Articles

May 11, 2008 -- As you go deeper into debt filling up your tank with $4 gas this weekend, look on the bright side - you're helping to fund countries that hate you.

From Russia to Iran to Venezuela, America's adversaries are splurging on oil windfalls, while programs directed against Uncle Sam and his allies are funded by petroleum revenues. Big bucks are allowing the oil sultans and dictators to intimidate US allies, buy politicians and academics, and purchase election outcomes.

Oil prices are going up partly because of supply and speculation - but also because these countries can decide to punish the US or limit our influence, particularly when they disagree with policies toward Iraq and Israel.

Part of the reason they can do this is that governments of the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel, and the non-cartel producers like Russia, make sure that international oil companies do not own reserves in the ground. Exxon, for instance, spent only 4 percent of its exploration budget in the Middle East last year - local governments do not allow Western companies to take control of their own destiny.

Thus, the global oil production is at the mercy of opaque and corrupt national oil companies, while the governments that own them enjoy skyrocketing oil prices and the growing, mindboggling wealth.

The revenues of the major oil producing countries have quadrupled in three years. Since 9/11, oil prices have more than quintupled. This year Europe and the US will spend approximately $2 trillion on imported oil, while the world will spend close to $3 trillion.

This money recycles back to the US and the West, often in the most legitimate ways. Sovereign Investment Funds have acquired large chunks of America's financial flagships: Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Blackstone and the Carlyle Group.

A foreign government acquiring a serious stake in US corporate gems can influence US policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. The oil sheikhs can "tweak" attitudes towards extremism and terrorism, and buy access to politicians through lobbying and campaign contributions. In the future, these funds may acquire defense and technology flagships: Boeing, General Electric, Lockheed Martin and others, or go after primary media assets, from CNN to FOX.

However, oil revenues may be used in much more sinister ways. Money can buy nuclear weapons programs, ballistic missile arsenals, and other arms. It can also pay for terrorist armies.

Today's attempt to overthrow the pro-American government in Lebanon is bankrolled by Iran. Hezbollah is a wholly-owned Iranian subsidiary. Its chief has the official title of the "representative of Iran's Supreme Leader" in Lebanon. Iran paid for the 27,000 rockets Hezbollah has aimed at Israel.

Iran also buys Hamas weapons and popularity in Gaza. In a recent children's TV broadcast by Hamas' Al Aqsa TV, a "Hamasnik" boy is shown assassinating President George W. Bush in the Oval Office and declaring that the White House will be turned into a mosque. Money may not buy you love, but it sure pays for propaganda.

Al Jazeera, the Qatari Arabic and English language TV is a propaganda arm with global reach. Viciously anti-American, it talks to tens of millions of Arabic speaking Muslims worldwide, as well as audiences in Pakistan, India, London and Detroit.

Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Salafi-Jihadi ideology known as Wahhabism, is financing hundreds of religious seminaries (madrassahs), educating generations of US-hating and anti-Semitic Muslim extremists from Michigan to Manila. Some of them will pick up arms to fight the US and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wahhabis deny other religions the right to exist in dignity, as a recent religious ruling (fatwa) in Saudi Arabia demonstrated. Two journalists who argued for tolerance were sentenced to death.

In the US a majority of mosques partake of Saudi and Gulf largesse. The Saudis often provide religious leaders (imams), textbooks and curricula, to Muslim communities and schools. There is little to no control as far as the content of the teachings or school books, but a Freedom House study found that these are anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-American and anti-Israel.

Despite trips by President George Bush and Vice President Cheney, Saudi Arabia refuses to increase output - and why would they? They can use it as leverage to get their way, particularly in Israel.

Riyyadh also employs an army of lobbyists and other "influencers" in Washington, London, Brussels and elsewhere around the world. These shadow mercenaries promote a benign image for the Kingdom.

They appear on TV, write newspaper and journal articles, direct university programs on Islamic or Middle Eastern studies. Saudi princes have poured tens of millions into prestigious universities, from Georgetown and Harvard to Cambridge and Edinburgh.

Former senior government officials and ambassadors are on the royal payroll influencing their colleagues in the diplomatic service. This is how the Saudi "peace plan" calling for undermining Israel through a massive influx of Palestinian "refugees" received US support at the highest levels.

This is how the Carter Center in Atlanta ended up taking millions in Gulf oil money. This is why Jimmy Carter looks like he's shilling for the Iranian-Saudi client, Hamas.

If all this were not enough, Hugo Chavez, the socialist-fascist ruler of Venezuela, is spending billions in dollar oil subsidies to assemble an empire of dependencies in Latin America. According to evidence on a laptop taken from a dead guerilla leader in the neighboring Ecuador, Chavez supports the FARC narco-guerillas who are attempting to overthrow the democratically-elected government of President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia.

Chavez, an ally of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, provides cheap oil and loans to Daniel Ortega and his wife, the Sandinista rulers of Nicaragua. Chavez also supports leftist leaders and forces in Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay. Their intent is to deny the US influence and allies in South America, and ease the way for an Iranian-Hezbollah penetration of the Southern Cone.

Russian leaders, more anti-American today than ever, have written the book on using money and energy muscle to buy friends and influence neighbors. They made an example out of Ukraine, by cutting gas supply to it on New Year's Day for four days.

They also intimidated France and Germany into bucking the US at the Bucharest NATO summit and objecting to Georgia and Ukraine being issued a North Atlantic Treaty Association membership plan.

Russia's Gazprom has hired former German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder as the Chairman of a pipeline consortium, and made a similar offer to former Italian Prime Minister and the top Eurocrat Romano Prodi. Vladimir Putin does brisk energy business with Silvio Berlusconi, and with the French President Nicolas Sarcozy, though both are considered pro-American. German businessmen enthusiastically lobby Chancellor Angela Merkel on the Kremlin's behalf. Russia, some argue, has more clout today in Europe than Washington.

Finally, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and even US friend Kuwait are dumping the greenback in favor of the Euro in energy transactions. This is likely to decrease demand and increase the supply of dollars, sending the US currency into a tailspin. Weaker dollars and higher inflation may add insult to injury in the prolonged process of America's economic deterioration.

To stave it off and to combat its oil-rich adversaries, the US needs, in the short term, to expand its domestic energy sector. Increasing oil and gas production in the West, along the Pacific and Atlantic continental shelf, and in Alaska will help, and so will a coal and nuclear power build-up.

The US Congress should also abolish corn ethanol subsidy and lift tariffs on the really competitive ethanol made from sugar cane. Brazil and Africa can produce more ethanol than Iowa and Nebraska. However, in the long term, more advanced technological solutions are vital to stem the global wealth redistribution to OPEC potentates and other America-haters.

World powers have risen and fallen over major economic factors. This should never be the case of our nation. The oil potentates should know that the US will not be intimidated - or bankrupted out of existence.

Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in International Energy Security at The Heritage Foundation and the author of The Real World, a weekly column published in The Middle East Times.

The 21st century will not be an easy one for Israel, yet the 20th initially looked even worse: Jewish pogroms in Russia, inept Ottoman rule in the Holy Land, Jews without a state for 2,000 years.

Yet, the enduring faith that prompts Jews to pray facing Jerusalem three times a day, the compelling vision of its founding father Theodor Herzl, enthusiasm of the Zionist movement, created a miracle. Sixty years ago the Jewish state was reborn in the wake of the Holocaust's horror.

The first state to come into existence based on a U.N. decision, Israel persevered despite three attempts by its neighbors – in 1948, 1967, and 1973, to wipe it out. Its achievements have been tremendous: its population grew from 600,000 at the founding, to 7 million today. It absorbed millions of Jewish refugees after the Holocaust; 800,000 kicked out of the Arab lands; and over 1 million from the Soviet Union.

A global hub of research and development, Israel today is more diverse than Los Angeles, yet united in its will to survive.

Israel has its ups and downs, such as commemoration of the Holocaust Day 10 days before the Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers, when the whole country freezes, listening to the sirens for two minutes, followed the next day by the joy of the Independence Day celebration.

But Israel and the Jewish people have paid the price; 22,437 Jewish and Israeli soldiers and citizens who have been killed since 1860 in wars and terror attacks, yet this figure is dwarfed in comparison with 6 million – one-third of the Jewish people, who were brutally murdered or died in the Holocaust in Europe and North Africa.

The Holocaust is a central historic event and lesson which dictates Israel's foreign and defense policy. "Never again!" is not an empty slogan, but an imperative to survive. That's why the four threats to its existence that Israel is facing today are as real as the Nazi calls for the destruction of the Jews in the late 1930s – calls that many in Europe and even among the Jewish people ignored.

First, there is the Iranian nuclear threat. Iran has intentions, articulated repeatedly by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to wipe Israel off the map. It is building the capabilities to achieve that end, with a growing rocket arsenal and a non-transparent nuclear program that the world lacks the will to stop. Iran wants a single blow "solution" to Israel. Mass murder in the blink of an eye.

Iran is also the sponsor, the trainer and the instigator of at least three groups considered to be terrorist organizations by Israel and the United States, Hezbollah (the Party of God) in Lebanon, and of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. These are religious extremist movements which are not fighting just for territory. They want to destroy Israel as the Jewish state, plain and simple.

Second, there is the threat of a terror war, of the kind waged by Yasser Arafat between 2000-2004, by Hezbollah in 2006, and by Hamas every day against Sderot and other towns in the south of Israel. If undeterred or undefeated, a terror war could undermine Israeli economy and morale, make life unbearable, and force thousands to emigrate. Hamas and Hezbollah are building their forces and rocket arsenals for the next escalation.

The third threat comes from campaigns to undermine Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state and the homeland of the Jewish people. This is being carried out on a global scale through a combination of Arab propaganda; the hate-filled anti-Semitic attacks; and the "mainstreaming" of leftist "anti-imperialist" narrative, which views Israel not as a reincarnation of the ancient Jewish state, but as European "colonialism." This is where anti-Zionism seamlessly merges with anti-Semitism.

The fourth threat is the moral health of the Jewish state itself. As new generations of "sabras" – Israeli-born – come of age, many lack historic understanding of the persecution and loss that brought Zionism into being. ?he memory of the Holocaust is at times absent, or so is a real sense of their Judaic roots.

People lose perspective as to why Israel is a modern miracle. Social ills abound, from drug and alcohol use to crime and corruption. The Jews have become what Israel's founding fathers wished for: a people like everyone else, but this often disappoints those with idealistic yardsticks.

Israel is plagued today by a pathetic bureaucracy; a crumbling education system; widening gaps between rich and poor (approximately 1/3 of the children live below the poverty line); friction between the religious and the secular, and between Jews and Israeli Arab citizens who often view themselves as Palestinians, not Israelis. The country needs strong leadership to survive and thrive. Unfortunately, it does not have it.

Its current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has become a spectacle of lapses in judgment and morality. Olmert is currently fighting his fifth corruption investigation since taking office. He was handpicked by Ariel Sharon to be a deputy, but never an heir.

Not only did Olmert demonstrate abysmal skills as a military leader in the 2006 Lebanon war, he refused to do the right thing after the Winograd Committee Report, which investigated the war and laid the responsibility for the many failures involved squarely at his feet.

Now engaged in putative peace initiatives with Syria and Mahmoud Abbas, Olmert may have only a few days left in office. The embarrassment of seeing the prime minister presiding over the 60th Independence anniversary after spending hours in a police interrogation room may be too much even for his jaded party comrades and coalition partners to endure.

Israel, always a cauldron of stress, desperately needs a breath of fresh air. On its 60th anniversary, ironically, new elections may be just what the country needs.

To the Westerner who 'understands' the terrorist
By Bradley Burston
Haaretz.com

Spare us the learned, sociology-drenched justifications.

Spare us the reasons why you "get" Palestinians when they gun Jews down in cold blood.

Spare us the chapter and verse on how the plight of the Palestinians is at the root of Islamic terrorism the world over, and if the Palestinians were to receive full justice, Islamic terrorism would pass from the world.

You may well believe, with the blind faith of the hopeful and the fear-stricken, that when these people are through with the Jews, they won't come for you.

When a gunman walks into a Jewish religious seminary at the main entrance to that part of Jerusalem which has been Jewish since 1948, and which was stolen from no one, pay attention.

When he opens fire on religious students hunched over books in a library, firing and firing until blood soaks holy book bindings and open pages of Talmud and the whole of the floor, pay close attention to the reactions of the self-styled people of faith who run Hamas.

Spare us the conclusion that the only reason Hamas kills Jews, and that its underlying motive for encouraging others to do the same, is to force Israel to agree to a cease-fire.

Spare us the "Israel's policies are responsible for the bloodshed" and "the seminary is, after all, an ideological bastion and symbol of the religious right" and all the other scholarly, arrogant, condescending and amoral ways of saying "they had it coming to them."

Spare us the understanding for the motivations of the mass murderer who kills with God on his lips. Spare us the understanding of the words of the Hamas official who says that after all the Israeli killings of Palestinians, the Jerusalem killings are "our only joy."

Spare us the sight of the thanksgiving prayers for the great victory, prayers that began in Gaza City mosques just after the slaughter of the Jews. Spare us the sight of the sweets being handed out by little children to motorists in passing cars in the Strip, sweets to celebrate the young Jews dead on the floor, the young Jews dead at their desks, the Jews killed for the crime of being Jews in that place of study and worship.

Spare us the righteousness of those who condemned Baruch Goldstein for entering a holy place with an assault rifle and murdering Palestinians, but who can understand why a Palestinian might do the very same thing,

Last week, when Israeli forces drove into Gaza, and some 120 Palestinians were killed, many of them were gunmen, but with children making up another sixth of the total, one grieving father spoke with quiet eloquence, saying "Other places in the world, when this happens, there is a great outcry. When this happens here, the world is silent. No one cares."

He's right. The world has grown content to let Palestinians die. The reason is not simple callousness. And it is not, as Hamas proclaims to its followers in Gaza, that the Jews control the world media and world finance, and thus Western government as well.

The world has grown weary of the Islamist's creed, that only the armed struggle can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the only proper resolution is the end of Israel.

Even the Israeli left, which for decades championed the Palestinian with courage and determination, has, in large part, had it with the Palestinians. The reason is terrorism. The reason is murder. The reason is that the rulers of Gaza are people who see an intrinsic value in the killing of Jews for the sake of increasing the number of dead Jews in the world.

The rulers of Gaza cannot bring themselves to accept the concept of sharing the Holy Land with the Jews.

The best that the rulers of Gaza can do, is to bring an end to hope among their own people and ours as well.

They believe that the Jewish state is temporary, and that they Jews will soon abandon it to Islamic rule.

From the Washington Times

September 5, 2007

The tidy Western view of Palestinian politics coming down to Islamists vs. secularists faces yet another reality check. Both Hamas and the supposedly secular Fatah are engaging in a new propaganda war, each portraying itself as the defender of the faith, while accusing the other party of defiling Islam, according to a report being released today by the Palestinian Media Watch.

While competing videos represent just a recent snapshot of the bitter struggle between Hamas and Fatah for Palestinian hearts and minds, it is indicative of the increasingly Islamic tenor of the culture that each group is attempting to stake out the Islamic high ground.

Though some are quick to blame Hamas for this state of affairs, it is Fatah, at the original direction of famed secularist Yasser Arafat, who is most responsible for Islamicizing Palestinian society.

After showing the destruction of a Gaza mosque caused by Hamas gunmen, the Fatah video has a close-up of a desecrated Koran with a grenade and bullet shells on top, and asks the question, "Whose grenades are these?"

Fatah's video even goes so far as to say that the Islamic jihad terrorists killed in the attack were "martyred" by Hamas — terminology typically used to describe a Muslim who is killed by an enemy of Islam.

The video was released around the same time as an Hamas production that portrayed Fatah as rats removing women's head coverings and literally burning Korans. Rather than using actual footage, though, the Hamas video is entirely animated. The surprisingly professional cartoon features a hero, representing Hamas, that bears striking resemblance to Simba, the title character in Disney's "The Lion King."

After the Fatah rats dance in their money and fire rockets at mosques, the Hamas lion defeats the rats, then stands on a hilltop looking off into the distance, with a Palestinian flag flying nearby.

This latest tussle demonstrates that Hamas has improved impressively upon the tactics long utilized by Fatah.

Upon taking the reins of Palestinian society following the 1993 Oslo accords, Mr. Arafat implemented an aggressive platform of Islamic indoctrination, beefing up Islamic education in the schools and giving new prominence on television and elsewhere to fire-breathing imams, including many who called for Islam to topple the West.

Tapping into the ascending worldwide Islamist political movement, Mr. Arafat used his newfound power to create a new generation of terrorists superior to the old-school Palestine Liberation Organization thugs in one key respect: These post-Oslo brainwashed Palestinian kids were not only not afraid of death, but they actually wanted to die.

Yet Mr. Arafat couldn't merely indoctrinate the children. Sane parents would never allow their children to blow themselves up, so Mr. Arafat carefully cultivated a cult of martyrdom that permeated Palestinian society. Much attention in the West has been paid to the hero worship of successful suicide bombers, but almost as important was the glorification of their parents.

Of particular symbolic significance has been Mariam Farahat, better known as Umm Nidal, or "Mother of the Struggle," who bursts with pride that three of her six children died as Islamic terrorists. Though embraced and praised over the years by Fatah, she is now a Hamas member of the Palestinian legislature.

The Islamization spawned by Fatah has now taken on a life of its own.

Anecdotal evidence coming out of Gaza, where Western journalists are no longer stationed, is that the area is in many ways starting to resemble fundamentalist Islamic police states Saudi Arabia and Iran. More and more men are reportedly sporting religious beards, and few women are venturing outside without a veil. Hamas thugs are also out roaming the streets scouring for un-Islamic activities, even recently breaking up weddings of Fatah members and accusing the celebrants of being "Jews," according to Palestinian Authority TV reports translated by Palestinian Media Watch.

This increasing radicalization could have implications beyond Gaza's borders. In March, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas warned that al Qaeda had infiltrated Gaza, and at least one prominent Arab newspaper echoed that claim.

The Egyptian government maintains that the attack on the Red Sea resort of Dahab in April 2006 was perpetrated by operatives who received weapons and explosives training in Gaza. The terrorists who struck Dahab belonged to Abu Musab Zarqawi's al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which was later renamed al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

While there is not strong evidence of ongoing coordinated operations between Hamas and al Qaeda, the two groups share similar theologies, worldviews and burning hatred for the United States. Dore Gold's latest book, "The Fight for Jerusalem," explores this budding alliance. The photo appendix also provides evidence, including a poster distributed by Hamas operatives with the images of both Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Osama bin Laden. Then there's bin Laden loyalist Sheikh Abd al-Majid al-Zindani speaking at a March 2006 Hamas fund-raiser in Yemen.

The billions of dollars in U.S. aid lavished on the Palestinians should have built support for the United States, but, in fact, the reverse has happened. Why? Because Mr. Arafat and his Fatah party enjoyed full U.S. support as they radicalized the Palestinians.

And the madness only continues, as U.S.-backed Fatah leaders frantically attempt to keep pace with the deeply Islamic society they helped create.

Close to the edge

Feeling abandoned by their countrymen, the residents of one Israeli town have endured over 2,000 rocket attacks.

A sweltering summer morning, and the hubbub and bustle of the central market place in Sderot is interrupted by the wailing of sirens and the urgent voice of a woman repeating Tzeva Adom, Tzeva Adom, over the public address system. In Hebrew that means “Colour Red”, and it signifies that another Qassam rocket has been launched by Palestinian militants from inside the Gaza Strip and is heading towards the town. As residents of Sderot are only too well aware, it gives them a maximum of 15 seconds to take cover.

Some shoppers respond instantly, scurrying for the freestanding steel-and-concrete shelters, known as “life shields”, dotted around public places. Others panic, running in one direction then another, spilling fruit and vegetables from their shopping bags. A few people ignore the warning, waiting calmly until a shrill whistle overhead is followed by the thud of an explosion in the distance. Moments later the market is back in business, mobile phones ringing constantly as news about the latest attack is exchanged (nobody was hurt). Later in the day, four more rockets land, again without inflicting casualties.

It is more than five years since the first Qassam hit Sderot, which sits on the western edge of Israel’s Negev desert, a little more than a mile away from the high-rise blocks of the Palestinian city of Beit Hanoun. In that time, more than 2,000 rockets have struck homes, schools, offices, factories and a local synagogue. Miraculously, only eight people have been killed (three of them small children) and a few dozen more wounded, but the bombardments – sometimes sporadic, often intense – have become a permanent and frightening part of the fabric of everyday life for Sderot’s 24,000 inhabitants.

Over the past decade or so, other communities in Israel have suffered much heavier casualties from terrorist attacks: suicide bombers have killed scores of civilians and more than 40 people died when Hezbollah’s rockets rained down on towns in the north of the country during the brief war in Lebanon last year. But none have endured such a prolonged and draining ordeal under fire as Sderot, whose long-suffering residents suggest, with gallows humour, that on a map of conflict in Israel, their home should be permanently represented by a bull’s-eye.

As my guide, Hava Gad, directs my car around the town, past buildings where fist-sized lumps of shrapnel have punched through concrete walls and metal doors, she sets out the ground rules for survival. If you can’t reach a shelter inside the 15 seconds, kneel by the nearest wall, head down with hands behind the neck: the rockets’ normal trajectory is west to east, so a good sense of direction is useful. Take your time getting back up, Gad cautions, because Qassams can arrive in irregular salvos. That’s not all there is to learn about staying alive in Sderot. “Driving with the radio on too loud could drown out the sound of the alarm,” Gad tells me, “and the same goes for taking a shower, so make sure there’s always someone else around.” When I reach for my seat belt, she points out that people have been hurt because they were unable to get out of their cars fast enough – “so now we’re the only place in Israel where it is officially forbidden to buckle up”.

Almost as an afterthought, Gad informs me that the Colour Red alert system, triggered when a laser beam detects the sudden increase in heat after a rocket has been fired, is not infallible. In certain weather conditions, such as heavy mist, launches can go undetected. In May, a 32-year-old woman was killed when a Qassam landed on her car without any advance warning.

This was the first death inflicted by a rocket for the best part of six months, during which time Hamas – the Islamic militant faction responsible for the majority of attacks – was observing an unofficial “tahidyeh” or lull (though other militant groups were still firing off occasional rockets). “That was fine while it lasted, but in Sderot we’ve learnt the hard way not to become complacent,” says Hava Gad. Sure enough, the bombardments resumed, quickly building up to a new peak of intensity. Over the next two weeks, more than 300 rockets struck the town.

Twenty fell in the space of a single day, Gad recalls with a shudder. “The alarms went on and on, and it seemed like the explosions would never stop.”

In her cramped office at Sderot’s centre for the treatment of shock victims, Dr Adriana Katz is talking about the invisible wounds inflicted on the hundreds of patients in her care by the relentless barrages. “It’s true the Qassams don’t kill many people, but they have largely destroyed the normal fabric of life in the town. Everyone exists in a state of permanent alert, which is physically and psychologically very destructive.”

Almost every attack results in 20 to 30 people being taken to the centre to be treated for shock, most exhibiting the classic symptoms: crying, stammering, sometimes trembling so violently they cannot control their limbs. In many of the cases, this gives way to what is classified in Hebrew as harada – a state of acute anxiety, often accompanied by feelings of helplessness and depression, that can persist for months on end.

“We do our best to prevent people lapsing into full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by getting them to take part in group therapy or one-on-one counselling,” says Katz. “The aim is to help them get back into some kind of regular routine, even if it’s just getting on with their jobs or doing the housework. But, of course, that means them returning to the hugely stressful circumstances that everyone here faces.”

One of her patients is a hollow-eyed young woman who stares into space, clenching and unclenching her hands. A rocket exploded right beside her house, Katz explains. “She is simply unable to overcome the terror she experienced.” Katz is sure many people in Sderot are similarly afflicted, but refuse to seek appropriate treatment, struggling by on tranquillisers. “You must have noticed almost everyone here smokes like a chimney,” she adds, stubbing out a cigarette. I ask what would make her job any easier – reduced caseload, more money, more staff ? Katz thinks for a moment.

“To be frank, the mental-health situation here is shocking and it’s getting worse, we need all the help we can get. But the best thing that could happen would be a lasting peace.”

The most tragic victims of the Qassams are Sderot’s children, one in three of whom suffers from PTSD according to a survey published last year. Like their parents, they spend much of their lives “on alert”, dreading the next attack, unable to concentrate at school or enjoy the normal pleasures of childhood at home. “It is a sad fact that there are 10-year-old kids who require tranquillisers daily,” says Liora Fima, head of a local elementary school where about half the pupils were being kept away by their parents.

When Fima invites a class to talk about the rockets, one youngster volunteers that if the alarm sounds “my mother jumps around doing chicken noises to make me laugh, but I know what is happening and I get even more frightened.” Another recounts how her parents encourage her “to make up silly names for the rockets, like Cornflake Qassams, only I can see how scared they are and it stops being fun”. As Fima notes, the paintings on the classroom walls reflect these fears, depicting burning houses and stick figures lying on the ground. “For them, red isn’t the colour of roses, but of blood and flames.”

Although Israeli law states that all schools must be fully reinforced against rocket attack, Fima’s is one of several in the town that still lacks complete protection because of a shortage of funds. “The safe rooms we have are painted bright blue so the children know where to run to when the sirens sound,” she says. “But as things are at present, we can’t risk letting them congregate in the unprotected playground or gymnasium, which means they spend hours cooped up here. Then they go home, where their parents are afraid to let them play out of doors.”

As a spokesperson for the Sderot parents association, Hava Gad knows all about the strains that the attacks impose on family life: her own eight-year-old son, Yanay, worries so much that he can no longer sleep in his own room, spending the night with her and her husband, Tsfania. “He was quite advanced as a little boy, out of nappies before he was two,” she recalls, “but he’s begun wetting the bed, something that other mothers say is also happening to their children.”

With two daughters, Shay, 16, and Hagar, 18, sharing the family’s single-storey house, there is little opportunity for privacy. “I haven’t worked for two years, after losing my job in marketing because I was always rushing off after attacks to check my kids were safe,” says Gad. “Living with the rockets 24/7 is unbelievably stressful.”

“My daughters are normal teenagers, interested in the usual things for girls of their age, but every time they go out at night it’s like planning a military exercise. We have to think about how they’ll get around, check the bomb shelter at the place where they’re going, make sure their mobiles are charged up. Then you sit and chew on your fingernails until they come home.”

As Gad points out, the pressure is intensified by the frustration of being unable to provide the usual blanket of parental security and protection for their children. “I think my husband, whose roots are Yemeni, feels this particularly strongly, because he’s from a background where family responsibilities are taken very seriously.” She describes the difficulties of sustaining a married relationship: “It’s hard to make love when you have a frightened child in the bedroom.”

Behind Sderot’s police station, there is a scrap yard packed with the remains of rockets that have hit the town, all labelled and dated. The Palestinian militants who launched them usually adorned the fuselage with their faction’s emblems, sometimes adding defiant slogans in Hebrew. The first Qassams – named after a firebrand Muslim preacher who died fighting the British in the 1930s – were knocked up in Gaza’s backstreet workshops from 6ft lengths of iron drainpipes or lampposts with four stabilising fins soldered into place. Launched from crude sloping racks and propelled by a mixture of sugar, oil, alcohol and fertiliser, they had a range of less than five miles and carried just 1lb of explosives to scatter the shrapnel load.

Over the past few years, the rockets’ range and destructive capability have increased as the militants experiment with fuel mixes and bigger payloads – though lacking a guidance system they remain inaccurate. The latest version, Qassam-3, packs over 20lb of explosive and can reach more than 15 miles inside Israel. This puts the port of Ashkelon just within range and several rockets have already landed on the city’s outskirts.

“They’ve improved targeting by calculating the angle of each launch, then listening to Israeli radio reports of where the rockets landed,” says Noam Bedein, a young Israeli journalist. There is a fairly predictable pattern to the attacks on Sderot, Bedein notes. “ It starts between 7 and 9am, when the kids leave for school and the buses are full of people going to work, then resume as they head home in the late afternoon.”

At night, sporadic bombardments ensure that people are kept awake and on edge, while Jewish religious holidays rarely pass without sirens. In May, a Qassam crashed through the roof of the Ohel Yitzchak synagogue shortly after 400 worshippers had left the building: the only casualty was an alsatian dog at the house next door.

Although surveillance cameras mounted in a blimp that floats above Sderot record every movement on the Palestinian side of the border fence, the Israeli military cannot prevent swift hit-and-run attacks. Once, when Bedein was at an observation point overlooking Beit Hanoun, a Qassam team appeared on the roof of a building there. “They were really slick, got the rockets off fast. By the time I heard the explosions, they were pulling out. We could hear them shouting “Allahu Akbar”. Israel’s retaliation usually involves airborne missile strikes against known militant bases and workshops involved in producing Qassams.

Sderot’s mayor is a fast-talking lawyer, Eli Moyal, who took office almost a decade ago, expecting “to be looking after things like education, leisure facilities and getting the garbage collected”.

No shrinking violet, he offers comparisons of himself with the New York mayor Rudy Giuliani at the time of 9/11. Neither of them expected to become national heroes, he observes, but events thrust both of them into the role.

Journalists flock to interview Moyal, but he is no fan of the media’s reporting from Sderot, blaming it for presenting a distorted picture of the town, where he has lived most his life. One reporter who asked him about the exodus of Sderot residents – around half the population has left since the attacks intensified earlier this year – got both barrels. “The 50% that aren’t leaving are the real story, but nobody’s filming them,” he snapped, “nor the 17-year-olds studying for exams while the Qassams are falling.”

Another sore point for Moyal is the free holidays in the Israeli resort of Eilat that Sderot residents have gratefully accepted from Arcadi Gaydamak, a Russian-born billionaire who announced recently that he was founding a new political party aimed at the many Israelis fed up with high-level corruption and misconduct. Nothing against this man personally, Moyal insists, but where was the government when people are reaching breaking point under fire? “We’re talking about a national problem of the highest order.”

Moyal has not endeared himself to his own community by arguing that the state-funded reinforcement of homes against the Qassams amounts to “capitulation”, implying terrorism will remain a fact of life in Sderot. The rockets have never killed anybody inside a building, he notes: even if every home was given full protection “we still have to go outside, to the shops or schools”. Provocative stuff, but Moyal insists most people in Sderot love him dearly – even though he has been assaulted in the street more than once and is trailed by a bodyguard.

Moyal rejects the notion that because Sderot is a “development town” – Israeli shorthand for a working-class community containing a high proportion of poor immigrants, in this case from North Africa, Ethiopia and most recently Russia – the government has turned its back on them. “Of course we are suffering. We’re becoming a ghost town where people don’t go to work and kids stay away from school. But that’s got nothing to do with ethnic factors; the crisis persists because the government doesn’t understand the needs of its citizens here.”

Hava Gad sees it differently: “Nobody else in Israel gives a damn about us,” she says, scornfully dismissing the politicians who pay a flying visit “then scurry away like frightened mice”. If rockets were hitting Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, she maintains, the government would quickly be galvanised into action. Sderot had high hopes when Amir Peretz, who grew up in the town, became Israel’s defence minister, Gad recalls, “yet he was as useless as the rest of them”. Although Peretz is no longer in office, when the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, arrived, there were angry protests. Demonstrators chanted “Livni, you’re a whore” and pelted her car with rubbish. As for Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, his two most recent visits to Sderot were not announced in advance, seemingly to avoid a similarly hostile reception. “He needn’t have bothered coming,” says Gad, “because all he had to tell us was that there’s no way to stop the Qassam attacks.”

During the clashes that erupted in the Gaza Strip in June between the rival militias of Hamas and Fatah, the rattle of gunfire and explosion of rocket-propelled grenades could be heard clearly in Sderot. While the conflict raged, only a handful of Qassams were launched at the town, but once it became clear that the tough Hamas fighters had triumphed, residents hunkered down in anticipation of a renewed blitz.

“These days, rockets are really the only weapon the Palestinians have to strike at Israel,” says Noam Bedein: the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza two years ago removed soft targets in the Jewish settlements there, and improved security measures have sharply reduced suicide bombings inside Israel. Adding to the threat posed by the Qassam-3, militants in Gaza have fired at least one Katyusha 122mm rocket in the direction of Sderot (it fell short due to a faulty launch). These Russian-made battlefield weapons pack a much bigger explosive punch than the Qassams and have a considerably longer range: Israeli intelligence services believe Katyushas have been smuggled into Gaza from Egypt, though not yet in any great number.

Since seizing control of Gaza, Hamas has held back from resuming attacks on Sderot, but the Qassams are still falling regularly: responsibility for recent strikes has been claimed by other militant factions, including Islamic Jihad. Military sources in Jerusalem claim Hamas has “licensed” such groups to continue the bombardment because its leaders fear that with the Palestinian Authority – nominally Israel’s partner in peace negotiations – now ousted, they will become prime targets for even more ferocious retaliation.

Meanwhile, the rest of Israel appears to be waking up to Sderot’s plight: around 30,000 people turned up for a solidarity concert in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, organised by the lead singer of Teapacks, one of Israel’s best-known pop groups, who comes from the town. Kobi Oz told the crowd his sister had complained to him that Sderot felt “abandoned” by the rest of the country. Unusually, the mayor shunned the limelight: an Israeli TV channel had just revealed that police were investigating Moyal’s handling of large sums of public money earmarked for improving the protection of buildings against Qassams.

Most welcome of all, a bill has been introduced in the Knesset (parliament) that will designate Sderot as a “frontline community”, enjoying the same status as the northern towns bombarded by Hezbollah’s Katyushas. Residents would be eligible for an aid package that includes hefty reductions in income and property taxes, financial assistance for improving home protection, free daycare services for children, and improved educational facilities.

Eighty people from Sderot were crammed into the Knesset’s public gallery as the bill sailed through its first reading with a handsome cross-party majority. When the result was announced, they leapt to their feet, clapping and cheering.

The Israeli town of Sderot lies less than a mile from the Gaza Strip. Since the beginning of the intifada seven years ago, it has borne the brunt of some 2,500 Kassam rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian terrorists. Only about a dozen of these Kassams have proved lethal, though earlier this month brothers Osher and Rami Twito were seriously injured by one as they walked down a Sderot street on a Saturday evening. Eight-year-old Osher lost a leg.

It is no stretch to say that life in Sderot has become unendurable. Palestinians and their chorus of supporters -- including the 118 countries of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, much of Europe, and the panoply of international aid organizations from the World Bank to the United Nations -- typically reply that life in the Gaza Strip is also unendurable, and that Palestinian casualties greatly exceed Israeli ones. But this argument is fatuous: Conditions in Gaza, in so far as they are shaped by Israel, are a function of conditions in Sderot. No Palestinian Kassams (or other forms of terrorism), no Israeli "siege."

The more vexing question, both morally and strategically, is what Israel ought to do about Gaza. The standard answer is that Israel's response to the Kassams ought to be "proportionate." What does that mean? Does the "proportion" apply to the intention of those firing the Kassams -- to wit, indiscriminate terror against civilian populations? In that case, a "proportionate" Israeli response would involve, perhaps, firing 2,500 artillery shells at random against civilian targets in Gaza. Or should proportion apply to the effects of the Kassams -- an exquisitely calibrated, eye-for-eye operation involving the killing of a dozen Palestinians and the deliberate maiming or traumatizing of several hundred more?

Surely this isn't what advocates of proportion have in mind. What they really mean is that Israel ought to respond with moderation. But the criteria for moderation are subjective. Should Israel pick off Hamas leaders who are ordering the rocket attacks? The European Parliament last week passed a resolution denouncing the practice of targeted assassinations. Should Israel adopt purely economic measures to punish Hamas for the Kassams? The same resolution denounced what it called Israel's "collective punishment" of Palestinians. Should Israel seek to dismantle the Kassams through limited military incursions? This, too, has the unpardonable effect of resulting in too many Palestinian casualties, which are said to be "disproportionate" to the number of Israelis injured by the Kassams.

By these lights, Israel's presumptive right to self-defense has no practical application as far as Gaza is concerned. Instead, Israel is counseled to allow goods to flow freely into the Strip, and to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas.

But here another set of considerations intrudes. Hamas was elected democratically and by overwhelming margins in Gaza. It has never once honored a cease-fire with Israel. Following Israel's withdrawal of its soldiers and settlements from the Strip in 2005 there was a six-fold increase in the number of Kassam strikes on Israel.

Hamas has also made no effort to rewrite its 1988 charter, which calls for Israel's destruction. The charter is explicitly anti-Semitic: "The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!" (Article Seven) "In order to face the usurpation of Palestine by the Jews, we have no escape from raising the banner of Jihad." (Article 15) And so on.

It would seem perverse for Israeli taxpayers, including residents of Sderot, to feed the mouth that bites them. It would seem equally perverse for Israel merely to bide its time for an especially unlucky day -- a Kassam hitting a busload of schoolchildren, for instance -- before striking hard at Gaza. But unless Israel is willing to accept the military, political and diplomatic burdens of occupying all or parts of Gaza indefinitely, the effects of a major military incursion could be relatively short-lived. Israel suffered many more casualties before it withdrew from the Strip than it has since.

Perhaps the answer is to wait for a technological fix and, in the meantime, hope for the best. Israel is at work on a missile-defense program called "Iron Dome" that may be effective against Kassams, though the system won't be in place for at least two years. It could also purchase land-based models of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System, used by the U.S. to defend the Green Zone in Baghdad.

But technology addresses neither the Islamic fanaticism that animates Hamas nor the moral torpor of Western policy makers and commentators who, on balance, find more to blame in Israel's behavior than in Hamas's. Nor, too, would an Iron Dome or the Phalanx absolve the Israeli government from the necessity of punishing those who seek its destruction. Prudence is an important consideration of statesmanship, but self-respect is vital. And no self-respecting nation can allow the situation in Sderot to continue much longer, a point it is in every civilized country's interest to understand.

On March 9, 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, N.M., killing 18 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson ordered Gen. John J. Pershing and 10,000 soldiers into Mexico for nearly a year to hunt Villa down, in what was explicitly called a "punitive expedition." Pershing never found Villa, making the effort something of a failure. Then again, Villa's raid would be the last significant foreign attack on continental U.S. soil for 85 years, six months and two days.

The NIE Fantasy
The intelligence community failed to anticipate the Cuban Missile Crisis.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, December 11, 2007

"The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it."

Twenty-five days after this NIE was published, a U-2 spy plane photographed a Soviet ballistic missile site in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. It's possible the latest NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program will not prove as misjudged or as damaging as the 1962 estimate. But don't bet on it.

At the heart of last week's NIE is the "high confidence" judgment that Tehran "halted its nuclear weapons program" in the fall of 2003, "primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work." Prior to that, however, the NIE states, also with "high confidence," that "Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons." Left to a footnote is the explanation that "by 'nuclear weapons program' we mean Iran's nuclear weapon design and weaponization work. . . . we do not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."

In August 2002, an Iranian opposition group revealed that Iran had an undeclared uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and an undeclared heavy water facility at Arak--both previously unknown to the pros of the U.S. intelligence community. Since then, the administration has labored to persuade the international community that all these facilities have no conceivable purpose other than a military one. Those efforts paid off in three successive U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding Iran suspend enrichment because it was "concerned by the proliferation risks" it posed.

Along comes the NIE to instantly undo four years of diplomacy, using a semantic sleight-of-hand to suggest some kind of distinction can be drawn between Iran's bid to master the nuclear fuel cycle and its efforts to build nuclear weapons. How credible is this distinction?

In "Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy" (1996), MIT's Owen Cote notes that "The recipe [for designing a weapon] is very simple. . . . Nor are the ingredients, other than plutonium or HEU [highly enriched uranium], hard to obtain. For a gun weapon, the gun barrel could be ordered from any machine shop, as could a tungsten tamper machined to any specifications the customer desired. The high-explosive charge for firing the bullet could also be fashioned by anyone with access to and some experience handling TNT, or other conventional, chemical explosives" (my emphasis).

In other words, Iran didn't abandon its nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, it went public with it. It's certainly plausible Tehran may have suspended one aspect of the program--the aspect that is the least technically challenging and that, if exposed, would offer smoking-gun proof of ill intent. Then again, why does the NIE have next to nothing to say about Iran's efforts to produce plutonium at the Arak facility, which is of the same weapons-producing type as Israel's Dimona and North Korea's Yongbyon reactors? And why the silence on Iran's ongoing and acknowledged testing of ballistic missiles of ever-longer range, the development of which only makes sense as a vehicle to deliver a weapon of mass destruction?

Equally disingenuous is the NIE's assessment that Iran's purported decision to halt its weapons program is an indication that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach"--an interesting statement, given that Iran's quest for "peaceful" nuclear energy makes no economic sense. But the NIE's real purpose becomes clear in the next sentence, when it states that Iran's behavior "suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige and goals for regional influence in other ways, might--if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible--prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program."

This is a policy prescription, not an intelligence assessment. Nonetheless, it is worth recalling that if Iran did have an active weaponization program prior to 2003, as the NIE claims, it means that former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami was lying when he said that "weapons of mass destruction have never been our objective." Mr. Khatami is just the kind of "moderate" that advocates of engagement with Iran see as a credible negotiating partner. If he's not to be trusted, is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Then again, when it comes to the issue of trust, it isn't just Mr. Ahmadinejad we need to worry about. It has been widely pointed out that the conclusions of this NIE flatly contradict those of a 2005 NIE on the same subject, calling the entire process into question. Less discussed is why the administration chose to release a shoddy document that does maximum political damage to it and to key U.S. allies, particularly France, the U.K. and Israel.

The likely answer is that the administration calculated that any effort by them to suppress or tweak the NIE would surely leak, leading to accusations of "politicizing intelligence." But that only means that we now have an "intelligence community" that acts as an authority unto itself, and cannot be trusted to obey its political masters, much less keep a secret. The administration's tacit acquiescence in this state of affairs may prove even more damaging than its wishful thinking on Iran.

For years it has been a staple of fever swamp politics to believe the U.S. government is in the grip of shadowy powers using "intelligence" as a tool of control. With the publication of this NIE, that is no longer a fantasy.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

The Annapolis Fiasco
Condoleezza Rice's pointless Middle East conference.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Henry Kissinger once observed that "when enough prestige has been invested in a policy it is easier to see it fail than abandon it." At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., next week, the current secretary of state will illustrate her predecessor's point.

"Annapolis," as it is spoken of in diplomatic circles, was conceived earlier this year by the Bush administration as a landmark conference that would revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and lead to a final settlement by January 2009. It was to be modeled on the Madrid conference of 1991, which brought Israeli leaders face-to-face with their Arab counterparts and, as it seemed at the time, created a new paradigm in the affairs of the Middle East. Back then, the idea was that the Iron Wall between the Jewish state and its neighbors could be brought down just as the Berlin Wall had. Today, the operative theory is that Israel's neighbors, fearful of Iran's growing regional clout, have a newfound interest in putting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to rest.

Nice theory--if only the locals would get with the concept. The Egyptians are openly skeptical about the conference, which they say lacks "an endgame." The Saudis, supposedly among the beleaguered and newly pliable Sunni powers, can hardly be bothered with Annapolis; even now it's unclear whether their foreign minister will attend. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has told the Saudis he would rather resign than attend a conference that achieves nothing. He fears Palestinians would "turn to Hamas after they see that Annapolis did not give them anything," according to an unnamed Palestinian official quoted in the Jerusalem Post.

Then there are the Israelis, who have even better reasons than the Sunnis to fear Iran. Yossi Beilin, architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords and a political dove, predicts not only that Annapolis will fail, but that its failure will "weaken the Palestinian camp, strengthen Hamas and cause violence." His political opposite, Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, calls Annapolis "dangerous" and warns that Israel risks giving away everything for nothing in return. Few Israelis take seriously the view that the creation of a Palestinian state offers a solution to their concerns about Iran. On the contrary, they fear that such a state would become yet another finger of the Islamic Revolution, just as Hezbollahstan is to their north in Lebanon, and Hamastan is to their south in Gaza.

No wonder, then, that as skepticism about Annapolis grows its perceived significance shrinks. What was originally billed as a conference is now being described by the State Department as a "meeting." What was originally envisaged as a three-day event has become a one-day event. There is, as of this writing, no firm list of participants. And there are whispers the date of the meeting may be pushed back, perhaps to December.

As for the agenda, there isn't one. Substantive discussions have been ruled out. There was some hope that Israelis and Palestinians would agree to a joint "declaration of principles," but they could not come up with a common text. Now there's talk of issuing separate declarations, or doing without declarations altogether.

Among the principles sharply in dispute is whether Israel is a Jewish state. "We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state," says Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, adding that "there is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined." Counters Mr. Olmert: "We won't have an argument with anyone in the world over the fact that Israel is a state of the Jewish people. Whoever does not accept this cannot hold any negotiations with me."

One would have thought the question of Israel's Jewishness was settled 60 years ago by a U.N. partition plan that speaks of a "Jewish state" some 30 times. (One would have thought, too, that Mr. Erekat would be mindful of his government's membership in the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference.) But the question hasn't been settled because Palestinians will not concede the "right" of their "refugees"--currently numbering in the millions--to return to their ancestral homes and farms in present-day Israel.

Mr. Olmert's governing coalition depends on two parties--the ultraorthodox Shas and ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu--which are opposed to any substantive concessions. The prime minister faces potential criminal indictments in multiple probes connected to his previous tenure as minister of trade and industry. A forthcoming official inquiry on last year's war in Lebanon will reportedly hold him accountable for the deaths of 33 soldiers. Ariel Sharon is still in a coma, but it's his successor who's really on life support.

Why, then, hold a conference at all? The short answer is that Condoleezza Rice demands one, and she has spent countless hours over eight mostly fruitless trips to the region this year trying to arrange it. But this hardly addresses the deeper mystery of why this administration has gotten itself caught in the Venus flytrap of the Arab-Israeli conflict, after vowing not to do so, and why it has done so with a degree of ineptitude that recalls the dimmer moments of the Carter administration. Maybe it's a matter of bureaucratic inertia. Or maybe it's about being seen to try. Or maybe it's the kind of fourth-quarter, fourth down Hail Mary pass that appeals to a secretary of state with a mania for football and a thin record of accomplishment. Then again, maybe it doesn't really matter.

But look on the bright side: Annapolis may yet serve us well as an object lesson in how diplomacy--the competent kind--just isn't done.

Columbia's Conceit
Exactly what would it have accomplished to "engage in a debate" with Hitler?

BY BRET STEPHENS
Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, September 25, 2007

On Saturday John Coatsworth, acting dean of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, made the remark that "if Hitler were in the United States and . . . if he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him." This was by way of defending the university's decision to host a speech yesterday by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

An old rule of thumb in debate tournaments is that the first one to say "Hitler" loses. But say what you will about Mr. Coatsworth's comment, it is, at bottom, a philosophical claim: about the purposes of education; about the uses of dialogue; about the obligations of academia; about the boundaries (or absence of boundaries) of modern liberalism and about its conceits. So rather than dismiss the claim out of hand, let's address it in the same philosophical spirit in which it was offered.

A few preliminaries: When Mr. Coatsworth postulated Hitler's visit, he specified the year 1939, just prior to Germany's invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II. This, then, is not yet the Hitler of Auschwitz, though it is the Hitler of Dachau, the Nuremberg Laws, Guernica and Kristallnacht. Mr. Coatsworth takes the optimistic view that "an appearance by Hitler at Columbia could have led him to appreciate what a great power the U.S. had already become," and thus, presumably, kept America from war.

Less clear is whether Mr. Coatsworth issued his invitation in the name of Columbia's current faculty or on behalf the faculty of the 1930s or '40s. We'll assume the answer is the current faculty, since it's unlikely that a committee led by Jacques Barzun, Mark van Doren, Lionel Trilling or other Columbia luminaries of the day would have had much use for "discussion" with the Führer (though it seems Columbia hosted a speech by Hans Luther, Hitler's U.S. ambassador, in 1933).

What, then, would be the purpose of such an invitation? Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, offered a clue in a statement issued last week: "Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas--to understand the world as it is and as it might be," he said. "Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through dialogue and reason."

That's an interesting thought, coming from a man who won't countenance an ROTC program on campus. But leave that aside. What's more important is the question of how Columbia defines the set of ideas it believes are worth "confronting," whether its confidence in "dialogue and reason" is well placed and, finally, whether confronting ideas is a sufficient condition for understanding the world.

In a March 1952 essay in Commentary magazine on "George Orwell and the Politics of Truth," Trilling observed that "the gist of Orwell's criticism of the liberal intelligentsia was that they refused to understand the conditioned way of life." Orwell, he wrote, really knew what it was like to live under a totalitarian regime--unlike, say, George Bernard Shaw, who had "insisted upon remaining sublimely unaware of the Russian actuality," or H.G. Wells, who had "pooh-poohed the threat of Hitler." By contrast, Orwell "had the simple courage to point out that the pacifists preached their doctrine under condition of the protection of the British navy, and that, against Germany and Russia, Gandhi's passive resistance would have been to no avail."

Trilling took the point a step further, assailing the intelligentsia's habit of treating politics as a "nightmare abstraction" and "pointing to the fearfulness of the nightmare as evidence of their sense of reality." To put this in the context of Mr. Coatsworth's hypothetical, Trilling might have said that in hosting and perhaps debating Hitler, Columbia's faculty and students would not have been "confronting" him, much as they might have gulled themselves into believing they were. Hitler at Columbia would merely have been a man at a podium, offering his "ideas" on this or that, and not the master of a huge terror apparatus bearing down on you. To suggest that such an event amounts to a confrontation, or offers a perspective on reality, is a bit like suggesting that one "confronts" a wild animal by staring at it through its cage at a zoo.

There is also the question of just what ideas would be presented by Hitler at Mr. Coatsworth's hypothetical conference, and whether they would be an accurate reflection of his beliefs and intentions. In his 1933 speech, Ambassador Luther made the case for Hitler's "peaceful intentions" in Europe, according to historian Rafael Medoff. Millions of Europeans believed this right up to September 1939, just as millions of Americans did right up to December 1941.

Let's assume, however, that Hitler had used the occasion of his speech not just to dissimulate but to really air his mind, to give vent not just to Germany's historical grievances but to his own apocalyptic ambitions. In "Terror and Liberalism" (2003), Columbia alumnus Paul Berman observes the way in which prewar French socialists--keenly aware and totally opposed to Hitler's platform--nonetheless took the view that Germany had to be accommodated and that the real threat to peace came from their own "warmongers and arms manufacturers." This notion, Mr. Berman writes, rested in turn on a philosophical belief that "even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

So there is Adolf Hitler on our imagined stage, ranting about the soon-to-be-fulfilled destiny of the Aryan race. And his audience of outstanding Columbia men are mostly appalled, as they should be. But they are also engrossed, and curious, and if it occurs to some of them that the man should be arrested on the spot they don't say it. Nor do they ask, "How will we come to terms with his world?" Instead, they wonder how to make him see "reason," as reasonable people do.

In just a few years, some of these men will be rushing a beach at Normandy or caught in a firefight in the Ardennes. And the fact that their ideas were finer and better than Hitler's will have done nothing to keep them and millions of their countrymen from harm, and nothing to get them out of its way.

Kernel of Evil: The U.S. is trapped by the weird logic of arming its false friends.
August 7, 2007 Wall Street Journal

It's hard to fault the logic of the sale, announced last week, of $20 billion in U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia, with trinkets going to the smaller Gulf states. The wisdom of the deal is another matter.

The Wahhabi kingdom is not, as of yet, an outlaw state: It can buy large quantities of sophisticated weapons on the international arms market from whomever it chooses. If the U.S. does not sell the Saudis upgraded versions of Boeing's F-15 Eagle, the Europeans can sell additional numbers of EADS's Eurofighter Typhoon (the Saudis already have 72 of these wonderjets on order). If the U.S. doesn't sell the Saudis laser-guided "JDAM" bombs, again courtesy of Boeing, they can buy the PR-632, an equivalent munition produced by Ukraine.

There may even be some non-mercenary advantages in tying the Saudi military to ours. When Washington cut its longstanding military-to-military ties with Islamabad in October 1990, after the U.S. "decertified" Pakistan as a non-nuclear state, the Pakistani military didn't simply mend its ways. Instead, what was once the most pro-Western institution in the country -- thanks to generations of Pakistani officers trained at Sandhurst and the U.S. Army War College -- came increasingly under the sway of Islamists. No need to repeat that experience with Riyadh. Then, too, as long as the Saudis operate U.S. military equipment, they remain dependent on us for training, maintenance and upgrades. The Iranian regime learned that lesson the hard way when they inherited the Shah's F-4s, F-14s and C-130s, but lost access to the planes' spare parts.

Yet the wisdom of arming the Saudis hinges in no small part on Riyadh remaining for the next few decades what it has been for the past six: a nominal ally of the U.S. It hinges, too, on the likelihood that the deal will advance American interests, and not just those of the Boeing Corporation, much as the two are sometimes confused. In both cases there is considerable room for doubt.

Consider the following dates: 1924, 1926, 1933, 1935. These are the birth years, respectively, of King Abdullah, current ruler of Saudi Arabia; Prince Sultan, his designated successor; and Princes Nayef and Salman, the two men next in line. The younger generation of contenders has problems of its own: Prince Bandar, 58, the urbane former ambassador to the U.S., is reportedly the son of a slave girl, which makes him ineligible; Prince Saud al-Faisal, 67, the current foreign minister, is said to be in poor health. And while the Saudis last year amended their Basic Law to regularize the rules of succession, a lot can go wrong when a throne is in play among a dozen or more billionaire princes, each with his own power base.

Even assuming the Saudis can manage an orderly succession, there are larger questions about where the kingdom is headed. In 2003, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that al Qaeda had "tried to recruit Saudi Arabian Air Force pilots to carry out a suicide attack in Israel . . . using either F-15 jets or civilian aircraft." Israel also has serious concerns about the extent of al Qaeda's penetration of Saudi Arabia's National Guard.

A year ago, the Treasury Department named the director and two branches of the Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization "for facilitating fundraising for al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups." The chairman of the IIRO is Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti and a member of the cabinet; Prince Sultan has also been a major donor. "Pouring weapons on this scale into a kingdom with an aging leadership, and which is still the fountainhead of Sunni extremism, does not seem prudent," argues Dore Gold, author of "Hatred's Kingdom."

But whatever direction Saudi Arabia takes in the future, there's also the question of what the U.S. gets from the arms sale. In an interview Sunday with Fox News' Chris Wallace, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted that "the Saudi government announced that it's going to put an embassy in Baghdad, something that we have hoped they would do for quite some time." The State Department has also tried to entice Saudi Arabia to attend a regional peace conference with Israel later this year.

In fact, the Saudis have not announced their intention to put an embassy in Baghdad, merely their willingness to discuss it with an Iraqi government they have demonized at every turn. They remain similarly equivocal about the conference. It's an old Saudi ploy. In November 1981, Abdullah, then the kingdom's deputy prime minister, mooted a "plan" that promised recognition of Israel at a time when he was seeking to buy AWACs radar planes from the Reagan administration. The sale was approved; the plan disappeared.

Now Ms. Rice isn't even getting phony Saudi peace offers in exchange for American weapons. Nor is she getting much relief on the terrorism front. The Bush administration rightfully complains about the role Syria plays as a transit point for jihadists. Yet according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, 45% of all suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudis; collectively, they account for some 2,000 deaths in the past six months. Would it be too much for the U.S. to ask the Saudis to screen young men leaving the country with one-way tickets to Damascus? So far, the Saudi government has refused. King Abdullah has also declared the U.S. presence in Iraq "illegal."

Equally misguided is the administration's argument that arming the Saudis is necessary to counterbalance the growing power of Iran. If containment is what the U.S. wants, Saudi F-15s will not be of much use against an Iranian bomb. But those fighters might ultimately find their use against Iraq's Shiite-led democratic government, whose air force consists mainly of junkyard Warsaw Pact equipment. Why we have neglected Iraq's justified military needs while lavishing top-of-the-line equipment on the Saudis is a mystery future historians will have to ponder.

Back in 2002, a Rand Corporation analyst named Laurent Murawiec gave a briefing to the Pentagon's advisory Defense Policy Board, in which he described Saudi Arabia as the "kernel of evil... active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader." Every word of that is true. Yet the administration walked a mile to distance itself from his remarks and Mr. Murawiec lost his job. Too bad. Had his advice been heeded then, we might not be trapped today by the weird logic of arming our false friends.

Arabs must take a long, self-critical look in the mirror

There was a time centuries ago in Arab countries when intellectual introspection was common and the culture produced searching, self-critical scholarship in various arenas.

That time is gone. Today, brave and questioning souls like Irshad Manji, who calls for an Islamic Reformation, receive death threats. Without the ability to look inward, Arab blame for problems is projected outward - meaning, at Israel and the U.S. That is very dangerous for the world.

As an Arab-American, recent events have reminded me in very stark terms why introspection needs to return to the Arab world in a big way, as quickly as possible, as a prerequisite for anything resembling peace, in the Middle East or elsewhere, to be a real possibility.

First, look at what Fatah just attempted to do regarding American victims of Palestinian terrorism. Because of the 1990 Anti-Terrorism Act, numerous lawsuits have been brought against Fatah and other Palestinian terrorist groups that have injured or killed Americans while in Israel. Recently, the State Department decided it might intervene in some of these judgments, which had found in favor of the defendants and held Fatah and other Palestinian groups liable for millions of dollars in damages, because Fatah had complained that these judgments would bankrupt them and that this in turn would hurt the peace process.

Yes, you heard right. Fatah complained that they were being held financially liable for injuring and killing Americans in Israel, acts for which they had previously claimed responsibility!

And our own State Department wanted to support them in this complaint, supposedly in the interest of peace, by having these judgments nullified. Joseph Heller, the author of "Catch 22," couldn't have come up with a more surreal scenario.

Fortunately, advocates like the Endowment for Middle East Truth, made noise, and as a result of that pressure, the State Department has backed down for now.

But where is the proper sense of shame that might stop a group like Fatah from lodging such a complaint to begin with?

The only explanation is that by having such a pathological, externally focused sense of blame, aimed exclusively at Americans and Jews, no such sense of reasoning or decency applies.

The recent massacre of the Yeshiva students in Jerusalem by a Palestinian Muslim fits the same pattern. Gaza celebrated - yes, celebrated - the cold-blooded and ethnically motivated murders of these religious students, most of whom were teenagers.

Why are we, as Arabs and Arab-Americans, not lining the streets in Ramallah and all the way to New York to decry this sort of barbarism?

Let me say unequivocally that I am ashamed. And I am angry. Nothing, nothing in the world justifies these sorts of actions. Tell me, when have you ever heard of Israelis celebrating the killing of Palestinians?

Yes, there are a few glimmers of progress. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has issued a call for interfaith dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims. And The New York Times actually called Hamas out on its murderous, anti-Semitic rhetoric.

The centuries-old downward spiral of tyranny, poverty, fanaticism and finger-pointing is the rule, not the exception in most Arab countries.

At this point in Arab history, we must finally renounce these fatally flawed tendencies to blame everyone but ourselves. As Arab-Americans, we must lead the way, away from groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations - which consistently claims big, bad America is the oppressor and poor Arabs are almost always the hapless victims.

Let us begin anew the path toward our own glorious Renaissance abandoned long ago, and pursue the higher road that will be ours when we finally look more deeply and critically at ourselves.

'I am with Israel': One Arab-American's salute
Despite all the spit, kicks & insults, the Jews would rather build than destroy
EMILIO KARIM DABUL

Wednesday, September 19th 2007, 4:00 AM
New York Daily News

One of the greatest Arab poets of the 20th century was a Syrian named Nizar Qabbani. He was, in his own way, the Pablo Neruda of the Middle East. His love poems in particular are on a par with anything Don Pablo wrote.

So, it was with great disappointment that I came across one of Qabbani's poems written in the late 1990s, entitled, "I Am With Terrorism." I hoped the title would prove ironic. It didn't. Not even close. In fact, it is one of themost naked, awful pieces of anti-Israel, anti-U.S. drivel I've ever read.

Witness this rhetorical device in which he is able to insult two peoples with one poetic stone:

"I am with terrorism as long as this new world order is shared between America and Israel half-half"

And that is actually one of the more moderate sections of the poem. As an Arab-American, I came away from reading it with a real sense of despair. If one of the great voices of Middle East poetry can do nothing more than recycle the Arabs-as-victims stance, justified in horrendous acts of violence against their "oppressors," then what hope is there ever that Arabs and Israelis will ever know true peace?

Having just passed the sixth anniversary of 9/11 - and in the midst of a new conversation about the so-called "Israel Lobby" that allegedly dominates U.S. foreign policy - I want to offer an antidote to that toxic verse and the other vitriol that has poisoned too much Arab thought

Israel, with all its imperfections, remains the beacon of light for the Middle East. For that reason, I wish to salute her, not only as one of America's greatest allies in the war on terror, but as one of the true miracle countries of this time or any other.

With no apologies to Qabbani, I give you my twist on his verse:

"I am with Israel
because a people so long denied bread and freedom,
crushed under the wheels of pharaohs, emperors, czars and Führers,
has done more than any other people to free the world from itself.

What single people in history have contributed more to faith, science, philosophy and the arts?
And done so against the greatest odds, with a sword at their throats...

I am with Israel
because my people, so long in the desert,
have not had the courage to acknowledge the great teachers among them,
but instead have turned on them,
blamed them for all evil and shed their blood...

What other people could crawl away from the wreckage of the Holocaust
and, instead of seeking revenge, build the miracle called Israel?
Why, as Wufa Sultan has asked, have there been no Jewish homicide bombers?
Perhaps it is because despite all the spit, kicks and insults they've faced,
along with the constant threat of extinction,
the Jews would rather build than destroy.

I am with Israel
because I am with life,
and because beyond its verdant desert,
Israel offers the knowledge that those most desirous of peace and freedom
are a people who have so long been denied it,
and who with all they know of the world,
look still toward Jerusalem and reach for their enemy's hand."

Dabul, an editor with the American Congress for Truth, is author of "Deadline," a novel about terrorism.

The Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), which educates the American public and Washington policy makers about Israel’s strategic importance to the United States, honored “Speakers of the Truth” on June 20th on Capitol Hill. Those honored included, in the words of EMET founder and President Sarah Stern, “five uniquely courageous Arab-Americans who have risked their lives to tell the truth about radical Islam.” Also honored were two pro-Israel members of Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehitnen, (R. Fl) and Eliot Engel, (D. NY), and the award winning, counterterrorism investigative journalist, Steven Emerson. Frank Gaffney, founder and President of the Center for Security Policy, emceed the awards ceremony.

-Dr. Zhudi Jasser (Director of American Islamic Forum for Democracy; www.aifdemocracy.org)

-Dr. Ali Alyami (President of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia; www.cdhr.info)

As one of those honored, I began to reflect on my Syrian Muslim grandparents and what a long road it has been from their village outside Damascus to this extraordinary night on Capitol Hill. Here was Sarah Stern, an Orthodox Jew, honoring Arab-Americans for speaking out against radical Islamic terrorism. And here were Arab-Americans such as Nonie Darwish passionately condemning Sharia law, and Brigitte Gabriel, of Lebanese Christian background, openly praising Israel’s democracy and overall humanity. Dr. Jasser identified himself as an American first and a Muslim second, and thanked all Americans for the freedom to practice his religion in the way he chooses. Dr. Alyami called Saudi Arabia “the real enemy” and called on Americans to support reform of that country’s draconian laws, particularly calling for rights for women.

By the time it came my time to speak, I was moved beyond words. I was raised in an atmosphere in which I had been taught that the Arab world had two main enemies: Israel and America. And various family members taught me that Jews in particular were the most cunning of villains. As I got old enough to think for myself and question those sorts of views, I met a lot of very stiff resistance from the Old (and in some cases Young) Guard.

And then, of course, I did the unspeakable when years later I met, fell in love with, and married a Jewish-American woman. We have a daughter who is being raised Jewish. Yes, the sound you’re hearing is that of my grandparents rolling in their graves. That is their problem. Everything must change, including traditions as old as Arab anti-Semitism.

Still, if someone had told me when I was a child that my partner and greatest friend would be Jewish, that I would celebrate Passover with her family, as well as various other Jewish traditions, I would have told them they were crazy.&

By ARIEL COHEN

Close to the edge

Feeling abandoned by their countrymen, the residents of one Israeli town have endured over 2,000 rocket attacks.

Kernel of Evil: The U.S. is trapped by the weird logic of arming its false friends.
August 7, 2007 Wall Street Journal

Arabs must take a long, self-critical look in the mirror

By ARIEL COHEN

Close to the edge

Feeling abandoned by their countrymen, the residents of one Israeli town have endured over 2,000 rocket attacks.

Kernel of Evil: The U.S. is trapped by the weird logic of arming its false friends. August 7, 2007 Wall Street Journal

Arabs must take a long, self-critical look in the mirror

Kernel of Evil: The U.S. is trapped by the weird logic of arming its false friends.
August 7, 2007 Wall Street Journal