AVOIDING NEW ELECTIONS
Herbert Zweibon

FROM THE EDITOR
Rael Jean Isaac

FREE FALL
William Mehlman

THIS HOUSE BELIEVES THAT ENGLAND HAS A RIGHT TO EXIST
David Isaac

ANTI-SEMITISM AND ALTERNATIVE HISTORY
Moshe Sharon

ISRAEL'S FOLLY
Hugh Fitzgerald

OUR MAN IN TRIPOLI
Ruth King

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

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Herbert Zweibon

In The Jerusalem Post (Jan. 18) Caroline Glick has presented a formidable indictment of the Olmert government along with possible scenarios for bringing it down and forcing new elections before they are scheduled in 2010. This is something that many Knesset members, fearful of losing their comfortable seats, have thus far resisted, despite Olmert’s single digit approval ratings. However, Glick overlooks the fact that the Olmert government can be brought down without the need for new elections.

As Glick says, “in every sphere of government, the Olmert government is capsizing the country.” Olmert is overseeing the demise of the educational system, as strikes topple high schools and universities. On the security front, he is negotiating an agreement that would render Israel indefensible. He does nothing to stop rocket assaults on Israel, stands by as Hizbullah, under the UN nose, has rebuilt its arsenal and reasserted its control over southern Lebanon, and vainly hopes the U.S. will take care of Iran.

Now that Israel Beiteinu has finally left the government, Glick looks to defections by Shas (now the coalition’s lonely “right wing” member) and the growing possibility that 11 members of Kadima’s 29 member Knesset faction might bolt to form a new independent party. In that event, writes Glick, “the opposition would have the requisite 61 votes to pass a no-confidence measure and move to early elections.”

But the opposition can come to power without new elections. Under Israeli law, if there are 61 Knesset votes for a no-confidence vote in the government, a petition can be presented to the President for a new Prime Minister to be appointed. The new candidate must be named and, given that the support of the Likud would be essential to assembling those 61 votes (former Kadima 11, Ichud Leumi 9, Israel Beiteinu 11, Shas 12, Aguda 6, Likud 12), it would have to be the Likud’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

There are several virtues to going this route, rather than to new elections. It would prevent Olmert from serving as head of a caretaker government in the period—a minimum of three months—prior to elections, in which time he could still do serious damage. Ehud Barak, in similar circumstances, made what were then unimaginable concessions to Arafat at Camp David—Israel was saved only when Arafat (despite Madeleine Albright famously chasing him through the building) refused to take them. Going this route would also prevent Olmert from preemptively restoring his coalition by wooing Meretz and the Arab parties on the basis that supporting his government was a small price to pay for securing the division of Jerusalem and the hand-over of Judea and Samaria.

The promise of avoiding new elections would also be an inducement for wavering Kadima members. If a third of its Knesset members split from a party (10 members in this case) they keep all the advantages of their party position, the government benefits etc. They would be assured of their Knesset seats for another two years during which time their options would remain open—to rejoin the Likud (from which most of them had originally split), join with yet another party or go to the elections as a new party, if they feel their support is growing. They would come strong out of the gate, basking in the glory of serving as those who saved the country from the existential threat posed by the Olmert government.

There would be another great advantage to this method of replacing Olmert. Netanyahu’s freedom of action would be constrained by his narrow majority. Given Netanyahu’s tendency for the voice to be the voice of a proud nationalist leader and the actions to be those of a weak and supine Labor capitulationist, it is very important that his freedom to follow what to him, once in power, might seem the easier course— giving in to the demands of a bullying American administration—be limited by his coalition partners.

Rael Jean Isaac

By Those They Honor…

We have many times pointed out in this column that those whom a society honors tells you a great deal about the society—its values, priorities and goals—and many of the prizes Israel has offered in recent years speak volumes of the country’s moral and political decline.

Yet another case in point: among the 2007 winners of Israel’s high prestige Emet Prize for Science, Art and Culture was Prof. Avishai Margalit, who taught philosophy at Hebrew University from 1970 to 2006. The selection committee includes a former Israeli Supreme Court Justice, assorted officials from the Prime Minister’s Office and academics.

As film maker Joel Amitai has noted, Margalit was a board member of B’tselem, the nefarious Israeli “human rights” organization that has served to provide legitimacy to the international campaign to delegitimize Israel. For over 20 years Margalit has written for The New York Review of Books, providing a steady supply of the anti-Israel provender which it dispenses. His most famous assault was a lie: calling Israel’s Yad Vashem “a shrine of kitsch” he reported “a ‘children’s room’ has been dedicated there recently, a pitch-dark room with tape-recorded voices of children crying out in Yiddish, ‘Mama, Tate.’” Yad Vashem wrote in to The New York Review of Books offering a prize of one million dollars if Margalit could prove there existed or ever had existed such a thing. Margalit had made the whopper up out of whole cloth, which makes his award by an outfit calling itself “Emet” (Truth) even more scandalous.

More recently Margalit has used his New York Review of Books forum to make moral equivalences between the Israeli army and Hamas terrorists and to vilify Israel’s attempts to protect itself.

Now if Israel had a “foul your own nest award” Margalit -- although he would have stiff competition – would be a worthy contender.

Flogging Lionheart

British blogger Lionheart, who focuses on the evils of radical Islam within the United Kingdom, has been told by the Bedfordshire police to submit to arrest. Asked on what ground, the police emailed him this reply: “The offence that I need to arrest you for is ‘Stir up Racial Hatred by displaying written material’ contrary to sections18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.”

The Public Order Act of 1986 makes it an offense to “stir up racial hatred,” defined as “hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins.” The definitions are vague making it a splendid weapon against freedom of speech. Nor are the penalties inconsequential—imprisonment for up to seven years, a fine, or both.

What makes all this especially Kafkaesque is that the U.K. itself is funding the most vicious stirring up of racial hatred. The British TaxPayers Alliance reports that 47.5 million pounds of taxpayer money is funding the hate curriculum of the Palestinian Authority, specifically “textbooks praising insurgents in Iraq, arguing for the execution of apostates and the idealization of martyrdom” and “television broadcasts aimed at children that urge violence against non-Moslems and promote the view that Israel should not exist.”

General Motors vs. Ford

While it is well known that the openly anti-Semitic Henry Ford admired the Nazis, General Motors was no slouch when it came to fawning on Hitler. Signius Wilhelm Poul Knudsen, president of General Motors (selected by President Roosevelt in 1940 to head the production division of the Defense Commission) in 1938, on inspecting GM’s German plants, proclaimed Hitler’s regime “the miracle of the twentieth century.” Knudsen brought to the Defense Commission as his liaison James D. Mooney who was awarded the Nazi Eagle by Hitler for his help in building Germany’s blitzkrieg machine as vice President of General Motors Overseas.

No Electricity for Hamas

The Arabs have pulled off another of their publicity stunts, with Hamas plunging Gaza into darkness, knowing full well that the Western media would mindlessly echo its claim that Israel did it.

But this brings up another question. Why on earth should Israel supply Hamas-run Gaza with electricity to make the rockets it rains upon her citizens? If Israel will not invade Gaza—the best way to eliminate the rocket and missile attacks on its territory—it is incumbent upon it to protect its own citizenry by exerting pressure in other ways. If Hamas chooses to make war, the citizenry must pay a price, as is the case in any war.

How about announcing in advance a day’s cutoff of electricity for every rocket that falls on Israeli soil?

William Mehlman

In an interview with the popular German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton declared the Bush Administration’s foreign policy to be “in free fall.”

Bolton’s specific reference was to the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate asserting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons production program in 2003. “I know the people who wrote that estimate,” Bolton averred during a January stop in Israel to participate in the annual conference of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center’s Institute for Policy and Strategy. “They are not from our intelligence community. They’re from our State Department. It was a highly politicized document written by people who had a very clear policy objective.” This was, of course, the same State Department whose thinly veiled distaste for Bolton’s redefinition of UN diplomacy in terms of America’s vital interests dulled President Bush’s appetite for a fight with the Pelosi-Reid Congress for the prolongation of his mission. Never one to mince words, Bolton said that in embracing the NIE report, the president was “acting against his own judgment and instincts under the influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

Had he been in Israel a week earlier, the ambassador might have witnessed even more pointed evidence of the Bush foreign policy in free fall. It was exemplified by the president’s performance at his January 9th reception at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. It’s doubtful that he ever delivered a speech so pockmarked with errors, half truths and sheer nonsense in all his seven years in office.

The mess was evident from the outset. “I reiterate my appreciation for the Arab League peace initiative,” he intoned. Granted even the most generous definition of “peace initiative,” it would require a giant leap of the imagination to construe this as anything but fiction. There is not, nor has there ever been a peace initiative directed at Israel by the Arab League. The so-called Saudi Initiative, belatedly adopted by the League, hardly meets that criterion. The Arab League’s operational charter recognizes Israel only as an illegal entity. A bit further on, the president was heard praising “both sides” for “getting down to the business of negotiating.” Nearly a month and a half after Annapolis, they haven’t even settled on a declaration of principles.

The going got progressively worse. In defining his “vision” of “two democratic states living side-by-side in peace and security,” the president called for “an end to the occupation that began in 1967.” In parroting this contemptuous reference to Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, the president put himself in league with the historical revisionist assault on the Jewish state’s solid claim to those lands under the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo and Paris Treaties, the League of Nations mandate and Israel’s own Basic Law.

Some of the components of Mr. Bush’s vision represented downright threats to Israel’s viability. Whether or not he realized it, the president’s goal of a “contiguous” Palestinian state, linking Gaza with Judea and Samaria, would mean the bifurcation of the Jewish state. And his call for a final status agreement predicated on “adjustments to the armistice lines of 1949” would effectively reverse every strategic territorial gain Israel made in 1967 and 1973. Moreover, it is totally at odds with Bush’s parallel insistence that Israel must emerge from this “peace process” with “secure and defensible borders.”

The President’s vow that evening that “no Palestinian state will be born of terror” flew in the face of reality. The gunmen of Tanzim and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades are root and branch of the Palestinian Authority the President would make sovereign in Judea and Samaria. Eliminating them would be tantamount to the PA’s self-immolation.

Mr. Bush’s closing assessment that “the establishment of a Palestinian state is long overdue” was dubious at best. His prediction that “it will enhance the stability of the region and contribute to the security of the people of Israel” would have made a tea leaf reader blush.

The impression of a policy in free fall created by the president’s January 9th speech in Jerusalem was at such variance with the strength and clarity of purpose he displayed in his June 2002 address to the graduating class at West Point that one can only wonder if it was a Bush Doppelganger who showed up at the King David Hotel.

There, at West Point, stood a George W. Bush with a “vision” worthy of the name, unflinching, undiplomatic in the best sense of the word, telling us there could be “no neutrality between the innocent and the guilty, between justice and cruelty.” He said that “we [were] in conflict between good and evil” and that America would “call evil by its name.” By confronting evil and lawless regimes, he assured us, “we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it.”

It was a speech blessedly free of contrivance, moral equivalency and fiction dressed up as truth. Endless, purposeless diplomatic schmoozing, toothless economic sanctions and other excuses for inaction against tyrants were not on the president’s agenda that day. “We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best,” he said. “All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price…We will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world…”

A U.S. president in free fall was the last thing an Israel in free fall needed. The scene that attended Bush’s arrival had the trappings of a comic opera as it might have been directed and choreographed by Federico Fellini. Jerusalem was in a semi-locked down mode with 10,000 cops on the streets and security agents of every description tripping over each other. The entrance to the King David Hotel was reconfigured into a tunnel, accessible only to the privileged, and there within its sumptuous confines stood the drama’s three protagonists – a lame duck president, a prime minister with the credibility of an Atlantic City blackjack dealer and a secretary of state who thinks Fatah is a chapter of the NAACP.

They had all assembled with their entourages for the rhetorical spade-turning on a “homeland for the Palestinian people.” Abu Mazen, its putative president, was there only in spirit. “Health reasons” would have precluded his acceptance of an invitation even had it been proffered.

Obsequy was the flavor of the evening. One eventually lost count of the number of times Mr. Olmert thanked the president for gracing Israel with his presence. Anybody exiting the premises uninformed of his view that George Bush was the greatest gift bestowed on the Jewish people since the parting of the Red Sea must have had his hearing-aid turned off. Bush, alternately dazed and embarrassed, looked for all the world like the chosen victim for a revival of the old “This Is Your Life” TV show as he was mindlessly mugged with a super-saccharine rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Aside from a bitchy query about “illegal outposts” ( Bush: “they should go”), the only disconcerting note of the evening was sounded by Mr. Olmert—and it was pure comedy. Exhausted with paeans to the “peace process,” the prime minister veered off at one point into an ultimately fruitless attempt to mollify coalition partner Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right wing Israel Beiteinu party, by playing tough guy on the Jerusalem issue. A visibly displeased Condoleezza Rice was the only one playing it straight. Meanwhile, over at the Dan Panorama Hotel, headquarters for the press corps accompanying Bush, a group of anti-road map activists were being charged by the police with “incitement” and “sedition” for distributing a pamphlet by investigative reporter Arlene Kushner questioning the “moderate” credentials of Abu Mazen and his Fatah organization. They were finally released with a reprimand.

The President and his entourage are gone, the American flags refurled, the King David Hotel restored to its pristine dignity, the streets of Jerusalem back in normal gridlock mode. Reality has returned to Israel but not without some lingering Felliniesque overtones. Avigdor Lieberman and Israel Beiteinu have quit Ehud Olmert’s coalition, reducing its governing majority from 78 to 67 seats. Entreaties from President Bush for Lieberman to remain in harness melted in the face of the threat to his already tattered right-wing credentials posed by the prime minister’s inability to further delay discussion of “core issues” with the Palestinians. If George Bush is in free fall, Israel isn’t going to provide a parachute.

Things haven’t gotten any brighter on other fronts for Mr. Olmert. The bereaved parents of 119 soldiers who fell in the 2006 Second Lebanon War have vowed to block roads and stage protests and hunger strikes until and unless the prime minister “goes home.” At this writing the Winograd Committee’s full report on his handling of the war is still a week away from release, but Winograd’s verdict on his ordering of a ground offensive when he knew a cease-fire was just hours away is expected to be especially damning. Thirty three IDF soldiers were killed in that inexplicable operation.

Olmert is taking further military flack from a letter published by 50 young IDF company commanders demanding his resignation. An inflammatory response by an unnamed aide has turned the incident into a cause celebre. “How dare these young officers judge the functioning of the prime minister,” he replied, admonishing a group that braved more than a month of fire in defense of Israel for “not having even done anything yet in their lives.”

The direst threat—military and political—to Olmert’s continued tenancy of the prime minister’s office is coming from the IDF reserves—the veteran officers and non-coms whose services were so scandalously ill-used during Lebanon II. They are the main source of pressure on Defense Minister Ehud Barak to fulfill a pledge to take his 19 Labor seats out of the coalition if the Winograd Commission report nails Olmert to the wall. Barak is thought to be desperately looking for a way to keep the coalition alive and prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from ascending to power without destroying his own credibility with the army he once led. It won’t be easy.

Meanwhile, in south Lebanon, a place where troubles don’t melt like lemon drops, Israel has witnessed the biggest military exercise ever put on by Hezbollah—three days of intensive maneuvers involving thousands of guerillas in infantry, anti-tank and antiaircraft units. All this under the noses of UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army. IDF intelligence reports that Hezbollah is getting almost daily shipments from Syria of Katyusha rockets and anti-tank missiles. Moreover, the terror group has now completely rebuilt its pre-war underground fortifications north of the Litani River—outside UN detection, but in range of Israel.

The Olmert government’s response has been a flat rejection of the preemptive strike urged by outgoing IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Moshe Kaplinsky. Instead, the government appears to be resting its hopes on UNIFIL, the same UNIFIL that has studiously ignored Hezbollah’s rearmament since the end of Lebanon II. Almost comically, even as Israel pressures the Europeans to continue contributing troops to this self-blinded collection of “peace keepers,” General Claudio Graziano, their commander, is issuing frantic warnings that the tension in south Lebanon and the deepening Lebanese political crisis could prompt the Europeans to close down the whole UNIFIL operation.

What passes for long range strategic thinking has also taken on a Felliniesque accent in the wake of President Bush’s visit. University of Haifa Professor Arnon Sofer, who doubles as a popular lecturer at the IDF’s National Defense College, compares Israel under Olmert to the Titanic, “where up on the Tel Aviv main deck they’re having a big party – a stock market orgy.” On the one hand, he assails “the leftists and so-called human rights lawyers who only care about the well being of cats, dogs and Palestinians, but never about Jews.” On the other, he is ecstatic over the 2005 Gaza disengagement, whose purpose, he claims, was “not to put an end to terrorism or Kassam fire,” but to “stop being responsible for a million and a half Arabs who continue to multiply in conditions of poverty and madness. I am thrilled we are out of there.”

So what about those Kassams coming down over the western Negev? “The Kassams,” Sofer replies, “do not constitute a strategic threat.” Nor does he regard Iran as a strategic threat. “Much ado about nothing. Two missiles on the Iranian islands of Karaj and Seri and Iran’s entire oil revenue drops from $60 billion to zero. Iran is so weak and vulnerable, it’s unbelievable.” Sofer’s formula for Israeli survival: Complete the security fence “and then whoever tries tocross it gets a bullet in the head….If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.”

Over and above all others, the two most Felliniesque characters in this post-Bush bash scenario are Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres. In a week that saw the western Negev on the receiving end of 160 Kassams, while the organization of a modern-day “Kindertransport” of traumatized Sderot children to America was taking shape, Mr. Olmert was telling us that pain was the only antidote to our existential concerns.

The more pain we accept—the handover of Judea and Samaria, the division of Jerusalem—the greater our chances for survival. He draws the line on the Palestinians’ professed “right of return,” but rumor has it he’s prepared to admit a “token” 50,000 “refugees” if that will close the deal. Praise for George Bush remains open-ended: “He’s not doing a single thing that I don’t agree to. He doesn’t support anything that I oppose. He doesn’t say a thing that he thinks will make life harder for Israel.” On at least the first two counts, the prime minister is being completely accurate. As former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens points out, “the Annapolis Conference would never have taken place had Olmert not made it clear that he was looking forward to such a conference where he could publicly state his view that the State of Israel is finished if a Palestinian state does not come into being. The slogans ‘two states for two peoples’ and ‘the occupation must end’ were launched in Israel, not in Washington.”

Never, in Mr. Olmert’s view, has Israel been surrounded by so many loving and influential European friends— Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in England, Nicholas Sarkozy in France, Angela Merkel in Germany. But, he hastens to remind us, “the world that is friendly to Israel…the world that really supports Israel, when it speaks of the future, speaks of Israel in terms of the ’67 borders. It speaks of the division of Jerusalem.” The Prime Minister’s wonderful world of Israel supporters clearly does not include the 50 million or so Christian Zionists who oppose the division of Jerusalem and an Israeli retreat to the pre-June 1967 lines.

At the Felliniesque pinnacle stands Israel’s president and Aesopian sage Shimon Peres. The clairvoyant Mr. Peres envisions Israel’s future encapsulated in the single word globalization. “Globalization,” he informs us, “has taken the place of nationalism and boundaries in today’s marketplace. It seems that today, territories and boundaries have lost their importance.” Security fences? Defensible borders? Anachronisms. Symbols of a bygone age. “In the world of today,” Peres asserts, “science has taken the place of the earth and the place of the government has been taken by the globe. Today’s world proves that empires could be established without colonization or an army. You just need to look at the empire Bill Gates has built. Look how much power he has.”

We can’t be sure at this early stage in his ruminations whether Mr. Peres might be suggesting dropping George Bush in favor of a defense pact with Microsoft, but it might be an idea worth pursuing.

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

On January 24, the Oxford Union held a debate entitled, “This House Believes that the State of Israel has a Right to Exist.” Arguing in favor of the motion were Ted Honderich and Norman Finkelstein. Against the motion were Ghada Karmi and Michel Massih, (Ilan Pappe was originally slated to oppose).

Finkelstein is a hero of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. In The Jewish Divide Over Israel, a collection of essays edited by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, the latter writes of Finkelstein, “In his moral calculus, Tel Aviv deserves the fate of Hiroshima and pregnant women are ‘legitimate targets’ for mass murder.” That the Oxford Union would choose this man to defend Israel defies the imagination.

Honderich, a lesser known character, and the only one who placed his remarks on the Internet, argued that Arabs have a moral right to conduct terrorism in all of Israel in order to obtain part of Israel for a state. So suicide bombers who hang on Honderich’s words can rest easy and carry on as before.

The debate was off-limits to the general public and no transcript exists, though Oxford students can listen to a recording on Oxford’s campus. The Oxford Union’s reply to our request for a transcript concluded, “And just in case, the event was closed to the press so whilst you would be able to listen to it, you would not be able to report on it or provide an account to the press.”

One student leaked a report to The Jerusalem Post. The debate was as farcical as one might expect. Finkelstein, who argued for the motion, voted against it while Honderich, who switched sides during the debate to oppose the motion, in the end voted for it. According to the Post, “the student union conceded Israel’s ’right to exist’ by just over 100 votes.”

While it seems out of character for a prestigious institution like Oxford to hold an anti-Israel hate debate, it may be more in keeping with the university’s tradition than at first thought, as much of the property on which Oxford was built was confiscated from Jews when they were expelled from England in 1290.

Curious as to whether the Oxford Union ever held a debate on the university’s right to exist on stolen Jewish land, we recruited an Oxford undergraduate to do research in the Union’s archives. What he unearthed was even more astonishing, a still more secret Oxford Union debate. The title, “This House Believes that England has a Right to Exist.” Arguing in favor of the motion were Al-Qaeda supreme leader Osama bin Laden and his spiritual adviser Ayman al-Zawahiri. Opposed to the motion were Al-Qaeda’s Jordanian operational planner Abu Musab Zarqawi and mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The following are excerpts our intrepid undergraduate smuggled out in his sock:

Mr. Bin Laden: England must be destroyed. It is an ally of [President George W.] Bush, man of many transgressions. Its troops sit on holy soil. We will punish the transgressors and crush them utterly.

Moderator: Um, Mr. Bin Laden, actually you are arguing in favor of the motion.

Mr. Bin Laden: Oh.

Mr. Al-Zawahri: Allow me to elucidate what our Supreme Leader has just said. What he means is that England has a right to exist provided it removes its troops, accepts Sharia law and submits to a world caliphate.

Mr. Bin Laden: That’s what I meant. Unless they don’t. Then we murder them all.

Mr. Zarqawi: This discussion makes me sick. There is no time to quibble about caliphates. England has no right to exist period! It is responsible for the Zionist entity in our midst. It opposed Nazism during World War II. Their women wear miniskirts. We must drive them into the sea.

Mr. Shaikh Mohammed: Which sea? Irish Sea, North Sea, Atlantic ocean? I need to know for operational planning.

Mr. Zarqawi: Whichever sea is closest.

Mr. Shaikh Mohammed: (jotting notes) Sea… closest.

Mr. Bin Laden: My mind has many confusing thoughts about England, especially about the women and their miniskirts. I think that now maybe only England’s women have the right to exist. They will become part of our world caliphate harem.

Mr. Al-Zawahiri: The Supreme Leader has spoken. All of England’s men must die. England’s miniskirts will become part of our harem.

Mr. Bin Laden: No, no miniskirts. We will put England’s women in burkhas and beat them repeatedly. Otherwise they will not know they are part of the caliphate.

Mr. Al-Zawahiri: You are wise beyond time, Oh Supreme Leader.

Mr. Zarqawi: Outrage! England’s women are full of filth and pestilence. These non-virginal whores must disappear. We will sink their island into the sea.

Mr. Shaikh Mohammed: Wait, which sea is that again?

Mr. Zarqawi: We will blow up England. We will make a new sea where England once existed!

Mr. Shaikh Mohammed: (jotting notes) New… sea.

Mr. Bin Laden: Can you repeat that? I can’t hear anything. I’m sitting at the back of a cave and there’s a lot of static on this video teleconference connection.

Mr. Al-Zawahiri: (loudly) He said he wants to sink England because their non-virginal women are whores.

Mr. Bin Laden: My mind finds it hard to argue with that logic. What if we keep the virgins only?

Mr. Al-Zawahiri: The Supreme Leader in his infinite greatness suggests only England’s virgins have a right to exist to serve us in our world caliphate harem.

Mr. Zarqawi: After we take out the virgins, then can I blow up England?

Mr. Al-Zawahri: We lost the Supreme Leader’s connection. But I feel confident he would agree.

David Isaac is a freelance writer in California.

Moshe Sharon

Hatred of Judaism and the Jews is an intellectual creation. Its foundations were laid in ancient times by historians, writers, poets, philosophers and artists long before Christianity added the theological dimension. Since then it has been the one permanent feature that has accompanied the Jews throughout their history.

Born in Hellenistic Egypt, in the third century BCE, intellectual anti-Semitism has two main features which go hand in hand; one is the invention of an alternative (or counter) history for the Jews; the other describing them as inferior human beings, filthy, bearers of disease and haters of humanity and of the gods.

Alternative history declares the historical records of its target people as false, and presents its own version as the truth. It has passed through certain major stations on its way, such as the writings of some of the Church Fathers, a number of Moslem historians and theologians in the Middle Ages, Voltaire’s (1694-1778) essay on the Jews in the Dictionaire Philosophique, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, until it became commonplace in Arab text books, in multitudes of internet sites, and in numerous publications.

The denial of the Holocaust is the most recent and most arrogant example of alternative history. The Holocaust deniers know the truth, for there is hardly a case in history that is more documented than the Holocaust. Nevertheless they are out to absolve the Nazis, and blame the victims, presenting the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews as a Jewish conspiracy. Mahmud ‘Abbas (nom de guerre: “Abu Mazen”), the current PA President of whom the West is so enamored, is one of them. In 1982 he received a PhD from Lumumba University in Moscow for his thesis on the “Secret Relations between the Nazis and Zionism,” which included all the elements of Holocaust denial.

The first known alternative history of the Jews was written in Alexandria by the Egyptian priest Manetho, who felt the need to supply his Greek readers with a reply to the Biblical story of the Exodus, with the explicit aim of denigrating the Jews. According to Manetho’s alternative history, the Jews were a group of 80,000 lepers who rebelled, took over Egypt and, ruling it for more than a decade, spread death and horror in the country. Their leader was Osarseph, a priest from Heliopolis. After thirteen years in exile the Egyptian king returned to Egypt, killed most of them and drove the rest out of the country.

Manetho’s “history” was designed to negate everything positive about the Jews. The Jews described Joseph as a wise governor who saved Egypt from disaster. Menetho replied by making him an apostate Egyptian priest of Osiris (hence his name Osarseph) who ruined Egypt. The Jews regarded themselves as a people; Manetho described them as a horrifying mob of lepers. The Jews claimed that God had brought them out of Egypt; Manetho asserted that they had been expelled.

Manetho’s fiction and the abundance of horror stories about the Jews, spread by his copiers and successors, exemplify a mixture of hatred and fear. Later, Moslem classical historians created their own versions of Jewish alternative history. But unlike their predecessors, their hatred of the Jews was based on contempt rather than on fear. However, once the Moslems became acquainted with European anti-Semitism, they embraced the Western description of the Jew as the embodiment of pure evil, and Judaism as a bloodthirsty religion whose followers planned to subdue the world with the help of Satan. Thus the hatred felt by the Moslems towards the Jews now comprised both fear and contempt.

The blood libel, the gruesome lie of Christian Europe against the Jews, assumed immediate prominence in Islamic anti-Semitic thought and practice.

The first blood libel case under Islamic rule in modern times was the “Damascus Affair”. In 1840, the Jews of Damascus were accused of the ritual murder of a Capuchin friar. Far from immediately opposing the false accusation, Ratti Menton, the French consul in Damascus gave it credibility. Supported by the French government, he himself conducted the “investigation” of the case together with the Moslem Governor. The entire Jewish community was held to ransom and its leaders were arrested, some tortured to death, before a general outcry in the world put an end to the affair. Ratti Menton, however, was never convinced of the innocence of the Jews.

The attribution of ritual murder to the Jews was popular among Moslem intellectuals and became the staple of anti-Semitic Moslem propaganda. The Damascus Affair has never died, still presented as proof of ritual murder anchored in the Jewish religion. Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian minister of war, wrote his PhD on the subject and published it in a book called The Unleavened Bread of Zion which by 2002 had sold out eight editions. He described the Damascus Affair in great detail as "evidence" of the Jewish practice of ritual murder. Ratti Menton is his proof for the truth of the information.

Arab readers now comprise an enthusiastic market for anti-Semitic literature whether written originally in Arabic or translated from other languages. Among the latter, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a crude, primitive anti-Semitic Russian forgery and Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf are best sellers, and compulsory reading for the military. The infamous book of Canon August Rohling Der Talmudjude is the modern Moslem historian’s bible. In the early 1880s Rohling, a professor at the Imperial University of Prague, published a worthless anti-Semitic book, which he claimed was based on the Talmud. In 1885, European scholars exposed Rohling as a fake, a liar, and an ignoramus. As a result he was obliged to resign his university post. Moslem writers do not let such minor facts confuse them. For them Rohling, the Protocols, Hitler, Tlas, Abu Mazen and writings by similar authors constitute the authentic library on the Jews and Judaism. Other sources fall under the headline of the “Jewish (Zionist) conspiracy.”

Having enthusiastically adopted the accusation of Jewish ritual murder as an absolute truth, Moslem writers have become ever more creative. They widened the scope of the victims from Christian to Palestinian and other children, and added the cakes of Purim to Passover unleavened bread.

The establishment of the State of Israel and the repeated defeats of the Arab armies needed an immediate, plausible, and face-saving explanation. This was readily provided by the Protocols and Mein Kampf which exposed the Jewish conspiracy to control the world. These books confirm Moslem fears and explain their shortcomings. Moslems do not feel alone any more, they belong to the large body of global victims, exposed to the danger posed to humanity by international Jewry, the enemies of God.

Like European anti-Semitic literature, its Moslem counterpart has very little variety. Hundreds of books repeat the same slogans, and cartoonists, directly influenced by the Nazi cartoons, repeat the same drawings of the ugly, inhuman, vicious Jew. Out of the vast literature the following examples chosen at random will suffice.

Anis Mansur, an Egyptian author and close adviser of Egyptian presidents, describing the treacherous “Jewish character” shamelessly gave the impression he was relying on Jewish sources for the "truth" of the blood libel: “The famous Jewish historian Josephus was the first to have revealed to the whole world that the Jews need the blood of other people to make matzot for their holidays. The Jews usually do not butcher the person. They only pierce the skull and then the heart, and drink the blood of the head and the heart together; then they discard the corpse anywhere.”

Josephus said exactly the opposite, defending Judaism against the Greek anti-Semites. But Mansur knows that his audience is thirsty for his words, the authority of which nobody questions.

During the Second World War, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, supported by other Moslem leaders, went to Berlin to serve the Nazi propaganda machine and prepare a military force to participate in the “Final Solution.” Moslem anti-Semites turn these facts upside down. The comparison of the Jews to the Nazis has become a staple of Islamic alternative history, a major topic in talk shows and a frequent subject of the crude Arab cartoon. In the book Oh Moslems, the Jews are Coming Muhammad ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Mansur claims that the Jews are no different from the Nazis, ascribing horrendous atrocities to them: the slaughter of babies, the stabbing of pregnant women, the torture and rape of non-Jewish women and so on.

In 1985 King Fahd of Saudi Arabia published the following observations about Israel and the Jews in the popular weekly aI-Musawwar:

“Israel has had malicious intentions since ancient times. Its objective is the destruction of all other religions. It is proven from history that they are the ones who ignited the Crusades at the time of Saladin so that war would lead to the weakening of both Moslems and Christians. They regard other religions as lower than their own, and other peoples as inferior to their level. And on the subject of vengeance—they have a certain day on which they mix the blood of non-Jews into their bread and eat it. It happened two years ago, while I was in Paris on a visit, that the police discovered five murdered children. Their blood had been drained and it turned out that some Jews had murdered them in order to take their blood and mix it with the bread that they ate on this day. This shows you the extent of their hatred and malice towards non-Jewish peoples.”

Dr. ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud, the rector of the famous al-Azhar University, wrote in his book Holy War and Victory: “The Jews have laid down a programme for the destruction of humanity, through subverting religion and ethics. They have already begun to implement the programme with their money, their control of the mass media and their propaganda. They have falsified knowledge, violated standards of literary truth and unscrupulously sought to break down and destroy humanity.”

Dr. Salah ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Khalidi, in his book The Jewish Personality on the basis of the Koran concludes that “the Jews are liars, corrupt, envious, cunning, fraudulent, treacherous, stupid, despicable, cowards, and misers; they break agreements and treaties, and cause injustice in the world…”

Even medieval Christian anti-Semitic literature, as bad as it was, does not match the viciousness of Arab-Islamic, anti-Semitic literature and the alternative history of the Jews that is based on it. The voluminous, Arab anti-Semitic literature, fills a demand and answers a need. It depicts the Jews as a demonic entity and therefore makes their extermination legitimate. As such, modern Islamic anti-Semitism is at least as vicious as that of the Nazis.

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

Hugh Fitzgerald

Fatah activists belonging to the "Brigades of Return" and to "Black September" claimed responsibility for carrying out the shooting attack in Shuafat on January 24 that left one Israeli dead and another seriously wounded. A spokesman for the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Fatah's military wing, told Ynet News that the attackers “returned to their base safely” and promised more attacks in response to “Israeli crimes.”

Meanwhile, the Olmert Government has refused to mount an operation to seize the killers-- known to the Israelis—of those two young men, Israeli soldiers on leave. It knows exactly where they are but will do nothing to "offend" the Slow Jihadists of Fatah.

And in that same meanwhile, the unbearable Tzipi Livni speaks again and again about the necessity of "dividing the land." By this she means that Israel, tiny Israel, which now exists on less than one-one thousandth of the total land area possessed by the Arabs, must relinquish part of the one-one thousandth to those Arabs. After all, the Arabs everywhere behave as if all of the Middle East, all of North Africa, belongs to Islam and to Arabs. The Copts, the Maronites, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Berbers, and of course, above all, the Jews, are entitled to nothing: not to a state, not to autonomy, not to equal treatment with Moslem Arabs.

Livni's Great Idea, and that of Olmert, is that Israel must "maintain its Jewish character." And the only way that these people can think of doing this is to slice off successive bits of Israel where the Arabs now have a majority. No doubt they will have to keep on slicing bit after bit, as the salami-slicing demands will never let up. The livnis and olmerts of this world do not want to think about this. They put it out of their minds in a bit of promised-land podsnappery. And certainly they haven't thought deeply about the Arabs who remain, overbreeding, inside whatever part of Israel is left once the olmert-livni "solution" has taken place.

The Bush Administration has been unable to understand Islam. Wanting not to delve too deeply into the matter and preferring to fashion a policy based on the children's game of "let's pretend," this incoherent and confused administration seeks the explanation elsewhere for the relentless hostility of Moslem states and peoples. This hostility has never, not one whit, been mitigated by the receipt of vast sums in "aid" from Western countries (really a disguised Jizyah), while the American government, while Bush, while Rice, look for the explanations--"poverty" and "lack of freedom" and anything else that can be offered up-- for that hostility, those smiles-with-murder-in-our-hearts behavior of, for example, our "staunch allies" in Egypt and Saudi Arabia (those Al-Saud, a primitive but exceedingly rich tribe, all daggers-and-dishdashas, with sneers of cold command on their seemingly cloned faces).

Yes, everything but Islam is thought to explain the behavior and views of Moslems—in Iraq, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in the Sudan, in Egypt and Jordan and the "Palestinian" occupied territories, and in Moslem communities in Thailand, the Philippines, and everywhere else that the meaning and menace of Islam is becoming, through the behavior of Moslems themselves, clear to many people.

In Israel, the olmerts and livnis have allowed themselves to complacently believe that refusing to make Israel's legal, moral, and historic case is the best way to peace. They think that identifying thoroughly with your enemy, seeing "his side," is the key to peace--while being careful, again, to view the conflict exactly as it is presented by Moslems and Arabs for Western consumption, as a matter of "legitimate rights" and "nationalist struggle." In fact, it is entirely a war to weaken, and then eliminate, the Jewish commonwealth which took almost 2000 years to astonishingly rebuild. And if it is lost again, there will be no second chance, with all that that implies for the history, and moral and mental stability, of the civilization of the West.

Long ago, in 1921, when the Mandate for Palestine was young, the British unilaterally removed the application of its provisions to all of its intended territory east of the river Jordan--that is, all of Eastern Palestine, as it had always been defined, and instead incorporated Eastern Palestine into a hastily concocted Emirate of Transjordan (in 1946 promoted to the status of Arab Kingdom). This they gave to Abdullah, the oldest Hashemite son—a move made necessary, the British felt, because his younger brother Faisal had been "given" the kingdom of Iraq, and a kingdom-less Abdullah might, miffed, have tried to claim Syria as his kingdom, thereby causing trouble with France, the possessor of the League of Nations' Mandate for Syria.

And having lost all of Eastern Palestine, the Jews of Israel, fighting for their lives when attacked in May 1948 by the regular armies of five Arab states, managed to survive. But Ben-Gurion stopped the fighting before that part of Judea and Samaria (toponyms in constant and wide use for 2000 years, not least by, inter alios, Jesus) that was later renamed by Jordan as "the West Bank" could be wrested from the Arabs. And the same hesitation left Gaza, also part of Mandatory Palestine, in Arab, in this case Egyptian, hands.

Later, after Israel's astounding victory in June 1967, those assorted Peace Plans -- Rogers, Kissinger, you name it -- became, after Saint Sadat went through his crowd-pleasing performance, a vague but apparently endless "Peace Process." This went along with a kind of amnesia about Israel's overwhelming legal, moral, and historic claims--as if Israel had lost the ability to recognize that it was in the right, and it was Israel, always and everywhere, that was under permanent assault.

All that peace-processing consisted of was, on the Israeli side, giving up that most precious and tangible of assets, land, for the most intangible and worthless of assets: Moslem Arab "promises" in a treaty made with an Infidel enemy, when as every educated Moslem knows, the model for all such treaties is that made by Muhammad with the Meccans in 628 A.D., at Al-Hudaibiyya, a model that stands for the immutable proposition not, as in the West, of "Pacta Sunt Servanda" (treaties are to be obeyed) but for a temporary truce only.

Again and again, over the past forty years, since the Six-Day War, we have witnessed those negotiations, those phony handshakes and smiles, those photo-ops, that shuttle diplomacy, those hideous dennis-rosses-aaron-millers-martin-indyks—each more sure of himself than the last. They know nothing, of course, about the one thing that can prevent, not a state of war, between the Moslem Arabs and Israel (that "state of war" will continue as long as Moslems take their Islam seriously), but rather a state of open warfare, which can be permanently prevented if Israel does not surrender further tangible assets, if the Western world begins to wake up from its deep dream of a (false) peace, and if, finally, as it recognizes its own Moslem menace within Western Europe, the countries of the West begin to rethink their willful misreporting about, and misunderstanding and cruel abandonment of Israel.

That will happen. The logic of events, the inevitability of Moslem aggressive demands and Moslem violence within the countries of Western Europe will make that reassessment happen. All Israel has to do is to hold on, not further surrender to the sly Slow Jihadists of Fatah.

But Olmert and Livni are also willfully unaware of how attitudes, in the larger Western world, are changing toward Islam because of the behavior of Moslems themselves. And failing to factor this into their policies, they are in danger of plucking, yet again, defeat from a conceivable victory. And this time, so terrible are they, and so willing to surrender, that the self-inflicted wound will be akin to that wound suffered by Philoctetes that made it impossible for him to fulfill his religious rites. The shallow Israeli leftists, quick to be outraged by religious Jews, are far less outraged by the denial of Jewish historic and legal rights to the state of Israel; they are far more exercised by this or that rabbi than by the “moderate” Abbas, that Holocaust-denier, who contemplates an Israel reduced in size and power by degrees, becoming a dhimmi state that will exist not by right but by Moslem sufferance. And then, by further degrees, it will be reduced until it ultimately disappears, and the Dar al-Islam is cleansed of that intolerable affront, the existence of an Infidel nation-state (and still worse, one run by Jews) smack in the middle of a now-uninterruptible Moslem land mass.

Then all will again be right, as Islam continues to expand, in western Europe and elsewhere, the lands within its domain, the ever-expanding Dar al-Islam.

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Jihadwatch on January 25.

Ruth King

In December 2003, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, sobered by the fate of Saddam Hussein, announced that he would dismantle his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. His gesture was followed by easing of an economic embargo and in June 2004 the State Department opened a liaison office in Libya’s capital and reestablished diplomatic relations after a twenty-five year hiatus.

At the UN Libya established a presence in the Human Rights Council and became a member of the Security Council. On January 3, 2008, capping Libya’s steep ascent to respectability Libya’s ambassador to the UN became President of the Security Council.

Abdel-Rahman Shalqam, Libya’s Foreign Minister, has made the Washington A list, gushing: "We don't speak anymore about war or confrontation or terrorism. No, the contrary: wealth of the people, cooperation, investments, peace and stability." He got all sorts of goodies from the State Department.

But who is Qaddafi—besides being the new man on Condi’s block? First of all, he is a man of many spellings: Moammar Kaddaf, Qaddafi, Al Khatafi, El Ghadafi, and my very favorite, from his site, Al Ghatafi. Why the media, which has adapted names without vowels among Slavic leaders cannot get a single spelling is a mystery but for purposes of this article I’ll just call him Muammar.

In 1969, a youthful twenty seven year-old, Muammar led a coup against Libya’s King Idris and established himself as the nation’s leader. He was too modest to declare himself king so he holds the titles "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah" and "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution.”

A fervent Moslem, Muammar blends faith, crackpot socialism and absolute power. All foreign bases, including British and American bases, were closed; cutting off hands for theft was reinstituted; gambling and alcohol were outlawed; and to further blend into the Arab neighborhood all Jewish property was confiscated and all Christian churches closed.

Muammar saw himself as the natural messiah of the movement to forge pan Arab/Islamic unity from “the Atlantic to the Gulf.” By the mid-1980s he was regarded in the West as the principal financier of international terrorism. He reportedly financed “Black September” and the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympics and is also said to have arranged the bombing of a disco in Berlin in 1986 where a large number of the injured were United States servicemen. He has confessed to Libya’s complicity in the bombing of Pan Am’s Flight 103 in 1988 where 270 civilians were killed, offering compensation to relatives of the victims. He has had more than 300 dissidents, including journalists, assassinated in exile and was a member of the top ten in the list of world’s worst dictators.

This is how Freedom House appraised him in 2003: “The state owns all media, criticism of government policy is forbidden, political trials are secret, and torture is common.” One year later he only won “honorable mention” among the top ten: Freedom House stated: “He gave up his nuclear weapons program and is opening his nation’s economy to foreign investment. Yet at home he continues to run a brutal dictatorship, maintaining total control over all aspects of Libyan life. Freedom of speech, assembly and religion are harshly restricted. Entire families, tribes and even towns can be punished for ‘collective guilt.’ Political opposition and damaging public or private property are considered ‘crimes against the state.’”

However, to show he’s contrite, after an ordeal of nine years, Muammar released Bulgarian medics who had been jailed for “deliberately” infecting children with AIDS. Their descriptions of confessions extracted under torture are hair-raising.

Although his credentials as an enemy of Israel keep him ensconced in the Arab League, Arab rulers with ambitions of their own rejected him and he turned his attention to meddling in the affairs of other African nations. He was involved in dozens of revolutions which soaked the soil of Africa in blood and actually invaded Chad in 1973. (He was finally forced to leave in 1994.)

In addition to Idi Amin, one of his best pals was Charles Taylor, the war lord of Liberia, who is responsible for the deaths of 200,000 and the dislocation of more than two million people in a country of 6,000,000. Muammar gave Taylor safe passage and ran arms for him. He has denounced Taylor’s trial for crimes against humanity at the UN War Crimes Tribunal on the grounds it would set “an unacceptable precedent that threatened all African leaders.” Well, what are friends for?

The State Department air-brushes his history of brutality by calling him “flamboyant”….read that as nuts.

A “Brotherly Leader and Guide” needs security and like the King of Dahomey of yore he maintains an all female army of body guards called the “Amazon” division. Although Muammar is a devout Moslem they do not cover their faces. They are well coiffed and look like Charlie’s Angels in flak suits. They run in place and demonstrate skills in judo and combat, ready to kill anyone who comes within ten feet of Muammar. Of course his new buddies such as Chavez, Blair and Sarkozy are given a wider berth.

His interesting children own and run everything. Muammar's only daughter Ayesha is one of the lawyers who served as defense counsel for Saddam Hussein. Eldest son Mohammed owns all the telecommunication companies in Libya. Mutasim-Billah, another son, masterminded an Egyptian-backed coup attempt against his father. Muammar forgave him and he is now national security adviser, also heading his very own unit within the army. Son Hannibal was involved in a series of violent incidents throughout Europe, including charges for beating up his pregnant girlfriend. Boys will be boys and one of them is slated to eventually run Libya—via elections, of course.

Muammar changes his gold-threaded robes continually and, according to Bob Woodward, has been spotted cross-dressing. In his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 Woodward quotes a CIA agent describing Muammar in high heels and make-up in Spain. Others have described an event where Muammar stumbled when walking up a podium because he was wearing high heeled ladies’ shoes.

Muammar is also a literary scholar. In 1980 he declared that Shakespeare was really an Arab poet whose name was Sheik El Zubeir.

Muammar’s Magnus opus is the Green Book, a guide to living, governing and everything else in three volumes, which is required reading in Libyan schools. In his own words, the book is “a guide for the whole of humanity, not just Libya.”

Among the Green Book’s pearls of wisdom and erudition are the following observations:

The Arts? “If one group of people wears white clothes in mourning and another group puts on black, the sentiment of each group will be adjusted according to these two colours, i.e., one group rejects the black colour on such an occasion while the other one prefers it, and vice versa. Such a sentiment leaves its physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body. This adaptation will be transmitted by inheritance.”

Biology? “Women are females and men are males. According to gynecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period.”

Religion? “Religion contains tradition, and tradition is an expression of the natural life of the people. Therefore, religion is an affirmation of natural laws which are discerned therein. Laws which are not premised on religion and tradition are merely an invention by man to be used against his fellow man. Consequently, such laws are invalid because they do not emanate from the natural source of tradition and religion.”

I could go on but you get the picture of this Renaissance man.

Shortly after the opening of diplomatic relations with the U.S., Muammar issued an edict that all his opponents will be killed wherever they are.

Nonetheless, he is already slated to be one of Condoleezza Rice’s new “moderate” friends. Well, if she can take tea with Holocaust denier terrorists such as Abbas, it is only logical that the welcome mat will be extended to Muammar. He was even invited to Annapolis.