Rubin - Step 1: Get Charity Donations From Well-Meaning American Jews;

Step 2: Use Money to Finance Israel’s Far Left

Barry Rubin
Rubin Reports
pajamasmedia.com
08 September '11

http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/09/08/step-1-get-charity-donations-from-well-meaning-american-jews-step-2-use-it-to-finance-israels-far-left/?singlepage=true

A newly leaked U.S. Embassy cable provides a startling revelation, not so much of the extremist anti-Israel views of one high-ranking New Israel Fund official, but of how money supposedly raised for good deeds pays for full-time radical activists and finances the Israeli political far left.

And this introduced the complex story of an Israeli social protest movement torn between trying to solve real problems with very specific reforms and seeking to bring down the government and transform Israel into a version of an economically faltering European welfare state.

As a result of the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to make peace, the 1990s peace process failure, and the violent 2000-2005 intifada, the Israeli left largely disintegrated or moved towards the center. Suddenly, however, the left has revived in recent months by shifting focus from failed proposals for massive concessions to the Palestinians to protests about Israeli housing and other prices. In this context, Israel’s social protest movement has nothing to do with the “Arab Spring,” and everything to do with trends in Europe and North America.

Of course, many Israelis face real problems with the gap between wages and living costs. Almost everyone I meet — including those on the right — sympathize with the protest even if they have doubts about its leaders and demands. They also all know a long list of factors making Israel different from Europe or North America.

Most understand that Israel has prospered because of jettisoning once-useful but now burdensome socialist features. A few years ago Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became a hero even to many on the left for successful privatization reforms. More recently, the very economic decisions tending to make prices higher and keep wages lower also kept down unemployment, debt, and inflation.

Today’s problems that have motivated protests are a combination of remaining socialist practices, the peculiarities of Israel’s social structure, and the country’s security situation. They have nothing much to do with capitalism or class conflict. And they could be reduced by some relatively simple measures.

Fresnozionism - NIF leader: disappearance of Jewish state no tragedy

Fresnozionism.org
05 September '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/09/nif-leader-disappearance-of-jewish-state-no-tragedy/



This is stunning.

Actually, it’s completely expected, not surprising at all. It’s like your spouse admitting to having an affair. You knew it all along but hearing from her own lips is … stunning.

Last year, the US Embassy in Tel Aviv interviewed a number of people in connection with a law being considered by the Knesset to require transparency in non-governmental organization (NGO) funding.

It had become common knowledge that huge amounts of money from such sources as European governments and the New Israel Fund (NIF) in the US were flowing to ‘Israeli’ NGOs — primarily left-wing organizations — which were acting against the interests of the State of Israel. A particularly egregious example was the way a group of these NGOs provided almost all of the anti-IDF material in the UN’s vicious blood libel, the Goldstone Report.

Ambassador James B. Cunningham reported on the interviews in a cable sent to the State Department on February 25, 2010, now made public by Wikileaks. The cable includes an explanation by Dr. Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor (a source I’ve quoted often) of why the legislation, based on the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) is needed.

You should read that, but let’s cut to the chase. Ambassador Cunningham’s cable included this:

New Israel Fund (NIF) [former] Associate Director in Israel Hedva Radovanitz, who manages grants to 350 NGOs totaling about 18 million dollars per year, told PolOff [political officer] on February 23 that the campaign against the NGOs was due to the “disappearance of the political left wing” in Israel and the lack of domestic constituency for the NGOs. She noted that when she headed ACRI’s [Association for Civil Rights in Israel] Tel Aviv office, ACRI had 5,000 members, while today it has less than 800, and it was only able to muster about 5,000 people to its December human rights march by relying on the active staff of the 120 NGOs that participated. Radovanitz commented that the NIF was working behind the scenes through many NGOs to prevent the NGO legislation from passing in its current form. She commented that she believed that in 100 years Israel would be majority Arab and that the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.

Could we roll the tape back, please:

She commented that she believed that in 100 years Israel would be majority Arab and that the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.

I would like all of my friends here in America who contribute to the NIF because they would like Israel to become “more democratic” to please read that again, and think about it.

Wiki Leaks and The Goldstone Report

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
19 April '11

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2052/wikileaks-goldstone-report

A book about Wiki Leaks recently published in England by editors of The Guardian, sheds an entirely new light on the Goldstone report. Richard Goldstone has recently reconsidered his report's central conclusion, namely that Israeli political and military leaders specifically intended to kill innocent Palestinian civilians. But even before Goldstone's reconsideration, many objective readers of the report could not find any hard evidence to support that unlikely conclusion, for an obvious reason: No such evidence is cited in the body of the report. The best those who wrote the report could come up with was an inference that since so many civilians were killed, that result must have been intended. Recently a leader of Hamas in Gaza acknowledged—indeed boasted—that most of the Palestinians killed during Operation Cast Lead were Hamas fighters. The number of innocent civilians killed (depending on how one defines "innocent" and "civilian" in a war fought by people who are terrorists by night and civilians by day) now appears to be about 500-600. The number of combatants killed now appears to be in excess of 700. In other words, the ratio of combatants to civilians appears to be that slightly more combatants than civilians were killed. Even one civilian death is too many but such deaths are inevitable when combatants hide among civilians, fire rockets from civilian areas and use civilians as human shields—as Hamas routinely does.

The Goldstone commission adamantly refused to accept testimony that would have shown that the Israeli army took greater care to reduce civilian deaths than any other armed forces fighting comparable wars. For example, they refused to hear the proffered testimony Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and a recognized expert on asymmetric warfare, who would have testified that:

"[F]rom my knowledge of the IDF and from the extent to which I have been following the current operation, I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.

The recently published book about Wiki Leaks strongly confirms Colonel Kemp's assessment.

The Guardian summarized one Wiki Leaks disclosure about Afghanistan as follows:

"We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported…."

And another:

"The logs disclosed a detailed incident-by-incident record of at least 66,081 violent deaths of civilians in Iraq since the invasion. This figure, dismaying in itself, was nevertheless only a statistical starting point. It is far too low. The database begins a year late in 2004, omitting the high casualties of the direct 2003 invasion period itself, and ends on 31 December 2009. Furthermore, the US figures are plainly unreliable in respect of the most sensitive issue—civilian deaths directly caused by their own military activities.

For example, the town of Falluja was the site of two major urban battles in 2004, which reduced the place to near-rubble. Yet no civilian deaths whatever are recorded by the army loggers, apparently on the grounds that they had previously ordered all the inhabitants to leave. Monitors from the unofficial Iraq Body Count group, on the other hand, managed to identify more than 1,200 civilians who died during the Falluja fighting."

In another incident, not the subject of a Wiki Leak disclosure, German forces in Afghanistan called in an air strike against two fuel tankers captured by Taliban insurgents. Between 70 and 100 civilians, including 24 children, were killed. There was an immediate attempt by German authorities to cover up the civilian deaths, but ultimately they were revealed and nominal compensation was paid.

As to the investigation of alleged war crimes, the Wiki Leaks disclosures show that:

"US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished…The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death….[T]he logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring torture allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence."

No "Goldstone Commissions" have ever been appointed to investigate the far greater number and proportion of civilian deaths caused by British, German and U.S. military actions—and the frequent lack of credible investigators.

Whenever efforts are made to put Israel's actions in a comparative context with other democracies, demonizers of Israel, who always impose a double standard on the Jewish state, respond by arguing "we're talking about Israel now; don't change the subject by talking about other democracies." That reminds me of a famous story about Harvard's notoriously anti-Semitic president, A. Lawrence Lowell, near the beginning of the 20th Century. In an effort to defend his decision to impose an anti-Jewish quota, he said, "Jews cheat." A distinguished Harvard alumnus, Judge Learned Hand, wrote President Lowell a letter saying that "Protestants also cheat," to which Lowell responded, "you're changing the subject; we're talking about Jews now."

You can't just talk about Jews, or about the Jewish state when making accusations of war crimes or violation of international law. Comparison is everything, especially since international humanitarian law is expressly based on how democratic nations customarily behave in comparable situations.

According to the materials disclosed by Wikileaks, Israel shines in comparison to other democracies. It has a significantly better ratio of combatant to civilian deaths; it takes greater steps to avoid such casualties, and it does a better job investigating negligent and criminal behavior on the part of its soldiers. Moreover, it is seeking to protect its own civilians directly from ongoing cross-border rocket attacks and other terrorist acts, whereas the other democracies are fighting wars of choice many miles from its civilian areas.

This is not to suggest the need for "Goldstone Reports" against Great Britain and Germany and the United States. It is to demand that a single standard be applied to all democracies.

** Alan Dershowitz is serving as an American legal consultant to Julian Assange's and Wiki Leaks British lawyers.


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Wikileaks: Brazil illustrates how to sacrifice principles for the Arabs

8

Elder of Ziyon
07 February '11

This 2009 Wikileaks cable discusses why Brazil, a country with a culture that is very much against restrictions on free speech, consistently abstains from any UN resolutions that are against "defamation of religion" - i.e., Islamic attempts to stifle free speech.

Embassy has raised the issue of Brazil's voting record on "defamation of religions" several times in the Department of Human Rights and Social Affairs (DDS), Ministry of External Relations (MRE). The last time was with DDS Chief (A/S level) Minister Glaucia Gauch. Brazil has not disagreed with a single argument in our previous demarches and non-papers. The response has been always the same: the concept of "defamation of religions" is repugnant to Brazilian values and principles, and it is inconsistent with Brazilian law and international law. For those reasons, Brazil cannot and will not support a resolution that purports to punish the "defamation of religions"; instead, Brazil consistently abstains.

When asked why Brazil does not vote against a resolution it finds totally objectionable, Gauch responded that it was enough to abstain. In the GOB's view, Brazil is taking a principled but practical position on the issue, not desiring to offend OIC countries, in particular powerful ones like Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia with which Brazil is attempting to deepen relations. Moreover, obtaining a permanent seat on the UNSC remains Brazil's overriding foreign policy goal. As a result, the GOB prefers to avoid antagonizing countries and groups of countries whose votes might be valuable in a future election.

In a similar vein, an earlier set of memos detail the Arab-South America Summit held in 2005 in Brazil, which turned into a farce as radical Arabs hijacked the session to put out outrageously anti-Israel and anti-American statements, leaving the major reasons for the summit (economic cooperation) in the dust.

By the time of Cast Lead, Brazil had already cast its lot with the radical Arabs.

(Read full "Wikileaks: Brazil illustrates how to sacrifice principles for the Arabs")

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British Foreign office, BBC, European liberal-left devastated by leaked revelations on Israeli settlements, Guardian furious at “weak” and “craven” Palestinian leadership

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
24 January '11

http://www.robinshepherdonline.com/british-foreign-office-bbc-european-liberal-left-devastated-by-leaked-revelations-on-israeli-settlements-guardian-furious-at-%E2%80%9Cweak%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Ccraven%E2%80%9D-palestinian-leadersh/

Game over. No way back. An entire edifice of anti-Israeli demonisation definitively consigned to the scrap heap, never to be recycled again. This is the uncompromising message that comes out of yesterday’s revelations on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. To the horror of a European political intelligentsia which has been steadfast to the point of fanatical in its opposition to Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem, the Palestinian leadership itself, we now know, has long accepted that the vast majority of Israeli settlements can be considered legitimate and would become part of Israel under any reasonable peace agreement.

This is utterly devastating since it simultaneously shows that everyone from the British Foreign Office and the BBC to the European Commission and the continent’s passionately anti-Israeli NGO community have been adopting a position which was significantly more uncompromising on “settlements” than the Palestinian leadership itself, and also that that same Palestinian leadership had accepted that the so called 1967 “borders” — the gold standard for practically every anti-Israeli polemic around — are irrelevant to the prospects of a lasting peace.

In one of its most resentful leader columns for years, the Guardian was nothing short of apoplectic: not so much with Israel, but with a Palestinian leadership which has effectively blown the credibility of the Guardian’s very own mantras on the MidEast straight out of the water. The Palestinian leadership, the paper declaimed, had been shown to be “weak” and “craven”. Their concessions amounted to “surrender of land Palestinians have lived on for centuries”. And, in words that look alarmingly close to the position adopted by Hamas, “The Palestinian Authority may continue as an employer but, as of today, its legitimacy as negotiators will have all but ended on the Palestinian street.” This is sheer spite.

The Palestinian leadership accepts what any reasonable person has been able to accept for decades. The Guardian then slams them as surrender monkeys. The Guardian newspaper is more hardline against Israel than the Palestinian leadership itself. And bear in mind, as you mull over the implications of that stark and unyielding state of affairs, that the Palestinian Authority is led by Mahmoud Abbas, who is a Holocaust denier.

Wikileaks: New Zealand used spy flap to help sell lambs to Arabs

Elder of Ziyon
22 December '10

From The Guardian:

US diplomats disparaged New Zealand's reaction to a suspected Israeli spy ring as a "flap" and accused New Zealand's government of grandstanding in order to sell more lamb to Arab countries, according to leaked cables.

The arrest and conviction in 2004 of two Israeli citizens, who were caught using the identity of a cerebral palsy sufferer to apply for a New Zealand passport, caused a serious rift between New Zealand and Israel, with allegations that the two men and others involved were Mossad agents.

"The New Zealand government views the act carried out by the Israeli intelligence agents as not only utterly unacceptable but also a breach of New Zealand sovereignty and international law," New Zealand's then-prime minister, Helen Clark, said after the arrests.

But US officials in Wellington told their colleagues in Washington that New Zealand had "little to lose" from the breakdown in diplomatic relations with Israel and was instead merely trying to bolster its exports to Arab states.

(Read full "Wikileaks: New Zealand used spy flap to help sell lambs to Arabs")

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The Folly of Linkage

Michael Weiss
The Weekly Standard
16 December '10

The theory of linkage holds that by resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict most other problems will be resolved. The end of the Arab-Israeli will contribute to the fight against terrorism as well as improve the prospects for Arab democracy and women’s rights. The conflict, linkage advocates argue, is a “lightning rod” for the recruitment of new al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention a handy propaganda foil for Iran to distract us from its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

And after the recent revelation of secret State Department cables by WikiLeaks, the linkage debate has been revived. Detractors are emboldened by evidence that shows Arab statesmen mortally terrified by the prospect of atomic Iranian mullahs. “Cut off the head of the snake,” said the Saudi king Abdullah to his American interlocutors. Beware of the “Iranian tentacles,” warned Jordanian officials, who added that the Obama administration’s policy of engagement would fail because Iran’s favorite tactic was waiting out the clock with negotiations. The United Arab Emirates’s foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan sounded more hawkish than his Israeli counterpart in terming the Islamic Republic an “existential threat” and suggesting a U.S. ground invasion if aerial bombardment failed. Abu Dhabi crown prince Muhamad bin Zayed said “Ahmadinejad is Hitler.” Indeed, a wide swath of Arab government opinion seemed united in recommending a preemptive American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

(Read full "The Folly of Linkage")

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Pouring Cold Water on WikiLeaks

Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
14 December '10

Of all the WikiLeaks revelations, the most captivating may be learning that several Arab leaders have urged the U.S. government to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. Most notoriously, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called on Washington to "cut off the head of the snake." According to nearly universal consensus, these statements unmask the real policies of Saudi and other politicians.

But is that necessarily so? There are two reasons for doubts.

First, as Lee Smith astutely notes, the Arabs could merely be telling Americans what they think the latter want to hear: "We know what the Arabs tell diplomats and journalists about Iran," he writes, "but we don't know what they really think about their Persian neighbor." Their appeals could be part of a process of diplomacy, which involves mirroring one's allies' fears and desires as one's own. Thus, when Saudis claim Iranians are their mortal enemies, Americans tend uncritically to accept this commonality of interests; Smith maintains, however, that "the words the Saudis utter to American diplomats are not intended to provide us with a transparent window into royal thinking but to manipulate us into serving the interests of the House of Saud." How do we know they are telling the truth just because we like what they are saying?

Second, how do we judge the discrepancy between what Arab leaders tell Western interlocutors sotto voce and what they roar to their masses? Looking at patterns from the 1930s onwards, I noted in a 1993 survey that whispers matter less than shouts: "Public pronouncements count more than private communications. Neither provides an infallible guide, for politicians lie in both public and private, but the former predict actions better than the latter."

The Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, would have ended long ago if one believes confidences told to Westerners. Take the example of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's strongman from 1952 to 1970 and arguably the politician who most made Israel into the abiding obsession of Middle Eastern politics.

(Read full "Pouring Cold Water on WikiLeaks")

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Israel’s Version of Bob Woodward

Michael Ledeen
Faster, Please!
12 December '10

I guess every free society has its own celebrated “investigative reporters,” and the Israeli version of Bob Woodward—the reporter believed to be the ultimate insider—is Ronen Bergman of Yediot Aharanot. Like Woodward, Bergman is important in understanding the thinking of a part of the political class, but, like Woodward, he’s not always reliable when it comes to reportage and analysis.

Take, for example, his article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, in which he tries to argue that the Wikileaks cables do not provide any reason for Israelis to be pleased. He says “Transcripts of meetings between Gulf Arab leaders and U.S. officials show that while Arab hatred and fear of Iran is considerable, hostility toward Israel is just as great.”

That’s quite an astonishing statement. Do you remember reading any cable in which an American diplomat reported on any Arab leader urging the United States to bomb Israel? I certainly do not, but I read quite a number of cables quoting Arab kings, princes and ministers calling for us to attack Iran. So it seems to me empirically false to claim, as Bergman does, that Arab “hostility toward Israel is as great as their hatred of Iran.”

(Read full "Israel’s Version of Bob Woodward")

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How WikiLeaks Influence the Middle East

Harold Rhode
Hudson New York
09 December '10

The Middle East has its own logic: people there believe that the US is all-powerful, and when it chooses to, enforces order as it sees fit. To them, whatever the US does, it does deliberately and calculatedly. By this logic, the release of the WikiLeaks classified documents was intentional: most Middle Easterners would have great difficulty believing otherwise.

Among many foreign leaders mentioned in these documents is Turkish Prime Minister Prime Minister Erdoğan. Before the leaks, Erdoğan seemed to be able to get away with doing everything he could to undermine Israel and the United States both in the Middle East and throughout the world.

From a Turkish point of point of view, there are two explanations for America's apparent acquiesce: Either America displayed weakness by letting Erdogan get away with this, or it intentionally let him do this because it fit into some American plan, which, as the Turks say, was developed "behind the curtain," with a hidden American hand intentionally directing this policy.

But from this perspective, all that changed when the US government "intentionally" released classified documents regarding Erdoğan, his government, and Iran. Among the leaked documents is one in which the US Embassy writes about rumors that Erdoğan has multiple Swiss bank accounts in which he has more the $1 billion. As the Turks see it, Erdoğan must have been stunned by this revelation. Many believe that the US released this document in order to embarrass and humiliate him.

America had shown its power. Erdoğan therefore had no choice other than it submit to its dictates. How best to do that? A large number of Middle Easterners believe the Jews run America and the world. By this logic, now that America has thrown down the gauntlet, the best way for Erdoğan to redeem himself is to find a way to ingratiate hmself to the Americans and Israelis. This, accordingly, would help him come down off of a branch onto which he dangerously had stepped.

(Read full article How WikiLeaks Influence the Middle East)

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With Israeli Settlements Out Of The Way, Let's Talk Iran!

Daled Amos
08 December '10

The timing is just right--now that the US is not going to push Israel on a settlement freeze, the Senate is telling Obama to get on the ball with Iran:

Senators to Obama: Pressure Iran

A bipartisan slate of senators urged President Obama to increase pressure on Iran in nuclear talks.


The major powers, including the United States, concluded talks Tuesday in Geneva aimed at getting Iran to make transparent its nuclear program. The parties agreed to reconvene in Istanbul in January.

In a letter Monday, six U.S. senators -- three from each caucus, and all continuing into the next Congress -- called on Obama to increase the pressure.

"It is absolutely essential that the United States and its partners make clear to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran that we intend to keep ratcheting up this pressure through comprehensive enforcement of existing sanctions as well as imposition of new measures," it said.

After all, thanks to Wikileaks we now know that the Arab world wants pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program--and that the issue of Israel and peace talks takes second place with them in importance.

So, what should be expect?

(Read full post)

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The Game

The leaked State Department cables reveal the diplomatic seduction that defines relationships in the Middle East

Lee Smith
Tablet Magazine
08 December '10

This is how U.S. diplomats used to talk about their work in the Middle East: “Every American ambassador in the region knows that official meetings with Arab leaders start with the obligatory half-hour lecture on the Palestinian question,” one with a long tenure in the Middle East told the New York Times before Thanksgiving. “If we could dispense with that half-hour and get down to our other business, we might actually be able to get something done.”

But that was in the pre-Cablegate age. One of the surprising (to some) revelations of the leaked diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks is that, counter to what we’ve been told for over a half century, the Palestinian question does not dominate the thinking of Arab officials.

American journalists still get the “half-hour drill”—I’ve gotten it most recently from the prime minister of Lebanon—but with U.S. diplomats, Arab rulers have more pressing issues to discuss. Indeed, the Wikileaks cables seem to confirm that our Arab allies are consumed by their fear of the Iranians. But are they really?

A number of analysts have spent the first weeks of the post-Cablegate era fighting a rear-guard action against the reality of Mideast diplomacy portrayed in the Wikileaks cables. Some are claiming that what the Arabs say in private to U.S. diplomats about Iran is not what they really mean, or that Arab security regimes do not represent the will of the Arab people. Others argue that those American analysts who find their positions vindicated in the released cables are just looking for any evidence to justify their desire to make war on Iran.

(Read full article)

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Wikileaks Contradicts Obama Administration on Iran

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
06 December '10

The recent disclosure by Wikileaks prove that the Obama Administration, and its water carrier J Street, were dead wrong in repeatedly asserting that the only way to get Arab support for tough policies toward Iran's nuclear weapons program is for Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank. There are good reasons for Israel to reach an agreement with the Palestinians leading to a two state solution, but garnering Arab support against Iran is not one of them. The Wikileaks proved beyond any doubt that Israel's Arab neighbors have a strong, independent basis for wanting to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons power.

The recently released cables establish that Saudi Arabia was pushing the United States to bomb Iranian nuclear sites; these cables never mentioned the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Nor were the Saudis alone in calling for the United States to cut off the "head of the snake." Other Arab nations were banging the drum for a military attack as well. Indeed there is evidence that the Saudis and Israelis—who have no diplomatic relations—have discussed military options against their common enemy.

Ever since the Obama Administration tried to put pressure on Israel by linking the end of the occupation to Iran, I have pointed out the absurdity of this linkage. But General David Petraeus, Secretary of State Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden have all insisted that the continuing occupation has made Arab states less willing to cooperate with the United States in preventing Iran from developing nuclear bombs. This party line view has been parroted, as usual, by various representatives of J Street.

Not only has this linkage never been true, but we now know that the Obama Administration has long been aware that the Arabs states are as anxious as Israel about Iran's nuclear ambitions. This information was contained in diplomatic cables that date back months, if not years. Why then would the Obama Administration deliberately mislead the public in regard so important a matter? The same question must be asked of the Bush Administration, which also mislead the public when it came to Iran by releasing the National Security Estimate in November 2007 that falsely concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

(Read full article)

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Welcome to reality

Op-ed: WikiLeaks proved that notion of Palestinian problem’s centrality was a myth

Moshe Dann
Israel Opinion/Ynet
06 December '10

Several major lacunae are obvious from the windfall of confidential diplomatic documents that have become available. Pay attention to what's not there.

First, there was and is no coherent policy, especially with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and little understanding of terrorism and how to eliminate it. Instead of building coalitions, working out strategies, and focusing on terrorist infrastructures, diplomats spent time spying on each other, and gabbing, with little, or nothing to show for it.

A great deal of shadow-boxing, but no one got into the ring.

Second, according to the leaked documents, President Shimon Peres' comment that the Oslo Accords were a mistake is not new; he and nearly everyone else involved have admitted it. Yet, those who are responsible for that mess not only insist on perpetuating it, but insist on its full implementation, via the Saudi/Arab/Geneva Initiatives and other surrender plans.

One of the greatest blunders in Israeli history, the Oslo Accords, has never been investigated.

(Read full article)

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The WikiLeaks challenge

Caroline B. Glick
jewishworldreview.com
03 December '10
Posted before Shabbat

Make no mistake about it, the ongoing WikiLeaks operation against the US is an act of war. It is not merely a criminal offense to publish hundreds of thousands of classified US government documents with malice aforethought. It is an act of sabotage.

Like acts of kinetic warfare on military battlefields, WikiLeaks' information warfare against the US aims to weaken the US. By exposing US government secrets, it seeks to embarrass and discredit America in a manner that makes it well neigh impossible for the US to carry out either routine diplomacy or build battlefield coalitions to defeat its enemies.

So far WikiLeaks has published more than 800,000 classified US documents. They have exposed classified information about US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and they have divulged 250,000 diplomatic cables.

One of the most distressing aspects of the WikiLeaks operation is the impotent US response to it. This operation has been going on since April. And the US had foreknowledge of the attack in the weeks and months before it began. And yet, the US has taken no effective steps to defend itself. Pathetically, the most it has been able to muster to date is the issuance of an international arrest warrant against WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange on rape charges in Sweden.

The US has not taken down the website. Aside from the US army soldier Pfc Bradley Manning who leaked most of the documents to the website, no one has been arrested. And the US appears impotent to prevent the website from carrying through on its latest threat to publish new documents aimed at weakening the US economy next month.
Neither US President Barack Obama nor any of his top advisors has had anything relevant or useful to say about this onslaught. Defense Secretary Robert Gates assured journalists that the damage caused by publishing US operations on the battlefield, classified reports of meetings with and assessments of foreign heads of state and other highly sensitive information will have no long lasting impact on US power or status.

Ignoring the fact that the operation is aimed specifically against America, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was "an attack on the international community."

(Read full article)

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Why Has Wikileaks Left Abbas Unscathed?

Daled Amos
02 December '10

Abbas says the Wikileaks documents are scandalous for everyone except him. He may be onto something:

Abbas said the WikiLeaks documents “are scandalous.”

However, he added, “not a single thing in the notes incriminates us. Let the entire world know that what we tell the Americans or Israel we say at the [Fatah] Central Council and we say it everywhere. We had nothing to fear.”

Apparently, Abbas misses the point: the diplomatic cables being leaked by Wikileaks concern the actions that various countries are contemplating--'action' being the operative word.

That would leave Abbas out.

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U.S. Adopts Israeli Anti-Terror Tactics, but Waffles on Defending Israel’s Use of Them

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
02 December '10

One cable from the WikiLeaks trove raises a disturbing possibility: the Obama administration’s obsession with Israeli settlements could end up undermining America’s own war on terror.

Shortly before Israel announced a 10-month freeze on settlement construction last year, Germany urged Washington to threaten that absent such a moratorium, the U.S. would refuse to block a UN Security Council vote on the Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza. U.S. officials correctly responded that this would be “counterproductive” but agreed to tell Israel “that their policy on settlements was making it difficult for their friends to hold the line in the UNSC” — thus implying that Washington might so threaten in the future. And last month, the U.S. indeed implicitly conditioned future efforts to block Goldstone on another settlement freeze.

Yet America has a vital interest of its own in burying Goldstone: facing many of the same military problems in its war on terror that Israel does, it has increasingly adopted many of the same tactics.

Last month, for example, the New York Times reported that in Afghanistan’s Kandahar region, “American forces are encountering empty homes and farm buildings left so heavily booby-trapped by Taliban insurgents that the Americans have been systematically destroying hundreds of them” in order “to reduce civilian and military casualties.” They even destroyed houses that weren’t booby-trapped because “searching empty houses was often too dangerous.” And as an Afghan official correctly noted, “It’s the insurgents and the enemy of the country that are to blame for this destruction, because they have planted mines in civilian houses and main roads everywhere.”

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Paranoia is funny:"Wikileaks is Israeli plot against Turkey"

Elder of Ziyon
01 December '10

The depths of crazy, courtesy of Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News:

Israel could have engineered the release of hundreds of thousands of confidential documents on WikiLeaks as a plot to corner Turkey on both domestic and foreign policy, according to a senior ruling party official.

“One has to look at which countries are pleased with these. Israel is very pleased. Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents,” Hüseyin Çelik, deputy leader of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the party’s spokesperson, told reporters at a press conference Wednesday.

Following initial reaction to the leaked U.S. Embassy cables, which have revealed diplomatic secrets about Turkey, Azerbaijan, its Middle Eastern neighbors, Turkish officials have started to suspect that “the main cause of these leaks was to weaken the Turkish government.”

WikiLeaks has released approximately 250,000 documents of confidential U.S. diplomatic correspondence to newspapers around the world. Around 8,000 of those documents are from the U.S. Embassy to Ankara.

That a whopping 3%.

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Obama driven by ideology, not realism

Fresnozionism.org
01 December '10

The main thing I’ve learned from the WikiLeaks documents is that I was wrong about Barack Obama. I’d thought that he was putting the screws to Israel in order to appease the Arab world, particularly the Saudis. Apparently not. David Horowitz puts it very well:

The Obama administration, it is now clear for all to see, was not pressing a reluctant Netanyahu to make settlement-freeze and other concessions to the Palestinians in part because it truly believed this would be helpful in generating wider support for tackling Iran.

Not at all. The United States, we now know courtesy of WikiLeaks, was being repeatedly urged by a succession of Arab leaders to smash an Iranian nuclear program they feared would destabilize the entire region and put their regimes at risk. Their priority was, and is, battering Ahmadinejad, not bolstering Abbas.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in 2008, had not urged the US to chivvy those recalcitrant Israelis toward concessions to the Palestinians as a pre-condition for grudging Saudi support for a firmer US-led position against Iran. Anything but. Never mind the Palestinians, the king simply implored Washington to “cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake.”

Likewise, with minor variations in the course of the following year, the rulers of Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.

We are now starting to hear, courtesy of WikiLeaks, what Jordan and Egypt had to say on the matter too.

So, one asks, if Obama was not doing the Arabs’ bidding, why did he base his entire Mideast policy on the obviously false ‘linkage’ theory that asserts that ‘solving the Palestinian problem’ is a prerequisite to stabilizing the Middle East, and in particular, to dealing with Iranian expansionism?

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Finally the neighbors are caught washing some of their dirty laundry

Arnold/Frimet Roth
This Ongoing War
29 November '10

For years, we Israelis have been subjected to the terrorist threats and attacks of the jihadist regime of the Mullahs of Teheran and their agents in Hamas and Hizbullah. The Iranian ambitions always extended beyond this tiny country, and now - finally - its extent is front-page news throughout the world today.

Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal, diplomatic cables show. Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year. The cable is a detailed, highly classified account of a meeting between top Russian officials and an American delegation led by Vann H. Van Diepen, an official with the State Department’s nonproliferation division who, as a national intelligence officer several years ago, played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity. The missiles could for the first time give Iran the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe or easily reach Moscow, and American officials warned that their advanced propulsion could speed Iran’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Source: The New York Times

Iran's Moslem cousins have known this and more for a long time. They, more than almost anyone except perhaps the Israeli government, have been anxiously lobbying for the power of the jihadists in Teheran to be curtailed - one way or (ahem) another.

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