St.) - Suite 205
New York, NY 10128
tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717

Herbert Zweibon

On June 9, 2005 then Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a meeting of the far left American Israel Policy Forum: “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies.” True to his sentiments, as Prime Minister Olmert has failed to fight and has now lost the war with Hezbollah.

As Laurent Murawiec of the Hudson Institute puts it: “Israel has been defied and found wanting: it neither defended territory and population from attack nor brought the war to its enemy. A hesitant war never tried to hit the enemy’s center of gravity.” Nor was a glove laid on Syria, the conduit of arms to Hezbollah. After a month of somnolence, Olmert seemed to be emerging from his coma. He was not tired of being Prime Minister and when polls made it obvious the public was rapidly growing tired of losing he finally bestirred himself to send in sizable ground forces.

Yet according to Yuval Steinitz, former chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, even this was phony, “an attempt to create the futile display of a near victory snatched from our hands at the last moment by UN involvement.”

In any case, after a month of witnessing what Steinitz calls Israel’s “new concept of static, low-risk war” President Bush had grown tired. The President, who had run interference at the UN, providing Israel a strategic opportunity to launch lethal blows at Hezbollah and Syria, gave in to his State Department. UN Resolution 1701 simply ensures that there will be a larger UN force to set up flags in cozy proximity to Hezbollah fortifications. President Bush’s claim that Hezbollah will be disarmed is ridiculous on its face.

National Interest editor Nikolas Gvosdev points out a far more likely outcome, noting that in Kosovo the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army has transformed itself from a terrorist organization on the State Department’s watch-list into the province’s official police force. What is to prevent Hezbollah from cloaking itself with the veneer of Lebanon’s state sovereignty? Certainly the poorly equipped Lebanese army, a nest of sectarian divisions, easily capable of fissuring into battling militias, is in no position to take on Hezbollah.

If Israel’s defeat is obvious, that of the United States will soon be no less so. Iran, as financier, supplier, trainer, ideological inspiration and controller of Hezbollah has had a huge victory in its battle with the Great Satan for regional influence. The U.S. can expect Iran to step up support for Shiite militias targeting the U.S. – and militias in Iraq, whatever their allegiance, now see what such forces can achieve. Syria has already announced its plan to create forces on the Hezbollah model, trained by Hezbollah leaders. For the impact is not confined to Shiite Islam. As Yussuf Ibrahim wrote in The New York Sun (August 14) “The entire network of mosques, madrassas, Islamic fundamentalist institutions, charities, Islamic parties, and hangers-on are now in an energized frenzy, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia.”

The movement for democracy in the region, weak at best, has been swept away by what to the Arab masses appears Hezbollah’s stunning victory. Bush’s vision of two states living peacefully side by side had already turned into the Hamas Revolution. Israel’s defeat has definitively transformed Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution into Hezbollah’s Revolution. The likelihood of much of Iraq falling into Iran’s orbit as another Shiite theocracy is greater than ever. What we at AFSI have called dubious allies (the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) will be under direct threat, and not by democratic reformers.

It is hard to see any good coming out of this debacle, except perhaps the collapse of the feckless, disgraceful government of Kadima.

PERES AFTER LIFE

In the June issue we suggested that with Shimon Peres in his 80s, the role of national fool would soon be up for grabs. One of our readers suggests this is a mistake. Over the decades Peres has become such a fixture in Israeli cabinets that they may not be able to conduct business without him. Our reader suggests that on his demise a stuffed Peres be propped up at cabinet meetings, with an implanted recorder emitting the “best” of his imbecile sonorities.

One advantage of keeping Peres perennial is that admiration for Peres provides a litmus test for exploding other gasbags with high reputations. For example, French “philosopher” Bernard Henri-Levy deserves a place in the gasbag Hall of Fame. In a long essay in The New York Times Magazine Levy fulsomely praises Peres as “the Wise Man of Israel” who has the “look of a prince-priest of Zionism.” In his voice of “melodious authority”, says Levy, Peres holds forth about “Mahmoud Abbas and Bill Clinton, whom he links as ’The men of good will. My friends. The friends of enlightenment and peace. The ones who will never renounce peace because of terrorism.’” (Never mind that Abbas was then praising Hezbollah as the “noble Arab resistance” on Al Arabiya TV). Peres, writes Levy, told him that Israel will “win this war” and clear the way for “paths of speech and dialogue.” Levy’s reaction to this mad babble? “I find that, today, for some reason, these prophecies have a new coefficient of obviousness and force.”

FOXMAN'S DEFAMATION LEAGUE

While most of the world defamed her, Pat Robertson courageously went to Israel in a show of solidarity and once the ceasefire was declared (under infamous UN Resolution 1701) voiced his misgivings about its results. Did the televangelist win high praise from Jewish organizations? Think again. Abe Foxman blasted Robertson as “irresponsible.” One wonders: what is the mission of the Anti-Defamation League? Does it consider support for Israel “defamation?” The dirty secret seems to be that the organization considers its real role to be as a support group for the Democratic Party. How else to explain its running newspaper ads praising Congressmen who support Israel – that list only Democrats!

ROTH'S ANTI HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

“Surprise” has been voiced that Human Rights Watch should serve as a propaganda arm for Hezbollah with its executive director Kenneth Roth saying he could “guarantee” the accuracy of Hezbollah’s phony figures on casualties in Qana.

Surprise is the last emotion that is appropriate. Human Rights Watch pulled a similar stunt in hyping the non-existent Israeli massacre of civilians in Jenin.

Human Rights Watch is a worthy member of the morally corrupt “human rights community.” Joe Stork is Deputy Director of the outfit’s Middle East and North Africa Division. Stork began his career at the radical (and radically anti-Israel) Institute for Policy Studies. Back in the early 1970s he was one of the “collective” that produced MERIP [Middle East Research and Information Project] Reports. MERIP’s chief problem was figuring out which Arab terrorist group it most identified with. On one matter MERIP had no problem. When Arab terrorists gunned down Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics (and even the Communist Daily World called it “murderous banditry”) MERIP issued a flyer saying “Munich and similar actions cannot create or substitute for a mass revolutionary movement, but we should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action…It has provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians in the camps.” Stork went on to speak at a Baghdad Conference on Zionism as Racism.

Such are the credentials of the man Human Rights Watch chooses as moral arbiter for the Middle East.

LEDEEN WAS RIGHT

More and more it looks as if Michael Ledeen was right when he argued, prior to the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that toppling the Iranian regime was a more promising way to begin any effort to achieve constructive change in the region.

ISRAEL'S FIFTH COLUMN

This war has clarified – if any clarification was necessary – the extent to which Israel’s Arab citizens identify with the enemy. In Nazareth, Matthias Gebauer reports in Der Spiegel, identification with Hezbollah is all but universal. When two small children were killed by a Hezbollah rocket, the community blamed Israel, the mayor protesting that there was a shortage of alarm sirens. But Nazareth had shut off its alarm sirens because they also sound to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day and the city preferred to jeopardize its safety to being subject to an expression
of Israeli patriotism. At the memorial for the children the deputy mayor announced: “Our passports say Israel, but we are brothers of the Arabs.” Green Hamas flags flew everywhere.

Gebauer could find only one moderate voice, a restaurant owner who was afraid to give his name. “Nazareth is full of crazy people,” he said. “I don’t want to get into trouble.”

PLAUT ON PERETZ

Steven Plaut writes from Haifa: “The banner headline in Haaretz of August 17 was ‘Defense Minister Peretz Claims the Army did not Warn Him There were Missiles and Rockets in Lebanon.’ Now I personally published at least 50 articles and web postings after the Barak capitulation and unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon, warning that northern Israel would soon be bathed by thousands of Hezbollah katyushas and I was hardly alone. I wonder what else Peretz was never warned of by the army – maybe that snakes bite and that smoking is bad for your health.”
No less bizarre is the news that a government commission to examine the effects of Kadima’s proposed “convergence plan” (eliminating the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria) had concluded after extensive study that the plan would expose Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport to rocket attacks. Any politician who needs a commission to figure this out needs to be committed.

Jihad is Kosher
Greg Jaffe in The Wall Street Journal reports that a judge on Yemen’s special terrorism court has acquitted 19 defendants who had traveled to Iraq to fight with al Qaeda and kill American soldiers – and bore wounds to show for it. The forty year old judge, who is no al Qaeda sympathizer and has family in the United States, said he had no choice: “Islamic Sharia law permits jihad against occupiers” of Moslem lands. The judge was puzzled by the protests from the American embassy and others. He asked “According to American law, isn’t it OK to fight with people of your own religion against the occupiers?”

Rael Jean Isaac

French President Jacques Chirac is only the most prominent of the multitude who raised their voices against Israel for supposedly engaging in, to use Chirac’s phrase, “totally disproportionate” actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon. (Meanwhile the French foreign minister revealed his sense of “proportion” by calling Iran, Hezbollah’s controller, “a great country…which plays a stabilizing role in the region.”)

Although not in the sense meant by hostile critics, Israel is indeed guilty of gross disproportion in its response to the challenges facing the state. One could argue that such “disproportionate response,” repeated over and over again, regardless of which party is in power, is at the core of Israel’s present desperate existential danger.

Let us begin with the most obvious area in which Israel has been guilty of disproportion – prisoner exchanges. The first of these ludicrously imbalanced “exchanges” occurred in May 1985 on the watch of the joint Likud-Labor government presided over (in agreed sequence) by Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres. In exchange for three Israeli soldiers Israel released 1150 Palestinian Arab prisoners. The pattern has continued with, for example, Israel releasing 436 terrorists in January 2004 in exchange for the remains of 3 Israeli soldiers and the release of a civilian, Elhanan Tennenbaum. No one should be surprised if eventually Israel releases hundreds of prisoners in exchange for the two soldiers Hezbollah captured.

Many in Israel seem to take a perverse pride in these lopsided exchanges, viewing them as evidence of moral superiority, proof that Israel will go to any length to secure the life of a single individual, the state serving as an extended family. But a country is not and must not behave like a family. Most parents would sacrifice everything they have to ransom a kidnapped child. In doing so, they may make it more likely that the kidnappers, or other would-be kidnappers, will seize someone else’s child, but they cannot be faulted for thinking only of saving the life important to them, without the broader implications even crossing their minds.

But a government must think of the implications of its actions. As would subsequently be widely acknowledged, that initial 1985 “exchange” provided the basis for the first Intifada (which in turn paved the way for the disastrous Oslo agreement), as those released became its organizers and leaders. Nadav Shragai recently pointed out in Haaretz that fourteen of the mass terror attacks in the last several years were carried out by freed terrorists and dozens of attacks in which hundreds of Israelis were killed or wounded were also organized by terrorists released by Israel. In choosing to secure the life (or sometimes dead bodies) of a very few at the price of setting free hundreds of terrorists to attack her citizens again, it can be argued that the Israeli government is as responsible for the clearly foreseeable deaths as if cabinet members had strapped on the suicide belts.

The widely publicized large scale prisoner releases (often made simply as a “gesture” of good will to her enemies) are not even the whole story. In foolish response to the pressures of Israel’s “human rights” organizations (as phony in Israel as most of the groups going under that rubric are in the United States) Israel has been steadily releasing teenagers and women engaged in terrorism simply on the ground of their sex and age.

Nor has Israel’s government learned anything. On August 1, with the war in both Lebanon and Gaza still in full swing, Israel announced it was releasing 100 Hamas and Islamic Jihad prisoners, obviously as an exchange for the single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas had captured. Nabil Shaath, former PA foreign minister, dismissed this as a wholly inadequate gesture, telling the newspaper Al Quds that negotiations were in the last stages to free 700 prisoners for Shalit.

These wildly disproportionate “exchanges” have other far-reaching consequences. The terror organizations (including the so-called government of the PA, whether Fatah or Hamas-led) have become accustomed to allowing the numbers of their members in Israeli prisons to grow into the thousands (there are 9,700 now), comfortable in the assurance that at any point they can capture one or two Israelis and secure the release of most of them. The present war may have been the inadvertent consequence of such “business as usual” with Hezbollah kidnapping two Jewish soldiers on the assumption that in its wonted fashion Israel would obligingly embark upon an “exchange.” As The New York Times (Aug. 4) notes, Hezbollah was particularly anxious to secure the release of Samir Kuntar, who had raided the apartment of the Haran family in Nahariya, killed the father, then killed his four year old daughter by smashing her head with a rifle butt. The mother survived, hiding in the attic with her two year old daughter whom she inadvertently suffocated as she tried to prevent
her from crying. Hezbollah spokesmen have openly expressed their surprise and outrage that Israel did not react in the way experience had led them to expect.

While Israel’s sensitivity to casualties is understandable, again, a country is not a family and cannot focus only on the immediate casualties, ignoring longer-range benefits. In another wildly disproportionate response, Israel fled headlong from southern Lebanon in 2000 in response to a protest group of “four mothers” who had lost their sons in the fighting there. The lives of soldiers should not be carelessly squandered (as was done in the terrible trench battles of World War I) but what is an army for if not to put lives on the line for vital goals?

In The Jerusalem Post (August 10) Evelyn Gordon points out that from 1982 until 2000 Israel’s fatalities in Lebanon averaged 20-25 soldiers a year. Southern Lebanon was a crucial buffer zone protecting northern Israel from Hezbollah terrorists; it was controlled by a Christian militia (the South Lebanese army) trained, supported and helped on the ground by Israel. There would be a huge price for winning a six year reprieve from the drip of Israeli casualties. The price of the disproportionate response in 2000 is not only paid six years later in far more lives lost, in one million displaced persons within Israel, in economic devastation, but most important, in the destruction of Israel’s deterrence, her only protection against future warfare that will leave her losses even in the costly War of Independence seem trivial.

Again, in Israel there is no learning curve. The original four mothers have given extensive interviews in which they declare their support for today’s war against Hezbollah while reaffirming the “rightness” of their earlier insistence that Israel leave. They simply will not connect the dots.

Israel also demonstrates a wholly disproportionate sensitivity to and respect for “world opinion.” In what Victor Davis Hanson rightly calls a West “on the brink of moral insanity,” a corrupt world “awash with a vicious hatred [for Jews] that we have not seen in our generation,” it is folly for Israel to think it can shape world opinion by its actions. Yet American Jewish leaders who went to Israel while the air campaign against Hezbollah was going on (Olmert prevented the army until the last moment from engaging in a meaningful ground campaign) found that Israeli politicians wanted only to talk of their effort to prevent civilian casualties in Lebanon – apparently this, not crushing Hezbollah, was their chief concern.

Israeli leaders typically embark on preemptive apologies at the first squeak of Western or even Arab outrage – and investigate afterwards, often to find the charges ludicrous. But by their apology they have given credence to the accusations, encouraging their enemies and making what friends they have abroad despair. For example, there was the embarrassing spectacle of Olmert apologizing to Mubarak for the killing of two Egyptian terrorists. The episode at the Lebanese village of Qana, where the number of deaths were doubled (as even the bitterly anti-Israel Human Rights Watch has acknowledged) and there remain questions whether the entire “event” was staged by Hezbollah not only made the government go into apologetic overdrive but led Israel to announce suspension of all air operations for two days.

The desultory way in which Israel conducted the war against Hezbollah was the product of the two ingrained disproportionate responses we have already noted – the fear of Israeli casualties and the fear of world opinion. Of course in the end, the feeble campaign maximized both. The war lost the element of surprise (what could have been a swift hard-driving ground invasion became a slow, slogging affair) and there was a torrent of world abuse.

It is a series of disproportionate responses which has led Israel into the terrible existential dangers she faces today. Israel responded to the first Intifada, a minor nuisance of stone-throwing, chiefly by teenagers -- with Oslo, installing a terror state on her doorstep. Israel would eventually respond to the second Intifada, launched by Arafat in 2000, with so-called “disengagement” (although it is possible the “disproportion” here was even more sordid – with disengagement being Sharon’s response to the threat of a probe into his election finances.)

The ultimate disproportion is between Israel’s government and her people. Maintaining the state requires strength, courage and sacrifice. Yes, Israel’s intelligentsia contains a sizable number of scoundrels and outright traitors. But far more ordinary Israelis are imbued with the necessary strength and spirit of sacrifice. In the last issue we published Naomi Ragen’s “The Taxi Driver” about the security officer who told Sharon he could not participate in the eviction of Jews from Gaza and thus lost his career. Ragen concluded: “Once again, the reality of living in a country with wonderful people and terrible leadership struck me full force.”

For Israel’s leaders have gone from disproportionate response to outright disconnect from reality. Israel experiences government by the Marx Brothers. Look at perennial Israeli leader (now vice premier) Shimon Peres. After Oslo he babbles of a delusory New Middle East. With the victory of Hamas, he announces that Israel is closer to peace than ever before. Now with this war he declaims on CNN (August 10): “Since we didn’t initiate the war, we don’t have to win it. We just have to stop it.” The second member of the trio, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, proudly announces that the war has laid “the groundwork for negotiations with Syria” (to return the Golan Heights) and says he is eager “to resume negotiations with the Palestinians” (i.e. presumably to turn over more territory for the rocket launchers).

Nor is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert any improvement. At the start of the war he told Associated Press reporters “I’ll surprise you. I genuinely believe that the outcome of the present conflict” will provide “new momentum” (for his “convergence” plan, i.e. more retreats in Judea and Samaria). His government actually chose this moment to send out eviction notices to families at Givat Ronen in Samaria. As northern Israel became uninhabitable, Olmert spun empty boasts not heard since “Baghdad Bob” announced Saddam’s great victories over U.S. forces even as they rolled into Baghdad. Olmert declared that Israel has won because Hezbollah “can never [again] threaten this nation that it will fire missiles at it.”

No wonder that Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader Abu Maamun declared that Olmert’s statements were proof Arab attacks were working. Said Maamun: This is a great period and I believe a new era.”

The responses of Israel’s rulers to the challenges facing the country are no longer simply disproportionate: they are insane.

Debbie Schlussel

Countless billions of your tax money are about to go to Hezbollah--and may already be in the terrorist group's coffers.

If you liked aid to Katrina victims, you'll love U.S. aid to Hezbollah, er . . . Lebanon. Millions in misspending? Get ready for billions. And it won't be misused to pay for tattoos, condoms, and porn.

This time, it will be used for something far, far worse. Like terrorism.

Should America reward Hezbollah for starting the war against Israel that just "ended" in a shaky, empty ceasefire? Should American tax dollars go to pay for destruction that was caused by Hezbollah's refusal to turn over two kidnapped Israeli soldiers?

Your answer to those questions is really an answer to this one: Do you want U.S. tax dollars to fund Hezbollah--the terrorist group that murdered over 300 U.S. Marines and civilians and continues to train insurgent terrorists in Iraq to kill more?

If your answer to that question is no--and it should be--then America should not send a dime of aid to Lebanon.

In 2000, after Israel left Lebanon the first time, Republican U.S. Congressman Joe Knollenberg of Michigan--and his then-Chief of Staff Paul Welday--sought at least $268 million in USAID money for Lebanon "to rebuild infrastructure in the South," the Hezbollah-controlled area. Even though Knollenberg had no Arab constituents--and certainly none from Lebanon--he sought the money at the request of pro-Hezbollah Arab American Institute chief James Zogby, an open extremist. And at the request of then-Michigan U.S. Senator, American Lebanese Spencer Abraham, who sponsored the same bill in the U.S. Senate.

They obtained about $86 million in U.S. tax money. And--surprise, surprise--it went straight to Hezbollah. The money, meant to rebuild hospitals and orphanages, probably went to weaponry and propaganda to put people in hospitals and orphanages.

I say "probably" because the money has never been traced, never been accounted for, never been proven to have gone to any single rebuilding project. No one knows where it went. But one thing is certain, the money went straight to the Hezbollah bank account.

Ka-ching!

Even if the money went into rebuilding--and that's highly doubtful (unless you're interested in buying some land from me under the Litani Bridge)--it's a sure bet it gave Hezbollah extra money to acquire weaponry and train kids in hate and terrorism. As we all know, money is a fungible good, extra money meant for one thing--like re-building infrastructure--always allows a party to spend money normally meant for that expense on something else.

In Hezbollah's case, that something else includes Hezbollah textbooks in Hezbollah-run schools. That means textbooks that teach young kids that Jews, Christians, and Americans are subhuman and to
Hezbollah's propaganda network 100 times worse than Al-Jazeera. That something else also includes weapons, missiles, and combat training for terrorists.

USAID--the U.S. Agency for International Development--gives out billions in U.S. taxpayer money, most of which has very little if any accountability or strings attached. And there is virtually no scrutiny over the funds, once they are given out.

At least with Katrina aid, we know where a lot of the misspending went. We will never know the details on where the USAID money to "Lebanon" will go. USAID has very little--if any--oversight.

And then there is USAID Ambassador/Administrator Randall L. Tobias, a Bush appointee. On Tuesday, he was interviewed by Fox News' Shepard Smith--the only TV journalist asking any tough questions. Smith reported that all Red Cross and other aid in South Lebanon and other Hezbollah-controlled areas goes straight to Hezbollah. Hezbollah administers it, without any interference--or oversight--from outsiders. That will not change anytime soon.

Smith asked Tobias if he will work directly with Hezbollah to administer the gazillions in U.S. aid now going to "Lebanon." Tobias repeatedly danced around the question and wouldn't answer. That means the answer is a big "Y-E-S."

Guh-reat! The U.S. openly nodding and winking at giving billions of our money to those who tortured and murdered hundreds of Americans and are helping Al-Qaeda continue to do so in Iraq. Brilliant.

Tobias, when he did answer, said something just as frightening. He told Smith that he will work with "NGOs"--Non-Governmental Organizations--to distribute the billions in aid. If lack of oversight of USAID money is a hemorrhaging gash, oversight of NGOs is a mammoth black hole.

In the U.S., the two biggest U.S.-based NGOs operating in the Islamic world are Islamic "charities" under investigation by several federal agencies for money-laundering to terrorists. One--Life for Relief and Development (LRD)--openly admitted on its tax forms to giving millions from 1995-1997 to Hamas' Jordanian operations. In 2004, at a Los Angeles fundraiser, a speaker more than hinted that money would go to train individuals for more operations "like Fallujah" (where U.S. contractors were burnt to a crisp). Its Iraq offices were raided by U.S. troops, perhaps because it was founded by men connected with Al-Qaeda.

LRD got its USAID status when "former" Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist and FBI award revokee Imad Hamad lobbied Senator Carl Levin (D-MI). LRD's General Counsel is the President and attorney for Hamad's Midwest Regional American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. All of these parties are openly pro-Hezbollah. LRD's spokesman, Mohammed Alomari, is the proud author of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory book and articles decrying Jews in the Bush Administration.

Then, there is Islamic Relief. It is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group, from which Al-Qaeda's No. 2 Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Yasser Arafat, and Hamas all emanated. A 2004 Islamic Relief fundraiser I attended in Dearborn was hosted by a former employee of a Hamas charity, and the entertainment was young kids simulating beheadings of other kids wearing the American, Israeli, and British flags--set to Arabic music about jihad and martyrdom. This was right after Nick Berg was beheaded on video. Israel says the group funds Hamas, and its Gaza chief stored Nazi images on his computer.

These are the groups to which U.S. aid to "Lebanon" will go. It isn't going to Lebanon. It's going--when not straight into Hezbollah's hands--to groups that support and fund Islamic terror and openly cheer Hezbollah.

If American taxpayers are going to donate billions to Hezbollah, we might as well wave the white flag in the War on Terror.

Debbie Schlussel is a radio talk show host, columnist, and attorney. This was posted on her website August 17.

Hugh Fitzgerald

At the gym I saw CNN, an hour of complete mindlessness with Christiane Amanpour, trying to find, trying to understand, trying to come to grips with, what it is, what could it be, what might it be, that makes some "young Muslims" -- a tiny tiny minority of them, contemplate suicide bombings of the kind involved in the plot recently revealed in England.
There were "experts" on Islam and "experts" on terror. The first "expert" explained that as long as "young Muslims" (the British equivalent of the "yoots" in "My Cousin Vinny") were exposed to "pictures" of what was going on in "Palestine" -- yes, what is going on in "Palestine" or rather Israel (and by the way, why are there not Jewish plotters planning to get revenge on so many countries that have abandoned Israel, thrown it to the Arab and Muslim wolves?) -- and in "Iraq" and in "Chechnya" and in "Afghanistan" and, continued the "expert," as long as these yoots believed that Islam was being attacked, Islam was under siege, their rage would continue to grow.
There was more in this vein. There was a Muslim, a friend of two brothers who had been picked up for their part in the plane-bombing plot, who kept saying that "all communities -- Christians, Jews, Muslims, all of them" have their "extremists" and all of them occasionally get out of control, and in any case he went on and on about how there was nothing, absolutely nothing, except indignation at the terrible things being done to Muslims that could conceivably explain these Muslim plans and plots and mass murders, past, and passing, and to come.
And among those "experts" was Lawrence Wright, who proceeded to explain that the "Arabs and Muslims" in the United States were not a worry. They were so much better integrated, because -- well, because they were, because 70% of them earned over $50,000 and so many of them had college degrees and so on. It was as if none of the information that has been so widely disseminated about how "disproportionately" the well-educated or rather, well-degreed and well-off Muslims are represented in the ranks of Muslim terrorists had ever reached him. Nor has it reached the other fellow who came after, who said that "Lawrence Wright is absolutely correct" in his explanation of why the "Muslim community" in the United States is so much less threatening.
Not a single person appeared to think that the true explanation was other: there are at most 3 million declared Muslims in the United States, with a population of 300 million. Of those, 2 million are Black Muslims, a group whose practices, and attitudes, lead them to be regarded as not real or full Muslims by the real, Pakistani or Arab variety. That leaves at most one million Muslims out of a population of 300 million. And far more of those 300 million are believing Christians. And there are also many more Jews than there are in Great Britain. Furthermore, American attitudes are not colored by diseased guilt over some Empire, nor are Americans quite so inclined to be influenced by the pro-Arab lobbies and agents that long ago took over the Foreign Office, but have also, in the past few decades, successfully infiltrated into the upper reaches of the BBC and many of the main newspapers. America, thank god, remains different.

But the main thing, of course, is merely that Muslims are not as numerous as they are in Great Britain. Out of a population that is 1/5 the size of that in America, Great Britain has 1.5 times as many Muslims (that "Muslim friend of two brothers picked up" predictably exaggerated their numbers, claiming there are "2.2 million Muslims" in Great Britain). In other words, in proportion to the non-Muslim population, Muslims in Great Britain are seven times as numerous as Muslims are in the United States. And the same obtains in other European countries, where the Infidel governments and the most farseeing citizens are tearing their hair out at the thought that this problem is entirely the result of negligence, of ignorance of the belief-system of Islam.
Oh, she looked everywhere, Christiane Amanpour. She tried consulting that Muslim friend, and then one expert, and then another, and another, and another, to find out what it is that "makes them do it." She sought the answer here, she sought it there, she sought her answer everywhere. But the Answer proved as elusive for Christiane Amanpour as did, for the French, that demmed elusive Pimpernel, played long ago, in a different England, by that elegant immigrant, who had no trouble "integrating" into England despite his Hungarian Jewish background, a certain Leslie (Steiner) Howard.

Hugh Fitzgerald is a frequent contributor. This article appeared on Jihadwatch of August 16.

J. R. Dunn

Another such victory and we are undone.” —Pyrrhus, after the Battle of Asculum (279 B.C.)

One of the few useful methods of judging the results of a war is whether you are better off at the end than at the beginning.

It’ll be some time before the chips stop falling, but the outline is clear enough: the Hezbollah War is an unmitigated disaster for Israel, the U.S., and the West at large.

This doesn’t mean Hezbollah has won – though that’s how it will be played throughout the Arab world. It means simply that the only rational goal of the war – the destruction of Hezbollah as a military power – has not been achieved. Hezbollah still exists, it still has a large fraction of its weaponry, it remains a threat to both the legitimate Lebanese government and Israel. It also has gained the prestige that comes from fighting a powerful enemy to a standstill.

Israel, on the other hand, has not only been stalemated on the battlefield for the first time, but has also suffered a stunning economic blow, with most of her northern cities emptied out and close to a million refugees to care for. The Israelis blew off the propaganda war completely, allowing themselves to be painted worldwide as child-killers while tossing aside their first-ever expression of sympathy from the major Arab states. Their military has been exposed as a clown act, their political system as completely dysfunctional, unable not only to rise to meet a crisis situation but even to recognize it. Their enemy remains, fully-armed, on their northern border, and their security has become the ward of the UN, that notorious New York-based child prostitution and bribery ring.

It didn’t have to be this way. The Israelis opened the war with a series of well-planned air strikes which succeeded in isolating southern Lebanon from resupply or reinforcement. All that remained was a swift attack in force in the customary Israeli style. Hezbollah, a guerilla force of small size—the number of active combat troops is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 1,000 – 6,000—with no real mobility or heavy weaponry, could not have stood up against this.

For the first week to ten days of the war, this appeared to be exactly what the Israelis had in mind. But it never came to pass. Precisely why remains unknown, beyond the fact that Ehud Olmert wanted it that way. The IDF ran into some trouble at the border with mines and fortifications, Hezbollah having been allowed to work on them for six years undisturbed, but these were little more than a shell and could have easily been pierced by combat engineers. But this was probably no more than a contributing factor.

If asked to speculate, I would point out that the IDF’s chief of staff, Dan Halutz, is an ex-air force commander. Air force officers placed in a position to affect the course of a war have a long history of claiming that their boys can do the entire job on their own with no assistance from ground-pounders (e.g., Goering in 1940, the USAF staff in 1965). What happens then is a series of limited strikes that accomplish little, followed by more and larger strikes, and then desperation raids on any conceivable target before the military settles for doing what it should have done in the first place. This narrative fits the war to a tee. Even down to the fact that, when the time came to throw in the ground forces, it was simply too late.

Time was bought by the major Arab states, who were anxious to see the radical Shi’ites bounced even if it was done by Jewish interlopers, and an all-out campaign by the U.S. to keep the UN from interfering. This offered Israel an unprecedented window of opportunity. But Israel wasted that window by consistently playing to Hezbollah strengths. Ground troops were dribbled into combat in penny packets, becoming bogged down in fortified villages like Bint Jbeil, which should have been bypassed and reduced at a later time. Even after IDF troops were ignominiously ejected from Bint Jbeil, the IDF failed to move in force, leaving the advantage to Hezbollah. The mass offensive that should have opened the war occurred only at the last possible moment, and then solely to give a jolt to the UN.

In the meantime, the air campaign had fallen victim to a well-planned Hezbollah PR operation, complete with an impresario, the notorious “Green Helmet” (who insists that he’s simply a civil defense worker doing his job, presumably with his own personal helicopter to fly him from site to site), an apparent stash of ready corpses, and a cadre of news photographers either too enthusiastic or too frightened to protest at being used as propaganda conduits.

The trap being prepared, the IAF obligingly fell in, bombing targets to little strategic purpose—a “Katyusha launcher” can be created with about $20 worth of hardware—though well aware that the Hezbollah was placing its assets at points where civilian casualties were inevitable. The result was a quick reversal by previously understanding Arab governments, a universal moan by the easily-flummoxed Western elite, and second thoughts by Israel’s allies.

All this time, the Katyushas kept falling on northern Israel in their thousands (the total is an astonishing 4,000). Hezbollah had deliberately modified the warheads for greater terror effects, adding loads of ball bearings and other forms of shrapnel. The missiles effectively cleared out the country’s northern tier, with remaining residents spending most of their days in bomb shelters. This created an image of Israeli helplessness that was both spurious and unnecessary – the original Israeli war plan would have solved that problem within a matter of hours. That image will not be forgotten either in Arab countries or in Israel itself.

The results of this war will be months in coming, and few will be good (e.g., expect to see a lot more katyushas in Iraq. A lot more.) But the most critical development is this: one of the major elements – perhaps the major element – of Israeli foreign policy is the premise that under no circumstances would Israel be dependent on any other nation for its survival. It could scarcely be any other way, the Jews being the sole existing people that the modern world once attempted to destroy. To depend on anyone else would be to invite a repetition of that ordeal. No greater responsibility lies on the shoulders of any Israeli politician than to see that situation maintained.

But now, thanks to Ehud Olmert, it is over. Israel now depends for its security on the United States and the UN. These are frail reeds. The U.S. has always been faithful, but that can no longer be guaranteed, with the Democrats now being taken over by their maniac wing. As for the UN, apart from incompetence, there’s the barely concealed contempt for Israel, bordering on blatant anti-Semitism, plainly evident in Kofi Annan and his people. The organization still believes that Zionism is racism. To depend on its goodwill is to tempt a second Holocaust.

Israel now needs to do three things:

1) The first is a purge of the IDF’s command cadre. It’s impossible to say what has gone wrong with the IDF, but that’s just the point. It has gone wrong all the way down the line. Three incidents will suffice: last year the IDF abandoned development of the Northrop THEL system, a laser cannon configured to destroy missiles of the Katyusha class that had performed promisingly in tests. The reasoning was extremely vague. The system was “too bulky”, didn’t work well if it was cloudy, and so forth. If purchased at the time, it would have been coming on line right about now. While not quite a Starship Enterprise phaser bank, the THEL is an impressive weapon that would have curtailed the panic generated by Hezbollah’s missiles in much the same way that the RAF encouraged the British people despite being unable to fully stop the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940.

Similarly, the IAF failed to procure a reasonable supply of bunker-buster bombs even though aware that Hezbollah had six years to fortify and tunnel. Again, this would not have completely solved the problem – some Hezbollah tunnels were over 120 feet deep – but it’s still a sign of gross un-preparedness, particularly on the part of ex-air force chief Dan Halutz.

Even more troubling are reports that tanks were being ordered into heavily-defended areas of southern Lebanon with no infantry accompaniment – which is simply asking for them to be blown away. Dealing with enemy anti-tank teams has been a textbook matter since the Normandy breakout in WWII. Infantry assaults the enemy teams, creating a hole for the armor to roar through. If there’s any truth is these stories, it reveals incompetence of a criminal degree. Courts martial should follow.

2) Get rid of Ehud Olmert. The man has proven himself incapable beyond recall. Democracies have a tendency to throw up such types in times of crisis before settling on the right man. Olmert not only failed to understand how to carry out his war, he failed to understand why it was being fought in the first place. According to Israeli sources, Olmert was heard remarking that the purpose of the war was that it would enable Israel to “remove its settlements from Samaria.” This is as if George Bush had concluded that the point of 9/11 was to give Manhattan back to the Indians. Of course the alternative, the suave media figure and playboy Benjamin Netanyahu is no prize, but at this point Jojo the Dogfaced boy would be an improvement. This is a case where the parliamentary system adapted by Israel is superior to ours: they can get rid of the useless politician.

3) Target Hezbollah for annihilation by any means necessary. This means every last active combatant. Hezbollah has humiliated Israel. The country – and the Middle East, and the world at large – will not be safe until that stain is wiped out.

As for us – the rest of the world – we’ll be seeing a lot of Sons of Hezbollah springing up in the near future. Hezbollah has taken the pennant from Al-Queda, and is now the hero of the pathological sector of Muslim manhood. And of course, Al-Qaeda will have to make some effort to get the pennant back….

The first phase of the War on Terror has now ended. It could have, and should have, gone better.. As it is, we can only repeat what Grant said to Sherman, as the two of them stood in the rain the evening after the carnage of Shiloh: “Whip ‘em again tomorrow.”

J.R. Dunn was editor of the International Military Encyclopedia for 12 years. This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the American Thinker on August 14.

Fjordman

We have seen videos on TV of Muslim Jihadis beheading infidel hostages. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country's "head," the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this "head" is cut off from the rest of the body?
In many countries across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating to minor cities or into the countryside. Soon, you will travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm and find that you have left one city dominated by burkas and sharia to find…yet another city dominated by burkas and sharia. For some reason, this eradication of unique, urban cultures is to be celebrated as "cultural diversity."

British citizenship has been granted to nearly one million foreign nationals since Tony Blair came to power in 1997. More white families are moving from London to the regions while many immigrants arrive in the capital from overseas. In an online story in The Daily Telegraph that was removed "for legal reasons," former Muslim Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo warned that British Muslims could soon form a state within the state. The next step will be pushing the Government to recognize sharia law for Muslim communities—which will be backed up by the claim that it is "racist" or "Islamophobic" to deny them this.
In France, Muslims already have many smaller states within the state. Criminologist Lucienne Bui Trong wrote that: "From 106 hot points in 1991, we went to 818 sensitive areas in 1999." The term she used, "sensitive areas," is used to describe Muslim no-go zones where anything representing a Western institution (post office truck, firemen, even mail order delivery firms) is routinely ambushed with Molotov cocktails. In 2002 the French government decided to stop collecting the statistics. In some of these areas, the phenomenon of gang rape "has become banal." .

The influence of radical Islamist groups is a growing threat to French business, too, a leading intelligence expert warned. A report commissioned by several retail and courier companies stated that the Islamists' strategy is to "take control of Muslims within the workforce" and then "challenge the rules in order to impose Islamic values."

Following three weeks of unrest, the police said 98 vehicles torched in one day marked a "return to a normal situation everywhere in France." Some of the rioters left boasting messages on various Internet forums. "We aren't going to let up. The French won't do anything and soon, we will be in the majority here." One observer stated: "In France, the majority of young Muslims believe that French society is dying, committing suicide.” In the southern city of Marseille, Muslims make up at least a quarter of the population, and rising fast.
In the Netherlands, Muslims will soon make up the majority in all major cities. "Today, we have 1 million Muslims out of 16 million Dutch," according to Frits Bolkestein, Dutch politician. "Within 10 years, they will have an absolute majority in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam.” A researcher for the Netherlands Ministry for Immigration and Integration found that 40% of young Moroccan Muslims in the Netherlands rejected Western values and democracy.

Douglas Murray attended a conference in memory of the murdered Islam critic Pim Fortuyn in 2006, and noted with concern the strict security measures and what he saw as a nation under siege. "All across Europe, debate on Islam is being stopped. Italy's greatest living writer, Oriana Fallaci, soon comes up for trial in her home country, and in Britain the government seems intent on pushing through laws that would make truths about Islam and the conduct of its followers impossible to voice.” A survey in April 2005, after the murder of another critic of Islam, Theo van Gogh, indicated that 32 percent of Dutch people wanted to emigrate abroad.

They leave what was once their country in favor of people such as Dyab Abou Jahjah, founder of the Arab European League (AEL). The AEL, founded in Belgium in 2000, now has branches in the Netherlands and France, and intends to spread across the EU. Jahjah, who has called the 9/11 attacks "sweet revenge," recruits Muslim youth to spread his ideology, which calls for the introduction of sharia in Europe. "We have three basic demands," he says. "Bilingual education for Arab-speaking kids, hiring quotas that protect Muslims, and the right to keep our cultural customs." "Assimilation” he claims, “is cultural rape. It means renouncing your identity, becoming like the others."

Security sources in Germany have warned that the country is home to between 3,000 and 5,000 potential Islamic suicide attackers. In 2006, Valley of the Wolves, a virulently anti-Semitic film about the Iraq war, sold out to cheering audiences from Germany's 2.5 million-strong Turkish community. According to Der Spiegel, Germany's biggest weekly, an estimated 50 women in Germany have been murdered in so-called honor killings in the past decade. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving family dignity.
Non-western immigrants account for nearly 86 percent of the Norwegian capital's total population growth over the past ten years. It has been reported that shopkeepers in certain areas of Oslo now need to pay protection money. The criminals are more trigger-happy than ever, and since many of them abide by the rules of blood vengeance, violence is rapidly increasing. In Sweden, reports about criminal gangs and mafias are coming in from urban areas all over the country, and a feeling of powerlessness is spreading among ordinary citizens. "We have no other possibility than to flee from this area. Families cannot fight against these problems alone. We are talking about survival, you can get stabbed here.”

The massive concentration of Muslims in major European cities will have dramatic consequences, some of which are already visible. If it is allowed to continue, it will destroy the coherence of society that is necessary for our democracies and our legal systems to work. Increased urban insecurity means that the state is not able to guarantee the security of its citizens. If ordinary citizens feel that the state is no longer able to guarantee the safety of their loved ones, then perhaps native Europeans will create groups and "clans" of their own, to counter the Muslim clans. The result will be a re-tribalization of our countries. The downfall of the nation state, if it happens, will be chaotic, painful and bloody. Can it still be avoided? Only time will tell.

This is excerpted from an article by the Nordic blogger Fjordman on Jihadwatch of July 12.

Ruth King

Rael Jean Isaac, editor of this publication, has asked me to avoid "disproportion" in discussing Israel's leadership vacuum. So I will let others describe Ehud Olmert, Israel's accidental Prime Minister, as an inept oaf, a pathetic excuse for a statesman, a man devoid of any sense of strategy, history or belief in Israel's legitimate rights. Let’s just focus on his actions.

On February 18th, 2005, at the annual Jerusalem meeting of the Conference of Presidents.of American Jewish Organizations, Olmert was questioned about the ability of Abbas to control Gaza, given the arms and terrorists pouring into the area. He angrily pounded on the lectern: "Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon is the model which Israel will apply to Gaza and Samaria." Although Hezbollah terrorists were stationed in the south of Lebanon, and had accumulated many weapons, he declaimed, "they have never, never, never used missiles against Israel on the northern border since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May, 2000."

As events have unfolded, it is clear Israeli governments were guilty of criminal neglect of a gathering threat. Nor was what Olmert said true. David Bedein reports that when Olmert was subsequently confronted with an IDF report documenting frequent missile strikes from Lebanon that had killed 28 people, Olmert walked away saying that he did not want to discuss it.

In his own words, Olmert is tired of fighting, of winning, even tired of negotiating…in May, he offered to withdraw from 90% of Judea and Samaria and “negotiate about the rest.” Midway into the current war, he reiterated his commitment to more withdrawals. Cut and run and more cut and run.

In his first speech to the Knesset following the cease fire, Olmert did gamely say "The responsibility for the military operation rests on my shoulders as prime minister” but then falsely claimed the war had changed the "strategic balance against Hizbullah which was no longer a state within a state.” Attempting to throw further dust in the public eye, he added "We will hunt Hezbollah down anytime, anywhere. We have no intention of asking anyone's permission." Did he even read the UN Resolution his government signed off on? He needs Kofi Annan's signed permission to move a muscle.

Olmert's approval ratings have plummeted. On August 16, a Teleseker poll in Ma'ariv found that 43% were satisfied with Olmert before the war, 78% during the war and only 40% after the ceasefire. The polls found that Peretz's situation was even worse. Teleseker found that 28% approved of his performance before the war, 61% during and 28% now. But many of those who revile these men were once enthusiastic supporters of their defeatist policies.

Why is it that Israel, an accomplished democracy with advanced cultural and scientific institutions, has been so eager to shed its patrimony? How did Israel permit the colossal identity theft whereby the words “refugee and Palestinian” came to mean Arab only? Why have they turned blind eyes to the naked truth that Arabs only enter into temporary agreements knows as hudnas which Islam specifically obliges them to abrogate when entered into with “infidels.?” Why have Israel's leaders betrayed their trust to protect the homeland and why do Israelis tolerate it? Why are they incensed when Ahmadenijad taunts the Jewish people by denying the Holocaust and yet call Mahmoud Abbas, a seasoned terrorist and documented Holocaust denier, "a friend of enlightenment and peace" (to quote Shimon Peres).

I love and admire Israel and like Jews throughout the Diaspora, my security and confidence are directly linked to its survival. I am enormously grateful that hundreds of thousands of young people are willing to sacrifice and die in order to protect it…..except, of course for the Prime Minister’s own children, who have either avoided military service, or accused the IDF of “war crimes” or urged their peers to disobey army rules. In fact Olmert himself avoided army service altogether, citing orthopedic problems. Could the problem have been spinelessness?

As I write this reports flood in of Hezbollah’s regrouping and rearming. In her own contribution to this Comedy of Errors, Condi Rice essentially said "Disarmament? What disarmament?" She said it in State Department-speak "I don't think there is an expectation that this force is going to physically disarm Hezbollah...You have to have a plan...and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily." All this shreds Olmert’s pretense that anything at all was accomplished in Lebanon, and makes the Israeli diplomats who attempt to spin the debacle into a success a laughingstock.

In the final analysis, it is not Olmert or Peretz or Peres, or Bibi or Barak or Rabin or Sharon --the long line of those who substituted appeasement for deterrence -- who bear chief responsibility. It is the body politic of Israel which elected such terrible leaders and then supported their policies. Has the Israeli public finally learned something? Anything?

This edition of OUTPOST was in print before the outbreak of the war in Lebanon. Within two weeks the September OUTPOST will be online.....more up to date.

Several of the articles in this issue remain relevant and unchanged by the war. Please take the time to read them.

Fruits of “Disengagement”
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

Radical Islam: Challenge and Response
Laurent Murawiec

Saving Darfur, Saving Face
William Mehlman

Death of a “settler”
Hugh Fitzgerald

The Taxi Driver
Naomi Ragen

An Open Letter on Israeli Democracy
Steven Plaut

“Take it all, no price too low”
Ruth King

Two Days In June
Ruth King

Herbert Zweibon

Seeking to free captured soldier Gilad Shalit and stop the missiles falling on Ashkelon and Sderot, the Israel Defense Forces moved into the northern Gaza Strip, retaking the ruins of the once flourishing Jewish settlements of Dugit, Nisanit and Elei Sinai. Left-wing politician Ephraim Sneh, a prominent supporter of “disengagement,” announced there is “no escape from prolonged ground presence at the launch sites.” As Caroline Glick points out, this is a clear admission that the government had lied when it said the IDF was in Gaza just “to protect the settlers.” If anything, the settlers provided a vital buffer and the removal of both endangered Israel’s national security.

Everything that we (and the all-too-few other critics of Sharon’s policy in this country) predicted has come true. The terrorists have been energized in the aftermath of what they rightly see as a victory for terror. The most serious consequences have not yet become obvious: the alienation of the best elements in Israeli society, above all those snidely characterized as “settlers;” rifts and decline of morale in the army; emboldening the entire Arab world in the conviction that Israel can be destroyed.

Everything the proponents of “disengagement” predicted has been proven false. Ehud Olmert’s forecast now looks absurd. He claimed the withdrawal from Gaza “will bring more security, greater safety, much more prosperity” and “a new morning of hope will emerge in our part of the world.” Clinging to the never-never land he inhabits with vice-premier Shimon Peres (of “New Middle East” infamy) Olmert nonetheless now promises to compound the disaster by destroying the much more numerous Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. The “new morning of hope” he promises is strictly for Hamas, which gathers confidence in its campaign to exterminate Israel.

Never has Israel been in more desperate need of new leadership. In the terrible vacuum, former IDF Chief of Staff General Moshe Ya’alon is emerging as a voice for honesty and reason, declaring the emperor has no clothes and describing why he shed them. There was no strategic plan behind the “disengagement,” he told Haaretz in a lengthy interview, only an effort by Sharon to escape his political and personal distress, i.e. his potential indictment for fund-raising irregularities. The Israeli public was “blinded and dazzled and drugged” by media spin. (It is a harsh comment on the sickness of Israel’s judicial and media elite that putting Israel’s security in jeopardy should have immunized Sharon.)

The Gaza Strip, says Ya’alon, “is turning into Hamastan, Hezbollahstan and Al-Qaidastan. The situation will only get worse over time. The failure of the disengagement will be more and more concrete. We will find ourselves facing a kingdom of terror that is capable of launching into Israel more rockets of greater range and greater effectiveness.” Israel’s failure to stick to its promise that it would react with all its force if Qassam rockets were fired after the disengagement “eroded our deterrence,” notes Ya’alon. “In practice we accepted the firing of the Qassams as though it were rain.”

Ya’alon enunciates truths as profoundly simple as they are unwelcome to Israel’s deluded government: “There is really no unilateralism.” “We cannot entrench ourselves behind fences and walls.” “Whoever projects weakness in the Middle East is like a weak animal in the wild; it is attacked…Therefore, if we now try to continue the failed disengagement with the convergence, the result will be grave. We will give terrorism a terrible tailwind. We will provide a tailwind for radical Islam across the region. We will create a strategic threat to Jerusalem and to Ben Gurion Airport and to the population centers of the coastal plain. The Qassams and the Katyushas will no longer be Sderot’s problem. They will reach the front door in Tel Aviv.”

Rael Jean Isaac

A FALSE FAITH

A widely held misconception, in earlier years the central theme of the Anti-Defamation League's publicity campaigns, is that education promotes tolerance. This false notion accounts for the special shock when organizations of professors engage in intellectually and morally ludicrous attacks on Israel, a notable recent example being the "boycotts" (which have fizzled) by both major English associations of academics.

In fact universities in the twentieth century have been in the forefront of fomenting hatred. In A Concise History of the Third Reich, Wolfgang Benz reports that within mere weeks of Hitler's assumption of power (on May 10, 1933) students in every university town, with the active participation of administration and professors, held the famous "bonfire celebrations" (book burnings), assigning the works of many of Germany's chief writers to the flames. A bitter Victor Klemperer, himself a born-Jewish professor forced out of his job (but who survived the war in Germany thanks to his Protestant wife) recorded in his diary: "If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go...but I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene."

FROM THE NATIONAL FOOL

In Kazakhstan, as the Hamas government was raining rockets into Israel and reaffirming its determination to exterminate the Jewish state, vice premier Shimon Peres announced that peace with the Palestinian Arabs was closer than ever. "The distance between us is the shortest it's been for the last fifty years" he declared. He was almost equally optimistic that Iran would abandon "religion" for "development." "Their choice is to keep the country poor and their arsenal rich. The speeches are very impressive, but the reality is very depressive."
It is hard to think of anything more "depressive" than this ever more puffed-up national hot-air balloon continuing to function at the highest level of Israel's government.

BY THOSE THEY HONOR

We have many times pointed out in this column that those whom a group, an institution, a government chooses to honor tells you a great deal about those bestowing the honor, their values, priorities and goals -- and many of the prizes Israel has offered in recent years speak volumes of the state's spiritual, political and intellectual decline.

A current case in point: Ben Gurion University in May awarded Andre Azoulay an honorary doctorate. Azoulay is a Moroccan Jew who lives in Rabat and serves as adviser to King Muhammad VI, in whose palace he has an office. Azoulay claims his "fight for Palestinian causes...makes his Judaism stronger." Says Azoulay: "Until the Palestinian people recover their dignity, their freedom, I feel my Judaism is weaker and hurt."

In other words Azoulay serves his Arab master as a convenient Jewish shill for the struggle against Israel. And this makes him a suitable recipient for honor by an Israeli university?

FIGHTING FOR AL QAEDA

While the U.S. labors to provide the "Palestinians" with a state, the "Palestinians" labor on behalf of our enemies. The U.S. military has found that over the last 18 months Palestinian Arabs have become a key element in Al Qaeda groups in Iraq, heading insurgency cells and recruiting university students in Baghdad for suicide car bombings.

Unsurprisingly, the Hamas government deplored the killing of murderer-in-chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, faxing to Reuters a statement in which it mourned him as a "martyr of the nation." The statement said: "With hearts full of faith, Hamas commends brother-fighter Abu Musab...who was martyred at the hands of the savage crusade campaign which targets the Arab homeland, starting in Iraq."

MAO THE UNKNOWN STORY

Perhaps the most interesting revelation in Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent book on Mao is that it was not Communism that animated him but a variant of a Nietzschean Superman view of life. They quote his writings as a young man, where he cites the attributes of Great Heroes, among whom he counts himself. "Everything outside their nature, such as restrictions and constraints, must be swept away by the great strength of their nature...When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses, they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible. Their power is like a hurricane...there is no way to stop them."

This could equally describe Hitler, Stalin, or more recently Saddam. The only difference between these men is that Stalin and Mao, during their lifetime, won a free pass for the exercise of their impulses from much of the intelligentsia in the Western world on the basis of the supposed "ideals" on which their regimes rested.

While all these men were worshipped by their hypnotized followers, in no case did the level of control - or deification -- rise to the level of Mao's. For example, Jung Chang describes a school textbook holding up as a model a youth who drowns after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao.

And in no case did the public reap the whirlwind as it did with China's Great Hero: Mao killed 70 million of his people in fulfilling his "invincible' impulses.

Laurent Murawiec

Deterrence works because one is able credibly to threaten the center of gravity of the enemy: the threat of inflicting unacceptable losses upon him, whether in a bar brawl or in nuclear escalation. The calculus deterrence relies upon is: is it worth it? Deterrence works if the price to be paid by the party to be deterred hugely exceeds his expected earnings. But deterrence only works if the enemy is able and willing to enter the same calculus. If the enemy plays by other rules and calculates by other means, he will not be deterred. There was nothing the Philistines could have done to deter Samson. If the calculus is: I exchange my worthless earthly life against the triumph of Allah on earth, and an eternity of bliss for me, if the enemy wishes to be dead, if to him the Apocalypse is desirable, he will not be deterred.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the Mayor of Tehran, he insistently proposed that the main thoroughfares of Tehran should be widened so that, he explained, on the day of his reappearance, the Hidden Imam, Mohamed ibn Hassan, who went into the great occultation in 941 AD, could tread spacious avenues. More recently, he told the Indian Foreign Minister that “in two years, everything will be settled,” which the visiting dignitary at first mistook to mean that Iran expected to possess nuclear weapons in two years; he was later bemused to learn that Ahmadinejad had meant that the Mahdi would appear in two years, at which point all worldly problems would disappear.

This attitude, truly, is not new, nor should it surprise us: Reality is invaded by belief, and belief in turn shapes the believer’s reality. The difference between the religious and the ideologically religious is this: The religious believer accepts reality and works at improving it; the fanatic rejects reality, refuses any compromise with it and tries to destroy it and replace it with his fantasy.

Ahmadinejad wants to hasten the reappearance of the Hidden Imam, whose coming, in traditional Muslim, and especially Shiite apocalyptics, will be the Sign of the Hour, that the End of Days is nigh. The task of the Mahdi, when he reappears, will be to lead the great and final war which will bring about the extermination of the Unbelievers, the end of Unbelief and the complete dominion of God’s writ upon the whole of mankind. The Umma will inflate to absorb the rest of the world.

Contemporary jihad is not a matter of politics at all (of “occupation,” of “grievances,’ of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and Zionism). Consequently, attempts at dealing with the problem politically will not even touch it. Aspirin is good, and so is penicillin, but they are of little avail to counter maladies of the mind. I am emphatically not saying here that the jihadis are “crazy.” I am saying that they are possessed of a disease of the mind, and the disease is the political religion of modern Gnosticism in its Islamic version.

Let us flash back in time to Sept. 28, 1971, in Cairo. The prime minister of Jordan Wasfi al-Tell, who had been threatened by the Palestinian movement in retaliation for the so-called Black September of 1970, walks into the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. “Five shots, fired at point-blank range, hit [him]… He staggered… he fell dying among the shards of glass on the marble floor. As he lay dying, one of his killers bent over and lapped the blood that poured from his wounds.”

Soldiers kill. Terrorists kill. Modern jihadis lap the blood. Inseparable from contemporary Arab-Muslim jihad is the idealization of blood. Gruesome murder, gory and gleeful infliction of pain, are lionized and proffered as models and exemplary actions pleasing to Allah. I have collected, as can anybody, dozens of examples of human sacrifice inflicted by the Islamic jihadi of all stripes. This pornography of crime is endless, from the gratuitous killing of a Leon Klinghoffer to Mohammad Atta’s instructions, “You must make your knife sharp and you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter,” to the Behesht Zahra, the ‘Paradise of Flowers’ graveyard near Tehran with its Fountain of Blood, or this report on the killing of an Algerian intellectual: “Dr. Hammed Boukhobza who was killed by a group of Islamist terrorists in the city of Telemly. (…) He was not just killed in his apartment, but his wife and children who wanted to escape were forced to watch how he was literally cut to pieces, his entrails slowly drawn out while he was just barely alive. The terrorists obviously liked to watch the suffering, and they wanted the family to share their enjoyment.”

The accumulation of such deeds shows that they are not an epiphenomenon but are central to the purpose of the jihadi. They are aired 24/7 on TV channels such as al Jazeera and many others. They are avidly watched and celebrated. Think of images and videofilms of assassinations, Daniel Pearl, Paul Johnson, ‘live’ killing for the viewing public. This is thanatolatry, martyropathology or nihilism: when an entire society orients itself in this direction, that society is becoming suicidal. A society that gears its young toward killing and actively seeking death is making choices that bring
about its extinction. “We love death more than you love life.”
The believers – here, the jihadis -- are the Elect: they, and only they, know God’s plan for the world; they have been chosen by Him to fight and win the final, cosmic battle between God and Satan, and bring about perfection on earth, in this case, the extension of God’s writ and dominion, the dar al-Islam, to mankind as a whole. Everybody else is wrong and evil, jahili, an enemy liable to be killed at will. The Perfect are “an elite of amoral supermen,” to use Norman Cohn's phrase, engaged in transforming the world so that it conforms to the ‘second reality’ that they alone know, thank to their special knowledge, gnôsis. In order to get from the evil today to the perfect tomorrow, torrents of blood have to be shed, the blood of all those whose actions or very being hinder the accomplishment of the Mahdi’s mission.

For five hundred years, from 1100 to 1600, Europe was wracked by Gnostic insurrections, from the Flanders to Northern Italy, from Bohemia to France: Pastoureaux, Taborites, Flagellants, Free Spirits, Anabaptists, etc. The belief-structure just described was theirs. They mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, threatened kingdoms and overthrew dukedoms; they slaughtered Jews, priests and rich people; they created their own, grotesque, bloody, totalitarian ‘republics.’

“Soon we shall drink blood for wine,” one of the leading insurgent writers stated, “those who do not accept baptism… are to be killed, then they will be baptized in their blood.” And another one: “Accursed be the man who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of the enemies of Christ. Every believer must wash his hands in that blood.” Hear Thomas Müntzer: “Curse the unbelievers… don’t let them live any longer, the evil-doers who turn away from God. For a godless man has no right to live if he hinders the godly. The sword is necessary to exterminate them….if they resist let them be slaughtered without mercy….the ungodly have no right to live, save what the Elect choose to allow them….Now, go at them…it is time….The scoundrels are as dispirited as dogs….Take no notice of the lamentations of the godless! They will beg you….don’t be moved by pity….At them! At them! While the fire is hot! Don’t let your sword get cold! Don’t let it go lame!”

By and large, the same words are heard from a variety of Islamic radicals. “Die before you die!” Ali Shariati tells the Shiite believer. “He who takes up a gun, a kitchen knife or even a pebble with which to arm and kill the enemies of the faith has his place assured in Heaven…” said Ayatollah Fazlallah Mahalati, organizer of Iranian assassination squads. “To allow the infidels to stay alive means to let them do more corrupting. To kill them is a surgical operation commanded by Allah….we have to kill….war is a blessing for the world and for every nation, it is Allah himself who commands men to wage war and kill….It is war that purifies the earth,” said Ruhollah Khomeiny. Article 15 of the Hamas charter explains: “I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill!”

In modern times in the West, as Eric Voegelin and Norman Cohn have shown, the ideology morphed and took on secular forms – Nazis and Bolsheviks in particular. Islam was heavily burdened by Gnostic contents and historically shaped by a tribal matrix that inherently fosters Manichean tendencies (“them” vs “us”). The jump from mere religion to religious ideology was easy. It was achieved in the 19th century by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. It was followed by Abu Ala Mawdoodi, Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, Ruhollah Khomeiny, Osama bin Laden. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Deobandi of South Asia, the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyya, the Taliban, the Wahhabi, all of whom share this outlook.

Knowing this, how do we deter the modern Gnostic warriors, the jihadi?

Mainly, we do not. Those who are dead already, who consider themselves dead to the world and only alive to the Afterworld, those who wish to die, generally cannot be deterred. Gnosticism is belief in a fantasy that is taken to be more real than the common reality: they do not believe what they see, they see what they believe. This cannot be deterred. Deterrence might have worked before contemporary jihad was able to reach critical mass, sometime in the early to mid-1990s.

Contemporary jihad, like its emanation, terrorism, is an integral chain: as long as it is islamico-glamorous to be a cleric who issues fatwas calling for the murder of Israeli civilians or American GIs, the cleric will go on. Once dead, he will stop. So will the chairman of a charity that funnels money to jihad. So will the senior intelligence officer who trains or smuggles them, the predicator who incites, the madrassa or university professor who brainwashes, the prince who lies for terror, the ayatollah who sends out teams of killers, etc. This is deterrence after the French expression: they have been shot pour encourager les autres. Jihad is the operative ideology of a number of states; states can be pinned down and hit.

What did Europe do to crush the insurrectionary Gnostics in the Medieval and late- Medieval era? Churchill once said: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Likewise I’ll have a kind word for the Inquisition (not the Spanish one, though), which did quite a job cleaning up the mess. Thomas Müntzer was defeated, captured and beheaded in 1525. The ‘King’ of the Anabaptists of Münster, John von Leyden and his aides, were executed in 1535. As a terrible warning, their bodies were suspended in iron cages from the tower of St. Lambert's church in the town. Those who survived hid in wait for better days. What they had found is that their insurgency was hopeless, that it was useless. Their will had been broken.

One martyr will have followers, ten martyrs will be admired and emulated. One thousand dead martyrs who died unheralded die in vain. If Ahmadinejad and others die in vain and uselessly they will not die as martyrs but as slobs. For the Gnostic, for the jihadi, his death is the only thing that matters to him: take that away and nothing is left. It does not mean, as the jurors of the Moussaoui trial were apparently led to believe, that “you cannot make a martyr out of him, since this is what he wants.” Make his death a lonely, useless, ignored death. Unextraordinary, unromantic, trivial deaths shatter the glory of the jihadi’s death.

This puts to the test our own, cherished values, the rule of law, the worth of human life, sovereignty, international law. I hear: “If we behave in this way, we become like the enemy.” I think this to be a foolish view: after all, not even Dresden made the Allies into Nazis, not even Hiroshima turned America into its enemy. Instead, after using the most terrible instruments of war, we turned our enemies into friends, their ruins into blooming cities.

I am often asked about ‘Muslim moderates.’ I invariably answer that anti-Nazi Germans existed, but were inaudible, and therefore played no role. Muslim moderates will only be a factor if they are heard, at whatever the cost to them.

The defeated European Gnostics went underground. Their sole hope resided in the clandestine conveying of their beliefs, especially to their children. Society cannot eliminate the Gnostic beliefs, but can make the strain dormant instead of virulent. Jihad is integral to Islam and derives from its most fundamental tenets. The severing of that link is not going to happen soon. But throughout history, when Islamic conquerors met their match, they stopped. When they met crushing defeat, they retreated, and found the ulama and the faqih to justify this, like prophets who announced the Rapture for yesterday, 8:09 am, and reschedule it for next year.

Once their leaders had been exterminated, the Medieval insurgents of Europe disbanded and scattered. Applying high-tempo attrition and nodal targeting to the jihadi apparatus worldwide (by which I emphatically do not mean ‘terrorists’ alone or even in the first place) seems to me to be a modern equivalent. If I may say in homage to the chain of command that orchestrated his elimination, Sheikh Yasin was not in the habit of wielding pistols – he wielded death. It is those who deploy the undead who must be the priority targets.

Laurent Murawiec is a Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute. This is an edited version of his essay for the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.

William Mehlman

Angst-ridden liberal American Jewry, obsessed with tikun olam as defined by the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman and the Dixie Chicks, is in a lather over Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s charge that the so-called Save Darfur Coalition (SDC), sponsor of rallies earlier this year in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, is nothing other than a platform for conspicuous consumers of Jewish guilt to strut their stuff.. “If we return to the last demonstrations in the United States and the groups that organized the demonstrations,” al-Bashir intoned, “we find that they are all Jewish organizations.”

While that might be something of an overstatement in view of the “130 diverse faith, humanitarian and human rights organizations” claimed by the SDC, the key role played by Jewish groups in organizing the demonstrations is hardly debatable. Mr. Foxman calls it “a badge of honor for the Jewish community.” At this writing, the bearers of that badge, sensitive to al-Bashir’s accusation, were pondering the appropriate level of Jewish presence at a second round of Save Darfur Coalition demonstrations scheduled to kick off with a September 17th rally in New York. The American Jewish World Service is believed to be leaning toward “nuancing” the Jewish imprint on the affair, leaving more room on the Big Apple stage for leaders of “other religious and ethnic communities.” Martin Raffel thinks “deep, sustained and powerful” is the only acceptable Jewish reaction to Darfur. “Jews don’t need to tone down their level of involvement,” asserts the senior associate executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “Are we over-participating? The answer to that is no.”

One needn’t question the merits or objectives of the Save Darfur Coalition to be troubled by the glaring contrast between the buckets of concern and outrage poured out over to this issue by the American Jewish Establishment and that same Establishment’s dry-well response to the suffering of 10,000 of its co-religionists, rendered homeless, penniless. futureless by Israeli bulldozers in Gaza and northern Samaria ten months ago. No problem with the American Jewish footprint being too visible at this scene. It would take a team of bloodhounds to find it.

For all the inexcusable brutality and irrationality of uprooting these communities, Gush Katif-northern Samaria is no longer a political issue. The awful deed having been done, to accolades from the secular Jewish left and barely a murmur from the rabbis, one might have expected some tangible expression of charity to the vanquished from the victors. In fact, their silence has been deafening. “With few exceptions, we have received almost no help from the mainstream Jewish American groups which grant billions of dollars,” avers Dror Vanunu, International Coordinator, Friends of Gush Katif, himself a former Gaza resident.

Vanunu’s charge is generally confirmed by leaders of the 22 former Gush Katif communities. Despite a 51 percent unemployment rate among their residents (compared to 1 percent prior to the August 2005 dispossession), despite the lack of permanent housing for all but 2 percent of the dispossessed, despite the non-provision of compensation for 72 percent of the businesses lost as a result of the evacuation (including 95 percent of the farms), despite the cutoff since March of funding for expellee youth programs, petition after petition to Jewish philanthropic organizations in America for help in coping with a humanitarian crisis have gone unanswered. Compounding its 10-month silence -- informed and directed by the Sharon-Olmert government’s vilification of Gush Katif and its inhabitants as “obstacles to peace,” fully worthy of the condign punishment visited upon them – was American mainline Jewry’s eagerness to embrace the Israeli government-inspired fiction that the benighted evacuees were receiving the tenderest of loving care.

“That was a lie,” Rachel Saperstein, chair of Israel/ U.S.- based Operation Dignity and former resident of Neve Dekalim, declared in a June 17th address to the World Betar Convention in Jerusalem. “Farmers with once thriving businesses sit and stare at television [Israel’s Agricultural Ministry is currently offering these growers and managers of a now-vanished $80 million a year produce and cut-flowers export business “retraining” as goat shepherds], promises of land are just that -- promises. Our small amounts of compensation are eaten up each day, mortgages on destroyed homes are still being paid to the banks. Private people come to give us handouts. Supermarkets donate food for the Sabbath meals. Donations are given so that infants can receive formula and diapers, brides receive household gifts from caring strangers. Today,” Saperstein continued, “our children cannot concentrate on their studies, our people still weep, for we are all traumatized. Many of our men have died of heart attacks. Within 24 hours our vital people were turned into the homeless and unemployed… This is what the government of Israel… did to its people. We were betrayed. You were betrayed.”

While consciousness of this betrayal and their passive participation in it has yet to surface among the Darfur savers, a glimmer of belated embarrassment has begun to peep through the cracks of mainline American Jewry’s organizational structure. Just a glimmer. The United Jewish Communities’ “Israel Emergency Committee” has announced it is allocating $400,000 for “trauma relief” for the dispossessed of Gush Katif and northern Samaria. If that sounds munificent, it works out to approximately $1 per week for each of the 10,000 evacuees. Some of the Federations in UJC (the Jewish Federation network in North America) are also beginning to step up to the plate. The Jewish Federation/Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago has raised $300,000 for “social services” for Gaza evacuees. The UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey and United Jewish Communities of Metrowest, N.J. have also kicked in with some funds. The cash register hasn’t yet tingled at national UJC, but President Howard Rieger reports it is in the process of gathering some $2 million “to make a difference for Israelis who have suffered.”

Too little and a year late. As Bud Macy, who severed his Federation ties in protest against its refusal to aid the dispossessed points out, this is the same UJC/Federation conglomerate that managed to raise $360 million in record time for Israel during the intifada. Moreover, one’s faith in coincidence would have to be particularly strong to believe there was no connection between these belated expressions of mainline Jewish philanthropic concern for the victims of realignment and Macy’s inauguration, with Friends of Gush Katif, of a grassroots fundraising campaign exclusively devoted to meeting their needs.

Nothing so stirs the juices of mainline organizational Jewry as the specter of fundraising competition. If that’s what it takes to begin even these minor repairs on the vast human and national damage to which it acquiesced, so be it. Could it perhaps presage a wider awakening to the disaster inherent in Mr. Olmert’s plan to create another 80,000 Jewish dispossessed in the Jewish State as he converts 95 percent of Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem into a Hamas playground? The Tikunai Olam might give that a moment’s thought, if saving Darfur allows any time.

William Mehlman, a frequent contributor, is chairman of AFSI in Israel.

Editor’s Note: Eighteen year old Eliahu Asheri, pictured below, was the “settler” whom “the Palestinians” “executed.” While his funeral was attended by thousands, the Israeli government did not send a single government official to his funeral.. Benzi Lieberman, head of the regional council incorporating Itamar, where Asheri lived, said of him: “He embodied love of the land.”

Hugh Fitzgerald

I listened to the BBC last night. The announcer could not get enough of that word "settler." The "Palestinians" had executed "an Israeli settler." The "settler" had been kidnapped. And so on. One would have no way of knowing, unless one already knew -- and how many do? -- that this "settler" was a young boy, that he had "settled" on land that was in the original League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, even after all of Eastern Palestine (that is historic Palestine, east of the Jordan), was unilaterally closed by the British to Jewish immigration -- an act that infuriated the members of the League of Nations' Mandates Commission.

That land, of course, given by way of instant consolation prize to Abdullah, now grandly promoted to Emir of the Emirate of Transjordan.

This young “settler” lived on land that still remained part of the absolute minimum territory that the British, as mandatory authority, were to hold and where they were supposed to promote, were required to promote by the terms of the Mandate, "close Jewish settlement on the land."

It is disturbing that all kinds of people, in all kinds of countries, who know nothing of the Palestine Mandate or the longer demographic and cadastral history of that area, make pronouncements without this knowledge. How many know, for example, that about 90% of the land was state and waste land -- that is, land owned by no one except, possibly, the Ottoman rulers, and that their title passed to the British as mandatory authority, to be held in trust for the intended successor government, that of the Jewish National Home?

It is intolerable that the BBC, an organ of the British government that served as the mandatory authority for Palestine, does not insist that its program speakers, or those who write their copy, demonstrate a clear understanding of, inter alia, the Mandate's provisions (quoting from them), and of the history of the various non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples of that area – that area which too many have been bamboozled into thinking of as the "Arab world" (an Aramco construction that has taken on a life of its own). BBC speakers should have to show also that they know something of the demography and land-ownership patterns.

If they did, they would never use that loaded word "settler" which they, and the European press and other media, have filled with such venomous meaning. If they did, they would never use that loaded word "occupied" (as in "occupied Arab lands" -- a phrase that says the case is closed, we can all go home), or "occupation," which are terms that evoke goose-stepping Germans marching into Paris in June 1940, and clearly suggest that the "occupier" has no valid title, no claim, to the land he is occupying.

But Israel does possess such valid title, a title far superior to that of the local Arabs, many of them descendants of the Egyptians and Iraqis and others who flooded in, in greater numbers than the Jewish "settlers," during the Mandatory period -- even though the place was supposed to be the one small sliver in the entire Middle East that the Jews would have to reconstruct their commonwealth and not be treated, as they were everywhere else, as dhimmis. And while a few years ago one would not have known what that word means, we all do now -- not least because we can look around the world and see how non-Muslims or even non-Arab Muslims are treated everywhere that Arab Muslims rule.

The Jihad against Israel is relentless and endless. Yet it is still hard for Israelis to face reality. In not facing it, in not identifying what they face as a Jihad, they have done themselves and their own position a terrible disservice, and they have also confused the Europeans as to what it is that Europe faces. One can hardly fault them on this -- it is not Israel's business to save the Europeans from their own folly, even as the EU does everything it can to de-legitimize the very idea of Israel. Still, one wishes that the sensible scholars of Islam -- there are some in Israel, though it too has all the problems that one finds in the larger Western world, including apologists, deniers, and the simply obtuse -- would be listened to by their own government, which under Olmert is still hellbent on believing there is a "solution" to be found in giving away territory.

This appeared on Jihadwatch on June 29, 2006

Naomi Ragen

I had a lecture to give in Haifa the other day. My usual driver wasn't available, so I called a local cab company to arrange a ride. Call it instinct, but when the cab arrived and I looked at the driver, he just didn't look the part. For one thing, he was in amazing shape: handsome, young, with an athlete's lean body. Not what I usually find in the men who sit behind the wheel all day. Something about his face, the way he spoke, too, struck me as unusual.

"It's a long ride to Haifa," I finally said. "How do you like being on the road so much?"

"Oh, it's fine. I like driving. Actually, I haven't been in the business long. Just a few months," he said smiling.

"And before this....?"

"I worked for the Ministry of Defense. I was a security guard."

We spoke a little more, and I began to realize that I was in the presence of one of the men from those elite units who protect the lives of our most elite citizens, including our former Prime Minister.

"You didn't like the work?"

"No, actually....."

This is what happened. A yeshiva graduate, he had served in the army's most elite units. He had been trained in advanced counter-terrorism techniques, and had been asked to lead men into battle in some of the most dangerous missions possible. He had spent 3.5 years in Lebanon. It was no wonder that the leaders of the country had put him on staff to protect their lives.

And then came the disengagement. They asked him to be responsible for leading soldiers to attack the residents of Gush Katif should trouble ensue. He knew Gush Katif well. He had been stationed there.

"The people there treated us so well," he said. "They made sure we had enough to eat and drink. They invited us over on Shabbat and holidays. They were the most wonderful people in the world. How could I now go into their communities and treat them like enemies? How?"

So, he walked into Sharon's office (which should give you an idea of who this person is, and what kind of job he had). I said: "I'll do anything you want. If you want me to wipe out a terrorist cell. Fine. That's what I'm trained to do. But please don't ask me to do this. Please."

Sharon didn't budge. Wasn't interested.

He also didn't budge. Despite the years he had spent risking his life to defend his country, and the people who run it, he was not only fired, he was thrown into jail for more than a month! When he got out, he married his girlfriend. He wasn't worried about getting another job. "The security companies were lining up to hire me. But when I went to get a weapon's license, I found I'd been blackballed. It was pure revenge. So it was impossible for me to work."

He bought a taxi, and now he drives. His wife is expecting. He's not making anywhere near what he used to make.

You've paid quite a price, I told him.

"I'm not sorry for a minute. I got my medal when my father told me he was proud of me. In the end, I have to live with myself. I have to face my little nephews. What would they think of me if I treated my own people like the enemy?" Instead, he went to visit the people of Gush Katif, in their hotel rooms and dormitories. He hugged them, and they hugged him. "I don't have a single regret," he shrugged.

He has a court case against the government for denying him a license. I wished him well. And I thought of the men in power, those complacent, graying old men whose lives he had risked his young one for so many times. And I was glad he wasn't protecting them anymore. Glad that he wasn't being sent on dangerous missions anymore. Not for these men anyhow. And I thought of what he had sown, and what he had reaped. And how much we were all losing because he couldn't use his skills.

And once again, the reality of living in a country with wonderful people and terrible leadership struck me full force.

Naomi Ragen is a novelist/essayist living in Jerusalem. Her newest novel is The Covenant, about a family’s encounter with terrorism.

Steven Plaut

I am writing to ask for your help in defending free speech in Israel from the malicious assault upon it by Israel's far-Leftist extremists in league with Arab anti-Israel radicals.

Free speech in Israel is inadequately protected in law, and it is defended with increasing political selectiveness. Under selective free speech, the most seditious behavior of far leftists and Arab militants is protected speech, but any criticism of these same extremists is "libelous". Anti-Oslo dissidents are routinely investigated and prosecuted for "incitement", "racism", and other "crimes" related to their speech. There has not been a single case in which a Jewish leftist or Arab anti-Israel extremist was convicted of "incitement": not for inciting to violence, justifying terror, or anti-Jewish racism.

Moreover, after Moshe Feiglin, a Jewish anti-Oslo activist, blocked a road during a protest, he was indicted and convicted of "sedition". Blocking roads is a common protest tactic in Israel but no one else has been prosecuted for it! In part, the selective enforcement of free speech protection is consistent with the "judicial activism" ideology long promoted in Israel by its Supreme Court justices. Political biases permeate the judicial system, including the Prosecutor's Offices.

A tactic being used against freedom of speech is the filing by leftists of malicious "libel suits" as harassment. This is a clear and present threat to Israeli democracy. Because Israel has no formal constitution, it has no "First Amendment" that can be used to strike down such assaults against free expression.

Over the past few years, an Israeli extremist professor has been attempting to recruit the court system as a tool for suppressing freedom of speech. Neve Gordon of Ben Gurion University has devoted his energies to denouncing Israel as a fascist, apartheid state, one practicing "state terrorism", in every forum imaginable. His anti-Israel articles have been reprinted on Nazi web sites, including that of deported Canadian Nazi Ernst Zundel, as well as on Islamist web sites. Gordon led a campaign of defamation against his own army commander, Gen Aviv Kohavi, accusing him falsely of being a "war criminal". Gordon’s actions formed the basis for an attempt in the United Kingdom to indict Kohavi, forcing Kohavi to abandon plans to study there as a private person. Gordon has also justified terrorist violence against Jews.

Gordon served as a "human shield" for Arafat and for the wanted terrorist murderers being hidden in Arafat's offices a few years back, including those who had assassinated an Israeli cabinet minister. Gordon entered Ramallah illegally with the "international anarchists" from International Solidarity Movement and similar groups to try to prevent Israeli anti-terror operations, to interfere with attempts by the IDF at apprehending those wanted murderers, and was arrested at least once for this. He was photographed in the Israeli media embracing Arafat while Arafat was refusing to turn over the murderers of the cabinet minister. Maariv denounced the "human shields" groups to which Gordon belonged as "traitors" (Maariv's term).

Gordon also has a long track record of endorsing Norman Finkelstein (described by the ADL as a Holocaust Denier). Gordon has largely endorsed Finkelstein's political views, including Finkelstein's horrific book on the Holocaust. Finkelstein, by the way, denounces the very existence of Israel, endorses Hizbollah and other anti-Israel terror, endorses Hamas, and at the University of California at Irvine recently declared publicly that Israel had perpetrated genocide against Arabs. In his article, Gordon compared Finkelstein ethically to the Prophets of the Bible. Gordon has also issued statements identifying with the "heroic" nuclear spy and traitor Mordecai Vanunu. He has endorsed countless anti-Israel petitions and statements, including one claiming Israel was planning to conduct Nazi-like atrocities against Arabs the moment that American troops entered Iraq to topple Saddam.

Three years ago, Gordon decided to launch a malicious legal assault against free speech and democracy in Israel. He filed a SLAPP-style "libel suit" against me because I had criticized his political behavior and opinions. SLAPP suits are malicious suits filed for purposes of suppressing free speech and are illegal in most states in the US. But, in Israel they are not.

Specifically, I had earlier harshly denounced Gordon's endorsements of Finkelstein and I had labeled the group to which Gordon belonged – the one that served as "human shields" for the terrorists - as "Judenrat wannabes". That was because – like the Judenrat – they were self-appointed "representatives" of Jews serving as "liaisons" for those seeking to murder Jews.

Gordon's suit claimed these criticisms of his political activities were "libelous". But given his own track record of libeling people (he routinely labels all Israeli politicians he does not like "murderers" and "war criminals"), including his campaign against General Kohavi, and given what he writes about Israel, such a complaint coming from Gordon was ludicrous.

Gordon decided to go "venue shopping." While neither he nor I live in the jurisdiction of the Nazareth court, Gordon filed his suit there, knowing full-well that nearly all the judges in that court are Arabs, including judges with extremist anti-Israel political positions. The venue shopping tactic worked. The case was assigned to an Arab woman judge, one whose husband is a close sidekick and political crony of Azmi Bishara. The judge refused to recuse herself. (Bishara is the Arab Knesset Member who has called for Israel's eradication while on an illegal visit to Syria and who also endorsed Hizbollah terror attacks against Israel.)

The suit, referred to in the press as the "David Irving Trial of Israel", because of the parallels with Irving's tactics in suing Deborah Lipstadt for "libel" for calling him a Holocaust Denier, dragged on for well over three years. In the judgment, while dismissing many of Gordon's claims, the Arab woman judge nevertheless issued a ruling claiming that two or three of the statements I had published about Gordon's politics constitute "libel". The supposedly libelous statements of mine were my use of the pejorative "Judenrat wannabe" to describe the group of extremists that were engaged in the criminally illegal entrance into Ramallah followed by their serving as "human shields" and my denunciation of Gordon's endorsements of Finkelstein's positions. Finally, I had written that at the time of the "human shield" incident, Gordon's publication record consisted largely of populist political propaganda in extremist magazines. Gordon's professional resume had been published on the Ben Gurion University web site and I simply reviewed its contents. All these statements constituted "libel" according to the judge.

While totally ignoring all of Gordon's own political extremism, anti-Israel fanaticism, ties with anti-Semites, and illegal interference with the Israeli army's anti-terror operations, the judge declared that all of Gordon's actions, writings, and behavior are protected speech, but harsh denunciation of them and criticism of his political behavior by me constitutes "libel". I was reminded of some Soviet court rulings.

The judge's political orientation was made clear in the ruling where she wrote that illegal interference with military anti-terror operations by anti-Israel protesters is "a legitimate form of protest," but denouncing such pro-terror activists as "Judenrat wannabe" is libelous. In paragraph 24 of the ruling, the judge openly endorsed “alternative” views of the Holocaust, clearly meaning Finkelstein’s. That indeed was the main theme of the entire ruling. [Editor’s note: Judge Nadaff wrote: “At times we are witness to the phenomenon in which some people ’dare’ to reexamine the Holocaust...It is impossible and improper to turn the Holocaust into some sort of ‘taboo’ subject, about which people may not comment, think beyond, investigate or analyze unless it is within the framework of the consensus and the ‘permissible,’ as the defendant claims.”]
To grasp the enormity of this ruling, imagine that the British court had actually found for David Irving and convicted Deborah Lipstadt of "libel" for denouncing him. The Nazareth ruling is an open assault against freedom of speech in Israel for non-leftists and will serve as precedent for any anti-Israel extremist in Israel who wishes to recruit a court to suppress freedom of speech for non-leftists. All such a person now need do is run to Nazareth and file a political SLAPP "libel suit" and hope for a biased judge.

Because of the enormous implications of all this, it is crucial that the ruling be overturned on appeal. That however is expensive and not simple. A first appeal would be heard at the same Nazareth court, before an appeals panel, and politics could play a role there. If that appeal failed, the next appeal would go to Israel's Supreme Court, where my guess is that it would be summarily overturned.

The judgment against me issued by the Nazareth judge grants Gordon about $18,000 in "damages." In the ruling, the judge agreed that Gordon never showed he suffered any material damages from what I had written about him, but assigns damages to him anyway, and also hits me with an additional $3,000 in court costs. All that of course is above and beyond my own legal costs.

At this point, the suit is only marginally about me personally and is mainly about whether freedom of speech can be subdued in Israel using malicious prosecution and SLAPP tactics, or whether the court system will put a stop to such things once and for all.

That is why it is so important to fight this all the way through the appeals process. This however is quite expensive. I estimate that I need to raise about $35,000 to continue this battle for freedom of speech in Israel. My own personal resources were stretched by the first trial round (bear in mind that Israeli professors make about $2000 a month).

The stakes at play in this suit are enormous and carry important implications for the future of Israeli democracy.

Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to Outpost, is professor of economics at Haifa University. The above article is an edited version of Plaut’s lengthier account. Because AFSI agrees that it is crucial that this court challenge to free speech in Israel be overturned, we are setting up a fund for the Plaut appeal. If you wish to contribute make out your check to AFSI noting that it is earmarked for the Plaut fund.

Ruth King

In late May, before his government was even three weeks old, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stuffed himself into his best shirt and trotted to Washington. He was flush with anticipation that his give-it-all-away-once-and-for-all plan, its title shifting dizzily from “disengagement: to “unilateralism” to “convergence” to “realignment,” would get United States blessings and big bucks.

His euphoria was short lived. While President Bush politely called the Olmert plan a bold move, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice actually said: “The Prime Minister has no program.” Instead, the State Department told Olmert to “build up” Abbas in order to weaken Hamas. Is that what they mean when they say “realpolitik”? Bismarck would pass out.

So, a deflated Olmert did what any great leader of firm convictions and principles would (not) do. He caved, issued warm praise for Abbas, and on his return to Israel promptly requested a meeting with him to renew negotiations. While he was waiting for a reply he went to see Egypt’s Mubarak and gushed “Mr. President, this was a very moving personal experience for me to sit with you now for approximately 1.5 hours, to hold talks and to listen to one of the most experienced and important leaders that I have had the opportunity of meeting with.” No matter to Olmert that Mubarak funnels arms to terrorists in Gaza and gratifies the Arab League with the most anti-Semitic media in the world.

And just in case he had not fawned enough, Olmert added an effusive apology for an incident in which two Egyptian terrorists who shot at IDF forces were killed. Mubarak, with steady icy smile, rejected the entire Olmert plan.

Next on the peripatetic (rhymes with very pathetic) Olmert’s jet stream was a decidedly unenthusiastic kinglet of Jordan, who not only rejected the Olmert land auction’s terms — “take it all, no price too low” — but had the effrontery to say “"The Palestinians' homeland and their state should be on Palestinian soil, and nowhere else." notwithstanding the fact that Jordan is 80% of historic Palestine.

And then it was off to Londonistan and Chiracistan to try to convince those leaders that he means business. In London, responding to the Kassam rockets being fired at Sderot, Olmert warned Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh that "no one involved in terror would have immunity," but then sent a bouquet to Abbas, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post : “Olmert said he would start by offering 90 percent and then negotiate what to do with the remaining 10.” This is actually comedic.

Olmert finally decided he had a “crisis” when Hamas rockets were raining on Ashkelon and a 19 year old Israeli soldier was kidnapped. In greatest secrecy (as if he were President Bush visiting Baghdad) Olmert stole into Sderot explaining he feared that if his presence were known more rockets would descend on the town. The message: “I feel your pain, but I sure don’t want to be a target like you.”

Olmert sent the IDF into several of the ruined Jewish settlements in Gaza — now rocket launching pads — that had protected Israel prior to “disengagement.” For all the strutting and braggadocio — we will not free thousands of Arab prisoners, we will not submit to blackmail — who could fail to believe that in the end he would do precisely what he said he would never do? Every leader has a line in the sand, beyond which he cannot be pushed, but not Olmert. Whatever you demand, I’ll find a way to give you more. The silver-tongued Abba Eban once said “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity….” Just substitute Olmert and the old saw is a perfect fit.

For Olmert has every opportunity to disavow continuing the foolhardy Gaza surrender. Even those in the media who earlier hailed the move are skeptical. And, most important, the Israeli public which elected Olmert shows an increasing unwillingness to go along with — what’s the most recent name for surrender?— “realignment.” Even the leftist sheet Ha'aretz disclosed a poll in which only 35% of respondents approved of Olmert's folly.

But the accidental Prime Minister, flush with failure, just pledges more concessions, brandishes his fist in the air, bangs on the table, and “warns” Israel’s enemies that nothing they can do can stop him from giving them everything they want and more.

In the aftermath of the Gaza beach bombing of civilians for which Israel was falsely blamed, and on his way to wow Tony Blair, Olmert did say: "The IDF is the most moral army in the world and it does not and never has made a policy of targeting civilians." However, he was silent when his own daughter Dana demonstrated against her father's chief of staff calling for him to be tried as a "war criminal." Nor can the uxorious Prime Minister control his Peace Now wife or radical sons. He reserves his harshness for Israel’s beleaguered settlers.

Like the old Henny Youngman joke, he tells Israel's enemies:
“Take my land…..please.”

Ruth King

When one revisits the Israeli raids on Entebbe on June 4th, 1976 and the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor on June 7th, 1981, one feels great pride in the pluck and bravery of Israel. What leader today can or would inspire and send a covert mission to rescue hostages held in Entebbe, Uganda by a combination of Arab and German terrorists, abetted by Ugandan troops armed with advanced Russian weapons?

Three Israeli Hercules planes flew 2500 miles, landed under cover of night, and their troops stormed the airport where the hostages were held.

In the ensuing 35 minute battle, the Israelis destroyed 11 Russian MIGs on the ground, killed all the terrorists and freed 100 hostages. Yonatan Netanyahu, commander of the operation was shot to death by a Ugandan sentry. He is of blessed memory.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who ordered the mission said "This operation will certainly be inscribed in the annals of military history, in legend and in national tradition." And indeed it is. It was the first salvo in the war against terrorism.

In 1981, Menachem Begin, then Prime Minister of Israel, became alarmed by the rapid building of a nuclear reactor in Iraq and planned one of the most dazzling military missions of all time.

On June 7th, 1981, Israeli F­15 and F­16's roared off the runway from Etzion Air Force Base in the Sinai desert. They followed a difficult low­level navigation route to Iraq. Every detail of the missions had been planned and was executed meticulously. When the air squadron sighted the reactor, the planes climbed precipitously to unload their cargo of bombs. Enemy defenses were caught by surprise, and in one minute and twenty seconds, the Osirak reactor lay in ruins. All planes returned safely in spite of dangerously low levels of fuel.

These were breathtaking actions in the global war against terrorism. Our pride and admiration are mitigated by rue at the loss of nerve that has overcome Israel and its leaders. Fatuous apologies and concessions to barbarians have replaced national courage and resolution.