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ISRANET DAILY BRIEFING ARCHIVE Volume VIII, No. 1,916 • Friday, August 29, 2008
Due to Labour Day (Canada), the next Daily Isranet Briefing will be issued on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008. THE JEWS & “EL LOCO” CHAVEZ THE YIDDISH DICTIONARY OF FOOLS …Yiddish-Yinglish Dictionary of Fools Bulvan: An ox, with no class. He’ll move your house on his back—without asking. Chaim Yankel: A mister nobody. His favorite color is beige. Chaleria: A shrew. If her pastrami’s fatty, she’ll make a federal case. Chazzer: A pig: He’ll take home the cheap wine he brought you for Passover. Draycup: She one not only forgot her address, she’s in the wrong city. Eingeshparht: He’s got a head like a rock. Gantseh Makher: He made a few bucks selling whoopie cushions, so suddenly he’s Trump. Synonym: K’nocker Gonif: Unscrupulous, a thief. His partner’s sent out an APB. Grubber yung: Crude. A big mouth who has dirt (from grabbing) under his fingernails. Klutz: Clumsy. She falls over her own sneakers- fastened with Velco. Kvetch: A whiner. The food’s salty, the place is chilly, eating out -who needs it? Luftmensch: A dreamer—who never wakes up. He could paint a masterpiece, if only he had an easel—and knew how. Meshugener: A loony. Whether he thinks his underwear is after him or barrels over Niagra Falls, he’s one letter short of an M&M. Moishe Kapoyr: Today he’d be called “oppositional.” The family votes to hold the reunion in Vegas. He votes for Vilna. Nar: He left his law practice to become a clown. Nayfish: A doormat. When he’s robbed, he apologizes for being short on cash. Nebekh: A hapless unfortunate. He gets stepped on by accident a lot. Nuchshlepper: A hanger-on. She shleps the 200 pound camping gear for the group. Nudnik: A persistent bore. She doesn’t stop with the talking, the asking, the annoying till you want to staple his lips together. Nudzh: A pesty badgerer. She tells you twelve times to check the locks. Unlike the nudnik, it could be an occasional occurrence. Ongeblussen: A self-involved blowhard. If his last name is Moses, he thinks the Bible gave him a mention. Oysvorf: Unpopular outcast. Think David Duke at a Hadassah meeting. Paskudnyak: A revolting, corrupt person. For him, there would be a very short funeral. Shikker: A drunk. She has a little chaser with her Cheerios. Shlemiel: A pathetic, clumsy loser. He drives over—through your living room. Shlimazel: An unlucky loser. He’s the one the shlemiel was visiting. Shlump: Unkempt, saggy. She shleps, stooped, with her hair in strings. Shmeggege: And idiotic doofus. Short of a “meshuganah,” he’s sure he’ll make a killing with his musical toilet seat ... and acts like a makher about it. Shmendrik: Nincompoop. A fraternal twin to a shlemiel, he’s thinner and weaker. Shnook: A likeable patsy. You could sell him a time-share in Area 51, and he’ll pay top dollar—for vacationing on an historical site. Shnorror: A beggar. He’s forever borrowing, taking advantage. Bad for a potluck party.
Trombenik: A lazy braggart. Not only does he blow his own horn, he doesn’t own one. Yuchna: A loud-mouthed, boorish female. In Loehmann’s dressing room she’ll yell “It would fit if you lost a few pounds!” Yutz: Socially inept. He takes you to a restaurant with a clown face and spends the evening discussing his train collection. Zshlub: Lazy slob. He shows up with schmutz on his untucked shirt. To Archie Bunker, “meathead” looked like a zshlub when he met him—although he’d never say it. (Marnie Winston-Macauley is the author of the award-winning A Little Joy, A Little Oy 2008 calendar.) HUGO
CHÁVEZ’S JEWISH PROBLEM …Venezuela’s Jewish community, amounting to less than 1 percent of the country’s total population of 26 million, is among the oldest in South America, dating back to the early 19th century.…Today, the majority of the country’s Jewish population is descended from an influx of European and North African immigrants who arrived during the years surrounding World War II. Most reside in the capital city of Caracas, comprising a tightly knit community made up of roughly equal numbers from Ashkenazi and Sephardi countries of origin.… Since Chávez took the oath of office at the beginning of 1999, there has been an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism throughout Venezuela. Government-owned media outlets have published anti-Semitic tracts with increasing frequency. Pro-Chávez groups have publicly disseminated copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century czarist forgery outlining an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world. Prominent Jewish figures have been publicly denounced for supposed disloyalty to the “Bolívarian” cause, and “Semitic banks” have been accused of plotting against the regime. Citing suspicions of such plots, Chávez’s government has gone so far as to stage raids on Jewish elementary schools and other places of meeting. The anti-Zionism expressed by the government is steadily spilling over into street-level anti-Semitism, in which synagogues are vandalized with a frequency and viciousness never before seen in the country. The details are arresting.
Not only has Chávez repeatedly expressed support for Hizballah in general, but (according to Venezuelan newspapers) he paid $1 million to print posters of himself with Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah to be displayed at a Hizballah rally in Beirut. Insofar as there is a rationale behind any of this, it would seem to form a part of Chávez’s general view of the world. According to that view, the United States has coopted both Europe and Israel into a transnational enterprise whose purpose is to exploit and impoverish the world’s less developed but resource-rich countries.…In a July 2006 interview with the Arab TV network al-Jazeera, Chávez elaborated…: “The Secretary of State has said that that [the U.S.] will change the map of the Middle East. This plan was made in advance and in great detail in the Pentagon, except that Israel is the executor.…They want to transform the map of the Middle East in order to guarantee the dominance and control of the largest reserves of oil and energy in the world.” As an alleged oppressor of the Palestinian Arabs, Israel has its own place of special infamy in Chávez’s world view.…[D]uring a 2005 speech marking Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, Chávez likened the plight of Venezuela’s Indians to that of Palestinians. Reminding his listeners of how their ancestors had been “murdered in their land” by “governments, economic sectors, and great land estates,” he thundered: “You were expelled from your homeland, like the heroic Palestinian people.” All of these elements seem entirely derivative of Marxist-Leninist theorizing, with a strong admixture of post-colonialism à la Franz Fanon and Fidel Castro. But Chávez is not just another Latin American leftist on the Castro model. While the Cuban dictator may be his most important political influence, his greatest intellectual debt is to the Argentinian writer and thinker Norberto Ceresole: a man not of the Left but of the populist Right, a Holocaust denier, and a sworn enemy of Israel and the Jews.… The ingeniousness of Ceserole’s doctrine, as filtered through the sensibility of Hugo Chávez, resides in its blending of Marxist economics with two venerable anti-Semitic traditions. The first, still powerful in South America, derives from Catholic teachings about the historic Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. The second, encapsulated most notoriously in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has flourished in both rightist and leftist variations throughout modern European history, resurfacing in our own time in the fulminations of extreme anti-Zionists. Chávez drew on both traditions in an address he delivered on Christmas Eve in 2004. Here he spoke ominously of certain “minorities, the descendants of those who crucified Christ,” who had “taken possession of the riches of the world.” But there was an added element at play in this passage, which has to be quoted in full to be properly appreciated:
Like most of its South American neighbors, Venezuela is a nation of economic extremes. There are a small number of extraordinarily well-to-do families—the “white oligarchs”—and an enormously large population of very poor people, partly or wholly native-American, with few prospects of economic advancement [and] Chávez has been engaged in a policy of forcible redistribution, nationalizing industries and large farms and turning their proceeds over to social programs aimed ostensibly at ameliorating the condition of the poor…. [H]owever, this [policy] has been a grotesque failure.… And so the inequities persist, and with them the need to identify scapegoats that can divert attention from Chávez’s culpability…. One-third of Venezuela’s Jews have fled the country by now, and those who remain are in a state ranging from discomfiture to terror. [S]ome wealthier Jews say that the [reason they stay] is economic…and offers by the Israeli government to ease the process of aliyah have so far met with few takers.… History suggests that once anti-Semitism becomes an instrument of state policy, the possibility of violence can never be discounted. For centuries, moreover, anti-Semitism has waxed and waned with fluctuating business cycles. With both the ailing economy and Chávez’s social programs dependent almost entirely on oil revenues, a drop in prices could trigger widespread animosity against the “Semitic banks” that members of Chávez’s party have repeatedly denounced for every passing ill. A major event like a military strike on Iran by the United States or Israel might similarly serve as justification for seizing the assets of Venezuela’s Jewry. In the meantime, as the numbers dwindle, and many of the richest depart, it is becoming increasingly difficult to care for the Jewish poor, who make up a full 25 percent of the community. Caught in a vise between an all too realistic fear and a possibly illusory hope, one of South America’s most productive and peaceful minorities awaits the future in grim expectancy. WJC
EMBRACES AN ANTI-SEMITE World Jewish Congress officials allowed themselves to get carried away when they hailed a recent meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as having been “successful” and proclaimed that he had joined the global struggle against anti-Semitism.… The paeans of praise directed towards Chavez [for his condemnation of anti-Semitism] by [WJC secretary-general Michael] Schneider and his colleagues ignore the fact that this wretched hooligan has achieved the notoriety of being the most loathsome contemporary anti-Semitic head of state outside the Muslim world. This is the man who in a Christmas speech alleged that “the descendants of those who crucified Christ control the world’s wealth.” Chavez has also achieved international notoriety as one of Ahmadinejad’s closest allies. Both tyrants extol one another’s virtues and radiate hatred against the US and Israel. Chavez describes Ahmadinejad as “a fighter for just causes,” a “brother” and a “revolutionary.” Last year the Iranian president awarded Chavez Iran’s highest honor, the Islamic Republic Medal. Chavez boasts of his close ties with President Bashar Assad of Syria. At a joint press conference with Assad, Chavez said “We know how Israel was born. It is an annex of the North American empire in the Middle East. Israel is the cause of the conflict in the region. This territory 6,000 years ago belonged to the Canaanites and the Philistines. These lands belong to the Palestinians.” The Venezuelan president has also enthusiastically identified himself with Hizbullah and was widely displayed together with its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, in posters throughout Lebanon stating that “Israel needs to be judged for its crimes.” He also provides a haven in Venezuela for Hizbullah terrorists. During the Second Lebanon War, Chavez recalled the Venezuelan ambassador to Israel in response to what he described as a “new Holocaust” comparable to Hitler’s actions against the Jews being perpetrated with “gringo” planes provided by the US. Chavez also intimidated the 12,000 members of the Venezuelan Jewish community, 25 percent of whom have emigrated since he assumed power. His government sanctioned vicious anti-Semitic media campaigns and a proliferation of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic propaganda and graffiti at all levels. As recently as six months ago, Chavez authorized a police raid on the Caracas Club Hebraica on the spurious grounds that illegal weapons were being stored there. The synagogue has also been subject to repeated vandalism.… It is therefore mind-boggling that Schneider could blithely inform the media that “there may have been some differences on some issues such as Iran and also the Middle East,” but after Chavez had assured him “that he was certainly not an anti-Semite,” the meeting was a “success.” In effect, certain World Jewish Congress leaders are legitimizing the man who maintains warm relationships with Holocaust deniers and demonizers of Israel, enshrining him with a mantle of respectability in the struggle against anti-Semitism, when he merely paid lip service to the cause by saying that he “opposed anti-Semitism.”… To top off this Alice in Wonderland diplomacy, Chavez is also reported to have agreed to assist the WJC in its interfaith dialogue activities with Christians and Muslims. Last month, WJC representatives at King Abdullah’s interfaith conference in Madrid displayed their impotence by failing to raise the issue of Saudi anti-Semitism. But if their intention is to now coopt this loathsome tyrant to promote interfaith relations, they would be forfeiting any semblance of Jewish dignity and their groveling would have descended to an all-time low.… [T]he WJC leaders blundered in failing to make explicit representations concerning the global anti-Semitic and anti-Israel policies conducted by the Venezuelan regime. They were also premature in dispensing a clean bill of health to one of the key personalities leading the international anti-Jewish campaign. Worse, their failure to even relate to these issues in subsequent media interviews may transform this encounter into an utterly counterproductive exercise. In recent years, our greatest challenge has been to demonstrate that demonization and delegitimization of Israel is simply a new version of anti-Semitism—substituting hatred of the Jew as an individual with hatred of the Jewish state. Now we have the WJC secretary-general and some of his colleagues lauding Chavez and bestowing upon him the dubious distinction of being the first leader openly embracing Iranian Holocaust deniers and shamelessly indulging in demonization of Israel to be treated with deference and regarded as an ally by a body purporting to represent world Jewry. If any reputable non-Jewish organization or government behaved in such a manner, we Jews would be the first to protest. HUGO’S
ARMS SPREE While Colombia has gone great guns in quashing the narcoterrorist FARC insurgency here—including a daring July hostage-rescue raid—trouble is still brewing right next door in Venezuela. Just this week, Latin America’s troublemaker-in-chief, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, threatened the recently reactivated US Fourth Fleet with two squadrons of newly arrived Russian Su-30 fighter planes, part of a $3 billion arms package he bought in 2006.… Clearly not satisfied with the most recent arms delivery, Chavez isn’t wasting a minuto building the region’s most powerful military in a bid for hegemony, if his late-July visit to Moscow is any sign. Post-summit reports indicate there might be another $1 billion or so in advanced Russian Tor M-1 air defense systems, T-90 battle tanks and Kilo-class diesel submarines in the pipeline. But that’s only the tip of the arms iceberg: The Russian press is reporting that arms sales to Venezuela over the next 10 years may top another $5 billion, including heavy-lift air transport, air-air refueling tankers (for the fighters) and long-range air-defense systems. Naturally, Chavez insists the buildup is necessary to defend against the US invasion that he’s been saying is just around the corner for at least several years now. Russia is also working with Venezuela on energy projects as the Kremlin looks to gain control over an increasing share of global oil production. This, of course, could lead to a squeeze on the US market, which gets 10 to 15 percent of its oil from Venezuela. In addition to giving the Russians preferential treatment to explore Venezuela’s oil-rich Orinoco Belt, Caracas is also collaborating with Moscow to develop an OPEC-like, Russian-led natural-gas cartel. Venezuela-Iran relations are also troubling. Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are chummy—and relish the idea of giving US policymakers heartburn when they think of the two states cooperating on missiles or nukes. There are allegations of Venezuelan-Hezbollah ties, too, with Israel insisting that Venezuela has become the largest base for the Iran-backed terror group outside of the Middle East.
Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume VIII, No. 1,915 • Thursday, August 28, 2008
POST-ZIONISM & APARTHEID POST-ZIONISM’S FATAL FLAW In my understanding, the
concept “Post Zionism” is—at the ideological level—a
demand for democratization of the state—i. e. a call for a liberal
democratic state in the Western mode. This quote from one of the leaders of the post-Zionist school in Israeli academia is representative of the moral hypocrisy, intellectual shallowness and pompousness, and grossly misplaced self-righteousness that characterize the adherents of this self- contradictory philosophy. For it takes only the most elementary analytical skill to identify the glaring flaw in the logic of post–Zionist positions which—allegedly in the name of enlightened liberal values—call for the conversion of Israel from a “Jewish State” to a “state of all its citizens.” It requires no extraordinary intellect to grasp the fact that should such a change indeed take place, the resulting realities would in fact be the exact antithesis of the values invoked for making it. Indeed, it is not difficult to foresee the inevitable chain of events that such a move would trigger. First, the significance of a simple but far-reaching truth must be recognized: If Israel is indeed defined as a “Jewish state,” there is a valid rationale and a viable justification for the existence of an entire range of elements that characterize the conduct of national and public life in the country, such as: the Star of David on the Flag; the “Menora” candelabrum as the state emblem; the words of the national anthem that refer to the “yearning of the Jewish soul”; and the status of Hebrew as the dominant vehicle of communication between the citizens of the state. The same is true for a considerable body of “Judeo-centric” legislation such as the Law of Return granting any Jew immediate citizenship on immigrating to Israel. However, should Israel be re-defined as a “state of all its citizens,” there will be no valid rationale or viable justification for any of these features. As an inevitable consequence, there will neither be rhyme nor reason why any Jew (apart from those ultra-devout few who regard living in the Holy Land a religious command) would choose to live their life in a “non-Jewish Israel” rather than in any other “state of all its citizens” where the rigors of daily life are less demanding and less stressful. No Jew (apart from the handful of ultra-pious souls who believe in the divine sanctity of the Land of Israel) would insist on living their life in a country, where instead of the blue Star of David, the national flag displays stripes—whether vertical or horizontal—of different colors even if these include nostalgic tinges of blue and white. Continual erosion of
Jewish population There would be no mass “aliyah” from lands where Jews were oppressed and sought safe haven in the Jewish state. Obviously the extraordinary phenomenon of the huge inflow of Jewry from the former USSR, with is huge contribution to every aspect of life in the country, would be inconceivable if Israel became just another “state of all its citizens” on the fringes of a desert at the gateway to the Levant. Moreover, if Israel became a state of all its citizens, there would be little grounds for preventing the massive influx of migrants from neighboring lands from pouring into the country—whether to fulfill the “right of return” or merely to make a better living—since, initially, the chances of finding a more lucrative livelihood would still be higher here rather than there. Inevitably, these processes will bring about a continual erosion of the Jewish population. As the composition of the population in the land becomes similar to that in the other states of the region, there is no reason to suppose that the realities that prevails in it will not also become similar to those prevailing in those states—including the level of economic development, standard of living and lifestyle, status of women, nature of the regime, and the liberties it allows those living under it. It is difficult to imagine that even the post-Zionists, with their bias and selective view of the world, are unaware of the fact that that in the entire Arab world—from Casablanca to Kuwait—there is no semblance of any “liberal democratic state in the Western mode” for which they allegedly yearn with such passion. Indeed, in view of the stark contrast between their declared objectives and the nature of the realities that the endeavor to achieve that objective is likely to create; in light of manifest contradiction between their purported aspirations and the consequences likely to result from the pursuit of those aspirations, it is difficult to determine whether the post-Zionists are motivated by nastiness or naiveté; whether they are being mean-spirited or only feeble-minded. However, whatever the explanation may be, all those genuinely desirous of “liberal democratic state in the Western mode” in this neck of the woods must recognize a basic inescapable truth: If Israel is not Zionist, it will not be Jewish; if it is not Jewish it will not be democratic. THIS
IS APARTHEID? Two weeks ago the editor of the largest newspaper in South Africa, the Sunday Times, wrote an article saying that Israel applies apartheid to Palestinian Arabs. In this scandalous accusation, he joins Jimmy Carter and others who have defamed the Jewish state. The apartheid label is very dangerous. If it sticks, Israel’s ability to defend itself diplomatically and militarily will be severely weakened. International pressure on South Africa’s apartheid government eventually played a major role in ending its power. The apartheid label is calculated to break the resolve of the Israeli people, who are called upon to make terrible sacrifices for our Jewish state. Who wants to die for apartheid? As Jews, we must fight this kind of mass defamation of our people. Israel’s security and Jewish lives all over the world depends on it, as well as our historic God-given mission of being “a light unto the nations.” To say that Israel is an apartheid state is as wildly outrageous as the blood libels of Europe. To answer the editor of South Africa’s Sunday Times, I wrote an article which he kindly published in last week’s newspaper. Here follow its arguments: To accuse Israel of apartheid is to diminish the victims of the real apartheid—the men, women and children of South Africa, who suffered for centuries under arrogant, heartless colonialism, and then for decades under the brutal policies of racial superiority, oppression and separation inflicted by the National Party. If everything is apartheid, then nothing is apartheid. In the State of Israel all citizens—Jew and Arab alike—are equal before the law. Israel has none of the apartheid legislative machinery devised to discriminate against and to separate people. It has no Population Registration Act, no Group Areas Act, no Mixed Marriages and Immorality Act, no Separate Representation of Voters Act, no Separate Amenities Act, no pass laws or any other of the myriad apartheid laws. On the contrary: Israel is a vibrant liberal democracy which accords full political, civil and other human rights to all its people, including its one million-plus Arab citizens, many of whom hold positions of authority throughout the Jewish state—including that of cabinet minister, Knesset member and judge at every level of the judiciary, the Supreme Court included. All citizens vote on the same voters’ roll in regular, multiparty elections, and there are Arab parties and Arab members of other parties in the Knesset. Due to Israel’s proportional representation system, Arab voters, although a minority, have often been partners in various coalition governments and influenced major long-term decisions affecting the country. Arabs and Jews live and work together, share all public facilities, including, importantly, hospitals and schools, and also malls, buses, cinemas and parks. Israel protects religious freedom and has been very sensitive and respectful in its management of the holy sites of all religions, granting easy access to everyone. Arab Israelis, like all their compatriots, can express themselves and act freely as members of a transparent and open, democratic society, where criticism of the government in an aggressively free press is the norm. In fact, Israeli Arabs enjoy more freedom and rights than do any other Arabs in the Middle East, where autocratic governments suppress democracy and freedoms, such as freedom of expression and of association, including outlawing labor unions. Israel is the only truly free democracy in the Middle East. If there is apartheid in the Middle East, then it is the apartheid in Arab states against Jews, Christians and women, who are all denied the most basic human rights and treated as second-class citizens. Most Arab governments do not even allow Jews to visit, let alone live. In fact, more than 800,000 Jews have been expelled from Arab countries over the last five decades, where they lived peacefully for centuries, albeit with inferior status. In 1967, as a result of a defensive war thrust upon it, Israel captured the territories known today as the West Bank and Gaza. Since then the status of these territories and their occupants has been unclear. It is incorrect legally, factually and even morally to speak of an occupation, which implies there was once a Palestinian entity in these territories, and that this is now occupied by Israeli forces. Before 1967 the West Bank was controlled by Jordan, and Gaza by Egypt. We should not speak of the “occupied territories,” but more accurately of “disputed territories.” There has never been a Palestinian state in all of history. By contrast, the State of Israel is the third Jewish state on the same land, the first dating back 3,280 years to when Joshua led the Jewish people into the land of Israel. Furthermore, Israel has strong claims to the West Bank, which is part of the biblical Israel that the Jews have always lived in. One of the holiest sites of Judaism is there—Hebron, where the founding fathers and mothers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah, are buried. Apart from the city of Jerusalem, the ancient capital of the Jewish people from the times of King David, the West Bank and Gaza were never annexed, pending the resolution of their status. For decades Israel tried to negotiate with various parties to permanently resolve the future of the disputed territories, but is still in search of a genuine peace partner to represent the Palestinian Arabs. Yasser Arafat demonstrated his inability to relinquish his dream of destroying Israel when he rejected prime minister Ehud Barak’s incredibly generous offer at the Camp David talks in 2000—a rejection which even Prince Bandar, the official representative of Saudi Arabia at the talks, described as a crime. And now Hamas, which states in its founding constitution its aim of destroying Israel completely, is the democratically elected majority party of the Palestinian people.… Given Israel’s relatively small population, proportionately, such carnage in South Africa would mean more than 10,000 murdered and more than 80,000 injured. What would we South Africans do if so many of our fellow citizens were blown up by suicide bombers? Appreciate for the moment what this would mean in the context of the US, where the murder of about 3,000 people at the World Trade Center bombings led to the invasion of two countries. Proportionately, had the US sustained similar causalities to those suffered in Israel, almost 80,000 Americans would have been killed and about 600,000 injured. The trauma inflicted on the Israeli people from the relentless barrage unleashed by the Palestinian leadership, enjoying widespread support from its people, is indescribable. Israel erected a security fence to shield it from the attacks launched from the disputed territories across its internationally recognized borders. Every sovereign country is legally and morally entitled to erect a fence to defend its people from attacks launched from the outside. The fence has been remarkably successful and has reduced successful suicide bombings by up to 90 percent. Israel relies on the most fundamental moral and legal principle—the right to self-defense. Never before in recorded history has any nation endured such civilian casualties and responded with such restraint.… If there is an analogy to the South African situation, it is that Israel is like the African National Congress, which was forced into the armed struggle because it had no partner for peace. As soon as the National Party came around to wanting genuinely negotiations, the situation was resolved.… When the Arab world is ready to make peace, Israel will be there. Let us all pray to God that this happens soon so that the misery and suffering of all can be brought to an immediate end. (Warren Goldstein is chief rabbi of South Africa.) Volume VIII, No. 1,914 • Wednesday, August 27, 2008
CIJR CELEBRATES 20 YEARS—PART II LETTERS TO THE EDITOR I would like to commend you for the wonderful work that you do at CIJR. I have learnt a tremendous amount from the articles that are sent to me. It has truly been an education.…—Anne Klar, Toronto, ON, 2002 [I] receive your newsletter almost daily and can’t thank you enough for all the diligent work you and your team do. Your knowledge, thoroughness and witness to these times documents some of the most horrific things we do not hear about or have access to, presented in such a cogent manner. I use these Briefings to tell both my Jewish and non-Jewish friends about what is really happening in the Middle East and elsewhere.…—Evra Taylor, Montreal, QC, 2002 Are your Briefings sent to Editors at major U.S. newspapers and to U.S. & EU political leaders? If not, they should be. I read both the NY Times & Newsday…and the editorials in both papers show, too clearly, that the editors of these powerful papers do not “get” what has been happening in Israel and the Middle East; do not comprehend the threat of the Beilin-Rabbo Geneva Trojan Horse; and do not have a clue about the rising tide of antisemitism in the world—or choose to ignore it. Your posts might bring a few crucial rays of enlightenment to these media giants.—Dr. Charles Fishman, Farmingdale, New York, NY, 2003 I’m a 55 year old white, middle-class, protestant male living in central Illinois, USA. The rural high school I attended had a thousand kids, one of whom was Jewish. The world view I grew up with was not so much prejudiced as it was innocent, and certainly myopic. I read the Isranet Daily Briefing every single day. I am writing to say thank you for helping me be the informed world citizen I strive to be. I share your service with everyone I can. A sheynem dank.—Dane K. Henry, Decatur, Illinois, 2004 I read your pieces on e-mail without fail, finding them invariably both informative and inspirational. Since Israel is most important to me, there is no better such source for me. However, today’s issue was superlative, so I feel I must say so. Many thanks to Michael Oren as well. It has served as a shot in the arm of a most potent Zionist vaccine.—May Ladman, 2005 I wish to congratulate you for your very fine Canadian Institute for Jewish Research. It does much to keep Canadians informed about the real dangers to World Jewry generally and to Israel particularly.—Prof. Morris Givner, Halifax, NS, 2005 Thanks so much for keeping to send me these! Now after a month as Israel’s vice consul in San Francisco, I can tell you it’s very challenging!—Ishmael Khalidi, Deputy Consul General, Israeli Consulate in San Francisco, CA, 2006 Thank you so much for sending this article. I was on a Kindertransport from Vienna and I met this wonderful gentleman at one of our reunions.—Lisl Schick, writing in response to Isranet Briefing 1524 on Sir Nicholas Winton’s rescue of children from Nazi concentration camps, January, 2007 Your newsletters have been especially entertaining, prescient and satisfying lately. And I thank you.—Michael Michaels, VT, 2007 Israel’s legacy is eternal. It will never be stamped out. God has imprinted Israel with His love, blessings, and protection. No matter what forces come against Israel, it will survive and prosper (Isaiah 54:17). Defeat only comes when it loses its commitment and faith in its Creator.—Nazario A. “Tito” Gonzales, CA, responding to Isranet Briefing 1840 “Israel @ 60—Part II”, 2008 It has been a constant thought to me that one day Israel will fulfill its prophesy to be a light unto the nations. If the world would choose to acknowledge the gift of the Jewish people and choose to emulate them rather than decimate them—then perhaps there would be peace on earth good will towards men.…—Victoria Kogan, responding to Isranet Briefing 1841 “Israel @ 60—Part III”, 2008 Greetings Baruch, I have been meaning to congratulate you repeatedly on your wonderful articles. Again and again I find myself so impressed by your knowledge and your language skills. Thank you Baruch for all your work on behalf of CIJR and the Jewish people. Kol Ha’kovode.—Sally Zerker, Professor Emeritus, York University, responding to Isranet Briefing 1855 “Yom Yerushalaim”, May, 2008 Thank you so much for your coverage of the Georgia situation. It is most complex, however your presentation of candid and varied viewpoints have enabled me to maintain my view of events. I appreciate the clarity of your contributors. Kohl ha kavod.—May D. Ladman, USA, 2008 INSTITUTE
CELEBRATES 20 YEARS OF DEFENDING ISRAEL “If you ask me what I’m most proud of after 20 years, it’s that we have survived,” says Frederick Krantz, founder and director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR), an independent, pro-Israel, largely voluntary foundation. CIJR, which is guided by academics but geared to the needs of the community’s grassroots, publishes the daily ISRANET Briefing and the biweekly Israzine, among other online and print English and French publications intended to disseminate accurate information and fair comment about the Middle East and Jewish issues. It also maintains a huge physical and online archive of articles and papers on the same topics and runs programs for university students, including training in how to advocate for Israel on campus. Krantz is proud of the fact that CIJR is able to do so much with a small staff and a very tight budget. The institute has just two year-round staff members headed by Jacqueline Douek, three student interns (two of whom are working only through the summer), and an archivist, a six-month position made possible by a Quebec government grant. Otherwise, CIJR relies almost entirely on funding from individuals, and that amounts to just enough to get by annually, Krantz said. It receives no money from the organized Jewish community, a circumstance that Krantz still doesn’t understand after two decades. “What we are doing is unique in Canada. We are recognized internationally, but still there is no support.” CIJR celebrates its 20th anniversary with a formal gala dinner—the first in its history—Aug. 27 at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim at 6 p.m. The honorees are veteran international Jewish leader Isi Leibler and his wife Naomi Leibler, world president of Emunah, and Alan Baker, who is shortly leaving his position as Israeli ambassador to Canada after four years. They will receive CIJR’s Lion of Judah award. Theo Caldwell, president of Caldwell Asset Management Inc. and a current affairs columnist for the National Post and Toronto Sun, who has frequently defended Israel, will be recognized as CIJR’s Golden Magen David honoree for outstanding person of the year. Isi Leibler is a former senior leader of World Jewish Congress who was forced to leave the organization a few years ago, when he called for an investigation into alleged financial irregularities that eventually proved to be justified. The Australian businessman and prolific writer now lives in Israel, where he chairs the Israel-Diaspora committee of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs. Krantz, a New York-born, Concordia University professor of the history of the Renaissance, who spends more time in Italy than in Israel, did not set out to create a think-tank or a lobby group. But he was incensed by what he saw as biased media coverage against Israel during the first intifadah in the late ‘80s. He was convinced that the Arabs were waging a campaign to divide Diaspora Jewry and that the community needed to put up a united public front. Krantz felt that leadership was not coming from the organized Jewish community. He started to write letters and articles to the Gazette and other papers. He noticed some fellow academics, notably Harold Waller and Julien Bauer, were taking similar action, and suggested they co-ordinate their activities. Soon, the professors were being invited to speak at synagogues and community groups, and Krantz became aware of the hunger for information in the Jewish community about what was going on in the Middle East. The professors launched a daily newsletter call Responsa, which was sent by fax connected to a computer, the leading technology of the day. “We spent $800 on that machine, which was a lot of money at the time,” Krantz recalled. For the first couple of years, CIJR operated out of Krantz’s basement as a volunteer effort. Responsa soon became Israfax, which continues to be published today as a quarterly digest. One of the first non-academics attracted to CIJR was Baruch Cohen, who at 88, continues to come into work as the organization’s volunteer research chair. The Romanian-born Holocaust survivor saw in CIJR a means of concretely expressing his passionate devotion to the continuity of the Jewish people. “CIJR is a gem,” he said. “A powerful voice against ‘shtadlanut’ [appeasement], an uncompromising defender of the rights of the Jewish people and the rights of the State of Israel. CIJR plays an essential role on the international political landscape by offering consistent, valuable and clear analysis of the Jewish world, the Middle East and Israel.” Cohen and Krantz found each other after a letter by the former was published in The Canadian Jewish News in August 1988, expressing his concerns about a federal government-sponsored symposium that brought together a select group of Arab and Jewish Canadians at Montebello, Que. Krantz also opposed the clandestine meeting. The CIJR’s first “office” was a room at the Canadian Zionist Federation’s headquarters, then on Décarie Boulevard. “I chain-smoked a pipe at that time, and Baruch threatened to leave if I didn’t quit. I said I need nicotine to write, but I did quit. Baruch was just too valuable to us,” Krantz said. Although his personal views are hawkish, Krantz has always insisted that CIJR be open to a broad spectrum of opinion on Israel, but he draws the line at Peace Now, whose open criticism, he feels, is detrimental. “Jewish unity has always been our key value. And that means not criticizing Israel publicly. Internal debate in the community is all right, but we should not be publicly questioning the legitimacy of its democratically elected government,” Krantz said. CANADIAN
INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH RESEARCH As the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR) gets set to mark its 20th anniversary with a gala event here at the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Aug. 27, the organization’s founding director is especially proud of what has been achieved. “How have we survived? The answer is with difficulty,” said Professor Frederick Krantz to a question from the Jewish Tribune. “From the beginning we had to generate our own fiscal resources—bereft of any sustained support from the organized community and/or its ‘Israel activism’ agencies. We have always survived primarily on small contributions from amcha, ordinary people.” The creation of a supportive board of governors was key, said Krantz, who has never collected a salary for his work. “We have been blessed to have a real community leader in Irwin Beutel as our board chairman,” he said. “We apply for modest government and private grants and our annual August fundraiser is a key event. But small tax-free donations, amplified by appeals via our publications and briefing series remain fundamental. We are, in this sense, a true community organization, one speaking directly to and supported directly by the myriad individuals who constitute the Jewish community, and we are very proud of this.” The CIJR focuses its attention at fighting back against the unprecedented assault on Israel and growing anti-Zionism in politics, in the media and on campuses. It could be said that there is a certain synergy between the CIJR and B’nai Brith Canada. “We have always admired, and worked closely, with B’nai Brith Canada, which is a true grassroots community organization,” said Krantz. “B’nai Brith’s advocacy programs, its excellent Jewish Tribune newspaper and, generally its intelligent and persistent political work federally and provincially, represent and strengthen Canada’s Jewish community. For us, B’nai Brith is an important source of consciously Israel-oriented, Zionist community leadership, and our own values and academic-research-publication-student activism strengths constitute a natural complementarity with it.” Krantz launched the CIJR in 1988 at the time of Israel’s first intifada. Last week he spoke proudly about what his organization has been able to accomplish, pointing to the work on Canadian university campuses as one of the most important goals. In the fall of 2000, the CIJR inaugurated its daily Isranet briefing e-mail service to counter anti-Israel propaganda, and to keep the public and subscribers informed of daily issues affecting the Jewish people. Each daily briefing—now nearing the 2,000th issue and read by more than 60,000 people worldwide—consists of multiple opinion pieces, articles, or documents, on current issues. A weekly French-language CommuniquÈ Isranet bulletin is also available. The Institute’s regular insider briefing seminars and community colloquia feature its own and other experts on Israel, Middle East and Jewish-world issues. “The CIJR is a world-class, Israel-related think tank, a unique, powerful, responsive resource speaking directly to the community on issues of concern to Israel and the Jewish people,” said Krantz. The CIJR has come up with a unique way in which to attract sponsors for its gala. Sponsored “cities” such as Jerusalem, Sderot and Safed are available for the evening, with all proceeds going directly to fund the new highly-successful Student Israel-Advocacy Program (SIAP) for 2008-09. All sponsors will have their family and/or company name prominently featured in the Isranet briefing and in the event’s commemorative program book. The sponsor’s name will also be displayed on the Donor Wall at the CIJR’s downtown office. Sponsors will meet their individual SIAP scholars at a special cocktail reception marking the inception of the new academic year. This year Krantz said the CIJR has set a goal for the August fundraising campaign of $250,000, which would enable it to strengthen key programs and begin to build a much-needed endowment. “We have been called the most efficient Jewish community organization in North America, if not the world, and we couldn’t do what we do with so comparatively small a budget if our director and research chairman were not voluntary, unpaid positions (just as our faculty Fellows are unpaid volunteers), with the work of CIJR aided by several outstanding unpaid lay volunteers, as well as several student Israel interns.” At this year’s gala, Lion of Judah honourees will be Israel Ambassador to Canada Alan Baker and Israel Diaspora Committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs Chair Isi Leibler of Australia. Theo Caldwell, president of Caldwell Asset Management, Inc., and a pro-Israel columnist in Canadian media, will receive the Golden Magen David Award as the outstanding person of the year. While Krantz has many objectives in the coming years, he noted, “I guess I could add the hope of attracting an enlightened, Zionist millionaire or two, after whom the Institute could be renamed. If you know anyone, please let me know.” Log on to www.isranet.org to learn more about the organization. Volume VIII, No. 1,913 • Tuesday, August 26, 2008
CIJR CELEBRATES 20 YEARS—PART I CELEBRATING CIJR—BIS ZU
[HUNERT UN] ZWANZIG! Anniversaries can be surprising. When they arrive, the passage of time they embody, and about which one is usually unaware, is erased, and the past suddenly snaps back into focus. So it is with the twentieth anniversary of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, which we will be celebrating with many invited dignitaries and guests at our August 27th Gala. Thinking about it, the years drop away and one is swept back in time to earlier days, to 1987-88. CIJR today is an internationally-respected pro-Israel think-tank, a unique structure doing creative work with students and bringing objective academic analysis of Israel, Middle East, and Jewish-world issues quickly and effectively to the public, Jewish and non-Jewish. But twenty years ago, what would become CIJR was a small group of academics and laymen, concerned by the sudden anti-Israel media of the first, violent Palestinian Arab intifada, meeting informally in my home. The “organized community” then was paralyzed by the new Arab “propaganda inversion” which, uncritically mirrored by the media, turned the Palestinians into David, and Israelis into Goliath, grotesquely portraying Arabs as an innocent, oppressed minority, “Jews”, and Israelis as powerful, and vicious aggressors, “Nazis”. The handful of like-minded people I was privileged to bring together—primarily pro-Israel academics used to writing and speaking publicly—began responding to the newspapers and radio-tv stations, to counter the anti-Israel wave. My basement became our “office”—and as our letters and articles brought us to public attention, synagogues and community groups began inviting us to speak to their confused and leader-less members. And as we spoke, people rallied, and began writing checks to support our work, and several lay people came forward to help in any relevant way. When we sought support from the organized community—nothing big, just access to a room with a Xerox machine and a secretary—we were—and still are, to this day, unaccountably—universally turned down. At any rate, at a certain point, we had to decide—disband, or incorporate and try to raise enough money to form our own supportive office and organization. We discussed the alternatives, and, unanimously, decided that morally, as well as politically, we had no option but to take the latter course. We didn’t know it then, but—as a result of much toil and sacrifice—CIJR would indeed not only survive, but flourish. Today, twenty years later, we have supportive National and International Boards of Governors, a distinguished Academic Council grouping outstanding Canadian, American and Israeli professors and intellectuals, and talented student Interns and trainees. Yet we remain unsupported by the organized community, are still without an endowment, and still must raise funds ourselves, directly from the public. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, we are also still independent, still hard-hitting and un-bureaucratic, still close to students, and still doing everything we can to defend our beloved Jewish democratic State, and the Jewish People, of which Israel is the vital, and indispensable, core. And the need for CIJR is, if anything, even greater today than it was twenty years ago. The last twenty years have seen 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the rise of the new global antisemitism, and of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. Given the ongoing negative representation of Israel in the media and on campuses (as well as new sources of anti-Israel propaganda like the internet and blogosphere, and new, hostile Arab media like Al-Jazeera), a constant, informed, effective, and up-to-date truth-telling voice addressing the public remains of crucial importance. Finally, our tradition enjoins us to zakhor, to remember. Allow me then to remember some of the many people, some sadly now gone, and many thankfully still active and with us, who from early days have helped make CIJR possible: First, the remarkable Clara Balinsky z”l, without whose sage advice and admonition we would not have a Board of Governors and, quite possibly, an Institute; Charles Lazarus, who graciously agreed to be our first Chairman, and was succeeded by a true community neshumah, Irwin Beutel, still CIJR Chairman, Richard Golick z”l, in whose kitchen (with Eddie Winant, and Richard’s wife Hilda Golick z”l present) the idea of a formal research institute was first conceived; and Irving “Bob” Levitt, our first Honorary Treasurer. Among many of our first National Board members were polymath Aaron Remer and fine community leaders like Thomas Hecht and Evelyn Schachter. Still among our active Academic Council Fellows are the unique Baruch Cohen, our indefatigable Research Chair, 88 this year; founding Fellows Profs. Julien Bauer and Hal Waller; and other initial Academic Council members were Rabbi Reuben J. Poupko, and Dr. Bill Bilek (now representing CIJR in Atlanta). And I would be remiss in not recalling the remarkable Karen Lazar, our first Assistant Director (and first full-time employee!), and volunteers like Alan Scholnikov, the Kons, Abraham, Marion, and George, and Inessa Golod. We were graced in early years, as today, by remarkable students, like Hillel Neuer, Elliot Kramer, Doron Goldstein, and Zev Gewurz, many of whom have gone on not only to important careers, but to leadership positions in the Jewish world. And let me record here the unfailing support of my wife, Lenore Hammel Krantz, who for two decades has put with what she calls my “second, full-time non-paying job”. Without her steadfast support and wise counsel, none of this could have happened. All of these people are emblematic of the many early Board members, students, volunteers, and staff—too many, indeed, to name individually here—without whom, past and present, the Institute could neither have survived nor flourished. Remembering the past, and looking forward to the future, it is my privilege, and my duty, to pledge in their names that, twenty years from today, the proudly Zionist Canadian Institute for Jewish Research will still fearlessly, determinedly, and effectively be continuing its unique pro-Israel work. (Prof. Frederick Krantz
is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, CIJR
AT 20: In loving memory of Malca z”l Then Pinhas stood up and
interceded, Twenty years! The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research is a gem, with which the entire Canadian Jewish community is proud to be associated. A powerful voice against anti-Zionism, antisemitism, racism and xenophobia. A powerful voice against shtadlanut (appeasement). An uncompromising defender of the rights of the Jewish people and the rights of the State of Israel, CIJR plays an essential role on the international political landscape by offering consistent, valuable and clear analysis of the Jewish world, the Middle East, and Israel. The tireless effort of Professor Frederick (Pinhas) Krantz—a visionary enthusiast and dreamer—as well as his knowledge of and love for Am Yisrael, has ensured, against powerful odds, the creation and continuing high quality of all of CIJR’s publications—ISRAFAX, Daily Isranet Briefing, the new Israzine (with excellent associate editor Machla Abramovitz), and CIJR’s website (www.isranet.org, under Aaron Muscott’s fine supervision) —publications read world-wide in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, South Africa, and the U.S.A. In addition to our much-appreciated weekly French-language Communiqué Isranet is the weekly Friday Briefing, a literary, historical, and cultural issue. CIJR is proud to have been the Beth Hamidrash (home) of Hillel Neuer (Executive Director, United Nations Watch, Geneva, Switzerland), Karen Lazar (Director, Communications, B’nai Brith Canada), accomplished journalist Miriam Shaviv, and many more fine students (Elliot Kramer, Dov Smith, Meirav Fima, and most recently of, Heather Stein, Eric Adler, Alan Herman, Rebecca Katz, Oliver Moore, and the list continues…). Over these twenty years, I was proud to work at CIJR with, and to learn from, Guy Mizrahi, Dr. Miriam Taylor, Karen Lazar, Kelly Menchick, Dr. Catherine Chatterly, and, last but not least, Dr. Joyce Rappaport (one of the editors of the recent YIVO Eastern Jewish Encyclopedia). These days, I can hardly keep up with our very talented and dynamic Assistant Director Jacqueline Douek, and with our Executive Secretary Leah Tobin, who blesses us all with daily motherly care. One of CIJR’s most recent and successful accomplishments is its ongoing Student Israel-Advocacy Program (SIAP), training students to respond to anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism, offering the highest level of academic excellence in a Middle East and Israel program, and taught by CIJR’s unique Academic Council Fellows and volunteer specialists. Twenty years ago, on August 4th 1988, the Canadian Jewish News published my letter of support for the strong position taken by Prof. Krantz against appeasement at the infamous secret Arab-Jewish “dialogue” conference (opposed by the State of Israel) in Montebello. I learned of Prof. Krantz’s new initiative, CIJR, after obtaining an introductory issue of his Response magazine (today, the internationally acclaimed ISRAFAX). Following the publication of my letter, I was invited to the home of the charming Lenore and Frederick Krantz. There, I was engulfed by the enthusiasm of Zelda Gold and an army of volunteers (Alfred Noodelman, Marion, George, and Abraham Kon, and Inessa Golod, to name a few). In the cramped room which was the first office at our disposal, I started what today we proudly call the Databank. CIJR’s Middle East & Jewish World Databank and library, including up-to-date material on the Jewish world, Israel and the Middle East, are comprehensive learning sources, available now online (www.isranet.org) of which I am very proud. Since its establishment by Prof. Krantz two decades ago, CIJR has played, and will continue to play, an essential role on the Canadian and international scenes. Given the recent, troubling developments in the Middle East, support for CIJR remains crucial. Your help directly enables us to continue to provide objective analysis to the community, and, through the SIAP, to provide students with the knowledge and skills necessary to combat the growing anti-Israel bias on their campuses. Now more than ever, it is time to heed CIJR’s motto, the words of our prophet, Theodor Herzl: “If you will it, it is no dream”. Looking forward to seeing you at CIJR’s 25th anniversary! HAZAK, HAZAK, V’NITHAZEK! Strong, Strong, but Stronger Together! (Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of CIJR.) A
YEAR IN REVIEW We hit the ground running this fall with no less than five seminars given at CIJR by visiting experts. Prof. Ted Friedgut of Hebrew University was the first to visit CIJR with a truly unique subject: Jewish pioneer farmers on the Canadian Prairies. Not two weeks later Dr. Asher Susser, Director of Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center and a frequent CIJR guest speaker, brought with him an assessment of Israel-Palestinian relations. He counseled that there is no conflict resolution to the Arab-Israeli dispute, only conflict management. Another well-known Middle East political scientist, Efraim Inbar, Director of the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar Ilan University, gave us his analysis of the Iranian nuclear challenge. The subject of Iran was further explored by Dr. David Menashrie, an Iranian expert from the Moshe Dayan Center, who presented an informative and original analysis on the structure of Iranian society. CIJR’s seminars continued into the spring and summer when we had the opportunity to present the talented French writer and philosopher Mourad El Hattab. Later, former Montrealer Dr. Mordechai Nisan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provided an extraordinary examination of how the strength of Shiite Islam may affect Israel and the West. During CIJR’s remarkable lecture-series (which, given the requisite support, could be compiled into an exquisite and informative book of essays) CIJR planned and launched a new student pilot-project: The Student Israel-Advocacy Program. The eight-month course—developed to respond to the increasing anti-Israel propaganda on campuses and often biased attitude against Israel in the media—was designed by CIJR’s Academic Council. The students, along with members of the Montreal community, also participated in special colloquia given by visiting experts. The first such specialist was Gabriel Schoenfeld, Senior Editor of Commentary magazine, who spoke on his seminal work The Return of Antisemitism. The second colloquium featured a panel of authorities on the media and propaganda including CIJR Director Prof. Fred Krantz, noted National Post columnist Barbara Kay, and Boston University’s Richard Landes. Landes’ discussion of “Pallywood”, Palestinian-created anti-Israel fabrications dressed up as news, helped students to fight back against the factually-distorted Palestinian narrative that they were subjected to at this year’s “Israel Apartheid Week” at Concordia. Today, one of these bright Scholars is working in Israel at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Another Scholar recently found employment in JPPS/Bialik administration and is hopeful about getting CIJR-programming into the classroom. Website visitors have responded positively to our newly-redesigned website, created by CIJR’s able part-time webmaster Aaron Muscott. Also, our new bi-weekly web-magazine, Israzine, edited by the very talented Machla Abramovitz, is very popular. This spectacular Gala evening [August 27, 2008], celebrating CIJR Twentieth Anniversary, and Commemorative Program Book would not have been possible without the indispensable help of our interns: Summer students Eric Adler, a CIJR veteran, and Rebecca Katz, (hopefully the next editor of CIJR’s student magazine Dateline: Middle East), our wonderful year-long Academic Intern Alan Herman, and Josh Peters, who comes to us with an MA in military history, as our government-subsidized Archivist. Of course, CIJR’s twenty-year achievement is inconceivable without the indefatigable Baruch Cohen, whose strength and passion continue to amaze me, and the inspiring knowledge and leadership of Prof. Fred Krantz. As we rejoice over CIJR’s twenty-year history, let’s also celebrate the achievements of this great year. Happy Anniversary CIJR… until 120! (Jacqueline Douek, is Assistant Director of CIJR and Associate Editor of ISRAFAX.) Volume VIII, No. 1,912 • Monday, August 25, 2008
“HUMAN RIGHTS” COMMISSIONS A HOLLOW VICTORY Some 900 days ago, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities launched a human rights complaint in Alberta against me because I reprinted of a series of Muhammad cartoons—the same cartoons that several winters ago set off an orgy of outrage in the Muslim world—in the now-defunct Western Standard magazine. Now, the government has finally acquitted me of illegal “discrimination.” Taxpayers are out more than $500,000 for an investigation that involved 15 bureaucrats at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The legal cost to me and the former magazine is $100,000. The case would have been thrown out long ago if I had been charged in a criminal court, instead of a human rights commission. That’s because accused criminals have the right to a speedy trial. Accused publishers at human rights commissions do not. And if I had been a defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this spring. Both managed to hijack a secular government agency to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me—the first blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them. The process I was put through was a punishment in itself—and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical slam.
The 11-page government report into my activities is a breathtakingly arrogant document. In it, Pardeep Gundara, a low-level bureaucrat, assumes the role of editor-in-chief for the entire province of Alberta. He went through our magazine article and gave his own thoughts on the cartoons, and pronounced on our magazine’s decision to publish them. The government’s wannabe journalist gets facts wrong and he’s obviously not good with deadlines. We’d never have hired him at our magazine. But the laugh is on us—he’s apparently our boss, and the boss of all journalists in Alberta. In his report, Gundara presents as “fact” his personal opinion of the Muhammad cartoons. He says they’re “stereotypical, negative and offensive.” That’s one viewpoint. Others have a different view. Why should anyone care about Gundara’s personal opinion? Do I need permission from him—or anyone other than my conscience—before I publish things in the future? Is this column OK by him? Gundara forgave me and the Western Standard our sins because, according to him, the offensiveness of the cartoons was “muted by the context of the accompanying article” and we ran letters both for and against the cartoons in our subsequent issue. He also acquitted us because “the cartoons were not simply stuck in the middle of the magazine with no purpose or related story.” Let me translate: You’d better be “reasonable” in how you use your freedoms, or you won’t be allowed to keep them. You’d better not run political cartoons “simply stuck in the middle” of a magazine. You’d better have a “purpose” for being “negative” that is approved by a bureaucrat, when he finally gets around to it three years later. That is not acceptable to me. I am not interested in Gundara’s views about the cartoons. I’m not interested in learning his personal rules of thumb for when I can or can’t express myself. This is Canada, not Saudi Arabia. My dismissal is not a victory for freedom of the press: Alberta’s press is not free—it is now subject to the approval of the government.… [T]wo years ago, the HRC told me that if I paid a few thousand dollars to my accusers and gave them a page in our magazine, I’d be set free. Most victims of the HRCs accept deals like that, and it’s certainly cheaper than a 900-day fight. But getting the approval of the HRC’s censor is morally no better than their shakedown attempt. Whether I have to pay off a radical imam or appease a meddling bureaucrat, it’s still an infringement on our Canadian liberties. WHY
ISLAM IS UNFUNNY FOR A CARTOONIST On a sunny May morning, six plainclothes police officers, two uniformed policemen and a trio of functionaries from the state prosecutor’s office closed in on a small apartment in Amsterdam. Their quarry: a skinny Dutch cartoonist with a rude sense of humor. Informed that he was suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities, the Dutchman surrendered without a struggle. “I never expected the Spanish Inquisition,” recalls the cartoonist, who goes by the nom de plume Gregorius Nekschot, quoting the British comedy team Monty Python. A fan of ribald gags, he’s a caustic foe of religion, particularly Islam. The Quran, crucifixion, sexual organs and goats are among his favorite motifs. Mr. Nekschot, whose cartoons had appeared mainly on his own Web site, spent the night in a jail cell. Police grabbed his computer, a hard drive and sketch pads. He’s been summoned for further questioning later this month by prosecutors. He hasn’t been charged with a crime, but the prosecutor’s office says he’s been under investigation for three years on suspicion that he violated a Dutch law that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sexual orientation. The cartoon affair has come as a shock to a country that sees itself as a bastion of tolerance, a tradition forged by grim memories of bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The Netherlands sheltered Jews and other refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and Calvinists fleeing persecution in France. Its thinkers helped nurture the 18th-century Enlightenment. Prostitutes, marijuana and pornography have been legal for decades. “This is serious. It is about freedom of speech,” says Mark Rutte, the leader of a center-right opposition party. Some of Mr. Nekschot’s oeuvre is “really disgusting,” he says, “but that is free speech.”… “Denmark protects its cartoonists. We arrest them,” says Geert Wilders, a populist member of the Dutch Parliament famous for his dyed-blond bouffant hairdo and incendiary denunciations of the Quran as an Islamic version of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” The arrested cartoonist, says Mr. Wilders, is “a bit obsessed” with Muslims and sex, but “it is not bad for artists to have a little obsession.” How to handle Muslim sensitivities is one of Europe’s most prickly issues. Islam is Europe’s fastest-growing religion, with immigrants from Muslim lands often rejecting a drift toward secularism in what used to be known as Christendom. About 6% of Holland’s 16.3 million people are Muslims, and nearly half of Amsterdam’s population is of foreign origin. Some predict the city could have a Muslim majority within a decade or so. The contrasting Danish and Dutch responses “show that there is a serious struggle of ideas going on for the future of Europe,” says Flemming Rose, a Danish newspaper editor who commissioned the drawings of Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten. At stake, he says, is whether democracy protects the right to offend or embraces religious taboos so that “citizens have a right not to be offended.”… If formally charged and taken to court, Mr. Nekschot risks up to two years in prison and a maximum fine of €16,750, or about $26,430, says his Amsterdam lawyer, Max Vermeij. He thinks the odds on his client being prosecuted are better than even but draws some comfort from recent Dutch court rulings in discrimination cases that mostly came down on the side of free speech. Mr. Nekschot himself is very worried. “I’m afraid of getting a judge who doesn’t have a sense of humor,” he says.… [Some] say the timing of his arrest suggests an attempt by authorities to soothe Muslims angry over the March release on the Internet of “Fitna,” a short film by Mr. Wilders, the Dutch legislator. The film, which denounces “hateful verses from the Quran,” infuriated many Muslims and also Dutch leaders, who had urged that it not be released. Officials deny any connection. The prosecutor’s office notes that it has also taken action against Muslims suspected of discrimination. A Moroccan-born Dutchman was recently convicted of discrimination for writing in a blog that homosexuals should be tossed from rooftops and thrown down stairs. A court ordered him to do community-service work.… The cartoonist blames his woes on what he calls Holland’s “political correctness industry,” a network of often state-funded organizations set up to protect Muslims and other minority groups. One of these, an Internet monitoring group known as MDI, says it received dozens of complaints about the cartoonist’s mockery of Islam and first reported him to the prosecutor’s office in 2005.… Mr. Nekschot says everyone is entitled to their opinions. “If people say my cartoons are disgusting that is fine by me. I see lots of things I don’t like. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” ACADEMICS
FEAR SPEAKING FREELY IN CANADA A group of U. S. professors launched a campaign this week protesting plans by a prominent political science organization to hold its annual conference in Toronto next year, claiming that Canada’s restrictions on certain forms of speech puts controversial academics at risk of being prosecuted. Bradley Watson, professor of American and Western political thought at Pennsylvania’s St. Vincent College, said he will present a petition calling for the American Political Science Association (APSA) to re-evaluate its selection of Toronto for its 2009 conference at this year’s annual meeting, taking place over the Labour Day weekend in Boston. His protest has garnered support from dozens of professors across the United States, including prominent scholars such as Princeton University legal philosopher Robert P. George and Harvard University’s Harvey Mansfield. “Our belief is that the APSA should choose its sites carefully, with particular regard for questions of freedom of speech and conscience,” Mr. Watson told the National Post by e-mail. “We therefore believe Canada to be a problematic destination.” Mr. Watson said that professors signing the petition are concerned that recent human rights commission investigations into Maclean’s and Western Standard magazines over articles concerning Islam, and the conviction of pastor Stephen Boisson, who was ordered by Alberta’s human rights tribunal in May to cease publicizing criticisms of homosexuality, suggest that professors risk being chilled from discussing important academic subjects, or ending up in legal trouble. Mr. Watson said he plans to distribute hundreds of buttons to attendees at the Boston conference reading “Toronto 2009, Non!”… The American Political Science Association, whose members include both American and Canadian academics, is the oldest and largest organization of political science professors. Next month’s annual meeting, expected to draw roughly 7,000 political scientists, will be its 104th. The program includes such discussions as Terrorism and Human Rights; Varying Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage; and Missing Alliances and (Un)expected Transformations in the Politics of Islam. In a statement issued on Thursday, the working group behind the protest said: “The nature of radical Islamism and the relationship of public morality and homosexual conduct are issues of vital public importance” and that “all political scientists have a professional interest in a full and open scholarly debate” on these topics. The group called it “unseemly” for APSA to “turn a blind eye to [Canadian] attacks on freedom of speech” and “unacceptable … to risk exposing its own members to them.” APSA standards for selecting meeting sites include “protection of academic freedom, equitable access to opportunity, and a commitment to non-discrimination,” but Mr. Watson said Canada does not satisfy that test.… Volume VIII, No. 1,911 • Friday, August 22, 2008
AS GOES AMERICA,
GOES THE WORLD Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at unimaginable levels. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch—all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing. “Citizens of the world” were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new “Planet Earth,” which was to have followed from a system of free trade, electronic communications, diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism. But was that ever quite true? In reality, to the extent globalism worked, it followed from three unspoken assumptions: First, the US economy would keep importing goods from abroad to drive international economic growth. Second, the US military would keep the sea-lanes open, and trade and travel protected. The Americans, as global sheriff, would deal with the occasional menace, like a Moammar al-Khadafy, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il or the Taliban. Third, America would ignore ankle-biting allies and remain engaged with the world—like a nurturing mom who at times must put up with the petulance of dependent teenagers. But there’ve been a number of signs recently that globalization may soon lose its US parent. The United States may be the most free, stable and meritocratic nation, but its resources and patience are not unlimited. It pays more than a half trillion dollars a year to import $115-a-barrel oil that’s often pumped at a cost of about $5. The Chinese, Japanese and Europeans hold trillions of dollars in US bonds—the result of massive trade deficits. The American dollar is at historic lows. We are piling up staggering national debt. Over 12 million live here illegally and freely transfer more than $50 billion annually to Mexico and Latin America. Our military, after deposing Milosevic, the Taliban and Saddam, is tired. And Americans are increasingly becoming more sensitive to the cheap criticism of global moralists. But as America turns ever so slightly inward, the new globalized world will revert to a far poorer (and more dangerous) place. Liberals like Barack Obama speak out against new free-trade agreements and want existing accords like NAFTA readjusted. More Americans are furious at the costs of illegal immigration—and are moving to stop it. The foreign remittances that help prop up Latin America are threatened by any change in US immigration attitude. Meanwhile, the hypocrisy becomes harder to take. After all, it is easy for self-appointed moralists to complain that terrorists don’t enjoy Miranda rights at Guantanamo, but it’d be hard to do much about the Russian military invading Georgia’s democracy and bombing its cities. Al Gore crisscrosses the country, pontificating about Americans’ carbon footprints. But he could do far better to fly to China to convince them not to open 500 new coal-burning power plants. It has been chic to chant “No blood for oil” about Iraq’s petroleum—petroleum that, in fact, is now administered by a constitutional republic. But such sloganeering would be better directed at China’s sweetheart oil deals with Sudan that enable the mass murdering in Darfur. Due to climbing prices and high taxes, gasoline consumption is declining in the West, but its use is rising in other places, where it’s either untaxed or subsidized. So, what a richer but more critical world has forgotten is that in large part America was the model, not the villain—and that postwar globalization was always a form of engaged Americanization that enriched and protected billions. Yet globalization, in all its manifestations, will run out of steam the moment we tire of fueling it, as the world returns instead to the mindset of the 1930s—with protectionist tariffs; weak, disarmed democracies; an isolationist America; predatory dictatorships; and a demoralized gloom-and-doom Western elite. If America adopts the protectionist trade policies of Japan or China, global profits plummet. If our armed forces follow the European lead of demilitarization and inaction, rogue states advance. If we were to treat the environment as do China and India, the world would become quickly a lost cause. If we flee Iraq and call off the War on Terror, jihadists will regroup, not disband. When the Russians attack the next democracy, they won’t listen to the United Nations, the European Union or Michael Moore. We may be on our way back to an old world, where the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer as they must. EXPOSING
ALLIED PERFIDY Israeli political activist and author Shmuel Katz, who died in Tel Aviv on May 9 at age 93, will be remembered for his role in the fight to create Israel, and his pioneering efforts to counter anti-Israel propaganda. What is not well known is that Katz also authored the first book to expose the Allies’ failure to bomb the Auschwitz death camp—thereby launching a public debate that still has not subsided, more than 40 years later. Today, Katz’s shloshim (end of the 30-day mourning period), is a good occasion to recall his groundbreaking work. Katz, who was born in South Africa, immigrated to British Mandatory Palestine in 1936. He became active in the Irgun, the underground militia fighting for Jewish statehood, eventually rising to become a member of the Irgun High Command and its primary spokesman to the world media. Katz was a founder of Menachem Begin’s Herut Party, was elected to the first Knesset as one of its representatives, and served as an adviser to Begin when the latter became prime minister in 1977. Katz’s best-known book was Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine. First published in 1973, Battleground underwent numerous reprintings as it became a staple for pro-Israel activists, especially on college campuses. More recently, Katz authored a critically-acclaimed two-volume biography of Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and a history of Nili, the Zionist espionage group that helped the British capture Palestine from the Turks in World War One. Katz’s first book, Days of Fire, was noteworthy as well. Published in Hebrew in 1966 and in English shortly afterwards, Days of Fire was the first English-language history of the Irgun. It was also the first book to expose the Allies’ failure to bomb Auschwitz. Using documents from British and Zionist archives, Katz recounted how Jewish Agency leaders approached British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden in July 1944, requesting an Allied air attack on Auschwitz and the railroad lines over which hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being transported to their doom. “It was 57 days, September 1, before the British Foreign Office sent its reply, a period during which the majority of the Jews of Hungary were exterminated,” Katz wrote. “The bombing,” stated the Foreign Office, “was impossible because of ‘the very great technical difficulties involved’.” Katz proceeded to expose the disingenuousness of the British excuse. He pointed out that during that same summer of 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the Royal Air Force (RAF) to airlift supplies to the Polish Home Army forces fighting the Germans in Warsaw. Despite the likelihood of the supplies being intercepted by the Nazis, Churchill did not allow “technical difficulties” to prevent the mission. A total of 181 air drops were undertaken by British planes, flying from the Foggia air base in Allied-occupied Italy. “The appeal of the Jewish Agency leaders [to bomb Auschwitz] was far less exacting,” Katz pointed out. “The death camp at Auschwitz was 200 miles nearer than Warsaw to the base at Foggia. The railway line from Budapest and Budapest itself were within easy range.” Katz also noted that in a postwar interview, the wartime Chief of RAF Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, denied that such an operation would have been impossible. Harris said he did not recall ever being asked to do it. Days of Fire also featured a full-page map showing the precise distance from the Foggia air base to Budapest, Auschwitz, and Warsaw. The map vividly demonstrated that the “technical difficulties” excuse British officials gave in 1944 for not striking Auschwitz was simply untenable. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Katz about his pioneering role in bringing the bombing issue to public attention. “Back in the mid-1960s, not much was known about the ability of the Allies to attack Auschwitz,” Katz recalled. “Later, of course, historians such as David Wyman revealed the full story of the American and British raids on oil targets next to Auschwitz, and the private discussions among the officials who rejected the appeals to bomb the death camp. But fortunately I was able to locate a few documents about the British government’s rejection and bring it up in my book, so people would start thinking about it.” Although Days of Fire was primarily an account of the Jewish revolt against the British in Palestine, Katz noted, the bombing issue was very relevant. “What was happening to the Jews in Europe in 1944 was an important factor in the Irgun’s decision to launch its war for independence,” Katz told me. “It helped shape [Irgun commander] Menachem Begin’s thinking. It intensified our sense of urgency. Nobody knew how long World War Two and the slaughter of the Jews would continue. We were fighting to create a Jewish homeland that would be a haven for the Jews who could escape from the Nazis. We felt as if we were engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the entire Jewish people.” (Rafael Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.) HILLEL
KOOK AND STEPHEN WISE On July 8, the Jerusalem Post published an article [republished in CIJR’s Daily Isranet Briefing—ed.] by Isi Leibler, a Jewish leader of importance, and a friend. Leibler attacked Yad Vashem’s refusal to incorporate into its Holocaust History Museum an exhibit relating to efforts by Hillel Kook to persuade the US government to rescue the Jews of Europe. Originally an emissary of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi in the US, Kook and his team later became independent actors. Leibler also attacked the then leading personality of US Jewry, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, not only for hampering Kook’s efforts to bring the tragedy of European Jewry to the attention of the American people, but also for not making public the famous cable of August 8, 1942, of Dr. Gerhardt Riegner, the secretary of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress, who tried to alert the WJC in London and New York to the danger of a mass annihilation of 3½ - 4 million Jews in the coming fall. Leibler says that Wise finally asked Roosevelt to intervene, and that Roosevelt said “Tell your Jewish associates to keep quiet.” But Roosevelt did not speak with Wise between August and December, 1942, so this is an error. Leibler says that Wise’s non-action was “the most shameful failure of Jewish leadership in the 20th century.” Unfair, and inaccurate. In the summer of 1942, the Germans were racing towards Stalingrad. They were at El-Alamein, and the danger to Palestine was obvious; the US had just barely managed to repulse the Japanese Navy at Midway. The Germans were sinking more Allied ships in the Atlantic than the shipyards delivered replacements. Public opinion in the US, as Gallup polls showed, was increasingly antisemitic. This was the scene when the cable was received. Riegner’s cable ended with the words “we transmit information with all necessary reservation as exactitude cannot be confirmed. Informant stated to have close connection with highest German authorities and his reports generally speaking reliable.” Riegner’s cable thus cast doubt on the accuracy of its own information. Sumner Welles, the State Department undersecretary, asked Wise not to make the cable public because the information had to be verified, as the cable itself had implied. In any event, in the summer of 1942 there was no Allied army anywhere near the Jews, and the Allied Air Forces in 1942 were incapable of reaching the Polish extermination sites. No one could have prevented the mass murder at that point; the situation changed in November, 1943—after that the Western Allies could have bombed the extermination sites, but refused to do so. In 1942 the Americans could not have rescued the Jews even if they had wanted to; in addition, they feared the accusation that they were fighting the war for the Jews. Was Wise right in yielding to Welles, when the cable itself had cast doubt on its own contents? As historians David S. Wyman and Raphael Medoff write (‘A Race Against Death’, 2002, p. 8): “Wise believed he had no realistic choice but comply, for he could not risk alienating the one government department whose cooperation was most needed in the effort to help the European Jews.” He did inform Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Judge Felix Frankfurter, in the hope that they would reach the President. He informed his colleagues, and then he waited for confirmation, which arrived in November, from the American representative in Switzerland. He then arranged for a press conference to make the information public, and it was reported in the New York Times, on a back page. Wise’s fault? Should all this contradictory and controversial story, without any background and context, be shrunk into a panel in the Yad Vashem Museum? Hillel Kook was a young activist, and he did great work in trying to mobilize American opinion to influence the US Administration to do something to save the Jews. He was hampered and attacked by the Jewish establishment of the day, with Wise at its head. Did he influence public opinion? Leibler mentions the big demonstration of supposedly 400 Orthodox Rabbis in front of the White House in on October 6, 1943, as proof of his effectiveness. It was indeed impressive, although Orthodoxy was then a small minority among American Jews; and their influence was minimal. They did not see Roosevelt, of course, but were received on Capitol Hill by the Vice President and some senators. Their demonstration was reported in the NYT (October 7, page 4; 441 words), and that was it. The media did not mention it afterwards, and the effect on American public opinion is very doubtful. American antisemitism was to reach a peak in 1944, with 48% of the population expressing anti-Jewish views. Among Members of Congress, the mood began to change later, in 1943, and part of that was no doubt due to the efforts of the Kook group; partly, it was also the influence of Wise and his official Zionist group, who made contact with Treasury Secretary Morgenthau. Yet it was some intrepid non-Jewish members of the Treasury who persuaded Morgenthau to press the President, who then established the War Refugee Board (WRB). Leibler claims, wrongly, that the WRB was initiated exclusively by Kook, and rescued 200,000 Hungarian Jews (Wyman and Medoff say that 120,000 were rescued in Budapest). This is demonstrably wrong: the rescue of the remnant of Hungarian Jews was the result of an interplay of many factors, only one of which was the WRB, which financed, for instance, Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, but with money from the JDC (the ‘Joint’)—opponents of Kook, and the heart of the non-Zionist Jewish establishment. Leibler is right. Kook should be given an honorary mention, along with other Jews outside of Europe. But for that we need a different Museum, as this one is devoted, by design, to what happened to the Jews of Europe, in Europe. The visitor will not find anything about efforts by World Jewry, or the lack of them, except for a comment by Jan Karski about his mission to the West. There is nothing there about the Yishuv, except for the parachutists; there is nothing there about the organization of Soviet Jews to support the Soviet war effort, almost nothing about Jews serving in Allied armies. Nor about Kook. Or Wise. Or Ben-Gurion. Or Begin. Yad Vashem’s Museum presents the story of the Holocaust, in detail. That is what people come to learn. Much even about what happened to the Jews in Europe had to be left out. If it introduced the story of world Jewish action and inaction during the Holocaust, and expanded on the attitude of the Allies and the neutrals, what does Mr. Leibler suggest should be kept out? Treblinka? Resistance? Judenraete? Isi Leibler’s heart is in the right place. It is his analysis that is wrong. (Prof. Yehuda Bauer of Hebrew
University and Israeli Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume VIII, No. 1,910 • Thursday, August 21, 2008
PRISONER RELEASE THE HIGH PRICE OF RANSOM Predictions about the consequences of a country’s behavior usually take time to come to pass. The chickens don’t come home to roost from one day to the next. Not so in the case of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal held hostage in Gaza by Hamas for the past two years. Just a month ago, Israel swapped convicted a Lebanese terrorist, Samir Kuntar, who was serving a life sentence for the 1979 murder of an Israeli father and his little daughter, for the dead bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, abducted by Hezbollah in an incident that sparked the war of 2006. Critics of the swap attacked it for being one more example of the disproportionate price that Israel has grown used to paying in its prisoner exchanges with Arab terrorist organizations. Dead bodies, they said, should only be paid for with dead bodies. To do otherwise would again give the signal that Israel is easy prey for extortionists—a signal that has time and again jacked up the cost of freeing the next Israelis to be bargained for. Precisely the fact that the men in question were dead (which the Israeli government knew all along, although it refused to admit as much in public), so that failure to strike a deal would not have been tragic, should have made it easy to hang tough.… A month has gone by—and the Egyptian government has now let us know that its efforts to help free an Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, from Gaza, where he has been held since his abduction by Hamas two years ago, have failed. Has Egypt blamed Israel for this, always the easiest thing for any Arab country to do? It has—but only indirectly. The immediate problem is Hamas. Ever since the Kuntar-Regev-Goldwasser exhange, the Egyptians say, Hamas has raised its already exorbitant demands for freeing Corporal Shalit, so that an agreement that might have been possible before then is no longer so now. Surprise, surprise! You can’t fault Hamas’s reasoning. Gilad Shalit is alive. If two dead Israeli bodies are worth one live Arab murderer, a live Israeli body is surely worth dozens or hundreds of murderers. If there is any good news, it is that it is not too late for Israel to redraw the line where it should go. Corporal Shalit will of course have to be freed first. Whether 500, or 1,000, or 2,000 Palestinian-Arab prisoners will be let go in return, and whether 50, or 100, or 200 of them will have “blood on their hands,” hardly matters. The price will be outrageous whatever it is. But the moment Corporal Shalit is home safe and sound, Israel’s government should issue a statement that says: “Gentlemen, the rules have changed. From now on, there will be no more bargaining over prisoners or hostages. There will be a fixed price—and it will be one of absolute parity. For one dead Israeli, you get one dead Arab. For one live Israeli, one live Arab. For any multiple of that, you get the multiple, no more and no less.”… “For the sake of repairing the world, one must never ransom hostages for more than their worth,” says the Talmud. Israelis can be excused for thinking that a Jewish life is worth more than an Arab one, but when it comes to swapping prisoners, they need to learn to be more egalitarian. One-for-one is the way it should be done. THE
BOLSHEVIKS OF GAZA Anna Geifman’s cappuccino is getting cold as she talks about Hamas and its motives. The energetic professor makes one point that leads to another, and then to four more. “I can talk about terrorism from today until doomsday,” Geifman says with a laugh, catching her breath and then adding, more seriously, “or until they stop.” In Jerusalem, discussions of Palestinian terrorism do seem as if they’ll go on until doomsday, and the academics doing the talking are a dime a dozen. What makes Geifman different is that her expertise lies in another field, even in another era: revolutionary Russia. It’s a subject she teaches her students at Boston University and one that, she says, is strikingly similar to modern times. “Everything you see today—every single aspect of terrorism—you can see it in the Russia of a century ago,” she says. Before our lives were changed by the likes of Hamas and Hizbullah, Geifman notes, Russian society was devastated by rampant violence, from the turmoil leading up to the peasant revolt of 1905, through the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Political violence in Russia—what we call terrorism today—developed primarily in Moscow and was perpetrated by “combat organizations” whose first targets were government officials. “This was old-time, traditional terrorism—targeting people very carefully, assassinating people who were senior members of the government, people who affected policy,” Geifman says. “But then, they basically killed whoever they could attack, and very often there was no connection. Anyone who wore a uniform became a target—being a mailman was a very dangerous occupation, for example.”… Not only were the targets of the attacks indiscriminate, but so were the attackers. Every other person, it seemed, was declaring himself a “revolutionary terrorist” and joining one of myriad groups, with fanciful names like “The League of the Red Fuse,” in a hodgepodge of violent orders that blurred together.… Terrorists testifying at their trials, Geifman notes, were often unable to explain what they believed—or, sometimes, to even accurately recall the full name of their organization. “Some were honest enough to say, ‘Who the hell cares about ideology? The main thing is to kill.’”… Mostly, though, Geifman tries to sound the alarm about the dangers of thinking that Hamas is moderated by its control of the Gaza Strip. “Whenever I hear someone suggest that Hamas might become a more responsible movement now that it is in charge, I think, ‘Why don’t you read a little about the Bolsheviks and see if you still believe that?’” she says. It bothers her to hear speculation about Hamas being more open to negotiating with Israel and softening its radical positions, when history suggests otherwise. “You want to know what happens when terrorists come to power? As soon as terrorists come to power, they begin building on what they did to get there. Look at the Bolsheviks, who were terrorists before they came to power in 1917. They used this terror-based revolution to build a terror-based state.” It’s no surprise, for example, that Hamas is so heavily invested in its “security forces,” considering that the Bolsheviks established the forerunner to the KGB less than a month after taking over. Terror states, Geifman says, are based on a legacy, an ideology and a practice—specifically, the legacy, ideology and practice of terrorism. So when anyone suggests that seeing a terrorist group like Hamas come to power in Gaza might actually be a positive development, Geifman says, “It scares me like you can’t imagine.”… “I think we suffer—I think the whole world now suffers—from a collective Stockholm syndrome,” she says. “Our problem is that we so want to believe in the goodness of people that we can’t see how bad some people are. [There are people who] don’t want to call these people terrorists. Well, you can call them pussycats, if you want. But they’re not going to stop killing.”… At this, Geifman turns to thoughts from her growing religious observance, recalling the Torah’s directive to “choose life.” “As Jews, we have an obligation to choose life, and to defend it. Otherwise,” she says, “death takes over.” In spite of this bleak view, though, Geifman says she is “very optimistic” that Hamas will eventually fade away. Why? “Because,” she says, “in history, not a single death cult survives.”… If history is a guide, she says, Hamas ought to pay attention. “[Terrorist] leaders think that they control death, but in reality they are merely agents of death,” she says. “That is why every revolution ultimately swallows itself.” IGNORING
FAILURE IN GAZA Monday will mark the third anniversary of the forcible expulsion of the Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria from their homes. Those expulsion were followed weeks later by the withdrawal of IDF personnel from the Gaza Strip. Unlike the Rabin-Peres government’s decision to embark on the Oslo peace process with the PLO in 1993, Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza did not take years to be discredited. It took moments. As the last IDF personnel left Gaza, the Palestinians began torching the synagogues Israel abandoned. Within minutes of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza’s border with Egypt, the Palestinians blew up the border wall. They immediately began transferring unprecedented quantities of heavy weaponry into Gaza—a practice that has continued to this day.… It is the Olmert-Livni-Barak government’s serial incompetence that ironically serves as [one of] the second[s] reason that there has been no accounting for the failure of the Gaza withdrawal plan. Quite simply, the government has moved from failure to failure so quickly that there has been no opportunity to confront the results of the last failure before the next one is spun out of the government’s policy chop-shop. The most recent example of this high-speed bungling is the government’s penchant for releasing terrorists from prison. The public has scarcely had a chance to digest the colossal stupidity and inherent danger of the government’s terrorists-for-dead-hostages swap with Hizbullah last month. No serious review of that policy—which enhanced Hizbullah’s popularity sufficiently to compel the Lebanese government to formally accept its right to attack Israel at will—has been conducted. And already on Wednesday, fresh from that failure, Olmert announced his intention to expand it by releasing another 150 terrorists from prison by the end of the month.… Israel’s prolonged failure to reckon with the disastrous outcome of the Gaza withdrawal bodes ill for the country’s prospects. Until the country reckons with the mistakes that led to that withdrawal, and forces those responsible to account for their failings, we will be doomed to repeat those mistakes with those same incompetents leading us over and over and over. [CANADIAN
SENATOR JERRY S. GRAFSTEIN AND] U.S. Representative Alcee L. Hastings (D-Miramar) urged a renewed focus on the status of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured over two years ago by the terrorist organisation, Hamas. In a letter to the American Red Cross, he encouraged the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the American Red Cross to continue to work to verify the soldier’s status and to achieve his immediate and safe return. Canadian Senator Jerry S. Grafstein has sent a similar letter. “Every passing day without knowledge of Gilad Schalit’s condition becomes increasingly difficult for his family and Israel. I urge the ICRC and the American Red Cross to revive their efforts to ensure his humane treatment while in captivity. As long as Gilad Shalit [captured by Hamas on June 25, 2006—ed.] is held hostage, these premier humanitarian organizations have an obligation to work for his sage return,” said Representative Hastings.… Congressman Hastings’ letter follows a July 29, 2006 letter he wrote to American Red Cross Interim President Jack McGuire urging the American Red Cross to apply pressure to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to look into the well-being of the three captured Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hamas and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Senator Jerry Grafstein also wrote a similar letter at that time. (Alcee L. Hastings Represents the Miramar district of Florida in the U.S. Congress.) Volume VIII, No. 1,909 • Wednesday, August 20, 2008
WEDNESDAY’S “NEWS IN REVIEW” ROUND-UP WEEKLY QUOTES “We first met when Joshua [Saloma] was 14 years old. He [had] participated in Bnei Akiva seminars in Scandinavia that I was taking part in, and there I had a chance to learn who he was. At the age of 18, Joshua came with his Bnei Akiva group for a training period in Israel that included studies at the Hesder Yeshiva in Kiryat Arba. Pretty soon Joshua became an outstanding student, who fell in love with the place’s unique atmosphere and the Torah studies.”—Rabbi Eliezer Waxman, remembering Joshua Saloma, a Danish immigrant to Israel who was murdered in 1980 by Muhammad Abu Ali, one of 191 Palestinian prisoners set to be released in advance of an anticipated visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Also to be released is Said al-Atba, who is serving a life sentence for his part in the 1977 Petah Tikva bomb attack that killed Tzila Galili. “I simply cannot understand how they [can] even consider releasing murderers. To send back hundreds of prisoners just like that, and for what? Where is the moral, the intimidation factor? This murderer was sentenced for life. Why let him and his friends go when we know most of them will renew their terror activity?” (Jerusalem Post, August 18) “South Ossetia may be very small, but it has become the scene of an event of colossal proportions: the return of Great Power politics, in which tanks are the deciding factor, not “soft power,” let alone international legitimacy. This huge change follows inevitably from Russia’s regression to its own historic version of empire… [T]he reversion of Russia to the dangerous rules of Great Power politics compels all others to change their behaviour as well – it is not a game, and participation is not voluntary… One way or another, Europe’s holiday from serious geopolitics is over.”—Historian Edward Luttwak, commenting on the far-reaching implications of Russia’s invasion of Georgia. (Globe and Mail, August 20) “Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later—it is no good when assistance comes to dead people. Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of—knock on wood—any possible conflict.”—Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, impatient with NATO, announcing his preference to act independently of the sluggish organisation. (National Post, August 15) “We feel at the moment a greater concern for our safety. That’s why every installation of the Western world on the Polish territory has its meaning, because it anchors Poland more deeply to the West.”—Polish Defence Minister Bogden Klich, articulating the fear of a resurgent Russia felt throughout the former Eastern Bloc, after Poland signed onto the deal to allow the U.S. to build a missile defence shield in Europe. (National Post, August 15) “McCain has a much stronger view of how Israel must protect itself…there is no naïveté on his part about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program… Ultimately [the evangelicals] will tend to trend more with Senator McCain because he more closely represents the values that really matter a broad section of voters.”—Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, during a recent visit to Jerusalem. Huckabee’s trip was sponsored by the Jerusalem reclamation project, which works to acquire property in east Jerusalem in order to resettle Jews there. “It is a historic reality that Jerusalem, and the entire land, was originally intended to be a homeland for the Jewish people…The Palestinians should in fact have a place and opportunity to settle, but it doesn’t have to be in Jerusalem.” (Jerusalem Post, August 18) “I hope that every Clinton delegate is brave and stands up and votes for the candidate they were elected to vote for, and the Democratic party leadership is brave enough to see the actual divisions in the party.…We are not in favour of her accepting the VP nomination, because we believe Barack Obama will lose in November and should lose in November. We don’t want such a strong candidate on a losing ticket.”—Darragh Murphy, Executive Director of People United Means Change, a group of pro-Clinton, anti-Obama Democrats, endorsing the news that Senator Hillary Clinton’s name will appear on the ballot to elect a Presidential candidate when the Democratic National Committee meets in Denver. (National Post, August 15) “I would like to go to Amman to stand trial. However, what I fear is that I am convicted in advance.…I respect Islam and its followers and I have nothing against it…however, I will not apologize. We have freedom of the press and religion in Denmark.... I can’t apologize; I respect Islam and I did not target it.”—Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who caused an uproar in 2005 when Muslims cried blasphemy, has been in hiding due to death threats, but says he is ready to stand trial. (National Post, August 15) “Unfortunately, NATO commanders in Afghanistan don’t have the troops needed for that kind of campaign: There are just 70,000 Western soldiers in Afghanistan, less than half the number deployed in Iraq. So they play whack-a-mole, scrambling from one hot spot to the next.…So long as NATO does not have the troops it needs to execute a true clear-and-hold counterinsurgency campaign across the whole of the south and east, Afghanistan will be in a constant state of limbo, and innocent souls such as [Jackie] Kirk and [Shirley] Case will have their lives snuffed out by murderers. If Afghanistan is to be saved, it needs its own surge.”—National Post editorial, advocating an Iraq-style surge of military personnel to Afghanistan, where the Taliban hunted-down and shot three female aid workers including two Canadians, Jackie Kirk and Shirley Case, at point-blank range last week. (National Post, August 15) SHORT TAKES SHIN BET ANGERED BY PRISONER RELEASE—(Jerusalem) Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, is opposed to the government’s decision to hand over almost 200 terrorists—some with “blood on their hands”—to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Shin Bet officials worry that the prisoner release will harm Israel’s deterrence abilities, as well as lower morale in security services. About forty per cent of prisoners are released before completing their sentences. Twenty per cent of those engage in terrorism after being released, while others continue to support terrorism through other means, such as recruiting and indoctrinating. (Jerusalem Post, August 17) SUICIDE BOMBER STRIKES ALGERIAN POLICE ACADEMY—(Issers, Algeria) A suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside a police school in Algeria, killing forty-three people and raising fears of an al-Qaeda backed terror campaign in North Africa. Conflict began in Algeria in 1992 when a military-backed government cancelled elections that a radical Islamic party was poised to win. Some 150,000 people have died in the subsequent violence. (National Post, August 20) U.S. UNWILLING TO SELL MID-AIR REFUELERS TO ISRAEL—(Jerusalem) The United States has refused to sell the Israeli Air Force several Boeing 767 mid-air refuelling aircraft due to concerns the U.S. has that Israel will use the aircraft to facilitate an air-strike against Iran. The IAF has great need of the new planes as the ones currently in use are extremely old. Last week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak reiterated that “the U.S.’s position at the present time is that they don’t see an action against Iran as the right thing to do… Our position, and formally their position as well, is that no options should be taken off the table. When we say that, we mean it.” Meanwhile, an unnamed U.S. State Department official also stressed that “the U.S. is committed to Israel’s security,” and that “the U.S. would defend Israel from any attack from Iran.” (Jerusalem Post, August 20) NAVY TO REPEL ”FREE GAZA” BOATS—(Gaza) Israel’s navy has been ordered to turn back two boats carrying 44 pro-Palestinian activists attempting to “break the siege of Gaza.” The so-called “humanitarian” group plans to unload equipment and pick up Palestinians living in Gaza before setting sail again, in what has been described by Israeli officials as largely a publicity stunt. (Jerusalem Post, August 18) SYRIA TESTS NEW MISSILES—(Jerusalem) Israeli radar systems have detected Syria test-launching a series of new long-range missiles, most of which are based on the Scud design. Syria is also believed to hold chemical and biological warheads in its arsenal, as well as batteries of other shorter-range rockets that are more accurate than the Scud missiles. In recent months, the Syrian army has begun emulating tactics used by terrorist group Hizbullah. (Jerusalem Post, August 18) REMEMBER OUR HUSBANDS: MUNICH WIDOWS AT BEIJING—(Beijing) During an emotional ceremony in memory of the massacre of the eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the widows of two of the murdered athletes appealed to the International Olympic Committee officially to commemorate the terrorist attack during each Summer Games. Ilana Romano and Ankie Springer said that the IOC must stop ignoring the death of their husbands. “We have come here today to tell the IOC that it is time to commemorate the memory of the eleven victims… For us, it seems like yesterday…our mission is to remind the world of what happened at Munich. We should have had this memorial in front of a full Olympic Stadium.” The memorial ceremony was held at the Hilton Beijing. (Jerusalem Post, August 18) EMMY AWARDS RECOGNISE AL JAZEERA—(New York) Al Jazeera English, the Qatar-based English-language television network, has been recognised by the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The organisation of global broadcasters, with members from over sixty-five countries, nominated the Middle East’s much-criticised exclusive English-language channel for International Emmy Awards in both the Current Affairs and News categories, its first nominations since launching in late-2006. (iemmys.tv, August 13) ABBAS REJECTS ISRAELI OFFER—(Ramallah) Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly rejected an Israeli proposal to transfer 92.7 per cent of the West Bank, an area in the Negev equivalent to 5.4 per cent of the West Bank, and the entire Gaza Strip to Palestinian control during the latest peace negotiations. Abbas refused the offer because it did not provide for an adjoining territory with Jerusalem as its capital. (BBC, August 12; Reuters, August 13) SYRIA SUPPORTS RUSSIA—(Damascus) Syrian President Bashar Assad pledged to support Russia in its conflict with Georgia and to consider deploying Russian Iskander missiles throughout the territory to threaten the U.S. missile shield in Europe. Assad, on his way to Moscow to cultivate a relationship with newly appointed Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, is said to be concerned about Israel’s supposed assistance to Georgia. (Jerusalem Post, August 20) JEWISH MUSEUM IN POLAND TO BE OPENED IN 2011—(Ottawa) The City of Warsaw and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland have announced the founding of The Museum of the History of Polish Jews at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The museum is to be completed by 2011 and is expected to be comparable to Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in significance. “The Jewish contribution was an important part of Polish history,” Ambassador Piotr Ogrodzinski said, “There were 1,000 years of Jewish Polish communities…it’s a very big piece of Jewish history.” (The Jewish Tribune, July 24) Volume VIII, No. 1,908 • Tuesday, August 19, 2008 PAKISTAN POST-MUSHARRAF PAKISTAN LEFT IN A POLITICAL
VACUUM The bloodless coup that brought Pervez Musharraf to power in Pakistan nine years ago was originally greeted with resignation bordering on indifference. “We want the army in,” a street vendor in Karachi told me at the time. “This time, we need them to clean our house.” Fed up with a decade of weak, corrupt civilian government, Pakistanis in 1999 yearned for a glimmer of hope. General Musharraf was widely regarded as a “reluctant coup maker.” He promised military rule would be short-lived, paving “the way for true democracy to flourish in Pakistan.” When he resigned as president yesterday one step ahead of being impeached by some of the very politicians he had overthrown, Gen. Musharraf left Pakistan a more fragile and fractured country than when he came to power.… Although he presided over a mini-boom that saw the economy grow by 7% a year for seven years, boosting the country’s middle class and transforming Pakistani society and institutions, Gen. Musharraf won’t be remembered as an efficient economic administrator. He is widely regarded and resented in Pakistan as a pro-Western dictator who was out of touch with his own people. He was blamed for opening the door to unwanted U. S. intervention by waging a war against terrorism and Islamic extremists in Pakistan’s western tribal areas. Now that Gen. Musharraf has fallen from power, his Western allies should fear what may ultimately replace him. The repeated failure of civilian governments in Pakistan raises the distinct possibility of a future military coup led by the Islamist wing of Pakistan’s military—the very soldiers who helped found and who now allegedly protect the Taliban. That fear is all the more real because Gen. Musharraf leaves behind a massive political power vacuum. The fragile coalition of corrupt and feuding politicians that now rules the country was united on only one thing—its opposition to Gen. Musharraf. Soon the coalition’s members will be jockeying for power in a country riven by ethnic and religious divisions. The economy has been in free fall since April…. The rupee has lost a quarter of its value and inflation is soaring. In recent weeks, clashes between Pakistani security forces and pro-Taliban extremists in the tribal areas have left hundreds of people dead and thousands displaced. A surge in radicalism—reflected in increased Taliban attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan—surfaces in Pakistan with increased terrorism, suicide bombings and growing uncertainty. Relations with India are worse than they have been in years, with riots and bombs exploding across the border in disputed Kashmir, while officials in New Delhi and Washington have accused Pakistani intelligence agents of organizing a suicide bomb attack on India’s embassy in Kabul in July. Nuclear-armed Pakistan, with its history of abetting nuclear proliferation, is in disarray and there is no indication the civilian leadership that has deposed Gen. Musharraf is in any position to control either Pakistan’s military or the more radical elements of the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).… The governing alliance that toppled Gen. Musharraf may already be poisoned by unsettled rivalries that will now likely come to the fore.… [Asif Ali] Zardari [widower of assassinated Premier Bhutto and now head of her Pakistan Peoples Party] spent 11 years in jail awaiting trial on 18 charges of corruption stemming from accusations he siphoned off US$1.5-billion in kickbacks and bribes in the 1990s when he served as a Cabinet minister…. Nawaz Sharif, whose Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) shares a tenuous governing coalition with Mr. Zardari’s PPP, wants to strip Pakistan’s presidency of its powers to appoint judges, military leaders and to dismiss parliament. As the ruler deposed by Gen. Musharraf’s 1999 coup, he wants the courts to overturn the legal legacy of Gen. Musharraf’s presidency— a move that could restore his own power and property, while also threatening Mr. Zardari. A social and religious conservative who in the past aligned himself with Islamists, Mr. Sharif didn’t have much of a record for democracy during the two periods he was prime minister in 1990 and 1996. One of his last acts as prime minister before being overthrown by Gen. Musharraf was to try to impose shariah law on Pakistan. Originally a protege of dictator General Zia ul-Haq, Mr. Sharif was prime minister in 1998 when Pakistan obtained and exploded its first nuclear bombs. In 1999, just months after he sought to normalize relations with India, his government launched a surprise mountain war in Kashmir. When he was out of power and living in exile in Saudi Arabia, two former Pakistani intelligence agents who are staunch al-Qaeda sympathizers claimed Mr. Sharif regularly met with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s and received financial support from the Saudi terrorist to overthrow Ms. Bhutto. When he announced his resignation yesterday, Gen. Musharraf insisted he wanted to avoid pushing Pakistan through a period of turbulence. But that may be exactly what he has done…. AFTER
MUSHARRAF General Musharraf’s departure from the presidency of Pakistan, which he has held formally or informally since 1999, comes with Pakistan experiencing political instability, terrorist bombings, and separatist campaigns.… That’s only part of the problem. The country’s most important foreign relationship beside India, with America, is in tatters.… During a visit to Washington, Prime Minister Gilani offered assurances of continuity in his government’s policies with regard to the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan. But many in the new government in Islamabad do not support the military operations by Pakistani forces in Swat and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.…[Musharraf’s] relationship [to America] is now bound to undergo a change. A. Q. Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb,” was released from house arrest although warned not to speak about nuclear proliferation. Apparently the generals feared that Mr. Khan might implicate people still in high office. At least Mr. Khan, if silenced, is alive. A widespread rumor in Pakistan is that Benazir Bhutto was assassinated after telling colleagues that, once elected, she would open the nuclear file. In an interview yesterday in a Singapore newspaper, the Straits Times, India’s national security adviser, M. K. Narayanan, said that many Pakistanis “attribute the killing to ISI.” Mr. Narayanan said the political instability in Islamabad was of great concern to New Delhi, predicting that Mr. Musharraf’s departure will leave a “big vacuum” that will give freedom to radical extremist elements to do “what they like.”… Jammu and Kashmir remain the focus of Pakistan-India tensions. The territories are heavily populated by Muslims but remained on the Indian side of the border when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1948. Many leading Pakistani Muslims never reconciled themselves to losing Kashmir.… Mr. Musharraf angered the Indians by condemning the recent violence [there] as “human rights violations” while describing the 21 people killed as a result of the new violence in the Kashmir valley as “martyrs.” To make matters worse, Mr. Musharraf’s remarks on the unrest in Kashmir valley came soon after India repudiated Pakistan’s attempt to internationalize the problem by referring it to the United Nations.… It’s hard to predict which way Pakistan will turn. All of the forces unleashed by the upheaval within the Muslim world appear in their most concentrated form in Pakistan: A weak state, nationalism eclipsed by religious and tribal loyalties, an inability to impose the rule of the central government in large areas, and a political class that routinely is unable to address the nation’s problems. That’s why the political history of Pakistan is of a pendulum swinging back and forth between military and civilian rule. Undoubtedly, we have not seen the last of the generals. And undoubtedly, too, one of the issues our next president will want to tackle, along with Iran and Russia and North Korea and China and Europe, will be how to gain Pakistan’s full cooperation against Al Qaeda and prevent its nuclear arsenal from slipping into the wrong hands. ‘ISLAMIC
BOMB’ CASTS A LONG SHADOW The resignation of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Monday has reignited concerns among some security analysts who say the prospect of an Islamist revolution in Pakistan—which is the world’s sole nuclear-armed Muslim state—keeps them up at night. Dr. Ely Karmon, an expert on Islamist movements and their drive to obtain weapons of mass destruction, says radical Pakistani Islamists have set themselves the goal of gaining access to Pakistan’s estimated 80 to 90 nuclear bombs, an arsenal they call “the Islamic bomb.” But he notes that there’s a “large distance between Pakistan and Israel,” adding that when it comes to Pakistani instability, India is justifiably the most concerned onlooker. At the same time, if jihadis do take control of Pakistan, Israel would have good reason to worry, he says.… Musharraf’s departure could see either of the two main contenders for power, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif or Asif Ali Zardari, widower of assassinated presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto, forge even closer links to Islamists, Karmon warned. “This instablity is influencing control over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal,” along with the country’s long-range missiles. An Islamist revolution in Pakistan would endanger “not only Pakistan’s neighbors but also longer-range states. Pakistani Islamists clearly see Israel as a central enemy.” Furthermore, the Pakistani army, which has traditionally played a balancing role in Pakistani power disputes, “has been infiltrated by Islamists.” Throw into the mix the fact that two leading Pakistani scientists have been found to cooperate with al-Qaida members, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and one can see why Pakistan’s instablity is holding the attention of Western governments.… But such scenarios are not at the top of Israel’s worry list, according to Ephraim Kam, an expert on Iran and the deputy head of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies. “The fact that Pakistan has had a nuclear program for a few years is not seen by Israel as a threat to it,” he said. “The main reason is because these weapons are aimed at India. The bombs are more Pakistani than Islamic,” he said. That could change if an Islamist revolution took hold in Pakistan, Kam added, saying it was possible that Iran would seek to change its relationship with Pakistan from one of mutual suspicion to an alliance. “Iran could try to expand its axis eastwards if Islamists seize control,” he said. Pakistan’s nuclear program may be linked to the Middle East in a more direct way: Some senior Israeli and Western experts have come to believe that Saudi Arabia funded some or most of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, as part of the kingdom’s attempt to secure its own nuclear shield. “The Saudis may have some kind of agreement with Pakistan over nukes, as the Saudis can’t produce them themselves,” one analyst told the Post. “This is a reasonable belief,” he added. But a hidden American hand may have the power to prevent any unwanted Pakistani nuclear activity, according to foreign media reports. Last year, The New York Times reported that the US had spent nearly $100 million in a secret program to train and equip Pakistani personnel in properly securing their country’s nuclear weapons.… The report also noted that Pakistan had refused the American “permissive action links” system (or PALS), which prevented detonation without proper authorization, out of fear the Americans could leave special access codes in the devices that would allow them to prevent the detonation of the weapons.… Please see our Picks of the Week for more opinions on Musharraf’s resignation. Volume
VIII, No. 1,907 • Mon RUSSIA, GEORGIA & THE MIDDLE EAST HOW TO STOP PUTIN The Russia-Georgia cease-fire brokered by France’s president is less than meets the eye. Its terms keep moving as the Russian army keeps moving. Russia has since occupied Gori (appropriately, Stalin’s birthplace), effectively cutting Georgia in two. The road to the capital, Tbilisi, is open, but apparently Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has temporarily chosen to seek his objectives through military pressure and Western acquiescence rather than by naked occupation. His objectives are clear. They go beyond detaching South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia and absorbing them into Russia. They go beyond destroying the Georgian army, leaving the country at Russia’s mercy. The real objective is the Finlandization of Georgia through the removal of President Mikheil Saakashvili and his replacement by a Russian puppet. Which explains Putin stopping the Russian army (for now) short of Tbilisi. What everyone overlooks in the cease-fire terms is that all future steps—troop withdrawals, territorial arrangements, peacekeeping forces—will have to be negotiated between Russia and Georgia. But Russia says it will not talk to Saakashvili. Thus regime change becomes the first requirement for any movement…. [Putin] is counting on Europe to pressure Saakashvili to resign and/or flee to “give peace a chance.” The Finlandization of Georgia would give Russia control of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which is the only significant westbound route for Caspian Sea oil and gas that does not go through Russia. Pipelines are the economic lifelines of such former Soviet republics as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan that live off energy exports. Moscow would become master of the Caspian basin. Subduing Georgia has an additional effect. It warns Russia’s former Baltic and East European satellites what happens if you get too close to the West. It is the first step to reestablishing Russian hegemony in the region. What is to be done? Let’s be real. There’s nothing to be done militarily. What we can do is alter Putin’s cost-benefit calculations. We are not without resources. There are a range of measures to be deployed if Russia does not live up to its cease-fire commitments: 1. Suspend the NATO-Russia Council established in 2002 to help bring Russia closer to the West. Make clear that dissolution will follow suspension. The council gives Russia a seat at the NATO table. Message: Invading neighboring democracies forfeits the seat. 2. Bar Russian entry to the World Trade Organization. 3. Dissolve the G-8. Putin’s dictatorship long made Russia’s presence in this group of industrial democracies a farce, but no one wanted to upset the bear by expelling it. No need to. The seven democracies simply withdraw.… 4. Announce a U.S.-European boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi. To do otherwise would be obscene. Sochi is 15 miles from Abkhazia, the other Georgian province just invaded by Russia. The Games will become a riveting contest between the Russian, Belarusan and Jamaican bobsled teams. All of these steps (except dissolution of the G-8, which should be irreversible) would be subject to reconsideration depending upon Russian action—most importantly and minimally, its withdrawal of troops from Georgia proper to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The most crucial and unconditional measure, however, is this: Reaffirm support for the Saakashvili government and declare that its removal by the Russians would lead to recognition of a government-in-exile. This would instantly be understood as providing us the legal basis for supplying and supporting a Georgian resistance to any Russian-installed regime.… Bush needs to make up for his mini-Katrina moment when he lingered in Beijing yukking it up with our beach volleyball team while Putin flew to North Ossetia to direct the invasion of a neighboring country. Bush is dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to France and Georgia. Not a moment too soon. Her task must be to present these sanctions, get European agreement on as many as possible and begin imposing them, calibrated to Russian behavior. And most important of all, to prevent any Euro-wobbliness on the survival of Georgia’s democratically elected government. We have cards. We should play them. Much is at stake. WELCOME
BACK TO THE GREAT GAME Last year, President Mikheil Saakashvili invited me along on a helicopter flight to see Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s capital, from the air. We viewed it at some distance to avoid Russian antiaircraft missiles manned by Russian personnel. He pointed out a lone hilltop sprinkled with houses some 10 miles inside Georgian territory—scarcely even a town. Much of the population, namely the Georgians, had long ago been purged by Russian-backed militias, leaving behind a rump population of Ossetian farmers and Russian security forces posing as Ossetians. “We have offered them everything,” he said, “language rights, land rights, guaranteed power in parliament, anything they want, and they would take it, if the Kremlin would let them.” Moscow’s thin pretense of protecting an ethnic group provided just enough cover for Georgia’s timorous friends in the West to ignore increasing Russian provocations over the past few years. Moscow, it now seems, intends to “protect” large numbers of Georgians too—by occupying and killing them if that’s what it takes—and prevent them from building their own history and pursuing their democratic destiny, as it has for almost two centuries.… Having overestimated the power of the Soviet Union in its last years, we have consistently underestimated the ambitions of Russia since. Already, a great deal has been said about the implications of Russia’s invasion for Ukraine, the Baltic States and Europe generally. But few have noticed the direct strategic threat of Moscow’s action to U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Kremlin is not about to reignite the Cold War for the love of a few thousand Ossetians or even for its animosity toward five million Georgians. This is calculated strategic maneuvering. And make no mistake, it’s about countering U.S. power at its furthest stretch with Moscow’s power very close to home. The pivotal geography of the Caucasus offers the Kremlin just such an opportunity. Look at a map, and the East-meets-West, North-meets-South vector lines of the region illustrate all too clearly how the drama now unfolding in the Caucasus casts Moscow’s shadow all across Central Asia and down into the Middle East. In effect, we in the West are being challenged by Russian actions in Georgia to show that we have the nerve and the stamina to secure the gains not just of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but of the entire collapse of Soviet power. Between Russia and Iran, in the lower Caucasus, sits a small wedge of independent soil—namely, the soil of Azerbaijan and Georgia combined. Through those two countries runs the immensely important Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which delivers precious oil circuitously from Azerbaijan to Turkey and out to the world…free of interference from Russia and Iran and the Middle East…. It says to the world that if any former Moscow colonies wish to sell their wares to the West directly, they have a right to do so…. According to Georgian authorities, Russian warplanes have tried to demolish the Georgian leg of that pipeline several times in the last days. Their message cannot be clearer. Besides their own pipeline, Georgia and Azerbaijan offer a fragile strategic conduit between the West and the “stans” of Central Asia—including Afghanistan—an area that the Soviets once controlled in toto. We should remember that an isolated Central Asia means an isolated Afghanistan. Look at the countries surrounding Afghanistan—all former Soviet colonies, then Iran, then Pakistan. The natural resources of Central Asia, from Turkmenistan’s natural gas to Kazakhstan’s abundant oil, cannot reach the West free of Russia and Iran except through that narrow conduit in the Caucasus. Moscow’s former colonies in Central Asia are Afghanistan’s most desirable trading partners. They are watching the strife in Georgia closely.…Moscow is perfectly aware, even if we are not, that choking off the bottleneck in the Caucasus gives Iran and Russia much say over our efforts in Afghanistan. In Iraq too, the Kremlin’s projection of power down through Georgia will soon be felt. Take another look at the map. If Russia is allowed to extend its reach southwards, as in Soviet times, down the Caucasus to Iran’s borders, Moscow can support Iran in any showdown with the West. Iran, thus emboldened, will likely attempt to reassert itself in Iraq, Syria and, via Hezbollah, in Lebanon.… If we don’t draw the line here, it doesn’t get easier down the road with any other border or country. We would be risking the future of Afghanistan, and the stability of Iraq, on the good will of Moscow and the mullahs in Tehran. This is how the game of grand strategy is played, whether we like it or not. WHAT
DOES MOSCOW WANT IN GEORGIA? …What is this conflict about? What are the ramifications, regionally, globally and for the Middle East? And is there a viable way to solve this conflict? The South Ossetian conflict with Georgia is not about nationalism or religion. It is about power politics and Moscow’s desire to retain influence in the former Soviet states that border it. During the Soviet breakup, hundreds if not thousands of groups were concerned about their future security and would have been happy to use the opportunity to gain independence. In fact the real story of the Soviet breakup is not about conflict, but its absence. Only six conflicts emerged in the region after the breakup—two wars and four secessionist conflicts. While hundreds of ethnic and religious groups live side-by-side in the Caucasus and Central Asia, few actively sought independence following the end of rule from Moscow, which teaches us that ethnic conflict is not the main source of violence, but rather something else. The only groups that achieved de facto independence within former Soviet republics were those that Moscow supported. Moscow actively aided the de facto independence of groups that resided in geographically strategic points: Nagorno-Karabagh (ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan); South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia; and Transniestria in Moldova. Moscow’s support of these groups’ secession provided leverage for Russia in these new states during the Soviet breakup and until today. Minority groups in Georgia were especially enticing objects for support: Georgia is the key to the land-locked Caspian region. If you control Georgia, or it is unstable, there is no need for Russia to muscle the rest of the Caucasus and Central Asia: all these land-locked states need Georgia to access the sea and to export their energy resources to Europe without transiting Russia.… The South Ossetian conflict emerged in the early 1990s, on the eve of the Soviet breakup. Why did it reerupt now? Five factors seem to be at play. First, this spring Georgia asked to join NATO. Despite Washington’s unequivocal support for Tbilisi, European states expressed reservations about accepting Georgia before it resolved its border conflicts with Russia. The re-firing of the conflict will surely increase the potency of that concern and push Georgia’s NATO membership beyond the horizon. Second, Russia wants to retain its domination of the European natural gas market. Europe’s energy dependence on Russia is growing from day to day, and this endows Moscow with significant income and political clout. A large part of the natural gas that Russia markets to Europe is actually from Central Asia, and Moscow coerces those states to sell it to Russia at half the price for which it then resells it to Europe. In recent months, Central Asian states have explored circumventing Russia and transporting their gas resources directly to Europe via Georgia. The present conflict clearly upsets these plans. Third, the Kremlin made it clear that if Washington recognized the independence of Kosovo (as it did), Moscow would recognize and support the independence of the secessionist regions in the Caucasus. Russia is extremely vulnerable to ethnic conflict (remember Chechnya and friends?) and did not want the Kosovo precedent on the table. Fourth, Moscow wants to foil US plans to deploy ballistic missile shields in Eastern Europe. Threatening a close ally of the US gets the message to Washington. Fifth, following the installation of Dmitri Medvedev as president of Russia, in-fighting in the Kremlin seems to be at play, and Moscow’s disproportionate response to Tbilisi may be influenced by this. What does this new war mean for the Caucasus region, globally and for the Middle East? If Washington fails to act effectively, the conflict will deal a big blow to US credibility in the former Soviet Union and beyond. If Georgia, Washington’s darling, is not supported in its hour of need, then how can Tashkent or Baghdad feel at ease? This war also has ramifications for the international efforts to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. Russia’s policy toward Iran is generally affected by the state of US-Russian relations. If the sides do not come to an understanding on the Georgia conflict soon, Moscow can not be expected to cooperate with the US on Iran.… (Dr. Brenda Shaffer, faculty
member at the University of Haifa, specializes Volume
VIII, No. 1,906 • Fri HOLOCAUST, YESTERDAY AND TODAY TISHA BE’AV, THE AFTERMATH In the Orthodox calendar, Tisha Be’av, which we observed on Sunday, is the culmination of three weeks of mourning that started with the 17th of Tammuz, when the Babylonians made the first breach in the walls of Jerusalem. After the ninth of Av, we relax and some celebrate the festival of the 15th, when the daughters of Israel were first permitted to marry outside their tribe, and which also counts as the annual wine harvest festival. But should we not remember the great suffering that must have followed the terrible events of Tisha Be’av? In the case of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, we have been assured that life went on in Israel outside Jerusalem, and Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was able to set up a new center of learning at Yavne. It became a powerhouse of scholarship and the beginning of the talmudic period of Jewish Orthodoxy, when the ideas of the Pharisees became enshrined in Halacha, or Jewish law. Thousands of Jews had been killed in the revolt and hundreds taken into slavery to Rome, but Jewish life continued in Israel and indeed intensified when the Sanhedrin reconvened at Yavne. But what of the aftermath of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple, what happened then to Jewish life? There are conflicting accounts of the numbers taken into exile: the Book of Kings says it was 10,000, while Jeremiah counts a total of 4,600 in three waves. But both agree it was the cream of society that was deported. The peasants struggled on, taking over the fields of the departed middle-class under a Babylon-appointed governor, Gedaliah ben Ahikam. A well-meaning and fair-minded civil servant, he lacked royal charisma, was hated by the jealous royalist party and was murdered by them. As a result turmoil was expected, and many Jews fled to the relative safety of Egypt, taking Jeremiah with them. But anarchy did not ensue, and direct rule from Babylon restored some sense of order and economic stability. But the Temple had gone and so had the kohanim, its priests. Jeremiah, who always opposed rebellion against the Babylonians, advised the exiles to accept their fate in Babylon, “Build yourself houses... plant garden... take wives... have children... multiply there and do not succumb” (29:5). He had predicted a stay of 70 years, but it was only to be 50 for those who came back at the earliest opportunity, when Cyrus II issued his cylinder of “human rights” in 538 BCE. For others who only came back with Ezra, it was to be 100 years longer, and for many there was to be no return at all. The first thing that must have happened to the unfortunate exiles was a forced march of 1,300 kilometers. Their path was along the Fertile Crescent, north to Syria, then east to the Euphrates and south down the river to the heart of Babylonia. It must have been a heartbreaking march, the march of the barely living, harassed on all sides by guards and hostile locals. Their transport may have been camels and horses for the lucky few, and some may have ridden on donkeys and asses, carrying their few goods on rough carts drawn by oxen; but the majority would have trudged on foot. One can get a picture of such exiles from the wall reliefs of the Assyrian capture of Lachish, whose refugees were deported from their city 100 years earlier than those of Jerusalem. They carry their pathetic bundles on their shoulders and their babies balance on kitchen pots on the carts. The route taken by the exiles may well have been the main caravan trail, with regular way stations, but their numbers would have been overwhelming, causing great food shortages. Fights would have broken out over water from wells controlled by others. Women would have been abducted on the way for immoral imprisonment and children captured for abuse and slavery. Many hundreds must have died of starvation and exhaustion. To have attempted to escape would have meant certain death in the desert. It may be that the numbers in the Book of Kings were of those who left, and those recorded by Jeremiah—less than half—were those that arrived. Arrival at Babylon, after months of trekking, would have been a relief. We can imagine that the first set of exiles, who had been deported 11 years earlier and included King Jehoiachin, could have prepared some kind of accommodation for the second wave of refugees. We know from the Babylonian annals that Jehoiachin was released from prison and given rations from the royal table. The Babylonians treated our royals with respect, and hopefully they in turn gave help to the later arrivals. We presume that they took Jeremiah’s advice and settled down to marry and to build. Judean women would have been in short supply, as not many would have survived. Taking local wives was the norm, as we know from Ezra many years later, who frowned on the practice. But in Babylon it was necessary for survival, and it would have been considered that the act of marriage, in whatever form, was equivalent to conversion of the woman, as it had been for the Patriarchs.
And that leads us to ask, what was the status of the Jewish religion during the first 50 years of exile? There can be little doubt that the exiles kept alive the hope of seeing the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem. But what was there in Babylon, when they wept by its waters, to keep them focused on the Temple? The traditionalists claim that in Babylon the exiles created the synagogue, without sacrifice and priests, to compensate for the lost Temple. But there is no evidence for that, and little likelihood, as the priests and the sacrifices persisted and appeared again 50 years later in Jerusalem. The synagogue as such was not known until the third century BCE in the Egyptian exile. It developed as a new form of community center and prayer and continued without the benefit of priest and sacrifice. But Babylon was different; it had legitimate priests and they were ready to practice their skills for a future Temple. It is likely that there was a form of temple in Babylon that trained the kohanim and the Levites in their duties in readiness for the return, and it would have served, as any temple did, to unite the people in the worship of their God. Such a situation had applied in Egypt, when the military colony of Jews built their small temple on Elephantine Island in the sixth century BCE. It had an altar for sacrifices and a small shrine for the Shehina, the presence of God. Such a building was considered necessary for the small community on the island near Aswan, and so too it would have been for the much larger and more educated group of Jews in Babylon. The prophet Ezekiel ben Buzi, himself a kohen of the Zadokite line, who came with the first deportees in 597 BCE, told his people of the abominations being performed in Jerusalem and showed them, by his vision of the heavenly chariot, that God had accompanied them to the waters of the Khebar, a tributary of the Euphrates. In his own words he describes how the Lord had provided them with a mikdash me’at, or miniature temple (11:16). That is exactly what the shrine at Elephantine was, at this same period, more like the Tabernacle than the Temple, and that is probably how it was in Babylon. Ezekiel talks about the Levites who went astray, having to bear their iniquity (44:10). Where did they go astray except in a temple in Babylon? In the eyes of Ezekiel, they went astray because they usurped the posts of the kohanim, of the line of Zadok, and that must have been in the service of some form of temple. The famous passage in Zechariah, the prophet of the return, accuses Joshua the high priest of wearing filthy clothes (3:4), which sounds mightily like his performing, without the correct ritual garments, in a temple away from Jerusalem. Zechariah also alludes to the unorthodox building of “a house in the land of Shinar” (5:11). The word “house” stands for temple and Shinar is Sumer, the ancient name for Babylon. The evidence from Ezra is more positive. He mentions that Levites for the Temple in Jerusalem should be brought from Casiphia “hamakom” (the temple?), a village near Babylon, where they were serving under a Levite called Iddo (8:17). It seems that Casiphia was the site of a Jewish temple, and Ezra was happy to bring Levites from there to serve in Jerusalem. The evidence is inconclusive and ambivalent as is to be expected when it might have embarrassed later readers. Thus the temple at Elephantine was never recorded in our sources and only came to light from local papyri documents and, 100 years later (10 years ago), by the turn of the spade. Could a Jewish temple in Babylon ever be excavated in our time? That is unlikely in the present state of war-torn Iraq, but inscriptions abound. The great museums of the world house hundreds of unread cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia. One day surely, one will be deciphered that will give us the necessary evidence, and then we will have something to celebrate as the aftermath of Tisha Be’av. (Stephen Gabriel Rosenberg
is a fellow of the W.F. Albright Europe’s
Shameful Honoring of Vilnius The European Union has designated Vilnius as the “European Capital of Culture” for 2009. It is a recognition Lithuania does not deserve. Vilnius, with its beautiful old town and venerable history, is without a doubt charming. Workers are busy restoring churches and palaces, and the first-time visitor is likely to be smitten by the postcard-perfect scenes. But behind Vilnius’s picturesque facade is something far less appealing to behold: Lithuania’s record of systematically ignoring a major element of its cultural heritage. Jews have lived in Lithuania for a millennium. Vilnius—or Vilna, as it was also known—was a major center of Jewish life and scholarship, boasting so many yeshivas and prominent rabbis in the 18th century that it was known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” By the 20th century one-third of the city’s population was Jewish. It was a world center of Yiddish culture and scholarship. That ended with the Holocaust. The Nazis, with the assistance of Lithuanian collaborators, murdered 200,000 Jews, more than 90% of the country’s Jewish population. Today, six decades later, the small, reviving Jewish community is seeking the return of former Jewish communal property as a means of restoring and preserving Jewish heritage sites and supporting its own limited religious and cultural needs. The Lithuanian Jewish community seeks to follow the paths taken by Jewish communities in neighboring countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, where community property restitution was implemented years ago. In Prague the restored Jewish quarter, with its eight synagogues, is again the center of Jewish activity in the Czech Republic and a magnet for tourists. The Krakow neighborhood known as Kazimierz hosts an annual Jewish Cultural Festival that brings 25,000 people together for a week of concerts, films and lectures that display Poland’s rich Jewish legacy. In Slovakia a government-endowed foundation, created as a partial settlement for looted Jewish assets during the Holocaust, aids the elderly and restores cemeteries and synagogues. None of this is happening in Lithuania. Instead, the Lithuanian government, for more than six years, has continually delayed an agreement on communal property restitution. Meanwhile, former Jewish properties have been privatized and the community lacks the most basic support for education and welfare. Vilna’s historic Jewish cemetery, for example, was hundreds of years old, but in the mid-19th century tsarist Russia built a military fort on the site, and in the 1950s the Soviets replaced it with a sports arena. The pattern of disrespect continued under Lithuania’s post-Communist leadership. Despite promises that no graves would be desecrated under their watch, the land was privatized, sold to developers and, ignoring regulations to the contrary, city permits were issued to allow the construction of luxury apartments. Lithuania’s president promised in September 2007 to stop construction, but it has yet to be halted. Holocaust knowledge also is wanting in Lithuania. The country was annexed by the Soviet Union before World War II ended, leaving no possibility of any critical, objective examination of Lithuania’s Holocaust history until it regained its freedom in 1991. A presidential decree created an international historical commission in 1998 to report on both the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Among its prominent members was Yitzak Arad, the founding director of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Arad was born in Lithuania. The Nazis killed his family, and as a teenager he fled and joined the Soviet Partisans. When the war ended he left for Palestine. Sixty years later a Lithuanian newspaper translated excerpts from his diary, describing the Partisans’ battles with Germans and Lithuanian collaborators. Last year Lithuania’s general prosecutor decided this was prima facie evidence that Arad might be guilty of war crimes and opened an investigation. The historical commission has published several scholarly works that detail the role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust. But the actions of the general prosecutor now make a mockery of these findings. In March, when Lithuania celebrated its independence from the Soviet Union, several hundred neo-Nazis and skinheads paraded along Gedimino Avenue in central Vilnius, walking past the Parliament and the prime minister’s office, waving flags with a Lithuanian swastika and shouting “Juden Raus.” This was not the first neo-Nazi rally in Eastern Europe. Last November a similar group organized a march in Prague with the provocative goal of walking through the city’s Jewish quarter. But in the Czech capital the neo-Nazis were greeted by thousands of vocal counter-demonstrators and nearly all the country’s political leaders. In Vilnius, where incitement to ethnic hatred is a crime, police made no arrests while providing the marchers with an escort. Lithuania’s president, to be fair, did voice criticism—10 days after the event. Twisting Holocaust memory, desecrating cemeteries, ignoring antisemitism and refusing to return communal property—surely this is not the best cultural capital Europe can offer. The E.U. should reconsider the honor accorded Vilnius. (Rabbi Andrew Baker is Director
of International Jewish Affairs THE
POWER OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS Dear Mr. Cohen, I now carry with me your telling of your experience and I cherish the opportunity to have heard you tell it. It will remain important to me for the duration of my life, for I believe that you taught me something that very few people can teach. You taught me the important of valuing human life regardless of anything that may differentiate us in the least bit.… I thank you for your honesty and for your time in helping my generation understand what went on during those horrendous years. Sincerely, Julian Dear Mr. Cohen, I had never had the opportunity to speak with an actual Holocaust survivor. Seeing your wise face and hearing the emotion in your voice after all these years brought the realisty home to me in a way no book had ever done before. I now feel like I am also a witness for future generations. This is a duty and an honour I promise I will not take lightly. Thank you sincerely, Joanna (Baruch Cohen, Research
Chairman at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume
VIII, No. 1,905 • Thurs MEDIA—FEAR AND BIAS YOU STILL CAN’T WRITE ABOUT
MUHAMMAD Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha’s life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of The Jewel of Medina—a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet’s harem. It’s not going to happen: In May, Random House abruptly called off publication of the book. The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.… After consulting security experts and Islam scholars, [Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group,] said the company decided “to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel.” This saga upsets me as a Muslim—and as a writer who believes that fiction can bring Islamic history to life in a uniquely captivating and humanizing way.... Last month, Ms. Jones signed a termination agreement with Random House, so her literary agent could shop the book to other publishers. This time, the instigator of the trouble wasn’t a radical Muslim cleric, but an American academic. In April, looking for endorsements, Random House sent galleys to writers and scholars, including Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin. Ms. Jones put her on the list because she read Ms. Spellberg’s book, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ’A’isha Bint Abi Bakr. But Ms. Spellberg wasn’t a fan of Ms. Jones’s book. On April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg’s classes and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from her. “She was upset,” Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told him the novel “made fun of Muslims and their history,” and asked him to warn Muslims.… After he got the call from Ms. Spellberg, Mr. Amanullah dashed off an email to a listserv of Middle East and Islamic studies graduate students, acknowledging he didn’t “know anything about it [the book],” but telling them, “Just got a frantic call from a professor who got an advance copy of the forthcoming novel, Jewel of Medina—she said she found it incredibly offensive.” He added a write-up about the book from the Publishers Marketplace, an industry publication. The next day, a blogger known as Shahid Pradhan posted Mr. Amanullah’s email on a Web site for Shiite Muslims—“Hussaini Youth”—under a headline, “upcoming book, ‘Jewel of Medina’: A new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam.” Two hours and 28 minutes after that, another person by the name of Ali Hemani proposed a seven-point strategy to ensure “the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologise all the muslims across the world.” Meanwhile back in New York City, Jane Garrett, an editor at Random House’s Knopf imprint, dispatched an email on May 1 to Knopf executives, telling them she got a phone call the evening before from Ms. Spellberg (who happens to be under contract with Knopf to write Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an.) “She thinks there is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence,” Ms. Garrett wrote. “Denise says it is ‘a declaration of war…explosive stuff…a national security issue.’”… All this saddens me. Literature moves civilizations forward, and Islam is no exception. There is in fact a tradition of historical fiction in Islam, including such works as The Adventures of Amir Hamza, an epic on the life of Muhammad’s uncle. Last year a 948-page English translation was published, ironically, by Random House. And, for all those who believe the life of the prophet Muhammad can’t include stories of lust, anger and doubt, we need only read the Quran (18:110) where, it’s said, God instructed Muhammad to tell others: “I am only a mortal like you.” (Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam.)
THE
“EXPERT REASSURANCE” OF NICHOLAS KRISTOF [New York Times columnist Nicholas] Kristof doesn’t write often on Israel, and has no particular expertise or experience in this region. The Far East is more his bailiwick. But that doesn’t deter him from occasionally dropping by here and penning the odd piece, usually dedicated, for the most part, to berating Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians, and laying on it most of the blame for failure to reach a peace agreement with the Arabs. Though Kristof’s views on these matters are in broad outline no different from the general editorial outlook of the Times, even those who in principle agree with some of his points—including myself—find his pieces on the subject irritating and unhelpful. That’s because he brings to these issues none of the nuance, knowledge or sense of context found, for example, in Friedman’s writing. An all too typical example was Kristof’s July 24 column, “Tough love for Israel?”—a response of sorts to earlier criticism of his articles dealing with the situation here. It’s filled with statements that are problematic and, to a degree, inaccurate, if not factually, then in terms of their general description.… … [O]ne statement … that I found the most objectionable [is]: “Particularly at a time when Israel seems to be contemplating military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the United States would be a better friend if it said: ‘That’s crazy.’” Really? Why is that? More specifically, why is an idea that what admittedly could be the wrong move to make at this stage, not just a mistake on Israel’s part but outright “crazy”? Kristof has argued elsewhere that…“The government is so corrupt, tyrannical and incompetent that it will eventually collapse—unless we attack its nuclear sites and trigger a nationalistic surge of support for the regime.”… In the meantime, while the rest of the world fails to pass the kind of tough economic sanctions that would really hurt Teheran, should Israel be expected to simply sit tight and wait around for its radical Islamic regime to “eventually collapse,” when it’s led by a president who talks about this nation being wiped off the map, and is getting ever closer to obtaining the means to make that possible? Even Kristof admits: “Granted, expert reassurances are easier to accept if you live in New York than in Tel Aviv, and the consequences of being wrong would be horrific.” Whew! I guess those consequences indeed would be pretty horrific for New Yorkers like Kristof—but, well, I guess he can live with it. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to…. Perhaps first [Kristof] should give some thought to pondering the possible “horrific” consequences when his expertise proves wrong—be it in the life of one individual or, when it comes to the Iranian nuclear threat against Israel, the lives of some seven million more. SOMETIMES,
THERE’S NEWS IN THE GUTTER The John Edwards “love child” story finally hit the national news media and made the front page of yesterday’s Times.… They could ignore it no longer when Edwards, who had been running away from reporters for weeks, sat down with ABC News and admitted he had an extra-marital affair and lied repeatedly about it. He denied he fathered Rielle Hunter’s 5-month-old daughter, as the National Enquirer reported in December before the baby was born. Before Edwards’s admission, The Times never made a serious effort to investigate the story, even as the Enquirer wrote one sensational report after another: a 2:40 a.m. ambush by the tabloid’s reporters at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles after Edwards spent hours in a room with Hunter and her baby; an allegation of $15,000 a month in “hush money;” a grainy “spy photo” of him with a baby. [Most readers] I heard from over the past several weeks [were] either puzzled or outraged that the newspaper, which carried front-page allegations of a John McCain affair, was ignoring the relationship between Edwards and Hunter. John Boyle of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., said, “I hope you will find the time to tell me why this news story is not reported by your paper.” Some readers, like Bert A. Getz Jr. of Winnetka, Ill., were sure they already knew the answer: liberal bias. I do not think liberal bias had anything to do with it. But I think The Times—like The Washington Post, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, major networks and wire services—was far too squeamish about tackling the story. The Times did not want to regurgitate the Enquirer’s reporting without verifying it, which is responsible. But The Times did not try to verify it, beyond a few perfunctory efforts, which I think was wrong.… It is also the kind of story that The Times seems instinctively to recoil from…. But Edwards was different. When the Enquirer first published its allegations, he was a major presidential candidate with a compelling personal story that included a wife of 30 years with incurable breast cancer.… Times editors said that when the first Enquirer story appeared and they could not verify it after fairly cursory inquiries, they left it alone. “I’m not going to recycle a supermarket tabloid’s anonymously sourced story,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor. By the time the Enquirer reported on its hotel stakeout, Edwards was no longer a presidential candidate and, according to Times reporting, not even under serious consideration as a running mate to Barack Obama. “Edwards isn’t a player at the moment,” said Richard Stevenson, who directs the newspaper’s campaign coverage. “There are a lot of big issues facing the country. The two candidates are compelling figures, and we have finite resources.”… I spoke with Stevenson and Keller last week before Edwards’s ABC interview. Keller and Stevenson said it was wrong to equate the McCain and Edwards stories, as so many readers and bloggers have. The editors saw the McCain story as describing a powerful senator’s dealings with lobbyists trying to influence government decisions, including one who anonymous sources believed was having a romantic relationship with him. “Our interest in that story was not in his private romantic life,” Keller said. “It was in his relationship with lobbyists, plural, and that story took many, many weeks of intensive reporting effort.” I would not have published the allegation of a McCain affair, because The Times did not convincingly establish its truth. I would not have recycled the National Enquirer story, either. But I think it was a mistake for Times editors to turn up their noses and not pursue it. “There was a tendency, fair or not, to dismiss what you read in the National Enquirer,” Keller said.…When the Enquirer published its first “love child” report, The Times was going energetically after the McCain story. It should have pursued the other story as well.… (Clark Hoyt is the readers’ representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own.) SEX,
LIES AND THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER What’s the ickiest part of the John Edwards scandal? Is it when he explained that his wife’s breast cancer was in remission when he took up with Rielle? Is it the e-mail in which she reveals that her nickname for him was “love lips”? Is it the campaign video (shot by Rielle) in which Mr. Edwards, dressed in tight jeans, says he doesn’t want to be seen as “some plastic Ken doll,” then leers, “I actually want the country to see who I am—who I truly am”? Is it Rielle’s wacko hairdo? Is it Elizabeth Edwards’s yech-inducing blog, in which she blamed her husband’s troubles on “a string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication”? Or is it that we never would have learned a word about any of this without the National Enquirer?… Scandal has turned Mr. Edwards into a pathetic has-been. It’s had much the same effect on the news bosses at the mainstream media, who used to be the gatekeepers for all things fit to print. When the Enquirer broke the story months ago—while Mr. Edwards was still in the race—they treated it like poison ivy. “Classically not a Times-like story,” sniffed Craig Whitney, the standards editor of The New York Times. This was the same paper, you may recall, that recently ran an innuendo-laden story on John McCain and his friendship with an attractive lobbyist a decade or so ago. No wonder critics accuse the MSM of double standards—one for Democrats, and another for Republicans. But the problem’s worse than that. Now that the barbarians have stormed the gates and sacked the citadel, the MSM have no idea what to do. Sending out their best reporters to match a story broken by the gutter press simply isn’t in their DNA.…And that is why anyone who can find the Drudge Report knew for weeks what the mainstream papers were too delicate to report: that Mr. Edwards had been caught skulking around the Beverly Hilton in the middle of the night, where the woman with whom he had publicly denied having an affair happened to be staying. With her baby. Of whom he is absolutely not the father.… In fact, the barbarians have been at the gates ever since the O. J. Simpson trial, which turned out to be a cultural and racial event of immense significance. The MSM couldn’t bear to dumpster-dive into the lurid details, even as an insatiable public gobbled them up. That was when they began to lose their grip on deciding what is news. With the explosion of the blogosphere, their power is gone for good.… Volume
VIII, No. 1,904 •Wednes WEDNESDAY’S “NEWS IN REVIEW” ROUND-UP WEEKLY QUOTES “Even if Tzipora Livni makes the decisions, this doesn't mean that she is fit to do so…. Her pride in UN resolution 1701 puts her judgment in question.”—Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an Army Radio interview, referring Foreign Minister Livni’s role in obtaining the less-than-favourable cease-fire agreement that ended the Second Lebanon War. Alluding to an ad Hillary Clinton's campaign ran in order to cast doubt on Barack Obama's experience, Barak continued, saying, “Livni is not necessarily qualified to provide the right solutions, neither at three in the morning nor at three in the afternoon,” and he referred to Kadima as a “refugee camp,” that had “brought upon Israel the repercussions of the disengagement, the Second Lebanon War and a series of embarrassing affairs.” Sources in Kadima lashed out at the defense minister in response to his interview, stating that “[i]t is obvious that at the helm of a party on the threshold of bankruptcy there is an hysterical man whose conduct in the past few days only reinforces our conviction that Barak understands Kadima is a strong party.” (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 13) “The resistance is now stronger than before and this keeps the option of war awake. If we were weak, Israel would not hesitate to start another war… We are stronger than before and when Hezbollah is strong, our strength stops Israel from starting a new war…we don’t seek war, but we must be ready...”—Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, a Hezbollah military commander, proclaiming the Shiite group’s increased strength in a rare interview with The Daily Telegraph on August 2 2008. Intelligence sources say that the Iranian-backed terror organization has tripled its weapons arsenal in the last two years, to 40,000 missiles, three times as many as at the start of the 2006 war. Iran is Hezbollah’s military and financial supplier, with Syria acting as the conduit for missiles and materiel from Iran to southern Lebanon. Commenting on the Iran-Hezbollah connection, Kaouk said that, “we are proud of our friendship with Iran and with Syria and every country which helps us to gain our rights.” (National Post, August 2) “The president keeps all his options on the table, and we still believe that the diplomatic option can work and there’s time for it to work.”—U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking days after Iran rejected internationally proposed incentives in return for suspending their uranium enrichment program. Meanwhile, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak maintained that a nuclear Iran would be “dangerous to world order… We need to keep every option open. If they provoke us, or they attack us, our army is prepared to attack and to succeed uncompromisingly…it’s up to us to find the best way to get the best result with minimum damage.” Barak maintained that UN Resolution 1701, which brought an end to the 2006 war, was insufficient since Hezbollah, Syria and Iran were acting with impunity in Lebanon. (Jerusalem Post, August 7) “The Zionist occupation…has not yet agreed to the demand to release our prisoners so our fighters are preparing for the next round in which we will try to abduct more Israeli soldiers to swap them for our hero prisoners.”—Abu Attaya, spokesman of the Gaza-based Palestinian terror group the Popular Resistance Committee, declaring to Reuters that, “[Israel] has until the end of the tenth week [since the implementation of the June 19 ceasefire] and if they do not abide by the obligations of calm, politicians will stop talking and military men will act.” (Ha’aretz, August 8) “God will protect me. God is watching. I strangled my daughter.”—Chaudhry Rashid, a Pakistani Muslim father, allegedly confessing murder to police in Atlanta, Georgia. At a preliminary hearing authorities told a judge that Rashid admitted to killing his daughter on July 6 with a bungee cord because she had filed divorce papers and was having an extramarital affair. “They do not leave their customs behind when they cross borders, the customs come right with them. If any woman in the family in any way does something that dishonours the family, the whole family is dishonoured, they are the laughingstock of the whole community, because they ‘don’t know how to control their women.’ And the only way this blight on their honour can be eradicated is to kill the one who has committed the crime,” commented Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, an expert on honour killing and the custom of genital mutilation in the Muslim world. (New York Post, August 6) “I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee… Our voters and Edwards’ voters were the same people.”—Howard Wolfson, former communication director for Hilary Clinton, insisting that had John Edwards’ sex scandal been exposed in the mainstream media last year, Clinton would have garnered enough support to beat Democratic Party presidential candidate Barak Obama, who garnered 38 percent of the Iowa vote. Edwards edged out Clinton for second place with 29.7 percent. Clinton managed 29.5 percent. Only the National Enquirer pursued the Edwards story and cover-up. (New York Post, August 12) “This process [at Guantanamo Bay] demonstrated that military commissions can effectively bring very dangerous terrorists to justice… The fact that the jury did not find Hamdan guilty of all of the charges brought against him demonstrates that the jury weighed the evidence carefully.”—Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for President, supporting the recent trial and conviction of former Osama bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan. Senator Obama praised the trial's presiding officers but took new shots at President George W. Bush's war on terror and declined to characterize the trial. “That the Hamdan trial—the first military commission trial with a guilty verdict since 9/11—took several years of legal challenges to secure a conviction for material support for terrorism underscores the dangerous flaws in the administration's legal framework.” Obama said, adding that Americans and their values would be better protected by using the civilian and the existing military court systems to prosecute terrorists, he said. “And while it is important to convict anyone who provides material support for terrorism, it is long past time to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and the terrorists who murdered nearly 3,000 Americans,” the Democratic White House hopeful said. (National Post, Aug. 7) SHORT TAKES LEBANON BOMB KILLS 18—(Tripoli) A massive explosion rocked a bus carrying civilians and off-duty soldiers in Tripoli, Lebanon this morning, killing 18 people and wounding 46. Tripoli has, in recent years, witnessed clashes between its Sunni majority and Alawite minority as well as between the Lebanese military and the al Qaeda-inspired terrorist group Fatah al-Islam. (Ha’aretz, New York Sun, August 13) PETRAEUS VISITS LEBANON AS HEZBOLLAH GAINS STRENGTH—(Beirut) American General David Petraeus, recently promoted commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, made a surprise visit to Lebanon to discuss American support for the country’s national army. Petraeus’ visit highlights the strategic importance of Lebanon in the region and the grave concerns that Israel has with Hezbollah’s growing power in the country. The composition of the Lebanese government now gives Hezbollah the ability to dominate Lebanon’s decision-making process. “The situation in Lebanon is worrisome,” an Israeli official stated, “Iran’s foothold in Lebanon, via Hezbollah, now threatens Israel.” (Jerusalem Post, August 7) GEORGIAN EXPERIMENT DRAWS WORLD ATTENTION—(Tel Aviv) Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport was the site of much relief Sunday, when the first flight from Tbilisi, Georgia touched down, delivering Georgians and Israelis from the terrifying development they suddenly faced following the Russian invasion of Georgia. (Jerusalem Post, August 11) MCCAIN DEMONSTRATES FOREIGN-POLICY EXPERIENCE—(Washington) In the wake of the Russia’s aggression against Georgia this weekend, while Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama simply declared that Russia and Georgia should “show restraint…to avoid an escalation to full-scale war”, Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for U.S. president, called for Russia to “immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory.” In a televised a warning to Russia on Sunday, McCain threatened that the actions of President Dimitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would have “severe, long-term negative consequences” for their relations with the U.S. and Europe, and outlined a plan to isolate and punish Russia. (Telegraph-UK, August 11) OLMERT INTERROGATION, TAKE FIVE—(Jerusalem) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was questioned by National Fraud Unit detectives for the fifth time regarding charges of corruption for taking bribes and for double-billing charities and a government ministry to finance personal travels. The detectives were forced to visit the Olmert home Friday morning since Olmert has allegedly been “playing for time” and employing “tricks” to stall previous interrogations. (Jerusalem Post, August 7; Ha’aretz, August 8) OBAMA RECEIVED PALESTINIAN FUNDING—(Rafah) Investigative blogger Pamela Geller discovered a series of online contributions made last year to the presumptive Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, that raised suspicion. While it is illegal for a U.S. presidential candidate to receive a campaign contribution in excess of $2,300 from a single individual or to accept contributions from non-U.S. citizens, Obama apparently collected nearly $30,000 from two Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Further investigation by journalist Aaron Klein turned up the brothers Monir and Hosam Edwan, who expressed their hope that Obama will be the U.S. president to force Israel to forfeit land for the birth of a Palestinian Arab state. (Israel Today, August 5) OBAMA’S MUSLIM OUTREACH RESIGNS—(Washington) Presidential candidate Barak Obama’s Muslim outreach co-ordinator, Mazan Asbahi, has resigned his post following allegations that he served on the board of the Dow Jones Islamic Index Fund alongside fundamentalist Illinois imam Jamal Said. The campaign has yet to name a successor to Asbahi. (Forward, August 7) ISRAEL’S NEW SUPER-WEAPON: “MAGIC RATS”?—(I) The Palestinian Authority has accused Israel of using a new weapon, rats with supernatural qualities, to chase Arab residents out of Jerusalem. According to two Palestinian Authority newspapers, Israeli settlers have been allegedly releasing the large rats—which are supposedly immune to cats and rat poison, and harass only Arabs, not Jews—in an attempt to make the lives of Arab citizens a “living hell.” The reports do not say how the Israelis are supposed to have accomplished this marvel of animal breeding and training. (Palestinian Media Watch, July 24) JABOTINSKY REMOVED FROM ISRAELI CURRICULUM—(Jerusalem) Just one week after Jabotinsky Day, Israel’s education minister decided to exclude the early Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky from Israel’s school curriculum. Education minister Yuli Tamir, who also brought the 1967 borders, or Green Line, back into Israeli textbooks, supposedly made the decision to “expel” the Revisionist Zionist thinker from the curriculum just before being replaced by a more conservative, nationalist minister. (Ha’aretz, August 11) CANADA NEEDS A COPY OF MASSIVE NAZI ARCHIVE—(Ottawa) In a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canadian Senator Jerry S. Grafstein has requested that Canada obtain an electronic copy of the International Tracing Service (ITS) archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, and make it available for public consultation. The ITS archive is a vast source of Holocaust and Second World War-related information that had been sealed from public access in 1955. The ITS archive was finally opened in November, 2007. (Office of Senator Jerry S. Grafstein, Press Release, August 7) ANTI-JEWISH BIAS FOUND IN CASE OF ACCUSED SPY—(Washington) A final report released by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Defence backs the discrimination claim of an Orthodox Jewish army engineer accused more than 10 years ago of spying for Israel. David Tenenbaum was subjected to anti-Jewish epithets, a polygraph test and the ransacking of his home before the U.S. Justice Department determined that there was no basis to prosecute him. The Department of Defence’s condemnation of the way the Tenenbaum case was handled has been described as a “welcome” and “historic” development by Agudath Israel of America. (Jewish Tribune, July 31) ANTISEMITIC T-SHIRTS SOLD IN PARIS—(Paris) French prosecutors are investigating the sale of t-shirts with Nazi slogans. The shirts were sold in a store in the Eastern Paris neighbourhood of Belleville, where there is a history of tension between North African immigrants and the Jewish community. (Jer. Post, Aug. 13) POLICE RAID “HITLER YOUTH” CAMP—(Berlin) Calls grew yesterday for the banning of a German youth movement after police raided what appeared to be a Hitler Youth-style vacation camp involving children as young as eight. Police sent 39 children from all over the country home, and seized material such as tea towels and song sheets printed with swastikas. (Agence France-Presse, August 13) ATTENTION TO JEWS FROM ARAB COUNTRIES—(London) B’nai Brith Canada’s senior legal counsel, David Matas, recently addressed the British House of Lords on the plight of Jews from Arab countries. Pleased with the response, Matas said that most audiences are unaware of the issue, and “it’s completely new to them. There’s a lot of support.” He began working with MP Irwin Cotler, Honorary Chair of Justice for Jews in Arab Countries (JJAC), and Executive Director Stan Urman five years ago, and successfully lobbied for the adoption of U.S. House Resolution 185 in April recognising the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. In July, Matas and Cotler were named honorary chairs of B’nai Brith International’s new International Commission on Jewish Legal Affairs. (Jewish Tribune, July 24) U.S. RELEASES FACTS OF ANTHRAX CASE—(Washington) U.S. federal authorities have released evidence backing their case against army researcher Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide earlier this month before he could be indicted for the anthrax murders of 2001. Ivins had unrestricted access to the unique strain of anthrax used in the attacks as well as a history of mental illness and threats of violence. Ivins has been declared the only culprit. (New York Post, August 7) Volume
VIII, No. 1,903 • Tues
GEORGIA ON [OUR] MIND… [Editor’s Preface: We are running a series of articles today on the Russian assault on Georgia—which, despite a proclaimed cease-fire, is by no means over—because of the intrinsic importance of this crisis for Israel and for Europe and the West. The implications of a resurgent and aggressive Soviet-like Russia for Israel and the Iran conflict, for the Middle East, and for Eastern Europe generally, are serious. Further, the potential impact of this international crisison the dynamics of the unfolding American Presidential election hardly needs underlining.] WILL
RUSSIA GET AWAY WITH IT? In August 1924, the small nation of Georgia, occupied by Soviet Russia since 1921, rose up against Soviet rule. On Sept. 16, 1924, The Times of London reported on an appeal by the president of the Georgian Republic to the League of Nations. While “sympathetic reference to his country’s efforts was made” in the Assembly, the Times said, “it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid, and that the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to make any impression upon Soviet Russia.” “Unlikely” was an understatement. Georgians did not enjoy freedom again until 1991.
Today, the Vladimir Putins and Hu Jintaos and Mahmoud Ahmadinejads of the world—to say nothing of their junior counterparts in places like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea—are no more likely than were Soviet leaders in 1924 to be swayed by “moral influence.” Dictators aren’t moved by the claims of justice unarmed; aggressors aren’t intimidated by diplomacy absent the credible threat of force; fanatics aren’t deterred by the disapproval of men of moderation or refinement.… Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.” But Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence—about 2,000 troops—fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of—and perhaps destabilizes all of—a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago. For that matter, consider the implications of our turning away from Georgia for other aspiring pro-Western governments in the neighborhood, like Ukraine’s. Shouldn’t we therefore now insist that normal relations with Russia are impossible as long as the aggression continues, strongly reiterate our commitment to the territorial integrity of Georgia and Ukraine, and offer emergency military aid to Georgia?… The United States, of course, is not without resources and allies to deal with [such] problems and threats. But at times we seem oddly timid and uncertain. When the “civilized world” expostulated with Russia about Georgia in 1924, the Soviet regime was still weak. In Germany, Hitler was in jail. Only 16 years later, Britain stood virtually alone against a Nazi-Soviet axis. Is it not true today, as it was in the 1920s and ‘30s, that delay and irresolution on the part of the democracies simply invite future threats and graver dangers? GEORGIA:
VLADIMIR PUTIN SENDS EMPHATIC MESSAGE OF GLOBAL IMPORTANCE By seizing the opportunity to pound Georgia with air strikes and military incursions, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, is sending an emphatic message with global consequences. The curtain has fallen on the era when NATO steadily expanded into Eastern Europe and onwards to embrace former republics of the Soviet Union—and Russia was able to respond with nothing more than bluster. Moreover, Mr. Putin has demonstrated that the Kremlin will use force to protect the 25 million Russians who inhabit the Soviet Union’s successor states, well beyond the mother country’s borders. The importance of this message cannot be exaggerated. Whether the populations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s two breakaway regions, are genuinely Russian or merely the recipients of passports recently issued from Moscow matters little. Dmitry Medvedev made the crucial point last week when he stated that as Russia’s president, he was obliged to protect the “security and dignity” of all Russian citizens, wherever they may live. Countries ranging from Latvia to Moldova to Ukraine have large Russian minorities. If their presence justified Russian intervention in Georgia, might the same happen in these countries? Is the fighting in Georgia merely a prelude to what lies ahead in nations close to the heart of Europe?… Ukraine is the most crucial link in the chain. This aspiring member of both NATO and the European Union has 11 million Russians, concentrated in its eastern regions and particularly in the Crimea, where they comprise about 70 per cent of the population. Jonathan Eyal, the head of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said that Russia’s key priority was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but further military intervention was unlikely. “They don’t need to do the same elsewhere simply because what is happening in Georgia has already driven home the message that what happens in these Russian enclaves, wherever they are, is for Russia to determine and no-one else,” he said.… When Mr. Putin sent the tanks into Georgia, Mr. Eyal [said] there was “absolutely no doubt that one of his key calculations was Ukraine”. In essence, Mr, Putin was seeking to deter Ukraine from pressing ahead with its plan to join NATO—and Mr. Eyal believes that Russia’s plan has succeeded. If so, the balance of power in Europe has fundamentally changed and Russia has, through the use of force against Georgia, seized the power to veto NATO’s future membership. Ukraine is by far the most important of the former Soviet republics. Columns of Russian tanks hundreds of miles from its borders may now have changed its future. IS
RUSSIA MORPHING INTO ANOTHER USSR? Well the Ukraine girls really
knock me out It’s not only the South Ossetians who are back in the USSR this morning. Other Georgians; countries in Russia’s “near abroad” from the Caucasus to the Baltic; “national minorities” such as the Chechens; the West; and even Russians themselves now have to deal with a country and political leadership that bear an eerie similarity to Soviet models. They are authoritarian, militaristic, greedy and not overly concerned about where their borders end. How lucky we should all feel about this is another matter. In recent years, the Russian state has been credibly accused of murdering an exile in London; expropriated foreign investments on behalf of an energy company controlled by itself; cut off energy supplies to states as a means of political intimidation; assisted secessionist rebels in neighbouring states in order to keep their newly independent governments off-balance; and in the past few days—no more Mr. Nice Guy—invaded and bombed the sovereign state of Georgia.… Almost all the senior officials in the South Ossetian “government” are former KGB officials from various Russian provinces. Its “Interior Minister,” for instance, previously served in the Interior Ministry of North Ossetia. As Yulia Latynina of Novaya Gazeta dryly points out: “South Ossetia is not a territory, not a country, not a regime. It is a joint venture of siloviki [former Russian intelligence officials] generals and Ossetian bandits for making money in a conflict with Georgia.” The result is a squalid depopulated entrepôt for drugs, smuggling, money-laundering and other criminal endeavours. In addition to making money for the siloviki, South Ossetia exists for the purpose of destabilizing pro-Western Georgia. Its sporadic shelling of nearby Georgian villages provoked Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili into a seemingly catastrophic military response. But if Georgia had taken no action, Russia would have incorporated the breakaway province by degrees. Mr. Putin had already given South Ossetian residents Russian passports. Both trapdoors led to the same result: Russian expansion; the punishment of Georgia for daring to be an ally of the West; and the annexation of South Ossetia, now occupied by Russian “peacekeepers.” Yes, it’s “back in the USSR,” boys. Will Mr. Putin’s redrawing of international boundaries stop there? Russian tanks crossed into Georgia proper last night. Might he dismember the country still further and block the one pipeline that brings Central Asian energy to the West without going through Russian territory? And if so, will the West let him get away with it? Moscow apparently calculates that its brute seizure of another country’s territory can be disguised as a “peacekeeping” operation to prevent “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” by the Georgians. A sophisticated press operation to popularize this mendacious “narrative” is being mounted internationally and at home. Initially, it found a hearing among those Western commentators for whom any enemy of George Bush or his friends must be in the right.… Another excuse employed to soften criticism of Russia is that Mr. Saakashvili had angered Mr. Putin by seeking to join NATO. This argument is a particular application of the general proposition that, as philosopher Roger Scruton ironically puts it, “defence equals aggression.” What the past week has demonstrated is that Mr. Saakashvili was right to seek the protection of NATO membership from Russian aggression. If granted, NATO membership would at least have given the Kremlin an additional serious reason not to risk this week’s invasion. This blend of a sophisticated Russian media campaign and the cultural masochism of Western public opinion might have persuaded the West to swallow a Russian seizure of South Ossetia and even Abkhazia, issue a few protests and then proceed with “business as usual.” That may indeed still happen—German public opinion is especially susceptible to such pacifist temptations.… Maybe the best Western diplomats can accomplish locally is to “re-freeze” the conflict along lines that allow Russia to keep its kleptocratic enclaves, but demand a retreat from Georgia proper. Given Russia’s continuing military advance, such a settlement would now look almost like an achievement. The longer term is another matter. If Russia is morphing into another USSR, then the West will have to defend the post-Cold War international structure and the independence of post-communist nations against Mr. Putin’s neo-imperialism.… Thus [perhaps now] the Central Europeans angered by the Georgia crisis might immediately accept the missile defence system opposed by Mr. Putin. His attack on Georgia would then be seen to have backfired drastically. A renewed offer of NATO membership to Georgia would similarly show that punishing the country had merely pushed it into a closer alliance with the West. The same offer might also be made to Ukraine, since the Russian attack on Georgia is seen in Kiev as a proxy warning to them.… (John O’Sullivan is executive editor, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.) PUTIN
MAKES HIS MOVE The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama. The events of the past week will be remembered that way, too. This war did not begin because of a miscalculation by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. It is a war that Moscow has been attempting to provoke for some time. The man who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century” has reestablished a virtual czarist rule in Russia and is trying to restore the country to its once-dominant role in Eurasia and the world. Armed with wealth from oil and gas; holding a near-monopoly over the energy supply to Europe; with a million soldiers, thousands of nuclear warheads and the world’s third-largest military budget, Vladimir Putin believes that now is the time to make his move. Georgia’s unhappy fate is that it borders a new geopolitical fault line that runs along the western and southwestern frontiers of Russia. From the Baltics in the north through Central Europe and the Balkans to the Caucasus and Central Asia, a geopolitical power struggle has emerged between a resurgent and revanchist Russia on one side and the European Union and the United States on the other. Putin’s aggression against Georgia should not be traced only to its NATO aspirations or his pique at Kosovo’s independence. It is primarily a response to the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia in 2003 and 2004, when pro-Western governments replaced pro-Russian ones. What the West celebrated as a flowering of democracy the autocratic Putin saw as geopolitical and ideological encirclement. Ever since, Putin has been determined to stop and, if possible, reverse the pro-Western trend on his borders. He seeks not only to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO but also to bring them under Russian control. Beyond that, he seeks to carve out a zone of influence within NATO, with a lesser security status for countries along Russia’s strategic flanks. That is the primary motive behind Moscow’s opposition to U.S. missile defense programs in Poland and the Czech Republic.… The mood is reminiscent of Germany after World War I, when Germans complained about the “shameful Versailles diktat” imposed on a prostrate Germany by the victorious powers and about the corrupt politicians who stabbed the nation in the back.… But the reality is that on most of these issues it is Russia, not the West or little Georgia, that is doing the pushing. It was Russia that raised a challenge in Kosovo, a place where Moscow had no discernible interests beyond the expressed pan-Slavic solidarity. It was Russia that decided to turn a minor deployment of a few defensive interceptors in Poland, which could not possibly be used against Russia’s vast missile arsenal, into a major geopolitical confrontation. And it is Russia that has precipitated a war against Georgia by encouraging South Ossetian rebels to raise the pressure on Tbilisi and make demands that no Georgian leader could accept. If Saakashvili had not fallen into Putin’s trap this time, something else would have eventually sparked the conflict.… Historians will come to view Aug. 8, 2008, as a turning point no less significant than Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia’s attack on sovereign Georgian territory marked the official return of history, indeed to an almost 19th-century style of great-power competition, complete with virulent nationalisms, battles for resources, struggles over spheres of influence and territory, and even—though it shocks our 21st-century sensibilities—the use of military power to obtain geopolitical objectives.… [T]he harsh realities of international life that have endured since time immemorial [are back]. The next president had better be ready. (Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, served in the State Department in the Reagan administration.) Please see our Picks of the Week page for the Wall Street Journal editorial “Vladimir Bonaparte”. Volume
VIII, No. 1,902 • Mon CANADIAN
INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH RESEARCH For more information, call (514) 486-5544 PEACE AND DEMOCRACY, BALANCED AND UNBALANCED THAT ELUSIVE BALANCE …[T]he Americans have been leading the “friendly” international pressure on Israel to seize the moment, take reasonable risks for peace and reach an accord with the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas—an accord that may not be implementable now but can constitute the “political horizon” to bolster Palestinian moderates and begin to roll back the Hamas extremists’ inexorable gains. Here…the question is whether those who are seeking to press for progress overestimate the risks that Israel dare take and the willingness and capability on the other side. President Bush, Secretary Rice, Prime Minister Brown, President Sarkozy et al insist that an accord is there for the signing. But is Abbas a viable partner? In large part because of his failure to reform Fatah, he continues to hemorrhage domestic support, has already lost Gaza and is consistently losing ground to Hamas in the West Bank. But he has also done precious little to reverse the strategic delegitimization of Israel so effectively pursued by his predecessor Arafat, who assured the Palestinian people that there was no Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and no legitimate Jewish claim to sovereignty in Palestine. Israel has a vital interest in a workable accommodation with the Palestinians. But how does that interest stack up against the possibility that concessions made in negotiations with Abbas will merely be banked by a subsequent, more extreme Palestinian leadership? And who is most capable of answering that question, of finding the appropriate, elusive balance—the international community, however well-intentioned, or Israel itself? In its original conception, 2005’s disengagement from Gaza was intended to relieve Israel of responsibility for 1.3 million Palestinians, reducing a degree of demographic pressure, demonstrating Israel’s commitment to viable compromise, freeing up at least part of the IDF while giving it greater international legitimacy to act against Gaza extremism where necessary, and providing the Palestinians with the opportunity to build a model state. In fact, Israel has not been able to disown Gaza, the strain on the IDF has been exacerbated by the incessant rocket attacks, Hamas has cemented its hold on the Strip, and the nature of the Israeli relationship to Gaza is becoming ever-more surreal. Israel supplies fuel to Gaza—and has its fuel delivery men shot dead by Gaza gunmen. It supplies electricity to Gaza—and has its power station targeted by rockets manufactured with that electricity. And this week, Israel rescued some of its enemies from Gaza, saving them from likely murder at the hands of even worse enemies, and we witnessed scenes of utter absurdity in which Gaza gunmen, injured in their violent struggle with Hamas, sat up in their Israeli hospital beds and told the TV crews that they thanked the lord that the Jewish state had been there to save them. (Some international TV reports disseminated a rather different narrative, in which brutal Israel had taken dozens of Palestinians out of Gaza, handcuffed and humiliatingly stripped down to their underwear. But that’s a whole other, familiar, story...)… First, that Israel is the sole reliable guarantor of its own security and can only be thoroughly cautious in relinquishing aspects of that role, even as it seeks to empower relative Palestinian moderates. And second, that where at least some Palestinians are concerned, Israel is the best guarantor of their security as well. THERE
WON’T BE “PEACE” WITHOUT DEMOCRACY A tragic peace process turned to farce last weekend. After bloody clashes between Hamas and Fatah loyalists in the Gaza strip killed 11 Palestinians and injured 120 more, nearly 200 Palestinians associated with Fatah sought asylum in Israel. Some have been transferred to the West Bank cities of Jericho and Ramallah, where they are now under the jurisdiction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Dozens more who were considered unwelcome by Mr. Abbas’s office were anxiously awaiting possible deportation back to Gaza. The only thing that saved them from this fate was an appeal by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which petitioned the Supreme Court to prevent the government from sending the Fatah refugees back to Gaza. The irony of the present situation boggles the mind. In 1993, then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin defended the Oslo accords he signed with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization to a somewhat skeptical Israeli public by arguing that Arafat would fight Hamas much better than Israel, since he had “no Supreme Court and no Betselem” (an Israeli human-rights organization)…. Yet 15 years later, another Israeli human-rights organization successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to save the remnants of Israel’s erstwhile peace partners from being deported back into the murderous hands of Hamas. In other words, a peace process that undermined Palestinian democracy created a “peace partner” so hated by its own people that the Israeli Army must now protect them. Israel, America and the free world share much of the blame for this fiasco. As Arafat and his Fatah party were busy hollowing out Palestinian civil society and turning control of the Palestinian economy over to corrupt cronies, the world showered them with money and diplomatic support…. But the corrupt dictatorship he built would win him and his party only the lasting scorn of his people. The Hamas victory two years ago in the Palestinian legislative elections was as much about Fatah’s misrule as it was about a resurgent Islamism, or Israel’s short-sighted disengagement from Gaza. Rather than link this concession to a positive change on the Palestinian side -- such as, for example, dismantling refugee camps where a fourth generation of Palestinian still shamefully reside -- Israel’s unilateral concession further empowered extremists. Last November’s Annapolis “peace” conference continued this misguided approach. Once again the focus is primarily on who is ruling and not on how they rule. Mr. Abbas has replaced Arafat as the recipient of international largess, but the emphasis remains on empowering a particular leader, rather than empowering Palestinian civil society and creating democratic institutions. Palestinians have suffered greatly for this neglect of democracy. Since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, internecine violence has reached unprecedented heights. According to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, the death toll includes: 122 killed in the streets (suspected collaborators), 41 by capital punishment, 34 honor killings, 48 stabbed to death, seven beaten to death, 258 killed under mysterious circumstances and 818 cases of gunfire. So far no one has been charged let alone tried for any of these unlawful killings…. It is high time that Palestinian civil society be fully recognized by the international community as a prerequisite to peace, not as an obstacle to it. If Palestinian civil society is not empowered, the Fatah-controlled West Bank may soon be ruled by Hamas, and Fatah leaders there may find themselves one day having to rely on Israel’s Supreme Court to save them. (Natan Sharansky, is chairman of the Adelson Institute of Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Bassem Eid is the founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.) CAPITAL
PUNISHMENT FOR CAPITAL CRIMES Six years ago last week, a bomb went off in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria at Hebrew University’s Mt. Scopus campus. Seven students were murdered. The attack was the work of a Hamas cell from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. The Silwan cell was one of the most prolific and murderous cells Israel has seen. In addition to the massacre at Hebrew University, its four members carried out the massacre at Moment Café in Jerusalem in which 12 were murdered; the Sheffield billiards club bombing in Rishon Lezion, which left 16 dead; and the bombing of railroad tracks in Lod. The cell’s most horrendous attack, however, is generally downplayed. In May 2002, the group planted a bomb in a fuel tanker and detonated it as the tanker stood on line to refuel at the Pi Glilot fuel depot. Miraculously, the cell had attached their bomb to a diesel tanker. Since diesel fuel is not as flammable as regular gasoline, the blast was insufficiently strong to blow up the fuel depot as they had planned. Had they managed to attach their bomb to a gasoline tanker, the blast would likely have resulted in a fireball that could have killed thousands…. For their activities, three members of the cell were convicted of 35 counts of murder and several counts of attempted murder (210 people were wounded in their attacks). They received 35 consecutive life sentences and additional decades for their non-lethal attacks. The fourth member was convicted of assisting murder and was sentenced to 60 years in prison. The crimes of the Silwan cell bear recalling today as the lame duck Olmert-Livni-Barak government continues its negotiations with Hamas toward the release of IDF Sgt. Gilad Schalit, whom the terror regime and its terror partners have held hostage since June 2006. Hamas is demanding that in a three-stage swap, Israel release a thousand terrorists for Schalit. Hamas has made clear that it demands senior terrorists and convicted murderers, including Fatah terror master Marwan Barghouti, PFLP commander Ahmed Sa’adat and an unknown number of additional murderers. In late June, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s hostage negotiator Ofer Dekel provided Hamas the names of 450 terrorists that Israel is willing to release in the first stage of the deal. Although their identities were not revealed to the public, it can be assumed that among them are convicted murderers. Olmert recently told the government that Israel will have to redefine what it means by terrorists “with blood on their hands” in order to relax the criteria for releasing murderers and attempted murderers in exchange for Schalit. Moreover, several ministers are actively lobbying for Barghouti’s release. To date, no one has publicly raised the prospect of releasing murderers like the Silwan cell members. But this is no cause for relief. Even if they are not released in a deal to free Schalit, there is no reason to assume that they will die in prison. In 2004, Israel refused to release baby-murdering Samir Kuntar in exchange for the bodies of soldiers Adi Avitan, Benny Avraham and Omar Sawayid, and for drug dealer and Hizbullah agent Elhanan Tannenbaum. Instead, Israel released Hizbullah commanders Mustafa Dirani and Abdul Karim Obeid—men who were supposed to only be released in exchange for IAF navigator Ron Arad who was kidnapped in 1986. Once Dirani and Obeid were released, Israel had no one left except Kuntar to release in exchange for the mutilated corpses of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser last month. So too, if Israel releases a thousand mid-level terrorist murderers as well as Barghouti and Sa’adat for Schalit, it will have set the stage for the release of mass murderers in the next go-round. All of this raises the issue that polite Israeli society insists on sweeping under the rug: Israel’s repeated willingness to release terrorists for live and dead hostages makes clear the need to implement the death penalty against terrorist murderers. The criminal code permits the death penalty to be used in cases of treason, murder, crimes against humanity, genocide and crimes against the Jewish people. The problem is not the laws on the books; the problem is the state prosecution’s refusal to use them. Regardless of the nature of their crimes, the State Attorney’s Office refuses to request that judges sentence terrorists to death…. Quite simply, the rarified intellectual and moral universe that [Rubinstein], his successor Menahem Mazuz and their fellow prosecutors inhabit is not the intellectual and moral universe that most Israelis live in. The prosecutors live in a world in which morality is an abstract issue, best adjudicated by professors, judges and themselves in the name of enlightened humanism…. In light of the legal and intellectual elites’ pathological refusal to recognize the murderous character of Palestinian terrorists and Israel’s duty to defend its citizens from murder, it would make sense for the Knesset to circumscribe their authority to adjudicate morality from the bench and the lectern. The Knesset could amend the criminal code to require the death penalty in cases of terrorist murder…. The Supreme Court’s refusal to simply acknowledge Israel’s duty to defend its citizens was made clear by its handling of the anti-Zionist Left’s 2001 petition to bar the IDF from conducting targeted killings of terrorists. Although the measure is perfectly legal, the court took five and a half years to issue its ruling that the IDF is in fact legally entitled by customary international law to target terrorists…. Yet even in its self-evident ruling, the Court invented limitations on the tactic to demonstrate its concern for the well-being of terrorist mass-murderers. The recidivism rates of terrorists released in hostage swaps alone make clear that hostages-for-terrorists swaps endanger Israeli citizens. And in light of the moral depravity of our intellectual and legal elites, it is clear that legislative action alone cannot remedy the current situation in which even the most monstrous terrorists can safely assume that they will one day be released. The public must involve itself in the issue…. It is hard for private citizens to take a public stand. But between our governmental instability, the weakness of our political leaders and the perfidy of our elites, it has fallen to us to make our demand for security and responsible leadership clear. Until we can be certain that murderers like Kuntar and the Silwan gang will never harm us again, we will not be able to sleep soundly in our beds. Volume
VIII, No. 1,901 • Fri CANADIAN
INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH RESEARCH For more information, call (514) 486-5544 FIGURES OF THE HOLOCAUST EXPLOITING ANNE FRANK: I want to go on living even after my death.—Anne Frank In January, a stenciled image of a smiling Anne Frank wearing a red and white kaffiyeh appeared on the walls of buildings in Amsterdam. Soon after, an enterprising Dutch business firm called Boomerang transferred this image to designer T-shirts and postcards. The cards were distributed free throughout the Netherlands, no doubt to boost sales for Boomerang’s politically chic new line of shirts. But it was a risky marketing move to promote a product featuring the face of Amsterdam’s most famous martyr made over to look like Yasser Arafat’s daughter. The Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands expressed outrage. So did Dutch Jewish organizations. But that response was not universal. Some were drawn to the newfangled Palestinian Anne Frank and endorsed the artist’s political point, which one blogger interpreted to be that “the Zionists, in the name of Jewry, [were] doing to the Palestinians what was done to Jews in Europe.” This simplistic formula has become a staple in the rhetoric of contemporary anti-Zionism. The charge it makes is baseless, but it is rhetorically catchy and now routinely employed to tar Israel with the Nazi brush. What plays well in certain political circles may not play well in business, however. Sensing, perhaps, that their company’s image was at risk, Boomerang executives quickly switched to damage control mode. Their aggressively revisionist T-shirt version of Anne Frank now was said… “to encourage people to reflect on a peaceful solution for Israel and the Palestinians.” But Boomerang’s spin doctors never explained just how aligning the Holocaust’s best known Jewish victim with the symbol of militant Palestinian nationalism could possibly create “an idealistic image in which both states exist alongside one another in peace.” The image is not only incongruous but also offensive. Yet contemporary political iconography has matched it with another image of Anne that is equally obscene: A drawing featured in a 2006 Holocaust cartoon contest sponsored by the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri shows a wasted-looking young girl sinking desolately under the bed sheets, while propped up next to her, a bare-chested, swastika-laden Hitler crows, “Write this one in your diary, Anne!” Above the head of the Führer’s victim, a wordless bubble registers the grief of the devastated girl.… In the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy, Jahjah was offering payback, declaring, “Europe too has its sacred cows.” Indeed it does, but Europe’s murdered Jews are not among them. Anne Frank, dead before she had turned 16, was no saint but rather one more addition to the mounds of anonymous corpses at Bergen-Belsen. One need not sacralize her memory in order to pay it a decent respect. Until recently, most people have found it proper to do so, but in an age of resurgent anti-Semitism, respect for even the Jewish dead has become a dwindling commodity. It gets worse. A few years ago, a writer quoted on the website aljazeerah.info presented the following scheme to copycat Anne Frank’s story for partisan purposes: “If it works for Jewish people, why will it not work for someone else...? If a Palestinian writer were to take the story [of a Palestinian girl] and give it the same treatment and the same style as The Diary of Anne Frank, maybe the book would become as popular as The Diary of Anne Frank.”… What does it all signify? Anti-Semitism is back, sometimes packaged anew. One especially cruel innovation is to convert the victims of Nazi slaughter into advocates for causes they had nothing to do with and never would have condoned. These Anne Frank makeovers exemplify this trend and also point up its morally corrosive side. To bed Anne Frank with Hitler and drape her in Yasser Arafat’s trademark headscarf is tantamount to killing her a second time. And to substitute made-in-the-Middle East counterfeits for the real Amsterdam diary is to lie against history itself. (Alvin H. Rosenfeld is professor
of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University MALEVOLENCE
AND THE MUFTI Icon of Evil Time and again the Arab world throws up absolute rulers who do nothing but harm, working their way into power by exploiting and imprisoning and killing as they see fit. There seems no way to stop these ruthless careerists except by deploying superior violence against them. A perfect example of the type is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem between the world wars. Haj Amin, the subject of David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann’s Icon of Evil, was born in about 1895 into the most prominent family of Ottoman Palestine. Authoritarian by nature, he possessed the skills necessary for operating in the culture of absolutism in which he had grown up. When he was still in his early 20s, the British acquired their Mandate in Palestine as a result of World War I and in 1921 made the crucial mistake of contriving Haj Amin’s election to be Mufti.… The situation in which Haj Amin found himself was new, to be sure. In common with many other peoples, Palestinians were caught in the huge political forces released in the recent world war. British intentions for the Mandate were unfathomable. Under the British aegis, moreover, Jews soon began to seek refuge in Palestine from persecution at the hands of Nazis. Still largely tribal and rural and in any case not militant, many—probably most—Palestinians were willing to cooperate with these immigrants. But Haj Amin was not so amenable; instead, he recruited and commanded a national movement of violence with the aim of forbidding all compromise with Jews. Regular and severe anti-Jewish riots and attacks culminated in the great Arab Revolt of 1936, which aimed simultaneously to end British rule and Jewish immigration but cost thousands of lives, mostly Arabs. In reality, Haj Amin was launching the Palestinians on the impossible task of reversing the course of world events, and that is the origin of the disaster that overwhelms them to this day. Haj Amin’s authoritarian character no doubt dictated his policy, but he was also perpetuating the absolutism of the Muslim world, in which the killing of enemies is the natural end of the political process, integral to the exercise of power, and altogether a matter of culture and custom. Palestinians who opposed him were blackened as collaborators and traitors; they were murdered by his agents in larger numbers than Jews. In the end the British had had enough, and by means of their superior force obliged Haj Amin to flee abroad. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, according to one of the staples of the absolute order. So in his quarrel with the British and the Jews, Haj Amin turned to Hitler. Spending the war in Berlin, he met Hitler in person, as well as Himmler, Ribbentrop, Eichmann and others. Letters of intention were exchanged at these levels, but he did not succeed in extracting promises that Germany would liberate Palestine and hand it over to him. Hitler viewed Arabs and Jews in the same racist perspective.… Raising Muslim volunteers for the Nazi SS, visiting concentration camps, endorsing the Final Solution and hoping for a special commando team to exterminate the Jews of Palestine, Haj Amin made himself a very public war criminal. Yet he escaped justice at the end of the war and settled in the Middle East—where he once again urged Palestinians to resort to violence. Morally and politically disgraced, he died in 1974…. (David Pryce-Jones is the author of “The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.”) YAD
VASHEM AND HILLEL KOOK I was privileged to sign a petition to Yad Vashem with over a 100 leading Israeli intellectuals and public figures encompassing the entire political spectrum, from Moshe Arens to former Supreme Court Justice Meir Shamgar to Yossi Beilin. The petition appealed to Yad Vashem to emulate the recent decision of the Holocaust Museum in Washington and incorporate an exhibit relating to the valiant efforts of Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson) to rescue European Jews at the height of the Auschwitz inferno. Regrettably, the Yad Vashem authorities responded that “Yad Vashem determines exhibits in its museum on balanced considerations rather than pressures and petitions.” They cynically added that the request could be reviewed 10 years hence. Hillel Kook was the embodiment of tenacity and devotion, in stark contrast to the leaders of the American Jewish establishment of his time, whose deafening silence in the face of the Nazi extermination was scandalous. Yet, only over the last few decades has Kook’s role truly been appreciated. The most powerful Diaspora Jewish leader at the time was Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress. On August 8, 1942, his Geneva-based Secretary General, Dr. Gerhardt Riegner, informed him of the systematic genocidal slaughter of European Jews. In an unforgivable lapse of judgment, acceding to a request of the US State Department, Wise failed to inform the world until November 25 of that year when a small item about Nazis murdering Jews appeared in the back section of The New York Times.… When Wise, who prided himself on being a friend and confidante of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, finally asked the US president to intervene, Roosevelt said: “The only way to stop the slaughter is to win the war. Tell your Jewish associates to keep quiet.” Wise decided not to rock the boat. Alas, not only did he remain silent, but he also brutally attacked and branded as extremists those who tried to raise the alarm, predicting that they would unleash unprecedented waves of anti-Semitism on American Jews. His attitude, which was shared by the majority of the Jewish establishment, was the most shameful failure of Jewish leadership in the 20th century. This was the environment in which Kook found himself. Born 1915 in Lithuania… Hillel arrived in Palestine as a child with his father, the first community rabbi of Afula. Kook became a disciple of Jabotinsky and was soon engaged in Etzel underground activities. In 1940, Jabotinsky sent him to New York to create a Jewish Brigade to fight the Nazis. He adopted the name Bergson after his favorite philosopher and linked up with Ben Hecht, the brilliant playwright and publicist. When news of the Nazi genocide emerged and Kook witnessed the impotence of the Jewish leaders, he concentrated his efforts on raising alarm bells in a desperate effort to save the doomed European Jews. Despite their shoe-string budget and pariah-like treatment, Kook and Ben Hecht launched an extraordinarily effective campaign of press releases, highly provocative full-page advertisements and even successful pageants, which for the first time made the American public aware of the horrors European Jews were undergoing. Wise and his WJC co-president Nahum Goldmann spared no efforts to undermine Kook’s efforts, reviling his group as irresponsible fanatics. They tried to sabotage the effective 1943 march to the White House by 400 Orthodox rabbis who urged the administration to intervene to save Jews. In 1944 they even went as far as to call on the US administration to deport Kook, alluding to him as great an enemy to the Jews as Hitler. But Kook was undeterred, dismissing his opposition as “the ghetto Jewish leadership” whose concept of “responsibility” amounted to doing nothing and keeping quiet. IN 1944, Kook’s efforts bore fruit when the administration set up the War Refugee Board which obliged Roosevelt to take action to save the surviving Jews, utilizing diplomatic intermediaries like Raoul Wallenberg. It may have been too little and too late but it is estimated that 200,000 Hungarian Jews owe their lives to Kook’s intervention. Kook subsequently launched other projects, including the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation which unsuccessfully tried to present itself as a government of exile. Disappointed at having failed to save the majority of European Jews, Kook returned to Israel, became a member of the Knesset, and after parting from Menahem Begin, retired from active politics. He died in 2001. In recent years, Kook has become a symbol for the Jewish activism and self-confidence which played such a crucial role in support of Israel and the freedom of Soviet Jewry. When Nachum Goldmann of the WJC tried to continue on the path of shtadlanut (silent diplomacy) in relation to Soviet Jewry, Kook was one of the role models who motivated Jews at the grass roots to override him. Kook taught us not to place our faith in princes and in the last resort, to rely on ourselves. He demonstrated that silence in the face of evil and genocide is a crime and that quiet diplomacy achieves nothing unless accompanied by a concerted public campaign. We are indebted to Hillel’s daughter, Dr. Becky Kook, who initiated the effort to encourage Yad Vashem to create an exhibit to honor her father. The negative response by their spokesman to the petition should not be considered the last word. Yad Vashem is not a private fiefdom. Its management has erred previously, showing crass ill judgment in erecting a plaque which explicitly names and expresses gratitude to the president and office-bearers of the Claims Conference, for their “generosity” in passing German restitution funds on to them as though it was their money and not the revenue from unclaimed properties or reparations for Holocaust victims. It is inexplicable why this shameful plaque has not been removed. The Yad Vashem Board responsible for approving such an unedifying display should think twice before arrogantly rejecting out of hand Dr Becky Kook’s documented proposal to eternalize the name of Hillel Kook. All of us have a share in Yad Vashem and wish to identify with it. It is not merely a museum perpetuating the memory of those murdered during the Shoah. It is also intended to convey a message for the future. Hillel Kook’s courageous struggle is an important reminder that Jews are responsible for one another and that we must never again stand by and permit a repetition of the shameful dereliction of responsibility displayed by Jewish leaders during that black era. Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume
VIII, No. 1,900 • Thurs KADIMA A PARTY WITHOUT DISTINCTION If the turnout for the election of a prime minister in a parliamentary democracy has ever in history been only 1% of a nation’s population, I’m not aware of it. Yet this is what it is scheduled to happen in Israel on September 17 when the country’s ruling party, Kadima, holds a primary vote to pick a successor to Ehud Olmert. Kadima is estimated to have some 70,000 registered voters, not all of whom will go to the polls. The population of Israel is some 6.5 million. This is an absurd situation. It would be bad enough if Kadima were a party that stood for something in Israeli political life, so that the 25% of the vote and the 29 Knesset seats that it obtained in the last election—an unimpressive but undeniable plurality—meant that nearly one in four Israelis identified with it and its policies. Then, too, it would make little political sense to let the registered members of just one party pick Israel’s next prime minister, but at least it could be argued that this reflects the most recent electoral expression of the popular will. But this is hardly the case. Kadima was a party invented by Ariel Sharon when he bolted from Likud in late 2005 because of internal opposition to his disengagement from Gaza, and the only policies it had at the time of its establishment were Mr. Sharon’s own. When shortly afterwards Mr. Sharon was disabled by a stroke, he was replaced by Mr. Olmert, a politician with no popular backing, solely because he was Mr. Sharon’s hand-picked deputy prime minister. Mr. Olmert then called for new elections, ran in them on the single-plank platform of extending disengagement to the West Bank, and managed, despite being so heavily draped in Mr. Sharon’s mantle that he was barely visible, to end the electoral campaign with 11 seats less than were forecast for him at its beginning. Kadima is a party that, once it became clear that West Bank disengagement was a no-starter, has had no distinctive policies of it own. Its attempt to be a centrist, middle-of-the-road force has consisted largely of borrowing Likud’s economic views and Labor’s negotiating position vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the Syrians. Although Israelis who approve of such combination might like Kadima to continue running the country, this was not what originally brought it to power. And if Kadima has no distinctive policies of its own, the two leading contenders to succeed Mr. Olmert, Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, have no distinctive policies of any kind. Although Ms. Livni has been, together with Mr. Olmert, in charge of conducting the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority that commenced after last November’s Annapolis conference, no one knows to this day what she believes about Israel’s final borders, the desirable status of Jerusalem, or any other issues that are part of the “peace process.” Mr. Mofaz, for his part, has told us that he will not permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons (has any Israeli politician announced that he will permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons?) and that while he would like to live on the Golan Heights when he retires from politics, he is willing to negotiate its future “without preconditions,” which presumably means that he may also be willing to live elsewhere. As for other things—economic issues, secular-religious relations, Israel’s Arab minority, etc.—the 60,000 or so Kadima members going to the polls in September know as much about where Ms. Livni and Mr. Mofaz stand on them as they know about life on Mars. If either candidate has any opinions on these matters, he or she has kept it a dark secret. In the final analysis, Kadima’s voters will be voting for an image and a hope. Ms. Livni is a blandly personable woman who keeps tossing the hair out of her eyes; Mr. Mofaz is a blandly personable man whose bald head looks polished by a shoeshine boy. The hope for the woman is that if Kadima has to run in national elections, she can beat Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud. The hope for the man is that Kadima will not have to run in national elections because he can keep Mr. Olmert’s shaky coalition together. Israelis deserve better than having their next leader selected from one of these two figures by less people than it would take to fill a football stadium. They deserve national elections now. What hasn’t been said against such elections? They’ll be divisive. They’ll cost too much money. They’ll perpetuate the bad habit of changing governments too often. They’ll waste months of the country’s time and prevent its government from making the major decisions it may have to make vis-à-vis the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Iranians. Prevent the government from making major decisions? That’s the best argument for elections that I can think of. Israel’s post-September 17 Kadima government (not that Mr. Olmert will leave office that quickly: he may still be minding the store for weeks or months afterwards) should not be making major decisions about anything. It won’t have been empowered to do so. Fifty or sixty thousand voters who do not even know what policies they are voting for should not be allowed to decide Israel’s future. Elections are indeed divisive and costly. And changing governments too often is truly a bad habit. But keeping governments in power when they no longer have anything to do with why they were chosen is an even worse one. Israelis should be allowed to choose their next government in a vote that is open to all. MAKING
A FARCE OF DEMOCRACY A foreign observer landing in Israel for the first time these days, and seeing the Kadima party gearing up for its primary with great fanfare, would surely think that the country was entering a political contest comparable to the recently concluded race in America between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Kadima spokesmen will no doubt refer to the primary as a festival of democracy, but in actuality it is no more than a farce of democracy. Kadima is essentially a defunct political party. It never really existed, but took on a virtual existence without ever establishing a political identity when Ariel Sharon broke away from Likud and took with him a number of hangers-on. Its membership roll—those who are entitled to participate in the coming primary election—has been packed with thousands of recent recruits, many of whom have no connection with the party and no intention of voting for it in the next Knesset election. But they will participate in the primary election that Kadima candidates insist will determine who the next prime minister of Israel will be. That is making a farce of democracy. Swimming against the current of public opinion, doing cartwheels in order to avoid going to elections they know they are going to lose, Kadima politicians are hoping to squeeze another two years of ministerial posts out of the current political mess, by maintaining an alliance of all those who know they will go down to defeat in the coming Knesset elections. So who are these candidates who insist that they have the qualifications to be Israel’s next prime minister? They are, all four of them, Olmert’s cohorts, who participated in the decisions that led to Israel’s defeat in the Second Lebanon War, and stood by him when the full measure of the fiasco had already become clear. They may have read the Winograd Report, but they act as if it didn’t exist. Whatever gave them the temerity to believe that, having taken part in that failure, they are qualified to deal with the defense problems facing Israel? What’s more, they have since consented to the cease-fire with the terrorists in Gaza, and made the mistaken judgment to trade Samir Kuntar for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, in disregard of the fate of Gilad Shalit, Ron Arad, and soldiers who may be abducted in the future. They were all supporters of uprooting 8,000 Israelis from Gush Katif, and using the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces to perform this ugly task. Is that the report card they intend to present to the voters on election day? No, they don’t have to when facing the small number of voters that have been recruited onto the Kadima membership roll. Those issues do not seem to really concern them. It is a sad commentary on the Israeli political scene that Olmert was not forced to leave political office because of his failure in the Second Lebanon War, but rather that it took the police investigations to show him the door. This failure of the political system can be directly attributed to those Kadima MKs who at the time were handpicked by Sharon and Olmert for the Kadima Knesset list. They might have not been expected to be run-of-the-mill politicians, and to demonstrate a minimal degree of independence and integrity when witnessing a government that was failing the people of Israel. But not one of them stood up to declare that he or she was not prepared to be a part of this facade. And the “senior” coalition partner, the Labor Party? With a few exceptions, they also went along docilely. And Shas? As long as they received the budgets they demanded for their institutions, they did not seem to care about anything else. That to our shame is the Israeli political system at the moment. No punches will be pulled in the Kadima primary that will be played out before the small number of Kadima electors. Tzipi Livni has brought in the “boys from the ranch” to give her strategic advice, the ones who so ably sold the Israeli public the hogwash that uprooting the settlers from Gush Katif would make Israel more “Jewish and democratic.” Shaul Mofaz has hired Arthur Finkelstein to do the same for him, a gun for hire to anyone prepared to pay the price. In the weeks to come we shall be inundated by so many spins that most of us won’t know if we are coming or going. The Kadima ministers and Knesset members will be dancing on the grave of this defunct party, while Olmert continues as the country’s prime minister. Volume
VIII, No. 1,899 • Wednes CANADIAN
INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH RESEARCH For more information, call (514) 486-5544
WEDNESDAY’S “NEWS IN REVIEW” ROUND-UP WEEKLY QUOTES “I want to make it clear: I am proud to be a citizen of a country where the prime minister can be investigated like a regular citizen. I will step aside in an honourable and responsible way, and afterward I will prove my innocence.”—Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, continuing to insist that he is conducting himself appropriately, announced that he is prepared to resign from the office of the Prime Minister once Kadima chooses a new leader. (Globe and Mail, July 31) “Unfortunately [the peace processes] are frozen, at least for a little while. Many people were against Olmert, not because of his crimes and his corruption, but because of the peace process.”—Yoram Peri, advisor the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the Oslo peace process, indicating that Israelis disapprove of negotiations with Palestinian and Syrian leaders. (Globe and Mail, July 31) “This government has finished its mission, irrespective of who will head Kadima. Everyone in this government is responsible for a string of failures. We must let the people decide through new elections.”—Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, calling for general elections, is favoured to become the next Prime Minister, garnering thirty-five per cent of a new Israeli poll, with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Labour leader Ehud Barak receiving twenty-seven and thirteen per cent, respectively. (Globe and Mail, August 1) “It is painful watching events unfold in Gaza and the West Bank, what with Fatah and Hamas factions battling it out like a bunch of armed neighbourhood gangs. The mood among Palestinians around the world is one of despair and gloom, tinged with embarrassment and occasional shame. “Arab and others supporters of the Palestinian cause are throwing their hands up in the air in bewilderment. It will be no surprise to see some friends of Palestine quietly walk away, mumbling that if the Palestinians wish to kill each other and destroy their own society, they are free to do so. The world will easily forget about them. “These are grim days for the Palestinians, but not unusual ones for the Arab world as a whole. The sight of clan-based political groups in Gaza killing each other is sadly familiar in many parts of the region. That being said, it is absolutely incomprehensible that at a time when economic pressures and sanctions have reduced Gaza not just to a prison-like encampment, but a ward of paupers, Palestinians would allow the situation to deteriorate further into political violence.”—Rami Khouri, Editor-at-large of the Daily Star in Beirut, commenting on the unfortunate degradation of Palestinian society. (Globe and Mail, Aug. 6) “Good news out of Iraq is becoming almost a daily event: In just the past week, we learned that U.S. combat fatalities (five) dropped in July to a low for the war, that key leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq have fled to the Pakistani hinterland, that troop deployments will soon be cut to 12 months from 15, and that Washington and Baghdad are close to concluding a status-of-forces agreement. “Now this: Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr plans to announce Friday that he will disarm his Mahdi Army, which was raining mortars on Baghdad's Green Zone as recently as April. Coupled with the near-total defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq, this means the U.S. no longer faces any significant organized military foe in the country. It also marks a major setback for Iran, which had used the Mahdi Army as one of its primary vehicles for extending its influence in Iraq.”—Wall Street Journal editorial on the successes in Iraq. (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 6) “Nobody in Pakistan wants to see America win…. That would spell danger to Pakistan in the long run. They, America, want to make us subservient to India.”—Retired General Hameed Gul, former director-general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, commenting on the announcement that Pakistan’s spy agency may have ties to terror groups. Pakistani government minister Sherry Rehman admitted Friday that there are still “probably” agents of Inter-Services Intelligence who are sympathetic to the Taliban and “act on their own in ways that are not in convergence” with Pakistan's interests or policies. “We need to identify these people and weed them out,” she said. (Globe and Mail, Aug. 2) “What Iran is doing is pure vanity… If a decision is taken against Iran, it will suffer the same fate as Iraq...Iran is no stronger than Iraq and will be unable to resist…. No country will survive on its own in the future - it will disappear…. The challenges facing Iran are greater than its ability to overcome them alone.”—Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, on Tuesday, arguing that countries that choose isolation were doomed to fail. Like Iran, Libya was for many years engaged in a conflict with the West over its nuclear ambitions before dropping its own nuclear program after the American invasion of Afghanistan. (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 5) “Avowed Obama supporter Ludacris on Wednesday released a freewheeling song called ‘Politics’ in which he repeatedly praised the candidate—as well as himself, for having found a home on the senator's iPod. But the Atlanta rapper also used a derogatory term to describe Hillary Clinton; asserted that John McCain should be in a wheelchair, not the White House; and declared that President Bush ‘is mentally handicapped.’ ... [T]he Obama campaign immediately denounced ‘Politics’ and suggested that ‘while Ludacris is a talented individual, he should be ashamed of these lyrics.’ [Yet] Obama is the first viable presidential candidate with an acknowledged affinity for hip-hop culture, having spoken fondly of Kanye West, Jay-Z and, yes, Ludacris. He borrowed Jay-Z's dirt-off-my-shoulder gesture to brush off his ‘haters’ during a much-analyzed April speech that was loaded with the sort of swagger that's typical of hip-hop.”—J. Freedom du Lac, Washington Post music critic, writing on endorsements that “come with a price.” (Washington Post, Aug. 1) “Should cartoonists get danger pay? Maybe it’s time. Canada’s own Barry Blitt has gone to ground after his infamous, satirical New Yorker cover depicting the Obamas as gun-toting Islamic militants. Obama fans hated it. Other cartoonists hated it. But Muslim groups hated it even more. The Council on American-Islamic Relations declared it ‘inflammatory.’ A commentator for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram called it ‘racist’ and Islamophobic. “Fortunately Mr. Blitt works in the United Sates, where the worst they can do is denounce you. Here in Canada, they can take you to a human rights commission. That’s what happened in April when Halifax’s Chronicle-Herald ran a political cartoon by Bruce MacKinnon. It shows a burka-clad figure identified as Cheryfa MacAulay Jamal, a woman who demanded a large amount of compensation after her husband was arrested in an anti-terrorism raid and later released. She holds a sign that says, ‘I want millions,’ and her speech bubble says, ‘ I can put it towards my husband’s next training camp.’ Outraged, a local Muslim group complained to the human rights commission, and, for good measure, called the police. “In fact, if the Muslim nations were to have their way, any criticism of Islam would be forbidden. The Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of 57 Muslim nations, has declared that Islamophobia is a menace and that any such defamation of religion should be criminalized and prosecuted vigorously. The OIC, which has growing clout at the United Nations, wants the UN to enact international ‘anti-defamation’ rules that would forbid blasphemy. Islamic members of the UN’s Human Rights Council have succeeded in changing the mandate of the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression. In addition to investigating cases of censorship and violations of free speech, this person will now ‘report on instances where the abuse of the right of freedom of expression constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination.’ “Cartoonists, beware. Feel free to offend anyone you want—so long as they’re not Muslims.”— Columnist Margaret Wente, expressing concern over the special considerations paid to cartoons of Islam. (Globe and Mail, July 29) “The main thing is never to act against your conscience, not to put your signature on documents you do not believe in, not to vote for those who you think should not be elected, not to approve decisions, not to applaud, not to pass on lies, not to broadcast them, not to write them, not to put them down on paper, not to pretend. Let your creed be ‘Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.’”—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the late Nobel laureate for literature who passed away this week, from his essay “Live not by the Lie”, fought the Communist Soviet regime, in whose gulag he spent many years, with his novels and essays. (National Post, Aug. 5) SHORT TAKES THREE PALESTINIAN FULBRIGHT SCHOLARS LINKED TO HAMAS—(Washington) The U.S. government has revoked the visas of three Palestinian Fulbright scholars after new information regarding their backgrounds connecting them to Hamas was obtained. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had personally taken up the cases of seven Palestinian Fulbright scholars who were denied exit from the Gaza Strip by Israel, dubbed by The New York Times the “Fulbright Seven.” Three of the original students are now studying in the U.S. The incident had originally caused some diplomatic tension between Jerusalem and Washington. (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 5) HEZBOLLAH SHUT DOWN IN BAGHDAD—(Baghdad) According to the Multinational Force Iraq, Coalition Special Forces in Iraq captured two members of the “Kata’ib Hizbullah” or “Hezbollah Brigades” cell in a Baghdad raid. The Hezbollah Brigades have been active for over a year in Iraq and like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the group is trained and financed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command for financing, weapons, training and guidance. The cell has claimed responsibility for attacks against Coalition and Iraqi Security forces since late 2005. (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 1) FATAH MEMBERS FLEE GAZA—(Gaza) Scores of pro-Fatah Palestinians who fled to Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Wednesday have sought refuge in the West Bank. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at first asked Israel to send Fatah members displaced by Fatah-Hamas fighting back to Gaza; however, Israel began busing them to the West Bank after receiving information that their lives were in immediate danger from Hamas in Gaza. The latest round of Hamas-Fatah fighting began with an explosion that killed five Hamas members and a six-year-old girl in Gaza City, for which Hamas blamed Fatah. (Washington Post, New York Times, August 4) INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIST GROUP MARCHES IN GAZA—(Gaza) Hizb ut-Tahrir supporters calling for a worldwide Islamic state have marched through Gaza for the first time. Members of the group, which is ideologically similar to Jihadist groups and has been banned in a number of countries including Russia, Germany and some Arab states, waved flags and shouted slogans for a global Islamic government on Thursday. The group’s activities are outlawed in the West Bank, where 20 of its members were arrested last week. (International Herald Tribune, July 31) AL QAEDA COMMANDER CONFIRMED DEAD; KNOWN TO KHADRS—(Cairo) Al-Qaeda has confirmed the death of top commander Abu Khabab al-Masri in a suspected U.S. airstrike on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border last week. Al-Masri was believed to have helped run an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where he conducted experiments with chemical and biological weapons, and was accused of training the suicide bombers who bombed the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 American soldiers. Canadian federal agents investigating Al Qaeda commander Abu Khabab al-Masri have reportedly connected him with the terrorist Khadr family. (Ha’aretz, Aug. 4; Globe and Mail, July 29) SYRIAN HEZBOLLAH LIAISON ASSASSINATED—(Cairo) Syrian general Mohammed Suleiman was shot to death at a beach resort in Syria over the weekend. Suleiman was believed to have been in charge of shipping Iranian and Syrian weapons, including long-range rockets, to terrorist group Hezbollah. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any connection to the incident. (Ha’aretz, Washington Post, Aug. 5) GERMAN FIRM CLOSES GAS DEAL WITH IRAN—(Berlin) A German company has closed a 100 million euro deal with Iran to supply three gas plants with high-tech equipment, after the German Federal Agency for Economics ruled that the deal does not violate sanctions again Iran. Steiner Gastec Prematechnik’s decision to supply the equipment came despite other European nations freezing plans to develop gas plants in Iran due to international sanctions. The decision has been criticized by Jewish groups and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, hoping to cancel the deal. (Ha’aretz, July 31, Aug. 5) ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS UP IN U.K.—(London) The first six months of 2008 have seen a nine per cent increase in antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom, according to a U.K. organization for the defense of British Jewry. There was also a significant increase in the number of reported incidents involving students both on and off campus. However, the number of violent antisemitic attacks fell by 24 per cent compared to the first six months of 2007. (Ha’aretz, July 31) Volume
VIII, No. 1,898 • Tues IRAQ MALIKI'S WITHDRAWAL CARD A year ago, the conventional Beltway wisdom had it that Iraq was a failed state. Today, the same wisdom holds that it is less chaotic but still fragile, dependent entirely on a U.S. presence to survive. But judging by recent comments from Nouri al-Maliki, even this view may be out of date. Addressing Arab ambassadors in Abu Dhabi … the Iraqi prime minister made headlines by saying his government was "looking at the necessity of terminating the foreign presence on Iraqi lands and restoring full sovereignty." Mr. Maliki has also been playing hardball with the Bush Administration in concluding a status-of-forces agreement by the end of the year, when the current U.N. mandate authorizing the U.S. presence in Iraq expires. Mr. Maliki's comments are an assertion of confidence in his country's stability—and not without cause. Fully nine of Iraq's 18 provinces are now under domestic security control. Al Qaeda is being smoked out of its last urban refuge in Mosul. The Iraqi army has performed with increasing skill and confidence against Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which has also been ousted from its urban strongholds. Iraq will take in some $70 billion in oil revenue this year. T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil magnate, told us yesterday that Iraq could double its current production, to five million barrels a day, in coming years. More important, Iraq seems to have been able to consolidate the security gains achieved by the surge, even as the last of the surge brigades deployed in 2007 are now returning to the U.S. That makes further reductions in U.S. force levels look increasingly plausible, a further validation of President Bush's "return on success" strategy. Mr. Maliki's comments were also designed for domestic Iraqi political consumption—another sign of that country's robust democratic debate. With elections scheduled for the autumn, Mr. Maliki wants to show he's nobody's pawn, especially not America's…. The Prime Minister is also making it clear to his Arab neighbors that his government is not about to collapse. Apparently, they believe him: Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have announced plans to break the Arab diplomatic embargo of Iraq and return their ambassadors to Baghdad; the UAE has also forgiven $7 billion of Iraqi debt. Perhaps Saudi Arabia and Egypt will follow. The significant question now is the pace and extent of any U.S. withdrawal, and the nature of any long-term U.S. military presence. Despite Mr. Maliki's comments, Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie was quick to add that the call for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal was "conditioned on the ability of Iraqi forces to provide security," according to the Associated Press. In other words, Mr. Maliki is not endorsing the Barack Obama agenda of immediate U.S. withdrawal starting on January 20…. Our sense is that, with the exception of the Sadrists, all of Iraq's main political factions want the U.S. to remain in some significant force. Iraq is now a democracy… and a withdrawal timetable should be mutual—and not imposed by a new U.S. President acting as if the Iraq he'll inherit in 2009 is the same as the Iraq of 2006. That would mean U.S. forces could be withdrawn with honor, and in victory. PLANNING
TO IGNORE THE FACTS At some point, Democrats decided that facts didn't matter anymore in Iraq. And they nominated just the man to reflect the party's new anti-factual consensus on the war, a Barack Obama who has fixedly ignored changing conditions on the ground. It's gotten harder as the success of the surge has become undeniable, but—despite some wobbles—Obama is sticking to his plan for a 16-month timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. He musters dishonesty, evasion and straw-grasping to try to create a patina of respectability around a scandalously unserious position. Obama spokesmen now say everyone knew that President Bush's troop surge would create more security. This is blatantly false: Obama said in early 2007 that nothing in the surge plan would "make a significant dent in the sectarian violence," and the new strategy would "not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." He referred to the surge derisively as "baby-sit[ting] a civil war." Now that the civil war has all but ended, he wants to claim retroactive clairvoyance. In a New York Times op-ed, he credits our troops' heroism and new tactics with bringing down the violence. Yet our troops have always been heroic; what made the difference was the surge strategy that he lacked the military judgment—or political courage—to support…. Obama treats as a vindication a recent statement by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki calling for a timeline for withdrawal of US forces. But neither Maliki nor anyone around him talks of an unconditional 16-month timeline for withdrawal as being plausible. His defense minister says Iraqis will be ready to handle internal security on their own in 2012 and external security by 2020. The Iraqis most enthusiastic about Obama's plan surely are al Qaeda members, Sadrists, Iranian agents and sectarian killers of every stripe. The prospect of a US president suddenly letting up on them has to be the best cause for hope they've had in months. His withdrawal would immediately embolden every malign actor in Iraq and increase their sway in Iraqi politics. Obama sticks to the badly dated contention that Iraqis "have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge." In fact, roughly 15 of 18 political benchmarks have been met by the Iraqis—progress Obama threatens to reverse. Obama loves to say that we have to withdraw from Iraq "responsibly." There's nothing responsible about his plan. US commanders on the ground say it may not even be logistically possible. Does Obama even care? He says that when he's elected he'd give the military a new mission—to end the war. Conditions in Iraq, let alone winning, are marginalia…. THE
DEMOCRATS' BAGHDAD TWO-STEP It's hard not to have heard about the positive developments in Iraq lately. On Friday, the White House announced that President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had reached agreement on a "time horizon" for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last Wednesday that "security is unquestionably and remarkably better." Iraqi security forces recently took responsibility for a 10th province and expect to assume responsibility for all 18 of the country's provinces by year-end. There have been virtually no sectarian killings in 10 weeks. The Iraqi government has made important progress in political reconciliation. Regional neighbors are reestablishing embassies in Baghdad, and some of Iraq's creditors have begun to forgive the enormous debts incurred by Saddam Hussein's regime. How have Democrats reacted to these developments? Have they reveled in the news that U.S. casualties have plummeted? Have they praised the achievements for which our troops have fought so hard? Have they congratulated the Iraqi government for progress in political reconciliation? Not exactly. Last Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continued to ignore recent gains and instead criticized Bush and Maliki for pushing a "vague" plan to withdraw U.S. troops. Addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual convention last month, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave major foreign policy speeches. Neither even mentioned Iraq…. Why are the Democrats in denial about recent gains in Iraq? Unfortunately, it appears that they realize that progress is being made and want to change the subject to some other policy they can use to attack the president. Indeed, they are so opposed to acknowledging America's hard-won achievements that in a May 28 interview Pelosi credited "the goodwill of the Iranians" for "some of the success of the surge. . . . They decided in Basra when the fighting would end." As Sen. Joe Lieberman noted in a speech last year, "Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus's new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq."... Sen. Barack Obama's (current) position on Iraq is hard to nail down. He still favors the same arbitrary 16-month withdrawal timetable he promoted when violence in Iraq was at a high point…. Setting aside Obama's verbal acrobatics on Iraq, his campaign was caught last week trying to purge his earlier harsh criticism of the surge from its Web site. While there is much still to be done in Iraq, recent events give many reasons for hope. Rather than always focusing on the negative of one front in the battle against radical jihadists, Democratic congressional leaders need to acknowledge success, highlight challenges and lay out a comprehensive long-term strategy to confront, contain and ultimately defeat the threat facing America…. (Peter Hoekstra, a representative from Michigan, is the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.) A
PATH OUT OF THE DESERT A Path Out of the Desert In recent days, commentators of both left and right have noticed Senator Barack Obama's efforts to adopt as many of President Bush's policies as he can in the hope of winning the presidential election. Some commentators have even dubbed the Democrat party's presumptive presidential nominee as Barack Hussein Bush. Kenneth M. Pollack's timely book shows that Obama is not alone in adopting, or swallowing, key aspects of Bush's domestic and foreign policies. A good many of the Democratic leadership elite, perhaps even a majority, realize that Bush-bashing of the kind that motivates MoveOn and similar groups cannot form a serious basis for a future administration's policies. Pollack, a former CIA analyst and official in the Clinton administration, describes himself as an internationalist neo-liberal, a term coined to put him at the opposite point of the political spectrum from neo-conservatives. He devotes a good part of his book to trashing the Bush administration record in the Middle East, but ends up adopting the Bush Doctrine that links US national security to democratization in the Middle East. What Pollack is angry about is Bush's supposed failure to implement the doctrine that bears his name, not the doctrine itself. "We cannot as a nation discard this approach just because the Bush administration championed it rhetorically," Pollard says. "Despite the fact that George W. Bush said it was the best thing to do, it is actually the best thing to do." Pollack also endorses Bush's position on Iraq. To pre-empt criticism from fellow Democrats, Pollack is careful to condemn the war in Iraq, and use clichés—fiasco, quagmire, catastrophe, mess, etc.—to describe the situation there. He has to do so if only because, four years ago, he was one of the most ardent advocates of pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein. (His book, The Threatening Storm: The Case of Invading Iraq, became a bestseller)…. Although the book was written before the full effects of the "surge" had persuaded most Democrats that the war was not lost, Pollack rejects cut-and-run as an option. He acknowledges that with the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the expulsion of the Syrians from Lebanon, and the subduing of Kaddhafi in Libya, a new system has begun to emerge in the region. "We cannot walk away from the system we built because it has helped so many others; it is also that we cannot walk away from it lest it collapses and in doing so threaten our economic development and even physical security," he says. More poignantly, Pollack even admits that the much maligned Bush may well have done better in protecting the US against terrorism than its predecessor. "We are already doing better than we did before 9/11, and for this the Bush administration deserves credit."… Although one has no way of guessing what influence this book might have on the shapers of foreign policy in the Democratic Party, one thing is certain: Pollack invites his fellow Democrats to think beyond partisan considerations. And that is good news. The United Sates cannot develop and implement a credible strategy in the Middle East as long as it is perceived to be a house divided. Volume
VIII, No. 1,897 • Mon MEDIA THE SILENCE OF THE TIMES The power of The New York Times is undeniable—even in an era of declining mainstream media influence. What its editors choose to report still influences policymaking, as coverage of, or silence about, two recent Gaza-related events underscores. Which story rated front-page coverage in the Times, with photos, follow-up stories and an editorial—triggering swift repercussions? Was it the bureaucratic blunder that temporarily deprived seven Palestinian students in Gaza of their Fulbright scholarships—or the landmark French court decision dramatically challenging a France 2 television report from September 2000 claiming Israel murdered 12- year-old Gazan Muhammad al-Dura, a sensational allegation that has fueled hatred of and violence against Jews for nearly eight years? Anyone familiar with the Times's chronic failure going back to the 1930s to cover the dimensions and significance of anti-Jewish propaganda knows the answer. The Palestinian students' dilemma stirred the paper to full-throated coverage beginning on May 30, triggering a diplomatic scramble in Washington and Jerusalem to enable the Fulbright winners to pursue their programs. A Times editorial on June 8 dubbed the students the "Fulbright Seven," applauded the "victory" of the official policy shift and—with a passing nod to its security needs—lectured Israel about measures that "sow more anger and hate." And what of the stunning "victory" and vindication in Paris on May 21 of Philippe Karsenty against charges of having defamed Charles Enderlin, France 2's Middle East Bureau Chief who reported the al-Dura story? Karsenty had denounced the episode as "a faked death," a "hoax" and a "fraud." Not a word in the Times. Nor was the paper moved to editorialize about the global "anger and hate" sown by Enderlin and his cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma, in spawning the false, incendiary al-Dura allegations against Israel. What has the Times thus far kept from its readers in regard to the remarkable French court decision and its profound implications? Judge Laurence Trebucq concluded that Karsenty had not defamed France 2 in light of the accumulated evidence of multiple documentaries, articles and books that testify to gross dereliction and dishonesty by a veteran journalist, his cameraman and a prestigious French media institution in broadcasting a story that shocked and incited much of the world. She saw the un-used footage from Netzarim Junction in Gaza on September 30, 2000—where the supposed al-Dura killing occurred—showing Palestinians staging injuries, casually faking falls, racing ambulances to bogus rescues. She enumerated the commentary of journalists, authors and scholars troubled by the contradictions and omissions concerning the Israeli military's line of fire with relation to the boy's location, the visible movement of the boy in the footage after being pronounced dead, the questionable provenance of the injuries of the boy's father, the absence of blood in the wake of ostensibly blistering gunfire, Enderlin's manifestly deceptive claims about footage of the final moments of al-Dura's life and much more. In the detailed court decision, Judge Trebucq cites the statements and prior testimony of many individuals who have investigated the Enderlin/Abu Rahma broadcast, including Luc Rosenzweig, former chief editor of Le Monde. The judge writes: "[Rosenzweig] concluded his testimony at the hearing in the lower court by stating his conviction that 'the theory that the scene [of the child's death] was faked was more probable than the version presented by France 2.' " She includes references to one of the most damning elements of all pointing to willful falsification by the network—Enderlin's repeated claim that he cut the last seconds of footage of al-Dura's death to spare audiences from witnessing the final bloody "agony" of the child. He said: "I edited out the child's agony. It was unbearable...It would not have added anything." But there is no such footage. No death-throes, no final moments. Few facts of the case are more incriminating than Enderlin's patently mendacious embellishment of the al-Dura story in this way weeks after the story exploded as an iconic rallying point of the violent Palestinian uprising…. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized on May 27, it is "hard to exaggerate the significance" of the court decision that "called the [al-Dura] story into doubt." It is also significant that the New York Times is mute about this triumph for free speech in what has rightly been termed a blood libel against the State of Israel. Ironically, former Times executive director Abe Rosenthal was eulogized in the same paper for his fierceness in confronting entrenched institutions and for saying: "When something important is going on, silence is a lie."… (Andrea Levin is Executive Director of CAMERA) AP’S
SNARKY SNOW OBIT Tony Snow’s recent death brought sadness to millions of Americans who admired the man's public service and optimism about his country. But not everybody felt the need to honor him. Just hours after he died from cancer, the Associated Press released an obituary that has shocked some people and badly damaged the AP's image, at least in the conservative community. AP reporter Douglass Daniel began the article by listing some of Tony's accomplishments, but then suddenly veered into ideological territory, writing: “With a quick-from-the-lip repartee, broadcaster's good looks and a relentlessly bright outlook—if not always a command of the facts—he became a popular figure around the country to the delight of his White House bosses.” “Critics suggested that Snow was turning the traditionally informational daily briefing into a personality-driven media event short on facts and long on confrontation.” Now, remember, that was written just hours after the man passed away at age 53. To accuse Snow of factual inaccuracies without citing evidence is itself irresponsible, but to do it in an obit is outrageously inappropriate and an insult to the Snow family. If the Associated Press wants to do an opinion piece about Snow's public service, fine. But at least wait until after the funeral. The AP's treatment of Tony was in marked contrast to its sendoff for the late Tim Russert. That obituary was a glowing tribute to the man, as it should have been. Russert had a lot in common with Snow. They both worked for political guys—Russert's former boss was the late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan—and they both hosted Sunday morning network news programs. But while Russert was suitably honored by the AP, Snow came in for some snarky jibes. Of course, this is all about ideology. The Associated Press has no use for President Bush, and that opinion has crept into its hard news coverage. This is a serious situation. The AP is America's primary news service; its dispatches go out to thousands of media organizations all over the world, many of which simply print whatever the AP sends them…. THE
‘ECONOMIST’ REWRITES HISTORY The respectable British Economist is compulsory reading for most people who want to know what's going on in the world—but it is probably not the first place one would go to if one were looking for objective reporting about the State of Israel. In one of its recent issues, under the heading "Lost Land," the magazine "reviewed" a book called Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (Scribner) by a certain Raja Shehadeh, portrayed as a lawyer and writer living in Ramallah. Though his oeuvre is lyrically described as a "superbly written book," it is in fact a blatant political pamphlet hiding under the guise of a description of walks in Palestine. However, instead of publishing the article under the heading of "Politics," the Economist prefers to include it in "Books and Arts"—contrary, by the way, to the trustees of the Orwell Prize, who more honestly, awarded Shehadeh a grant for what it is, i.e. political writing. Shehadeh, who by his own account is something of a political extremist for whom even Yasser Arafat was too moderate, actually makes no secret of his real intentions in publishing the tract, but the Economist goes out of its way in uncritically spreading the author's political and factually false line. So we have the article saying: "It is something of an irony that a land whose timeless beauty has survived basically unchanged since biblical times is being transformed by a people who base their claim to it on biblical history... Wildernesses have become national parks that are barred to Palestinians; and Arab villages that once blended organically into the landscape are little more than besieged ghettos." There is more in the same vein, standing historical truth on its head; the country's erstwhile beauty had indeed been tampered with—but by whom? If the Economist's reviewer had taken the trouble to read some of the descriptions of Palestine in the 19th century, by for instance, Mark Twain and Herman Melville (who described Jerusalem as an "empty skull") he might have learned how the beauty of biblical Israel had indeed been despoiled during centuries of Ottoman and Arab rule. Mark Twain in his The Innocents Abroad writes: "The grass ought to be sparkling with dew, the flowers enriching the air with their fragrance, and the birds singing in the trees. But, alas, there is no dew here, nor flowers, nor birds, nor trees." And in another passage: "There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus... had almost deserted the country." And when he comes to Jerusalem, he describes it as "mournful and dreary and lifeless"—and with what would hardly be considered today as politically correct, he adds—"Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Muslim rule more surely than the crescent flag itself." After the majority of the Jews had been expelled from the land and following the Arabs' incursion, it became over time completely deforested, its fields decayed into desert and as a result of soil erosion, large areas became malaria-infested swamps. Only with the return of the country's rightful owners, the Jews, did this sad chapter of ruination end. Millions of trees were planted, swamps were dried and the land was progressively restored to its former biblical glory. Once the Palestinians will finally agree to make peace with Israel and the Jewish people, Shehadeh will hopefully resume his walks in the country and perhaps even write about it without straying from the path of truth. (Zalman Shoval is a former Israeli ambassador to the United States) Volume VIII, No.
1,896 • CANADIAN
INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH RESEARCH For more information, call (514) 486-5544 OLMERT’S LEGACY—UNCERTAINTY OLMERT’S ANNOUNCEMENT FUELS
UNCERTAINTY IN ISRAEL Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert announced yesterday that he will not compete in his party’s September primary and will resign as premier once a new leader is elected. The move ends Olmert’s two and half years as Israeli premier, a post he took up after Ariel Sharon’s debilitating stroke in January 2006. High-profile allegations of financial wrongdoing have cast a shadow over his administration in past months, and until recently, he pledged he would only leave if there were a formal indictment. His announcement comes at a critical time for Israel and will certainly lead to sense of uncertainty about the future. Two Scenarios for Succession In the other scenario, Olmert’s announcement will mark the beginning of political turbulence, culminating in new general elections.… Israel may be forced to hold new elections if the government cannot form a coalition after ninety days. Israeli law requires a new general election by 2010, and Israeli coalitions are famous for not surviving their full term.… In either scenario, Kadima—Olmert’s party—will choose a new leader in a primary on September 17 or in a subsequent run-off between the top two candidates one week later. Once the leader is chosen, Olmert will resign. At that point, Israeli president Shimon Peres will authorize an Israeli official, presumably the new head of Kadima, to form a new government. This individual will have up to forty-two days to put a new government together. Until then, Olmert’s administration will serve as a caretaker government with the same legal authority as before. Livni v. Mofaz: Differing
Strategies The two top candidates to succeed Olmert have distinct campaign strategies. Livni is the front-runner, but polls suggest her lead over Mofaz is narrowing. She has made clear that she will run on her perceived strength of personal probity, which she hopes will provide counterpoint to Olmert. She also hopes that her stature as foreign minister will make her more electable than Mofaz, since one of them will have to face two former prime ministers—Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu—in the general election.… Mofaz, in contrast, will undoubtedly make a security argument. He will assert that he is best positioned to lead Israel, given his background as a former defense minister and chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. He will emphasize Israel’s deep anxiety about Iran’s nuclear program, an issue with which he has substantial experience as leader of the strategic dialog with the United States.… Palestinians and Iran The most pressing policy question remaining is whether the new Israeli political dynamic will add fresh uncertainty regarding Iran in the coming months. There has been increasing speculation, coupled with Israeli statements and a major air force exercise off the coast of Greece, that Israel might attack Iran in the final months of a Bush presidency. In addition to questions about the prospects and advisability of such an attack, there is now uncertainty as to who will be making the decisions.… (David Makovsky is a senior
fellow and director WILL
OLMERT MAKE A LAME DUCK PEACE PUSH? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s announcement—that he intends to resign following his party’s mid-September primaries to select a new leader—was greeted graciously across the Israeli political spectrum. Even political rivals commended Mr. Olmert for displaying courage and dignity in acknowledging his inability to continue leading the country under a pall of police investigations into his alleged corruption. In fact, though, Mr. Olmert may be about to embark on one of the most politically corrupt maneuvers in Israel’s history. According to aides, Mr. Olmert intends in the coming weeks to intensify negotiations with both Syrian and Palestinian leaders. He knows, of course, that what remains of his term is hardly enough time to reach an agreement on either track. Instead, he seeks to create the foundation for a future agreement—hoping, aides say, to ensure that he isn’t remembered only as the prime minister removed from office by scandal. But there could be a more nefarious motive at work: that Mr. Olmert will use peace negotiations to prolong his stay in office. According to this scenario, neither of Mr. Olmert’s likely successors, Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni or Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, is likely to create a stable coalition. The collapse of the government would then be followed by elections, which, polls say, would result in a victory for Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Olmert may believe that progress toward a peace agreement with either the Palestinians or the Syrians will convince the all-powerful Israeli media—overwhelmingly left-wing and deeply antagonistic to Mr. Netanyahu—to support his continuation in office.… [I]n his desperation to achieve progress in negotiations—either with an eye toward his place in history or toward prolonging his stay in office—he could make concessions that violate Israel’s most basic positions. Mr. Olmert may be tempted to concede the Syrian demand, rejected by three former Israeli prime ministers, for a foothold on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s main fresh-water source. Likewise, on the Palestinian track, Mr. Olmert could undermine Israel’s refusal to accept the principle of the “right of return” of descendants of Palestinian refugees to the Jewish state. For Syrian and Palestinians leaders, Mr. Olmert’s vulnerability presents an opportunity to extract concessions from Israel that would not be attainable under a more legitimate prime minister. True, those concessions would almost certainly be dismissed as meaningless by the Israeli public and by the Knesset. The danger for Israel, though, is that the international community is likely to regard Mr. Olmert’s concessions as binding on his successor.… Mr. Olmert’s replacement offers the political system a chance to begin healing itself from pervasive corruption. For a country facing existential threat, maintaining the public’s trust in the decency of its leaders is an essential component of national defense. Israel does not have a written constitution. But it does have a powerful social contract, according to which the leader who sends Israelis into battle or who decides on ceding territory vital to Israel’s future must be perceived as acting from national, and not personal or political, motives. Mr. Olmert has violated that contract.… (Yossi Klein Halevi and
MichaelOren are senior fellows KADIMA’S
LEGACY OF NOTHINGNESS …So far from leaving office anytime soon, Olmert will remain in power at least three more months, and perhaps for as long as 10 months. Olmert’s non-resignation resignation speech was filled with protestations of patriotism. But it is hard to see how his announcement served the national interest. If Olmert had wanted to do what is best for the country, then he would have announced that his resignation was effective immediately. This would have set the course for a general election in November. In the interim, and in light of the intensifying security crisis with Iran, a caretaker government could have been formed that would have encompassed all willing Zionist parties represented in the Knesset. If such a government were formed, Israel could have attacked Iran’s nuclear installations with the full backing of the Knesset and the people. The political cost of such a vital operation would have been borne equally by all of Israel’s political leaders and so, in a sense, it would have been borne by no one. Under such circumstances, Israel’s political leaders would have been able to concern themselves only with Israel’s survival as they made their best decisions on how to prevent the ayatollahs from acquiring nuclear weapons. But rather than enable Israel to unite in the face of a threat to its existence, Olmert opted for continued instability, continued uncertainly and a continuation of the polarized status quo that leaves him in office and leaves Israel strategically hamstrung at the hands of a governing coalition that the nation does not want and does not trust. And this situation could easily last for nearly a year.… After Olmert led Israel to defeat in the Second Lebanon War two years ago, he staved off calls for his resignation by appointing the Winograd Committee to study his failures. Eight months later, the Winograd Committee issued its interim report where it concluded that Olmert had failed in his stewardship of the country during the war. In the face of the public outcry that followed, Olmert bought himself another eight months by insisting on waiting until the committee issued its final report. As the criminal probes against him rose to the top of the national agenda in late April with the revelation that Olmert had accepted cash-stuffed envelops from Talansky for a decade, Olmert bought himself another four months by pledging to resign if indicted. And now, of course, he has bought himself at least three more months, and perhaps up to 11 months more in power. And who knows what unanticipated crisis or windfall may intervene in the meantime and add another few months to his lifespan as prime minister?… By placing his personal interests above the national interest, Olmert was loyally reflecting the character of his party. Winning and maintaining power for power’s sake, irrespective of the national interest and ideological principles, were the purposes for which Kadima was founded by Ariel Sharon.… Olmert and Kadima are the direct consequences of Sharon’s decision to turn his back on his party, and on the ideology that brought him into office in 2003 in favor of clinging to power for power’s sake. To remain in office amidst two serious criminal probes, Sharon betrayed his ideological camp and Israel’s national security interests. This he did by implementing the discredited radical leftist policy championed by Israel’s media and legal fraternity of withdrawing all Israeli military personnel and civilians from the Gaza Strip and transferring control of the area to Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror control.… [But w]ithout the benefit of ideology to guide them, Kadima’s leaders have been led by nothing more than their personal interests. And their primary interest is not to do what is best for the country irrespective of ideology. Their primary interest is to maintain and expand their power for as long as possible. To maintain and expand their power, Kadima’s leaders from Olmert to the party’s last backbencher have sought to align their policies with the nation’s shifting moods. The nation’s mood swings from left to right are always followed by sharp changes in Kadima’s policies. With the nation in a left leaning mood in the run-up to the last election, Kadima announced its plan to give Judea and Samaria to terrorists from Fatah and Hamas.… [When] Israel’s body politic shifted to the right in June 2006 after the Palestinians attacked an IDF post near Gaza and kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Schalit [and] shifted further to the right when Hizbullah carried out a nearly identical attack along the border with Lebanon and supposedly abducted reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.… Olmert and his colleagues followed immediately. When Olmert launched the Second Lebanon War, he sounded downright Churchillian as he promised the nation nothing less than the total defeat of Hizbullah and the return of our hostage servicemen. But then, when Olmert’s bombast was confronted with the hard reality of war, he lost interest in being a right-winger. And so he fought the war like a radical leftist and accepted humiliating defeat.… In the meantime, the actual threats arrayed against Israel as a whole have become more acute and more fateful. But Olmert and his colleagues can’t be bothered to deal with them. They are too busy. Deciding who you are each day anew on the basis of the morning radio broadcasts is a time-consuming venture. And their solitary aim remains constant throughout. They just want to stay in power for another day, another week or with a little luck, for a few more months.… Kadima entered the political stage dead on center and offered voters a way to avoid making a decision. It professed to be all things to all people. But of course, no one and no political party can be all things to all people. And since Kadima’s leaders won’t choose whose side they are on for longer than opinion polls stay constant, their party has been nothing to all people. Here it bears noting that Olmert’s slow, meandering exit from office against the backdrop of growing dangers is a fitting end to this sad chapter in Israel’s history. For when a government of nothings is running the show, nothing takes precedent over all things—even the most important things.… SHALOM
EHUD, IT’S (NOT) BEEN (SO) GOOD TO KNOW YOU Ehud Olmert, by withdrawing from the field of contenders in his Kadimah party’s primary elections, scheduled for September 17, has in effect resigned. Although far from having exited from power—Israel’s convoluted electoral system could see him in office for another six months—it is clear that a new, and even more than usually dangerous, era in Israeli politics is dawning, as Kadimah candidates, along with Labor, Likud, and Shas, jockey for position in the coming months. Olmert’s peace overtures to Mahmoud Abbas and Syria’s Bashir Assad, if they ever were more than utopian, or simply opportunistic, are clearly now on the back burner, which will, no doubt, frustrate Condoleeza Rice’s transparently opportunistic “legacy” plans. Several key issues loom before Israel. Lebanon, where Hezbollah—thanks to American and French weakness in face of its recent “coup”—has gained an increasingly dominant position, remains a powder keg. Indeed Olmert’s incompetent handling of the second Lebanon war (as attested to by the impartial Winograd Commission Reports), and latterly through what many see as a botched and dangerously unbalanced prisoner exchange negotiation, has exacerbated this situation. This produced the chilling spectacle of the murderer Samir Kuntar’s “heroic” Beirut reception by Hezbollah’s Nasrallah, the entire Lebanese government, and ambassadors of Iran and the Arab League states. Hezbollah, which has strengthened its military position in south Lebanon despite UN Resolution 1701 and the UNIFIL presence there, now has veto power over government decision-making. And its patron Syria’s involvement in Lebanon has—as its involvement in the assassination of Prime Minster Hariri fades from memory— been reinforced. Above all, the ongoing Iran crisis steadily worsens, with Teheran manipulating the weak and temporizing UN sanctions push while steadily proceeding with uranium enrichment. The lame-duck Bush administration is increasingly impotent, with Condoleeza Rice and the State Department going back on earlier hard-line policies designed to force Teheran into compliance. Israel’s best estimate is that such an Iran nuclear device is at most two years, and perhaps little more than one, away. This as Ahmadinejad continues to threaten the Jewish state with obliteration, and tests long-range rockets already capable of reaching Israel (and Western Europe). It is increasingly clear that the spent Bush administration will not confront Iran militarily. This leaves only Israel, but Israel too will now probably be paralyzed by post-Olmert political division and confusions. All of this works to strengthen Iran and, its regional clients, Syria, Hezbollah, and—in Gaza—Hamas. Olmert’s government, and now his semi-resignation, has weakened Israel. The weeks and months ahead will prove particularly trying, as Israel’s unflagging enemies, taking advantage of the combined Israeli-American political hiatus, may well test new, or weakened, leaders. The fall of a great leader is tragic; the exit of a failed one is, finally, whatever the uncertainties, at least a relief. If Olmert had been a true statesman and patriot, he would have resigned far earlier, and allowed Israel to go to a much-need election, one which could return a new, vigorous and uncompromised government. Until the advent of such an election, which now may be least three to six months away, it will be, dangerously, more of the “same old same old”. (Prof. Krantz is Director
of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research Shabbat Shalom to all our readers.
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