Have You No Sense of Decency
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

Netanyahu—Past and Present
William Mehlman

Reviving the Caliphate
Moshe Sharon

The Aaronsohn Saga—Shmuel Katz
Reviewed by Rael Jean Isaac

Moderate To An Extreme
David Isaac

Remove Mid-East Studies From Departments of Mid-East Studies
Hugh Fitzgerald

The al Dura Fauxtography Fraud
Nidra Poller

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Legacy
Ruth King

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

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Herbert Zweibon

That famous line, addressed in 1954 to Senator Joseph McCarthy by Counsel for the Army Joseph Welch today should be directed to our Secretary of State and to Israel’s Prime Minister.

To start with Condoleezza Rice: at Annapolis she conducted an meeting redolent of apartheid. Although she did not (as was initially wrongly reported) bow to Saudi demands that Israeli representatives enter through a different door, the Saudis maintained their refusal to shake hands with the unclean Israeli leaders. They also took off their translation earphones when Prime Minister Olmert spoke. Israeli reporters were thrown out of a press event for the arrival of Arab League Foreign Ministers.

As if this was not surreal enough at what was billed as a “peace conference,” Rice, in a truly Orwellian inversion of reality, cast the Arabs in the role of segregated blacks. The Saudi demand that Israelis use a separate entrance did not awake memories of segregation in our Secretary of State. Speaking at a private session at the close of the Annapolis meeting, she said (as reported in The Washington Post of Nov. 29) that having grown up as a black child in the South and being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, she understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians. “I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian.” As Michael Freund noted in The Jerusalem Post the fact that American blacks were victims of violence while Palestinians are its proficient practitioners seems to have escaped her attention. And her comparison between Israeli security measures, aimed at catching Palestinian suicide bombers, and America’s Jim Crow laws was morally obscene.

As for Israel’s Prime Minister, rather than maintaining his country’s dignity, Olmert and his sidekick Tzipi Livni groveled through the room, begging for a hand to shake. In his talk Olmert expressed his sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people—not a word about how much of that suffering was self-induced or the suffering the Palestinian terror-masters had caused Israel. Yet worse, in the Israeli-Palestinian declaration President Bush read out at the conference, Olmert had agreed on wording that equated (non-existent) “Israeli terror” with Palestinian terror.

Fresh from the unbelievably humiliating experience of Annapolis, Olmert put a spin on the proceedings that even Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, called “bizarre.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (Dec. 3) Senor noted that even before the first day of the conference was over Olmert was tracking down U.S. Presidential candidates and members of Congress, most of them strong advocates for Israel, to let them know their skepticism was misplaced: “it truly was an historic event, a real breakthrough.” Compounding the black humor of this spin was Olmert’s “evidence.” “The Saudi foreign minister even applauded after my address. That’s never happened before.” In fact he did not applaud – he didn’t even hear it.

And so the abasement of Israel continues. Former Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens writes: “’Dividing the land’ and establishing a Palestinian state has become the prime minister’s ultimate aim, just as in the past the establishment of a Jewish state had been the aim of the Zionist movement.” Minister of Education Yuli Tamir has ordered inclusion of the “Palestinian narrative” of the War of Independence, a tissue of lies, in the curriculum of Israeli schools. The Olmert government is turning its attention to uprooting the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria and dividing Jerusalem. As Arens concludes: “The Palestinian state that Olmert and Livni dream of handing to Mahmoud Abbas must not have a single Jew in it. This is the immoral low ground to which the new post-Zionists have sunk.”

From the Editor

AFSI’s Man of the Year Award

While Time names Vladimir Putin “Person of the year” (as Gary Kasparov points out, Time insists this involves no value judgment but it will be trumpeted in Russia as an endorsement of Putin’s policies), we at AFSI give our Man of the Year award to two courageous men: Daniel Pipes and John Bolton.

No one has elucidated as clearly and consistently the dangers of the misnamed “peace process” as Daniel Pipes or been so courageous in championing Israel in those bastions of anti-Israel conformity, our universities. Of those who have played an important role in the Bush administration, John Bolton stands out for articulating the dangers Islam now poses to the West and Israel. Most recently he has taken on the NIE report on Iran’s nuclear program, pointing out that it purveys policy biases as “intelligence judgments” opening “the way to Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.”

Against Nature

The average American recognizes that Islam, despite President Bush’s repeated pronouncements, is not a religion of peace. But what is increasingly apparent is that Islam today fosters among some of its adherents what most people on this planet would consider unnatural behavior. To strangle your own 16 year old daughter, because she fails to wear a hijab in class at her Applewood Heights school in Canada? To booby trap an infant in order to murder Benazir Bhutto? It was Bhutto’s concern for the infant that saved her own life—she says that she did not take the baby in her arms because she was fearful of harm to the child as it was being handed from person to person to reach her. Of course that did not save the infant or the others blown up nearby. These are only especially egregious examples of behavior by those prepared to violate every canon of “natural law” in the name of Islam.

Free Speech on Trial

Columnist Mark Steyn, along with Maclean’s, Canada’s best-selling magazine, are being hauled before not one but two modern equivalents of the medieval Star Chamber, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Maclean’s “crime” is publishing a chapter from Steyn’s book America Alone. The book documents the demographic collapse of Europe and the rise of its Islamic population, both such obvious facts that chronicling them does not merit the name of “opinion.” Nonetheless five Moslem law school students, sponsored by the Canadian Islamic Congress, demand Maclean’s be punished for spreading “hatred and contempt” for Moslems.

Given how brilliant, funny and quick on his feet Steyn is, he should have no trouble making hash of the complaint (if he is allowed to speak). Of course, this is not to say the human rights commissioners will be swayed—as David Warren notes in the Ottawa Citizen they are a “committee of smug, leftwing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators” empowered to “make up the law as they go along and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly limited imaginations –such as ruinous fines and lifetime ‘cease and desist’ orders, such that, if you ever open your mouth again on a given topic, you stand to go to prison.”

Alas, although the title of Steyn’s book suggests its theme—that the U.S. is the best hope for sustaining Western values—political correctness and dhimmi-wittedness is stifling free speech here as well, most obviously on campus but in other venues as well: for example the New York Post notes that New York City has a human rights panel that seeks to stamp out “anything deemed too politically incorrect.”

Libel Tourism Wins a Round

Speaking of suppressing free speech, the New York State Court of Appeals refused to uphold the First Amendment rights of Rachel Ehrenfeld. As we noted in Outpost (July/August 2007) Saudi billionaire Khaled bin Mahfouz had obtained a default judgment for libel against Ehrenfeld in Britain on the ground that her book Funding Evil referred to his financial backing of organizations with ties to terrorism. Because English libel law is much more friendly to plaintiffs, and Saudis, awash in cash, can easily sue (while their targets lack funds for international suits), “libel tourism” is flourishing, with American authors sued in English courts over books or articles published in America. Ehrenfeld asked the New York Court of Appeals to rule the British judgment against her was unenforceable under the First Amendment. Avoiding the free speech issue, the Court of Appeals has now ruled against her on technical grounds, saying it lacked jurisdiction over Mahfouz. (The British courts were not bothered that they lacked jurisdiction over Ehrenfeld whose book had not been published or distributed in (continued on page 12)
(From The Editor: continued from page 2)
England–a handful of books had reached Britain through purchases on Amazon.)

All is not yet lost. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out that the federal court panel that sent the case to the New York state court in June made clear that it maintained jurisdiction to deal with any issues that remained after the state court ruled. Nonetheless, McCarthy says it is essential that Congress enact a law establishing a federal cause of action for this kind of intimidation so Saudis can’t game the system “by traveling to England to sue Americans but then claim Americans can’t touch them in America. If our courts won’t protect us from this kind of nonsense, our laws must—especially when the deprivation involved is something as fundamental as free speech.”

Munich-style Giveaways

Julia Gorin notes that in Bush’s final year, we’re seeing a repeat performance of Clinton’s last year—with the targets again both Israel and Kosovo.

Gorin writes: “Recall that heading into his final year in office, Bill Clinton launched a war against the Serbs on behalf of Albanians, to be able to say that his administration ‘did something.’ Then, Clinton’s final year—2000—saw a desperate Clinton-Albright attempt to achieve a last minute peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, with Albright announcing, ‘We’re going to have a deal no matter what’…. In poetically parallel timing, what Bill Clinton started in his second-to-last year in office is being completed by Bush in his own second-to-last year in office eight years later: the creation of a jihadist mafia drug-cartel state, otherwise known as an independent Kosovo. As well, in Clinton-Albright-style desperation, Bush and Condoleezza Rice have decided to just ’do something’ in the Middle East via the Annapolis conference this week, further paving the way for Israel’s demise.

“The question emerges: Why are Albanian Muslims entitled to two states, while Jews aren’t entitled even to one.”

Freeing Terrorists

We have often pointed out that Israel’s repeated mass releases of Arab terrorists as “good will” gestures are in fact death sentences on her own citizens. Now we have some numbers. Almagor, the organization representing the victims of Palestinian Arab terrorism, has issued its report: the Israeli government has sentenced to death a minimum of 177 Israelis who have been murdered by released terrorists.

William Mehlman

In his much admired 1993 book A Place Among The Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu recalled how members of Sayeret Matkal, his elite commando unit, used to keep in shape by doing a daily 10-mile jog covering Israel’s pre-June 1967 midsection—from the Mediterranean shore to Kfar Saba. An Israel again reduced to those dimensions, an Israel shorn of the West Bank, he declared, would be indefensible—geographically and politically.

Of the geographical importance of the mountains of Samaria, he observed that "to an invader from the east, the range is an extraordinary obstacle…Such an invader enters the West Bank in the Jordan River Valley, which is the lowest point on earth, more than a thousand feet below sea level. He then has to fight his way up a cliff face that rises a daunting three to four thousand feet within a space of seven to nine miles. This is terrain that…is virtually impassable to tanks and other heavy equipment. No amount of electronic gadgetry can replace a stone wall thousands of feet high as an obstacle to war."

Politically, Netanyahu regarded the Israeli Left’s case for abandoning Judea and Samaria as chillingly analogous to the specious demographic brief presented fifty-five years earlier by the British and French for the surrender of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland to Hitler. Totally ignoring the fact that Czech defenses were concentrated in precisely that area, a 1938 London Times editorial quoted by Netanyahu importuned the Prague government to "[make] Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous state by the cessation of that fringe of populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race. The advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous state might conceivably outweigh the disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German district."

Reviewing Netanyahu’s book for National Review, Eliott Abrams, Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy averred that “one can read these same arguments in the New York Times today.” In Israel they are chiseled in stone. The demographic bogeyman is ever at the barricades in the Olmert government’s crusade to set Israel’s clock back to pre-June 1967.

Three years after the publication of A Place Among the Nations and in no small measure on the wheels of its impact, Netanyahu rode to electoral victory over a heavily favored Shimon Peres, becoming Israel’s third Likud prime minister. It didn’t take but the twinkling of an eye for the combined forces of the national Zionist camp and the Chabad Hassidim who assured his victory to realize they’d been had. In October 1996, on the heels of three-days of Arab rioting over the inauguration of an archeological tunnel outside the Western Wall that claimed 15 Israeli lives, Netanyahu withdrew IDF forces from all but three percent of Hebron. That left the five hundred residents of Israel’s second holiest city bereft of any hope of enlarging the community they’d resurrected in 1968 on the ashes of the Jewish yishuv decimated in a 1929 Arab auto-da-fe.

Netanyahu’s response to the anguished protests of half the country, including members of his own Likud party, was to cop what is known in judicial circles as the stare decisi plea, citing his assumed obligation to honor an agreement by the preceding Rabin-Peres government under the Oslo Accords to make a gift of Hebron to Yasser Arafat. Moreover Clinton, facing reelection the following month, felt sorely in need of a Hebron pullout to burnish his image as a Middle East problem solver. However much it violated Jewish sensibilities, the deal would have to stand. With the acquiescence of coalition partners The Third Way and the ultra-Orthodox Shas party paid for at the prevailing rate, the Hebron giveaway had no trouble sailing through the Knesset. Arch-leftist Yossi Beilin, however, couldn’t resist applying a little vinegar to the wounds Netanyahu inflicted on Likud when he assured the prime minister he could ignore the recriminations of Uzi Landau and Benny Begin, two of the party’s most passionate voices. “He needn’t worry about Begin and Landau,” Beilin declared. “I will give him my vote in place of theirs.”

Hebron wasn’t Netanyahu’s last contribution to the health and welfare of the Clinton presidency. A year and a half later at the Wye Plantation in Maryland, the Prime Minister agreed to hand over to Arafat 13 percent of the Judean and Samarian heartland whose importance to Israel’s security he’d so stoutly proclaimed in his book. That Arafat would renege on his pledge to disarm and dismantle his terror gangs and turn off his anti-Israel propaganda faucet should have been a foregone conclusion. However, in sitting still for a Clinton volte face on a promise to deliver Jonathan Pollard into his custody in exchange for the land grab and the release of 750 Palestinian captives, Netanyahu appended a dangerous post-script to the stare decisi concept he claimed he was obligated to honor in the Hebron redeployment. He didn’t free the 750 prisoners, but two years later at the 2000 Camp David II summit, Prime Minister Ehud Barak did, getting nothing in return. Eight years after the price for his freedom was paid, Jonathan Pollard remains behind bars.

Mr. Netanyahu is soliciting the Israeli electorate for another chance at the brass ring. Given the incredible weakness and ineptitude of the Olmert regime, his relatively high standing in the polls comes as no surprise. Were elections to be held now, the Likud might garner 30-plus mandates against an estimated 15-17 each for Kadima and Labor. President Shimon Peres would be compelled to invite Netanyahu to form the next government. What kind of government would that be? Given his undisputed success as finance minister in broadening the free-market parameters of the most robust economy in the region, one could anticipate continued economic growth and a further easing of the centralized grip on the nation’s distribution and service mechanisms.

The political profile of a new Netanyahu is far less clear. His promoters make a strong case for his having learned from past errors. But those who thought he might have demonstrated this with a plea of forgiveness for his failure to shake himself loose of the Sharon government early enough to have rallied the nation against the destruction of 25 Jewish communities in Gush Katif and northern Samaria have every reason to question that assumption. Netanyahu has conceded no errors, asked for no pardon. Ensuring Sharon’s support of his economic reform package took precedence over averting the Gush Katif disaster. “It probably wouldn’t have made any difference,” was the lame response of one of his apologists.

Would a second Netanyahu government brave the thunder of the White House and State Department and say no to the creation of a Jihadist state in Judea and Samaria as inimical to Israel’s survival? Or would we again be informed that the previous government’s acquiescence to this suicidal decision obviated any change of course? The portents are not encouraging. Mr. Netanyahu is standing firm against the repartition of Jerusalem but even Tzipi Livni isn’t keen on that one. He has yet to reject unequivocally the creation of a terrorist state in Israel’s heartland.

The jury will remain out on these issues until after Israel goes to the polls in early 2009 or hopefully sooner. Netanyahu’s less than passionate exception to the goings on at Annapolis does not add to the national Zionist camp’s confidence in him as bearer of the opposition’s banner. His advocates claim his anti-Annapolis message was muffled by an antagonistic media. That’s undoubtedly true, but how loud was the voice they are charged with muffling? Not nearly loud enough, in the view of many. They will be listening for a higher decibel level in the critical months ahead. Meanwhile, the search for the man who wrote A Place Among The Nations will remain a work in progress.

William Mehlman represents AFSI in Israel and is co-editor of the Jerusalem based internet magazine ZionNet (www.zionnet.net).

Moshe Sharon

In an interview with Karby Legget, published in the December 23-26, 2005 Wall Street Journal, Hassam al-Masalmeh, the leader of the Hamas group in the municipal council of Bethlehem, described a tax that would be imposed selectively in the Islamic state which is to be established on the ruins of Israel. He said: “We in Hamas intend to implement this tax someday. We say it openly—we welcome everyone to Palestine but only if they agree to live under our rules.”

Al-Masalmeh was referring to the tax which non-Muslims, throughout Islamic history, have had to pay in order to receive the status of dhimmi, namely a “protected” inferior minority. Failure to pay this tax, called jizyah, denied the non-Muslim (mainly Christians and Jews) this “protection,” and put his life and possessions in jeopardy. This tax, or tribute, was imposed in accordance with the Koran (Surah 9 verse 29) which says: “Fight those who were given the Book (i.e. Jews and Christians) until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humiliated” and according to Muslim law—the Sharia.

Hamas is a terrorist movement directed by Islamic ideology, faithfully practicing Islamic law. Far from representing a small fringe group, it is an integral part of an ever growing movement of Islamic revival which appeals to an ever growing number of Muslims who believe that Islam is destined to establish itself as a world state in which the implementation of Islamic law will assure the superiority of the Muslims and the inferiority of Christians and Jews (“infidels”).

From the time of Muhammad, Jews and Christians have been regarded as the enemies of Islam. The Egyptian-born Abu Hamza al-Masri, a Muslim cleric, is currently being tried in Britain on charges of incitement to murder. Al-Masri was head preacher until 2003 at the Finsbury Park mosque in North London, which has been linked to several terrorist suspects, including the suspected Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Musawi and the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. In a 90-minute video recording of a lecture shown at his trial (January 17 2006) al-Masri was seen telling his supporters that the Jews and Christians were on a list of the enemies of Islam, and as such the targets of Muslim enmity.

In the same vein, Shaykh Abd al-Aziz Fawzan Al-Fawzan, a Saudi professor of Islamic law at al-Imam University urged Muslims to show “positive hatred” towards Christians because they are infidels, for they say that Allah is one in a Trinity and they worship Jesus. He also added that whoever says that he does not hate Christians is not a Muslim.

What has all this to do with religion?

It has to do with Islam. Islam is not a religion as most Westerners understand it. For the Western media and apologetic thinkers, Islam is comparable to Christianity, and Muslim groups in the European and American countries are religious communities. These definitions entitle them to all the “religious services” available according to local laws. Accordingly Muslims demand and receive the support of the state for the building of mosques and state subsidies for religious functionaries, for special Muslim schools, and even for the establishment of an Islamic University (in Rotterdam, The Netherlands).

Had Islam been a religion in the usual sense of the word, namely a system of beliefs and rituals centered on the relation between man and God, then the demands of the Muslim communities in the Western world to enjoy the same services as other religions would be justifiable.

But Islam is not a religion in this “narrow” sense. It is much more than that. It is a system of law; it is a social and political system; it is a way of life. Islam has full control over the behavior of the individual, the society and the state. It deals with war and peace; it defines the relations between the Moslems and the rest of the world; and as we saw, it also determines the attitude to non-Muslims who are unfortunate enough to come under Islamic rule. The particular nature of Islam is best described, concisely and accurately, by a famous tradition which says: “Religion and the state are twins.” This means that there is no difference between the sacred and the secular in Islam, there is no such thing as the separation of state and religion. It follows that a community of Muslim believers is regarded as the army of Allah whose main raison d’être is to fight the enemies of Allah, in order to bring as much as possible of the world under the rule of Allah, that is to say under the jurisdiction of an Islamic government guided by the Koran, the tradition of Prophet Muhammad and the Islamic Sharia.

Westerners have the tendency to use Western terminology in order to describe Islam, which causes them to misunderstand it entirely. A few examples will suffice to demonstrate this misconception.

1. “The mosque is the church of the Muslims.” This is a mistake. The mosque is not only a house of prayer. It is a combined religious, social and political institution; the church is only a house of worship. The mosque has always represented the authority of the ruler as much as the authority of Allah’s law. The oath of allegiance to any new ruler was taken in the mosque, but rebellions also began in mosques. The sermon in the mosque encouraged obedience to the ruler as much as it gave vent to grievances and fomented revolutions.

2. “The Koran is the Bible of the Muslims.” Wrong! There is a huge difference between the Bible, created over several millennia, containing a variety of literary styles and a variety of messages, and the Koran, created by one man in one style and containing a few facets of a limited number of messages.

3. “Friday is the Sabbath of the Muslims.” Incorrect! There is no day of rest in Islam, and Friday is only the day of public prayer, and the time for public sermon.

4. “Jihad, Holy War, is a war against evil inclinations.” This is how the apologists of Islam present Jihad in politically correct language to innocent Westerners. The Holy War (what an oxymoron!) is a real war, not a virtual one; it is a bloody affair – the eternal war of Islam against the non-Muslim world until its conquest.

These few examples, illustrating the misconceptions of the West, suggest that Islam is better defined as a civilization. This civilization most fully realized itself within an empire that was created by Jihad, Holy war, conquering the lands of other people and reducing them to insignificant minorities.

Today the great dream of the Muslims is to renew the empire and to revive the ethos of Jihad. Israel is the obstacle in the Middle East to the re-creation of the Islamic Caliphate—the imperial body stretching over huge tracts of conquered territories and, as in the glorious past, responsible for keeping the spirit of Jihad kindled and actual Jihad—war in the path of Allah—active.

The caliphate is not a dream but a plan of action. It is a goal to be achieved. This is the message coming from Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, from the doctors at universities, and from preachers in mosques throughout the world of Islam. The achievement of this goal begins with weakening the Christian enemy state from within by using its own legal institutions and liberal media, by playing the victim, by terrorizing its civilians, by suffocating its economies; in short by waging a multiple-front Jihad.

Iran’s plan to achieve atomic power, the Jihadist declarations coming from the Palestinians and al-Qaeda’s various offshoots, and the open hostility of the Muslims in England, France, Holland and other European countries to their hosts, the education of Muslim children from kindergarten on to cherish the idea of martyrdom and to wish for martyrdom (shahadah), are all part and parcel of the age-old Islamic agenda.

Whether the caliphate dream can be realized only time will tell, but there is now a huge anti-Western power active as it was in the Middle Ages. So the threat is no longer theoretical, or a romantic Islamic dream as most of the Western media presents it. It is the real thing, because Islam, the army of the Faithful, has positioned itself once again against the House of War, the term reserved for that part of the world which is not yet under Islam. Conflict has always been the best habitat for Islam. Now, once again, Islam is revitalized by a new exciting conflict, toying with a seemingly helpless Europe.

By regarding Islam simply as a religion, the Europeans are enabling the Moslems to use the funds of Western states to build the infrastructure of an Islamic entity in each state as a bridgehead for conquering it from within. But what is more disturbing is that the billions of dollars which stream from the EU to Muslim terror groups under various disguises are nothing less than Jizyah money paid by the dhimmis of Europe to the Muslim rulers. Like the Jizyah, the money that the non-Muslim had to pay to secure some degree of security for himself, so also European money is the collective Jizyah paid by the Europeans in the (false) hope that it will secure for them the protected status of the dhimmi.

Moshe Sharon is Professor Emeritus of Islamic History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Reviewed by Rael Jean Isaac

The Zionist movement has produced a few truly astonishing figures, men hugely impressive by any standards. This book is especially noteworthy because it is about one of those men, Aaron Aaronsohn, who initiated and led Nili, the spy group which provided crucial intelligence for the British from behind Turkish lines in World War I, written by another of them, Shmuel Katz, in his youth a member of the high command of the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi, since then unequalled for his single-minded devotion to Zionism and his powers of political analysis.

There have been other books about Nili (the acronym based on the Biblical phrase Netzach Yisrael Lo Yeshaker, the splendor of Israel will not deceive Sam 1 15:29), ranging from serious to silly. The most recent, Patricia Gladstone’s Aaronsohn’s Maps: The Untold Story, falls into the latter category. The story she tells has hitherto been untold because there was nothing to tell. Goldstone elaborates–without any evidence–on a supposed love affair between Aaron’s sister Sarah and T.E. Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia fame and even more far-fetched, predicts that had Aaronsohn lived, there would have been no Arab-Israel conflict.

Katz has now written the definitive work on Aaronsohn and Nili, following his definitive work–the two volume Lone Wolf--on Vladimir Jabotinsky, along with Herzl the greatest of the Zionist giants. In some respects Aaronsohn was even more amazing than Jabotinsky and Herzl, who were educated and developed their abilities in the framework of vibrant European cultures. Aaronsohn was born in Rumania and in 1882, at the age of six, was brought by his parents to the barren rural area that would become the small Jewish township of Zichron Yaakov in the backwater that was Turkish Palestine. Largely self-taught (he completed his formal education at the age of eleven), Aaronsohn became expert in agronomy, hydrology and geology although it was as a botanist that he established an international reputation, for his discovery of wild wheat.

Along with his erudition, it was his personality and character (as in the case of Jabotinsky and Herzl) that impressed the influential people with whom he would come in contact, including scientists, leaders of the American Jewish community, military officers and diplomats. This comes through from the reactions recorded by some who came in contact with him. For example Katz quotes William Bullitt, then an adviser to President Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference (later U.S. ambassador to Moscow and Paris): “He [Aaronsohn] was, I believe, the greatest man I have known. He seemed a sort of giant of an elder day—like Prometheus. He was the quintessence of life: of life when it runs torrential, prodigal and joyous. Many men, no doubt, are as great as he was intellectually, though I have never known his peer, but if they are great intellectually, they are not also great emotionally, as he was: great in courage, in sympathy, in desire, in tenderness, in swift human understanding; great at once in dealing with statesmen and children, with scientists and artists, great at once in humor and constructive imagination.”

A week after Aaronsohn’s death David Fairchild of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in a letter to famous jurist (later Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter recorded his sense of Aaronsohn as beyond ordinary mortals. “I was accustomed to think of Aaronsohn as one of the eternal natural forces, and I cannot think of him as one of us…Something tremendous has been snatched from the range of our interests with the death of Aaronsohn and his disappearance into the unseen world, which has not yet been studied scientifically.”

Aaronsohn could have had a well-rewarded scientific career. On a lecture trip to the United States in 1909, the 33 year old Aaronsohn was offered the coveted post of professor at the University of California at Berkeley, then the premier seat of learning in the fields of agronomy and botany, to replace the renowned Professor Hilgard, who was retiring. He turned it down. Aaronsohn was a Zionist and was determined to fulfill his dream of creating an agricultural experiment station meeting international standards in Palestine. With the support of influential Jews in the United States (including people like Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, business leader Julius Rosenwald and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold), not all of them sympathetic to Zionism, he was able to achieve this. Registered as an official American institution, the station was on the coast near Haifa, not far from Zichron Yaakov, and Aaronsohn initially ran it with his sisters Rivka and Sarah.

World War I changed the course of Aaronsohn’s life and that of his entire family. Even before the war Aaronsohn had been convinced that the best chance for fulfilling the Zionist dream would be if Palestine became a British protectorate. But what impelled him to actual revolt was Turkish brutality: once the war began the Jewish community was subject to deportations, arrests, confiscation of property. The Jews of Palestine, he feared, were likely to suffer the terrible fate of the Armenians (whom Sarah Aaronsohn, returning home from Constantinople, had seen being murdered from her train window). And so Aaronsohn determined to turn his unequalled knowledge of Palestine’s geography and his ability to travel through Turkish lines into an intelligence trove for the British.

Most of Katz’s book is devoted to the dramatic story of the Nili spy ring which Aaronsohn developed. There were enormous difficulties contacting the British, convincing them of their good faith, overcoming endless failures of communication. There were hair breadth escapes from the Turks. At its height there would be thirty people working in Nili full time with many more contributing information. Sarah would coordinate the network on the ground since Aaronsohn was considered too valuable a resource by the British and he was forced to remain in Egypt.

On one point Katz is less than compelling: he explains Sarah’s brief loveless marriage to a much older businessman in Constantinople by her need to marry before her engaged younger sister, in accordance with Jewish mores of the time. But on his own evidence, both sisters were probably in love with the same man, the tragic Avshalom Feinberg (killed in the Sinai, trying to reach the British). Sarah may well have seized on any opportunity to escape an intolerable situation.

By some counts Aaronsohn’s efforts met with failure. The wild wheat he discovered turned out not to provide the key, as he hoped, to producing new strains of wheat that could grow in hitherto inhospitable soil. The agricultural station that he started with such high hopes was destroyed by the Turks in 1917. Worst of all, the Turks rolled up Nili, killing its leaders. Sarah killed herself during a break in the torture sessions. The British did not make the best use of Aaronsohn’s intelligence, which showed how feeble Ottoman positions were along the coast and did not land by sea near Haifa as Aaronsohn urged them to do. Doing so would have enabled them to sever the railroad line which alone sustained Turkish forces in Gaza. (The British were obsessed with the disastrous consequences of their landing at Gallipoli.) And Aaronsohn himself died in 1919 in an airplane crash, flying from England to Paris on one of his frequent missions on behalf of the Zionist Organization to the Versailles peace conference. He was 43, a year younger than Herzl at his death.

Yet despite all this, Aaronsohn’s work had a major impact. He convinced General Allenby that an attack on Beersheba would lead to the fall of Gaza (which the British had twice vainly attacked). Allenby himself wrote in 1919 “Aaron Aaronsohn...was mainly responsible for the formation of my field intelligence organization behind the Turkish lines.”

After the war Weizmann chose Aaronsohn to lead the Zionist campaign in Paris at the peace conference. Aaronsohn had unequalled knowledge of Palestine, its geography, geology and economic potential, and credibility with the British. Like Jabotinsky, who had created the Jewish Legion to fight for Britain, Aaronsohn had given important tangible aid to the Allies—and had a right to demand his reward in the coin of fulfilling Jewish national aspirations. His work provided the needed evidence that Palestine could support a large Jewish immigration and his maps influenced the drawing of the boundaries of the Mandate.

Like Jabotinsky Aaronsohn was vilified in his lifetime. Even after his death the remaining members of his family in Zichron Yaakov were treated as pariahs, scorned as “spies,” hated for the danger to which they had exposed the community—even though the community had met no harm. The Jews do not treat their genuine heroes kindly. They are more likely to give their adulation to those who take them into the abyss, a Yitzhak Rabin, an Ariel Sharon. And so it is of some comfort that the saga of Aaron and Sarah Aaronsohn, a great man and his remarkable sister, has finally been given the writer it deserves.

Note: This book is available for $25.00 through AFSI.

David Isaac

“Moderation in all things.” That famous saying from classical antiquity is attributed to Cleobulus, one of the seven sages of Greece. But even he would have had his patience worn thin by the Jews’ immoderately moderate response to Muslim terror.

We see it here in this country. Attend a mainstream Jewish event, say a Federation fund-raiser or simply the Shabbat morning service at the local reform temple, and bring up the subject of Islamic extremism. Almost inevitably, some well-meaning, if not deep-thinking listener will pipe up that, “Yes, but most Muslims are moderate.”

When assaulted by a group who wishes your annihilation, who blows up your women and children and hasn’t given your brethren a moment’s peace since they returned to their biblical inheritance after 2,000 years in exile, the healthy response is not to say, “Well, they’re not all bad.”

It’s not difficult to see why someone would say that. It’s hard for a normal person to cope with the sort of naked evil our enemies have embraced, and it’s intellectually offensive to most fair-minded men and women to hear an entire religious group labeled as extremist. The point is not that we should paint all Muslims as murderous madmen but that we should adapt a way of thinking that intellectually equips us to fight the madmen among them. One thing is certain. Resorting to the trope that most are moderate is not cutting the mustard.

When the U.S. went to war against the Nazis we didn’t wring our hands and go out of our way to say most Germans were decent, law-abiding people who wanted to live quiet lives, if for no other reason than such statements were beside the point. They are equally beside the point today as we fight our Muslim enemy.

Is there a proper approach to thinking, talking and dealing with a determined and radicalized foe? This writer proposes that it’s not the Greeks who best equip us for this war, but our Jewish tradition. Our predecessors have faced extremism before. Their solution was to dig in, fortify their position and resist.

As the greatest Jewish philosopher Maimonides said, if one wishes to escape one form of extremism, one should adopt its opposite. His famous Iggeret Teman or Epistle to Yemen is a good example. As the Jews there faced forced apostasy, Maimonides wrote to them to strengthen their community.

“My Brethren! Hold fast to the covenant, be immovable in your convictions...With regard to what you reported, that the adversary seeking your apostasy seduces people by trying to show that several words in the Torah can be explained as alluding to the rise of Mahomet, and that in the same book even his name is mentioned, you may rest assured that this theory is not only untenable and preposterous, but supremely ridiculous.” Maimonides added that Judaism differed from Islam “as a living man endowed with the faculty of reason is unlike a statue which is ever so well carved out of marble, wood, bronze or silver” and that while they modeled their religion upon “ours in order to glorify themselves” their “counterfeiting is an open secret to the learned” and “consequently they become objects of derision and ridicule…”

Though these words are hardly conducive to interfaith dialogue, they had a profound effect on the Yemenite community and fueled their resolve to resist their oppressors. It’s also clear that Maimonides chose his words carefully for the crisis.

As Abraham S. Halkin, a former professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, notes in his introduction to one translation: “Although Maimonides counted the belief in the advent of the Messiah as an article of faith and restated it in his legal code, his view of the Messianic age is rather sober. He regards it merely as a period of peace and of the ingathering of the exiles… But in The Epistle to Yemen his entire attitude changes. Perhaps as a result of the difficult condition of the Jews or of the critical situation in Yemen, he manifests greater excitement, warmth, and typically Jewish piety.”

Today there is no such adjustment by the Jews or their leadership. One can only imagine what Israeli President Shimon Peres would have written to Yemen’s Jews had he lived at that time. Perhaps it would have gone something like this. “To my dearest brethren in Teman: We are discovering that all the things we are fighting for are not so important. It’s a changed world and you are out of date. The old enemies have disappeared or will disappear, since they don't have a future. The world has changed completely. It is only you in Teman who do not know this. What counts is not the intentions of the Muslims. What counts is the confrontation between two realities. All known solutions are dead ones. The art of negotiation is to invent and create and not to hang from the cliffs of yesterday. Listen, we have to take a chance. Those who don’t dare are not realists. Remember, I may not know what you want but I know what is good for you. P.S. You are all fascists. Ich bin ein Bayer.*”

If we are to win we ought to change our way of thinking about what it takes to fight extremism. Tom Paine said: “Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” And lastly remember that were Maimonides alive today to write letters to the editor no one would print them.

David Isaac is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.
*All the above (apart from the references to Teman) are actual statements by Shimon Peres.

(Editor’s note: This warning about Mid-East Studies departments is particularly important because it is the people who graduate from these departments who, as supposed “Middle East experts,” will shape our future policy.)

Hugh Fitzgerald

Middle Eastern studies must be removed from departments of Middle Eastern Studies. Those who obtain their degrees in such studies at such places as Columbia are indoctrinated by such disinterested souls as Hamid Dabashi, Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, the inimitable George Saliba, and Ms. Al-Haj. The latter is fresh from her incredible achievement in obtaining tenure, despite her utter failure to meet minimal standards of scholarship, from a department that has lost its collective senses.

Presidents and provosts must swallow their fear of interfering with "faculty autonomy." Other faculty members should not be shy, especially if they are trained in history and other relevant fields, to look into what their "colleagues" in Middle Eastern departments are actually teaching about Islam, for without Islam, no discussion of anything in the Middle East makes sense. (It would be like putting on Hamlet without the vacillating prince.) And one cannot rely on Muslims to demonstrate the same objective presentation that, for example, one can expect about the presentation of Western history by those who are real or nominal Christians. Scholarly standards never developed in the world of Islam, which has no universities or scholarship equivalent to what both the West and, with a lag, now the East have both developed.

If such follies as Iraq are not to be repeated, then Islam must be understood. Had Americans in the corridors of power understood that in Islam political legitimacy is located in the will expressed by Allah and not in the expressed will of the people, that might have prevented the whole absurd Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations project, by which "democracy" was to be transplanted in the sandy soil of Iraq, where "ordinary moms and dads" were said to long for it, rather than to long for settling scores, and seizing, or seizing back, power from their sectarian and ethnic enemies, and making sure that their sect, or their group, had as much power as it could grab, and keep.

And were Islam properly understood, the naive and fruitless attempts to "solve" the Arab-Israeli dispute would end. They would be replaced by the recognition that there is no "solution" but merely a situation to be managed, given the immutable Muslim belief that the Infidel nation-state of Israel must be destroyed. Its continued existence, no matter what its size, constitutes a permanent affront to the Muslims, for it does not accord with their world-view about land once part of Dar al-Islam having to be recaptured.

Of course, in the end the entire world must submit to Islam, but until large numbers of Muslims were allowed to settle deep within Infidel lands and until the Money Weapon supplied by oil revenues (some ten trillion dollars since 1973 alone), that larger dream seemed impossible. It no longer does, especially in certain parts of Western Europe.

What if the KGB had had the kind of money to play with that the Saudis do? During the 70 years of its existence, Soviet Communism spent about 7-8 billion on propaganda worldwide. The Saudis alone have spent about one hundred billion, with more being spent every year. It is spent on mosques and madrassas all over the Western world. It is spent on academic "centers," most connected with universities, and some stand-alone, as well as endowments for well-upholstered chairs at universities that are chosen either because they are conveniently located to centers of power (e.g. Esposito's Muslim-Christian Understanding operation at Georgetown, in Washington) or to curry favor with a new President (that Islamic studies money lavished on the University of Arkansas when Clinton was President) or at places where the reflected glory can do the cause some good such as Harvard and the other self-promoting self-described "world-class" universities.

And if the presidents and provosts and other alarmed faculty do not act, alumni should withhold contributions, no matter how keenly they may feel a loyalty to their alma mater. They owe a higher loyalty to the political and legal institutions, and to the conditions of freedom that make art and science possible, and that are under assault, slowly but steadily, by those who derive the meaning of their existence, and the regulation of that existence, from Islam.

Ignorant undergraduates, unfortunately, are also impressionable. They are being misinformed and mis-schooled, systematically so, by Muslim and non-Muslim apologists for Islam, who are determined that the real Western scholarship about Islam--that of C. Snouck Hurgronje and Joseph Schacht and Arthur Jeffrey and Charles-Emmanuel Bousquet and Georges Vajda and Henri Lammens and Antoine Fattal and so many others--is never brought to the students' attention, or is first discredited by heavy doses of Edward Said's Orientalism That book was Said’s attempt, for so long successful, to undercut centuries of Western scholarship on Islam. But recent books, and especially that by Ibn Warraq, have blown Said sky-high. All the horses, and all the men, even of those sinister Maecenases deploying the money weapon from their palaces in Jiddah and Riyadh, can't put Orientalism back together again.

This appeared on jihadwatch on Dec. 15.

Nidra Poller

(Editor’s Note: The footage showing the alleged brutal shooting of a cowering Jamal al Dura and his young son by the Israelis, first shown on news channel France 2, was equivalent to a shot heard round the world. Endlessly replayed, especially in the Moslem world, it was a precipitating incident triggering the 2000 intifada. But thanks to the efforts of Nidra Poller and other determined French journalists, it has been exposed as a staged fraud. Nidra Poller here reports on what one hopes will prove to be the final nail in the coffin of this fabrication.)

The wounds purportedly sustained on September 30, 2000 by Jamal al Dura, a “target of gunfire from the Israeli positions”—in the words of France 2’s bureau chief Charles Enderlin—were in fact incurred in 1992. Jamal, identified as the father of the shahid [martyr] Mohamed al Dura, is one of the two living witnesses to the incident that triggered the “Al Aqsa Intifada.” The al Dura news report has been the subject of controversy for seven years.

Philippe Karsenty, who is appealing his 2006 defamation conviction—for declaring on his Media-Ratings site that the al Dura news report was a blatant fake—has obtained medical records proving that Jamal’s wounds were treated by an Israeli surgeon in 1994. The surgeon, Yehuda David, confirmed this information on a December 12 newscast on Israel’s Arutz 10 TV. Jean Tsadik of Metula News Agency summed up the Hebrew-language newscast for French-speaking readers.

According to the Metula release, Jamal al Dura declared on medical records in 1992 that Palestinian militia had attacked him with axes. Doctors at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital were able to save his life but he lost the use of his right hand because they could not repair a ruptured tendon in the forearm. Palestinian doctors referred Jamal to Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv in March 1994. Dr. Yehuda performed reconstructive surgery, grafting a tendon taken from the foot, and restoring almost normal use of the hand. The medical record of that operation also refers to the removal of “foreign bodies,” suggesting that other instruments besides axes were used in the 1992 attack.

In 2004 Talal Abu Rahma [the cameraman who shot the footage used on France 2] provided the film of Jamal’s wounds at the demand of France 2 news director Arlette Chabot, who wished to silence investigators. Having been alerted to this by Ména [Metula News Agency] Dr. Yehuda and his colleagues declared that the scars shown in that film were incurred in 1992 and result from axe blade wounds and definitely not from gunshot. They are ready and willing to testify to this in any court.

Pajamas Media [the site which has provided ongoing coverage of the al Dura affair while mainstream French media has largely ignored the whole controversy) will try to solicit reactions from French journalists Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte who were granted the exceptional privilege, in 2004, of viewing a bit over 20 minutes of raw footage filmed by Talal Abu Rahma at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000. After publicly declaring that there was no evidence in the footage to sustain the accusation that Jamal and his son Mohamed were hit by Israeli gunfire, they backed off from the controversy. Convinced by the film of Jamal’s wounds, produced expressly to spin their almost courageous conclusions, they opted for the crossfire explanation of the unfortunate incident.

The day after the alleged shooting Jamal, filmed on his hospital bed wrapped up in bloody bandages, described the ordeal in a critically wounded voice. A few weeks later, in an Israeli TV interview, he declared plaintively, with his hand resting on a crutch, that the Israelis fired at him and his son for 45 minutes, clearly recognizing them as innocent civilians.

Now we learn that Jamal used the arm restored by Israeli surgeons to act out the blood libel that provoked the murderous rage that killed countless Israeli civilians, including doctors who had treated Palestinians with the same generosity he experienced.

On November 14th Charles Enderlin stood before a French court and walked the judges through 18 minutes of raw footage filmed by Talal Abu Rahmah, including the 59-second al Dura shots. He had an explanation for every incongruity. When will he realize that he is walking down a gangplank?

Nidra Poller is a journalist living in Paris. This appeared on pajamasmedia.com on December 14.

Ruth King

On January 10, 2007, promoting a “surge” in troop levels in Iraq, the President issued these strong words: “The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time.”

He made a perfunctory reference to the “Palestinians” but omitted any mention of the “two state (dis)solution which had become a staple of his policy statements since 2003. It seemed that the President had chosen a path to victory rather than a “road map” to retreat. In the penultimate year of a presidency, all leaders confront their role in history, and it seemed that President Bush clearly saw his.

But then something funny happened on his way to a legacy.

One might have thought that the chaos in Gaza, a nuclear threat from Iran, an increasingly belligerent Russia, a bellicose Chavez increasing his influence in Latin America, the growth of jihad in Africa, a derisive North Korea, along with problems in Iraq and Afghanistan would weigh on the president’s mind.

Yet only seven days later, in his annual State of the Union address, President Bush returned to his idee fixe: “With the other members of the Quartet-- the U.N., the European Union, and Russia--we're pursuing diplomacy to help bring peace to the Holy Land, and pursuing the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in peace and security.” There he went again.

In a dramatic flourish he renewed his pledge to make America “energy independent” by introducing a plan called 20 in 10—reducing gasoline consumption by 20% in ten years by adding more government regulation, clean coal, safe nuclear energy, ethanol. (There was the requisite vow to confront global warming.) But this time around he left out domestic drilling and his strong statement in 2006 (in connection with his proposed Advanced Energy Initiative): “America is addicted to oil, which is often (often?) imported from unstable parts of the world.”

Alas, the facts belie the promises. Nothing, absolutely nothing has been done to make our economy, our national institutions and our foreign policy independent of the oil producing states.

Instead of penny ante alternatives such as ethanol and batteries, how about encouraging private investment in technology for switching to clean coal? National deposits can produce enough energy for 400 years. Equally important, instead of caving in to the “climateers” of Bali whose true agenda is de-industrialization of the West, why not take real steps to renew the building of nuclear energy plants? The President has now signed an "energy bill" whose most dramatic recommendation is an end to the incandescent bulb. Wow! This "dhimming" of lights will leave Americans in darker homes still reliant on foreign oil to keep warm.

The president applied moral zeal to advancing research for non-embryonic stem cells. Why did he not apply equal zeal to energy independence? That would have burnished his legacy to make him an equal of Ronald Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

How about immigration reform and homeland security? Americans want immigration controls with national identity cards, “profiling” and tracking. Where is the president on all this? Hiding behind platitudes about a “melting pot.”

And what about Russia? Putin won and consolidated his autocratic rule, but Condi, supposedly an expert on Russia, was busy demanding concessions from Olmert in preparation for the Annapolis ball and the launching of a new terror state in the heartland of Israel.

And, finally, what about the war on terror? We were solemnly told that the Annapolis gang-up on Israel was designed to consolidate “moderate” Arab support for an initiative against Iran and “the war on terror.” In fact Annapolis was a display of vulgar and flagrant anti-Semitism by what Ralph Peters has called “fat men in white robes with oil cans in their hands.” The guest list was impressive. Everyone needs a break from committing genocide, so a representative from Sudan attended and Bashar Assad made sure that while he was gone, the dissidents in his jails were “controlled” with methods that make waterboarding look like an “extreme sport.” The robed thugs whose citizens are jailed and flogged when they are victims of rape, overtly “dissed” the entire Israeli delegation.

Two states (four if you count Jordan and Gaza) and a divided Jerusalem are now a given, and to show he means it, Olmert released more than 750 terrorists to wreak further havoc on Israel. According to Olmert, only those terrorists “without blood on their hands” were released. One would assume that during their incarceration they did wash their hands.

And then, poof….the entire State Department “rationale” for Annapolis collapsed with the release of an NIE report that Iran was not so close to realizing its nuclear ambitions after all. In spite of serious doubts by serious intel experts, the Bush administration took the less proactive path and sought “dialogue” with Iran with no let up of pressure on Israel.

When President Ronald Reagan was buried, I kept observing the faces of ex-presidents, who were no doubt thinking of their own legacy. Ronald Reagan held fast to his vision of “the Evil Empire” and the end of Soviet colonization is his great legacy. Presidents Carter, Clinton, the first George Bush and the late Gerald Ford may get nice funeral processions and big libraries but no lasting legacy.

President Bush, our steward during the horrible days of September 2001, the man who ostracized Arafat and stood up to Al Qaeda, toppled Saddam Hussein and withstood the assaults of dhimmi-wit legislators, is a major disappointment to those of us who liked and encouraged him. One may blame Condoleezza Rice for what John Bolton has called the “free-fall” of America’s foreign policy, but legacies are made by the President and the buck stops there. •