In a polemic published last month in the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,”the left-wing journalist Peter Beinart argued that American Jews, especially the younger generation, are turning their backs on Israel. In Beinart’s estimation, this is a most understandable and inevitable development. Beinart expounded on the points of his original essay during a recent lecture . Just as in the original article, Beinart’s argument was profoundly flawed.

For anyone with a modicum of knowledge of Israeli society and the larger picture of the Middle East, the lecture was an astonishing display of ignorance and arrogance. The following analysis of the lowlights of his talk shows how Beinart, like other Israel-bashers, rides roughshod over the truth in an effort to portray Israel as violent and inhumane and deserving of the increasing suspicion in which it is held by American Jews.

The “Radical Settlers”

Beinart stated as a matter of fact: “The same radical settlers who used violence against Palestinians used violence against an Israeli prime minister .”

Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin was not assassinated by a “radical settler,” but by a law student from Herzilya, a coastal town adjacent to Tel Aviv.

Beinart gave no evidence in this part of his talk that he knew what percentage of the settlers were involved in violence against Palestinians. Or who has been subject to greater and more lethal violence. Is it Palestinians by settlers? Or settlers by Palestinians?

Nor did he mention that Palestinian movements have proven all too ready to use violence. Not only is this violence directed toward “radical settlers” and innocent Israeli citizens, but Palestinians have also embarked on a frenzy of fratricidal fury against themselves.

The Eviction of Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah Quarter in East Jerusalem

On this matter, Beinart posed this rhetorical question: Is what is happening in Sheik Jarrah, where Palestinians who were living in their homes for 50 years were forcibly evicted and are now living in the street, “kosher”?

This mirrors his claim in his New York Review of Books article that:  the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, … a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers.

In fact, the Palestinians’ eviction was not a politically motivated initiative to dispossess hapless, helpless Palestinians as Beinart implies, but the result of a court ruling.

The courts (including the Israeli Supreme Court, which often — indeed more often than not — rules against the “radical settlers”) determined that the property in which the Palestinians were living in fact belonged to Jewish owners. In 1967, the court awarded the Palestinian families “protected tenant” status, whose right to reside in the homes was guaranteed as long as they paid rent to the legal owners.

In 1982, the legal owners sued 23 families for nonpayment of rent. According to an agreement reached between the lawyer representing the Palestinian families and the authorized representatives of the owners, the Palestinian families were indeed recognized as “protected tenants” whose occupancy in the buildings was ensured as long as they paid rent. However, most of the families refused to do so.

Does Beinart believe that Israel would be looked on more favorably if the rule of law was flouted, and legal property rights violated because of the ethnic identity of those ruled against?

Pikuach Nefesh and Reverence for Life Over Land

Beinart lamented: One of the things that bothers me is the great reverence for Pikuach Nefesh and the recognition that it is acceptable to withdraw from land if it meant saving lives.

This is a statement that can only be explained by either total ignorance or total insincerity. For as anyone who follows the news or reads the papers must know, a dramatic inverse relationship exists between Pikuach Nefesh (preserving lives) and withdrawal from land.

Indeed, since the doctrine of “land-for-peace” was introduced into Israeli policy, fatalities have soared to unprecedented levels on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. To suggest otherwise reflects a massive deficit of either information or integrity.

Double Standards

Regarding the conduct of his like-minded Israel-basher peers, Beinart pontificated: “There is something frankly silly to me about a Jewish community that feels so self-confident in how our values apply in Bosnia, the former Soviet Union, and Darfur, but is so timid in talking about how our values apply in the place we care about most .”

So Israel’s attempts to defend its people are morally comparable to the wholesale slaughter in Darfur, the widespread massacres in Bosnia, and the oppressive brutality of the Soviet regime?

What a windfall for the assorted collection of Jew-baiting anti-Semites, Judeo-phobic Israel-bashers, and other hate-driven villains such thinking is. What greater endorsement could they hope for than Beinart’s exhortation that his fellow Jews relate to the Jewish State as if it were governed by the genocidal Janjaweed militias in Sudan, or by the brutish guards in the Siberian gulags, or the murderous perpetrators of the bloody events in Srebrenica.

Double Standards II

Beinart endorses double standards when they work to Israel’s detriment, and only dismisses them when they do not.

When a challenge was raised regarding the application of these double standards, Beinart’s rather glib and unoriginal response was to claim that while Israel was “far morally superior to North Korea, Syria, Libya and Iran,” these were not relevant criteria he would expect from a Jewish state. According to Beinart, he should not have to “compromise just because North Korea is worse.”

Such an approach might have some merit if Israel was being censured less severely, or even equally severely, for violations of liberal-democratic values similar to those perpetrated by North Korea, Iran, etc. But what is happening is altogether different. Israel is being censured far more harshly and frequently for infringements much less notable than those glossed over by the international community when committed by other nations.

Moreover, it is not only in comparison to the tyrannies in Tehran and Tripoli and the dictatorships in Damascus and the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) that Israel is being held to a double standard. Indeed, widely divergent criteria are used to judge the actions of Israel and those of the leading democratic countries that comprise NATO. This is true both with respect to military action in the Balkans and the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan.

In the Balkans, high-altitude bombing by NATO, including the use of cluster bombs, inflicted hundreds of civilian Serbian casualties during a military campaign in which not one single civilian in a NATO nation was ever threatened.

In Afghanistan, where military action was undertaken in response to a single terror attack on a single NATO member, estimates of civilian deaths caused directly by NATO military action since 2001 are in the range of 5000-8000, with additional indirect fatalities estimated at up to 20,000.

Why should the victims of Israeli actions taken to defend their citizens elicit a far greater expression of moral outrage on the part of the international community than actions taken to perpetuate regimes in East Asia, Central Africa, or in the Middle East?

Why should several families evicted because of failure to pay rent, after being afforded due process by the Israeli legal system, be more troubling to liberal Jews than the millions of victims of gender apartheid, creed apartheid, and gay apartheid across the Islamic world?

Israel’s Right to Defend Itself

Beinart magnanimously agrees that “to ask Israel to be willing to not defend itself would be wrong,” but predictably goes on to ask – rhetorically – “is every military action…does every Israeli policy contribute to Israeli defense..?”

To be sure, with the benefit of hindsight, some Israeli security measures may be criticized for one reason or another. But in a situation of such uncertainty, what would Beinart recommend as Israel’s working security policy: To err on the side of sober caution? Or on the side of reckless optimism?

Nothing could imperil liberal democratic values more than trying to foist on Israel unattainable standards of liberal democratic ideals that make the defense of these ideals impossible. These standards are not demanded or expected of any other country, much less from one faced with such grave existential threats.

Of course no one is disputing Beinart’s right to criticize Israeli policy. However, as someone who has chosen not to share the burden of living in Israel, he would surely understand that when he states that “as a Jew, I have a certain set of expectations… as to what a Jewish state might be,” some might interpret his approach as being more than a little presumptuous.

Indeed, it would be interesting to know what kind of Israeli military actions Beinart would condone as not offensive to his liberal sensibilities. Would they include the construction of the much maligned separation barrier? Targeted killings (with the lowest level of collateral casualties in military history)? Large scale campaigns (such as “Cast Lead”) to quell rocket and mortar fire on civilian populations?

Blockades and Balance

Beinart asks: “How did the Gaza blockade which banned a vast, vast number of consumer products that had nothing to do with making rockets…help Israeli security?” He added, ”It seems to me that all it did was lead to more and more and more hatred of Israel.”

Can Beinart really be unaware of the fact that the imposition of the blockade was a result of, not a reason for, Palestinian enmity; that it is a consequence, not a cause, of Palestinian hatred for Israel?

Is he really ignorant of the fact that whenever Israel has turned the other cheek, it has been resoundingly slapped by the Palestinians; that whenever Israel extended the hand of friendship, it has been brusquely brushed aside by the Palestinians?

Why should Israel be condemned by liberal democrats for imposing a blockade on Gaza, when the international community imposed a UN Security Council-sanctioned blockade against Iraq and its despotic ruler?

Why is the Gaza blockade more reprehensible than the U.S.-led, UN sanctioned Iraqi blockade that caused infant mortality to sky-rocket and banned importation of over 300 items – including painkillers, pencils, hearing aids, musical instruments, and shampoo?

The Ascendancy of Lieberman

Beinart bewailed the strengthening of Minister of Foreign Affairs Avignor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party as evidence of a widening disregard for liberal democratic values in Israel.

However, a far more powerful case can be made to ascribe Lieberman’s electoral success to the dramatic failure of the left-wing’s ”Chamberlainian” program of “land-for- peace” and the consequent disappointment with this disastrous doctrine. It is an approach which, for the past two decades, has wrought nothing but death and destruction on both Jew and Arab alike.

Actually, Beinart’s loathing for Lieberman’s party appears to be based more on hearsay rather than hard facts. After all, Lieberman has not only accepted, at least implicitly, the notion of a two state solution but is in fact offering arguably even more territorial concessions than most left-wing parties.

It is true that this would involve redrawing the 1967 borders in certain places to exclude large population centers of Israeli Arabs. These would then be annexed to the Palestinian Authority. Yet, it is not quite clear why this would be considered odious to anyone who believes that a viable functioning Palestinian state is realistic, as Beinart presumably does.

Indeed, Israeli Arabs continually claim that the dominant Jewish character of Israel is incompatible with their ethno-religious identity and complain that, as a result, they are often subjected to various forms of prejudice and discrimination. So, if one assumes that a viable functioning Palestinian state is indeed feasible, one is compelled to ask, from both a moral and a practical perspective, why would Israeli Arabs not leap at the chance of being extricated from the clutches of the discriminatory Zionist regime and brought under the auspices of an egalitarian non-discriminatory Palestinian one?

As this would not involve the physical displacement of a single Israeli Arab from his/her home, what possible liberal democratic principle would Beinart invoke to object to such a proposal?

The Sentiments of Israeli Arab

Beinart’s contention is that Israel Arabs object to this arrangement of annexation to the Palestinian Authority because “they consider themselves Israeli.” But this has a rather suspicious ring to it. Is Beinart seriously suggesting that that Israeli Arabs “feel Israeli” in the sense they identify with: the words of the national anthem Hatikva – expressing 2000 years of yearning by the Jewish soul to be free in the land of Zion; the Star of David displayed on the flag; the biblical Menorah as the State symbol; Saturday rather than Friday as the official Sabbath; Yom Kippur Passover, Rosh Ha’Shana as national holidays; Hebrew as the predominant language; or Independence Day as a triumph over Arab aggression?

And if not, how is it possible to make them, as he suggests, “feel more comfortable in their Israeliness”? To annul the Jewish character of Israel as expressed by the prevalence of Jewish symbolism in public life and Israel’s social institutions?

Beinart is of course right that Israeli Arabs strongly object to their annexation to the Palestinian Authority, but wrong in ascribing this aversion to a desire to become more fully integrated into the fabric of Israel. A more plausible explanation would be the desire of Israeli Arabs to continue enjoying the best of both worlds: the benefits of greater economic prosperity and personal freedom that life as an Israeli citizen affords them, and also the expression of their ethno-religious identity through an ongoing and intensifying hostility toward the entity that provides them these benefits.

Beinart’s attempt to demonstrate Israeli Arabs’ attachment to Israel seems curiously contradictory. He quotes a poll allegedly conducted in 2006 during the Second Lebanon War, and proclaims that “when they polled Israeli Arabs, they found that by a factor of about 3 to 1 they supported Israel “ Although several hours of Google-searching failed to produce any trace of such a poll, I have no reason to doubt that it may in fact exist.

Other survey results that are extremely difficult to reconcile with Beinart’s contention regarding the sentiments of Israeli Arabs for their country of residence. A 2007 poll conducted by Haifa University’s Sammy Smooha, a well-known sociologist of well-known left-leaning proclivities, found that:

• 48.2% of Arab citizens of Israel said they believed that Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel during that war were justified;

• 76% of Arab citizens of Israel described Zionism as racist;

• 40.5% of Arab citizens of Israel deny the Holocaust; among high school and college graduates the figure was 33%.

A later poll by Smooha produced arguably even more disturbing results:

• Only 41% of Israel’s Arab minority recognize the country’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state;

• Only 53.7% of the Israeli Arab public believe Israel has a right to exist as an independent country – Jewish or otherwise.

So, almost 60% do not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and almost half deny Israel any right of existence at all. Was Beinart, who made no reference at all to these findings, unaware of their existence? If not, then he is surely woefully ignorant. If so, then he is clearly willfully misleading

The Nuclear Threat

While Beinart acknowledges that “an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a disaster,” he goes on to expose a massive misunderstanding of the threat Israel would face if Tehran in fact realized its nuclear ambitions. He merely proclaims that in such a case “Israel would have to deal with some of the things with Pakistan on its borders, and that has a nuclear weapon.”

This comparison is ludicrous. India has a population five times that of Pakistan spread over an entire subcontinent seven times the size of Pakistan. It is in no danger of annihilation from its impoverished eastern neighbor, even if it were to suffer a surprise first-strike that wiped out several of its population centers. India has – and Pakistan knows it has – absolute first strike survivability and unassailable second strike capability to devastate Pakistan in retaliation.

In stark contrast, Israel has a population less than one tenth and an area one eightieth of Iran’s. Moreover, 80% of Israel’s civilian population live in a narrow coastal strip 8-10 miles wide and 60 miles long, of which much, indeed most, would be wiped out by a single nuclear weapon. This would dramatically undermine the ability of the country to continue to function as a viable national entity. So although Israel allegedly has marine-based second-strike capability and may be able to inflict devastating retaliation, this will not ensure its survival if Iran miscalculates the cost of a first-strike or calculates that it is worth the risk.

It also should be remembered that while Iran has overtly threatened Israel with destruction, this has never been the declared intention of Pakistan regarding India.

Furthermore, with a nuclear Iranian umbrella, terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Jihad, could operate with far greater freedom against Israel. The fear that harsh retaliation may precipitate a nuclear confrontation would make ordinary life in the country untenable.

So, while Beinart may be right in pointing out that modern day Israel should not be likened to the powerless, helpless Jews in Europe, this does not mean it is not facing existential threats and genocidal dangers that could precipitate tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust. He should remember that if there is a lesson to be learnt from the Holocaust it is this: it is extremely dangerous to dismiss declared intentions of despots, however delusional they may initially appear.

The Real Failure of the American Jewish Establishment

Beinart is right in diagnosing the failure of the American Jewish establishment. But it is a failure quite different than the one he writes about.

Assuming that Beinart is sincere when he implies that Israel “is the place we care about the most,” then all of the following comprise a catastrophic moral lapse on the part of the American Jewish establishment:

• The failure to vigorously assert Israel’s right to defend itself and its citizens against attacks perpetrated against them just because they are Jewish;

• The failure to unequivocally repudiate the prevailing custom that portrays every measure Israel undertakes to protect itself as “racist”;

• The failure to reject the egregious standard by which Palestinian inconvenience is considered more heinous than the threat to Jewish lives;

• The failure to unambiguously distinguish between the causes and the consequences of Arab antagonism; and

• The failure to comprehend and support policy imperatives.

Addressing and correcting these failures is a far more urgent, a far more pertinent, and a far more authentic mission than any obsessive tendency to dwell on the imperfections of Israel’s vibrant liberal democracy. Such imperfections are only the product of security driven exigencies and not illiberal, anti-democratic proclivities.

To expect Israel to conduct itself in a manner totally divorced from the exigencies of its environment and totally detached from the nature of its adversaries, is a position that reflects neither moral merit nor political prudence.

It is this that the American Jewish establishment, including its liberal democratic members, needs to understand and to address accordingly – before great tragedy overtakes the Jewish people again.

By Dr. Martin Sherman - July 20, 2010

http://www.haaretz.com/news/poll-over-25-of-israeli-arabs-say-holocaust-never-happened-1.215853

http://www.haaretz.com/news/poll-40-of-israeli-arabs-believe-holocaust-never-happened-1.276190

http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=55103

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Jews (at end of article)

On Saturday night, the starving people of Gaza opened up a luxury mall.

At opening ceremonies attended by ministers and government officials, the Gaza Mall is a multi-story shopping center that includes food, clothing, perfumes, shoes, household appliances, office supplies and more.

The mall has a website, where we can see that it has air conditioning and parking, as well as delivery and other amenities that one would expect in any major mall.

The mall web page advertises "Israeli men's trousers at an attractive price," men's shirts from the US, girl's dresses from France and boy's pants from Turkey.

More pictures here.


The humanitarian crisis continues to grow in Gaza.

UPDATE: AP had pictures as well - but no accompanying story.

Also, I just emailed Catherine Ashton, European Union's foreign policy chief, who is now visiting Gaza, if she will have the opportunity to visit this mall.

Posted by Elder of Ziyon

Visit www.CJHSLA.org for details on our important and exciting upcoming events:

Caroline Glick - July 21
Boots of the Ground with Israeli Elite Commandos - July 26
Uzi Landau - Briefing on his recent White House visit - July 28

Ten years on from Camp David, Bill Clinton’s candour shows that the only peace offers worth making are to those prepared to accept them
By Daniel Finkelstein, July 15, 2010 - TheJC.com

Three days before he left office, President Bill Clinton received a message of congratulations from Yasir Arafat. "You are a great man," Arafat told him. But Clinton was having none of it. "I am not a great man," he replied. "I am a failure. And you made me one".

President Clinton has always been very clear where he believes the blame lies for the failure of the Camp David peace talks that took place 10 years ago this month. Arafat, and the Palestinian leadership, Clinton believes, missed a golden chance when they rejected, out of hand, the deal they were offered by Ehud Barak.

In fact, reading My Life - Bill Clinton's frank memoirs - is shocking. Here is what he writes about the moment he realises from Arafat's body language that he is going to reject Barak's offer: "The deal was so good I couldn't believe anyone would be foolish enough to let it go." And here is his explanation for Arafat's behaviour: "He had grown used to flying from place to place, giving mother-of-pearl gifts made by Palestinian craftsmen to world leaders and appearing on television with them. It would be different if the end of violence took Palestine out of the headlines and instead he had to worry about providing jobs, schools and basic services."

Why is this shocking? Because it demonstrates that the implied Western liberal promise to Israel is a dud.

Arafat was simply not interested in accepting any concessions for peace.

Many (most?) liberals believe that if only Israel were to make a decent offer to the Palestinians, there would bepeace. And - here's the promise - if such decent offer were to be rejected, well, then Israel's tough security measures and negotiating stance would enjoy everyone's support. Just be reasonable, Western liberals urge.

And what Bill Clinton's book, and the whole Camp David thing shows is that this isn't true. Because Israel made a wonderful offer. And the Palestinians rejected it. But Western liberals have not supported Israel's tough security measures in the years that passed.

Instead, they have reinvented history - claiming that Israel's offer wasn't really that good - or forgotten history - I wonder how many people who protested against the Gaza action even know about Camp David.

Which is why it is shocking, but also crucial, to find it all written down in Clinton's memoirs. It is a history that cannot be ignored, or forgotten, or reinvented.

Realising, truly accepting, that the implied Western liberal promise to Israel is a dud is vital. What happened in Camp David, and the liberal reaction to it, then changes a lot.

First, it means that while Israel might fear Western liberals' ire if it is not prepared to respond to their demands, it cannot expect much in the way of gratitude even when it does make concessions. And that means that expecting such gratitude should never be part of the calculation when considering deals.

The only reason, therefore, for making an offer is if you believe it might be accepted. There is no dividend in making genuine offers that are rejected.

And this, in turn, leads to the toughest, least palatable, but I am afraid, unavoidable lesson of Camp David. Territorial concessions are the final step in the process, not the first step.

The only concessions worth making are those that will be accepted, and they will only be accepted when those being offered them have decided that they want peace. No concession made to Arafat would have been accepted, because he did not want to accept any concessions. Natan Sharansky makes this point often, and even goes so far as to argue that the real moment when peace will come is when you can leave the settlers in their houses and not fear that they would be killed.

In other words, the lesson of Camp David is that land for peace is wrong. Peace comes before land.

Daniel Finkelstein is executive editor of The Times
http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/columnists/35687/peace-those-who-want-it 

Anger over Gaza is a distraction.
We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region

By José María Aznar - former Spanish Prime Minister published in the British newspaper 'The Times' on 17 June 2010

For far too long now it has been unfashionable in Europe to speak up for Israel. In the wake of the recent incident on board a ship full of anti-Israeli activists in the Mediterranean, it is hard to think of a more unpopular cause to champion.

In an ideal world, the assault by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara would not have ended up with nine dead and a score wounded. In an ideal world, the soldiers would have been peacefully welcomed on to the ship. In an ideal world, no state, let alone a recent ally of Israel such as Turkey, would have sponsored and organised a flotilla whose sole purpose was to create an impossible situation for Israel: making it choose between giving up its security policy and the naval blockade, or risking the wrath of the world.

In our dealings with Israel, we must blow away the red mists of anger that too often cloud our judgment. A reasonable and balanced approach should encapsulate the following realities: first, the state of Israel was created by adecision of the UN. Its legitimacy, therefore, should not be in question. Israel is a nation with deeply rooted democratic institutions. It is a dynamic and open society that has repeatedly excelled in culture, science and technology.

Second, owing to its roots, history, and values, Israel is a fully fledged Western nation. Indeed, it is a normal Western nation, but one confronted by abnormal circumstances.

Uniquely in the West, it is the only democracy whose very existence has been questioned since its inception. In the first instance, it was attacked by its neighbours using the conventional weapons of war. Then it faced terrorism culminating in wave after wave of suicide attacks. Now, at the behest of radical Islamists and their sympathisers, it faces a campaign of delegitimisation through international law and diplomacy.

Sixty-two years after its creation, Israel is still fighting for its very survival. Punished with missiles raining from north and south, threatened with destruction by an Iran aiming to acquire nuclear weapons and pressed upon by friend and foe, Israel, it seems, is never to have a moment’s peace.

For years, the focus of Western attention has understandably been on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. But if Israel is in danger today and the whole region is slipping towards a worryingly problematic future, it is not due to the lack of understanding between the parties on how to solve this conflict. The parameters of any prospective peace agreement are clear, however difficult it may seem for the two sides to make the final push for a settlement.

The real threats to regional stability, however, are to be found in the rise of a radical Islamism which sees Israel’s destruction as the fulfilment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran, as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony. Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel, but also the wider West and the world at large.

The core of the problem lies in the ambiguous and often erroneous manner in which too many Western countries are now reacting to this situation. It is easy to blame Israel for all the evils in the Middle East. Some even act and talk as if a new understanding with the Muslim world could be achieved if only we were prepared to sacrifice the Jewish state on the altar. This would be folly.

Israel is our first line of defence in a turbulent region that is constantly at risk of descending into chaos; a region vital to our energy security owing to our overdependence on Middle Eastern oil; a region that forms the front line in the fight against extremism. If Israel goes down, we all go down. To defend Israel’s right to exist in peace, within secure borders, requires a degree of moral and strategic clarity that too often seems to have disappeared in Europe. The United States shows worrying signs of heading in the same direction.

The West is going through a period of confusion over the shape of the world’s future. To a great extent, this confusion is caused by a kind of masochistic self-doubt over our own identity; by the rule of political correctness; by a multiculturalism that forces us to our knees before others; and by a secularism which, irony of ironies, blinds us even when we are confronted by jihadis promoting the most fanatical incarnation of their faith. To abandon Israel to its fate, at this moment of all moments, would merely serve to illustrate how far we have sunk and how inexorable our decline now appears.

This cannot be allowed to happen. Motivated by the need to rebuild our own Western values, expressing deep concern about the wave of aggression against Israel, and mindful that Israel’s strength is our strength and Israel’s weakness is our weakness, I have decided to promote a new Friends of Israel initiative with the help of some prominent people, including David Trimble, Andrew Roberts, John Bolton, Alejandro Toledo (the former President of Peru), Marcello Pera (philosopher and former President of the Italian Senate), Fiamma Nirenstein (the Italian author and politician), the financier Robert Agostinelli and the Catholic intellectual George Weigel.

It is not our intention to defend any specific policy or any particular Israeli government. The sponsors of this initiative are certain to disagree at times with decisions taken by Jerusalem. We are democrats, and we believe in diversity.

What binds us, however, is our unyielding support for Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. For Western countries to side with those who question Israel’s legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel’s vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values rather than robustly to stand up in defence of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude.

Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined.

José María Aznar was prime minister of Spain between 1996 and 2004.

Finally! Since the beginning of this fiasco, where the international community has lined up against Israel for legally enforcing its blockade on the genocidal Islamists in Gaza, CJHS has been waiting for someone to put together a fully documented expose on the lies and fabrications being thrown around in the media. That video has finally arrived.

Please watch this explanation, which begins with the blockade itself and moves backward and forward, exposing the "humanitarian disaster" and the "Israeli aggression" myths for what they are - calculated and dishonest attacks meant to delegitimize the very possibility of Jewish self-defense.

www.vimeo.com/12555636Click on image to watch the video or go straight to www.vimeo.com/12555636   

A New Abbas?

David Hazony - 06.13.2010 - 12:53 PM

The term “Reassessment” entered the diplomatic discourse between Israel and the United States in 1975.  U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sought to pressure the then prime minister Yitzak Rabin into an “interim agreement” with Egypt, by which Israeli forces would withdraw from the Yom Kippur War ceasefire lines to the Mitla and Gidi passes in Sinai.  Kissinger froze U.S. arms shipments and hinted that more drastic measures would follow. Rabin was unfazed and took his case to the Senate.  President Gerald Ford and Kissinger relented.

Even at the height of that crisis, the United States did not dare to endanger the heart of its strategic understanding with Israel: Israel’s ambiguous nuclear policy.  President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Golda Meir set the policy in 1969 that has been followed by all the presidents and prime ministers since. This policy has often been articulated in written agreements between them but occasionally simply by mutual understanding. “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East,” said prime ministers Levi Eshkol and Shimon Peres, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, and all who followed. U.S. presidents have come and gone; sometimes they had questions, sometimes they asked for clarifications, but ultimately they all accepted the formula and agreed to abide by it.  Until Obama.

After his election, Obama promised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to maintain the ambiguity Israel’s ambiguous nuclear policy.  Two weeks ago he betrayed Israel.

On May 28, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, which meets once every five years, called unanimously - with America’s support - for Israel to sign the non-proliferation treaty and open its nuclear installations to external supervision.  Israel is not a signatory to the treaty; Iran is a signatory, yet Iran is rushing towards production of nuclear weapons.  Syria and Libya are signatories, but their signatures have not prevented them from building uranium enrichment plants for military purposes.  North Korea built a bomb and tests nuclear weapons, mocking the entire world supposedly opposed to it.  Pakistani scientists led by the “father of the Pakistan’s nuclear bomb” Abed Qadeer Khan sold nuclear secrets and technology necessary for the building of nuclear weapons to Iran, Syria, Libya, and possibly North Korea.  In the face of this burgeoning industry, the United States gave in to an Egyptian initiative and agreed to single out Israel as the country the world should be worried about.  Israel alone was mentioned in the NPT Review Committee’s report.  Apparently only its installations need to be examined.

The time has come for a reassessment of U.S.– Israeli relations.

Israel may want the billions of dollars it receives in military aid from the United States, and in the event of a long war, Israel may need the U.S. munitions reserves currently stored in Israel and re-supply lines for the Israeli army; the U.S. market is also of great importance for Israel’s economy; and U.S. intevention often limits Israel’s international isolation. But the fact is, Israel can no longer rely on the support of the United States. 

Israel must reassess the value of all American promises, whether they be in writing,  made ceremoniously at public festivities, or whispered privately in a room of the White House. He who without batting an eyelash has betrayed Israel on the nuclear issue, a matter whose existential importance to the Jewish state is obvious given the  Iranian dash for bomb, will not hesitate to deny other commitments. Obama is currently pressuring Israel to accept dictates that would lead to a Palestinian state in the heart of its country.  In return, he offers to guarantee our security, preserve our technological advantage, and ensure the Palestinian state will be demilitarized.  Why would anyone in Israel be willing to take existential risks while relying on the commitment of an American president who has betrayed and denied the commitments of his predecessors and forgotten even his own? 

One might think that as Israel’s military and political situation worsens, our ability to maneuver opposite the United States decreases.  But with our back to the wall and knowing full well that we have no one to rely on, Israel can turn this lack of maneuverability into resoluteness and the dearth of options into strength. When doubts are resolved, fortitude may emerge.  The knowledge that American promises are without value is of itself quite valuable.  Even a pauper will not agree to give the little he has in exchange for a guarantee openly declared to be worthless. 

Obama is no more frightening than Ford.  Clinton dislikes us no more than Kissinger did. The sea we are threatened with being thrown into is the same sea.  The Arabs are the same Arabs.  But the wall our backs are up against is much closer and more dangerous. The depth of Obama’s betrayal must be made known to the American public today.  As the November elections approach in the United States, Netanyahu has the opportunity to replicate Rabin’s achievement of 1975. 

Posted by Omri Ceren Jun 3rd 2010

It must be insanely frustrating to do media outreach or public diplomacy for Israel.

It's not only that media outlets seem to have an endless supply of anti-Israel storylines that they just mix and match regardless of context, from lurid descriptions of imagined atrocities to old standbys about Palestinian dispossession. It's also that journalists and editors seem to pick their themes with something approaching reckless abandon, throwing against the wall one thinly sourced anti-Israel libel after another. If something sticks they congratulate themselves on brave journalism. If a smear is debunked they just shrug and move on.

The problem isn't so much a resistance to specific facts, though the BBC has indeed been conspicuously ignoring Israeli evidence that contradicts their preferred take on reality. It's just that being wrong is a functionally costless proposition if the error works against Israel, so journalists can publish an endless stream of sensational accusations with minimal concern for their veracity. All they need is a quote, which anti-Israel partisans are more than willing to provide, and that qualifies as fact-checking.

The reports surrounding Israel's Monday raid on the Mavi Marmara ship stands as a veritable textbook on how that coverage plays out in real time.

The flagship of the Gaza "Freedom Flotilla," transporting ostensibly humanitarian aid to Iran's ostensibly impoverished proxies in the Gaza Strip, was part of the ostensibly nonviolent fleet seized by Israeli naval commandos. The ship was contacted by Israel and asked to unload its cargo for inspection, the captain explicitly declared the fleet's intention to breach Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, and the Israelis dispatched commandos to intercept it.

That was when the gentle humanitarians on the Marmara executed a carefully planned ambush, attacking the Israeli commandos with knives and metal pipes while the soldiers waited 40 minutes for permission to use live fire. Meanwhile they tried to defend themselves with paintball rifles, while one commando after another was brutally assaulted. Several ended up in the hospital in critical condition. One has reportedly been beaten beyond recognition.

That much we know because the IDF released a torrent of video and audio proving it, much of it posted to YouTube before Americans were awake on Memorial Day. But they still weren't fast enough to beat the first wave of articles, most of which conveyed fantastic tales of innocent humanitarians getting sprayed with gunfire by bumbling, blundering IDF thugs. That those tales turned out to be wrong has done very little to dampen the media's enthusiasm for anti-Israel propaganda.

Even before the raid, Reuters had pointedly juxtaposed Israel's concerns about the fleet with a reminder that "a Turkish human rights group is one of the organizers." That organization was the International Humanitarian Fund (IHH), which a later Reuters article outlined as an international charity group whose members "don't have anything against Israel." Except the IHH is actually an Al-Qaeda linked terrorist organization according to multiple countries, Turkey included. As for their members' lack of concern with the Jewish State, the characterization squares poorly with videotapes of flotilla members chanting genocidal antisemitic war chants before departing.

Just a few hours after news of the raid broke, the New York Times had already published an article with prominent quotes declaring that "it was inconceivable" that the flotilla passengers had used live fire against the commandos. A video subsequently published by the IDF showed not only that it was eminently conceivable, but that Israeli commandos walked into a lynching party. The overhead and close up videos were incontrovertible, though fringe conspiracy theorist are certainly working on explaining how the IDF manufactured them.

Stephen Walt of Walt and Mearsheimer fame took to his Foreign Policy blog to denounce Israel's attack on an "unarmed ship." Elsewhere the AFP quoted a flotilla leader stating flat out that "nobody had a weapon." So the IDF produced tape of protesters detonating stun grenades and stabbing commandos, plus an entire video carefully cataloging all the arms that were on the unarmed ship.

According to quotes in Al Jazeera and the International Herald Tribune, the flotilla jihadists didn't anticipate any violence. Except the IDF showed them writing up wills, preparing gasmasks, bringing night vision goggles and bullet-proof vests, and arming themselves with metal pipes, rods, slingshots, and broken bottles.

The Washington Post's musings over whether Israel had violated international law or committed piracy were answered as soon as someone bothered to read international law or look up the definition of piracy.

The "crippling Israeli siege" of the Gaza Strip is neither particularly crippling nor exclusively Israeli.

And so on.

IRAN-US-ISRAEL-POLITICS-PROTEST-EMBASSY-ANNIVERSARY

None of which has slowed down the anti-Israel invective. The new tactic is simply to assert over and over again what a disaster the raid was, with the hope being that it eventually becomes exactly that. The Huffington Post has naturally been leading the way, mixing ominous declarations of a "botched raid" with unseemly headlines about how Barney Frank is ashamed "as a Jew." The Los Angeles Times editorial about "Israel's self-inflicted wound" is another fine example of the genre.

Ditto for the Associated Press's analysis of how Israel's "bloody, bungled" operation has strained Israeli/US ties. And of Bloomberg's description of how the Israeli raid has ruined Israeli/Turkish relations. And of the NYT's discovery that the raid has undermined Israeli/Palestinian proximity talks. Meanwhile the US/Israeli special relationship was already heading for a collapse and if anything has recovered ground during this crisis. And the Israeli/Turkish relationship has been over for months as a result of Turkey's strategic decision to pull away from the West. And the only thing that Palestinians and Israelis agree upon is that the proximity talks have always been a waste of time. But somehow all of these are still more tenable than the demonstrable lies that dominated the news cycle for the first few post-raid days.

So the Israelis have a right to feel a little bit frustrated. They've been pouring millions of dollars into documenting their excruciatingly careful military operations, building on lessons stretching back a decade. In April 2002, after a string of horrific suicide bombings, Israel invaded the "the martyrs' capital" of Jenin as part of Operation Defensive Shield. The fighting was brutal and flood-the-zone media coverage of a "massacre" immediately ensued. Fabrications of murders and atrocities - entire families bulldozed, thousands dead, etc - became ubiquitous. By the time the true facts came out and it was proven that only 52 mostly combatant Palestinians had died, the libels had hardened into conventional wisdom.

Israelis became determined not to let anti-Israel media feeding frenzies get ahead of facts ever again, with the assumption being that media outlets simply couldn't simply lie in the face of evidence.

They were half-right: journalists gave up the easily disprovable lies, and moved on to incoherent arguments. Instead of trying to sustain new story lines, they just fell back to older talking points.

Two days before the Gaza flotilla raid, the Wall Street Journal quoted a senior Israel military official saying that "it makes no difference what we do, or how careful we are... whatever we do, they'll all be against us, they'll condemn us."

No kidding.

FROM: Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
TO: Free Gaza Freedom Flotilla
RE: Gaza Tourism Guide

Dear Crazy People,

We’ve been given to understand that you intend to stage another media stunt, wherein you’re again going to float some empty ships – they may be full this time, they were mostly empty last time – in the general direction of the Gaza Strip. Your hope is apparently that your cameramen will capture the Israeli reaction and edit it into an overreaction or, failing that, simply reprint your feverish fantasies with slack-jawed credulity. Again.

Our problem isn’t so much that your goal involves obfuscating the millions of tons of food and aid we’ve delivered to Gaza civilians, which allowed Hamas to move money away from infrastructure and into weaponry, which led to more of our cities getting bombarded with rockets and missiles. It’s not even how, knowing that we deliver 15,000 tons of goods every week, your 10,000 tons of concrete isn’t exactly a shining testament to your good intentions. Not when just last week we handed over 810,209 liters of heavy duty diesel fuel, 21 truckloads of milk powder and baby food, 897 tons of cooking gas, 66 truckloads of fruits and vegetables, 51 truckloads of wheat, 27 truckloads of meat, chicken and fish products, 40 truckloads of dairy products, 117 truckloads of animal feed, 36 truckloads of hygiene products, 38 trucks of clothing, 22 trucks of sugar and 4 trucks of medicine and medical equipment. But again: not the issue.

Really what we’re concerned about is that you suck at driving boats. Last time you only had one ship and you still managed to crash it because – of all things – you tried to outmaneuver an Israeli Navy vessel. This time you’re bringing nine boats. While we fully expect our Navy to interdict all of you, a legal and justified act under black letter maritime law, the odds are overwhelming that one of you tools is going to accidentally ground your boat. Given your obvious intention of creating a spectacle and your similarly obvious inability to manage same, it’s pretty much inevitable.

If and when that happens, we’d like you to have at least some sense of how to survive in Gaza City. The alternative is you running across the border – complaining the whole time about our security checkpoints – and that would be awkward for everyone.

So we’ve put together this Gaza Tourism Guide, complete with picture galleries, which we believe to be the most comprehensive ever assembled on the web.

We know that after looking over everything, you’ll be as excited to stay in Gaza as we are to have you there. Feel free to pass this on at your ISM tabling sessions at Evergreen or whatever you people do on college campuses in between advocating genocide. And in the future, if you really want to repeatedly create Gaza media spectacles so you can damage Israel’s reputation, do what everyone else does. Join the UN.

WHERE TO SLEEP

Gaza City’s luxury hotels are located on the Gaza coastline in the posh district of Ramal, which gets its name from the Arabic word for “sands.” Ramal serves as a central gathering place for international and domestic dignitaries. Foreign officials are often found in the area, speaking about Gaza’s unbearable plight at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights during the day, before retiring to the United Nations beach club at night. Top Hamas officials also congregate in the area, and can be easily identified during wartime as the ones hiding in the half-bunker/half-silo basement of the district’s Shifa Hospital. As can be expected the accommodations and eateries in Ramal are superb.

At the far end of the luxury spectrum, the Grand Palace Hotel has a direct beach view and puts guests literally across the street from the Mediterranean Sea. The building’s decadent Crystal Hall – included in the gallery below – makes it a much-desired banquet location for first weddings, second weddings, and martyrdom celebrations. Those seeking to secure the room are advised to book well in advance.

The Grand Palace’s sprawling facilities also make it a prime location for political and corporate events. When Fatah leader Nabil Shaath returned to the Gaza Strip in 2010, entering the territory for the first time since Hamas had violently seized control in a 2007 campaign that involved shooting out the kneecaps of Fatah-linked civilians, throwing them off roofs, and executing them in the streets – this is where Shaath met with his Hamas counterparts.

Click on image to watch the slide show

If you’re looking for a younger vibe you might want to check out the Marna House. The warm family-run establishment is like a home away from home. Though it’s Gaza’s oldest hotel, the blending of modern luxury with the ethos of anti-Zionist resistance has made it a favorite with college-aged ISM volunteers. Stable Internet means guests can – and do – blog about the savagery of targeted Israeli self-defense operations, tweet about the wonderful bravery of Hamas’s human shields, and even upload galleries of the beach side terrace to Flickr. Since the clientele skews young, it’s no surprise that past guests have set up a Marna House hotel & restaurant Facebook page so they can “share memories” of their bitter twilight struggle against Occupation. The crappy resolution on the uploaded photos are a testament to the grittiness of the experience:

Click on image to watch the slide show

The Al Deira hotel, built along Gaza’s coast in sun dried mud bricks, is an option somewhere in between the Al Deira and the Marna House. Though the hotel boasts 22 spacious rooms and a world-class staff – enough so that some regular Western European diplomats and anti-Israel human rights investigators actually prefer it to the Grand Palace – the experience exudes down-to-earth Mediterranean hospitality. Bookworms will find a shop in the lobby specializing in Middle Eastern works of fiction, historical biographies, and conspiracy theories demonizing Jews. Wireless Internet is available for $2/hr or $10/day, and a fully equipped business center is available for $6/hr.

Click on image to watch the slide show

WHERE TO SHOP

Gaza’s markets are simply overflowing with goods supplied by hundreds of smuggling tunnels, from food and clothing to widescreen TVs and even live cows.The depth and breadth of the selection is so astounding that smaller tunnel operators are actually getting run out of business because they can’t compete with the scale of the larger operations.

Tourists hoping for bargains may nonetheless find themselves disappointed, however. Gaza’s relatively healthy per capita income – higher than India’s as a result of being the world’s largest per-capita aid recipient– keeps demand robust and prices stable.

Still, wily locals will know where great deals can be found. Don’t be afraid to ask for tips, either from your hotel clerk or from the attentive Hamas-provided tour guides who will be accompanying you everywhere. If you’re lucky they might be able to track down one of the souvenir Goldstone headscarves, honoring brutal apartheid judge Richard Goldstone. They’ve unfortunately been selling out all over Gaza, so nothing’s certain. Much more common are open air swap meets filled with kids selling automatic weapons.

Click on image to watch the slide show

Many tourists, especially Americans, find bartering to be distasteful or uncomfortable. This is especially true in the hustle and bustle of a market. If it’s not your cup of tea, you can head over to Gaza’s professional and well-stocked supermarkets for the kind of experience that you would find in any American chain.

Click on image to watch the slide show

WHERE TO DINE

All of the major luxury hotels have food facilities, with the seaside terrace restaurant at the Al Diera hotel being a local favorite. It’s known for its view, its mezes (small Mediterranean-style dishes), and its fresh strawberry juice. Gazans will top the juice off with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, which is perfect for getting through the hot desert summer days.

If you’re looking to get away from hotels, you can’t do better than Roots. The well-known restaurant, part of the Cactus for Development Group’s family of fine dining restaurants – “new standards in the hospitality business in Palestine!!!” – emphasizes that you should call ahead for reservations. Their full blown interactive menu here.

Click on image to watch the slide show

Visitors are strongly cautioned not to drink tap water while in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians have severely overpumped Gaza’s wells, perhaps irreparably depleting the water table and leaving it open to mass contamination. Ground water is therefore not potable. Stick instead to bottled water, which is regularly supplied by Israel and imported through smuggling tunnels.

WHERE TO PLAY

Gaza summers revolve around whatever Gaza beaches aren’t being used at the time to hack up critically endangered sea turtles for their ostensibly magical blood. Whether it’s relaxing with friends, exercising with a partner, or watching an AP stringer set up photo shoots in anticipation of captions about beach life being “the only escape available to Gaza children” – there’s always something interesting going on.

The beaches do get crowded, and the new mandatory Hamas dress code makes them somewhat drab, so at some point you may want to join other relatively wealthy foreigners at Gaza’s nearby, full-time luxury spa. There you’ll find a steam room, a sauna, a small gym and a beauty parlor that offers facials and massages.

Click on image to watch the slide show

WHERE TO DRINK

Unfortunately, the Hamas government declared a total ban on alcohol importation and consumption in 2009. Even hotels frequented by well-intentioned Westerners such as yourselves are banned from serving liquor, a substance that Muslims find objectionable. Stores and clubs that fail to adhere to the ban get bombed.

WHERE TO WORSHIP

Unfortunately, non-Muslims will find few options for worship in the Gaza Strip. The synagogues left by withdrawing Israelis were immediately desecrated and destroyed. Most Christian churches were long ago transformed into mosques. Visiters are also advised to avoid gathering in Christian bookstores, which increasingly get bombed, or around actual Christians, who increasingly get killed.

WHERE TO DANCE

Unfortunately, Hamas has banned women from dancing, as well as from wearing all but the most conservative outfits.

WHERE TO LISTEN

Unfortunately, music shops and performances have also been deemed un-Islamic in recent years, to the detriment of music shop owners and performers.

WHERE TO GET ONLINE

Unfortunately, visitors are advised to avoid Internet cafes because they get bombed.

By Omri Ceren - Mere Rhetoric May 26, 2010

It is time for American Jews to stand up and speak out. Enough of the debate about whether there is a gray area on which we can all agree. Anti-Semitism is a black-and-white issue. Hitler was evil. Ahmadinejad is evil. Period. And if American Jews do not wake up to the reality that there really is a right and a wrong, and stop talking about two sides to every issue, they will find themselves reliving a second Holocaust.

In a recent Shabbat sermon, the senior rabbi at one of Baltimore's largest congregations explained why, whether he liked it or not, he felt compelled to talk about Israel. He suggested that due to the voluminous number of e-mails he received discussing an article written by Ed Koch and a sermon delivered by local rabbi Mark Wohlberg, he felt compelled to discuss the topic on everyone's mind. 

The opening remarks of the sermon reminded me of Obama's recent statement that "... whether we like it or not, America remains a military superpower." And while Americans have come to expect Obama's ridiculous apologies for America's exceptional nature, American Jews do not and should not accept this attitude from anyone -- least of all our rabbis. Our history and faith dictate, and our survival depends upon, our leaders -- our rabbis -- celebrating Israel's greatness and the success of the Jewish people.

The rabbi discussed a recent poll in which Israel joined Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea at the bottom of a list of 28 nations viewed favorably in the world. From there, rather than discuss what American Jews could do to help improve world perception of Israel, the rabbi politicized the two-state solution by characterizing it as an internal Israeli policy debate rather than what it is -- a fight for Israel's survival. Though there was no coherent message being conveyed, the rabbi used two words to describe Israel that said more than anything else in the speech -- "occupying state."

The clear message was that Israel is occupying land on which Jewish people are not entitled to live. After the service, I told the rabbi that I was offended by his description of Israel as an occupying entity -- a description reserved for use by anti-Semites. I suggested that, especially in light of recent rifts in U.S.-Israel relations and the virulent growth of anti-Semitism globally, rabbis need to choose their words wisely. He responded, "Oh, I see, you're from the far right."

The rabbi then stated that he would use another term if I could suggest something appropriate to describe what Israel was doing. I looked at him inquisitively and asked how Israel could be occupying land that God gave to the Jewish people thousands of years ago. And with his next question, the rabbi took the conversation to a new low for Jews and Christians the world over: "How do you know that? Just because the Bible says so?"

Rabbis whose views are driven by political ideology rather than faith-based spirituality enable leaders like National Security Advisor Jim Jones to feel comfortable making a pathetic joke about those greedy Jews. It is because of congregants who sit in the pews of liberal shuls and do not understand the issues, who agree with the liberal "blame the Jews" mantra, or who are too apathetic to speak up that Jones has not been forced to resign.

Imagine the reaction of the African-American community if Jones had begun a speech with a joke about black people that feeds into negative stereotypes about that race. And that's exactly what Jones' joke was -- racist -- but when it comes to the Jews, the only response is perhaps a whisper, but mostly silence.

The dichotomy between the American Latino response to an Arizona law addressing illegal immigration and the American Jewish response to the numerous anti-Israel policies emanating from the White House, including Obama's outrageous reaction to legal construction in Jerusalem, is also telling. While Latinos quickly unite, plan mass protests, and have the support of the liberal establishment, who threaten to boycott Arizona; Jews across the country debate and point fingers at each other about who is right and who is wrong, yet have no one but themselves to stand up for the Jewish homeland.

It is time for American Jews to stand up and speak out. Enough of the debate about whether there is a gray area on which we can all agree. Anti-Semitism is a black-and-white issue. Hitler was evil. Ahmadinejad is evil. Period. And if American Jews do not wake up to the reality that there really is a right and a wrong, and stop talking about two sides to every issue, they will find themselves reliving a second Holocaust.

In reaction to my response to the rabbi's sermon, a relative labeled me an extremist. If a fellow Jew labels me extreme for questioning a rabbi who openly pronounces that Jews should not look to the Bible for guidance on matters pertaining to the Promised Land because it apparently does not fit with his own ideology, then Jews the world over have a serious problem. If I am considered a right-wing lunatic because I believe that God gave the land of Canaan to the descendants of Abraham, then Israel has a problem. Perhaps they should consider that if more American Jews had been "extremists" in the early 1930s, the Holocaust may have been avoided, or at least have ended sooner.

Great Britain is expelling Israeli representatives while the U.S. is sending its first ambassador to Syria in five years. The president and his minions accuse Israel of being responsible for the death of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and fan the fires of ever-growing anti-Semitism worldwide. And self-hating Jews like Richard Goldstone, who have set Israel up as the scapegoat on the international stage, have the support of Obama, the Europeans, the Arab League, and the U.N.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria have their missiles aimed at Israel and set on standby, and the Palestinians, to whom the world wants to cede parts of Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, educate their children to kill the Jews. At the same time, Obama intends to force a two-state solution on tiny Israel, all the while claiming that Israel has not proven its interest in peace and ignoring the reality of Palestinian rejectionism. Hamas and Hezbollah have been completely rearmed since previous conflicts with Israel, scud missiles are being shipped to Syria, the Islamic fanatics in Iran are building nuclear weapons, and the president has not approved a single major weapons request by Israel since taking office.

It is clear not only that Obama has no intention of helping Israel militarily, but also that members of his administration have made outright threats of armed action against our ally. When questioned about Obama's Mideast advisor Brzezinski, who believes that the U.S. should shoot down Israeli war planes if they fly over Iraqi airspace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, simply responded, "I just wouldn't get into the speculation of what might happen and who might do what."

Here at home, American Jews have become complacent and apathetic. They are unmoved by the protests of anti-Semites screaming "Go back to the ovens" and "Nuke Israel." They have no interest in J Street's desire to divide the Old City of Jerusalem and its protests about Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren speaking at Brandeis University's commencement, nor in rabbis who claim that Jewish people do not have a Biblical and historical right to Israel.

This past week, anti-Semitic attacks have been directed at middle-school-age children in my hometown just outside New York City. Sixth-graders are checking out a website called "I Hate Jews," and Holocaust-deniers speak openly at the high school level.

This country desperately needs leadership that will bring people together, not feed into the biases that will tear it apart. American Jews bought into Obama's rhetoric hook, line, and sinker, and they were sold a bill of goods. But many of them do not realize it because they have rabbis, driven by liberal ideology, who stand on their bully pulpits preaching from the Torah of Liberalism.

It is one thing to claim to be a Zionist. But actions speak louder than words, and when 57% of American Jews still support Obama (and 55% support his handling of Israel), their Zionist declarations may make them feel good, but they have about as much weight as the empty promises made by their Messiah.

American Jews need to educate themselves to understand the history of the land of Israel. They must educate their children to be proud of their Jewish heritage. Only then will they move away from labels, differentiate good from evil, and feel comfortable confronting anti-Semitism. Israel's survival may very well depend on it.

By Laurie B. Regan - May 6, 2010 - American Thinker

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/the_mainstreaming_of_antisemit.html at May 06, 2010 - 01:44:42 AM CDT

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide and met his Maker. If his dream of world conquest and subsequent "Thousand-Year Reich" had been achieved, there would be no Jews and no Israel today. Our world would be without Slavs, gypsies, Communists, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, homosexuals, and "dissenters" of every kind. Everyone would be driving a Volkswagen, and the government would be running everything, including health care.

Adolf Hitler demonstrated that one does not need atomic or nuclear weapons to be responsible for the murder of more than fifty million people. Adolf Hitler taught us that tyrants sign treaties not with peace in mind, but with the intention of buying time to seek military advantage.

Adolf Hitler was much more than a despicable maniac who slaughtered innocents and went back on his word. Adolf Hitler was the great emissary of evil, whose Machiavellian wielding of power personified the worst of humanity's capability.

Adolf Hitler was living proof that contrary to popular belief, morality is not relative. Evil is real. Not only is evil real, but it thrives in our world, and it is always there, ready to do war with and overwhelm the complacent and the good.

From Hitler, we learned that when devils take on human form, they do not have horns and can therefore be difficult to recognize. Just as important, Hitler demonstrated to those willing to learn history's lessons that devils are capable of rising to power anywhere -- even in the midst of a democratic republic.

Traditionally, Christianity views evil as a corruptive force capable of inducing and coercing man to sin and wickedness. In Judaism, evil is the Yetzer Hara, the evil inclination within each of us to act immorally.

Whether evil exists internally, externally, or both within and without, if one wishes to understand the dynamics of evil, the study of Hitler and the Nazi modus operandi is a good place to start. Beyond the unspeakable horrors of work and death camps, the infringement of individual freedom, and the never-ending terror placed upon the shoulders of all who fell under the Nazi shadow, one cannot avoid facing the reality of Hitler's state-run anti-Semitism and the systematic murder and eventual gassing of six million Jewish men, women, and children. In fact, it would be preposterous not to link Hitler, arguably the evilest man of all time, with his preoccupation to annihilate the seed of Abraham.

Hitler's war against the Jews was a story in itself. The horror story included Mein Kampf, an array of anti-Jewish laws, Kristallnacht, the formation of Jewish ghettos, mass deportations, the Wannsee Conference, and Auschwitz.

By April 29, 1945, Hitler had already been living in his subterranean Berlin bunker for weeks. Germany was kaput, and the Russians were already inside the German capital. Adolf Hitler's entire world was coming down upon him. As he dictated to his secretary My Political Testament, Hitler was already planning his own suicide. Despite his imminent demise, within the context of his final testament, Adolf Hitler still found it necessary to spew more hatred at the Jews and concluded with a call to "fight mercilessly against the poisoners of all the peoples of the world, international Jewry."

Was the anti-Semitic message included in My Political Testament simply the continued mad ranting of a genocidal maniac now on the verge of his death? Alternatively, was it the solicitation of a man who had given in to his evil inclination so many times that his personality had been severed from his soul, leaving him to speak as an empty vessel on the behalf of an invisible master? If it was the latter, then what are today's implications for the world, the Jewish people, and for Israel?

Adolf Hitler, the totalitarian tyrant of the 20th century and the murderer of millions, committed suicide on April 30, 1945. This day should be remembered as the day Hitler met his Maker and evil suffered a major setback in its quest to shackle the hearts and minds of humanity and wipe the Jews off the face of the Earth.

However, let us also take this day to remember that the war between good and evil did not end with Hitler's suicide. Evil is alive and well. The war between good and evil goes on. God's game of life continues, and nothing changes except the players.

By Harold Witkov - American Thinker - Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/evils_greatest_emissary_adolf.html at April 30, 2010 - 01:12:27 AM CDT

Last week Israel celebrated its 62nd year as a nation, but there was major cause for concern amid the festivities as the Israeli people faced the looming menace of a nuclear-armed Iran, as well as the prospect of a rapidly deteriorating relationship with Washington. The Israel-bashing of the Obama administration has become so bad that even leading Democrats are now speaking out against the White House. New York Senator Chuck Schumer blasted Barack Obama's stance towards Israel in a radio interview last week, stating his "counter-productive" Israel policy "has to stop".

At the same time a poll was released by Quinnipiac University which showed that US voters disapproved of the president's Israel policy by a margin of 44 to 35 percent. According to the poll, "American voters say 57 - 13 percent that their sympathies lie with Israel and say 66 - 19 percent that the president of the United States should be a strong supporter of Israel."

I recently compiled a list of Barack Obama's top ten insults against Britain, America's closest ally in the world. This is a sequel of sorts, a list of major insults by the Obama administration against America's closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. As I wrote previously on Obama's treatment of both Britain and Israel:

In the space of just over a year, Barack Obama has managed to significantly damage relations with America's two closest friends, while currying favour with practically every monstrous dictatorship on the face of the earth. The doctrine of "smart power" has evolved into the shameless appeasement of America's enemies at the expense of existing alliances. There is nothing clever about this approach - it will ultimately weaken US global power and strengthen the hand of America's enemies, who have become significantly emboldened and empowered by Barack Obama's naïve approach since he took office.

The Obama presidency is causing immense damage to America's standing in the free world, while projecting an image of weakness in front of hostile regimes. Its treatment of both Israel and Britain is an insult and a disgrace, and a grim reflection of an unbelievably crass and insensitive foreign policy that significantly undermines the US national interest.

So here's my top 10 list of Obama administration insults against Israel after just 15 months in power:

1. Obama's humiliation of Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House

In March, the Israeli Prime Minister was humiliated by Barack Obama when he visited Washington. As The Telegraph reported, "Benjamin Netanyahu was left to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his family", after being presented with a list of 13 demands. As I wrote at the time:

This is no way to treat America's closest ally in the Middle East, and a true friend of the United States. I very much doubt that even third world tyrants would be received in such a rude fashion by the president. In fact, they would probably be warmly welcomed by the Obama White House as part of its "engagement" strategy, while the leaders of Britain and Israel are frequently met with arrogant disdain.

2. Engaging Iran when Tehran threatens a nuclear Holocaust against Israel

In contrast to its very public humiliation of close ally Israel, the Obama administration has gone out of its way to establish a better relationship with the genocidal regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which continues to threaten Israel's very existence. It has taken almost every opportunity to appease Tehran since it came to office, and has been extremely slow to respond to massive human rights violations by the Iranian regime, including the beating, rape and murder of pro-democracy protesters.

3. Drawing a parallel between Jewish suffering in the Holocaust with the current plight of the Palestinians

In his Cairo speech to the Muslim world, President Obama condemned Holocaust denial in the Middle East, but compared the murder of six million Jews during World War Two to the "occupation" of the Palestinian territories, in a disturbing example of moral equivalence:

"On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own."

4. Obama's attack on Israeli "occupation" in his speech to the United Nations

In his appalling speech to the UN General Assembly last September, President Obama dedicated five paragraphs to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, without once referring directly to Palestinian terrorism by name, but declaring to loud applause "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." He also lambasted the Israeli "occupation", and drew a connection between rocket attacks on Israeli civilians with living conditions in Gaza. The speech served as a ghastly PR exercise aimed at appeasing anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East, while bashing the Israelis over the head.

5. Obama's accusation that Israel is the cause of instability in the Middle East

As The Wall Street Journal noted, "the Obama Administration seems increasingly of the view that Israel is the primary cause of instability in the Middle East", citing a recent press conference where he stated:

"It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure."

6. The Obama administration's establishment of diplomatic relations with Syria

While actively appeasing Iran, the Obama administration has also sought to develop closer ties with the other main state sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East, Syria, establishing diplomatic relations with Damascus in February. Syria remains a major backer of Hamas and Hizbollah, both responsible for a large number of terrorist attacks against Israel.

7. Hillary Clinton's 43-minute phone call berating Netanyahu

As The Telegraph reported, Hillary Clinton sought to dictate terms to Israel in the wake of Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Jerusalem:

"In a telephone call, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, ordered Mr. Netanyahu to reverse a decision to build 1,600 homes for Israeli settlers in occupied East Jerusalem that sparked the diplomatic row. She also instructed him to issue a formal pledge that peace talks would focus on core issues such as the future of Jerusalem and the borders of a Palestinian state. In addition, the Israeli prime minister was urged to make a substantial confidence-building gesture to the Palestinians. Mrs. Clinton suggested this could take the form of prisoner releases, an easing of the blockade of Gaza and the transfer of greater territory in the West Bank to Palestinian control."

Last time I checked, Israel was still an independent country, and not a colonial dependency of the Obama White House. Yet that still hasn't stopped the Secretary of State from acting like an imperial Viceroy.

8. David Axelrod's attack on Israeli settlements on "Meet the Press"

It is extremely unusual for a White House official to launch an attack on a close US ally on live television, but this is exactly what the President's Senior Adviser David Axelrod did in an interview in March with NBC's Meet the Press, designed to cause maximum humiliation to Israel, where he stated in reference to new settlement construction in East Jerusalem:

"This was an affront, it was an insult but most importantly it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region. For this announcement to come at that time was very destructive."

9. Hillary Clinton's call on Israel to show "respect"

As The Telegraph revealed, the Secretary of State lectured the Israelis at a dinner attended by the Israeli ambassador and the ambassadors of several Arab states in mid-April, urging Israel to "refrain from unilateral statements" that could "undermine trust or risk prejudicing the outcome of talks". In Clinton's words:

"Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has embraced the vision of the two-state solution. But easing up on access and movement in the West Bank, in response to credible Palestinian security performance, is not sufficient to prove to the Palestinians that this embrace is sincere. We encourage Israel to continue building momentum toward a comprehensive peace by demonstrating respect for the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians, stopping settlement activity and addressing the humanitarian needs in Gaza."

10. Robert Gibbs' disparaging remarks about Israel

Not one to shy away from criticizing America's friends when the opportunity arises, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs entered the fray in an interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace in March where he attacked the Israeli government for weakening "the trust that's needed for both sides to come together and have honest discussions about peace in the Middle East." In condescending terms he stated that Benjamin Netanyahu should start "coming to the table with constructive ideas for constructive and trustful dialogue about moving the peace process forward."

Nile Gardiner - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - Telegraph.co.uk - http://tiny.cc/a123v

Don't miss the opportunity to meet this article's author, Daniel Greenfield - Sultan Knish - and other respected bloggers at CJHS's May 10th event "Watch Dog Media Bites Lap Dog Media."  Details below.

What is a free country? Is it a country that is free of being ruled by any other country, or is it a country of free people who are not afraid. The truth is that no country can be free, unless its people are free. Not freedom as embodied in legal documents or stirring anthems, which nearly every country has, but free in their minds. Unafraid to believe, to speak and to live.

Tyranny isn't a man holding a gun to your head and telling you what to do. Tyranny is when you do what you're told, because you're holding the gun to your own head. And then you have become a collaborator in your own oppression. It is possible to be enslaved without ever becoming a slave. And it is sadly possible for people to act like slaves without any chains being anywhere in sight.

No regime, no ideology and no power can maintain absolute physical control of all the people, all of the time. To rule, they need to control not their bodies, but their minds and their souls. Tyranny wants loyalty, but it will settle for fear. And fear once internalized, destroys moral courage and replaces it with moral cowardice, eroding the strength of beliefs and ideas with the poisonous liquid of dread. The individual becomes an agent for the forces of tyranny, warning himself against any action that could get him into trouble. And then he is finally a slave.

In Stockholm Syndrome, hostages try to take control of their powerlessness by identifying with their captors. Under tyranny, entire populations can suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, paying devoted obeisance to the tyrants who murdered them in numberless amounts. Because once oppression is internalized, it comes to seem like a benediction. The mind forged slave embraces his chains as a moral good, clings to them as an expression of all that is right and sensible in the world. He will even die for them. Because to a slave, freedom is more terrifying than death.

Recently we rediscovered the simple fact that even on Cable television, on a network where anything goes, one thing does not go. Depicting Mohammed. Even in a bear suit. That same iron law has been unofficially passed in country after country, where operas, newspapers, books, television programs have been censored in order to avoid offending the people who might kill them, if they were not censored. Speech and image have been blocked, cut out, snipped and silenced. Not because anyone has actually been killed, but because attempts have made to kill some people. Which is enough to make free speech go the way of the Dodo.

And that is exactly the point. They don't have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first. They don't have to oppress us, if we oppress ourselves first. They don't have to demand our surrender and submission, if we surrender and submit first. Islam, we love it. Sharia law, we'll gladly adopt it. Free speech, it has to have its limits. Women's rights, we'll have to walk a fine line. Freedom. Ha, what freedom. We've already traded that away for a nice set of multicultural bongos, a few curry shops, a glass of arack and a leatherbound copy of the Koran.

A free country is not one that nickel and dimes its birthright of freedom like a ten year old begging his parents to extend his curfew. It is a country whose people uncompromisingly refuse to surrender their freedoms, in the face of tyranny, torture and death. In the face of armies, tanks, secret police and all the forces of the world arrayed against them. And a country that compromises on its freedom is no longer free. It will know fear. It will know terror. It will be oppressed, and there will be no relief from that oppression, until they choose freedom over tyranny once again.

Fear is a reflex. Tyranny thrives on it, imbues it and feeds it. It kills randomly in order to spread that terror further. To create populations who never know when their day will come. When the suicide bomber, the black van, the sword and the secret police will come for them. Men will fight and die for freedom on the battlefield, but the struggle to remain defiant in a society where everyone is afraid all the time is a much harder fight. Yet overcoming that reflex to find safety by surrendering and collaborating, by learning to love Big Brother and embracing his ideals, is what it takes to be a free citizen of a free nation.

Pavlov, the formulator of the Pavlov Reflex, knew quite a lot about conditioning. His own experiments showed that fear could be conditioned by the ringing of a bell. Perhaps those insights were what enabled Pavlov to go on defying the Soviet Union for decades. At a time when most scientists and researchers were terrified out of their minds at a slip, a wrong word that might send them to a long death in the basements of the Lubyanka or an even longer death in the Gulags-- Pavlov would ride buses and lecture the passengers on the fascism of the Soviet regime. And while those scientists eventually ended up in the Gulags themselves, Pavlov died a natural death.

Where so many Russians had become conditioned to hear the ringing of the bell everywhere, and to search for it when they didn't, to be afraid all the time, and to love the thing they feared in order to have some measure of security-- Pavlov understood the reflex and rejected it. He chose to be a free man instead. And freedom comes from standing up to evil. From confronting it and defying it. Not from submitting to it and collaborating with it. From silencing yourself in the hope that you will no longer be afraid when the bell rings.

Today the bell is Islam. The bell is Mohammed. That two headed religion with its two faces, the Religion of Peace and the Religion of Death. And if you focus hard enough on it as the Religion of Peace, perhaps you won't notice the grinning skull on its other side. And so the bell rings, and the poodles run to their master, licking his hands and showering him with adoration. Oh yes Islam is a wonderful religion. It has so many human rights. Truly it is a paragon for us today. If only we could be as free as Muslims. If only.

And what is the source of Islam's power? Comedy Central reminds us of that again. Its power is simple enough. Its followers are more willing to kill those who resist, than those who are not its followers are willing to resist them. 

No military victory. No superior technology. Not even sheer numbers, as there is still no First World country in which Muslims have officially become a majority. Their power comes from fear. From being prepared to murder anyone who disagrees with them. Until the mere threat alone, from a worthless source, is enough to badly panic a multibillion dollar corporation. The same corporation that would never take protests from Jews or Christians seriously, caves when a single Muslim on a previously obscure website threatens a beheading. What is the difference? The difference is murder. Muslims murder people who offend them. And having gained a reputation for that, they are quickly parlaying it into practical political power.

A nation's police, legal and military divisions are entirely useless if they cannot protect the exercise of such basicfreedoms. Without that they become nothing more than glorified social service centers that enforce the law only when it isn't too dangerous for them. Only when it won't offend the wrong people. The wrong people being those who kill on casual provocation. And such a country, though it may have documents to its name attesting its freedoms, and endless ranks of judiciary appointees and professors debating those freedoms-- they mean nothing if the people cannot actually exercise those freedoms.

The Bush Administration's War on Terror did not actually put an end to fear of Islamic terrorism, instead it fed it with endless alerts and prolonged battles thousands of miles away, while in the heart of civilization, terror remained emboldened enough to wave its green scimitar decorated flag. That is why the assault on Salman Rushdie was in some ways a more significant strategic blow than 9/11. On 9/11 thousands of our fellow Americans died. But when we surrender to Islamic terror and intimidation, our freedom dies. For everyone. And the bell begins to ring.

Only by defying Islam, can we begin the process of taking back our freedoms. Only by speaking out, do our voices matter. Because they don't have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first.

Watch Dog Media Bites Lap Dog Media
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Jen, nothing better demonstrates the point that Aaron David Miller and you make about the "peace process" than the fact that, when speaking about it, one needs to put air quotes around it. The "peace process" has not produced peace, and these days is not even a process. The proposed "proximity talks" are not really talks, and the word "proximity" means . . . what? That the non-talking parties are physically near each other? That the non-talks are "approximately" talks? It is getting difficult to follow even the euphemisms used for the "peace process" rituals.

The irony is that when Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington last May, six weeks after forming a government that included both Likud and Labor, he proposed immediate peace negotiations -- rejecting the advice of his foreign minister to slow down. Netanyahu was met with a new precondition: cessation of any and all building anywhere east of the 1967 boundaries, even in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and even in major Jewish population centers that Israel would retain in any conceivable peace agreement. No similar cessation was proposed for Arab building, nor was any other precondition proposed for the Palestinians, who only months before had rejected still another Israeli offer of a state that the secretary of state had urged them to accept.

A week later, Obama met with Mahmoud Abbas and undoubtedly told him about the condition he had just imposed on Netanyahu; ever since, Abbas has refused to negotiate until the condition is met. A week after that, Obama went to Cairo and announced to the entire Muslim world that the U.S. did not accept the "legitimacy of continued settlements." In a little over two weeks, Obama had transformed the "peace process" into a battle over a precondition that no Israeli government could accept and no Palestinian leader could forgo (not after the U.S. had insisted on it and announced it to the world).

To believe that the next logical step should be a U.S. "plan" to be effectively imposed on the parties -- or at least one of them, or maybe one and a half of them -- is a sign of a religion in search of stone tablets to be handed down. Having failed to initiate talks even after Israel accepted them, the peace processors in the administration now apparently want to jump to the end game and have the president simply announce it. They must think he is sort of a deity.

Rick Richman - 04.19.2010 - 6:58 PM - http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/richman/280701

If there were any lingering doubts in the minds of Democrats who care about Israel that the president they helped elect has fundamentally altered American foreign policy to the Jewish state’s disadvantage, they are now gone. The New York Times officially proclaimed the administration’s changed attitude in a front-page story this morning that ought to send chills down the spine of anyone who believed Barack Obama when he pledged in 2008 that he would be a loyal friend of Israel.

In the view of the paper’s Washington correspondents, the moment that signaled what had already been apparent to anyone who was paying attention was the president’s declaration at a Tuesday news conference that resolving the Middle East conflict was “a vital national security interest of the United States.” Mr. Obama went on to state that the conflict is “costing us significantly in terms of blood and treasure,” thus attempting to draw a link between Israel’s attempts to defend itself with the safety of American troops who are fighting Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world. By claiming the Arab-Israeli conflict to be a “vital national security interest” that must be resolved, the “frustrated” Obama is making it clear that he will push hard to impose a solution on the parties.

The significance of this false argument is that it not only seeks to wrongly put the onus on Israel for the lack of a peace agreement but that it also now attempts to paint any Israeli refusal to accede to Obama’s demands as a betrayal in which a selfish Israel is stabbing America in the back. The response from Obama to this will be, the Times predicts, “tougher policies toward Israel,” since it is, in this view, ignoring America’s interests and even costing American lives.

The problem with this policy is that the basic premise behind it is false. Islamists may hate Israel, but that is not why they are fighting the United States. They are fighting America because they rightly see the West and its culture, values, and belief in democracy as antithetical to their own beliefs and a threat to its survival and growth as they seek to impose their medieval system everywhere they can. Americans are not dying because Israelis want to live in Jerusalem or even the West Bank or even because there is an Israel. If Israel were to disappear tomorrow, that catastrophe would certainly be cheered in the Arab and Islamic world, but it would not end the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, cause Iran to stop its nuclear program, or put al-Qaeda out of business. In fact, a defeat for a country allied with the United States would strengthen Iran and al-Qaeda.

But undeterred by the facts and the experience of a generation of failed peace plans that have always foundered not on Israeli intransigence but rather on the absolute refusal of any Palestinian leader to put his signature on a document that will legitimize a Jewish state within any borders, Obama is pushing ahead. In the view of unnamed administration officials who have helpfully explained Obama’s policies to the Times, it is now only a matter of time before the president puts forward his own peace plan. And as the debate on health care illustrated, Obama will attempt to shove his diktat down the throats of the Israelis, whether the vast majority of Americans who support Israel like it or not.

As the Times notes, there is a great irony to Obama’s blazing anger at the Israelis and the urgency with which he views the issue. It comes at a time when the overwhelming majority of Israelis have “become disillusioned with the whole idea of resolving the conflict. Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government has long been skeptical about the benefits of a peace deal with the Palestinians. But skepticism has taken root in the Israeli public as well, particularly after Israel saw little benefit from its traumatic withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.” In other words, after countless concessions made to the Arabs at Oslo, and in subsequent accords and after offers from Israel of a state comprising Gaza, the West Bank, and parts of Jerusalem were refused by the Palestinians in 2000 and 2008, most Israelis have finally figured out that the other side doesn’t want to end the conflict. And they are baffled as to why Obama and his advisers haven’t come to the same all too obvious conclusion.

But with the Obama administration now so passionately committed to hammering Israel even as it apparently neglects to take action to stop Iran’s nuclear program, the question remains what will be the response of pro-Israel Democrats. As Obama draws closer to all-out diplomatic war on Israel’s government, the obligation for principled Democrats to speak up in open opposition to these policies cannot be avoided. While many Democrats have sought to confuse the issue or avoid conflict with the president, stories such as the one on the front page of the Times this morning make it clear that sooner or later, pro-Israel Democrats are going to have to decide whether partisan loyalties will trump their support for the Jewish state’s survival.

Jonathan Tobin - 04.15.2010 - 10:21 AM - Contentions-Commentary

President Barack Obama--this week launched a special nuclear security summit in Washington--finally acknowledges that Iranian threats to annihilate Israel are serious. Still, Obama fails to understand that applying so-called economic sanctions to Iran will be ineffectual. Somehow, despite very good reasons to the contrary, the president is now insisting that Israel learn to "live" with a nuclear Iran.

Obama confidently assumes that Tehran could be dealt with using the normally-compelling dynamics of nuclear deterrence. The problem with such threat-based optimism, however, is the always-underlying presumption of enemy rationality. Without rationality, deterrence will fail.

No system of nuclear deterrence can operate unless all of the involved countries value their own physical survival more highly than anything else. Significantly, Tehran's new nuclear status could coincide with an unshakable leadership belief in the Shi'ite apocalypse. Here, Israel would face not only more Palestinian suicide-bombers (President Obama's recycled Road Map toward a "Two-State Solution" will only encourage Palestinian terrorism), but also a "suicide state."

Barack Obama stubbornly fails to recognize something critical. This is the unspeakable goal of all Israel's Islamist enemies, which remains Jewish extermination. Oddly, this expressly genocidal goal is unhidden. In the bitterest of ironies, an ancient nation that was ingathered in 1948 precisely to prevent another Holocaust has become the fevered focus of another Final Solution.

The goal of all Israel's enemies, especially Iran and the soon-to-be-born (and Obama-favored) Palestinian state, is to be left standing while Israel is made to disappear. For these refractory enemies, there can be no coexistence with Israel. At the end of the day, this is because their own survival is believed to demand Israel's extinction.

Pressured by President Obama to exchange land for nothing, Israel is being pushed to collaborate in its own disappearance. Israel's prime minister should take notice. It would be a fatal mistake for Binyamin Netanyahu to embrace Obama's cheery belief that reason and rationality govern the world, a belief implicit, for example, in the president's hope for "a world free of nuclear weapons."

Barack Obama will not save Israel. Once Iran had decided to launch nuclear missiles at Israel, perhaps a plausible prospect in just a few years, Washington's best assistance would be confined to help bury the dead. Even for this "assistance," whole Israeli cities would first have to be converted into cemeteries.

Whether in Gaza, West Bank (Judea/Samaria) or Tehran, Israel's Jihadist enemies wish to kill Jews because every such homicide is a deeply felt and genuinely sacred obligation. For them, killing Jews remains a praiseworthy expression of religious sacrifice. President Obama should bear in mind that such killing is expected to confer upon the perpetrators immunity from personal death. Could there ever be a more compelling expectation?

In the Islamic Middle East, power over death always trumps all other forms of power. There is no greater power in the Dar al Islam (the World of Islam) than the religiously-authoritative promise of immortality, and this promise is always linked to total war against "unbelievers."

The core idea of death as a zero-sum commodity--"I kill you; I therefore remain alive forever"--has already been explained in certain literatures, and in psychology. It is captured perfectly in philosopher Ernest Becker's paraphrase of Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti: "Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."

Just to stay alive, Israel must understand what Freud inner-circle member Otto Rank once called a general principle of psychology: "The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed."

Israel's enemies, to remain standing, and to prevent Israel from standing up, seek to sacrifice the Jewish state on a joyously bloodstained altar of protracted war and terror.

This planned destruction of Israel is not about geopolitics. It is integrally part of a system of religious worship that is directed toward the conquest of personal death.

True peace in the Middle East will never be brought about by political cliches and empty witticisms. Real wisdom is necessary, and this insight will need to be based upon a true awareness of jihadist goals and capabilities. For Barack Obama, this calls for a much deeper understanding of the interpenetrating and existential threats to Israel posed by Iran and "Palestine."

April 13, 2010 | Professor Louis Rene Beres
lberes@purdue.edu
________________________________________
PROFESSOR LOUIS RENE BERES, Professor of Political Science at Purdue, was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). Born in Zurich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, he is the author of many major books, monographs and articles dealing with international law, strategic theory, Israeli nuclear policy, and regional nuclear war. In Israel, where he served as Chair of Project Daniel, his work is known to selected military and intelligence communities.

“Humanity sympathizes with a strenuous aspiration.  It can’t have respect for people who lack self respect." Pierre Van Paassen - "The Forgotten Ally"

By Beth Gilinsky and Rabbi Aryeh Spero

We have been receiving numerous communications from the People of Israel expressing how demoralized and abandoned the Jewish People in Israel feel by the lack of any strong and meaningful statement and vigorous, public demonstrations sponsored by any of the major and established Jewish organizations in support of Israel's position regarding Jerusalem.
 
They feel that the treatment of Israel during the last three weeks by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and spokesmen for the Administration has been an unprecedented humiliation of the Jewish State and a willful isolation of it among the community of nations. 
 
In addition, they are alarmed at the silence of the Jewish community in light of how the Obama Administration has been making statements and taking measures that everyone knows give license for the Arab population within Israel and on its borders to renew intifada and rioting that will severely harm the individual Israeli, as is already being done.
 
Furthermore, the brazen and humiliating way in which the Prime Minister of Israel, the de facto representative of the entire Jewish People, was treated by the entire staff of the White House in front of all the eyes of the world should not be tolerated.  It is encouraging other Western countries, as well as Arab countries, to treat Israel as a diplomatic pariah and even question Israel's legitimacy as a state itself.
 
The Israeli People are not looking for yet another statement from the establishment Jewish community as to how we are in favor of a peace process, a "two-state solution", or that the last three weeks of humiliation "disrupts" further peace negotiations.  What they are looking for, and what the establishment Jewish organizations should do, is to express their outrage at the mistreatment and humiliation of the Jewish State and attempts to portray the Jewish State as being the sole entity blocking a successful War on Terror.  This is reminiscent of previous blood libels throughout history, where the Jewish People have been accused that their existence, rituals, or means of survival has been the cause for the loss of Muslim or Christian life.
 
The Jewish world is awaiting your affirmation that the entire city of Jerusalem is to be under Jewish sovereignty and is its eternal, united capital.  
 
Furthermore, it is apparent that the Obama Administration, from the President to Mrs. Clinton, to David Axelrod, and the President's spokesmen are engaging in an attempt to overturn the will of the Israeli People who voted for the current Prime Minister and his coalition partners. They view it -- and rightly so -- as a belittlement not only to their sovereignty, but also to their right to determine who their leaders should be.  
 
On so many fronts, the past three weeks have been an absolute and unwarranted, yet purposeful, humiliation of the Jewish People and the State of Israel.  We would expect that the establishment Jewish organizations and leaders would have the courage to stand up, with pride, for the Jewish People and its state.  Instead, we are witnessing a silence that conveys the message that the leadership of the Jewish community is more interested in being friends with the Administration than doing its duty by announcing to the world that this cannot be tolerated.  We look for the Jewish organizations and its leaders to speak Truth to Power. 
 
The silence of the established Jewish organizations on this matter, in contrast to the outspokenness from J Street, has elevated and allowed J Street to become the most visible and prominent organization speaking out about these issues within the Jewish community.  No doubt, many of our leaders are working behind the scenes to repair the rupture of the last three weeks.  In this case, however, that is simply not enough and evades the real issue.  The world at large has seen a public humiliation and rebuke of the State of Israel go unanswered. Unless it sees a profoundly public rebuke of such treatment, it will assume that such humiliating treatment of Jews and the Jewish State are now acceptable and de rigueur. 
 
The World must hear.  The World must see.  It takes little courage to meet with other leaders behind closed doors. The courage that is needed now is one where the world sees that Israel, its representatives and the Jewish People cannot tolerate that which no other nation or community would tolerate.  Failure to do so openly and in public will guarantee that this will happen again, even if this particular crisis is "smoothed out." 
 
Leaders are not simply men and women who work behind the scenes. Leaders of a community are those who have enough conviction and pride in the profile of their community that they boldly, with enthusiasm, defend their People when unjustly humiliated. Doing so stops the slide of demoralization in its people and restores their confidence in themselves as a People, a people with a legitimate destiny. The American Jewish Community expects that type of leadership from those who claim to be its leaders.
 
 
Beth Gilinsky
Political Strategy, Events, Communications
(212) 726-1124 tel
(212) 726-3124 fax

By Steven M. Goldberg - American Thinker - March 31, 2010

Rahm Emanuel famously proclaimed, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."  Ironically, although the President's Chief of Staff has proven to be a false friend of Israel, the leadership of the Jewish State would do well to heed his advice.

That Israel is in peril is obvious.  Israel's enemies sense the opportunity to destroy it through a perfect storm, a confluence of events that seem to leave Israel reeling and vulnerable.  First and foremost is the unmistakable betrayal by the President of the United States, who has loudly broadcast his eagerness to sacrifice the security of the Jewish State to appease the Muslim world.  Israel is under enormous duress to surrender vital territory to allow for the creation of a Palestinian state within its borders.  That such a development would be catastrophic for Israel is apparent to anyone who knows history.  As former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stated, "The Palestinian state can only emerge on the ruins of Israel."

In addition, Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons, and it is clear that the international community will do nothing to stop it.  President Obama appears to be pressuring Israel to refrain from military action to stop the Iranian threat.  Hezb'allah and Hamas have restocked their arsenals of rockets and missiles, which now threaten to reach the center of Israel, including Tel Aviv.  The European Union is championing the Fayed Plan, pursuant to which the Palestinian Authority would unilaterally announce the establishment of the Palestinian state, which would shortly thereafter be recognized by the United Nations Security Council.  In view of President Obama's indifference and even antipathy to Israel, the United States cannot be counted on to exercise its veto.

Ominous as all this seems, Israel has the opportunity to seize the moment and secure its future.  The actions required are not for the faint of heart.

With regard to Iran, Israel can let the United States know in no uncertain terms that it will take military action against Iran, with or without American assistance.  If the Obama administration balks, and perhaps even threatens to withhold military hardware to Israel that might be necessary for a successful conventional strike, Israel can advise the United States, discreetly yet firmly, that it has non-conventional options, i.e., tactical nuclear weapons.

Such an admonition is not unprecedented.  It has been reported that in 1973, during the first desperate hours of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Golda Meir warned the Nixon Administration that Israel would have no choice but to resort to the nuclear option if conventional military resupplies were not forthcoming.  Shortly after this communication by the Israeli Prime Minister, the Americans provided the assistance the Israelis needed to turn the tide in the war.

The situation is equally dire now.  The possibility that Israel will resort to tactical nuclear weapons against Iran should be sufficient to convince the Obama administration to support Israel's attack with conventional weapons.  If not, however, Israel must be prepared to carry out its threat.  Failure against Iran is not an option.

With regard to the Palestinians, Israel need not sit idly by as the Palestinians carry out their threat to have the United Nations impose the creation of a Palestinian state, which would run afoul of the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap, which require a negotiated agreement by the parties, not an imposed solution.

A cardinal legal principle is that the violation of a contract by one party entitles the other party to rescind the contract.  The Palestinians have repeatedly flouted both the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap.  Israel can and should declare that those agreements have been abrogated.  In their place, Israel can announce its annexation of Judea and Samaria.  The Arabs residing in Palestinian cities will receive full civil and religious rights, but not political rights, which would be consistent with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 as well as the Mandate for Palestine that was adopted by the League of Nations in 1922 and ratified by the United States in 1924. 

As for a Palestinian state, Israel would declare that issue to be dead as a doornail.  Any such entity, if it is to be created, will be carved out of neighboring Arab lands, not out of the tiny piece of land afforded the Jewish State.

The international condemnation that will follow will be great, but history teaches it will be short-lived.  The world will be a different place after an attack on Iran, and much of the international community will be silently grateful to Israel for ridding the Middle East of the Iranian menace.  Anti-Semitism will never be eradicated, and thus Israel will always have enemies, but those enemies can be kept at bay if, and only if, they are convinced that Israel has demonstrated the will to do whatever is necessary to prevail.

Converting Israel's crisis into an opportunity will require extraordinary leadership.  Israel's leaders will need strategic vision, decisiveness, steady nerves, unflinching determination, and absolute confidence in the justice of the cause.  American Jewry will also have a critical role to play.  We will need to dig deep, find our inner strength, coalesce and defend the Jewish nation.  There is, however, no choice.  It is a matter of life or death.

Steven M. Goldberg is a trial lawyer in Los Angeles who is involved in a number of Jewish organizations, including Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

Rick Richman - Jewish Current Issues - March 25, 2010

Gideon Rose, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, held an on-the-record conference call today with Ehud Yaari, an International Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Middle East Commentator for Channel 2 in Israel, who was speaking from Jerusalem while awaiting the return of Benjamin Netanyahu from the United States.

Rose asked Yaari to provide his “first-hand take on what’s going on right now” and received this response (the quotes are from my transcription):

… I think that the sense among the Israeli delegation coming back from D.C. right now is that they fell into a trap. The general sense in Israel right now is that the Prime Minister was humiliated by President Obama. There is quite a degree of amazement at the way he was treated. I think it’s fair to say that neither the Prime Minister nor his Defense Minister Ehud Barak were aware of the kind of reception that they were greeted with at the White House. They did not expect the Obama administration to insist on a freeze of all activities in east Jerusalem, including those Jewish neighborhoods built decades ago, which was understood with both Presidents Clinton and Bush would remain part of Israel in any future peace settlement.

Rose asked whether the essence of the problem was Netanyahu’s statement at AIPAC that “Jerusalem is not a settlement”:

Yes. I think every Israeli prime minister — let’s assume the leader of the opposition Kadima Party Tzipi Livni was prime minister now, she would say exactly the same , and she would not refute what I am saying now – it’s impossible for any Israeli prime minister to say that he is going to forego Jerusalem before final status negotiations with the Palestinians for an end-of-conflict, end-of-claims . … And it was always understood between Israel and the United States, and I venture to say also between Israel and Mr. Abbas, that were going to stay part of Israel in any future peace deal. …

Rose asked how important Yaari thought the current moment is:

I think it is the worst moment in U.S.-Israeli relations … going back to Eisenhower-Ben Gurion in ’56. But I hope it’s only a moment, and not an extended period. But I think that what should be of concern to anybody interested in advancing the peace process is the fact that at this moment, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, we have a lot of daylight, a lot of space, between Israel and the United States, and a very strong sense in Israel, including amongst many people who are not fans of the present government and Mr. Netanyahu – people who were extremely enthusiastic about the election of President Obama – people feel that this administration is seeking to maintain distance from Israel, to maintain some sort of ongoing strain and tension, if not a continuing crisis, in order to serve probably broader objectives in the Middle East.

Rose asked whether Yaari viewed this as an attempt to disrupt Netanyahu’s coalition and make the government fall:

Absolutely so.  I think that the sense in Israel right now — as I said the Prime Minister is just about to land, is that Mr. Netanyahu and Barak — and it’s very important that he took with him the Defense Minister, because he wanted to reassure President Obama that he is indeed talking about a two-state solution, that he is bringing his closest ally, the defense minister, who was the man who made the proposal at Camp David in 2000 — but instead he was presented by what is perceived at the moment at least as demands that are very difficult to accept.

If the American moves are generated by the wish to see a different government in Israel, then I have to say that, number one, I don’t think that the Netanyahu coalition is about to disintegrate; and number two, I do not think that the Kadima party – Livni – who seems to be viewed more favorably in Washington – that she is going to join the coalition any time soon. And if indeed the coalition breaks down and we go to early elections, I can assure you – I will take the responsibility for that – that the right wing will win.

The extraordinary aspect of this manufactured crisis is that as Iran proceeds steadily toward nuclear weapons, while the Obama administration lowers its sights from “crippling” sanctions to ones that will “bite” Iran’s ankles, the administration has decided to provoke a fight over long-standing Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem, which were not the critical issue even in the “peace process,” much less the broader Middle East.

At least, they weren’t until Obama elevated them into a precondition not previously raised as a barrier to any prior negotiation -- but which now have elevated Palestinian and Arab expectations beyond the level that any Israeli prime minister can fully satisfy.

No one will frighten the great and free Jewish community of the U.S., no one will succeed in cowing them with anti-Semitic propaganda.
They will stand by our side. This is the land of their forefathers - and they have a right and a duty to support it.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY:  DECEMBER 20, 1981

On December 14, 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin presented the Golan Heights Law to the Knesset where it was passed by a two-thirds majority.  On December 17, 1981, the UN Security Council passed a resolution declaring that the law was invalid.  On December 20, 1981, Menachem Begin invited the US Ambassador to hear this statement which later became known as "The Banana Republic" speech.  Excerpts follow:

A week ago, at the instance of the Government, the Knesset passed on all three readings by an overwhelming majority of two-thirds, the "Golan Heights Law."
Now you once again declare that you are punishing Israel.

What kind of expression is this - "punishing Israel"? Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we youths of fourteen who, if they don't behave properly, are slapped across the fingers?
…
The people of Israel has lived 3,700 years without a memorandum of understanding with America - and it will continue to live for another 3,700.
…
Then the slogan was sounded "We should not let the Jews determine the foreign policy of the United States." What was the meaning of this slogan? The Greek minority in the U.S. did much to determine the Senate decision to withhold weapons from Turkey after it invaded Cyprus.

No one will frighten the great and free Jewish community of the U.S., no one will succeed in cowing them with anti-Semitic propaganda. They will stand by our side. This is the land of their forefathers - and they have a right and a duty to support it.
…
The essence of the Resolution is negotiation to determine agreed and recognized borders. Syria has announced that it will not conduct negotiations with us, that it does not and will not recognize us - and thus removed from Resolution 242 its essence. How, therefore, could we adversely affect 242?

As regards the future, please be kind enough to inform the Secretary of State that the Golan Heights Law will remain valid. There is no force on earth that can bring about its rescission.

To read the statement in full, please refer to this site.

The fake U.S.-Israel crisis: Obama's flawed response to an ally's gaffe

Posted by David Rothkopf - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 11:24.a.m.

The word is that the decision to hammer Bibi Netanyahu on Friday for Israel’s settlements screw-up last week came directly from President Obama. 

He was apparently very upset at the seeming contempt the Israelis showed for the vice president and by extension for the president himself and his administration. In addition, Obama, like many of his top aides, felt that the Israeli action was undermining U.S. standing at a critical time in American efforts to both advance the "peace process" and to weave together tough, effective international sanctions on Iran.

Here's the problem: This is one of those diplomatic flare ups that may trigger fire-drills in the governments and polemic fireworks from pundits but which, upon analysis, is really much less than meets the eye. It's actually a fake crisis. 

First, of all, on the face of it the Israeli action seems genuinely to have been much more of a screw-up than a calculated affront. And if someone was trying to undercut the U.S.-Israel relationship, it seems certain they represented a fringe group and not the Netanyahu government. Subsequent statements of defiance by Netanyahu regarding building within Jerusalem were more in response to U.S. efforts to make additional political hay out of the dust up than they were related to the initial misstep.

Second, there is no real "or else" backing up U.S. demands for a reversal, an inquiry and the offering of a meaningful olive branch to the Palestinians. Obama, with few foreign policy accomplishments to point to thus far in his young presidency, needs the peace process at least as much if not more than Netanyahu does. Time and leverage are, for the near term at least, on Netanyahu's side ... which is one reason why the U.S. government is opportunistically trying to use this crisis as a pretext to gain concessions out of the Israelis in advance of talks with the Palestinians. 

Further, the United States can't really turn its back on Israel and embrace the Palestinian side any more closely than it has because there is really no there there. And were the United States to ally themselves more closely to the Palestinian position (as I believe some at high levels wish they could), the administration knows they would inevitably find the Palestinian authorities made gaffes of the magnitude of this most recent Israeli blunder on an uncomfortably frequent basis -- thanks to the fact that the Palestinian government is more defined by rifts than by meaningful accomplishments.

Finally, most importantly, the U.S. argument that the Israelis need to be seen to be more quietly cooperative with U.S. efforts or Obama won't be able to effectively stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program is undercut by the fact that the United States won't, in the end, actually stop the Iranian nuclear program. We just don't have the domestic will or the international support to do so. Just as each successive deadline for Iranian compliance with international cease and desist requirements has evaporated so too will the illusions that the U.S. can engineer anything like effective sanctions against the Iranians in an effort to penalize them for their noncompliance. 

Containment is rapidly replacing engagement as the false hope on which the U.S.-Iranian relationship will be built. (Engagement was dependent on the other side wanting to engage back. Containment is dependent on the government or some other rational actor exercising effective control over all nuclear warheads. Neither precondition will, I'm afraid, prove to have been sufficiently certain to warrant betting our vital interests on it.)  In any event, when the Iranians do ultimately go nuclear, the United States will want and need a strong relationship with Israel more not less. 

This has created the current, almost bizarre, set of circumstances. Everyone, including the Israelis, agree Netanyahu's government made a big-league error last week. (In a way, it's a real breakthrough: finally something that everyone on all sides of the Israeli-Arab divide can agree on.) But the reaction of the United States, regardless of all the robust language and diplomatic dressing down of top Israeli officials, is indicative of weakness not of strength. 

The bigger message that will be unintentionally have been delivered to the world at the end of all this is that the United States is willing to get fierce with its friend Israel over a perceived insult but that we are likely to remain ineffective in the face of self-declared Iranian enemies' efforts to destabilize the entire Middle East with nuclear weapons. This is not only a problem for the president because the outcome is so dangerous. It's also that "tough on your friends, weak with your enemies" is neither a common trait among great leaders nor is it a particularly good campaign bumper sticker.

Daniel Greenfield
March 11, 2010

"I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem" - Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, March 09, 2010

For nearly 20 years, the great sham of the Middle East Peace Process has dragged on. And this despicable scam has consisted of only one policy, only one platform and only one plan: Pressuring Israel for more concessions.

Year in and year out, new peace conferences were declared and new plans for peace were hammered out. All of them had one thing in common: They carved up Israel for a non-existent peace. When Arafat and his gang of terrorists made a concession, it was to demand five percent less of Israel in the current phase of negotiations. When Israel made a concession, it was to turn over another 10 percent of land to its worst enemies in this phase of negotiations... in exchange for them putting off their demands for that five percent into the next phase of the negotiations. And this sick charade in which Israel gave and the terrorists took was the peace process.

While this great surrender process was going on, outside the bombs went on exploding, tearing apart buses, restaurants, malls and families - the politicians and diplomats in charge excused the terrorists and damned Israel if it so much as lifted a finger to defend itself, or erected a single checkpoint to catch at least one of the terrorists on the way to kill a dozen people in Jerusalem.

And now finally the Vice President of the United States arrives in Israel to reaffirm his absolute commitment to Israel's security, a commitment he and just about every other politician who let that phrase trip lightly off their lips, honors by pressing Israel to surrender again the terrorists. He arrives and condemns the greatest impediment to peace: Jewish families living in the capital of their own nation.

Biden did not take the time to condemn Abbas for his failure to hold elections, for his attendance at a funeral for the terrorists in his own militia who murdered an Israeli Rabbi, for his violation of the Gaza Jericho agreement or for his recent threats of a Holy War against Israel. Not even the Palestinian Authority naming a municipal square two days ago after Dalal Mughrabi, one of the Coastal Road Massacre bus hijackers, resulted in any statements of condemnation. Let us for a moment balance the horrifying scene of Jews moving into new apartments in Jerusalem, vs the Coastal Road Massacre in which Fatah terrorists murdered Gail Rubin, an American nature photographer, hijacked a bus, and murdered 38 passengers, 13 of them only children.

But the murder of Israelis never "undermines the trust we need right now." Only Jews living in East Jerusalem can do that. Not Israelis, Jews, for if Arab citizens of Israel were moving into new buildings in East Jerusalem, Biden and the media would not be condemning Israel for it. It is precisely Jews that are the problem for the Obama administration and its Media-Government Complex, just as they were a problem for Hitler and Stalin - just as they have always been a problem for would be tyrants.

There are of course no worries about whether Israel will trust Abbas and his Fatah gang. As if anybody in their right mind would, after nearly two decades of terrorism that followed the ballyhooed signing of the Peace Accords and the famous handshake overseen by a smiling Clinton. After violating nearly every agreement he ever signed with Israel, Arafat unleashed a wave of terror, while pocketing a fortune in foreign aid. And after every bombing, the same despicable conglomeration of diplomats and politicians and diplopols that form the "World Community" pointed Israel to the negotiating table. Their only solution, then as now, was more concessions - by Israel to the terrorists, of course.

And so here we are in the splendid year 2010, 5770 in the Hebrew calendar, and 1431 in the Muslim calendar. In a few months it will be 43 years since the Liberation of Jerusalem, and since Jews returned to the Old City they were ethnically cleansed from by Muslim soldiers. And today, the Hurva synagogue, twice destroyed by Muslims, has been completely reconstructed. In 1948 the Jordanian command expelled the Jews from East Jerusalem and destroyed the Hurva synagogue, vowing that the Jews would never return. And today, in the year 2010, the Vice President of the United States comes on a mission to carry on their work - that of the dynamiters and the bombers and the expellers.

This is where nearly two decades of negotiations have brought us. In the early 1990s, Israel was discussing the status of certain West Bank towns. Today Israel is being warned against allowing Jews to live in Jerusalem. Tomorrow? I would dearly like to say that the possibilities are endless, but there are only so many parts of Israel where Jews still live, and no doubt the eager ethnic cleansers in the Obama administration and the EU have plans for them too.

And so the Middle East Peace Scam marches on. There is a great deal of preparation for intense rounds of negotiations at which it will be determined what else Israel must give for there to be no peace. East Jerusalem will naturally end up on the table soon enough. Meanwhile the entire farce has less legal basis than a kangaroo court and all the consistency of a drunken liar on the witness stand.

Today there are three Palestinian states. One in Jordan, divided to create an Arab State in the bygone days of the Palestine Mandate. A second state in Gaza, which is ruled over by Hamas as part of the spoils from their war with Fatah. A third state in the West Bank ruled over by Abbas and Fatah, even though his term ended and there have been no new elections. Out of this hodgepodge, Israel is expected to negotiate even though Hamas refuses to negotiate any permanent peace agreement, and Fatah has no legal authority to represent anyone.

You will not of course here about any of this in the media, which is still busy being outraged by the thought of Jews living in Jerusalem - that is, when they're not being outraged by the thought of Israel treating Rachel's Tomb as a heritage site. After all the Prime Minister of Turkey has declared that Rachel's Tomb is not Jewish, but Islamic. Just as all of Israel is Islamic. Just as all the world is Islamic. But the world isn't paying attention. The world is certain that the rage and violence of a billion Muslims can be calmed with some Jewish land and Jewish blood. Just as the rage and violence of Nazism could be calmed with some Czech land and blood.

But why listen to me? Listen instead to the soothing words of Ahmad Bahar, the Speaker of the Palestinian Authority Parliament.

"Make us victorious over the infidel people... Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies, Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies... Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don't leave even one."

Ah, but you say it's about "the occupation". And there will be peace when the terrorists have all the land they feel they're entitled to. But... no.

"Our enmity with the Jews is a matter of faith, more than an enmity owing to occupation and the land."

Oh yes, there will be peace when they have all the land that they feel Muslims are entitled to. And this is the scope of their territorial demands.

"Soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, like Constantinople was conquered, according to the prophecy of our prophet Muhammad. Their capital will be the first post of the Islamic conquests that will spread all over Europe then it will turn to the two Americas and even to Eastern Europe."

But don't worry. Joseph Robinette Biden is deeply committed to fighting against Jewish families living in Jerusalem. And the Middle East Peace Scam marches on.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Daniel Greenfield is a blogger, columnist and freelance photographer born in Israel, who maintains his own blog, Sultan Knish.

Amnesty's Travesty

Martin Sherman - Jerusalem Post - Dec 5, 2009

The Israeli occupation changed local agriculture profoundly. It introduced modern technology, including mechanization, precision tillage, pest control, plastic covering of crops for temperature control, high yielding varieties, postharvest processing of produce,marketing and export outlets. It also introduced efficient methods of irrigation, including sprinkler and especially drip irrigation. Consequently, output increased greatly, and farming was transformed from a subsistence enterprise to a commercial industry. — Daniel Hillel, Rivers of Eden, Oxford University Press, 1994

The above excerpt is sufficient to heap richly-deserved ridicule on the recent Amnesty International report claiming that Israel's avaricious water policy has gravely compromised Palestinians Arabs' human rights. Miraculously, the Amnesty report was published to coincide perfectly with a vicious crusade launched across US campuses by Omar Barghouti, a Tel Aviv University graduate student, campaigning for - among other things - the boycott of Tel Aviv University, together with the entire Israeli academic establishment (avowed leftists and all).

By some curious coincidence, one of the issues raised by Barghouti to justify the BDS (boycott-cum-divestment-cum-sanctions) campaign was Israel's alleged exploitation of water resources to implement a process of "ethnic cleansing" and "apartheid." Predictably - if not persuasively - Amnesty denied any hint of collusion with the Barghouti initiative, emotively entitled "Palestine: Thirsting for Justice."

The facts, however, paint a very different - indeed antithetical - picture to that painted by the A/B (Amnesty/Barghouti) duo. For by every conceivable measure of consumption of fresh water, the lot of the Palestinian Arabs has improved dramatically - indeed beyond all recognition - since 1967 under Israeli administration, whether it be overall consumption, per capita consumption, consumption relative to Israel/Israelis, conveyance of running water to households, area under agricultural cultivation or size of the agricultural product.

Read it all here

Martin Sherman has issued a public challenge to engage anyone in the BDS movement to an open debate. 
So far the challenge has not been taken up.

Sheera Frenkel, Jerusalem - February 27, 2010

Would you be prepared to cross-dress? And kill a guest in an adjacent hotel room? If the answer to these questions is a resounding “yes”, and you can also act, enjoy luxury international travel with a twist and can carry off a convincing Irish or Australian accent, then the job could be yours.

The Israeli spy agency Mossad may be the target of international reproach since it allegedly killed the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel this month, but at home emerging details of the operation have generated Mossad mania.

It has never been more popular in Israel, with stores selling out of Mossad memorabilia and its official website reporting a soaring number of visitors interested in applying to become agents. “Mossad has been restored to its glory days,” said Ilan Mizrahi, a former deputy director of the agency, which is located in the affluent beach town of Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in Mr al-Mabhouh’s death — despite increasingly confident announcements by Dubai police that they have linked Mossad to the killing. Of the 28 suspects named, 11 share identities with Israelis who hold dual citizenship.

Governments across the world are lambasting Israel for what it considers a sloppy job done by agents who were caught on CCTV and may have left behind DNA. In Israel, the operation is being touted as a job well done. Israelis are discussing the killing with a wink, a nod, and pride in the agency, offically known as the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.

Opticians have reported a rise in sales of the horn-rimmed glasses in the style worn by 14 of the 26 suspects, T-shirts with Mossad logos are selling out at stores and the agency has experienced a flood of applicants.

Although no new jobs have been posted for half a year, a new statement on the Mossad website reads: “You have an opportunity to create a new reality where you can play the leading role. If you possess intelligence and sophistication, you can make a difference and fulfil a national mission. If you can engage, charm and influence people — you may have the qualities we are looking for.”

Elad, 21, had been dreaming of joining Mossad for years, but filed an application this week, the news site Ynet reported. “I ran to a computer and applied for a job,” Elad told Ynet. “I’ve always had a dream to work for the Mossad. It’s obvious why – it’s exciting, dangerous and special. Nobody really knows what people do there, and now I suddenly understand how it works. It’s cool. I hope they accept me. I think I have all the required skills.”

The Mossad website says that candidates must hold an academic degree and good command of at least two languages. Preference is given to people with experience abroad and an ability to begin work immediately.

If the reports by Dubai police are correct, the assassination and surveillance team of nearly 30 agents so far exposed would represent a sizeable number of Mossad agents who would no longer be able to engage in covert espionage.

Photographs of the alleged assassins have been published across the world and studied by a number of governments.

An inquiry by Haaretz newspaper announced this week that the photographs were doctored so that the agents could not be identified. Details such as eye colour or contours of the nose and lips were altered slightly to make it difficult for facial recognition software to identify the individuals, Haaretz said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article7043239.ece

UN Envoy to Peres: No Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza

GALLUP POLL - February 24, 2010

PRINCETON, NJ -- For the first time since 1991, more than 6 in 10 Americans -- 63% -- say their sympathies in the Middle East situation lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians. Fifteen percent side more with the Palestinians, down slightly from recent years, while a combined 23% favor both sides, favor neither side, or have no opinion.

The 63% sympathizing with Israel today is statistically unchanged from the 58% to 59% seen from 2006 to 2009; however, it is considerably higher than most of the previous readings on this Gallup measure since 1993. The trend includes two 38% readings in 1996 and 1997.

Only in January 1991 -- shortly after Israel was hit by Iraqi Scud missiles during the Gulf War -- did U.S. support for Israel register as high as it does today.

"Americans' attitudes about the prospects for peace are little changed from last year, but are among the more pessimistic Gallup has found since initiating the question in 1997."

Over the last five years, support for Israel has increased slightly among Republicans (rising from about 77% for each of the past several years to 85% today) and independents, but has stayed roughly the same among Democrats. Since 2001, however, there has been a more dramatic shift in partisan attitudes: a 25-point increase in sympathy for Israel among Republicans and an 18-point increase among independents. Even on this longer-term basis, support for Israel among Democrats has been relatively flat.

The latest findings come from Gallup's annual World Affairs survey, updated Feb. 1-3, 2010. In the same poll, Americans were asked to give their opinions of 20 countries, including Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel's 67% favorable rating ranks among the highest and the Palestinian Authority's 20% among the lowest. However, current favorability toward Israel is similar to where it has been for the last several years, and favorability toward the Palestinians is on the high end of the range since 2000.

Outlook for Peace

Additionally, the poll asked Americans about the chances that peace will eventually come to the Middle East. Currently, 30% think "there will come a time" when "Israel and the Arab nations will be able to settle their differences and live in peace"; 67% are doubtful.

Americans' attitudes about the prospects for peace are little changed from last year, but are among the more pessimistic Gallup has found since initiating the question in 1997. The only time fewer Americans were optimistic about Arab-Israeli peace (27%) was in July 2006, during the Israeli-Hezbollah war in southern Lebanon. While public optimism has since remained low, it has shown longer-term variations, and has a history of rebounding -- particularly after U.S.-brokered peace talks in 1999, 2003, and 2005.

With 39% of Democrats saying peace will come about, this group is more optimistic than either Republicans (25%) or independents (26%) are about Arab-Israeli peace. This has been the general pattern for the past decade; however, the gap between Democrats and others has expanded in recent years.

Independents have become significantly less optimistic about the chances of peace since President Obama took office: the percentage believing peace will come about fell from 41% during the last year of the Bush administration (in February 2008) to 30% in May 2009, and stands at 26% today. Optimism among Republicans fell below 30% in 2007 and has since remained low. Democrats' views have been fairly steady since 2001, except for a brief spurt of optimism in 2005 -- seen among all three party groups (a major Israeli-Palestinian peace summit that resulted in a truce agreement was underway at the time of that survey).

Bottom Line

In the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict, a striking 63% of Americans currently say their sympathies lie more with the Israelis, the highest level in nearly 20 years. Support for the Palestinians, at 15%, is about average for the same period. At the same time, Gallup finds Americans' fundamental views of Israel no more favorable than they have been for the past several years. Israel does continue to enjoy a substantial advantage over the Palestinian Authority in its general image, a fact that clearly colors the ways Americans view the conflict.

Americans are no more optimistic today than they were last year that peace can be reached between Israel and the Palestinians -- and they are, in fact, less optimistic than they were toward the end of the Bush administration. This is largely owing to a drop in optimism among independents.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,025 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Feb. 1-3, 2010. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Test Your Palestine IQ

Daniel Pinner (Israelnationalnews.com)
Tevet 24, 5770, 10 January 10 12:07

Answer the questions but don't check them until you are finished. Check your score at the end.

1. As is well known, Palestine is the Holy Land for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Palestine’s sanctity in Islam is expressed in the fact that the Koran mentions Palestine:

a) 1,034 times;
b) 837 times;
c) 408 times;
d) 1 time;
e) never.

2. Jerusalem is the third holiest city for Islam (after Mecca and Medina). In honour of this status, the Koran refers to Jerusalem as:

a) Al-Kuds (“The Holy”);
b) Al-Medina al-Kuds (“The Holy City”);
c) Urusalim (“Jerusalem”);
d) Al-Kibla al-Awalani (“The First Direction ”);
e) By no name, because Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran.

3. The Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, is one of Islam’s holiest shrines. In accordance with this sanctity, Moslems pray on the Temple Mount:

a) facing the Dome of the Rock;
b) in the north-west section, to face the Dome and Mecca simultaneously;
c) standing facing the Dome of the Rock, kneeling facing Mecca;
d) facing the Dome of the Rock for certain prayers, Mecca for others;
e) kneeling facing Mecca, their backsides towards the Dome of the Rock.

4. The Jewish claim to the Holy Land is that God promised it to them. Moses – the Jewish national leader – is quoted as saying: “O my people! Remember the bounty of God upon you…and gave you that which had not been given to anyone before you amongst the nations. O my people! Enter the Holy Land which God has decreed for you”. This speech of Moses is recorded in:

a) the Book of Exodus;
b) the Book of Isaiah;
c) the Talmud;
d) the Midrash;
e) the Koran (Sura 5:20-21).

5. In popular literature, historical discussions, political debates, and other forums, the Palestinians’ standard claim is that they are:

a) the descendants of the Biblical Philistines (a European tribe originating in Crete, who invaded the Holy Land in the early Biblical period);
b) the continuation of the Biblical Canaanites (a Hamatic tribe, in perpetual warfare against the Philistines);
c) the descendents of the earliest Christians (i.e. Jews);
d) an integral part of the Arab nation (a Semitic nation originating in Arabia, and entirely unconnected to the Philistines, the Canaanites, and the Jews);
e) all of the above.

6. In the period of history that Palestine was an independent country, its capital city was:

a) Jerusalem;
b) Jaffa;
c) Haifa;
d) Ramallah;
e) meaningless, because there was never in history an independent country called Palestine, so it never had a capital city.

7. The earliest mention of a place called Palestine in history is:

a) in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Genesis, when God commanded Abraham to go to Palestine;
b) in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Joshua, when the Israelites conquered Palestine;
c) in a stone plaque dating from about 600 BCE, commemorating the Babylonian conquest of Palestine;
d) in the New Testament;
e) in the year 135 CE, after the European Roman invaders defeated the Jewish revolt in Judea, and re-named the province Palestine.

8. “There is no such country ! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us.”
Who said these words?

a) Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, in a speech to the American Zionist Organisation, 1972;
b) Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defence of Israel and former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces, addressing the General Staff, 1968;
c) Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, in his election victory speech, 1996;
d) Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, in a speech in 1981;
e) Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, a local Arab leader, addressing the British Peel Commission, 1937.

9. “The ‘Palestinian People’ does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel.”
Who said this?

a) Egyptian dictator, President Gamal Abdul Nasser, addressing the Egyptian parliament, a month after the Six Day War, July 1967;
b) Jordanian King Hussein, a week before the Six Day War, May 1967;
c) Syrian dictator, President Hafez al-Assad, addressing the Arab League, 1994;
d) Iraqi dictator President Saddam Hussein, addressing the Iraqi nation in a televised speech, 2002;
e) Zahir Muhsein, executive member of the PLO, in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 1977.

10. On the eve of Israel’s independence in May 1948, approximately 600,000 Arabs lived in the areas that would soon become the State of Israel. When the War of Independence was over (March 1949), 150,000 Arabs were still there. This is why the UNRWA (United Nations Relief Works Agency) officially recognized that the number of Arab refugees was:

a) 450,000;
b) 600,000;
c) 850,000;
d) 1,000,000;
e) 1,300,000.

11. In June 1982, the Israel Defence Forces entered south Lebanon to fight against the PLO, which had invaded Lebanon in 1975. The total population in southern Lebanon was about 400,000, of whom vast numbers – perhaps as many as 10% – fled northwards to escape the fighting. UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) officially estimated the number of refugees as:

a) 40,000;
b) 80,000;
c) 120,000;
d) 250,000;
e) 600,000.

12. The Palestine National Covenant (the constitution of the PLO) states that “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit” (Article 2). 77% of this “indivisible territorial unit” is today:

a) the State of Israel, and the remaining 23% is Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and Gaza;
b) Israel (including Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, i.e. the “occupied territories”), and the remaining 23% are the border areas of various neighbouring Arab states;
c) Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (the “occupied territories”), and the remaining 23% is divided between Israel and Jordan;
d) Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and the remaining 23% has been annexed to the State of Israel;
e) The Kingdom of Jordan, and the remaining 23% is Israel (including Judea, Samaria, and Gaza).

13. As its name suggests, the raison d’etre of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) is to liberate Palestine. Accordingly, the PLO has fought to establish its independent state in:

a) the whole of Israel, starting with Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (the “occupied territories”);
b) sovereign Israel alone, rejecting any claim to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (prior to the Six Day War);
c) Jordan (in the late 1960s and early 1970s)
d) Lebanon (from the mid-1970s until 1982);
e) All of the above.

14. The PLO’s purpose, as they and their supporters make clear, is to liberate the “occupied territories” which Israel captured in the Six Day War (5th-10th June 1967). This claim is proven by the historical fact that the PLO was founded:

a) in Ramallah, the biggest city in the West Bank, a month after the Six Day War;
b) in Gaza City, which has traditionally been a centre of Palestinian nationalism, on the first anniversary of the Six Day War;
c) as a response to the establishment of the first Israeli settlement in Hebron in 1969;
d) on the 10th anniversary of the Six Day War, in June 1977, in Hebron;
e) 3½ years before the Six Day War, on 1st January 1964, in Cairo (the capital of Egypt).

15. In the 25-year period 1950-1974, the Arab countries (including Iran) donated a total of $26,476,750 in aid to Palestinian refugees, representing 0.04% (i.e. $1 out of every $2,500) of their combined oil revenue for 1974 alone. The only country in the entire Middle East which gave no aid at all to Palestinian refugees was:

a) Israel;
b) Iran;
c) Libya;
d) Jordan;
e) Algeria.

16. Israel has often been accused of “ethnic cleansing” of the Arabs in the “occupied territories”. The demography bears this out, because the Arab population of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza has:

a) plummeted from 6,500,000 in 1967 to 3,000,000 in 2009;
b) plummeted from an estimated 5,000,000 in 1967 to less than 2,000,000 in 2009;
c) remained steady at 3,000,000, despite huge natural growth in the rest of the world;
d) increased at one tenth of the pace of natural population growth;
e) increased from about 750,000 in 1967 to an estimated 3,700,000 in 2009, a population growth of nearly 500% in barely more than a generation, which is one of the highest rates of increase anywhere in the world.

17. Israel has also been accused of “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs who are citizens of the state, and deliberately enforcing policies designed to keep the Arab population small. This, too, is shown by the demography, in that the Israeli Arab population has:

a) dropped from slightly over 1,000,000 (40% of the overall population) in 1948 to 750,000 (20% of the population) in 2009;
b) remained at a steady 1,000,000 from 1948 to 2009, while the overall population has increased seven-fold;
c) increased from 500,000 in 1948 to 1,000,000 in 2009, representing a drop from 35% of the overall population to just 12% in 58 years;
d) decreased steadily by 2% per year from 1948 onwards;
e) increased from 150,000 (15% of the overall population) in 1948 to about 1,420,000 (22% of the overall population) in 2009.

18. As of 2009, there are five universities (the Islamic University of Hebron; Bir Zeit University; Bethlehem University; Al-Najah University in Shechem ; and Al-Ahzar in Gaza), and five religious higher education academies, throughout the “occupied territories”. These institutes are:

a) all that remain of 25 institutes of higher education, the others having been destroyed by the Israeli occupation forces;
b) some of the oldest in the Arab world, with the Islamic University of Hebron having been founded under the original Caliphate in the 8th century;
c) forced to operate secretly, because the Israeli authorities have banned them;
d) barely tolerated by the Israeli authorities;
e) all founded since the Israeli “occupation” of 1967, under Israeli auspices, the oldest one being the Islamic University of Hebron, founded in 1971.

19. Since the Israeli “occupation” of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in 1967, nine Palestinians have been sentenced to death by the courts and judicially executed, and scores – probably hundreds – more have been executed in extra-judicial killings. All of them, without exception, were executed:

a) by the Israeli military occupation authorities;
b) by the Israeli Army after military courts-martial;
c) by the Israeli civil administration, following criminal trials in civilian courts;
d) by Israeli civilian courts, acting under special emergency regulations;
e) since September 1993 by the Palestinian Authority in the autonomous zones, because Israel, alone in the Middle East, does not use the death penalty.

20. In early October 2005, an estimated 650 people charged the security fence/separation barrier, and an estimated 350 succeeded in crossing it. Security forces responded with bayonets, shotguns, and rubber bullets, killing between ten and fifteen people and injuring dozens more. This incident was given minimal media attention, and has been entirely forgotten, because:

a) the world media is biased in Israel’s favour;
b) a dozen Palestinians killed is so commonplace, it is not even newsworthy;
c) the Israeli authorities imposed a media blackout;
d) Jewish settlers intimidated the journalists and photographers into silence;
e) the incident occurred along the security fence in Morocco, separating sovereign Morocco from the Spanish Sahara, and the security forces in question were Spanish.

Scoring

Every a) is worth 1 point; every b) is worth 2 points; every c) is worth 3 points; every d) is worth 4 points; every e) is worth 5 points.

Now add up your score. If your score is 20, then you answered a) to every question. This means that you got every single answer wrong, and that you are politically correct and base your ideas of the Middle East on standard anti-Israel and pro-Arab propaganda lies rather than on the truth. Since you are more concerned with Israel-bashing than truth, and since you parrot every canard peddled by pro-Arab propagandists, you are ideally suited to become a European career diplomat accredited to the Middle East, or a BBC or CNN reporter, or a journalist for Haaretz.

If your score is between 21 and 99, then you might have a more open mind than others, and you might know slightly more than the average media report contains. You might be interested in studying more on the subject.

If your score is 100, then you answered e) to every question. This means that you got every answer right. This suggests that you have a good, solid knowledge of the issues involved and are uninfluenced by propaganda. Be careful: people infected by independent and honest thought tend to become targets of Islamic terrorists and their left-wing cohorts. At the very least, they get demonized as “right-wing fanatics”.
 
If your score is below 20 or above 100, this means that you cannot count properly. Why not consider a career as the Secretary General of the United Nations? 

Palestine is to Israel as Oz is to Kansas

Test Your Palestine IQ

Daniel Pinner (Israelnationalnews.com)
Tevet 24, 5770, 10 January 10 12:07

Answer the questions but don't check them until you are finished. Check your score at the end.

1. As is well known, Palestine is the Holy Land for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Palestine’s sanctity in Islam is expressed in the fact that the Koran mentions Palestine:

a) 1,034 times;
b) 837 times;
c) 408 times;
d) 1 time;
e) never.

2. Jerusalem is the third holiest city for Islam (after Mecca and Medina). In honour of this status, the Koran refers to Jerusalem as:

a) Al-Kuds (“The Holy”);
b) Al-Medina al-Kuds (“The Holy City”);
c) Urusalim (“Jerusalem”);
d) Al-Kibla al-Awalani (“The First Direction ”);
e) By no name, because Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran.

3. The Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, is one of Islam’s holiest shrines. In accordance with this sanctity, Moslems pray on the Temple Mount:

a) facing the Dome of the Rock;
b) in the north-west section, to face the Dome and Mecca simultaneously;
c) standing facing the Dome of the Rock, kneeling facing Mecca;
d) facing the Dome of the Rock for certain prayers, Mecca for others;
e) kneeling facing Mecca, their backsides towards the Dome of the Rock.

4. The Jewish claim to the Holy Land is that God promised it to them. Moses – the Jewish national leader – is quoted as saying: “O my people! Remember the bounty of God upon you…and gave you that which had not been given to anyone before you amongst the nations. O my people! Enter the Holy Land which God has decreed for you”. This speech of Moses is recorded in:

a) the Book of Exodus;
b) the Book of Isaiah;
c) the Talmud;
d) the Midrash;
e) the Koran (Sura 5:20-21).

5. In popular literature, historical discussions, political debates, and other forums, the Palestinians’ standard claim is that they are:

a) the descendants of the Biblical Philistines (a European tribe originating in Crete, who invaded the Holy Land in the early Biblical period);
b) the continuation of the Biblical Canaanites (a Hamatic tribe, in perpetual warfare against the Philistines);
c) the descendents of the earliest Christians (i.e. Jews);
d) an integral part of the Arab nation (a Semitic nation originating in Arabia, and entirely unconnected to the Philistines, the Canaanites, and the Jews);
e) all of the above.

6. In the period of history that Palestine was an independent country, its capital city was:

a) Jerusalem;
b) Jaffa;
c) Haifa;
d) Ramallah;
e) meaningless, because there was never in history an independent country called Palestine, so it never had a capital city.

7. The earliest mention of a place called Palestine in history is:

a) in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Genesis, when God commanded Abraham to go to Palestine;
b) in the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Joshua, when the Israelites conquered Palestine;
c) in a stone plaque dating from about 600 BCE, commemorating the Babylonian conquest of Palestine;
d) in the New Testament;
e) in the year 135 CE, after the European Roman invaders defeated the Jewish revolt in Judea, and re-named the province Palestine.

8. “There is no such country ! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us.”
Who said these words?

a) Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, in a speech to the American Zionist Organisation, 1972;
b) Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defence of Israel and former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces, addressing the General Staff, 1968;
c) Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, in his election victory speech, 1996;
d) Abba Eban, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, in a speech in 1981;
e) Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, a local Arab leader, addressing the British Peel Commission, 1937.

9. “The ‘Palestinian People’ does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel.”
Who said this?

a) Egyptian dictator, President Gamal Abdul Nasser, addressing the Egyptian parliament, a month after the Six Day War, July 1967;
b) Jordanian King Hussein, a week before the Six Day War, May 1967;
c) Syrian dictator, President Hafez al-Assad, addressing the Arab League, 1994;
d) Iraqi dictator President Saddam Hussein, addressing the Iraqi nation in a televised speech, 2002;
e) Zahir Muhsein, executive member of the PLO, in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 1977.

10. On the eve of Israel’s independence in May 1948, approximately 600,000 Arabs lived in the areas that would soon become the State of Israel. When the War of Independence was over (March 1949), 150,000 Arabs were still there. This is why the UNRWA (United Nations Relief Works Agency) officially recognized that the number of Arab refugees was:

a) 450,000;
b) 600,000;
c) 850,000;
d) 1,000,000;
e) 1,300,000.

11. In June 1982, the Israel Defence Forces entered south Lebanon to fight against the PLO, which had invaded Lebanon in 1975. The total population in southern Lebanon was about 400,000, of whom vast numbers – perhaps as many as 10% – fled northwards to escape the fighting. UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) officially estimated the number of refugees as:

a) 40,000;
b) 80,000;
c) 120,000;
d) 250,000;
e) 600,000.

12. The Palestine National Covenant (the constitution of the PLO) states that “Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit” (Article 2). 77% of this “indivisible territorial unit” is today:

a) the State of Israel, and the remaining 23% is Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and Gaza;
b) Israel (including Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, i.e. the “occupied territories”), and the remaining 23% are the border areas of various neighbouring Arab states;
c) Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (the “occupied territories”), and the remaining 23% is divided between Israel and Jordan;
d) Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and the remaining 23% has been annexed to the State of Israel;
e) The Kingdom of Jordan, and the remaining 23% is Israel (including Judea, Samaria, and Gaza).

13. As its name suggests, the raison d’etre of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) is to liberate Palestine. Accordingly, the PLO has fought to establish its independent state in:

a) the whole of Israel, starting with Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (the “occupied territories”);
b) sovereign Israel alone, rejecting any claim to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (prior to the Six Day War);
c) Jordan (in the late 1960s and early 1970s)
d) Lebanon (from the mid-1970s until 1982);
e) All of the above.

14. The PLO’s purpose, as they and their supporters make clear, is to liberate the “occupied territories” which Israel captured in the Six Day War (5th-10th June 1967). This claim is proven by the historical fact that the PLO was founded:

a) in Ramallah, the biggest city in the West Bank, a month after the Six Day War;
b) in Gaza City, which has traditionally been a centre of Palestinian nationalism, on the first anniversary of the Six Day War;
c) as a response to the establishment of the first Israeli settlement in Hebron in 1969;
d) on the 10th anniversary of the Six Day War, in June 1977, in Hebron;
e) 3½ years before the Six Day War, on 1st January 1964, in Cairo (the capital of Egypt).

15. In the 25-year period 1950-1974, the Arab countries (including Iran) donated a total of $26,476,750 in aid to Palestinian refugees, representing 0.04% (i.e. $1 out of every $2,500) of their combined oil revenue for 1974 alone. The only country in the entire Middle East which gave no aid at all to Palestinian refugees was:

a) Israel;
b) Iran;
c) Libya;
d) Jordan;
e) Algeria.

16. Israel has often been accused of “ethnic cleansing” of the Arabs in the “occupied territories”. The demography bears this out, because the Arab population of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza has:

a) plummeted from 6,500,000 in 1967 to 3,000,000 in 2009;
b) plummeted from an estimated 5,000,000 in 1967 to less than 2,000,000 in 2009;
c) remained steady at 3,000,000, despite huge natural growth in the rest of the world;
d) increased at one tenth of the pace of natural population growth;
e) increased from about 750,000 in 1967 to an estimated 3,700,000 in 2009, a population growth of nearly 500% in barely more than a generation, which is one of the highest rates of increase anywhere in the world.

17. Israel has also been accused of “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs who are citizens of the state, and deliberately enforcing policies designed to keep the Arab population small. This, too, is shown by the demography, in that the Israeli Arab population has:

a) dropped from slightly over 1,000,000 (40% of the overall population) in 1948 to 750,000 (20% of the population) in 2009;
b) remained at a steady 1,000,000 from 1948 to 2009, while the overall population has increased seven-fold;
c) increased from 500,000 in 1948 to 1,000,000 in 2009, representing a drop from 35% of the overall population to just 12% in 58 years;
d) decreased steadily by 2% per year from 1948 onwards;
e) increased from 150,000 (15% of the overall population) in 1948 to about 1,420,000 (22% of the overall population) in 2009.

18. As of 2009, there are five universities (the Islamic University of Hebron; Bir Zeit University; Bethlehem University; Al-Najah University in Shechem ; and Al-Ahzar in Gaza), and five religious higher education academies, throughout the “occupied territories”. These institutes are:

a) all that remain of 25 institutes of higher education, the others having been destroyed by the Israeli occupation forces;
b) some of the oldest in the Arab world, with the Islamic University of Hebron having been founded under the original Caliphate in the 8th century;
c) forced to operate secretly, because the Israeli authorities have banned them;
d) barely tolerated by the Israeli authorities;
e) all founded since the Israeli “occupation” of 1967, under Israeli auspices, the oldest one being the Islamic University of Hebron, founded in 1971.

19. Since the Israeli “occupation” of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in 1967, nine Palestinians have been sentenced to death by the courts and judicially executed, and scores – probably hundreds – more have been executed in extra-judicial killings. All of them, without exception, were executed:

a) by the Israeli military occupation authorities;
b) by the Israeli Army after military courts-martial;
c) by the Israeli civil administration, following criminal trials in civilian courts;
d) by Israeli civilian courts, acting under special emergency regulations;
e) since September 1993 by the Palestinian Authority in the autonomous zones, because Israel, alone in the Middle East, does not use the death penalty.

20. In early October 2005, an estimated 650 people charged the security fence/separation barrier, and an estimated 350 succeeded in crossing it. Security forces responded with bayonets, shotguns, and rubber bullets, killing between ten and fifteen people and injuring dozens more. This incident was given minimal media attention, and has been entirely forgotten, because:

a) the world media is biased in Israel’s favour;
b) a dozen Palestinians killed is so commonplace, it is not even newsworthy;
c) the Israeli authorities imposed a media blackout;
d) Jewish settlers intimidated the journalists and photographers into silence;
e) the incident occurred along the security fence in Morocco, separating sovereign Morocco from the Spanish Sahara, and the security forces in question were Spanish.

Scoring

Every a) is worth 1 point; every b) is worth 2 points; every c) is worth 3 points; every d) is worth 4 points; every e) is worth 5 points.

Now add up your score. If your score is 20, then you answered a) to every question. This means that you got every single answer wrong, and that you are politically correct and base your ideas of the Middle East on standard anti-Israel and pro-Arab propaganda lies rather than on the truth. Since you are more concerned with Israel-bashing than truth, and since you parrot every canard peddled by pro-Arab propagandists, you are ideally suited to become a European career diplomat accredited to the Middle East, or a BBC or CNN reporter, or a journalist for Haaretz.

If your score is between 21 and 99, then you might have a more open mind than others, and you might know slightly more than the average media report contains. You might be interested in studying more on the subject.

If your score is 100, then you answered e) to every question. This means that you got every answer right. This suggests that you have a good, solid knowledge of the issues involved and are uninfluenced by propaganda. Be careful: people infected by independent and honest thought tend to become targets of Islamic terrorists and their left-wing cohorts. At the very least, they get demonized as “right-wing fanatics”.
 
If your score is below 20 or above 100, this means that you cannot count properly. Why not consider a career as the Secretary General of the United Nations? 

by Martin Sherman

"There is always a cost to defeat an evil. It never comes free, unfortunately. But the cost of failure to defeat a great evil is far higher."
-Jamie Shea, NATO Spokesman on BBC News, May 31, 1999

The international furor over the Goldstone Report and the ongoing censure of Israel over its conduct of "Operation Cast Lead" refuses to die down, even against the backdrop of the country's remarkable humanitarian efforts in earthquake-stricken Haiti. It is this unending maelstrom of condemnation that imparts particular pertinence to the words with which the official NATO representative chose to respond to criticism regarding the numerous civilian casualties incurred by the alliance's frequent air attacks during the war in Kosovo between March and June 1999.

Shea insisted NATO planes bombed only "legitimate designated military targets" and if civilians had died it was because NATO had been forced into military action. Adamant that "we try to do our utmost to ensure that if there are civilians around we do not attack," he emphasized that "NATO does not target civilians...let's be perfectly clear about that."

Hundreds of civilians were killed by a NATO air campaign, however, code named "Operation Allied Force"-which hit residential neighborhoods, old-aged sanitariums, hospitals, open markets, columns of fleeing refugees, civilian buses and trains on bridges, and even a foreign embassy. (See Table for a summary of some of the undisputed major incidents.)

Exact figures are difficult to come by, but the undisputed minimum is almost 500 civilians deaths (with some estimates putting the toll as high as 1,500)--including women, children and the elderly, killed in about 90 documented attacks by an alliance that included the air forces of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Holland, Italy, Turkey, Spain, the UK, and the United States. Up to 150 civilians deaths were reportedly caused by the use of cluster bombs dropped on, or adjacent to, known civilian areas.

By contrast, the military losses inflicted by NATO on the Serbian forces during almost 80 days of aerial bombardment, unchallenged by any opposing air power, were remarkably low, with most estimates putting the figure at less than 170 killed.

NATO forces suffered... no combat fatalities! This was mainly due to the decision to conduct high altitude aerial attacks which greatly reduced the danger to NATO military personnel in the air, but dramatically increased it for the Serbian (and Kosovar) civilians on the ground. As opposed to realities which led to the IDF's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, moreover, the civilian populations of the countries participating in Operation Allied Force were never attacked or, even threatened in any way by Serbian forces.

The significance of all this for Israel, beset as it is by a tirade of criticism and censure regarding its military campaign in Gaza, should be starkly apparent. It raises three trenchant issues which it would fail to address to its great detriment:

1. The Irrelevance of Proportionality in Military Engagements
2. The Unlimited Hypocrisy of International Politics
3. The Disastrous Incompetence of Israeli Public Diplomacy

The issue of proportionality, or rather the alleged lack thereof, has been the basis the fierce condemnation of Israel's conduct in its military operations in Gaza because the number of Palestinians casualties far outweighs that of Israeli ones. The conduct of military operations in Kosovo by many of Israel's present detractors, however, shows that this was never a consideration or constraint to which they felt bound. Quite the contrary, the very modus operandi they adopted such as high altitude bombing, demonstrates that they deliberately aspired to disproportionality. As noted, this ensured an almost zero casualty rate among their own combatants but inevitably resulted in less accurate targeting of alleged military objectives on the ground, exposing a virtually defenseless civilian population to far greater danger and far higher casualties.

All of this serves to underscore vividly the crass hypocrisy of Israel's critics. For their code of conduct hardly gives them the high moral ground with regard to their code of combat. Indeed, in stark contrast to NATO's willful disregard for enemy civilians, the IDF has often placed Israeli soldiers in mortal peril to prevent Palestinian civilians from being harmed. Israel's use of military might, furthermore, has invariably been in response a tangible threat, or actual assault, on its citizens. This, however, was not the case for military strikes carried out by NATO forces against the Serbs, who as mentioned previously, constituted no threat whatsoever to any civilian population outside the confines of the former Yugoslavia-certainly not to those in any of the countries participating in the alliance. Any claim that Serbian brutality justified NATO's harsh actions can be swiftly countered by pointing to the cruel atrocities perpetrated against Serbs by Kosovars once Serbian forces had been neutralized by NATO. Indeed, the inter-ethnic civil war in the Balkans was encloaked in heavy moral ambiguity in which it was far easier to determine which party was "strong" and which "weak" rather than which was "good" and which "bad." [1] Moreover, if brutality is a justification for the use of disproportionate force then surely there are few more deserving targets than the Islamist terror organizations such as Hamas, however regrettable the inevitable collateral damage might be.

The blatant disregard for any semblance of proportionality by democratic belligerents and the shameless hypocrisy of their self-righteous and misplaced criticism of Israel highlight a crucial deficiency-often diagnosed and equally often neglected-in the overall structure of its international strategy: the incompetence, indeed impotence, of Israeli diplomacy, particularly its Public Diplomacy.

For the documented data on the conduct of the war in Kosovo by the world's leading democracies should provide ample material with which to resolutely rebuff much of the pompous tirade of condemnation being hurled at Israel today. Sadly, however, this has not happened and, although Israel's media management during the Gaza operation showed a marked improvement relative to the appalling performance during the 2006 Lebanon War, it still appears to be trapped in mindset of unbecoming apologetics and mired in a misplaced timidity that undermine its credibility and persuasiveness.

For Israel to prevail in the crucial battle for public opinion it must go on the offensive. It must convey a confidence and a conviction in the fundamental moral validity of the nation's actions. It must not shy away from resolutely repelling unjustified slander and from reprimanding malicious slanderers.

It should not shrink from convening all the NATO country ambassadors in a public forum, open to the international media, and sternly point out how unacceptable "stone throwing" is for residents of "glass houses", how inadvisable it is for "pots" to accuse "kettles" of being black, and to firmly demand, in appropriately discreet diplomatic terms, that they "put a sock in it."

It should not refrain from confronting unprincipled foreign correspondents who concoct malevolent fabrications against Israel and unambiguously convey to them that gross lack of professional integrity and balance will not be tolerated, that excessive abuse of journalistic privilege will result in its withdrawal. It should be made clear to those in the international media who reside in Israel but insist in portraying it in an unfair and unfounded light that they will have to cover events in the region while residing in some Arab country where they presumably will find society less objectionable and less defective.

It must emphasize that although it is true that criticism of Israeli policy is not necessarily anti-Semitism, the massive and enduring application of double standard toward the Jewish state regarding alleged human rights abuses while glossing over far more horrendous cases elsewhere, makes anti-Semitism a increasingly plausible explanation for such conduct. Indeed this is an explanation which can no longer be blithely dismissed and is one that needs to be convincingly refuted...or acknowledged and accepted

The Israeli government must not hold back the resources required to assertively-even coercively-replace political correctness with political truth in the international discourse on the Middle East in general and on the Israel-Palestinian conflict in particular.[2] It must bring these truths to the attention of political opinion-makers and of politically aware publics across the globe-if need be by circumventing hostile and obstructive editorial bias by means of prominent, paid infomercials in major media channels.

Only measures such as these will allow Israel to gain the upper hand in the battle for public opinion, to prevent it being the victim of unjust, unjustified and unjustifiable double standards, and to ensure that military operations in Gaza and Kosovo are not judged by wildly disparate criteria.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] "Moral ambiguity" should be distinguished from "moral relativism" where no party is deemed"good" or "bad".
[2] Today, the budget for Public Diplomacy is ludicrously small. As MK Michael Eitan pointed out, it totals less than the advertising budgets that some Israeli food manufactures spend to promote their sales of snacks and fast foods. Ha'aretz, May 22, 2002.

Professor Martin Sherman is the 2009-2010 Hebrew Union College/University of Southern California Schusterman Visiting Israeli Professor of Security Studies and International Policy.

Professor Sherman is the academic director of the Jerusalem Summit and a research fellow in the Security Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. He is also a research fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) and was an academic advisor to the Herzliya Conference. Professor Sherman served for several years in operational capacities in the Israeli intelligence community and has held the post of ministerial advisor to the Israeli government.

Professor Sherman's books include The Politics of Water in the Middle East, (1999) and Despots, Democrats and the Determinants of International Conflict, (1998). He has been published widely in journals and has edited books and policy papers on a range of strategic and foreign policy issues. His latest work focuses on Israel's developing ties with India. Professor Sherman is a frequent television and radio commentator on foreign and security policy topics in Hebrew and English.

In the rubble and suffering of Haiti, Israelis are relentlessly searching for and saving lives. It is this "disproportionate response" that rankles their enemies the most, for it shines a light on their failings.

Peggy Shapiro - January 18, 2010

In the midst of the tragedy and chaos in the Haitian capital, Israeli doctors, part of IsraAID -F.I.R.S.T. (the Israel Forum for International Aid), delivered a healthy baby boy in an IDF field hospital. When the baby's grateful mother, Gubilande Jean Michel saw her newborn son, alive and well, she named him Israel in gratitude to the people and nation who brought her this blessing.

Little Israel is one of the hundreds who have been saved by Israeli doctors or rescue teams. A search and rescue team from the ZAKA Israel's International Rescue Unit pulled eight Haitian college students from a collapsed eight-story university building. Despite its small size, Israel sent a large contingent of highly-trained aid workers to quake-stricken Haiti. Two jumbo jets carrying more than 220 doctors, nurses, civil engineers, and other Israeli army personnel, including a rescue team and field hospital, were among the first rescue teams to arrive in Haiti. In fact, they were the first foreign backup team to set up medical treatment at the partially collapsed main hospital in Port-au-Prince. Yigal Palmor, Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman said, "It's a large delegation and we're prepared to send more."

The international agencies that condemn Israel for its "disproportionate response" when it is attacked are not mentioning Israel's disproportionate response to human suffering. The U.S. has pledged 100 million and sent supplies and personnel. The U.K. pledged $10 million and sent 64 firemen and 8 volunteers.China, a country with a population of 1,325,639,982 compared to Israel's 7.5 million sent 50 rescuers and seven journalists. The 25 Arab League nations sent nothing.

Israel's "disproportionate" response stems from Jewish memory and tradition. Mati Goldstein, head of the ZAKA International Rescue Unit delegation managed described the scene, "Everywhere, the acrid smell of bodies hangs in the air. It's just like the stories we are told of the Holocaust - thousands of bodies everywhere. You have to understand that the situation is true madness, and the more time passes, there are more and more bodies, in numbers that cannot be grasped. It is beyond comprehension." At the start of Sunday's regular Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Israeli team had already treated hundreds of patients. "I think that this is in the best tradition of the Jewish People; this is the true covenant of the State of Israel and the Jewish People," he said. "This follows operations we have carried out in Kenya and Turkey; despite being a small country, we have responded with a big heart. The fact is, I know, that this was an expression of our Jewish heritage and the Jewish ethic of helping one's fellow. "

In the rubble and suffering of Haiti, Israelis are relentlessly searching for and saving lives. It is this "disproportionate response" that rankles their enemies the most, for it shines a light on their failings.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/israels_disproportionate_respo.html at January 19, 2010 - 01:01:08 AM CST

Mitchell: Mideast stagnation endangers US aid

On eve of visit to region, American special envoy threatens Israel with sanctions if it fails to advance peace talks, two-state solution. Secretary of State Clinton says working to restart negotiations 'without preconditions'
Yitzhak Benhorin

WASHINGTON - On the eve of his visit to the Middle East, US special envoy George Mitchell threatened that his country would freeze its aid to Israel if the Jewish state failed to advance peace talks with the Palestinians and a two-state solution.

Mitchell clarified in an interview to the PBS network that the United States would use incentives or sanctions against both sides.

According to American law, Mitchell said, the US can freeze its support for aid to Israel. He added that all options must remain open and that the sides must be convinced about what their important interests are.

The US envoy noted that some progress had been made and that his country would continue its efforts to resume the negotiations.

The American guarantees allow Israel to raise funds at low interest rates and improve the Jewish state's credit rating. The last time the US threatened to freeze the guarantees was during the term of President George Bush Sr. and former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Ahead of Mitchell's visit, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held talks Friday with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit. Egyptian Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman is also in Washington.

Clinton's aim is to recruit Egypt to host a possible meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in which a resumption of direct negotiations will be declared.

The secretary of state Hillary Clinton said after meeting with her Jordanian counterpart that she was working to restart peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis "without preconditions."

"We are working with the Israelis, the (Palestinian Authority), and the Arab states to take the steps needed to relaunch the negotiations as soon as possible and without preconditions," she said.

Clinton and Judeh said that resolving those matters first would eliminate Palestinian concerns about continued construction of Jewish settlements in disputed areas. They said negotiations should begin as soon as possible and be bound by deadlines.

"Resolving borders resolves settlements, resolving Jerusalem resolves settlements," Clinton said after meeting Judeh at the State Department. "I think we need to lift our sights and instead of being looking down at the trees, we need to look at the forest."

Peace efforts in the past have tended to focus on broader issues, including settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and water, with even more contentious matters like borders and Jerusalem being left for so-called "final status" talks.

"If you resolve the question of borders then you automatically resolve not only settlements and Jerusalem but you identify the nature on the ground of the two-state solution and (what) it looks like," Judeh said.

Both Clinton and Judeh spoke out against new Israeli housing construction in east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as their capital, saying it was damaging to the process.

'Hunger for a resolution'
When he travels to the region, Mitchell is expected to be carrying letters of "guarantees" outlining the US position.

The letters are likely to contain gestures to both sides. For the Palestinians, that would include criticism of settlements and the belief that the borders that existed before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War should be the basis of a future peace deal.

For the Israelis, they would acknowledge that post-1967 demographic changes on the ground must be taken into account, meaning that Israel would be able to keep some settlements.

Clinton did not address the letters in her remarks. But she said the administration wanted a resolution that meets both the Palestinian goal of a clearly defined and viable state based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war "with agreed swaps" and the Israeli goal of security within boundaries that "reflect subsequent developments."

"There is a hunger for a resolution of this matter, a two-state solution that would rebuke the terrorists and the naysayers, that would give the Palestinians a legitimate state for their own aspirations and would give the Israelis the security they deserve to have," she said.

"This is a year of renewed commitment and increased effort towards what we see as an imperative goal for the region and the world," Clinton said.

Egypt and Jordan are essential to the peace push as they are Israel's only Arab neighbors to have fully recognized the Jewish state.

Judeh said it was essential that once they resume, the negotiations must be "bound by a timeline and a clear plan with benchmarks."

"You cannot just have another open-ended process," he said. "Some deadlines have to be put on the table and these deadlines help to serve the parties rather then present obstacles in the path to peace. They help the parties put things in the right timeframe and the right perspective

Caroline Glick – November 20, 2009


No nation can give up its capital city and survive.

One might have thought that American Jews could be counted on to stand by Israel on this issue.  But then, one would be wrong.

If the American Jewish community is to long survive, American Jews throughout the country must support Israel's right to exist.

Continue reading Message to American Jews

UN guards eject Canadian for her pro-Israel views Denounced Report

By Steven Edwards; with files from Kenyon Wallace, Canwest News Service; National Post

Guards ejected an accredited Canadian commentator from the United Nations after she denounced a controversial report that focuses heavily on alleged Israeli war crimes.

Anne Bayefsky, a York University law professor, offered the only pro-Israel commentary Thursday night at a microphone outside the General Assembly hall following remarks by its Libyan president, Ali Treki, and the chief Palestinian official at the United Nations, Riyad Mansour.

Arab and Muslim countries had overcome Western opposition in the adoption of a resolution endorsing the report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone, which focuses on the Israeli assault last winter on Gaza.

Ms. Bayefsky said four guards confiscated two UN passes the organization had issued to her as director of Touro Law Center's Institute on Human Rights and The Holocaust, and removed her from the building after questioning her.

"I am quite sure that if I had congratulated the United Nations, no one would have said anything," said Ms. Bayefsky, who was unable to get her credentials reinstated after spending more than two hours drafting a request at the UN last night.

Continue to read Pro-Israeli Canadian lawyer ejected from UN

Andrew Roberts, Historian

There has hardly been a single year since Brigadier-General Deedes established AIA in 1949 when a speaker has not been able to say that Israel faced a crisis, and on some occasions – in 1956, 1967, 1973 and especially in the face of the present Iranian nuclear programme today – these were existential. At a time when Barrack Obama appears to be least pro-Israeli president since Eisenhower, the dangers are even more obvious. For there is simply no way that Obama will prevent Ahmadinejad, perhaps Jewry’s most viciously outspoken and dangerous foe since the death of Adolf Hitler, to acquire a nuclear Bomb.

None of us can pretend to know what lies ahead for Israel, but if she decides pre-emptively to strike against such a threat – in the same way that Nelson pre-emptively sank the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen and Churchill pre-emptively sank the Vichy Fleet at Oran – then she can expect nothing but condemnation from the British Foreign Office. She should ignore such criticism, because for all the fine work done by this Association over the past six decades - work that’s clearly needed as much now as ever before – Britain has only ever really been at best a fairweather friend to Israel.

Although History does not repeat itself, it’s cadences do occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to anything it is testament to this:

That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.

Israpundit

Continue reading The ugly truth about Britain’s Foreign Office

The View From Jerusalem
Why Israel is anxious about the Obama Administration

April 19, 2010

Imagine that you're an Israeli perusing the past week's headlines. Senior U.S. military officials have told Congress that Iran may be a year away from producing a bomb's worth of fissile material. Efforts to sanction Iran are again bogged down at the U.N., even as the sanctions are watered down to insignificance. And senior Israeli officials now say that Syria has supplied Hezbollah with Scud-D missiles that can hit every city in Israel with a one-ton warhead to an accuracy of 50 meters.

Oh, and now the Obama Administration seems increasingly of the view that Israel is the primary cause of instability in the Middle East. In a press conference last week, President Obama said the U.S. had a "vital national security interest" in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on the theory that "when conflict breaks out . . . that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure."

The remark, which echoes previous comments by senior Administration and Pentagon officials, is being widely interpreted as presaging a concerted Administration effort to press even harder for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement over territory. After the recent flap over Jewish settlements north of Jerusalem, concern is growing that the U.S. wants Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders. At their narrowest, those borders give Israel a nine-mile margin between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea.

Israel could conceivably withdraw to something close to that border if it had credible assurances that a future Palestinian state would be peaceful, stable and well-governed. But the Palestinian reality today is that it is riven politically and geographically between two camps, one of which (Hamas) is armed by Iran and sworn to Israel's destruction.

As for Israel's other neighbors, Syria has further entrenched its alliance with Iran, despite repeated entreaties by the Administration and its allies in Congress; Egypt is entering a period of political transition; and Turkey has gone from being an Israeli ally to an adversary under its Islamist government. None of this can inspire much confidence among Israelis that the time is ripe to withdraw from the West Bank.

Nor will Israel's fears be assuaged by paper guarantees of its security in some future settlement. In 2006, a senior Bush State Department official gave us similar assurances that the Security Council's resolution that brought the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah to a close would seal the Lebanese border at least to "heavy weapons" from Syria and Iran. The resolution even provided for a

beefed-up international security force to enforce the resolution's terms. So much for that, and so much for the results of the solicitous visits to Syria in recent years by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry.

As for Iran, yesterday brought reports of a secret memo from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the White House arguing that the Administration lacks a strategy for coping with Iran's drive to gain a nuclear weapon. We're not sure why this memo is secret, since it merely says what has been obvious to the world for months. Everyone in the Middle East has begun to assess how its interests and strategic calculations will change once Iran gets the bomb.

For all the current talk about Israel costing America lives and treasure, the striking fact is that the U.S. has never had to go to war to defend the Jewish state. This is more than can be said for Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Bosnia, Kosovo and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. That's because for 62 years Israelis have provided for their own defense, in an alliance with the U.S. that has reflected American values and—in both the Cold War and the war on terror—advanced American interests.

The Obama Administration seems not to grasp this point, which is why these are anxious days for Israel and its American friends.

Wall Street Journal - http://alturl.com/vbnx

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