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ISRANET DAILY BRIEFING ARCHIVE Volume IX, No. 2,161 • Monday, August 31, 2009
WHY WON'T OBAMA
TALK TO ISRAEL? In his global tours and
TV appearances, President Obama has spoken to Arabs, Muslims, Iranians,
Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Russians and Africans. His words
have stirred emotions and been well received everywhere. J STREET'S DANGEROUS
DETOUR TO THE WHITE HOUSE Yasser Arafat sought
peace with Israel, Jeremiah was a bullfrog, the Brooklyn Bridge is
for sale, Brutus was an honorable man and J Street is a pro-Israel
organization. Not. (Lenny Ben David
served as a senior diplomat in the Israeli Embassy in Washington A prominent American
Jewish leader recently told me that the passionate standing ovation
he received after addressing 4,000 participants at John Hagee's Christians
United for Israel rally in Washington was reminiscent of the fervent
Zionist gatherings he attended as a youngster. The two-day Evangelical
Christian parley...heard addresses from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu
via satellite, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Ambassador Michael Oren, Malcolm
Hoenlein of the Presidents' Conference and others. WHAT HARRY COULD
TEACH OBAMA ON ISRAEL President Obama was disappointed
that his June 3 meeting with Saudi King Abdullah brought no Saudi
concessions to move the peace process forward. From day one, the president
has pressured the Israelis to halt all settlement activity. Having
been tough on them, he believed that he could ask something in return
from the Arabs. Volume IX, No. 2,160 • Friday, August 28, 2009
OBAMA'S SUMMER
OF DISCONTENT So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These "townhallers" who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled "evil-mongers" (Harry Reid), "un-American" (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse. A political class, and
a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that
branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to
be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama
himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament
that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national
debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The
rules have changed. So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system-17% of our GDP-without a serious debate, and without "loud voices." It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class. We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country's institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed. The leader would be different things to different people. The Obama coalition was the coming together of disparate groups: the white professional liberals seeking absolution for the country in the election of an African-American man, the opponents of the Iraq war who grew more strident as the project in Iraq was taking root, the African-American community that had been invested in the Clintons and then came around out of an understandable pride in one of its own. The last segment of the electorate to flock to the Obama banners were the blue-collar workers who delivered him Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. He was not their man. They fully knew that he didn't share their culture. They were, by his portrait, clinging to their guns and religion, but the promise of economic help, and of protectionism, carried the day with them. The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his "first hundred days." Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family. All this hero-worship before Mr. Obama met his first test of leadership. In reality, he was who he was, a Chicago politician who had done well by his opposition to the Iraq war. He had run a skillful campaign, and had met a Clinton machine that had run out of tricks and a McCain campaign that never understood the nature of the contest of 2008. He was no FDR, and besides the history of the depression-the real history-bears little resemblance to the received narrative of the nation instantly rescued, in the course of 100 days or 200 days, by an interventionist state. The economic distress had been so deep and relentless that FDR began his second term, in 1937, with the economy still in the grip of recession. Nor was JFK about style. He had known military service and combat, and familial loss; he had run in 1960 as a hawk committed to the nation's victory in the Cold War. He and his rival, Richard Nixon, shared a fundamental outlook on American power and its burdens. Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can't rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can't be his. Mr. Obama isn't Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads. In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation's esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was "morning in America" he meant it; he believed in America's miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power. The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan's view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come. In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path. Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn't underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama. American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics. Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama's charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation's recovery of its self-confidence. (Fouad Ajami teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He is also an adjunct fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.) LIBERALS AND
THE CIA There is nothing more
important than protecting the identities of CIA officers. So I need
everybody to be clear: We will protect your identities and your security
as you vigorously pursue your missions. Once upon a time, Valerie Plame Wilson was a hero to liberals everywhere, a covert CIA operative whose cover was blown by a vindictive Bush administration out to ruin its critics. Today, liberals within government and without are betraying covert CIA operatives as if it were the very essence of virtue. Consistency, principled or foolish, has never been a hobgoblin of the liberal mind. Consider Attorney General Eric Holder's decision Monday to investigate and potentially prosecute about a dozen previously closed cases involving alleged detainee abuse by CIA officers or contractors. Whether those agents and contractors are innocent or guilty-or whether they were simply working within parameters they believed were necessary and permissible, and circumstances they deemed urgent, but which the Obama administration has retroactively decided were not-are matters that will be determined in due course. The 2004 CIA report on which Mr. Holder based his decision says that the most damaging allegations are "too ambiguous to reach any authoritative determination regarding the facts." What's nearly certain,
however, is that the names of the agents will soon become a part of
the public record, either directly or through leaks that the liberal
press will have no scruple about printing. Last year, for instance,
the New York Times published the name of a CIA officer who interrogated
9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This was despite the protests
of the officer and the CIA that to identify him would "put him
at risk of retaliation from terrorists or harassment from critics
of the agency," as the Times put it in an editor's note. Liberals have never liked the CIA, except when it suited their partisan purposes. That's fine: There's much not to like about the agency, and the U.S. might well be better off without its bungled operations and laughable intelligence estimates. But having shouted themselves hoarse over Mrs. Wilson, their enthusiasm for this new round of outing is a bit unseemly. Especially when lives are actually at stake. Especially when a liberal president has pledged to protect those lives. IRAN AND SYRIA:
SO HAPPY TOGETHER One can learn a great deal by analyzing the visit of Syrian President Bashar Assad to Iran last week. Statements made by Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reveal a great deal about the allies' strategy which seems to escape Western observers. The first point is that they are indeed close allies. I would estimate that analyses by Western "experts" that Syria can be pried away from Iran outnumber explanations that this is impossible by about 10 to one. This mistaken conception is also the official policy of the United States and France, perhaps Britain as well. There are, of course a huge number of benefits Syria derives from its alliance with Iran including Islamist legitimacy, protection against being attacked or pressured, money, weapons, cooperation in anti-Israel terrorism and spreading both countries' influence among the Palestinians, Lebanese and Iraqis. Once Iran gets nuclear weapons, which is on the horizon, the alliance's value for Syria will rise dramatically. This is why it was silly for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to suggest recently: "Given what's been going on in Iran and the instability that appears to be present there, it may not be in Syria's interest to put their eggs into that basket." Well, Assad apparently doesn't agree with her. Perhaps she should listen to what he's saying and watch what he's doing in order to draw the opposite conclusion. Assad said: "I think that what happened in Iran is an important thing and a big lesson to the foreigners, and therefore they are not very satisfied. I believe the Iranian people's reelection [of Ahmadinejad] is another emphasis on the fact that Iran and Syria must continue the regional policy as in the past."... Watching the gradual concessions made by the West to the Iran-Syria block, and its evident fear of confronting them, Assad stated that he was confident the international community would accept Iran and Syria more than it had done in the past.... "Iran and Syria are on the same front, and any political event is an opportunity which must be used at the best way possible while helping one another," said Assad. Iranian Supreme Leader (and the real leader of the country) Ali Khamenei agreed: "The result of this unity is evident in the Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq issues and also in the entire region." The tide is in favor of the resistance, he added, referring to the combination of Iranian, Syrian, Hamas, Hizbullah, Iraqi insurgents and other members of the radical alliance. What does this mean? Palestine: Hamas is entrenching itself further, while European governments seem less willing to isolate it. There is no prospect of bringing down that regime and the West isn't even trying to do so. ... Lebanon: While Hizbullah didn't win the last election, it is clear that the Iran-Syria client increasingly owns the country.... [Even] the most courageous opponent of Iran-Syria influence, Walid Jumblatt, has changed sides (or at least gone to neutrality). Iraq: The US forces are withdrawing. Iran's money, agents and clients seem to be able to operate freely, though Teheran is nowhere near taking over the country. Khamenei also said something truly shocking...that unity (the translation probably should say "alliance") between Iran and Syria, on one hand, and their neighbors Iraq and Turkey would benefit the region. What does this mean? He is showing Iran's longer-term plan to pull Iraq (under a more friendly faction) and Turkey (currently ruled by an Islamist-oriented regime) into a broad alliance.... Iran and Syria, along with their clients, are at war with America, and the US government doesn't even know it. That's why Khamenei remarked, "America's blade has become blunter in the region." He's right. ... With a US government so intent on apologizing to everyone, all but ruling out the use of force...they're concluding in Teheran and Damascus, as Ahmadinejad put it: "Today the world has realized that Western theories are not working anymore and that is why it needs the help and cooperation of Syria and Iran." An increase in economic sanctions, which is the main US plan against Iran at present, is not going to change this perception...But before effective action can be taken, there must be the realization that a conflict is going on, one that is far more important than the one between the US and al-Qaida. NETANYAHU'S
PERILOUS STATECRAFT This week we discovered that we have been deceived. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's principled rejection of US President Barack Obama's bigoted demand that Israel bar Jews from building new homes and expanding existing ones in Judea and Samaria does not reflect his actual policy. Construction and Housing Minister Ariel Attias let the cat out of the bag. Attias said that the government has been barring Jews from building in the areas since it took office four months ago, in the hopes that by preemptively capitulating to US demands, the US will treat Israel better. And that's not all. Today Netanyahu is reportedly working in earnest to reach a deal with the Obama administration that would formalize the government's effective construction ban through 2010. ... Unfortunately, far from treating Israel better as a result of Netanyahu's willingness to capitulate on the fundamental right of Jews to live and build homes in the land of Israel, the Obama administration is planning to pocket Israel's concession and then up the ante. Administration officials have stated that their next move will be to set a date for a new international Middle East peace conference that Obama will chair. There, Israel will be isolated and relentlessly attacked as the US, the Arabs, the Europeans, the UN and the Russians all gang up on our representatives and demand that Israel accept the so-called "Arab peace plan." ... The Arab plan - formerly
the "Saudi Plan," and before that, the Tom Friedman "stick
it to Israel 'peace' plan" -- calls for Israel to retreat to
the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and expel hundreds of thousands
of Jews from their homes in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan
Heights. It also involves Israel agreeing to cease being a Jewish
state by accepting millions of foreign, hostile Arabs as citizens
within its truncated borders. Then there is the other Obama plan in the works. Obama also intends to host an international summit on nuclear security in March 2010. Arab states are already pushing for Israel's nuclear program to be placed on the agenda [and] force Israel to allow international inspections of its nuclear facility in Dimona. Obama's planned nuclear conclave will place Israel in an untenable position. Recognizing the Obama
administration's inherent and unprecedented hostility to Israel, Netanyahu
sought to deflect its pressure by giving his speech at Bar-Ilan University
in June. There he gave his conditional acceptance of Obama's most
cherished foreign policy goal - the establishment of a Palestinian
state in Israel's heartland. Since it is obvious that the Arabs do not accept these eminently reasonable conditions, Netanyahu presumed that Obama would be forced to stand down. What the prime minister failed to take into consideration was the notion that Obama and the Arabs would not act in good faith -- that they would pretend to accept at least some of his demands in order to force him to accept all of their's, and so keep US pressure relentlessly focused on Israel. ... [At] the heart of the problem with Netanyahu's conditional support for Palestinian statehood [is that] far from deflecting pressure on Israel to make further concessions, it trapped Israel into a position that serves none of its vital interests. For Israel to secure its long-term vital national interests vis-a-vis the Palestinians, it doesn't need for the US and the Palestinians to declare they agree to a demilitarized state or for a Palestinian leader to announce that he recognizes Israel's right to exist or even agrees that Israel doesn't have to commit national suicide by accepting millions of Arab immigrants. For Israel to secure its national interests, Palestinian society needs to be fundamentally reorganized. As we saw at the Fatah conclave in Bethlehem last week, even if Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas were to accept Netanyahu's conditions, he wouldn't be speaking for anyone but himself.... There is no Palestinian leader with any following that accepts Israel. Consequently, negotiating the establishment of a Palestinian state before Palestinian society is fundamentally changed is a recipe for disaster. ... [Further,] as the prime minister has repeatedly stated, the Palestinian issue is a side issue. The greatest impediment to Middle East peace and the greatest threat to international security today is Iran's nuclear weapons program. A nuclear-armed Iran will all but guarantee that the region will at best be plagued by continuous war, and at worst be destroyed in a nuclear conflagration. Netanyahu had hoped that his conditional support for Palestinian statehood, and his current willingness to bar Jews from building homes in Judea and Samaria would neutralize US pressure on Israel and facilitate his efforts to convince Obama to recognize and deal rationally with the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program. But as Ambassador Michael Oren [has] made clear...the opposite has occurred.... [I]t appears that Israel has not only made no headway in convincing the administration to take Iran seriously. It appears that Jerusalem has joined the administration in accepting a nuclear-armed Iran. ... Some critics of Netanyahu from the Right like Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman claim that it may well be time to begin bringing down Netanyahu's government. They are wrong. We have been down this road before. In 1992, the Right brought down Yitzhak Shamir's government and brought the Rabin-Peres government to power and Yassir Arafat to the gates of Jerusalem. In 1999, the Right brought down the first Netanyahu government and gave Israel Camp David and the Palestinian terror war. There is another way. It is being forged by the likes of Vice Premier Moshe Ya'alon on the one hand and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee on the other. Ya'alon argues that not capitulating to American pressure is a viable policy option for Israel.... If the US wants to have a fight with Israel, a fight against American anti-Jewish discrimination is not a bad one for Israel to have. Ya'alon's argument was borne out by Huckabee's visit this week to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Huckabee's trip showed that... [t]here is plenty of strong American support for an Israeli government that would stand up to the administration on the Palestinian issue and Iran alike. Netanyahu's policies have taken a wrong turn. But Netanyahu is not Tzipi Livni or Ehud Olmert. He is neither an ideologue nor an opportunist. He understands why what he is doing is wrong. He just needs to be convinced that he has another option. Please see our Picks of the Week for the Forward editorial, "Sweden's Jews". Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume IX, No. 2,159 • Thursday, August 27, 2009
IT'S OPEN SEASON
ON ISRAEL Avigdor Lieberman is a nuisance -- a nuisance to those who hide their heads in the sand and deny that a storm is raging around us. Lieberman broke official Israel's conspiracy of silence in the face of the worldwide smear campaign being waged by various media outlets and countless nonprofit organizations (including Israeli ones), which are preparing public opinion -- and the governments that follow public opinion -- to see the Jewish state as a virus that endangers world peace. Only due to the uproar that Lieberman fomented did the public become aware of the anti-Israel zealotry of many of these nongovernmental organizations, which are financed, inter alia, by donations from Arab oil powers, huge western foundations like the Ford Foundation, countries such as Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and the European Union. The assault on the Israel Defense Forces by a Swedish newspaper is part of a worldwide blood libel campaign. When this campaign's participants include organizations that present themselves as global guardians of human rights, it stops being merely absurd (the IDF traffics in organs and kills women and children waving white flags), and becomes another link in the chain of depredation. Millions of people worldwide are deluged morning and evening with a flood of libelous op-eds and reports, broadcasts full of crude lies, and hate-filled caricatures. The language used to criticize the globe's worst tyrannies does not even come close to the hate-filled language used against Israel. If a Swedish newspaper, albeit a tabloid, decided to publish this libel about organ trafficking, that means the author and the editor deem it conceivable that it really happened. If the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by an Israeli who urged a total boycott of his own country, there is only one possible conclusion: A global boycott of Israel would be perfectly legitimate. Indeed, since the reports issued by Breaking the Silence (an Israeli organization) and Human Rights Watch (an international organization) include allegations of crimes against humanity committed by members of a nation that was itself a victim of such crimes just 70 years ago, it must be proper to impose a boycott. In the past, before the demonization had gained a foothold even in the serious press, no American paper would have dreamed of publishing an op-ed like this. Lieberman's response in the affair of the Swedish paper was not the opening shot of a comprehensive campaign against the dehumanization of Israel. It seems doubtful that his statements will succeed in breaking the conspiracy of denial about the gravity of the problem, even within his own ministry. The Foreign Ministry, even if the minister assigns it this task, is not built -- primarily due to lack of motivation and deep faith in the justice of Israel's cause -- to wage a multipronged strategic campaign against the numerous tentacles of organizations whose main goal, and perhaps even their only one, is to bring about Israel's collapse. Fact: It is not the Foreign Ministry, with its hundreds of employees, that has gathered most of the information we have about these organizations, but NGO Monitor, a small nonprofit headed by Prof. Gerald Steinberg, which obtained this information via patient, diligent footwork. Words, screamed Peace Now earlier this week, can kill. That is true. And what about the millions of words denouncing Israel that this organization, and others like it, export overseas, where they serve as weapons of propaganda against Israel? (In 2007, to take one example, the British government donated more than NIS 4 million to radical leftist organizations like Peace Now and Breaking the Silence in order to fund these words. And that is on top of the money from private donors, the European Union and various foundations.) Can these words not also kill? As far as is known, Military Intelligence and the Mossad have not identified the globalization of anti-Israel hatred as a strategic threat. Nor has the "sextet" of key cabinet ministers ever dealt with this issue.... Maybe now that the National Security Council, under Uzi Arad's leadership...correctly identify the magnitude of the threat. But merely identifying it is not enough. This ongoing, organized, global and completely unbridled campaign of demonization is liable (and who should know better than we?) to end in a new license for genocide -- against us. HUMAN RIGHTS
WATCH EARNS ITS PAY There's a certain asymmetry in the international demonization of Israel. Organizations like Human Rights Watch [HRW] get to make things up out of whole cloth, but Israel has to spend precious resources disproving the charges. By the time the nonsense is debunked, the news cycle is long gone. And nobody publishes "turns out, Israel didn't commit war crimes after all" articles. In addition, anti-Israel academics just repeat the myths anyway since they can just footnote the original report. For example, in 2006 HRW put out a report saying that Israel took potshots at Lebanese civilians waving white flags. It was dutifully picked up by the usual outlets. Of course the report was nonsense -- Israel produced documents and videotapes showing the "civilians" waving white flags were Hizbullah soldiers launching missiles. But as of 2008 the report is still being cited in academic dissertations under headings like "8.1.1 Possible war crimes committed by Israel." Earlier this month, HRW published a study pointing out that, yes, Hamas did in fact try to kill Israeli civilians. Rather than let that simmer for a while, it quickly published a brand new "Israel shot at civilians waving white flags" report. This way, it can say "we release reports on both sides" -- which is what it did in its Lebanon "white flags" incident -- without bringing up how its anti-Israel reports are (a) more numerous, (b) mostly false and (c) timed to starve any anti-Hizbullah or anti-Hamas reports of coverage. The money line from the summary of the new report, helpfully boldfaced on its Web site, says: "In the 11 killings documented in this report, Human Rights Watch found no evidence that the civilian victims were used by Palestinian fighters as human shields or were shot in the crossfire between opposing forces. The civilian victims were in plain view and posed no apparent security threat." This is the same organization that also stated -- flat out -- that there was no evidence that civilians were used by Hizbullah fighters as human shields. Of course there was the photographic evidence and the video evidence and how Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah explicitly bragged about using human shields -- but whatever.... This is the third anti-Israel report that HRW has published on Operation Cast Lead. At least HRW's Saudi funders are getting their money's worth. (Omri Ceren, publisher of MereRhetoric.com, studies rhetoric at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School forCommunication, where he is currently a PhD candidate.) ABUSING FREEDOM
OF SPEECH Having lived through a revolution in Romania and following five years in Egypt, I rejoiced when my husband Zvi was named ambassador to Sweden. Indeed, I looked forward to what was to be our last posting in a friendly Western country. This time we would not be isolated, I thought; there would be glittering functions, invitations to Royal events, and we would bask in a friendly atmosphere. Ah, well. It did not quite happen that way. This was the time of the second Intifada and nobody -- nobody -- loved us. Thus, for instance, when a massive demonstration was held against the United States before its 2003 invasion of Iraq, people marched by the tens of thousands under our window on their way to the US Embassy. Among the many banners prominently displayed, one was particularly striking: "Bomb Tel Aviv, not Baghdad," it said in bold black letters. A few weeks later, the University of Stockholm Student Union decided to hold a "Palestine Day" which was to end with a debate to which the Israeli ambassador was invited. Zvi gave a nice diplomatic
speech about the need for compromise and reconciliation which was
met with silence. Then the Palestinian representative took the floor
and launched into a diatribe about the savage Israeli soldiers: "When
they spy a pregnant Palestinian woman these beasts start betting on
whether it's a boy or a girl and then CUT OPEN THE WOMAN to know who
won. Furthermore", he went on, "no young Palestinian woman
is safe from them. If she is pretty, they will strip her naked and
force her to walk through the streets of Jerusalem." But it got worse. Soon enough some of this hatred turned to the Jewish community. In October 2003, one Jan Samuelsson, a so-called expert on religion and religious history, published an article in one of the leading dailies -- Dagens Nyheter, a morning paper with a circulation that equals that of Aftonbladet -- explaining that it was legitimate to hate Jews as long as Israel occupied Arab territories. Here are some choice quotations out of that article: "Muslim hatred of Jews is justified", "hatred of Jews is primarily a modern phenomenon sparked by the violations that the State of Israel commits against Arabs in the Middle East." Incidentally, the Israeli Embassy protested, but guess what? The sanctity of the freedom of the press prevailed and nothing was done. Swedish Jews were quick to understand the message. Hillelskolan, the Jewish school, received police protection and its pupils were advised to take off their head coverings and Stars of David when they left the premises. Their parents got the same advice. To this day, religious envoys from Israel are told to wear a hat, not a kippa. To be sure, some of this can be attributed to the sizable Muslim community living in Sweden today -- some 500,000 out of a total of nine million. In Stockholm, elderly Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors, were invited every Friday to an "Oneg Shabat" in the community building.... [T]here in early March 2004 to say goodbye, [a] very old man with a strong Polish accent took a newspaper from his pocket. "It says there," he told me, "that in the great mosque of Stockholm they give out leaflets and cassettes calling to get rid of the Jews, sons of pigs and monkeys.... [A] government spokesman declared there was no ground for intervention. What do you say about that?" There was not much I could
say. Once again the embassy protested; once again the hallowed mantle
of the sanctity of freedom of speech had been thrown over what can
only be described as blatant anti-Semitism.... And when the Israeli ambassador, having vainly protested...hurled the spotlights illuminating that monstrosity into the water, all three leading newspapers protested this intolerable attack on the freedom of art and artistic expression. The following day the exhibit was restored in all its glory. When a year later Muslims protested against a painting in a Gothenburg museum they found insulting, they did it with far greater efficiency. An anonymous letter spelled what would happen to the wife and the children of the curator if the painting was not removed forthwith. This was promptly done. (Michelle Mazel is the author of Ambassador's Wife, a personal account of the years she spent in Cairo)
Last week, not for the first time, the world witnessed state-sanctioned violence against protesters in Iran and China. Yet the United Nations was instead focused on Israel, due to unprecedented hearings held by a UN inquiry into the Gaza conflict of six months ago. This was precisely the goal of the body that organized the inquiry, the discredited UN Human Rights Council. The inquiry's lead investigator
is former international prosecutor Justice Richard Goldstone. From
the beginning, the terms of his mandate have been unclear. The original
council resolution in January began by finding Israel guilty of "massive
violations," and then created a "fact-finding mission"
to support its pre-determined conclusion. At the Human Rights Council,
where tyrannies are the majority, such upside-down justice is the
norm. Yet whatever balance Goldstone may bring, the inherent problem with his mission is that it plays into the collective strategy of the council's repressive regimes, which is to cover up abuses in places such as Iran, China, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt and Zimbabwe -- all ignored this year -- and instead shine a permanent spotlight on Israel.... More than three-quarters of all its condemnatory resolutions have been against one country -- Israel -- as well as five out of its nine emergency sessions on country situations.... Except for a handful of censures of North Korea and Burma, the world body has virtually ignored the UN's 191 other member states. But didn't the council in May hold a session on Sri Lanka? Yes, but one that actually praised the government, instead of holding it accountable.... [T]he [repressive] war-time actions by Sri Lanka were far worse than Israel's. Yet at the council, it was Israel that got slammed and Sri Lanka praised. Though a minority of well-intended democracies forced the council to debate Sri Lanka, the repressive majority determined the outcome...laud[ed] "the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights."... Even if [Goldston's] mission presents a somewhat balanced report -- and that does not mean equating a terrorist group that deliberately targets civilians with a democracy that seeks to defend itself while avoiding such casualties -- it is unclear what the council would do with it. Nothing will prevent the majority of Islamic states and their allies from endorsing the inevitable sections on Israeli criminality while ignoring the rest. One thing is certain: Justice Goldstone's mission has already served the council's rulers by keeping the spotlight where they want it, and by lending the wayward institution, and particularly its handling of Israel, a credibility it most assuredly does not deserve. (Hillel Neuer is executive director and Marissa Cramer, Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fellow at UN Watch.) Volume IX, No. 2,158 • Wednesday, August 26, 2009
WEEKLY QUOTES "I have a personal opinion, it concerns me that it's true. I was [present] during the interview that night, I was a witness. It concerns me to the extent that I want it to be investigated. But whether it's true or not--I have no idea, I have no clue."--Donald Bostrom, Swedish tabloid author of last week's blood libel that alleges that the IDF was harvesting Palestinian organs for trafficking, pleading his innocence and diverting the blame rather than accepting responsibility. Although Sweden's ambassador to Israel immediately denounced the report, saying, "The article in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet is as shocking and appalling to us Swedes, as it is to Israeli citizens", his government retracted his admonition insisting, "The condemnation was solely the judgment of the embassy [in Tel Aviv], and designed for an Israeli audience." In a Friday interview with the Arab media site Menassat Bostrom emphasised that there was "no conclusive evidence" but rather a "collection of allegations and suspicious circumstances." (Jerusalem Post, August 19, 24; Ha'aretz, August 20) "To be sure, freedom of speech is a bedrock of democracy, and you should rightly be proud that it is enshrouded in the Swedish Constitution. But no less important alongside that freedom is responsibility and accountability. And that is where the most egregious problems with this issue lie, which could lead to the loss of greater values such as diminishing the sanctity of life. The bitter lessons of our shared history teach us that there is a short distance between 'anything goes' under the cloak of 'freedom of speech' and actions of incitement and violence.... "While much has been made of Swedish government officials' responses, I believe that a fundamental issue has been woefully overlooked; the responsibility that lies with both the article's author and the newspaper's editors. The allegations made in the story derive from dangerous age-old anti-Semitic canards and hateful blood libels and should be condemned as such. But the central issue is that the author of the story and the Aftonbladet editors have been given a green light under the banner of 'freedom of speech' to disseminate these false allegations.... "Therefore, I implore you as educated, rational European brothers and sisters, to demand responsibility and credibility from your reporters, their editors and their publishers. What's more, editorial integrity, responsibility and accountability must be demanded by government officials. Otherwise, the sacred institution of freedom of speech will be worth nothing more than something to wrap our fish in."--Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, in an open letter to the Swedish people imploring them to recognise the slippery slope that results from a defence of freedom of irresponsible speech. (Jerusalem Post, August 25) "Assurances had been given by the Libyan government that any return would be dealt with in a low-key and sensitive fashion.... It is a matter of great regret that Mr. al-Megrahi was received in such an inappropriate manner."-- Scotland 's Justice Minister Kenney MacAskill, accusing Libya of violating their agreement, while defending the decision to release Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, who got a hero's welcome after his early release from Scottish jail. Iain Gray of the opposition Scottish Labour party slammed the decision: "Last week the Scottish government made a wrong decision in the wrong way with the wrong consequences. I acknowledge it was a difficult decision, but... does he understand how ashamed we were to see our flag flying to welcome a convicted bomber home." FBI chief Robert Mueller denounced MacAskill's decision in a letter to the Scottish minister at the weekend, saying that it "makes a mockery of the rule of law" and "gives comfort to terrorists around the world." (National Post, August 25) "I don't believe there are civilians in Israel . All of Israeli society is a military society, and therefore, a military target."--Rashideh al-Mughrabi, a senior deputy to the Fatah congress that took place last week in Bethlehem, and the sister of Dalal al-Mughrabi, one of the most infamous anti-Israel terrorists in history. Dalal led an attack in March 1978 that killed 36 Israelis. Rashideh said her only regret about her sister's attack was that she herself could not participate. "If I feel any sorrow it is because I wasn't allowed to participate in the operation..." she said. Mughrabi said the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "is for every Israeli to pack up and leave." Other notable attendees to the Fatah conference included Kamal Ranam, Chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorist group, and Jamal Abu Al-Rub, who is notorious for carrying out public executions of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel . (Jewish Tribune, Aug.13) "For the life of me, I can't figure out why the news value of this revelation outweighs the obvious security risk that al-Qaeda and its ilk will target the base in question. I also can't figure out the tone of outrage that runs not so deeply beneath the surface of the Times articles. Their coverage makes it seem as if the CIA were planning to assassinate antiwar parliamentarians in Europe instead of some of the world's most deadly terrorists.... Where, I wonder, is the scandal? Is the scandal from the Times's viewpoint that our government is killing terrorists rather than reading them their Miranda rights?"--Columnist Max Boot, posting on the Contentions group blog, amazed by the New York Times' decision to endanger U.S. soldiers by prioritising news that the CIA had engaged Blackwater and by naming the location of a CIA base in Afghanistan over the security of the mission. (CommentaryMagazine.com, August 21) "Seven massive car bombs exploded in Iraq on Wednesday, killing 96 people and injuring 536; yesterday four suicide bombers attacked police posts in Chechnya, just days after a bomb outside a police station in neighbouring Ingushetia killed 25 people and injured 160. Fierce fighting also exploded in Somalia yesterday, killing 22 people, as Islamist rebels launched a Ramadan offensive against African Union peacekeepers in Mogadishu. "'The month of Ramadan has a special status as the month of religious spirituality and devotion. However, in Muslim tradition it is also perceived as a month of jihad, a month in which Allah grants military victories to his believers,' says a report by the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute.... Today, Islamist websites are filled with rumours of a new Ramadan message from Osama bin Laden. In the past, al-Qaeda called for Ramadan terror campaigns 'to come closer to Allah through the blood of infidels.' This week, Maulana Noor Muhammad, a spokesman for the Pakistani religious organization Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, told the Urdu-language newspaper Roznama Dunya the Prophet Muhammad regularly undertook battles during Ramadan. 'In such pious times, participate in jihad and continue the support to the mujahideen,' he said. 'Nowadays, infidel forces want to destroy Islam and the Koranic orders. The fight [against the infidels] is not the responsibility of Taliban and Arab mujahedeen alone; rather it is the responsibility of the entire Ummah [Muslim world].'... Many Muslims reject radicals and condemn using Ramadan to justify violence. 'Ramadan is about returning to the fountain of truth and drinking from it as deeply as possible,' Muqtedar Khan, director of Islamic studies at the University of Delaware , writes. 'Unfortunately, for some Muslims, murder and mayhem rather than prayer and fasting have become a way to celebrate Ramadan.'"--Peter Goodspeed, in his National Post op-ed, highlighting the readiness radical Islamists demonstrate for subverting even their most sacred occasions. (National Post, August 22) "General McChrystal is going to make some recommendations. I'm not happy with what he's going to do, because it's been published. It will be high-risk, medium risk, low risk. Whenever you do that, they always pick the medium risk. I think that he ought to do what General Petraeus did, and that's decide on exactly the number he needs and then we debate it, and the president makes the ultimate decision."-- U.S. Senator John McCain, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, responding to a question on troop levels in Afghanistan . McCain added that he believes "a reversal of these very alarming and disturbing trends on attacks, casualties, areas of the country that the Taliban has increased control of. In other words, you need to see all of those things reversed and on a significant downward slope. And I think we can do that in the year to 18 months...[W]e cannot allow Afghanistan to return to a base for terrorist attacks on the United States and our allies. That's why we went in in the first place." Regarding Iraq , McCain said, "I think you could argue that we may have left a bit too soon, but I think it was important in General Odierno's eyes to give them what they wanted. I think there's probably going to be a need for greater American cooperation particularly as far as some of our technology is concerned.... But overall, this is an uptick but one which I think can return to steady progress. We've made an agreement. We're going to have to stick to it." (ABC News, This Week, August 23) "I don't take guidance on how to practice medicine from presidential decree, but from the Oath of Maimonides. The great 12th century rabbi and physician wrote, 'The eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and health of thy creatures . . . May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.' "I was trained to never give up hope in curing a patient until hope is truly lost. That's the moral imperative in my practice of medicine--and it requires no government oversight. I'm hardly alone among physicians in being guided by these egalitarian principles. We're taught in medical school and residency to treat all patients the same, regardless of income, VIP status, sex or skin color.... My precepts run contrary to the idea of meeting with a 65-year-old to discuss specific ways I may withdraw care, as detailed in the House bill that the president has praised."--Marc K. Siegel, a practicing internist, and associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center , in an op-ed for the New York Post, criticizing the Obama Administration's health care plan for potentially comprimising medical practitioners' ethics. (New York Post, August 26) SHORT TAKES TERROR SUSPECT NOMINATED AS IRANIAN DEFENCE MINISTER--(London) Ahmad Vahidi, deputy defence minister of Iran and wanted by Interpol in connection with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires which killed 94, has been nominated by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be defence minister. Vahidi has been on an Interpol "red notice" since November 2007, requesting police worldwide to detain him if possible. Argentina 's Jewish leaders issued a statement saying that the appointment "constitutes an incalculable offense against the victims of the massacre and their families." (Bloomberg News, August 22) IRANIAN PROTESTER ALLEGES RAPE IN PRISON--( Cairo ) According to a statement released on Iranian reform leader Mehdi Karroubi's website, a young man arrested during protests in the wake of the disputed Iranian presidential election alleges that he was raped and tortured by his jailers. Karroubi has defied Iranian authorities' demands to remove the allegations, saying that there was more evidence to come if prison authorities continued to deny the charges. The reform movement in Iran has criticized the government for killing up to eighty protesters as well as for torture and brutality in putting them. The show trials for prominent Iranian reformist politicians continue. (NYT, Aug. 25) UNCERTAINTY PLAGUES AFGHAN ELECTION--(Kabul) Results trickling in from last Thursday's presidential election in Afghanistan show incumbent President Hamid Karzai maintaining a slight lead over his top challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, with just over 10 percent of ballots counted and certified. Officials in the Karzai camp have already claimed an overwhelming victory, while Abdullah has raised serious concerns about large-scale vote rigging. Final results are not expected until mid-to-late September. (Washington Post, NYT, August 25) VIOLENCE ESCALATING IN IRAQ-- ( Baghdad ) On August 19, two terror bombings targeting government buildings in Baghdad killed about 100 people. Twelve Iraqis were killed in three separate attacks the following day. These attacks suggest that the sectarian divide between Shiites and Sunnis is far from bridged, and that the Iraqi government may not be able to guarantee security adequately since the June 30 withdrawal of U.S. troops. Iraqi officials suspect that supporters of Saddam Hussein's outlawed Ba'ath party were responsible for last week's attacks, and that two of the masterminds are currently in Syria . A spokesman for the Iraqi government said Tuesday that Iraq will demand that Syria hand the terrorists over. In all, 409 Iraqis have been killed in various terrorist attacks in August of this year. (NYT, August 20, 21; Wash. Post, August 20, 25; NYP, August 23) SAUDI ARABIA, ISRAEL SPENDING THE MOST ON DEFENCE--(Jerusalem) The Frost & Sullivan consulting firm has released a report showing that defence expenditure in the Middle East will cross the $100 billion mark in the coming five years. The emerging fear of Iran 's nuclear program was cited as the main cause of the spending increase. The report shows that Saudi Arabia , Iraq , the United Arab Emirates and Israel spend the most on defence, with Saudi Arabia having spent the most--$36 billion--while Israel was second at $13 billion in 2008. Iraq 's defence expenditures are primarily infrastructural in nature, while Israel and Saudi Arabia focus their spending on high-technology weapons platforms. (Jer. Post, Aug. 23) IDF STRIKE ON SMUGGLING TUNNELS KILLS THREE--( Jerusalem ) According to Palestinian officials, three Palestinians were killed and six were wounded on Tuesday in an Israeli Air Force strike on smuggling tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip. The IDF confirmed the attack, saying it came in response to Palestinian mortar shells which landed in the western Negev and wounded an Israeli soldier. The tunnels are used to smuggle weapons into Gaza . (Ha'aretz, August 25) HAMAS , AL QAEDA FIGHTING IN GAZA-- ( Gaza City ) A number of al Qaeda-affiliated groups have spoken out against the Hamas regime in Gaza , condemning the Palestinian terror organization as an apostate movement that serves the interests of Israel . Fighting had broken out in Gaza between Hamas and Jund Ansar Allah, a franchise of al Qaeda, after it had declared the establishment of an Islamic emirate in the Gaza Strip and accused Hamas of being a secular party. The majority of Jund Ansar Allah's members were liquidated in the subsequent fighting and their leaders executed publically, according to Israeli Channel 10 and Channel 2 TV news stations. Meanwhile, Hamas has ordered schoolgirls in the Gaza Strip to wear the jilbab--the Islamic long-sleeved dress--or face being expelled from school. (Jer. Post, Aug. 24) NGO: BIASED ACADEMIC MUST QUIT INQUIRY--( Geneva ) Geneva-based NGO UN Watch has called on British academic Christine Chinkin to step down from a UN commission investigating Operation Cast Lead, calling into question her impartiality and exposing her preconceived belief that Israel was guilty of war crimes. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, has demanded that Chinkin be disqualified because her presence on the commission violates international law, which requires that fact-finders investigating human rights be free of bias or of the appearance of bias. Chinkin expressed her biased views about the Israel-Hamas conflict in a publication in January. (Jer. Post, Aug. 23) PHILIPPINES ARRESTS TERRORISTS IN EMBASSIES PLOT--( Manila ) On Tuesday, authorities in the Philippines arrested a group of Muslim rebels with links to the al-Qaida affiliated terrorist group Rajah Solaiman Movement. The arrests included Dinno-Amor Pareja, leader of the RSM, who is suspected of having helped plan attacks on the embassies of Israel , the U.S. and the United Kingdom in Manila , as well as on other targets in the Philippines , in 2006. Security forces foiled the 2006 attacks, but had been unable to arrest Pareja. (Haaretz, August 25) OBAMA: $9-TRILLION
DEFICIT--( New York ) The U.S. federal deficit is
likely to hit nine trillion dollars over the next decade, some two
trillion more than the White House predicted in May. According to
estimates the Obama administration released, the national debt will
reach nearly three-quarters of the U.S. economy by the end of the
decade. Moreover, the economy will shrink by 2.5 to 2.8 percent this
year, even as it climbs out of recession. The deficit is currently
at the highest level it has been since the end of the Second World
War. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell commented that "if
anyone had any doubts that this burden on future generations is unsustainable,
they are gone." (New York Post, August 26)
Volume IX, No. 2,157 • Tuesday, August 25, 2009
ACCUSATION OF ORGAN THEFT STOKES
IRE IN ISRAEL Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel urged the Swedish government on Sunday to condemn an article in a Swedish newspaper last week accusing the Israeli Army of harvesting organs from Palestinians wounded or killed by soldiers. As the furor in Israel over the article gathered into a diplomatic storm revolving around questions of anti-Semitism and freedom of speech, Mr. Netanyahu told ministers at a cabinet meeting on Sunday that the article, published in the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet, was "outrageous" and compared it to a "blood libel," referring to medieval anti-Semitic accusations that Jews ritually killed gentile children and collected their blood. "We are not asking the government of Sweden for an apology," Mr. Netanyahu said, according to an official who attended the cabinet meeting and who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We are asking for their condemnation. We are not asking from them anything we do not ask of ourselves." Mr. Netanyahu made his comments behind closed doors, but other Israeli ministers have publicly attacked the Swedish government's refusal to take an official stand against the article. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's outspoken foreign minister, has led the protest, saying that the Swedish government's silence was "reminiscent of Sweden's position during World War II, when it also did not become involved." Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli finance minister, said: "Whoever does not distance himself from a blood libel such as this may not be so welcome now in Israel. We have a crisis until the government of Sweden understands otherwise." Sweden currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, and its foreign minister, Carl Bildt, is scheduled to visit Israel next month. Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said Sunday that Israel had no intention of canceling the visit but that the Aftonbladet affair would "cast a shadow" over it if left unresolved. Mr. Bildt has rejected Israeli calls for an official condemnation of the article. Explaining his position, he wrote in a blog post late Thursday that freedom of expression was part of the Swedish Constitution, according to The Associated Press. Sweden's ambassador to Israel, Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier, issued a statement last week calling the Aftonbladet article "shocking and appalling" and sharing the dismay of the Israeli government and public, but the Swedish Foreign Ministry disavowed her denunciation.... the article, by the Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom, ran on an inside page of the newspaper on Aug. 17. It was based on accusations Mr. Bostrom heard from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1990s, and which he published in a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2001. Mr. Seaman said Mr. Bostrom last worked here in 2006. Mr. Bostrom apparently revived the allegations by linking them to the July arrests of 44 people in New Jersey in a major corruption and international money laundering conspiracy that included several assemblymen, mayors and rabbis. One of its members, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, faces charges of conspiring to broker the illegal sale of a human kidney for transplant. Aftonbladet followed up on Sunday with an article about one of the Palestinian families at the center of the original accusations. In interviews with the Israeli news media, Mr. Bostrom has said that he has no idea whether the accusations are true, but that they warrant investigation. In his Aug. 17 article, he included a denial of the claims by the Israeli military.... The Aftonbladet episode dominated Israeli headlines on Sunday. The columnist Eitan Haber wrote on the front page of Yediot Aharonot that "Freedom of the press does not mean the publication of lies that justify the killing of Israeli soldiers and civilians." 'AFTONBLADET'
TO NEVE GORDON It's easy to support freedom of the press and freedom of speech as abstract principles. But what if a Swedish newspaper publishes false stories that could inspire violence against Jews? What if a tenured Israeli academic calls on the world to boycott his country? Last week, Donald Boström "reported" in the mass-circulation Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet that the IDF murders young Palestinian Arabs to enable the harvesting of their organs for transplanting. On Sunday, the paper said it had sent two other journalists, Oisin Cantwell and Urban Andersson, to the West Bank, where Palestinians confirmed Boström's original expose. If Israelis have overreacted to this mendacious twaddle, it's because anti-Semitic blood libels have had deadly consequences for our people ever since Greek pagans first accused ancient Jews of kidnapping foreigners for sacrificial purposes. Christians picked up the theme in the Middle Ages, accusing Jews of drinking the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. In 1236, Germanic Christians "modified" the vilification by claiming that the Jews used the blood of Christian boys for medicinal purposes. And the Nazis brought the defamation into the 20th century via Der Stuermer. Now Aftonbladet has the distinction of keeping the lie alive in 21st-century Europe. Had the Swedish Foreign Ministry backed the condemnation of Boström's article by Elisabet Borsin Bonnier, Sweden's ambassador in Tel Aviv -- instead of reprimanding her -- the matter would have ended there. Stockholm could have announced that in a democracy, the government does not muzzle newspapers; but that the blood libel does not reflect the views of the Swedish people or government.... Instead, while Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt opted to pontificate about the Swedish constitution and freedom of speech, he could not bring himself to dissociate from the substance of the defamatory article.... Aftonbladet can take succor from the support it received Sunday from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The terror group recalled that as early as the 1980s, the IDF had been suspected of stealing organs from Gazan children who had been taken to Israeli hospitals -- ostensibly for treatment. Free-world newspapers, in both hard copy and electronic form, can write basically anything they want, subject to self-regulation and national libel laws. So it should be. The bylaws of the Swedish Journalists Association call on members not to lie. Sweden's press ombudsman and its press council are charged with monitoring and promoting good journalistic practice. Let them judge whether Aftonbladet has violated the ethical standards of Swedish journalism. We feel much the same way about
Neve Gordon's op-ed in The Los Angeles Times last week, in which the
Ben-Gurion University political science instructor called for boycott,
divestment and sanctions against our country. The most apt response would be for contributors to endow a chair in Zionist studies in Gordon's department, and for the university to fill it with a Zionist scholar of world renown. SWEDISH
GOVERNMENT FUNDS NGOS AND ANTI-SEMITISM The article in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladetaccusing Israeli soldiers of stealing and selling the organs of Palestinians is not a surprise or isolated aberration, but rather the result of a long campaign of anti-Israeli demonization, based on manufactured "evidence" repeated by Palestinian "eyewitnesses". Applying the strategy adopted at the NGO forum of the 2001 UN Durban conference, the well-financed network of radical non-governmental organizations (NGOs) plays a major role in this demonization, and the Swedish government is a major source of funding. Expressions of modern anti-Semitism and blood libels are the logical results of this activity. An NGO Monitor research report on Swedish government funding, published on June 29 2009, documented this pattern in detail, and warned of the incitement and anti-Semitic language being used routinely by these organizations. This systematic study examined over 20 major NGOs funded through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), Diakonia, the multi-national NGO Development Center (NDC), and the Swedish Mission Council (SMR). Many of these NGOs routinely accuse Israel of "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and "apartheid," and some compare Israeli military and political officials to Nazis. This propaganda warfare is waged through the façade of "research" reports which routinely quote Palestinian "testimonies," taken and repeated without question. The path from this demonization to the blood libels of Aftonbladet is short and direct. The Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS), run by Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, and receiving funds from the SMR framework, is a prominent example. Barghouthi referred to the Gaza conflict as a "horrendous massacre," and used terms like "ghetto," and "apartheid" on a radio program. PMRS refers to the security barrier as the "apartheid wall," and claimed that Israel employs a "racist ideology" and inflicts "collective punishment" on the Palestinians. Similar language is found in the publications and statements of the radical Israel-based Alternative Information Center (AIC), which received 300,000 Krona ($42,000) in 2008, Palestinian-based Al Haq (SEK 3 million, as part of Diakonia's IHL program), and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (SEK 900,000). The central role of PHR-I officials in the campaigns accusing Israeli doctors of torture and other forms of heinous immorality, resulted in a decision by the Israel Medical Association to sever relations. SIDA money also goes to the Women's Affairs Technical Committee (WATC), Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS), and Jerusalem Center for Women (JWC), which demonize Israel with the rhetoric of "apartheid," "ethnic cleansing," and "massacres." This language is repeated in NGO reports and and press statements, which are then reprinted in the media and amplified in the United Nations Human Rights Council. NGOs supported by Sweden are
also among the leaders in the effort to rewrite the history of the
conflict in order to portray Israel as an "evil empire"
and the world's worst violator of human rights. The Palme Center,
run by the Social Democratic Party and leading trade unions, accuses
Israel of "provok[ing] the al-Aqsa rising and the 'Second Intifada,'"
and "disproportionate violence against civilians, unlawful executions
and torture." The fighting in Gaza is also blamed solely on "the
provocative Israeli occupation," rather than on the over 8,000
rockets launched by Hamas, or other forms of terror. The history of
Arab rejectionism, the wars designed to "wipe Israel off the
map", and the decades of massive Palestinian terror, are erased
as part of this demonization. Diakonia's "International Humanitarian Law" project and other Swedish government funding are behind the abuse of legal frameworks to demonize Israel. The "lawfare" movement uses courts in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand to accuse Israelis of war crimes and similar charges. While all of the cases heard to date have been dismissed, the main purpose of this effort is to reinforce the incitement and hatred directed against Israelis through the rhetoric of morality and human rights. Using Swedish funding, lawfare cases are promoted by Al Haq and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), which, like other such groups, accuses Israelis of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." When NGO Monitor sent the draft report to the Swedish embassy in Tel Aviv and government officials in Stockholm, they refused to comment or to engage in a discussion of the implications of these reprehensible activities. Perhaps now, after the Aftonbladet report has highlighted the results of this demonization, they will reconsider and stop this destructive misuse of public funds. SWEDISH-FUNDED
DIAKONIA: DISTORTING Diakonia, "a Christian development organization," receives over $40 million annually from the Swedish government, and is very active in supporting the Palestinian narrative. Its activities consistently present a simplified and highly misleading view of the conflict, in which Palestinians are always portrayed as victims, and Israel is guilty by definition. Diakonia's "IHL in the OPT" initiative systematically distorts international law in condemnations of Israel, and promotes "lawfare" against Israeli officials. The evidence, based on funding policies and activities, clearly suggests that Diakonia is not bringing the region closer to peace; but rather is fueling the conflict. Highlights of the report include:
Click here to read the full report. Please see our Picks of the Week for the NGO Monitor research report on Swedish government funding.
Volume IX, No. 2,156 • Monday, August 24, 2009
ISRAEL ON CAMPUS: DEFENDING THE
UNIVERSITY A war is raging on our campuses, one we ignore only at our, and Israel's, peril. This war, waged with twisted words and simplistic slogans, inside and outside the classroom, is also one for the soul of the university, a fragile institution the basic values of which lie at the heart of liberal Western democracy and society. It is a war in which the initiative has been taken by enemies of the democratic Jewish state of Israel, who have sought, with remarkable success to date, to turn words like "Israel" and "Zionism" into negative terms of opprobrium, while perversely inverting "freedom of expression", "human rights", and "democracy" into their contraries. On our campuses today a true, and endangered, democracy like Israel, is increasingly seen as a vicious and "fascist" exploiter of a poor, pacific and "occupied" people, the Palestinians. Pro-Palestinian students and faculty, as well as external groups and speakers, seek to delegitimate Israel, the only state in the UN which is denied, often explicitly, the right -- given to even the most despotic dictatorships -- of existing as an independent nation. Israel's enemies on campus have learned how to manipulate and misappropriate universalizing liberal terminology in order to appeal to well-meaning, but often uninformed, students. And unlike earlier antisemites, they have learned how to disarm critics. They do this by claiming to care about the Holocaust, appealing to "good" Jews and even denouncing antisemites, in order to turn even Jews against the supposedly evil Jewish state. Israel is, viciously, represented as dishonoring the memory of the Six Million by wreaking a new Holocaust against the poor, suffering, innocent Palestinians. Indeed, one of the striking features of this "new" antisemitism is its ability to enroll marginal Jews into the campaign against Israel. In this respect the "new" antisemitism, unlike the older variety, presents itself as highly "moral" and a defender of human rights, for it supports "good" Jews as well as the poor, victimized Palestinians, whom it turns into the quintessential expression of all the suffering people of the contemporary world. (The implicitly Christian-religious dimension of this inversion -- suffering [Christian] Palestinians, persecuting [Jewish] Israelis -- nevertheless connects it to the "old" antisemitism, with its Christian roots in Jewish guilt for the supposed persecution of Jesus. If the Palestinians are a kind of collective suffering Christ, and Jewish Israel an "occupying" Jewish oppressor, then the "new" antisemitism can still energize, and be energized by, the age-old "Christ-killer" motif of traditional Christian antisemitism.) Turning the Palestinians -- who have since 1947-48 sought, with Arab support, repeatedly to destroy the Jewish state simply because it is Jewish, rejecting repeated peace proposals in the process -- into Christ-like "turn the other cheek" victims, is a patent absurdity. So is another false analogy -- Israelis as Nazis, Palestinians as Jews, Gaza as the Warsaw ghetto, and so on. But this propaganda has had a major impact on campuses, and not only among gullible or "activist" students concerned about "imperialism" and the "Third World", but among both willingly deluded left-wing professors and the larger body of "passive professorial onlookers". In Western Europe from the late 1920s and '30s, universities became a prime locus of fascist and Nazi-organized political activities aimed at both students and faculty. The antidemocratic forceswell understood the role of academic freedom and free inquiry in defending democratic values. Hitler's first move upon taking power in 1933 (supported, we should recall, by many intellectuals and academics) was rapidly to Nazify (and "de-judaize") the universities (see the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger's Rectoral Address at the University of Heidelberg, 1934). Today it is the left, not the right, in the U.S. (and Western Europe) which finds support for Palestinian and Islamist terrorism "objectively" useful in the struggle against American "imperialism". Turning the Palestinians into passive, helpless victims of the "Jews" enables this left to assume (as is its historical wont) the guise of a universalizing moralism which can grease the ways to its academic (and political) dominance. Attracting uninformed and well-meaning "Jews" to its ranks is icing on the cake: as Lenin knew, there are always "useful idiots" to be recruited, and used. CIJR has organized the August 23rd "Israel on Campus: Defending Our Universities" international conference precisely to help hoist a warning flag about the worsening situation on our campuses. Universities today are not ivory towers: they are one of the key institutions upon which the sustaining liberal values of democratic Western societies rest. The enemies of freedom know this full well -- it is why they seek to dominate the campus. It is high time, then, that we came to our universities', and our students', defense. (Prof. Frederick Krantz, Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, is a European historian and co-founder of the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University) CONCORDIA
TO HOST CONFERENCE Concordia University will be the venue for a day-long international conference Aug. 23 on what organizers see as a growing trend on North American campuses to undermine the Jewish state's right to exist. The event, called Israel on Campus: Defending Our Universities, is being presented by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR), an independent pro-Israel advocacy and research group headed by Concordia professor Frederick Krantz. The public event will be held at the downtown campus, but because of security concerns, the exact site is not being made public beforehand. For the same reason, only advance registration is being accepted. Krantz said CIJR had no trouble booking space at Concordia, which has had a history of anti-Israel activity, although it has been relatively calm in the past few years. The conference isn't being sponsored by the university, but Concordia president Judith Woodsworth will make the opening remarks. The lineup of speakers includes Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, who will give the keynote address; and Edward Beck, director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, an American non-governmental organization that organized an online petition after the British University and College Union put forward a resolution to boycott Israel, signed by thousands of non-Jewish academics who said they would not participate in any event that excluded their Israeli counterparts. Also on the agenda are Alvin Rosenfeld, director of the Institute of Jewish Culture and the Arts (Indiana U.) and author of Imagining Hitler, who wrote a controversial essay in 2006 in which he contended that extreme left-wing Jewish critics of Israel are aiding the state's enemies and contributing to a new wave of anti-Semitism. The lineup also features two leading scholars on anti-Semitism: Robert Wistrich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem [and] Charles Small, a Montreal native who launched Yale University's Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism three years ago...[and] Manfred Gerstenfeld of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs. In a rare collaboration with CIJR, Federation CJA is contributing materially to the conference. Other sponsors include the Middle East Forum, a conservative American think tank founded and directed by historian Daniel Pipes, who also started Campus Watch to monitor professors believed to be disseminating misinformation about the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as the private and Canadian Asper, Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman, and Dym Family foundations. The New York-born Krantz, who has taught at Concordia for 40 years and founded CIJR 21 years ago, believes pro-Arab activism at North American colleges has entered an ominous phase in which the Israeli government is not only criticized for its policies, but the country's very legitimacy is being attacked and the need for action is urgent. Accusing Israel of practising apartheid, an increasingly acceptable charge, amounts to rejecting the belief that the Jewish state has a place within the family of nations, he said, and that is, effectively, anti-Semitic. This anti-Israel expression is coming not only from pro-Palestinian and left-wing student groups, but increasing from members of the faculty, Krantz said. He said he frequently hears from pro-Israel students at Concordia and McGill University who say they feel they're prevented from speaking up for Israel or feel intimidated from doing so. "They are either being shot down when they try to speak at [student-organized] events or, increasingly, in the classroom," he said. "Certain professors are making their anti-Israel views known, and I'm hearing more often from students who say their teachers are not letting them speak or they are restraining themselves from saying anything for fear it will affect their grades." Training students who are sympathetic
to Israel in how to respond is a major aspect of CIJR's work.
Among the goals of the conference are to develop strategies to counter Israel's detractors, including founding a North America-wide "Campus Defence Council" made up of students, faculty and administrators to co-ordinate a campaign to "take back the campus." The conference will be followed in the evening by a fundraising gala dinner for CIJR at the Gelber Centre, where Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler will be guest speaker. There will also be a performance by violinist Dame Ida Haendel in memory of the late Clara Balinsky, a founding member of the CIJR's board of directors. The honoree is Krantz. Tickets for that event start at $1,000 per couple. A
FAREWELL MESSAGE As preparation for writing what has become an annual column for the CIJR Commemorative Program Book, it is customary to reflect on the events of the past year. This means not just CIJR's events, but community happenings, and global incidents that affect Israel and the Jewish world. This year, however, as I prepare to write my last column as CIJR's Assistant Director for our 21st Anniversary, I find myself looking back to November, 2002, when the Jewish community was still reeling from the Concordia Netanyahu riots, and I had just finished my MA dissertation. I noticed an ad in a back issue of the Canadian Jewish News for an event sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research. After visiting their website, I learned that Prof. Harold Waller, an undergraduate professor of mine at McGill, was a member of CIJR's Academic Council. Following a brief meeting with Prof. Waller, I started volunteering with CIJR in their archives, and soon became the CIJR Archivist on a six-month government-funded contract. My first week at CIJR was chaos: Not only were we hosting Norman Podhoretz, Editor-at-Large of Commentary magazine, in Montreal and Toronto, we were organizing a huge rally in Dorchester Square on the 55th anniversary of UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181. About a year later I became CIJR's new Assistant Director. My first project was to help coordinate with Federation CJA the major International Conference on the New Global Antisemitism, which brought outstanding scholars to Montreal, to examine growing contemporary antisemitism. Fast-forward seven years: thanks to the generous support of our Board of Directors and worldwide donors, CIJR is still here, doing what we do best: fighting for Israel, inspiring the Jewish people, and supporting and mentoring our students. As I look back over these years, I am reminded of our tremendous accomplishments. We successfully converted our paper-copy archives into a digital database accessible online. Our outreach was expanded through a powerhouse colloquia series, involving renowned international speakers, including Ted Friedgut (Hebrew U.) Asher Susser (Tel Aviv U.), Efraim Inbar (Bar-Ilan U.), David Menashrie (Tel Aviv U.), Mordechai Nisan (Hebrew U.), Richard Landes (Boston U.). Gabriel Schoenfeld, formerly of Commentary magazine, Barbara Key (National Post), Mourad El Hattab, French-Muslim philosopher and activist, Israeli Amb. Alan Baker, and veteran Israel-activist Isi Leibler. (Did I mention that all these visits took place in one year?) Most recently, we established the much-needed and highly successful Student Israel-Advocacy Program, which has enabled our students to show the anti-Israel thugs that pro-Israel students are not going to be silent anymore. Our SIAP students have organized several on-campus conferences and counterdemonstrations at Concordia, McGill and Ottawa U. And CIJR is now expanding its role on the international scene by establishing the International Institute for Jewish Research, a U.S.-associated branch of CIJR. With new talented staff and technologies we are reaching an international audience of thousands of people daily though our website, Isranet Briefing series, ISRAFAX and Israzine web-magazine. Our Facebook and Twitter accounts have a strong and growing following of student readers. Working well as a team, CIJR
has attained record levels of support, enabling us to counter biased
media, shame the pro-Palestinian myth-peddlers, inspire seemingly apathetic
students, and stand up for democratic Israel. Happy 21st Birthday CIJR, and may you continue to go from strength to strength. (Jacqueline Douek is Assistant Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.) Volume IX, No. 2,155 • Friday, August 21, 2009
THE GOLDSTONE
MISSION -- TAINTED TO THE CORE (PART I) After nearly a decade of rocket-fire from Gaza targeting Israeli civilians -- including armed attacks that continued and escalated for the three years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 -- this year's conflict in Gaza was nothing if not preventable and predictable. From the moment Hamas officially announced that it would not extend its truce with Israel in December 2008, military confrontation appeared unavoidable. In the conflict that ensued, Israel -- even if acting in self-defence -- was bound to the rules of war like any other combatant. Yet despite the fog of war immediately covering the on-going hostilities, the international community was rife with "experts" who were ready to convict Israel of war crimes. Among those supposed experts was Christine Chinkin, a law professor in England. As events would turn out, Chinkin would become both a member of, and an apt metaphor for, the seriously-flawed Goldstone Commission that would be called upon by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to investigate the conflict.
Goldstone, it would seem -- and his record would indicate -- is also a man preoccupied with fairness. As he himself declared: "I'm just not prepared to be involved in any inquiry, in any mission, in any report that has any unprofessional or inappropriate political agenda. I can give you that absolute assurance." It is somewhat surprising then that he now heads yet another infamous United Nations mission to investigate Israel. That Goldstone is heading an inherently tainted inquiry whose formal mandate is to investigate Israel and not Hamas is as disturbing as it is evident. Indeed, the mandate that was handed over to Goldstone was deeply one-sided and flawed, by his own admission. For the resolution of the UNHRC creating the mandate already served as a direct indictment of Israel -- it began by "strongly condemn[ing] the ongoing Israeli military operation... which has resulted in massive violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people and systematic destruction of Palestinian infrastructure." Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom -- among others -- accordingly refused to support it. Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson stated that "the resolution is not balanced because it focuses on what Israel did, without calling for an investigation on the launch of the rockets by Hamas. This is unfortunately a practice by the Council: adopting resolutions guided not by human rights but by politics. This is very regrettable." Asked to head up the mission before Goldstone, Robinson refused. Goldstone admits that he also refused the appointment -- at least initially. "More than hesitate, I initially refused to become involved in any way [with the inquiry], on the basis of what seemed to me to be a biased, uneven-handed resolution of the UN Human Rights Council," he explained. But he felt comfortable enough to proceed when the then-president of the Council, Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, purportedly expanded the mission's mandate for him, even though the enabling resolution behind the inquiry would remain unchanged, and though he would still be accountable to the Council that passed this resolution. How Goldstone could have considered his personal conversation with Uhomoibhi sufficient to quell his fears is surprising to say the least. One-sided or not, the mandate in the enabling Human Rights Council resolution is the one that determined the scope and tenor of the "fact-finding" mission. Uhomoibhi could no more have altered that mandate unilaterally than Goldstone could have himself, in defiance of the Council.... The alleged expansion of the mandate's timeframe that Goldstone apparently fought for, to include reference to Hamas's provocation (apparently from June 2008), was nowhere to be found in the description of his mandate. I know from first-hand experience the baggage that comes with participating in a mission created by the UN Human Rights Council -- a UN body systematically and systemically biased against Israel. For this is a Council that has a special and permanent agenda item targeting Israeli violations of human rights, and another agenda item for the rest of the world -- thereby singling out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment. This is a Council that targets some 80% of its resolutions at one member state, Israel, while the major human rights violators enjoy exculpatory immunity. This is a Council that has had more emergency "Special Sessions" directed against Israel than against all the other countries of the world combined. This is a Council that excludes only one country -- Israel -- from membership in any regional grouping, thereby denying it international due process. As it happens, I was invited to participate in one of the UN Council's exercises in Alice in Wonderland justice -- where the conviction is secured even before the hearing begins -- in 2006. The context was a fact-finding mission to investigate the Israeli "wilful killing of Palestinian civilians" in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, without reference to the targeting of Israeli civilians in Sderot, Israel. Then, as now, the mandate was one-sided from the start. Then, as now, the conviction preceded the investigation. Then, as now, the mission was designed less as a true independent inquiry than as an imprimatur of legitimacy on the Council's own, biased declarations. I felt obliged to decline.... Notably, one Professor Christine Chinkin accepted the appointment. Now Chinkin joins Goldstone in an inquiry that bears the hallmarks of bias and politicization that he supposedly shunned. Indeed, before the mission began -- as if to add insult to injury -- Chinkin notoriously signed her name to a public letter that was titled "Israel's bombardment of Gaza is not self-defence -- it's a war crime." Why she feels qualified at this point to hear witness evidence along with the rest of the commission -- without triggering a reasonable apprehension of bias -- is not entirely clear.... Goldstone [signed] his name to a public letter on the Gaza conflict, stating that the events "shocked [him] to the core." Yet he signed no such letter about Hamas's terrorist crimes in the years that preceded the war. In an interview earlier this month, he had the temerity to excuse away the UN's inaction vis-à-vis Hamas based on the fact that Israel never brought the matter to the Security Council's attention. THE GOLDSTONE
MISSION -- TAINTED TO THE CORE (PART II) Disturbing as it may be, the failure to include a thorough review of Hamas's continuous rocket attacks in the resolution establishing the Goldstone Commission -- and to then staff the mission with a member who has already decided that such attacks do not alter Israel's guilt -- can be seen as evidence of the reductionist narrative that the UN Human Rights Council seeks to promulgate. None of this is intended to suggest, nor would I wish to have it inferred, that Israel is somehow above the law, or that Israel is not to be held accountable for any violations of law. On the contrary, Israel is accountable for any violations of international law or human rights like any other state. The Jewish people are not entitled to any privileged protection or preference because of the particularity of Jewish suffering. But the problem is not that Israel seeks to be above the law; it is that Israel has been systematically denied equality before the law in the international arena. The issue is not whether Israel must respect human rights, but that the human rights of Israel and its people have not been respected. The discrimination emerges not from suggesting that human rights standards should be applied to Israel -- which they must be -- but from the fact that these standards have not been applied equally to anyone else. It is on this basis that the Goldstone Commission should be opposed: not because it represents an objective inquiry into Israel -- because independent and impartial inquiries should be welcomed by democracies -- but precisely because it does not represent such an objective inquiry. Consistently applying discriminatory standards has the effect not only of demonizing Israel, but of undermining the integrity of the UN and the edifice of international law. Decades from now, historians looking back at the meetings of the council will be led to believe that more Palestinians died at the hands of Israelis than Darfurians at the hands of Sudan; that discrimination was institutionalized in Israel to a larger extent than in apartheid South Africa; and that Israel -- the lone democracy in the Middle East -- was a greater threat to international peace and security than any other state since its inception. But yet it was Hamas that fired deliberately on Israeli civilians. It was Hamas that boasted -- only days before the conflict exploded in December -- that Israel was "hopeless and desperate" when faced with its attacks. It was Hamas that promised to continue firing rockets, that painted Israel and Jews as the sons of apes and pigs and that called for their murder in its charter and publicly incited to their genocide. Once the war began, it was Hamas that continued to target Israeli civilians -- not infrequently but as part of a systematic, widespread attack. It was Hamas that chose to position its fighters in Palestinian civilian areas. It was Hamas that decided to misuse humanitarian symbols -- such as using an ambulance to transport fighters -- to launch attacks. It was Hamas that recruited children into armed conflict. These are all indisputable war crimes. Yet they do not find their way, at any point, into the resolution establishing the Goldstone Commission. The mission's mandate is tainted through more subtle ways of prejudging its conclusions as well. For instance, the council's enabling resolution refers to the Gaza as being "occupied Palestinian territory." Such a description is loaded, and ignores the reality on the ground -- that Israel fully withdrew from Gaza years ago. Indeed, the territory's status under international law remains unclear. By adopting this vernacular, the council -- and Goldstone himself, who uses a similar characterization -- implicitly predetermines an essential part of its analysis. For under international law, what constitutes a legitimate response will be very different depending on whether rocket attacks are coming from territory a state "controls," or whether they are coming from territory that is controlled by the attacking terrorist government, as in the case of Hamas. In the end, whatever bargain Goldstone personally struck about his mandate, and whatever intentions he has of examining both sides of the conflict, his work will nonetheless be regrettably tarnished by its connection to the UN Human Rights Council, and may well be manipulated to satisfy the council's ends. And thus we are left with the reality that Judge Richard Goldstone, previously shocked to the core, has become the leader of a mission that is tainted to the core.... [T]here is also a clear international legal asymmetry in the conflict between Israel and the terrorist group. This asymmetry exists not only in what lawyers call jus ad bellum -- or the legal context of aggression and self-defense -- but also in jus in bellum -- the application of international human rights law to the combatants. With respect to Hamas, any attempt at "evenhandedness" will not do justice to this reality. Indeed, no analysis of the principle of proportionality can be undertaken without a keen understanding of intentionality. Accordingly, the commission should thus be singling out Hamas's deliberate and unprovoked acts of war, as well as its avowed and publicly-declared intention to destroy Israel and kill as many of its citizens as possible. Such intentions on the part of Hamas need to be contrasted with Israel's objective -- to prevent and deter such armed attacks in order to better protect its innocent citizens. The paradigm of false moral equivalence not only wrongly puts Israel and Hamas on the same level, but it also undermines the importance of intentionality in international law. For this reason, we should be looking for the Goldstone report not merely to observe that Hamas fired rockets at Israeli civilians while imperilling Palestinian civilians -- a double war crime -- but to look at this practice as the reason behind innocent Palestinian deaths. We should be looking for the Goldstone report not merely to mention Gilad Schalit in passing, but to look at his situation as a case study in Hamas terror and impunity.... The tarnish of the UN Human Rights Council, the enabling resolution it drafted, the personnel it grouped together, and the legal asymmetry cannot be so easily redressed. Indeed, between Goldstone -- a renowned Jewish jurist who played right into the hands of a partial process -- and Christine Chinkin -- a law professor willing to sign off on an indictment before the evidence is in -- the UN Human Rights Council no doubt found its ideal inquisitors. And the council will no doubt be looking for their final report to be a final stamp of confirmation on the verdict it already determined. (The Hon. Irwin
Cotler is the former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada.
He is the Member of Parliament for Mount-Royal, special counsel on
human rights and international justice to the Liberal Party, and a
law professor (on leave) at McGill University. He will be delivering
the keynote address, on "Israel on Campus" at the Canadian
Institute for Jewish Research's 21st Anniversary Gala in Montreal,
HOW ISRAEL BECAME
SOUTH AFRICA It's a bad old world out there. Tens of thousands are being raped in war-torn eastern Congo. In Sudan, a woman faces 40 lashes for daring to wear pants. The Iranians have brutally suppressed a peaceful uprising and shot protesters in the streets. The tyrants who run Burma have sentenced the brave Aung San Suu Kyi to more house arrest. So which evil regime finds itself in the crosshairs of Canada's largest church? Israel, of course. The United Church of Canada (which seems to be more interested in social justice than in God) is engaged in one of its periodic wrangles over Israel. Is Israel really, really bad, or just sort of bad? Should the church call for a boycott of Israeli universities or just stop buying Jaffa oranges? These questions are consuming a large portion of its general council meeting this week in Kelowna. To their credit, delegates have backed off from the most offensive stuff. They've decided not to refer to Israel as an "apartheid state." The United Church is just one of many institutions obsessed with tiny Israel. There's also the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., the Church of England, Britain's National Union of Journalists, Ireland's largest public-sector union, various British academic groups, and our own beloved CUPE, all of which have passed anti-Israel resolutions. Israel Apartheid Week is a tiresome staple of campus life. In Paris, activists invaded the retail chain Sephora to protest against the sale of Israeli face cream. In Wales, they rampaged through supermarkets and sprinkled Israeli melons with fake blood. In Montreal, gay and lesbian activists promise that this weekend's Pride Parade will include a protest against Israel's "racist apartheid" policies. (Israel is the only country in the Middle East that believes in civil rights for homosexuals, an irony that seems to have eluded them.) How did Israel become the new South Africa? After the old South African regime collapsed, social justice seekers in the West needed a new cause -- preferably one that extended the narrative of Western racism, occupation and colonialist oppression. After the Middle East peace talks broke down in 2000 (because of Palestinian rejectionism), the "apartheid" label picked up steam. Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner, gave the term his blessing in a series of articles he wrote condemning the Israeli occupation of the territories. Jimmy Carter wrote a book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/palestine_peace_not_apartheid], in which he argued that some Israeli policies were even worse than South Africa's. The barrier built to stop the deadly flow of suicide bombers into Israel from the West Bank was nicknamed the Apartheid Wall. But the analogy with South Africa is badly flawed. Under apartheid, non-white South Africans were denied the right to vote, to organize, to live where they wanted or to marry across racial lines. A small white minority ruled a large black underclass. They settled in South Africa not to escape persecution but to get rich. In Israel, Israeli Arabs make up 20 per cent of the population, and are full citizens. The conflict is not racial. It is a national-religious struggle for land, not unlike many others around the world. There's another difference, too. As pundit Michael Kinsley put it, "If Israel is white South Africa and the Palestinians are supposed to be the blacks, where is their Mandela?" Israel can be condemned for many things, including bad judgment, botched military campaigns, unnecessary harshness and occasional brutality. So can lots of other countries. But Israel is often characterized as uniquely awful -- scarcely better than the Nazis who ran Hitler's Germany. And so, when someone like Naomi (No Logo) Klein says "Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality" and recommends a global boycott such as the one that brought an end to apartheid in South Africa, I feel like running to the store and buying all the Jaffa oranges I can get. Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume IX, No. 2,154 • Thursday, August 20, 2009
THE BLOOD LIBEL
THAT WON'T DIE We are not talking about a Saudi newspaper or a Hamas radio station but a Swedish newspaper. We are not talking about a neo-Nazi rag, but a daily tabloid closely tied to the Swedish Social Democratic Party. And we are not just talking about an obscure item but an article that received top billing. On Aug. 18, the newspaper Aftonbladet published an article by a man named Donald Bostrom. The editor responsible is named Asa Linderborg. She is the newspaper's cultural affairs editor. This was no random decision for her. When asked once: "What do you wish for most in life right now?" She answered: "What a simple question. What I want is a free Palestine." And what did this article say? That Israel's army deliberately murders Palestinian civilians so that it can cut out and sell their organs to sick people needing transplants. The author is a left-wing activist for Palestinian causes, though the newspaper calls him a journalist. The story is tied to the recent arrest of a Jewish man in Brooklyn for selling organs -- despite there being no hint of any Israeli connection to his alleged organ-trading activities. In going after Israel, Aftonbladet relies primarily on Palestinian sources (though the author also claims to have UN sources). One is reminded of the false 2002 claims of a "massacre" in Jenin, which received massive coverage in the Western media and which was also based on made-up Palestinian accounts. At this point, readers are no doubt thinking: This is some kind of sick joke. Yes, it is. But the newspaper published it any way -- and no, it wasn't in the style of satire. A competitor, Svenska Dagbladet, has blasted the article, which it accurately calls an anti-Semitic blood libel without a shred of evidence. And the Swedish Embassy in Israel also has condemned it, declaring: "The article shocks the Swedes, just as it shocks the Israelis. We agree with the Israeli government, press and people that this is an unwanted article." But will the country's politicians, intellectuals and others rise up, pronounce this a national disgrace, and demonstrate (the usual response when Islam is perceived to be slighted in some way)? Will the editor be fired? Will there be serious reconsideration of how the hatred of Israel, which has so obsessed this supposedly enlightened country, has gone over the edge? This incident tells us that there is no limit to the frothing lunacy that informs Israel's left-wing critics. It also tells us that anyone of decency and good intentions should start re-examining their credulity in accepting anti-Israel slanders and ostensibly objective "human rights" reports -- which, like this plainly fictitious article, often are based on the supposed "eyewitness" reports of anonymous Palestinians who have been trained to spout propaganda and conspiracy theories. The hysterical misrepresentation of Israel increasingly seems to parallel the tales of well-poisonings, ritual murders and Jewish conspiracies to seize world power that plagued past eras. It is a trend that every thinking person has a duty to oppose. (Barry Rubin is director
of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) centre, LOSING
ITS HALO Human Rights Watch (HRW) was founded in 1978 in New York (as Helsinki Watch) with the mission of using public demonstrations and other forms of naming and shaming to free prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Gulag denizens, including Natan Sharansky, later recognized HRWs role in gaining their freedom. Shortly thereafter, HRW began advocating on behalf of political prisoners and torture victims in other totalitarian regimes, including in Chile, Argentina and Greece. But since then, HRW has lost its moral compass, and the organization is using its substantial budget -- $42-million in 2008 (all figures in U. S. dollars) -- to repeatedly attack Israel by exploiting the language of human rights and international law. Tendentious reports and press conferences, using distorted legal rhetoric in place of credible evidence, target Israeli responses to terror attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah. My organization, NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org), annually releases a systematic analysis of HRW's agenda, and our reports clearly show that HRW singles out Israel in the Middle East. For years, this arbiter of international morality and human rights had very little to say about Libya, Saudi Arabia or Palestinian terrorists. HRW's recent cautious criticism of Saudi policy came only after a changing of the organization's board, and then only after receiving unwelcome attention for its see-no-evil treatment of the country. In May 2009, Arab News reported
that HRW officials went to Saudi Arabia to raise funds, advertising
its numerous condemnations and pseudo-research reports against Israel
in the Gaza war. Some of the founders, including Robert Bernstein, are
in strong disagreement with the organization they originally built.
Part of the answer is the addiction to the influence, power and money that lies just below the moral facade. The collapse of the Soviet empire forced groups like HRW to create new objectives if they wanted to keep the donations coming (and they succeeded; HRW executive director Ken Roth has a $350,000 salary package). The struggle against South African apartheid was but a short-lived substitute. HRW and Amnesty International transformed from human rights groups to research organizations, claiming expertise in the complexities of international law and armed conflict. They added a few self-proclaimed experts in these fields, and began producing impressive-looking battlefield reports based on unverifiable eyewitness testimony and emotive graphics. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a prime target -- and HRWs agenda fit directly into the Palestinian political strategy of isolating and demonizing Israel through the vocabulary of human rights. The campaign to label Zionism as racism, endorsed by the UN in the mid-1970s, returned in the late-1990s as the Oslo process exploded, giving the NGO network a powerful platform. For the Arabs and Iran, anti-Israel NGO activists who labelled Zionism as neo-colonialism and the new apartheid became convenient allies. Double standards promoting anti-Israel positions provided direct access to the United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council), led by moral stalwarts such as Iran, Libya, Pakistan and Cuba. In every round of violence, including the 2002 Jenin massacre myth, the 2006 Lebanon war and numerous others, HRW officials called for international investigations of Israeli war crimes and violations of international law. Meanwhile, HRWs annual income grew as fast as Bernie Madoff's balance sheets. Journalists usually accept and repeat the obsessions and automatic condemnations published by human-rights superpowers, without bothering to check the evidence presented. And this media attention, in turn, helps the top NGOs get more money from foundations promoting radical agendas (like George Soros's Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation), naive donors and now, perhaps, the Saudis.... Another factor in HRW's disproportionate emphasis on Israel is the number of anti-Israel Jews among its top officials, beginning with executive director Ken Roth. Roth has often held press conferences in Jerusalem's American Colony Hotel, home base for the pro-Palestinian media, in order to attack Israel. As suicide bombers were slaughtering hundreds of Israelis, Roth's solution was to call for sending police into Gaza's slums to arrest the perpetrators and bring them to trial. In 2006, Roth condemned Israel's response to Hezbollah rocket attacks and kidnapping of soldiers as an eye-for-an-eye approach resulting from the morality of some more primitive moment. Reed Brody, another Jew, led the HRW delegation to the infamous 2001 NGO Forum of the UN Durban conference, which labelled Israel an apartheid state. Brody was also active in the case brought against prime minister Ariel Sharon in a Belgium court while hundreds of Israelis were being killed in Yasser Arafat's terror campaign.... [Now] HRW has become a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia, one of the top human-rights abusers in the world. According to Arab News, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division, and Hassan Elmasry, a member of both the HRW board of directors and the MENA advisory committee, attended a welcoming dinner and encouraged prominent members of Saudi society to make up the shortage of funds due to the global financial crisis and the work on Israel and Gaza, which depleted HRW's budget for the region. Whitson has reportedly sought to reel in the Saudis by touting HRW's (invented) evidence of Israel using white phosphorus and launching systematic destructive attacks on civilian targets, and by invoking the pro-Israel pressure groups that strongly resisted the report and tried to discredit it.... In terms of its budget and ideological agenda, HRW's embrace of the Saudis makes sense, because it can compensate for the group's loss of support from liberal Jews. In addition, this new partnership is based on a shared agenda of attacking Israel and the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state -- while more than 50 officially Islamic countries are universally accepted. But as a result, HRW's halo has been tarnished, perhaps beyond repair. The long history of cynical manipulation of moral rhetoric notwithstanding, the absurdity of a Saudisupported human-rights organization that targets Israel may be a step too far. For the first time, Roth and Whitson find themselves being held accountable and answering charges, rather than playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. If this also becomes true of Amnesty International and the other human-rights superpowers that have gone bad, this will mark a major step in restoring the moral foundation of universal human rights. (Prof. Gerald Steinberg
is executive director of NGO Monitor. A longer version IT
DOESN'T MATTER WHO WINS THE AFGHAN ELECTION The Taliban minced no words in the leaflets they scattered across southern Afghanistan last weekend. In one of their missives, they threatened to cut off the noses and ears of anyone who dared to vote in Thursday's presidential elections. Another leaflet said that anyone whose fingers were stained with ink -- a sign that they had voted -- also risked disfigurement. A third said "respected residents" should think twice about entering polling booths, since they risked becoming "a victim of our operations." Don't vote, in other words, or we'll blow you up. It was a stark message, but in one sense a very useful one. Sometimes, when one stares too long at Afghanistan, all one sees are tangled webs of complexity: hundreds of ethnic groups, dozens of languages, political clans pulled in different directions by corruption, drugs, and billions of dollars of Western aid. As a result, even people who have been there a long time have trouble defining whom, exactly, we are fighting against. The Taliban is sometimes described as an ideological force, sometimes as a loose ethnic coalition, sometimes as a band of mercenaries, men who fight because they don't have anything else to do. But perhaps with this election, we can now start to use a narrower definition: The Taliban are the people who want to blow up polling stations. The threat is also useful in another sense: It reminds us of what we are fighting for -- by which I don't mean "democracy" as such. After all, we are not trying to create some kind of Jeffersonian idyll in the rugged heart of Central Asia, but merely an Afghan government that is recognized as legitimate by the majority of Afghans -- a government that can therefore prevent the country from turning back into a haven for terrorist training camps. If there were someone acceptable to all factions, we might presumably consider helping the Afghans restore the monarchy. For that matter, if the Afghans were willing to accept an appointed American puppet, we might, I'm guessing, consider that, too, at this point. But there isn't, and they won't. Which means that democratic elections -- which the majority of Afghans support -- are the only means of establishing any Afghan government's legitimacy. It isn't that we are setting the bar "too high" by holding elections in Afghanistan, it's that we don't have anything better to offer. And that, of course, is also why the Taliban are trying to scare Afghanistan's voters. They won't be able to stop the elections altogether, and they won't be able shut down all the polling stations. But that isn't their intent: Their goal is to make the elections appear illegitimate, so that doubts about the president's right to rule haunt the winner throughout his term of office. If they can lower the turnout dramatically in the southern part of the country, if they can intimidate women and prevent them from voting at all, if they can cast a shadow over the fairness of the counting, and if they can therefore convince Afghans that the election was inconclusive, they will have achieved a great deal. Without doubt, whoever wins will carry baggage. Hamid Karzai, the current president, has many detractors (who accuse him of corruption) and a few admirers (who think he is a conciliator). Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister, is a brilliant economist but somewhat remote from ordinary Afghans. Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, Ramazan Bashardost, a former planning minister, and indeed all of the 41 candidates have their pluses and minuses, but that isn't the point: It doesn't matter who wins. It matter how he wins, and it matters that his victory is accepted by most Afghans. The U.S. and NATO troops who will be guarding polling stations this week are crucial to that outcome. So are the efforts of Radio Free Afghanistan, which co-sponsored the country's first ever live, televised, presidential debate this week. (The radio station's director, Akbar Ayazi, described the process of persuading candidates to participate as so difficult, "I could take people to Mars probably by now"). All that pales, however, to the importance of what we do afterward. Our policy -- the Western world's policy, the U.N. policy -- must be to endorse and support whichever candidate emerges as the legitimate winner, lending him further credibility, weakening further the Taliban who opposed his election. We should do what we can (not much, I realize) to encourage Afghanistan's neighbors -- Iran, Russia, Pakistan -- to do the same. And if, for any reason, a legitimate president does not emerge? Then the tangled webs will once again unfurl themselves, the clans and the tribes and the paid mercenaries will start choosing sides, the people who blow up polling stations will have gained credibility -- and we will have to think hard about whether to stay in Afghanistan. (Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.) Please see our Picks of the Week for Aryeh Dean Cohen's analysis of the hate propaganda propagated on Palestinian television Volume IX, No. 2,153 • Wednesday, August 19, 2009
WEEKLY QUOTES "Jerusalem is an epic. It is the wellspring of a civilization. Without Jerusalem's civilization the spiritual history of the world would be stagnant. To us Jerusalem is family. Has anyone ever heard of a daughter or a son of a Saladin ever fasting each year in memory of ancient Jerusalem's anguish? Not a one! Has anybody ever heard of a son of a Crusader who breaks a glass at his wedding ceremony in memory of ancient Jerusalem's torment? Not a one! How could you have heard, when throughout its 3,000-year-long history Jerusalem has been capital to no one but to the Jews. So it was. So it is. And so it shall ever be." -- The late Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin, addressing U.S. Jewish leaders following the Camp David talks in 1978, cited in a review of Yehuda Avner's forthcoming The Prime Ministers -- An Intimate Portrait of Leaders of Israel. (Jewish Tribune, August 6) "The problem with Iran is not only the desire to produce nuclear weapons, but also the character of the regime.... From my point of view, a nuclear weapon in Iranian hands has only one meaning -- a flying death camp. The fact that Iran is investing billions of dollars in the development of long-range missiles, in parallel to its nuclear project, is clear indication of its intent." -- Israeli President Shimon Peres, while meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to discuss the sale of Russian weapons to Middle East countries hostile to Israel. (Jerusalem Post, August 18) "We can't vote. Everybody knows it. We are farmers, and we cannot do a thing against the Taliban." -- Hakmatullah, a Pashtun farmer in Afghanistan, expressing his fear of the Taliban's threat that anyone who tries to vote in Thursday's presidential election will pay with their voting finger. (New York Times, August 17) "The government of Afghanistan needs to demonstrate it can have a road network and can keep it open. The insurgents recognize that and are working against it. [The ring road] is a symbol of governance." -- Brig. Gen. Frank McKenzie, a staff member for the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, promoting a 1,925-mile national ring road that aims to connect Afghanistan's cities. (Wall Street Journal, August 17) "Three-quarters of the terrorist plots that hit Britain derive from the mountain areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan and it is to make Britain safe and the rest of the world safe that we must make sure we honour our commitment to maintain a stable Afghanistan." -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in the wake of renewed criticism of Britain's NATO role in Afghanistan, affirming his commitment to maintain troops in the region. Britain's death toll recently topped 200 this weekend, and just yesterday a suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy, killing seven people and wounding over 50 near a British military base. (Associated Press, August 18-19) "We must never forget. This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people." -- U.S. President Barack Obama, speaking to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, defending his policy to increase U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Yesterday, it was reported that Maulvi Said Muhammad, the Taliban's chief spokesman in Pakistan, was captured, and that he confirmed the recent death of its top commander in a U.S. airstrike. (New York Times, August 18-19) "[I]f you try to layer two governments on top of each other, there is going to be nothing but conflict.... Historically, the international community has already said Israel has a right to be here, that this is going to be their homeland. The question is, should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic." -- Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, during a visit of U.S. Republicans to Israel, responding to reporters who asked if the Palestinians had a right to a homeland within territories currently controlled by Israel. (Jerusalem Post, August 18) "I affirmed to President Obama in Cairo that the Arab initiative offers recognition of Israel and normalization with it after, and not before, achieving a just and comprehensive peace. I told him that some Arab states which had mutual trade representation offices with Israel could consider reopening those offices if Israel commits to stopping settlement [building] and resumes final status negotiations with the Palestinian Authority where they left off with Olmert's government." -- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, meeting in Washington with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as the U.S. administration encouraging Israel, the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab nations to take "parallel steps" toward a final peace agreement. Mubarak said he felt that Obama's Cairo speech had "removed all doubts about the United States in the Muslim world." (Ha'aretz, August 18; National Post, August 19) "There are concerns that reprinting of the cartoons and the release of the movie could provoke the kind of violent reaction which occurred within some Muslim communities overseas when the cartoons were originally published." -- The Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, in one of seven recently-revealed Canadian intelligence reports from last year, monitoring the release of the Dutch documentary Fitna, a film critical of Islamism in the tense atmosphere after Danish cartoons of Mohammed provoked Muslim violence in 2006. (National Post, August 19) SHORT TAKES YEMEN'S LAST JEWS LEAVE -- (Jerusalem) Yemeni state media agency Saba has reported that the final remnant of Yemen's ancient Jewish community, numbering about 250 people, is set to leave the country due to persecution and violence. Israeli sources have confirmed the report. Rabbi Yahya Yaish, chief rabbi of the Ridah and Amran districts in Yemen said that "all Jews in the area are preparing to leave for Israel in the next [few] days." Yaish is the brother of Moshe Yaish al-Nahari, a Jewish community leader who was murdered last December after refusing to convert to Islam. (Jerusalem Post, August 14) BEIRUT SYNAGOGUE BEING REBUILT -- (Beirut) The oldest synagogue in Beirut, which has laid in ruins since the chaos of the Lebanese civil war, is being rebuilt. The Magen Avraham synagogue, named after Moise Abraham Sasson, who donated funds for its construction in 1926, is currently undergoing a year-long million-dollar reconstruction and renovation project. The company responsible for the restoration of downtown Beirut, Solidere, decided that it was up to each religious sect to restore its own places of worship. The Lebanese government's decision to allow the 200-strong Jewish community to rebuild the synagogue was met with approval from all factions, including Hezbollah. (Jerusalem Post, August 13) BRITISH UNION CALLS FOR BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL -- (London) The Fire Brigades Union has called for complete economic sanctions on, and a boycott of Israel, urging the British Trade Union Congress to distance itself from its Israeli counterpart, the Histadrut Labor Federation. The Fire Brigades Union, which represents about 85 percent of British firefighters and support staff, has condemned Israel for its ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip. The sanction call has been criticized by Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine (TULIP), a new organization which works with Israeli and Palestinian trade unionists and NGOs to find constructive ways to respond to boycott calls. (Jerusalem Post, August 16) IRANIAN POLICE QUASH PROTESTS -- (Teheran) Protesters chanting "death to the dictator" in central Teheran were beaten and dispersed by baton-wielding police. The protest was a response to the regime's closing of the reformist newspaper Etemad-e Melli. The paper angered many hard-liners when it claimed that many of the protesters arrested in the wake of the June 12 presidential election had been raped in prison. (Reuters, August 18) SPAIN PAYING TO REBUILD PALESTINIAN HOMES IN JERUSALEM -- (Jerusalem) The Spanish government is paying 42 people to help rebuild two Palestinian homes that Israel demolished in northeast Jerusalem. Volunteers from all over the world are currently in Israel, according to Jeff Halper, the director of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). The Spanish Foreign Ministry has allocated 80,000 Euros to ICAHD, and the same amount to Breaking the Silence, and another 170,000 Euros to similar left-wing Israeli human rights and pro-Palestinian organizations. Israeli PM spokesman Mark Regev criticized Spain's funding of these organizations, especially ICAHD, saying that "it would indeed be strange if European money were going to an NGO headed by [Jeff Halper], who both rejects a two-state solution, and who justifies terrorism." (Jerusalem Post, August 10) CANADA TO SAFEGUARD BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS IN KYRGYZSTAN -- (Ottawa) Canada will spend $30-million building a high-level bio-security lab in Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet Union. Existing Kyrgyz facilities house numerous dangerous pathogens, many developed during the Cold War, without proper security. Such facilities may be infiltrated by terrorists seeking biological weapons. Canada's expenditure, necessary to secure dangerous materials and prevent biological weapons from falling into the wrong hands, is part of a G8 initiative begun in 2002. (National Post, August 18) NUCLEAR WATCHDOG HIDING DATA ON IRAN -- (Geneva) Western diplomats have accused the International Atomic Energy Agency of refusing to publish reports indicating that Iran is pursuing information about its nuclear weapons program. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director of the IAEA, has maintained that his agency has no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The reports in question contradict this claim. American, Israeli and European diplomats are pressuring the IAEA to declassify the data next month. (Ha'aretz, August 19) IRAN CONVENIENTLY SEEKING BAN ON NUCLEAR SITES -- (New York) Iran has asked the UN to consider banning attacks on nuclear installations, the Fars news agency reported. Teheran has asked a conference of 150 nations to vote on a proposed ban in a letter by Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The vote would take place in the scheduled IAEA September conference. Iran has said its nuclear program is purely civilian in nature. Israel has said that it will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, and that it would take military action if diplomatic efforts fail to prevent Iran from going nuclear. (New York Times, August 14) CANADA, CHINA AND ISRAEL STRENGTHEN SCIENTIFIC TIES -- (Ottawa) Chinese, Israeli and Canadian representatives met earlier this month to enhance cooperation on scientific and agricultural research. The gathering, known as the Second Canada-China-Israel Round-table on Agri-Innovation, focused on applying high technology to the development of sustainable agriculture and recognized Israel's leadership in these fields. The meeting, which included political and business leaders from all countries involved, also called for the development of a China-Canada-Israel agricultural co-operation park in Yangling, China. (Canadian Jewish News, August 6) NEWSPAPER: IDF HARVESTING PALESTINIAN ORGANS -- (Jerusalem) A leading Swedish left-leaning paper, has reported this week that Israeli soldiers are abducting Palestinians and stealing their organs. "They plunder the organs of our sons," read the headline in Sweden's largest daily newspaper, the Aftonbladet. The article claims that IDF organ-snatching has been occurring since 1992. A rival Swedish paper published harsh criticism of the article, running an opinion piece entitled "Antisemitbladet," which lambasted the Aftonbladet, saying "now all that remains is the defense, equally predictable: 'Anti-Semitism' No, no, just criticism of Israel." (Ha'aretz, August 19) RUSSIA TO REVIEW MISSILE SALES TO IRAN -- (Jerusalem) Russian President Dmitry Medvedev promised Israeli President Shimon Peres that Russia will review a decision to sell Iran S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, following Peres' warnings about the dangers of a nuclear Iran. Medvedev said that he opposes a nuclear-armed Iran, and has also offered to assist in diplomatic efforts to secure the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. (Ha'aretz, August 19) SAUDIS IN A FLAP OVER RACY TV SEGMENT -- (Riyadh) Saudi TV personality Mazen Abdul Jawad has been arrested for discussing his sex life and displaying sex toys on the talk show Bold Red Line, broadcast on the Lebanon-based LBC network. Abdul Jawad was arrested for immoral behaviour on July 31st, and some clerics have even called for his execution. Because the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia bans cinemas, stage drama and music, satellite television channels are popular forms of entertainment, though some Saudi scholars have referred to them as "axes that destroy Islam and Muslims". (National Post, August 12) Volume IX, No. 2,152 • Tuesday, August 18, 2009
NORTON MEZVINSKY'S
LAMENTABLE LEGACY -- A newly formed "educational think tank," the International Council for Middle East Studies (ICMES), is poised to influence U.S. policy toward the Middle East in ways that could further harm American interests in the region. It will be led by Norton Mezvinsky, a radical anti-Zionist who recently retired after a 42-year-career teaching Middle East history at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). If Mezvinsky remains true to form, ICMES will advocate for holding U.S. policy hostage to the fallacy that Israel is always at fault for the region's troubles. ICMES found a welcoming home at the International Law Institute (ILI) at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. And according to Mezvinsky, ICMES's goal will be to build cultural bridges and promote faculty and student exchanges between the United States and Middle Eastern countries. An immediate question comes to mind: with whom will those bridges be built? That Mezvinsky's new organization is being parachuted into ILI, a group that according to its website "raises levels of professional competence and capacity in all nations so that professionals everywhere may achieve practical solutions to common problems in ways that suit their nations' own needs" is most disturbing. We should question how such a politicized individual as Mezvinsky could operate "practically" and decide what are the needs regarding Israelis and Palestinians when he has devoted his entire career to demonizing Israel. For example, in 2002 Mezvinsky participated in a weeklong teaching institute for Connecticut middle and high school teachers on the Middle East. Among the myths he perpetrated on his students, as recorded by an attendee, was that:
Jonathan Calt Harris later reported that Mezvinsky told the entire class of teachers that, contrary to historical fact, "'the well-armed and well-funded Israelis' fought the Palestinians in 1948, but did not mention that armies of five Arab countries first invaded the U.N.-sanctioned Jewish state."... Mezvinsky endorses the infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 that declared Zionism a form of racism. Furthermore, his biased views resemble the propaganda fed to eighth graders in Saudi Arabia, who are taught that, "the blood of non-Jews has no intrinsic value" and that, therefore, the killing of non-Jews does "not constitute murder according to the Jewish religion." Such blatant anti-Semitism has nothing on Mezvinsky's claim that Judaism teaches "the killing of innocent Arabs for revenge as a Jewish virtue." He also places the sole onus for the Palestinian refugee problem on Israel while never acknowledging the estimated 750,000 Jewish refugees who were expelled from Arab lands....
Mezvinsky and Shahak are prime examples of Jewish academics who throughout their careers questioned their own religion and the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Edward Alexander of the University of Washington sums up this malady in The Jewish Divide over Israel Accusers and Defenders:
Mezvinsky is associated with other supporters of Shahak, including the One State for Palestine/Israel group, which advocates the "one-state solution." (They fail to note that "one state" requires no Jewish State, or that this is part of the Palestinian phased plan to destroy Israel as the Jewish homeland.) At their last conference Mezvinsky was joined by a host of radical anti-Zionist Jewish activists, including: Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada; Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism, in which he advocates the elimination of Israel; Phyllis Bennis, an antiwar activist and a fellow at the far-left Institute for Policy Studies; Ilan Pappe a zealous anti-Zionist who now teaches at the University of Exeter in England; and Gabriel Piterberg a professor of history at UCLA and devoted devotee of Edward Said.... This lamentable record underscores how a tenured professor who taught generations of undergraduates and was influential and an active head of CCSU's Middle East Lecture Series, was able to spread his ideas through the many anti-Israel/anti-Zionist speakers he brought to campus to "educate" the university community.... [This] should raise serious questions about the credibility and education Mezvinsky will disseminate to a much larger audience through his International Council for Middle East Studies. (Asaf Romirowsky is an adjunct scholar for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.) FEAR-MONGERING
AT YALE Flash back to 2006. Professor Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan, is invited to lecture in Tehran on her field of expertise, infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Muslim countries. On her return, she seeks to dispel misconceptions about the Middle East. Because of the "American daily diet of fearsome media discourses about the Middle East, particularly Iran," she complains, "it was difficult to convince relatives, including my 80-year-old mother, that it was safe for me, a mother of two young children, to travel to that part of the world." Landing in Detroit, she finds the same bias:
They're not going to cut off our heads or irradiate us -- that's her message. They just want to serve us their delicious food and sell us their gorgeous carpets. Nothing to fear but fear itself. Flash forward to July 2009. Professor Inhorn has recently made a big move: she's now at Yale, where she chairs its Middle East center (known as the Council on Middle East Studies). She's seated in a cafe in Boston with Jytte Klausen, author of a forthcoming book on the Danish cartoons affair -- those dozen cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that Muslim extremists seized upon in 2005.... Professor Inhorn has been called in by the publisher to break some bad news to the author. Here's a summary of what transpired at that meeting (as told by Klausen to Roger Kimball):
The reason? Yale University Press, relying on Professor Inhorn and other "expert" consultants, had determined that running the cartoons "ran a serious risk of instigating violence," and that "publishing other illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad in the context of this book about the Danish cartoon controversy raised similar risk." A statement by Yale University Press justifying its decision directly quoted Inhorn: "If Yale publishes this book with any of the proposed illustrations, it is likely to provoke a violent outcry." Wait a minute.... The last time we encountered Professor Inhorn, she was telling us to ignore the fear-mongering, not to let the media dupe us into expecting the worst. Now, behind the scenes, she's telling an expert author, who knows a lot more about the topic than she does, that Yale's press absolutely must expect the worst. The author's book must be censored. So let me try to reconcile Professor Inhorn's view of how it works "over there." Sure, they'll feed you delicious food and sell you gorgeous carpets, but they can suddenly be "instigated" to violence by the mere reproduction, in a scholarly book, not only of old cartoons that anyone can access in a flash on the internet, but canonical works of Western art that have been in the public domain for decades (and even representations of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic art). How easily they come unhinged! Why, show them the wrong image, and they could... well, behead you, just like that. And Professor Inhorn fancies herself above the "fearsome media discourses about the Middle East".... Now I don't know if publishing these images in an academic book at this time would run a "serious risk of instigating violence." Everything I do know tells me that it wouldn't.... The reason we have "restricted visas, travel bans and demeaning airport luggage searches" (and other disdained measures) is so that in America, a university press can publish the Danish cartoons in a book about the Danish cartoons, and do so without fear. If we didn't have that line of defense, we would constantly have to censor ourselves and ban whole classes of free expression, lest we be tormented by fanatic extremists. Given a choice between undergoing a baggage search and muzzling themselves, Americans prefer the former. More than that: if you threaten their freedoms, they may just cross an ocean to search for you. That's why America is free and a refuge for the world. What sort of American would prefer the muzzle? Now we know.
The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn't even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism -- particularly Muslim religious extremism -- that is spreading across our culture. A book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who is a professor of politics at Brandeis University, tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of "protest" and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Postenran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.... By the time the hysteria had been called off by those who incited it, perhaps as many as 200 people around the world had been pointlessly killed. Yale University Press announced last week that it would go ahead with the publication of the book, but it would remove from it the 12 caricatures that originated the controversy. Not content with this, it is also removing other historic illustrations of the likeness of the Prophet, including one by Gustave Doré of the passage in Dante's Inferno that shows Mohammed being disemboweled in hell. (These same Dantean stanzas have also been depicted by William Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Salvador Dalí, and Auguste Rodin, so there's a lot of artistic censorship in our future if this sort of thing is allowed to set a precedent.)... [Yet] Islamic art contains many examples -- especially in Iran -- of paintings of the Prophet, and even though the Dante example is really quite an upsetting one, exemplifying a sort of Christian sadism and sectarianism, there has never been any Muslim protest about its pictorial representation in Western art. If that ever changes, which one can easily imagine it doing, then Yale has already made the argument that gallery directors may use to justify taking down the pictures and locking them away. According to Yale logic, violence could result from the showing of the images -- and not only that, but it would be those who displayed the images who were directly responsible for that violence. Let me illustrate: The Aug. 13 New York Times carried a report of the university press' surrender, which quoted its director, John Donatich, as saying that in general he has "never blinked" in the face of controversy, but "when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question."... Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and..."[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence." So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them ... and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own. It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media -- and in the age of "the image" at that -- refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear.... Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism...inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility. Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but who's to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense now. I deny absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands. He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood -- our own and that of others -- to attain it. The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself. (Christopher Hitchens is the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.) Please see our Picks of the Week for Patricia Cohen on Yale's Mohammed-pictures censorship Muhammed. Volume IX, No. 2,151 • Monday, August 17, 2009
FATAH LEADERS
SEEK "VOTING FRAUD" PROBE Senior Fatah leaders in
the Gaza Strip on Wednesday demanded an investigation into alleged fraud
in this week's election for the faction's central committee. The demand
came as members of the Higher Committee of Fatah in the Gaza Strip announced
their resignations in protest of the voting results. Meanwhile, the
final results of the vote, which were announced late Wednesday at a
press conference in Bethlehem, gave another seat to Tayeb Abdel Rahim,
an old-guard Fatah leader and close aide to Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas. [Ibrahim] Abu al-Naja, one of the candidates who were not elected to the Central Committee, called on the Fatah leadership to reconsider the decision to hold the vote without the participation of dozens of delegates from the Gaza Strip. But another senior Fatah official from the Gaza Strip, Zakaria al-Agha, said the mass resignations were in accordance with the faction's internal regulations and not an act of protest. The newly elected Central Committee, which has 23 seats, includes only two representatives from the Gaza Strip: Muhammad Dahlan and Nabil Sha'ath. Eighteen members of the committee are directly elected by delegates to the Fatah General Assembly, while four others are appointed by the head of the faction.
An editorial piece published on the Al-Jazeera Web site noted that Fatah had witnessed the decline of its position in Palestinian society, and that the movement was in need of more than just a conference to improve the lives of Palestinians; it must undertake continual and comprehensive work. The editorial acknowledged that the conference was a historical event for Fatah and helped pave the way for the party's future. However, it noted that the conference lacked meaningful internal discussions on the past failures of the movement and on how to implement positive changes. Another editorial piece, published in the Arabic-language Al-Hayat newspaper, commented on the results of the gathering and questioned whether Fatah was prepared to undertake the necessary initiatives on all levels to lead the Palestinian people.... The article noted that the new central committee had its fair share of internal conflicts and that the new leadership was in need of major reworking. However, it also claimed that Israel was largely to blame for the absence of peace negotiations, saying there had been an Israeli retreat from the peace requirements and that Israel had rejected the two-state solution. While these two editorials took a more critical approach toward the conference results, Arabnews.com praised the outcome and stated that Abbas had reclaimed legitimacy with his voters. According to the Web site, the call for a new General Assembly was a successful gamble on Abbas's part and the new leadership will rejuvenate the movement and consolidate Abbas's position as its leader. FATAH'S TICKING
BOMB What happened at the Fatah congress? It was largely successful at maintaining the status quo, but the outcome is unlikely to be conducive to a comprehensive peace. And there's one terribly dangerous issue -- the next Fatah leader -- which could blow up everything. Once Mahmoud Abbas appoints four more officials to form a Fatah central committee of 22 people, at least two-thirds will be old-style Fatah bureaucrats, with almost all the rest members of the younger guard. Of the 18 elected, at least five are hard-liners who don't even accept the peace process and the Oslo Accords and the rest are Abbas's allies or lieutenants. The latter are not extremists by Palestinian standards; they are happy to negotiate with Israel and don't want to go to war, for now at least. But they will insist on having all Palestinian refugees who wish to do so live in Israel, adherence to the 1967 borders, no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and perhaps they won't support a formal ending of the conflict and will give very little, if anything, on security arrangements. Only two men can be called moderates: Muhammad Shtayyeh, a private sector reformist type who was last to get into the committee, making it by a single vote, and Nabil Sha'ath, a Fatah loyalist. And only one of the 18 men elected has been an important critic of the establishment: Marwan Barghouti, who is currently serving time in an Israeli prison. Call him a practically-minded radical who believes Israel must be driven out of the West Bank by force. There is no question that the meeting was a success for the Fatah establishment and for the PLO, and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas in particular. But like many such successes, it will be paid for by an inability to move toward peace as well as Palestinian suffering. As Fatah continues the conflict and blocks a resolution for years, they face lower living standards and destructive violence. If Fatah becomes more radical, as indicated by Abbas's choice for successor, the Palestinian people will suffer even more. Yet despite the fact that rejecting peace will hurt their people more than those of Israel, on every issue where it had to choose between peace-oriented flexibility and intransigence, the Fatah leadership chose the latter.... I want to stress that Fatah
in its current form is not an extremist entity eager to tear up previous
agreements and go to war (though that could happen), it is a group with
which Israel must try to work to stabilize the situation, minimize violence
and keep Hamas from seizing control of the West Bank. More importantly
for Western governments, this isn't a leadership which will strive for
a comprehensive peace agreement. Since achieving that often seems the
number-one goal of US and European governments, it is of broad significance.
Why did two-thirds of the delegates vote for him? Ghaneim got 33 percent more votes than Barghouti, who not only has a personal base of support but the chic of being a prisoner.... The key reason is that Abbas and his colleagues told delegates to vote for Ghaneim. Why? Part of the answer might be that he has a good personal relationship with Ghaneim. In addition, Ghaneim seems able to bridge the two groups which make up the Fatah leadership: radicals who thought Arafat too moderate, and hardliners who supported Arafat and now back Abbas. Finally, the West Bank warlords and political barons find it hard, as so often happens in politics, to give up their own ambitions and accept one of their rivals as chief. It's easier to accept an outsider who hasn't been in the West Bank at all and with whom one hasn't personally quarreled or competed. Abbas may well retire in the next year, and Ghaneim would then become leader of the PA, PLO and Fatah, too. This is incredibly important, far more so than the minor changes which are monopolizing debate over the meeting. I'm reminded here of the last Palestinian elections, when I correctly predicted a Hamas victory. How? Simply by analyzing the previous local elections and looking at the candidate lists. The State Department depended, however, on opinion polls taken by a Fatah activist, a decent and moderate guy but nevertheless a partisan. Hamas won and later seized the Gaza Strip. This was a disaster for US policy (and also the Palestinians, the Arab regimes, Israel and the region in general).... If Ghaneim takes over, you can not only forget about peace -- which doesn't look too promising anyway -- but the status quo could also be jeopardized. The re-radicalization of Fatah might lead to a very big, even violent, sustained crisis. Attention must be paid to this development. When propagandists distort the facts, they fool only others. When Western policy-makers distort the facts, they fool themselves with ultimately devastating results. FATAH'S MESSAGE A central pillar of the Obama administration's Middle East policy paradigm was shattered at the Fatah conference in Bethlehem -- but don't expect the White House to notice. At the conference, Fatah's supposedly feuding old guard and young guard were united in their refusal to reach an accommodation with Israel. Both old and young endorsed the use of terrorism against Israel. Both embraced the Aksa Martyrs Brigades terror group as a full-fledged Fatah organization. Both demanded that all Jews be expelled from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem ahead of the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state. Both claimed that any settlement with Israel be preceded by an Israeli withdrawal to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and by Israel's destruction as a Jewish state through its acceptance of millions of foreign-born, hostile Arabs as immigrants within its truncated borders. Both demanded that all terrorists be released from Israeli prisons as a precondition for "peace" talks with Israel. Both accused Israel of murdering
Yasser Arafat. Both approved building a strategic alliance with Iran.
Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas's decision to remove both his own mask and that of his organization should cause the Netanyahu government to reassess its current policies toward the group. For the past four months, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his government have quietly barred all Jewish construction in eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem neighborhoods, as well as in Judea and Samaria. The government's unofficial policy has been implemented in the hopes of pleasing the Obama administration, which argues that by barring Jewish building, Israel will encourage the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority to moderate its policies and so engender an atmosphere conducive to a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. The Fatah conference put paid to that fiction.... Fatah was supposed to be the prototype of the noble terrorist organization that really just wants respect. It was supposed to be the group that proved the central contention of the Obama White House's strategy for dealing with terror, namely, that all terrorists want is to be appeased. But over the past week in Bethlehem, Fatah's leaders said they will not be appeased. To the international community whose billions of dollars in aid money and boundless goodwill and political support they have pocketed over the past decade and a half they sent a clear message. They remain an implacable terror group devoted to the physical annihilation of Israel. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is already making clear that it is incapable of accepting this basic truth.... Speaking before the Center for Strategic and International Studies last Thursday, [Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John] Brennan declared that appeasing terrorists and terror-supporting regimes and societies by bowing to their political demands is the central plank of the administration's counterterror strategy. As he put it, "Even as we condemn and oppose the illegitimate tactics used by terrorists, we need to acknowledge and address the legitimate needs and grievances of ordinary people those terrorists claim to represent."... Building on the false Fatah model of appeasable terrorists, Brennan indicated that the Obama administration believes that Hizbullah is well on its way to becoming a respectable political actor. As he sees it, simply by participating in Lebanon's political process, the Iranian proxy has earned the right to be viewed as a legitimate political force.... As The Jerusalem Post's Barry Rubin argued on his Web site, The Rubin Report, Brennan's assessment of Hizbullah is not merely factually wrong. It also exposes a deep misunderstanding of why Hizbullah entered the Lebanese political fray -- and why Hamas entered the Palestinian political fray -- in the first place.... Unfortunately, as Brennan made clear last Thursday, the Obama administration is intellectually wed to the notion that terrorists like Hassan Nasrallah, and terror-supporting regimes like Bashar Assad's Syria and his overlords in Iran just want to be accepted by the West. They cannot accept any evidence to the contrary.... The Obama administration's unswerving efforts to accommodate terrorists and terror-supporting regimes wherever they are to be found demonstrates that for the administration, appeasement is not a tactic for achieving US policy aims. Appeasing terrorists and regimes that support them is the aim of US policy.... The Obama administration's devotion to appeasement shows that even if it wished to reward Israel in some way for going along with a construction freeze, it has nothing to offer. The only play in its game book is further concessions to terrorists and regimes that sponsor them. A settlement freeze will lead to a demand to accept a Lebanese "unity" government where Hizbullah reigns supreme, or a Palestinian "unity" government that paves the way for Hamas's international legitimization. An Israeli willingness to discriminate against Jews in Jerusalem will lead to a further demand that Israel cede the Golan Heights to Damascus, and accept Iran as a nuclear power. For the Obama administration there is but one way of looking at terrorists: Just as Fatah can be appeased, so the mullahs can be accommodated. Fatah's message that it will not be appeased is a message the Obama administration will never receive. Volume IX, No. 2,150 • Friday, August 14, 2009
ACTIVIST GROUP
STIRS UP STORM A Montreal-based group billing itself as "anti-authoritarian, grassroots collective" is looking for students to map links between the city's four universities and Israeli academic, corporate, military and government institutions. Tadamon! is even dangling the prospect of course credits for those who join its campaign against what it calls "Israeli apartheid" - a promise that university officials say the group won't be able to keep. Meanwhile, a delegation of rabbis, scholars and politicians will descend on Montreal next weekend for an international conference which aims to "take back the campus" in the face of what it sees as mounting threats to academic freedom and acts of anti-Semitism "masquerading as anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism." Sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, the conference will call for development of a "Campus Defence Council" to counteract burgeoning campaigns by pro-Palestinian activists, unions, student and church groups which have appealed for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel in the wake of last winter's bombing campaign in Gaza. Members of the activist fringe group Tadamon! joined the international BDS campaign three years ago. Last month, the group asked the Community University Research Exchange (CURE), which is affiliated with student-funded public interest research groups at Concordia and McGill Universities, to help it map links between local universities and "Israeli institutions which are complicit in human rights abuses in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Middle East."... The research, to be completed by the end of the fall semester, should detail "both the links between the universities in Montreal and Israel and also the impacts of those links on the ground in Israel/Palestine." Abraham Cooper, a rabbi and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles who will be the keynote speaker at next week's conference, condemns the mapping campaign, likening it to the anti-Semitism of 1930s Germany, when Nazis traced families for the tiniest hint of Jewish ancestry. Writing with historian Harold Brackman, Cooper argues that an attempt by anti-Muslim groups which targeted individuals and organizations with links to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan would be widely denounced. "The alarms would be sounding at Homeland Security and the RCMP, human rights groups and mosques. Concerns about Islamophobia, racial profiling and even hate crimes would be raised." CURE is a project of QPIRG-Concordia and QPIRG-McGill. At Concordia, QPIRG is independent of student government. It receives funding through a per capita student fee of 0.31 cents per credit. CURE claims some of its research projects qualify for university credits as independent study, term paper or thesis, provided the student finds a professor willing to monitor their research. But Ollivier Dyens, vice-provost for teaching and learning at Concordia, cautions students shouldn't get their hopes up.... He said serious research requires objectivity and open-mindedness. He said it's most unlikely a professor would sanction a project where issues were so volatile and the starting point was so politically-motivated. Yesterday, Stefan Christoff,
a freelance journalist and member of Tadamon!, said the campaign is
still very much in the planning stages. "There isn't much public
organizing going on concerning this project until now." For more on Tadamon! and its pro-Hezbollah agenda, follow this link... http://www.isranet.org/tadamon.pdf LESZEK Sometimes nothing is more enchanting than disenchantment. I had the good fortune to have been born late in the intellectual wars about Marxism, and far away from the Marxist tyrannies, and I never was a Marxist; but when I was a student I suffered for a while from the suspicion that the Marxist tradition contained important truths, and that only it contained them. Marxism, after all, explained everything; and I was not yet smart enough to hold this against it. The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one - infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga; and I wondered also whether it might go with my Jewishness. (Enter Borochov!) And I record all this with embarrassment, so as to praise the memory of the great man who embarrassed me. He died last week. In 1975, at All Soul's, in Oxford, I participated in Leszek Kolakowski's seminar on Pascal. It fell to me to report on Lucien Goldmann and his celebrated interpretation of Pascal, and more generally of Jansenism, as the expression of the perplexity of a particular social class in seventeenth-century France, the noblesse de robe, which responded to its increasing isolation from the king, in the years of the emergence of monarchical absolutism and its powerful bureaucracy, with the tragic mystery of the deus absconditus, the hidden God. Here, I supposed, was a scholarly and unpolitical and humanistic Marxism; and I was encouraged to learn that Goldmann was never a Stalinist, or even a member of the Communist Party. At Blackwell I sprung for the hardcover of Goldmann's book, and threw myself into it. There was no way I could have known that Kolakowski was at the time revising his own view of Goldmann's work. In a Polish journal, in 1957, he had given it a mixed review, but he was no longer so clemently inclined. His new, and devastating, analysis of Goldmann appeared a few years later, in the third volume of Main Currents of Marxism. So when I turned up with my own mixed review, the stage for my education was set. Kolakowski heard me out, and congratulated me on some of my comments about Goldmann's affinities with Lukacs, and then proceeded to his own account of the text and the theory. He swiftly demonstrated the crudity of Goldmann's assumption of a "one-to-one correspondence" between the social position of a class and its cultural expressions; and then he went further. He launched into a lecture - I will never forget it - about the distinction between "actual class-consciousness" and "possible class-consciousness," and the damage that it did to humanistic understanding. The notion of possible class-consciousness, or zugerechnetes Bewusstsein, was Lukacs's innovation. It taught - these are Kolakowski's words in Main Currents of Marxism - that "by relating the empirical consciousness of a social class to the 'totality' of the historical process we can discover not only what that class actually thinks, feels, and desires, but also what it would think, feel, and desire, if it had a clear, unmystified understanding of its position and interests." The Marxist historian, in other words, knows not only what was, but also what should have been; and it is on the basis of what should have been that he knows what was. About this pseudo-omniscience Kolakowski was withering. So even the "humanism" of Goldmann was another engine of necessity, and hermeneutically coercive, and indifferent to actuality. As Kolakowski said - I am quoting again from his Goldmann chapter, but I can hear him saying it - we know that in practice all kinds of circumstances contribute to the formation of a worldview, and that all phenomena are due to an inexhaustible multiplicity of causes." That is humanism, and also liberalism. My Bewusstsein was never quite the same. We became friends. And the disenchanter became the re-enchanter, because what most stimulated Leszek was the ancient but unantiquated search for truth that used to be described affectionately as metaphysics. He came to Goldmann because of Pascal, not to Pascal because of Goldmann. Or more precisely, Goldmann came to him, cruelly, with the caprices of history, in the poisoned air of Marxism-Leninism in Poland; but when Goldmann died for him, Pascal still lived. Leszek exposed the theological character of Marxism because he was a student of theology - he referred to Lafargue as "one of the principal scriptores minores of the Marxist canon," and Main Currents of Marxism might be described as a critical study of socialist patristics. He could tell a doctrine with integrity from a doctrine without it. Nobody contributed more than him to the systematic philosophical demolition of Marxism - he mastered what he hated as brilliantly as what he loved; and others will laud him for this. I wish to recall Leszek gratefully as a democrat with a metaphysical interest. There are not many liberals who prefer to discuss Ockham or Cusanus. He made reason soulful. I found in him an uncommon example of the spirituality of philosophy. His sympathy for religion was owed not to a settled faith - the elusiveness of certainty was one of his lifelong themes - but to a conviction that religion was another home for philosophy, a sanctuary for its questions and (some of) its answers in a culture that was indifferent to it and an academy that had professionalized it. There was an almost taunting quality to his essays about the conceptual richness of religious thinkers. And yet Leszek was a perfect stranger to piety, with his weathered ironies and his worldly cigarettes. In 1966, he delivered a legendary "revisionist" speech, which resulted in his expulsion from the Party and the loss of his position at the university in Warsaw, and published an essay on "the epistemology of striptease." A dissent, and a dissent. Before the uncompromised defense of justice and pleasure, tyrannies may tremble, and even fall. (Leon Wieseltier is The New Republic's literary editor.) AUTOCRACY AND
THE DECLINE OF THE ARABS "It made me feel so jealous," said Abdulmonem Ibrahim, a young Egyptian political activist, of the recent upheaval in Iran. "We are amazed at the organization and speed with which the Iranian movement has been functioning. In Egypt you can count the number of activists on your hand." This degree of "Iran envy" is a telling statement on the stagnation of Arab politics. It is not pretty, Iran's upheaval, but grant the Iranians their due: They have gone out into the streets to contest the writ of the theocrats. In contrast, little has stirred in Arab politics of late. The Arabs, by their own testimony, have become spectators to their history. A struggle rages between the Iranian theocracy and the Pax Americana for primacy in the Persian Gulf and the Levant. The Arabs have the demography - 360 million people by latest count - and the wealth to balance Iran's power. But they have taken a pass in the hope that America - or Israel, for that matter - would shatter the Iranian bid for hegemony. We are now in the midst of one of those periodic autopsies of the Arab condition. The trigger is the publication last month of the Arab Human Development Report 2009, the fifth of a series of reports by the by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on the state of the contemporary Arab world. The first of these reports, published in 2002, was treated with deference. A group of Arab truth-tellers, it was believed, had broken with the evasions and the apologetics to tell of the sordid condition of Arab society - the autocratic political culture, the economic stagnation, the cultural decay. So all Arabs combined had a smaller manufacturing capacity than Finland with its five million people, and a vast Arabic-speaking world translated into Arabic a fifth of the foreign books that Greece with its 11 million people translates. With all the oil in the region, tens of millions of Arabs were living below the poverty line. Little has altered in the years separating the first of these reports from the most recent. A huge oil windfall came into the region, and it was better handled, it has to be conceded, than earlier oil windfalls. But on balance the grief of the Arabs has deepened, and the autocracies are yet to be brought to account. They remain unloved, but they remain in the saddle.... Wily rulers, the men at the helm may have failed their peoples. They may have denied them decent educational systems. They may not have figured out a way into the modern world economy. But they have mastered the art of political survival. "He who eats the sultan's bread, fights with the sultan's sword," goes an Arabic maxim. The economic dominance of the rulers, the absence of the countervailing power of property and the private sector, has increased the awesome power of the governments and their security establishments. It is no mystery, this sorrowful decline of the Arabs. They have invested their hopes in states, and the states have failed. According to the UNDP's report, government revenues as percentage of GDP are 13% in Third World Countries, but they are 25% in the Middle East and North Africa. The oil states are a world apart in that regard: the comparable figures are 68% in Libya, 45% in Saudi Arabia, and 40% in Algeria, Kuwait and Qatar. Oil is no panacea for these lands. The unemployment rates for the Arab world as a whole are the highest in the world, and no prophecy could foresee these societies providing the 51 million jobs the UNDP report says are needed by 2020 to "absorb young entrants to the labor force who would otherwise face an empty future." The simple truth is that the Arab world has terrible rulers and worse oppositionists. There are autocrats on one side and theocrats on the other. A timid and fragile middle class is caught in the middle between regimes it abhors and Islamists it fears. Indeed, the technocrats and intellectuals associated with these development reports are themselves no angels. On the whole, they are unreconstructed Arab nationalists. The patrons of these reports are the likes of the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi and the Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi, intellectuals and public figures whose stock-in-trade is presumed Western (read American) guilt for the ills that afflict the Arabs. Anti-Americanism suffuses this report, as it did the earlier ones. There is cruelty and plunder aplenty in the Arab world, but these writers are particularly exercised about Iraq. "This intervention polarized the country," they say of Iraq. This is a myth of the Arabs who are yet to grant the Iraqis the right to their own history: There had been a secular culture under the Baath, they insist, but the American war begot the sectarianism. To go by this report, Iraq is a place of mayhem and plunder, a land where militias rule uncontested. For decades, it was the standard argument of the Arabs that America had cast its power in the region on the side of the autocrats. In Iraq in 2003, and then in Lebanon, an American president bet on the freedom of the Arabs. George W. Bush's freedom agenda broke with a long history and insisted that the Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA. A despotism in Baghdad was toppled, a Syrian regime that had all but erased its border with Lebanon was pushed out of its smaller neighbor, bringing an end to three decades of brutal occupation. The "Cedar Revolution" that erupted in the streets of Beirut was but a child of Bush's diplomacy of freedom. Arabs know this history even as they say otherwise, even as they tell the pollsters the obligatory things about America the pollsters expect them to say. True, Mr. Bush's wager on elections in the Palestinian territories rebounded to the benefit of Hamas. But the ballot is not infallible, and the verdict of that election was a statement on the malignancies of Palestinian politics. It was no fault of American diplomacy that the Palestinians, who needed to break with a history of maximalist demands, gave in yet again to radical temptations. Now the Arabs are face to face with their own history. Instead of George W. Bush there is Barack Hussein Obama, an American leader pledged to a foreign policy of "realism." The Arabs express fondness for the new American president. In his fashion (and in the fashion of their world and their leaders, it has to be said) President Obama gave the Arabs a speech in Cairo two months ago. It was a moment of theater and therapy. The speech delivered, the foreign visitor was gone. He had put another marker on the globe, another place to which he had taken his astounding belief in his biography and his conviction that another foreign population had been wooed by his oratory and weaned away from anti-Americanism. The crowd could tell itself that the new standard-bearer of the Pax Americana was a man who understood its concerns, but the embattled modernists and the critics of autocracy knew better. There is no mistaking the animating drive of the new American policy in that Greater Middle East: realism and benign neglect, the safety of the status quo rather than the risks of liberty. (If in doubt, the Arabs could check with their Iranian neighbors. The Persians would tell them of the new mood in Washington.) One day an Arab chronicle could yet be written, and like all Arab chronicles, it would tell of woes and missed opportunities. It would acknowledge that brief interlude when American power gave Arab autocracies a scare, and when a despotism in Baghdad and a brutal "brotherly" occupation in Beirut were laid to waste. The chroniclers would have to be an honest lot. They would speak the language of daily life, and the truths that Arabs have seen and endured in recent years. On that day, the "human development reports" would be discarded, their writers seen for the purveyors of double-speak and half-truths they were. (Fouad Ajami is a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and an adjunct fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.) Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume IX, No. 2,149 • Thursday, August 13, 2009
FIGHTING THE CAMPUS
WAR AGAINST ISRAEL AND THE JEWS The Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA) has chapters at nearly 600 colleges and universities across North America. Treated by administrators and student governments alike as a respectable political organization, the MSA has, over the past few years, sponsored a series of vile expressions of Jew-hatred in a variety of campus and non-campus venues. A few examples serve to illustrate the content of the MSA's character: In October 2000, the president of UCLA's MSA led a crowd of demonstrators at the Israeli consulate in chants of "Death to Israel!" and "Death to the Jews!" At UCLA's annual "Anti-Zionist Week" festivities, rank-and-file MSA members have raised money for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, who are solemnly sworn to the mass murder of Jews and the annihilation of Israel. At its Annual Conference in 2003, the Iowa MSA invited, as a guest speaker, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad -- on record as a proud "supporter of the Hamas movement." Alkalima, the newspaper of UC Irvine's Muslim Student Union (an MSA campus affiliate), once published a special report called "Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid," which glorified Hamas and Hezbollah as noble warriors fighting Israeli oppression. At the 7th annual MSA West Conference held at the University of Southern California in January 2005, former MSA member Ahmed Shama praised Hamas and Hezbollah for being "uncompromising" on their principles, and for refusing to "shake hands with the other side." MSA's Muhammad al-Asi is a frequent guest speaker on university campuses; his hatred of Israel is his trademark theme. In an article titled "The Qur'an Says Zionist Israel Will Be Shattered," al-Asi wrote: "The prophet of Allah...summed it up when he said: 'The final hour shall not commence until the Muslims engage Yahud [Jew] in warfare. And the Muslims will deal the deathblow to Yahud....'" Appearing as a guest speaker at UC Irvine, al-Asi stated: "We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly [sic] with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in Occupied Palestine." Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, formerly a community activist and currently an Oakland, California-based Imam, is a frequent guest lecturer at MSA events. A passionate supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, he endorses suicide bombings as a legitimate "resistance" tactic: "Palestinian mothers are supporting their children who are suicide bombers, saying, 'Go honey, go!' That ain't suicide; that's martyrdom." In a May 2006 appearance at UC Irvine, Malik-Ali accused the "apartheid State of Israel" of carrying out a "holocaust" and a "genocide" against the Palestinian people. Referring to Jews as "new Nazis" and "a bunch of straight-up punks," he told Jews directly: "The truth of the matter is your days are numbered. We will fight you. We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious." Imam Abdul Alim Musa, founder and director of the As-Sabiqun movement (which seeks to recreate an Islamic caliphate), is another frequent speaker at MSA events. During a May 9, 2007 "Islamic Revival" at UC Irvine, Musa said: "Who ran the slave trade...who funded [it]? You'll study and you will find out: the Jews.... It was the Jewish bankers...in Vienna, with pockets full of money, funding and insuring, that's who did it." In June 2007, Musa held the U.S. and Israel jointly culpable for both attacks on the World Trade Center (in 1993 and 2001). The racist anti-Semitism that rolls off the tongues of each of the foregoing speakers is also the defining feature of the organization that has anointed them as its leading mouthpieces. Established in January 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the MSA is the most well-known and influential Islamic student organization in North America. Neither its benign-sounding name nor its professed objective -- "to serve the best interest of Islam and Muslims in the United States and Canada" -- betray any hint of its repugnant ideology or its radical Islamic roots. MSA was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, godfather organization to Hamas and al Qaeda. In fact, MSA (according to documents confiscated by the FBI) was named explicitly in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the Brotherhood's likeminded "organizations of our friends" who shared the common goal of destroying America and turning it into a Muslim nation.... In its earliest days, MSA was financed largely by Saudi Arabia. In return, the organization promoted the kingdom's extremist Wahhabi strain of Islam.... Wahhabi textbooks do not recognize Israel as a sovereign state and do not show it, by name, on any map. Instead, all maps bear the name "Palestine." From its inception, MSA had close links with the extremist Muslim World League, whose chapters' websites have featured Osama bin Laden's propaganda. MSA formerly solicited donations for the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose assets the U.S. government seized in December 2001 because that organization was giving financial support to the genocidal barbarians of Hamas. MSA also has strong ties to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which serves as a vehicle through which the Saudi government funds Islamic extremism and international terrorism. WAMY was co-founded by a former senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and by Osama bin Laden's nephew. Moreover, WAMY raises funds for Hamas. A Saudi opposition group reports that WAMY disseminates literature encouraging "religious hatred and violence against Jews, Christians, Shi'a and Ashaari Muslims." As WAMY puts it, this literature is expressly designed "to teach our children to love taking revenge on the Jews and the oppressors, and teach them that our youngsters will liberate Palestine and Jerusalem when they go back to Islam and make jihad for the sake of Allah." A number of noxious organizations have splintered off from MSA, including: the Muslim Arab Youth Association (a now-defunct group that sponsored conferences featuring known Islamic terrorists as guest speakers); the Islamic Circle of North America (currently under investigation by U.S. authorities for possible connections to Islamic terrorist groups); and the Islamic Society of North America (created by MSA with the help of Sami Al-Arian, former North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad). The MSA uses the current obsession with "diversity" in American higher education as a form of protective coloration to conceal its goals. Not all of the MSA's rank-and-file members are aware of the organization's roots as an anti-Semitic hate organization. Some, in fact, are under the impression that they have simply joined a fraternity of sorts, dedicated to cultivating friendships, promoting outreach, and fostering interfaith understanding on campus. And indeed, not all MSA campus chapters are equally radical. But the national MSA, which serves as the umbrella group for the various campus MSAs, is a veritable training ground for those shock troops who spearhead the campus war against Israel and the Jews. (John Perazzo is the
Managing Editor of DiscoverTheNetworks and is the author of TORONTO'S NEWEST
SPEAKING STAR: "Long live the Taliban" might seem an unlikely thing for a prominent anti-war figure to declare, but that's today's peace movement for you. Stranger still, the man who recently uttered those words, Azzam Tamimi, is being promoted by a new Toronto-based institute that says it is embarking upon a national campaign to cultivate wholesome, faith-based civic virtues among Canada's young Muslims. The Mississauga, Ont.-based Al-Fauz Institute for Islamic Thought claims its purpose is to teach young Muslims how to apply Islamic ideas to Canada's pluralistic society and "prepare young minds that will take up the mantle of the Muslim community." But Tamimi -- who currently has top billing on the Al-Fauz website, and is listed as a member of the institute's "faculty" -- has loudly renounced democracy. Indeed, he recently proclaimed: "I don't believe in democracy anymore," explicitly praises suicide bombers, and says he is willing to blow himself up in Israel: "It's the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity." He distinguishes good Muslims from their adversaries this way: "We love death. They love life." You'd never know any of this from the billing the Al-Fauz Institute gives Tamimi. He's presented as a Palestinian-born British academic and a "political activist." His leading role with Britain's Stop The War Coalition is noted. But nowhere does the institute mention that Tamimi is also a high-ranking advisor to Hamas, an organization considered by Canada to be a terrorist group. His best-known book is titled Hamas: A History From Within. Nor is this fact mentioned by Toronto's Ryerson University, which is permitting Tamimi to deliver a four-day "intensive course on Islamic history" from July 24 to July 27. Aside from Tamimi, five well-known Canadian imams are listed by the Al-Fauz Institute as "faculty" members. But the best known among them -- Hamid Slimi, chairman of the Canadian Council of Imams -- told me he'd never even heard of the institute. "I don't know anything about this," Slimi said.... Iqbal Masood Nadvi, the institute's "senior patron," denied any knowledge of Tamimi's dodgy associations or his various bloodcurdling pronouncements. "I am hearing this from you for the first time," he said. "I don't believe in the Taliban. What I know about Tamimi is he is an academic person." Nadvi referred further questions
to the Al-Fauz Institute's co-ordinator, Junaid Mirza, who had taken
the lead in bringing Tamimi onboard. While Mirza was quite familiar
with Tamimi's political background, he said it was Tamimi's academic
expertise in the history of Islamic reform movements that landed him
the institute faculty post and the Ryerson gig. But if the point is
to present Canadians with "a balanced and comprehensive vision
of Islam," isn't a character like Azzam Tamimi pretty well the
worst choice the Al-Fauz Institute could have made? Is the Al-Fauz Institute really interested in helping young Muslim Canadians make healthy contributions to this country's mosaic? Azzam Tamimi preaches a toxic, anti-democratic Islamism and espouses a decidedly oppressive way of life. The Al-Fauz Institute must be called to account -- Canadians deserve to know just what this group has planned. (Terry Glavin is an author, journalist and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia.) TERRORIST IN THE
IVORY TOWER? Do the ranks of Middle East studies professors include terrorists? If the allegations against University of Ottawa professor Hassan Diab are proved true, the answer will be yes. Diab, a Lebanese-born dual Canadian citizen and author of Beirut: Reviving Lebanon's Past, is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Ottawa and until recently taught a part-time summer introductory sociology course at Carleton University in Ottawa. His job ended last month following allegations by French authorities that Diab was the leader of a commando team that perpetrated the 1980 bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris. The bombing, which was attributed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- Special Operations (PFLP-SO), a splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), killed three Frenchmen and an Israeli woman and wounded 20. At the request of French authorities, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Diab in November, 2008. He's since been granted bail on numerous conditions, including wearing an ankle bracelet and only leaving his house escorted by one of the five people who posted his $250,000 bail. French authorities who seek to extradite Diab for trial in France accuse him of making and planting the bomb used in the attack. According to Canwest News Service:
Diab maintains his innocence. As reported in a National Post editorial:
Furthermore, Diab's friends and colleagues insist that he is a peaceful, non-violent man who has never shown anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist leanings. Predictably, Carleton University's
decision to terminate Diab has caused an uproar among his academic peers.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers issued a statement condemning
Diab's "unjust termination" "in the strongest possible
terms." An August 1, 2009, Ottawa Citizen op-ed signed by 30 members
of Carleton's Department of Sociology and Anthropology described Diab's
firing melodramatically...blaming the allegedly repressive, post-9/11
political atmosphere in "George W. Bush's America" for the
firing -- of a Canadian....
(Cinnamon Stillwell
is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, Volume IX, No. 2,148 • Wednesday, August 12, 2009
WEEKLY QUOTES "If Hezbollah
joins the Lebanese government as an official entity, let it be clear
that the Lebanese government, as far as we are concerned, is responsible
for any attack--any attack--from its area on the state of Israel.
It cannot hide and say: 'It's Hezbollah, we don't control them.'"--Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, responding to news that
Hezbollah could join the new Lebanese government, and declaring that
Israel would then hold Lebanon responsible for any future attack from
its territory. (Ha'aretz, August 11) "Those elements
within Lebanon, be they Hezbollah or others, know the United States
has tried to be a very honest broker there regarding support for Lebanese
institutions and those who shun terrorism will in fact gain favour
with the United States. The same thing with the Palestinian community:
those Palestinians that are really going to ensure that they pursue
a path towards peace that does not bring terrorism to bear are going
to be partners of the United States."--U.S. Chief Counter-Terrorism
Advisor John Brennan, during a meeting with a think-tank
in Washington D.C., insisting that Pres. Obama's strategy of diplomacy
with Muslims should yield more effective results than the previous
Administration's "global war on terror". (National Post,
August 7) "That's right: Among the 16 medal winners is Mary Robinson, who ran the UN's Human Rights Commission from '97 to '02 and built a notable anti-West, anti-US and anti-Israel legacy. In knocking NATO's Yugoslavia mission in the '90s, slapping America for its criminal-justice practices and opposing sanctions against Hussein, she drew much US ire. Indeed, so hostile was she to US interests that Washington actively sought to oust her. "Her one-sided hits on Israel won special notice. The late Rep. Tom Lantos (a Democrat, human-rights advocate and Holocaust survivor) called the UN's '01 Durban parley, which she organized, 'the most sickening . . . display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.' "Obama aide Robert
Gibbs defends the award, calling her a 'crusader of women's rights.'
Which, uh, misses the point, no? Judging by Obama's recent global
'apology tour,' his view of America is pretty clear. But this award
goes too far."--New York Post Editorial, chastising
Pres. Obama's decision to bestow the prestigious award on one of the
most frequent critics of his nation's policies and those of its allies.
(New York Post, August 12) "But Franklin's troubles...are the result of something deeper--the FBI's constant and unwavering suspicion that Israel is a treacherous state which, unsatisfied with the generous aid it receives from its American ally, systematically and unscrupulously connives to spy and steal information and technology in the United States. "Those suspicions, which became an obsession, were reinforced in 1985 with the affair of the civilian navy analyst Jonathan Pollard, who was discovered to be spying for Israel. From its investigation of Pollard, the FBI concluded that Israel had another spy deep within the administration--someone even more senior than Pollard.... The agency initially thought it was Franklin.... "Franklin's impression was that his interrogators believed Pollard had a secret partner, a mole, probably in the office of the secretary of defense. 'The pursuit to uncover the mole was fed by a malevolent anti-Semitic passion. In the intelligence community, Israelis are called 'Izzis,' which has an unpleasant odor to it. They can't say 'kikes' nowadays, so they resort to 'Izzis.''"--Yossi Melman, reporting on an interview with Lawrence Franklin, who plans to write a book saving the world from the Iranian threat. (Ha'aretz, July 27) SHORT TAKES LIEBERMAN CALLS ON
ENVOY TO RESIGN--(Jerusalem) Israel's Consul General
in Boston, Nadav Tamir, should resign in the wake of his
scathing critique of Israeli policy towards the U.S., said Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Tamir wrote a leaked confidential
memo to the Foreign Ministry in which he criticized the Israeli government's
policies vis-à-vis the settlements and its recent dealings
with the Obama administration, saying that the "manner in which
we are conducting relations with the American administration is causing
strategic damage to Israel." Over the weekend, Lieberman instructed
his ministry director to summon Tamir for consultation. (Ha'aretz,
August 10) Volume IX, No. 2,147 • Tuesday, August 11, 2009
LETTER TO MRS.
MARY ROBINSON Dear Mrs. Robinson, Recent statements by you and your defenders, amid the growing opposition to your receipt this Wednesday of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, require a response. According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights -- for whom you recently worked on a report together with one of its board members, Richard Goldstone -- you are being "vilified" by "false accusations." In your own words, "certain elements" of the Jewish community -- those opposed to your selection -- are subjecting you to "bullying." Mrs. Robinson, let's be honest: no one has bullied you, and you are not being vilified by false accusations. Instead, facts were presented and issues raised concerning your 1997-2002 tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights -- by mainstream Jewish organizations as well as by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle -- which question the integrity of your actions on the Middle East, most famously during the lead-up to that dark moment in history known as the Durban conference. Hurling ad hominem epithets won't make these facts go away. Nor will misrepresenting your critics' arguments and then purporting to refute them, which is what both you and your defenders have been doing. If you are to receive this medal, the American people are entitled to know precisely what the issues are. I. Your Role at Durban Let us begin with Durban, the U.N.'s 2001 world conference against racism, which you presided over as Secretary-General, and then consider your overall tenure as U.N. rights chief.... The late Tom Lantos, founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and a respected defender of human rights for all, was a U.S. delegate to the conference.... Shortly after the conference, Lantos published an essay in the Fletcher Forum for World Affairs that amounts to a stinging indictment of your role in the events leading up to the conference, including at the fateful preparatory meetings in Tehran and Geneva, with your acts of omission and commission described as "a major contributing factor to the debacle in Durban." This article is the primary source cited by your critics. If its author had been a hawkish unilateralist, you could have easily dismissed him as just another "bully." But Tom Lantos was a Democrat, a firm believer in vital multilateral institutions, and a true friend -- meaning never an uncritical one -- of the United Nations. And so you have no choice
but to address his charges. Your main defense, as reported in the
Irish Times, is that Lantos "misunderstood" your role. "The
conference was run by the member states..." you said. "So
all key meetings and all decisions at the official level were made
by governments and I wasn't present when they were arguing about whether
anti-Semitic language which was in brackets should be included. I
just wasn't there." Yet even if your account were true, it is, in the end, immaterial to Lantos' 22-page indictment, only a small fraction of which discusses your role at the final conference. Most of it, as you know, addresses what you did -- and failed to do -- during the lead-up. Lantos never denied that at Durban you stood up to condemn anti-Semitic pamphlets distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union, or that you rejected the viciously anti-Israel NGO declaration.... I urge you to respond to Lantos' detailed charges concerning your actions during three key moments, in Tehran, Geneva, and Durban: 1. That You Condoned the Tehran Hatred of February 2001 -- In February 2001, when the Tehran preparatory meeting of Asian states adopted a text condemning only one country -- demonizing Israel as a country guilty of a "new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity," and calling Zionism a "racist and violent movement based on racist and discriminatory ideas" -- your response was to congratulate the Tehran delegates for their "high degree of consensus."... Your comments, wrote Lantos, "represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the World Conference Against Racism. By appearing to condone the Asian conference's efforts to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the World Conference, [Mary Robinson] betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes. From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct." In other words, at the moment when the Islamic states injected the toxic language that would eventually poison the entire Durban process, your actions encouraged it.... 2. That You Opposed the U.S. at the Geneva Pre-Conference of August 2001 -- Lantos detailed your actions during the emergency Geneva meeting of August 2001, a last-minute attempt to stave off the impending disaster. "Mrs. Robinson's intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary [Colin] Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed 'the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and...the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.' Thus, instead of condemning the attempt to usurp the conference, she legitimized it. Instead of insisting that it was inappropriate to discuss a specific political conflict in the context of a World Conference on Racism, she spoke of the 'need to resolve protracted conflict and occupation, claims of inequality, violence and terrorism, and a deteriorating situation on the ground.'..." 3. That You Opposed
the U.S. at the Durban Endgame in September 2001 -- Finally,
at the endgame in Durban, Lantos documents your counter-productive
role: "As the U.S. pressed its case, Robinson seemed to be working
to stymie our efforts. In her public and private statements, as was
the case in Geneva, she insisted that the conference had to recognize
the suffering of the Palestinian people. In a meeting on Sunday, September
2, with [U.S.] Ambassador Southwick, she lashed out at him, characterizing
the U.S. threat to pull out if the Norwegian language was not accepted
as 'warped, strange and undemocratic.'"... II. Your Role as High Commissioner But the concerns about
your actions on the Middle East are not limited to Durban. They extend
to your entire 5-year tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Here again, you invoke the same defense: Your critics "misunderstand"
what your role was, failing to appreciate the difference between the
former Commission on Human Rights, a body of 53 U.N. member states,
and your own role as the U.N.'s top human rights official.... Examples abound. To name but a small portion: On May 15, 1998, as we reported, you legitimized Palestinian demonstrators hurling bricks, rocks and Molotov cocktails as a "peaceful assembly." In September 2000, we protested your breach of impartiality and integrity when you named Ms. Mona Rishmawi, notorious for having written articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, as your senior advisor. She continues to serve at the office of the High Commissioner. In November 2000, when you led a fact-finding mission with the cooperation of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, we noted your distinct policy of listening to the Palestinians, while asking hard questions only of the Israelis. The subsequent report that you published was found by UN Watch to have denounced Israeli actions without considering their cause and context, including self-defense from armed attacks, and to have presumed Israel to be the aggressor.... Mrs. Robinson, last week you said that when it came to the Middle East, you acted "purely in a principled, human rights way with no bias, which I am incapable of." The evidence above, however, shows that you were not only capable, but all too willing. I look forward to your response, which we offer to publish in its entirety. Yours truly, Hillel C. Neuer AMERICANS FOR
PEACE NOW: A CASE OF MISLEADING DOGMA The recent article, "Obama means what he says" on July 22 by CEO of Americans for Peace Now (APN) Debra DeLee, was a breathtaking display of misplaced arrogance and misleading dogma. One can only marvel at how, after well over a decade and a half of support for a disastrously failed policy, the proponents of a two-state solution still behave as if they have not only a monopoly on the moral high ground, but also the inside track to enlightened political wisdom. Indeed, one can only wonder how much more tragedy has to befall both Jews and Arabs before these smug, self-satisfied proponents of a Palestinian state muster the intellectual integrity to admit they were wrong. In the heady days of Oslowian-Optimism (Oh-Oh?), a case might have conceivably been made for placing the burden of proof on the opponents of a two-state concept to provide a convincing case that this was a policy whose chances of success were negligible and the cost of failure unacceptable. But today the onus has shifted. Today -- after 16 years of disaster, death and destruction -- a more sober approach is called for. Today, the burden of proof must be on the proponents of the two-state solution to show that their preferred policy not only has (a) a reasonable probability of success, but (b) the risk it entails is tolerable. Given the post-Oslo experience, it is not immediately evident how they would go about this -- on either count. For what are the security risks implicit in a two-state solution?... If a Palestinian state were established atop the limestone hills east of the 1967 frontier, in any territorial configuration even remotely acceptable to the Palestinians, all of [Israel's strategic targets] would be in range of weapons being used today from territory transferred to Palestinian rule (misrule?). This is not a statement that reflects any political proclivity. It is a statement of verifiable fact that is a consequence of topographical elevation and geographical distance. It reflects a reality, the prospect of which can no longer be dismissed as "right-wing scaremongering," but merely one that reflects past empirical precedents.... But risk aside, the continuing advocacy for the two-state solution by those professing support for Israel and genuine concern for its future is being made to look increasingly ludicrous by the frequent statements of allegedly "moderate" Palestinians who repeatedly and resolutely refuse to acknowledge Israel as the nation-state of the Jews. Such obdurate rejectionism includes the current head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who has frequently and unequivocally declared that he will not accept Israel as Jewish state. Ms. DeLee should know that Palestinian persistence on this point is not mere tactical posturing but strategic positioning. Indeed, as Al-Arabiya pointed out in an April 27 article, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state "would amount to an effective renunciation of the right of return of refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war." As "return" would undoubtedly result in the Jewish population being swamped by a massive Palestinian influx, continued insistence on it is totally inconsistent with any genuine desire for a solution based on the principle of "two states for two peoples."... Which "two peoples" do they mean? For if the one is the Palestinians, and they refuse to acknowledge the right of Jews to a state of their own, who are the "other" people? Perhaps DeLee should clarify this point before committing.... The time has also come to urge the well-meaning, but misguided, members of DeLee's APN to wake up and smell the coffee -- before it's too late. (Martin Sherman
is Academic Director of the Jerusalem Summit DUMP THE CEIRPP Over the years, the United Nations has done its fair share to prolong and exacerbate the Arab-Israel conflict. The explanation for this lies not with the world body conceptually, and certainly not with the ethos of its founders. But the UN can't but reflect the values shared by the bulk of its members, the efforts of an enlightened minority notwithstanding. With the arguable exception of General Assembly Resolution 181, which in 1947 called for the establishment of independent Jewish and Arab states -- and which the Arabs rejected out of hand -- just about every subsequent UN/GA stand on the conflict has been to Israel's detriment. The most recent pertinent GA resolution, for instance, ES-10/18 of January 2009, basically regurgitated the Palestinian position on Operation Cast Lead, codifying it in international law.... But perhaps the one single most damaging step the organization took to institutionalize its bias against the Jewish state came with the creation in 1975 of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP). Unlike the Kurds, Roma, Copts, Uyghur, Tibetans, and others peoples' who plead for international support, only the Palestinian Arabs have a permanent UN-funded body which does nothing but agitate on their behalf. As part of a revolving door of injustice, each year the GA meets to "discuss" the "Question of Palestine" and each year it passes the recommendations of the CEIRPP. The biases of the committee have metastasized throughout the UN system owing to its ability to poison attitudes toward Israel from within.... The committee -- which convenes again today and tomorrow in Geneva -- is comprised of Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Cyprus, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey and Ukraine. It will not question the Palestinian decision to reject former prime minister Ehud Olmert's magnanimous 2008 peace offer. It will not tell the Palestinians that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's seminal Bar-Ilan speech offers a way forward toward. It will not tell the Palestinians to end their boycott of the peace negotiations. The CEIRPP will never call on Hamas to recognize Israel, end terror and accept previous Palestinian commitments -- as demanded by the Quartet. Of course, the committee will do none of these things -- because its raison d'etre is not peace but the vilification of Israel. That is why [The Jerusalem Post] endorses a campaign initiated by the New York-based...Anti-Defamation League urging UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to dismantle the committee on the grounds that it is the "single most prolific source of material bearing the official imprimatur of the UN which maligns and debases the Jewish state." The CEIRPP is also an obstacle to peace -- it needs to go. Volume IX, No. 2,146 • Monday, August 10, 2009
HONORING AN
AMERICA HATER The Medal of Freedom is the nation's highest civilian honor...This year, one of the 16 recipients President Obama selected is former Irish President and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson. Robinson's views are well out of the American foreign-policy mainstream. Rep. Peter King (R-LI) says, "She is definitely from the school of moral equivalency which somehow invariably comes down on the side against vibrant democracies such as Israel and the United States." Despite her noble commitment to human rights, Robinson has become a symbol of all that's wrong in the human-rights community and the United Nations-of the tendency to appease dictatorships, rationalize terrorism and bash the West. She is perhaps best known for presiding over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa-which targeted the West, especially Israel, while overlooking racism in Arab countries. The conference was so biased the United States and Israel boycotted it... The Obama administration had to be aware of all this before the president decided to honor her. The White House has careful procedures for selecting winners of awards like this, and for running these names by key White House offices to avoid trouble. This process of "clearing" the 16 Medal of Freedom recipients surely allowed officials such as Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Adviser David Axelrod, both savvy political operatives, to sign off or object before the list became final. If Obama's aides missed the fact that Robinson would be controversial, then the incompetence of the Cabinet-vetting process continues. If the staff-and the president himself-were aware of her record but chose to go ahead anyway, we have to ask: What message is Obama sending by awarding her America's highest civilian honor? (Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and a member of the CIJR's Academic Counsil. Tevi Troy, a former senior White House aide and deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, is a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.) LOSING ITS HALO Human Rights Watch (HRW) was founded in 1978 in New York (as Helsinki Watch) with the mission of using public demonstrations and other forms of naming and shaming to free prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Gulag denizens, including Natan Sharansky, later recognized HRWs role in gaining their freedom... But since then, HRW has lost its moral compass, and the organization is using its substantial budget-$42-million US in 2008-to repeatedly attack Israel by exploiting the language of human rights and international law. Tendentious reports and press conferences, using distorted legal rhetoric in place of credible evidence, target Israeli responses to terror attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah... NGO Monitor annually releases a systematic analysis of HRW's agenda, and our reports clearly show that HRW singles out Israel in the Middle East. For years, this arbiter of international morality and human rights had very little to say about Libya, Saudi Arabia or Palestinian terrorists. HRW's recent cautious criticism of Saudi policy came only after a changing of the organization's board, and then only after receiving unwelcome attention for its see-no-evil treatment of the country. In May 2009, Arab News reported that HRW officials went to Saudi Arabia to raise funds, advertising its numerous condemnations and pseudo-research reports against Israel in the Gaza war... How and why did this human-rights superpower turn into a major Israel-basher, along with London-based Amnesty International (which began with a similar mission at about the same time)? And why do such groups appear to be credible and moral-if not as vocal-only when it comes to human-rights violations outside the Middle East, such as those in China? Part of the answer is the addiction to the influence, power and money that lies just below the moral facade. The collapse of the Soviet empire forced groups like HRW to create new objectives if they wanted to keep the donations coming (and they succeeded; HRW executive director Ken Roth has a $350,000 salary package). The struggle against South African apartheid was but a short-lived substitute. HRW and Amnesty International transformed from human rights groups to research organizations, claiming expertise in the complexities of international law and armed conflict. They added a few self-proclaimed experts in these fields, and began producing impressive-looking battlefield reports based on unverifiable eyewitness testimony and emotive graphics. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a prime target-and HRWs agenda fit directly into the Palestinian political strategy of isolating and demonizing Israel through the vocabulary of human rights. The campaign to label Zionism as racism, endorsed by the UN in the mid-1970s, returned in the late-1990s as the Oslo process exploded, giving the NGO network a powerful platform. For the Arabs and Iran, anti-Israel NGO activists who labelled Zionism as neo-colonialism and the new apartheid became convenient allies. Double standards promoting anti-Israel positions provided direct access to the United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council), led by moral stalwarts such as Iran, Libya, Pakistan and Cuba. In every round of violence, including the 2002 Jenin massacre myth, the 2006 Lebanon war and numerous others, HRW officials called for international investigations of Israeli war crimes and violations of international law. Meanwhile, HRWs annual income grew as fast as Bernie Madoff's balance sheets... But power and money are only part of the explanation for the radical political agenda. HRW, like other once-liberal organizations, has been captured by activists with anti-democratic ideologies, strong egos and major chips on their shoulders. Another factor in HRW's disproportionate emphasis on Israel is the number of anti-Israel Jews among its top officials, beginning with executive director Ken Roth.... As suicide bombers were slaughtering hundreds of Israelis, Roth's solution was to call for sending police into Gaza's slums to arrest the perpetrators and bring them to trial. In 2006, Roth condemned Israel's response to Hezbollah rocket attacks and kidnapping of soldiers as an eye-for-an-eye approach resulting from the morality of some more primitive moment. Reed Brody, another Jew, led the HRW delegation to the infamous 2001 NGO Forum of the UN Durban conference, which labelled Israel an apartheid state. Brody was also active in the case brought against prime minister Ariel Sharon in a Belgium court while hundreds of Israelis were being killed in Yasser Arafat's terror campaign... But now the facade is
thinning, and HRW has become a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia, one of
the top human-rights abusers in the world. According to Arab News,
Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North
Africa (MENA) division, and Hassan Elmasry, a member of both the HRW
board of directors and the MENA advisory committee, attended a welcoming
dinner and encouraged prominent members of Saudi society to make up
the shortage of funds due to the global financial crisis and the work
on Israel and Gaza, which depleted HRW's budget for the region. Whitson
has reportedly sought to reel in the Saudis by touting HRW's (invented)
evidence of Israel using white phosphorus and launching systematic
destructive attacks on civilian targets, and by invoking the pro-Israel
pressure groups that strongly resisted the report and tried to discredit
it. In terms of its budget and ideological agenda, HRW's embrace of the Saudis makes sense, because it can compensate for the group's loss of support from liberal Jews. In addition, this new partnership is based on a shared agenda of attacking Israel and the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state-while more than 50 officially Islamic countries are universally accepted. But as a result, HRW's halo has been tarnished, perhaps beyond repair...the absurdity of a Saudi-supported human-rights organization that targets Israel may be a step too far. For the first time, Roth and Whitson find themselves being held accountable and answering charges, rather than playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. If this also becomes true of Amnesty International and the other human-rights superpowers that have gone bad, this will mark a major step in restoring the moral foundation of universal human rights. (Gerald Steinberg is executive director of NGO Monitor) DOUBLE STANDARDS
AND HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH Over the past two weeks, Human Rights Watch has been embroiled in a controversy over a fund raiser it held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. At that gathering, Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson pledged the group would use donations to "battle...pro-Israel pressure groups." As criticism of her remark poured in, Ms. Whitson responded by saying that the complaint against her was "fundamentally a racist one." And Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, declared that "We report on Israel. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception." The facts tell a different story. From 2006 to the present, Human Rights Watch's reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict have been almost entirely devoted to condemning Israel, accusing it of human rights and international law violations, and demanding international investigations into its conduct. It has published some 87 criticisms of Israeli conduct against the Palestinians and Hezbollah, versus eight criticisms of Palestinian groups and four of Hezbollah for attacks on Israel... It was during this period that more than 8,000 rockets and mortars were fired at Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza. Human Rights Watch's response? In November 2006 it said that the Palestinian Authority "should stop giving a wink and a nod to rocket attacks." Two years later it urged the Hamas leadership "to speak out forcefully against such [rocket] attacks . . . and bring to justice those who are found to have participated in them." In response to the rocket war and Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza in June 2007, Israel imposed a partial blockade of Gaza. Human Rights Watch then published some 28 statements and reports on the blockade, accusing Israel in highly charged language of an array of war crimes and human rights violations. One report headline declared that Israel was "choking Gaza." Human Rights Watch has never recognized the difference between Hamas's campaign of murder against Israeli civilians and Israel's attempt to defend those civilians. The unwillingness to distinguish between aggression and self-defense blots out a fundamental moral fact-that Hamas's refusal to stop its attacks makes it culpable for both Israeli and Palestinian casualties. Meanwhile, Egypt has also maintained a blockade on Gaza, although it is not even under attack from Hamas. Human Rights Watch has never singled out Egypt for criticism over its participation in the blockade. The organization regularly calls for arms embargoes against Israel and claims it commits war crimes for using drones, artillery and cluster bombs. Yet on Israel's northern border sits Hezbollah, which is building an arsenal of rockets to terrorize and kill Israeli civilians, and has placed that arsenal in towns and villages in hopes that Lebanese civilians will be killed if Israel attempts to defend itself. The U.N. Security Council has passed resolutions demanding Hezbollah's disarmament and the cessation of its arms smuggling. Yet while Human Rights Watch has criticized Israel's weapons 15 times, it has criticized Hezbollah's twice. In the Middle East, Human Rights Watch does not actually function as a human-rights organization. If it did, it would draw attention to the plight of Palestinians in Arab countries. In Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are warehoused in impoverished refugee camps and denied citizenship, civil rights, and even the right to work. This has received zero coverage from the organization... Unfortunately, Human Rights Watch seems only to care about Palestinians when they can be used to convince the world that the Jewish state is actually a criminal state. (Noah Pollak is a graduate student in international relations at Yale University) Volume IX, No. 2,145 • Friday, August 7, 2009
THE MOUNT OF
OLIVES IN JERUSALEM: The Mount of Olives as a Jewish Site for Assembly and Prayer The Mount of Olives separates the Judean Desert to the east from the city of Jerusalem. The olive trees that covered the mount in the past are responsible for its name. An alternate name for the mount cited in the Talmud and the Midrash is the Mount of Anointment, named after the anointing oil, prepared from the olives that grew there, to anoint kings and high priests. Even before it became a Jewish cemetery, the Mount of Olives functioned as a place of prayer, even prior to the building of the Temple.King David would customarily prostrate himself there, and he earmarked the site for prayer. The Jewish commentaries relate that for three and a half years the Divine Presence dwelled on the Mount of Olives after having left the site of the Temple Mount in the expectation that the Jewish people would do repentance. The prophets Zachariah and Ezekiel prophesied that from there it would make its return to its proper place at the Temple. The Red Heifer ceremony was performed on the Mount of Olives. Ashes from the heifer were used to purify those defiled by contact with the dead during the Temple period and afterwards. A relay of bonfires that began from the Mount of Olives would inform the Jews of the Land of Israel as well as Jews residing in the diaspora that the new moon had been sanctified. After the Temple was destroyed, the Mount of Olives, which overlooked the Temple Mount and the site of the destroyed Temple, became a pilgrimage site and a venue for prayer and assembly, one that continued to function in that manner for many centuries. Jewish sources in particular note the pilgrimage to the Mount of Olives on the Festival of Tabernacles and on Hoshanna Raba (the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles), as well as on the Sabbath and weekdays. Jewish tradition holds that the dove that brought the olive branch to Noah at the end of the Flood came from the Mount of Anointment. The Jewish Cemetery on the Mount of Olives The Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives is the largest and most important Jewish cemetery in the world, extending over 250 dunams east of the Temple Mount and constituting in effect a national and religious pantheon for the Jewish people containing the tombs of the illustrious dead of the nation over the course of 3,000 years. The greats of the Jewish people and the state are buried there, creators from all walks of life: rabbis and dynastic leaders, the prophets Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi, David's son Absalom, the commentator on the Mishnah Rabbi Obadiah of Bartanura, Rabbi Haim ben Atar (the Orah Hayyim), and Rabbi Shalom Sharabi (the Rashash). Others include Pinhas Rutenberg, the founder of the Israel Electric Company; fighters such as Yehiam Weitz; the authors Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Haim Hazaz; the renowned poet Uri Zvi Greenberg; Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the reviver of the Hebrew language; the rabbis of the Sadigora, Gur, and Nadborna hassidic dynasties; the founder of Hadassah, Henrietta Szold; intellectual giants such as Professor Ephraim Ohrbach; the revered Chief Rabbi Abraham HaCohen Kook; Menachem Begin, the sixth prime minister of Israel and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize; Moshe Yoel Salomon, one of Jerusalem's builders at the close of the nineteenth century and the founder of Petah Tikva; and myriads upon myriads of simple Jewish folk in the Yemenite, Bukharan, Georgian, Ashkenazi, Hassidic, Babylonian, and Jerusalem sections. All of them together constitute the historic backbone of the Jewish people. The Mount of Olives (which is also sanctified in Christian and Muslim traditions) is mentioned in the visions of the prophet Ezekiel and the prophecies of Zechariah, and has a special sanctity and qualities attributed to it that exempts those buried there on the day of the resurrection of the dead from the "separation of the soul at the grave" and "migration via underground passages." Jewish tradition relates that the beginning of the resurrection process will take place on the mount at the end of days, as prophesied by the Jewish prophets. Many Jews believe that those buried on the mount will be the first to arise for everlasting life. The Jews of Jerusalem customarily sent soil from the Mount of Olives in bags to Jewish communities in the diaspora, and Jews outside of Israel would spread this soil on the graves of their beloved. There are twelve separate burial locations on the mount. The deceased were Jerusalem dwellers in particular, but also included those who resided outside the city and outside the boundaries of Israel who had requested to be buried there. The four major burial locations on the mount are:
Aside from the four major burial areas that cover most of the area of the Mount of Olives, there are eight additional minor burial areas that belong generally to the Oriental community. Jewish burial on the Mount of Olives began when Jerusalem was transformed into the Jewish people's capital during the time of King David (circa 1,000 BCE). The most ancient burial caves on the Mount of Olives are in the area of the contemporary Arab village of Silwan, and date from biblical times. The Carta Guide to the Mount of Olives relates that burial on the eastern ridge gathered impetus at the end of the First Temple period (the eighth to sixth centuries BCE), continued during the entire period of the Second Temple, and then expanded and reached Mount Scopus as well. At the close of the Second Temple period (circa 70 CE), the eastern ridge in the middle of the Mount of Olives became a giant burial ground with many burial caves scattered around the gardens and the olive orchards. However, out of the myriads of burial caves dating from that period, only a few survived. Most of them were plundered. Historical sources relate that during the Arab, Crusader, and Mameluke periods, Jewish burial took place on the southern slopes and east of the Temple Mount. However, in the sixteenth century, with the beginning of Ottoman rule, the Jews returned to bury their dead on parts of the Mount of Olives. The Mount of Olives under Jordanian Rule On the eve of Israel's War of Independence in 1948 there were about 60,000 graves on the Mount of Olives. When hostilities were initiated by the Arabs against the Jewish community, the Jews risked their lives to continue to bury their dead on the mount. However, when the violence intensified they were forced to prepare "temporary" cemeteries in the western part of the city. Jordan had obligated itself within the framework of the Armistice Agreement that it had signed with Israel on April 3, 1949, to allow "free access to the holy sites and cultural institutions and use of the cemeteries on the Mount of Olives," but did not honor its obligation. At the end of 1949, Israeli lookouts posted on Mount Zion reported that Arab residents began uprooting the tombstones and plowing the land in the cemeteries. The destruction of the cemeteries continued over the course of the 19 years that the Jordanians ruled eastern Jerusalem. Four roads were paved through the cemeteries, in the process destroying graves including those of famous persons. Skeletons and bones were strewn about and scattered. Tombstones were used as paving stones for roads in the Jordanian Army camp in Azariya, east of Jerusalem. In Azariya a telephone booth was found built out of tombstones, and Jewish tombstones were also used as flooring for latrines. Uprooted tombstones were also used in Jordanian military positions surrounding the city. Both the newer sections and ancient graves were destroyed, some a thousand years old. A gas station and other buildings, including the Intercontinental Hotel, were erected on top of ancient graves. Israel attempted to focus global attention and alert international institutions to the destruction that was being perpetrated, but to no avail. In 1954 Israel protested to the United Nations over the destruction of graves and the plowing up of the area. In 1956, the Jordanians attempted to pave a new road through the cemeteries, Israel complained, and the work was halted. In July 1963, Israeli lookout posts again reported that Jordanian soldiers were destroying the tombstones. After the site was liberated in 1967, about 38,000 smashed or damaged tombstones were counted. The slow rehabilitation of the mount and the tombstones has continued until this very day, and Jewish burial at the site was renewed. The Period of Israeli Rule The renewed Jewish presence on the Mount of Olives guaranteed the restoration of orderly burial at the site. Nevertheless, Arab damage to Jewish tombstones and attacks on Jewish mourners has continued. Occasionally, when Israel relaxed its vigilance over the mount and the access routes to it in the belief that the area was quiet, Arab violence resumed. In periods of increased tension, especially during the first and second intifadas, more offenses of this type were recorded. In December 1975 a number of tombstones were smashed in the section belonging to the Sephardic Community Committee on the Mount of Olives. In March 1976, 14 tombstones in the North African immigrants (Mughrabi) section were totally destroyed. In 1977, tombstones were shattered in the Tzur section opposite the Panorama Hotel and the grave of the rabbi of the Gura dynasty was desecrated. In August 1978 a small explosive charge went off near the Intercontinental Hotel next to the Jewish cemetery. In May 1979 the Jerusalem Cemetery Council reported a series of complaints by relatives of the deceased on the desecration of graves and the displacement of tombstones on the Mount of Olives. During the course of the first intifada, the Mount of Olives became a focal point for the desecration of Jewish graves. In his book The War of the Holy Places, attorney Dr. Samuel Berkowitz recounted some of the incidents. In February 1988 the Yemenite section was desecrated and many tombstones were smashed. In May and July 1989 and June 1991, about ten large PLO flags were drawn on the support walls of the cemetery. In May 1990, 13 tombstones were shattered in the Sephardic section and crosses and hate inscriptions were drawn. In June 1990, 68 tombstones in the "Kolel Polin" section and 11 tombstones in the American section of the cemetery were smashed with heavy hammers. A year later about forty additional tombstones were found shattered in the Sephardic section on the Mount of Olives. On October 6, 1992, on the eve of Yom Kippur, 25 graves were desecrated at the burial site where Prime Minister Menachem Begin was buried, and nationalist slogans in Arabic were spray-painted. Scores of additional incidents of this type have occurred in recent years as well. Often, the perpetrators were apprehended: bands of Palestinian youths (sometimes also adults) whose actions were motivated by nationalist and/or religious fervor. Yet these events did not come close to the massive and systematic desecration of tombstones during the period of Jordanian rule. In the period of Israeli rule, Jewish burial parties have made their way to the mount daily, and in most cases without incident. Jews visit the graves of their beloved on the mount on a daily basis and the police have provided improved security. Extensive rehabilitation work has been performed on the mount. Access and parking have been arranged; passageways, paths, and observation points were built. Fences and thousands of graves were rehabilitated. Public toilets were installed and a promenade was erected on the top of the mount. During the nighttime hours, the view from the mount provides one of Jerusalem's most spectacular attractions as nearly 202 dunams are illuminated with special lighting. The churches of Dominus Flevit, Mary Magdalene, and the Church of All Nations-on the path of Jesus, and at the foot of the mount the ancient tombs of the prophet Zachariah, the sons' of Hezir (the High Priests at the close of the Second Temple period), and Absalom (the son of King David) have also received the emphasis that they deserve. The Mount of Olives in Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians During the course of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians at the Camp David summit in 2000, President Bill Clinton broached an outline for partitioning Jerusalem based on the principle: "What is Jewish to the Jews, what is Palestinian to the Palestinians." Israel was prepared to adopt this outline, but with reservations. During the negotiations, the Palestinians demanded sovereignty not only over the Arab neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem, but also over additional territory including the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. Israel rejected this demand and insisted on sovereignty and Israeli security on the mount and on the roads leading to it. In the Taba discussions as well, Israel and the Palestinians stuck to their respective positions. During the Olmert-Livni government (2006-2009), there were discussions with the Palestinians on a special regime in the "Holy Basin," which was defined as the Old City of Jerusalem and additional areas such as Mount Zion and the Mount of Olives. As far as is known, the sides didn't enter into the substance of the special regime, although, according to sources close to the negotiating team, Israel did not propose and did not intend to propose any Palestinian control whatsoever on the Mount of Olives. Despite Israeli insistence on continued sovereignty and security control on the Mount of Olives and the roads leading to it, Israel agreed, both at Camp David as well as Taba, to Palestinian sovereignty and control in areas adjacent to and controlling the Mount of Olives including parts of the neighborhoods of A-Tur, Ras Al-Amud, Silwan, and parts of the Old City. A different position was manifested by the Israeli side in the framework of the Geneva Initiative, a plan lacking binding legal force that was discussed between senior Palestinian personages and members of the Labor Party and the Israeli left. According to the plan, the Mount of Olives was to be under Palestinian sovereignty, but Israel would operate the site and retain security responsibility over the mount. Freedom of access to the mount would be preserved by organized transport from the Jewish Quarter or the Western Wall Plaza in the Old City. Israeli security would be provided but would not fly a flag while entering the Mount of Olives compound. This arrangement was part of a series of special arrangements that the Geneva Initiative prescribed for the holy places. The initiative also prescribed in reciprocity that the Christian cemetery on Mount Zion would be under Israeli sovereignty, and that Palestinian transport would arrive there as well, with the cemetery to be under Palestinian management, control, and operation. Jewish Settlement in the Mount of Olives Region In May 1999, work commenced on the construction of a small Jewish neighborhood of 132 housing units at the edge of the Ras Al-Amud neighborhood in an area adjacent to the "Hatzur" section of the Sephardic cemetery on the Mount of Olives. 51 Jewish families are living today at the location, called "Maale Hazeitim." The land on which the neighborhood was built was purchased 20 years ago by the Jewish magnate Irving Moskowitz, who purchased it from two rabbinic colleges that had purchased the land at the location over a hundred years ago. The British authorities had prohibited annexing this land to the Mount of Olives for burial purposes due to its proximity to the main thoroughfare, and thus the area remained vacant of graves. In the future, the entrepreneurs are planning to expand and join the neighborhood to another adjacent area that is under Jewish control. The establishment of the neighborhood was accompanied by a stormy political debate between Israel and the Palestinians and the United States. The argument voiced against Israel was that this was a provocation and it would create a perpetual source of friction. The Israeli government postponed the granting of permits for building the neighborhood for many months, but when the internal political timing in Israel was deemed suitable (following the fall of the first Netanyahu government), building commenced. The result after nearly a decade is one of prolonged quiet, without friction. The Jews and Palestinians coexist side-by-side, without friction, but also without cooperation. It is noteworthy that construction at the site was supported by the Cemetery Council and a number of burial societies that are active in Jerusalem. The Cemetery Council submitted an opinion to the urban planning council noting that "the erection of the neighborhood would induce many whose beloved are buried on the Mount of Olives to come visit the graves of their beloved, something that is denied them from time to time due to security considerations, while the building of a neighborhood would produce a result that many people who currently were not prepared to bury their dead on the Mount of Olives due to similar apprehension, would change their positions." The Attitude of the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority to Jewish Holy Sites Within or Adjacent to Their Territory The performance of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinians in everything connected to respecting and preserving the Jewish holy places within or adjacent to their territory has been poor. In September 2000, the Western Wall was targeted by a Palestinian mob that threw stones from the Temple Mount above, in the presence of religious officials and security personnel from the Palestinian Authority. Israel had allowed their presence at the site in the hope that this would help calm the situation and control it. At the same time, Joseph's Tomb in Nablus came under a constant hail of gunfire and finally was plundered and burned by a Palestinian mob after it was evacuated by Israel on October 7, 2000. Rachel's Tomb at the edge of Bethlehem was also attacked and had to be defended and fortified. The ancient "Peace Unto Israel" Synagogue in Jericho was plundered, and holy books and religious artifacts were set ablaze. The Oslo agreements stipulated that the Palestinian Authority would guarantee freedom of access to all Jewish holy sites and would protect them. In the Second Oslo Agreement signed on September 28, 1995, 28 sites were defined as having "religious significance" or as "archaeological sites," and it addressed the status of 23 Jewish holy places including the tombs of biblical figures, remnants of ancient synagogues, and ancient graveyards. The Palestinians undertook to guarantee freedom of access to these places. In practice, the Palestinians severely hampered or prevented access to these sites. Reality as manifested in the West Bank since the Oslo Accords has demonstrated that one cannot entrust responsibility for Jewish holy places, or the access roads to the regions adjacent to them, to Palestinian hands. It is preferable to leave such responsibility in Israeli hands. Conclusions The importance and centrality
of the Mount of Olives as the most important Jewish cemetery in the
world and a focal point of a three-thousand-year-old Jewish tradition
makes it incumbent to leave the site under full Israeli sovereignty
and responsibility, especially as we are dealing with an active cemetery,
where burial has not ceased. The transfer of neighborhoods adjacent to the Mount of Olives to Palestinian sovereignty and control (A-Tur, Ras Al-Amud, and part of Silwan) would endanger the free access of the Jewish public to this ancient holy site. Even defining the location as part of the "Holy Basin," as was done in the course of earlier negotiations, jeopardizes Jewish freedom of access to the site, as well as continued burial there, as long as it is not made clear that the State of Israel will enjoy authority there in all that concerns security, management of burial procedures, and access to the mount. (Nadav Shragai,
author of Jerusalem: The Dangers of Division-An Alternative Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume IX, No. 2,144 • Thursday, August 6, 2009
SPEAKERS AT A
RAMALLAH FATAH RALLY HELD UNDER AUSPICES OF PA PRESIDENT ABBAS: WE ARE
MARTYRDOM-SEEKERS; HAIFA, ACRE, JAFFA-PART OF PALESTINE Following are excerpts from statements by speakers at a Fatah rally, held in Ramallahbefore the August 4th Fatah General Conference, under the auspices of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to honor students who completed their matriculation exams. Footage of the rally aired on PA TV on July 27, 2009. To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/2193.htm. "In the Name of Palestine-Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, and Our Arab Jerusalem" Young woman: "In the name of the land, the homeland, and the cause," Young man: "in the name of the martyrs, the prisoners, in the name of the stone and the rifle," Young woman: "in the name of people who revolted in the face of tyranny, screaming at the top of their lungs: We will not give up what was bequeathed to us,'" Young man: "in the name of Fatah-a storm that raged so that the sun of liberty will rise-" Young woman: "in the name of Fatah-the school that taught us the meaning of patriotism-" Young man: "in the name of Palestine-Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, and our Arab Jerusalem-" Young woman: "in the name of Palestine-Gaza, the West Bank, and a flag embodying national unity-" Young man: "in the name of the man whom they wished would be wanted, imprisoned, dead, but who declared at the top of his lungs: a martyr, a martyr, a martyr, thus making the Arab nation shake-" "In The Name of Yasser Arafat, and In The Name of the Martyrs of Palestine... We Raise the Banner of Knowledge, Which Will Serve as a Bridge That We Will Cross to Jerusalem" Young woman: "in the name of the man who raised the banner of knowledge, along with the bullets of the rifle-" Young man: "in the name of Yasser Arafat, and in the name of the martyrs of Palestine, today, we raise the banner of knowledge, which will serve as a bridge that we will cross to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Palestine." [...] "We Are All Seekers Of Martyrdom" Raed Radwan, Secretary of Fatah in Ramallah: "We have come here to say that the Palestinian people turns pain into hope, towards Palestine, towards Jerusalem, towards knowledge. This is the Palestinian people that said and will continue to say that we are all seekers of martyrdom-the student and the worker, the clerk, the father and the mother, the brother and the sister-towards Palestine." WILL FATAH GIVE
UP THE ARMED STRUGGLE AT ITS SIXTH GENERAL CONGRESS? The Sixth Fatah General Congress, convening for the first time in twenty years, will be judged mainly by two factors: its decisions and the composition of its new leadership. Here we will examine the nature of its expected decisions and leave the evaluation of the new leadership for future examination. There is great international interest in the Fatah Congress since so much of the international community perceives the Palestinian problem as the key to the entire spectrum of conflicts in the Middle East. Many observers are watching to see to what extent the congress will advance or retard the prospects for re-launching the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, and even launching a regional peace process based on the Israeli-Palestinian bilateral track. In this regard, the crucial question is: Is Fatah going to waive its historical principle of "armed struggle"-muqawama-and devote itself to peace negotiations based on compromise, as was discussed extensively between the former Kadima-led Israeli government and Palestinian negotiators-led by PA leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and former Prime Minister Abu Ala? Two Documents: One for International Consumption and the Other for Internal Use
The two relevant documents to be discussed and approved by the Fatah
Congress are the Political Program and Fatah's "Internal Order."
The Political Program might be seen by many as reflecting progress in
terms of accepting a political solution and rejecting violence-but it
falls short of waiving the principle of armed struggle.... Furthermore, Article 22 calls for: "objection by force to all political solutions that are offered as an alternative to the extermination of the occupying Zionist entity in Palestine and all the projects that aim for the elimination of the Palestinian problem, or seek to internationalize it or put an outside custodian on its people from any possible party." This article is in contradiction to the call in the Political Program for greater international involvement in the problem and its welcome for the involvement of international forces in Palestine. Article 9 states clearly that "the liberation of the Holy Land and the defense of its holy sites (that are forbidden to infidels) is an Arab, Muslim, and humanitarian duty." Fatah Retains the Strategy of the Armed Struggle And here we come to the essence: Fatah retains the armed struggle as a strategy in order to liberate the whole of Palestine and eliminate Israel. Article 12 calls for "the liberation of Palestine completely and the elimination of the state of the Zionist occupation economically, politically, militarily, and culturally." (Indeed, one of the methods mentioned in the Political Program for the "peaceful intifada" is an economic boycott of Israel.) Article 13 calls for "establishing a sovereign democratic Palestinian state on the entire Palestinian territory that will preserve the legitimate rights of the citizens on the basis of justice and equality without discrimination on the basis of race, religion and belief, and Jerusalem will be its capital." While the Political Program lists the "one-state solution" as an option in case the "two-state solution" fails, the Internal Order document mentions the "one-state solution" as the only solution. Article 17 says: "The armed popular revolution is the only inevitable way to the liberation of Palestine." Finally, Article 19 notes: "The armed struggle is a strategy and not just a tactic and the armed revolution of the Arab Palestinian people is a decisive factor in the war of liberation and the elimination of the Zionist existence, and the struggle will not end until the elimination of the Zionist entity and the liberation of Palestine." While Fatah's Political Program tries to accommodate international expectations and seems designed to mobilize international legitimacy for the re-launching of a "peaceful intifada," Fatah's "Internal Order" reminds us how deeply ingrained in Fatah is its ideology from the 1960s and 1970s. (Pinhas Inbari, a veteran Palestinian affairs correspondent who formerly reported for Israel Radio and Al Hamishmar newspaper, and currently reports for several foreign media outlets, is a senior policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.) THE RADICALIZATION
OF FATAH Many in Washington and some European capitals are hoping that the Fatah faction, which controls the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, is headed toward moderation and reforms as it holds its sixth general assembly in Bethlehem this week. But on the eve of the conference, which is being held for the first time in two decades, there are growing indications that Fatah is actually headed in the opposite direction. Perhaps one of the most disturbing signs of the growing radicalization of Fatah can be seen in calls by top representatives for a "strategic alliance" with Iran's dictatorial and fundamental regime. In January 2006, Fatah lost the parliamentary election in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Hamas largely because of its leaders' involvement in financial and moral corruption. Since then, not a single Fatah official has been held responsible for the humiliating defeat. Nor has Fatah drawn the conclusions from its expulsion from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007. Hopes that the conference would pave the way for the emergence of a new and younger leadership have faded as old guard officials of Fatah appear determined to hold on to their positions regardless of the price. Fatah is therefore unlikely to emerge stronger and younger from its sixth general assembly. By adopting a hard-line approach toward the conflict and blocking reforms, Fatah is sending a message both to the Palestinians and the world that it's still not ready for any form of compromise or reforms. As such, Fatah remains part of the problem, and not part of the solution. During the three-day conference, about 2,200 delegates would be required to vote for new members of Fatah's two most important decision-making bodies: the Central Committee [21 seats] and the Revolutionary Council [120 seats]. The Central Committee has long been dominated by old timers and former cronies of Yasser Arafat who over the past four decades have stubbornly resisted attempts to inject fresh blood into the committee. The Revolutionary Council, on the other hand, consists of representatives of both the old guard and the new guard. But this council has never been taken seriously and its decisions are regarded by the Fatah leadership as nothing but mere recommendations. Days before the conference was opened in Bethlehem, Fatah members were surprised to discover that Mahmoud Abbas and his old guard colleagues had selected more than half of the delegates who were invited to the meeting. In protest, young guard representatives decided to drop their candidacy for the prestigious Central Committee after realizing that their chances of beating the old guard members were slim, if not impossible. This means that the committee will continue to be controlled by former Arafat cronies, some of whom are even publicly opposed to the Oslo Accords with Israel. To further strengthen the old guard camp, Abbas sought and received permission from Israel to allow Mohammed Ghnaim, a hard-line Fatah leader, to move from Tunisia to the West Bank. Ghnaim is one of a handful of senior Fatah leaders who remain strongly opposed to the Oslo Accords, insisting that the "armed struggle" against Israel is the only way to "liberate Palestine." Ghnaim is now being touted as Abbas's successor as head of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority as to ensure the continuity of the old guard hegemony over the affairs of the Palestinians in the West Bank... FATAH'S GENERAL
CONFERENCE AND THE FUTURE OF PALESTINIAN POLITICS ...On 24 June, Fatah held an emergency meeting and agreed to hold the organisation's Sixth General Conference on 4 August in Bethlehem. Amid ongoing uncertainty as to whether it will go ahead after repeated delays, the organising committee released a final schedule of the three day conference last Friday. Elections will be held for the 21-seat Fatah Central Committee, which serves as the party executive, and the 120-member Revolutionary Council, the second most important Fatah institution. Though the Fatah leadership is supposed to be elected every five years, internal rifts have meant no forum has been held since 1989. Long-time leaders have repeatedly sought to delay it. Fatah today is in a state of deepening crisis. Notably, in the 2006 general election, rival Fatah candidates contested against each other in the same electoral districts, thereby splitting their own vote. Along with widespread corruption, this severely damaged the party and enabled Hamas's victory, ending Fatah's domination of Palestinian politics. With Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and presidential elections due in January 2010, the need for cohesion within Fatah's ranks is becoming ever more pressing.... The greatest fault line over the last two decades is between the 'old guard' and the 'young guard' leaderships. The veteran old guard is itself subdivided into those who came to the Palestinian Territories from Tunis with Arafat in 1994 and run the Palestinian Authority (PA) today and Fatah's leaders abroad. It is those within the Palestinian Territories that have long feared losing power to the younger generation of Fatah activists who grew up locally, led operations during the First and Second Intifadas, and are frustrated by the nepotism and manipulations of their elders. This rift makes every aspect of this week's conference politically sensitive, from who attends and the choice of location to substantive issues about future policy and strategy.... Israel, for its part, has been cooperating with the PA to facilitate the arrival of delegates from Arab countries via the Allenby Bridge crossing from Jordan. But the main opposition to Fatah in Palestinian politics, Hamas, has been trying to scupper the event. It demands the release of up to 900 Hamas followers being held in PA West Bank prisons before authorising some 400 Gaza-based Fatah delegates to attend. Its interest is in its political rivals remaining weak and divided. Ironically, it is a shared disdain for Hamas that offers the greatest hope of renewal and unity within Fatah this week. But it is also unclear to what extent Abbas's rivals within Fatah-of which he has many-will boycott the affair. A senior leader, Mohammed Ghneim (better known as Abu Maher), has entered the Territories, and he plans to run for a top post in the party hierarchy. Another of Fatah's founders, Farouk Qaddumi, has refused to attend and remains in Tunis. Qaddumi has always fundamentally opposed the peace process and any form of compromise with Israel.... With Fatah preoccupied by pre-conference political jostling, little energy seems to be going into substantive policy reform. A draft 'political plan' leaked to Arab press over the weekend indicates intentions to oppose recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and to consider opening a strategic dialogue with Iran. Although Abbas and others in Fatah are sincere in their commitment to non-violent means, the plan also proposes reiterating Fatah's long-held option of 'armed resistance' in order to achieve an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.... These issues have practical implications on the streets of the West Bank.... [R]ecourse to violence would be deeply problematic for Abbas. His newly trained PA security forces have begun clamping down on paramilitary groups operating in the West Bank. His strong relationship with the US and the future prospects for peace negotiations with Israel are premised on his commitment to non-violence. Owing to these entrenched political difficulties, Abbas seeks to contain his own party to enable him to pursue his aims in government. Under US pressure, he has stuck with his independent ally, Salam Fayyad, as prime minister, and denied Fatah key ministerial portfolios-a further source of friction, and a further rationale for trying to create unity.... Even if Fatah can renew itself this week, the big challenge hanging over the Palestinian arena will remain the geopolitical division between the West Bank-based PA and Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. A successful Fatah conference could impact on the protracted Egyptian-brokered 'national unity' talks. The dialogue is essentially aimed at reaching an interim understanding which both Fatah and Hamas can live with until general elections are held. But Egypt has been struggling to secure agreement even on some form of temporary joint committee.... A key question [is] whether Abbas ends the conference with greater legitimacy than before, and whether a new leadership will emerge that is capable of providing new energy for the future. This is a sensitive moment for Fatah.
Volume IX, No. 2,143 • Wednesday, August 5, 2009
WEEKLY QUOTES "I'm very concerned about some of the reports indicating some disagreement and pressure being put on Israel regarding construction in the settlement areas, as well as Jerusalem in particular. I feel that any kind of emphasis on the issue of natural growth in the settlements is a distraction from the real urgent crisis in the region, which is the nuclearization of Iran.... The fundamental issues should be the recognition, or at least the affirmation, of Israel's historical legitimacy. That should be the focus. We are not going to be able to achieve peace, or foster an environment to achieve peace, unless you have the Palestinians and the Arab states affirming Israel's historic legitimacy....
"The strength of the US-Israel relationship, the survival
of Israel as a Jewish state, its legitimacy in the eyes of thee world,
is obviously of the utmost concern to many in the American Jewish community....
I think there are certainly some signs to indicate that there could
be a shift in the policy, which is why we are going to Israel. Those
of us in the Republican delegation, and I believe we have many counterparts
on the other side of the aisle, feel very strongly that there should
not be a shift in the US-Israel relationship, and that is why we are
going to demonstrate our commitment to continuing to strengthen the
relationship."--U.S. Representative Eric Cantor,
the sole Jewish Republican in the House and the minority whip, in a
telephone interview before joining nearly 15 percent of the 435-member
House of Representatives travelling to Israel on AIPAC-sponsored trips,
affirming Americans' support for strong U.S.-Israel relations. (Jerusalem
Post, July 30) "[T]he tensions persist, and public opinion is following: The Pew Global Attitudes Project reported last week that Israel was the only country among 25 surveyed where the public's image of the United States was getting worse rather than better.... "[T]he administration also is guilty of missteps. Rather than pocketing Mr. Netanyahu's initial concessions--he gave a speech on Palestinian statehood and suggested parameters for curtailing settlements accepted by previous U.S. administrations--Mr. Obama chose to insist on an absolutist demand for a settlement 'freeze.' Palestinian and Arab leaders who had accepted previous compromises immediately hardened their positions; they also balked at delivering the 'confidence-building' concessions to Israel that the administration seeks.... "[T]he president may find himself diminished among both Israelis and Arabs before discussions even begin on the issues on which U.S. clout is most needed. If he is to be effective in brokering a peace deal, Mr. Obama will need to show both sides that they can trust him--and he must be tough on more than one country."--Washington Post editorial, criticizing U.S. Pres. Obama's policies toward Israel as evidently destructive. (Washington Post, July 30) SHORT TAKES
CLINTON PUTS N. KOREA ON THE MAP--(Pyongyang)
North Korea has released and pardoned two American journalists, Laura
Ling and Euna Lee, captured in March, after Former President
Bill Clinton met with its dictator Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang
yesterday. Clinton's trip followed three weeks of secret negotiations
involving academics, congressional figures, and senior White House and
State Department officials. While U.S. officials declared the mission
offered Kim an opportunity to save face by ending North Korea's provocative
actions like missile launches and nuclear tests, critics like the former
U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, warn that Clinton's visit lends
international legitimacy to the defiant leader, since it undermines
the U.S. Administration's tough public statements. "I think this
is a very bad signal," Bolton said, "because it does exactly
what we always try and avoid doing with terrorists, or with rogue states
in general, and that's encouraging their bad behaviour." (National
Post, Washington Post, August 5) Volume IX, No. 2,142 • Tuesday, August 4, 2009
WHY
ISRAEL IS NERVOUS The tension in U.S.-Israel relations was manifest this past week as an extraordinary troupe of Obama administration officials visited Jerusalem. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Advisor James Jones, special Middle East envoy George Mitchell and new White House adviser Dennis Ross all showed up in Israel's capital in an effort to...well, to do something. It was not quite clear what. Since President Obama came to office on Jan. 20 and then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 31, the main motif in relations between the two governments has been friction. While nearly 80% of American Jews voted for Mr. Obama, that friction has been visible enough to propel him to meet with American Jewish leaders recently to reassure them about his policies. But last month, despite those reassurances, both the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League issued statements critical of the president's handling of Israel.... [N]o other administration, even among those experiencing considerable dissonance with Israel, started off with as many difficulties as Obama's. There are two explanations for this problem, and the simpler one is personal politics.... The deeper problem -- and the more complex explanation of bilateral tensions -- is that the Obama administration, while claiming to separate itself from the "ideologues" of the Bush administration in favor of a more balanced and realistic Middle East policy, is in fact following a highly ideological policy path. Its ability to cope with, indeed even to see clearly, the realities of life in Israel and the West Bank and the challenge of Iran to the region is compromised by the prism through which it analyzes events. The administration view begins with a critique of Bush foreign policy -- as much too reliant on military pressure and isolated in the world. The antidote is a policy of outreach and engagement, especially with places like Syria, Venezuela, North Korea and Iran.... Iran is the major security issue facing Israel, which sees itself confronting an extremist regime seeking nuclear weapons and stating openly that Israel should be wiped off the map. Israel believes the military option has to be on the table and credible if diplomacy and sanctions are to have any chance, and many Israelis believe a military strike on Iran may in the end be unavoidable. The Obama administration, on the other hand, talks of outstretched hands; on July 15, even after Iran's election, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said "we understand the importance of offering to engage Iran....direct talks provide the best vehicle....We remain ready to engage with Iran." To the Israelis this seems unrealistic, even naïve, while to U.S. officials an Israeli attack on Iran is a nightmare that would upset Obama's outreach to the Muslim world. The remarkable events in Iran have slowed down U.S. engagement, but not the Iranian nuclear program. If the current dissent in Iran leads to regime change, or if new United Nations sanctions force Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program, this source of U.S.-Israel tension will disappear. But it is more likely that Iran will forge ahead toward building a weapon, and U.S.-Israel tension will grow as Israel watches the clock tick and sees its options narrowed to two: live with an Iranian bomb, or strike Iran soon to delay its program long enough for real political change to come to that country. Israel believes the only thing worse than bombing Iran is Iran's having the Bomb, but the evidence suggests this is not the Obama view. If Iran is the most dangerous source of U.S.-Israel tension, the one most often discussed is settlements: The Obama administration has sought a total "freeze" on "Israeli settlement growth.".... It is, once again, about the subordination of reality to pre-existing theories. In this case, the theory is that every problem in the Middle East is related to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The administration takes the view that "merely" improving life for Palestinians and doing the hard work needed to prepare them for eventual independence isn't enough. Nor is it daunted by the minor detail that half of the eventual Palestine is controlled by the terrorist group Hamas. Instead, in keeping with its "yes we can" approach and its boundless ambitions, it has decided to go not only for a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, but also for comprehensive peace in the region. Mr. Mitchell explained that this "includes Israel and Palestine, Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon and normal relations with all countries in the region. That is President Obama's personal objective vision and that is what he is asking to achieve. In order to achieve that we have asked all involved to take steps." The administration...decided that Israel's "step" would be to impose a complete settlement freeze, which would be proffered to the Arabs to elicit "steps" from them. But Israelis notice that already the Saudis have refused to take any "steps" toward Israel, and other Arab states are apparently offering weak tea.... They also notice that Mr. Mitchell was in Syria last week, smiling warmly at its repressive ruler Bashar Assad and explaining that the administration would start waiving the sanctions on Syria.... None of this appears to have diminished the administration's zeal, for bilateral relations with everyone take a back seat once the goal of comprehensive peace is put on the table. The only important thing about a nation's policies becomes whether it appears to play ball with the big peace effort.... Israelis have learned the hard way that reality cannot be ignored and that ideology offers no protection from danger. Four wars and a constant battle against terrorism sobered them up, and made them far less susceptible than most audiences to the Obama speeches that charmed Americans, Europeans, and many Muslim nations. A policy based in realism would help the Palestinians prepare for an eventual state while we turn our energies toward the real challenge confronting the entire region: what is to be done about Iran as it faces its first internal crisis since the regime came to power in 1979. Mrs. Clinton recently decried "rigid ideologies and old formulas," but the tension with Israel shows the administration is -- up to now -- following the old script that attributes every problem in the region to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while all who live there can see that developments in Iran are in fact the linchpin of the region's future. The Obama administration's "old formulas" have produced the current tensions with Israel. They will diminish only if the administration adopts a more realistic view of what progress is possible, and what dangers lurk, in the Middle East. (Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the deputy national security adviser overseeing Near East and North African affairs under President George W. Bush from 2005 to January 2009.) THE
LONELY ISRAELI LEFT Israel's leftists are lonely these days. This was the central thrust of an opinion column in Tuesday's New York Times authored by Aluf Benn, editor-at-large of the left-wing Haaretz newspaper. Benn's article, "Why won't Obama Talk to Israel?" was a plaintive call for US President Barack Obama to woo the Israeli public. As Benn put it, "Next time you're in the neighborhood, Mr. President, speak to us directly." Benn's article has been touted by Obama supporters and detractors alike as evidence that the president has a credibility problem with Israelis. Jewish Obama supporters sought to soften the impact of Benn's article on their fellow Jewish leftists by claiming that Obama is listening to the likes of Benn. For instance, the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg reported without irony that administration officials defend Obama's silence toward Israel by arguing that his June 4 speech to the Muslim world in Cairo was also geared toward Israelis.... Benn's piece is an interesting read, but not for the reasons that have been widely cited. It is interesting for what it says about the Israeli Left on the one hand, and what it says about Obama and his American Jewish supporters on the other. Although
Benn gives a long bill of particulars on why Israelis mistrust Obama,
the general thrust of the article is supportive of the administration.
Far from an attack on Obama, it is a cry for help. Benn and his fellow
Israeli leftists want the administration to help them by changing the
tenor of its policies, not the policies themselves. It is in his attempt to convince Obama to help the Israeli Left that Benn makes his most consequential critique of the US leader. As he puts it, Obama "seems to have confused American Jews with Israelis." Benn points out that Obama's repeated attacks on Holocaust denial resonate more strongly with US Jews than with Israelis and that the two Jewish populations have "different historical narratives."... But he fails to grasp the real significance of what Obama is doing and what is actually happening in relations between the two communities. It isn't that Obama is confusing the two groups. Through both his rhetoric and his actions, Obama is demonstrating his priorities and concerns. Obama cares about securing the support of American Jews. He does not care about gaining the support of Israeli Jews. Moreover, Obama feels comfortable wooing the former while alienating the latter because he recognizes something that Benn has apparently missed: Today a large and growing chasm separates leftist US Jews from leftist Israeli Jews. During his recent meeting at the White House with hand-picked American Jewish leftist activists and centrist American Jewish leaders, Obama explained that he welcomes open disputes with Israel. As he put it, during the Bush presidency, there was "no daylight [between the US and Israel] and no progress."...
Led by the new anti-Israel Jewish lobby J Street, and supported by groups
like Americans for Peace Now, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Jewish
Council for Public Affairs and the National Jewish Democratic Council,
the American Jewish Left supports the White House's hostile positions
on Israel as an ends unto themselves.... Although attacking Israel on the Palestinian issue is the central pillar of these groups' missions, they are also involved in defending Iran's nuclear weapons program and championing Syria in Washington.... The group has similarly supported ending sanctions against Syria and pressuring Israel to relinquish the Golan Heights to Syrian control. In short, through their full-throated support for all of the Obama administration's anti-Israel policies, the organized American Jewish Left has made clear that today it does not share a common goal with the Israeli Left. It does not view US pressure on Israel as a means to achieve peace and normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Rather, like Obama, it views pressure on Israel as a means to weaken US ties to Israel in the interest of pursuing closer ties with the Arab world. The
current split between the Israeli and American Jewish Left, as well
as the Obama administration's disparate treatment of both groups have
policy implications for the Netanyahu government in its dealings with
all three. What the White House's distress over the Post's poll shows, however, is that today -- with a domestic consensus now backing Netanyahu against Obama -- Netanyahu has less call to minimize the breach than Obama does. Indeed, doing so only advances Obama's fortunes among American Jews and so strengthens the position of anti-Israel Jewish organizations that support him. Rather than leak stories about an impending deal, Netanyahu's advisers should leak stories about American intransigence and hostility. Moreover, given the administration's overarching desire to put "daylight" between the US and Israel, reaching an agreement with Washington will bring no relief. Since it is the administration's goal to weaken US ties to the Jewish state, clearly any deal that Israel could obtain would either be antithetical to Israel's national interests or breached by the administration.... As to the Israeli Left, to date, Netanyahu has successfully built a strong, stable center-right coalition by going over its head and forming a national consensus around support for defensible borders, a united Jerusalem and rejecting unreciprocated concessions of any kind.... Benn's anguished plea for help from the Obama administration shows that Netanyahu's policies are having the desired effect. His political opponents are descending into the depths of political irrelevance. Netanyahu should leave them to their richly deserved fate. Click here to read the latest "insider" Roger Cohen piece from the New York Times Magazine, which should be read in context with today's Isranet Briefing. Volume IX, No. 2,141 • Monday, August 3, 2009
US
POLICY: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER There are more signs that the Obama administration is switching gears on its Middle East policy. The recent visit of several US officials to Israel did not bring any major friction over the construction on settlements issue, which is probably far deader than people think. There are two factors involved in bringing about this new phase in US strategy. First, it is dawning on the administration that its Middle East policy isn't working so well. The phrase "no success in six months" is being heard. That obviously isn't enough time to solve the world's problems, but to fail to have a single positive development anywhere in the globe -- given the high expectations generated by this administration and its over-optimism -- is humiliating. And as it looks ahead, it doesn't see any successes on the horizon. Second, the administration has to gear up for its sanctions-building plan on Iran. The leaks say that the basic timetable is clear. In August and September, the US will try to mobilize international support for increasing sanctions on Iran. If the Islamic republic hasn't changed course by the end of September -- and it won't -- these sanctions will be put into effect. What's
on the list? Cutting exports of gasoline and other ready-to-use petroleum
products -- something Congress is already passing -- and no insurance
for companies trading with Iran are highest on the list. There might
also be boycotts of companies trading or investing with Iran.
[I]t's also a policy of too little too late, not because Iran is so much closer to getting nuclear weapons and long-range missiles but because the Teheran regime has made up its mind. This is a far tougher Iranian regime than that of a few months ago, having stolen an election, repressed the opposition and pushed to the side the less militant of its own hard-line leadership. Obama's idea that while Iran's president was very extreme, its supreme leader was more flexible is now exposed as absurd. The partnership of the two leaders is sealed in blood. Moreover, the Iranian regime regards the West -- and especially Obama -- as weak, helpless and cowardly. This was a totally predictable outcome of the administration's engagement policy as the US government was repeatedly warned. No one seems to realize, and it is better to avoid saying so in public, that Israel has won a tremendous diplomatic victory. Obama who, before running for office, was arguably hostile to Israel and who began his term as an incredibly popular new president by confidently issuing an ultimatum demanding Israel concede on the construction issue, has now for all practical purposes backed down. Of course, as always, much of the "credit" is due to a Palestinian leadership which made crystal-clear its intransigence on making peace, along with Arab regimes who told the Obama administration they wouldn't help. And of course as best-supporting actors, Iran and Syria also treated Obama with contempt and showed they weren't at all interested in any real compromise with the US. Indeed, the administration itself helped sabotage its own policy. By coming out of the starting-gate so critical of Israel, it unintentionally signaled to Arabs to sit back and enjoy a US-Israel confrontation. And since the new US government made its desire to avoid friction with Arabs or Muslims clear, they knew there would be no cost for defying Obama. Incidentally, the reason why US policy is the critical variable in the region is not that America is so all-important in its own right, though of course it is -- or should one say used to be? -- such a powerful factor. The reason is that the stances of everyone else are fixed. In their basic course, Arab regimes and Iran, Israel and the Palestinians are not about to make huge changes. And so US policy is the only aspect of the region that really shifts much.... True, the Obama administration's Phase Two should be better than Phase One, which was an unworkable, even ludicrous, scheme to get Israel to stop settlement construction, then persuade Arab states to help produce dramatic progress toward Israel-Palestinian peace, while also engaging Iran and Syria. But Phase Two will also ultimately fail, as Arab radicals walk all over America and as Iran expands its influence and goes full speed to develop nuclear weapons. Every month through the end of this year and into next year, Obama and Clinton will wag their fingers at Iran in empty threats, and every month the Iranian regime will give America the finger. One day -- though it's not going to happen this calendar year -- the Obama administration is going to have to think about things like toughness, the use of force (not necessarily applied by itself) and defining enemies in serious terms. DEATH
OF A DOCTRINE The Obama administration lacks a foreign policy ideology as a matter of ideology. Speaking recently at the Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted, "Rigid ideologies and old formulas don't apply." The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- tempered by pragmatism, proud of its ad hockery and willing to consider everything on a case-by-case basis. But even lacking an ideology, the administration does have a doctrine. The defining principle of President Obama's foreign policy is engagement with America's adversaries. Much of the president's public diplomacy has been designed to clear a path for such talks -- expressing respect for legitimate grievances, apologizing for past wrongs and offering dialogue without preconditions. Six months on, how fares the Obama doctrine? Concerning North Korea and Iran, the doctrine is on its deathbed. North Korea responded to administration outreach by testing a nuclear weapon, firing missiles toward U.S. allies, resuming plutonium reprocessing and threatening the United States with a "fire shower of nuclear retaliation."... The Iranian regime's reaction to engagement was to cut the ribbon on a nuclear enrichment facility, add centrifuges, conduct a fraudulent election, and kill and imprison a variety of political opponents.... The problem is not engagement itself -- which was, after all, attempted in various forms by the previous administration. The difficulty is that the Obama foreign policy team has often argued that the reason for tension and conflict with nations such as North Korea and Iran is a lack of adequate American engagement -- which is absurd, and which has raised absurdly high expectations.... Obama's diplomatic hand has been extended for a while now. Fists remain clenched. This is not because some magical diplomatic words remain unspoken. It is because of the nature of oppressive regimes themselves. Such regimes are often internally preoccupied. Precisely because they lack genuine legitimacy, they spend large amounts of time and effort maintaining their fragile authority, consolidating power and managing undemocratic transitions. North Korea confronts a succession crisis. Iran deals with growing dissent and clerical division. Both tend to make calculations based on internal power struggles, not some rational calculation of their external image and interests. They are so inwardly focused that they do not have, as Clinton said, "any capacity" to respond to engagement. It is questionable in these cases whether we currently have any serious negotiating partners at all. And the inherent instability of oppressive regimes also leads them to tighten control by invoking threats from abroad -- particularly from the United States. Because anti-Americanism is a central commitment of North Korean and Iranian ideologies, any softening of this resentment requires a kind of voluntary regime change. Pyongyang and Tehran would need to find a new source of legitimacy -- a new prop for their power -- other than hatred for America. Not easy or likely. The Obama administration's public campaign of engaging enemies is headed toward an entirely unintended consequence. Eventually it will raise expectations for action. As the extended hand is slapped again and again, the goals of North Korea and Iran will be fully revealed and the cost to American credibility will rise. Already the administration has given Iran a September deadline to respond to the offer of talks and has threatened "crippling action" if Iran achieves nuclear capabilities. Congress is preparing sanctions on Iranian refined petroleum, which would escalate tensions significantly. This is the paradox of the Obama doctrine. By attempting to engage North Korea and Iran so visibly, Obama is dramatically exposing the limits of engagement -- and building the case for confrontation. DEPRESSING
SIGNS FROM RIYADH, RAMALLAH AND DAMASCUS Call it the three noes of the summer of '09. Following intensive efforts by US Mideast envoy George Mitchell to relaunch a diplomatic process in the region that would lead to a comprehensive peace process, the Arab world over the weekend -- in three seemingly disconnected events -- seemed to give its response, and it sounded like echoes of the famous three noes from Khartoum following the Six Day War. Back in the summer of 1967, the Arab states -- after the war -- gathered in the Sudanese capital and said no to peace with Israel, no to recognition of Israel, and no to negotiations with Israel. Well, we're obviously beyond that, but still, there were three significant signals from the Arab world over the weekend, and they were all negative. On
Friday, in a speech marking Syria's Army Day, President Bashar Assad
said there would be no compromise on the Golan Heights, and that the
return of the region was "non-negotiable." "The return
of all occupied land... is nonnegotiable," he said in a speech.
"The Syrian Arab Golan will remain Arab... and will return to the
nation." The second no, or -- actually -- the second possible no, came in the form of Arab press reports over the weekend that Fatah, at its upcoming convention in Bethlehem, will reject Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's call for a Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. If that's the case, that will indeed be a significant setback to attempts to relaunch the diplomatic process, because this government will have trouble pushing forward a peace process if the Israeli public is not convinced that any future deal will ultimately result in an end to the conflict, and an end to Arab claims against it. The refusal of the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state means the refugee issue will never be resolved, since the Palestinians will always claim the right for descendents of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to return to Israel, and Israel will continue to reject that demand because it would essentially mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. The third no delivered this weekend, however, had to be the most disappointing for the Obama administration, because it signaled that the administration's intensive work over the last few months had essentially gotten nowhere. Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal stood in the treaty room at the State Department in Washington on Friday, next to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and pretty much said Israel could forget about getting any gestures, or confidence-building measures, from Saudi Arabia. "Incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and -- we believe -- will not achieve peace," he said. "Temporary security, confidence-building measures will also not bring peace...." Sounding like the Syrians, Saud essentially said first withdraw completely from the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and then we'll talk. He blatantly rejected the Obama administration's game plan, which was that the Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia, needed to show Israelis something -- some weak gesture like letting their planes fly over Saudi airspace on the way to Thailand, or holding academic meetings -- and then Israel might be in a more giving mood and be willing to make concessions it was reluctant to make in the past. The Obama administration game plan has been based on asking something from everybody. It has asked, most vocally and publicly, for Israeli concession on the settlements, and for allowing greater movement and access for Palestinians in the West Bank. It has asked the Palestinians to improve the security situation and stop incitement. And it has asked the Arab world to take steps to build Israeli confidence.... Six months after US President Barack Obama took over and began seriously recalibrating the country's Middle East policy, and a week after he sent his A-Team here for intensive discussions, this is what he has to show for it: an Israeli public that, as recent polls indicate, doesn't trust him; and an Arab world that remains unwilling, despite all his coddling, to make any practical move or gesture toward Israel -- not promises of normalization at the end of the process, but practical steps that would give Israelis any confidence in any of those promises.
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