President Obama repeatedly insists that American foreign policy be conducted with modesty and humility. Above all, there will be no more "dictating" to other countries. We should "forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions," he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth "start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating."

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone -- Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: "a stop to settlements -- not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions."

What's the issue? No "natural growth" means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them -- not even within the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns -- even before negotiations.

To what end? Over the past decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements -- and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself.

That was envisioned in the Clinton plan in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001. After all, why expel people from their homes and turn their towns to rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians?

This idea is not only logical, not only accepted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the past decade, but was agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding exchanged between Israel and the United States in 2004 -- and subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all parties to the conflict honor previous obligations. And who now expects Israel to accept new American assurances in return for concrete and irreversible Israeli concessions, when he himself has just cynically discarded past American assurances.

The entire "natural growth" issue is a concoction. Is the peace process moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren? It is perverse to make this the center point of the peace process at a time when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert's peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode -- waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave -- before he'll do anything to advance peace.

In his much-heralded "Muslim world" address in Cairo yesterday, Obama declared that the Palestinian people's "situation" is "intolerable." Indeed it is, the result of 60 years of Palestinian leadership that gave its people corruption, tyranny, religious intolerance and forced militarization; leadership that for three generations rejected every offer of independence and dignity, choosing destitution and despair rather than accept any settlement not accompanied by the extinction of Israel.

That's why Haj Amin al-Husseini chose war rather than a two-state solution in 1947. Why Yasser Arafat turned down a Palestinian state in 2000. And why Abbas rejected Olmert's even more generous December 2008 offer.

In the 16 years since the Oslo accords turned the West Bank and Gaza over to the Palestinians, their leaders built no roads, no courthouses, no hospitals, none of the fundamental state institutions that would relieve their people's suffering. Instead they poured everything into an infrastructure of war and terror, all the while depositing billions (from gullible Western donors) into their Swiss bank accounts.

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over "natural growth" may curry favor with the Muslim "street." But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

When President Obama met with Prime Minister Netanyahu a couple of weeks ago, he clearly stated that he expected Israel to stop all building activities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. Yet when PA Chairman Abbas was hosted at the White House last week, he was not asked to make any move in order to improve the chances of advancing the cause of peace. To be accurate, Obama did mention something about the anti-Semitic incitement in PA schools and mosques. But, instead of demanding the end of such incitement, Obama "praised" Abbas for his "efforts" to end it –and since Abbas is not making any "efforts" to end incitement, the message was clear: the PA is not expected to make any change or effort. Only Israel is.

Obama's "demand" that Israel ends all building activities, including for "natural growth," goes to show how valuable was the letter issued by President Bush to Prime Minster Sharon on 14 April 2004. The letter stated, inter alia: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities." Sharon claimed at the time that this letter meant the United States recognized Israel's right to keep the large settlement blocs. To put it mildly, it seems that Obama does not feel committed by this letter.

By putting the onus exclusively on Israel, the Obama Administration is making a mistake. If Obama wants the "two-state solution" to work, then both sides have to give up on something. The major obstacle to the "two-state solution" is not Israel's building activities. Israel removed all its settlements from Gaza in 2005, and look what a successful state the Palestinians built there. Nor was there any Israel settlement in the disputed territories before 1967. What were the Palestinians waiting for to build a state then? The major obstacle to the two-state solution it that the Palestinians reject it implicitly by continuing to insist on the so-called "right of return." The fact that Obama is letting the Palestinians get away with this perfidy puts to test his fairness or, worse, his understanding of the problem.

So here is a short tip for him on the Palestinian "refugee problem." For a start, there would not have been a single refugee had the Arabs not rejected the 1947 partition plan, and had they not launched a war of aggression against Israel. Many of the Arabs of British Palestine had immigrated there during the first decades of the twentieth century because of the economic opportunities created by the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community of British Palestine), and their "historical" rights had hardly been ignored by the partition plan. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinians' leader at the time, called upon his "Muslim brothers" to "murder the Jews," and Azzam Pasha, who was Secretary of the Arab League in 1948, declared that the war against the emerging Jewish state was to be "a war of extermination."

The Arab aggression created a double refugee problem. About 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries, while about 600,000 Arabs fled the British Mandate. Mahmoud Abbas declared in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on June 5, 2003, that the Arab armies "forced [the Palestinian Arabs] to emigrate and to leave their homeland." Benny Morris admits in his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem that the Arab commanders encouraged the Arabs of Palestine to temporary leave in order to be out of harm's way. During Israel's War of Independence, the Israeli army allowed Arab civilians to flee to Arab-controlled areas, while the Arab armies killed Jewish civilians who tried to escape (the Arab Legion murdered in cold blood the 127 Jews it captured in Gush Etzion).

There is a scandalous double standard in international law on the issue of refugees. There are two types of refugees in the world today: refugees and Palestinian refugees. All refugees in the world, except for Palestinian refugees, are under the responsibility of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Only for the Palestinian refugees is there a special UN agency that was created for them only: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA). This discrimination, however, is not only institutional. Besides the fact that no UN agency was created in 1949 to tackle the fate of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, Palestinian refugees enjoy a special definition of the word "refugee." For UNHCR, a refugee is a person outside the country of his or her nationality as a result of expulsion. UNRWA, however, extends this definition to the refugees' descendants. Which is why the number of refugees worldwide has decreased from about 60 million in 1948 to about 17 million today, while the number of Palestinian "refugees" has increased from about 600,000 in 1948 to over five million today. Moreover, according to UNRWA's definition, any Arab who had lived for at least two years in the British Mandate prior to 1948 can be considered a Palestinian refugee (together with his descendants). Which means that the grandchild of an Egyptian worker who came to British Palestine in 1945 to find work and who left as a result of the war, is today counted as a "Palestinian refugee."

If the UN were to abandon this double-standard, the "Palestinian refugee problem" would be easily solved. Of the 600,000 refugees from 1948, maybe a third are still alive, and most of them are old. Israel would have no problem integrating them. Alternatively, if UNRWA's definition of a refugee was to be applied to the 25 million refugees from the partition of India in 1947, to the 15 million German refugees who fled Eastern Europe in 1945, or to the 1.5 million refugees of the 1922 conflict between Turkey and Greece, then dozens of millions of German "refugees" would have to "return" to Poland, and hundreds of millions of "refugees" would have to re-cross the border between India and Pakistan. Only in the case of the Palestinian refugees are such fanciful ideas even discussed.

While the purpose of UNHCR is to integrate refugees, the purpose of UNRWA is to keep Palestinian refugees in camps. This is not surprising. As former UNRWA Director Ralph Garroway candidly admitted in 1957: “The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the UN and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die.” Gamal Abdel Nasser admitted no less candidly in an interview to Zürcher Woche on September 1st, 1961, that "if the Arabs return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist." PA official Nabil Shaath was quoted in Ha'aretz on 15 July 2003 saying that "the right of return is part of the Road Map. This right includes the return to Palestinian cities inside the Jewish state, such as Haifa." The website mideastweb.org reported on 13 October 2003 that "Hisham Abd-el Razek, who is one of the signatories [of the Geneva Accords], denies that the document conceded the right of return."

The Palestinians also mislead international public opinion when they claim that Palestinian refugees are entitled to "return" to Israel according to UN resolutions. This is untrue. The often-quoted UN General Assembly resolution 194 (from November 1948), like all General Assembly resolutions, is not binding in international law. General Assembly resolutions are mere recommendations. Besides, Resolution 194 states that "the refugees wishing to return to their houses and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so." How would such "refugees" possibly live at peace with their neighbors today, more than sixty years after their parents and grandparents left? As Abba Eban said, "hundreds of thousands of people would be introduced into a state whose existence they oppose and whose destruction they are resolved to seek."

The relevant UN resolution on the refugees is UN Security Council resolution 242 (from November 1967). As opposed to General Assembly resolutions, Security Council resolutions are binding. Resolution 242 calls for "a just settlement of the refugee problem." The word "just" can obviously be interpreted in different ways. But it cannot possibly mean the demographic disappearance of Israel (in fact, it does, as long as the Palestinians are concerned). As for the word "settlement," it certainly does not mean "return." The Palestinian refugees could and should have been integrated a long time ago in their host countries, like the rest of the refugees around the world. Moreover, the word "refugee" in Resolution 242 refers not only to the Arab refugees of the 1948 war, but also to the Jewish refugees. As explained by Arthur Goldberg, who was the US Delegate to the UN in 1967, Resolution 242 "refers both to Arab and Jewish refugees, for about an equal number of each abandoned their homes."

There is also a double-standard regarding the rights of the refugees' descendants. If an Arab can be allowed to return to Jaffa because his grandfather fled in 1948, why can't a Jew be allowed to return to Hebron because his grandfather was murdered there in 1929 during the Mufti's pogrom? Jews have been living in Hebron for three-thousand years, many centuries before the birth of Islam, before the appearance of the Arab nation, and certainly way before the Arabs invaded Hebron.

The Palestinians want to invade Israel with the descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 Arab refugees, but they won't accept a single Jewish refugee into the Palestinian state that they want to establish. Jews have lived peacefully and uninterruptedly in Hebron for generations. The Arab pogrom of 1929 emptied Hebron of its Jews for the first time in History. But the Arabs deny the rights of the Jews whose parents were murdered in 1929 to return to their homes, while they demand that the descendants of the Arab refugees who fled because of the Arab war of aggression in 1948 return to what is Israel today. This is as absurd as it is immoral.

Which also raises the question of minorities in the framework of the "two state solution." Why should there be an Arab minority in the Jewish state and no Jewish minority in the Arab state? There are Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India. About 20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs, but the Arabs want the Palestinian state to be Judenrein. How about if a Jew whose family has been living in Hebron for dozens of generations would rather stay there as a Palestinian citizen? Such as Jew, however, would not have that option. His life would not be safe, and if he would be lucky enough to stay alive, he would be treated as a dhimmi, a second-class citizen, because he is not a Muslim.

Either Obama is not aware of this –which is bad- or he is, but has decided that the Palestinians should continue to get away with their hypocrisy –which is worse. President Obama has yet to deliver his long-awaited speech in Cairo, so he might still enjoy the benefit of the doubt for another couple of days. But his treatment of Israel and the PA in the past two weeks betrays signs of a double-standard that puts to test his reputation for fairness and probity.

As Israeli tanks and soldiers completed their withdrawal from a Guernica-looking Gaza Strip hours before the swearing of Barack Obama and less then three weeks ahead of a general election in Israel, one lesson emerged from this latest round of the unending Arab-Israeli conflict.

The critics of Israel's military intervention claim that it was cruel and disproportionate. But, mostly, so they say, it was unnecessary. For the solution to rocket firing is not retaliation but a "political horizon." According to that theory, the Palestinians fire rockets from Gaza because of their frustration, and Israel (together with the international community) can alleviate this frustration by putting an end to the Gaza blockade and by establishing a Palestinian state more or less along the Clinton parameters. This theory ignores what the Palestinians themselves say. Hamas does not accept the idea of a "two-state solution." Its ultimate goal is the demise of Israel, with Iran's support. As for Fatah's alleged "moderation," the bottom line is that as long as Fatah insists on the "right of return" and fills its media and schoolbooks with anti-Jewish hatred, its adherence to the "two-state solution" will continue to be was its has always been since the Oslo accords: a sham.

It is not that Israel has been ignoring the need to find what pundits call a "political solution." Without getting into the blame game, the fact is that negotiations have been conducted, unsuccessfully, for the past fifteen years.

If the conflict cannot be solved, it has to be managed. But how? The rationale of the disengagement strategy was that, since the conflict is unsolvable and since the status quo is untenable, Israel should at least get the Palestinians off its back. If only. We left Gaza, but Gaza did not leave us. If the price for preventing rocket firing is the yearly reenactment of a "Cast Lead" kind of military operation, one question must be asked. There was not a single rocket fired at us from the south when Israel controlled the Gaza Strip. Yes, the price for this quiet status quo was a military occupation for which both Israeli society and world opinion had no more patience. But how exactly was that occupation less moral then the death and destruction that we had to inflict in order for Hamas to stop firing rockets? Since relinquishing control over Gaza means destroying it every so often in order to protect our citizens, it is not only that Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza generated a more challenging military and strategic threat. It also weakened our moral standing.

Israel, of course, is not going to reoccupy Gaza, and the likely scenario for the coming years is a long term war of attrition with this cursed enclave. This is more bearable and manageable than the similar type of warfare we had with Egypt after the Six Day War, unless the United States is unable to deter and neutralize Iran's regional troublemaking.

One thing is clear, though. Reenacting the "brilliant idea" of the Gaza withdrawal in Judea and Samaria would be suicidal at this point. Israel put an end to massive suicide bombings and shooting attacks by taking control of what was transferred to the PA under the Oslo accords. This is an undisputable fact. The present situation in Judea and Samaria is far from being ideal. It raises the same moral questions that paved the way to Oslo in the first place. But is it more moral to let our citizens be slaughtered by suicide bombers? Since we are in a Catch 22 type of situation anyways, we might as well prevent the ugly and relentless terrorism that prevailed between the Camp David Summit and Operation Defensive Shield.

While we should continue to strive for a political solution, we have to understand that the more the Palestinians feel that we cannot do without such a solution, the less likely they will be to compromise. Managing the conflict, at this point, means making the status quo both bearable and changeable.

Our neighbors need to be convinced that Israel is here to stay in order to consider making peace with us. The "Iron Wall" strategy worked with Egypt. The fact that it does not seem to impress Hamas and Iran (at least until Operation "Cast Lead") is mostly Israel's fault. Unbelievably, The Economist wrote last week that "A new obstacle to peace is the apparent crumbling of Jabotinsky's iron wall" ("The Hundred Years War," January 10th, 2009).

What The Economist is implying is that chances of reaching a "cold peace" type of agreement with the Palestinians depend on the restoration of Israel's deterrence. Coming from a relentless critic, this is a welcome recommendation indeed.

Israel has less than three weeks to choose a leadership that can be trusted to restore its deterrence and thus improve the chances of preventing future wars. Those who cut and run from southern Lebanon and from Gaza cannot be reasonably trusted to fulfill this vital task.

Terrorism expert Steve Emerson says there’s no hope of victory in the war on terrorism until we call it what it really is.

This past Saturday, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece entitled “What They Hate about Mumbai,” focusing specifically on the free market sins of that great city. With contrived evenhandedness, the op-ed managed to blame both Hindus and Muslim extremists—without blaming either party in particular for the murderous attacks.

Without realizing it, the Grey Lady had hit upon a great travel series. In the best spirit of jihad for dummies, why not a year’s worth of op-eds focusing on “Why They Hate____” filled in, mad-libs style, with the U.S., Britain, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Kenya, and the other 74 countries where radical Islam has reared its violent head? With only the moral blindness that the New York Times could capture, each op-ed would portray the attacks in a contrived even-handed way, without blaming, or even naming, the perpetrators of the attacks—Muslim jihadists.

Watching and reading the last 5 days of reports of the Mumbai attacks was an Alice in Wonderland experience. Even after an Islamic terrorist group took credit, TV anchors and reporters assiduously avoided the term Islamic terrorist. They must have consulted with the Thesaurus for the Politically Correct to determine that the word “gunmen” would not offend any jihadist.

The real truth is that there is war against the West and the Jews by Islamic jihadists.

On Wednesday, even though everyone knew by then that the perpetrators were jihadists, CNN constantly referred to the terrorists as “extremists”—with no modifier. Hell, they could have been the Basque ETA or the ultra right wing U.S. militia. Then a CNN anchor asked his guest with totally innocence, “Now why would an extremist group target a Jewish house of worship?” Because, my dear politically correct anchor, it was an Islamist terrorist group.

The most that government officials, in cahoots with mainstream media, could utter were names like Al Qaeda (AQ) or Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT) as potential suspects. Yet even here, the discussions were mindless. One talking head said it could not be AQ since AQ behavior is to have massive simultaneous explosions (as if Al Qaeda follows a pre-programmed script). Another expert said LeT did not have the resources to carry it out, forgetting ever so slightly that all Islamic terrorist groups share resources, recruit from other terrorist groups, train each other, provide each other with equipment and, most importantly of all, want to destroy their “enemies.”

In the United States, after 9/11, a group of American men (mostly converts) pleaded guilty or were found to be guilty of training with LeT and of trying to “wage war” against the United States. Evidence produced in the trial showed that LeT’s website—before being taken down—focused disproportionately on two enemies: Americans and Jews. In 2004, Ismail Royer, an official with the Council on Islamic Relations (CAIR) who had trained with the Taliban, pled guilty to weapons and explosives charges. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In later grand jury testimony, Royer admitted that the cell's primary goal was to fight with the Taliban against United States forces in Afghanistan.

Our politically craven governments, followed in part by the media, have now started to ban the use of the term “Islamic terrorists” or “Islamic militants,” insisting that they simply be called “extremists” or militants. The government’s rationale was a page picked right out of the playbook of western radical Islamic strategy: Portray the use of the term “Islamic terrorist” as “racist” and as allegedly stigmatizing all Muslims.

Last year, the Departments of State and Homeland Security issued an internal memorandum that henceforth no one could use the term “Islamic terrorists” and could only use the generic term “militant” or “extremist.” Even President Bush, who once invoked the term “Islamofacism,” now refuses to use the term Islamic terrorist. In Canada, the author Mark Steyn was the subject of three human rights complaints and subsequent trials for calling radical Muslims terrorists and other such “slurs.” He won all three tribunals.

It is time to stop caving in to the PC crowd. If we refuse to use the term Islamic terrorist, we conveniently take away any onus of responsibility for Islamic groups to halt the murderous ideology they propagate. In fact, in nearly EVERY claim of responsibility, which I studied, for hundreds of violent Islamic attacks which took place since 9/11, the common justification by the Muslim terrorist perpetrator was that there was a “war against Muslims” by the West and the Jews that had to be avenged. The real truth is that there is war against the West and the Jews by Islamic jihadists. And no amount of territorial withdrawal or peace negotiations will assuage them.

But thankfully, there remains a glimmer of hope, and not from the condescending columnists of the New York Times or the State Department know-it-alls, but from courageous Muslim moderates in this country like Zuhdi Jasser or brutally honest Muslim columnists in the Middle East. While the West refuses to utter the term Islamic extremists and as a corollary holds no one responsible, at least one Muslim columnist has the guts to tell the truth of where the responsibility lies.

Aijaz Zaka Syed, a Muslim columnist who wrote a column for Sunday's Khaleej Times Online:

"It’s all very well for us to say Islam has nothing to do with extremism and terrorism. We can go on deluding ourselves these psychopaths do not represent us..."

"The great religion that preaches and celebrates universal brotherhood, equality of men and peace and justice for all has been hijacked by a demented, miniscule minority. And, as my friend says, only Muslims can solve this problem. Only Muslims can confront these anarchists in their midst..."

"Only they can get their faith freed from the clutches of extremism. This is no time to hide. It’s time to stand up and speak out. For the terrorists will continue to speak on our behalf, until we do not speak up. This is no time for silence. Enough is enough!"

Indeed, enough is enough. It is time to start listening to folks like Mr Syed or the courageous Zuhdi Jasser, rather than cave in to the PC crowd. Reporters seem incapable of reporting Islamic radicalism at home unless there is a conviction. And even then, as The New York Times has so dishonestly but consistently demonstrated, there are only good sheiks and good Islamic groups, not bad ones that preach jihad.

Even after the conviction of the defendants of all 108 counts in the Holy Land Foundation (Hamas) trial this past week, The New York Times poignantly focused its reporting not on the convictions for abetting terrorism and contributing to countless deaths of civilians, but on the tear jerking sobs of the wives and daughters of the convicted defendants who (surprise) claim their fathers were innocent. Now can you imagine the New York Times focusing its coverage sympathetically on the families of the convicted members of the KKK or neo-Nazis? Now further imagine reporters from the top newspapers getting their exclusive information for stories from un-indicted co-conspirators in the Hamas case.

It all comes together. After more than 7 years since 9/11, we can now issue a verdict: Islamic terrorists have won our hearts and minds. Let’s thank those who made it happen: the U.S. government, European governments and the mainstream media. It’s time to stop placating or being intimidated by Islamic front groups who masquerade as civil rights groups. In 2007, the perversity of was demonstrated when the FBI released its annual 2007 hate crime reports. Of the total 1,628 victims of anti-religious hate crimes, 69.2% were Jewish and 8.7% were Muslim. Yet by my still unfinished account, there were at least 40 times more stories last year about Islamophobia than about anti-Semitism.

The Mumbai massacre was a heavily planned plot carried out by Islamic terrorists. Period. Memo to Obama: Until the onus of responsibility is put on Islamic “civil rights” groups that want to ban free speech and claim that anyone who uses the term Islamic terrorist is a racist, there is no hope of winning the battle.

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The insurance giant AIG has lately become the poster child for corporate risk-taking, mismanagement and greed. Its unimaginably large losses, rooted in insurance it extended to financial companies engaged in subprime mortgage-backed transactions, have destroyed both AIG's corporate reputation and balance sheet.

Indeed, but for the fact that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - who during his days running Goldman Sachs had extensive ties to AIG - deemed the insurance firm "too large to fail," the company would surely have gone under by now. Instead, Mr. Paulson gave AIG well over $40 billion of the slush-fund Congress intended to bailout the financial sector (part of a total $150 billion the U.S. has sunk in AIG to date). As a result, you and I and our fellow taxpayers have been saddled with ownership of nearly 80 percent of this once high-flying and now-floundering global insurance enterprise.

It turns out that AIG has a subsidiary specializing in "takaful" - insurance products that are purportedly "Shariah-compliant." I say purportedly because - while they have been cynically deemed "pure" (halal) by Shariah advisers that AIG employed for the purpose of making such certifications - the Islamic code expressly prohibits business transactions that involve risk.=2 0Consequently, insurance products designed to hedge against risk are inherently "impure" or haram.

Whatever the status of AIG's "takaful" products under Islamic law, the U.S. government now has a vested interest in their financial success. Uncle Sam has become Uncle Shariah.

In so doing, Henry Paulson has acted in a manner that not only appears to smack of a conflict of interest and egregious disregard for the public's fiduciary interests. He also seems to have violated the Constitution.

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights has long been interpreted as prohibiting the establishment of any national religion or conferring upon one religion a preference over others. By taking a massive stake in a company that explicitly promotes Islam's Shariah law, the U.S. government is acting at odds with both of these revered principles.

Fortunately, an important legal initiative has just been launched aimed at blocking Mr. Paulson and the Federal Reserve Board from engaging in this sort of unconstitutional behavior via Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF) and other commercial transactions. A lawsuit filed Dec. 15 in U.S. district court in Michigan by an Iraq war veteran named Kevin Murray contends that:

"The Shariah-based Islamic religious practices and activities that the government-owned AIG engages in - activities that are funded and financially supported by American taxpayers, including Plaintiff, who is forced to contribute to them - are antithetical to our Nation's val ues, customs, and traditions with regard to religious liberty, religious tolerance, and the proscriptions of the First Amendment. These government-funded activities not only convey a message of disfavor of and hostility toward Christians, Jews, and those who do not follow or abide by Islamic law based on the Quran or the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, but they also embody actual commercial practices which are pervasively sectarian and which disfavor Christians, Jews, and other 'infidels,' including Americans."

The litigation seeks relief in ways that would be far-reaching at a time when the U.S. government has bought not only most of AIG but owns some 20 other financial institutions - and seems intent on encouraging their embrace of Shariah-Compliant Finance. (Notably, in November, Mr. Paulson's fellow Goldman Sachs alumnus and point-man for the financial sector bailout, Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari, convened an "Islamic Finance 101" seminar where officials in the "policy community" were propagandized by Harvard University professors and other champions of the SCF industry.)

The court is being asked to rule that, among other things, the defendants' "policy and practice of approving, endorsing, promoting, funding, and supporting Shariah-compliant finance" and "the United States government's ownership interest in and use of taxpayer money to financially support AIG and its Takaful Insurance business, which is pervasively sectarian, violate the Establishment Clause."In addition, Murray v. Paulson seeks a permanen t injunction against such practices both with respect to AIG and Shariah-Compliant Finance more generally.

Most Americans remain unaware of the menace posed by Shariah, let alone the extent to which it is being insinuated stealthily into our country. Happily, the latter is the subject of an excellent new book by the acclaimed scholar of Islam, Robert Spencer, entitled, "Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs."

Murray v. Paulson therefore provides not just an opportunity for an urgently needed constitutional ruling and injunctive relief with respect to the U.S. government's submission to Shariah. This lawsuit brought on Mr. Murray's behalf by one of the nation's preeminent public interest law firms, the Thomas More Law Center, and by the formidable litigator/Shariah expert David Yerushalmi, who also serves as the Center for Security Policy's general counsel, affords the American people a vital teaching moment:

Official promotion of Shariah law is unconstitutional and, given Shariah's inherently seditious nature (it explicitly requires the violent overthrow of all non-Islamic governments in favor of a global theocracy), acquiescence to its insinuation in this country constitutes a felony offense known as "misprision of treason."

We cannot tolerate and must not permit Uncle Sam's morphing into Uncle Shariah. Prompt action by the courts on Murray v. Paulson may spare us that monstrous transformation.

This week will be all about the new order in Washington. Whether Tuesday’s balloting results in an administration populated by a President Obama or a President McCain, one thing is already clear: The U.S. Treasury Department is submitting to Shariah – the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.

As reported in this space last week, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt set the stage with his recent visit to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states. His stated purpose was to promote the recycling of petrodollars in the form of foreign investment here.

Evidently, the price demanded by his hosts is that the U.S. government get with the Islamist financial program. While in Riyadh, Kimmitt announced: “The U.S. government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis.”

“Islamic banking” is a euphemism for a practice better known as “Shariah-Compliant Finance (SFC).” And it turns out that this week the Treasury will be taking officials from various federal agencies literally to school on SFC.

The department is hosting a half-day course entitled “Islamic Finance 101” on Thursday at its headquarters building. Treasury’s self-described “seminar for the policy community” is co-sponsored with the leading academic promoters of Shariah and SCF in the United States: Harvard University Law School’s Project on Islamic Finance. At the very least, the U.S. government evidently hopes to emulate Harvard’s success in securing immense amounts of Wahhabi money in exchange for conforming to the Islamists’ agenda. Like Harvard, Treasury seems utterly disinterested in what Shariah actually is, and portends.

Unfortunately, such submission – the literal meaning of “Islam” – is not likely to remain confined long to the Treasury or its sister agencies. Thanks to the extraordinary authority conferred on Treasury since September backed by the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the department is now in a position to impose its embrace of Shariah on the U.S. financial sector. The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Treasury’s purchase of – at last count – 17 banks and the ability to provide, or withhold, funds from its new slush-fund can translate into unprecedented coercive power.

Concerns in this regard are only heightened by the prominent role Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari will be playing in “Islamic Finance 101.” Kashkari, the official charged with administering the TARP fund, will provide welcoming remarks to participants. Presumably, in the process, he will convey the enthusiasm about Shariah-Compliant Finance that appears to be the current party line at Treasury.

As this enthusiasm for SCF ramps up in Washington officialdom, it is worth recalling a lesson from “across the pond.” Earlier this year, the head of the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams provoked a brief but intense firestorm of controversy with his declaration that it was “unavoidable” that Shariah would be practiced in Britain. Largely unremarked was the reason he gave for such an ominous forecast: The U.K. had already accommodated itself to Shariah-Compliant Finance.

This statement provides an important insight for the incumbent U.S. administration and whomever succeeds it: Shariah-Compliant Finance serves as a leading edge of the spear for those seeking to insinuate Shariah into Western societies.

Regrettably, SCF is not the only instrument of the stealth jihad by which Shariah-promoting Islamists are seeking to achieve “parallel societies” here and elsewhere in the West. The British experience is instructive on this score, too. Her Majesty’s Government has allowed the establishment of at least five Shariah courts to hear (initially) family law cases. Polygamists in the U.K. can get welfare for each of their wives (as long as all the marriages beyond the first were performed overseas). And in the latest British act of obeisance to the demands of Shariah-sensitized multiculturalism, Oxford will dispense with Christmastime in favor of a “Winter Lights” celebration.

Thus far, we in this country may not have reached the point where evidence of this sort of creeping Shariah is so manifest. But Treasury’s accommodation to SCF demonstrates that we are on the same trajectory – the one ordained and demanded by the promoters of Shariah, one to which we serially accommodate ourselves at our extreme peril.

After all, the object of Shariah is the supplanting of our government and Constitution, through violent means if possible and, until then, through stealthy ones. Islamists, having secured footholds via their parallel societies, inevitably use those to extend their influence over Muslims who have no more interest in living under authoritative Islam’s Shariah than the rest of us do. Inexorably, it becomes the turn of non-Muslims to accommodate themselves to ever more intrusive demands from the Islamists. It is known as submission, or dhimmitude.

Soon – possibly as early as this Wednesday – the Treasury Department and the other federal agencies will be taking orders from representatives of Barack Obama or John McCain. It may be that the outgoing administration’s determination to advance the Islamist agenda via “Islamic Finance 101,” and what flows from it, may be the first, far-reaching policy decision inherited by the new President-elect. If he does not want to have his transition saddled with an implicit endorsement of submission to Shariah, the winner of the White House sweepstakes would be well-advised to pull the plug on Thursday’s indoctrination program and the insidious industry it is meant to foist on the “policy community,” our capital markets and our country.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

We cannot afford to pretend that there is an appropriate way for the United States to fight Islamofascist totalitarians and the terror they wield against us, then insist that our allies must negotiate with and try to appease such groups when they are in the Islamofascists' cross-hairs

On September 11, 2001, a freedom-loving nation was attacked by a terrorist organization operating from the territory of a sovereign state with the acquiescence, if not the active complicity, of the latter's government. The United States retaliated with what can only be called a "disproportionate response."

America launched air and ground assaults on Afghanistan, aimed at destroying not only the al Qaeda safe havens but toppling the Taliban regime. We damaged or destroyed critical Afghan infrastructure so as to deny its use to the enemy. Civilian casualties occurred, as did refugee flows. At one point, the UN declared the resulting dislocation a humanitarian crisis.

Once the campaign to eliminate al Qaeda was launched, there was no consideration given to negotiating with the terrorists or the government that afforded them protection. The United States would not have contemplated a UN-mandated ceasefire, let alone the insertion of an international peacekeeping force under a Chapter 7 mandate from the Security Council — whose purpose, inevitably, would have been to protect the terrorists from our military, not the other way around.

And most especially, it would have been inconceivable that the U.S. could accede to one of its enemy's central demands — for example, the removal of all American forces from the Mideast — as part of a negotiated ceasefire brokered by the UN and approved by the Taliban at the direction of al Qaeda.

It is therefore stunning, not to say depressing, to see how the Bush Administration's early, strong support for Israel's response to the murderous attacks on its territory by the terrorist group, Hezbollah, has morphed in recent days.

First, Israel was told it must not undermine the Lebanese government, even though the latter had not only acquiesced to what amounts to a Hezbollah-controlled state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon. The government in Beirut actually has two Hezbollah ministers in its cabinet — a role al Qaeda never enjoyed in Taliban Afghanistan. This injunction had the practical effect of limiting Israeli efforts to press officials in Beirut to disassociate themselves from the terrorists in their midst.

Then, the U.S. embraced the idea that Israel must reward the government that has allowed Hezbollah to occupy and operate against the Jewish State from the part of south Lebanon the Israelis foolishly and unilaterally vacated in 2000. Where we destroyed the regime that afforded safe haven to our foes, Israel has been told it must make a further territorial concession to its counterpart by surrendering to Lebanon a small area known as Shebaa Farms that Israel has occupied since 1967.

Never mind that Shebaa Farms was not Lebanese territory to begin with; Israel conquered it from Syria in the Six-Day War. The character of this area was confirmed by none other than the United Nations. It certified in May 2000 that Israel had withdrawn from all Lebanese territory, that the Farms are not and have never been part of Lebanon and that their final status would ultimately have to be settled in negotiations between Israel and Syria.

Now, however, Israel is being told it must satisfy what amounts to a demand of Hezbollah — a manufactured pretext for the Iranian-backed terrorist organization to continue its war against Israel, even after the Israelis had abandoned the security zone they had wisely maintained in Lebanon for eighteen years (along with the erstwhile Lebanese allies who lived there).

It is bad enough that Hezbollah will thus be rewarded for its terrorist attacks on Israel. The implications of this concession will prove much worse, however, to the extent the message is conveyed by it that Israel is not entitled to — and cannot expect to enjoy — inviolable, internationally recognized borders. To paraphrase an old saw: What belongs to the Arabs is the Arabs'; what belongs to Israel is extortable.

Even more problematic is the prospect that the United Nations will shortly mandate — with U.S. backing and Israel's acquiescence — the insertion into southern Lebanon of an armed international force. Its purpose, ostensibly, will be to enforce a ceasefire pursuant to a new Chapter 7 Security Council resolution. If its job is to "keep" the peace, not make it, such a force will by definition require Hezbollah's assent to enter. The peacekeepers will understand, moreover, that they will be allowed to remain there in safety only if they do not interfere with the terrorists' rebuilding and resupply activities in south Lebanon.

The make-up of this force may compound the problem. Under discussion are troop contributions from places like Turkey, Indonesia and France — nations that are not likely to prove unfriendly to Hezbollah and that are, to varying degrees, hostile to Israel. In short, this will be just another anti-Israel UN mission, providing protection to the Free World's terrorist foes and doing little if anything to keep them from readying new attacks on freedom-loving peoples.

For the United States, the current phase of this War for the Free World began on September 11, 2001. For others, like Israel it has been going on for decades and represents an unmistakably existential threat. We cannot afford to pretend that there is an appropriate way for the United States to fight Islamofascist totalitarians and the terror they wield against us, then insist that our allies must negotiate with and try to appease such groups when they are in the Islamofascists' cross-hairs.

If Israel is not Zionist, it won’t be Jewish; if it’s not Jewish it won’t be democratic

In my understanding, the concept "Post Zionism" is - at the ideological level - a demand for democratization of the state - i. e. a call for a liberal democratic state in the Western mode.
Prof. Uri Ram -- from "The Anti Zionist Congress" Israel Radio (Reshet Bet) 27-4-2008

This quote from one of the leaders of the post-Zionist school in Israeli academia is representative of the moral hypocrisy, intellectual shallowness and pompousness, and grossly misplaced self-righteousness that characterize the adherents of this self- contradictory philosophy.

For it takes only the most elementary analytical skill to identify the glaring flaw in the logic of post–Zionist positions which - allegedly in the name of enlightened liberal values - call for the conversion of Israel from a "Jewish State" to a "state of all its citizens." It requires no extraordinary intellect to grasp the fact that should such a change indeed take place, the resulting realities would in fact be the exact antithesis of the values invoked for making it.

Indeed, it is not difficult to foresee the inevitable chain of events that such a move would trigger. First, the significance of a simple but far-reaching truth must be recognized: If Israel is indeed defined as a "Jewish state," there is a valid rationale and a viable justification for the existence of an entire range of elements that characterize the conduct of national and public life in the country, such as: the Star of David on the Flag; the "Menora" candelabrum as the state emblem; the words of the national anthem that refer to the "yearning of the Jewish soul"; and the status of Hebrew as the dominant vehicle of communication between the citizens of the state. The same is true for a considerable body of "Judeo-centric" legislation such as the Law of Return granting any Jew immediate citizenship on immigrating to Israel.

However, should Israel be re-defined as a "state of all its citizens,” there will be no valid rationale or viable justification for any of these features. As an inevitable consequence, there will neither be rhyme nor reason why any Jew (apart from those ultra-devout few who regard living in the Holy Land a religious command) would choose to live their life in a "non-Jewish Israel" rather than in any other "state of all its citizens" where the rigors of daily life are less demanding and less stressful. No Jew (apart from the handful of ultra-pious souls who believe in the divine sanctity of the Land of Israel) would insist on living their life in a country, where instead of the blue Star of David, the national flag displays stripes – whether vertical or horizontal – of different colors even if these include nostalgic tinges of blue and white.

Continual erosion of Jewish population

Accordingly, not only would there be a dramatic increase in the number of Jews who leave the country (and who of course no longer will be called "Yordim" but merely "emigrants",) but also an almost total termination of the number of Jews arriving here. After all, if Israel in not a Jewish state, there will be absolutely no motivation for, nor reason, why highly educated, highly skilled and highly trained Jews from across the developed world should aspire to make their homes here - not scientists, not doctors, not engineers not entrepreneurs, not academics.

There would be no mass "aliyah" from lands where Jews were oppressed and sought safe haven in the Jewish state. Obviously the extraordinary phenomenon of the huge inflow of Jewry from the former USSR, with is huge contribution to every aspect of life in the country, would be inconceivable if Israel became just another "state of all its citizens" on the fringes of a desert at the gateway to the Levant.

Moreover, if Israel became a state of all its citizens, there would be little grounds for preventing the massive influx of migrants from neighboring lands from pouring into the country – whether to fulfill the "right of return" or merely to make a better living – since, initially, the chances of finding a more lucrative livelihood would still be higher here rather than there.

Inevitably, these processes will bring about a continual erosion of the Jewish population. As the composition of the population in the land becomes similar to that in the other states of the region, there is no reason to suppose that the realities that prevails in it will not also become similar to those prevailing in those states – including the level of economic development, standard of living and lifestyle, status of women, nature of the regime, and the liberties it allows those living under it. It is difficult to imagine that even the post-Zionists, with their bias and selective view of the world, are unaware of the fact that that in the entire Arab world - from Casablanca to Kuwait - there is no semblance of any "liberal democratic state in the Western mode" for which they allegedly yearn with such passion.

Indeed, in view of the stark contrast between their declared objectives and the nature of the realities that the endeavor to achieve that objective is likely to create; in light of manifest contradiction between their purported aspirations and the consequences likely to result from the pursuit of those aspirations, it is difficult to determine whether the post-Zionists are motivated by nastiness or naiveté; whether they are being mean-spirited or only feeble-minded.

However, whatever the explanation may be, all those genuinely desirous of "liberal democratic state in the Western mode" in this neck of the woods must recognize a basic inescapable truth: If Israel is not Zionist, it will not be Jewish; if it is not Jewish it will not be democratic.

By ARIEL COHEN

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.

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.

Maybe this column would get a better reception if it were titled, "No Endgame for Israel." Because the quantity of commentary claiming that Israel cannot possibly achieve any kind of successful outcome in Gaza is already approaching presurge levels of Iraq defeatism.

Next, they say, the human cost of taking physical control of Gaza will be too high in terms of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians. Down that road lie memories of the 1982 siege of Beirut.

Third, we are told that the only method by which Israel can prevent Hamas from regaining power is by resorting to another full-scale occupation. Down that road lies endless international condemnation and, inevitably, another excruciating intifada.

Finally, we hear that by invading Gaza, Israel has further weakened Palestinian moderates and midwifed into existence yet another generation of jihadists. Down that road lies the end of the two-state solution and, demography being what it is, the end of the Jewish state itself.

On this last point, it would be interesting to know how a two-state solution is supposed to come about by allowing Hamas to continue to rule half of a presumptive Palestinian state. Are we now to endorse a three-state solution of Israel, Hamastan and Fatahland? Are Israelis supposed to support a peace deal by looking at Gaza as the model for what they should expect in the West Bank? Is Mahmoud Abbas's hand strengthened by the mockery Hamas makes of his claims to presidential authority? And, speaking of Palestinian moderates, shouldn't the test of their moderation be a willingness to stand up to Hamas, if only rhetorically?

Then there is the matter of the war itself. Israel has already demonstrated that it has learned the principal lessons from the war with Hezbollah. It did not wait too long to begin the ground campaign. It resisted the lure of a premature cease-fire, engineered by others. It did not promise ambitious goals at the war's outset only to walk away from them amid military and diplomatic complications.

On the contrary, the stated goal of a "quiet" border with Gaza has the dual advantage of suggesting a degree of restraint while allowing Jerusalem to preserve its options as the battle unfolds. "Quiet" does not require the destruction of Hamas. But neither does it exclude it.

In other words, instead of being forced publicly to ratchet its aims downward, as it did in Lebanon, Jerusalem can now ratchet them upward, putting Hamas off-balance and perhaps tempting it to cut its losses by accepting a cease-fire on terms acceptable to Israel. Doing so would not quite amount to a defeat for Hamas. But it would be an unambiguous humiliation for a group whose greatest danger lies in its pretension of invincibility. Burst balloons aren't easily reinflated.

It is precisely for this reason that Hamas will likely fight on, in the hopes that Israel will flinch. Critics of military action point to this damned-if-Israel-does, damned-if-it-doesn't scenario as evidence of the folly of the war.

Yet by no means is it obvious that the Israeli army needs to walk directly into a Gaza City Götterdämmerung in order to achieve its military aims. Hamas has been able to arm itself with increasingly sophisticated rockets thanks to a vast network of tunnels running below its border with Egypt. Israel found it difficult to destroy that network prior to its withdrawal from Gaza and will not easily do so now. But by bisecting the Strip, as it has now done, it will have no trouble preventing these rockets from moving north to their usual staging ground, thereby achieving a critical war aim without giving Hamas easy opportunities to hit back.

Israel also has much to gain by avoiding a frontal assault on Gaza's urban areas in favor of the snatch-and-grab operations that have effectively suppressed Hamas's terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank. A long-term policy aimed squarely at killing or capturing Hamas's leaders, destroying arms caches and rocket factories, and cutting off supply and escape routes will not by itself destroy the group. But it can drive it out of government and cripple its ability to function as a fighting force. And this, in turn, could mean the return of Fatah, the closest thing Gaza has to a "legitimate" government.

All this will be said to amount to another occupation, never mind that there are no settlers in this picture, and never mind, too, that Israel was widely denounced for carrying out an "effective occupation" of the Strip after it imposed an economic blockade on Hamas. (By this logic, the U.S. is currently "occupying" Cuba.) If Israel is going to achieve a strategic victory in this war, it will have to stand firm against this global wave of hypocrisy and cant.

Israel will also have to practice a more consistent policy of deterrence than it has so far done. One option: For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of "proportionality" is just the endgame that Israel needs.

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. And, if someone had told her that she would one day marry someone whose middle name is “Karim,” she probably would have told them the same. But love, as Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, and millions of others can attest to, doesn’t care about religious, political, or familial differences. Love goes where it’s sent, and that includes some very strange, unlikely places and pairings.

When it comes to the great historical crisis now in front of us—the Islamist threat to democracy and freedom-loving people all over the world—the core values of love and liberty, as well love for liberty, will ultimately defeat the dark forces that seek world domination. It is why all such fascists wind up, as President Bush put it after 9/11, on the “scrap heap of history”, because hate, as powerful as it can be, is no match for mankind’s desire to overthrow tyrants, whether they call themselves Nazis, Communists, or Al Qaeda.

Right now, it may seem farfetched to think that Arab countries throughout the Mideast will one day in the not too distant future be free, prosperous, and living in harmony with the US and Israel. But not that many years ago, the Berlin Wall looked immoveable, China was a locked door, and much of the world bowed to Moscow, whether they wanted to or not. All of that changed.

And the other night, hearing the free voices of other Arab-Americans calling for freedom throughout the Arab world, I realized that things are changing again. And to all those in Damascus, Teheran, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, and throughout the Mideast clamoring for change, but afraid to speak out, we hear you, we know your struggle, and know as well that once you begin your march toward liberty, there will be no turning back to the old, dark road.

Caroline Glick

Column One: Soldiers of Peace

Mar. 6, 2009
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Compare and contrast the following three events: At the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors meeting on Wednesday, George Schulte, the US ambassador to the IAEA, pointed an accusatory finger at Syria. Damascus, Schulte said, has not come clean on its nuclear program. That program, of course, was exposed in September 2007 when Israel reportedly destroyed Syria's North Korean-built, Iranian-financed al-Kibar nuclear reactor.

In its report to its Board of Governors, the IAEA stated that in analyzing soil samples from the bombed installation, its inspectors discovered traces of uranium. The nuclear watchdog agency also noted that the Syrians have blocked UN nuclear inspectors from the site and from three other suspected nuclear sites.

Reacting to the IAEA report, Schulte said that it "contributes to the growing evidence of clandestine nuclear activities in Syria."

He added, "We must understand why such [uranium] material - material not previously declared to the IAEA - existed in Syria, and this can only happen if Syria provides the cooperation requested."

On Tuesday, at a press conference in Jerusalem with outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the Obama administration is sending two senior envoys to Damascus. Their job, as she put it, is to begin "preliminary conversations" on how to jumpstart US-Syrian bilateral ties.

Clinton's statement made good headlines, but she was light on details. On Wednesday, hours after Schulte accused Syria of covering up its illicit nuclear program, US Sen. John Kerry helpfully filled in the blanks about the nature of the Obama administration's overtures to nuclear-proliferating Damascus. In an address before the left-leaning Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute in Washington, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who just returned from a visit to Syria, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, said that the purpose of US overtures to Damascus is to appease Syrian President Bashar Assad.

If in the past, both American and Israeli policy-makers interested in engaging Damascus have made ending Syria's alliance with Iran a central goal of their proposed engagement, Kerry dismissed such an aim as unrealistic. In his words, "We should have no illusions that Syria will immediately end its ties with Iran."

Indeed, as far as Kerry is concerned, Syria's role in these talks is not to actually give the US anything of value. Rather, Syria's role is to take things of value from the US - and of course from Israel.

Kerry proposed that in exchange for Syrian acceptance of the US's offer of friendship and Assad's willingness to negotiate an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights, America should consider "loosening certain sanctions" against Syria. Doing so, he claimed, will also be good for the US economy because it will open new opportunities for US businesses.

ON THE surface, the disparate statements by Schulte, Clinton and Kerry present us with a puzzle. In Geneva, Schulte noted that Syria is a nuclear proliferating rogue state that has refused to cooperate with UN inspectors. And in Jerusalem and Washington, Clinton and Kerry ignored Syria's dangerous actions, and advocated a policy of appeasement.

At the same IAEA Board of Governors meeting this week, the agency reported that Iran has produced more than a thousand kilograms of low enriched uranium - enough to build a bomb after further enrichment. That enrichment can be completed by year's end with Iran's 5,600 centrifuges. Moreover, between the Russian-built, soon-to-be-opened nuclear reactor in Bushehr and the illicit heavy water reactor in Arak, Iran will have the capacity to build plutonium-based bombs within two years.

Commenting on the IAEA's report on Iran, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that Iran has enough uranium for a bomb. Seemingly contradicting Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates claimed that there is no reason to worry about all that uranium because Iran won't have a bomb for some time, given that the uranium it possesses is not sufficiently enriched to make a weapon.

For his part, US President Barack Obama is receiving guidance on contending with Iran from former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who co-authored the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report published in December 2006. That report called for the US to coordinate the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq with Iran and Syria - the principal sponsors of both the Shi'ite and Sunni insurgencies in the country. It recommended that the US purchase Syria's good will by pressuring Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Damascus, and Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Hamas. It recommended that the US win Iran's trust by accepting it as a nuclear power and pledging not to overthrow the regime.

In an interview last month with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Hamilton reiterated those recommendations. He claimed that the starting point for US-Iran discussions is for the US to "state our respect for the Iranian people, renounce regime change as an instrument of US policy, seek opportunities for a range of dialogue across a range of issues, and acknowledge Iran's security concerns and its right to civilian nuclear power."

Hamilton assured Ignatius that these recommendations have been adopted by the White House.

ALL OF the above show that there is no contradiction between what the Obama administration understands about Iran and Syria and the policy it has adopted toward them. Specifically, as Schulte's and Mullen's statements make clear, the administration is aware of the dangers that both Iran and Syria constitute to global security. And as Clinton, Kerry, Gates and Hamilton all make clear, the administration's policy for dealing with those dangers is to change the subject and hope the American public won't notice or mind.

To this end, the administration is now asserting that Iran and Syria - the two most active agents of regional instability - share the US's interest in a stable, democratic Iraq. And owing to their sudden devotion to stability, Obama's surrogates tell us the Syrians and Iranians will support the new anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian Iraqi democracy and even protect it after the US withdraws its forces from the country.

Then, too, as both Kerry and Clinton made clear, the administration plans to ignore Syria's support for Iraqi, Palestinian and Lebanese terrorism, its nuclear proliferation activities and its massive ballistic missile arsenal, as well as its strategic alliance with Iran. Rather than confront Syria about its bad behavior, the administration favors a policy based on making believe that in his heart of hearts, Assad is a liberal democrat who aspires to peace, and hope, and change.

But the core of the administration's campaign to ignore Iran's nuclear program - as well as Syria's - is its unrelenting quest for the big payoff: Palestinian statehood.

This week Iran staged yet another "Destroy Israel" conference in Teheran, replete with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's trademark Holocaust denial, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's ritual castigation of the Jewish state as a "cancerous tumor," and the US as a treacherous enemy, and Ali Larijani's threat to attack Israel's suspected nuclear sites. The conference enjoyed a newfound sense of international legitimacy, taking place as it did just after burka-clad Annette Bening's goodwill Hollywood celebrity visit to the mullocracy.

THE GENOCIDAL pageantry in Teheran elicited no significant response from Clinton and Kerry. They had bigger fish to fry. While the administration and its supporters seem to believe that the US has no right to make demands on Iran and Syria, which, they assert, are both just advancing their national interests, for them Israel is a completely different story. As Clinton and Kerry demonstrated this week, the administration and its supporters will not stop making demands on Israel.

Kerry justified Syria's continued alliance with Iran by saying that Syria should be expected to "play both sides of the fence [with the US and Iran] as other nations do when they believe it is in their interests."

But Israel has no right to similarly take what action it deems necessary to secure its interests. In Kerry's view, the time has come for the US to show that it is serious about Palestinian statehood, and the way to do that is to force Israel to block all Jewish building in Judea and Samaria.

In his words, "On the Israeli side, nothing will do more to make clear our seriousness about turning the page than demonstrating - with actions rather than words - that we are serious about Israel freezing settlement activity in the West Bank."

He also called for the US to compel Israel to open its borders with Gaza. And he said that from his perspective, it is unacceptable for the incoming Netanyahu government not to embrace establishing a Palestinian state as its most urgent goal.

Clinton joined Kerry in his efforts to compel the Jewish state to ignore its national interests in the cause of the higher goal of Palestinian statehood. Like him, she attacked Israel for not handing control over its borders with Gaza to Hamas. And like Kerry, she stated repeatedly that her greatest goal is to establish a Palestinian state.

Clinton's unique contribution to that great "pro-peace" endeavor this week was her outspoken criticism on Wednesday of the Jerusalem Municipality's decision to enforce the city's building and planning ordinances equally toward both Jews and Arabs. That policy was made clear this week when city inspectors destroyed illegal buildings in both Jewish and Arab neighborhoods.

Since as far as Clinton is concerned, Israel will one day be required to throw all the Jews out of East, South and North Jerusalem to make room for what she believes is the "inevitable" Palestinian state, Israel has no right to treat Arabs and Jews equally in its soon-to-be-inevitably divided capital city. Arabs should be allowed to break the law at will. When Israel insists on enforcing its laws without prejudice, Clinton condemns it for being anti-peace.

Kerry argues that by forcing Israel to give its land to the Palestinians, the US will be promoting regional stability by doing the bidding of anti-Iranian Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But even if putting the screws to Israel makes Cairo and Riyadh happy, their happiness will have no impact whatsoever on Iran's nuclear weapons programs or on Syria's proliferation activities. That is, Israeli land giveaways will have no impact on regional stability.

And that's precisely the point. The Obama administration has no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power or Syria from maintaining its alliance with the mullahs. The White House seeks far more modest ends.

Through its policies toward Israel on the one hand and Iran and Syria on the other, the Obama administration demonstrates that it has already accepted a nuclear Iran. Its chief concern today is to avoid being blamed when the mushroom clouds appear in the sky. And it may well achieve that aim. After all, how could the administration be blamed for a nuclear Iran when it has wholly devoted its efforts to advancing the righteous cause of peace?

Column One: The perils ahead

Nov. 14, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

US President-elect Barack Obama has properly sought to maintain a low profile in foreign affairs in this transition period ahead of his January inauguration. But while Obama has stipulated that the US can have only one president at a time, his aides and advisers are signaling that he intends to move US foreign policy in a sharply different direction from its current trajectory once he assumes office.

And they are signaling that this new direction will be applied most immediately and directly to US policy toward the Middle East.

Early in the Democratic Party's primary season, the Obama campaign released a list of the now-president-elect's foreign policy advisers to The Washington Post. The list raised a great deal of concern in policy circles, particularly among supporters of the US-Israel alliance. It included outspoken critics of Israel such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser under president Jimmy Carter, and Robert Malley, who served as a junior Middle East aide to president Bill Clinton. Both men are deeply hostile to Israel and both have called repeatedly for the US to end its strategic alliance with Israel.

In the months that followed the list's publication, the Obama campaign sought to distance itself from both men as the president-elect's advisers worked to position Obama as a centrist candidate.

Brzezinski was cast aside in February when he headed a delegation to Syria to meet with President Bashar Assad. The purpose of his "fact-finding" mission was to castigate the Bush administration for its refusal to pursue Syria as an ally, and to decry Damascus's international isolation caused by its support for the insurgency in Iraq, its strategic alliance with Iran, its support for Hizbullah as well as Hamas and al-Qaida, its illicit nuclear program and its subversion of the pro-Western Lebanese government.

To Brzezinski's dismay, his mission was overtaken by events. The depth of Syria's support for terror was graphically displayed during his visit when arch-Iranian/Lebanese terrorist Imad Mughniyeh was killed in Damascus the day after he called on Assad.

Although he was a junior staffer in Clinton's National Security Council, since 2000 Malley has used his Clinton administration credentials to pave his emergence as one of America's most outspoken apologists for Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Immediately after the failed July 2000 Camp David peace summit, Malley invented the Palestinian "narrative" of the summit's proceedings. While Clinton, then-prime minister Ehud Barak, and Ambassador Dennis Ross, who served as Clinton's chief negotiator, have all concurred that Yasser Arafat torpedoed the prospects of peace when he refused Barak's offer of Palestinian statehood, Malley claimed falsely that Israel was to blame for the failure of the talks.

In succeeding years, he has expanded his condemnation of Israel. He insists that not only Palestinian aggression, but Syrian, Lebanese and Iranian attacks against Israel are all Israel's fault. The Obama campaign distanced itself from Malley in May after the Times of London reported that he was meeting regularly with Hamas terror leaders.

As the election drew closer, the Obama campaign expanded its efforts to present its candidate as a foreign policy moderate. Moderate foreign policy advisers such as Ross were paraded before reporters. Both Obama and his surrogates insisted that he supports a strong American alliance with Israel. Obama abandoned his earlier pledge to withdraw all US forces from Iraq by 2010. He attempted to temper and later deny his public pledge to hold direct negotiations with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions.

Due in large part to media credulousness, Obama's new image as a centrist was widely accepted by the public. And it is likely that he owes a significant portion of his support in the American Jewish community to the campaign's success in distancing Obama from men like Brzezinski and Malley.

BUT NOW that the campaign is over, it appears that as his critics warned, Obama's moves toward the center on issues relating to the Middle East were little more than campaign tactics to obscure his true policy preferences.

Two days after his election, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius gave a sense of the direction in which Obama will likely take US foreign policy. And, apparently directed by Obama's campaign staff, Ignatius based much of his column on his belief that Obama's foreign policy views have been shaped by his "informal" adviser, Brzezinski.

Based on what Brzezinski and Obama's "official" campaign told him, Ignatius wrote that the two major issues where Obama's foreign policy is likely to diverge from Bush's right off the bat are Israel and Iran. Obama, he claimed, will want to push hard to force Israel to come to an agreement with the Palestinians as soon as he comes into office. As for Iran, Obama plans to move immediately to improve US relations with the nuclear-weapons-building ayatollahs.

As for Malley, an aide of his told Frontpage magazine this week that acting on Obama's instructions, Malley traveled to Cairo and Damascus after Obama's electoral victory to tell Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Assad that "the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests."

In a related story, Hamas terror operative Ahmad Youssef told the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that in the months leading up to his election, Obama's advisers held steady contacts with the leaders of the terror group in Gaza, and had asked that Hamas keep the meetings secret in order not to harm Obama's chances of being elected.

Both Obama's transition team and Hamas leaders were quick to deny Youssef's statements. Yet, together with the earlier Times of London story about Malley's contacts with Hamas and the new revelations about Malley serving as Obama's unofficial Middle East envoy, the Al-Hayat report has the ring of truth.

Even more foreboding than these reports are statements by Obama's foreign policy advisers regarding his plans to open direct contacts with Iran. On Wednesday The Washington Post reported that Obama intends to move quickly to seek an accommodation with Iran regarding Afghanistan. Obama's advisers assert that such a deal is possible because as far as they are concerned, the Shi'ite Iranians oppose Sunni jihadists just as much as the US does.

But the facts do not support this view. Top US and British military commanders have asserted repeatedly that Iran is a major sponsor of the Taliban and al-Qaida in their war against the Afghan government and NATO forces in the country. Since 2006, Iran has provided advanced weapons, money and political support to the Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents in the country.

The Obama team's rejection of the demonstrated reality of Iran's support for the Taliban and al-Qaida in favor of a policy based on the fantasy that it is possible to cut a deal with the ayatollahs will undoubtedly not be his last move in the mullahs' direction. It will likely be quickly followed by an offer to conduct direct, high level talks with Iran's leaders about their nuclear weapons program.

What is most disturbing about Obama's emerging foreign policy is not simply that it ignores the reality on the ground - a reality that clearly demonstrates that Iran and its Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese surrogates are implacable foes of Israel and America and therefore not interested in being appeased. It is also not just the fact that it sends a signal of American weakness to Iran and its proxies just as Iran reaches the nuclear threshold. And Obama's emerging foreign policy is not merely disconcerting because by speaking with Iran and its proxies, Obama will be legitimizing the genocidal regime in Teheran.

WHAT IS most alarming about Obama's emerging foreign policy toward Iran and its proxies on the one hand and Israel on the other is that it will cause actual harm to the Jewish state.

By pressuring Israel to cede land to Syria and the Palestinians, Obama's apparent foreign policy will provide Iran with still more territory from which to attack Israel both through its terror proxies and with its expanding ballistic missile arsenal. By embracing the Syrian regime in spite of its support for terrorism, its nuclear proliferation activities and its subversion of Lebanon, the incoming Obama administration will embolden Syria to increase its subversion of Lebanon and Iraq, while strengthening its ties to Iran still further.

As for direct talks with Iran itself, the question immediately arises, what could Obama offer Teheran in exchange for an end to its nuclear program that Bush hasn't already offered?

What it can offer is Israel.

Over the past few years, Obama's top nuclear nonproliferation adviser, Joe Cirincione, has repeatedly advocated placing Israel's nuclear arsenal on the negotiating table and offering it up in exchange for an Iranian pledge to end its nuclear program. Defense Secretary Robert Gates - whom Obama is considering retaining - insinuated in his 2006 confirmation hearings that Iran is only building nuclear weapons to defend itself against Israel. Gates, it should be recalled, has been instrumental in convincing Bush not only not to attack Iran's nuclear installations, but not to support an Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear installations.

What is profoundly distressing about statements by men like Cirincione and Gates is what they tell us about the strategic reasoning informing the incoming Obama administration. Their views echo those voiced by advocates of American abandonment of Israel such as Professors Steve Walt and John Mearshimer. Walt and Mearshimer argue that Iran is not a threat to US interests or to global security because in the event that the mullahs acquire nuclear weapons, they are likely to view them merely as a deterrent against Iran's enemies. And as a result, Iran will respond as the Soviet Union did to a deterrent model based on mutually assured destruction.

This view is contradicted by Iran's open advocacy of Israel's destruction, and its declared willingness to absorb a nuclear attack in return for destroying Israel. But assuming that this how the Obama team views Iran, they should be the last ones advocating Israeli disarmament. Because if this is their view, then by their own reasoning, Israel's presumed nuclear arsenal is necessary to deter Teheran from attacking. And if as Cirincione advocates, Obama intends to place Israel's nuclear arsenal on the negotiating table, he will effectively be giving Iran a green light to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.

All of the Obama team's post-election/pre-inaugural foreign policy signals place Israel's next government - which will only be elected on February 10 - in an extraordinarily difficult position.

It is not just that their positions make clear that the Obama administration will do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The Obama team's pre-inaugural signals indicate strongly that Israel's next government will need to strike Iran's nuclear installations before two rapidly approaching deadlines.

The strike will have to occur before the mullahs enrich sufficient quantities of highly enriched uranium to produce nuclear bombs. And Israel will need to neutralize Iran's nuclear program before the Obama administration begins implementing America's new foreign policy.

Column One: Ignoring failure in Gaza

Aug. 8, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Monday will mark the third anniversary of the forcible expulsion of the Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria from their homes. Those expulsions were followed weeks later by the withdrawal of IDF personnel from the Gaza Strip.

Unlike the Rabin-Peres government's decision to embark on the Oslo peace process with the PLO in 1993, Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza did not take years to be discredited. It took moments.

As the last IDF personnel left Gaza, the Palestinians began torching the synagogues Israel abandoned. Within minutes of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza's border with Egypt, the Palestinians blew up the border wall. They immediately began transferring unprecedented quantities of heavy weaponry into Gaza - a practice that has continued to this day.

Another important distinction between the Oslo policy and the withdrawal policy is that at least Oslo asked the Palestinians to give Israel something in exchange for the land, money, arms and political legitimacy Israel lavished on them. As events would show, Israel asked the Palestinians for too little. But at least Israel asked them for something. The withdrawal policy, in contrast, demanded nothing from the Palestinians. It was simply an unconditional surrender of land. As a result, Hamas -- the terror group which has distinguished itself from Fatah by refusing to even pay lip service to peace -- was the chief beneficiary of Israel's retreat.

The first harbingers of Hamas's ascendance to power came the day after Israel completed its withdrawal. Tens of thousands of armed Hamas terrorists, clad in spanking new uniforms, goose-stepped through the streets of Gaza in their victory parade. The then-ruling Fatah government's own parade was dingy and poorly attended in comparison.

Hamas's pageantry was followed with the jihadist group's decisive electoral victory over Fatah in January 2006. This led to the further weakening of Fatah in March 2007 with the signing of the Mecca accord that rendered Fatah a junior member of Hamas's ruling coalition. The Mecca accord also signaled a shift in the Arab world's sympathies from Fatah to Hamas. That agreement then paved the way for Hamas's violent ouster of Fatah forces from Gaza in June 2007 and its rising challenge to Fatah's leadership in Judea and Samaria.

It should be pointed out that Hamas's victory over Fatah was not a victory of extremists over moderates in any real sense of the terms. Both Hamas and Fatah share the aim of destroying Israel. This was made clear most recently in the lead-up to the Annapolis conference last November. As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the coming of peace, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas refused to recognize Israel's right to exist.

Moreover, there is little to distinguish between the groups' embrace of terrorism as a means of achieving their aim of destroying Israel. Fatah forces have carried out more attacks against Israel than Hamas has.

Hamas's refusal to even pretend that it is willing to live at peace with Israel is what distinguishes it from Fatah. And the Palestinians' embrace of Hamas after Israel withdrew from Gaza demonstrated that the withdrawal increased the popularity of the prospect of continuous war against Israel among the Palestinians.

Hamas's rise to power has changed the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel in a fundamental way. It is not simply that Hamas has abandoned the rhetoric of Arab nationalism for the rhetoric of Islamic jihad and so changed the nature of the Palestinian war from a limited struggle to an unlimited war for Islamic domination.

Unlike Fatah, which was beholden to several Islamic countries at once, Hamas is a wholly-owned Iranian proxy. Consequently Gaza, like Lebanon, has become an Iranian colony. And as Hamas's star rises in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and within the Israeli Arab community, Iran's influence over events in those quarters rises. This was made clear this week with the revelation that Khaled Kashkoush, an Israeli Arab from Kalansuwa, last month became the latest Israeli Arab arrested for spying for Hizbullah.

GIVEN THE absolute, obvious failure of the Gaza withdrawal, what is most distressing about the initiative is that three years on, Israeli society has managed not to discuss why it failed or to learn the lessons stemming from its failure. There has been no chastening of the political leaders involved. No heads have rolled. There has been no official inquiry into how decisions regarding the withdrawal were made. Indeed, many of the plan's chief proponents have prospered.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert succeeded Sharon to power due in large part to his support for the plan. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni built her entire political career on her role as one of the architects of the expulsion of Israeli civilians from their homes. And today she is the frontrunner to succeed Olmert as head of Kadima and replace him as prime minister until the next elections are held. Her chief opponent, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, was defense minister during the operation and an active participant in implementing the ill-conceived initiative.

In contrast, those who opposed the withdrawal remain in the opposition. They are never recognized for their attempts to divert their country from this disastrous course. Indeed, they continue to be castigated as somehow extremist for the fact that they oppose basing Israel's national strategies on capitulation and faith in other people's willingness to defend us.

There are three main reasons that there has never been an accounting for the failure of the withdrawal from Gaza. The first reason is luck. Sharon got "lucky." He was felled by a debilitating stroke and slipped into a coma before the dimensions of the failure of his most significant policy became widely understood.

Since Sharon pushed the withdrawal plan through against the wishes of his government colleagues, his voters and his party by turning the plan into a popularity contest that pit himself against his opponents, once he was gone, there was no way to hold him to account. And his incapacitation itself made discussing the failure of the withdrawal somehow unseemly. After all, it was said, the poor man can no longer defend himself, how dare you add insult to injury by noting that his most significant action while in power imperiled the country? In this manner, not only Sharon, but all his supporters in his government, were immunized from criticism and the need to account for their strategic imbecility.

Israel is presented with a similar situation today with Olmert. Like Sharon, Olmert has not had to face the voters to account for his failures in the Second Lebanon War; for his refusal to act against Hamas's Iranian-backed regime in Gaza; or for his apparent willingness to expand on those failures by seeking to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and so enable Iranian proxies to surround Israel on all sides.

And now, with his announcement that he will leave office not for his substantive incompetence but for his suspected criminal activities, Olmert has removed the substantive causes of his failure in office from the national agenda. In so doing, he has immunized his cohorts, and particularly Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, from the need to account for their continued strategic imbecility.

IT IS the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's serial incompetence that ironically serves as the second reason that there has been no accounting for the failure of the Gaza withdrawal plan. Quite simply, the government has moved from failure to failure so quickly that there has been no opportunity to confront the results of the last failure before the next one is spun out of the government's policy chop-shop.

The most recent example of this high-speed bungling is the government's penchant for releasing terrorists from prison. The public has scarcely had a chance to digest the colossal stupidity and inherent danger of the government's terrorists-for-dead-hostages swap with Hizbullah last month. No serious review of that policy - which enhanced Hizbullah's popularity sufficiently to compel the Lebanese government to formally accept its right to attack Israel at will - has been conducted. And already on Wednesday, fresh from that failure, Olmert announced his intention to expand it by releasing another 150 terrorists from prison by the end of the month.

THE FINAL reason that the failed Gaza withdrawal has not led to any change in either the public discourse or in the general tenor and direction of government policy is because of the debilitating impact the withdrawal had on Israeli democracy. In order to build the public's support for his inhumane and strategically irredeemable decision to expel 10,000 Jews from their homes and destroy their communities in Gaza and northern Samaria in exchange for nothing, Sharon and his colleagues worked systematically to demoralize, disenfranchise and criminalize his political opponents.

He demoralized them by castigating them as criminals, extremists and enemies of the people in general. He disenfranchised them by ignoring the results of the Likud's referendum on his plan that he himself initiated.

In all his activities, Sharon received crucial assistance from the law enforcement system and the media which were themselves corrupted by his plan. As Ha'aretz's left-wing military commentator Amir Oren noted five months after the plan was carried out, Sharon was given a free ride by Israel's elites due to their common "hatred of the settlers."

To enable Sharon to carry out the expulsions they so desired, the state prosecution, backed by the Supreme Court, was willing to close corruption probes of Sharon. As retired Supreme Court justice Michel Cheshin explained, "If Sharon had stood trial, there would have been no disengagement."

More egregiously, as public protests against the withdrawal gained force, Israel's law enforcement system became a tool of political repression, and the media became apologists for that repression. The police conducted mass arrests of law-abiding demonstrators, used brutal force against them and suspended the civil rights of opponents of the plan. The state prosecution and the courts sent thousands of protesters - including children - to jail for weeks and months without filing charges against them.

Then too, Sharon's personalization of the withdrawal distorted the country's public discourse by moving it from substantive discussions of government policies to superficial discussions of personalities. And this transformation has remained in effect until today. It was most recently in evidence in the media's rendering of the debate over the terrorists-for-dead-hostages swap as the personal struggle of the Goldwasser and Regev families against the government.

Sharon's successful repression and castigation of his opponents, and Olmert's successful repetition of Sharon's behavior both in the brutal repression of demonstrators at Amona in February 2006 and in his dismissive attitude towards the protest movement in the wake of the Second Lebanon War, have imbued the public as a whole with a sense of powerlessness. This sense manifested itself with the historically low voter turnout in the 2006 elections.

Israel's prolonged failure to reckon with the disastrous outcome of the Gaza withdrawal bodes ill for the country's prospects. Until the country reckons with the mistakes that led to that withdrawal, and forces those responsible to account for their failings, we will be doomed to repeat those mistakes with those same incompetents leading us over and over and over.

Our World: Ending Lebanon's free ride

Jul. 29, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Since Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora bowed to Hizbullah's demands in Doha last month and agreed to grant the Iranian-controlled, Syrian-supported terror group control over his government, Lebanon has become an official agent of a terror group. That is, Lebanon, as a state, has become a sponsor of terror. But no one seems to notice or to care.

Truth be told, on the surface the situation in Lebanon is quite complicated. There is a power struggle of sorts going on today between Saniora's pro-Lebanese sovereignty March 14th movement and Hizbullah. Even in its diminished status, the March 14th movement is seeking to compel Hizbullah to subordinate its Iranian proxy army to the government. But this is an exercise in futility.

As Hizbullah demonstrated clearly during its armed insurrection in May that led to the Doha agreement, and as it continues to demonstrate in its attacks against Sunni neighborhoods in Tripoli, it is fully willing to use its militia to force its political opponents to accept its complete independence.

But then, while it is clear that the March 14th movement's leaders and supporters oppose Hizbullah's independence from central authority, it is far from clear that they oppose its terrorist operations. The fact of the matter is that none of Hizbullah's political opponents in Lebanon have anything but praise for its aggression against Israel and its clear intention to continue its war against Israel for its Iranian commanders.

MAKING THIS point this week, Lebanon's Finance Minister Muhammad Shatah, explained, "We are all in agreement that it will be crazy not to benefit from Hizbullah resistance capabilities, but the dispute is whether this will be done within the state or outside." The widespread support that Hizbullah's terror war against Israel enjoys in Lebanon was prominently displayed on July 16 when convicted baby killer Samir Kuntar and his fellow Lebanese terrorists were released to Lebanon by Israel in exchange for the mutilated corpses of IDF soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser who were killed in Hizbullah's raid on their military position in Israel on July 12, 2006.

All of Lebanon's supposedly moderate leaders were at the Hizbullah-controlled Beirut airport to accord Kuntar a hero's welcome. President Michel Suleiman embraced Kuntar - who crushed four-year-old Einat Haran's skull - and his fellow terrorists as "our freed heroes." Sa'ad Hariri, the head of the March 14th movement, referred to Kuntar's release as "an historic day of joy." Saniora hailed the corpses-for-murderers swap explaining, "The success of Hizbullah in the negotiations led by a third party is a national success for the party and for the struggle of the Lebanese because it secured national goals which Israel always refused to respect." And Druse leader Walid Jumblatt hailed Kuntar's release as "a national holiday."

HIZBULLAH'S DOMESTIC intimidation and international terrorism is enabled by the Lebanese military which refuses to confront it. And this is nothing new. During the 2006 war, when Suleiman commanded the Lebanese armed forces, the Lebanese military actively collaborated with Hizbullah units. Then, as now, Hizbullah was a coalition partner in Saniora's government.

During the war, the Lebanese military guided Hizbullah in attacking the INS Hanit along the Lebanese coastline with an advanced, Iranian-supplied Chinese C-802 missile. The Lebanese military pays pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in battle. Since the war, the Lebanese military enabled Hizbullah to reassert its control over south Lebanon, to expand its control north of the Litani River and to massively rearm.

Moreover, throughout the war, Saniora acted as Hizbullah's mouthpiece. He condemned all Israeli efforts to defend its territory from wanton aggression and championed all of Hizbullah's demands in cease-fire negotiations. By the same token, the Saniora government backed all of Hizbullah's attacks against Israel - attacks which forced a million Israelis to flee their homes or live in bomb shelters for the duration of the war.

IN JULY 2006, understanding the Saniora government's collusion with Hizbullah, Israel's immediate reaction to Hizbullah's abduction of its soldiers and bombardment of northern Israel was to hold Beirut accountable. In his first press conference of the war, just hours after Goldwasser and Regev were abducted and their comrades killed, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made this point explicitly. He declared, "This morning's events were not a terror attack. They were the act of a sovereign state that attacked Israel, without reason and without provocation. The government of Lebanon, of which Hizbullah is a part, is attempting to destabilize the region. Lebanon is the responsible party, and Lebanon will pay the consequences for its actions."

Israel's initial strategy for fighting the war was to disable Hizbullah's war machine by bombing Lebanese infrastructure targets such as highways, the airport, bridges, electricity grids and the telecommunication systems. All of these facilities enabled Hizbullah's war effort. It is possible that if Israel had in fact attacked Lebanon's national infrastructures, the blow to Hizbullah's war machine might have been strategically debilitating. In that event, the task of land forces charged with defeating Hizbullah forces on the ground would have been smoother.

But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would have none of it. Already in the earliest stages of the war, she began putting pressure on Israel not to attack Lebanese infrastructure. Her demand was formalized in the G-8 declaration three days after Hizbullah initiated hostilities.

Rice's support for Saniora's government was so strong and consistent, that she eventually forced Israel to cave to all of Hizbullah's demands in UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which set the terms of the cease-fire at the end of the war. Rice defended her support by noting the democratic character of the March 14th movement and its success - with US and French support - in forcing most Syrian forces to depart Lebanon in April 2005.

Despite the Lebanese government's and military's open and active collusion with Hizbullah throughout the war, in its aftermath, US support for Saniora's government and his military expanded exponentially. In the year following the war, US aid to Lebanon grew from $41 million to $520 million. US military assistance to the Lebanese military since the war has been in excess of $410 million, making Lebanon the second largest recipient per capita of US military aid.

US military support for Lebanon grows even as the Lebanese armed forces demonstrate at every turn that they collaborate with Hizbullah. It was supplemented after the Lebanese military, under Suleiman's command, refused to prevent Hizbullah's coup in May. Moreover, the day before Suleiman gave Kuntar the red carpet treatment at the Beirut airport, Maj.-Gen. Robert Allardice, the US Central Command's director of strategy, plans and policy, visited Beirut and announced an additional $32 million in military aid.

Since 2006, the US has given Lebanon some 285 Humvees, 200 cargo trucks, helicopter parts, assault rifles, grenade launchers, anti-tank weapons and urban warfare bunker weapons. Another 300 Humvees, mobile communications systems, several hundred anti-tank missiles and coastal patrol craft are on order.

Israel has recently begun openly expressing its alarm about these weapon transfers. Given Hizbullah's now inarguable control over Lebanon and its sway over its military forces, it is all but a foregone conclusion that these weapons will likely be used by Hizbullah and its allied forces in the Lebanese army in any future war with Israel. In recent weeks, senior Defense Ministry officials have been dispatched to the Pentagon in an attempt to convince the US to stop the weapons transfers. Yet while the Pentagon was only too happy to give Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Ashkenazi an unrequested medal, it has rebuffed all of Israel's entreaties.

ALL OF this is depressingly familiar. In many ways, the Saniora government is to Hizbullah in Lebanon what the Fatah terror group is to Hamas in the Palestinian Authority. As is the case in Lebanon, the US trains, finances and arms Fatah. It supports Fatah politically against Israel, claiming that Fatah has earned its support through its moderation relative to Hamas. But as events have shown repeatedly, Fatah is a terrorist organization and is only too happy to collude with Hamas in attacking Israel and to form governments with Hamas so long as Hamas doesn't embarrass it too much.

Notably in the case of the Palestinians, the US cut off its assistance to the PA after Fatah and Hamas formed their unity government last year and only reinstated that assistance after Hamas ended the unity deal by seizing control of Gaza from its Fatah partner. In Lebanon's case, US support for the country has grown as Hizbullah's control of the government and the military have become more open. Indeed, today Rice is openly pressing Israel to surrender Mt. Dov and Ghajar village to Lebanon even though Lebanon has no legal claim to either. And this she does by claiming that an Israeli capitulation to Hizbullah's demands will strengthen Saniora who is controlled by Hizbullah - and believing that this will be a good thing.

With even the Olmert-Livni-Barak government calling openly for a revision of Resolution 1701 to curtail the Lebanese military's ability to facilitate Hizbullah's rearmament and assertion of control over southern Lebanon, and with even Britain finally classifying Hizbullah's militia as a terror group, the time has come to revisit US policy.

US JEWISH leaders and counterterror champions on Capitol Hill should begin a campaign to compel the State Department to place Lebanon on its list of state sponsors of terror. At a minimum, US military and financial assistance to the Hizbullah-controlled government should be abrogated immediately.

The current government of Lebanon is only expected to remain in power for another year. Hizbullah is expected to be the big winner in Lebanon's parliamentary elections scheduled for next year. As Lebanese parliamentarian Samir Franjieh from the March 14th movement explained in a media interview this week, "Weapons eliminate the principle of majority [rule]. In... 2005 the March 14 [movement] won a majority of parliamentary seats in the elections. The result was practically eliminated by the use of force. Having armed factions [running for elections in 2009] would limit the freedom of voters."

It is reasonable for the US to seek to support pro-Western democrats in the Arab world. It is unreasonable for the US to be bankrolling a terror-controlled regime populated by terrorists and democrats who support their aggression. This is particularly the case when the same terrorists are waging war not only against Israel, but against America's own forces in Iraq.

Olmert's July 12, 2006 declaration is still apt. Lebanon must be forced to suffer the consequences of its support for Hizbullah.

Our World: When talking can kill

Jul. 14, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

At the end of the week, Saeed Jalili, Iran's nuclear negotiator, is scheduled to arrive in Geneva for yet another round of talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. It is unclear what the two have to discuss.

On July 4, the Iranians sent their written response to the West's latest offer to appease them. In and of itself, the offer, made by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany and communicated to Iran by Solana, constituted a major achievement for the Iranians. It promised civilian nuclear power plants, economic assistance, new airplanes, agricultural assistance, hi-tech transfers and a freeze on the expansion of economic sanctions against the nuclear-weapons-seeking mullocracy. In exchange for all of that, the Iranians weren't even required to end their uranium enrichment activities. To get the ball of concessions rolling, all the Iranians needed to do was promise not to expand their current enrichment activities.

If Iran were ever even remotely interested in reaching a deal with the international community, this was the deal it would have taken. For the unspoken subtext of the agreement was that the international community is willing to accept a nuclear armed Iran in exchange for the mere appearance of Iranian willingness to bow to international pressure. As David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, explained to Newsweek last week, at their current, known level of uranium enrichment the Iranians are producing 1.2 kg. of enriched uranium a day. And at this enrichment level, they will be able to produce a nuclear bomb by next year. So the international community's willingness to accept continued Iranian uranium enrichment at current levels is a clear signal of the international community's willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

And yet, that offer still wasn't good enough for the Iranians. Their written response didn't even discuss the issue of uranium enrichment. They just asked for more concessions in exchange for nothing. And now they believe that their "counterproposal" should form the basis of this week's round of discussions.

As Iran submitted its response to the offer, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dispatched his foreign policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati to the media to discuss Iran's interest in accepting the West's offer. The Western media and some EU officials were so thrilled by the gesture that the immediate coverage of Iran's response lent the impression that Iran had in fact accepted the offer.

IT WAS only two days later, after those same officials sat down and read what the Iranians wrote that they realized that they had been tricked. And just to be sure that there was no residual optimism, senior Iranian leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manoushehr Mottaki stated clearly that they would never accept any deal that places limitations on their uranium enrichment.

After verbally snuffing out all hopes for an agreement, Iran proceeded to show off its military prowess by testing ballistic missiles last week and augmenting those tests with verbal threats to destroy Israel and attack all US bases in the Middle East.

And still despite all of this, Solana looks forward to his meetings this Saturday with Jalili with hope for an accommodation. After Iran rejected a deal that effectively offered it acceptance as a nuclear-armed state, he still believes that the best way to deal with Iran's clear intention to acquire and use nuclear weapons is to offer it membership in the World Trade Organization.

Solana's unshakeable faith that Iran can be appeased is to be expected. After all, Solana was on the first flight to Teheran to begin negotiating with the mullahs the minute that Iran's nuclear program was exposed five years ago. And he's been running the talks ever since - first for France, Germany and Britain, and then starting last May, for the US as well.

Solana cannot acknowledge that the talks have failed. He is too personally invested in them to admit that Iran has been using him as the diplomatic fig leaf behind which it has pushed forward with its nuclear bomb program.

SOLANA IS a perfect example of why the oft repeated policy mantra "there's never any harm in talking" is incorrect. The basic idea behind that assertion is that negotiations can never cause damage, they can only do good - by resolving a conflict without resorting to force. But they can and often do cause tremendous harm - and to the wrong side.

If Europe's initial justification for negotiating with Iran was that it wished to convince Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, over time that justification gave way to a more basic justification - to deny that the talks had failed. That is, after it became clear that the talks would not succeed in engendering a change in Iran's behavior, the parties involved changed their focus from Iran to themselves. The talks were about them. And if the talks failed, it wasn't because Iran refused to listen to reason. It was because the West hadn't given it a good enough offer. So just by engaging Iran and its ilk, these Westerners were transformed from Western representatives to the Iranian regime to advocates of the Iranian regime in the West.

As a result it has become nearly impossible to have coherent discussion about the Iranian nuclear program. For when the "experts" are called to tell us how to proceed in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, they instead exhort us to engage at ever higher levels with the Iranians in order to show them our good intentions toward them.

And of course, it isn't only Iran that is benefitting from the West's false belief in the harmlessness of negotiations. Iran's proxies in Syria and Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are also prospering thanks to the West's belief that negotiations can only do good.

THE LATEST display of this Western preference for the pomp of accommodation over the responsibility of confrontation was French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Mediterranean summit in Paris this week. The purpose of the parley, which Sarkozy has been trying to organize since entering office last May, was to project himself as a global leader in international affairs and to project France as an important country in Europe and throughout the world.

Although the summit - like the Barcelona and Madrid summits before it - was officially focused on building economic cooperation among the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea and Europe, its actual purpose was to propel France to the position of peacemaker between Israel and its neighbors, and specifically between Israel and Syria. And to do this, the success or failure of the entire conference was contingent upon Syrian President Bashar Assad's willingness to participate and sit in the same room as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

To bring Syria on board, Sarkozy was compelled to accept the Assad regime as legitimate. And to do this, he needed to ignore the nature of the new Lebanese government, Syria's role in establishing it, Syria's support for terrorism, its feudal relationship with Iran and its role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and a host of anti-Syrian Lebanese parliamentarians and journalists over the past three years.

Last Friday, just ahead of the Paris summit, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora announced that he had formed his new, Hizbullah-controlled government. Saniora was compelled to abdicate control over Lebanon to Iran's foreign legion as a result of Hizbullah's violent takeover of the country in May. And Hizbullah justified its coup by noting that Saniora's pro-democracy March 14 movement in the Lebanese parliament had failed to elect a new president to replace Emil Lahoud, who completed his term last November. Of course, Saniora only failed to elect a new president because Syria and Hizbullah had murdered so many March 14 movement members of parliament that he no longer had enough votes to elect a candidate without Hizbullah's approval.

After Saniora announced his new Iranian-controlled government, Assad was quick to announce that he would be opening a Syrian embassy in Beirut for the first time ever. Assad's announcement was greeted with glee in the Elysee Palace and throughout the West. It was perceived as Syria's first acknowledgement of Lebanese sovereignty. But this is a false perception.

Syria's announcement was not a sign of moderation by Damascus but a sign of radicalization. Syria has not accepted Lebanon's sovereignty. It has accepted Iranian dominion over Lebanon. And in accepting Iran's control of Lebanon, Assad effectively acknowledged that today Syria is nothing more than Iran's Arab vassal state.

Rather than stand up for Lebanon in its hour of need, Sarkozy joined forces with the Bush administration and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and pretended that Saniora and his pro-democracy forces are still in charge of the country. He pressured Israel to give Mt. Dov to Iranian-controlled Lebanon in spite of the fact that the territory is both vital to Israel's security and is part of the Golan Heights. And rather than boycott Syria for its role in destroying Lebanon, Sarkozy chose to embrace Assad as a peacemaker.

By doing all of this, Sarkozy argued he would place himself in a position of acting as an honest broker in talks between Israel and Syria. But of course like Solana in his constant struggle to find the right mix of concessions to convince Iran to only enrich small quantities of uranium, so Sarkozy's concessions to Syria served only to embolden Assad still further.

Assad agreed to come to Paris. But he refused to have anything to do with Olmert. And then, once he arrived in Paris, he gave an interview to Al-Jazeera explaining that he wouldn't sign a peace treaty with Israel even if it gives him the entire Golan Heights. As far as he is concerned, Israel has no right to expect him to normalize relations. And of course Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah al-Islam and all the rest of the terror groups living in Damascus are simply "resistance" groups and perfectly legitimate. And by the way, Iran, he assured us, is not developing nuclear bombs to the best of his knowledge.

So in exchange for recognizing the new Iranian-controlled regime in Lebanon and embracing Syria to the bosom of civilized nations, Sarkozy provided Assad with an international bullhorn to oppose everything that Sarkozy claims to be interested in achieving. But now that he's embraced engagement as his chosen strategy for dealing with Syria and Lebanon, he can do nothing but proceed with what he started. And so he committed himself to paying a state visit to Damascus by September.

Neither Sarkozy nor Solana are at all unique. Their associates in Europe, Olmert and his ministers, the State Department and most US political leaders support negotiating with rogue regimes that refuse to agree to anything except the West's need to make more concessions to them. And all of these leaders, at a certain point, have claimed that those negotiations mustn't be endangered by more confrontational policies that might actually have a chance of advancing their national interests.

Our world: How Lebanon was lost

Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

May. 12, 2008

Hizbullah's successful overthrow of the pro-democracy forces in Lebanon this past week was eminently foreseeable. But that doesn't make the violent overthrow of the forces of freedom in that country any less of a tragedy. And the fact that Hizbullah's coup was predictable does not mean that it was inevitable.

A great many forces had to turn their backs on Lebanon's democratic forces in order to enable Hizbullah's easy triumph. A great many actors had to turn a blind eye to Hizbullah's Iranian and Syrian-financed rearmament over the past two years. A great many actors had to ignore and so exacerbate the inherent weaknesses of the March 14 movement and the Saniora government it produced. A great many countries and international bodies had to accept the fiction that the Lebanese military takes its orders from the elected Lebanese government.

And alas, over the past two years, most of the supposedly pro-democracy, anti-Iranian, anti-Syrian and anti-Hizbullah governments of the world have turned blind eyes to all these things and so paved the way for Hizbullah's takeover of the country.

Three years ago, backed by the US, the one-and-a-half-million-member strong March 14 movement successfully shamed Syria into withdrawing its military forces from Lebanon and so ended their 18-year occupation of the country. As of Monday morning, the March 14 movement's leaders were effectively Hizbullah prisoners. Sa'ad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt, as well as Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, had publicly submitted to Hizbullah's humiliating conditions for a ceasefire.

Jumblatt has been the March 14 movement's gadfly opposing Lebanon's steady transformation into an Iranian-Syrian proxy through Hizbullah. Sunday he laid bare the powerlessness of the movement when he begged Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah to spare his followers in the Shouf Mountains. Speaking under Hizbullah siege from his home in Beirut, Jumblatt said in a television interview, "Through the LBC I address Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: If you have a personal issue with me, that's fine. But we cannot allow attacks on the people of Al-Jabel [i.e. Druse villagers in the mountains around the capital city]. We must all work for a ceasefire with the army, and leave personal issues aside."

Jumblatt made his plea for the lives of his people after he was obliged to instruct them to lay down their weapons and place their faith in the Lebanese army on Sunday afternoon. Yet the army, under the command of General Michel Suleiman has refused to protect them. Apparently Hizbullah's campaign against the Druse is a vicious one. For Sunday, even Hizbullah's Druse collaborator Mir Talal Arslan requested that the Lebanese army intervene. For their part, Jumblatt's followers in the Shouf mountains were waging a desperate defense of their villages and pleading with the world for assistance. So far, no one has answered their calls.

OBVIOUSLY, JUMBLATT knew that he couldn't trust Suleiman's army. If he had, he wouldn't have begged Nasrallah to have mercy on his people. And he was right, for since Hizbullah began its violent takeover of Lebanon last Wednesday, it has done so with the full cooperation of the Lebanese army. When Hizbullah forces raided, set fire to and destroyed Hariri's Future News newspaper offices and Future TV station, they did so with Lebanese army escort. Suleiman's forces did not reopen Hariri's pro-democracy media outlets after they ordered Hizbullah forces to leave the streets of Beirut over the weekend. They did not confront Hizbullah forces in Tripoli or Tyre. And now they are allowing the Druse to be destroyed.

And of course, the Shi'ite-dominated Lebanese army rendered Hizbullah the victor in its coup when the generals announced they would not carry out the Saniora government's anti-Hizbullah decisions from last Tuesday. The army reinstated sacked Hizbullah agent Brigadier General Wafiq Shuqeir to his position as head of security at Beirut's Hariri International Airport. It similarly bowed to Hizbullah by announcing it would take no action to shut down Hizbullah's independent telecommunications system, which is run by Iran and linked to Syrian intelligence.

Suleiman's collaboration with Hizbullah is not new. It was exposed during the 2006 war with Israel. Lebanese forces actively assisted Hizbullah forces in their war with Israel. They painted Israeli targets for Hizbullah missile squads. They collaborated in Hizbullah's missile attack on the INS Hanit. They paid pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in the war.

Since 2006, Lebanese military forces deployed along the border with Israel under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 have reported IDF movements to Hizbullah. They have enabled Hizbullah to transfer arms and deploy fighters to the villages bordering Israel. They have permitted Iran and Syria to transfer massive quantities of arms to Hizbullah throughout the country. These arms transfers enabled Hizbullah's missile arsenal to triple in size from pre-war levels.

Then too, there was Suleiman's supposedly successful campaign against Syrian-backed al-Qaida forces in Nahar el Bared refugee camp last summer. Suleiman allowed the fighting to go on for 33 days rather than storming the camp. He allowed most of the Syrian-backed, al-Qaida-affiliated Fatah al Islam terrorists - including their commander Shaker al Abssi - to run away to Syria.

WITH THIS history, it should have been clear long ago to anyone paying attention that far from being a national institution which serves Lebanon's democratically elected government, the Lebanese army is just another militia. And it also should have been clear that in the absence of a loyal, subservient army, the Saniora government was little more than a lobbying group.

Yet many colluded to ignore this reality. First of course there is Israel. The Olmert-Livni government has upheld Resolution 1701 and its prescribed deployment of the Lebanese army to the border with Israel as their crowning achievement in office. They have to maintain the fiction that the Shi'ite-dominated Lebanese army opposes Hizbullah control over Lebanon in order to keep up the appearance that Resolution 1701 was a good deal for Israel.

Moreover, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have upheld the fiction that UNIFIL's 15,000 ground forces and naval detachment are actually deployed in South Lebanon to defend the Lebanese government and Israel from Hizbullah and to prevent Hizbullah's rearmament and redeployment. In line with this fantasy, rather than take effective action to prevent Hizbullah's rolling takeover of Lebanon, Livni and Olmert have sufficed with issuing complaints to the UN regarding Hizbullah's massive rearmament and redeployment along the border. Again, actually contending with reality would involve acknowledging their own incompetence.

At the outset of the war two years ago, Olmert announced rightly that Israel held the Saniora government responsible for Hizbullah's aggression. Olmert's announcement was reasonable because at the time, Hizbullah was a full member of the Saniora government which effectively acted as Hizbullah's mouthpiece. Yet the US would have none of it.

In the early days of the war, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanded that Israel take no action against the Saniora government which she claimed - wrongly - was a credible US ally. Largely as a consequence of Rice's demand, and of the Olmert-Livni government's refusal to target Hizbullah and Hamas training and logistical bases in Syria, the Olmert-Livni government's plan for fighting against Hizbullah lost its strategic rationale. From then on, Israel's defeat was just a matter of time.

AFTER THE war, the US was given an opportunity to actually support democratic, anti-Iranian-Syrian forces in Lebanon by supporting the Saniora government when Hizbullah abruptly bolted the ruling coalition and backed by Iran and Syria attempted to take control of the government by assassination and terror.

The US could have taken action against Syria or Iran. But instead it sought to appease Iran and Syria in the hopes that they would temper their support for insurgents in Iraq. The pinnacle of this US abandonment of the March 14 movement was Rice's decision to invite Syria to participate in her peace confab at Annapolis last November.

Both the US and Israel's silent acquiescence to Iran's takeover of Lebanon through Hizbullah complements their acceptance of Iran's takeover of Gaza through Hamas.

Again, in an effort to hide the failure of their signature policy of withdrawing IDF forces from Gaza and expelling 10,000 Israeli civilians from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005, the Olmert-Livni government has refused to take action against Hamas's Iranian backed regime in Gaza. Then too, just as it protected Hizbullah during the 2006 war by siding with Saniora, who was then keeping house with Nasrallah, so too, today, the US protects Hamas by siding with Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas who kept house with Hamas until Hamas threw him out of the house last summer and who has been desperately seeking to reunite with Hamas ever since.

With Egypt's Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman's visit to Israel Monday, the Olmert-Livni government exposed the depth of its recognition of the Hamas regime in Gaza. Suleiman came to present the government with the ceasefire agreement Egypt has negotiated with Hamas. The agreement will bar the IDF from overthrowing Iran's Palestinian proxy and enable Hamas to keep its Iranian armed, trained and funded army. Hamas's Katyusha rocket attack on Ashkelon Monday morning signaled clearly where that ceasefire will lead.

And yet, the Olmert-Livni government embraces it. And the Bush administration supports it.

During his festive visit to Israel this week, President George W. Bush is expected to celebrate the US's strategic alliance with the Jewish state. It is a great tragedy that the strategies this alliance has advanced in recent years have paved the way for Lebanon's demise and for Israel's encirclement by Iranian proxies.

The tragedy is only heightened by the fact that this outcome was eminently avoidable.

Column One: Whitewashing Hamas

Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST May. 1, 2008

Another ordinary week has come and gone in southern Israel. Bombarded by rockets from Hamastan in Gaza, residents of Sderot, Ashkelon and nearby towns watched as their national leaders conducted negotiations by proxy with Hamas to release hundreds of terrorists in Israeli jails and consolidate Hamas's weapons supply lines by suspending Israeli counter-terror operations during a "cease-fire." Between trips to the local bomb shelter, they watched Israeli trucks deliver fuel and supplies to Hamas in Gaza in the morning and they watched Hamas store the fuel and supplies in depots near the border in the afternoon. In the evening they watched news reports echoing Hamas's claims that Israel is depriving Gazan hospitals of fuel and Gazan civilians of basic foodstuffs.

Wednesday night they tried having a Yom Hashoah ceremony in Sderot but it was interrupted by incoming rockets. For its part, Hamas marked the Holocaust with a documentary series claiming that the genocide of European Jewry was a satanic Jewish plot to cull the Jewish population of its handicapped and to manipulate the world media.

Hamas captured headlines this week with its allegation that Israel was responsible for the death of a Palestinian woman and four of her children in an explosion in Bet Hanoun in Gaza as the IDF targeted Hamas terrorists from the air. The IDF conducted two investigations showing that the woman and her children were killed by something else: a secondary explosion caused by bombs the Hamas terrorists - one of whom was her husband - were carrying at the time the IDF targeted them.

Hamas's allegations that the IDF killed four children and their mother were reported by both the international and Israeli media as facts. Those "facts" were only questioned when the IDF began its probes. Neither the local media nor the international media thought the fact that the source of their accounts was Hamas should make them question the veracity of the initial reports.

When its spokesmen are not busy accusing Jews of planning genocide and Israel of killing mothers and children, Hamas devotes its efforts to accusing Israel of killing sick Palestinians by refusing to let them into Israel for free medical care. As no good deed by Jews goes unpunished by the UN, early last month the World Health Organization punished Israel for admitting more than 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza for free medical care during 2007. Echoing Hamas propaganda, the WHO accused Israel of causing the deaths of 33 sick Palestinians between October 2007 and March 2008. They died, the WHO claimed, due to the Jewish state's heartless refusal to allow them into its hospitals.

The WHO report made no mention of the fact that Hamas now controls the hospitals and clinics in Gaza. No mention was made of the fact that Israel bears no responsibility for providing health care to non-citizens from enemy territories, or of the fact that there is no place in the world where such care is provided other than Israel. No mention was made of Hamas intercepting and hoarding hospital supplies for propaganda purposes. No responsibility was assigned to Egypt - the other country bordering Gaza - which does not admit any Palestinian patients. The report never questioned the credibility of its Gazan sources.

As Andrea Levin, the executive director for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) noted this week in The Jerusalem Post, it was only due to the quick and detailed response of Israeli officials refuting Hamas's allegations that Israel wasn't widely condemned for murdering sick people.

The most interesting aspect of these media reports is that for the most part, the news agencies reporting Hamas's wild allegations don't even have correspondents in Gaza. Hamas's habit of kidnapping Western - even pro-Hamas - reporters caused most Western media outlets to remove their correspondents from Gaza more than a year ago. The Israeli media have not had correspondents on the ground since Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005.

Yet the same media outlets that realized Hamas is too radical to be trusted to respect their own reporters' lives refuse to question the veracity of Hamas's stories and are more than willing to credit these stories as fact well past the point of professional embarrassment. Indeed, no media outlet - either Israeli or foreign - has ever asked whether it even makes sense to run Hamas's propaganda in the first place. They have certainly not bothered to inform their audiences that the source of their stories is a genocidal terror group that is currently waging a missile campaign against Israeli civilians whose goal is to terrorize and kill them just because they are Jewish.

BUT THEN, the media can perhaps be forgiven for their refusal to admit that their reports from Gaza are generally nothing more than terrorist propaganda for they are far from alone in their refusal to acknowledge the significance of Hamas's regime. From Jimmy Carter to the Bush administration to the Olmert-Livni-Barak government, denial is the order of the day.

Carter defends his decision to meet with Hamas's leaders in Syria and Judea by noting that the jihadist, genocidal, Iranian-sponsored terror group won the Palestinian elections. Since a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas and still support it, the jihadist, genocidal, Iranian-sponsored terror group is legitimate, Carter argues. Certainly no peace agreement can be reached without it.

But then as Hamas clarified just after its leaders met with Carter, any deal it may reach with Israel is merely a tactic in its ongoing war to destroy Israel. So while it may be true that no Palestinian-Israeli peace is possible without Hamas, it is absolutely true that no Palestinian-Israeli peace is possible with Hamas.

Far from demonstrating the necessity of negotiating with Hamas, Hamas's popularity shows the futility of attempting to coax peaceful coexistence out of a Palestinian society committed to its neighbor's destruction. Yet just as the media and Carter refuse to acknowledge the significance of Hamas's terror regime, so the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge the significance of its broad-based popular support among Palestinians.

In her remarks Tuesday before the American Jewish Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that Palestinian society today overwhelmingly supports Israel's annihilation through terrorism when she said: "Increasingly, Palestinians who talk about a two-state solution are my age. And I'm not that old, but I'm a lot older than most of the Palestinian population."

But then, after acknowledging that most Palestinians do not support peaceful coexistence with Israel, Rice argued that Israel must give them more land, more guns and more money because as she sees it, now is the time for a Palestinian state and leaders need to "make hard decisions confidently for the sake of peace and for the sake of their people."

Rice went on to explain that this appeasement must be done while enabling the Hamas regime in Gaza to remain in place. As she put it, "The only responsible policy is to isolate Hamas and defend against its threats, until Hamas makes the choice that supports peace."

So from Rice's perspective, not only must Hamas not be defeated, it would be irresponsible to even try to defeat it. The only "responsible" policy for Israel is to allow Hamas to continue stockpiling arms and building its army while trying to reach a cease-fire with it. Then too, as far as Rice is concerned, Israel must curb its counterterrorist operations in Judea and Samaria, dry out Israeli communities there and in post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhoods and allow US-trained and armed Fatah militias (who are also terror-supporting) to deploy in Palestinian towns and cities by the thousands. This, she believes, is the best way to make Hamas transform itself into a peaceful political party willing to live at peace with Jews.

AS FOR Israel, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government clearly agrees with Rice, for it is following her policy.

Wednesday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refused to comment on his government's involvement in cease-fire talks with Hamas during the security cabinet meeting. When pointedly confronted by Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter about his apparent decision to allow Hamas to remain in charge of Gaza with its Iranian trained and armed terror army, Olmert simply said that it would be inappropriate to discuss such things.

Thursday, The Jerusalem Post reported that the government is enthusiastic about the proposed cease-fire agreement with Hamas, strangely claiming that it may pave the way for a second and unrelated agreement in which Israel ransoms hostage Gilad Schalit from Hamas captivity by releasing hundreds of terrorists.

Then too, the government claims triumphantly that Hamas has agreed to have Fatah forces deploy at the international border with Egypt. But since both Hamas and Fatah enjoyed a nearly unimpeded flow of weaponry through that border when Fatah was responsible for it, it is far from clear why this would be a positive development.

The simple truths that the media, Jimmy Carter, the Bush administration, and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government are all unwilling to acknowledge are that Hamas is a genocidal terror group sworn to Israel's destruction and that it represents the will of the majority of Palestinians who elected it to office in 2006 and who continue to support it today.

This plain reality demonstrates that there is only one responsible policy for Israel to follow and for the international community to support if they are truly interested in peace between Israel and the Palestinians. That policy is for Israel to lay waste to Hamas's terror army in Gaza and overthrow its regime. Only when they are forced to pay a real price for their support for terror and jihad - as opposed to being rewarded for it with further Israeli land giveaways - will the Palestinians be forced to reconsider that support. Only when they realize that terror will get them nowhere - as opposed to anywhere they wish - will the Palestinians be forced to accept Israel as an unchanging reality with which they must live in peace.

Dichter's condemnation Wednesday of his government's pro-Hamas policies was not the first time the Ashkelon resident and former head of the Shin Bet has argued that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's policies are dangerous for the country. And Dichter, together with Transportation Minister and former defense minister Shaul Mofaz, who has similarly criticized the government's policies as dangerous, could end the current situation if they had the courage to act on their convictions. Were they to band together with eight of their colleagues in Kadima's Knesset faction and leave the government, they would bring on new elections.

Yet so far, they have refused to take action. Until they do, Dichter, Mofaz and their colleagues are enabling Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak to continue endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israelis through their bluster and appeasement of Hamas. Until they do, they are as guilty as the media, Carter, the Bush administration and their government colleagues of whitewashing and protecting Hamas to the detriment of their country and to the cause of peace.

Our World: America's coalition confusion

Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Mar. 31, 2008

A core question arises from last weekend's Arab League summit in Damascus. Boycotted by half the league's members, the conference demonstrated the depth of Egyptian and Saudi opposition to Iran's rise to prominence in the Arab world. So too, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki's ostentatious participation at the summit showed the strength of Iran's strategic ties with Syria.

The question that arises from the summit is if Egypt and Saudi Arabia are willing to discard even the semblance of Arab unity in order to make clear their opposition to Iran, why do they support Hamas?

Hamas is an Iranian proxy. It receives its arms, training and orders from Teheran. Its leaders reside in Syria. Given their open opposition to Iran, and their increasingly open opposition to Syria as Iran's client, wouldn't it make more sense - from their perspective - to boycott Hamas?

The reason that Egypt and Saudi Arabia support Hamas in spite of its client relationship with Teheran is that for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, support for Palestinian terrorists trumps opposition to Iran. If they are forced to choose between fighting Iran and collaborating with Iran in support of Palestinian terrorists, they will always choose the latter. This is why they are spearheading negotiations between Fatah and Hamas towards the reestablishment of a Fatah-Hamas unity government. This is why Egypt enables Hamas and Iran to use its territory as their weapons supply route.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia think supporting the Palestinians is more important than fighting Iran because the Palestinians fight Israel. As the heads of the so-called "moderate Arab" camp, Egypt and Saudi Arabia hate the Jews more than they fear the Iranians.

The central question then for policymakers in Washington who are trying to deploy a successful strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and asserting regional predominance is how can the Palestinian war with Israel be defused so that the "moderate" Arab states will be forced to join them in confronting Iran?

THE CONSENSUS answer that the US has come up with is to pressure Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians. It is argued that such concessions will appease not just the Palestinians, but more importantly, they will appease the US's "moderate" Arab supporters in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. As this thinking goes, if Israel can be forced to cough up big enough concessions quickly enough, then the Palestinians will quiet down and the Egyptians and Saudis will be sufficiently satisfied with the "progress" being made to direct their attentions to confronting Iran.

This argument was elucidated this week by Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in an interview with the Jewish Exponent. Clinton claimed that the Oslo negotiating process between the PLO and Israel which her husband embraced as his central Middle East policy from 1993 through 2000 brought levels of violence down between Israel and the Palestinians and so engendered regional stability.

In her words, "I think what we did in the '90s was beneficial in a strategic way and led to a period where, at times, there were no attacks being made, no suicide bombings and no deaths." She then went on to criticize the Bush administration which during its first term in office did not pressure Israel to restart negotiations towards Palestinian statehood with the PLO. Clinton added that she would consider opening negotiations with Hamas if she is elected president.

Clinton's argument is notable for two reasons. First, it accurately reflects not only her view, but the view now being pushed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her bimonthly visits to Israel. As she made apparent in her visit to Israel this week, Rice believes that the only way to reach an agreement is for Israel to empower Fatah and give Hamas a pass. So too, in her clear support for Egypt's negotiations with Hamas, Rice shows that the Bush administration is already holding indirect negotiations with Hamas.

THE SECOND reason that Clinton's argument is notable is because it has been so obviously disproven by reality. During the years that her husband was applying massive pressure on Israel to appease the Palestinians, terror levels against Israel eclipsed anything Israel had seen since the 1950s. In the 15 years which preceded the 1993 Oslo accord, 216 Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks. In the seven years of the Oslo peace process, 286 Israelis were killed. Indeed, it was only in 1994, when Israel was first transferring territory to PLO control and the Palestinian Authority was building its armies that Israel suffered its first suicide bombing.

During the six years of the Palestinian uprising from 1987-1993, 172 Israelis were killed. During the first six years of the Palestinian terror war against Israel which Oslo produced, more than 1,100 Israelis were killed. Violence levels dropped not because of peace talks, but because of Israeli offensive operations against the Palestinians.

As Yasser Arafat told Palestinian audiences throughout the 1990s, his goal in the Oslo process was to gain the military and political means to continue his war against Israel. Arafat's confidante Faisal Husseini made this Palestinian perspective explicit with the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000. Speaking to the Arab media, Husseini said that for the Palestinians, the Oslo process was a "Trojan horse" against Israel. They came to Israel bearing the promise of peace with the premeditated aim of using Israel's willingness to make peace as a means of launching a new round of war whose aim was the political and military destruction of the Jewish state.

THE OSLO process which Clinton praises and Rice apes with her Annapolis process brought the Palestinian issue, which had been buried throughout much of the 1980s to the forefront of the pan-Arab social consciousness and political agenda. This it did to the detriment of other salient issues like Iran's steps towards regional hegemony, Egyptian and Saudi repression of liberal forces in their countries, and, during the 1990s, Saddam Hussein's systematic breach of UN Security Council sanctions.

Here it is worth noting that the pinnacle of US success in building an Arab coalition against a rogue state came in 1990. The Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which saw the entire Arab world united with the US against a fellow-Arab regime, came not in the midst of a Palestinian-Israeli peace process. It came when there were no diplomatic negotiations whatsoever between Israel and the Palestinians or between Israel and any state.

THERE ARE two principal reasons that the advent of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations weakened pan-Arab interest in working with the US against common threats. First, because the Oslo process empowered terrorists, terror attacks increased. Each terror attack received massive, supportive coverage in the Arab media.

Second, since the Oslo process placed terrorists in charge of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, the Palestinians found themselves ruled by murderers who had no interest in economic development and opposed liberalization and democracy. As a consequence, the Palestinian economic situation went from one of sustained growth to one of massive depredation. The footage of Palestinian terror attacks and Palestinian economic privation shown daily in the pan-Arab media eclipsed coverage of every other issue. And since the US is viewed as Israel's ally, it engendered unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world.

So if the Palestinian-centric model embraced by the US to build an Arab coalition against Iran works precisely to undermine such a coalition by bringing to the forefront the one issue that the Arabs and the Iranians agree on, what would an alternative model of policymaking look like?

The Achilles heel of the US's current strategy is its reliance on Egyptian and Saudi support. Since Egypt and Saudi Arabia prefer fighting Israel to confronting Iran, a better policy for confronting Iran would be to base a US coalition on states that prefer fighting Iran to fighting Israel. Regionally, Israel, Lebanon and Iraq fit this model.

IF THE US were to shore up these allies and stiffen their resolve to confront Iran rather than divert its attention to a policy which simply serves to galvanize Arab attention and energies against Israel and away from Iran, the US would pose a more imposing threat to Iran. It would also push the Iranian threat to the forefront of political discourse in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Such a revised policy would involve not only shoring up Israeli, Iraqi and Lebanese willingness to confront Iran and Syria. It would also involve scaling back US involvement in the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Such a scaling back could only be successful if at the same time as it disengaged from the negotiations process between Israel and Fatah, Washington also gave Israel a green light to defeat Hamas in Gaza. Such an Israeli operation would both end the specter of an Iranian takeover of Judea and Samaria and remove Iran's ability to reignite the Palestinian conflict at will.

Obviously, to advance such a policy option, the US would have to confront an Israeli government that has embraced the incorrect logic of the current failed strategy of winning Arab support for confronting Iran by forcing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. So too, it would have to confront an Iraqi government that is afraid to confront Iran, and a UN that seems to have abandoned its previous willingness to acknowledge Syria's culpability for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

It would also have to ensure that Israel's military defeat at the hands of Iran and Hizbullah in 2006 will not repeat itself. That defeat enabled Hizbullah to reassert its control over south Lebanon and acquire an even more sophisticated arsenal than it had two years ago.

Replacing the current failed strategy of squeezing Israel in the hopes of winning the support of unreliable Arab allies for confronting Iran will no doubt be a controversial move. It will win the Bush administration no fast friends in Europe or on American university campuses. It will even anger the Israeli Left which now sues for peace with Syria.

The only advantage to be had from basing America's strategy towards Iran on building a US-led anti-Iranian coalition comprised of states that prefer to fight Iran than to fight Israel is that such a policy has the potential of actually ending Iran's increased domination of the Middle East and of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Our World: Bush's historical parallels

Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Jan. 7, 2008

During his tenure as President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld often likened the administration's foreign policy decisions to those of the Truman administration during the first years of the Cold War. As President George W. Bush makes his way to Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states with a stated agenda of advancing the goal of Palestinian statehood, it is worth examining president Truman's achievements and comparing them with those of President Bush.

President Harry S Truman was in some ways an accidental president. Elected vice president in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fourth term in office, he assumed the presidency when Roosevelt died in April 1945, a month before the Allied victory in Europe and four months before the surrender of Imperial Japan.

As the war wound down, Truman was quick to understand the threat that Soviet imperialism and communist ideology posed to US national security. A world dominated by communism was a world in which America, as the beacon of human freedom and liberty, could not be safe. Consequently, he recognized that the rising Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US would be the defining contest of the postwar era.

DURING HIS tenure, Truman established the instruments of government and international affairs which, in the years to come, would counter and contain the Soviet threat. He also took military action to begin to combat the Soviets with the intention of rolling back Soviet domination of East-Central Europe and preventing the Soviet Union from expanding its influence globally.

Truman established the Defense Department, the National Security Council, the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. He set forth the Truman Doctrine, which prevented Soviet domination of Greece and Turkey and stemmed the political advance of the communists in France and Italy. He established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to provide for the military defense of Western Europe. Through the Marshall Plan, he enabled the postwar economic recovery of Western Europe.

Militarily, Truman conducted the Berlin airlift to ensure the economic development of western Germany as the anchor of postwar Western European unity against the Soviets. He also waged the Korean War to contain communist expansion in Asia.

After the Soviets surprised the US with their acquisition of the atom bomb in 1949, Truman moved speedily to test the hydrogen bomb. Moreover, quick to realize that with the advent of Soviet nuclear power the US could no longer rely simply on its nuclear deterrent to fight the Soviets, Truman revamped and expanded US conventional forces which had been largely scrapped in the rapid demobilization after World War II.

ON THE IDEOLOGICAL and political front, Truman worked to educate the American people about the threat of communism and took steps to root out Soviet agents from the US government. Truman also set up the infrastructure to combat the Soviets in a war of ideas inside of the Soviet bloc. He founded Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty which brought American ideals, culture and credible news directly into the Soviet Union and Soviet-controlled East-Central Europe.

Beyond all that, Truman willingly took on his foreign policy bureaucracy when he felt that its members were wrong. Against the virulent opposition of his popular secretary of state George Marshall and what Truman referred to as the "striped pants conspirators" in the State Department, he recognized the State of Israel.

By the time he left office, then, Truman had ensured that the US had the institutional wherewithal and the political and ideological will to fight the Cold War, and had upheld the principle of presidential control over US foreign policy.

LIKE TRUMAN, Bush too was in some respects an accidental president. His electoral victory in the 2000 presidential race came despite his failure to win the popular vote. Like Truman also, Bush has been forced to contend with a foreign policy establishment openly hostile to his stated foreign policy objectives. Truman left office with the lowest popularity ratings in modern US history. The war in Korea was overwhelmingly unpopular and his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, based his campaign for office on his pledge to take US forces out of Korea.

Although Bush was considered a foreign policy lightweight when he entered office, the September 11, 2001 jihadist attacks on America made it clear that foreign policy would dominate his presidency. And, like Truman, Bush's legacy would be determined by his conduct of the war against the new epochal struggle with Islamic fascism and global jihad.

Bush clearly understands this. In his interviews with the Israeli and Arab media ahead of his trip to the Middle East this week, Bush claimed that, like Truman in his day, he hopes that history will remember him as the leader who clearly identified the threats of the 21st century and set up the institutional, military and ideological foundations for the current epochal struggle.

Yet although the historical parallels between Bush and Truman are clear, unlike Truman, Bush has not yet struck a clear course for fighting the war and so, with a year left in office, he has not ensured that those who follow him will have either the administrative and international tools to fight the war, or the ideological and political clarity to understand that the war with Islamic fascism is in fact the central security challenge of the new century.

Since September 11, Bush has made numerous speeches that have indicated that he does indeed grasp the challenges of our times. In a speech before the National Endowment for Democracy in October 2005 for instance the president said, "The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century."

In that address and several others like it, Bush argued that jihadists must be denied control over any territory; that there can be no distinction between jihadists and their state sponsors - both have to be defeated - and that the message of democracy and human liberty has to be communicated clearly in an ideological war against those preaching jihad.

Bush eschewed appeasement, claiming, "No act of ours invited the rage of the killers - and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

"On the contrary: They target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence. Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory."

Yet speeches like this one have been in large part superseded by the president's actions. With al-Qaida and the Taliban resurgent in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with Iraq's borders with Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia still unsecured, the president's sometimes assertive definition of the road to victory has been largely obscured by bumps in that road.

THEN TOO, although Bush, like Truman, set out to form institutional tools to fight the long struggle against the forces of jihad, these institutions have done little to advance the cause. The Department of Homeland Security has not stymied the strength of Islamic agents of subversion in the US. And the National Intelligence Directorate has caused grave harm to Bush's foremost objective of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In what has been cast as a bureaucratic assault on presidential power to determine US foreign policy, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran stripped Bush of the political capacity to act forthrightly to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Defense Department's decision last week to sack Stephen Coughlin, the only expert on Islamic law in the Pentagon's joint staff, because his documented report on American Muslim institutional support for jihad angered pro-Muslim forces in the Pentagon, is another indication that the foreign policy bureaucracy is successfully scuttling the president's agenda.

Most important, though, is the fact that the new centerpiece of Bush's foreign policy agenda is to establish a Palestinian state. Bush's support for Palestinian statehood, stated first just two months after 9/11, has always been difficult to square with his recognition of the global jihad and its radical Islamic ideology as the central challenges of our age.

After all, when America was attacked the Palestinians were entering the second year of their jihad against Israel. The Palestinians greeted those attacks with open delight. And now, after the Palestinian people popularly elected Hamas to lead them and transformed Gaza into an operating base for global terrorists; while Fatah leaders like Mahmoud Abbas refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state and official Fatah security forces wantonly murder Israeli civilians, Bush's main foreign policy goal in his last year in office is to establish a Palestinian state.

WHILE BUSH argues that the Palestinians have to be shown what they can achieve if they eschew terror and accept Israel, he never mentions what price they must pay for their continued, open support for Israel's destruction and support for and involvement in the global jihad. In his treatment, then, of the Palestinian war against Israel and its central role in the global jihad, Bush has done more to undermine the coherence of his recognition of the challenges of the 21st century and his own legacy in shaping the free world's war against the forces of terror and jihad than anyone else.

Truman is today considered one of the great American presidents because his forthright clarity and consistent policies in office set the US on a steady course for victory against Soviet communism even as specific actions - like the Korean War - were deeply unpopular.

In his last year in office, Bush's central challenge is to clarify what he himself has allowed to become muddled about the nature of the current generational struggle. Unfortunately, though his commitment to Palestinian statehood, and his refusal to assert his own foreign policy against the wishes of a hostile bureaucracy, he calls to mind not Truman, but another American president who led his country at the cusp of another formative crisis. Like Bush, James Buchanan - the last president to serve before the Civil War - understood the nature of the gathering storm; yet rather than confront the dangers, he was overwhelmed by them.

http://israelbehindthenews.com/pdf/ModerateFatah.pdf

Column One: The rape of Israel

Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST

Jan. 3, 2008

Last Wednesday, New York's Jewish Week reported that the editor of Israel's self-described "newspaper of record" asked the US secretary of state to rape his country and told her that his erotic fantasy is to watch America rape Israel.

On September 10, at a dinner at the home of US Ambassador Richard Jones, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with a group of Israeli "elites." Among the elitists was Haaretz editor David Landau. According to the Jewish Week, Landau "referred to Israel as a "failed state" politically, one in need of a US-imposed settlement. He was said to have implored Rice to intervene, asserting that the Israeli government wanted "to be raped" and that it would be like a "wet dream" for him to see this happen.

When questioned by the paper, Landau claimed this account of his comments was inaccurate, but then confirmed saying that "Israel wants to be raped" into a settlement and that he told Rice it was his "wet dream" to address her on the issue. He added that several people came up to him afterwards and congratulated him for his remarks, claiming, "I articulated what many Israelis feel."

Actually, almost no Israelis feel what Landau expressed. But his views are shared by his newspaper and by a significant portion of the elitists who dominate the country.

The pro-rape crowd's influence, which rose after Israel's defeat in the war with Hizbullah in 2006, became decisive over the past few months as the date of the publication of the Winograd Committee of Inquiry's final report on the war approaches. The report, set to be issued later this month, is expected to find Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responsible for Israel's failure to defeat Iran's foreign legion in Lebanon.

To offset the public's demand for his resignation that the report will likely trigger, Olmert has worked overtime to woo the Landau crowd. To this end, he courts Syria, advocates Israel's withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem, and refuses to act against either Iran or the burgeoning Iranian-trained Hamas army in Gaza.

Then too, a week before George W. Bush's first presidential visit to Israel, Olmert gave an interview to The Jerusalem Post where he went out of his way to prove that Landau is right. His government does wish to be "raped" by the US.

Sounding more like a Palestinian spokesman than the leader of Israel, Olmert attacked his own country, claiming that it isn't abiding by its obligations to the terror-supporting Palestinians. In his words, "There is a certain contradiction... between what we're actually seeing and what we ourselves promised. We always complain about the [breached] promises of the other side. Obligations are not only to be demanded of others, but they must also be honored by ourselves."

Olmert argued that Israel must withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines with minor modifications, not because doing so will ensure peace with the Palestinians, but because if we don't we'll lose our Jewish majority.

The prime minister's contention is questionable for two basic reasons. First, the 1949 lines are not demographic borders but cease-fire lines. On the eastern side of the line live a half million Jews, and on the western side live one million Arabs. Second, the cease-fire lines are indefensible. So while not solving any demographic problem, withdrawing to the 1949 lines would imperil Israel militarily.

Beyond that, there is the fact that Olmert's dark demographic projections are based on falsified census data published by the Palestinian Authority in 1997. As the American-Israeli Demographic Research Group proved conclusively in January 2005, the PA's numbers were inflated by some 50 percent. Although demography is a problem, Israel is in no immediate danger of losing its Jewish majority.

The immediate danger Israel faces stems not from demography but from the ideology of jihad that has convinced the Arab and Islamic world to seek Israel's destruction rather than to accept it. Shrinking into indefensible borders will only exacerbate that problem by telling the jihadists that Israel can be destroyed through violence and terror.

Olmert also argued that Israel must give up its sovereignty over Jerusalem because Israel's supporters want it to. In his words, "The world that is friendly to Israel... that really supports Israel, when it speaks of the future, it speaks of Israel in terms of the '67 borders. It speaks of the division of Jerusalem."

So in an English-language interview a week before Bush's arrival in the country, Olmert essentially asked Israel's friend in the White House to pressure Israel to concede its vital national rights and interests.

In the same interview with the Post, Olmert acknowledged that his putative peace partner - Fatah leader and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas - does not recognize Israel's right to exist and demands the so-called "right of return" for millions of foreign descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948. But, he soothed, this is not a cause for worry.

Olmert's not worried, because he can see into Abbas's soul. As he put it, "If you ask [Abbas] to say that he sees Israel as a Jewish state, he will not say that. But if you ask me whether in his soul he accepts Israel, as Israel defines itself, I think he does."

For Olmert, intent as he is on securing the support of the pro-national rape crew, his faith in Abbas's peaceful soul is more important than the visible reality on the ground. And that reality is not merely reflected in the fact that Fatah and Hamas are rhetorically indistinguishable from one another. That reality is also reflected in the fact that the three Israelis murdered in the last six weeks - Ido Zoldan, David Rubin and Ahikam Amihai - were all killed by official, Abbas-commanded PA security forces.

The three terrorist murders show clearly that the PA itself, rather than Hamas, is the most lethal terrorist group in Palestinian society. And the same PA security organs involved in killing Israelis are funded and armed by Israel and the US - which together with the Europeans and the Russians also train them.

Rather than contend with this sordid reality, the Olmert government makes excuses for it. On Thursday, Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev told the Post that Israel will raise the involvement of PA security forces in the murder of Israelis with Bush, but Regev took pains to underplay the significance of the fact that the PA security forces themselves are the ones killing Israelis. He referred to the killers as "rogue, extremist elements inside the Fatah machine and the Palestinian security apparatus," and so sought to distance them from their leaders who encourage and celebrate their behavior.

Through their actions and statements, the Palestinians themselves show daily that there is no difference between Abbas and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, or between Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. None of them is interested in peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state - whatever they may or may not feel in their souls. Just as happened in Gaza, so in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem, any land that Israel transfers to their authority will be used as a base for operations against Israel. Any Israeli community relinquished will be transformed into terror training bases and missile launching pads.

But then, the reality of war doesn't have much to recommend itself under the looming specter of the Winograd Report. The only reality that interests Olmert is the reality of his quest to survive in office. And to stay in office, Olmert needs Landau and his friends. And so Israel's strategic straitjacket grows tighter by the day.

THIS WEEK, Iranian strongman Ali Larijani paid an official state visit to Egypt. He met not only with President Hosni Mubarak and Foreign Minister Ahmad Gheit, but with Egypt's chief cleric, the head of the Al Azhar Mosque and Islamic University Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi. During his visit, Larijani offered nuclear collaboration with Egypt. He also worked to settle religious disputes between Shi'ite and Sunni Islam to facilitate jihadist collaboration against the common enemies of all Muslims.

On the heels of Larijani's visit, Mubarak broke his pledge to Defense Minister Ehud Barak from a week ago not to allow the thousands of Hamas terrorists seeking to return to Gaza after traveling to Saudi Arabia to enter the Strip through the Rafah crossing, where Israel has no security presence. On Wednesday, the terrorists marched across the border unopposed. Some were reportedly carrying more than $100 million in cash that they received from Iran and Saudi Arabia. Others were returning after receiving military training in Iran.

The Olmert government had nothing to say about Egypt's open collusion with Israel's enemies. And how could it? Admitting that Egypt is an enemy state would harm the pro-national rape gang's peace narrative. For them, Egypt is the head of the "moderate camp." Rather than acknowledge this reality, Olmert showers Mubarak with praise. In his interview with the Post, he said, "When I even think of how things would be if we were dealing with people other than Mubarak, well, I pray every day for his well-being and good health."

The truth is that so far, Olmert's gambit has been successful. All of the public's attempts to force him to resign - over Lebanon, Gaza and allegations of Olmert's massive corruption - have been scuttled. Guarding their man, the pro-national rape camp has given little to no media backing to popular calls for his removal from office. Landau and his friends are fully willing to lose wars and to be led by morally impaired, incompetent leaders if doing so facilitates the international rape of their country.

Take for example Landau's Haaretz employee, columnist Yoel Marcus. In his December 14 column, Marcus called for Olmert to be forced from office. Just one week later, emphasizing the importance of the peace process, Marcus said that Olmert must stay in power after the Winograd Report is published.

There are officials in Washington who claim that Bush is angry at Olmert. They say Bush expected Olmert to stand up to Rice when she became overtly hostile to Israel in the leadup to the Annapolis conference. These officials argue that if Olmert were just to stand up to Rice, the president would finally have the opportunity to marginalize her.

It is hard to know what to make of this claim. Unfortunately, we won't see it tested any time soon. Controlled by the rape-Israel crowd, Olmert needs Rice's pressure. And so he told the Post that Bush, (and by extension Rice), is "not doing a single thing that I don't agree to. He doesn't support anything that I oppose."

Bush's first presidential visit to Israel could have been a great opportunity for the country. But in his interview with the Post, a week before Bush's arrival, Olmert made it clear that the visit will be a disaster. Whether Bush wants to or not, ahead of the publication of the Winograd Report, Olmert will leave him no choice. Bush will be forced to rape Israel.

Daniel Pipes

PLO Acknowledges: Still at War with Israel

by Daniel Pipes
Hudson Institute
October 28, 2008

Yasir Arafat may have shaken Yitzhak Rabin's hand in 1993 and signed solemn declarations about ending the war to eliminate Israel, but late last month, in a New York City courtroom, the Palestine Liberation Organization formally confirmed that it still sees terrorism against Israelis as legitimate acts of war.

The lawsuit, Sokolow v The Palestine Liberation Organization, brought by the intrepid David Strachman, alleges that the PLO carried out two machine-gun and five bombing attacks in the Jerusalem area between January 2001 and February 2004. The plaintiffs allege, in the words of U.S. District Judge George Daniels, that the PLO did so "intending to terrorize, intimidate, and coerce the civilian population of Israel into acquiescing to defendants' political goals and demands, and to influence the policy of the United States and Israeli governments in favor of accepting defendants' political goals and demands." The attacks killed 33 and wounded many more, some of them U.S. citizens; the victims and their families are seeking up to US$3 billion in damages from the PLO.

To this, the PLO, represented in part by none other than the appalling Ramsey Clark (who in a distant age, 1967-69, was attorney general of the United States), replied that the attacks were acts of war rather than terrorism. As Daniels summarizes the PLO argument: "defendants argue that subject matter jurisdiction is lacking because this action is premised on acts of war, which is barred under the ATA [Antiterrorism Act of 1991], and further is based on conduct which does not meet the statutory definition of ‘international terrorism'."

This response is noteworthy for two reasons: (1) Fifteen years after Oslo supposedly ended the state of war, four years after Mahmoud Abbas took over and supposedly improved on Arafat's abysmal record, the PLO publicly maintains it remains at war with Israel. (2) The PLO argues, even in the context of an American law court, that blatant, cruel, inhumane, and atrocious acts of murder constitute legitimate acts of warfare.

Judge Daniels rightly slammed the PLO's argument: "the Court finds that the attacks, as alleged to have occurred in the amended complaint, do not constitute acts of war nor do they, as a matter of law, fall outside the statutory definition of ‘international terrorism'." He went on to point out that civilians, not soldiers were the intended victims of these assaults:

There has been no showing that the situs of the attacks were in any combat or militarized zone, or were otherwise targeted at military or governmental personnel or interests. Rather, plaintiffs allege that the attacks were intentionally targeted at the civilian population. They were purportedly carried out at locations where non-combatants citizens would be known to congregate, such as in the cafeteria on the Hebrew University campus and on a commercial passenger bus.

Daniels went on, rising to an eloquence not frequently heard in district court decisions:

Additionally, the use of bombs, under such circumstances, is indicative of an intent to cause far-reaching devastation upon the masses. The "benefit" of such weaponry is its merciless capability of indiscriminately killing and maiming untold numbers in heavily populated civilian areas. Such claimed violent attacks upon non-combatant civilians, who were allegedly simply going about their everyday lives, do not constitute acts of war.

That the PLO justifies "merciless capability of indiscriminately killing and maiming untold numbers" suggests it remains the terrorist organization it has always been since its founding in 1964.

When will the diplomatic bright lights in Jerusalem and Washington figure this out?

Counting Islamists
by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
October 8, 2008

The recent distribution of some 28 million copies in the United States of the 2005 documentary Obsession has stirred heated debate about its contents. One lightening rod for criticism concerns my on-screen statement that "10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide support militant Islam."

"Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" (2005)

The Muslim Public Affairs Council declared this estimate both "utterly unsubstantiated" and "completely without evidence." Masoud Kheirabadi, a professor at Portland State University and author of children's books about Islam, informed the Oregonian newspaper that there's no basis for my estimate. Daniel Ruth, writing in the Tampa Tribune, asked dubiously how I arrived at this number. "Did he take a poll? That would be enlightening! What does ‘support' for radical Islam mean? Pipes provides no answers."

Actually, Pipes did provide answers. He collected and published many numbers at "How Many Islamists?" a weblog entry initiated in May 2005.

First, though, an explanation of what I meant by Muslims who "support militant Islam": these are Islamists, individuals who seek a totalistic, worldwide application of Islamic law, the Shari‘a. In particular, they seek to build an Islamic state in Turkey, replace Israel with an Islamic state and the U.S. constitution with the Koran.

As with any attitudinal estimate, however, several factors impede approximating the percentage of Islamists.

· How much fervor: Gallup polled over 50,000 Muslims across 10 countries and found that, if one defines radicals as those who deemed the 9/11 attacks "completely justified," their number constitutes about 7 percent of the total population. But if one includes Muslims who considered the attacks "largely justified," their ranks jump to 13.5 percent. Adding those who deemed the attacks "somewhat justified" boosts the number of radicals to 36.6 percent. Which figure should one adopt?

· Gauge voter intentions: Elections measure Islamist sentiment untidily, for Islamist parties erratically win support from non-Islamists. Thus, Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) won 47 percent in 2007 elections, 34 percent of the vote in 2002 elections, and its precursor, the Virtue Party, won just 15 percent in 1999. The Islamic Movement's northern faction won 75 percent of the vote in the Israeli Arab city of Umm el-Fahm in 2003 elections while Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization, won 44 percent of the vote in the Palestinian Authority in 2006. Which number does one select?

· What to measure: Many polls measure attitudes other than the application of Islamic law. Gallup looks at support for 9/11. The Pew Global Attitudes Project assesses support for suicide bombing. Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi security specialist, focuses on pro-Osama bin Laden views. Germany's domestic security agency, the Verfassungsschutz, counts membership in Islamist organizations. Margaret Nydell of Georgetown University calculates "Islamists who resort to violence."

· Inexplicably varying results: A University of Jordan survey revealed that large majorities of Jordanians, Palestinians, and Egyptians wish the Shari‘a to be the only source of Islamic law – but only one-third of Syrians. Indonesian survey and election results led R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani in 2003 to conclude that the number of Islamists "is no more than 15 percent of the total Indonesian Muslim population." In contrast, a 2008 survey of 8,000 Indonesian Muslims by Roy Morgan Research found 40 percent of Indonesians favoring hadd criminal punishments (such as cutting off the hands of thieves) and 52 per cent favoring some form of Islamic legal code.

The Islamic Supreme Council of America's Hisham Kabbani says 5-10 percent of American Muslims are extremists.

Given these complications, it is not surprising that estimates vary considerably. On the one hand, the Islamic Supreme Council of America's Hisham Kabbani says 5 to 10 percent of American Muslims are extremists and Daniel Yankelovich, a pollster, finds that "the hate-America Islamist fundamentalists … averages about 10 percent of all Muslims." On the other, reviewing ten surveys of British Muslim opinion, I concluded that "more than half of British Muslims want Islamic law and 5 percent endorse violence to achieve that end."

These ambiguous and contradictory percentages lead to no clear, specific count of Islamists. Out of a quantitative mish-mash, I suggested just three days after 9/11 that some 10-15 percent of Muslims are determined Islamists. Subsequent evidence generally confirmed that estimate and suggested, if anything, that the actual numbers might be higher.

Negatively, 10-15 percent suggests that Islamists number about 150 million out of a billion plus Muslims – more than all the fascists and communists who ever lived. Positively, it implies that most Muslims can be swayed against Islamist totalitarianism.

Appease Iran?

Sep. 24, 2008
Daniel Pipes , THE JERUSALEM POST

After Hitler, the policy of appeasing dictators - ridiculed by Winston Churchill as feeding a crocodile, hoping it will eat one last - appeared to be permanently discredited. Yet the policy has enjoyed some successes and remains a live temptation today in dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Academics have long challenged the facile vilification of appeasement. Already in 1961, A.J.P. Taylor of Oxford justified Neville Chamberlain's efforts, while Christopher Layne of Texas A&M currently argues that Chamberlain "did the best that he could with the cards he was dealt." Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at UCLA, finds the common presumption against appeasement to be "far too strong," while his University of Florida colleague Ralph B.A. Dimuccio calls it "simplistic."

Neville Chamberlain mistakenly declared "peace in our time" on September 30, 1938. In perhaps the most convincing treatment of the pro-appeasement thesis, Paul M. Kennedy, a British historian teaching at Yale University, established that appeasement has a long and credible history. In his 1976 article, "The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy, 1865-1939," Kennedy defined appeasement as a method of settling quarrels "by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise," thereby avoiding the horrors of warfare. It is, he noted, an optimistic approach, presuming humans to be reasonable and peaceful.

From the prime ministry of William Gladstone until its discrediting in the late 1930s, appeasement was, in Kennedy's description, a "perfectly respectable" term and even "a particularly British form of diplomacy" well suited to the country's character and circumstances. Kennedy found the policy had four quasi-permanent bases, all of which apply especially well to the United States today:

Moral: After the Evangelical movement swept England in the early 19th century, British foreign policy contained a strong urge to settle disputes fairly and non-violently.
Economic: As the world's leading trader, the United Kingdom had a vital national interest in avoiding disruptions to commerce, from which it would disproportionately suffer.
Strategic: Britain's global empire meant it was over-extended (making it, in Joseph Chamberlain's term, a "weary titan"); accordingly, it had to choose its battles sparingly, making compromise an accepted and routine way of dealing with problems.
Domestic: The extension of the franchise made public opinion a growing factor in decisionmaking, and the public did not care for wars, especially expensive ones.

As a result, for over seven decades, London pursued, with rare exceptions, a foreign policy that was "pragmatic, conciliatory, and reasonable." Again and again, the authorities found that "the peaceful settlement of disputes was much more to Britain's advantage than recourse to war." In particular, appeasement steadily influenced British policy vis-à-vis the United States (in relation to, for example, the Panama Canal, Alaska's borders, Latin America as a US sphere of influence) and Wilhelmine Germany (the "naval holiday" proposal, colonial concessions, restraint in relations with France).

Kennedy judges the policy positively, as serviceably guiding the foreign relations of the world's most powerful state for decades and "encapsulating many of the finer aspects of the British political tradition." If not a brilliant success, appeasement permitted London to accommodate the expanding influence of its non-ideological rivals such as the United States and Imperial Germany, which generally could be counted on to accept concessions without becoming inflamed. It thus slowed the UK's gentle decline.

POST-1917 AND the Bolshevik Revolution, however, concessions failed to mollify the new kind of ideologically-driven enemy - Hitler in the 1930s, Brezhnev in the 1970s, Arafat and Kim Jong-Il in the 1990s, and now, Khamene'i and Ahmadinejad. These ideologues exploit concessions and deceitfully offer a quid pro quo that they do not intend to fulfill. Harboring aspirations to global hegemony, they cannot be appeased. Concessions to them truly amount to feeding the crocodile.

However dysfunctional these days, appeasement abidingly appeals to the modern Western psyche, ineluctably arising when democratic states face aggressive ideological enemies. With reference to Iran, for example, George W. Bush may bravely have denounced "the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history," but Middle East Quarterly editor Michael Rubin rightly discerns in the realities of US policy that "now Bush is appeasing Iran."

Summing up, the policy of appeasement goes back a century and a half, enjoyed some success, and ever remains alive. But with ideological enemies it must consciously be resisted, lest the tragic lessons of the 1930s, 1970s, and 1990s be ignored. And repeated.

The writer is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Samir Kuntar and the Last Laugh

by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
July 21, 2008

Israel has lived the past sixty years more intensively than any other country.

Its highs – the resurrection of a two-thousand year old state in 1948, history's most lopsided military victory in 1967, and the astonishing Entebbe hostage rescue in 1976 – have been triumphs of will and spirit that inspire the civilized world. Its lows have been self-imposed humiliations: unilateral retreat from Lebanon and evacuation of Joseph's Tomb, both in 2000; retreat from Gaza in 2005; defeat by Hizbullah in 2006; and the corpses-for-prisoners exchange with Hizbullah last week.

An outsider can only wonder at the contrast. How can the authors of exhilarating victories repeatedly bring such disgrace upon themselves, seemingly oblivious to the import of their actions?

One clue has to do with the dates. The highs took place during the state's first three decades, the lows occurred since 2000. Something profound has changed. The strategically brilliant but economically deficient early state has been replaced by the reverse. Yesteryear's spy masterminds, military geniuses, and political heavyweights have seemingly gone into high tech, leaving the state in the hands of corrupt, short-sighted mental midgets.

How else can one account for the cabinet meeting on June 29, when 22 out of 25 ministers voted in favor of releasing five live Arab terrorists, including Samir al-Kuntar, 45, a psychopath and the most notorious prisoner in Israel's jails, plus 200 corpses? In return, Israel got the bodies of two Israel soldiers murdered by Hizbullah. Even The Washington Post wondered at this decision.

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert endorsed the deal on the grounds that it "will bring an end to this painful episode," a reference to retrieving the bodies of war dead and appeasing the hostages' families demand for closure. In themselves, both are honorable goals, but at what price? This distortion of priorities shows how a once-formidably strategic country has degenerated into a supremely sentimental country, a rudderless polity where self-absorbed egoism trumps raison d'être. Israelis, fed up with deterrence and appeasement alike, have lost their way.

Appalling as the cabinet decision was, worse yet is that neither the Likud opposition party nor other leading public Israeli institutions responded with rage, but generally (with some notable exceptions) sat quietly aside. Their absence reflects a Tami Steinmetz Center poll showing that the Israeli population approves the swap by a nearly 2-1 ratio. In short, the problem extends far beyond the official class to implicate the population at large.

On the other side, the disgraceful celebration of baby-murderer Kuntar as a national hero in Lebanon, where the government shut down to celebrate his arrival, and by the Palestinian Authority, which called him a "heroic fighter," reveals the depths of Lebanese enmity to Israel and its immorality, disturbing to anyone concerned with the Arab soul.

The deal has many adverse consequences. It encourages Arab terrorists to seize more Israeli soldiers, then kill them. It boosts Hizbullah's stature in Lebanon and legitimates Hizbullah internationally. It emboldens Hamas and makes a deal for its Israeli hostage more problematic. Finally, while this incident appears small compared to the Iranian nuclear issue, the two are related.

International headlines along the lines of "Israel Mourns, Hezbollah Exults" confirm the widely held but erroneous Middle Eastern view of Israel as a "spider's web" that can be destroyed. The recent exchange may give the already apocalyptic Iranian leadership further reason to brandish its weapons. Worse, as Steven Plaut notes, by equating "mass murderers of Jewish children to combat soldiers," the exchange effectively justifies the "mass extermination of Jews in the name of Jewish racial inferiority."

For those concerned with the welfare and security of Israel, I propose two consolations. First, Israel remains a powerful country that can afford mistakes; one estimate even predicts it would survive an exchange of nuclear weapons with Iran, while Iran would not.

Second, the Kuntar affair could have a surprise happy ending. A senior Israeli official told David Bedein that, now out of jail, Israel's obligation to protect Kuntar is terminated; on arrival in Lebanon, he became "a target for killing. Israel will get him, and he will be killed … accounts will be settled." Another senior official added "we cannot let this man think that he can go unpunished for his murder of a 4-year-old girl."

Who will laugh last, Hizbullah or Israel?

Zionism's Bleak Present

Jerusalem Post
October 11, 2007

"We are all Keynsians now," Richard Nixon famously asserted just as the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes fell into disrepute. Likewise, one could have said with similar confidence in 1989, as Israel's existence reached wide acceptance, "We are all Zionists now." No longer.
Count the ways Israel is under siege: from Iranians building a nuclear bomb, Syrians stockpiling chemical weapons, Egyptians and Saudis developing serious conventional forces, Hizbullah attacking from Lebanon, Fatah from the West Bank, Hamas from Gaza, and Israel's Muslim citizens becoming politically restive and more violent. World-wide, professors, editorialists, and foreign ministry bureaucrats challenge the continued existence of a Jewish state. Even friendly governments, notably the Bush administration, pursue diplomatic initiatives that undermine Israeli deterrence even as their arms sales erode its security.

Let's suppose, however, that the country muddles through these many problems. That leaves it face to face with its ultimate challenge: a Jewish population increasingly disenchanted with, even embarrassed by, the country's founding ideology, Zionism, the Jewish national movement.
As developed by Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and other theoreticians, Zionism's call for a sovereign Jewish state fit the political context and mood of its time. If Chinese, Arabs, and Irish sought to establish a national state, why not Jews?

Indeed, especially Jews, for through nearly two millennia they had paid the greatest price of any people for their political weakness, having been expelled, victimized, persecuted and mass murdered as none other. Zionism offered an escape to this tragic history by standing tall and taking up the sword.

From its inception, Zionism had its share of Jewish opponents, raging from the Haredim (Ultra Orthodox) to nostalgic Iraqis to reform rabbis, But, until recently, these were marginal elements. Now, due to high birth rates, the once-tiny Haredi community constitutes 22 percent of Israel's current first-grade class; add to this the roughly equivalent number of Arab first-graders and a sea-change in Israeli politics can be expected about 2025.

Worse for Israel, Jewish nationalism has lost the near-automatic support it once had among secular Jews, many of whom find this nineteenth-century ideology out of date. Some accept arguments that a Jewish state represents racism or ethnic supremacism, others find
universalist and multi-cultural alternatives compelling. Consider some signs of the changes underway:

* Young Israelis are avoiding the military in record numbers, with 26 percent of enlistment-age Jewish males and 43 percent of females not drafted in 2006. An alarmed Israel Defense Forces has requested legislation to deny state-provided benefits to Jewish Israelis who do not serve.
* Israel's Attorney General Menachem Mazuz has up-ended the work of the Jewish National Fund, one of the pioneer Zionist institutions (founded in 1901) by determining that its role of acquiring land specifically for Jews cannot continue in the future with state assistance.
* Prominent Israeli historians focus on showing how Israel was conceived in sin and has been a force for evil.
* Israel's ministry of education has approved school books for
third-grade Arab students that present the creation of Israel in 1948 as a "catastrophe" (Arabic:
nakba).
* Avraham Burg, scion of a leading Zionist household and himself a prominent Labor Party figure, has published a book comparing Israel with 1930s Germany.
* A 2004 poll found only 17 percent of American Jews call themselves "Zionist."

Abraham Burg, a former Labor Party leader, compares Israel with 1930s Germany. Seen in a larger context, this turn from Zionism echoes trends in other Western countries, where old-style patriotism and national pride have also declined. In Western Europe, citizens tend to see little of
special value in their own history, customs, and mores. Last month, for example, the Netherlands' Princess Máxima, wife to the heir to the throne, announced to wide acclaim that "The Dutch identity does not exist." This Western-wide decline of patriotism aggravates Israel's
predicament, suggesting that developments there fit into a larger trend, making them the more difficult to resist or reverse.

To top it off, Arabs are moving these days in the opposite direction, reaching a fever pitch of ethnic and religious bellicosity. As a Zionist myself, I watch these several trends with foreboding
about Israel's future. I console myself by recalling that few of today's problems were evident in 1989. Perhaps in 2025, Zionism's prospects will again brighten, as Westerners generally and Israelis specifically finally awake to the dangers posed by Palestinian irredentists, jihadists, and other extremist Middle Easterners.

www.danielpipes.org

We congratulate Rachel Ehrenfeld on her victory against "Libel Tourism".

This is a victory, not just for Rachel Ehrenfeld, but for all Americans who wish to protect our sacred freedom of speech. We are very proud of our member of our Board of Advisors, Rachel Ehrenfeld for having the vertebrae to withstand the tremendous Saudi pressure.

When Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote “Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It,” she assumed she would be protected by the First Amendment. She was, in the United States. But a wealthy Saudi businessman she accused in the book of being a funder of terrorism, Khalid bin Mahfouz, sued in Britain, where the libel laws are heavily weighted against journalists, and won a sizable amount of money.

The lawsuit is a case of what legal experts are calling “libel tourism.” Ms. Ehrenfeld is an American, and “Funding Evil” was never published in Britain. But at least 23 copies of the book were sold online, opening the door for the lawsuit. When Ms. Ehrenfeld decided not to defend the suit in Britain, Mr. bin Mahfouz won a default judgment and is now free to sue to collect in the United States.

The upshot is a First Amendment loophole. In the Internet age, almost every American book can be bought in Britain. That means American authors are subject to being sued under British libel law, which in some cases puts the initial burden on the defendant to prove the truth of what she has written. British libel law is so tilted against writers that the United Nations Human Rights Committee criticized it last month for discouraging discussion of important matters of public interest.

Mr. bin Mahfouz, who has denied financing terrorism, said Ms. Ehrenfeld’s book contained inaccuracies and demanded a retraction. He also demanded a significant contribution to a charity of his choice — a charity Ms. Ehrenfeld said she feared would be one with ties to terrorism. Ms. Ehrenfeld, who describes herself as being “in the business of stopping people who fund terrorism,” refused to back down. “I said,” she later recalled, “he’s found the wrong victim.”

Ms. Ehrenfeld rallied prominent champions of free speech to her cause, including the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers and the PEN American Center. She also set to work trying to change American law. The New York State Legislature passed a bill that some are calling “Rachel’s law,” which blocks enforcement of libel judgments from countries that provide less free-speech protection than the United States. Gov. David Paterson signed it on May 1.

A similar, bipartisan bill has been introduced in Congress. The federal bill would extend protection to the entire country. It would also allow American authors and publishers to countersue, and if a jury found that the foreign suit was an attempt to suppress protected speech, it could award treble damages. There is little opposition to it — and Congress should pass it before it adjourns later this month.

“Libel tourism” is a threat to America’s robust free-speech traditions, which protect authors here. If foreign libel judgments can be enforced in American courts, there will be a “race to the bottom”; writers will only have as much protection as the least pro-free-speech nations allow.

Most writers, particularly those who concern themselves with arcane subjects like terrorism financing, are not wealthy. The prospect of a deep-pocketed plaintiff coming after them in court can be frightening. Even if the lawsuit fails, the cost and effort involved in defending against it can be considerable.

The result is what lawyers call a “chilling effect” — authors and publishers may avoid taking on some subjects, or challenging powerful interests. That has already been happening in Britain. Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties” was a best seller in the United States. But its British publisher canceled plans to publish the book, reportedly out of fear of being sued. (A smaller publisher later released it.)

Ms. Ehrenfeld says that even in the United States, writers and publishers have been backing away from books about terrorism financing — particularly about the Saudi connection — out of fear of being sued. It is hard to know if other books are not being written out of fear of lawsuits — that is the essence of the chilling effect.

Britain should rethink its libel laws, as the U.N. committee urged, for the sake of its citizens. But until it does, the United States should ensure that other countries’ pro-plaintiff libel laws do not infect this country and diminish our proud tradition of freedom of expression.

Islamic banking : Is Treasury complicit?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Rachel Ehrenfeld and Samuel A. Abady

If "cash is king," then Middle East coffers are irresistibly enticing. During a recent tour of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt applauded the "growing role" of Arab banks in the U.S. economy. Treasury is seeking buyers for its newly acquired bailout assets because more than $1 trillion in cash is urgently needed to rescue the largest U.S. banks.

However, cash from the Arabian Gulf comes with a vital string attached: Islamic banking, erroneously viewed as an ancient practice. In fact, Islamic banking is a newly invented institution: "Neither classical nor medieval Islamic civilization featured banks in the modern sense, let alone 'Islamic' banks," notes Timur Kuran, professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California.

According to the Dinar Standard, "assets managed by Islamic banks are in excess of $700 billion - predominantly concentrated in the Middle East."

Islamic banking took off in the 1970s, but was first concocted by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna in the 1920s. The stated goal was to penetrate the Western finance system, corrupting it from within in hopes of creating a parallel system to re-establish a global Islamic empire governed by Islamic law (Shariah). Islamic rules of commerce (fiqh al-muamalat) forbid interest (riba) and investing in a prohibited (hara'am) enterprise. They also mandate tithes on wealth (zakat). However, the Koran fails to precisely define these concepts. Imams and ayatollahs differ, for example, on whether riba prohibits all interest or only usurious interest.

While the overhaul of American and Western banking regulations is urgent, Islamic banking cannot be the answer because Muslim clerics - not U.S. laws and regulators - make the rules. In 1969, the Saudis created the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which is now leading the charge for global expansion of Islamic banking and has established new regulatory, accounting and auditing organizations to govern such banks. Notably, the OIC's charter is to "liberate Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa [mosque] from Zionist occupation."

Not surprisingly, zakat from Islamic banks often funds terrorist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood's Hamas. That organization's agenda was exposed during the Dallas trial of The Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas front group and an American Muslim charity just convicted of terrorism crimes. Evidence of the charity's true purpose included an 18-page "explanatory memorandum" outlining its "strategic goal … that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad (holy war) in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within."

Sharia financing forbids loans to entities labeled hara'am, such as industries that use alcohol, and to all Israeli businesses The Arab League Council established the boycott against Israel on December 2, 1945, (more than two years before creation of the Jewish state). The boycott prohibits all Arab states, companies and individuals from any financial or trade relations with Israel. Companies worldwide are blacklisted for doing business with Israel, as are companies doing business with boycotted firms. The OIC high commissioner for the boycott of Israel coordinates the efforts of its 57 member states from the Central Boycott Office in Damascus.

In response, the United States made it illegal for individuals or companies to cooperate with the Arab boycott. The law mandates reporting of boycott requests and imposes civil and criminal penalties against boycott participants. Arab boycott requests have risen sharply in tandem with the U.S. financial crisis and the rapid growth of Islamic banking. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security reported a 20 percent increase in Arab boycott requests overall from 2005 to 2006, and the Congressional Research Service reported 24 boycott requests to U.S. companies in fiscal 2007 from little Bahrain alone.

On April 5, 2006, Congress unanimously condemned Saudi Arabia for its continued enforcement of the boycott - which violated commitments the Saudis made to the World Trade Organization in 2005. Nonetheless, last August Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states threatened to boycott Nissan, which aired a commercial on Israeli television promoting a fuel-efficient car, and demanded the Japanese carmaker's apology. Not a word from Washington.

Instead, the Treasury Department, hungry for petrodollars, is holding seminars to promote Islamic banking and U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill. This practice must stop. Islamic banking corrupts our financial system, enables the illegal Arab economic boycott of Israel and entangles government with Islam in violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.

Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the American Center for Democracy. Samuel A. Abady is a civil rights lawyer.

Who’s Next on Obama List for Intel Chairman?

Continual erosion of Jewish population

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

The Iranian Challenge

Deterrence

Preemption

Problems with Preemption

The Choices Ahead

Samir Kuntar and the Last Laugh

Bringing an End to ‘Libel Tourism’

Who’s Next on Obama List for Intel Chairman?

Continual erosion of Jewish population

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

The Iranian Challenge

Deterrence

Preemption

Problems with Preemption

The Choices Ahead

Samir Kuntar and the Last Laugh

Bringing an End to ‘Libel Tourism’

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