Bush's Legacy
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

A Morality Tale
Rael Jean Isaac

How Bush’s Messianism Leads To Moral Relativism
Lawrence Auster

Live For Sderot!
David Isaac

Waste To Energy
J. Lauber and A. Lappen

Whose Occupation?
Moshe Sharon

It Was Never About Borders
Ruth King

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

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Herbert Zweibon

In his second term, President Bush has shifted gears from engaging in the war on terror. Secretary of State Rice has formulated the new target: “There could be no greater legacy for America than to help to bring into being a Palestinian state for a people who have suffered too long…and who have so much to give to the international community and to all of us.” (As Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa Lappen point out, the Bush Administration’s search for partners to promote peace within the Palestinian Authority resembles Lord Charles Bowen’s “blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat which isn’t there.”)

While there was much publicity about what Edward Alexander calls the “Annapolis comic opera of 49 governments in late November,” there is less awareness of the sheer number of trips Rice has made to pressure Israel. In 2005, when she took office as Secretary of State, Rice made four trips to Israel (February, June, July and November); in 2006 two trips (July and October); in 2007 two trips (January, October); and in 2008 she has gone twice (February, March) and plans to return in April. President Bush went in January and is scheduled to return in May (determined to launch a Palestinian state by the end of the year, the administration is turning up the heat).

The damage Rice has already wrought to Israeli security in those trips is substantial. For example, in November 2005 she forced a reluctant Israeli government to give up its control of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, substituting EU monitors. The monitors soon fled and the result, predictably, has been to open the Philadelphi road to massive movement of arms and terrorists into Gaza. Rice was the architect of the ceasefire with Hezbollah that enabled it to rearm and reassert its control over southern Lebanon. It was Rice who forced Israel to permit U.S. General Keith Dayton to train and arm Fatah forces in Gaza, in effect arming Hamas since Fatah subsequently surrendered its weapons to Hamas without a fight.

The administration also keeps up the pressure through on-the-ground interference by lesser fry. Ambassador to Israel Richard Jones recently announced that Jews will simply have to leave Jerusalem rather than build new housing that might interfere with plans to make East Jerusalem the capital of the new Arab state. JINSA (the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) has complained that three U.S. generals are now on an inappropriate political mission for the State Department: one trains the Palestinian army/police/praetorian guard; one “judges” Israeli and Palestinian Authority compliance with the Road Map; a third “coordinates security” between Israel and the PA. The generals are complaining that Israel is not sharing enough intelligence with the Palestinian Security Services (apparently even the Olmert government is not that suicidal); that it refuses to remove checkpoints (again a rational effort to protect Israeli citizens); and that IDF security operations are driving terrorists into PA-controlled areas, making it more difficult to maintain order (presumably the IDF should leave them unmolested to murder Israelis where they are).

Most recently Vice President Cheney has come to Israel. In a joint appearance with Prime Minister Olmert he announced “The United States will never pressure Israel to take steps that threaten its security” and then reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to a Palestinian state. How are we to interpret this obvious contradiction? Incoherence? Blindness? An attempt to mollify through rhetoric while the fatal blow is struck?

Is this to what the Bush doctrine has sunk? From the war on terror and the spread of democracy to the establishment of a terror state and the destruction of the only Middle East democracy?

Rael Jean Isaac

The Lemming Plenum

Meeting In Atlanta in February, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella organization representing 14 national Jewish groups and 125 local Jewish Community Relations Councils affirmed its support for a Palestinian state. The vote was unanimous, with one “abstention” (by the Orthodox Union).

In the case of Jim Jones 913 people died when the Peoples Temple leader induced his flock to take cyanide laced Kool-Aid. In this case the entire organized Jewish community has volunteered Israel’s Jewish population for mass suicide.

Where there is no vision the people perish, and never were Jews so blind.

No Debate

Caroline Glick (Jerusalem Post, March 20) raises an important point. With “the surge,” President Bush changed U.S. strategy in Iraq, because the obvious failure of existing strategy had set off a passionate domestic debate. The Democratic victory in the Congressional elections was a warning sign that the most important decision he made as president was about to go up in flames.

Unfortunately, Glick writes, there has been no similar reevaluation of the equally obvious failure of Bush’s strategy of creating a Palestinian state that will live “peacefully” beside Israel, although it is obvious Abbas, no less than Hamas, anticipates a future without Israel. The Democratic-controlled Congress has approved a Bush administration request to give the PA $150 million, reflecting bipartisan support for the same old, same old. There is no political debate in the U.S. regarding the reasonableness of the policy of embracing the PLO as a “peace partner” and so year in and year out the U.S. promotes a policy with no chance of succeeding.

There is not even any debate in the Presidential campaign. On his recent trip to Israel Senator McCain professed support for a Palestinian state. As for Senators Obama and Clinton, their support is so obvious they don’t even bother mentioning the issue.

Sarkozy: Two Sides

Nicolas Sarkozy has exercised imaginative moral leadership. He is requiring all fifth grade students to learn the story of one of the 11,000 French Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. There can be no better way to bring home the reality of the Holocaust—and the extent of French complicity—than by personalizing it. The diaries of one young girl, Anne Frank, brought home the horror of the Holocaust as no numbing numbers could.

As law professor and novelist Thane Rosenbaum points out, this fine initiative has brought upon Sarkozy a flood of attacks: it is too traumatic for fifth graders; there is no reason to single out Jewish victims; the Arab population won’t like it. Writes Rosenbaum: “The attacks against Mr. Sarkozy are but another version of cultural protectionism, a cynical way to prevent the ghosts of Holocaust memory to penetrate the tight seal of French guilt….[H]is public gesture with respect to the Holocaust should be a source of national pride, not shame. If nothing else, it will remind the citizens of France that their remembrance of the Holocaust has been inadequate and long overdue, but, in the hands of French school children, perhaps it will not be too late.”

Unfortunately not all of Sarkozy’s initiatives are so admirable. Editor of the Brussels Journal Paul Belien notes that Sarkozy has used his large parliamentary majority to ratify a treaty which transfers substantial powers from Paris to the European Union, even though the French had rejected such a transfer in a 2005 referendum. Also, with Angela Merkel he has announced establishment of a “Mediterranean Union” to encompass the 27 EU states and all the countries on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Sarkozy wants France and Algeria (where many of the thugs that have turned areas of France into no-go zones come from) to form the axis of this union. Even more Moslem immigrants are likely to flood France under this scenario.

Happy Birthday Israel

These are words Brandeis University cannot bring itself to say. Never mind that it was established as a place where Jews, then still subject to quotas at elite universities, could receive a quality education and that one of its “four pillars,” listed on the school’s website, is “sponsorship by the Jewish community.”

Background: Five members of the Brandeis Student Union Senate proposed a resolution to wish Israel a happy 60th anniversary. One of them, Asher Tanenbaum, said that he wanted to show that “Israel is still an issue that people care about at Brandeis.” But the majority of student senate members found any expression of good will to Israel “controversial.” Said one: “This campus has very, very strong views on Israel both for and against, and it really shouldn’t be the (continued on page 11)
place of the Student Union to be commenting on Israel.” A number argued that a happy birthday vote “might unintentionally hurt some students’ feelings.”

Given that even the student senate of the University of California at Berkeley (scarcely a bastion of pro-Israel sentiment) passed the resolution Brandeis found too “controversial,” the depth to which Brandeis has sunk is notable. Donors, beware.

A Man for This Season

Ironically it is a man raised in Pakistan who has assumed the mantle of supporter of traditional Christianity in England. While the Archbishop of Canterbury looks forward to the “inevitable” adoption of “aspects” of sharia law, the Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, defying threats to his life and that of his family, warns that the Archbishop’s remarks could become a reality unless Britain regains belief in its Christian heritage. Says the Bishop: “If people are not given a fresh way of understanding what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a Christian-based society then something else may well take the place of all that we’re used to and that could be Islam.”

Israel’s New Guardians

In both the Galilee and the Negev, farmers and ranchers are beset by the lawlessness that in the early years of the Zionist enterprise led to the founding of the Hashomer volunteer guard forces. Then, as now, the problem lay in the unwillingness of the political authorities to defend Jews from Arab marauders.

What is shocking is that it is now a Jewish sovereign state that refuses to protect Jewish citizens as their livestock and crops are constantly plundered. Filing a complaint with police is an exercise in futility. Caroline Glick notes: “Fearing Arab riots or political condemnation by the Israeli Left, Arab leaders, the Islamic Movement and their allies abroad, the police and the state prosecutors have simply stopped enforcing the laws against the Galilee and Negev Arabs.” Farmers face the choice of doing nothing and seeing their lives’ work destroyed, paying protection money to Arab criminal gangs who then agree not to rob them, or abandoning agriculture altogether.

The good news is that the son of one Galilean farmer, a young soldier in an elite commando unit, has set up an organization of more than a hundred young volunteers which he calls Hashomer Hayisraeli Hahadash or the New Israeli Guardsmen. He says: “We’re not simply a security service. We see ourselves as a new movement. Our activities rest on three foundations: securing the land, expanding our operations throughout the Galilee and the Negev, and teaching Zionist and Jewish values to our members, our communities and the general public.”

These young Jews are surely a sign of hope. But how terrible it is that the state is in such decline that almost exactly 100 years after the founding of the first Hashomer, a second is needed.

A Dual Profile in Courage

At the Easter vigil at St Peter’s, Pope Benedict XVI baptized 55 year old Magdi Allam. An Egyptian born Moslem, Allam is not only an outspoken critic of Islam but a supporter of Israel who has been under police protection for five years following death threats against him over his criticism of suicide bombings.

Writing in Correre della Sera, of which he is deputy editor, Allam said his soul had been “liberated from the obscurantism of an ideology which legitimizes lies and dissimulation, violent death, which induces both murder and suicide and blind submission to tyranny.” Allam noted that the Pope, by baptizing him publicly, had “sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too cautious in the conversion of Muslims because of the fear of being unable to protect the converted, who are condemned to death for apostasy.” And indeed Moslem groups in Italy professed “amazement” at the “high profile” the Vatican had given the conversion.

Rael Jean Isaac

Mainstream publisher Simon and Schuster has now published a revisionist narrative of World War II, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization, novelist Nicholson Baker’s foray into writing a pacifist’s history of World War II. Up to now this has been the one sacrosanct conflict, “the Good War,” whose moral necessity was challenged only by kooks of the Holocaust-didn’t-happen stripe. Baker states he was attempting to answer three questions: “Was the war necessary? Was it a ‘good war’? Did waging it help anyone who needed help?” The message of the book is that the answer is “no” to all three.

How does Baker manage to do this? In his review of the book (New York Sun, March 12) Adam Kirsch observes that Baker, whose book stops at the end of 1941, ”does not even attempt to make a consecutive argument based on knowledge of all the relevant sources, the sine qua non of historical writing.” Instead he provides “disconnected factoids,” a “collage or montage”—drawing on newspapers of the day, diaries and correspondence from those on both sides of the conflict. This enables him to serve up uncritically the most cynical Nazi propaganda—for example to present the Nazi’s deportation of Jews from Hanover “to the east” (code word for extermination) as “compelled” by a shortage of housing caused by British bombing. Baker even uses Goebbels as a source on Churchill’s character: “His face is devoid of one single kindly feature. This man walks over dead bodies to satisfy his blind and presumptuous personal ambition.”

And so it goes. As Baker presents it, writes Kirsch, Nazi aggression would have ceased if Britain had only made peace with Hitler in 1941; Roosevelt connived to get us into war on behalf of the arms merchants (and probably knew about Pearl Harbor in advance); in Japan’s invasion of China, China was the aggressor. By omission and false juxtapositions, by distorting the real sequence of events, by reversing cause and effect, Baker manages to make Churchill, not Hitler, seem most responsible for the war.

Only time will tell if this book is an aberration or starts a trend in morally upending the story of World War II. (Lest we be too complacent on this score, Kirsch notes that a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times praised Baker for “demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.”) But at least for now, the true moral narrative of World War II is still so ingrained that the vast majority will be repelled by Baker’s pacifist revisionism. We know that Hitler was a monster, hatred of Jews his ruling passion, who mobilized his countrymen to fulfill his dream of taking over the world and massacred millions in that effort. We know he was finally beaten back at tremendous cost by reluctant democracies and the Soviet Union and that for many months England, with Churchill its heroic leader, fought the Nazi juggernaut alone.

But there’s another equally compelling moral narrative that has already been successfully turned on its head, with the evil ones morphing into oppressed noble victims, the heroes into Nazi villains. Indeed the inversion of reality has become so pervasive that most have forgotten the original–and true—narrative.

I speak of the story of modern Israel: its religious and historical roots, its pioneering hardships, its birth, its vigorous democracy, its continuing wars for survival, its determination to maintain the highest moral standards despite the ever mounting barbarism of its Arab enemies. What we have here is a morality tale every bit as white and black as that of the Allies versus Hitler, indeed in some respects even more so. This is because the narrative of World War II has its moral clouds: the dependence for victory on Stalin, scarcely less monstrous than Hitler (indeed in a non-aggression pact with Hitler until he invaded Russia), the massive bombing of cities (some of it of questionable value in advancing victory), the cruel refusal of Western countries to admit desperate Jews, the slamming shut of the doors of Palestine (even though, under the League of Nations Mandate, Britain was obligated to make it the Jewish National Home), the refusal of the Allies to so much as bomb the train tracks to the Nazi murder camps, the rewarding of Stalin at the close of the War at the expense of the freedom of Eastern Europe.

The moral narrative of modern Israel is straightforward, free of all such clouds. Victims of persecution in the Christian and Moslem world, Jews returned to the ancient homeland they had never abandoned (although as a result of repeated expulsions and oppression their numbers in Palestine dwindled) and to which they prayed daily to be restored. As Samuel Katz writes in Battleground, “Time after time a wave of hope surged through the ghettos of Europe at the news of some new would-be Messiah. The Jews’ hopes were dashed and the dream faded, but never for a day did they relinquish their bond with their country.”

And yes, for all the efforts to discredit this part of the narrative, near the end of the 19th century the pioneering Zionists came to an empty country. A series of warring imperial dynasties had devastated the land—which had never been an independent state for any but Jews—and the ruin had been made yet worse by revolts of local chieftains, civil strife and intertribal warfare. Bedouin raids from the desert finished off whatever was left. The Jews who remained were forced to subsist largely on the charity of Jews abroad. Katz quotes Alphonse de Lamartine who described conditions in 1835. “Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no living object…a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country…the tomb of a whole people.” Three decades later, in 1867, nothing had changed. Mark Twain, traveling the length of the country, wrote: “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.” Palestine, he wrote, “sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies….Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition, it is dreamland.” Saul S. Friedman’s title says it all: Land of Dust.

It was Zionist settlement and Jewish investment that revived Palestine economically and made it a beacon of economic opportunity. Large numbers of Arabs from neighboring countries joined the small native Arab population: they would become the famed Arab refugees who had supposedly been there “from time immemorial” (the title of Joan Peters’ book exposing the falsity of this claim).

After the British assumed the Mandate for Palestine, they almost immediately began to renege on their obligations. British army administrators in Jerusalem were intensely hostile to Jewish aspirations, to the point Zeev Jabotinsky, then a lieutenant in the Jewish Legion which he had founded, wrote “Not in Russia nor in Poland had there been seen such an intense and widespread atmosphere of hatred as prevailed in the British Army in Palestine in 1919 and 1920.” (Battleground, p.61) As the situation in Europe drastically worsened in the 1930s, the Jews were prepared to accept anything that was offered, a mindset that would continue up to the present. As former Jerusalem Post publisher Tom Rose and Gary Bauer note in Human Events “There is not a single internationally accepted program of diplomatic settlement (no matter how ill advised) proposed since 1917 that Israel has ever rejected, while there is not a single internationally accepted program of diplomatic settlement proposed since 1917 that the Palestinians have ever accepted.”

Even after Israel’s stunning victory in 1967 the national unity government immediately offered to give up the land it conquered for peace agreements (and that included the supposedly hawkish Menachem Begin). Its offer was met with the three nos of Khartoum, no to negotiations, no to recognition, no to peace with Israel. Subsequent efforts to make peace have been no more successful. The treaty with Egypt turned out to be a sham. As a consequence of the ill-advised Oslo Accords with Arafat, while the Arab (indeed Islamic) goal of destroying Israel has remained unchanged, Israel has become more vulnerable to the mounting barbarism of its enemies, with their shaheeds detonating bombs full of nails in buses and cafes, their “police” indiscriminately firing rockets into Israeli communities, their political leaders threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation. Through it all Israel has remained committed to its doctrine of purity of arms, often sacrificing the lives of its own soldiers in its commitment to minimize the danger of killing civilians.

As for Israel’s supposed “guilt” for the Arab refugees, despite the attempts at revisionist history, yes, most did indeed leave at the instigation of Arab leaders who told them victory was certain (after all, seven Arab states were invading) but it would be quicker and easier if the local Arab population was temporarily out of the way. As Katz points out (Battleground, p. 13) in the three months during which the major part of the flight took place—April, May, and June 1948—the London Times, at that time openly hostile to Zionism, published eleven leading articles on the situation in Palestine in addition to extensive news reports and “in none was there even a hint of the charge that the Zionists were driving the Arabs from their homes.”

Because Israel integrated the Jews driven from their homes in Arab countries, while the Arabs refused to absorb fellow Arabs, the obvious fact that there was a population exchange has been ignored. Nonie Darwash, whose father commanded “fedayeen” operations against Israel from Gaza in the 1950s, reminds us of the role taken by the Arab League, which passed special laws all Arab countries had to implement. “Even if a Palestinian married a citizen of an Arab country, that Palestinian could not become a citizen of his or her spouse’s country. A Palestinian can be born, live and die in an Arab country, but never gain its citizenship…..It is difficult to find a similar situation in human history: the intentional creation of a refugee status for a million and a half people [the refugees and their descendants] sustained for 60 years.”

All this is not to say that Israel has been without serious moral failings, but they have nothing to do with the “intransigence” or “oppression of Palestinians” of which the world accuses her. On the contrary, the obsessive, reckless pursuit of an illusory peace by successive Israeli governments has led them to a series of betrayals, starting with the abandonment of the South Lebanon Army in 2000. In 2005 the Gaza communities were destroyed (although Jews had built up them up with the active support of every Israeli government, Labor and Likud). Most recently, the residents of Sderot and the southern Negev have been abandoned, left to their own devices as the rockets fall. The rule of law has been undermined as opponents of government policy are sent to prison on trumped up charges. In its never-ending effort to appease its enemies, the government even turns its back on Arabs loyal to the state. There is something very much amiss when, as Caroline Glick reports (Jerusalem Post, March 10), the family of a Bedouin officer killed by a roadside bomb asks that his name not be revealed for fear of Arab revenge attacks on family members (all of whose male members serve in the IDF), while at the same time hundreds line up openly at a mourning tent in Jerusalem to pay respects to the family of one of the murderers who massacred eight boys and young men studying at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva.

So how has it come about that a state whose chief failing is an undue willingness to propitiate, to conciliate, to appease, so eager to create a Palestinian state it seems oblivious to the danger it will destroy the Jewish one, is seen in a 2003 European Union poll as the state posing the greatest threat to world peace? Many of the mechanisms are the same as those identified by Kirsch in his review of Baker’s Human Smoke. The media employ omission and false juxtapositions, distort the sequence of events, use sources without attention to their credibility (the Goebbels become the authorities on the Churchills), takes the propaganda of the evildoers at face value, present a “collage” and “montage” of incidents, endorse and propagate blatant lies.

The impact of all this is described in Bernard Harrison’s fine book The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion. The progressive left in Europe routinely compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But to use Nazi analogies to criticize Israeli policies, writes Harrison “is to disseminate the suggestion that Israeli policies are morally indistinguishable from Nazi policies and hence that the State of Israel is therefore in no way morally distinguishable from the Third Reich, from which, if true, it surely follows that the existence of the State of Israel has as little to be said for it as the existence of the Third Reich: which is to say nothing.” By representing Israel as carrying total responsibility and the entire guilt for the problems of the Middle East, the overwhelmingly leftwing media convey to the large numbers of people dependent upon them for information that “Israel when it comes down to it, is indeed ‘a satanic force’ and ‘the embodiment of evil.’” As Harrison points out, the obsessive focus on Israel as uniquely evil is the more absurd in a world “which presents, as ours at present does, a large unrelieved panorama of racism, genocide, religious bigotry and political despotism of every shade and political hue.”

Even President Bush, while not endorsing the falsehoods rife in Europe (and on American campuses), insists, against all evidence, that a peace-loving democratic Palestinian state lies just over the horizon, if only Israel provides the necessary territorial and other concessions. Condoleezza Rice clings to the fiction that the Palestinians are, in her words, “victims of Hamas.” But as columnist Walter Williams points out, “whether most people of a country are peace-loving or not is not nearly as important as who is calling the shots.” In the case of Palestinian Arabs, there is in any case no gap between leaders and public. A recent poll (reported in the New York Times of March 18) by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that Hamas would probably win in new elections, that 84% of the Palestinian public supported the March 6 massacre of students at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, that 64% supported the hurling of rockets into southern Israel and 75% wanted an end to all negotiations with Israel, in short that there was greater support for violence than had been uncovered in any previous poll. Presumably the endless indoctrination in hatred under the “moderate” Abbas and the sanctification of suicide bombers (developments to which the U.S. administration has turned a convenient blind eye) is having an effect.

The current dominant narrative of what Harrison calls the Saints (to whose ranks the Palestinian have been assigned) who can do no wrong and the Reprobate (Israel) who can do nothing else is so insanely wide of the mark that there is little chance it will be long sustained. But the damage this false morality tale is doing while it prevails is so great that there is a real question, when it is ultimately swept away, whether Israel will still be there.

Lawrence Auster

(Editor’s Note: With President Bush making a “final push” to achieve a Palestinian state in his presidency, this article, written on February 21, 2005, is even more apt than when it was originally written.)

Put on your seat belts. Here's our president in a speech today in Brussels:

"Our efforts are guided by a clear vision: We're determined to see two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security."

We're determined to see a Palestinian state? We're determined to see a Palestinian state? Don't the Palestinians' own actions and preferences have something to do with this hoped-for outcome? According to Bush's own position dating from June 2002, we will only help the Palestinians acquire a state if they eliminate their terror networks, eliminate their culture of terrorism, accept Israel's existence, and develop a working democratic government. If they meet these and other conditions, then we help them acquire a state. This was Bush's moral and realistic break with the disastrous "peace process" mentality of the past (for which the neocons praised him mightily). But now Bush has eliminated those conditions (yet the neocons still praise him mightily). Now a Palestinian state is something that we are positively seeking, meaning that it doesn't matter what the Palestinians do.

Bush continues:

“The Palestinian people deserve a government that is representative, honest and peaceful. The people of Israel need an end to terror and a reliable, steadfast partner for peace. And the world must not rest until there is a just and lasting resolution to this conflict.”

The Palestinian people deserve a government that is representative, honest, and peaceful? Since when is having any particular form of government something that you deserve? That's like saying that a person deserves to have a career as a heart surgeon, or deserves to be a millionaire, or deserves to have a successful marriage. Such things aren't a matter of deserts, but of the person making it happen.

In speaking of what the Palestinians "deserve," Bush has committed one of the cardinal acts of modern leftism: he has redefined a good as a positive right. Further, if a good is a positive right, then some other party has the obligation to deliver that good to you. And who is that party? It is we, or, as Bush puts it, it's the whole world: "[T]he world must not rest until there is a just and lasting resolution to this conflict." Once again, Bush is saying that the end result, a Palestinian state, or, rather, our endless effort to achieve it, does not depend on what the Palestinians themselves do. By his logic, even if the Palestinians keep up their terror war against Israel, even if they keep teaching their children to hate and massacre Jews and Israelis, the world must keep striving to create a Palestinian state.

Bush continues:

“All the parties have responsibilities to meet. Arab states must end incitement in their own media, cut off public and private funding for terrorism, stop their support for extremist education, and establish normal relations with Israel.”

Now, this is Bush's original language from June 2002, which clearly meant that if the Palestinians don't fulfill any of those conditions, then the world has no obligation to do anything for them. But that is not what Bush is now saying. Instead he is saying that the world must not rest until there is a Palestinian state.

Will any prominent conservatives criticize Bush for these dangerous, arrogant, incoherent commitments? No, because the conservatives have given up thinking. All that matters to them is beating the destructive left and making Bush look good. By standing resolutely at Bush's side no matter what he does, by refusing to criticize him under any circumstances, the conservatives are enabling him to keep moving deeper and deeper into some kind of freaky, UN-style leftism, which the conservatives celebrate as a victory for conservatism.

The same loss of reality is seen in Bush's discussion of his democracy agenda for the broader Mideast:

“Europe and America should not expect or demand that reforms come all at once -- that didn't happen in our own histories. My country took many years to include minorities and women in the full promise of America -- and that struggle hasn't ended.”

With these words, Bush is portraying the pre-1919 America, when women didn't have the vote, and the pre-1964 America, when blacks in the South were discriminated against, as the moral equivalent of brutal Moslem dictatorships. Do people understand what this man is up to? First he sets out a utopian, off-the-planet agenda—that the Moslem countries will turn into liberal democracies. But then, in order to cover himself, since he knows that this utopian vision is not about to happen in the next ten minutes or the next ten years or ever, he puts America and these repulsive Moslem regimes on the same moral plane: "Hey, we're not perfect either, guys, so we don't expect you to be perfect." It is the ultimate act of liberal relativism: to avoid passing judgment on Moslem tyrannies, Bush pretends that our historic political system has been as bad as theirs.

And what is it that drove him to this extreme act of relativism? Ironically, it is his own messianic, neoconservative utopianism, which claims that Moslems are all desirous and capable of becoming liberal democrats like us. To escape the embarrassing consequences of having based his entire global strategy on these impossibly high standards that he has set for Moslems, Bush has to turn around and eliminate all standards, by suggesting a moral equivalence between our country and the most backward and oppressive regimes on earth.

Could anything be more shameful? .

Lawrence Auster’s blog, on which this first appeared, is “View From The Right.”

David Isaac

It’s strange to observe the mainstream Jewish reaction to the Qassaming of Sderot. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they do.

There are rallies and fundraisers. Rabbis who talk about Carl Jung now talk about red lines. Lefty editors of Jewish papers sound like Menachem Begin, with remarks like, “No other country in the world would countenance even a single missile.”

On Purim, Hadassah organized a Web event, streaming videos of seven rallies on four continents featuring international notables in support of Sderot. A month before, Los Angeles saw “Live for Sderot!”—a star-studded concert featuring Ninette, winner of the Israeli version of “American Idol”—and sponsored by the Consulate General of Israel. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa showed up. Sylvester Stallone made an appearance.

You say to yourself, “Either I’m crazy or the world’s gone sane.” You can relax. You’re not crazy. Mainstream Jews in America as elsewhere haven’t seen the light. They’re doing what they always do—toe the line. In the case of Sderot, the Israeli government’s official position is that bombing a Jewish city is outrageous, so, OK, it’s outrageous.

When it was Gush Katif on the receiving end of Qassams, that was different. Only 12 miles from Sderot, the settlement bloc razed by Israeli bulldozers in 2005 included some 8,000 residents and suffered 6,000 rockets in a four year period. Where was the outpouring of support from the major Jewish organizations? If anything, they deserved the support more. They didn’t turn tail and run as have the Jews of Sderot, not that we, for a second, blame them.

The only difference, no surprise, is that the Gaza communities were on one side of the Green Line and Sderot is on the other. So Jews in “Israel proper” get the fundraisers and Jews outside it get to watch their houses demolished. The Green Line acts as a sharp, clear, easily understandable—even for American Jews—divide between who gets our support and who doesn’t.

Lucky for Israel, American Jews can be counted on not to think through an issue every time. This leads Israel’s leaders to hold us in the same contempt they hold, well, Sderot. For all their crocodile tears, militarily speaking, they’ve done as much for Sderot as they did for Gush Katif. The latter got hit with 6,000 rockets, the former with 7,000. That’s a lot of rockets not to stop. You almost have to work at not stopping that many rockets.

If American Jews were to start thinking a) there would be a lot of smoke b) they would realize that demolishing Gush Katif led to the bombing of Sderot. The problem exists because of the destruction of Gush Katif. The Jews didn’t occupy the Gaza Strip so much as they kept the terrorists occupied. Now that there are no more Jews within the Strip, the terrorists can turn their attention outward, so they bomb towns like Sderot.

This brings the American Jew, if his cerebral cortex hasn’t exploded yet, to c) If the people who said we shouldn’t leave Gaza because that would lead to the bombing of Sderot were right, while the people who said we should leave Gaza because everything would be hunky-dory were wrong, and the people who were right are now saying we shouldn’t leave Judea and Samaria because that would lead to the bombing of Tel Aviv, and the people who were wrong are now saying we should leave Judea and Samaria because everything would be hunky-dory again, then that might mean that… that…

At this point, the American Jew’s cerebral cortex did, in fact, explode.

After it exploded, he got on a plane to Atlanta in February and voted for the establishment of a Palestinian State at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), an umbrella group of mainstream Jewish organizations. The group called for a two-state solution, “the Jewish state of Israel and a state of Palestine—living side-by-side in peace and security." It’s more likely suicide bombers meet up with 70 virgins than that this vision comes to pass.

It’s worth taking a look at the JCPA’s Web site at www.jewishpublicaffairs.org. Images representing the group’s various causes follow one after the other. Second on the list, after a request for aid to Darfur, is a call for support for JCPA’s global warming campaign with the question: “How many Jews does it take to change a light bulb?”

My answer: More than it takes blondes.

A better question would have been, “How many rocket factories can Israel turn off in the Gaza Strip?” The answer: “All of them—from the Israeli Electric Company in Ashkelon.”

An added benefit is that such a course of action would dovetail nicely with the JCPA’s global warming strategy by cutting down on carbon emissions from the Gaza Strip.

David Isaac is a freelance writer living in California.

Jack D. Lauber and Alyssa A. Lappen

As we search for esoteric alternative sources of energy to cut our use of fossil fuels, there is a readily available energy source no farther than the local landfill.

Israeli academics and officials recently invited Mr. Lauber---in his capacity as a Chemical and Environmental Engineer, a Research Associate of Columbia University's New York City Earth Engineering Center and a former New York State Department of Environmental Conservation engineer---to advise them at Ariel University and the Ministry of the Environment on waste to energy (WTE).

Israel should follow the examples set by Japan, the European Union, and several U.S. states, including Florida and Minnesota. They have all constructed state-of the-art waste to energy facilities, which generate some 700 kilowatt hours of electric power for every ton of municipal solid waste (MSW) they burn. Such facilities will sharply reduce Israel's need for high-cost energy imports. Consider: Tel Aviv generates over 2,000 tons of trash daily, and Jerusalem more than 1,300 tons.

When all that garbage is burned in multi-staged, 21st century controlled burning waste-to-energy plants, it will generate more than 2.3 million kilowatt hours daily. That will be nearly 70 million kilowatt hours a month---enough to power nearly 200,000 homes for 30 days. After all, one ton of municipal solid waste contains more energy than a barrel of oil.

Israel's WTE plants will replace landfills that trash precious resources---like the garbage mountain sitting dangerously at Israel's defunct Heria dump near Tel Aviv. Officials plan to cover it and make a park. Israel won't create any more such monsters. Japan mines municipal wastes to fuel WTE plants, reclaiming both land and energy. Israel should do the same.

Israel will also harvest the environmental benefits of eliminating landfills.

Dumps are toxic time bombs. In past decades, New York City's borough of Staten Island buried upwards of 100 million tons of municipal waste---without the landfill liners prescribed during the 1980s. Disposable household wastes, together with illicit hazardous materials, react chemically, generating additional contaminants. Thus toxins will continue leaching into adjacent New York City wetlands---and flowing into its air---throughout the 21st century.

Eventually, properly lined landfills will also leak toxins as their industrial-strength plastic liners degrade. Moreover, as they disintegrate, organic landfill wastes also emit methane---21 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Some U.S. landfills do harvest gas emissions. But even at those landfills that reclaim half of their landfill gas, atmospheric emissions exceed by as much as 95% those generated by high-tech waste-to-energy plants.

Not surprisingly, therefore, virtually every European nation and municipality bans MSW landfills. Instead, they have constructed waste-to-energy plants that recycle some 2 million tons of garbage annually, generating enough electricity and heat for more than 30 million people yearly.

Israel has definitively determined to harness waste-to-energy technologies. Yet a few misguided environmental groups oppose the plan, despite Israel's tiny land mass and limited water resources. To avoid the potential pitfalls such over-zealous groups can create, Israel should consider the monumental garbage headache plaguing New York City thanks to “environmental” objections.

For each ton of MSW, waste-to-energy plants emit five times less toxic particulate matter into the air than diesel trucks. Nevertheless, simply to avoid trash-to-energy facilities, NYC sends 600 diesel trucks daily to Pennsylvania and Virginia landfills---shipping at least 4 million tons of residential solid waste annually. At more than $120 per ton, New York taxpayers spend some $700 million-plus annually funding garbage exports. Meanwhile, NYC loses at least $50 a ton in potential revenues from local waste-to-energy electrical generation. Burning even 70% of its residential garbage with state-of-the-art WTE technology, NYC could produce enough electricity to power 236,000 homes and help avoid blackouts. The city could also recycle most WTE plant wastes---valuable metals, and road-building and construction materials.

Environmentalists created all this fiscal and energy waste by relying on obsolete data concerning dioxins and other WTE by-products. By citing outdated numbers, they scuttled waste-to-energy in New York with fear tactics. They lobby for an impossible dream---"zero waste" generation. Engineers will never create a garbage disposal system that generates “zero waste,” for this is mathematically impossible. First, manufacturers will never create fully recyclable products. Only about 25% of plastic wastes, for example, can be recycled, although they contain energy that should not be wasted. Indeed, plastics overall contain more energy than coal (and can burn cleaner).

Europe, Japan and several U.S. states have built energy-recovery facilities that facilitate “zero waste to landfill” plans. Multistage, controlled-burn WTE plants have eliminated toxins and dioxin emissions by upwards of 99 percent in the last decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports.

Israel, known for its technological advances, should focus on building as many state-of-the-art WTE plants as soon as possible, hopefully serving as a model for the U.S. This will not only reduce Israel's need for energy imports and cut pollution but also redirect finances into Israel's struggling economy.

Most important, massive waste-to-energy programs that add to domestic energy production both in Israel and in the West will cut demand for high-priced oil and gas, reducing the revenues of Middle East regimes that promote and fund terrorism

Jack Lauber is a Chemical and Environmental Engineer. Alyssa A. Lappen is a senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy.

Moshe Sharon

The word "occupation" has been used for many years now to describe the rule of Israel in Judea and Samaria (known as the "West Bank") and the Gaza district which Israel took from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and from Egypt respectively in the course of the Six Day War in 1967. In the distorted language of the media and of politicians, both in Israel and in most parts of the world, these two territories are described as "the occupied Palestinian territories" as if Israel occupied a country called "Palestine" in 1967 and took Palestinian lands. Sadly, very few of the media consumers in the West and the East are aware of the lie behind the usage of these terms.

First, let us review the simple facts about this "occupation." Israel took the "West Bank" from Jordan and not from a non-existent "Palestinian" entity; and occupied Gaza that was held by Egypt. Both countries had occupied these territories during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and had ruled them illegally. The Jordanians even annexed territory to the west of the Jordan and called it "The West Bank." Egypt established its administration in Gaza. Both these areas were, therefore, in Arab hands for 19 years, but nobody, during these years of Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, even thought about the establishment of a Palestinian State in them, although such a state could have been established easily and recognized, even by Israel.

Moreover, the Jordanian occupation of the "West Bank" and the Egyptian rule over Gaza were never recognized internationally for the simple reason that these two countries occupied territories that, according to international agreements, international decisions and international law, belonged to the Jewish National Home. In fact, the only title to these territories belonged and still belongs to the State Of Israel.

The legal position of the whole of Palestine was clearly defined in several international agreements.

The most important is the one adopted at the San Remo Conference (following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War), which decided, on April 24, 1920 to assign the Mandate for Palestine under the League of Nations to Britain. An agreed text was confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 and came into operation in September 1923.

In the preamble to this document it is stated that "...the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The declaration of November 2, 1917 is the famous Balfour Declaration and in this document, it was given international ratification.

Moreover, in Article 2 of the document, the League of Nations declares that "The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble.”

In the preamble it was clearly stated that "recognition has hereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."

It was on this basis that the British Mandate was established. Britain betrayed its duty and far from keeping to its undertakings did everything to jeopardize the establishment of the Jewish National Home and finally decided, in 1947, to end its mandate unilaterally, leaving Palestine on May 15, 1948.

Meanwhile the UN (which had inherited the League of Nations) decided on the partition of Western Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab, but this decision of November 29, 1947 was not only rejected out of hand by the Arabs, but seven Arab armies invaded Palestine to put an end to the young State of Israel which had been established on May 14, 1948.

The 1948 war ended with an armistice. A line was drawn on the map which delineated the position of the fighting armies on the two fronts in the east and the south at the time of the ceasefire. This is the "Green Line." It is not a border and neither Israel nor the Arabs regarded it as more than what it was: a line defining the positions of the respective armies at the end of one phase of the hostilities; it could be moved to either side if war was to be resumed, as actually happened in 1967. As an outcome of the 1948 war, parts of the Jewish National Home in Palestine were left occupied by Jordan and Egypt, since the only title to these territories belonged to the Jewish people, in other words to Israel, not to the Arabs and definitely not to the "Palestinians" who were not even mentioned at the time.

The 1967 war created a new situation in the field: the armistice line from 1948-49, which had been drawn in green on the maps, was moved as an outcome of this war further east to the River Jordan, and in 1994 was ratified as an international border by the peace agreement with Jordan. In the south, the Green Line was moved as a result of Israel's victory over the Egyptians and in 1979 was recognized as an international border in the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. There is no Green Line any more! It was abrogated by a new war and ultimately was turned into a "mauve line" by the peace agreements. Those who sanctify the Green Line worship an illusionary image. They have created a Palestinian People and a Palestinian State behind this sacred line but they are not interested in the welfare of the Palestinians as much as in creating the conditions for the elimination of the Jewish National Home.

Forty-five years after the League of Nations Declaration in San Remo, Israel retrieved its rightful possession of the territories assigned to the Jewish People as a National Home. How her possession of her own homeland can be called the "Occupation of Palestinian territories" is beyond explanation. What is tragic is that the Jews themselves have adopted this usage and made it a cornerstone of their own national policy.

All these facts are well known, but tend to be conveniently forgotten. It is therefore necessary to repeat them at least as frequently as the lies about the false “occupation” are endlessly repeated.

The same can be said about the demand to return to Syria the “occupied” Golan Heights as the “price for peace.” In this case too the facts are well known but must be ceaselessly repeated. Syria lost the Golan Heights as an outcome of two wars which it initiated and waged against Israel in 1967 and 1973, and after many years in which it used the Golan as a big military base for perpetrating endless acts of aggression against innocent Israeli villages in the Jordan Valley. Having lost this territory through aggression, Syria cannot have it back, just as Germany cannot have back the territory that it had lost in the War.

One last word about occupation. If there is any occupation which is historically relevant to the Middle East and North Africa it is the Islamic one. By the power of the sword, the armies of Islam broke out of Arabia in the seventh century, occupied vast territories, subjugated peoples, destroyed cultures and languages in the name of Allah and in the service of His Prophet, and they are now poised to occupy Europe.

Moshe Sharon is professor emeritus of Islamic History at the Hebrew University.

Ruth King

In its sixtieth year, Israel is a nation in retreat.

Since anniversaries beget nostalgia and retrospection, there will be invocations of the epic rescue of the wretched survivors of the Holocaust and the oppressed Jews from Arab countries; of the almost impossible victory of David against an Arab Goliath in 1948; of the lightning victory of 1967; of the come from behind victory in Yom Kippur 1973; of the rescue of the hostages in Entebbe; of the incredible destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, all of which were the source of pride and renewed confidence for Jews in every corner of the world.

There will be also be obloquy from the international left, including too many in Israel, who see the so-called “occupation” of Judea and Samaria as the “root cause” of the entire conflict. What makes this so risible is that Israel has conceded to every Arab demand in its suicidal quest for accommodation with its enemies, but the drumbeat of attacks from the left escalates in lockstep with the increase in terrorism and destruction.

And from the right (count me in) there will be well-deserved criticism of Israel’s government and its serial appeasements, which only whet the bloodlust of its enemies.

The fact is that all Israel’s achievements are imperiled because its government and elites live in a delusional world. They deny the past, persuading themselves of the existence of an earlier idyllic era of comity between Jews and Arabs to which they can return. They deny the present, refusing to recognize that Arab opposition is not based on reasserting control of “occupied territories” but is rooted in an unwillingness to accept a Jewish state in any boundaries.

Israel has averted its eye from the reality of jihad; from the long and bitter history of Arab oppression starting with the Arab conquest of 600 A.D.; from the Moslem and Arab complicity in the Holocaust and the blood libels which even now permeate Arab/Moslem media, sermons, textbooks and rhetoric in every Arab country including those which have signed peace treaties with Israel.

Why is a foreign Hashemite ruler accepted in 82% of Palestine while a Jewish presence in 10,000 square miles including Judea and Samaria is called a “cancer” that must be annihilated? If the territory of Israel were occupied by Arab Moslems who called it “Islama,” would there be hair-raising calls for their extermination? Would four generations of children be taught to hate and kill them? Would mosques resound with sermons preaching their destruction? Would they be called descendents of pigs and apes? Of course not. “Islama” would simply take its place as the 23rd nation in the all Moslem Arab League.

The Arabs, wealthy or poor, adjoining Israel or at a distance, all are determined to destroy Israel and Islam fuels their fanatic hatred.

Listen to what is said in the mosques and in the Arab street by Israel’s proposed “peace partners.” Just a few weeks ago, on February 28, a Saudi cleric intoned: “What compensation will satisfy us? By Allah, we will not be satisfied even if all the Jews are killed.” Here is the Hamas Charter, article 7:"The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” And here is the Hamas charter, article 15: “The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of jihad be raised.”

What is lost in translation here? The short and simple answer is Islam and jihad, holy war, Palestine restored to the umma.

There were always warnings.

In 1922, United States Congressional resolution 360 stated: "We respectfully submit that the Arabs in Palestine should be and would be happy and content under the present government of that country if it were not for Turkish and Arab agitators, who travel around over the land stirring up trouble by making false representations concerning the true character of the Zionist movement, and by preaching a kind of holy war [jihad] against the immigrant Jews who arrive from day to day.”

Professors Moshe Sharon, Moshe Gil, Raphael Israeli and Mordechai Nissan have meticulously detailed the centuries of jihad against Jewish “infidels” in Palestine.

Saul S. Friedman, Emeritus Professor of History at Youngstown State University, described the frenzy of Islamic anti-Semitism which occurred upon the founding of Israel as “the brew of thirteen centuries of intolerance.” He noted: “Since 1896, the development of modern, political Zionism has placed new tension on, and even destroyed, the traditional master-serf relationship that existed between Arab and Jew in the Middle East. An Arab world that could not tolerate the presence of a single, ‘arrogant’ Jewish vizier in its history was now confronted by a modern state staffed with self-confident Jewish ministers.”

The scholar Bat Ye’Or, a Zeev Jabotinsky of our time, understood that the Arab war against the Jews of Palestine was always a jihad. She warned:

“Since Israelis are to be regarded, perforce, only as a religious community, their national characteristics—a geographical territory related to a past history, a system of legislation, a specific language and culture—are consequently denied. The ‘Arab’ character of the Palestinian territory is inherent in the logic of jihad. Having become fay territory by conquest (i.e. ‘taken from an infidel people’), it must remain within the dar al-Islam. The State of Israel, established on this fay territory, is consequently illegal.

“Israel represents the successful national liberation of a dhimmi civilization. On a territory formerly Arabized by the jihad and the dhimma, a pre-Islamic language, culture, topographical geography, and national institutions have been restored to life. This reversed the process of centuries in which the cultural, social and political structures of the indigenous population of Palestine were destroyed. In 1974, Abu Iyad, second-in-command to Arafat in the Fatah hierarchy, announced: ‘We intend to struggle so that our Palestinian homeland does not become a new Andalusia.’ The comparison of Andalusia to Palestine was not fortuitous since both countries were Arabized, and then de-Arabized by a pre-Arabic culture.”

As Bat Ye’or predicted when she coined the term Eurabia, Western European culture is now being gradually subjected to sharia law and Moslem demands.

For decades Israel and its Western allies concentrated on the Cold War, with Israel seen as a bulwark to thwart Soviet ambitions. That role vanished with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The West ignored the growing aggressiveness of Islam, fueled by the wealth of oil producing Arab states, preparing a jihad against the West. And it failed to see that Israel is a bulwark in the existential battle of the century—Islam against the infidel world.

Geography has dictated that Israel lives in the belly of the Moslem Arab beast and because of its large and potentially seditious Arab population, the beast also lives in Israel’s belly. The failure to understand jihad is Israel’s most colossal — it may well be fatal —blunder.

N.B. My thanks to Dr. Andrew Bostom, physician and scholar, for, as always, pointing me in the right direction. His forthcoming book is The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, Prometheus Books, May 2008.