Myths?

Jennifer Rubin

Contentions/Commentary

09 September 09

J Street has apparently gotten so much flack about its perpetual criticism of Israel and cheerleading for every Palestinian propaganda point that the J Street team has been forced to come up with a “Myths and Facts About J Street” crib sheet. Let me just say that if a Jewish organization has to put out a statement denying that it is anti-Israel, pro–Mary Robinson, is funded mostly by Arabs, and has defended a nuclear-armed Iran, then they might as well pack it in. Suffice it to say, you don’t see the ADL or AIPAC or any other genuinely pro-Israel group in such a defensive crouch.

Moreover, some of its “defenses” are rather, well, pathetic. Let’s take just two. On Mary Robinson, J Street says it never defended the choice of Mary Robinson for the Medal of Freedom Award. The “defense”? They were mute! Only their friends defended her. No, really:

J Street never issued a single statement related to Mary Robinson. Individuals associated with J Street’s public relations firm may have done some personal work on the issue — but that had nothing to do with J Street, just as the firm’s work for dozens of other clients is completely unrelated to J Street.

Wow, that sure settles that.

Then there is Iran. J Street denies it has defended Iran’s nuclear program. Well, they haven’t defended it. They just don’t think we should, you know, do anything about it:

As of the early fall of 2009, we are not of the opinion that the time has come for Congress to move ahead with further sanctions. We agree with those who are calling for ’strategic patience’ at this moment of unrest and uncertainty in Iranian domestic politics and continue to urge Congress to give the diplomatic and political processes currently underway more time to unfold.

I think the mullahs are the one’s calling for more and more and more time to “unfold.”

And so it goes: J Street doesn’t support U.S. negotiation with Hamas; it just thinks Hamas is too important to ignore:

Ultimately, a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will require Palestinian political reconciliation and we support efforts by third parties to achieve reconciliation and a unity government, whose officials will work within a diplomatic process to achieve an acceptable two-state solution. Further, we would not oppose a decision by the Israeli government, the United States, or other countries to find unofficial, indirect ways to engage Hamas in order to advance U.S. and Israeli interests.

Sort of easy to see how these “myths” take hold. It seems that crack team at J Street’s PR firm that defended Mary Robinson isn’t very good at its job. But then it has an impossible task—trying to convince the Jewish community that they really, deep down, support a strong and secure Jewish state.

Related: Protecting the QB in the White House, J Street Acquisitions And Mergers

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Despair, Indeed

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
05 September 09

Jimmy Carter brings us his report, fresh from his Middle East visit with his fellow ”Elders,” including the Medal of Freedom prize-winning duo of Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson. Carter and crew go to the Middle East and see “despair.”

Not the despair of Jews in Israel who would like to live in peace with their neighbors and have tried repeatedly to give the Palestinians their own state. Not the despair of victims of Hamas violence or of honor killings. Not the despair of the Palestinian people who would like a government free from corruption. Not the despair of Jews who find it incomprehensible that teaching the Holocaust is considered to be a human-rights violation by Hamas. Not the despair of Israel and its neighbors who are contemplating a nuclear-armed Iran and a timid U.S. response. And certainly not the despair that Israelis must feel as a U.S. administration renounces past obligations and delights in picking a fight with its ally.

No, all Carter sees and all he writes about (I know, you’ll be shocked) is the “despair that settlement expansion is continuing apace.” And he divines that Israel is bent on a one-state solution, aiming to “colonize” East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Using unmistakable Holocaust terminology, he terms Gaza a “ghetto.” How perfectly Carter-esque. And Robinson-esque. (Anyone in the White House still think that Medal of Freedom thing was a grand idea?)

In his account, the terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza get no mention, so readers are left to wonder why it is that traffic doesn’t flow freely between Gaza and Israel. And in Carter’s view, one supposes, the Israelis must be awfully clever to mask their plot to dominate the Palestinians with repeated offers of statehood. How sneaky of the Jews to have repeatedly given up land for “peace” and dismantled their own settlements when all they really want is to “colonize.”

Well this is pretty much par for the Carter course. But really, how different is this from the administration’s Middle East outlook? The same obsession with settlements that animates Carter seems to dictate all that Obama and George Mitchell say and do these days with regard to the Middle East. The same Carter-esque refusal to recount accurately the history of the Middle East, let alone America’s own agreements, permeates Obama’s rhetoric. The same muteness grips the Obama administration when it comes to Palestinian rhetoric. It’s almost enough to fill one with despair.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Virgin boss Richard Branson play on the Holocaust to advance case against Israel

Richard Shepherd
Think Tank Blog
28 August 09

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Virgin boss Richard Branson play on the Holocaust to advance case against IsraelIt is a sign of the corrosiveness of the anti-Zionist agenda that even some of the most admirable and well-regarded of international luminaries feel no compunction these days about using the greatest crime against the Jewish people as a convenient weapon against the Jewish state. Holocaust inversion has now entered the mainstream. No-one, it seems, is immune from its temptations.

Enter former anti-apartheid campaigner, Nobel laureate, and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu who has used an interview with the liberal-Left Israeli newspaper Haaretz today to make some typically ill considered remarks of his own:

“The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns,” he was quoted by the paper as saying. “…in South Africa, they tried to get security from the barrel of a gun. They never got it. They got security when the human rights of all were recognized and respected.”

This is crass even by Tutu’s standards when talking about Israel. But it was nothing compared to the truly disturbing comments made earlier this week by Virgin Atlantic boss and international NGO financier Richard Branson.

Asked to draw on his business and public relations skills to advise Israel on how to improve its image, he said:

“I think it’s something similar to what happened after 9/11. You know after 9/11 the world had enormous sympathy for America, and you know that sympathy was somehow lost. And obviously after the Second World War, the world had enormous sympathy for the Jewish people. Over a number of decades, that sympathy has been lost …. You’ve got a great country, but you’ve just got to hold the hands of your neighbors, and then you’ll get back on top again.”

I have remarked on a number of occasions on how submersion in the anti-Zionist agenda leads otherwise reasonable and sane individuals to say things which make them look ridiculous. But “you’ve just got to hold the hands of your neighbours, and then you’ll get back on top again.”? Don’t these people ever think about what they are saying? The mind boggles.

That aside, the first thing to note about Branson and Tutu is that it is obvious that neither of them has any idea of what they are talking about. They seek to pronounce on a matter of great complexity while demonstrating that the history and basic facts of the conflict are simply lost on them. All we are left with is the standard UN/NGO narrative in which a belligerent and colonialist Israel is juxtaposed with oppressed third-world freedom fighters struggling against all odds for justice and recognition.

Tutu in particular has form in this regard. As an attentive reader reminded me earlier today, he made some particularly vicious remarks in a commentary in the Guardian along such lines in April 2002. In an article tellingly entitled Apartheid in the Holy Land he said of the struggle against Israel:

“For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”

Well, I’m glad that Desmond Tutu thinks we are living in a “moral universe”. And one trusts he is confident that, when confronted with the higher authority he invokes, his Faustian pact with the forces of anti-Zionist bigotry is not held against him.

As for Richard Branson, one really has to marvel at his audacity. I am not Jewish myself, but I would venture to say that “sympathy” is not quite what the Jewish people were looking for in establishing their state after the Holocaust.

Even so, if defending that state against extremism is all it has taken for all that “sympathy” to evaporate I am not convinced that it was all that deeply rooted in the first place.
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Deconstructing Jimmy Carter: Former president visits Israel with the “Elders”, and gets a drubbing

Robin Shepherd

Think Tank Blog

26 August 09

“Could it be,” asks columnist and writer Michael D. Evans in today’s Jerusalem Post, “that Jimmy Carter’s ideals are formulated by the number of zeros before the decimal on the contributions to the Carter Center by oil-rich Gulf States?”

That’s right. This is not going to be a hagiography of the former president, and his supporters would be advised to read no further. But just what has Jimmy Carter been playing at? I don’t just mean in the last couple of days where he has turned up in Israel with Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson to tell “apartheid” Israel to start behaving itself. He is visiting as part of a delegation of “The Elders”, a designation which is either ludicrously pompous or, in the Israeli context, just plain crass (Elders? Protocols? Zion?), according to your taste. Set up with funding from Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson, the Elders say that they “amplify the voices of those who work hard to be heard, challenge injustice, stimulate dialogue and debate and help others to work for positive change in their societies.”

In other words, it’s a UN talk-fest gone freelance. We know what to expect then. But back to Jimmy Carter and his record in the Middle East. Evans has a few gems to offer.

His piece takes the form of a review of Carter’s latest book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan that Will Work. In it, Evans tells us, Carter comes up with the startling innovation that all sides should embrace the Road Map advanced by the so called Quartet: The US, the EU, the UN and Russia. But that Hamas, Hizbolloah, Iran and Syria should also be involved.

Quoting the British, Menachem Begin is described as the “most notorious terrorist in the region”. It is also alleged that at one point Begin agreed to divide Jerusalem, a point which Evans ridicules:

‘I found that to be astonishing, especially since Begin had given me a copy of the letter he penned to Jimmy Carter on September 17, 1978, in which he wrote, “Dear Mr. President, on the basis of this law, the government of Israel decreed in July 1967 that Jerusalem is one city indivisible, the capital of the State of Israel.” According to Begin, Carter informed him that the US government did not recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

‘Begin told me he responded, “Excuse me sir, but the State of Israel does not recognize your non-recognition.”‘

There is plenty more of this sort of thing (see article below). But Jimmy Carter’s ability to be taken in any way seriously in the Middle East peace process died the day he published, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid thus legitimising a form of hate-speech against the Jewish state which has now entered the mainstream and in no small part due to the former American president’s own efforts.

Carter has tried to wriggle and squirm his way out of this. But to no avail. In an online interview with Amazon.com in January 2007 he gave the following absurd response to a question as to whether he had been surprised by the reaction his wording elicited:

“Forced segregation in the West Bank and terrible oppression of the Palestinians create a situation accurately described by the word,” said Carter. “I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land. This violates the basic humanitarian premises on which the nation of Israel was founded. My surprise is that most critics of the book have ignored the facts about Palestinian persecution and its proposals for future peace and resorted to personal attacks on the author. No one could visit the occupied territories and deny that the book is accurate.” (My Italics)

So if it is “not about racism” why did Carter use the term which more than any other in the post-Holocaust era is synonymous with brute racism and white supremacy? There is no rational come-back to that question. His use of the word “apartheid” was a term of abuse: nothing more and nothing less.

As for his latest foray into peace-making in the Middle East, Evans has a simple piece of advice:
“The best thing President Obama could do is completely ignore Jimmy Carter and his plan.”

Enough said, I think.

To read the piece from the Jerusalem Post, click here:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251145115888&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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Mary Robinson’s Medal of Freedom

Anti-Americanism and anti-Israel activism win Obama’s approbation.

By John Bolton
Wall Street Journal
11 August 09

Barack Obama’s decision to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson has generated unexpected but emotionally charged opposition. Appointed by then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as high commissioner for human rights in 1997-2002, Ms. Robinson had a controversial but ineffective tenure. (Previously, she was president of Ireland, a ceremonial position.)

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s award, to be officially bestowed tomorrow, has centered on Ms. Robinson’s central organizing role as secretary general of the 2001 “World Conference Against Racism” in Durban, South Africa. Instead of concentrating on its purported objectives, Durban was virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and at least implicitly anti-American.

So vile was the conference’s draft declaration that Secretary of State Colin Powell correctly called it “a throwback to the days of ‘Zionism equals racism,’” referring to the infamous 1975 U.N. General Assembly resolution to that effect. President George W. Bush (whose father led the 1991 campaign that repealed the U.N.’s “Zionism is a form of racism” resolution) unhesitatingly agreed when Mr. Powell recommended the U.S. delegation leave the Durban conference rather than legitimize the outcome.

Ms. Robinson didn’t see it that way then, and she has shown no remorse since. In late 2002, she described Durban’s outcome as “remarkably good, including on the issues of the Middle East.”

Outrage over Durban reignited earlier this year when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did her best to get the United States to attend the successor conference (“Durban II”) to polish Mr. Obama’s “multilateralist” bona fides. Because the Durban II draft declaration reaffirmed Durban I’s hateful conclusions, even the Obama administration couldn’t swallow attending.

Durban is not the only reason Ms. Robinson should not receive the Medal of Freedom. Over the years she has actively opposed “the security or national interests of the United States,” one of the categories of eligibility for the Medal. Those in the administration who recommended her either ignored her anti-Israel history, or missed it entirely, as they either ignored or overlooked her hostility toward America’s role in promoting international peace and security. Or perhaps they share Ms. Robinson’s views.

One example, particularly significant today given the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, is Ms. Robinson’s strong opinions about the use of force. During the Clinton administration’s (and NATO’s) air campaign against Serbia because of its assault on Kosovo, for instance, she opined that “civilian casualties are human rights victims.” But her real objection was not to civilian casualties but to the bombing itself, saying “NATO remains the sole judge of what is or is not acceptable to bomb,” which she did not mean as a compliment.

In fact, Ms. Robinson wanted U.N. control over NATO’s actions: “It surely must be right for the Security Council . . . to have a say in whether a prolonged bombing campaign in which the bombers choose their target at will is consistent with the principle of legality under the Charter of the United Nations.” One wonders if this is also Mr. Obama’s view, given the enormous consequences for U.S. national security.

This February, asked whether former President George W. Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes, Ms. Robinson answered that it was “premature,” until a “process” such as an “independent inquiry” was established: “[T]hen the decision can be taken as to whether anybody will be held accountable.” In particular, she objected to the Bush administration’s “war paradigm” for dealing with terrorism, saying we actually “need to reinforce the criminal justice system.” Asked about Mr. Obama’s statements on “moving forward,” Ms. Robinson responded that “one of the ways of looking forward is to have the courage to say we must inquire.”

Ms. Robinson’s award shows Mr. Obama’s detachment from longstanding, mainstream, American public opinion on foreign policy. The administration’s tin ear to the furor over Ms. Robinson underlines how deep that detachment really is.

Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations” (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
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