Defusing the Demographic Time Bomb

by Bennett Zimmerman and Michael Wise
inFocus
Spring 2008
http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/article/111

In an historic and pivotal speech before the Knesset in May 2003, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon shocked his nation by announcing that Israel would withdraw from the Gaza Strip and large parts of the West Bank to demographically defendable lines in light of forecasts that Israeli Jews would soon lose their majority west of the Jordan River.

This was a striking turnabout for Sharon, who had established his reputation as a security hawk, and was widely considered to be the father of Israel's settlement movement. After decades of backing the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the former general was convinced that Israeli control in the disputed territories would soon force Israel to choose between its Jewish character and its vibrant democracy.

Subsequent Israeli policy has been built upon the same premise. Israel's current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, continues to believe that Jews will soon be outnumbered in their own land. This has been an important rationale for the renewed land-for-peace negotiations with the Fatah-backed Palestinian Authority in which Israel is considering painful concessions that may impact its long-term security. However, the forecasts, based largely upon numbers provided by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), are wrong.

The New Palestinian Census of 2007

The newest Palestinian census, released in February 2008, reported that there are now 3.71 million persons living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, this figure includes persons living overseas, persons twice counted, and projections that have spooked successive Israeli governments in recent years.

According to corroborative reports gathered from the PCBS, other Palestinian Agencies, Israeli authorities, and third parties, the recent Palestinian census numbers themselves are still inflated by as many as 1 million persons. After removing twice-counted persons and individuals not currently living in the territories, the population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip totals no more than 2.7 million people.

Original Sin: The Palestinian Census of 1997

The current PCBS data is wrong because it does it not reflect corrections the PCBS itself noted in its original census of 1997. That census included Palestinians who had left over the years, but who were issued identification cards during Israel's Civil Administration. According to the Oslo Accords, these persons had preferential rights to return to the territories. However, the PCBS included these individuals in their figures even if they were absent for decades. Using this data, the PCBS arrived at a faulty estimate for the West Bank and Gaza population totaling 2.8 million persons.

International supervision, however, required the PCBS to define the methodology that helped it arrive at its final numbers. Once it was understood that the PCBS augmented its numbers by including 325,258 residents living abroad, and 210,000 Jerusalem Arabs already counted by Israel, it was clear that the PCBS 1997 Census should have totaled 2.2 million persons. This number essentially confirmed Israel's estimated figure of 2.1 million persons living in the territories, based upon school records, the re-issuance of identification cards, and Israel Border Police records.

Curiously, the Israeli government did not adopt the adjusted figures. Rather, successive Israeli governments worked with the faulty data first provided by the PCBS.

Projecting an Expanded Population

Successive Israeli governments also accepted at face value other faulty data produced by the PCBS, including projections for a rapidly-expanding population base. Not only were the projections based upon the incorrect numbers furnished in the 1997 PCBS census, but they were also based upon inacurate projections of growth for non-residents, as well.

For one, the PCBS harbored incorrect assumptions about population projection. The overall growth projections became so great that the West Bank and Gaza Strip were commonly described as experiencing "the highest birth rates in the world." However, a recent World Bank report noted declining student enrollment, as did annual reports of the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Education. These, in turn, confirmed lower birth levels as recorded by the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Health.

Over an 11-year period, however, the Palestinian Census Bureau estimated 560,000 more births than recorded by the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Health. Furthermore, a simple fact check at the United Nations website revealed that fertility rates ranked 20th for the Gaza Strip and 50th for the West Bank. An American University of Beirut study also corroborates a significant decline in Palestinian fertility levels, especially in the West Bank, based on extensive and large-scale household interviews and registration records of births (including overseas residents).

There were also wrong projections for immigration. While Israeli border records indicated that the territories were experiencing net emigration between 10,000 and 20,000 persons each year, the PCBS figures included a 1.5 percent growth rate each year for non-existent immigration. In fact, over an 11-year period, the PCBS included in their projections 458,000 immigrants who did not arrive, and failed to remove from the PCBS projection 170,000 emigrants. Nor did the PCBS remove the 105,000 Palestinians who officially moved to Israel.

The PCBS defended these faulty numbers with arguments about the "right of return" for those who had been abroad for years. This only underscored the lack of professional standards employed. Israel, for example, regularly subtracts residents who leave the country for a period of one year from its population count. It only adds them again when they reestablish residency.

The most recent Palestinian census also raised a red flag when it counted 208,000 Arabs living in Jerusalem. Israel currently reports that 254,000 Arabs live in Jerusalem. The discrepancy suggests that the PCBS calculated 46,000 Jerusalem Arabs living in adjacent West Bank suburbs. If so, those residents may have been counted twice; once by the PCBS census excluding Jerusalem and once by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS).

Shifting Demographic Momentum

Today, in Israel, there are 5.7 million Jews and 1.45 million Arabs, with another 1.5 million Arabs living in the West Bank. With the Gaza Strip fenced off and separated from Israel, Jews now enjoy a 2 to 1 majority in Israel and the West Bank.

The demographic momentum has also recently shifted. Since 2000, Jewish fertility and immigration have been above, and Israel Arab fertility has plummeted below, all scenarios considered by Israel's demographers and the ICBS. Specifically, Jewish births have grown by 40 percent since 1995, while total Arab births have fallen back to decade-ago levels throughout Israel and the West Bank.

Large segments of the Orthodox Jewish population display the highest fertility rate at 4.8 births per woman, followed by Arab groups at 3.5 births per woman, while the large secular and traditional Jewish majority displays rising fertility rates of 2.2 births per woman. The latter group has become the determinant factor propelling Jews beyond the modest expectations set by Israeli demographers.

Moderate but persistent net aliyah (new Jewish immigration minus emigration plus returning Israelis) at current levels of 20,000 per year are sufficient to keep Israel's Jewish majority steady until 2025, when the current Jewish baby boomers begin to have children. The bottom-line shows Jews holding a strong demographic advantage today in Israel and the West Bank, exclusive of the Gaza Strip.

Establishing Defendable Political Borders

Israel's strong Jewish majority should be considered an historic 120-year achievement of modern Zionism, and not an advantage to be traded away.

Only one scenario exists by which Jews can lose their strong position: open Arab migration into the West Bank. Israel must not allow a situation whereby West Bank Arabs link up politically with Arab populations beyond the Jordan River. In this scenario, Israel could face a renewed demographic challenge.

West Bank Arabs currently encompass only 16 percent of the total population in Israel and the West Bank. The Jewish state can thus weigh its options on how to deal with this territory. It need not tolerate strategic Arab threats against her democracy based on false projections.

Armed with false figures, Israel's political leaders could make needless concessions while negotiating Israel's final borders. Armed with correct ones, Israel has an opportunity to confirm and protect the strategic demographic advantage it enjoys today in Israel and the West Bank.

The correct numbers, and not dramatic claims of a "demographic time bomb" that have so thoroughly terrified Israeli leaders for more than a decade, should provide a firm foundation for Israel to create solutions for peace and security from a position of strength.

Bennett Zimmerman and Michael Wise are with the American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG).

This item is available on the Jewish Policy Center website, at http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/article/111

 

A Friend's Analysis on the Syrian-Iranian Nexus

Syrian-Iranian nexus: Linking WMD programs & support to insurgency

January 17, 2008

The Syrians are rebuilding the nuclear reactor site and seem to have maintained the pumping station. Rather than 'paving over' the evidence of the destroyed site, they seem to have cleared the foundation for the purposes of re-erecting the site. It is not a surprise that the Syrians are pushing a maximilist position on what on the face of it seems to be an overt act of hostility. Though Condoleezza Rice in her public statements continues to downplay the Iranian linkage to Syrian WMD activity, there is something to say of the fact that Larijani, the former chief nuclear negotiator and secretary of the supreme council for national security, has been meeting with senior Syrian officials lately and that both the Syrian Foreign Ministry and the Iranians have ensured that there is no misunderstanding that both nations stand together against "western aggression".

It may be the 'diplomatic' thing to do, separating the nuclear portfolio from Syrian and Iranian dual complicity in fomenting insurgencies in both Iraq and the Levant; but it is not entirely clear that the increasingly proximate leadership of Tehran and Damascus are not pursuing a tandem 'swarm' strategic approach designed to press the West on multiple lines of attack, in the hopes of achieving a EU-US split and instability in Iraq as means to force the US and allies to back-off on all fronts of pressure.


Larijani made a similar public visit and joint statement with the Syrians in 2006 prior to the summer conflict between Hizballah and Israel. What's notable is that Lairjani is still serving as a high level representative to the Syrians on behalf of the Supreme Leader, signaling
his continued central role in shaping Iranian regional policy. The timing of the visit is also notable as it comes prior to President Bush's tour and follows the high-profile visit of US gov officials to Lebanon as the government formation crisis steadily escalates. It certainly sends a potent signal to surrounding Arab allies just before the hosting of the Arab League conference by Damascus, that the special relationship with Iran is a central fixture of Syrian strategic
interests. Moualem frames the relationship between Syria and Iran as serving wider Arab interests ; a narrative that speaks further to Iranian efforts to use proxies like Hizballah, HAMAS, and Iraqi Shia extremists to 'Arabize' the Islamic revolution and give further Iranian
weight as a benefactor for both Islamic and Arab nationalist resistance in the region.

Syrian FM Mualem's comments on the resiliency of the Syrian-Iranian partnership parallels public comments reiterated by the Syrian defense minister Turkmani. The relationship with Iran is billed as one based on mutual security interests; in other words defense against a common foe: the US. That Mulem would also specifically comment to speculation of
divergence between Syrian and Iranian foreign policy is significant. Mualem was either compelled by Syrian leadership to prove to Tehran its commitment to the strategic alliance, or meant to send a public rebuke to Saudi and Egyptian efforts to bring Syrian within the traditional Arab fold. Of further significance is Mualems statement regarding the 'triumph' of Iran's Islamic revolution--word choice that will certainly irk the Sunni populace in Syria and northern Lebanon and contribute to simmering sectarian tensions as Hezbollah gears up for further internal political escalation in tandem with agitation against Israeli forces

"The two other structures in the facility, including the alleged pump-house, remain. It seems to me if Syria wanted to hide all evidence of a reactor, it would dismantle these as well. Of course that may be the intent, but something the Syrians have not yet accomplished."

U.S. Intel Possibly Duped by Iran

December 4, 2007
By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
Newsmax

A highly controversial, 150 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programs was coordinated and written by former State Department political and intelligence analysts — not by more seasoned members of the U.S. intelligence community, Newsmax has learned.

Its most dramatic conclusion — that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure — is based on a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.

Newsmax sources in Tehran believe that Washington has fallen for “a deliberate disinformation campaign” cooked up by the Revolutionary Guards, who laundered fake information and fed it to the United States through Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers posing as senior diplomats in Europe.

Dangerous Game

The National Intelligence Council, which produced the NIE, is chaired by Thomas Fingar, “a State Department intelligence analyst with no known overseas experience who briefly headed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research,” I wrote in my book "Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender." [Editor's Note: Get "Shadow Warriors" free — go here now.]

Fingar was a key partner of Senate Democrats in their successful effort to derail the confirmation of John Bolton in the spring of 2005 to become the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations.

As the head of the NIC, Fingar has gone out of his way to fire analysts “who asked the wrong questions,” and who challenged the politically-correct views held by Fingar and his former State Department colleagues, as revealed in "Shadow Warriors."

In March 2007, Fingar fired his top Cuba and Venezuela analyst, Norman Bailey, after he warned of the growing alliance between Castro and Chavez.

Bailey’s departure from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was applauded by the Cuban government news service Granma, who called Bailey “a patent relic of the Reagan regime.” And Fingar was just one of a coterie of State Department officials brought over to ODNI by the first director, career State Department official John Negroponte.

Collaborating with Fingar on the Iran estimate, released on Monday, were Kenneth Brill, the director of the National Counterproliferation Center, and Vann H. Van Diepen, the National Intelligence officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation.

“Van Diepen was an enormous problem,” a former colleague of his from the State Department told me when I was fact gathering for "Shadow Warriors."

“He was insubordinate, hated WMD sanctions, and strived not to implement them,” even though it was his specific responsibility at State to do so, the former colleague told me.

Kenneth Brill, also a career foreign service officer, had been the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in 2003-2004 before he was forced into retirement.

"Shadow Warrior" reports, “While in Vienna, Brill consistently failed to confront Iran once its clandestine nuclear weapons program was exposed in February 2003, and had to be woken up with the bureaucratic equivalent of a cattle prod to deliver a single speech condemning Iran’s eighteen year history of nuclear cheating.”

Negroponte rehabilitated Brill and brought the man who single-handedly failed to object to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and put him in charge of counter-proliferation efforts for the entire intelligence community.

Christian Westermann, another favorite of Senate Democrats in the Bolton confirmation hearings, was among the career State Department analysts tapped by Fingar and Brill.

As a State Department intelligence analyst, Westermann had missed the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba, and played into the hands of Castro apologist Sen. Christopher Dodd, D, Conn., by continuing to use impeached intelligence reports on Cuba that had been written by self-avowed Cuban spy, Ana Belen Montes.

“After failing to recognize the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba and Cuba’s cooperation with Iran, Westermann was promoted to become national intelligence officer for biological weapons,” I wrote.

“Let’s hope a walk-in defector from Iranian intelligence doesn’t tell us that Iran has given biological weapons to terrorists to attack new York or Chicago,” I added, “because Westermann will certainly object that the source of that information was not reliable — at least, until Americans start dying.”

It now appears that this is very similar to what happened while the intelligence community was preparing the Iran NIE.

The Defector

My former colleague from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz, suggests in today’s print edition of the paper that Revolutionary Guards Gen. Alireza Asgari, who defected while in Turkey in February, was the human source whose information led to the NIE”s conclusion that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

But intelligence sources in Europe told Newsmax in late September that Asgari’s debriefings on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs were “so dramatic” that they caused French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his foreign minister to speak out publicly about the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Sarkozy stunned his countrymen when he told an annual conference of French ambassadors on Aug. 27, 2007, that Iran faced a stark choice between shutting down its nuclear program, or tougher international sanctions and ultimately, war.

“This approach is the only one that allows us to escape from a catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb, or the bombing of Iran,” Sarkozy said.

Three weeks later, Foreign Minister Bernard Koucher warned in a televised interview that the world’s major powers needed to toughen sanctions on Iran to prevent Tehran from getting the bomb and to prevent war. “We must prepare for the worst,” Kouchner said. “The worst, sir, is war.”

Those comments were prompted by reports that were given to the French president about Iran’s nuclear weapons program derived from debriefings of the defector, Gen. Ashgari, a Newsmax intelligence source in Europe said.

Ashgari is the highest-level Iranian official to have defected to the West since the Islamic revolution of 1979. His defection set off a panic in Tehran.

As a senior member of the general staff of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Asgari had access to highly-classified intelligence information, as well as strategic planning documents, as I reported at the time.

A damage assessment then underway in Tehran was expected to “take months” to complete, so extensive was Asgari’s access to Iran’s nuclear and intelligence secrets.

Asgari had detailed knowledge of Iranian Revolutionary Guards units operating in Iraq and Lebanon because he had trained some of them. He also knew some of the secrets of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, because he had been a top procurement officer and a deputy minister of defense in charge of logistics. But Asgari never had responsibility for nuclear weapons development, and probably did not have access to information about the status of the secret programs being run by the Revolutionary Guards, Iranian sources tell Newsmax.

In an effort to cover up the failure of Iranian counter-intelligence to prevent Asgari’s defection, a Persian language Web site run by the former Revolutioanry Guards Comdr. Gen. Mohsen Rezai claimed in March that Asgari was on a CIA “hit list” of 20 former Revolutionary Guards officers and had been assassinated.

The Senate intelligence committee will be briefed today on the NIE, and the House committee on Wednesday.

But already, the declassified summary has Republicans grumbling on Capitol Hill.

“We want to know why we should believe this,” one congressional Republican told Newsmax. “This is such a departure from the past and there are so many unanswered questions.”

While the intelligence community is supposed to report just the facts and its assessment of those facts and their reliability to policy-makers, this NIE clear advocates policy positions.

“Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously,” the NIC wrote in the declassified “Key Judgments” of the NIE.

The NIE opined that the new assessment leads to the policy conclusion that the United States should offer “some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunites,” in order to lock in Iranian good behavior.

This carrot and stick approach has been the State Department’s preferred policy for the past 27 years, and has only strengthened the resolve of Iran’s leaders to continue defying the United States. “Those [countries that] assume that decaying methods such as psychological war, political propaganda and the so-called economic sanctions would work and prevent Iran's fast drive toward progress are mistaken," Ahmadinejad said in Tehran in September at a military parade.

By “progress” Ahmadinejad was referring to Iran’s recently-declared success at enriching uranium.

Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees “have been running around with big smiles on their faces,” a Republican source tells Newsmax.

Republicans on the committees intend to ask for more information on the sourcing of this latest NIE during closed door briefings today and tomorrow.

What You Can Do about Iran

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

This week brought unusual news from Russia, which until now has been a major supplier of Iran’s nuclear programs.

The Russians said they were pulling engineers and technicians out of Busheir, the Persian Gulf site where since 1995 they have been building a nuclear power plant for Iran. They cited as pretext Iran’s failure to make timely payments on the $800 million contract.
 
Should this turn out to be more than just a tactical maneuver, Russia’s pullback from Iran signals a real success for U.S. diplomacy.
 
But the U.S. has had less success in other areas. And the administration must show results soon if it doesn’t want Congress to pass new legislation that will impose mandatory sanctions on foreign companies trading with Iran.
 
Sen. Chris Dodd (D, Conn) berated administration witnesses during a hearing of the Senate Banking committee on Wednesday for their failure to cut off foreign investment in Iran’s oil and gas industry.
 
He displayed a chart showing 14 recent investment deals worth potentially $126 billion, which companies in Britain, France, Italy, Holland, China, Malaysia have signed with Iran.
 
Despite laws on the books passed initially during the Clinton administration that require the administration to impose sanctions on foreign companies that invest more than $20 million in Iran’s oil and gas sector, “not one foreign energy concern has been sanctioned,” Dodd said.
 
Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns replied that top U.S. officials have been “jawboning” foreign oil companies to get them to back off from those contracts, and that he expected many of the deals on Dodd’s chart would never materialize. “We’ve gone to their CEOs and said, ‘this is a bad idea.’” Burns said.
 
Then he warned that stronger action would destroy two years of patient U.S. diplomatic efforts to build a coalition that has gradually ratcheted up the pressure on Iran. With no results yet to show, he was essentially saying, trust me.
 
Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey described the type of financial steps the U.S. has been taking with our allies behind the scenes. These have had a real impact, and have made it more difficult for Iran to use the international financial system to send money to terrorist groups and to purchase equipment for their WMD programs.
 
Just one example: In January 2006, the U.S. imposed $70 million in fines on ABN Amro Bank NV of Holland for violating sanctions on Iran and laundering payments for Iranian entities. The fines were an effective measure that sent a clear message to the international banking community. They also led Amro and other banks to announce in the ensuing months that they would take no new business in Iran.
 
I travel the United States speaking to various groups about the threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Except for pro-Tehran groups, or hard Leftists who would like the United States to become an Islamic Republic, no one really disputes Iran’s nuclear weapons intentions or their support for international terrorism.
 
But no one really knows what to do about it. They see what the U.S. government claims to be doing, and then they look at Sen. Dodd’s chart: $126 billion in fresh investment in Iran is no chump change.
 
American corporations continue to do business with Iran despite the total U.S. trade embargo imposed by Executive Order in 1995. They do it by flowing their Iran contracts through foreign subsidiaries. This is perfectly legal, but it is wrong.
 
So what can ordinary citizens do about it? Here are a few suggestions.
 
In Maryland, where I live, Delegate Ron George has introduced a bill into the state legislature that would require the State Pension funds to disinvest from companies that continue to do business with Iran. He needs your support.
 
Maryland is a relatively small state of just over five million citizens. And yet, the state pension funds have nearly $2 billion invested in companies that invest in terrorist-sponsoring states.
 
The pitch is very simple: Do you want your pension fund invested in companies who prop up Iran? There are lots of other places you can invest. Why choose companies helping countries such as Iran whose leaders state publicly they want to destroy America?
 
A similar bill has been introduced in California, whose state pension fund, Calpers, controls a hefty $338 billion dollars of investments along with the California State Teacher’s Retirement System. Joel Anderson, the Republican legislator who introduced the bill, said it would impact $24 billion worth of investments. Pennsylvania is contemplating a similar measure.
 
The “Divest Terror” bandwagon, spearheaded by my friend Frank Gaffney, has begun to roll. It worked with South Africa. It can work with Iran.
 
Gaffney has a very simple idea. Identify a “dirty dozen” group of international companies who supply capital or technology or know-how to terrorist states, and encourage U.S. state pension funds to pull funding from them.
 
Even State Department Undersecretary Nick Burns acknowledged in a back-handed way that such legislation helps, since it provides State Department diplomats with a bogeyman they can trot out in front of reluctant coalition partners: if you don’t play ball, it gets much worse.
 
There are other measures ordinary Americans can take on a more personal level.
 
How many of us buy gasoline from Shell stations, or own vehicles produced by DaimlerChrysler? These are just two examples of international corporations heavily invested in Iran. Boycotting their products, and letting the companies know it, can have an impact.
 
DaimlerChrysler has been expanding its operations in Iran in recent years, and recently opened an assembly line to build E-class vehicles in Iran. It also owns a factory that builds Mercedes-Benz diesel engines for trucks and buses under license.
 
In 2004, DaimlerChyrsler sold through a Saudi affiliate 270 Mercedes Benz commercial vehicles to Iran in a $22 million contract. Those vehicles have since been used by law enforcement authorities in Iran for riot control. A German prosecutor in Stuttgart opened an investigation into the sale.
 
DaimlerChrysler AG is the parent corporation of what used to be Chrysler corporation here in the United States. The U.S. company has no legal or corporate responsibility for the sales of its parent to Iran. Those sales are perfectly legal. But they are wrong.
 
Shell has signed pre-contractual agreements to invest billions of dollars in Iran’s oil and gas sector. Without help from Shell and other major oil companies, the International Energy Agency projects that Iranian oil exports will grind to a halt by 2015.
 
There are dozens of U.S. and international corporations in a similar situations as DaimlerChrysler or Shell. And most of them do business here in the United States.
 
Want to have a personal impact? Start there.

"Saudi Arabia has proposed a new formula for a comprehensive peace."

FACT

In an effort to jumpstart the peace process, Saudi Arabia has resurrected the idea of negotiating with Israel on the basis of a formula outlined by then Crown Prince Abdullah in 2002. Abdullah's ideas were revised and adopted by the Arab League as a peace initiative that offered Israel"normal relations" in exchange for a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and
resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue.

In response to the renewed discussion of the plan in March 2007, Prime Minister Olmert expressed a willingness to talk about the Saudi initiative. When the plan was brought up a few months earlier, Olmert reportedly met secretly with a member of the Saudi royal family (Reuters, October 4, 2006). More recently, Israel tried to persuade the Saudis to modify the
plan's position on the refugees to make it more palatable, but the Palestinians objected to any changes.

For the plan to have any chance of serving as a starting point for negotiations, the Saudis and other Arab League members will have to negotiate directly with Israel. In 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he would go the Arab League summit to discuss the plan, but he was not
invited. The Saudis were also been invited to Jerusalem to discuss their proposal, but they rejected this idea as well.

As it is, this initiative is nothing more than a restatement of the Arab interpretation of UN Resolution 242. The problem is that 242 does not say what the Saudi plan demands of Israel. The resolution calls on Israel to withdraw from territories occupied during the war, not "all" the
territories in exchange for peace.

In addition, Resolution 242 also says that every state has the right to live within "secure and recognizable boundaries," which all military analysts have understood to mean the 1967 borders with modifications to satisfy Israel's security requirements. Moreover, Israel is under no obligation to withdraw before the Arabs agree to live in peace.

"There are some who have urged, as a single, simple solution, an immediate return to the situation as it was on June 4..this is not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities."

- President Lyndon Johnson, speech on June 19, 1967


The Arab plan calls for Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights. The Israeli government has offered to do withdraw from most, if not all of the Golan in exchange for a peace agreement; however, Syrian President Bashar Assad has so far been unwilling to negotiate at all with Israel.

The demand that Israel withdraw from "the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon" is at odds with the UN conclusion that Israel has completely fulfilled its obligation to withdraw from Lebanese territory.

The Arab initiative calls for a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem based on the nonbinding UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Today, the UNRWA says that 4.3. million Palestinians are refugees. The current population of Israel is approximately 7 million, 5 million of whom are Jews. If the Palestinians all returned, the population would exceed 10 million and the proportion of Jews and Palestinian Arabs would be roughly 60-40. Given the higher Arab birth rate, Israel would soon cease to be a Jewish state and would de facto become a second Palestinian state (along with the one expected to be created on the West Bank and Gaza Strip). This suicidal formula has been rejected by Israel since the end of the 1948 war
and is totally unacceptable to all Israelis today. Israel does, however, recognize a right for all the refugees to live in a future Palestinian state.

Israel has agreed to allow some Palestinian refugees to live in Israel on a humanitarian basis, and as part of family reunification. Thousands have returned already this way. In the past, Israel has repeatedly expressed a willingness to accept as many as 100,000 refugees as part of a resolution of the issue. In fact, one government report said that Israel accepted
140,000 refugees in the decade following the Oslo agreement of 1993 (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 6, 2002).

The refugee issue was not part of Abdullah's original proposal and was added at the summit under pressure from other delegations. Also, it is important to note that Resolution 242 says nothing about the Palestinians and the reference to refugees can also be applied to the Jews who fled and were driven from their homes in Arab countries. Another change from
Abdullah's previously stated vision was a retreat from a promise of full normalization of relations with Israel to an even vaguer pledge of "normal relations."

The Arab demand that Israel accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital has been part of the negotiations since Oslo. Israel's leaders, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have accepted the idea of creating a Palestinian state in part of those territories, and Israel has even offered compromises on the status of Jerusalem, but the Palestinians have rejected them all.

It is also worth noting that most of the Arab League nations have no reason not to be at peace with Israel now. Israel holds none of their territory and is more than willing to make peace with the members of the League. Several members of the League had already begun to normalize relations with Israel before the latest outbreak of violence, and their principal critic
was Saudi Arabia.

The Delusional World of the Realists
                                     
By Sarah N. Stern

In memory of Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who did not suffer fools or despots gladly.

    “Alice: There is no use trying…one can’t believe impossible things.
      The Queen: I dare say you haven’t had much practice. Why sometimes I’ve believed             as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
                            -----Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland”

The Bush administration is in a difficult spot. Even the most ardent supporters of the War in Iraq are admitting to the fact that the war has been a much more arduous battle than they had originally contemplated.  Many political strategists on both sides have been taking the mid-term defeat of many congressional republicans as a referendum not only on the Iraqi War, but on the entire Bush foreign policy agenda, including his ideas of bringing democracy to the Middle East, and his suspicion of various contemporary Muslim leaders.

Americans do not like long wars. The body count is reaching almost 3,000 American lives. None of us like the prospect of our sons or daughters arriving home in body bags. We would all like a quick fix, a silver bullet, something to extract us from this deadly, long, expensive war that is splitting apart the nation.

This December, with a great deal of fanfare and Washington showmanship, former Secretary of State James Baker III and former congressman Lee Hamilton made a dramatic re-entrance into the field of public policy with their much touted Iraqi Study Group (ISG) Report. The quite proficient public relations firm of Edelman had generated quite a public “buzz” before, during and after the immediate release of the results of collective wisdom of this venerable group, which includes many of the Washington elite from a few decades ago.

Read it all >>

The Myth of a “Moderate” Fatah

Arlene Kushner

There is a prevailing notion in Western diplomatic circles today that Hamas – and only Hamas – is the stumbling block to a successful negotiation of peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.  According to this thinking, Fatah – and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in particular – are essentially “moderate” in outlook and should be strengthened in the interests of achieving that peace. 

Statements offered to a Western world eager to embrace peace are cheap.  They represent the major difference between Fatah and Hamas:  While Hamas is boldly belligerent and declares its intentions outright, Fatah appears to play the game.  But this difference is one of style and not of ultimate intentions.    

A review of salient facts dispels the notion that Fatah is “moderate.”

The argument has been made that it was the influence of Arafat that caused Fatah to lack moderation, and that we are seeing a “new” Fatah since Arafat’s death.  There is scant evidence to support this.

We begin by looking at the Fatah of today, for this is of immediate concern. 

We then turn to a broader look at Fatah, and a consideration of the years leading up to the present.  No accurate understanding of Fatah would be possible without this perspective.  What we find is that, while style may have changed, the essence of Fatah goals and policies have not. It is all of a piece.

read the entire paper

Should U.S. Hold Direct Talks With Iran?
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006

 WASHINGTON -- The talk of the town in Washington these days is all about getting "real."

Less than two full weeks after Democrats won control of Congress by opposing the war in Iraq, Iraqi leaders bowed their heads in submission and agreed to hold direct talks with Iran and Syria.

 President Jalal Talabani was initially supposed to go to Tehran over Thanksgiving weekend, but a curfew in Baghdad (put in place because of Iranian-backed violence) prevented him from traveling. He finally made the trip on Monday.

Iran has real "influence" with bad actors in Iraq, so Talabani needed to slouch to Tehran, hat in hand.

The Iraq Study Group, led by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, is widely expected to recommend that the United States negotiate directly with Syria and Iran, to convince them to reduce their assistance to the terrorists in Iraq.

What 'Getting Real' Really Entails

Talking to the funders and the strategists and the weapons-suppliers of the terrorists who are trying to kill us is called getting "real." And yet, a lot of very influential people, including two former National Security advisors, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and virtually the entire Council on Foreign Relations, believe that is what we should do.

 To these so-called realists, we never should have ventured into Iraq to depose the regime of Saddam Hussein in the first place. As Scowcroft hectored U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a semi-public forum three years ago, "at least with Saddam in power, we've had 50 years of peace."

Besides the arithmetic exaggeration (Saddam only assumed full power in Iraq in 1979), Scowcroft's argument is not unlike what we are hearing today from the Baker-Hamilton commission.

 Let's negotiate with Syria and Iran.

 After all, these regimes respect power. They know we can do them tremendous harm. So we have leverage that we can and should use to achieve our goals. We don't need to overreach by seeking to overthrow them.

 America's goal, in the eyes of the realists, is to get Syria and Iran to moderate their support for the insurgents, so we can prevent a few attacks today and tomorrow. Let's decrease the level of violence, so the U.S. can withdraw troops from Iraq without destabilizing the country.

'Help' Smacks of Aid to Terror

In exchange for their help in achieving a very temporary goal (which is certainly in their power, since they are backing the insurgents), the United States must abandon all support to pro-democracy forces in Syria and Iran and provide security guarantees to both regimes. That's the deal that is currently on the table.

We get political cover for a troop withdrawal, and they tell their terrorist proxies to lay low for a time and half a time (if we're lucky). All we really get is a fig leaf. But smiling as we put it on is called realism.

 On the contrary, I believe talking to Tehran and Damascus would not just be a mistake. It would be a mistake of monumental and historic proportions:

 It would reward the world's two major state sponsors of terrorism for their success in murdering Americans.

 It would demoralize our friends in Iraq who want to see their country win its freedom and achieve stability and prosperity.

 It would encourage Iran to pursue its nuclear weapons program, and embolden Iran to continue using terrorism to achieve its goals.

 It would terrify our allies in the region, who would understand immediately that the United States will not be there to protect them when Iran asserts its hegemony over the entire region.

The Path Toward Destrcution

The realists are leading us into very dangerous territory.

 For 27 years, the United States has imposed various forms of punishment on the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a vain hope that pain would induce them to change their behavior.

 Clearly, it hasn't worked, because the pain has been too slight.

 So now the Realists are telling us that we should abandon those tools and simply ask politely, and hope for better results.

This is not "realism," but pure folly.

 Ultimately, U.S. talks with Iran could set the stage for a disastrous war that would sweep across the entire region.

 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not been shy about informing us that his goals are to "wipe Israel off the map" and to "destroy America." Each day we allow his power to go unchecked, he gets a little bit closer to acquiring the capabilities to achieve those goals.

Feeding the Crocodile
By Kenneth R. Timmerman

We’re told it’s the Realists versus the Neo-Cons, and the Realists are winning.

On Monday, less than two full weeks after Democrats won the Congress on a platform of “phased withdrawal” from Iraq, Iraqi leaders bowed their heads in submission, announcing that they will hold direct talks with Iran and Syria in Tehran this weekend.

Right on cue, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group leaked on Tuesday its recommendation that the United States negotiate directly with Syria and Iran, to convince them to reduce their assistance to the terrorists in Iraq.

Also on Tuesday, the Syrians and the Iranians (and their agents in Lebanon) assassinated yet another pro-Western political leader, Lebanon’s ministry of industry, Pierre Gemayel.

Pierre Gemayel, the 34-year old scion of one of Lebanon’s most prominent Maronite Christian families, had joined forces with the anti-Syrian alliance led by Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated former prime minister. His uncle, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated by the Syrians in August 1982, just weeks after he was elected Lebanon’s president in an earlier élan of Lebanese independence. His father, Amin, was elected president to replace him.

To the Realist school of American foreign policy, such events are the sad necessities of life. We can’t keep murderers and thugs from killing each other. But through cautious diplomacy and the judicious use of force, we can keep them from killing us.

Nobody, in either school, believes this sequence of events is mere coincidence. Neo-Cons such as Michael Ledeen view these developments as signs of U.S. weakness and drift; a failure to pursue the terrorists who declared war on us in 1979, when Iranian “students” (including Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 54 diplomats and all of America hostage for 444 days.

To the Realists, whose current champions are former National Security advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, we never should have ventured into Iraq to depose the regime of Saddam Hussein. As Scowcroft hectored Condoleeza Rice in a semi-public forum 3 years ago, “at least with Saddam in power, we’ve had fifty years of peace.”

Besides the arithmetic exaggeration (Saddam only assumed full power in Iraq in 1979), Scowcroft’s argument is not unlike what we are hearing today from the Baker-Hamilton commission. Let’s negotiate with Syria and Iran. After all, these regimes respect power. They know we can do them tremendous harm. So we have leverage that we can and should use to achieve our goals. We don’t need to over-reach by seeking to overthrow them.

America’s goal, in the eyes of the Realists, is to get Syria and Iran to moderate their support for the insurgents, so we can prevent a few attacks today and tomorrow. Let’s decrease the level of violence, so the U.S. can withdraw troops from Iraq without destabilizing the country.

In exchange for their help in achieving a very temporary goal (which is certainly in their power, since they are backing the insurgents), the United States must abandon all support to pro-democracy forces in Syria and Iran and provide security guaranties to both regimes. That’s the deal that is currently on the table.

We get political cover for a troop withdrawal, and they tell their terrorist proxies to lay low for a time and half a time (if we’re lucky). All we really get is a fig leaf. But smiling as we put it on is called Realism.

Neo-cons view these events quite differently. They remember that these very same Realists called on the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War in March 1991, and then we withdrew, allowing Saddam to slaughter his opponents by the tens of thousands.

Neo-cons understand that Iraqi president Jalal Talabani is not bowing his head and slouching toward Tehran out of any desire to conclude a pact with Iran’s Islamofascist leaders. He is going there because he knows we are about to abandon his country once again.

But Neo-cons also argue that we have never seriously tried to achieve the policy goals the President has so eloquently laid out in speech after speech, where he has spoken of his “freedom agenda” and of breaking fifty years of stability that was based on U.S. support for regional dictators.

• We have failed to carry out that agenda in Iraq, by allowing an ill-chosen “Viceroy” to transform liberation into occupation through his monumental arrogance.

• We have failed to support freedom-fighters in Iran, bowing to pro-regime lobbyists in the United States and to the siren-songs of regime envoys, who claim their willingness to cooperate if only we would treat them with respect;

• We have never even tried to help the pro-democracy forces in Syria, while abandoning the Lebanese to Hezbollah militiamen and Syrian thugs.

The Realists argue, we don’t have time to wait for the seeds of freedom to sprout. Indeed, it may be that they are being sown on rocky ground and will never grow, at least not in our lifetime.

On the contrary, we don’t have the luxury of accommodating Islamo-fascist regimes that are hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and have no intention of abandoning that quest just because we kowtow before them.

The Realists are leading us into very dangerous territory. Where have James Baker and Lee Hamilton taken their cues when it comes to recommending direct talks with Iran? From Iranian officials and Iranian regime surrogates, among others.

Baker himself had a three-hour lunch in New York recently with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, while special envoy Frank Wisner has reportedly been meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s national Security advisor, Ali Larijani, in Stockholm and other places to discuss the terms of America’s surrender.

For 27 years, the United States has imposed various forms of punishment on the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a vain hope that pain would induce them to change their behavior. Clearly, it hasn’t worked, because the pain has been too slight.

So now the Realists are telling us that we should abandon those tools and simply ask politely, and hope for better results.

This is realistic? Even a flaming left-wing Hollywood screenwriter could go to town with that plot. That is precisely what Neville Chamberlain did in Munich when he negotiated with a very reasonable Adolf Hitler in 1938, and returned home to Britain proclaiming “Peace in our time!”

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile,” Winston Churchill said famously, “hoping it will eat him last.”

Neo-cons got a boost from an unsuspected quarter earlier this week: Saudi ambassador to Washington, and long-time head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki bin Faisel bin Abdel-Aziz. Envisaging a future for Iraq of open civil war, massive ethnic cleansing, and the military involvement of Iraq’s neighbors, he told the Washington Post: “Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited.”

The Democrats won Congress on a program of unilateral surrender. And they are about to reap the spoils as we prepare the terms of our submission to the Islamofascists in Iran and to the thugs in Syria.

Unfortunately, the rest of us are going to pay the price of their folly – and so will countless thousands of freedom-loving Iraqis, Iranians, and Lebanese, who so foolishly believed in us and our commitment to freedom.

We have seen the first victims over these past few days. Many more are about to fall.

Our World: History's dangerous repetition

It would seem that Karl Marx got things backwards. History does not repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Rather, it repeats itself first as farce and second as tragedy. This, perhaps more than anything else is the conclusion one should reach from North Korea's nuclear test on Columbus Day.

It was the Clinton administration, which back in the Roaring '90s began the policy of appeasing North Korea. Throughout the decade the US wined and dined the North Korean Stalinists who always responded by pocketing US concessions and escalating their nuclear and ballistic missile activities and threats against the US and its Asian allies.

The farce was then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright's visit to Pyongyang in late October 2000, two weeks before the US presidential elections. There, after the North Koreans tested the Taepo-Dong 1 ballistic missile off the coast of Japan in 1998 and refused to end either their missile programs or missile exports to Iran, Albright tripped the night fantastic with Kim Jong-Il. Her buffoonery was a perfect capstone to eight years of the Clinton administration's addiction to ceremony over substance.

While America's tone towards North Korea chilled under the Bush administration, there was little substantive change in its policies.

Secretary of state Colin Powell met with his North Korean counterpart Pak Nam Sun and to this day US attempts to strike a deal with Pyongyang have not ended. And now, Pyongyang, with its medium- and long-range ballistic missiles, has tested a nuclear bomb.

THERE IS of course also North Korea's ally Iran. Toward Iran, too, the substance of the Bush administration policies is little different from that of his predecessor. Like North Korea, the Iranians respond to US attempts at appeasement by escalating their rhetoric and redoubling their offensive military build-ups of missiles and nuclear capabilities.

The great shift, then which occurred under the Bush administration, a shift for which President George W. Bush has been pilloried by his political rivals, has been rhetorical.

While hypocritical, the division between rhetoric and substance has something to recommend it. The benefit of the current US position toward North Korea and Iran is that the rhetoric has left open the possibility that the policy itself will finally be suited to reality. Today, unlike the situation in the 1990s, the American public is at least aware that these states are a threat to US national security interests.

In the aftermath of North Korea's nuclear bomb test, the US can support military actions by Japan and South Korea against North Korea; build up its missile shield; and perhaps end its 14 year self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing and so revamp its nuclear arsenal.

Were the Bush administration to change its policy tomorrow regarding Iran - begin shaming Europe into ending its appeasement, and threatening Russia with trade sanctions if Moscow continues supporting Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, while building up its military options to strike at Iran's nuclear installations - the American public would understand why the policy change was necessary. Indeed, such a move could even help the Republican Party in the upcoming elections.

DISTURBINGLY, WHILE Bush has paved the way rhetorically for a shift in policy toward North Korea and Iran, he has done no such thing in the US's relations with the terror-ruled Palestinian Authority. And as is the case with Iran and North Korea, the stubborn and ill-considered continuation of the Clinton administration's appeasement policy toward the PA during the Bush years has only exacerbated and escalated the threat posed by the PA to US national security interests and to the national security of US allies - first and foremost, of Israel.

In the 1990s, the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat, was the most frequent foreign visitor at the White House. The head of the PLO was the object of adoration by the Clintonites. It didn't matter to them that Arafat never revoked the PLO Charter calling for Israel's destruction. It didn't matter that he indoctrinated a generation of Palestinian children to become suicide bombers in jihad against the Jews. It didn't matter that he used billions of dollars of American and European taxpayer money to build the largest terror army in the world. Arafat showed up at signing ceremonies. He was the poster child of appeasement.

The Clinton administration tied itself to a policy toward the Palestinians which, like its policies toward North Korea and Iran, opened it to ever escalating blackmail. As the terror threat emanating from the PA-ruled areas rose, empowering Arafat became the obsession of the Clinton White House. He was showered with money, guns and love. No Israeli security consideration could hold a candle to the need to strengthen Arafat.

From bombing to bombing, Arafat was enriched and empowered. Israel's security became the main obstacle to the signing ceremonies.

After seven years, the myth of Arafat the peacemaker exploded in the faces of more than a thousand Israelis who would be killed over the next six years of the Palestinian jihad. But the myth of the PA endured.

For the past six years, each bombing, every clear indication that the PA itself is a terrorist entity is met by more breathless US protestations of support for Palestinian empowerment and statehood. The fact that the last six years have left the State Department unfazed was made absolutely clear during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit last week.

Since Arafat appointed Mahmoud Abbas, his deputy of 40 years, PA prime minister in 2003, the US has upheld Abbas as a man of peace, a moderate and a respectable leader that the Bush administration wishes to strengthen. To this end, the Bush administration has overlooked Abbas's clear support for terrorism. It has excused his constant appeals to merge his Fatah terror group with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It has ignored the fact that his Fatah terror group has committed more acts of terror than Hamas and that Fatah's involvement in terror and the sophistication of its attacks has only increased since Abbas replaced Arafat after the latter's death in November 2004.

During her visit last week, at Abbas's request, Rice was scheduled to meet with Fatah commander Hussein a-Sheikh in the American Consulate-General in Jerusalem. The meeting was cancelled at the last minute when Israeli activists demanded that Sheikh, who was directly responsible for the murder of dozens of Israelis and several American nationals, be arrested by Israel police upon arrival at the consulate. Yet, Rice still met with other Fatah leaders, like Muhammad Dahlan who has been directly implicated in the murder of Israelis in terror attacks perpetrated by men under his command.

EVEN MORE disturbingly, Rice has officially sanctioned a policy put together by US Army Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton to expand by up to 70 percent Abbas's presidential guard and personal army, Force 17. The administration wishes to raise some $20 million to fund the training and arming and expansion of Abbas's army from 3,500 to 6,000 soldiers. This move comes after the US transferred 3,000 rifles and 1 million bullets to Force 17 in June. Yet Force 17 is a terrorist army led by terrorists.

Right after he received the weapons shipment, Abbas appointed Mahmoud Damra commander of the force. Damra, who like many of the Force 17 officers and soldiers, doubles as a Fatah terrorist, was wanted by Israel due to his direct involvement in the terrorist murder of at least 15 Israelis. One of his deputies claimed that the US rifles were immediately used to attack a bus carrying Israeli school girls in Judea.

Israel arrested Damra at a checkpoint shortly after he received Abbas's appointment. The US immediately began pressuring Israel to release him.

In addition to Damra's direct involvement in Fatah terror, he also has close ties with Iran and Hizbullah. In 2002, Arafat reportedly appointed him Force 17's liaison officer to Iran and Hizbullah forces. The fact that Abbas appointed Damra Force 17's overall commander just weeks before Fatah and Hamas began Iran's proxy war against Israel by attacking the IDF position at Kerem Shalom and kidnapping Cpl. Gilad Shalit, should say something about Abbas's intentions. Yet, last week, Rice couldn't praise Abbas enough.

North Korea's nuclear test and Iran's nuclear intimidation show us what happens when failed policies are not abandoned. Due in part to its continued US-backed legitimacy, the PA is used by Pakistan as an excuse for terror sponsorship and nuclear proliferation and by jihadists throughout the world as justification for attacks on Western and Jewish targets.

No doubt the North Korean nuclear test is a turning point in this world war.

The question is whether it will force the US to finally part with appeasement, or whether Rice will convince President Bush to take his chances by repeating history a third and fourth time

Our World: Bush's information offensive

During the past week we learned a great deal about the nature of our enemies. We also learned a great deal about ourselves. If we draw the proper lessons from what we have seen we will go far toward winning the war.

With their ghoulish presentations at the UN General Assembly, both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made clear their hostile intent, disdain for freedom and their foes, and their fanatical intent to use all murderous means toward their totalitarian ends. The men were so hostile that even their usual apologists in academia and the political Left were too embarrassed to be seen in their company.

The Chavez and Ahmadinejad show ensured that the Bush administration's gamble in permitting the two entry to the United States had paid off. Given a platform, the dictators demonstrated the gravity of the threat they posed, as the administration had doubtless hoped they would.

Yet laying out a gangplank and hoping the enemy will be stupid enough to walk it is hardly a winning strategy in war. The stark reality of the global Islamist jihad and its strong support from European appeasers to third world dictators makes it necessary for the US to enact an information campaign capable of effectively advancing the stated American war aim of destroying jihad as a governing ideology and social force.

The potential for victory in the information warfare arena is great, and the failure of the US to meet this challenge is a great shame.

INFORMATION operations are a vital part of any war effort. They serve four basic purposes: to rally supporters to the rightness of their cause and the wrongness of their enemies cause; to dissuade any potential allies of one's enemies from joining their forces; to gain an ideological foothold in the enemies' society; and to demoralize enemy societies and so convince them that they have no chance of winning the war.

In both the Muslim world and the West, massive Saudi and other Islamist funding of mosques, Islamic schools, Middle East studies departments in universities, and lobbying arms show that jihadists have placed a premium on their information operations. The jihadists' extensive use of the Internet, cassette tapes, DVDs, videotapes and the print and broadcast media in the Muslim world complement these efforts.

The goals of the jihadists are clear. They wish to recruit soldiers. They wish to buy supporters among Western elites who will act as their apologists. They wish to demonize and delegitimize their ideological opponents in both Muslim societies and in the West by calling them apostates or racists. They wish to convince their enemies that there is no way to defeat the forces of jihad.

While massive, these efforts should be easy enough to undermine. For all the billions of dollars the jihadists have spent indoctrinating Muslims and weakening the West's will to fight them, their cause is anything but attractive. The cause of jihad is the cause of totalitarianism. It is the cause of hatred, misogyny, bigotry, mass murder, slavery, barbarism and humiliation. It is fundamentally unesthetic and unsympathetic.

As a result, attacking those who sponsor jihad, or serve as its apologists or purveyors should be a simple matter that can be undertaken at vastly less expense than that which has already been paid by the other side.

BUT THERE is a catch, of course. In order to conduct information operations effectively you have to be willing to identify your enemies and your allies, and to point fingers at those who refuse to take sides and embarrass them for sitting on the fence. That is, you need moral courage and clarity. You need to be willing to make people angry at you if you wish to earn their respect and support.

For the past five years the Bush administration has shirked this unpleasant task. It has categorized Saudi Arabia, the prime financier and propagator of jihad, as its ally. It has labeled Egypt, the epicenter of jihadist propaganda and incitement, a paragon of moderation and a stalwart ally.

Then there is Pakistan, which created the Taliban and has served as a refuge for Osama bin Laden since November 2001. Pakistan, too, is labeled a great ally, as are the Europeans and the Russians.

Israel, on the other hand, is a problem. Israel is the excuse that all of America's "great allies" give for refusing to act like America's allies. In the interests of pleasing its great allies, America holds Israel at arm's length.

Unfortunately, this policy sends exactly the wrong message. It teaches America's "allies" that they have nothing to lose by double-crossing the US. And it teaches truly liberal forces in the Muslim world and in the non-Islamic world that the US will not keep faith with them, and that they are, essentially on their own if they wish to take on the forces of jihad in their own societies and throughout the world.

THE BUSH administration's refusal to acknowledge the difference between its enemies and its allies was most pronounced last week in the president's meetings with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Earlier in the month Musharraf signed an accord with the Taliban that gave the group control over the Pakistani territories of north and south Waziristan. This agreement, which also involved Pakistan's release of some 2,500 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters from prison, is the Taliban's and al-Qaida's greatest victory since September 11, 2001. As military analyst Bill Roggio has reported on his Web site, The Fourth Rail, Musharraf's decision to hand Waziristan over to the Taliban and al-Qaida makes clear that he is a major enemy of the US.

But the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge this fact. Bush met with Musharraf in the White House and praised his leadership and his strong alliance with the US in fighting al-Qaida. The State Department praised the agreement that has caused NATO commanders to announce that more troops will be required in Afghanistan to fight the resurgent Taliban.

Likewise, Abbas has gone out of his way in recent months to forge an alliance between Fatah and Hamas on Hamas's terms. He agreed to form a unity government with Hamas that would unify their terror forces under one command to better wage war against Israel. He agreed that Hamas would not recognize Israel's right to exist. Fatah itself, which he commands, has committed more attacks against Israel than Hamas in recent years, and was involved in the cross-border attack on Israel in June where Cpl. Gilad Shalit was abducted. Under the agreement he offered, Fatah would maintain its terrorist agenda.

And yet, rather than announce that the US will have nothing to do with Abbas, Bush invited him to the White House and praised his commitment to peace. Rather than acknowledge that the Palestinian leadership - in Fatah and Hamas, as well as all other major parties - has shown by word and deed that it seeks not an independent Palestinian state but the eradication of the Jewish state, Bush has insisted that he wants nothing more than to see the creation of a Palestinian state.

THE BUSH administration's insistence on confusing friends and foes has been complemented by its refusal to make distinctions between jihadist political parties and non-jihadist political parties. Indeed, the US facilitated the participation of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, Hizbullah in the Lebanese elections, the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian elections, and the jihadist Justice and Development party in the Moroccan elections.

In all these cases, these forces of totalitarianism were legitimized by their participation in the elections and their empowerment has enabled them to more ably advance the cause of jihad in their own societies and worldwide, at the expense of those moderate, liberal Muslims that must be empowered if jihad is to be defeated.

The world stands today on the edge of a potential upheaval. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas are poised to retake power in elections in November. In the US, on November 7, voters will decide the composition of the Congress and Senate and so, in many ways, decide whether the war will continue to be fought to victory or will be abandoned.

Israelis have awoken from the fantasy of appeasement and are poised to bring in a government capable of defending them. In Britain, Tony Blair's heirs operate with the knowledge that they will be better off politically if they abandon the US.

Information operations that expose liberal democratic civilization's foes and support its allies - be they states or individuals - have never been more vital. Yet unless the Bush administration finds the courage to properly identify those foes and allies, its message will do more to confound than to clarify, and US policies will continue to be plagued by confusion - to the detriment of America and humanity as a whole.

Column One: A prayer for 5767

Pope Benedict XVI has become political Islam's newest excuse for rioting. Mobs from Rawalpindi to Ramallah are burning him in effigy. Muslim leaders from Gaza to Indonesia to Qatar, from Turkey to Washington and London are attacking the pope and demanding that he apologize to Islam for what they consider to be a heinous attack against their religion.

To recap what has been exhaustively reported in recent days, the pontiff's "crime" against Islam occurred in the course of a scholarly lecture at the University of Regensburg in his native Germany earlier in the month. Benedict quoted from a dialogue between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a Persian scholar of Islam circa 1391 where the emperor criticized harshly the Islamic practice of forcibly converting non-Muslims to Islam.

In the pope's words, the Byzantine emperor, "addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'

"The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God,' he says, 'is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.'"

As Benedict explained, the harsh judgment that the Byzantine emperor rendered on Islam stemmed directly from his Christian understanding of God as a reasonable deity. According to Benedict, the reason a Christian leader was able to judge Islam, and so conduct a meaningful inter-cultural discussion on the merits of Islam and Christianity, was because he had a clear understanding of how his religion construed the God-created world and conceived of man's relationship to God.

Expanding on this theme, the pope told his audience that European civilization itself is a fusion of Christian faith and Greek philosophy of reason. Europe's current cultural drift, he argued, stems from the cultural separation between faith and reason that began with the Reformation and went on through the Enlightenment. By relegating faith to a subculture that has no place in discussions of practical human endeavors, he said, Europeans have rendered themselves incapable of understanding who they are or of defending themselves and their values in a manner that the Byzantine emperor, in the pre-scientific era, was able to do so stalwartly.

IT COULD be said that the Islamic world's hysterical and violent reaction to Benedict's use of the 600-year-old dialogue only serves to reinforce the Byzantine emperor's impression that Islam does not perceive God as being a reasoning deity. But limiting an analysis of Benedict's lecture to the Muslim world's hysterical reaction would ignore the pope's central point. Benedict's overarching message in that lecture was that to survive, a culture must be willing to embrace its identity, for if it does not, it won't even be capable of understanding why it should survive.

While Benedict's specific message was to his fellow Christians, the Jewish people should take heed of his general message. Today, the Jewish people, in Israel and throughout the world find ourselves under attack from all quarters. The rise of anti-Semitism globally, and particularly in the Islamic world, finds us in a period of grave self-doubt. Like the Europeans, our ability to defend ourselves against the swelling ranks of haters is dependent on our ability as a people and as individuals to embrace our identity as Jews.

Commenting on the nature of this surge in Jew-hatred, the great (non-Jewish) Canadian pundit Mark Steyn wrote last month in the National Review, "The oldest hatred didn't get that way without the ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are - so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they're hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless-cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they're hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they'd be hated for that, too."

It is crucial that all of us internalize the message that these lines convey. For in recent years, rather than recognize the prejudice of our detractors, we have devoted ourselves to attempting to understand and so justify the hatred they heap upon us.

We tell ourselves we are hated because we are too strong - or because we are too weak. We are hated because we are too religious - or because we are not religious enough. We are hated because we insist on defending Israel - or we are hated because we are willing to compromise on Israel.

Yet, as Steyn wisely notes, we are not hated because of what we do, we are hated because we are Jews. In light of this, the best way to defend ourselves, the best way to safeguard our freedom and our heritage, is to embrace and celebrate our identity as Jews. As Elie Wiesel once explained to me, the key to defending ourselves is to never allow our haters to tell us who we are. "Hatred only defines the haters," he said.

And indeed, when we look at the manner in which Jews in Israel and throughout the world are being attacked today, we see that the attacks are based not on Jewish actions but on the fact that we are Jews.

Thus, in the midst of yet another wave of violent attacks by Muslims against Jews in Norway last month, Norway's Jewish community warned its members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public.

Thus it is that the charter of Hamas, the movement that now controls the Palestinian Authority, calls not for compromise with Israel but for all Jews to be expelled from the Land of Israel or forcibly converted to Islam as part of the global jihad.

So it is that attacks against Jewish supporters of Israel in the West target not the substance of their arguments, but their right as Jews to lobby for Israel in their countries of citizenship.

"We Jews," Wiesel explained, "have always defined ourselves as the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Indeed, at Mount Sinai, in our acceptance of the Ten Commandments, the Jewish people became the first nation in history to self-consciously define itself. And each subsequent generation of Jews has remade that choice. Jews do not exist, as Jean-Paul Sarte ignorantly argued, because anti-Semites exist. The leader of the existentialist movement should have understood; anti-Semites exist because anti-Semites choose to exist.

AS STEYN notes, today hatred against Jews is anchored on Israel. Provoked by this new form of Jew-hatred, some Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora see Israel as a burden. This is a self-inflicted tragedy. For if we look at Israel, we see that far from being a burden, our Jewish state is one of the most stunning successes of Jewish history.

Today, Israel is the home of the largest Jewish community in the world. More Jews live in Israel today than at any time in our history. And the state in which we live is one of the most vibrant, optimistic, "happening" countries in the world. We have the highest birthrate in the West. Rates of entrepreneurship are among the highest in the world.

We are one of the most highly educated societies in the world. Over the past 15 years, more than a dozen colleges have been established in Israel and last year the government decided to allow two colleges to join Israel's nine research universities as full-fledged, independent research universities.

Israelis are among the most patriotic citizens in the world. Our patriotism is expressed in the high level of volunteerism in all age groups. In the recent war, tens of thousands of reservists willingly left their families and jobs to take up arms and defend the country, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis volunteered to help our one million brothers and sisters whose homes were targeted by rockets, missiles and mortars.

Jewish life blossoms in Israel as it has nowhere else in our history. The rates of literacy in Jewish learning in Israel are higher than they have ever been anywhere in our history. Israel is the home of some half dozen generations of Jews whose mother tongue is the language of the Bible and the Talmud.

Israel's success stems from its serving as a vehicle that allows us to express our heritage in all facets of society. And our Jewish heritage is one of the most precious heritages known to man.

The Jewish people gave humanity the concepts of God, liberty and law. Our understanding of the fallibility of mankind has prevented us from being tempted by false prophets promising us heaven on Earth, and has allowed us to take practical steps toward improving our lot and our world.

All of the ideals that Israel represents, both spiritual and physical, have formed the foundations for human progress and freedom throughout the world for millennia. Our willingness to stay loyal to our identity and our heritage has been the key to our survival throughout the ages in the face of the countless foes who sought to destroy us both spiritually and physically.

Rosh Hashana marks the beginning of the Ten Days of Repentance that precede Yom Kippur. To properly atone for our sins and correct our mistakes, we must understand who we are, what we represent and what we can and should aspire to as Jews. To do this, we must reject the notion that those who hate us can tell us who we are. To do this we must embrace our Jewish identity and uphold our commitment to our collective destiny.

The fact that hatred of Jews has endured for so long says nothing about the nature of the Jewish people. What does speak volumes about that nature is the fact that through the ages our fortunes have been directly related to our ability to spurn our enemies' distorted portraits of the Jewish people and our willingness to endure and progress as Jews in the midst of that hatred.

Pope Benedict is able to discuss Islam because, secure in his Christian identity, he has a clear basis for judging the goodness or unreasonableness of Muslim values and behavior. Whether we agree with his judgments or not, through his willingness to judge, Benedict capably defends and advances his faith.

When we embrace our moral and intellectual identity as Jews, we are then capable of meeting the challenges of our times. It is my prayer that in 5767, the Jewish people will rally around our heritage, history and culture and so pave the way for a secure, peaceful and moral future for our people and our world.

Column One: The free world's Achilles heel

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair is Israel's best friend in Europe.

And he's not a very good friend.

Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, Blair was instrumental in convincing US President George W. Bush to view the Palestinian jihad against Israel as a conflict completely separate from the global jihad. His success in convincing Bush of this distinction turned the anti-Semitic - not to mention strategically disastrous - view that terrorists who kill Israelis should be treated differently from terrorists who kill anyone else into one of the cognitive foundations of the US war on Islamic terror. This foundation was first enunciated in Bush's address of September 20 to a joint session of Congress where he identified "every terrorist with global reach" - that is every terrorist who isn't part of the Palestinian Authority - as enemies of the US.

Later, Blair was a principal force behind Bush's move to abandon the guidelines for dealing with the Palestinians that he enunciated in his speech of June 24, 2002. In that address, Bush stipulated that the Palestinians needed to transform themselves from a society that supported terror into one that combated terror in order to receive US support for Palestinian statehood.

Shortly after Baghdad fell to coalition forces in April 2003, Blair convinced Bush to accept the road map plan for Palestinian statehood. The road map, which effectively locks in US support for Palestinian statehood irrespective of Palestinian terrorism and radicalism, represented a practical abandonment of the positions that Bush set out in his June 24, 2002 address.

During his visit to the region this week, in keeping with his studied habit, Blair ignored the fact that the Iranian-backed Hamas government was elected to lead the Palestinian Authority by a large majority of Palestinians. He ignored the fact that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has voiced support for the abduction and continued captivity of Cpl. Gilad Shalit and for the continuation of the terror war against Israel. He ignored the fact that rather than working to overthrow the Hamas government, Abbas has begged Hamas to allow Fatah to join its government. To this end, Abbas has accepted Hamas's policy guidelines rejecting the possibility of recognizing Israel's right to exist and committing all Palestinians to unite in the war against Israel.

Ignoring all these inconvenient facts, Blair called on the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government to renew negotiations with Abbas on the basis of the road map.

And yet, for all this, Tony Blair is Israel's best friend in Europe. He is Israel's best friend because, in contrast to all his colleagues in Britain and the EU, Blair at least recognizes that the global jihad is a threat to the free world and that the price of not fighting the forces of jihad would be the loss of our freedom.

Soon, Israel's closest European friend will exit the world stage after being effectively sacked by his own Labor Party last week. British political commentators say the chances are slim that Blair will manage to hold onto the reins of power as a lame duck for the next 12 months, as he pledged. More likely, he will leave 10 Downing Street in a matter of months.

The two men most likely to succeed Blair - Chancellor Gordon Brown and Tory leader David Cameron - will be more similar to French President Jacques Chirac than to Blair in their attitudes toward Israel and the US. This is the case first and foremost because that is what the British people expect of them.

British antipathy towards the US and Israel was clearly exposed in an opinion poll published on September 6 in the Times of London. The poll reported that 73 percent of Britons believe that Blair's foreign policy, and especially his "support for the invasion of Iraq and refusal to demand an immediate cease-fire by Israel in the recent war against Hizbullah, has significantly increased the risk of terrorist attacks on Britain."

More than 62% said that to "reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on Britain, the government should change its foreign policy, in particular by distancing itself from America, being more critical of Israel and declaring a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq."

The day after the poll was published, Blair announced that he would leave office in a year.

Also, on September 7, a committee of members of Parliament released a report on anti-Semitism in Britain. The all-party committee found that that since the Palestinian jihad against Israel began in 2000, anti-Semitism in Britain has become a mainstream phenomenon. Attacks against Jews in Britain were at an all time high over the summer.

In their anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, the British, of course, are no different from their Continental brethren. And the situation in Europe is alarming. Writing in Frontpage magazine this week, Islamic expert Andrew Bostom reported that in November 2005, Stephen Steinlight, the former director of education at the US Holocaust Memorial Council, told a conference in Washington that on average, Muslims attack Jews in Paris 12 times a day. According to Steinlight, this means French anti-Semitic violence is approaching the level of anti-Semitic violence in Germany during the days of the Weimar Republic.

These attacks against Jews in Europe are accompanied by ever increasing official hostility towards Israel on the part of European governments. On the second day of the war with Hizbullah, Chirac felt comfortable alleging that "Israel's military offensive against Lebanon is totally disproportionate." Chirac then acidly asked, "Is destroying Lebanon the ultimate goal?"

Chirac's remarks opened the floodgates for anti-Israel propaganda throughout Europe. They were followed by the barring of El Al cargo planes carrying weapons shipments from the US from European airports. That prohibition still stands.

From the moment Chirac launched this unjustified diplomatic assault against Israel, his government began acting as an agent of the Lebanese government, which itself acted throughout the war as Hizbullah's mouthpiece. So from the second day of the war, the groundwork was already laid for UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which treats Israel and Hizbullah as equals and lets both Syria and Iran off the hook for their central roles in Hizbullah's illegal war against Israel.

THROUGH THEIR behavior toward both Israel and the US, Europe's leaders have made clear that they will do just about anything to please the Muslim world. Even though Iran has made absolutely clear that it refuses to end uranium enrichment activities, or even to suspend them, the Europeans continue to insist on negotiating with the mullahs and refuse to take even the smallest concrete step against Iran in the UN Security Council.

As for the Palestinians, the Europeans have made no attempt to hide their eagerness to renew their monthly transfers of tens of millions of euros to the Palestinian Authority in the wake of Hamas's agreement to let Fatah join its jihadist government.

And in Lebanon, together with the UN, the Europeans have defined the rules of engagement for UNIFIL in a way that on the one hand protects Hizbullah, and on the other hand, prevents Israel from defending itself. Above all else, these policies clearly demonstrate that the Europeans have defined ingratiating the Muslim world as their primary geopolitical interest.

Seemingly unaware of Europe's growing hostility toward Israel, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government has succumbed to the charms of the likes of Chirac, Romano Prodi and Javier Solana and is systematically abandoning Israel's positions in favor of Europe's pro-Arab stands. During his press conference with Blair, Olmert renounced his previous well-considered demand that Shalit be released before any meeting can take place between him and Abbas.

During her visit to Washington, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni emphasized Israel's desire to renew negotiations with the Palestinians on the basis of the road map, and the government's continued support for Abbas. This, in spite of the fact that the government Abbas is forming with Hamas will not recognize Israel's right to exist and will be committed to continuing its jihad against Israel. In so doing, Olmert and Livni are lending informal approval to the renewal of European funding of the Palestinian Authority.

Even more troubling is the government's inaction, bordering on tacit support, regarding the radical Left's campaign to transfer responsibility for Israel's security from the IDF to Europe. The campaign, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman enthusiastically dubbed, "Land for NATO," in his column on Wednesday, involves the adoption of the UNIFIL model in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. This newest messianic trend is based on the blind belief that Israel can continue giving land to the Palestinians in spite of the fact that the Palestinians are the most radical, pro-jihad society on the face of the earth, because Europe will prote