The Jewish Revolution
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

Big Ideas In The Middle East
Martin Kramer

Sharia By Any Other Name
David Isaac

Netanyahu’s Back: More of the Same?
Ben Shapiro

A Moslem Hero
Rael Jean Isaac

British Boycott Their History
Ruth King

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

Outpost is distributed free to
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Herbert Zweibon

The Jewish Revolution by Israel Eldad, philosopher, journalist and underground leader, now reissued by his son Arieh Eldad, serves as a stirring reminder of what Zionism could and should be.

Eldad wrote the book three years after Israel’s brilliant victory in the 1967 War. Israel was at the height of her power, international standing and self-confidence. The seeming impossible dream of restoring Judea and Samaria to the Jewish people had in six short days been realized. Eldad believed that the state’s territorial achievements, its emergence as a geopolitical factor and the awakening of world Jewry to a new solidarity with the State of Israel had opened up the opportunity to fulfill a revolutionary Zionism for the redemption of the entire Jewish people.

In some ways Eldad was prescient. He noted the beginning of Zionist awakening among the Jews of the Soviet Union and believed it would one day become a tide that would carry millions of Soviet Jews to Israel. He believed that the reconversion of Palestine (the name Rome used to wipe out Jewish Israel) into Eretz Israel would go forward. And indeed a few years after the book was published the Gush Emunim movement began to create Jewish communities throughout Judea and Samaria.

Eldad was also prescient in identifying dangers from within, including an apologetic, defensive mindset and a Jewish sense of justice that had failed abroad and to which some Jews now sought to give full rein with a message of peace, love and happiness to the entire Middle East.

Nonetheless the book is full of hope and faith. Eldad writes: “Those parts of Eretz Israel that have been liberated with the nation’s blood and love cannot be given up. …Also from the point of view of our own sense of history and self-esteem such a withdrawal is inconceivable. It goes against our inherent patriotism, our firm conviction that we are not engaged in a campaign of conquest and colonization, but are coming back to Zion, our home.”

Eldad could not have conceived of the depths of the disaster to come. He could not have fathomed how, in little over thirty years, Israel would be acting, as Steve Feldman of the Zionist Organization of America puts it, “like a floundering business liquidating its holdings. Clearance sale. Going out of business after 59 years. Everything must go. No offer, no matter how unreasonable, will be rejected.” Those who guide the state have lost all self-respect, given up the will to live, forfeited even basic rationality. As Eldad’s son notes in the Afterword, the leadership of Israel has become a stone weighing down the Zionist revolution rather than a cornerstone in the edifice supporting it.

Eldad argues that “an essential non-conformity is the primary characteristic of the Jewish people.” This led to the heavy involvement of Jews in a series of harmful utopian ideologies and finally to the Zionist Revolution. Even this “essential nonconformity” seems to have vanished. Since Eldad wrote, large numbers of Israelis have jettisoned Zionism altogether, a development captured in the oft-used term “post-Zionism.” They are in headlong pursuit of “normalization,” oblivious to the impossibility of the Jewish state being “like all the nations.”

Painful as it is to read The Jewish Revolution in the light of its betrayal, Eldad reminds us that the re-emergence of the state after two thousand years showed that Eretz Israel lay hidden deep inside the heart of every Jew and was able to reemerge intact when the time came. There are many Jews in Israel with faith, courage and determination, who would respond to a leader prepared to reinvigorate Zionism, to defend Jewish rights, to make the state stand tall once again. A people that produced Herzl and Jabotinsky can reach again for the stars.

Rael Jean Isaac

The New Israel Fund

Prof. Gerald Steinberg, who heads Bar Ilan University’s Program on Conflict Management (one of the many nonexistent disciplines so popular in today’s academy) has written an article in The Canadian Jewish News “It’s Time for a Debate on the New Israel Fund,” which, he points out, has become one of the most wealthy and powerful institutions in Israel and the diaspora.

Steinberg notes that the NIF empowers “the most radical Israeli Arab voices” with one third of its annual budget going to over 20 organizations that “use the money to demonize and delegitimize the concept of Jewish sovereignty and equality among the nations.” Some, Steinberg complains, call Zionism racism and distribute an alternative constitution for Israel that would abolish the concept of a Jewish state. Steinberg wants to discuss the problem with the heads of the NIF “to realize our shared goals.”

Hello? Does Steinberg really think those who run the NIF are innocent of any knowledge of the nature of the outfits they fund? On the contrary, the less obnoxious recipients are simply cover for what has always been the core of NIF’s work—funding Israel’s enemies.

Seventeen years ago we at AFSI “told you so.” In 1990 we published a 37 page pamphlet The New Israel Fund: A Fund for Israel’s Enemies that pointed out that the largest single beneficiary of NIF funds was the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which engaged in relentless legal crusades on behalf of PLO terrorists. We described the background of NIF’s board of directors, noting that it was “an organization directed and staffed primarily by individuals with long histories of attacking Israel, who regard the New Israel Fund as a convenient vehicle for furthering their radical agenda.” We said the only difference between the NIF and other far left Jewish groups was that the NIF strove to conceal its political orientation to attract donors.

When our pamphlet appeared virtually every Jewish establishment organization virulently attacked us for supposedly defaming this fine charity. If early in NIF’s history Jewish organizations had condemned the organization (rather than the messenger), this poisonous outfit (many of whose chief donors are politically mindless rich Jews who donate because their friends do) could have been stopped in its tracks and at the very least, had its funding sharply reduced.

A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn

New Yorkers and indeed the entire country are in debt to Pamela Hall and the group of 150 activists in the Stop the Madrassa Community Coalition.

In a major stroke of multi-cultural folly Mayor Bloomberg (demonstrating his unfitness to be mayor let alone President) and school chancellor Joel Klein laid the groundwork for a deceptively packaged Islamist public school, to open for sixth graders this fall. The deception begins with the soothing name, the Khalil Gibran International Academy. Gibran was a Lebanese Christian poet, an exponent of tolerance who would have hated everything about the school.

That starts with the woman Klein chose as school principal, Yemeni-born Dhabah (Debbie) Almontaser, whose Islamist associations and views only became public thanks to the efforts of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition. The mayor and the chancellor turned a determined blind eye to the Coalition’s findings, including Almontaser’s links to the Hamas-tied CAIR (which even gave her an award) and her statements that “our foreign policy is racist; in the ‘war against terror’ people of color are the target.” But Almontaser did herself in after Pam Hall photographed T-shirts with the words “Intifada NYC” being sold at an Arab street fair by Arab Women Active in Arts and Media, an outfit that shares office space in Brooklyn with the Saba Association of American Yemenis of which, Daniel Pipes points out, Almontaser is board member and spokeswoman. Asked by The New York Post about the T-shirts, Almontaser said Intifada simply means “shaking off” and the shirts were “an opportunity for girls to express that they are part of New York City society…and shaking off oppression.” This was too much for Almontaser’s erstwhile advocates, including United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, and she was forced to resign.

Even here, the Department of Education refused to release the text of Almontaser’s letter of resignation until its hand was forced. No surprise here, for the letter reinforced the claims of her critics: portraying herself as victim, Almontaser wrote that “a small group of highly misguided individuals has launched a relentless attack on me because of my religion.” In a cynical ploy to undercut criticism Joel Klein has now appointed a left-wing Orthodox Jewish woman who does not even know Arabic as interim principal.
The Coalition continues its efforts to shut the madrassa down. Forced to fight the secretive Board of Education every step of the way, the Coalition used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the “Executive Summary” of the school’s program. As the Coalition noted, the summary was “actually a manual for creating an Islamist vocational school, one in which every activity is planned around creating social activists with an Arab supremacist mindset.” A change of principal will do nothing about this – the teachers, the curriculum have all been set in place by Almontaser.

At this writing the mayor and chancellor are still intent on opening the school. If they succeed they will be establishing a terrible precedent for publicly funded madrassas throughout the country.

So kudos to Pam Hall and the Coalition and a dunce hat not only to the mayor and school chancellor but to the ADL and the American Jewish Committee which have supported the school.

Correction

Frequent AFSI contributor Roger Gerber sends in a correction to an article in the July-August Outpost “A Ship that Changed the Middle East:”

“Victor Sharpe errs when he writes: ‘Geographical Palestine, the only portion set aside for a Jewish National Home by Great Britain in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, covered a mere 10,000 square miles. That area was further reduced through subsequent political decisions by the British Colonial Office.’

“The boundaries of Palestine were not specified in the Balfour Declaration. I know of no authority for claiming that the Balfour Declaration restricted the Jewish National Home to only 10,000 square miles. Bernard Lewis has written that the geographical term ‘Palestine’ has no meaning other than that contained in the British Mandate for Palestine. In fact, British Mandatory Palestine comprised over 46,000 square miles of which the present Kingdom of Jordan, which until 1946 formed part of Mandatory Palestine, consisted of 35,367 miles, or 77% of Mandatory Palestine.

“Mr. Sharpe’s reference to ‘a mere 10,000 square miles’ presumably refers only to the area encompassed by Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip and Israel within the green line (totaling about 10,400 square miles). Presumably it is the 1922 suspension of the Jewish National Home provisions of the Mandate in the Transjordan province of Palestine (not in Judea and Samaria) that is the ‘subsequent political decision by the British Colonial Office’ to which Mr. Sharpe refers.”

The College of Judea and Samaria

It gives us great pleasure to report that scientists in Israel’s fledgling College of Judea and Samaria, located in the community of Ariel in Samaria, have made significant progress in a promising new treatment for leukemia that would force cancer cells to shine, activating light-sensitive drugs that would then kill them without damaging healthy tissue nearby.

Three “I” Words

There has been a striking contrast between the Republican and Democratic candidate debates. While the Republicans have all talked of the danger of Islamic terrorism, the scrupulously politically correct Democrats have studiously avoided the “I” word. But what in the debates was universal was the absence of the word “Israel” and “Intifada.” In previous Presidential debates it was routine for candidates to express support for Israel – even Dhimmi Carter. This is yet another troubling sign of the way Israel has sunk in estimation even in this country.

JNF Funds Arabs

The Israeli attorney general has ruled that the Israel Lands Authority, which administers land owned by the Jewish National Fund, must make JNF land available to Arabs as well as Jews. Never mind that the charter of the Jewish National Fund says that the purpose of the corporation is “to be devoted to and expended in the purchase of land in Palestine for the settlement of Jews thereon.”

Hadassah Marcus points out that if the JNF wants to raise funds in the U.S. it will run into difficulty. In a decision in a case she had helped bring against the JNF (this one for its failure to fund projects in Judea and Samaria, despite its ads which showed Israel in its entirety, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan), the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court ruled: “Certainly a donor to a charity should be fully informed with respect to the use to which the contribution is being put and should not be misled into believing that the funds will be applied for one purpose when, in reality, they are being utilized somewhere else.”

Even some of the New Israel Fund’s donors might balk at their donations buying land for Israel’s hostile Arab minority. Perhaps the Israeli authorities will turn to Saudi Arabia to raise JNF funds.

Peres Forever

Over the years Roger Gerber and your editor have compiled several collections (still available from AFSI) of the babble of Israel’s shameful choice for President, Shimon Peres. We have said repeatedly that Israeli comedians failed to take advantage of the rich mine of material offered by this “holy cow.” Now, belatedly, this may be changing. In Haaretz Doron Rosenblum offers an imaginary dialogue between two Israelis about their new President. Here’s a small excerpt. One of them asks what Peres, given his age, can possibly do in the President’s office. The response:

“My friend, you’re forgetting with whom we’re dealing here. This is someone who, if you tossed him into the middle of the desert, all alone, wearing nothing but a loincloth and equipped with nothing more than a small canteen – within a month, you’d hear that in that location was built the Intercontinental Conveyor Belt for Forestation and Urbanization with branches in Los Angeles, Lichtenstein and San Remo…If I were UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon or whatever his name is, from this day on I’d be looking over my shoulder every morning. In fact, I also wouldn’t be complacent if I were Yo-Yo Ma.

“The cellist?

“The cellist, the trumpeter, the NATO secretary-general, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, the director of NASA, the King of Sweden, Philip Roth, Henry Kissinger, Stephen Hawking, Stephen King, Dr. Ruth Westheimer—God himself. All of them are going to be hearing very soon from the honorable national-global President Shimon Peres and hearing big-time. And that’s nothing. They say that President Bush awoke as if bitten by a snake and rushed to give his Middle East speech already this week for one reason alone: out of the fear that Peres would beat him to it with a vision for the Notaricon Valley or maybe it’s the Silidot.com Valley.”

If only Israeli newspapers and TV had kept up a steady diet of this sort of thing earlier Peres would have been laughed off the national stage (to Israel’s enormous benefit) many years ago.

Martin Kramer

US policy over the last decade has been very much influenced by big ideas designed to transform the Middle East. None of these ideas has worked, which is why Washington is being bombarded with new, alternative big ideas.

I have watched one of these ideas evolve over the past year, getting bigger and bigger, and I would go so far as to call it the enemy from within. But before I tell you what the enemy is, let us briefly look back at what has already gone wrong.

We must look back, because the debate today is the result of a decade of American failure in the Middle East. Three big American ideas or grand strategies for transforming the Middle East have failed over the last ten years: peace, globalization and democracy.

First, peace. That is the generic name, but you also know it under its brand name, the "new Middle East." In the 1990s, some observers began to argue that the conflicts in the Middle East had been put out of business by the end of the Cold War. The Soviets were not around anymore to back up their Arab clients, such as the PLO and Syria. Their weakness supposedly left them more amenable to joining the "peace process." If peace agreements between Israel and its remaining enemies could be nailed down in a diplomatic push, the Middle East could become a cooperative zone, like the European Union. Animosities would wane; borders would melt.

The brand name, "new Middle East," came from the title of a book published by Shimon Peres in 1993. Peres wrote: "I have earned the right to dream. So much that I dreamed in the past was dismissed as fantasy, but has now become thriving reality."

But not every dream comes true, and the failed pursuit of fantasies is not without cost. In reality, it turned out that Syria and the PLO, even without the Soviets behind them, were not going to be pushed or pulled into any "new Middle East."

Syria never came in, and the PLO stepped in at Oslo and then out again at Camp David. Yasser Arafat's intifada then turned the "new Middle East" into an object of ridicule, and the peace process went down with it.

Second big idea: globalization. Where diplomacy couldn't do the job, so the globalists said, economic forces would do it. Tom Friedman became the champion of this notion in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. There he wrote about the "silent invasion going on in the Middle East--the invasion of information and private capital through the new system of globalization."

The Arabs and Iranians would eventually have to put on what he called the "Golden Straitjacket." "As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket," he wrote, "two things tend to happen: Your economy grows, and your politics shrink." Friedman filled his book with anecdotes about another Middle East, full of wired, business-focused Arabs and Persians. His book became a bestseller, because it made Americans feel good: market forces would fix the world.

The United States tried to accelerate the process by organizing Middle East economic summits. And the United States punished bad guys with economic sanctions, which became the all-purpose jackknife of US Middle East policy.

Even by the late 1990s, it was obvious that economic sanctions were not taming the radicals. But the globalization idea finally came crashing down with the Twin Towers on September 11.

Globalization, it turned out, could also empower the wrong Arabs--most obviously, Osama bin Laden and the global jihad. They were using e-mail to plot terror acts, the banking system to transfer money and websites to post their videos, which were carried by Al-Jazeera via satellite to millions of viewers. Globalization in the Middle East, we now know, has not made politics shrink; it is making them expand, politicizing every corner of society, often against us.

If globalization wasn't going to cure the Middle East, what would?

Obvious, said the neoconservatives: democracy. The root cause of the problems in the Middle East, they said, is the absence of democracy and the continued rule of dictators.

The way to cure the Middle East was to shake it up by promoting democracy--first by forced "regime change" in Iraq and then by encouraging liberals across the Middle East. The president launched what he described as his "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East." It became known as the "Bush Doctrine."

Now that big idea has crashed, too. It has crashed, first, as a result of the maelstrom in Iraq, and second, as a result of the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and the fact that free elections everywhere end in victory for Islamist zealots.

The "forward strategy of freedom" is ending in a quest for an exit strategy from chaos. Poll after poll now shows that the majority of Americans think there is no chance of making Iraq into a model democracy, and that is understating it. Promoting democracy to Arabs is coming to be regarded in this country as the ultimate fool's errand.

So the three big ideas for transforming the Middle East--peace, globalization, democracy--all have been repulsed or hijacked by forces opposed to America's vision.

This has left us at one of those rare moments in Washington, when the playing field is suddenly made level for the competition of new big ideas. It happened after September 11, and it is happening now because of Iraq. And there is a big idea out there that is moving toward the center of the battlefield and that I have no hesitation in describing as the enemy from within. This big idea calls itself "engagement."

Its basic premise is this: the root cause of the pathology of the Middle East is... us. The Middle East has its problems, but everything we do just makes them worse. All the big ideas that have failed were about transforming the Middle East.

What we really have to do is first transform the United States--to get ourselves back over the horizon, as much out of the Arab line of sight as possible. And since Israel is our client and its treatment of the Palestinians is blamed on us, we have to pull Israel back--today.

To do that, we have to treat a domestic problem. Right now our policy towards the Middle East is being dictated by the Israel lobby, which got us into the Iraq war and which could get us into an Iran war. This is America's own pathology--the inability of our political system to resist the pressure of a highly motivated, aggressive and determined interest group, whose parochial interest now conflicts with the national one.

And as we pull back, say the engagers, we have to admit that our putative Arab friends are too weak to hold the line. The Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians are all weak reeds; the radical forces are stronger. So to manage our withdrawal, we have to talk to the stronger forces--to Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas. We have to "engage" them in a "dialogue" and find some shared interest with them, so that we can reposition ourselves safely and not leave chaos behind.

After all, they continue, radicals have interests, too. Perhaps if we get out of their line of sight, we might even be positioned to transform them--it is our policies that made them radical in the first place, so if we change those policies, it might make them reasonable. For in every radical resides a potential moderate and we have the power to bring him out, through humility and dialogue.

Now I hope that even in this abbreviated summary of "engagement," you can appreciate its appeal. Why fight what the Pentagon calls the "long war"--already longer than World War II--when we can send in the pinstripes and get better results?

It helps that many advocates of "engagement" call themselves "realists"--Americans are nothing if not realistic. And proponents of "engagement" come from the pinnacles of the foreign policy and academic establishment--here the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, there a chaired Harvard professor, and over there, a former national security adviser.

They call themselves realists. But the interesting thing is that "engagement," despite its realist pretensions, actually oozes optimism about the Middle East. And in a bizarre twist, its optimism is fixed first and foremost on Syria, Iran and the Islamists.

"Engagement" rests on the notion that these states and movements don't have big ideas or grand strategies of their own. What really drives them is "grievances." If we were only to address these "grievances," we could diminish their bad behavior--their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, their support for terrorism, their anti-American incitement.

I could give you lots of examples of "engagement-think," but I will confine myself here to one relating to Hamas. US policy toward Hamas has been to isolate it, sanction it and give Israel a wide berth to punish it. None of this has moderated Hamas, but it has arguably diminished its popularity. But here is Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, on how "engagement" would approach the problem.

US officials, he says, should "sit down with Hamas officials, much as they have with the leaders of Sinn Fein." And once they are all seated together, what should they discuss?

Haass thinks now is the time for the United States to outline a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement, including the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines. Then he adds: "The more generous and detailed the plan, the harder it would be for Hamas to reject negotiation and favor confrontation."

So "engagement" with Hamas is essentially about appealing to some Hamas sense of fair play--getting it to say "yes" by being "more generous." Here you have, in capsule form, the core optimism that infuses the "engagement" strategy--the idea that a movement whose leaders have vowed they will never, ever recognize Israel can somehow be talked out of it by acts of American generosity.

The flaw of "engagement" is the same flaw that has wrecked the last decade of US policy. It is yet another case of unfounded, unwarranted, unjustifiable optimism about the Middle East. Just as you could not turn Arafat into a man of peace (even with a Nobel peace prize ceremony), and just as you could not turn Iraqis into democratic citizens (even when their fingers turned purple), you cannot change Syria and Iran and Hamas and Hizbullah into our partners by sitting down with them.

That is because they have more than interests and more than grievances. They also have big ideas and grand strategies, just like we do.

The essence of their biggest idea is simple: America will never be anything but an enemy of their regimes, their culture and their religion. So every move they make has the purpose of pushing America back, out and away. Their big idea is served every time America is humiliated, reviled and defeated. They aren't interested in helping us to achieve final settlements or our visions of a "new Middle East." They are out to defeat us--and to replace us.

And nothing so feeds their big idea as our own defeatism. They were ecstatic when Haass wrote these words: "Less than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the American era in the Middle East ... has ended.... The second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end."

We're on the run. In a recent Newsweek, a report from Damascus by a veteran journalist described the mood in ruling circles as "cocky," because they overhear us. A Syrian analyst close to the regime has told the foreign press that Syria has its terms for "engagement," but the package, in his words, is "all or nothing."

So "engagement," which masquerades as realism, is as naive and ahistorical as any big idea America has produced about the Middle East. It envisions a fantasy new Middle East of radicals transformed, working with us over Iraq, proliferation and resolving the Palestine issue. This fantasy, if carried to its conclusion, would simply continue and complete the failures of the past decade. For although proponents of the idea give it the feel-good name of "engagement," in the Middle East, it looks, feels and smells like appeasement. It is emboldening our enemies, and it is leaving our allies bewildered.

Appeasement can work if your opponent has limited aims. But everyone in the Middle East knows that the aims of Iran, Syria and the Islamists are not limited, that every concession will give rise to a new demand, that every sop to violence will produce more violence.

"Engagement" is one more disaster just waiting to happen--one that would leave the Middle East under the thumb of Iranian nukes, Al Qaeda insurgents and Bashar al-Assad's mafia.

"Engagement" is the enemy within--because only we can so thoroughly defeat ourselves.

A process has to start of disabusing Americans of the notion that the pathologies of the Middle East have one root cause and one grand fix. There are many different pathologies in the Middle East and no single fix. For some of the pathologies, alas, there may be no fix at all.

This is an edited version of a speech Martin Kramer delivered to a Washington Institute for Near East Policy program in Beverly Hills on November 29, 2006. It was published on his blog site and is available on the Jerusalem Post online.

David Isaac

[Editor’s note: Here is an example of “engagement” in action, what Kramer calls the “big new idea,” as the U.S. “engages” the Muslim Brotherhood.]

“Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” – Muslim Brotherhood

On July 25, The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article revealing that U.S. policymakers have been meeting with one of the most radical elements in the Arab world.

In this instance, the U.S. government has been holding regular meetings with a group controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood in the delusory hope that this will help bring democratic reform to Syria.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist organization whose credo is that the Koran is the "sole reference point for ... ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community ... and state." It seeks to create an Islamic theocracy throughout the Middle East and, ultimately, the world.

It established the terrorist group Hamas. It’s the spiritual father of Al Qaeda and, as The Wall Street Journal article points out, its intellectual leader inspired Osama bin Laden. With this sort of resume, one would not think that the administration’s first reaction would be, “Great. Let’s meet!”

It seems that our State Department and National Security Council has added a new ripple to Bush’s doctrine stated on Sept. 20, 2001 that, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Now there’s a third option. “If you are a founder of terrorist organizations, we may use you as a consultant for democratic change.”

To ask the Muslim Brotherhood to bring democracy to Syria would have been like asking Saddam Hussein to choose his own successor. We didn’t because the difference would have been negligible.

It’s almost comical to read about the assurances to U.S. diplomats by the Syrian Brotherhood that it has renounced violence. It’s no big deal to renounce violence when violence really isn’t an option.

At one point, the Syrian Brotherhood engaged in all kinds of violence against the Alawite regime, including an elaborate assassination campaign in the 1970s that culminated in an attempt on Syrian President Assad in 1980. The Brotherhood’s back was finally broken with the Syrian government’s massacre of 20,000 in the city of Hama.

Unable to establish a Syrian theocracy through violent means, the Syrian Brotherhood now “dedicates” itself to democratic means. Their reassurances seem to be enough to assuage U.S. officials. But means and goals are not the same thing and Sharia law imposed by ballots is no less merciless than one imposed by bullets. Democracy will never square with the Brotherhood’s core principle that the Koran rules all. For such a group, democracy can only mean one election, one time, one choice.

What the administration’s move really demonstrates is its desperation. In the nasty, brutish world of the Arab Middle East, they play for keeps, so moderate elements are scattered and powerless. The choices are harsh and harsher. Some may say that’s reason enough to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s realpolitik: the best of bad choices.

But there’s another way. Rather than deal with bad actors, deal in principles. We’ve stated that we are at war with terror. If Syria won’t respect Iraq’s borders and sends its terrorist proxies to attack our troops, then we won’t respect its borders either.

If a namby-pamby latte drinker like this writer can turn up the locations of Syria’s terror camps with a quick Google search, it shouldn’t be too difficult for our armed forces to do so as well. A few well-aimed Daisy Cutters would have a far more efficacious role in reducing Syria’s influence in the Middle East than endless meetings with a group which, if it ever gained power, would set up an Islamic state.

America has a long history working with the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s fine as far as it goes. We just have a habit of forgetting our new friend is still our enemy. Josef Stalin became Uncle Joe. Muslims battling the Soviets became freedom fighters. What we ended up with was the Iron Curtain and 9-11.

If the administration could assure us that it intends to break us of this habit, that after it helps the Muslim Brotherhood bring democracy to Syria, it would then be prepared to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood should it go back on its democratic promises, that would be one thing.

Although this writer personally doesn’t have a terrorist resume, should the administration choose this course of action, he is prepared to meet with them as a consultant for democratic change.

David Isaac is a freelance writer in Los Angeles

Ben Shapiro

He’s baaack. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has retaken the Likud Party leadership. Netanyahu, elected Prime Minister in 1996, lost his 1999 re-election campaign; he then dropped out of politics for several years before becoming Foreign Minister and Finance Minister under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, before Sharon’s creation of his own political party.

Netanyahu has historically been a center-right politician—which is to say, he has given up less land than both his predecessors and successors. He is not, however, an ideological opponent of handing away land to terrorists. He opposes such capitulation when it is politically advantageous to do so—he resigned from the Likud leadership in 2005 when Ariel Sharon rammed through unilateral surrender of the Gaza Strip, thereby gaining credibility within the Likud Party. He accepts capitulation when he believes it is politically advantageous to do so—he signed over 13 percent of Judea and Samaria in the un-implemented Wye River Accords in 1998.

Netanyahu’s greatest strength is his unwavering commitment to free market principles. Founded by socialists, Israel has its share of committed socialists as well as socialists by habit; it also has its share of parties, religious and non-religious, who enjoy living off the public dime. Netanyahu is a revolutionary politician with regard to economics—he has consistently championed free enterprise.

Netanyahu’s commitment to economic freedom should be applauded, but his commitment to security remains questionable. Netanyahu now finds himself in the uncomfortable position formerly occupied by Ariel Sharon: the bulwark against internal rightward pressure.

That rightward pressure is embodied in Moshe Feiglin, former leader of Zo Artzeinu and ardent opponent of any land-for-peace blackmail by the Palestinian Arabs. Feiglin led his supporters into the Likud Party several years ago in an attempt to take over Likud-–what commentator Hillel Halkin (a titular rightist but actual leftist on Israel) termed a “hostile takeover.” Feiglin’s “hostile takeover” would actually restore Likud to its charter, which opposes the creation of any Palestinian state. His detractors label him a religious extremist–he has the temerity to invoke the Bible while discussing security policy–but Feiglin’s success within the Likud demonstrates the growing recognition within Likud that the strategy of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu has largely been Labor-lite.

And so Netanyahu has campaigned against Feiglin the same way Sharon did, by labeling Feiglin an opponent of Likud ideals, an outsider to be scorned. Sharon’s opposition to Feiglin led him to exit Likud altogether; Netanyahu’s opposition to Feiglin may lead him to attempt a party purge in order to cater to centrist Israelis.

This would be the Israeli equivalent of Rudy Giuliani attempting to oust the religious right component of the Republican Party base. Likud would become a perpetual minority party, particularly since current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the Sharon-created Kadima Party parrots the center-right position occupied by Netanyahu, albeit in slightly more liberal fashion. While Olmert, the architect of the disastrous Israeli incursion into Lebanon, remains insanely unpopular-–his approval ratings clock in at an unheard-of eight percent-–Netanyahu may fare no better once in office. He will then be splitting the Israeli centrist vote with Kadima; Labor would monopolize the left, while the right, ousted by Likud, would splinter between a bevy of religious parties.

More dangerously, if Netanyahu’s prospective purge is successful, Netanyahu will have even less reason to abandon the failed Israeli security policy of slow suicide. Establishment Israeli politicians embrace the strange notion that hewing to the center – bleeding Israel dry through concessions, while simultaneously, hollowly insisting that the Palestinian Arabs keep their side of the bargain-–will lead to continued electoral power. It’s a mistake (no Israeli prime minister has served a full term since Yitzchak Shamir, 1986-1992), and it’s a mistake that leads to dead Israelis.

Ben Shapiro is a third-year student at Harvard Law School. He is the author of Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth. This article appeared on the site of the Family Security Foundation on August 16.

Rael Jean Isaac

At a dinner sponsored by the Hudson Institute on August 2, I was privileged to hear Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, editor of the Dacca (Bangladesh) English language paper The Weekly Blitz (also available on-line) which he describes as “the only Zionist newspaper in the Moslem world.”

Forty-two years old, Choudhury is that rarest of breed, a faithful Moslem who, in the belly of the beast, publicly dissents from the stifling orthodoxy of hatred and extremism that characterizes the Islamic world. There are a handful of other outspoken Moslem-born men and women (mainly the latter), but while their heroism is unquestionable, most live in the West where, although their lives remain in danger, their right to speak is at least upheld by the government. Choudhury lives in Bangladesh where he is currently on trial on spurious charges of sedition, treason and blasphemy before an Islamist judge and faces the death penalty.

A few days after the Hudson Institute dinner Choudhury returned to Bangladesh for his next court date, set for August 17 (on his appearance in court postponed to September 23).

Most of the best known dissidents, moreover, alienated by the prevailing extremism, are no longer practicing Moslems. Choudhury finds grounds for his support of Jews and Israel in Islam. “In the Koran, God has assured the dignity of the Jewish people and tells us that the land of Israel is only for the Jews,” he notes.

Why did Choudhury choose to return rather than ask for a sure-to-be-granted asylum? The question, doubtless uppermost in the minds of his listeners, was raised in the question and answer period. Choudhury responded that this was just what the Islamic extremists wanted. “I will fight in my own country. If someone is willing to say no to jihad he must say it on the ground.” On practical grounds, too, Choudhury observed that if he were to take political asylum, others in Bangladesh would lose heart and he wants to show them you can stand up against the extremists at home. “I have to give them confidence by being there. If I abandon them, why should they join me?” Choudhury says that while he was alone at the time of his arrest, gradually he has been winning support, especially from Hindus and Bahais (around 17% of the population is not Moslem) but also increasingly among Moslems.

Choudhury’s crime? He had accepted an invitation to speak at a Hebrew Writers Association Conference in Israel in 2003. Arrested at the airport in Dacca before he could start on the trip, he was imprisoned and tortured for ten days as the authorities vainly tried to make him confess he was an Israeli spy. He spent the next 17 months in solitary confinement, his cell the size of a table, the diet miserably inadequate, denied medical treatment. To him, most painful of all, he was not allowed to go to his mother’s funeral.

Susan Rosenbluth, editor of The Jewish Voice and Opinion, who has been a staunch supporter since she learned of the case, offers an in-depth summary in her newspaper on which what follows draws heavily. Choudhury had aroused the wrath of the Islamists months before his arrest, by what he wrote in his newly established paper The Weekly Blitz. Choudhury condemned terrorism and the propagation of hatred by clerics, supported the free exchange of ideas and, most unforgivable of all, argued that the Bangladesh government should recognize Israel and establish diplomatic and trade relations with her. What’s more he included in his paper contributions by Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, head of the Muslim Association in Rome, who like Choudhury calls himself a “Muslim Zionist” and finds the Jewish right to Israel anchored in the Koran, Yehudit Barsky of the American Jewish Committee; and Dr. Yehuda Stolov of the Jerusalem-based Interfaith Encounter Association.

On being arrested, Choudhury used his cell phone to call the man he had “met” on the internet several months earlier, Dr. Richard Benkin of Chicago, the man he now calls his brother. As Rosenbluth points out, Benkin turned out to be the friend everyone in trouble should have. He wrote articles, sought out politicians, the media, Jewish organizations, human rights organizations. The first big payoff came when Benkin’s Congressman Mark Kirk (R, Illinois) met with Bangladeshi ambassador Shamsher Chowdhury (no relation—the name is common in Bangladesh) who agreed to help secure Choudhury’s release and indeed he was set free early in 2005. (Dr. Benkin reached out repeatedly to his senator, Barack Obama, with no success whatever.)

However, despite the assurances of the ambassador, the case was not dropped. In September 2006 an Islamist judge, Mohammad Momin Ullah, ordered the case to proceed on the grounds that Mr. Choudhury had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by praising Christians and Jews and damaging the image of Bangladesh.

Benkin’s next major achievement came in the same month that Judge Ullah ordered the case to go on. Benkin mobilized a fellow former student at the University of Pennsylvania Glenn Oppenheim, who contacted The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens. Stephens (who introduced Choudhury at the Hudson Institute dinner) published an account of Choudhury’s plight in October 2006 and contacted the U.S. embassy in Dacca. The embassy made it clear it had no interest in the case, considering Choudhury, as Stephens puts it, “a nuisance.” Undaunted Stephens, along with Rep. Kirk and Dr. Benkin, turned to Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky who put the screws on the U.S. embassy in Dacca which finally agreed to have monitors at each step of the trial. “That way, at least, we knew he was still alive,” Stephens noted.

Other members of Congress, notably Nita Lowey (D-NY), Steven Rothman (D-NJ), Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and Tom Lantos (D-CA) became active. In Nov. 2006 Kirk and Lowey introduced House Resolution 2006 calling on the Bangladeshi government to drop all charges against Choudhury. In March 2007 it passed overwhelmingly, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) was the only one to vote against it. (It is fortunate that Paul’s chances to win the Republican Presidential nomination are nonexistent.)

Similar resolutions have been passed in the Australian Parliament and, more surprisingly, the appeasement-minded European Union.

Unsurprisingly, when it came to the so-called human rights organizations, Benkin struck a stone wall. Not a word could be elicited from Amnesty International (which Benkin and Choudhury term “Amnesia International”). The UN Human Rights Commission was similarly silent. Benkin says the UN might issue a statement “if, God forbid, the Bangladeshi government were to murder Shoaib.”

In the 17 months Choudhury was imprisoned, the Blitz closed. But on his release, he reopened the paper, which was as forthright and courageous as ever in warning of the threat of fundamentalist Islam. In July 2006 the Blitz’s offices were firebombed by Islamist extremists and he and his managing editor were attacked by a mob in his office in October of that same year. Knowing the identities of their attackers they sought to lodge a complaint with the police, but the officers refused to accept it. Instead they issued a warrant for Choudhury’s arrest! “They wanted to arrest me, assault me in custody, and kill me” says Choudhury who went into hiding until his next court appearance. Again, the connections Benkin had established proved invaluable, as under pressure from the Americans, the government provided police protection to his home and business.

An optimist, Choudhury puts the odds at his trial at 50-50. At the Hudson Institute he said that he was prepared for whatever happened, even a death sentence or life imprisonment. Yet clearly he was hopeful that whatever the trial verdict, Western pressure, spurred by friends in good places like The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, would eventually make the government back off. (Choudhury even went home with keys to the city for Teaneck and Englewood, New Jersey, also something to give pause to Bangladesh authorities.)

What can we learn from the heroism and tribulations of this extraordinary human being, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury? On one hand, his fate is a reminder of the depth of hatred toward Israel in the Moslem world, which Israel’s peace-processors ignore to their great peril. Bangladesh is not Arab, has no borders or conflict with Israel. Yet this country, with the third largest Moslem population in the world, makes it a crime for a citizen to go to Israel and is so hostile that it is prepared to give the death penalty to anyone who seeks to defy the ban and speaks up for friendship with the Jewish state.

There is a more encouraging lesson if the West would but take it. Choudhury is precisely the kind of Moslem reformer the administration says it is looking for. Arguing the administration should be doing much more on his behalf, Bret Stephens observes: “Mr. Choudhury has identified himself, at huge personal risk, as one such Moslem [reformer]” making “unimaginable sacrifices for the values of the U.S., Israel, and all who wish them well.” Stephens pleads for American policy to “keep faith with the people who have kept faith with us.” There can be no actions more discouraging to those who would read the Koran differently, who need support to stand up against the jihadists sweeping the Moslem world, than to see the American administration courting the Hamas-supporters of CAIR and the other extremist organizations it currently coddles.

Ruth King
 
British organizational boycotts of Israel have been much in the news of late. But nothing has been said of the most reprehensible British boycott – the boycott of their own history. The English have simply turned their back on the ugly story of their perfidy to the Jews after they had undertaken responsibility for establishing a Jewish National Home in the Mandate for Palestine. Some of the story has come to light (no thanks to British authors), much even now is virtually unknown. For example, the crucial Jewish contribution to British victory in North Africa in World War II has been consigned to a memory black hole.

This forgotten episode, along with the rest of British treachery to the Jews of Palestine, is meticulously described in Pierre van Paassen’s The Forgotten Ally, first published in 1943. Sociologist David Kirk published several chapters a few years ago and now a group of writers and editors, headed by Carol Gould, have made the entire book once more available.
Born in Holland, Van Paassen emigrated to Canada. As a correspondent for The Toronto Globe, he would travel extensively to Europe, Africa and Middle East: his postings even included an interview with Hitler, whose global menace Van Paassen was one of the first to understand.

In the chapter entitled “The Best Kept Secret of World War II” Van Paassen describes how, in the summer of 1942, the British were in danger of being routed by German forces in Egypt. Fifty percent of British manpower and ordnance had been lost to the armies of Rommel and the Mediterranean sea lanes were heavily patrolled by Axis bombers, limiting resupply. Sentiment among the Arabs, including those of Palestine, was solidly on the side of Hitler.

The Jews of Palestine volunteered in vast numbers, even for “suicide missions” which required laying down mines under withering enemy fire. General Marie-Pierre Koenig of the Free French saluted the ragged Jewish survivors of this mission and insisted on bearing the Jewish flag on his truck (to the wrath of the British), ordering his men to salute it.

Jewish engineers organized and manned coastal defense signals; entire Jewish families volunteered for the British Red cross; Jewish meteorologists helped predict weather which is of critical importance in the desert campaigns; Jewish builders erected bridges and fortifications; the Jewish Coast Guard ran speedboats along the dangerous Mediterranean; 2500 Jews were bombardiers, pilots and observers with the RAF; Jews manned anti-aircraft stations; Jewish units penetrated and demolished enemy fortifications; Jews provided medical care in Jerusalem for injured Allied soldiers; Jews provided blankets, bandages, medicines, food, concrete, cutting tools, oil -- even beer. All these were lugged to the front lines by Jewish volunteers. Their contribution is detailed in page after page of The Forgotten Ally.

While van Paassen may have exaggerated the Jewish role (he claims General Montgomery said the Jews turned the tide for Britain) there is no doubt that the Palestinian Jewish contribution of manpower and resources contributed significantly to the success of the North African campaign.

The British displayed the rankest ingratitude. Even while Jews were dying for Britain, English ships fired on vessels trying to bring desperate Jews to Palestine and forced others to distant ports where in one grotesque episode, 750 sank in the harbor of Istanbul.

Neglect of Jewish contributions, and indifference to Jewish suffering was an established British pattern during the decades of their rule in Palestine.

In a telling passage in an earlier book Days of Our Years Van Paassen recounts his personal experience as a journalist following the massacre of Jews in the home of Rabbi Slonim in Hebron in 1929. "What occurred in the upper chambers of Slonim's house could be seen when we found the twelve-foot-high ceiling splashed with blood. The rooms looked like a slaughterhouse. When I visited the place in the company of Captain Marek Schwartz, a former Austrian artillery officer, the blood stood in a huge pool on the slightly sagging stone floor of the house. We stood silently contemplating the scene of slaughter when the door was suddenly flung open by a British soldier. In strolled Mr. Keith Roach, governor of the Jaffa district, followed by a colonel of the Green Howards battalion of the King's African Rifles. They took a hasty glance around that awful room, and Mr. Roach remarked to his companion, 'Shall we have lunch now or drive to Jerusalem first?'"

Van Paassen’s contempt for British duplicity is the recurring theme in his book. He describes the Balfour Declaration as a noble gesture supported by Lloyd George, Jan Smuts, Mazaryk, Clemenceau, the United States and fifty other nations. The irony is that the colonial officers like Ronald Storrs, Humphrey Bowman, Keith-Roach and the indefatigable “Queen of the Desert” Gertrude Bell who were asked to help implement the transition of Palestine to a Jewish state did everything in their power to abort the entire enterprise. Van Paassen does not spare Herbert Samuel, a Jew who behaved in a super impartial way and helped in “slowing the building of the house for his own people.”

Van Paassen points to the diaries and letters of Gertrude Bell who acknowledged Arab indifference to Palestine, but, in a nice anti-Semitic touch, prophesied the failure of Zionism in spite of all the “gold of the Hebrews.” He records the notes of Charles Ashbee, adviser to the Governor of Jerusalem: ‘We are for the Arabs…We make great capital of the Arab tradition of Jerusalem coming back to the Arabs”….Ashbee’s pan-Arabism was so strong that he was ignorant of the very minor ties of Moslems to Jerusalem. And, there are the hundreds of letters to the Home office recommending a stop to Jewish immigration which led to the disastrous White Papers which trapped millions of European Jews.

Nor does Van Paassen spare the Jews of America. As a journalist covering Eastern Europe in the 1920s he was stunned by the terrible conditions of the Jews, dislocated, stripped of property and civil rights, relegated to poverty and hunger. He strove to bring all this to the attention of Jews in America and for his efforts many leading Jews decried his reports as intentionally alarmist, exaggerated and even “unobjective.” Van Paassen’s comments on this have a particular bite, as applicable today as when he wrote them, indeed more so, for Jewish achievement of a homeland has not cured the fundamental Jewish malady of which he writes.

“Making a high virtue of a cruel historical fatality, they proclaimed Israel’s mission to be dispersal….to be a light unto the Gentiles and an example to the peoples…..They are not aware that their nervous fear of life, the fear of their own people, their self-hatred and self-abasement and servilism…..are the surest symptoms of the Jewish peoples’ mortal malady: the lack of a homeland, the lack of a backbone…..Humanity sympathizes with a strenuous aspiration. It cannot have respect for people who lack self-respect.”
 
Pierre Van Paassen completed The Forgotten Ally, a virtual “J’Accuse” against British perfidy, in 1943, but British infamy did not stop then. The end of World War II brought no relief in the British war against the Jews. The British fired on refugee ships in Haifa harbor; they transferred arms, vehicles and material assistance including intelligence to the Arabs; they sent refugees from the charnel houses of Europe to camps in Cyprus ringed with barbed wire and manned with armed guards. In additional acts of betrayal, before leaving Palestine, the British abstained in the United Nation’s vote to recognize Israel and in the immediate aftermath of the cease-fire of 1949 they offered, along with only one other state, Pakistan, de jure recognition of Jordanian sovereignty in the “West Bank” including old Jerusalem.

The late Richard Crossman, author of A Nation Reborn was editor of the Socialist weekly The New Statesman. In a stunning BBC interview on December 12, 1971, he bluntly accused the former Labor Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who presided over Palestine after World War II, of having "tried to destroy the Jews of Palestine." (It is worth noting that Bevin is cited by James Baker as a role model in his Princeton thesis.)

To be fair, the Jewish people owe a great debt to the British who initially stood alone in fighting Hitler. But the British have acknowledged all their allies in this monumental endeavor except for the Jews of Palestine. Moreover, British historians and writers, BBC miniseries and politicians have come to terms with the less favorable aspects of British colonial rule, even bending over backwards to be sympathetic to the Indians, the Africans, and all the nations of their empire where the sun never set.

But when it comes to Palestine, they have never presented a fair accounting: if anything, they are more obdurately pro-Arab than ever. Emanuele Ottolenghi describes England’s current Middle East policy: “Betray your friends, appease your enemies, pay ransom, surrender, and where possible, and lucrative, collaborate.”

It is the boycott of England’s history in betraying the Mandate that should most distress friends of Israel but this is the boycott which no academics or Nobelists or Jewish grandees will even address.

Now The Jerusalem Post reports that England has sharply cut back on selling arms to Israel. It seems that when it comes to betraying the Jews there will always be an England.