In This Issue

Iraq For Land (Land of Israel)
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

Now It Can Be Told
Rael Jean Isaac

Modernity and Arab Anti-Semitism
B. Thornton

Fencing Karnei Shomron
Michael Teplow

La Republique in Danger
Nidra Poller

Israel’s Oblomov
Ruth King

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

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Herbert Zweibon

At first glance President Bush’s speech to the nation on January 10 was a repudiation of the central proposals of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group. Baker-Hamilton advocated negotiations with Iran and Syria, the chief foreign contributors to Iraq’s turmoil. In return for broad regional cooperation in the stabilization of Iraq, the U.S. would deliver up Israel. Israel would be summoned to an international conference where (shades of Munich) it would be forced to submit to a diktat spelled out in the Iraq Study Group Report: give Syria the Golan, create a Palestinian state and address the “right of return” (the Arab demand that millions of so-called refugees be absorbed into Israel’s pre-1967 borders, in other words that the Jewish state cease to exist).

In his speech, far from offering to parlay with them, President Bush warned that he would “interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria” and “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” Nor was there any direct mention of Israel, although there was a single disquieting sentence about Secretary Rice using “urgent diplomacy…to help bring peace to the Middle East.”

Unfortunately what has become evident since the speech is that the most immediate “surge” is not in American troops but in squeezing Israel. Condoleezza Rice’s “urgent diplomacy” gives every indication that if the administration is not disposed to use Israel as a carrot to win over Syria and Iran, it is prepared to offer up Israel to our supposed Arab “friends,” above all as a sop to Saudi Arabia. These “friends” have got the message: according to a January 15 AP report Arab officials will propose a broad bargain which they dub “Iraq for Land” – in return for their help in stabilizing Iraq the U.S. will give them Israel’s land.

The entire “bargain” is surreal. These states have no ability to pacify Iraq where Iran is the key player, backing both the Shiite militias and the Sunni jihadists. And the broader premise is absurd -- that “solving” the Arab-Israel conflict so as to satisfy the Arabs (i.e. dissolving Israel) will in any way mitigate the threats posed by the deeply dysfunctional Middle East.

The moment Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections the U.S. should have scrapped the misbegotten Road Map, built on the false premise that Palestinian Arabs wanted peace with Israel, not the end of Israel. The Hamas leaders lack even the forked tongue of an Arafat or Abbas, for publicly and privately, in English as in Arabic, they proclaim unreserved devotion to Israel’s destruction. Instead Condoleezza Rice is seeking shortcuts, as she put it in Ramallah “to accelerate progress on the road map” to a Palestinian state. That means eliminating what few demands the Road Map puts on Arab behavior: these, Rice complained, prevented “momentum” in going forward. The U.S. is now in the truly ludicrous position of championing the territorial and other demands of a government with which its officials are not allowed to speak. As The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 12) notes, “American officials are forbidden from dealing with anyone inside an entity controlled by Hamas, because it’s designated as a terrorist group under U.S. law.”

Our current crazy policy, which flies in the face of the principles this administration claims to stand for – fighting terror and supporting democracy -- will do nothing to advance American values or interests. It will do nothing to improve the dire situation in Iraq or reduce Islamic terror or increase Middle East stability. On the contrary, by fostering the perception of a U.S. so weak and desperate it is willing to sacrifice Israel, it will invigorate and vastly strengthen the darkest forces in the Moslem world. This policy is not even made in the State Department which would be bad enough. It’s of Saudi Arabia, by Saudi Arabia and for Saudi Arabia

Rael Jean Isaac

BAHRAINI RUNNER LOSES CITIZENSHIP

As Condoleezza Rice races around the world to produce “Arab-Israel peace,” small events reveal how unpromising the terrain is for the genuine article. A Kenya-born Bahraini citizen Mushir Salem Jawher competed in – and won—the Tiberias marathon in Israel this summer. Far from celebrating their athlete’s achievement, the committee of sport and government authorities decided (shades of the Nazi’s eradication of the records of Jewish athletes) to strike Jawher’s name off the sport union’s records and strip him of his Bahraini citizenship.

And then there’s Salah Uddin Choudhury, on trial for his life in Bangladesh, for the “crime” of wanting to address the Tel Aviv Writer’s Association and advocating better relations with Israel.

LET THEM DRINK OIL

After decades of false promises of “alternative energy,” technology at last offers genuine promise of progress toward energy independence. Former CIA director James Woolsey writes in The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 30) that over the next 20 years cellulosic ethanol (based on biomass, not corn) could produce half the fuel needed by U.S. passenger vehicles at a cost of 70 cents per gallon, this on just 7% of U.S. farmland, the amount now in the Soil Bank. That doesn’t even include the potential of thermal processes that can convert industrial, municipal and animal wastes into energy.

In the more immediate future electricity will increasingly replace liquid fuels in transportation thanks to advanced batteries based on nanotechnology, with the cost as much as 90% lower than gasoline. Utilities are enthusiastic because plug-ins will exploit unutilized capacity, given that batteries will normally be charged in off-peak nighttime hours.

And then there’s gasification of coal, in which GE is already making investments, which promises an alternative fuel for commercial and military airplanes.

Sooner than anyone thought possible, the Middle East may be restored to its rightful place in world affairs, as a primitive impoverished backwater.

SPANISH BISHOPS AWAKE

While Europe sleeps, to use Bruce Bawer’s book title, Spain’s bishops have belatedly woken up to the prospect that resurgent Islam will lay claim to southern Spain. The English paper The Independent (Jan. 5) reports they are alarmed by plans to recreate the city of Cordoba, the heart of the ancient Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus, as a pilgrimage site for Moslems throughout Europe. Plans include construction of a half-size replica of Cordoba’s eighth century Great Mosque. The bishops are also alarmed by increasingly assertive Spanish Moslems demanding the right to pray in what was once the Great Mosque itself, now a cathedral which was built to consolidate Catholic rule after the Moslems were expelled in 1492.

ELLISON STALKS BUSH
I
n May 2006, while still a state representative, Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, introduced a bill in the Minnesota House that would have put the legislature on record – it didn’t pass -- to urge the impeachment of President Bush. Expect Ellison, now on the Judiciary Committee, to return to the assault. He already promises an agenda for “the restoration of American citizen’s civil liberties” and banning racial profiling. Read, Ellison is committed to making the U.S. open to the kind of terror attacks depicted on Fox’s hit show 24.

This is the man whose election the Minneapolis Jewish Herald endorsed and whose victory Rabbi Aaron Bergman (in a January 9 op-ed in The Detroit News) says Americans “should celebrate.” Bergman may be right that “history may show that the most significant event of the recent elections” was Ellison’s victory. But if so, it will not be, as Bergman rosily (and insanely) proclaims, because “this is one of the best things that could happen to America…the beginning of a larger shift to democracy throughout the world.” It foretells a far darker future.

SELECTIVE OUTRAGE?

In last month’s Outpost Ruth King pointed out the double standard American Jewish leaders have employed, with deserved outrage at Iran’s anti-Holocaust conference not matched by outrage at similar behavior from Israel’s Arab neighbors. A recent case in point: on December 27 the Egyptian Arab Socialist Party held its own Holocaust denial conference in Cairo. It was ignored by most Jewish organizations. And when the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an honorable exception, urged Olmert to protest when he met Mubarak at Sharm el Sheikh, a craven Olmert said nothing about it and instead, as Caroline Glick notes, heaped superlatives on him for his leadership of “moderate” Arab states.

A FOUR STATE SOLUTION?

What is called a “two state solution,” as Outpost has pointed out many times, is a three state solution, with Jordan, Israel and a third Palestinian state carving up Mandatory Palestine. But can world backing of a fourth Palestinian state be far behind? Israeli Arabs are organizing a new front against Israel. Daniel Pipes reports that the Mossawa Center in Haifa (funded in part by American Jews) has issued “The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel,” which insists Israel become a “joint homeland” in which the Law of Return will be cancelled, the flag and anthem altered, Arabs will have a veto over decisions by Jewish Israelis and will have separate representation in international forums. Even the Israeli media has reacted negatively to these demands, but no doubt they will soon call them “moderate” – after all there’s no mention of putting the Jewish population out to sea.

AFSI foresaw these developments long ago. In May 1955 Outpost published “Israeli Arab (Dis)Loyalty” by Erich Isaac, which noted that “the territorial dwarfing of Israel will lead to an immensely powerful release of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment among Israel’s Arab citizens.”

SADR'S U.S. FOLLOWERS

Dearborn, Michigan is the face of what many more cities in the U.S. will look like, if this country does not quickly clamp down on Moslem immigration. Debbie Schlussel reports on a rally in Dearborn celebrating Saddam’s hanging. While it was widely reported in the press, what was not mentioned was that the leaders were major supporters of the Shiite anti-American militia headed by Moqtada al Sadr. Take Hushem al-Hussainy, the imam who organized the celebrations. He heads one of Dearborn’s three largest Shi’ite mosques. He’s been invited to the Pentagon and hugged by President Bush, but he’s no moderate. Schlussel points out that he led almost daily protests by thousands of Hezbollah supporters last summer in Dearborn and Detroit and has led pro-Hamas and pro-Arafat rallies. Writes Schlussel: “Shiites who hate Sunnis to death in Iraq, love Sunnis in Israel when they’re killing the Jews.”

CHURCHILL ON IRAQ

“At present we are paying 8 millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.”
Even taking inflation into account, the cost of sitting on the volcano has gone way up – but what we get out of it is likely to be exactly the same.

POLITICIDE: VICTOR SHARPE

“Politicide” is a word coined by Abba Eban to describe the act of murdering a state…that state being Israel. In his book, dedicated to Zeev Jabotinsky “a fighter for his people whom so few chose to follow,” Sharpe details the relentless attempts by the Arab world to destroy the Jewish state. In thirty five cogent essays, Sharpe skillfully traces the historical background as well as the current conflict, including the Israeli government’s acquiescence to its own destruction. The book is available online at www.lulu.com .

Rael Jean Isaac

The State Department has finally admitted what it was determined to conceal for 33 long years – that it knew Arafat personally ordered the killings of two U.S. diplomats in Khartoum in 1973, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Sudan George Curtis Moore, then the highest ranking black man in the Foreign Service, and his replacement as Ambassador, Cleo Noel. They were brutally beaten and machine-gunned. The State Department’s Office of the Historian has released an authoritative summary of the relevant documents prepared by the CIA.

Why the long cover-up? Seven successive administrations, Republican and Democrat, denied the government had any evidence Arafat was involved. As recently as 2002 the State Department once again officially denied it had any proof Arafat was responsible. For the last seven years James J. Welsh, the National Security Agency’s Palestinian communications analyst from 1970-1974 and the man who heard the tapes and first intercepted Arafat’s murder plans, had vainly tried to mobilize Congressional interest in exposing the story.

In a 2002 letter to columnist/lawyer Debbie Schlussel, Welsh writes about Arafat’s double game. Arafat pretended to the West and the international press that he was making every effort to get the hostages released (Noel and Moore, along with Belgian Charge d’Affaires Guy Eid, who was also murdered, had been captured by Black September operatives while attending a farewell party for Moore at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum). Arafat would then return to Fatah headquarters in Beirut to instruct the hostage takers on the next step in the demand process (they were demanding the release of terrorists held by a number of countries, among them Sirhan Sirhan, the murderer of Robert F. Kennedy). And then he ordered that the murders be carried out. The CIA and NSA had tapped into Fatah’s phones and bugged its headquarters – everything was on tape.

Welsh explains the initial reasons for the cover up in a letter he sent to members of Congress in October 2000 (which Schlussel has reprinted on her website). He and another analyst responsible for monitoring PLO communications had learned from an NSA field station of a conversation between Arafat and other Fatah leaders about preparations for an imminent operation in Khartoum. The information was sent at Flash (highest) precedence to the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum via the State Department, as channels required. Welsh was amazed and horrified when he heard of the capture of the diplomats – they would never have gone to that reception, given the warning. He learned that a Watch officer in the State Department had downgraded the urgent warning message to a routine cable – it arrived two days after the men had been assassinated.

The cover-up went into high gear. The field intercept tapes and transcriptions were buried – when Welsh asked to see them he was told they’d been looked at and there wasn’t much there. His folders and that of his fellow analyst, with all the materials on the hostage crisis, were never returned from the higher levels to which they had gone. Welsh is convinced that the President’s office (Nixon was President at the time) and the State Department were fearful of the scandal that would erupt if the bungled delivery of the warning message became public knowledge. And so, he charges, they covered up the existence of the warning message, removed from the normal analytical departments all evidence of the message, destroyed copies of the cable sent too late to the U.S. embassy in Khartoum, and shielded Arafat from paying any penalty due to “the need to keep this warning hidden from any scrutiny.”

Subsequent administrations, Welsh believes, chose for political reasons to turn a blind eye to Arafat’s guilt, seeing him as useful in advancing Arab-Israel negotiations and after Oslo, wanting at all costs to avoid “derailing the Middle East peace process.”

Thus it came to be that the man directly responsible for the brutal murders of U.S. diplomats and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid, and known by each administration to be their murderer, was transformed with American connivance into a fawned-over “partner for peace,” a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and eventually became the most courted and frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton White House. In sum, successive U.S. administrations knowingly betrayed their bedrock responsibility to seek justice for the assassination of their own diplomatic representatives.

Mind you, it isn’t as if the story, even prior to Welsh going public with his testimony, had not leaked. In the immediate aftermath of the murders, Sudan's s President Jaafar Numeiry reported that one of the terrorists (they had been promptly captured) confessed the entire operation had been orchestrated by Fatah headquarters in Beirut. In 1986 47 U.S. Senators (including Al Gore, then senator from Tennessee) sent a letter to Ed Meese, head of the Justice Department, saying they knew the Justice Department had State Department cables confirming Arafat’s role in the murder, and a tape of the intercepted message in which Arafat ordered the assassinations. They urged a warrant be issued for Arafat’s arrest and a criminal indictment be filed. The Reagan Justice Department stonewalled, denying any knowledge of such tape recordings, the sine qua non for taking legal action.

In April 2002 we republished in Outpost an article by Joseph Farah, editor of WorldNetDaily, “New Evidence Arafat Killed U.S. Diplomats.” Russ Braley, a retired long-time foreign correspondent for the New York Daily News, had explored boxes of papers in the National Archives’ Nixon Project (created when Congress took control of Nixon’s papers) and come upon several boxes of documents related to the 1973 kidnap-murders in Khartoum. The following is from Farah’s article:

“Though the files had been, according to Braley, thoroughly purged of information regarding intercepts of Arafat giving the explicit orders for the machine-gun murders of the diplomats, one surviving CIA report, found in NSA box 666 and enclosed in a message from [Secretary of State] Rogers to some 40 U.S. embassies, shows Arafat’s complicity in the terrorist crimes.

“The embassies were instructed to convey the information to foreign governments ‘orally only,’ due to its sensitivity: ‘Begin text. The Black September Organization (BSO) is a cover term for Fatah’s terrorist operations executed by Fatah’s intelligence organization, Johaz al-Rasd. The collapse of Fatah’s guerilla efforts led Fatah to clandestine terrorism against Israel and countries friendly to it. Fatah’s funds, facilities and personnel are used in these operations. There is evidence that the BSO [Black September Organization] operation in Khartoum was carried out with substantial help from Fatah’s Khartoum office and applauded by Fatah radio stations in Cairo and Beirut...

“For all intents and purposes no significant distinction now can be made between the BSO and Fatah. Four of Fatah’s 10-man command, including [Fatah Deputy Chief Salah] Khalaf, the planner and director of the Munich and Khartoum operations, are identified as BSO leaders. Fatah leader Yasser Arafat has now been described in recent intelligence reports as having given approval of the Khartoum operation prior to its inception.”

This smoking gun discovery by Braley never made it past WorldNetDaily. Then as now the media turned its back. (For decades the mainstream media portrayed Black September as a revolt against Arafat’s leadership and said he disapproved of its methods.) Today, as Caroline Glick notes in her Jerusalem Post column (Jan. 1), the media have shown no interest in the newly released State Department material, with a Google search showing none of the major news networks or national newspapers picking up the story.

Media that hype the most minor scandal or hoped-for-scandal (look at the recent feeding frenzy over the supposed leak of CIA employee Valerie Plame’s name) are disinterested in a truly massive decades-long cover-up with huge political consequences. Glick asks: “How many lives would have been saved if the U.S. had not been intent on upholding Arafat’s big lie? How would such a U.S. policy have impacted the subsequent development of sister terror organizations like Hizbullah, al-Qaeda and Hamas, all of which were founded by members of Arafat’s terror industry….Imagine what the world would have looked like if, rather than clinging to Arafat’s big lie that he and his Fatah terror organization were central components of Middle East peace, the U.S. had captured and tried Arafat for murdering its diplomats and worked steadily to destroy Fatah.”

Sadly, the release, finally, of the incriminating material does not signify any change in U.S. policy which continues to be the whitewashing of terror leaders. In the tradition of his mentor Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas continues the same double game while the U.S. – backed by a cooperative media -- plays the same role of willing dupe. One need look no further than Abbas’ most recent major speech in Ramallah on January 11. Yes, as the AP reported, Abbas called for rival factions in the PA to “respect each other” but, as the AP failed to report, he went on to say “let our rifles, all our rifles, all our rifles, be aimed at the Occupation.” Nor did the AP or the hundreds of English-language articles on the speech bother to mention that Abbas went on to use the Koran to claim Jews “are corrupting humanity on earth.”

And what is the U.S. response to the blatant anti-Semitism of the speech and the call to arms against Israel? Why, the most fulsome praise for Abbas. Standing beside him in Ramallah three days after his speech, Condoleezza Rice declared “I want everyone to know, particularly the Palestinian people, how much we admire the leadership of President Abbas as a leader of the Palestinian people.” The effusive panegyrics are accompanied by a policy of arming Abbas’ security forces, notably Force 17, with $86.4 million currently scheduled to be devoted to this effort. There can be no question the arms and training will go to killing Israelis. As Aaron Klein notes on WorldNetDaily, some in Force 17 are openly members of Fatah’s “military wing,” the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (which along with Islamic Jihad has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing in Israel over the past two years). Klein quotes Abu Yousuf, an avowed member of both Force 17 and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, who says “It’s unnatural to think these American weapons won’t be used against the Israelis.”

Moreover, although the ostensible U.S. purpose in arming Abbas’ forces is to undercut Hamas, in fact the weapons quickly travel to Hamas. The forces of Abbas are riddled with Hamas supporters. Hamas spokesman Abu Oubaida told Klein: “I am sure that like in the past, this $86 million from America will find its way to the Hamas resistance via the honorable persons in the Fatah security organizations, including in Force 17. I can confirm 100 percent that this money and purchased weapons will find its way to Hamas.” The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 12) quotes Bassam Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, who put it succinctly: “What Mr. Bush will do with this money is double the number of thugs.”

Meanwhile in Newspeak worthy of Orwell’s 1984, a U.S. document announces that the $86 million will “assist the Palestinian Authority presidency in fulfilling PA commitments under the Road Map (peace plan) to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza.”

So the surreal “peace processing” goes on. It is as likely to achieve “two states living peacefully side by side” as, in columnist Ralph Peter’s apt analogy, a rabbi is likely to become king of Saudi Arabia.

Bruce Thornton

There’s an Elvis Costello lyric that goes, “I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.” Before 9/11 that was pretty much my philosophy. Working in the university, I was daily treated to the postmodern mumbo-jumbo, multicultural noble-savage fantasies, and left-over leftist delusions that are all so transparently incoherent and severed from reality that disgust seemed a waste of energy. The detached amusement of a Victorian explorer studying some bizarre cargo-cult seemed more appropriate and was less stressful.

Then came 9/11, and the bloody truth of Richard Weaver’s dictum that “ideas have consequences” made amusement reprehensible. That disaster was the fruit of years of bad ideas, particularly the West’s institutionalized self-loathing that demonizes its own ideals and values and culture while idealizing those of the “other” no matter how dysfunctional. Our intellectuals, academics, and artists for decades had been telling the world that the West, particularly America, is the villain of history, its crimes of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, resource depletion, and pollution responsible for all the world’s ills. Was it any wonder, then, that one of the West’s fiercest historical enemies, Islam, should take our self-flagellation seriously and conclude that we deserved to die for the crimes which we ourselves keep admitting we are guilty of?

And given that even after 9/11 those same bad ideas continue to addle our thinking and compromise our attempts to defend our civilization against a smart, committed enemy, disgust is the only legitimate reaction to the behavior generated by such stale received wisdom. Evidence of this cultural disease crams the daily media, but the West’s response to Israel’s sixty-year struggle against annihilation remains exhibit number one.

Israel has always been and remains the key to understanding the war against Islamic jihad. The creation, in the heart of the Muslim empire, of a modern Western state — for a people, moreover, long scorned as inferior dhimmi, spiritual renegades who had rejected the ultimate revelation of Allah and thus were legitimately deprived of their ancestral land — was merely the crowning insult marking Islam’s decline from its high tide at Vienna on September 11, 1683. The counter-attack against the West, then, the jihad to recover the lands bestowed upon Muslims by Allah, would start in earnest with the struggle against Israel. So in 1948 the Arab nations rejected the U.N.’s resolution creating Israel and a Palestinian Arab state — the U.N. being a Western institution utterly alien to the values and ideals of Islam in any case — and sent its armies to destroy the “Zionist entity.” That attempt failed, as did two more. Muslim Arabs shifted the struggle to wearing down Israeli resolve with terrorism, while their propaganda exploited the spiritual, cultural, and intellectual corruption of the West.

Of the many bad ideas exploited by the jihadists — the Marxist-inspired demonization of imperialism and colonialism, the sentimental Third-Worldism that idealizes the non-Western “other,” the juvenile romance with revolutionary violence — moral relativism has been the most lethal. The failure to discriminate between the aggressor and the victim — to make a distinction between killing in order to obliterate a people, and killing in order to defend oneself against such an existential threat — has created the notion of the “cycle of violence,” the morally moronic notion that the violence of aggression and the violence of defense are indistinguishable, each a reflex responding mindlessly to the other.

Yet the “morality” is not quite as “equivalent” as it first appears, for beneath these condemnations of some abstract “cycle” lurks a concrete, severe judgment of Israel’s primal guilt. Even though Israel is as internationally legitimate as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, other nations created in the fallout of the Ottoman Empire’s demise, it alone is to blame for illegitimately “occupying” the lands of its ancestors, and so must be the first to exercise restraint, make concessions, and “break the cycle of violence.”

The latest example of this moral incoherence can be found in the title of ex-President Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. The use of “apartheid” to describe the measures Israel is forced to take to defend its citizens from being blown up by murderers is obscene. It recalls the U.N. resolution that condemned Zionism as racism and that was rescinded only because the U.S. threatened to withhold funds. Carter’s use of this word bespeaks either profound ignorance or an animus against Israel whose roots one can only speculate on. Carter’s harping on the “Israel lobby,” the latest model of that old “Elders of Zion” calumny in which nefarious Jews rule the world, suggests that Carter may harbor some unpleasant prejudices.

I don’t know if Carter and other rabid critics of Israel are anti-Semites. But how else explain the relentless, irrational hatred of Israel, and the exacting standards by which Israel alone is judged? By some estimates, since World War II, 25 million people have died in various conflicts. Eight thousand deaths have resulted from the conflict between Israel and Palestinian Arabs, which ranks Israel forty-sixth on the list of lethal conflicts. (To put those 8000 in context, remember that Jordan killed many more Palestinians during the “Black September” war of 1970.) Yet the U.N. has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than the other forty-five combined. And let’s not forget that whatever violence Israel has used, or mistakes it has made, has resulted from its attempts to defend itself against much larger national armies and terrorists driven by hatred to “wipe Israel from the map,” as the president of Iran has put it — with nary a peep from the U.N., which has been just as silent about the conclave of Holocaust deniers recently hosted by Iran.

The hatred of Israel, then, does not result from the universal principle that those states killing others or “occupying” their lands deserve condemnation by the international community. Even if Israel were “illegally occupying” the land of others — which it isn’t, by any just reading of history; and even if Israel didn’t kill Palestinians out of self-defense — which in nearly every case it does; in short, even if Israel were as guilty as its detractors claim, the intensity of its demonization would still be irrational, given the numerous other aggressors whose toll of victims and brutality of oppression dwarf even the worst caricature of Israel’s behavior.

Anti-Semitism of course isn’t the only explanation for the hatred of Israel. Anti-Americanism is another important factor. The appeasement of terrorists and petro-blackmailers also figures in some states’ behavior. National self-interest, as in France’s bid to increase its global stature by currying favor with Arab regimes, helps to explain the willingness to sell out Israel. Those idealizations mentioned earlier of dark-skinned “others” battling against “neo-colonialism” and “neo-imperialism” have transformed terrorist murderers into dashing “freedom-fighters.” Yet when you parse carefully criticisms of Israel like those made by Carter, old stereotypes of grasping Jews plotting to rule the world keep surfacing.

Here is where the West’s institutionalized self-hatred comes in. For modern anti-Semitism has little to do with medieval hatred of Christ-killers and well-poisoners, and everything to do with the anxieties and dislocations wrought by modern capitalism, industrialization, and urbanism. The Jew is hated because he is the embodiment of these forces, as well as the supposed beneficiary and manipulator of them. Thus the Jew becomes the concrete emblem of modernity’s “creative destruction” whose costs are intolerable to some, not just to those left behind but also to those in the West who have benefited from the widespread affluence and freedom created by modern capitalism.

One of the biggest losers in the race to become modern has been the Muslim Arabs. So it is no surprise that these days the traditional Islamic disdain of the conquered dhimmi has been married to Western anti-Semitic fantasies of Jewish cabals pulling all the levers of modernity from international finance to the media. And these caricatures find willing allies among Westerners who hate their own culture as much as do radical Muslims, and who indulge, under cover of “anti-Zionism,” the same vicious stereotypes.

This supremely bad idea—that the modern West and its defining cultural cargo of free market capitalism, individualism, rationalism and liberal democracy are the engines of global evil, and that Jews and Israel are the most dangerous embodiments of this evil—continues to fuel the jihadists rage and to weaken the West’s resolve. The stakes are too high for this suicidal notion to arouse in us anything but disgust.

Bruce Thornton teaches classics at California State University, Fresno. This article appeared Dec. 20 on www.victorhanson.com

Michael Teplow

It was during this past High Holiday season that the residents of Karnei Shomron were rudely awakened. The normally pastoral quiet in these hills of Samaria was broken by the pounding sound of earth moving equipment. Despite declarations in the late summer by Israeli government leaders that the Olmert Convergence Plan is no longer relevant, the tractors in front of our houses said otherwise.

It is widely known that for the past two years Israel has been constructing a separation fence along the former Green Line, separating the areas of Judea and Samaria from pre-67 Israel. Much of the fence has already been completed along the Green Line. What is less well known is that secondary fences have been planned for certain settlement blocs, such as the Gush Etzion bloc, the Karnei Shomron-Kedumim bloc, and the Elkana-Ariel bloc. Recently, the construction work on these fences has begun in the Karnei Shomron, Emanuel and Efrat areas.

I was still in mourning over the tragic destruction of Gush Katif and the communities of the northern Shomron, when I received a wake up call from a neighbor. "Michael, the tractors are working in front of our houses building the Fence. We have to do something." I was in no mood to once again take on the Israeli government and army. The mind-boggling tragedy of the evacuations over a year ago had left a cavernous hole in my heart. Yet, I knew that we no longer had the luxury of time.

The dangers that the Fence posed were obvious to me. The army claims that the Fence will prevent terrorist attacks, and yet the Kassam missiles crashing into Sderot, and the Katyusha rockets of this past summer flying over the Lebanese border proved that fences alone cannot provide adequate protection for the Israeli population. Experts are emphatic that the only effective way to fight terror is through military penetration of the territory occupied by the terrorists. The Fence is a placebo to our people, who are desperate to live in peace. It was approved by the government because our leaders are too frightened to adopt effective plans that require invading territory presently controlled by the Palestinian Authority. And so, out of fear of placing Israeli soldiers in the kasba of Shechem and Jenin, and out of desperation to show that they are "doing something," it was decided to build a fence between "us" and "them."

What is planned for the Karnei Shomron area is a 2-3 meter tall barbed wire fence on a low concrete base with electronic motion detectors. The Fence is being built a mere 300 meters from our back yards, so that a potential terrorist need not cross the fence in order to shoot directly into our back yards and on our houses. The Fence will separate the houses of Karnei Shomron from thousands of acres of our land owned either by the state of Israel or purchased by private Jewish owners, thereby preventing our community from expanding onto these land reserves that were intended for its expansion. Moreover, the Fence will separate the residents of Karnei Shomron from the main road, requiring the army to build a new road in the middle of the Kane River nature reserve. Not only will the new road destroy the wildlife in this nature reserve, but it will force the Jewish residents of the area to travel on a valley road that will pass between two Arab villages overlooking the road – thereby allowing the villagers to shoot upon us without even leaving their houses. Presently, the road we use is a mountain road that uses the high ground, making shooting attacks from within the Arab villages extremely difficult.

Despite these dangers, the former Israeli government thought it could convince the Jewish population of Yesha (the organization representing Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria) to support the Fence by offering to encircle large settlement blocs, "attach them" to the pre-67 parts of Israel, and thereby create a de-facto annexed area. Perhaps as a result of the up-hill battle against the Disengagement Plan, or the tedious struggle over the past 12 years as a result of the Oslo accords, many leaders of Yesha agreed to the proposal, arguing it was impossible to fight against the Fence, and we must make the best of a tough situation. But then, primarily due to the intervention of the Israeli Supreme Court, the intended settlement blocs were chopped into thin slivers, making their defense practically impossible. A group of residents in Karnei Shomron quickly formed, and we decided to prepare ourselves for a struggle against the Fence, understanding that it was much better for us to be placed outside it, and try to stop its construction wherever possible.

Local parlor meetings were held, a "Power Point" presentation was created, and an internet site was set up in order to begin educating residents of the danger of the Fence (this can be seen at: www.stopthefence.up2.co.il ). A protest was held over Sukkot where 150 people participated – not bad for a community of 1200 families! A petition was circulated, and soon the majority of the residents will have signed their name. After our months-long efforts, it is now common knowledge that the majority of Karnei Shomron is against the Fence. In addition, local army experts were contacted, and a paper was drafted explaining the military dangers the Fence will cause.

Soon, residents of Kedumim and Efrat joined us. The word is spreading like wild-fire – the Fence is "bad for the Jews", and yes with some efforts, we can stop its construction. We have been contacting the Israeli media, and stories have appeared in both print and television. On seeing the large-scale grass-roots response to our efforts, the Yesha Council stated that it too is against the Fence, and will work to prevent its construction. We have begun efforts to lobby individual Knesset Members. We believe that the following argument will convince most Knesset Members, irrespective of their political affiliation: (a) The Fence is strongly opposed by both the Jewish residents and the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria. (b) The Fence is being constructed at a cost of approximately 10 million shekel for every kilometer! (c) If you are looking for a place to cut the government budget, here is the perfect project to cut.

Yes, the battle is difficult, and those waging it are few. Nonetheless, we are confident that construction of the Fence can be stopped. We have faith that Jewish settlement in all of Eretz Yisrael will flourish, and the army will perform the necessary actions in order to bring peace back to our Land.

The writer is a resident of Karnei Shomron since 1990 and practices law in Tel Aviv.

Nidra Poller

Square Theodor Herzl was dedicated with appropriate ceremony on a sunny afternoon last July. The unassuming square – actually a triangle, in a downscale corner of the 3rd arrondissement where Asian wholesale jewellery shops alternate with remnants of the once flourishing schmatte district – was chosen as the site to honour the father of political Zionism on the centennial anniversary of the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus. It was a matter of a few weeks before vandals painted over the Square Herzl street sign, turning it into a signpost of the problematical situation in France, where self-conscious ceremonial acknowledgment of past crimes is given a new coat of
dangerous Jew-hatred.

Any description of the dangers facing Jews in France today will sound alarmist because it can be countered by ample evidence to the contrary. A French Jew can wake up in the morning, go through the day and retire at night without encountering a single real-life anti-Semitic incident. French Jews are prominent in every sphere, financially successful, respected as intellectuals, visible in the media and show business, elected to political office. Three major contenders for nomination as their party’s presidential candidate – Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Nicolas Sarkozy and Laurent Fabius – are Jewish or half-Jewish. And yet important thinkers – Shmuel Trigano, Michel Gurfinkiel, Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Sibony, Jean-Claude Milner, among others – cast doubt on the future for Jews in France.

As if to demonstrate that doubt, six hundred French Jews made aliyah in late July 2006, while Hizbullah rockets were raining death and destruction on Israel and anti-Zionism was stoked up in France in reaction to ‘Israel’s war against Lebanon’.

The current wave of Jew hatred did not arise as a continuation or resurgence of the mid-twentieth-century European anti-Semitism that culminated in the Shoah, with the extermination of six million European Jews, the destruction of Yiddishkeit and the murmur of a more or less sincere ‘never again’. Ill-digested lessons of the Shoah have paved the way for the new Jew-hatred that has risen to fever pitch in Arab-Muslim nations and spread rapidly to Europe’s Muslim communities. Fellow-travelers promote this lethal hatred that is cloaked in ideals and ideologies – multiculturalism, post-colonial guilt and anti-Western resentment.

It was almost unthinkable in the immediate post-war years for Jews to return to Germany. Why did it seem so natural for survivors to return and pick up where they had left off in France? French collaboration was, perhaps, considered less evil than Nazi instigation. For decades France portrayed itself as a victim of
German tyranny; the former French Vichy official Maurice Papon claimed, at his 1997 trial for crimes against humanity, that he had collaborated with the Nazis in order to save Jews. France jumped into the Allied camp at the tail-end of the war and still thinks of itself as among the victors. And French culture has a particular talent for smoothing things over, balancing them out, prettying them up, talking them away. French Jews, like everyone else, enjoyed the benefits of thirty years of post-war peace and prosperity, ‘les trentes glorieuses’.

The community was reinvigorated in the Fifties by an influx of Jewish refugees from the Maghreb. In those days, feisty little Israel was admired by opinion-makers, French Jewish intellectuals stood at the forefront of humanitarian causes, participated in all the noble combats, mobilized in favour of decolonization and sailed blithely into the storm centre of 1967 and the subsequent downhill slide.

The roots and foundations of contemporary anti-Semitism – age-old persecution, Catholic anti-Judaism, right-wing fascism, left-wing repulsion – link the distant past to the present day. At different periods
in French history anti-Semitism has been countered by
values of tolerance, Enlightenment rationality, the assertion of secular values and an abiding strain of philo-semitism. The Napoleonic concord that granted French Jews all rights as individual citizens and no rights as a religious community is cited as a force that favours successful integration while leaving Jews vulnerable in times of stress because they cannot defend themselves collectively.

The historical approach may be misleading. A sufficiently broad perspective can demonstrate simultaneously that France has been particularly hospitable to Jews and, with equally convincing arguments, that France has periodically both welcomed and rejected Jews, exploiting their talents only to confiscate their wealth and kick them out. Europeans are often paralyzed by excessive focus on the past, which leaves them helpless to forge a better future. What lesson should be drawn from the ease with which the French collaborated in the mass extermination of European Jews in the mid-twentieth century?

The Vichy government was formed as a result of surrender to Nazi military aggression. The current danger to Jews arises from surrender to a strategy of soft invasion combined with a variety of jihad attacks, commonly described as terrorism. The historian Bat Ye’or has scrupulously documented the ‘Eurabian’ policy that has led to the installation of aggressive Muslim enclaves within European nations. By incorporating, enhancing and whitewashing Islamic Jew-hatred, French society has become increasingly hostile to Jews. By denying that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are the same rose with different names, French society has liberated itself from post-Shoah taboos.

The Jewish community reacted vigorously to the sudden outburst of anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence in 2000-2001; to no avail. No matter what form of action was attempted, no matter what groups were formed, no matter what previous influence was brought to bear, the result was equally disappointing. One by one, forthright voices fell silent. Whether the cases were pled in the law courts or in the court of public opinion, the verdict was the same: Jewish grievances were treated as neurotic, exaggerated, communitarian (clannish), Islamophobic, extremist, irrelevant.

United in expressing shock and indignation at the sudden deterioration of their situation, French Jews have now split into various camps: some have chosen exile, primarily to Israel or the United States; some writers and thinkers have slipped into the background and pursue their careers within the limits left to
them; some pursue a rather factitious activism that leads nowhere; many have decided to withdraw from the battle and cultivate their gardens.

A drop in the number of violent attacks against Jews or, more often, a cloak of silence that renders them invisible might suggest that the worst is behind us. The absence of ‘official anti-Semitism’ (as compared with the situation during the 1930s and 40s) is held forth as a sort of absolute ceiling, while official anti-Zionism thrives. An underlying hostility to the state of Israel, a deep-seated refusal to recognize Israel as a sovereign state, consistent alignment with Arab governments, excessive indulgence for Hamas, Hizbullah, Saddam Hussein and the little Hitler of Iran . . . this is the background music of France’s foreign policy. Anti-Zionism is a prerequisite for acceptance in academic circles and prestigious think tanks. Anti-Zionism, intimately associated with anti-Americanism, has soaked into the public mind, colouring thoughts and attitudes but no longer open to critical examination.

To understand how anti-Zionism permeates French society, it is essential to know something about French media. Whatever legitimate complaints might be made about media bias in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and other European countries, nothing can compare with the drastic lack of information in French media. It is worse than it was in the USSR – because at least Soviet citizens knew they were being fed propaganda. The French public exults in an illusion of a free press. Journalists are outraged at the suggestion that they are beholden to someone, anyone, whomever. Arrogant, misinformed French people delight in declaring that the American media are under government control, censored, bought, sold.

The French media speak with one and only one voice on questions of foreign policy. Is this done by unspoken rules, direct orders or survival instinct? I don’t pretend to know. The result is so striking, and yet it seems that generally well-informed people who do not follow French media day by day cannot imagine the mixture of inanity and propaganda fed to the public. Newspaper and magazine circulation is negligible compared to the UK and the US – the great bulk of French people get their news from radio and TV. Primetime newscasts, one half hour twice a day, are repetitive and nearly identical between the three big networks, two state-owned, France 2 and 3, one ‘independent’, TF1.

During the Hizbullah war last July, radio and TV newscasts opened systematically with: ‘On the xth day of the Israeli offensive against Lebanon . . .’ Hizbullah rocket attacks against Israel were tacked on at the end of the report, like an afterthought. The general population was fed a meticulously packaged version of the conflict and led to believe that French diplomacy had soared to new heights, bypassing Bush’s wrong-headed approach to the Middle East, successfully leading the international community into an exquisitely moral alternative to Israel’s US-backed ‘disproportionate’ war against Lebanon and its innocent civilians. President Chirac’s popularity rating jumped by 11 per cent.

France has the largest Jewish community in Western Europe (estimated at 550-600,000 and falling), the largest Muslim population (estimated at 6 to 10 million and multiplying), and the most fervently Zionist community in the Diaspora. More than half of the Jews in France are of North African descent, many of whom have family in Israel. Increasingly uncertain of their future in France, they draw closer to Israel. Young people go to study, retired people buy apartments, businessmen develop commercial relations. They are more likely to think of Israel as a haven than a high-risk destination.

Organized Jewish community leadership favours access over confrontation with the powers that be. Political heavies attend galas, dinners and conferences and make all the right noises. High government officials receive Roger Cukierman of the CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France, an umbrella organization representing all Jewish groups in France), Chief Rabbi Joseph Chaim Sitruk, presidents of Jewish associations, charities and student groups. It would be foolish to deny the benefits of access – an aura of prestige reflected on the Jewish community and practical measures such as police protection for synagogues and day schools – but it often leads to embarrassing compromises. Community leaders acting as interface with American and Israeli counterparts regularly praise France’s fabulous laws against anti-Semitism and neglect to mention that they are not enforced.

As the Jewish community shrinks, the Muslim population grows and occupies the scene; their misdeeds are hidden behind thick veils of euphemism, their qualities are exaggerated beyond belief. Jewish success is viewed as an imbalance or, worse, an injustice to be corrected; Muslim failure is attributed to Islamophobia, discrimination, disrespect, humiliation.

Religion is rejected in France today, but Islam is glorified. The absence of religious fibre leaves French society vulnerable to pressure from Islam, while a mixture of tolerance, exoticism and colonial nostalgia increases the attraction of Islam as fashion. France’s twenty-first-century New Look is distinctly third world.

France is in the grip of a grave crisis that has implications for the whole of Europe. European countries are fast approaching a crossroads, and do not seem to have any idea which way to turn. European women are not producing enough children to perpetuate their societies. An overwhelmingly Muslim immigrant population may ensure its own reproduction; it will not produce Europeans.

‘When synagogues burn the République smoulders,’ they chanted, more than one hundred thousand people, almost all of them Jewish, who marched from Place de la République to the Bastille in the spring of 2002, to stand up against anti-Semitism in France, show solidarity with Israeli victims of terrorism, and warn the Republic of imminent danger. The warning was ignored. Four years later the flames are more often directed at buses and the rocks are thrown at policemen. A church was torched at the beginning of November in la Duchère district near Lyon, near to where a synagogue was attacked in 2001. The French Republic is, without exaggeration, in danger. It is not rising to the challenge. The façade is cracking, revealing a breakdown of institutions, a deficit of democracy, an antiquated judicial system, an inadequate police force and rotting prison infrastructure. France, mired in humanitarian cant, has turned its back on meritocracy; it is losing its reputation for industrial innovation, losing its finesse, its intellectual prowess, its vitality. Talented, skilled, ambitious people are looking elsewhere for opportunity.

In this volatile situation the fate of Jewish citizens is just part of the collective uncertainty...only more so. Today the mobs are attacking the police, tomorrow the flames could leap in other directions. We have seen that nothing or no one stops them.

Nidra Poller is an American writer living in Paris. This is an abbreviated version of an article that appeared in The Jewish Quarterly in England, Winter 2006/2007. The website is: www.jewishquarterly.org

Ruth King

Last week, the Israeli press reported that Ehud Olmert took a few days off to have his lids surgically lifted to “improve his vision.” Cosmetic surgery only permits Nancy Pelosi to see to the left, so there is scant hope that Israel’s Prime Minister will be helped.

Under his befuddled stewardship, Israel’s enemies have learned that those who fire rockets and kill Israeli civilians will be treated with "restraint"; that tunnels burrowed to bring advanced artillery to terrorists will be ignored; that agreements can be violated with impunity and only result in more phantom agreements; that big concessions will be followed by even bigger ones.

There is not a single self-respecting Jew who did not feel pride in Israel’s military and its combination of proficiency, determination and discipline, but today the Arab world and Israel’s detractors gloat over Hezbollah's victory over Israel in Lebanon.

In The Beirut Star (Dec. 30) Arab journalist Rami G. Khouri wrote an article with the stinging title “Israel's Dominance May Be Going Into Slow Reversal: “…[A]fter the United States had given Israel weeks of extra warfare to hit Hizbullah….Israel…failed to make the Arabs cough up the soldiers.…Israel swallowed its words, put away its ultimatums and threats, and accepted cease-fires in both cases...Olmert met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, where it was announced that Israel would release $100 million of withheld Palestinian tax revenues and remove some checkpoints in the West Bank reversing his previous refusal to make such gestures or meet with the Palestinians before Shalit was released. Olmert met, talked and made concessions to the Palestinians, with Shalit and the captured soldiers still nowhere in sight.”

That comes from an enemy but on January 2, 2007 Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, (formerly the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies), issued an equally scathing summation: “The Lebanon war eroded Israeli deterrence among Arabs and others in the Middle East… underscored the problematic and fluctuating nature of Israel's strategic environment, damaged Israel's deterrent image, and exposed weaknesses in the Israel Defense Forces and the decision-making process in Israel."

Even Jordan's spurious kinglet, in an interview in Japan on December 28th, mocked Israel, repeating several times that Israel is no longer as strong as had been thought and declaring: “More and more countries in the region will now believe that the only way to get Israel to listen is through force and not negotiations.”

On the very day that the kinglet was deriding Israel, Olmert surprised the Israeli public by an unprecedented act....even by the high bar he had already set…. when the flags of the State of Israel and the terrorist Palestinian Authority flew side-by-side at the official Prime Minister’s Residence.

While the flag of Israel's enemies was fluttering and Olmert was kissing the posterior of Abbas, Israeli civilians in Sderot continued to be victims of daily and deadly rocket fire and have sued to withhold taxes because the government does nothing….absolutely zilch…to protect them. Well, really, Olmert has no time to visit Sderot….he’s on his merry way to China to see a less controversial wall. He has no time to deal with Israel's enemies, other than to offer them wider swaths of Israel's heartland.

On January 4th, 2007, he finally noticed the victims of Sderot. His spokes-lackey Miri Eisin, assured journalists that the al-Aqsa Brigades members firing the deadly rockets from Gaza are not affiliated with Fatah and don't take orders from Olmert's pal Abbas. This does not square with the fact that the leader of Al Aqsa, Abu Ahmed told Aaron Klein of World Net Daily: "The al-Aqsa Brigades is the military wing of the Fatah and the President Abu Mazen (Abbas) is the chairman of the movement…..All our activity is in accordance with the political line of Fatah, which consists of fighting the occupation until the creation of a Palestinian state. The rocket shooting is part of this vision."

What accounts for Olmert's behavior? Turpitude? Corruption? There is the questionable deal with American millionaire S. Daniel Abraham who had contributed large sums to his campaign and whose charities and goals mirror those of George Soros. Olmert sold his home to Abraham for $2.7 million, a sum way above market value, and arranged to lease the home for below market rates. In December 2006, Abraham was Olmert’s liaison for a meeting with the Syrian ambassador in the United States.

Is it that he avoided military service, a fact that has never been examined by Israel’s media? Even disabled people serve in Israel’s citizen army.

Have his pacifist wife and his seditious children influenced him? One son avoided the draft altogether and lives in the United States. The other promoted a group that paid recruits to refuse service in the “occupied territories.” The daughter serves as watchdog at check points to make sure that would be suicide bombers are not hassled entering Israel.

Could it be a form of Oblomovism? Oblomov was a character in Ivan Goncharov’s novel of that name written in the 1840’s. Oblomov is passive and inert while his financial advisers cheat him, servants steal from him and his friends betray him and steal his fiancé. As Goncharov describes him "All his anxiety resolved itself into a sigh and dissolved into apathy and drowsiness." Even before he became Prime Minister Olmert did say he was tired….really tired.

Now it transpires he has taken leave of reality altogether. On January 15 he rallied a meeting of his Kadima faction, telling them: "There has never been a more comfortable period for the State of Israel than the present period. We have to understand that reality is good and only the polls are not -- and thank God this is so." A tsunami of anti-Semitism is washing up over Europe; under Olmert's "leadership" Israel's fine army has suffered defeat at the hands of a terrorist militia; the Arab states, smelling blood, hover for the kill; the U.S. gears up to sell out Israel for the mere hope of dampening the chaos in Iraq -- and Olmert thinks Israel's condition has never been more "comfortable?" Will we next see Olmert riding naked in a chariot through the streets of Jerusalem inviting the public to admire his golden garments?

On February 14th, 1949 when the first parliament was convened in Jerusalem. Chaim Weizmann, the President of Israel, opened the ceremonies by reminding Israel’s newly elected legislators of their mandate.

“No nation in the world has suffered as we have, but at last the vision of redemption has been fulfilled. It is our lot to bear the heavy burden of responsibility for filling the gap which has been created within the ranks of our people with the murder of the best of its sons, the bearers of its standard and the carriers of its culture. Remember that the eyes of the whole Jewish world are upon us, and that the yearning and prayers of past generations accompany us. May we all be worthy of this great moment and this immense responsibility.”

Olmert remembers nothing of Jewish hopes or destiny. The Rorschach test for that imperiled people is if they recognize Olmert and everyone associated with his government as a national blot and drive them permanently out of public life.