Obamanauts ignore facts, defame dedicated former Mideast envoy

Fresnozionism.org
03 April '10

I’ve said that there are elements in the Obama Administration that are seriously hostile to Israel. Here’s one example, provided by Laura Rozen of politico.com (March 28):

“He [Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this administration…”

Last week, during U.S.-Israeli negotiations while Netanyahu was in town and subsequent internal U.S. government meetings, the first official said, Ross “was always saying [sic] about how far Bibi could go and not go. So by his logic, our objectives and interests were less important than pre-emptive capitulation to what he described as Bibi’s coalition’s red lines.”

When the U.S. and Israel are seen to publicly diverge on an issue such as East Jerusalem construction, the official characterized Ross’s argument as: “the Arabs increase their demands … therefore we must rush to close gaps … no matter what the cost to our broader credibility…”

As to which argument best reflects the wishes of the president, the first official said, “As for POTUS, what happens in practice is that POTUS, rightly, gives broad direction. He doesn’t, and shouldn’t, get bogged down in minutiae. But Dennis uses the minutiae to blur the big picture … And no one asks the question: Why, since his approach in the Oslo years was such an abysmal failure, is he back, peddling the same snake oil?” [my emphasis]

I’ve boldfaced two statements that I want to discuss.

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What The NYTimes Didn't Find Fit or, The Arab Easter Incident

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
04 April '10

A miracle! On Easter! A resurrection!

From the august and reliable New York Times:

A 14-year-old boy thought to have been killed either by Israeli gunfire or from internal Palestinian violence last week turned up unharmed at his family’s house after trying to sneak into Egypt via smuggler tunnels and being held by Egyptian security officials, his parents said Saturday.

The boy, Muhammad al-Farmawi, disappeared on Tuesday...[and] it was revealed that Muhammad, along with 16 other teenagers, had sneaked into smuggler tunnels to try to get into Egypt and was then picked up by Egyptian security forces.

“It was a very big shock for us,” Mr. Farmawi said. “We were told that he had been killed by Israeli fire and that his body had been left near the fence at Rafah,” in southern Gaza.

We?

Were told?

By whom?

Why would the NYTimes leave it out?

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The Middle East's Biggest Con-Game: Claiming Israel is the Cause of the Region's Problems

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
04 April '10

A former senior Canadian diplomat, Robert Fowler, made the main foreign policy speech to the Liberal Party convention there. He voiced the most common myth about the contemporary Middle East. In fact, it is a myth now returning to favor in the United States after many years in the shadows. (The last thing that killed it was the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait which indicated there were a few other problems in the region.)

Regarding Fowler, let me quote from the Ottawa Citizen editorial about the speech:

“Fowler singled out Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, as the primary source of instability in the region. Meanwhile, a country like Iran -- a totalitarian theocracy bent on obtaining nuclear weapons, which it has already threatened to use -- didn't get a mention. Is that Fowler's idea of an "even-handed" approach to the Middle East?

“By externalizing blame for Arab-Muslim dysfunction--pinning it on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on Israeli intransigence in particular-- Fowler is playing into the hands of all the Muslim dictators, autocrats and mullahs who use the "Zionist" threat to win popular legitimacy and to justify their refusal to embrace modernization, democratization and economic reform.

“As eminent Middle East scholar Barry Rubin has put it, attributing the Arab world's problems, including the rise of Islamic extremism, to Israel serves only to prevent "the kind of reappraisal necessary to fix the internal factors at the root of the problems and catastrophes" that have crippled virtually every single Arab country.”

By the way, Fowler also blamed the expansion of Islamism into sub-Saharan Africa on Israel and dropped dark hints that Canadian foreign policy was currently so pro-Israel because Canadian Jews--who Fowler implies are somehow interlopers in any position of authority in the country--have too much power in the government. Funny how nobody would dare talk about any other religious, racial, or national-origin group that way. Indeed, if the name of any other such community were substituted in a similar speech, the speaker's career would be over.

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Build Now! The Antidote to Appease AKA Peace sic Now

Batya Medad
Shiloh Musings
04 April '10

Things have always been a bit "cockeyed" here in the Holy Land. The "Laws of Nature" and Mathematics, conventional logic don't always work.

According to conventional logic, the Jewish People should be a postscript in history, but we're not. We're still around, as feisty and unpredictable as ever. That's why we celebrate our על הניסים Al HaNissim, Because of the Miracles... holidays, Chanukah and Purim.

In the Twentieth Century, Hitler's Nazi Germany was sure that it could destroy the Jewish People. Remember that the world didn't care. Not a single nation did anything to oppose the Final Solution. The fight against the Nazis was for the other nations, not to protect Jews. The world really didn't care if every Jew was wiped out, off the face of the earth.

After World War II, the Zionists in the Promised Land AKA Palestine had to fight the British who wouldn't end the Mandate and give us independence. We succeeded and promptly defeated the Arabs who attacked the nascent Jewish State. Though the State of Israel was "approved" by the infant United Nations, we had no real support. I have no doubt that most countries only voted in favor because they were certain that we'd be defeated.

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An Unhappy Passover for Hussein Obama

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
03 April '10

Obama delivered the expected Passover greeting in which he informed Jews that our holiday is really about social justice and "our ongoing responsibility to fight against all forms of suffering and discrimination", which sounds a lot more like the job of a Community Organizer or the party platform of the Democratic Party, than the actual Biblical commandment which calls on the Jews to remember when G-d took them out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

But of course it has always been in the interests of the left to reinvent Judaism and Christianity as religions of social justice, and not much else. This conveniently jettisons any actual theology and belief system, replacing it with their own party platform. And in any such arrangement, god becomes the leading social justice campaigner. And who else could Barack Obama could be thinking of in that role of fighting "against all forms of suffering and discrimination", but himself. If he left out any reference to ObamaCare, it was only because it had already become redundant by then.

But let's pause a minute to remember the real message of Passover. It is about a people being redeemed through faith from slavery to freedom. By contrast Barack Hussein Obama would like to take a free people from freedom to slavery, convincing them to have faith in him. The Biblical Pharaoh insisted on his own supremacy, his own godhood, which justified his oppression. Obama's "I Won" serves the same function. His mockery of a Passover message is an echo of that same arrogance. It's not about G-d anymore. It's about Obama and the centrality of his own values, even in a Passover greeting.

The climax of the Passover Seder is the proclamation, "Next Year in Jerusalem". At a pre-election Seder that he hosted, Obama proclaimed, "Next Year in the White House," his own idea of a holy city, because it is the seat of power. Before Passover, Obama conducted a hate campaign against Jews in Israel for daring to realize that old proclamation repeated over thousands of years, "Next Year in Jerusalem." Obama would much rather see it replaced by, "Next Year in Al Quds". But the power of "Next Year in Jerusalem" is that it is a statement of freedom in which we insist that whatever oppression we may be living under, we have faith once again in G-d's redemption, just as our ancestors in Egyptian slavery did. That whatever our circumstances now, whatever temporal rulers may in their arrogance believe in their own omnipotence, if G-d wills, next year we will be in Jerusalem.

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BBC Blurs Israeli Motives In Gaza Strike

NB
CAMERA/Snapshots
02 April '10

Readers often don't get past a headline -- or, at best, the first few lines of a news story. That's why journalism 101 calls for providing the essentials about an event -- who, what, where, when, why -- at the very beginning of an article. An April 2 BBC Web site posting flunked the test in a story about an Israeli strike on Gaza.

The Israeli air force attacked weapons and training facilities in the Gaza strip, in retaliation for the recent firing of Qassam rockets into Israel, as well as the killing of two IDF soldiers in Khan Younis last Friday.

However, readers of the BBC website will have a hard time fully understanding Israel’s motives and actions.

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Putty in his hands

Obama’s pressure is all about attempting to make Israel more of an international pariah than it already is.


Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
02 April '10

Lonely, vulnerable, affection-craving Israel always yearned for friends. It always also liked to kid itself that it has friends. Hence, at a ceremony half-a-century ago, standing alongside Charles de Gaulle, David Ben-Gurion extolled French friendship for little, renascent, plucky Israel. With no compunctions, haughty de Gaulle doused BG’s warm sentiments. “In international affairs,” he intoned superciliously, “there are no friends, only interests.”

Though unpleasant and untactful, de Gaulle was at least honest, which is more than can be said for Barack Obama.

It doesn’t take a paranoid conspiracy-theory promoter to speculate that the pressure brought to bear by the US president on Israel has little to do with furthering the peace process. Obama’s pressure in fact contradicts the cause of peace. It’s no conjecture to argue that it has everything to do with attempting to diminish Israel, shoving it into a corner, intensifying the ostracism to which it’s subjected and making it more of an international pariah than it already is.

Why?

Because that would weaken and demoralize Israel to such an extent that it would become putty in Obama’s hands. He could then appease the Arab world at its expense.

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Shi'a Wakf claims that Ezekiel's shrine is Muslim

Bataween
Point of No Return
02 April '10

In the week that Jews read the Biblical story of Ezekiel's valley of dry bones, there are resurgent fears that the Shi'a Wakf (religious endowment) wishes to turn the shrine of the Jewish Prophet Ezekiel into a mosque.

Two activists on behalf of the preservation of the shrine, at Kifl south of Baghdad, Mr Maurice Shohet from New York and Professor Shmuel Moreh, an Israeli emeritus professor of Iraqi origin, sent Point of No Return an article published on 2 April in the respected Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat in London and on the Sawt al-'Iraq site (The Voice of Iraq) in Baghdad. The article proves that the Islamic authorities consider that the tomb of the Jewish prophet Ezekiel is an exclusively Muslim shrine.

"That being the case, we find that we have to appeal to international authorities such as UNESCO, the US and European governments to redouble their efforts to save the Jewish character of Ezekiel's tomb," says Professor Moreh.

Religious authorities in Iraq are determined to convert the tomb of the Jewish prophet Ezekiel into a mosque after deleting Hebrew inscriptions, according to Al-Hayat and Sawt al-'Iraq. But a debate is still raging about the ownership of the shrine, and some Iraqis are prepared to stand up for Jewish interests.

The newspaper quotes the official in charge of the Shi'a Waqf (Endowment), Salih al-Haydari, who denies that the shrine belongs to the Jews. He says that the tomb is that of Dhu al-Kifl, a prophet mentioned in the Koran - proof enough that the site belongs to the Muslims. Recent excavations at the site, he claims, prove that it is not a Jewish site, although the findings have not yet been published!

(Read full article)
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Neo anti-Semitic hysteria in Britain goes “viral” as Obama opens the floodgates

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
03 April '10

For readers who may have missed Melanie Phillips’ forensic analysis last week of the ever more hysterical assault on Israel and the Jews in Great Britain, I offer here an opportunity to recap on her main points. If you have already read it, read it again. It’s well worth it.

She opens by rightly pointing out that the Obama administration’s hostility to Israel has opened the floodgates to Israel bashing generally. In Britain it now amounts to “a fanatical and obsessive verbal pogrom.”

She offers the following examples to illustrate her point:

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Today, Jerusalem. Tomorrow, security.

Fresnozionism.org
01 April '10

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports,

JERUSALEM—Several high-profile former U.S. officials, some with close ties to the Obama administration, met with leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas in recent months, raising hope inside the group that its views are being heard at the White House.

White House officials and participants in the talks emphasize the meetings weren’t sanctioned by Washington. U.S. officials say there has been no change to Washington’s insistence that Hamas take a number of steps before official dialogue can begin.

Still, the talks have been interpreted by some officials inside Hamas, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which is run by the Palestinian Fatah party—a rival to Hamas—as a sign Washington may be softening its position toward Hamas…

Such informal “track two” meetings aren’t uncommon between former U.S. officials and Hamas. But the ex-officials involved in recent talks are seen as higher-profile figures in Washington’s diplomatic establishment. They are also seen as enjoying more foreign-policy heft with the administration than U.S. officials in the past.

“This administration is different from the previous administration,” said Hamas’ deputy foreign minister, Ahmed Yussuf, said in an interview. “We believe Hamas’s message is reaching its destination.”

“There were many meetings like this” in the past, Mr. Yussuf said. “But now, we know the people coming to see us are so much more connected to the White House.”

The US may also be planning to soften its stance toward Hizballah.

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If You Think the Obama Administratiion's Middle East Policy is Bad Now, Just Consider This...

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
03 April '10

Charles Freeman has just taken another step in revealing his out-of-control loathing of Israel, accusing it of being worse than South Africa. Who is he and why is this significant?

It matters because Freeman, with nothing more to lose from making public his true feelings, had been the Obama Administration nominee to be coordinator of Middle East intelligence. Freeman had to withdraw and though the real reason has never before been made public, it is this: he was involved in business with Saudi Arabia which came dangerously close to the borders of legality.

Freeman was also a client of the Saudis to such an extent that then Secretary of State James Baker apparently decided to get rid of him. Baker, who certainly couldn't be accused of being pro-Israel, described Freeman in scathing terms in his own autobiography for always taking the Saudi line in a way that interfered in the effort to force Iraq out of Kuwait in 1990-1991.

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Exploiting the crisis with Washington

Caroline Glick
Carolineglick.com
03 April '10

There is an element of irony in the current crisis of relations between the Obama administration and Israel. On the one hand, although US President Barack Obama and his advisors deny there is anything wrong with US-Israel relations today, it is easy to understand why no one believes them.

On the other hand on most issues, there is substantive continuity between Obama's Middle East policies and those his immediate predecessor George W. Bush adopted during his second term in office. Yet, whereas Israelis viewed Bush as Israel's greatest friend in the White House, they view Obama as the most anti-Israel US president ever.

This contradiction requires us to consider two issues. First, why are relations with the US now steeped in crisis? And second, taking a page out of Obama's White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel's playbook, how can Israel make sure not to let this crisis go to waste?

The reason relations are so bad of course is because Obama has opted to attack Israel and its supporters. In the space of the past ten days alone, Israel has been subject to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his advisors. First, during his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than respectfully disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked out in the middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the unfed Netanyahu to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up Israel's capital city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated negotiations with an unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that supports terrorism and denies Israel's right to exist.

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A Blind Eye for Hamas’ Victims

Anav Silverman
Frontpagemag.com
29 March '10

It is not every day that Human Rights Watch (HRW) comes out with a report that accurately highlights Hamas war crimes against Israel, but in the case of the Thai worker killed by a Gaza rocket on March 18, 2009, HRW did just that.

The tragic story of Manee Singmueangphon , a Thai migrant worker who was killed when a rocket struck an Israeli greenhouse north of Gaza on Thursday March 18, was barely given any in-depth coverage in the mainstream media. Most news reports simply stated that a Thai migrant worker was killed in a rocket attack, not even giving the victim a name.

Indeed, almost no western leader or human rights organization directed words of condemnation to the Islamic terrorists who fired the rockets that killed Manee, a 33-year old husband and father with children back in Thailand, and sent shock waves among his fellow Thai and Nepalese workers. In an interview with Sderot Media Center, a friend and coworker of Manee indicated that the rocket attack made him question whether working in Israel was worth the money. “Money is not worth this kind of danger,” the Nepalese worker stated in shock.

Over 70 people around the site of the rocket attack sought therapy treatment for shock and trauma, including 20 workers from Sderot.

Those foreign officials who did voice condemnation glazed over very general statements that held no one in Gaza responsible for the rocket attack. Catherine Ashton, the top EU diplomat who happened to be entering Gaza at the time the rocket was fired at Israeli civilians on the other side, responded that she condemned “any kind of violence,” while UN Chief Ban Ki-moon stressed that all acts of violence are “totally unacceptable.”

(Read full story)
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Hamas and the Terrorist Threat from the Gaza Strip

The Main Findings of the Goldstone Report Versus the Factual Findings


The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center
March '10
Posted before Shabbat

(This report is more than 300 pages, authoritative, and a major resource. Y.)

Introduction: main findings

1. This document provides the main findings of a study which examined how the Goldstone Report dealt with the nature and activities of Hamas in the Gaza Strip before and during Operation Cast Lead .

2. The first part of the study examines how the Report relates to the terrorist threat as it developed in the Gaza Strip in the years before Operation Cast Lead . The subsequent parts deal with the various aspects of Hamas’ strategy and combat tactics during the operation , emphasizing the massive use it made of Gazan civilians as human shields. The study does not deal with specific cases of IDF actions, which the IDF has examined separately.

3. The study compares the findings of the Goldstone Report with the actual events on the ground. It is supported by a vast amount of reliable, varied information which originated in the Israeli intelligence community, as well as open-source information, including statements made by Hamas elements .

4. The comparison clearly indicates four basic flaws in the way the Goldstone Report relates to the period before Operation Cast Lead:

The Report does not deal with the nature of Hamas, particularly its terrorist aspects . It focuses on severe criticism of Israel and presents an openly pro-Palestinian version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It does not deal with Hamas’ ideology , its strategy, the military-terrorist infrastructure it constructed, its radical Islamic nature, the way it relates to the West and the pro-Western Arab regimes, the brutality with which it treats its Palestinian opponents, the direction and aid it receives from its headquarters in Damascus, and its record as the terrorist organization which led suicide bombing terrorism against Israel and fired rockets at its civilians over a period of many years . The Report refers to the de facto Hamas administration as a governmental entity (“the Gaza authorities”), and adopts Hamas’ false claim that there is no connection between that entity and the military-terrorist wing . The facts unequivocally prove that Hamas is one integral system, with a hierarchical leadership which maintains close contact between its political, administrative, security and military-terrorist branches.

(To read full report)
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[Fear of failing?] Akiva Eldar carefully avoids hard questions in interview with PA PM

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
02 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:

If Akiva Eldar was certain that Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad really had answers to the hard questions he would ask them. And he would follow up on PA PM Fayyad's soft answers.

But Akiva Eldar doesn't do this.

Now if Akiva Eldar genuinely believes that Fayyad can handle the hard questions he does him a disservice.

And if he avoids hard questions because he doesn't want to hurt the Palestinian cause he is doing a disservice to his readers.

Here are some questions:

(1) Throwing rocks and firebombs is a form of "peaceful protest"?

(2) You demand that all Palestinians held by Israel be released now. Israel is holding Palestinian cop Mahmoud al-Khatib who recently murdered an Israeli soldier. Are you saying that al-Khatib should also be freed?

(3) What is your position on the right of Jews to immigrate to Israel and become citizens while the same right is not provided for Arabs with family ties to locations within Israel?

And there's more.

=============================================

Palestinian PM to Haaretz: We will have a state next year
By Akiva Eldar Haaretz Last update - 11:44 02/04/2010
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1160513.html

RAMALLAH - Next year, "the birth of a Palestinian state will be celebrated as a day of joy by the entire community of nations," says Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in an exclusive interview to Haaretz.

Relaying Passover greetings to the Jewish community, Fayyad hopes Israelis will also participate in the celebrations for the birth of a new state.

"The time for this baby to be born will come," he says, "and we estimate it will come around 2011. That is our vision, and a reflection of our will to exercise our right to live in freedom and dignity in the country [where] we are born, alongside the State of Israel in complete harmony," says Fayyad, 58.

He also welcomed the Quartet's announcement of two weeks ago in Moscow, which supports the PA's August 2009 plan to establish a state within 24 months.

(Read full article)
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Case Closed?

Lee Smith
Tabletmag.com
01 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

“I wish they’d leave Bibi alone,” said my cab driver, an African-American born-again Christian in his mid-fifties. He was upset about the recent turn in U.S.-Israel relations over the last two weeks and complained all the way to Union Station. “What do they mean Jews can’t build in Jerusalem?” he asked. He grabbed his Bible from the dashboard and handed it to me. “You can find it right here.”

Europeans may believe that Palestine was settled by colonialist interlopers, but to many American ears this is akin to calling God a liar. Americans read the Bible as an authentic document detailing the eternal relationship between the Jews and their historical homeland. There are privileged sectors of the country that cannot comprehend the broad popularity of pro-Israel politics in America—corners of academia and the media that argue that Israel is a liability to U.S. interests. However, especially after 9/11, the rest of this vastly Christian country believes that American interests and those of the Jewish state are in sync, a conviction borne out not only in opinion polls, but electoral polls as well. There is no powerful coterie violating American laws to ensure that the U.S. Congress looks favorably on the Jewish state. If anti-Israel positions pleased voting constituencies, and campaign donors, our elected officials would adopt them as readily as they would spit at babies if such behavior ensured campaign victories.

For decades, those who work in academia or the news media have used plenty of methods to challenge and criticize the American consensus over Israel. But those who work in official Washington have taken up an even more meaningful weapon: the criminalization of policy disputes. Nowhere was this clearer that in the case of Steve Rosen, the former director of foreign policy issues for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who was the target of an FBI sting operation that cost him his job.

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Hamas hangs on

Hamas has done well to survive but it is threatened by rivalry among Islamists


Economist.com
31 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

AFTER four gruelling years under siege, the Gazans—and the Islamist movement, Hamas, that governs them—are still managing against the odds to survive. Some even prosper. The tunnels that snake under Gaza’s border with Egypt have multiplied so fast that supply sometimes exceeds demand. So stiff is commercial competition that tunnel-diggers complain that their work is no longer profitable. As a British parliamentary report recently noted, Israel officially allows Gaza to import only 73 of more than 4,000 items that are available in the strip. The rest is home-made—or acquired illicitly. For instance, cement, which cost 300 Israeli shekels ($80) a sack two years ago, has dropped almost tenfold in price, precipitating a spate of building for the first time since Israel’s attack a year ago reduced 4,000 houses to ruins. And eyewitnesses say that flashy 4x4 vehicles can actually drive through tunnels built from shipping containers.

Israel’s siege still causes misery. Yet some economists say the strip is growing faster than the West Bank run by Hamas’s rival Palestinian Authority (PA), albeit from a far lower base. The petrol pumped into Gaza by underground pipes and hoses from Egypt costs a third of what it does in Ramallah, the Palestinians’ West Bank capital, where Israel supplies it. Free health care is more widely available in Gaza. Imports travel faster through the tunnels than via Israel’s thickets of bureaucracy. The web of Israeli checkpoints that still impedes Palestinian movements and commerce on the West Bank is absent in Gaza.

As well as lower prices, Gazans benefit from civil-service payrolls. Several outfits pump cash into the strip’s economy: the local Hamas government; the UN, which employs 10,000 Gazans; and Salam Fayyad’s West Bank government, which is the largest employer of all. Payments to Hamas and its connected tunnel-operators boost the economy too. A car-dealer bringing in a new Hyundai saloon through the tunnels stands to make a profit of $13,000.

Above ground things look better, too. In the 14 months since the war ended, Hamas has swept up much of the wreckage. The Islamic University, bombed by Israel’s aircraft, sparkles again. New cafés have opened across Gaza City. Power cuts dog Gazan life, but Hamas profits from the taxes it collects on the fuel that powers a noisy surfeit of generators. America recently imposed sanctions on the main Hamas-owned bank, but the informal hawala banking system that straddles the border keeps the strip solvent. Whereas Gaza was once plugged into Western economies, the siege has forced it to find other financial moorings. So confident is Hamas that it can survive without the PA’s banking system that it has just, for the first time, sent its police to raid a bank that had obeyed a PA order preventing a Hamas-run charity from having access to deposits.

(Read full article)
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Obama's Foolish Settlements Ultimatum

Steven Rosen
MEF
ForeignPolicy.com
01 April '10

U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to confront Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli construction activity in East Jerusalem has been greeted by a hail of praise, especially from people impatient to proceed with peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The belief seems to be that meeting this issue head-on will accelerate progress toward an agreement ending a conflict that has festered for generations. The historical record suggests a different conclusion.

The assumption that a faceoff over construction in Jerusalem will advance negotiations has not been subjected to much scrutiny. But the last two decades show that progress has occurred not when this issue was put first, but when it was finessed and left for the final status negotiations on Jerusalem.

Consider this: If, 17 years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton or Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin freeze all settlement construction, including in Jerusalem, before Arafat would sit down with Rabin, there would have been no Oslo agreements. By Rabin's own account, in comments before the Knesset, Israel's parliament, he had to fudge the issue.

"I explained to the president of the United States," he said,"that I wouldn't forbid Jews from building privately in the area of Judea and Samaria ... I am sorry that within united Jerusalem construction is not more massive."

The same year as the famous handshake on the White House lawn, 1993, the Rabin government completed the construction of more than 6,000 units in the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood of East Jerusalem, out of a total of 13,000 units that were in various stages of completion in areas of the city that had been outside Israeli lines before 1967.

So Arafat did sit down with Rabin, even while Israel's construction in Jerusalem continued. And, on Sept. 13, 1993, the Oslo peace accord was signed -- by the same Mahmoud Abbas who refuses to sit down today. And on October 14, 1994, Rabin, who built homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Altogether, Israel completed 30,000 dwelling units in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the four years of Rabin's government. Even the Jan. 9, 1995, announcement of a plan to build 15,000 additional apartments in East Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the 1967 borders (especially Pisgat Zeev, Neve Yaacov, Gilo, and Har Homa) did not stop negotiations, which resulted in the Oslo II accord of September 28, 1995. Israeli construction continued while Abbas and Rabin signed an historic accord.

And what was the American policy toward Rabin's construction of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem? Mild annoyance.

(Read full article)
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Target Israel

Jamie Glazov
Frontpagemag.com
01 April '10

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.

FP: Kenneth Levin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about the Obama administration waging war on Israel. Tell us the ingredients of this war and why it is being waged.

Levin: Let’s first consider the elements of policy that are evidence of Obama’s anti-Israel animus. Virtually his first step in Arab-Israeli diplomacy was to demand a total freeze of all Jewish construction beyond the pre-1967 cease-fire lines. This is something which no previous American administration has ever demanded. In addition, it has never been a pre-condition to previous Israeli-Palestinian talks, nor has it ever been undertaken or agreed upon by any previous Israeli government. At the same time, the Obama administration made no comparable demands of the Palestinians or their Arab supporters.

Somewhat as an afterthought, and with much less fanfare, the Administration did suggest the Palestinians ought to refrain from anti-Israel incitement and that Arab states ought to make some gestures of openness towards Israel. The former request was ignored and the latter was explicitly rejected, but the Administration remained focused on pressuring Israel.

Noteworthy in this regard was Jackson Diehl’s article in the Washington Post on an interview with PA prime minister Mahmoud Abbas in Washington at the time of Abbas’s first meeting with President Obama after the president’s inauguration. Abbas conveyed to Diehl that he did not feel the need to make any gestures towards Israel to advance the search for “peace”; that, for example, the Palestinian Authority’s anti-Israel incitement and rejection of compromise on key issues were not problems he had to address. Rather, he could wait until sufficient Israeli concessions were delivered to him. The impression was clearly that this stance derived from what Abbas learned of the Administration’s attitudes: The pressure was going to be focused on Israel and nothing of significance was expected of the Palestinians. Indeed, this was Diehl’s explicit conclusion: “[President Obama] has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud.”

(Read full interview)
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How George Armstrong Custer's scouts can help us understand the Middle East

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
02 April '10

As I reflect on how U.S. history is being distorted into seeming like one long hate crime, I recall how interesting it is if one really presents it in three dimensions rather than as a cartoon. It can even teach us about contemporary issues.

In the summer of 1876, the U.S. army sent an expedition to fight the Sioux who had left the reservation where they had been forced to live. One of the units sent in this task force was the Seventh Cavalry, commanded by the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer.

Instead of waiting for the other forces to join him outside the giant encampment whose warriors outnumbered his troops by at least six-to-one, Custer took about one-third of his men and charged. Custer quickly became even more famous for foolishly getting himself and five companies of his soldiers wiped out by the Sioux. This battle at the Little Big Horn river became known as Custer's Last Stand.

But that's not the point of this story.

Among his forces were a number of "Indian scouts," men like Hairy Moccasin, Yellow Robe, and Iron Hawk who knew the ways and languages of the enemy. They were smart enough to warn Custer not to attack. Not only did he ignore their good advice but--luckily for them--angered by their opposition, he sent them off with another part of his force.

On a discussion group about these events last year, someone wrote the kind of note typical of thinking today. Shame on those scouts, the anonymous correspondent virtually shouted, for betraying their Native American brothers and not fighting together against the white man in national solidarity.

Sort of sounds like the equivalent of Arab nationalist and Islamist arguments today in the Middle East.

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Arab League Rejects Israel's Right To Survive

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
Weekly Commentary
01 April '10

The most generous interpretation of the position of the Arab League is that if Israel meets all Arab demands that the member states would recognize Israel's existence at that point in time but not its right to survive.

There is a critical difference between recognizing Israel's temporary existence and its right to survive.

The former is no more than a form of the traditional "hudna". A temporary ceasefire until such time that conditions make possible the defeat of the enemy

The 28 March Arab League Sirte Declaration rejecting the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is a rejection of Israel's right to survive.

The Arab states should have no problem with the idea that a country is associated with a religion. After all, the constitutions of the member states in the Arab League all explicitly state that Islam is their official state religion - as is also the case with the draft Palestinian constitution.

But when the Arabs - including the Israeli Arabs - oppose Israel's designation as being a "Jewish State" the issue goes far beyond Judaism being reflected in Israel's national calendar and other facets of the State. The core feature of Israel as a Jewish State that they find unacceptable is that Jews around the world have the right to immigrate to Israeli and become citizens.

If the Arabs recognized Israel's right to survive then it would not be so critical to them to want to stop Jewish immigration.

Instead they press for an end to Jewish immigration along with the right of Arabs with family ties to Israel to flood the country.
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AP: Arab States Bowing To Iran Because Of Israeli Settlement Construction

Omri Ceren
Mere Rhetoric
31 March '10

Jews building homes for their families and schools for their kids? Is there anything it can't do?

The head of the Arab League urged the 22-nation bloc on Saturday to engage Iran directly over concerns about its growing influence in the region and its disputed nuclear program... The push to engage Tehran seems to be at least partly fueled by Arab frustration over Washington's failure to get Israel to back down on plans for more Jewish settlements on land the Palestinians want for a future state. It also suggests that Arab nations are increasingly less likely to align with the U.S. strategy on Iran if they feel they are getting nothing in return in Mideast peace efforts.

This comes courtesy of the AP's Khaled al-Deeb. Because that's why they're doing it. It has nothing to do with how Iran is steadily growing more powerful in the region, forcing millennial-old antagonists like Turkey into their orbit and Finlandizing Arab states one by one. It's that Israelis are building supermarkets in the West Bank and condos in East Jerusalem. Obviously.

The real question is whether it was an editor or al-Deeb himself who inserted the weasel phrase "at least partly" into the copy. Smart money's on the editor, who couldn't really cut out the entire analysis section but also couldn't get over how transparent and stupid the stunt was.

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The Ongoing Tragedy of Gilad Shalit

P. David Hornik
Frontpagemag.com
1 April '10

This year for the Passover Seder some Israeli families left a symbolic empty chair for Gilad Shalit, the soldier who was abducted by Hamas on June 25, 2006, and remains in captivity today. Nineteen years old at the time, he is described as “well-mannered, quiet and introverted”—an account that fits the clips of him that have been shown, in some periods with high regularity, on Israeli TV since his kidnapping.

Apparently both the Olmert and Netanyahu governments have judged that there is no military option for rescuing Shalit even though he’s located, so to speak, next door to Israel in Gaza. The Israeli defense establishment either doesn’t know more precisely where he is, or does know but regards the spot, and his situation—heavily guarded? surrounded by explosives?—as infeasible for a rescue attempt.

Somewhat surprisingly, about half a year ago the Netanyahu government was involved in negotiations with Hamas for Shalit’s release in return for a draconian number of terrorists, generally reported as about a thousand. It still wasn’t enough for Hamas and the negotiations broke down. Before they did Hamas released a coerced video of Shalit, made on September 14, 2009, in which he addressed his family members and spoke of his desire for freedom. In a segment this week on Israel’s Channel 2 news, Shalit’s parents said they had heard nothing of him since then, and possibly no one else in Israel has either.

As Shalit’s captivity approaches four years, the cruelty of what is being inflicted on him and his family—even if completely to be expected from a group like Hamas—is limitless. In stark contravention of international law, even the International Red Cross has not been allowed to visit him. Although Hamas has practical aims—coercing a higher price out of Israel, pressuring its government and its society more generally—the cruelty is also an expression of sheer hatred, a phenomenon in itself.

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The decline of the West

UK’s move against Israel fits into the European trend of appeasing Islam.


Zvi Mazel
Op-Ed/JPost
01 April '10

Osama bin Laden must be laughing his head off while plotting his next action against Europe in his dusty cave somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once again Great Britain has demonstrated what a staunch ally it can be. One can trust the West; democracy is good for terrorists. It views terror as an ordinary offense against society and deals with it accordingly. Never mind that Bin Laden, Khaled Mashaal, Hassan Nasrallah, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the like have basically declared war on Western society and its values, and are making a concerted effort to achieve their aim. First on their list is Israel.

This is not a conventional war but something far more insidious and dangerous. Terrorists hide among civilians to target civilians. This is a gross violation of international law and all the conventions dealing with the rules of engagement should be addressed as such, with Western nations banding together to fight this modern scourge. They have to search and neutralize terrorists.

Like the US, England sends its very own secret service people to search out and kill terrorists wherever they are – from Ireland to Gibraltar to Afghanistan. Of course, they have their pick of Commonwealth passports. But let a master terrorist, a man who has killed, a man who has been masterminding the steady flow of arms into Gaza, the arms used against Israeli citizens, die in suspicious circumstances and all fingers are pointed at the assumed culprit – Israel.

GREAT BRITAIN, a country which has made so many Muslim arch-murderers welcome (Abu Hamza al-Masri, Abu Qatada who was considered Bin Laden’s representative in Europe, to name just two), granting them political asylum on the grounds they would be put to death in their own countries because of their crimes there; Great Britain where the disciples of these murderers launched deadly attacks against British civilians in 2005, decided that now was the time to make a stand.

By expelling an Israeli diplomat it would show the world that it would not let an alleged misuse of its passports go unpunished.

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When Ben-Gurion said no to JFK

The "don’t ask, don’t tell" compromise served both Israel and the US well.


Gerald Steinberg
Op-Ed/JPost
28 March '10

It’s official – there is a major crisis in relations between Jerusalem and Washington. This is not an emotional response or passing tiff over the timing of Jerusalem building announcements, but a full-blown dispute on issues effecting vital Israeli and American interests. And although the personalities of Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu may influence the conflict at the margins, the real clash is over policies and goals.

In these situations, both the president and the prime minister are aware of the huge asymmetry in the relationship. America is Israel’s only reliable ally, and while there is some reciprocity through military technology and anti-terror intelligence, there is no balance. No other country – certainly not any European one – provides the sophisticated and costly weapons platforms needed to protect Israeli lives. As a result, the White House holds most of the cards, particularly with a majority in Congress (as is the case now).

But history shows that some issues are so critical that even the president of the United States cannot force Israel’s hand. Important examples include Menachem Begin’s rejection of Jimmy Carter’s demand for an indefinite settlement freeze in the 1978 Camp David summit, and Ariel Sharon’s refusal to accept George W. Bush’s demand to end anti-terror operations in March 2002, following the Passover attacks, including the Park Hotel. The sharpest example took place almost 50 years ago, when John F. Kennedy demanded that David Ben-Gurion end Israel’s nuclear deterrent program, deemed necessary to ensure Jewish survival in a very hostile world.

THE CLASH began in 1960, when the outgoing Eisenhower administration sought an explanation for the mysterious construction near Dimona. It was told that this top-secret activity in the middle of the desert was a harmless textile plant, and no, it could not come and visit. Classified spy photos were then published on the front page of The New York Times (yes, the CIA spied on the Jewish state, with or without forged passports).

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Israel: Obama misses the point, deliberately

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Orange County Register
31 March '10

Why is President Obama so obviously humiliating Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu? Why is Secretary of State Clinton negating everything she said when she represented New York state and piling on the Jewish state?

They want Benjamin Netanyahu out. Specifically, they want him to feel such pressure that he dumps his right-wing coalition partners and forms a new government with the center-left party Kadima headed by former Prime Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni, who thinks nothing of trading land for peace, no matter how flawed the peace might be, will then hold Netanyahu's government hostage and force it to bend to the will of Washington and sign a deal with the Palestinians that cedes them land in return for a handful of vague vapors and promises none of which will be kept.

On March 3, Livni said in a Knesset debate that since Netanyahu took control, "Israel has become a pariah country in the world." She is trying to use Obama's and Clinton's rejection of Netanyahu's course to force her way into the government. And Obama and Clinton are intent on helping her do so by publicly humiliating Netanyahu.
But Netanyahu insists that he'd be happy to negotiate a peace accord. But, as he told me last year, "I just don't have a peace partner with whom to negotiate."

The Palestinians are expert at playing "good cop/bad cop" with Israel. The good cop – the Palestinian Authority – wants to negotiate a peace deal and insists on signs of Israeli good faith to do so. Meanwhile, the bad cop – Hamas – fires missiles at Israel from Gaza, land Israel ceded to the Palestinians to promote the peace process earlier in the decade.

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Encouraging Palestinian Rejectionism

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
01 April '10

How’s Obama’s Jerusalem gambit working out? (By the way, note to White House: don’t assail Israel by concocting an international incident centered on Jerusalem, the most emotional symbol of the Jewish people, in the weeks before Pesach — it gets even liberal Jews very riled up.) Well, as anyone who has been following Palestinian rejectionism and victimology for the past few decades anticipated (no, this doesn’t include the Obami), the Palestinians now perceive an opportunity to extract even more concessions from Israel and to gin up the violence:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction on Wednesday called for escalating the “popular struggle” against the security barrier and the settlements in the West Bank. … Veteran members of the Fatah Central Committee, including Nabil Shaath, Mahmoud al-Aloul, Muhammad Dahlan, Hussein al-Sheikh and Jibril Rajoub, said that the decision to escalate popular protests against the security fence and settlements was part of the faction’s political platform

They said the Sixth General Assembly of Fatah, which met last year in Bethlehem for the first time in over 20 years, had endorsed “popular resistance” as a means of confronting Israel’s measures in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

By seizing upon and escalating an issue on which no Israeli government could relent, the Obami have made clear that the “game” here is not compromise or resolution but rather high-pressure tactics directed against the Israeli government.

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Woe will be a divided Jerusalem

David M. Weinberg
Op-Ed/JPost
01 April '10

The upshot of last week’s Obama-Netanyahu confrontation is that the White House wants to move Israel rapidly towards a division of Jerusalem.

However, the widely held presumption that splitting Jerusalem will lead to prosperity for the city and to peace for Jews and Arabs is an egregious error. Partitioning Jerusalem will destroy the city. It will die, in every way – culturally, religiously, economically and more. And politically, the shearing of Jerusalem into Arab and Jewish sovereignties will turn it into the bull’s eye of Mideast battle – a city that will make Belfast at its worst look like paradise.

The main reason for this is that any section of the city handed over to Arab rule will immediately become ground zero for the fierce war being waged within the Arab world over Islamic lifestyle, ideology and legitimacy.

Just who is going to rule in Arab eastern Jerusalem? Will it be the declining secular Palestinian national movement (whose sway in the West Bank is tentative at best), or the radical Islamist Hamas (which openly seeks Israel’s destruction), or the annihilationist al-Qaida affiliated forces (who are growing in strength in the territories), or the increasingly radical and violent Israeli Arab Islamic movement (which has been the main force behind recent unrest on the Temple Mount), or the Jordanians (who have a superior claim to Arab leadership in Jerusalem under the 1994 peace treaty with Israel), or the Moroccans (who head the Arab League’s Supreme Jerusalem Committee), or the Saudis (who see themselves as the true custodians of Islamic holy sites)?

EACH OF these forces will seek to prove its supremacy and bolster its legitimacy in the Islamic world through control of Arab Jerusalem and aggression against what remains of Jewish Jerusalem. What better way to prove one’s loyalty to the Islamic cause than to attack the rump Israeli presence in the city? And with bases of operations to work from in the eastern half of the city (whose neighborhoods will no longer be under Israeli security control) – locations that are bare meters away from Israeli homes and government and commercial centers – such terrorism will be oh, so very easy, so irresistibly tantalizing.

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Power plays between friends in Beirut

Michael Young
Daily Star (Beirut)
01 April '10

(As we were sitting on the border somewhat earlier today, my thoughts were directed northward. Obama by far, is still the novice in the neighborhood. Y.)

No one could fail to notice that it was a Syrian spokesperson, Wi’am Wahhab, who spilled the beans recently about Hizbullah members being called in for questioning by investigators working on behalf of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. It was also Wahhab alone who mentioned the possibility of a link between the late Imad Mughniyeh and the Hariri assassination. This has raised interesting questions about what Syria is trying to achieve.

Of course, Wahhab’s professed purpose was to warn against what an accusation directed against Hizbullah might mean for Lebanon’s stability. This has been a recurrent theme sounded by the Syrians and their allies in recent years. However, party officials must also have suspected that Wahhab’s comments, by providing information no one else had, threw the light, uncomfortably, on Hizbullah to avoid it falling elsewhere.

Beyond the tribunal, there are other dynamics at play specifically related to the Syria-Hizbullah relationship. In its effort to reassert its hegemony in Lebanon, Damascus has not only sought to wear down its one-time adversaries in March 14; it also seems to be looking for ways to tighten its control over its more autonomous allies, above all Hizbullah.

It’s not difficult to grasp why. In the five years after Syrian soldiers left Lebanon in April 2005, the party became the pre-eminent defender of Syria’s interests in Lebanon. With no soldiers on the ground the regime of President Bashar Assad had to watch as Iran’s sway over events in Beirut increased, because although Hizbullah remained close to Syria, there was never any question that it was, above all, an Iranian venture.

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The Palestinians: Why Negotiate? The US Will Extract Concessions For You

Mark Sillverberg
Hudson New York
01 April '10

When Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post attacks Obama’s outrage over the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee’s decision to approve the construction of 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo (a post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhood) as “ideological - and vindictive,” you know that Obama has made a serious political blunder.

The administration has apparently decided to provoke a diplomatic crisis with Israel over a construction project that was plainly in keeping with past U.S.-Israeli undertakings concerning East Jerusalem.

Israel’s official position for the last forty years has been that East Jerusalem’s status will not be negotiable in any future land-swap agreement with the Palestinians.

This policy, however distasteful it may be to the Obama Administration, did not prevent the conclusion of peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, nor did it preclude the Palestinians from negotiating with Israel for more than fifteen years after the Oslo Accords of 1993. Now, suddenly, it has become a major issue with this administration, and an impediment to world peace.

Apparently, a zoning dispute in Israel’s capital city is more important than addressing the nuclear threat posed by Iran.

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An Unusual Alignment of Interests

Michael J. Totten
Contentions/Commentary
31 March '10

More than any other Arab head of state in the world, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has mastered the art of telling listeners what they want to hear.

Last week, he said his country is fully committed to peace in the Middle East, though he worries the Israel government isn’t. He knows this is what bien pensants in the West like to believe. He knows they find it refreshing that he can talk like a liberal while Iran’s Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten apocalypse.

He also knows how to talk like the right kind of hardliner. Yesterday, he condemned the double suicide-bombing in Moscow’s underground metro and urged the international community to “fight terror around the globe.”

It’s no wonder, then, that some in Washington, Paris, and even Jerusalem think he’s a man they can do business with. All they have to do is convince him that his alliance with Iran is counterproductive, that it runs contrary to his self-evident interests and public pronouncements.

Syria, though, is the most aggressive state sponsor of terrorism in the world after Iran. Assad doesn’t even try to keep up the pretense when he isn’t preening before peace processors. Last week, he said Israel only understands force — a statement perfectly in line with his behavior. And just two days ago, he and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi urged the Palestinian Authority to scrap negotiations with Israel and return to its terrorist roots.

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'The cycle of violence between Jews and Egyptians continues': How CNN might have reported the Passover story

Stephanie Gutmann
Telegraph UK
29 March '10

Here’s how the Passover story would have been reported, back in the day, by CNN or the New York Times (courtesy Daniel P. Waxman of Mideasttruth.com):

The cycle of violence between the Jews & the Egyptians continues with no end in sight in Egypt. After eight previous plagues that have destroyed the Egyptian infrastructure and disrupted the lives of ordinary Egyptian citizens, the Jews launched a new offensive this week in the form of the plague of darkness.
Western journalists were particularly enraged by this plague. “It is simply impossible to report when you can’t see an inch in front of you,”complained a frustrated Andrea Koppel of CNN. “I have heard from my reliable Egyptian contacts that in the midst of the blanket of blackness, the Jews were annihilating thousands of Egyptians. Their word is solid enough evidence for me.”

While the Jews contend that the plagues are justified given the harsh slavery imposed upon them by the Egyptians, Pharaoh, the Egyptian leader, rebuts this claim. “If only the plagues would let up, there would be no slavery. We just want to live plague-free. It is the right of every society.”

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High-Ranking U.S. Official: Enemies? Islamists? Revolutionaries? We Don't See Anyone Like That!

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
31 March '10

What could one sentence spoken by a high-ranking U.S. official prompt a brilliant pro-Western Arab intellectual to go ballistic and say the following:

“How could America be governed and represented by such blazing idiocy? How is that possible? It's a parallel universe, I'm convinced. The biggest threat, I maintain, to global security is not terrorism. It's stupidity.”

Well, this one. At his confirmation hearing, Robert Ford, ambassador-designate to Syria said:

"I do not see how instability in the region serves Syrian interests."

So here is Syria, a radical, anti-American regime allied with Iran, a major sponsor of terrorism, and Ford says that this government has no interest in stirring up instability and cannot receive any benefit from doing so? Of course, Ford rightfully does not want to criticize Syria before arriving there as U.S. ambassador. OK, understood.

But does he have to indicate such an appalling view in advance? Doesn't this throw away all U.S. leverage over Syria in advance? I can tell you that this is precisely the way Syrian leaders are portraying American policy nowadays. Of course, Ford is saying this because it reflects the thinking of this administration and the president.

Incidentally, I recently saw a non-published communication from an international affairs' expert that criticized someone else for having the old-fashioned view that the point of foreign policy is to reward friends and punish enemies. As I have said before even the most basic principles of diplomacy have been forgotten nowadays in large sections of academia, the media, and--much more dangerous--policymaking circles.

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The Full Measure of Joe Biden's Hypocrisy on Jerusalem

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
31 March '10

Not that long ago, Joseph Robinette Biden was supposedly gravely insulted by Israel announcing that potential housing to be built in Jerusalem had passed one stage of a multi-stage approval process. Biden was so insulted by this dastardly act that he stood up the Prime Minister of Israel for 90 minutes and that he and various Obama Administration officials proceeded to lambaste Israel for "insulting" Biden.

Hillary Clinton proclaimed; "it was not only an insult to Biden, but an insult to the United States." "There was an affront, it was an insult", huffed Senior Obama advisor David Axelrod. Hundreds of newspapers immediately penned editorials denouncing Israel's grave insult. The essence of it was that Israel had insulted Biden by laying claim to Jerusalem during his visit.

There's just one problem with this. In 1995 Biden himself served as a co-sponsor of S. 1322, known as the Jerusalem Embassy Act. (Additional Senate co-sponsors included such obscure legislators as John McCain, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, Jesse Helms, John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, Strom Thurmond and Bob Dole.) Let's look at the text of the Jerusalem Embassy Act now.

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The Ruins of Byblos

Joel B. Pollak
American Thinker
31 March '10

Imagine, for a moment, that Iran and Syria had begun feuding publicly over the fate of the ruins in Byblos, Lebanon. Imagine that some Syrian-backed party in the Lebanese government had begun restoring the buildings of the early Islamic period, leaving evidence of Persian rule for a time of greater budgets and ambitions. Imagine, then, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had taken to the airwaves to denounce the Syrian insult.

What would we think, as outsiders with a vested interest in weakening Syria's alliance with Iran? We would, of course, seize the moment. We might take the opportunity to topple the brutal Syrian regime -- or, more likely, offer inducements to dictator Bashar al-Assad to encourage him to open his country to the Western world. Either way, we would see a superficial spat over a few buildings as evidence of a deeper, emerging divide.

Imagine further that a prominent Syrian figure on the international stage -- or someone of Syrian descent, like Syrian-American novelist Mona Simpson, for argument's sake -- had stepped forward to lead a U.N. fact-finding mission on Syria, which aimed to document "brutal violations of human rights and suppression of democracy." Barred from entry by the regime, the mission would still interview dissident exiles and international NGOs.

Now imagine that in the wake of the lengthy, strident report produced by Simpson and approved by the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Human Rights Council had passed five resolutions condemning Syria and established a new U.N. body to monitor compliance with the Simpson report. Would we not feel a sense of momentum, an expectation that the regime would soon crack? Would we not try to ratchet the pressure ever higher?

That is exactly what Israel's enemies feel at the moment, watching President Barack Obama join international condemnation of Israel over a housing project in Jerusalem, watching a prominent Jewish intellectual like Richard Goldstone accuse Israel of crimes against humanity, watching the U.N. Human Rights Council devote the bulk of its efforts to attacking Israel's right to defend itself from genocidal terrorist groups on its borders.

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It’s tough to be Russian

Fresnozionism.org
30 March '10

Rob Vincent has a unique, very focused view of things. I hope you’ll enjoy this guest post.

By Rob Vincent

What follows below is not in any way meant to make light of the horrible suffering recently inflicted on Russian civilians in Moscow earlier this week.

However, given the experience of at least one country near and dear to my heart that has suffered to a far greater degree from Islamist terrorism over the past several decades, a country that has had a great deal of time to consider this matter and which has received voluminous advice and counsel from abroad on this topic, I would offer the following modest proposal to our friends in Russia:

They need to give independence to Chechnya.

Not that there’s a lot of international pressure on them to do so. Where is the ‘Chechen Authority observers seat’ in the UN? Where are all the college protests, the boycotts, the divestment campaigns over the brutal Russian occupation of Chechnya (and it really has been pretty brutal, incalculably worse than anything Israel has ever done)? Where are all the UN resolutions condemning Russia? Has the UN Secretary General made a tour of Chechnya lately? I kind of doubt it. Why isn’t the Obama administration threatening some kind of sanction or another against Russia, standing up to them, over the poor oppressed Chechnyans?

But why not? I mean, how about — dare I say it? — land for peace?

A perfectly reasonable request, I submit. If it is good enough for tiny Israel, I’m sure Russia — which has more land to spare than anyone — could set the example. After all, they are a member of the Quartet that presumes to tell the Israelis what they must do for peace, aren’t they?

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Take your money back

Avi Trengo
Opinion/Ynet
31 March '10

Senior New York Times commentator Tom Friedman is not an anti-Semite and will never be one. He wholeheartedly believes that he is objective and genuinely wishes to help Israel. Yet even a real friend like him is inspired by the “commander-in-chief’s spirit” these days.

In February 2002 I reviewed his peace initiative with astonishment: Full Arab world recognition of Israel’s right to exist in exchange for a full withdrawal to the 1967 borders. As an Israeli leftist, I lauded the fact that a senior commentator realized the problem is not merely Israeli-Palestinian, but rather, has to do with the Arab world’s unwillingness to accept any sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East.

February 17th, 2002 is a day I will never forget: It was during the Intifada, with the worse still ahead of us. I participated in an intimate Peace Now demonstration as an active member. For more than 30 years, I shared Friedman’s view that a return to the 1967 borders is a magical solution. Yet during the rally, we were informed that a suicide bomber killed two children at a pizza parlor. The protestors observed a moment of silence, before the next speaker, a Palestinian “moderate,” took the stage. His speech focused solely on accusing Israel while going back to the Nakba and early days of Zionism. The terror attack at the pizza parlor in Karnei Shomron was not mentioned at all. I left the rally with a sense of disgust.

The next day, I read in the New York Times that the Saudi ruler, who was preoccupied at the time with a PR effort after “fine Saudi boys” carried out the September 11 attacks, adopted the Friedman initiative and turned into the “Saudi peace plan.” Friedman must have noticed that the Saudis added a condition that no Israeli could accept: The immigration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (“1948 refugees”) to Israel, thereby amending its demographic character. Did Friedman fail to understand back then already that this is a symptom of the problem: The Muslim world’s unwillingness to accept Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East?

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