Fabio dixit: Caroline B. Glick-trompeta Sionului, o prezenta exotica in massmedia israeliana
mai 24, 2011
Caroline B. Glick-trompeta Sionului
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Caroline B. Glick trage sirena lui Roaita
JERUSALEM POST DECLARES THE START OF THE THIRD INTIFADA”Understanding the third terror war”
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0311/glick032511.php3?printer_friendly
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 10:54 am |
Caroline B. Glick plange la mormintul lui Mubarack
America’s descent into strategic dementia
http://jewishworldreview.com/0311/glick032211.php3
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 10:58 am |
“TOTI pt.UNUL , unul pt.TOTI”-Caroline a citit Cei 3 muschetari
World to Israel: Surrender before it’s too late
Caroline B. Glick :evreii americani delegitimeaza Israel
PS
“TOTI pt.UNUL , unul pt.TOTI-Caroline a citit Cei 3 muschetari ? Apropo de deposedarea de paminturi a palestinienilor cred ca distinsa parasutista a inteles gresit, adica “HOTI pt.UNUL , unul pt.HOTI ”
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0311/glick031811.php3
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:00 am |
Trompetistul Glick suna alarma-The PLO’s desperate defenders
Israelul este un partener activ la propria sa distrugere
Netanyahu’s time to choose
There are many reasons that Netanyahu is incapable of stating the truth and ending the 18-year policy nightmare in which Israel is an active partner in its own demise
http://jewishworldreview.com/images/netanyahu_lip.jpg
http://jewishworldreview.com/0411/glick042911.php3
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:05 am |
Palestinian statehood is increasingly more likely. The lessons …pam pam
Palestinian statehood is increasingly more likely. The lessons that can — and must — be learned from the Goldstone affair
DELIRIUM CAROLINENSIS
SURSA
http://jewishworldreview.com/op-art/un_palestinians.jpg
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:08 am |
Caroline s-a ienervat:Peter Beinart ACUZAT de antisemitism
http://jewishworldreview.com/0411/glick040111.php3
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:09 am |
Caroline vrea sa asmuta cainii razboiului asupra Siriei
Assad has a large stockpile of chemical weapons including Sarin gas and blister agents. In February 2009 Jane’s Intelligence Review reported that the Syrians were working intensively to expand their chemical arsenal. Based on commercial satellite imagery, Jane’s’ analysts concluded that Syria was expending significant efforts to update its chemical weapons facilities. Analysts claimed that Syria began its work upgrading its chemical weapons program in 2005 largely as a result of Saddam Hussein’s reported transfer of his chemical weapons arsenal to Syria ahead of the US-led invasion in 2003.The Jane’s report also claimed that Assad’s men had built new missile bays for specially adapted Scud missiles equipped to hold chemical warheads at the updated chemical weapons sites.As for missiles, with North Korean, Iranian, Russian, Chinese and other third-party assistance, Syria has developed a massive arsenal of ballistic missile and advanced artillery capable of hitting every spot in Israel and wreaking havoc on IDF troop formations and bases.
The Syrian spring
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:11 am |
Will Syria Lift Decades-Old Emergency Law? Street Protests & Deadly Crackdown Force Assad Regime to Consider Political Changes
SURSA
Lieberman DJ
How many troops will it take to police the smashed cities and prevent reprisals? Who provides those troops? If a Battle of Algiers war begins, as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and are still going on, who fights that war? And if a regime’s use of violence against protesters justifies a U.S. attack, does Obama have carte blanche to attack Syria and Iran?
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman thinks so. As he said in Paris: “The same principles, activities, the Western world has taken in Libya … I hope to see those regarding the Iranian regime and the Syrian regime.”
SURSA
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:13 am |
Caroline B. Glick chitaie iar : [infamul Obama ] Obama’s newest ambush
It is hard to believe, but it appears that in the wake of the Palestinian unity deal that brings the genocidal, al Qaida-aligned, local franchise of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Hamas into a partnership with Fatah, US President Barack Obama has decided to open a new round of pressure on Israel to give away its land and national rights to the Palestinians. It is hard to believe that this is the case. But apparently it is.
In rest,BLA BLA BLA
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0511/glick051311.php3
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:14 am |
Meseriaş thread,felicitări.Hai să contribui şi eu :
Obama’s diversionary tactics
What did the president wish to accomplish by purposely starting an ugly fight with the prime minister this past weekend?
As the Washington Post pointed out on Friday, US President Barack Obama purposely provoked the current fight with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He knew full well that Netanyahu does not back the Palestinian formulation that negotiations with Israel must be based on the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, or what are wrongly referred to as the 1967 lines. In the days leading up to Obama’s speech last Thursday, Israel registered explicit, repeated requests that he not adopt the Palestinian position that negotiations should be based on those lines.
And so it was a stinging rebuke when Obama declared Thursday: “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” According to the Washington Post, Obama wrote these lines of his speech himself and Netanyahu was informed of them just as he was scheduled to fly to the US on Thursday evening. Obama gave the speech while Netanyahu was in the air on his way to Washington to meet Obama the next morning. It is hard to think of a more stunning insult or a greater display of contempt for the leader of a US ally and fellow democracy than Obama’s actions last week. And it is obvious that Netanyahu had no choice but to react forcefully to Obama’s provocation.
The question is why would Obama act as he did? What did he wish to accomplish by purposely starting such an ugly fight with Netanyahu?
Probably the best way to figure out what Obama wished to accomplish is to consider what he did accomplish, because the two are undoubtedly related.
ON MAY 4, two weeks before Obama gave his speech, Fatah and Hamas signed a unity agreement. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like its fellow Brotherhood satellite al-Qaida, Hamas shares the Brotherhood’s ideology of global jihad, the destruction of Western civilization and the establishment of a global caliphate. Also like al-Qaida, it is a terrorist organization which, since its establishment in 1987 has murdered more than a thousand Israelis.
In 2005, Hamas subcontracted itself out to the Iranian regime. Since then, its men have been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and by Hezbollah. Hamas maintains operational ties with both outfits and receives most of its weapons and significant funding from Iran.
The agreement between Fatah and Hamas makes Hamas a partner in the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. It also paves the way for Hamas to win the planned Palestinian legislative and presidential elections that are scheduled for September just after the UN General Assembly is scheduled to endorse Palestinian statehood. It also sets the conditions for Hamas to integrate its forces and eventually take over the UStrained Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria and to join the PLO.
The Hamas-Fatah unity deal constitutes a complete repudiation of the assumptions informing Obama’s policies towards the Palestinians and Israel. Obama perceives the conflict as a direct consequence of two things: prior US administrations’ refusal to “put light” between the US and Israel, and Israel’s unwillingness to surrender all of the territory it took during the course of the 1967 Six Day War.
The Hamas-Fatah unity deal is indisputable proof that contrary to what Obama believes, the conflict has nothing to do with previous administrations’ support for Israel or with Israel’s size. It is instead entirely the consequence of the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s right to exist and their commitment to bringing about Israel’s destruction.
Forcing Israel into indefensible boundaries, (which as Netanyahu explained to Obama at the White House on Friday, “were not the boundaries of peace, they were the boundaries of repeated wars because the attack on Israel was so attractive for them,”), will not advance the cause of peace. It will advance the Palestinians’ goal of destroying Israel.
Obama had two options for contending with the Palestinian unity deal. He could pay attention to it or he could create a distraction in order to ignore it. If he paid attention to it, he would have been forced to disavow his policy of blaming his predecessors in the White House and Israel for the absence of peace. By creating a distraction he would be able to change the subject in a manner that would enable him to maintain those policies.
And so he picked a fight with Netanyahu. And by picking the fight, he created a distraction that has, in fact, changed the subject and enabled Obama to maintain his policies that have been wholly repudiated by the reality of the Palestinian unity deal.
By inserting the citation of the 1949 armistice lines into his speech, Obama made Israel’s size again the issue.
The Hamas-Fatah unity deal actually demonstrates that not only is Israel’s size not the cause of the conflict, it is the main reason that Israelis and Palestinians live in relative peace.
Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem, and with them, its ability to ward off invasion and attacks on its major cities is what has prevented wars. If Israel were more vulnerable, the de facto Palestinian terror state would not be weighing whether or not to begin a new terror war as its leaders from Fatah and Hamas are doing today. It would be waging a continuous campaign of terror whose clear aim is Israel’s destruction for again, as Netanyahu said the 1949 armistice lines make war an attractive option for Israel’s enemies.
BY PICKING a fight with Netanyahu, since Thursday, no one could have possibly noted this basic truth because the false issue of Israel’s control over these areas — that is, Israel’s size — has dominated the global discourse on the Middle East.
Obama would never have been able to create his diversion from the unwelcome fact of Palestinian duplicity and rejectionism, to imaginary problem with the size of Israel without the enthusiastic support given to him by the Israeli Left.
Led by opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Left responded to Obama’s full-scale assault on Israel’s legitimacy by launching a full-scale partisan assault on Netanyahu. Rather than back Netanyahu as he fights for the country’s future, Livni called for him to resign and said that he was wrecking Israel’s ties with the US. In so doing, the Left provided crucial support for Obama’s move to maintain his phony anti- Israel paradigm for Middle East policymaking in the face of the Palestinian unity deal’s repudiation of that model.
The Left’s assault on Netanyahu is not the only way it has enabled Obama to maintain his pro-Palestinian policies in the face of the Palestinians’ embrace of terror and war. In his speech to AIPAC, Obama argued that Israel needs to surrender its defensible boundaries because the Palestinians are about to demographically challenge Israel’s Jewish majority.
As Obama put it, “The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories. This will make it harder and harder — without a peace deal — to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state.”
The demographic time bomb story is a Palestinian fabrication. In 1997, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics published a falsified Palestinian census that inflated Palestinian population data by 50 percent. The Israeli Left adopted this fake report as its own when Palestinian terrorism and political warfare convinced the majority of Israelis that it was unwise to give them any more land and that the peace process was a lie.
Since 2004, repeated, in-depth studies of Jewish and Arab birthrates and immigration/ emigration statistics west of the Jordan River undertaken by independent researchers have shown that the demographic time bomb is a dud. In January, the respected demographer Yaakov Faitelson published a study for the Institute of Zionist Strategies in which he definitively put to rest the tale of pending Jewish demographic doom.
As Faitelson demonstrated, Jewish and Arab birthrates are already converging west of the Jordan River at around three children per woman. And whereas the fertility rates of Israeli Arabs, Gazans and residents of Judea and Samaria are all trending downward, Jewish fertility is consistently rising. Moreover, whereas the Arabs are experiencing consistently negative net immigration rates, Jewish net immigration rates are positive and high.
Faitelson based his multiyear projections on current population numbers in which Jews comprise 58.6 percent of the population west of the Jordan River and Muslims constitute 38.7% of the overall population. Non-Jewish, non-Muslim minorities comprise the other 2.7%. Using assessment baselines for Jewish net immigration well below current averages, Faitelson showed that in the years to come, not only will Jews not lose our demographic majority. We will increase it.
Faitelson’s study, like the studies published since 2004 by the American-Israeli Demographic Research Group show that from a demographic perspective, Israel is in the same situation as many Western states today. Namely, it has to develop policies for dealing with an irredentist minority population.
There are many reasonable, liberal policies that Israel can adopt. These include applying the liberal Israeli legal code to Judea and Samaria and enforcing the laws of treason. It is hard to see why the best policy for Israel is to take some of that irredentist population off its books by establishing a terror state ruled by what Netanyahu rightly referred to as “the Israeli equivalent of al-Qaida” on its border.
ALL OF this brings us back to Hamas, terrorism, the Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist, and Obama’s diversionary moves to facilitate his preservation of a Middle East policy based on a wholly false and discredited assessment of reality and the Israeli Left’s facilitation of Obama’s efforts.
When we realize what Obama is up to, we recognize as well what Netanyahu must do in response.
In his address before Congress on today and in all of his appearances in the coming weeks and months, Netanyahu should have one goal: to bring the focus of debate back where it belongs — on the Palestinians.
At every opportunity, Netanyahu needs to pound the message that the Palestinians’ commitment to Israel’s destruction is the sole reason that there is no peace.
As for the Israeli Left, it is high time that Netanyahu place the likes of Livni on the defensive. This involves two things. First, Netanyahu must attack the Left’s doomsday demographic projections that are without factual basis and are indeed antithetical to reality. As long as the demographic lie goes unchallenged by Netanyahu, the Left will continue to argue that by refusing to build a terror state on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Netanyahu is endangering Israel.
Netanyahu deserves a lot of credit for standing up to Obama on Friday. He showed enormous courage in doing so. It was his finest hour to date and polls over the weekend show that the public appreciates and supports him for it. He must build on that success by putting the focus on the truth.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0511/glick052411.php3
Comentariu prin mihaibeltechi — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:29 am |
Betraying Israel
With friends like President Obama, who needs enemies? If you’re Israel, you already have quite enough of those.
On May 14, 2011, the State of Israel observed the 63rd anniversary of its independence. But if the proposals made by President Obama in his State Department speech are implemented, that observance could be its last.
It is difficult to say if the president is self-deluded, if he drinks State Department Arabist Kool-Aid or if he’s just a fool. It doesn’t matter. The results are the same.
Why does anyone continue to believe that the unsuccessful “Land for Peace” formula can magically persuade Arab states and terrorist groups to lay down their arms and change their minds about a goal they have taught in their schools, preached in their mosques and reinforced in their media since 1948?
The president’s peace formulation is as likely to succeed as Harold Camping’s doomsday prophecy.
This is the reality, expressed by Hamas’ former minister of “culture,” Atallah Abu Al-Subh, and broadcast on Al-Aqsa TV: “The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the earth.” Would 1967 borders change his mind?
Here’s another excerpt from Al-Subh’s April 8 sermon: “Whoever is killed by a Jew receives the reward of two martyrs, because the very thing that the Jews did to the prophets was done to him.” That would be 144 virgins and double the fig ration.
He continued: “Allah will kill the Jews in the hell of the world to come, just like they killed the believers in the hell of this world.” And “The Jews kill anyone who believes in Allah. They do not want to see any peace whatsoever on Earth.”
This kind of “peace” means no Jews with all Israel occupied and dominated by legions of Muslims who will impose Sharia law to the detriment of women and anyone who believes in a different God and different laws and rules.
The apologists for such rhetoric, which is legion, turn blind eyes and deaf ears to the intent and objectives of Hamas, which is increasingly considered mainstream in the Arab world. Arab and Palestinian diplomats say one thing for Western consumption and the opposite when communicating with their own.
In his bold rebuke of President Obama in the Oval Office, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a history lesson. Ignorance of history threatens not only Israel, but also American interests and ultimately America itself. That’s because Arab intentions to dominate do not end in the Middle East. “Peace based on illusions,” said Netanyahu, “will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle East reality.”
Once again the prime minister noted that Israel’s 1967 borders would be indefensible. All of the talk by this and previous administrations of “unshakable” support for Israel is meaningless if enemy tanks, missiles and especially nuclear weapons are used against this tiny nation. What would America do? Bomb Iran? Invade Egypt? Strafe Syria? The State Department would likely wring its hands and blame Israel for its own destruction, saying it should have compromised sooner.
The ludicrously named “Arab Spring” is more like an Arab winter that will never end as long as radical Islam is the established religion. Very little good is likely to come out of the uprisings from Egypt to Syria and beyond because there is no foundation in the region for political pluralism, religious tolerance and equality for women. Such things are not part of their political and religious DNA. So why is the U.S. sending billions more in borrowed money to Egypt when the Muslim Brotherhood candidate might win the upcoming election?
It is only when the State Department and the White House begin to understand reality that Israel’s — and America’s — interests will be served.
The public seems to understand that better than politicians and diplomats. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 78 percent of U.S. voters believe peace between Israel and the Arab world is unlikely. Thousands of years of history and common sense confirm this.
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas052411.php3
Comentariu prin JOKER 2009 — mai 24, 2011 @ 11:38 am |
RAHAT cu perje
Netanyahu should realize what his astounding success means for him as well as for Israel. The people of Israel and our many friends around the world will continue to stand behind him proudly if he continues to lead us as well and wonderfully as he did this week. And we will admire him. And we will thank him.
The lessons of Netanyahu’s triumph
By Caroline B. Glick
AICI
Comentariu prin fabio — mai 27, 2011 @ 6:10 pm |
Ratting the Cage: Obama’s albatross
By LARRY DERFNER
05/25/2011 22:52
Israel’s fearless leader just showed the president who’s boss, didn’t he? But where will this showdown leave America in the Middle East?
With that Salute to Judea and Samaria he just staged in Washington, our wise and fearless leader just screwed American policy in the Middle East, turned Israel into an albatross around the neck of the president of the United States, made Western Europe ashamed to be associated with us, waved a red flag at the Palestinians and the entire Muslim world, and I don’t know what else.
Way to go, Bibi.
The US, Western Europe and the rest of the democratic world that we supposedly want to be a part of wants very much to get on the right side of this Arab Spring that’s changing the Middle East, and, by extension, the globe. They want to “build relationships” with the emerging Arab nations and try to influence their direction.
And look who’s tagging along – Mr. AIPAC, Mr. Right- Wing Congress, Mr. Obama-Slayer, Mr. Settlement- Builder, Mr. Status Quo, Mr. Nyet. Him and the country that elected him, and that almost certainly will again.
He just showed Obama who’s boss, didn’t he? He had 10,000 American Jews cheering and standing up for him every two minutes at AIPAC, he had Republicans and Democrats doing the same thing in Congress, and what was his message?
Israel is right and the Arabs are wrong, thank you and God bless America.
Standing ovation.
And now Obama, who can’t say a word against an Israeli prime minister in an election year, who is being led around by the nose by this guy, has to convince hundreds of millions of restive Muslims that America is their friend. That America’s on their side.
Oh God. Bibi, you have really done it.
This is your big peace plan, the one that everybody’s been waiting for – “some settlements will end up beyond Israel’s borders”? That would have been a bold, far-reaching declaration in 1992, maybe, coming from Yitzhak Shamir, but the world has, as they say in America, moved on.
With the Middle East in play, who’s supposed to stick up for Israel now – the Republicans and AIPAC-trained Democrats? The prime minister of Canada? Glenn Beck? That’s about all we’ve got left, the only people who still think Bibi’s singing the right tune.
The Palestinians are going to the UN in September to gain the world’s recognition for a state on the land where Israel has ruled them against their will since 1967 (a point Bibi left out in his history lesson to Congress about Judea and Samaria).
With the Muslim world paying very, very close attention, the US is going to vote “no.” AIPAC, Congress and Israel will be pacified, but what will, you know, the people who actually have to manage US affairs in the world be thinking? Where will it leave America in the Middle East?
Wedded to an Israeli policy it deplores, tied to an Israeli leader its president now loathes if he didn’t before, led into an isolated corner by the albatross around its neck.
Way to go, Bibi.
It’s funny – before this Likud convention in English that just took place, Obama planned to lobby the leaders of Western Europe to at least abstain in the UN vote.
I would love to hear what Obama and Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron are saying to each other now.
How in the hell is Obama supposed to lobby for Israel in Europe after what Netanyahu just gave him to work with?
And how are England, France, Germany and other Western countries, none of which want to alienate the Muslim world, certainly not now, supposed to vote against a Palestinian state – which they all support – when the option is Bibi’s promise of eternal status quo – which they all detest?
Here’s what I think Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron and the other European leaders will be telling Obama about that UN vote: “Sorry, Barack, we’d love to help you out, but not if it means turning a billion Muslims against us at this particular juncture. With all due respect, Bibi’s your problem, not ours.”
Bibi and Barack, alone together, sinking like a stone.
There’s only one way out, only one way to salvage America’s standing in the Middle East and, at the same time, save Israel from itself and this very unfortunate choice it made for prime minister.
The US has to vote “yes” on Palestine in the UN this September. That would change everything for everyone, and only for the better.
Will it happen? Of course not. Obama doesn’t want to be branded an anti-Israel Arab-lover in the campaign; he’ll get killed in the election. Instead, he’s going to let Bibi, the Republicans, AIPAC and the AIPAC-trained Democrats coerce him into crippling America, and, incidentally, crippling Israel.
Way to go, Obama. You’re even worse than Bibi. At least he’ll be dragging his country down for an ideology, vile as it is, that he believes in. What will be your excuse?
http://www.israelleft.com
AICI
Comentariu prin Gabriela zana Maseluta — mai 27, 2011 @ 6:14 pm |
The real Egyptian revolution
CAROLINE B. GLICK ne va desfata un pic ,va dansa si din buric
Muslim Brotherhood
ante portas ,AICI
Comentariu prin fabio — iunie 5, 2011 @ 10:27 am |
Column One: Glenn Beck’s revealing visit
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
In general, Israeli media responded to Beck’s visit either as a non-event, or distorted who Beck is and what he is trying to do.
American media superstar Glenn Beck’s visit to Israel this week was a revealing and remarkable event. It revealed what it takes to be a friend of Israel. And it revealed the causes of Israel’s difficulty in telling its enemies from its friends.
Many world leaders, opinion-shapers and other notables protest enduring friendship with Israel. From Washington to London, Paris to Spain, policy- makers and other luminaries preface all their remarks to Jewish audiences with such statements. Once their declarations are complete – and often without taking a breath – they proceed to denounce Israel’s policies and to deny its basic rights.
US President Barack Obama exemplifies this practice. Obama always begins his statements on Israel by proclaiming his enduring friendship for Israel. Then he tells us to deny Jewish property rights, accept indefensible borders, or desist from defending ourselves from aggression.
The Israeli Left habitually embraces self-proclaimed friends such as Obama. Often leftist leaders encourage such friends to harm Israel in the name of helping it. For instance, in 2007, speaking to then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice – who had a habit of comparing her friend Israel to the Jim Crow South – then-Haaretz editor David Landau asked her to “rape” the Jewish state. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni recently encouraged Obama to increase pressure on Israel.
When anti-Semitic public intellectuals such as the late Nobel laureate Jose Saramago compare Israel to Nazi Germany, the Israeli Left makes light of their remarks. For instance, when at the height of the Palestinian terror war in 2002 Saramago said Israel was worse than the Nazis and that Jews had no right to speak of the Holocaust, Yediot Aharonot’s Ariella Melamed referred to Saramago as “one of the most beloved foreign novelists in Israel.”
On Thursday, Israeli Arab actor and filmmaker Muhammad Bakri was the subject of a two-page hagiographic profile in Yediot. Bakri’s libelous 2003 film Jenin, Jenin, in which he falsely portrayed IDF soldiers as murderers and war criminals, was brushed off as merely “controversial.”
Making no mention of Bakri’s family ties to terrorist murderers or supportive statements regarding terrorism and war against Israel, Yediot portrayed this foe as a hero. Bakri, who has used his considerable talents to criminalize and demonize the country and to support its terrorist enemies, was lionized as an unwilling culture warrior who would much rather be acting than fighting, but feels he cannot escape his duty to fight for the great causes he holds dear.
Also Thursday, Yediot ran a story about Beck’s Restoring Courage Rally beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The headline read, “Glenn Beck’s Messianic Show.”
In general, the Israeli media responded to Beck’s visit to Israel either as a non-event, or they distorted who Beck is and what he is trying to do. Thursday’s print edition of Ma’arivsufficed with a photograph from Beck’s rally in Jerusalem the previous day.
By casting Beck’s visit as insignificant, Ma’ariv disserved its readers. Beck is one of the most influential media personalities in the US today.
Unlike the leftist public intellectuals such as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who are celebrated and obsessively covered by the Israeli media, Beck exerts real influence on public opinion in the US. His calls for action are answered by hundreds of thousands of people. His statements are a guidepost for millions of Americans. Aside from radio host Rush Limbaugh, no media personality in the US has such influence.
It is highly significant that thousands of Beck’s supporters followed his call and came with him to Israel for a week to express their support for Israel and the Jewish people. It is similarly significant that millions more of his supporters followed his actions on Internet.
Those media that did not seek to downplay the importance of Beck’s visit opted instead to distort who he is and what he is doing. As the Yediot headline indicated, the media portrayed him as an unstable messianic, or they castigated him as an extremist and marginal force in the US. Haaretz and Globes both ran articles attacking Beck as an anti-Semite.
These claims are outrageous and represent yet another gross disservice to Israeli news consumers who do not have an independent means of judging Beck, his message and his actions for themselves.
Beck came to Israel to launch a global movement of activists committed to supporting Israel, not in order to “rape” it, but in order to empower it to defeat its enemies and to stand up to an increasingly hostile world. In his speech under the Temple Mount, Beck roused his audience – which contrary to media reports was a mix of American Christians and American Jews joined by scores of Israelis – to action. With gripping prose, Beck told his audience to disregard the “convenient” lies about Israel and embrace the truth.
That truth, he said, is that “In Israel, there is more courage in one square mile than in all of Europe. In Israel, there is more courage in one Israeli soldier than in the combined and cold hearts of every bureaucrat at the United Nations. In Israel, you can find people who will stand against incredible odds, against the entire tide of global opinion, for what is right and good and true. Israel is not a perfect country. No country is perfect. But it tries, and it is courageous.”
From Israel he proceeded Wednesday night to South Africa to tell the true story of Apartheid and to dispel the popular falsehood that Israel bears any similarity to Apartheid South Africa. From there he will continue on to Latin America to meet with communal leaders and mobilize them to support Israel. And from there he will return to the US where he will launch his global movement to support Israel before a mass audience in Dallas early next week.
What was most remarkable about Beck’s message was its rarity. Beck did not say anything factually inaccurate. The vast majority of Israelis certainly would find nothing controversial in any of his assertions. Yet despite his honesty, and his reasonable interpretation of Israel’s strategic and diplomatic circumstances, Beck’s is a voice in the wilderness. One almost never comes across a foreigner – or even an Israeli – who is willing to speak such basic truths in public.
Both the rarity of truthful assessments of reality such as Beck’s and the gross distortion of his message and importance by the media are the consequence of intellectual and social intimidation that has led to groupthink among members of the media and of the cultural elites in Israel and throughout much of the Western world.
As Beck put it, “The grand councils of the earth condemn Israel. Across the border, Syria slaughters its own citizens. The grand councils are silent…
“These international councils, these panels of so-called diplomats, condemn Israel not because they believe Israel needs to be corrected. They do so because it is convenient.
“Everyone does it. In some countries, it’s a crime not to.
“The diplomats are afraid, and so they submit. They surrender to falsehood. The truth matters not. To the keepers of conventional wisdom, a sacrifice of the truth is a small price to pay. What difference does it make if we beat up on little Israel? These are the actions of the fearful and cowards.”
And in the face of this cowardice, Beck organized his visit to Israel under the banner “Restoring Courage.”
He told his audience, “I stand here to tell you this: Fear is the pathway to surrender. And to overcome fear, we must have courage.”
Beck is rare, because he refuses to bow to the intellectual intimidation and groupthink that plagues the discourse on Israel in Israel itself and throughout the world. He refuses to play by the rules in which friends of Israel are castigated as messianic crazies and extremists and Israel’s enemies are praised as friends and great artists and courageous dissidents. He is an exception to a demented rule.
Israel’s media didn’t come to their hatred of Beck on their own. Most of it is fueled by American Jewish leftists. Beck ran afoul of the liberal American Jewish establishment through his outspoken attacks on George Soros. In January, Beck ran several shows on Soros, the extremist leftist anti-American and anti-Zionist global financier who has given more than $100 million to radical leftist groups.
Among other things, Beck ran a 1998 interview that Soros gave to CBS News’s Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes. During the course of the interview, Soros admitted that as a boy in Nazi occupied Hungary he collaborated with the Nazis in confiscating Jewish property. Beck dwelled on Soros’s statement and his stated lack of guilt for his actions. Beck considered its impact on the shaping of Soros’s personality.
For his actions, Beck was attacked as an anti- Semite by the Soros-funded Jewish Funds for Justice. The group which conducts community organizing in liberal Jewish congregations collected the signatures of several dozen rabbis and ran a $100,000 ad in The Wall Street Journal asking Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch to take action against Beck. According to JCCWatch.org, New York’s UJA-Jewish Federation has given more than a million dollars to the Soros-funded organization.
The Left’s attacks on Beck are fueled by the fact that he is a Christian Zionist. The Left’s default mode is to accuse Christian Zionists of a hidden agenda to convert Jews and a secret desire to see us killed in an Armageddon.
But in truth the media’s embrace of Israel’s enemies, their rejection of Beck, and most important Beck’s refusal to bow to their conventional wisdom that Israel’s enemies should be praised and its friends should be condemned all reveal the reason that Christian Zionists can be trusted and embraced by Israelis.
Christian Zionists – like Jewish religious Zionists – are unmoved by the media’s intimidation because of their faith in God, and their reliance on scripture. Their faith provides them with a means of judging reality that is independent of the largely post-religious intellectual commissariat that runs the media and the cultural elite in the Western world. They don’t seek or care about receiving the accolades of the New York Times or other post-religious totems for their actions. And Beck’s message to Israelis is that we shouldn’t care either.
For most Israelis, this message rings powerful and true. But for the media, in Israel and throughout the West, it is dangerous sedition that must be marginalized and destroyed.
Beck said that his movement will be one of individuals who work together to defend Israel and the Jews from those who seek our destruction. He argued that regular people are far more capable of understanding what needs to be done than the well-heeled experts who lead us down the garden path of weakness and demoralization.
And he is right.
And in bringing this message to Israel, he demonstrated his friendship. We should return the favor by taking his advice. We should trust ourselves and our instincts and stop listening to the “experts” who preach weakness and surrender.
caroline@carolineglick.com
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=235441
Comentariu prin Fabio — august 28, 2011 @ 3:29 pm |
The war America fights
Why the United States will fail in eliminating those who are aggressively seeking its destruction
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Ten years ago, in the shadow of the crater at Ground Zero, the smoldering Pentagon and a field of honor in Pennsylvania, America found itself at war.
Today, a decade on, America is still at war.
Ten years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the time has come to assess the progress of America’s war. But in order to assess its progress, we must first understand the war.
What war has the US been fighting since Sept. 11?
Former President George W. Bush called the war the War on Terror. The War on Terror is a broad tactical campaign to prevent Islamic terrorists from targeting America.
The War on Terror has achieved some notable successes. These include Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan which denied al Qaida free rein in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban. They also include the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and his fascist regime in Iraq, which played a role — albeit far less significant than the Taliban regime and others — in supporting Islamic terrorism against the US.
Moreover, the US has successfully prevented multiple attempts by Islamic terrorists to carry out additional mass terror attacks on US territory. This achievement, however, is at least partially a function of luck. On two occasions — the Shoe Bomber in 2001 and the Underwear Bomber in 2009 — Islamic terrorists with bombs were able to board airplanes en route to the US and attempt to detonate those bombs in mid-air. The fact that their attacks were foiled by their fellow passengers is a tribute to the passengers, not to the success of the US war effort.
The US’s success in killing Osama bin Laden and other senior al Qaida members is another clear achievement of this war.
But ten years on, the fact that Islamic terrorism directed against the US remains a salient threat to US national security shows that the War on Terror is far from won. And this makes sense. Despite its significant successes, the War on Terror suffers from three inherent problems that make it impossible for the US to win.
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The first problem is that the US has unevenly applied its tactic of denying terrorists free rein in territory of their choosing. In his historic speech before the Joint Houses of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, Bush pledged, “We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
And yet, while the US applied this principle in Afghanistan and Iraq, it applied it only partially in Pakistan, and failed to apply it all in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. By essentially ending its application of the counter-terror tactic of denying terrorists free rein of territory and punishing regimes that provide them shelter, the options left to the US in fighting its war on terror have been reduced to catch-as-catch can killing and capturing of terrorists, and reactive actions like arresting or detaining terrorists when they are caught on US soil.
On the positive side, these limited tactics can keep terrorists off balance if they are applied consistently and over the long term. Taken together, the tactics of targeted killing and financial strangulation comprise a strategy of long term containment not unlike the US’s strategy in the Cold War. US containment then caused the Soviet Union to exhaust itself and collapse after 45 years of superpower competition.
Unfortunately, the US’s containment strategy in its War on Terror is undermined by the second and third problems inherent to the US’s policies. The second problem is that since Sept. 11, 2001, the US has steadfastly refused to admit the identity of the enemy it seeks to defeat.
US leaders have called that enemy al Qaida, they have called it extremism or extremists, fringe elements of Islam and radicals. But of course the enemy is jihadist Islam which seeks global leadership and the destruction of Western civilization. Al Qaida is simply an organization that fights on the enemy’s side. As long as the enemy is left unaddressed, organizations like al Qaida will continue to proliferate.
It isn’t that US authorities do not acknowledge among themselves whom the enemy is. They do track Islamic leaders, and in general prosecute jihadists when they can build cases against them.
But their refusal to acknowledge the nature of the enemy has paralyzed their ability to confront and defeat threats as they arise. For instance, US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan was not removed from service or investigated despite his known support for jihad and his communication with leading jihadists. Rather, he was promoted and placed in a position where he was capable of massacring 12 soldiers and one civilian at Ft. Hood, Texas.
Had the US not been in denial about the identity of its enemy, Hassan’s victims would likely be alive today.
So too, the US’s refusal to identify its enemy has made it impossible for US officials to understand and contend with the mounting threat from Turkey. Because the US refuses to recognize radical Islam as its enemy, it fails to connect Turkey’s erratic and increasingly hostile behavior to the fact that the country is ruled by an Islamist government.
In the face of the rising political instability and uncertainty in the Arab world the US’s refusal to reckon with the fact that radical Islam is the enemy fighting the US bodes ill for the future. Quite simply, America is willfully blinding itself to emerging dangers. These dangers are particularly acute in Egypt where the US has completely failed to recognize the threat the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes to its core regional interests and its national security.
The last problem intrinsic to the US’s War on Terror is the persistent and powerful strain of appeasement that guides so much of US policy towards the Muslim world.
This appeasement is multifaceted and pervades nearly every aspect of the US’s relations with the Islamic world.
The urge to appeasement caused the US to divorce the Islamic jihad against the US from the Islamic jihad against Israel from the outset. Appeasement has been the chief motivating factor informing the US’s intense support for Palestinian terrorists and its refusal to reassess this policy in the face of Palestinian terrorism, jihadism and close ties with Iran.
Appeasement provoked the US to embrace radical Islamic religious leaders and terror operatives like Sami Arian and Abdurahman Alamoudi as credible leaders in the US Muslim community. It stood behind the decisions of both the Bush and Obama administrations to embrace US affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood as legitimate leaders of the American Muslim community and court the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the detriment of US ally former president Hosni Mubarak.
Appeasement stood behind the US’s bid to try to entice Iran to end its nuclear weapons programs with grand bargains.
It motivated US’s decision not to confront Syria on its known support for al Qaida and Hezbollah as well as Palestinian terror groups; its proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; or its involvement in facilitating the insurgency in Iraq.
It is what has compelled the US not to seek the dismantlement of Hezbollah in Lebanon and indeed to fund and arm the Hezbollah-controlled government and army of Lebanon.
The urge to appease has motivated the US’s decision to take no action to stem the advance of Iran and its terror allies and proxies in al Qaida and Hezbollah in Latin America.
When a nation engages in appeasement at the same time it wages war, its appeasement efforts always undermine its war efforts. This is particularly the case however in long-term wars of containment like the one the US is fighting against Islamic terrorism.
The logic guiding a containment strategy is that an enemy force will eventually collapse if kept off balance for long enough. Given that militarily the forces of Islamic jihad are weaker than the US, it is reasonable to assume that if applied consistently for long enough, a policy of containment can indeed cause the forces of global jihad to collapse.
The chronic instability of the Iranian regime and the current unrest in Syria demonstrate the structural weakness of these regimes. The dependence of terror groups like Hezbollah, al Qaida, Hamas on the support of governments make clear that containment could potentially defeat them as well by drying out their support structure at its roots.
The problem is that the US’s moves to appease its enemies empower them to keep fighting. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are far stronger militarily today than they were on Sept. 11, 2001. Hamas controls Gaza and would likely win any Palestinian elections.
Hezbollah controls Lebanon.
Iran is on the verge of nuclear weapons and is poised to become the predominant power in Iraq. Its Egyptian nemesis Hosni Mubarak is gone.
Ten years ago Iran and its terror allies and proxies could have only dreamed of having the presence on the Western Hemisphere they enjoy today.
In Europe the threat of domestic terrorism is more salient than ever because the jihadist forces and leaders on the continent have been appeased rather than combated by both the governments of Europe and the US.
The US was able to win the Cold War through its policy of containment because throughout the long conflict there was strong majority support in the US for continuing to pursue the war effort. Despite the widespread nature of Soviet efforts at political subversion, US public opinion remained firmly anti-Soviet until the Berlin Wall was finally destroyed.
The US government’s moves to appease its Islamic enemies undermine the domestic consensus supporting the War on Terror. And without such domestic solidarity around the necessity of combating jihadist terrorists, there is little chance that the US will be able to continue to enact its containment strategy for long enough to facilitate victory.
Even as it has continued to prosecute the War on Terror, since it came to power in January 2009 the Obama administration has worked intensively to confuse the American people about its nature, necessity and goals. President Barack Obama dropped the name “War on Terror” for the nebulous “overseas contingency operation.” He has rejected the term “terrorism,” and expunged the term “jihad” from the official lexicon. In so doing, he made it impermissible for US government officials to hold coherent discussions about the war they are charged with waging. Meanwhile the public has been invited to question whether the US has the right to fight at all.
Today the events of Sept. 11 are still vivid enough in the American memory for America to continue the fight despite the administration’s efforts to discredit it in the national discourse and imagination. But how long will that memory be strong enough to serve as the primary legitimating force behind a war that even in its limited form is far from won?
http://jewishworldreview.com/0911/glick090911.php3
Comentariu prin klein raluca — septembrie 9, 2011 @ 12:02 pm |
Our World: Lessons from the embassy takeover
Until last weekend, both the Israeli Left and the US foreign policy establishment believed the situation in Egypt was not significantly worse than it had been under deposed president Hosni Mubarak.We are able to consider the lessons of the weekend’s mob assault on the Israeli embassy in Cairo because the six Israeli security officers who were on the brink of being slaughtered were rescued at the last moment and spirited out of the country. If the Egyptian commandos hadn’t arrived on the scene at the last moment, the situation would have been too explosive for a sober-minded assessment of the rapidly deteriorating situation with our neighbor to the south.
Any assessment of the weekend’s events must begin by recounting a few key aspects of the assault. First, this was the second mob attack on the embassy in so many weeks. During the first assault, an Egyptian rioter scaled the 20-story building where the embassy is housed, tore down the Israeli flag, and threw it to the frenzied mob below which swiftly burned it. Rather than being arrested for the crime of assaulting a foreign embassy, the rioter was embraced as a hero by Egypt’s military regime. The governor of Giza awarded him an apartment and a job.
Second, for six hours after the assault on the embassy began on Friday evening, Israel’s leaders tried desperately to contact the leaders of the Egyptian military junta to request their intercession on behalf of the trapped security officers.
Field Marshal Muhammad Tantawi refused to speak with either Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Third, Egyptians authorities refused to intervene to save the lives of the Israeli security officers until after the Americans intervened directly on their behalf.
That is, Israel’s entreaties, and Egypt’s international legal obligations were insufficient to move the Egyptian authorities to act to save the embassy personnel from the mob. Only the apparent threat of direct US action against Egypt convinced them to act.
The behavior of the Egyptian mob and military junta alike served as a wake-up call for two key constituencies.
Until last weekend, both the Israeli Left and the US foreign policy establishment believed the situation in Egypt was not significantly worse than it had been under deposed president Hosni Mubarak.
Most Israelis awoke to the fact that Israel’s border with Egypt is no longer a peaceful one three weeks ago. After the Egyptian-Palestinian terror cell infiltrated Israel from Sinai on August 18 and massacred eight Israelis on the highway to Eilat, most Israelis recognized that relations with Egypt had been ruptured.
But until the weekend, Israel’s Left insisted there was a distinction between the lawless Sinai and the more orderly situation in Cairo. They argued that all that was needed to calm the situation in Sinai was for the military junta to assert its authority in Sinai as it does in the rest of Egypt. Hence, the Left argued that it is in Israel’s interest to amend the peace treaty and allow the Egyptian military to remilitarize the Sinai.
Since the weekend, these claims have been notably absent from the discourse. After the Egyptian military allowed the mob to take over the embassy, residual leftist faith in the junta’s moderation and commitment to the peace with Israel is swiftly evaporating.
As for the Americans, unlike Israel, American foreign policy hands from across the conservative- liberal divide supported the mob in Tahrir Square that called for Mubarak’s overthrow. The Americans hailed Mubarak’s demise as a triumph of liberal democratic forces in the Arab world. But in the aftermath of the weekend’s assault on the embassy, voices from across the political spectrum in the US are calling for a reassessment of US relations with Egypt.
For his part, Obama’s willingness to intervene on behalf of the besieged security guards at the embassy was probably not divorced from his assessment of the political fallout likely to ensue from the slaughter of Israeli embassy guards by the Egyptian mob.
In such an event, the American public would immediately equate Obama’s support for the “democratic, revolutionary” mob against longstanding US ally Mubarak with his predecessor Jimmy Carter’s support for the “democratic, revolutionary” Iranian mob against the US-allied Shah of Iran in 1979.
The fact that Obama recognizes the political significance of the developments in Egypt signals that he too may be willing to consider adopting a different policy towards Egypt in the months to come.
All of this is important.
In the absence of a reassessment of the situation in Egypt by the Israeli Left and the American policy establishment alike, the chance of anyone adopting rational policies towards the strongest Arab state would remain small.
Any rational policy must be based on an accurate assessment of the dynamics of the post- Mubarak political situation. Specifically, is the junta part of the mob or is it simply unable or unwilling to manage it? Apparently it is a bit of both.
Like its treatment of the rioter who tore the Israeli flag from the embassy building two weeks ago, the regime’s arrest in June of the dual Israeli- American citizen ` on trumped-up espionage charges is an example of the junta acting as part of the mob.
On the other hand, the regime’s decision to try Mubarak and his sons in contravention of Tantawi’s solemn pledge to Mubarak is an indication that Tantawi and his generals are led by the mob.
As for Grapel – and to a lesser degree Mubarak – the US’s ultimate success in forcing the junta to rescue the Israelis trapped at the embassy demonstrates that the US still has significant leverage against Egypt. When it is sufficiently adamant, Washington can force the junta change its behavior.
It is not clear how much this leverage is dependent on continued US financial and military assistance to Egypt. Obviously, an assessment of its significance should guide any US consideration of reducing or cutting off that aid.
As for Israel, the mob’s ability to determine the course of events in Egypt and the junta’s refusal to stand up to the mob on Israel’s behalf is a strong indication that the peace treaty is doomed. After the junta stood back and allowed the mob to storm the embassy, it is impossible to believe the junta will defy the mob’s demand to abrogate the treaty.
The fact that the treaty is doomed doesn’t mean that Israel will immediately find itself at war with Egypt – although the prospect can no longer be ruled out. The US’s continued leverage against the regime – like NATO’s leverage against Turkey – may very well convince the Egyptians to maintain a ceasefire with Israel.
On the other hand, US leverage may end after November’s elections. The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are expected to win a parliamentary majority and the presidency.
Given the explosiveness of the situation, it is imperative that the US not repeat its rush to action from January where without considering the consequences of its actions, Washington hurriedly sided with the Tahrir Square mob against Mubarak. The US shouldn’t support elections or oppose them. It shouldn’t cut off aid or increase it. It shouldn’t condemn the junta or embrace it.
The Americans should simply monitor the situation and prepare for all contingencies.
As for Israel, it must prepare for the possibility of war. It must increase the size of the IDF by adding a division to the Southern Command. It must train for desert warfare. It must expand the Navy.
Thankfully, all Israeli personnel were safely evacuated from Cairo. But this happy circumstance must not blind anyone to the dangers mounting in Egypt.
caroline@carolineglick.com
Here
Comentariu prin klein raluca — septembrie 13, 2011 @ 12:00 pm |
The Palestinian obsession
By If nothing else, the Palestinians’ UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority — or Fatah — or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression.
Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn. There, the terror group committed itself to a peace process in which all disputes between Israel and the PLO — including Palestinian statehood — would be settled in the framework of bilateral negotiations.
The Palestinian Authority was established on the basis of this accord. The territory, money, arms and international legitimacy it has been given was due entirely to the PLO pledge to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel through bilateral negotiations.
By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel’s expense.
In truth, there is little new in the Palestinians’ behavior. They have been using the UN to weaken Israel diplomatically since the early 1970s. Moreover, even if their bid does provide them with upgraded diplomatic status, it won’t change the reality on the ground, nor are the Palestinians particularly interested in changing the situation on the ground.
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As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon Abdullah Abdullah made clear in an interview Wednesday with Lebanon’s Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new “State of Palestine” will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian “refugees.” This is true, he said, even for the “refugees” who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian “refugees” living inside of “Palestine.”
As he put it, “Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”
So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority?
Why have the senior peace processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans?
Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN?
Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats?
Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this?
The Palestinians have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.
And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.
Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel’s right to exist and stated that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign born Arabs — the so-called Palestinian “refugees” — as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel’s destruction.
And yet, both the US and the EU, which certainly do not support the destruction of Israel, insist that it is imperative to strengthen and support the supposedly moderate Fatah party which seeks the destruction of Israel.
Every year, the US and Europe transfer collectively approximately a billion dollars in various forms of aid to the Palestinian Authority and yet, the PA has failed to develop a market economy capable of supporting the Palestinians without foreign assistance. Rather, they have developed a welfare society where most economic activity stems from foreign handouts.
Rather than feel embarrassment at their failures, PA leaders use their economic corruption to continuously threaten their patrons. If aid is cut off, they say, the PA will disintegrate and the far more popular Hamas movement will take over, and then, woe of woes, the peace process will be destroyed.
Of course, Hamas is also sustained by Western aid dollars. Every month, the same PA that warns of the dangers of a rising Hamas transfers tens of millions of foreign aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay salaries of Hamas “government” employees.
Yet despite its mafia economy, and its exploitation of their aid funds to support a terrorist organization, the US and EU insist on maintaining the PA’s status as the largest per capita foreign aid recipient in human history. And they do so even as the Euro zone is on the brink of collapse and the US is descending rapidly into a new recession.
Finally, in the interest of maintaining the peace process, aside from periodic pro forma statements, the US and the EU have turned blind eyes to the PA’s routine and institutional glorification of terrorist mass murderers and Nazi-style anti-Semitic indoctrination and incitement of Palestinian society.
Given their absolute commitment to the so-called peace process, it would be reasonable to expect the US and the EU to oppose the Palestinians’ decision to move their conflict with Israel from the negotiating table to the UN. After all, in acting as they are, the Palestinians are making clear that they are abandoning the sacrosanct peace process.
Alas, this is not the case.
The Obama administration is engaging in desperate eleventh hour diplomacy to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plan because it does not wish to oppose it. For their part, most EU member states are expected to support the Palestinian bid at both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
The fact that the US and the EU are reluctant to oppose the Palestinian UN initiative despite the fact that it destroys the foundations of the peace process tells us two things about the Americans and the Europeans. First, their support for the Palestinians has more in common with a psychological obsession than with a rational policy decision.
The Obama administration, the EU bureaucracy and most EU member states are obsessed with the Palestinians. There is nothing the Palestinians can say or do to convince them that the Palestinian case is anything other than wholly and completely just.
There are many possible explanations for how they arrived at this obsession. But the fact is that it is an obsession. Like all obsessions, their faith in the justice of the Palestinian cause is impermeable to contrary facts or rational interests.
The flipside of this obsession is of course, a complementary obsession with blaming Israel for everything that goes wrong. For if the Palestinians are always in the right, and they are fighting Israel, then it naturally follows that Israel is always in the wrong.
This “Blame Israel First” mindset was exposed in all its madness in a New York Times editorial on Thursday.
Despite the Palestinians’ refusal to negotiate with Israel, despite Fatah’s unity government deal with Hamas, and despite their rejection of Israel’s right to exist, the Times argued that Israel is to blame for the current crisis in relations.
In the paper’s view, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “has been the most intractable,” party to the conflict. Netanyahu’s crime? He has permitted Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to exercise their property rights and build on land they own.
Of course, that is not how the Times put it. In the Times’ words, Netanyahu has been “building settlements.” Intrinsic to the Times’ claim, (and to the Obama administration’s EU-supported demand that Israel disregard Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria), is an embrace of the Palestinians’ bigoted position that Jews must be banned from the future Palestinian state.
That is, like the administration and the EU, the Times’ support for the “just Palestinian cause” is so comprehensive that its editors never even question whether it is reasonable for them to be completely committed to the establishment of a racist state. It is this inability to consider the significance of their actions that removes Western support for the Palestinians from realm of policy and into the sphere of neurosis.
The second lesson of the US and European unwillingness to oppose the Palestinians’ UN statehood bid is that the Obama administration and the EU alike are obsessed with getting on the right side of inherently anti-Western international institutions.
Here too, the reason that the position is an obsession rather than a considered policy is because no conceivable rational US or European interest is advanced by strengthening the UN and similar bodies.
Administration officials have repeatedly stated that they do not wish to veto a Palestinian statehood resolution at the Security Council because they do not want to isolate the US at the UN. It is due to their aversion to isolation that the administration has worked so intensively in recent weeks to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plans by pressuring Israel to give them massive concessions.
It never seems to have occurred to anyone at the White House that standing alone at the UN more often than not means standing up for US interests and that standing with the crowd involves sacrificing US interests.
As for the EU, their automatic support of the UN is somewhat more reasonable. Although the UN majority systematically empowers states and forces that are hostile to Europe, many EU member states share the UN majority’s anti-Israel and anti-American positions. So by voting with the majority, EU member states are able to act on their prejudices without having to own up to them. Moreover, many EU states have irredentist Islamic minorities. Joining the Israel bashers at the UN is a low cost way to appease them.
Thursday Netanyahu announced that he will address the UN General Assembly in New York next week and put the truth about the Palestinian cause on the table.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0911/glick091611.php3
Perhaps someone will be moved by his words.
Perhaps not.
But whether he makes a difference or not, at least reason will have one defender at the UN next week.
Comentariu prin mihaibeltechi — septembrie 16, 2011 @ 4:16 pm |
Column One: The Palestinian obsession
In a nutshell, the PA initiative of asking the UNSC, General Assembly to upgrade its status is an act of diplomatic aggression.
If nothing else, the Palestinians’ UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority – or Fatah – or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression.
Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn.
There, the terror group committed itself to a peace process in which all disputes between Israel and the PLO – including the issue of Palestinian statehood – would be settled in the framework of bilateral negotiations.
The PA was established on the basis of this accord. The territory, money, arms and international legitimacy it has been given was due entirely to the PLO pledge to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel through bilateral negotiations.
By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel’s expense.
In truth, there is little new in the Palestinians’ behavior. They have been using the UN to weaken Israel diplomatically since the early 1970s. Moreover, even if their bid does provide them with upgraded diplomatic status, it won’t change the reality on the ground, nor are the Palestinians particularly interested in changing the situation on the ground.
As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, made clear in an interview Wednesday with that country’s Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new “State of Palestine” will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian “refugees.” This is true, he said, even for the “refugees” who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian “refugees” living inside “Palestine.” As he put it, “Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”
So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority? Why have the senior peace-processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans? Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN? Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats? Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this? THE PALESTINIANS have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.
And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.
Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel’s right to exist and said that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign-born Arabs – the so-called Palestinian “refugees” – as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel’s destruction.
And yet, both the US and the EU, which certainly do not support the destruction of Israel, insist that it is imperative to strengthen and support the supposedly moderate Fatah party which seeks the destruction of Israel.
Every year, the US and Europe transfer collectively approximately a billion dollars in various forms of aid to the Palestinian Authority and yet, the PA has failed to develop a market economy capable of supporting the Palestinians without foreign assistance. Rather, they have developed a welfare society where most economic activity stems from foreign handouts.
Rather than feel embarrassment at their failures, PA leaders use their economic corruption to continuously threaten their patrons. If aid is cut off, they say, the PA will disintegrate and the far more popular Hamas movement will take over, and then, woe of woes, the peace process will be destroyed.
Of course, Hamas is also sustained by Western aid money. Every month, the same PA that warns of the dangers of a rising Hamas transfers tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay salaries of Hamas “government” employees.
Yet despite its mafia economy, and its exploitation of their aid funds to support a terrorist organization, the US and EU insist on maintaining the PA’s status as the largest per capita foreign aid recipient in human history. And they do so even as the Eurozone is on the brink of collapse and the US is descending rapidly into a new recession.
Finally, in the interest of maintaining the peace process, aside from periodic pro forma statements, the US and the EU have turned blind eyes to the PA’s routine and institutional glorification of terrorist mass murderers and Nazi-style anti-Semitic indoctrination and incitement of Palestinian society.
Given their absolute commitment to the so-called peace process, it would be reasonable to expect the US and the EU to oppose the Palestinians’ decision to move their conflict with Israel from the negotiating table to the UN.
After all, in acting as they are, the Palestinians are making clear that they are abandoning the sacrosanct peace process.
Alas, this is not the case.
The Obama administration is engaging in desperate eleventh hour diplomacy to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plan, because it does not wish to oppose it. Most EU member states are expected to support the Palestinian bid at both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
The fact that the US and the EU are reluctant to oppose the Palestinian UN initiative, despite the fact that it destroys the foundations of the peace process, tells us two things about the Americans and the Europeans. First, their support for the Palestinians has more in common with a psychological obsession than with a rational policy decision.
The Omaba administration, the EU bureaucracy and most EU member states are obsessed with the Palestinians. There is nothing the Palestinians can say or do to convince them that the Palestinian case is anything other than wholly and completely just.
There are many possible explanations for how they arrived at this obsession. But the fact is that it is an obsession. Like all obsessions, their faith in the justice of the Palestinian cause is impermeable to contrary facts or rational interests.
The flip side of this obsession is, of course, a complementary obsession with blaming Israel for everything that goes wrong. For if the Palestinians are always in the right, and they are fighting Israel, then it naturally follows that Israel is always in the wrong.
This “Blame Israel First” mindset was exposed in all its madness in a New York Times editorial on Thursday.
Despite the Palestinians’ refusal to negotiate with Israel, despite Fatah’s unity-government deal with Hamas, and despite their rejection of Israel’s right to exist, the Times argued that Israel is to blame for the current crisis in relations.
In the paper’s view, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “has been the most intractable” party to the conflict. Netanyahu’s crime? He has permitted Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to exercise their property rights and build on land they own.
Of course, that is not how the Times put it. In the Times’ words, Netanyahu has been “building settlements.”
Intrinsic to the Times’ claim, (and to the Obama administration’s EU-supported demand that Israel disregard Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria), is an embrace of the Palestinians’ bigoted position that Jews must be banned from the future Palestinian state.
That is, like the administration and the EU, the Times’ support for the “just Palestinian cause” is so comprehensive that its editors never even question whether it is reasonable for them to be completely committed to the establishment of a racist state. It is this inability to consider the significance of their actions that removes Western support for the Palestinians from the realm of policy and into the sphere of neurosis.
The second lesson of the US and European unwillingness to oppose the Palestinians’ UN statehood bid is that the Obama administration and the EU alike are obsessed with getting on the right side of inherently anti-Western international institutions.
Here, too, the reason that the position is an obsession rather than a considered policy is because no conceivable rational US or European interest is advanced by strengthening the UN and similar bodies.
Administration officials have repeatedly said that they do not wish to veto a Palestinian statehood resolution at the Security Council because they do not want to isolate the US at the UN. It is due to their aversion to isolation that the administration has worked so intensively in recent weeks to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plans, by pressuring Israel to give them massive concessions.
It never seems to have occurred to anyone at the White House that standing alone at the UN more often than not means standing up for US interests, and that standing with the crowd involves sacrificing US interests.
As for the EU, their automatic support of the UN is somewhat more reasonable. Although the UN majority systematically empowers states and forces that are hostile to Europe, many EU member states share the UN majority’s anti-Israel and anti-American positions. So by voting with the majority, EU member states are able to act on their prejudices without having to own up to them. Moreover, many EU states have irredentist Islamic minorities. Joining the Israel-bashers at the UN is a low-cost way to appease them.
On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that he will address the UN General Assembly in New York next week and put the truth about the Palestinian cause on the table.
Perhaps someone will be moved by his words.
Perhaps not.
But whether he makes a difference or not, at least reason will have one defender at the UN next week.
caroline@carolineglick.com
AICI
de vazut si un comentariu savuros pe marginea “capodoperei” de mai sus
AICI
Comentariu prin mihaibeltechi — septembrie 17, 2011 @ 6:04 am |
Israel’s path to victory
By Caroline B. Glick
The US Congress is providing the Jewish state with a path to security. So why is Netanyahu hesitating?
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | There is something surreal about the coverage of developments this week at the UN. The general tenor is akin to the showdown at the O.K. Corral. Either the Palestinians win recognition of statehood, or they don’t. If they do, they win. If they don’t, Israel wins.
The problem with this message is that even if the Palestinians don’t receive UN membership they still win. There is no scenario in which Israel wins at the UN. The reason is simple. The UN is profoundly hostile to Israel. It has a large, permanent, automatic majority of members that always supports harming Israel.
In the present circumstances, the best case scenario for Israel is that the Palestinians bring their membership resolution before the Security Council and the US immediately vetoes it. If that happens, at least we’ll have closure in this particular fight.
But even such a “victory” will have little lasting effect. There is nothing preventing the Palestinians from reinstating their membership request whenever they want. And given the sympathy their current membership bid has won them, the Palestinians have every reason to repeat the process again and again and again.
By Thursday, it appeared that the most likely outcome of their present statehood bid will not be a quick US veto in the Security Council, but rather something much worse for Israel. Wednesday morning talk had already begun of a long drawn out period of deliberation at the Security Council which could last weeks or months or even longer. The idea is that during that time, the US and the Europeans will place massive pressure on Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians in order to restart stillborn negotiations. And the specter of a Security Council endorsement of Palestinian statehood will loom over Israel’s head the entire time like the Sword of Damocles.
Rather than wash its hands of this loser’s game and move its policies to a diplomatic battlefield where it has a chance of actually winning, the government is playing out its losing hand as if what Israel does makes a difference. Even worse, the Netanyahu government is refusing to consider crafting a strategy for victory that it can advance outside the hostile confines of the UN.
This is not simply a failure of imagination. It is a failure of cognition. It is a failure to notice the significance of what is already happening.
Israel’s friends in the US Congress have put forward two measures that pave the way for just such a strategy for victory. By failing to recognize the opportunity they represent for Israel, the government is showing a distressing lack of competence.
The government’s behavior is probably due to force of habit. Since the initiation of the phony peace process with the PLO 18 years ago, at their best, Israel’s governments have justified the Jewish state’s control over territories it won control over in the 1967 Six Day War on the basis of our security needs. Without the Jordan Valley, Israel is vulnerable to foreign invasion from the east. Without Gush Etzion to Jerusalem’s south and Gush Adumim to its north, the capital is vulnerable to attack. Without overall Israeli security control over Judea and Samaria, Israel’s population centers are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. And so on and so forth.
All of these statements are accurate. But they are also defensive. While Israel has been defending its right to security, the Palestinians have been on the offensive arguing that all the land that Israel took control over from Jordan in 1967 belongs to them by ancestral right. And so for the past 18 years, the conflict has been framed as a dispute between the Palestinians’ rights versus Israel’s security requirements.
Like its willingness to place itself at the UN’s mercy, Israel’s willingness to accept this characterization of the Palestinian conflict with Israel has doomed its cause to repeated and ever escalating failure. For if the land belongs to the Palestinians then whether or not their control of the land endangers Israel is irrelevant.
This is the reason the US’s support for Israel’s right to defensible borders has been reduced from support for perpetual Israeli control over unified Jerusalem and some fifty percent of Judea and Samaria in 1993 to US support for a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines — including the partition of Jerusalem — in 2011. You can define “defensive needs” down. Defining rights down is a more difficult undertaking.
The irony here is that Israel’s sovereign rights to Judea and Samaria are ironclad while the Palestinians’ are flimsy. As the legal heir to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, Israel is the legal sovereign of Judea and Samaria.
Moreover, Israel’s historic rights to the cradle of Jewish civilization are incontrovertible.
And yet, because Israel has not wanted to impede on the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians, for the past 18 years it has avoided mentioning its rights and instead focused solely on its security requirements. Consequently, outside of Bible-literate Christian communities, today most people are comfortable parroting the totally false Palestinian claim that Jews have no rights to Judea, Samaria or Jerusalem. They further insist that rights to these areas belong exclusively to the Palestinians who did not even exist as a distinct national community in 1967.
As for Israel’s allies in the US Congress, they have responded to the PLO’s UN statehood gambit with two important legislative initiatives. First Cong. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee introduced a bill calling for the US to end its financial support for the Palestinian Authority and drastically scale-back its financial support for the UN if the UN upgrades the PLO’s membership status in any way. Ros-Lehtinen’s bill shows Israel that there is powerful support for an Israeli offensive that will make the Palestinians pay a price for their diplomatic aggression.
Ros-Lehtinen’s bill is constructive for two reasons. First, it makes the Palestinians pay for their adversarial behavior. This will make them think twice before again escalating their diplomatic warfare against Israel. Second, it begins an overdue process of delegitimizing the Palestinian cause, which as is now clear is inseparable from the cause of Israel’s destruction.
Were Israel to follow Ros-Lehtinen’s lead and cut off its transfer of tax revenues to the PA, and indeed, stop collecting taxes on the PA’s behalf, it would be advancing Israel’s interests in several ways.
It would remind the Palestinians that they need Israel far more than Israel needs them.
Israel would make them pay a price for their diplomatic aggression.
Israel would end its counterproductive policy of giving the openly hostile PA an automatic seal of approval regardless of their treatment of Israel. Israel would diminish the financial resources at the PA’s disposal for the advance of its war against Israel.
Finally, Israel would pave the way for the disbandment of the PA and its replacement by another authority in Judea and Samaria.
And this brings us to the second Congressional initiative taken in anticipation of the PLO’s UN statehood gambit. Earlier this month, Cong. Joe Walsh and thirty co-sponsors issued a resolution supporting Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria.
While annexation sounds like a radical formula, the fact is that Israel already implemented a similar move twice when it applied Israeli law to Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. And the heavens didn’t fall in either case. Indeed, the situation on the ground was stabilized.
Moreover, just Israel remains willing to consider ceding these territories in the framework of a real peace with its neighbors, so the application of Israeli law to Judea and Samaria would not prevent these areas from being ceded to another sovereign in the framework of a future peace deal.
And while not eliminating the prospects of a future peace, by applying Israeli law to Judea and Samaria, Israel would reverse one of the most pernicious effects of the 18-year-old phony peace process: the continuous erosion of international recognition of Israel’s sovereign rights to these areas.
With each passing round of failed negotiations, offers that Israel made but were rejected were not forgotten. Rather they formed the starting point for the next round of failed negotiations. So while then prime minister Ehud Barak for instance claimed that his offer to cede the Temple Mount was contingent of the signing of a peace treaty, when the so-called Middle East Quartet issued its roadmap plan for peace, Barak’s ostensibly cancelled offer was the starting point of negotiations.
By applying Israeli law to Judea and Samaria, Israel would change the baseline for future negotiations in a manner that enhances its bargaining position.
Perhaps most importantly, by applying its laws to the areas, Israel would demonstrate that it understands finally that rights need to be asserted by deeds, not just by words if they are to be taken seriously.
Thursday the New York Times published a news story/analysis that essentially rewrote the history of the last two and a half years. The paper ignored Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s open admission that US President Barack Obama compelled him to radicalize his own policies towards Israel when Obama demanded that Israel abrogate Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as a precondition for negotiations. This was a precondition the Palestinians themselves had never demanded. And by making it a US demand, Obama ended any possibility of resuming negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel.
By the Times’ telling, Obama is a victim of the combined forces of an intransigent Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobby that holds sway in Congress. These nefarious forces made it impossible for Obama to bring the sort of pressure to bear on Israel that would have placated the Arab world and paved the way for a peaceful settlement. And in the absence of such presidential power, Israel and its lobbyists wrecked Obama’s reputation in the Arab world.
The lesson that Israel should take from the Times’ borderline anti-Semitic historical revisionism and conspiracy theories is twofold. First, Israel will never be rewarded for its concessions. The Times and its fellow anti-Israel activists don’t care that since 2009 — and indeed since 1993 — Israel has made one concession after another only to be rewarded time after time with ever escalating demands for more concessions. The Times and its fellow Israel baiters have a story of Israeli conspiracies and bad faith to tell. And they will tell that tale regardless of objective facts and observable reality.
This brings us to the second lesson of the Times article specifically and the experience at the UN generally. Israel has nothing to lose and everything to gain from going on the offensive. Our friends in the US Congress have shown us a path that lays open to us to follow. And we must follow it. Since we’ll be blamed no matter what we do, we have no excuse for not doing what is best for us.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0911/glick092311.php3
Comentariu prin mihaibeltechi — septembrie 23, 2011 @ 11:12 am |
For the New Year . . . secular Jewry must learn to embrace true friends and fiercely fight enemies
By Caroline B. Glick
It is possible that so many are simply unaware of the disparities between reality and their perceptions of reality? There is a duty to educate ourselves about the threats that reality poses to ourselves and our people
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Upon his return to Ramallah from New York, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was greeted by a crowd of several thousand well-wishers. They applauded him for his speech at the UN. There, Abbas erased Jewish history from the Land of Israel, denied Israel’s right to exist and pledged his commitment to establish a racist Palestinian state ethnically cleansed of all Jews.
Many of Abbas’s supporters in Ramallah held posters of US President Barack Obama. On them Obama was portrayed as a monkey. The caption read, “The First Jewish President of the United States.”
The fact that the Palestinians from Fatah and Hamas alike are Jew hating racists should surprise no one who has been paying a modicum of attention to the Palestinian media and general culture. Since the PA was established in 1994 in the framework of the peace process between Israel and the PLO, it has used the media organs, schools and mosques it controls to spew out a constant flow of anti-Semitic propaganda. Much of the Jew hating bile is indistinguishable from anti-Jewish propaganda published by the Nazis.
As for their anti-black bigotry, it is enough to recall the frequency with which Condoleezza Rice was depicted as a monkey and a devil in the Palestinian and pan-Arab media during George W. Bush’s presidency to realize that the racist depiction of Obama was not a fluke. Moreover, and more disturbingly, it is worth recalling that like its fellow Arab League members, the PA has strongly supported Sudan’s genocide of black Africans in Darfur.
To a degree, the willingness of African Americans to turn a blind eye to Arab anti-black prejudice is understandable. Since the mid-1960s, oil rich Arab kingdoms led by Saudi Arabia have spent hundreds of millions of petrodollars in outreach to African Americans. This outreach includes but is not limited to massive proselytization efforts among inner city blacks. The combination of a strong and growing African American Muslim population and a general sense of amity towards Muslims as a result of outreach efforts contribute to a willingness on the part of African Americans to overlook Arab anti-black racism. Unlike African Americans, Jewish Americans have been targeted by no serious outreach campaigns by the likes of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world. To the contrary, as Mitchell Bard documented in his book Arab Lobbythese Arab nations have spared no effort in anti-Israel lobbying in the US. Among the Arab lobby’s goals is to undermine the legitimacy of American Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel.
Furthermore, the anti-Jewish atmosphere in the Arab world is far more comprehensive and poisonous than its anti-black prejudice. A Pew global opinion poll from 2008 showed that hatred of Jews is effectively universal in the Arab world and overwhelming in non-Arab Muslim states. In Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, between 95 and 97 percent of respondents expressed hatred of Jews. In Indonesia, Turkey and Pakistan between two thirds and three quarters of respondents expressed hatred of Jews.
Jew hatred among Muslim minorities in the West is less overwhelming. But Muslim antagonism towards Jews vastly outstrips that of the general populations of their countries. According to a Pew survey from 2006, while7 percent of British citizens express unfavorable views of Jews, 47 percent of British Muslims admit to such views. In France, 13 percent of the general population admits to harboring negative feelings towards Jews and 28 percent of French Muslims do. Likewise in Germany, 22 percent of the general population acknowledges anti-Semitic views and 44 percent of German Muslims do.
More dangerously, the quantity of anti-Semitic attacks carried out by Muslims in the West far outstrips their percentage in the general population. According to Pew data, in 2010 Muslims comprised just 4.6 percent of the population of the UK but carried out 39 percent of the anti-Semitic attacks. Moreover, according to the Times Online, in 2006, 37 percent of British Muslims claimed that British Jews are legitimate targets for attacks. Only 30 percent of British Muslims disagreed.
With the overwhelming data showing that throughout the Arab world there is strong support for organizations and regimes which advocate the genocide of world Jewry, the American Jewish community could have been expected to devote the majority of their attention and resources to exposing and combating this existential threat. Just as the American Jewish community dedicated itself in the past to causes like the liberation of Soviet Jewry and fighting neo-Nazi groups in the US and throughout the world, it could have been expected that from the Anti-Defamation League to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to AIPAC, that major American Jewish groups would be using the financial and human resources at their disposal to defend against this violent, genocidal hatred.
But this has not occurred. Many leading American Jewish organizations continue to be far more involved in combating the currently relatively benign anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians than confronting the escalating dangers of Muslim anti-Semitism.
According to a Gallup poll released last month, 80 percent of American Jews have favorable views of American Muslims. 70 percent believe that they are not supportive of al Qaeda. These data indicate that American Jews are second only to American Muslims in their support for Muslim Americans. Indeed six percent more American Jews than American Muslims believe that American Muslims face prejudice due to their religion.
American Jewish championing of American Muslims is disconcerting when compared with American Jewish treatment of the philo-Semitic Evangelical Christians. Matthew Knee discussed this issue in depth in a recent article published at the Legal Insurrection website.
In a 2003 Pew survey, 42 percent of American Jews expressed antagonism towards Evangelical Christians. In a 2004 American National Election Study, Jews on average rated Evangelical Christians at 30 out of 100 on a “feeling thermometer,” where 1 was cold and 100 was hot.
A 2005 American Jewish Committee survey found that Jews assessed that following Muslims, Evangelical Christians have the highest propensity for being anti-Semites. And yet, in the same 2004 American National Election Survey, Evangelical Christians rated Jews an average of 82 on the 1-100 feelings scale. Evangelical Christians rated Catholics at 80.
Consistent survey data show that levels of anti-Semitism among Evangelical Christians is either the same as or slightly lower than the national average According to a 2007 ADL survey, the US average is 15 percent.
There is a clear disparity between survey data on anti-Semitism among various American ethnic groups and American Jews’ assessment of the prevalence of anti-Semitism among the same groups. The AJC survey found that American Jews believed that 29 percent of Evangelicals are largely anti-Semitic. They assessed that only 7 percent of Hispanics and 19 percent of African Americans are anti-Semites.
As it works out, their perceptions are completely incorrect. According to the 2007 ADL survey, foreign born Hispanics and African Americans harbor significantly stronger anti-Semitic views than the national average. 29 percent of foreign born Hispanics harbor very anti-Semitic views. 32 percent of African Americans harbor deeply anti-Semitic views.
Like Jews, Hispanics, African Americans and Muslims vote disproportionately for the Democratic Party. Evangelical Christians on the other hand, are reliably Republican. A 2009 survey on US anti-Semitism conducted by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco found that Democrats are more likely to be anti-Semitic than Republicans.
The Gallup survey from last month showing American Jews’ deep support for American Muslims is of particular interest because that support stands in stark contrast with survey data concerning American Jewish perception of Muslim American anti-Semitism.
The 2005 AJC survey showed that American Jews believe that 58 percent of American Muslims are anti-Semitic. That is, American Jews are Muslim Americans’ strongest non-Muslim defenders at the same time they are convinced that most Muslim Americans are anti-Semites. What can explain this counterintuitive behavior? And how can we account for the apparent pattern of incorrect Jewish perceptions of anti-Semitism among Evangelical Christians on the one hand and fellow Democrats on the other hand.
As Knee argues, the disparity may very well be due to partisan loyalties. The Democratic Party has openly engaged in fear mongering and demonization of Evangelical Christians in order to maintain Jewish loyalty to the party. Knee quotes then Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean’s statement that “Jews should feel comfortable in being American Jews without being constrained from practicing their faith or be compelled to convert to another religion.”
As to Muslims, Knee cites a press release from the National Jewish Democratic Council from March attacking Cong. Peter King’s hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. In the press release, the NJDC claimed that such hearings “can and will” harm religious tolerance in America. That is, the NJDC implied that by investigating the radicalization of American Muslims — and its concomitant transformation of American Muslims into supporters of the genocidal Jew hatred endemic among radical Muslims worldwide — Cong. King is endangering Jews.
If American Jews are most concerned with being able to maintain their loyalty to the Democratic Party, then it makes sense for them to wildly exaggerate Evangelical anti-Semitism. It is reasonable for them to underestimate African American and Hispanic anti-Semitism, and ignore the higher rates of anti-Semitism among Democrats than among Republicans. Moreover, it makes sense for them to follow their party’s lead in failing to address the dangers of global Islamic anti-Semitism.
None of this makes sense however if American Jews are most concerned with defending Jews — in America and worldwide from anti-Semitic sentiments and violence.
Tonight we begin our celebration of the New Year. Rosh Hashana marks a period of soul searching among Jews. We are called upon at this time to account for our actions and our failures to act and to improve our faithfulness to our people, to our laws and to G0d.
It is possible that American Jews are simply unaware of the disparities between reality and their perceptions of reality. But it is the duty of all Jews to educate ourselves about the threats that reality poses to ourselves and our people.
At the UN last week, Abbas received accolades and applause from all quarters for his anti-Semitic assault on Jewish history and the Jewish state. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s remarks were applauded by Israel supporters in the audience in the General Assembly.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0911/glick092811.php3
As Israel is increasingly isolated and Jews worldwide are under attack, it is my prayer for the coming year that the American Jewish community will come to terms with a difficult reality and the choices it entails, and act with the majority of their fellow Americans to defend Israel and combat anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world.
Comentariu prin Fabio — septembrie 29, 2011 @ 11:13 am |
Justice for Jonathan Pollard
American Jewish leaders deserve praise for their willingness to plead on Pollard’s behalf. Pollard committed a crime. But his punishment far outweighs his misdeeds.
Next month, convicted Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard will begin his 27th year in prison, and the Obama administration is displaying stunning insensitivity to what this means for the American Jewish community.
Pollard was arrested in 1985 for transferring classified documents to Israel during his service at US Naval Intelligence. In 1987, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for his crime.
Pollard’s sentence contradicted his plea bargain agreement. It was based, among other things, on an impact assessment report of his crimes that was authored by CIA officer Aldrich Ames. At the time of Pollard’s arrest, Ames had been spying for the Soviet Union for two years.
Ames was arrested for espionage in 1994. He was responsible for the deaths of at least 10 agents working for US intelligence in the USSR.
Ames reportedly blamed Pollard for some of the agent deaths caused by his own espionage.
Pollard’s life sentence was grossly disproportionate to the sentences routinely given to offenders who transfer classified information to US-allied governments. The median sentence for such crimes is two years in prison.
Until last year, there was a longstanding consensus in the US political and intelligence communities opposed to granting clemency to Pollard.
This consensus evaporated last year. In late 2010, US President Barack Obama received letters recommending commutation of Pollard’s sentence to time served from former CIA director R. James Woolsey, and from retired senator Dennis DeConcini, who served as the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time of Pollard’s arrest and sentencing.
Obama received similar letters from former secretaries of state George Schultz and Henry Kissinger. He received requests for commutation from Sen. John McCain and former attorney-general Michael Mukasey.
Lawrence Korb, who served as assistant defense secretary under Caspar Weinberger, has spearheaded the effort to release Pollard. Korb has stated categorically that Pollard’s harsh sentence was the result of Weinberger’s antipathy for Jews.
Other US luminaries who have called for Obama to grant Pollard clemency include former congressman and presidential adviser Lee Hamilton, former senator and presidential adviser Alan Simpson, Harvard law professor and Obama mentor Charles Ogletree, US Appellate Court Judge Stephen Williams and former deputy attorney- general Phillip Heymann. Scores of congressmen, several senators and more than 500 clergymen have called for Pollard’s release from prison.
Answering public entreaties from Korb and Pollard’s wife, Esther, in early January, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu became the first Israeli leader to issue a formal, public appeal for clemency for Pollard. Netanyahu read the text of his appeal to Obama from the Knesset podium and submitted it to the White House on January 4.
One of the main reasons for the urgency of the current appeal is Pollard’s failing health. Aside from that, the basic arguments given by his advocates are the disproportionate length of Pollard’s sentence; his deep, repeatedly stated remorse for his actions; his exemplary behavior in prison; and the fact that deterrence has been achieved.
OBAMA HAS failed to respond to Israel’s formal request for clemency.
He has been silent in the face of lesser requests as well. When Pollard’s father, Morris, was on his deathbed in June, Obama did not respond to formal requests to permit Pollard to visit him in the hospital. He similarly failed to respond to formal requests for Pollard to attend his father’s funeral.
Obama’s cold silence was broken last week by his agent Vice President Joseph Biden. According to the New York Jewish Week, in a meeting with 15 rabbis in South Florida on September 23, Biden provided an unsolicited monologue about Pollard’s case. Repeatedly referring to Pollard as a “traitor,” Biden said, “It would take the Third Coming before I would support letting Pollard out.”
According to The New York Times, in making the statement, Biden, who is considered a friend of the US Jewish community and of Israel, served as Obama’s fall guy. Biden’s job was to deflect criticism of Obama’s unstated decision not to release Pollard away from the president.
In the event, Obama’s decision to send Biden out to reject calls for Pollard’s release backfired.
Rather than killing the issue, Biden’s unbridled assault on Pollard caused the US Jewish leadership to unify around Pollard and call for his release. As Anti-Defamation League National Director Abe Foxman told Channel 2 on Wednesday, Jewish leaders had never discussed Pollard’s case publicly, but after Biden went public, they decided that they must follow suit. The leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements were all quoted by Jewish Week calling for Pollard’s release.
Their calls came just before Biden’s previously scheduled Rosh Hashana reception for Jewish leaders. So at the party on Wednesday, Biden was beset by leaders asking him to reconsider his position and recommend clemency for Pollard. In response, Biden agreed to meet with a small group of Jewish leaders in the near future to discuss Pollard’s case.
Biden’s assault on Pollard was strange for two main reasons. First, it was bad politics. Obama reportedly tasked Biden with rebuilding Jewish support for the administration. That support has frayed in the face of Obama’s harsh treatment of Israel.
It is odd that in the context of Biden’s outreach attempts, he chose to express a hostile position on Pollard that couldn’t help but raise the hackles of the very community he was dispatched to woo. Rather than bringing the US Jewish community closer to the administration, Biden accomplished the astounding feat of unifying the fractured community in opposition to his position.
The second reason that Biden’s anti-Pollard harangue made no sense is because it flew in the face of the claim that Obama has turned over a new leaf on Israel. Obama’s supporters have argued that his speech at the General Assembly last month where he opposed the PLO’s efforts to gain UN membership as a sovereign state was a watershed event for the president. In announcing his intention to veto a Palestinian statehood resolution in the UN Security Council, his supporters argue that Obama abandoned his previous hostility towards Israel and embraced it as an ally.
BIDEN’S ATTACK on Pollard is just the latest in a stunning line of rebukes of Israel by Obama’s senior surrogates over the past 10 days that cast a pall on that supposed watershed event. First Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US opposes even symbolic recognition of Israel’s capital city Jerusalem. Then she attacked Israel for approving new housing construction in Jerusalem.
Following on Clinton’s heels, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta launched a public assault on Israel both ahead of and during his visit early this week.
Panetta seemingly made US support for Israel contingent on Israel’s willingness to make concessions to its increasingly radicalized neighbors, saying, “As [the Israelis] take risks for peace, we will be able to provide the security that they will need in order to ensure that they can have the room hopefully to negotiate.”
Panetta further accused Israel of isolating itself diplomatically due to its unwillingness to take what he considers sufficient risks. Just weeks after US intervention was needed to force Egypt’s military junta to prevent the murder of six Israeli embassy guards besieged by a mob of Egyptian rioters who took over the embassy in Cairo, Panetta added, “Real security can only be achieved by both a strong diplomatic effort as well as a strong effort to project your military strength.”
Besides blaming Israel for the absence of peace with the Palestinians and for post-Mubarak Egypt’s rapid radicalization, Panetta publicly rejected Israel’s right to take military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, claiming all action against Iran must be multilateral. In stating this position, Panetta effectively gave a green light for Iran to develop nuclear weapons.
This is the case because the sanctions policy the Obama administration clings to has already demonstrably failed to deter Iran from advancing its nuclear weapons program.
Clinton’s attack on Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, Panetta’s assault on Israel’s right to defend itself from the threat of genocide, and his unrestrained criticism of Israel’s refusal to genuflect before increasingly belligerent neighbors all indicated that Obama’s speech at the UN was not a new chapter in his administration’s treatment of Israel. Rather, it was a one-off response to concern about the loss of American Jewish support for the president. That concern was spiked by the Republican victory in New York’s Ninth Congressional District’s special election last month.
Biden’s assault on Pollard – and through him, the American Jewish community – was a similar sign that Obama has not let go of his antipathy for Israel.
Obama’s behavior on Israel following the Democrats’ congressional upset replicates his response to Republican Sen. Scott Brown’s upset victory in the special Senate election in Massachusetts in January 2010. Brown was elected at the height of the debate on Obama’s nationalized healthcare plan.
For the first couple of weeks after Brown’s election, Obama and his surrogates signaled their willingness to compromise with Republicans in light of Massachusetts voters’ rebuke of their partisan brinksmanship on the healthcare issue. But within two months of Brown’s victory, Obama and his allies had doubled down and passed their highly controversial healthcare program with no Republican support and against the opposition of the majority of American voters.
In the case of both Israel and healthcare, Obama has opted to ignore the political consequences of his actions and press on with his ideological agenda.
The lesson Pollard and his supporters in the US and in Israel should take from Obama’s behavior is that they must continue to press on in their campaign for Pollard’s release as energetically and as relentlessly as possible. As the election date nears, if Obama’s polling numbers continue to drop, it is possible – although unlikely – that he will decide that desperate times call for desperate measures and grant Pollard clemency.
Even if Obama fails to act in such a politically sensible fashion, a public and outspoken campaign for Pollard’s release still makes sense. At a minimum, it can set the conditions for a new president to grant Pollard clemency immediately upon taking office, by causing Obama’s Republican opponent to commit to such a course of action.
Speaking of Pollard’s case with Jewish Week, Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said, “In the midst of the Days of Awe, as we ponder the wrongdoings we have committed and pray for God’s mercy, we pray as well that President Obama will act with mercy and grant Mr. Pollard long-overdue clemency.”
American Jewish leaders deserve praise for their willingness to plead on Pollard’s behalf. And they should be urged to continue to highlight Pollard’s plight and call for his immediate release.
Pollard committed a crime. But his punishment far outweighs his misdeeds. Whether Obama releases him from his long suffering or not, it is heartwarming that due to Biden’s unbridled assault on Pollard, the American Jewish leadership has found its voice and is calling for justice to be done.
AICI
Comentariu prin Fabio — octombrie 8, 2011 @ 3:31 pm |
The forgotten Christians of the East
By Caroline B. Glick
t is unclear what either Western governments or Western churches think they are achieving by turning a blind eye to the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | On Sunday night, Egyptian Copts staged what was supposed to be a peaceful vigil at Egypt’s state television headquarters in Cairo. The 1,000 Christians represented the ancient Christian community of some 8 million whose presence in Egypt predates the establishment of Islam by several centuries. They gathered in Cairo to protest the recent burning of two churches by Islamic mobs and the rapid escalation of state-supported violent attacks on Christians by Muslim groups since the overthrow of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February.
According to Coptic sources, the protesters Sunday night were beset by Islamic attackers who were rapidly backed up by military forces. Between 19 and 40 Copts were killed by soldiers and Muslim attackers. They were run over by military vehicles, beaten, shot and dragged through the streets of Cairo.
State television Sunday night reported only that three soldiers had been killed. According to al-Ahram Online, the military attacked the studios of al-Hurra television on Sunday night to block its broadcast of information on the military assault on the Copts.
Apparently the attempt to control information about what happened worked. Monday’s news reports about the violence gave little indication of the identity of the dead or wounded. They certainly left untold the story of what actually happened in Cairo on Sunday night.
In a not unrelated event, Lebanon’s Maronite Catholic Patriarch Bechara Rai caused a storm two weeks ago. During an official visit to Paris, Rai warned French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria could be a disaster for Christians in Syria and throughout the region. Today the Western-backed Syrian opposition is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. Rai cautioned that the overthrow of President Bashar Assad could lead to civil war and the establishment of an Islamic regime.
In Iraq, the Iranian and Syrian-sponsored insurgency that followed the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in 2003 fomented a bloody jihad against Iraq’s Christian population. This month marks the anniversary of last year’s massacre of 58 Christian worshippers in a Catholic church in Baghdad. A decade ago there were 800,000 Christians in Iraq. Today there are 150,000.
Under the Shah of Iran, Iran’s Christians were more or less free to practice their religion.
Today, they are subject to the whims of Islamic overlords who know no law other than Islamic supremacism.
Take the plight of Yousef Nadarkhani, an evangelical Protestant preacher who was arrested two years ago, tried and sentenced to death for apostasy and refusal to disavow his Christian faith. There is no law against apostasy in Iran, but no matter. Ayatollah Khomeini opposed apostasy. And so does Islamic law.
Once Nadarkhani’s story was publicized in the West the Iranians changed their course.
Now they have reportedly abandoned the apostasy charge and are sentencing Nadarkhani to death for rape. The fact that he was never charged or convicted of rape is neither here nor there.
Palestinian Christians have similarly suffered under their popularly elected governments.
When the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, Christians made up 80 percent of Bethlehem’s population. Today they comprise less than 20% of the population.
Since Hamas “liberated” Gaza in 2007, the area’s ancient Christian minority has been under constant attack. With only 3,000 members, Gaza’s Christian community has seen its churches, convents, book stores and libraries burned by Hamas members and their allies. Its members have been killed and assaulted. While Hamas has pledged to protect the Christians of Gaza, no one has been arrested for anti-Christian violence.
JUST AS the Jews of the Islamic world were forcibly removed from their ancient communities by the Arab rulers with the establishment of Israel in 1948, so Christians have been persecuted and driven out of their homes. Populist Islamic and Arab regimes have used Islamic religious supremacism and Arab racial chauvinism against Christians as rallying cries to their subjects. These calls have in turn led to the decimation of the Christian populations of the Arab and Islamic world.
For instance, at the time of Lebanese independence from France in 1946 the majority of Lebanese were Christians. Today less than 30% of Lebanese are Christians. In Turkey, the Christian population has dwindled from 2 million at the end of World War I to less than 100,000 today. In Syria, at the time of independence Christians made up nearly half of the population. Today 4% of Syrians are Christian. In Jordan half a century ago 18% of the population was Christian. Today 2% of Jordanians are Christian.
Christians are prohibited from practicing Christianity in Saudi Arabia. In Pakistan, the Christian population is being systematically destroyed by regime-supported Islamic groups. Church burnings, forced conversions, rape, murder, kidnap and legal persecution of Pakistani Christians has become a daily occurrence.
Sadly for the Christians of the Islamic world, their cause is not being championed either by Western governments or by Western Christians. Rather than condition French support for the Syrian opposition on its leaders’ commitment to religious freedom for all in a post-Assad Syria, the French Foreign Ministry reacted with anger to Rai’s warning of what is liable to befall Syria’s Christians in the event President Bashar Assad and his regime are overthrown. The Foreign Ministry published a statement claiming it was “surprised and disappointed,” by Rai’s statement.
The Obama administration was even less sympathetic. Rai is now travelling through the US and Latin America on a three week visit to �migr� Maronite communities. The existence of these communities is a direct result of Arab and Islamic persecution of Lebanese Maronite Christians.
Rai’s visit to the US was supposed to begin with a visit to Washington and meetings with senior administration officials including President Barack Obama. Yet, following his statement in Paris, the administration cancelled all of its scheduled meetings with him. That is, rather than consider the dangers that Rai warned about and use US influence to increase the power of Christians and Kurds and other minorities in any post- Assad Syrian government, the Obama administration decided to blackball Rai for pointing out the dangers.
Aside from Evangelical Protestants, most Western churches are similarly uninterested in defending the rights of their co-religionists in the Islamic world. Most mainline Protestant churches, from the Anglican Church and its US and international branches to the Methodists, Baptists, Mennonite and other churches have organized no sustained efforts to protect or defend the rights of Christians in the Muslim world.
Instead, over the past decade these churches and their related international bodies have made repeated efforts to attack the only country in the Middle East in which the Christian population has increased in the past 60 years – Israel.
As for the Vatican, in the five years since Pope Benedict XVI laid down the gauntlet at his speech in Regensburg and challenged the Muslim world to act with reason and tolerance it its dealing with other religions, the Vatican has abandoned this principled stand. A true discourse of equals has been replaced by supplication to Islam in the name of ecumenical understanding. Last year Benedict hosted a Synod on Christians in the Middle East that made no mention of the persecution of Christians by Islamic and populist forces and regimes. Instead, Israel was singled out for criticism.
The Vatican’s outreach has extended to Iran where it sent a representative to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s faux counter terror conference. As Giulio Meotti wrote this week in Ynet, whereas all the EU ambassadors walked out of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denying speech at the UN’s second Durban conference in Geneva in 2009, the Vatican’s ambassador remained in his seat. The Vatican has embraced leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and the Middle East.
It is unclear what either Western governments or Western churches think they are achieving by turning a blind eye to the persecution and decimation of Christian communities in the Muslim world. As Sunday’s events in Egypt and other daily anti-Christian attacks by Muslims against Christians throughout the region show, their behavior is not appeasing anyone. What is clear enough is that they shall reap what they sow.
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Comentariu prin klein raluca — octombrie 11, 2011 @ 11:45 am |
Iran’s war to win
By Caroline B. Glick
It is fairly obvious that the administration will take no military action whatsoever against Iran’s nuclear program
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The Obama administration’s response to Iran’s plan to bring its 32-year-old war against the United States to the US capital is the newest confirmation that President Barack Obama has no intention of taking action to remove or diminish the threat Iran poses to the US, its allies and interests.
Last week, the Justice Department revealed that law enforcement officials foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US and to blow up the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington.
They arrested an Iranian-American dual national who is a relative of a senior terror mastermind serving in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The dual national, Mansoor Arbabsiar, contacted an American undercover agent whom he believed worked for one of Mexico’s drug cartels and asked for the cartel to assist Iran in carrying out the plot.
Iran declared war on the US in 1979. Since then, it has used its terrorist arms in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region to murder Americans. It has used its terror arms in Latin American to target US interests and allies. And now it has been caught in the act of recruiting agents to assist it in carrying out acts of terror in Washington, DC.
Indeed, upon reflection, it is clear that the announced aim of isolating Iran involves doing nothing to retaliate against Iran for its aggression.
There are three reasons that this is the case. First, by placing the burden for punishing Iran on the nebulous “international community,” Obama is signaling that under his leadership, America does not view operational plans to attack US interests on American soil as something that America should deal with.
In Iran’s case, the “international community” means Russia and China. The two UN Security Council-veto-wielding regimes have collaborated with Iran on its illicit activities generally and its development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles specifically. Russia and China have blocked all serious sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. Their active defense of Iran at the Security Council renders it a foregone conclusion that the UN will never authorize military force to be used against Iran’s nuclear installations.
Since Russia and China prefer to see Iran acquire nuclear weapons than authorize any UN measure that could prevent or slow down this development, it is hard to imagine either government suddenly agreeing to isolate Iran just because it planned to kill the Saudi ambassador and blow up a couple of foreign embassies in Washington.
THE SECOND reason it is reasonable to conclude that the administration is being disingenuous in its tough talk about Iran is because the administration tells us it is being disingenuous. Speaking to The New York Times over the weekend, several senior White House officials said they were considering options to steeply escalate the US’s sanctions against Iran.
Specifically, they said the administration is mulling the prospect of barring financial transactions with Iran’s central bank. They also said that the White House is thinking about barring contact with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards-owned company that controls the sale of Iranian oil and natural gas to foreign countries.
Then again, administration sources also told the Times that they aren’t certain that the sanctions are such a good idea. If the US blocks the only viable path toward purchasing Iranian gas and oil and otherwise makes it impossible for Iran to sell its natural resources, they warned, the US would cause the market price of both commodities to rise sharply, thus harming its own economy.So probably the US won’t ratchet up sanctions on the regime after all.
Then there is the notion of military retaliation. After the news broke of the foiled terror plot, Obama let it be known that the “military option is on the table.” But then, he didn’t specify the goal of the military option or its target. Is the US developing an option for attacking Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities? Is it preparing to attack Iranian regime targets in an effort to topple the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world? Is it planning a military strike against IRGC targets in Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan? It is highly unlikely that the US is planning to undertake any of these missions. Over the weekend, the US announced that its troops would be fully removed from Iraq in January. Obama has insisted on withdrawing his surge troops from Afghanistan despite the Taliban resurgence in the country.
As for attacking regime targets, it is hard to imagine that after siding with the mullahs against democracy protesters in the aftermath of the 2009 stolen presidential elections, Obama would decide to call suddenly for the regime to be replaced – let alone take military action to advance that goal.
THEN THERE is the nuclear issue. Since Russia’s and China’s support for Iran at the Security Council rules out any option of a Security Council-sanctioned attack in Iran’s nuclear installations, it is fairly obvious that the administration will take no military action whatsoever against Iran’s nuclear program. This is, after all, the administration that believes the US must receive UN approval for any military operation.
Obama’s effectively pro-ayatollah policies have caused him to treat the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as essentially identical to the threat posed to the US by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As nuclear proliferation scholar Avner Cohen explained in an interview with The Jerusalem Post earlier this month, the administration is committed to a policy of containing a nuclear-armed Iran rather than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Cohen explained, “The US wants itself, and also Israel, to be engaged in a thorough effort to contain Iran – like the way the Soviet Union was contained during the Cold War – meaning that for all practical purposes and short of extreme circumstances, both the US and Israel would have to put aside the military option and instead work to contain Iran.”
According to Olli Heinonen, the former deputy director of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, the US will have an opportunity to put its nuclear containment policy toward Iran into action in the near future. In an interview two weeks ago with Der Spiegel, Heinonen asserted that within two years, the Iranians will have sufficient quantities of plutonium to produce atomic bombs. Within a year, they will have enough highly enriched uranium to have what is referred to as “break-out capacity,” meaning they can produce nuclear bombs at will.
The problem with Obama’s non-response to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its terror plot to attack Washington is that the Iranian regime is nothing like the Soviet Union. The regime whose first foray into international diplomacy involved taking a knife to the nation-state system by attacking the US embassy and holding its personnel hostage is not a strategic equivalent of the Soviet Union. A regime that lured 100,000 of its children to their deaths during the Iran-Iraq War by sending them out to the field as human mine sweepers is not a regime that can be contained through mutual assured destruction as the Soviets were.
Iran’s war against the US is a war that only Iran is fighting. And if something doesn’t change very quickly, it is clear that since Iran is the only side fighting the war, Iran is the only side that will win the war.
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Following the Justice Department’s announcement, the Obama administration proclaimed it intends to “isolate” Iran in the international community. While it sounds like a serious plan, particularly when it is stated assertively by Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the fact is that this is not a serious policy at all.
http://jewishworldreview.com/1011/glick101811.php3
Comentariu prin JOKER 2009 — octombrie 18, 2011 @ 11:06 am |
Whither the IDF?
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It was a normal Sabbath afternoon in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood. Children were outside visiting with their friends and playing in the empty streets. But the tranquility of the scene was destroyed in a moment when a Palestinian terrorist crept up on 17-year-old Yehuda Ne’emad and his friend and began stabbing Ne’emad in the abdomen and shoulder.
Ne’emad’s neighbor, a 12 year old girl told reporters that there but by the grace of God both she and her six year old little brother would have also been attacked. After stabbing Ne’emad, the Palestinian terrorist began chasing the two children. “It was only due to God’s help that I was able to escape,” she said. “I am sure that I couldn’t have escaped alone because he was much faster than me.”
The IDF, which failed to prevent the attack, played no role in saving their lives. One week later, the terrorist was still at large.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the IDF would view Ne’emad’s stabbing, along with the steep escalation of terror and sabotage from Ashdod to the Galilee to Gush Etzion over the past several days as a wake-up call. The time has come to ratchet up the IDF’s counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria to end the current wave of terror before the Palestinians have the opportunity to get their killing machines back in gear.
But shockingly, it appears that defeating terrorists is at the bottom of the IDF’s to-do list. Statements emanating from the IDF’s top echelons indicate its commanders are unaware that it is even their job to fight and defeat terrorists.
Israel’s release of hundreds of convicted Palestinian mass murderers in exchange for Gilad Schalit was a shot of adrenalin for Hamas and Fatah alike. Hamas views the swap as a vindication of its path of murder in the name of jihad. Fatah sees the swap as a challenge to its power that can be surmounted only by proving it can mount its own renewed terror assault against Israel.
Rather than meet this new challenge with an aggressive counter-terror initiative, earlier this week officers in the General Staff told Ha’aretz that Military Intelligence, the Civil Administration and the Shin Bet believe the best way to respond to Hamas’s ascendency is to release Fatah terrorists from jail and to give more land to Fatah’s terror-aligned security forces in Judea and Samaria.
That is, those charged with fighting Hamas terrorists recommend empowering Fatah terrorists. And they do so at a time when Fatah’s leadership refuses to have anything to do with the Israeli government and as Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is preparing for his summit with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
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Rather than recognize and confront the rising dangers from Hamas and Fatah alike, senior IDF commanders made statements this week indicating the army believes that its most important mission in Judea and Samaria today is to fight Jews.
This week Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon completed his two year stint as Judea and Samaria Division Commander. At his farewell party held two days after the terror attack in Jerusalem, Alon described the central challenges facing the IDF in Judea and Samaria as evicting Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria from their homes.
As he put it, “It’s likely that the IDF will be required to carry out, together with the police and the Civil Administration certain missions that are not within the national consensus, and do so in the face of a rising conflict with the extremist but expanding fringes of Israeli society.”
During his time as division commander, Alon ordered troops to shoot at Israeli residents of outpost communities slated for destruction with rubber bullets if they tried to oppose forcible expulsion.
Alon went on to speak of the grave threat of “Jewish terrorists.” He said, “Already today there is an extremist minority, marginal in size but not in influence, that is liable to steeply escalate the acts commonly referred to as ‘price tag,’ but are actually terrorism. These acts must not only be condemned; their prevention, and the arrest of their perpetrators must be undertaken more effectively than what we have managed to accomplish to date.”
As far as Alon is concerned, “Jewish terrorists,” pose a threat to Israel that is just as dangerous — if not more dangerous — than the threat posed by the real terrorists just freed from prison. And from OC Central Command Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrachi’s supportive statements at Alon’s farewell bash, it appears that Mizrachi agrees with him.
But how can this be? No “Jewish terrorists” have stabbed and murdered Palestinian children. No “Jewish terrorists” have sent missiles into Palestinian residential neighborhoods or strapped bombs on their chests to blow up Palestinian cafes and buses. What Jewish terrorism are they talking about?
True, earlier this month there was an arson attack at the mosque in Tuba Zangaria in the Galilee. While the media was quick to blame it on unknown Jewish assailants, it is hard to see why they would be the obvious or even most likely culprits. Residents of Tuba Zangaria torched their own clinic and community center. They routinely steal and kill livestock belonging to Jewish farmers in neighboring communities and set fire to their fields.
Aside from that, the police arrested two Jewish suspects but were compelled to release them this week due to lack of evidence. The police arrested a third suspect this week but failed to convince a judge to remand him to custody for ten days. The judge scolded the police for even asking given that they had no evidence of guilt.
Why would Jews from Judea or Samaria go to all the way to the Galilee to attack a mosque anyway? There are plenty closer to home.
The truth is that the “price tag” attacks are not acts of terror. They are acts of hooliganism and warrant criminal punishment. But their Jewish perpetrators are not terrorists. They are petty hooligans.
The fact of the matter is that there is no Jewish terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria or anywhere else. And there never has been. This was reported earlier this week by Amir Oren in Haaretz. Among other things, Oren’s article dealt with the 1994 Shamgar Commission formed in the aftermath of Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Arab worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Oren revealed that following the massacre, the Shin Bet recommended forming fake Jewish terror groups in order to provide an organizational framework for would-be Jewish terrorists that would enable the Shin Bet to find and arrest them. The commission adopted the recommendation in its final report.
Obviously, if there had been a Jewish terror infrastructure, the Shin Bet wouldn’t have needed to build fake ones. So what has motivated Alon to focus his attention on fighting a non-existent Jewish terror threat?
Throughout his two years in Judea and Samaria, Alon distinguished himself as one of the most politicized IDF commanders. He consistently overstepped his authority, contradicted government policies and advocated positions of the radical Left. For instance, in an interview earlier this month with the New York Times, Alon indicated that unlike the government, he supports a full IDF withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and doesn’t believe that a withdrawal will be dangerous for Israel.
In the same interview, Alon reprimanded the US Congress for threatening to cut off US funding to the Palestinian Authority’s terror-aligned security forces, claiming that they are a stabilizing force in the region. It is hard to think of another example of an IDF officer telling the US Congress how to spend US taxpayer dollars.
But while Alon’s political activism is more pronounced than that of his colleagues, he is far from the only commander who misapprehends the responsibilities of the military.
Take the IDF’s behavior on September 25, the day Abbas was in New York to request Palestinian membership as a state at the UN. A few hours before Abbas’s speech, 300 Palestinians from Kusra in Samaria attacked a platoon of soldiers from the Kfir Brigade commanded by Lt. Maor Asayag. When one of the soldiers reported his life was threatened, Asayag ordered him to use live fire to protect himself. His soldier’s life was saved and a 34 year old Palestinian attacker was killed.
For his actions, last week, Asayag was removed from his command and barred from further service in combat forces by his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Yoav Tzikrun. Shocked and angry at their commander’s removal, Asayag’s soldiers wrote a letter to Tzikrun defending Asayag’s behavior as exemplary. They also raised concern that he was punished for political reasons and demanded that he be restored to his command.
For their efforts, the soldiers received a harsh reprimand from Tzikrun.
Asayag wasn’t the only victim of the IDF’s decision to put politics before duty during the UN General Assembly session. That day the police, Central Command and the IDF Spokesman’s Unit falsely reported that the terrorist murder of Asher Palmer and his infant son Yonatan was a simple car accident. The two were killed by Palestinians who threw stones at the windshield of their car as they drove along the highway. It took two days and a court order to force the IDF to acknowledge that the father and baby had been murdered.
Not surprisingly, the politicization of senior IDF officers has demoralized junior officers and line soldiers. Soldiers and officers who for years risked their lives in operations aimed at capturing the same terrorists that were just released for Schalit feel betrayed by their commanders who supported the deal.
As one officer told Arutz 7, “It may not be so nice to say it, but we are asking what the point was in taking all those risks? These aren’t some amateur Molotov cocktail throwers or stone throwers. These are real killers. We know them and their release is frustrating.”
In the aftermath of the Second Lebanon War, the IDF’s senior officer corps was subjected to well-deserved public attack for its poor performance during the war. Not only did senior commanders fail to produce and implement a plan to defeat Hezbollah, preferring instead to let the politicians put together a “political solution.” They failed to lead their soldiers in battle, opting to stay behind in air conditioned command posts watching the fighting on television screens.
Three division commanders and OC Northern Command were removed from their posts for their normative and operational failures and then-chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz was eventually forced into early retirement.
It was widely believed that the public opprobrium forced the IDF’s senior ranks recognize that their duty is to defend the country, and defeat the enemy, not behave like politicians. Unfortunately, the IDF’s current behavior indicates that nothing has changed.
With the Muslim Brotherhood on the rise throughout the Arab world, and with Hamas co-opting Fatah in Judea and Samaria, Israel needs the IDF to defend it. The current situation, where politicized commanders highlight nonexistent threats and punish committed officers for doing their jobs cannot be allowed to continue.
AICI
Comentariu prin Fabio — octombrie 28, 2011 @ 11:47 am |
Delegitimizing the delegitimizers
By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | You have to hand it to the Palestinians. They decided to abandon the peace process and seek international recognition of the “State of Palestine” — a state in a de facto state of war with Israel. And they are pursuing their goal relentlessly.
This week their efforts bore their first fruit with the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) vote to accept “Palestine” as a full state member.
It is not a coincidence that the PLO/PA decided to apply for membership for “Palestine” at UNESCO first. Since 1974 UNESCO has been an enthusiastic partner in the Palestinians’ bid to erase Jewish history, heritage and culture in the Land of Israel from the historical record.
In 1974 UNESCO voted to boycott Israel and “withhold assistance from Israel in the fields of education, science and culture because of Israel’s persistent alteration of historic features in Jerusalem.”
UNESCO’s moves to deny Jewish ties to Jerusalem and the rest of historic Israel have continued unabated ever since. For instance, in 1989 UNESCO condemned “Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem” claiming it was destroying the city through “acts of interference, destruction and transformation.”
In 1996 UNESCO held a symposium on Jerusalem at its Paris headquarters. No Jewish or Israeli groups were invited to participate.
Beginning in 1996, the Arab Wakf on the the Temple Mount began systematically destroying artifacts of the Second Temple. The destruction was undertaken during illegal excavations under the Temple Mount carried out in order to construct an illegal, unlicensed mosque at Solomon’s Stables.UNESCO never bothered to condemn this act. It was silent despite the fact that the Wakf’s actions constituted a grave breach of the very international laws related to antiquities and sacred sites that UNESCO is charter bound to protect. Similarly, UNESCO never condemned Palestinian desecration of Rachel’s Tomb, of Joesph’s Tomb or of any of the ancient synagogues in Gaza and Jericho which they razed to the ground.
The reason for UNESCO’s miscarriage of its responsibilities is clear. Far from fulfilling its mission of protecting world heritage sites, since 1974 UNESCO has been a partner in one of the greatest cultural crimes in human history – the Palestinian and pan-Arab attempt to wipe Jewish history in the Land of Israel off the historical record. And UNESCO’s crimes in this area are unending. In 2009 it designated Jerusalem a “capital of Arab culture.”
In 2010 it designated Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron “Muslim mosques.”
UNESCO’s campaign against Jewish history is not limited to Israel. In 1995 it passed a resolution marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Despite requests from Israel, the resolution made no mention of the Holocaust.
In December 2010, UNESCO published a report on the history of science in the Arab world. Its report listed the great Jewish doctor and rabbinic scholar Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon — Maimonides — as a Muslim renamed “Moussa ben Maimoun.”
In light of UNESCO’s virulently anti-Jewish policies and actions, it is not surprising that it cooperated with the PLO/PA’s bid to achieve recognition of a state that is in a state of war with Israel.
More surprising than UNESCO’s behavior was the behavior of all but five EU member states. Aside from the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden, all EU member states either voted in favor of the Palestinian membership application or abstained from the vote.
The reason it is surprising is because the EU has made strengthening UN institutions and speeding up the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians to facilitate Palestinian independence the central aims of its foreign policy. And by supporting or failing to oppose the Palestinian membership bid, the Europeans undercut both aims.
UNESCO was weakened by the vote for two reasons. First, since US law bars the government from funding UN agencies that accept “Palestine” as a member nation outside the framework of a negotiated peace with Israel, in accepting “Palestine” UNESCO reduced its budget by the 22 percent covered by US contributions.
Second, by accepting the Palestinians as a member state UNESCO undermined its legitimacy and organizational viability. Accepting “Palestine” represents a breach of the organization’s charter. The charter stipulates that only states can be accepted as members.
Moreover, it represents a repudiation of the goals of UNESCO as laid out in its charter. Those goals involve among other things promoting cooperation in education and advancing the rule of law. As a recent report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE) showed, PA textbooks remain imbued with Jew hatred at all education levels. By enabling this breach of the UNESCO charter, the Europeans made a mockery of UN rules and so weakened not just UNESCO but the UN system as a whole.
The Europeans’ claim to support the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians was rendered hollow by their behavior at UNESCO. The peace process between Israel and the PLO/PA is predicated on the latter’s commitment that a Palestinian state can arise only as a consequence of a peace treaty with Israel. By supporting the Palestinians’ breach of this fundamental commitment at UNESCO, the Europeans diminished the possibility of achieving a negotiated peace that will lead to Palestinian statehood.
What the Europeans’ behavior at UNESCO indicates is that just as UNESCO is willing to undermine its mission to harm Israel, so the Europeans are willing to undermine the declared goals of their foreign policy if doing so will harm Israel.
This state of affairs has important consequences for Israel. To date, Israel has placed fostering good relations with EU member states high on its list of priorities. In light of the Europeans’ behavior at UNESCO, this ranking should be revised. The Europeans do not merit such high consideration by Israel.
Finally, the UNESCO vote exposed disturbing truths about US President Barack Obama’s position on Israel. Obama has been widely praised by American Jewish leaders as well as by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for his announced commitment to veto the draft Security Council resolution recommending that the PLO/PA be granted full state membership at the UN. Obama’s pledge – forced out of him by massive Congressional pressure – is touted as proof of his commitment to the US alliance with Israel.
But Obama’s response to the PLO/PA’s bid for UNESCO membership tells a different story. In the lead up to the vote, the Obama administration went out of its way not to threaten UNESCO. It did not threaten to withdraw the US from the organization. Instead, just days before the vote, US Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter addressed the body and praised the “great things have happened at UNESCO,” over the past year. Kanter then announced the US’s bid for reelection to UNESCO’s executive board.
The administration did not attack the move as one that undermines chances of peace. It did not note that by endorsing the PA/PLO’s decision to act unilaterally, UNESCO was making it all the more difficult for Israel and the Palestinians to achieve a negotiated peace deal. Rather, State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland sufficed with claiming that the move was “regrettable,” and “premature.”
Administration officials did not make clear that in accordance with US law, all US funding to UNESCO would end if the Palestinian membership bid was approved. Rather administration officials joined forces with UN officials to lobby Congress to change the law.
As Claudia Rosett reported in Forbes on Tuesday, David Killion, the US Ambassador to UNESCO made what bordered on an apology for the US funding cut-off when he said “We sincerely regret that the strenuous and well-intentioned efforts of many delegations to avoid this result fell short.”
Killion added, “We pledge to continue our efforts to find ways to support and strengthen the important work of this vital organization.”
So after UNESCO thumbed its nose at the US, undermined its mission, breached its own charter and seriously diminished chances of Palestinian peace with Israel by accepting “Palestine” as a member state, the Obama administration reacted with near groveling apologetics.
To understand the full significance of the administration’s behavior, it is important to contrast it with the administration’s response to the Israeli government’s decision in the aftermath of the UNESCO vote to approve the construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem, Maaleh Adumim and Efrat. All of the housing units will be built in areas that will remain part of Israel even after a peace deal. And the administration knows this.
But speaking of the government’s decision, a US official told Reuters that the administration is “deeply disappointed by the announcement.
“We continue to make clear to the [Israeli] government [that] unilateral actions such as these work against efforts to resume direct negotiations and do not advance the goal of a reasonable and necessary agreement between the parties.”
So on the one hand, the Palestinians’ move to abandon the peace process and UNESCO’s support for their move is merely “regrettable” and “premature.” But on the other hand, Israel’s decision not to discriminate against Jewish property rights undermines efforts to resume peace talks and harm prospects for an agreement.
Since entering office, Netanyahu has repeatedly characterized Arab and leftist efforts to delegitimize Israel as “a strategic threat” to the state. In truth, he overstates the danger. Delegitimization is a political threat, not a strategic threat. Israel will not be destroyed by the UN or by professors at Oxford and Columbia or trade unions in Norway.
But still it is a threat that Israel cannot ignore.
Since September 2009, citing the need to demonstrate the dishonesty of the delegitimizers’ accusations against Israel, Netanyahu abandoned his lifelong opposition to a Palestinian state. He believed that Israel had to embrace the PLO/PA as a legitimate partner for peace in order to prove to the likes of Obama and his supporters that Israel has a right to exist. In the meantime, and in the face of Netanyahu’s staggering concession, the PLO/PA abandoned the peace talks and escalated its political war to criminalize Israel and delegitimate it.
UNESCO’s acceptance of “Palestine” demonstrates that Netanyahu’s chosen policy is misguided. By accepting the legitimacy of the Palestinian demand for statehood, Netanyahu indirectly conceded Israel’s rights to Judea and Samaria and at a minimum placed its right to sole sovereignty over Jerusalem in question. In so doing, Israel gave the Palestinians’ supporters at the UN, in Europe and the White House no reason to reconsider their anti-Israel bias. With the Palestinians relentlessly asserting their rights, and Israel conceding its rights, why should anyone side with Israel?
In the end, the only way to defeat those who delegitimize Israel and deny our rights to our land, our nationhood and history is to expose their corruption, and their malevolent, dishonest and hateful intentions towards the Jewish people and the Jewish state. That is, the only way to defeat the delegitimizers is to delegitimize them by proudly and consistently asserting Israel’s historic and legal rights and the justice of our cause.
Comentariu prin Fabio — noiembrie 4, 2011 @ 2:41 pm |
Calling things by their names
By Caroline B. Glick
There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Next month, the US’s long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country. Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of US President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw on the US’s hard won gains in that country. After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.
The general stupor was broken last week with The Weekly Standard’s publication of an article entitled, “Defeat in Iraq: President Obama’s decision to withdraw US troops is the mother of all disasters.” The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan. The Kagans contributed to conceptualizing the successful US-counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as “the surge,” that former president George W. Bush implemented in 2007.
In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic implications of next month’s withdrawal. First they note that with the US withdrawal, the sectarian violence that the surge effectively ended will in all likelihood return in force. Iraq’s Iranian-allied Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is purging the Iraqi military and security services and the Iraqi civil service of pro-Western, anti-Iranian commanders and senior officials. With American acquiescence, Maliki and his Shiite allies already managed to effectively overturn the March 2010 election results. Those elections gave the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi the right to form the next government.
Due to Maliki’s actions, Iraq’s Sunnis are becoming convinced they have little to gain from peacefully accepting the government.
The strategic implications of Maliki’s purges are clear. As the US departs the country next month it will be handing its hard won victory in Iraq to its greatest regional foe – Iran. Repeating their behavior in the aftermath of Israel’s precipitous withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies are presenting the US withdrawal from Iraq as a massive strategic victory. They are also inventing the rationale for continued war against the retreating Americans. Iran’s Hezbollah trained proxy, Muqtada al-Sadr has declared that US Embassy personnel are an “occupation force” that the Iraqis should rightly attack with the aim of defeating.
The US public’s ignorance of the implications of a post-withdrawal, Iranian-dominated Iraq is not surprising. The Obama administration has ignored them and the media have largely followed the administration’s lead in underplaying them.
For its part, the Bush administration spent little time explaining to the US public who the forces fighting in Iraq were and why the US was fighting them.
US military officials frequently admitted that the insurgents were trained, armed and funded by Iran and Syria. But policymakers never took any action against either country for waging war against the US. Above the tactical level, the US was unwilling to take any effective action to diminish either regime’s support for the insurgency or to make them pay a diplomatic or military price for their actions.
As for Obama, as the Kagans and Sullivan show, the administration abjectly refused to intervene when Maliki stole the elections or to defend US allies in the Iraqi military from Maliki’s pro-Iranian purge of the general officer corps. And by refusing to side with US allies, the Obama administration has effectively sided with America’s foes, enabling Iranian-allied forces to take over the US-built, trained and armed security apparatuses in Iraq.
All of these actions are in line with the US’s current policy towards Egypt. There, without considering the consequences of its actions, in January and February the Obama administration played a key role in ousting the US’s most dependable ally in the Arab world, former president Hosni Mubarak. Since Mubarak was thrown from office, Egypt has been ruled by a military junta dubbed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, (SCAF). Because SCAF is comprised of the men who served as Mubarak’s underlings throughout his 30-year rule, it shares many of the institutional interests that guided Mubarak and rendered him a dependable US ally. Specifically, SCAF is ill-disposed to chaos and Islamic radicalism.
However, unlike Mubarak, SCAF is only in power because the mobs of protesters in Tahrir Square demanded that Mubarak stand down to enable civilian, majority rule in Egypt. Consequently, the military junta is much less able to keep Egypt’s populist forces at bay.
Throughout Mubarak’s long reign, the most popular force in Egypt was the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. The populism unleashed by Mubarak’s ouster necessarily rendered the Brotherhood the most powerful political force in Egypt. If free elections are held in Egypt next week as planned and if their results are honored, within a year Egypt will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the outcome Obama all but guaranteed when he cut the cord on Mubarak.
Recognizing the danger a Brotherhood government would pose to the army’s institutional interests, in recent weeks the generals began taking steps to delay elections, limit the power of the parliament and postpone presidential elections. Their moves provoked massive opposition from Egypt’s now fully legitimated and empowered populist forces. And so they launched what they are dubbing “the second Egyptian revolution.” And the US doesn’t know what to do.
In late 2010, foreign policy professionals on both sides of the aisle in Washington got together and formed a group called the Working Group for Egypt. This group, with members as seemingly diverse as Elliott Abrams from the Bush administration and the Council on Foreign Relations and Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress chose to ignore completely the fact that the populist forces in Egypt are overwhelmingly jihadist. They lobbied for Mubarak’s overthrow in the name of “democracy” in January and February. Today they demand that Obama side with the rioters in Tahrir Square against the military. And just as he did in January and February, Obama is likely to follow their “bipartisan” advice.
From Iraq to Egypt to Libya to Syria, as previous mistakes by both the Bush and Obama administrations constrain and diminish US options for advancing its national interests, America is compelled to make more and more difficult choices. In Libya, after facilitating Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow, the US is faced with the prospect of dealing with an even more radical regime that is jihadist, empowered, and already transferring arms to terror groups and proliferating nonconventional weapons. If the Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment acknowledge the hostile nature of the new regime and refrain from supporting it, they will be forced to admit they sided with America’s enemies in taking down Gaddafi. While Gaddafi was certainly no Mubarak, at worst he was an impotent adversary.
In Syria, not only did the US refuse to take any action against President Bashar Assad despite his active sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, it failed to cultivate any ties with Syrian regime opponents. The US has continued to ignore Syrian regime opponents to the present day. And now, with Assad’s fall a matter of time, the US is presented with a fairly set opposition leadership, backed by Islamist Turkey and dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The liberal, pro-American forces in Syria, including the Kurds, have been shut out of the post-Assad power structure.
And in Egypt, after embracing “democracy” over its ally Mubarak, the US is faced with another unenviable choice. It can either side with the weak, but not necessarily hostile military junta which is dependent on US financial aid, or it can side with Islamic extremists who seek its destruction and that of Israel and have the support of the Egyptian people.
How has this situation arisen? How is it possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled “The Lost Decade.”
Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after Sept. 11, 2001 to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those interests.
The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes like Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn’t want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world’s hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.
For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US’s enemy because it feared the Left.
And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic – terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn’t an enemy. It’s just a tactic. And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular. Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.
The lion’s share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn’t want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after Sept. 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.
Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left’s ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America’s worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey’s Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.
And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro-American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington’s irresponsibility.
http://jewishworldreview.com/1111/glick112511.php3
There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.
Comentariu prin Narcisa — noiembrie 25, 2011 @ 11:19 am |
Gingrich’s fresh hope
You just knew Caroline Glick would weigh-in. And you were certain that her column would be masterful. You are right on both accounts!
OUT OF THE PARK!
Gingrich’s statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago.
Last Friday, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, did something revolutionary. He told the truth about the Palestinians. In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an “invented” people, “who are in fact Arabs.”
His statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. At the end of 1920, the “Palestinian people” was artificially carved out of the Arab population of “Greater Syria.” “Greater Syria” included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago. Moreover, as Gingrich noted, the term “Palestinian people” only became widely accepted after 1977.
As Daniel Pipes chronicled in a 1989 article on the subject in The Middle East Quarterly, the local Arabs in what became Israel opted for a local nationalistic “Palestinian” identity in part due to their sense that their brethren in Syria were not sufficiently committed to the eradication of Zionism.
Since Gingrich spoke out on Friday, his factually accurate statement has been under assault from three directions. First, it has been attacked by Palestinian apologists in the postmodernist camp. Speaking to CNN, Hussein Ibish from the American Task Force on Palestine argued that Gingrich’s statement was an outrage because while he was right about the Palestinians being an artificial people, in Ibish’s view, Israelis were just as artificial. That is, he equated the Palestinians’ 91-year-old nationalism with the Jews’ 3,500-year-old nationalism.
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In his words, “To call the Palestinians ‘an invented people’ in an obvious effort to undermine their national identity is outrageous, especially since there was no such thing as an ‘Israeli’ before 1948.”
Ibish’s nonsense is easily dispatched by a simple reading of the Hebrew Bible. As anyone semi-literate in Hebrew recognizes, the Israelis were not created in 1948. Three thousand years ago, the Israelis were led by a king named David. The Israelis had an independent commonwealth in the Land of Israel, and their capital city was Jerusalem.
The fact that 500 years ago King James renamed the Israelis “Israelites” is irrelevant to the basic truth that there is nothing new or artificial about the Israeli people. And Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, did not arise in competition with Arab nationalism. Zionism has been a central feature of Jewish identity for 3,500 years.
THE SECOND line of attack against Gingrich denies the veracity of his claim. Palestinian luminaries like the PA’s unelected Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told CNN, “The Palestinian people inhabited the land since the dawn of history.”
Fayyad’s historically unsubstantiated claim was further expounded on by Fatah Revolutionary Council member Dmitri Diliani in an interview with CNN. “The Palestinian people [are] descended from the Canaanite tribe of the Jebusites that inhabited the ancient site of Jerusalem as early as 3200 BCE,” Diliani asserted,
The Land of Israel has the greatest density of archeological sites in the world. Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan Heights and other areas of the country are packed with archeological evidence of the Jewish commonwealths. As for Jerusalem, literally every inch of the city holds physical proof of the Jewish people’s historical claims to the city.
To date, no archeological or other evidence has been found linking the Palestinians to the city or the Jebusites.
From a US domestic political perspective, the third line of attack against Gingrich’s factual statement has been the most significant. The attacks involve conservative Washington insiders, many of whom are outspoken supporters of Gingrich’s principal rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
To date, the attackers’ most outspoken representative has been Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. These insiders argue that although Gingrich spoke the truth, it was irresponsible and unstatesmanlike for him to have done so.
As Rubin put it on Monday, “Do conservatives really think it is a good idea for their nominee to reverse decades of US policy and deny there is a Palestinian national identity?” In their view, Gingrich is an irresponsible flamethrower because he is turning his back on a 30- year bipartisan consensus. That consensus is based on ignoring the fact that the Palestinians are an artificial people whose identity sprang not from any shared historical experience, but from opposition to Jewish nationalism.
The policy goal of the consensus is to establish an independent Palestinian state west of the Jordan River that will live at peace with Israel.
This policy was obsessively advanced throughout the 1990s until it failed completely in 2000, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected then-prime minister Ehud Barak’s and then US president Bill Clinton’s offer of Palestinian statehood and began the Palestinian terror war against Israel.
BUT RATHER than acknowledge that the policy — and the embrace of Palestinian national identity at its heart — had failed, and consider other options, the US policy establishment in Washington clung to it for dear life. Republicans like Rubin’s mentor, former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, went on to support enthusiastically Israel’s surrender of Gaza in 2005, and to push for Hamas participation in the 2006 Palestinian elections. That withdrawal and those elections catapulted the jihadist terror group to power.
The consensus that Gingrich rejected by telling the truth about the artificial nature of Palestinian nationalism was based on an attempt to square popular support for Israel with the elite’s penchant for appeasement. On the one hand, due to overwhelming public support for a strong US alliance with Israel, most US policy-makers have not dared to abandon Israel as a US ally.
On the other hand, American policy-makers have been historically uncomfortable having to champion Israel to their anti-Israel European colleagues and to their Arab interlocutors who share the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s right to exist.
The policy of seeking to meld an anti-Israel Arab appeasement policy with a pro-Israel anti-appeasement policy was embraced by successive US administrations until it was summarily discarded by President Barack Obama three years ago. Obama replaced the two-headed policy with one of pure Arab appeasement.
Obama was able to justify his move because the two-pronged policy had failed. There was no peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The price of oil had skyrocketed, and US interests throughout the region were increasingly threatened.
For its part, Israel was far more vulnerable to terror and war than it had been in years. And its diplomatic isolation was acute and rising.
Unfortunately for both the US and Israel, Obama’s break with the consensus has destabilized the region, endangered Israel and imperiled US interests to a far greater degree than they had been under the failed dual-track policy of his predecessors. Throughout the Arab world, Islamist forces are on the rise.
Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power.
The US is no longer seen as a credible regional power as it pulls its forces out of Iraq without victory, hamstrings its forces in Afghanistan, dooming them to attrition and defeat, and abandons its allies in country after country.
The stark contrast between Obama’s rejection of the failed consensus on the one hand and Gingrich’s rejection of the failed consensus on the other hand indicates that Gingrich may well be the perfect foil for Obama.
Gingrich’s willingness to state and defend the truth about the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the perfect response to Obama’s disastrous speech “to the Muslim world” in Cairo in June 2009. It was in that speech that Obama officially abandoned the bipartisan consensus, abandoned Israel and the truth about Zionism and Jewish national rights, and embraced completely the lie of Palestinian nationalism and national rights.
Both Rubin and Abrams, as well as Romney, justified their attacks on Gingrich and their defense of the failed consensus by noting that no Israeli leaders were saying what Gingrich said. Rubin went so far as to allege that Gingrich’s words of truth about the Palestinians hurt Israel.
This is of course absurd. What many Americans fail to recognize is that Israeli leaders are not as free to tell the truth about the nature of the conflict as the US is. Rather than look to Israel for leadership on this issue, American leaders would do well to view Israel as the equivalent of West Germany during the Cold War. With half of Berlin occupied by the Red Army and West Berlin serving as the tripwire for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, West German leaders were not as free to tell the truth about the Soviet Union as American leaders were.
Today, with Jerusalem under constant political and terror threat, with all of Israel increasingly encircled by Islamist regimes, and with the Obama administration abandoning traditional US support for Israel, it is becoming less and less reasonable to expect Israel to take the rhetorical lead in telling important and difficult truths about the nature of its neighbors.
When Romney criticized Gingrich’s statement as unhelpful to Israel, Gingrich replied, “I feel quite confident that an amazing number of Israelis found it nice to have an American tell the truth about the war they are in the middle of, and the casualties they are taking and the people around them who say, ‘They do not have a right to exist and we want to destroy them.’” And he is absolutely right. It was more than nice.
It was heartening.
Thirty years of pre-Obama American lying about the nature of the conflict in an attempt to balance support for Israel with appeasement of the Arabs did not make the US safer or the Middle East more peaceful. A return to that policy under a new Republican president will not be sufficient to restore stability and security to the region.
And the need for such a restoration is acute. Under Obama, the last three years of US abandonment of the truth about Israel for Palestinian lies has made the region less stable, Israel more vulnerable, the US less respected and US interests more threatened.
Gingrich’s statement of truth was not an act of irresponsible flame throwing. It was the beginning of an antidote to Obama’s abandonment of truth and reason in favor of lies and appeasement. And as such, it was not a cause for anger. It was a cause for hope.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1211/glick121311.php3
Comentariu prin mihaibeltechi — decembrie 13, 2011 @ 1:18 pm |
The land-for-peace hoax
Now that the Islamists are poised to take power in Cairo, the Israel-Egypt treaty is null and void.The rise of the forces of jihadist Islam in Egypt places the US and other Western powers in an uncomfortable position. The US is the guarantor of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. That treaty is based on the proposition of land for peace. Israel gave Egypt Sinai in 1982 and in exchange it received a peace treaty with Egypt. Now that the Islamists are poised to take power, the treaty is effectively null and void.
The question naturally arises: Will the US act in accordance with its role as guarantor of the peace and demand that the new Egyptian government give Sinai back to Israel? Because if the Obama administration or whatever administration is in power when Egypt abrogates the treaty does not issue such a demand, and stand behind it, and if the EU does not support the demand, the entire concept of land-for-peace will be exposed as a hoax.
Indeed the land-for-peace formula will be exposed as a twofold fiction. First, it is based on the false proposition that the peace process is a two-way street. Israel gives land, the Arabs give peace. But the inevitable death of the Egyptian- Israeli peace accord under an Egyptian jihadist regime makes clear that the land-for-peace formula is a one-way street. Israeli land giveaways are permanent. Arab commitments to peace can be revoked at any time.
Then there are the supposedly iron-clad US and European security guarantees that accompany signed treaties. All the American and European promises to Israel – that they will stand by the Jewish state when it takes risks for peace – will be exposed as worthless lies. As we are already seeing today, no one will stand up for Israel’s rights. No one will insist that the Egyptians honor their bargain.
As it has become more apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist parties will hold an absolute majority in Egypt’s democratically elected parliament, Western governments and media outlets have insistently argued that these anti-Western, and anti-Jewish, movements have become moderate and pragmatic. Leading the charge to make the case has been the Obama administration. Its senior officials have eagerly embraced the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood Yusuf Qaradawi is reportedly mediating negotiations between the US and the Taliban.
Qaradawi, an Egyptian who has been based in Qatar since 1961, when he was forced to flee Egypt due to his jihadist politics, made a triumphant return to his native land last February following the overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak. Speaking to a crowd of an estimated two million people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Qaradawi led them in a chant calling for them to invade Jerusalem.
Over the years, Qaradawi has issued numerous religious ruling permitting, indeed requiring, the massacre of Jews. In 2009, he called for the Muslim world to complete Hitler’s goal of eradicating the Jewish people.
As for the US, in 2003, Qaradawi issued a religious ruling calling for the killing of US forces in Iraq.
BOTH THE Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists are happy to cater to the propaganda needs of Western journalists and politicians and pretend that they are willing to continue to uphold the peace treaty with Israel. But even as they make conditional statements to eager Americans and Europeans, they consistently tell their own people that they seek the destruction of Israel and the abrogation of the peace deal between Egypt and Israel.
As the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ Jonathan D. Halevi documented last week in a report on Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist positions on the future of the peace between Egypt and Israel, while speaking to Westerners in general terms about their willingness to respect the treaty, both groups place numerous conditions on their willingness to maintain it. These conditions make clear that there is no way that they will continue to respect the peace treaty. Indeed, they will use any excuse to justify its abrogation and blame it on Israel. And they will do so at the earliest available opportunity.
It is possible, and perhaps likely, that the US will cut off military aid to Egypt in the wake of Cairo’s abrogation of the peace treaty. But it is impossible to imagine that the Obama administration will abide by the US’s commitment as the guarantor of the deal and demand that Egypt return Sinai to Israel. Indeed, it is only slightly more likely that a Republican administration would fulfill the US’s commitment as guarantor of the peace and demand the return of Sinai to Israel after Egypt’s democratically elected Islamist regime finds an excuse to abrogate the peace treaty.
It is important to keep this sorry state of affairs in mind when we assess the prospects for a land-for-peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This week, following months of intense pressure from the US and the EU, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met face to face for the first time in 16 months. According to Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, who hosted the meeting, the Palestinians submitted their proposal on security and border issues to Israel. The sides are supposed to meet again next week and Israel is expected to present its proposals on these issues.
There are several reasons that these talks are doomed to failure. The most important reason they will fail is that even if they lead to an agreement, no agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is sustainable. Assuming for a moment that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas goes against everything he has said for the past three years and signs a peace deal with Israel in which he promises Israel peace in exchange for Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, this agreement will have little impact on the Palestinians’ view of Israel. Abbas today represents no one. His term of office ended three years ago. Hamas won the last Palestinian elections in 2006.
And Hamas’s leaders – like their counterparts in the Muslim Brotherhood – make no bones about their intention to destroy Israel. Two weeks ago at a speech in Gaza, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh proclaimed, “We say today explicitly so it cannot be explained otherwise, that the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel]… We won’t relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine.”
In his visit with his Muslim Brotherhood counterpart, Mohammad Badie, in Cairo this week Haniyeh said, “The Islamic resistance movement of Hamas by definition is a jihadist movement by the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian on the surface, Islamic at its core, and its goal is liberation.”WITH HAMAS’S Brotherhood colleagues taking power from Cairo to Casablanca, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which supposedly peaceseeking Fatah will win Palestinian elections. It is in recognition of this fact that Abbas has signed a series of unity agreements with Hamas since May.
So the best case scenario for a peace deal with the Palestinians is that Abbas will sign a deal that Israel will implement by withdrawing from Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and expelling up to a half a million Israeli citizens from their homes. Hamas will then take power and abrogate the treaty, just as its brethren in Cairo are planning to do with their country’s peace treaty.
This leads us to the question of what the diplomatic forces from the US, the EU, and the UN who have worked so hard to get the present negotiations started are really after. What are they trying to achieve by pressuring Israel to negotiate a deal that they know will not be respected by the Palestinians?
In the case of some of the parties involved it is fairly obvious that they want to weaken Israel. Take the UN for example. In 2005, Israel withdrew all of its military forces and civilians from Gaza. Rather than reward Israel for giving up land with peace, the Palestinians transformed Gaza into a launching pad for missile attacks against Israel. And in June 2007, Hamas took over the territory.
Despite the fact that Israel is wholly absent from Gaza, and indeed is being attacked from Gaza, no one has called for the Palestinians to give the territory back to Israel. The UN doesn’t even recognize that Israel left.
Last September, the UN published yet another report labeling Israel as the occupier of Gaza. And in accordance with this fiction, the UN – along with the EU and the US – continues to hold Israel responsible for Gaza’s welfare.
Ironically, Hamas itself denies that Gaza is under Israeli occupation. In an interview with the Ma’an news agency on Tuesday, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar openly admitted that Gaza is not under occupation. Speaking of Fatah’s plan to launch massive demonstrations against Israel, Zahar said, “Against whom could we demonstrate in the Gaza Strip? When Gaza was occupied, that model was applicable.”
Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Fatah can all freely tell the truth about Israel and their commitment to its destruction without fear of any repercussions. They know that the Western powers will not listen to them. They know that they will never have to pay a price for their duplicity. Indeed, they know they will be rewarded for it.
Since the inauguration of the land-for-peace process between Israel and the PLO 19 years ago, the Palestinians have repeatedly demonstrated their bad faith. Israeli land giveaways have consistently been met with increased Palestinian terrorism. Since 1996, US- and European- trained Palestinian security forces have repeatedly used their guns to kill Israelis. Since 1994, the PA has made it standard practice to enlist terrorists in its US- and European-funded and trained security forces.
The US and Europe have continued to train and arm them despite their bad faith. Despite their continued commitment to Israel’s destruction and involvement in terrorism, the US and the EU have continued to demand that Israel fork over more territory. At no point have either the US or the EU seriously considered ending their support for the Palestinians or the demonstrably fictitious landfor- peace formula.
As Israel bows now to still more US and EU pressure and conducts land-for-peace talks with Fatah, our leadership may be seduced by the faint praise they receive from the likes of The Washington Post or even from the Obama administration. But this praise should not turn their heads.
To understand its feckless emptiness, all they need to do is direct their attention to what happened this week in Cairo, as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists secured their absolute control over Egypt’s parliament. Specifically, our leaders should note the absence of any voices demanding that Egypt respect the peace treaty with Israel or return Sinai.
The time has come for Israel to admit the truth. Land-for-peace is a confidence game and we are the mark.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=252431
Comentariu prin mihaibeltechi — ianuarie 6, 2012 @ 6:28 pm |
American “friends” like Wexler and Obama play Israel for a fool again and again.
Former US congressman Robert Wexler is a man worth listening to. Wexler served as then-senator Barack Obama’s chief booster in the American Jewish community during the 2008 presidential campaign. He appeared everywhere and said anything to convince the American Jewish community that the same man who sat in the church pews listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic vitriol for two decades, and listed among his closest friends and associates a host of Israel-haters as well as former terrorists, was the greatest friend Israel could ever have.
Once Obama was elected, Wexler continued to serve as his Jewish shill. Wexler traveled to Israel multiple times in the early months of Obama’s presidency, to pressure Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to submit to Obama’s demand and embrace the cause of Palestinian statehood. After Netanyahu finally announced his support for Palestinian statehood at his speech at Bar-Ilan University in September 2009, Wexler returned with a new demand – that Netanyahu enact a moratorium on Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post at the time, Wexler promised that Israel would be richly rewarded if it took the unprecedented step of denying Jews the right to their property in Judea and Samaria simply because they were Jewish. Even if the moratorium were temporary, Obama would view the discriminatory measure as proof of Israel’s good intentions.
Moreover, he would expect the Palestinians and the wider Arab world to respond to Israel’s move by taking steps to normalize their relations with Israel.
For instance, Wexler claimed that Obama had demanded that the Arabs respond to an Israeli moratorium on Jewish property rights by among other things opening trade offices and direct economic ties; conducting cultural and economic exchanges; and permitting Israeli airplanes to overfly their territory.
And in the event that the Arabs refused to rise to the occasion, Wexler proclaimed, “You can rightly say that all bets are off.”
Wexler continued, “I want to call their bluff. I want to see, if Israel makes substantial movement toward a credible peace process, whether they are willing to do it. And if they are not, better that we should find out five or six months into the process, before Israel is actually asked to compromise any significant position.”
In the event, Netanyahu bowed to Obama’s demand and enacted a temporary ban on the exercise of Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria. And in the aftermath of his stunning move, the Arab world did nothing.
Amazingly, far from calling their bluff, Obama doubled down on his pressure on Israel.
Among other things, since squeezing the first temporary ban on Jewish property rights out of Netanyahu, Obama has demanded that the moratorium be made permanent and be extended to Jerusalem.
As for his vision of the “peace process,” Obama has demanded that Israel accept the 1949 armistice lines as the basis for negotiations.
He has used the US veto at the UN Security Council as a means of pressuring Israel to make further unreciprocated concessions to the Palestinians.
And the pro-Israel US president has demanded no similar concessions from the Palestinians.
THIS WEEK, Wexler, now the head of the far-left S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, was back in town. Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, he said that Israel should consider extending the ban on Jewish property rights to within the 1949 armistice lines. Wexler based his claim on then-prime minister Ehud Olmert’s 2008 peace offer to Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Olmert’s offer, which Abbas rejected, involved a “land swap,” in which in the framework of a comprehensive peace deal, Israel would give the Palestinians land from within its 1949 boundaries in exchange for land in Judea and Samaria that Israel would permanently retain. According to media reports, Olmert offered Abbas 4.5 percent of Israeli territory in exchange for a similar amount of land in Judea and Samaria.
While Wexler appeared at the Herzliya Conference as the president of a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, his continued intimate relationship with Obama is well known. Last fall, Commentary’s Omri Ceren documented that Zvika Krieger, Wexler’s vice president at the Daniel Abraham Center, authored documents for Obama’s reelection campaign. Among other things, those documents cited articles authored by Krieger and Wexler in which they championed Obama’s record on Israel from their nonpartisan perch at the Daniel Abraham Center.
Given Wexler’s close ties to Obama, it is reasonable to assume that his suggestion that Israel cease exerting its national sovereignty over its sovereign territory in the interests of the peace process is not simply his personal view.
There is much to criticize about Wexler’s suggestion.
But more important than its arrogant, insulting absurdity, and more disconcerting than Wexler’s own hypocrisy, is what his suggestion tells us about the dangers inherent in Netanyahu’s current negotiations with the Palestinians.
To understand the connection we need to recall the nature of Olmert’s offer to Abbas.
Olmert’s negotiations with Abbas were based upon the proposition – repeated ad nauseam to the Israeli public – that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”
The idea was clear. True, on the one hand, the prime minister was conducting negotiations far from the spotlight, and refusing to tell the public what was on offer. But on the other hand, we could rest assured that that nothing he offered would have any significance whatsoever unless the Palestinians agreed to a final-peace deal with Israel. If they rejected peace, then everything Olmert said would become null and void, and be tossed down the memory hole.
In accordance with this basic proposition, when Abbas rejected Olmert’s offer, and made no counteroffer, it was naturally assumed that Olmert’s proposal was rendered null and void.
Yet four years later, here is Wexler, Obama’s surrogate, advocating a policy of unilateral abrogation of Israeli sovereignty over 4.5% of its national territory in order to enable the eventual implementation of an offer that was predicated on the notion that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”
AND THIS brings us to the current negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. For the past month, under the aegis of the Middle East Quartet, Netanyahu’s representative attorney Yitzhak Molcho has been conducting negotiations with Abbas’s representatives in Amman, Jordan. Last week, Molcho reportedly outlined the government’s general positions on lands it is willing to cede to the Palestinians.
Without presenting any maps, Molcho reportedly said that a permanent agreement would involve most of the Israelis living in Judea and Samaria remaining in Israeli territory. The media interpreted this to mean that like Olmert, Netanyahu expects for Israel to retain perpetual control over large blocks of Israeli communities that take up less than 10% of the overall landmass in Judea and Samaria.
For his part, Netanyahu this week reiterated his position that Israel must maintain a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley. This has been interpreted to mean that Netanyahu is willing to cede sovereign rights to the area to the Palestinians.
Taken together, what Molcho’s statement and Netanyahu’s statement indicate is that at a minimum, in exchange for peace, the Netanyahu government is willing to expel some portion of the 350,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria from their homes and to transfer sovereignty over a significant portion of the territory to a Palestinian state.
From the vagueness of what has been reported, it is apparent that Netanyahu has been far less specific about the scope of the territorial concessions he is willing to undertake than his predecessor was. But then again, Olmert made his offer after conducting negotiations with Abbas for over a year. Netanyahu only entered these talks a month ago.
And while no one in or out of government believes that these negotiations have any chance of leading to a peace deal, the fact is that Netanyahu is feverishly working to ensure that the talks continue. He spent a good part of his day on Wednesday speaking on the phone to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and meeting with Quartet envoy Tony Blair and UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon, begging the foreign leaders to convince the Palestinians not to abandon the negotiations.
As he put it in his joint press conference with Ban, “You cannot complete the peace process unless you begin it. If you begin it, you have to be consistent and stick to it.”
For his part, Abbas is doing everything in his power to make clear that he does not wish to negotiate, and that even if negotiations continue, he will never cut a deal with Israel. To underscore his bad faith, next week Abbas will travel to Egypt to meet with Hamas terror chief Khaled Mashaal. The two men are set to discuss the means of implementing the unity government deal they signed last May.
Netanyahu is obviously under great pressure to continue with these talks. A day doesn’t go by without some US official or European leader talking about the need for talks, or a leftist politician or political activist at home blaming Netanyahu for the absence of peace. But none of this pressure can justify the damage that is done to Israel’s position by continuing to engage in these negotiations.
As Netanyahu’s own experience with Obama (and Wexler) shows, concessions never bring a respite from the US leader’s pressure. They only form the baseline for demands for further concessions.
Beyond the narrow confines of Obama’s personal hostility towards Israel, Netanyahu’s current engagement in negotiations with the Palestinians is devastating to Israel’s position in two ways.
First, it makes it impossible for Israel to extricate itself from the lie of PLO moderation and to start telling the truth about its Palestinian “partner.”
Quite simply, as Abbas’s continued courtship of Hamas and his open embrace and glorification of mass murderers such as the murderers of the Fogel family make clear, the PLO has returned to its roots as a terrorist organization. It is no longer credible to claim that the PLO has abandoned terror in favor of peace.
By engaging in peace talks with the PLO, Netanyahu renders it impossible to make this critical claim. Consequently, he damns Israel to a situation in which we continue to empower and politically legitimize a terrorist organization committed to our destruction.
The second way continued negotiations devastates Israel’s position is by eroding our ability to claim our rights to Judea and Samaria and so extricate ourselves from this fake peace process with terrorists. As Wexler made clear, from the international community’s perspective, everything that Israel offers at the negotiating table is catalogued. Regardless of Palestinian bad faith, irrespective of actual prospects for peace, every theoretical Israeli concession becomes the new baseline for further negotiations.
American “friends” like Wexler and Obama play Israel for a fool again and again.
In truth, we should thank Wexler for coming here this week and reminding us of his bad faith, and the bad faith of the president he serves. But it is up to Netanyahu to draw the appropriate lessons.
caroline@carolineglick.com
Comentariu prin ARHIVAR — februarie 4, 2012 @ 10:55 am |
Column One: Let’s embrace our friends
In recent years, poll after poll has shown that majority of Israelis do not believe that two-state paradigm will bring peace. Two weeks ago, US Congressman Joe Walsh published an op-ed in the The Washington Times in which he called for the US and Israel to abandon the two-state solution.
After running through the record of Palestinian duplicity, failed governance, terrorism and bad faith, he called for Israel to apply its sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. In his words, Israel should “adopt the only solution that will bring true peace to the Middle East: a single Israeli state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel is the only country in the region dedicated to peace and the only power capable of stable, just and democratic government in the region.”
The evidence that the two-state paradigm has failed is overwhelming. The Palestinians’ decision to reject statehood at Camp David in 2000 and launch a terror war against Israel made clear that they had not abandoned their refusal from 1947 to accept partition of the Land of Israel with the Jews.
So, too, the Palestinians’ election of Hamas in the 2006 elections, and their missile war against Israel from Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, all made clear that they are not interested in a Palestinian state. Rather, their chief desire is Israel’s annihilation.
Consequentially, there is no chance whatsoever that the two state paradigm can work.
Indeed, the fact that there is no Palestinian leader willing to recognize Israel’s right to exist makes clear that if a Palestinian state is established in Judea and Samaria – in addition to the de facto Palestinian state in Gaza – that state will be in state of war with Israel. All territory under its control will be used to attack the rump Jewish state.
Given the abject failure of the two-state paradigm, it is abundantly clear that for all the complications that may be associated with the application of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, it is a better option for Israel than Israeli surrender of the areas.
Walsh’s op-ed is not his first statement of support for Israeli annexation. Last September, ahead of the UN general assembly, Walsh authored Congressional Resolution 394 supporting Israel’s right to annex Judea and Samaria in the event that the Palestinians asked the UN to recognize a Palestinian state outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel. Forty-four other congressmen co-sponsored the resolution.
And this makes sense.
The Palestinians’ decision to turn the issue of Palestinian statehood over to the UN constituted a substantive breach of the treaties the PLO signed with Israel. Those agreements stipulated that both sides agreed that their conflict would be solved through negotiations and not through unilateral actions. By ending negotiations with Israel and turning the issue of statehood over to the UN, the Palestinians canceled their treaties with Israel. Consequently, Israel is no longer bound by those accords and is free to take its own unilateral actions, including applying its laws to Judea and Samaria as it did in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the past.
FOR HIS unstinting support for Israel, Walsh has been subject to an unbridled assault by leftist American Jews. Ron Kampeas from JTA, for instance, attacked Walsh, accusing him of being no different than Israel’s enemies who seek to destroy Israel by ending its ability to define itself as a Jewish state through what they refer to as the “one-state solution.”
Kampeas blasted Walsh for suggesting that Palestinians unwilling to live under Israeli rule could move to Jordan which, with its 75-percent Palestinian majority, is effectively the Palestinian state. To back up his condemnation, Kampeas quoted Robert Wright’s excoriation of Walsh in The Atlantic.
There Wright wrote, “Offhand, I don’t recall a member of Congress in my lifetime saying anything so grotesquely at odds with American ideals about ethnic relations and for that matter basic human rights.”
For its part, the Jewish-run anti-Israel lobby J Street is mobilizing its supporters to bring about Walsh’s defeat in the November elections by soliciting contributions to his Democratic challenger. J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote that “Walsh’s prescription amounts to a call for an end to Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people.”
It is hard to know where to begin a discussion of this assault in which Jewish Americans attacked one of Israel’s strongest supporters simply because he had the temerity to recognize reality and call for the US to support an Israeli victory against our enemies who seek our destruction.
First, it is important to consider the claim that Walsh went against the grain of American ideals by suggesting, “Those Palestinians who wish to may leave their Fatah- and Hamas-created slums and move to the original Palestinian state: Jordan. The British Mandate for Palestine created Jordan as the country for the Palestinians. That is the only justification for its creation. Even now, 75% of its population is of Palestinian descent.”
The fact of the matter is that the two-state paradigm rests on the assumption that the Palestinian state will be ethnically cleansed of Jews before it is established. Whereas Walsh somehow stands in opposition to American ideals for suggesting that the Palestinians may voluntarily immigrate to Jordan, Kampeas, Ben- Ami and their cohorts have no problem with the concept of a Jew-free Palestine and the forcible expulsion of up to 675,000 Jews from their homes in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem simply because they are Jewish.
Aside from their pernicious hypocrisy and moral blindness, what stands out in their assaults on Walsh is that they cannot tell the difference between Israel’s enemies that seek its destruction through the so-called one-state solution, and Israel’s friends, who want it to defeat its enemies and live with security and peace. For the likes of Kampeas and Ben-Ami, there is no difference between Walsh and Israel’s worst enemies.
PART OF this problem is their apparent unquestioning acceptance of the myth of a demographic time bomb. They seem not to have noticed that the Palestinian claim that by 2015 there will be an Arab majority west of the Jordan River is a complete fabrication.
The truth is that if Israel applied its laws to Judea and Samaria tomorrow and all the Palestinians in those areas received Israeli citizenship, Israel would still retain a two-thirds Jewish majority. Moreover, all the demographic trends for Israel, including increasing birthrates and positive immigration rates, are positive. And all the demographic trends for the Palestinians, including decreasing birthrates and negative immigration rates, are negative. According to Israeli demographic researcher Yoram Ettinger, by 2030, Jewish will likely comprise 80% of the population of Israel, Judea and Samaria.
So Ben-Ami’s argument that Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria means the end of Israeli democracy is simply incorrect.
But aside from their hypocrisy and refusal to accept simple arithmetic realities, what stands out most clearly in these leftist American Jews’ assault on Walsh is how they have become addicted to the fable of the two-state solution. Their addiction to this fable – that argues that after a century of Palestinian devotion to the annihilation of Israel, the Palestinians are suddenly willing to meet Israel halfway – is what propels these Jewish activists to attack anyone who points out reality. It is what drives them to brand as a foe anyone with the temerity to suggest a better way forward.
The beauty of the two-state fable is that it puts the onus to make peace on Israel’s shoulders.
If it is true that the Palestinians want to make peace, then Israel must make peace. And if all the Palestinians require to make peace is for Israel to quit Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, then that is what Israel must do, together with the 675,000 Jews who live there.
The real tragedy is of course not that the likes of Kampeas and Ben-Ami maintain faith with the fairy tale of Palestinian willingness to live at peace with Israel. The real tragedy is that this myth has been the official policy of the government of Israel for the past 19 years. Since then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin launched the peace process with Yasser Arafat in September 1993, to greater or lesser degrees, every Israeli government has kept faith with the two-state solution lie.
It hasn’t mattered that the Palestinians rejected statehood and peace not once, but twice. It hasn’t mattered that the Palestinians received Gaza lock, stock and barrel with no strings attached and used the territory to launch an illegal missile war against Israeli civilians. The fact that both Arafat and his supposedly moderate successor Mahmoud Abbas rejected partition and maintained their devotion to Israel’s destruction did not stop Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from bowing to US pressure and embracing this fool’s game.
People like Kampeas are the first to bemoan Israel’s sorry state in the realm of public diplomacy. They decry Israel’s hasbara efforts as pathetic and failed. But what they fail to acknowledge is that it is the two-state trap that makes the construction and execution of an effective public diplomacy strategy impossible.
To maintain faith with this failed policy, Israel’s leaders and representatives are not merely required to ignore the history of the past 90 years of Palestinian rejection and aggression.
They are required to ignore current events.
They are forced to ignore not just what happened in 1947, but what happened at 7 o’clock in the morning.
And this brings us back to Rep. Walsh. There may be things to criticize about Walsh’s policy argument. For instance, he calls for the conferral of “limited voting power” on the Palestinians under Israeli sovereignty. In truth, there is no reason for them to receive anything but full voting rights.
But you have to be blind to reality to view him as anything other than a friend of Israel.
Happily, not everyone in Israel remains paralyzed. Members of Knesset have launched repeated attempts in recent months to debate legislation calling for Israel to apply its sovereignty over all or parts of Judea and Samaria. Next Wednesday, MK Miri Regev is holding a conference to launch a new Knesset caucus calling for the adoption of this policy.
IN RECENT years, poll after poll has shown that the majority of Israelis do not believe that the two-state paradigm will bring peace or that if a Palestinian state is formed, it will live at peace with Israel.
And yet, because of the choke-hold that Kampeas and Ben-Ami’s Israeli counterparts have held over the national discourse, the Israeli people have been given no other option to consider. Rather, we have been told over and over again that giving our enemies a veto over our rights, land and security is the only alternative.
Walsh and the 44 congressmen who co-sponsored his resolution are Israel’s friends. We should take heart in their willingness to buck consensus and support us. And we should give careful and responsible consideration to their reasonable and supportive policy recommendations.
caroline@carolineglick.com
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=270472
Comentariu prin Ion Pribeagu — mai 18, 2012 @ 5:50 pm |