Mideast Outpost: OUTPOST Archives

FROM THE EDITOR

Rael Jean Isaac

Bibi MacDonald?

In view of Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to freeze settlements, it’s worth noting the grim irony that in doing so the Israeli prime minister has linked his administration with the policies of the British White Paper of 1939, also referred to as the MacDonald White Paper after British Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, who presided over it.

The 1939 White Paper is best known for severely curtailing the number of Jews who could enter Palestine, bottling them up in Europe at a time when they desperately needed to escape. Less well-known were the White Paper’s “land laws,” whose purpose was to freeze Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.

The laws went into effect with the publication of the “Palestine Land Transfer Regulations” in January, 1940. The regulations divided Palestine into three areas: 1) The first, comprising 5% of the western portion of the Land of Israel, which was permitted to Jews 2) An area totaling 31% of the land, which could only be bought by special permission of the High Commissioner, and 3) 64% of all the territory, forbidden to Jews and reserved exclusively for “Palestinian Arabs”.

When Netanyahu left Ariel Sharon’s Government in the lead-up to the expulsion of the Jews of Gush Katif, he said he was motivated by his fear of "the trial of history.” It looks as if history has already shown us which side he will end up on.

Commentary Awakes

Under new editors John Podhoretz and Jonathan Tobin, Commentary has finally emerged from its multi-year trance induced by long time editor Norman Podhoretz’s infatuation with President George W. Bush. The senior Podhoretz, by his own account, endorsed the uprooting of the Jewish communities in Gaza (a political, military and moral disaster) because Bush approved it and he trusted Bush. As a result, for the last five years, Commentary, which post-Oslo had been the voice of sanity on Israel, has been irrelevant, indeed silly. Its chief policy analyst on Israel was Hillel Halkin, who perfectly epitomized the magazine’s own confusion: Halkin, after endless agonizing back and forth, rarely—if ever—encountered an Israeli retreat he did not approve.

So it is to be celebrated that Commentary’s January issue cuts to the chase with an article by Evelyn Gordon, whose clear-thinking columns appeared for years in The Jerusalem Post. Israel’s standing, Gordon writes, has declined drastically as a direct result of the Oslo accords. She cites three major reasons: 1) With Oslo Israel sidelined its own claims to Judea, Samaria and Gaza, endorsing the Palestinian claim 2) Israel’s territorial retreats led to more Palestinian Arab deaths which mobilized public opinion against her. (Israel’s Hobson choice was to sit with folded hands while its citizens were attacked or to take actions for which she’d be condemned. 3) Israel’s withdrawals energized anti-Israel radicals worldwide.

While the Palestinian negotiating position remained unchanged (including the demand Israel commit suicide by accepting an Arab “right of return”), Gordon observes that Israel ditched red line after red line. Against all evidence, each Israeli Prime Minister kept insisting peace was within reach, senseless behavior if peace was unobtainable and territorial concessions only produced more terror. In sum, the desperate pursuit of peace is not the solution but the problem, as Israeli leaders respond to every inevitable failure of the “peace process” with a better offer.

One important caveat to this otherwise excellent essay. Gordon concludes by pinning her hopes on Netanyahu, saying he has the communication skills to convey the unpalatable truth that the peace process is a chimera to a worldwide audience. True enough, but what she does not say—despite her emphasis on “telling it like it is”—is that Netanyahu has been every bit as dishonest as his predecessors in promoting the peace-that-never-will-be.

Gordon applauds Netanyahu’s June 14 speech at Bar Ilan University and his October address to the UN General Assembly for straight shooting, but at the conclusion of both these speeches he endorsed the Great Lie: that by “universal consensus” a Palestinian state was the solution. Netanyahu’s actions have been no better than his words. Bowing to Obama’s demand for a settlement “freeze,” upon taking office in March Netanyahu froze all construction, even in East Jerusalem. While 700 new housing units have recently been announced, it transpires that these units are only being built as a result of threats by coalition partner Shas—even then Netanyahu insisted on “coordinating” with the Americans, from whom he wangled a “mild” condemnation.

This is not the stuff of a Prime Minister who will defy the “universal consensus” to announce the emperor is naked. As this writer has repeatedly said of Netanyahu, character is fate, and the man, for all his talents, lacks the spine to be Prime Minister.

Barak’s “Thought Process”

No one better typifies what Gordon calls Israel’s projecting a sense of panic in the pursuit of “peace” than Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Speaking to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in December, Barak declared that Israel was now in a “position of strength and that allows us to make an agreement and bring about a reality of two states living side-by-side.”

What position of strength can Barak possibly be talking about? Israel confronts two Palestinian political entities locked in combat for legitimacy on the basis of which is the greater enemy of the Jewish state. This deprives Israel of any leverage in reducing the most extreme demands of either. Barak went on to say that unless this Palestinian state comes into being Israel will wind up as “an apartheid state.”

It is insanity for an Israeli cabinet minister to endorse the calumnies of Israel’s enemies, from Jimmy Carter on down. It also gives all the cards to the enemy. If Fatah and Hamas don’t agree to a Palestinian state (one state? two states?), Israel loses her legitimacy, becomes a deservedly pariah state in the eyes of her own leadership.

Barak claims to be describing “the government’s thought process.” If this is thought, what is mindlessness?

Kudos to Kissin

World class pianist Evgeny Kissin, a Russian child prodigy who became a British citizen in 2002, has taken up cudgels against the BBC, accusing it of “slander and bias”, broadcasting material “painfully reminiscent of the old Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda.”

IsraelNews of January 4 reports that in a letter to BBC director-general Mark Thompson, Kissin accuses the BBC’s Persian service of a “blood libel concerning Israel’s alleged harvesting of Palestinian organs and blood for future transplant.” Kissin continues: “It beggars belief that the British taxpayer should be funding an organization which is aligning itself with Iran’s despotic leader in its anti-Semitic propaganda.” Kissin concludes by asking: “Is it not time for the BBC to return to the values for which it was so much respected, before it finds itself in the garbage of history, together with Pravda, Tass, Volkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff?“

Kissin promises to continue to speak out on behalf of Israel. This is the more welcome given the moral failure of some other musicians of stature like Daniel Barenboim, an Israeli citizen known for his attacks on Israel.

Kissin’s action has already encouraged others to speak up. Classical music promoter Lillian Hochhauser said: “I encourage all in the arts world to act against the growing stigmatization of Israel, as well as increasing our cultural cooperation with the country.”

Yemen Kidnappers: A Foretaste?

Yemenis claiming to hold five members of a German family kidnapped last June are demanding $2 million in ransom from the German government and the release of several al-Qaeda terrorists being held by the Yemeni government.

It is difficult to imagine that al Qaeda will not avail itself of similar opportunities when high profile trials of their members go on interminably in New York courts. Why not seize a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. How about the AIPAC office in Washington? A bunch of politicians at a favored watering hole? Actors at an Academy Awards party? The possibilities are endless. Kill them one by one on video camera if Terrorist A, B, C is not released and sent on his way, unimpeded, to Somalia.

Brandeis Grad: No Jews on My Jury

Finally brought to trial, Brandeis Ph.D Aafia Siddiqui (captured in Afghanistan) has demanded that everyone on her jury undergo genetic testing to be sure they are not Jews. “Israel was behind 9/11. That’s not anti-Semitic” she called out from the defense table as a jury pool was being questioned.

Readers of Outpost may remember Peter Metzger’s article “Brandeis: School for Terrorists? (October 2008) describing its nefarious record in providing, in his words, “a sanctuary for more extreme radicals than any other university in America.”

Metzger began his article with Siddiqui. Here is what he wrote: “Snatching a loaded M4 carbine, the diminutive mother of three fired on her FBI questioners, and was swiftly injured by return fire. She is now in federal court awaiting charges of attempted murder. The FBI had placed her near the top of its most wanted list of fugitive terror suspects...she is charged with being an important Al-Qaeda “fixer,” a person who coordinates terror plots between various other terrorists within this very secret organization...When arrested in August [2008] just before the shootout, she was carrying plans to bomb various U.S. landmarks…” (She also had two pounds of poisonous sodium cyanide and documents on how to build chemical and biological weapons.)

It’s quite a family. Siddiqui is married to a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, and who is himself a top al Qaeda operative.

Presiding over the trial, federal Judge Richard Berman has already conceded that Siddiqui be fully veiled in court, has set aside time during the trial for Islamic prayer, thrown out key evidence and disallowed prosecutors from mentioning her ties to al Qaeda.

Welcome to the world of trials in civilian courts for al Qaeda terrorists in New York City.

War on Green

AFSI declares war on green. It’s the color of jealousy, one of the mainsprings of anti-Semitism. It’s the color of Hamas. It’s the color of environmentalists who would send our (emission-free) economy back to the Dark Ages. It’s the color of the nefarious “Green Line” to which Israel’s enemies would reduce her (preparatory to eliminating her altogether). We suggest the “good greens” of the Women in Green change their color to Blue.

Foxman, Again

Abe Foxman of the ADL is proving his appallingly bad judgment yet again in what Norman Podhoretz calls "a vile attack" on Rush Limbaugh. Podhoretz points out that in discussing his book Why are Jews Liberal? on the air, Rush noted that for a lot of people—prejudiced people he called them twice—the words "banker" and "Wall Street" are code words for "Jewish." He wondered if Obama's attacks on bankers and Wall Street were triggering a certain amount of buyers' remorse within the American Jewish community and if some of the self-described "independents" who voted for Scott Brown might have been Jewish liberals.

We can't improve on Michael Ledeen's comment:

"Norman Podhoretz quite properly takes Anti-Defamation League czar Abe Foxman to task for insinuating that Rush is somehow a Jew-hater for wondering if Jewish voters are having buyer's remorse regarding Obama. They certainly should, both because of Obama's striking nastiness to Israel and of his attacks on "greedy bankers" (which Rush mentioned), free broadcasting, and of course the crusade against American medicine, all enterprises in which Jews have long flourished.

“Rush should be a hero to Foxman and American Jews, but they are so blindly partisan that they can no longer distinguish between their friends and their enemies. Foxman has relentlessly attacked American Evangelicals — arguably the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel people in America....Foxman wants Rush to apologize.

“Nuts. I want Foxman retired and replaced by somebody who fights for Jews and our friends.”

Israel's Disproportionate Response

From Israel, David Yehezkel observes that many countries and world leaders have accused Israel of responding disproportionately to aggression from Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. It is time, he suggests, that the world press and media speak of another disproportionate response from Israel.

The terrible earthquake in Haiti has generated responses from many nations. The Arab and Moslem world has contributed … nothing. Israel, a nation of 7.5 million people has sent a team of 220 including medical personnel (who established the largest field hospital in Haiti, treating up to 5000 people a day), an experienced search and rescue team and medical supplies. As in previous earthquake disasters, Israel has been one of the most generous givers of aid and assistance.

Given that the favorite occupation in the UN is Israel bashing, it is amusing that the U.N. has asked Israel to send police to help with security in Haiti.

Posted by Ruth at 09:46 PM

THE TRUE IMPERIALISM

Dan Greenfield

A theme constantly repeated both by the internationalist left and the isolationist right is that Islamic terrorism is a backlash or blowback against our foreign policy. Exponents of this point of view, whether it is Bill Ayers or Pat Buchanan, echo the same list of Muslim grievances against America and imply that if we simply left the Muslims alone, they in turn would leave us alone.

But their premise is as foolish as arguing that the Visigoths would have left Rome alone, if only Rome had left the Visigoths alone. One can buy some time by leaving the people who are expanding into your territory alone, but that just means postponing the inevitable. Europe is full of governments anxiously trying to leave the Muslims who are overrunning their countries alone. And all they're doing is buying themselves a little time, until the inevitable sacking begins. In countries such as France and Belgium, the sacking has begun already.

The internationalists and isolationists who are expert at offering the most cynical and conspiratorial readings of American foreign policy, also inevitably offer the most optimistic and naive readings of Muslim expansionism. That double standard is a mandatory requirement for blaming America first and blaming Islam never. Instead Muslims are treated as pinballs who only act violently in response to our aggression.

This pinball theory of Islamic victimization is used to sell absurdities such as the Cycle of Violence theory, which argues that if people stopped fighting Islamic terrorism it would go away, or the They Hate Us Because of Our Foreign Policy theory which pretends that Islamic terrorism is a justified response to our liberation of Kuwait, protection of Saudi Arabia and foreign aid to Israel. Both theories dehumanize Muslims by assume that the Ummah has no larger agenda than just wanting to be left alone.

Far left and far right critics of America, such as Ayers and Buchanan, routinely charge America with that dreaded "I" word, Imperialism. But it is the rising Caliphate that practices actual imperialism, spreading the faith by the sword, expanding its dominions by exploiting Muslim fifth columns around the world, and murdering anyone in its way. Muslim corporations from the oil rich gulf states leverage their wealth to promote their influence in the United States and Europe. Muslim nations band together in the UN to outlaw any speech they consider blasphemous, even when that speech takes place in non-Muslim countries.

When Obama bows to the Saudi King, when tax dollars are used to repay US oil companies whose property was nationalized by the Saudis, when Saudi lobbyists hold high positions in the government, when terrorists out of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia murder thousands of Americans while their countries profit from U.S. foreign aid and rising oil prices from the aforementioned nationalized U.S. oil companies, when Islamic leaders promote death and terror against the infidels, while demanding unflinching respect for their beliefs—there you can see true imperialism.

There was a time when Islamic terrorism was about foreign policy, but that time has long passed for Europe, where Islamic terrorism is now a matter of domestic policy. It is quickly becoming a matter of domestic policy in America as well. Because while Westerners may divide Islamic grievances into domestic and foreign spheres, Muslims themselves make no such distinction except within their own nations.

The rise of an Islamic minority in a non-Muslim country to the Muslim mind demands the imposition of Islamic law, since all other forms of jurisprudence are illegitimate and inferior in comparison to it. If that request is not granted, then Muslims naturally have the "right" to rise up against their oppressors. If the request is granted, the first seeds of an Islamic takeover have been planted. Soon disputes between Muslims and non-Muslims will have to be tried in accordance with Islamic law. Blasphemy must be outlawed. And Islamic law must step by step become the basis of the nation's legal system. Eventually the nation's indigenous legal system is so weak and inferior that it is wholly swallowed up by a little problem named Sharia.

When Muslims speak of fighting an American or Western empire, they don't mean it in quite the sense that Ron Paul or Cindy Sheehan do. They mean it in the sense of obliterating the Pax Americana, the hegemony of the Western powers in the military, economic and cultural spheres—and replacing it with their own. The Ummah is not searching for some Benetton/UNICEF fantasy of global co-existence. It is playing a zero sum game from which there is no exit. The Islamic birth rate combined with the domestic impoverishment and oppression of Muslims, stimulate immigration. The growing treasure houses of the oil rich states are used to buy power and influence and to do what all royal houses do, extend their power and dream of global ambitions.

American and European internationalists are still wedded to Soviet propaganda, which with the flexibility of Communist dogma, was willing to embrace anyone at war with the West as an enemy of capitalism. This flexibility allowed the Communists to embrace Hitler and Nazi Germany as victims of Western Imperialism (at least until German tanks swept across the border). Embracing Islamism seems almost like a trivial contortion of principles at this point.

American isolationists like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul still think that bashing American foreign policy and Israel is a cure for all of Islam's ills, a foolish cowardice that they share with many tottering European governments who imagine the same thing. While Islamists such as Bin Laden do indeed resent America's ties to the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Israel or the House of Saud, that is only because we stand in the way of their ambition to take over those countries, a move that would quadruple the world's terrorist quota. One might as well argue that the solution to race riots is to appoint Al Sharpton president, an absurd premise that neither Buchanan nor Paul would sign on to at home, but that they somehow seem to think would solve our problems abroad.

While European right wing isolationists have generally learned that playing the foreign policy card or taking out and polishing one's antique anti-Semitism for display, as the likes of Buchanan are wont to do, are no answer, their solutions, which depend on isolationism combined with a limited domestic crackdown are no answer either. That might have been enough in 1968, but probably not even then. It certainly would not be enough now. Not in a world where the Caliphate is organized enough to sow domestic terrorism around the world, while keeping a death grip on the UN and the international energy trade. Not in a world in which NATO warplanes bombed a country because it dared stand up to Islamic separatists. Not in a world in which international boycotts are organized by the left against Israel for simply building a wall to keep the terrorists on their side of the border. Not in a world in which the ministers of every civilized nation tremble when the Caliphate squeaks.

One cannot simply build a wall and then wait out the worst of it. Because the worst of it is yet to come. If darkness spreads across Europe and the world, then Fortress Britannia will not wait it out alone. Not without cutting off international trade, ending free elections in which any more liberal party could win, developing a nuclear shield and enough weaponry to stand off all the combined forces that the UN or the remains of NATO could field. In short it isn't feasible. If a patient falls ill, he cannot simply wall off the disease in his foot or his right arm. And like it or not, the modern world has become far too interconnected for isolationism to be a survival strategy anymore.

No single nation alone could have stood off Nazism. No single nation alone can stand off Islamism. What was once foreign policy is now domestic policy. What was once a distant thunder is now a dull roar in our own streets. If you build a wall, they can shoot rockets over it. If you pass laws, they will become causes of terror. And if you fail to pass them, you will be forced to live under theirs, sooner or later. We can either stand together, or following the cowardly policies of the last few decades, sell each other out in the hopes that the best diplomat and the most esteemed backstabber will be the last to be eaten by the black crocodile of the caliphate that circles the globe from ocean to ocean.

There is no help for it, but to form an alliance of nations, an alliance of religions, an alliance of philosophies and civilizations, from the east to the west. That alliance is not yet here, but it must come, if we are to survive what waits ahead for us. .

Daniel Greenfield blogs at sultanknish.blogspot.com. This appeared on the blog on January 17.

Posted by Ruth at 09:44 PM

PLEASE STOP THE "PROBLEM' AND "SOLUTION" NONSESE ABOUT ISLAM

Hugh Fitzgerald

Many continue to believe that if we argue that Islam itself is the problem, this will leave the West with no solutions.

Americans, unlike Europeans, are used to identifying situations that are troublesome or difficult or unpleasant as "problems," and, as problems, they are assumed to be susceptible of solution and therefore can be "solved." In some ways it is an attractive attitude. It testifies to a certain strain in the national character, a belief that may come from the encounter in this country with Nature, that the settlers in order to survive had to learn to subdue. And when there was a need for something to be invented, born of necessity, that invention would emerge. Yankee know-how and stick-to-itiveness, the attitude that there is "no problem in the world that cannot be solved" if we just put our minds to solve it, may seem to some comically naïve, but for many it reflects an attitude that will not disappear, and of which many of us apparently cannot be disabused.

How many times have you heard someone call in to one of those NPR talk shows (where the host invites one and all to "join the conversation" and then has his call-vetters carefully keep out any well-informed callers whose questions would throw a spanner into the whole party-line works)? The callers who are allowed on the air say that "in the Middle East those folks have been making war on each other for thousands of years" and "we Americans have got to get on in and bash some heads together to solve their problems if they can't do it for themselves."

It never occurs to those who make these suggestions, or those who run the shows and hear them, to ask if it is merely a question of a "problem" to be solved, where the Americans come in because the parties in question are unaccountably stubborn, and "solve" the problem by a little common-sensical solution—that "Two-State Solution." We already know it is a solution because otherwise why would everyone in both parties who has been working on such an outcome call it a "Two-State Solution"? Q. E. D.

And what, even for Roger Fisher, he of Harvard Law, who once galumphed all around the world peddling his made-for-television series on "Arabs and Israelis," has been one of the biggest rackets and profit centers in para-academic life? It's "Negotiation." You can learn the craft and art of "Negotiation." You can buy books, you can take courses, you can hire consultants who will help you, help anyone and everyone if the price is right, to Get To Yes. Many of those who first worked with Fisher now have their careers, and their consulting centers, and their fat, fat fees.

It never occurs to anyone that you can always "Get To Yes" if one side can be pressured into giving up what it needs for its survival (see under "Israel"). And it never occurs to anyone that sometimes life is a zero-sum game—-very often in fact—and that one side may not wish to listen to Sweet Reason and Get To Yes, because recovery at once of any lands once possessed by Muslims is more important than any Getting To Yes could ever be (unless of course "Getting To Yes" is merely a way to weaken the Infidel enemy, a variant on the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya).

There is no "solution" to the war being waged on Israel. Nor is there a "solution" within Israel to the presence of those Muslim Arabs who do not and cannot feel loyal to the state of Israel and wish the Jews and the State of Israel ill.

But the same thing is true in the case of Muslims all over Western Europe and, to a much lesser extent, in North America. In a few decades of criminal negligence, elites in these places allowed in many Muslims who regard the countries they have settled in as places of comfort, stability, economic opportunity— and also as places where they must work to establish Islam. They work to increase its power and the numbers of its adherents, to expand Muslim political power and, in addition, the power of Muslims to intimidate outside the political system. And they work against the legal and political institutions, such as the American Constitution, that flatly contradict the spirit and letter of the Sharia. There is a way to handle this, but there is no solution.

Many begin with the idea that there is a "problem" and that, therefore, there is a "solution" or must be, and if we analyze Islam and conclude that there is no "solution" to that perceived "problem," then we shall have to let loose the dogs of war, and nothing good can come of it.

Those who think this way are using the wrong terms. They are using the language of political Mr. Fixits, a language that misinterprets reality.

Is world poverty a problem? Is there a "solution" to this problem? What about human greed? Radix malorum cupiditas est, saith the Schoolmen. The desire for money is the root of all evil. Is that a "problem" to be "solved"? Or is it a condition to be recognized, and warned about, as are all the other Seven Deadlies? What about the innate inequality of intelligence among individuals? Is such inequality a "problem" to be "solved," or simply a condition to be recognized, and one not necessarily to be deplored? Is war (the permanence of) a "problem" to be "solved," or a condition to be dealt with, a threat to be made less rather than more dangerous?

The ideology of Islam cannot be transformed. None of those who tried, in the early part of the 20th century, to "reform" Islam managed to succeed. And indeed, the only reason they wanted to "reform" Islam was in order to make Muslims stronger, because in the early 20th century it was clear that Muslims all over the world were weak, and the Infidel West was strong. And so some changes were entertained by a few "reformers" because they correctly perceived that Muslim weakness and wished to address its causes, not because they wanted to modify the claims of Islam, or the hold of Islam, on its adherents.

Kemal Pasha, Ataturk, was someone who sensed the connection between the disorder and decadence of the Turkish state, the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Turkish Muslim society, and what Islam inculcated. He was not a "reformer." He knew that there was no way to change the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. What he wanted to do, and systematically did, was to curtail the power of Islam, as a political and social force, over Turkish Muslims themselves, and thereby to allow room for the development of a secular class. The tragedy of modern Turkey is that many of those who were the beneficiaries of Kemalism did not continue to work to extend its reach and its effects and those who had remained faithful to Islam bided their time, and then helped bring Islam back, and it is they— Erdogan and his associates—who are in the ascendant in Turkey. Those who thought that Kemalism was forever turned out to be wrong. It is Islam that is forever.

Apparently, some find recognition of a permanent threat too upsetting an idea. But why? Fascism, including its Nazi variant, and Communism remain political ideas that will always attract some adherents. Anti-Semitism, a pathological mental condition, has not been, and never will be eradicated even with the most potent of vaccination programs. But the numbers of Nazis and Communists and anti-Semites, relative and absolute, and their positions close to or far from power, and their consequent ability to do harm, or to influence others—all this is in the realm of what can be affected.

We can divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam. We can make some Muslims aware, even keenly aware, of all the ways that Islam itself explains the failures, political and economic and social and intellectual and moral, of their societies. We can prevent Muslim states and groups from acquiring major weaponry. We can halt Muslim immigration to the West and make conditions such that the conduct of Muslim life becomes more and more subject to review, critical scrutiny, open discussion. Instead of extending a dangerously naïve welcome, we can make clear that we now understand the texts and tenets of Islam, and as a consequence, we feel justified in viewing those who still call themselves Muslims with suspicion and alarm.

That isn't a "solution" to a "problem." That is something much more complicated and, for those who think we can achieve an identifiable "victory" over the ideology of Islam, or over the bearers of that ideology, no doubt this view is unsatisfying. Unsatisfying it may be. But as a way to deal with the never-to-end threat of Islam, it is the one that, being based on the truth, will prove to be the most effective.

And that is the only thing that counts.

Hugh Fitzgerald is editor of Jihadwatch. This appeared on Jihadwatch.org on January 16

Posted by Ruth at 09:42 PM

BBC DOCUMENTARY ON JERUSALEM: BIAS AND DISTORTION

An Anatomy Of Bias And Distortion
Robin Shepherd

On Monday night, the BBC’s flagship documentary program Panorama was devoted to Jerusalem. Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world’s most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold.

Entitled “A Walk in the Park”—a reference to the parkways which link settlements across East Jerusalem—the program was introduced by veteran BBC reporter Jeremy Vine: “Palestinians are being thrown out of their homes; Israelis are moving in, even underground,” he tells us. The drama then shifts to Jerusalem itself where Jane Corbin, narrator and reporter on the ground, is ready to begin a demolition job all of her own.

Right away, the documentary cuts to the destruction of a Palestinian home: “…roads were sealed. The Israelis don’t make it easy to see what’s going on,” we are ominously told as she skips daringly down a dirt track to avoid the watchful eye of the dastardly Israelis.

So why, one wonders, would the Israelis be so keen to hide their dirty little secret? “Under international law,” she tells us earnestly, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory; its status shouldn’t be changed.”

Well, good to know that we haven’t wasted much time before she introduces her very own, and quite definitive, interpretation of international law. But objective versions of the law are soon complemented by a historical narrative which forms the backdrop to the entire program:

“When the State of Israel was born in 1948, Jerusalem was divided,” says Corbin. “The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan. In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours.”

And that’s it. That is the broad historical context offered to a prime time British audience on the BBC’s most prestigious weekly documentary program. Is her version accurate? Well, yes, modern day Israel was formed in 1948 and Jerusalem was indeed divided—Jordan on the one side and Israel on the other. It is also true that “following war” with its Arab neighbours in 1967 East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel.

But as an instance of propagandist methodology in airbrushing out vital context, especially in a documentary about the status of Jews in Jerusalem and the underlying causes of the wider conflict, this really rather takes the biscuit.

Consider another way of phrasing that paragraph which, once again, is vital to the documentary since it serves as the key context for a largely uninitiated British audience. Try this, with the salient points in italics:

“When the State of Israel was born in 1948— following Arab and Palestinian rejection of a peace agreement accepted by Israel which would have seen the internationalisation of the city—Jerusalem was divided. The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan—which expelled Jewish residents and forbade Jews from praying at all of the city’s holy sites. In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours. That war was caused by Arab governments and the Palestinians who had the aim of eliminating the state of Israel in its entirety and expelling its Jewish residents.”

Well, that would really cast a different light on things wouldn’t it?

Next we come to Corbin’s “walk in the park” which starts in Sheikh Jarrah and winds its way through the Mount of Olives and Ras al Amoud to Silwan. Stopping off in Ras al Amoud the documentary now introduces “an Israeli lawyer” who serves throughout the program as the objective analyst providing a neutral point of reference to enhance the credibility of the narration. That Israeli lawyer is none other than, Danny Seidemann, a well known (but not to British viewers) left-wing lawyer-activist. No countervailing Israeli opinion from a legal source is offered.

But the slippery and blatantly biased tactics of the program are immediately revealed as the “objective” reference point offered by Seidemann is then counterbalanced by the opinion of an Israeli, Arieh King of the Israel Land Fund. A purportedly neutral anti-settlement view is thus juxtaposed with the views of an interested party whose work we are told (to a background of darkly melancholic music), “is paid for by wealthy backers [i.e. Jews] in America and Europe.”

Then we are offered another piece of “context”: “Peace deals proposed so far reckon on giving Arab areas in these eastern parts of the city to the Palestinians. Western areas, which are Jewish, would go to Israel.” Hmm. I wonder what’s missing from that one then? Again, here’s another way of putting that point with my suggested additions in italics:

“Peace deals proposed so far—all of which were rejected by the Palestinians—reckon on giving Arab areas in these eastern parts of the city to the Palestinians. Western areas, which are Jewish, would go to Israel.”

The omission is so blatant it is almost laughable. In this desperate attempt to support the long-standing BBC narrative that Israeli “occupation” forms the root cause of the conflict, it has become necessary to mention peace deals without pointing out that such peace deals were offered by Israel but flatly rejected (in favor of violence, one might add) by the Palestinians. To raise that issue would clearly undermine the ideological edifice. It would suggest that the root cause of the conflict is Palestinian rejectionism and anti-Semitism—two concepts that the BBC is apparently unable to deal with.

The distortion is reinforced as we then move to a catalogue of instances of how settlement policy is making a two state solution difficult if not impossible.

Harrowing stories are told of Palestinians kicked out of their homes. The briefest of references is made to the claim of the settlers that they are taking back land and property which was seized from them by Jordan in 1948. But it is done in such a way that no lay audience could possibly see any real justification for the settlers’ position.

We are told of, and shown, instances of Palestinians being thrown out of homes they have “lived in for generations.” This is stated as fact by the narrator. The counter argument, that the land they have lived on was stolen from Jews in the first place, is ventured as the mere opinion of Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem.

Arriving in Silwan, the narrator just happens to drop in at the very moment a Palestinian house is being demolished. A Palestinian activist, Jawad Siyam, is given prominence as the articulate and reasoned voice of the oppressed. He cries out: “It’s the most racist state in the world, you see…” Pointing to Israeli policemen he adds: “You are the most racist people in the world.”

No voice from the Israeli side is offered to protest about terrorism or Palestinian anti-Semitism. Nothing. With the historical context largely obliterated earlier in the program, few uninitiated viewers could disagree with Siyam’s diatribe.

Fading in the melancholic music again, we are then told ominously that many of the settlers come from abroad as we are introduced to the Adlers, a family of American religious Jews who have settled in Silwan. (American, religious, Jewish and settlers? That’s the sort of combination that gives BBC reporters sleepless nights).

As a warning of how Israeli policy is leading to tensions, we are later introduced to a Palestinian man, Ahmed, (complete with close-up of crying son) who was shot in the right thigh by an Israeli following a scuffle. No instance of Palestinian violence is offered for balance. Ahmed then tells of how the Israeli stepped over him and “shot a child”.

As the documentary draws to a close, the narrator once again interjects with her own tendentious opinions: “Those who know Jerusalem warn that this is a powder keg,” she says. “More than the city could be ignited if the Israelis persist in what they are doing.”

“Those who know Jerusalem?” Who might that be then? We cut back to Danny Siedemann, the BBC’s “objective” analyst of events. Widening the discussion and placing responsibility for the overall conflict squarely with Israel, he says: “This is the volcanic core of the conflict…what begins in Jerusalem doesn’t stay in Jerusalem.” He adds darkly that regimes could be destabilised from Pakistan to Morocco in the ensuing cataclysm.

Finally we move to the wider settlements outside Jerusalem and “The Wall”. Corbin concludes the documentary with the words: “The face of the city is changing and that makes the chances of peace even more remote.”

Well, you get the picture. Obviously the issue of Jerusalem excites passions inside Israel and outside it. Reasonable people can disagree on it. There are many shades of opinion to be assessed. And there is no reason why a BBC documentary should not reflect that. The problem is that the documentary does not reflect that reality at all.

Every Jewish step in East Jerusalem is presented as wrong and dangerous. All the important context has been removed. A clear ideological agenda has been pushed at the expense of basic standards of fair reporting.

Welcome to the world of the BBC. And welcome to yet another illustration of the slippery path to the delegitimisation of the world’s only Jewish state.

Robin Shepherd is Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society in London, England. This appeared on www.robinshepherdonline.com on January 19th.

Posted by Ruth at 09:41 PM

A BLASPHEMY TRAIL IN HOLLAND

A Blasphemy Trial in Holland
Rael Jean Isaac

It has been dubbed “the trial of the century.” Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Policy Forum has called Dutch politician Geert Wilders, the man on trial, “the most important European alive today” with “the potential to emerge as a world-historical figure” for taking on the Islamic challenge facing Europe.

Wilders faces a 70 page charge sheet covering five counts of breaking Dutch law on incitement and discrimination against Muslims in more than 100 public statements, perhaps the most controversial being his comparison of the Koran to Mein Kampf. The charge includes Wilders’ film Fitna, which shows images of 9/11 and beheadings interspersed with (supportive, calls to jihad) verses from the Koran.

The trial opened January 20 in an Amsterdam court. Ironically, one of the two prosecuting attorneys, Paul Velleman, had earlier decided not to prosecute Wilders, finding his statements well within the boundaries of the law. He was overruled when others, determined to see Wilders on trial, took the prosecutor to court and a judge ruled the office of the prosecutor had to try the case.

What makes this case so important is the combination of Wilders’ political position and the premise of the charges—that protecting the feelings of Muslims supersedes free speech. As Pipes notes, the Party for Freedom (PVV) which Wilders founded and heads, differs from most of Europe’s other nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in being politically mainstream, with its roots not in neo-fascism but in libertarianism and mainstream conservatism. Indeed Wilders is the European leader who most staunchly supports Israel. And the Party for Freedom has been rising dramatically in popularity so that polls now show it winning a plurality of votes and becoming the country’s largest party. There is thus a real prospect that Wilders could become Prime Minister and assume a leadership role in Europe in halting the creeping Islamization of the continent.
Wilders spoke eloquently on the meaning of the trial in his opening statement:
“Freedom is the most precious of all our attainments and the most vulnerable…I believe with all my heart and soul that the freedom in the Netherlands is threatened. That what our heritage is, what generations could only dream about, that this freedom is no longer a given, no longer self-evident. I devote my life to the defence of our freedom. I know what the risks are and I pay a price for it every day. I do not complain about it; it is my own decision. I see that as my duty and it is why I am standing here.

“ I know that the words I use are sometimes harsh, but they are never rash. It is not my intention to spare the ideology of conquest and destruction, but I am not out to offend people. I have nothing against Muslims. I have a problem with Islam and Islamization of our country because Islam is an odds with freedom.

“Future generations will wonder to themselves how we in 2010, in this place, in this room, earned our most precious attainment. Whether there is freedom in this debate for both parties and thus also for the critics of Islam, or that only one side of the discussion may be heard in the Netherlands? Whether freedom of speech in the Netherlands applies to everyone or only to a few? The answer to this is at once the answer to the question whether freedom still has a home in this country.”

When Wilders says he pays a price for defending freedom every day, he does not speak idly. He lives under armed guard, his life constantly in peril from Islamic radicals. Bat Yeor, author of Eurabia, who warned about the Islamic danger decades before others took it seriously, says that the threats to Wilders’ life “are the real crimes the Netherlands should address.” The obvious risk to Wilders’ life makes the refusal of the Dutch government to take special security precautions more questionable (ironically it took such precautions in the trial of the Dutch-born Muslim who stabbed filmmaker Theo van Gogh to death in an Amsterdam street.). Columnist Mark Steyn has noted caustically: “You’d almost get the impression it would suit them if he failed to survive till the verdict.”

What are the chances Wilders will be acquitted? According to U.S. attorney David Yerushalmi, the probability is high that he will be fined or imprisoned and stripped of his political office. That is because given the law as written, he is guilty. Article 137c of the Dutch Penal Code says: “He who publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in any way insulting of a group of people because of their race, their religion or belief, or the hetero- or homosexual nature or their physical, mental or intellectual disabilities will be punished with a prison sentence of at the most one year or a fine of third category. If the offense is committed by a person who makes it his profession or habit, or by two or more people in association, a prison sentence of at the most two years or a fine of fourth category will be imposed.”

Yerushalmi asks: “What do you say to the Netherlanders who would tolerate such fascist legislation? Is it really possible that a Western European country would criminalize speech that insults a group of people for their anti-Dutch beliefs?” The only rational defense, he says “is that the Dutch statutes which Wilders is accused of violating are themselves a violation of what it means to be a Dutchman.” Truth is no defense. Muslims profess themselves insulted. That alone is enough to condemn Wilders under the statute.

The broad language of the statute accounts for the seemingly bizarre argument of the second prosecutor in the case, Birgit van Roessel, that expressing his opinion to the citizenry is not part of the job of a member of the Dutch parliament. When Wilders’ lawyer argued that Wilders made his statements as a lawmaker, with parliamentary immunity, she replied that “expressing his opinion in the media or through other channels is not part of an MP’s duties.”

Wilders has been compared to Churchill and the comparison is apt in many ways. Like Churchill in the 1930s, Wilders is a political voice in the wilderness, describing the need to act against dangers that others refuse to see or hope to deflect through appeasement. As Wilders said in an interview on the eve of the trial: “Europe is weak. European leaders are weak….If we stay weak, we lose our identity; our culture based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism will lose ground and Islam will grow even stronger in Europe today. There will be no freedom, no room for anything but Islam, no tolerance and more sharia.”

But there is another way in which the two are similar and that is in their assessment of Islam. If Churchill were a Dutch citizen today he too might be on trial. For this is what he wrote about Islam:

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

“No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

“Far from being moribund, Islam is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread through Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

The outcome of Wilder’s trial will be momentous. Bat Yeor argues that a conviction will “reinforce his aura and weaken his political enemies” because “for most Europeans, Geert Wilders appears to be the hero and defender of their lost freedoms and dignity.” The public, says Bat Yeor, sees his opponents “as the stooges of the Organization of the Islamic Conference who continuously and by every means pressure European governments to punish severely what it considers blasphemy.”

In a ringing defense of Wilders, Iran expert Clare Lopez declares: “He stands in the dock for all of us. Netherlands, the world is watching. Do not lead Europe into a long black night where the light of freedom flickers but fitfully as it does in every place where sharia is law. Stand with your forebears who, like William of Orange, fought to keep Dutchmen free and do not fear the violence of assassins and mobs. Your liberty is our liberty and Wilders’ free speech is our free speech.”

Posted by Ruth at 09:39 PM

OUTSOURCING SECURITY

Ruth King

Our southern border is nearly 2,000 miles long with a variety of protective barriers. This has created a simmering border conflict with Mexico.

Mexico is awash with unemployed and restive workers who have been flooding the United States border regions with thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants every year. Adding to immigration enforcement woes are the number of Mexican drug cartel criminals clamoring to join them. These cartels murder thousands of people every year and there is danger they will do the same here. Indeed, in February of 2009 the Justice Department announced the results of “Operation Xcellerator” which resulted in 750 arrests and the seizure of many millions of dollars worth of drugs and weapons smuggled into the United States from Mexico. The Justice Department report warned that violent gangs masterminded by Mexican drug lords were expanding their spheres of operation into large cities throughout this country.

These Mexican cartels are not composed of ordinary criminals. They are heartless killers who employ the kind of grisly techniques--beheadings, flaying, torture and kidnapping--common to Arab terrorists. While unlike Arab terrorists, the cartels do not deliberately target civilians, thousands have died in the crossfire and an equal number live trapped in fear in their homes. In Mexico, more than seven thousand people have been killed since 2008.

The situation has become so grave that in March 2009 Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to Mexico to negotiate a plan with Mexican leaders to deal with the problem. The Mexicans demanded and received $1.4 billion for law enforcement equipment and training. Unfortunately not much has been achieved and some researchers have estimated that in over 230 cities in the United States the drug trade is controlled by Mexico’s cartel.

Very little on this subject gets into the daily media. For example on the day I write this (January 20, 2010) UPI, AP and Reuters between them have nineteen articles about Israel and none about the border problem with Mexico, which former director of the CIA Michael Hayden called a strong threat to national security.

Now, you may wonder what all this has to do with Israel. Patience dear reader.

What would you say if Russia nominated a “special envoy” to arbitrate the border conflict between the U.S. and Mexico and a quartet of nations far removed from our soil held a meeting in some European capital to discuss a solution? What if the quartet grew into an international symphony with chorus demanding American “concessions”?

Furthermore, what if the leaders of the drug cartels were invited by presidents of countries throughout the world to press their complaints against American law enforcement? What if academics took up the cause of the cartels as “oppressed people” citing the disparity between annual income in Mexico and America as the “root cause” of the problem?

What if world leaders and opinion makers then took up the cause of Aztlan a Hispanic/American movement that calls for the creation of an independent state in the “lost” (to Mexico) territories of our southwestern states? And what if this escalated into a demand that the United States cease its “occupation” of Texas, with every dictator in the world (joined by blackbelt strutters Sarkozy and Tony Blair) joining the chorus, along with most American academics and sundry former legislators on the cartel’s payroll?

Outrageous! How dare they expect the United States to outsource its security to Europe and South America? “Mind your own business. This is our problem and the solution is with us” we would tell the robed thugs from the oil Kingdoms, and the Frau Merkels and Vladimirs and Hugo and the Zapateros and the minions of blowhard thinktankers and pundits.

But, and here is the big but. What would we say if our President, intimidated by the “process,” travelled to every corner of the world promising to fulfill the demands of the cartels and the Aztlaners if only they would promise to like us and give up crime?

Impossible, you say? Yet this is precisely the course that Israel and its leaders follow as they acquiesce repeatedly to the demands of the West. And it has become customary for Israeli leaders to travel the world outsourcing the state’s sovereignty, with negotiations on Israel’s borders and future conducted everywhere but in Jerusalem.

A dangerous side product is that Israeli concessions weaken the resolve of American supporters of Israel. They too parrot the “two state solution.” After all it is trumpeted as “the universal consensus” by the man who is reputed to be leader of Israel’s “hard-line.” Mush line, is what it is.

The excuse of Netanyahu and the supposed “nationalist” members of his cabinet is that the two state solution is entrenched—it is too late, they shrug, to alter the course of Palarab independence. It is not.

The two state dissolution of Israel is anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish, illegal, immoral, untenable and suicidal and it is time to start a “tea party” movement here and in Israel to stop its course.

Americans showed in Massachusetts that a bad policy which seemed inevitable could be thwarted by public outrage. The American public would never give in to the demands of criminals for sovereignty in our heartland.

Israel should follow suit and stop outsourcing its sovereign responsibilities.

Posted by Ruth at 09:38 PM

JANUARY 2010

Table of Contents

LURCHING LEFT
Herbert Zweibon

FROM THE EDITOR
Real Jean Isaac

ISRAEL UNDERMINES ITS LEGAL STANDING
William Mehlman

NETANYAHU'S SURRENDER
Jerold Auerbach

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Andrew Roberts

THREE TO READ
Ruth King

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

Outpost is distributed free to
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Posted by Ruth at 05:03 PM

LURCHING LEFT

Herbert Zweibon

Recently Shimon Peres told Newsweek’s Lally Weymouth that Netanyahu was mistakenly viewed as a right-winger. Since assuming power, his behavior, on small matters as on larger issues, suggest that for once Peres’s words correspond to reality.

Take Beit Shalom (the Peace House) in Hebron. The Jewish community legally purchased the building (at a highly inflated price). Nonetheless the Olmert government embarked on a long process of harassment, finally evicting the residents. The case is still in the courts and it is a travesty of justice to put people out of their homes while adjudication is going on. If only to symbolize that the new government differed from its predecessor in upholding Jewish rights, Netanyahu could have made the small gesture of restoring the residents of Beit Shalom to their home.

Then, under the aegis of his own government, there are the three young men from the community of Yitzhar in Samaria, banished from their homes and families without explanation, having violated no law, charged with no offense. It may seem a small matter in that only a few families are affected, but a big principle is involved. Netanyahu could have shown solidarity with the settler community (which had invested their hopes and votes in him) and with the rule of law by insisting they be charged or allowed to return home.

Netanyahu’s actions reveal the same pattern of collapse in the face of American pressures that he manifested when he was elected Prime Minister in 1996. First there was the speech at Bar Ilan University on June 14 where Netanyahu abruptly reversed course to endorse a Palestinian state. (With breathtaking political cynicism he insisted the new state be demilitarized, although he had argued a few years earlier that demilitarization was an absurdity, that the Palestinian state would assume all the powers of a state “and the world will stand by and do nothing but it will stop us from trying to stop them”.)

Now, acceding to Obama’s pressure, there is the settlement freeze. This Outpost includes two articles, by William Mehlman (from Israel) and Jerold Auerbach, on the deadly implications of this latest exercise in appeasement. Suffice it to point out here the needlessly provocative way in which the Netanyahu government is treating the “frozen” communities. Netanyahu met with leaders of the affected communities telling them, “We need to cooperate and get through this period together” and “I would like you to sit at the steering wheel together with us.” In direct contradiction to his words, he has sent contingents of “building inspectors” to each community with “stop work papers,” backed by police and worst of all, Yassamnikim. (Yassam is an abbreviation for Special Reconnaissance Unit. Set up during the second Intifada, these black-garbed experts in strong arm techniques have been retained for “special” circumstances.) If the government wants to monitor building activities it could do so by flyovers or through sending in left-wing “spies.” In Kedumim the mayor Hananel Durani, sitting with a handful of protesting high school kids, was beaten and dragged away and Yassamnikim were caught on video manhandling young girls.

Required to enforce the freeze on Jewish construction, Israel Defense Forces have scaled back anti-terror operations in Judea and Samaria. Military affairs correspondent Haggai Huberman quotes an IDF officer: “We are barely doing patrols or initiating action against terrorists, except for the bare necessity minimum.” One result of the government’s crazily skewed priorities is already in: a young Jewish woman was stabbed in the back at a bus stop south of Efrat—the checkpoint had been removed.

While they are not likely to voice their appreciation, the fact is that judging from his behavior thus far, the secular (delusional) left could scarcely have obtained a more satisfactory leader than Benjamin Netanyahu.

Posted by Ruth at 04:58 PM

FROM THE EDITOR

Rael Jean Isaac

Freebies at Copenhagen

An unusual freebie was on offer to delegates at the Copenhagen climate-fest. Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjernegaard, in cooperation with Copenhagen’s Community Council, sent postcards to 160 hotels urging delegates “Be sustainable—don’t buy sex.” Copenhagen’s prostitutes were up in arms. They offered free sex to anyone who could produce one of the offending postcards and an identity card for the conference. In the wake of the exposure of distortion and destruction of key data at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one AFSI reader wrote in: “Which are the prostitutes? The girls or the climate scientists?”

Representing Israel at this jamboree, Shimon Peres, in what is billed as a “special speech” emphasizing Israel’s obligation in solving the climate crisis, is likely to produce enough hot air to single-handedly raise global temperatures.

Talibanizing Gaza

Shin Bet (Israel’s security service) has issued a report on the ways in which Hamas has Islamized Gaza.

Here are a few: Judges have been instructed not to hold sessions if female lawyers do not appear in Islamic garb. On official Hamas TV, women announcers wear a veil and Islamic content is increasingly featured in its programs. Mixed gender public ceremonies may not be held, and men may not teach in girls’ schools. Hamas is trying to separate boys and girls in UN-run schools. Unmarried couples may not appear in public; married couples must be ready to produce a marriage certificate on demand. The pace of building mosques, madrassahs and Islamic sharia courts is being stepped up. The Bureau for Legal Counsel and Legislation is preparing a new criminal code based on Islamic law.

To be sure, Hamas faces some opposition: organizations have cropped up claiming Hamas is too compromising and moderate.

The Left and Islam

Journalist and retired federal agent Chuck Hustmyre has an original take on the union between the American left and fundamentalist Islam which, he points out, given their huge differences on issues like feminism and homosexuality, “seems like a marriage made in hell.”

Writes Hustmyre: “The Amercan Left’s affair with fundamentalist Islam is essentially a love-fear relationship. The Left loves Islam’s hatred of America and its desire to radically change this country, but the Left also fears what militant Muslims are capable of, especially if they turn their murderous rage on their so-called friends. So the Left, like Neville Chamberlain with the Nazis, walks a tightrope, appeasing Muslims at every turn, offering excuses for Islamic violence, and hoping Muslim fundamentalists won’t bite the hand that feeds them their excuses.”

The Policy of Olmerta

William Buckley famously wrote that he would rather entrust the government to the first 400 names in the Boston telephone book than to the faculty of Harvard. Reading former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s interview with The Australian (November 28), it appears Israel’s government was in the hands of a man even more foolish and reckless than anything Harvard’s faculty could offer.
Here’s Olmert on Obama: “I’m entirely free of any suspicions or complaints about the Obama administration. I think the Obama administration is very friendly to Israel.”

He goes on to provide hitherto unknown detail on the offer he made to Abbas on September 16, 2008. Israel would keep 6.4% of territory beyond the Green Line and provide an equivalent amount of territory inside the Green Line in recompense. A re-divided Jerusalem would become the capital of a Palestinian state. The holy sites would be jointly administered by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the U.S. There would be territorial continuity for the Palestinian state via a tunnel controlled by the Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would accept a certain (low) number of Arab refugees for five years and create an international fund to compensate Palestinians for their suffering.

Olmert says he gave Abbas a map embodying the plan and Abbas promised that the next day his adviser would come. The adviser never came.

And so Israel was (temporarily) saved from its leadership. It is hard to imagine a more irresponsible offer—to uproot untold thousands of Israelis from their homes in Judea and Samaria, to re-divide Jerusalem, physically to join Hamastan to Fatahstan, hastening the day Hamas took over both. And then there was the absurdity of expecting “peace” to follow massive withdrawals, after the experience of Oslo and what followed retreat from Gaza. And Hamas, the “other” Palestinian state, was not even party to the talks!

Posted by Ruth at 04:56 PM

ISRAEL UNDERMINES ITS LEGAL STANDING

William Mehlman

Even were one to accept Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “bottom-line” assurance that his shutdown of Jewish housing construction in Judea and Samaria is a “one-time step for a limited time period,” or that now “hooked,” the Israeli fish is ever going to be let off the hook by Obama & Global Associates, the bedrock damage done to the Jewish State’s most fundamental legal cover by this act could well be irreparable.

The first and most immediate casualty of the “freeze” is the July 1950 “Law of Return,” characterized by then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion as “the unchanging law of Jewish history, reflecting the principle whereby the State of Israel was established.” At the heart of Israel’s raison d’etre, it cast in concrete the universal Jewish right of citizenship and settlement in Israel. The language of the law, moreover, is quite specific. In prescient anticipation of changes in the contours of Israel, it deliberately does not confine the right of Jewish settlement to “Medinat Yisrael,” the “State of Israel” as it existed in the summer of 1950, but. rather extends it to “Erez Yisrael,” the “Land of Israel,” wherever and however future events might define the parameters of the “National Jewish Home.”

Given that the exercise of the right of settlement in “Eretz Yisrael” is contingent on the availability of places to live, the government’s ban on housing construction (however “limited”) in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of “Eretz Yisrael,” renders that right and the law underlying it essentially meaningless. Beyond that, the government’s action widens the shadow over the status of 120 Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, all of which draw their legitimacy from the same legal wellspring.

Even more ominous than its marginalization of the Law of Return is the can of worms the government may have opened in its outright snub of the 1948 “Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance.” It would be a grave error to let its cumbersome title obscure the impact of this ruling on Israeli history, avers Howard Grief, attorney, constitutional scholar and legal adviser to the late Professor Yuval Ne’eman, Minister of Energy in the Shamir government. Embodied in the September, 1948, “Land of Israel Proclamation,” the Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance officially recognized all laws applicable to the State of Israel as applicable with equal force to “any area of Palestine” that came under the authority of the Israel Defense Forces. It was under that umbrella that Israel settled and populated major portions of the Negev and the Galilee—not allocated to the Jewish State in the 1947 UN Partition—that came into its possession in the 1948-49 War of Independence. The Israeli Left needs occasional reminding that those lands are part and parcel of what it sanctimoniously refers to as “Israel proper.”

It was also in part as a result of the Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance that Israel saw itself within legal bounds in creating 142 Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and additional communities on the Golan Heights, territories that fell to the IDF in the Six-Day War. None of them, needless to say, were allocated to Israel under the Partition. Israel may consider itself fortunate if new challenges to its territorial status do not ensue from the fresh openings it has provided its worldwide legion of enemies and ill-wishers.

If amidst concerns over Ahmadinejad’s centrifuges, Hezbollah’s rockets and the mass murderers being set free in exchange for Gilad Schalit, Israel needs to worry about the deference it pays to 60 year-old laws, it’s because it is in the courts, the agencies of the UN and other international bodies and among a phalanx of well funded, intensely hostile NGOs that the battle for the survival of the Jewish State is being played out. The suicide bombers have been replaced by lawyers and lobbyists. Their weapons are the lawsuit (900 and counting against the IDF alone): the “fact-finding” mission (UN and ad hoc); the international arrest warrant and “universal jurisdiction statute” (arrests and trials of Israeli military and public figures anywhere, any time); the petition, the initiative, the academic boycott, the apartheid charge—all directed toward the single aim of delegitimizing the Jewish State. The targets are no longer buses and coffee shops, but the legality of Israel’s presence on its land and its sovereign right to defend that land and its people.

On this battlefield, no mistake can prove more costly than ignoring the law of unintended consequences, as Netanyahu appears to be doing with this “freeze.” Nothing more painfully illustrates that fact than Israel’s 2000 middle of the night abandonment of its anti-terrorist stronghold in south Lebanon (along with its South Lebanese Army ally of 18 years) and its unilateral evacuation and destruction of 22 Jewish communities in Gaza. The first gave sinew to the then fledgling Iranian terrorist proxy Hezbollah, for which the Jewish State was repaid six years later with 4,000 Katyusha rockets over Haifa and the Galilee. Today, as a well equipped army with 15 times that number of rockets, it threatens a major retaliatory response to any Israeli strike at Iran’s nuclear installations.

The unintended consequences of Ariel Sharon’s handover of Gaza to Hamas continue to wind themselves like a steel daisy-chain around Israel’s throat. From this single most irrational act by any government in the state’s 61-year history ensued a four-year rocket bombardment of the western Negev, the termination of which required a full-scale IDF air and ground offensive into Gaza, causing minimal but inevitable casualties (lovingly documented by a hostile media) among the civilians behind whom the Hamas terrorists shielded their dirty work. This resulted in near universal condemnation of Israel as a heartless human rights violator, a charge underwritten and codified in the damning Goldstone Report, soon to be featured at the UN Security Council. The campaign to strip Israel of its right of self-defense against a terrorist organization pledged to its destruction has exceeded the wildest imaginings of its planners.

What have the legal potholes Netanyahu has dug for himself with the freeze availed him? Precious little at this counting. They have no more taken Barack Obama “off his back” than has his embrace of the “two-state solution.” “The Americans drove me nuts,” he was quoted by Ynet to have confessed to a meeting of Likud branch members. “They wanted more, also in Jerusalem.” In addition to concessions on Jerusalem, moreover, the White House, according to Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick, is demanding that Israel allow the Palestinian “Security Forces,” equipped and trained by U.S. General Keith Dayton, to set up shop in Judean and Samarian areas currently under full IDF control and that Israel “surrender land to Fatah in the strategically crucial Jordan Valley.”

The Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot further reports that as a precondition to talks with the Palestinians, President Obama will be asking Israel to formally declare its acceptance of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem and agree to cleanse those areas of all Jews. “So far from winning American support, or at least causing the White House to ease its bullying,” Glick concludes, Obama regards Netanyahu’s “decision to implement a militarily irrational, bigoted policy of prohibiting Jews from building in Israel’s heartland as a drop in the bucket.”

From Mahmoud Abbas, the prime minister has gotten a complete brushoff. Yet, his flat rejection of “peace talks” unless the construction freeze is extended to include Jerusalem, is raising few eyebrows. The “President” of the Palestinian Authority can hardly be seen as less demanding than Israel’s self-appointed masters in Washington. Former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, for one, is not surprised. Like all of America’s past promises of “reciprocity” from Abbas in return for Israeli concessions and “gestures,” he asserts this one also runs aground on the thorny fact that Abbas is “incapable of being a partner to peace negotiations.” The guy Obama really needs to accomplish that purpose, Halevy submits, is someone Mahmoud Abbas is not and will never be – “a Palestinian leader acceptable to all the Palestinians.”

International applause for the moratorium has also been notably absent. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hopes for a joint declaration of support from America’s “Quartet” partners, Russia, the European Union and the UN, were dashed by Moscow’s reservations to two items in the text proposed by Washington: an acknowledgement of the “Jewish identity” of the State of Israel and that the dividing line between Israel and a future Palestine would be determined by developments on the ground, including the anticipated Israeli annexation of major settlement blocs.

What the prime minister’s accession to the freeze certainly did achieve was almost uniform settler denunciation and a deep but at present not unbridgeable rift within the Likud sector of the cabinet. Ministers Silvan Shalom, Gilad Erdan, Moshe Kahalon. Yuli Edelstein and Limor Livnat were unanimous in their condemnation of the decision, with Livnat declaring that “we have fallen into the hands of a horrible U.S. administration” and Erdan refusing to provide inspectors from his Environmental Protection Ministry to help enforce the freeze. Shalom, a late convert to the “Land of Israel” movement, declared that if the Likud was now abandoning its championing of the settlement enterprise, such a turnabout would have to be deliberated by the party’s institutions.

At least three of the “Security Cabinet” members who voted 11 to 1 to back Netanyahu on the freeze (Minister Uzi Landau of “Yisrael Beteinu” cast the lone dissenting vote) were experiencing varying degrees of buyer’s remorse. Stung by an avalanche of “Stop Work” orders on the settlements, propelled by Defense Minister Ehud Barak within hours after the announcement of the moratorium, Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon told the Hebrew weekly Makor Rishon that he was particularly disturbed by the blanket manner in which the decision was being implemented. “It was not intended to be an overall freeze of all construction,” he said. “This is not what we meant. Whatever was already being built and approved should have continued to be built.” He vowed to quit the government if the moratorium was not lifted after 10 months.

Joining Yaalon in a request to Netanyahu that he rein in an overly zealous Barak, Minister Without Portfolio Benny Begin promised that the end of the moratorium would see a resumption of housing construction in Judea and Samaria “at a faster pace than before the freeze.” Likud Central Committee Chairman and Communications Minister Moshe Kahalon caustically noted that “the U.S. did not send us flowers,” while the Europeans were “unilaterally declaring east Jerusalem to be the Palestinian capital.”

As for the settlers, a column in the Hebrew daily Ha’aretz by the paper’s chief political correspondent Yossi Verder entitled “Worst of All Worlds,” seemed to say it all: “If Tsipi Livni were in power today,” Verder opined, “she would not have had the courage to freeze construction. And if she had, she would have been left without a government because Shas and Yisrael Beitenu (her prospective coalition partners) would have walked. Netanyahu, however, can do what he wants.”

Verder touches on a key point in that last sentence, because for all the grousing among the Likud cabinet members and the Likud Knesset caucus as a whole, not one of the senior members has risen to lead a revolt, nor have any of them attacked the prime minister directly. They are not ready to bring this government down—at least not yet.. Virtually all of their anger has been vented at Barak, the leader of a fractured, diminishing, unpopular Labor party. However emotionally satisfying, that expedient may have limited shelf-life. All of which raises an intriguing question: When push comes to shove, as it inevitably will when Obama demands that he acquiesce to the division of Jerusalem (“One Capital for Two Nations”), in order to lure or keep Mahmoud Abbas at the bargaining table, will Netanyahu, faced with a revolt that must bring his premiership crashing to earth, finally stand his ground, or might he do something else?

The “something else” scenario initially posed by Verder and now gaining increasing traction, is that the Prime Minister, flushed with the momentum of a perceived diplomatic “breakthrough” on the Palestinian or Syrian “track,” might—a la Ariel Sharon in 2005— split the Likud, taking a required one-third (but probably more) of the faction with him, and join forces with Barak and his nine “loyalists” (none of whom would presumably cavil at deserting a drowning Labor party $40 million in debt) and, with a bunch of Tsipi Livni-hating Kadima defectors in tow, cobble together a new “centrist” Likud. Verder believes Barak has been banking on just such a turn of events “from the moment he entered the government. A government of ‘B’s’—Bibi and Barak—may be his last opportunity to succeed Netanyahu as prime minister,” Verder argues. As for Netanyahu, Verder says nothing about the man would surprise him: “Since taking office less than a year ago, Netanyahu’s principles and declarations of the past have been put to the test repeatedly and each time a new reality emerges victorious.”

Is such a scenario within the realm of possibility? If we are to credit MK Ophir Pines-Paz, one of the four Labor “rebels” who have fought the party’s entry into the Likud coalition from the outset, a variation of it could be in the making. Pines-Paz related to Verder the details of a meeting he recently had with an unidentified Likud cabinet minister. In the course of the conversation, Pines-Paz says, he was “suddenly asked” what he thought about Likud and Labor running on a joint list in the next election, but with each party retaining an autonomous existence. Queried as to the genesis of the idea, the Likud minister said it was put to him by Netanyahu. He said he told Netanyahu he could live with it. Knowing Netanyahu, he added, he didn’t think the prime minister would have broached the subject “if something wasn’t cooking.” Pines-Paz tossed the idea around with several of his colleagues and “not one of them fell off his chair.”

Be that as it may, it could be a signal for the rest of the country to fasten its seat belt.

William Mehlman is AFSI’s representative in Israel..

Posted by Ruth at 04:53 PM

NETANYAHU'S SURRENDER

Jerold S. Auerbach

Just before Prime Minister Netanyahu imposed the ten-month housing freeze in Jewish settlements that has roiled Israel since late November, President Obama committed his Gilo gaffe. The woefully misinformed president labeled a neighborhood of 40,000 Israelis in southwest Jerusalem, purchased by Jews before World War II, a “settlement” in (Arab) “East” Jerusalem where Jews must not build new homes. Rejecting Obama’s demand for a Jerusalem freeze, Netanyahu responded with a far more draconian constraint of his own. The two episodes are not unrelated.

To be sure, Netanyahu’s penchant for yielding to American pressure is hardly new. In 1998, during his first term as prime minister, he was strong-armed by President Clinton into relinquishing Israeli control over nearly all of Hebron, the ancient biblical city where the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are entombed, where King David reigned, where sixty-seven Jews were brutally massacred in 1929 – and where Jews once again now live.
Even by Netanyahu’s surrender standards, however, the announcement of a ten-month housing freeze stunned the settler communities. Instantly polarizing Israelis, it raised the danger of massive civil (and even military) disobedience and draconian government retaliation. Worse yet, the freeze may represent only the beginning of massive capitulation to American demands: for the release from prison of a thousand Fatah terrorists, the surrender of strategic land in the Jordan Valley to the Palestinian Authority, and ultimate acceptance of a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
It was hardly coincidental that just days after Netanyahu’s announcement of the housing freeze Defense Minister Ehud Barak visited an army induction base to warn soldiers of the consequences of refusing orders. “We intend to use an iron fist to limit this phenomenon,” Barak announced bluntly, while directing a special warning to “kippa-wearers” to obey the Talmudic injunction against a civil war between Jews, a warning that Barak himself seemed prepared to disregard.

Netanyahu has been deservedly criticized for his abject surrender. “In the hopes of appeasing the unappeasable Obama administration,” Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick wrote sharply, “the government has adopted Obama’s anti-Semitic policies against Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.” Yoram Ettinger, who carefully monitors Middle Eastern demographic trends, dismissed Netanyahu’s implicit claim that Jewish settlements are obstacles to peace. It was, after all, the evacuation of 9,000 Jews from twenty-five communities in Gaza in 2005, ordered by Prime Minister Sharon, that enabled Hamas militants to ascend to power there. Ettinger wondered whether President Obama, who evidently considers 300,000 Jews (17%) living among 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria to be an obstacle to peace in the Middle East, would also support the uprooting of 1.4 million Arabs (20%) who reside among six million Jews within the State of Israel. If not, why are only Jews to be ethnically cleansed?

By the beginning of December, just a week after Netanyahu’s announcement of the housing freeze, several dozen army officers and soldiers on reserve duty had signed and circulated a statement indicating their refusal to report to active service for the duration of the housing freeze: “We see this as a racist decision that infringes on our human rights and our rights as citizens, contradicts the rights of the Jewish nation to its land, and goes against morality and justice.” Ehud Barak’s nightmare scenario was already unfolding, and he was eager to enforce the edict that provoked it.

Confronting the outrage that was building in Israel, even Cabinet ministers who had supported the Netanyahu freeze began to backtrack. Directing much of their criticism at Barak for his ham-handed zeal— the Defense Ministry had even issued stop-work orders to houses already approved or under construction —Moshe Yaalon and Benny Begin asked Netanyahu to urge Barak to “calm down.” The Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samaria Affairs demanded that the housing freeze order be revoked for its violations of settlers’ rights.

Prime Minister Netanyahu could hardly ignore the outrage that his capitulation to Obama had generated. As settlers sought an injunction against the freeze, he met with their leaders to persuade them that “We took this difficult decision in order to move Israel’s widest interests forward.” In an atmosphere described by one participant as “hard and tense,” Netanyahu tried to reassure them that “we are not your enemy, we are your brethren.” But, for entirely understandable reasons, it was a hard sell, not least because it implicitly undermined the 2004 agreement reached by President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon that large settlement blocs (Ma’ale Adumim, Gush Etzion, Ariel) would, in any peace agreement, remain part of Israel.

Insisting that the freeze would make it evident that it is Palestinians who provide the real resistance to peace, Netanyahu was sharply rebuked: “Didn’t Israel already make that point when it withdrew from Gaza in the summer of 2005?” Offering reassurance that the suspension was “one-time and temporary,” the Prime Minister also issued a firm warning: “You can protest, demonstrate and express your opinion, but it can’t be that you don’t abide by a decision that was lawfully taken.” Predictably, the Palestinians rejected the housing freeze as insufficient, demanding that it also include a freeze in Jerusalem. Given Netanyahu’s inclination to capitulate, why not?

Settler leaders remained openly defiant. Danny Dayan, chairman of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, bluntly declared: “We will disobey the freeze order and we are willing to pay the price in order to break Netanyahu’s ‘White Paper’ policy”—a reference to British limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine during and after the Holocaust years. Residents of Kedumim, a settlement founded during Hanukkah in 1975, responded by blocking Civil Administration officials from distributing stop-work orders in its new building projects.

Israeli opinion, at first, was sharply divided over Netanyahu’s decree. Haaretz, predictably, focused more on the “organized lawlessness” of Jewish settlers whose communities were threatened by the freeze than on the draconian restriction itself. “Only a few kilometers from Tel Aviv,” proclaimed a lead editorial (December 3), “the laws of democracy give way to the law of the jungle.” But once Tel Aviv is within Palestinian missile range, as it will be if Israel returns to its pre-1967 borders, Israeli leftists may regret the absence of the “jungle” Jews whose presence in Judea and Samaria now protects them.
Journalist Amos Harel noted that Netanyahu, under heavy American pressure, had “crossed an ideological Rubicon” with his announcement of the housing freeze. Indeed, in tandem with his embrace of a two-state solution in his Bar-Ilan speech several months earlier, the Likud prime minister was sounding increasingly like Shimon Peres, whose shimmering vision of “a new Middle East” plunged Israel into the Oslo “peace process” fiasco. To his Haaretz colleague Akiva Eldar, the problem was that the prime minister had not yet done enough. If only Netanyahu had been more conciliatory toward Palestinian Authority and President Abbas. If only he had formed a new government based upon a genuine commitment to “the road map and a regional peace plan.” If only he had reached out to his Kadima opponent Tzipi Livni instead of to the settlers. By now, of course, Israel would have returned to the “safety” of its pre-1967 “Auschwitz borders.”

Once public opinion consolidated, however, the depth of opposition to the Netanyahu freeze was evident. One week into December, 72% of Israelis believed that the housing freeze stemmed from Netanyahu’s inability to withstand American pressure; 68% believed that Netanyahu’s primary objective was to placate President Obama; 65% believed that the freeze should be brought to the Knesset for approval; 56% believed that the freeze would increase, not decrease, pressure on Israel to make further concessions.

As Netanyahu scrambled to minimize the damage caused by the housing freeze, he insisted that it was not intended to apply to construction already underway. But Defense Ministry inspectors, surely at Barak’s orders, had already ordered stoppage of work under construction.

Settlers quickly let Netanyahu know that they would resist his draconian plan. In Beit Arieh, their mayor was arrested when residents blocked security forces from entering to enforce the freeze. In Elon Moreh and Kiryat Arba, there were confrontations with inspectors. "The anger we feel over the freeze is only getting stronger," said a resident of Psagot. "And we're making our voices heard." Indeed they were: the evening of December 9, more than 10,000 Israelis gathered in Jerusalem, near the Prime Minister’s residence, to make their opposition known. "Jews are not ice pops,” Knesset member Aryeh Eldad proclaimed at the rally. “You don't freeze us so fast."

Netanyahu’s housing freeze in Judea and Samaria was instantly volatile because it needlessly—and heedlessly—reopened the issue of Israel’s final borders. For sixty years now, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, Israeli prime ministers have ignored the settlement rights of Jews under international guarantees that were set in place in 1920. In that year, the San Remo Conference converted the Balfour Declaration (1917) into what Howard Grief has correctly called in The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel Under International Law “a binding legal document.” The right of the Jewish people to establish their national home in Palestine —the land that now encompasses Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza—was affirmed. The League of Nations mandate for Palestine, ratified unanimously two years later, recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and “the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” In this land, Jews were guaranteed the right of “close settlement.”

But Great Britain, the Mandatory Trustee for Palestine, retained the discretion to “withhold” the right of Jews to settle east—not west—of the Jordan River. Consistent with that solitary exception, and to satisfy the ambitions of the Hashemite Sheikh Abdullah, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill removed the land east of the Jordan River, which became Trans-Jordan, from Palestine. West of the river, however, the right of Jewish settlement remained undiminished. No international legal agreement has ever abrogated it. The United States, having signed the 1924 Anglo-American Convention stipulating acceptance of the mandate, remains bound by it. Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, drafted in 1945, explicitly protected “the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.”

After the Six-Day War, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling for “secure and recognized boundaries.” It provided that when “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” was achieved—not before—Israel would be required to withdraw “from territories”—but not from “the territories” or “all the territories”—that it gained in that defensive war. No limitation on Jewish settlement was adopted. “The Jewish right of settlement in the area,” wrote Eugene V. Rostow, Undersecretary of State for political affairs between 1966-69, “is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing [Palestinian] population to live there.” International law expert Julius Stone concluded that any allegation of settlement illegality was a “subversion . . . of basic international law principles.” In sum, the right of Jews to “close settlement” throughout Mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River has never been abrogated.

It is nothing less than astonishing, and potentially catastrophic for Israel, that its political leaders from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu have been prepared to relinquish Israel’s legitimate land claims in Judea and Samaria. Only in Chelm, the mythical land of Jewish folly, can such a surrender otherwise be imagined. Why has a long parade of prime ministers, defense ministers, judges, media sages, and “peace” advocates been so eager to divest the State of Israel of its internationally guaranteed rights in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people?

The question answers itself. For the Israeli secular majority, and its representatives in government, anything that promises to squelch the potential political power, and undermine the land base, of religious Zionism is both worthy and urgently necessary. The Gaza withdrawal, as Caroline Glick wrote perceptively, “wasn’t about peace with the Arabs. It was about cultural supremacy within Israel.” Even Haaretz editors conceded that “the real disengagement” was not from Gaza but from Jewish religious sources. That helps to explain why no Israeli government during sixty-one years of statehood has acted as though it believed that Judea and Samaria actually belong to the Jewish people.

The enduring lesson from ancient Jewish history is that sinat hinam, groundless hatred between Jews, undermined national independence and led to the destruction of the Jewish Commonwealth. That very hatred, however, propels the unfolding Jewish tragedy of our time: the willingness, if not eagerness, to abdicate the biblical homeland of the Jewish people.

Jerold S. Auerbach, professor of history at Wellesley College, is the author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (Roman & Littlefield, 2009).

Posted by Ruth at 04:49 PM

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Andrew Roberts

Editor’s Note: Melanie Phillips posted this speech, given by historian Andrew Roberts (raised in the Anglican church) on Dec. 9, on her (U.K.) Spectator blog.

My Lords, Ladies & Gentlemen,

It’s a great honour to be invited to address you, especially on this the 60th anniversary of the Anglo-Israel Association, and I’d like to take the opportunity of this anniversary to look at the overall story of the relationship between Britain and Israel, and to try to strip away some of the myths.

Because it seems to me that for all the undoubted statesmanship implicit in Arthur Balfour’s Declaration of November 1917, promising “a National Home for the Jewish People,” it doesn’t mean that Britain has ever been much more than a fair-weather friend to Jewish national aspirations. The Declaration itself was at least in part conceived to keep Eastern European and Russian Jews supporting the Great War after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Chaim Weizmann’s preferred wording of ‘a Jewish State’ was turned down by the British Foreign Office. As David Ben-Gurion wrote at the time: “Britain has made a magnificent gesture … But only the Hebrew people can transform this right into tangible fact: only they, with body and soul, with their strength and capital, must build their National Home and bring about their national redemption.”

Sure enough, at the Versailles Conference and its ancillary meetings up to 1922, although Britain was given the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish National Home was not established. During the Mandate period there was an observable tension between the Colonial Office, which was responsible for administering Palestine and wanted to do so within the terms of the (admittedly self-contradictory) Balfour Declaration, and the Foreign Office, which feared that allowing the de facto creation of a Jewish State would alienate Arabs. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended ending the Mandate and partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with population transfers of 225,000 Arabs from Galilee, an outcome Ben-Gurion said “could give us something which we have never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples.” Nonetheless, both the Arabs and the 20th Zionist Congress rejected Peel’s recommendations, to the palpable relief of the Foreign Office, which concentrated its own opposition to it on the basis of its supposed impracticality.

Instead there was the notorious 1939 White Paper, which severely limited Jewish immigration into Palestine at precisely the period of their greatest need, during the Final Solution. A total upper limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the fateful years 1940-44, a figure that was also intended to cover refugee emergencies. The White Paper was published on 9 November 1938—the very same day as the Kristallnacht atrocities in Germany—and was approved by Parliament in May 1939, a full two months after Hitler’s occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia. The Manchester Guardian described it as “a death sentence on tens of thousands of Central European Jews,” which in sheer numerical terms was probably an underestimation. Although the Labour Party Conference voted to repeal the White Paper in 1945, the Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin—a bitter enemy of Israel—persisted in it, and it was not to be repealed until the day after the State of Israel was proclaimed.

In late April 1948, Bevin ordered that Arab positions in Jaffa needed to be protected from the Jews “at all costs,” and when Israeli independence came the next month, the departing British sometimes handed over vital military and strategic strong points to the five invading Arab armies, the most efficient of which, Transjordan’s Arab Legion, was actually commanded by a Briton, Sir John Glubb. And then on New Year’s Eve 1948 the British Government actually issued an ultimatum to Israel threatening war if Israel did not halt its counter-attacks on Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip and Sinai. Britain was the only country in the UN that came to Egypt’s aid in this regard.

One can easily see, therefore, why when Brigadier-General Sir Wyndham Deedes set up the Anglo-Israeli Association only weeks after Israel was finally recognized by Britain in 1949—months after America, Russia and several other states had already done so—it was much-needed. There was still massive resentment over the War of Independence; Israel was considered at best a headache by the Foreign Office; and worst of all, unlike her neighbours, she had no oil. Nor did the Suez Crisis much help matters seven years later: the way in which Israel fitted in neatly with British plans to crush Nasser ought to have endeared her to the Foreign Office, but of course it didn’t.

When in May 1967 Nasser announced the blockading of the Straits of Tiran, closing Israel’s commercial lifeline to the east, the guarantors of this international waterway—including Britain—failed to act quickly or decisively, and although Harold Wilson was proud of his pro-Israeli sentiments, his foreign secretary George Brown and the Foreign Office certainly did not reciprocate them. Britain compounded its generally lukewarm attitude during the Six Day War by sponsoring Resolution 242 at the end of it, which called on Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied,” in a resolution that was so badly worded by the Foreign Office that Arabs and Israelis have been able to argue over its proper meaning ever since.

The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 saw even worse bias by the Foreign Office in favour of the Arabs and against the Jews. Announcing an arms embargo “equally” between the belligerents, the Heath Government effectively stopped Israel buying spare parts for the IDF’s Centurion tanks, whilst allowing them to be bought by Jordan, the only other country affected, because it was not (officially at least) a belligerent. Egyptian helicopter pilots continued to be trained in Britain, with the foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home lamely telling the Israeli Ambassador that it was better for the pilots to be training in Britain than fighting at the front. Heath even refused to allow American cargo planes taking supplies to Israel to land and refuel at our bases on Cyprus.

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher seemed to offer a new warmth to Anglo-Israeli relations. She sat for Finchley, her Methodism chimed well with Jewish values, and she was the most philo-Semitic PM since Churchill, yet even she was stymied by the Foreign Office, especially over Intelligence cooperation with Mossad. It’s true that John Major sent a special SAS unit to seek and destroy Iraqi Scud missile batteries targeting Israel during the First Gulf War, but that was largely to remove the danger of Israel retaliating, and thereby perhaps destroying the Arab coalition against Saddam.

After 9/11 Tony Blair seemed to appreciate how Israel was in the very front line in the War against Terror, and he thus bravely refused to condemn Israel’s acts of self-defence in Lebanon, but since then Britain’s contribution to the EU’s strand of negotiating over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been, frankly, pathetic.

One area of policy over which the Foreign Office has traditionally held great sway is in the question of Royal Visits. It is therefore no coincidence that although HMQ has made over 250 official overseas visits to 129 different countries during her reign, neither she nor one single member of the British royal family has ever been to Israel on an official visit. Even though Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for sheltering a Jewish family in her Athens home during the Holocaust, was buried on the Mount of Olives, the Duke of Edinburgh was not allowed by the Foreign Office to visit her grave until 1994, and then only on a private visit.

"Official visits are organized and taken on the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth office," a press officer for the royal family explained when Prince Edward visited Israel recently privately—and a spokesman for the Foreign Office replied that “Israel is not unique" in not having received an official royal visit, because “Many countries have not had an official visit.” That might be true for Burkino Faso and Chad, but the Foreign Office has somehow managed to find the time over the years to send the Queen on State visits to Libya, Iran, Sudan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan & Turkey. So it can’t have been that she wasn’t in the area.

Perhaps Her Majesty hasn’t been on the throne long enough, at 57 years, for the Foreign Office to get round to allowing her to visit one of the only democracies in the Middle East. At least she could be certain of a warm welcome in Israel, unlike in Morocco where she was kept waiting by the King for three hours in 90 degree heat.

The true reason of course, is that the Foreign Office has a ban on official Royal visits to Israel, which is even more powerful for its being unwritten and unacknowledged. As an act of delegitimization of Israel, this effective boycott is quite as serious as other similar acts, such as the academic boycott, and is the direct fault of the Foreign Office Arabists. Which brings us on to Mr Oliver Miles.

One of the reasons I’m proud to be an historian is that there are scholars of the integrity and erudition of Prof. Sir Martin Gilbert and Prof. Sir Lawrence Freedman who also write history. If people as intelligent, wise and incorruptible as they choose to be historians, then it must be an honourable profession. Let me quote to you, therefore, word-for-word, what a former British Ambassador to Libya and Greece, Mr. Oliver Miles, wrote in The Independent newspaper, commenting on the composition of the present Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War: “Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media….All five members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.”

Ladies and gentlemen, if that’s the way that Foreign Office Arabists are prepared to express themselves in public, can you imagine the way that they refer to such people as Professors Gilbert and Freedman in private? For the balance that Mr. Miles is talking about here is clearly a racial balance, that only a certain quota of Jews should have been allowed on to the Inquiry. Of course there’s a reason why “such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream media,” and that is because it is a disgraceful and disgusting concept even to notice the racial background of such distinguished public servants, and one that wouldn’t have even occurred to most people had not Mr. Miles made such a point of it.

It seems to me that there is an implicit racism going on here. Jews are expected to behave better, goes the Foreign Office thinking, because they are like us. Arabs must not be chastised because they are not. So in warfare, we constantly expect Israel to behave far better than her neighbours, and chastise her quite hypocritically when occasionally under the exigencies of national struggle, she cannot. The problem crosses political parties today, just as it always has. William Hague called for Israel to adopt a proportionate response in its struggle with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2007, as though proportionate responses ever won any victories against fascists. In the Second World War, the Luftwaffe killed 50,000 Britons in the Blitz, and the Allied response was to kill 600,000 Germans—twelve times the number and hardly a proportionate response, but one that contributed mightily to victory. Who are we therefore to lecture the Israelis on how proportionate their responses should be?

Very often in Britain, especially when faced with the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we fail to ask ourselves what we would not do placed in the same position? The population of the United Kingdom of 63 millions is nine times that of Israel. In July 2006, to take one example entirely at random, Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed 8 patrolmen and kidnapped 2 others, and that summer fired 4,000 Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further 43 civilians. Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would not do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire 36,000 rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 387 British civilians, after killing 72 British servicemen in an ambush and capturing a further eighteen? I put it to you that there is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right too. So why should Israel be expected to behave any differently?

There has hardly been a single year since Brigadier-General Deedes established the Anglo-Israel Association in 1949 when a speaker has not been able to say that Israel faced a crisis, and on some occasions—in 1956, 1967, 1973 and especially in the face of the present Iranian nuclear programme today— these were existential. At a time when Barack Obama appears to be the least pro-Israeli president since Eisenhower, the dangers are even more obvious. For there is simply no way that Obama will prevent Ahmadinejad, perhaps Jewry’s most viciously outspoken and dangerous foe since the death of Adolf Hitler, to acquire a nuclear bomb.

None of us can pretend to know what lies ahead for Israel, but if she decides preemptively to strike against such a threat—in the same way that Nelson preemptively sank the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen and Churchill preemptively sank the Vichy Fleet at Oran—then she can expect nothing but condemnation from the British Foreign Office. She should ignore such criticism.

Although History does not repeat itself, its cadences do occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to anything it is testament to this: That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.

Posted by Ruth at 04:47 PM

THREE TO READ

Ruth King

Pretend there is no European Union, no United Nations, no Arab League, no Iran, no mainstream media and no George Mitchell. Fly this magic carpet to a warm and comfortable chair and read two books that are original and exhilarating and optimistic about Israel.

First, George Gilder’s The Israel Test is a thrilling paean to the Jewish people and Israel. Gilder, an apostle of free market capitalism and author of highly acclaimed books and articles on economics and technology, calls tiny Israel the “central issue in international politics, dividing the world into two fractious armies”…one of creative excellence and the rule of law and its opposite an army of envy, hatred and resentment—for Gilder sees anti-Semitism as the product of irrational envy.

Gilder, who calls Israel “the Hong Kong of the desert,” sees a thriving, creative and entrepreneurial Israel as the paradigm of achievement and endless possibility in an economically free society. He credits Jews with genius in science, technology, business and medicine which continues to propel them to the cutting edge in the advance of Western civilization.

Gilders spares no obloquy for the easy fix policies of peace processors. He mocks those who treat the impasse as though it was caused by Israel’s occupying “too much land” and “think it is within Israel’s power to choose peace” by making territorial concessions. He calls the recidivist recyclers of Oslo “extortionists.”

For Gilder Israel is America’s most valuable partner and ally, but it is more than that. In the last lines of the book, Gilder melds his political, secular and entrepreneurial respect for Israel with his spiritual love of the land: “Ultimately our loyalty to Israel arises not from the cold calculus of survival but from a sense of the holy…..What Americans must fathom with both heart and mind is that this instinct is true—and vital to our survival—that if we would live, we must defend this Holy Land.”

One finishes this book with gratitude and a fervent Amen.

The second highly recommended book is Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, a senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and Saul Singer, a former adviser to the U.S. Congress and journalist who lives in Israel.

Again, one succumbs to the pleasure of reading an original, lively and optimistic recounting of the nation’s booming start-up companies that outpace those of China, India, Korea, Canada and the United Kingdom. Incredibly, there are more Israeli companies on the Nasdaq than from all of Europe, Korea, Japan, Singapore and India combined!

The authors believe that Israeli “chutzpah”, immigration, research and development, and the military have been key components of this incredible economic leap.

Jews have always been entrepreneurial. In the U.S., in the pre-computer and technology era, they were key to the development of the garment trade, large retail chains and the movie industry which between them employed more Americans from entry level to executive suites than all other industries.

However, in Israel, the early oppressive bureaucracies inhibited growth and innovation, and created a brain drain of top scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs. The Israeli “hero” in those days was a farmer who grew crops in sand and not a “yuppie” business upstart.

The authors also remind us that in an earlier and (I might add, saner) incarnation, Shimon Peres encouraged and persuaded Israel’s government to develop its first technological “start-up,” namely its nuclear deterrent, long before India, China and Pakistan developed theirs.

Ironically, the unrelenting wars and the need for an effective and efficient military presented Israel with a great opportunity to train its citizens. As the authors point out, America has a limited all-volunteer army but in Israel all families have soldiers, and the “Ivy League” of the citizens are the elite army units that challenge, inform and teach problem solving and strategy as well as ordnance and combat. Friendships are formed that lead to collaborative efforts in industry. Their army education transforms these people into what the authors call “mission oriented leaders and problem solvers”--read that as business school students in military uniforms.

In a bizarre turn of events, Senor and Singer point out that the Arab boycott spurred Israel to develop products that could be shipped in boxes which would not arouse boycotters’ suspicions—unlike produce which requires more space and open carting.

One ends the book with renewed appreciation of Israel’s Defense Forces which not only guard the nation but contribute mightily to its dazzling economic successes.

But, and here is the seemingly everlasting “but” of the Jewish people, the delight and optimism these books produce are quickly dissipated when we turn to our third volume, Robin Shepherd’s A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel which chronicles the tsumani of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe. This hatred gives aid and support to the Jihad that threatens the survival of the state that elicits Gilder’s, Senor’s and Singer’s admiration.

Shepherd wrote this book while running the Europe program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Presently, he is Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. As he states in his introduction, Shepherd is neither Jewish nor a Christian Zionist and as a mainstream Anglican youth he was largely unaware of Jews or their myriad problems. In 1989 he read Conor Cruise O’Brien’s epic The Siege, given to him by a Zionist friend, and for the first time he challenged what he calls the prevalent anti-Israel bias that mushroomed in British academia in the eighties.

The forty-four pages of footnotes and index display the meticulous research that sustains the author’s conclusion that the language, tone, content and mainstream commentary on Israel in Europe is hard to distinguish from the libels of the Arab world.

Shepherd calls this a civilizational sickness fueled by appeasement and moral relativism rather than an atavistic return to old style European anti-Semitism. One may debate the roots, but not the actual facts. Shepherd also cautions that the virus of Jew-hatred may easily spread to American shores.

Although he gives a cursory overview of Israel’s history, Shepherd concentrates on the past nine years and the question of how and why Israel has become the focus of such intense disdain in Europe, with attitude polls reflecting a significant decline in Jewish prestige along with an irrational view of the Israel/Arab dispute wherein Israel is painted as oppressor, racist and neo-Nazi, and terrorism seen as the “natural” response of her victims.

Shepherd blames the Jewish defamers of Israel, the old left which leads the charges against Israel, the large Muslim population which is becoming electorally and culturally significant throughout the continent and elements of the right which have made common cause with Muslims and the left in their anti-Israel bandwagon. Whenever Israel engages in self defense, throughout Western Europe there are charges of war-crimes, violations of international law, and disproportionate response. Israel’s denials are lost in the howls of self-righteous venom.

Then, there are the charges of Israel as untrustworthy and a liability rather than a worthy ally. These spill over to the general Jewish population which by and large continues to support Israel and lead to overt anti-Semitism including harassment, defamation and threats.

Shepherd reminds us that in Europe the only nations that defend Israel are Eastern European countries freed of the Soviet yoke. He attributes this to their recent first hand experience with totalitarianism which they see throughout the Arab world.

There is no hint in Shepherd’s fine book that things will change for the better, and although he avoids reference to similarities between the present and pre-Holocaust Europe, one cannot avoid thinking of Europe, 1938.

On reflection, perhaps one should reverse the order I have taken here—read Shepherd first and then rush to the other books for solace. •

Posted by Ruth at 04:43 PM

DECEMBER 2009 OUTPOST

THE JABOTINSKY PRIZE
Herbert Zweibon

FROM THE EDITOR
Rael Jean Isaac

TRAPPED BY THE AXIS OF ANTI-SEMITISM: LEFT,RIGHT AND ISLAM
Rael Jean Isaac and ruth King

THE FIRST TITHE
Reveiwed by David Isaac

THE DEAD END QUEST FOR PEACE
Daniel Greenfield

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

Outpost is distributed free to
Members of Americans For a Safe Israel
Annual membership: $50.

Americans For a Safe Israel
1751 Second Ave. (at 91st St.)
New York, NY 10128
tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717
E-mail: afsi @rcn.com web site: http://www.afsi.org

Posted by Ruth at 11:32 PM

THE JABOTINSKY PRIZE

Herbert Zweibon

Americans for a Safe Israel, in cooperation with the Jabotinsky Order in Israel, is sponsoring an essay contest open to Israeli high school students on the great Zionist leader Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky.

The contest is designed to combat the frightening level of ignorance of Zionist history among Israel’s young people. The level of knowledge of the Middle East is doubtless not as bad as it is in Britain where the winner of the BBC’s weekday general knowledge quiz show “The Weakest Link,” asked to name Israel’s most prominent secret intelligence service, shrugged and ventured “Al Qaeda?” Nonetheless, we fear the results of any survey of high school students asked to state the contributions to the birth of Israel made by Jabotinsky.

Students will be offered a choice of topics, covering Jabotinsky’s major achievements.

Founder of Betar. Jabotinsky set out to transform the habits of thought and behavior of young Jews through a youth movement that would instill a sense of national pride and honor, a code of personal behavior summed up in the word “hadar.”

Creator of the Jewish Legion. In World War I Jabotinsky created the Legion to fight with the Allies so as to assure a voice for the Jewish people in the disposition of Palestine after the war.

Leader within the World Zionist Organization. As the British whittled down their obligations under the Mandate to create a Jewish National Home, even as Jewish need for a refuge grew, Jabotinsky struggled within the WZO to keep up pressure for a Jewish state, in frustration ultimately creating a parallel New Zionist Organization.

Prophet of Catastrophe and Resistance leader. As the storm clouds gathered, Jabotinsky tirelessly traveled through Europe, especially Poland (with its very large vulnerable Jewish population) urging Jews to leave while they yet could, forecasting a cataclysm to come. And he became the leader in the developing movement of resistance within Palestine against the British abandonment of Jewish rights under the Mandate and Britain’s failure to maintain security for Jews.

There will be several winners in each category and the finalists will be interviewed by a panel of experts to make sure they have genuinely mastered their subject (and have not cribbed their essay from an obscure internet source!).

The winners this year will divide a total prize of 200,000 shekels, with an award to the schools which produce the winners. Our hope is that this will spark a continuing program, through contests or other means, to reconnect young Israelis to the heroic figures of Zionism. David Ben Gurion is a more familiar name to young Israelis, but we suspect the level of knowledge about him is thin.

Israel suffers under many handicaps, including neighbors intent on its annihilation and irrational world hostility. Israel can only counter the forces arrayed against her if her people understand and believe in the Zionist principles on which the state was built—principles that no one articulated more eloquently than Jabotinsky. “Post-Zionism” is the term used by many Israelis to denigrate and dismiss the Zionism of earlier generations as no longer necessary, the state’s very existence sufficient to justify the presence of the Jews who live there. But “post-Zionism” will not sustain Jews in their homeland.

And one way for young people to learn why Israel is their patrimony is through study of the great Zionist leaders.

Posted by Ruth at 11:26 PM

FROM THE EDITOR

From the Editor

UN Evicts Bayefsky

Anne Bayefsky, indomitable critic of the UN’s obsessive hunting down of Israel, was ejected by guards from the UN after she used a microphone outside the General Assembly Hall to offer the only pro-Israel commentary on the resolution then being passed by the Assembly endorsing the infamous Goldstone report accusing Israel of “war crimes.” She called the UN a “laughingstock” for singling out Israel and ignoring human rights violations by Hamas. Bayefsky reports that four guards confiscated two UN passes issued to her as director of Touro Law Center’s Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.

She is now in what she describes as a Kafkaesque situation with the UN having confiscated her credentials while denying to reporters that her access has been blocked. Her 25 years of monitoring the UN is in jeopardy—in the hands of the Committee on NGOs chaired by the genocidal regime in Sudan.

Clinton-in-Wonderland

Speaking in Israel in November at the Yitzhak Rabin Center, former President Bill Clinton declared that in the last 14 years not a single week had gone by that he did not think of Rabin: “Nor has a single week gone by in which I have not reaffirmed my conviction that had he not lost his life on that terrible November night, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement for peace in the Middle East.”

This breathtakingly silly remark brings to mind the famous words of the great 17th century Swedish diplomat Axel Oxenstierna to his son: “Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” In the eight years of his Presidency, supposedly a highly intelligent man, Clinton apparently learned nothing about the nature of the Arab-Israel conflict, even though he devoted so much time to it and his efforts at “peace-making” culminated in Arafat literally running away from Secretary of State Albright. (We leave aside the fact that Clinton must have known that all the polls at the time of the assassination showed Rabin losing the approaching election, the public having lost patience with his endless intonation of “sacrifices for peace” as bombs exploded in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem buses in the wake of Oslo.)

In Praise of Folly

Unfortunately more evidence for the aptness of Oxenstierna’s comment comes from Prime Minister Netanyahu who on October 21 extolled our old friend Simple Shimon, the man to whom the poet John Dryden’s line applies perfectly: “For every inch that is not fool is rogue.” The occasion was the 2009 President’s Conference called by Peres, an international collection of Shimon-worshipping notables and celebrities before whom he loves to preen. Here is some of what Netanyahu had to say: “As you have done your whole life, Mr. President, tonight you continue to dream, to lead and to make dreams reality. It is no secret that we meet frequently and that I consult with you often. You are a learned man, a statesman, an intellectual, a prime minister and a president. You are an Israeli patriot, and at the same time, man of the world. Shimon, you are a national treasure and I am happy to be here tonight at your Conference.”

One is reduced to hoping that Netanyahu believed not a single word in this absurd panegyric. But then, why lie so fulsomely? It may well be that Peres is right when he told Lally Weymouth of Newsweek that Netanyahu was mistakenly viewed as a right-winger.

The Muslim Mafia

Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America exposes the phony “civil rights” organization CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) via an undercover operation that outdoes the sting videos that have made ACORN a by-word. Co-author P. David Gaubatz’s son Chris, posing as a Muslim convert, wangled a job at CAIR’s national office in Washington and made off with thousands of emails, faxes and internal memos, exposing CAIR as part of a network of front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood. They provide new evidence that CAIR was launched to support Hamas and has transferred many thousands of dollars to its fund-raising arm. And they reveal that CAIR, under the pretense of cooperating with the FBI, works to mislead it on behalf of terror suspects, going so far as to cultivate Muslim moles within law enforcement who have tipped off FBI terror targets.

Just as the ACORN sting mobilized politicians, this one has led several Republican members of Congress, led by Sue Myrick (N.C.), co-founder of the Congressional Anti-Terror Caucus, to call for an investigation into CAIR. In the words of Rep. Paul Broun (R, Ga.) “If an organization that is connected to or supports terrorists is running influence operations or planting spies in key national security-related congressional offices, I think this needs to be made known.”

As in the case of ACORN, the reaction of the exposed organization is to strike out against the truth tellers. ACORN has sued the intrepid young journalists for taping without permission and CAIR has sued in federal court alleging “breach of contract, trespass and violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.” The website Politico (first to break the news of the lawsuit) notes that what the suit does not claim is libel or defamation.

Thus far the government has collapsed in the face of CAIR’s tactics of bullying and intimidation. It remains to be seen if mollifying the Muslim mafia will trump the war on terror (excuse me, our effort to counter “man-made disasters”).

One unhappy portent: thanks to a ruling by Clinton-appointed judge Ann Montgomery, the so-called flying imams have won a settlement in their (CAIR-financed) case against U.S. Airways and Minneapolis airport police. Three years ago six Muslim clerics were bounced from a Phoenix bound flight for behaving like hijackers: yelling Allah, Allah, cursing the United States etc. In retrospect it looks as if the group was deliberately courting being removed so as to pave the way for the lawsuit. Documents Gaubatz came away with in his undercover months at CAIR show that it used the Flying Imams case to push Congress to “criminalize” anti-terrorist profiling by airlines. The end result can only be to intimidate airlines and airport police from removing Moslems who raise red flags—making a new terror attack against airlines more likely.

When Prophecy Fails

It’s been called Climategate. Files obtained from the UN Climatic Research Unit show that many of the key global warming “scientists” manipulated the data to eliminate the Medieval Global Warming period, conspired to bar scientists with conflicting views from climate journals, destroyed data to avoid complying with Freedom of Information requests from scientists they feared would expose their flawed findings, among other misdeeds. Some have argued that the great global warming bubble has now burst.

Don’t count on it. Leon Festinger’s classic study When Prophecy Fails was about an apocalyptic group that believed the world would end on a specific date. The allotted day came and went, so the prophecy was disproved and the group should have disbanded. But the effect was to make them believe harder than ever—in the short term. Global warming is an apocalypse—the end of the world is coming if we don’t reduce our carbon footprint forthwith. It doesn’t have a fixed date so it is not susceptible to the same kind of disproof. But the psychology is the same—the believers will believe harder than ever. Eventually the whole thing will collapse but we may have seriously damaged our economy before it does.

Another factor that will keep the global warming movement going for now is that politicians have signed on en masse and they would look like total fools if they abruptly signed off. So it’s on to Copenhagen!

Finally! Israel Slams NY Times Bias

The government of Israel has finally taken public notice of the naked anti-Israel bias of the “paper of record”—which CAMERA has been painstakingly exposing, chapter and verse, for many years.

The Times’ coverage of the Goldstone Report was the last straw. Israel’s UN delegation sent an official complaint to the Times editorial board for “the subjective and often damning language” in the Times’ news reports, their inaccurate description of the contents of the Report and the paper’s failure to even present Israel’s viewpoint—that the Goldstone Report ignored Israel’s legitimate exercise of its right to self-defense and “offers legitimacy to Hamas terrorism and its deliberate strategy to launch attacks, store weapons and use as shield the civilian population and infrastructure of Gaza.”

At this writing, the Times had not replied but if CAMERA’s experience is any guide, the newspaper will blithely continue as before, acting on its true slogan “distorting all the news as it sees fit.”

Rule of Law?

Three young men from the community of Yizhar in Samaria, Akiva Hacohen, Eliav Eliyahu and Ariel Groner, have been banished from their homes and families without explanation by a military court. All have small children—Akiva has three small children and his wife expects a baby momentarily. They have not violated any law, do not possess or carry weapons and are not suspected of launching illegal activities. (If there were any ground to suspect illegal actions, Israel’s General Security Service—Shabak—would have thrown the book at them and attempted to have them sentenced to jail.)

The most likely explanation is that they irritated the bitterly hostile (to the settler community) General Gadi Shamni who signed the order expelling them. Disturbingly, the Netanyahu government has made Shamni Israel’s military attaché in Washington.

Ivory Tower Anti-Semitism

The following are excerpts from Steven Plaut’s article in Frontpage (Oct. 26) focusing on Stephen H. Norwoods’ important new book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

“Campus radicalism, support for totalitarianism and general political extremism are not new on Western campuses. Indeed some of the worst political extremism in academic history took the form of enthusiastic support on American campuses for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

“By warmly receiving Nazi diplomats and propagandists on campus, [university leaders] helped Nazi Germany present itself to the American public as a civilized nation, unfairly maligned in the press.

“Harvard University stood out above the rest in its moral failure and in its collaboration with Nazism. The high Nazi official Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaungl was invited as the Harvard commencement speaker in 1934…. He was on record insisting “the Jews must be crushed,” and describing Jews as “the vampire sucking German blood.” Harvard maintained intimate relations with many Nazi institutions, in particular the University of Heidelberg, even after it proclaimed proudly that it had expelled all its Jews and began promoting what it called ‘Aryan Physics.’

“Norwood’s own alma mater of Columbia University is a major target in his book. Months after Germany started book burning, Columbia’s President Nicholas Murray Butler went out of his way to welcome Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the US for a lecture circuit at the school. Shortly afterwards, when a man who had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp lectured on campus, Butler refused to attend….More than one Columbia faculty member was fired for taking an anti-Nazi stand.

“Many other universities were little better. The ‘Seven Sisters,’ meaning the seven elite women’s colleges in America, were decidedly unwilling to take any anti-Nazi stands. Collaboration with the Nazis continued at some campuses even after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland.

“Freedom of speech was selectively defended on campuses in the 1930s, as it is again today. The President of Queens College prohibited an anti-Nazi speaker from giving a lecture on campus as late as spring 1938.

“Nor is phony symmetry the innovation of the past decade’s campus campaign to defend Islamic terror. In the 1930s academics and university presidents signed statements that protested German behavior but at the same time gave it legitimacy. For example, in one attempt at ‘even-handedness,’ a petition claimed that Nazi actions were ‘in large part the result of the lack of fair play to Germany’ on the part of Western countries and their ‘slighting of German rights and needs.’ It added that ‘minorities are suppressed and discriminated against to some degree in every land.’ They knew so well—at the time most Ivy League universities and many other colleges officially and openly discriminated against Jewish applicants.

“Does all of the above sound familiar? It does to Norwood, who says he sees frightening similarities between what has been happening in American campuses since the early 1990s and what transpired in the 1930s.”

The EU Beckons

“The European Dream is a beacon of light in a troubled world. It beckons us to a new age of inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, deep play, sustainability, universal human rights, the rights of nature and peace on Earth.”

Did you assume this was penned by the gaseous Shimon? Wrong! It’s the deep thought of Jeremy Rifkin, eco-prophet extraordinaire. Rifkin does not just bloviate: he was adviser to Romano Prodi when Prodi was European Commission President.

Posted by Ruth at 11:23 PM

TRAPPED BY THE AXIS OF ANTI-SEMITISM: LEFT, RIGHT AND ISLAM

Trapped By The Axis Of Anti-Semitism: Left, Right And Islam
Rael Jean Isaac and Ruth King

The Jewish people are in danger of being entrapped in a pincer movement of anti-Semitic hatred from left and right, often thinly masked as “anti-Zionism,” with moral cover provided by haters of Israel within the Jewish community. Europe is in the lead but there are ominous developments in this country (and Canada) as well.

In the recent period hostility from the left has been dominant, even though, precisely because Jews overwhelmingly identify with this end of the political spectrum, many remain in denial. In The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism, British philosophy professor Bernard Harrison reminds us of the enormity of what has occurred: “[S]urely few of the most cynical observers of human affairs would have predicted that anti-Semitism would be flourishing in Western Europe within little more than fifty years of the destruction of the Nazi regime—and what is more, establishing its base within the self-proclaimed ‘progressive, anti-racist’ left in universities, journalism and political life.”

Harrison’s book was published in 2005 and it is a mark of the rapid deterioration of the situation in the last few years that anti-Semitic calumnies are being disseminated that even he felt were unthinkable.. Thus Harrison writes that while left-wing progressive thinkers would never dream of invoking the blood libel, they do not hesitate to make false and vile charges. Far from being unthinkable, the blood libel, in the form of charges that the Israeli army was killing Palestinian teenagers to harvest their organs, was featured in the popular left-wing Swedish daily Aftonbladet. In Britain, CounterPunch, edited by radical leftist Alexander Cockburn, printed an article using medieval blood libels against Jews as evidence for the Aftonbladet charges. Daniel Greenfield (who blogs as Sultan Knish) points out that CounterPunch uses a modern blood libel to revive and legitimize medieval ones!

In Germany the left has put the Jewish community in a double bind. Historian Suzanne Urban reports that groups on the left embrace Jews as valued allies against neo-Nazi Holocaust denial, even as these same groups defame Israel and her supporters. As German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder observed in a hearing by the Interior Committee of the Bundesrepublik: “The modern anti-Semite condemns ordinary anti-Semitism, but he names himself without hesitation anti-Zionist. He is grateful for having his chance to show his resentments in a politically correct way. The anti-Zionist has the same attitude toward Israel as anti-Semites carry toward Jews.” Making the situation of Jews even more uncomfortable, the left demands that as victims of the Holocaust, they publicly identify with Moslems, their chief tormentors. Writes Urban: “The former victims should be alert and help the actual victims—it is seen as their duty to warn against anti-Islamic attitudes.”

While the situation is not as bad on this side of the Atlantic, here too the anti-Semitic virus is spreading, especially in those institutions viewed as the pillars of enlightened thought: universities and the mainline churches. Campus anti-Semitism has been especially virulent in Canada. Canadian poet and essayist David Solway notes that Jewish students at York University had to be locked inside a building to protect them from an anti-Semitic mob and security guards warned visiting lecturer Daniel Pipes not to inflame his audience (when it was the audience that should have been policed).

As far back as 2002 a riot at Concordia College in Montreal (known locally as Gaza U.) forced the cancellation of a speech by now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Professor Alain Goldschlager of the University of Western Ontario, who has monitored growing anti-Semitism on Canadian campuses, writes: “Jewish students feel more and more under siege.” Israel Apartheid Week, an annual week-long hate-fest against Israel, was pioneered at the University of Toronto in 2004 and has spread to other Canadian, U.S. and British institutions.

One of those institutions is the University of California at Irvine, a hot-bed of anti-Semitic intimidation, to the point that members of the local Jewish community in 2008 issued a detailed report and recommended Jewish students avoid the university. Elite colleges from Harvard on down have spawned petitions and proposals for boycotts and divestment of funds from companies that do business in Israel. So much for the old ADL mantra that education is the key to combating anti-Semitism—it has become key to its dissemination.

As for the churches, Solway points out that every major convention of the United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant confession, includes motions to divest from companies providing “products, services or technology” to Israel and anti-Israel boycott resolutions. In the U.S., the Presbyterian Church actually passed a divestment resolution in 2004 (watered down in 2006). Similar proposals continue to surface at the annual conventions of mainline churches which also repeatedly pass resolutions on the Arab-Israel conflict sharply skewed against Israel. Church publications foster hostility to Israel. Indeed, a recent 225 page report on the Arab-Israel conflict by the Women’s Division of the Methodist church referred to the creation of Israel as “the original sin.”

Anti-Semitism suffuses human rights organizations, the very sort of “progressive” outfits with which Jews eagerly identify, indeed often took a prominent role in founding (and funding). True to form, on October 27 Amnesty International issued another of its unfounded attacks on Israel, this one accusing Israel of “denying water to Palestinians.” Robin Shepherd, author of a fine new book Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, points out that the United Kingdom branch of Amnesty road-showed this latest “report” at a meeting featuring Ben White, promoting his new book Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide.

The other major international moral arbiter, Human Rights Watch, is even more egregious, debased into a Johnny one-note denouncing Israel. Key staff members belong in a Human Rights Hall of Infamy. Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North African division (and thus moral arbiter on Israel), was a founder of MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project), a far left propaganda mill which cast its assault on Israel in the language of Marxist anti-imperialist analysis. MERIP even applauded the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In 1976 Stork traveled to Iraq to present a paper at Saddam’s conference on Zionism and Racism. Stork opposed any political settlement on the grounds this would spoil the chance for creating a revolutionary movement to destroy Israel.

Robert Bernstein, a founder of Human Rights Watch, and its chairman for twenty years, went public with his criticism in an October 20 New York Times op-ed. Human Rights Watch had lost all critical perspective, ignoring “brutal, closed and autocratic” Arab and Iranian regimes, while singling out Israel for far more condemnations than any other country in the region. Yet Israel was an open society, Bernstein noted, home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently ruled against the government, a politically active academia and multiple political parties.

The reaction of Human Rights Watch was to dig deeper down. Tom Porteus, director of London’s Human Rights Watch, rejected Bernstein’s “obvious double standard. Any credible human rights organization must apply the same human rights standard to all countries.” That Human Rights Watch agreed there had to be a single standard but was oblivious to its failure to maintain one (indeed could claim that it was Bernstein who advocated a double standard!) strongly suggested its leaders were blinded by their obsessive hatred.

Human Rights Watch went on to add ten members to the advisory board of the Middle East division, four of them well known as radical anti-Israel activists. How extreme they are can be gleaned from the rhetoric of one of the new members, currently on the board of MERIP, who slammed the Palestinian Authority for being a “discredited quisling government that was mandated to provide security for its master, Israel.” Clearly, far from returning to its roots as a genuine human rights organization (as Helsinki Watch it played a distinguished role in democratizing the Soviet Union and its satellites), Human Rights Watch is bent more than ever on turning Israel into a pariah state.

The anti-Semitic left enjoys moral cover provided by an assortment of Jewish organizations and individuals. Some, like J Street and the New Israel Fund, pretend to be concerned for Israel’s welfare, a stance that fools only the terminally foolish. Tellingly, its campus component has dropped “pro-Israel” from J Street’s slogan “pro-Israel, pro-peace” because, as the secretary of J Street U’s student board said candidly, “people feel connected to Palestine.” (J Street and a number of other anti-Israel Jewish outfits are funded by George Soros.)

The anti-Semitic left especially values Israelis and former Israelis who echo its attacks on Israel, people like Daniel Machover, Ilan Pappe, and Shlomo Sand. Machover, a British lawyer born in Israel, co-founded Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights and prepares legal ambushes for Israeli military and civilian leaders who visit Europe, hoping to obtain their arrest and prosecution for war crimes. Pappe, formerly a professor at Haifa University, now at Exeter University in England, made his mark by publishing charges of Israeli massacres (historian Benny Morris called them “complete fabrications”) and championing an academic boycott of Israeli universities. Shlomo Sand, currently a professor at Tel Aviv University, is the anti-Semite’s flavor of the month for his recent book The Invention of the Jewish People which argues that the Jews have no link or claim to Palestine at all.

Machover, Pappe and Sand are only a few of the appallingly large number of Israelis and Jews in the diaspora who aid and abet their enemies. Professor Michael Neumann of Trent University in Ontario is another of this breed. The son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Neumann’s book The Case Against Israel (designed to counter Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel) was published by Alexander Cockburn’s CounterPunch press. An email from Neumann quoted by Goldschlager provides insight into the mindset of these people. Affirming that his sole concern was to “help the Palestinians,” Neumann continued: “I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose…If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still don’t care.” No wonder famed historian Jacob Talmon concluded such enemies were motivated by “morbid masochism.”

While anti-Semitism on the left still dominates, anti-Semitism on the right is gaining recruits, social respectability, self-confidence—and acceptance from the left. While the left for many years rejected overtures by the far right seeking joint action against capitalism, anti-Semitism is proving the tie that binds, a common hatred strong enough to bring together what long seemed antithetical political poles.

Horst Mahler is an embodiment of this meeting of the extremes. A former member of the notorious far-left Bader Meinhof terror gang, he trained in Jordan with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Caught and jailed, on his release he became a neo-Nazi and co-founder of the Society for the Rehabilitation of Those Persecuted for Refutation of the Holocaust. Jailed again for Holocaust denial in February 2009, Mahler’s words are described as “an inspiration” by the fascist blogosphere: “In our day, the German who does not kowtow to the Jews will be relentlessly brought before the courts and deprived of his freedom, so that he will spend his life behind bars. I stand convicted of exposing Talmudic perfidiousness by ceaselessly calling the Auschwitz Lie by its name and confronting it with the truth. I have been doing this for many years now, since I swore a sacred oath to my Volk never to relent in the struggle against the ‘Holocaust’ cult.”

Laws against Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic invective in Germany (punishable by fines and in cases like that of Mahler, jail) were designed to prevent a resurgence of Nazism. But now they have the disconcerting effect of giving “victim” status to the culprits and of encouraging recrudescence of neo-Nazi organizations. The fastest growing (officially banned) neo-Nazi group is named Frontmann 24,” for the forerunner of the storm troopers set up in 1924.

The integration of East Germany into the West seems to have encouraged anti-Semitism. Anita Kahane, writes in The Jerusalem Post (Nov. 10): “Neo-Nazis and the Left express extremist ideas that are becoming commonplace in general German society: a sometimes malignant anti-Zionism that is completely oblivious to the realities of the Middle East. Thus it is necessary to say that the fall of the wall and the accompanying euphoria have made something possible that would not have been possible 20 years ago. A run-of-the-mill social worker in Berlin may now tell the youths he works with, without causing concern: ‘Don’t say Jewish pig. Just say you are critiquing Israel’s policy.’”

Cooperation between extremists of the left and right grows ever more common. In England the far left, anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Arab “Stop the War Coalition” welcomes the far-right British National Party. On the right, hatred of Israel trumps hostility to Moslem immigration. Thus Kristina Morvai, a professor at Budapest University Law School, is a leader of the Jobbik neo-Nazi party. Elected to the European Parliament, she joined France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the anti-Semitic National Front Party, and the British National Party’s Nick Griffin to form “The Alliance of European National Movements,” ostensibly to protest unfettered Moslem immigration. Yet all three were scheduled to take part in the Palestine Return Center’s pro-Hamas rally in London on December 16. (Despite her frequent appearances in a keffiyeh to demonstrate her solidarity with Arabs, Morvai has been disinvited because her Jobbik Party harasses gypsies—this disturbed some of the leftist British eminences scheduled to appear at the rally.)

On November 22 Jobbik organized a mass rally and march through downtown Budapest, commemorating the rule of Admiral Miklos Horthy, who led Hungary under Hitler. The crowd, estimated at 5,000, heard a Jobbik member promise a new extermination of “vermin” in a forthcoming “cleansing” of the Hungarian nation (one presumes of gypsies and Jews).

In Switzerland Ahmed (aka Armand) Albert Friedrich Huber, a former socialist journalist and banker with close ties to both neo-Nazis and the Moslem Brotherhood, attempted to put together a conference of Holocaust deniers in Lebanon with the stated goal of creating a nexus for cooperation between Moslems and neo-Nazi groups. Faced with an international outcry, the Lebanese government canceled the event but Huber has a large following as a result of his “eclectic” group of anti-Semitic supporters.

Anti-Semites of the left, the right and Moslem supporters, whether in Europe or on this continent, are animated by the conviction that Jews are engaged in a vast conspiracy to control the media, the financial system and the governments of the West. This of course is the thesis of the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which supposedly reveals a Jewish plot to take over the world and is still a bestseller in the Moslem world. Flowers of Galilee by Swedish anti-Semite Joran Jermas, published by the Austrian left-wing Promedia, wins enthusiastic praise from the fascist general secretary of the Austro-Arab Friendship Society: “The Occupation Regime in Iraq was installed by the U.S. army in the interests of Zionists, and it may be rightly called ZOG, Zionist Occupation Government, if anything. However, this ZOG is also a Zog, a servant of Darkness and Annihilation, for its first step was the destruction of Baghdad’s libraries and museums.”

In Sweden the first “anti-Zionist party” has just been formed. The party leader openly welcomes neo-Nazis, radical Islamist and left-wing extremists. And while this may be the first party based purely on hatred of Jews in post-Holocaust Europe, one suspects it will not be the last.

Clearly the huge Moslem immigration into Europe has been crucial to these developments. Moslems are the foot soldiers in the war against the Jews. It is they who intimidate, who terrorize, who rampage, who engage in violence against ordinary Jews in schools, on the streets, in public transportation. More broadly, the Moslem war against Israel is crucial for the anti-Semitic left, much of which, uncomfortable with naked anti-Semitism, relies on the mask of anti-Zionism.

What is especially disconcerting is that it grows ever harder anywhere in Europe to find a rational middle bloc. The first major warning of the extent to which the broad public had been influenced by relentless media pounding on Israel was in 2003 when a European Commission poll of 15 countries found that 59% of respondents considered Israel the greatest threat to world peace—far outstripping Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan. This November came another shock when England’s Channel 4 aired “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby,” purveying the notion of a Jewish conspiracy that had successfully manipulated the media and politicians to support Israel.

The documentary was silly. In the real world, British media, above all the influential BBC, rides a relentless anti-Israel hobby horse. Yet it provoked, as Robin Shepherd has put it “a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4’s widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby’s ‘seditious behavior,’ its ‘disgusting attack on British democracy,’ ‘the hand of global Zionism at work,’ and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: ‘We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out.’” In fact, what the documentary had flushed out was the extent of British anti-Semitism.

The makers of Channel 4’s documentary have written that their inspiration came from John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” who have given a “scholarly” veneer to the conspiracy theory of Zionist control of U.S. policy, a central theme of anti-Semites of all stripes.

In the United States the extreme right has long operated on the societal fringe (e.g. the David Dukes, Liberty Lobby, Holocaust revisionists). Conservatives have been far more supportive of Jews and Israel than their counterparts in the multi-culti left. But the exceptions grow. Paul Craig Roberts has a sterling mainstream conservative resume (assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute, etc.). He spouts conspiracy theories on V-Dare, a right-wing website hospitable to anti-Semites. “Why is the U.S. making itself impotent fighting wars that have nothing whatsoever to do with its security, wars that are, in fact, threatening its security? The answer is that the military-security lobby, the financial gangsters, and AIPAC rule. The American people be damned.” Similarly V-Dare editor Stephen Sailer, often cogent on other issues, accuses “neo-cons” [code word for Jews] of “furnishing the Republican Presidential candidates with a ready-made grand strategy: Invade the World/ Invite the World/ In Hock the World.”

Although National Review did dump anti-Semitic journalist Joe Sobran, there is a certain tone-deafness to anti-Semitism on the right. Editors of Townhall, Human Events, as well as the conservative Fox News overlook the “sophisticated” Holocaust denial of Pat Buchanan—Sean Hannity is a great admirer. When Robert Novak died, a man who would gladly have blamed Katrina on Israel, the orgy of lament and praise was mind-numbing.

What can Jews (and their supporters) do to counter the pincer movement from left and right? In Europe, probably not much. For one thing, massive Moslem immigration, combined with below-replacement birth rates by the native population, is fast bringing major European countries to a demographic tipping point. But it goes beyond this. Robin Shepherd finds the roots of the new form of anti-Semitism centering on Israel “the most important Jewish project of our time” in a civilizational sickness, a lack of self-belief, ideological pathologies, relativism, a tendency to appease. He warns that in Europe “hostility to Israel is nowhere near as striking at the peaks of the political landscape as in the subterranean caverns below. But at some point, the tectonic movements of cultural change must inevitably push peaks, caverns and everything else together…forg[ing] anew the look and feel of political life.”

In the United States, on the other hand, there is much Jews could do, although if past is prologue, they will fail to take the appropriate measures (indeed be shocked to hear them voiced). It is the huge, militant Moslem population that makes Europe so unlikely a prospect for positive change. Jews should be working to restrict and monitor Moslem immigration to the United States, for the larger this population, the more the position of Jews—and political support for Israel—will be undercut.

Unlike in Europe, in the United States Israel still has an important base of support in the Christian evangelical community and Jews should be cultivating these friends, going out of their way to cooperate with them in as many areas as possible. Instead, while a few groups (like AFSI) have done so, major organizations like the Anti-Defamation League for decades have gone out of their way to antagonize and defame these chief friends of Israel (and if they would allow them, of Jews).

In the end, though, it is the state of Israel that can do most to sustain existing and mobilize potential supporters, the kinds of people Melanie Phillips describes as fading from the British scene: “[who] embodied decency and fairness and intelligence and a quiet but unyielding determination to stand up for right against wrong and face down the bullies and the bigots.” Sadly since the disastrous Oslo accords, Israel has been on a steady downward slide. Once the pillar of resistance to terror (remember Entebbe?), it has become the model for appeasement of terror, releasing floods of terrorists for single Israelis, for the dead bodies of Israelis, for nothing at all—as empty gestures of goodwill.

Once an exemplar for boldly confronting its enemies, Israel now incessantly prattles of negotiations and “two-state solutions,” proffering suicidal concessions although the Arabs (not to mention Iran) make no bones that they have no intention of accepting a Jewish state in any borders. Israel has been so easily pushed around for so long it is no wonder Obama thought he could demand a complete building freeze, including in Jerusalem (what did it matter that Israel had formally annexed it?) and have Israel fall in line without objection. (And Netanyahu, after a struggle of some months, indeed seems to be falling in line.)

In 1944, with Jews at their lowest ebb, screen-writer and staunch Zionist Ben Hecht, in Guide for the Bedeviled, laid out what Jews should not do. They should not go on the defensive—they should not proclaim their humanitarian virtues, they should not proclaim their distress, they should not try to contradict and disprove the anti-Semite. (Hecht writes disapprovingly, ”They feel only that anything an anti-Semite says must be contradicted and disproved”). Adds Hecht: “You would think that the Jews would wake up to this one fact about themselves—that their defensive position is the chief delight and arsenal of the anti-Semite. But never comes such awakening.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s much praised speech at the UN in September of this year is further proof the awakening never comes, for it embodied every mistake Hecht outlined. Netanyahu started out by “disproving” Ahmadinejad’s holocaust denial. He waved before the General Assembly the notes of the Wannsee meeting at which the Germans decided on the plan to exterminate Jews and copies of the construction plans for Auschwitz. He went on to emphasize Israel’s humanitarian contributions to the world. He proclaimed Israel’s “distress:” it had suffered an endless rain of rockets after it had left Gaza, even though it had destroyed Jewish communities in the search for peace. He emphasized how badly Israel wanted peace, how much it would do for peace, that it believed in the two state solution with two free peoples living side by side. As Ben Hecht could have told him, the defensive speech only made Israel’s enemies smell her weakness.

What speech might Netanyahu have made? He could have said that the Jewish people were in Israel as of religious, historic and legal right, in the words of the Hatikva, to live as a free people in our land. From Israel’s inception, the Arabs had been—and continued to be--intent on destroying the state. He could have acknowledged that Israel’s pursuit of peace when there was no peace had led it into terrible errors, most recently the Oslo accords and the retreat from Gaza. He could have said that the two state solution the whole world supported was a lie, a chimera. He could have said that Israel had two non-negotiable preconditions for any negotiations: the Arabs must integrate the refugees into their countries, giving up “the right to return,” and they must openly acknowledge Israel as the legitimate state of the Jews. Until such time, Israel was prepared to stand fast and do whatever it deemed necessary to maintain its security, defend itself against attack and utterly defeat those who attempted to destroy it.

Such a speech would have caused an uproar (not least in Israel). But it would have been a first step in changing the atmosphere, in instilling respect and fear in enemies, in strengthening friends tired of all the lies (including being told that Islam is a religion of peace). The greatest irony of all is that Israel is guilty of sins precisely the opposite of those of which it is accused. It can properly be faulted, but not for being a bully, an oppressor, a second coming of the Nazi Reich. Its real sin is failing to stand up to the bullies, the oppressors, the anti-Semites of the region and of the world.

Ultimately it is Israel which is the chief target of the anti-Semites, the rallying point for their irrational hatreds, and it is Israel that has the potential, if it would stand firm, to break through the wall of hatred closing in on world Jewry.

Absent that, the vice tightens.

Posted by Ruth at 11:18 PM

THE FIRST TITHE

Reviewed by David Isaac

“Know your enemy,” said Sun-Tzu. Had he been a Jew, he would have said, “Know your enemy both without and within.” Israel Eldad, a member of the leadership of Lehi, the smallest, but most ruthless of the Jewish undergrounds that fought against British rule in Palestine, learned this truth the hard way. His book, The First Tithe, first published in 1950, was only translated into English last year (and is available on Amazon).

Israel Eldad (nee Scheib), who was born in Galicia in 1910, describes his book as a “personal memoir,” and it is that, painting a picture of a man who was a remarkable mixture of original thought, unswerving determination and self-sacrifice. To protect his wife and newborn daughter, he was forced to leave them. “I leave my apartment in the month of Adar 5704 (1944), to return only in Adar 5708 (1948). In that instant, as I left, I lost my civilian and my family life,” he writes.

He suffered physical torment as well. While fleeing the British, he fell from a building. His body shattered by the fall, he found himself doubly imprisoned—both in a body cast and a Jerusalem jail cell. The ideological strategist for Lehi, he continued to write even in a body cast, preparing speeches for fighters who were on trial and acting as a mentor to his fellow prisoners.

Though active in Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Eldad marked his official start in politics with the Third Betar Conference in Warsaw, which took place on September 10, 1938. In a well-known exchange at that conference, Jabotinsky likened Menachem Begin, who called for a more activist policy, to a “squeaking door” which served no useful purpose. Less well known was Eldad’s defense of Begin. He said that not all squeaking doors are useless. A squeaking door once warned him that thieves had broken into his home.

Jabotinsky applauded Eldad’s rhetorical hit, and from that moment Eldad’s “personal memoir” also became a historical one. The First Tithe reads like a secret history, lifting a veil from the events leading up to Israel’s establishment, and illuminating much of what would otherwise seem incomprehensible to those observing Israel from afar. As the book’s translator, Zeev Golan, writes in his introduction, “Historians and political scientists who try to explain Begin at Camp David, Shamir at Madrid, Rabin and Barak in their dealings with Arabs, without first understanding the roots of the behavior of these individuals and the movements they represent in Zionism, are writing blind.

“How can one explain Begin’s far-reaching concessions without knowing of the rooftop conversations Eldad and Begin held in the 1940s? How can one understand Shamir’s behavior as premier during the Gulf War without reading Eldad’s analysis of the personality of his Underground co-commander? How can one account for the policies pursued by three different Labor Party prime ministers without putting their motives in the context of the Labor movement’s goals before the creation of Israel, as described by Eldad?” Golan writes.

Though one might reasonably have expected Eldad to focus on the conflict with the British, given that Lehi made it its mission to drive them from the Holy Land, it’s the “Yishuv”-–a term used to refer to the Jewish community in Israel, but in this case, to its official institutions—to which Eldad returns again and again.

For it was the Yishuv, led by the socialist-dominated Jewish Agency headed by David Ben-Gurion, that did its best to stop the Jewish underground from waging war against the British. As Ruth Wisse details in her Jews and Power. centuries of accommodation with gentile rulers had instilled in Jews a meekness in the face of authority. Old Diaspora habits die hard, and this submissive posture proved difficult to shake for even the most committed Zionists.

But there was more going on than a centuries-bred tradition of conciliation. Eldad argues that the Yishuv had grown wealthy and complacent during the war years. Essentially, the underground movements forced the Yishuv to fight. “They hated us for making them fight, for fighting before they did, and because we would continue to fight after they surrendered,” Eldad writes.

The hostility reached its zenith with the Altalena affair. The story, of which the reader is probably familiar, involved the arms-laden ship Altalena, which the Irgun had sailed to the shores of Palestine to supply the new Jewish army. On David Ben-Gurion’s orders, the Haganah, under the command of Yitzhak Rabin, opened fire on the ship and destroyed it under the false pretense that Menachem Begin had planned a putsch.

It would be unfair to say the Yishuv as a whole welcomed the sinking of the Altalena. Many Jews, even on the left, condemned the despicable act. Yet, Eldad’s explanation—that the Yishuv’s leaders were motivated by fear that their rule was threatened, that they did not want the Irgun to save the day by supplying the army —is the most convincing of many that have been given. Popular support had been growing for the dissident underground organizations and were it not for the Altalena, which turned the tables, who knows what Israel’s history might have looked like. Historians have suggested that with the arms supplied by the Altalena, Israel could have taken all of Jerusalem in 1948.

There are many similarities between then and now. The hostility the Left felt toward the underground is mirrored today by the hostility its spiritual heirs feel toward religious Zionists who insist on living in areas like Judea and Samaria even as the Left works to abandon them.

After the War of Independence, Eldad taught Bible and Hebrew literature in an Israeli high school until David Ben-Gurion had him fired, fearing Eldad would instill his ideology into his students. Finding it difficult to find work after being, as he says, “publicly fingered as a danger to the state,” Eldad wrote columns, books, a newspaper-like review of Jewish history called Chronicles and a nationalist journal Sulam. In 1962, he was made a lecturer at Haifa’s Technion.

A central idea to which Eldad adhered all his life was that the State of Israel was a stage on the road to “Malkhut Israel,” the “Sovereign Kingdom of Israel,” a term he used to express the idea of full redemption, in which the Jews would be politically powerful, fending off hatred from without and treason from within. He viewed this Malkhut as Israel’s destiny, without the completion of which it would not long survive.

Eldad also recognized early the cultural rot that infected Israel’s elites and whose damage became apparent only decades later. In the preface to his 1962 edition of The First Tithe, he writes, “We have the tremendous potential to manage our national and physical and spiritual powers in a wide expanse, yet we also see so many brains and hearts reduced to a lack of vision, or even an openly professed and exhibited anti-Vision of the type now expressed in what is called literature and art; a culture the content of which is abandon and which, in boredom and plenitude, mimics the wild and disturbed West which is actualizing the anthem of the East: No God, no king, no heroes.”

Eldad was iron-willed; ruthless in a way that only intellectuals can be. One could make the argument that he was constitutionally unsuited for the give-and-take of a politician’s life, but there’s no doubt that had he been in power, Israel would be in a stronger position today to withstand Israel’s enemies. The Jews need more like him.

David Isaac is a freelance writer living in California.

Posted by Ruth at 11:12 PM

THE DEAD END QUEST FOR PEACE

Daniel Greenfield

Peace, peace. Everyone wants peace. Or so we would like to think. Chamberlain and a sizable portion of the English electorate were certain that Hitler wanted peace and all that was needed was for everyone to sit down around a table, make some compromises (at someone else's expense if possible) and everyone could go back to buying their biscuits, playing cricket and generally enjoying life. What did not occur to them was the possibility that Hitler did not want peace. What did not occur to them was that by constantly talking about peace, they were only bridging the gap to war with their own naïveté and conspicuous weakness.

A year into Obama's first term dedicated to multilateralism and soft power, the world is more unstable than ever. Iran is openly pursuing nuclear weapons and regional domination. North Korea is firing on South Korean ships. The Chavez Marxist axis in Latin America has become more ambitious. Russia is amping up the rhetoric against the Ukraine and Georgia again, and building up its arsenal. And even Obama's staunchest apologists and defenders cannot think of a single tangible thing that he has accomplished in all his visits to virtually every major country on the globe.

But that is because peace is a paradox. To have peace, you must be prepared for war. You may speak softly, but you must carry a big stick. And like happiness, the worst possible way to go about finding peace, is by going out and looking for it. Because to pursue peace is to deliver a signal of weakness that all but invites war. Peace is produced not through goodwill— those with whom goodwill is easy to achieve are not likely targets for war—but through deterrence. War is deterred the same way that crime is deterred, through vigilance and strength.

To let go of that strength and relax your vigilance brings not peace, but instability and eventually war. This understanding of human affairs is reflexively rejected by those who assume that "we" are the real problem. That "we" are the reason why there is war. "We" are the reason why the enemy does not trust us. "We" are what stands in the way of peace, love and understanding with the whole world. And if the peace initiatives fail, clearly "we" are the ones to blame and must try harder to break through and reach an understanding. And if "we" are lucky, we may wake up from this form of madness before the tanks of the people we worked so hard to achieve peace with roll into Poland.

Because there is nothing quite so pathetic as the leaders of a free nation crawling before tyrants and thugs in search of peace, beating their own breasts and offering more and more concessions in trade for false promises and falser hope.

Consider Israel's outreach program of shipping their films to film festivals, which is ironic when you consider that the average Israeli film is just as anti-Israeli, as the average American movie is anti-American. Israeli consulates are still flogging The Band's Visit. The Band's Visit is one of those charming movies that every liberalized country makes sooner or later, and in the words of film critic Roger Ebert showcases a vision of "Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty."

The Band's Visit was meant to promote Jewish-Arab and Israeli-Egyptian co-existence. The movie however was banned in Egypt, where any actual talk of co-existence with Israel is virtually a criminal offense. Which made it all the more absurd for the movie to depict an Egyptian band visiting Israel, when Egyptian writers, musicians and filmmakers are effectively barred from visiting Israel at risk of being expelled from their respective guilds. The few who have, like playwright Ali Salem who faced ostracism, expulsion from the Union of Egyptian Writers and police interrogations for merely visiting Israel, have paid a high price for promoting "normalization" with Israel.

That is the "peace" that exists between Israel and Egypt, 30 years after Camp David. That is the only peace that will ever exist between Israel and Egypt, for the simple reason that it is a peace based on three wars in which Israel demonstrated that it would not allow itself to be conquered by Egypt. That is of course the only way to stop a war, to demonstrate that it will not succeed.

Had England and France backed down Nazi Germany in the Rhineland, there likely would have been no World War II. Had the United States put its soldiers where its boycott was in Asia, there would have been no Pearl Harbor. Had the Allied troops in Russia intervened more directly against the Bolsheviks, there would have been no Cold War. And the list goes on and on. There are far more modern cases where a raised fist would have stopped a devastating war, than when a handshake or a hug would have done the same thing. And some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century could have been prevented not by diplomacy, but by preventing the diplomacy itself, which more often than not has accommodated conquest and genocide.

But naturally the people who made The Band's Visit and their cultural ilk have learned absolutely nothing from their actual experience in Egypt, nor have they understood that their enemies are not interested in seeing them as fellow human beings with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. To paraphrase Cassius, they insist that the fault lies not in their enemies, but in themselves. Or in those intolerant people around them who insist that their country must be vigilant and strong, instead of a pushover for the sort of people who burn books when they cannot burn the writers themselves.

While peace is a wonderful thing, it is part of a balance. There cannot be peace all the time, because humans are not peaceful creatures. As long as there is greed, hate and the will to power, there will be war. And for as long as there is war, peace can only be obtained through a strong hand, rather than a bended knee. Peace requires war, as day requires night and summer requires winter. It is part of a natural balance that is sustained by the willingness to maintain that balance. To be willing to have peace when war is over, and to be willing to fight when peace can no longer avail.

To quest for peace is as pointless as questing for constant summer or constant day. To do so is to ignore the natural balance of human affairs, and to bring on war anyway—only a war on increasingly unfavorable terms. For though men may cry peace, peace—there is no peace. Only preemptive surrender.

Daniel Greenfield blogs as Sultan Knish. This appeared on his blog of November 25.

Posted by Ruth at 11:08 PM

NOVEMBER 2009

BRINGING SHAME TO ISRAEL
Ruth King

FROM THE EDITOR
Rael Jean Isaac

THE ARTIFICIAL STATE OF IRAQ; IMPLICATIONS FOR ISRAEL
Moshe Sharon

WHY ARE JEWS LIBERAL
A review by Rael Jean Isaac

THE NOBEL APPEASEMENT PRIZE
Daniel Greenberg

DISAPPEARING HUMAN RIGHTS
Fiamma Nirenstein

IMMIGRATION IS DOWN BUT NOT FROM MOSLEM NATIONS
Debbie Schussel

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

Outpost is distributed free to
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Posted by Ruth at 08:55 PM

BRINGING SHAME TO ISRAEL

Ruth King

In his paean to Israel The Israel Test, George Gilder cites the enormous contribution to culture, commerce and science by the Jewish people. Indeed, one need only see the list of 170 Nobel Prizes in Literature, Economics, Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine--an outsize contribution by under .2% of the world’s population. Since 2000 seven Jews have won Nobels in chemistry, six in medicine, six in physics, eight in economics.

Now Ada Yonath, a Jerusalem native born in 1939, has won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Professor Yonath is on the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovoth, Israel, one of the world’s leading research facilities.
Her award for distinguished contribution to science initially brought honor to the Weizmann Institute, to Israel, and to the Jewish people—in effect a rebuke to the envy and hatred of the Jewish state, which, according to Gilder, is provoked in large part by Israel’s stunning success.

However, only days after receiving the award Professor Yonath dishonored herself, the Weizmann Institute and Israel when she rebuked Israel with a plea for unconditional release of all Hamas prisoners and an apologia for Arab suicide bombers. In her words: The Arabs “having no hope for their future….in a state of such despair they have every reason to jump at the opportunity to better their prospects for a better after-life." Read that as an “opportunity” to blow themselves up when they kill innocent Israeli civilians.

Where is Yonath’s gratitude to a nation that sheltered her family from Hitler in 1938, that gave her security and a first-rate education, that enabled her to fulfill her scientific potential by providing her with state-of-the-art research facilities and fine housing even in the shadow of the merciless Arab war against Israel?

Contrast Yonath’s behavior with that of another Israeli Nobel Laureate, Professor Robert Aumann who won the award for economics in 2005. Professor Aumann is a member of Professors for a Strong Israel and a vocal opponent of the removal of Israeli citizens from Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

Contrast Aumann’s view of terror with the puerile BBC-speak of Yonath. Shortly after the prize was awarded, Aumann told the ZOA’s Mort Klein: “People say the people who blow themselves up are acting irrationally. I don’t think they’re acting irrationally. It’s rational as long as it works. And what we’re doing is giving them the fruit of their terrorist acts…Our enemies are encouraged by this (Gaza) withdrawal.” In 2008, Professor Aumann joined the “AHI” [My Brother] party which rejects territorial concessions (and has since merged in the Likud).
In an ironic twist, when Germany lists its recipients of Nobel Prizes, they include Aumann, whose family fled Hitler shortly after Kristallnacht.

In Outpost of January 2009 we printed an article by Haim Harari, former president (1988-2001) of the Weizmann Institute. He said of the non-stop propaganda by Hamas TV and Al-Jazeera: “The news items themselves are often lies, but that really does not matter. What matters are the video clips, edited like commercials, brainwashing a worldwide audience and a new generation of future terror sympathizers. That the Hamas murderers use these tactics, lies and methods, is not at all surprising. That the international community, with all its investigative reporters, swallows these lies so eagerly, without exposing them, is something which demands an explanation.”

Obviously Ada Yonath eagerly swallows every lie. There is even less excuse for her than for the worldwide audience. And the Nobel Prize, from a source of pride to Israel becomes a source of hurt and harm as Yonath has the distinction of the award and a worldwide platform to slander her country and promote its enemies. Shame on her.

Posted by Ruth at 08:49 PM

FROM THE EDITOR

Rael Jean Isaac

DISARMING ISRAEL

In The Wall Street Journal of October 5 Bret Stephens wrote an all-too prophetic piece (he dates it January 20, 2010) on future U.S. pressures on Israel to give up her nuclear deterrent. Stephens foresees the U.S. working through the UN to demand that Israel sign the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and submit its nuclear facilities to international inspection.
In Stephens’ scenario it will be part of the effort to appease Iran. He quotes an as yet imaginary senior administration official. “The U.S. can’t forever be the enforcer of a double standard where Israel gets a nuclear free ride but Iran has to abide by every letter in the NPT. President Obama has put the issue of nuclear disarmament at the center of his foreign policy agenda. His credibility is at stake and so is U.S. credibility in the Moslem world.”
Nobel Peace Prize winner and outgoing head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency Mohammed El Baradei, at a joint press conference with Iran’s Atomic Energy Director Ali-Akbar Salehi, has already called Israel’s nuclear capability “the most serious threat facing the Middle East.” At the same time he defended Iran: “As I have said many times and I continue to say today, the agency has no complete proof that there is an ongoing weapons program in Iran.” (Presumably “complete proof” only comes when they drop their nuclear weapons on Israel.)
The only mistake in Stephens piece is probably in the timing—a year is too far out. Obama has already said: “This is not about singling out Iran. This is not about creating double standards.” (Never mind that Iran has singled itself out through its promise to wipe out another state.) Obama’s call for a nuclear free Middle East (in practice, confined to Israel) is on the horizon.

ENVIRONMENTAL GLOBAL GOVERNMENT

Assorted fringe groups on the far right used to warn of global government (under such bogeymen as President Eisenhower). What was once absurd is absurd no longer, thanks to the global warming panic (never mind that the globe is currently cooling, contrary to all the models on which the panic relies).

Here are excerpts from an October 19 speech by Lord Monckton, England’s foremost critic of climate change dogma.

“At Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your President will sign it, most of the third-world countries will sign it because they think they’re going to get money out of it, most of the left-wing regimes around the world like the European Union will rubber-stamp it.

“I have read that treaty, and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word ‘government’ actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity.

“The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third-world countries in satisfaction of what is called coyly ‘a climate debt.’

“And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

“You are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a President who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace laureate; of course, he’ll sign it. And you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get the agreement of all the other states. And because you’ll be the biggest paying country they’re not going to let you out.

“So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom for the world. But in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever.”

SHIMON IN WONDERLAND

A shaft of light wouldn’t fit between Shimon’s view of the Arab-Israel conflict and the propaganda of Israel’s most virulent enemies. Here’s Shimon: “In my opinion, if we move forward with peace and make peace with the Palestinians, and if we start negotiations with Syria and Lebanon, we will remove the main pretext for the Iranian madness—against us and against the other residents of this region.” Never mind that the existence of Tel Aviv is as much the “pretext for the Iranian madness” as that of Gush Etzion. Never mind that Iran sees nuclear weapons as the key to supremacy in the Middle East.

And here’s Shimon’s missive to “His Excellency Barack H. Obama” on his Nobel Peace Prize, so smarmy we print it in its entirety: “Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such profound impact. You provided the entire humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a lord in heaven and believers on earth. Under your leadership, peace became a real and original agenda.

And from Jerusalem, I am sure all the bells of engagement and understanding will ring again. You gave us a license to dream and act in a noble direction.”

Israel is constantly buffeted by the false accusations of its enemies. The worst that can legitimately be said of Israel is that it is guilty of the high crime and misdemeanor of making this dangerous buffoon President of the state, its chosen symbol to the world.

END OF THE ROADMAP

Remember the Road Map? The Quartet (the U.S., the UN Secretariat, the EU and Russia) laid out a series of stages on the road to a Palestinian state with both sides required to live up to a set of obligations before moving on to the next stage. As former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dore Gold notes in The Jerusalem Post (October 2), on September 24 the Quartet (with Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell representing the U.S.) issued a new policy statement explicitly discarding the reciprocity at the core of the Road Map. Writes Gold: “Astoundingly, the Quartet called on both parties to ‘act on their previous agreements and obligations—in particular adherence to the road map, irrespective of reciprocity…’”

Obama is determined to earn his peace prize, which is best seen as the eighth Nobel Peace Prize given in whole or in part for “solving” the Arab-Israel conflict. Obama’s prize is unusual only in that it has been given “on account,” a sort of promissory note. While it is no more likely to bring real peace than the other seven prizes, this one has the promise of bringing massive devastation to the region.

HONDURAS UPDATE

In October’s “From the Editor” we reported on would-be Honduran dictator Manuel Zelaya’s bizarre claim from his snug nest in the Brazilian embassy that Israeli mercenaries were torturing him with high frequency radiation.
Not to be outdone, Zelaya’s chief propagandist David Romero Ellner, head of Radio Globo, had this to say on the air: “There are times when I ask myself if Hitler was or was not correct in finishing with that race with the famous Holocaust. If there are people that do damage in this country, they are Jewish, the Israelis…After what I have learned, I ask myself why, why didn’t we let Hitler carry out his historic mission?”

Ellner and Radio Globo, like Zelaya, are being treated as civil rights martyrs. Daniel Greenfield notes that “Reuters and other media outlets are already carrying touching narratives of the police raid on Radio Globo and David Romero Ellner continuing to carry on broadcasting over the web.” Beginning his career as a Communist Party activist, Ellner, says Greenfield, co-founded the People’s Revolutionary Union, better known for its Cinchoneros armed wing which carried out numerous terrorist attacks including attacks on U.S. servicemen in Honduras that claimed 28 casualties.

Posted by Ruth at 08:44 PM

THE ARTIFICIAL STATE OF IRAQ: IMPLICATIONS FOR ISRAEL

The Artificial State of Iraq: Implications for Israel
Moshe Sharon

Moshe Sharon

Many years ago, one of the most venerated historians of Islam remarked: “The map of the Middle East has not yet been fixed.” What he meant was that almost all the Arab states in the Middle East are artificial creations, an outcome of the arbitrary dissection of the defeated Ottoman Empire following the First World War. Britain and France, the two main players in Middle East politics after the war, were each responsible for such artificial creations as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan and to some extent also huge Saudi Arabia.

None of these countries, which have by now also created for themselves an artificial history, existed as even an administrative entity under the Ottomans or prior to the emergence of the Ottoman Empire. For example, what today is Syria was divided under the Turks, and virtually throughout Islamic rule, into at least four administrative regions. However, in 1919, following the French takeover, it was cobbled together as a “state” which became independent in 1946. This state incorporates such contradictions as the Aleppo region in the north, the Isma’ili-Ansari territory in the north-west, Homs and Damascus in the centre, and the Druze Mountain in the south, to mention only part of the ethnic, religious and cultural conglomerate making up modern Syria.

While at it, the French created “Lebanon,” a mishmash of Moslem Sunnis and Shi‘tes, Christian Maronites and Druze, all thrown into a pot of some 10,000 sq. km to cook together in impossible arrangements of power sharing. Jordan is even more ridiculous. Transjordan, torn away from the mandate of Palestine by the British, was created as a “kingdom” for an Arab sheikh from the Hejaz (first Emir and later King Abdullah).

But probably the most outrageous creation of the British is the state of Iraq. Here Britain’s cynicism reached its peak. The British took three former provinces, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul (the first two in 1921, and the last added in 1926) and bound them together to create yet another artificial kingdom which they bestowed on another sheikh, the brother of Abdullah, who carried the title of King—King Feisal of Iraq.

In 1932 the British granted independence to the King who was left to rule over Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, and a few other ethnic groups. Since being born in sin, this artificial state has been a collection of contradictions, ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic. In the north, most of the territory is controlled by the non-Arab Kurds. They have their own language, they are Sunnis but mostly belong to Sufi orders. They also inhabit some very oil-rich areas. Part of them live in Turkey and some of them are also under Iran, but the bulk of the Kurds are in Iraq, and they want independence—which they have every right to demand. Even under the great Empires they led a semi-independent life up in their mountains. Saddam Hussein made every effort to carry out a campaign of genocide against them, using the most deadly weapons of mass destruction, notably gas, to exterminate men women and children. At present Kurds are participating in the post-second Iraqi war government but they are virtually independent. They will not give up this independence even if an all-Iraqi authority is to be established. There are strong forces against them. Neither Turkey nor Iran wish to see a Kurdish state on their borders which would, no doubt, become an irredentist entity to the Turkish and Iranian Kurds.

Central Iraq, namely, the greater Baghdad area, is occupied mainly by Sunni Arabs. They constitute about 35 percent of the Arab population of the country. Under the British and subsequent governments, they formed the elite of the administration. The British Mandatory government chose its civil servants almost exclusively from amongst the Sunni population, leaving the 65 percent of the Shi‘ites, who occupy the southern parts of this “state” around the city of Basra, and many parts in the centre in and around Baghdad, un-represented in the political life of the country, and virtually barred from major economic activity.

In southern Iraq are the most important shrines of the Shi‘a: the tomb of the first Imam, Ali, in the city of Najaf, the tomb of the martyred Imam Husain in Karbala, and the tombs of the seventh and the ninth Imams in Baghdad itself. The highly venerated tomb of the eleventh Imam and the site of the “disappearance” of the 12th Imam-Mahdi, the Messiah of the Shi‘a, in 873—who has since been hiding in his place of occultation and whose victorious re-appearance the Shi‘ites are awaiting—are in the north, in the city of Samarra.

These shrines belong to the whole Shi‘a. They are the sites of pilgrimage for Shi‘ites from all over the world, for whom they are more important and meaningful even than Mecca and Medina, the greatest holy sites of Islam. They are more than shrines, for they amass around them the most active Shi’ite clergy, Shi’ite institutions of learning, Shi‘ite publishing houses and intensive political activity. They are also targets of Sunni acts of terrorism. Moreover, they are places much coveted by the Shi‘ite establishment of neighboring Iran because the Iranian Shi‘ites as well as the Iraqi ones know that the Iranian Shi‘a originated in the area of the Holy Shrines around the city of Basra. In the 16th century, the rulers of Iran imposed the Shi‘a on their country with the help and active participation of the Iraqi clergy (ulema).

The tension between Shi‘ites and Sunnis goes back to the beginning of Islam, but nowhere was it so obvious as in Iraq. These two communities did not cease to compete with each other over the right to rule Islam. This competition developed into open violence and bloodshed as we see today, when major gatherings of Shi‘ites are targeted by open attacks, al-Qa‘eda suicide bombers and booby-trapped cars. Nothing is safe, particularly not mosques and markets. Even the most holy shrine of the Imam-Mahdi in Samarra was annihilated by a Sunni bomb.

The Shi‘ite areas in the south are highly important strategically and economically. Both Iran and Iraq covet the oil-rich fields of the south and wish to control the tip of the Persian Gulf (which the Arabs call “The Arab Gulf”), the area called Shatt al-Arab, around which conflict between the two countries flared in the last century into the long eight years war (1980-1988) between them. In this war, which cost the two sides some 1.5 million men, neither of them managed to gain any territory. But that does not mean that the Shi‘ite holy and rich southern Iraq is not still desired by the Persians.

Shi‘ite southern Iraq is also a problem for the Saudis. The Persian Gulf’s western coast (occupied by Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and other Arab principalities) is populated by Shi‘ites who scarcely bear allegiance to their Sunni rulers. They would have been much more comfortable with their neighboring Shi‘ite brethren around Basra, enjoying the protection of the Ayatollahs’ regime in Iran.

I am not sure to what extent the Americans learned the complications of this artificial state before embarking, together with the British and others, on their latest adventure. The idea of giving the second Iraqi war, which began in 2003, the extra aim of establishing democracy in Iraq is more than ridiculous. Which of the Arab countries in the Middle East is a democracy? The idea of personal and political freedom is an alien concept in the patriarchal society which exists in the world of Arab Islam and beyond.

The Americans, putting themselves in the position of apostles of Western political thought, have harmed both themselves and the Iraqis. It would-have been far more practical if they had re-established, soon after Saddam was caught and hung, the three old Vilayets (provinces) of the Ottomans, one under the Kurds, one under the Sunnis and one under the Shi‘ites, and get out.

This might still happen but with much bloodshed. The Americans will leave, but Iraq will remain the same pot of boiling broth, the ingredients of which can never mix. This anomaly, if it is to be maintained, needs a dictator, not an unrealistic Western-style democracy.

In recent decades, the Western world has developed a Pavlovian reflex to blame Israel for every negative development in the Middle East. After the American pullout, when things go bad in Iraq, Europe and America will doubtless explain that it is because Israel did not succumb to Palestinian demands and actually went on to build an additional two rooms in Jerusalem.

Moreover, although all serious, unbiased students of the Middle East are aware of the abnormality of the so called Arab states with their artificial borders, the United States and Europe are advocating enthusiastically the establishment of a “Palestinian State”—another artificial entity within borders which can only be described as ridiculous. One has to be blind not to see that such a political entity has no justification from any point of view. The “Palestinians” themselves reject it. If they dream about a state of their own, they dream about one Arab state in the whole of Palestine.

It is specifically with this aim that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established in 1964 when the “West Bank” was in Jordanian hands and the Gaza Strip under Egyptian rule. The PLO was not created to free these territories from Jordan or Egypt but to free “Palestine” from Israel. The PLO still exists, has been accorded international respectability, even legitimized by Israel, the country which it plans to destroy! The idea of “two states for two nations,” which is presented as a miraculous remedy to all the illnesses of the Arab Israeli conflict, was concocted in the patronizing minds of American and European politicians, supported by irresponsible third-rate Israeli officials, sponsored by vicious anti-Israeli media, backed by the “useful fools” of the Left everywhere, fueled by the immoral enthusiasm of academicians on campuses all over the world including Israel, and automatically endorsed by the anti-Israel world body of the UN.

The Arabs who speak about a “Palestinian state” make sure to connect its establishment with conditions that leave no doubt that such a state is only a stage in the final solution that eliminates Israel. The Arabs have never kept it secret that the establishment of another artificial Arab entity in the Middle East aims at the abolition of the Jewish State, the only state in the area whose existence, founded on the cultural and religious ties of the Jewish people to its homeland, is backed by thousands years of history, and whose borders, since 1967, are almost the same borders of the ancient historical territory of Israel.

The lessons from the irresponsible creation of artificial political entities in the Middle East have not been learned, and the Western world is again toying with the same dangerous idea of introducing another artificial political entity into the area which even at this stage has proved to be a detonating agent in the explosive conditions of the region.

What has this to do with Iraq? Following the American withdrawal, a drastic change will take place in the geopolitical conditions in the Middle East with direct impact on Israel. Iraq has always been part of Israel’s hostile Eastern Front. Temporarily, during the American presence, its enmity to Israel was neutralized, but once the Americans are out, there is no guarantee that it will not resume its historical attitude to the Jewish State, even if, for a while, with weaker military force. Alternatively, Iran might take advantage of Obama’s policy of appeasement, and will attempt to take Shatt al-Arab and southern Iraq. Such a major geopolitical development coupled with the Islamophile regime in the U.S. and defeatist Europe would put Israel in much greater danger—and would be no less dangerous for Iran’s Arab neighbors.

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

Posted by Ruth at 08:40 PM

WHY ARE JEWS LIBERAL?

Reviewed by Rael Jean Isaac

Norman Podhoretz’s Why Are Jews Liberals? (Doubleday, 2009, 337 pp.) is a fine book on an anomaly often noticed but never before given the in-depth attention it deserves. Podhoretz writes with his customary clarity, incisiveness and deceptive simplicity, i.e. while the topic sounds formidable, the book is not only a pleasure to read, but hard to put down. As he piles up the evidence for the political folly of Jewish voters, the reader, as in a “whodunit,” eagerly awaits, in this case, the “why” rather than the “who.”

A more precise title would have been Why Are American Jews Liberals? For Podhoretz does not discuss (similar) proclivities of Jews elsewhere. For background Podhoretz takes us all the way back to the foundation of Christianity but really begins his story with the European Enlightenment and its rocky aftermath. Up to a point, Podhoretz finds the identification of Jews with the left reasonable in that the opposition to Jewish emancipation came overwhelmingly from the right.

On the other hand, Podhoretz notes, Jews blinded themselves to the hatred that emanated from distinguished precincts of the left—from the likes of Voltaire, Marx, Bauer, Proudhon, Fourier, among others. Many Jews, says Podhoretz, “converted” to Marxism as a religion that promised them liberation from the burdens of Judaism without forcing them to convert to Christianity, its millennial persecutor.

In the United States, where Jews found a far more welcoming climate, the hostility they encountered was largely from the right, whether the WASP patriciate (Henry Adams was obsessively anti-Semitic) or, in the 1930s, from the Catholic radio priest Father Coughlin and the large number of small anti-Semitic Protestant groups that sprang up. Roosevelt became the great hero of the Jews. His quasi-socialist policies initially appealed to the large numbers of Jews still enamored of Marxism of one variant or another and later his struggle against (chiefly right-wing) isolationism and his leadership of the war against Hitler cemented their love affair with him.

Until the late 1960s Podhoretz finds the steady support of Jews for the Democratic Presidential candidate understandable in terms of Jewish interests (however out of whack with the voting patterns of the American electorate, including the other groups who had been at the core of the New Deal coalition). As the Jews saw it, writes Podhoretz, the Democratic Party “represented the closest American counterpart to the forces on the Left that had favored Jewish emancipation in Europe—just as the Republicans seemed to represent an American version of the conservative forces that had opposed equal rights for Jews in the past.”

But while the Democratic and the Republican Party would both change, the Jews were blind to the ways this transformation affected their interests. The latter part of the book chronicles the post-1967 rise of anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism on the left, the increasing sympathy toward Israel and Jews among Republicans, especially the evangelical base, and the continued stubborn adherence of Jews, national election after national election, to the Democratic Party. Most recently this produced the lopsided 78% Jewish vote for Obama (in contrast to only 43% of the white vote generally) although McCain had a track record of strong support for Israel while everything about Obama raised red flags.

Podhoretz’s explanation is that left-liberalism has become for Jews a religion in its own right despite its conflict “with the Torah of Judaism at so many points, and even though it is also at variance with the most basic of all Jewish interests—the survival of the Jewish people.” (To take just one example, the sanctification of abortion rights by a rapidly dwindling Jewish American population is bizarre.)

While not faulting Podhoretz’s analysis, I came away with a somewhat different take on the basis of the same evidence—and one which makes Jewish behavior even more culpable. Podhoretz feels that it was reasonable for Jews to conclude on the basis of their European experience, culminating in the Holocaust, that their interests lay with the left. I would argue that after the Holocaust for Jews the only rational conclusion was that their interests lay in a state of their own. Yes, Nazism was right-wing (although it was shorthand for National Socialism, suggesting Nazi pretensions went left as well) so Jews had good reason to look askance at political parties on the right. But where was the left when Jews desperately needed refuge? The Soviet Union—prior to Hitler’s invasion—turned over Jewish Communist refugees to the Gestapo. The so-called civilized West kept the doors slammed shut, with Britain also keeping the doors of Palestine firmly barred, although the only basis for its administration of Palestine under the Mandate was to create a Jewish National Home there. The lesson should have been obvious: when the chips were down, only a sovereign Jewish state could provide a sheltering fortress, one that could also intervene to protect far-away endangered communities.

And at least initially, this lesson seems to have been absorbed. While earlier Jews had been divided about Zionism, as Podhoretz notes, once Israel was established, serious opposition melted away. Support reached its height in the period immediately prior to the Six Day War when the U.S. government “lost” the papers committing it to keep open the Straits of Tiran (that commitment a condition for Israel’s leaving the Sinai after the 1956 War), Israel’s Arab neighbors promised its annihilation to the enthusiasm of frenzied mobs and Israel’s survival seemed in imminent jeopardy. But when, in subsequent years, Israel became branded, notably on the left, as an imperialist oppressor, an illegal occupier of Arab land, a malevolent quasi-Nazi state, many American Jews, far from standing fast behind Israel, became progressively more alienated.

In a column entitled “My Friends Used to Be Jewish” Norma Zager describes dining recently in Beverly Hills at a table filled with wealthy, influential Jewish women when one of them mentioned a woman most of the others did not know and explained “You know the type. She’s one of those far right pro-Israel people.” For these people Israel is simply an embarrassment.

Podhoretz describes their creed as the Torah of Liberalism but it is also faith in a new variant of assimilationism. In pre-revolutionary Russia, Communism, socialism, and Bundism, with their promise of a secular, universal, just society offering equality to all appealed to more Jews than Zionism. Many U.S. Jews today aspire to absorption into their ideal of a secular majority culture built on celebration of diversity, social justice (defined as redistribution of wealth), environmentalism (combating climate change, the cause of the hour), life-style freedoms (abortion, gay rights, gay marriage), opposition to war (by Western nations, at any rate), among other values. The umbrella is large enough to include religions of a certain type: Reform Judaism, devoted to social action, and the mainline churches, whose platforms are often indistinguishable from the progressive canon—see the resolutions passed by the National Council of Churches.

As their left-wing assimilationist forebears ignored the anti-Semitism prominent in the Marxist left, these Jews overlook the hostile resolutions (condemnations of Israel, support for anti-Israel boycotts, divestment) emanating from these churches: after all, on the “important” issues, they are on the correct side. That support for Israel and good will toward Jews are prominent among evangelical Christians cuts no ice because these supporters deeply threaten the vision of a secular majority culture on which the Jewish assimilationist enterprise depends. The notion that perhaps there is a majority Christian culture with fundamentally different values is upsetting—alliance with it on the basis of a parochial concern for Israel not to be contemplated.

Although Podhoretz does not discuss the Jews of Israel, to a large extent they have followed a similar trajectory—which has in turn strongly influenced American Jewish attitudes. The urge to assimilate has taken different forms, in part because the Jews are not clear with what they want to assimilate or how it can be done. The West? The Middle East? Over fifty years ago the effort to assimilate to the latter was pioneered by a small group of self-styled Canaanites, who based themselves on the theory of Protestant German biblical higher criticism that Israelite tribes had merged with the inhabitants of the Land of Canaan to produce the synthesis that was Hebrew culture. As Jewish Canaanites saw it, the hold of the religions (Judaism, Islam) that had intervened to divide Canaanites from each other must be broken. There was to be a two-stage process. First must come a Brit Canaan, including the Maronites of Lebanon, the Druze and the Bedouin, then the unification of all the inhabitants of Eretz ha-Prat (the Land of the Euphrates) in a kind of Hebrew United States stretching from the Tigris River to the Suez Canal. The Canaanites found no adherents beyond Jews, which has been the fate of more recent efforts as well.

Overwhelmingly the “majority culture” to which Jews in Israel want to assimilate is that of the West (Netanyahu once noted ruefully that more Israelis knew of Madonna than of Moses). The Israel of their imagination looks nothing like Syria or Egypt or Iraq. But to live like Scandinavians or secular “progressive” Americans they cannot be on the permanent edge of warfare with their neighbors. The solution, as laid forth by Shimon Peres in The New Middle East was to strip the neighbors of their unacceptable particularity, and having properly refashioned them, assimilate alongside them into Western culture.

Critics of The New Middle East pointed out that Peres made no reference to Jewish cultural flowering but there was no reference to Arab culture either—the New Middle East would have no cultural individuality, Arab or Jewish, but was to be democratic, peaceful, prosperous, confederated, and culturally advanced. Not surprisingly, the Arabs rejected the makeover. When Peres said Israel wanted to join the Arab League (which, he said, should rename itself the Middle East League) the secretary of the Arab League said Israel was welcome once its citizens converted to Islam.

With transformation of their neighbors out of reach, Israelis concentrated on another option: appeasing them. Let the Palestinians have their state and they would let Israel alone. And so there was the ongoing obsessive effort to implement the Oslo accords (despite their manifest failure) and later the destruction of Jewish communities in Gaza. When that only emboldened Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and led to more ferocious attacks on her in the “progressive” circles of the West, Israel’s assimilationist Left did not rethink its false assumption that Arab hostility could be assuaged, but, encouraged by what Caroline Glick aptly calls “Israel’s scandalously imbecilic and flagellant media” turned with ferocity on “the settlers,” above all the religious Israelis who do not share their vision but, stubbornly particularistic, had created communities in Judea and Samaria because this was the heart of the Promised Land. It was their fault—minus the settlers, Israel could win acceptance in the region and proceed on the path of becoming another progressive secular Western culture.

All this has had a profound effect on American Jewish attitudes. Those who see themselves as staunch supporters of Israel endorse whatever policies the “democratic government of Israel” chooses. Leaders of most American Jewish organizations comfortably support the concessions, urging yet more, in the (foolish) hope that if Israel makes enough of them, it will stem the flood of attacks from the progressive circles whose opinion they value. As for those who are alienated, they become ever more alienated. What all of them fail to see is how much their own security is bound up with the fate of Israel. Unaware that their most crucial self-interest is in a strong and viable Israel, Jews engage in moral preening at Israel’s—and ultimately their own—expense. Many foolishly see their promotion of “diversity” as a protection, failing to recognize that, as can readily be seen on our college campuses, PC codes for minorities do not apply to “anti-Zionism” or “anti-Semitism.”

I must offer one caveat to Podhoretz’s analysis. To my mind, Podhoretz places too much emphasis on whether an American President is “friendly” to Israel or not. This can lead, as it did in Podhoretz’s case, to serious errors of judgment, as, according to his own account in Commentary, he supported the Gaza withdrawal because President Bush did so—and he had huge faith in the friendship toward Israel of President Bush.

This is not to say that hostile Presidents will not do much more damage (as Obama is in the process of proving). But Bush, whom Podhoretz describes as “friendlier to Israel than any president before him” was the first President to come out openly for a Palestinian state—which Netanyahu, in his candid period, repeatedly called a death knell for Israel. (Podhoretz makes much of the qualifiers Bush attached, like an end to terrorism, but as we predicted would happen in Outpost, when the PA showed no interest in “fighting terror,” the Bush administration wound up putting heavy unilateral pressures on Israel.)

If Jews were not in the pocket of the Democratic Party but united in their focus on the importance of a strong Israel (and voted and provided financial support to Presidential candidates on this basis) they could have had far more influence in shaping policy, particularly in the case of friendly Presidents.

No one has summed up Jewish political behavior better than Irving Kristol (whom Podhoretz quotes). Jews, said Kristol combined “an almost pathologically intense concern for politics with a seemingly equally intense inclination toward political foolishness, often crossing over into the realm of the politically suicidal. How is one to understand this very odd Jewish condition—the political stupidity of Jews?”

Perhaps it is idle to look for rational explanations for the irrationality of Jews. I keep being reminded of the tale of Sleeping Beauty. Her fairy godmothers came to the christening of the infant princess bringing valuable gifts, including beauty, wit, musical talent. But an angry overlooked fairy had her revenge. Coming uninvited to the party, she put the princess under an enchantment, announcing that when she became an adult she would prick her finger and die.

The fairy godmothers of the Jews bestowed on them the gifts of intelligence, tenacity, talent and creativity in a host of fields from finance to the arts to science (all those wildly disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes). The angry overlooked fairy declared: “I will make all these gifts worthless because I will make Jews political fools and without political intelligence all the other gifts will prove worthless.”

In the case of Sleeping Beauty a good fairy came (partly) to the rescue by declaring that after 100 years the curse would be broken and Sleeping Beauty would awake. In the case of the Jews, as time passes, the curse only seems to intensify.

Posted by Ruth at 08:36 PM

THE NOBEL APPEASEMENT PRIZE

Daniel Greenfield

Quick, name the greatest peacemaker of the 20th Century who never received a Nobel Peace Prize? The wrong answer given by Foreign Policy magazine is Gandhi. The right answer is British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Churchill would strike many as an odd choice for a Nobel Peace Prize. Didn't he preside over the bloodiest war of the 20th century? A war that left millions dead and entire nations in ruins? And that of course is exactly the point. By resisting Hitler, Churchill brought peace to Western Europe and to every part of the world threatened by Nazi Germany. By contrast Gandhi did nothing but advise England to surrender, to let the Nazis occupy their cities, rather than "taint" themselves with violence.

Both Churchill and Gandhi wanted peace, they just wanted different kinds of peace. Churchill wanted a secure peace for England and Europe by defeating the Nazis. Gandhi wanted a sham spiritual peace by surrendering to the Nazis, letting them do their worst and priding himself on being better than them. Churchill wanted to hold the moral high ground by taking the strategic high ground. Gandhi wanted the moral high ground by waving the white flag of surrender. These radically different notions of what peace is are at the heart of our problems today.

A notion of peace that rewards the Gandhis over the Churchills rewards appeasement over resistance. It promotes the idea that throwing your hands up in surrender is better and nobler than reaching for a gun to defend yourself and your family. That is the significance of the Norwegian committee awarding Obama a Nobel Peace Prize, which should be renamed the appeasement prize.
The Nobel committee cited Obama's speech about a "World Without Nuclear Weapons" as his qualification for receiving the award. Naturally this does not mean that the United States will actually prevent the Hitlers of tomorrow from getting their hands on nuclear weapons. Rather it means that the United States and countries reasonable enough to follow its lead will give up nuclear weapons. Leaving them exclusively in the hands of madmen, tyrants and terrorists. That is the self-destructive Gandhian ideal that the Committee and Obama want to promote...surrender, helplessness and impotence are the points on the moral compass of pacifism.

Naturally Obama did not get the Nobel Peace Prize for anything he actually accomplished. But this makes him a worthy successor to Jimmy Carter, whose unwanted "diplomacy" enabled North Korea to continue developing nuclear weapons, and Al Gore who made a movie telling others to live simply, without ever following his own advice. Both accomplished nothing except to make empty speeches and handicap those who actually wanted and want to do something constructive. Without Carter's intervention, half of Asia might not be constantly waiting for the bomb to drop. And what Carter did for Kim Jong Il, Obama is supposed to do for the Islamists, a grand devil's bargain to enable mass murder in the name of peace.

In the face of Nazi terror, Gandhi advised England to surrender, arguing that fighting the Nazis was worse than losing to them. There is a free world today only because England, America and the remains of the civilized world disregarded Gandhi's "noble" ideas and did the right thing by fighting the Nazi war machine instead. Gandhi's ideas would not have made the world civilized, as so many today insist, they would have made the world Nazi. That is the simply truth, perverted by those who brand the armies of the free world as Nazis, and real Nazis, as victims.

Those who would apply Gandhi's ideas today to restrain and throttle the use of force against terrorism, would produce not a world free of cruelty or violence, but a world broken under the Islamist boot, a world without freedom, without kindness, mercy or hope. And where the Bush Doctrine emphasized the right of America to defend itself and the world, the Obama Doctrine emphasizes multilateral diplomacy and a willingness to negotiate until the bombs begin falling, and probably all the way until doomsday itself.

The Nobel Peace Prize has a long history of rewarding the false diplomacy of leaders like Le Duc Tho, Arafat, Sadat, Desmond Tutu, Gorbachev, Mandela, and their enablers like Pauling, Kissinger, MacBride, Peres, Kim Dae Jung, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, El Baradei and of course Barack Obama. The Nobel Peace Prize does not foster peace, it fosters only appeasement. Little wonder that UN agencies won the Nobel Peace Prize six separate times. And if there is any group of organizations more useless and more disabling to the free world than the UN, look and be fairly certain that they have their own Nobel, already or pending.

In 1947, after all the American, Canadian, British and Australian soldiers who had died fighting to liberate and bring peace to Europe, the Nobel Committee handed over the award to the pacifist anti-war Quaker American Friends Service Committee. This was after giving the award to the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1944 whose conduct during the war had bordered on Nazi collaboration. After the end of a war which saw Norway itself occupied and liberated and protected from Nazi and Soviet troops, the Committee saw fit only to go on promoting the same old pacifist doctrine of appeasement first.

Yet had the British and Americans decided that a non-violent negotiated solution was best, Norway would have gone on being ruled by Nazi Germany until the end of time. In a truly ironic paradox, had England and America been governed by the ideas that the Nobel Peace Prizes sought to instill, the prizes, whose disposal was halted by World War II, would never have been given again, except perhaps and most appropriately to Vidkun Quisling.
And that in sum total is what the Nobel Peace Prize amounts to, a trophy for the murderers cunning enough to get what they want at the negotiating table, and their pet Quislings. It is only fitting that Obama, who has left Eastern Europe naked in the face of Russian aggression, given Iran an open invitation to use endless delaying tactics while developing nuclear weapons, enabled Chavez's Marxist expansionism across South America and is preparing to cut a deal with the Taliban themselves, receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Not for what he has done, but for what he has not done—stand up to evil.

Obama has made appeasement look cool, which is all that the committee really values in a patsy, figureheads to turn into heroes and make the morally indefensible ideas of pacifism more palatable. Gandhi's ideas on their own are laughable, but when combined with a saintly figure somehow seem credible as a quasi-religious virtue. Obama's ideas are equally laughable, but when combined with his manufactured image, they were accepted by large numbers of Americans.

Protesting that Obama has done nothing to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize misses the point. It is precisely because Obama has done nothing but give ridiculous speeches that he was given the Nobel Peace Prize in the first place. Doing nothing is the greatest virtue of pacifism. To lift your hands high and let the enemy have his way with your country is exactly the sort of high moral notion that the Nobel Peace Prize rewards. Just ask the various League of Nations officials, random pacifists and disarmament promoters who received the award in the 1930's, until Hitler's armies swept across Europe, temporarily putting an end to the awards.

The Nobel Peace Prize is no high honor; it is pacifism's highest honor to the conscious and the misguided appeasers. To receive it is to paint a giant target on your own country's back. A "Kick Me" sign a hundred feet tall lighting up the night sky. A white flag waving high.

In celebration of the International Day of Non-violence, Obama said: "The America of today has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent social action movement for Indian independence which he led.” (U.K. Telegraph, October 2, 2009)

"I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions." - Gandhi

Daniel Greenfield blogs as Sultan Knish and this appeared on his blog of October 12.

Posted by Ruth at 08:28 PM

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The Disappearance of Human Rights
Fiamma Nirenstein

The UN’s human rights policies have been experiencing an unprecedented crisis. The UN has immediate anti-Western majorities that used to be under the USSR umbrella. Today they are under the umbrella of Islam and totalitarianism. I am not only speaking of the horror in seeing the UN podium invaded by people like Chavez who "smell a rat because the American demon is around" or Ahmadinejad who preaches the extermination of the Jews and brags about justice while he is suffocating his opposition. There is also Sweden, which now holds the Presidency of the European Union, and remained in the hall while the Iranian President, at the opening of the General Assembly, was talking about the Jewish conspiracy dominating the world because it didn't consider that he had gone beyond any red line predetermined by the bright mind of the European Union.

The death sentence to human rights was mainly given by the birth of what I call “Palestinism.” The UN has attached enormous significance to this issue—which can only be explained by the third-worldism of the cold war on the one hand, and on the other to an invincible historical antipathy towards the State of Israel, as the state of the Jewish nation. The issue has destroyed any possibility of actually fighting for human rights.

The UN has devoted one third of Security Council resolutions to condemning Israel. In 1975, only three years after the massacre at the Munich Olympic games, the UN invented the unlikely formula according to which Zionism is racism. The UN transformed an international conference against racism—the Durban conference of 2001—into a racist conference against Israel and the Jews. (The UN tried a repeat performance in April in Geneva with the “Durban Review Conference,” but this time many countries protested and Italy’s decision to withdraw had a major impact.) Recently the UN launched the Goldstone Commission—endorsed by the Human Rights Council—on the Gaza conflict.

The international institutions do not realize that the conclusions of this Commission have set a dangerous precedent. In depriving Israel of its right to defend itself and establishing that it needs to surrender to systematic terrorism that hits and uses civilians as human shields, it is actually fostering terrorism around the world.

The organizations for the protection of human rights are run by people whose countries abhor the very idea of human rights. Suffice it to say that the preparation of the conference against racism known as “Durban 2” was assigned to countries such as Iran, Cuba and Pakistan, serial violators of human rights.

Imagine the protests if Israel had been proposed for the presidency of the General Assembly. And yet nobody has raised any doubt as to the presidency of Libya with Ali Treki, who will run the 64th General Assembly inaugurated on September 23.

Of the ten special sessions held so far by the UN General Assembly, 6 were devoted to the Middle-East. The tenth—opened 12 years ago at the request of Qatar—has practically become a permanent commission on the rights of the Palestinians (it is called: “Illegal Israeli actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory”). The supposedly extremely serious issue justifying this ten-year long discussion is the construction of the Har Homà district in East Jerusalem. No suggestion has been made to stop this debate or at least to put it aside in order to talk about the elections in Iran and about the ensuing crackdown, just to mention one of the most sensitive subjects that, last summer, outraged public opinion around the world.

In 2008, 28 resolutions were issued on Israel by the UN agencies—six by the Human Rights Council alone—while only four concerned Burma, just to take one example of a serious human rights abuser. In general, throughout 2008, Israel was the country condemned for the highest number of human rights violations: 120 documents of different kinds were drafted on this country followed, at a great distance, by Sudan (47 files). Not a single resolution was adopted on Zimbabwe. So far, in 2008, 96 official documents have been drafted on Israel.

It is fantastic that the resolutions of the International Tribunal on Israel’s security fence have not taken terrorism into consideration. And that the Goldstone Commission’s response to events is totally detached from a reality in which human rights are violated first by the aggressors, i.e. Hamas.

The international illusion that “if the Palestinians had a state...” has seemed to be a panacea for the aggressions perpetrated by Iran, by the Taliban and by the Islamists in general. The Palestinian issue has deranged Europe, thus setting the stage for a change in the very concept of human rights. Yet human rights are the ontological bond, the lifeblood on the basis of which we have to build inter-Atlantic relations.

Notwithstanding September 11, the U.S. does not know the fear creeping around European cities. And Europe does not know the meaning of a war against terrorism to bring the world back on the road to civilization. And instead of making an effort to foster our mutual and indispensable understanding, we are trying to eliminate our anxiety with a selective policy that is creating estrangement and detachment from our glorious history of human rights.

Nirenstein is Deputy Chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. This is excerpted from her remarks at a round table on Human Rights at the Magna Carta Foundation

Posted by Ruth at 08:27 PM

IMMIGRATION IS DOWN, BUT NOT FROM MOSLEM, MID-EAST NATIONS

Debbie Schlussel

The U.S. Census Bureau released the results of its annual American Community Survey (ACS). The figures were taken in 2008. All of the major media outlets (including USA Today and The Wall Street Journal) are touting it as evidence that the bad economy has solved our alien problems, noting that immigration–legal and illegal–is down and that less foreign born people are here.

But that’s hardly the real picture. In fact, while immigration is down from places like Mexico and Peru, immigration is up from Middle Eastern Moslem nations like terrorist-host states Syria and Iran. I did my own investigation into the census numbers and uncovered the important story here that no-one else is telling you. The countries that hate us the most are still exporting their haters to our shores. Those numbers are up, not down.

A Wall Street Journal graph shows that the number of Iranian-born immigrants is up by 18,730 from 2007, for a total of 344,935 (though the WSJ article on this story doesn’t cover Mid-East immigration and sticks to the “immigration is down” narrative). While some of the nearly 19,000 new U.S. residents from Iran came here to get away from Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs, others did not. And we have no way of knowing which are which. If even only a fraction of that number are anti-American and inclined to do Iran’s bidding here, that’s far too many.

Then there are the figures from Syria. The Census figures show that the number of Syrian-born residents in the U.S. increased by 11,349 persons to 66,077 Syrians in 2008. That’s an alarming increase, given that most Syrians here are Shi’ite Moslems who support the (Alawite) Assad government and its hand in Hezbollah. (Most Syrian Christians who were going to leave did so long ago.)

From Lebanon, the increase is only 3,550, according to the Census. But that’s an estimate. And based on the number of Lebanese immigrants–both legal and illegal–here in Detroit, I’d say it’s far larger. And, still, most of those are Shi’ite Moslems who support Hezbollah. We really do not need even one more Hezbollah enabler on American soil, let alone the majority of 3,550 of them.

And none of this takes into account immigrants from the Gulf States–Al-Qaeda hotbeds of extremism–Saudi Arabia and Yemen, not to mention the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, which don’t have their own category in the Census survey.

Fortunately, the numbers of those here from Pakistan, Egypt, and North Africa are slightly down from last year, but again, this is only a sampling–an estimate–and they could be completely off. The survey also claims the number of Iraqi-born residents is down by over 1,000, yet we’ve welcomed tens of thousands of Iraqis to our shores, so the number doesn’t seem accurate and is likely reflective of the rest of the accuracy of the survey.

Still, it’s annoying–no, it’s maddening. Since 9/11, as I’ve noted over and over again, we’ve done everything to make it hard for Hispanic illegal aliens, but little to discourage Islamic ones–you know the Moslem Arabs with the same theology and heritage as the 19 hijackers. That’s why it’s so disturbing–but not at all surprising–that we see this increase in population, despite the bad economy, from our friends in the “Religion of Peace.” For them, a bad economy doesn’t hinder their non-stop milking of the system, bailouts, and entitlements, a la Najibullah Zazi and Ali Nemr and Rania Rahal. And it certainly doesn’t discourage their plans to Islamicize America.

They murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, and yet we keep welcoming them to our shores.

Yes, immigration is down, but not where it counts. The most undesirable–the most dangerous–keep on comin’.

Debbie Shlussel is a lawyer and columnist.

Posted by Ruth at 08:24 PM

OCTOBER 2009

A TRIP TOO FAR
HERBERT ZWEIBON

FROM THE EDITOR
RAEL JEAN ISAAC

OBAMA AT THE UN: TAKE ISRAEL, PLEASE
RUTH KING

TIT FOR TAT
DAVID WILDER

WHERE IS THE "CENTER" OF THE WAR ON TERROR?
HUGH FITZGERALD

GEERT WILDERS: SPEECH TO THE DUTCH PARLIAMENT

A LANDMARK WORK; A REVIEW
WILLIAM MEHLMAN

ARABS ARE NOT READY FOR PEACE
SAMI ALRABBA

FATAHLISTIC IN THE MIDDLE EAST
RUTH KING

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

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Posted by Ruth at 12:40 PM

A TRIP TOO FAR

HERBERT ZWEIBON

Prime Minister Netanyahu should have stayed home. By coming to the United States he merely strengthened Obama, easily the most hostile-to-Israel President to inhabit the White House (yes, Carter is unbeatable, but much of his animus became manifest after he left office). And, his experience outside political office largely confined to community organizing, Obama employs the arsenal of bullying tactics learned from Alinsky manuals to achieve his arrogant aim “It’s absolutely critical that we get the issue [the Arab-Israel conflict] resolved.”

Caroline Glick points out that Obama needed to stage a photo-op at the UN with Abbas and Netanyahu to be seen as doing something productive, after a series of unilateral concessions harmful to U.S. allies. (He was so eager he was even ready to scrap, if only momentarily, the demand for a total Israeli settlement freeze as a precondition for talks.)

What happened was wholly predictable. Netanyahu was berated by an irate and impatient Obama, and like a chastened and frightened schoolboy hastened to say being beaten up was a salutary experience. Asked by Charles Gibson on ABC news to comment on reports that the meeting was “testy,” Netanyahu insisted it was “very good.”

The entire interview was appalling. Netanyahu had an opportunity to underline (what is never heard on mainstream media)-–that the Palestinian Authority was no different from Hamas in its commitment to destroy Israel. He could have reported on the results of the sixth general assembly of Fatah (which controls the PA) this August in Bethlehem in which the 2200 delegates reelected Abbas and decreed handing over the entire city of Jerusalem—both East and West Jerusalem—to Palestinian control was a non-negotiable “red line,” that the right to return would not be compromised and Israel would not be recognized as a Jewish state. Netanyahu could have asked, “What is there to negotiate?” “ And why, Mr. Gibson, have you and your fellows in the media not reported on the Fatah conference?”

Instead Netanyahu babbled absurdly about “peace.” “I want to move on to peace. And I think the sooner we put this [Obama’s demand for a total freeze on settlements] to the side, the quicker we can move forward toward peace.” He was glad, he told Gibson, “we can get on with the business of forging a lasting and secure peace between us.”

Netanyahu went on to hear Obama—as former UN ambassador John Bolton phrased it--put Israel on the chopping block. Israel, said Obama, must be prepared to go back to what even super-dove Abba Eban called the Auschwitz lines of 1949 or American support would come to an end.

Like his June speech at Bar Ilan, delivered after his first drubbing by Obama, Netanyahu’s own speech at the UN has been fulsomely praised by friends of Israel. Why? Because he said the Holocaust happened? It was demeaning to do so before an assemblage thick with thugs who are not in doubt the Holocaust happened but look forward to another. Because he said “the jury is still out on the United Nations?” The jury came in decades ago. The bottom line, both at Bar Ilan and at the UN, is that Netanyahu endorsed “the two state solution” although over the years he has said and written innumerable times that this would mean the death of Israel.

As for “demilitarization,” which he again invoked, no one has been more eloquent than Netanyahu in explaining that a Palestinian state would soon assume all the powers denied it. The world, he said, will stand by and do nothing but it will stop us from trying to stop them.

Yair Shamir, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, recently urged Netanyahu to withstand U.S. pressure the way his father did: “Just say no.”

Posted by Ruth at 12:32 PM

FROM THE EDITOR

RAEL JEAN ISAAC

HONDURAS. OBAMA'S DISGRACE

We spoke too soon last month, with our headline “Honduras Wins.” We were deceived by our government’s two-faced policy. It’s single--ugly—face has now become obvious. The State Department told Richard Lugar of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. would no longer threaten sanctions on Honduras or insist on Zelaya’s return to power. In direct contradiction to these assurances, the administration has now cut off military and economic aid to Honduras, ruled that the fourteen justices of the Honduras Supreme Court cannot enter the U.S. (treating them as pariahs on a par with Mugabe’s brutal henchmen) and announced it would not accept the results of the planned election in November. Obama stands rigidly at the side of Chavez, Nicaragua’s Ortega and the brothers Castro.

Encouraged by the U.S. effort to impose Chavez-style rule on Honduras, Zelaya managed to slip into the country and, at this writing, has taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy, which he is using as a platform from which to rally his lumpenproletariat supporters to violent revolution. Interviewed in the embassy, Zelaya (who belongs in an asylum) told the Miami Herald (September 24) that Israeli mercenaries were torturing him with high frequency radiation and preparing to assassinate him.

HOW NOT TO WAGE WAR

Thanks to Diana West for unearthing a story not covered in this country. The UK Guardian reports that in August Marine Commandant James T. Conway told a conference in a Washington hotel of Marine efforts to reduce their carbon footprint in Afghanistan. Writes West: “Gen. Conway’s ostensibly running a war, with men in the field of battle under rotten conditions, and he’s worried about…going green?”

West has also attacked the rules of engagement under which U.S. forces operate, costing them their lives. That theme was taken up by Ralph Peters in the New York Post (September 24) who denounces what he calls the “Obama Way of War” in Afghanistan. Unless our troops are absolutely certain no civilians are present, they’re denied artillery or air support. If any civilians appear where we meet the Taliban, our troops are ordered to “break contact.” The result says Peters, is that the Taliban make sure civilians are present for all their operations and after they attack, we quit, “lugging our dead and wounded back to base.”

VENI, VIDI, VICI

Much is made of Obama’s popularity (in contrast to George Bush) outside the United States, especially in Russia. But not with everyone. Here is Valeria Novodvorskaya, a pro-democracy activist and founder and chairwoman of the Democratic Union, referring to Obama’s visit to Russia: “Yes, veni, vidi, vici didn’t work out for Obama. He came, saw nothing, and lost this basketball game to the Chekists. God grant the world and America survive Obama, with his cheap show business, for which he traded in the eternal ideals of freedom. I hope the Americans will see, hear and not forgive.” In Russian parlance Novodvorskaya is a “liberal,” a term meaning the opposite of what it does here, for a Russian liberal is anti-leftist, for free markets, against centralization of power.

TORONTO FILM BOYCOTT FIZZLES

Hard times seem to have blunted the calls for a boycott of the Toronto Film Festival by 50 morally challenged Hollywood types who accused the festival of being a pawn in the hands of the Israeli government because of its inaugural “City to City” event featuring ten films about Tel Aviv by Israeli directors. In the end the would-be boycotters simmered down after a plethora of news conferences, letters, articles and blogs. The Toronto festival rivals Venice and Cannes in importance, and this year, it was generally agreed, was the most difficult ever for selling films.

Here is a list of some of the best known of the infamous 50 whose films supporters of Israel might in their turn like to avoid: Julie Christie, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Viggo Mortensen, musician David Byrne and British filmmaker Ken Loach.

A stand-out for her support of Israel is Madonna. She visited Israel and dined with Netanyahu—if she can face down Hollywood, perhaps she can give Netanyahu the spine to confront the lesser venom of the world’s politicians.

TREES FROM ACORNS GROW

Twenty-five years ago, we (my husband Erich Isaac and I) wrote The Coercive Utopians (Regnery, 1983). In it we described ACORN, then still small beer, as one of the Alinsky-inspired organizations that had just begun to obtain government funds. Comprising a handful of radicals (it’s still led by its founder Wade Rathke), ACORN grandiosely claimed to represent most of the country’s (then) 200 million people. (continued on page 12)

Successive governments, Republican as well as Democratic, state and local as well as national, kept upping the funding and ACORN’s activities burgeoned. ACORN became so convinced of its invulnerability that its offices were successfully scammed by two enterprising youngsters, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe—ACORN employees freely offered tax evasion advice (on videotape) for their supposed brothel, including passing off their 13 year old sex slaves imported from San Salvador as dependents.

Still cocky—now stupidly so—ACORN is suing O’Keefe, Giles and Breitbart.com (it posted the videos) for violating Maryland law which prohibits audiotaping without consent (a felony punishable up to five years). This opens up ACORN to discovery, and the can of worms the defendants will uncover should be sufficient to deplete the oceans of fish.

J STREET IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

On September 13 the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy puff piece on J Street, the newest in the string of anti-Israel “Jewish” organizations that go back decades—think Breira, New Jewish Agenda, Americans for Peace Now, to name a few. J Street is only unusual in its heavy funding by Arabs (who seem to have finally realized how useful these outfits can be). Where J Street very much resembles its predecessors is in how the mainstream media has fallen in love with it. How many new, small, untested-for-staying power groups get full scale treatment in the “paper of record”? Breira did, in its day, in the mid-1970s. Not only in the New York Times, but in The Washington Post, even The London Times.

What AFSI’s 1977 pamphlet on Breira said of that organization is every bit as applicable to J Street: “Breira invites criticism of Israel, makes indeed a virtuous and courageous act of it….Israel has ’behaved badly,’ ’oppressed Palestinians,’ ’ignored the prophetic mission it was her task to fulfill,’ ’has not really sought peace’….It is the basic dishonesty of Breira, which abandons Israel in the name of commitment to her future, that has made it such an attractive tool for those hostile to the state.”

And that’s the attraction of all these groups for the anti-Israel media.

NEGOTIATING WITH AHMADINEJAD

Political analyst Barry Rubin calls Obama’s negotiating with Iran the most important—and worst—of his foreign policy decisions. Here’s why:

“By letting its own strategy [raised sanctions] be derailed it [the U.S.] looks ineffective.

By accepting an insulting proposal obviously meant to change the agenda it will be perceived as being humiliated.

By ignoring the recent behavior of the Iranian regime it will invite more of the same.

By letting Russia and China veto a U.S. policy it seems to have abandoned American leadership in the world. Or at least of the West.

By allowing the Iranian regime to stall for time it has apparently moved a long way toward acceding to Iran’s having nuclear weapons, and not just the weapons but weapons in the hands of the country’s most extreme faction.

A big price will be paid in future for this mistake.”

.

Posted by Ruth at 12:29 PM

OBAMA AT THE UN: TAKE ISRAEL, PLEASE

RUTH KING

As I sit down to write this, I just had the great displeasure of reading and rereading President Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly.

At the outset he stated to the assembly of America’s staunch enemies: “No longer do we have the luxury of indulging our differences to the exclusion of the work that we must do together.”

Must we really work with thugs and serial human rights oppressors? For what common purpose? And which ones? Mugabe perhaps. Or maybe we can figure things out with the butcher of Darfur, Omar al Bashir. Then there's Qaddafi who in his 90 minute speech repeatedly called Obama "our son" while urging a reinvestigation of the Kennedy assassination (the work of the Jews, according to Qaddafi). We have no differences with Canada or Australia or Belize--at least none that we cannot indulge. But what about Honduras? Here Obama is indulging his differences to the full, making every effort to bring down its democratic government and install a Chavez-clone.

Obama also reiterated a commitment to work closely with the United Nations: “We've re-engaged the United Nations. We have paid our bills. We have joined the Human Rights Council.” Now that’s comforting. Obama can bond with Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to wrong Israel by investigating alleged "war crimes" in Gaza. And that he did with relish, accusing Israel of possible “crimes against humanity” and recommending that if Israel fails to “properly” investigate its own behavior in Gaza it should be summoned before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Even the ADL and the rest of the comatose Presidents’ Conference were ruffled by that report.

But no matter, Obama quickly segued into the Middle East, his current passion (outside domestic affairs). He evoked his “special czar for Middle East Peace” George Mitchell who will midwife a settlement based on: "security for Israelis and Palestinians, borders, refugees, and Jerusalem……Two states living side by side in peace and security--a Jewish state of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people.”

Got that? Contiguous territory. That means Israel is cut in two since that's the only way Judea, Samaria and Gaza can be contiguous and Obama speaks of one Palestinian state, not two. Refugees. To the Arabs that means “right to return.” And in all his rhetoric about peace-making, never once has Obama said a word about resettling Arab refugees in Arab lands. Jerusalem, borders, refugees, occupation--back to the 1967 lines—-all the code words are there and his Arab audience knows what they mean.

Applause, applause…the man works his audience.

And then: “The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians.”

Applause and more applause.

Why should unwavering commitment to our most reliable ally be “coupled” with anything at all, particularly since the other party to the couple has not, can not and will not renounce its goal of destroying the Jewish state? That's its definition of the "legitimate claims" and "rights of the Palestinians." Does the President never read a word of what his new best friends say and write and preach?

Israel is clearly expendable to this administration despite the sappy message sent from the White House on the Jewish New Year that was the equivalent of a Hallmark greeting card “wishing you and yours,” with blanks to be filled in. The Ramadan greeting was lavish with praise for the Religion of Peace and its many contributions to justice, apple pie, and global well being. Just so they know he means it, he threw in his “unyielding” support for--you guessed it.

The President has signaled his intention to join the kangaroo court known as the United Nations in their unrelenting pressure and resolutions against Israel. His handlers Emanuel and Axelrod have leaked memos that he is “impatient” with Israel and, just as soon as he gets a moment after pummeling the American public with health care nationalization and a vast new system of energy taxation, he will turn full attention to exacting a suicide pact from Israel.

At the United Nations there was no mention of the terrorism and barbaric violations of human rights in the Arab/Moslem world. This is what Obama did say: "Extremists sowing terror in pockets of the world….Protracted conflicts that grind on and on; genocide; mass atrocities; more nations with nuclear weapons; melting ice caps and ravaged populations; persistent poverty and pandemic disease."

Applause, applause.

The irony is that he was addressing and appeasing and being applauded by a handsome collection of those very “extremists” and their enablers who perpetuate poverty and disease within their own populations and who sow terror and atrocities in pockets of the world including the United States. As for “melting icecaps”—I guess that’s “honor killing” of our environment.

Oh yes, he did give perfunctory warnings about North Korea and Iran and nukes. He threatened them with a “time out” to be followed by threats. You know, we have to set aside our differences and work together, one despot at a time.

So, why do Jews turn out for a rally against Ahmedinejad? What a waste of energy and good people with good intentions. Ahmadinejad threatens Israel and denies the Holocaust? So does Mahmoud Abu Mazen Abbas, the Palarab thug that Mitchell and Imamobama flaunt as their messenger for peace. Where is the rally against him? Furthermore, what cause for Jews does this rally advance? Giving Ahmedinejad a piece of their minds?

Jews and supporters of Israel should be rallying against the present administration. We are Americans and Obama is our elected leader with a Congress that has no notion that they work for us, and not the other way around.

Why don’t supporters of Israel join the “tea parties” and meld support for Israel and the betrayal of allies to the overwhelming opposition to the President’s domestic policies?

Why weren’t we part of the September 12th rally in Washington? That rally was heard around the world.

But only silence greets the abandonment of Israel and its ugly twin international anti-Semitism.

Posted by Ruth at 12:23 PM

TIT FOR TAT

DAVID WILDER

At first glance, it seems ironic that the author of the scathing report dealing with Israeli 'war crimes' during the Gaza war is a Jew. And not just any Jew. According to Goldstone's daughter, in an interview published by The Jerusalem Post, Richard Goldstone "is a Zionist and loves Israel."

As the proverbial saying goes, 'with friends like that, who needs enemies?'

Goldstone reportedly slept during accounts of rocket attacks on Sderot, in south Israel. So related Sderot resident and media expert Noam Bedein on Israel radio. However such accounts ignore the fact that there is only one bottom line for Goldstone and his sponsors: Jews may be attacked in any manner the attacker deems fit but may not defend themselves.

The state of Israel serves as a wonderful target for continued Jew-bashing. Perhaps one of the best examples, today especially relevant, was Israel's attack destroying Saddam's nuclear missile facilities in June, 1981. The United States blasted Israel for this attack. The United Nations Security council unanimously passed UN Resolution 487 which “strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct.”

This same pattern of behavior continues, as international policy demands 'negotiations' and 'sanctions' prior to any attempts to destroy Ahmadinejad's weapons of mass destruction. By that time, of course, it may be too late, but then, it's only Israel's existence that seems to be at stake.

The Goldstone Report is merely another manifestation of an international principle which allows Israel to be attacked and refuses to accept Israel's right to self defense.

But….And here is a big but.

I believe that the drama unfolding before our eyes, including the Goldstone report, is not only the fault of the international community. It is our fault, the direct responsibility of the state of Israel and a direct result of Israeli policies.

How so?

Nine years ago what is known as the "Second Intifada" began here in Hebron. Just after midnight Arab terrorists started shooting at the Jewish neighborhoods in the city. The gunfire came from the hills 'transferred'/abandoned to the Palestinian authority in January, 1997 with implementation of the 'Hebron Accords.' Shooting also started in other areas of Judea and Samaria. Jerusalem's southern neighborhood, Gilo, came under attack from Bethlehem and Beit Jala.

The shooting continued for over two years, with the Barak/Sharon administrations refusing properly to defend its citizens against sustained, incessant attacks. Had the government ordered the army back into the areas and cities handed over to the PA the attacks would have ended immediately. Instead, the state's leaders watched as almost 1,500 Jews were murdered by Arab terrorists.

But it should be remembered that, prior to this war, Gush Katif communities were under mortar fire day and night for years. Thousands of mortars were shot at civilian and military populations with no effective answer from those who were elected to keep Israelis safe. The missile attacks against Kiryat Shmona and cities in the Israeli north should also not be forgotten, attacks which remained unanswered for years.

And finally, how many rockets were shot into Sderot following the catastrophic expulsion and destruction of the communities of Gush Katif. Thousands and thousands and thousands.

And let it not be said that the government didn't know, that it wasn't warned. Recently, at a lecture in Netanya, retired Major-General Yaakov Amidror said: "A secret IDF Intelligence assessment warned as early as 1993 that the Oslo Accords would likely end with rocket attacks on Ashkelon." The politicians were not interested. According to Amidror, who headed the IDF's Research and Assessment Division responsible for preparing the National Intelligence Assessment, the decision to go ahead with the Oslo agreements between Israel and the PLO was made without taking into account the military implications. Amidror claims the Rabin government "completely ignored" IDF assessments.

Writers, myself included, warned, year after year, of the deadly implications of Oslo, Hebron, Wye, Gush Katif. To no avail. The government knew, and did nothing. In other words, Israel allowed itself to be attacked, without any true attempt to stop the terror. That being the case, when, at long last, Israel finally decided to take action, our enemies, enemies from without and enemies from within, raised a red flag imprinted with a huge question mark: What happened—why now? The state of Israel had restrained itself for so long, had decided not to protect itself, its citizens and its cities, that any such action was viewed as bizarre and uncharacteristic. And with this, a great international outcry--How dare you!!!

In this High Holy Day season we try to take stock of the events of the past year, to determine how to correct our errors in the future. We are taught that one of the ways G-d deals with us human beings is, in Hebrew, mida c'neged mida. Translated this means something like tit for tat. You get back what you gave.

Ehud Barak, presently Defense Minister, nine years ago Prime Minister, fled from Lebanon and offered Arafat almost all of Judea and Samaria, including Jerusalem. Now he claims that the Goldstone report encourages terror. Tit for tat, Mr. Barak. You did nothing to stop terror. You encouraged it by doing nothing about it; you tried to appease the terrorists by offering to abandon more of Eretz Yisrael. Now you're getting it back in the form of another Jew blaming you for trying (and, by the way, not succeeding) to stop the terror, much too little, much too late. Mida c'neged mida.

David Wilder is spokesman for Hebron’s Jewish community of Hebron.

Posted by Ruth at 12:18 PM

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS THE "CENTER" OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM?

HUGH FITZGERALD

“Somalia is the next challenge in efforts to stem Islamic terrorism, a report said Sunday" (from a news article in Agence-France Presse).

Let's see. For many years, until just the day before yesterday, Iraq was "the central front" in the "war on terror."

But now the theatre of war has mysteriously moved more than a thousand miles eastward, and the theatergoers—chiefly American soldiers and civilians—have packed up and moved over to Afghanistan, which with neighboring Pakistan, constitutes Af-Pak. And it is Af-Pak that is now "the central front" in the "war on terror."

But for how long? If the Shi'a Zaidis in northern Yemen defeat the government forces, and that would worry the Saudi government, won't the Saudis then tell the Americans that they have to take care of Yemen? Then Yemen may very well come to constitute, after Af-Pak, or perhaps substituted for it, the "central front" in the "war on terror."

And Libya, don't forget Libya, which thanks to the whims of Muammar Qaddafi can become at a moment's notice a candidate for being the "central front" of the "war on terror." Qaddafy has for decades supplied money to all sorts of terrorist groups, and he could take it into his head to do so again.

And what about the Islamic Republic of Iran? Remember that Iran has been involved in all sorts of attacks abroad, including the blowing up of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires. And Iran has supported Hizballah with money and weaponry so that it, in turn, can terrorize the Christians, the Druse, even the Sunnis of Lebanon. As a consequence, Lebanon appears now to be in a state of permanent political paralysis. Would Iran, especially if it acquires nuclear weapons, not become, not almost certainly come to be recognized, as "the new center" in the "war on terror"?

And then there is Syria. The country is ruled of, by, and for Alawites, who rule in the armed forces but who constitute only 12% of the population. So far Bashar al-Assad appears to think he can continue in power by placating the Shi'a of Iran (acting as a conduit for Iranian weapons and money to Hezbollah, and standing by Iran diplomatically). Part of his strategy also involves placating the Sunnis of Syria by allowing other Sunnis--particularly the exiled Ba'athists of Iraq--to enter Iraq to conduct attacks to destabilize the Shi'a-controlled government. Why should not Syria become at some point part of the "central front" in the "war on terrorism," possibly along with Iran?

And then there's Saudi Arabia, with a regime of those Al-Saud princes and princelings who, all daggers and dishdashas and sneers of cold command, toy with the Americans, even as they hire an army of propagandists to write Op/Ed articles on the bestial behavior of those quite unreasonable Israelis (when the Arabs have cried Peace! Peace! for so long, but because of Israel, there is no peace). These princes and princelings continue with their promotion of Islam, and of the most uncompromising and therefore most sinister and malevolent form of Islam--their own homegrown Wahhabi version. The Al-Saud, with a regime that gets good press for its ballyhooed ability to "turn terrorists around," in fact does nothing more than persuade some Muslims who were attacking the Saudi government for being in bed with Infidels. They convince them that the Saudis, with their sly ways, have managed to do far more for Islam than those terrorists did, in their obvious way, on the eleventh of September, 2001.

And it's true. Despite appearances -- or despite what American officials continue to pretend to believe because it is easier than recognizing the grim truth--those Saudi princes are doing everything they can, through deployment of the Money Weapon, to further the cause of Islam.

All the mosques and madrassas and campaigns of Da'wa that the Saudis pay for in the West create more and more and more Muslims. The more Muslims there are, the greater the pool of potential terrorists, and the larger the number of those who believe in Jihad and will support or pursue it by other means. This in turn leads to a greater expense and a more nightmarish problem (see Great Britain, see France) for the security services of the Infidel nation-states that have allowed this problem to build and build.

So even if you right now want to join the American government in pretending, or even believing (it's hard to decide which is worse) that Saudi Arabia is a "staunch ally" in the "war on terrorism" because, you see, "it too is threatened," won't you at least agree that Saudi Arabia, too, might someday be recognized as a "center" in the "war on terrorism"?

And what about a member of NATO, Turkey? In Turkey, once seen as thoroughly, permanently secular in its orientation, Islam is back with a vengeance, as Erdogan step by systematic step undoes the secularists. The university rectors, and the journalists, and the lawyers, and the professors, and the curators at Topkapi, and the art gallery and bookstore owners and habitues, and a dozen Orhan Pamuks, cannot prevent Turkey from becoming more and more like the Arab states and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Could it be that in a future not far away, Turkey, stout provider of troops to NATO during the Korean War, listening post and provider of airbases during the Cold War, might become—whether or not Erdogan succeeds in consolidating power, and whether or not Turkey becomes part of the EU— a "center" of the "war on terrorism"?

And what about—oh, go around the world and ask what is going on in Chechnya, or Bosnia, and whether you have heard of Chechens or Bosnian Muslims being picked up in the most distant, seemingly oddest places, for participating in terror attacks.

And while we are at it, are there no recruits? Has no one been plotting, scheming, training, and then taking part, enough to make the countries that they now live in possible future "centers" in the "war on terrorism"? This is happening not in Iraq and Afghanistan, not in Pakistan and Syria and Iran, but in NATO countries that possess arsenals of the most advanced weaponry, and civilisationally are part of, and the heart of, the West. Wherever immigrants may come from, America remains, in its political and legal institutions, its language, its literature, its art, its science, a child of Europe, and its fate is tied to that of Europe. America would suffer terribly were it to see those who gave it birth succumb to Islam.

We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek that "center" of the "war on terrorism" everywhere. But we need not, because there is no "center." Muslim terrorism will take place wherever there are a sufficient number of Muslims ready and able to participate in violent Jihad. Those who are willing only to promote Jihad through non-violent means could, at any time, and for any number of reasons, metamorphose into those who are willing to use violent means—that is, qitaal (combat), including what we have no trouble identifying as terrorism but that Muslims see merely as a form of qitaal that is justified because Infidels are militarily superior, and that isn't fair.

How long will it be before enough plots are hatched in such unlikely-sounding places as England and France and Denmark and the Netherlands and Belgium and Germany and Italy, that they become "centers" in the "war on terrorism"? And long before they become those "centers," they are already places where the Jihad, rightly defined, is underway. Now it's a question of having this most obvious of observations becoming recognized, and understood, in those corridors of power all over the Western world—the ones that have those banana-peels strewn about, and on which policymakers keep slipping and taking their falls, and their pratfalls. La commedia è finita, however. At this point, no one should be laughing.

Hugh Fitzgerald is a vice president of Jihadwatch to which he contributes regular articles. This is a briefer version of an article that appeared on Jihadwatch on September 20.

Posted by Ruth at 12:16 PM

GEERT WILDERS' SPEECH TO THE DUTCH PARLIAMENT

GEERT WILDERS

Speech On The First Day Of The General Debate in The Dutch Parliament

Editors Note: The following is excerpted from a speech by Geert Wilders, the fearless and outspoken leader of the PPV (Dutch Freedom Party). Wilders goes on trial on January 20, accused by the Dutch government of “racism and hate mongering” for speaking out about Islam. The largest Dutch paper calls it “the trial of the century.” (It is interesting that the public prosecutor wanted to dismiss the case on the grounds that Wilders had contributed to the debate on Islam in Dutch society and was guilty of no criminal offense but was overruled by the Amsterdam appeals court.) Like Churchill in the 1930s, Wilders is a political voice in the wilderness, warning willfully blind elites of the dangers that are closing in. And as this speech shows, like Churchill, he will not be silenced.

It is over. This government has run aground, like an old car that got stuck in loose sand. It still squeaks a little, it cracks. The battery is dead. It's all over. Madam Chairman, it would be laughable if it were not for the future of the Netherlands. Then you could make fun of that little club of helpless people who stare out through the misty windscreen, hoping there is someone who can tell them which way to go.

There is just one reason the [coalition government] continues stumbling: that is out of fear of elections.

For when the Netherlands gets to vote, it will show that the crisis mainly is happening in one specific place—and that is in the government. How dare the government go after ordinary citizens while they simultaneously spend billions on banks and leftist hobbies, and hundreds of millions for the 19,000 asylum seekers that await us next year, about double the number of last year!

But, fair is fair; there is also a lot being achieved by this government. For instance, integration goes very well—at least, the integration of the Netherlands into Dar-al-Islam, the Islamic world. This government is enthusiastically co-operating with the Islamization of the Netherlands. In all of Europe the elite opens the floodgates wide. In only a little while, one in five people in the European Union will be Muslim. Good news for this multiculti-government that views bowing to the horrors of Allah as its most important task. Good news for the CDA [Christian Democratic Appeal, the party of the Prime Minister]: C-D-A, in the meanwhile stands for Christians Serve Allah [Christenen Dienen Allah].

Madam Chairman, this government, this elite does not have even the slightest will to oppose Islamization. No, it looks to it as a great enrichment of the Dutch landscape. All those snug mosques, those cute headscarves, those cozy burkas. Yes, the Netherlands really becomes more beautiful with that. Here and there from time to time some are left dead, or some are raped, and eventually our country will go bankrupt. But all that may not spoil the fun. Only a grumbler would pay attention to that. Just have patience for a little while, because we await the Islamic Utopia.

Those headscarves are a true sign of oppression of women, of subjugation, of conquest. It is a symbol of an ideology that is out there to colonize us. Therefore: it is time for a big spring-cleaning of our streets. If our new Dutch citizens want so badly to show their love for that seventh-century desert ideology, then they should rather comfortably do that in a Muslim country, but not here, not in our country.

Madam Chairman, the government refuses to tell the citizen what mass immigration and the presence of non-western immigrants costs us. The government refused to answer our questions on this. Fortunately we know approximately what this joke costs us. The Dutch weekly Elsevier did a calculation and came up with over two hundred billion euros. To be precise: 216 billion euros [$318 billion]. For this year alone that already means nearly 13 billion euros [$20 billion].

But, Madam Chairman, this government does not want to know it. "For we aren't going to calculate how much the elderly cost us, either," the government says. How is it we do not know how much an elderly person costs? Someone in a nursing home costs €165 a day, a prisoner €192 and a TBSers [criminally mentally ill offenders] €476 euros. But when it comes to the electoral cattle of the Socialist Party then the truth has to remain under the hood. When it comes to immigration, that information suddenly almost seems a state secret. And this while immigration is the result of government policy, the result of the decision to open the locks wide.

Madam Chairman, the Netherlands has approximately one million Muslims. Many of them are immigrants. And none of those really came over here out of love for the Netherlands. What did they come over for then? Well, for state benefits, for instance. And before you attack me on this, I am not the only one who says this. Green/Left MP Tofik Dibi recently said that young people in Morocco view the Netherlands as a utopia where you can get free benefits. A takeaway counter for free money, as I understand it. In short, they come here out of an economic calculation. Over there penniless, here a fat benefit.

Madam Chairman, is it such a surprise then, that we start to wonder how much that leftist hobby costs us? That we carry out an economic calculation? If they do it, why can't we?

We stand at a crossroads: do we opt for more mass immigration or do we choose for our own elderly? The Party for Freedom chooses for our elderly.
Madam Chairman, sound economic policy starts with lower taxes. These are necessary for the first steps on the road to a better Netherlands, and that can already be done next year. Therefore we created a counter-budget proposal. In 2010 we start with a cut of seven billion on leftist hobbies and subsidies. With this we lower the income tax in the second level [tax on income and property and for social security "insurances", now circa 42%] by 3%. This means not a few euros less [like in the government budget], but a few hundred euros more for an average family.

And, apart from tax reduction, we have other plans to slightly soften where possible the economic crisis. Two plans to boost the economy. First: we cut the property transfer tax in half [tax on house sales, circa 6-8% of the sale price]. That will make the housing market slowly start up again, because buying a house becomes cheaper.

Second: we boost job creation by temporarily making labor cheaper. The PVV budgets 320 million euros to help people who lost their jobs get on a faster track to a job in the private sector. We scrap the social security charges for one year for employers who take on people from unemployment. This enables 100,000 people who could no longer have jobs because of the crisis to get back to work faster! 100,000 people!

Madam Chairman, crime must be taken on much harder. The Netherlands should be reconquered, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood. With officers who act rock-hard against criminals instead of issuing speeding fines for driving a few miles too fast. Never again a community service or a low prison sentence for rape. Moroccan street terrorists we must pick up. We must take them on rock-hard.

Madam Chairman, in our new Netherlands, the heaviest punishment will be imprisonment—not living in our nursing homes. They [criminals]] have it much better in prison. The PVV proposal is crystal clear. Give our elderly in the nursing homes more rights than prisoners, and take away the luxuries for those villains in prison. No game computers, no TVs anymore, no halal food, no sport and recreation. Let them feel they are criminals. And spoil our elderly. It does not seem too much to ask that the people who had to eat tulip bulbs in the famine winter [1944-45], who worked on the rebuilding of the Netherlands after the war—that these people may have a better deal than burglars, rapists, and murderers.

Madam Chairman, I conclude. The Netherlands would look so much better without this government. Richer. Safer. More social. And above all: more Dutch. The elite is dreaming their sweet pink dreams, but the people are not crazy. The people, who have been betrayed for decades, will no longer take it. Change is in the air. Hope glimmers on the horizon. You can taste it everywhere. There is no stopping it. Everybody sees it. Except the people in that little car, in the dead of night, somewhere in the middle of the woods. Stuck in the loose sand. The battery is dead.

It is pitch dark and dead quiet. They are all lost. Nobody cares for them anymore. The silence is only disturbed by the little GPS that says to this government "You have arrived at your destination".

It is time for elections!

Posted by Ruth at 12:13 PM

A LANDMARK WORK

WILLIAM MEHLMAN
A Review

With The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law (Mazo Publishers, Jerusalem) Canadian-born Israeli constitutional scholar and lawyer Howard Grief has given us a book that shatters every myth, lie, misrepresentation and distortion employed over the 61 years of Israel’s existence to negate the sovereign rights of the Jewish People to their national home.

It is a lengthy treatise—660 pages plus a 50-page appendix—but the Jewish people’s long and tortuous struggle to retrieve their stolen patrimony deserves nothing less than full disclosure. Anyone who has ever been at a loss to counter the slanders and calumnies that are the stock in trade of the Israel-bashers and anti-Semites on both the Left and Right will treasure every one of its 20 illuminating chapters.

Rooted in the premise that the best antidote to a myriad of small and medium sized fabrications is the exposure of the whole cloth from which they’ve been woven, The Legal Foundation lays bare two dominant myths that have shaped popular perspectives on Israel. The first is the fallacy that Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel was the joint product of the 1947 United Nations Partition and the May 15th, 1948 termination of the British Mandate for Palestine. In fact, as Grief points out, Jewish sovereignty in Palestine had been validated under international law 28 years earlier. “The legal title of the Jewish People to the mandated territory of Palestine in all of its historical parts,” he informs us, was first recognized on April 24, 1920 when the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council (Britain, France, Italy and Japan), meeting in San Remo, Italy, “converted the 1917 ‘Balfour Declaration’ into a binding legal document.”

How “binding” may be construed from the fact that its wording gave effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and became incorporated into the Mandate for Palestine. Indeed, the “San Remo Resolution,” within which the Allied Supreme Council’s decision is contained, constitutes what the author terms “the foundation document of the State of Israel, the legal existence of which is directly traceable from that document.”

That the Jewish People were unable to exercise their sovereignty in Palestine for 28 years—it being assigned to the British Mandatory power as their de facto agent—did in no way detract from their de jure rights to the land under international law during that interregnum. In this thesis, Grief is ironically supported by both a passionate Zionist, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and one of Zionism’s most implacable opponents, post World War I British Foreign Secretary Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. Brandeis believed that with the passage of the San Remo Resolution, the debate over who owned Palestine was effectively over. Curzon called the Resolution the “Magna Carta” of the Jewish People.

From the initial misattribution of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to the 1947 Partition Plan rather than the 1920 San Remo Resolution, it was just a hop and a skip to a second major misrepresentation of Israel’s international legal status—the erroneous assumption that the Partition Plan and the May 1948 termination of the British Mandate somehow erased the Jewish People’s rights to Palestine in all its historical parts and dimensions enunciated at San Remo, and implemented under the terms of the League of Nations Covenant. Those “parts and dimensions” were defined inter alia, as including the northwestern portions of the Golan and most of present day Jordan by the “Franco-British Boundary Convention” in Paris.

The presumptive cancellation of those rights, Grief submits, is thoroughly discredited by “the principle of acquired rights,“ codified in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the “Law of Treaties,” and the “doctrine of estoppel.” The first, he asserts, insures that “the fundamental rights of the Jewish people did not lapse with the international process [the San Remo Resolution] which brought them into existence. The second further guarantees that these rights cannot “simply be abrogated or denied by those states which previously recognized their existence.” Taken together, they provide what the author terms a “definitive answer [to] anyone who claims that Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over all of Palestine and the land of Israel did not continue after the end of the Mandate for Palestine…except in the allotted boundaries of the UN Partition Plan…”

Noteworthy among the states that wholeheartedly endorsed Jewish sovereignty over Palestine in all its “historical parts and dimensions” was the United States of America—the same U.S.A that today regards Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria as an illegal “occupation” of lands upon which it favors the creation of a Palestinian State. The Obama administration and the Bush administration that preceded it are either unaware or have chosen to be unaware of the fact that the 1924 Anglo-American Convention on Palestine made the U.S. a “contracting party” to the Mandate, further reinforcing a unanimously passed Joint Resolution of the 67th Congress two years earlier, signed by President Warren G. Harding, recognizing a future Jewish State in “the whole of Palestine.”

It needs to be borne in mind, Grief notes, that the Mandate for Palestine that was ceremoniously incorporated into U.S. law in 1924 “was a constitution for the projected Jewish state that made no provision for an Arab state and which especially prohibited the partition of the country.” Thus, he concludes, the fierce exception the U.S. has taken to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and its unremitting pressure for creation of a “Palestinian State” amount to a repudiation of its signature to the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine. It is in violation of American law and America’s obligations under international law.

The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law is the product of 25 years of independent research by Grief, a former adviser on international law to the late Professor Yuval Ne’eman, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure in the Shamir government and the father of Israel’s nuclear energy program. It is the kind of seminal work that seems destined to become both an indispensible source for defenders of Israel’s rights under international law and a mirror on the events and personalities that transformed a November 2, 1917 letter from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild into the trumpet call that awakened Jewish nationhood from a 1,900-year coma.

The author’s unsparing portrayal of France’s opposition to the creation of a Jewish state at San Remo and, when thwarted, its efforts at the Franco-British Boundary Convention to confine it to the narrowest geographical limits, should dismiss any notion that French anti-Zionism began with De Gaulle. By the same token, the Zionist sympathies attributed to Winston Churchill by Martin Gilbert and other historians withers in the face of the 1922 “White Paper” attached to his name as then Colonial Secretary. Grief offers irrefutable evidence of its having not only “negated” the Jewish state in Palestine that the Mandate “required” of Britain, but of having elevated “Arab pretensions and aspirations to such an extent that everything thereafter became muddled…subject to continuous disputes as to what was really intended in the Mandate for Palestine.”

For the actual authorship of that document and the wreckage it made of the original plan for the establishment of a Jewish state in all its “historic parts and dimensions” under British tutelage, we have Herbert Samuel to thank–the same Herbert Samuel who worked closely with Chaim Weizmann in the Zionist Organization and was later to pack it in for a “Lordship” and an appointment as British High Commissioner to Palestine. In ironic contrast, Lord Curzon, Balfour’s successor as Foreign Secretary, who “detested” the idea of a Jewish state, put loyalty above personal feelings at San Remo and Paris in arguing manfully for the realization of Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s vision of a Jewish state comprised of all its ancient Biblical territories.

On the Jewish side, nobody comes off better in this saga than Brandeis, who Grief portrays as “the only Zionist leader…who properly understood the natural consequences of the legal recognition of the Balfour Declaration embodied in the San Remo Resolution.” Had Brandeis headed the Zionist Organization, the author believes, “there is little doubt that he would have successfully halted Britain’s gross violation of its [Mandatory] obligation …to rebuild the Jewish state.”

At the end of the day, it was Menachem Begin who provided the most heartbreaking counterpoint to Lloyd George’s vision of a Jewish state reconstituted in most, if not all of its Biblical parts, Grief submits. Begin, national Zionism’s anointed champion, bearer of the torch lit by Herzl and passed to Jabotinsky, not only failed to make Israel constitutionally whole by annexing Judea, Samaria and Gaza (as he was expected to do), but in what the author describes as an act of “unimaginable folly,” brought to the Knesset in 1977 a plan to establish Arab “self-rule” over those critical portions of the Jewish estate. In so doing, he opened the portals wide for their identification as “unalloted,” “disputed” and finally “occupied” territories.

Nine months later, in September 1978, Begin crowned his ”achievement” by injecting the “self-rule” proposal into the negotiations with Egypt at Camp David, offering to leave the final determination of sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Gaza to their inhabitants and “local representatives.” Thirty one years later, Israel remains bedeviled by that fateful decision.

William Mehlman is AFSI’s representative in Israel. Grief’s book is sold on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Posted by Ruth at 12:08 PM

ARABS ARE NOT READY FOR PEACE

DR. SAMI ALRABAA

What has Tony Blair, former British prime minister, achieved since his appointment, in July 2007, as special envoy of the Middle East Peace "Quartet"? Nothing.

What has George Mitchell achieved since assuming his job as the United States Special envoy for the Middle East in January 22, 2009? Nothing.

What have all those Western officials, including Xavier Solana, the Foreign Relations of European Union Coordinator, achieved through their shuttle diplomacy to the Middle East? Again, nothing.

In the meantime, while the European Union injects billions of dollars in a corrupt Palestinian Authority, the oil Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia and Libya, support Muslim terrorists with their petrodollars across the globe.

Nevertheless, the West still believes that it can help the Israelis and Arabs strike a peace deal.

Arabs are demagogues. They hail the man who threw his shoes at President Bush, who rid the Iraqis from one of the worst dictators in the history of mankind, as a hero. But none of them would dare do the same with an Arab dictator.

Even if Israel withdrew completely from the West Bank, as it did in Gaza, would the Arab regimes normalize their relations with Israel? Of course not. Although Israel signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, these Arab countries have not yet normalized their relations with the Jewish state. Egyptians hardy enough to visit Israel can expect heavy penalties.

If peace were attained in the Middle East, Arabs would ask, “What then?” They would start demanding political and social reforms. This implies, of course, the end of Arab regimes.

Unfortunately, peace in the Middle East has to wait 50-100 years. By then the current Arab dictators are dead, and both oil and petrodollar have dwindled and radical Muslims are dead or at least tired.

The West must change its foreign policy toward the Arab regimes. It must unequivocally tell these regimes: change or perish! Only then will peace prevail in the Middle East. Anything else is like talking to the wall. Enough is enough.

This is excerpted from an article in FamilySecurityMatters.org on Sept. 24. Dr. Alrabaa, an ex-Muslim, is a professor of Sociology who has taught at Kuwait University, King Saud University, and Michigan State University. He also writes for The Jerusalem Post.

Posted by Ruth at 12:02 PM

FATAHLISTIC IN THE MIDDLE EAST

RUTH KING

Given the current obsession with health care reform, here are medical questions. If your doctor prescribed a medication with no therapeutic effects but with side effects which almost killed you several times, how would you respond if he wanted you to try it again? Suppose you had a critical but curable disorder and instead of dealing with it your doctor insisted on amputation? What would you do?

Okay, I know the answers, but that is exactly what Dr. Obama and his “death panel” for Israel are doing, pushing prescriptions which bring Israel closer to extinction.

Smug George Mitchell and cheerleaders like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Rahm Emanuel, Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk (and assorted Jewish shills) are bending every effort to extract living wills from a stressed and desperate Israeli population. It’s routine by now. The more Israel concedes, the more the Arabs ratchet up their demands and terrorism against Israeli civilians. Follow the dots from Camp David to Oslo to the “Road Map” to the Gaza withdrawal to Obama’s "settlement freeze"--what journalist Cal Thomas has aptly called “Quid but no Quo.”

Once, dividing Jerusalem and creating what George Will once called “Arafatville” in Judea and Samaria raised hackles among Israel’s supporters, but now they are “acceptable” concessions. Soon to follow are the so called “right of return”, read, a flooding of Israel with Arab population, then a binational state, then dhimmitude for the Jews of Israel, and finally end of life counseling. Each disastrous move by Israel produces a new poster boy for Arab “moderation”--from Sadat to Arafat to the new golden boy, Mahmoud Abu Mazen Abbas.

Fatah, we are reassured, unlike Hezbollah and Hamas, is ready to cut a deal with Israel. In fact Fatah is ready to cut Israel’s throat, and its leader, “moderate’ terrorist Abu Mazen, holds the knife. Why is Israel asked to trust a man whose college thesis published by Moscow University denies the Holocaust; a man who masterminded the Munich Massacre in 1972; whose ties with rogue regimes and international terrorist networks is documented; whose “education ministry” produces the identical anti-Israel incitement that is the trademark of Hamas/Hezbollah; and who, for good measure, still refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and routinely promises a return to all-out violence if his demands are not met.

Why? Because so many of Israel’s supporters, including Alan Dershowitz and the grandees of the Presidents’ Conference, and the media and the think tankers and the same-old-same old State Department are hell bent on implementing the two state [dis]solution. By their reasoning, if Israel amputates itself deeply enough, Arab swords will turn to plowshares. But no. They will turn to shovels for burial.

Hello? Does anyone remember Gaza? Since the beginning of 2009 about 715 Qassam rockets, mortars and Grad missiles have been fired into Israel. What has been the response of the world? An increase in fulminations about the “settlements” and the “occupation” and more calls for boycotts of Israel in every sphere--the academies, the churches, financial institutions and the media.

And the peace loving Arabs of Judea and Samaria? They had a holiday greeting on Rosh Hashana. They set fire to Givat Gilad, a town in Samaria, which resulted in panic, evacuation, severe damage and several wounded and homeless residents. And that’s just a small taste of what Fatah would do if they gain total control of the area.

The Mideast is on the brink of conflagration. Iran steadily and surely is obtaining nuclear arms; Lebanon is a tinderbox, hostage to Hezbollah; Syria and Iraq, Iran and Libya are bonding over hatred of Israel and desire to humiliate the West; radical Islam is emboldened in its goal of a world-wide caliphate; the Taliban grows stronger and more defiant; and the sugar daddies of jihad, namely the Saudis and the Emirates continue to fund the spread of the ideologies that foment terror.

Fiddling while the Moslem world burns with hatred, the Obama administration exercises all its foreign policy muscle against Israel. What is behind this Fatahlistic approach? Why has our government gone beyond any previous administration in its antipathy to Israel?

Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger asks:

“What’s in it for the United States?

What has transformed Israel into an American liability? It is the largest U.S. aircraft carrier, which requires no U.S. personnel, which can't be sunk, which is the most battle-tested and cost effective, which is located in a most critical area for vital U.S. national security interests and which is sparing the U.S. mega-billion dollars annually and the stationing of additional real aircraft carriers in the Middle East?

Why would the U.S. Administration punish the Jewish State for fulfilling its security requirements, thus cutting off its (U.S.) nose to spite its (U.S.) face?”

The answer, I fear, lies in the President’s outreach to Moslems. The President understands what Bat Ye’or and Moshe Sharon and Raphael Israeli and Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom know. Islam’s price for a temporary and tenuous accommodation with the West is Israel.

And our President is willing to cut the deal.

Posted by Ruth at 12:00 PM

SEPTEMBER 2009

Table of Contents

Principles Above Politics
Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
Rael Jean Isaac

Solving The Arab Refugee Problem
by Rael Jean Isaac and Ruth King

Hebron’s Jews by Jerold Auerbach

Lux et Dhimmitude by Diana West

Swedish Hypocrisy by Fjordman

Hanna Senesh: A Flame That Still Burns
by Rita Kramer

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

Outpost is distributed free to
Members of Americans For a Safe Israel
Annual membership: $50.

Americans For a Safe Israel
1751 Second Ave. (at 91st St.)
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tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717
E-mail: afsi @rcn.com web site: http://www.afsi.org

Posted by Ruth at 10:47 PM

PRINCIPLES ABOVE POLITICS

Herbert Zweibon

On his recent trip to Israel former Arkansas governor (and Republican Presidential contender against McCain) Mike Huckabee put to shame not only the Congressional delegations that preceded him but Israel’s own Prime Minister.

Huckabee is no fair weather friend of Israel. While he, like Clinton, was born in Hope, Arkansas, unlike the Clintons, who tack with the wind, Huckabee over many years has consistently and staunchly supported Israel despite the fact that the state he governed had an insignificant Jewish population. On this trip Huckabee dared to up-end international political dogma and say simply that there is no room for a Palestinian state “in the middle of the Jewish homeland.” If the international community wanted to give the Palestinians a homeland, it would have to be somewhere else. Instead of the conventional pleading for Moslem acceptance of Jews near their holy places, Huckabee neatly turned tables and praised Israel for giving Moslems access to the Dome of the Rock, the site of the ancient Jewish temple, even though, he noted, the presence of a mosque there “could be considered an affront.”

The vilified “settlements” Obama is intent on “freezing”? Said Huckabee: “It concerns me when there are some in the United States who would want to tell Israel that it cannot allow people to live in their own country, wherever they want.” No restrictions, of the sort Netanyahu pleads for, about limiting Jewish communities to “natural growth” or fulfilling preexisting building contracts. Huckabee is straightforward: Jews have the right to build as they choose n their own country.

Huckabee also spoke with his feet. He traveled through Samaria, to Beit El , Har Gerizim, Har Beracha and Givat Olam and to Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem Obama wants to destroy. Metaphorically he put his finger squarely in Obama’s eye by going to a dinner, attended by a hundred people, including several members of the Knesset, on the grounds of the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem. Obama has specifically demanded that Israel stop the hotel’s Jewish owner from renovating the property, treating it as a symbolic key to re-dividing the city. The Shepherd Hotel is indeed heavy with symbolism. It was built by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Jerusalem mufti who mobilized Moslem forces for Hitler in World War II. When Israel reunited Jerusalem in the Six Day War, it took control of the empty structure and eventually sold it to its current owner, Zionist philanthropist Dr. Irving Moskovitz.

Contrast Huckabee’s forthright support for Israel’s rights with the 25 member Republican delegation led by Eric Cantor and the 29 member Democratic delegation that followed on its heels led by Steny Hoyer. Yes, they criticized Obama’s obsessive focus on a settlement freeze, but nary a one said that “the two state solution,” cutting off Judea and Samaria from Israel was illegitimate, and a recipe for Israel’s destruction. Contrast Huckabee’s stance with that of Netanyahu, who campaigned on the promise “no Palestinian state,” and collapsed on this central issue after one browbeating by Obama and who insisted publicly there would be no settlement freeze only, duplicitously, to institute one.

Perhaps the most important contribution of Huckabee’s visit is in giving heart to those Israeli leaders like Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon (who met with Huckabee on his visit) who say it is not necessary to capitulate to every dangerous and insulting American demand. The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick writes: “Huckabee’s trip showed that the administration is not operating in a policy vacuum. There is plenty of strong American support for an Israeli government that would stand up to the administration on the Palestinian issue and Iran alike.”

Posted by Ruth at 10:01 PM

FROM THE EDITOR

Rael Jean Isaac

Archaeology as Farce

The World Archaeological Congress chose Ramallah—of all places—for its recent international conference. The Israel Antiquities Authority’s deputy director Dr. Uzi Dahari accused the organization of excluding Israelis, not informing the IAA of the event and turning the proceedings into “little more than a political demonstration [against Israel].”

Further, Dahari noted that although it was unethical and unprofessional to visit active archaeological sites without informing the archaeologists charged with the excavation, the Congress had visited the Temple Mount and City of David Archaeological Park in Jerusalem without any such coordination, indeed with a politico-archaeological tour guide who, in the words of City of David spokesman Doron Spielman, engaged in “a political diatribe” designed to “use archaeology as a guise to enforce an extreme political agenda to weaken Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem.”

Spielman observes that it is particularly ironic to hold an archaeological conference in Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian Authority, when the Palestinian Authority-controlled Wakf carried out in 1999 what is likely the largest archaeological devastation in recent history, when they bulldozed and dumped 13,000 tons of archaeological earth from the Temple Mount.

J Street Meets S Street

It turns out the self-styled “pro-Israel” organization J Street receives substantial funding from Arabs and Palestinian Arab and Iran advocacy groups. We are confident they earn every dinar. But while it’s no surprise that Moslems find the virulently anti-Israel J Street worthy of support, it did come as a shock to learn from Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman that ADL “occasionally” receives money from Arabs. Foxman stated that the key issue in his mind was whether J Street’s contributors were individuals or organizations. That strikes us as a tad silly. Then Foxman asks: “Why are these Arab or Muslim organizations supporting a Jewish or pro-Israel group?” Precisely! And one has to ask the question of ADL as well.

As for J Street, it intersects with S Street. That’s S for Strumpet, for this outfit operates in the political red light district.

The Paper of Record

The New York Times merits its famous title as the paper of record—only now it’s the record for obfuscation. Reporting on the Fatah Party elections on August 12, it spun the event as “ushering in a younger generation,” “more pragmatic” than its elders, in a better position to negotiate with Israel.

Nary a mention that this “more pragmatic” leadership endorsed the terrorist-gangster Aksa Martyrs Brigades as Fatah’s official armed wing and proclaimed that the “right to return” was sacred. Nary a mention that the Fatah General Assembly decreed that Palestinian control over the entire city of Jerusalem, East and West, was a non-negotiable “red line.”

The U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem does not seem to differ from Fatah on the last score. Melanie Phillips notes that its website never mentions Israel. Writes Phillips: “As far as the U.S. Consulate is concerned, Israel’s capital city is Arab. It’s as if Israel and its Jewish identity have been airbrushed from history altogether.”

Honduras Wins

In the last Outpost we noted that small, impoverished Honduras put Israel to shame. We further noted that “it is only by standing up to pressure that a leader has the chance to develop countervailing pressures.” Honduras is already proving the validity of this observation. A month ago the entire world was arrayed against its courageous leadership, which had refused to back down after blocking President Zelaya’s attempt to remain in office through a Chavez-style coup. Now it is the State Department which has backed down, informing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Richard Lugar that the U.S. would no longer threaten sanctions on Honduras nor would it insist on Zelaya’s return to power. Since U.S. sanctions were the worst threat (Honduras depends on the U.S. for 80% of its trade) this is a clear win for the new Honduras.

Iran’s Bomb

Iran is going into its familiar routine of playing the West like a fiddle (it’s opening up one of its reactors to IAEA inspection in an effort to obtain yet more time to get its nuclear weapons program up and running). Just prior to this phony “breakthrough” the Konrad Adenauer foundation had organized a conference of Iran experts (including diplomats who had served in Teheran, former senior Iranian military officers and defense and intelligence officials). British journalist Con Coughlin (no friend of Israel) reports that the
consensus at the conference was that unless Iran could be prevailed on to rein in its nuclear ambitions (which they considered highly unlikely, especially given Obama’s appeasement of the mullahs) the world is heading toward calamity. With the political will to stop Iran diminishing in the West, conference participants concluded the most likely outcome was for leading Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt, to seek to acquire their own nuclear arsenals. And alas, as Coughlin writes “the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, which could be relied upon during the Cold War to prevent a nuclear holocaust, cannot be applied to a region in which national pride and personal honour often take precedence over the more basic human instinct for self-preservation.”

De Mortuis, Veritas

In “Bob Novak, Truth Seeker,” (Wall Street Journal, August 20) Jeffrey Bell, a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, adds to the praise gushing from the right for the conservative columnist. The focus in Bell’s op-ed is on Novak’s ability to change his mind, his openness to argument, his ever-readiness “to open a new door.”

But there was one issue on which Novak shut the door—Israel. Born a Jew (he finally converted to Catholicism in 1998), Novak was so consistently, obsessively and irrationally hostile to Israel (Jewish self-hatred, anyone?) that he even embraced Hamas.

Debbie Schlussel and Diana West have been among the very few to zero in on Novak as hater of Israel. Both quote from a November 24, 2001 CNN Capital Gang just after Israeli forces had killed Hamas mastermind Abu Hanoud (he was behind the Sbarro pizza parlor murders and those at the Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv, among others). Novak was livid, his reaction so outrageous that the Capital Gang, left (Margaret Carlson, Al Hunt) and right (Kate O’Beirne), ganged up on him. When O’Beirne argued the killing was self-defense, Novak retorted that he was “always amazed how American conservatives can get involved in this absolutely mindless support of the intransigent Israeli policy.” When Carlson referred to Hanoud as a terrorist Novak retorted: “Why do you call him a terrorist? I mean, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Carlson shot back: “Bob, you’re the only person who would call Hamas freedom fighters.” Sticking to his pro-terrorist guns, Novak replied: “Oh, no; people all over the world do.” (For Novak clearly it was no bar that Hamas, as Ken Levin puts it “explicitly declares in its charter, in its media, in its mosques, in its schools, its dedication not only to the annihilation of Israel but to the murder of all Jews, and daily seeks to translate its words into acts.”)

Schlussel reports on Novak’s reaction when, in 1989, attending the conservative National Journalism Center school at which he was a speaker, she challenged him. “I asked him, since he was such an anti-Communist, why he would openly support Yasser Arafat and the PLO—who were sponsored and funded by the Soviets and had trained with other Communists around the world that he [Novak] hated….And I asked him to name a single other communist group he supported in the world. He sputtered to give a response, because he and I both knew the truth: he simply hated Jews.”

Diana West puts her finger on what is really disturbing: “The question is, how does this significant aspect of Novak’s political makeup—repeated over time—get lost in all the lionizing. At least in the early reactions I have seen, it is as if it has been erased from the record. As far as many conservatives go, to-the-hilt support for a jihad group dedicated to the eradication of Israel just doesn’t count for anything at all in the end.”

The Peres Center Boondoggle

Haaretz on August 21 ran an article by Uri Blau detailing how the Peres Center for Peace had become a vanity project spending most of its millions on a trophy building in Jaffa and elaborate parties drawing billionaires around the globe jockeying to sit close to the Great Man of Peace.

Actually, this is good news. By spilling its money on a high design building with huge cost overruns and over-the-top social events, the Center is prevented from funding “peace projects” that would do real damage. (One of the projects staff laments having to cut was a joint Israeli-Palestinian theater group—My Name is Rachel Corrie is feeble fare compared to the anti-Israel propaganda that would flood out of this operation.)

Still, the story is amusing. According to the Center’s director general Ron Pundak “the architect is very, let’s say, original” and his design posed a large number of engineering problems. As costs mounted, the Center sought vainly to take out a mortgage. The building, consisting of layers of green-tinged cement on bands of glass, is in the heart of a poor Arab neighborhood adjacent to a Moslem cemetery. The banks, Pundak notes ruefully, “claim it would be impossible to sell the building.”

As for its tenth anniversary party in October 2008, Blau writes that it drew tycoons, artists and actors from the ends of the earth. “We filled the airportwith private planes,” a former Center employee tells Blau. Every tycoon and celebrity wanted to be seated next to Peres, posing a big problem. A worse problem was that fund-raising fell so short that the celebration cost far more than it brought in.

Pundak notes the building is all donors want to fund—out of “love for Peres” and a feeling it’s necessary to create something to remember him by. The building is a fitting memorial to Simple Shimon—an unsalable cement box adjoining a Moslem cemetery.

Watching Joe Stork

Writing on the Commentary blog, Noah Pollak praises “a block buster article” by Ben-Dror Yemini in Maariv for exposing the anti-Israel background of Human Rights Watch’s Joe Stork. Please. Much of it was obviously drawn, probably second or third hand, from AFSI’s 1977 pamphlet Breira: Counsel for Judaism available on www.afsi.org, see esp. pp. 12-14. (To his credit, Yemini wrote a splendid riposte to Stork who was stung into attacking the article.)

An interesting fact that no one has mentioned is that Barry Rubin, like Joe Stork. started his career in MERIP (the Middle East Research and Information Project), a radical outfit dedicated to the proposition that Zionism had to be destroyed to create a “socialist” Middle East. Both Stork and Rubin have maintained their focus on Israel but the paths they took could not be more different. The difference is typified by the most recent actions of each. Stork called a press conference where, absent evidence, he accused the IDF of killing twelve Palestinians in Gaza who waved white flags. At the same time Barry Rubin, now a political analyst and long time resident of Israel, was exposing the indecent allegations of a Swedish newspaper that the IDF stole organs of dead Palestinians.

The title of Rubin’s piece, equally applicable to Joe Stork, was “How Low Can They Go?”

Posted by Ruth at 09:58 PM

PUTTING FIRST THINGS FIRST-SOLVING THE ARAB REFUGEE PROBLEM

Rael Jean Isaac and Ruth King

Editors Note: In the September 2003 Outpost we published the first version of this article entitled “Putting First Things Last: The 55 Year Failure to Address the Arab Refugee Problem.” The failure is now 61 years old and we felt it was time to say it again: the integration of the refugees into Arab countries is a prerequisite for any meaningful agreement. We published an updated version of our 2003 article on the Family Security Matters website on August 12, 2009. We reprint that article—slightly expanded—because this issue has been neglected by Jewish organizations almost as badly as by diplomats, Middle East experts and the media. If Jewish organizations, each time the issue of settlements was raised, would say “No, the core issue is refugees, with their claimed ‘right of return,’ What are you doing to resettle them in Arab countries?” they could force a shift in the terms of the debate.

The Rogers Plan of 1969, like all subsequent and ill-fated efforts to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict, tabled the issue of the Palestinian "refugees," leaving it for "final status" negotiations. "It is our hope," said the Rogers Plan, "that agreement on the key issues of peace, security, withdrawal and territory will create a climate in which these questions of refugees...can be resolved as part of the overall settlement."

But this is to put first things last. As the passage of time has made abundantly clear, the issue of "refugees" remains the defining obstacle to any reconciliation in the region. Pretending to negotiate, without addressing this issue at the outset, is like operating on a patient and leaving a growing cancer intact. Had it been confronted in 1949, the prospects for finding a subsequent modus vivendi between Israel and the Arabs would have been vastly improved.

President Obama has promised a fresh perspective on issues, to bring "change" in the old ways of doing things. There is no better place to start than by confronting the core issue of the Arab refugees head on—and putting responsibility for solving it on the only ones who can do so, the Arab states.

When the problem of the Arab refugees was at last put on the table at Camp David in the year 2000, the issue blew up the tattered remnant of the Oslo "peace process." Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak thought he had a winning formula. Israel would make a virtually total territorial withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines. In return, all that would be asked of the Palestinian Authority was to abandon the "right to return," i.e. to eliminate, via demography, the Jewish state. If the Arab-Israel conflict was susceptible to solution via "land for peace," Barak should have had a deal. But Arafat refused to give up the "right to return" and launched outright war, including the most deadly series of terrorist attacks in Israel's history.

When the present “peace processing” runs into the same impasse (and the "moderate" Abbas, never mind Hamas, repeatedly reiterates that the Palestinians will never give up the refugees' right to return) the resulting explosion is likely to make the old intifada look like pale beer.

There is a widespread impression that the Arab refugee problem is immutable. But is it? Before we offer our answer, it's time to examine more closely the question: Who are the Palestinian Arab refugees?

Initially, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which administers the refugee camps, defined Palestine refugees as persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. The camps opened in 1950, in the wake of the first Arab war to destroy the state of Israel. The precise number of Arab refugees as a result of that war is uncertain, estimates ranging from 450,000 to 700,000. Even experts who lean to the higher side believe that no more than 550,000 wound up in refugee camps, since some fled to families settled in other Arab countries and fleeing Bedouin resumed their nomadic life in Jordan.

UNRWA would set up 59 camps in what is now Judea and Samaria, Gaza (then part of Egypt), Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Certainly no one, including UNWRA and its donors, imagined that refugee status would become a heritable trust to be bestowed on the refugees' cousins, sisters and their aunts, their children, grandchildren, by now their great grandchildren. Yet now the world (including the world's Jews) accept without protest UNRWA's assertion (on its 2009 homepage) that it provides education, healthcare, social services and emergency aid to over 4.6 million Palestinian refugees. UNWRA, which has relocated headquarters from Amman to Gaza, the better to serve Hamas, has a staff of over 29,000 persons and its General Assembly-approved budget for 2008 was $541 million (www.un.org/unrwa/finances/index.htm).

As of May 31, 2008, the Agency's largest contributors are the United States, the European Union, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Norway and the Netherlands. The Arab states contribute almost nothing in hard cash but millions in lip service.

Although long forgotten by the media and general public, the number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries was substantially greater. On May 16, 1948, the day following Israel's declaration of independence, The New York Times headlined an article: "Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands: Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia Face Wrath of Their Foes." And indeed within 15 years (the last great wave was from Algeria, after it gained independence from France in 1962), Jews had fled the Arab world en masse (until the Shah's ouster, in 1979, there remained one viable Jewish community in the Moslem world, in non-Arab Iran). Today there are barely 5,000, chiefly elderly Jews in the entire Arab world.

One reason the expulsion and flight of these Jews even then attracted little attention was that Israel never referred to them as refugees—they were welcomed as an "ingathering of the exiles," given citizenship on the spot. Yet these Jews had lived in the countries from which they were forced to flee far longer than the vast majority of Arabs who left the small territory that became Israel. Indeed Jews had lived in these countries longer than their Arab conquerors. In Iraq, for example, the Jewish community dated back to the Babylonian exile. In contrast, most of the Arabs leaving Israel in 1948 were recent arrivals, attracted by the economic opportunities opened up by Zionist colonization of Palestine in the 20th century.

What happened in Israel was a replay, on a far smaller scale, of the vast population exchange that took place on the Indian subcontinent when England gave up rule of its last great colony. In that case, 8,500,000 Hindus fled Pakistan to India and 6,500,000 Muslims fled to Pakistan.

In the 1950s, in the wake of World War II, Elfan Rees, leader of World Refugee Year, reported the existence of 36 million refugees in Africa, Asia and Europe, with Arabs only one in 72 refugees. All but the Arabs have been forgotten because the others were integrated into the lands in which they sought refuge. No one today seeks the "right to return" of the ethnic Germans, probably 12 million in all, expelled after WWII from nations of Eastern Europe, or the Japanese expelled from Manchuria and Korea or the 3 million North Koreans who fled to South Korea. More recently, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, 1.6 million refugees from Vietnam, including the "boat people" who escaped so perilously to freedom, have been resettled. This is what the official website of the boat people concluded in 2003: "Yes, we suffered in the past and we lost everything. But we've managed to overcome the difficult times, settle, rebuild our lives and bring up our children. And that's something to celebrate."

Only the Arab refugees, at the insistence of Arab host countries, and by now with full UN American and European Union support, have been denied integration, their plight perpetuated as an Arab "ultimate" weapon to destroy Israel by demographic means.

It should be noted that UNWRA only gradually became transformed from an agency seeking to settle Arab refugees into one dedicated to perpetuating their refugee status. In a report he submitted in November 1951, UNRWA director John Blandford Jr. said he expected the Arab governments to assume responsibility for relief operations by July 1952. The international community assumed the refugees should be resettled as soon as possible, said Blandford, because, as he put it, "sustained relief operations inevitably contain the germ of human deterioration."

By the late 1950s, the early UNRWA leaders were disillusioned and voiced their disgust. Ralph Garroway, who also served as an UNRWA director, said in August 1958: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die." Elfan Rees, who worked closely with UNRWA, noted in 1959 that the Arab refugee problem should be the easiest in the world to solve, for there was, in countries like Syria and Iraq, "a developing demand for the manpower they represent and their new settlements would be distinct economic assets." Unfortunately, said Dr. Rees, "the organized intransigence of the refugees and the calculated indifference of the Arab states concerned have brought all its [UNRWA's] plans to naught." Even in 1959, Dr. Rees noted that UNRWA, because of Arab "chicanery" was "feeding the dead" and "by political pressure it is feeding non-refugees." (Interview in New York Post, June 11, 1959)

Nothing better illustrates UNRWA's transformation than its response to an Israeli effort, in the mid- 1980s, to improve the lives of Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip by constructing new housing for them. UNRWA protested to the UN and on December 3, 1986, the General Assembly passed a resolution demanding Israel "desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip and from the destruction of their shelters." It declared that "measures to resettle Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip away from the homes and property from which they were displaced constitute a violation of their inalienable right of return." Similarly, when Israel built new homes for residents of a camp near Nablus, UNRWA forbade anyone to move into them and posted a guard at the empty houses to make sure no one moved in. The Shuafat camp is within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and the city offered to give it full services in street paving, sewers and other urban amenities; UNRWA forbade it.

The camps have become centers of recruitment, training and storage of weapons for terrorists. Camp ambulances are used for transportation of men and armaments; their schools teach hatred and Jihad; they glorify suicide bombers; some of their “honor students” have become notorious terrorists; corruption and profiteering with aid is endemic. In September 2008 a bipartisan group headed by Representative Steve Rothman (D.NJ) submitted a report documenting those abuses and citing specific examples of UNRWA ambulances, schools and hospitals used to shield terrorists and build bombs and rockets.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration (which hectors Israel about the "natural growth" of settlements while ignoring the "unnatural growth" of the Arab refugee population) has pledged an additional $900 million for Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, including an extra $160 million for UNRWA. Thus the United States, struggling with a severe economic crisis, is involved in a morally and strategically indefensible contradiction to its avowed goals: it funds and enables suicide bombing, rocket launching and other forms of Middle East terrorism.

There have been noble protests, specifically from senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, House Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio, House Republican whip Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, chairman of the House Republican Conference Mike Pence of Indiana, and chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, who in March excoriated the administration.

However, more is required.

Leaving the camps and their populations where they are permanently entrenches what the media calls “the cycle of violence.” They must be resettled elsewhere in the Arab world. If the United States were to announce, "Millions for permanent resettlement in Arab states, not a penny more for perpetuating victimhood," the dynamic would be transformed overnight. Here would be a demand for a tangible concession by the Arabs instead of minor gestures that can easily be withdrawn.

Does this sound like a surprising, even shocking suggestion? Consider the absurdity of the alternatives. The "right to return" of over four million Arabs to a Jewish state that comprises a mere 8,000 square miles is in itself an insane demand. Nor is there any way a resourceless miniscule West Bank area – combined with Gaza comprising only 2,400 square miles, a fourth of the size of tiny Israel – can economically support the millions of UNRWA-defined refugees.

The fairest, most equitable, way to end the problem of the refugees is to base their resettlement on the population exchange that followed the 1948 Arab-Israel war. If 1948 is the starting point for the Arabs, it must also be the starting point for the Jews. Because so many Arab states had a substantial Jewish population, this also has the advantage of forcing a number of Arab states to take some share of responsibility for the refugees, without singling out or overwhelming any one of them. Wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates that did not have a Jewish population, could shoulder a disproportionate share of the cost.

Returning to the population exchange also has the merit of throwing out reparations claims. The Jews left far more property behind in Arab lands than Arabs in what became Israel; generously, Israel can offer to declare a washout. Making the Arab states face up to the task of resettlement will also have the merit of encouraging them to evaluate honestly claims to refugee status. While the international community footed the bill and the larger the number of refugees, the greater the pressure on Israel, the attitude of the Arab states was "the more the better." Once the burden is on them, phony claims are no longer welcome and it is safe to assume it will rapidly be discovered that there are far fewer refugees than UNRWA now claims.

What, then, would refugee resettlement look like? Iraq, Morocco and Algeria between them had almost half the population of expelled Jews; they should proportionately take responsibility for half the number of Arab refugees. Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, in that order, also had substantial Jewish populations; they would also take in substantial number of refugees. (Since Syria already hosts 409,000 refugees, it would need to permanently absorb them, not take in any more.) The burden on these states would not be as great as it sounds because Jordan has 1,718,767 registered refugees, only 304,000 of whom are in camps. Jordan has behaved better than any other Arab state toward the refugees, making them full citizens, in effect absorbing them (indeed they form a majority of Jordan's population). Of course, those so-called refugees in Jordan are, strictly and historically speaking, in Palestine, bearing in mind the 1922 partition of Mandatory Palestine which gave the Hashemites 80 percent of the land. Thus almost half the refugees are off the table.

Lebanon, with close to 400,000 refugees, over half in camps, is a special case. It did not expel its small Jewish population in 1948 and is desperate to rid itself of the Palestinian Arab refugee population, who have served as persistent troublemakers and would totally destroy the balance between Muslims and Christians, should they become citizens. The other overwhelmingly Muslim Arab states should resettle the refugees now in Lebanon. (If any of the Arab states had insuperable difficulties with absorbing their "fair share" of refugees, they could, if need be with the help of international funds, find Muslim states which would absorb a portion of their "quota.")

Were the refugees to be resettled away from Judea, Samaria and Gaza—and the entire refugee issue dissolved—the Arab-Israel conflict would become manageable (precisely the reason the Arab states refuse to contemplate dissolving the issue). An agreement between Israel and Jordan, perhaps on the lines of that proposed by Minister of Tourism Benny Elon, dividing responsibilities in the territory now under the failed rule of the PA, should be possible to find. Jordan and Israel, which share Mandatory Palestine, are the only states that can negotiate a settlement, and this can only occur when the "refugee problem" is solved.

One can hear the State Department. One can hear the President's advisers. "Impossible. The Arabs will never agree." True, they will not willingly accept any such plan. But this does not mean the United States is helpless to act. The United States can refuse to reauthorize UNRWA. It can say, as noted earlier, "We will no longer pay to perpetuate refugee victimhood. We have seen the catastrophe of destroyed lives, hatred and terrorism that we have unwittingly funded and we will do this no longer. Only if you agree to our plan of resettling the refugees will we contribute – and then, we will contribute generously. Otherwise you can take over the task of funding the refugees: not only are you on your own, but we will do our best to take our European allies with us."

The United States can do more. Each Arab ruler lets no opportunity go by to tell President Obama the hostility of the Arab world toward the U.S. will only end when the Arab-Israel conflict is solved. The President can take them up on this statement. If that is so, he should say, it is incumbent upon each of you to contribute now toward solving the crucial stumbling block of the Arab refugees. If they are unwilling to do so, the President should tell them the Road Map has nowhere to go and they are on their own when it comes to the "peace process" as well.

No money for UNRWA. No U.S. promotion of any "Road Map" in the absence of guaranteed Arab absorption of the refugees. It would be a paradigm shift that would get the attention of the Arab states.

There are finally rare voices within the Arab world daring to speak up about the need to shut down the camps. MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) reports that Daoud Al-Shiryan, Al-Hayat columnist and deputy secretary-general of Al-Arabiya TV (and no friend of Israel), recently published a series of four articles criticizing how the Palestinian refugees have been treated and calling on the Arab countries to “tear down the refugee camps’ fences.” In Lebanon, says Al-Shiryan scornfully, Palestinians are barred from 72 types of work “despite the fact that you wouldn’t find such a long list of professions even on Mars.”

In one article Al-Shiryan contrasted the fate of two Lebanese friends, a Jewish woman who left Lebanon after the 1958 civil war and a Palestinian woman living in the camps. The Jewish woman, Hannah, goes to the U.S., is assisted by Jewish organizations, obtains citizenship, earns a good salary. Her son Avraham becomes director-general of a bank. Over 35 years after leaving, Hannah returns to Lebanon for a visit and seeks out her old friend Umm Bilal, still in the camps, living in a hut, her son working for a pittance in a local bicycle repair shop. “The resettlement for which I call,” writes Al-Shiryan, means “that the ’rope’ countries that serve as a gallows for the Palestinians, will allow them to live as they live in Great Britain, the U.S., Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states where they have dreams and jobs…”

It is quite true that there is little evidence that Arab states will heed Al-Shiryan (who was promptly accused of advancing “Zionist proposals”) and much evidence that they are determined to preserve the refugees as a battering ram against Israel. The Arab goal is to destroy Israel, not to solve the Arab-Israel conflict. But if this is the reality, surely it is better for the United States to confront the harsh facts squarely now. For what is the alternative? As long as the U.S. is unwilling to exert pressure for real change on the Arabs, it winds up inevitably–as it is doing now–exerting pressure only on Israel.

There are two possible outcomes. One is a repeat of the debacle in 2000. Israel offers radical territorial concessions but balks at the suicidal right of return, again precipitating an explosion, this time on a greater, more dangerous scale. Or, relentless U.S. and European pressure brings Israel to its knees. Israel agrees both to return to the vulnerable 1949 lines and to accept an Arab "right to return." The result can only be more refugees, this time 5 million Jewish refugees with no neighboring states to take them in.

Is this the legacy any U.S. President—even Obama—wishes to be his? If not, the time for the U.S. to reevaluate its warped Middle East policies is now.

The President has signaled his intention to sell his policy directly to the Israeli public. What he should be doing is formulating a new policy and selling it to the Arabs.

Posted by Ruth at 09:53 PM

HEBRON'S JEWS

Jerold Auerbach
(Editors Note: In the May 2009 Outpost we ran an excerpt from Auerbach’s fine new book Hebron’s Jews—Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel. Here we run an excerpt from the Epilogue.)

To secular liberal Israelis, as daily newspaper reports incessantly revealed, the Hebron Jewish community symbolized everything they despised about the settler movement: its religious zeal and arrogant assertion that it was the rightful inheritor of Zionist tradition. Headlines suggested that the intense debate over the future of the settlements might determine whether Israel was truly a Jewish state—or merely a state of Jews.

Some months later, during another sabbatical year in Israel, I once again set out to visit Hebron. By then, the West Bank had become a virtual war zone, with frequent Palestinian attacks on Israeli vehicles and their occupants. Driving south from Jerusalem, my guide Dov maintained close radio contact with settler security headquarters. His car had protective plastic windows, and his pistol was in the glove compartment. Perhaps to ease the tension, Dov told the apocryphal story about Henry Kissinger after his term as secretary of state had ended. In his new job as manager of a zoo, he had finally discovered how to get the Arab lion to lie peacefully with the Israeli lamb. An astonished visiting diplomat asked Kissinger to explain this remarkable achievement. “Don’t tell anyone,” the former secretary of state whispered, “but I change lambs every morning.” Nearing Hebron, I tried to appreciate Dov’s gallows humor.

Accompanied by Mischa, our gruff but friendly escort from Kiryat Arba, we drove into Hebron, past the looming Machpelah enclosure, along narrow streets bordering on the casbah, to the restored Avraham Avinu quarter. The synagogue had only recently been rebuilt after decades of desecration, neglect, and, finally, destruction. Soldiers guarded the entrance; others were stationed on a nearby roof….

I was relieved to finally enter the synagogue, where Mischa recounted the horrors of the 1929 massacre, the compulsory evacuation of survivors by the British, and the more recent murders of yeshiva students. But he also reminded us of the Arab sheikh who took Jews into his home to protect them and, nearly forty years later, led Jews back to the ruins of Avraham Avinu, its floor covered with excrement. Mischa opened the aron to display Torah scrolls enclosed in the beautiful wooden cases that are customary in Sephardic synagogues.

On our way to Beit Hadassah, which I had last glimpsed from a bus window nearly fifteen years earlier, Mischa updated me on its recent history. By now, it had become home for a dozen Jewish families whose young children darted playfully through the spacious entrance hall. As we walked along the narrow balcony that surrounds the building, Mischa pointed to adjacent houses, now vacant, where Jews once had lived but now were excluded by the Israeli government. The message was evident: just as the Avraham Avinu synagogue had been restored for Jewish worship and the old Beit Hadassah medical clinic had been reclaimed for Jewish occupancy, so other property would be returned to Jewish habitation. I was beginning to learn about the fierce tenacity of Hebron Jews, still attached by an umbilical cord of memory to biblical antiquity and to their own history in this beleaguered city.

Leaving Beit Hadassah, we wound our way up the hill to Tel Rumeida, the likely site of biblical Hebron. On the hilltop, in the newest cluster of Jewish homes, half a dozen small caravans housed Jewish families. As we arrived, a young Orthodox man stepped outside. After brief introductions, Chaim invited us for conversation and refreshment. It was a pleasure, he assured us: it is, after all, in the tradition of Abraham to welcome strangers in Hebron. I asked him why he lived here, in such a dangerous place, surrounded by so many hostile Arabs. Because, he responded, Jewish history began here. “The tree with the deepest roots,” he explained, “is the strongest tree….”

Did it matter that Jewish history, as Hebron Jews invariably remind visitors, began here? If not, why did it matter that the Jewish state be built in the Land of Israel rather than in Africa or South America? Can a people ever relinquish the attachments formed by its deepest memories?

We returned to Machpelah for the morning service, with the reading of Chaye Sarah that 20,000 people had come to Hebron to hear. Recounting a simple real estate transaction, Chaye Sarah irrevocably connects Jews to their promised land—and to Hebron. Inside the densely packed Isaac Hall, there was a surge of anticipatory excitement. When the Torah scroll was removed from the aron and carried through the room to be reverently touched and kissed, it pulled everyone forward like a magnet. A cluster of rabbis and community elders gathered on the bima. I edged as close as I could get to the reader, whose strong voice began to chant the opening words: “Sarah died in Kiryat Arba—now Hebron—in the land of Canaan. (Gen. 23:2)”

With his purchase of a grave site, Abraham became a landholder, with legal rights of inheritance that his descendants would claim, in perpetuity: “So Ephron’s land in Machpelah, near Mamre—the field with its cave and all the trees anywhere within the confines of that field—passed to Abraham as his possession….And then Abraham buried his wife Sarah in the cave of the field of Machpelah, facing Mamre—now Hebron—in the land of Canaan (Gen. 23:17-20).”

Chaye Sarah recounts the precise moment when the attachment of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and to Hebron was forever sealed. Its annual reading affirms the unbroken link of identification between present and past. That morning in Hebron, the power of the deepest historical memory of the Jewish people was palpable. I was standing on the bedrock of Jewish history, directly above the burial cave in the field of Machpelah, in Hebron, in the Land of Israel, as it is described in the biblical text. At this most venerable yet vulnerable Jewish holy site in the world, I felt enclosed, for that moment, within a community of Jewish memory.

If the Hebrew Bible is the ultimate source for Zionism, as David Ben-Gurion affirmed to British royal commissioners some seventy years ago, then Zion surely includes Hebron. Once Jews relinquish their right to live in Hebron, they implicitly undermine their claim to live anywhere in their biblical homeland. To abandon Hebron is to surrender the claims of memory that bind Jews to each other, to their ancient homeland, and to their shared past and future.

Jewish prayer resonates with pleas from the prophet Jeremiah for the return of his people “within our borders.” Immediately preceding the affirmation of the Shma, Jews recite, “Bring us in peacefulness from the four corners of the earth and lead us with upright pride to our land.” During the concluding Musaf service, Jews implore God to “bring us up in gladness to our land and plant us within our boundaries.” These ancient religious pleas, as it happens, also define the essence of Zionism. For the Jews of Hebron, Judaism and Zionism are inseparable. In Hebron, in Me’arat Hamachpelah, on Shabbat Chaye Sarah, an exuberant community of religious Zionists revealed the enduring power of Jewish memory.”

Jerold Auerbach is Professor of History at Wellesley.

Jerold Auerbach is professor of history at Wellesley College.

Posted by Ruth at 09:47 PM

LUX ET DHIMMITUDE

Diana West

Behold the guardian of Yale Dhimmi-versity Press: John Donatich, dressed for a hard day's work in the Ivory Tower snipping out what he calls "gratuitous" images of Mohammed through the centuries.

Mohammed by Old Masters and Mohammed by sketch artists; Mohammed in a 19th-century woodcut by Dore and Mohammed in a 21st-century caricature by Westergaard.

I refer, of course, to Yale University Press's decision to delete all imagery of Mohammed in a book about imagery of Mohammed, which, as Roger Kimball reports in a fine bit of detective work, appears to have emanated from Yale University's highest offices. The book's title is The Cartoons That Shook the World. Sans pics, the book also should be re-titled: ....That Shook the World. It makes as much sense.

Not that "sense" is the goal. Yale's motto, Lux et Veritas has been obliterated in this shameful effort to pursue not light and truth, but Islamic approval. And Yale University Press will get that approval because it has proven that it operates under Islamic law (sharia), which prohibits both images of Mohammed and criticism of Mohammed. And woe to anyone who draws or publishes a critical image of Mohammed.

Of course, there is irony in the fact that the book itself is unlikely to be a resounding smack-down of Islamic dictates on speech and artistic expression in the Western world. As Thomas Landen of Brussels Journal points out, the book's author, Jytte Klausen, a leftist Danish-born professor at Brandeis, was one of the "experts" cited in Newsweek's cover-story last month downplaying the Islamization of Europe, along with anyone fighting it. Landen writes: “Mr. Underhill, writing from his ivory tower at Newsweek, cites Jytte Klausen, “an authority on Islam in Europe at Boston’s Brandeis University,” and Grace Davie, “an expert on Europe and Islam at the University of Exeter in Britain,” to prove that those who warn for a Muslim take-over in Europe are “scaremongering.” Ms. Klausen gained some notoriety when, in a March 2006 article in Prospect Magazine, she said the Danish cartoon affair was the result of “a provincial newspaper’s prank.”

The rationale for publishing the cartoons was anything but a "prank." It was a serious exercise to prove that Denmark is not under Islamic sharia prohibitions against depicting images of Mohammed. The exercise was undertaken by Jyllands-Posten features editor Fleming Rose on discovering that a Danish publisher of a children's book on Mohammed was unable to procure illustrations for his childlishly positive little book because Danish illustrators were afraid to draw Big Mo.

Jyllands-Posten's response was a laudable effort unequaled anywhere in the West, to assert that Western law, not Islamic law, operates in Denmark. The craven reaction throughout the West, tragically, shows the fragility of Westerners' attachment to their own freedoms. Landen goes on:

“As a result of this ‘prank,’ Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist of the newspaper Jyllands Posten, based in the European provincial backwater of Aarhus, Denmark, lives in a house which, as I could witness when I visited him there last month, the Danish authorities have had to transform into a fortress, with surveillance cameras, bullet-proof windows and a panic room.

Every day, the Aarhus police drives Mr. Westergaard to work. Such is the situation facing a simple cartoonist of a European provincial newspaper and his wife, four years after he drew a cartoon depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. One wonders why Mr. Underhill did not consult Mr. and Mrs. Westergaard for their views on the effects of Islam in early 21st century Europe. Surely, he is as much an expert on the issue as Ms. Klausen in her cosy office at Brandeis University, another of America’s ivory towers.

Last night, I picked up a 1967 book called The Battle of Silence by Vercors, the alias of J. Bruller. It is the wartime memoir by the publisher of a secret anti-Nazi press run in the midst of Nazi-occupied Paris. The first sentence is unforgettable: “When the Nazis occupied France after the defeat of 1940, French writers had two alternatives: collaboration or silence.”

The parallels are distinct if incomplete. The Nazis imposed the censorship by force; The Muslims are imposing censorship by threat of force backed up by occasional bloodlettings. Yale has many, many alternatives -- publish the pictures, for Chrissake -- but it has seized on the two natural reactions of the already-enslaved: collaboration and silence.

Syndicated columnist Diana West is author of The Death of The Grown-Up. This appeared on her blog.

Posted by Ruth at 09:44 PM

SWEDISH HIPOCRISY

Fjordman

Sweden's foreign minister Carl Bildt has rejected calls from Israel for the government to distance itself from the newspaper article [in Aftonbladet which details allegations of the systematic harvesting by Israeli soldiers of the organs of Palestinian men]. Writing on his blog, Bildt argues that Sweden's free press and tradition of free speech are the best defense against "breaches of judgment, bad taste and transgressions of core societal values."

The fact that the anti-Israeli and anti-American writer Helle Klein, for many years the political editor of Aftonbladet, at her blog also speaks warmly of "free speech" is such an extreme case of hypocrisy that it simply cannot go unanswered.

Free speech does not exist in Sweden. I would personally rate Sweden as being probably the most totalitarian and politically repressive country in the entire Western world as of 2009, and Aftonbladet has made substantial contributions to this repressive climate.

Sweden has huge problems caused by mass immigration, and Muslim immigration in particular, but speaking honestly about this is absolutely taboo. According to journalist Karen Jespersen, Helle Klein has stated that "If the debate is [about] that there are problems caused by refugees and immigrants, we don't want it."

As I have stated in “Why Europeans Should Support Israel,” the demonization of Israel should be rejected not just because of Israel, but because of Europe. The very same people who are demonizing Israelis are also demonizing native Europeans who resist the Islamization of their lands.

The truth is that Israelis defend themselves so that their daughters do not have to suffer rape at the hands of Muslim Jihadists, the way the authorities in Western European countries, and in Sweden in particular, allow to happen every single day.

Here are a few relevant quotes from the chapter “The Case of Sweden,” taken from my book Defeating Eurabia.

"Leading newspaper Aftonbladet has close ideological ties to the Social Democrats, the country’s dominant party for most of the past century. Helle Klein, its political editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2007, during a demonstration organized by Islamic and anti-racist organizations in December 2006 stood in front of a banner which read “A Sweden for all--Stop the Nazi violence“ and warned against Islamophobia in the media. Klein has voiced sympathy for terrorist organization Hamas in her editorials while warning against the threat posed to world peace by Israeli aggression and the Christian Right in the USA. The irony of warning against “Nazi violence” while showing sympathy for an organization that wants to finish what the Nazis started apparently doesn’t strike Ms. Klein.

Before the elections in 2006, the established parties cooperated in boycotting the Sweden Democrats and other “xenophobic” parties. In one of many similar incidents, which extreme Leftists bragged about on the Internet, around 30 members of the SD were attacked during a peaceful, private party outside the town of Växjö. The brave “anti-Fascists” threw tear gas into the building, forcing people outside where they were beaten with iron bars and axes. "

According to Jonathan Friedman, an American Jew working in Sweden for years, “no debate about immigration policies is possible, the subject is simply avoided. The elites are worried to see their power slip away and therefore want to silence critics, for instance the Sweden Democrats, a small party opposed to immigration: “It is a completely legal party, they just aren’t allowed to speak.…In reality, the basis of democracy has been completely turned on its head. It is said: ‘Democracy is a certain way of thinking, a specific set of opinions, and if you do not share them, then you aren’t democratic, and then we condemn you and you ought to be eliminated. The People? That is not democratic. We the Elite, we are democracy.’ It is grotesque and it certainly has nothing to do with democracy, more like a kind of moral dictatorship.”

This is excerpted from Fjordman’s essay which appeared on the website Atlas Shrugs on August 22.

Posted by Ruth at 09:40 PM

HANNAH SENESH: A FLAME THAT STILL BURNS

Rita Kramer

In the early days of World War II, when Britain stood alone against Nazi-occupied Fortress Europe, Winston Churchill created a secret organization and gave it the mandate “now set Europe ablaze.”

The organization, Special Operations Executive, would drop agents into the countries of occupied Europe to organize and train resistance groups to be ready to rise up in support of an eventual cross-Channel invasion.

The organization’s existence and activities remained secret all through the war and for years afterward for two reasons. The military establishment did not approve of irregular or “ungentlemanly” warfare, not yet having learned that such tactics would be necessary in order to defeat an enemy that did not play by the rules. The other reason was that SOE was recruiting and training women to be sent into the dark and dangerous Continent.

Women who were fluent in the language of an occupied country could more easily pass as natives than men of military age. Where men would be challenged to show their papers, women could move about freely among the crowds of housewives going about the business of looking for food, soap, and other necessities of domestic life, carrying messages or hidden radio sets on which to communicate with London. The women who volunteered for this mission were told of the dangers, the risks of capture, and what would follow if they were caught.

Among those who accepted those risks was a 23-year-old Jewish woman born in Hungary.

Hannah Senesh (Szenes in Hungarian) was the child of assimilated Budapest Jews; her father was a well-known writer. Her daily experience of anti-Semitism at school and on the streets led her to join a student Zionist group called Maccabea and then in 1939 to emigrate with her brother to Palestine. Hannah studied agriculture at the training school for girls at Nahalal and in 1941 joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam. She continued the writing she had been doing since childhood—a diary, poetry, songs and plays. And she joined the Haganah, determined to fight for Eretz Yisrael.

As it became clear what kind of war they would have to fight and what kind of enemy they faced, the British Army, if not the Foreign Office, relaxed its traditional attitude of suspicion and distaste toward Jews. Many of them were proving useful in unanticipated ways. Those who had escaped from Europe knew the languages of the countries in which they had grown up and many of them were young and strong and eager to enlist in the fight to defeat the Nazi horrors, which by 1943 were clear to those who did not choose to close their eyes.

Enzo Sereni, an Italian Zionist who during the 1930s had worked tirelessly to bring Jews to the Yishuv, both legally and in secret, succeeded in convincing the British to make use of Jewish volunteers as SOE agents. Of 250 who volunteered, fewer than half were selected for training by SOE in Egypt, where they practiced parachuting and were taught other skills they would need in evading capture once dropped into the occupied countries. Hannah Senesh was one of the volunteers who made the cut, and it seemed to her she was destined for the task. She had written in her diary: “Suddenly the idea grabbed me that I must go to Hungary, and be there during these days, to lend a hand to Aliyat Hanoar [an organization to bring out Jewish children]…” And a month later, “A member of the Palmach visited here…and told me that a unit is being organized to do…exactly what I felt ought to be done…”

In March 1944 Hannah was one of three Jewish paratroopers dropped by SOE into Yugoslavia with the plan of eventually crossing the border into Hungary to help the threatened Jews—as well as downed Allied pilots and escaped prisoners of war—to reach safety on one of the evasion lines being run out of occupied Europe. The three joined Tito’s partisans in the Balkan mountains and waited for the right time to continue on.

By now the Germans had taken over in Hungary and disaster awaited the agents. Her two male companions decided to abort the mission, but Hannah was determined to chance it and in early June she made her way to the border, carrying her British wireless transmitter. She was captured on arrival by Hungarian authorities, before she had any chance to carry out her mission. She was imprisoned in the Horthy Miklos Prison in Budapest and tortured—clubbed, whipped, and threatened with the torture of her mother, who had remained in Hungary and been arrested.

She never broke. She never revealed her wireless codes or any information about her comrades, her mission, or the organization that had trained and sent them. Remarkably, she kept her spirits up during the months of her brutal imprisonment, finding ways to communicate with other prisoners and singing in the hopes of helping to keep up their spirits.

When it became clear that nothing would be gotten from her, she was accused of treason and tried as a spy. SOE had secured British Army commissions for the agents in the belief, naïve as it turned out, that they would be protected by the uniform and treated as prisoners of war. But Hannah was condemned to death, before the court had even declared a verdict.

As she stood before a German firing squad, she refused to be blindfolded, so she could look her killers in the eyes.

It was November 7, 1944. She had kept writing in her diary until the last, when an entry found in her cell after her death read, “I played a number in a game/I gambled on what mattered most/ the dice have rolled/ I lost.” Hannah Senesh did not live to her twenty-fourth birthday.

Among the things she left behind were poems and songs still sung in Israel today. The best known is Eli, Eli, which concludes “The voice called, and I went/I went because the voice called.”

These lines are from the last song she wrote from the partisan camp in Yugoslavia:

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

The flame in Hannah Senesh’s heart answered Churchill’s urging to “set Europe ablaze.”

Hannah Senesh’s diary appeared in Hebrew in 1946. In 1950 her remains were brought to Israel for burial on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem and in 2007 her tombstone was brought to Sdot Yam. Her story has been told in histories, novels and films. She is a particular hero of Israeli children, who know her story and her songs. In 1993 a Hungarian Military Court saw fit to inform her family in Israel that she had been officially exonerated.

Rita Kramer's most recent non-fiction book is Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France. Her latest book, When Morning Comes, her first novel, draws on her skills as a biographer, a historian, a social critic, and a lover of fiction.

Posted by Ruth at 09:35 PM

OUTPOST JULY/AUGUST 2009

Table of Contents

Menachem Begin To Ronald Reagan....a letter

Twenty Questions
By Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor
By Rael Jean Isaac

Character is Fate
by Rael Jean Isaac
.
After The Fall
by William Mehlman

Its Official! Guinness World Record
by David Isaac

Déjà vu All Over Again
by Melanie Phillips

Paved With Good Intentions
by Ruth King

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

Outpost is distributed free to
Members of Americans For a Safe Israel
Annual membership: $50.

Americans For a Safe Israel
1751 Second Ave. (at 91st St.)
New York, NY 10128
tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717
E-mail: afsi @rcn.com web site: http://www.afsi.org

Posted by Ruth at 10:34 PM

Menachem Begin to Ronald Reagan in September 1982

The following letter was sent by Menachem Begin to Ronald Reagan in September 1982:

What some call the 'West Bank,' Mr. President, is Judea and Samaria, and this simple historic truth will never change. There are cynics who deride history. They may continue their derision as they wish, but I will stand by the truth. And the truth is that millennia ago there was a Jewish Kingdom of Judea and Samaria where our kings knelt to God, where our prophets brought forth the vision of eternal peace, where we developed a rather rich civilization which we took with us in our hearts and in our minds, on our long global trek for over 18 centuries; and, with it, we came back home. By aggressive war, by invasion, King Abdullah conquered parts of Judea and Samaria in 1948; and in a war of most legitimate self-defense in 1967, after being attacked by King Hussein, we liberated, with God's help, that portion of our homeland.

Geography and history have ordained that Judea and Samaria be mountainous country and that two-thirds of our population dwell in the coastal plain dominated by those mountains. From them you can hit every city, every town, each township and village and, last but not least, our principal airport in the plain below.

Mr. President, you and I chose for the last two years to call our countries 'friends and allies.' Such being the case, a friend does not weaken a friend, an ally does not put his ally in jeopardy. This would be the inevitable consequence were the 'positions' [Begin refers here to the Reagan Plan which called on Israel to withdraw to the 1967 lines] transmitted to me on August 31, 1982, to become reality. I believe they won't. 'For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest.' (Isaiah 62).

Posted by Ruth at 10:30 PM

Twenty Questions

Herbert Zweibon

Twenty Questions was a popular television panel show from 1949 to 1955. A person chose a subject, not known to the panel, which then had twenty questions, answered yes or no, to reach the correct answer. We offer our own adapted 20 Questions, directed to Prime Minister Netanyahu, asking how he plans to deal with the ramifications of the (Demilitarized) Two State Solution.

1. In the year prior to signing the Oslo agreements, Israeli intelligence experts did a study for the Labor government of 200 agreements that Arafat’s PLO had signed over the years and found that he had honored none of them. What makes you believe “this time” will be any different?

2. How are you going to prevent an influx of sophisticated weapons into the “demilitarized” state? And please don’t insult our intelligence by saying foreign “monitors” are going to stop it.

3. How are you going to prevent the firing of missiles at airplanes going in and out of Ben Gurion airport? One downed plane will mean the end of international carriers flying to Israel.

4. How do you prevent the training and equipping of a Palestinian army in another Arab state?

5. How do you propose to deal with demands by Israeli Arabs in the Galilee, where they are a majority, to join the Palestinian state?

6. How will you respond to Hamas or Hezbollah taking over “demilitarized” Palestine?

7. How do you deal with the loss of political support from Bible-believing Christians in the United States, your last important source of support in a world filled with irrational hatred of Israel?

8. How will you cope with the depletion and destruction of the mountain aquifer on which Israel depends for water?

9. How do you restore the morale of Israelis after the shock of forfeiting Jerusalem and all claims to the heartland of the Jewish people?

10. How do you envisage expelling 500,000 Jews from their homes on the “wrong” side of the Green Line (including East Jerusalem)?

11. How do you pay for their resettlement, given that Israel has still not managed to recompense and resettle the 10,000 Jews it expelled from their homes in Gaza?

12. How do you stem the flood of Israelis leaving the country in the wake of this demoralization?

13. How do you defend a country whose width is the distance between New York’s JFK and LaGuardia airports??

14. How do you defend the coastal plain when a Palestinian state controls the mountain ranges that dominate it?

15. Are you now preparing to give the Golan Heights to Syria and destroy its Jewish communities?

16. How do you deal with the loss of ability to engage in “hot pursuit” in a sovereign Palestine?

17. How do you prevent foreign armies entering Palestine when you don’t control the entry points?

18. How do you propose to recoup the loss in business investment and tourism?

19. Do you plan to recognize two Palestinian states, Gazastan and Palestine?

20. The PA, like Hamas, has made clear it insists on the Right to Return. How will you deal with these demands for a “one state solution” after you have forfeited your claims to the historic Land of Israel and given up so many of your strategic advantages?

We will be astounded if you can come up with a rational answer to any of these questions. And under those circumstances, it is, to quote Edgar Allen Poe, “much of Madness, and more of Sin” to embark—or pretend to embark—on a “two state solution.”

Posted by Ruth at 10:27 PM

From the Editor

Truth In Fairy Tales

In July, when the G8 voted to stop global warming by cutting greenhouse gases 80%, Investors Business Daily and The Wall Street Journal came up with the same analogy: King Canute. King Canute was the king of England, Denmark and Norway who, legend goes, was flattered by his courtiers into believing he was so powerful the tides would recede at his command.

We falsely pride ourselves on having left behind such absurd beliefs as a result of our allegiance to the scientific method. On the contrary, the current Western politicians who decree “the temperature shall not rise” are as chock full of cockamamie hubris as those around King Canute. Moreover, at least according to some versions of the tale, the King (if he ever believed his courtiers) was a fast learner. When the tide came in anyway and he nearly drowned, the king is supposed to have told his assembled followers: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws.”

Our politicians never learn. As the temperature cools while carbon dioxide levels go up, they substitute “climate change” for global warming, and by magical abracadabra (known as computer projections) continue on their wacky economy-destroying project of controlling the climate.

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” underscores the power of a similar perennial human failing—self-delusion. No empirical evidence, no history of failure, no honest statements by Arab spokesmen can shake the faith of the political herd in the “two state solution” dogma. No sooner had Netanyahu toed the Obama line than a Fatah leader appeared on PA TV to say: “It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; and the goal is Palestine.” Needless to say, that’s Palestine as it appears on PA maps, without Israel.

If we do not find better ways to monitor and check these human propensities, our future is bleak.

A Double Apology

The administration of inveterate apologizer Obama has apologized twice(!) for one of the few appropriate actions it has taken—staying away from Durban II. One of the apologies to the UN Human Rights Council went like this: “It was with regret that we did not join the recent Durban Review Conference. We are deeply grateful to the many country delegations and senior UN officials who worked steadfastly to improve the outcome document and to refocus the Durban Review Conference squarely on the global fight to eliminate racism and racial discrimination.”

What world are these Obama-apologizers living in? The opening speaker at Durban II was Ahmadinejad and the conference unsurprisingly again singled out Israel for condemnation as “racist.” As Eye on the UN’s Anne Bayefsky notes: “Obama officials bent over backwards to issue an obsequious unprincipled statement about [UN officials] working to improve a meeting and its result while fully aware that those improvements never came.” Embarrassing for those touting Obama’s human rights credentials.

Europe Against Israel

Nothing better illustrates the hatred sweeping “progressive” Europe than the wave of count ‘em, 936 lawsuits against Israeli IDF officers and politicians in Spain, Britain, Holland, Norway—there are even some in New Zealand. In Norway six attorneys have been seeking a European-wide warrant to arrest senior Israeli officials, including former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for war crimes. In London, attorneys are waiting for one of their targets to travel to a country where it is legally possible to file charges, so a local attorney can petition for his arrest. Prominent Israelis fear to travel: former head of the IDF Southern Command Doron Almog only narrowly escaped arrest when, warned at the last minute, he refused to leave his plane at Heathrow Airport and flew back to Israel.

Needless to say, there’s nary a lawyer in these places expressing the slightest interest in arresting the terror chieftains of Hamas or Fatah.

Nor is it just avant garde “progressives.” See the Melanie Phillips article in this issue on Britain’s arms embargo against Israel for its “crime” of finally taking up arms against Hamas bombardments. Can one imagine the reaction were Israel to react against assaults from a “demilitarized” sovereign state of Palestine?

Jews Donate the Rope

If you give to Jewish communal federations including the Jewish Federation of New York, the Durham-Chapel Hill Federation and the Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids, be aware that you are contributing to Arab outfits dedicated to Israel’s destruction. That’s because many Jewish federations contribute to the New Israel Fund, which provides hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-Israel groups. For example, NIF is the core funder for Adalah, a legal center for Israeli Arabs, Mossawa, an advocacy center and I’lam, a media center. They all reject the right of Jews to a Jewish state.

Samuel Sokol and David Bedein point out that I’lam’s first director was Hanin Zoabi, recently elected as a member of the hostile Israeli Arab Balad Party. In her maiden interview with the Jerusalem Post as a Knesset member, Zoabi declared her support for a nuclear Iran. As director of I’lam, Zoabi helped draft the Haifa Declaration, which called for the negation of Israel’s Jewish identity. The current director of I’lam was a senior adviser for the Palestinian Authority, while its international relations coordinator has issued numerous statements in support of Hamas.

As for Adalah, writer and researcher Arlene Kushner notes that its position is that Jewish immigration should be banned and that the Israeli government is a “junta which proves each day that it is the most fascist and racist in history.”

Sokol and Bedein report that Mossawa, along with New Israel Fund grantee Coalition of Women for Peace, recently wrote to the Norwegian government asking “the Norwegian people to join us in our efforts and to stop investing in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.”

Breaking the Silence is the most recent New Israel Fund project (along with the British Embassy, it was the chief funder) to create international waves by slandering Israel, in this case the Israel Defense Forces, through anonymous charges of “war crimes” in the operation to halt the multi-year rocket attacks from Gaza.
Almost twenty years ago AFSI published a pamphlet on the New Israel Fund, calling it “A New Fund for Israel’s Enemies.” All that has changed is that mainstream Jewish organizations that claim to support Israel now fund it.

Macabre Humor
Human Rights Watch, which ranks with Amnesty International in deserving a Nobel Prize in hypocrisy, has sent a delegation to raise money from that bastion of human rights Saudi Arabia. Its pitch is that it has earned the support of Saudi royals by its battles with “pro-Israel pressure groups in the U.S., the European Union and the United Nations.” (Even the Saudis must wonder how Human Rights Watch could find such groups to battle in the latter two.)
Law Professor David Bernstein says the point “is not that Human Rights Watch is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation [of that hostility] is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth…without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis’ manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don’t ‘behave.’”
What Bernstein overlooks is that when it comes to off-the-wall attacks on Israel, Human Rights Watch can feel sure there is no danger the organization will fail to live up to donor expectations.

Posted by Ruth at 10:25 PM

Character is Fate

Rael Jean Isaac

The many plaudits it received to the contrary, Netanyahu’s June 14 speech at Bar Ilan University was appalling from beginning to end. The normally astute Caroline Glick called it “an eloquent, rational and at times impassioned defense of Israel…a breath of fresh air.” The usually perspicacious Daniel Pipes called it “a fine speech, making many needed points” which failed “on the critical point of prematurely accepting a Palestinian state.”

But the speech failed on many more counts than that. Netanyahu stood before not just Israel, but a world audience, an emperor who has no clothes, elaborating the details of his finely wrought costume. For although he emphasizes the need to “be firmly connected to reality, to the truth,” the speech is built upon a lie—the lie that peace with Palestinian Arabs and the broader Arab world is achievable and potentially at hand. Sounding like Israel’s chief-fantasizer Shimon Peres, Netanyahu spins his vision of peace (“in my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side by side, in amity and mutual respect”) and waxes lyrical over the potential glories of regional economic cooperation. In doing this, in buying into the never-never land of the peace-processors, Netanyahu undercut the ground upon which he needed to stand firm if he were to face down Obama’s existential threat to the state.

What should Netanyahu have said? He could have kept his first sentence “Peace has always been our people’s most ardent desire.” But instead of burbling on about our prophets who gave the world the vision of peace, the need to advance peace and “a new era of reconciliation in our region,” he should have said bluntly that despite this desire, the people of Israel must listen to the prophet who warned of those who say peace, peace, when there is no peace. An unreformed Islam, he should have said, will simply not tolerate a non-Islamic state in what it considers its heartland. We have pretended too long that our territorial concessions could produce peace, with devastating results to our security and internal morale, our retreat from Gaza being only the last such disastrous experiment, and we are not going to pursue policies that have consistently led and can only lead to failure.

If Netanyahu had been what he pretended to be, “firmly connected to reality, to the truth,” instead of lauding the treaties with Egypt and Jordan, he would have said that almost all their provisions had been violated from the outset by the other side. To take only one example, he could have pointed out that one of the provisions of the treaty with Egypt was that it would proscribe anti-Jewish incitement yet its government controlled media spew hatred to the extent that Egypt vies with Iran for the unenviable title of world center of anti-Semitism. Even now, he should have continued, President Mubarak says our demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people “scuttles the chances for peace.” If that is the case, what is the nature of the peace Mubarak has in mind? A peace without a Jewish state? That is not a “peace” this Prime Minister of Israel has any interest in negotiating.

The much-applauded history lesson Netanyahu was clearly addressing to Obama in response to the latter’s speech in Cairo—that Israel was not a response to the Holocaust and Arab hostility did not begin with post 1967 “settlements” nor did it lessen with Israeli concessions—was totally vitiated by the speech’s conclusion which contradicted all that went before. Abruptly he argues that another massive Israeli territorial concession, in the form of a Palestinian state (with vastly more Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria implicitly uprooted) is the “solution” by universal consensus. Netanyahu should have concluded by declaring flatly that the two state solution was no solution: the phrase merely masked Arab determination to achieve a one state solution.

He could have ended by throwing the ball into Obama’s court. Obama believed that the Arab world was prepared to make peace with Israel. All right then, Obama should put pressure on the Arabs to live up to the commitments already made. He should demand that Egypt dust off the 50 detailed agreements on cultural and economic cooperation it made with Israel in 1979 (which were buried no sooner than signed) and abide by them. He should demand that both the governments of Gaza and the so-called “West Bank” eliminate all incitement from their schools and media, end all terror and acts of war, and embrace in all the forums under their control the idea of living at peace with the Jewish state. He should insist all the Arab states lift their various boycotts and show by word and deed they accepted Israel into the region.

Yes, Netanyahu could have said, the Prime Minister of Israel did not believe that the Arabs were capable of making these changes. Since Obama did, let him try. And if he, Netanyahu turned out to be right, there was no peace to process. The United States would have to join with Israel in accepting that another way to manage the conflict had to be found.

Instead the speech showed that it had taken only one browbeating by Obama in their meeting a month earlier to whip Netanyahu into shape on the key issue. As Knesset member for the National Union Party Arieh Eldad noted caustically: “He was elected to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and now he declares that there is a consensus on two states for two peoples. But Netanyahu knows that the only consensus now is that he is a weak leader who crumbles under pressure.”

Yet if his supporters were taken aback, Netanyahu’s behavior was all too predictable. The online Frontpage Magazine conducted a symposium over two years ago, in March 2007, exploring the threats Israel then faced. Since all the participants-- myself, Caroline Glick, terrorism specialist David Keyes, psychiatrist Kenneth Levin and free lance writer P. David Hornik—agreed that the Olmert government was incompetent and delusional, we wound up debating the changes that could be expected once it was replaced, with Netanyahu, as we all presumed, the new Prime Minister. I found myself alone in predicting what has in fact happened. I based my prediction on Netanyahu’s previous performance as Prime Minister, when he was elected in 1996. Netanyahu, I pointed out, “admittedly understands the Middle East and world politics far better than Mr. Olmert, but nonetheless, as Prime Minister, held out the same delusional promise of ‘peace’ and furthered the Oslo process (through more concessions at the Wye conference).”

The other symposium participants all believed that Netanyahu had learned from previous experience and “this time would be different.” I countered that “character is fate, and Netanyahu simply lacks the character necessary for the role of Prime Minister; he lacks political courage and resolve, the willingness to abide by bedrock principles and commitments, even when the going is tough.” I observed that as Prime Minister Netanyahu had sought to return the Golan Heights to Syria (the only dispute is whether he was prepared to go back to the pre-1967 war line or held out for a few kilometers beyond it). I noted that subsequently, as a member of the Sharon cabinet, he had backed the morally and strategically culpable destruction of Gaza’s Jewish communities, cynically resigning just before the actual pullout so that “on the model of John Kerry he could then say ‘I actually voted against the Gaza withdrawal after I voted for it.’” I insisted that to expect anything different from Netanyahu now was folly, that “he has always talked the talk, but never been able to walk the walk.”

One of the most disconcerting aspects of Netanyahu’s character, I observed, was the split between his understanding and his practice. And indeed this was dramatized in his recent speech by his insistence on demilitarization of the new Palestinian state “with ironclad security provisions” lest it “become another terrorist base against the Jewish state.” In his speech Netanyahu elaborated what he meant by demilitarization: no army, no control of its airspace, security measures to prevent weapons smuggling, no ability to forge military pacts.

No one knows better than Netanyahu how idiotic this is. He clearly explained why in a May 12, 2002 speech to the Likud Central Committee, arguing against then Prime Minister Sharon’s implied support for a demilitarized Palestinian state. Said Netanyahu: “[I]t [the Palestinian state] will demand all the powers of a state, such as controlling borders, bringing in weapons, control of airspace and the ability to knock down any Israeli plane that enters its area, the ability to sign peace treaties and military alliances with other countries. Once you give them a state, you give them all these things, even if there is an agreement to the contrary, for within a short time they will demand all these things, and they will assume these powers, and the world will stand by and do nothing but it will stop us from trying to stop them…We will thus have created with our own hands a threat to our very existence. What will happen if the Palestinians do what the Germans did after World War I, when they nullified the demilitarized zone? The world did nothing then, and the world will do nothing now as well.”

The absurdity is compounded in that U.S. Lt. General Keith Dayton is already training a PA army and the Netanyahu government this July approved the transfer of 1,000 AK-47 rifles to them. Defending these soldiers, whom Hamas mockingly calls “Dayton Forces” former PA Minister of Prisoners Ashraf al-Ajrami counters that they constituted the backbone of Palestinian operations [i.e. terror attacks on Israel] during the five year intifada. As they would doubtless be the backbone of future attacks from any Palestinian state. All that Netanyahu has achieved with his “demilitarization” gimmick is to open Pandora’s box. Ten days after Netanyahu’s speech Haaretz reported that the Obama administration was examining an Israeli-Syrian peace plan based on demilitarizing a returned-to-Syria Golan Heights and transforming it into a nature preserve or “peace park.”

It is the task of a leader to withstand pressures deeply harmful to his country’s welfare. As Israeli journalist Israel Harel has aptly pointed out, Israel is treated like a doormat because it acts like a doormat. Who would have thought that small, impoverished Honduras would put Israel to shame? Yet, after ousting its President Zelaya, who had defied the Constitution and the Honduran Supreme Court in illegally seeking to extend his stay in office, it has thus far stood firm against pressures to reinstate him. Those pressures include the vote of all 192 members of the UN General Assembly, the Organization of American States, such champions of democracy as Hugo Chavez (who demands an OAS-led military invasion), Daniel Ortega and Raul Castro, and shameful addition to the list, Barack Obama, who promptly suspended military assistance and development projects.

In 1940, shortly before his death, the great Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky penned what he called his kaddish, his final testament. The Jewish people was at its lowest ebb, with the Holocaust looming and the British White Paper of the year before cutting off Palestine as a refuge for the Jews of Europe. Since he had long been forbidden entry into Palestine, Jabotinsky cast the kaddish as the demand of his young followers in Palestine.

“A Jew comes to us, particularly a young one, and announces before the entire world ‘I demand right and justice for myself—if I will not get it, may the entire world turn into a desert. In a place where I am a king among other kings—there progress will flourish. But if my fate is to be ejected from the structure of peoples, it will not bother me if all of you are consumed by fire. I shall add oil to the flame. There will be no redemption for the world if I have no part in it.’ This is a position…for which it is worthwhile to fight, to suffer and to devote your life.”

An Israeli leader must be imbued with faith in Israel’s legitimate rights to her ancient land, a bedrock conviction that not everything is negotiable, and those convictions must be so strong they inure him to pressures, both internal and external. Were Netanyahu to have the uncompromising underlying attitude expressed by Jabotinsky’s kaddish--I will be treated as an equal, with my national and legal rights and core principles respected—he would immeasurably strengthen Israel The more Israel appeases its enemies, the more Israel’s deterrence erodes. The more Netanyahu crumbles before Obama’s unreasonable demands, the more those demands will accelerate. It is only by standing up to pressure that a leader has the chance to develop countervailing pressures. If Netanyahu were to refuse the role of doormat, he would find Israel has allies, among Democrats in Congress as well as Republicans and among evangelicals. It even has potential allies in Europe—look at staunch supporter of Israel Geert Wilders, who may yet be the next Prime Minister of Holland.

If Netanyahu were a genuine leader, he would force debate on the real issues including, among others, Iran’s development of nuclear bombs under an apocalyptic leadership, the dangers posed by resurgent Islam to the West, with Israel only the initial target, the steady transformation of Gaza into a Taliban statelet and international terror base at the very time when the U.S. is pouring resources into preventing the reemergence of such a base in Afghanistan.

Instead, by caving in to Obama’s outrageous and unethical demands (who is Obama to decide what houses may be built and how many children Jews may have?), he allows Obama to set the framework for negotiation, which now focuses on such absurd trivialities as whether a “settlement freeze” includes kindergartens and toilets in Jewish communities beyond the 1949 Green Line.

What is most painful of all is that the folly, the betrayals and the debasement of Israel comes from a political party and leadership that claims spiritual descent from Zeev Jabotinsky, the man who above all sought to instill pride, honor and determination in the Jewish people. ,

Posted by Ruth at 10:22 PM

AFTER THE FALL

William Mehlman

Nothing was more glaringly exposed in the Iranian people’s heroic response to the theft of their national election than the mendacity of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy.

Indeed, the most tellingly absent ingredient in the mass protests and marches the world witnessed on the streets of Teheran in June, was the slightest evidence of passion for the creation of a 23rd Arab state in Judea and Samaria. The Iranian people had more important things on their minds, like the right to a legitimate count of their ballots and to raise hell over its denial without having their skulls caved in by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Basij thugs.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on whose behalf those skulls were being cracked, the perpetually grinning punk with whom the President of the United States was planning to play peekaboo for the rest of the year while he enriched enough uranium to make an atomic bomb, is in almost universal bad odor. The White House’s portrait of an Arab world waiting only for Israel’s acquiescence to a Palestinian state between Kfar Saba and the Jordan to join it in defanging the Iranian viper has never looked more like a forgery. “Peace Now” to the contrary notwithstanding, it turns out the “Arab World” was always a lot more concerned about Iranian territorial ambitions in the Middle East than the number of mirpesets [balconies] in Karnei Shomron. It is the mullahs, moreover, not Ahmadinejad, who call the shots in Iran, and the “Arab World’s” influence over them—even if one could imagine it being exerted on Israel’s behalf—is roughly zero. Unless and until that mullahcracy is replaced by a sane, civilized government, Israel will remain on the nuclear griddle. And last anybody checked, the centrifuges at Natanz were going full blast.

Back in Israel meanwhile, continued fallout over Benjamin Netanyahu’s June 14th speech appears to have at least temporarily nudged concern over Iran’s nukes to the sidelines. Was the prime minister’s finger-dip in the “Two-for-Two” baptismal font the act of a genuine converso or a survivalist looking to buy time after being shown the instruments of the Inquisition? And how does one define a “demilitarized” Palestinian state populated by the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades as other than an oxymoron?

What is beyond question is the ideological upheaval caused by the speech. Nothing since Ariel Sharon’s decision to unilaterally disengage Israel from Gaza has so fractured the “national Zionist camp” or created stranger misalliances. Martin Sherman, director of the Jerusalem Summit and lecturer on security policy at Tel Aviv University, accuses Netanyahu of having chosen “surrender over resistance” and in so doing, having “put in grave danger not only his country and his people, but the very rationale of Zionism itself.” To the no less Zionistically-committed Michael Freund, founder and chairman of Shavei Zion, which scours the globe for ”lost” Israelite tribal remnants, Sherman’s indictment of Netanyahu puts him in league with a “knuckleheaded” Right incapable of esteeming the tactical brilliance with which the prime minister, in the course of 29 minutes, “succeeded in outwitting U.S. President Barack Obama at his own game, using his considerable rhetorical skills to marshal an unprecedented consensus among the public.”

Putting fervent right-wingers Daniella Weiss and Aryeh Eldad at loggerheads in the national Zionist kitchen would seem a challenge too far for even the most skilled rhetorician, but what the fiery former mayor of Kedumim considered chulent—she heard Netanyahu say “no” to a Palestinian state, “yes” to continued building in Judea and Samaria—the National Union party’s No.2 declared to be pork stew. “In saying a ‘demilitarized’ Palestinian state, Netanyahu is trying to eat a pig that has been slaughtered according to Jewish dietary laws,” Eldad declaimed. “[He] has crossed not only the red lines of his election promises, but also converted.”

The enthusiasm with which the Left and Center-Left greeted Netanyahu’s mouthing of the “Two-for-Two” mantra (“a large step for Israel, a giant leap for Netanyahu,” glowed Labor Member of Knesset Daniel Simon; “responsible and serious,” chimed in Kadima’s Otniel Schneller), could not have been music to the ears of the Knesset’s Likud contingent. Yet, even its most disquieted members stopped well short of a break with their leader. The normally uninhibited Danny Danon confined himself to labeling Bibi’s accession to Palestinian sovereignty “one unnecessary sentence in a brilliant speech.” The more outspoken Druz MK Ayoub Kara accused the prime minister of “going against the decision of the party’s institutions in agreeing to a Palestinian state, demilitarized or not.” He joined with Danon in a pledge to “work in the Knesset faction and Central Committee to make sure it doesn’t get implemented.”

More circumspect was Minister-without-Portfolio Benny Begin, regarded in some circles as the “conscience” of the Likud. “Although I have reservations about some components of the speech,” he said, ”[Netanyahu] presented facts that sometimes disappear from the political discourse in Israel and abroad.” In what he termed “a hint to Obama,” Yoel Marcus, writing in Ha’aretz, cautioned the president to keep a sharp eye on Benny Begin. “He’s not really a politician,” Marcus observed of the geologist professor son of Menachem Begin, “but you can’t question his .integrity and zealousness for his cause…If the government signs an agreement obligating it to make territorial concessions, Begin will go home quietly…Conclusion: As long as Begin remains there, Bibi will only talk.”

Convinced that is about all Netanyahu ever means to do, Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning New America and Century Foundations, opines that “the words ‘Palestinian State’ were intended primarily for [Obama’s] ears. Next, were Netanyahu’s supporters in the United States, desperate for ammunition to depict their Israeli champion as reasonable and to push the blame for an impasse back onto Arab and Palestinian shoulders.” Third, and no less important, Levy added, “was the premier’s domestic constituency. That his speech did not spark even the slightest coalition crisis reveals more about the stinginess of his words than it does about the sturdiness of his coalition.”

Netanyahu certainly wasn’t stingy with the markers he laid down in his Bar-Ilan address. They included demands for the unequivocal recognition of Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people;” resolution of the Palestinian “refugee problem” outside the borders of Israel; the continued status of Jerusalem as the “united capital of Israel;” obligatory Palestinian Authority responsibility for establishing “the rule of law in Gaza and overcoming Hamas;” recognition of Israel’s “need to enable the residents [of the Jewish communities beyond the Green Line] to lead normal lives …[as] an integral part of our people,” and the demilitarization of any territory passing under the control of a future Palestine.

It took Saab Erekat, the ubiquitous voice of the PA, less then five minutes to declare before an Al-Jazeera TV camera that “in a thousand years, no Palestinian leader will accept” the humiliating demands of the Israeli prime minister. PA Executive Committee secretary Abed Rabbo nearly had apoplexy waiting his turn. Calling Netanyahu “a swindler, a fraud and a liar” and his speech “a zero,” he accused the prime minister of trying to inveigle the Palestinians into joining the Zionist movement by offering them a state under Israel’s protectorate. There was more restraint from PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas but the bottom line was the same. “The speech has destroyed all initiatives and expectations,” read the memo from his headquarters in Ramallah. “It has placed restrictions on efforts to achieve peace and constitutes a clear challenge to the Palestinian, Arab and American positions.”

Significantly, neither the PA, in damning the speech, nor the Obama administration, in cautiously applauding it, paid nearly as much attention to the Netanyahu marker the media most prominently featured in its account of the prime minister’s acceptance of a Palestinian State—namely, its demilitarization. Perhaps that’s because, as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak presciently noted, “the concept of a demilitarized Palestinian state is baseless.”

Purdue University International law professor Louis Rene Beres agrees: “Any new agreement for demilitarization will be a non-starter…a non-treaty agreement” with no legal authority behind it. Within the bounds of international law, Beres explains, a future Palestinian state could choose from among a number of pretexts to extricate itself from a pre-state demilitarization pact, including a real or imagined “material breach” of the agreement by Israel, or a “fundamental change of circumstances” in which the future Palestine declares itself “vulnerable to previously unforeseen dangers, perhaps even from the forces of other Arab armies.” Moreover, he points out, no demilitarization agreement ever devised would stand a chance against the “peremptory rule” of national sovereignty. “Because the right of sovereign states to maintain military forces for self-defense is such a rule,” he adds, “Palestine could be within its lawful right to abrogate any agreement that had previously compelled its demilitarization.”

The one marker Netanyahu laid down in his June 14th speech that has galvanized the attention of the White House and its Palestinian client is the one related to the allowance for “natural growth” of the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. The milk Netanyahu spilled at Bar-Ilan can’t be put back in the bottle, but a Jihadist entity between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River can still be foreclosed by the facts Israel creates on the ground. It is little wonder that the White House and the State Department have honed in with laser intensity on the demand for a dead halt to all Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and “east” Jerusalem.

The prime minister’s insistence on the right to “normal lives” for the 300,000 Jews of Judea and Samaria raised “new and unnecessary obstacles to negotiations” for even “friendly” Italy’s foreign minister Franco Frattinni. The Obama administration was notably less diplomatic. “Netanyahu needs to know that one speech, a large part of which was in any case meant to reassure us, will not buy us,” was the way one unidentified White House official put it to an Israeli source. “If anyone is under any illusions, we do not intend to reduce the pressure to achieve progress.”

“Progress” in the Arab-Israeli diplomatic theatre of operations has long been a code word for Israeli retreat, and retreat is precisely what settlement leaders fear Netanyahu may do. Dani Dayan, who heads the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea and Samaria says he is “very worried.” Well he might be. Netanyahu’s initial “I will not freeze [natural growth]” has morphed into “I will not completely freeze.” There are other warning flags. Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s increasing presence in the “natural growth” negotiations is far from comforting. He made two trips to Washington in late June to “consolidate all the construction data” relative to the “natural growth” question and “define the parameters of a settlement freeze.”

In a cogent analysis, Jerusalem Post diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon contends that Obama’s “hard line on the Settlements has effectively made Israeli-Palestinian negotiations dependent on a complete Settlement freeze, something the Netanyahu government—because of its political makeup and Netanyahu’s desire for political longevity—is simply not going to do.” And since the Palestinians insist they will not begin talking until a freeze is in place, the bottom line is there will be no negotiations. Mahmoud Abbas, Keinon asserts, finds that much to his liking. “He is not interested in negotiating with Netanyahu and Obama has now given him an excuse not to.” If the Obama’s game plan is to ignite a revolt against the Likud government and bring on a more pliant Tzippi Livni, he is playing to lose, Keinon believes. The prime minister is riding a 61 percent popularity wave in favor of “natural” settlement expansion. He has no intention of going “gently into the good political night.”

“At the end of the day and after all the speeches,” Nadav Shragai recently wrote in Ha’aretz. “the Palestinian State – and with it the State of Israel – will rise or fall on Jerusalem, the most legitimate and greatest Israeli settlement ever...When it comes to Jerusalem, there is no need to mention either ‘natural growth’ or natural development. What is at stake is nature itself, the nature of our connection to this city and the realization of the right that is rooted in our religion, our history and 2,000 years of memory and longing, during which the Jewish presence in Israel never ceased to exist.”

The challenge to that history penetrates beyond political considerations into the heart of a zero sum culture incapable of recognizing any right, any truth alien to its fevered illusions. It has spawned a Palestinian television network that daily warns its viewers that the Al-Aksa mosque is under imminent threat of a man-made Israeli earthquake and a Jerusalem mufti, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein, who believes that if the earthquake doesn’t come off, Israel will do the job with “bombs” dropped from the air or detonated from a distance. The stirring of Arab blood lust isn’t confined to religious leaders or alleged threats to the Al-Aksa. The mere Jewish presence in Jerusalem was sufficient to have prompted Dr. Marwan Abu Khalaf, director of Al-Quds University’s “Institute of Islamic Archeology” to declare that “under every stone and in every corner, on every street and at every bend in Jerusalem, there are remains that say: ‘We are Arab, we are Muslim.’” Given such a narrative, Shragai avers, “it is no wonder that the Palestinian Authority—and not just Hamas—is defining Jerusalem as ribat land, meaning that Muslims are religiously mandated to fight for it and hold on to it…for the sake of Islam.”

That Israel after 61 years stands virtually alone in the face of this barbaric revisionist onslaught is about the most damning commentary that can be made about the “civilized” West. That the most powerful and enlightened democracy in the history of the world appears to be shifting to the side of the barbarians is the stuff of which our worst dreams are made. One can only hope that the awakening that ends this nightmare is not much longer delayed.

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

Posted by Ruth at 10:19 PM

It’s Official! Guinness Book Declares Palestine Demilitarized Zone, Most Militarized Region On The Planet

David Isaac

"The second principle is demilitarization. Any area in Palestinian hands has to be demilitarized, with ironclad security measures. Without this condition, there is a real fear that there will be an armed Palestinian state which will become a terrorist base against Israel, as happened in Gaza." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Bar-Ilan University speech, June, 14, 2009.

East Jerusalem - It was a festive atmosphere today in the Palestine State's new capital. A large crowd gathered along Nablus street singing "Death to Israel!" as a parade passed by in commemoration of Land Day. The local holiday, celebrated yearly on March 30, features incursions across the border into Israel to have picnics and set forest fires.

What makes this year's Land Day special, however, is the parade's unusual Grand Marshal. Instead of the run-of-the-mill mother of a suicide bomber, it's Jim McNicholls, editor-in-chief of the Guinness Book of World Records. The unassuming 5'3" Glasgow native has been invited to verify what Palestinian State officials have been saying for a long time; that Palestine is the most militarized region in the world.

"We thought we'd be counting weapons per square mile," said Guinness editor McNicholls, explaining why it's taken over two years to make the announcement. "It was more like per square inch."

McNicholls was the center of attention as he waved to the crowd from his float, a fantastically large piece of dynamite. "We thought of putting him on a giant spinning top filled with nitroglycerin, but it looked too much like a Jewish dreidel. Plus it exploded," said Parade Organizer Walid Schmalid. "You can still see where we assembled it over where Mt. Scopus used to be."

The story behind how Guinness counted the weapons is itself one for the record books. At first, the company assigned a single representative to tally the armaments of the newly minted 23rd Arab state. When the official collapsed from a brain spasm after checking off his 380,000th Qassam rocket, the people at Guinness recognized their resources were woefully inadequate to the task.

To count the weapons, Guinness realized it would need an army. Luckily, there was one nearby. Some 50,000 blue-helmeted UN soldiers, police and civilian personnel were on hand as part of a long-term mission to ensure that Palestine remain demilitarized, as stipulated in the final status agreement signed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority three years earlier.

The task of putting the UN peacekeepers to work on a new mission, one which some said was at odds with their original one, was not a simple matter. Negotiations went on until McNicholls hit on the idea of putting the UN peacekeepers themselves in the record book.

"It was the largest UN peacekeeping operation in history. I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner," McNicholls said. "Most people melt like butter when you dangle a Guinness record in front of them. The UN was no different."

The UN General Assembly ratified the changed mission in Resolution 2450. French General Louis de Funes expressed relief once he received his new orders. "Before, it was embarrassing. There were weapons everywhere. You couldn't take a step without tripping over an artillery piece," de Funes said. "But what could I do with 50,000 troops? Stop them?"

The French general beamed with pride as he stood on the podium with various Arab dignitaries as McNicholls presented them with a plaque certifying the Palestinian State as the most heavily armed zone on the planet.

The parade ended with the usual barrage of missiles, tank rounds and artillery shells launched against Israel, one of which accidentally dropped into Ricky Rukab's ice cream parlor, wiping out the Arab girls inside who were enjoying Ricky's famous Rocket Pops.

There was an additional note of sadness in the proceedings. Their mission accomplished, General de Funes and his troops would be leaving Palestine to go across the border into Israel. The UN troops will now oversee Israel's demilitarization. According to recently passed UN Resolution 2544, it was decided that in order to make the two-state solution work, one of the sides should be demilitarized. If the Arabs wouldn't do it, it would have to be the Jews.

"This time our mission will succeed," declared General de Funes. "We have learned many lessons from our efforts here. The first of which is that the people must want to be demilitarized. The Arabs didn't want it. But from everything I hear, the Jews do. They are tired of war. They are tired of fighting. That gives us reason to hope."

McNicholls hitched a ride with the peacekeeping convoy as it made its way to the border. He was on his way to present still another plaque, this one for Israel’s new Peace Park, once the site of Tel Aviv University. The buildings were destroyed in a recent rocket attack. Trees, grass and birds were trucked in before the flames had even died down. It’s the fastest built park in the world, McNicholls says.

David Isaac is a free-lance writer living in California.

Posted by Ruth at 10:15 PM

It's Déjà Vu All Over Again

Melanie Phillips

So now the veil is well and truly ripped off. All the warning signs have been there for months: Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s boilerplate leftist agitprop about Operation Cast Lead in Gaza; Britain’s pressure on the EU to renege on the agreements it made with Israel and boycott produce from the settlements; Miliband’s statement that Jerusalem should be the capital of ‘Palestine’ as well as of Israel. Now there has been a step-change. Haaretz reports that the British government has revoked a number of arms export licenses to Israel following the Gaza war. Five export licences have been revoked over spare parts for ships’ guns. The decision apparently resulted from heavy pressure by both members of Parliament and human rights organizations.

The unhinged malevolence over Cast Lead can no longer be brushed off as the foamings of the far-left and its acolytes in the media, NGOs and fashionable society. This is the British government now acting to punish Israel for defending itself against relentless rocket attack by an enemy bent on its destruction.

It says Israel’s actions were ‘disproportionate’. What is it talking about? The actual evidence showed that the proportion of civilians killed in Gaza was very small—far smaller than might have been expected given the tactics Hamas was using of embedding itself within the population. The claims of large numbers of civilians and children killed were fabricated by Hamas and recycled by the Israel-bashers of the UN and media. Far from being ‘disproportionate’, Cast Lead was a carefully targeted operation which, given the circumstances, was astonishingly successful in its aim of confining its attack to terrorist operatives. The only people claiming ‘disproportionate’ are enemies of Israel. Now the British government has openly joined them.

Even now, however, the Foreign Office is in weaselly fashion attempting to deny that this is what it is. This partial arms embargo, it says, is not a partial arms embargo—because all export licenses will continue to be considered individually:

“Future decisions will take into account what has happened in the recent conflict. We do not grant export licenses where there is a clear risk that arms will be used for external aggression or internal repression. We do not believe that the current situation in the Middle East would be improved by imposing an arms embargo on Israel. Israel has the right to defend itself and faces real security threats. This said, we consistently urge Israel to act with restraint and supported the EU Presidency statement that called the Israeli actions during operation Cast Lead ‘disproportionate.’”

Sorry, but an embargo is an embargo. An act of ideological spite is still an act of ideological spite. The false flag of 'disproportionality' is hoisted only by those who find it 'disproportionate' that Israel should ever defend itself against the Palestinians by military means at all. Israelis are expected instead passively to die under rocket and bomb attack—or perhaps live in shelters for ever. That's proportionate.

It is time now for all decent people of goodwill everywhere to boycott NGOs like Amnesty, War on Want and all the others who are pushing these obscene lies and libels about Israel. No decent person should have anything to do with these organizations. No-one should give money to these inciters of hatred and purveyors of lies. They have sided with the forces of genocide and Islamic fascism against the Jewish people, truth and conscience. They have become a force for evil in the world.

As for the current British Labour government, it can no longer be counted a friend or ally of Israel. The odious Miliband made this as plain as could be when he called two months ago for a ‘new coalition of consent’ between the West and the Islamic world. He went on: “Decisions taken many years ago in [the Foreign Office] are still felt on the landscape of the Middle East...Ruined Crusader castles remain as poignant monuments to the religious violence of the Middle Ages. Lines drawn on maps by colonial powers were succeeded, among other things, by the failure to establish two states in Palestine.”

There was only one reason why a Palestine state did not arise, and that was because the Arabs refused precisely such a proposal—offered not just by the ‘colonial’ power, Britain, but again in 1947 by fiat of the United Nations. As Miliband did not recall, the Arab response was a rejection of a state of Palestine and a war of extermination against Israel instead. This in turn followed decades in which Arab rejectionism of ‘two states’ and of the Jews’ right to be in their historic homeland at all was directly related to the systematic British appeasement of Arab terror. Britain’s history in Palestine was in fact one of repeated betrayal of its pledges to the Jewish people made under international law and its appeasement of Arab tyranny.

Let us not hear any more sickening cant from Gordon Brown about how he learned to love Israel at his father’s knee. In this latest act of malice, Britain has merely reverted to shameful colonial type, courtesy this time of the post-modern left.

It’s déjà vu all over again.

This appeared in the Spectator (UK) on July 13. Melanie Phillips is the author of Londonistan.

Posted by Ruth at 10:12 PM

Paved With Good Intentions

Ruth King
I am not a Torah scholar, but having consulted with experts and scoured the Decalogue and the 613 additional commandments codified in the eighth century, I can report with confidence that among the hundreds of “shalts” and “shalt nots” there are none that command Jews to be Democrats or liberals or to love their enemies better than themselves. You could be excused for not knowing this, given the number of political groupies who cloak themselves in “religious” palaver when their politically correct doctrines are challenged.

The most misused and overused cliché is Tikkun Olam, translated as “repairing the world.” The phrase originated in classical rabbinic literature and is found in kabbalah, a major strand of Jewish mysticism whose famous exponent was the 16th-century Rabbi Isaac Luria. It is now used to promote the cult of global warming, universal health care and assorted other “progressive” policies, especially those inimical to Israel’s survival. Incidentally, one of the directors of the seditious group “J” Street which acts as shill for President Obama’s anti-Israel policies is named Isaac Luria. Well what’s in a name? The director is called “Ben-Ami” which means son of my people.

Groups like “J” Street were founded on anti-Israel premises. More alarming are the formerly mainstream organizations which have veered precipitously to the left. For example, Hadassah is the world’s largest volunteer women’s organization with a sterling record of hands-on support for Israel. Hadassah sent the first group of public health nurses to Palestine in 1913. It established nurseries, schools, health centers and major hospitals. Its members were active in the rescue movement which saved thousands of children from the Nazis. With Israel’s independence Hadassah played an outsize role in the ingathering which brought the wretched survivors of Europe and the Arab states to Israel, providing housing, medical care, counseling and language and vocational training.

However, as younger women active in the 1970s anti-war movement took over, the focus changed to trendy domestic issues such as abortion, gay and lesbian rights, embryonic stem cell research, a “green” planet, and “social justice and civil rights” as seen through the prism of the far left of the Democratic party. It is not only that this has nothing to do with specifically Jewish concerns. “Social justice” issues, thus defined, are the mainstay of Israel-hating groups—to take Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as well known examples.

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith is another former powerhouse that fell to the left. Founded in 1943, the B’nai B'rith is the oldest Jewish service and communal organization in the world. It founded the ADL in 1913 "to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people.” The great influx of refugees from Eastern Europe had intensified latent anti-Semitism. Libels of Jews as “money lenders” and criminals were widespread; clubs were formed to exclude them; even boycotts of businesses gained traction; and financial and academic institutions established quotas to limit Jewish participation.

Through education, public relations and the courts, the ADL rose to the challenge of taking on defamers of Jews. The ADL was also strongly supportive of Israel and after 1967 closely monitored anti-Vietnam and other leftist protests which degenerated into stealth-bashing of Israel. The ADL maintained the most thorough archives of United Nations depredations, anti-Semitic cartoons and editorials in the Arab press, media assaults and libels against Israel. Within the President’s Conference, the ADL was foremost in resisting the pressures of left-wing anti Israel groups.

What happened?

Why did the ADL turn from opposing anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda to insulting people like Dennis Prager as "intolerant, misinformed and downright un-American” for insisting that. Moslem Congressman Keith Ellison take the oath of office on a Bible, not the Koran? (The worst the ADL could find to say about Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University was that it was "a charade of half-answers and obfuscation.")

Why does the ADL slam the heroic Geert Wilders, who has put his life on the line for the West, for “Islamophobia,” while remaining silent on the genocidal intentions toward Jews of “the religion of peace”? Why have they defamed the Evangelicals who are Israel’s most stalwart supporters while schmoozing with and empathizing with the “hurt feelings” of those who want to behead all infidels? In its zeal to empty the public square of any and all religious content, the ADL has gone so far as to criticize the placement of the Ten Commandments on public property and Bibles in public schools.

In a hard-hitting column Ann Coulter skewered the ADL: “The survival of Israel is inextricably linked to the survival of the Republican Party and its evangelical base. And yet the ADL viciously attacks conservatives, implying that there is some genetic anti-Semitism among right-wingers in order to hide the fact that anti-Semites are the ADL's best friends—the defeatists in Congress, the people who tried to drive Joe Lieberman from office, the hoodlums on college campuses who riot at any criticism of Muslim terrorists and identify Israel as an imperialist aggressor, and liberal college faculties calling for ‘anti-apartheid’ boycotts of Israel. The Democratic Party sleeps with anti-Semites every night, but groups like the ADL love to play-act their bravery at battling ghosts, as if it's the 1920s and they are still fighting quotas at Harvard.”

The ADL’s poster boy is Alan Dershowitz, once a defender of Jews and Israel at Harvard and the bête noir of Jhimmi Carter, who feared debating him. His obsession with abortions, climate-warming hysteria, and other multi-culty trash has rendered him a pathetic hero worshipper of Obama and the Democratic party and a loud and articulate defamer of Christian friends of Israel.

What is going on?

People like Dershowitz, along with the leaders of most of the mainstream Jewish organizations, somehow got the idea that blending with the left and dabbling in “progressive” politics was good for the Jewish future. They bought into the idea that they were furthering Jewish interests but now the idea has them in its grip. To the left, which increasingly flirts with outright anti-Semitism, they are irrelevant. As defenders of Israel they are useless. Indeed, by their support of the left they wind up in the same place as Israel’s most malevolent detractors, the J Streets, Tikkuns and New Israel Funds, driving away friends and gratifying enemies.

As the old saw has it, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Posted by Ruth at 10:10 PM

JUNE 2009 OUTPOST

REPORT FROM ISRAEL
Herbert Zweibon

FROM THE EDITOR
Rael Jean Isaac

WHO NEEDS A PALESTINIAN STATE?
Daniel Greenfield

GEYSER OF PEACE ERUPTS!
David Isaac

OBAMA'S MOVE AGAINST ISRAEL
Anne Bayefsky

FOOTPRINTS....ORDE WINGATE
Norman Landerman-Moore

DISMANTLEMENT TO NON-EXISTENCE
Diana West

REFLECTIONS ON NORMANDY
Ruth King

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

Outpost is distributed free to
Members of Americans For a Safe Israel
Annual membership: $50.

Americans For a Safe Israel
1751 Second Ave. (at 91st St.)
New York, NY 10128
tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717

Posted by Ruth at 12:42 PM

REPORT FROM ISRAEL

Herbert Zweibon

My wife and I were in Israel from mid-April to mid-May on our semi-annual monthly visit. In that time I was able to oversee the creation of AFSI’s new website in Hebrew, entitled Maspik Vedai—“Enough, already!” While Outpost has long been distributed in Israel and we have had a chapter there chaired by William Mehlman (whose trenchant articles are familiar to readers of Outpost), this is the first time we have a program of outreach in Hebrew.

Through Maspik Vedai we hope to mobilize Israelis at the grassroots to demand better from their government. The website, which is highly professional and beautifully designed by former Member of the Knesset Michael Kleiner’s staff, focuses on the need to combat corruption in government, broadly understood. It includes not just what the public means by corruption—elected officials with hands in the till—but an intertwined political corruption, where individuals are “bribed,” by means other than money, for political purposes and where institutions—Israel’s Supreme Court is a good example—seize power that belongs to other branches of government.

While non-Hebrew speakers will not be able to use most of the website, which offers news, relevant articles, lists of suggested reading material and videos, there is one segment I strongly recommend to everyone. Go to the site, www.maspikvedai.co.il, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the second link from the left (“kittei itonot” or press clippings) and then click on the picture of the projector. You will see video of a parade of Israeli politicians on the Knesset floor, explaining why they are voting for the Gaza “disengagement,” with English translations at the bottom of the screen. That includes Benjamin Netanyahu saying “Let there be no mistake, I will support the disengagement plan” and then actually voting for it. (He has since tried to rewrite history to cast himself as someone who always warned against and opposed the plan.) The Likud’s Yuval Steinitz (then head of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee!) says “I think this plan is trustworthy—it has a good chance of improving our geo-strategic position.” The Likud’s Meir Shitreet scoffs: “Some argue that there will be a threat to Negev communities. I have never heard such a ridiculous claim.” Shaul Mofaz, who as Defense Minister and former chief of staff should have known better, says: “I am convinced the process is necessary and correct. It will give more security to citizens.”

How wrong they all were. In any rational country that replaced rather than recycled failed politicians, these men would all be in private life now, embarrassed to be seen in public. Instead they continue in leadership roles. As for their victims, I visited Nitzanim where land has finally been allocated for 800 families who have been without permanent housing since they were evicted by the Sharon government from their homes in Gush Katif. Despite the government promises of restitution at the time, I was informed by their spokesman Dror Vanunu that residents will have to pay for their housing without government help.

I made my regular trip to Hebron where Beit Hashalom (see the December 2008 Outpost for the full background) remains empty as a result of a court order evicting the families who lived there. I was told the legal cost of fighting the government’s efforts to prevent the community’s use of the building were high.

Finally I met with Minister of Infrastructure Uzi Landau, Minister for Strategic Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon and Arieh Eldad, Member of the Knesset for the National Union (which is not in the government coalition). They all felt that there were countervailing pressures (to those exerted by Obama and Labor, from within the coalition) exercised by elements in the Likud that might stiffen Prime Minister Netanyahu’s spine. That Netanyahu did not cave in his meeting with Obama suggests they are right.

Posted by Ruth at 12:37 PM

FROM THE EDITOR

Rael Jean Isaac

AIPAC AGAINST ISRAEL

In this issue Dan Greenfield says all that needs to be said about the (third) state President Obama (like Bush before him) is intent on creating within the territory of Mandatory Palestine. It is, simply put, a weapon for Israel’s destruction. Prime Minister Netanyahu, fully aware of this, has (so far) resisted pressures to endorse the phony “two state solution.” Yet AIPAC, which ends its annual conference with a mass lobbying effort in which thousands of participants spread out across Capitol Hill to meet their Congressional representatives, this year sent forth its masses to urge Congress to press Obama (as if he needed pressing) for a “viable Palestinian state.” If this is AIPAC’s idea of “advancing American-Israeli interests” (supposedly its raison d’etre) both Israel and the U.S. would be better off without AIPAC.

UNREQUITED LOVE

Caroline Glick provides another example of the pervasive unreality in which so many Israelis live (making them fantasize that all that stands between them and peace with the Arab world is “the settlements.”) She reports that Israelis “are wild about Europe” with 76% of the country’s Jews wishing to join the EU. Needless to say, the love is unrequited. As Glick points out, a 2003 Pew survey of 15 EU countries showed that 59% of Europeans considered Israel the greatest threat to world peace and a poll taken in Germany a year later found 68% of Germans believed Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians and 51% found no significant difference between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

What Israelis also fail to appreciate is just how disastrous membership in the EU would be. Presently EU courts lack power to enforce their rulings against Israelis (as long as they don’t go to Europe they won’t be arrested). But were Israel to join the EU, EU laws would supersede Israeli laws. Glick writes: “European courts could compel Israeli courts to enforce their rulings. Israel, in short, would find itself subsumed in a hostile political entity that could simply adjudicate and legislate it out of existence.”

FROM FEITH TO BROOKS

When the ghost of his father first appears to Hamlet, he laments “O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!” referring to his wife’s replacing him with his evil brother. The words seem apposite, now that the intellectually formidable Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy under Bush, has been replaced by Michelle Flournoy and her light-weight adviser, Rosa Brooks, a crude anti-Bush polemicist who has called Bush “our torturer in chief,” described Bush and Cheney as “psychotics who need treatment” and has urged “direct government support for public media” and government licensing of news outlets. L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, responded to that last hideous proposal: “The day that the government gets involved in the news media you see the end of the democratic process, because an independent news media is absolutely essential to the success of a democracy.”

AYRES AT BRANDEIS

In the October 2008 Outpost we published H. Peter Metzger’s “Brandeis: School for Terrorists?” which detailed how Brandeis has provided a sanctuary for more extreme radicals than any other university in America. Brandeis is at it again, having invited unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayres to speak on campus. Responding to protests, Brandeis spokesman Dennis Nealon self-righteously announced: “This is about freedom of educational opportunity.”

Not surprisingly, Israel falls victim to Brandeis’s “progressive” posturing. In 2006 the university gave playwright Tony Kushner an honorary doctorate. As writer Marilyn Penn points out, he’s the fellow “who called Israel’s founding a ‘mistake,’ referred to the country as a ‘disgrace’ and to its American Jewish supporters as ‘repulsive.’ It was an odd choice of honoree for a university founded by Jews and named after a great American Zionist and Supreme Court Justice.” A year earlier, Penn reports, Brandeis picked up a Ford grant of $500,000 to develop a formal relationship with Al Quds University in Jerusalem—Al Quds, on its website, denies any historical connection of Jews to Jerusalem.

Jewish parents would do a great deal better sending their children to Hillsdale College than to Brandeis.

UNESCO HONORS BOOK BURNING

In the Wall Street Journal (May 1), writing from Beirut where he is a visiting professor at the American University, William Marling notes the irony that Beirut has been named UNESCO’s 2009 “World Book Capital City” (with the occasion kicked off with a variety of (continued on page 11)
readings to honor “conformity to the principles of freedom of expression [and] freedom to publish” as stated by the UNESCO Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UNESCO’s Florence Agreement.) A colleague at the university had recently ordered copies of The Diary of Anne Frank for his classes, to learn the book was banned along with all books that portray Jews or Zionism favorably.
Such is “conformity to the principles of freedom of expression,” UNESCO style.

DOWN WITH ENERGY

That’s the policy of this coercive utopian administration, from Obama on down. Yes, they babble about what expert on environmental policy Paul Driessen calls “pixie dust energy from wind turbines and solar panels that now meet barely 1% of our total energy requirements.” But when it comes to what Driessen terms “Real Energy,” the hydrocarbons and nuclear that generate “93% of the energy that safeguards our jobs, health, living standards and national security”—they are being closed down.

Obama, says Driessen, “wants energy prices to ‘skyrocket,’ to coerce Americans to slash carbon dioxide emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050—to levels last seen in 1905! The National Economic Council and other analysts put the cap-and-trade tax hit designed to achieve this at $1.3 to 3.0 trillion. Driessen observes that in addition to hitting poor households the hardest, cap-and-tax will clobber manufacturing and heavy industry jobs. “Twenty states get 60-98% of their electricity from coal. They form our manufacturing heartland and every increase in electricity prices will result in more businesses laying off workers or closing their doors.”

In the meantime, Driessen writes, “Whether it’s oil and natural gas (onshore or off), coal or coal-to-gas, shale oil or uranium, Congress and the White House are making America’s best prospects off limits. Investors Business Daily (best editorial page in the country) asserts that years from now people will scratch their heads in wonder at the foolishness of the U.S. in taking more than 31 billion barrels of oil, 154 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 11 billion tons of coal off the market through laws that make it difficult, if not impossible, to prospect and produce energy on federal lands.

IBD notes that we will be dependent on Canadian oil sands to provide us with the billions of barrels of oil we must have if our economy does not shudder to a halt. And the administration’s coercive utopians have already suggested we might not want Canada’s oil since it’s so ‘dirty’ and likely to increase our carbon footprint. Concludes IBD: “Here’s a little yellow Post-It for U.S. policymakers: Make nice with Canada. Given our ridiculous refusal to exploit our own vast energy resources, it’s going to be the best friend we can have.”

Impervious to mere reality, the Democrats in Congress have hired a speed reader to deal with the Republican threat to have the 946 page energy bill read in its entirety. A fitting way—reading the bill so that it sounds like gobbledygook—to jam through an intrinsically absurd bill.

SEYMOUR HERSH AGAIN

Since 1992, in a series of articles, this writer has exposed the shoddy journalism of Hersh, now The New Yorker’s chief investigative reporter, who specializes in attacking Israel. (The first was “Seymour Hersh’s Obsessions” Midstream Feb./March 1992).

In “Investigating Seymour Hersh” (in The Jewish Divide Over Israel, 2006) I noted that as he gained celebrity and became a staple of the campus lecture circuit, he became ever more reckless, in his talks lobbing wild and incendiary charges that were quickly disseminated via the internet.

His most recent foray is documented by Ralph Alter on the American Thinker website. Hersh is quoted by the Pakistan paper The Nation as claiming “Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al Hariri and the army chief of that country.”

Hersh now denies he said “anything remotely to that effect.” But Alter notes that on March 10 Hersh was caught on tape by The Minnesota Post at a “Great Conversations” event held at the University of Minnesota describing an executive assassination ring supposedly directed by Cheney: “Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially and it’s been going on and on and on.”

Hersh is what he is and by now may have genuine difficulty separating paranoid fantasy from fact. The real villain is David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, who is not delusional, knows or should know that Hersh is untrustworthy, yet continues to foist him upon an unsuspecting public.

Posted by Ruth at 12:35 PM

WHO NEEDS A PALESTINIAN STATE?

Daniel Greenfield

Everyone, and by "everyone" I mean the denizens of Washington D.C.'s and Brussels’ government buildings, agrees that we need a Palestinian state. Chiming in with their "Yes" votes are the dictators of a dozen Arab states who agree that the only thing that will fix the region is adding another Arab dictatorship and subtracting the region's one democracy.

But who actually needs a Palestinian state? Or rather a second Palestinian state. The first Palestinian state, commonly called Jordan, was carved out of the Palestine Mandate and equipped with a refugee ruler from the Hashemite royal family in what is now Saudi Arabia. Today Jordan exists mainly under the protection of the U.S. and Israel, and its population of Palestinian Arabs is a seething mass of Muslim extremists currently enjoying a 30 percent unemployment rate, where the majority of the population supports Osama Bin Laden at a higher rate than even Pakistan.

But Jordan is heaven on earth compared to the Second Palestinian State that the Obama Administration is determined to inflict on Israel. Ruled by mutually hostile armed gangs loyal to either the Fatah or Hamas terrorist groups, Palestine 2.0 has been a failed state for over a decade. Every attempt at foreign investment has failed. The ruins of industrial zones, greenhouses and even a casino dot the landscape. Palestinian Arab Christians from overseas who returned to build up the economy fled quickly in the face of relentless shakedowns, kidnappings and militia gangs masquerading as law enforcement.

The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs work for two employers, UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority, which in turn is funded by foreign donors. Work for the Palestinian Authority usually means belonging to a militia gang which is loyal to a particular figure in the PA leadership, who in turn passes that loyalty on to the current "government." With little to do, the gangs spend their free time dealing drugs, carrying out terrorist attacks and collecting protection money from their town's remaining stores.

For 17 years, Israel, America and just about every interested party has tried to build a Palestinian state. They provided weapons and training to build a modern Palestinian police force. They sent advisers and fortunes in economic aid, thousands per Palestinian Arab. Billions in funds from the EU, America and various do-gooders were swallowed up to fund the lavish lifestyles of Arafat and his henchmen.

Year after year, the proposed Palestinian state has become a worse place. Given its own military, political, legal and economic system, "Palestine" has made the region more unstable than ever. Proposing that more of this will stabilize the region is akin to a man setting fire to one piece of furniture after another in his living room, and claiming that when the entire room is on fire, it will be a safe place to live.

So I ask again, who needs a Palestinian state? If the Palestinian Arabs really wanted a state (a second state) in Gaza, the West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem, they could have had it before 1967, when those territories were in Arab hands. Instead the PLO back then called for no Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel. As Clinton discovered to his chagrin at the end of his term, Arafat did not want a state and was not interested in an Israeli offer that gave him 99 percent of what he said he wanted. Is it any surprise that Hamas today follows the same party line?

And really why would they want a Palestinian state? If a state was actually created, the UNRWA would have to close up shop. A Palestinian state could no longer rely on foreign donors to fund the hundred thousand or so armed gangsters who form its "government" and its only real form of employment. And the same Muslim states who pass along "charity" to help fund the "martyr operations" that are behind much of the local terrorism would turn elsewhere.

Instead for 17 years the same tired opera has been playing in the region's one theater. First the world's statesmen and diplomats descend on Israel, crying that the only hope for regional stability is a Palestinian state. Israeli diplomats arrive with a generous territorial offer, counterbalanced by a second clause that asks for an end to terrorism.. That second clause is immediately ignored by everyone in the room.

Next the Palestinian Authority diplomats arrive demanding twice as much land, no more border security preventing terrorists from entering Israel, half of Israel's capital, contiguous borders that would cut Israel in half, the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from territories claimed by them—and finally the return of the "refugees," which is code for unlimited immigration from their proposed Palestinian State into Israel.

The Israelis make a counteroffer. The statesmen and diplomats accuse Israel of rejecting peace. The Palestinian Arabs begin carrying out terrorist attacks again (assuming they even bothered to stop during the negotiations). Israel bombs the terrorists. The statesmen and diplomats accuse Israel of perpetuating the cycle of violence, and urge everyone to go back to the negotiating table and the whole "Cycle of Peacemaking" repeats itself all over again.

The Palestinian ruling powers derive their authority from two forces:

1. The Muslim desire to destroy Israel as an infidel state whose existence contradicts Islam. This keeps the money and arms flowing in to the different factions, as well as provides popular support by Arabs.
2. Western and Israel diplomats who keep trying to create a Palestinian state out of the bizarre notion that such a state would bring the terrorism to an end. Like all Dhimmi behaviors in regard to Islam, they ignore the fact that the short term goal of terrorism is terrorism. The long term goal of terrorism is to conquer and hold the territory of the terrorized. Palestinian nationalism has always been a crock, a transparently phony justification for terrorism that has always come before nationalism. Palestine was never a country or a state. It was the name given by the Roman occupation forces to a region they were administering, a region far larger than modern day Israel. There was never an Arab Palestinian king or ruler until Arafat.

Nearly two decades of terrorism have turned the endless rounds of peace negotiations into a joke. Half the Palestinian Authority is now ruled by the Iranian backed Hamas terrorist group, which insists it will never recognize or accept permanent peace with Israel—a state of affairs that never would have come into being had Israel not completely withdrawn from Gaza in the first place.

So once again, who wants or needs a Palestinian state?

Israel did not come into being out of pity for the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Nor did it come into being thanks to U.S. aid or support. Both of these are common myths.

The State of Israel was in place well before the Holocaust, in the form of an embryonic country of farmers who drained the swamps, businessmen who set up shops, journalists who printed newspapers, and soldiers who trained to protect and defend their homeland. When the UN recognized Israel, it simply accepted the fait accompli that Israel existed and was capable of taking care of itself, which it proved by fighting the armies of the surrounding Arab nations to a standstill. It did it without U.S. military aid, which only came into the picture much later with the Kennedy administration. It did it, because the people of Israel genuinely wanted their own state and worked to make it happen.

By 1942, 17 years after the Palestine Mandate, the Jews of Israel had built a thriving country, from power generators to vast stretches of farmland, from a revived language to the Technion, created in 1924 and considered one of the leading electrical engineering and computer science schools in the world.

Seventeen years after Oslo, the Palestinian Arabs have built nothing but death and destruction. Worse yet they've taken everything that was given to them and turned it into either a weapon or a bribe. Not even the most liberally minded thinker can point to anything in the Palestinian Authority leadership that suggests that they're capable of running a functional state. Which is why that same species will naturally duck the question and begin blaming Israel instead.

The two state solution is not a formula for any kind of stability or end to the violence. It's meant to take the violence to a whole new level. It is a formula for the destruction of Israel. Seventeen years of peacemaking by Israelis has produced 17 years of terrorism by the Palestinian Arabs. Everything sowed on the Palestinian Authority, from money to guns, from autonomy to infrastructure, have come up as dragon's teeth.

Palestine is not a state. Palestine is a gun aimed at the head of Israel with one goal, its destruction. Palestine is a gun aimed at the head of every Jew in the world, legitimizing the worst and ugliest kinds of bigotry. Palestine is an imaginary place given form as a vicious myth, brainwashing generation after generation of Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs to call themselves Palestinians and kill and die in the name of perpetuating a second Holocaust, all for the glory of Allah, Mohammed, Marx, not to mention Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, the House of Saud, and every cause and ruler with an interest in toppling Israel into the dust.

Palestine is death. It exists as a form of living death by people taught to see themselves as willing martyrs to the bomb belt from birth. It breathes death, celebrates death, teaches death and preaches death. It is the final ugly end of the hatred and cruelty bottled up in the Arab and Islamic dictatorships of the region. It is the true face of Islam and its shining reflection in the mirror of the Western press and diplomats is the true measure of their Dhimmitude.

The cult of death in Palestine and the war against Israel is only a preview for the West of things to come. Palestine is not a place; it is hate and homicide boiled down into myth. Palestine is not only in Israel. It is in Paris and London. It is in Madrid and Detroit. It is in Sydney and Moscow. It is everywhere that the toxic brew of Muslim fanaticism and Arab nationalism flows. Its flag is the flag of death. Its constitution is a death warrant for every free nation. Its legislature is a smug coven of obese terrorist chieftains sending their followers off to death with the promise of virgin demons fornicating with them in Paradise.

Palestine 2.0 is a monster with only one purpose, to create Holocaust 2.0. That is who needs a Palestinian state. That is why the far left and the far right are both hell-bent on bringing one into being. Accepting the two state solution means accepting death. Rejecting it means embracing life.

Daniel Greenfield blogs under the name of Sultan Knish. This appeared on his blog in May 2009.

Posted by Ruth at 12:30 PM

THE GEYSER OF PEACE ERUPTS!

David Isaac

"My experiences have taught me that peace is not necessarily the result of detailed negotiations or map-design. Peace bursts from the soil like a geyser. It is beautiful to behold and impossible to contain."
—Shimon Peres, President of Israel in May 4, 2009 speech to AIPAC conference

JENIN - This morning on Mount Gilboa overlooking the sleepy suicide bomber capital of the world, a miracle has occurred. A geyser of peace has erupted. The geyser announced itself at 6:04 am local time with a rumbling that knocked local goat herder Ali Wali Mufti Tufti off his donkey.

"First I was on the donkey, then I was off the donkey," recalled Ali Wali Mufti Tufti at a press conference.

The geyser, now known as Peace Geyser, shoots a boiling jet stream to a height of 500 feet every 92 minutes, instantly making it one of the largest geysers on the planet.

World leaders did not know how to respond to the eruption. Environmentalist Al Gore was the first to try and explain the phenomenon, labeling it "a dangerous harbinger of climate change." But his remarks lost much of their steam when it was pointed out that the climate is above ground and the geyser was below ground.

Until 10 a.m., no one could explain the geyser. "It was inexplicable," said Israeli MK Benny Begin, former Director of the Israel Geological Survey. "Geysers only exist in a few places on earth. You need water, heat, air vents. There was nothing like that on Mount Gilboa. I was stumped. Then I read the speech and it all made sense."

The speech to which Begin referred was given by Israeli President Shimon Peres to The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee two weeks earlier. Peres, already lauded for his visionary rhetoric, foretold, "Peace bursts forth from the soil like a geyser. It is beautiful to behold and impossible to contain."

"The geyser is no longer just a geyser. It's Biblical prophecy," said Allison Lotus Sutra Gupta Cohen, a popular Buddhist nun in the San Francisco area who credits the geyser for her split-second decision to re-convert back to Judaism. "Moses brought forth water from a rock. Peres brought forth a geyser from a hill. It's basically the same thing if you think about it."

Former nun, soon-to-be rabbi Cohen's reaction was typical of all who heard about the Peace Geyser and its foretelling by the Israeli president. The news, which has dominated the conversation on social networking sites, twitters and blogs, as well as discussions around water coolers, gym treadmills and sidewalk cafes, has sparked an almost messianic fervor. People who had never heard of Shimon Peres claim kinship. "Hey, his name's Perez. My name's Perez. Of course, we're related," said Cookie Perez, as he served a fish taco to Cohen across from The Fisherman's Wharf.

Indeed, it seems the only person to have nothing nice to say about Shimon Peres is Rael Jean Isaac, editor of Outpost, the monthly periodical of Americans for A Safe Israel, a reactionary anti-geyser group. "I don't care if two geysers came out of that mountain. That man is an idiot," she said, hanging up during a phone interview.

Asked to comment on her response, the only one of its kind, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Sallei Meridor said, "Listen, you'll always have some holdouts. I mean, there's still a Flat Earth Society. The point is that 99.99% of the world thinks Shimon Peres is a great man with divine powers. Why focus on some kook?"

It is still too early to tell what, if any, will be the lasting effects of the geyser. But early indicators seem to bear out Shimon Peres's vision as laid out in his 1994 book, The New Middle East, which Henry Holt & Co. now expects to outsell all the Harry Potter books put together. In his book, Peres foretells of a regional superstructure, providing security and economic prosperity "for all people and all nations of the Middle East."

"The people of Jenin are superstitious by nature," complained Abdul Rub A Dub Dub, chief of the Islamic Jihad terror squad in Jenin. "Since that waterspout came out of the ground, they all stay in their homes. We had a big bombing planned today and we had to cancel. Everyone starts to think maybe the next geyser comes right through their living room. They start to think maybe the Jews are right."

In a hastily called meeting of the Arab League, the mood was grim. "It really looks like peace," said Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority. "I suggested we put a giant rock over the geyser in the League Council today. I was laughed out of the hall. Nobody wants to take on the geyser. Nobody. It's too big," he said, admitting that the Holocaust happened.

One topic of concern was a second comment Peres made during the same speech to AIPAC, in which he said, "A tsunami of hope is rolling across the globe." The members of the Arab League, many of whom reside in coastal cities, wanted to know if this meant they were going to be washed out to sea. "Why are we even holding this meeting in Cairo?" shouted Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, referring to the city's proximity to the Mediterranean. "This is madness!"

Events in Israel were no less dramatic with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately stepping down in favor of President Shimon Peres, a move that is actually illegal according to Israeli law. The prime minister waved off concerns. "In this country, the PM does whatever he wants. And right now I don't want to be PM," he said, packing his suitcase.

On his first day in office, Prime Minister Shimon Peres was full of grace and humility, 'I've reached a stage where I'm really an independent political figure. Nobody can take away from what I've done, and nobody can add to what I need." Asked for another prophecy, he intoned, "Peace will burst forth like a volcano." The remark has caused widespread panic in Hawaii.

David Isaac is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.

Posted by Ruth at 12:27 PM

GEYSER OF PEACE ERUPTS!

David Isaac

JENIN - This morning on Mount Gilboa overlooking the sleepy suicide bomber capital of the world, a miracle has occurred. A geyser of peace has erupted. The geyser announced itself at 6:04 am local time with a rumbling that knocked local goat herder Ali Wali Mufti Tufti off his donkey.

"First I was on the donkey, then I was off the donkey," recalled Ali Wali Mufti Tufti at a press conference.

The geyser, now known as Peace Geyser, shoots a boiling jet stream to a height of 500 feet every 92 minutes, instantly making it one of the largest geysers on the planet.

World leaders did not know how to respond to the eruption. Environmentalist Al Gore was the first to try and explain the phenomenon, labeling it "a dangerous harbinger of climate change." But his remarks lost much of their steam when it was pointed out that the climate is above ground and the geyser was below ground.

Until 10 a.m., no one could explain the geyser. "It was inexplicable," said Israeli MK Benny Begin, former Director of the Israel Geological Survey. "Geysers only exist in a few places on earth. You need water, heat, air vents. There was nothing like that on Mount Gilboa. I was stumped. Then I read the speech and it all made sense."

The speech to which Begin referred was given by Israeli President Shimon Peres to The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee two weeks earlier. Peres, already lauded for his visionary rhetoric, foretold, "Peace bursts forth from the soil like a geyser. It is beautiful to behold and impossible to contain."

"The geyser is no longer just a geyser. It's Biblical prophecy," said Allison Lotus Sutra Gupta Cohen, a popular Buddhist nun in the San Francisco area who credits the geyser for her split-second decision to re-convert back to Judaism. "Moses brought forth water from a rock. Peres brought forth a geyser from a hill. It's basically the same thing if you think about it."

Former nun, soon-to-be rabbi Cohen's reaction was typical of all who heard about the Peace Geyser and its foretelling by the Israeli president. The news, which has dominated the conversation on social networking sites, twitters and blogs, as well as discussions around water coolers, gym treadmills and sidewalk cafes, has sparked an almost messianic fervor. People who had never heard of Shimon Peres claim kinship. "Hey, his name's Perez. My name's Perez. Of course, we're related," said Cookie Perez, as he served a fish taco to Cohen across from The Fisherman's Wharf.

Indeed, it seems the only person to have nothing nice to say about Shimon Peres is Rael Jean Isaac, editor of Outpost, the monthly periodical of Americans for A Safe Israel, a reactionary anti-geyser group. "I don't care if two geysers came out of that mountain. That man is an idiot," she said, hanging up during a phone interview.

Asked to comment on her response, the only one of its kind, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Sallei Meridor said, "Listen, you'll always have some holdouts. I mean, there's still a Flat Earth Society. The point is that 99.99% of the world thinks Shimon Peres is a great man with divine powers. Why focus on some kook?"

It is still too early to tell what, if any, will be the lasting effects of the geyser. But early indicators seem to bear out Shimon Peres's vision as laid out in his 1994 book, The New Middle East, which Henry Holt & Co. now expects to outsell all the Harry Potter books put together. In his book, Peres foretells of a regional superstructure, providing security and economic prosperity "for all people and all nations of the Middle East."

"The people of Jenin are superstitious by nature," complained Abdul Rub A Dub Dub, chief of the Islamic Jihad terror squad in Jenin. "Since that waterspout came out of the ground, they all stay in their homes. We had a big bombing planned today and we had to cancel. Everyone starts to think maybe the next geyser comes right through their living room. They start to think maybe the Jews are right."

In a hastily called meeting of the Arab League, the mood was grim. "It really looks like peace," said Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority. "I suggested we put a giant rock over the geyser in the League Council today. I was laughed out of the hall. Nobody wants to take on the geyser. Nobody. It's too big," he said, admitting that the Holocaust happened.

One topic of concern was a second comment Peres made during the same speech to AIPAC, in which he said, "A tsunami of hope is rolling across the globe." The members of the Arab League, many of whom reside in coastal cities, wanted to know if this meant they were going to be washed out to sea. "Whyare we even holding this meeting in Cairo?" shouted Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, referring to the city's proximity to the Mediterranean. "This is madness!"

Events in Israel were no less dramatic with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately stepping down in favor of President Shimon Peres, a move that is actually illegal according to Israeli law. The prime minister waved off concerns. "In this country, the PM does whatever he wants. And right now I don't want to be PM," he said, packing his suitcase.

On his first day in office, Prime Minister Shimon Peres was full of grace and humility, 'I've reached a stage where I'm really an independent political figure. Nobody can take away from what I've done, and nobody can add to what I need." Asked for another prophecy, he intoned, "Peace will burst forth like a volcano." The remark has caused widespread panic in Hawaii.

David Isaac is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.

Posted by Ruth at 12:23 PM

OBAMA'S LATEST CALCULATED MOVE AGAINST THE JEWISH STATE

Anne Bayefsky

In advance of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the United States, President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn't fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the U.N. and other international gangsters have at their prey.

It began May 11 with the adoption of a so-called presidential statement by the U.N. Security Council. Such statements are not law, but they must be adopted unanimously—meaning that U.S. approval was essential and at any time Obama could have stopped its adoption. Instead, he agreed to this: "The Security Council supports the proposal of the Russian Federation to convene, in consultation with the Quartet and the parties, an international conference on the Middle East peace process in Moscow in 2009."

This move is several steps beyond what the Bush administration did in approving Security Council resolutions in December and January—which said only that "The Security Council welcomes the Quartet's consideration, in consultation with the parties, of an international meeting in Moscow in 2009." Apparently Obama prefers a playing field with 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 22 members of the Arab League—most of whom don't recognize the right of Israel to exist—and one Jewish state. A great idea—if the purpose is to ensure Israel comes begging for American protection.

The U.N. presidential statement also makes laudatory references to another third-party venture, the 2002 Arab "Peace" Initiative. That's a Saudi plan to force Israel to retreat to indefensible borders in advance of what most Arab states still believe will be a final putsch down the road. America's U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, announced to the Security Council that "we intend to integrate the Arab Peace Initiative into our own approach."

Make no mistake: This U.N. move, made with U.S. approval, sets America on a well-calculated collision course with Israel. U.S. collusion on this presidential statement was directly at odds with Israel's wishes and well-founded concerns about the U.N.'s bona fides on anything related to Israel. Israeli U.N. ambassador Gabriella Shalev issued a statement of Israel's position: "Israel does not believe that the involvement of the Security Council contributes to the political process in the Middle East. This process should be bilateral and left to the parties themselves. Furthermore, the timing of this Security Council meeting is inappropriate as the Israeli government is in the midst of conducting a policy review, prior to next week's visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the United States…Israel shared its position with members of the Security Council."

By contrast, Rice told reporters: "We had a very useful and constructive meeting thus far of the Council. We welcome Foreign Minister Lavrov's initiative to convene the Council, and we're very pleased with the constructive and comprehensive statement that will be issued by the president of the Council on the Council's behalf. This was a product of really collaborative, good-faith efforts by all members of the Council, and we're pleased with the outcome."

The Obama administration's total disregard of Israel's obvious interest in keeping the U.N. on the sidelines was striking. Instead of reiterating the obvious—that peace will not come if bigots and autocrats are permitted to ram an international "solution" down the throat of the only democracy at the table—Rice told the Council: "The United States cannot be left to do all the heavy lifting by itself, and other countries…must do all that they can to shore up our common efforts." In a break with decades of U.S. policy, the Obama strategy is to energize a U.N. bad cop so that the U.S. might assume the role of good cop—for a price.

On May 12 the Obama administration did it again: It ran for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. As expected, the administration won election to represent the Council's Western European and Others Group—it was a three-state contest for three spaces.

The Council is most famous, not for protecting human rights, but for its obsession with Israel. In its three-year history it has: adopted more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than condemning the 191 other U.N. members combined; entrenched an agenda with only ten items, one permanently reserved for condemning Israel and another for condemning any other U.N. state that might "require the Council's attention"; held ten regular sessions on human rights, and five special sessions to condemn only Israel;
insisted on an investigator with an open-ended mandate to condemn Israel, while all other investigators must be regularly renewed; spawned constant investigations on Israel and abolished human-rights investigations (launched by its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights) into Belarus, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Moreover, every morning before the Human Rights Council starts, all states—and even observers like the Palestinians—get together in their regional blocs for an hour to negotiate, share information, and determine positions. All, that is, except Israel. The Western European and Others Group refuses to give Israel full membership. Now the U.S. will be complicit in this injustice.

Joining the Council has one immediate effect on U.S.-Israel relations: It gives the Obama administration a new stick to use against Israel. Having legitimized the forum through its membership and participation, the U.S. can now attempt to extract concessions from Israel in return for American objections to the Council's constant anti-Israel barrage.

Obama administration officials may believe they can put the lid back on Pandora's box after having invited the U.N., Russia, the Arab League, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to jump into the process of manufacturing a Palestinian state while Israel is literally under fire. If so, they have badly miscalculated. By making his bed with countries that have no serious interest in democratic values, the president has made our world a much more dangerous place.

Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and editor of www.EYEontheUN.org. This article appeared in JewishWorldReview.com on May 18.

Posted by Ruth at 12:20 PM

FOOTPRINTS

Norman Landerman-Moore

I saw the flash and began the count, one-one thousand, two-one thousand, then heard the sharp report of the adversaries’ rifle. About 750 yards, I calculated. We need to move closer! I signaled Arista to move out to our left. It was a slow crawl through the Lebanese scrub brush. The flash and crackle of another shot came, from the same location. A few more yards, I thought, then, we would be in position.

Crawling flat on our bellies, Arista and I slowly approached a small rise and then waited. I signaled Arista that we would fire on the next flash. After a few seconds the flash came. I adjusted slightly lower, sight on the spot, and squeezed the trigger. Arista followed by letting go with a full clip of eight rounds in less than five seconds. We waited for counter fire but none came.

After about ten minutes we carefully made our way toward the enemy position. Sooner than anticipated, we were on the sniper’s nest and confirmed the kill…one less enemy of freedom. His buddies, if there were any, had departed.

We were part of a U.S. Marine expedition sent to Lebanon by President Eisenhower in 1958. Joe Arista and I had been partners for some time, having first met when we volunteered for Marine Recon training. The schooling was rigorous. We were introduced to tactics and fighting methods that were not the norm, at least not what we had experienced when we served in a regular Marine Rifle Company. Our tasking ranged from guerilla tactics, mapping, spotting for artillery, and calling in air strikes on selected targets to insertion behind enemy lines to engage in sabotage, gain intelligence on infrastructure, enemy strength, positions and movements. Then there was sniper work, still in its infancy as a legitimate role for fighting Marines. The theme of one shot, one kill was instilled in us.

What I did not know was that Arista and I, and many like us, were beneficiaries of the pioneering efforts of a unique man by the name of Orde Charles Wingate, who had been dedicated to assisting Jews living in and settling Palestine during the 1930’s and 40’s. He taught Moshe Dayan tactics to defeat marauding Arabs with stealth and resolve. Wingate’s fighting and tactical skills were the foundation for the effectiveness of the Haganah and the military doctrines adopted by the Israeli Defense Forces. His fighting prose and doctrines would eventually cascade to the United States Marine Corps, Army and Navy. Through Wingate, Israeli and American warriors were learning how to carry the fight to the enemy and destroy him in unconventional ways.

In a general sense, little is known of this man, whose Hebrew nickname is “Hayedid,” meaning, “the friend.” Oh yes, one may Google the name, and surf reference material that pops up on the screen. But relatively few know of the life and dedication of this man, a British subject, who devoted his creative warrior talents to the defense of Zionism and the restoration of Jews to their ancient and sacred homeland.

Orde Charles Wingate, a Scot, was born on February 26, 1903, the son of a British officer and a religious Christian mother, in Naini Tal, India. His youthful exposure to religious teachings included a strong belief in the restoration of Jews to their homeland. As part of this belief, he was taught that British peoples and many who had immigrated to America were descendents of the lost tribes, carrying the blood of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

In 1921, when Wingate was 18, he was accepted to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, England. He began a serious study of Arabic and Semitics and in 1923 became a gunnery officer. A few years later, young Wingate received an assignment to the Sudan to patrol the Abyssinian border to interdict slave traders and ivory poachers. He introduced a system of ambushing in place of standard British patrolling with its regularity, exposure, and easy discovery by the enemy. This was the beginning of irregular, and at the time, controversial tactics that would give advantage to small fighting units pitted against a vastly larger military body.

As a Captain of military intelligence, Wingate was ordered to Palestine. His assignment was to gather intelligence on the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al Husseini who had initiated a bloody campaign of attacks against Jewish communities and British Mandate officials stationed in Palestine (no friends of the Jews, by the way). This Arab campaign against Jews, begun during the First World War, was to be dubbed the “Palestine Arab Revolt.”

Wingate became friends with Zionist leaders Chaim Weizmann and Moshe Sharett (Shertok). He began to study Hebrew and soon found himself being accepted, albeit suspiciously, among Jews. His clear, unabashed statement to his new Jewish friends was “I am here to help you!” It was all too clear that military help was going to be needed, and soon.

With broken yet maturing Hebrew spilling off his Scottish/British tongue, a young Captain Wingate initiated plans to create small, mobile units of dedicated warriors from the elite among Israel’s children. On June 25th 1938 Wingate submitted a report to British Military authorities titled “Secret Appreciation of Possibilities of Night Movements by Armed Forces of the Crown—With Object of Putting an end to Terrorism in Northern Palestine”

The report was initially ignored by British brass. However, after intense coaxing by Wingate, the then Commander of British Forces, Archibald Wavell, approved the plan. Immediately, Captain Wingate won support from the Jewish Agency and the Haganah. The new British commander, General Haining, gave Wingate the green light to create what was to become known as the SNS or Special Night Squads. Making his primary base at Ein Harod, Wingate began training and carrying out limited covert operations.

Referring to his Biblical hero Gideon, Wingate would recite to his “special forces” the account of the destruction of a large enemy force allied against Israel by 300 hand picked men. It is said that Wingate kept a Hebrew Bible with him at all times. (After his death his wife Lorna inscribed his Hebrew Bible and it is now in a museum in Ein Harod.) Quickly the uneasiness about this young British warrior waned as the Zionists came to recognize a true friend. On the other hand, British officers would demean Captain Wingate, according to one account complaining of “his rebellious scorn, his arrogance, his paranoid touchiness, his reckless rudeness, his flouting of convention, his personal scruffiness, his leftish ideas, and (dare one suggest it?) his strange obsession with Zionism and the Jews.”

Despite ridicule, Captain Wingate stayed the course. His plan was plain: “The units would carry the offensive to the enemy, take away his initiative and keep him off-balance, and….produce in their minds the belief government forces (SNS) will move at night and can and will surprise them in villages or across the country.” The Jewish police and the Haganah had good intelligence and knew the land. The British had the equipment and under Wingate’s advanced irregular training, the opportunity to become very effective. In many respects Wingate’s plan fit well with what the Haganah, under Yitzhak Sadeh, was attempting to put into place. Sadeh would later comment that, “for some time we did the same things as Wingate, but on a smaller scale and with less skill. We followed parallel paths, until he came to us, and in him we found our leader.”

Bases were established throughout the country. One was located at Hanita on the Lebanese border, another at Geva and another at Ayelet Hashachar. The training expanded in size and techniques. In addition to Moshe Dayan his students included many who were to become leaders in the Haganah, the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli government. Wingate instilled traditions of commando warfare, night fighting and covert operations, as well as the tradition that officers lead from the front, a practice that became his trademark, along with eating raw onions.

Wingate took the long view. He foresaw a major war and in 1937, after only four months in Palestine, told Sir Reginald Wingate that the British Empire should ally itself with the Jews, that they would be better soldiers and could be the key to preserving British interests in Palestine. Wingate insisted that Jewish fighters could help ensure the safety of a predicted one million Jewish immigrants fleeing Europe for Mandatory Palestine within the coming few years. Unfortunately, at that very time British politics were moving toward barring Jews from entering Palestine at all.

Having been away from home for some time, Wingate received leave to return to England for a brief visit with his wife, Lorna Moncrieff Paterson, whom he had married in England in 1935. In England Captain Wingate arranged a private meeting with Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald to lobby against the 1938 Woodhead Commission, which had rejected proposals to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. When word of the meeting reached them, his commanding officers in Palestine stripped him of his command. In May 1939 he was transferred to England, his passport stamped with an entry prohibiting him from returning to Palestine. Wingate became a target for anti-Semitic innuendo and was accused of being “Jewish” by his military peers and members of Parliament. Personal harassment became so intense that Wingate made this public statement: “I am not ashamed to say that I am a real and devoted admirer of the Jews….Had more officers shared my views the [Arab] rebellion would have come to a speedy conclusion some years ago!”

By September 1939, as World War II was getting under way, Wingate was in command of an anti-aircraft unit guarding the homeland. However, Wavell, now Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Command based in Cairo, requested Wingate to lead covert operations against the Italian occupation forces in Abyssinia, today’s Ethiopia. Securing the aid of Avraham Akavia, his former Haganah interpreter, and assembling the Gideon Force, made up of British, Sudanese and Ethiopian soldiers, along with a group of Jewish doctors from Palestine, Wingate set out to deal with the Italians. Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, Wingate led his small Gideon Force against over 20,000 Italians, capturing about 14,000 of the enemy.

He returned to England with a severe case of malaria and convalesced for a short time before being called upon again by Wavell, now Commander of the South-East Asian Theater of War. Wingate formed a long-range penetration unit named the Chindits, a force of about 3,000 men. After initial successes, the Chindits suffered heavy losses and only about 2,200 men made it out of the Burma jungle in April and June of 1943. His success against the Japanese caught the attention of the press and Wingate was soon promoted to Major General. He and his wife Lorna accompanied Winston Churchill (a great admirer of Wingate) to the Quadrant Conference held in Quebec, Canada.

Returning to India, Major General Wingate planned Operation Thursday. Designed to penetrate 200 miles deep into Japanese held Burmese territory, the operation was launched March 5, 1944 using gliders and troop carriers. Three bases were set up and the Chindits, along with Merrill’s Marauders, under the command of American Brigadier General Frank Merrill, wrecked havoc upon the Imperial Japanese Army.

During a storm on March 24, 1944, Wingate and some Americans flew out of Camp Broadway, the primary encampment behind enemy lines, and hit a nearby mountain top killing all aboard. Wingate’s remains, along with those of the American soldiers, are interred at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Wingate never lost sight of his love of Zion and hoped to return to aid the Zionist enterprise after the war. Shortly before his death Wingate wrote to his wife: “Finally I am feeling very much at the moment Im Eshkhokheych Yerushalaim Tishkah Yamini (if I forget Jerusalem let my right hand forget its cunning) and do you too pray that our lot takes us there together to the place and the work we love.”

There were many tributes to Wingate, from Winston Churchill to David Ben-Gurion to the men he led in battle. But the best epitaph for the man is the battle order he gave at the beginning of the Chindit campaign in Burma.
“…it is always a minority that occupies the front line. It is still smaller minority that accepts with good heart tasks like this that we have chosen to carry out…

“Victory in war cannot be counted upon, but what can be counted is that we shall go forward, determined to do what we can to bring this war to the end we believe best for our friends and comrades in arms—without boastfulness or forgetting our duty, resolved to do the right, so far as we can see the right….”

A deeply religious man, Wingate concludes: “Finally, knowing the vanity of man’s effort and the confusion of his purpose, let us pray that God may accept our service and direct our endeavors, so that when we have done all, we shall see the fruit of our labors and be satisfied.”

He left footprints which only a warrior with skills that confound the enemy leaves, like those of Gideon who destroyed the altars of Baal and defeated the Midianite hordes. He left footprints for us all.

Norman J. Landerman-Moore, a Christian supporter of Israel, is president of Landerman-Moore Associates. He wishes to thank Joseph M. Hochstein and Ami Isseroff for their extensive bibliography on Wingate which he drew upon for this article.

Posted by Ruth at 12:17 PM