Love of the Land

Ettinger - Attack Iran – at all costs

2012-01-31T20:15:00.005+02:00

Yoram Ettinger..
Israel Hayom..
30 January '12..

The discussion about the cost of a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities has added value only if it is intended to advance the attack and neutralize the potential response from Iran and its allies. The discussion becomes harmful, plays into Iran's hands and threatens Israel's existence if it appears hesitant and doubtful, if it denies the possibility of a pre-emptive attack and assumes that Israel can accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

On May 12, 1948, the People's Administration in pre-state Israel decided by a vote of six to four to announce the establishment of a state that would include Jerusalem, despite internal resistance and opposition from the U.S. and despite a terrible price: The U.S. withheld military aid, threatened economic punishment and surmised that the declaration would result in a second Holocaust, this time at the hands of the Arabs. Then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion refused to abide by the American request to postpone the announcement by a few years, knowing that such a delay would bring tragedy upon future generations and that independence exacts a painful price.

On Oct. 5, 1973, the eve of the Yom Kippur War, then Prime Minister Golda Meir rejected the option of a pre-emptive strike to repel the clear and present danger of a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack. She was concerned about the cost of such a strike – namely appearing as the aggressor and severely damaging ties with the U.S. – and preferred to be portrayed as the victim. However, the terrible, long-term cost of that war has been far greater than pre-emptive action would have been. As expected, Israel was not viewed as a victim, but rather as a country that lost the "spirit of the Six-Day War" and that eroded its deterrent power and its position as a strategic asset for the U.S.

In June 1981, just before the destruction of the nuclear reactor in Iraq, then Prime Minister Menachem Begin weighed the cost of a pre-emptive strike versus the cost of inaction. The heads of the Mossad and military intelligence, then Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, opposition leader Shimon Peres, Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin, Israel's national security adviser and the head of the Atomic Energy Commission all opposed striking Iraq. They presented apocalyptic scenarios that would result from such action: an irreparable rift with the U.S., harsh sanctions, conflict with the Soviet Union and Western Europe, reconciliation between Muslim countries and a pan-Islamic attack, threats to the peace treaty with Egypt and other doomsday events. They underestimated the success of a pre-emptive attack and glorified Iraq's military capabilities. Some claimed there was a greater chance of seeing Israeli pilots being dragged through the streets of Baghdad than being welcomed back to their bases.

But Begin decided in favor of a pre-emptive strike, ultimately determining that the cost of restraint could be greater than that of a pre-emptive strike; that a nuclear threat would enslave Israel both politically and militarily; that a nuclear attack could not be ruled out considering the violent, unexpected nature of regimes in the region, and that the ratio of Israeli territory to that of surrounding Arab states (0.2%) did not allow for a nuclear threat balance. Begin understood that the window of opportunity for a strike against Iraq's nuclear reactor was about to close. The destruction of the reactor drew a wave of virulent criticism even from avowed Israel supporters, but it was later followed by a sea of admiration and long-term collaboration.

In 2012, after a decade of failed attempts at dialogue and sanctions, and in light of the help (in terms of development and acquisition) Iran has received from Pakistan, North Korea, Russia and China for its nuclear program, Israel must decide between launching a pre-emptive attack to eliminate that threat or withstanding it. Opponents of an attack warn that it could potentially result in a harsh response from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, international anger directed at Israel over higher oil prices, or a wave of terror and conflict in the Persian Gulf. Yet these pale in comparison to the deadly cost of a nuclear threat, which include a withdrawal of Israeli and foreign investment in the country, a greater number of Israelis leaving and fewer immigrants coming to Israel, dwindling tourism, greater military-political-economic dependence on the U.S. and a more powerful and influential Iranian regime that takes control of the Persian Gulf. Israel's position as a strategic asset would be reversed without even one nuclear warhead needing to be launched.

The cost of a pre-emptive attack against Iran would be non-lethal and short-term, and would boost Israel's long-term strategic image. It would also provide a tailwind for the forces opposing the ayatollahs' regime. Will Israel adopt the legacy of Ben-Gurion and Begin, or that of their opponents?

Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1298

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(Video) Israel & Nuclear Iran - Douglas Murray at his best

2012-01-31T18:00:00.002+02:00

Uploaded by lector0003
26 January '12
H/T Elder of Ziyon

Probably Douglas Murray's finest speech delineating the inane moral fetor emanating from Western academicians on the Iranian nuclear crisis (and the Jewish state Europe hates).

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3dBzslDdQ_g

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Daphne Anson - Melbourne Zionist Uproots Sherwood's Forest Of Stones

2012-01-31T15:34:00.000+02:00

The Age once carried this cartoon ...

Daphne Anson..
30 January '12..

Harriet Sherwood, Jerusalem correspondent of the notoriously anti-Israel Guardian, frequently features on the Guardian-monitoring website CiF Watch, and with good reason. The Melbourne Age, one of the worst offenders in Australia as far as bias against Israel is concerned, recently published an article of hers entitled "No Stone Left Unpunished".

Emily Gian, Israel Advocacy Analyst at the Zionist Council of Victoria and a doctoral candidate in Israeli literature at the University of Melbourne, has issued a riposte, carried in the latest J-Wire:

Writes Emily Gian:

'An article appeared in last Thursday’s Melbourne Age entitled "No stone left unpunished". Penned by Harriet Sherwood of The Guardian, it told the story of Palestinian children detained by Israeli authorities for committing crimes such as "throwing stones at soldiers or settlers… flinging petrol bombs… [or] more serious offenses such as links to militant organisations or using weapons".

I couldn’t help but sense from the way Sherwood dismissed such activities as stone throwing and flinging petrol bombs as not being serious, that the writer was preparing to unleash what is now becoming stock standard fare from this publication on matters relating to Israel. Plenty of one-sided accusations without context and a token response from the Israeli side usually derided or sneered at by the author in the next paragraph or somewhere further down the line.

In its original incarnation in the Guardian, it was a termed a “special report” but, to its credit, the Age avoided the embarrassment and described it more correctly as an “opinion piece”. Perhaps “propaganda” might have even been more apt.

Dealing with children involved in conflict is a serious issue that needs to be handled responsibly. So does reporting on their treatment and, in this case, allegations of their mistreatment. Sherwood’s piece is problematic on three levels.

In the first place, there is the matter of the veracity of the claims made against the Israelis. Both Honest Reporting and CiF Watch have comprehensively refuted many of the article’s allegations so I will not repeat too much of what they say. However, what is of interest is how little time Sherwood dedicates to the Israeli response to the claims made and the inadequacy of her fact checking. It seems as though she simply wishes the allegations to be true and leaves it at that hoping that nobody (and certainly not the editors at the Guardian or the Age) will detect or care about the shoddiness of her work.

The Israel Security Agency (ISA) responded directly on the claims to the Guardian before the article went to print but the response was never fully published. The ISA states that “the claims that Palestinian minors were subject to interrogation techniques that include beatings, prolonged periods in handcuffs, threats, kicks, verbal abuse, humiliation, isolation and prevention of sleep are utterly baseless”.

The full ISA statement explains how all employees act within accordance of Israeli law and that those detained receive the full rights for which they are eligible. The statement also provided a categorical denial of “all claims with regard to the interrogation of minors. In fact, the complete opposite is true – the ISA guidelines grant minors special protections needed because of their age”.

Sherwood simply chose to ignore much of this statement, and instead used information provided to her by an organisation called the Defence for Children International. The DCI is a BDS supporter that calls for the full Right of Return of Palestinian refugees and previously lobbied for the now discredited Goldstone Report to be endorsed. Given its commitment to causes aimed at deligitimising the Jewish State and ultimately destroying it (a fact not disclosed in the article), the DCI is hardly an objective observer. Interestingly, one of its board members is Shawan Jabarin, a member of the terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. CiF Watch notes that his position on the board of a group that purports to protect children is strange “for someone involved with an organisation with such obvious disregard for the lives of either terror victims or the brainwashed teenagers sent to perpetrate terror attacks”.

It goes without saying that Sherwood also brushes over the crimes committed by some of the children. Her emotive piece attempts to paint a picture of harmless little pebbles being tossed at Israeli soldiers carrying guns – the old David and Goliath image. Never mind that such attacks have had fatal results such as the instances of Asher Palmer and his infant son Yonatan, who were killed when a rock hit the car in which they were travelling last September.

We see occasional instances of people throwing rocks at cars on Australian roads which have also caused serious injury but there is no reason to make light of such behaviour (see more) let alone of the throwing of petrol bombs which Sherwood doesn’t apparently consider too seriously when those attacked happen to be Israeli.

The second matter is one of timing. The initial Guardian piece appeared on Sunday 22 January. Honest Reporting and CiF Watch both published their rebuttals on Tuesday 24 January reprinting the Israeli response, which had already been ignored by the Guardian. The Age decided to republish the Sherwood article on Thursday 26 January, days after all of the information was available.

One expects that Age editor Paul Ramadge, Foreign Editor Carolyn Jones and Foreign Desk News Editor Maher Mughrabi are intelligent, well-read people, who would have seen the ISA response to the Guardian piece, and yet somehow, it appeared in its original form days later. Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened (see more here and here).

Thirdly, and to their everlasting shame, it seems that neither the journalist nor any of the agencies mentioned in the article appear to have the slightest interest in coming up with a solution to the problem of children becoming embroiled in the violence of the conflict. That their usefulness is measured only as a propaganda tool for those with more sinister motives leaves a stench far greater than that which offended Sherwood so much when she visited Cell 36, deep within Al Jalame prison in northern Israel.'

Link: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/01/melbourne-zionist-uproots-sherwoods.html

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Lerner - A Post Palestinian State Simulation

2012-01-31T13:00:00.004+02:00

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
inFocus Quarterly..
Fall 2011..
H/T Chetz18

Simulations are important tools for policymakers. And there certainly have been numerous simulations of what may happen after the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. The problem with simulations, however, is that they are, by their nature, driven by the assumptions made regarding the goals and interests of the various players. Of course, assumptions have to be made, but there is the danger that the outcome of the simulation may then take on a life of its own without the caveat that it is dependent on those assumed goals.

Take for example a simulation organized last May 16 by the Lauder School of Government to consider, among other things, how a nuclear Iran would act. Former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate Maj. Gen (res.) Zeevi Farkash participated in that simulation playing the role of Iranian Supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei is a "Twelver Shiite"—as is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and as such believes that incinerating Israel with nuclear weapons—even if followed by the incineration of Iran—would be a positive thing because the apocalyptic result would bring the return of the Hidden Imam.

But Farkash apparently maintains that deep down inside Ayatollah Khamenei actually subscribes to some sort of universal value system that considers the incineration of Iran an unacceptable outcome rather than a reasonable price to pay for the return of the Mahdi. As a result, the simulation found that Iran would only brandish its nukes for deterrence and never actually use them. As Farkash put it, "Iran would regard its bomb as a means of self-defense and strategic balance."

Was Farkash's critical assumption correct? Perhaps a more responsible approach would have been to run the simulation both ways to see how things play out in a world where the leaders of Iran genuinely believe what they claim to believe. It might have turned out that the results were so catastrophic that even if there were only a 10 percent chance that these Twelvers are true believers, policymakers would have to adjust their recommendations to account for it.

A Palestinian Simulation

What is a reasonable assumption regarding the goals of the Palestinians? Is it indeed the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel, or is such a state no more than a step towards reaching the ultimate goal of replacing Israel with a Palestinian state spanning from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River? The evidence weighs heavily in favor of the latter.

Former Fatah leader Yasser Arafat made no bones about his true view of the purpose of the Oslo Agreements. He flew straight to South Africa after the May 4, 1994 Agreement On The Gaza Strip And The Jericho Area signing ceremony in Cairo where, in a Johannesburg mosque, he explained that "I am not considering this agreement more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Muhammad and Quraysh," known as the Treaty of Hudaybiya. Yes, Islam holds that the treaty was violated, but Arafat's audience also knew that Muhammad exploited the treaty to decimate the Quraysh tribe. And that is exactly what he did when he amassed enough strength and a treaty violation afforded him the excuse to cancel the deal.

Simply put, the agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel are no more than a temporary ceasefire to facilitate preparations to destroy the Jewish state. When victory can be assured, the Palestinians will call the peace deal off, citing some kind of trumped up Israeli violation of the agreement, and proceed to the next stage in the plan. This ongoing attitude is reflected in the fact that, to this day, the PLO Charter that sets as its goal the destruction of the Jewish state has yet to be amended—this despite the December 14, 1998 Clinton-Arafat Gaza photo op hand-wave.

And as Palestinian pollsters consistently find, the Palestinian street concurs. For example, the June 22-July 8, 2011 Palestinian Center for Public Opinion poll commissioned by The Israel Project found that 66 percent of Palestinians believe: "The real goal should be to start with two states but then move to it all being one Palestinian state."

Realizing the Goal

How could the Palestinian leadership exploit the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state to realize their ultimate goal? There are two basic ways to advance the goal: One is to make life inside Israel so untenable that the Jews (who the Palestinians view as temporary foreign interlopers—no more than modern day crusaders) leave en mass. The other is to create conditions conducive to Israel being defeated on the battlefield.

A sovereign Palestinian state could readily facilitate an ongoing proxy war of attrition against the Jewish state. By facilitating, it would not openly organize and direct the hostilities. In fact, the leadership of the sovereign Palestinian state could officially take the position that it opposes the attacks against Israel and even issue press releases against particularly high profile terror attacks. Thus, the Palestinian state could present itself as a victim of the attacks against Israel rather than as having any responsibility for them, with photo ops showing Palestinian security forces earnestly seeking for the perpetrators of the attacks.

The spin would be clear: The true purpose of the terror attacks in Israel is to undermine the ruling Palestinian leadership by evoking Israeli security activities inside the Palestinian state. The dead Israelis are just a byproduct. Israel would be urged to stand down and let the Palestinians take care of the "problem" on their own. The international observers in the area would position themselves as human shields to prevent Israeli operations in violation of Palestinian sovereignty. This while they issue glowing reports about the performance of the Palestinian security forces and recommend that they be given more weapons and other equipment.

To make matters worse, Israeli intelligence efforts against the perpetrators of the attacks would be seen first and foremost as a violation of Palestinian sovereignty. The Palestinians would use the Israeli intelligence information shared with them to ferret out the Palestinian "collaborators" who provided Israel with the information as opposed to using the intelligence to capture and close down the terrorists.

Thus, it would be possible for this war of attrition against Israel to continue essentially indefinitely. With tourism dead, an effective freeze on foreign investment and no end in sight, the Palestinians could certainly shed crocodile tears as they watch their Israeli neighbor crumble before their eyes. Yes, the deteriorating economic situation in Israel could be expected to have a significant impact on the Palestinian economy. But that is a cost measured over months or years in order to reach a goal worthy of a generation of sacrifice.

Thinking Outside the Box

Critical elements in any simulation are the assumptions regarding the secondary players. Is a "ceteris paribus" (all other things equal) approach appropriate? Less than a year ago, much of the analysis prepared for policymakers assumed that Hosni Mubarak would rule Egypt forever. Are analysts more careful in the wake of the "Arab Spring?"

It is noteworthy that many of the very same experts who insisted that policymakers did not have to take into account the possibility of a revolution in Egypt continue to base their policy recommendations on the assumption that the current leadership of Jordan will remain in power in perpetuity. Suffice it to say that the formation of a radical Muslim Jordanian state could dramatically change the scenario—in particular if the current Hashemite Kingdom fell after the creation of the Palestinian state, with Jordan's role in the state and its interaction with the state set when it was still viewed by Israel as a trusted moderating force rather than a threat.

Thus, in a world where Jordan and Egypt become unfriendly countries and decide to invade Israel—not such a far fetched idea today—the sovereign Palestinian state could function as a bridgehead for the invading Arab armies in an all-out war to destroy the Jewish state. Such an invasion could take place because it serves the interests of the leadership of the invading states or as a result of developments in Israel-Palestine that compel them to intervene. In the former case, the assault on Israel would be more a matter of domestic politics with the leadership opting to divert the rage of their masses towards Israel in order to avoid finding themselves hanging from the lamp post, rather than anything actually related to Israel or Palestine.

In the latter case, the Palestinians could manipulate events with an eye towards whipping up the Arab street to such a frenzy that the leadership feels that it has no choice but to join in the fray. To be clear: Regardless of how generous the arrangements on the ground are to the Palestinians, it would be child's play for them to come up with an ever growing series of Israeli "crimes" and "injustices" threatening not just the Palestinians but the entire Muslim world. And with a Palestinian state created, Israel would be seen as significantly more vulnerable. The leaders of the Arab world would be considerably less deterred by fear over the consequences of joining in battle against the Jewish state.

Some Israeli analysts argue that for all practical purposes the existence of a sovereign Palestinian state has no relevance in simulations of the invasion of Israel since, in the event of foreign troop movements towards Israel, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) would simply roll through the Palestinian state as it deploys to stop the invading force before it even comes close to the Jordan River. But this optimistic assessment ignores that the Palestinians themselves will have many thousands of well-armed troops.

It is reasonable to assume, based on the gross failure of anti-weapons smuggling arrangements to date, that the "demilitarized" Palestinians will have ample stocks of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons—not to mention rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), mortars, rockets, and more. But even if they only had their regulation assault rifles, this sizeable Palestinian force, deployed within walking distance of most of Israel's soft underbelly, could easily interfere with the IDF forces racing to the border while wreaking havoc on Israel's vital infrastructure—this as literally hundreds of well trained and equipped assault teams swarm on targets across the country.

The potential outcome in this scenario would be complete and total chaos within Israel with Israeli security forces stretched beyond their limits—torn between adequately addressing the invading armies approaching from Jordan, Egypt, or elsewhere, and devoting more forces to the task of somehow clearing out a seemingly endless wave of Palestinian assault teams. All this as literally thousands of rockets slam into pre-selected Israeli targets from southern Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and in all likelihood from launching pads across the West Bank.

The Need for a Realistic Simulation

Is the above scenario an overly apocalyptic assessment? Perhaps. Then again, there is nothing in it that requires that the Palestinians acquire anything that they do not already have.

If the purpose of a simulation is to find comfort, then assume that the Palestinians want to live side by side in peace with Israel forever—just like the retired military Israeli intelligence head, who apparently sleeps well, is confident that the Twelvers leading Iran are faking their religious belief in the return of the Mahdi.

But if the purpose of the exercise is to make responsible policy decisions, there is no place for optimistically simplifying assumptions.

Link: http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2497/palestinian-state-simulation

Dr. Aaron Lerner is director of IMRA, Independent Media Review and Analysis, www.imra.org.il

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Gordon - So, You Think the Palestinians Are Actually Interested in Negotiating?

2012-01-31T10:00:00.015+02:00

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
30 January '12..

As I noted earlier, one area in which Palestinians need no help from anyone is finding excuses to shun negotiations. Currently, of course, they are claiming Israel’s position on borders leaves no room for progress. But if you want to see the real reason talks are stalemated, take a look at what happened last week, when Israel tried to present its position on security arrangements at a negotiating session in Amman: Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat refused to even let the Israeli official speak, saying he had no “mandate to negotiate security arrangements” until Israel presented “detailed documents” with its position on borders.

Everyone involved in the peace process has always understood that borders and security are intimately connected, because how much territory Israel is willing to cede will depend on the robustness of the compensatory security arrangements. That’s why even President Barack Obama, in his May 2011 speech calling for a “borders first” approach that would defer issues like Jerusalem and the refugees until later, didn’t propose deferring security; he suggested that talks focus first on “territory and security.” Thus, if the Palestinians aren’t even willing to listen to Israel’s positions on security arrangements, they clearly aren’t interested in conducting serious negotiations at all. As Israel’s chief negotiator aptly told Erekat, “If you do not have the mandate to discuss this, maybe you should leave and bring someone in your place who does have the mandate.”

But that isn’t the only evidence; equally telling is the ever-growing list of “gestures” the Palestinians are demanding from Israel in exchange for deigning to sit in the same room with Israeli officials. For months, they said the condition for continued talks was a freeze on settlement construction. But now, even this isn’t enough: Nimer Hammad, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said earlier this month the PA also demands a release of Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel, the dismantling of Israeli security checkpoints in the West Bank and the transfer of additional chunks of West Bank territory to PA control – or in other words, that Israel cede territory prior to negotiations instead of as a result of negotiations.

Even worse, the “international community” is pressuring Israel to agree to these demands, seemingly incapable of seeing the obvious: If the Palestinians had any interest in holding genuine negotiations, they wouldn’t need to be bribed with lavish Israeli concessions just to get them to enter the room.

And that, of course, brings us to the other obvious corollary that the “international community” willfully refuses to see: If the Palestinians had any real interest in obtaining a state, they wouldn’t need to be bribed, cajoled and arm-twisted just to get them to hold talks with the only party that can actually give them one –Israel.

But to admit that is to admit the entire peace process is a fraud and a failure, and that is too painful. It’s much more comfortable to keep pretending that peace could be achieved if Israel would just give a little more.

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/30/palestinians-negotiating-with-israel/

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Glick - Hamas and the Washington establishment

2012-01-31T07:00:00.001+02:00

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
30 January '12..

To date, the Republican presidential primary race has been the only place to have generated any useful contributions to America’s collective understanding of current events in the Middle East. Last month, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became the first major political figure in more than a generation to pour cold water over the Palestinian myth of indigenous peoplehood by stating the truth, that the Palestinians are an “invented people.”

As Gingrich explained, their invention came in response to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement. Since they were created somewhere around 1920, the Palestinians’ main purpose has not been the establishment of a Palestinian state but the obliteration of the Jewish state.

For his truth telling, Gingrich was attacked by fellow politicians and policy hands on both sides of the ideological divide. To his credit, Gingrich has not backed away from the truth he spoke. Rather he has repeated it in two subsequent Republican candidates’ debates.

The second important contribution that Republican presidential candidates have made to the discourse on the Middle East was undertaken by Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a candidates’ debate in South Carolina on January 17, shortly before he pulled out of the race. When asked about Turkey, Perry said that country “is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists.” He went on to say that the US ought to be having a debate about whether Turkey should continue to serve as a member of NATO.

Like Gingrich, Perry was pilloried by all right thinking people in the US foreign policy elite. And like Gingrich, Perry was right. The hoopla his statement generated showed just how destructive so much of America’s received wisdom about the Middle East has become. Moreover, it demonstrated the extent to which the US has adopted Middle East policies that are inimical to its national interests.

After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Turkey was the first country to invite Hamas’s terror master Khaled Mashal to Ankara. Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s move provoked criticism from the Bush administration. But Erdogan just shrugged it off. And he was right to do so. By 2006, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had come to view Erdogan as the US’s indispensable ally in the Muslim world. As she saw it, he was proof that Islamist parties could be democratic and moderate.

The fact that Erdogan embraced Hamas could not get in the way of Rice’s optimistic assessment. So, too, the fact that Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to stifle press freedom, curb judicial independence and imprison his political critics in the media and the military could not move Rice from her view that Erdogan personified her belief that moderate jihadists exist and ought to be embraced by the US.

Rice’s starry-eyed view of Erdogan set the stage of US President Barack Obama’s even stronger embrace of the increasingly tyrannical Turkish Islamist. Since Obama took office, not only has Ankara stepped up its support of Hamas, and ended even the pretense of a continued strategic alliance with Israel that it maintained during the Bush years. Turkey began serving as Iran’s chief diplomatic protector while vastly expanding its own strategic and economic ties with Tehran.

In the face of Turkey’s openly anti-American behavior and actions, Obama clings to Erdogan even more strongly than Rice did. Obama reportedly views Erdogan as his most trusted foreign adviser. According to the media, Obama speaks with Erdogan more often than he speaks to any other foreign leader. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Obama listed Erdogan as one of the key foreign leaders with whom he has formed a friendship based on trust.

Over the past few weeks, Turkey has emerged as Hamas’s largest financier. During an official visit in Turkey, Hamas’s terror master in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh received a hero’s welcome. Erdogan pledged to finance the jihadist movement to the tune of $300 million per year.

COMMENTATORS CLAIM that Turkey’s sponsorship of Hamas was necessitated by Iran’s abandonment of the terror group. Iran, it is claimed, cut Hamas off in August due to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s refusal to actively assist Iran’s other Arab client – Syrian President Bashar Assad – in massacring his domestic opponents.

These analyses are problematic for two reasons. First, it is far from clear that Iran cut Hamas off. Iran’s rulers have invited Haniyeh to Tehran for an official visit. This alone indicates that the mullahs remain committed to maintaining their relationship with the jihadist movement that controls the Gaza Strip.

And why would they want to cut off that relationship? By serving as Hamas’s chief sponsor since 2006, Iran has won enormous credibility in the Arab world. This credibility has bought Tehran influence with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and beyond. Particularly now, with the Brotherhood taking over Egypt and much of the Arab world, Iran would only stand to lose by cutting off Hamas.

The second problem with these assessments is that it makes little sense to believe that Turkey has replaced Iran as Hamas’s main state sponsor since Iran and Turkey are not necessarily competing over Hamas. Given the interests shared by Tehran and Ankara, it is far more reasonable to assume that they are coordinating their moves regarding Hamas.

Iran became Hamas’s chief financier and weapons supplier the same year that Erdogan emerged as Hamas’s most important political supporter. And in the six years since then, Iran and Turkey have become strategic allies. Even with regards to Syria, the fact that Assad remains in power today is due in no small measure to the fact that Erdogan has used his influence over Obama to ensure that the US has remained on the sidelines and so effectively supported Assad’s survival.

In light of Erdogan’s enormous influence over leaders in both US parties, it is little wonder that Perry’s factual statement about the nature of the Turkish government and the need for the US to reassess its strategic alliance with Turkey provoked such an across the board outcry. Erdogan’s close relationship with Obama – like his previously close relationship with Rice – renders it well nigh impossible for US government officials and inside-the Beltway “experts” to make the kind of commonsense assessments of Turkey’s counterproductive regional role that an outsider like Perry was able to make from his perch in Austin, Texas.

CONTRARY TO what several leading commentators have argued since the onset of the Syrian popular rebellion against Assad, Hamas has not been seriously damaged by the events. True, its leaders are looking for a new place to station their headquarters. But there is no law that requires terrorist organizations to have one central office. The families of Hamas’s leadership have decamped to Jordan. Hamas leaders have close relations with the Qataris – who remain major funders – as well as with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Sudanese regime.

In addition to these state supporters, through its relations with Turkey and Fatah, Hamas has Washington as well. To understand how Washington acts as Hamas’s protector, it is necessary to consider the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

Since its inception in 1993, the peace process has been predicated on Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. To the extent that Israel makes concessions, the peace process is seen as advancing. To the extent that Israel fails to make concessions, the peace process is seen as collapsing. True, at certain times, the Bush administration blamed the Palestinians for the failure of the peace process, but the blame owed to the fact that Palestinian terrorism made Israel less amenable to concession making.

Palestinian terrorism was not in and of itself blamed for the demise of the peace process. Rather it was perceived as the means through which Israel avoided making more concessions. And at certain times, the US supported Israel’s avoidance of concession making.

Since Israeli concessions to the Palestinians are the only tangible component of the peace process, the US, as the chief sponsor of the peace process, requires the Palestinian Authority – run by Fatah – to be accepted as a credible repository for Israeli concessions regardless of its actual nature. Consequently, despite Fatah’s two unity deals with Hamas, its sponsorship of terrorism, its incitement of terrorism, its refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, its adoption of negotiating positions that presuppose Israel’s demise, and its conduct of political warfare against Israel, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration ever showed the slightest willingness to consider ending their support for the PA. If Israel has no peace partner, then it can’t make concessions. And if it can’t make concessions, there is no peace process. And that is something that neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration was willing to countenance.

It is true that under Obama the US has become far more hostile towards Israel than it was under Bush. The most important distinction between the two is that whereas George W. Bush sought to broker a compromise deal between the two sides, Obama has adopted Fatah’s negotiating positions against Israel. As a consequence of Obama’s actions, the peace process has been derailed completely. Fatah has no reason to compromise since the US will blame Israel no matter what. And Israel has no reason to make concessions since the US will deem them insufficient.

Noting this distinction, Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin wrote this week that for the benefit of the peace process, it is important for a Republican administration to be elected to replace Obama in November. As she put it, “If history is any guide, progress is made in the ‘peace process’ when the Israeli prime minister operates from a position of strength and has the full support of the US president. We might get there, albeit not until 2013.”

The problem with her analysis is that it is of a piece with the insiders’ attacks on Gingrich and Romney alike. That is, it is based on the false assumptions of the peace process and the generally accepted wisdom embraced by the American foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle that the PA is a reasonable repository for Israeli concessions.

Here it is worth noting that this week Fatah-controlled PA TV aired a sequence venerating the murderers of the Fogel family. Udi and Ruth Fogel and their children Yoav, Elad and Hadas were brutally murdered in their home last March.

Fatah’s glorification of their murderers is yet further proof that the foundations of the peace process are false. Peace cannot be based on appeasing societies that uphold mass murderers as role models. It can only be based on empowering free societies to defeat societies that embrace murder, terror and in the case of Hamas, genocide.

And this brings us back to the Republican primaries and Gingrich’s and Perry’s statements. For the US to secure its interests in the Middle East, it requires leaders who are willing to reassess what passes for common wisdom on both sides of the aisle.

caroline@carolineglick.com

Link: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=255802

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Tobin - Echoes of 1967 in Israel’s Iran Dilemma

2012-01-31T04:00:00.003+02:00

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
30 January '12..

One of the interesting aspects of yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story about Israel’s decision whether or not to strike at Iran’s nuclear program came from a passage in which author Ronen Bergman describes his meeting with former Mossad chief Meir Amit. Amit, who headed Israel’s intelligence agency at the time of the 1967 Six-Day War, described a meeting with the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv during the lead up to that conflict. According to the transcript of the meeting, which was given to Bergman, the American spy threatened Israel and did all in his power to prevent the Jewish state from acting to forestall the threat to its existence from Egypt and other Arab states that were poised to strike.

The lessons of this confrontation certainly put Israel’s current dilemma about attempting to pre-empt Iran’s ability to threaten the Jewish state with extinction via a nuclear weapon in perspective. Bergman provides no firm answer to the question of whether or not Israel will go ahead and strike Iran even if, as was initially the case in 1967, it must happen over the objections of the United States. But he does attempt to give a coherent framework for how the decision can be made as well as providing a bit more background on the chief Israeli critic of a strike on Iran.

According to Bergman, Israel has three criteria for deciding to act on their own on Iran:

1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?

2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders believe the response to all of these questions is yes.

I’m not sure he’s right about that, especially when it comes to the first two points. While Israel can inflict serious damage on Iran, there’s no question that to do the job properly it will require American involvement. And though it may well be that ultimately the Obama administration will give Israel the same blinking green light it got in 1967, a close read of most of the statements coming out of Washington lately on the subject may lead to a different answer. It remains to be seen whether Obama is more afraid of the terrible consequences of an Iranian nuclear device for the world as well as Israel as he is of the fallout from an Israeli attack. Elsewhere in the piece, Bergman presents an Israeli assessment of what many believe is a feckless American stand on the issue that seems more the product of magical thinking than an analytic process:

“I fail to grasp the Americans’ logic,” a senior Israeli intelligence source told me. “If someone says we’ll stop them from getting there by praying for more glitches in the centrifuges, I understand. If someone says we must attack soon to stop them, I get it. But if someone says we’ll stop them after they are already there, that I do not understand.”

Just as fascinating is his account of the activities of Meir Dagan, another former Mossad chief who has been quoted incessantly in the American press largely because he is a vocal critic of the idea of an Israeli strike on Iran.

Bergman allows Dagan his say on the matter in which he bitterly criticizes both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Defense Minister Ehud Barak. But his is one of the rare accounts in the U.S. press to also note the spymaster carries a political grudge against the two because they did not reappoint him to his position after the fiasco in which Mossad personnel were exposed while carrying out a hit on a Hamas terrorist in Dubai.

Though he is often represented in the Western press as someone who minimizes the danger from Iran, Bergman also corrects this impression. Dagan seems as intent on stopping Iran as Netanyahu and Barak, but he thinks it can be better achieved by Mossad’s cloak-and-dagger assassinations of Iranian scientists and/or sabotage of Iranian facilities. But it’s far from clear the Iranians haven’t already overcome those tactics.

The other Israeli critic of a strike on Iran that he cites is Rafi Eitan, the 85-year-old former spook whose most famous achievement in his field was the Jonathan Pollard disaster (something Bergman fails to note). He believes it is a foregone conclusion that Iran will go nuclear and thinks the only way to avert the danger is to promote regime change. While the replacement of the Islamist dictatorship with a democratic government would be an improvement, waiting around for that to happen doesn’t seem particularly prudent, especially when you consider the consequences.

Bergman’s conclusion is Israel will attack Iran sometime this year because of a growing consensus it has no choice but to do so. If Barack Obama wishes to avert that overcome, he is going to have to prove to the Israelis he means business about sanctions that will bring the Iranian economy to its knees. But given the ambivalent signals emanating from Washington on that subject, everything Netanyahu and Barak are hearing is more likely to be hardening their conviction that, as Bergman writes, “only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.”

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/30/israel-iran-nuclear-dilemma-strike/#more-782314

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Dr. Shmuel Bar - Western Hopes And Dreams, And Iranian Reality

2012-01-31T00:30:00.002+02:00

A Nuclear Iran and the Ramifications of a
Poly-Nuclear Middle East

Dr. Shmuel Bar..
Working Paper..
The 12th Herzliya Conference..
January 2012..

The failure of the international efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a military nuclear capability has raised debate in the academic and strategic communities regarding the possibility that such a development may still be averted and regarding the ramifications of a nuclear Iran.

The classic European thesis which has now been adopted in Washington is that there is some – yet undiscovered - enticement that can be offered to Iran which would hold greater value than becoming a nuclear power. A cursory examination of what Iran believes it can achieve with even the image of being a threshold state will show that nothing the West can offer Iran (short of total hegemony over the Gulf and parts of Central Asia) can give Iran more. Furthermore, the basic Iranian perception of the conspiratorial West – including perfidious Albion – is that such offers are no more than a ruse to disarm Iran of the only capability that can protect it from western subterfuge.

Another popular hypothesis draws an analogy between Iran today and the Soviet Union in the mid 1980’s. It focuses on Iran’s economic situation, the behavior of the younger generation who are attracted to Western culture, and what appears to be the decline of the clerical authority in Qom, comparable to the disintegration of the Communist party’s authority. Those who believe that it was the detante and the American engagement opposition in the former USSR that encouraged the internal opposition to the regime and ultimately contributed to the fall of the Soviet Empire now advocate Western “engagement” with civil society in Iran, which will, they believe, ultimately produce a similar Iranian “counterrevolution”. Unfortunately, this “deus ex machina” will not appear. The disparity between the Soviet Union before its collapse and Iran today is vast. The Communist ideology that went bankrupt in the Soviet Union was a secular ideology superimposed on the nation’s root religion. Its abandonment did not entail giving up basic cultural beliefs. In contrast, while the Islamic regime in Iran may not be liked by the populace, it does represent a strong tradition in Iran that existed before the revolution and retains the devotion even of those who oppose the regime. Furthermore, the Soviet Union did not fall overnight: its collapse can be traced to first stages of détente in the 1970’s when it became clear to the Kremlin that it had to reach a strategic accommodation with the US. The Soviet Union also went through a series of destabilizing leadership changes with one octogenarian coming fast on the heels of another. Other forces that had no little effect on the fall of the Soviet Union were the SDI and the defeat in Afghanistan. There is no analogy in Iran for any of these forces.

Even if, despite the dissimilarity to the Soviet Union, we accept that Iran is tending to a democratic counter-revolution, the timeline for the transformation makes this irrelevant to the nuclear crisis. Even the optimists do not see democratic change happening within the next year or two, the time most experts
believe Iran needs to cross the threshold of a military nuclear capability. And because the public, even the public that seeks democratic change, will congratulate the regime for its achievement, acquisition of a nuclear bomb will only lengthen the road to democracy in Iran.

If the above is not likely, then the question should be: what are the regional ramifications of Iran becoming a nuclear power. A common argument is that nuclear weapons endow their owners with a heavy sense of responsibility in the light of the awesome destructive power of those weapons. This would lead us to believe that a nuclear Iran will be more restrained in its behavior in the region than Iran is presently. This argument is also specious. In any case, it behooves us to explore the potential for further nuclearization in the Middle East, a breakdown of the non-proliferation regime in general and implications for the relationships between a number of nuclear states which would not be grouped in two main blocs as was the case in the cold war.

The prospect of such a “poly-nuclear” Middle East has given rise to a number of theories regarding the relevance of the lessons of the cold war to such a situation. Some highly respected experts (among them Kenneth Waltz and Thomas Schelling) regard the cold war experience as highly relevant to such a scenario. Some argue, on the basis of that experience, that a nuclear Iran not only may not be a destabilizing factor in the region, but may even provide the foundation for a regional order based on the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction or MAD. According to their line of thought, the very possession of nuclear weapons tempers military adventurism and inculcates a degree of strategic responsibility commensurate with the grave consequences that would result from nuclear conflict. These experts point at the fears that permeated the western military establishments of a nuclear China and the fact that a nuclear Indian sub- continent did not result in nuclear war, despite mutual hostility and frequent outbreaks of crisis.

Others point at substantial differences between the cold war and the type of nuclear Middle East that may evolve. According to his viewpoint, all of these stabilizing characteristics of the Cold War strategic balance that saved the world from a nuclear war are absent in the Middle East:

1. MAD--was based not on small nuclear arsenals in the hands of several countries but large stockpiles in two nations (or two alliances) that really did assure mutual destruction. The first years of the Cold War, before the two Superpowers developed the capabilities for mutual destruction and the command and control mechanism to prevent such a catastrophe, were the most dangerous and held the highest risk of both nuclear war and local conflicts under the “umbrella” of nuclear deterrence.

2. The Cold War was in essence a bilateral struggle between American and Soviet blocs, which simplified the signaling of intentions and prevention of misunderstandings. A nuclear Iran will lead to a “polynuclear” Middle East in which the potential for nuclear error will be greatly increased. Nuclear posturing by one party will not be interpreted only by the party it was intended for but by all other parties. Regimes in the Middle East have shown a much higher predilection for brinkmanship than the US and the USSR ever did.

3. Both sides to the cold war were governed by elite decision making groups with much in common; a centralist executive system and a clear preference (in the case of the Soviet Union – even an ideological preference) for “rational” and “pragmatic” decision making. Public discussion of nuclear weapons in the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War tended to be restricted to experts, so policy makers could develop rational strategies with little public pressures to take a more belligerent position. It is argued that never did crowds in Washington or Moscow demonstrate – as they have in Pakistan - with models of nuclear bombs and calls to use them against historic enemies. Religious and nationalistic fervor have led Arab countries to countless military debacles. There are no grounds to argue that the possession of nuclear weapons will change these patterns of behavior.

4. Cold war parties did not have to deal with apocalyptic or suicidal traditions or with the centrality of honor as it is manifested in the Middle East. As eminent a scholar of Middle Eastern culture and politics as Prof. Bernard Lewis has argued that presenting a threat of destruction to a leader or leadership group which fervently believes in the imminence of the apocalypse would not be a threat but a promise. Muslim belief in the appearance of a Mahdi who will fight on the side of Allah’s soldiers and protect them, heightens the risk. Other scholars – while they do not go as far as imputing suicidal apocalyptic goals to these leaders – argue that their very posturing as believing in such a development or in claiming divine protection from any devastating reprisal from the enemy holds potential for escalation which can get out of control.

5. Regimes in the Middle East are notoriously weak and fragmented with strategic decisions taken for internal political reasons. Elements of regimes tend to latch on to the “strategic issues” confronting those countries as levers for enhancing their clout within the regime. This tendency, if translated into multiple parties involved in nuclear programs – or even in nuclear command and control – would make command and control in the hair-trigger situations that nuclear conflicts can create more difficult than was ever experienced during the cold war.

6. The cold war did not have at its core an age-old enmity such as the Sunni-Shiite and Arab-Iranian conflict. An Iranian bomb would be perceived in the Sunni Arab world as an Iranian (i.e. anti-Arab) and Shiite (i.e. anti-Sunni) capability.

So what would a nuclear Middle East look like? Certainly not a re-run of the cold war. We should expect that a nuclear Iran will move to assert its dominance in the waters that it likes to remind all is the “Persian Gulf” and to gain hegemony over the Gulf, including dictating oil production levels. Even before the present economic crisis, Iran’s economy was in shambles; the decline in oil prices has exacerbated the situation and Iran will probably attempt to intimidate its neighbors in order to raise prices. Iran will also assert itself in the heart of the Middle East by using terror with impunity. These and the very potential of a nuclear confrontation in the region should bring the western world to the conclusion that the best option remains prevention at all costs.

Link: http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/Bar_ANuclearIran.pdf

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Gordon - Encouraging Aggression by Making it Cost-Free

2012-01-30T22:25:00.000+02:00

How Egypt's economic turmoil and Western positions on the peace process combine to increase the risk of another Arab-Israeli war

Evelyn Gordon..

JINSA Visiting Fellow..
30 January '12..

Last month, Victor Davis Hanson published a fascinating article on why Iran might nevertheless decide to start a war it can't win. In it, he analyzed several cases in which countries did exactly that, including the Korean War in 1950, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982 Falklands War and the 1991 Gulf War, and found three common factors: pressing domestic crises, belief that the West might acquiesce in their aggression, and conviction that even if it didn't, the Western response would stop well short of regime change. In short, their leaders had something to gain (domestic distraction) and nothing irreversible to lose.

While surely relevant to Iran, Hanson's analysis is equally relevant to another Mideast powder keg - one created by the combination of Egypt's revolution and a troubling change in Western attitudes toward the Israeli-Arab peace process. The former left Egypt with a major economic crisis. And the latter has assured Arab states that attacking Israel carries no risk of irreversible losses: Even if a war results in Israel capturing Arab territory, the West will demand that it return every last inch.

This wasn't always the case. UN Security Council Resolution 242, the original framework for the peace process, was deliberately crafted to ensure that Israel wouldn't have to return all the territory captured in its defensive war of 1967. While the Arab and Soviet blocs wanted the resolution to require Israel to withdraw from "the territories" or "all the territories," the final wording merely required an Israeli withdrawal from "territories" captured in 1967. And both sides understood that this omission was "not accidental," as America's then UN ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, explained: The West envisioned a "peace settlement encompassing less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories, inasmuch as Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure," and therefore, "the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal."

As time passed, however, Western attitudes shifted drastically. The European Union has been demanding a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank for years now, and last year, the U.S. joined in: President Barack Obama declared that any future Israeli-Palestinian border must be "based on the 1967 lines," modified only by "mutually agreed swaps," meaning Palestinians can veto any proposal encompassing less than 100 percent of the territory. That is a retreat from both President Bill Clinton's parameters of 2000 (which called for Israel to cede 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank) and President George Bush's position in 2004 ("it is unrealistic to expect ... a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949").

And on the Syrian front, this change occurred even earlier: Here, even the U.S. has demanded a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights for decades.

It's sometimes argued that Israel itself set the 100-percent precedent, by returning every inch of Sinai to Egypt under their 1979 peace agreement. This, however, is a flawed comparison. Egypt was the first to breach the Arab consensus against peace with Israel, at considerable cost to its relations with its Arab neighbors (who barred it from the Arab League for 10 years). It therefore deserved a territorial bonus. But there's no reason why others should receive a similar reward for more than three decades of continued refusal to make peace.

This Western attitude has long been an impediment to Israeli-Arab negotiations: Syria has no incentive to make peace sooner rather than later as long as the West guarantees that 100 percent of the Golan will still be on the table later, while the Palestinians have learned that rejecting repeated Israeli offers of statehood merely results in Western pressure for Israel to offer them more. Had either Syria or the Palestinians thought instead that they had something to lose by holding out - i.e., that waiting would reduce the amount the territory they could ultimately expect to obtain - they might have signed an agreement sooner.

But that issue pales beside the danger posed by the new situation in Egypt. The revolution left Egypt an economic basket case. Tourism, the country's second-largest revenue source, was down 35 percent in the first nine months of last year, while third-quarter unemployment stood at 12 percent, up from 9 percent a year earlier. Foreign exchange reserves plunged 50 percent in 2011 - a disaster for a country that imports half its food - and last month, a government bond issue flopped, with investors buying less than a third despite yields of almost 16 percent. The chances that Egypt's new government can produce the economic miracle needed to reverse this decline seem slim, and if it doesn't, demonstrators are likely to return to Tahrir Square to demand its ouster, just as they did with Hosni Mubarak.

Hence Egypt's new rulers may soon find themselves in desperate need of something to distract the public from its economic distress. And in a country where 90% of the population views Israel as an "enemy" and a "threat," they might well see war with Israel as the ideal distraction.

This makes it vital for Western leaders to make it clear that Egypt does have something irreversible to lose by starting another war - namely, that if it loses Sinai to Israel again, the West won't back Egyptian demands for its full return. But there's no way to make such a threat credible while the West is simultaneously demanding that Israel return every inch of land captured in an earlier defensive war: Egypt's leaders will know they just have to wait a few years for the furor to die down, and the West will similarly demand 100 percent restitution for them.

It's therefore high time for Western leaders to send the following message to both Syria and the Palestinians: You went to war, you lost, and you refused to make peace for 45 years; our patience is exhausted. We will no longer back your demands for restoring the status quo ante; aggression and intransigence have a price.

For only by ensuring that aggression does entail a territorial price can the West deter future aggressors from trying it.

Evelyn Gordon, JINSA Visiting Fellow, is a journalist and commentator writing in The Jerusalem Post and the English version of Haaretz.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Kushner - From Israel: Frenetic Times

2012-01-30T20:27:00.000+02:00

Arlene Kushner..
30 January '12..

Afraid it's "that time" again: Time for a review of what's going on with our "partners for peace" and their brothers in Hamas. Hate doing this. But every so many days...

As was totally predictable, the "talks" supervised by Jordan have gone nowhere and are likely finished. (Although, as I write there is an unconfirmed report that the low level talks may continue for another month. We'll see.)

You realize, of course, that the lack of progress in the talks is all Israel's fault. Must be, because that's what PA leaders are saying. We failed to submit a detailed plan of our demands for security and borders (to which I say, Baruch Hashem!); we merely submitted principles of what we think must be dealt with. The PA says the deadline for us to do so was January 26. Israel says the PA is counting wrong. The Quartet had said both side were to submit plans within three months. The PA calculates that three months as having ended now. Israel says it ends three months after the Jordanian talks began.

~~~~~~~~~~

For background information: It is Israel's policy generally (not always adhered to as perfectly as might be desired) not to reveal specifics of what might be conceded until everything is on the table and dealt with -- "nothing is decided until everything is decided."

~~~~~~~~~~

At the Cabinet meeting yesterday, Netanyahu reported, "As things stand now, according to what happened over the past few days - when the Palestinians refused even to discuss Israel's security needs with us - the signs are not particularly good."

Naturally, we will continue to see pressure brought to bear, to bring the parties back to the table. Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief, was in the region last week, meeting with Israeli and PA officials.

~~~~~~~~~~

What particularly enrages -- although this is hardly new -- is that the Western world knows full well that Israel has no "partner for peace." It's simply that leaders are mindful of their relationship with Arab nations, and pander to the growing number of Muslims within their own nations, as well as to the left wing pro-Palestinian segment of their electorates. And so, they have an agenda that has nothing to do with facts or justice.

Please see this Palestinian Media Watch bulletin revealing the fact -- complete with video clip -- that Palestinian Authority TV twice last week broadcast greetings to Hakim Awad, convicted of murdering five members of the Fogel family last year, from members of his family and from the TV host. From his mother, who calls him the "apple of my eye," and his aunt, who refers to him as "the hero, the legend."

http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=6245

~~~~~~~~~~

Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore has been here visiting, and PM Netanyahu remarked to him that while the world asks Israel to provide "confidence building measures," what the PA does with such praises of a terrorist destroys Israel's confidence.

Actually, I think that our prime minister didn't make the case nearly strongly enough. What this behavior does is cast a light on the perverted soul of the PA: What sort of society glorifies the murderer of babies this way? And why is it imagined that such a society merits a sovereign nation of its own?

But in the end it probably doesn't matter what Netanyahu said -- although he was correct to speak out -- because Gilmore, who represents a nation that is not exactly pro-Israel, probably wasn't really listening anyway. His mind is made up.

~~~~~~~~~~

Con Coughlin, writing last week in The Telegraph, said, "The Palestinians are doing their best to derail peace talks with Israel":

"...I am told by Western diplomats close to the exploratory talks that are currently taking place [note: have since ended] in Jordan between the two sides that the real reason they are running into difficulty is because the Palestinian delegation, led by the veteran Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, is refusing to take the talks seriously.

"For example, I am told by a Western diplomat working for the Quartet that when the Israeli delegation arrived for a meeting last weekend in Amman, the Jordanian capital, to present their latest security proposals, Mr. Erekat simply refused to enter the room.
"My man in the Jordan conference room says that he was surprised at Mr. Erekat's behaviour, especially as the topic under discussion was supposed to be one of the two main topics the Palestinian delegation wanted on the agenda...

"Erekat's refusal to enter the negotiating room and hear what the Israelis had to say does not bode well for the Quartet's attempts to get the two sides to resume full negotiations, and raises questions about just how serious the Palestinians are about getting a peace deal..."

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/concoughlin/100132355/the-palestinians-are-doing-their-best-to-derail-peace-talks-with-israel/

~~~~~~~~~~

"Not bode well"? "Raises questions"? Enormous understatements, but point is taken.

Barack Obama was inclined at one time -- before he began currying favor with American Jews for election purposes -- to publicly chastise Israel, for example, for announcing that homes for young couples would be build in Jerusalem east of the Green Line. But if he publicly chastised the PA for failure to exhibit good faith in the negotiations, I missed it.

A most unpalatable fact of life: This is what Israel must contend with.

~~~~~~~~~~

According to the Palestinian Maan News, the PLO executive committee will be meeting today, to discuss the "failure" of the preliminary talks. Then of course there will be discussion of "alternatives." UN bids, Hamas reconciliation (see below on this), etc.

Here we may go again...

~~~~~~~~~~

As to Hamas, it's in a severe state of turmoil. Iran has cut off assistance because of its leaders' refusal to back Assad in Syria. And thus, for all intents and purposes, Hamas is finished with regard to being headquartered in Damascus. According to intelligence sources, Khaled Mashaal has left for good; he's in Jordan at the moment and won't be coming back.

There seems, however, to be a real reluctance to say that the Hamas headquarters are closed. As one diplomat cited recently in the JPost put it, "Our belief is that Hamas [would] not announce a departure from Syria even if it happened." What is likely is that they'll keep low level staff there and maintain the fiction that they still have a headquarters there.

~~~~~~~~~~

But where will they go? Jordan has established limits to a Hamas presence, saying that Hamas leaders are welcome as individuals, but no more than this. King Abdullah has his hands full as it is.

The Muslim Brotherhood is similarly less than keen on hosting this movement. And, says Guy Bechor in YNet, they won't settle in Gaza because they fear it would make them too ready a target for an Israeli hit.

Bechor says that the "domestic" Hamas leadership in Gaza headed by Ismail Haniyeh is gaining ascendency within the organization now. And Mashaal is so frustrated that he's talking about leaving Hamas and starting a rival Muslim Brotherhood group, which means "a return to the Islamic track at the expense of Palestinian national identity."

Lastly, says Bechor, "Hamas won momentary global glory as result of the so-called blockade on Gaza. Yet now, when the siege is no longer in place with the border crossing to Egypt open to people and goods, how will the organization survive on the public relations front? This may be the worst problem faced by a group that lives off anti-Israel slogans and now finds itself crashing against the rocks of reality. "

See the full article here: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4181496,00.html

~~~~~~~~~~

A likely result of this enormous Hamas turmoil is that the idea of a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation will be more readily exposed for the myth that it is.

~~~~~~~~~~

We've looked before at the issue of the joint US-Israeli military exercises that were to take place here, but were cancelled, amid much speculation as to why and by which party. Even now I am seeing reports claiming that Israel cancelled, and that is what a representative of the Obama administration claimed when Gingrich chastised Obama for the cancellation.

Now I have on background, from a highly reliable source, this information:

"The U.S.-Israeli exercise was canceled because Obama is dealing secretly and intensively with Iran in an effort to stop a nuclear crisis and to ensure Teheran's cooperation for a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. The easiest and most effective way for Obama to show his sincerity to Teheran is to keep Israel at arm's length if not farther."

~~~~~~~~~~

I want to call an important article to your attention:

Caroline Glick's brilliant "Zionist Imperative," in which she speaks about the historical ambivalence of America Jews to Zionism (all emphasis added).

"The problem that anti-Zionism poses for American Jewry is that it forces them to pay a price for supporting Israel. This is problematic because Zionism has never been fully embraced by American Jewry. Since the dawn of modern Zionism, the cause of Jewish self-determination placed American Jewish leaders in an uncomfortable dilemma.

"Unlike every other Diaspora Jewish community, the American Jewish community has always perceived itself as a permanent community rather than an exilic community. American Jews have always viewed the United States as the new Promised Land.

"With the formation of the modern Zionist movement in the late 19th century, American Jews found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Clearly, the state of world Jewry was such that national self-determination had become an existential necessity for non-American Jews.

"But while supporting Jewish refugees and a scrappy little country was okay, support for the Zionist cause of Jewish national liberation involved an acceptance of the fact that Israel – not the US – is the Jewish homeland. Moreover, it involved accepting that there are Jewish interests that are independent of – if not necessarily in contradiction with – American interests. For instance, irrespective of the prevailing winds in Washington, and regardless of whether the US supports Israel or not, it is a Jewish interest that Israel exists, thrives and survives...

"Pro-Israel American Jews have historically tried to tie their support for Israel to larger, more universal themes, in order to extricate themselves from the need to admit that as Jews and supporters of Israel they have a right and a duty to support Jewish freedom even if it isn’t always pretty. Again, for Israel’s first several decades, it was about helping poor Jews and refugees. In recent years, the predominant defense has been that Israel deserves support because it is a democracy.

"Certainly, these are both reasonable reasons for supporting Israel. But neither support for Israel because it was poor nor support for Israel because it is free is a specifically Zionist reason for supporting Israel. You don’t have to be a Zionist to support poor Jewish refugees and you don’t have to be a Zionist to support democracy.

"You do have to be a Zionist however, to defend the Jews in Israel and throughout the world in a coherent manner when the predominant form of Jew-hatred is anti-Zionism.

"You have to be willing to accept and defend the right of the Jewish people to freedom and self-determination in our national homeland against those who deny that right. You have to be a Zionist to defend Israel’s right to survive and thrive even though it is no longer poor and its democratically elected government is not liked by the Obama administration.

"And you have to be a Zionist to realize that since Jewish survival is dependent on Jewish power, and anti-Zionists reject the right of Jews to have power, that anti-Zionists seek to bring about a situation where Jewish survival is imperiled...

"...To oppose Iran’s nuclear program effectively, American Jews are required to oppose these strongly supported US policies. And at some point, this may require them to announce they support Israel’s right to survive and thrive even if that paramount right conflicts with how the US government perceives US national interests.

"That is, it may require them to embrace Zionism unconditionally...

"We must hope that world Jewry will recognize today that the fate of the Jewish people in Israel and throughout the world is indivisible and rally to Israel’s side whatever the social cost of doing so. But even if they do not recognize this basic truth, the imperatives of Zionism, of the Jewish people, remain in place."

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=255334

~~~~~~~~~~

I end, most appropriately in light of the above, by repeating the core of yesterday's posting, which requested the assistance of readers in contacting members of Knesset. I know that many people of good heart and with the best of intentions read what I write, make a mental note to get to it, and then somehow never do. Too little time, too many distractions. And so, I am providing that information a second time, with my heartfelt thanks for your efforts.

~~~~~~~~~~

A very significant vote is coming up in the Knesset this week. The issues are complex and YOUR COOPERATION HERE IS EXCEEDINGLY IMPORTANT.

You've heard about this legislation from me previously: Proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi), it would forbid the dismantling of communities of more than 20 families in Judea and Samaria without properly filed documentation that the land was Arab-owned. This would negate the vague, unsubstantiated claims of land being "Arab" that are currently filed in court by Peace Now.

What is more, this legislation stipulates that if the documentation of Arab ownership is filed after a specified period of time (four years, as I understand it), the community still wouldn't be taken down and instead the Arab land owner would be provided with monetary compensation.

~~~~~~~~~~

Prime Minister Netanyahu -- at the behest of Minister Benny Begin, who is attempting to negotiate a "deal" with the residents of Migron and wants them to feel squeezed -- has secured a negative vote on this legislation in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. Nothing prevents the promoters of a piece of legislation from bringing it to the Knesset without the approval of the committee -- it is simply that without this endorsement it is less likely to pass in the Knesset.

An appeal has been filed -- requesting a re-vote in the committee -- by Minister of Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein (Likud) and Minister of Science Daniel Hershkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi) -- but there has been no response to this. There is reason to believe the original vote would overturned if there were a second vote.

~~~~~~~~~~

Now MK Orlev has decided to bring this proposed law before the Knesset -- possibly by Wednesday.

And here's where you have to pay attention to understand the situation and its serious implications:

Coalition discipline will not be invoked, so that members of the Knesset will be free to follow their conscience on this important matter rather than having to vote a party line.

HOWEVER, since the Ministerial Committee voted against the legislation, ministers are expected to also vote against it in the Knesset. They can, if they choose, vote for the legislation, but then, according to the rules, Netanyahu can fire them. He is not obligated to fire them, he is simply at liberty to do so.

Needless to say, Netanyahu is applying pressure, and making noises about firing those who do not toe the line.

~~~~~~~~~~

This has an unpleasant echo of Gush Katif, when then PM Sharon applied every sort of strong-arm technique possible to keep his ministers in line so they'd vote as he wished. We must not let this happen again. Sharon betrayed his mandate when he behaved this way, and Netanyahu is now playing matters in a similar fashion. I've cut him slack with regard to many issues. But I cut him none here.

~~~~~~~~~~

In previous posting, I asked you to write to the Likud ministers in support of Migron. Now I ask you to write again, to these ministers and those of Shas and Yisrael Beitenu as well:

Say that you understand that legislation that would save Migron and other communities in Judea and Samaria is about to come before the Knesset. It would release Israel from the strangle-hold of Peace Now and prevent Jewish communities from being destroyed.

Remind them that the mandate given to the coalition by the voters was nationalist and that they would be betraying this mandate if they voted against this legislation.

Tell them that, even more importantly, if they vote against it they would be taking a position that is not in the best interests of the State of Israel.

Let them know that you see it as imperative that they vote their conscience on this matter. It is not acceptable for them to place job security ahead of what is best for Israel. In any event there is no guarantee that the prime minister will fire any ministers, and less likely if many ministers stand together to do what is right.

Voters and those who support the parties are very tired of political game playing. The ministers must know that they are being watched and that support in the future will depend on their readiness to do the right thing now.

~~~~~~~~~~

Do NOT send a group message; the message to each minister should be separate. But there is no reason to be intimidated by the fact that there are several names on the list that follows.

There is a way to make it easy for yourself: Compose a message that says "Dear Minister," followed by text of that message. Copy that message and salutation. Then, in turn, click on each minister's e-mail address, paste in the greeting and message, and hit send.

LIKUD:
Minister of Improvement of Government Services Michael Eitan
meitan@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Environmental Protection Gilad Erdan
gerdan@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Welfare Moshe Kahlon
mcachlon@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz
yiskatz@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Culture Limor Livnat
llivnat@knesset.gov.il (a previous typo in this address has been corrected)

Minister Yosi Peled
ypeled@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Education Gideon Saar
gsaar@knesset.gov.il

Minister of the Development of the Negev Silvan Shalom
sshalom@knesset.gov.il

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz
ysteinitz@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon
myaalon@knesset.gov.il

SHAS:
Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai
eyishay@knesset.gov.il

Minister Meshulam Nahari
mnahari@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Religious Affairs Yakov Margi
ymargi@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Housing Ariel Atias
aatias@knesset.gov.il

YISRAEL BEITENU:
Minister of Tourism Stas Misezhnikov
smiseznikov@knesset.gov.il

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman
aliberman@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Immigrant Absorption Sofa Landver
slandver@knesset.gov.il

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon
dayalon@knesset.gov.il

~~~~~~~~~~

If Gush Katif infuriated you or pained you, if you want to be part of a democratic process that protects Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, if the idea of their having to turn over their land to Arabs distresses you, please! take the time to do this.

Numbers count a great deal. Send this to others who are likely to also respond.

Thank you. More will follow tomorrow.

~~~~~~~~~~

In closing, a note of clarification, very broadly, for those who are outside of Israel and perhaps confused by our system: Parties receive mandates (seats) in the Knesset according to the percentage of votes they secured in the previous election. If one party does not have sufficient seats (i.e., more than 60) to constitute a majority of the Knesset, then a coalition is formed; this always happens. Once the coalition is in place, there are ministerial positions allocated to the various parties in the coalition. With very rare exceptions, the ministers are chosen from the ranks of those within the parties who have been elected to the Knesset. Those who are ministers sit in the Cabinet and constitute the government, but they are still members of the Knesset.

~~~~~~~~~~

© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.

See my website at www.arlenefromisrael.info Contact Arlene at akushner@netvision.net.il

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Weinberg - Throwing good euros after bad

2012-01-30T18:00:00.011+02:00

David M. Weinberg..
Israel Hayom..
30 January '12..

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unearthed the nefarious dealings behind Watergate by following the advice of their mysterious source, nicknamed Deep Throat. “Follow the money,” counseled Deep Throat. And so they did – all the way up to President Richard Nixon in the White House.

So, too, with the Palestinian Authority. The money trail – which pays for stalemates, rejectionism, and diplomatic assault on Israel – leads directly from PA President Mahmoud Abbas to his central banker: the European Union.

Last week, the EU announced that it would to transfer another $70 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) – the largest single donation ever to UNRWA. EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton said that the donation “represents our ongoing commitment to the Palestine refugees.”

It is an old story. Ask yourself: Who has been the primary financier of the PA and all its so-called refugees?

Mostly, it has not been Israel – although in the days of Rabin and Peres, Israel sinned by propping up the PA with direct payments into a secret Tel Aviv bank account held by Yasser Arafat himself.

The Sharon government held back on some $1.5 billion in various taxes and customs duties collected by the Israel Finance Ministry on behalf of the PA. Then Finance Minister Silvan Shalom used the embargoed funds to cover PA debts owed to Israeli firms and organizations like the Israel Electric Company. Current Finance Minister Dr. Yuval Steinitz tried to do the same last year after the PA angled for unilateral recognition at the U.N., but the Cabinet released the funds under international pressure.

Who, then, has bankrolled the PA and UNRWA? The U.S. and Canada cut most of their funding to UNRWA years ago, when its ubiquitous corruption and unhelpful perpetuation of Palestinian victimhood became clear. They have restricted their funding of development programs in the PA to Western-administered projects that advance governmental and security-sector reform.

What about Abbas' Arab brothers? Nah. They never have substantially put their money where their collective mouth is. Even the biggest talker of all, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, preferred to transfer his “martyr rewards” directly to the families of suicide bombers, not though the PA budget.

The correct answer is – the European Union. The EU has been the PA’s bighearted sugar-daddy; Arafat and Abbas' bountiful and boundless papa-bear; the deepest honey-pot the Palestinians could ever hope for.

As Shareholder Number One in the PA, the EU has a lot riding on Abbas. So much so that EU leaders are finding it hard to accept that the PA has grossly overshot its credit.

In sum, the EU has poured well over $3 billion into propping up the PA since Oslo, aside from funds contributed separately by individual EU countries and in addition to support for the UNRWA. This includes everything from food and health services through training and equipment for the PA intelligence and police forces, and salaries for more than 50,000 PA bureaucrats.

In the world of development assistance, this is an enormous sum of money; the size of which no other Third World territory or country could ever dream of.

So, where are the fruits of this lofty largesse? Where are the new neighborhoods for Palestinian refugees, the new infrastructure projects, the successful industrial parks, the small business incubators and thriving educational institutions – all carefully monitored for quality and efficiency by EU inspectors?

More importantly, where is the diplomatic moderation and spirit of cooperation with Israel that all this money was supposed to generate? Remember: For more than two decades we have been told that Palestinian radicalism and rejectionism could be tempered by economic development ...

Consider: Brussels has bankrolled and mentored PA television since its inception. It even rebuilt PA-TV antenna towers after Israel toppled them during Operation Defensive Shield. This is the same television that broadcasts messages of Jihad against the Jews and praise for Palestinian suicide bombers.

Consider: The PA school system has enjoyed the investment of over $600 million in EU funds since 1994, including funds for the writing and production of the new, official PA textbooks. I do not need to tell you that these textbooks deny any ancient Jewish claim to Jerusalem and Israel; that murderer-martyrs are praised; and that Israel is not to be found on any maps in these glorious, EU-financed, educational tomes.

Consider: Under the UNWRA, which applies the term “refugee” to all descendants of Palestinian refugees (unlike any other refugee in the world), the number of so-called Palestinian “refugees” has swelled from 600,000 in 1948 to seven million today! And UNRWA’s task is to perpetuate their lives as second-class citizens in camps, not to integrate and settle them in host countries. For this, the UNRWA needs another $70 million from the EU, and counting.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Arab leaders from Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere sought to convince Western leaders to invest billions in the nascent “Islamic democracies.” Invest in us, do not fear us, they said. The unfortunate experience with the PA should serve as a warning and a caution. Unless Western support is rigorously conditioned on real democracy and human rights reforms, and unless it is closely controlled for hard results – it will be pouring good money down the drain; or worse: it will be bankrolling extremism and obstructionism.

Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1289

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Kuntzel - The Wannsee Legacy: Lessons for Genocide Prevention

2012-01-30T15:30:00.005+02:00

By Matthias Küntzel

Henry Jackson Society Event in the House of Commons, London, January 19, 2012

Let me please start with Fanny Englard, an active survivor of the Holocaust and a friend of mine. She grew up in Germany/Cologne and lives now south of Tel Aviv. Fanny wrote in a letter:

“As a twenty-year-old, on 8 May 1945 I was liberated from hell and tried to find my family, but without success. Eventually I had to accept that my father had lost his life in the Warsaw Ghetto, while my mother and ten-year-old brother had been poisoned in the gas chambers at Belzec along with my grandmother, aunts and cousins. Two brothers, aged 15 and 13, had been shot in Belarussia not far from Minsk and buried in shallow graves in 1942, but in 1943 the corpses had been dug up and burned – their ashes scattered to the four winds. In May 1947 I came to Israel and married in order to create a new family as a replacement for the murdered one that had fallen victim to Jew-hatred.”

I know the photos and the faces of Fanny’s murdered siblings and parents and I want to contrast her personal letter with the bare numbers and the monstrous language of the Wannsee-protocol which talks about “the complete clearing up of the problem” and continues: “this final solution of the European Jewish question concerns about 11 million Jews, distributed among the various countries.”[1]

However, the Final Solution was not limited to Europe.

In 1941, the 700.000 Jews of the Middle East attracted Hitler’s attention as well.[2] As Hitler envisaged it, after the assault on the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht would also occupy the Caucasus and so open the way to the Middle East. Then Iran, Iraq and Egypt would be conquered and the British Empire destroyed from the south. Pro-German movements would prepare for the German invasions of that countries. Part of this scenario was the killing of the Jews.

At the end of November 1941 – in the run-up to the Wannsee-Conference – Hitler received Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti and leader of the Palestinians. On this occasion Hitler stated that, after the defeat of the Soviet Union, “the hour of liberation” would arrive for the Arab world. “The German goal would then be the annihilation of the Jews … living in the Arab region.”[3] These were’t mere words.

By summer 1942 the Nazis had drawn up concrete plans to murder the Jews of the Yishuv. They expected their genocidal endeavor to be substantially assisted by Arab collaborators.

Therefore, the SS Einsatzkommando for Palestine, which was set up in Athens by the summer of 1942 in order to direct this genocide was staffed by only 17 Germans – waiting there for Rommel to clear the way to Palestine. And indeed, as Rommel’s Afrikakorps pushed eastwards during the summer of 1942, the Germans registered growing pro-nazi sentiment all across the Middle East.

“There is no reason to claim that the anti-Semitic potential of Lithuanian, Latvian or Ukrainian nationalists should have been stronger than that of Arabs expecting the German Wehrmacht”, emphasize the German historians Mallmann and Cüppers.[4]

Persia was a more difficult place. You may recall that the name Iran means “Country of Aryans”. Thus, a long-lasting controversy among German racist ideologues sprang up over whether Persian Jews were “racially” Persian and should therefore be categorised as “non-Semites” or even “Aryans”.

Adolf Eichmann brought this debate to an abrupt end on December 8, 1942. It is clear from Eichmann’s letter that he intended to show no mercy to the native Iranian Jews, who numbered around 60,000. “In the light of the above remarks”, he concludes his letter to the Foreign Office, “no grounds exist for recognising the equal status of the Jews with Iranians as recognised in Iran in the countries within Germany’s sphere of control.”[5]

His euphemistically formulated advice could lead to only one conclusion: as soon as Iran came under German control, the Jews of Iran too would be deported to death camps and murdered.

Let me summarize my first remark. The Wannsee protocol dealt with the „European Jewish question“. Adolf Hitler, however, wanted to kill the Jews of the Middle East as well. Pro-German Muslims were designated to do the dirty work. But there was a problem which brings me to my second point.

It was understood that German-style antisemitism would have little resonance in the Middle East.

“The level of education of the broad masses is not advanced enough for the understanding of the race theory”, complained a leading German Nazis in Egypt in 1933. “An understanding of the Jewish threat has not yet been awakened here.”[6] Later, the German embassy in Tehran submitted the same complaint to Berlin. “The broad masses lack a feeling for the race idea”, explained a member of the embassy in January 1942. Thus, he recommended to lay “all the emphasis on the religious motif in our propaganda in the Islamic world. This is the only way to win over the Orientals.”[7]

But how exactly could Nazi Germany of all countries conduct a religious propaganda campaign? The German ambassador at Tehran, Erwin Ettel had an idea.

“The way to directly connect up with Shiite ideas is through the treatment of the Jewish question, which the Muslim perceives in religious terms and which, precisely for this reason, makes him susceptible to National Socialism on religious grounds”, Ettel recommended to the German Foreign Office. “A way to foster this development would be to highlight Muhammad’s struggle against the Jews in the old days and that of the Führer in modern times. By, additionally, identifying the British and the Jews, an exceptionally effective anti-English propaganda campaign can be conducted among the Shiite people.”[8]

The Nazi’s anti-Jewish incitement within the Islamic world built on the traditional, Islamically-prescribed exclusion of the Jews. It was radicalised by Nazi propaganda, the crucial medium for which was a short-wave radio channel that, since 1939, broadcast Goebbels’ antisemitism from Germany to the Middle East.

This radio channel disseminated the Nazi ideology in a multitude of languages to many parts of the world. The Orient Department, with 80 employees, was its largest foreign-language department, catering to Arabs, Turks, Persians and Indians.

We know from many contemporary reports that, at a time when people mainly listened to the radio in town squares or in bazaars and coffee houses, the Nazi broadcast was very popular. “Even if we do broadcast in Persian”, wrote Reader Bullard, the British Ambassador in Tehran, in 1940, “we cannot hope to rival the Germans in interest, as their more violent, abusive style, with exaggerated claims … appeals to the Persian public.”[9]

Let me summarize my second point: Radio programs in Muslim languages – broadcast between 1939 and 1945 several times a day – served not only the purpose of preparing the arrival of the German army but also of inciting the hatred of Jews. One example: In July 1942, on the eve of Rommels expected invasion of Cairo – only six month after the Wannsee conference – the Axis radio addressed the Egyptian people as follows: “Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores, annihilate these base supporters of British imperialism. Your sole hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they annihilate you.”[10] This brings me to my last remark.

The Nazi radio ceased operation in April 1945. But it was only after that date that its frequencies of hate really began to reverberate in the Arab world. I cannot go into details today but if you study this issue you will find a striking similarity between the Jew-hatred of the Nazis’ Arab propaganda and the Jew-hatred of Islamists today.

At the end of 1941, Hans Frank, a leading Nazi official, declared : “We must annihilate the Jews wherever we meet them and whenever it is at all possible.”[11] In 1944, the Mufti of Jerusalem repeated this message via the Nazi transmitter: „Kill the Jews whereever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.”[12] In 1946, after the war, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, praised the Mufti as follows: „O Amin! What a great, stubborn, terrific, wonderful man you are! …Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Hussaini will continue the struggle.”[13] My last quote is from 2009: “Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”[14] This appeal stems from a former friend of a former mayor of this city –Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood today.

It was the Wannsee Conference which “counted” the Jews’ number in order “to kill them, down to the very last one”, indeed.

This conference decided on a crime which was and will remain unparalleled. The echo of Wannsee, however, still exists and also the willingness to propagate and to prepare for a new Holocaust.

Our remembrance of the Wannsee Conference would lose much of its value if it did not also serve to sharpen our attention with regards to the contemporary threats to the Jews and the Jewish State of Israel. I would therefore like to end my statement with Fanny Englard’s words:

“Here in Israel, many Holocaust survivors created new families to replace those that were murdered. However, we did not create these new families in order to sacrifice them in the wars repeatedly inflicted on us by the Jew-hatred of the Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler’s Islamist heirs… This Jew-hatred compels us to engage in a fight for life; this is not a war to kill others, but a fight for life to secure a safe future for the new families. Did we survive and found a new family in order to sacrifice them to the same Jew-hatred again?”

Link: http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/the-wannsee-legacy-lessons-for-genocide-prevention

—————
[1] Protocol of the Wannsee conference, p. 5 and 10.

[2] Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, New Haven (Yale University Press) p.7.

[3] Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten, Darmstadt (Wissenschasftliche Buchgesellschaft) 2007, p. 61.

[4] Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina, Darmstadt (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft) 2006, p. 164.

[5] Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Eichmann an das Auswärtige Amt, Betrifft: Juden iranischer Staatsangehörigkeit, Berlin, den 8. Dezember 1942, R 99422, Inland II A-B Juden im Iran 41-44.

[6] Gudrin Krämer, Minderheit, Millet, Nation? Die Juden in Ägypten 1914-1952, Wiesbaden (Verlag Otto Harrassowitz) 1982, p. 278.

[7] Quoted in: Matthias Küntzel, Die Deutschen und der Iran. Geschichte und Gegenwart einer verhängnisvollen Freundschaft [Germany and Iran. Past and Present of a Fateful Friendship], Berlin (wjs-Verlag) 2009, p. 54.

[8] Matthias Küntzel, op.cit., p. 54.

[9] Reader Bullard, Letters from Tehran, London/New York 1991, p. 28.

[10] Jeffrey Herf, op. cit., p. 126.

[11] Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945, Stuttgart (Deutsche Verlagsanstalt), p. 652,

[12] Jeffrey Herf, op. cit., p. 213.

[13] Herf, op. cit., p. 244.

[14] Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, New York (Melville House) 2010, p. 92.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Roth - Reality bites and the Palestinian Arab future is not what it used to be

2012-01-30T13:00:00.050+02:00

The double-headed world of Palestinian
Arab politics has gotten one-head
more complicated, and that's just
the start [Image source]

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
27 January '12..

We wrote recently about the triumphant tour of Middle East capitals by the "prime minister" of the Hamas terrorist regime, Ismail Haniyeh. His speeches in Ankara and such Arab capitals as Tunis, Cairo and Khartoum were filled with threats of the destruction to shortly rain down on Israel's head and promised "difficult days" for Israel.

"We are saying to the Zionist enemies that times have changed and that the time of the Arab Spring, the time of the revolution, of dignity and of pride has arrived."

But what's actually happening to Hamas, though, is more interesting than their bombastic war talk. Because inside Hamas, and in its immediate surroundings, things have changed, are changing and are certain to lead to even larger changes. Gay Bechor, an Israeli political commentator, lays some of this out in a Ynet op ed article today entitled "Hamas in deep trouble: Op-ed: Despite pompous declarations, terror group faces problems on multiple fronts "

Bechor points out that Haniyeh has lately been rousing the crowds with pretentious calls for the establishment of a Palestinian jihadist army of liberation, but reality is imposing some real challenges on him and his organization.

For instance, the mutually-productive alliance of terrorists between Sunni Moslem Hamas and non-Arab, non-Sunni, Shi'ite Iran has come to an end, at least for now. In mid 2011, Iran ordered the Hamas leadership to throw its extremely-well-armed support behind the flailing, blood-drenched Syrian despot Bashar al Assad. But this was more than Hamas was willing or able to do. Consequently, Bechor says,

"the flow of money used by Hamas to pay some 50,000 officials and troops in Gaza has ended. So where will Hamas get money? This is why the organization is engaged in bitter disputes with the Palestinian Authority and Arab League over funds supposedly owed to the group. Hamas was also forced to leave the capital of its external leadership in Damascus. Where will it go now? There were hopes that Jordan will take in Hamas’ headquarters, until the group’s leadership was stunned last week to hear that Jordan is imposing limitations. Jordan’s prime minister made it clear that the country will host senior group figures and their families as “individuals,” banning them from any political activity. Hence, the Jordan option is no longer viable in furious Hamas’ view.

Bechor makes an interesting observation about the Egyptian option:

With the Muslim Brotherhood aiming to portray itself as pragmatic and realistic in the eyes of the world, moving the headquarters of a terror group to Cairo would be an embarrassment. Haniyeh himself visited Egypt and spoke at length about Israel’s demise, yet Brotherhood representatives kept silent, and this silence should worry him. The Muslim Brotherhood now needs to care not for 50,000 people, but rather, for 88 million.

Haniyeh's victory tour was said to be predicated on the changes wrought by the mis-named Arab Spring and the conviction that newly empowered Islamic political parties would embrace Hamas. Not so much, as it turns out. Says Bechor:

We certainly saw lip service, but establishing a Jihad army against Israel? Every Arab state is currently contending with deep domestic problems; this existential trouble dwarfs Hamas’ problems.

Bechor's article also deals with the increasingly complex battle for control and influence within the world of the fractious Palestinian Arabs. The stop-start-stop-again "reconciliation" with Fatah (which Haniyeh opposes). The stop-start-stop-again road to Palestinian elections. And, most troublesome for them, the way in which

the double-headed Palestinian politics has now become tripled-headed: The domestic Hamas, external Hamas and Abbas. Each leadership has its own political agenda and its own senior figures.

Abbas and Dahlan: "The PA president last week requested
three different countries to freeze fixed and liquid assets belonging
to former Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan amid
ongoing corruption charges" [Source]. Dahlan meanwhile has been
making corruption charges of his own against Abbas and family.

And that's before we start to factor the newest edition of the Palestinian Arab national past-time - vicious infighting - into the equation. A well-documented Jonathan Schanzer article, "When Palestinian Politics Get Personal" in latest Weekly Standard lays out the contours of the Mahmoud Abbas witch-hunt to bring down Mohammad Dahlan:

It underscores the fact that Abbas has consolidated power, and that he will abide no challenges. Abbas’s whims bode poorly for the Palestinian Authority, which may now expend more energy settling scores than resolving the long-standing conflict with Israel.

The whole Weekly Standard article is worth reading for the sharp light it shines on the sea of money the Palestinian Arab leadership has looted from international aid agencies and from its own subjects over the past three decades.

Guy Bechor wraps up his analysis with a glance at the fleeting moment in the sun achieved by the Gazan Palestinian Arabs during the blockade-busting glory days of the last two years.

Now, when the siege is no longer in place [he notes] with the border crossing to Egypt open to people and goods, how will the organization survive on the public relations front? This may be the worst problem faced by a group that lives off anti-Israel slogans and now finds itself crashing against the rocks of reality.

Rocks of reality? Now there's an image to have in mind when the next choreographed, media-coordinated rock-throwing attack on Israelis appears in your newspaper or evening TV.

Link:http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2012/01/27-jan-12-reality-bites-and-palestinian.html

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Marquadt-Bigman - The progressive quest for comparative consolations

2012-01-30T10:00:00.000+02:00

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
30 January '12..

The folks who expected that the “Arab Spring” would lead to a Tweeples-government in Egypt are understandably disappointed by the landslide victory of the Muslim Brothers and the Salafists.

But progressives were quick to find a formula that offers comparative consolation: the basic recipe is to simply claim that Egypt’s Islamists are really no worse – and maybe even better!!! – than disagreeable political figures or forces in your own country.

Following this recipe, Lisa Goldman, writing for the Israeli left-wing blog +972, claims:

citizens of the democratic state of Israel […] freely elected, as the largest faction in its governing coalition after the Likud, the quasi-fascist Yisrael Beitenu party. […] In our Knesset, we also have Kahanists and a large contingent from Shas, which is quite similar to the [Salafist] Nour party.

Unsurprisingly, Goldman’s comment was promptly quoted by The Arabist, where Issandr El Amrani added that “Israelis might mind their own business about Egypt and other post-uprising countries” because “they won’t be doing much business with them at all for some time to come.” Since the post was entitled “Israel and the new Egypt”, I can’t resist the temptation to take Amrani’s comment as a validation of the point I made when I wrote some two months ago that it would be the “Same old story in the new Middle East” because “when it comes to anti-Western and ‘anti-Zionist’ sentiments, the new rulers of the Middle East will be at least as eager as their predecessors to put them to demagogic use.” And as Amrani’s comment illustrates, even supposed Arab liberals seem happy to hold on to the “anti-Zionism” that provided Arab dictators for decades with a useful tool to distract the masses.

But naturally, Goldman was very pleased to be quoted by The Arabist, and tweeted:

.arabist linked to my +972 piece, ‘Egypt’s election results are none of Israel’s business.’ I can die happy now. http://tinyurl.com/6u58lzs

Another example of the quest for comparative consolations was provided by “Informed Comment” blogger and Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole. Under the promising headline “South Carolina & Gingrich, Egypt & the Muslim Brotherhood,” Cole argued that the media unfairly emphasized the religious motivations of Egyptian voters, while downplaying similar sentiments when it came to American voters [emphasis Cole’s]:

The result of this difference in approach is that it is implicitly deemed illegitimate for Egyptians to be religious or vote for a religious party. But it is legitimate for South Carolinians to be religious, to vote on a religious basis, to seek to impose their religious laws on all Americans.

But what if Egyptians voted for the religious parties because they saw them as uncorrupt and despite their religious platforms, not because of them? [...]

It is therefore probable that religious motivations actually played a larger role in the primary in South Carolina than in the election in Egypt! Likewise, an MB leader like Essam El-Erian is the voice of reason compared to Gingrich and is no worse in his own way than Gingrich’s sugar daddy, Sheldon Adelson.

Since Cole claims to be an expert on the Middle East and the Muslim world, it seems fair to assume that he knows full well that there is plenty of reason to conclude that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is a totalitarian movement espousing vile Jew-hatred and that the MB is likely to pursue a theocratic domestic policy and a confrontational foreign policy.

But if Professor Cole thinks it makes for “Informed Comment” to equate the MB with Newt Gingrich, I can only conclude that I have a different idea of informed comment…

In their rather desperate quest for comparative consolations, progressives like Cole and Goldman also ignore the importance of democratic institutions and a well-developed civil society. To simply dismiss America’s historical record as a democracy and pretend that the consequences of a landslide victory for religious parties in Egypt are somehow comparable to a Gingrich victory in the Republican primaries in South Carolina is utterly bizarre. Perhaps Professor Cole should read Professor Mead’s truly informed comment on the left’s enduring obsession with the “Christianist” threat?

It is similarly ridiculous to dismiss Israel’s record as a democracy, because even if Israel’s democracy may not be perfect, it presents truly a record: Israel’s democracy was established when the country had to fight for its very survival, and Israel’s democracy was maintained in the most challenging circumstances, which included not only hostile neighbors threatening war, but also the need to absorb large numbers of destitute refugees.

The Canadian-born Lisa Goldman, who found life in Israel so “unbearable” that she returned to Canada after 14 years here, may feel that Yisrael Beitenu – which is strongly dominated by immigrants from the former Soviet Union – is best described as “quasi-fascist”, and that Shas – traditionally associated with religious Mizrahi and Sephardi voters – is “quite similar to the [Salafist] Nour party,” but democracy is a process, and in a country like Israel, where waves of immigration have brought together groups with very different outlooks, it is not necessarily a simple process. Perhaps Lisa Goldman would have found life in Israel less “unbearable” if the country was still dominated by left-wing Ashkenazi elites that follow the Schocken line – but then it would be a less vibrant democracy.

And while Goldman may be happy that her scathing view of Israel’s democracy was quoted by The Arabist, it has always been real easy to get scathing views of Israel published in the Arab press – and this is just one of the things that the Arab Spring hasn’t changed.

Link: http://warped-mirror.com/2012/01/30/the-progressive-quest-for-comparative-consolations/

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Tobin - Obama’s ’67 Borders Mistake Haunts Talks

2012-01-30T05:48:00.000+02:00

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
29 January '12..

The Palestinian reaction to Israel’s position about West Bank settlement blocs once again demonstrates that rather seeking an agreement that will lead to a Palestinian state, what they are doing is looking for an excuse to avoid ever having to sign a peace deal. Even worse, it is evidence that President Obama’s misguided intervention into the question of future borders last May is still having a harmful effect on the effort to revive negotiations.

The Israeli position in the discussions taking place in Jordan is they want the major settlement blocs (which comprise a tiny portion of the West Bank’s territory but also the vast majority of the more than 250,000 Jews who live there) to be incorporated into Israel as part of a deal. But rather than negotiate this point, the Palestinians have rejected it out of hand and said they won’t talk if the Israelis stick to their position. Israel’s position is compatible even with President Obama’s stand on the issue which allows for territorial swaps that would enable Israel to retain these blocs. But even though the president’s Jewish defenders claim his May 2011 speech merely restated existing policies, the Palestinian interpretation seems to illustrate how damaging his mention of the 1967 lines has been.

By stating that a Middle East peace deal should be negotiated on the basis of the 1967 lines, Obama strengthened the Palestinians’ belief that their demands for a complete Israeli retreat and the eviction of every Jew living in the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem had America’s tacit backing. Though Obama quickly followed up with a reassurance that he backed the idea of territorial swaps that would allow Israel to try to keep some settlements, the Palestinians viewed that as inconsequential, as the president had buttressed their position that a return to the status quo of June 4, 1967 was an imperative.

The Palestinians approach the West Bank–an area to which no sovereign nation had a claim that the world recognized in 1967–as theirs without any need to negotiate. Indeed, they are even incredulous at the notion that Israel has any claim or rights. Israel’s position is the West Bank is disputed territory, not Palestinian. By speaking of 1967 as the starting point, Obama tacitly endorsed the Palestinian position that the West Bank was “stolen” from them, even though they never owned it in the first place.

Given the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement and the impending changes in Palestinian politics that this will cause, there is no reason to believe the PA will ever agree to any peace deal that recognizes the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. But what Israel is doing here is explicitly demonstrating that even the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, derided by the American left for its supposed opposition to peace, is once again offering the Palestinians a state in most of the West Bank and Gaza. But rather than pursuing this opportunity and seeking to use the certain support of the United States and the European Union to better their negotiating position, the Palestinian Authority is merely looking a for a way out of the talks.

The irony is that although the Obama administration has always wanted to further peace talks, its every effort to achieve that goal has made it more difficult. Just as the president’s unprecedented demands for an Israeli building freeze even in Jerusalem made it impossible for the Palestinians to negotiate for anything less, so, too has Obama’s borders blunder given the PA an excuse to avoid talking about creating a viable border between Israel and a putative Palestinian state.

Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/29/obama-67-borders-palestinians-israel/

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Meet Oren Almog: Blind Terror Victim Volunteers to the IDF

2012-01-30T04:03:00.037+02:00

idfblog.com..
29 January '12..

Every soldier of the IDF has a unique background and story, yet some soldiers have a truly astonishing tale to tell. Meet Oren Almog:

“[It is] true that I suffer from blindness and have scars, but I decided that I’m still

like everyone and so I enlisted.”

Credit: Yediot Ahronot

Oren lost five members of his family as well his eyesight in the 2003 Maxim Restaurant suicide bombing in Haifa, where 21 people were killed and 51 were wounded. Oren quickly became the face of the second intifada, and despite losing his eyesight at a very young age, he insisted over the years on being treated just like his friends.

Three days ago, nine years after the atrocity, Oren walked up to the ceremonial stage unassisted by either a walking cane or a seeing-eye dog, and swore an oath to the IDF to the applause and the tears of everyone in attendance.

Pvt. Oren Almog at his swearing-in ceremony on January 26th

Credit: HOTחדש

“As someone who was hit pretty hard by terrorism I am proud to serve an organization [the IDF] that aims to protect the security of Israel, to prevent terrorism, and to protect its residents,” he said later with a smile. Oren volunteered to the army as he was not conscripted due to his handicap; however, he has nevertheless been accepted into an undisclosed intelligence unit.

“I want my father and grandfather to be proud of me,” he said. “I was raised by them to serve, if I had not enlisted I would feel a very big missed opportunity. I am proud that I’ve decided to undertake this trying task, and contribute back to the state.”

Link: http://www.idfblog.com/2012/01/29/lost-eyesight-ability-achieve-dream/

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Fresnozionism - ‘Palestine’ adores vicious murderers

2012-01-30T00:30:00.000+02:00

The murdered Fogel family:
Ruth, Udi, Yoav (11), Elad (4),
Hadas (4 mo.).

Fresnozionism.org..
29 January '12..

The absolute vileness of the “Palestinian movement” is hard for those of us who grew up in civilized societies like the US and Israel to comprehend. As a result, many of us may be prepared to listen when they say that it is about human rights or justice.

But every once in awhile we get a window into what’s really behind it.

Even Israeli police and security personnel, who have seen some terrible things, were shocked last year by the sadistic murder of five members of the Fogel family including a 4-month-old baby whose throat was cut, committed by two Palestinian Arab teenagers, Amjad and Hakim Awad, cousins from the village of Awarta.

Captured after an intensive manhunt, the Awads were both convicted and given multiple life sentences. There was even consideration of applying the death penalty, something not done in Israel since Eichmann was hanged in 1962. Unfortunately, the court decided against it.

One might expect that the official Palestinian reaction — after all, they are preparing to petition the UN for statehood again — would have been something like “we condemn violent extremism, although we understand their frustration, etc.”

But they are past pretending even that much.The official reaction is that the butchers are heroes!

Watch the following video, from official Palestinian TV, courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch:

PA TV host: “We have a call from the family of prisoner Hakim Awad.”

Mother of Hakim Awad: “I thank you for connecting me with my son, because I and all of the family are prevented for security reasons [from visiting him].

Host: “Go ahead, sister, we can convey your voice.”

Mother of Hakim Awad: “My greetings to dear Hakim, the apple of my eye, from the village of Awarta, 17 years old, who carried out the operation in Itamar [i.e., killing of 5 Fogel family members], sentenced to 5 life sentences and another 5 years, in prison.”

Aunt of Hakim Awad: “I’m the sister of prisoner Hassan Awad and of Salah Awad; [I am] Um Habib, from the village of Awarta. My warm greetings to all the great heroic prisoners, to my brother Hassan Awad, head of the village council; to my brother Salah Awad, the heroic prisoner journalist; to the heroic, resolute prisoner, the lion, Yazid Awad, my nephew; and to my nephew Hakim Awad, the hero, the legend.”

Host:“We [PA TV], for our part, also convey our greetings to them.”

Aunt of Hakim Awad: “I dedicate this song to Hassan Awad, Yazid Awad, Hakim Awad, and Salah Awad, in prison:

‘My brother, in solitary confinement, your voice calls to me
You dare not throw down the rifle
That is what the homeland asked of me
In your eyes, we are all self-sacrificing fighters.
I convey greetings to the sound of the bullets of Ahmad Sa’adat and Hakim Awad.’”

Host: “Thank you for being with us, the family of prisoners Hassan and Salah Awad of Awarta.”
– (PA TV, Jan. 19 and 21, 2012)

This is nothing new. According to the Palestinian ethos, murdering Jewish civilians, including (especially) children, is not only legitimate, but praiseworthy.

Now I know that if any Palestinian sympathizers are reading this, right now they will be saying “well, didn’t the IDF murder children in Gaza?”

Actually, no. Pro-Arab propaganda often takes the form of inverting reality, accusing Israel of behaving like Nazis, or (more to the point) Arab terrorists. The IDF’s operation in Gaza in 2008-9, a response to the thousands of rockets that had been bombarding Israeli towns since 2002, resulted in a higher ratio of combatant to noncombatant casualties (about 3 to 1) than any instance of urban warfare in recent times (where the ratio is more like 9 to 1). This is despite the fact that Hamas deliberately operated from civilian areas in order to use the population as a shield.

On the other hand, we have Palestinian Arab ‘military’ actions like these:

The Ma’alot massacre, in which 25 Israelis were killed including 22 children, the Bus of Blood (35 dead, 13 children), the attack on the nursery at Kibbutz Misgav Am (3 dead, 2 children), the Dolphinarium bombing (21 teens dead), the Sbarro Pizza bombing (15 dead, 5 children), the shooting at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva (8 dead, 7 teens), the vicious butchering of the Fogel family (5 dead, 3 children), the antitank rocket attack on a yellow school bus (1 child) — these are just a few of a long, long list.

One of the scandals of the the conflict is that the media have helped the Arabs get away with portraying it as a dignified struggle for self-determination, when it is better described as one to eliminate the Jewish presence from the region, carried out primarily by terrorism against civilians — an attempt to make living in Israel so painful that Jews will simply give up — and only secondarily by conventional war and diplomacy.

Don’t expect to see the details of the Palestinian admiration for murderers in the NY Times, for example.

Link: http://fresnozionism.org/2012/01/palestine-adores-vicious-murderers/

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Navon - The EU is an Obstacle to Peace

2012-01-29T22:56:00.010+02:00

Emmanuel Navon..
For the Sake of Zion..
29 January '12..

The claim that Israeli “settlements” constitute “an obstacle to peace” has become a self-evident European dogma. The truth, of course, is that there was no peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors when none of those “settlements” existed (between 1949 and 1967); that the Palestinian leadership rejected twice Israel’s offer to dismantle most of its settlements (by Ehud Barak in July 2000 and by Ehud Olmert in September 2008); and that when Israel unilaterally dismantled all its settlements in Gaza in 2005, it was “rewarded” by thousands of rockets.

Rather than settlements, one of the major obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the so-called “right of return.” By this euphemism, the Palestinians want to flood Israel with about 7 million immigrants who are the descendants, or alleged descendants, of the 600,000 Arabs who left their homes during Israel’s War of Independence. This would turn Israel into a bi-national state with an Arab majority. Except for a minority of post and anti-Zionist Israelis, even the most dovish members of the Israeli Left consider the “right of return” a non-starter.

While the Zionist Left generally pooh-poohs the “right of return” as a mere rhetorical tool in which the Palestinians themselves don’t actually believe, the fact is that the Palestinian refusal to give in on that issue is what caused the rejection of Barak and Olmert’s peace proposals. Moreover, neither Arafat nor Abbas ever tried to educate their people into admitting that the “right of return” is unrealistic; on the contrary: both leaders have made the “right of return” a central tenet of Palestinian nationalism and an issue whose abandonment is an act of high treason.

The fantasy of the “right of return” is kept alive and indeed nurtured by UNWRA, the United Nations Agency created in 1949 to handle the issue of Palestinian refugees. There are two main reasons why UNWRA is perpetuates and even aggravates the “Palestinian refugee problem.” First, the mandate of UNWRA (as opposed to the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR) is not to integrate refugees into their host countries but to support them and to subsidize their lives as second-class citizens in camps. Second, UNWRA applies the definition of “refugees” to the descendants of the refugees, while UNHCR limits this definition to the refugees themselves. Hence has the world’s number of refugees decreased from 60 million in 1947 to 17 million today, while the number of “Palestinian refugees” has increased from 600,000 in 1948 to 7 million today.

UNWRA is thus a major obstacle to peace. Had UNHCR been in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNHCR handles all the world refugees except Palestinian refugees), the issue would have been solved a while ago. First, were Palestinian refugees defined as such according to UNHCR criteria, about 100,000 Palestinian refugees would still be around today, most of them elderly. Second, UNWRA collaborates with the discriminatory policies of countries such as Lebanon and Jordan by subsidizing the confinement of Palestinian refugees in camps instead of integrating them into countries with which they have no language, ethnic, and religious differences.

Dismantling UNWRA and transferring the fate of the remaining actual Palestinian refugees to UNHCR would thus remove a major obstacle to peace.

The EU has just decided to do the very opposite by granting UNWRA a €72 million donation. This decision is not only an affront to the Palestinian refugees themselves, since it contributes to the perpetuation of their status of segregated and pauperized minorities among their Arab brothers. It is also an affront to the cause of peace. The EU, in effect, has just signed a big check that will fund a major obstacle to peace.

While the EU did somewhat realize the Kantian vision of democratic peace within its borders (although with a little help from the United States, whose army protected Europe from the Soviet Union during the Cold War), Europe’s contribution to peace outside of the Old Continent’s borders has been dismal. From Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia, the EU has been powerless at best and part of the problem at worst. The EU (formerly EEC) promoted the PLO in the 1970s and did not welcome the Camp David Agreements of 1979. Although the Oslo Agreements were technically not made in the EU (Norway is not a EU member), the European recipe for peace in the Middle East has failed miserably and tragically.

The EU’s recent decision to fund UNWRA belongs to a long history of counter-productive efforts. But, mostly, it confirms the fact that the EU is an obstacle to peace in the Middle-East.

Link: http://navonsblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/eu-is-obstacle-to-peace.html

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Kushner - From Israel: Pushing Back, Pushing Forward

2012-01-29T20:30:00.006+02:00

Arlene Kushner..
29 January '12..

There's a good deal happening, and much to respond to. Please read this through and act. I like to think of my readers as also actors in the important fights we are fighting -- against some things, for others. Your assistance does make a difference.

~~~~~~~~~~

I begin with a link to my latest article on Front Page Magazine, "Answering Obama's Israel Lies."

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/27/answering-obamas-israel-lies/

It exposes the distortions and half-truths that have been put out in a campaign video purporting to show what a good friend to Israel Obama is. Please, circulate broadly.

Here's the link to the original video, in case you haven't seen it. It's making the rounds big time and must be responded to in a serious fashion, for it's so easy to be taken in if you don't know the facts. When you DO know the facts, the response to this is some combination of rage and deep disgust.

(My thanks to Debbie B.)

~~~~~~~~~~

A very significant vote is coming up in the Knesset this week. The issues are complex and YOUR COOPERATION HERE IS EXCEEDINGLY IMPORTANT.

You've heard about this legislation from me previously: Proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi), it would forbid the dismantling of communities of more than 20 families in Judea and Samaria without properly filed documentation that the land was Arab-owned. This would negate the vague, unsubstantiated claims of land being "Arab" that are currently filed in court by Peace Now.

What is more, this legislation stipulates that if the documentation of Arab ownership is filed after a specified period of time (four years, as I understand it), the community still wouldn't be taken down and instead the Arab land owner would be provided with monetary compensation.

~~~~~~~~~~

Prime Minister Netanyahu -- at the behest of Minister Benny Begin, who is attempting to negotiate a "deal" with the residents of Migron and wants them to feel squeezed -- has secured a negative vote on this legislation in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. Nothing prevents the promoters of a piece of legislation from bringing it to the Knesset without the approval of the committee -- it is simply that without this endorsement it is less likely to pass in the Knesset.

An appeal has been filed -- requesting a re-vote in the committee -- by Minister of Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein (Likud) and Minister of Science Daniel Hershkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi) -- but there has been no response to this. There is reason to believe the original vote would overturned if there were a second vote.

~~~~~~~~~~

Now MK Oren has decided to bring this proposed law before the Knesset -- possibly by Wednesday.

And here's where you have to pay attention to understand the situation and its serious implications:

Coalition discipline will not be invoked, so that members of the Knesset will be free to follow their conscience on this important matter rather than having to vote a party line.

HOWEVER, since the Ministerial Committee voted against the legislation, ministers are expected to also vote against it in the Knesset. They can, if they choose, vote for the legislation, but then, according to the rules, Netanyahu can fire them. He is not obligated to fire them, he is simply at liberty to do so.

Needless to say, Netanyahu is applying pressure, and making noises about firing those who do not toe the line.

~~~~~~~~~~

This has an unpleasant echo of Gush Katif, when then PM Sharon applied every sort of strong-arm technique possible to keep his ministers in line so they'd vote as he wished. We cannot let this happen again. Sharon betrayed his mandate when he behaved this way, and Netanyahu is now playing matters in a similar fashion. I've cut him slack with regard to many issues. But I cut him none here.

~~~~~~~~~~

In my last posting, I asked you to write to the Likud ministers in support of Migron. Now I ask you to write again, to these ministers and those of Shas and Yisrael Beitenu as well:

Say that you understand that legislation that would save Migron and other communities in Judea and Samaria is about to come before the Knesset. It would release Israel from the strangle-hold of Peace Now and prevent Jewish communities from being destroyed.

Remind them that the mandate given to the coalition by the voters was nationalist and that they would be betraying this mandate if they voted against this legislation.

Tell them that, even more importantly, if they vote against it they would be taking a position that is not in the best interests of the State of Israel.

Let them know that you see it as imperative that they vote their conscience on this matter. It is not acceptable for them to place job security ahead of what is best for Israel. In any event there is no guarantee that the prime minister will fire any ministers, and less likely if many ministers stand together to do what is right.

Voters and those who support the parties are very tired of political game playing. The ministers must know that they are being watched and that support in the future will depend on their readiness to do the right thing now.

~~~~~~~~~~

Do NOT send a group message; the message to each minister should be separate. But there is no reason to be intimidated by the fact that there are several names on the list that follows.

There is a way to make it easy for yourself: Compose a message that says "Dear Minister," followed by text of that message. Copy that message and salutation. Then, in turn, click on each minister's e-mail address, paste in the greeting and message, and hit send.

LIKUD:
Minister of Improvement of Government Services Michael Eitan
meitan@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Environmental Protection Gilad Erdan
gerdan@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Welfare Moshe Kahlon
mcachlon@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz
yiskatz@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Culture Limor Livnat
llivnat@knesset.gov.il (a previous typo in this address has been corrected)

Minister Yosi Peled
ypeled@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Education Gideon Saar
gsaar@knesset.gov.il

Minister of the Development of the Negev Silvan Shalom
sshalom@knesset.gov.il

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz
ysteinitz@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon
myaalon@knesset.gov.il

SHAS:
Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai
eyishay@knesset.gov.il

Minister Meshulam Nahari
mnahari@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Religious Affairs Yakov Margi
ymargi@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Housing Ariel Atias
aatias@knesset.gov.il

YISRAEL BEITENU:
Minister of Tourism Stas Misezhnikov
smiseznikov@knesset.gov.il
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman
aliberman@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Immigrant Absorption Sofa Landver
slandver@knesset.gov.il

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon
dayalon@knesset.gov.il

~~~~~~~~~~

If Gush Katif infuriated you or pained you, if you want to be part of a democratic process that protects Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, if the idea of their having to turn over their land to Arabs distresses you, please! take the time to do this.

Numbers count a great deal. Send this to others who are likely to also respond.

Thank you. More will follow tomorrow.

~~~~~~~~~~

In closing, a note of clarification, very broadly, for those who are outside of Israel and perhaps confused by our system: Parties receive mandates (seats) in the Knesset according to the percentage of votes they secured in the previous election. If one party does not have sufficient seats (i.e., more than 60) to constitute a majority of the Knesset, then a coalition is formed; this always happens. Once the coalition is in place, there are ministerial positions allocated to the various parties in the coalition. With very rare exceptions, the ministers are chosen from the ranks of those within the parties who have been elected to the Knesset. Those who are ministers sit in the Cabinet and constitute the government, but they are still members of the Knesset.

~~~~~~~~~~

© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.

See my website at www.arlenefromisrael.info Contact Arlene at akushner@netvision.net.il

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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CAMERA - NPR Lament: Palestinians Watching Sesame Street Reruns

2012-01-29T18:00:00.026+02:00

Steven Stotsky..
CAMERA Media Analysis..
27 January '12..

CAMERA has documented extensively NPR's advocacy on behalf of Palestinian views and grievances. A glaring example of NPR's selective bias in the stories it carries was evident in its decision to air a 4 minute segment on All Things Considered (Jan. 17, 2012) about Palestinian children being deprived of a new season of Sesame Street programming because of a delay in U.S. funding, while ignoring the public call to murder the Jews by the Palestinian Authority's most prominent religious official.

The All Things Considered segment, introduced by Robert Siegel and reported by Daniel Estrin, claims House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is punishing Palestinian children by withholding funds for production of new segments of the Palestinian Sesame Street, Shara'a Simsim. This followed an earlier article on the same topic (Jan. 7) by the Associated Press published on NPR's Web Site. Compounding NPR's skewed judgement in focusing intensively on such a minor issue, the public radio network also failed to place the story in its essential context regarding the large amount of aid the U.S. provided to the Palestinians in 2011.

Ros-Lehtinen held back $190 million of USAID funds designated for projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because of the recent Palestinian decision to bypass negotiations and pursue statehood in the UN and her concerns with how U.S. funds were being utilized. A small portion of this money (about $2.5 million) has for several years supported the production of the Palestinian version of Sesame Street.

Ros-Lehtinen's motive in withholding the funding is phrased deceptively. Estrin reports:

She told lawmakers that the U.S. should not support Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who decided to ask the United Nations to recognize an independent state of Palestine. She said Abbas should be negotiating the matter with Israel instead.

The NPR reporter makes it seem Ros-Lehtinen is pronouncing a new demand on the Palestinians, when, of course, she's echoing Hillary Clinton, the State Department and the Obama administration in deploring the Palestinians' U.N. gambit. NPR quotes Ros-Lehtinen saying that "by providing the Palestinians with $2.5 billion over the last 5 years, the U.S. has only rewarded and reinforced their bad behavior." But NPR does not report that in 2011, the U.S. gave the Palestinians $800 million dollars in aid. (See full Jan 17 transcript below)

While revealing the funds were held up due to the Palestinian Authority's decision to try to bypass direct negotiations with Israel and instead go to the UN to gain statehood recognition, NPR fails to adequately explain the full reasons for Ros-Lehtinen's action. According to the Congresswoman's spokesman, Brad Goehner, the decision by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to engage in unity talks with Hamas, deemed a terrorist group by the U.S., was also a factor.

NPR also obscures the fact that in reality most of the funds originally withheld have been released. Toward the end of the piece, NPR notes that $40 million of the remaining withheld funds were released for "healthcare, infrastructure and other programs," but gloomily recounts that "its doubtful that the Palestinian Sesame Street will get a piece of the pie."

In fact the story is not new news, Washington Jewish Week reported on Nov. 10, 2011 that after receiving assurances from President Barack Obama that "releasing the money was in the national security interest of the United States; that Israel had no objection to releasing the funds; and that Salam Fayyad, the P.A. prime minister who is trusted by Western leaders, would retain control of the funds," Ros-Lehtinen agreed in November to release $200 million to pay the salaries of Palestinian officials and fund security operations. $40 million of the remaining withheld funds were approved for release as well.

Much of the NPR coverage in articles and on the air includes statements meant to evoke sympathy, like puppeteer Rajai Sandouka's comment: "My daughter, she told me, when are you going to make a new one [Sesame Street segment]? I've - always, I see it, and I remember everything. I want to see something new. I don't know what I tell her."

Nowhere is the question raised as to why it is the responsibility of United States taxpayers to ensure Palestinian children don't have to suffer through reruns of Sesame Street.

Apparently, what riles NPR is that in its view Palestinian Sesame Street is being treated unfairly because "While Congress has turned off the tap for Palestinian Sesame Street, the U.S. is helping support a new season of Israeli Sesame Street." Of course, NPR's Daniel Estrin doesn't bother to point out that Congress is not seeking to penalize Israel for circumventing peace efforts because Israel has continued to extend its hand towards the Palestinians, only to be rebuffed time and again.

There are other angles to this story that NPR could have delved into. CIF Watch, a web site that critiques the Guardian's coverage of Israel, noted a recent report by Palestinian Media Watch revealing that the Palestinian Authority pays jailed terrorists and their families the equivalent of over $51 million per year, $4.3 million per month, and $788 per month per prisoner. CIF Watch suggested that instead of paying terrorists, the Palestinian Authority could fund Sesame Street. A recently published report by the Congressional Research Service reveals that while U.S. funding for the Palestinians has doubled from what it was just 7 years ago, donations from Arab states have declined precipitously. One wonders why NPR does not do a story on this aspect of Palestinian aid.

Meanwhile the more recent call to genocide by the Palestinian Authority's chief cleric, the Mufti, was not deemed newsworthy. The Mufti's words are similar to those that appear in the Hamas Charter, warning that "The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: 'Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

The prominence NPR gave to the Sesame Street story reflects the herd mentality of much of the mainstream media's coverage of the Middle East. With all the significant events occurring in the region, spiraling violence in Syria, transformation in Egypt and North Africa, Iranian belligerence, this relatively trivial story appeared first in Al Arabiya and the Associated Press, and was then amplified by NPR, CBS news, ABC news, the Guardian, BBC and numerous other news outlets. Predictably, coverage of the Mufti's incitement to murder has been ignored (as of Jan. 26, 2012) by these same outlets with the exception of the Associated Press wire service.

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

Transcript of All Things Considered Segment : 'F' is for Funding, Which Palestinian Muppets Lack

AUDIE CORNISH: From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
ROBERT SIEGEL: And I'm Robert Siegel.

Call it Muppet diplomacy. There are about two dozen versions of " Sesame Street " around the world, and one of them is now on pause. A U.S. lawmaker has frozen funding for Palestinian " Sesame Street ," along with other projects in the West Bank and Gaza, despite objections from the Obama administration. The freeze is meant to protest the Palestinians' bid for statehood recognition at the United Nations. From Ramallah, Daniel Estrin reports that Palestinian producers are hoping sunny days will sweep the politics away.

DANIEL ESTRIN: This used to be a busy time of year for "Shara'a Simsim," the Palestinian version of " Sesame Street ." Producers and educators will be choosing the words of the day for the upcoming season. Writers would be brainstorming ideas around a large conference table. Project director Laila Sayegh says everyone would be working long days.

LAILA SAYEGH: From the morning, like 8 until 6 o'clock in the evening, usually. And now, as you see, it's empty. We have nothing.

DANIEL ESTRIN: The U.S. government was set to donate $2.5 million for three more seasons of the show. But in October, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee placed a hold on about $190 million earmarked for projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That means no money to produce "Shara'a Simsim."

LAILA SAYEGH: Nobody believes that the reason is logical. You're working on education, on fun stuff, on kids; educating kids and families. So it was very sad for everybody.

DANIEL ESTRIN: Today, the writing workshop room is bare. The Muppets have been sent to New York for repairs. Saed Andoni, the show's line producer, sits in a small office, staring at a laptop. So what are you doing now that there's no funding for a new show? What are you - what do you do every day?

SAED ANDONI: Actually, we don't do anything.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAED ANDONI: Yeah. Surfing the Net, reading news, keeping the hope that we can stay together because, otherwise, everybody will have to go in his own way.

DANIEL ESTRIN: Saed is keeping the staff on half salaries and reduced hours. They have some leftover funding to work on projects like making jigsaw puzzles for preschoolers. Palestinian TV is airing reruns, but kids are getting sick of the same old programming, says puppeteer Rajai Sandouka, as he slouched in an office chair, fingering prayer beads.

RAJAI SANDOUKA: For example, my daughter, she told me, when are you going to make a new one? I've - always, I see it, and I remember everything. I want to see something new. I don't know what I tell her.

DANIEL ESTRIN: The lawmaker who ordered the hold on funding is Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida. She told lawmakers that the U.S. should not support Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who decided to ask the United Nations to recognize an independent state of Palestine. She said Abbas should be negotiating the matter with Israel instead.

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN: By providing the Palestinians with $2.5 billion over the last five years, the U.S. has only rewarded and reinforced their bad behavior.

DANIEL ESTRIN: The U.S. did give $200 million in direct aid to the Palestinian Authority last year; it's the funding for local NGOs that's on hold. Last month, Congress released $40 million of those funds. But with infrastructure and health care programs waiting for money, it's doubtful Palestinian " Sesame Street " will get a piece of the pie.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Three, two and action.

DANIEL ESTRIN: While Congress has turned off the tap for Palestinian " Sesame Street ," the U.S. is helping support a new season of Israeli " Sesame Street ." The State Department awarded $750,000 to a local nonprofit to team up with the Israeli show and develop classroom activities. A spokeswoman for the State Department says the grant is unrelated to funding for the Palestinian show. The cast includes an Arab Muppet, a wheelchair-bound Muppet and one familiar red character.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (as Israeli Elmo) Hello, American radio.

DANIEL ESTRIN: Hi. Who are you?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (as Israeli Elmo) I'm Israeli Elmo.

DANIEL ESTRIN: Palestinian producers are saying it's not fair that Israeli kids get to see new " Sesame Street " programming while Palestinian kids don't. Danny Labin, an executive at the Israeli TV channel that co-produces the show, agrees " Sesame Street " shouldn't be politicized.

DANNY LABIN: Children, no matter who they are, no matter where they're from, should not be penalized because of the politicians over which children have no control.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (as Israeli Elmo) (Foreign language spoken)

DANIEL ESTRIN: Palestinian producers, like Sayegh, say they're optimistic funding will somehow return.

LAILA SAYEGH: We will continue, and we will survive.

DANIEL ESTRIN: For NPR News, I'm Daniel Estrin.

Link: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=28&x_article=2184

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Hornik - ‘Peace Now’ Faults Israel For Palestinians’ Genocidal Urges

2012-01-29T15:30:00.001+02:00

P. David Hornik..
frontpagemag.com..
27 January '12..

Last week Palestinian Media Watch revealed that the Mufti Muhammad Hussein, top cleric of the Palestinian Authority, had approvingly quoted a hadith calling for the genocide of Jews. Hussein, who was appointed to his post by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, did so at a ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the Fatah movement. The moderator at the ceremony chimed in that “Our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs [i.e., Jews] is a war of religion and faith.” As for Mufti Hussein, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ordered Israel’s attorney-general to investigate him for incitement.

Palestinian Media Watch now reports that the mufti’s words have drawn international condemnation. This, actually, doesn’t amount to much—far less than, for instance, the typical round of condemnations when Israel announces plans to build homes in parts of Jerusalem that the enlightened world thinks should be Judenrein.

Alistair Burt, the UK minister for the Middle East, said: “I condemn the inflammatory words used by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and others…. To refer to the Jewish people in such a way and to talk of killing Jews is anti-semitism, pure and simple.” More surprisingly—seemingly—Palestinian Media Watch also offers a quote from Americans for Peace Now. This organization, founded in 1981 to drum up support for its Israeli parent-organization, Peace Now, states that it

strongly condemns the belligerent anti-Jewish comments made by the Palestinian Authority’s Mufti of Jerusalem at a public event in the West Bank earlier this month…. “We are appalled by these comments, coming from the most senior Muslim cleric on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll,” said Debra DeLee, APN’s President and CEO. DeLee added, “What we find particularly disturbing is that these vile comments were broadcast on the Palestinian Authority’s official television channel, amplifying their inciting [e]ffect.”

I was surprised by those seemingly unequivocal words, and checked the original statement on APN’s website.

Indeed, the context reveals that they weren’t unequivocal at all. Immediately after her above-quoted words, DeLee said further:

People in positions of religious authority, on all sides, bear a heavy responsibility of avoiding incendiary rhetoric. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a dispute between two national movements with conflicting claims to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Clerics on both sides must prevent this conflict from being perceived as a religious conflict and from becoming one.

DeLee, then, quickly turned her censure of the mufti’s words into an admonition to “both sides.” The problem is that, presumably, neither she nor the organization she represents could be so ignorant as not to realize that this is disingenuous.

Incendiary statements about Palestinians by Israeli rabbis are rare, confined to a fringe, and heavily denounced by the mainstream—if not leading to arrest, as in a case last year involving a rabbi who wrote a preface to an obscure book arguing that non-Jews could be killed in certain situations in wartime. Mufti Muhammad Hussein is, as mentioned, the governmentally appointed religious leader of the Palestinian Authority, and made his statement on official PA TV. Still more significant is that his words were hardly a fringe phenomenon but, instead, a standard and typical part of the PA’s comprehensive campaign, through media, mosques, and schools, of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incitement.

That Americans for Peace Now could not bring itself simply to condemn a call for genocide of Jews and leave it at that, is actually what one would expect.

The parent-organization, Israel’s Peace Now, was established in the spring of 1978 about nine months after Israel had, for the first time in its history, elected a right-of-center government. As Kenneth Levin noted in an article exposing Peace Now’s intellectual and moral corruption, the group launched its political life by criticizing Prime Minister Menachem Begin for purportedly “not moving fast enough or being forthcoming enough” in his negotiations with Egypt. Since then Peace Now has always held the Israeli side responsible whenever its panacea of “peace” receded in bloodshed.

As Levin observes, it was “under the banner of Peace Now” that Israel embarked on the disastrous Oslo process in the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s, with the corpses from terror attacks already piling up, the group kept loudly demanding “peace now” in rallies attended by tens of thousands in Tel Aviv. And it kept demanding “peace now”—of Israel—even in the next decade when the terror attacks of what was called the Second Intifada reached even more horrific proportions.

The difference, though, was that by then Peace Now could no longer organize mass rallies and was rapidly shrinking in membership. Today, with the bulk of the Israeli population sobered by two decades of suicide bombings and rocket attacks, Peace Now is reduced mainly to harassing Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria. It petitions the left-leaning (until recently) Supreme Court to declare some of their communities illegal, and releases annual reports on Israeli construction in those areas that relate to it as a criminal enterprise.

Part of the corruption of Peace Now is its making of “peace” into an ideology. Peace can be a conclusion; that is, one could legitimately maintain at a particular time that one of Israel’s neighbors (or at least its leadership) was ready to lay down the hatchet. (Even then, experience has shown—with Egypt a dramatic recent case—that such situations are temporary.)

But according to the Peace Now ideology, peace is always, prima facie, available; Peace Now said so in 1978, it says so today, and it will say so ten or twenty years from now no matter what the mere reality on the ground. Given the premise, then, the only logical inference is that the failure to pluck this shining apple of peace is Israel’s, and always Israel’s.

Hence Peace Now, and its U.S. affiliate, is not capable of reacting appropriately to an outrage like Mufti Muhammad Hussein’s officially televised call to genocide. No sooner had President and CEO DeLee seemingly done so than she turned it into an opportunity to sternly warn “both sides,” the jihadist Palestinian Authority and democratic Israel. It’s yet another shameful display by a deplorable organization.

Link: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/27/peace-now-turns-call-to-murder-jews-against-israel/

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator in Beersheva, Israel. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com.

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Rennert - Wash. Post funnels Palestinian lies to readers

2012-01-29T13:00:00.002+02:00

Leo Rennert..
American Thinker..
27 January '12..

After a series of meetings between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Jordan, Palestinian President Mahdoud Abbas has called a time out so he can consult with the Arab League on next steps. In the meantime, the Washington Post is quick to report that the talks have been "foundering" and that diplomacy has reached a crisis stage. It also, predictably, blames mainly Israel for lack of progress, while uncritically purveying a slew of Palestinian propaganda lies ("Efforts under way to try to save Mideast negotiations - Israel, Palestinians at standstill over borders and security" by Joel Greenberg, Jan. 27, page A12).

The headline, of course, is misleading. There haven't been any "negotiations" that need saving. The Jordanian-sponsored meetings amounted to preliminary contacts to find a way toward negotiations -- so far without discernible success.

However flawed the headline may be, the article by Greenberg, the Post's Jerusalem correspondent, deviates even more from straight reporting, as he relies primarily on Hanan Ashrawi, a veteran Palestinian propagandist, for commentary about the current lull. Ashrawi, who served brilliantly in that capacity during the second intifada when Western reporters could rely on her for snappy sound bites, is not part of the Amman discussions. Reporting from Jerusalem, Greenberg goes out of his way to reach her by telephone from Ramallah to feast on her anti-Israel diatribes.

"There has been no progress whatsoever," she tells Greenberg. "There are no talks anymore. We don't want to be complicit in this game of deception. We see a public relations exercise, an attempt to create the impression that they want to talk while grabbing more land and destroying the substance of the talks. They just want talks for their own sake. This could go on forever while they go on building settlements and annexing Jerusalem and finally laying to rest the two-state solution."

To underscore her comments, Greenberg then paraphrases Ashrawi, telling readers that "the Palestinians have said that they will not resume negotiations unless Israel halts settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, activity they say is swallowing up land they seek for a future state."

There's no shortage of notable Israelis -- in and out of government -- who could easily cite chapter and verse to demolish these Palestinian canards. But Greenberg doesn't pick up the phone to get any substantive rebuttals to Ashrawi's propaganda. He just mentions very briefly in the last paragraph that Israel is "urging talks without preconditions to resolve all issues." Where is an Israeli counterpart to Ashrawi? Not in Greenberg's dispatch.

Greenberg simply lets Ashrawi's lies go unrebutted. He doesn't deign inform Post readers that Israel has not been "grabbing more land" and has not been "building settlements" in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Under Netanyahu and under Ehud Olmert before him, Israel has not added any settlements or expanded the contours of existing settlements. Special housing incentives for new settlers have been reined in. The only construction has been within existing settlements. Greenberg is channeling Palestinian lies with his reference to Israel "swallowing up land" for a future Palestinian state. No additional land has been set aside for settlements. And there continues to be ample available land in the West Bank for a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.

As for Ashrawi's alarms about Jerusalem, Greenberg leaves unchallenged the notion that the city is being Judaized. The opposite is true. If anything, there has been a steady trend of Arabization of Israel's capital. Since 1967 when Israel captured the eastern part of the city, Arab population has grown about twice the rate of Jewish population growth. In 1967, 68,000 Arabs lived in Jerusalem. Today the total tops 250,000. In 1967, Arabs comprised 26 percent of Jerusalem's population. Today, the Arab portion comprises more than 35 percent and demographers predict that this ratio will rise to 40 percent by 2020 and reach parity with Jews in another 30 years or so.

Having given full license to Ashrawi propaganda nuggets, Greenberg also quotes her as complaining that the Israelis "have not submitted specific proposals for any of the core issues in dispute."

Specific proposals, of course, weren't expected in this preliminary round of contacts. But having let Ashrawi fault Israel on this score, shouldn't it behoove Greenberg to inquire if the Palestinians submitted any specific proposals on their side - and what was in them?

Greenberg is at one with Ashrawi in loading the dice against Israel while exempting the Palestinians from scrutiny of their demands for a peace deal.

Link:http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/01/wash_post_funnels_palestinian_lies_to_readers.html

Leo Rennert is a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers

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Roth - Uncommonly plain talk about the nightmare being plotted in Iran

2012-01-29T09:57:00.001+02:00

Iran: Messianic, religious, military,
commercial and nuclear issues all
rolled into one unholy complex dilemma.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
27 January '12..

Richard N. Haass is the former Director of Policy Planning in the U.S. State Department and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. In a short essay entitled "Answering Iran", he makes some very straight-forward assertions about what is being plotted from Teheran. Here's the main statement:

We know quite a bit about Iran's nuclear program, and what we know is not encouraging. Iran is reported to be enriching uranium at two sites - some of it to levels of 20%, far beyond what is required for civilian purposes. The International Atomic Energy Agency also reports that Iran is carrying out research to develop designs for nuclear warheads. In short, Iranian officials' claims that their nuclear program is aimed solely at power generation or medical research lacks all plausibility.

Unless one's head is firmly thrust into a hole in the ground, there are some other aspects of this evolving catastrophe that ought to interest - well, just about everyone, since just about everyone stands to lose if the crazies of Teheran win. Haass points out what we don't know:

We do not know whether Iran is conducting secret activities at undisclosed sites, or when Iran could develop a crude nuclear weapon, with estimates ranging from several months to several years. We also do not know whether Iran’s divided leadership has decided to develop nuclear weapons, or to stop just short, calculating that the country could derive many of the benefits of possessing nuclear weapons without running the risks or incurring the costs of actually doing so.

Whatever we - the free world - decide to do, Haass points out that all the choices are tough or free of risk. And those risks, along with the costs that go along with them, can be calculated with certainty.

What if we accept a nuclear-armed Iran?

Given its use of subversion and terrorism against its adversaries, a nuclear-armed Iran might be even more assertive. It might also transfer nuclear-related material, technology, or weapons to allies (Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, for example) or radical organizations such as Hizbullah and Hamas. Nor can it be assumed that Iran's radical leadership would always act rationally, or that proliferation would stop with the Islamic Republic. If Iran develops its nuclear weapons, countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt would be tempted to purchase or develop nuclear weapons of their own.

Haass sums it up as cogently as anyone else has so far:

A Middle East with multiple fingers on multiple triggers is as good a definition of a nightmare as there is.

The whole article is worth a close read.

And if you're not sufficiently rattled by it, or if you feel those much publicized sanctions are going to turn the Iranians away from the headlong race into hell, go and read an outstanding piece of analysis, "Sanctions on Iran: Ushering in the post-American world" by J. E. Dyer on the Optimistic Conservative blog site. Commander Dyer applies her acuity to an eloquent description of the Chinese (and to an extent the Russian) business model of geopolitical pressure, maneuver, and intimidation. This is a very frightening scenario.

Link:http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2012/01/27-jan-12-uncommonly-plain-talk-about.html

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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CAMERA - International Herald Tribune Falls for AFP Fauxtography

2012-01-29T07:00:00.023+02:00

Tamar Sternthal..
CAMERA Media Analysis..
28 January '12..

In the past, Reuters was the wire service most associated with "fauxtography" of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but it seems that Agence France-Presse may also be getting in the act. On Jan. 25, the AFP photo service carried an image by photographer Hazem Bader in which a Palestinian construction worker is said to be screaming in pain after he was run over by a trailer driven by an Israeli soldier. The photo appeared on page 4 of the International Herald Tribune (at least in the Israeli edition) on Thursday (Jan. 26). The image and captions (both AFP and IHT follow).

The original AFP caption reads:

An injured Palestinian construction worker screams in pain after an Israeli army driver drove a trailer hooked to a tractor over his legs, as he tried to block him when Israeli forces stopped workers on January 25, 2012 from building a house in al-Dirat village, south of Yatta in the southern Bank town Hebron region. The Israeli forces were seizing the equipment and trailer from the construction workers as the site falls in the occupied zone C in which Israel prevents Palestinians from building on their land.

Similarly, the IHT caption states:

A Palestinian construction worker screamed in pain Wednesday after he tried to block an Israeli Army driver who drove a trailer over his legs near Hebron. Israeli forces were seizing the trailer from construction workers because the site was in a zone where Israel prohibits Palestinians from building on their land.

Yet, after checking with both Palestinian and Israeli sources, it seems that the man was not at all injured, and there is no evidence that he was run over.

On the Palestinian side, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), which provides comprehensive weekly reports about all injuries, fatalities, incursions, and other incidents in both the West Bank and Gaza, makes no mention of this alleged injury in its report for Jan. 19- 25. In addition, the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency did not cover the alleged injury, even though it does report on Israeli army activity that day nearby in Tel Rumeida. And Ma'an also reported a hit and run incident, in which a Palestinian teen was hit by an Israeli driver at a checkpoint this morning. Presumably, then had this worker actually been run over and injured on Wednesday, Ma'an would have carried the story. Nor does it appear that any English-language wire service or other media outlet covered the alleged injury.

On the Israeli side, Capt. Barak Raz, spokesman for the Judea and Samaria division who had spoken to soldiers at the scene, told CAMERA the following: IDF soldiers were on site to provide security for the Civil Administration, which was preventing Palestinian construction in an area not permitted for building. One Palestinian worker was lying on the ground next to the trailer when he started to scream that he had been run over. Nobody saw him get run over. First he complained that his left leg was injured. An army medic checked him and saw nothing. The medic did, nevertheless, wrap him in a bandage since the worker was carrying on that he had been run over. The man then subsequently claimed that it was his right leg which was injured. According to Raz, the Palestinian Red Crescent, which was also on the scene, checked him, and likewise found absolutely nothing wrong with him.

In short, at worst, this incident is staged, as Raz contends, and the man pretended to be run over and injured, while neither happened. At best, there is zero independent confirmation that he was injured. If neither AFP nor IHT can substantiate the claim, it ought to be immediately retracted.

Link: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=139&x_article=2186

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Marquardt-Bigman - Same message, different mufti: the rhetoric of the 1940s in 2012

2012-01-29T04:00:00.006+02:00

Petra Marquardt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
27 January '12..

When Sheik Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, who is the Palestinian Authority’s senior religious official, recently recited a traditional Islamic text urging Muslims to “fight and kill the Jews” during a ceremony celebrating the 47th anniversary of Fatah’s establishment, he unintentionally revealed how little the messages of Palestinian religious leaders have changed since the days of another Palestinian mufti by the name of Husseini.

This deplorable rhetorical continuity also serves as a timely reminder that words are usually spoken to inspire deeds. Palestinians, eagerly echoed by many of their world-wide supporters, like to claim that they had no part whatsoever in the Holocaust, and that they should indeed be seen as indirect victims of the Jews who fled Europe.

This “narrative,” which seems particularly popular among Germany’s progressive elites, requires that the historical record of Amin Al-Husseini – the predecessor of the current Palestinian mufti – is ignored. While both muftis call for killing the Jews, Husseini sought and seized the opportunity to contribute to the Nazi’s genocidal undertaking to kill as many Jews as possible.

In a review of a book by Klaus Gensicke about Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis, John Rosenthal emphasized that the mufti did not only collaborate with the Nazis by contributing to propaganda activities aimed at Arab speakers and by organizing the Muslim SS division “Handzar” in Bosnia:

Indeed, perhaps the most shocking finding of Gensicke’s research concerns the repeated efforts of the mufti after 1943 to ensure that no European Jews should elude the camps [...] Thus, for example, Bulgarian plans to permit some 4,000 Jewish children and 500 adult companions to immigrate to Palestine provoked a letter from the mufti to the Bulgarian foreign minister, pleading for the operation to be stopped. In the letter, dated May 6, 1943, Husseini invoked a “Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live.” [...]

One week later, the mufti sent additional “protest letters” to both the Italian and German Foreign Ministries, appealing for them to intervene in the matter. The German Foreign Ministry promptly sent off a cable to the German ambassador in Sofia stressing “the common German-Arab interest in preventing the rescue operation.” Indeed, according to the post-War recollections of a Foreign Ministry official, “The Mufti turned up all over the place making protests: in the Minister’s office, in the waiting room of the Deputy Minister and in other sections: for example, Interior, the Press Office, the Broadcast service, and also the SS.” “The Mufti was a sworn enemy of the Jews,” the official concluded, “and he made no secret of the fact that he would have preferred to see them all killed.” [...]

In late June, both the Romanian and Hungarian Foreign Ministers would be recipients of similar appeals from the mufti. The Romanian government had been planning to allow some 75,000 to 80,000 Jews to immigrate to the Middle East, and Hungary — which had become a refuge for Jews escaping persecution elsewhere in Europe — was reportedly preparing to allow some 900 Jewish children and their parents to immigrate as well. The mufti repeated his counsel that the Jews should be sent rather to Poland, where they could be kept under “active surveillance.” “It is especially monstrous,” Gensicke concludes, “that el-Husseini objected to even those few cases in which the National Socialists were prepared, for whatever reasons, to permit Jews to emigrate. . . . For him, only deportation to Poland was acceptable, since he knew fully well that there would be no escape for the Jews from there.”

Inevitably, some people will be inclined to argue that Husseini was only defending the national interest of the Palestinian Arabs when he tried to prevent any Jewish emigration from Europe. But as Gensicke has shown, Husseini was convinced that there was a “Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live,” and in May 1943, he also expressed this view in a letter.

Soon after Husseini had written these words, Arab regimes proceeded to demonstrate that they shared this view. The Arab League drafted Nuremberg-style laws designed to disenfranchise and dispossess Jews, and Arab states began to encourage the ethnic cleansing of the ancient Jewish communities that had existed for millenia all over the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of the Jews who had to flee from Arab countries found refuge in the fledgling Jewish state that the Arabs vowed, and tried, to wipe out.

Back then, the motives may have been rooted in Arab nationalism, but as the recent remarks by the Palestinian mufti illustrate, there is a long and – according to the mufti, “noble” – tradition of Jew-hatred in Islam that up to this day is regularly invoked to present the Arab and Palestinian refusal to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state as part of a fight against Jews that is an integral component of Muslim identity.

Nazi-like rhetoric about Jews is nowadays mostly expressed in Arabic and Farsi, and just like 70 years ago, there is widespread reluctance to confront this rhetoric and face the fact that it is meant as incitement to deadly deeds.

Link: http://warped-mirror.com/2012/01/27/same-message-different-mufti-the-rhetoric-of-the-1940s-in-2012/

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Kushner - Answering Obama’s Israel Lies

2012-01-29T00:16:00.000+02:00

Arlene Kushner..
frontpagemag.com..
27 January '12..

On January 19, President Barack Obama’s campaign staff released a video, “America and Israel: An Unbreakable Bond” – a piece rife with half-truths and distortions. As patently false as it seems to anyone with a properly jaundiced eye, it nonetheless requires a response. For one suspects that those American Jews eager to find a reason to vote for Obama may be all too ready to stand convinced of what they are being told.

Recently elected NY Congressman Bob Turner gave an interview in Israel last week, in which he said, “I think American support militarily has been more an investment in our own defense..” It was a refreshingly honest and significant observation that directly applies here.

Obama likes to claim – as he does in this video – that US military cooperation with Israel makes him a huge supporter of Israel. But this cooperation serves US needs and goals in important ways: the US requires an Israel that is militarily solid. Nothing wrong with that. It means US interests coincide with Israeli interests in this respect. But Obama misrepresents when he claims the US does this for Israel. And it should be noted here that it is the Pentagon, which understands the military situation, that has always been the major promoter within the US of cooperation with Israel.

This same principle applies to other, related, matters. Last year the Israeli embassy in Cairo was attacked. The ambassador and his staff got out, but two Israeli security guards were caught in the building and in danger of being killed. Obama (and I note here there were others from elsewhere involved as well) intervened and helped get those guards out safely. He then made a great deal about how he worked on Israel’s behalf. Nonsense. Imagine what would have happened if those guards had been killed, when, according to international law, a country is responsible for the safety of foreign embassy personnel within its borders. Israel would have had to respond very strongly – perhaps there would have been war. Obama knew this, knew that there was risk of a disastrous turn of events in the Middle East and he had to try to cool things. All to the good. But he didn’t do this for Israel.

Did Israelis, including Netanyahu, thank him for his actions here and elsewhere? Of course. That’s the diplomatic thing to do. But the Israeli prime minister did not do so with the expectation that Obama would use this expression of appreciation as an endorsement come election time. The Obama team merely borrowed an earlier clip and added it to their video. I haven’t discussed this with Netanyahu personally, but I am reasonably confident that the prime minister is privately praying that Obama loses – for Obama has been rude to him and a thorn in his side in many respects. But it’s neither politic nor appropriate for him to voice any opinion in the matter.

As to Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s praise of Obama, which is given considerable play in the video: It’s long been known in Israel that Barak is an Obama “buddy.” This is a man who is intensely disliked by those Israelis who care about preserving their nation. Barak is the one who sanctions middle of the night expulsions of people in “unauthorized” communities in Judea and Samaria, allowing young children to be dragged from their beds into cold rain. What Barak says should carry no weight with caring people.

The imagery of Obama at the Kotel, which begins the video, is designed to grab at the heart. But for some this is more likely to grab the stomach: Obama has not visited Israel once since he’s been in office – even though he is a much-traveled president. Where does he travel? To Muslim countries, mostly. He had no trouble visiting Indonesia, which is engaged in horrendous human rights violations. Not a word about that. But from a podium in Indonesia, of all places, he criticized settlements in Judea and Samaria. It was no accident – he was showing Muslims how tough he is with Israel. This is a friend of Israel?

The footage in the video showing Obama in Israel comes from his time as a candidate, when he needed to appear friendly to the Jewish State in order to garner support (financial and electoral) from American Jews. Much as he needs to do now. In the video he talks about how touched he was with the hardships of the people of Sderot, who get hit by rockets from Gaza. But from Israel he went to Germany for a major speech. In that speech he addressed the problems nations of the world are having with terrorism. He spoke about Spain and Great Britain, etc. etc., but neglected to mention Israel. No point in appearing supportive of Israel on the international scene. The Arabs might not like it. This is a friend of Israel?

As to Obama’s unswerving dedication to Israel’s security, it should be noted that he is the first president to explicitly call for a freeze on settlement building, and for the ’67 lines (with minor adjustments) to be the basis for negotiations with the PA. Those lines would not constitute a secure border for Israel. This has been widely acknowledged since 1967; the Security Council resolution 242 said as much. But Obama denied that he had to honor the letter written to then PM Sharon by his predecessor President Bush regarding recognition of settlements in Judea and Samaria in the course of final negotiations. Some friend to Israel.

In another respect, Obama has severely weakened Israel’s security, by courting Islamic forces. He does not work to strengthen Western interests in the Middle East and his policies have been a horror. While his errors of judgment are too numerous to detail in full here, some examples will suffice:

In Egypt, the overthrow of Mubarak (who supported the peace treaty with Israel and was an ally of the US) and the rising influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (which is virulently anti-Israel as well as being anti-Western) came about to a very great degree because of Obama policies.

The US, as commentator Caroline Glick has just observed, has actually intervened on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood since 2009: When Obama addressed the “Muslim world,” in his speech at Cairo University (a Brotherhood stronghold), he was embracing the Muslim Brotherhood vision of a pan-Arab world, which they see united by Islam via a caliphate. This was a rejection of Arab nationalism and constituted a direct hit on Mubarak’s national legitimacy. Subsequently, Obama played a primary role in pushing out Mubarak.

Additionally, the US has now embraced Turkey, which is moving into the Islamist camp, as its most solid ally in the Middle East.

Obama refused to support the Green Movement in Iran, which was seeking to overthrow the Islamist regime, even as they begged for assistance.

And where Iran is concerned, it gets even worse. In spite of the fact that Iran is an enormous danger to Israel and all moderate interests in the Middle East, Obama has not applied sanctions with the stringency that the Congress endorsed. In fact, using Turkey as a conduit, he is – incredibly – reaching out to Iran yet again regarding “dialogue.” What he is doing is buying time for a duplicitous Iranian regime.

Thus, there are solid reasons for not voting for Obama even beyond his failure to be a true friend to Israel. He is, more broadly, making the world less safe for the forces of moderation and freedom.

Link: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/27/answering-obamas-israel-lies/

American-Israeli journalist Arlene Kushner maintains a blog in which she discusses political, diplomatic and military issues affecting Israel: www.arlenefromisrael.info. She currently also serves in a consultant capacity with the Center for Near East Policy Research.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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