In This Issue

CUTTING OFF FUNDS TO TERRORISTS
by Herbert Zweibon

FROM THE EDITOR
by Rael Jean Isaac

WHY IT WOULD BE A CATASTROPHE TO SOLVE THE ARAB-ISRAEL CONFLICT
by Rael Jean Isaac

TAKING THE HIGH ROAD TO DEFEAT
by Diana West

PEACE NOW FLAKES OUT
by Moshe Dann

PEACE ON EARTH, HATRED TO ISRAEL
by M. Phillips

SELECTIVE OUTRAGE
by Ruth King

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

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HERBERT ZWEIBON

Since 9/11 cutting off funds to terror has been a top administration priority. Yet despite considerable achievements (a number of supposed Moslem “charities” in the U.S. have been shut down and efforts have been made to track, and halt, international banking conduits to terrorists), the flow of funds continues – and may grow, given the rising reluctance of other countries to cooperate with the United States.

In Canada, for example, Jennifer Stoddart, the “Privacy Commissioner,” declares that while the need to address terrorist financing is understood, “we do have concerns about the potential impact on privacy rights” and the disclosure of information “to foreign entities raises concerns.” And the European Union earlier this year found that the international banking network SWIFT broke privacy laws by allowing the U.S. Treasury Department to consult its records after the September 11 attacks. Privacy protection trumps halting terror attacks in these purviews.

Some regions have become free enterprise zones for terror funding. The tri-border area, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, is a lawless zone where drug traffickers abound and fundraising for Islamic terror groups, notably Hezbollah, Hamas and al Qaeda, flourishes. The BBC (in a rare positive contribution from that poisonous media operation) has found documents showing the transfer of large sums of money to the Middle East, which investigators believe go to fund terrorism. The BBC also reports that New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has prosecuted a number of American banks for moving millions of dollars from the tri-border area to suspected terrorist bank accounts in the Middle East. And several high profile individuals have been captured: for example Assad Ahmad Barakat, Hezbollah’s chief financier in the area, was extradited from Brazil to Paraguay to face tax evasion charges. Yet the problem continues. Surely the United States can do more to pressure the three countries involved to take control of their border areas and end their status as a safe haven for every type of illegal activity.

And then there’s our false friend Saudi Arabia. Money continues to flow from Saudi Arabia to fund the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, i.e. the money we pay for Saudi oil is being transferred to terrorists to murder our soldiers and civilian contractors. The flow is so large that on December 8 Iraqi officials publicly accused Saudi Arabia of providing funds to Sunni insurgents. No slouch in the chutzpah department, King Abdullah, in his meeting with Vice President Cheney, reportedly refused to talk with Cheney about the purpose of his visit — to tell the Saudis they should persuade the Sunnis in Iraq to stop their attacks. Instead Abdullah kept emphasizing that Israel was the leading cause of instability in the Middle East. (He’d already assured that delivering up Israel was the main plank of his friend James Baker’s Study Group). On top of that the Saudis have threatened “massive Saudi intervention” in Iraq should the U.S. withdraw. The U.S. should be demanding that the Saudi king make sure that the funds to Sunni terrorists in Iraq from Saudi princelings, tribal leaders and others stop – now.

Much more can be done, and not just by governments. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy has taken an important initiative. He has started a nationwide campaign called DivestTerror.org modeled on the successful disinvestment-in-South Africa program of the 1980s. The aim is to involve the ordinary citizen through universities, local communities, churches, unions, retirement accounts to insist on disinvestment by pension plans, college endowments, 401(k) plans etc. from the 400 public companies worldwide that are providing revenues, technology and moral cover to governments that sponsor terrorism. It gives the ordinary person a way of saying “This is my money and it will not go to support terror.”

RAEL JEAN ISAAC

CHUTZPAH PRIZE TO CARTER

There’s little doubt that the Chutzpah Prize for 2006 goes hands down to Jimmy Carter (also a prime candidate for Worst President in U.S. History). Scheduled to speak at Brandeis University on his new book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, he cancelled his appearance when Brandeis asked him to debate Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz. Carter offered two grounds. He told the Boston Globe “There is no need…for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine” and declared the debate request was proof that many in the U.S. are unwilling to hear an alternative view on the nation’s most taboo foreign policy issue, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.

The chutzpah here is truly breathtaking. Carter declaims on every TV screen that no one is willing to engage in “forthright debate” on the issues he raises and then refuses to debate as soon as it is offered.

The reality is that Carter is terrified of debate. He had a foretaste of the public humiliation he could expect in Dershowitz’s review in The New York Sun (Nov. 22) which outlines only a small sample of the outright falsehoods, glaring omissions and plain naked anti-Israel bias that permeates the book. Indeed the book is so sloppy and riddled with elementary factual errors that it has even drawn fire from Norman Finkelstein, himself second to none as a hater of Israel.

As Jacob Laskin notes in Frontpage (Dec. 18) Carter’s basic thesis is that no Jew who identifies with Israel is capable of engaging in the debate. Yet if identification with one side disqualifies one, by his own logic Carter himself is disqualified. Laskin points out the extent to which the Carter Center depends on Arab largesse. In 1993 alone King Fahd presented Carter with a gift of $7.6 million. And then there is the king’s nephew, Prince Alaweed Bin Talah, who has coughed up at least $5 million, the Saudi Fund for Development, which turns up repeatedly on the Center’s list of contributors, even ten of Bin Laden’s brothers who produced $1 million for the Center. And that’s just Saudi Arabia. The United Arab Emirates are also big supporters. No surprise that Carter is now an advocate for the “government of elected Hamas.”

A CLOSE SECOND

A close second in the chutzpah department is James Baker. To be sure, the hoopla attending the report of the Iraq Study Group rapidly dissipated when its “79 theses” were published, according to Baker a magical integrated web that could not be selectively implemented. It is easy enough to sum the plan up: persuade Iran and Syria to reduce support for Iraqi insurgents by giving them Israel in exchange (yes, the Baker Study Group even called for enforcing an Arab “right of return,” i.e. curtains for Israel).

On The American Thinker website Ed Lasky notes that the Study Group’s shift of attention from Iraq to Israel can be understood in terms of Baker’s strong financial ties to the Saudis. He made sure that the Study Group’s staff, which made the real proposals (commission members simply added their stamp of approval) had one trait in common: opposition to Israel.

A small sampling of the list Lasky provides of those comprising the four working groups that formed the Iraq Study Group: Raymond Close, a former CIA official who served in Saudi Arabia, and on his retirement almost 30 years ago, went to work for the Saudi security agency. David Mack is vice President of the Middle East Institute, a Saudi-funded “think tank.” Richard Norton is a former member of the Cairo University faculty, who has declared “I can’t recall any U.S. president who has subordinated American interests to Israeli interests like this one.” Phebe Marr is on the editorial board of both The Middle East Journal (published by the Middle East Institute) and the Middle East Policy Council, another Saudi “front” outfit. Charles Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as head of the Middle East Policy Council has become a de facto Saudi ambassador to America. Martin Peretz aptly notes that when the Iraq Study Group went to work, “personnel became policy.”

For the last word on this whole ridiculous enterprise go to YouTube for a two and a half minute film by Hollywood’s David Zucker entitled “The Fabulous Baker Boy.”

WHITHER TURKEY?

While the Pope’s visit to Turkey went relatively smoothly, the tirade launched in advance of his visit by former Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erkaban at a protest rally is both noteworthy and worrisome, especially in view of Turkey’s potential entry into the EU. Some excerpts: “All humanity, including the Pope, owes everything to Islam and to our Prophet….We are also telling the Pope not to come because we know why he is coming…He is coming in total defiance of the Turkish people, to visit the Patriarch of the Orthodox [Christians], to strengthen his hand and claims for ecumenical status, and to resurrect Byzantium. He is coming as the religious representative of the Greater Middle East Project…This is part of the plan to divide our country and nation into easy-to-swallow bites.”
For those who believe in the saving power of education, Erkaban holds a PhD in engineering from a German university and for many years was professor at a Turkish university.

Unreported News from Iraq
The administration often complains that the good news from Iraq is not being heard. That may be so, but it is also true that there is much additional bad news that goes unreported. Christians for Assyrians of Iraq (CAI) organized a demonstration at the White House to seek some remedy for the targeting of Assyrian Christians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) by radical Islamists. Only 5% of the population, they are reported to be close to 40% of refugees fleeing Iraq. The situation is so bad (church bombings, kidnapping, crucifixion-murders, beheadings) that the only “solution” CAI has come up with is creating an autonomous zone (to be called the Nineveh Plains Adminstrative Unit) within Iraq for Assyrians and other Christians where they would be free to practice their faith.
In Mosul the Catholic charity Caritas had to close its doors when its staff was threatened with bodily harm if it did not provide funds “to support resistance to the American occupation of Iraq.”

Good for Goode
Our congratulations to Rep. Virgil Goode (R.-Va.) for not only speaking out but standing firm in face of the predictable cries of outrage from Islamic groups. In a letter to constituents Goode wrote: “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United states if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.”
And in a session with reporters he insisted: “I do not apologize and I do not retract my letter.”

Halima of Troy
The Brussels Journal reports that Halima Chechaima, the 18 year old daughter of a Moroccan father and Flemish mother, was elected Miss Brussels and as symbol of the multicultural paradise Belgium hoped to be, was the odds on favorite to be chosen Miss Belgium. No longer. She declared Israel must be wiped off the map. While that would probably not have been enough to derail her, her fate was presumably sealed when she wound up in the middle of a multicultural duel. On the one side her lover Ould Haj, an oft-convicted Belgian criminal of Moroccan origin soon to stand trial for torturing an 84 year old lady. (When he broke into her home and found only 500 euros Haj flew into a rage, broke the woman’s legs with a hammer and set her hair on fire). On the other side Halima’s other lover, an Albanian criminal who, in a jealous fury, knifed Ould Haj (who had escaped from prison) twice in the neck (he survived to be rearrested).

RAEL JEAN ISAAC

Editor’s note: This talk was given at the AFSI national conference on December 3, 2006. The prediction about the content of the Iraq Study Group recommendations turned out to be correct. As Melanie Phillips has observed, in Baker’s exit-from-Iraq strategy “It’s Israel that will be making the exit.”

There is no political certainty more widely held than that there is nothing that would so contribute to world peace as solving the Arab-Israel conflict. It doesn’t matter where you stand on the conflict. Western democratic leaders and Arab despots, the EU, the UN, Israeli leaders, the average Israeli, Jews of the world – for all of them, solving the Arab-Israel conflict is the Holy Grail.

You only need to breathe life into the hope to garner a Nobel peace prize. No conflict has garnered so many prizes – not surprising since after the prize is handed out, the conflict remains as healthy as ever. The first went to Ralph Bunche in 1950 for working on the Arab-Israel armistice that gave us the green line. In 1978 Sadat and Begin received the prize for Camp David and the supposed peace with Egypt. In 1994 it went to Arafat, Peres and Rabin for bringing peace via Oslo. Those were the ones purely for Arab-Israel peace. But there were a number of others where the Nobel Committee cited contributions to Arab-Israel peace: for example in giving the prize to Canada’s Lester Pearson in 1957 the Nobel committee said that as a result of his efforts “The Palestinian problem was actually put to rest for some time.” UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who won the Prize in 1961, was cited for “easing tensions” between Israel and neighboring Arab states. In 1988 the Nobel peace prize went to the UN Peacekeeping Forces – created to keep the peace between Egypt and Israel after the 1956 war. And in 2002 Jimmy Carter got the Nobel. Yes, that was really a reward for being anti-American, but the major achievement the Nobel committee cited was Camp David. That’s seven Nobel peace prizes in whole or part for solving the Arab Israel conflict – and the prospect for real peace is further away than ever.

Why so much emphasis on this one conflict in a world awash with them? The reason is the perception that it is at the root of all the dysfunction in the Middle East. In a way this is a comforting proposition to Western leaders. It’s something to fall back on when your policies collapse. In fact it’s the litmus test of the bankruptcy of your policies when you fall back on the need to solve the Arab-Israel conflict. This is precisely what is happening now. The effort to bring about a stable, unified, democratic Iraq is clearly failing. So the advance word is that the Baker-led Iraq Study Group is going to propose a conference to solve the Arab-Israel conflict, with Israel the fall guy. Tony Blair runs around telling any audience he can find that solving the Israel-Palestinian problem is key to solving all other Middle East problems. He said this to the Iraq Study Group, he told it to a Washington Post interviewer, he even said it on Al Jazeera’s new English language TV channel in an interview with David Frost.

I’m reminded of an old joke. A professor of zoology asked his graduate students, among them several foreigners, to write papers on the elephant. The German student took as his topic “An introduction to the Bibliography for the Study of the Elephant.” The French student wrote: “The Love life of the Elephant.” The English student wrote: “Elephant Hunting“ (you can tell it’s an old story—the English have banned hunting). An American student wrote: “Breeding Bigger and Better Elephants.” There was also a Jewish student in the class. He wrote: “The Elephant and the Jewish Problem.” This of course made fun of the Jewish obsession with relating everything to Jewish concerns, no matter how inappropriate. But it is just as apropos of the obsession of world leaders with the Arab-Israel conflict.

In Iraq, with little fanfare or notice, the Kurds, 20% of the population, have opted out of the state. They have their own army, customs officials, education system, language, flag. A telling incident is reported by Peter Galbraith in his recent book The End of Iraq. To show their friendship for the United States, the Kurds decided to throw a party for the Americans on July 4. American officials said they’d be happy to attend, but only if an Iraqi flag flew over the building. The Kurds refused to budge – the flag of Iraq is anathema throughout Kurdistan. So there was no Fourth of July party. As for the rest of the country, it looks mighty like civil war bubbling up between Shiites and Sunnis with U.S. forces straining to keep the lid halfway on the pot. And of course there’s Syria and Iran stirring the pot to defeat the United States, not to mention the folks from al Qaeda. It’s a bad scene but the elephant is more relevant to the Jewish question than the chaos in Iraq is relevant to the Arab-Israel conflict.

You may say, O.K. It’s clear the Arab-Israel conflict is more likely to produce peace prizes than peace. And pretending that solving it would solve other unrelated problems is indeed a massive cop-out by those who know that pushing Israel around is a lot easier than achieving Western goals in the Moslem world. But why do I say that actually solving the Arab-Israel conflict would be a catastrophe? A catastrophe not only for Israel but for the U.S. and for Judeo-Christian civilization as a whole.

Let’s begin with Israel where it is not hard to see why solving the Arab-Israel conflict spells catastrophe. The only way Israel can achieve peace is to disappear. The Arabs make that clear, no matter how much the rest of the world and indeed the Israelis shut their ears. The Hamas government on Israel’s border makes it crystal clear, without any of the peace-in-English, war-in-Arabic obfuscations of the Arafat era. The conflict is not about territory occupied since 1967, but about all the territory Israel occupies. Professor Moshe Sharon has written eloquently of the religious basis for Islam’s rejection of a Jewish state. For Moslems, the establishment of a Jewish state on Islamic land is an open rebellion against Islamic law; it is in contravention of the law of nature.

What is less obvious is that for Israel even the process of trying to achieve peace is catastrophic. Even those skeptical of such efforts may not recognize this – they may think that by constantly striving to reach a peace agreement, Israel scores brownie points, proving to the world that while Israel is willing to make sacrifices for peace the Arabs refuse all reasonable compromise. But the damage far outweighs what little good those brownie points may do Israel. That is because when elected Israeli leaders hold up the promise that peace can be achieved, they are impelled to act in ways that supposedly will advance it. In 1992 Labor, led by Yitzhak Rabin, defeated the long ascendant Likud with the promise that if elected, it would achieve peace within the year. Labor leaders then felt they had to produce something quickly. The result was the catastrophe of Oslo. Should Israel be destroyed, historians will surely find that a major turning point.

At election time, from then on, leaders of both parties would continue to offer voters the same promise. In his victorious campaign against Shimon Peres in 1996 Netanyahu promised to bring peace. What he delivered was another retreat sealed and delivered at the Wye conference. Barak promised to bring peace. He offered Arafat the territorial store, even including a limited Arab right of return: for his pains he obtained a renewed Arab Intifada, far more lethal than the first. Sharon promised to bring peace. He delivered the so-called “disengagement,” a despicable euphemism for the destruction of Jewish settlements. As a direct result rockets have rained steadily on Israeli communities in the south while the army brass and politicians alike shrug and tell desperate residents, there’s nothing we can do, live with it. Hamas tells the Jews of Sderot, the hardest hit community, that the only solution for them is to evacuate the town. At this moment there’s a truce, but even in the unlikely event it holds up, it’s a form of Arab escalation: Hamas says if Israel hasn’t gone back to the 1949 borders within six months, they’ll embark on all-out war.

In short, the promises of peace have delivered only Israeli retreats, escalating Arab demands, greater Arab self-confidence, declining Israeli morale, greater Israeli vulnerability. We can blame Israeli leaders or blame the public, the chicken or the egg. The guilt of the leaders is clear. They lie to the voters and fail miserably in their responsibility to rally the public for the challenge of confronting unrelenting Arab hostility.

They pander, telling voters what the majority want to hear. For this reason Israeli Nobel Prize winner in Economics Robert Aumann says the average Israeli is equally guilty. Says Aumann: “Jews are so desperate for peace that we run around in a frenzy, we can’t wait, we expel people from their homes in an unprecedented act of barbarism, self-hatred and stupidity. We fall all over ourselves with anxiety and self-hatred.”

Despite the failure, over and over again, of retreat and concessions, Israeli leaders, gripped by a form of obsessive compulsive behavior, come up with more of the same. In the wake of the IDF’s humiliation by Hezbollah in Lebanon, Olmert still talks of his hopes to do to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria what was done to Jewish communities in Gaza. Other members of the cabinet talk optimistically of relinquishing the Golan to Syria. These seem to be the chief “new ideas” of the Baker Working Group, – dismember Israel for a short-lived Syrian and Iranian promise to limit their participation in the Iraqi mayhem. But can Israeli leaders possibly expect a different outcome this time? More likely they are so bankrupt of ideas, so lacking in fortitude, so devoid of belief in Israel’s historical and religious rights – even in its right to exist at all – that they can think of no alternative but yet more retreats. And so the broken record scratches over and over again on the same groove. In short, I think it is beyond debate that even the search for peace has had catastrophic consequences for Israel.

What about the United States and the Western world? Why should Arab-Israel peace be catastrophic for them? Let’s look for a moment at the analysis and expectations of those who see Arab-Israel peace as the key to solving the myriad problems and conflicts of the Middle East. As they see it, it was the creation of Israel that roiled the slumbering waters of the Middle East, producing the fury, the frustration, the sense of humiliation and injustice that keeps the area seething. In this view the bitterly anti-Western attitudes of the man on the Arab street derive from resentment of the West for forcing a Jewish state upon Arab lands displacing Arab peoples, all this because of the Holocaust, a Western sin. The continuing rage feeds regional instability as Arab masses fasten on a series of bad actors who exploit that rage, a Nasser, a Saddam Hussein, an Osama bin Laden. Now, the highest bidder yet has emerged, Iran’s Ahmadinejad, who promises a nuclear Armageddon. And so, according to this scenario, if the problem of Israel could only be solved to Moslem/Arab satisfaction, all the most intractable problems posed by the region would melt away. The Arab sense of grievance toward the West would dissolve. No more planes into New York towers. No more bombs on London tubes. This view of the situation is reinforced by Arab leaders of all stripes who repeat endlessly to their Western counterparts that the Arab-Israel conflict is the root cause of every Middle Eastern debacle. Jordan’s King Abdullah just appeared on ABC to proclaim yet again that the Arab-Israel conflict is the root cause of all the crises in the Middle East.

How then to solve it? Some Western leaders, and I’m willing to give credit to the idealism of a Tony Blair or President Bush, believe a two state solution can produce peace – that if only the right formula is devised, Palestinian Arabs will live contentedly side by side with Israel and Arab rhetoric to the contrary is just that, rhetoric. However there are plenty of realists out there, Baker surely among them, who realize that peace means the end of Israel and figure that’s a good thing too. As they see it, as long as Israel is there in any borders it’s an irritant and it is only after it is gone that the Middle East will be a new slate on which good relations with the West can be written.

What about this analysis, in either its idealistic or realist version? It’s not entirely wrong. It’s clearly true that the Arab-Israel conflict woke the Arabs up to their impotence. Incredible to the Arab mind, five Arab armies, supremely confident of driving the Jews into the sea, were beaten by what they viewed as a small ragtag community of despised Jews, many of them the beaten down survivors of concentration camps. For the Arab world it was immensely traumatic, and the trouncing of Arab armies two decades later, in 1967, only reinforced the trauma.

But the trouble with the analysis is that for the Arabs, and indeed the broader Moslem world, Israel is a small part of the problem. The core problem is their abject inferiority to the West in both power and cultural influence. They would have woken up to this, admittedly in less dramatic fashion, without Israel. Thus the nature of the Moslem problem with the West goes way beyond Israel. Yes, the Moslem world longs to extirpate the little Satan, but much of that world now feels itself ready to take on the Great Satan, to restore the Caliphate, to embark on a global jihad to win the world for Allah. The Moslem world is in a much stronger position than in 1948, poised today on the threshold of taking over much of Europe demographically, from within. And however stubbornly the realists may balk at recognizing this reality, if the West delivers up the little Satan, it will only increase its own danger and vulnerability. That’s because Israel’s demise would be perceived as a huge victory for the Islamists.

Possessed of a strong sense of religious and cultural superiority, the Arab world for decades looked to one nostrum after another to restore it to glory, to cure its “humiliation” by Western power. Some looked to Soviet Communism; that romance petered out. Then there was pan-Arabism, epitomized by Nasser, involving such short-lived experiments as the union between Syria and Egypt. The enthusiasm for Pan-Arabism faltered when it failed to achieve Arab “glory.” What has replaced pan-Arabism is the notion that Islam is the answer, that a pure Islam is the tool to restore worldwide Moslem preeminence. For the West the worst possible outcome would be if the Islamists, whose goals go way beyond the pan-Arabists, were to prove they had found the path that works.

Bin Laden has repeatedly stated his belief that Islam defeated one of the two great powers in Afghanistan. He is convinced the other is weak and without will, a belief the vigorous U.S. response in the wake of 9/11 only temporarily undermined. To the Moslem world Israel and the U.S. are umbilically tied. Many of us in the West may know that U.S. support for Israel has been wavering and less than full-throated. But that’s not how the Moslem world sees it. The destruction of Israel would be seen as a huge defeat for the U.S. There could be nothing more likely to produce the wreck of U.S. interests and policies throughout the Middle East, no greater boost for the Islamists in encouraging them to pursue their larger war against Judeo-Christian civilization.

If solving the Arab-Israel problem is the path to perdition, what policies can productively be pursued in respect to the Middle East? Deterrence? Exploiting divisions within Islam? Military action? Supporting internal dissidents within individual countries? Sharply curtailing Moslem immigration to the West? A crash program to develop non-mid East energy sources? A combination of these? Other possibilities? We are in for a long struggle against a resurgent Islam and there are no Five Easy Steps to End the Islamic Threat. This said, it is past time for some genuine realism to be brought to bear in thinking about the problems of the Middle East, not the phony kind James Baker represents. Putting the idea of solving the Arab Israel conflict in the diplomatic trash bin should be the first order of business.

DIANA WEST

Once upon a time Americans could discuss the present danger to Israel—tragically, a permanent feature of the state—from a safe, if concerned, distance. The permanent danger to the Jewish nation under permanent siege by its Muslim neighbors was something deeply troubling, dastardly and unconscionable, but physically and metaphysically removed from our own national experience.

Then came 9/11. The attack, and maybe more important, the seemingly permanent threat of attack that has been with us ever since, quite suddenly, if rather improbably, brought our national condition closer to that of Israel’s than ever before.

In most measurable ways, our super powerful state of being does not compare with tiny Israel and its daily experience with Islamic terrorism and war. But we have begun to display some of the same psychic signs of a nation under siege—delusional thinking about the nature of our enemy, and delusional thinking about the nature of ourselves.

Harvard psychiatric instructor Kenneth Levin has given us the template for this kind of thinking in his book The Oslo Sydrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege. He examines what he characterizes as two delusional experiences: the Israeli experience, in which Israel entered into concessionary negotiations with a so-called “peace partner” openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction and the historical Jewish Diaspora experience, in which Jewish populations identified with their tormentors and even echoed their anti-semitism.

According to Levin, these interactions, engendered by a permanent condition of siege mentality, rely on delusional thinking.

There are two kinds: One is delusional thinking about the intentions of the aggressor (be it Arab Muslim or European Christian); the other is delusional thinking regarding the victim’s ability to change the aggressor’s intentions. Such thinking, he writes, is common to victims of chronic abuse, particularly children. They like to fool themselves into thinking that they, the victims, control the abuser, by, in their own minds, linking the abuse they suffer to their own behavior.

In other words, in their delusional mode of thought, they see their own behavior as the cause of their own abuse. This mind game, Levin says, gives victims a vital sense of control over situations that are expressly beyond their control—an abusive parent, for instance, or neighbors—“peace partners”-- committed to the destruction of one’s state. Thus, they avoid the devastating alternative of helplessness and despair.

At least, that’s the diagnosis from the psychiatrist’s couch. I, for one, welcome it, because it explains my own rather less eloquent hunch that such behaviors are, and have always been, quite nuts.

But then what? Playing mind games to deny the culpability and intent of one’s tormentors or battlefield foes is not playing to win. But rather than change the strategy, the victims continue with this tortured reasoning, and the same game goes on and on.

We continue to respond to Islamic terrorism—and in this case, by “we,” I mean both Israel and the United States, along with most countries identified with the West—with more flights of fancy—seeking a refuge of sorts in our natural abhorrence of terrorism itself. Trapped as we are in Levin’s siege mentality, we have failed to turn this abhorrence into an engine that drives us to confront and destroy Islamic terrorism—which I prefer to think of as the resurgence of age-old jihad. We have instead used our abhorrence to contrive what might be called “coping strategies”—strategies to shape ourselves and our response to the danger of permanent jihad, strategies that emphasize the distinction between ourselves and the jihadists—as though this were an end in itself.

Emphasizing the distinction isn’t difficult. The ideal of justice for all is the fruit of Judeo-Christian civilization, not Islam. But again—emphasizing the distinction is not a winning strategy; in fact, it calls into question whether victory is the goal. Facing off against an enemy that strikes at non-combatants at the heart of civilized society, we take enormous pride—self-satisfaction, even—in our efforts to spare non-combatants at the heart of terrorist society—whether in the Palestinian Authority, Afghanistan or Iraq—no matter the cost to civilized society. To me, this overarching concern for the Other—at the expense of the Self--seems like another terrible manifestation of the delusional behavior of the victim trying to affect or appease his abusers by displaying ever more extreme feats of virtue and blamelessness.

We can see an example of this terrible manifestation in the failed attempt by the Israeli military to destroy the senior leadership of Hamas in 2003. It was then, at an apex of the Palestinian terror war against Israel, that Israeli intelligence discovered that eight of the most senior Hamas leaders--jihadis responsible for killing hundreds of Israelis and also, not incidentally, Americans as well--had gathered in an apartment to plan new terror attacks. Among them were Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who would eventually be assassinated, and Ismail Haniyeh, who would be elected prime minister of the Palestnian Authority.

Writing in the Washington Post earlier this year, Moshe Yaalon, who, at the time of the failed attack, was chief of staff of the IDF, summed up: “We knew a one-ton bomb would destroy the three-story building and kill the Hamas leadership. But we also knew that such a bomb would endanger about 40 families who lived in the vicinity. We decided to use a smaller bomb that would destroy only the top floor of the building. As it turned out, the Hamas leaders were meeting on the ground floor.”

According to our delusional coping strategies, according to our delusional siege mentality, this strike might be seen as a partial success: No terrorists were killed, but then no innocent lives were lost either.

Or were they? As Yaalon reminds us, all of these murderers lived to kill another day. In sparing noncombatants on the enemy side--noncombatants who very, very likely supported the jihadis in their midst--Israelis were condemning some incalculable number of their own to pain and death, noncombatants who abhor and are victimized by jihad terrorism.

How does such a moral calculus work out?

Yaalon, writing during the summer’s war in Lebanon, was using this missed opportunity to defend Israel against world opprobrium by avowing Israel’s adherence to what he said boiled down to the “central principle” of the rules of war: the need to distinguish combatants from non-combatants.

But is that really the central principle of the rules of war? I would prefer to think the central principle concerns saving your people from annihilation, slow or sudden, and protecting your society from the crippling, disfiguring torment of fear. But from the standpoint of the West, there really is something more important at this stage of warfare. And that is what the Israeli general isn’t alone in calling “high moral standards.”

Such standards, Yaalon continued, are expressed in “every effort to avoid harming civilians. We have dropped fliers, sent telephone messages and broadcast radio announcements so that innocents can get out of harm’s way.”

But is warfare targeting buildings and bad guys—which, it’s important to note, has also become the American policy of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan—truly warfare on the high road? I would argue that it is not, because, whatever its intentions, it is also a sure-fire recipe for warfare unending. Without one victorious side—hopefully ours—defeating the other, there can be no peace, no safety, no security—no civilization. There can be only more war--fear, terrorism, blood, broken lives. As Yaalon also notes: In warning of pending Israeli attacks, “we imperil our own citizens since, by losing the element of surprise, we invariably allow some of the enemy to escape with their missiles.”

I fail to see in this mindset—sparing “them” at the expense of “us”— evidence of a more advanced stage of human enlightenment. In fact, I am afraid, it signals the End Stage of human enlightenment. That’s because in fighting to win this morality war, we—the West, and that of course includes Israel--will surely lose the fight to survive.

It is a fact of war through the ages that if a more civilized society is to prevail over a more barbarous one, it will necessarily and tragically be degraded by the experience as a vital cost of victory. Partly, this is because civilized war tactics are apt to fail against barbarous war tactics, thus requiring the civilized society to break the “rules” if it is to survive a true death struggle. Then there is the clash itself—the act of engaging with the barbarous society—which forces civilization to confront, repel and also internalize previously unimagined depredations. This, too, is degrading.

During World War II—arguably the last war fought to a concluding victory--the more civilized world of the Allies was necessarily degraded to some intangible extent by what it took to achieve victory over barbarous Nazism. For example, bombing cities, even rail transportation hubs, lay beyond civilized conventions, but this was one tactic the Allies used to defeat Hitler. However justifiably, civilization crossed a previously unimagined and uncivilized line to save, well, civilization. Then there was Hitler’s Holocaust—an act of genocide on a previously unthinkable scale and horror. Who in the civilized world ever imagined killing 6 million people before Hitler? And who in the civilized world retained the same purity of mind afterward? Civilization itself was forever dimmed.

The question is, did, for example, bombing Dresden to defeat Hitler or, in the Pacific War, dropping two nuclear bombs to force Japan to stop fighting, make the Allies into barbarians?

I think most people would still say, Of course not, and argue that such destructive measures were necessary to save civilization itself—and certainly hundreds of thousands of mainly American and Allied men’s lives. But if this argument continues to carry the day, it’s because we still view that historic period from its own perspective: namely, as one in which Allied lives—our fathers, husbands, brothers and sons--counted for more than Axis lives, even those of women and children.

How quaint. That is, this is not at all how we think any more. If we still valued our own men more than the enemy and the “civilians” he hides among—and now I’m talking about say, Israelis fighting in Jenin, or Americans fighting in Fallujah—our tactics would be totally different, and, not incidentally, infinitelymore successful. We would drop bombs on city blocks, for example, not waste men in dangerous house-to-house searches. We would destroy enemy sanctuaries in Syria and Iran, not disarm “insurgents” at perilous checkpoints in hostile Iraqi strongholds.

In the 21st century, however, there is something that our society values more—more!--than our own lives—and more than the survival of Western civilization itself. That something may be described as the kind of moral superiority that comes from a good wallow in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or even the confoundingly tortured decision as to whether to obliterate the leadership of Hamas. But this concept of moral superiority—which I would describe as delusional--doesn’t win wars. And it won’t save civilization.

That’s because it masks a massive moral paralysis. The morally superior (read: paralyzed) don’t really take sides, don’t really believe or, at least, act as if one culture is qualitatively better or worse than the other. Many don’t even believe one culture is just plain different from the other. Only in this atmosphere of politically correct and perpetually adolescent non-judgmentalism could anyone believe, for example, that compelling, forcing, or torturing a jihad terrorist to get information to save a city in any way undermines our “values.” It undermines nothing—except the jihad.

Do such coercive tactics diminish our inviolate sanctimony? You bet. But so what? The alternative is to follow our precious rules and hope the barbarians will leave us alone--or, perhaps, not deal with us too harshly. Fond hope. Consider the 21st-century return of (I still can’t quite believe it) beheadings. The first French Republic aside, who on God’s modern green earth ever imagined a head being hacked off the human body before we were confronted with modern manifestations of Islamic jihad? Civilization itself is forever dimmed—again.

And maybe that in itself is the present danger. The danger for all time--for the United States as for Israel—is that we don’t seem to know or want to know what it will take for civilization to shine again.

Diana West gave this talk at the AFSI national conference on December 3rd. She is a nationally syndicated columnist.

MOSHE DANN

Peace Now's latest "expose"-–charging that Israeli settlements are built on "private Palestinian land"–-is a fraud. Nonetheless its allegations, accepted as fact, became front page news in newspapers across the world.

Peace Now’s report purports to show that Israel has stolen privately owned Palestinian lands to construct settlements in violation of Israel's own laws: "Nearly 40 percent of the total land area on which the settlements sit, according to official data of the Israeli Civil Administration (the government agency in charge of the settlements) is privately owned by Palestinians. The settlement enterprise has undermined not only the collective property rights of the Palestinians as a people, but also the private property rights of individual Palestinian landowners."

Peace Now is unable, however, to produce any official data. Its spokesman admitted it has no evidence to back up its claim of illegally acquired land, except some "digital" information (unavailable) which, it says, was stolen from the offices of the Civil Administration. In fact, Peace Now says the authorities refuse to provide it with the official maps and designations on which all settlement activity is based.

Where then does Peace Now get its information? Settlement residents assert that in some cases privately owned land was purchased from Arabs and that relations were normal until Peace Now agitators pushed Arabs to complain. Much of the "data" apparently comes from interviews with Arabs who claim but cannot prove property rights.

Asked why Palestinians have not come forth to claim ownership, Peace Now said that the individuals lacked the funds. Peace Now also admitted that they have only a few names of individual Palestinian owners because they need more funds to track them down. They did not explain why local Arabs, with free access to numerous pro-Palestinian legal assistance organizations (many funded by the New Israel Fund, the EU and others) need Peace Now's help in finding claimants.

Peace Now does not hide that its agenda is to undermine all settlement activity. It states that the organization made a "political decision" not to contest areas which Israel conquered in the War of Independence, and areas which were incorporated into Israel after the war in 1967, i.e. "East Jerusalem". But it insists "all settlement activity is an obstacle to peace" and even consensus areas like Gush Etzion and Maale Adumim must be given up.

Much of Peace Now's information and conclusions are contained in a controversial report commissioned by former PM Ariel Sharon two years ago authored by Talia Sasson, a vehement opponent of settlements. Sasson charged that government officials and agencies cooperated in building settlements and outposts without proper government approval.

Peace Now also charged that beginning in the 1970's, the Civil Administration for Judea, Samaria and Gaza "seized private Palestinian land" for use by settlements. They admitted, however, that they "don't know what was registered or taken over by the government," since all such records are held by the Civil Administration. But information on all land registered under the Ottoman, British and Jordanian administration is available and easily documented. Any land owner can apply to a court and have his/her property returned or demand compensation -- as so many have already done.

Under Jordanian law, selling land to a Jew is a capital crime; no Jews live in Jordan and none own property there. Since the Oslo Agreements, members of Palestinian death squads (so-called "security forces") have murdered hundreds of their own people who were accused of selling land to Jews. Peace Now's activities are making it easier to identify more potential victims and, it would seem, as an organization, it is not far from supporting those shocking anti-Jewish restrictions.

Moshe Dann, a former assistant professor of History (CUNY) is a writer and journalist living in Jerusalem.

MELANIE PHILLIPS

Christmas, the time of goodwill to all men, has been the occasion for the latest vicious attack upon the Jews by the Church of England. In the Catholic weekly The Tablet, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was reported as saying:

“People are leaving Bethlehem in large numbers. It is now very difficult to get in and out of and we thought we could go there, and do what we can to encourage that very beleaguered community, and remind others that it matters that there are Christians in the middle of that conflict.” Dr Williams challenges the Israeli Government: “I would like to know how much it matters to the Israeli Government to have Christian communities in the Holy Land. Are they an embarrassment or are they part of a solution? That’s a question.”

The assumption behind his question is that the very real beleaguerment of the dwindling number of Christians in Bethlehem is caused by Israel. This is a diabolical falsehood. A story in the Mail provides a very different picture of the cause of the Bethlehem Christians’ suffering:

“Life for Palestinian Christians such as 50-year-old Joseph has become increasingly difficult in Bethlehem - and many of them are leaving. The town’s Christian population has dwindled from more than 85 per cent in 1948 to 12 per cent of its 60,000 inhabitants in 2006. There are reports of religious persecution, in the form of murders, beatings and land grabs. Meanwhile, the breakdown in security is putting off tourists, leading to economic hardship for Christians, who own most of the town’s hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops…

“The sense of a creeping Islamic fundamentalism is all around in Bethlehem…George Rabie, a 22-year-old taxi driver from the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jala, is proud of his Christianity, even though it puts him in daily danger. Two months ago, he was beaten up by a gang of Muslims who were visiting Bethlehem from nearby Hebron and who had spotted the crucifix hanging on his windscreen. ‘Every day, I experience discrimination,’ he says. ‘It is a type of racism. We are a minority so we are an easier target. Many extremists from the villages are coming into Bethlehem.’

“Jeriez Moussa Amaro, a 27-year-old aluminium craftsman from Beit Jala is another with first-hand experience of the appalling violence that Christians face. Five years ago, his two sisters, Rada, 24, and Dunya, 18, were shot dead by Muslim gunmen in their own home. Their crime was to be young, attractive Christian women who wore Western clothes and no veil. Rada had been sleeping with a Muslim man in the months before her death. A terrorist organization, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, issued a statement claiming responsibility, which said: ‘We wanted to clean the Palestinian house of prostitutes.’ “

The story goes on to say that that isolation is exacerbated by Israel’s security barrier. But the only reason that was erected was as a desperate last resort to prevent the Palestinians from murdering large numbers of Israelis by human bomb attacks. As the story makes clear, however, the principal reason for the Christians’ flight is Muslim violence.

A report by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs provides an informed riposte to the Christian lies:

•The plight of Christian Arabs remaining in the PA is, in part, attributable to the adoption of Muslim religious law in the PA Constitution. Israel, by contrast, safeguards the religious freedom and holy places of its Christian (and Muslim) citizens. Indeed, in recent years Israel has been responsible for restoring many of the churches and monasteries under its jurisdiction.

•The growing strength of Islamic fundamentalism within the Palestinian national movement poses problems for Christians, who fear they will be deemed opponents of Islam and thereby risk becoming targets for Muslim extremists. This is exacerbated by the fact that Hamas holds substantial power and seeks to impose its radical Islamist identity on the entire population within the PA-controlled territories.

In a July 3, 2006, article, “Who Harms Holy Land Christians?,” syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, a long-time critic of Israel, paraphrased a letter from Michael H. Sellers, an Anglican priest in Jerusalem, to U.S. Congressmen Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Joseph Crowley (D-NY), who were circulating a draft resolution blaming the Christian decline on the discriminatory practices of the Palestinian Authority. Sellers insisted that “the real problem [behind the Christian Arab exodus] is the Israeli occupation—especially its new security wall.”

Yet two-thirds of the Christian Arabs had already departed between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip, decades before construction began on the security barrier. Every one of the more than twenty Muslim states in the Middle East has a declining Christian population. In fact, Israel is the only state in the region in which the Christian Arab population has grown in real terms— from approximately 34,000 in 1948 to nearly 130,000 in 2005.

From Christian Arabs under the thumb of the PA, I have heard testimony of forced marriages of Christian women to Muslim men, death threats against Christians for distributing the Bible to willing Muslims, and Christian women intimidated into wearing ultra-modest Islamic clothing. Churches have been firebombed (most recently in Nablus, Tubas, and Gaza) and/or shot up repeatedly. And this is the tip of the iceberg.

Under the Palestinian Authority, Christian Arabs have found their land expropriated by Muslim thieves and thugs with ties to the PA’s land registration office. Christians have been forced to pay bribes to win the freedom of family members jailed on trumped-up charges. And Arabs, Christians and Muslims alike, have been selling or abandoning homes and businesses to escape the chaos of the PA and move to Israel, Europe, South America, North America, or wherever they can get a visa.

Not a peep of any of this from the Archbishop of Canterbury, or indeed any other prominent Christian leader. Instead the Church blames Israel for the flight from Bethlehem, part of the systematic campaign of libelous propaganda against the Jewish state and the sanitization of Arab murderous hatred that is circulated and believed as holy writ among so many Christians in Britain and elsewhere. Recently, a cleric of the Church of England sent me—as an apparently pointed rebuke —a truly wicked book, Bethelehem Besieged, by one Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian pastor in Bethlehem. With a jacket garlanded by encomia from Hanan Ashrawi, George McGovern, James Zogby, Desmond Tutu and others, this book presents a picture of Bethlehem’s Christians suffering under a yoke imposed by the cruel and belligerent Israelis. Page after page is devoted to claims about the “apartheid-like wall”; unwarranted “invasions” of Bethlehem by overwhelming Israeli military might; the siege of the Church of the Holy Nativity when Israeli troops “clearly had instructions to go in and destroy” (doubtless that’s why there was a stand-off for days while the Israelis tried to persuade the Arab gunmen inside, who were trashing the church, to surrender) — a scandalous misrepresentation with more than a whiff of old-style theological prejudice, when the author compares his family locked inside the parsonage for safety to “the first disciples after the crucifixion of Jesus”; describes the “devastating impact” of the curfews under the Second Intifada; and so on and dishonestly, virulently, sickeningly, on.

No mention whatsoever of the never-ending murder of Israelis perpetrated by the Palestinians; no acknowledgement of the fact that Israel’s military actions in the town were solely acts of self-defense against Palestinian aggression; no mention at all of the truly unwarranted persecution of Bethlehem Christians by Palestinian Muslims. Instead, the Israeli victims of Arab aggression are blamed by this Arab Christian as a source of unredeemed evil — a nationalistic scapegoating of the Jewish state that mirrors the theological scapegoating of the Jewish religion in the Gospels and the calumnies of the early church fathers.

This vile travesty merely mirrors the kind of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli filth that pours out of places like the Sabeel centre and other sources of Palestinian Christian writing, along with NGOs like Christian Aid. As Canon Andrew White has more than once observed, not only does this all smell of replacement theology or supercessionism, the ancient Christian calumny against the Jews, but it has become once again standard fare within the Church of England and many other churches.

The results of all this incitement to hatred are on display in the response to a gruesome opinion poll in The Tablet: “Do you accept that Israel is engaged in a struggle for its survival and support its efforts to root out its enemies? 21.2%”

Read that last figure again. Almost 80 per cent of British Christians polled do not accept that Israel is fighting enemies who are pledged to destroy it. Almost 80 per cent of British Christians are ignorant of the truth, have swallowed a diabolical lie and as a result have turned Jewish victims into global villains. Where, alas, have we heard this before?

I’m sorry if this pains the many decent Christians who uphold truth and fight evil and therefore support Israel in its existential struggle to survive the attempt to exterminate it; but it has to be said that, at a time when Iran is openly threatening to destroy Israel, the churches in Britain are not only silent about the genocidal ravings emanating from Iran but are themselves helping pave the way for a second Holocaust. The time has arrived for decent Christians around the world to raise their voices as loudly as they can against this terrible, primitive anti-Jewish stain that once again besmirches their religion.

This is excerpted from Melanie Phillips’s Diary: www.melaniephillips.com/diary.

RUTH KING

On December 14th, a group of 150 prominent Jewish leaders, attorneys, intellectuals, journalists and diplomats assembled in New York under the auspices of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The stated goal was the indictment of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad for inciting genocide.

As is predictable at such august gatherings, there was much soap box rhetoric. Most were enraged and sincere, but some statements were over the top. Irwin Kotler, a former Minister of Justice in Canada, went so far as to compare Ahmadinejad to (gasp) Pinochet! If only Israel’s enemies were like Pinochet.

Alan Dershowitz announced that he was drafting a legal brief justifying the use of preemptive force against Iran: "If the international community fails, we reserve the right of self-defense." Kotler accused Ahmadinejad of “state-ordered, state-sanctioned genocidal anti-Semitism.” Meir Rosenne, a former Israeli ambassador added: "When 6 million Jews were killed, countries remained silent. At that time, everyone said they didn't know. Today, they know, but…they don't care...The apathy of the civilized world when it comes to killing Jews is probably a matter of tradition."

Other speakers denounced the United Nations for its inaction in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Martin Peretz, slammed Kofi Annan as a “handmaiden to Darfur” and compared James Baker to Neville Chamberlain.

Hello? They denounce the UN even as they bring their lawsuit to the United Nations International Court of Justice? Forgive my cynicism, but the long and the short of it is that they will sue the bastard. Well, as they say on the farm “that‘ll learn him.”

My, my….did the noble gentlemen ever listen to the daily "state-ordered, state-sanctioned, genocidal anti-Semitism" that prevails throughout the Arab world? Have they heard the sermons or read the newspapers or seen the schoolbooks calling Jews vermin, bacteria and dogs? What about the daily and ritual chants of “death to the Jews”? And, how about the fact that Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are best sellers throughout the Arab world? Did they ever see the vicious cartoons of Israelis and Jews that flood Arab newspapers or witness the daily flag burnings and street theater calling for the destruction of “evil and illegitimate Israel.” Have they a clue that jihad and Jew hatred have a long and deadly history among the Moslems of the world?

No dear sirs…these atrocities do not take place only in Iran. They are random and routine in the Arab gutters of all Israel’s enemies….but you do not denounce them, you do not sue them, you do not curse them…..you accept this in the name of peace processing. You brandish your collective fist at Iran, but you ask Israel to negotiate with the rest of this genocidal scum. In fact you sanction Israeli concessions to these thugs whose aim is identical to that of Iran’s lunatic President.

Did you not gather like fools in the White House to applaud Yasser Arafat, a genocidal anti-Semite if there ever was one? Did you protest when Sadat, author of a fawning letter of praise to Hitler, went to Israel to issue demand after demand rather than an apology for the nearly devastating sneak attack on Israel on Yom Kippur of 1973? Do you not call Mahmoud Abbas, a well known terrorist and Holocaust denier, “Mr. President” and a “moderate”? Did you not urge Israel to leave Gaza and do you not urge Israel to leave Judea and Samaria even in the face of the chaos and murder that ensues after each Israeli concession? Do you not indulge in the massive identity theft that has usurped the title “Palestinian” by changing its definition and history?

To be sure among those gathered were decent people. Among those protesting against Ahmadinejad is Elie Weisel whom I like and respect. Who could forget his speech when he was invited to the White House shortly after it was announced that President Reagan was to visit a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany where members of the SS, the Nazi elite notorious for their murderous anti-Semitism, were buried.

At the ceremony where Weisel was to be honored with a Congressional Medal of Achievement, he invoked the Jewish tradition which commands one “to speak truth to power” and asked the President to cancel his visit to Bitburg with the stirring words “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Why can’t Jewish leaders speak truth to power? Why, instead of posturing about indicting Iran’s President, can’t they urge President Bush to abandon the “road map” and why don’t they openly denounce those who bend the President’s ear and mind with respect to Israel and its enemies? Why can’t they gather in Hebron, the cradle of the Jewish faith and the locus of the unbroken chain of Jewish survival which our tormentors sought to break? Their place is with the intended victims.

Instead, the convenient whipping boy is Ahmadinejad, while so many of the “Jewish leaders” continue to nurture the hallucination of the “two state solution.”

It is their indifference and ignorance and indolence that will certainly speed up the two state solution…the state of war and the state of extinction.