"[Symposium] On the Strip: Where To Go from Gaza?"
National Review Online |
June 29, 2006
The Bush administration sees the United States at war with Islamic radicalism; has not the time come for it to see other theaters of this same war – Russia's with the Chechen rebels, India's with the Kashmiri insurgents, Israel's with Hamas – as we see our own, and work for the defeat of the Islamists?
Instead, in the Israeli case at least, Washington urges understanding, restraint, compromise, management of the problem, and other half-hearted and doomed remedies. The result is an ever more exhilarated and aggressive Palestinian population that believes victory within reach.
Washington's mistaken approach goes back to the Oslo accords of 1993, when Yasir Arafat seemingly closed the existential conflict in writing to Bill Clinton that "The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security." But Arafat's assurances were fraudulent and the Arab effort to eliminate Israel remains very much in place.
Israel, with U.S. support, must defeat this foul ambition. That implies inflicting a sense of defeat on the Palestinians, and winning their resignation to the permanent existence of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. Only then will the violence end.
By Sarah N. Stern
How does one respond when the international forum that is established for the sole purpose of creating peace and stability in the world, calls for the violation of its very own resolutions? And how does one respond when this is done by none other than the individual who is charged with the sole responsibility of ensuring that these resolutions are enforced?
Such is the case, now, when Secretary General Koffi Annan has been parading throughout the international community calling for Israel’s lifting of the blockade, citing UN Resolution 1701.
However, Mr. Annan seems to currently be experiencing a rather convenient bout of selective amnesia. Towards the beginning of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, a rather lengthy document, it explicitly calls for the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers.
The exact wording is this: “Emphasizing, (italics theirs), the need for an end to violence, but at the same time emphasizing, (again, italics, theirs), the need to address urgently the causes that have given rise to the current crisis, including by the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers.”
Yet Koffi Annan has been in Jerusalem, subjecting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to enormous pressure to lift the blockade that Israel has imposed on Lebanon, and basically impugning Israel, solely, with the culpability of violating UN Resolution 1701.
Needless to say, the reason that the Israelis have deemed it necessary to impose this blockade has also been conveniently forgotten by Secretary General Annan.
The reason is that, to this day, Syria has been supplying Hizballah with arms for the next round of their terrorist war against the Jewish state. The arms, no doubt, are the same ones that the Israeli defense forces have found in the last round, which include the C-802 missiles, the Fajir 3 and Fajir 5 rockets, as well as the longer range Zilzal 1 and Zilzal 2 missiles, all stamped, “made in Iran”.
As has been well established by now, Iran is the godfather of this ongoing terrorist war, Syria is the stepfather, and the rightful father is Hizballah. The conduit through which these arms are reaching Hizballah in Lebanon, is through the porous border with Syria: Hence the grounds for the Israeli blockade.
In an interview with an Iranian news agency, Fars, on August 30th, the Persian Hizballah representative, Muhammad Abdul Sif al Din, reported that the Hizballah leader Sheik Nasrallah is being armed by Iran, and getting ready for the next phase of the war. Mr. Sif al Din stated that the Hizballah leader, Hassan Nisrallah has a entered a new strategic phase “to rearm ahead of the next round with Israel.”
In these series of quite convenient memory lapses, the Secretary General has also forgotten that the very opening clause of the resolution he is responsible for enforcing.
That opening clause cites no less than seven United Nations resolutions, going back twenty eight years to 1978. Each resolution calls for the strict respect for the territorial integrity of Lebanon, and for the withdrawal of all foreign forces, with the exception of the United Nations UNIFIL forces.
First Syria, and now Hizballah, has flagrantly ignored these seven resolutions, and have kept the good people of Lebanon under a constant state of siege, fear and repression.
In a beautiful display of semantic double speak, Hizballah representative Sif al Din, said on his August 30th interview, “From the perspective of the parliament and government in Lebanon, we are not a military militia, but a resistance force. Therefore the clause in 1559, [which calls for the disarmament of all militias], can’t include Hizballah.”
Mr. Sif Al Din describes Hizballah as a resistance force. What, precisely, is Hizballah resisting?
Might I remind you that in May of 2000, Israeli forces honored not only the letter, but the spirit of United Nations resolution 425, going south of the border with Lebanon, and even going so far as painting the stones blue, as a physical demarcation of the border, as a reminder over where not to transverse. (Hence we derived the term, “blue line).
So thorough was the Israeli withdrawal that the Security Council made a statement on June 18th of 2000, which was read by the then President of the United Nations Security Council, Jean David Levitt of France, confirming that Israel had withdrawn its forces from Southern Lebanon in accordance with UN Security Resolution 425, saying that it was “a happy day for Lebanon”. It then called upon all parties to respect the line identified by the United Nations. (This statement was also made a part of the first clause of the recent UN resolution 1701 However, again, this fact was conveniently forgotten by Mr. Annan.)
What, then, might I ask, is it that Hizballah is resisting? To bring it closer to home, it would be one thing to say that the American Indians were forming a group to resist American occupation of the South West. It would be quite another thing to say that the Mexicans or Canadians are resisting American occupation.
Yet, despite this, Mr. Annan seems to be holding only Israel culpable for a violation of UN Council resolution 1701.
Poor Mr. Annan really must see someone about his memory lapses. The fifth clause of UN resolution 1701 states that it is “Welcoming (italics theirs), the efforts of the Lebanese Prime Minister and the commitment of the Government of Lebanon, in its seven point plan, to extend its authority over its territory, through its own legitimate armed forces, such as there will be no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon, and no authority other than the government of Lebanon…”
No weapons? What about the porous border with Syria through which the Iranian weapons are being passed to Hizballah? How is it that this clause of the oft-cited resolution 1701 is also forgotten? The absence of Lebanon’s enforcement of this aspect of the UN resolution has left it to Israel to fill the void. Israel should actually be commended for freeing up Lebanon from the very weapons with which Hizballah, acting as “a state within a state,” has been using to hold the Lebanese people captive.
Let me remind Mr. Annan that article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which constitutes the very philosophical foundation of the audacious body over which he presides, says that “Nothing shall impair the right of individual or collective self defense, if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations.”
Perhaps it is an early onset of Alzheimer’s.
by Sarah N. Stern
It is with profound sadness that I report on the loss of a giant in the battle to preserve the free world, a friend of both the United States and of Israel, and a deep personal friend of mine, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
The world needs a Jeane Kirkpatrick today. She had the intellectal integrity, the courage and grit to face down the Soviet threat, the great evil of her day; just as Winston Churchill had the grit and fortitude to stare down the evil that confonted Western civilization of his day, Nazism.
We need people like Jeane today, to have the moral fortitude and grit to face down the threat that currently confronts Western civilization: radical Islamic Jihadism.
Jeane was a legend in her time. She possessed the rapier sharp intellect necessary to stare down the Iron Curtain in the United Nations. It was Jeane who had presciently coined the phrase that describes so much of the liberal world, (where both of us had our roots), as "the blame Amerca first group", which made her take her leave from the democratic party. She was a strong and passionate advocate of Israel, which she saw, in the spirit of Ronald Reagan, as a beleaguered democracy surrounded by a sea of hostile nations.
Jeane had confided in me that she was horrified about the unparalleled and unprecedented focus that Israel receives in the United Nations, and that she had felt that that august body had become "dominated by a street gang of bullies."
Jeane did not suffer fools gladly, and it was that quality that had brought us together.
I had been together with Jeane in many forums and think tank discussions in Washington. She had always been for me, somewhat of a Goddess. I had felt that she was up there in the Platonic policy stratosphere, philosopher-queen of sorts, while I was way down below, deep below the roots of public policy soil.
One day, an illustrious think tank had sponsored four Tanzem terrorists to address an assemblage of policy wonks, diplomats, journalists and congressional staffers. They had dubbed them "The New Face of Tanzem". describing them as the pragmatic, young generation of Fattah realistic, who wanted to break with the Old Guard of inflexible ideologues.
This was on October 22, 2004, before the death of Chairman Arafat, but after the violence had broken out in September of 2000. Many were hungry to "breathe new life in a moribund peace process", which were precisely the words that they had used while introducing this group.
When they took to the podium, the only idea that they were proposing were that they would have a new "hudna", a temporary cease fire between Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah with Israel.
Judging from the questions, most members of the audience seemed to be impressed. The content of the queries were basic softball stuff such as "What other capitols are you going to?" and:"Who else did you meet with in Washington?"
I garnered the courage to raise my hand, and ask them two questions. The first was : "If Israel were to give back all of the territories it captured in its defensive war of 1967, including part of Jerusalem, would you once and or all, in Arabic, on your web site, and in front of the television cameras today, renounce the "Right of Return" and relinquish the dream of returning to your grandfather's orchards in Haifa?"
They spoke and they spoke, using words to obfuscate their true meanings. I raised my hand, and summoned up the courage to say, "I'm sorry ...I must be deft this ,orning...Was that a "Yes?" or Was that a "No?"
"No"they assured me, was the answer, and added:"Where would you be, Sarah without your dreams?"
At that point, I asked them another questions, I asked them "If , during this "hudna" members of Hamas and PIJ were to violate the cease-fire, cross the green-line, and go into "Israel proper", and blow up Israelis on their way to work and school on buses, or out eating pizza with their families, they would dismantle their infrastructures and arrest those involved."
Again, they spoke and they spoke, suing words to obfuscate their true meaning. And again, I raised my hand, and said " I must be incredibly dense this morning...Was that a yes, or was that a no?"
And again, they said, "No"..."No brother would ever embarass his partner in the struggle."
All the pens in this illustrious policy forum, at that moment, dropped. I had felt the gaze of one penetrating pair of eyes staring upon me.
I followed the gaze and saw the warm and welcoming, almost maternal smile, of Jeane Kirkpatrick.
I introduced myself to he ambassador, and she said, in her somewhat gruff and halting manner of speech, "I know who you are, Sarah...You don't have to introduce yourself to me...I know you...And I like you."
We quickly became friends. Jeane had shared with me how difficult it had been for her to be taken seriously in the field of public policy, as a woman, (a sentiment, that unfortunately, I have been forced to share.) She confided in me how she was distressed that the Israeli government could ever consider negotiating with the "grand-daddy of modern terrorism", Yassir Arafat, (her words, not mine). She had told me that the peaceful mission of the United Nations had been "disgraced" the day that Arafat had come to address that great body wearing a gun in his holster.
She was particulally upset that after the Gaza withdrawal, where we had the empirical evidence that that momentus Israeli sacrifice did not buy the good will of the Arab world, but had the paradoxical effect, Prime Minister Ehud Olmart had been contemplating more land withdrawals.
Jeane belived in EMET, and in our view that sees Israel as being on the Eastern front in the fight for Western democracy against radical Islam. She did not believe a weakened Israel would do much good in support of America's security needs, but would have the antithetical effect. She agreed with me that in our pursuit of democracy in the Middle East, we should not weaken our one solid, democratic ally in the region, the state of Israel.
Jeane had been an active member of our Board of Advisors, and wanted to recruit her close friend and counsel from when she had been ambassador to the United Nations, Alan Gerson
When I found out the crushing news on Friday, I called her house. Her son, Stuart, answered the phone. "Sarah", he told me...I was just about to call you...I was going over her telephone directory, and over your name she had written the word, "FRIEND".
Nothing I ever have achieved, or will achieve in my life-time, could ever mean quite so much.
The Delusional World of the Realists
By Sarah N. Stern
In memory of Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who did not suffer fools or despots gladly.
“Alice: There is no use trying…one can’t believe impossible things.
The Queen: I dare say you haven’t had much practice. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
-----Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland”
The Bush administration is in a difficult spot. Even the most ardent supporters of the War in Iraq are admitting to the fact that the war has been a much more arduous battle than they had originally contemplated. Many political strategists on both sides have been taking the mid-term defeat of many congressional republicans as a referendum not only on the Iraqi War, but on the entire Bush foreign policy agenda, including his ideas of bringing democracy to the Middle East, and his suspicion of various contemporary Muslim leaders.
Americans do not like long wars. The body count is reaching almost 3,000 American lives. None of us like the prospect of our sons or daughters arriving home in body bags. We would all like a quick fix, a silver bullet, something to extract us from this deadly, long, expensive war that is splitting apart the nation.
This December, with a great deal of fanfare and Washington showmanship, former Secretary of State James Baker III and former congressman Lee Hamilton made a dramatic re-entrance into the field of public policy with their much touted Iraqi Study Group (ISG) Report. The quite proficient public relations firm of Edelman had generated quite a public “buzz” before, during and after the immediate release of the results of collective wisdom of this venerable group, which includes many of the Washington elite from a few decades ago.
Read it all >>
The death of moral clarity
by Sarah N. Stern
January 30, 2008
Special to WJW
In the 1990s, as a lobbyist for a major American Jewish organization, I was working on a bill that would create an office within the Justice Department specifically calling for the equal pursuit of justice for all Americans who had been killed abroad, including those murdered by Palestinian terrorists.
The State Department and the bulk of establishment American Jewish organizations were reluctant to back it. They thought that the pursuit of "Equal Justice Under Law" might embarrass Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, and therefore "undermine the peace process." They knew, at least on some level, that Arafat and Fatah had been complicit in the murder of American civilians.
My efforts to see this bill pass were strengthened by my strong personal connection to Koby Mandell's family. In 2001, shortly before his 14th birthday, Koby, who had once lived in Silver Spring, had done the Huck Finn thing: He skipped school with his friend, Yosef Ishran. Their bodies were found the next morning, in a cave outside the families' neighborhood of Tekoa, Israel, brutally bludgeoned to death.
I called Koby's mother and suggested that the bill be named for her son. Her response still resonates in my ears: "I can just see Koby jumping up and down in heaven to have a law named for him."
I knew that despite the strong opposition to the bill, I would would not rest until it was passed. Indeed, there is today an Office of Justice for Victims of Overseas Terrorism in the Department of Justice.
I tell this story not to call attention to my efforts, but because I had become almost physically sickened by the constant obfuscation during the Clinton administration of the violations of virtually all of the signed Oslo Accords. A 1986 antiterrorism law called for the swift prosecution on American soil of any alleged murderer of American citizens abroad, yet when it came to Americans killed by Palestinian terrorists, the State Department ignored this statute for "diplomatic considerations."
It was this moral turpitude that had led me to be the first in my family in generations to change my registration to "Republican." I had now left the party of "moral equivalence" and joined the party of moral clarity.
During President George W. Bush's first term, I was delighted to hear his Feb. 20, 2001, words: "You are either with us or you are with the terrorists."
Something, however, has gone seriously awry during Bush's second term, and the moral clarity for which I was hungering in the Republican Party has died. Just as the signed commitments of Oslo had been obfuscated by President Bill Clinton, the moral clarity of the "performance-based" road map of April 2002 was buried in Bush's trip to the Middle East.
The road map that laid out the beautiful vision of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and democracy, was to be compliance-based, not timeline-based. Yet, Bush wants a Palestinian state by 2009. This, irrespective of the corruption, terrorism, incitement to hate and to kill that has been emanating from the Palestinian Authority even since the Annapolis summit in December. The P.A., to this day, has been airing children's television shows exhorting for martyrdom, and showing the entire map of Israel as Palestine.
Earlier this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated: "The road map for peace has become a hindrance to the peace process because the first requirement for the Palestinians was to fight terrorist attacks Š . As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one."
Madame Secretary, aren't we engaged in a war on terrorism? How could there be a process whose objective is peace that obfuscates the bombing of innocent civilians?
This only rewards terrorism, and will create yet another terrorist state within the Middle East, making the one democratic ally in the Middle East, Israel, nine miles wide in its narrowest waist.
This will no more buy us the goodwill of the radical Islamic world than handing the Sudetenland to the Nazis did for England in 1938. Each Israeli land withdrawal, no matter how justified in the sophisticated Western corridors of power, is ultimately translated in the Islamic netherworld of the Internet as a victory of Islam over the weakened West, particularly when there is not even the most flimsy attempt to eradicate terrorism by the P.A.
The legitimate concerns of our people are not being heard by either party, and will, unfortunately come back to haunt all of us in the West.
Dangerous Games The Cost of the Israel-Palestine Peace Talks
by Sarah N. Stern
New Republic Online
October 26, 2007
Sarah is totally cancer free. She is happy, healthy and making a difference in the world.
Tomorrow, I will be undergoing some exploratory surgery for cancer. I am grateful for the support of friends and family members, but mostly to my physician who has been honest enough to level with me about what, precisely, we are looking for. When it comes to matters of life and death, one does not want to play games.
It was with this backdrop in mind that I read the news about the November Israeli-Palestinian conference that the Bush administration plans to hold in Annapolis, Maryland. Some would say that there can't be any harm in dialogue. But as someone who's been keeping a close eye on the Arab street for some years now, this looks to me like playing a game of Russian roulette.
On July 25, 2000, I was in attendance at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. when Israeli Attorney General Eli Rubinstein had come to address the group. He had just returned from Camp David, Maryland, where the talks between Chairman Arafat, Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton had just broken up. I will never forget what he told us.
"I can look every one of you straight in the eye," he said, "and I can tell you that we went as far as any responsible government could possibly go. In fact, some will argue that what we offered was irresponsible. What we offered was shared sovereignty of Jerusalem, with Muslim control of the Haram al-Sharif, and Israeli control of the Western Wall, a dismantling of all West Bank settlements, which have always been our eyes and ears to the East, and 95 to 97 percent of the West Bank, with a land swap for the remaining three to five percent."
"There were people who are now crying in their limousines back to the airport. We figured that if we offered Chairman Arafat an offer that he couldn't refuse...he wouldn't."
"You will find no documentation about the terms of the offer. We have presented this in a 'now or never' formulation," added the former Attorney General.
I have been internally crying ever since. I knew then that by making the terms of the offer so extraordinary, the Clinton-Barak parameters could never be matched, and would doom any future "land for peace" negotiations to failure. How could any responsible Palestinian interlocutor come back to his people with less than what Arafat walked away from? And how could any responsible Israeli interlocutor come back to his people, after the seven years of ensuing violence since Camp David II, and offer so much?
The Clinton-Barak parameters have raised the bar so high as to make it nearly impossible for future negotiators to come to a practical understanding that works for both sides. So it's no surprise what currently confronts us: A maximalist Palestinian position and an Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 borders, which are actually the 1949 armistice lines. These boundaries were nine miles wide at their narrowest point, lacking the strategic depth to enable Israel to defend itself, which led the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban (of the Labour Party) to dub them "the Auschwitz lines."
With what confidence can the Israelis contemplate that such a retreat will not be met with a barrage of missiles onto the coastal plain, where Israel's population is most densely located? Particularly in light of how Hamas has used its beach head in Gaza to fire qassam missiles into the neighboring Israeli town of Sderot.
Culpability should not be put on the Bush White House for a lack of "engagement." If there is any culpability, it should go to the Clinton administration, for encouraging Prime Minister Barak to "bet the barn," and therefore making it virtually impossible for any future Israeli negotiator to match his generosity.
These already inflated expectations are actually growing. On October 11, Adnan Husseini, advisor to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said that Palestinian demands for eastern Jerusalem also include the Western wall, Judaism's holiest site. Said Husseini, "This is part of the Islamic heritage that cannot be given up, and it must remain under Islamic control." Ceding control of the Western wall is, of course, anathema to the vast majority of the Jewish people.
Unrealistic expectations are seeding the ground for a future explosion. There are times when dialogue is not the palliative we generally think it to be in the West, but can become a stroll down a lethal minefield. We are almost setting the stage here for a religious war.
The head of the Palestinian negotiating team, Ahmed Qureia was quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on October 12 saying, "If the talks fail, we can expect a third, and much more severe, intifada."
Azzam al-Ahmed, the head of the Fatah parlimentary list and a close associate of Mahmoud Abbas, warned of the possibility of much greater bloodshed if the negotiations fail. He told the Jerusalem Post, "If we don't prepare well for the conference, so that it will result in something positive, the repercussions will be much more dangerous than what happened after the failure of Camp David."
President Mahmoud Abbas has threatened to resign if the talks fail, paving the way for another round of bloodshed, and for the strengthening of Iranian-backed Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
Even the European Union's special representative to the Middle East peace process, Marc Otte, has warned that a failure to advance the peace process at next month's planned summit in Annapolis could trigger worse violence then what followed the failed Camp David II talks in 2000.
The fantastic terms of the Clinton-Barak peace offering, and its rejection by Arafat, are not the only obstacle to a meaningful, further negotiation. The 1995 Oslo accord specifically obligated Israel and the Palestinian Authority to "abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other." The Bush administration's Roadmap for Peace in the Middle East, has a similar provision. Phase I states that at the outset, that "all official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel."
These statutes were, and are, critical, and the official Palestinian stance of ignoring them is of great significance. While Israel was embarking on a withdrawal process from Gaza, and taking steps toward implementing a "peace curriculum" in its schools, the Palestinian Authority was inculcating its people with a culture of hatred and death.
According to Palestinian Media Watch, a clip that has been broadcast by Fatah-controlled television throughout last week, shows the entire map of Israel, painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag. Although the official Palestinian position is for a Palestinian state to exist in Gaza and the West Bank, with shared sovereignty of Jerusalem, the leaders have been preparing their people for the eventual annihilation of all of Israel. This is consistent with the Palestinian National Covenant, which was never formally amended to eliminate its call for the destruction of the State of Israel.
As President Kennedy once said, "Peace does not exist in signed documents and treaties alone, but in the hearts and minds of the people."
Hopefully, there will be a time when future Palestinian leaders will be preparing their people for a durable peace, one that will last for generations, but at this point we have no firm evidence to believe that is the case. The litmus test of when the Palestinians will be actually ready to sit down and negotiate a lasting peace is when they will stop teaching their children to play war games in their summer camps, training them to become suicide bombers for the sake of a fully "liberated" Palestine.
The Palestinians have been using every means of communication available to teach their children hatred of Israel. Only after we have verification that this incitement stops, will we have a negotiating partner who is not playing "blind man's bluff." Until then, we, in the West, will be covering up our eyes and pretending to be the blind man, as the Palestinians bluff.
In a recent conversation with a colleague from another think tank, I expressed my fears. His response was "Life is like a game of charades."
No, it is not. Not when we are dealing with issues of life and death.
SARAH N. STERN is the founder and president of EMET, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a Washington based think-tank and policy center.
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The Stealth Jihad
By Sarah N. Stern
A stealth jihad for winning the hearts and minds of American school children is taking place, right here in America. The financial foundation for this jihad comes from Sultan bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a member of the Saudi Royal family, who has been implicated in the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks as well as the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.
The original planning site for this jihad is Mecca, Saudi Arabia. However, unbeknownst to him, the American taxpayer is also contributing to this jihad.
The American epicenter of this intellectual jihad is a quiet, rural campus set among 1,375 peaceful acres in Abiquiui, New Mexico. At the heart of this tranquil compound, set among the serene, arid hills and colorful junipers and poplar trees of the mesa, lie a mosque and a madrassa, (school). The school and the mosque, along with the beautiful property they sit on, are all funded by the Saudi Royal family.
Also among this serene setting is a publishing house. It is within this publishing house that some of the most radical, Wahhabaist English translations of the Koran are printed.
It is also here that the teaching materials that are now being used in teaching training workshops and classrooms throughout the country are printed.
According to their website, “Dar al Islam” is a not-for profit conclave founded in 1979, by an American born Moslem, and an American-educated industrialist, which came about after a meeting at the Ka’aba in Mecca., Saudi Arabia .Their stated purpose is “The presentation of Islam through the Primary Sources, (i.e. the Koran and the Sharia) as understood through God fearing scholars of Islam throughout the ages.” Offered there are a variety of programs on how to present Islam to the outside world, how to live a life, according to the law of Islam and teacher training workshops for American teachers of secondary school.
“Dar al Islam” is part of a stealth campaign, financed by the Saudi royal family to infiltrate the hearts and minds of our American children, not only within the university setting, but from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Teacher training and curriculum materials are issued out of this quiet compound, with which to conduct outreach programs to train teachers and librarians. A sample workshop for teachers after September 11th has as its first chapter: “Why do they hate us?” The number one reason that is given is invariably “Because of America’s support for Israel.”
America, itself, is described, as the incarnate of evil, who destroys native cultures and civilizations in its quest for capitalistic expansionism and imperialistic hegemony.
The back of he materials distributed is imprinted with an insignia bearing the words “Aramco”, the Saudi oil company, with a dazzling bright star set amidst a tranquil field of green and blue.
What is deeply disturbing is that a little known American law that has quietly been re-authorized, again and again, and is about to be re-authorized once more, has made this all possible.
It is no longer shocking to the well-informed American that Saudi petro dollars have been used to “bridge gaps in understanding” between American university students and the Moslem world. In December of 2005, the Harvard University Gazette proudly announced that they have accepted the gift of twenty million dollars from Saudi business man Prince Alaweed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud to create a university wide program on Islamic studies. An identical display of generosity has been bequeathed by Prince Alaweed Bin Talal to the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University to support and expand its Center for Muslim Christian Understanding.
These are just two of the more illustrious names in the American Academy that have profited generously by Saudi magnificence. The Middle Eastern Studies Department of the University of Californian at Santa Barbara , has a chair named after the Saudi King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz. One would do well to wonder how much of this money is intended to “bridge the gaps in understanding” and how much is intended to steadily infiltrate the American educational system as a way to affect American policy in the Middle East, and ultimately assist a Wahhabaist agenda.
The Saudis have stated in their English language newspaper “Ain Al Yaqueen”, “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under the custodian of the two Holy Mosques, King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aqziz has positively shouldered responsibility and played a promising role in order to raise the banner of Islam all over the globe and raise the Islamic call either insider or outside the kingdom.”
As Lee Kaplan explains:
Over the last 30 years, the Saudi royal family
has contributed upwards of 70 billion US dollars to infiltrate
worldwide institutions with propaganda against the West and
Israel. This sum, it has been observed, makes the one billion
Dollars per annum spent by the Soviet Union during the Cold
War for Communist propaganda pale by comparison.
What should be most alarming to Americans is that these Saudi funds have also been used to develop curricula for the average American elementary to high school student, who are still in their impressionable, vulnerable years and have yet to posses the sufficient critical intellects to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction. (It is quite an assumption to presume that the average college student does posses these critical thinking skills, but we will put that aside, for the time being).
What should also be quite troubling is the fact that this program has been developed at the behest and the largess of the American taxpayer, who unwittingly has created the vehicle for the Saudis to embed themselves widely into the American classroom, and undermine American foreign policy.
And finally: What should be profoundly disturbing to the average American reader is the instructional content, itself, of these curricula, which is replete with both highly anti-American and ant-Israeli agendas that has been underwritten by the United States taxpayer under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965.
The original legislative intent of this public funding was in order to ensure that we had “a pool of international experts to meet national security and defense needs.”
Title VI of the Higher Education Act came about at a time when America and the West were combating the last great ideological struggle of its time, the Cold War against the former Soviet Union. At this time, policymakers in Washington rightfully recognized the fact that our nation’s youngsters were woefully ill-equipped in their knowledge of foreign languages and cultures to be able to withstand the Soviet threat.
In 1958, the nation, therefore, passed the National Defense Education Act. Title VI of the Higher Education Act is the successor. Its main purpose was to provide knowledgeable specialists to the fields of government, education, the military, and industry to be able to enhance the national security of this country.
What Title VI of the Higher Education Act did, in reality, was to give birth to a robust Regional Studies industry within our nation’s campuses. Because of this act, hundreds of academic centers have sprung up around the country to study various regions of the world, including Asian Studies, African Studies, Post Soviet Studies, European Studies ,Latin Studies and seventeen Middle Eastern Studies Centers, all at the public trough.
In I978 the late professor of comparative literature at Columbia, Edward Said wrote a slim, facile but powerful book that profoundly transformed the field of regional studies, in general, and Middle Eastern studies, in particular, Orientalism . In it, he argued that the study of the Middle East has been saturated by a European and Western bias, that is permeated with colonialism and imperialism.
As is the time-honored tradition in the academy, this facile, single factor, and profoundly “blame America first” analyses quickly caught traction. It has, up until the very present, remained the predominant paradigm within which the world is viewed in most of the regional studies programs on the American college campus, and is found in equal abundance in all regional studies departments throughout our nation, including departments of Middle Eastern Studies.
What has resulted from the Title VI legislation is a very substantial annual endowment to the university, creating a vigorous regional studies industry. What has happened in the years that have ensued since the original legislation has been passed, (thanks, in great measure, to the canonized post-colonial biases established by Edward Said), is that many professors have used their desks as a platform for one-sided, anti-American political polemic as a paltry substitute for a good, solid education. So entrenched is the academic politicalization of the field, that most professors in these departments in fact, feel that imparting their left wing biases is a part of a good education. The bias has become so calcified into the scholarship of the regional studies industry, that statements that would be regarded as overtly and vulgarly political in normal discourse are taught as though they are a priori truths.
This would be one thing if we were not being confronted with a ruthless enemy, and we were studying a quaint, extinct civilization. However, it is quite perilous to educate our children with a feeling of moral ambiguity of the rightness of America’s global role when we are confronted with enemies whose people have been taught to detest us and who have brutal hegemonic ambitions.
The universities has taken this money and have run with it, as an entitlement, without the slightest degree of oversight or even the remotest memory of why a share of our national treasure had been appropriated to them in the first place. As the president of the American Council of Education had said, “The Federal Government has provided its share of the financing of language and area centers without impairing the autonomy of the institutions receiving the funds; in short, Federal funds have been given without Federal control.” As the preeminent expert in the field, Martin Kramer, says in his seminal book on the subject, Ivory Towers on Sand, “From its inception, Title VI was administered as a no-strings-attached benefit. Later the “defense designation” was dropped altogether.”
Even more pernicious, however, is the fact that in order to qualify for the funding, the university is obligated to conduct community outreach seminars to teachers of public and private schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. And where do the materials for these outreach centers in the universities come from?
Simply attend any one of the many Teacher-Training Outreach Centers in Middle Eastern Studies Departments at Harvard, Georgetown, Princeton, UCLA, NYU or Yale, and you will see the familiar icon of Aramco, the Saudi based oil conglomerate.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, the academy and its several powerful lobbyists, petitioned the US congress for an additional 20 million dollar per year increase, from 100 million dollars a year to 120 million. The ostensible reason given to congress was that we need more expertise in understanding why we were attacked on September 11th, and more speakers of Arabic.
If one were to look for the results of our taxpayers’ magnificence, he would simply have to scratch his head in utter bewilderment.
According to an article in the New York Times, there are still 120, 000 hours of pre-September 11th chatter that have yet to be analyzed by our nation’s intelligence services. This is due to one simple reason: There is a dearth of Arabic translators in our nation. One might do well to question whether or not these tax dollars are being well spent, being that the original intent of the Title VI funding was to prepare our students to confront growing threats to our national security interests.
In order to obtain the funding, the university simply has to write a grant application to the Department of Education, and it is routinely rubber-stamped. An excerpt from the application for federal funding for the fiscal year of 2003 to 2005 from Georgetown University reads, “Through its publications, public affairs, and k-12 outreach programs, CCAS, (The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies) sponsors a variety of public activities, enabling it to reach a wide audience beyond the University.”
Needless to say, no mention is made as to the source of the curriculum materials for the teacher training workshop programs.
In the 109th Congress, we came so close to passing legislation to reform the way these funds have been administered, one could almost taste it. (As it now stands. The Title VI provisions are set to be re-authorized later this year, without any changes to the way in which this whole system is administered.)
In the last session, a bill in the House sponsored by John Boehner, (Republican Ohio), had actually passed through the appropriate committee, (Labor and the Work Force), and through the floor, which would have created an oversight board to oversee how the funding was administered. In addition, the bill would have enhanced academic freedom by ensuring that the Title VI outreach programs would “reflect diverse perspectives and represent a full range of views.”
The Senate Version, which passed through the committee of jurisdiction, (Health Education, Labor and Pensions), and which Senator Mike Enzi, (Republican, Wyoming), had promised he would attach to the Higher Education Authorization Bill, went even further. This bill asked for a survey of what our departments of national security and defense needs from the university, (i.e. Arabic language instruction); an independent grievance procedure if a student felt that he was being penalized for his political views, without fear of confronting the professor, and an accounting by the university as to how many of their graduates actually went on to careers in service of our nation.
Thinking the Advisory Board was the great boogeyman, Senator Kennedy, the then-minority chair of the committee had actually signed off on this legislation. However, in the last minute, he attached so many controversial bells and whistles on to the Higher Education Authorization Act, that there was simply not enough time on the senate calendar to debate it.
Opponents of the proposed changes had claimed that would inhibit academic freedom. However, the way the programs are administered today, and the narrow ideological lens through which the regional studies programs are taught, today, constitute a far graver assault on intellectual freedom.
Academic freedom is not a one way street. It is not the freedom to inhibit the heady exhilaration of the student of delving into marketplace of ideas because of the restrictions and biases of the professor. The bill’s requirement to foster a diversity of perspectives would actually encourage intellectual freedom. As it stands now, there are professors who make such statements with total impunity, as “No one is permitted into my class who does not acknowledge Israeli atrocities.”
In reference to the House bill, it should be noted that most other university-directed federal grant programs already have advisory boards, including include the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, the National Security Education Program and the U.S Institute of Peace. The scope of this Title VI Board would have been limited to
making recommendations to the Secretary of Education and to the Congress concerning the overall program.
The government has a responsibility to its taxpayers that when money is appropriated toward a certain objective that there is oversight. As taxpayers, we are entitled to demand accountability to assure that our money is being well spent.
Beyond that, however, whether or not people frequenting the serene ivy covered towers of the academy are willing to acknowledge it, America is facing grave threats from the world of radical Islam. They are not going away soon. We need to prepare our students, and our nation for the challenges that will be confronting us for many years to come. We cannot imbue them with a sense of moral relativism, ambiguity and guilt towards America’s or Israel’s deserved place in the world.
Critics of the proposed amendments to the Title VI legislation argued, (with a great deal of exaggeration), that “We have to keep the government out of the classroom, while most were unaware that the government is already in the classroom.
However, it is not our own government. It is that of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Sarah N. Stern is President of EMET, the Endowment for Middle East Truth. She writes frequently about the Middle East.
The Washington Times
Carter's Arab financiers
By Rachel Ehrenfeld
Published December 21, 2006
To understand what feeds former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Israeli frenzy, look at his early links to Arab business.
Between 1976-1977, the Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, "poorly managed" and highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). According to a July 29, 1980 Jack Anderson expose in The Washington Post, the bank's biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter's confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance.
At that time, Mr. Lance's mismanagement of the NBG got him and the bank into trouble. Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), known as the bank "which would bribe God," came to Mr. Lance's rescue making him a $100,000-a-year consultant. Abedi then declared: "we would never talk about exploiting his relationship with the president." Next, he introduced Mr. Lance to Saudi billionaire Gaith Pharaon, who fronted for BCCI and the Saudi royal family. In January 1978, Abedi paid off Mr. Lance's $3.5 million debt to the NBG, and Pharaon secretly gained control over the bank.
Mr. Anderson wrote: "Of course, the Saudis remained discretely silent... kept quiet about Carter's irregularities... [and] renegotiated the loan to Carter's advantage."
There is no evidence that the former president received direct payment from the Saudis. But "according to... the bank files, [it] renegotiated the repayment terms... savings... $60,000 for the Carter family... The President owned 62% of the business and therefore was the largest beneficiary." Pharaon later contributed generously to the former president's library and center.
When Mr. Lance introduced Mr. Carter to Abedi, the latter gave $500,000 to help the former president establish his center at Emory University. Later, Abedi contributed more than $10 million to Mr. Carter's different projects. Even after BCCI was indicted — and convicted -— for drug money laundering, Mr. Carter accepted $1.5 million from Abedi, his "good friend."
A quick survey of the major contributors to the Carter Center reveals hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi and Gulf contributors. But it was BCCI that helped Mr. Carter established his center.
BCCI's origins were primarily ideological. Abedi wanted the bank to reflect the supra-national Muslim credo and "the best bridge to help the world of Islam, and the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists."
Shortly after assuming office, in March 1977, Mr. Carter made his first public statement regarding a Palestinian "homeland." Since then, he has devoted much of his time to denouncing Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism, which he claims is not only "abominable oppression and persecution" of the Palestinians, but also damages U.S. interests in the region.
By the time BCCI was shut down in July1991, it operated in 73 countries with a deficit of $12 billion, which it had managed to hide with wealthy Arab shareholders and Western luminaries. Among them Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan of Abu Dhabi, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Yasser Arafat and Palestinian terrorist groups, and who branded the United States: "our enemy number one"; Former head of Saudi foreign intelligence service, and King Faisal's brother-in-law, Kamal Adham — who with another Saudi, the banker of the royal family, Khaled bin Mahfouz, staged BCCI's attempt to illegally purchase the Washington-based First American bank, in the early 1980s.
True to its agenda, BCCI assisted in spreading and strengthening the Islamic message; they enabled Pakistan's nuclear ambitions, and helped the Palestinian leadership to amass a $10 billion-plus fortune, used to further terrorist activities and to buy more influence in the West.
BCCI founders also supported the Islamic fundamentalist opposition to the Shah of Iran, and saw it as an opportunity to undermine Western influence in the Gulf. They assisted the revolution financially, reinforcing their position within the leadership of the Iranian revolution. Ironically, the success of that revolution cost Mr. Carter his presidency.
BCCI's money also facilitated the Saudi agenda to force Israel to recognize Palestinians "rights," convincing Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to sign the Camp David Accords in September 1978. Since then, Mr. Carter repeatedly provided legitimacy to Arafat's corrupt regime, and now, like the Saudis, he even sides with homicidal Hamas as the "legitimate" representative of the Palestinian people.
In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter again laid responsibility for U.S. bias against the destitute, depressed and (consequently) violent Palestinians on American policy makers' helplessness, over the last 30 years, against the menacing tactics of the powerful American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC).
However, it seems that AIPAC's real fault was its failure to outdo the Saudi's purchases of the former president's loyalty. "There has not been any nation in the world that has been more cooperative than Saudi Arabia," the New York Times quoted Mr. Carter June 1977, thus making the Saudis a major factor in U. S. foreign policy.
Evidently, the millions in Arab petrodollars feeding Mr. Carter's global endeavors, often in conflict with U.S. government policies, also ensure his loyalty.
Rachel Ehrenfeld is the director of the American Center for Democracy.
A 'political party' unveiled
By Rachel Ehrenfeld
Published August 11, 2006
"Remember, Hezbollah is a political party within Lebanon... The problem is... that they're a political party with a militia that is armed by foreign nations," said President Bush earlier this week. "Political Party"? "Armed Militia"?
Hezbollah, which was established in 1982 as a terrorist organization, was finally designated in 1995 as such by the U.S. government. It was upgraded to the status of a global terrorist organization in 1997. Hezbollah's evolvement into a "political party" began in the 1980s. With Iran's generous assistance and guidance, Hezbollah established a network of educational and cultural institutions, as well as health and social welfare services. The latter included an Islamic health authority that operated pharmacies, clinics and even hospitals where thousands of people were treated every day. Hezbollah also established a construction company that not only built houses, mosques and schools, but also paved roads and even supplied water to Shi'ite villages. Particularly prominent in all of this was its contribution to the reconstruction of thousands of houses damaged in the battles with Israel in south Lebanon. Such activities bought the loyalty of the local population.
Hezbollah, like the PLO and Hamas, also maintained a Martyrs' Fund, which provided assistance to thousands of families of the dead, injured and imprisoned Shi'ites.
To maintain and expand its political-social activities in the Shi'ite community in Lebanon and elsewhere, Hezbollah needs large sums of money. The $100 million to $120 million it is said to receive annually from Iran, and the weapons and supplies from Tehran and Damascus, are just a drop in Hezbollah's bucket. Where did Hezbollah's fund come from? By the mid-1980s, Shi'ite Hezbollah loyalists in Western Europe had quietly and effectively infiltrated local Muslim communities with the subversive aim of converting them to Ayatollah Khomeini's version of Islam, and of eventually gaining control over those communities. Countless legal and quasi-legal institutions — including religious, cultural and economic groups — were established to conceal these dormant Hezbollah networks; to finance their activities; to serve as a source for future recruitment of European-based terrorists; and to provide financial support for their attack.
Hezbollah's support comes from both legitimate and illegal resources. The legitimate channel includes charitable organizations operating worldwide, donations from individuals and proceeds from legitimate business.
Drug trafficking is a major money maker for Hezbollah, endorsed by a special fatwa by the mullahs. In addition to the production and trade of heroin in the Middle East and cocaine in and from South America, Hezbollah facilitates, for a fee, the trafficking of other drug smuggling networks. It cooperates, for example, with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) in Colombia and the "Abadan drug ring," a long-established Iranian drug network, allowing them to use the Hezbollah-controlled drug routes in Lebanon to transport heroin and opium from Iran and Afghanistan to Europe and North Africa.
Hezbollah's other illegal resources include: money laundering, illegal arms trading and smuggling; counterfeiting and selling currency (U.S. dollar — super notes) and goods (designer clothing and accessories); piracy of compact discs and DVDs; trafficking in humans; conducting elaborate import-export schemes with traders from India and Hong Kong to Ivory Coast, Belgium, and South and Central America. Hezbollah also extorts "donations" from Shi'ite, especially Lebanese immigrants in South and North America under the threat of physical harm or death.
Hezbollah operatives also generate huge profits from the theft and resale of stolen vehicles and baby formula; credit card, welfare, Social Security, and marriage, health care and insurance fraud; forgery of passports, drivers' licenses, and other forms of identification; arson; robbery; food coupon fraud; counterfeiting resident alien cards and drivers' licenses; telecommunications fraud, such as selling long-distance telephone access through fraudulently obtained services, and through cloning the identification of cellular phone subscribers.
The magnitude of Hezbollah's criminal operations serves not only to reap huge profits — estimated at $6 billion in 2001 — thus enabling it to buy its way to the Lebanese parliament and government, but also facilitates Hezbollah's infiltration into their targeted countries, weakening the countries' economies while furthering their terrorist agenda.
Hezbollah should also be identified and designated as a global criminal organization.
And while it continued to fund the vast social welfare system it put in place, enlisting more martyrs to their cause, Hezbollah spent no money to protect the "civilian" population in Lebanon because it does not consider them as such. Instead of building bunkers to protect their own Shi'ite brothers and sisters, members of Hezbollah spent fortunes to build fortified bunkers to launch war, and calculated death and destruction.
That, according to Hezbollah and their paymasters in Iran, is a good thing because only death and destruction will pave the way for the return of the mahdi, the 12th imam and Shi'ite supremacy in the world. This is the Hezbollah the president calls a "political party."
Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of American Center for Democracy and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger.
Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
Upon hearing Warren Buffett’s announcement on June 25, 2006, of giving $37 billion to charitable foundations, mostly to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, declared that Muslim organizations “are lagging behind,” only because of intimidation by the West. The Muslims, he said, are in “the cycle of fear,” [of] “being accused of funding suspicious organizations that fall under the scrutiny of anti-terrorism investigations.” One wonders why they are funding “suspicious organizations” in the first place.
Instead of blaming America and the West, as CAIR constantly does, it could initiate the establishment of a new Muslim foundation with a similar mission to that of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This new Muslim foundation could supply immunization, HIV and anti-malarial medication, and medical means to reduce cervical cancer incidence and deaths in poor Muslim countries, feed millions of refugees from Muslim atrocities in Darfur, and generally “bring innovations in health” to Third World Muslim countries. Indeed, Awad himself pointed out that, “We in the Muslim world are lagging behind when we should be pioneers as per our Islamic beliefs.”
To be sure, there is no shortage in oil billionaires in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. According to Forbes Magazine 2006 list of the World’s Richest People, Saudi and Gulf billionaires are worth at least $134 billion. Muslim billionaires in Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon are worth additional $29.4 billion. This is not taking into account Muslim billionaires and millionaires in Asia and elsewhere. Moreover, the oil boom in the Middle East generated at least 300,000, new wealthy millionaires in the region.
According to the Department of Energy, Saudi Arabia is estimated to gain $154 billion in oil revenues in 2006, alone, and has at least $110 billion in foreign assets.
Yet, despite all this wealth, Muslim charities do not focus on alleviating the suffering of millions of poor Muslims and provide for their economic development the way the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) does. Instead, Muslim charities, led by the Saudis, continue to pour billions into madrassas to spread Wahhabism and hatred of the West around the globe – and not only in the Muslim world.
Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on June 29, 2006, Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer stated, “Saudi Arabia has become a leading financier of the Islamic takeover of Somalia.” And in the Middle East, Saudi and Gulf cash, smuggled into Gaza under the watchful eyes of the Egyptians, helped Hamas pay the salaries of at least 130, 000 employees of the Palestinian Authority, according to Middle Eastern sources. And more money is coming. On July 5, The Arab League announced in Cairo the transfer of $50 million to the West Bank and Gaza, and $15 million to pay for o Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and to employees and diplomats in Palestinian embassies and Palestinian representative. In addition, the U.S. “good ally,” Saudi Arabia, “also provided $50 million.” This is at the time that President George W. Bush, declared: "In order for there to be peace, Hamas must be dismantled."
Two years ago, the Saudi government gave at least $12 billion per year to Muslim charities. In light of their growing oil revenues, it is reasonable to assume that they are contributing more now.
According to testimony given before the Senate Banking Committee by Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey on on April 4, Saudi money “is going to Iraq. And it's going to Southeast Asia and it's going to any other place where there are terrorists.” He added Saudi promises to stop the financing of terrorism “haven't been uniformly implemented.”
While the Saudis work hard to fight domestic terrorism, they have yet to turn off the flow of money from wealthy Saudis and their charities that continue to fuel terrorism against the West. Instead, the Kingdom increased its public relations offensive in the U.S., spending tens of millions of dollars on Washington lobbyist, and in contributions to U.S.-based Muslim organizations such as CAIR, who oppose the government’s condemnation of Palestinian terrorism and Hamas.
Last month, CAIR announced that it was “launching a massive $50 million media campaign involving television, radio, and newspapers as part of its five-year program to create a better understanding of Islam and Muslims in the U.S.” Following their Saudi paymaster’s lead, CAIR now orchestrates a media offensive demanding that President Bush come to Hamas’s rescue and condemn Israel.
Clearly, the idea that the $50 million CAIR spends to promote Hamas’ culture of death can instead help millions of Muslims to live better, just did not cross Awad’s mind.
By Bennett Zimmerman, Roberta Seid, and Michael L. Wise
http://www.pademographics.com/
Voodoo Demographics
originally appeared in Azure Magazine
Demography has always been a driving force in the 120-year-old Arab-Jewish conflict. Indeed, modern Zionism’s dream of restoring the Jewish nation to its ancestral homeland seemed feasible in part because the region was then so sparsely populated. When modern aliya, or Jewish immigration,began in 1880, fewer than 500,000 people lived in the corner of the Ottoman Empire that would become the Palestine Mandate. And while the mix of ethnic groups collectively referred to as Arabs, or “Orientals,” formed the bulk of the Mandate’s population at the time, Jews were already the majority in Jerusalem. With the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and the waves of immigration that followed, Jews indeed quickly became the majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Today, however, many believe that the demographic pendulum is swinging the other way. A “demographic time bomb” is ticking, it is said, in which Arabs will soon outnumber Jews in the areas under Israel’s control. Indeed, when the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) reported 2004 population of 3.83 million is added to the 1.3 million Israeli Arabs, the new total-5.1 million Arabs-rapidly approaches parity with Israel’s 5.5 million Jews. This number, coupled with PA claims to the world’s highest growth rate and a high Israeli Arab birthrate, as well, has led to the widely held conviction that the Jews will soon become a minority west of the Jordan River-and that the idea of a Jewish state with an enduring Jewish majority will be severely undermined.
This perception of the region’s demographic situation has had a profound effect on recent Arab and Israeli strategies vis-à-vis the determination of Israel’s final borders. Historically, it has been in the minority’s interest to accept the partition of territory, while the majority lays claim to the entire land. Accordingly, the Jewish minority during the Mandate period acquiesced to the excision of three-fourths of the Mandate to create the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan in 1922, and, after the Arabs had persuaded the British to limit Jewish immigration to restricted areas in the remainder of Palestine, agreed to the 1937 and 1947 partition proposals. In contrast, the Mandate’s Arab majority all along demanded a one-state solution. Only in 1988, after the Arabs had become the clear regional minority, did the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership finally acquiesce, at least provisionally, to a two-state solution.
Today, the existential threat posed to the State of Israel by the specter of an Arab majority has resulted in a decisive policy shift on the part of the Jews. Portraying the high growth forecasts for the Palestinian and Israeli Arab populations as an inexorable force of nature poised to engulf Israel and doom the Zionist enterprise, then-Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned in 2003 that “Above all hovers the cloud of demographics. It will come down on us not in the end of days, but in just another few years.”1 Also in 2003, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the Likud Central Committee, “The idea that it is possible to continue keeping 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation… is bad for Israel, and bad for the Palestinians, and bad for the Israeli economy.”2 Today, while both Prime Minister Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni maintain that Israel has historic and security rights to the West Bank, they are nonetheless committed to further unilateral disengagement, couching their argument less in terms of Palestinian rights than basing it on demographic grounds.
For their part, the Palestinians have consistently seen the demographic time bomb as a weapon guaranteeing Palestinian victory in the century-long struggle with the Jews. Alongside the claim of Palestinian rights, it is the belief in the eventual Arab demographic dominance that has continued to sustain the Palestinian will to fight at a time when much of the Arab world has reconciled itself to Israel’s existence. “The womb of the Palestinian woman,” Yasser Arafat was fond of saying, “will defeat the Zionists.”
These deep-rooted assumptions about a demographic time bomb, however, are wrong. A careful review of the data behind these forecasts reveals that Israel does not, in fact, face an imminent demographic threat from any combination of Arab population groups. Rather, the source of much of Israel’s anxiety may be traced to inaccurate numbers issued by the Palestinian Authority and taken for granted by the rest of the world-numbers that paint a very different picture.
In The Million Person Gap: The Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza, we undertook an exhaustive investigation of the sourcing and methodology of the PA’s numbers as compared to other records issued by Palestinian and Israeli agencies.3 These records, when carefully corroborated against each other, suggest that the mid-year 2004 population in Gaza and the West Bank was 2.49 million, and not, as reported by the PA, 3.83 million. This gap of 1.34 million persons-an artificial inflation of more than 50 percent-can be traced to the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics (pcbs), which conducted its only census in 1997, and has since used those results to develop a forecast for each year from 1998 to 2015. It is, in fact, these predictions that the PA has released each year as its population size, although they have never been adjusted to account for actual, changing demographic events.
How is this possible? The million-person gap stems from two major flaws in accounting: First, in the pcbs’s method of establishing the Palestinian Arab population base when it first began counting the population; and second, the pcbs’s method of predicting birth, emigration, and immigration rates among the relevant Arab groups, on the basis of which the current data was determined. These errors began when, as part of the implementation of the 1993 Oslo accords, responsibility for tracking demographics was transferred from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (icbs) to the pcbs. In 1997, the pcbs reported an astonishing 648,000-person increase in the Arab Palestinian population-about 30 percent-over the number reported internally by the icbs the previous year.4 How did the pcbs find so many new people? The answer is simple, and telling. First, the pcbs counted the 210,000 Jerusalem Arab residents that were already counted in Israel’s population surveys. Although the Palestinian Authority seeks to incorporate Jerusalem’s residents into its future state, in fact they are living within the city limits of Jerusalem, under Israeli civilian rule, and rely heavily on Israeli infrastructure and government services; more importantly, the Oslo accords left the icbs, not the pcbs, in charge of counting the Jerusalem Arabs.
Second, the pcbs, by its own admission, included at least 325,000 Palestinians, fully 13 percent of the pcbs total, who were living outside of the PA. Although the agency claimed it was performing a de facto census (defined by demographers as counting only people physically present), it made an exception for non-residents who had received identification cards during Israel’s Civil Administration, regardless of how long they had been absent. (Israel, by comparison, removes people from its population counts after they have been abroad for a year.) The inclusion of non-residents with identification cards is not an uncommon practice for Palestinian agencies: The Palestine Central Election Commission (CEC), for example, noted in 2004 that 13 percent of its base of eligible voters lived abroad.5 Thus, by double-counting the Jerusalem Arabs and including Palestinian Arabs living abroad in their total, the pcbs managed to add 535,000 people to their population total.
When the twice-counted Jerusalem Arabs and those residents living abroad are subtracted from the pcbs population base, it turns out that there are only 113,000 more Arabs than documented by the icbs. This new disparity bodes far better: Considering the contentious nature of demographics, such a small difference between the Israeli and Palestinian counts underscores that the disparities between the two counts were the result of changes in definition, not changes in actual numbers of people. The lower icbs figure was further corroborated by Palestinian voting records: According to the CEC, there were 1.3 million adults physically living in the territories and eligible to vote in 2004 and 2005. That figure exactly matches the icbs age grouping predictions, which indicated that there would be 1.3 million residents over the age of 18 and eligible to vote in 2004, as opposed to the 1.85 million predicted in the pcbs forecast. Thus when projecting Palestinian population figures for 2004-the last year for which official data has been released-the pcbs began with a significantly inflated base number for 1997.
The pcbs then took its artificially inflated population base and predicted that it would grow at an average of 4.75 percent per year from 1997 to 2004-the highest rate in the world-as a result of high birth rates and massive immigration. Yet official data from Palestinian and Israeli agencies has since revealed that these pcbs birth and immigration expectations were not met for even one year between 1997 and 2004.
The first explanation for the lesser growth rate is the lower observed rate of natural increase-that is, births minus deaths. From 1997 through the end of 2003, there were 308,000 fewer births than the pcbs had predicted, according to the PA Ministry of Health (MOH), which kept detailed birth records by district, hospital, and type of delivery.6 PA Ministry of Education records on the number of children entering first grade corroborate the MOH’s lower figures.7 With regard to deaths, the numbers are also lower, with the pcbs projections of deaths from 1997 to 2003 exceeding MOH statistics by some 32,000. The pcbs birth and death rate predictions were not significantly off, but when they were applied to a large number of individuals not living in the West Bank and Gaza, they caused the pcbs forecast to significantly overstate births and deaths. In the area of natural population growth, therefore, the Palestinian projections were artificially inflated by some 276,000.
The second explanation has to do with the movement of Palestinians into and out of the territories. The pcbs predicted that a net 236,000 Palestinians would move into the territories from abroad between 1997 and 2003, when in reality Israeli border police records show that a net 74,000 moved out-yielding a net error of 310,000 people. In addition, according to an Israeli Ministry of the Interior report, in the same period 105,000 Palestinians moved to pre-1967 Israel from the territories under family reunification programs-Palestinians whom the pcbs continued to count, but who were now being counted as Israeli Arabs as well-bringing the total inflation of Palestinian figures as a result of faulty accounting of immigration and emigration to 415,000 people. It is a fact that Palestinian Arab emigration is one of the most important untold stories behind the conflict, playing as it does a critical role in reducing the Palestinian growth rate. For instead of a large number of Palestinians moving into the territories as the pcbs anticipated, a much larger number of Palestinians fled to neighboring countries and to democracies such as Australia, Europe, the United States, Canada, and their destination of first choice, Israel. Over 100,000 have entered Israel legally-plus an uncertain but substantial number who entered Israel illegally and are not counted in any of the data in question. One reason for this Palestinian exodus is the uprisingthat erupted in the fall of 2000: Since then, many concerned Arab parents have sent their children out of the country to escape the influence of a society that encourages its young to volunteer for suicide missions. Many of these parents, moreover, were not certain their children would return, or indeed, whether they would join them abroad.8 This phenomenon, as Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid observed in 2001, was a “well-kept secret”: Journalists were forbidden to report on it, since the PA believed it would be “detrimental to the national interest.”9
In sum: By double-counting the Jerusalem Arabs and counting Arabs living abroad, the Palestinians inflated their base data for 1997 by 648,000. By predicting unrealistically high rates of natural population growth, the number was inflated by an additional 276,000; and by falsely predicting massive immigration to Gaza and the West Bank, and ignoring the significant net emigration of Palestinians from the territories, the pcbs further inflated the numbers by another 415,000. If we add these figures together, by 2004 the pcbs figures had managed to inflate the population in the West Bank and Gaza by some 1.34 million people-more than 50 percent. When the pcbs’ numerous errors are corrected, the Palestinian Arab population for Gaza and the West Bank drops to 2.49 million people, with 1.42 million in the West Bank and 1.07 million in Gaza in mid-2004.
We should emphasize that these corrected figures are not simply based on alternate, and in our view superior, demographic assumptions; they are based on the Palestinian authority’s own government records from ministries outside the pcbs, such as the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, agencies that tracked actual demographic activity since 1997. The figures cited here should thus be considered far more reliable in all discussions of Palestinian demography-decisively so. The pcbs predictions of 4.4 and 4.9 percent growth rates for the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, are also dramatic overstatements in comparison to the observed rates of 1.8 and 2.9 percent.
Beyond the question of the Palestinian population living in the West Bank and Gaza, however, there is a no-less-important question of the number of Arabs living within pre-1967 Israel. Many Israeli Arabs identify as Palestinians; and it is the combined total of Arabs living on both sides of the pre-1967 border that forms the basis for the “demographic time bomb” theory. Here too, however, we discover a number of fundamental errors in describing the growth rate of this population, and where it stands in comparison to that of the Jewish population.
During the years 1997-2003, while the overall Jewish growth rate (including both natural growth and net immigration) was 2.1 percent per year, the Israeli Arab growth rate was significantly higher, at 3.3 percent-the highest for any group in the present study-partly a result of immigration from the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, the Israeli Arab population grew from 10.5 percent of the regional total in 1967 to 14 percent by 2004, which is the main cause of the Jewish majority’s falling during that time from 64 percent to 59 percent. Yet even these numbers are subject to manipulation: Some demographers, for example, have artificially lowered Israeli Jewish figures even further by removing some 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not halachically recognized as Jewish from the “Jews and Others” category, despite the fact that many of them identify with Jews and Israel, have Jewish familial links, or consider themselves Jewish.10 (The icbs, by contrast, places them in the “Jews and Others” category, and reserves the “Arabs and Others” category for groups such as the Druze, who are of similar ethnic and geographical origin to their Arab Muslim neighbors.)11 It is clear that Israel has become more demographically complex and multicultural, but not necessarily more Palestinian Arab. The demographic results from the Territories were mixed: While Gaza’s ratio increased from 9.5 percent in 1967 to 11.5 percent by 2004, the West Bank’s share fell from 16 to 15 percent.
Taken together with the corrected Palestinian figures for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it emerges that while both Arab and Jewish population groups have grown markedly during the past four decades, their relative ratios have not changed all that dramatically. In fact, Jews remain in a fairly strong majority position: In the combined territories of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, the ratio of Jews to Arabs is 3 to 2. If we discount the Gaza Strip-which is no longer under any kind of Israeli rule, and therefore is of questionable relevance when speaking of a demographic threat-then the proportion is 2 to 1. And in pre-1967 Israel including Jerusalem, the ratio is 4 to 1.
While many demographers and commentators are inclined to downplay the significance of these corrected figures, saying that they merely delay the date when Arabs will outnumber Jews, this is often the product of habituated thinking rather than a hard look at the numbers. They argue that as the disproportionately young Arab population reaches childbearing age, its demographic momentum will propel it to majority status. But that scenario, too, is somewhat far-fetched, particularly as the demographic outlook for Israeli Jews has begun to improve. Indeed, while the number of children a woman is likely to bear over her lifetime (known as the Total Fertility Rate, or TFR) has been steadily rising in the Jewish sector, it has been dropping among the Arabs. Between 2000 and 2005, the Jewish TFR gradually increased to 2.7-the highest rate in any advanced industrialized nation-and the number of Jewish births grew from 80,000 per year in 1995 to 96,000 in 2000 to more than 104,000 by 2004.12
By contrast, Arab fertility rates have been declining. Within Israel, the overall fertility figure for the Arab grouping (including Muslims, Christians, and Druze) declined from 4.4 in 2000 to 4.0 in 2004. Meanwhile, the number of total births, which has increased among the Jews, has been stabilizing among Israel’s Arabs: While births among Israeli Arabs grew from 36,500 in 1995 to 41,200 in 2000, they have leveled off over the past five years. In fact, the absolute number of Israeli Arab births fell for the first time in 2004, possibly the result of new government policies affecting high-fertility sectors of the Israeli population, notably the reduction of child allowances.13 And in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well, there has been a similar lack of momentum in Arab births. In the West Bank the fertility rate has dropped from 5.7 in 1999 to 5.0 in 2003, and in the Gaza Strip from 6.6 to 5.7, respectively.14
One of the pitfalls of predicting population sizes is that demographers often apply yesterday’s or today’s fertility rates to tomorrow’s forecast. By assuming Israeli Arab fertility rates from the 1960s (which averaged between 9 and 10 births per woman), Israeli demographers projected that Israeli Arabs would overtake Israeli Jews before 1990. When the Israeli Arab fertility rate dropped to 5.4 in the early 1980s and to 4.7 in the second half of that decade, demographers applied the new rate to their next series of forecasts. However, by 2005, the Israeli Arab rate had dropped even further, to 4.0, reflecting the progressive economic development in the Arab sector, and echoing the more dramatic drops reported throughout the Middle East. To date, however, Israeli demographers have not readjusted their forecasts in light of changes in fertility level. This consideration-the forward-reaching effects of changing cultural attitudes or economic conditions-is vital to any demographic forecast.
Adding to the demographic pessimism, moreover, most forecasters have dismissed the possibility of significant future Jewish immigration. In this, they repeat the errors of the 1980s, when a leading Israeli demographer maintained that Soviet Jews would never come to Israel in significant numbers-just one decade before almost one million did.15 After all, the American Jewish community-the largest outside Israel-has a burgeoning Orthodox sector that is deepening its ties with Israel and has markedly increased its rate of immigration to Israel, in part as a result of improved economic conditions in Israel. Furthermore, rising hostility toward Jews in Western Europe is fueling immigration to Israel, as well, especially among French Jews, for whom the desire to move to Israel has never been more acute. Finally, among those consistently excluded from Israel’s census are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who live abroad, many of whom possess a powerful loyalty to Israel and end up returning when economic times improve. For instance, when Israel’s economy resumed its high annual growth in 2003, the rate of returning Israelis jumped 20 percent in 2004 and 50 percent in 2005.16
What, then, does a more factual approach to demographic trends portend for Israel’s demographic security?
In a further study undertaken by the authors, Forecast for Israel and West Bank 2025, we used corrected population data for the West Bank to update the forecasts provided for both Israeli Arabs and Jews recently released by the icbs for 2000-2025.17 It is important to take note of a methodological shift we undertook in considering forecasts into the distant future. For the purposes of calculating the past and current populations of the region, it was important to expose the faulty demographic figures widely cited with regard to the entire region-Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Yet it is still the case that Israel has withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, rendering its population figures of questionable relevance when considering the “demographic time bomb” theory. After all, if Israel no longer rules over Gaza, and has no intention of ever ruling over it again, then the very inclusion of Gaza’s population into the “demographic question” is itself an act of distortion: Whether Israeli democracy is compromised by the prospect of a minority ruling over an Arab majority, for example, only matters in the area in which Israel is ruling today or may be ruling tomorrow. And whereas the political arrangements which will govern the West Bank in the long run are still very much an open question, it seems that those regarding the Gaza Strip are not, at least as far as Israel is concerned. Thus, the entire “demographic time bomb” theory must be re-examined in light of the respective long-term demographic prognosis for Israel and the West Bank, to the exclusion of Gaza. More significantly, with no reliable border data available since Israel transferred the Rafah border crossing to the Palestinians, a Gaza forecast based on recent demographic events would lose relevance against any, even dramatic, changes in population that might accompany recent political changes.
The study used corrected population and growth figures for Israel and the West Bank, and postulated a range of scenarios of possible growth in all the respective population groups. In the mid-growth scenario developed in the study, Israeli Jews maintain the current fertility rate of 2.7, and net immigration (aliya plus returning Israelis, minus Israelis who leave) stays at its recent 2001-2004 average of a net 20,000 per year.18 Likewise, Israeli Arab fertility rates continue their downward trend from the current 4.0 to 3.0 by 2025. Even if we use United Nations data, which show fertility rates above those issued by the pcbs, the fertility rates of Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank still fall gradually from 5.4 to 3.24.19 Within these parameters, in 2025 the Jewish population would form a 63 percent majority in Israel and the West Bank-down slightly from the current level of 67 percent. Moreover, in a scenario adjusted for greater Jewish immigration and fertility rates boosted by rising Orthodox birthrates, the proportion of Jews would instead grow to a 71 percent majority of the total population. This situation is hardly unfeasible: Jewish fertility rates over the past five years are now above the highest level predicted by the icbs, while the Israeli Arab sector is approaching the lowest fertility levels of the icbs forecast. The only possible challenge to the Jewish position, barring unforeseen events, would be from large-scale Arab immigration into a provisional West Bank Palestinian state from the Gaza Strip or abroad.
It is true that Israel has always depended on some level of immigration to maintain or improve its demographic position in relation to the Arab population, a dependency that will likely continue. Without immigration, long-term demographic stability will require a convergence of birthrates between the Jewish and Arab population groups. In this regard, it is instructive to note the different fertility rates of Israel’s various Arab subgroups. Among Christian Arabs, fertility rates have fallen to 2.1, barely replacement level. The Druze, who once boasted high fertility rates, are now holding steady at 2.66, just below the current Israeli Jewish fertility rate of 2.7. The reason for this drop is likely linked to the modernization of the Druze community and its integration into Israeli society, including its participation in Israel’s military and increased educational opportunities for women, which in turn led to delayed marriage and fewer childbearing years. Today in Israel it is widely advocated that in the interests of equality, Israel should adopt similar policies for the Muslim sector, including national service and enhanced educational opportunities for both men and women. If these were adopted, their high but declining fertility rates might decline even further, and eventually approach Jewish levels.
The conclusions from all this seem overwhelmingly clear: The Arab demographic time bomb is, in many crucial respects, a dud. It is the product of a dramatically inflated account of the actual number of Palestinians living in the territories, combined with obsolete assumptions about future growth. The question must now be asked: Why is it that Israel has relied on PA population projections as starting assumptions in envisioning the future contours of the Jewish state? And why have these statistical errors gone unnoticed? The official answer is that when Israel turned over administration of the territories to the new PA agencies in 1994 and 1995, no Israeli agency was charged with monitoring the accuracy of the pcbs figures. Recently, when the Knesset’s Operations Committee summoned members of the icbs for three inquiry hearings devoted to this question, the icbs maintained that monitoring the Arab population in the West Bank and Gaza was beyond its jurisdiction, both for budgetary reasons and because the Oslo accords explicitly barred Israeli agencies from doing so. Furthermore, the original divergence between pcbs and icbs numbers occurred in 1997, when the political process between Israel and the PA was proceeding smoothly and there was little interest in questioning the figures.
In some cases, simple negligence contributed to reports about a dwindling Jewish ratio. Though it is generally known that both Israeli and PA surveys include Jerusalem’s Arabs, many international and government agencies, including, for example, the U.S. State Department and the CIA, simply add the two surveys together to get their totals, thus double-counting the 220,000 Jerusalem Arabs. Yet an additional reason, it seems, relates to the intense politicization of the subject in Israel and the PA, and the way that Israelis have come to assume the inevitability of Arab demographic dominance. Prominent Israeli academics who addressed demography were committed to the separation of Jewish and Arab populations, and their policy recommendations were inseparable from their “demographic time bomb” warnings. Arnon Soffer’s widely distributed Israel Demography 2004-2020: In Light of the Process of Disengagement,20 for example, accepted pcbs population claims for the West Bank and Gaza, exaggerated Jerusalem Arabs by nearly double, removed religiously unclassified Soviet immigrants from the icbs “Jews and Other” category, included foreign workers in the “Arabs and Other” category (not included by the icbs in Israel’s population), and included illegal immigrants to Israel from the PA without removing the same persons from the pcbs count, thereby arriving at a Jewish minority west of the Jordan River.
Moreover, the pcbs numbers continue to be widely cited by national and international organizations, lending them further credibility. International aid to the territories, for example, is based in part on PA population figures. On March 15, 2006, pleading for continued American aid to Palestinians, U.S. Quartet representative James Wolfensohn told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee there was a humanitarian crisis developing for 4 to 4.5 million Palestinians in the territories.21 Surprisingly, no senators questioned his numbers or their provenance, although his casual reference was higher than even those claims made by the pcbs or Israeli demographers. There are signs that this automatic acceptance of inflated figures may well be on the wane, however: Since the Oslo accords, the U.S. has granted the Palestinians $1.5 billion, most of which has gone not to the PA, but rather to humanitarian programs whose budgets are often calculated on a per capita basis. While it is difficult to backtrack on a decade of aid calculations, in the wake of Hamas’ recent victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, various government agencies are reassessing aid programs to the Palestinians. The Middle East and Central Asia Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, for example, chaired by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, invited the authors of this article to present evidence of the inflated population figures issued by the PA. As a result, the U.S. and other donors may decide to recalibrate their support, given the significantly smaller number of people in the territories.22
Yet the deeper answer to why the incorrect figures were unquestioningly accepted may lie in history itself: For more than a century, Jews have been locked in a demographic battle with Arabs. As such, many are predisposed to believe the worst-case scenarios-and a chorus of scholars ready to confirm their worst fears is always waiting in the wings.
Do the Jews of Israel face a demographic threat? The answer is still a qualified yes-but the threat has been greatly exaggerated. As the real numbers make clear, Arab population growth is not an overwhelming force that is destined, sooner or later, to relegate the Jews to minority status. On the contrary: With a greater understanding of demography and the specific forces that drive it, Israeli policymakers can develop a range of choices to affect the long-term demographic trends in the region-from the encouragement of Jewish immigration to the fostering of economic and social equality between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. More important, Israel must realize that it has time, demographically speaking, to evaluate these choices, and to make the right decisions.
What is clear, however, is that the corrected data neutralizes a major psychological weapon in the Arab-Jewish propaganda war. Palestinians have wielded their supposed demographic strength to threaten Israel and inspire confidence in the inevitability of victory; but the Jews, it must now be declared openly, are not a vulnerable majority whose foothold in the land is weak. On the contrary, the Jews remain a clear-cut majority with robust demographic features. This moment in Israel’s history is, therefore, a pivotal one: It must undertake the kind of bold new thinking that will ensure that the Jewish state remains a reality, even as the rights and welfare of Palestinian and Israeli Arabs are addressed. And this can begin only with good, reliable data.
ISRAEL'S GRIM DEFENSE FACTS
By URIEL HEILMAN
FOUR weeks after the start of a war sparked by Hezbollah's surprise attack on an Israeli military patrol along the Israel-Lebanon border, northern Israel has become a ghost town.
An estimated million Israelis - a sixth of the nation - have abandoned the country's north, fleeing for the relative safety of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the southern resort city of Eilat.
But as Hezbollah's rockets hit deeper and deeper into Israel's heartland, approaching the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israelis are running out of places to go. In a country roughly the size of New Jersey, there's not much room for safe haven.
In the south, Palestinians are shooting Qassam rockets out of the Gaza Strip, threatening towns from coastal Ashkelon to the desert city of Sderot. In the north, Hezbollah's rockets are raining terror from Haifa to Tiberias.
In central Israel, Israeli authorities are engaged in a constant battle to stop Palestinian suicide bombers before they reach their targets. Yesterday, Israeli police caught a woman in Nablus with an explosives belt on her way into Israel.
If the West Bank were under Palestinian control, the conflict zone would include Jerusalem, which abuts the West Bank, and the metropolis of Tel Aviv, less than 10 miles from the border. Both are within range of hostile rockets.
This is why Israel's need to defend its borders is paramount, and why Israel has responded so seriously to the Hezbollah threat from southern Lebanon.
Israel is surrounded by militants intent on destroying the Jewish state - militants practicing their ideals in the form of rocket fire, suicide bombings and arms shipments.
"The real cure for the conflict is elimination of the Zionist regime," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last week. Herein lies the true root of the conflict.
Israel's enemies in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank won't be satisfied until Israel is "wiped off the map," in Ahmadinejad's words.
During the intifada years, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian TV broadcast Hebrew-language advertisements calling on Jews to leave Israel and return to their countries of origin in Europe. "Go back to Poland, to Germany," the ads said, showing footage of suicide bombings in Israeli cities. "It's not safe for you here."
Of course, the Jews came to Israel in the first place because Europe had become a killing ground for them. The Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews, and many of Europe's Allied powers turned away Jewish refugees even during the height of the Holocaust.
Jews also came to Israel from the Arab world, where the Arabs kicked them out of millennia-old Jewish communities in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Libya in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Today, nations around the world are pressing Israel to hold its fire and pull its troops out of Lebanon - essentially leaving in place the threat of national destruction looming from Israel's northern border.
That would render Israel an unsafe place for the Jews.
So where, exactly, are Jews supposed to go?
Israeli troops are fighting in Lebanon to make Israel a safe place for Jews to live. Israel would prefer someone else do the job of disarming Hezbollah - the Lebanese army, the U.N. force in the area, a multinational force - but so far no one but Israel has shown the willingness or ability to put lives on the line to solve the problem.
Thousands of years of persecution have taught the Jews a sad but an important lesson: Rely on no one but yourselves.
Unless someone else is willing to step up and guarantee quiet on the Lebanon-Israel border - and UNIFIL, in 28 years in southern Lebanon, failed to establish even the appearance of security - Israel should not accede to demands to halt its defense against the Lebanon-based militia. It may cost more Israeli lives, but Israel doesn't have any other choice. The life of the country depends upon it.
Uriel Heilman is a Jerusalem correspondent for JTA News Service.
LT.-GEN. (RET.) YA'ALON and Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Amidror
Discussions about security arrangements in Lebanon at the end of the war have included the proposal to station an international force in that country. Yet the UN has a very bad name in terms of confronting strong forces in areas where it is stationed.
The only logical basis for an international presence is the creation of a force whose primary mission will be assisting the Lebanese army in disarming Hizbullah (as stated in UN Security Council Resolution 1559). Such a force should be deployed close to Beirut, at Lebanese-Syrian border crossing, and deep in the Bekaa Valley.
An international force has no role in southern Lebanon along the Israeli-Lebanese border. Israel is deployed along its northern border to defend itself and prevent the strengthening of Hizbullah, should it try to move southward.
To complement this deployment, there should be an agreement prohibiting the building of fortifications in southern Lebanon - as in the agreement between Israel and Egypt. In addition, the UN should establish a supervisory force like UNSCOM to deal with locating and clearing out Hizbullah's arms caches and preventing the building of new ones.
Types of international forces
In the interest of a serious national discourse about security arrangements in Lebanon at the end of the war, it is worthwhile to more thoroughly discuss the proposed stationing of an international force in Lebanon, an idea that Israel has opposed in the distant and recent past.
There are four known kinds of international forces:
- A force whose purpose is to supervise signed agreements between two states - such as the multinational force (MFO) that supervises the Israeli-Egyptian agreement in the Sinai.
- A force whose role is to report on events in the field where it is deployed, without the ability or role of enforcing a certain policy - such as the international force that is deployed by the UN in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL).
- A force whose mission is to maintain quiet in a region where there is a potential for clashes - that being the role of the NATO forces in Kosovo.
- A force whose task is to fight in the name of a certain policy - such as the UN force in the Korean War in the 1950s and the NATO force in Afghanistan today.
Although it is not clear what is being considered or planned regarding an international force in Lebanon, the accumulated experience on this issue should not be ignored.
The US Marines, who came to Lebanon at the end of 1982, withdrew in fear a few months later after Hizbullah used intensive terrorism against them. UNIFIL has been in the field since 1978 and has done more harm than good - it did not prevent Palestinian terror (prior to Israel's entry into southern Lebanon in 1982) or Hizbullah attacks, while hampering the IDF's freedom of action.
Among all the international forces in our area, the only one that successfully carries out its role is the multinational force in Sinai, which is built on a broad American basis. Its success is due mainly to the fact that the two countries involved, Egypt and Israel, are determined to uphold the security arrangements.
Also in Kosovo, where a large international force is stationed, there has been relative success - because the force, just by being there, promotes the interests of the local actors who want independence or annexation to Albania, and no one has an interest in harming the functioning of the force.
In Afghanistan, however, the multinational force under NATO command is waging a real war, and quite successfully, yet has no connection to the UN or its institutions.
What should Israel expect from a multinational force?
Israel should not expect a multinational force to fight Hizbullah so as to disarm it. The UN has a very bad name in confronting strong forces in areas where its forces are stationed.
A force that will separate between the aims and actions of a thriving Hizbullah and the State of Israel is a recipe for disaster; it will most likely fail in fighting Hizbullah, but will also hamper the IDF's freedom of response.
It seems the only logical basis which justifies an international force, made up of real combat soldiers, is the creation of a force whose primary mission will be assisting the Lebanese army.
It is the Lebanese Armed Forces that must carry the burden of disarming Hizbullah and that must verify that there are no military contingents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon (all as stated in UN Security Council Resolution 1559). It is the Lebanese Armed Forces that must safeguard Lebanon's borders - so that Iranian and Syrian weapons are not smuggled into Lebanon to help Hizbullah rebuild close to the border with Israel.
The Lebanese Armed Forces is a sufficiently strong army and there seems to be no need to fear that the Shi'ites in it will defect to Hizbullah. This army may, however, need assistance and backing, and that is what a strong international force can provide. It should be prepared to assist the Lebanese Armed Forces in areas where Hizbullah was strong and influential.
An international force has no role along the Israel-Lebanon border
In southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Armed Forces will have a supportive backup in the form of the IDF, stationed along Israel's northern border. However, it needs a similar supportive framework in central and eastern Lebanon.
To complement this deployment, it may be worth importing two important ideas from other conflict zones. These ideas can help ensure Lebanon's flowering as an independent state, without threat from Hizbullah, either internally or by threatening Israel:
An agreement should prohibit the building of fortifications in southern Lebanon - as in the agreement between Israel and Egypt. This will remove the concern that the threat will return to Israel's northern border.
The UN should establish a supervisory force like UNSCOM to deal with locating and clearing out Hizbullah's arms caches and preventing the building of new ones. The UN carried out this role reasonably well in Iraq and there is no reason it cannot do so in Lebanon.
Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon was the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and is currently a distinguished military fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Maj.-Gen. (res.) Ya'akov Amidror heads the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The Rules of War
By Moshe Yaalon
Thursday, August 3, 2006; A27; Washington Post
The conflict in the Middle East is about much more than Israel and Hezbollah, or even Hezbollah's Syrian and Iranian sponsors. What is at stake are the very rules of war that underpin the entire international order.
Sadly, judging from how most of the world has responded to Israel 's military action against Hezbollah, these rules have been completely abandoned.
The rules of war boil down to one central principle: the need to distinguish combatants from noncombatants. Those who condemned Israel for what happened at Qana, rather than placing the blame for this unfortunate tragedy squarely on Hezbollah and its state sponsors, have rewarded those for whom this moral principle is meaningless and have condemned a state in which this principle has always guided military and political decision making.
Faced with enemies who openly call for its destruction and victimized by unremitting wars and terrorism since well before it was born, Israel has risked the lives of its citizens and its soldiers to abide by this principle in a way that is unprecedented in the history of nations.
Here is but one of countless examples: In 2003, at the height of the Palestinian terror war against Israel, our intelligence services discovered the location of a meeting of the senior leadership of Hamas, an organization pledged to the annihilation of the Jewish state and responsible for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever carried out against Israel.
We knew that a one-ton bomb would destroy the three-story building and kill the Hamas leadership. But we also knew that such a bomb would endanger about 40 families who lived in the vicinity. We decided to use a smaller bomb that would destroy only the top floor of the building. As it turned out, the Hamas leaders were meeting on the ground floor. They lived to terrorize another day.
Imagine for a moment that the United States had advance knowledge of the meeting place of al-Qaeda's senior leadership. Does anyone believe that there would be a debate about what size bomb to use, much less that any leader would authorize insufficient force to do the job?
So while it is legitimate to question whether Israel should go to such extreme lengths to avoid civilian casualties, it is preposterous to argue that Israel uses excessive force. Even more absurd was the shameful statement last week that Israel appeared to have deliberately targeted U.N. officials -- a statement fit for a knave or a fool, not for the secretary general of the United Nations. Rather than lead the fight against those who target civilians and use them as human shields, Secretary General Kofi Annan has strengthened them.
It is clear to any objective observer that Hezbollah is using Lebanese civilians as human shields. It builds its headquarters in densely populated areas, embeds its fighters in towns and villages, and deliberately places missiles in private homes, even constructing additions to existing structures specifically to house missile launchers.
The reason terrorist groups such as Hezbollah use human shields is elementary. They try to exploit the respect for innocent human life that is the hallmark of any civilized society to place that society in a no-win situation. If it fails to respond to terror attacks, it endangers its own citizens. If it responds, it runs the risk of killing innocents, earning world opprobrium and inviting diplomatic pressure to stand down.
Hoping to retain its high moral standards in the face of such a cynical enemy, Israel has made every effort to avoid harming civilians. We have dropped fliers, sent telephone messages and broadcast radio announcements so that innocents can get out of harm's way. In doing so, we imperil our own citizens since, by losing the element of surprise, we invariably allow some of the enemy to escape with their missiles.
But at Qana, Hezbollah responded to Israel 's compassion with more cynical brutality. After launching missiles at Israel , the terrorists rushed inside a building. When Israel fired a precision-guided missile to strike at the terrorists, scores of civilians, including children, were killed.
The difference between us and the terrorists is clear: We endanger ourselves to protect their civilians. They endanger their own civilians to protect themselves.
If tragedies such as Qana are not to be repeated, then, rather than condemning Israel , the world should be directing its anger at Hezbollah and at the Syrian and Iranian regimes that support it.
Terrorists are fanatics, but they are not idiots. If the terrorist tactic of using human shields helps them achieve their goals, they will utilize it. If it undermines their goals, they will abandon it.
If we want to live in a world where civilians are never used as human shields, then we must create a world in which employing such measures results in the unequivocal condemnation of terrorists and in forceful action against them by the civilized world.
If the world were now blaming Hezbollah , Syria and Iran for the innocent Lebanese killed, hurt or displaced in this conflict, then it would be sending a powerful message to every terrorist group on the planet: We will not tolerate the use of human shields. Period.
Instead, those who condemn Israel have sent precisely the opposite message. They have told every terrorist group around the world that the use of human shields will pay huge dividends, thereby providing them with a powerful weapon that endangers innocents everywhere.
The writer, a retired lieutenant general, was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 2002 to 2005. He is now a distinguished military fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Our World: Olmert's international coalitions
Today Hamas consolidates its power in Gaza and plans its next moves in Judea and Samaria. Fatah - its main competitor - has collapsed.
Fatah was plunged into a state of organizational shock last month after its US-trained militias surrendered control of Gaza to Hamas and its US-benighted commanders fled the area.
Although with sufficient bribes for its angry followers courtesy of Israel and the US, Fatah may be able to temporarily resuscitate itself (at least until its leaders feel secure enough with the size of their Swiss bank accounts to decamp to Borneo), Hamas's consolidation of its control over Gaza has nonetheless sealed Fatah's death warrant.
In the course of its jihadist putsch in Gaza, Hamas took control not only of Fatah's US- and European-financed military arsenal and the CIA and MI-6 intelligence gathering equipment Fatah was lavished with. It also took control of Fatah's intelligence files and the personal files of Fatah leaders. This means that Hamas now has complete documentary evidence of Fatah's corruption; its involvement in terrorism; and its double dealing with the West, with rogue regimes like Iran, and with terror groups like Hizbullah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida.
THERE CAN be no doubt that under the tutelage of the Iranian and Syrian intelligence directorates, Hamas will use its treasure trove of information in a manner that will block any move by Fatah to renew its support bases in Palestinian society.
Hamas's intelligence windfall will similarly prevent Fatah from significantly resisting Hamas's consolidation of control over Gaza and the expansion of Hamas's rule to Judea and Samaria.
Two examples of Hamas's use of information to date suffice to make this point clear. First there is Israel and the US's favorite Palestinian "straight-shooter" Salam Fayad. Fayad - a former senior official from the terror-linked Arab Bank and the current prime minister of Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Judea and Samaria government - served willingly as finance minister in Hamas's government before the Gaza takeover.
Claiming that Fayad was a personal friend of hers, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ignored her own government's boycott of the Hamas government to meet with Fayad when he visited Washington in the spring.
Sunday Gaza-based Hamas terrorist and parliamentarian Yahya Musa accused Fayad of corruption. Referring to him as "the head of the thieves," Musa claimed that Fayad is "suspected of embezzling $36 million from the Agricultural Development Company."
Musa also hinted that Fayad has personally overseen the finance of terrorism by stating that he "used to channel public funds to Fatah."
THE SECOND example is Hamas's use of information on Fatah commander Muhammad Dahlan. On June 15, Hamas took control of Dahlan's palatial residence in Gaza. Hamas claimed it found a suitcase filled with gold, forged Pakistani and US passports and the identification card of murdered IDF border guard Nissim Toledano. The last find is particularly revealing.
Since 1994 both the US and Israel ignored mountains of evidence of Dahlan's involvement with terrorism. Both governments have clung to their support for Dahlan despite his close relationships with senior Hamas terrorists like Muhammad Deif and his own forces' direct involvement in the murder of Israelis. The fact that Dahlan had possession of Toledano's ID card shows just how ill-advised this support for Dahlan has been.
Toledano was kidnapped on his way to his border guard base in 1992. His mutilated body was found near the Dead Sea some days later. Toledano's abduction and murder became a pivotal event for all that would follow in the region.
Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. In response, the Rabin government deported 417 Hamas terrorists to Lebanon where they were quickly taken under the wing of Hizbullah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In 1994, in the wake of the Oslo peace process with Fatah, Rabin allowed the 417 to return to Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Once back, they immediately fomented a terror onslaught against Israel the likes of which had never been seen before. It was the returnees who organized the first suicide bombings, beginning in April 1994.
The fact that Dahlan was in possession of Toledano's ID raises the question of Fatah's involvement in his kidnap and murder and casts a pall over the entire attempt by Israel and the West to make a distinction between Hamas and Fatah terrorists.
There can be no doubt that more information about Fatah leaders (and their business and other connections with Israeli political leaders and others) will follow - as suits the operational interests of Hamas and its Iranian bosses.
In light of this it is clear that Fatah can be of no use to anyone any longer. Indeed, those who work to strengthen Fatah may well be opening themselves to blackmail and public humiliation at a time and place of Hamas's choosing. So not only is Fatah a dead horse, it is a dead horse rigged to a landmine.
YET FOR all that, supporting Fatah and Abbas remains the central goal of Israel's government. This week Israel handed some $120 million over to Abbas and Fayad. Next week it will release 250 Fatah terrorists from prison. Last week Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embraced Abbas at Sharm e-Sheikh after expounding on Abbas's greatness with US President George W. Bush at the White House the week before.
Olmert and his colleagues portray Abbas as a central member of a camp of "moderates" which includes the Saudis, the Egyptians and the Jordanians. All these so-called moderates are supposed to form a coalition with Israel, the US and the EU against the "extremists" in Hamas, Iran, Hizbullah and Syria. Unfortunately the camp of moderates is a fiction. Jordan is so frightened of a jihadist coup that its government statements are barely distinguishable from Muslim Brotherhood press releases.
Over the weekend, at Egypt's invitation, Hamas terror forces deployed along the Gaza border with Egypt. For its part, Saudi Arabia oversaw the formation of the Hamas-Fatah "unity" government last March which subordinated Abbas and Fatah to Khaled Mashaal and Hamas. The Saudis have embraced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his maiden visit to the Sunni Islamist capital, the genocidal, messianic Shi'ite Ahmadinejad was kissed, and hugged, and held hands with King Abdullah.
For her part, rather than condition any further US support for Fatah on credible steps to fight Hamas and its own terror networks, Rice is redoubling her pressure on Israel. Rice is planning to use $86 million in US-taxpayer funds to have Lt. Gen Keith Dayton train Fatah forces in Judea and Samaria. That's the same Gen. Dayton who trained and armed the Fatah forces in Gaza who cut and ran rather than fight Hamas last month and so surrendered their US-supplied weapons to Iran's proxy without a fight.
Additionally, Rice is aggressively pushing her plan to force Israel to negotiate and conclude a treaty with Abbas that would involve an Israeli pledge to surrender Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem to Fatah. This is the same Fatah whose membership is revolting and bolting and the same Abbas who Fatah members are revolting against.
AS FOR the Europeans, newly appointed Quartet envoy Tony Blair is set to begin negotiating with Hamas in his planned visit to Gaza next week.
While like Rice, Blair has repeatedly claimed that the absence of a Palestinian state is the cause of all the troubles in the Muslim world today, a week ago a Blair adviser went a step further. According to media reports, the official advised the Israeli government that as far as Blair is concerned, Israel is responsible for the global jihad because of its refusal to surrender to Palestinian terrorism.
The only reasonable explanation of the Olmert government's behavior in regards to the Palestinians is that the government hopes that by appeasing the US and the rest of the gang on the Palestinian issue, Israel will receive their cooperation in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, here too, all evidence points to the conclusion that Israel has not received anything on the Iran front from any of the relevant actors in exchange for its willingness to let Hamas take over Gaza and to continue to finance and arm Fatah terrorists.
Over the weekend Saudi Arabia's Deputy Foreign Minister met with Iran's ambassador to the Kingdom and reasserted Saudi Arabian support for Iran's pursuit of "peaceful nuclear technologies." The Saudis and the Iranians also agreed on the need for Islamic solidarity against the "enemies of Islam."
As for the Egyptians, not only are they, like the Saudis now openly moving to get nuclear capabilities of their own, the Egyptians are responsible for enabling Hamas to take control of Gaza. In spite of repeated Israeli entreaties, Egypt has never lifted a finger to prevent the flow of arms and terror personnel across its border. To the contrary, it facilitated Gaza's transformation into a jihadist hub. Since last summer's war, Egypt has moved towards reestablishing full diplomatic relations with the Iranians.
Today both the US and the Europeans are poised to set aside the option of escalating sanctions against Iran for its refusal to end its uranium enrichment activities. Over the weekend, their representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency debated a plan to take a break from escalating sanctions if Iran agrees to stop expanding its uranium enrichment. That is, the US is presently considering a plan that would allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium without facing effective international sanctions as a result.
The tragedy of this situation is that a coalition could be brought together that would be capable of meeting both the Palestinian and Iranian threats to Israeli and global security. Friends of Israel in Congress, the Bush Administration and the US policy community would be happy to work with Israel to counteract Rice's failed policies.
Unfortunately, Israeli leaders capable of appreciating and acting on this fact are nowhere to be found in the Olmert government
Column One: Bishara and the Old Guard
Since the details of former MK Azmi Bishara's rap sheet for treason are still secret, it is impossible to assess how his actions on behalf of Hizbullah during last summer's war affected Israel's campaign against Iran's proxy army in Lebanon.
But even without knowing the specifics of Bishara's crimes, two notable aspects of his case stand out. First, the very decision of Israel's investigatory arms to open a probe against Bishara for acts of treason is a welcome development. It marks a clear departure from their past treatment of Bishara and other Arab parliamentarians who have openly worked on behalf of Israel's enemies in recent years.
Bishara has acted as an overt Syrian and Hizbullah flunky ever since he was first elected to the Knesset in 1996. In contravention of Israeli law, which bars unauthorized travel to enemy states, in 1997 he traveled to Syria and met with then-vice president Abdel Halim Khadam. In 1998 he returned to Syria to meet with then-foreign minister Farouk a-Shara. Throughout the 1990s he organized illegal visits for Israeli Arabs to Syria.
Bishara's high profile visit to Syria and Lebanon last September along with his Knesset colleagues Jamal Zahalka and Wasal Taha, when he praised Hizbullah and Syria, was but an escalation of his actions on behalf of Hizbullah and Syria in the wake of the IDF's withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000. After that withdrawal, Bishara praised Hizbullah at a conference of Israeli Arabs in Umm el-Fahm, saying, "Hizbullah is entitled to take pride in its achievement in humiliating Israel."
He repeated the statement in 2001 during another illicit visit to Syria. There he praised Iran's proxy army in Lebanon while standing next to Hizbullah commander Hassan Nasrallah at a memorial ceremony for Hafez Assad.
Bishara's work on behalf of Syria and Hizbullah was but one aspect of his treasonous behavior. He has also championed the unification of Israeli Arabs with the Palestinians in their war against Israel. According to the Orr Commission, Bishara played a central role in inciting the Israeli Arab riots of October 2000.
Although all of these acts reeked of treason, Israel's legal and security establishment demurred from addressing them. Rather than investigate him for treason, he was probed for incitement or supporting terrorist organizations or visiting enemy states without permission. Due to his political prominence, time after time, he was given a pass.
And Bishara's was not a unique case. Since 1994, MK Ahmed Tibi has openly acted as an agent of the Fatah terror organization. Last month MKs Muhammad Barakei and Ibrahim Sarsour participated in a conference in Ramallah where they called on the Palestinians to conquer Jerusalem. No criminal probes have been initiated against any of these men.
Is there reason to hope that Bishara's investigation signals a new willingness on the part of the legal and political establishment to put an end to the culture of treason that has come to dominate Israeli Arab society?
Unfortunately, the answer to this question can be inferred from the second notable aspect of the Bishara case, namely, that he has fled the country.
The law on treason stipulates that members of Knesset suspected of being traitors do not enjoy parliamentary immunity from investigation or prosecution. The police and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) could have arrested Bishara for the duration of the probe against him. Yet not only did they not place him under arrest, they allowed him to leave the country.
Some have attributed the authorities' decision to permit Bishara to leave to a bad judgment call. But this view a misses the mark. It is far more likely that the decision to allow him to flee justice stemmed from institutional weakness.
To date, attempts by the Knesset, the police and the Shin Bet to enforce the laws of the state against Arab politicians and radical leftists who act against the state have been stymied by the Israeli establishment. That establishment is comprised of the academic and cultural elites who embrace them and the heads of the state prosecution, the Supreme Court justices and Israel's political leadership who protect them.
In 1999 and 2003, the Supreme Court overturned decisions of the Central Elections Commission to bar Bishara from running for Knesset. Haaretz provided him with an open forum to air his anti-Zionist rantings. Despite his East German university pedigree, Hebrew University's Van Leer Institute gave Dr. Bishara academic legitimacy.
Faced with this state of affairs, the police, the Shin Bet and the Israeli people as a whole had no reason to believe that Bishara would be indicted upon the completion of his investigation. They had no reason to believe that if he were indicted he would be convicted. And they had no reason to believe that if convicted, he would remain in prison rather than released by presidential pardon in the framework of a deal with Hamas, Fatah or Hizbullah.
So it is reasonable to assume that the investigatory authorities preferred allowing Bishara to become an announcer on Al-Jazeera to having him make a mockery of the rule of law in Israel. Were Bishara to be indicted and acquitted, far from deterring others from following his example, the entire affair would have encouraged Israeli Arabs to embrace him as a role model.
AND HERE lies the heart of the problem. Bishara and his associates have only been able to act as they have because the Israeli establishment has allowed them to do so. And the Israeli establishment has allowed them to do so because since the inauguration of the Oslo peace process with the PLO in 1993, that establishment has been corrupted and dominated by anti-Zionists.
Since Deputy Premier Shimon Peres was the father of the Oslo process, it can come as no surprise that he has been the central engine behind the corruption of the establishment. Today, Peres openly mocks the rule of law by basing his campaign for the presidency on his promise to pardon Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Fatah commander and convicted mass murderer.
After inaugurating the Oslo process, then-foreign minister Peres worked steadily to undercut the Zionist foundations of the state bureaucracy. The most obvious example of this was his decision to close the Foreign Ministry's public diplomacy department. That department had been responsible for making Israel's case to the world based on Jewish history, the history of the Zionist movement, and the history of the Arab world's war against the Jews in the Land of Israel.
For Peres, ensuring public support for his embrace of the PLO - a terrorist organization founded in 1964 to destroy Israel and to nullify the Jewish people's right to self-determination in its homeland - necessitated a rejection of history. Still today, Peres insists that history must be rejected. Just two weeks ago he said, "If it were up to me, I would cancel all history studies."
Under the thrall of Oslo and the control of anti-Zionist professors, the Education Ministry quickly began toeing the line. Now led by Yuli Tamir, one of the founders of Peace Now, the ministry last month announced that in accordance with her educational vision, school children will learn fewer facts, since there is no real historic truth.
As Prof. Anat Zohar, the head of the ministry's pedagogical secretariat put it, "Until now, classrooms didn't deal with developing thought, only with the transfer of knowledge. Today, with the expected change, the learner will become active. The knowledge will be built in terms of context."
So since everything is now contextual, there can be no value distinction between the a-historical, false Palestinian narrative and Jewish history.
Wednesday, Ma'ariv's columnist Ben Dror Yemini published a front page jeremiad entitled "From independence to suicide." Yemini reported that three taxpayer-funded bodies - the Rabinovich Fund, the Jerusalem Cinematheque, and Channel 8 - have hired the anti-Israeli and arguably anti-Semitic former Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan to make the official movie marking Israel's 60th birthday next year.
Yemini asserted, "Anti-Zionists, who make up perhaps a half a percent of the public, control 70% of the cultural institutions in Israel."
Yemini ended his dirge with an impassioned plea to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to end the disgrace and cancel the deal. "Mr. Prime Minister," he wrote, "You have the opportunity to act as a Zionist and a nationalist, to prevent this enormous travesty. Do not let this opportunity pass."
But what Yemini failed to note is that Olmert is part of the problem. The corruption scandals that engulf Olmert and his colleagues in Kadima are the fuel that drives the anti-Zionist takeover of the national establishment.
It is this corruption-driven takeover that caused the Shin Bet and the police to prefer to see Bishara escape justice by leaving the country than be tried in an Israeli courtroom for crimes against the state. It is this takeover that empowers people like Bishara to work toward the collapse of the state without fear.
BUT FOR all this, there is reason, great reason, for hope in this country. This hope was clearly evident on Sunday when hundreds of young people from all walks of society came together at the Kedumim cemetery to pay their final respects for Prof. Yosef Ben-Shlomo. Ben-Shlomo, who died at 77 after a prolonged bout with cancer, is widely considered to have been the greatest teacher and scholar of his generation.
Due to his staunch loyalty to Jewish and Zionist values, Ben-Shlomo - who headed Tel Aviv University's Jewish Philosophy Department until he was coldly encouraged to retire eight years ago - was isolated and ignored by his colleagues in Israeli academia. Upon retirement, he turned down an offer to teach at Harvard and opted to become the chief pedagogue of the secular pre-army leadership training academies that his former students were establishing.
At the onset of the Oslo process 14 years ago Ben-Shlomo challenged Israeli society to prove that Zionism is not a passing fad. He took up his own challenge by becoming the life force behind the academies that swiftly began filling the void left by the school system. In eight short years these schools have inculcated thousands of Israeli youngsters with Jewish, Zionist and humanist values.
Although the funeral was a sad occasion, the message that emanated from it was a mighty one. The hundreds of officers, soldiers and students present made clear that Israel's establishment is not Israel. The nation is not corrupt, and has not turned its back on its history. Far from the leering eyes of the old guard, the citizens of Israel are building a new guard, based on our true Jewish and Zionist values.
So in spite of the establishment's corruption so brutally exposed by the Bishara affair, there is every reason to believe that it, rather than Zionism, is a passing fad.
Column One: The road to serfdom
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
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Mar. 22, 2007
In Israel, as in the rest of the free world, we are witnessing the death by a thousand cuts of free thought.
Last month, two students at Cambridge University's Clare College became victims of this state of affairs. The students dedicated an edition of their satire magazine to the one-year anniversary of the global Muslim riots which followed the publication of caricatures of Muhammad in the Danish Jyllands Posten newspaper. As the students recalled, those riots led to the deaths of more than a hundred people.
Although the British media refused to republish the caricatures, British Muslims held terrifying protests throughout the country where they called for the destruction of Britain, the US, Denmark and Israel and for the murder of all who refuse to accept the global domination of Islam.
In their magazine, the students published some of the caricatures and mocked the Muslims for their hypocrisy in accusing British society of racial prejudice while calling for its violent destruction.
The Muslim reaction was apparently swift. Fearing for their lives, the students were forced into hiding.
But the Muslims were not alone in their anger. Clare College set up a special disciplinary court to consider action against the students. And the Cambridgeshire police opened a criminal investigation against them in late February.
The persecution of these students provides a case study of the two-pronged offensive being carried out today against Western culture. First there are the jihadists, who call for our destruction. Then there are the leftist intellectuals and public figures who defend radical Islamists and work to silence those who criticize them by criminalizing speech and condemning free thinkers as racists.
The direct consequence of this two-pronged offensive is the repression of free thought.
FOUR YEARS ago, US President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Freedom."
The intention was clear. The purpose of the war was not merely to bring down Saddam Hussein's murderous, terror-supporting regime. It was to bring about the defeat of the vile world view that supported the regime and to replace that view with the values of freedom, tolerance and democracy.
Four years on, US forces continue their heroic fight to bring order and security to that violent land. But the purpose of their efforts is no longer clear. The US no longer pushes the Iraqis or the greater Arab world to abandon jihad in favor of freedom.
Earlier this month, columnist Joel Mowbray gave evidence of the Bush administration's abandonment of the war of ideas in a Wall Street Journal expose on the US taxpayer-financed Arabic-language television network Al-Hurra. The US launched Al- Hurra in February 2004 to compete with jihadist television networks like Al Jazeera. Its stated aim was to present a liberal, pro-democracy and pro-human rights voice to the Arab world. Yet, as Mowbray reported, since former CNN producer Larry Register was appointed to lead the network last November, that aim fell by the wayside.
In December the network began allowing itself to be used as a platform by arch terrorists like Hizbullah commander Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Last month, when the Israeli Islamic movement began attacking Israel for conducting an archeological dig by the Aksa mosque, Al-Hurra's coverage of the story was more extreme than Al Jazeera's. Palestinian Authority mufti Ikremah Sabri was brought on live and accused Israel of shooting and throwing bombs into the mosque and of denying medical care to those it had supposedly wounded. Al-Hurra has also hosted an al-Qaida terrorist who rejoiced in the September 11 attacks on America.
As is the case in Britain, the Bush administration's decision to largely abandon the ideological battlefield is the result of an uncompromising and unrelenting ideological and political assault against the voices that justify the war against the global jihad generally, and against the hawks in the Bush administration specifically.
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and John Bolton - and arguably Scooter Libby - were all forced from their positions in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House after coming under unrelenting attack by the Left which all but accused these men of treason for their vigilant support of the war against Islamic totalitarianism. A central component of the onslaught against them was the repeated claim that their support for Israel is what brought these men to delude America into believing that the global jihad is a threat to US national security.
One of the central players in this concerted attack has been the billionaire George Soros. Soros is an anti-Zionist Jew with a troubling past. Specifically, by his own admission in interviews with 60 Minutes in 1998 and PBS in 1993, Soros collaborated with the Nazis in seizing Jewish property in Budapest in 1944.
Author Serge Trifkovic, who is currently researching a biography of Soros, tells of a Holocaust survivor in Hungary who claims that the reason Soros was allowed to remain free was "the boy's special knowledge of the Jewish community and its attempts to protect its property from confiscation."
Since 2003, Soros has donated more than $100 million to radical left-wing groups and to the political campaigns of far-left anti-war Democratic candidates in the US. His money has made him one of the most influential forces in the Democratic Party.
After Hamas won the Palestinian election last January, Soros turned his guns against Israel. Last October he announced his intention to work with left-wing American Jewish groups such as Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, American Friends of Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum to form an effectively anti-Israel lobbying group that will compete with the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Soros accuses AIPAC of making common cause with the war hawks and so harming US and Israeli national security.
This week Soros laid out his anti-Israel views in the New York Review of Books. In a longwinded screed entitled, "On Israel, America and AIPAC," Soros presents an incoherent hodgepodge of sloppy logic and contradictory statements. On the one hand, he acknowledges that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza radicalized the Palestinians and brought Hamas to power. On the other hand, he insists that further Israeli withdrawals will cause the Palestinians to moderate. While he acknowledges that Hamas is a terror group, he insists that the US must recognize it and force Israel to recognize it and that AIPAC is responsible for neither recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political force in the region.
Soros claims to want peace for Israel. Yet he demands that the US and Israel embrace the Saudi plan which calls for Israel's effective destruction through a forced Israeli withdrawal from Judea, Jerusalem, Samaria and the Golan Heights and the demographic destruction of the Jewish state through unimpeded immigration of 4-5 million foreign-born Arabs.
In effect, Soros's arguments make clear that protestations aside, the advancement of human rights and peace cannot possibly be his true goals. Rather, what seems to interest him most is the erosion of the US-Israel alliance. A US abandonment of Israel is seen as a necessary component of an overall strategy for causing the US to cease its fight against the global jihad.
In her visit here next week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to pressure the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government to continue diplomatic contacts with the Hamas-Fatah terror government through PA Chairman and Fatah commander Mahmoud Abbas. In light of the administration's weakening stand on Hamas, it is clear that Soros's views have taken hold in ever-widening policy circles in Washington.
In advancing their anti-Israel views, Soros and his allies (most recently, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof), invoke the work of radical leftist Israeli organizations like the Geneva Initiative, B'tselem and Peace Now. Like Soros, these organizations claim to act for the advancement of peace and human rights. And like Soros, these organizations effectively cooperate with pro-jihadist groups in eroding Israel's ability to defend its rights as a Jewish democracy.
The public storm that ensued this week after Jews in Hebron took control of a building they recently purchased in the city was a clear example of this leftist-jihadist collusion.
In demanding that the IDF move immediately to eject the Jews from the building they had bought, Peace Now and B'tselem ignored human rights and openly advocated the abrogation of the human rights of Israeli Jews to purchase and hold property. In so doing, they lent their support to the racist jihadist view that Jews must be barred from stepping foot in so-called Arab areas.
B'tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that whether the Jews purchased the building or not was immaterial. In her words, "Our opposition in principle is that these settlements should be evacuated anyway and that there shouldn't be these pockets in Hebron."
She added that "other than watching and making sure that [the sale] was done in a legal way, the IDF has the obligation to make sure that settlers don't take over more areas."
In so arguing, Michaeli gave effective Jewish Israeli support to even more outrageous statements by Israeli Arab parliamentarians. As she claimed that the IDF's job is to fight Jews, Arab MKs Ibrahim Sarsour and Muhammad Barakei participated in the PA's "Jerusalem First" conference in Ramallah. Sarsour called for "Muslims and Arabs" to "liberate Jerusalem."
Sarsour declared, "Just as the Muslims once liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders, so must we today believe that we can liberate Jerusalem. It is not an impossible dream."
Barakei accused Israel of trying to "empty Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants." Calling Jerusalem a "national issue, not just a religious issue," he called on Palestinians to act immediately to "reclaim the city."
As for Hebron, on Tuesday MK Taleb a-Sanaa called for an international boycott of Israel in response to the Jewish purchase and takeover of the building.
The Arab MKs spoke against the backdrop of Israel's first Arab cabinet minister Ghaleb Majadle's refusal to sing the national anthem and the publication of a University of Haifa poll showing that 76 percent of Israeli Arabs believe that Zionism is a form of racism and that 28% of Israeli Arabs deny the Holocaust.
Needless to say, no criminal investigations into possible treason charges have been opened against the Arab politicians.
A CLEAR line connects the Cambridge students, the Americans in Iraq, and the situation in Israel. The leftist-Islamist front is eroding the free world's sense of justice. Rather than assert our liberal, democratic values and defend our freedoms, fearing leftist condemnation, politicians and opinion shapers have permitted themselves to become shackled to ideologies that negate everything for which the free world stands.
Israel, which stands on the front lines of freedom, is duty-bound to stem the tide. But our ignoble leaders have preferred to stop thinking and silently surrender.
This is how a civilization collapses.
Column One: The diplomatic fetishists
Feb. 22, 2007
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST
Iran has an interesting take on international law. According to Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki, the UN Security Council's Chapter VII resolution from last December requiring Iran to cease all its uranium enrichment activities is illegal. As he put it Wednesday during a friendly visit in Turkey, "We were against [the resolution] for being illegal and politically motivated."
Anyone with even a casual acquaintance with international law should recognize that Mottaki's statement is not merely incorrect. His rejection of the legality of Security Council Resolution 1737 is an expression of contempt for the very foundations of the law of nations which have been almost universally adhered to since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
What comes across most clearly in Mottaki's statement is that little has changed in Iran since the Khomeini revolution in 1979 brought the current regime to power. Back then, in their first stab at international diplomacy, the mullahs showed that their regime stands opposed to all the norms of civilized behavior that have formed the basis of the nation-state system since the end of the Thirty Years War. The Iranian takeover of the US embassy in Teheran and the holding hostage of 52 embassy employees for 444 days was not merely an act of state terrorism. It was a declaration of war against civilization.
And so, it should come as a surprise to no one that Mottaki rejects the Security Council's right to force Iran to abide by its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which Iran voluntarily signed and ratified. He is behaving in a manner that is wholly consistent with Iran's international behavior since the overthrow of the Shah.
Similarly, the US and its Western and UN partners responded to Iran's provocation in a manner that is wholly consistent with their treatment of Iran since the revolution. For the past 27 years, the US, the European Union and the UN have responded to Iran's contemptuous disregard for international law and civilized norms of behavior by seeking to appease the mullahs.
Wednesday US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed this consistent preference in an interview with CNN. Brushing off the allegation that the US may be planning to forcibly prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons Rice said, "The United States is on a diplomatic path and we believe in this diplomatic path."
She continued, "If Iran will, in fact, suspend its enrichment and reprocessing activities we can sit down together, reverse 27 years of the isolation of the United States from Iran and Iran from the United States. We can talk about anything. The United States has no desire for confrontation with Iran. None. We would rather have with Iran the opportunity to discuss whatever matters Iran would like to discuss."
So as far as Rice is concerned, diplomacy is not only her chosen method of dealing with Iran. It is the only method for dealing with Iran.
Muhammad el Baradei, who as chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency is charged with reporting Iranian non-compliance with Resolution 1737 to the Security Council, took Rice's diplomatic line to the next logical level when he said last month, "the only solution to the Iranian issue… is dialogue, is negotiation."
Baradei argues this point in both practical and normative terms. Practically speaking, he said Tuesday that it is impossible to put the Iranian nuclear genie back in the bottle because the Iranians have already acquired the know-how to build atomic bombs.
Baradei made that statement after meeting with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani. At the meeting Larijani told Baradei that Iran remains steady in its rejection of the Security Council's demand that it suspend its uranium enrichment activities.
Aside from explaining why it is pointless to try to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs, Baradei explained that it would also be wrong to check the mullahs' behavior. "Our experience without exception is that sanctions alone do not work and in most cases radicalize the regime and hurt the people who are not supposed to be hurt…. [S]anctions have to be coupled at all times with incentives and a real search for a compromise based on face-saving, based on respect," Baradei opined.
Perhaps Rice's enthusiasm for appeasing Teheran is influenced by people like former senator and Democratic contender for the presidency John Edwards. This week Edwards reportedly said that the greatest short-term threat to world peace is the possibility that Israel will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. Perhaps it is similar voices in the James Baker and Brent Scowcroft corner of the Republican Party that are motivating Rice to behave like the Europeans and the UN.
Whatever the explanation for the US's French-style Iran policy, the EU for its part insists on negotiating with Iran in spite of the fact that last week an official EU document acknowledged that the Europeans know full well that their four-year nuclear diplomacy with the Iranians has failed to delay even slightly Iran's acquisition of atomic bombs. That is, Europe maintains its "jaw jaw" with Iran in spite of the fact that it knows that by doing so it is all but ensuring that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons which it has publicly pledged to use to eradicate Israel.
THE IRANIANS are more than willing to humor the West's diplomacy fetish. Even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday that "It is worth it to stop other activities for 10 years and focus only on the nuclear issue," he and his colleagues announced their willingness to discuss their nuclear weapons program with the US and anyone else who asks (aside from Israel), so long as those discussions don't impinge on their freedom to build their nuclear bombs.
From Washington to Brussels to Moscow to Turtle Bay, everyone applauds the fact that both the so-called international community and its Iranian antagonist desire negotiations. This, they say, is proof that there is no reason to abandon diplomacy.
But this is nonsense. The American, European and UN defense of negotiations with Teheran is nothing more than a willful act of collective delusion. For while it is true that everyone wants to talk, it is equally true that there is absolutely nothing to talk about.
In theory, nations engage in negotiations in order to advance their national interests, whether separately or collectively. In the case of Iran, the US and its allies seek to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. They maintain that the best means of achieving that aim is diplomacy.
For its part, Iran wishes to acquire nuclear weapons unmolested. It chooses to negotiate with the West in order to achieve that aim.
The problem here is that the sides' intentions are mutually exclusive so one side's gains come at the other's expense. Since Iran refuses to suspend its uranium enrichment, diplomatically engaging its emissaries serves only to legitimize the regime and enable its leaders to acquire nuclear weapons under the cover of international diplomacy.
THIS SAME disturbing pattern repeats itself with the so-called international community's engagement of the Palestinians. This is particularly the case in the aftermath of the Mecca agreement which relegated the Fatah terror organization to the position of junior partner in the Hamas terror organization's government. As with Iran, so too with the Palestinians: While everyone agrees that negotiations are the answer, they ignore the fact that there is nothing to negotiate about.
The so-called international community argues that it wishes to engage the Palestinians in order to peacefully resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel. For their part, the Palestinians in Hamas and Fatah claim that the purpose of negotiations is to advance their strategic aim of destroying Israel.
In their dealings with both Iran and the Palestinians, the leaders of the so-called international community assert that were they to abandon diplomacy they would strengthen the most radical elements on the other side. As Baradei put it with regard to Iran, "We know that if you jolt a country's pride, all the factions, right, left and center will get together and try to accelerate a program to develop a nuclear weapon to defend themselves."
Unfortunately, experience shows that just the opposite is the case. The so-called international community's engagement of the Iranians and the Palestinians has in no way weakened the most radical elements in those societies. Rather, it has weakened the West's willingness to confront those radical elements and so brought about an effective radicalization of the West. Case in point is Britain.
Until recently, the British treated Hamas like the genocidal jihadist movement that it is. But Wednesday Britain's policy collapsed completely. In a speech before Parliament, Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "It's far easier to deal with the situation in Palestine if there is a national unity government. I hope we can make progress, including even with the more sensible elements of Hamas."
But of course, there are no "sensible elements of Hamas." So what sort of "progress" does Blair believe it is possible to make?
Moreover, while Ahmadinejad may be the most outspoken Iranian leader on the issue of eradicating Israel, he is by no means alone in his intention. Every Iranian leader from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on down has expressed a desire to see Israel wiped off the map. Engaging these fanatics in talks that have already failed can only serve to strengthen their commitment to carry out their monstrous, openly acknowledged plans.
What we have here is a full-blown eclipse of rational policy-making with diplomatic fetishism. What Rice, Blair, Baradei, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are all forgetting is that diplomacy is a means and not an end. By engaging the Palestinians and the Iranians, they willfully ignore the fact that if you are not using diplomacy to advance your aims, that diplomacy will be exploited by your antagonist to advance his aims.
If Israel had an even slightly competent government, our leaders would be pointing out the perversity and stupidity of fetish diplomacy. But Israel's government is not even slightly competent. The Olmert-Livni-Peretz government has descended to a level of incoherence that makes it seem like a waste of time to even bother criticizing it. Its moves are transparently motivated by nothing more than a desire to hold onto power for as long as possible.
In light of this abysmal state of affairs, it falls to private individuals to remind the diplomatic fetishists that diplomacy is a means, not an end. If their current policies are played out, the fact that they abjured war and remained faithful to diplomacy will not excuse them when Hamas transforms Gaza, Judea and Samaria into a Taliban state; destabilizes the Jordanian monarchy; and murders thousands of Jews in Israel. Their commitment to diplomacy will not make posterity more forgiving of their failure to prevent a second Holocaust.
You are not being peacemakers when you engage the mullahs and Hamas. You are preparing the ground for a huge conflagration.
Our World: History's dangerous repetition
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
Oct. 9, 2006 |
It would seem that Karl Marx got things backwards. History does not repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Rather, it repeats itself first as farce and second as tragedy. This, perhaps more than anything else is the conclusion one should reach from North Korea's nuclear test on Columbus Day.
It was the Clinton administration, which back in the Roaring '90s began the policy of appeasing North Korea. Throughout the decade the US wined and dined the North Korean Stalinists who always responded by pocketing US concessions and escalating their nuclear and ballistic missile activities and threats against the US and its Asian allies.
The farce was then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright's visit to Pyongyang in late October 2000, two weeks before the US presidential elections. There, after the North Koreans tested the Taepo-Dong 1 ballistic missile off the coast of Japan in 1998 and refused to end either their missile programs or missile exports to Iran, Albright tripped the night fantastic with Kim Jong-Il. Her buffoonery was a perfect capstone to eight years of the Clinton administration's addiction to ceremony over substance.
While America's tone towards North Korea chilled under the Bush administration, there was little substantive change in its policies.
Secretary of state Colin Powell met with his North Korean counterpart Pak Nam Sun and to this day US attempts to strike a deal with Pyongyang have not ended. And now, Pyongyang, with its medium- and long-range ballistic missiles, has tested a nuclear bomb.
THERE IS of course also North Korea's ally Iran. Toward Iran, too, the substance of the Bush administration policies is little different from that of his predecessor. Like North Korea, the Iranians respond to US attempts at appeasement by escalating their rhetoric and redoubling their offensive military build-ups of missiles and nuclear capabilities.
The great shift, then which occurred under the Bush administration, a shift for which President George W. Bush has been pilloried by his political rivals, has been rhetorical.
While hypocritical, the division between rhetoric and substance has something to recommend it. The benefit of the current US position toward North Korea and Iran is that the rhetoric has left open the possibility that the policy itself will finally be suited to reality. Today, unlike the situation in the 1990s, the American public is at least aware that these states are a threat to US national security interests.
In the aftermath of North Korea's nuclear bomb test, the US can support military actions by Japan and South Korea against North Korea; build up its missile shield; and perhaps end its 14 year self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing and so revamp its nuclear arsenal.
Were the Bush administration to change its policy tomorrow regarding Iran - begin shaming Europe into ending its appeasement, and threatening Russia with trade sanctions if Moscow continues supporting Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, while building up its military options to strike at Iran's nuclear installations - the American public would understand why the policy change was necessary. Indeed, such a move could even help the Republican Party in the upcoming elections.
DISTURBINGLY, WHILE Bush has paved the way rhetorically for a shift in policy toward North Korea and Iran, he has done no such thing in the US's relations with the terror-ruled Palestinian Authority. And as is the case with Iran and North Korea, the stubborn and ill-considered continuation of the Clinton administration's appeasement policy toward the PA during the Bush years has only exacerbated and escalated the threat posed by the PA to US national security interests and to the national security of US allies - first and foremost, of Israel.
In the 1990s, the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat, was the most frequent foreign visitor at the White House. The head of the PLO was the object of adoration by the Clintonites. It didn't matter to them that Arafat never revoked the PLO Charter calling for Israel's destruction. It didn't matter that he indoctrinated a generation of Palestinian children to become suicide bombers in jihad against the Jews. It didn't matter that he used billions of dollars of American and European taxpayer money to build the largest terror army in the world. Arafat showed up at signing ceremonies. He was the poster child of appeasement.
The Clinton administration tied itself to a policy toward the Palestinians which, like its policies toward North Korea and Iran, opened it to ever escalating blackmail. As the terror threat emanating from the PA-ruled areas rose, empowering Arafat became the obsession of the Clinton White House. He was showered with money, guns and love. No Israeli security consideration could hold a candle to the need to strengthen Arafat.
From bombing to bombing, Arafat was enriched and empowered. Israel's security became the main obstacle to the signing ceremonies.
After seven years, the myth of Arafat the peacemaker exploded in the faces of more than a thousand Israelis who would be killed over the next six years of the Palestinian jihad. But the myth of the PA endured.
For the past six years, each bombing, every clear indication that the PA itself is a terrorist entity is met by more breathless US protestations of support for Palestinian empowerment and statehood. The fact that the last six years have left the State Department unfazed was made absolutely clear during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit last week.
Since Arafat appointed Mahmoud Abbas, his deputy of 40 years, PA prime minister in 2003, the US has upheld Abbas as a man of peace, a moderate and a respectable leader that the Bush administration wishes to strengthen. To this end, the Bush administration has overlooked Abbas's clear support for terrorism. It has excused his constant appeals to merge his Fatah terror group with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It has ignored the fact that his Fatah terror group has committed more acts of terror than Hamas and that Fatah's involvement in terror and the sophistication of its attacks has only increased since Abbas replaced Arafat after the latter's death in November 2004.
During her visit last week, at Abbas's request, Rice was scheduled to meet with Fatah commander Hussein a-Sheikh in the American Consulate-General in Jerusalem. The meeting was cancelled at the last minute when Israeli activists demanded that Sheikh, who was directly responsible for the murder of dozens of Israelis and several American nationals, be arrested by Israel police upon arrival at the consulate. Yet, Rice still met with other Fatah leaders, like Muhammad Dahlan who has been directly implicated in the murder of Israelis in terror attacks perpetrated by men under his command.
EVEN MORE disturbingly, Rice has officially sanctioned a policy put together by US Army Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton to expand by up to 70 percent Abbas's presidential guard and personal army, Force 17. The administration wishes to raise some $20 million to fund the training and arming and expansion of Abbas's army from 3,500 to 6,000 soldiers. This move comes after the US transferred 3,000 rifles and 1 million bullets to Force 17 in June. Yet Force 17 is a terrorist army led by terrorists.
Right after he received the weapons shipment, Abbas appointed Mahmoud Damra commander of the force. Damra, who like many of the Force 17 officers and soldiers, doubles as a Fatah terrorist, was wanted by Israel due to his direct involvement in the terrorist murder of at least 15 Israelis. One of his deputies claimed that the US rifles were immediately used to attack a bus carrying Israeli school girls in Judea.
Israel arrested Damra at a checkpoint shortly after he received Abbas's appointment. The US immediately began pressuring Israel to release him.
In addition to Damra's direct involvement in Fatah terror, he also has close ties with Iran and Hizbullah. In 2002, Arafat reportedly appointed him Force 17's liaison officer to Iran and Hizbullah forces. The fact that Abbas appointed Damra Force 17's overall commander just weeks before Fatah and Hamas began Iran's proxy war against Israel by attacking the IDF position at Kerem Shalom and kidnapping Cpl. Gilad Shalit, should say something about Abbas's intentions. Yet, last week, Rice couldn't praise Abbas enough.
North Korea's nuclear test and Iran's nuclear intimidation show us what happens when failed policies are not abandoned. Due in part to its continued US-backed legitimacy, the PA is used by Pakistan as an excuse for terror sponsorship and nuclear proliferation and by jihadists throughout the world as justification for attacks on Western and Jewish targets.
No doubt the North Korean nuclear test is a turning point in this world war.
The question is whether it will force the US to finally part with appeasement, or whether Rice will convince President Bush to take his chances by repeating history a third and fourth time
Our World: Bush's information offensive
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
Sep. 25, 2006 |
During the past week we learned a great deal about the nature of our enemies. We also learned a great deal about ourselves. If we draw the proper lessons from what we have seen we will go far toward winning the war.
With their ghoulish presentations at the UN General Assembly, both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made clear their hostile intent, disdain for freedom and their foes, and their fanatical intent to use all murderous means toward their totalitarian ends. The men were so hostile that even their usual apologists in academia and the political Left were too embarrassed to be seen in their company.
The Chavez and Ahmadinejad show ensured that the Bush administration's gamble in permitting the two entry to the United States had paid off. Given a platform, the dictators demonstrated the gravity of the threat they posed, as the administration had doubtless hoped they would.
Yet laying out a gangplank and hoping the enemy will be stupid enough to walk it is hardly a winning strategy in war. The stark reality of the global Islamist jihad and its strong support from European appeasers to third world dictators makes it necessary for the US to enact an information campaign capable of effectively advancing the stated American war aim of destroying jihad as a governing ideology and social force.
The potential for victory in the information warfare arena is great, and the failure of the US to meet this challenge is a great shame.
INFORMATION operations are a vital part of any war effort. They serve four basic purposes: to rally supporters to the rightness of their cause and the wrongness of their enemies cause; to dissuade any potential allies of one's enemies from joining their forces; to gain an ideological foothold in the enemies' society; and to demoralize enemy societies and so convince them that they have no chance of winning the war.
In both the Muslim world and the West, massive Saudi and other Islamist funding of mosques, Islamic schools, Middle East studies departments in universities, and lobbying arms show that jihadists have placed a premium on their information operations. The jihadists' extensive use of the Internet, cassette tapes, DVDs, videotapes and the print and broadcast media in the Muslim world complement these efforts.
The goals of the jihadists are clear. They wish to recruit soldiers. They wish to buy supporters among Western elites who will act as their apologists. They wish to demonize and delegitimize their ideological opponents in both Muslim societies and in the West by calling them apostates or racists. They wish to convince their enemies that there is no way to defeat the forces of jihad.
While massive, these efforts should be easy enough to undermine. For all the billions of dollars the jihadists have spent indoctrinating Muslims and weakening the West's will to fight them, their cause is anything but attractive. The cause of jihad is the cause of totalitarianism. It is the cause of hatred, misogyny, bigotry, mass murder, slavery, barbarism and humiliation. It is fundamentally unesthetic and unsympathetic.
As a result, attacking those who sponsor jihad, or serve as its apologists or purveyors should be a simple matter that can be undertaken at vastly less expense than that which has already been paid by the other side.
BUT THERE is a catch, of course. In order to conduct information operations effectively you have to be willing to identify your enemies and your allies, and to point fingers at those who refuse to take sides and embarrass them for sitting on the fence. That is, you need moral courage and clarity. You need to be willing to make people angry at you if you wish to earn their respect and support.
For the past five years the Bush administration has shirked this unpleasant task. It has categorized Saudi Arabia, the prime financier and propagator of jihad, as its ally. It has labeled Egypt, the epicenter of jihadist propaganda and incitement, a paragon of moderation and a stalwart ally.
Then there is Pakistan, which created the Taliban and has served as a refuge for Osama bin Laden since November 2001. Pakistan, too, is labeled a great ally, as are the Europeans and the Russians.
Israel, on the other hand, is a problem. Israel is the excuse that all of America's "great allies" give for refusing to act like America's allies. In the interests of pleasing its great allies, America holds Israel at arm's length.
Unfortunately, this policy sends exactly the wrong message. It teaches America's "allies" that they have nothing to lose by double-crossing the US. And it teaches truly liberal forces in the Muslim world and in the non-Islamic world that the US will not keep faith with them, and that they are, essentially on their own if they wish to take on the forces of jihad in their own societies and throughout the world.
THE BUSH administration's refusal to acknowledge the difference between its enemies and its allies was most pronounced last week in the president's meetings with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Earlier in the month Musharraf signed an accord with the Taliban that gave the group control over the Pakistani territories of north and south Waziristan. This agreement, which also involved Pakistan's release of some 2,500 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters from prison, is the Taliban's and al-Qaida's greatest victory since September 11, 2001. As military analyst Bill Roggio has reported on his Web site, The Fourth Rail, Musharraf's decision to hand Waziristan over to the Taliban and al-Qaida makes clear that he is a major enemy of the US.
But the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge this fact. Bush met with Musharraf in the White House and praised his leadership and his strong alliance with the US in fighting al-Qaida. The State Department praised the agreement that has caused NATO commanders to announce that more troops will be required in Afghanistan to fight the resurgent Taliban.
Likewise, Abbas has gone out of his way in recent months to forge an alliance between Fatah and Hamas on Hamas's terms. He agreed to form a unity government with Hamas that would unify their terror forces under one command to better wage war against Israel. He agreed that Hamas would not recognize Israel's right to exist. Fatah itself, which he commands, has committed more attacks against Israel than Hamas in recent years, and was involved in the cross-border attack on Israel in June where Cpl. Gilad Shalit was abducted. Under the agreement he offered, Fatah would maintain its terrorist agenda.
And yet, rather than announce that the US will have nothing to do with Abbas, Bush invited him to the White House and praised his commitment to peace. Rather than acknowledge that the Palestinian leadership - in Fatah and Hamas, as well as all other major parties - has shown by word and deed that it seeks not an independent Palestinian state but the eradication of the Jewish state, Bush has insisted that he wants nothing more than to see the creation of a Palestinian state.
THE BUSH administration's insistence on confusing friends and foes has been complemented by its refusal to make distinctions between jihadist political parties and non-jihadist political parties. Indeed, the US facilitated the participation of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, Hizbullah in the Lebanese elections, the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian elections, and the jihadist Justice and Development party in the Moroccan elections.
In all these cases, these forces of totalitarianism were legitimized by their participation in the elections and their empowerment has enabled them to more ably advance the cause of jihad in their own societies and worldwide, at the expense of those moderate, liberal Muslims that must be empowered if jihad is to be defeated.
The world stands today on the edge of a potential upheaval. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas are poised to retake power in elections in November. In the US, on November 7, voters will decide the composition of the Congress and Senate and so, in many ways, decide whether the war will continue to be fought to victory or will be abandoned.
Israelis have awoken from the fantasy of appeasement and are poised to bring in a government capable of defending them. In Britain, Tony Blair's heirs operate with the knowledge that they will be better off politically if they abandon the US.
Information operations that expose liberal democratic civilization's foes and support its allies - be they states or individuals - have never been more vital. Yet unless the Bush administration finds the courage to properly identify those foes and allies, its message will do more to confound than to clarify, and US policies will continue to be plagued by confusion - to the detriment of America and humanity as a whole.
Column One: A prayer for 5767
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
Sep. 22, 2006 |
Pope Benedict XVI has become political Islam's newest excuse for rioting. Mobs from Rawalpindi to Ramallah are burning him in effigy. Muslim leaders from Gaza to Indonesia to Qatar, from Turkey to Washington and London are attacking the pope and demanding that he apologize to Islam for what they consider to be a heinous attack against their religion.
To recap what has been exhaustively reported in recent days, the pontiff's "crime" against Islam occurred in the course of a scholarly lecture at the University of Regensburg in his native Germany earlier in the month. Benedict quoted from a dialogue between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a Persian scholar of Islam circa 1391 where the emperor criticized harshly the Islamic practice of forcibly converting non-Muslims to Islam.
In the pope's words, the Byzantine emperor, "addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'
"The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God,' he says, 'is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.'"
As Benedict explained, the harsh judgment that the Byzantine emperor rendered on Islam stemmed directly from his Christian understanding of God as a reasonable deity. According to Benedict, the reason a Christian leader was able to judge Islam, and so conduct a meaningful inter-cultural discussion on the merits of Islam and Christianity, was because he had a clear understanding of how his religion construed the God-created world and conceived of man's relationship to God.
Expanding on this theme, the pope told his audience that European civilization itself is a fusion of Christian faith and Greek philosophy of reason. Europe's current cultural drift, he argued, stems from the cultural separation between faith and reason that began with the Reformation and went on through the Enlightenment. By relegating faith to a subculture that has no place in discussions of practical human endeavors, he said, Europeans have rendered themselves incapable of understanding who they are or of defending themselves and their values in a manner that the Byzantine emperor, in the pre-scientific era, was able to do so stalwartly.
IT COULD be said that the Islamic world's hysterical and violent reaction to Benedict's use of the 600-year-old dialogue only serves to reinforce the Byzantine emperor's impression that Islam does not perceive God as being a reasoning deity. But limiting an analysis of Benedict's lecture to the Muslim world's hysterical reaction would ignore the pope's central point. Benedict's overarching message in that lecture was that to survive, a culture must be willing to embrace its identity, for if it does not, it won't even be capable of understanding why it should survive.
While Benedict's specific message was to his fellow Christians, the Jewish people should take heed of his general message. Today, the Jewish people, in Israel and throughout the world find ourselves under attack from all quarters. The rise of anti-Semitism globally, and particularly in the Islamic world, finds us in a period of grave self-doubt. Like the Europeans, our ability to defend ourselves against the swelling ranks of haters is dependent on our ability as a people and as individuals to embrace our identity as Jews.
Commenting on the nature of this surge in Jew-hatred, the great (non-Jewish) Canadian pundit Mark Steyn wrote last month in the National Review, "The oldest hatred didn't get that way without the ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are - so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they're hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless-cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they're hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they'd be hated for that, too."
It is crucial that all of us internalize the message that these lines convey. For in recent years, rather than recognize the prejudice of our detractors, we have devoted ourselves to attempting to understand and so justify the hatred they heap upon us.
We tell ourselves we are hated because we are too strong - or because we are too weak. We are hated because we are too religious - or because we are not religious enough. We are hated because we insist on defending Israel - or we are hated because we are willing to compromise on Israel.
Yet, as Steyn wisely notes, we are not hated because of what we do, we are hated because we are Jews. In light of this, the best way to defend ourselves, the best way to safeguard our freedom and our heritage, is to embrace and celebrate our identity as Jews. As Elie Wiesel once explained to me, the key to defending ourselves is to never allow our haters to tell us who we are. "Hatred only defines the haters," he said.
And indeed, when we look at the manner in which Jews in Israel and throughout the world are being attacked today, we see that the attacks are based not on Jewish actions but on the fact that we are Jews.
Thus, in the midst of yet another wave of violent attacks by Muslims against Jews in Norway last month, Norway's Jewish community warned its members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public.
Thus it is that the charter of Hamas, the movement that now controls the Palestinian Authority, calls not for compromise with Israel but for all Jews to be expelled from the Land of Israel or forcibly converted to Islam as part of the global jihad.
So it is that attacks against Jewish supporters of Israel in the West target not the substance of their arguments, but their right as Jews to lobby for Israel in their countries of citizenship.
"We Jews," Wiesel explained, "have always defined ourselves as the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Indeed, at Mount Sinai, in our acceptance of the Ten Commandments, the Jewish people became the first nation in history to self-consciously define itself. And each subsequent generation of Jews has remade that choice. Jews do not exist, as Jean-Paul Sarte ignorantly argued, because anti-Semites exist. The leader of the existentialist movement should have understood; anti-Semites exist because anti-Semites choose to exist.
AS STEYN notes, today hatred against Jews is anchored on Israel. Provoked by this new form of Jew-hatred, some Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora see Israel as a burden. This is a self-inflicted tragedy. For if we look at Israel, we see that far from being a burden, our Jewish state is one of the most stunning successes of Jewish history.
Today, Israel is the home of the largest Jewish community in the world. More Jews live in Israel today than at any time in our history. And the state in which we live is one of the most vibrant, optimistic, "happening" countries in the world. We have the highest birthrate in the West. Rates of entrepreneurship are among the highest in the world.
We are one of the most highly educated societies in the world. Over the past 15 years, more than a dozen colleges have been established in Israel and last year the government decided to allow two colleges to join Israel's nine research universities as full-fledged, independent research universities.
Israelis are among the most patriotic citizens in the world. Our patriotism is expressed in the high level of volunteerism in all age groups. In the recent war, tens of thousands of reservists willingly left their families and jobs to take up arms and defend the country, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis volunteered to help our one million brothers and sisters whose homes were targeted by rockets, missiles and mortars.
Jewish life blossoms in Israel as it has nowhere else in our history. The rates of literacy in Jewish learning in Israel are higher than they have ever been anywhere in our history. Israel is the home of some half dozen generations of Jews whose mother tongue is the language of the Bible and the Talmud.
Israel's success stems from its serving as a vehicle that allows us to express our heritage in all facets of society. And our Jewish heritage is one of the most precious heritages known to man.
The Jewish people gave humanity the concepts of God, liberty and law. Our understanding of the fallibility of mankind has prevented us from being tempted by false prophets promising us heaven on Earth, and has allowed us to take practical steps toward improving our lot and our world.
All of the ideals that Israel represents, both spiritual and physical, have formed the foundations for human progress and freedom throughout the world for millennia. Our willingness to stay loyal to our identity and our heritage has been the key to our survival throughout the ages in the face of the countless foes who sought to destroy us both spiritually and physically.
Rosh Hashana marks the beginning of the Ten Days of Repentance that precede Yom Kippur. To properly atone for our sins and correct our mistakes, we must understand who we are, what we represent and what we can and should aspire to as Jews. To do this, we must reject the notion that those who hate us can tell us who we are. To do this we must embrace our Jewish identity and uphold our commitment to our collective destiny.
The fact that hatred of Jews has endured for so long says nothing about the nature of the Jewish people. What does speak volumes about that nature is the fact that through the ages our fortunes have been directly related to our ability to spurn our enemies' distorted portraits of the Jewish people and our willingness to endure and progress as Jews in the midst of that hatred.
Pope Benedict is able to discuss Islam because, secure in his Christian identity, he has a clear basis for judging the goodness or unreasonableness of Muslim values and behavior. Whether we agree with his judgments or not, through his willingness to judge, Benedict capably defends and advances his faith.
When we embrace our moral and intellectual identity as Jews, we are then capable of meeting the challenges of our times. It is my prayer that in 5767, the Jewish people will rally around our heritage, history and culture and so pave the way for a secure, peaceful and moral future for our people and our world.
With the quiet release of a 33-year-old US State Department cable, a good chunk of the edifice of the longest-running big lie was destroyed
By Caroline B. Glick
Time for world to admit it was duped to the tune of billions of dollars
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Yasser Arafat was a master of the big lie. Since he invented global terrorism with the founding of the Fatah terror organization in 1959, Arafat successfully portrayed himself as a freedom fighter while introducing the world to passenger jet hijackings, schoolhouse massacres and embassy takeovers.
To cultivate the myth of his innocence Arafat ordered his Fatah terror cells to operate under pseudonyms. In the early 1970's he renamed several Fatah murder squads the Black September Organization while publicly claiming that they were "breakaway" units completely unrelated to Fatah or to himself.
In 2000, as he launched the current Palestinian jihad, he repeated the process by renaming Fatah terror cells the Aksa Martyr Brigades and then claiming that they were completely unrelated to Fatah or to himself. This fiction too, has been successful in spite of the fact that all Aksa Martyr Brigades terrorists are members of Fatah and most are members of Palestinian Authority official militias who receive their salaries, guns and marching orders from Fatah.
Last week, with the quiet release of a 33-year-old US State Department cable, a good chunk of the edifice of his great lie was destroyed.
ON MARCH 1, 1973, eight Fatah terrorists, operating under the Black September banner stormed the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan during a farewell party for the US Embassy's Charges d'Affaires George Curtis Moore. The terrorists took Moore, US ambassador Cleo Noel, Belgian Charges d'Affairs Guy Eid and two Arab diplomats hostage. They demanded that the US, Israel, Jordan and Germany release PLO and Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorists, including Robert F. Kennedy's Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan and Black September commander Muhammed Awadh (Abu Daud), from prison in exchange for the hostages' release.
The next evening, the Palestinians brutally murdered Noel, Moore, and Eid. They released their other hostages on March 4.
Arafat denied any involvement in the attack. The US officially accepted his denial. Yet, as he later publicly revealed, James Welsh, who served at the time of the attack as an analyst at the National Security Agency, intercepted a communication from Arafat, then headquartered in Beirut to his terror agents in Khartoum ordering the attack.
In 1986, as evidence of Arafat's involvement in the operation became more widely known, more and more voices began calling for Arafat to be investigated for murder. As the New York Sun's online blog recalled last week, during that period, Britain's Sunday Times reported that 44 US senators sent a letter to then US attorney-general Edwin Meese, "urging the American government to charge the PLO chief with plotting the murders of two American diplomats in 1973."
The article went on to note that the Justice Department's interest in pursuing the matter was making senior State Department officials uneasy: "State Department diplomats, worried that murder charges against Arafat would anger the United States' friends in the Arab world, are urging the Justice Department to drop the investigation."
As late as 2002, in spite of President George W. Bush's pointed refusal to meet with Arafat, the State Department continued to protest his innocence. At the time, Scott Johnson, a Minneapolis attorney and one of the authors of the popular Powerlineblog weblog, inquired into the matter with the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. In an emailed response from the bureau's deputy director of press affairs Gregory Sullivan, Johnson was told, "Evidence clearly points to the terrorist group Black September as having committed the assassinations of Amb. Noel and George Moore, and though Black September was a part of the Fatah movement, the linkage between Arafat and this group has never been established."
So it was that for 33 years, under seven consecutive presidential administrations, the State Department denied any knowledge of involvement by Arafat or Fatah in the execution of its own people.
Until last week.
THE CABLE released by the State Department's historian states, "The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, (PLO), and the head of Fatah. Fatah representatives based in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy."
Although clearly skilled in the art of deception, Arafat could never have succeeded in creating and prolonging his fictions and with them, his crimes, without the cooperation of the US government and the media.
In this vein, the release of the State Department cable raises two daunting questions. First, how is it possible that the belated admission of a massive 33 year cover-up of the murder of senior American diplomats spanning the course of seven consecutive presidential administrations has been ignored by the US media? A Google news search for Cleo Noel brought up but a handful of stories - none of which were reported by the major news networks or national newspapers.
On the face of it, the released cable, which calls into question the very foundation of US Middle East policy for the past generation is simply stunning. The cable concludes, "The Khartoum operation again demonstrated the ability of the BSO to strike where least expected. The open participation of Fatah representatives in Khartoum in the attack provides further evidence of the Fatah/BSO relationship. The emergence of the United States as a primary fedayeen target indicates a serious threat of further incidents similar to that which occurred in Khartoum."
The media's silence on the issue does not merely raise red flags abut their objectivity. By not availing the American public to the knowledge that Fatah and the PLO have been specifically targeting Americans for 33 years, the media has denied the American people basic knowledge of the world in which they live.
The media's abject refusal to cover the story raises an even more egregious aspect of the episode. Specifically, what does the fact that under seven consecutive administrations, the US government has covered up Arafat's direct responsibility for the murder of American diplomats while placing both Arafat and Fatah at the center of its Middle East policy, say about the basic rationale of US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians? What would US Middle East policy looked like, and what would have been the results for US, and international security as a whole, if rather than advancing a policy that made Arafat the most frequent foreign visitor to the White House during the Clinton administration, the US had demanded his extradition and tried him for murder?
How many lives would have been saved if the US had not been intent on upholding Arafat's big lie? How would such a US policy have impacted the subsequent development of sister terror organizations like Hizbullah, al-Qaida and Hamas, all of which were founded by members of Arafat's terror industry?
Sadly, the release of the cable did not in any way signal a change in the US policy of whitewashing Fatah. In contravention of US law, for the past 13 years, the State Department has been denying that Fatah, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority are terrorist organizations, and has been actively funding them with US taxpayer dollars.
This policy went on, unchanged even after Fatah gunmen murdered three US embassy employees in Gaza in October 2003. This policy continues, unchanged still today, as Fatah's current leader, Arafat's deputy of 40 years Mahmoud Abbas works to form a unity government with Hamas. Indeed, the central component of the US's policy towards the Palestinians today is the goal of strengthening Fatah by arming, training and funding its Force 17 terror militia.
In a November 14, 2006 interview on Palestinian television, Ahmed Hales Abu Maher who serves as Secretary of Fatah in Gaza, bragged of Fatah's role in the development of international terrorism. In his words, reported by Palestinian Media Watch, "Oh warrior brothers, this is a nation that will never be broken, it is a revolution that will never be defeated. This is a nation that gives an example every day that is imitated across the world. We gave the world the children of the RPG [Rocket Propelled Grenades], we gave the world the children stone [-throwers], and we gave the world the male and female Martyrdom-Seekers [suicide bombers]."
Imagine what the world would have looked like if, rather than clinging to Arafat's big lie that he and his Fatah terror organization were central components of Middle East peace, the US had captured and tried Arafat for murdering its diplomats and worked steadily to destroy Fatah.
Imagine how our future would look if rather than stealthily admitting the truth, while trusting the media not to take notice, the US government were to base its current policies on the truth, and the media were to reveal this truth to the world.
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
Sep. 1, 2006 |
On Tuesday, Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin warned of the growing threats to Israel's security emanating from the Gaza Strip and Northern Samaria in the aftermath of the latest war. If the proper steps are not taken to stop the massive transfers of advanced armaments to Gaza, he warned, in just a few years, it will turn into a second south Lebanon.
In south Lebanon itself, Hizbullah is creating the illusion of cooperation with the Lebanese army in order to put us all to sleep as it quietly rebuilds its forces in anticipation of an Iranian order to renew the war against Israel. Hizbullah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah's assertions last week that his organization had no intention of starting a second round and that it had had no idea that Israel would respond so massively to its abduction of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev on July 12 were aimed at confusing Israel and calming the Lebanese. At least as far as Israel is concerned, his goal was accomplished. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Israeli media pounced on Nasrallah's statements as "proof" that Israel had won the war.
In the meantime, the Ayatollah Republic is proceeding steadily toward the acquisition of a nuclear capability. The conciliatory international reactions to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's announcement Thursday that Iran rejected the UN Security Council's demand that it end all uranium enrichment actually preceded Ahmadinejad's insolent statement. On Wednesday, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana was busily attempting to renew talks with Iran.
Meanwhile, the UN is behaving not as an international policeman, but rather as Iran's defense attorney. During his visit to Israel Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan sounded like an Arab leader with his unrestrained, obnoxious condemnations of Israel for every act of self-defense it has taken in Gaza and Lebanon on the one hand, and his seemingly endless tolerance for Iranian threats of nuclear genocide against Israel on the other.
During his press conference with Olmert, Annan intimated that from his perspective, the problem with Iran's threats to annihilate Israel is not that they are illegal or morally inexcusable. Rather, Iran's threats are wrong simply because Israel is a member of the UN. Surrealistically ignoring both Iran's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and its command over the latest war in Lebanon and Gaza, Annan stated bizarrely, "One cannot wipe away Israel with statements."
Today, unbeknownst to the Israeli public, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government is steering Israel down a course that, if not quickly abandoned, will render our right to self-defense - and by extension our independence - conditional. The proliferation of security threats is being exacerbated by the government's facilitation of an UN-EU diplomatic bid to chip away at Israel's right to defend itself against Hizbullah, the Palestinians and Iran.
The present danger is rooted in the text of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which set the guidelines for the cease-fire in Lebanon. That decision constituted an unprecedented diplomatic victory for Hizbullah by placing the sub-national, jihadist, illegal militia on equal footing with Israel.
Moreover, Resolution 1701 set the terms for the reinforcement of UNIFIL forces in a way that enables Hizbullah to continue to reinforce its forces in south Lebanon while barring Israel from exercising its right to defend itself against the growing threat.
Resolution 1701 restricts Israel's freedom of action in three additional ways. First, the resolution named Ahmadinejad's solicitor, Kofi Annan, as arbiter of the sides' compliance. Annan revealed how he will be using this authority two weeks ago when he condemned the IDF's commando raid in Baalbek while beginning his calls for Israel to lift its air and sea blockade of Lebanon and so enable Hizbullah to rearm, not only by land, but by air and sea as well.
Second, although Olmert and Livni loudly champion the European forces being deployed to Lebanon as an important diplomatic achievement, the fact is that the decision to empower the EU to dominate UNIFIL is disastrous for Israel. While protesting their "love" for Israel, the Europeans are making no bones about the fact that their decision to lead UNIFIL is motivated by their intention to prevent Israel from defending itself.
Italy's Communist Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema made this point clearly in his interview last Friday with Ha'aretz. There he explained that the EU goal in Lebanon is to "prove to Israel that it can ensure its security better through the politics of peace than through war."
D'Alema then insulted the US by adding, "The American policy, which Israel also supported, created an impossible situation... The thinking was that it is possible to control the world via the power of a hegemonic liberal power. This philosophy has created serious damage, and now the US is looking for a logical way out."
So by deploying troops to UNIFIL, the Europeans will show us that the only way to contend with enemies who wish to destroy us is by appeasement and more appeasement.
The Europeans and Annan also do not hide the fact that they plan to use their deployment in Lebanon as a springboard for achieving greater influence on Israel in its dealings with the Palestinians. In this vein, D'Alema stated, "I think if things go well in Lebanon, a similar positive process could also begin in the Gaza Strip: The release of [Israeli hostage Cpl. Gilad] Shalit, a Palestinian unity government that meets the criteria set by the international community, and the presence of a UN force to bolster the Palestinian government."
Here the EU is openly joining forces with radical leftist Israeli policymakers led by Meretz leader MK Yossi Beilin, who for the past two years have been quietly advancing the idea of internationalizing the conflict. After both Israel's negotiations and its unilateral surrender of land to the Palestinians both led to war, the thinking now is that the Palestinians will accept Israel after the UN divests the Jewish state of its ability to defend itself.
IF THE above is insufficient to convince us that the expanded UNIFIL force, whose arrival is so eagerly awaited by Olmert-Livni-Peretz, is not a good thing for Israel, there's also the Islamic element of the proposed force. Both Annan and the Europeans are insisting that a force of up to 7,000 soldiers from Muslim countries be included in the UNIFIL force. These soldiers are set to be sent by Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey. All of these countries are commonly referred to as "moderate Muslim countries." This assertion bears investigation.
The jihadist party Jamaat-e-Islami is a member of Bangladesh's coalition government. Its student activists recently sent death threats to two prominent intellectuals for teaching the country's youth the values of secularism, democracy and science.
Furthermore, in November 2003, Bengali journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury was arrested as he waited to board a flight to Bangkok with continuing service to Tel Aviv. Choudhury, who was set to attend a conference in Israel about how the media can promote peace, was accused of sedition and spying for Israel. He was repeatedly tortured during his 17-month incarceration. Bangladesh plans to send 2,000 soldiers to Lebanon.
Then there is Indonesia, the largest Muslim state. As punishment for inciting the terror bombings in Bali in 2002 that killed 202 people, the not-particularly-independent Indonesian judiciary sentenced Jemaah Islamiyah leader Abu Bakar Bashir to 30 months in prison, the last five of which were commuted in June.
In May, Ahmadinejad was received by roaring crowds during a visit to Jakarta. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, Indonesian Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said he believed the best way to secure south Lebanon was for Hizbullah forces to be "absorbed" into the Lebanese army.
As the war in Lebanon raged, the Malaysian government called for all nations of the world to cut off diplomatic relations with Israel. This week, senior Malaysian officials said that there was no justification for the West's opposition to Iran's nuclear program.
Of all the Muslim countries who are planning to contribute forces to UNIFIL, Turkey is the only one that has diplomatic relations with Israel. As a result, to date, its forces are the only ones the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government is willing to see deployed in Lebanon. Two weeks ago, during a visit with Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, Olmert said, "Turkey plays an important role in the Middle East and will continue to do so." He added, "Israel has confidence in Turkey."
While until the formation of the AKP's Islamist government in 2002 it made sense for Israeli prime ministers to say such things, today such statements are unjustified. Over the past four years, Turkey has been transformed from a stalwart US and Israeli ally into one of the most overtly anti-American and anti-Semitic states in the world. By the same token, Turkey has gone to great lengths to warm its relations with the Arab world and Iran.
During the war, IDF Military Intelligence discovered that Iran was shipping weapons to Hizbullah through Turkey. After Hamas's electoral victory in January, Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan was the first international leader to host Hamas terror leaders in an official visit. During the war, Erdogan announced Turkey's support for Hizbullah, saying that "nobody should expect us to be neutral and impartial."
From all of this it is apparent that the participation of Muslim armies in the UNIFIL force - even if they are only from Turkey - could easily lead to a situation where the IDF finds itself fighting UN forces. Alternatively, as the UN and EU foresee, cowed by the "international community," the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government may simply concede Israel's right to self-defense, in spite of the growing threats from Hizbullah, the Palestinians and Iran.
AS FOR America, disturbingly the Bush administration, like the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government, is showing acute signs of policy collapse. In a near inexplicable move, the State Department issued a visa to former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami. Obscenely, the former leader and regime flack for the Islamic supremacist ayatollahs has been invited to speak at the National Cathedral in Washington.
As it did at the beginning of the war in Lebanon, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government set the proper goals for managing the cease-fire. But as it did during the war, it has proceeded to take every step possible to ensure that those goals will not be achieved.
Now, the troika hopes that through UNIFIL, Israel will cobble together a coalition against Hizbullah, while it is actually facilitating the formation of a coalition that will protect Hizbullah against Israel. They have failed to recognize that to secure its national security interests, Israel does not need to negotiate, it needs to act. The only reason the EU and the UN feel comfortable ordering Israel around is because the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government obeys them.
Things do not have to be this way. No country in the world lets outsiders dictate its policies on fundamental issues of national security. Israel must not be the first to do so.
Column One: Jews Wake Up!
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 8, 2006
When the history of our times is written, this week will be remembered as the week that Washington decided to let the Islamic Republic of Iran go nuclear. Hopefully it will also be remembered as the moment the Jews arose and refused to allow Iran to go nuclear.
With the publication of the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group chaired by former US secretary of state James Baker III and former congressman Lee Hamilton, the debate about the war in Iraq changed. From a war for victory against Islamofascism and for democracy and freedom, the war became reduced to a conflict to be managed by appeasing the US's sworn enemies in the interests of stability, and at the expense of America's allies.
Baker and his associates claim that the US cannot win the war in Iraq and so the US must negotiate with its primary enemies in Iraq and throughout the world - Iran and Syria - in the hopes that they will be persuaded to hold their fire for long enough to facilitate an "honorable" American retreat from the country.
Like his unsupported assertion that the US cannot win in Iraq, Baker also asserts - in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary - that Iran and Syria share America's "interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq." Because of this supposed shared interest, Baker maintains that with the proper incentives, Iran and Syria can be persuaded to cooperate with a US withdrawal from Iraq ahead of the 2008 presidential primaries.
The main incentive Baker advocates offering is Israel.
Baker believes that Iran will agree to temporarily hold its fire in Iraq in exchange for US acceptance of Iran as a nuclear power and an American pledge not to topple the regime. Syria will assist the US in exchange for US pressure on Israel to hand over the Golan Heights to Syria and Judea and Samaria to Hamas.
Obviously, if implemented, the Baker-Hamilton group's recommendations will be disastrous for Israel. Just the fact that they now form the basis for the public debate on the war is a great blow. But it isn't only Israel that is harmed by their actions. The US too, will be imperiled if their views become administration policy.
Although Baker - and incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who served on his commission until Bush announced his appointment last month - believes that there is a deal to be done that will end Iranian and Syrian aggression against the US, its vital interests and its allies, the fact of the matter is that there is no such deal. Contrary to what the Baker report argues and what Gates said in his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, Iran is not analogous to the Soviet Union and the war against the global jihad is not a new cold war.
Even if the US were to somehow get them to agree to certain understandings about Iraq, there is no reason to believe that the Iranians and Syrians would keep their word. Not only would the US be approaching them as a supplicant and so emboldening them, but to date the US has never credibly threatened anything either Syria or Iran value. Indeed, through supporting negotiations between the EU and Iran, empowering the UN to deal with Iran's nuclear program, and forcing Israel to accept a cease-fire with Hizbullah last summer that effectively gave victory to the Syrian and Iranian proxy, the US has consistently rewarded the two countries' aggression.
Worse than that, from a US perspective, although Gates admitted Tuesday that he cannot guarantee that Iran will not attack Israel with nuclear weapons, he ignored the fact that Iran - whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad daily calls for the destruction of the US - may also attack the US with nuclear weapons.
Gates admitted in his Senate hearing that Iran is producing many bombs - not just one.
Since it is possible to destroy Israel with just one bomb, the Americans should be asking themselves what Iran needs all those other bombs for. There are senior military sources in the US who have been warning the administration to take into consideration that the day that Iran attacks Israel with a nuclear bomb, 10 cities in the US and Europe are liable to also be attacked with nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, no one is listening to these voices today.
IT IS particularly upsetting that Washington has chosen now of all times to turn its back on the war. Ahmadinejad hinted Monday that Iran has completed the nuclear fuel cycle and so has passed the point of no return on its nuclear program. He also made a statement indicating that Iran will have its nuclear arsenal up and running by March - just four months away.
Serious disagreement exists in Washington over the status of the Iranian program. Some claim that Iran is four or five years away from nuclear weapons capabilities. Others maintain that Iran has recently experienced serious technical setbacks in their uranium enrichment activities and that the North Korean nuclear bomb test in October, in which Iranian officials participated, was a failure.
But there are also engaged officials who agree with Ahmadinejad's assessment of Iran's nuclear progress. Those officials maintain first that the North Korean-Iranian test in October was successful and should be taken as a sign that Iran already has a nuclear arsenal. Second, they warn that the US and Israel have six months to act against Iran's nuclear installations and to overthrow the regime or face the prospect of the annihilation of Israel and the destruction of several US cities as a result of an Iranian nuclear offensive.
Obviously, Israel cannot risk the possibility that the last group of officials is correct. And since Washington has decided to go to sleep, it is up to Israel alone to act.
WHAT MUST Israel do? First, it must plan an attack against Iran's nuclear facilities and regime command and control centers. To pave the way for such an attack, the IDF must move now to neutralize second order threats like the Palestinian rocket squads and the Syrian ballistic missile arsenals in order to limit the public's exposure to attack during the course of or in the aftermath of an Israeli attack on Iran.
Second, Israel must work to topple the Iranian regime. As the Defense Minister's advisor Uri Lubrani told Ha'aretz last week, the regime in Iran is far from stable today and ripe for overthrow.
The overwhelming majority of Iranians despise the regime. There are rebellious groups in every ethnic group and province in the country - Azeris, Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmen and even Persians - that are actively working to destabilize the regime. Every day there are strikes of workers, women and students. Every few weeks there are reports of violent clashes between anti-regime groups and regime forces. Recently, oil pipelines were sabotaged in the oil-rich Khuzestan province in the south where the Ahwazi Arabs are systematically persecuted by the regime. Westerners who recently visited Iran claim that Israel operating alone could overthrow the regime by extending its assistance to these people.
Thirdly, in his testimony in the Senate on Tuesday, Gates casually mentioned that Israel has nuclear weapons. In so doing, he unceremoniously removed four decades of ambiguity over Israel's nuclear status. While his statement caused dismay in Jerusalem, perhaps Israel should see this as an opportunity.
With the threat of nuclear destruction hanging over us, it makes sense to conduct a debate about an Israeli second strike. While such a discussion will not dissuade Iran's fanatical leaders from attacking Israel with nuclear weapons, it could influence the Iranian nation to rise up against their leaders.
Moreover, such a debate could influence other regimes in the region like Saudi Arabia which today behave as if Israel's annihilation will have no adverse impact on them. Americans like Baker, Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and their European friends need to understand that as goes Israel so go the Persian Gulf's oil fields. Such an understanding may influence their willingness to enable Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
Tragically, in these perilous times, we are being led by the worst, most incompetent government we have ever had.
Prime Minister Olmert's way of dealing with the Iranian threat is to pretend that it is none of his business. During his visit to the US last month, Olmert abdicated responsibility for safeguarding Israel from nuclear destruction to President Bush. It didn't bother him that Bush didn't accept the responsibility. By mindlessly adhering to non-existent cease-fires with Iranian proxies in Gaza and Lebanon and squawking about peace with them, Olmert continues to behave as if this is someone else's problem.
For her part, reacting to the possibility of national extinction, Education Minister Yuli Tamir this week cocked her pedagogical pistol and shot at her rear. By ordering the public schools to demarcate the 1949 armistice lines on the official maps and so wipe Israel off maps of Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights, Tamir worked to divide the nation over second order issues at a time when unity of purpose is most essential. Olmert, who refused to overturn her scandalous decree, was doubtlessly pleased with her political stunt. For two days the media devoted itself entirely to stirring up internal divisions and so ignored the threat hanging over our heads and Olmert's refusal to deal with it.
Next Thursday, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations Malcolm Hoenlein and former ambassador to the UN Dore Gold will hold a press conference in New York where they will call for the US to indict Ahmadinejad under the International Convention Against Genocide for his call to annihilate Israel. This is doubtlessly a welcome initiative. But it is insufficient.
In a few months, Iran may well be in possession of nuclear weapons which it will use to destroy the Jewish state. With the US withdrawing from the war and Israel in the hands of incompetents, the time has come for the Jewish people to rise up.
GUARANTEEING our survival begins with each of us deciding that we are willing to fight to survive. And today the challenge facing us is clear. Either the Iranian regime is toppled and its nuclear installations are destroyed or Israel will be annihilated. The Jews in the Diaspora must launch mass demonstrations and demand that their governments take real action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The citizens of the State of Israel must also take to the streets. The government that led us to defeat in Lebanon this summer is leading us to a disaster of another order entirely. All citizens must demand that Olmert, his ministers and the generals in the IDF General Staff make an immediate decision. They now hold the responsibility for acting against Iran. They must either act or resign and make way for others who will.
America just abdicated its responsibility to defend itself against Iran and so left Israel high and dry. Nevertheless, the Jewish people is far from powerless. And the State of Israel also is capable of defending itself. But we must act and act immediately.
Column One: Why Israel must win
As the Israeli people waited Thursday for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to implement his cabinet's decision to widen the ground offensive in Lebanon, Britain found itself under siege. British security officials announced that the entire country was on a red alert for a terror attack. The night before, British security forces foiled a terrorist conspiracy to explode some ten US-bound passenger jets.
As London's deputy police commissioner Paul Stephenson told reporters, "This was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
By Thursday morning security forces had arrested some 21 suspects. All are British citizens. All are Muslims.
It is not a stretch of the imagination to assume that these British Muslims are jihadists. Indeed, it can probably be assumed that, like their predecessors last July 7, they made their decision to commit an unspeakable atrocity against their countrymen to advance Islam's takeover of Britain.
The path of jihad is the path of terror. Using terror, the jihadists believe that they can destroy the confidence of citizens of free societies and so coerce them to bend to their will.
In his letter to US President George Bush last May, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad enunciated the coercive goal of jihad when he threatened the US with war unless Bush converts to Islam. Iran, which today leads the global jihad, has managed to make the language of jihad the lingua franca of the Muslim world.
Many have noted that Hizbullah's initial attack against Israel on July 12 was highly convenient for Teheran. Distracted by the war in Israel and Lebanon, the G-8 and the UN Security Council put off their discussions of Iran's nuclear weapons program, which were scheduled to take place that week.
While the actual date of the attack is easily explained, the question still arises, why is the jihad picking up steam now? Why are fanatical Muslims on the march this summer?
It would seem that the answer to this question is found in the increased cultural weakness of the two states leading the war against radical Islam: the US and Britain. In both countries, for the past two years, the forces of leftist radicalism and appeasement have been on the rise. Both countries' leaders are hated by ever larger swaths of their countrymen for their stand on the war against jihad. And so they waver.
On Tuesday, Britain's Home Secretary John Reid discussed the twin dangers of jihad and Western cultural weakness. Reid argued that Islamic terrorism has placed Britain in its greatest peril since the end of World War II. Reid proceeded to utter a stinging indictment of the British judiciary for preferring the "human rights" of terror suspects to the right of British citizens to security. Just last week, the British High Court ruled that security forces had to loosen restrictions they had placed on six Iraqis suspected of links of terrorism.
Tuesday also saw the defeat of Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman in the primary elections for the Democratic nomination to the Senate. He was beaten by wealthy businessman Ned Lamont, who based his entire campaign on attacking Lieberman for his support for the war in Iraq. The months-long primary campaign against Lieberman was replete with venomous anti-Semitic attacks on him, his family, American Jews and Israel by Lamont supporters.
Lieberman's defeat by an "anti-war" candidate is a clear sign that the Democratic Party is morphing into a radical leftist party. If this trend is not reversed, America's political climate will likely become much less sympathetic and supportive of Israel and much more supportive of countries like France, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A deterioration of the position of American Jews is also liable to ensue.
UNDER ATTACK domestically, both Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have less time and ability to rally their nations to fight against the forces of global jihad. Moreover, as a result of its own culture wars, Israel today finds itself led by the weakest government it has ever had. The weakness of all three governments presented Iran with an unmistakable opportunity to strike.
While Bush and Blair's weakness is the result of political forces, Olmert's weakness is inherent to his nature. Yet, today, the ability of both Blair and Bush to convince their nations to support their war efforts against forces committed to the destruction of their nations' ways of life is dependent on Olmert's ability to lead Israel to victory in the war against Hizbullah.
With a quarter of our population under attack, our cities and forest in flames and our economy surging toward recession and debt, most Israelis agree that the war we face is a war for our national survival. In that sense, it is not all that different from previous wars.
Yet there is a qualitative difference between the current war and wars of previous generations. In the past, our enemies were states. They wished to conquer Israel and take our land for themselves. Today our enemies do not wish to conquer Israel. They wish to destroy Israel as a stepping stone on their path toward global domination. An Israeli victory or defeat in the current war will influence not only Israel's future. It will influence the future of the free world as a whole. If Israel is defeated, if we do not fight to victory over Hizbullah, the march of jihad will move forward with unprecedented force.
Not surprisingly, Olmert hesitates as he faces this challenge. His nation tells him to choose victory. His instincts tell him to seek the path of least resistance.
If Olmert allows the IDF to fight, if he orders the implementation of the security cabinet's decision to widen the ground offensive to the Litani River and so enable us to vanquish Hizbullah, we will be able to change the face of the region and of the world as a whole.
A clear Israeli victory against Hizbullah that destroys Hizbullah as a fighting force would enable leaders like Bush and Blair to defend their decision to wage war against jihad. Quite simply, an Israeli victory will help them inspire their nations to believe that they can win this war as well.
SINCE HIS ascension to power last year, Ahmadinejad has been on one long winning streak. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's success in convincing Bush to open direct negotiations with Teheran regarding its nuclear weapons program was a huge victory for Ahmadinejad. And nothing breeds success like success. Because he has yet to fail, the Iranian leader enjoys an aura of invincibility that deters other leaders from challenging his power. An Israeli victory against the Iranian military's advance guard would shatter that aura and facilitate a much more robust Anglo-American stand against Teheran and its client Syria.
As well, events in Iraq will be critically influenced by how Israel comes out of this war. On the one hand, an Israeli defeat is liable to foment a violent Shi'ite revolt led by Hassan Nasrallah's underling Muqtada al Sadr and his terror squads. On the other hand, an Israeli victory will galvanize the moderate Shi'ite forces in Iraq that are working to stabilize their country.
Finally, an Israeli victory will put paid the fiction which claims that Israel is a strategic liability for to West. The forces who call for Israel's abandonment and a US "engagement" of the Syrians and Iranians will be exposed as fools.
But the option of defeat has an allure of its own. Defeat, or as Olmert might put it, "bowing to international pressure" has the advantage of being the path of least resistance. Unfortunately for Israel, if Olmert surrenders to his nature and opts for capitulation, the result will be catastrophic.
If, as Rice, Shimon Peres and Olmert himself recommend, Israel holds its fire and waits for a multinational force to deploy along the border, Israel will lose its right to self-defense. The laws of political gravity dictate that a relinquishment of the right to self defense is tantamount to a surrender of sovereignty. If Olmert decides that he would rather have foreigners patrol our borders than the IDF, his message to the world will be clear: As far as he is concerned, Israel does not value its liberty because it is unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices to defend it. If Olmert truly wants for foreign forces to be stationed in south Lebanon, he can do us all a favor and agree to Hizbullah's demand to keep UNIFIL in place. At least UNIFIL, for all its fecklessness, is more or less harmless. It is not empowered to limit Israel's right to defend itself.
If Olmert decides to surrender to outside pressures, he will be serving the interests of the forces in Washington who claim that Israel is not worthy of America's support. An Israel that is unwilling to contend with Hizbullah is an Israel that cannot be trusted as an ally. That is, if he goes along with Rice and her colleagues at the UN and agrees not to fight to win, Olmert will be paving the way for the defeat of pro-Israel forces in US policymaking circles and politics.
The fact of the matter is that those who push for Israel's abandonment are the same people who push for a US-British retreat from Iraq and an end to their war against radical Islam. If Israel capitulates and so strengthens the powers who oppose it in the US and throughout the West, it will similarly contribute to the political defeat of the political forces that call for the jihad to be defeated. So in a very profound sense, as goes Kiryat Shmona, so go Washington and London.
TODAY ISRAEL is gripped by dread. There is not a household in the country that is not directly impacted by this war. All of us have family and friends in the North and in the IDF. All of us are concerned about the future of our country.
It would be nice to think that there is some shortcut that we could take to secure our country and our freedom on the cheap. It is the natural tendency of men like Olmert to look for such a shortcut.
But there are no shortcuts in this war, this existential war that in many respects we brought on ourselves by attempting to disengage from the reality of our surroundings.
At the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Olmert demanded that his ministers behave like grown-ups because "the whole nation is watching us now." This is true. We are watching. And at this time, it is up to our nation to force our leaders to lead us to victory.
Column One: Amateur hour is over
The good news is that Israel has not lost the war. We can win. As the IDF's long awaited ground assault is demonstrating, on a tactical level, the IDF has been able to learn on the go, and learn well.
The bad news is that Israel's national leadership has so far managed to take every political and strategic advantage that Israel has, and turn it into an impediment. Today, assuming Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will let us win, what three weeks ago could have been a rapid victory will now be costly and slow.
Regionally and internationally, the threats that Israel faces mount by the day. While all eyes are focused on Lebanon, Syria and Iran have both upped the ante. Diplomatically, Israel is a guppy swimming with the sharks. And as the dangers mount, far from learning from their mistakes, Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen Dan Halutz have gone from acting like rookies to acting like amateurs.
And so, as the IDF marches on to an uncertain but still forward marching trumpet, it is becoming increasingly clear that Israel's chief impediment to victory is its government.
The week began well enough. In his speech before the Mayors Conference, Olmert made a go of speaking in Winston Churchill's voice. His message of stubborn commitment to victory was so well delivered that even his political rivals admitted he had inspired them. It is true that doubt lurked in the shadows. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's support for a rapid cease-fire showed that the wall of American support was beginning to crack. But Olmert seemed impervious to pressure.
Then came that bizarre State Department announcement in the middle of the night informing the IDF that it would be ceasing aerial bombardment for 48 hours. This, together with Rice's announcement Monday morning that working with her colleagues at Turtle Bay she would be forcing Israel to end its operations altogether by Wednesday or Thursday, was the first clear indicator that Israel's leaders had failed to maintain meaningful US support.
By Tuesday, Olmert had replaced his Churchillian face with a one more reminiscent of Bill Clinton. To the amazement of the media and indeed of the entire country, Olmert announced that we had won the war. Addressing the IDF War College, Olmert declared, "If the military campaign were to end today, already today it could be said with certainty that the face of the Middle East has changed… Now [Hizbullah] can never threaten this nation that it will fire missiles at it - because this nation is contending with these missiles and beating them."
Huh? Olmert went on to say that neither he, nor Peretz nor the members of the General Staff had ever promised us that when the war ends we won't still face the threat of missiles from Lebanon. Even the normally supportive media admitted that was a bold-faced lie.
Yet the contempt which greeted Olmert's fabrications and empty declarations of victory did not deter him. In fact, it seemed to embolden him. By Wednesday morning he removed his Clinton mask and went back to being plain old Olmert - the hack politician who was barely elected to Knesset in 2003.
Speaking to news services Wednesday morning, Olmert built on his fantasies of victory. By then not only had Israel changed the balance of power and restored its deterrence, it had actually destroyed all of Hizbullah's infrastructure in southern Lebanon.
Before Olmert's remarks hit the wires, Hizbullah opened its largest missile attack at Israel to date. In all 231 missiles, including two long-range missiles, rained down on Israel that day.
Of course that wasn't all Olmert said. He also told the Associated Press that Israel's "victory" against Hizbullah would pave the way for the implementation of his plan to transfer control of Judea and Samaria to Hizbullah's most ardent supporters - the Hamas and Fatah-led Palestinians.
Olmert's empty declarations of victory and his continued obsession with his plan to expel up to 100,000 Israeli citizens from their homes in Judea and Samaria and transfer the areas to the Palestinian Authority are not simply preposterous. They are dangerous.
On the domestic level, anyone who takes a look at both the IDF casualties and the IDF troops and officers themselves will see that talk of withdrawing from Judea and Samaria is a recipe for demoralization. Maj. Ro'i Klein, the deputy battalion commander from the Golani brigade who was killed in Bint Jbail last week, died heroically, when after calling out "Shema Yisrael" he jumped on a hand grenade to save the lives of his soldiers. Klein lived with his wife and two young children in the community of Eli that Olmert has slated for destruction.
So too, Lt. Amichai Merhavia, who was also killed in the battle, lived in Eli. In photographs making their way through the Internet, Merhavia is seen being beaten by police as he passively resisted the destruction of the Gilad Farm in Samaria in 2002. Last summer prior to the expulsion of Israeli civilians from Gaza and the withdrawal of IDF forces, Merhavia sent a private letter to Halutz. In it he explained why he believed the operation was wrong. Halutz reportedly ordered him thrown out of the army. His commanders intervened and Merhavia was placed on a three-week leave.
Between 30-50 percent of the IDF combat troops and officers in the regular army and the reserves are religious. A large percentage of them live in Judea and Samaria. By claiming that a victory in Lebanon will pave the way for them to be thrown out of their homes, Olmert signaled clearly that he doesn't understand the role of a national leader in wartime, and worse, he doesn't understand why victory is essential.
Indeed, his declarations of victory themselves indicate that he does not understand the nature of the war Israel is facing or the challenges it must contend with both regionally and internationally. By claiming that Israel has already won when it is absolutely clear it has not, Olmert sends terrible messages to both Israel's ally the US, and to Israel's enemies.
He tells the US that it doesn't have to take us seriously as a client. Since we're willing to pretend that we've already won, we tell America that we will accede to any settlement the State Department carves out with the French and the Russians - even if it involves a total Israeli capitulation replete with land giveaways to Hizbullah and the surrender of Israel's right to defend itself to some UN mandated multinational force made up of French dhimmis and Indonesian jihadists.
Olmert tells our enemies that they do not have to be concerned that Israel will defeat them because the prime minister of Israel is not planning on doing anything that would involve their actual defeat. This of course emboldens them to widen their attacks.
AND OUR enemies are in fact emboldened. Over the weekend, for the first time, Syrian forces detonated a bomb along the border at Kuneitra in the northern Golan Heights. On Monday, Assad ordered his army to ready itself for war. For the first time, this week Assad allowed Druse leaders in Damascus to openly call for a reconquest of the Golan Heights. And of course, Syria is actively assisting Hizbullah by resupplying its forces and providing logistics bases for them.
Rather than explaining to the world that Syria is in fact a participant in the war and should be treated as an aggressor, intent on pretending that the conflict is limited and so can be wished away Olmert and his government have all but given Damascus a clean bill of health. Not only did the government announce that it would not attack Syrian targets, it reportedly asked the anti-Israeli, anti-American government of Spain to engage the Syrians. And so, on Thursday Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos went to Damascus, ending Syria's diplomatic isolation initiated after it masterminded the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. While there, Moratinos praised Assad's leadership and said that Syria "will play a positive role," in any cease-fire talks. Far from insisting that Syria be shunned for its aggression, Israeli incompetence is paving the way for Syria to be rewarded for it.
Then there is Iran, the mastermind of this war. As each day passes, Iran's threats and its actions become more and more extreme. Wednesday, the German newspaper Die Welt reported that Iran sent Osama bin Laden's son Sa'ad, who has been living in Iran since November 2001, to the Syrian-Lebanese border to mobilize Palestinian forces in Syria to fight against Israel.
On Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made veiled nuclear threats against Britain, the US and Israel when he said, "Today, the Iranian people is the owner of nuclear technology. Those who want to talk with our people should know what people they are talking to. If some believe they can keep talking to the Iranian people in the language of threats and aggressiveness, they should know that they are making a bitter mistake. If they have not realized this by now, they soon will, but then it will be too late."
This statement was followed Thursday by his address to the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Malaysia where he again called for Israel to be annihilated.
THE UNDENIABLE fact is that the nature of the war that Israel is now fighting in Lebanon is not local. It is not about territory. It is about jihad. Hizbullah is not simply a terrorist organization. It is the Iranian army. According to press reports, over the past six years, some 3,000 Hizbullah fighters underwent military training in Iran. Iran and Syria are not simply Hizbullah's patrons. They are active participants in this war against the West in which Israel is a frontline state.
Yet due to Olmert's weak and incompetent leadership and Rice's opportunistic laziness, both the US and Israel are pretending it is possible to see the war as a simple, isolated event. As a result, they are advancing purported solutions, like cease-fires, multinational forces and empty declarations of victory that only increase the dangers.
To date, in the interest of maintaining national unity, Israel's political opposition, led by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, has been unwilling to publicly criticize Olmert for his mishandling of the war. This approach has much to recommend it. But what the government needs right now is some very tough love from leaders like Netanyahu, his fellow opposition members Natan Sharansky, Effie Eitam, Yuval Steinitz and Aryeh Eldad as well as from military leaders like former Chief of General Staff Moshe Ya'alon. These men and others, who understand the nature of the war and the dangers Israel faces, need to force Olmert and his colleagues to listen to reason and change course immediately. Amateur hour must end. A difficult victory awaits us.
Our World: As Ahmadinejad watches
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the man to watch these days. And yet it would seem that those in positions of power are paying him little heed.
Ahmadinejad, whose proxy army Hizbullah is now waging war against Israel, has promised to respond to European and American demands to cease his country's illicit nuclear programs on August 22. As Robert Spencer, a noted expert on Islam, has explained, August 22 corresponds with the 27th of Rajab on the Muslim calendar. According to Islamic tradition, that is the day after Muhammad made his nighttime journey to Jerusalem and then flew to heaven from the Temple Mount, lighting up the skies over the holy city in his wake.
Monday the UN Security Council passed a resolution giving Iran until August 31 to end its nuclear programs. The obvious meaning of the new deadline is that until then, in spite of Iran's direction of Hizbullah's war against Israel - a state which Iran daily threatens to destroy - no action will be taken against Teheran.
Indeed, in all the talk of Security Council resolutions regarding the war that Iran's proxy force Hizbullah is waging against Israel, no one has mentioned the possibility of condemning Iran, or Syria, for their sponsorship of Hizbullah.
AS THE STAKES of the war against Israel rise by the day, we find the international community, led by the US, and willingly followed by the Olmert government, scope-locked on a diplomatic agenda that is irrelevant to the imminent dangers Israel and the world now face in the midst of this Iranian sponsored jihad.
Indeed, it is worse than irrelevant. It is counterproductive.
For if the aims of the ongoing diplomatic blitzkrieg are all met, Israel will find itself denied its right to self-defense; with its legal right to secure and recognized borders in tatters; and with Hizbullah sitting pretty behind a protective shield of the Lebanese military and an international force that will not attack it.
On Wednesday the UN Security Council is scheduled to vote to approve a resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that will mandate a cease-fire and the establishment and deployment of a multinational force to Lebanon. The tasks of the proposed force will be to man a buffer zone in southern Lebanon; enable the deployment of the Lebanese army along the border with Israel; and control Lebanon's international border with Syria.
The purpose of the force is to prevent Hizbullah from attacking Israel and to cut it off from its logistical base in Syria while barring Israel from continuing the fight.
THERE ARE several basic problems with this approach. First, Chapter VII resolutions are the only UN resolutions that enable the Security Council to use force and other coercive tools against UN member states. Any state breaching them is considered an international lawbreaker.
Israel's enemies have for decades sought to have Israel come under the authority of Chapter VII resolutions, but the US has blocked all such attempts, understanding that they are aimed at denying Israel the right to defend itself.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her colleagues claim that the proposed multinational force would protect Israel. Yet it is already clear that this will not be the case. As things now stand, the proposed force will be led by France. Indonesia and Turkey have reportedly offered to participate. With France leading the international community in condemning Israel for defending itself; with some 40 percent of Indonesians telling pollsters that they wish to participate in jihad; and with Turkey led by an Islamist government, can anyone believe that this force will neutralize Hizbullah? None of these countries even accept that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization.
OBVIOUSLY this force will not fight Hizbullah. But it will prevent Israel from attacking Hizbullah. And given that the force is to be mandated under a Chapter VII resolution, were Israel to take independent measures to defend itself, it would immediately become an outlaw state open to arms embargoes and other sanctions.
Moreover, the planned multinational force is supposed to facilitate the Lebanese army's deployment along the Lebanese border with Israel. This is supposed to be a good thing. Yet, since the outbreak of the war, the Lebanese army has been actively fighting with Hizbullah. Its radars have been used to lock in Israeli targets for Hizbullah missile crews. It is paying pensions to the families of fallen Hizbullah fighters. On Sunday Lebanese media organs boasted that Lebanese soldiers shot at IDF helicopters in the Bekaa Valley. But to date, the US-led international community refuses to recognize the Lebanese army as a combatant, and similarly insists that the aim of the postwar settlement should be to strengthen both the Lebanese government that includes Hizbullah and the Lebanese army that fights by Hizbullah's side.
IN HER discussions with Israeli leaders, Rice has proposed that in the framework of a settlement of the current crisis, Israel give Mt. Dov on the Golan Heights to Lebanon. There has been almost no public debate about the reasonableness of the US position. Yet even the most superficial analysis makes it clear that such a move would be catastrophic for Israel's long-term viability.
Mt. Dov, which Hizbullah refers to as the Shaba Farms, is not and has never been Lebanese territory. In 2000, following Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, the UN certified that Israel had removed itself from all Lebanese territory.
The UN further confirmed that Mt. Dov was territory Israel wrested from Syria during the course of the 1967 Six Day War. The UN stated that the fate of the territory would be determined in the course of negotiations toward a peace treaty between Israel and Syria.
Hizbullah cut the Lebanese territorial claim to Mt. Dov out of whole cloth as a pretext for continuing its war against Israel after Israel left Lebanon. Its claim that Mt. Dov is Lebanese territory has been rejected by the international community. Yet today, the US is prodding Israel to give Mt. Dov to Lebanon as a confidence-building gesture toward the Lebanese government, which of course supports Hizbullah's demand. By adopting this Hizbullah demand, the US is breaching the decades-old foundation of the Law of Nations, which stipulates that states cannot win territory from other states through armed aggression.
ADDITIONALLY, by supporting Hizbullah's demand, the US is in effect suing for a Hizbullah victory in this war. Hizbullah has never demanded Mt. Dov for itself. It demands the vast territory that connects the Syrian Golan to the Upper Galilee for Lebanon. And the Lebanese government, which the US seeks to strengthen, supports this Hizbullah demand just as it supports all of Hizbullah's demands. If Lebanon receives the territory, Hizbullah will be the clear victor in this war.
Moreover, by even suggesting that Israel consider giving Mt. Dov to Lebanon, the US is undermining the very notion that Israel has a right to recognized borders. If after Israel removed itself to the international border Lebanon can receive support for additional territorial claims against Israel, that means there is no line to which Israel can remove itself in the Golan, or in Jerusalem, or in Judea and Samaria or Gaza and safely assume that its borders will be recognized by the rest of the world.
In short, by backing Lebanese claims to Mt. Dov, the US is paving the way for future territorial claims for West Jerusalem, the Galilee, Haifa, indeed for all of Israel.
Israel will never be able to trust that any peace treaty it signs is final. An act of aggression by its enemies may pave the way for additional claims, which in the interests of strengthening the Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian, or Syrian governments the international community is liable to support.
IT WOULD seem that, in spite of themselves, both the US and the Israeli government have managed to maneuver themselves into diplomatic positions that undermine their own national interests. Somehow, between the US's early and misguided decision to ignore the Lebanese government's support and responsibility for Hizbullah and the Olmert government's clearly halfhearted prosecution of the war, both governments have gotten lost. The goals that now form the basis of their diplomatic agendas serve only to advance the interests of their enemies.
A clear break from the current path must be made immediately. Ahmadinejad is looking on and laughing.
The Good, the bad and the ugly
In his address to the Knesset last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert framed Israel's war in Lebanon as a war for "our right to be normal." His emphasis on our right to drink coffee led many to wonder if he understands the immensity of the threat we face as he curries favor with Israel's aging baby boomers.
As polls of the Arab and Muslim world's opinion of Israel make clear, The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh probably understated the magnitude of their desire to destroy Israel when he wrote on Thursday: "Throughout the Arab and Islamic world, hatred of Israel is so immense today that, if given the chance, tens of thousands of women and men would join Hamas and Hizbullah almost immediately."
The Arab world's desire to "wipe Israel off the map" is the result of their total immersion in an anti-Jewish, jihadist, genocidal world view through the indoctrination efforts of their state-run schools, mosques and media organs. In addition, their perception of Israel being on the retreat ever since it opened negotiations with the PLO in 1993 has convinced them it is possible to destroy Israel.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has made wiping Israel off the map the central goal of his administration and is the primary sponsor of Hizbullah and Hamas, says he will respond to the US and European demand that Iran cease its uranium enrichment activities, on August 22. It is assumed that Iran today is pushing forward with its enrichment program. It is now accepted that Iran is collaborating with North Korea in its program to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles.
And so it may well be that on August 22 Ahmadinejad will announce that Iran has successfully completed the nuclear fuel cycle and so has the ability to independently destroy Israel, and to attack its Arab neighbors, Europe and the US with nuclear weapons. Such an announcement would push the Middle East into a tailspin.
This is the context in which Israel now finds itself at war with Iran's proxies. Both the Israeli people and Israel's allies must understand that the clock is ticking. Come what may, Israel must win this war.
Given the gravity of the hour, after two and a half increasingly bloody weeks of war, we Israelis must keep our heads and coldly assess where we stand: our resources; our stumbling blocks; and our mistakes. In short, we must assess the good, the bad and the ugly in our campaign in Lebanon.
The good
Our major ace in the hole is the unprecedented support we are receiving from America. US support for Israel stems from clear strategic considerations and, as a result, it is fairly stable. The Americans understand well just how dangerous Hizbullah and the Iranian-Syrian-Hizbullah axis are. If Israel loses this war, chances are the US will be unable to hold on in Iraq, where the same forces are fuelling the violence.
The fact of the matter is that in Lebanon, the jihad against the US and its allies has openly merged with the jihad against Israel. Because it understands that our fortunes are directly linked, the US is blocking all attempts by the UN, Arab governments and the EU to bring about an immediate cease-fire, understanding that doing so would be perceived as an Israeli defeat and a Hizbullah victory.
Due in large part to Hizbullah's successful psychological warfare against Israel, we seem to be ignoring the distress signals that our enemies are emitting. On Tuesday, Syria declared its interest in reaching a cease-fire. Iran joined the call on Wednesday. In his speech Tuesday night, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah for the first time felt the need to justify his decision to attack Israel to the Lebanese people. Moreover, Nasrallah reduced his definition of victory from defeating Israel to ensuring Hizbullah's survival. These and other statements by Lebanese politicians indicate that Israel is causing Hizbullah significant pain.
Finally, there is the strength of the Israeli people. The fact that in the past week alone nearly 1,000 new olim have arrived from the US and France is a testament to the strength of our nation. That tens of thousands of families in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Judea and Samaria, and the Negev are taking in refugees from the North is proof that in spite of our enemies' best efforts, the will of our people remains steady.
The bad
Israel's strengths are formidable. Yet Israel also suffers from weaknesses that must be immediately addressed. First, although the Olmert government properly defined the goal of the campaign in Lebanon as dismantling Hizbullah, it will not take the necessary steps to achieve that vital goal. The government's stubborn refusal to commit a sufficient number of forces to Lebanon to enable the IDF to achieve victory is inexcusable.
The government's plan for prosecuting the war aimed at Hizbullah's dismantlement places the IAF as the main component of the campaign. The IAF is supposed to be assisted by limited ground operations that should not rise above the brigade level. Although this plan's logic fell apart a week ago when it became clear that the IAF bombings had not done enough to damage Hizbullah's war waging capabilities and its ability to rain down 100 rockets and missiles a day on northern Israel, the government maintains its devotion to the plan because it is unwilling to admit that its entire political vision for the country is based on lies.
The Olmert government insists that Israel can separate itself from terror and jihad and live a "normal life" by building a big fence and hiding behind it. The government knows that nothing will prove to the public the emptiness of its political rhetoric better than a serious ground invasion of southern Lebanon. And so, rather than shed its hallucinatory agenda, it clings to it with all the fervor of a Communist true-believer in Stalin's gulag.
While our political leadership insists on paralyzing the campaign in favor of its narrow political and ideological interests, for its own reasons the IDF General Staff is demonstrating a dangerous unwillingness to accept that its doctrine of an aerial war has failed.
The General Staff's concept of a campaign based predominantly on aerial bombing is a recap of the operational logic that guided the IDF in its earlier (failed) campaigns in south Lebanon, namely Operations Accountability (1993) and Grapes of Wrath (1996).
The logic of both operations was to "send a message" to Hizbullah and the Lebanese government not to mess with Israel. That message was to be sent by aerial and artillery bombardments of Hizbullah infrastructures and of Lebanese infrastructures that served Hizbullah. Today, since Israel's goal is to destroy Hizbullah as a fighting force rather than deter it, "sending messages" should not be the IDF's concern. Destroying Hizbullah as a fighting force requires more than an infantry battalion here and an infantry battalion there. It requires 100 tanks entering southern Lebanon to take control of the territory and destroy Hizbullah's arsenal and to kill or capture its fighters.
The ugly
The government's refusal to acknowledge that it cannot win a war through half-measures and the General Staff's insistence on believing, contrary to all evidence, that the IAF can win this war almost on its own have caused the IDF to commit avoidable tactical failures that if left uncorrected are liable to entrap us on a strategic level.
The battles in Bint Jbail this week were the result of a mistaken operational concept. IDF generals constantly refer to Hizbullah fighters as "terrorists." While this is a reasonable distinction for politicians, it is fatal for those actually waging war. It is true that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization. But on the ground in Lebanon, it has organized itself as a near-conventional force that uses terror and guerrilla warfare tactics along with standard flanking maneuvers and ambushes.
When military commanders define the enemy as "terrorists" rather than as "fighters" they engender a perception of Hizbullah as an enemy little different from Fatah or Hamas. The result of this intellectual indolence is unwillingness on the part of IDF commanders to recognize the magnitude and quality of the military challenge they face and to take appropriate measures to surmount it.
When an army knows it is fighting a well trained opposition, its commanders remember to activate and man the electronic warfare defensive systems on their missile boats.
When an army fights against a conventional foe that has trained continuously for this exact war in earnest for the past six years and periodically for the past 24 years, its spokesmen and commanders do not make empty, unverifiable claims of victory. They do not make bombastic statements claiming to have destroyed 50 percent of the opposing force's infrastructures by aerial bombardment after two days and argue that ground forces are unimportant.
When an army fights an army, it does not attempt to cordon off an entire village with a single infantry battalion and it does not claim to have cordoned off a village when it has only surrounded it from 270 degrees.
As an increasing number of voices in and out of the IDF claim, it is possible that the IDF commanders who insist on fighting in Lebanon with force levels and methods bettered suited to Gaza will have to be replaced. Galilee Division Commander Brig.-Gen. Gal Hirsch, OC Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam, IDF Spokeswoman Brig.-Gen. Miri Regev and Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz may not be capable of successfully performing their duties.
At the same time, even ideal commanders would have difficulty achieving victory when the Israeli government, in the interest of its narrow and misguided political agenda, is denying the IDF the resources needed for victory. The security cabinet's decision Thursday afternoon to reject the IDF's request to intensify the ground campaign and to call up more reserve units is nothing less than a gift to Hizbullah - a gift the IDF will be hard pressed to take back no matter who its commanders are.
Wednesday, Olmert said that the war will last as long as the public supports it. It is debatable whether it is proper for a premier who is leading his nation in a war for survival to make such a statement. But since he has placed the decision in our hands, we the Israeli people must make clear our demand for victory.
A people that demands and requires victory cannot be deterred by obstacles placed in its path. With Israel's international, social, economic and strategic resources, it has the ability to win this war. And we have our secret weapon: the IDF.
As the soldiers and officers of Battalion 51 of the Golani Brigade demonstrated at that horrible battlefield of Bint Jbail Wednesday, our soldiers are simply extraordinary. Their heroism under fire takes your breath away. Without a doubt, it is the combination of its spirit and its hardware that make the IDF a world class fighting force.
A nation that sends its best sons into battle to defend its liberty and its very survival has the right and the duty to require its government to act responsibly and to discard hallucinatory ideological agendas before they lead us to yet another disaster.
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
Oct. 9, 2006 |
It would seem that Karl Marx got things backwards. History does not repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Rather, it repeats itself first as farce and second as tragedy. This, perhaps more than anything else is the conclusion one should reach from North Korea's nuclear test on Columbus Day.
It was the Clinton administration, which back in the Roaring '90s began the policy of appeasing North Korea. Throughout the decade the US wined and dined the North Korean Stalinists who always responded by pocketing US concessions and escalating their nuclear and ballistic missile activities and threats against the US and its Asian allies.
The farce was then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright's visit to Pyongyang in late October 2000, two weeks before the US presidential elections. There, after the North Koreans tested the Taepo-Dong 1 ballistic missile off the coast of Japan in 1998 and refused to end either their missile programs or missile exports to Iran, Albright tripped the night fantastic with Kim Jong-Il. Her buffoonery was a perfect capstone to eight years of the Clinton administration's addiction to ceremony over substance.
While America's tone towards North Korea chilled under the Bush administration, there was little substantive change in its policies.
Secretary of state Colin Powell met with his North Korean counterpart Pak Nam Sun and to this day US attempts to strike a deal with Pyongyang have not ended. And now, Pyongyang, with its medium- and long-range ballistic missiles, has tested a nuclear bomb.
THERE IS of course also North Korea's ally Iran. Toward Iran, too, the substance of the Bush administration policies is little different from that of his predecessor. Like North Korea, the Iranians respond to US attempts at appeasement by escalating their rhetoric and redoubling their offensive military build-ups of missiles and nuclear capabilities.
The great shift, then which occurred under the Bush administration, a shift for which President George W. Bush has been pilloried by his political rivals, has been rhetorical.
While hypocritical, the division between rhetoric and substance has something to recommend it. The benefit of the current US position toward North Korea and Iran is that the rhetoric has left open the possibility that the policy itself will finally be suited to reality. Today, unlike the situation in the 1990s, the American public is at least aware that these states are a threat to US national security interests.
In the aftermath of North Korea's nuclear bomb test, the US can support military actions by Japan and South Korea against North Korea; build up its missile shield; and perhaps end its 14 year self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing and so revamp its nuclear arsenal.
Were the Bush administration to change its policy tomorrow regarding Iran - begin shaming Europe into ending its appeasement, and threatening Russia with trade sanctions if Moscow continues supporting Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, while building up its military options to strike at Iran's nuclear installations - the American public would understand why the policy change was necessary. Indeed, such a move could even help the Republican Party in the upcoming elections.
DISTURBINGLY, WHILE Bush has paved the way rhetorically for a shift in policy toward North Korea and Iran, he has done no such thing in the US's relations with the terror-ruled Palestinian Authority. And as is the case with Iran and North Korea, the stubborn and ill-considered continuation of the Clinton administration's appeasement policy toward the PA during the Bush years has only exacerbated and escalated the threat posed by the PA to US national security interests and to the national security of US allies - first and foremost, of Israel.
In the 1990s, the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat, was the most frequent foreign visitor at the White House. The head of the PLO was the object of adoration by the Clintonites. It didn't matter to them that Arafat never revoked the PLO Charter calling for Israel's destruction. It didn't matter that he indoctrinated a generation of Palestinian children to become suicide bombers in jihad against the Jews. It didn't matter that he used billions of dollars of American and European taxpayer money to build the largest terror army in the world. Arafat showed up at signing ceremonies. He was the poster child of appeasement.
The Clinton administration tied itself to a policy toward the Palestinians which, like its policies toward North Korea and Iran, opened it to ever escalating blackmail. As the terror threat emanating from the PA-ruled areas rose, empowering Arafat became the obsession of the Clinton White House. He was showered with money, guns and love. No Israeli security consideration could hold a candle to the need to strengthen Arafat.
From bombing to bombing, Arafat was enriched and empowered. Israel's security became the main obstacle to the signing ceremonies.
After seven years, the myth of Arafat the peacemaker exploded in the faces of more than a thousand Israelis who would be killed over the next six years of the Palestinian jihad. But the myth of the PA endured.
For the past six years, each bombing, every clear indication that the PA itself is a terrorist entity is met by more breathless US protestations of support for Palestinian empowerment and statehood. The fact that the last six years have left the State Department unfazed was made absolutely clear during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit last week.
Since Arafat appointed Mahmoud Abbas, his deputy of 40 years, PA prime minister in 2003, the US has upheld Abbas as a man of peace, a moderate and a respectable leader that the Bush administration wishes to strengthen. To this end, the Bush administration has overlooked Abbas's clear support for terrorism. It has excused his constant appeals to merge his Fatah terror group with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It has ignored the fact that his Fatah terror group has committed more acts of terror than Hamas and that Fatah's involvement in terror and the sophistication of its attacks has only increased since Abbas replaced Arafat after the latter's death in November 2004.
During her visit last week, at Abbas's request, Rice was scheduled to meet with Fatah commander Hussein a-Sheikh in the American Consulate-General in Jerusalem. The meeting was cancelled at the last minute when Israeli activists demanded that Sheikh, who was directly responsible for the murder of dozens of Israelis and several American nationals, be arrested by Israel police upon arrival at the consulate. Yet, Rice still met with other Fatah leaders, like Muhammad Dahlan who has been directly implicated in the murder of Israelis in terror attacks perpetrated by men under his command.
EVEN MORE disturbingly, Rice has officially sanctioned a policy put together by US Army Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton to expand by up to 70 percent Abbas's presidential guard and personal army, Force 17. The administration wishes to raise some $20 million to fund the training and arming and expansion of Abbas's army from 3,500 to 6,000 soldiers. This move comes after the US transferred 3,000 rifles and 1 million bullets to Force 17 in June. Yet Force 17 is a terrorist army led by terrorists.
Right after he received the weapons shipment, Abbas appointed Mahmoud Damra commander of the force. Damra, who like many of the Force 17 officers and soldiers, doubles as a Fatah terrorist, was wanted by Israel due to his direct involvement in the terrorist murder of at least 15 Israelis. One of his deputies claimed that the US rifles were immediately used to attack a bus carrying Israeli school girls in Judea.
Israel arrested Damra at a checkpoint shortly after he received Abbas's appointment. The US immediately began pressuring Israel to release him.
In addition to Damra's direct involvement in Fatah terror, he also has close ties with Iran and Hizbullah. In 2002, Arafat reportedly appointed him Force 17's liaison officer to Iran and Hizbullah forces. The fact that Abbas appointed Damra Force 17's overall commander just weeks before Fatah and Hamas began Iran's proxy war against Israel by attacking the IDF position at Kerem Shalom and kidnapping Cpl. Gilad Shalit, should say something about Abbas's intentions. Yet, last week, Rice couldn't praise Abbas enough.
North Korea's nuclear test and Iran's nuclear intimidation show us what happens when failed policies are not abandoned. Due in part to its continued US-backed legitimacy, the PA is used by Pakistan as an excuse for terror sponsorship and nuclear proliferation and by jihadists throughout the world as justification for attacks on Western and Jewish targets.
No doubt the North Korean nuclear test is a turning point in this world war.
The question is whether it will force the US to finally part with appeasement, or whether Rice will convince President Bush to take his chances by repeating history a third and fourth time
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
Sep. 25, 2006 |
During the past week we learned a great deal about the nature of our enemies. We also learned a great deal about ourselves. If we draw the proper lessons from what we have seen we will go far toward winning the war.
With their ghoulish presentations at the UN General Assembly, both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made clear their hostile intent, disdain for freedom and their foes, and their fanatical intent to use all murderous means toward their totalitarian ends. The men were so hostile that even their usual apologists in academia and the political Left were too embarrassed to be seen in their company.
The Chavez and Ahmadinejad show ensured that the Bush administration's gamble in permitting the two entry to the United States had paid off. Given a platform, the dictators demonstrated the gravity of the threat they posed, as the administration had doubtless hoped they would.
Yet laying out a gangplank and hoping the enemy will be stupid enough to walk it is hardly a winning strategy in war. The stark reality of the global Islamist jihad and its strong support from European appeasers to third world dictators makes it necessary for the US to enact an information campaign capable of effectively advancing the stated American war aim of destroying jihad as a governing ideology and social force.
The potential for victory in the information warfare arena is great, and the failure of the US to meet this challenge is a great shame.
INFORMATION operations are a vital part of any war effort. They serve four basic purposes: to rally supporters to the rightness of their cause and the wrongness of their enemies cause; to dissuade any potential allies of one's enemies from joining their forces; to gain an ideological foothold in the enemies' society; and to demoralize enemy societies and so convince them that they have no chance of winning the war.
In both the Muslim world and the West, massive Saudi and other Islamist funding of mosques, Islamic schools, Middle East studies departments in universities, and lobbying arms show that jihadists have placed a premium on their information operations. The jihadists' extensive use of the Internet, cassette tapes, DVDs, videotapes and the print and broadcast media in the Muslim world complement these efforts.
The goals of the jihadists are clear. They wish to recruit soldiers. They wish to buy supporters among Western elites who will act as their apologists. They wish to demonize and delegitimize their ideological opponents in both Muslim societies and in the West by calling them apostates or racists. They wish to convince their enemies that there is no way to defeat the forces of jihad.
While massive, these efforts should be easy enough to undermine. For all the billions of dollars the jihadists have spent indoctrinating Muslims and weakening the West's will to fight them, their cause is anything but attractive. The cause of jihad is the cause of totalitarianism. It is the cause of hatred, misogyny, bigotry, mass murder, slavery, barbarism and humiliation. It is fundamentally unesthetic and unsympathetic.
As a result, attacking those who sponsor jihad, or serve as its apologists or purveyors should be a simple matter that can be undertaken at vastly less expense than that which has already been paid by the other side.
BUT THERE is a catch, of course. In order to conduct information operations effectively you have to be willing to identify your enemies and your allies, and to point fingers at those who refuse to take sides and embarrass them for sitting on the fence. That is, you need moral courage and clarity. You need to be willing to make people angry at you if you wish to earn their respect and support.
For the past five years the Bush administration has shirked this unpleasant task. It has categorized Saudi Arabia, the prime financier and propagator of jihad, as its ally. It has labeled Egypt, the epicenter of jihadist propaganda and incitement, a paragon of moderation and a stalwart ally.
Then there is Pakistan, which created the Taliban and has served as a refuge for Osama bin Laden since November 2001. Pakistan, too, is labeled a great ally, as are the Europeans and the Russians.
Israel, on the other hand, is a problem. Israel is the excuse that all of America's "great allies" give for refusing to act like America's allies. In the interests of pleasing its great allies, America holds Israel at arm's length.
Unfortunately, this policy sends exactly the wrong message. It teaches America's "allies" that they have nothing to lose by double-crossing the US. And it teaches truly liberal forces in the Muslim world and in the non-Islamic world that the US will not keep faith with them, and that they are, essentially on their own if they wish to take on the forces of jihad in their own societies and throughout the world.
THE BUSH administration's refusal to acknowledge the difference between its enemies and its allies was most pronounced last week in the president's meetings with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Earlier in the month Musharraf signed an accord with the Taliban that gave the group control over the Pakistani territories of north and south Waziristan. This agreement, which also involved Pakistan's release of some 2,500 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters from prison, is the Taliban's and al-Qaida's greatest victory since September 11, 2001. As military analyst Bill Roggio has reported on his Web site, The Fourth Rail, Musharraf's decision to hand Waziristan over to the Taliban and al-Qaida makes clear that he is a major enemy of the US.
But the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge this fact. Bush met with Musharraf in the White House and praised his leadership and his strong alliance with the US in fighting al-Qaida. The State Department praised the agreement that has caused NATO commanders to announce that more troops will be required in Afghanistan to fight the resurgent Taliban.
Likewise, Abbas has gone out of his way in recent months to forge an alliance between Fatah and Hamas on Hamas's terms. He agreed to form a unity government with Hamas that would unify their terror forces under one command to better wage war against Israel. He agreed that Hamas would not recognize Israel's right to exist. Fatah itself, which he commands, has committed more attacks against Israel than Hamas in recent years, and was involved in the cross-border attack on Israel in June where Cpl. Gilad Shalit was abducted. Under the agreement he offered, Fatah would maintain its terrorist agenda.
And yet, rather than announce that the US will have nothing to do with Abbas, Bush invited him to the White House and praised his commitment to peace. Rather than acknowledge that the Palestinian leadership - in Fatah and Hamas, as well as all other major parties - has shown by word and deed that it seeks not an independent Palestinian state but the eradication of the Jewish state, Bush has insisted that he wants nothing more than to see the creation of a Palestinian state.
THE BUSH administration's insistence on confusing friends and foes has been complemented by its refusal to make distinctions between jihadist political parties and non-jihadist political parties. Indeed, the US facilitated the participation of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, Hizbullah in the Lebanese elections, the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian elections, and the jihadist Justice and Development party in the Moroccan elections.
In all these cases, these forces of totalitarianism were legitimized by their participation in the elections and their empowerment has enabled them to more ably advance the cause of jihad in their own societies and worldwide, at the expense of those moderate, liberal Muslims that must be empowered if jihad is to be defeated.
The world stands today on the edge of a potential upheaval. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas are poised to retake power in elections in November. In the US, on November 7, voters will decide the composition of the Congress and Senate and so, in many ways, decide whether the war will continue to be fought to victory or will be abandoned.
Israelis have awoken from the fantasy of appeasement and are poised to bring in a government capable of defending them. In Britain, Tony Blair's heirs operate with the knowledge that they will be better off politically if they abandon the US.
Information operations that expose liberal democratic civilization's foes and support its allies - be they states or individuals - have never been more vital. Yet unless the Bush administration finds the courage to properly identify those foes and allies, its message will do more to confound than to clarify, and US policies will continue to be plagued by confusion - to the detriment of America and humanity as a whole.
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
Sep. 22, 2006 |
Pope Benedict XVI has become political Islam's newest excuse for rioting. Mobs from Rawalpindi to Ramallah are burning him in effigy. Muslim leaders from Gaza to Indonesia to Qatar, from Turkey to Washington and London are attacking the pope and demanding that he apologize to Islam for what they consider to be a heinous attack against their religion.
To recap what has been exhaustively reported in recent days, the pontiff's "crime" against Islam occurred in the course of a scholarly lecture at the University of Regensburg in his native Germany earlier in the month. Benedict quoted from a dialogue between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a Persian scholar of Islam circa 1391 where the emperor criticized harshly the Islamic practice of forcibly converting non-Muslims to Islam.
In the pope's words, the Byzantine emperor, "addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'
"The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God,' he says, 'is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.'"
As Benedict explained, the harsh judgment that the Byzantine emperor rendered on Islam stemmed directly from his Christian understanding of God as a reasonable deity. According to Benedict, the reason a Christian leader was able to judge Islam, and so conduct a meaningful inter-cultural discussion on the merits of Islam and Christianity, was because he had a clear understanding of how his religion construed the God-created world and conceived of man's relationship to God.
Expanding on this theme, the pope told his audience that European civilization itself is a fusion of Christian faith and Greek philosophy of reason. Europe's current cultural drift, he argued, stems from the cultural separation between faith and reason that began with the Reformation and went on through the Enlightenment. By relegating faith to a subculture that has no place in discussions of practical human endeavors, he said, Europeans have rendered themselves incapable of understanding who they are or of defending themselves and their values in a manner that the Byzantine emperor, in the pre-scientific era, was able to do so stalwartly.
IT COULD be said that the Islamic world's hysterical and violent reaction to Benedict's use of the 600-year-old dialogue only serves to reinforce the Byzantine emperor's impression that Islam does not perceive God as being a reasoning deity. But limiting an analysis of Benedict's lecture to the Muslim world's hysterical reaction would ignore the pope's central point. Benedict's overarching message in that lecture was that to survive, a culture must be willing to embrace its identity, for if it does not, it won't even be capable of understanding why it should survive.
While Benedict's specific message was to his fellow Christians, the Jewish people should take heed of his general message. Today, the Jewish people, in Israel and throughout the world find ourselves under attack from all quarters. The rise of anti-Semitism globally, and particularly in the Islamic world, finds us in a period of grave self-doubt. Like the Europeans, our ability to defend ourselves against the swelling ranks of haters is dependent on our ability as a people and as individuals to embrace our identity as Jews.
Commenting on the nature of this surge in Jew-hatred, the great (non-Jewish) Canadian pundit Mark Steyn wrote last month in the National Review, "The oldest hatred didn't get that way without the ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are - so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they're hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless-cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they're hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they'd be hated for that, too."
It is crucial that all of us internalize the message that these lines convey. For in recent years, rather than recognize the prejudice of our detractors, we have devoted ourselves to attempting to understand and so justify the hatred they heap upon us.
We tell ourselves we are hated because we are too strong - or because we are too weak. We are hated because we are too religious - or because we are not religious enough. We are hated because we insist on defending Israel - or we are hated because we are willing to compromise on Israel.
Yet, as Steyn wisely notes, we are not hated because of what we do, we are hated because we are Jews. In light of this, the best way to defend ourselves, the best way to safeguard our freedom and our heritage, is to embrace and celebrate our identity as Jews. As Elie Wiesel once explained to me, the key to defending ourselves is to never allow our haters to tell us who we are. "Hatred only defines the haters," he said.
And indeed, when we look at the manner in which Jews in Israel and throughout the world are being attacked today, we see that the attacks are based not on Jewish actions but on the fact that we are Jews.
Thus, in the midst of yet another wave of violent attacks by Muslims against Jews in Norway last month, Norway's Jewish community warned its members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public.
Thus it is that the charter of Hamas, the movement that now controls the Palestinian Authority, calls not for compromise with Israel but for all Jews to be expelled from the Land of Israel or forcibly converted to Islam as part of the global jihad.
So it is that attacks against Jewish supporters of Israel in the West target not the substance of their arguments, but their right as Jews to lobby for Israel in their countries of citizenship.
"We Jews," Wiesel explained, "have always defined ourselves as the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Indeed, at Mount Sinai, in our acceptance of the Ten Commandments, the Jewish people became the first nation in history to self-consciously define itself. And each subsequent generation of Jews has remade that choice. Jews do not exist, as Jean-Paul Sarte ignorantly argued, because anti-Semites exist. The leader of the existentialist movement should have understood; anti-Semites exist because anti-Semites choose to exist.
AS STEYN notes, today hatred against Jews is anchored on Israel. Provoked by this new form of Jew-hatred, some Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora see Israel as a burden. This is a self-inflicted tragedy. For if we look at Israel, we see that far from being a burden, our Jewish state is one of the most stunning successes of Jewish history.
Today, Israel is the home of the largest Jewish community in the world. More Jews live in Israel today than at any time in our history. And the state in which we live is one of the most vibrant, optimistic, "happening" countries in the world. We have the highest birthrate in the West. Rates of entrepreneurship are among the highest in the world.
We are one of the most highly educated societies in the world. Over the past 15 years, more than a dozen colleges have been established in Israel and last year the government decided to allow two colleges to join Israel's nine research universities as full-fledged, independent research universities.
Israelis are among the most patriotic citizens in the world. Our patriotism is expressed in the high level of volunteerism in all age groups. In the recent war, tens of thousands of reservists willingly left their families and jobs to take up arms and defend the country, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis volunteered to help our one million brothers and sisters whose homes were targeted by rockets, missiles and mortars.
Jewish life blossoms in Israel as it has nowhere else in our history. The rates of literacy in Jewish learning in Israel are higher than they have ever been anywhere in our history. Israel is the home of some half dozen generations of Jews whose mother tongue is the language of the Bible and the Talmud.
Israel's success stems from its serving as a vehicle that allows us to express our heritage in all facets of society. And our Jewish heritage is one of the most precious heritages known to man.
The Jewish people gave humanity the concepts of God, liberty and law. Our understanding of the fallibility of mankind has prevented us from being tempted by false prophets promising us heaven on Earth, and has allowed us to take practical steps toward improving our lot and our world.
All of the ideals that Israel represents, both spiritual and physical, have formed the foundations for human progress and freedom throughout the world for millennia. Our willingness to stay loyal to our identity and our heritage has been the key to our survival throughout the ages in the face of the countless foes who sought to destroy us both spiritually and physically.
Rosh Hashana marks the beginning of the Ten Days of Repentance that precede Yom Kippur. To properly atone for our sins and correct our mistakes, we must understand who we are, what we represent and what we can and should aspire to as Jews. To do this, we must reject the notion that those who hate us can tell us who we are. To do this we must embrace our Jewish identity and uphold our commitment to our collective destiny.
The fact that hatred of Jews has endured for so long says nothing about the nature of the Jewish people. What does speak volumes about that nature is the fact that through the ages our fortunes have been directly related to our ability to spurn our enemies' distorted portraits of the Jewish people and our willingness to endure and progress as Jews in the midst of that hatred.
Pope Benedict is able to discuss Islam because, secure in his Christian identity, he has a clear basis for judging the goodness or unreasonableness of Muslim values and behavior. Whether we agree with his judgments or not, through his willingness to judge, Benedict capably defends and advances his faith.
When we embrace our moral and intellectual identity as Jews, we are then capable of meeting the challenges of our times. It is my prayer that in 5767, the Jewish people will rally around our heritage, history and culture and so pave the way for a secure, peaceful and moral future for our people and our world.
| Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST |
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair is Israel's best friend in Europe.
And he's not a very good friend.
Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, Blair was instrumental in convincing US President George W. Bush to view the Palestinian jihad against Israel as a conflict completely separate from the global jihad. His success in convincing Bush of this distinction turned the anti-Semitic - not to mention strategically disastrous - view that terrorists who kill Israelis should be treated differently from terrorists who kill anyone else into one of the cognitive foundations of the US war on Islamic terror. This foundation was first enunciated in Bush's address of September 20 to a joint session of Congress where he identified "every terrorist with global reach" - that is every terrorist who isn't part of the Palestinian Authority - as enemies of the US.
Later, Blair was a principal force behind Bush's move to abandon the guidelines for dealing with the Palestinians that he enunciated in his speech of June 24, 2002. In that address, Bush stipulated that the Palestinians needed to transform themselves from a society that supported terror into one that combated terror in order to receive US support for Palestinian statehood.
Shortly after Baghdad fell to coalition forces in April 2003, Blair convinced Bush to accept the road map plan for Palestinian statehood. The road map, which effectively locks in US support for Palestinian statehood irrespective of Palestinian terrorism and radicalism, represented a practical abandonment of the positions that Bush set out in his June 24, 2002 address.
During his visit to the region this week, in keeping with his studied habit, Blair ignored the fact that the Iranian-backed Hamas government was elected to lead the Palestinian Authority by a large majority of Palestinians. He ignored the fact that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has voiced support for the abduction and continued captivity of Cpl. Gilad Shalit and for the continuation of the terror war against Israel. He ignored the fact that rather than working to overthrow the Hamas government, Abbas has begged Hamas to allow Fatah to join its government. To this end, Abbas has accepted Hamas's policy guidelines rejecting the possibility of recognizing Israel's right to exist and committing all Palestinians to unite in the war against Israel.
Ignoring all these inconvenient facts, Blair called on the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government to renew negotiations with Abbas on the basis of the road map.
And yet, for all this, Tony Blair is Israel's best friend in Europe. He is Israel's best friend because, in contrast to all his colleagues in Britain and the EU, Blair at least recognizes that the global jihad is a threat to the free world and that the price of not fighting the forces of jihad would be the loss of our freedom.
Soon, Israel's closest European friend will exit the world stage after being effectively sacked by his own Labor Party last week. British political commentators say the chances are slim that Blair will manage to hold onto the reins of power as a lame duck for the next 12 months, as he pledged. More likely, he will leave 10 Downing Street in a matter of months.
The two men most likely to succeed Blair - Chancellor Gordon Brown and Tory leader David Cameron - will be more similar to French President Jacques Chirac than to Blair in their attitudes toward Israel and the US. This is the case first and foremost because that is what the British people expect of them.
British antipathy towards the US and Israel was clearly exposed in an opinion poll published on September 6 in the Times of London. The poll reported that 73 percent of Britons believe that Blair's foreign policy, and especially his "support for the invasion of Iraq and refusal to demand an immediate cease-fire by Israel in the recent war against Hizbullah, has significantly increased the risk of terrorist attacks on Britain."
More than 62% said that to "reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on Britain, the government should change its foreign policy, in particular by distancing itself from America, being more critical of Israel and declaring a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq."
The day after the poll was published, Blair announced that he would leave office in a year.
Also, on September 7, a committee of members of Parliament released a report on anti-Semitism in Britain. The all-party committee found that that since the Palestinian jihad against Israel began in 2000, anti-Semitism in Britain has become a mainstream phenomenon. Attacks against Jews in Britain were at an all time high over the summer.
In their anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, the British, of course, are no different from their Continental brethren. And the situation in Europe is alarming. Writing in Frontpage magazine this week, Islamic expert Andrew Bostom reported that in November 2005, Stephen Steinlight, the former director of education at the US Holocaust Memorial Council, told a conference in Washington that on average, Muslims attack Jews in Paris 12 times a day. According to Steinlight, this means French anti-Semitic violence is approaching the level of anti-Semitic violence in Germany during the days of the Weimar Republic.
These attacks against Jews in Europe are accompanied by ever increasing official hostility towards Israel on the part of European governments. On the second day of the war with Hizbullah, Chirac felt comfortable alleging that "Israel's military offensive against Lebanon is totally disproportionate." Chirac then acidly asked, "Is destroying Lebanon the ultimate goal?"
Chirac's remarks opened the floodgates for anti-Israel propaganda throughout Europe. They were followed by the barring of El Al cargo planes carrying weapons shipments from the US from European airports. That prohibition still stands.
From the moment Chirac launched this unjustified diplomatic assault against Israel, his government began acting as an agent of the Lebanese government, which itself acted throughout the war as Hizbullah's mouthpiece. So from the second day of the war, the groundwork was already laid for UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which treats Israel and Hizbullah as equals and lets both Syria and Iran off the hook for their central roles in Hizbullah's illegal war against Israel.
THROUGH THEIR behavior toward both Israel and the US, Europe's leaders have made clear that they will do just about anything to please the Muslim world. Even though Iran has made absolutely clear that it refuses to end uranium enrichment activities, or even to suspend them, the Europeans continue to insist on negotiating with the mullahs and refuse to take even the smallest concrete step against Iran in the UN Security Council.
As for the Palestinians, the Europeans have made no attempt to hide their eagerness to renew their monthly transfers of tens of millions of euros to the Palestinian Authority in the wake of Hamas's agreement to let Fatah join its jihadist government.
And in Lebanon, together with the UN, the Europeans have defined the rules of engagement for UNIFIL in a way that on the one hand protects Hizbullah, and on the other hand, prevents Israel from defending itself. Above all else, these policies clearly demonstrate that the Europeans have defined ingratiating the Muslim world as their primary geopolitical interest.
Seemingly unaware of Europe's growing hostility toward Israel, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government has succumbed to the charms of the likes of Chirac, Romano Prodi and Javier Solana and is systematically abandoning Israel's positions in favor of Europe's pro-Arab stands. During his press conference with Blair, Olmert renounced his previous well-considered demand that Shalit be released before any meeting can take place between him and Abbas.
During her visit to Washington, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni emphasized Israel's desire to renew negotiations with the Palestinians on the basis of the road map, and the government's continued support for Abbas. This, in spite of the fact that the government Abbas is forming with Hamas will not recognize Israel's right to exist and will be committed to continuing its jihad against Israel. In so doing, Olmert and Livni are lending informal approval to the renewal of European funding of the Palestinian Authority.
Even more troubling is the government's inaction, bordering on tacit support, regarding the radical Left's campaign to transfer responsibility for Israel's security from the IDF to Europe. The campaign, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman enthusiastically dubbed, "Land for NATO," in his column on Wednesday, involves the adoption of the UNIFIL model in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. This newest messianic trend is based on the blind belief that Israel can continue giving land to the Palestinians in spite of the fact that the Palestinians are the most radical, pro-jihad society on the face of the earth, because Europe will protect Israel from them. Whether under the UN flag or the NATO flag, the new writ of leftist faith maintains that Europe can replace the IDF in defending the Jews.
Blair's stubborn refusal to acknowledge the simple fact that just as the Iranians will not cease uranium enrichment because they want to build atom bombs, so the Palestinians will reject all offers of statehood because they prefer to destroy the Jewish state is infuriating. And yet the fact remains that he is the last European leader who truly believes that Israel has an inherent right to exist and bases his policies on this belief. It is absolutely clear that in the coming years, Europe's hostility towards Israel and the Jewish people as a whole will continue to rise.
HOW THEN, is Israel to contend with Europe? As Israel's largest trading partner, relations with Europe are vital to Israel's economic well-being. So it is clear that Israel cannot simply turn its back on the free world's Achilles heel.
At the same time, given Europe's hostility, it is similarly obvious that the direction of the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government's policies toward Europe must be reversed. Rather than enabling Europe to increase its influence in the region, Israel must take every step possible to minimize Europe's foothold in its neighborhood.
Israel should use Blair's exit from the world stage as an opportunity to lock its doors and shutter its windows before any new European friends can come inside.
The big lesson Iran can teach the U.S.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
December 14, 2006
What do you call a world leader who faces a strategic threat stemming from his country's energy dependence and introduces a crash program for energy independence that taps into his country's domestic resources?
Ahmadinejad.
With 43 percent of Iran's gasoline imported, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows that a comprehensive gasoline embargo could cause social unrest that could undermine his regime. In response, he recently announced a three-part crash program for energy independence.
One tenet of the plan is massive expansion of the country's refining capacity. While no refinery has been built in the United States in decades, Iran's refinery infrastructure is undergoing one of the world's fastest expansions, including the construction of two large new refineries.
A second pillar is to secure imports of refined products from Venezuela, one of Iran's staunchest allies against the West.
The third, and most innovative, part of the plan is to convert Iran's vehicles to run on natural gas rather than gasoline within five years. Iran has the world's second-largest natural-gas reserve after Russia - 16 percent of the world's total - which guarantees an uninterrupted supply of cheap transportation fuel for decades. The cost of conversion of both the cars and refueling stations is heavily subsidized by the government.
The conversion of cars is simple, particularly in a country where unemployment surpasses 10 percent and labor is cheap. All that is needed is a minor engine adaptation and the installation of a gas cylinder in the trunk of the car. More than 105 conversion centers have already been built.
A shift from petroleum to natural gas will save Iran between $3 billion and $8 billion per year on gasoline imports. It will also leave refineries free to produce a greater proportion of essential non-gasoline petroleum products like jet fuel, which will keep Iran's air force and commercial airlines intact, and diesel to power its army and navy.
Ahmadinejad's gas revolution is a clear sign that Iran is preparing itself for the possibility of war and is developing a comprehensive economic warfare strategy to supplement its military and diplomatic initiatives.
Yet, while Iran is taking meaningful steps to reduce its strategic vulnerability, the United States is doing the exact opposite when it comes to energy security. Despite President Bush's statement in January that "America is addicted to oil," neither Congress nor the administration has done much to address this vulnerability. We still impose a stiff, 54-cent punitive tariff on imported Brazilian ethanol; our fuel-efficiency standards have been stagnant; and severe limits on domestic exploration of oil and gas are still in place. This year, imports account for more than 60 percent of U.S. oil supply. Barring policy changes, U.S. dependence five years from now will have swelled further, with profound implications for its national security. At that point, economic sanctions against Iran would likely hurt the United States far more than Iran.
With the sanctions option waning, we must begin to answer Iran's economic warfare strategy with one of our own. Therefore, the United States should:
Require that every new car sold here be a flex-fuel vehicle capable of running on any combination of gasoline and alcohol fuels, such as ethanol and methanol, that can be generated from vast domestic resources of biomass, wastes and coal. The extra cost to the automaker to make a car fuel flexible is less than $150, about a quarter the cost of converting an Iranian gasoline-powered car to run on natural gas. Requiring fuel flexibility will provide investors in alternative fuel plants the confidence that there will be a growing market for such fuels.
Tap into domestic resources by encouraging the use of electricity as a transportation fuel. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles can shift our transportation sector from oil to made-in-America electricity generated from coal, nuclear power, and renewable sources.
Remove the ridiculous 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, and encourage friendly Latin American countries to ramp up ethanol production from sugar cane. Nothing would improve America's posture in Latin America more than dollars invested in the region's farming communities.
Energy dependence presents a serious and urgent national security problem. This is something America's staunchest enemy clearly understands and is sparing no effort to address. Will we be smart enough to do the same?
Gal Luft
is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (www.iags.org) in Washington
Anne Korin
is chair of the Set America Free Coalition (www.setamericafree.org) and co-director of IAGS
Gal Luft & Anne Korin
On February 17, 2006, a rebel group
called the Movement for the Emancipation
of the Niger Delta (MEN D)
declared “total war” against oil companies operating
in Nigeria’s main oil-producing region.
Nigeria is Africa’s leading oil exporter and ranks
fifth as an oil supplier to the United States. For
oil companies, it is one of the most inhospitable
domains on the planet in which to do business.
In recent years the country, half of which is
controlled by strict Islamic law, has become a cauldron of turmoil where sectarian violence,
radicalism and corruption are rampant and on the rise.
That winter week, MEN D launched a campaign of pipeline sabotage and kidnapping of
oil workers that led to a 20 percent decline in
Nigeria’s oil production. Five days later, Iraq,
with the world’s second-largest reserve of conventional
crude, nearly went offline when the
Shi‘a Askaria shrine in Samarra was bombed,
threatening to drag the country into a bloody
civil war. Since Saddam Hussein’s invasion of
Kuwait in August 1990, Iraq has been producing
far less oil than its potential capacity. Years
of sanctions and neglect have brought production
to less than three million barrels a day
(MBD). The Iraq war has since brought the
country to a new oil production low. A sabotage
campaign against the country’s oil installations
has reduced Iraqi production to a disappointing
average of two MBD. But the Samarra attack
could have pushed the country over the edge,
stopping crude exports altogether. This was the
moment al-Qaeda was waiting for.
Since September 11, terrorist groups have
identified oil terrorism as a way to break the
economic backbone of the West. Until 2002,
the oil market had sufficient elasticity to deal
with occasional supply disruptions. Such disruptions could be offset by the spare production capacity owned by some OPEC producers, chiefly Saudi Arabia. This spare capacity
has been the oil market’s main source of liquidity.
But due to burgeoning demand in developing
Asia, coupled with the voracious appetites
of traditional consumers in the industrialized
world, this liquidity mechanism has eroded
from seven MBD in 2002, which constituted
10 percent of the market, to about two MBD
today, less than 2.5 percent. As a result, the oil
market today resembles a car without shock
absorbers: The tiniest bump can send a passenger
to the ceiling.
Read the entire article
Hizballahland
By Gal Luft
Commentary Magazine, July-August 2003.
When Israel pulled out of its security zone in southern Lebanon several years ago, it was widely predicted that the radical Shiite group Hizballah, whose forces had relentlessly attacked the occupying Israeli troops, would close up military operations and henceforth focus solely on Lebanese domestic affairs. In the event, the exact opposite occurred: promptly declaring that its next objective was the liberation of the entire land of Palestine and the destruction of the "Zionist entity," Hizballah seized control of the 350-square-mile area that had been occupied by Israel, turning it into a de-facto state within a state. In Hizballahland, as the area might now be called, the group has managed to amass an impressive stockpile of weapons, including 10,000 rockets and missiles capable of hitting a quarter of Israel's population, and it has continued to launch numerous armed attacks across the border.
Indeed, ever since the inception of the Palestinian intifada in September 2000, Hizballah has persistently tried to provoke Israel into opening a second front on its northern border. In addition to armed attacks, the terrorist organization has instigated a water dispute between Israel and Lebanon by pushing an initiative to divert water from a tributary of the Jordan River. It has fanned the flames of the intifada itself by delivering weapons and know-how to Palestinian terrorist groups. And it has openly propagandized for the destruction of Israel by means of its media and Web outlets and through such wildly popular Hizballah-sponsored video games as Special Force (available in English and French as well as Arabic and Farsi), whose aim is to show "the defeat of the Israeli army and the heroic actions taken by the heroes of Islam's resistance in Lebanon."
This might soon have to change. Just as in May 2000, when Hizballah defied expert opinion by refusing to enter into hibernation after Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon, so today it continues to march to the beat of its own drummer, its political and military calculus influenced more by the strength of its implacable convictions than by considerations of "prudence." Together with Syria and Iran, the organization appears bent on creating a unified anti-U.S. front in the Middle East, a kind of Shiite "axis" spanning the region from Tehran to Beirut and including a number of its sectarians in newly liberated Iraq. With anti-Americanism running high in the Muslim world, the possible takeover of Lebanon by a terror organization of global reach is becoming a pressing threat.
Formed in 1982 by a group of young graduates of Shiite seminaries in Iran, Hizballah took as its main goal the exporting of Iran's Khomeini revolution to Lebanon. Although its primary aim was to drive Israel out of Lebanon--Israeli forces had invaded the country in 1982 in order to disrupt and destroy Yasir Arafat's PLO army, which had a death grip on the south--it was not Israel but the U.S. that became the first casualty of the organization and of its weapon of choice, the suicide attack. In 1983, a Hizballah activist killed 63 people at the U.S. embassy in Beirut; another drove a truck bomb into U.S. Marines headquarters, murdering 241 American servicemen.
That was just the beginning; since the 1980's, Hizballah has gone international. Its cells have been uncovered in Europe, Southeast Asia, and West Africa. In our own hemisphere, the so-called Triple Frontier or tri-border area along the junction of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil has offered a lucrative haven for the drug and arms trafficking, smuggling, counterfeiting, and other illicit activities that now provide a major source of Hizballah's funding. And then there is North America. Prior to last December, when Ottawa banned Hizballah, Canada was another major base of fundraising, primarily through a car-theft ring. One of Nasrallah's top men, Ayub Fawzi, who also appeared on the FBI's list of 22 most wanted terrorists after 9/11, operated from Canada for several years; so did Muhammed Dbouk, head of a clandestine cell in Vancouver that bought military equipment for the organization.
In the U.S. itself, Hizballah activists enjoy, as the FBI has warned, "the capability to attempt terrorist attacks." One operative, Muhammad Hammoud, led a recently uncovered cigarette-smuggling ring in North Carolina and Michigan. A graduate of Hizballah's training camps in Lebanon, Hammoud managed to gain entry to the country using forged immigration documents; once here, he married an American woman and established a false identity. His cell purchased and sent it on to Lebanon dual-use equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, while he himself functioned as a "sleeper" terrorist, i.e., one who could easily be activated to help carry out an actual armed attack. Hammoud's cell was discovered by sheer luck when an off-duty police officer, working as a security guard, noticed suspicious activity at a cigarette wholesaler in North Carolina. How many others like Hammoud are living in the U.S. is impossible to know.
Even if Hizballah has not committed any overt anti-U.S. terrorist acts in several years, its fingerprints have featured prominently in such acts and in many more plots that we have managed to thwart before execution. In the mid-1990's, Hizballah was involved in an aborted attack on American targets in Europe and Singapore, as well as in the successful Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in which 19 American servicemen were killed. Hizballah provided training in high-impact explosives to the terrorists who carried out the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. It also trained al-Qaeda operatives in connection with the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. This latter episode is what finally brought the U.S. government to acknowledge the magnitude of the threat posed by Hizballah, and to put it on the official terror list.
After our campaign to drive al Qaeda from Afghanistan, it was suggested by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that Hizballah may have become "the 'A team' of terrorists," while "al Qaeda is actually the 'B team.'" This might or might not be the case. But it is certainly true that Nassrallah's terrorists now enjoy three distinct advantages over Osama bin Laden's.
First, Hizballah possesses the single most important asset lost by al Qaeda with its expulsion from Afghanistan: control over territory. With Syrian and Lebanese acquiescence, Hizballah has carved itself a piece of real estate amounting, so far, to nearly 15 percent of Lebanon. Its fighters occupy dozens of villages, bases, and outposts, where they can conduct military training and routine patrols. Defying both the Lebanese army and the 2,500 peacekeepers of the United Nation's Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), Hizballah has declared these training areas off limits, and has even proclaimed a no-fly zone to prevent UNIFIL from conducting its mandated daily helicopter patrols.
In Hizballahland, the movement's fighters have much more than a safe haven. Its training camps have become a hub of international terrorism, a convention center for some of the world's most dangerous men. Here they can experiment with new weapons, practice their tactics, and collaborate with fellow terrorists from groups like al Qaeda, Hamas, Ansar al-Islam, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Kurdish Workers' Party. From Lebanon, similarly, Hizballah's agents and associates can easily export their skills to destinations around the world.
The second advantage Hizballah enjoys is sophisticated weaponry. Al Qaeda's arsenal is now limited to small, easily smuggled arms. When it comes to anti-aircraft capabilities, it possesses (as far as we know) only antiquated Soviet SA-7 Strella missiles, part of roughly 50,000 that were sold to third-world countries during the cold war; such missiles--they may have figured in last November's attack on an Israeli passenger plane in Kenya--are largely ineffective against the counter-measures routinely employed by modern planes. By contrast, Hizballah has accumulated an impressive stockpile of weapons, including, as I mentioned at the outset, thousands of rockets, artillery pieces, and anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. In the latter category, it has reportedly equipped itself with SA-18 missiles, whose substantially improved range and speed enable them to shoot down almost any aircraft.
Owning more weapons than it knows what to do with, Hizballah has also helped procure arms for other groups. It played a key role in the January 2002 attempt to smuggle 50 tons of weapons to the Palestinian Authority aboard the Karine-A. Its external-operations commander, Imad Mughniyeh, one of the world's most wanted terrorists, arranged to purchase the ship, and Mughniyeh's deputy Haj Bassem personally supervised the loading operation at the Iranian island of Kish.
How did Hizballah develop a military capability surpassing that of some Arab countries? This is where its third advantage over al Qaeda comes in--state patronage. Since the fall of the Taliban, al Qaeda has been disavowed, at least formally, by almost every country on earth, and its leaders are being hunted down. Global rejection has meant denial of training facilities, weapons, and a financial base. For Hizballah, things are quite different. From Iran it gets funding, weapons, training, and political guidance; from Syria, political clout and more weapons; and from Lebanon, tacit approval to run its mini-state and to tax the population under its control.
Hizballah's status vis-à-vis each of its sponsors is different, and so is its approach. Viewing Lebanon's current political system as an aberration, the organization plans to turn that country into a satellite of Iran. The project may take many years, but Hizballah's leaders are optimistic. After all, they already control not only the entire south but also the crowded Shiite suburbs of Beirut--not to mention eleven out of the 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament. In Lebanon, Hizballah runs schools, community centers, and hospitals and operates an independent media outlet. As such, it enjoys the power to pursue its own foreign policy--which is to say, its vision of a Middle East free of Western influence.
Syria, the de-facto ruler of Lebanon, operates there through many terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and different Fatah offshoots in the Palestinian refugee camps. But of all the groups under Syria's umbrella, Hizballah enjoys special privileges. It alone has integrated elements of its military units into the Syrian army in Lebanon and received weapons directly from Syria's arsenal. In return, Hizballah provides valuable services for Damascus--money laundering, weapons smuggling, drug trafficking--while also securing the allegiance of the country's Shiite Muslims. Most importantly, Hizballah's ability to keep Israel's northern front hot serves Syria's purposes by constantly reminding the Israeli government and people that peace on this border will not be possible as long as Israeli tanks continue to sit on the Golan Heights.
If Syria is Hizballah's landlord, Iran is the sugar daddy who pays the rent. Hizballah's relations with Iran transcend convenience: culturally, ideologically, and politically, the two are cut from the same cloth. Like Syria, Iran provides weapons to Hizballah, but the quality is generally superior, including Fajr-5 rockets with a range of 45 miles. Iran also supplies funds, estimated at $100 million per year, which allow Hizballah to finance its military operations as well as to buy the hearts and minds of the Lebanese population. Training and political guidance come through Iran's Revolutionary Guards, stationed in Lebanon's Beqa' valley. Finally, and most usefully, Tehran's official representatives throughout the world offer logistical support to Hizballah's overseas operations. In return, Hizballah operatives undertake various illicit missions promoting instability and strife in the world's trouble spots without further darkening Iran's image as a state sponsor of terrorism.
One such international trouble spot is Iraq. The U.S.-led war on terrorism has put both of Hizballah's main state sponsors on the defensive. Iran, already included in President Bush's "axis of evil," is now surrounded by American forces in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq. The noose around Syria is likewise tightening: in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bashar Assad has found himself more isolated than ever, with U.S. forces to his east, Israel and Jordan to his south, and Turkey to his north. Had he exercised better judgment in March and April, Assad would not have allowed war materials and Islamic fighters to cross into Iraq, or have hosted fleeing Ba'ath officials. But he has proved a reckless leader, which suggests that he is also unlikely to crack down on Hizballah, at least voluntarily. Besides, Syria is more than ever in need of Lebanon, its only territorial cushion, and Hizballah is a critical tool in enabling Damascus to maintain a grip on its neighbor.
To break out of their current isolation, Syria and Iran, together with remnants of Saddam's regime, are hoping to foment a general Islamic revolt against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, mainly using guerrilla and terror tactics similar to those faced by the U.S. in Lebanon in 1983. (In the words of Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa, "Syria has a national interest in the expulsion of the invaders from Iraq.") Meanwhile, Iran has begun to recruit radical Shiite clergymen inside Iraq and to broadcast religious-tinged anti-American propaganda in Arabic. One particular theme has to do with the American occupation of the holy city of Najaf, where Ayatollah Khomeini spent years as an exile shaping his revolutionary doctrine, and where many of Hizballah's senior leaders, including Nassrallah and Sheikh Muhammad Fadlallah, the movement's founder, received their religious education.
By virtue of its success in driving the U.S. out of Beirut in the 1980's and Israel from south Lebanon in 2000, no group is better fitted to carry the banner of Iraqi resistance and "liberation" than Hizballah, and no individual better than Nassrallah. With Osama bin Laden weakened and displaced, Saddam Hussein defeated, and Yasser Arafat confined to quarters, Nassrallah remains the only Arab general in modern times who can plausibly claim to have led his people to victory in the battlefield. Under his leadership, Hizballah, a non-state actor, has prevailed where state actors failed, transforming itself from a local gang into a pan-Islamic symbol of pride, courage, perseverance, and valor.
No wonder, then, that in recent months Hizballah's leaders have shifted their focus from the "little Satan," Israel, to the "great Satan," America. Nassrallah has called for a campaign of millions to eradicate the American presence in the heart of the Arab world. "'Death to America' was, is, and will remain our slogan," he proclaimed just days before the invasion of Iraq, while Hizballah's satellite TV channel al-Manar, ("Lighthouse"), steadily broadcasts music clips with lyrics like: "America is the mother of all terrorism. / Let the mother of terrorism fall. / America is the army of evil. / An invading aggressive occupying army. / There is nothing left but rifles. / There is nothing left but martyrs."
The rhetoric does not fall on deaf ears. Hizballah has already started recruiting fighters around the Muslim world as well as local political leaders and militia chiefs in Iraq itself. With the American invasion, suicide volunteers, among them hundreds of Hizballah fighters answering Nassrallah's call for "martyrdom operations," began flowing into Iraq to help Saddam's "holy war." The discovery of hundreds of bomb-laden leather jackets in an elementary school near Baghdad, each lined with several pounds of plastic high explosives laced with ball bearings, was only one sign that his call was enthusiastically heeded.
In the Middle East, gratitude is short-lived. While many senior Shiite clerics are indeed grateful to the U.S. for ending Saddam's dictatorship, and hope to work for a new and democratic Iraq, others have greeted the U.S. occupation with bitter silence. From this group, many volunteers will be found to re-create the Lebanese experience in Iraq. Hizballah's mode of operation has always been to deliver a blow through a proxy--fictitious groups like the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, or anonymous individuals who preserve the deniability both of Hizballah itself and of its state sponsors. If and when the U.S. is attacked, either at home or abroad, there may not be a business card attached to the bomb.
What, then, can be done? One initiative is the Syria Accountability Act (SAA), a draft congressional bill proposing economic sanctions if Syria does not cease its sponsorship of terrorist organizations, stop its development of weapons of mass destruction, and close down its military occupation of Lebanon. Although sanctions are admittedly an instrument of limited utility, the Bush administration has so far refused to embrace this legislation on the grounds that it would hamper U.S. maneuverability in the region.
As for Lebanon, the official home of Hizballah and other terrorist organizations and host to some of the FBI's most wanted terrorists, it has not been held in the least accountable for misdeeds initiated on its territory. It does not suffer sanctions, and it does not appear on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. To the contrary, Lebanese leaders pocket $40 million a year in U.S. aid while brushing off demands to rein in Hizballah--"they are not terrorists but facts of resistance," in the words of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. Would it be too much for the United States to warn that acquiescence in Hizballah's takeover of Lebanese land will eventually bring upon the Lebanese themselves another round of destruction and suffering? Or to demand that the government of Lebanon assert its sovereignty in the south in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 520, evicting all terrorist and foreign forces from the area?
Another possible mechanism for curbing Hizballah is, believe it or not, UNFIL--but only if its mandate were changed. UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have not lifted a finger to stop Hizballah's unprovoked attacks against Israel. In fact, nowhere in UNIFIL's reports to the world body is there any mention of the thousands of rockets and missiles Hizballah has deployed or of the activities of its training bases. In its present form, UNFIL has no function other than to obstruct Israel's efforts to defend itself, but one could imagine ways in which its annual budget of $120 million, mostly funded by American taxpayers, could be put to better use. This, however, would require a determined U.S. push to expand its responsibilities, beef up its capabilities, and demand that it fulfill, and be seen to fulfill, its official mandate of restoring international peace and security.
Other nations might also play a part. Unlike the case of al Qaeda, Hizballah leaders and activists travel the globe with relative ease. Many countries still see Hizballah as a legitimate resistance movement, and the European Union in particular has refused to include it in its list of terrorist groups. Others draw a distinction between a putatively "good" Hizballah, the charitable organization taking care of Lebanon's sick and elderly, and its less virtuous military branch commanded by Imad Mughniyeh.
Of course, a similar and not less artificial distinction is regularly drawn between the "good" Hamas and its military branch, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, or between Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and the al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades. The suggestion in each case is that the charitable and political organization is somehow disconnected from the terrorist activity it itself initiates and sponsors. This is utter nonsense. Terrorist organizations are not cholesterol, divisible into good and bad kinds. Their benevolent activities earn the support and raise the money needed to sustain their terrorist activity, and nations that decline to ban the entire organization are only conferring on terrorists the freedom of movement they require to hit those nations harder.
Diplomatic pressure, sanctions, and other non-belligerent actions can only take one so far, however. Time after time, the U.S. has had to learn the hard way that threats and ultimatums leave little impression on dictators. On the other hand, as recent events have vividly demonstrated, the U.S. can use military means when necessary to defend its interests and its principles, and can do so without inflicting massive casualties. Whether or not talk of "Operation Lebanese Freedom" is likely to be well received in the current international environment, the idea of armed strikes on an organization that calls day and night for martyrdom operations against the U.S. surely falls within the parameters of the Bush doctrine. At the very least, now that U.S. forces are in Iraq and control its airspace, it should be possible to intercept weapons shipments for Hizballah from Iran, and/or to lean on Turkey and Jordan to block such flights over their territory.
In the end, though, nothing short of a complete disarmament of Hizballahland will do. As Bob Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has suggested: "We should tell the Syrians that we expect them to shut down the [Hizballah] camps within x number of days, and, if they don't, we are reserving the right to shut them down ourselves." Among other advantages, such a go-it-alone campaign would be far easier to execute than any of America's recent military operations. Hizballahland is small enough to fit 400 times into Iraq and 700 times into Afghanistan, requiring very little force to clean up.
If September 11 taught us the danger of allowing terrorist organizations (like al Qaeda) to establish themselves in comfortable homes (like Afghanistan), it also reminded us that terrorists mean what they say and say what they mean, and deserve to be taken at their word. Administration officials have promised that Hizballah's "time will come," but unless we adopt an aggressive and preemptive approach to their sworn determination to bring "Death to America," that time may come too late.
Gal Luft is co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS) in Washington, D.C. His article, "Who is Winning the Intifada?," appeared in the July-August 2001 Commentary.
by Caroline B. Glick
 Israel’s incoming Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has announced his intention to implement what he refers to as “the convergence plan,” which involves an Israeli pullout from some 90-95 percent of the West Bank and from several neighborhoods in Jerusalem by the end of 2007. Mr.
Olmert is scheduled to visit Washington in May 2006 to present his plan to the Bush Administration and Congressional leaders in the hope of securing U.S. monetary and policy support for his plan.
Olmert’s convergence plan entails the expulsion of between 50,000-100,000 Israeli civilians from their homes in the West Bank and the destruction of between 50-100 Israeli towns and villages in the area. It further requires the withdrawal of Israeli military forces to garrisoned
locations in proximity to Israel’s security barrier which will encompass the remaining 5-10 percent of the West Bank territory located along the 1949 armistice lines that constituted Israel’s national boundaries until 1967.
Olmert maintains that implementation of his plan will enhance Israeli security and regional stability by lessening the daily contact between Israelis and Palestinians and by safeguarding Israel’s demographic durability as a democratic Jewish state. He further maintains that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank will enhance U.S. and Israeli interests by improving Israel’s political posture internationally.
Upon scrutiny, however, it is clear that Olmert’s plan will do none of the above. An Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank will effectively cause the area to be transferred to the control of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. As experience from Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in September 2005 has shown, the area will likely become a base for global terrorists allied with Iran and other terror-supporting states.
In fact, terrorists operating in the relinquished areas will be capable of conducting missile attacks against Israel’s major cities, its international airport and other strategic locations in Israel.
They will constitute a destabilizing force that could lead to the fall of the Hashemite regime in
Jordan. Mass expulsions of Israeli civilians will destabilize Israeli society and will manifest a
serious blow to the morale and retention levels of the Israeli military’s combat officer corps.
Also, an Israeli pullout from the West Bank will likely make it easier for terrorist forces to
execute infiltrations of Israel for the purpose of conducting large-scale bombing attacks in Israeli population centers like Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa and mobilizing the Israeli Arab minority in the cause of jihad against the Jewish state.
From a U.S. perspective, the implementation of Olmert’s convergence plan will damage American efforts in the Global War on Terror in the Middle East and throughout the world on several levels. Jordan and Israel are the United States’ most stable allies in the region and their likely destabilization in the aftermath of the operation will both motivate and facilitate the operations of those fighting the U.S. in Iraq and other places in the region. The Palestinians are supported by terror supporting states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The destabilization of Israel and Jordan will be perceived as a victory for these supporters of the Palestinians and they will be strengthened at the expense of America, which is perceived as Israel’s sponsor.
Indeed, in a manner even more significant globally than the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which brought Hamas to power in the Palestinian Authority, an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank will be perceived as a strategic victory for Global Jihad. Recruitment efforts by organizations like al Qaeda worldwide and particularly in Europe, Turkey, India and Indonesia will be greatly strengthened.
Moreover, U.S. efforts at mobilizing support against jihadist groups and efforts in these states as well as in Iraq, the Persian Gulf region generally and the greater Middle East will be
significantly weakened. Individuals, political leaders and civil society organizations throughout
the region and the world that are overtly sympathetic to the U.S. and its goals of defeating global
jihadist forces and democratizing the Middle East will be substantially and perhaps irreversibly
weakened.
Although an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the dismantlement of Israeli
communities there seems consonant with traditional American policies in the Middle East, in
light of the radicalization of Palestinian society, as evidenced by Hamas’ electoral victory in
January 2006, it is unclear how an Israeli withdrawal today will align with U.S. national security
interests and goals. Unfortunately, it seems evident that an Israeli retreat from the West Bank
will empower the terror supporting, anti-American de facto Palestinian state and will create a
new base for global terrorism.
In light of all this, the Bush Administration and the congressional leadership would be
well-advised to refuse Olmert’s requests for U.S. support for his convergence plan while backing
alternative policy options that will serve to strengthen U.S. allies in the Global War on Terror,
while weakening those opposed to U.S. efforts. Such alternative policies will be the subject of an
additional Center for Security Policy report that will be released in the near future.
Ehud Olmert’s “Convergence” Plan.
Read it all >>
EMET would like to thank Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy for making this possible.
U.S. Intel Possibly Duped by Iran
December 4, 2007
By: Kenneth R. Timmerman
Newsmax
A highly controversial, 150 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programs was coordinated and written by former State Department political and intelligence analysts — not by more seasoned members of the U.S. intelligence community, Newsmax has learned.
Its most dramatic conclusion — that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure — is based on a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.
Newsmax sources in Tehran believe that Washington has fallen for “a deliberate disinformation campaign” cooked up by the Revolutionary Guards, who laundered fake information and fed it to the United States through Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers posing as senior diplomats in Europe.
Dangerous Game
The National Intelligence Council, which produced the NIE, is chaired by Thomas Fingar, “a State Department intelligence analyst with no known overseas experience who briefly headed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research,” I wrote in my book "Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender." [Editor's Note: Get "Shadow Warriors" free — go here now.]
Fingar was a key partner of Senate Democrats in their successful effort to derail the confirmation of John Bolton in the spring of 2005 to become the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations.
As the head of the NIC, Fingar has gone out of his way to fire analysts “who asked the wrong questions,” and who challenged the politically-correct views held by Fingar and his former State Department colleagues, as revealed in "Shadow Warriors."
In March 2007, Fingar fired his top Cuba and Venezuela analyst, Norman Bailey, after he warned of the growing alliance between Castro and Chavez.
Bailey’s departure from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was applauded by the Cuban government news service Granma, who called Bailey “a patent relic of the Reagan regime.” And Fingar was just one of a coterie of State Department officials brought over to ODNI by the first director, career State Department official John Negroponte.
Collaborating with Fingar on the Iran estimate, released on Monday, were Kenneth Brill, the director of the National Counterproliferation Center, and Vann H. Van Diepen, the National Intelligence officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Proliferation.
“Van Diepen was an enormous problem,” a former colleague of his from the State Department told me when I was fact gathering for "Shadow Warriors."
“He was insubordinate, hated WMD sanctions, and strived not to implement them,” even though it was his specific responsibility at State to do so, the former colleague told me.
Kenneth Brill, also a career foreign service officer, had been the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in 2003-2004 before he was forced into retirement.
"Shadow Warrior" reports, “While in Vienna, Brill consistently failed to confront Iran once its clandestine nuclear weapons program was exposed in February 2003, and had to be woken up with the bureaucratic equivalent of a cattle prod to deliver a single speech condemning Iran’s eighteen year history of nuclear cheating.”
Negroponte rehabilitated Brill and brought the man who single-handedly failed to object to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and put him in charge of counter-proliferation efforts for the entire intelligence community.
Christian Westermann, another favorite of Senate Democrats in the Bolton confirmation hearings, was among the career State Department analysts tapped by Fingar and Brill.
As a State Department intelligence analyst, Westermann had missed the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba, and played into the hands of Castro apologist Sen. Christopher Dodd, D, Conn., by continuing to use impeached intelligence reports on Cuba that had been written by self-avowed Cuban spy, Ana Belen Montes.
“After failing to recognize the signs of biological weapons development in Cuba and Cuba’s cooperation with Iran, Westermann was promoted to become national intelligence officer for biological weapons,” I wrote.
“Let’s hope a walk-in defector from Iranian intelligence doesn’t tell us that Iran has given biological weapons to terrorists to attack new York or Chicago,” I added, “because Westermann will certainly object that the source of that information was not reliable — at least, until Americans start dying.”
It now appears that this is very similar to what happened while the intelligence community was preparing the Iran NIE.
The Defector
My former colleague from the Washington Times, Bill Gertz, suggests in today’s print edition of the paper that Revolutionary Guards Gen. Alireza Asgari, who defected while in Turkey in February, was the human source whose information led to the NIE”s conclusion that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
But intelligence sources in Europe told Newsmax in late September that Asgari’s debriefings on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs were “so dramatic” that they caused French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his foreign minister to speak out publicly about the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Sarkozy stunned his countrymen when he told an annual conference of French ambassadors on Aug. 27, 2007, that Iran faced a stark choice between shutting down its nuclear program, or tougher international sanctions and ultimately, war.
“This approach is the only one that allows us to escape from a catastrophic alternative: an Iranian bomb, or the bombing of Iran,” Sarkozy said.
Three weeks later, Foreign Minister Bernard Koucher warned in a televised interview that the world’s major powers needed to toughen sanctions on Iran to prevent Tehran from getting the bomb and to prevent war. “We must prepare for the worst,” Kouchner said. “The worst, sir, is war.”
Those comments were prompted by reports that were given to the French president about Iran’s nuclear weapons program derived from debriefings of the defector, Gen. Ashgari, a Newsmax intelligence source in Europe said.
Ashgari is the highest-level Iranian official to have defected to the West since the Islamic revolution of 1979. His defection set off a panic in Tehran.
As a senior member of the general staff of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Asgari had access to highly-classified intelligence information, as well as strategic planning documents, as I reported at the time.
A damage assessment then underway in Tehran was expected to “take months” to complete, so extensive was Asgari’s access to Iran’s nuclear and intelligence secrets.
Asgari had detailed knowledge of Iranian Revolutionary Guards units operating in Iraq and Lebanon because he had trained some of them. He also knew some of the secrets of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, because he had been a top procurement officer and a deputy minister of defense in charge of logistics. But Asgari never had responsibility for nuclear weapons development, and probably did not have access to information about the status of the secret programs being run by the Revolutionary Guards, Iranian sources tell Newsmax.
In an effort to cover up the failure of Iranian counter-intelligence to prevent Asgari’s defection, a Persian language Web site run by the former Revolutioanry Guards Comdr. Gen. Mohsen Rezai claimed in March that Asgari was on a CIA “hit list” of 20 former Revolutionary Guards officers and had been assassinated.
The Senate intelligence committee will be briefed today on the NIE, and the House committee on Wednesday.
But already, the declassified summary has Republicans grumbling on Capitol Hill.
“We want to know why we should believe this,” one congressional Republican told Newsmax. “This is such a departure from the past and there are so many unanswered questions.”
While the intelligence community is supposed to report just the facts and its assessment of those facts and their reliability to policy-makers, this NIE clear advocates policy positions.
“Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously,” the NIC wrote in the declassified “Key Judgments” of the NIE.
The NIE opined that the new assessment leads to the policy conclusion that the United States should offer “some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunites,” in order to lock in Iranian good behavior.
This carrot and stick approach has been the State Department’s preferred policy for the past 27 years, and has only strengthened the resolve of Iran’s leaders to continue defying the United States. “Those [countries that] assume that decaying methods such as psychological war, political propaganda and the so-called economic sanctions would work and prevent Iran's fast drive toward progress are mistaken," Ahmadinejad said in Tehran in September at a military parade.
By “progress” Ahmadinejad was referring to Iran’s recently-declared success at enriching uranium.
Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees “have been running around with big smiles on their faces,” a Republican source tells Newsmax.
Republicans on the committees intend to ask for more information on the sourcing of this latest NIE during closed door briefings today and tomorrow.
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006
WASHINGTON -- The talk of the town in Washington these days is all about getting "real."
Less than two full weeks after Democrats won control of Congress by opposing the war in Iraq, Iraqi leaders bowed their heads in submission and agreed to hold direct talks with Iran and Syria.
President Jalal Talabani was initially supposed to go to Tehran over Thanksgiving weekend, but a curfew in Baghdad (put in place because of Iranian-backed violence) prevented him from traveling. He finally made the trip on Monday.
Iran has real "influence" with bad actors in Iraq, so Talabani needed to slouch to Tehran, hat in hand.
The Iraq Study Group, led by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, is widely expected to recommend that the United States negotiate directly with Syria and Iran, to convince them to reduce their assistance to the terrorists in Iraq.
What 'Getting Real' Really Entails
Talking to the funders and the strategists and the weapons-suppliers of the terrorists who are trying to kill us is called getting "real." And yet, a lot of very influential people, including two former National Security advisors, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and virtually the entire Council on Foreign Relations, believe that is what we should do.
To these so-called realists, we never should have ventured into Iraq to depose the regime of Saddam Hussein in the first place. As Scowcroft hectored U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a semi-public forum three years ago, "at least with Saddam in power, we've had 50 years of peace."
Besides the arithmetic exaggeration (Saddam only assumed full power in Iraq in 1979), Scowcroft's argument is not unlike what we are hearing today from the Baker-Hamilton commission.
Let's negotiate with Syria and Iran.
After all, these regimes respect power. They know we can do them tremendous harm. So we have leverage that we can and should use to achieve our goals. We don't need to overreach by seeking to overthrow them.
America's goal, in the eyes of the realists, is to get Syria and Iran to moderate their support for the insurgents, so we can prevent a few attacks today and tomorrow. Let's decrease the level of violence, so the U.S. can withdraw troops from Iraq without destabilizing the country.
'Help' Smacks of Aid to Terror
In exchange for their help in achieving a very temporary goal (which is certainly in their power, since they are backing the insurgents), the United States must abandon all support to pro-democracy forces in Syria and Iran and provide security guarantees to both regimes. That's the deal that is currently on the table.
We get political cover for a troop withdrawal, and they tell their terrorist proxies to lay low for a time and half a time (if we're lucky). All we really get is a fig leaf. But smiling as we put it on is called realism.
On the contrary, I believe talking to Tehran and Damascus would not just be a mistake. It would be a mistake of monumental and historic proportions:
It would reward the world's two major state sponsors of terrorism for their success in murdering Americans.
It would demoralize our friends in Iraq who want to see their country win its freedom and achieve stability and prosperity.
It would encourage Iran to pursue its nuclear weapons program, and embolden Iran to continue using terrorism to achieve its goals.
It would terrify our allies in the region, who would understand immediately that the United States will not be there to protect them when Iran asserts its hegemony over the entire region.
The Path Toward Destrcution
The realists are leading us into very dangerous territory.
For 27 years, the United States has imposed various forms of punishment on the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a vain hope that pain would induce them to change their behavior.
Clearly, it hasn't worked, because the pain has been too slight.
So now the Realists are telling us that we should abandon those tools and simply ask politely, and hope for better results.
This is not "realism," but pure folly.
Ultimately, U.S. talks with Iran could set the stage for a disastrous war that would sweep across the entire region.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not been shy about informing us that his goals are to "wipe Israel off the map" and to "destroy America." Each day we allow his power to go unchecked, he gets a little bit closer to acquiring the capabilities to achieve those goals.
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
We’re told it’s the Realists versus the Neo-Cons, and the Realists are winning.
On Monday, less than two full weeks after Democrats won the Congress on a platform of “phased withdrawal” from Iraq, Iraqi leaders bowed their heads in submission, announcing that they will hold direct talks with Iran and Syria in Tehran this weekend.
Right on cue, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group leaked on Tuesday its recommendation that the United States negotiate directly with Syria and Iran, to convince them to reduce their assistance to the terrorists in Iraq.
Also on Tuesday, the Syrians and the Iranians (and their agents in Lebanon) assassinated yet another pro-Western political leader, Lebanon’s ministry of industry, Pierre Gemayel.
Pierre Gemayel, the 34-year old scion of one of Lebanon’s most prominent Maronite Christian families, had joined forces with the anti-Syrian alliance led by Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated former prime minister. His uncle, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated by the Syrians in August 1982, just weeks after he was elected Lebanon’s president in an earlier élan of Lebanese independence. His father, Amin, was elected president to replace him.
To the Realist school of American foreign policy, such events are the sad necessities of life. We can’t keep murderers and thugs from killing each other. But through cautious diplomacy and the judicious use of force, we can keep them from killing us.
Nobody, in either school, believes this sequence of events is mere coincidence. Neo-Cons such as Michael Ledeen view these developments as signs of U.S. weakness and drift; a failure to pursue the terrorists who declared war on us in 1979, when Iranian “students” (including Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 54 diplomats and all of America hostage for 444 days.
To the Realists, whose current champions are former National Security advisors Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, we never should have ventured into Iraq to depose the regime of Saddam Hussein. As Scowcroft hectored Condoleeza Rice in a semi-public forum 3 years ago, “at least with Saddam in power, we’ve had fifty years of peace.”
Besides the arithmetic exaggeration (Saddam only assumed full power in Iraq in 1979), Scowcroft’s argument is not unlike what we are hearing today from the Baker-Hamilton commission. Let’s negotiate with Syria and Iran. After all, these regimes respect power. They know we can do them tremendous harm. So we have leverage that we can and should use to achieve our goals. We don’t need to over-reach by seeking to overthrow them.
America’s goal, in the eyes of the Realists, is to get Syria and Iran to moderate their support for the insurgents, so we can prevent a few attacks today and tomorrow. Let’s decrease the level of violence, so the U.S. can withdraw troops from Iraq without destabilizing the country.
In exchange for their help in achieving a very temporary goal (which is certainly in their power, since they are backing the insurgents), the United States must abandon all support to pro-democracy forces in Syria and Iran and provide security guaranties to both regimes. That’s the deal that is currently on the table.
We get political cover for a troop withdrawal, and they tell their terrorist proxies to lay low for a time and half a time (if we’re lucky). All we really get is a fig leaf. But smiling as we put it on is called Realism.
Neo-cons view these events quite differently. They remember that these very same Realists called on the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War in March 1991, and then we withdrew, allowing Saddam to slaughter his opponents by the tens of thousands.
Neo-cons understand that Iraqi president Jalal Talabani is not bowing his head and slouching toward Tehran out of any desire to conclude a pact with Iran’s Islamofascist leaders. He is going there because he knows we are about to abandon his country once again.
But Neo-cons also argue that we have never seriously tried to achieve the policy goals the President has so eloquently laid out in speech after speech, where he has spoken of his “freedom agenda” and of breaking fifty years of stability that was based on U.S. support for regional dictators.
• We have failed to carry out that agenda in Iraq, by allowing an ill-chosen “Viceroy” to transform liberation into occupation through his monumental arrogance.
• We have failed to support freedom-fighters in Iran, bowing to pro-regime lobbyists in the United States and to the siren-songs of regime envoys, who claim their willingness to cooperate if only we would treat them with respect;
• We have never even tried to help the pro-democracy forces in Syria, while abandoning the Lebanese to Hezbollah militiamen and Syrian thugs.
The Realists argue, we don’t have time to wait for the seeds of freedom to sprout. Indeed, it may be that they are being sown on rocky ground and will never grow, at least not in our lifetime.
On the contrary, we don’t have the luxury of accommodating Islamo-fascist regimes that are hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and have no intention of abandoning that quest just because we kowtow before them.
The Realists are leading us into very dangerous territory. Where have James Baker and Lee Hamilton taken their cues when it comes to recommending direct talks with Iran? From Iranian officials and Iranian regime surrogates, among others.
Baker himself had a three-hour lunch in New York recently with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, while special envoy Frank Wisner has reportedly been meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s national Security advisor, Ali Larijani, in Stockholm and other places to discuss the terms of America’s surrender.
For 27 years, the United States has imposed various forms of punishment on the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a vain hope that pain would induce them to change their behavior. Clearly, it hasn’t worked, because the pain has been too slight.
So now the Realists are telling us that we should abandon those tools and simply ask politely, and hope for better results.
This is realistic? Even a flaming left-wing Hollywood screenwriter could go to town with that plot. That is precisely what Neville Chamberlain did in Munich when he negotiated with a very reasonable Adolf Hitler in 1938, and returned home to Britain proclaiming “Peace in our time!”
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile,” Winston Churchill said famously, “hoping it will eat him last.”
Neo-cons got a boost from an unsuspected quarter earlier this week: Saudi ambassador to Washington, and long-time head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki bin Faisel bin Abdel-Aziz. Envisaging a future for Iraq of open civil war, massive ethnic cleansing, and the military involvement of Iraq’s neighbors, he told the Washington Post: “Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited.”
The Democrats won Congress on a program of unilateral surrender. And they are about to reap the spoils as we prepare the terms of our submission to the Islamofascists in Iran and to the thugs in Syria.
Unfortunately, the rest of us are going to pay the price of their folly – and so will countless thousands of freedom-loving Iraqis, Iranians, and Lebanese, who so foolishly believed in us and our commitment to freedom.
We have seen the first victims over these past few days. Many more are about to fall.
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
This week brought unusual news from Russia, which until now has been a major supplier of Iran’s nuclear programs.
The Russians said they were pulling engineers and technicians out of Busheir, the Persian Gulf site where since 1995 they have been building a nuclear power plant for Iran. They cited as pretext Iran’s failure to make timely payments on the $800 million contract.
Should this turn out to be more than just a tactical maneuver, Russia’s pullback from Iran signals a real success for U.S. diplomacy.
But the U.S. has had less success in other areas. And the administration must show results soon if it doesn’t want Congress to pass new legislation that will impose mandatory sanctions on foreign companies trading with Iran.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D, Conn) berated administration witnesses during a hearing of the Senate Banking committee on Wednesday for their failure to cut off foreign investment in Iran’s oil and gas industry.
He displayed a chart showing 14 recent investment deals worth potentially $126 billion, which companies in Britain, France, Italy, Holland, China, Malaysia have signed with Iran.
Despite laws on the books passed initially during the Clinton administration that require the administration to impose sanctions on foreign companies that invest more than $20 million in Iran’s oil and gas sector, “not one foreign energy concern has been sanctioned,” Dodd said.
Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns replied that top U.S. officials have been “jawboning” foreign oil companies to get them to back off from those contracts, and that he expected many of the deals on Dodd’s chart would never materialize. “We’ve gone to their CEOs and said, ‘this is a bad idea.’” Burns said.
Then he warned that stronger action would destroy two years of patient U.S. diplomatic efforts to build a coalition that has gradually ratcheted up the pressure on Iran. With no results yet to show, he was essentially saying, trust me.
Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey described the type of financial steps the U.S. has been taking with our allies behind the scenes. These have had a real impact, and have made it more difficult for Iran to use the international financial system to send money to terrorist groups and to purchase equipment for their WMD programs.
Just one example: In January 2006, the U.S. imposed $70 million in fines on ABN Amro Bank NV of Holland for violating sanctions on Iran and laundering payments for Iranian entities. The fines were an effective measure that sent a clear message to the international banking community. They also led Amro and other banks to announce in the ensuing months that they would take no new business in Iran.
I travel the United States speaking to various groups about the threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Except for pro-Tehran groups, or hard Leftists who would like the United States to become an Islamic Republic, no one really disputes Iran’s nuclear weapons intentions or their support for international terrorism.
But no one really knows what to do about it. They see what the U.S. government claims to be doing, and then they look at Sen. Dodd’s chart: $126 billion in fresh investment in Iran is no chump change.
American corporations continue to do business with Iran despite the total U.S. trade embargo imposed by Executive Order in 1995. They do it by flowing their Iran contracts through foreign subsidiaries. This is perfectly legal, but it is wrong.
So what can ordinary citizens do about it? Here are a few suggestions.
In Maryland, where I live, Delegate Ron George has introduced a bill into the state legislature that would require the State Pension funds to disinvest from companies that continue to do business with Iran. He needs your support.
Maryland is a relatively small state of just over five million citizens. And yet, the state pension funds have nearly $2 billion invested in companies that invest in terrorist-sponsoring states.
The pitch is very simple: Do you want your pension fund invested in companies who prop up Iran? There are lots of other places you can invest. Why choose companies helping countries such as Iran whose leaders state publicly they want to destroy America?
A similar bill has been introduced in California, whose state pension fund, Calpers, controls a hefty $338 billion dollars of investments along with the California State Teacher’s Retirement System. Joel Anderson, the Republican legislator who introduced the bill, said it would impact $24 billion worth of investments. Pennsylvania is contemplating a similar measure.
The “Divest Terror” bandwagon, spearheaded by my friend Frank Gaffney, has begun to roll. It worked with South Africa. It can work with Iran.
Gaffney has a very simple idea. Identify a “dirty dozen” group of international companies who supply capital or technology or know-how to terrorist states, and encourage U.S. state pension funds to pull funding from them.
Even State Department Undersecretary Nick Burns acknowledged in a back-handed way that such legislation helps, since it provides State Department diplomats with a bogeyman they can trot out in front of reluctant coalition partners: if you don’t play ball, it gets much worse.
There are other measures ordinary Americans can take on a more personal level.
How many of us buy gasoline from Shell stations, or own vehicles produced by DaimlerChrysler? These are just two examples of international corporations heavily invested in Iran. Boycotting their products, and letting the companies know it, can have an impact.
DaimlerChrysler has been expanding its operations in Iran in recent years, and recently opened an assembly line to build E-class vehicles in Iran. It also owns a factory that builds Mercedes-Benz diesel engines for trucks and buses under license.
In 2004, DaimlerChyrsler sold through a Saudi affiliate 270 Mercedes Benz commercial vehicles to Iran in a $22 million contract. Those vehicles have since been used by law enforcement authorities in Iran for riot control. A German prosecutor in Stuttgart opened an investigation into the sale.
DaimlerChrysler AG is the parent corporation of what used to be Chrysler corporation here in the United States. The U.S. company has no legal or corporate responsibility for the sales of its parent to Iran. Those sales are perfectly legal. But they are wrong.
Shell has signed pre-contractual agreements to invest billions of dollars in Iran’s oil and gas sector. Without help from Shell and other major oil companies, the International Energy Agency projects that Iranian oil exports will grind to a halt by 2015.
There are dozens of U.S. and international corporations in a similar situations as DaimlerChrysler or Shell. And most of them do business here in the United States.
Want to have a personal impact? Start there.
by Barak M. Seener
02.14.2008
Without transparency, how can a government properly represent its people, let alone function properly? Western democracies police their own governments rigorously, but, unfortunately, these same countries fail to hold the recipients of their aid to the same robust standards. The international community’s support of the Palestinian Authority (PA) is a striking example of and a cautionary lesson in the perils of bankrolling a corrupt regime while turning a blind eye to its dysfunction. The PA’s lack of transparency, democracy and civil society has exacerbated hostilities with Israel, resulted in internecine conflict and served as an incubator for Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. But despite all this, $7.4 billion was pledged to the "Palestinian State" for 2008–2010 at the Paris Conference. The international community must cease paying endless lip service to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Instead, it should force PA accountablility through international donations, making contributions contingent upon transparent governance and setting benchmarks for the establishment of a stable and democratic state infrastructure.
Corruption thrives in the PA, as those controlling the purse strings benefit from the absence of accountability and by embezzling funds earmarked for critical infrastructure projects. Far from attempting to generate a dynamic economy, the PA—first under Yasir Arafat and now under Mahmoud Abbas—perpetuates a system based on monopolies in various industries granted by PA officials in exchange for kickbacks. At times during Arafat’s reign, a third of the PA’s budget went for "expenses of the President’s office," without further explanation, auditing or accounting. The international community, particularly European governments, disbursed funds, often in bags of cash delivered directly to Arafat, watching silently as billions of dollars of international aid disappeared into personal bank accounts. Officials throughout Europe ignored the evidence of this widescale corruption.
The PA’s payroll is so bloated that the cost of wages alone exceeds all revenues. So despite ever-increasing amounts of Western aid, Palestinians sink deeper into poverty. Annual per-capita income has plunged from $2,000 in 1992 to $1,200 today; the poverty rate has jumped from 22 percent in 1998 to 35 percent in 2006. Yet the financial assistance continues unabated and unaccounted for. The EU funnelled nearly $2.5 billion to the Palestinians in 2007 without demanding political accountability or financial transparency. In October 2007, President Bush followed suit and requested a $410 million supplement beyond a $77 million donation earlier in the year.
Despite these generous donations, no evidence exists that unqualified financial aid leads to Palestinian enthusiasm for the peace process. In fact, the opposite seems to be true—the PA’s opaque nature and corruption have led Palestinians into the arms of Hamas. The PA’s failure to provide even minimal public services allowed the radical Jihadi group to fill the vacuum with a civil society that it would spearhead—hospitals, schools and grassroots organizations founded and maintained by Hamas’ Islamic fundamentalist network. With the creation of institutions meeting their basic needs, Palestinians came to perceive Hamas as a functional and noncorrupt alternative to the Fatah-dominated PA. Unwittingly, the international community has acted as an enabler to the PA’s abuses and essentially guaranteed the election of an Islamist terrorist organization in 2006.
In a futile attempt to mitigate the situation, the West refuses to engage Hamas while supplying billions of dollars in aid money, arms and training to Fatah on the condition that it act against Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups. But once again, the international community has no means of ensuring accountability; it is demanding little and receiving even less for its substantial aid. The faith of donors partially lies in the view that Fatah is a moderate alternative to Hamas. Yet Fatah’s textbooks continue to rival Hamas’ in extremist rhetoric and 40 percent of the $7.7 billion pledged by donor countries has been promised to Hamas-controlled Gaza by the PA’s labor and planning minister, Samir Abdullah. What’s more, Fatah is seeking a formal alliance with Hamas. Even Abbas has used classic Jihadi slogans, has extended financial support to the families of suicide bombers and prays for the souls of "martyrs" like Marwan Zaloum, the Hebron al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade leader. Aside from bankrolling an organization that seems at times no better than Hamas, the ramifications of Abbas’ flirtation with extremism pose a threat to the creation of a functional Palestinian state living at peace with Israel and the West.
The PA’s lack of transparency and poor human-rights record has also encouraged a significant number of Palestinians to support intercommunal strife and other conflictual activities in the Palestinian territories. This drives numerous Palestinians to embrace Jihadi organizations and has even led al-Qaeda to take root in Gaza. The effect of these changes is a shift in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from having a purely territorial tone to one of ideological Jihadism. This does not bode well for the West. The lack of good governance within the Palestinian territories could very well provide a springboard for Jihadi terrorist organizations trying to establish a base to strike against the West. It is unclear whether Western governments consider their own security when providing unconditional financial aid to autocratic bodies with no transparency or human rights to speak of. Without intending it, donors to the PA have essentially encouranged the kinds of groups and activities that they are trying to combat.
Unqualified aid is often accompanied by the international community’s propensity to project onto the Palestinian leadership its own standards of moderation, often when it is absent. Despite rhetoric supporting a Palestinian state, these actions prevent the emergence of a vibrant civil society that is the necessary foundation for a viable nation. It is essential that the international community attach conditions to financial aid and demand transparency and accountability from those administering the funds to the Palestinian citizenry. Furthermore, the bulk of aid should be directed to NGOs and civil-societal organizations—prerequisites for a viable democratic Palestinian state. It is in the West’s interests to foster Palestinian trade unions, women’s rights organizations and schools eschewing Jihadi extremism. If the international community is actually serious about creating a functional, terror-free Palestinian state, then it must demand the same high standard of governance that it expects from its own democratic governments. This will foster a moderate middle class so essential for building and sustaining the infrastructure that can lead to a thriving Palestinian state.
In a 1999 speech to the Chicago Economic Club, Tony Blair stressed the importance of good governance: "We have therefore proposed that we should make greater transparency the keystone of reform."The international community has yet to see the realization of this ideal.
Barak M. Seener is the Greater Middle East Section Director at the Henry Jackson Society.
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