CAROLINE B. GLICK

SHACKLED
WARRIOR

Israel and the Global Jihad

______________________________

David Bar-Illan (1930–2003), was a renowned concert pianist, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Director of Communications, and a warrior for human freedom and the rights of the Jewish people through and through. He was also my mentor and my friend. Without his encouragement and faith in me, I would have never been able to write. This book is dedicated to his memory.

______________________________

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: The War against Israel

No Tolerance for Genocide

Ending the Ostrich Strategy

Our National Confusion

Israel’s New War

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

An Acceptable Cease-Fire

Why Israel Must Win

The Olmert Government Must Go

Welcome to Palestine

As Syria Prepares for War

Grounded in Fantasy

The Lost Lessons of Lebanon

Chapter Two: The War against the Free World

Malaysian Road Map

Hezbollah’s Iraqi Campaign

Stop Navel Gazing

An Attack against Us All

The New Zionist Occupiers

The Long Road to Victory

Where America and Iraq Converge

Chapter Three: Israel Alone

Washington Won’t Let Israel Win

Israeli Victims Don’t Count at State

Depending On the Enemy

Pollard’s Freedom and Our Freedom

The Jewish Threat

Postcards from Saigon

The Longest-Running Big Lie

Echoes of 1919

America’s Best Friends

The Ghosts of Wars Lost

Chapter Four: The Threat of Destruction

The Road to a Nuclear Iran

How to Deal with Iran

The Second Worst Option

Why Deny the Holocaust?

Making the Case against Genocide

If Iran Gets the Bomb

Bankrupting Iran Is Not Enough

Ahmadinejad’s Overlooked Message

Chapter Five: Israel’s Suicide Attempt

Wanted: Israeli Neocons

The Demographic Bomb Is a Dud

The Incitement of Ideas

The Settlers Show Their True Colors

Democracy’s Descent to Darkness

The Fictitious “Third Way”

The IDF’S Suicide Attempt

Shimshon Cytryn and Aharon Barak

Scapegoating Our Friends

What Is Israel’s Problem?

History’s Unsettling Verdicts

Chapter Six: The Battle for Hearts and Minds

Morality Under Fire

The War of Words

Information Warfare

Leaving the Hall of Mirrors

Terrorist Theater Tricks

Prime-Time Blood Libels

Chapter Seven: Contemporary Thought Police

Of Intellectual Bondage

Politically Correct Perfidy

After the Muses Fall Silent

Chapter Eight: European Betrayal

The European Solution

The Holocaust Fetish

The Paris Fall

The Weakest Link

Jihad’s Campus Collaborators

The Road to Serfdom

Hirsi Ali’s Challenge to Humanity

Chapter Nine: An Israeli in Iraq

One Minute to Zero-hour

Odyssey of an Israeli Journalist

Why They Fight

“We’re Going to Destroy These Bastards”

Combat Diary

The Battle for Baghdad

America’s Gift for Passover

America’s Unheralded Victory

Chapter Ten: A Light unto the Nations

A Light unto the Nations

A Providential Friendship

Ilan Ramon’s Legacy

The Beautiful Israeli

A Prayer for 5767

FOREWORD

When I was growing up in Oklahoma in the 1950s, the highest praise you could get from my parents and grandparents – all from the small towns and ranches of Oklahoma and West Texas – was to be told you’d showed “gumption.” My dictionary’s definition of gumption is “initiative, aggressiveness, resourcefulness; courage, spunk, guts.”

But even those synonyms don’t quite do justice to “gumption.” It was the characteristic that made it possible for my parents’ Great Generation to surmount the Depression and win WWII. It is, essentially, the best one can do in dealing with anything tough in life.

As I later learned, it is something like the US Navy’s “Bravo Zulu” (meaning “Well Done,” in naval signaling). Just as there is no “Very Well Done,” in the US Navy there is – at least in Oklahoma-speak – no “extraordinary gumption.” Just gumption.

It’s not easy to describe what Caroline Glick does – neither “journalist,” nor “reporter” nor “woman of letters” really fits her, and this collection is more than just a remarkable set of well-written and vivid columns and reports. I think of Caroline Glick not just as someone who chronicles the politics, morals, tactics, and implications of the leading issues of our time but more importantly as our chief gumption-keeper.

If you are put off by straight-from-the shoulder prose or have a soft spot in your heart for political correctness, you may want to find something else to read. But if your taste runs to appreciating skillful and direct confrontation of cant, duplicity, appeasement, and wishful thinking – along the lines of the writings in the 1930s of George Orwell and Winston Churchill, but on today’s manifestations of the issues those men confronted so brilliantly – then you’ve got the right book in hand.

Some of the things you’ll find in this collection:

A superb essay on the parallels and differences between Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush;

A fresh and subtle assessment of the politics of Holocaust denial;

A forthright interview with Jonathan Pollard and an insightful assessment of the implications of his case – “I fell in love with two women – Israel and the US. It doesn’t work in private life, and it doesn’t work in politics.”

An assessment of the reasons behind academic cowardice, as manifested in such places as Cambridge University’s Clare College;

An analysis of enemy propaganda creeping into the broadcasts of US-government-funded Al-Hurra (“more extreme [on some issues] than Al-Jazeera”);

A careful analysis of demographics in the Near East that contradicts the conventional wisdom;

A discussion of the battle over language in public discourse and its importance (i.e., what does it mean when terrorists are called “militants”?);

Bravery and straight talk by Pope Benedict XVI and Ayaan Hirsi Ali;

An American officer reading to his men from the Book of Joel on the eve of the invasion of Iraq: “The Lord thunders at the head of His army”;

A good definition of peace: When an Israeli woman reporter can feel “as safe in a 5-star Kuwaiti hotel as with the US Army [in combat].”

Glick concludes this remarkable collection with a call for Jews – and indeed for all of us who live in a civilization guided by the concepts of liberty and the rule of law that Judaism has given the world – to emulate Pope Benedict in his “willingness to judge.”

She does. So should we.

– By R. James Woolsey,
Former Director of Central Intelligence

PREFACE

Nine days after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush stood before a joint session of Congress and announced, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

At the time, with so many momentous events seemingly happening at once, the full strategic significance of that comment went largely unnoted. The president of the United States had just declared war. It was clear that the US would soon respond in a massive way to the attacks on its soil.

But for many in Israel, the meaning of that statement was as immediately clear as it was harsh. A year before, the Palestinians had begun their terror war against Israel. By limiting the definition of the enemies of the free world to terrorist groups “with global reach,” President Bush was explicitly removing Palestinian terrorists from the enemy camp. Correspondingly, Israel was not included in the camp of allies.

Many commentators have rightly criticized the Bush administration’s decision to name the war the War on Terror. After all, terror is not an enemy. It is a tool of war. To limit the aims of the war to the eradication of the suicide bomber or the roadside bomb means that the actual enemy which wields these weapons in order to advance its nefarious aims is never addressed.

While it is rarely acknowledged by Western leaders, the identity of the enemy is not hidden from view. The forces of jihad – whether comprised of state actors or non-state actors – are the enemy in this war. Consequently, anything that advances jihad’s aim of Islamic domination is antithetical to the interests of the free world. Anything that harms that cause advances the interests of human liberty and freedom. Given that terror is but a tool of war for the jihadists, countering terrorism, while necessary, is not sufficient to win the war.

By declaring that the war is against terror organizations of global reach the US hurt the cause of freedom twice. First, it denied itself the ability to acknowledge and understand the enemy that uses terror against it. Second, by limiting the scope of the fight to global terror groups, it divested itself of the ability to see and understand the relationships between local jihadist groups and the larger global arena. When jihadists in Pakistan or Gaza or the Philippines or Nigeria call for the establishment of a caliphate in their neighborhood, is it reasonable to dismiss them as mere local political forces in the event that a direct link cannot be made between them and Osama bin Laden?

The US has not been alone in failing to accept the significance of jihad and Israel’s unique importance to the forces of jihad worldwide. Israel too has ignored these basic realities. Israeli leaders from Shimon Peres to Ehud Olmert have argued that if the Palestinian war against Israel is a jihad – a religious war – then that means that there is no way to peacefully resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Since they wish to peacefully resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel, as far as they are concerned, the Palestinian war against Israel cannot be a jihad.

Sadly, despite the best efforts of both the Bush administration and successive Israeli governments to dictate for their enemies who they can and cannot be and what they can and cannot stand for, American and Israeli arguments have failed to convince the jihadists. For them, the Palestinian jihad against Israel, the only non-Islamic enclave from the Mediterranean Sea to India, is a central front in the global jihad.

It is a strange predicament when the two nations most directly targeted by the enemies of civilization refuse to acknowledge their enemies’ identity, ideology, doctrine or goals. It is tragic when as a result of their denial of the fact that their enemies are common ones they deny themselves also a true understanding of their own alliance.

And of course, in spite of their double denial of the nature of the war being waged against them, the US and Israel are still far ahead of much of the rest of the world in coming to grips with reality just by recognizing that there is a war to begin with. Much of the world, and particularly Western European nations, but also Russia and China, have for various reasons refused even to acknowledge that a war is going on.

When the jihadists struck America on September 11, 2001, I was at my home in Israel writing a retrospective article on the failed Israel-PLO peace process which had begun eight years earlier on September 13, 1993 and collapsed the year before on September 28, 2000, when the Palestinians began their jihad against Israel.

After watching the second hijacked airliner fly into the World Trade Center, I called my editor at the Hebrew Makor Rishon newspaper where I worked at the time. I told him that my article would come in later than expected as I had to write a completely different article about a completely different war.

But even as I said those words, it was clear to me that it was the same war. The same regimes and private financiers were bankrolling both the Palestinians and Osama bin Laden. The Palestinians and al-Qaeda subscribed to the same religious authorities. Just as the Palestinians cheered for al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, so al-Qaeda cheers daily for Palestinian jihadists.

Over the years I have observed this war from a variety of vantage points. I have observed it as an Israeli citizen, whose neighbors and friends have been murdered and wounded in buses and cafes. I have observed it as a combat reporter, accompanying American forces in the invasion and liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime. I have observed it as a researcher in the Israeli military, watching officers attempting to find ways to fight a war whose nature they are instructed to ignore. I have watched it as a member of a think tank in Washington attempting to formulate policies for contending with a global web of jihadists whose existence governmental policymakers in the US and throughout the world studiously avoid acknowledging. And I have watched it as a newspaper columnist charged with placing the events of the day within wider social and strategic contexts.

As the years have passed, I have repeatedly been struck by the double chains that shackle Israel and the free world in contending with the war being waged against us. We blind ourselves by refusing to recognize the nature of the war. And once blinded, we deny ourselves the tools necessary to fight to victory.

Over the years, the image of Samson, the biblical judge, the unwilling, shackled, and ultimately blinded warrior, has often entered my mind. Samson wished to be seduced by his enemies and ignore his responsibilities to his people and to his God. And when he fought, although mighty, he was manacled and so his fight hurt him as well, and ultimately, led to his own demise. How different his life might have been, and how different the fate of the Children of Israel might have looked, had he not been so inclined towards denial!

For several years, I have been thinking of writing a book describing and analyzing these double binds the free world has placed on itself. But I couldn’t figure out what such a book should look like. Then, about a year ago, a friend made an offhand comment about my columns, referring to them as “a running chronicle of the world war that no one will acknowledge.”

After some consideration, it occurred to me that in my friend’s offhand comment lay the key to the book I wished to write.

The war which we dare not acknowledge is the defining feature of our times. The war and the West’s refusal to acknowledge its nature form twin axes around which events of our times revolve. My biweekly columns in the Jerusalem Post discuss many of those events as they occur. After some consideration, I realized that when read together and organized by theme, they go some way toward achieving my goal of writing a book that explains our current predicament. And so, from an offhand comment by a friend, The Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad was born.

Samson’s fate was eminently avoidable. The Philistine women in his life were not particularly skilled in guile. But it was his willful blindness and self-absorption at the end of the day that made it essential for him to sacrifice himself in an effort to destroy his people’s enemies.

It is my sincere belief that his fate need not – and will – not be shared by either Israel or the free world. We have the ability to win without being destroyed. But to do so, we must accept the reality of war. And we must love ourselves and respect our enemies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people I wish to thank for their help and encouragement over the years in enabling me to write my columns and understanding the world in which we live. First, my thanks go to my friend and colleague Professor Avi Bell of Bar Ilan University and Fordham University law schools. Avi has been my constant sounding board as I consider events and craft my columns, forcing me to think through my ideas before committing them to writing.

Both my former editor Bret Stephens and my current editor David Horovitz at the Jerusalem Post, and Amnon Lord at Makor Rishon have given me complete freedom and support for my writing. For this I couldn’t be more appreciative and grateful.

Frank Gaffney, the President of the Center for Security Policy, has provided me a professional home in Washington, DC. He has guided and supported me in judging the shared and distinct political and strategic challenges facing Israel and the United States. He is also my dear friend.

Brig. Gen. (ret.) Shimon Naveh gave me a research perch at the IDF’s Operational Theory Research Institute from 2004 to 2006. There he taught me an enormous amount about the theoretical grounding of military-civilian relations, and the development of warfare and doctrinal approaches to fighting through the ages.

Numerous friends have also played central roles in enabling me to move forward over the years. Now seems like a good time to thank them. Ruthie Blum, Ofra Gracier, Erez Eshel, Lisa Stodder, John Reitman, Fiamma Nirenstein, Gershon Hacohen, Khaled Abu Toameh, Yossi Lahmani, Richard Miniter and Eugene Kontorovich all deserve special mention.

This volume, of course, would never have come to life if it hadn’t been for the enthusiasm and commitment of Ilan Greenfield of Gefen Publishing House. Jim Fletcher, who gently and deftly edited the manuscript, is also deserving of this writer’s thanks. The Jerusalem Post has generously permitted me to collect these columns – all originally published in the newspaper – in this volume.

Finally, there is my family. My siblings, David, Bonnie and Douglas Glick, have been my constant supporters and intimate friends. And my parents, Gerald and Sharon Glick, well, all that I am, I owe to their love.

THE WAR AGAINST ISRAEL

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

– Ulysses S. Grant

Where are the roots to this conflict? They’re in the history of the Arab conquests and of the rise and spread and fall and rise of Islam.

– John Keegan

The world will condemn us. But we will survive.

– Yigal Allon

NO TOLERANCE FOR GENOCIDE

The television camera lens moves with seeming effortlessness from the pictures of suffering and death at the Hebrew University to the carnival in Gaza City, where thousands take to the streets in celebration of the pictures from Jerusalem. Gazing at the revelers on the screen, one strains one’s eyes to find an expression of shame, guilt or remorse on the faces in the crowd. One unconsciously prays to discern anything that would show that those in front of the camera are there by accident or because they were forced to be there. But no, the faces on the screen are uninhibited, joyful ones.

Far from being forced to participate in the festivities, each and every one of the people at the parade in Gaza makes a personal decision to leave his or her home and join the crowd in applauding the mass murder of Jews. They are there because they support the murders. They are there because such murders make them happy.

These Gazans, and their counterparts at Balata refugee camp near Nablus, were not celebrating a military victory. There was no battle at the cafeteria in the Frank Sinatra International Student Center. These Palestinians – men, women, teenagers and small children – came together to celebrate another massacre in their genocidal campaign against the Jewish people.

Yes, genocide. The Palestinians have reached a point in this war where it has now become clear that their goal in this struggle is not the end of the so-called “occupation,” but rather the organized, premeditated mass murder of Jews because they are Jewish. That is, the Palestinian goal today is genocide.

In a seminal article in Commentary magazine this past February on the recent rise of anti-Semitism, Hillel Halkin argued, counterintuitively, that the Holocaust is the main reason why it is so difficult for Jews today to accept the fact of anti-Semitism. In his words, “The Holocaust has made some Jews less, rather than more, able to see anti-Semitism around them. This is because if the Nazis demonized the Jew, they also demonized the anti-Semite.” In short, if an anti-Semite is not a Nazi, then it is hard for Jews to perceive him as a threat.

Just so. Even as generations of Jews adopted “Never Again” as their rallying cry, the Holocaust made it difficult for us to notice when genocide is adopted as a policy against the Jewish people, without gas chambers present. The fact that the Palestinians currently lack the means used by the Germans to perpetrate their genocidal policy against the Jews blinds us from the fact that their desire to do so is the same as that of the Germans in the 1930s and 1940s.

The absence of the trappings of the Nazi Holocaust also prevents us from properly identifying repeated massacres of Israelis by Palestinians. Contrary to what we tell ourselves, these attacks are not expressions of rage or reactions to specific actions by the IDF. They are acts of genocide perpetrated against Jews as Jews because the Palestinians have descended to the level of depravity where they do not view the Jews as human beings whose murder is an inherently immoral act.

The fact that the Palestinians don ski masks and keffiyehs rather than brown shirts and swastikas also makes us undervalue the fact that, like the Nazis, the Palestinians are utilizing all their technological know-how and military resources to kill Jews and are making their best efforts to constantly improve and enhance these resources to increase their kill rate.

Daniel Goldhagen showed in his groundbreaking book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, that contrary to popular belief, the Holocaust was not a Nazi-specific affair, but rather a German affair. While Hitler and his Nazi Party dominated Germany, the Germans allowed themselves to be dominated. While the Nazis were the architects of the Holocaust, they perpetrated it with the active support and participation of many rank-and-file Germans from all walks of life, in all sectors of German society regardless of membership in the Nazi Party.

Such is also the case in Palestinian society today. It is not just Hamas or Tanzim or Islamic Jihad that we must fight, but Palestinian society itself must be transformed for there to be peaceful coexistence. Poll after poll shows that a solid majority of Palestinians from all socioeconomic levels supports suicide bombers and other forms of terrorism against Israel. In fact the polls show that the higher the socioeconomic level of the respondents, the stronger their support for terrorism.

Virulent, Nazi-style Jew hatred and dehumanization has become for the Palestinians, as for the Germans before them, the central unifying theme of society. The best-seller lists in the PA for years have included such works as Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Being a relative of a suicide bomber is a status symbol.

From the schoolrooms to the mosques to the daily papers to the art studios, Palestinians teach, preach, write and paint in praise of genocide. Even Yasser Arafat’s purportedly democratic and pro-Western opposition has no moral qualms about massacring Israelis. Leaders like the much-feted Sari Nusseibeh argue against suicide bombings not because they are morally reprehensible, but because of their tactical inconvenience.

In an interview on Al-Jazeera television on July 14, translated by Palestinian Media Watch, Nusseibeh praised everyone involved in jihad against Israel. Explaining that he did not want to pass moral judgment on the murderers when he signed a petition a month earlier calling for an end to suicide bombers, Nusseibeh said that terrorism presents no moral dilemma; it is only a question of whether or not “political benefit” accrues from killing Israeli civilians.

Once we understand that this is the situation in Palestinian society, we reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are not in a struggle against a political movement for national sovereignty. We are being victimized by a genocidal campaign for our violent elimination supported by the overwhelming majority of Palestinians.

To defuse the danger presented to Israel by the genocidal Palestinians, we must also look to the German experience and take our cue from the Allied policy for the de-Nazification of postwar Germany. In World War II it was clear to the Allies that Germany would have to undergo a long process of social and political transformation before the Germans could again be trusted with sovereignty. The first step on the road was an unconditional surrender of the German army to Allied forces. As part of their military surrender, German nationals were forcibly deported from the strategically vital Danzig corridor and East Prussia, which were handed over to Poland. The Germans ceded all claims to the territory and deported nationals were banished with no right of return.

Furthermore, the surrender terms for Germany involved the stationing of a permanent occupation force on German soil, which still exists today, 58 years later, and forced limitations on German military capabilities and troop levels.

The transformation of German politics involved permanently banning anyone involved in the Nazi regime or supportive of that regime from participation in German political life.

There is no longer any room to doubt that the Palestinians, to become a nation that will live at peace with Israel, must undergo a similar transformation. Whether Israel can force such a process onto the Palestinians by itself or whether such a transformation will necessarily take place as part of a reshuffling of the Arab world that supports its genocidal program remains to be seen. But what is clear enough is that there can be no negotiations, no legitimacy, and no tolerance for a society whose central organizing principle is the physical elimination of the Jewish people.

– August 2, 2002

ENDING THE OSTRICH STRATEGY

The large boom that reverberated throughout Jerusalem on Tuesday morning threw the city’s residents into a momentary panic. Windows of homes and offices rattled. As my dog nose-dived under the bed, I, heart pounding, went over to the window to see if smoke was rising from any tall buildings around my shaking home. Seeing none, I decided it must have been a sonic boom and went about my business, cursing the air force under my breath, yet feeling a little silly for my reaction.

As the day wore on, more and more people related similar stories. “I was standing in the mall and heard the boom and everyone dropped to the floor,” went one of the worst. It became clear that I was far from alone in my anxiety.

Responding to the incident, OC Air Force Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz grounded the F-16 squadron responsible and ordered an investigation of how it happened that our pilots could be so insensitive to a justifiably jittery public.

To a certain degree, the otherwise unremarkable incident is an indication of the shallowness of our sense of security. Quite simply, if a sonic boom can cause a general panic, we have no sense of security. And the panic was reasonable, because statistically speaking, given the IAF’s record of thoughtfulness, the chance of that boom having been a bomb was actually larger than it being a jet fighter breaking the sound barrier directly above our rooftops.

Up in the north, our fellow citizens probably raised an eyebrow when they heard of their anxious brethren in the capital. While a sonic boom is a rare occurrence here, from Haifa to Nahariya to Kiryat Shmona, they are heard all the time. While in Jerusalem we reasonably mistake sonic booms for Palestinian bombs, in the north the automatic response is to believe that Hezbollah is attacking.

Since the start of the year, Hezbollah has been deliberately firing anti-aircraft guns at northern communities. The specially designed shells explode at an altitude of some 3,000 meters. This ensures that the noise heard on the ground is extremely loud and frightening. By lobbing the shells over the border, Hezbollah also ensures that the fragments fall in our cities and towns.

We are being victimized by a terrorist war fought against us on two fronts. Both the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, and Hezbollah in south Lebanon manifest strategic threats.

The impossibility of deterring Hezbollah was brought home yet again this past week when the group began dumping raw sewage into Nahal Ayoun, which flows into Israel. The dumping dovetails with the Lebanese project of diverting the flow of the Wazzani River away from the Hatzbani, which flows into the Jordan and Lake Kinneret.

Both of these provocations, like the anti-aircraft fire, the cross-border shootings, the kidnapping of three soldiers, the killing of another three, and the terrorist attack near Shlomi in the spring, point to an abject failure to deter the rising Hezbollah threat.

Dr. Boaz Ganor, director of the Counterterrorism Institute at Herzliya’s Interdisciplinary Center, explains why Hezbollah is a growing cause for alarm. “Before the precipitous IDF pullout from south Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah was simply an annoyance, a tactical threat to Israel. Since the pullout, because it is deployed directly across the border and because it has significantly upgraded its capabilities, it now for the first time constitutes a strategic threat to the country.”

On Tuesday, the US Army conducted a successful test of a high-energy laser that shot down an artillery shell in New Mexico. The test followed a successful test some months ago of the laser that shot down both single and multiple Katyusha rockets. The high-energy laser system is a joint US-Israeli project.

The Defense Ministry is no doubt keen to get the system operating in the north. This because Hezbollah has a large Iranian- and Syrian-supplied arsenal of long-range Katyusha rockets and mortars capable of reaching targets as far south as Netanya. Sources familiar with Hezbollah’s capabilities explain that it has developed advanced guidance systems that enable it to hit specific targets. This situation not only exposes civilians to attack, but also endangers sensitive strategic targets like the oil refineries in Haifa and military installations throughout the north and center of the country.

Even more foreboding was the Sunday Times of London’s report last month that Hezbollah recently acquired Zelzal-2 ballistic missiles with a range of 250 km capable of hitting Tel Aviv, which can be armed with chemical warheads.

According to Ganor, the recent capture of the ring of Bedouin suspected of spying for Hezbollah, like the recent arrest of a senior Hezbollah operative in Hebron, “ gives a clear indication of the group’s intentions.”

Similar to its response to the Palestinian terror war, the international community’s response to the growing Hezbollah threat, to a large degree, is to blame the situation on Israel. Of late, this tendency has been most clearly expressed by Canada. Its government, which is working to withhold tax-exempt status from the Canadian chapter of Magen David Adom on the grounds that MDA ambulances operate in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip refuses to define Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, claiming that it is also a purveyor of social services and therefore can be seen as something other than a terrorist organization.

It is true that much of Hezbollah’s annual budget of $100 million goes to social services. But like Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, its media, educational and welfare systems are aimed at indoctrinating Shi’ite Muslims in Lebanon in its ideology of jihad and Islamic fundamentalism.

On the day that an IDF artillery battery misfired and killed Lebanese civilians in Kafr Kana during Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, then-prime minister Shimon Peres was meeting with Yasser Arafat at the Erez checkpoint. When reports of the incident started flowing in, both Arafat and Muhammad Dahlan joked with their Israeli counterparts, congratulating them on the operation. Arafat and Dahlan explained that the PLO hates Hezbollah, which is sponsored by Iran and Syria, both of which were at the time hostile to Arafat for signing the Oslo Accords.

And yet, the strategic ties between Palestinian terrorism and Hezbollah are deep and long-standing. In his recent exposé on Hezbollah in the New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that Imad Mugniyah, its chief of overseas operations and the second most wanted terrorist, after Osama bin Laden, on the FBI’s list, began his career in the PLO training camps in Lebanon in the 1970s and later served in Arafat’s Force 17, until the IDF drove the PLO from Lebanon in 1982. Goldberg reports that Mugniyah served as an agent for the PA’s acquisition of Iranian weaponry that was bound for Gaza on the Karine-A in January.

That the Palestinians perceived the IDF ’s pullout from south Lebanon as a Hezbollah victory and modeled their terror campaign along Hezbollah lines is a well-known and undisputed fact. Aside from the fact that al-Manar, Hezbollah’s television station, is the first to report on Palestinian terrorist attacks, experts do not see a direct link between Palestinian terror operations and Hezbollah. At the same time, since Yitzhak Rabin temporarily deported 415 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists to south Lebanon in 1992, there has been close cooperation between these groups and Hezbollah.

The fact that the primary sponsor of both Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad is Iran acts to strengthen these ties. The fact that Hamas leaders met with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut before their meeting with Fatah terrorists in Cairo this week is a further sign of the strategic coordination between the organizations.

In Israel’s timidity in facing down Hezbollah’s aggression, we see deterrence theory turned upside down.

As Ganor put it, “If Israel can be said to have tried to lay down red lines for terror organizations, we see that not only has it failed, but that the Hezbollah has successfully laid down red lines for Israel. After the IDF bombed a Hezbollah training camp in Baalbek in 1994, they bombed the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. When the IDF inadvertently caused civilian casualties while fighting Hezbollah in south Lebanon, they lobbed Katyushas at Kiryat Shmona.”

There is no doubt that between the bombs in Jerusalem and the Katyushas pointing at Hadera, we have cause for anxiety. The only way to end the constant attacks and eliminate the threat of even greater ones is to destroy the capabilities of our terrorist enemies and to deter their state sponsors. As with the US war on al-Qaeda, our war on Palestinian and Hezbollah terror will be long, costly and unpopular in Europe and Canada. But the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

– November 8, 2002

OUR NATIONAL CONFUSION

Aclose friend was recently called up to the reserves, where he serves as a commander in an infantry battalion currently responsible for an area of operations in Samaria. On his first furlough home, he told me the story of an interchange with one of his soldiers. The soldier – a kibbutznik whom we’ll call Alon – gave my friend, his new commander, the following background information during a personal interview:

I refused to serve in the reserves for the past three years while we were in Gaza because I think that we should give the territories to the Palestinians. But then I realized that the Arabs keep killing us no matter what we do, so now I don’t know what I think. My wife, who comes from Denmark, doesn’t think I should be here. She wants us to move to Denmark. I decided to serve this year because now I think I am supposed to fight.

On the one hand, we should give them a state. On the other hand, they don’t want a state because we already gave them one at Camp David and they went to war to kill us. On the one hand, maybe our being in the territories gets them mad, but on the other hand they keep killing us no matter what we do, so we have to keep fighting them because they will never leave us alone. So I am confused. I came here to fight because I think this is what I am supposed to do, but I don’t know.

Alon cannot really be blamed for his confusion. Over the past four years of the Palestinian terror war, we have been receiving mixed messages from all quarters. On the one hand, we have images like the children of Sderot being incinerated by rockets in front of their mothers’ eyes. On the other hand, we are given explanations from a variety of sources that are aimed at explaining away these unforgivable crimes.

First on the list of the obfuscators are the Palestinians, whose goal it is to confuse us. One of the chief aims of the terror war doctrine is to maintain a sense of confusion among the target nation. The point of the confusion is to bring about a situation where the targeted society is no longer able to make the causal link between the source of its pain – the terrorists and the regimes supporting them – and the pain itself. Once the link is broken, a target society will turn against itself and the terrorists will win.

The Palestinians disorient us by playing a double game. They conduct a war against us while simultaneously projecting their aggression onto us by pretending that they wouldn’t be killing our babies with rockets and mortars and bullets and bombs if we hadn’t killed terrorists the day or week or month or year before. So our babies die, and if the Palestinians are successful as they generally are, we spend weeks and months blaming ourselves.

After the Palestinians come the media. It is they, after all, who are charged with telling us the story of our reality. Their success in doing their job can be measured, in light of the terror doctrine of disorienting a target society, by the degree to which our society is able to understand the nature of our enemies.

Sadly, given statements like Alon’s and the general resignation with which terror attacks are now greeted by Israeli society, it is clear that to the extent that Israelis are not confused about who the aggressor in this war is, they have been convinced that there is little they can do about it.

This latter point is clear when we compare the reaction of Israelis to terror attacks in the early Oslo years to terror attacks today.

In 1995, when the first bus bombing in Tel Aviv occurred, I was serving in the army. Immediately after we got word of the bombing, my soldiers and I walked to the Magen David Adom blood bank in the center of the city to donate blood. When we arrived, we found that thousands of other people had the same idea. We waited on line for over five hours. Today, no one would think of giving blood after an attack. No one thinks of doing anything. After the early attacks, thousands of Israelis – religious and secular alike – would protest. Today no one does.

In a recent article in the New Republic, Israeli authors Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi argue that without anyone having noticed, Israel has won the war against Palestinian terrorism. Entitled “Israel’s Unexpected Victory over Terrorism,” the article claims that since Israelis have not stopped going out to dinner or riding the bus, the terrorists have lost. In their words, “Terror that no longer paralyzes is no longer terror.” Perhaps. But then terror never paralyzed Israelis.

The main reason that shops were empty in the first years of the war is because the tourists were staying away. The truth is that the heroism of Israelis – from our soldiers in the field to Egged bus drivers who have personally thrown bombers from their buses, to waiters who have wrestled bombers to the ground and border policemen who have sacrificed their lives to keep suicide bombers away from civilians at a bus stop – is unmatched by that of any nation in the world. The problem isn’t our resilience; it is our lack of outrage. We have gotten used to being killed.

If this were not the case, then how could we explain the lack of public outcry after Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei’s statements last week on Israel Radio. During the interview, Qurei admitted that the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the most active terror organization in the Palestinian terror war, is an integral part of Fatah, the ruling party of the PA. Qurei said, “The Aksa Brigades are part of Fatah, and we are ready to absorb them and deal with them, but for this to happen, I must ask that Israel guarantee their security.”

The meaning of Qurei’s call for Israel to grant immunity to these PA killers was made clear on Sunday in the aftermath of the IDF’s targeted killing of Aksa Brigades commander Jihad Hassan. Reacting to Hassan’s death, PA General Intelligence Commander for Judea and Samaria Tawfik Tirawi issued an obituary notice. The obituary stated, “The command of the Palestinian General Intelligence Force and all its officers and soldiers mourn the death of martyr and hero Lieutenant Jihad Hassan, who was martyred on the soil of Salfit on September 26, 2004, while carrying out his duties.” Yet in spite of this, the public has not called for the destruction of the PA.

Oren and Klein Halevi equate Arafat’s sidelining with Israel’s isolation. In their words, “Arafat may be a pariah, but Israel is becoming one too.”

The problem, however, is that Arafat is not Israel’s central problem, and his sidelining does not equal an Israeli victory; it certainly is not a reasonable trade-off for Israel’s international isolation. As Qurei’s admission makes clear, the PA itself, not just its leader, is a terrorist entity. The militias that the Americans so wish to see placed under the command of someone other than Arafat are terrorist organizations and their commanders are actively involved in terrorism and terror training.

Getting rid of Arafat solves none of this. And of course, the PA and its terror cells from Fatah and its terror militias are not the only folks out there. There are also Hamas and Hezbollah and Syria and Iran and Islamic Jihad.

And the actions of these groups and countries, together with the international reach of the PLO, show that far from being a local war, the Palestinian terror war is simply one front in the global Islamic war against the West.

Hamas itself makes this point in its internal propaganda. CD-ROMS created by Hamas and distributed at colleges in the territories that were seized by the IDF in recent months depict Chechen and al-Qaeda figures next to Hamas commanders. The message the recordings, replete with fatwas and Koran quotes, drum home is that the fight against Israel is the same as the fight against Russia and the fight against America.

In their article, Oren and Klein Halevi lionize Ariel Sharon as the architect of the victory. The two paint a glowing portrait of Sharon, claiming he “imposed on himself a regimen of single-mindedness and patience.”

They claim that while he refused to go to war after the June 2001 Dolphinarium discotheque bombing, in which 22 Israeli teenagers were murdered, he was “gradually escalating” and “acted like the leader of a nation at war, not a party at war.”

Yet, the truth is that Sharon has not exhibited any courage in his leadership. Oren and Klein Halevi applaud Sharon for becoming the first Likud leader to endorse a Palestinian state, for in so doing “Sharon broke with his own party’s ideology and recast himself as a consensus politician.” But what does that mean?

Acceptance on the Left for what Sharon has done does not constitute consensus.

And the price of Sharon’s acceptance by the Left, where there is less clarity about the need to fight and be heroic, has been that our wartime leader has never articulated Israel’s case in this war in a memorable way to his own countrymen.

As a result, a reservist like Alon has no direction other than his survival instinct and native patriotism to guide him through the moral dilemmas and national crises with which Israel’s longest and most confusing war has presented him – and us.

– September 30, 2003

ISRAEL’S NEW WAR

The nature of the war being waged against Israel changed, perhaps irreversibly, this week. Processes that have been developing for more than four years came together this week and brought us to a very different military-political reality than that which we have known until now.

The face of the enemy has changed. If in the past it was possible to say that the war being waged against Israel was unique and distinct from the global jihad, after the events of the past week, it is no longer possible to credibly make such a claim. Four events that occurred this week – the attacks in the Sinai, the release of Osama bin Laden’s audiotape, the release of Abu Musab Zarqawi’s videotape, and the arrest of Hamas terrorists by Jordan – all proved clearly that today it is impossible to separate the wars. The new situation has critical consequences for the character of the campaign that the IDF must fight to defend Israel and for the nature of the policies that the incoming government of Israel must adopt and advance.

The two attacks in the Sinai were noteworthy for several reasons. First, they were very different from one another. The first, which targeted tourists in Dahab, was the familiar attack against a soft target that we have become used to seeing in the Sinai over the past year and a half. The attack against the Multinational Force and Observers was more unusual since it only has one past precedent.

In an article published last October in the journal MERIA, Reuven Paz explained that the al-Qaeda strategist Abu Musab al-Suri supported the first type of attack. His follower, Abu Muhammad Hilali, wrote last September that in waging the jihad against the Egyptian regime there is no point in attacking foreign forces or Egyptian forces because such attacks will lead nowhere. He encouraged terrorists to attack soft targets like tourists and foreign nongovernmental organizations on the one hand, and strategic targets like the Egyptian gas pipeline to Israel on the other. In both cases, such attacks would achieve political objectives. Opposing Hilali’s view is Zarqawi’s strategy. As one would expect from al-Qaeda’s commander in Iraq, Zarqawi upholds attacks on foreign forces.

The foregoing analysis is not proof that two separate branches of al-Qaeda conducted the attacks. But the combination of approaches this week does lend credence to the assessment that al-Qaeda is now paying a great deal of attention to Israel’s neighborhood. And this is a highly significant development.

Until recently, Israel, like Jordan and Egypt, did not particularly interest al-Qaeda. When bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and his military commander Saif al-Adel merged their terror organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, with al-Qaeda, they adopted bin Laden’s approach which dictated suspending their previous war to overthrow the Egyptian regime and concentrating on attacking America and its allies. In the same manner, when the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi joined al-Qaeda, he was compelled to put his wish to overthrow the Hashemite regime to the side. Israel was not on the agenda.

But today everything has changed. Israel, like Egypt and Jordan, is under the gun. Bin Laden himself made this clear in his tape this week. By placing Hamas under his protection, bin Laden made three moves at once. First, he announced that the Palestinians are no longer independent actors. Second, he defined the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority as a part of the liberated Islamic lands where al-Qaeda can feel at home. Third, he hitched a ride on the Palestinian issue, which is more popular in the Islamic world than the Iraq war, where al-Qaeda is apparently on the road to defeat.

For his part, Zarqawi already announced his plan to go back to his old war and work to topple the Hashemites (and destroy Israel) last November, after he commanded the Amman hotel suicide bombings. Back then Zarqawi announced that Jordan was but a stop on the road to the conquest of Jerusalem.

In his video this week, Zarqawi emphasized that the destruction of Israel through the conquest of Jerusalem is one of his major goals. Both he and bin Laden made clear that from their perspectives, the war against the US and the war against Israel are the same war.

On the level of strategic theory, bin Laden and Zarqawi both expressed al-Qaeda’s long-term strategy that Zawahiri laid out last year to Jordanian journalist Fuad Hussein. Zawahiri explained then that there are seven stages to the jihad before the establishment of the global caliphate. According to Zawahiri, the global jihad began in 2000 and will end in 2020. Today we are in the third stage, which includes the toppling of the regimes in Jordan, Syria and Egypt and the targeting of Israel for destruction.

While al-Qaeda today is setting its sights on Israel and its neighbors, the arrests of Hamas terrorists this week in Jordan show that for their part, the Palestinians are working to advance the global jihad. The Hamas attempt to carry out attacks in Jordan points to a change in Hamas’s self-perception. They have gone from being local terrorists to being members of the Islamist axis, which is led by Iran and includes Syria, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.

A week after Zarqawi carried out the attacks in Amman last November, Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki met with the heads of Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP and DFLP-GC in Beirut. At the end of the summit, Ahmed Jibril declared, “We all confirmed that what is going on in occupied Palestine is organically connected to what is going on in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Lebanon.”

A week later, Hezbollah launched its largest Katyusha rocket attack on northern Israel since the IDF withdrew from south Lebanon in May 2000. Two weeks later, Islamic Jihad carried out the suicide bombing outside the shopping mall in Netanya. Shortly thereafter, Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda operatives launched another barrage of Katyushas on northern Israel from Lebanon.

Zawahiri’s seven stages of jihad go hand in hand with a 60-page text written by Saif al-Adel sometime after the US invasion of Iraq. Adel deposited his manuscript with the same Jordanian journalist last year. Adel, who has been operating from Iran since the battle of Tora Bora in November 2001, is reportedly Zarqawi’s commander in Iraq and al-Qaeda’s senior liaison with the Iranian regime.

In his manuscript he laid out al-Qaeda’s intentions for the third stage of the jihad. He explained that the organization needed new bases and was looking for a failed state or states to settle in. Darfur, Somalia, Lebanon and Gaza were all identified as possible options.

As the American author and al-Qaeda investigator Richard Miniter puts it, “US forces together with the Kenyans and the Ethiopians have pretty much prevented al-Qaeda from basing in Somalia or Darfur. That left only Lebanon with all its problems with its various political factions, overlords and the UN. But then suddenly, like manna from Heaven, Israel simply gave them the greatest gift al-Qaeda ever received when Ariel Sharon decided to give them Gaza.”

Israel, he explains, provided al-Qaeda with the best base it has ever had. Not only is Gaza located in a strategically vital area – between the sea, Egypt and Israel – it is also fairly immune from attack since the Kadima government will be unwilling to reconquer the area.

Moreover, as was the case with Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Gamaa Islamiyya terrorists who merged with al-Qaeda in the 1990s, the Palestinians today constitute an ideal population for al-Qaeda. They already support jihad. They have vast experience in fighting. And if it only took Hamas two weeks in office to get all the other terror groups – from Fatah to the Popular Resistance Committees to the Popular Front – to pledge allegiance to it last week, Hamas’s co-optation by al-Qaeda shouldn’t be very difficult.

Al-Qaeda today is building its presence in Gaza, Judea and Samaria gradually. It drafts Palestinian terrorists to its ranks and provides them with ideological indoctrination and military training. In November, for instance, a terror recruiter in Jordan who had drafted two terrorists from the Nablus area to al-Qaeda’s ranks and instructed them to recruit others, informed them that he intended to send a military trainer from Gaza to train them. The two, who were arrested in December, had planned to carry out a double suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

Last May, the first terror cell in Gaza announced its association with al-Qaeda. When Ra’anan Gissin, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s spokesman, was asked to comment on the development by a foreign reporter, he presented the government’s position on the issue as follows: “There is some evidence of links between militants in Gaza and al-Qaeda...but for us, local terrorist groups are just as dangerous.”

On the face of it, Gissin’s arrogance seems appropriate. After all, what do we care who sends the bombers into our cafes and buses? But things don’t work that way.

As the attacks in Egypt, the arrests in Jordan and the bin Laden and Zarqawi messages this week all indicated, we find ourselves today in a world war. The Palestinians are no longer the ones waging the war against us. The Islamist axis now wages the war against us through the Palestinians. The center of gravity, like the campaign rationale of the enemy, has moved away. Today, the decision makers who determine the character and timing of the terror offensives are not sitting in Gaza and or Judea and Samaria. They are sitting in Teheran, Waziristan, Damascus, Beirut, Amman and Fallujah. The considerations that guide those that order the trigger pulled are not local considerations, but regional considerations at best and considerations wholly cut off from local events at worst.

This new state of affairs demands a change in the way all of Israel’s security arms understand and fight this war. The entire process of intelligence gathering for the purpose of uncovering and preventing planned terror attacks needs to be reconsidered.

A reconfiguration of political and diplomatic strategies is also required. Talk of a separation barrier and final borders, not to mention the abandonment of Judea and Samaria to Hamas, sound hallucinatory when standing against us are Zarqawi who specializes in chemical and biological warfare, bin Laden who specializes in blowing up airplanes, and Iran which threatens a nuclear Holocaust.

Who can cause Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz, Tzipi Livni and Yuli Tamir to take the steps required to protect Israel from the reality exposed by the events of this past week?

– April 28, 2006

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

Northern Israel is a vacationer’s paradise. From hiking trails to walk on, to rivers to swim in, to luxury hotels to bask in, to mystical sites to seek inspiration from, it has something for everyone. This is why, when last week I took my first vacation in four years, I made my way to the north.

As Hezbollah attacked an IDF patrol on the Lebanese border Wednesday morning and so opened its newest round of war, I was standing at the fortress of Megiddo looking at the ruins of civilizations and their wars for this land stretching back 5,000 years. Thursday found me in Nahariya walking on a battlefield of the current war: the street where two hours earlier Monica Seidman was killed by a Katyusha while sitting on her balcony drinking her morning coffee.

After I left Nahariya with its residents huddled in bomb shelters and stairwells of apartment buildings, I headed west along the border highway to Kiryat Shmona. As I drove along the empty, beautiful mountain road and gazed at the rocket smoke buffeting upwards from Mt. Meron, Safed and Rosh Pinna below me, commentators on the radio kept asking, “Why is Hezbollah attacking Israel now?” Former generals spoke of the need for Israel to restore our deterrence against Hezbollah.

For six years, since Ehud Barak surrendered to the demands of the radical, EU-funded Israeli Left and withdrew IDF forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel stood by and did nothing as Hezbollah built up its massive arsenal of rockets and missiles. The IDF did nothing as Iran effectively set up shop along the border.

All day Thursday Lebanese radio stations played military marches. Announcers made repeated statements invoking Allah, Lebanon, mujahadin and jihad. Clearly, they were thrilled that the long anticipated war had begun.

For six years Israel was deterred by Hezbollah. The knowledge that the Iranian proxy has missiles capable of hitting Haifa and Hadera sufficed to convince three successive governments to ignore or appease repeated Hezbollah provocations while praying that Hezbollah would wait for the next government to start its war.

Now that Hezbollah has started the war, can it be deterred from continuing to attack Israel? What can Israel do now, as more than one million Israelis live in areas that have already come under attack?

Hezbollah struck last week because Iran ordered it to attack. Immediately after the Iranian delegation rejected the European-American offer of all manner of goodies in exchange for a suspension of its uranium enrichment activities, they flew to Damascus and gave Hezbollah its marching orders.

Hezbollah is always ready to attack Israel. That is what it exists to do. As its leader Hassan Nasrallah makes clear every day, Hezbollah sees the destruction of Israel as a central battle in the global jihad. And jihad is all that matters to Hezbollah.

In this, Hezbollah is no different from Hamas. Hamas (and Fatah for that matter) defines itself by its goal of destroying Israel and conquering Jerusalem in the name of jihad. Both Hamas and Fatah have used all their resources to build up their political, social and military capabilities to fight Israel.

Because these groups exist only to destroy Israel and advance the cause of global jihad, they cannot be deterred. They have no interest other than war and there is nothing they are not willing to sacrifice in order to win. Since they cannot be deterred, the only thing that Israel can do is destroy their ability to fight by demolishing their military capabilities.

Although it is impossible to deter Hezbollah, there are parties in the current conflict that can be deterred. Specifically, Israeli officials have rightly pointed their fingers at the Lebanese and Syrian governments as central enablers of Hezbollah. Although both governments are also Iranian proxies, unlike Hezbollah and Hamas, they have interests beyond the destruction of Israel and therefore, they can be deterred. To date, because Lebanon is weaker than Hezbollah, Iran and Syria, successive Lebanese governments have cooperated with Hezbollah rather than fight it.

The Lebanese army cannot disarm Hezbollah. It can however be deterred from assisting Hezbollah. If Israel is able to credibly assert to the Lebanese that IDF forces will not end their operations in Lebanon until Hezbollah is completely destroyed as a fighting force, then it can persuade the Lebanese government to stay out of the conflict and deploy its military along the border with Israel after the fighting is ended.

Syria too has interests unrelated to Israel. Bashar Assad wants to maintain his grip on power. Israel can weaken Syria’s bond with Iran by threatening his regime. In the first instance, this should involve targeting Hamas headquarters and Hamas chief Khaled Mashal’s home in Damascus.

By targeting Hamas in Syria, Israel would be making clear that national borders are not sacred for states that sponsor terrorism. If attacking Hamas in Damascus is not enough to make Assad recalibrate his national interests, then Israel should attack the headquarters of the regime’s secret police as well as Syria’s Scud missile bases and its chemical and biological weapons arsenals.

By destroying Hezbollah and peeling away its client states, Israel would be striking a serious blow at Iran which is directing the violence in Lebanon and Gaza as well as in Judea and Samaria and Iraq. Iran has made destroying Israel a central plank on its agenda because by attacking the hated Jews, Iran is successfully raising its stature as the leader of the Muslim world. By leading the war against Israel, Iran has rendered itself immune to attacks from Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt that, while objecting to Iran’s power grab, cannot condemn aggression against the same Israel they have indoctrinated their people to despise.

Iran’s proxy war against Israel follows the same strategy as its proxy war against the US in Iraq. In both cases its goal is to defeat its enemies through a prolonged war of attrition that will defeat the will of the Israeli and American people to fight to victory.

Given the diverse interests of all the parties involved in the current war against Israel, the Olmert government rightly defined Israel’s objectives as destroying Hezbollah as a fighting force and compelling the Lebanese army to deploy along the border with Israel after Hezbollah is routed.

But is the Olmert government capable of achieving its stated objectives?

Disturbingly, several indicators lead to the conclusion that to the contrary, the government does not have the will to accomplish its declared goals. First, by Sunday evening, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was signaling that he was ready to start negotiating a cease-fire through UN or EU intermediaries.

Since both the UN and the EU are organizations dedicated to ensuring the survival of organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, Olmert’s willingness to use these groups as intermediaries exposes his willingness to stop far short of destroying Hezbollah.

Second, Olmert’s strategy in the south against Hamas and Fatah in Gaza shows that he does not understand that Israel’s terrorist adversaries are by their nature undeterrable. When Saturday Palestinian forces blew a hole in the wall separating Gaza from Egypt and so enabled hundreds of terrorist to pour across the border, they made quite clear that they have not been impressed by Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Indeed, Israel’s continued support for Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in spite of his group’s intense collaboration with Hamas both in the guerrilla raid that led to Cpl. Gilad Shalit’s capture, and in the rocket offensive against the Western Negev is a clear indication that Israel is not serious about destroying its terrorist enemies.

Third, the Olmert government’s continued insistence on going forward with its plan to retreat from Judea and Samaria and partition Jerusalem indicates that the premier has not accepted the now obvious fact that Israeli withdrawals strengthen our enemies. Since the central policy of the government contradicts its stated objective of denying operating bases to terrorists, it is difficult to see how the government will muster the necessary enthusiasm to see its campaign in Lebanon to a successful conclusion.

Finally, the fact that the government has limited the IDF campaign in Lebanon to aerial bombardment indicates that it is not willing to take the necessary actions to secure the country from Iranian-Hezbollah attacks. The IDF campaign recalls the NATO bombing campaign against Kosovo and Serbia in 1999. Yet the situation on the ground in Lebanon is more analogous to the situation in Afghanistan in 2001. It was possible to limit the campaign in Kosovo to aerial bombardment because the Serbian government was deterrable. Yet, like the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Hezbollah is not open to persuasion and so must be destroyed utterly. This can only be accomplished with ground forces.

As my interrupted vacation proved, by retreating from Lebanon and Gaza, Israel effectively surrendered the initiative for waging war to its enemies. Israelis no longer control when war comes to us. It is therefore imperative that the Olmert government understand that retreat is not an option. Otherwise, whether at work or at play, at home or on the town, we will all be sitting ducks.

– July 17, 2006

AN ACCEPTABLE CEASE-FIRE

The week before Hezbollah launched the war in the north, Ha’aretz’s chief diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn wrote an ode to the Islamist movement. Entitled “We Need a Nasrallah,” Benn romanticized the terror master, writing, “Nasrallah hates Israel and Zionism no less than do the Hamas leaders, [kidnapped IDF Cpl. Gilad] Shalit’s kidnappers and the Kassam [rocket] squads. But as opposed to them – he has authority and responsibility, and therefore his behavior is rational and reasonably predictable.”

Benn continued, “The moment Hezbollah took control over... south [Lebanon] and armed itself with thousands of Katyushas and other rockets, a stable balance of deterrence was created on both sides of the border.”

On Thursday, Benn wrote a follow-up column excusing his own blindness by noting that “the IDF, the intelligence services and the government, which have at their disposal much better sources of information than mine, thought the same” of Nasrallah in the days before his Iranian bosses ordered him to war.

Benn’s strategic befuddlement is noteworthy not merely because of what it says about the quality of analysis he provides to his readers, but also because it makes clear that there is a gaping chasm between the perceptions of reality shared by a disconcertingly large and influential segment of Israel’s governing elite and reality itself.

Happily, today Benn and his like-minded colleagues in the IDF, the intelligence services and the government are no longer being looked to for guidance by the Bush White House. While the Israeli elites, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and her colleagues in the government, still speak of a need for Israel to seek some sort of accommodation with Hezbollah, its terrorist allies in the Palestinian Authority and Syria, as well as with the terror apologists in the EU and UN, America has stopped listening.

US President George W. Bush, his press secretary Tony Snow, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton and both houses of the US Congress have made it clear over the past week of war that America is unwilling to continue to abide by the view that it is possible to deter terrorists.

As Snow put it in a press briefing on Tuesday, “What we want is... the cessation of violence in a manner that is consistent with stability, peace, democracy in Lebanon, and also an end to terror. A cease-fire that would leave the status quo ante intact is absolutely unacceptable. A cease-fire that would leave intact a terrorist infrastructure is unacceptable. So what we’re trying to do is work as best we can toward a cease-fire that is going to create not only the conditions, but the institutions for peace and democracy in the region.”

Snow explained that from the administration’s perspective, a cease-fire that left Hezbollah intact would effectively be rewarding it for its criminal behavior. In his words, “You0 do not want to engage in a cease-fire...when you say to the Israelis, you guys just stop firing, when you have Hezbollah saying, ‘We’re going to wage total war,’ because Hezbollah would read that as vindication of its tactics.”

It is important to remember that “the status quo ante” was a situation where Hezbollah and its state sponsors Iran and Syria pocketed Israel’s ill-advised territorial and political concessions and used them to build up not only a massive arsenal of missiles, but also a complex underground bunker system that Israeli ground forces are only beginning to uncover; and a formidable, well-trained paramilitary force replete with Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers as trainers and commanders. This is the threat that developed under the status quo ante, and the declared goal of Israel’s current campaign in Lebanon is to eliminate this threat.

Assuming that Israel is able to achieve its military objectives, what should a cease-fire that does not revert to the status quo ante look like? What should be its guiding assumptions?

Any Israeli strategy directed toward building military and political stability has to be based on two components: decisive and continuous fighting against terrorist and other irregular forces; and the development of a system of deterrence directed against hostile regional actors, whose aim will be to compel them to refrain from interfering in the Israeli-Lebanese-Palestinian area of operations.

In the case of Lebanon, this means that the Lebanese and Syrian governments must be compelled to accept that, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1559 and the requirements of Israel’s national security, Hezbollah and all other irregular forces must remain perpetually disarmed.

To this end, during the current military campaign, Israel must make clear to both governments that they will pay an enormous price if they enable the reconstitution of Hezbollah. And that price must be clear: Israel will bring down both governments if they do not ensure that in the aftermath of the current campaign, Hezbollah remains disarmed.

In this vein, Israel must not accept an international force in south Lebanon. The lesson of our long and bitter experience with international forces, from UNIFIL in Lebanon to the MFO in Sinai, is clear: the only force willing and able to defend Israel is the IDF.

So too, Israel must end its practice of granting immunity to Syrian way-stations that arm Hezbollah as well as Syrian bases of Hamas and other terror groups.

It is quite reasonable to expect that in the future, the Israel-Lebanon border will remain open for one type of traffic. IDF forces will enter Lebanon any time there are signs that Hezbollah and other hostile forces attempt to build a presence anywhere near the border.

While attention is now riveted on events in Lebanon, it is important to keep in mind that Lebanon is merely one of three fronts from which Israel is being attacked. After all, Hezbollah joined the fray last week to come to the aid of its ally and fellow Iranian proxy, the Palestinian Authority.

The PA is led by a formal alliance between the Fatah and Hamas terror organizations. That alliance was cemented both by last month’s Fatah-Hamas cross-border operation that led to the capture of Cpl. Shalit, and by the signing of the so-called “Prisoners’ Document” by Fatah leader and PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader and PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

As Mort Zuckerman noted this week in U.S. News and World Report, the joint signing of that document “means that both Hamas and Fatah are equally committed to Israel’s annihilation. Now that Fatah is seeking to outflank Hamas on the side of radicalism, it is no surprise that Israelis feel they do not have a partner for peace. Abbas’s willingness to sign it should open the eyes of the world to the fact that he is no moderate and no potential peacemaker.”

In a recent training video broadcast on Al-Jazeera, Hamas boasted that like Hezbollah in Lebanon, it has exploited Israel’s land giveaway in Gaza to establish a military force of some 15,000 soldiers in Gaza alone. Moreover, events of the past week are a stark indicator that there is no difference between Hezbollah control of south Lebanon and PA control of Gaza and sections of Judea and Samaria.

Since the northern campaign began last Wednesday, the PA has organized daily mass marches in both Ramallah and Gaza in support of Hezbollah. Members of PA militias, from both Fatah and Hamas, have demanded that Arab League states join the war against Israel. Commanders from the PA militias have openly admitted their desire to join Hezbollah in attacking Israel. This week, two suicide bombers from Judea and Samaria attempted to carry out attacks in Jerusalem and in the Sharon region, and Israeli troops have been engaged in pitched battles with terror forces in Nablus.

Nearly every day another militia is founded. Last week Fatah announced the establishment of a force of female suicide bombers in Judea and Samaria and this week the Popular Resistance Committees – a terror consortium that includes personnel from PA militias, Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad – displayed its female suicide bomber unit in Gaza. The ladies marched through the streets with their rifles and declared their intention to join the forces of global jihad.

As a spokesman in that Hamas training video explained, Hamas will continue to fight “until the liberation of Palestine, and until the message ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger’ reaches the entire world.”

The activities of all factions in the PA show that, as is the case in Lebanon, it would be impossible to achieve stability in Gaza, Judea and Samaria through deterrence. The only way to stabilize these fronts is to conduct a military campaign aimed at disarming all the terror groups and all 17 PA militias. That is, Israel must conduct a campaign in Gaza and Judea and Samaria that will disarm the Palestinian Authority in its entirety.

Once this operation is complete, Israel will have to establish buffer zones in Gaza and along its borders with Egypt that will prevent the Palestinians from either rearming or attacking Israel.

In Judea and Samaria, Israel should reassert complete security control over and apply Israeli law to the large settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley, based on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s stated intention to act in accordance with the Israeli consensus that these areas should remain under Israeli control in perpetuity.

Israel’s steps in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria should be accompanied by a declaration of intent according to which Israel will freeze the political status of Gaza and the remaining sections of Judea and Samaria for ten years. This declaration would serve two purposes. First, it would recognize the fact that today, Palestinian society is unwilling to live at peace with Israel.

Second, it gives the Palestinians sufficient time to determine whether or not they wish to reform themselves and to act on that decision. If at the end of the decade the Palestinians have in fact undergone a cultural transformation, Israel would be willing to recognize a demilitarized, democratic and anti-terrorist Palestinian state in Gaza. It would also be willing to conduct negotiations with that state and other relevant parties regarding the future status of the Palestinian areas in Judea and Samaria.

An israeli strategy aimed at stabilizing the security and political situation in Lebanon, Gaza, and Judea and Samaria is essential to enable the international community to contend with the greatest threat to global security: Iran’s nuclear weapons program. As was evidenced by last weekend’s meeting of the G-8 in Russia, through its proxies’ attacks against Israel, Iran has been able to distract the global leaders from its nuclear program.

As if to emphasize the danger his regime poses, in a speech broadcast on Iranian television on Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said,

The final point of liberal civilization is the false and corrupt state that has occupied Jerusalem. That’s the bottom line. That’s what all those who talk about liberalism and support it have in common.

Ahmadinejad went on to threaten “all those who talk about liberalism and support it,” saying, “If this volcano [of Muslim pride] erupts – and we are on the brink of eruption...and if this ocean rages, its waves will not be limited to the region.”

The challenge that Israel is now presented with on the battlefield is great. But if Israel stands strong with US support and meets this challenge, it will have the opportunity to strike out in a new strategic direction that holds a realistic possibility of stabilizing the security situation in a way that increases the chances for a peaceful future for the region and for the world as a whole.

– July 20, 2006

WHY ISRAEL MUST WIN

As the Israeli people waited Thursday for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to implement his cabinet’s decision to widen the ground offensive in Lebanon, Britain found itself under siege. British security officials announced that the entire country was on a red alert for a terror attack. The night before, British security forces foiled a terrorist conspiracy to explode some ten US-bound passenger jets.

As London’s deputy police commissioner Paul Stephenson told reporters, “This was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”

By Thursday morning security forces had arrested some 21 suspects. All are British citizens. All are Muslims.

It is not a stretch of the imagination to assume that these British Muslims are jihadists. Indeed, it can probably be assumed that, like their predecessors last July 7, they made their decision to commit an unspeakable atrocity against their countrymen to advance Islam’s takeover of Britain.

The path of jihad is the path of terror. Using terror, the jihadists believe that they can destroy the confidence of citizens of free societies and so coerce them to bend to their will.

In his letter to US President George Bush last May, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad enunciated the coercive goal of jihad when he threatened the US with war unless Bush converts to Islam. Iran, which today leads the global jihad, has managed to make the language of jihad the lingua franca of the Muslim world.

Many have noted that Hezbollah’s initial attack against Israel on July 12 was highly convenient for Teheran. Distracted by the war in Israel and Lebanon, the G-8 and the UN Security Council put off their discussions of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which were scheduled to take place that week.

While the actual date of the attack is easily explained, the question still arises, why is the jihad picking up steam now? Why are fanatical Muslims on the march this summer?

It would seem that the answer to this question is found in the increased cultural weakness of the two states leading the war against radical Islam: the US and Britain. In both countries, for the past two years, the forces of leftist radicalism and appeasement have been on the rise. Both countries’ leaders are hated by ever larger swaths of their countrymen for their stand on the war against jihad. And so they waver.

On Tuesday, Britain’s Home Secretary John Reid discussed the twin dangers of jihad and Western cultural weakness. Reid argued that Islamic terrorism has placed Britain in its greatest peril since the end of World War II. Reid proceeded to utter a stinging indictment of the British judiciary for preferring the “human rights” of terror suspects to the right of British citizens to security. Just last week, the British High Court ruled that security forces had to loosen restrictions they had placed on six Iraqis suspected of links of terrorism.

Tuesday also saw the defeat of Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman in the primary elections for the Democratic nomination to the Senate. He was beaten by wealthy businessman Ned Lamont, who based his entire campaign on attacking Lieberman for his support for the war in Iraq. The months-long primary campaign against Lieberman was replete with venomous anti-Semitic attacks on him, his family, American Jews and Israel by Lamont supporters.

Lieberman’s defeat by an “anti-war” candidate is a clear sign that the Democratic Party is morphing into a radical leftist party. If this trend is not reversed, America’s political climate will likely become much less sympathetic and supportive of Israel and much more supportive of countries like France, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A deterioration of the position of American Jews is also liable to ensue.

Under attack domestically, both Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have less time and ability to rally their nations to fight against the forces of global jihad. Moreover, as a result of its own culture wars, Israel today finds itself led by the weakest government it has ever had. The weakness of all three governments presented Iran with an unmistakable opportunity to strike.

While Bush and Blair’s weakness is the result of political forces, Olmert’s weakness is inherent to his nature. Yet, today, the ability of both Blair and Bush to convince their nations to support their war efforts against forces committed to the destruction of their nations’ ways of life is dependent on Olmert’s ability to lead Israel to victory in the war against Hezbollah.

With a quarter of our population under attack, our cities and forest in flames and our economy surging toward recession and debt, most Israelis agree that the war we face is a war for our national survival. In that sense, it is not all that different from previous wars.

Yet there is a qualitative difference between the current war and wars of previous generations. In the past, our enemies were states. They wished to conquer Israel and take our land for themselves. Today our enemies do not wish to conquer Israel. They wish to destroy Israel as a stepping stone on their path toward global domination. An Israeli victory or defeat in the current war will influence not only Israel’s future. It will influence the future of the free world as a whole. If Israel is defeated, if we do not fight to victory over Hezbollah, the march of jihad will move forward with unprecedented force.

Not surprisingly, Olmert hesitates as he faces this challenge. His nation tells him to choose victory. His instincts tell him to seek the path of least resistance.

If Olmert allows the IDF to fight, if he orders the implementation of the security cabinet’s decision to widen the ground offensive to the Litani River and so enable us to vanquish Hezbollah, we will be able to change the face of the region and of the world as a whole.

A clear Israeli victory against Hezbollah that destroys Hezbollah as a fighting force would enable leaders like Bush and Blair to defend their decision to wage war against jihad. Quite simply, an Israeli victory will help them inspire their nations to believe that they can win this war as well.

Since his ascension to power last year, Ahmadinejad has been on one long winning streak. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s success in convincing Bush to open direct negotiations with Teheran regarding its nuclear weapons program was a huge victory for Ahmadinejad. And nothing breeds success like success. Because he has yet to fail, the Iranian leader enjoys an aura of invincibility that deters other leaders from challenging his power. An Israeli victory against the Iranian military’s advance guard would shatter that aura and facilitate a much more robust Anglo-American stand against Teheran and its client Syria.

As well, events in Iraq will be critically influenced by how Israel comes out of this war. On the one hand, an Israeli defeat is liable to foment a violent Shi’ite revolt led by Hassan Nasrallah’s underling Muqtada al Sadr and his terror squads. On the other hand, an Israeli victory will galvanize the moderate Shi’ite forces in Iraq that are working to stabilize their country.

Finally, an Israeli victory will put paid to the fiction which claims that Israel is a strategic liability for the West. The forces who call for Israel’s abandonment and a US “engagement” of the Syrians and Iranians will be exposed as fools.

But the option of defeat has an allure of its own. Defeat, or as Olmert might put it, “bowing to international pressure,” has the advantage of being the path of least resistance. Unfortunately for Israel, if Olmert surrenders to his nature and opts for capitulation, the result will be catastrophic.

If, as Rice, Shimon Peres and Olmert himself recommend, Israel holds its fire and waits for a multinational force to deploy along the border, Israel will lose its right to self-defense. The laws of political gravity dictate that a relinquishment of the right to self-defense is tantamount to a surrender of sovereignty. If Olmert decides that he would rather have foreigners patrol our borders than the IDF, his message to the world will be clear: as far as he is concerned, Israel does not value its liberty because it is unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices to defend it. If Olmert truly wants foreign forces to be stationed in south Lebanon, he can do us all a favor and agree to Hezbollah’s demand to keep UNIFIL in place. At least UNIFIL, for all its fecklessness, is more or less harmless. It is not empowered to limit Israel’s right to defend itself.

If Olmert decides to surrender to outside pressures, he will be serving the interests of the forces in Washington who claim that Israel is not worthy of America’s support. An Israel that is unwilling to contend with Hezbollah is an Israel that cannot be trusted as an ally. That is, if he goes along with Rice and her colleagues at the UN and agrees not to fight to win, Olmert will be paving the way for the defeat of pro-Israel forces in US policymaking circles and politics.

The fact of the matter is that those who push for Israel’s abandonment are the same people who push for a US-British retreat from Iraq and an end to their war against radical Islam. If Israel capitulates and so strengthens the powers who oppose it in the US and throughout the West, it will similarly contribute to the political defeat of the political forces that call for the jihad to be defeated. So in a very profound sense, as goes Kiryat Shmona, so go Washington and London.

Today Israel is gripped by dread. There is not a household in the country that is not directly impacted by this war. All of us have family and friends in the north and in the IDF. All of us are concerned about the future of our country.

It would be nice to think that there is some shortcut that we could take to secure our country and our freedom on the cheap. It is the natural tendency of men like Olmert to look for such a shortcut.

But there are no shortcuts in this war, this existential war that in many respects we brought on ourselves by attempting to disengage from the reality of our surroundings.

At the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Olmert demanded that his ministers behave like grown-ups because “the whole nation is watching us now.” This is true. We are watching. And at this time, it is up to our nation to force our leaders to lead us to victory.

– August 11, 2006

THE OLMERT GOVERNMENT MUST GO

From all sides of the political spectrum calls are being raised for the establishment of an official commission of inquiry to investigate the Olmert government’s incompetent management of the war in Lebanon. These calls are misguided.

We do not need a commission to know what happened or what has to happen. The Olmert government has failed on every level. The Olmert government must go.

The Knesset must vote no confidence in this government and new elections must be carried out as soon as the law permits. If the Knesset hesitates in taking this required step, then the people of Israel must take to the streets in mass demonstrations and demand that our representatives send Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and their comrades out to pasture.

Every aspect of the government’s handling of the war has been a failure. Take relief efforts as an example. For five weeks the government ignored the humanitarian disaster in the north where over one million Israelis are under missile assault. The government developed no comprehensive plan for organizing relief efforts to feed citizens in bomb shelters or for evacuating them.

And then there is the military failure. The IDF suffers from acute leadership failures – brought to Israel courtesy of Ariel Sharon who hacked away at the General Staff, undermined its sense of mission and treated our generals like office boys just as he decimated the Likud by undermining its political vision and promoting its weakest members.

Yet, guiding the generals to make the right decisions and finding the generals capable of making them in wartime is the government’s responsibility. It was the government’s responsibility to critique and question the IDF’S operational model of aerial warfare and to cut its losses when after two or three days it was clear that the model was wrong. At that point the government should have called up the reserves and launched a combined ground and air offensive.

But the government didn’t feel like it. It wanted to win the war on the cheap. And when the air campaign did not succeed, it abandoned its war goals, declared victory and sued for a cease-fire. When the public objected, after waiting two precious weeks, the government called up the reserves but then waited another unforgivable ten days before committing them to battle.

All the while, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni did her best to demoralize the IDF and the public by publicly proclaiming that there is no military solution to what is clearly a military conflict.

Olmert’s decision Friday to begin the ground offensive was by all accounts motivated not by a newfound understanding that this is a real war, but by the headlines in the newspapers that morning calling for his resignation. Yet, by Friday, the IDF had only 48 hours to achieve the objectives it had waited a month to receive Olmert’s permission to accomplish.

Diplomatically, in the space of five weeks the government managed to undermine Israel’s alliance with America; to hand Syria, Hezbollah and Iran the greatest diplomatic achievements they have ever experienced; and to flush down the toilet the unprecedented international support that US President Bush handed to Israel on a silver platter at the G-8 summit.

The UN cease-fire that Olmert, Livni and Peretz applaud undercuts Israel’s sovereignty, protects Hezbollah, lets Iran and Syria off the hook, lends credibility to our enemies’ belief that Israel can be destroyed, emboldens the Palestinians to launch their next round of war, and leaves IDF hostages Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in captivity.

Israel’s diplomatic maneuvers were cut to fit the size of our Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni who believes that her job is limited to being nice to other foreign ministers when they call her up on the telephone. In an interview with Yediot Aharonot over the weekend, Livni defended her decision not to engage in public diplomacy by claiming that this is not an important enough task for the foreign minister. It makes sense that this would be her view because as one who understands neither diplomacy nor English, she is incapable of conducting public diplomacy.

Livni argued that the job of the foreign minister is “to create diplomatic processes” – whatever that means. She also claimed that the best way to gain international support is not by publicly arguing Israel’s case, but through back-door discussions devoted to developing good relations with other foreign ministers. This is ridiculous. The job of the foreign minister is to defend Israel and advance Israel’s national interests to foreigners, not to be their friend.

Aside from the fact that the government’s bungling of the military mission meant that Olmert and Livni sprinted to the negotiating table empty-handed, the reason that the UN Security Council cease-fire resolution ignores every single Israeli demand is because Israel didn’t aggressively pursue its goals. While the Lebanese and the Arabs massed all their forces and pressured the UN, the Foreign Ministry asked US Jewish leaders to say nothing about the draft resolution and to make no public objections to that diplomatic process Tzipi and Ehud “created” with their “friends.” And so Israel’s positions were ignored.

Yet the reason that this incompetent embarrassment of a government must go is not simply because it has delivered Israel the worst defeat in its history. This government must go because every day it sits in power it exacerbates the damage it has already caused and increases the dangers to Israel.

Iran has been emboldened. Its success in the war is now being used by the ayatollahs to support their claim of leadership over the Arab world. In evidence of Iran’s success, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak met in Cairo with Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. So now, after 27 years of official estrangement, Egypt is moving towards establishing full diplomatic relations with Teheran.

The Palestinians have been emboldened. Hamas leaders and spokesmen are openly stating that just as Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000 precipitated the Palestinian terror war in September 2000, so Israel’s current defeat in Lebanon will spur the outbreak of a new Palestinian terror war against Israel today.

The Americans have lost faith in Israel as an ally. After he gave Israel every opportunity to win this war, even signaling clearly that Israel should feel free to go as far as Beirut if necessary, President Bush was convinced that Olmert simply didn’t want to fight. The Americans were shocked by Israel’s performance. They know that we can win when we set our mind to it and were flummoxed when presented with an Israeli leadership that refused to even try.

Today we have 30,000 soldiers in Lebanon with an unclear mission. Because of the failure of this government, Israel now needs to contend with an emboldened Hezbollah protected by Kofi Annan. Already on Sunday, Annan sent a letter to Olmert instructing him that once the cease-fire is put into effect, the IDF will be barred from taking action even if it comes under attack. As far as Annan is concerned, Resolution 1701 says that if Israel is attacked, all it is allowed to do is call his secretary.

Given that both the Lebanese army and the countries that plan to send forces to Lebanon all say that they will not deploy to the south until after Hezbollah is dismantled, it is clear that the military mission is still to be accomplished.

In its helter-skelter offensive over the weekend, the IDF performed brilliantly as it tried to accomplish in 48 hours what it had been denied permission to accomplish for an entire month. Still now, in the diplomatic minefield this government set for it, the IDF remains the only military force capable of fighting and dismantling Hezbollah. But there can be no doubt that it will not be accomplished under this government.

There will be time to inquire into what has gone wrong in the IDF. There will be time to fire the generals that need to be fired. But we don’t need a commission to determine what we need to do. Because of the Olmert government’s failures, ever greater battles await us. As the dangers mount by the hour, we must replace this misbegotten government with one that can defend us.

– August 14, 2006

WELCOME TO PALESTINE

In the world of international diplomacy few issues receive more wall-to-wall support than the notion that it is essential to establish a Palestinian state. Leaders worldwide are so busy speaking of how essential it is for a State of Palestine to be founded that none of them seems to have noticed that it already exists.

This state was officially founded in the summer of 2005, when Israel removed its military forces and civilian population from the Gaza Strip and so established the first wholly independent Palestinian state in history. Israel’s destruction of four Israeli communities in Northern Samaria and curtailment of its military operations in the area set the conditions for statehood in that area as well.

And so it is that as statesmen and activists worldwide loudly proclaim their commitment to establishing the sovereign State of Palestine, they miss the fact that Palestine exists. And it is a nightmare.

In the State of Palestine 88 percent of the public feels insecure. Perhaps the other 12 percent are members of the multitude of regular and irregular militias. For in the State of Palestine the ratio of police/militiamen/men-under-arms to civilians is higher than in any other country on earth.

In the State of Palestine, two-year-olds are killed and no one cares. Children are woken up in the middle of the night and murdered in front of their parents. Worshipers in mosques are gunned down by terrorists who attend competing mosques. And no one cares. No international human rights groups publish reports calling for an end to the slaughter. No UN body condemns anyone or sends a fact-finding mission to investigate the murders.

In the State of Palestine, women are stripped naked and forced to march in the streets to humiliate their husbands. Ambulances are stopped on the way to hospitals and wounded are shot in cold blood. Terrorists enter operating rooms in hospitals and unplug patients from life-support machines.

In the State of Palestine, people are kidnapped from their homes in broad daylight and in front of the television cameras. This is the case because the kidnappers themselves are cameramen. Indeed, their commanders often run television stations. And because terror commanders run television stations in the State of Palestine, it should not be surprising that they bomb the competition’s television stations.

So it was that last week, terrorists from this group or that group bombed Al-Arabiya television station in Gaza. And so it is that Hamas attacks Fatah radio announcers and closes down their radio station claiming that they use their microphones to incite murder. Because indeed, they are inciting murder. What would one expect for terrorists to do when placed in charge of a radio station?

And so it is that in the State of Palestine, journalists – whether members of terror groups or not – are part of the 88 percent of their public who are afraid. Sunday they protested outside the offices of one terror faction or another that controls the Palestinian Authority.

Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, reporter Ala Masharawi explained, “No one goes outside, no one moves without thinking twice. Gaza’s streets have become terrible streets, especially at night. Gaza is a ghost town.”

As the Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh reported last week, in the State of Palestine, Christians are persecuted, robbed and beaten in what can only be viewed as a systematic campaign to end the Christian presence in places like Bethlehem. As Samir Qumsiyeh, owner of the Beit Sahur-based private Al-Mahd (Nativity) TV station lamented, “I believe that 15 years from now there will be no Christians left in Bethlehem. Then you will need a torch to find a Christian here.”

Many government ministers and commentators seek strategic meaning in the strife in the State of Palestine. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, for instance, goes on and on about the need to strengthen the “moderates” – that is, the Fatah terror group – over the “extremists” – that is, the Hamas terror group.

Helping her to propound this nonsense is PA Chairman and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas and his men tell Westerners how pro-Western they are at the same time as they name streets and schools financed by US aid after Saddam Hussein and build sports facilities on the American taxpayers’ tab in memory of terrorists who killed American soldiers in Iraq.

For the umpteenth time, on Sunday Fatah spokesmen in PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s office blamed Iran and Syria for the escalating violence in Gaza and Judea and Samaria that has killed 29 people, including two children, in four days. “Iran and Syria are encouraging Hamas to continue fighting against Fatah,” they alleged.

And yet, just last Thursday the Shin Bet arrested Omar Damra, a Fatah terrorist in Nablus. Damra is accused of manufacturing suicide bomb belts and attempting to smuggle them into Israel. He also stands accused of plotting to place explosive devices along roads in Judea and Samaria with the intention of blowing up IDF patrols.

Damra and his partner and fellow Fatah terrorist Mahmad Ramaha, who was arrested a month ago, were working under the instruction of Hezbollah – that is, under the direction of Iran. According to the Shin Bet, Hezbollah – that is, Iran – has taken over Fatah operations in Nablus. Since Israel’s withdrawal from northern Samaria in August 2005, the Shin Bet has noted that, like Gaza, the Nablus area has become a mini-Afghanistan.

So not only are Hamas terrorists operating under Iranian and Syrian direction today, Fatah terrorists are as well. Yet this doesn’t stop the US and Israel from pouring guns and money into the hands of Fatah terror chiefs. They fail to recognize that what you see is what you get.

These guns are not used to encourage moderation. These guns are used against Israelis and Palestinians alike in a turf battle between terror groups over money, guns and power that will never end. And it will never end because fighting and killing for money, guns and power is what terrorists do.

For the past 13 years, since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, the contours of the State of Palestine have taken form in front of our eyes. Starting with Yasser Arafat’s abrogation of the rule of law and murderous campaign against land dealers and journalists, with each passing year and with each move to further empower the PA, the situation has only grown worse. And yet, international pressure on Israel from Arabs, Europeans and the US to surrender more territory, curtail its authority, abrogate its claims to the areas set for Palestine, and finance the Fatah terror group have only grown in intensity.

And with each passing year, as the reality of Palestine has become clearer, the Israeli leadership’s will to resist this pressure is increasingly eroded.

So it is that last week Defense Minister Amir Peretz announced that he supports negotiating with Hamas. Peretz laid out his “vision” for the reinstatement of the so-called peace process with the Palestinians, and stated that, to “empower” the Palestinians, he supports extending the ban on IDF operations from Gaza to Judea and Samaria. It should go without saying that such IDF operations are aimed at preventing massacres of Israeli civilians like the one that happened in Eilat Monday morning.

Livni, for her part, has become the international champion of Fatah. Gushing to an audience of international peace processors in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Livni said, “In order to achieve peace and in order to promote a process, we must stick to this vision of a two-state solution and examine what the best steps to take are.”

Of course, neither Livni nor Peretz, who insist that Israel’s most urgent priority is to establish Palestine, is willing to recognize that Palestine exists already. They refuse to acknowledge what we already know: Palestine is a terror state and an economic basket case fully funded by the international community. Indeed, over the past year since Hamas won the Palestinian elections, international assistance to the Palestinians has increased dramatically.

As Ibrahim Gambari, the UN under-secretary-general for political affairs, noted last Thursday, official Western aid to the Palestinians, not including Arab and Iranian support for Hamas and Fatah, increased by 10 percent in 2006 over 2005, and stood at $1.2 billion.

The Palestinians, who receive more aid per capita than any people on earth, are needy not because they lack funds. They are poor because they prefer poverty, violence and war to prosperity, peace and moderation. So it is that 57 percent of Palestinians support terror attacks against Israel.

The multitude of protesters worldwide who demand an end to the so-called “occupation” and the establishment of Palestine should be made aware of the fact that Palestine already exists. The hordes of political leaders mindlessly squawking about “visions” and “two-state solutions” should know: This is Palestine. Enter at your own risk.

– January 27, 2007

AS SYRIA PREPARES FOR WAR

This has been a banner week for Syrian diplomacy. First, together with their big Iranian brothers, the Syrians were given a place at the table alongside US officials at the conference on Iraqi security in Baghdad last weekend.

At the same time as their underlings exchanged recriminations with the US, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and Iranian Defense Minister Mustafa Muhammad Najjar merged the Syrian and Iranian militaries at a summit in Damascus. On Sunday Najjar explained the deal to reporters saying, “We consider the capability of the Syrian defensive forces as our own and believe that expansion of defensive ties would...help deal with the threats of the enemies.” Najjar added that Iran “offers all of its defense capabilities to Syria.” The meeting was capped off on Monday when Najjar signed a memorandum of understanding on military cooperation with his Syrian counterpart Hassan Turkmeni.

Tuesday, US Assistant Secretary of State for Refugees Ellen Sauerbrey became the first senior US official to visit Syria since Damascus engineered former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination in February 2005.

Following closely on Sauerbrey’s heels was the EU’S foreign policy chief Javier Solana. Like Sauerbrey, Solana was the first senior EU official to set foot in the Syrian capital since Hariri was murdered. Unlike Sauerbrey, who came and left without making a sound, Solana used the occasion to drop a diplomatic bomb.

Standing next to Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moualem Wednesday, Solana announced, “We would like to work as much as possible to see your country Syria recuperate the territory taken in 1967.”

Israel should be very concerned by Solana’s statement. Seventeen years ago, an American diplomat made a similar statement to another Arab dictator. It was swiftly followed by war.

On July 25, 1990, then US ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie held a fateful meeting with Saddam Hussein. It occurred against the backdrop of a massive Iraqi military buildup along the Kuwaiti border. Glaspie received a cagey and defensive reply from Saddam when she asked the meaning of the deployment. According to the protocol of the meeting which she sent that day to Washington, Glaspie told Saddam that the US took no position on intra-Arab disputes.

At the time, and since, the common view has been that Saddam interpreted Glaspie’s statement as American acquiescence to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait which took place eight days later.

Solana’s statement that Europe supports the reassertion of Syrian control over the Golan Heights came in the midst of a massive Syrian deployment of offensive weapons systems close to its border with Israel. Early this week, Israeli military commanders revealed that since last September, Syria has deployed between 1,000 and 3,000 missiles and rockets close to that border.

This revelation followed the apparent murder of Russian journalist Ivan Safronov. Safronov, who fell to his death from his fifth-floor apartment window in Moscow on March 2, told his editors at the Kommersant newspaper just before his death that he was working on a story exposing Russian sales of advanced Iskander missiles to Syria and jetfighters to Iran.

This week, Michael Maples, the director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, announced that “Syria has a program to develop select biological agents.” Maples explained, “Syria’s biotechnical infrastructure is capable of supporting limited biological agent development.” He added that Syria is seeking to install biological and chemical warheads on its missile arsenal.

Indeed, according to opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, over the past year Syria has increased its military outlays by a factor of ten.

Syria is using the smokescreen of near weekly protestations of interest in negotiating with Israel to divert attention away from its clear preparations for war. Rather than see these statements for the psychological warfare antics they are, Israeli leftists have pounced on them. Led by Haaretz newspaper, the Israeli Left is exerting massive pressure on the rudderless Olmert-Livni-Peretz government to force it to open negotiations with Damascus – negotiations that would lead to Israel’s surrender of the Golan Heights in exchange for a piece of paper from Iran’s Arab colony.

Due to the government’s general incompetence, it is unable to formulate a coherent policy towards Syria. The Left’s calls for surrender talks consequently dominate the public debate on Syria. This in turn has paralyzed the state bodies responsible for taking measures to prepare the IDF and the public for the prospect of war.

The IDF’S public assessment of the Syrian threat is evidence of the confusion. Last month, Military Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin addressed the Syrian threat at the government’s intelligence assessment meeting. Yadlin said, “The chances of a full-scale war initiated by Syria are low, but the chances of Syria reacting militarily against Israeli military moves are high.”

Yadlin’s statement was presented to the public as good news. But it was not good news. Syria will not initiate a full-scale war against Israel because it would lose a full-scale war. Syria’s comparative advantage against the IDF is found in the area of low-intensity warfare. And as Yadlin noted, there is every reason to expect that it is this sort of warfare that Syria is preparing to initiate.

Over the past several years, Syria has built up massive artillery, missile and rocket arsenals capable of causing extensive damage to the IDF and to Israeli communities in the Golan Heights and the Galilee. So too, Syria fields a highly trained commando corps capable of exacting physical losses and tactical setbacks to the IDF.

Syria has two good reasons to go to war against Israel. Since 1973, every Arab state and terrorist organization that has gone to war against Israel has benefited from their aggression. Syria no doubt expects for the pattern to continue. In all likelihood, if Syria is able to fight Israel to a stalemate as Hezbollah did last summer, the Israeli Left, the EU and the US can be expected to increase their pressure for an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights.

Moreover, a war with Israel would shore up Assad’s dwindling support at home. Sherko Abbas, a Kurdish-Syrian exile living in the US, heads the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria. He explains that due to Syria’s economic weakness and the Assad government’s profligate corruption, the regime is widely despised by its Syrian subjects. According to Abbas, the organized domestic opposition to the regime crosses ethnic lines and includes Kurds, Druse, Alawites, and even members of Assad’s family clan.

Three years ago, regime-sponsored Sunni thugs attacked Kurdish soccer fans in Dayz az Zawr, a Kurdish city along the border with Iraq. The attack led to three days of Kurdish anti-regime riots. Rioters destroyed regime monuments and burned government offices. Brutally quelled, the riots left 85 Kurds dead, hundreds wounded and thousands imprisoned.

Numbering between 2.5 and 3 million, Kurds make up some 15 percent of the Syrian population. On Monday, hundreds of thousands of Kurds flocked to cemeteries to publicly commemorate the anniversary of the riots. As Abbas sees it, the fact that the Kurds were unafraid to publicly commemorate their uprising is proof of the regime’s weakness.

Most Israeli politicians claim that were the regime to be overthrown, it would be replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood. The specter of an Islamist government arising in Syria is seen as sufficient reason for the Israeli government to do nothing to destabilize the Assad regime despite its strategic partnership with Iran.

Abbas disputes this view. He claims that the Muslim Brotherhood is a spent force in Syria. “If the Brotherhood were capable of replacing the regime, it would have overthrown it when there was a chance in 2004,” he argues.

To offset his regime’s unpopularity, over the past few years Assad has imported more than 100,000 “immigrants” from Iran. These new Persian-speaking Syrians are keen to influence their adopted society. To this end, they have built new Shi’ite mosques throughout the country and are paying Syrians to convert to Shi’ite Islam.

According to Abbas, the regime has settled its new loyalists in Damascus, Latakiya, Homs and Aleppo. All these areas – in close proximity to Lebanon and Israel – are of strategic importance to the regime.

By the same token, repeated press reports from Syria over the past year indicate that Assad replaced his Syrian security detail with a new presidential protection force comprised of members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Hezbollah.

With Syria clearly on war footing, there are several moves Israel must make right now. Militarily, Israel must prepare for war. The IDF should be pre-positioning equipment in the Golan Heights, training its reserves and regular forces for war, and updating its doctrine for fighting in the Golan Heights. So too, municipal authorities should be readying their bomb shelters for another war and preparing contingencies to evacuate civilians from the north.

If Syria does initiate hostilities, the IDF’S goal must be to destroy the Syrian military and avoid a stalemate at all costs.

Diplomatically, Israel must work to cancel the diplomatic gains that Syria made this week. The goal must be to return Syria to the international isolation it has been relegated to since it engineered Hariri’s murder.

Israel must also identify and assist forces in Syria working to undermine and topple the regime. Last week the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee invited Syria’s US-based agent Ibrahim Suleiman, who held contacts with the far-left former director-general of the Foreign Ministry, Alon Liel, to address its members. That invitation should be rescinded. Rather than Suleiman, the Knesset should invite regime opponents to speak to its members.

Working with the Kurdish opposition, the US-based Center for Democracy in the Middle East operates a satellite television station that runs limited broadcasts into Syria in Kurdish, Arabic and Persian. The station educates its viewers about the regime’s corruption, suppression of human rights and democracy. It calls for peaceful coexistence with Israel and the rest of Syria’s neighbors. Israel should be helping to fund, expand and run these broadcasts.

For its part, the regime itself announced this week that it is planning to launch a satellite television station that will advance the Syrian-Iranian line to the Arab world. Imagine how refreshing it would be for audiences to have the opportunity to watch something other than jihad on television.

In all its dealings with Syria, Israel must understand that today Syria is a clear enemy whose interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the Jewish state. As a result, in all arenas and at all times, Israel should be working to weaken and destabilize the regime. There is much it can do to advance this purpose.

Unfortunately, until the current government is replaced, it is hard to imagine how this can happen.

– March 15, 2007

GROUNDED IN FANTASY

Iran and its client state Syria have a strategic vision for the Middle East. They wish to take over Lebanon. They wish to destroy Israel. They wish to defeat the US in Iraq. They wish to drive the US and NATO from Afghanistan. They wish to dominate the region by driving the rest of the Arab world to its jihad-supporting knees. Then they wish to apply their vision to the rest of the world.

Today, Syria and Iran are ardently advancing their strategic vision for the world through a deliberate strategy of victory by a thousand cuts. Last week’s Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, Sunday’s reopening of the Lebanese front against Israel with the Syrian-ordered rocket attacks on Kiryat Shmona, the now five-week old Syrian ordered low-intensity warfare against Lebanon’s pro-Western Siniora government, last week’s attack on the al-Askariya mosque in Samarra, the recent intensification of terrorism in Afghanistan and Iran’s move to further destabilize the country by violently deporting 100,000 Afghan refugees back to the war-torn country – all of these are moves to advance this clear Iranian-Syrian strategy.

And all these moves have taken place against the backdrop of Syria’s refashioning of its military in the image of Hezbollah on steroids and Iran’s relentless, unopposed progress in its nuclear weapons program.

For their part, both the US and Israel also have a strategic vision. Unfortunately, it is grounded in fantasy.

Washington and Jerusalem wish to solve all the problems of the region and the world by establishing a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. While Israel now faces Iranian proxies on two fronts, in their meeting at the White House today US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will gush about their support for Palestinian statehood. Creepily echoing LSD king Timothy Leary, they will tune out this reality as they drone on about the opportunities that Gaza’s transformation into a base for global jihad afford to the notion that promoting the Fatah terrorist organization’s control over Judea and Samaria can make the world a better, safer, happier place.

Today Bush and Olmert will announce their full support for Fatah chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s new government. The US will intensify General Keith Dayton’s training and arming of Fatah forces. Israel will give Fatah $700 million. The Europeans and the rest of the international community will give the “moderate, secular” terror group still more money and guns and love. The US will likely also demand that Olmert order the IDF to give Fatah terrorists free reign in Judea and Samaria.

Olmert and Bush claim that by backing Abbas militarily, financially and politically they will be setting up an “alternative Palestine” that will rival Hamas’s jihadist Palestine. As this notion has it, envious of the good fortune of their brethren in Judea and Samaria, Gazans will overthrow Hamas and the course will be set for peace – replete with the ethnic cleansing of Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem of all Jewish presence.

Fatah forces barely raised a finger to prevent their defeat in Gaza in spite of the massive quantities of US arms they received and the military training they underwent at the hands of US General Keith Dayton. Bush, Olmert and all proponents of the notion of strengthening Fatah in Judea and Samaria refuse to answer one simple question: why would a handover of Judea and Samaria to Abbas’s Fatah produce a better outcome than Israel’s 2005 handover of Gaza to Abbas’s Fatah?

They refuse to answer this question because they know full well that the answer is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the outcome can be better. They know full well that since replacing Yasser Arafat as head of the PA in 2004, Abbas refused to take any effective action against Hamas. They know that he refused to take action to prevent Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. They know that the guns the US transferred to Fatah in Gaza were surrendered to Hamas without a fight last week. They know that the billions of dollars of international and Israeli assistance to Fatah over the past 14 years never were used to advance the cause of peace. They know that that money was diverted into the pockets of Fatah strongmen and utilized to build terror militias in which Hamas members were invited to serve. They know that Fatah built a terror superstructure in Judea, Samaria and Gaza which enabled operational cooperation between Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror cells.

So why embrace the fantasy that things can be different now, in Judea and Samaria? Rather than provide rational arguments to defend their view that Hamas’s takeover of Gaza is an opportunity for peace, proponents of peace fantasies as strategic wisdom explain vacuously that peace is the best alternative to jihad. They whine that those who point out that Israel now borders Iran in Lebanon and Gaza have nothing positive to say.

To meet the growing threat in Gaza, they argue that Europeans, or maybe Egyptians and Jordanians, can be deployed at the international border with Egypt to stem the weapons and terror personnel flow into Gaza. To meet the growing threat in Lebanon, Olmert pleads for more UN troops.

Both views ignore the obvious: Gaza has been transformed into an Iranian-sponsored base for global jihad because Egypt has allowed it to be so transformed. Assisted by its Syrian-sponsored Palestinian allies, Hezbollah has rebuilt its arsenals and reasserted its control in southern Lebanon because UN forces in southern Lebanon have done nothing to prevent it from doing so.

No country on earth will volunteer to fight Hamas and its jihadist allies in Gaza. No government on earth will voluntarily deploy its forces to counter Hezbollah and Iran in south Lebanon. This is why – until they fled – European monitors at the Rafah terminal were a joke. This is why Spanish troops in UNIFIL devote their time in Lebanon to teaching villagers Spanish.

So why are Bush and Olmert set to embrace Fatah and Abbas today? Why are they abjectly refusing to come to terms with the strategic reality of the Iranian-Syrian onslaught? Why are they insisting that the establishment of a Palestinian state is their strategic goal and doing everything they can to pretend that their goal has not been repeatedly proven absurd?

Well, why should they? As far as Bush is concerned, no American politician has ever paid a price for advancing the cause of peace processes that strengthen terrorists and hostile Arab states at Israel’s expense. Bush’s predecessor Bill Clinton had Arafat over to visit the White House more often than any other foreign leader and ignored global jihad even when its forces bombed US embassies and warships. And today Clinton receives plaudits for his efforts to bring peace to the Middle East.

By denying that the war against Israel is related to the war in Iraq, by ignoring the strategic links between all the Iranian and Syrian sponsored theaters of war, Bush views gambling with Israel’s security as a win-win situation. He will be applauded as a champion of peace and if the chips go down on Israel, well, it won’t be Americans being bombed.

Olmert looks to his left and sees president-elect Shimon Peres. Peres, the architect of the Oslo process which placed Israel’s national security in the hands of the PLO, has been rewarded for his role in imperiling his country by his similarly morally challenged political colleagues who just bestowed him with Israel’s highest office.

Olmert looks to his left and sees incoming defense minister Ehud Barak. In 2000, then-prime minister Barak withdrew Israeli forces from Lebanon, and enabled Iran’s assertion of control over southern Lebanon through its Hezbollah proxy. In so doing, Barak set the conditions for last summer’s war, and quite likely, for this summer’s war.

By offering Arafat Gaza, 95 percent of Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem at Camp David, Barak showed such enormous weakness that he all but invited the Palestinian terror war that Arafat began planning the day he rejected Barak’s offer.

For his failure, Barak has been rewarded by his Labor Party, which elected him its new chairman on the basis of his vast “experience,” and by the media, which has embraced him as a “professional” defense minister.

Olmert looks to his right and sees how the media portrays Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu and former IDF chief of General Staff Moshe Ya’alon as alarmists for claiming that Israel cannot abide by an Iranian-proxy Hamas state on its border. He sees that Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu supported Peres’s candidacy as president and have joined their fortunes to Olmert’s in a bid to block elections that will bring the Right to power.

Israel has arguably never faced a more dangerous strategic environment than it faces today. Yet it is not without good options. It can retake control over the Gaza-Sinai border. It can renew its previously successful tactic of killing Hamas terrorists. It can continue its successful campaign of keeping terrorists down in Judea and Samaria, and it can continue preparing for war in the north. All of these options can be sold to the Left.

But today both Bush and Olmert will reject these options in favor of mindless peace process prattle. They will reject reality as they uphold Abbas as a credible leader and shower him with praise, money and arms. Their political fortunes will be utmost in their minds as they do this. And they will be guaranteeing war that will claim the lives of an unknown number of Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Bush and Olmert should know that when the time for reckoning comes they will not be able to claim along with Peres and Barak that their hands did not shed this blood. Reality has warned them of their folly. But in their low, dishonest opportunism, they have chosen to ignore reality and amuse themselves with fantasies and photo-ops.

– June 19, 2007

THE LOST LESSONS OF LEBANON

On Wednesday, it was reported that the UN has determined that Mount Dov, otherwise known as the Shaba Farms, belongs to Lebanon and that Israel must relinquish the area to UN control ahead of its transfer to Lebanon. Although the UN later denied the report, true or false it reminded us that since last summer’s war, pressure on Israel to withdraw from Mount Dov has risen dramatically.

It should be recalled that in 2000, the UN certified that Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanese territory. The UN acknowledged that sovereignty over Mount Dov is disputed between Israel and Syria.

Hezbollah rejected the UN’S finding and insisted that Mount Dov is Lebanese territory. As Lebanese politicians such as Druse leader Walid Jumblatt have argued, Hezbollah invented the claim as a means of justifying its continued war against Israel.

During last summer’s war, Hezbollah’s demand for Mount Dov was supported by the Saniora government of which Hezbollah was then a member. Since both the US and France support the Saniora government, they accepted the demand.

UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which determined the conditions of the cease-fire, authorized the UN’S secretary-general to determine which country the area – which controls the back entrance to Mount Hermon, the sources of the Sea of Galilee and the Israeli communities on the Golan Heights – belongs to.

The UN’S claim that it has yet to settle the issue of sovereignty over Mount Dov has given the Olmert government a temporary reprieve from international pressure to withdraw from the strategically vital area. But the fact that last year Israel agreed to empower the UN to study the issue is itself a disaster for Israel.

By allowing the UN to revisit a sovereignty issue it had already settled, Israel gave up its right to assume that the international community will one day recognize its borders. If Israel were to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, for instance, the Mount Dov precedent shows that there is no guarantee that a Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian or Jordanian demand for more Israeli land wouldn’t enjoy similar international backing.

Over the past year, Israel has conducted no critical analysis of the political and military consequences of Resolution 1701. No one has discussed the significance of an agreement that places Israel on equal footing with an illegal terrorist organization and makes no mention of Hezbollah’s state sponsors, Syria and Iran. No one has asked how the IDF will deal with UNIFIL forces, which at the Olmert government’s insistence are deployed along the border, when the next round of fighting begins.

Israel’s failure to analyze 1701 is but one illustration of how it has avoided truly reckoning with what happened last summer. Israel’s failure is especially disconcerting given that today we are poised on the edge of another war against the same forces – Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and the Palestinians – that fought us last summer.

A year ago, assisted and directed militarily by Iran and Syria, and backed politically by international human rights groups, the UN, France and the Western media, Hezbollah successfully carried out a 34-day attack against Israel. Israel failed to either stop or mitigate the Hezbollah onslaught.

Since then, assisted by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah has rearmed and expanded its missile arsenal. It has filled its ranks with operatives who have undergone training in Iran. Hamas has taken over Gaza and built its own army of some 10,000 soldiers, many of whom have also been trained in Iran. Syria and Iran have both mobilized for war and Iran has made great progress in its nuclear weapons program.

In Lebanon itself, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria are actively destabilizing the Saniora government. Whether or not their ultimate goal is to repeat the Hamas model in Gaza by fomenting a Syrian-Hezbollah takeover of the country, their actions to date have neutralized all threats to their freedom of action. The Lebanese military is neutralized. After the car bombing against Spanish UNIFIL forces last month, Spain and another country are holding talks with Hezbollah and Iran.

The Bush administration, which supported Israel in the first weeks of the war, is now keeping its distance. From its support for Hezbollah’s demand for Mount Dov and its pressure on Israel to support Fatah to its attempts to appease Iran, the Bush administration is clearly signaling that it views Israel as a liability.

In Israel itself, the only point of light is the tactical training that IDF forces have been undergoing since the cease-fire. But although the training is vital, the fact is that the tactical level was the least problematic level of the last war. Although they were ill-equipped and ill-trained, in every head-on engagement with Hezbollah, IDF forces convincingly defeated the enemy.

The real problems that the war exposed were on the operational and strategic levels of war. And here, no improvements have been made.

Under then-chief of General Staff Dan Halutz, the General Staff conceived of the war as an air battle, with a limited ground component comprised of special forces. Although this operational concept failed in the first days of the war, the General Staff stubbornly maintained it throughout.

Due to the General Staff ‘s refusal to revisit its operational concept, it was unable to draw lessons from engagements with the enemy. Rather than examine the surprise inflicted on the special forces in their first engagements with Hezbollah and update IDF operations in accordance with what those engagements revealed about Hezbollah’s deployment and mode of operations, the General Staff ignored the experience and allowed itself to be drawn into a war it didn’t understand. Forces were deployed willy-nilly in battles of no operational significance and with no connection to any overarching plan for victory.

A month before the war, Halutz closed down the IDF’S Operational Theory Research Institute. The institute was responsible for training corps commanders in operational warfare. That training boils down to giving commanders cognitive tools to test their operational environment and to update their plans to ensure they maintain the initiative. As Halutz’s successor, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, has noted on various occasions, today there is no operational thinking in the IDF. Perhaps this is important. Perhaps it is not. We’ll only find out in the next war.

Strategically, the situation has deteriorated rapidly. Despite the obvious nature of Israel’s failure, the Olmert government insists that we won. And since it claims we won, it also claims that nothing needs fixing.

The government’s insistent claims of victory have forced it to also say that Israel is now safer for having fought the war. As a result, the government downplays the significance of Hezbollah’s rearmament and of Syria’s preparations for war.

Moreover, by ignoring the fact that with Iranian and Syrian guidance, the Palestinians and Hezbollah launched a coordinated attack against Israel, the Olmert government is forced to ignore the significance of the strategic alliance that exists between its enemies. It is because of its need to underplay the dangers that it continues to embrace Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas, even though Fatah forces participated in the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. The government is forced to embrace Abbas, even though since September 2005, he and his forces did nothing to prevent Hamas from training, arming and raising an army in Gaza.

Intent on ignoring the results of its failed war, the government says nothing about the fact that the weapons Israel allowed the US to supply to Fatah were surrendered to Hamas without a fight and are now being used to attack Israeli soldiers. Indeed, next week, with full US backing, Abbas is scheduled to demand that Olmert allow him to deploy armored vehicles and a Jordanian brigade in Judea and Samaria, and to equip his forces with bulletproof vests and more guns.

The arrogance and ignorance of Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and their colleagues plays a significant role in the government’s refusal to reconcile itself to reality. But their personal failings tell only part of the story. Both Israel’s political leaders and its military leaders are party to a general conceptual failure that has plagued Israel since the Rabin-Peres government signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO in 1993.

To embrace the PLO, Israel had to abandon its national narrative and adopt the false narrative of peace. Only by so acting was it possible to embrace a terrorist group dedicated to its destruction. Although today Israel has no Palestinian or Syrian partner in peace, and is beset by a global jihad fueled by Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Israel’s policy-makers continue to cling to the peace narrative.

The peace narrative assumes that Israel rather than the Arabs is responsible for the lack of peace in the region, and so Israel, rather than the Arabs, must change its behavior to engender the peace it has blocked. As a result, the peace narrative negates Israel’s right to defend itself from aggression, for doing so would distance the chance of peace. Even worse, an Israeli assertion of its right to self-defense would risk exposing the fact that there is no peace to be had and that Israel is not responsible for its absence.

On the military level, the attraction of an air war for generals is largely a consequence of the peace narrative. If Israel is on the verge of peace, then soldiers shouldn’t be dying, and control of land – which we want to give away for peace anyway – is neither necessary nor desirable. If we still are forced to fight, it is best to do so from an altitude of 20,000 feet. Boots on the ground would involve an acknowledgement that we are at war.

On the political level, the peace narrative has paralyzed strategic analysis and policy-making for 14 years. If we are in a peace process, then it isn’t only that we mustn’t defend ourselves. We mustn’t assert our sovereignty at all. We mustn’t tell the UN that in accordance with Israeli law, Mount Dov is part of the State of Israel. We mustn’t tell the US that Judea and Samaria are Israeli territories and that we haven’t the slightest intention of giving them to our enemies. We mustn’t tell the Palestinians that they have shown they cannot be trusted with international borders and we are therefore taking back the Gaza-Sinai border. We mustn’t acknowledge that Fatah is our enemy or that Syria is an Iranian client state.

A year after the war, we still haven’t found the courage to recognize that security, not peace, is our goal. Until we do, we will remain plagued by war.

– July 12, 2007

II

THE WAR AGAINST THE FREE WORLD

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

– John Stuart Mill

If you let a bully come in your front yard, he’ll be on your porch the next day and the day after that he’ll rape your wife in your own bed.

– Lyndon B. Johnson

MALAYSIAN ROAD MAP

Is Malaysian autocrat Mahathir Mohamad insane?

Many critics of his latest anti-Semitic rant at the annual Islamic Summit Conference last week think so. It was there that he said, “The Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”

For his fellow Islamic heads of state and leaders, Mahathir is not a madman but a sage. Speaking of Mahathir’s speech, Egypt’s foreign minister Ahmed Maher said, “I think it was a shrewd and very deep assessment of the situation.” Maher added, “I hope the Islamic countries will be able to follow this very important road map.”

Given the standing ovation that Mahathir received at the conference, as well as the daily diet of anti-Semitism broadcast and published throughout the Islamic world, it seems safe to say that the views he enunciated are more or less mainstream in the Islamic world today. Because of this, it is important to understand the “road map” set out by Mahathir in his address and assess its ramifications for Israel’s future.

In his 4,200-word homily, Mahathir restated his long-held belief that the Islamic world needs to modernize. For this he has long been touted in the West as a moderate and a reformist. Yet unlike states such as South Korea or Singapore, which view modernization as a goal in and of itself, Mahathir views it as a means to a larger pan-Islamic end. That end is the defeat of the West by the Islamic world.

And the shortest path to eventual victory is the destruction of Israel. Victory goes through Israel, in Mahathir’s view, because although the US and Europe are the true targets, they will only accept Islam as their master after their current masters, the Jews, are destroyed.

The notion that the West is enslaved by the Jews is so outrageous that it is difficult to take Mahathir seriously. But Mahathir is no kook. Indeed, the blueprint for victory that he laid out is already being implemented by many of his coreligionists.

The Saudis, Iranians, Syrians, and Egyptians are actively supporting and abetting the Palestinian terror war against Israel. And lest we tell ourselves that terrorism is not a strategic threat, we need only look to the Philippines to realize what its true destructive potential can be.

There, Islamic terrorists seem to have already attained nonconventional capabilities. On Monday, AFP reported that Philippine security forces recovered traces of possible biological weapons in a raid on a Jemaah Islamiya hideout in the southern Philippine city of Cotabato. The findings included residues of a tetanus virus-carrying chemical. The security forces also found a bio-terror manual at the site.

Aside from intra-Islamic cooperation, Mahathir pointed out that not everyone in the hated West hates the Muslims back. Mahathir counseled the Islamic leaders to use those Westerners who support them and who “see our enemies as their enemies” to advance their goal of world domination. And again, this week, we saw two instances of this occurring.

In the first instance, the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany converged on Teheran on Tuesday and succeeded in postponing the need to deal with the Iranian nuclear weapons program. This they did by accepting the powerless Iranian president Mohammed Khatami’s vaguely worded promise to temporarily stop enriching uranium.

Now Iran has at least another month to enrich uranium without needing to worry about the International Atomic Energy Agency turning the matter over to the UN Security Council. Israel estimates that the Iranian nuclear program will have reached the point of no return by the summer.

Understanding that the Europeans have no interest in actually preventing the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons, Teheran didn’t even wait until the end of the news cycle to expose the agreement as a fraud. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council chief Hassan Rohani told reporters Tuesday evening that the freeze on uranium enrichment would only last for “as long as Iran thinks this suspension is beneficial. Whenever we don’t want it we will end it,” he said.

The UN General Assembly’s decision to condemn Israel for building a security fence is another example of Muslims using non-Islamic allies to advance Mahathir’s agenda. The resolution was introduced by the Arab League. 144 member states voted in favor, four opposed and 12 abstained.

Finally, Mahathir argued that the Islamic world must work with Jews “who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.” Mahathir invoked the precedent of the Prophet Muhammad’s treaty of Hudaibayah with the Koresh tribe in Mecca several times during his speech. In his words,

at Hudaibayah [Muhammad] was prepared to accept an unfair treaty, against the wishes of his companions and followers. During the peace that followed he consolidated his strength and eventually he was able to enter Mecca and claim it for Islam.

What can Israel do to defend against this onslaught? Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz have made clear that Israel cannot accept a nuclear armed Iran. Israel’s anti-ballistic missile defenses are the most sophisticated in the world. And as Israel showed when its F-15s flew over Auschwitz en route to Tel Aviv some weeks ago, Israel has the capacity to conduct long-range bombing missions.

Given the fact that terrorists have and will continue to amass nonconventional capabilities, it is vital that Israel not allow them the space to operate with impunity. This means that the Palestinians must not receive sovereignty over territory unless all terrorist elements in Palestinian society and their support networks have been obliterated.

To ensure Israel’s survival against nonconventional terrorist threats, it is not enough to build a wall. A wall will do nothing against chemical, biological or even tactical nuclear weapons launched on rockets, mortars or artillery shells.

Finally, it is important that Israel be honest with itself and its ally, the US, about the intentions of its enemies. We may not have ever believed we would need to take a delusional bigot like Mahathir seriously. But he seems to be an able spokesman for hundreds of millions of like-minded people.

We must respect these Islamic bigots enough to take their threats at face value. We must look at their intentions and soberly assess their actions and their capabilities.

When Mahathir defined us as the enemy, he did us a favor. He told us where he and the Islamic world stand, and where they intend to go. Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.

– October 24, 2003

HEZBOLLAH’S IRAQI CAMPAIGN

This week it finally happened. Hezbollah came out of the closet and launched a full-scale military campaign against US-led forces in Iraq.

Two weeks after the US shelved its sanctions against Hezbollah sponsor Syria, and as the US remains silent in the face of increased Iranian assertiveness in advancing the mullocracy’s Manhattan Project, the cat jumped out of the bag.

Ushering in his fight against the US, Hezbollah-Iranian front man Moqtada al-Sadr told his followers last Friday, “I am the striking arm for Hezbollah and Hamas in Iraq because the fate of Iraq and Palestine is the same.” Under the spell of Sadr’s call to “terrorize” the Americans, Shi’ite militiamen launched attacks in several cities at once. Militarily, the results have been mixed but have served to cause a political maelstrom by spooking US coalition partners into reconsidering their involvement in Iraq.

Hezbollah’s appearance in Iraq is not a surprise. Although Sadr’s offensive has been sudden, it followed a year-long buildup of Hezbollah’s organizational, propaganda, and military apparatuses in Iraq.

In the weeks before the US-led invasion last March, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was already calling for suicide bombings against US forces in the event that they went through with the invasion. Shortly after the fall of Saddam’s regime, Hezbollah opened offices in Basra and Safwan.

While press coverage of Sadr has portrayed him as a young firebrand who acts autonomously, his connections to Hezbollah and to Iran are long-standing. Nasrallah is personally tied to Sadr’s family. In 1976, he studied under Sadr’s father Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Najaf. Back in Lebanon, Nasrallah joined the Shi’ite Amal militia when it was led by its founder, Sadr’s uncle Musa.

Aside from his personal ties to Nasrallah, Sadr takes his direction from Ayatollah Haeri, one of the most ardent extremists in Iranian ruling circles. And on the family level, Sadr’s aunt is reportedly the first lady of Iran, Mrs. Muhammad Khatami. Iranian Revolutionary Guards reportedly comprise the backbone of Sadr’s fighting force.

At the same time that Hezbollah, like Sadr, was establishing itself in post-Saddam Iraq, mysterious terrorists were systematically killing moderate Shi’ite clerics who were working with the US. First there were the April 2003 assassinations of Abdul Majid al-Khoei and Haider Kelidar in the Ali Mosque in Najaf. Sadr is the chief suspect in Khoei’s murder. Then in August, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim was murdered outside the same mosque. Both Khoei and Hakim were considered moderates who wished for a secular, multiethnic Iraq to succeed Saddam’s dictatorship.

Interestingly, each time another pro-coalition Shi’ite leader has been killed, Nasrallah has studiously called for civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites to be averted at all cost. This message became almost hysterical in the aftermath of the attack on Shi’ite worshipers in Karbala and Baghdad during the Ashoura holiday in early March; 140 worshipers were killed in the bombings.

The day of the bombings, Nasrallah took to the airwaves on Hezbollah TV’s Al-Manar satellite network and called for calm. Referring to Shi’ite-Sunni sectarian strife as “a strategic danger,” he alleged a “conspiracy” to sow hatred between the two groups and insinuated that the Mossad had something to do with the bombings.

In the same address, Nasrallah attacked the Sunni Taliban, claiming they had killed more Sunnis than Shi’ites during their period in power in Afghanistan. He argued that because of their murderousness towards fellow Muslims, the Taliban were responsible for the US takeover of the country and the establishment of a pro-American government that stands opposed to jihad. A similar event, he argued, must be prevented from occurring in Iraq.

Michael Ledeen, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, explained that defeating US-led forces in Iraq is the top priority for Teheran and, by extension, its terrorist proxies. “For Iran, the struggle against the US in Iraq is an existential struggle.”

Echoing Nasrallah’s speech, Ledeen said, “If Iraq is able to achieve stability under a democratic, secular government, after the same has happened in Afghanistan, the Iranian regime is finished.”

The main reason that Hezbollah constitutes a danger of a new order to the US-led occupation forces is because it has succeeded in a way that no other group has in unifying the terrorist forces operating in Iraq in the common cause of defeating coalition forces. It is in this vein that Sadr’s call for unity between Palestinian and Iraqi terror groups becomes understandable.

The Palestinians, as Saddam’s favorite cause, were historically despised by the Iraqi Shi’ites whom Saddam brutally oppressed. Indeed, immediately after Saddam’s downfall last spring, the Iraqi Governing Authority threw Palestinians out of their state-supplied apartments throughout the country as punishment for their support for Saddam.

Embracing the Palestinian cause is a way of building bridges to the Sunni groups that are battling coalition forces in Fallujah, Tikrit, and Ramadi. At least in Ramadi, this unity is further advanced by the participation of Hezbollah’s good friends the Syrians in the fighting.

Iran itself is well placed to project pan-Islamic unity over the issue of Israel. Since 2000, it has become the largest sponsor of Palestinian terror groups, surpassing Saddam’s largesse by leaps and bounds even though the Palestinians are Sunnis.

Islamic Jihad has always been an Iranian group. Even before the Palestinian terror war began in September 2000, Iran began making overtures toward Fatah. They blossomed into a full-blown sponsorship after the Iranian arms ship Karine-A was intercepted in January 2002.

Iran has also picked up the slack in Saudi financing of Hamas, and it is now estimated that it finances at least half of the group’s $30 million annual budget. No doubt, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s decision to officially bring Hamas and Islamic Jihad into his government was influenced by Iranian dominance of all three organizations.

Aside from Hezbollah’s ability to unify the forces fighting the coalition, it is a threat of a new magnitude because Nasrallah is the world master of terrorist warfare. With Syrian and Iranian military sponsorship, he successfully trapped Israel into abandoning the initiative in the fighting in southern Lebanon. Through a nefarious mix of terror, propaganda, negotiations, and blackmail, he forced the government to accept a low-intensity conflict it could not shape through offensive strikes.

Through his brilliant use of psychological warfare Nasrallah was able to convince Israel to cut and run by playing to our worst fear as a nation: that we were fighting a pointless and unnecessary war.

He did so by carefully orchestrating terror attacks at key political junctures and by convincing influential Israeli constituencies that our actions in Lebanon were futile and pointless, and therefore our losses were self-inflicted. These constituencies were then galvanized to act unwittingly as Hezbollah’s representatives to the nation as a whole.

The Israeli experience with Hezbollah, and the fact that Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the Palestinians are now actively supporting and involving themselves in operations against the coalition ought to lead US policymakers to base their current and future actions, both military and political, on an understanding of Hezbollah’s mode of operation and on the limitations to its operations.

Hezbollah’s operations are limited first and foremost by the fact that it lacks the ability to defeat conventional forces militarily. Because of this, it operates in a manner it believes will induce demoralization of coalition members. Militarily this will translate into an attempt to induce a constant low-level bloodletting that will lend the impression of chaos and inability to achieve order and stability.

Given Hezbollah’s operational guidlelines of low-intensity combat mixed with strategic use of information operations, to combat Hezbollah’s effort, it is vital for the administration not to lose control of the tone of the public debate either in Iraq or in the US. The decision to close Sadr’s newspaper was of crucial importance for this reason. As Sadr’s militia is publishing its announcements on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar satellite network, arresting Al-Manar reporters and blocking the station from Iraqi television would also be a vital move.

Domestically, political opponents, like Sens. Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd, should be placed on the defensive for buying into Hezbollah’s psychological warfare in repeating the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam.

Hezbollah also operates under a second limitation. It cannot fight unless it is clear to its state sponsors in Damascus and Teheran that its battle will not place their national interests in danger. If the US agrees, as Israel did, to limit its fight against the terrorists to the battlefield of their choosing, while appeasing their sponsors on other fronts, Hezbollah will fight on forever.

Because of this, US inaction on the issue of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, like its decision to hold up sanctions against Syria, is self-defeating. Similarly, the distinction made by the administration between the jihad against Israel, which can be appeased, and the jihad against the US, which must be defeated, is both unsustainable and destructive.

In Hezbollah, the US has found a dangerous and cunning foe. Hezbollah, together with its state sponsors, strives to reenact against the US in Iraq its success against Israel in Lebanon. If the US learns from, rather than repeats Israel’s mistakes, it will ensure its eventual success in bringing stability and freedom to Iraq, and score an enormous victory in the war on terror as a whole.

– April 9, 2004

STOP NAVEL GAZING

We are in a world war and yet we do not notice it.

Over the past few weeks reports have abounded about the widening berth of the forces of global jihad. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that al-Qaeda linked groups are operating in Africa from the Western Sahara to the Horn of Africa. The jihadis in countries like Niger, Chad and Mali are being financed, trained and indoctrinated by religious authorities from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The recent elections in Indonesia ended with neither major party receiving much more than one fifth of the popular vote. In Indonesia’s parliamentary system this means that the small Islamic parties will be able to exert great influence over the new government which will need to bring them into the governing coalition to rule.

In Nigeria this week Muslim mobs brandishing machetes butchered some thirty Christians in the streets of the city of Kano. The panicked Christians ran for shelter in police stations as they watched their coreligionists butchered and set aflame before their eyes.

The problems in Nigeria began in 1999 after elections brought an end to military rule in the oil-rich country. Today 11 of Nigeria’s 36 states are governed by Sharia law. Rights of women and non-Muslims in these areas have been summarily destroyed. Nigeria’s turn to jihad has been spurred on by foreign Arabs. Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians and Sudanese have all been acting as advisers to the mullahs in Nigeria and have been actively funding and training the Muslim militias that have killed thousands of Christians there over the past few years.

In the Philippines, President Gloria Arroyo has given de facto autonomy over large swathes of the country to an al-Qaeda linked group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front operating in the southern parts of the archipelago dominated by the country’s Muslim minority. The MILF too is supported by the Saudis and other Arab states with money, arms and jihad indoctrination.

Both Western intelligence agencies and casual observers are casting worried glances at Europe itself. With Western Europe’s large and increasingly extremist Muslim minorities demanding cultural autonomy while preaching and funding and training men for jihad, many EU member states are looking more and more like Islamic countries every day.

All of this should be taken into account when we look at the bloody toll of the Palestinian offensive in Gaza and when we observe the American confusion in Iraq today. It should be taken into account because we must realize that our enemies are engaged in a world war against the non-Muslim world. When we consider our daily battles on our limited terrain we must not allow our perceptions to be distorted by that directly before us.

Yet undermine our perceptive powers we have. Although the Palestinians, like their Iranian and Hezbollah overlords, have consistently stated that their aim is to destroy Israel in stages, we Israelis refuse to see the overall picture of their strategy. They execute Tali Hatuel and her daughters on the day of the Likud poll and we fail to understand the message. It is not, “Get out of Gaza, or else.” It is, “Regardless of what you desire, we will push you out of Gaza as we pushed you out of Lebanon and as we will push you out of the rest of Palestine that you refer to as Israel.”

But we don’t see it that way. Our press, like our beleaguered and vain politicians, pushes a different story. In their story, there is no enemy, only Israel. There is no jihad, only settlers provocatively daring to live in their homes and soldiers carrying too much explosive material in their armored personnel carriers and tanks. It is the settlers who “endanger” their children and the soldiers who place too much TNT in their APCS who are responsible for their deaths.

We do not see news analyses of Palestinian societal derangement that manifests itself in cannibalism. We do not see debates of what an Israeli defeat in Gaza means to a society bred from the cradle to the grave on global jihad and its requisite genocide of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel and beyond.

Indeed, we see no discussion of Gaza as part of a larger whole – whether that whole be the entire Land of Israel or the entire non-Muslim world. Because we limit our gaze with super telephoto lenses to see only that immediately before us, our picture of the war being waged against us is taken up almost entirely by ourselves with the enemy barely visible at the outer edges of the frame.

Rather than learning from our mistakes, over the past month or so we have seen our American allies repeat them in Iraq. There, the US has limited its gaze to itself. Can the US forces enter into sacred Shi’ite towns or not? Can US forces engage in house-to-house battles, risking civilian casualties in Fallujah, or not? Can the US empower its allies and weaken its enemies in Iraq without being perceived (by itself) as imperialistic? Can the US continue its occupation of Iraq and campaign to bring freedom to this malformed Arab state when a handful of its soldiers besmirch the honor of their uniforms by abusing Iraqi enemy prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison?

The questions here are not turned to the enemy that transforms sacred cities into armed camps and hides behind civilians, rendering them either fellow terrorists or hostages. The question of why the US would send 135,000 US troops to liberate Iraq only to have them turn it over to the same UN-supported Ba’athist forces they were brought to Iraq to defeat is resoundingly ignored.

The confused Bush administration is not asked why the president should seek the approval of the Arab world for America’s actions or forgiveness for its failings. It is not asked this even though, as the American scholar Fuad Ajami pointed out this week in the Wall Street Journal, the Arabs preferred Saddam’s butchers to the American liberators and prefer to see Iraq revert to pan-Arab fascism and tyranny to its emerging as a secular democracy.

Indeed in the recent weeks of American Israeli-style navel gazing on Iraq, we see little questioning of what US retreats in Fallujah and hesitancy in Najaf do to the forces of jihad throughout the world.

In the US tendency towards Israeli-style self-obsession, we see them like us, buying into the psychological warfare of the enemy aimed at forcing their retreat. So it is that in the barbaric butchering of Nick Berg, the American press reports as fact the terrorists’ contention that Berg’s beheading was retribution for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Of course this is a lie. Daniel Pearl was beheaded before the US invaded Iraq. The workers in Yanbu were murdered a year after the US pulled its military forces out of Saudi Arabia. The US contractors were lynched before the Marines went into Fallujah.

When we pay attention to our enemies and see the scope of their ambitions and depth of their hatred we must come to a revolutionary conclusion. We, Israelis, Americans, and indeed all non-fascistic Muslims constitute the frontline in the war wherever we are. It was not US military deployment in Saudi Arabia that precipitated the September 11 attacks any more than it was the Israeli presence in Lebanon or in Gaza or Judea and Samaria or Jerusalem that precipitated the Palestinian-led jihad against Israel. It is our existence that provokes our enemy.

Our enemies, the forces of global jihad, be they Palestinian or Jordanian, Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian or Iraqi use all the means at their disposal to wage their war against us. From their television and radio stations and newspapers they incite for our destruction and feed us fictions of our own culpability to both strengthen their forces’ will to fight us and to weaken our will to defend ourselves.

In the UN, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and on countless other international stages they seek to criminalize us for our crime of defending our existence. In this they find accomplices among our own self-absorbed elites who are only too happy to blame the war being waged against us on ourselves.

In Israel, our self-obsession has brought about plan after plan all of which have weakened us and our allies in the global struggle. From the Oslo initiative to the retreat from Lebanon to Sharon’s pullout plan from Gaza and parts of Samaria we have hurt ourselves and our allies.

We have hurt ourselves by weakening our ability to recognize our enemies as such, seeing them rather as erstwhile peace partners.

In behaving as though the Palestinian branch of the global jihad is engaging in a war over a few kilometers in Gaza, Judea and Samaria rather than playing a central role in the global jihad against non-Muslims, we are making it harder for our allies, first and foremost the Americans, to see the true nature of the war they too are fighting. If it is only Israeli settlers who are preventing peace by living in mobile homes in Judea and Samaria then perhaps it is only America in its “arrogance” that is preventing the jihadis from coming to a meeting of the minds with the West.

As the jihad spreads throughout the world, we must stop finally with our self-destructive self-absorption. The butchers in Zeitoun who kicked the remains of our soldiers like footballs on Tuesday, like the butchers in Baghdad, Karachi, Riyadh and beyond who kill with barbaric ecstasy and primordial hatred do so not because of anything we have done. They do so because they are barbarians. And if we do not wish to be destroyed, we must do everything to destroy them and nothing to give them hope for victory against us.

– May 14, 2004

AN ATTACK AGAINST US ALL

The barbaric terrorist attacks on Thursday morning in London make us all feel like Englishmen.

Sitting in Jerusalem and watching the scenes on the television screen of emergency workers evacuating wounded from the burned-out bus and of survivors, faces blackened from the underground blasts, describing the frightful events, bend one’s heart toward Britain in its hour of pain.

As we Israelis think of England, it is hard to help from wondering if perhaps, in the hearts of some of the British, the sentiment arose that on July 7, 2005, they became Israelis.

It will take a long time to sort out how the attacks were organized and perpetrated. But one thing is clear enough. Britain was attacked by jihad. In attacking London’s financial center, as in the attacks on the World Trade Center, the object of the terrorists was not merely to kill people, but to harm a way of life, built on freedom and free trade – the way of life of Western civilization.

The reason that it is hard not to wonder if, at their moment of shock, the British people felt a kinship with the Israeli people is because for the past five years, since the Palestinians began their jihad against Israel, Britain has been playing a lead role in distinguishing between jihad directed against Israel and jihad directed against the rest of the world.

In Britain itself, which for the past two decades has hosted some of the ideological leaders of global jihad, the jihadists have made no attempt to hide that their goals are not limited to the Jewish state, or as the common parlance has it, “the occupation,” but rather span the globe.

In the weeks ahead of the British elections in May, Muslim activists stormed mosque meetings and denounced democracy demanding that British Muslims boycott the elections. Even as radically anti-Israel politicians like George Galloway and Oona King tried to outdo one another with their anti-Israel diatribes to win a seat in Parliament, both were attacked by Muslims on campaign stops.

In 2004, anti-Semitic attacks against Jews in Britain increased 42 percent over 2003. Yet, lip service aside, the steady rise of violent anti-Semitism has been greeted with complicity by the government. The Labor Party’s election campaign was marked with anti-Semitic imagery. In one campaign poster, Tory leader Michael Howard was depicted as a hooked-nose Fagin – the anti-Semitic archetype from Oliver Twist. Rather than apologize for the slur, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s adviser Alistair Campbell laughed off the storm, saying that the publicity the poster had generated was worth millions of pounds of free advertising.

In an article published on his website, www.elaph.com, and quoted by MEMRI this past spring, Dr. Ahmad Abu Matar, a Palestinian living in Oslo, discussed the Islamic Liberation Party, active in Britain, which “announces from London its political platform – to establish the Islamic caliphate over all corners of the earth – and declares that the party will suggest to the Queen of England that she convert to Islam, and thus will not have to pay the Islamic poll tax on non-Muslims.”

Last summer, London Mayor Ken Livingstone received Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the main religious authority of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has spawned such movements as al-Qaeda and Hamas, to his City Hall, referring to him as “an Islamic scholar of great respect.” This “scholar” to whom Livingstone gushed, “You are truly, truly welcome,” is a bit of a liberal in Islamist circles. He believes that both men and women should strive to become suicide bombers in the name of jihad.

Just months before, the senior imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Abdul Rahman al-Sudayyis, visited London as well. Sudayyis was welcomed by a minister from Blair’s government as an honored guest of Britain even though he has referred to Jews as “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.”

Rather than accept that the jihadists who live in and visit Britain themselves make no distinction between their anti-British rhetoric and their anti-Semitic rhetoric, the British societal elite, on both the Left and the Right, have been intent on ignoring that in the minds of those who seek their destruction, there is no distinction between the war against the Jews and the war against the Christian West. The vilely anti-Semitic decision by the Anglican Church last week to divest from Israel and companies doing business with Israel is a case in point. The Anglican Church, which has wholeheartedly adopted the anti-Semitic “replacement” theology which asserts that Christianity replaced the Jewish covenant with God, is no doubt so blinded by its anti-Semitism that it is incapable of understanding that it shares the same enemies as the despised Jews.

Responding to the increasing anti-Semitism in his own country, Tony Blair has worked to undermine Israel’s strategic partnership with the United States. Since the September 11 attacks, Blair has been studiously insisting that Arab and Palestinian terrorism against Israel and Jews and concomitant anti-Semitic ideology is wholly distinct from terrorism and jihadist ideology against non-Jews. Over the weekend, on his way to Singapore, Blair made a brief visit to Saudi Arabia to meet with Crown Prince Abdullah and reportedly discussed with him the need for the establishment of a Palestinian state. During his campaign for reelection, Blair paid a visit to the Board of Jewish Deputies and told them, in the midst of the violent anti-Semitism that wracked the campaign, that achieving “peace” between Israel and the Palestinians through the establishment of a Palestinian state was the most urgent foreign policy issue on his agenda. Even as the battles were still raging in the immediate aftermath of the American-British invasion of Iraq, in April 2003, Blair pushed US President George W. Bush to pressure Israel to accept the so-called road map for peace despite Israel’s objections. Blair has offered to train the terror-tainted Palestinian militias and Alistair Crooke, the British EU security coordinator with the Palestinians, has been carrying on a dialogue with Hamas and Hezbollah for years.

The thing of it is, through all of this, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have had great respect for Blair as a leader because of his willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in Iraq despite the toll it has taken both on his standing in his own political camp in Britain and on Britain’s relations with France and Germany. His insistence on remaining true to the Anglo-American alliance even as levels of anti-American sentiment have risen precipitously throughout Europe and in Britain itself in recent years has been honorable and courageous. Israelis see a reason for hope in Blair’s stubborn defense of that partnership. Just as he stands by America, we believe that he will also stand by Israel when at last he accepts the truth that the Palestinian war against Israel is part and parcel of the same jihad that turned Salman Rushdie into a hunted man in Britain and has now turned Britain’s underground system and its buses into scenes from a Tel Aviv cafe.

This past May in a sermon televised on PA television, PA employee Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris said, “We [Muslims] have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews.”

As it is true that Israel stands with Britain in the aftermath of the murderous attacks on its citizens, it is also true that for the civilized nations of the world to win the war against jihad, it is necessary for all to understand that the forces who fight us are the same ones. An attack against any of us – including Israel – is an attack against all of us.

– July 8, 2005

THE NEW ZIONIST OCCUPIERS

The diplomatic campaign against Iran has failed.

After three years of sterile diplomacy, last Saturday the UN Security Council passed impotent sanctions against Iran. Iran greeted the sanctions by announcing its intention to expand its uranium enrichment activities by running an additional 3,000 centrifuges at its nuclear installation in Natanz.

Iran’s contemptuous response to the sanctions indicates that they have come too late. The Security Council resolution is aimed at encumbering foreign assistance to Iran’s nuclear program. But the Iranians no longer need much outside help to develop atomic bombs.

Due to this Iranian invulnerability, many in Israel and the US argue that additional sanctions that would target Iran’s economy, undertaken outside the UN, must be adopted. Israeli diplomats and Bush administration officials have reportedly descended on Europe in the hopes of convincing the Europeans to support NATO sanctions that would isolate Iran economically.

Yet here too, such sanctions would probably come too late to make a difference. As a report recently released by the Institute for Analysis of Global Security in Washington demonstrates, Iran is working steadily to minimize its economic susceptibility to sanctions. To this end it is working to overcome its two principal economic vulnerabilities: its dependence on imported refined oil, and its antiquated oil and gas infrastructures.

Last year Iran signed a $70 billion deal with the Chinese to modernize its oil and gas fields. Iran also signed an oil deal with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez that guarantees its fuel imports will be sanctions-proof.

To make itself immune from the effects of economic sanctions or a possible naval blockade, Iran is building two new oil refineries. It is also moving its transportation sector from oil to natural gas. With the second largest natural gas reserves in the world, an Iranian transportation system that runs on natural gas will be immune to foreign sanctions. Furthermore, by modifying its gas stations and private cars to run on natural gas, Iran is freeing up its oil refineries to produce jet fuel for its air force.

Through these massive economic projects, Iran shows clearly that it is placing its economy on long-term war footing. It will do whatever it takes to ensure it is equipped to acquire nuclear weapons and maintain its control over the global jihad.

This all-out Iranian commitment to jihad is disconcerting to its Sunni neighbors. Yet, tempting as it is to believe that Riyadh and Cairo would help us to fight our common foe in Iran, there is absolutely no chance that they will. In any Islamic contest against Israel or the US, the Arabs will support the jihadists. This is so because Arab despots who have promoted jihadist ideals among their subjects must support jihad against non-Muslims throughout the world to prevent their people from implementing their ideals at home. The support for jihad is what brings together Arab nations of all stripes and colors with their Persian neighbors.

This Arab-Islamic union was given ideological heft last week at a two-day conference in Doha, Qatar. “The Sixth Pan-Arab and Islamic Conference” brought together some 270 leading pan-Arab and jihadist leaders from throughout the world. The jihadists, led by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, included Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, Hezbollah leader Hassan Hadroug and the Iraqi Sunni jihadist ideologue Sheikh Hathir al-Dari. Among the pan-Arabists was Khair al-Din Haseeb, who the US Army refers to as the “father of pan-Arab nationalism.” Iranian and Iraqi Shi’ite ayatollahs also reportedly attended.

Qaradawi announced that the goal of the conference was to merge the pan-Arab and Islamic wars against the US and Israel specifically and against the infidels generally. In his words, “All Arabs, Kurds, Sunni, Shia, right-wingers, left-wingers should be united in the full-scale battle with the enemies. They are launching a political, economic, social and civilizational, and cultural battle against us and we should unify our efforts to stand up to it.”

The participants all echoed Qaradawi’s call for Fatah and Hamas to formally merge and so reflect the wider trend of consolidation in the cause of jihad that is occurring throughout the Arab world.

That the pan-Arabists and Islamists are military allies in the global jihad was made clear this week in the Horn of Africa as Sunday Ethiopia invaded Somalia.

Last June an al-Qaeda-aligned jihadist movement called the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) took control of Mogadishu and so consolidated its control over most of Somalia. The ICU moved swiftly to institute Sharia law, and so transformed Somalia into a Taliban-like state.

The legitimate Somali government, the Transitional Federal Government – a secular regime run by various warlords and tribal chiefs – was isolated in the provincial capital of Baidoa. The ICU is strongly supported by Eritrea. And although it fights neither Americans nor Jews, it is also sponsored by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Yemen and Libya.

In November, the ICU declared jihad against Ethiopia and announced its intention to conquer large chunks of Ethiopian and Kenyan territory. According to the US, the ICU was also planning to assassinate Ethiopian and Kenyan political leaders, and carry out terror attacks in Ethiopia. Surrounded by Sudan and Eritrea to its west and north and the ICU to its east, the government in Addis Ababa decided to help the TFG overthrow the ICU and reinstate its authority. In just four days, it succeeded, as Thursday morning TFG and Ethiopian forces took control of Mogadishu, while ICU forces were on the run.

Unfortunately, in today’s world, apparently nothing breeds condemnation and hatred more than military victories against jihadists.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference has called daily for an Ethiopian pullout from Somalia. So too, the Arab League demands that Ethiopia retreat. With their people on the ground retreating with the ICU, as has been their consistent policy towards Israel, so in Somalia the Arabs and Muslims wish to win at the negotiating table what they cannot achieve on the battlefield.

In this pursuit, they enjoy support from a familiar quarter. Five days before Ethiopia invaded Somalia, the EU attempted to mediate the conflict in a manner that would prolong and legitimize the ICU’s control of Somalia.

On December 20, EU mediator Louis Michel shuttled between Baidoa and Mogadishu. Later that day he triumphantly announced, “There is a strong, good will by both parties to resolve this conflict with political dialogue.”

When word of the Ethiopian invasion got out, Michel – like his associates in the EU Secretariat – moved immediately to condemn Ethiopia. Sunday he said, “I condemn in the strongest terms the escalation of the conflict in Somalia into an all-out war and appeal for all Somali sides to cease immediately all hostilities. I express my deepest concern on the reported involvement of foreign forces in Somalia and urge all external players to refrain immediately from intervening militarily in Somali affairs and provoke [sic] further violence.”

Last week, as he engaged in his shuttle diplomacy, Michel pointedly did not take a public stand regarding the ICU’s declaration of jihad against Ethiopia or its announcement that it would target any UN peacekeepers that entered the country.

Israelis routinely assume that Europe’s pro-jihadist policy towards the Palestinians is a result of anti-Semitism or anger over Israel’s military victory in 1967. But the EU’s treatment of Ethiopia and the TFG indicates that Brussels’ hostility towards the Jewish state is part of a much further-reaching policy. Europe’s pro-jihad position toward the war in Somalia indicates that its support for jihad is overarching rather than limited to specific battlegrounds.

So what we learn from the Qatar conference and the war in Somalia is that a tripartite alliance of Iran, the Arab world and Europe upholds the cause of jihad not merely against Israel and the US, but globally. It is clear that the Iranians are the most dangerous part of the three-headed jihadist Hydra. Like the Arab despots, the Europeans are provoked by cynicism. While the Arab dictatorships embrace jihad to safeguard their regimes, the Europeans support the jihadists in the hope that their support will deflect jihadist violence away from them.

For their part, the Iranians truly believe in the ideals of jihad, which is why Europe and the Arabs oppose them. The Iranian regime wants to see jihad everywhere and so it supports the overthrow of the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Belgium no less than it supports jihad in Israel, Iraq and Somalia.

All this is important for Israel to understand today as it weighs its options towards Iran and the Palestinians. The events in Somalia and Qatar demonstrate that Israel cannot influence the Palestinians’ behavior one way or another because the Palestinians do not stand on their own. They are part of a wider pan-Arab and pan-Islamic trend.

In their jihad against Israel, the Palestinians will receive automatic support not only from Iran, but from the Arab world and Europe as well. So too, the war in Somalia and the conference in Qatar show that supporting the Palestinians is but one aspect of Arab and European global support for jihad. Just as the US was the only country not to call for an Ethiopian retreat this week, so Israel cannot expect to expand its support base beyond Washington.

Ethiopia’s flag once portrayed the Lion of Judah. This is notable for today Ethiopia is becoming the new Zion. If Israel wishes to persevere in the jihad raging against it, it must take close note of what is happening to Ethiopia today.

It is true that Iran threatens the Arabs and Europe. Sadly, as their joint support for the jihad in Somalia indicates, none of them will help us contend with Teheran.

– December 26, 2006

THE LONG ROAD TO VICTORY

The common wisdom in Washington these days is that the Americans will leave Iraq by the end of President George W. Bush’s presidency regardless of the situation on the ground. This view is based on the proposition that Iraq is unwinnable and it has had a devastating impact on the administration’s confidence that it can handle Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Monday’s events brought that impact home starkly. On the one hand, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad came as the US wages a seemingly last-ditch attempt to defeat the insurgency in Iraq. On the other hand, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s performance at the Natanz nuclear installation where he said, “With great pride, I announce as of today our dear country is among the countries of the world that produces nuclear fuel on an industrial scale,” indicated that he, for one, does not believe he has anything to worry about from America.

“Right-thinking” people these days claim that if the US and Britain hadn’t invaded Iraq, everything today would have been perfect. The US would have been loved. The Europeans, Arabs and the UN would be standing on line to support the US in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

As British commentator Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian on Tuesday, “If ever [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair hoped to carry his ‘Western values agenda’ on a white charger to the gates of Teheran, that hope vanished in the mire of Iraq.”

Yet this is untrue. The US’s difficulties with confronting Iran have little to do with the decision to invade Iraq. Rather, America’s feckless diplomacy toward Iran to date is the result of the administration’s early misunderstanding of Iraq and of Iranian and Arab interests.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration identified certain basic guiding realities and missed others. First there was the issue of Arab tyranny. As Bush recalled last September, “For decades, American policy sought to achieve peace in the Middle East by pursuing stability at the expense of liberty. The lack of freedom in that region helped create conditions where anger and resentment grew, and radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits.”

Yet recognizing this basic reality did not lead the administration to adopt appropriate policies. Rather than promote liberty, which at its core revolves around a certain foundational understanding of human dignity, the administration promoted elections – fast elections – in Iraq and throughout the region.

In so doing, the administration placed the cart before the horse, with predictable results. The legacy of tyranny is hatred and dependence. And the values of hatred and dependence were those that were expressed at the ballot boxes in Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. In all these elections jihadists, often allied with Iran, were empowered while those who were considered moderates modified their positions in opposition to the US.

The Americans pushed for elections in the hopes of finding a silver bullet that would instantly solve the problem of tyranny in the Arab world. But in their rush, the Americans trampled the very liberal democrats they sought to empower.

These forces, who receive no money from Iran and Saudi Arabia to buy votes, and have no private militias to intimidate voters, couldn’t compete against the likes of the Dawa Party in Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian Authority.

In Iraq, the one openly liberal party, led by Mithal al-Alousi, won one seat. In the Palestinian elections, all political parties were either directly or indirectly tied to terrorist organizations. And in Egypt, the supposedly liberal Kifaya Party one-upped dictator Hosni Mubarak when it demanded to nullify Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

By pushing fast elections, the US entrapped itself. It inadvertently empowered its enemies and so was unable to embrace the duly elected governments. In opposing the forces it expended so much energy getting elected, the US was perceived as weak, foolish and hypocritical.

After September 11, Bush explained that the attacks showed that the friend of your enemy is also your enemy. As he put it last September, “America makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror, and those that harbor and support them, because they’re equally guilty of murder.”

Yet what Bush failed to note is the converse of that reality: the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. Here the distinction generally relates to Sunnis and Shi’ites. The administration’s failure to grasp that just because Shi’ites and Sunnis are rivals doesn’t mean that they will join forces with the US to fight one another, or won’t join forces with one another to fight the US, has caused the Americans no end of difficulty.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration did recognize this truth. In its handling of the Iran-Iraq War, the Reagan administration adopted a policy of dual containment. The Americans helped both sides enough to ensure they could keep fighting, but too little to enable either side to emerge the victor. Rather than believing the fiction that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Reagan administration advanced US interests by using their rivalry to weaken both.

Rather than follow its predecessor’s example, the Bush administration clung to the delusion that Shi’ites and Sunnis would ally with the US against one another. This fantasy has confounded the administration in every one of its subsequent initiatives toward Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Palestinians.

In Iraq, for three years the Americans treated Mugtada al-Sadr, Teheran’s man in Baghdad, as a potential ally due to the fact that he too is an enemy of al-Qaeda. The delusion only ended finally when Sadr moved to Iran in February ahead of the US surge operation in Baghdad.

The Americans’ treatment of Sadr is similar to its treatment of his state sponsor. Since the fall of Saddam, the Americans have repeated the mantra that Iran and Syria share America’s interest in bringing stability to Iraq because the current instability destabilizes them.

But while it is true that the chaos in Iraq breeds instability in Syria and Iran, it does not follow that the Iranians and Syrians are interested in ending it.

Since Iran and Syria view the US as their enemy, their ideal scenario is for the US to bleed in Iraq while propping up a weak Shi’ite government that has no inclination or ability to threaten them. That is, for Iran and Syria, the current situation in Iraq aligns perfectly with their interests (which explains why they are working so diligently to maintain it).

As for the Arab world, the administration believes that since the Arabs oppose Iran’s quest to become a regional nuclear power, they will help the US both in stabilizing Iraq and in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Here too, the administration confuses common interests with common agendas. The fact that the Arabs share common interests with the US does not make them allies. As a young Saudi imam put it this week to the Wall Street Journal,

We are waiting for the time to attack [the US]. Youth feel happy when the Taliban takes a town or when a helicopter comes down, killing Americans in Iraq. It is a very dangerous situation for the US in the whole Muslim world.

The fruits of America’s disorientation were revealed in last month’s three Saudi summits: the Hamas-Fatah summit, the King Abdullah-Ahmadinejad summit and the Arab League-Iranian summit.

Since last summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah and more intensively since the publication of the Baker-Hamilton Commission report on Iraq last November, the Bush administration has been advancing a vision of an anti-Iranian Arab coalition that will join forces with America to confront and defeat Teheran.

There has been no rational basis for this view since the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians responded last year to Iran’s nuclear advances by announcing that they will get their own nukes. But it took last month’s diplomatic cavalcade in Saudi Arabia to finally destroy the fantasy.

First there was the Hamas-Fatah summit in Mecca where Abdullah undermined the US by promising to pay Hamas terrorists a billion dollars in exchange for their agreement to let Fatah terrorists be their junior partners in government.

If that wasn’t sufficient proof that Abdullah is not a friend, there was his warm and fuzzy love-fest with Ahmadinejad.

Their meeting shocked Israeli, American and British intelligence services, who perceived it as the culmination of a progressive Saudi estrangement from the US. It was preceded by a massive expansion of Saudi ties with China and Russia.

Any notion that the US could expect assistance from the Arabs in contending with Iran disintegrated a week later when Abdullah and Mubarak enthusiastically signed onto the Arab League and Iranian statement referring to the US presence in Iraq as an “illegal occupation.”

Yet for all their overt anti-Americanism and competition with Iran to see who can destroy Israel first, the Arabs have not become Iran’s allies. They do not want Iran to win its war against America. They want to play Iran and the US against one another. That is, the Arabs are implementing the double containment strategy that the US should have adopted toward them.

The fact of the matter is that the Americans are capable of learning from their mistakes. This week, the commander of US forces in Iraq General David Petraeus published a letter to the Iraqi people ahead of the fourth anniversary of Baghdad’s fall. In it, he discussed the anti-American rallies that Sadr organized from Iran.

As Petraeus put it, “On this April 9th, some Iraqis reportedly may demonstrate against the coalition force presence in Iraq. That is their right in the new Iraq. It would only be fair, however, to note that they will be able to exercise that right because coalition forces liberated them from a tyrannical, barbaric regime that never would have permitted such freedom of expression.”

In the end, the protests were ill attended. Now Sadr is whining that he will pull his support for the government as US forces destroy his militia in Diwaniyah and daily release information about Iranian support for the insurgency.

The success the US is now experiencing in Iraq is the result of a process of identifying and correcting mistakes. If such learning could take place regarding the US’s regional strategy, there is every reason to believe that it will contend successfully with Iran and the Arab world. But to correct mistakes it is first necessary to recognize them.

The US is not failing to contend with Iran because it went to war in Iraq. It is failing because it is implementing policies that prefer imaginary silver bullets to real solutions for real problems.

There are no shortcuts in this war. But victory is still waiting at the end of the long and difficult road.

– April 12, 2007

WHERE AMERICA AND IRAQ CONVERGE

General David Petraeus and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker’s long-anticipated Congressional testimonies this week were edifying on two levels.

First, they told us a lot about the complex and challenging nature of the war in Iraq today. In their presentations, the two men did not simply inform the Congress of the estimable, indeed amazing progress that coalition and Iraqi forces have made over the past several months since the new counterinsurgency surge strategy was adopted. They also highlighted the enormity of the challenges facing the US and their coalition and Iraqi allies as they look to the future of the country.

The two men did not deliver their remarks in isolation. Their appearances on Capitol Hill came against the backdrop of shrill denunciations of Petraeus specifically and the war in Iraq in general. Those denunciations were orchestrated by deep-pocketed left-wing anti-war activists, and by Democratic politicians who apparently march to the beat of the activists’ drummers (and bankrollers).

The Left’s preemptive condemnations of Petraeus, and the Democratic politicians’ continuation of the Left’s attacks inside the committee chambers, exposed the troubling direction that American politics have taken in the six years that have passed since legislators from both parties stood shoulder to shoulder outside the Capitol building on September 11, 2001, and sang “God Bless America.” And as Petraeus and Crocker’s reports on the situation in Iraq today and the prospects for Iraq in the future make clear, the Democratic Party’s embrace of radicalism has strategic repercussions for the prospects of the war in Iraq and for the future of global security as a whole.

As Ambassador Crocker explained, after 40 years of Ba’athist tyranny, Iraq emerged in 2003 as a traumatized and fractured society that today is still grappling with basic questions regarding its identity and its aspirations. Its ability to come up with reasonable answers to these existential questions is limited by the war now besetting it. The enemy forces battling in Iraq of course seek through force to provide answers to those basic questions – and their answers obviously will not be good ones for Iraq, for the Middle East or for the world.

Petraeus and Crocker explained that in general, the US and its allies face two distinct enemy forces in Iraq today – al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian-backed Shi’ite forces. As the stunning reversal of the security situation in the al-Qaeda infested Anbar province over the past several months shows, US forces have made great progress against the first enemy.

The US wisely capitalized on tribal leaders’ disaffection with al-Qaeda barbarism and worked with them to launch an offensive against al-Qaeda forces and to bring the Sunni tribes into the political processes in Iraq. As a result of this cooperation, terror and insurgent attacks in Anbar, which as recently as last December was considered “lost,” have gone down some 80 percent. Tribal warriors have joined the Iraqi security forces by the thousands. And for its part, the Shi’itedominated central government in Iraq has embraced the Sunni reversal and is providing monetary and other assistance to the Sunni leaders in Anbar province.

On the other hand, there has been no decrease, indeed according to Crocker and Petraeus there has been an increase in Iranian-directed attacks in recent months. Characterizing Iran’s role Petraeus said, “It is increasingly apparent to both coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds Force, seeks to turn the Iraqi Special Groups [Shi’ite militias] into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.”

The disparity between al-Qaeda’s defeats and Iran’s Shi’ite countersurge tells us something important about the difference between state-controlled operations and operations by nonstate belligerents. It is true that al-Qaeda in Iraq has direct ties to Syria and Iran. Its leaders have ties to Syrian intelligence, its commanders in Iraq are largely directed by al-Qaeda’s Shura Council in Iran, and it receives arms and funding from Teheran and Damascus.

But still there is a major difference between Iranian and Syrian sponsorship of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian support for the Shi’ite militias there. Iran and Syria view al-Qaeda as a proxy of convenience. Although its war in Iraq serves their goal of preventing a post-Saddam Iraq from developing into a coherent, multiethnic, stable state governed by the rule of law, al-Qaeda is not an Iranian (or Syrian) organization. From their perspective, its contribution to the war effort against the US and its Iraqi allies is good for as long as it lasts.

In contrast, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, the Dawa Party and the Badr Brigades are agents of the Iranian regime, as are Hezbollah and the Iraqi Special Groups.

Petraeus noted that both the US and the Iraqis were surprised by the depth of Iran’s involvement in the war. But they needn’t have been. Iraq and Iran, with their historic competition for primacy in the Persian Gulf and within Shi’ite Islam, have always been integrally and competitively linked. In the 1980s, recognizing the hostility of both countries to US national security interests, the Reagan administration wisely adopted a policy of dual containment toward them.

Unfortunately, in 2003, the US ignored the interconnectedness of the two countries’ fates, and so it adopted divergent policies toward them. While Iraq was confronted, Iran was ignored. Over time, the US policy of neglecting Iran was eventually replaced by a policy of appeasement. This divergence in US policy toward the two countries enabled Iran to renew its traditional bid for control over Iraq just as it was making moves toward regional domination through its nuclear weapons program, its co-optation of the Syrian regime, the expansion of its military and political influence over Lebanon through Hezbollah, and its sponsorship of the Palestinian war against Israel.

Iran’s offensive moves in Iraq point to one of the most basic strategic complexities of the entire battle in Iraq. Iraq does not exist in isolation. It is part of the Arab and Islamic worlds. The pathologies plaguing post-Saddam Iraq are not merely the consequence of his brutal totalitarianism. They are also consequences of the pathologies that have taken hold of the Arab and Muslim world since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire 90 years ago. As a result, the American goal of shepherding the development of a democratic, stable post-Saddam Iraq governed by the rule of law, while the rule of the jackboot, the mullah and the imam remain the order of the day in neighboring countries, has always been problematic.

With Petraeus and Crocker’s openness in acknowledging Iran’s central role in the war in Iraq, we are seeing for the first time an admission that it is counterproductive to view Iraq in isolation from its neighbors. And this acceptance of the regional nature of the war exposes one of the central risks inherent in the US’s current counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.

Perhaps the central component of the US strategy for stabilizing Iraq is the organization and training of the Iraqi army and police forces. While the majority of Iraq’s security forces are loyal to their commanders and to the central government, and support the coalition forces they fight alongside, many Iraqi units have been infiltrated by enemy forces – most prominently, by members of Iranian-sponsored Shi’ite militias.

As Petraeus and Crocker warned this week, if the US Congress or the next administration decides to pull the plug on American-led efforts in Iraq, the results will be horrendous. Both men warned that a rapid withdrawal of US forces would likely cause the disintegration of the country, and Iran can be trusted to snatch key pieces of Iraq for itself. But beyond that, a US withdrawal would set adrift nearly half a million US-trained and armed forces who will undoubtedly seek out new sponsors.

The implications of the disintegration of the Iraqi forces for regional and indeed for global security are terrifying to imagine, and the policy ramifications of such an eventuality are clear. If the US plans on a quick exit from the country, the best thing it could do is to stop training and arming the Iraqi army.

This brings us to the strategic danger implicit in the raw hostility and irrationality of the American Left toward everything related to the Iraq campaign, which was expressed so openly in Congress and in the liberal US media this week. When a formerly responsible Congressional leader like the Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee Tom Lantos prefers belittling Petraeus and calling for speedy withdrawal of US forces and a “diplomatic surge” involving negotiations with Syria and Iran over accepting the responsibilities of US global leadership in time of global war, it is clear that something horrible has happened to the Democratic Party.

As the Wall Street Journal put it on Tuesday, the hard Left, which seems to have been catapulted to the leadership of the Democratic Party, “sees politics as not so much an ongoing struggle but a final competition.”

The Journal continued,

Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy.

Much criticism has properly been heaped on the lap of the Maliki government in Iraq for failing to make critical political progress that could improve the long-term prospects for post-Saddam Iraq. Governmental competence is imperative because as Petraeus explained, “the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources.”

Petraeus continued, “The question is whether the competition takes place more – or less – violently.”

What is notable about Petraeus’s statement is that it can be equally applied to all countries. Politics and warfare are both about the relative distribution of power. What separates democracies from tyrannies and failed states is that democracies determine power’s distribution through deliberation and debate while tyrannies and failed states are governed by the rule of the gun and the laws of the jungle.

That the political party now in control of both houses of Congress and well positioned to form the next administration seems to have discarded this basic truth is far more dangerous for Iraq, the Middle East and indeed the entire world than the chronic weakness, incompetence, double dealing and corruption of the Maliki government or of any successor government.

The strategy that the US has adopted in Iraq, which has met with such success in the brief time it has been operative, is a long-term strategy. Unless the Democrats regain their senses, it will be difficult for anyone to trust that the US won’t simply abandon Iraq, and with it, its responsibility as the leader of the free world in the midst of a global war.

– September 12, 2007

III

ISRAEL ALONE

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

– Winston Churchill

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

– Edmond Burke

WASHINGTON WON’T LET ISRAEL WIN

Wednesday’s New York Times led with the banner headline “New Strategy Set by US and Saudis for Mideast Crisis.” The article cited administration sources, explaining that the outcome of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s visit to US President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, was a “division of labor” between the two. The Saudis are to deliver Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to the negotiating table, and Bush is to deliver Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, starting at their meeting on Monday. The endgame, according to the article, is the establishment of a PLO state along the lines set out by President Bill Clinton in December 2000.

The Clinton proposal, which was declared null and void by the Bush administration early last year, envisioned the establishment of a Palestinian state in about 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of the Gaza Strip, eastern Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, and the Halutza dunes inside pre-1967 Israel.

The Clinton proposal also gave legitimacy to the Palestinian demand for a “right of return,” allowing for the immigration of several thousand in the framework of family reunification.

If the Times’ report is true, (and the Times seems to have a knack for forcing events to follow its stories), it can be said that the Bush administration is quite simply following in the footsteps of all US administrations since Dwight Eisenhower’s – allowing Israel to beat Arab aggression militarily, but forcing it to lose the war politically.

So it was in 1956, when Eisenhower forced David Ben-Gurion to beat a speedy retreat from the Sinai and Gaza at the end of the Suez campaign. The president justified the uncompromising demand by promising Israel that if the Egyptians were again to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, the US would send its navy to reopen the waterway by force. In 1967, when Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the straits, President Lyndon Johnson begged off, forcing Israel to stand alone.

After the Six-Day War, which should have led to a complete political reshuffling of the region, the US again protected Israel’s neighbors.

Adopting UN Security Council Resolution 242, the US again dragged Israel along by extolling the resolution’s balance – conquered land would be returned to the aggressors, but not all of it, for Israel would be allowed to retain all territory necessary to ensure it had “defensible” borders. Promises aside, since the Carter administration, the US has accepted the Arab misinterpretation of 242 – that Israel is required to return all the lands it conquered.

In 1973, the US administration was again on hand, wresting the Egyptians from the jowls of defeat. Henry Kissinger prevented Israel from destroying Egypt’s Third Army, allowed the Egyptians to escape with honor and thus enabled the creation of the current Egyptian myth – that Israel lost that war.

The Ford and Carter administrations strongly pressured Israel to sign away the Sinai in exchange for peaceful ties with Egypt, which after 23 years have yet to materialize, although Egypt, rearmed with American assistance, now poses a military threat unimaginable in the past.

In Lebanon in 1982, the Reagan administration stepped in to save a routed Arafat. The Americans paved the way for his escape with his troops from Beirut to Tunis, free to fight another day. In the meantime, the US forced Israel to withdraw from much of Lebanon and allowed the Syrian army to remain.

And in the Gulf War, the first Bush administration not only prevented Israel from achieving political advantage, it prohibited Israel even from defending itself against unprovoked Iraqi ballistic missile attacks. After isolating Israel from the coalition, the administration proceeded to force its democratic ally to the negotiating table to discuss the transfer of territory to the Arabs. When the negotiations failed to bear fruit, the administration meddled in the 1992 elections to assist in the victory of the more forthcoming Labor Party.

Although the Clinton administration served in a decade unscathed by large-scale war, but marked by an increase in rogue states’ audacity and terrorist attacks on US targets, Clinton consistently urged Israel to accept Palestinian terrorism and insisted on turning a blind eye to blatant PA breaches of its commitments to Israel. The Clinton administration’s addiction to pressuring Israel to accept Arab aggression under the guise of peacemaking led to unprecedented meddling in Israel’s internal politics. The end result could be seen in the twin pictures of Clinton impertinently announcing his peace plan after his successor had already been elected, and Madeleine Albright chasing after Arafat outside the US embassy in Paris in a vain attempt to get him to return to the negotiating table he had just overturned.

The refusal of successive administrations to locate the US embassy in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, is not simply an indignity, but another example of how the US has consistently prevented Israel from gaining any political advantage from its military victories against Arab aggression.

Why has the US treated Israel so shabbily? Mainly because it can get away with it. After all, Israel has no other diplomatic outlet, given that the American people is not as cynical as the State Department. Throughout this history, the US has justified denying its democratic ally the fruits of its military victories against despotic aggressors “in the interests of peace.” This policy has never brought peace, nor has it engendered stability. Rather, just as feeding the beast acts not to placate it but to strengthen it, so US placation of the Arab world at Israel’s expense has legitimized Arab rejection of Israel.

Never having to worry about losing irrevocably in their wars against Israel, rogue states like Syria, Iraq and Iran ostentatiously build up nonconventional capabilities to destroy Israel. For their part, supposedly moderate regimes, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are free to inspire as much anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment as they wish, knowing there will never be a serious price to pay, even if this hatred foments a war they will lose.

Today Bush, perhaps to a degree even greater than his predecessors, has sole power to determine which side will emerge victorious from the current Palestinian terrorist war against Israel.

And what would a much maligned and dreaded Israeli political victory over the current terrorist war look like? First and foremost, it would see Arafat’s physical disappearance from the scene and the dismantling of his Palestinian Authority as a political and military organization. Just as in Afghanistan today and hopefully in Iraq in the near future, the US has and will set up friendly, quasi-democratic governments, so Israel, or the US, would set up a new Palestinian government, committed to coexistence with Israel and the provision of political and economic freedom to the Palestinian people. Although sovereignty would not be promised, the chances of sovereignty being achieved, naturally and peacefully, would be greatly enhanced if the Palestinian people is allowed to develop democratic institutions and economic prosperity.

There is nothing wrong, immoral, imperialistic, or even anti-Palestinian about this plan. In fact, it would allow the Palestinians the opportunity to reconstitute their civil society after eight years of living under a corrupt dictatorship, which impoverished and subjugated them and told them to value murder more than life.

The only thing wrong with this plan is that it allows Israel to win this war politically.

In seemingly siding with the Saudis over Israel, the Bush administration has opted for the status quo, even though the status quo has failed repeatedly. On September 11, the US was attacked by the consequences of the status quo. Decades of hatred of the US, fuelled by despotic, US-backed regimes that have seen the value of US guarantees as successive administrations have sold Israel out to Arab pressure, empowered al-Qaeda to strike. The belief that today the US is again preventing Israel from defeating the PA has made Arafat stronger than he ever was before. It should have been clear by now that the Palestinian terrorist war against Israel, supported by Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Syria, together with al-Qaeda’s war against the US – backed by the same governments – have rendered the status quo not only destined to failure, but also dangerous to US interests.

Given the almost schizophrenic nature of the US administration’s Middle East policies, it is still anybody’s guess what Bush will decide to do. One thing is certain though: for the US to be able to win its war on Islamic terrorism, Israel must be allowed to win its war on Palestinian terrorism, both militarily and politically.

– May 3, 2002

ISRAELI VICTIMS DON’T COUNT AT STATE

Americans this week have been swamped with dire pronouncements by their leaders warning that additional terrorist attacks on US soil are a foregone conclusion. From Vice President Richard Cheney to FBI Director Robert Mueller, Americans this week were told it is only a question of time before they will again experience mass murder similar in scale to the September 11 attacks.

Also this week it surfaced that on March 27, the very day the Arab League convened in Beirut to discuss the much touted Saudi “peace plan,” a clandestine conference of leading al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas operatives took place in the Lebanese capital. Given this confluence of discoveries and warnings, one could have reasonably expected that the State Department’s annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report, released on Tuesday, would be a no-holds-barred explication of the threats posed by terrorist organizations and their sponsors against which the US is currently at war.

Secretary of State Colin Powell himself gave cause to believe the report would meet this expectation when, in releasing the document, he announced, “This report, mandated by Congress, is the 22nd such annual report to chronicle in grim detail the lethal threat that terrorism casts over the globe.”

Sadly, at least with regards to Palestinian terrorism against Israel, the report is a painful disappointment. Far from detailed, and a football field shy of the truth, it paints a muted, almost apologetic picture of Palestinian terrorism. So far from accurate is the version of events that one is given pause to consider whether the State Department is committed to playing a helpful role in winning the war against terrorism.

An examination of the report must first begin with its reporting on terrorist attacks. Its “Chronology of Significant Terrorist Incidents, 2001” lists all terrorist incidents that occurred worldwide during 2001 that the department deems “significant.” According to the report, “An International Terrorist Incident is judged significant if it results in loss of life or serious injury to persons, abduction or kidnapping of persons, major property damage, and/or is an act or attempted act that could reasonably be expected to create the conditions noted.”

As Aaron Lerner of Independent Media Review Analysis news service notes, the chronology contains only nine incidents of Palestinian terrorism against Israel in all of 2001. It is far from clear how the State Department chose which attacks to mention. Some of the nine took place within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, and others took place outside of them. Some were large-scale massacres, while others were isolated drive-by shootings. The most likely explanation is that the State Department considered significant only attacks in which non-Israelis were killed or wounded, as in all but one of the nine, foreign nationals were among the victims.

While not included in the department’s own definition, a determination that the only “significant” terrorist incidents are those which involve harm to non-citizens of the state in which the acts are perpetrated could perhaps be defended if it were applied across the board. But going over the list, it is clear that this is not the case. The State Department provides relatively detailed accounts of 37 terrorist incidents in India, none of which involved any non-Indian victims.

Thankfully, the massacres at the Dolphinarium discotheque and Sbarro restaurant make the list. The Dolphinarium massacre apparently warranted note because among the 21 victims was Sergei Pancheskov of Ukraine. Similarly, Sbarro presumably receives notice because among the 15 dead were two American citizens and five members of the Schijveschuurder family, who held dual Israeli-Dutch citizenship (although the State Department mentions only that they were Dutch). Again this is unclear, because the report fails to mention that another victim of the Sbarro attack was a tourist from Brazil.

The Foreign Ministry, which lists victims murdered in terrorist attacks since the start of the Palestinian terrorist war on its website, counts 95 terrorist attacks in 2001 that resulted in 191 fatalities. The total death toll from attacks noted by the State Department is 56.

Among the 86 terrorist attacks and 146 victims the State Department deemed insignificant were the assassination of tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi on October 17; the massacre of 15 (including one Philippine national) on an Egged bus in Haifa on December 2; the murder of ten Israelis in an attack on a Dan bus outside of Emmanuel on December 12; the March 26 murder of ten-month-old Shalhevet Pass, gunned down by sniper fire while being wheeled in her baby carriage at a playground in Hebron; and the murder of five and wounding of 100 Israelis blown up by a Palestinian terrorist outside a shopping mall in Netanya on May 18, to name just a few examples.

Then there’s the problem of characterizing Palestinian terrorism. Although the Aksa Martyrs Brigades made the list of foreign terrorist organizations, the report claims that sources of external aid to the group are unknown. This even though Israel provided documentary evidence to the State Department proving that Yasser Arafat personally authorized payment to the group; that the brigades are indistinguishable from Tanzim and work closely, if not seamlessly, with Tawfik Tirawi’s General Intelligence Service in the West Bank; and that members of Arafat’s security forces double as members of the Aksa Brigades.

As regards Tanzim, in the country report concerning Israel and the PA, the State Department claims that Tanzim “is made up of small and loosely organized cells of militants drawn from the street-level membership of Fatah.” Here too, the State Department ignores the facts. The fact is that Tanzim itself has claimed that Arafat is the organization’s supreme leader and that Marwan Barghouti, the head of Fatah in the West Bank, is its field commander. Israel, again, has provided documentary evidence proving conclusively that Arafat siphoned funds from the PA budget, to the tune of $200,000 per month, to each of the Tanzim regional commanders in the West Bank.

When questioned about the documents provided to the US government by Israel, Ambassador Francis Taylor, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, stated, “We don’t have any question about the authenticity of the documents provided by the Israeli government. We are continuing to study those documents and to draw our own conclusions about what they mean.”

Clearly, the documents meant nothing for those who wrote and approved the State Department’s 2001 report.

The terrorism report also notes and to a certain degree draws conclusions about international links among terrorist organizations and between these organizations and states that support their actions. Yet somehow, when it comes to state support for terrorism against Israel, no conclusions are drawn.

For instance, there’s the problem with arms smuggling. While the State Department applauds Egypt’s actions in combating terrorism, it makes no mention of the rampant arms smuggling taking place along the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip. Very rarely does a week go by without an IDF announcement about another tunnel for arms smuggling at Rafah being exposed and destroyed. Only this past week, the IDF exposed a massive tunnel, complete with electric lighting and a telephone cable connecting Palestinian Rafah with Egyptian Rafah. The Egyptian government has done nothing to stop this illicit flow of arms, and on several occasions Egyptian soldiers have fired on IDF troops patrolling the international border.

Further, the report contains bizarre accounts of Israel’s capture of the Santorini and Karine-A weapons ships. Of the Santorini capture, the report states, “In early May, the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) tried to smuggle weapons into Gaza aboard the Santorini.” While no doubt an accurate description, the report makes no mention of the fact that the arms were destined for PA forces.

The account of the Karine-A capture is even more incomprehensible. Given that the interdiction occurred in January 2002, the State Department was not obliged to make mention of the episode at all, but since it did, one could expect for it to do so accurately. And yet, here too, underplay was the order of the day. According to the report,

In January 2002, Israeli forces boarded the vessel Karine-A in the Red Sea, and uncovered nearly 50 tons of Iranian arms, including Katyusha missiles, apparently bound for militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Apparently? The captain of the ship, Omar Achawi, was the deputy commander of the PA’s naval police. Its crew was Palestinian. The commander received his orders from Arafat directly, and the entire operation was reportedly agreed upon last May when Achawi accompanied Fuad Shubaki and Arafat to Russia and met secretly with Iranians, while Arafat met with President Vladimir Putin.

President George W. Bush himself implicated Arafat directly. Briefing reporters after meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on February 7, the president said in response to a question about maintaining contact with Arafat, “Mr. Arafat has heard my message...that he must do everything in his power to reduce terrorist attacks on Israel. And that at one point in time, he was indicating to us that he was going to do so, and then all of the sudden a ship loaded with explosives shows up that most of the world believes he was involved with.”

“Most of the world” apparently does not include the State Department.

Saudi support for Palestinian terrorism is similarly downplayed and distorted. While Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayaf personally set up a fund paying the families of dead terrorists $5,333 each after September 11, the State Department limits its characterization of Saudi support for Hamas to funding from “private benefactors in Saudi Arabia.”

This past week, terror warnings caused traffic halts on the Brooklyn Bridge as New Yorkers were forced to wait until police investigated a “suspicious package.” New York police officers came over here to learn from the Israel Police how to deal with suicide attacks in population centers. Since September 11, the fact that the forces attacking Israel and the US are one and the same has become obvious. The State Department terrorism report’s whitewash of this reality jeopardizes the ability of both nations to destroy this threat to their countries and citizens.

– May 24, 2002

DEPENDING ON THE ENEMY

Hamas has joined the big leagues. No longer can it be seen as a local terror group that concentrates its efforts on destroying Israel. According to testimony given last week to the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee by Lt. Gen. Peter Pace, the deputy chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hamas has joined Hezbollah and al-Qaeda in the Triple Frontier Zone in Latin America where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay converge. There the Islamic terror groups train recruits, gather intelligence on targets for attacks, launder money and sell drugs.

Hamas is usually viewed as a local phenomenon. When in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks President George W. Bush announced that the US war on terror would target “every terrorist group of global reach” it was generally assumed this meant Palestinian terror groups were off the target list.

These organizations were seen as distinct from groups such as al-Qaeda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayyaf or Ansar al-Islam that attacked mainly non-Israeli targets. By so distinguishing Palestinian terror organizations the Americans have, to date, been able to view the terror war against Israel as categorically distinct from the world jihad against the US and other Western countries.

This distinction never made much sense. The fact that Islamic charities such as the Holyland Foundation, which were shut down in the US in the aftermath of September 11, funded both al-Qaeda and Hamas made it clear that separating their operations was at best a dubious enterprise. Consistent Palestinian public support for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden – evidenced by opinion polls, the official PA media and public demonstrations – also gave the lie to the notion that the Palestinian terror war is in a class by itself.

But if in the past the distinction was difficult to justify, it became downright untenable in the wake of the murder of three US officials in Gaza last October. It is not simply that Palestinian terrorists targeted American officials. Nor is it just that the attack has been followed up by an official PA cover-up of the affair. The fact is that official PA media in the weeks preceding the attack conducted targeted incitement against the officials who were murdered.

This week US Ambassador Dan Kurtzer decried the PA show trial of four men it claims were behind the October attack.

The trial, which was conducted behind closed doors last Saturday, came in the wake of a US decision to offer a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the attack. Kurtzer said Monday that not only does the US consider the trial proceedings unacceptable, it also finds the charges inexplicable. Kurtzer admonished:

We’re not even sure that the charge sheet that has been put together reflects the gravity of the crime. The charges seem to implicate these individuals for involuntary manslaughter rather than what we would call first-degree murder.

US anger at the PA is well founded. Kurtzer is known for his strong affinity with the Israeli peace camp. And yet, given the mountain of evidence of PA involvement in terrorism, he could not avoid concluding that

The road map failed because of terrorism. It failed because Palestinians had not only not done enough to stop terrorism and had not done enough to uproot the terrorist infrastructure, but in the wake of the terrorism directed against Israeli citizens..., the Palestinians did nothing.

Even the EU is no longer finding it possible to ignore PA involvement in terrorism. At the beginning of the week the Berlin Morgenpost newspaper published the results of an investigation by the EU’s fraud investigations unit OLAF into the misuse of EU funds by the PA. The investigators were in Israel two weeks ago to check IMF allegations that $1.1 billion dollars of the EU’s aid to the PA was illegally diverted.

According to the Morgenpost, OLAF investigators found that Yasser Arafat has diverted a large portion of the EU’s assistance to the Fatah’s Aksa Martyrs Brigade terror cells and to other Palestinian officials.

And yet, in spite of the fact that Hamas is clearly operating on a global level and in spite of the fact that the PA has been exposed for what it is, the US, like the EU, refuses to recognize the Palestinian war against Israel as an integral part of the world terror war that the US is fighting against.

In the same speech on Monday, Kurtzer said of the security fence,

If Israel makes a decision that the security fence is an important adjunct to its security then the United States will support that. However, if decisions on the routing of the fence are taken for reasons that have less to do with security and more to do with politics then we will have problems with it.

The question is, why does the US still insist that Israel cannot take any actions that will break the deadlock in the Palestinian war? Why is it that the US will not back Israeli actions that would bring it a political and military victory against the PA?

The answer was made clear this week. Led by Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday the OPEC oil cartel announced that it was cutting back oil production by one million barrels a day starting in April and would immediately eliminate the 1.6 million barrels a day of excess production over its standing quotas.

Reacting to the announcement, US Secretary of the Treasury John Snow said that “higher energy prices act like a tax and are certainly not welcome.”

In response to Snow’s remarks, Reuters reported that the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh shot back “saying that that the US has no right to warn OPEC against cutting oil output and accusing Washington of waging war on the cartel under the guise of protecting the global economy.”

Were the US to acknowledge that the Palestinian war against Israel is in fact an integral part of the global jihad against the West, it would find itself in open hostilities with Saudi Arabia which, with a quarter of the world’s proven oil reserves, has the power to seriously damage the global economic recovery. And yet, the Saudis, who are the largest backers of Sunni terrorists like al-Qaeda and Hamas, are in fact the enemy of the US.

America’s dependence on foreign sources of oil has brought about the unprecedented situation where it is engaged in a world war against an enemy it is partly dependent on. Imagine what World War II would have looked like if Adolph Hitler had controlled the world steel markets.

And so it is that the US finds itself pursuing its current policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. The fact of the matter is that Israel is one of the US’s staunchest and most valuable allies in the global war against terrorism. While the US media is filled with reports about the overextension of US forces worldwide, the Bush administration not only makes no use of Israel’s capabilities, but it places stringent limitations on Israel’s ability to carry out operations in its own defense.

In the run-up to the November presidential elections, the Bush White House finds itself on the defensive for its actions in the war on terror. Perhaps America’s reluctance to articulate clearly who its enemies and allies really are is one of the main reasons it is losing control of the debate on the war as a whole.

– February 2, 2003

POLLARD’S FREEDOM AND OUR FREEDOM

Jonathan Pollard is one of the most polarizing figures of our times. Pollard, a former intelligence analyst in US naval intelligence, has now served 20 years of a life imprisonment sentence following his conviction for transferring classified US intelligence materials relating to Arab ballistic missile and nonconventional weapons programs to Israel from May 1984 until his arrest in November 1985.

For his contribution to Israel’s security and for his long suffering in prison, Israelis consider Pollard a national hero. He is commonly considered the source of Israel’s preparedness for the Iraqi missile attacks during the Gulf War. Israelis across the Right-Left and religious-secular divide are basically unified in their hope to greet Pollard in Israel as a free man.

For many American Jews, Pollard is reviled as a traitor. Since his arrest, a cloud of suspicion has hung over all Jews employed in the Pentagon, the State Department, the US military and intelligence services. Time after time, baseless allegations surface of American Jews spying for Israel. In spite of Israel’s strategic alliance with the US, American intelligence agencies define Israel as a “country of concern” for intelligence breaches and American Jews are under constant, often malicious scrutiny. All a person has to do to expose the deep frustration of Washington Jews with the constant discrimination by intelligence agencies is mention the name “Pollard.” Immediately he will be showered with bitter statements like, “If it weren’t for that traitor, we wouldn’t be in this position,” and, “I hope he rots in jail.”

For the past 12 years Pollard has been incarcerated in Butner Federal Prison in North Carolina. He was transferred to Butner from Marion Federal Prison in Illinois where he was held in a subterranean cell in solitary confinement for seven years. Pollard’s treatment, like his life sentence, is unprecedented in the history of US espionage investigations. Never has a spy in the employ of a friendly country received such a sentence. On average, spies working for countries considered US allies receive four to seven years in jail. Aldrich Ames, the most notorious spy in recent history, who as head of the CIA counterintelligence department compromised all US intelligence emanating from the Soviet Union for over 15 years and caused the death of more than ten US agents operating in the Soviet Union – while sentenced to life in prison – was never placed in solitary confinement for stretches comparable to Pollard.

I went to see Jonathan Pollard last week. During a two-and-a-half-hour meeting, we spoke at length about his espionage, the conditions of his imprisonment, his feelings toward the US, Israel, the Jewish people and his hopes for the future.

Pollard is now 50 years old. He grew up in South Bend, Indiana. He studied political science, economics and classics at Stanford University and was studying towards a doctorate in military history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts when he was recruited in 1979 by Naval Intelligence.

Pollard first visited Israel in 1971 for a summer program at the Weitzman Institute. He refers to his Jewish background as “modern-Orthodox, American style. The centrality of Israel for the Jewish people was emphasized.”

I had thought constantly about aliya, but it’s hard to pick up and leave the “Golden Medina.” My parents are proud Americans. My father is a decorated Army officer. He carries a copy of the US Constitution in his pocket. But when I joined Naval Intelligence my father warned me that it’s not a good place for a Jew. There is a lot of anti-Semitism there. But even when I saw it, I thought it would be better for me to stay.

Today at Butner, Pollard is employed as a window washer. His life is one of constant terror.

I will give you an impressionistic description of my life. It involves constant noise, constant violence; profanity – every conceivable type of profanity. There is no place to be quiet or to find quiet – to read. You really have to be disciplined not to be provoked. You need to be disciplined to see when a situation is getting out of hand and to get away as quickly as possible. I have to be ready if my door opens at two in the morning.

I live in a small room, not in a cell, with a roommate. My room is so small that when I sit on my bed and stretch out my arms I touch both of the walls. And it is impossible to lock the door. When I am not washing windows I spend my day reading and listening to the radio – to NPR and the BBC.

The prison has television sets set up in common rooms for inmates. His fellow inmates include murderers, rapists, armed robbers, pedophiles and other violent criminals. On September 11, Pollard was in the TV room, watching CNN.

What did you feel when you saw the World Trade Center and the Pentagon attacked?

I felt sick to my stomach. The worst thing for me was that a lot of the Muslim inmates here greeted the attacks by saying Alla Akhbar and cheering.

But why would it bother you to see the US under attack? After all, you betrayed this country.

To this, Jonathan gave me a look of profound sadness and said,

I fell in love with two women – Israel and the US. It doesn’t work in private life, and it doesn’t work in politics. My reaction to September 11 was as an American. As an American, I believe that this country is guarding the gates of Western civilization from the barbarians.

In 1983, shortly after Israel and the US signed a memorandum on intelligence sharing, then deputy director of the CIA Admiral Bobby Ray Inman unilaterally breached the agreement by stopping all intelligence transfers to Israel on Arab and Muslim states not directly bordering Israel. This included Iraq, Iran, Libya, Tunis and Pakistan. Inman was hired after leaving the agency by a company called International Signal and Control. The company’s owner, James Guerin, was imprisoned later for transferring military technology to Iraq and South Africa.

Pollard, who was privy to the now embargoed intelligence, believed that Israel faced the specter of chemical and biological warfare attacks from these countries. Pollard claims that he considered all legal venues for ending the embargo but felt that informing the media, testifying before Congress or involving the US Jewish leadership of the situation would all be ineffective.

He claims also that

there was an incident during Operation Peace for the Galilee that provided me with my introduction to the US-Israel “special relationship.” I saw the incredible cynicism with which the US views Israel. It flew in the face of everything that I thought was the point of the relationship. The way I viewed the world was destroyed. I had never before thought that my loyalties towards the US and Israel were in contradiction. But then I understood.

What did you understand?

I understood that we are alone.

Pollard argues that his decision to spy for Israel, and thus betray the US, stemmed from his conviction that he “was preventing a second Holocaust.”

One can question whether it was necessary for him to prevent it personally, or whether he could simply have quit his position, informed the responsible Israeli officials of the mounting dangers and let Israel – with its intelligence agencies and military – contend with the issue as a sovereign state. But the fact is that Pollard chose himself for the task and Israel, too, in employing Pollard as its agent, chose him for the task. Over the 18-month period that Pollard worked for Israel, he provided suitcases of documents to his handlers on a regular basis.

Rafi Eitan, Israel’s master spy who served as Pollard’s chief handler from his position as head of the Office for Information Cooperation (LAKAM) at the Israeli embassy, told him that his information was discussed at cabinet meetings and Pollard understood that his main contractor was then Maj. Gen. Ehud Barak, who then served as Commander of Military Intelligence.

Yet, when Pollard was arrested, Israel did whatever it could to deny its connection to him. From the moment then-prime minister Shimon Peres ordered embassy security officers to physically eject Pollard and his wife-at-the-time Anne from the embassy, Israel has done everything in its power to distance itself from Pollard. It wasn’t until 1995 that he was granted Israeli citizenship and it wasn’t until 1998 that Israel officially recognized that Pollard was its agent.

Binyamin Netanyahu was the only prime minister to have made a serious effort to get Pollard released.

For Pollard, who expected to be protected by Israel if caught, it is the treatment he has received from the Israeli government that surprises and disturbs him more than the harsh and disproportionate punishment that he has received from US authorities.

I had two particularly memorable terrible days since I was arrested. The first was when the FBI showed me transcripts of statements that Israeli officials made shortly after my arrest. It was clear that the Mossad had three goals. They wanted to put all the blame on the Office for Information Connections and Rafi Eitan, they wanted to protect AIPAC at all costs, and they wanted to bury me. It was the Mossad that was the source of all the disinformation about me and my character. The lies that I used cocaine and was a mercenary, selling secrets to countries other than Israel, it all came from them.

Later, in 1995, a Mossad agent came here to see me and suggested that I kill myself. I said that while I would die for Israel, I would not die for some group of toadies.

The Israelis claimed that mine was a rogue operation. But this was a total lie. Not only did the senior political and military leadership know what was happening, Ariel Sharon tried to use me for his own ends. Rafi Eitan was Arik’s man. And he asked me to collect political intelligence for Sharon – what people in Washington were saying about him and the like. I refused.

But what hurt me the most was when I saw the unclassified version of the Eban Report. [The Eban Report was a report of the Knesset’s sub-committee on intelligence services investigation into the Pollard affair that was published in 1987.] It made me almost physically ill. The report includes a summary of a midnight conversation between Peres and [then US secretary of state George] Schultz about a week after I was arrested. Schultz asked Peres to return the documents I took and Peres agreed but made Schultz promise that the documents wouldn’t be used against me and Schultz agreed.

No one ever told me about this agreement. I could have used it in my defense. It is the country’s responsibility. Israel had standing before the court. Israel is the only country to participate in the prosecution of its own agent.

Several years later [in 1990] Sharon attacked Yitzhak Shamir for going along with my abandonment. But that is what Sharon is doing now.

Although sources close to Sharon claim that Pollard may be released on the sidelines of the destruction of the Jewish communities in Gaza and northern Samaria and the pullout of IDF forces from the areas, White House sources know of no request on Sharon’s part to release Pollard from prison.

Ahead of Sharon’s visit to the White House last spring, 112 Knesset members, including Sharon himself, signed a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to release Pollard from prison. Sharon refused to deliver the letter to Bush. This month, ahead of Sharon’s meeting with Bush at his ranch in Texas, all current and former Israeli chief rabbis signed a letter to Bush requesting that he free Pollard. Again, Sharon refused to deliver the letter to Bush during his meeting.

After meeting with Pollard, I contacted James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. Woolsey told me that upon taking up his position in 1993 he reviewed Pollard’s entire file carefully.

This man would not be my first candidate for clemency, but 20 years is a long time. As a general proposition, one dimension of this is that a substantial penalty has been paid, so that the element of deterrence is dealt with.

I do think there is a consideration here. Israel and the US, Australia, Japan, Poland and Britain are all in this war on terror together. We need to pay attention to the concerns of the citizens in fellow democracies. I would feel this way if it were Japanese espionage. We have to have a degree of sympathy for the sentiments of citizens in a fellow democracy.

At the same time, Woolsey was quick to explain, “This is not a recommendation for clemency.”

Woolsey also stated that Pollard was not suspected of having transferred secrets to governments other than Israel. In his view “the heart of the matter” was the US fear that Israel’s own intelligence apparatus would be penetrated by hostile governments and that as a result the materials Pollard transferred would be picked up. This, he explained, “would present a danger to the US ability to collect intelligence.”

“The fear was that the Israeli government itself might have been penetrated, not that Pollard gave the information to anyone else.”

When Pollard speaks of his future, he says that he has been training himself to go into a non-security-related field if released from prison and most of his reading materials are scientific. “I have an interest in alternative energy sources to replace oil and in water desalination.”

Is there any reason that the US should worry about security damage you may cause if released from prison?

There is no substantive American worry regarding my release. My life has been destroyed so deterrence has been achieved. Nothing I know and certainly nothing I would ever do would be antithetical to US interests. The bottom line is, I want to come home so I can be with my wife, my people and my land.

In the days that have passed since the interview it occurred to me that the reprehensible behavior of the Israeli government in the Pollard affair tops that of all concerned parties – all of whom have behaved reprehensibly. Aside from the anti-Semites who take pleasure in spewing Jewish conspiracy theories, Israel was the only side that gained anything from Pollard’s espionage. The US gained nothing and Pollard lost everything.

In shirking its responsibility for Pollard, Israel paved the way for the entire story being blown out of all proportion by opportunistic enemies of Israel and American Jewry for two decades now. If Israel had resolutely stood by Pollard, then the aspersions cast on Washington’s Jews would be far more circumspect than they are today and the US would have seen that Israel is an ally to be reckoned with, not a doormat to be stepped on at will.

Passover is the holiday of freedom. But for a nation to be free it must take responsibility for its actions, no matter how grave the consequences may be. In shirking its responsibility a nation is doing more than casting out the unwanted weight. It is casting off its own ties to freedom. Pollard said, “The abandonment of a nation begins with the abandonment of an individual.”

If we wish to maintain our integrity as a free people, we can do so only by taking on the task of bringing Pollard home. He may be a hero and he may be a fool. However he is viewed, he is one of us and he has been discriminated against and persecuted because he helped us. And other Jews are being persecuted because we refused to defend him. It is time for us to take responsibility for Pollard because his imprisonment paves the road to our servitude.

– April 22, 2005

THE JEWISH THREAT

On the eve of Israel’s general elections, Israelis should be deeply concerned about the state of our relations with the United States.

Last week the London Review of Books published a long article under the heading “The Israel Lobby.” The article was authored by two prominent American international relations and political science professors: Stephen Walt, the academic dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago.

Walt and Mearsheimer are prominent members of the “Realist” school of political science and international relations. Realists assert that states are rational actors that use the international arena to advance their national interests. For realists, states’ rationality bars morality and sentiment from playing any significant role in the international affairs.

This is significant because their essay, “The Israel Lobby,” and a longer version of the work published as a “Faculty Working Paper” by the Kennedy School earlier this month, completely contradicts every single aspect of the realist doctrine of international relations.

The article begins with a general accusation that since the 1967 Six-Day War, US Middle East policy has been driven not by US national interests, but by Israel’s national interests. In their view, “The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world.” So Mearsheimer and Walt believe that for the past 40 years, the US has been acting in a manner that completely undercuts its national interest.

With this opening salvo, Walt and Mearsheimer argue that the reason that the US acts in opposition to its national interests is because for the past four decades US Middle East policy has been dictated by the “Israel Lobby.” The distinguished professors define the Israel lobby, or in their conspiratorial shorthand, “the Lobby,” as “the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.” Members of “the Lobby” include most US media outlets, Jewish American organizations generally and AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations in particular, pro-Israel evangelical Christians, Jewish and “gentile neo-conservative” newspaper columnists, Washington think tanks – both Jewish and “gentile neo-conservative,” Jewish government officials and politicians, and “gentile neo-conservative” government officials and politicians.

Walt and Mearsheimer allege that members of “the Lobby” and their friends and professional counselors in the Israeli government and the Likud Party were a “critical” factor behind the US decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime three years ago. Similarly, these forces are behind America’s (unjustified and counterproductive) hostility towards Iran and its nuclear weapons program and its (incorrect) view that the Iranian program constitutes a threat to global security.

Israel, they claim, weakened the US-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War and is at least partially responsible for Osama bin Laden’s decision to attack the US. (“There is no question that many al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians.”)

Israel itself is described by Mearsheimer and Walt as a colonialist, criminal state that has conducted a “long campaign to kill or marginalize a generation of Palestinian leaders” and Palestinian children, and to methodically and criminally abuse the political, legal and human rights of the Palestinians. Their Israel was born in the sin of “ethnic cleansing,” a sin that has forced the Palestinians to turn to terror in order to protect themselves. Israel’s nuclear arsenal forced Iran to seek nuclear weapons. And “the Lobby” is now insisting the US take military action against Iran in order to protect Israel.

Although they acknowledge that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” they deny that Israel is in any danger from Iran. By supporting Israel, the racist state that kills and oppresses Arab Israelis and Palestinians and inflames the Arab and Islamic worlds in general, the US has become “complicit in [Israel’s] crimes.”

The two celebrated professors declare that the reports of anti-Semitism in Europe are either incorrect or wildly exaggerated and work to advance the interests of “the Lobby” and Israel. As well, they accuse “the Lobby” of silencing criticism of Israel by labeling everyone who dares to criticize the Jewish state as an anti-Semite.

In an interview this week with the New York Sun, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, whom Mearsheimer and Walt label as an “apologist” for Israel, noted that many of the authors’ claims are found in neo-Nazi websites. David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, called the report “excellent,” and said, “It is quite satisfying to see a body in a premier American university essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.”

Although Mearsheimer and Walt politely acknowledge that “the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Dershowitz is unimpressed by their largesse. “Sorry,” he says, “but it sounds very similar to me. The only difference is the Protocols are a forgery, but this [essay] is actually written by two bigots.”

It is deeply disturbing that two prominent American professors have chosen to attack Israel and its American supporters in this manner. But only one element of their attack serves to signal a broader crisis in Israel’s relations with the US. That aspect is the fact that this so-called “academic” paper does not stand any academic test. It is filled with obviously false assertions, ridiculous statements and idiotic, tendentious and absurd claims that no political science professor would dare to publicly express in any article about any other political lobby or foreign country.

For instance, the “academic” version of the paper’s first footnote maintains, “The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.”

Every semi-sentient person with even an incidental knowledge of American politics knows that there is no area of human endeavor that is not represented by a lobby in the US. What Walt and Mearsheimer’s asinine assertion means is that every American interest group – from the elderly to the insurance industry, from the Muslims to gun owners to organic food lovers – stands opposed to the American national interest simply by existing. Any professor who made a similar assertion about any other interest group would be imperiling his career.

And herein lies the grave danger inherent in their decision to publish their essay. Walt and Mearsheimer – who are both rational men – undoubtedly considered the likely consequences of publishing their views and concluded that the anti-Israel nature of their article would shield them from criticisms of its substandard academic quality. That is, they believe that hostility towards Israel is so acceptable in the US that authors of shoddy research whose publication would normally destroy their professional reputations can get away with substandard work if that work relates to Israel.

The fact that academic works criticizing Israel are held to a lower standard than works on any other subject should elicit some response from Israel. But to date, Israel’s Kadima government not only has not dealt with this state of affairs, it has insisted that the problem does not exist.

If it does nothing else, Walt and Mearsheimer’s screed proves the absolute stupidity of the claim that Israeli land giveaways and expulsions of Israelis from their homes increase international sympathy and support for Israel. Their article not only gives Israel no credit for coming to the brink of civil war this summer when it ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in the hopes of appeasing international opinion, it claims that Israel intended to bring about Hamas’s electoral victory in January in order to force the US to continue to support it.

For their part, the Bush administration and the Europeans today continue to hold Israel responsible for the well-being of Gazans and demand that Israel feed them and provide them with everything from electricity to emergency medical care. To earn their “goodwill,” the Israeli government agreed this week to endanger Israel’s national security by continuing to finance the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and by operating the Karni cargo terminal at the Gaza border as if Israel had never withdrawn.

In 1999 I studied under Walt at the Kennedy School. It was clear to me back then, through Walt’s passive-aggressive non-sequiturs about American Jews and the Israel lobby, that he suffered from an unhealthy obsession with the Jewish state. But back then, when the Likud that he so despises was in power and the government conditioned all Israeli concessions to the Palestinians on reciprocal, measurable Palestinian concessions to Israel, Walt did not give his hostility towards Israel and its supporters such direct and crass expression either in his classroom lectures or in his publications. Rather, he does so now, when Israel is ruled by a party whose only clearly stated policy is its intention to destroy Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and transfer the areas to Hamas without receiving anything in return.

The growing crisis in Israel’s relations with American and other Western societies as manifested by Mearsheimer and Walt’s decision to publish their essay leads to two conclusions. First, Israeli weakness harms Israel’s international standing and Israeli strength enhances it. Ironically, this conclusion arises from the realist worldview that Walt and Mearsheimer champion on every issue except for Israel. If states seek to increase their strength through their international policies, it makes more sense for them to attack a weak state that will respond to expressions of hostility by seeking to appease the aggressors than to attack a strong state that will exact a price for such aggression. Israeli demonstrations of international, political, military or cultural weakness open it up to ever escalating demands and expressions of animosity.

Finally, Walt and Mearsheimer’s decision to publish their essay points to Israel’s desperate need for a leader who understands international politics generally and American politics specifically. In World War II, the preponderance of Walt and Mearsheimer’s view – that the Jews forced America to enter the war – caused the Roosevelt administration to refuse to lift a finger to save European Jewry. If, with the assistance of a weak and incompetent Israeli government, their view again becomes prominent, Israel will find itself in existential peril.

Today there is only one Israeli leader capable of rebuilding Israel’s standing in the international community generally and in American society particularly. We have only one leader who is capable of bringing about a renewed delegitimization of views like those expressed in Walt and Mearsheimer’s essay.

His name is Binyamin Netanyahu.

– March 23, 2006

POSTCARDS FROM SAIGON

Apropos of nothing, Wednesday night Channel 2 news broadcast a jihadi snuff film. The video, produced by an Iraqi group called the Islamic Army of Allah, shows a jihadi sniper knocking off American soldiers one by one.

Being a propaganda flick whose goal is to demoralize Americans and their allies and recruit new soldiers to the army of jihad, not surprisingly the video doesn’t show how the US forces reacted to the sniper fire. The American forces in the film are powerless victims. If they are smart, they will cut and run before it is too late.

The video is effective because it effectively tells a complete lie. US forces in Iraq are far from helpless. They have won nearly every engagement they have fought with insurgent forces in Iraq. And their capabilities get better all the time.

Today, the public debate in the US revolves around one question: when are we leaving Iraq? The conventional wisdom has become that US operations in Iraq are futile. Due in large part to politically driven press coverage, Americans have received the impression that the US cannot succeed in Iraq and that consequently, their leaders ought to be concentrating their efforts on building an exit strategy. Comparisons between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War are legion.

Last Wednesday, President George W. Bush was asked whether it is possible to make a comparison between the recent sharp rise in violence in Iraq and the Tet offensive in Vietnam in January 1968. Bush responded by noting that then as now, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

During the Tet offensive, the North Vietnamese attacked 40 South Vietnamese villages simultaneously with a massive force of 84,000 troops. The offensive failed utterly; 45,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed, no ground was taken. Yet, when then US president Lyndon Johnson declared victory, the American people didn’t believe him.

Walter Cronkite, the all-powerful anchorman of the CBS Evening News, had told them that the US had lost the offensive. Who was the president to argue with Cronkite? In March 1968 Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.

So when the media wonder if one can compare the battles in Iraq today to the Tet offensive, what they really want to know is if they have successfully convinced the American public that its military has lost the war in Iraq.

Over the past several weeks, Bush has been waging a political offensive to convince the public that their military is winning the war in Iraq. On Wednesday, the president gave a press conference on Iraq and later reinforced his message in a meeting with conservative columnists.

Bush made four major points in those appearances. First, he explained that the US is at war and described the nature of the war. Iran, he said, stands at the helm of enemy forces. Iran’s senior role was made clear, he said, through its sponsorship of this summer’s Hezbollah and Palestinian war against Israel. One of Iran’s central goals – shared with Syria and its terrorist proxies – is to destroy the forces of moderation and democracy in the Middle East.

Secondly, Bush asserted that Iraq is a vital front in this war. In his view, the only way the US can lose that war is if it leaves, “letting things fall into chaos and letting al-Qaeda have a safe haven.” Bush argued that if the US leaves Iraq, Iraq will come to the US, to Iraq’s neighbors and indeed to the entire world.

Thirdly, Bush argued that the US can only win the war if the American public supports it. The only way to ensure the public’s support is by showing that America is winning. Bush said that showing success is difficult because while its benchmarks for victory – political freedom, economic development and social progress – are amorphous, “the enemy gets to define victory by killing people.”

Finally, Bush argued that to defeat Iran, Syria and North Korea, the US must have international support for its efforts. Countries like Russia, China and France must understand the dangers and agree to isolate these regimes with effective international sanctions.

While Bush clearly knows what he wants to do, he is hard-pressed to succeed. Not only are the Democrats and the media trying to undercut him, members of his own administration – and particularly Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her colleagues at the State Department – are subverting the president’s agenda.

For example, there is Alberto Fernandez, the Director of Public Diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Fernandez’s job is to defend the US in the Arabic media. Yet, in an interview with Al-Jazeera last week, Fernandez said that the US had been “arrogant” and “stupid” in Iraq. In September he reportedly said that Americans and others “are trying intentionally to encourage hell in the Arab world.”

Then there is Rice herself. Rather than promoting US victories in Iraq, Rice is turning the Iraqi government into a scapegoat for the ongoing jihad. If the government doesn’t get its act together, she intimates, the US will feel free to wash its hands of the matter. It won’t be a US defeat, but an Iraqi failure. That is, far from extolling American success, she is paving the way to justify an American defeat.

At the same time, rather than explain Iran’s central role in the war, Rice courts the mullahs. Ignoring Iran’s sponsorship of the Palestinians, Rice waxes poetic comparing the Palestinians – who chose Hamas to lead them – to the American founding fathers and to the civil rights movement.

On Wednesday Bush explained that the relative level of violence is not a determinant of victory or defeat because the enemy can use cease-fires to rearm. In his words, “If the absence of violence is victory, no one will ever win, because all that means is you’ve empowered a bunch of suiciders and thugs to kill.”

Yet contrary to Bush’s clear view on the matter, State Department officials work around the clock negotiating cease-fires. Indeed, one of the capstones of Rice’s diplomatic efforts is the August cease-fire in Lebanon under which Israel is prevented from defending itself and Hezbollah is moving swiftly to rebuild its forces.

Today the only high-level US diplomat who believes that the purpose of diplomacy is to advance US national interests and not to achieve agreements for their own sake is US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. Just this week Bolton effectively prevented Venezuela from being elected to the Security Council.

Rice does not support Bolton. According to Senate sources, Rice played a major role in preventing Bolton from receiving Senate confirmation for his appointment. As a result, he will likely be forced to leave the UN next month.

Rice’s machinations have made her popular with the media. But her popularity comes at the expense of public and international support for the US’s war goals. Her actions and those of her State Department colleagues have contributed to the anomalous situation where while US forces improved their capabilities in Iraq, the American public became convinced that the war is going badly.

Rather than fearing the US, Iran, Syria and North Korea behave as though the US is a paper tiger. Rather than support America, European “allies” increasingly see their national interests best served by distancing themselves from the US as much as possible.

The situation can be reversed. The media are no longer the power they were in Cronkite’s day. Were the administration to challenge the networks, the networks would be forced to adjust their coverage to reality.

Last week CNN broadcast the Iraqi sniper video. Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Congressman Duncan Hunter reacted by blasting the broadcast and calling for the military to bar CNN reporters from embedding with US forces in Iraq. Hunter said that by showing the film CNN was collaborating with America’s enemies and consequently, CNN reporters should enjoy no support from US forces in Iraq. His attacks were widely reported and there can be little doubt that CNN will think long and hard before broadcasting another enemy propaganda movie.

For Israel, the results of the American debate over the future of the war in Iraq are of critical importance. A US retreat will place Israel in grave danger. The eastern front, whose demise the military “experts” were quick to announce in 2003 to justify slashing the defense budget, will make a comeback – replete with massive quantities of arms and tens of thousands of trained jihadi soldiers who will believe that they just won their jihad against the US. Moreover, if the US retreats, the IDF will find itself facing a US-armed and trained Shi’ite army. That is, if the US withdraws, Israel could potentially find itself facing an enemy force better trained and equipped than the IDF.

The leaders of the Democratic Party today compete amongst themselves to see who can be more defeatist. If in the November 7 elections the Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, or even just one of them, the push for a US retreat will grow stronger.

Whatever the results of the elections, Israel must hope that for his last two years in office, President Bush will take firm control of his administration and lead a concerted, unabashed diplomatic and public opinion offensive.

If Bush does this, he will gain wide public support and sufficient support from the international community to move ahead in the war.

If Bush does not take control of his administration, the Vietnam War analogy will become an accurate one for Iraq, and Israel will find itself playing the role of Cambodia.

– October 26, 2006

THE LONGEST-RUNNING BIG LIE

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Yasser Arafat was a master of the big lie. Since he invented global terrorism with the founding of the Fatah terror organization in 1959, Arafat successfully portrayed himself as a freedom fighter while introducing the world to passenger jet hijackings, schoolhouse massacres and embassy takeovers.

To cultivate the myth of his innocence Arafat ordered his Fatah terror cells to operate under pseudonyms. In the early 1970s he renamed several Fatah murder squads the Black September Organization while publicly claiming that they were “breakaway” units completely unrelated to Fatah or to himself.

In 2000, as he launched the current Palestinian jihad, he repeated the process by renaming Fatah terror cells the Aksa Martyrs Brigades and then claiming that they were completely unrelated to Fatah or to himself. This fiction too, has been successful in spite of the fact that all Aksa Martyrs Brigades terrorists are members of Fatah and most are members of Palestinian Authority official militias who receive their salaries, guns and marching orders from Fatah.

Last week, with the quiet release of a 33-year-old US State Department cable, a good chunk of the edifice of his great lie was destroyed.

On March 1, 1973, eight Fatah terrorists operating under the Black September banner stormed the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, during a farewell party for the US embassy’s Chargé d’Affaires George Curtis Moore. The terrorists took Moore, US ambassador Cleo Noel, Belgian Chargé d’Affaires Guy Eid and two Arab diplomats hostage. They demanded that the US, Israel, Jordan and Germany release PLO and Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorists, including Robert F. Kennedy’s Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan and Black September commander Muhammed Awadh (Abu Daud), from prison in exchange for the hostages’ release.

The next evening, the Palestinians brutally murdered Noel, Moore, and Eid. They released their other hostages on March 4.

Arafat denied any involvement in the attack. The US officially accepted his denial. Yet, as he later publicly revealed, James Welsh, who served at the time of the attack as an analyst at the National Security Agency, intercepted a communication from Arafat – then headquartered in Beirut – to his terror agents in Khartoum ordering the attack.

In 1986, as evidence of Arafat’s involvement in the operation became more widely known, more and more voices began calling for Arafat to be investigated for murder. As the New York Sun recalled last week, during that period, Britain’s Sunday Times reported that 44 US senators sent a letter to then US attorney general Edwin Meese, “urging the American government to charge the PLO chief with plotting the murders of two American diplomats in 1973.”

The Times’ article went on to note that the Justice Department’s interest in pursuing the matter was making senior State Department officials uneasy:

State Department diplomats, worried that murder charges against Arafat would anger the United States’ friends in the Arab world, are urging the Justice Department to drop the investigation.

As late as 2002, in spite of President George W. Bush’s pointed refusal to meet with Arafat, the State Department continued to protest his innocence. At the time, Scott Johnson, a Minneapolis attorney and one of the authors of the popular Power Line weblog, inquired into the matter with the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. In an emailed response from the bureau’s deputy director of press affairs Gregory Sullivan, Johnson was told,

Evidence clearly points to the terrorist group Black September as having committed the assassinations of Amb. Noel and George Moore, and though Black September was a part of the Fatah movement, the linkage between Arafat and this group has never been established.

So it was that for 33 years, under seven consecutive presidential administrations, the State Department denied any knowledge of involvement by Arafat or Fatah in the execution of its own people.

Until last week.

The cable released by the State Department’s historian states,

The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the head of Fatah. Fatah representatives based in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

Although clearly skilled in the art of deception, Arafat could never have succeeded in creating and prolonging his fictions and with them, his crimes, without the cooperation of the US government and the media.

In this vein, the release of the State Department cable raises two daunting questions. First, how is it possible that the belated admission of a massive 33 year cover-up of the murder of senior American diplomats spanning the course of seven consecutive presidential administrations has been ignored by the US media? A Google news search for Cleo Noel brought up but a handful of stories – none of which were reported by the major news networks or national newspapers.

On the face of it, the released cable, which calls into question the very foundation of US Middle East policy for the past generation, is simply stunning. The cable concludes, “The Khartoum operation again demonstrated the ability of the BSO to strike where least expected. The open participation of Fatah representatives in Khartoum in the attack provides further evidence of the Fatah/BSO relationship. The emergence of the United States as a primary fedayeen target indicates a serious threat of further incidents similar to that which occurred in Khartoum.”

The media’s silence on the issue does not merely raise red flags about their objectivity. By not availing the American public of the knowledge that Fatah and the PLO have been specifically targeting Americans for 33 years, the media has denied the American people basic knowledge of the world in which they live.

The media’s abject refusal to cover the story raises an even more egregious aspect of the episode. Specifically, what does the fact that under seven consecutive administrations, the US government has covered up Arafat’s direct responsibility for the murder of American diplomats while placing both Arafat and Fatah at the center of its Middle East policy, say about the basic rationale of US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians? What would US Middle East policy have looked like, and what would have been the results for US and international security as a whole, if rather than advancing a policy that made Arafat the most frequent foreign visitor to the White House during the Clinton administration, the US had demanded his extradition and tried him for murder?

How many lives would have been saved if the US had not been intent on upholding Arafat’s big lie? How would such a US policy have impacted the subsequent development of sister terror organizations like Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Hamas, all of which were founded by members of Arafat’s terror industry?

Sadly, the release of the cable did not in any way signal a change in the US policy of whitewashing Fatah. In contravention of US law, for the past 13 years, the State Department has been denying that Fatah, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority are terrorist organizations, and has been actively funding them with US taxpayer dollars.

This policy went on, unchanged even after Fatah gunmen murdered three US embassy employees in Gaza in October 2003. This policy continues, unchanged still today, as Fatah’s current leader, Arafat’s deputy of 40 years Mahmoud Abbas, works to form a unity government with Hamas. Indeed, the central component of the US’s policy towards the Palestinians today is the goal of strengthening Fatah by arming, training and funding its Force 17 terror militia.

In a November 14, 2006, interview on Palestinian television, Ahmed Hales Abu Maher, who serves as Secretary of Fatah in Gaza, bragged of Fatah’s role in the development of international terrorism. In his words, reported by Palestinian Media Watch,

Oh warrior brothers, this is a nation that will never be broken, it is a revolution that will never be defeated. This is a nation that gives an example every day that is imitated across the world. We gave the world the children of the RPG [Rocket Propelled Grenades], we gave the world the children stone [-throwers], and we gave the world the male and female Martyrdom-Seekers [suicide bombers].

Imagine what the world would have looked like if, rather than clinging to Arafat’s big lie that he and his Fatah terror organization were central components of Middle East peace, the US had captured and tried Arafat for murdering its diplomats and worked steadily to destroy Fatah.

Imagine how our future would look if rather than stealthily admitting the truth, while trusting the media not to take notice, the US government were to base its current policies on the truth, and the media were to reveal this truth to the world.

– January 1, 2007

ECHOES OF 1919

Both critics and supporters of US President George W. Bush’s post-September 11 vision of a new, freedom-loving Middle East have noted the strong similarities between the president and his predecessor Woodrow Wilson.

In 1917, the 28th president brought US forces into World War I with the promise that an Allied victory against Germany and its allies would make the world “safe for democracy.” Wilson’s vision of a postwar world was a bit out of place in the war being fought on the killing fields of Belgium and France. Neither the Allies nor the Central Powers were fighting the war for ideological gain. Rather, the war was being fought to restore or upset the balance of power between European empires in Europe and beyond.

Yet Wilson had his vision. As he sent 1,200,000 American soldiers to war, he appointed a committee of 150 academics to prepare the peace. In 1918, he announced his 14-point plan for the postwar era. The last point, which called for the establishment of an international government with the power to guarantee each nation’s sovereignty and independence, was the one that Wilson held to most strongly.

As historian Paul Johnson noted in his History of the American People, Wilson “became obsessed with turning [his vision of the League of Nations] into reality, as the formula for an eventual system of world democratic government, with America at its head.” It was through the League of Nations, Wilson believed, that the war could indeed become a war to end all wars.

Wilson’s messianic view was harshly criticized by the British and French, by his domestic political opponents who controlled the Congress and by members of his own administration. The French and British, together with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee responsible for ratifying the Treaty of Versailles, all called for a scaled-back version of the plan.

They could see no advantage to an organization that would place the US and its allies on equal footing with Germany. Nor could they understand why a nation would go to war to protect the territorial integrity of countries that did not impact their national interests. Cabot Lodge specifically objected to the diminution of US national sovereignty inherent in the notion of transferring the power to commit US forces to war from the US Congress to an international body.

Cabot Lodge and French president Georges Clemenceau suggested that the US limit its objectives to guaranteeing the peace of Europe. They suggested the formation of an organization much like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which from its establishment in 1949 maintained the peace of Europe for the duration of the Cold War.

But Wilson refused to compromise and, as a result, his vision was defeated. The Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty and so the US never joined Wilson’s League of Nations. For its part, the League proved incapable of preserving either the peace or itself.

In the 1920 presidential elections, Warren Harding won handily by promising to turn America away from Wilson’s grand designs and return it to “normalcy.” Harding’s “normalcy” was quickly translated into a policy of isolationism. The US locked its doors and shuttered its windows, blocked immigration and ignored the world as Germany descended into fascist madness and placed itself under the leadership of a tyrant bent on global domination.

Today, as then, Bush’s freedom agenda for the Muslim world is under attack from all quarters as the US shifts noticeably into a comparable isolationist mode. Conservatives concerned about preserving America’s cultural identity are pushing for an end to illegal immigration from Mexico. The Democrats, in concert with former secretary of state James Baker’s considerable camp of followers in the Republican Party and the State Department, are advocating an end of US support for its allies and supporters in Iraq, Israel and Lebanon in favor of an embrace of US enemies Iran and Syria.

There are many differences between the Bush and Wilson administrations, but three stand out in particular. First, by ignoring the real interests of the US and its allies in favor of utopian peace, Wilson’s vision of postwar peace was a flight of fancy predicated on a rejection of reality. In contrast, by recognizing the threat that the global jihad constitutes for the free world, Bush sought to shake the US and its allies out of their collective flight from reality in the 1990s and force them to contend with the world as it is.

But while Wilson’s vision was unrealistic, he has to be credited for his unstinting devotion to it. In contrast, Bush never completely matched his visionary rhetoric to his actual policies. And today, increasingly abandoned by his supporters and undermined by his own advisers who reject his vision and insist on returning to fantasyland, Bush has apparently abandoned his own doctrine of war and peace.

Over the weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated that the administration stands united around her policy of appeasing the Iranian regime that is guiding the terror wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Lebanon and beyond. In Rice’s words,

The President of the United States has made it clear that we are on a course that is a diplomatic course [with Iran]. That policy is supported by all members of the cabinet and by the Vice President of the United States.

Rice’s statement cannot be aligned with Bush’s statement at his 2002 State of the Union Address and subsequent speeches, where he announced that one of the principal aims of the US war against the global jihad is to deny rogue regimes, specifically Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

As the president put it then,

We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.

But then, since the September 11 attacks, for every rhetorical step the president has taken towards reality, he has taken two policy steps back to delusion.

While upholding Islam as a religion of peace, the administration courted Islamic preachers of war. So it was that at the post-September 11 memorial service at the National Cathedral, the administration invited Muzammil Siddiqi to speak for Muslims. Siddiqi, who heads one of the largest mosques in North America, was the man who converted Adam Gadahn, the American Taliban, to Islam. As head of the Wahabist Islamic Circle of North America, on October 28, 2000, Sidiqi participated along with Abdulrahman Alamoudi – now in jail on terrorism charges – in a rally outside the Israeli embassy. There he proclaimed, “America has to learn. If you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come.”

Until his arrest, Alamoudi presided over the training of Muslim chaplains in the US military. In 2004 Congress initiated a probe into ISNA’s suspected links to terror groups. Several members of its board of directors were arrested and convicted of involvement with terror cells.

In embracing radical Muslim religious leaders and pro-jihadist Muslim organizations in the US rather than embracing and strengthening anti-jihadist Muslim activists and leaders, the Bush administration followed a pattern that has remained consistent worldwide. Rather than embrace liberal, pro-American and pro-democracy Muslims, the administration embraces America’s enemies. In Iraq, leaders like Mithal al-Alousi and Ahmed Chalabi were spurned in favor of Ba’athists like former prime minister Iyad Allawi and Iranian puppets like current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

As for the Palestinians, Bush has opted to ignore Fatah’s involvement in terrorism, its jihadist indoctrination of Palestinian society and its strategic collaboration with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. By upholding Fatah, Bush blocked all possibility that an alternative, liberal and democratic Palestinian leadership could emerge. The same pattern has held in Egypt.

Whereas Bush’s commitment to advancing his stated strategic aim has been far weaker than Wilson’s was, the danger of abandoning the fight today in favor of isolationism and appeasement is far greater than it was in the 1920s. While Great Britain’s embrace of isolationism and appeasement under the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments was a disaster for the British, who were high on Germany’s target list, it is possible to argue that isolationism was a sensible policy for America. There was no German threat to the US in the 1920s and 1930s. Today the situation is different.

Last week FBI Assistant Director John Miller said that most of the 2,176 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act search warrants approved in 2006 were used against terror suspects inside the US. Three days later, the FBI announced the arrest of the members of an American and Caribbean terror cell that was plotting to bomb JFK International Airport. Last month the FBI arrested a terror cell planning to attack Fort Dix.

Then there is last month’s Pew Survey of American Muslims under the age of 30. The survey found that 26 percent of young Muslims in America believe that suicide bombings are justified. Only 40 percent believe that Arabs carried out the September 11 attacks.

Historical hindsight has judged the feckless appeasement and irresponsible isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s responsible for the catastrophe of World War II. Bush’s doctrine of war and peace was aimed at preventing just such a reenactment of history.

As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaims that the countdown to the next Holocaust has begun while actively waging war against the US and its allies on all available fronts, the catastrophe that will follow an American relapse into isolationism and appeasement is undeniable.

– June 4, 2007

AMERICA’S BEST FRIENDS

Two major arms sales were announced over the weekend. First, the US announced that it is planning to sell Saudi Arabia $20 billion in advanced weapons systems, including Joint Direct Attack Munition kits or JDAMs that are capable of transforming regular gravitational bombs into precision-guided “smart” weapons.

Largely in an attempt to neutralize Congressional opposition to the proposed sale, the Bush administration also announced that it plans to increase annual military assistance to Israel by some 25 percent next year and that it hopes that next year’s increase in assistance will be maintained by the next administration.

The second arms sale was the reported Russian agreement to sell Iran 250 advanced long-range Sukhoi-30 fighter jets and aerial fuel tankers capable of extending the jets’ range by thousands of kilometers. Russia’s massive armament of Iran in this and in previous sales over the past two years make clear that from Russia’s perspective, all threats to US interests, including Shi’ite expansionism, work to Moscow’s advantage.

On the face of it, these contrasting US and Russian announcements seem to signal that geopolitics have reverted to the Cold War model of two superpowers competing for global power by, among other things, assisting their proxies in fighting one another. Yet, today the situation is not the same as it was before.

Today, the US finds itself competing not only against an emergent Russia, but against Iran, and the Shi’ite expansionism it advances. Moreover, it finds itself under attack from Sunni jihadism, which is incubated and financed by Saudi Arabia, America’s primary ally in the Persian Gulf.

The US’s proposed arms sale to Saudi Arabia has raised pointed criticism in Israel and among Israel’s supporters in the US. As senior defense officials told the Jerusalem Post Monday, the JDAM sale to Saudi Arabia constitutes a strategic threat to Israel, which has no way of defending itself against JDAM capabilities.

To assess the reasonableness of Israel’s opposition to the proposed sale, and to understand the sale’s significance against the background of emerging regional and global threats to US national security interests, it is worthwhile to revisit US actions toward Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Cold War when checking Soviet expansion worldwide was the main goal of US foreign policy.

The US held Israel at arms length until after its stunning victory against Soviet clients Egypt and Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War. In the aftermath of Israel’s victory, the US realized that Israel was a natural ally in checking Soviet power in the Middle East. As a result, in 1968 it began providing Israel with political and military aid. This policy paid off in spades in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and in the 1982 Lebanon War when the IDF handily beat the Soviets’ proxy armies. Indeed, from the US perspective, there was no downside to supporting Israel. Israel’s patent lack of expansionist ambitions ensured that the US would suffer no ancillary blowback for its support.

The US-Israel alliance’s central weakness was the US’s perception of Saudi Arabia as its strategic ally. This weakness came to the fore most prominently in 1981 with the Reagan administration’s decision to sell AWACs spy planes to the Saudis. As is the case with the US’s current proposed arms sale to the Saudis, back then Israel perceived the AWACs sale as a strategic threat to its national security. Yet, since checking Soviet expansionism and not securing Israel was the US’s primary strategic aim, and since the US perceived Saudi Arabia as an ally against Soviet expansionism, the Reagan administration pushed the sale forward against Israel’s strenuous objections.

In the end, the AWACs were not used against Israel. Yet by the same token, they also did nothing to curb Soviet expansionism or advance any other US interest. During the 1991 Gulf War, the Saudis played no effective combat role against Iraq.

The main Saudi contribution to the US’s victory in the Cold War was its willingness to finance the mujahadeen in Afghanistan who fought the Soviet invasion. There can be no doubt that the rout of the Soviet military in Afghanistan played a central role in causing the dissolution of the Soviet empire. But there is also no question that the blowback from the war in Afghanistan has been enormously detrimental to US national security and to global security as a whole.

The mujadaheen’s US-armed and Saudi, financed victory against the Soviets in Afghanistan fed the aspirations of Saudi, supported Sunni jihadists. It spawned al-Qaeda and provided arms and combat experience to forces that would come back to haunt the US.

So as far as the Middle East and Central Asia are concerned, a primary lesson of the Cold War relates to the relative weight the US can securely place in its alliance with Israel on the one hand, and its alliance with the Saudis on the other. Israel used US support in a manner that advanced both Israel’s national security and US geopolitical interests with no blowback. The Saudis were either inconsequential, or advanced US interests in a manner that caused enormous blowback.

Today as the US faces Russian hostility, Iranian expansionism and Saudi-financed Sunni jihadists, it remains afflicted by the Cold War dilemma of the relative importance of its alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia. On the face of it, given that today the potential for blowback in supporting Saudi Arabia is far higher and eminently more foreseeable than it was 25 years ago, it should seem clear that in assessing its strategic assets and interests in the region, the US would place far greater weight on its alliance with Israel.

Unfortunately, today the Bush administration is behaving counterintuitively. It pursues its alliance with Saudi Arabia with vigor while eschewing and downgrading its alliance with Israel.

The administration’s hostility toward Israel is not limited to its intention to arm the Saudis with weapons capable of destroying Israel’s strategic assets in the Negev. It is also actively pressuring Israel not to defend itself against Iran and its proxies. Since the Second Lebanon War last summer, the US has pushed Israel to take no action against Iran’s proxy Hamas on the one hand, while pushing Israel to empower Fatah, which has its own strong ties to Iran and to Hamas, on the other. By pressuring Israel to enact a policy of capitulation toward the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, similar to its capitulation to the Palestinians two years ago in Gaza, the Bush administration is advancing a policy that if implemented all but ensures Iranian control over the outskirts of Jerusalem and Amman.

There are two principal causes of the US’s coolness toward Israel and warm embrace of the Saudis. First, the administration’s failure to achieve its goals in Iraq strengthened the influence of the Saudi’s Cold War proponents. These proponents, led by former secretary of state James Baker’s disciples Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, advance their Saudi-centric agenda while paving the way for a US withdrawal from Iraq without victory. In the Baker camp’s view, the best way to facilitate a pullout is by strengthening the Saudis so that they can perhaps prevent a post-US-withdrawal Iraq from devolving into an Iranian colony.

The second cause of the administration’s hostility toward Israel is the Olmert government’s irresolute handling of the Second Lebanon War last year. As was the case 25 years ago, so too last summer, the administration supported Israel against the wishes of the Baker camp. Yet when unlike 25 years ago, last summer the Olmert government led Israel to defeat in Lebanon, it weakened the standing of administration officials who view Israel as a strategic ally and oppose the Saudis, while strengthening Israel’s Baker-inspired foes who view Israel as a strategic liability.

The Olmert government’s enthusiastic embrace of capitulation as a national policy toward the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria merely serves to strengthen the US view that Israel is a strategic liability rather than an asset.

Yet the lessons of the Cold War and those of the past 15 years remain clear. The Saudis remain at best fair-weather friends to the US, while Israel’s strength or weakness directly impacts US national security and geopolitical interests. As was the case during the Cold War, so too today, the US’s best option for checking Russian and Iranian expansionism and neutralizing Sunni jihadists is to back Israel.

If the US were willing to understand the clear lessons from its Cold War experience in the Middle East, it would not be pushing Israel to weaken itself still further through land giveaways to Iran’s Palestinian proxies. It would not be actively undercutting Israel’s national security by supplying sophisticated weapons to the Saudis. It would be admonishing the Olmert government for its irresponsible behavior and exhorting Israel not to go wobbly because it is needed for the larger fight.

– July 31, 2007

THE GHOSTS OF WARS LOST

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s statements Tuesday in support of stiffer sanctions against Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons were justifiably heartening to many. Sarkozy’s remarks, like his Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner’s trip to Iraq last week, marked a refreshing departure from his predecessor Jacques Chirac’s knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

Yet while Sarkozy’s open support for sanctions serves to distinguish him from Chirac, his justification of his position indicates that although much has changed, much has also remained the same in France. By Sarkozy’s lights, “This [sanctions] initiative is the only one that can allow us to escape an alternative that I can only call catastrophic: an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.”

Praising Sarkozy on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal was quick to conflate his remarks with those made by Sen. John McCain a few months ago about the prospect of a US military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations. McCain said, “There’s only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option; that is a nuclear-armed Iran.”

But these statements are not the same. A moral chasm divides them. Unlike McCain, Sarkozy makes no moral distinctions between a nuclear-armed Teheran and a military strike aimed at preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. For him, they are the same.

Sarkozy’s moral blindness is rooted in post-World War II Europe’s instrumental treatment of the legacy of that war. For the Europeans – and first and foremost for the Germans, and for the Dutch, French and Belgians who collaborated with the Germans during the war – the main lesson of the war was that militarism and nationalism are bad. This view informed postwar Europe’s ideological embrace of pacifism and transnationalism.

But in truth, militarism and nationalism did not cause WWII. The true cause of that war was Germany’s decision to embrace evil and depravity as its guiding philosophy and the willingness of the nations of Europe that collaborated with German authorities to also embrace this evil. That is, the real legacy of the war is a moral one and the real lesson to be learned from it is not that nations must allow themselves to be gobbled up into transnational entities or that they must eschew war at all costs. Rather, the true lesson is that nations should embrace morality that sanctifies life and freedom and that holds men and women accountable for their choices.

Europe’s refusal to reckon with this central truth is what brings leaders like Sarkozy to ignore the real reason why Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons. As a regime that embraces evil and preaches genocide and global domination, Teheran cannot be trusted with weapons of genocide and global domination. War waged to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power is preferable and less catastrophic than a war the Islamic Republic would wage if it were to acquire such weapons.

Europe is far from unique in its refusal to accept and contend with the true legacy of its wars. Humanity as a whole more often than not prefers to evade the difficult lessons of war – and especially of lost wars. We see this very clearly today in the Islamic world, where the forces of global jihad base their efforts to destroy human freedom on their refusal to accept the reasons that Western nations, organized around the Judeo-Christian notion of human liberty, have defeated their forces in war for the past 500 years.

The refusal to reckon with the lessons of war is also the central unifying characteristic of Israel’s political and intellectual establishment. The Israeli establishment’s denials of the lessons of its military history began at the end of the Yom Kippur War, and extend to the 1982 Lebanon War, the Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s, the Oslo process, the 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon, the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the war in Lebanon last summer.

In the midst of all this evasion, something refreshing and, indeed, inspiring is happening today in America. There, a debate about the legacy of an unpopular lost war has recently begun in earnest. That war, of course, is the Vietnam War.

Last Wednesday, US President George W. Bush gave a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars where he discussed the consequences of America’s defeat in Vietnam. Bush did not speak of the conflict itself. He did not connect then-president Lyndon Johnson’s failure to explain the war to the American people to the US media’s decision, made around 1967, to actively sue for American defeat at the hands of the Soviet and Chinese-backed Communists in North Vietnam. He did not discuss the defeat of the members of the American establishment at the hands of their children.

Bush made no mention of the fact that Congress’s refusal to provide military assistance to the South Vietnamese made their loss of freedom a foregone conclusion. He didn’t discuss how then-president Gerald Ford betrayed South Vietnam when he refused to provide air and naval support when the North Vietnamese invaded in 1975.

Bush did not discuss the reasons the US was defeated at all. He limited his remarks to the consequences of that defeat on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and on the US’s position in the world to this very day. He noted that some two million Cambodians died at the hands of Pol Pot’s murderous Communist regime, which rose to power after South Vietnam was overrun. He recalled the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who were imprisoned in concentration camps, the tens of thousands who were killed and the hundreds of thousands who took to sea in rickety boats in a desperate bid to find freedom in the America that had just abandoned them. He noted statements by Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri asserting the US defeat in Vietnam as proof that the US can and will be defeated by Islam.

The US mass media reacted to Bush’s speech with fits of hysterical rage. The New York Times, which together with CBS News led the media war against the US defense of South Vietnam, dismissed the president’s remarks as “bizarre.” Major newspapers and television networks excoriated Bush for remembering the heavy and abiding toll of that lost war and for warning against repeating the mistake by embracing defeat in Iraq.

Christopher Hitchens’s response to Bush’s speech in the Observer was emblematic of the Left’s condemnations. Hitchens wrote:

If one question is rightly settled in the American and, indeed, the international memory, it is that the Vietnam War was at best a titanic blunder and at worst a campaign of atrocity and aggression.

But contrary to the claims of Hitchens and his comrades, the question of America’s memory of Vietnam was never settled. They never managed to successfully dictate America’s national memory, even as they succeeded in squelching popular debate of history.

This week, author Robert Kaplan published an article in the Atlantic Monthly pointing out the unbridgeable gap between popular histories of the Vietnam War, which are largely based on the views of that war espoused by Hitchens and the New York Times, and the literature of the war read by the American military. In an article entitled “Rereading Vietnam,” Kaplan gives an overview of that literature, which in contrast to the Left’s best sellers, has generally been published by boutique presses.

These books tell the stories of the warriors who fought in Vietnam. They discuss the stoic heroism of the American POWs who were subjected to years of physical torture and unrelenting psychological abuse during their captivity in North Vietnamese prison camps. They describe the counterinsurgency tactics employed by anti-communist forces that by 1970 had succeeded in politically defeating the Viet Cong in 90 percent of South Vietnam.

As Kaplan notes, in recent years these books have been supplemented by new histories, like Lewis Sorley’s A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, which examine the strategic success of the American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam after Gen. Creighton Abrams took command from Gen. William Westmoreland in 1968.

After the September 11 attacks, the American public began expressing a willingness to reassess Vietnam. This newfound openness was manifested in the public’s belated embrace of Vietnam veterans, who had been shunned and silenced upon their return home.

The force of that embrace was felt strongly in the 2004 presidential elections.

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry had built his political career on public condemnations of his brothers in arms when he joined the anti-war movement after being released from the US Navy in 1970. The veterans banded together and, with massive public support, launched a successful campaign against him.

Although the Left has denounced Bush for his use of Vietnam as a warning for what will occur if the US is defeated in Iraq, the war’s opponents have made near obsessive use of the Vietnam War as a means of convincing the American public that the war in Iraq is unwinnable. Just a week after the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, major media outlets were invoking Vietnam and warning that “a Vietnam-like quagmire” was ensuing in Iraq.

In a recently released study of the US media’s treatment of the war in Iraq, the internet blog “Media Busters” noted that a document search showed that since March 2003, the New York Times has published some 2,500 articles that make mention of both Vietnam and Iraq. CNN has run more than 3,000 stories that discuss the wars side by side. And always, the message is the same: as then, so today, the US cannot win, and so every American life sacrificed in Iraq is sacrificed in vain.

Bush’s challenge to the received wisdom about the Vietnam War came then against the backdrop of these cultural crosscurrents, which also inform the current debate on the war in Iraq and the war against Islamic fascism in general. Bush is to be applauded for raising the story of Vietnam’s legacy. His entrance into the debate will no doubt speed up the long-delayed moral reckoning with the legacy of Vietnam – of America’s betrayal of its South Vietnamese allies, and of the consequences of that betrayal for America’s international standing and its own self-assessment.

Hopefully, America’s newfound readiness to reckon with the lessons of Vietnam will bring about a renewed and realistic American assessment and discussion of the current war against Islamic fascism.

And perhaps America’s willingness to examine the demons of its past will prompt Europe and Israel, and perhaps one day even the Islamic world, to honestly study their military pasts. For until we recognize the causes of our past failures, we will be doomed to repeat them, time after time after time.

– August 31, 2007

IV

THE THREAT OF DESTRUCTION

The struggle for world domination is between me and the Jews. All else is meaningless. The Jews have inflicted two wounds on mankind: circumcision on its body and conscience on its soul. I come to free mankind from their shackles.

– Adolf Hitler

Israel must be wiped off the map.... The establishment of a Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world.... The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of the war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land.

– Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

THE ROAD TO A NUCLEAR IRAN

As the world’s media and foreign ministries have again trained their sights in on Israel and the Palestinians, a much more significant drama is being largely underplayed.

At its meeting next month in Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency will address the recent confirmation of reports that Iran is poised to produce nuclear weapons.

Since a consortium of Russian companies signed an $800 million deal in 1996 to build a 1,000-megawatt light water nuclear reactor for Iran in Bushehr, most efforts by the US and Israel to stop the Iranian nuclear program have centered around applying pressure on the Russian government.

“The Iranians learned from Iraqi mistakes,” says a senior Israeli intelligence official who is involved in efforts to monitor the Iranian nuclear program.

The Iraqis worked 80 percent in secret and 20 percent in public on their nuclear program. This attracted attention to the program and made it possible to take action to prevent them from moving forward.

In contrast, Iran works 80 percent in public and 20 percent in secret in developing its nuclear weapons program. It moves forward publicly, lulling the international community into a sense of complacency that all the Iranians are building is a nuclear power plant. Then suddenly we discover that they are on the verge of producing nuclear bombs.

Last August, an Iranian rebel group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, showed that the Bushehr plant might very well be little more than a smokescreen hiding the real Iranian nuclear program.

The group’s disclosure, which was later substantiated by satellite imagery, indicated that Iran secretly developed two other nuclear sites in Natanz and Arak. The Natanz plant is used for the production of nuclear fuel, and the Arak facility is used for the production of heavy water. While Russian companies have been under constant Western intelligence surveillance, it appears that these two facilities have been built with intense and little noted Chinese, Pakistani and North Korean assistance.

When satellite images taken after the group’s disclosure backed up the allegations, IAEA director Muhammad el-Baradei requested permission from the Iranian government to inspect the sites last December. In what is itself a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, (NPT) of which Iran is a signatory, the Iranian government delayed the inspection until February.

The IAEA’s inspections were limited to the Natanz facility due to Baradei’s tight schedule. Visiting the Natanz plant, Baradei and his inspectors found a network of centrifuges for enriching uranium. At the time Baradei indicated that a pilot facility at the site was complete and that a large centrifuge enrichment plant was still under construction. He described the plant as sophisticated and comprehensive.

Reports have noted that the Natanz facility already has 160 operational centrifuges and that an additional 1,000 are set for production in the next 18 months.

The still uninspected heavy-water plant in Arak will presumably be capable of producing plutonium-based nuclear weapons.

For their part, the Russians appear to be cooperating in the attempt to rein in the Iranians. Although they refuse to curtail their involvement with the Bushehr reactor, they have conditioned the operation of the Bushehr plant on Iranian agreement that the spent fuel rods from the reactor, which can be used to produce enriched plutonium, be returned to Russia. The Iranians have refused to sign on to the Russian proposal and as a result, although complete, the Bushehr plant is not operational.

As MK Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, notes,

The Iranian nuclear program is of course a strategic threat to Israel, but it is far from being only Israel’s problem. The Iranians are now enhancing their ballistic missile capabilities to cover not only Israel but targets throughout Europe. A nuclear armed Iran, capable not only of bombing Israel, but of bombing Europe, will be a force of global instability and will significantly change the global balance of power.

As with every other significant national security and foreign policy issue, the Bush administration is divided on how to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat. Hawks in the Pentagon are pushing for the US to force the IAEA to find Iran in material breach of the NPT at its meeting next month. Such a finding would open the Iranian nuclear program to UN Security Council scrutiny that could lead to UN-sanctioned military action similar to the actions taken by the Security Council against Iraq in 1990.

For its part, the State Department as usual has recommended traveling a less contentious path that involves “engaging” the Iranian government in an “unofficial” dialogue that has been taking place over the past several months in Geneva under UN supervision. At these meetings, the Iranian officials have denied that they are pursuing nuclear weapons just as they refused to accept that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, denied supporting terrorism, and pretended they are not harboring al-Qaeda commanders. That is, these unofficial negotiations with the Iranians have been characterized by complete Iranian duplicity.

At the same time, by soft-pedaling the Iranian threat, the State Department is paving the way for a failure at the IAEA meeting next month. Speaking to Reuters, a Western diplomatic official in Vienna said last week that Baradei is expected merely to note that there are “inconsistencies” in the Iranian nuclear program that need to be explained.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week, former FBI director Louis Freeh addressed the issue of the Iranian threat to US national security. Calling Hezbollah “the exclusive terrorist agent of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he criticized the Clinton administration for refusing to apply pressure on Iran after the FBI found that its security services stood behind the 1996 Hezbollah bombing of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where 19 US airmen were killed. Then, too, the US has accused Teheran of sheltering top al-Qaeda terrorists like Said Adel, the network’s security chief, and Osama bin Laden’s son Saad. Washington further alleges that al-Qaeda operatives in Iran directed the May 12 terror attacks against US targets in Riyadh in which 34 people were murdered.

In addition to Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, the Iranians also control the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, finance Hamas, and since the Karine-A weapons ship sale to the PA was concluded in late 2001, Iranian intelligence authorities have been backing and instructing Fatah terror cells as well.

In the aftermath of the May 12 attacks, the State Department suspended its dialogue with the Iranian government and raised its rhetoric against the Iranian regime. And yet, in spite of the clear strategic threat posed by a nuclear armed Iran, the State Department has been spending its energy not playing up the IAEA meeting next month, but in pressuring Israel to accept its road map to establish a Palestinian state by 2005.

In an article in the Atlantic Monthly published in August 1992, Robert Kaplan discussed how it came to pass that the US government was caught unawares when Saddam Hussein marched his army into Kuwait in August 1990. By Kaplan’s telling, after the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988, US policy regarding Saddam became vague. With little direction from the White House, Saddam’s 1988 gassing of 5,000 Kurds met with little backlash from Washington, as Arabists in the State Department were given more or less free rein regarding US policy towards Iraq. These career Arabists, like then-ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie, argued that Saddam, while a dictator, had a pro-Western orientation.

As Kaplan noted, “The only Middle East issue that really energized [US secretary of state James] Baker was the one with a domestic political payoff: the Arab-Israeli question.”

Due to his near obsession with this second-order issue, Baker failed to take note of what Saddam was planning for Kuwait. This, in spite of the fact that in April 1990, four months before the invasion, Chas Freeman, then US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, warned specifically that Saddam was likely to invade Kuwait.

For anyone with eyes to see, it is clear that despite his “pro-peace” rhetoric, PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas’s ascension to power in the PA is a farce. The new wave of massacres in Israel and Abbas’s repeated declarations of allegiance to Yasser Arafat and Hamas are simply expressions of the obvious: Abbas is not a trustworthy interlocutor and by supporting his sham of reform, the US is supporting the terrorist organizations murdering Israelis as well as their state supporters in Teheran.

There is an old joke about a man groping around on the street at night. His friend approaches him and asks him what he is doing.

“I’m looking for my keys,” he responds.

“Did you drop them here?” his friend asks.

“No, I dropped them in the alley across the way. But there’s no light in the alley, so I’m looking for them here.”

The prime danger to US national security lies in Teheran. The key to the global Islamic terror nexus that stretches across the world is found in the dark allies of Teheran, not in the well-lit streets of Jerusalem. Rather than pressuring an ally to reward Teheran’s terrorist friends, the US should be using all its leverage throughout the world to prevent the ayatollahs from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The price the US paid in 1990 for ignoring Saddam Hussein in favor of pressuring Israel was the Gulf War. The price it will pay for repeating the mistake with Iran will be a nuclear nightmare.

– May 23, 2003

HOW TO DEAL WITH IRAN

Iran this week summarily rejected the latest call by the International Atomic Energy Agency to cease all its uranium enrichment programs. Speaking at a military parade on Tuesday, where Iran’s surfaceto-surface Shihab-3 ballistic missiles earmarked “Jerusalem” were on prominent display, Iranian President Muhammad Khatami defied the IAEA, saying: “We will continue along our path [of uranium enrichment] even if it leads to an end to international supervision.”

Given Iran’s intransigence and the West’s timidity, a new received wisdom seems to be coalescing in Washington. This view is that it is not possible today, given the US preoccupation with Iraq, either to change the Iranian regime and therefore moderate the threat posed by a nuclear Iran, or to engage the mullahs in negotiations that would appease them into giving up their nuclear ambitions. Therefore, it is being said, a new “middle road” policy must be constructed.

The most serious voice weighing in on the “middle road” option to date is Henry Sokolski. Sokolski, who now heads the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, was a US arms control negotiator in the first Bush administration and has held senior positions on arms-control-related issues in Congress and in the US intelligence community. Last week, the NPEC published a report, partially funded by the Pentagon, on the Iranian nuclear program, entitled “Restraining a Nuclear-Ready Iran: Seven Levers.”

Given Sokolski’s own hard-won credibility in nonproliferation affairs, and the fact that the Pentagon partially funded his report, it is important to analyze the study and its conclusions.

The study asserts at its outset that it will be impossible to target Iran’s nuclear sites militarily. This assertion arises from intelligence reports which have shown that Iran has up to 15 separate and dispersed nuclear sites, many of which are hardened and underground. Aside from this, the report and its precursor, “Checking Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions,” asserts that Iran already possesses the scientific knowledge base necessary to reconstitute any sites that are destroyed or damaged by air strikes.

Similarly, the study asserts that engaging Iran on its nuclear program is an exercise in futility, given Iran’s current and past duplicity on the subject.

Disturbingly, while Sokolski accuses officials presently working on the Iran issue of being “in denial” about the inevitability of Iran acquiring nuclear capabilities, he himself is in denial about the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose. Sokolski enumerates three dangers that he views as likely to emanate from a nuclear Iran.

First, he says that Iranian nuclearization will act as a catalyst for neighboring countries to attempt to gain nuclear capabilities, citing Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Turkey as likely candidates for adopting such a policy.

Second, the report argues that nuclear capabilities will embolden Iran to take action to reduce world oil shipments by attacking tankers in the Straits of Hormuz or Saudi and Iraqi oil installations and pipelines, leading to a dramatic increase in oil prices.

Finally, a nuclear armed Iran would feel free to increase its support for terror strikes against the US and its allies. Such strikes would lead to a diminishment of US influence in the Middle East and throughout the world.

In truth, all the threats that Sokolski’s report argues will arise if Iran becomes nuclear capable already exist. Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Algeria are all already seeking to gain nuclear capabilities, as the report itself acknowledges. As well, Iran has been linked to much of the terrorism against oil-related targets in Saudi Arabia over the past year and a half, and to most of the sabotage attacks against Iraqi oil installations since the US-led invasion. Indeed, Iran today is the world’s primary sponsor of terrorism. Its links to al-Qaeda have been copiously documented. Its primary sponsorship of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Fatah is also unquestionable.

Yet, while labeling already existing threats emanating from Iran as future ones, Sokolski ignores the main new threats that would exist were Iran to become equipped with nuclear bombs – the use of those bombs to destroy Israel or its neighbors and rivals in the Persian Gulf, and the transfer of nuclear weapons to a terrorist group deployed as Iran’s proxy.

Given that Sokolski fails to acknowledge these threats, it is not surprising that his policy recommendations for checking Iran’s nuclear ambitions read like an instruction manual for US arms negotiators facing the Soviets during the era of detente in the 1970s. They are all based on the assumption that, like the Soviet Union, Iran is a status-quo power that will respect some mutually acceptable game rules.

Some of Sokolski’s recommendations are interesting, but irrelevant to the matter at hand. He talks of the need to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by amending it to extend automatic nuclear blacklisting and other sanctions on any state that vacates its signature to the treaty. This may be a good idea, but what possible effect could it have if Iran has independent nuclear capabilities?

Most significantly – and egregiously – Sokolski recommends that in an effort to check Iranian nuclear capabilities,

Israel should announce how much weapons usable material it has produced and that it will unilaterally mothball (but not yet dismantle) Dimona, and place the reactor’s mothballing under IAEA monitoring. Israel should announce that it will dismantle Dimona and place the special nuclear material it has produced in “escrow” in Israel with a third trusted declared nuclear state, e.g., the US.

That is, the primary target of Teheran’s nuclear arsenal should respond to the emerging threat by disarming itself.

If this recommendation were made by a European or an Arab, one could simply laugh it off. But given the respectability of the source, it is necessary to engage it. Adopting such a course would be devastating for three main reasons:

First, it ignores the real danger of Iran using nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, as it has threatened.

Second, it ignores the rationale behind Israel’s nuclear program: deterring the threat of physical destruction by both conventional and nonconventional enemy forces. It is not simply a deterrent against nuclear attack. To discuss nuclear transparency for Israel without calling for conventional disarmament of, say Egypt, whose conventional armed forces alone constitute a strategic threat for Israel, is to ignore Israel’s strategic vulnerabilities.

Finally, the recommendation makes no distinction between a nuclear-armed, stable democracy and a nuclear-armed, terror-supporting theocracy. Comparing a nuclear Israel and a nuclear Iran is like comparing a housewife in the kitchen wielding a butcher’s knife to a murderer in a dark alleyway wielding a butcher’s knife. It is both morally obtuse and strategically blind.

Sokolski states at the outset that the option of a military strike against Iran must be dismissed because Iran’s program is too far-flung and its sites are too hardened. That is, since it may well be impossible to hit every nuclear target, it is not worth hitting any of them. As well, Iranian leaders daily threaten that any military action taken against Iran will be responded to in a devastating manner.

Yet, were an air strike on Iran to take out say, only 10 of 15 sites, it would still severely retard the Iranian nuclear effort, buying the West time to formulate and enact either a policy of engagement from a position of strength, or a policy of regime change with the requisite credibility among regime opponents that such a strike would inspire.

As to the threat of Iranian retaliation, it can be mitigated by taking certain steps. Hezbollah leadership, as well as its rocket and missile depots and launchers, can be preemptively destroyed or disabled in Lebanon. Saudi oil installations can be secured by Western Special Forces. A naval flotilla can be deployed to the Persian and Oman Gulfs, ready to secure the Strait of Hormuz for oil tankers.

In addition, immediately following a military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, allied governments could launch a massive information warfare campaign, flooding Iran with radio and satellite television broadcasts explaining the need for the strike and offering assistance to Iranian reformers.

In short, while calling for a “middle ground” – looking askance at naive formulations of engagement with no deterrent credibility, or regime change with no operational credibility – may seem like an attractive option, in reality, given the hostility and radicalism of the Iranian regime, Sokolski’s report provides no real new option.

A more formidable middle road that could be used to develop options for either regime change or engagement must necessarily be predicated on a comprehensive military option supporting limited air or commando strikes at Iran’s nuclear facilities.

– September 23, 2004

THE SECOND WORST OPTION

A week before the US Congressional elections the New York Times published a front-page story which all but admitted that Iraq’s nuclear program had been active until March 2003, when the US-led coalition deposed Saddam Hussein. The Times’ report relayed concerns of officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding captured Iraqi documents that the administration had posted on the internet.

The documents in question contained Iraqi nuclear bomb designs that could be useful to rogue states like Iran that are currently working to build a nuclear arsenal. The Times’ article also reported that, in the past, the same website had published Iraqi documents relating to nerve agents tabun and sarin. They were removed after their content elicited similar concerns from UN arms control officials.

In response to the Times’ story an international security website run by Ray Robinson published a translation of a story that ran on the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassah’s website on September 25.

Citing European intelligence sources, the Al-Seyyassah report claims that in late 2004 Syria began developing a nuclear program near its border with Turkey. According to the report, Syria’s program, which is being run by President Bashar Assad’s brother Maher and defended by a Revolutionary Guards brigade, “has reached the stage of medium activity.”

The Kuwaiti report maintains that the Syrian nuclear program relies “on equipment and materials that the sons of the deposed Iraqi leader, Uday and Qusai...transfer[red] to Syria by using dozens of civilian trucks and trains, before and after the US-British invasion in March 2003.” The report also asserts that the Syrian nuclear program is supported by the Iranians who are running the program, together with Iraqi nuclear scientists and Muslim nuclear specialists from Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.

The program “was originally built on the remains of the Iraqi program after it was wholly transferred to Syria.”

This report echoes warnings expressed by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon in the months leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq that suspicious convoys of trucks were traveling from Iraq to Syria. Sharon’s warnings were later supported by statements from former IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, who said last year that Iraq had moved its unconventional arsenals to Syria in the lead-up to the invasion.

In the weeks and months after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, President George W. Bush repeatedly stated that America’s primary security challenge was to prevent the world’s most dangerous regimes from acquiring nonconventional and particularly nuclear weapons. When Bush’s statements are assessed against the backdrop of the apparently advanced Iraqi nuclear bomb designs that were placed on the web in recent weeks, it becomes clear that the US-led invasion successfully prevented Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons.

In his State of the Union Address in 2002, Bush placed Iraq in the same category of threat to US national security as Iran and North Korea. The three rogues states, Bush argued, constituted an “axis of evil” that must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The post-Saddam insurgency in Iraq – an insurgency largely facilitated and sponsored by Iran – has caused the US and its coalition partners no end of grief. Some 3,000 coalition servicemen have been killed since the invasion; the overwhelming majority of casualties have been American. Frustration with the continued bloodletting in Iraq was undoubtedly the most significant factor that caused the Republican Party to lose control of both houses of Congress in last Tuesday’s elections.

And yet, for all the difficulties, pain and frustration the post-Saddam insurgency has caused the US, the toppling of Saddam’s regime successfully prevented Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iraq is a war zone today. But it does not have, and likely will not acquire, nuclear weapons – nor chemical or biological weapons, for that matter. To that degree, Bush was neither wrong nor premature when he made it known in the months following the invasion that the US had accomplished its mission in Iraq.

In the summer of 2003, assessing future trends on the basis of the US-led invasion of Iraq, Libya’s dictator Mu’ammar Gaddafi decided to forgo his nuclear weapons program. Libya’s decision to give up its nuclear weapons program was a direct consequence of Gaddafi’s analysis of US intentions after the invasion. Quite simply, he believed that the best way to ensure the survival of his regime was to relinquish his aspirations to become a nuclear power.

But as the months and years have progressed it has become clear that far from being a warning to other would-be nuclear armed dictatorships, the US-led invasion of Iraq was a one-shot deal. As Saddam was captured in his hole, Teheran and Pyongyang marched forward, unchallenged in their campaign to become nuclear powers.

The ascent of the most dangerous regimes in the world to the status of nuclear powers reached a new climax last month. First was North Korea’s nuclear bomb test on Columbus Day. Two weeks later Iran announced it was doubling its uranium enrichment by utilizing a second network of centrifuges.

For their part, most of the nations of the world have looked on with indifference to these developments. South Korean Foreign Minister and incoming UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon appears far more concerned with the Japanese debate over whether North Korea’s nuclear test should or should not cause Japan to develop its own nuclear arsenal than with the fact that Pyongyang now has nuclear bombs.

Ban’s apparent moral and strategic dementia is of a piece with the international community’s apathy. Europe has responded to Iran’s sprint toward nuclear arms by offering its usual mix of toothless sanctions, emotional appeals and diplomatic pageantry, all aimed at marking time until Iran announces its entrée into the nuclear club.

Russia and China have responded to both Pyongyang and Teheran’s nuclear machinations by increasing their collaboration with both regimes.

As for the US, Iran, North Korea and al-Qaeda have all been quick to interpret the Democratic victory in last Tuesday’s Congressional elections as a sign that the US has chosen to turn its back on the threat they pose to America. Reasonably, the world is now assessing the US through the prism of its nonaction against Iran and North Korea rather than through the prism of Iraq. And the consequence of the view that Iraq was a deviation from a norm of US passivity is nothing less than the complete breakdown of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Last week London’s Sunday Times reported that Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the UAE have all announced their intention to build civilian nuclear reactors. Last Tuesday, in an official visit to China, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak reportedly signed an agreement with Chinese leader Hu Jintao for China to build nuclear reactors in Egypt.

It is not hard to see the lesson of these developments. As the Iraq campaign shows clearly, while the price of taking action to prevent rogue regimes from acquiring nuclear weapons is high, the price of not acting is far higher.

Relating this wisdom to Iran earlier this year, Senator John McCain said, “There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option [to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons], and that is a nuclear-armed Iran.”

The US and its allies are paying a high price for having successfully prevented Saddam from getting nuclear bombs. The price that Israel or the US, or both, will pay to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs is liable to be even higher. Yet the alternative to paying that price will be suffering, destruction and death on an unimaginable scale.

– November 13, 2006

WHY DENY THE HOLOCAUST?

There is something terribly confusing about Iran’s penchant for denying the Holocaust. Given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stated desire to see Israel wiped off the map, it would seem more reasonable for Iran to be celebrating the Holocaust than denying it as he has done this week by hosting his international Holocaust denial conference in Teheran.

But Ahmadinejad is slicker than that. He embraces not the Holocaust but the nation that pulled it off. In his August missive to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he referred to the German nation as “a great contributor to progress in science, philosophy, literature, the arts and politics” who have had a “positive influence in international relations and the promotion of peace.” These lines of course are open to interpretation. He could be referring to Goethe and Schiller and he could be referring to Heidegger and Goebbels.

So why is the guy who is gunning for a new Holocaust belittling the last one?

First of all, by doing so he empowers those Germans and friends of Germany who carried it out. By denying the Holocaust Ahmadinejad turns the Nazis into victims and so provides a space for them to express themselves after a 60-year silence. Indeed, in Germany neo-Nazism is a burgeoning political and social force that proudly parades its links to Iran.

The German fascist party NPD’S followers demonstrated in support of Iran at the World Cup in Germany last spring. This week, Der Spiegel reported that attacks against Jewish children have increased markedly in recent years. Jewish children and their non-Jewish friends have been humiliated in anti-Semitic rituals unheard of since the Nazi era. “Jew” has become one of the most prevalent derogatory terms in use in Germany today.

Iran’s adoption of Holocaust denial as an official, defiant policy gives legitimacy to this striking phenomenon. This is especially the case since Iran is blaming the Jews for silencing these poor fascists. In his same letter to Merkel Ahmadinejad wrote,

The perpetual claimants against the great people of Germany are the bullying Zionists that funded the Al Quds Occupying Regime with the force of bayonets in the Middle East.

Ahmadinejad of course does not limit his efforts to the Nazis. He is also setting the cognitive conditions for the annihilation of Israel for the international Left by presenting Israel’s existence as a direct result of the Holocaust. As Iran’s Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki said this week, “If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt.”

In short, Iran views Holocaust denial as a strategic propaganda tool. By downgrading the Holocaust, Iran mobilizes supporters and paralyzes potential opponents. Its coupling of the last Holocaust with the one it signals daily it intends to carry out wins it support among the Nazis and the Sunnis alike. Its presentation of the Holocaust as a myth used to exploit Muslims wins it support in the international Left which increasingly views Israel as an illegitimate state. So by denying the Holocaust Iran raises its leadership profile both regionally and globally.

Indeed, even if the Left doesn’t buy into Holocaust denial, it can still agree with Iran’s conclusion that Israel has no right to exist. As Mottaki explained,

If during this [Holocaust denial conference] it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis’ crimes?

So from Mottaki’s perspective, Israel is illegitimate whether the Holocaust happened or not. In making this point, Mottaki closed the gap between Iran and a loud chorus of voices in both Europe and the US who claim that Israel was established only because of European guilt over the Holocaust and consequently the Jewish state has no inherent legitimacy. This is a view that even Jewish leftists like Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and New York University Professor Tony Judt have expressed.

Inevitably, those who hold this view come to believe that Israel has no right to defend itself. After all, if Israel is but an illegal European colony on stolen Arab lands, then any act of self-defense that Israel takes is by definition an act of aggression. So from this perspective, all Israel can do is give away land and accept that it must pay for all the pathologies of the Arab world.

The view that every problem in the region is somehow or other bound up in Israel’s stubborn refusal to disappear is clearly reflected also in the policy prescriptions of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, in former president Jimmy Carter’s anti-Semitic attacks against Israel, and in the position paper authored by professors Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer about the so-called “Israel Lobby” (which is due to be published as a full-length book ahead of the 2008 presidential elections).

And so, by framing its Holocaust denial around an interpretation of the Arab world’s war against Israel propounded by radical leftists and foreign policy “realists” of the soft-Right, the Iranians enable them to find a comfort level with what Iran is doing today. This comfort was displayed by the new US Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his Senate confirmation hearing where he justified Iran’s nuclear weapons program by claiming that it was a deterrent measure in response to the fact that Pakistan, Russia, the US and Israel all have nuclear weapons. Gates of course served on the Baker-Hamilton commission and no doubt supports its recommendation that Israel be forced to give the Golan Heights to Syria and Judea and Samaria to Hamas.

Although it has not for a moment desisted from its calls of “Death to America,” its vision of a world without America or its threats to attack Europe, Iran has made Israel the focus of its propaganda. In so doing it has provided cover for “realists” like Mearsheimer, Walt and James Baker who claim that the war is really just between Israel and the Muslims and that the only reason that the US finds itself caught in the middle is because of its support for Israel. That support, in turn, is the result of Jewish subversion of Washington through the so-called all-powerful “Israel lobby,” which Carter claims, as he sells his latest screed, no politician will risk bucking up against.

This view, now emerging into the mainstream political debate in the US, has already won the debate in most of Europe. There the view is that European Muslims are only attacking their non-Muslim countrymen in places like Belgium and Norway because states like the US and Micronesia have yet to abandon Israel.

For Merkel, the centerpiece of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s trip to Germany Tuesday was her furious denunciation of the Iranian conference. “I would like to make it clear that we reject with all our strength the conference taking place in Iran.... Germany will never accept this and will act against [Holocaust denial] with all the means that we have,” she said.

Merkel’s breathless furor is an example of the final problem that Ahmadinejad has created for his opponents by adopting Holocaust denial as a central plank of Iran’s foreign policy. Bluntly stated, he gives people a way to be perceived as being against Iran without actually doing anything to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Merkel and her fellow Germans have spent an inordinate amount of time over the past three years condemning the Nazi Holocaust. This week they even organized a special Holocaust-condemning conference in response to the Iranian Holocaust-denying conference.

Yet over the same time period, they have conducted negotiations with Teheran as part of the EU-3 that have enabled Iran to continue its nuclear progress, obstructed US efforts to levy sanctions on Iran, and maintained active trade relations with Iran. Merkel’s government has continued the practice of providing loan guarantees to German firms doing business with Iran. In 2005, German-Iranian trade stood at about $5 billion.

Now, after three years of disastrous negotiations with the mullahs, Germany has finally come around to supporting the European draft sanctions resolution against Iran being debated in the UN Security Council. The problem is that the proposed sanctions are so weak that they will have no impact on Iran’s ability to move on with its nuclear bomb program.

The obvious fact that the sanctions will have no impact on Iran has not made a dent in Merkel’s refusal to support military action against Iran under any circumstances – a refusal she reiterated while standing next to Israel’s prime minister on Tuesday.

Olmert was apparently too busy admitting that Israel has nuclear weapons only to take back his admission hours later, absurdly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for his opposition to the “nuclearization of Iran” which Putin is actively promoting, and promising to give Judea and Samaria to Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas to take issue with Merkel’s statement. And that is a pity, because by taking issue with it, he would have gone far towards destroying the effectiveness of Iran’s Holocaust denial strategy.

Were Israel to base its diplomatic, military, informational and economic policies on a single-minded commitment to preventing Iran from achieving nuclear capabilities, it would succeed.

Unfortunately, under the Olmert government Israel is doing nothing of the kind on any level.

On the public diplomacy level, were Israel to take concerted action against Iran’s Holocaust denial program, it could destroy the program and so enact a positive change in the public discourse on Iran. Merkel’s stated refusal to support military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities was an ideal opportunity to launch such action. If Olmert had reacted in disgust to Merkel’s statement and announced that it was unacceptable, he would have stood the Iranians’ propaganda on its head.

Imagine what the impact would have been if Olmert had rejoined, “Excuse me, but it is quite possible that at the end of the day a military strike against Iran will be the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring atomic bombs and so committing another Holocaust. Given this, your blanket opposition to the notion of military strikes constitutes Germany’s effective acceptance of another Holocaust. Shame on you, Angie. Shame on Germany.”

Such a statement would have changed the entire dynamic of the international discourse on Iran.

If we are willing to do what is necessary, Israel can prevent the next Holocaust. It is unforgivable that Olmert and his ministers are not doing what needs to be done.

– December 15, 2006

MAKING THE CASE AGAINST GENOCIDE

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an evil man. But he is not a stupid man. Indeed, he is smart and fastidious. He understands power and how to get it. And he understands that the purpose of a nation’s foreign policy is to sell ideas and messages and to build coalitions that enable a state to achieve its national aims. Due to his understanding and his abilities, Ahmadinejad has achieved significant success in advancing his policy aims of defeating the United States, destroying the State of Israel, and acquiring nuclear weapons.

The source of his frenetic motivation for destruction is his deep-seated and fanatical desire to hearken the arrival of the Shi’ite messiah – the twelfth imam or the Mahdi. Ahmadinejad promises that the arrival of the Mahdi will signal the enduring defeat of liberal democracy and the notion of human freedom and the eradication of Christianity and Judaism. All will be replaced by the “pure” Islam of the Mahdi, of Ahmadinejad and of the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Over the past week evidence of Ahmadinejad’s success was legion. On Wednesday, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that Iranian-North Korean nuclear collaboration has reached new heights. Not only were Iranian scientists present at North Korea’s nuclear test last October, according to the Telegraph, North Korean nuclear scientists are in Iran today assisting their Iranian counterparts in preparing a nuclear test that could take place by the end of the year.

This new information means that the timeline for Iranian acquisition of nuclear bombs has been shortened dramatically. If just months ago US intelligence officials claimed that Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons until 2011, and if just six weeks ago Mossad chief Meir Dagan told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Iran needed two years to acquire the bomb, the report that Iran could test a nuclear weapon by the end of 2007 means that there is reason to fear that Iran will have the means to launch a nuclear attack against Israel next year.

Moreover, recently there have been several reports that all Iran’s nuclear facilities are working at full strength to increase uranium enrichment. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki’s announcement Monday that 38 predominantly Western UN nuclear inspectors would be barred from returning to the country is yet another sign that Iran’s nuclear efforts are being stepped up. As well, Iran’s acquisition last month of advanced Russian Tor M-1 anti-aircraft missiles demonstrates that with Russian assistance, Iran is preparing seriously for war.

Aside from North Korea’s apparent nuclear alliance with Iran, we have the escalation of chaos by Iran’s proxy arm in Lebanon. This week Hezbollah moved ahead with its stated goal of overthrowing Prime Minister Fuad Siniora’s government. It should be clear from the events this week in Lebanon that Iran is working to undermine any semblance of order in that country in order to facilitate its exploitation as a forward operating base against Israel.

As Nobel laureate Professor Israel Aumann explained Wednesday at the Herzliya Conference, the empowerment of Iran’s terror army in Lebanon is an acute strategic threat to Israel. Aumann noted that there is every reason to fear that Iranian nuclear bombs could be transferred to its terror proxies. A nuclear attack against Israel aimed at annihilating the Jewish state can be conducted by relatively primitive delivery systems. And there is little reason to doubt that Hezbollah possesses such systems.

Iran’s recent diplomatic successes are also quite impressive. This week, Iran signed a defense pact with Belarus. The agreement comes on the heels of Ahmadinejad’s successful state visit to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Indeed, Iran’s hyperactive diplomacy is bringing about a situation in which every state with a beef against the US or Israel is collaborating on some level with Iran. Bringing this point home on Wednesday was Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa. In his speech before the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Moussa expressed opposition to any US military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.

In the realm of international public opinion, Iran’s position is anything but weak. This was made clear last Saturday in London during a public debate between London’s pathologically anti-American and anti-Israel Mayor Ken Livingstone and US Islamic scholar Dr. Daniel Pipes. During the debate, Livingstone noted in a laconic manner that evoked no outrage that he thinks that the establishment of the State of Israel was a mistake.

Speaking at the Herzliya Conference Tuesday, former minister Natan Sharansky explained the significance of statements like Livingstone’s for Israel’s national security. Sharansky warned that today international opinion is more sympathetic to the view that Israel should be destroyed than European opinion in 1939 was to Germany’s exhortations that the Jewish people should be expunged from Europe. As a result of the Arab-Islamic-Leftist campaign to demonize Israel that has been going on systematically for more than six years, today throughout the world there is a large and growing sense that wiping Israel off the face of the earth wouldn’t be particularly objectionable.

Many members of the audience who heard Sharansky’s remarks on Tuesday serve in official capacities vested with responsibility for contending with this terrible state of affairs. So the question that must be asked is what are they and the politicians under whom they serve doing to contend with the growing specter of national destruction? Unfortunately, on the level of international diplomacy the answer is precious little. Israel’s top leaders spend most of their time spreading baseless promises that everything is under control. Aside from that, they engage in either feckless or counterproductive diplomatic activity.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for instance, has visited world capitals and told us that he is building a coalition. Yet, all evidence is to the contrary. During his visit last month to Germany – a potential coalition partner against Iran – Olmert failed to give the Germans any reason to work with us against Iran. His recent visits to Russia and China were preordained failures since there is no chance that those countries – which are assisting Iran economically, militarily and diplomatically – will lift a finger to prevent Teheran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

A proper Israeli foreign policy would serve to check and undermine Iran’s international maneuvering. It would work to bring about Iran’s delegitimization and isolation in the international community. It would work to dry up Iran’s bank accounts and so unravel the stability of the regime and then act to overthrow it through popular insurrections.

There is a small group of prominent Israelis who currently serve in no official capacities who are privately acting to delegitimize and isolate Iran internationally. Members of this group include opposition leader and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Sharansky, former IDF chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya’alon, MK Dan Naveh and former UN ambassador Dore Gold. These men are pushing to have Ahmadinejad indicted under the Genocide Convention for inciting to genocide by calling for Israel’s destruction. Many also work tirelessly to explain the magnitude of the Iranian nuclear threat not only to Israel, but to the entire world.

On the economic warfare front, Netanyahu is waging a one-man war – and rather successfully at that – to push forward an international campaign to divest from companies doing business with Iran. A study conducted by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy showed that US public employee pension funds are heavily invested in such companies. Divestment from these companies could potentially cause hundreds of billions of dollars in losses for Iran.

During the Herzliya Conference, Republican presidential contenders including former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senator John McCain all went on record in support of pension fund divestment. Moreover, Netanyahu met with the state treasurers of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Connecticut on Tuesday in Boston and urged them to divest their public employee pension funds from companies that do business with Iran. If all five states were to divest their funds, Iran would stand to lose $71 billion.

There are a significant number of prominent public figures – both Jewish and non-Jewish – in the world who fervently wish to join forces with Israelis to defend against Iran and the forces of global jihad more generally. A number of them participated in the Herzliya Conference. Sharansky noted that during the war with Iran’s army in Lebanon last summer, several prominent foreigners volunteered to help Israel in defending itself in the crucial battle for international opinion. Yet these esteemed friends of Israel, such as Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler, could get no information from the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Defense Ministry or the IDF’S Spokesman’s Unit. No one could be bothered to talk to them. No one had time to help them help Israel.

In a similar fashion today, angry voices are emanating from the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office complaining about Netanyahu’s efforts. Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and others have repeatedly accused Netanyahu of alarmism and are seeking to silence Israel’s most effective defender in the international arena today.

Tomorrow will mark the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In recent years, the international community has declared the day International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Under the morbid influence of the Iran discussions at Herzliya, this week I paid a visit to Yad Vashem’s new museum. On display were several copies of Der Stürmer – Josef Goebbels’s infamous anti-Semitic propaganda organ. What was most striking about the caricatures that pictured Jews as monkeys and monsters in human form was how stupid and primitive they were. If we had had the power then to respond to the demonization campaign that paved the way to Birkenau and Babi Yar, we could have defeated it. But we did not have the power then.

Today, the genocidal propaganda emanating from Iran, the Arab media and the radical Left is no less foolish and flimsy. If we are wise enough to fight it as a nation and a state, there is no doubt that we will be victorious. All Ahmadinejad’s coalitions and evil intentions cannot help him against a roused Jewish people.

But if we want to win, we need to fight.

– January 26, 2007

IF IRAN GETS THE BOMB

With the Bush administration now happily basking in the glory of positive coverage in the New York Times and enjoying the warm embrace of the James Baker/Brent Scowcroft wing of the Republican Party, it is hard to imagine that it will reconsider its decision to abandon the Bush Doctrine. That doctrine, named after President George W. Bush and most forcefully enunciated by him, eschewed appeasement of terror-supporting, weapons-of-mass-destruction-proliferating enemies of the free world.

Today, what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refers to as a “diplomatic initiative” aimed at appeasing terror-supporting, and weapons-of-mass-destruction-proliferating Iran, and its terror-supporting, and weapons-of-mass-destruction-proliferating Syrian colony is about to take off in Baghdad. So too, this week, the US began normalizing its relations with the terror-supporting, weapons-of-mass-destructionproliferating Stalinist dictatorship in Pyongyang.

Bush’s traditional opponents are beside themselves with glee.

With regard to North Korea, these opponents are quick to note that there has always been great uncertainty about the level to which Kim Jung Il has advanced in his illicit uranium enrichment program. With regard to Iran, in an interview with the Times, former congressman Lee Hamilton warned that the Bush administration had better not think that the negotiations with the mullahs will lead anywhere quickly.

As the co-chairman of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group which last November called for the president to appease Teheran and Damascus by forcing Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and Judea and Samaria explained, negotiations with the mullahs have to be open-ended. In his words, “You can’t expect miracles here. There has to be a sustained effort. Successful diplomacy requires very careful preparation and very extensive follow-through.”

For his part, Hamilton’s partner, former secretary of state James Baker, ecstatically declared on Tuesday night, “America must be prepared to talk to our enemies.”

What is lacking from both the media’s reportage of the Bush administration’s strategic about-face, and the administration’s traditional detractors’ praise for that sudden turn is an analysis of the likely downside of appeasing the mullahs. For instance, on Wednesday the Times ran a report on North Korea under the heading “US Concedes Uncertainty on North Korean Uranium Effort.”

The thrust of the article, which was based on interviews with administration sources, was that while North Korea’s commitment to acquire nuclear weapons has never been in doubt, at no time has the US had certain knowledge of its actual capabilities. In light of the uncertainty relating to Pyongyang’s capabilities, the Bush administration was wrong – the Times’s sources clucked – to have confronted it over its intentions.

By the same token, those who applaud the administration’s decision to engage the nuclear weapons-seeking mullahs in Teheran argue that the administration would be wrong to confront Iran for its stated intention to “wipe Israel off the map,” and to bring about “a world without America,” since US intelligence services are incapable of bringing unequivocal information regarding the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Clearly there is something wrong with this analysis. If what is not in doubt is Iran’s commitment to acquiring nuclear weapons, rather than base its policies on a best-case-scenario regarding Teheran’s unknown capabilities, the US and its allies should be basing their policies on a calculation of the risks a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute for global security.

Broadly speaking, there are three possible scenarios of how Iran would likely behave were it to become a nuclear power. In the most optimistic scenario, Iran would not attack Israel or any other country with its atomic arsenal, but would rather use it as an instrument of international and regional influence. In this scenario, Iran would reap economic advantage from its nuclear status by threatening oil shipping in the Persian Gulf and so jack up worldwide oil and gas prices. A massive economic dislocation in the oil-consuming countries would no doubt ensue. In this state of affairs, all international economic sanctions against Iran would disappear and states would begin fighting with one another for the right to develop Iran’s oil and gas fields and refining capabilities.

Operating under Iran’s nuclear umbrella, terror groups like Hezbollah and al-Qaeda would feel free to attack at will throughout the world. The rates of terrorism – of both the organized and lone wolf variety – would increase exponentially.

Regionally, Iran would work to export its Khomeinist Shi’ite revolution. It would increase its interference in both Iraq and Afghanistan and so neutralize and defeat coalition and NATO efforts to stabilize those countries.

As to Saudi Arabia, there can be little doubt that Iran would seek to foment an uprising of Saudi Shi’ites who happen to live as a repressed minority on top of the Saudi oil fields.

In a moderate scenario, not only would all the events that would likely occur in a best-case scenario occur, Iran would also make indirect use of its nuclear arsenal. In this case, Iran would likely use one of its existing terror proxies in Sinai, Gaza or Lebanon, or invent a new terror group in one or all of these areas. Iran would transfer one or more nuclear weapons to its terror group of choice, which would then attack Israel and cause the second Holocaust in 70 years. Iran would deny any connection to the attack, although it would shower high praise on its perpetrators.

While Iran’s leaders from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on down have expressed a willingness to endure an Israeli nuclear second-strike, judging from the way in which the Western policy elites are treating Iran today, the Iranians can have every expectation that they can wipe Israel off the map and pay no price for their aggression, either from a destroyed Israel or from the US.

The New York Times and its counterparts will likely note that there is no absolute certainty that Iran was behind the attack. Even the skimpiest Iranian denials or vague allegations against countries like Pakistan or Russia or “rogue” scientists from the former Soviet Union or Pakistan will likely be seized upon as a justification for not responding to the attack. Israel, it will be said, had it coming anyway, because it refused to negotiate with the “militants” from Hamas, preferring instead to maintain its “occupation” of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem.

In the worst-case scenario, not only would Iran implement the best case and the moderate-case scenario, it would also widen its network of allies while neutralizing its competitors in the Muslim world in order to expand its exportation of the Khomeinist revolution worldwide. All this it would do in an effort to achieve its longstanding aim of destroying America. Here the Iranians would be operating under the reasonable assumption that Europe will be neutral in the conflict, and Russia and China would likely support them against the US – at least covertly.

In this scenario, the Iranians would strengthen their alliances with America-haters in Latin America like Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro or his heirs. It could openly supply these countries with nuclear bombs or strengthen Hezbollah’s foothold in South and North America. In the latter case, Iran could transfer nuclear weapons and delivery systems to its terror proxies and use these networks, which include Hezbollah cells that are already active in the US, to attack the US.

Most brazenly, Teheran could collaborate with its ally North Korea in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of attacking US cities with nuclear weapons launched from Iran. At the same time, given the US’S large nuclear arsenal and ICBM capabilities, it is less likely that the Iranians would attack the US directly.

In light of this analysis it seems that in spite of the praise it is reaping from the policy jet-set, the Bush administration would do well to reexamine its new policy toward Iran. It should accept their criticism and revert to basing its policy toward the nuclear-proliferating, terror-supporting rogue state on what is known rather than on what is unknown.

Since Iran not only wants nuclear weapons, but has an active nuclear weapons program, the question that should be guiding policymakers is not whether Iran should be negotiated with, but rather, whether the US is willing to accept any of the likely scenarios of what will transpire if Iran does in fact acquire nuclear weapons. If the US is not willing to accept any of those scenarios, then it should be asking itself what must be done to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

While Europe may be willing to sit on the sidelines of this fight, just as it sat on the sidelines of the Cold War, and did little to prevent the Nazi conquest of the continent in World War II, Israel has no such luxury.

In light of this, it is deeply disturbing that this week the OlmertLivni-Peretz government reacted to the US move toward appeasement by claiming that it will have no impact on Israel. Rather than trying to gloss over the dangers, Israel should be actively engaging the many forces in Washington and elsewhere who understand the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran. Together we should be working tirelessly to ratchet up support for a policy based on the understanding that the world cannot abide a nuclear-armed Iran.

– March 1, 2007

BANKRUPTING IRAN IS NOT ENOUGH

According to a spate of recent media reports, Iran’s economy is on the skids. It works out that aside from being a messianic, genocidal killer, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also an economic dunce.

Ahmadinejad entered office two years ago after running a populist campaign pledging to share Iran’s oil and gas revenues with the Iranian people. As his campaign slogan put it, Ahmadinejad would “put petroleum income on people’s tables.” But two years into his tenure, the economy is failing. While the government places inflation rates at 12–13 percent, Radio Farda reported that Iran’s Parliament Research Center indicates that the rate is actually closer to 20 percent.

Ahmadinejad’s economic mismanagement, which includes discouraging international investment by destabilizing the region politically through his bellicose rhetoric and frenetic advance of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and support for global jihad, has singled him out for opprobrium by Iran’s intellectual elites. In June, 57 Iranian economists signed an open letter condemning Ahmadinejad’s policies and accusing him of “ignoring the basic principles of economics.” The economists warned that “government mismanagement is inflicting a huge cost on the economy and underscores that high oil revenues over the last two years can only delay the imminent economic crisis.”

The basic problem with Iran’s economy is that the government spends more subsidizing prices than it takes in from oil and gas revenues. The government sells gasoline to the public for one-fifth the cost of production. As the Associated Press reported on Sunday, in 2006 Iran earned $50 billion in oil and gas revenues. But it spent $60 billion on fuel and other subsidies.

Iran would be able to cover its costs more successfully if it were able to attract foreign investors to develop its increasingly antiquated oil and gas fields. While there is much foreign interest in developing Iran’s oil and gas sectors, two factors work to depress such investment. First there are the US efforts to discourage foreign investment in Iran’s energy sector. Second, as AP reported, Iran itself discourages foreign investors in its energy sector by offering deals with low rates of return.

Mikkal Herberg, a former oil executive, told the wire service that Iran today offers rates of return of 6–10 percent to foreign investors. As Herberg put it, “In a very low-risk environment, you want to see 10 to 12 percent returns. In a high risk environment [like Iran], you need 15 percent plus to make sense.”

Iran’s lowball offers have put off investors who have no problem with investing in a nuclear-proliferating rogue state. China’s Sinopec’s deal to develop the Yadavaran oil field is being delayed because the rate of return Iran offered the Chinese was too low.

For its part, Iran maintains that foreign investment is high. Last week Iranian parliamentarian Ahmad Nejabat boasted that Iran had secured some $10 billion in European investment in its oil and gas sectors in recent years. Iran also announced that from March 2006– March 2007, its volume of non-oil trade with the Arab world stood at some $16 billion.

Yet even if the picture is mixed, it is clear that Iran’s economy is on a downward trajectory. That this is the case has caused many to believe that the Iranians’ economic dissatisfaction will cause the Iranian regime to take a more conciliatory position toward the international community by putting its nuclear program aside. It is similarly argued that Iran’s economic woes will bring Ahmadinejad’s more moderate political opponents to power in next year’s parliamentary elections. Additionally, for the past several months, it has been forecast that Iran’s economic weakness will eventually cause the regime to collapse and so end the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Unfortunately, the probability that in the foreseeable future Iran’s economic problems will cause the regime to moderate its policies or bring regime opponents to power in Iran’s parliament is not high.

Sunday, the regime’s Guardians Council appointed four radical mullahs to form Iran’s elections panel. This panel is responsible for approving political candidates and overseeing the voting processes. In 2004, the elections panel disqualified moderate candidates from running and so ensured that the hardliners would control the parliament. Sunday’s announcement by the Guardians Council ensures that the 2008 elections will similarly maintain the power of the radicals.

Moreover, Ahmadinejad has responded to his economic failures by further strengthening his control over the economy. Sunday the Iranian media announced that Ahmadinejad had sacked the country’s oil and industry ministers. Both men had worked to prevent Ahmadinejad from completing his takeover of the economy. With the two powerful ministries now under his full control, there is little doubt that he will intensify both his consolidation of power and his repression of his critics.

While it is possible that Ahmadinejad’s economic mismanagement may at the end of the day capsize his regime by bankrupting the country, there is no reason to believe that this will occur before Iran acquires nuclear weapons. Today Iran is enriching uranium in some 3,000 centrifuges at its nuclear installation in Natanz. Last month, an Iranian official stated that this is sufficient to make a nuclear bomb.

If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the desirability of investing in its oil sector may rise. European countries eager to appease the Iranians in the hope of removing themselves from the nuclear-armed mullahs’ enemies list may decide that a 6-or even 3-percent return on their investment is a deal to be had. And so a nuclear-armed Iran may be more economically viable than a non-nuclear-armed Iran.

Finally, even if the regime collapses as a result of its economic incompetence, it is far from guaranteed that a new regime would be more friendly to the outside world, or pose less of a threat to global security in the medium and long term than the current regime. To understand why this is the case it is worth considering post-Soviet Russia.

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not cause the Russian people to revisit the basic ideological and moral assumptions on which the Soviet regime was predicated, or link those assumptions to the eventual implosion of the Soviet empire. As Reuben Johnson noted this week in the Weekly Standard, the Russians attributed the fall of the USSR to betrayal – by disloyal officials and by the outside world. By scapegoating others for the collapse of the regime, the Russians spared themselves the need to accept the moral failure of the Soviet model and to strike out on a new course.

The fact that the Russians have not come to terms with the evil nature of Soviet Communism was brought to the fore in 2003, when 53 percent of Russians claimed that Josef Stalin was a great leader and 36 percent said that he was more good than bad.

As Boris Nemstov, the former deputy prime minister and current regime opponent, wrote recently in the Vedemosti newspaper, the fact that “40 percent of Russians are prepared to vote for whomever [Russian President Vladimir] Putin supports” in next year’s presidential elections is testament to the fact that the Russian people themselves oppose democracy.

Russia today is challenging the US on every conceivable level. It is pushing out in a neo-imperialist direction. This is brought home most clearly in its assertion of sovereignty over the North Pole, its treatment of the former Soviet republics and its stated aim to build a permanent naval station in Syria. In light of Russia’s hostility, and its rejection of democracy, it is evident that the fall of the Soviet Union did not foment a change in Russia’s moral or psychological makeup.

Noting Russia’s refusal to reckon with the legacy of the Soviet Union, Russia scholar David Satter presciently warned in the National Review in 2002 that

The “era of good feelings” in US-Russian relations... may prove short lived.... Geopolitical interests notwithstanding, the Russian leadership has made no real effort to adopt Western values, particularly respect for the individual and the value of human life.

The same could easily be the case in Iran if economic failure, unaccompanied by moral rebuke, foments the fall of the regime. To prevent a successor regime in Iran from looking like an Iranian version of Putin’s Russia, it is insufficient to weaken Iran’s economy. The US, Israel and other outside forces should be actively cultivating, supporting and organizing an alternative leadership that can take charge and move Iran in a new moral and ideological direction after the regime falls.

From all of this it is clear that while Iran’s economic failure is a positive development that should be capitalized and built upon, it alone is no indication that Iran’s threat to global security is weakening. To prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening the world in the long run, the promotion of its economic failure must be accompanied by military policies aimed at destroying its nuclear facilities, and political policies aimed at ensuring that Iran’s next regime will be better than the current one.

– August 13, 2007

AHMADINEJAD’S OVERLOOKED MESSAGE

During his visit to New York this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attacked every basic assumption upon which Western civilization is predicated. Ahmadinejad offered up his attacks while extolling his vision of Islamic global domination.

Refusing to note his existential challenge to the free world, the Western media concentrated their coverage of his trip on his statements regarding specific Western policy goals. His rejection of the UN Security Council’s authority to take action against Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program, his championing of the Palestinian cause and Israel’s destruction, his denials of Iranian support for terrorism, and his attacks against the US were widely reported. So too, his insistence that Iranian women enjoy full rights and that there are no homosexuals in Iran received banner headlines.

Ahmadinejad gave two major addresses this week – at Columbia University and at the UN General Assembly. He devoted both to putting forward his vision for global Islamic domination. And while the Western media sought hidden meanings and signals for peaceful intentions in his words, the fact is that on both occasions, Ahmadinejad made absolutely clear that his vision of Islamic domination cannot coexist in any manner with Western civilization. Consequently, Ahmadinejad’s statements were not negotiating stances. They were the direct consequence of the worldwide view he propounds. As such, they are nonnegotiable.

At Columbia University, Ahmadinejad devoted the majority of his speech to a discussion of the role of science in human affairs. While most coverage surrounded his refusal to renounce his call to annihilate Israel, his central message, that he rejects the right of people to be free to choose their paths in life, was ignored. His remarks on the issue were dismissed as “weird” or “unintelligible.” Yet they were neither.

Speaking as “an academic,” Ahmadinejad said that from his perspective, the role of science is to serve Islam and that any science that does not serve Islamic goals is corrupt. As he put it,

Science is the light, and scientists must be pure and pious. If humanity achieves the highest level of physical and spiritual knowledge but its scholars and scientists are not pure, then this knowledge cannot serve the interests of humanity.

Elaborating on this notion, he argued that Western scientists serve corrupt governments who reject the pure and pious path of Islam and therefore are used as agents for corruption.

Tellingly, Ahmadinejad moved directly from his assault on non-Islamic scientists and regimes to a defense of Iran’s nuclear program. The message was clear: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is done in the name of Islam and therefore it is inherently legitimate. As far as he is concerned, refusing to allow Iran to pursue nuclear weapons is tantamount to an assault on God.

In his address at the UN, Ahmadinejad laid out his case for Islamic supremacy. He claimed that all of the world’s problems are the consequence of two things. First, by his reading of history, after the Second World War,

The victors of the war drew the road map for global domination and formulated their policies not on the basis of justice but for ensuring the interests of the victors over the vanquished nations.

The second cause for the world’s woes is the world powers’ rejection of Islam. As he put it,

The second and more important factor is some big powers’ disregard of morals, divine values, the teachings of prophets and instructions by the Almighty God.... Unfortunately, they have put themselves in the position of God!

Thankfully for Ahmadinejad, this “corrupted” world order will soon be swept away. Either the “corrupted” powers will “return from the path of arrogance and obedience to Satan to the path of faith in God,” or “the same calamities that befell the people of the distant past will befall them as well.”

Concluding his UN remarks Ahmadinejad pledged,

Without any doubt, the Promised One who is the ultimate Savior...will come. In the company of all believers, justice-seekers and benefactors, he will establish a bright future and fill the world with justice and beauty. This is the promise of God; therefore it will be fulfilled.

It could be argued that since Ahmadinejad’s central message failed to register on his Western audiences that his visit to America was a failure. The fact that no media organs felt it necessary to analyze what he was talking about could be seen as a clear sign that no one is interested in buying what he is selling. But this is a dangerous argument, for it misses a basic truth.

Ahmadinejad is not interested in convincing the US government or even the majority of Americans to convert to Islam. He is interested in convincing adherents of totalitarian Islam and potential converts to the cause that they are on the winning side. He is interested in demoralizing foes of totalitarian Islam within the Islamic world and so causing them to give up any thoughts of struggle.

In this goal he is no different from any of his Sunni counterparts in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or their sister organizations throughout the Islamic world and indeed throughout the West.

Throughout the world, Islamic ideologues are aggressively spreading their message of global domination. In mosques, on the internet, on television, in schools, hospitals and prisons, Islamic preachers can be found propagating the cause of Islamic domination. And aside from Iran, no regime, including the Saudi regime, is immune from the pressures of the message.

Perhaps the central reason that Ahmadinejad’s message, and the hundreds of thousands of voices echoing his call throughout the world, are so dangerous is because the free world is making precious little effort to assert its own message. Indeed, rather than contend forthrightly with the challenge that men like Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden pose to the West, the West searches for ways to either co-opt their message by seeking out points of agreement or to show that really, the Islamic imperialists have nothing to fear from the West.

The main issue on which the West seeks to co-opt Islamic totalitarians is the Palestinian issue. The obvious hope is that by supporting the Palestinians, the West (including Israel) will be able to defuse what its elites consider to be the central grudge that Islamic imperialists hold against them. In so doing, they willfully ignore the basic incompatibility of the Islamic worldview with human freedom, the jihadist character of Palestinian society, and the instrumental use that Islamic totalitarians make of the Palestinian issue.

Since it was established in 1994, the Palestinian Authority has been a central clearing house for jihadist, anti-Semitic and anti-Western propaganda. Even after Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in June, Fatah has continued to compete with Hamas for the mantle of jihadist purity. Moreover, while its leaders dazzle Western and Israeli leaders with the talk of peace, Fatah’s media organs and terror masters maintain the movement’s support for terrorism and adherence to political goals that are incompatible with the continued existence of the State of Israel.

Every day, Fatah media mouthpieces extol PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s adherence to the so-called “right of return” which, if implemented, would destroy Israel as a Jewish state by overwhelming it with millions of hostile Arab immigrants. As Palestinian Media Watch documented, while Abbas was meeting with US President George W. Bush in New York, Fatah’s daily newspaper, Al-Hayat al-Jedida, published articles denying all Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and referring to Israeli cities like Sderot, Beit She’an and Safed as “settlements.” So too, the newspaper reported that this past summer Fatah sent teenage boys from Judea and Samaria to a “summer camp” in Syria called “Camp Return.”

Rather than contend with Fatah’s embrace of jihad, as has been its practice with so-called “moderate” regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, the Bush administration ignores it in the hopes that by supporting Palestinian terrorists not overtly identified with jihad it will somehow weaken the attraction of jihad. So it was that in his remarks before the UN General Assembly, Bush extolled Fatah’s “moderate leaders, mainstream leaders that are working to build free institutions that fight terror, and enforce the law, and respond to the needs of their people.”

Not only are Bush’s sentiments not supported by the Palestinians, who overwhelmingly voted Hamas into office last January, they are not even supported by US allies like Britain, which are pushing for a Western engagement of Hamas. And since Hamas is ideologically indistinguishable from other jihadist groups, it should come as no surprise that the West’s willingness to support Palestinian jihadists necessarily leads to their willingness to accept jihadists in general.

Britain’s Defense Minister Des Browne made this point explicit Monday when he argued for diplomatically engaging the Taliban in Afghanistan. Using the Palestinian issue as a point of departure, Browne said,

In Afghanistan, at some stage, the Taliban will need to be involved in the peace process because they are not going away any more than I suspect Hamas are going away from Palestine.

The Islamic imperialists’ response to the new Western willingness to engage the Taliban was given last week by Osama bin Laden. In a new videotape released in Arabic, Urdu and English, bin Laden called for Pakistanis to wage jihad to overthrow the pro-Western, nuclear-armed government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

The point in all of this couldn’t be clearer. And Ahmadinejad made it at every opportunity. The free world today finds itself embroiled in an ideological war for its very survival. Our enemies – whether Shi’ite or Sunni – are followers of a totalitarian ideology based on Islam which tells them that Allah wishes to rule the world through them. Israel is a central front in this war. Given the weakness of Western support for the Jews, jihadists see attacking Israel as a strategic tool for eroding the West’s ideological defenses and shoring up their supporters throughout the world.

The thing of it is that aside from blind narcissism, there is a reason that the West ignores the dangers facing it. The Western media ignored Ahmadinejad’s message, just as it has insistently ignored the messages of bin Laden and Fatah throughout the years, because Westerners have a hard time believing that anyone would want to abide by the Islamic worldview which denies mankind’s desire for freedom.

But no matter how ugly an ideology is, in the absence of real competition it gains adherents and power. The only way to ensure that jihadists’ demonic views are defeated is by stridently defending and upholding the fundamental principles on which the free world is based. And the West hasn’t even begun to take up this challenge.

As a result, it has handed its enemies two victories already. It has demoralized its potential allies in the Islamic world, and it has failed to rally its own people to defend themselves.

In spite of what the West would like to believe, Ahmadinejad and his allies from Ramallah to Waziristan, from Gaza to Kandahar to Baghdad, are not negotiating. They are fighting. Rather than ignore them or seek to find nonexistent common ground, we must defeat them – first and foremost on the battleground of ideas.

– September 28, 2007

ISRAEL’S SUICIDE ATTEMPT

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

– Edmund Burke

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

– Saul Bellow

WANTED: ISRAELI NEOCONS

Speaking at the Interdisciplinary Center’s Herzliya Conference on Monday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon said that Israel’s “interest is to separate the general Palestinian population from those involved in terrorism.” This, of course, stands at the core of all anti-guerrilla and counterterror operational thinking.

Ya’alon noted the economic devastation that the Palestinian terror war has wrought on the general Palestinian population. Repeated suicide attacks at the Erez Industrial Park, where 4,000 Gazans worked each day to support some 35,000 people, forced Israel to close the park. This week’s attack against an IDF outpost on the border between Gaza and Egypt forced the army to close the border-crossing terminal, preventing Gazans from conducting business in Egypt. Suicide bombers disguised as ordinary workers have forced Israel to stringently limit the number of Palestinians working in Israel and to erect roadblocks throughout Judea and Samaria.

Israel has, over the past four years, and indeed since the first Palestinian suicide bomber introduced himself to Israeli civilians back in 1994, tried to develop methods of screening cargo and workers that would make Palestinian economic activity possible while preventing the infiltration of human bombs. Additionally, as Ya’alon noted, Israel has worked to ensure that the health and education systems in Judea, Samaria and Gaza have continued to operate. This, in spite of the fact that terrorists have hidden in maternity and cancer wards from Bethlehem to Jenin and that the Palestinian school system teaches children that their life goal should be to become a suicide bomber.

Yet, in spite of all of Israel’s attempts to separate the broader Palestinian population from the terrorists, Ya’alon admitted that support for the terrorists had not waned, nor had enthusiasm for terrorism in general. In his words, IDF counterterror operations over the past two years “have decreased the ability, not the motivation” of Palestinians to carry out attacks against Israelis.

And so it can be said that the IDF, and Israel as a whole, have failed in the mission of separating the general Palestinian population from those involved in terrorism.

How can this be the case? After all, Israel’s leaders have never declared war on the Palestinians. To the contrary, every time it seemed there was a break in the clouds, Israel moved quickly to embrace any opportunity to begin discussions with Palestinian officials – whether at the political level or among the various official Palestinian militia commanders.

An answer to this seeming paradox was provided by the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh in a dispatch from Gaza earlier in the week. Toameh reported the case of Dr. Hassan Nurani, a psychologist from Gaza City who wished to run for the PA’s presidency. Nurani composed a platform calling for the building of a “civilized and moral society.” He was able to collect the requisite 5,000 signatures to submit his candidacy but couldn’t afford the $3000 needed to register for the election. Desperate to run, Nurani tried selling off his small parcel of land and his home furnishings. But he still wasn’t able to raise the sum, which is the rough equivalent of an annual salary in Gaza.

It is possible that Dr. Nurani supports terrorism. It is possible that he is not willing to live in a Palestinian society which exists alongside a strong and vibrant Jewish state. It is possible that he insists that Israel allow millions of foreign-born Arabs to immigrate freely into Israel as a condition for peace. But we’ll never know, and neither will the Palestinians, because he is too poor to tell us.

And then we have the frontrunner for the Palestinian presidency, new PLO head Mahmoud Abbas. He’s the only show in town. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone that Yasser Arafat’s deputy of 40 years has refused to call for an end to the Palestinian terror war, saying just Wednesday in Saudi Arabia that he didn’t mean to offend anyone when he said the day before that violence against Israel is counterproductive.

“All I meant,” Abbas explained, “is that we are in a phase that does not necessitate arms because we want to negotiate.” And in the meantime, he decried Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom’s call earlier in the day for the international community to build permanent housing for the millions of Arabs, whose ancestors may have once lived in Israel, who have been interned in UN refugee camps in the Arab world for the past 55 years. “Any proposal regarding the resettlement of the refugees is completely rejected,” Abbas, the soon-to-be-democratically elected Palestinian leader, said.

Shalom’s call for the rehabilitation of the residents of the UN refugee camps was given in the course of his address to the Herzliya Conference. Aside from daring to raise the possibility of letting these poor people finally be free of the burden of living their lives as political symbols, his speech was actually wholly supportive of the combative, rejectionist Abbas.

Shalom devoted much of his address to calling for the convention of a second Aqaba summit with US President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Abbas right after the January 9 elections. In his words:

The lead actors from the first Aqaba summit, which took place in June 2003 – Sharon, Bush and Abu Mazen [Abbas] – are the same actors today, but stronger.

So, in the run-up to the Palestinian election, which is supposed to be the first step toward the liberalization and democratization of Palestinian society, the presumptive winner – who stands opposed to any action against terror operatives or compromise on the so-called refugees that would enable peace to be achieved – is embraced as a positive development, a window of opportunity and a foregone conclusion. So much for giving the Palestinians a reason to separate themselves from the terrorists.

In an interview with the Post’s Ruthie Blum appearing today, Palestinian apologist extraordinaire Hanan Ashrawi assailed Bush for adopting “the neocon agenda” in calling for the transformation of Palestinian society from a terror-supporting and -engendering society into a peaceful democratic one before the establishment of a Palestinian state. In her words,

You don’t use democracy for justifying the existence of states. You would then have to remove many states. Self-determination for Palestinians is a right that has to be implemented as a way of bringing peace and stability to the region. Therefore, you don’t make a state dependent on its system of government.

Ironically the very thought that Palestinian society must be democratized meets its staunchest opposition from Israelis, specifically from the Israeli elites. In his column in Yediot Ahronot last Friday, Nahum Barnea, Israel’s journalistic supremo and proud socialist, wrote scathingly of Bush’s attachment to the notions of democracy and morality. Speaking of Bush’s reading of Minister-without-Portfolio Natan Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy, which argues that peaceful relations are contingent on individual freedom and democracy, Barnea sneered, “The book publisher can now advertise it as ‘the only book the president has read in the last ten years.’” He then went on to witheringly criticize Sharansky’s book, describing it as “clear, easily digestible, unburdened by doubt, moralistic, very positive and totally simplistic.”

Israel’s elitists, like Barnea and Peres, and their sheep-like followers like Shalom, no doubt took comfort in the obnoxious responses evinced toward the Bush administration’s policy doctrine of bringing democracy to the Arab world during last Saturday’s international summit on the topic in Rabat, Morocco. There, US Secretary of State Colin Powell was barraged by angry statements from the Egyptian, Saudi and Libyan foreign ministers, who claimed that the US can’t talk about democracy until “the peace process” goes forward and US occupation of Iraq comes to an end.

Even German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the champion of the Israeli Left, said that progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians “will lend all reform and modernization efforts in the Arab world unprecedented momentum.”

It isn’t surprising that the same people who demonize their political opposition in Israel as warmongering extremists and potential political assassins would have such a low opinion of the possibility that Arabs might, if given the opportunity, choose to live freely and at peace with Israel and the rest of their neighbors.

And yet, as the Washington Post’s editorialist noted on Wednesday, even as the Arab potentates at the Rabat summit were berating the Americans for daring to discuss democracy with them, Arab human rights activists who also participated in the conference insisted that the Americans continue to pressure their governments and that “Palestinian and Iraqi issues should not be used as excuses for not launching reforms.”

And what did these people want? They demanded that their governments

allow free ownership of media institutions and sources; allow freedom of expression and especially freedom of assembly and meetings; ensure women’s rights and remove all forms of inequality and discrimination against women in the Arab world; and immediately release reformers, human rights activists and political prisoners.

The American neoconservatives, who have been the most visible proponents of democracy in the Arab world and who Barnea, echoing Ashrawi, alleges “control the foreign policy of the Bush administration,” have often been accused of working for Israel. Yet, as our elites’ revulsion with democracy and our government’s silence on the issue shows, American democracy advocates have almost no one to talk to in Israel. Indeed, Israel’s passivity in the face of Palestinian corruption, authoritarianism and hate indicates that what Israel needs most desperately is for a movement of Israeli neoconservatives to arise and “take control” of Israel’s foreign policy.

– December 16, 2004

THE DEMOGRAPHIC BOMB IS A DUD

For the past generation, Israel has found itself engaged in post-modern warfare. Whereas Arab armies have proved themselves in five wars to be no match for the IDF on the battlefield, our enemies over the last 20 years, since the IDF withdrawal from most of Lebanon, have found that the most effective means of fighting Israel is on the postmodern battlefield.

The most conspicuous component of the postmodern battlefield is terrorism. Terrorist foot soldiers of the postmodern army sow fear and revulsion in the heart of the target population in order to induce a sense of helplessness. In the face of photographs of the charred remains of babies being pulled from bombed-out cafes and buses, the mighty Israeli army suddenly seems small and impotent.

While terrorism is the outward face of the postmodern aggressor, social psychology is perhaps his greatest weapon. If the target population can be manipulated to view itself as the aggressor, if it can be brought to view its position as untenable, then it will sue for peace and surrender. So it was that Kadoura Fares, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and one of the heads of Fatah who signed Yossi Beilin’s Geneva Accords, said in an interview with the pan-Arab London-based newspaper Al-Hayat in October 2003 that the Palestinian aim in signing the accords was to “foment a piercing public and political debate in Israel.”

While Hamas has placed its emphasis mainly on the terrorist aspect of the postmodern battlefield, the PLO has placed an equal emphasis on the psychological component of the war. In fact, it could be said in retrospect that the greatest single victory the PLO has scored in its 46-year-old war with Israel was the publication of a single report in 1997. That report, “Demographic Indicators of the Palestinian Territory, 1997–2015,” is based on a census carried out by the PA’s Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) in 1997. It projects that the Arab population west of the Jordan River will by 2015 outnumber the Jewish population.

These numbers were immediately adopted by such prominent Israeli demographers as the University of Haifa’s Arnon Soffer and the Hebrew University’s Sergio DellaPergola, who have both warned that by 2020 Jews will make up between 40 and 46 percent of the overall population of Israel and the territories. The Palestinian projections, which place the Arab population of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip at 3.83 million and the Israeli Arab population at 1.33 million for a total of 5.16 million Arabs west of the Jordan River, put Israel with its 5.24 million Jews at the precipice of demographic parity with the Arabs.

Largely in reaction to these statistics, which were bandied about by everyone from politicians to diplomats to defense officials, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided a year ago to adopt the Labor Party’s campaign platform and withdraw the IDF from Gaza and northern Samaria and forcibly remove the Jews living in those areas from their homes. In his interview with Yediot Aharonot in December 2003, which was the curtain raiser for Sharon’s announcement of his policy shift later that month, Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said:

Above all hovers the cloud of demographics. It will come down on us not in the end of days, but in just another few years. We are approaching a point where more and more Palestinians will say: “There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want is the right to vote.” The day they get it we will lose everything.

But what if the numbers are wrong? What if the doomsday scenarios we hear on a daily basis, arguing that Israel is about to be overrun by the Arab womb, are all based on fraudulent data – part of an ingenious Palestinian plan to psychologically manipulate Israel into capitulating?

This week a team of American and Israeli researchers presented a study of the Palestinian population statistics at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation in Washington. The team, led by American businessman Bennett Zimmerman and Israeli strategic consultant Yoram Ettinger, compared the PCBS data to birth and death records published annually by the PA’s Health Ministry, to immigration and emigration data from Israel’s Border Police at the international crossing points into the Palestinian Authority and at Ben-Gurion Airport, and to internal migration records of Palestinians from the territories into Israel recorded by the Israeli Interior Ministry.

The researchers also compared Palestinian population data from the PCBS to voting records compiled by the Palestinian Central Elections Commission before the 1996 Palestinian elections and this week’s Palestinian elections, as well as to the Israeli Civil Administration’s population survey of Palestinians carried out in the 1990s before the transfer of authority over Palestinian population records to the PA.

The PCBS forecast was further compared to Palestinian population surveys carried out by UNRWA and the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) in the mid-1990s, and to World Bank Palestinian population studies. All of the team’s comparative analyses led to the conclusion that the Palestinian population forecasts upon which Israel is basing its current policy of withdrawal and uprooting of Israeli communities in the territories are faulty in the extreme.

The PCBS count includes the 230,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem. Yet these Arabs are already counted by the ICBS as part of Israel’s population, which means that they are counted twice.

The PCBS numbers also project Palestinian natural growth as 4 to 5 percent per year, among the highest in the world and significantly higher than the natural population growth of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Yet Palestinian Ministry of Health records published annually since 1996 show that Palestinian natural growth rates in Judea, Samaria and Gaza average around 3 percent. In 2002, the Palestinian Ministry of Health retroactively raised its numbers and yet even the doctored figures never extended beyond 3.7 percent. The original data show a steady pattern of decrease in natural growth leading to a natural growth rate in 2003 of just 2.6 percent.

Indeed, the total fertility rate of Palestinian women has been trending downward in recent years. Palestinian women in Judea and Samaria averaged 4.1 children in 1999 and 3.4 in 2003. Palestinian women in Gaza averaged 5 children each in 1999 and 4.7 in 2003. The multi-year average of Israel’s compound growth rate from 1990 to 2004 is 2.5 percent. And even as Israel’s growth rate went down to 1.7 percent between 2000 and 2004, a similar decline occurred among Palestinians in Gaza, where growth decreased from 3.9 percent to 3.0 percent, and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, where growth declined from 2.7 percent to 1.8 percent.

The PCBS also projected a net population increase of 1.5 percent per year as a result of immigration from abroad. But the study’s authors found that except for 1994, when the bulk of the Palestinian leadership and their families entered the areas from abroad, emigration from the Palestinian areas has outstripped immigration every year.

Aside from this, the PCBS numbers include some 200,000 Palestinians who live abroad. This fact was corroborated by an October 14 press release by the Palestinian Central Elections Commission which stated that “200,000 eligible voters are living abroad.” The number of Palestinians living abroad constitutes 13 percent of the Palestinians counted in 1997 and forms the basis of the projections of that population’s growth in spite of the fact that they don’t live in the territories.

The report also shows that while the Israeli Interior Ministry announced in November 2003 that in the preceding decade some 150,000 residents of the Palestinian Authority had legally moved to Israel (including Jerusalem), these 150,000 residents remain on the Palestinian population rolls. Parenthetically, this internal migration is largely responsible for the anomalous 3.1 percent annual growth in the Israeli Arab population. Absent this internal migration, the Israeli Arab natural growth rate is 2.1 percent – that is, below the Israeli Jewish growth rate.

The study presents three separate scenarios for calculating the actual Palestinian population in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Its authors prove that the first scenario, based on the PCBS numbers, minus the double-counted Jerusalem Arabs and minus the internal migrations, is not statistically plausible. Yet even this scenario places the Palestinian population at 3.06 million, or 770,000 less than the number that currently informs Israeli decision makers.

The average of the last two scenarios, which corrected for the Palestinians living abroad and were based on base populations comprised of ICBS Palestinian population survey projections from the 1990s and Palestinian voting records in 1996 and 2004, brought the final projected number of Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria to 2.42 million – nearly a third less than the 3.83 million figure currently being used.

The study, which has been accepted by prominent American demographers Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt and Murray Feshbach, shows that contrary to common wisdom, the Jewish majority west of the Jordan River has remained stable since 1967. In 1967 Jews made up 64.1 percent of the overall population and in 2004 they made up 59.5 percent. Inside Israel proper, including Jerusalem, Jews make up 80 percent of the population.

While reading the report, the inescapable sense is that something has gone very wrong within Israeli society. The numbers are so clear. The data have always been readily available. And yet, like bats attracted to the darkness of a cave, we preferred the manipulative lies of the PA to the truth.

The entire 117-page report can be accessed online at www.pademographics.com. Given that it shows that the government’s current policies are based in large part on an uncritical acceptance of fraudulent data whose purpose was to demoralize us into capitulating to our post-modern foe, hopefully Olmert and Sharon will take a look at it.

– January 14, 2005

THE INCITEMENT OF IDEAS

Last Friday night, the TV stations were in a frenzy over the right-wing incitement against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza and northern Samaria and to expel all Jews living in these areas from their homes and communities. Channel 2 devoted fully a third of its hour-long news broadcast to the issue – superimposing images of the political protests against the Oslo Accords in the months before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination with footage from the recent mass rally and protests against Sharon’s withdrawal plan.

Much was made of the fact that right-wing activist Itamar Ben-Gvir yelled at Education Minister Limor Livnat at the memorial service for the slain Jewish underground leader from the pre-statehood days, Avraham Stern. Ben-Gvir told her (probably correctly) that Stern would never have approved her support for Sharon’s plan.

It was unpleasant seeing Ben-Gvir and his nasty friends following Livnat and yelling at her. But then again, how was their behavior different from that of members of Knesset who insult and curse one another as a matter of course?

Then there is the pseudo-attack against Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at Kfar Habad last Thursday night. The initial reports claimed that a group of anti-withdrawal thugs slashed Netanyahu’s tires and surrounded him, yelling, as he tried to make it to his disabled car. He was spirited away in another vehicle, escaping, so the reports had us believe, by the skin of his teeth.

After the matter was duly investigated, it worked out that Netanyahu’s tires had not been slashed; he may simply have had a flat tire. And that no group of hooligans had surrounded him; one teenager had yelled at him. According to Amnon Abramovich, from Channel 2, this teenager had actually been asked to yell at Netanyahu by a journalist at the scene who told him what to say and even sent him a “thank you for a job well done” text message on his cellular phone.

In the meantime, in light of these major infractions on the apparent right of public servants to receive no unpleasant criticism for their support of highly controversial policies, Sunday, Interior Security Minister Gideon Ezra called for inciters – including people writing nasty graffiti on city streets – to be placed under administrative detention.

For his part, Sharon has castigated anyone who calls for a referendum on his withdrawal program as contributing to incitement and indeed as advancing the cause of civil war. In a speech last week Sharon said, “The idea of holding a national referendum is an attempt to delay the implementation of the Disengagement Plan.” He went on to say,

The inciters use threats of civil war in order to influence the public who wants disengagement but prefers quiet. A national referendum will bring about an increase in incitement.

So for the prime minister of Israel, anyone who claims that the Israeli voters have a right to weigh in on what is perhaps the most controversial plan ever adopted by an Israeli government is playing a direct role in inciting a civil war.

This is a shocking statement for two reasons. First, it shows the utter disdain the prime minister feels for his people who he clearly doesn’t believe are capable of responsibly exercising the freedom to choose. Second, Sharon is effectively saying that anyone who calls for the people to be given the right to choose is guilty of fomenting a rebellion. That is, he has relegated all of his political opponents to criminal status.

This week saw MK Effi Eitam thrown out of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee when he argued with Sharon for accusing parliamentarians who are opposed to his plan of incitement. Apparently, committee chairman Yuval Steinitz is unaware that in a democracy, one of the main functions of a parliament is to enable free and fair – often rancorous – debate of the issues of the day, and that it is the responsibility of legislators to call leaders to account for their actions and policies.

Then there is democratically challenged Transportation Minister (and former justice minister) Meir Sheetrit. On Monday, Sheetrit told Israel radio that as far as he is concerned, Likud Party members are guilty of incitement when they write letters to Likud MKs informing them that future political support for these politicians is dependent on their voting against the withdrawal and expulsion plan. That is, in Sheetrit’s view, it is incitement for constituents to base their support for politicians on the extent to which those politicians advance their interests while in office.

The most amazing aspect of the entire “incitement” craze is that, as Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter explained this week, statements by opponents of Sharon’s plan have no influence over potential assassins. According to Dichter, there are some 500 people floating around who fit the psychological profile of a potential assassin. Like Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, and John Hinckley Jr. who attempted to assassinate US president Ronald Reagan in 1981, these individuals are not members of any organization or group.

Rather, potential assassins are sociopaths with messianic protestations of divine selection. People of Amir’s ilk are not moved by what leaders say. They are moved by their own delusions of grandeur and sense of alienation. They would murder even if no one were in the streets protesting against Sharon’s plan.

But in the meantime, rather than focusing their attentions on finding and neutralizing the threat posed by such sociopaths, our political leadership is moving to demonize and criminalize the huge swath of the Israeli public who opposes Sharon’s policy of withdrawal and expulsion.

In advancing this objective, the government has been ably assisted by the media. The news media’s advocacy of Sharon’s withdrawal plan has been shockingly brazen. Opponents of the plan, when given any airtime at all, find themselves under attack.

Rather than allowing people like MK Gideon Sa’ar or Binyamin Regional Council Chairman Pinchas Wallerstein to explain why it is that they oppose the plan, radio and television left-wing partisans posing as objective journalists attack them for their role in contributing to the “atmosphere of incitement,” and pointedly demand that they justify their disloyal and dangerous behavior. On the other hand, these pretend journalists shamelessly pander to Sharon’s supporters, such as Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is constantly handed softball questions by fawning hacks commiserating with him about the dangerous extremists on the right who are just about to kill Sharon.

Because, as far as these paragons of the free press are concerned, it is a foregone conclusion that Sharon will be assassinated. On Sunday, under a headline that proclaimed “The Fear: A Jewish Suicide Attacker,” a Yediot Aharonot subhead asserted, “The question isn’t whether they will try to assassinate the prime minister, the question is how.” Alex Fishman, the paper’s military “reporter,” detailed the likelihood of a Jewish suicide bomber breaking through Sharon’s security cordon and then pushing the button. The entire article was devoid of sourcing, facts or even grounded suspicions. But then, what can we expect from the most widely read newspaper in the country? Certainly not that it accurately report the news.

US Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once famously said, “Every idea is an incitement.” And in a democracy, ideas – that is incitement – are supposed to flow uninhibited. Indeed, ideas – from the idiotic to the sublime – are the stuff of democratic societies. The constant incitement of competing ideas is what differentiates democracies from tyrannies.

The failure of Sharon, his allies and underlings – like the failure of his apparatchiks who run the country’s media – to understand that just as an elected government has the legal right to set policy, so does its political opposition have a legal right to protest its policies as loudly, nastily and unaesthetically as they wish, exposes a singular failure of our political and cultural elite to adopt the habits of democracy.

The main victim of this terrible reality is, of course, the Israeli public, which has not been afforded an opportunity to hear any significant debate or discussion of Sharon’s plan to uproot thousands of Jews from their homes and withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza and northern Samaria. This policy – arguably the most controversial plan ever to be adopted by an Israeli government – is being bulldozed through to implementation without Sharon or his allies ever satisfactorily explaining how it will advance Israel’s security or political interests.

Sharon has not explained how turning Gaza over to the Palestinians will enhance Israeli security.

He has not explained how Israel will protect itself from rocket and mortar attacks on Ashkelon, Ashdod or Netivot after the withdrawal.

He has never explained why it is necessary to give the Palestinians the communities in northern Gaza – Dugit, Alei Sinai and Nissanit – which are geographically indistinguishable from Ashkelon and whose heights control the entire area.

He has never explained how Israel will be able to defend the strategic sites like the Ashkelon power station and the Ashkelon-Eilat oil pipeline with Hamas roaming freely on those heights.

He has never explained why it is necessary for Israel to remove itself to the 1949 armistice lines, rather than retain the areas necessary for its security, and what Israeli acceptance of these lines in Gaza means for future negotiations regarding Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem.

Because of the absence of real debate in the Knesset or in the press, and the concerted effort by the government and the media to criminalize political speech, the Israeli public is being denied the one thing that distinguishes a democracy from a tyranny: the ability of the citizenry to make informed decisions and to hold their leaders accountable for their actions.

– February 18, 2005

THE SETTLERS SHOW THEIR TRUE COLORS

Walking among the tens of thousands of Israeli protesters at Moshav Kfar Maimon this week was like being witness to a miracle. There in the scorching summer heat were thousands upon thousands of families with children of all ages, young men and women and elderly people, living under siege and in conditions that would make an infantryman cringe.

And yet, there was no complaining. There was no shouting. There was no pushing. There was no garbage on the ground. There was no stench of any kind. What one saw in the protesters’ faces and heard in each and every statement and conversation was dignity, determination, integrity, faith and a form of earthy, plainspoken and unabashed patriotism and concern for the greater good that has become an artifact of a barely remembered past for many Israelis.

In witnessing this – when just outside were 20,000 soldiers and policemen, laying concertina wire along the fence penning these people in as if they were terrorists, and standing arms locked in row upon row, poised to pounce at them at the slightest provocation – it was, indeed, hard to shake off the sense that one was watching a miracle happen.

The tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens – estimates of their actual numbers run between 30,000 and 60,000 – were exercising their democratic right to protest the government’s plan to expel 10,000 Israelis from Gaza and northern Samaria and destroy the communities they built from sand next month. The protesters oppose this plan for moral reasons. It is simply obscene, they say, to carry out these expulsions. These people are set to be thrown out of their homes and their farms just because they are Jews. Israel receives nothing in return. These people’s homes will be either destroyed or turned over to the same Palestinian terrorist forces that have been attacking them continuously for the past five years. Their hothouses and livestock are set to be turned over to the Palestinians as well.

The plan’s proponents argue that the expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their farms and communities in the Land of Israel is necessary to maintain Israel as a democratic, Jewish society. Yet, what these opponents of the expulsion plan experienced, in their efforts to even voice their opposition, is that in insisting on carrying out this plan – which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was reelected overwhelmingly in 2003 by promising to oppose – the government is trampling and endangering both Israel’s democratic form of government and its character as a Jewish state.

On Sunday evening, the day before the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip’s solidarity march from Netivot to Gush Katif was set to begin, the police denied the council a permit. In so doing, the police unabashedly denied these people their democratic right to protest the policies of their government. The police’s justification was the announced plan to walk to Gush Katif – on the third day of the protest. The denial of the permit to demonstrate meant that everything about the protest plan was deemed illegal. Citizens conducting demonstrations in Netivot, Kfar Maimon and Kibbutz Re’im, the first three planned stops on the march – all of which are well within the sacrosanct 1949 armistice lines – was deemed an illegal activity.

Then Monday, when the council ignored this draconian announcement, the police breached the constitutional rights of tens of thousands of Israelis by intercepting privately owned buses throughout the country – from the Golan Heights to Tel Aviv to Eilat – and prevented their law-abiding passengers and drivers from exercising their right to travel freely in the State of Israel. In both of these actions, the police – with full backing from the Prime Minister’s Office, the State Attorney’s Office and the leftist local media – took actions that undermined Israeli democracy and its foundations as a state ruled by law and not the police.

On the roads to Netivot on Monday and on the roads to Kfar Maimon on Tuesday and Wednesday, the police set up roadblocks to inspect cars. Cars with orange banners of solidarity with the residents set for expulsion, and cars whose passengers were identifiably religious, were pulled over and not allowed to pass. Rather than turn around and go home, the passengers said nothing of this obviously unlawful, discriminatory humiliation. They simply got out of their cars and, pushing their baby carriages and strollers, walked for kilometers under the desert sun to reach Kfar Maimon on foot. In so treating these citizens, the police clearly signaled that they view religious Jews as a threat. So much for leaving Gaza and northern Samaria in order to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic state.

As one walked along the crowded road and the lawns of Kfar Maimon, one was struck by the ubiquity of the television cameras. Nearly all major news organizations in the Western world were present. In the past, when the council brought up to a quarter of a million people out to protest land giveaways, the mass demonstrations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv received barely any attention. And here were Fox and Sky News, CNN and the BBC competing with Israel’s television channels for the best place to park their satellite dishes.

The reason for this is clear: the world press has bought into the demonized image of the Jewish residents of Gaza, Judea and Samaria that has been largely propagated by the Israeli Left and the Israeli media. The “settlers” are viewed as violent, extremist, money-grubbing religious fanatics who threaten the foundations of Israel and block any chance for peace between Israel and its neighbors. In other words, under normal circumstances, protests by the settlers are considered unworthy of media attention. But this time, the media swallowed the bait set by the council leaders who insisted that they would march to Gush Katif. Everyone came to film the blood that would be let when the protesters clashed with the Israeli army and the police.

But once they were there, far away from their air-conditioned offices and apartments in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, they had to send in the pictures of what they saw. And what they saw was the truth they have been insistently denying for the past 30 years. Namely, that these Israelis have nothing in common with their demonized image. Here were tens of thousands of peaceful protesters singing and dancing and studying together. Here they were, handing fruit and drinks to the soldiers and policemen sent to stand against them and, rather than fighting with them, they prayed with them. For the first time, perhaps ever, both the general public in Israel and the world were able to receive undistorted images of these people on their television screens.

If the police’s trampling of democracy by attempting to block the protesters from arriving at Netivot and Kfar Maimon weren’t enough, we had the hysterical reaction of the police and the IDF to ensure that the general public understood that, like the media, the commanders of the police and the IDF had fallen for the discriminatory stereotypes of the settlers and their supporters. Arrayed against these families was a division and a half of security forces. There were more security forces laying siege to Kfar Maimon than participated in Operation Defensive Shield in Judea and Samaria in April 2002. In the entire US invasion force of Iraq in 2003, only 20,000 troops actually participated in combat operations. As the Palestinians in Gaza continued their Kassam rocket and mortar attacks, rather than fight Israel’s enemies, the IDF deployed six combat brigades to Kfar Maimon, where the soldiers were told to lay siege on their own family members.

Brig. Gen. Gershon Hacohen, who is the division commander charged with commanding the withdrawal and expulsion from Gush Katif, laid siege to his brother, Rabbi Reem Hacohen and his family. Reem’s son, a cadet at officer training school, laid siege to his parents and siblings. Thirty percent of the soldiers in the Golani Infantry Brigade live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. These soldiers laid siege to their parents and brothers and sisters.

At least one battalion commander refused to follow his order to lay barbed wire along Kfar Maimon’s fence. Several commanders ordered their soldiers to remove their unit insignias and berets so that no one would recognize them. Soldiers from command courses in the IDF, who were sent with no warning to Kfar Maimon, cried when they received the orders and the soldiers standing arm to arm against the protesters cried as they were forced to lay siege to their innocent countrymen whose only offense was voicing their opposition to the expulsion plan.

Perhaps sensing the rising tide of dissent, as the latest opinion polls show that less than 50 percent of Israelis support the plan, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived Thursday afternoon to make sure that Sharon goes through with it. This she does in spite of the fact that doing so all but ensures that Hamas will take over Gaza.

Hamas has already prepared 20,000 new uniforms for its operatives and supporters. They are planning a victory march through Gush Katif the day after the last Jew is expelled. So much for Washington’s belief that throwing Jews out of their homes simply because they are Jews will contribute to the prospects of Middle East peace.

When a democratic government adopts an immoral policy, it is the duty of its loyal citizens, through acts of protest and civil disobedience, to hold up a mirror to their leaders and their fellow citizens to force them to contend with the implications of their policies. At Netivot and Kfar Maimon this week, the protesters did just that. What we saw on the one side was the dignified, humble and stubborn Zionism of the citizens set to be expelled and of their supporters.

On the other side, we saw the anti-democratic and discriminatory face of the government that stands against them. The time has come for the people of Israel to be allowed to freely and democratically decide which side they are on.

– July 21, 2005

DEMOCRACY’S DESCENT TO DARKNESS

It is still unknown what will happen today and in the coming days in the newest face-off between the police and the tens of thousands of Israeli citizens who wish to assemble in Sderot to protest the Sharon government’s plan to expel 10,000 Israeli citizens from their homes and communities in Gaza and northern Samaria.

On Sunday night, the police were sending their personnel to the Western Negev ahead of the expected order to close the entire area off to civilian traffic to prevent protesters from participating in the demonstration in Sderot called by the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

During the cabinet meeting on Sunday morning, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon prevented Education Minister Limor Livnat from starting a discussion of the government’s position on the police’s decision, which is backed by Attorney General Menahem Mazuz, to prevent lawful protesters from arriving at Sderot. In so deciding the police and the attorney general have made clear that they believe it is more important to prevent a political protest than to uphold the legal right of Israeli citizens to travel freely in the country.

In her request to discuss the issue, Livnat said that the decision to block protesters

is not a technical or operational decision, but a much wider issue. It involves the balance between democracy and the enactment of government and Knesset decisions. Democracy is not simply the holding of elections. It is also the safeguarding of the freedom of expression, of protest, and of demonstration. Here we are talking about a large public that is protesting and angry. And so a decision to prevent buses from traveling to Sderot is a decision the government has to discuss.

When Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu attempted to add his voice to the discussion, Sharon cut him off saying, “The issue is not on the agenda, and it is not open for discussion.”

Today there are three girls, aged 13 to 16, who are in jail until the end of proceedings against them. Moria Goldberg, 13, Chaya Belogrodsky, 14, and Pnina Ashkenazi, 16, have been incarcerated since June 29, when they were arrested while participating in an anti-withdrawal/expulsion demonstration aimed at blocking highway traffic. In a letter I received from Chaya’s father, Moshe, he relates that in her decision to uphold the lower court’s ruling to remand his daughter in custody until the end of legal proceedings against her, Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia wrote that Chaya must remain in jail for a period that could last months because she constitutes a “danger to the society because of her ideological motivation.” The amazing thing is that if Chaya is convicted, according to her father the maximum punishment she is liable to receive is a monetary fine.

The fact that a Supreme Court justice could label a young girl a danger to society because of her “ideological motivation” is no surprise to 50-year-old Vitaly Vovnoboy. At 5 a.m. on July 4, six men, in civilian dress, five of them armed with M-16 rifles, forcibly entered the Vovnoboys’ home in Karnei Shomron. After a panic-stricken Vovnoboy screamed out “Terrorists!” the men identified themselves as police officers. Armed with a search and arrest warrant, which they refused to show Vovnoboy, who subsequently fainted, or his wife, they proceeded to confiscate two of the family’s computers, and membership forms for the Likud Party that were piled on his desk.

Only after they had arrested Vovnoboy and taken him to the Russian Compound in Jerusalem was he informed that he had been arrested for sedition and distributing seditious materials. Vovnoboy was remanded in custody for four days the next morning by a Jerusalem district judge in spite of the fact that his lawyer showed that the arrest and search had been conducted illegally. According to the warrant, two witnesses were supposed to have been present during the execution of the warrant, and none were.

Vovnoboy’s “crime” was having provided technical support for the internet site belonging to the anti-withdrawal/expulsion group “Habayit Haleumi” (the National Home), whose members organized the highway blocking protests. Both while under arrest, and since his release, Vovnoboy has not once been interrogated.

Vovnoboy, a senior software engineer for a major international high-tech firm, is a well-known and highly respected figure in Russian immigrant circles. He is a longtime member of the Likud and serves as a member of the party’s Central Committee. After making aliya in 1991 from Moscow, he was a member of the Zionist Forum led by Natan Sharansky, and later served as its acting chairman.

Word of his arrest sparked uproar in the community. Fifteen former Prisoners of Zion sent a letter of protest demanding his immediate release to President Moshe Katsav, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra and the prime minister. MKs Yuli Edelstein and Yuri Shtern wrote similar appeals.

In his view, the entire ordeal “was meant to terrorize and silence Sharon’s political opposition.” The forms confiscated from his home were signatures from Likud Central Committee members demanding a convening of the committee to debate the removal of Sharon from his leadership of the party. In order to convene the committee, 20 percent of its members must sign requests to do so. Vovnoboy had planned to submit the forms the day after he was arrested. The deadline for submission was the day before he was released. The police returned the forms to him two days after the deadline passed.

Last Wednesday, Yekutiel Ben Yaacov was arrested on charges of inciting racism. Ben Yaacov runs a website called mishal.org where visitors are asked to decide whether they prefer Sharon’s plan to expel Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria or the website’s plan to expel Palestinians who refuse to commit to not carrying out violent activities against Israel. He was interrogated for several hours in Jerusalem and then released.

The arrests of Ben Yaacov and Vovnoboy and the remand of the girls are appalling and alarming because, at base, the police and court actions taken against them are all directed not at their actions, but at their thoughts and ideas. The “danger” they constitute is not the threat or commission of violent crimes, but rather the fact that they object to the government’s policies.

In a rare move, on Sunday, President Katsav criticized the Supreme Court for refusing to rule on the legality of the police decision to block buses transporting protesters to the anti-withdrawal/expulsion demonstration at Netivot two weeks ago:

I would have expected the court to decide on this issue. There has to be a distinction between crimes. In this case there was no intention on the part of the opponents of withdrawal to commit a break-in or a theft, rather they wished to protest against the withdrawal.

Given Justice Procaccia’s view that the opponents of the withdrawal and expulsion plan manifest a danger to society because of their “ideological motivation,” it is hardly surprising that she and her colleagues on the court are allowing Sharon, through the police, to trample the laws of the country. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly apparent that for supporters of Sharon’s plan, the test of whether someone is or is not a danger to society has nothing to do with his respect for law. The litmus test that defines what is or is not “lawful” or “democratic” is whether a person, through action or thought, is obedient or disobedient to Sharon’s withdrawal and expulsion regime.

These are dark days for Israeli democracy. We see in the behavior of the police, the courts and the Prime Minister’s Office that in their hysteria to push through a controversial plan whose benefits to Israel’s national interests and security are unclear at best, everyone who objects to this plan – regardless of age, station or action – is suspect. Their homes are raided, their liberties denied and their civil and legal rights discarded.

Is this really a price the Israeli public is willing to pay – for anything? Is this what we have come to?

– August 1, 2005

THE FICTITIOUS “THIRD WAY”

What legacy has Ariel Sharon left Israel, and what will be the long-term impact of that legacy on Israel? Since the prime minister was stricken by a stroke last week columnists and commentators have been clamoring to describe Sharon and to define the impact of his years in power on Israel and the Middle East. Disturbingly, most of the commentators have based their views of Sharon’s tenure in office on a myth.

The myth of Sharon and his leadership is that over the past two years he redefined the center of Israeli politics. In the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer claimed: “Sharon’s genius was to seize upon and begin implementing a third way.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Oren argued that Sharon “began his political career on the left, swung keenly right, and concluded in the center.” Other conservative commentators, like Peter Berkowitz at the Weekly Standard and James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal’s online publication, have made identical and equally false arguments.

It is true that Sharon restructured the political map of Israel over the past two years. But he did not do so by blazing a new path, with a new vision for Israeli politics, society and security. Sharon redefined Israel’s political map by embracing the Israeli Left. And in so doing, as one top military official dolefully put it to me in November, “Sharon brought post-Zionism into the mainstream of Israeli public discourse.”

For years Israel has been divided between Right and Left. The Right argues that given the Arab world’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist, Israel must take all necessary measures to ensure that it is capable of defending itself, by itself, from all threats to its security.

For its part the Left has claimed that Arab world’s rejection of Israel is due to Israeli actions and, as a result, the Arabs can and ought to be appeased. To appease the Arabs the Left believes that Israel must transfer territory to the Palestinians and enable the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Until September 2000, when PLO chieftain Yasser Arafat began the current Palestinian terror war against Israel, the Israeli Left claimed that the appeasement of the Palestinians had to be conducted in the course of negotiations with the PLO. After its resounding electoral defeat in 2001, the Left updated its policy. The new policy of the Left was the unilateral surrender of territory to the Palestinians.

Like Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak before him, Sharon’s political cachet was based on the public’s perception of him as a security hawk and a patriot. What differentiated Sharon from Rabin and Barak was not so much his policies, but rather the fact that he came from the rightist Likud rather than the leftist Labor Party.

Rabin’s adoption of the strategically catastrophic Oslo peace process with the PLO, and Barak’s cataclysmically misguided peace offers to Arafat at Camp David and Taba, paved the way for the Palestinian terror war against Israel. These policies provided Israel’s enemies with the military means, the territory and the political legitimacy necessary to carry out their war.

Yet the demise of these policies did not leave Israelis without other options. In the 1996 elections, as in 2001 and 2003, Israelis turned to the Likud and the political Right for remedies. Indeed, in 2003 Sharon won his smashing victory for the Likud after militarily reentering the cities of Judea and Samaria to fight terror, and ridiculing the irresponsibility of Labor’s proposed unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

And then Sharon – for reasons still unknown because Sharon himself refused to explain them – took a sharp leftward turn and adopted the very policies the Israeli electorate had just so resoundingly rejected.

While the myth of Sharon as a centrist is being propagated by conservative analysts whose sympathies until Sharon’s political transformation lay consistently with the Israeli Right, the people who seem most ready to acknowledge the truth are the leftist commentators. Radical leftist Israeli novelists David Grossman and Amos Oz both embraced Sharon as a man of the Left in commentaries in the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian newspapers over the weekend. Oz wrote,

Sharon’s rhetoric changed overnight. First his vocabulary began to sound like that of his rivals.

Sharon’s rhetorical shift to the Left was followed by his policy shift in the same direction when, against the backdrop of ever-increasing Palestinian radicalization, he called for and carried out its reconfigured policy of appeasement by unilaterally surrendering Gaza and northern Samaria to Palestinian terrorists. As Oz noted approvingly,

They called him a bulldozer when he planted the settlements, and indeed he acted like a bulldozer when he uprooted them. The evacuation of the Israeli settlers from Gaza was a military operation. Sharon smashed the settlers in Gaza in the same blitzkrieg style in which he won his many wars.

Like Rabin’s leftward shift of a decade ago and its attendant handover of territory and power to Palestinian terrorist organizations, Sharon’s policies have wrought terrible consequences for Israel’s security. Last Friday, even Haaretz’s leftist military commentator Amir Oren acknowledged that “the disengagement looked like a failed initiative in most of its aspects.”

As IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz acknowledged last week, the army today is at a loss to find adequate responses to the post-withdrawal transformation of Gaza into the largest terrorist base in the Arab world. As well, with the acquisition of an arsenal of missiles and mortars, including Katyusha rockets and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles by the Palestinians, the security fences around both Gaza and Judea and Samaria, which have long been the Left’s ultimate answer to Palestinian terrorism, have been proven to be colossally misguided.

Even as it acknowledges this failure, the Left embraces Sharon, as Amir Oren put it, because of “hatred of the settlers...more than from any belief in the wisdom of Sharon.”

It is true, of course, that Sharon has remade the political map of Israel, just as Rabin did before him. But he did not do so by changing Israelis’ basic commitment to their own security. Instead he has made the success of the leftist ostrich policy of “separating” Israel from the Arabs by handing territories to Israel’s enemies the central issue of future political campaigns.

Sharon’s personal prestige gave the Left a new lease on life, split the Right, delegitimized his political camp both domestically and internationally and weakened Israel’s party system. Today, energized by Sharon’s unraveling of the Right, Israel’s Left has become ever more radicalized. Last week, it was reported that Jeris Jeris, an Israeli Arab member of the Meretz-Yahad Party and a former head of the Pasuta village council in the Galilee, had been arrested and charged with spying for Iran.

This is not to say that the party where Jeris hoped to run for Knesset has become a collaborator with Iran. Indeed, its leader announced that he would be happy to join a Sharon-led government. But the fact of the matter is that Meretz – which in 1992 voted for the expulsion of 417 Hamas terrorists to Lebanon – has become so radicalized that an Iranian agent felt he could comfortably operate from within its party apparatus.

The large “centrist” faction Sharon is so hailed for having discovered is little more than a collection of leftists like Shimon Peres and Haim Ramon on the one hand, and opportunistic and nonideological Likud members like acting premier Ehud Olmert and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni on the other. Sharon has left no coherent vision for the state other than Peres’s: further surrender to Palestinian terrorism based on the expulsion of thousands upon thousands of Jews from their homes, in the vain hope that strengthening the enemy will lessen the costs of its war on Israel.

Whatever the results of the coming post-Sharon elections may be, one thing is all but certain. Sharon’s legacy of adopting the Left’s vision of Israeli policy will eventually be abandoned. As was the case with Rabin and Barak before him, Sharon’s adoption of the Left’s view of Israel’s security predicament, based as it is on false assumptions, will reach a point where its failure will no longer be deniable. When this occurs, Israeli voters will elect a rightist government. Hopefully when that happens, the Right will not be induced to repeat Sharon’s mistakes.

– January 9, 2006

THE IDF’S SUICIDE ATTEMPT

It appears that the IDF’S General Staff has lost its collective mind. On Independence Day last Wednesday, at the annual ceremony at the President’s House honoring outstanding IDF soldiers, Sergeant Hananel Dayan, upon receiving his decoration, saluted IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, but refused to shake his hand. When asked by President Moshe Katzav the meaning of his action, Dayan explained, “My family was expelled from Gush Katif.”

Members of the audience at the ceremony had no idea what was happening on the stage. The incident was over before it began. It would have been easy for Halutz to shrug the incident off. But he chose not to.

After Dayan descended the stage, he was accosted by Maj. Gen. Elazar Stern, head of the IDF’S Manpower Division, who berated him for his action. Stern demanded an apology. Dayan refused to provide one.

Stern later claimed that the IDF would have shrugged off the incident were it not for the presence of the media at the ceremony. Yet this claim is ridiculous. Had the IDF ignored the episode, the media would also have ignored it. In the “worst case” scenario, a reporter would have asked Halutz to comment on Dayan’s action. Halutz would have said that it is understandable that those whose families were forced out of their homes in Gaza during the withdrawal last summer have hard feelings about what happened. Case closed.

But rather than ignore the minor incident, the IDF went bananas. Stern held a disciplinary hearing for Dayan on Thursday, even though Dayan had violated no IDF regulation. Dayan’s brigade commander then expelled him from his unit and barred him from serving in any combat unit. Stern is now considering revoking Dayan’s award for outstanding service.

The IDF’S decision to react to Dayan’s expression of his personal sentiment by crushing him with the full weight of the General Staff is indicative of a serious problem that has repercussions for both Israel’s continued national viability and the IDF’S continued capabilities as a fighting force.

Halutz, Stern and their subordinates accuse Dayan of having brought politics into the army by expressing his personal anger over what the IDF did to his family last August. It is true that Dayan’s grief over the expulsion of his family is shared today almost exclusively by the Right, but that fact does not make his expression of his opinion either a crime or an act of politicization of the IDF. On the other hand, the generals’ hysterical reaction to his refusal to shake Halutz’s hand indicates that the politicization has already occurred.

Today, the national religious sector makes up some 15 percent of the overall population, yet its sons make up more than 30 percent of combat soldiers in the IDF. Soldiers from the national religious camp make up a plurality of cadets in combat officer training courses and a majority of soldiers in most commando units.

Some 60 percent of NCOS in combat units graduated from national religious high schools and last year, 80 percent of company commanders in Golani Infantry Brigade were from the national religious camp. National religious officers are similarly overrepresented – by a ratio of between 2:1 to 4:1 in all combat units to the level of battalion command in the IDF. During the course of the Palestinian terror war since September 2000, 30 percent of soldiers killed in action were from the national religious camp.

The IDF’S implementation of the expulsion orders last summer caused a sea change in the way that Israelis from the national religious camp perceive the IDF. The brutal police-commanded evacuations of protesters at Amona last February – which left more than 300 demonstrators wounded – only widened the rift.

In an interview with Haaretz last week, Halutz claimed that there has been no decrease in levels of volunteerism of members of this sector since last summer. Yet members of the General Staff claim that his statement was misleading. The decreased motivation and ruined morale is evident today mainly in reenlistment rates. Company and battalion commanders are increasingly refusing to reenlist when their contracts end in anticipation of orders to carry out further withdrawals and expulsions.

Rather than contend with this situation with the necessary self-interested sensitivity in light of the damage a breach of relations with the religious Zionist camp will cause to the IDF as a fighting force, Halutz has been going out of his way in recent months to publicly chastise, insult and alienate this public. Several months ago, referring to the violence at Amona and the protests last summer against the expulsions from Gaza, Halutz described the protesters as “poisoners of wells.” On Holocaust Memorial Day he accused them of belittling the Holocaust for using the slogan “We won’t forget and we won’t forgive” regarding the expulsions last summer, although the same slogan has been used by the Left numerous times in the past. Halutz has held publicized meetings with members of the extremist left-wing group Machsom Watch but rudely refused to meet with Col. (res.) Moti Yogev, the former deputy commander of the Gaza Division who was wounded by police at Amona.

Halutz recently appointed Brig. Gen. Tal Russo as his personal emissary to the national religious sector to try to build bridges between religious leaders and youth and the IDF. IDF sources claim that Russo’s appointment was the result of successive opinion polls that showed that the national religious camp despises Halutz. Russo has been going from community to community talking with rabbis and youths aged 16 to 18 to convince them to maintain their motivation to serve. Yet actions like those taken against Dayan directly undercut Russo’s work.

Unfortunately, a recent report indicates that perhaps Russo’s mission is a mere feint. According to Middle East Newsline, a news service that specializes in coverage of the IDF, Stern recently revised the IDF’S guidelines for recruitment. In light of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s intention to expel tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in Judea and Samaria, the IDF no longer believes that soldiers from the national religious camp are trustworthy. So, according to an officer in the Manpower Division quoted in the report, the IDF will now limit the recruitment of religious soldiers. The shortfall will be made up by juvenile delinquents who are currently barred from serving in combat units.

Over the past several months, a significant number of religious youths have received notices in the mail informing them that their IDF service had been cancelled just days before they were scheduled to show up at the induction centers. In most cases, the youths were scheduled to begin infantry basic training and were caught completely by surprise. When in some cases the youths pulled strings to reinstate their conscription, they were forced to undergo lengthy interrogations by Shin Bet officers who grilled them about their spiritual connections to the Land of Israel and their willingness to participate in expulsions.

Taken together, the IDF’s treatment of Dayan, its new recruitment guidelines and Halutz’s anti-religious rhetoric reveal a dangerous politicization of the IDF. It seems that today, with Hamas now in charge of the Palestinian Authority and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz now in charge of Israel, the IDF views Israelis rather than Arabs as its principal threat. Halutz and Stern, in criminalizing actions like Dayan’s while minimizing the significance of the Hamas takeover of the Palestinian Authority, are sending a clear signal of where they believe the IDF should be devoting its energies.

The IDF General Staff ‘s decision to attack religious Zionists is perhaps the most disturbing development in Israel’s recent past. Israel is in the middle of a war – a war it has given its enemies every reason to believe they are winning. The result of Halutz and Stern’s goading of the national religious camp is already being felt as its members make increasingly unrestrained statements regarding their unwillingness to fight for the country. If the current trend is not quickly reversed, not only will the IDF itself degrade its fighting capabilities by rejecting its best soldiers and recruits; it will be transformed into a force charged not with defending Israel against its enemies, but with defending the government against its political opponents.

– May 8, 2006

SHIMSHON CYTRYN AND AHARON BARAK

Sunday Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy presided over a hearing on a petition submitted by one Shimshon Cytryn requesting to be released from Dekel prison and placed under house arrest. Justice Levy deferred his ruling to a later date.

Cytryn, a 19-year-old yeshiva student from the community of Nachliel in the Binyamin Region, is accused of attempted murder. Last June 28, two groups of teenage boys pelted one another with rocks on the Muwassi beach area in Gaza adjacent to the Israeli community Shirat Hayam. As the fight raged for three days without IDF intervention, the Israeli press set up shop near the boys and waited.

On June 28 the media sprang into action. Channel 1 filmed a series of narrow lens video clips which showed only the Israeli youths – including Cytryn – throwing rocks. Then Yediot Aharonot reporter Yitzhak Saban “heroically” inserted himself into the drama. He jumped before the cameras and “saved” a Palestinian youth whom he and his fellow reporters claimed had been critically wounded by the Israeli youths in a manner that recalled “a lynch.” The next morning a photo of Saban’s “intervention” was on the front page of Yediot. Television and radio news broadcasts led with stories about the “lynching” carried out by “right-wing extremists.” They reported that the Palestinian “victim” was hospitalized in Gaza and fighting for his life.

Yet that Palestinian “victim” was in and out of the hospital in the space of two hours. The picture of health, he gave multiple interviews to Arab and European reporters where he expounded on the “heroic battle” he and his friends fought against the “Jewish settlers.” The fact of the “victim’s” miraculous recovery from his life-threatening wounds was not reported in the Israeli press until several days later and then the story was hidden in laconic reports on the inside pages of the papers.

The “lynch” story was manufactured against the backdrop of a steady drop in public support for the Sharon government’s plan to expel all the Israeli residents from Gaza and northern Samaria. Polling data showed that less than 50 percent of Israelis supported the plan. But the “lynching” story reversed the trend. In the space of 24 hours, the public’s support for the withdrawal rose to over 60 percent.

After the expulsions were completed last August, IDF commanders, including then OC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Dan Harel admitted that there had never been anything even vaguely resembling a lynching. But the crime’s fabrication did not prevent the police from arresting Cytryn nor did it did stop the state prosecution from charging him with attempted murder. So now Cytryn sits in prison awaiting trial for a crime that was never committed.

The legal environment that enabled situations like Cytryn’s to arise is part of the judicial legacy of retiring Supreme Court President Aharon Barak.

Barak has presided over the court for 11 years. As a self-declared “judicial-statesman,” he used his position on the bench to reshape Israeli society and politics in his own image through his “constitutional revolution.”

Barak’s revolution placed the judicial branch above the legislative and executive branches. The elevation of the high court was enacted in four ways: First, the court gave standing to petitioners who were neither directly nor indirectly affected by the matters they brought before the court. Second, by cleverly interpreting a series of new Basic Laws to say something their drafters had never dreamed of, Barak was able to gain the power to overturn lawfully promulgated legislation. Third, the court empowered itself to intervene in government decisions by raising the standards of “permissible actions” by the government and the Knesset in a manner that constricted the freedom of elected officials to set policy and legislate laws. Finally, Barak insisted that “everything is justicible.”

The consequence of all these actions was the effective transfer of executive and legislative authority to the judiciary. As a result, private and public behavior that has traditionally been seen as the realm of morality and prudence, military decisions regarding Israel’s national security that had previously been under the exclusive authority of the executive, ideological questions that had been the preserve of private citizens and state bodies, and religious questions that had been the exclusive reserve of religious authorities now all came under the authority of the Supreme Court.

As he was establishing his power to overturn government and legislative decisions, Barak also consolidated his control over the judiciary. Using his control over the judicial selection process, over the past 11 years Barak transformed Israel’s judiciary into a near-unitary organism whose members are overwhelmingly united in their support for Barak’s political agenda and his use of the judiciary as a means of forcing his political agenda on the Israeli public.

Barak’s political agenda is one of leftist, post-Zionist multiculturalism and radical secularism. Barak used various methods to advance his agenda. While refusing to ever consult Jewish legal traditions, he has given anti-Israeli, non-binding UN General Assembly documents and International Court of Justice advisory opinions the weight of international law and has incorporated these “international laws” into Israeli law.

He pushed the idea that elected leaders are not allowed to make their best-faith judgments about Israel’s defense, economy or ideological foundations. Working indirectly with far-left special interest groups that have eagerly embraced Barak’s throwing open of the court’s doors to politics and flocked to the court to gain through judicial fiat what they cannot hope to gain at the ballot box, Barak has ruled lawful, good-faith government decisions regarding the defense of Israel and other national policy issues to be illegal.

Aside from that, through a legal precedent he himself established, Barak rendered our elected officials subject to blackmail by the legal bureaucracy. Barak’s court ruled that all ministers indicted for any crime must resign their offices. As a result, the police and state prosecution, backed by the court, can effectively fire political leaders by indicting them on the basis of flimsy or nonexistent evidence. Such charges led to the resignations of Justice Ministers Ya’acov Neeman and Haim Ramon and former Internal Security Minister Rafael Eitan, all of whom expressed opposition to some aspects of Barak’s policies. Former Justice Minister Tzahi Hanegbi was neutralized in office by a criminal probe against him which remained open throughout the course of his tenure.

Through his rulings, Barak made clear that some people’s human and civil rights are more equal than others. He barred the IDF from utilizing certain tactical measures that protect the lives of the troops because Barak said those measures impinged on the human rights of civilians who sheltered wanted terrorists. Barak ruled that Arab farmers’ free access to their crops outweighs the right of Israelis to defenses capable of protecting them from terrorist infiltration.

Retired justice Mishael Cheshin explained that Barak’s support for the expulsion of all Israelis from Gaza and northern Samaria made Ariel Sharon and his son Gilad immune from indictment for what appeared to be clear acceptance of bribes. In his words, “If Sharon had stood trial, there would have been no disengagement.”

And of course, under Barak’s rule, religious Israelis could expect little to no legal protection for their human or civil rights. Last year Barak’s court enabled the abrogation of their freedom of expression by approving the police decision to prevent buses from traveling to licensed demonstrations; he indirectly approved police harassment and violence against demonstrators; he enabled unindicted citizens to be barred from their homes and prohibited from seeing their families. He ruled that they could be divested of their property rights without due process and without equitable restitution by the government, could be divested of their livelihood without due process or equitable restitution, could be prevented from running for office, and could be held for months in administrative detention.

All of these decisions are part of the means through which Barak’s “enlightened society” is cultivated and his “democracy” is protected.

Unfortunately for Shimshon Cytryn and the 65 percent of Israelis who in a poll last week said they believe that the court’s rulings are motivated by political interests rather than law, the guard will not change when Barak retires next week.

His handpicked successor Justice Dorit Benisch not only subscribes to his judicial philosophy, during her 31 years in the State Prosecution, Benisch stacked the prosecution with what she referred to in a recent interview with Yediot as attorneys who “worked in accordance with the same values” that she ascribes to. As she has made clear through her actions and words, Benisch’s “values” are post-Zionism; hostility towards the military; hostility towards religious Zionists; support for the Palestinians; and support for anti-religious social forces and pressure groups.

As Benisch replaces Barak next month she faces a situation where only 32 percent of Israelis think that she is qualified for office, and only 33 percent of the public has full faith in the court. This is in contrast to the 85 percent of Israelis who had full faith in the court in 1995.

Since it is clear that she will continue and attempt to widen Barak’s usurpation of governing authority in Israel, the question that arises is whether our political leaders will have the courage to curb the court’s power.

Unfortunately, given our current crop of politicians, there is every chance that Shimshon Cytryn will be tried and convicted of a crime that was never committed.

– September 4, 2006

SCAPEGOATING OUR FRIENDS

There is something insidious about half-truths. To accept a half-truth demands accepting also a lie.

Last week, readers of the Wall Street Journal were presented with a particularly insidious half-truth along with a lie in the form of an oped by University of Haifa professor and prominent Israeli intellectual Fania Oz-Salzberger.

Oz-Salzberger’s article, “With Friends Like These... Jews, Beware of Islamophobes Bearing Gifts,” was a broadside against Israel’s supporters in Europe.

The column began with a breezy recognition and cool condemnation of European hostility toward Israel. Oz-Salzberger went on to elegantly deride the opportunistic and sleazy embrace of the Holocaust by the same European elites who reject Israel’s right to exist.

Then, having duly expressed the self-evident truth of European moral corruption, Oz-Salzberger moved on to her lies. She turned her attention to Israel’s tiny group of ardent supporters in Europe and their little umbrella organization, the European Coalition for Israel (ECI). These people, she alleged, are no-good bigots motivated purely by their racism against Muslims, or the view that “The enemies of Israel are also a threat to Europe.”

In her most devastating paragraph, Oz-Salzberger wrote,

I, for one Israeli, would be grateful to my newfound buddies if their sympathy for me did not rely on trashing another religion. Unlike them, I am touched by the sight of young Muslim women on European university campuses. They remind me of my own grandmother, a student in Prague who had to flee after the Nazi rise to power, and of all the other young and hopeful Jews whose dreams and lives were shattered by the European culture they so admired. I will therefore not solicit support based on unqualified dislike of other human groups, least of all on the continent that kicked out my grandparents.

Is it really possible that her grandmother or any Jewish student in European universities before the Holocaust would accept her comparison of them with Muslim students in European universities today?

No doubt, the Jewish students in European universities – like European Jewry in general – would have broken down and cried in exultation had the treatment they received from the Europeans then been even vaguely similar to that which European Muslims receive today. Indeed, drawing parallels between the subjugation and genocide of European Jewry during the Holocaust and the treatment of European Muslims today runs dangerously close to Holocaust denial.

Aside from the vast difference between Europe’s treatment of its Muslims today and its Jews 60 years ago, there is the issue of Oz-Salzberger’s protestation that those Jews and today’s Muslims are comparable in and of themselves. For while she notes that European Jews “admired” European culture, and identified with it, it is far from clear that Muslim students share their admiration.

According to a Pew Research Center poll taken last spring, 81 percent of British Muslims identify with their religion, while only 7 percent identify with Britain. In Germany, 13 percent of Muslims identify themselves as Germans while 66 percent identify as Muslims. Similar numbers were recorded in Spain. In France, Muslims are almost evenly split, with 42 percent identifying as French citizens and 46 percent identifying as Muslims.

Perhaps the greatest disparity between European Jewry in the 1930s and European Muslims today is their disparate views of Jews. While European Jews overwhelmingly liked Jews, European Muslims don’t like Jews. The Pew poll showed that only 32 percent of British Muslims, 38 percent of German Muslims, and 28 percent of Spanish Muslims have a favorable view of Jews. While 71 percent of French Muslims professed a favorable view of Jews, the 29 percent who did not state such a view no doubt include, among others, Ilan Halimi’s murderers.

As is the case throughout Europe, in Prague itself – the city of Oz-Salzberger’s memory – evidence suggests that jihadists are making inroads. A 2005 Czech documentary film, I, Muslim, included candid camera footage from inside a Prague mosque. The film showed Muslims proclaiming their support for Islamic terror and for the replacement of civil law with Sharia law – including the death penalty for adultery – throughout the Czech Republic.

And Sorbonne professor Guy Milliere wrote recently:

In many French cities with a growing radical Islamist population, no teenage girl can go out in the evening, at least without a full burqa – otherwise she’s admitting that she’s worse than a whore and asking to be raped.

Yet Oz-Salzberger ignores all of this in her bid to publicly malign Israel’s supporters in Europe for their alleged racism – a racism whose sole alleged manifestation lies in their insistence on warning about the rising jihadist threat to European civilization. Ignoring that threat herself, Oz-Salzberger unfairly conflates those who bravely express the need to confront the danger of jihad with racists.

Oz-Salzberger’s analysis devolves rapidly from the vindictive to the bizarre. In her conclusion, she recommends that Israelis act as Islam’s defenders in Europe by pointing out irrelevantly that 1,000 years ago Jews flourished under Islamic rule.

The oddest thing about Oz-Salzberger’s attacks is that during the European Coalition for Israel’s fourth annual conference last September, which she invokes as proof of its members’ racism, no hateful diatribes against Islam were issued.

In fact, a review of the 28 pages of minutes from their conference – available on the ECI’S website – shows that during the two-day affair, European funding of both the Palestinian Authority and UNWRA was scrutinized. EU commissioners were asked to justify their statements against European newspapers that published the cartoons of Muhammad last year. The European media was criticized for its inherent hostility toward Israel. The EU’S policy of ignoring the persecution of Christian communities in the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon and the Arab world in general was criticized.

In this vein, the ECI hosted Palestinian Greek Orthodox pastor Naim Khoury from Bethlehem. After telling the conference how his church was firebombed repeatedly by jihadists, Khoury noted that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Christians are not persecuted for their religious beliefs. Khoury demanded to know why the EU has refused to defend Christians in the PA, Lebanon and the Middle East.

So too, a Lebanese Christian spokesman, who, fearing Hezbollah, spoke incognito, told the attendees that Hezbollah has prevented Christian villagers from the south from returning to their homes after this summer’s war with Israel. He demanded to know why Europe’s UNIFIL forces are doing nothing to prevent Hezbollah’s persecution of Christians and reassertion of control over south Lebanon.

As to European Muslims, ECI members called for funds to be raised to begin an outreach program to Muslim youth in high school to give them an option other than jihad early on. So too, they called for a public awareness campaign to inform Europeans about Muslim Brotherhood activities on the continent.

That is, far from engaging in racist attacks, ECI conference participants called for the tools of liberal democracy – deliberation and debate – to be used to launch a war of ideas against the ideology of jihad that is swiftly gaining currency over an ever-growing proportion of European Muslims.

So why Oz-Salzberger’s unfathomable broadside against ECI? The only readily available explanation is the identity of its members. ECI is made up of a handful of Christian groups: Bridges for Peace, Christian Friends of Israel, Christians for Israel, the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem and Operation Exodus.

Oz-Salzberger laments the fact that Israel’s European friends are not leftist atheists like the late Orianna Fallaci, “whose commitment to the Jews stemmed from her heroic anti-Fascist youth, and whose harsh critique of Islam came from an enraged liberal soul.”

But if she had bothered to listen to what the members of the ECI said she would see that their commitment to Jews stems from their enraged liberal souls too. Like Fallaci, their liberalism arouses their commitment to the preservation of the Judeo-Christian foundations of Europe. Unlike Fallaci, at least until her later years, the root of their commitment to human freedom is their Christian faith.

And so, at last, we discover the true irony in Oz-Salzberger’s attack on Israel’s European friends. In attacking these courageous European Christians she is attacking, rather than upholding, the liberal values of tolerance she professes.

There is nothing liberal about attacking Christian supporters of Israel simply because their religious beliefs are different from ours.

Moreover, morality is inverted and corrupted by the likes of Oz-Salzberger who, on the one hand, purport to “respect” Muslims while denying the xenophobia, bigotry, misogyny and anti-Semitism that dominates so many European Muslim communities today; and, on the other hand, decry Christian faith that is coupled with amity, calls for dialogue, and the moral courage to confront true evil.

Israel’s friends deserve better than this.

Israelis deserve better than this.

And we all deserve the full truth.

– January 8, 2007

WHAT IS ISRAEL’S PROBLEM?

In an interview last Friday with Ma’ariv, former IDF chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya’alon expressed his view that the ongoing debate in Israel regarding the solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is an exercise in futility. As he put it, “We argue over what the solution is, but we still haven’t agreed on what the problem is.”

On the face of it, Ya’alon’s statement beggars belief. It doesn’t take a genius to understand what Israel’s problem is. All a person has to do is take a look at Palestinian “educational” television, where Mickey Mouse exhorts kindergarteners to become mass murderers, destroy Israel and bring about Islamic world domination, to know that Palestinian society seeks Israel’s destruction and Islamic global supremacy.

And the Palestinians are not alone. The Arab and Muslim world supports their goals. The Syrian government threatens war with Israel every day. Hezbollah and Iran issue daily calls for Israel’s annihilation. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the central clearinghouses for genocidal anti-Semitism, replete with Holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda characterizing Jews as subhuman filth whom the Muslim world must unite to snuff out.

Opposing all this is the State of Israel and its citizens. Since we are not interested in being annihilated and don’t like it when people insult us, it should be fairly clear that Israel must be strong in order to defend itself and to prevent our enemies from acquiring the ability to carry out their evil designs.

But as Ya’alon points out, for the past 15 years, this obvious predicament has rarely been mentioned. It certainly has not informed the policies of Israel’s governments.

So it would seem that if we wish to solve our problems, the first question that must be addressed is, why are we ignoring reality? Over the past week, three events exposed the causes of this national flight of fancy. First, last week, B’Tselem and Hamoked published a joint report entitled “Utterly Forbidden: The Torture and Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees.”

The report purports to detail 73 testimonies of Palestinian prisoners claiming to have been tortured by IDF soldiers and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) agents.

The report was extensively and dispassionately covered by the Israeli media. The fact of its publication was the first item on Israel Radio’s hourly news updates for several hours running. The impression given by the coverage was that there was no reason to doubt the veracity of the report’s findings.

The press reports made no mention of the fact that B’Tselem and Hamoked are radical leftist organizations with documented histories of falsifying and distorting data. No mention was made of the funding these groups receive from European countries. Representatives of B’Tselem and Hamoked were not asked why their report does not identify any of the alleged victims and so makes it impossible for the Justice Ministry to investigate any of their claims. Moreover, the media made light of the fact that the alleged victims are terrorists who were arrested and interrogated for their role in planning and carrying out terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens.

This Wednesday, another report received similar sympathetic coverage. The World Bank published a report claiming that Palestinian poverty in Judea and Samaria is the direct result of IDF checkpoints and roadblocks. Rather than substantively examine the allegations, in repeated broadcasts, Israel Radio gave the impression that the World Bank’s allegations were credible.

The fact of the matter is that the World Bank’s findings, as well as its methodology and sources, are grossly prejudicial to Israel. The World Bank based its claims on reports by the Israeli radical leftist organizations B’Tselem, Hamoked, Peace Now, Yesh Din and Bimkom; the blatantly anti-Israel UN Organization for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; and Amnesty International.

While placing the full measure of blame for Palestinian economic failure on the IDF, the World Bank report completely ignores the fact that the Palestinians are waging a terror war against Israeli society and that the IDF has a responsibility to defend the state and its citizens from murder. An indication of the report’s extreme prejudice is found in the fact that the word “terror” is never mentioned.

The fact of the matter is that roadblocks are a vital component of the IDF’s success in preventing terror attacks from being carried out in Judea and Samaria. In 2006 alone, security forces arrested 45 suicide bombers in Judea and Samaria en route to their murderous missions. Many of them were intercepted at roadblocks. Others were captured because the presence of roadblocks forced them to travel in a manner that facilitated their capture.

In placing the blame on Israel for the Palestinians’ economic failure, the World Bank also ignored the fact that the Palestinian Authority is a kleptocracy. But this is not surprising.

Since the PA was established in 1994, the World Bank has played a central role in ignoring and so enabling Palestinian leaders to abscond with hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid money. Far from fulfilling their duty to oversee the use of development funds, World Bank officials have turned a blind eye to their diversion to private accounts controlled by Yasser Arafat and his deputies, who used the pilfered funds to enrich themselves and to raise terror militias.

To date, the Israeli media has not asked World Bank officials to explain why the august lending institution is operating as an anti-Israel pressure group and propaganda organ.

The professional malpractice of the Israeli media came through a second time on Wednesday when all three television stations opened their evening broadcasts with a radical leftist propaganda film.

The film portrayed a violent altercation at a roadblock near Otniel between IDF reservists and radical leftists and Palestinians who outnumbered the troops by a ratio of 20 to one. The leftists and the Palestinians were forcibly confronted by the reservists as they illegally dismantled an IDF roadblock.

It is hard to shake the impression that it was no coincidence that the group chose to assault a far-flung, lightly manned IDF roadblock on the same day that the World Bank published its report condemning the very existence of IDF roadblocks. Whatever the case, the media glossed over the fact that group was not merely demonstrating. By dismantling the roadblock, they were actively sabotaging Israel’s national security and the security of its citizens, which the roadblock was erected to protect.

Treating the propaganda film as fact, the media gave the impression that the aggressors at the scene were the soldiers, not the saboteurs. In recent years, the once ad-hoc collaboration between leftist anti-Israel and anti-American organizations and jihadist terror organizations has become premeditated. In one striking example in late March, 20 Canadian “anti-war” activists participated in a conference in Cairo along with senior members of several terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hezbollah. The expressed goal of the Cairo Conference was to forge an alliance against “imperialism and Zionism.”

According to a report in the Ottowa Citizen, at a post-conference briefing in Toronto on April 27, the Canadians who participated in the conference encouraged their colleagues on the Left to cooperate with terrorist organizations. As one speaker put it, “We have to forge a more solid and more united anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist movement here to be able to have something to show our brothers and sisters [in the terrorist organizations] when we get back [to the next conference].”

These organizations and their fellow travelers in the UN and the World Bank have had an immense impact on Israeli and US policy-makers. Their disinformation campaigns have engendered the current situation where the US and Israeli governments base their policies on lies while stubbornly ignoring the reality of terror and the global jihad.

Case in point is the US State Department’s recently released paper calling for Israel to dismantle roadblocks and checkpoints in Judea and Samaria and to enable free travel between Gaza and Judea and Samaria.

The report was greeted with shock by the IDF and the Shin Bet, which quickly understood that implementing it would be tantamount to signing the death warrants of countless Israelis. Not only would bombers be allowed to move at will, by enabling free travel between Gaza and Judea and Samaria, Israel would all but guarantee that the rockets now terrorizing residents of the western Negev would also threaten residents of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Despite the security services’ logical opposition, the Foreign Ministry has given the US document passing marks. On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Post reported on one official who claimed that Israel should accept the US demand to dismantle roadblocks. As he put it,

The Western world, with the exception of the US, sees the roadblocks and checkpoints as a main problem here. It is considered collective punishment that bothers everyone, but only weeds out a few terrorists.

So rather than attacking those who would deny Israel its inherent right to safeguard its territory and the lives of its citizens, the Foreign Ministry, which is responsible for arguing Israel’s case to the world, thinks we would be better off just letting terrorists run free and so endangering the lives of Israeli citizens. That is, the Foreign Ministry has swallowed whole our enemies’ propaganda and is basing its positions on their false narratives of Israeli aggression and brutality.

Similarly, Wednesday night, rather than defend the reservists for their actions in defending the roadblock from attack, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Military Advocate General Brig. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit hung them out to dry.

Peretz called the soldiers’ behavior “egregious and deviant.” IDF officials referred to the footage as “embarrassing.” Mandelblit ordered an investigation of the soldiers for their actions in defending their position.

In abandoning the reservists, the three sent a clear message that they care more about being embraced by the media than about defending the honor of their soldiers and the reputation of the country.

All of this returns us to Ya’alon’s observation that before we try to find solutions to our problems, we first must understand what they are.

As long as we continue to base our national debates and policies on enemy propaganda, it should surprise no one that Israel finds itself in its current dire predicament. If we are serious about solving our problems, we must liberate ourselves from hostile forces that distort our national conversation with the help of their Israeli media buddies.

– May 10, 2007

HISTORY’S UNSETTLING VERDICTS

Compare and contrast two separate actions taken last month by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Last month, after a five-year campaign by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies which culminated in the publication of a petition signed by some 100 Holocaust scholars, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum decided to add to its permanent exhibition the story of the Bergson Group’s efforts to rescue European Jewry during the Holocaust.

The Bergson Group, named after its leader Peter Bergson, who served as the Irgun Tzvai Leumi’s representative in the US during the war, was formed in 1943 to pressure the Roosevelt administration to take active measures to save the Jews of Europe from annihilation.

Bergson, whose real name was Hillel Kook, arrived in the US in 1940 as part of Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s delegation to the US. Jabotinsky formed the delegation to ramp up US support for Zionism against the British government’s illegal decision to block Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel.

In 1943, as news of the slaughter of European Jewry began filtering into press reports, Bergson decided to put his Zionist efforts on hold and devote all his energies to saving Europe’s Jews. His efforts ran afoul of the American Jewish establishment, led by American Jewish Congress leader Stephen Wise, who felt that an activist response to the genocide would increase anti-Semitism in the US and alienate the Roosevelt administration.

Rather than pressure President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to do something to save Europe’s Jews, Wise acted as an apologist for the administration to the Jewish community. He embraced the administration’s line that the best thing for European Jewry was for American Jews to support the war effort and not make waves about the genocide.

Bergson would have none of it. He organized a group of supporters that spanned the political spectrum, from Communist fellow travelers to Southern reactionaries. With the help of Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, he galvanized the great stars of Hollywood to the cause of European Jews. His organization, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, published more than 200 full-page advertisements in major US newspapers to promote awareness of the Holocaust and motivate politicians to act.

Though constantly undercut by Wise and his allies, Bergson’s group carried out a massive national campaign that included a Broadway play written by Ben Hecht and composer Kurt Weil, starring Marlon Brando, which demanded action to save European Jews, a march of some 400 rabbis in Washington to demand that Roosevelt do something to save European Jews, and a major lobbying effort on Capitol Hill among both Democrats and Republicans to force the Roosevelt administration to act on behalf of European Jewry.

It was the large-scale support of Republicans, and the threat of losing Jewish support for the Democratic Party in the 1944 elections, that finally prompted Roosevelt to take action. As a result of Congressional pressure, in 1944 Roosevelt formed the War Refugee Board, which ultimately saved the lives of 200,000 Jews, mainly in Hungary. It was the only significant effort Roosevelt took throughout the war to save European Jewry, and it came about only because of the tireless efforts of the Bergson Group.

That the American Jewish establishment was unforgiving of the Bergson group’s activities is made clear by the fact that it took 14 years and a public pressure campaign to convince the museum to recognize the group’s efforts. Indeed, press reports of the museum’s decision make clear that even today there remains an underlying hostility toward Bergson’s activities.

Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, University of Toronto historian Michael Marrus complained that there is “an unspoken political dimension” to the debate about Bergson. He alleged that in lobbying the museum to recognize Bergson, the Wyman Institute was trying to advance the right-wing agenda of Jewish activism that Bergson and the Revisionists embraced.

So even 70 years after the Holocaust, when it is clear that the Bergson’s group’s efforts led to the only US action to save Europe’s Jews, supporting and upholding those efforts is considered a provocative political act. Yet memorializing men like Wise, who actively sought to undermine those efforts in order to maintain his warm relationship with Roosevelt, is considered uncontroversial.

As irksome as the lingering attempts to push Bergson into a political cubbyhole are, at least the public campaign launched by the Wyman Institute succeeded in convincing the Holocaust Museum to give his efforts the institutional recognition they deserve.

More irksome than the abiding hostility toward Bergson is Yad Vashem’s decision last month to hold a ceremony where it accepted the personal archive of Rudolf Kastner and extolled as a “hero” the man who served during the war as the deputy head of the Labor Zionist-affiliated Relief and Rescue Committee of Hungarian Jews.

Kastner may have been many things, but he certainly was not a hero.

The annihilation of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews began only in 1944. In early 1944, Kastner was warned by two Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, who had escaped from Auschwitz, that the Nazis planned to deport Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz. The men’s “Auschwitz Protocol” provided a detailed account of the Nazis’ plans.

Rather than alert his fellow Jews to the coming dangers, Kastner made a deal with Nazi chief Adolf Eichmann to buy the freedom of some 1,685 Hungarian Jewish notables, including his relatives.

Kastner maintained close relations with Nazi war criminal Kurt Becher, who played a major role in the genocide of Hungarian Jews. He went so far as to testify on Becher’s behalf during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals.

After the war Kastner moved to Israel and ran for Knesset on the Mapai slate. In 1952 he was working as a spokesman and party official at Israel’s Industry Ministry when Malkiel Grunwald self-published a pamphlet in which he accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Nazis. The state sued Grunwald for libel.

In the course of a ten-month trial, the facts of Kastner’s collaboration became clear. Presiding Judge Binyamin Halevy dismissed the suit in 1955. He ruled that “Kastner sold his soul to the devil.” Kastner was murdered in 1957. In 1958, the government appealed Halevy’s verdict to the Supreme Court. While accepting much of the evidence of Kastner’s betrayal, including his postwar testimony on behalf of Becher, the court ruled, in a split 3-2 decision, that Kastner had not collaborated with the Nazis.

The debate over Kastner’s role in the genocide of Hungarian Jewry continues to this day. While historical and court evidence as well as survivors’ testimony clearly point to the conclusion that he collaborated with the Nazis, the Labor Zionist establishment in Israel has never accepted the allegations against him. And now, the establishment, in the form of Yad Vashem, has decided to uphold this man, who refused to warn his fellow Jews of the danger, as a hero.

Speaking to the Jerusalem Post’s Elliot Jager last week, Yad Vashem president Yosef Lapid argued that Kastner was acting honorably by testifying on Becher’s behalf because during the war he had pledged to the Nazi that he would defend him.

Lapid excused Kastner’s failure to warn his fellow Jews that the trains they were being placed on would take them to Auschwitz and not to a labor camp in Rumania, as the Nazis said. In Lapid’s view, warning them, and so giving them a chance to fight for their lives would have been deadly:

A revolt by Hungarian Jewish women and children would have resulted in an immediate massacre. (The men had already been taken for forced labor.) The object was to buy time in any way possible.

Lapid has apparently decided to ignore the simple fact that these innocent women and children were murdered at Auschwitz. The only ones who benefited from the “bought time” were the Nazis. Due to Kastner’s refusal to warn his fellow Jews of the fate that awaited them, the Nazis were able to carry out the deportations to Auschwitz without risking a repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Budapest.

Yad Vashem’s execrable decision to honor Kastner on the one hand, and the controversy over the US Holocaust Museum’s decision to belatedly give the Bergson Group the recognition it deserves on the other, demonstrate two things. First, they show that in times of crisis it may be necessary to buck the establishment in order to save lives. Second, they show that the establishment will not embrace success or acknowledge perfidy if it believes that doing so will harm its reputation.

The stories of the Bergson Group and Kastner could not be more relevant today as the Jewish people again faces the prospect of annihilation at the hands of an Iranian nuclear bomb. The stories of the men and women who confronted the establishment during the Holocaust, and that of the establishment man who enabled it, should serve as a warning as the Israeli government today insists on taking a back seat to others in contending with Iran’s threat to commit a second Holocaust.

– August 6, 2007

VI

THE BATTLE FOR HEARTS AND MINDS

Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence.

– Kingsley Amis

Ideas control the world.

– James A. Garfield

MORALITY UNDER FIRE

In an interview with the Palestinian Authority’s television station shortly after he was named prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas was asked how he thought he would be able to make a deal with Israel given what the interviewer referred to as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s anti-peace stand.

Abbas responded by explaining that Sharon does not operate in a vacuum. He argued that the Israeli people could be counted on to force Sharon to make a deal that will be acceptable to the Palestinians.

More than telling us anything interesting about Sharon or Israeli democracy, this statement revealed much about who Abbas is and the strategy he is implementing from his lofty new post as the Bush administration’s favorite son of the Palestinian terrorist revolution. What Abbas said is quite simply a neat encapsulation of the entire doctrine of terrorist and guerrilla forces that war against democratic societies. It is a doctrine that he, like the PLO’s chief strategic partner Saddam Hussein, has propounded for years.

Generally speaking, terrorist and guerrilla warfare doctrines are founded on the psychological manipulation of the enemy’s society. Aware of his inability to destroy the enemy through conventional military force, the guerrilla or terrorist leader bases his strategy on two central and interconnected tenets.

First, he contends that continuous and seemingly random attacks on civilian populations and military personnel will grind down his enemy’s society to the point where that society will lose its will to fight back. If a belief in the existence of a “cycle of violence” takes hold in the victimized society, then terrorist attacks will be justified as simple and crude – yet not unwarranted – responses to the victim society’s military “provocations” against the terrorists.

As is known to all Israelis, over the past three years we have rearranged our lives and constricted our living space and habits in an attempt to minimize risk of death by terror. We go out less and to fewer places. We ride on buses only as a last resort. This narrowing of our public space is a testament to the terrorists’ success in making us doubt our government’s ability to protect us. The sense of futility and hopelessness of fighting terror is a vital component of the terrorist’s plan to break our will to destroy him.

At the same time, the monstrosity of random acts of murder against civilians being what it is, the natural, moral and instinctive response of the victimized society is to call for the total destruction of the terror or guerrilla forces and the transformation, by military means, of the society that supports them. Thus, imposing a sense of vulnerability on a democratic society, while necessary, is insufficient to break its spirit. So the terror and guerrilla ideologue fights a parallel battle for victory.

The second premise of terror and guerrilla leaders is that when fighting a democratic society, it is necessary to make their enemy doubt the morality of his stand against them. The moral disorientation of the victimized society is absolutely necessary for a terrorist strategy to succeed.

Through a concerted campaign, the terrorist or guerrilla leader must frame his rhetoric in a manner that calls into question whether the targeted society is really being victimized at all.

If it can be argued that the murderers have a legitimate grievance against the targeted society, then it will likely follow that in spite of the barbarity of the campaign being waged against it, members of that society will begin to argue that it is futile, and indeed immoral, to fight back.

Once that argument is won, the terrorists have won their war. The democracy will capitulate.

In contending with the continued and escalating hostilities in Iraq, the Bush administration finds itself, after two years of unapologetic rhetoric and a successful, wildly popular military campaign against Saddam Hussein, suddenly on the defensive. Its enemy, the not so marginal remnants of Saddam’s regime and their Arab terrorist partners, is implementing a war strategy against the US and British forces taken directly from the Saddam-Abbas playbook.

Militarily, the coalition forces are under constant attack by mobs, snipers, suicide bombers, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. These attacks, together with sabotage of Iraqi infrastructure, work to demoralize the coalition forces stationed in the country. Newspapers are filled with accounts of the frustration of soldiers who find their attempts to bring stability to Iraq stymied. As tensions rise in the terrible heat, soldiers communicate a sense of anger and helplessness that makes their countrymen wonder why their armies can’t simply come home.

Statements by the Iraqis who criticize the coalition troops and demand their immediate withdrawal compound this sense of doubt.

Politically, the fact that Saddam remains at large also casts a pall of doubt as to the actual success of the campaign to oust him. Repeated failure to capture or kill him mars the US public’s sense of pride and invincibility against weaker Third World dictatorships.

The fact that the US has so far been unsuccessful in locating any of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction has been highly destructive to the American and British publics’ sense of justice and serves to undermine the moral justification of the war itself. This past week, media polls indicated that a majority of Americans believe that the Bush administration misled them – wittingly or unwittingly – about the threat emanating from Saddam’s regime.

When taken separately, all the components of the Iraqi campaign against US-led forces in Iraq are a cause for distress and ambivalence regarding the importance and necessity of the continued fight. But when seen from the perspective of the terror and guerrilla doctrine, long adopted by Saddam, it all makes sense.

Saddam and his loyalists knew they were no match for the coalition forces, so they stole what they could, headed for the hills, and allowed the remnants of their brainwashed forces to launch what resistance they could muster. Even during the campaign, those Iraqi forces that did engage coalition forces made constant use of terror and guerrilla tactics to exact casualties.

Now that US and British forces are hunkered down in static locations, it is easier to kill them. As peacekeepers, they are forced to come into daily contact with Iraqi civilians. As American and British soldiers, they want very much for those civilians to appreciate what they are trying to do for them. They are easily demoralized when confronted by mobs.

Finally, with hindsight, it makes perfect sense that in the yearlong run-up to the US-led invasion, Saddam would find a way to either destroy or hide his WMD arsenal. Preventing the US and Britain from being able to present that arsenal to their publics is key to eroding their societies’ belief in the morality of the war and thus prompting them to demand the swift exit of US and British forces from the country.

Winning a war against a terrorist enemy is perhaps the most difficult victory for a democratic society to achieve. It requires a deep-seated and resilient belief in its values and, in Israel’s case, its very existence.

Both Israel and the US have been built around our core values of human decency and our ideals of a just and moral society. Both countries’ military prowess is a direct result of our understanding that these values are worth fighting for. For both Israel and America, power exerted in defense of these values is power morally exerted.

Both Israeli and American societies must now think carefully about how we are allowing the subversive poison of terrorist war doctrine to infect our sense of justice and indeed our sense of our own identity.

– July 4, 2003

THE WAR OF WORDS

In a recent interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, translated by MEMRI, Syria’s Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass made a number of revealing statements.

On the military front, he explained that Israel and the US are terrorist states. At the same time, terrorism-supporting countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia are victims, and terrorist organizations like Hezbollah in Syrian-controlled Lebanon and Palestinian terrorist groups operating in Israel and headquartered in Damascus are legitimate resistance movements.

On the theological front, Tlass explained that the Jews have no right to object to his book The Matza of Zion. There he described the 1841 blood libel against the Jews of Damascus, which accused them of killing children to make Passover matzot, as historical fact. Tlass argued that Jews have no right to object to his writing, because killing children to make matzot is a “Jewish ritual.”

Finally, Jews, according to Tlass, have no right to claim that anti-Semitism is discrimination against Jews, because Arabs are the majority of Semites.

Aside from lying about every subject he was asked to discuss, Tlass in one interview managed by statement and inference to distort the meaning of a number of key terms. These include terrorism, resistance, occupation, racism, discrimination, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. By Tlass’s redefinition of these terms, both Israel and the US are criminal states. The US must be reeducated and Israel must be destroyed.

Last week, Prof. Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University debated Dr. Daniel Pipes, the head of the Middle East Forum, on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country. In the course of his remarks, Khalidi personally attacked Pipes twice, implying that he is a bigot because he supports Israel.

He also referred to support for Israel by senior policymakers in the Defense Department and Vice President’s Office as “virulent.”

As the Edward Said Professor of Middle East Studies, Khalidi no doubt is aware that Webster’s defines “virulent” as “malignant; extremely poisonous or venomous.”

While referring to support for Israel in this way, Khalidi, under direct questioning from host Joe Scarborough, nonetheless felt it necessary to lie about the fact that in the past he has referred to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as “a fanatic, extreme right-wing Zionist.”

He also denied referring to Israel as a “racist” state with an “apartheid” system and of claiming that America has been “brainwashed” by Israel. Yet when interviewed by writers from the Australian Financial Review and the online magazine opentent.org, Khalidi was absolutely clear in making these statements.

Two years ago this week, the UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance was in the midst of its deliberations in Durban, South Africa. The end result of the weeklong conference was the subversion of the definitions of “racism,” “racial discrimination,” “xenophobia” and “related intolerance.”

At Durban, Israel and the US were isolated, as every other member nation of the UN and every major international human rights organization either stood by and watched or was actively engaged in the systematic criminalization of Israel, the marginalization of the Holocaust, the whitewashing of anti-Semitism, and the demonization of the Jewish people as a nation and of Jews as individuals.

In the course of its deliberations, the terms “Zionism,” “anti-Semitism,” “racism,” “refugees,” “colonialization,” “terrorism,” “civilians,” “resistance” and “occupation” were all redefined to one end. That end was to foment a distortion of reality whereby, one week before the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York, Israel was castigated as the single most lethal and virulent threat to the world.

And so, two years after Durban, ten years after Oslo, three years after the Palestinian terrorist war was launched, and two years after the September 11 attacks, we must take it upon ourselves to do just that. If we allow our enemies to define our world for us, we are destined to lose our place in it.

– September 5, 2003

INFORMATION WARFARE 101

On June 30, the Council for the Protection of Journalists penned a letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon protesting a missile attack the previous night on an office building in Gaza. According to the CPJ, whose honorary chairman is Walter Cronkite, the building housed the offices of several foreign press organizations, including the BBC and MBC.

According to the IDF and to the Government Press Office, the building in question also housed offices of Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television and operated as a Hamas communication center. Through it, Hamas maintained constant communications with terrorists, disseminated propaganda and claimed responsibility for attacks like the one the organization had carried out the previous day – the murder of four-year-old Afik Zahavi and 49-year-old Mordechai Yosepov by Kassam rockets in Sderot. This fact was ignored by the CPJ.

In its penultimate paragraph, the letter stated,

CPJ reminds you that media offices are civilian facilities and are protected from attack under international humanitarian law unless they are used for military purposes. The IDF has not provided any compelling evidence that the office was used in this manner. The attack on the building was also disproportionate to any perceived threat and reckless in endangering civilians – in this case the many journalists who work there.

The letter by the CPJ followed a similar protest launched, by the Foreign Press Association in Israel.

The fact that Hamas and Hezbollah cohabit a building used by media organizations and hide their operations behind journalistic cover is nothing new. It is standard fare for terrorists, both in the Palestinian population centers and in Iraq, to disguise themselves as journalists and to use journalistic cover to travel freely.

Before his arrest by the IDF, Hassam Yusuf, the Hamas commander in Judea and Samaria, sat in a Ramallah office bearing the sign “Nur Press Office.” When last fall the US began pressuring Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to close the terrorist headquarters in Damascus, Assad claimed that they were not headquarters, but press offices.

At the beginning of the month, Agence France Presse photographer Mohammed Abed took a picture of two Palestinian terrorists in ski caps assembling a bomb in Rafah refugee camp. The photograph was shot from a distance of less than a meter. How was he allowed to get so close?

In Iraq there have been several instances of reporters arriving at the scene of terror attacks against coalition forces before the attacks take place. They have admitted that they were tipped off by the terrorists in order to enable them to take real-time footage of dying Americans.

While Israel was roundly criticized for firing three missiles into the “press” headquarters of Hamas and Hezbollah, neither the CPJ nor the Foreign Press Association issued any condemnatory statement against the Palestinian Authority for the attack on New York Times bureau chief James Bennet in Gaza in May. When AFP photographer Jamal Arouri had both his arms broken by the Aksa Martyrs Brigades earlier in the year to prevent him from working, neither organization launched a protest.

A Washington Post article about the US Army’s fight against the Sadr army in southern Iraq this past spring includes a revealing line. In a fight in Najaf, US forces fought terrorists in a pitched battle that lasted six hours in order to prevent the enemy from taking hold of a burning Humvee. As one of the officers put it,

We weren’t going to let them dance on it for the news. Even with all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them a victory.

All the above vignettes point to the fact that the ability to harness the media and to control the images of the war is one of the chief components of the terrorist war doctrine. The enemy hides behind press credentials in order to gain operational cover. It stage-manages terrorist theater by giving “scoops” of attacks to fellow travelers with cameras, tape recorders and notepads. It reenacts battlefield defeats as victories before the cameras. It uses its video footage of its own atrocities to both frighten its foes and encourage its sympathizers.

In the strategic use of the media to advance their war aims, the terrorists are assisted by Western press agencies. “Reporters” from Al-Manar, Al-Jazeera, Hamas and al-Qaeda websites and other propaganda organs are viewed as “colleagues” rather than agents of jihad and participants in the war.

From all of this it is clear that one of the greatest challenges to democracies in fighting and winning the war is finding adequate answers to the question of how to conduct an informational warfare campaign that is integrally linked to the battlefield and diplomatic aspects of the war.

The US military rediscovered one of the most potent weapons against terrorist media warfare in the planning stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The decision to integrate or embed journalists with US forces was a monumental achievement. In so doing, the US reinstated a long tradition of battlefield reporting that had been nearly snuffed out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Embedding reporters with the troops enables the military to get out the story from the perspective of its own personnel in real time. When I was in Iraq with the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division the necessity of the embed program was constantly in evidence. This was perhaps most starkly brought to my attention with the American seizure of Baghdad airport.

As I phoned into Israel Channel 2 news to report that I was at the airport, I was told by the television producer on the other end of the line that I must be mistaken because the Iraqi “Information” Minister had just said that there were no US forces at Baghdad Airport.

So embedding journalists with combat units is exceedingly important. But as the war moves on and mutates into increasingly ugly and sophisticated forms of made-for-TV barbarism it clearly is not sufficient. Additional methods of fighting terrorist propaganda must also be found. One of these methods is to refuse to accord journalistic privileges automatically to anyone claiming to be a member of the press. The Iraqi Provisional Governing Authority recognized this when its members last year banned Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya satellite stations from broadcasting in Iraq.

News organizations should be judged by the impact of their reports and their content as well as by their legitimacy. If they are actively pursuing the cause of the enemy, they should be unmasked as the enemy. And this should be done without apology.

One of the advantages of the terrorists over the democracies they fight is that they have no compunction about lying. So it was in the case of the US air strike against a terrorist drop-off point on the Syrian-Iraqi border: before US officials in Baghdad had information about the raid, Arab “journalists” were reporting that US forces had bombed a wedding party.

In Israel’s case, the first blood libel of the Palestinian terrorist war – the allegation that the IDF had killed 12-year-old Muhammed al-Dura in October 2000 – was created as a result of the slowness of the IDF’s ability to check the facts of the case. By the time the IDF had proved irrefutably that al-Dura had been killed by Palestinian forces, weeks had passed and the blood libel had circulated all over the Arab world.

To solve this problem, a policy must be adopted of never providing the terrorists with the moral high ground. On a strategic level, this requires never accepting blame for anything until all the facts have been unearthed. It is better to deny – indeed, it is possible to deny because, as a rule, the IDF does not target civilians – than to allow that the allegations may or may not be true. If, after the fact, it works out that civilians were killed, an explanation of the deaths can be given in a full context. The terrorists must never be granted a monopoly on telling the story.

On a tactical level, it means that democratic armies must integrate the informational warfare component into all their operational plans. This may involve becoming more flexible about exposing intelligence information. This may involve bringing army photographers with troops in every operation in order to take control of the visual image emanating from battle scenes.

While not according rights to terrorists and their media helpers, democratic armies must protect journalists who are actually doing their job. Reports have surfaced again and again of reporters from the US-funded Al-Hurra news network being physically attacked and harassed by terrorists and their supporters. This must not be allowed to continue.

While reporting in war zones always involves risk, democratic forces must do everything they can to provide a modicum of safety for legitimate reporters.

The informational component of terrorist-warfare doctrine is one of the most unique aspects of the present war. The proliferation of news sources through the internet and satellite television combined with the post-nationalist, post-modernist preferences of large swathes of the Western media elites have made the necessity of integrating informational warfare components into every stage of battle planning, fighting and post-combat debriefings and overall strategic planning absolutely essential. Getting the story out is now of equal if not greater importance than defeating enemy forces in any particular engagement.

Because without the story, the battlefield victory will eventually become a strategic defeat.

– July 16, 2004

LEAVING THE HALL OF MIRRORS

Freelance journalist Kevin Sites was just another guy trying to make his way in the business until the battle of Fallujah. While accompanying US Marines into a mosque, Sites filmed a Marine shooting a prostrate terrorist lying in the mosque, then crassly pronouncing him dead. As the pictures made their way around the world, millions of anti-US voices rang up angrily denouncing the Marines for committing “war crimes.”

Overnight, Sites became an international star. Everyone wanted to read the Left’s dazzling Johnny-on-the-Spot and all “right-thinking” people pronounced him a professional upholding the highest standards of journalism. That’s heady stuff for a reporter on the make and a powerful message for all aspiring pliers of the trade.

In Israel, our TV news broadcast Sites’s footage over and over as wizened anchors shook their heads with revulsion over the inhumanity of US armed forces in Iraq. The newspapers played up coverage of the event to make certain that all of us knew just how awful American forces really are.

No one bothered to make mention of the fact that Marines and soldiers fighting in Fallujah had been repeatedly attacked by terrorists playing possum. No one bothered to make mention of the numerous instances of terrorists raising the white flag of surrender only to fire at forces coming to take them into custody.

What does the context of the battle matter when a case can be made for vilifying US Marines as war criminals – on the basis of Sites’s isolated, deconstructionist footage – rather than praising them as battle-trained warriors?

Terrorists have two basic advantages over the Western armies and societies that fight them: their own invisibility, and the self-obsession and hatred of Western leftists. By not abiding by the centuries-old rules of war that stipulate that combatants are uniformed members of the armed forces of a country or a recognized insurgency in control of territory, the terrorists have an upper hand despite their relatively small numbers and outdated weaponry. How can a war be justified against an enemy you can’t see who looks just like the civilians you are obligated by law and your values to protect?

Add to this the fact that terrorists eagerly exploit universally recognized symbols of noncombatants and you have a war that you simply cannot justify on camera. Terrorists shoot from mosques so mosques must be raided. Terrorists are transported in ambulances so ambulances must be inspected. But of course, the television cameras aren’t filming when the terrorists fire RPGS from minarets, only when terrorists wounded while shooting them lie pitifully on the floor. And there is no camera on hand when they plant explosives beneath gurneys.

And for all that, the US in Iraq is in a better position than Israel is in waging its counterterror operations against the Palestinians. Iraq is a heterogeneous society. The US can mobilize the Shi’ites and Kurds to assist its efforts to fight the Sunni Arab terrorists and it can depend on Iraqis generally to support coalition forces’ efforts against foreign jihadists.

Israel, on the other hand, is fighting against a homogeneous enemy. The Palestinians are almost exclusively Sunni Muslims and the majority of Palestinians support the aims of the terrorists to murder Israeli civilians with the eventual goal of destroying Israel.

For solipsistic leftists, who reign supreme in Israel’s media, academia and judiciary, the homogeneity of Palestinian society makes it easy to ignore the enemy while vainly walking through their distorted halls of mirrors and echo chambers. Their goal is to create a perception of reality in which the Palestinians are all innocent and Israel is always at fault. In recent weeks, their primary target has been the IDF.

A week and a half ago, Supreme Court justices demanded that Deputy Chief of General Staff Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz present them, in writing, with his views on the morality of collateral damage. The fact that there is no legal basis for this Orwellian thought control has never been raised by any of Israel’s legal pundits or court reporters. Halutz’s appointment to his job was opposed by the radical Left for a statement he made in a newspaper interview in which he said he slept like a baby after arch-terrorist Salah Shehadeh was killed by an IAF helicopter in 2002, despite the fact that civilians were also killed in the operation.

The crusaders of mercy for Palestinian terrorists petitioned the Supreme Court to revoke his appointment. No one in the media ever questioned whether in a normal country these radical leftist organizations would have any standing, or wondered about the credentials of these groups that never launched a petition questioning the moral probity of Palestinian murderers with whom the Israeli government has negotiated.

Then we have the Palestinian violinist. On November 9, the radical leftist “human rights” organization Machsom Watch videotaped a Palestinian playing his violin at an IDF checkpoint near Nablus. Machsom Watch is a group of enlightened ladies who fan out to checkpoints to ensure that soldiers charged with keeping terrorists out of Israel behave politely to Palestinians wishing to cross into Israel.

According to its website, the organization is devoted to advancing Palestinian human rights. No mention whatsoever is made of Israeli human rights, but then why get bogged down by details? The fact made very plain by Machsom Watch’s website is that the organization is devoted to exposing the evil of the Israeli military forces.

But who cares about the inherent hostility of Machsom Watch to the IDF when it shoots great footage of soldiers caught red-handed “humiliating” a Palestinian violinist? The local media pounced on the tape.

In last Friday’s papers, the IDF was excoriated for its inhumanity. Novelist Meir Shalev, writing on the cover of Yediot Ahronot’s news magazine, likened the scene to images of the Holocaust. Maariv devoted its cover story to eyewitness accounts of reserve soldiers enumerating the human rights violations they committed during their reserve service.

No mention was made by anyone of the fact that a violin case is a pretty good place to hide a bomb. No mention was made of the fact that the terrorists who conducted the massacre at Sbarro pizzeria in August 2001 hid their bomb in a guitar case.

The incident at the roadblock was investigated by the IDF and the findings, released this week, show that the Palestinian in question was asked to remove his violin from its case by the soldiers and that he began playing his instrument on his own initiative. Indeed, the report reveals that the soldiers had to ask him to stop playing. But what does the truth matter when the image can be used by the Israel-bashing radical Left to “prove” that its narrative, in which Israel is the aggressor and Palestinians are innocent victims, is right and reality is wrong?

The inability of Israel’s “enlightened” elite, like their counterparts in Europe and the US, to ever see anything right about their own side, and their insistence on refusing to countenance that many aspects of their enemy’s culture of hatred are unpardonably evil, extend to all aspects of life.

This week at the Jerusalem Summit conference, Shinui MK Etti Livni participated in a panel discussion regarding the persecution of women in Muslim society. Livni stated that in her view, the stories of abuse of Muslim women are similar to tales of abuse of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women.

The preposterousness of this claim is boundless. In Egypt, the majority of girls are forced by their fathers to undergo the barbaric procedure of genital mutilation euphemistically referred to as female circumcision. Where does this happen in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities?

According to a report released this week by Human Rights Watch, one third of Egyptian women have been beaten by their husbands. In what ultra-Orthodox community are comparable numbers to be found?

But admitting that Muslim societies and countries are misogynistic and systematically enslave half their members would make Israel look good by comparison, so it is better to sweep the evil under the rug.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum reported this week that a new legend is being propagated in left-wing circles in Europe and the US that the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have been demonstrating against the patently fraudulent election results in their country are actually all CIA provocateurs. An article in the UK’s Guardian, for instance, alleged that the protests are “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing.”

As Applebaum argues it, the myth is being created to explain away the inconvenient truth that millions of people look to the US as an inspirational beacon of freedom which they wish to emulate. It cannot be, say these reactionary anti-American “progressives,” that good people actually like the US and oppose those who share the “enlightened” public’s hatred of Uncle Sam. Therefore, anyone advancing a claim that could be viewed as pro-American cannot be an authentic activist. Rather, the CIA must be paying his light bill.

When faced with this sort of opportunistic America- and Israel-bashing we have to ask what exactly these people want. The only rational answer is power. If we can be convinced that they are right and reality is wrong, they will never have to pay a price for all their mendacious notions of Israeli racism and American imperialism. They will never be taken to task for the thousands who have died as a result of their conviction that anyone who fights for the right to be free and unmolested by Third World fascists is by definition a fascist.

The only way to fight these people is to refuse to play by their rules. We must be able to look in the mirror and realize that indeed we are the good guys here. And we must be willing to look at the rotten evil that characterizes the ideology of our enemies and say that defeating them is the mission of our generation.

– December 3, 2004 s

TERRORIST THEATER TRICKS

What are we seeing when we watch events from the Middle East on our television screens? Is it news or is it terrorist theater?

Let us observe two media events that occurred on Sunday in Gaza. Sunday afternoon released hostages and Fox News journalists Steven Centanni and Olaf Wiig spoke before the cameras. The fact of their release and their statements were reported by more than 1,000 news organizations throughout the world.

At the press conference, Centanni and Wiig, who were forced by their Palestinian captors to convert to Islam, praised the Palestinians. Centanni said, “I just hope this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover this story because the Palestinian people are a very beautiful, kind-hearted and caring people that the world need [s] to know more about.” Wiig similarly praised the Palestinians.

While their remarks were covered extensively, no one seemed to think that the fact that their first post-release statements were made at a Palestinian Authority-sponsored media extravaganza in Gaza was significant. No one noted that the men were flanked by Palestinian “security forces,” and stood next to Hamas terrorist leader and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. No mention was made of the fact that the two were initially kidnapped by just such PA “security officials,” or that Haniyeh is one of the leaders of one of the most fanatical jihadist organizations in the world, an organization that the majority of the “beautiful, kind-hearted and caring” Palestinians voted into office last January.

That is, no mention was made of the fact that until the two men left Gaza, they remained unfree. No one asked whether they had been given the option of not giving a press conference in Gaza. And now that they have spoken, there can be little doubt that a second press conference by the two men, in Israel or the US where no one will force them to convert to Judaism or Christianity or threaten to kill them, will draw far less media interest. After their press conference, the two men became yesterday’s news.

Conveniently, the same day the PA released the men its own forces had kidnapped, Reuters reported that the IDF had shot a missile at its press vehicle and wounded two cameramen – one from Reuters and one from Iranian World TV network – while they were en route to a battle taking place between IDF forces and Palestinian terrorists. Reuters, which is demanding an independent investigation into the attack, is portraying its cameraman Fadel Shada as an embattled hero who would do anything to bring the truth to the world.

Yet it is unclear why anyone should believe either Shana or Reuters. Shana told Reuters that as he was driving to the battle scene, “I suddenly saw fire and the doors of the jeep flew open.” He claims to have been wounded by shrapnel in his hand and leg. These are minor injuries for someone whose vehicle was just hit by a missile.

But then, the photographs taken of his vehicle after the purported missile attack give no indication that the car was hit by anything. There is a gash on the roof. The hood is bent out of shape. But nothing seems to have been burned. Cars hit by missiles do not look like they have just been in a nasty accident. Cars hit by missiles are destroyed. Yet the glass on the windshield and the windows of Shana’s vehicle isn’t even shattered. In the photographs taken of Shana on the way to the hospital in Gaza, he lies on a stretcher, eyes closed, arm extended in full pieta mode. He is not visibly bleeding although there are some blood stains on his shirt, but then his undershirt is completely white.

I did not see these pictures in the media coverage of the purported IDF attack on the Reuters and Iranian cameramen. I saw them on the Power Line blog website. I did not see any questions raised from either the Israeli or the international media on the veracity of Shana’s tale, which, of course, provides a nice balance to the Centanni-Wiig hostage story.

As is the case with the Palestinian war against Israel, one of the most notable aspects of Hezbollah’s latest campaign against Israel has been the active collaboration of news organizations and international NGOS in Hezbollah’s information war against Israel. Like their rogue state sponsors, subversive subnational groups like Hezbollah, Fatah and Hamas see information operations as an integral part of their war for the annihilation of Israel and defeat of the West. And their information operations are more advanced than any the world has seen. As becomes more evident with each passing day, they have successfully corrupted both the world media and the community of NGOS that purportedly operate in a neutral manner in war zones.

It is not a coincidence that I saw the pictures of the Reuters vehicle on Power Line and not in the media coverage of the purported attack. Both the global media and the international NGO community abjectly refuse to investigate themselves. As democratic governments and their militaries have proven incapable of dealing with the phenomenon (in part because they seek to curry favor with the media and the international NGO community), the blogosphere has taken upon itself the role of media watchdog.

Bloggers have become a critical component of the free world’s defense in the current war. During the Hezbollah campaign in Lebanon, bloggers scrutinized coverage of the war in a way that has never been done before. Their work has exposed the dirty secret of the Middle East that the media has hidden for so many years: the global media and the international NGO community, which profess to be neutral observers, are in fact colluding with terrorist organizations.

The blogosphere, and particularly Little Green Footballs, Power Line, zombietime, Michelle Malkin, and EU Referendum, have relentlessly exposed the systematic staging of news events, fabrication of attacks against relief workers, and doctoring of photographic images by Hezbollah with the active assistance of international organizations and the global media.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, with its internationally mandated status as a protected organization, is particularly culpable. The blogosphere – and specifically EU Referendum and zombietime websites – have shown that Red Cross employees in Tyre and Kana fabricated from whole cloth a tale of an Israeli airstrike against Red Cross ambulances in Kana on July 23. In an exhaustively documented report, “How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War,” zombietime showed how Red Cross employees took an old, rusty ambulance and alleged that the IAF had attacked it with a missile that blew a hole straight through the middle of the red cross on the ambulance’s roof.

The Red Cross allegation was reported as fact by such “credible” news organizations as Associated Press, Time magazine, the BBC, ITV, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Age, MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both published accounts of the attack as evidence of Israeli “war crimes” in Lebanon.

Zombietime clearly proved from simple scrutiny of the photographs taken of the ambulance that the hole in the cross was not the result of a missile attack but the work of the ambulance manufacturer. It was the hole for an air vent. The pockmarks on the roof were the result of age and decay. There had been no fire in the ambulance. There was no attack. It was a complete fabrication, concocted by Red Cross employees who enjoy their protected status because their organization has pledged its neutral status in this and all wars.

One week later, as EU Referendum reports in a similarly detailed investigation of the much-condemned IAF bombing of Kana on July 30 (which actually happened a mile north of Kana at Khuraybah village), Red Cross relief workers actively participated in the staging of a perverted media extravaganza where the bodies of dead children were paraded about before the waiting camera crews for hours and hours.

Rather than demand that the ICRC account for the clear breach of its binding commitment to neutrality, and rather than attack the Lebanese Red Cross for its active collaboration with Hezbollah, the international media has attacked the bloggers. They are brushed off as “Israel supporters,” and “right-wing extremists.” The aim of these brush-offs is to convince “right-thinking” citizens that they oughtn’t have anything to do with these champions of truth and human decency.

As each day passes, the governments, formal and informal legal apparatuses, and media of free societies show themselves to be less and less capable of contending with the information operations conducted against their societies by subversive forces seeking their destruction. As each day passes it becomes clear that the responsibility of protecting our nations and societies from internal disintegration has passed to the hands of individuals, often working alone, who refuse to accept the degradation of their societies and so fight with the innovative tools of liberty to protect our way of life. The vigilance of just a handful of bloggers brought us the knowledge of the corruption of our media and the network of global NGOS that we have come to rely on to tell us the “objective” truth.

It is up to all citizens of the free world who value our freedom to recognize this corruption, applaud the bloggers and join them in refusing to allow these corrupt institutions to cloud our commitment to freedom.

– August 28, 2006

PRIME-TIME BLOOD LIBELS

Last Thursday a French court found Philippe Karsenty guilty of libeling France 2 television network and its Jerusalem bureau chief Charles Enderlin. Karsenty, who runs a media watchdog website called Media Matters, called for Enderlin and his boss Arlette Chabot to be sacked for their September 30, 2000, televised report alleging that IDF forces had killed 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura at Netzarim junction in Gaza that day.

Their lawsuit against Karsenty was the first of three lawsuits that Enderlin and France 2 filed against French Jews who accused them in various ways of manufacturing a blood libel against Israel by purposely distorting the events at Netzarim junction that day. The second trial, against Pierre Lurcat, is set to begin this week. Lurcat organized a mass demonstration against France 2 on October 2, 2002, after the broadcast of a German television documentary film by Esther Schapira called Three Bullets and a Dead Child: Who Shot Muhammad al-Dura? Schapira’s film concludes that IDF bullets could not have killed Dura.

September 30, 2000, was the third day of the Palestinian jihad. That day an IDF position at Netzarim junction was attacked by Palestinian Authority security forces. A prolonged exchange of fire ensued. That afternoon, France 2’s Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma submitted footage of a man and a boy at the junction cowering behind a barrel. The two were later identified as Jamal al-Dura and his 12-yearold son Muhammad.

Enderlin, who had not been present at the scene, took Rahma’s 27 minutes of raw footage and narrated a 50-second film in which he accused the IDF of having shot and killed the boy. Enderlin’s film itself does not show the boy dying. There are no blood stains where the boy and his father were crouched. No ambulance came to evacuate them. No autopsy was performed on Muhammad’s body.

France 2 distributed its film free of charge to anyone who wanted it – although not the full 27 minutes that Rahma filmed. The film was shown repeatedly worldwide and particularly on Arab television networks. The results of the footage were murderous. On October 12, two IDF reservists, Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche, were lynched by a mob at a PA police station in Ramallah. The mob invoked Dura’s death as a justification for its barbarism.

The Orr Commission which investigated the violent rioting by Israeli Arabs in October 2000 stated in its final report that “Muhammad al-Dura’s picture, which was distributed by the media, was one of the causes that led people in the Arab sector to take to the streets on October 1, 2000.”

Countless suicide bombers and other Palestinian terrorists have cited Dura as a justification of their crimes. For the past six years PA television has continuously aired a film showing Dura in heaven beckoning other Palestinian children to “martyr” themselves by becoming terrorists and join him there.

The Palestinians are not the only ones who have used Dura as a terrorist recruitment tool. He is prominently featured in al-Qaeda recruitment videos and on Hezbollah banners. Daniel Pearl’s murderers interspersed their video of his beheading with the France 2 film. Throughout Europe, and particularly in France, Muslims have used Dura as a rallying cry in their attacks against Jews – attacks which broke out shortly after the Dura film was broadcast.

At first, Israel accepted responsibility for Dura’s death without conducting an investigation. Yet, in the weeks that followed the event, engineers Nahum Shachaf and Yosef Doriel conducted investigations on behalf of the IDF’s Southern Command.

Both men separately proved mathematically and physically that the IDF forces on the ground could not see the Duras from their position and that it was physically impossible for their bullets to have killed Muhammad. Then OC Southern Command Maj. Gen.Yom Tov Samia held a news conference in late November based on their findings at which he said that the probability that the IDF had killed Dura was low.

Yet Samia was the only senior Israeli official to question the veracity of the film. Then chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz disavowed Samia’s investigation. Prime minister Ehud Barak never questioned the veracity of Enderlin’s murderous accusation against the IDF.

In the intervening years, private researchers and media organizations have taken it upon themselves to investigate what happened that day. Their findings have shown that at a minimum, the probability that the IDF killed Dura is minuscule and more likely, the event was either staged or edited to engender the conclusion that Dura had been killed by Israel. The few people who have been allowed to watch Rahma’s entire film have stated that it is impossible to conclude that Muhammad was killed because he raises his head and props himself up on his elbow after he was supposedly shot.

Respected media organizations like the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Atlantic Monthly and Commentary magazine have published detailed investigations that all conclude that the footage was either staged or simply edited to show something that didn’t happen.

Yet, even as private individuals were dedicating their time and passion to proving that France 2 had purposely broadcast a blood libel against Israel that caused the death and injury of Israelis and Jews throughout the world and marred the honor of the IDF, official Israel remained silent.

The Foreign Ministry never asked France 2 to show its officials the full 27-minute film. Neither the IDF nor the Foreign or Justice Ministries defended the IDF or called into question the veracity of Enderlin’s film. As late as this past June 23, IDF spokeswoman Brig. Gen. Miri Regev told Haaretz, “I cannot determine whether the IDF is or is not responsible for the killing of al-Dura.”

In the French judicial system, the people’s interest is represented by a special court reporter who recommends verdicts to the judges. It is rare for judges to disregard the reporter’s recommendations. During his trial, Karsenty and his witnesses produced piece after piece of evidence that called into question the credibility of the France 2 film.

For its part, France 2 sent no representatives to the trial. Its attorney did not question any of the evidence submitted by Karsenty nor did she cross-examine any of his witnesses. She brought no witnesses of her own. She simply produced a letter of support for France 2 from President Jacques Chirac. The court reporter recommended dismissing the case.

In their judgment last week, the judges argued that Karsenty’s allegations against Enderlin and France 2 could not be credible since “no Israeli authority, neither the army which is nonetheless most affected, nor the Justice [Ministry] have ever accorded the slightest credit to these allegations” regarding the mendacity of the Dura film.

Over the years Israeli officials have justified their silence by saying that it was a losing proposition to reopen the Dura case. We’ll be accused of blaming the victim, they said.

This statement is both cowardly and irresponsible. As the French verdict shows, without an Israeli protest, the protests of private individuals, however substantial, ring hollow. When Israel refuses to defend itself from blood libels, it gives silent license to attacks against Israel and world Jewry in the name of those libels.

In 2000, Barak was desperately trying to close a peace deal with Yasser Arafat. The last thing he wanted was to admit that Arafat was promulgating blood libels against Israel. So he was silent. This is unforgivable, but understandable.

Israel’s continued silence is a sign that Israeli officialdom has still not understood what the war of images demands of it. The Dura film, like the fictional massacre of Lebanese children at Kafr Kana in Lebanon this summer, shows that victory or defeat in wars is today largely determined on television. To win, Israel must go on the offensive and attack untruthful, distorted images that are used to justify the killing of Israelis and Jews throughout the world.

When Karsenty heard the court’s verdict last week, he said, “If this judgment is upheld, Jews should ask themselves questions about their future in France. Justice covers the anti-Semitic lies of a public channel. It’s a strong signal, it is very severe.”

To this it should be added that if the Israeli government continues to be silent as the good name of the IDF, of Israel and of the Jewish people is dragged through the mud by distorted television images broadcast by foreign news outlets, if the Israeli government does nothing to defend those who are persecuted for fighting against these distortions, then Jews will have to ask themselves some questions about how on earth we are supposed to defend ourselves, let alone win this war against those who seek our destruction.

– October 23, 2006 ss

VII

CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT POLICE

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

– Abraham Lincoln

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

– Groucho Marx

OF INTELLECTUAL BONDAGE

“How could you report the war in Iraq if you sided with the Americans?”

“How can you say that George Bush is better than Saddam Hussein?”

These are some of the milder questions I received from an audience of some 150 undergraduate students from Tel Aviv University’s Political Science Department. The occasion was a guest lecture I gave last month on my experiences as an embedded reporter with the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division during the Iraq war.

Many of the students were visibly jolted by my assertion that the patriotism of American soldiers was inspirational. The vocal ones among them were appalled when I argued that journalists must be able to make moral distinctions between good and evil, when such distinctions exist, if they wish to provide their readership with an accurate picture of the events they describe in their reports.

“Who are you to make moral judgments? What you say is good may well be bad for someone else.”

“I am a sane human being capable of distinguishing good from evil, just like every other sane human being,” I answered. “As criminal law states, you are criminally insane if you can’t distinguish between good and evil. Unless you are crazy, you should be able to tell the difference.”

When the show was over, and the students began shuffling out of the lecture hall, a young woman approached me.

“Excuse me,” she said with a heavy Russian accent. “How can you say that democracy is better than dictatorial rule?”

“Because it is better to be free than to be a slave,” I answered.

Undeterred, she pressed on, “How can you support America when the US is a totalitarian state?”

“Did you learn that in Russia?” I asked.

“No, here,” she said.

“Here at Tel Aviv University?”

“Yes, that is what my professors say,” she said.

In the weeks that have passed since I gave that lecture, I have not been able to get those students out of my mind. While campuses throughout the Western world are known as hotbeds for radicalism, it is still hard to believe that Israeli students, who themselves served in the IDF, and who as civilians have experienced more than three years of unrelenting terrorist attacks on their cafes, night clubs, campuses, highways and public buses, could subscribe to such views.

How can they believe it is impossible to make moral distinctions between those fighting terrorism and totalitarian regimes and those perpetrating terrorism and leading such dictatorships?

It is an open secret that many of the most prominent Israeli academics and professors are also identified with the radical leftist fringes of the Israeli political spectrum. The Hebrew University’s Political Science Department was dominated for years by the leaders of Peace Now. Tel Aviv University’s Social Science and Humanities Faculties are the professional home to some of the leaders of the even more radical Ta’ayush and Yesh Gvul organizations.

Israeli professors have signed petitions calling for boycotts of Israeli goods. Some have even supported the boycott of Israeli academics by foreign universities and academic publications. Israel Radio reported this week that the letter written by 13 reservists from the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit in which they announced their refusal to serve in the territories was written for them by a Tel Aviv University professor.

Professor Rafi Yisraeli from the Hebrew University notes, “It is ironic that the university presidents and Minister Natan Sharansky are now organizing a campaign to stop the boycott of Israeli academics in foreign universities. A year ago, I discussed the issue, as well as the rampant anti-Semitism on European campuses, with the president of the University of Paris. He told me, ‘What do you want from us? All we are doing is repeating what we hear from Israeli professors.’”

Case in point is Tel Aviv University law professor Andrei Marmor. Marmor is currently a visiting faculty member at the University of Southern California Law School. Recently he published a policy paper at USC where he argues that Israel’s territorial claims to land it secured during the 1948–49 War of Independence are no different from its claims to land secured in the 1967 Six-Day War. In his view, both are illegitimate. Marmor goes on to argue that Zionism cannot claim to be a liberal movement unless it accepts the “right of return” of Palestinians to Israel.

In the mid-1990s, a Tel Aviv University graduate student conducted a survey of the political views of university professors. The student discovered that not only were the professors overwhelmingly self-identified with far-left and Arab political parties, most also expressed absolute intolerance for the notion that professors with right-wing or even centrist views should be allowed to teach in their departments. “Over my dead body,” said one.

All of this is well known. Yet knowing of the professors’ radicalism and seeing the effects of such dogmatic views on university students are different things. Since my exchange with those students, I have spoken to professors and students at the five major liberal arts universities in Israel to try to understand how the intellectual tyranny of the radical Left on campuses impacts their educational and professional experiences.

Students speak of a regime of fear and intimidation in the classroom. Ofra Gracier, a doctoral student in Tel Aviv University’s humanities faculty, explains the process as follows:

It starts with the course syllabus. In a class on introduction to political theory for instance, you will never see the likes of Leo Strauss or Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. You will only get Marx and Rousseau and people like that. So, if you want to argue with Marx, you are on your own. You don’t know anything else.

But say you want to dispute your professor. I was taught this class by Yoav Peled, an avowed communist. He was explaining why capitalism is evil. I mentioned the Asian economic miracle – South Korea, Japan, Singapore. He went nuts and spent the rest of the class screaming at me.

Then there is the grading system. In a history course I took, I took a Zionist line in a research paper. My professor gave me a low grade and explained that my grade was the result of my argument.

Most people toe the leftist line even when they disagree because of the grade discrimination. If you get low grades, you can’t get accepted to a master’s program and if in the master’s program you get low grades you won’t be accepted into a doctoral program.

Avi Bell, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University’s Law School, relates a separate but related problem:

Last year I taught a course on the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Most of my students were clearly Zionists and also knowledgeable about Israeli history. And yet, when I received their seminar papers at the end of the term, I saw that most of them wrote anti-Zionist arguments.

The reason this happened is because there is a dire lack of scholarship in certain areas. For instance, if you want to research the issue of Palestinian policies of land discrimination against Jews, you have to go to primary sources. No one has written a book about it even though it is a huge issue. But if you want to research the question of alleged Jewish land discrimination against Arabs, you have a bookshelf full of books at your disposal.

Indeed, Dr. Martin Sherman of Tel Aviv University’s Political Science Department was unable to get the university’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies to publish his original work on the hydro-strategic impact of a Palestinian state on Israel. Sherman, with degrees in physics and geology and practical experience as a water adviser in the Ministry of Agriculture, is a recognized expert in the field:

My paper showed conclusively that the establishment of such a state would involve the transfer of control over 60 percent–70 percent of Israel’s water sources to the Palestinians. They wouldn’t have it. I was strung along by Shai Feldman [the head of the Jaffee Center] for months and months, until it was finally made clear that it wouldn’t be published.

Most of the academics and students that I spoke with were happy to discuss their situations and yet averse to the notion of being quoted by name. “I am up for tenure,” and “I still need my dissertation proposal approved,” were some of the most frequent explanations.

A survey carried out by the left-wing Israel Democracy Institute on Israeli attitudes toward the state was published on Thursday in Haaretz. According to the findings, a mere 58 percent of Israelis are proud of being Israeli, while 97 percent of Americans and Poles are proud of their national identity. Mexicans, Chileans, Norwegians and Indians all have higher degrees of pride in their national identities than Israelis.

Is it possible that our academic tyrants have something to do with the inability of 42 percent of Israelis to take pride in who they are?

– December 26, 2003

POLITICALLY CORRECT PERFIDY

Last Friday, Harvard University’s student newspaper the Crimson had a noteworthy front page. The top headline read “Students Plan to Protest Khatami’s Visit.”

The second headline read “Cheney Visits Harvard Club through Back Door.” The first story referred to plans by student groups to protest Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government’s decision to invite former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami to speak at the school on September 10.

The second story reported how Vice President Richard Cheney was forced to enter the Harvard Club in Boston through the back door to evade some 200 protesters.

On the surface, these stories seem to perfectly balance one another. Some people are protesting against Cheney, some against Khatami...

Now how are the Red Sox doing?

Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood defended the decision to provide his school’s most prestigious platform to Khatami by asking rhetorically, “Do we listen to those that we disagree with, and vigorously challenge them, or do we close our ears completely?” This sounds reasonable, but is it?

It is surely important to know what people like Khatami have to say. But why did Harvard need to honor him with an invitation to speak? And why was he allowed to speak alone? Why did Harvard not suggest that he debate Iranian students or journalists whose friends and colleagues were imprisoned, tortured and in some cases killed by Khatami for calling for democracy and freedom of the press during his tenure?

Why did Harvard not offer to have Khatami debate former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu regarding the ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads that Iran developed during his tenure, the hundreds of millions of dollars Iran transferred to Palestinian terror groups and to Hezbollah during his presidency, and the advances in Iran’s nuclear weapons program that were made when Khatami was in office?

Why did Harvard not suggest Khatami debate Vice President Richard Cheney regarding the evidence that several of the Sept. 11 terrorists passed through Iran on their way to the US; several senior al-Qaeda leaders including Osama Bin Laden’s son Sa’ad have been operating in Iran since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and that most of the terrorists in Iraq are directed by Iran?

Of course, Khatami would have refused to participate in such a debate. But had a debate between him and Cheney been organized, it would have been interesting to see which side the protesters outside of the Harvard Club in Boston would have supported. Expressing the view of his 200 fellow demonstrators, Nick Giannone told the Crimson that having Cheney speak at the Harvard Club was “the equivalent of Hitler coming back to life and coming to Boston.”

The twin headlines in the Crimson were complemented by twin news stories in Israel’s papers on Sunday. Sunday morning Jerusalem Magistrates Court Judge David Mintz dismissed criminal charges against right-wing activist Nadia Matar. Last summer Attorney General Menachem Mazuz indicted Matar for “insulting a public servant” in reaction to a letter Matar faxed to Yonatan Bassi, the head of the Disengagement Authority, where she compared Bassi to the Judenrat who collaborated with the Nazis in deporting fellow Jews to concentration camps.

In his decision to expunge the charges against Matar, Mintz wrote, “Anytime we are dealing with freedom of speech, criminal law does not present the correct and effective tool.”

Using the same logic in the past, Attorney General Mazuz has refused to indict MK Azmi Bishara, now visiting in Damascus with two of his fellow MKS, Jamal Zahalka and Wasal Taha, for incitement to violence or treason for statements he has made expressing support for Palestinian terrorism, Hezbollah and Syria.

At the urging of Interior Minister Roni Bar-On, Sunday Mazuz ordered a criminal investigation against Bishara, Taha and Zahalka for visiting Syria in violation of the law barring officials from visiting enemy states without explicit government permission. The law was passed in response to Bishara’s last visit to Damascus in 2001. The Knesset passed the law because six years ago the attorney general claimed he lacked the legal means to indict Bishara.

Bishara claims that he has a right to say anything that he likes. And he is right. He has the right to praise Hezbollah. He may tell Israeli Arabs that they should reject Israel’s right to exist. His colleague Taha had the legal right in July to tell an online audience that he and his colleagues had repeatedly advised the Palestinians to kidnap IDF soldiers. Taha had the right to commend them for abducting Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Bishara had the right last week to praise Syria for its operations to free “occupied Arab lands,” and warn his Ba’athist hosts to be on the lookout for Israeli aggression.

It is legal to make these statements. What is illegal is the treasonous actions they describe. Yet, rather than contending with the fact that Bishara, Taha and Zahalka are guilty of treason, Mazuz now investigates the technical fact of their visit, just as in the past he ignored their treasonous actions arguing that they have a right to their opinions – as if providing aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies is a matter of opinion.

It bears pointing out that Bishara – who like Hezbollah, Iran, Fatah and Hamas believes that Israel has no right to exist – is a favorite son of the Israeli Left. Haaretz’s op-ed pages are open to him. Last Tuesday he wrote there that protests against the government and IDF’S mishandling of the war are the result of the inherent racism of Israeli society which immorally assumes

that Israel...must threaten its Arab neighbors and not be threatened, deter and not be deterred; and that the Arabs are incapable of developing human and material infrastructures that make resistance possible.

Bishara, who blamed the war in Lebanon on the US which he said put Israel up to it, is the former director of research at Hebrew University’s Van Leer Institute and a frequent speaker at the institute’s events. In 1997, the New Israel Fund invited him to participate in a conference at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington discussing Israel at 50.

When considered in isolation, Harvard’s decision to invite Khatami to speak; the leftist protesters’ desire to humiliate Cheney; Mazuz’s decision to indict Matar for “insulting a public servant”; and Mazuz’s decision to ignore Bishara, Taha and Zahalka’s apparent treason all seem to be reasonable good-faith judgments. They can all be defended in the interests of liberty, democracy, free speech and public order. But when placed in the overall context, it becomes clear that the opposite is true.

By inviting Khatami to speak unopposed at Harvard, the Kennedy School effectively advanced his anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal agenda.

In calling Cheney a Nazi, a fascist and a war criminal, the leftist protesters in Boston silenced debate about the nature of fascism, genocide and war crimes by claiming that those who fight these scourges of humanity are morally equal to those who commit them.

By indicting Matar for expressing herself because he didn’t like her views on the one hand, and refusing to even investigate apparent acts of treason by Bishara and his colleagues because those actions are considered acceptable by his social circle on the other hand, Mazuz makes a mockery of Israel’s laws. To advance a radical, anti-Zionist and anti-American political agenda, he is willing to outlaw debate and ignore treason.

Many argue that the only way to stop the Left’s subversion and so win the war of ideas is to attempt to co-opt its agenda from the inside. By this logic, champions of free speech, democracy and liberty should eagerly seek opportunities to speak at Harvard, or be the token “fascists” on panel discussions at Hebrew University. Unfortunately, this view is wrong. Accepting the legitimacy of leftist institutions prolongs their power, expands their undeserved legitimacy and erodes the power of the message of those who defend liberty, free speech and democracy.

Rather than supporting the Left, those concerned about the protection of liberal values should work to expose the corruption of these institutions and build alternative institutions that can replace them.

Five years after September 11, the greatest asset the jihadists who seek our physical and spiritual destruction have are those individuals, institutions and groups within our own societies that prevent us from seeing the dangers and defending ourselves. Our greatest challenge as individuals is to expose these dangers and those who hide them to our fellow citizens.

– September 11, 2006

AFTER THE MUSES FALL SILENT

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone on an appeasement spree and no one seems to mind. On Friday, Blair gave a marquis interview to Al-Jazeera’s new psychological warfare platform – its English-language channel – to celebrate its launch.

It is unclear whether Blair meant to give the impression in that interview that he agreed with Al-Jazeera’s Man-about-Town-in-Britain David Frost’s assertion that the US-British war in Iraq is “pretty much a disaster.” But Blair has made unmistakably clear that what he is suing for now is an ignominious American-British retreat from Iraq.

In his recent statements and actions, Blair has been unambiguous in communicating his belief that peace in Iraq begins with Israeli surrender to the Palestinians, Hezbollah and Syria. Blair sees in suicidal Israeli retreats from the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria the key to unlocking the hearts of the mullahs in Teheran and the Ba’athists in Damascus. As Blair sees it, these enemies of Israel, the US, Britain and the entire free world will suddenly become reliable friends of the non-Jewish West if Israel is left at their tender mercies. As friends, Iran and Syria will allow the US and Britain to surrender Iraq with their heads held high as they hand global jihadists their greatest victory since the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan.

No less disturbing than Blair’s embrace of surrender as a national strategy is the utter lack of outrage against his decision in the British and international media. No one questioned, for instance, his decision to grant Al-Jazeera in English an exclusive interview. It is widely accepted, even by some of the British media, that Al-Jazeera’s Arabic satellite station is used as a recruiting tool for global jihad. It can be reasonably presumed that the English channel will be used to erode the West’s will to defend itself against global jihadist domination. The fact that the network is now operating an English channel should send a chill up the spine of Western and specifically British media outlets which will now have to compete against an enemy propaganda arm masquerading as a news channel.

There are many reasons that actions like Blair’s strategic retreat from reason and responsibility have gone uncriticized by the media. It is not simply that Western and particularly European journalists are overwhelmingly anti-American and virulently anti-Israel. One of the central reasons for the silence of Western intellectuals and media in the face of actions like Blair’s is fear of death at the hands of jihadists.

In France today, high school teacher Robert Redeker has been living in hiding for two months. On September 19 Redeker published an op-ed in Le Figaro in which he decried Islamist intimidation of freedom of thought and expression in the West as manifested by the attacks against Pope Benedict XVI and against Christians in general which followed the pontiff ‘s remarks on jihad earlier that month.

Redeker wrote:

As in the Cold War, where violence and intimidation were the methods used by an ideology hell bent on hegemony, so today Islam tries to put its leaden mantel all over the world. Benedict XVI’S cruel experience is testimony to this. Nowadays, as in those times, the West has to be called the “free world” in comparison to the Muslim world; likewise, the enemies of the “free world,” the zealous bureaucrats of the Koran’s vision, who swarm in the very center of the “Free World,” should be called by their true name.

In reaction to Redeker’s column, Egypt banned Le Figaro and Redeker received numerous death threats. His address and maps to his home were published on al-Qaeda-linked websites and he was forced to leave his job, and flee for his life. While Redeker e-mailed a colleague that French police have set free the man they know was behind the threats to his life, Redeker recently described his plight to a friend in the following fashion:

There is no safe place for me, I have to beg, two evenings here, two evenings there.... I am under the constant protection of the police. I must cancel all scheduled conferences.

For its part, Le Figaro’s editor appeared on Al-Jazeera to apologize for publishing Redeker’s article.

This weekend British author Douglas Murray discussed the intellectual terror in the Netherlands. Murray, who recently published Neoconservativism: Why We Need It, spoke at a conference in Palm Beach, Florida, sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He noted that the two strongest voices in Holland warning against Islamic subversion of Dutch culture and society – Pim Fortyn and Theo Van Gogh – were murdered.

The third most prominent voice calling for the Dutch to take measures to defend themselves, former member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, lives in Washington, DC, today.

Her former colleague in the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders, has been living under military protection, without a home, for years. In the current elections, Wilders has been unable to campaign because his whereabouts can never be announced. His supporters were reluctant to run for office on his candidates’ slate for fear of being similarly threatened with murder. Last month, two of his campaign workers were beaten while putting up campaign posters in Amsterdam.

In 2000, Bart Jan Spruyt, a leading conservative intellectual in Holland, established a neoconservative think tank called the Edmund Burke Institute. One of the goals of his institute is to convince the Dutch to defend themselves against the growing Islamist threat. In the period that followed, Spruyt was approached by security services and told that he should hire a bodyguard for personal protection. Although he couldn’t afford the cost of a bodyguard, the police eventually provided him with protection after showing up at his office hours after Van Gogh was butchered by a jihadist in the streets of Amsterdam in November 2004.

Another leading conservative voice, law professor and social critic Paul Cliteur, distinguished himself for his repeated calls for freedom of thought and for the protection of the Dutch secular state. In the weeks after Van Gogh’s murder, Cliteur was the target of unremitting criticism from his leftist colleagues in the press. According to a report by the International Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, his colleagues blamed him and his ideological allies for the radicalization of the Muslims of Holland.

Clituer reacted to their abuse by announcing on television that he would no longer speak out or write about the Islamic takeover of Holland.

As the Helsinki report notes, although the European Human Rights Convention stipulates that states must enable free speech,

Annemarie Thomassen, a former Dutch judge at the [European Human Rights Court] in Strasbourg, stated that the limits to freedom of speech in the European context lie where the expressed opinions and statements affect the human dignity of another person. This means that, according to her, in Europe one cannot simply write and say anything one wants without showing some respect to other persons.

In Britain itself, the fact that no media organ dared to publish the Danish cartoons of Muhammad last year is a clear indication of the level of fear in the hearts of those who decide what Britons will know about their world.

Melanie Phillips, the author of Londonistan, noted at the Freedom Center conference that what Britons hear is best described as “a dialogue of the demented.” In this dialogue, European Islamists protest victimization at the hands of the native Europeans while threatening to kill them, and native Europeans apologize for upsetting the Muslim radicals and loudly criticize the US and Israel for not going gently into that good night.

In the meantime, jihadist ideologues and political leaders are flourishing in Europe today. In Britain, aside from happily helping Al-Jazeera’s ratings, the government has hired Muslim Brotherhood members as counterterrorism advisers.

In the wake of the Muslim cartoon pogroms, the BBC invited Dyab Abou Jahjah, who heads the Arab European League, to opine on the cartoons on its News Night program. Jahjah, who is affiliated with Hezbollah, led anti-Semitic riots in Antwerp in 2002 in which his followers smashed the windows of Jewish businesses, chanted slogans praising Osama bin Laden, and called out, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!” Most recently, Jahjah published cartoons depicting Anne Frank in bed with Adolph Hitler.

The first action that Yasser Arafat took in 1994 after establishing the Palestinian Authority was to attack Palestinian journalists, editors and newspaper offices. Journalists and editors were arrested and tortured and all were forced to accept PA control over their news coverage. The man charged with overseeing censorship was then information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, who in a later psychological warfare coup, signed the so-called Geneva Accord with Yossi Beilin in 2003.

This is the nature of our times. We are at war and those who warn of its dangers are being systematically silenced by our enemies who demand that nothing get in the way of our complacency with our own destruction.

If journalists, intellectuals, social critics, authors and concerned citizens throughout the world do not rise up and demand that their governments protect their right to free expression and arrest and punish those who intimidate and trounce that right, one day, years from now, when students of history ask how it came to pass that the free world willingly enabled its own destruction, they will have to look no further than the contrasting fortunes of Al-Jazeera and Dyab Abou Jahjah on the one hand and Le Figaro and Robert Redeker on the other.

– November 20, 2006

VIII

EUROPEAN BETRAYAL

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

– George Orwell

The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.

– Oriana Fallaci

THE EUROPEAN SOLUTION

What does Europe want from the Jews?

Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis’s Hitlerian rant this week was the latest expression of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. To an audience which included the Greek ministers of culture and education he asserted that the Jewish nation “is the root of evil. It is full of self-importance and evil stubbornness.”

Theodorakis has a long personal history of hating Jews and Israel matched by a long history of support for the PLO – support which led to the PLO’S decision to have him compose the Palestinian national anthem. Because of this, the fact that he feels the way he does about Israel and the Jews is no surprise.

What is interesting about Theodorakis’s remarks is that they come but a week after we learned that 59 percent of Europeans believe that Israel is the single largest threat to peace in the world. And the publication of the EU poll came but a week after the EU, under French leadership, refused to condemn the anti-Semitic screed uttered by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed at the Islamic Summit Conference where he said that “the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”

In Israel, Theodorakis’s remarks, like the EU poll results, have been greeted with red headlines and a shallow public discussion of what Israel has done to cause this rash of Jew hatred. Is our army’s treatment of the Palestinians responsible? Are the Israelis who live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to blame for Europe’s steadily rising comfort level with public expressions of anti-Semitism?

Underlying all of this gratuitous and vain soul searching has been another running subtext.

What has Israel done to defend itself against the resurgence of anti-Semitism as a cultural and political force in the West and why have these actions, such as they are, failed so abysmally?

Under the gun of media scrutiny, Israel’s public diplomacy gurus launched their breathless defense. Led by Foreign Ministry Deputy Director-General for Public Diplomacy Gideon Meir, they whined that they don’t have enough money to launch a successful campaign to defend Israel abroad. The decision to close Israeli embassies due to budget cuts also adds to the Foreign Ministry’s failure to defend the country and indeed the Jewish people from constant vilification, we were told. And, aside from these tired excuses, the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office found a scapegoat on which to pin their failure.

Danny Seaman, who has headed the Government Press Office for the past three years, was informed Monday night by a reporter that a decision had been made to replace him. Seaman, whose crime has been his staunch and unprejudiced enforcement of Israeli laws towards the foreign press, we are told, is responsible for the biased reporting that characterizes the media coverage of Israel. If he hadn’t made foreign news organizations hire Israeli cameramen and if he hadn’t ended the policy of accrediting Palestinian journalists, Israel would never be in the mess it is in today.

Of course this is ridiculous, as are all of the Foreign Ministry’s excuses for its failure to mount even a modicum of defense for the state in the international media and towards foreign governments.

The real cause of Israel’s abject failure to combat anti-Semitism in Europe is our failure to see the big picture. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe because many members of the European political and intellectual elite believe that vilifying Israel and the Jews advances their interests. And what are these interests that are served by anti-Semitism? They have to do with the enhancement and projection of European power.

How has this been manifested? A month before the September 11 attacks on the US, French policy wonk Dominique Moissy published an article in Foreign Affairs under the title “The Real Crisis over the Atlantic.”

Moissy, an advisor to the French Institute for International Relations and a member of the Trilateral Commission, explained that the rift between the US and the EU has to do with how Europe defines its role in the world. Using the example of European rejection of the US’S right to use the death penalty, Moissy explained,

Traditional state-centered concerns are no longer as relevant in this age of interdependence. Instead, domestic issues such as the death penalty and abortion have emerged on the foreign policy agenda.

Moissy’s argument, at base, was that the US needs to accept European cultural supremacy if it wishes to maintain its Atlantic alliance with a self-confident New Europe. Two and a half years later, after the “New Europe” which Moissy described prevented the US from going to war in Iraq under UN Security Council or NATO aegis, many argue that the EU-US rift that was already apparent before the September 11 attacks has turned into an unbridgeable break.

Undaunted by the split his own government was so responsible for causing, Moissy recently published an article in the International Herald Tribune where he made the case for why Europe is indispensable for America. In his view, America cannot turn its back on Europe because

Europe is America’s best protection against its own inner evils – neo-isolationist narcissism and arrogant ignorance of the way others may feel and think.

Moissy also provided a way to mend fences between Europe and the US. The way to rebuild the Atlantic alliance, he argued, was to work together to end Israeli sovereignty. In Moissy’s words, “The road to reinvent the West goes through Jerusalem.” Moissy urged that Europeans and Americans work together to force Israelis to accept the European-financed Geneva “peace formula” which he claims “is the only way out of the abyss into which the region is falling.”

The Geneva initiative calls for the institution of an international regime to include military forces from the EU, UN, US, Russia and indeed, Mahathir’s Organization of the Islamic Conference that will take over the role of sovereign from the government of Israel. The international forces will be responsible for settling all disputes between Israel and the Palestinian state and will oversee everything from the security of Jerusalem to the use of airspace and the protection of borders. In short, the Geneva initiative that the EU stands so squarely behind calls for the end of Jewish sovereignty in Israel and the reinstitution of an international mandate like that of the League of Nations.

It has been evident for years that many European governments view Israel’s right to sovereignty as conditional upon our enemies’ acceptance of our right to exist. European block voting in favor of anti-Israel resolutions in the UN is a case in point. As long as the PLO said it was okay to recognize Israel, the Europeans went along. The minute that Arafat renewed his call for the destruction of Israel, the Europeans, again, followed his lead.

But the current European hostility towards Israel, which is manifested as much in its policies as in its overt expressions of anti-Semitism, is not simply a matter of never fully accepting Israel’s right to exist. This conditional European acceptance of Jewish sovereignty is now linked to European aspirations to cultural hegemony over America.

There is a direct connection between Europe’s anti-Semitism and its anti-Americanism. European anti-Americanism stems from cultural envy of American independence and power. Europe wants America to accept its cultural superiority and in so doing, hitch US military and financial might to European visions of social engineering and global governance.

Anti-Semitism plays an enormous role in the New Europe’s attempt to force the US to adhere to its cultural dictates. If the US can be convinced that Israel is the gravest danger to world peace, as the vast majority of Europeans believe, then the US will effectively abandon its right to make moral distinctions for itself and come to rely on European guidance in its application of its military might.

If Israel, the archetype of the nation state, is accepted as a rogue nation, then the US will hardly be able to argue with Europe’s self-proclaimed right to interfere in its own internal debates about issues like the death penalty, abortion rights, genetically modified crops or global warming. Europe will have proven its point. According to the European logic, America, after abandoning Israel, will have been brought to cultural heel.

When seen as part of an overall European push for cultural hegemony over the West, the resurgence of anti-Semitism stops being a matter of simple public diplomacy. And our self-indulgence in blaming European anti-Semitism on loyal civil servants or on Jewish settlements is also unmasked as so much self-destructive nonsense.

To be successful, public diplomacy, like traditional diplomacy, must be based upon what is actually happening in the real world. Israel has become a European pawn in its power bid to force its norms on America. If we wish to combat European anti-Semitism, we must understand that it has nothing to do with our actions. Rather, the resurgence of Jew-hatred in Europe has to do with the European quest for power.

– November 14, 2003

THE HOLOCAUST FETISH

The war made it clear that almost everybody agreed that the Jews had no right to live.

That goes straight to the bone.

Other people have some choice of options – their attention is solicited by this issue or that, and being besieged by issues they make their choices according to their inclinations. But for “the chosen” there is no choice. Such a volume of hatred and denial of the right to live has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was confirmed and justified by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their disappearance and their extinction.

– Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, 2000

Yom Hashoah is a day of collective Jewish mourning. We have other days when we mourn – most prominently Tisha Be’av, when we mourn the loss of the First and Second Temples and of our sovereignty.

As a day of mourning, Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day is distinct in that it is not a fast day. We don’t deny ourselves things on Yom Hashoah. We eat. We drink. We go to work.

There are explanations – handed to us by generations of rabbis – for the destruction of the ancient Kingdoms of Israel. We were persecuted back then by the Greeks and the Assyrians and the Romans, but we too played a role in our own destruction. We had some power over our fate.

The Holocaust was unique from those other catastrophes that befell us in just how little it had to do with the Jews. We were not actors in the Holocaust. We were objects acted upon by the nations of Europe which, as Bellow wrote, did in fact agree that it would not be too objectionable to anyone if the Germans were to go ahead and exterminate the Jewish people.

In March a dispute between Holocaust survivors and Yad Vashem generated a modicum of domestic media attention. It seems that Jews who saved other Jews want to be recognized by Yad Vashem in some way. These Jewish heroes – now approaching death – argued that since the non-Jews who saved Jews are recognized as Righteous Gentiles, they, who at much greater peril saved far more Jewish lives, should also be distinguished officially for their valor.

Yad Vashem rejected their request explaining that from its perspective, a Jew acting heroically to save another Jew is obeying an existential imperative. The murder of one Jew is a wound that every other Jew absorbs. In contrast, the Christians who saved Jews in the Holocaust were exercising a choice. Therefore, said the officials at Yad Vashem, those Christians should be specifically and individually acknowledged for their efforts.

There is something telling in Yad Vashem’s argument. It cuts to the heart of something that has nothing at all to do with the Holocaust. It speaks about what it means to be a Jew. We have a responsibility to our fellow Jews because the fortunes of all of us are connected inextricably with the fortunes of each individual Jew. Try as we might, there is nothing we can do to escape this reality.

But again, the Holocaust, in and of itself, tells us nothing about Jewish identity. It only tells us about the rest of the world. The Jews of Europe did not decide to die. They neither seized territory nor did they plant bombs in German cafes. The Holocaust was a German initiative, carried out by Germans and millions of collaborators from France to Greece to Poland to Lithuania. The decision to prevent the Jews’ escape from Europe to the Land of Israel belonged to Britain.

The group that really ought to be taking the Holocaust to heart is not the Jews, but the Europeans who two generations ago descended to the depths of human depravity by either conducting the extermination of European Jewry or enabling it.

Sadly, Europe has avoided serious self-examination and instead has turned the Holocaust into a fetish. Holocaust memorials spring up like mushrooms after the rainfall throughout the continent. But what do they signify? A sop to Holocaust-obsessed Jews, they are used to teach Europeans that nationalism is bad. Speaking in 2000, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said, “The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance of power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states.”

But this has nothing to do with the causes for the liquidation of European Jewry. It was not Polish or American nationalism that led to the Holocaust. The balance of power between Britain and France had nothing to do with the Holocaust. It was genocidal anti-Semitism, nurtured by 2000 years of Christian mythology, embraced by a post-Nietzschean Germany, and accepted relatively enthusiastically by the overwhelming majority of the rest of Europe that caused the Holocaust.

There is something deeply distasteful and viscerally disturbing about the spectacle of dozens of leaders of anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian governments coming together at Auschwitz or the UN General Assembly or Westminster Cathedral and self-righteously bowing their heads for our exterminated brothers and sisters. It is particularly odious given that the nihilistic moral relativism that played such a role in enabling the Holocaust remains the order of the day in the societies these leaders now govern.

Israel exists and Jewish communal organizations in the Diaspora exist both to cultivate Jewish life for the benefit of Jews, and to protect Jewish existence from manifestations of anti-Semitism. Jews cannot convince anti-Semites not to hate us any more than a deer can convince a wolf not to hunt it. That work must be done by the societies that committed and enabled the Holocaust.

Israel has a duty to recall the Holocaust for what it means to the Jewish people to have lost a third of our members. But we have nothing to gain from joining the Europeans in their bizarre Holocaust rituals. It is neither our right nor our responsibility to wash Europe’s hands of our brothers’ blood.

Indeed, what that blood tells us most of all is that in the postwar world, we cannot allow ourselves to be enchanted by odes to brotherly love or utopian dreams. We can only defend ourselves, in our land, with our military and with our economic creativity, because the notion of trust perished at Auschwitz.

– May 2, 2005

THE PARIS FALL

The French are in serious trouble. They have a home-grown insurrection on their hands. In some ways – mainly in the intensity of the violence – the current insurrection recalls the 1968 student rebellion. But there is a major difference between the spring of 1968 and the autumn of 2005. In 1968 the rioting students – at least those who weren’t receiving their orders from the Soviets – felt they had a stake in France and its future.

The firebombers and marauders in today’s riots do not feel any significant commonality with the people they are rioting against. As Theodore Dalrymple explained in his Autumn 2002 City Journal essay, “The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris,” the Muslim youth rioting today feel nothing but nihilistic or Islamic hatred and alienation from their country and their countrymen. In his words, “They are of France, but not French.” Dalrymple explained that the bloated French welfare state houses, clothes, feeds and pays its unassimilated immigrant communities in a manner that enables disaffected youth to

enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in countries of their parents’ or grandparents’ origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity.

News reports of the violence quote police commanders who define the insurrection as “a state of war.” On Saturday night, as the firebombers and violent mobs spread to Normandy, Philippe Jofres, a deputy fire commissioner from the area, told France 2 television, “Rioters attacked us with baseball bats. We were attacked with pickaxes. It was war.” Some fire chiefs and policemen are asking for the army to be brought in to quell the violence. Law enforcement officials and French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have noted that there is coordination among the militants. People have been seen passing out petrol bombs and other ordnance from their cars to militants on the streets. Instructions are given by cellular telephones and internet sites. French Prosecutor-General Yves Bot told Europe 1 he could see “organized actions, a strategy” informing the militants in the streets.

For their part, law enforcement commanders seem not to have any strategy to speak of. Their actions to date call to mind the image of feckless cat herders. The militants – at least those who are found – are chased from place to place with uninspiring results. On Saturday night, when some 1,300 cars were torched and businesses, schools and stores were ignited throughout the country, only 200 arrests were made. In light of the constant increase in the scope and volume of attacks, one can assume that those arrested were expendable foot soldiers.

It would seem that the French authorities need a two-pronged approach to dealing with their mini civil war. First they need to take control of the violence. In order to do so, they have to stop chasing the rioters and have the rioters come to them. This is necessary in order for them to gain a basic understanding of the command structure of the rival they face. There are people giving orders. There are people deciding where and what to attack. These people need to be arrested and either sent to prison or deported.

Were the police to choose tactically significant locations within the ghettos where these militants live and simply take them over, they would force the militants to confront them in an area they can control. The locations they choose should afford them geographical control over a discrete area – say one square block. As the militants attack them, reinforcements can enter the area from pre-planned routes and easily take control of the area.

In the arrests that will ensue, the police will be able to see, after confiscating the militants’ cellular phones, where their orders are coming from, and move swiftly to arrest the lieutenants, who will lead them up the feeding chain. In acting in such a manner, the authorities will induce systemic shock on the militants, who will suddenly be forced to contend with a previously unfamiliar situation – French government control over “their” territory. By thus gaining the initiative, the authorities will be able to eventually achieve control over the violence.

One of the notable aspects of the violence thus far is the absence of murder. The militants have apparently decided to limit their campaign to property damage. No doubt this is because their objective is political, not military. As some Muslim leaders have explained, what they want is autonomy in their ghettos. They seek to receive extraterritorial status from the French government, meaning that they will set their own rules based, one can assume, on Sharia law.

If the militants are able to achieve this goal, even on an informal basis, then those declaring that France has fallen will be proven right. The only way for France to save itself is to prevent such a reality from occurring. If the French government accepts the notion of communal autonomy, France will cease to be a functioning state.

One could ask why Israel should care what happens in France. Given France’s traditional and rather obscene hostility towards Israel, a certain level of good old-fashioned Schadenfreude would seem justified. But the fact of the matter is that Israel has two reasons to care about the future of France. First, five years into this global jihad we see that while Muslim terrorists or militants in Ramallah, Paris, Jakarta, New York, New Dehli, Tikrit, Amsterdam, London, Teheran, Umm el-Fahm and Beslan may not speak to each other directly, they are certainly aware of one another’s actions and successes. And were France to fall, all of us would feel the aftershocks.

Secondly, if France begins to assert its authority and responsibility for unassimilated Arabs and Muslims in France, perhaps Israel will be inspired to do the same for our Arab minority in Israel and Judea and Samaria, and thus move our country from a position of policy paralysis and defeatism to one of movement and strength.

– November 7, 2005

THE WEAKEST LINK

The British people could be forgiven if they feel bewildered by the poor treatment they have been receiving at the hands of the Muslims of late.

Iran places Britain in the category of Satan, along with the US and Israel, and eagerly kidnapped its servicemen and humiliated Her Majesty’s Admiralty and Government. But for all of Iran’s anti-British rantings, the fact of the matter is that Britain is the mullahs’ most effective defender.

By working with France and Germany to fecklessly negotiate with the ayatollahs regarding their nuclear weapons program, the British were more responsible than anyone for giving the mullahs three years to work freely on developing their nuclear weapons. If the French and Germans had engaged Iran without the British at their side, the Bush administration would have condemned the talks for the stalling tactic they were and set out to shape a coherent, effective policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.

When, last summer, it became impossible to ignore the fact that the Europeans’ jaw-jaw had failed, it was once again Britain who curbed Washington by convincing President George W. Bush to empower the UN Security Council to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. Without Britain pressing the UN route, it is difficult to imagine Bush agreeing to subordinate US national security to a body more or less dedicated to demonizing, isolating and eviscerating America.

The ignominy Britain suffered at the hands of Iran occurred a week after BBC Gaza reporter Alan Johnston was abducted by Palestinian terrorists. After a month of silence, Sunday his kidnappers announced that they had executed Johnston.

Monday morning, the kidnapers had yet to produce their promised execution film, and so Johnston’s status was still unknown. But with or without a body bag, the British could be excused for feeling even more confused by their reporter’s plight than by their servicemen’s kidnapping in Iraqi coastal waters.

After all, since the 1920s, the Palestinian Arabs have had no friend more stalwart than the British. Until Israel declared independence 59 years ago the British did everything possible to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state. They even enabled the Holocaust by blocking the doomed Jews of Europe from escaping to the Land of Israel.

Since Israel declared independence, the British have been unrelenting detractors of the Jewish state and champions of the Arabs. In recent years, British support for the Palestinians against Israel has been one of the rallying cries not only of the Foreign Office but of British society as a whole.

In a sharp departure from both British and EU official policy, Britain’s consul-general in Jerusalem Richard Makepeace held open talks with Hamas terror commander and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on April 5 in a bid to secure Johnston’s release.

Last week, after declaring a “day of action” on Johnston’s behalf, BBC Chairman Mark Thompson went to Ramallah, where he met with Fatah terror chief and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. After the meeting Thompson praised Abbas and announced that Abbas claimed to have “credible evidence that Johnston was safe and well.”

Poor Johnston was so biased in favor of the Palestinians that he could have been forgiven for believing he would be safe from Palestinian terror. As the BBC’S Middle East Bureau chief Simon Wilson put it, Johnston “is regarded as a Gaza journalist foremost and a foreign journalist second.” The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said that Johnston is “famous for his opinions which are supportive of the Palestinians.”

Of course, there is nothing extraordinary about Johnston’s anti-Israel positions. The day before his execution was announced his colleagues in Britain went out of their way to prove their anti-Israel animus. By a vote of 66-55, Friday the British National Union of Journalists voted to boycott Israeli goods.

It will be interesting to see how they manage to implement their boycott and work as reporters at the same time. Since Israeli engineers developed their cell phones, their Pentium chip computers, their voice-mail and their instant messenger software, boycotting Israel will involve giving up their ability to quickly amass their anti-Israel propaganda, vomit it out on their computers and send it off to their Israel-bashing editors.

But then, even if they figure out a way to work without technology, one can still only wonder at their decision. After all, their Palestinian colleagues don’t seem too concerned with Israel these days. They have real tyrants to contend with.

In response to Johnston’s disappearance and in protest against the utter lack of press freedom in the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate called a boycott not of Israel, but of the PA.

The sad truth is that British journalists are far from the worst Israel-bashers in Britain. Anti-Semitism has increasingly become the defining characteristic of British society.

First there are the nongovernmental organizations. Last week, Oxfam, one of Britain’s largest charities, chastised Blair, claiming that both his decision to participate in the US-led campaign in Iraq and his refusal to side with Hezbollah against Israel in last summer’s war have damaged Britain’s international clout. Oxfam is calling for the UK and the EU to resume their transfer payments to the Hamas-controlled PA.

Yet Oxfam, which claims to “support Israel’s right to exist alongside a viable and independent Palestinian state,” could be mistaken as an Israel advocacy group compared to those tasked with educating British students. Last year, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), the largest university and college trade union in the UK, and the Association of University Teachers (AUT), agreed to institute a “silent boycott” of Israeli universities, students and professors.

NATFHE urged its members to consider “the appropriateness of a boycott of those [Israelis] that do not publicly dissociate themselves [from Israel].” The organization also castigated the British media and government for their response to Hamas’s victory in the January 2006 Palestinian elections. NATFHE decried the “hysterical reporting of the [election] result by most of the British news media and the outrageous bias shown by UK government statements against the outcome of a democratic process.”

Britain today is in the throes of a noxious blend of virulent anti-Semitism and indifference. An example is the willingness of school teachers to abandon their professional duties in a bid to appease their Muslim students. Rather than confront the Muslims’ rabid anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, their teachers have opted to stop teaching about the genocide of European Jews.

According to a study just released by Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism, another product of this mix has been a steep rise in anti-Jewish violence in Britain.

In one of the 136 “major violent attacks” against Jews last year in Britain, last August, while riding a London bus, Jasmine Kranat was brutally beaten by a gang of Muslims. The attackers refused to believe her when she denied being Jewish. They beat her unconscious, then continued to stomp on her chest and head, breaking the orbital bone in her eye.

Not one of the bus passengers or the bus driver came to her defense.

It is true that the Blair government is criticized by the British people for not following them in labeling Israel the greatest threat to global security, and the US as the second-greatest threat to global security. But the fact is that the Blair government has been responsible for turning the Bush administration into a loud proponent of Palestinian statehood. And it was Blair who brought the White House on board with both the so-called road map peace plan and the Saudi peace plan. Were either of the plans to be implemented, Israel would lose its ability to defend itself or to survive as a sovereign Jewish state.

Yes, it is more than understandable for the British to wonder why they are being targeted by the likes of the Iranians and Palestinians, whose interests they have done so much to advance.

But to answer the question they need to look in the mirror. In their relentless campaign to advance the interests of the Palestinians and Iranians who daily call for their destruction, the British have made themselves the most attractive targets for attack.

They are the weakest link in the alliance of so-called Satans. And as members of the alliance, the British are in the best position to pressure the US and Israel. Iran, the Palestinians and their allies understand and exploit this fact.

The British will continue to be targeted for as long as they champion the cause of their enemies and then react to attacks against them by redoubling their pressure on the US and Israel to join them in appeasing those sworn to our collective destruction.

If it wished, the Bush administration could try using the bully pulpit to at least stem Britain’s societal dementia. For its part, aside from warning British Jewry to leave before it is too late, the Jewish state can do nothing to influence England.

The most urgent change that must be made in Israel’s policy toward Britain is to cease viewing it as an ally. As with France, it is possible for Israel to cooperate with Britain on certain levels, but impossible to trust British support on any level. Although they share the same enemies and interests as Israel, the British, blinded by their bigotry, are incapable of understanding this basic reality. Until they do, Israel must keep its distance and watch its back when the British come a-calling.

– April 16, 2007

JIHAD’S CAMPUS COLLABORATORS

The general tendency of Westerners is to view global jihad as a foreign policy issue. But today it is clear that it is also a domestic policy issue.

Over the weekend the Sunday Telegraph reported that a recently circulated British intelligence report warned:

The terrorist threat facing Britain from home-grown al-Qaeda agents is higher than at any time since the September 11 attacks in 2001.

After foiling the jihadist plot to down US-bound British passenger aircraft last summer, MI5 director Eliza Manningham-Buller claimed that there are some 1,600 British Muslims actively involved in plotting attacks against Britain. According to the intelligence report cited in the Sunday Telegraph, today that number exceeds 2,000.

As one senior British political source told the newspaper, “The Security Services have constantly warned that the task of countering Islamic terrorism is a daunting one. There will be more attacks in Britain.”

It is not surprising that Britain faces the specter of mass attacks carried out by its own citizens in the name of Allah. Repeated exposes of the goings-on in British mosques and in supposedly “moderate” British Muslim communal organizations have shown unequivocally that they are being used as indoctrination centers for jihad.

A poll published last month by Britain’s Policy Exchange think tank bore out the poisonous impact this indoctrination has had on young Muslims in the country. Thirty-seven percent of British Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 would rather live under Sharia law than under British Common Law, 36 percent think Muslims should be killed if they convert to another religion, 13 percent admire al-Qaeda and similar terror groups, and a whopping 74 percent of young British Muslims believe women should wear veils.

While it is true that in the US the danger of home-grown jihadists to national security is lower than it is in Britain, it is also true that there is a growing phenomenon of jihadist violence being perpetrated by Muslim men against American civilians in the name of jihad.

Ten days ago, the Investor’s Business Daily published an editorial enumerating a partial list of acts of terrorism carried out by Muslim men against their fellow Americans since the September 11 attacks. Most recently, Sulejman Talovic entered a shopping mall in Salt Lake City, murdered five and wounded four unsuspecting shoppers before being killed by an off-duty police officer.

As was the case when Derrick Shareef, another Muslim male, was arrested in early December for plotting to carry out a similar attack at a shopping mall in Illinois just before Christmas, the media and the law enforcement agencies covering the Salt Lake City massacre have made light of the fact that the perpetrator was a Muslim.

While Talovic is dead and so cannot explain his motives to authorities, Shareef was arrested after telling an FBI informant of his plans to murder Jews specifically and Americans in particular for Allah. As Shareef told the informant,

I swear by Allah man, I’m down for it too. I’m down for the cause. I’m down to live for the cause and die for the cause, man.

Shareef ‘s protestations of jihadist ardor made little impression on either federal authorities or the media. Upon announcing Shareef ‘s arrest, US Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that he was acting on his own and that he had no outside inspiration for his decision to commit mass murder for Allah. As was the case with Talovic and with Naveed Afzal Haq, who murdered one woman and wounded five during his shooting rampage at the Seattle Jewish Federation last July, the media and federal authorities have hushed up and failed to investigate the jihadist motives for the Illinois attacker or link him to any larger phenomenon.

The Investor’s Business Daily editorial ran under the headline “Sudden Jihad Syndrome.” The term, which has been bandied about by law enforcement officials in both the US and Britain in recent months, encapsulates the view that Muslims can be incited and then move to commit acts of murder in the name of Allah and jihad instantaneously.

The attractiveness of the “sudden jihad syndrome” explanation for violent Islamic crime is clear. By arguing that the jihadists are acting on their own after being mysteriously inspired by no one, law enforcement officials and the media are relieved of the thankless task of investigating mosques, Muslim advocacy groups and Islamic centers, where the jihadist indoctrination is conducted on a daily basis.

It is hard to know what to make of this view. Perhaps there is something to it. Perhaps the message of jihad is so strong that young Muslim men can be inspired to shoot pregnant women in office buildings after the notion of murder for Allah enters the transoms of their minds independently of other outside factors – through vapors or spontaneous generation perhaps.

What is clear enough is that since this is the view that is informing policymakers, law enforcement officials and the media in handling a clear trend of jihadist murder, it requires serious empirical study. The obvious place for that research to take place is in the universities.

Unfortunately, there can be little hope that universities in the US or in the West in general will devote any serious consideration to this most important sociological, psychological and national security trend. Far from being willing to study the most central issue of our times, universities are leading the charge in either ignoring it, or apologizing for it.

On February 15, the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN, Hamid Al Bayati, spoke at New York’s Fordham University. During the course of his remarks, Bayati doubted the fact that the Holocaust had occurred. In his words, “I’m not aware of any dictator who used chemical weapons against his own people. Some academics or diplomats would say Hitler used chemical weapons, but I am sure he didn’t use them against his own people – his German people.”

When pressed by law professor Avi Bell on the fact that several hundred thousand German citizens were gassed to death by Nazi Germany, Bayati still refused to take the point.

Fordham University is far from alone in providing a platform for Holocaust deniers. Last Thursday the Dean’s office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-sponsored an event on the Arab-Israel conflict called “Foreign Policy and Social Justice: A Jewish View, a Muslim View.” The man invited to provide the Jewish view was Dovid Weiss, a member of the crackpot Neturei Karta sect. Weiss rose to prominence when he traveled to Teheran last December to participate in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial conference.

While MIT and Fordham were hosting Holocaust deniers in the name of intellectual freedom, their fellow universities were hosting “Israel Apartheid Week.” As part of their efforts to criminalize the Jewish state, Arab and Jewish speakers at “Israel Apartheid Week” events refer to Israel as “1948 Palestine” and show propaganda films portraying IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria as murderers.

The events are generally sponsored by the International Solidarity Movement. In addition to their campus outreach, the ISM sponsors the weekly riots against the security fence in Bil’in and in Hebron, where its protesters throw rocks at IDF soldiers. Given the violent content of their actions in Israel, it should come as no surprise that their events on US campuses also breed violence.

At an “Israel Apartheid Week” event at City University of New York, after watching a propaganda film, 19-year-old Binyamin Rister rose and politely asked the ISM presenters if they supported terrorism. When he received no reply he politely repeated the question. Rather than wait for an answer, CUNY security guards dragged Rister from the room and then repeatedly banged his head against the wall of an elevator and threw him head first down the stairs. Rister’s injuries from the assault by campus security required him to be evacuated by ambulance in a neck brace to the hospital.

In an almost identical case at Georgetown last year, Bill Maniaci, a 65-year-old retired Jewish American police officer, was brutalized by Georgetown security guards after he asked ISM spokesmen if they supported terrorism. He is currently suing Georgetown for $8 million in damages for the assault. According to Lee Kaplan’s report of the CUNY event in FrontPage Magazine, there were seven witnesses to the unprovoked attack against Rister. He too has filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against CUNY.

Even those propounding the view that jihadist murderers in the US and Britain are inspired to kill after being brought under the spell of the “sudden jihad syndrome” cannot deny that the root of the jihad is ideas. Similarly, it is self-evident that the key to beating the global jihad is victory in the battlefield of ideas. Unfortunately, as the pro-jihadist trend on US and Western campuses and its impact on idea consumers in law enforcement, the media and policy circles throughout the free world shows, to the extent that those charged with engaging in the battle of ideas are engaged, they fight on the side of the enemy.

– February 26, 2007

THE ROAD TO SERFDOM

In Israel, as in the rest of the free world, we are witnessing the death by a thousand cuts of free thought.

Last month, two students at Cambridge University’s Clare College became victims of this state of affairs. The students dedicated an edition of their satire magazine to the one-year anniversary of the global Muslim riots which followed the publication of caricatures of Muhammad in the Danish Jyllands Posten newspaper. As the students recalled, those riots led to the deaths of more than a hundred people.

Although the British media refused to republish the caricatures, British Muslims held terrifying protests throughout the country where they called for the destruction of Britain, the US, Denmark and Israel and for the murder of all who refuse to accept the global domination of Islam.

In their magazine, the students published some of the caricatures and mocked the Muslims for their hypocrisy in accusing British society of racial prejudice while calling for its violent destruction.

The Muslim reaction was apparently swift. Fearing for their lives, the students were forced into hiding.

But the Muslims were not alone in their anger. Clare College set up a special disciplinary court to consider action against the students. And the Cambridgeshire police opened a criminal investigation against them in late February.

The persecution of these students provides a case study of the two-pronged offensive being carried out today against Western culture. First there are the jihadists, who call for our destruction. Then there are the leftist intellectuals and public figures who defend radical Islamists and work to silence those who criticize them by criminalizing speech and condemning free thinkers as racists.

The direct consequence of this two-pronged offensive is the repression of free thought.

Four years ago, US President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The intention was clear. The purpose of the war was not merely to bring down Saddam Hussein’s murderous, terror-supporting regime. It was to bring about the defeat of the vile worldview that supported the regime and to replace that view with the values of freedom, tolerance and democracy.

Four years on, US forces continue their heroic fight to bring order and security to that violent land. But the purpose of their efforts is no longer clear. The US no longer pushes the Iraqis or the greater Arab world to abandon jihad in favor of freedom.

Earlier this month, columnist Joel Mowbray gave evidence of the Bush administration’s abandonment of the war of ideas in a Wall Street Journal exposé on the US taxpayer-financed Arabic-language television network Al-Hurra. The US launched Al-Hurra in February 2004 to compete with jihadist television networks like Al-Jazeera. Its stated aim was to present a liberal, pro-democracy and pro-human rights voice to the Arab world. Yet, as Mowbray reported, since former CNN producer Larry Register was appointed to lead the network last November, that aim fell by the wayside.

In December the network began allowing itself to be used as a platform by arch-terrorists like Hezbollah commander Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Last month, when the Israeli Islamic movement began attacking Israel for conducting an archeological dig by the Aksa mosque, Al-Hurra’s coverage of the story was more extreme than Al-Jazeera’s. Palestinian Authority mufti Ikremah Sabri was brought on live and accused Israel of shooting and throwing bombs into the mosque and of denying medical care to those it had supposedly wounded. Al-Hurra has also hosted an al-Qaeda terrorist who rejoiced in the September 11 attacks on America.

As is the case in Britain, the Bush administration’s decision to largely abandon the ideological battlefield is the result of an uncompromising and unrelenting ideological and political assault against the voices that justify the war against the global jihad generally, and against the hawks in the Bush administration specifically.

Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and John Bolton – and arguably Scooter Libby – were all forced from their positions in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House after coming under unrelenting attack by the Left which all but accused these men of treason for their vigilant support of the war against Islamic totalitarianism. A central component of the onslaught against them was the repeated claim that their support for Israel is what brought these men to delude America into believing that the global jihad is a threat to US national security.

One of the central players in this concerted attack has been the billionaire George Soros. Soros is an anti-Zionist Jew with a troubling past. Specifically, by his own admission in interviews with 60 Minutes in 1998 and PBS in 1993, Soros collaborated with the Nazis in seizing Jewish property in Budapest in 1944.

Author Serge Trifkovic, who is currently researching a biography of Soros, tells of a Holocaust survivor in Hungary who claims that the reason Soros was allowed to remain free was “the boy’s special knowledge of the Jewish community and its attempts to protect its property from confiscation.”

Since 2003, Soros has donated more than $100 million to radical left-wing groups and to the political campaigns of far-left anti-war Democratic candidates in the US. His money has made him one of the most influential forces in the Democratic Party.

After Hamas won the Palestinian election last January, Soros turned his guns against Israel. Last October he announced his intention to work with left-wing American Jewish groups such as Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, American Friends of Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum to form an effectively anti-Israel lobbying group that will compete with the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Soros accuses AIPAC of making common cause with the war hawks and so harming US and Israeli national security.

This week Soros laid out his anti-Israel views in the New York Review of Books. In a longwinded screed entitled “On Israel, America and AIPAC,” Soros presents an incoherent hodgepodge of sloppy logic and contradictory statements. On the one hand, he acknowledges that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza radicalized the Palestinians and brought Hamas to power. On the other hand, he insists that further Israeli withdrawals will cause the Palestinians to moderate. While he acknowledges that Hamas is a terror group, he insists that the US must recognize it and force Israel to recognize it and that AIPAC is responsible for neither recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political force in the region.

Soros claims to want peace for Israel. Yet he demands that the US and Israel embrace the Saudi plan which calls for Israel’s effective destruction through a forced Israeli withdrawal from Judea, Jerusalem, Samaria and the Golan Heights and the demographic destruction of the Jewish state through unimpeded immigration of 4–5 million foreign-born Arabs.

In effect, Soros’s arguments make clear that protestations aside, the advancement of human rights and peace cannot possibly be his true goals. Rather, what seems to interest him most is the erosion of the US-Israel alliance. A US abandonment of Israel is seen as a necessary component of an overall strategy for causing the US to cease its fight against the global jihad.

In her visit here next week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to pressure the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government to continue diplomatic contacts with the Hamas-Fatah terror government through PA Chairman and Fatah commander Mahmoud Abbas. In light of the administration’s weakening stand on Hamas, it is clear that Soros’s views have taken hold in ever-widening policy circles in Washington.

In advancing their anti-Israel views, Soros and his allies (most recently, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof), invoke the work of radical leftist Israeli organizations like the Geneva Initiative, B’Tselem and Peace Now. Like Soros, these organizations claim to act for the advancement of peace and human rights. And like Soros, these organizations effectively cooperate with pro-jihadist groups in eroding Israel’s ability to defend its rights as a Jewish democracy.

The public storm that ensued this week after Jews in Hebron took control of a building they recently purchased in the city was a clear example of this leftist-jihadist collusion.

In demanding that the IDF move immediately to eject the Jews from the building they had bought, Peace Now and B’Tselem ignored human rights and openly advocated the abrogation of the human rights of Israeli Jews to purchase and hold property. In so doing, they lent their support to the racist jihadist view that Jews must be barred from stepping foot in so-called Arab areas.

B’Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli told the Jerusalem Post on Sunday that whether the Jews purchased the building or not was immaterial. In her words,

Our opposition in principle is that these settlements should be evacuated anyway and that there shouldn’t be these pockets in Hebron.

She added that “other than watching and making sure that [the sale] was done in a legal way, the IDF has the obligation to make sure that settlers don’t take over more areas.”

In so arguing, Michaeli gave effective Jewish Israeli support to even more outrageous statements by Israeli Arab parliamentarians. As she claimed that the IDF’S job is to fight Jews, Arab MKS Ibrahim Sarsour and Muhammad Barakei participated in the PA’S “Jerusalem First” conference in Ramallah. Sarsour called for “Muslims and Arabs” to “liberate Jerusalem.”

Sarsour declared, “Just as the Muslims once liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders, so must we today believe that we can liberate Jerusalem. It is not an impossible dream.”

Barakei accused Israel of trying to “empty Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants.” Calling Jerusalem a “national issue, not just a religious issue,” he called on Palestinians to act immediately to “reclaim the city.”

As for Hebron, on Tuesday MK Taleb a-Sanaa called for an international boycott of Israel in response to the Jewish purchase and takeover of the building.

The Arab MKS spoke against the backdrop of Israel’s first Arab cabinet minister Ghaleb Majadle’s refusal to sing the national anthem and the publication of a University of Haifa poll showing that 76 percent of Israeli Arabs believe that Zionism is a form of racism and that 28 percent of Israeli Arabs deny the Holocaust.

Needless to say, no criminal investigations into possible treason charges have been opened against the Arab politicians.

A clear line connects the Cambridge students, the Americans in Iraq, and the situation in Israel. The leftist-Islamist front is eroding the free world’s sense of justice. Rather than assert our liberal, democratic values and defend our freedoms, fearing leftist condemnation, politicians and opinion shapers have permitted themselves to become shackled to ideologies that negate everything for which the free world stands. Israel, which stands on the front lines of freedom, is duty-bound to stem the tide. But our ignoble leaders have preferred to stop thinking and silently surrender.

This is how a civilization collapses.

– March 23, 2007

HIRSI ALI’S CHALLENGE TO HUMANITY

Ayaan Hirsi Ali one of the bravest and most remarkable woman of our times.

To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary, she must be assessed in the context of the forces pitted against her in her twin struggles to force the Western world to take note of Islam’s divinely ordained enslavement of women, and to force the Islamic world to account for it.

A series of incidents this week placed the forces she battles in stark relief. Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Gaza. One man was killed and six were wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in which little boys would be playing with little girls.

The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little boys and girls.

On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at the gate of a girls’ school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam.

On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires across the street from the newly built Huda Girls’ school in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had been built as a deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls.

And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women’s rights activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out “Allah Akhbar.” She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.

Late last year Hirsi Ali published her memoir, Infidel. In describing her own life, what she actually explains are the two competing human impulses – conformity and individualism. In her own life, the clash of the two has been played out on the stage of Islamic ascendance and Western cultural collapse.

Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a politically active father who sought to free his country from Said Barre’s Marxist dictatorship. Forced to flee the country with her family, Hirsi Ali’s childhood in Arabia and Africa revolved along the axis of Islamic ascendance at the hand of the Saudi-financed Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini’s Iran.

Hirsi Ali’s rebellion against Islam was personal, not political. As a young girl and later as a young woman, she found herself abused and stifled by the dictates of Islam just as her youthful spirit wished most to take flight. As a five-year-old in Somalia, she screamed in pain and shock when her grandmother tied her down and had a man with a knife mutilate her genitals.

Living in Saudi Arabia she was struck by the oppressiveness of the “true Islam.” Why, she wondered, were she and her mother and sister prohibited from leaving their apartment without a male relative escorting them? As an adolescent in Nairobi she wondered why the enjoyment she felt in the company of boys was sinful.

Why did her mother need to suffer the humiliation of polygamy? Why could she not choose her own husband? Why was she told by one and all that her normal human impulses to seek love, respect and compassion and think for herself were sinful and evil?

As she puts it,

I could never comprehend the downright unfairness of the rules, especially for women. How could a just God – a God so just that almost every page of the Koran praises his fairness – desire that women be treated so unfairly? When the [Islamic teachers] told us that a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s, I would think, Why? If God is merciful, why did He demand that His creatures be hanged in public? If He was compassionate, then why did unbelievers have to go to Hell?

In her words, “The spark of will inside me grew even as I studied and practiced to submit.” Ali credits Harlequin romance novels for her initial mental deliverance from submission. These books, with their passionate loves and steamy sex scenes, were her first glimpse at the possibility of freedom. The novels showed her that the emotions and desires she was told to repress were natural and could even be beautiful and right.

Her impulse to rebel was matched by her impulse to conform. As a teenager, Hirsi Ali tried to be a faithful Muslim and even joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Embracing the notion of submission she began wearing a full-body burka.

But try as she might, she could not accept that her own will had no inherent value. She blamed the preachers for the terror she saw as a Muslim girl, believing they must be distorting the Koran. “Surely,” she writes, “Allah could not have said that men should beat their wives when they were disobedient? Surely a woman’s statement in court should be worth the same as a man’s?”

Yet, when she sat down and read the Koran on her own, she found that everything the preachers had said was written in the book.

At 21, Hirsi Ali emancipated herself. Fleeing from an arranged marriage to a Somali immigrant in Canada, she sought and received asylum in Holland. There, she embraced Dutch society and freedoms and quickly flourished in a true rag-to-riches immigrant tale. She learned Dutch fluently and began supporting herself as a translator. In just four years she had bridged the cultural divide between Africa and Europe and began studying political science with the creme de la creme of Dutch society at the University of Leiden.

A mere decade after her arrival, as a naturalized Dutch citizen, she was a pubic figure, an outspoken social critic of Islam in Europe. In January 2003, she was elected to Parliament as a member of the conservative Liberal Party.

In Holland, Hirsi Ali found herself confronted by a kinder, gentler type of cultural tyranny – the moral relativism of political correctness and multiculturalism dictated by the Left. Just as she rejected Islamic oppression in Africa, so in Holland she refused to submit to the will of the majority not to notice, judge or take action against the misogynist tyranny and anti-Western culture of the Muslim minority.

Hirsi Ali’s labors brought her to Theo Van Gogh. In 2004 the two produced the film Submission, Part One. The short film shows a young Muslim woman wearing a see-through burka. Passages of the Koran permitting the abuse of women are written on her body. The woman prays in submission to Allah all the while noting her abject suffering in his name. At the end of the movie, the woman raises her head to Allah and calls into question the reasonableness of her submission.

The film’s provocative message placed both Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh’s lives in imminent danger. And on November 21, 2004, Van Gogh was butchered by a Dutch Muslim on the streets of Amsterdam. The murderer stabbed a letter into Van Gogh’s chest in which he threatened to murder Hirsi Ali “in the name of Allah Most Gracious and Most Merciful.”

While Hirsi Ali was forced to flee her home and live under armed guard in army installations, her message proved too much of a challenge for the Dutch establishment which vomited her out last year. Her own party found a formality on which to revoke her citizenship and throw her out of the country and the parliament. Although the public outcry that ensued forced the government to restore her citizenship, the message was clear.

Hirsi Ali moved to Washington, DC. As a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute she continues to warn the West of the dangers of Islam and of Western cultural disintegration under the tyranny of multiculturalism. Just last month, her work brought an imam from Pittsburgh to call for her murder for the crime of apostasy.

In her life and work, Hirsi Ali personifies the central challenges of our times. She holds a mirror up to the Islamic world and demands that it contend with the evil it propagates in the name of divinity.

She holds a mirror up to the free world and demands that we defend our freedom against the onslaught of moral relativism and cultural decline.

So too, she demands our compassion for the women of Islam. She says we must see the suffering beneath the veil and work to alleviate it. Whether it means that we must mass produce and distribute Arabic and Urdu copies of Harlequin romance novels throughout the Islamic world, challenge veiled women to explain why they ascribe to a faith that gives men the divine right to beat and rape women, or simply hold Muslim communities in the West to the standards of freedom on which our civilization is based, the West must help these women free themselves from oppression.

Finally, in our own societies we must protect and uphold voices like Hirsi Ali’s. For the past five years, Hirsi Ali has lived under threat of death for her views.

We must understand that only when she and people like her can walk on the streets unafraid will we have properly defended our freedom.

– May 7, 2007

IX

AN ISRAELI IN IRAQ

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

ONE MINUTE TO ZERO-HOUR

Kuwaiti Desert – Monday afternoon I ate a hamentaschen on the hood of a humvee in the Kuwaiti desert, 40 km (25 miles), south of Iraq, with US Army 1st Sergeant Michael Mansfield. We clinked hamentaschen for l’haim. In lieu of the megilla reading, I told his driver an abbreviated version of the Purim story. The hamentaschen were courtesy of the sergeant’s uncle Norman in Florida. The rest of the experience was compliments of the US Army.

This is by far the most bizarre holiday celebration I have ever had, but Sgt. Mansfield, a 39-year-old Brooklyn native who has been in the US Army for 18 years, has experiences that far outpace our humvee Purim picnic.

In the first Gulf War he was a squad leader with the same battalion he is presently attached to – the 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion of the 3rd Army Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade.

Being a Jew in the army means knowing how to compromise. But back in 1991, when I was in Saudi Arabia, I insisted on being allowed to celebrate Hanukka with other Jews.

They flew me to this camp in the middle of nowhere in the desert; out there they had this tent set up and inside the tent was a rabbi and five other Jews. We said some prayers and lit the menora. The rabbi sang and pulled out the Manischewitz wine. I don’t know how he got that wine into Saudia. That was by far the most memorable Hanukka of my life.

As far as postings go today, the 2-7 Battalion is a pretty good place for Jews. The commander, Lt. Col. Scott Rutter, is Jewish.

Rutter cuts an interesting figure. The 40-year-old, 1.8 m (5’11”) commander with bright blue eyes and salt and pepper hair is the only Jewish combat battalion commander in the US Army and one of the only Jewish commanders at any level. Rutter is also the only battalion commander in the 3rd Infantry Division who fought as a company commander in the Gulf War.

Rutter, an only child, grew up in Philadelphia. He finished college at the age of 20 and joined the army. In June he is set to round out his 20 years of service and to the great consternation of his superiors, is determined to leave “at my peak,” and become a civilian.

Today he, his wife Joline, and their sons Seth and Luke live in Manhattan and are members of the Lincoln Square Orthodox synagogue.

He is proud of his background and his heritage and is open to sharing it, especially with a writer from Jerusalem. His mother’s family came to America from Germany before the US Revolution in 1776 and they have maintained their Judaism throughout the centuries.

But today, the story for Rutter is not about his Judaism. It is about his battalion and the war that he and his 730 soldiers and officers are about to fight.

I arrived at Rutter’s battalion on March 11, about ten days after they left the cultivated Camp New Jersey and moved to the outback closer to the border. Conditions for the battalion are harsh. In their desert camping ground, they have much sunlight during the day, much darkness during the night and very little else. They have no running water and receive electricity from generators. They live off combat rations and food trucks that come from the brigade command some 10 km (6 miles) away.

The troops have all learned one word in Arabic since arriving in this spot – shamal – which means sandstorm. I experienced my first shamal on Wednesday night. In this type of storm, once the sand starts moving, there is no stopping it. Day and night visibility can be limited to less than 20 cm (8 inches). Wednesday night I could barely make out my hand in front of my face.

Unlike the Negev or the Judean Desert, the Kuwaiti desert is perfectly flat. Any hills are the result of either Kuwaiti mining or oil drilling explorations or US military maneuvers. There are no natural obstacles to hide a person from the wind or to slow it down.

And yet there are no complaints. As Lt. Col. Rutter says,

Our forces are much happier here than they were in Camp New Jersey. It’s true that there they had showers and regular toilets. They even had internet access. But now that we are here they know that the battle is approaching. And they know that the way home goes through the north.

The topography of the desert is one of the reasons that the US forces here foresee little resistance for their troops in their initial push into Baghdad. Commander of 1st Brigade Col. William Grimsley explains,

It is hard to defend in this terrain. If a side in hostilities believes that it is best to place troops in a location where their presence will reinforce naturally defended terrain then this would not be the place to deploy them.

The US military leadership in Kuwait is exceptionally confident about its ability to complete the march from Kuwait to Baghdad within four to five days. A mechanized infantry battalion like the 2-7 can move an average of 20–30 km (12–19 miles) per hour and at that rate Baghdad, at 450 km (280 miles) from the border is just about four days away.

Rutter’s battalion today is an almost wholly autonomous offensive strike force. The 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion (nicknamed the Cottonbailers), includes a heavy mechanized infantry company equipped with ten Bradley fighting vehicles and four M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, a fully mechanized company with 14 M1A1s, and a third company with ten M1A1S and four Bradleys. The Bradleys have a 25 mm cannon, two TOW missile launchers and a 7.62 machine gun. They are heavily armored and can dismount eight troops. In addition, the battalion has an engineering company, a mortar company, a scouts company and an air defense artillery platoon armed with stinger missiles launched from their Bradleys instead of the TOWS.

For the purpose of the invasion, the 2-7 Battalion will also be carrying two Patriot missile batteries. The battalion will receive heavy artillery support from the brigade’s battalion of Palladin howitzers. The Palladin cannons have a 33 km (20 mile) range and their payload includes laser-guided heavy explosive charges. The 2-7 Battalion’s indigenous mortar range is limited to 7.2 km (4.5 miles).

In addition to its fighting forces, Rutter’s 2-7 Battalion has a civil affairs team of reservists who were called up for 365 days as well as a psychological warfare team of active duty soldiers. Both of these attached assets are part of the Special Operations Command from Fort Bragg. The task of these forces during the fighting stage will be to keep civilians away from the battle and to instruct Iraqi forces how to surrender.

Captain Bill Thompson, the head of the civil affairs team, teaches photo journalism at a junior college back home in South Carolina. The soft-spoken 38-year-old is to lead the civil affairs team in setting up displaced persons camps, POW camps and, in later stages of the war, identifying Iraqis who will cooperate with the US in regime change as well as in coordinating the work of NGOS in rehabilitating the country.

Thompson recalls the success of the US psychological operations in the Gulf War:

We had Iraqi soldiers surrendering to us with our leaflets in their hands. If we hadn’t come they would have died. They had no water and all the food they had left were these inedible black oranges.

Our leaflets had pictures of food on them. They came with their hands up with their fingers pointing to the food pictures. They ate our entire rations, including the powder for the coffee creamer and the Tabasco sauce – they were so hungry. On the leaflets there was a picture of a banana and the prisoners kept pointing to the picture. We figured out that in Iraq bananas were a delicacy so we flew in a planeload on a C-130 (Hercules) and gave them to the Iraqis.

While the attack plan is complete, it is far from clear how Iraq will be stabilized after the fall of Saddam’s regime. Third Infantry Division commander Maj. Gen. Buford Blount believes that his division will remain in Iraq through the initial stabilization stage after the hostilities die down.

“Our mission here is to set conditions for a new regime and to locate and seize all weapons of mass destruction,” Blount, a 1.9 m (6’3”) model of an American general says. “All of this is necessary to prepare the country for a new regime.”

It appears that the Pentagon planners believe that after the initial push to Baghdad it will take some time to put together a new Iraqi government. First there is the problem of northern Iraq. In the absence of Turkish bases, US forces will have to move from south to north and it will take time to arrive in Kurdistan.

Second, there is the problem of civil affairs. While there are 100,000 ground forces in Kuwait and heading for Iraq, there are only 180 civil affairs troops. These men, all reservists, will be responsible for going from village to village and making the determination of whether or not the local leaders should stay in power. Of the 180, only 30 speak Arabic. No doubt it will take months for the US to train and deploy a sufficient force to operate a civil administration for the Iraqis. In the meantime, they seem to be operating under the impression that NGOS will volunteer happily to work with the US military government in rebuilding infrastructure and providing for the basic humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people.

One Civil Affairs soldier, 36-year-old S.Sgt. Yancey Christopher, explains:

We want to avoid a Balkan situation where the country fell apart after Tito left power. Hopefully we can bring democracy to Iraq but I don’t know how that can happen. As Civil Affairs soldiers we don’t do rebuilding work ourselves. We farm it out to NGOS. We have a bird’s eye view of the country and we coordinate the activities of others.

The problem is that many of the NGOS look at us as aggressors. We understand that after September 11, the world changed for us. They may look at the Americans as colonizers. I know that this is not the case. I hope they will understand that this is not our objective. But today, instead of being reactive and waiting to be attacked, we need to be proactive and take care of these guys before they can attack us.

As for the attacking forces, they are ready and their motivation is high.

Captain Matt Paul from New Jersey, who commands the mortar platoon, has a picture of the World Trade Center in his command car. For Paul and his men the mission is clear. They have American flags flying on the backs of all of their vehicles.

The US troops, whose average age is 22–23, are sophisticated in their analysis of the need for the war and the morality of the battle, if perhaps a bit innocent about the likelihood that the Iraqis will view them in the same light as they view themselves.

Paul says:

I can think of no battle more moral than the one that we approach. Saddam has caused mayhem and will continue to do so, both against the US and our allies, as well as against his own people. To me, it would be unacceptable not to go in and take him down. Were we to stand down, I know that we would be back here in a few years to do this. But in the meantime, we must ask how much damage will Saddam have caused?

Twenty-four-year-old Bradley gunner Jason Trombley from Vermont makes the case even more bluntly:

This man Saddam tortures women and children in front of their husbands and fathers. I know what has to happen to a person like that. And we are going to take care of it.

The US forces come from all over the US, from all social classes, races and regional affiliations. While the US itself has over the past decade or so upheld diversity rather than unity as the pinnacle of its social pluralism, the army is a study in melting-pot socialization.

In one of Paul’s mortar carriers sits a crew from South Carolina, California, Russia and Ohio.

“We all work together,” says the commander, a 34-year-old sergeant from Georgia.

Sure there are lots of differences between us but we find things in common. We talk about sports or movies or work. We don’t run out of things to say.

The troops seem to believe, like their commanders, that because they have nothing against the Iraqi people, the Iraqi people will have nothing against them once they enter the country as liberators. When I mentioned the word conquest to the deputy battalion commander Maj. Kevin Cooney, the husky native of Arkansas with a smile forever on his face looked surprised.

I have never thought of us as conquerors. We are going in to liberate the Iraqis from a terrible dictator and set up a new government that will treat them with respect. I guess we are going to conquer their country but we don’t want anything from them. We just need to safeguard the security of our country and help them.

Specialist Bobby Roberts from West Virginia, who joined the army at 25 and divides his time fairly equally between driving Rutter’s humvee and writing poetry, expressed the same sentiment.

It will be clear to the Iraqis that we mean them no harm. We’ll be helping them. They’ll understand that.

In an address before the 1st Brigade’s battalion and company commanders on Tuesday morning, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, who commands the army’s V Corps in charge of all army forces in the theater, told the men that he is not concerned about the ability of the forces and indicated perhaps the root cause of the army’s sense that the Iraqis will accept them.

You are all a hell of a lot better than the force needed to get this done quickly, decisively and on our terms.

The US forces believe that terrorism is likely to be used against their forces but do not believe that it will be used to much effect. Col. Grimsley explains, “Terror won’t stop us.”

The terror attack that most concerns the forces is the prospect of a bombing of the fuel tankers that will resupply the armored columns.

A car bomb or a human bomb is more effective against a fueller than against a Bradley or an M1A1. But in the event that a 5,000-gallon tanker is blown up, while it will be a terrible tragedy, it won’t stop me from moving forward.

Due to fear of terror attacks against the support lines, the US has collapsed the distance between its front and its rear. Maj. Gen. Blount explains that all the convoys “will be armed and protected.”

The coming battle will be significantly different from Desert Storm not just in its ends but in its means as well. If the air war in Desert Storm continued for 30 days before the introduction of ground troops, the coming war will introduce ground forces at an early stage. As one high level source explains, “It will be a matter of hours or at most a couple of days between the beginning of the air campaign and the ground campaign.”

At the battalion level the men can be packed and ready to go within four hours. By Tuesday the camp was already being broken in preparation for the advance northwards. The actual movement to the edge of the border is set for Wednesday morning and the breach is presumably to begin early Thursday morning – at the end of President George W. Bush’s 48-hour deadline.

The troops are infused with a sense of the justice of their cause. Fire support officer Capt. Jason Happe from West Virginia found a chapter from the Bible that expresses their feelings and the purpose of their mission best for himself and his men. He read from the Book of Joel, chapter 2, to his troops as the move toward battle became palpable:

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy hill. Let all who live in the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming. It is close at hand.

A day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness. Like dawn spreading across the mountains, a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come.

Before them fire devours, behind them a flame blazes. Before them the land is like the garden of Eden, behind them a desert waste – nothing escapes them....

The Lord thunders at the head of his army; his forces are beyond number, and mighty are those who obey his command. The day of the Lord is great; it is dreadful. Who can endure it?

– March 21, 2003

ODYSSEY OF AN ISRAELI JOURNALIST

Southern Iraq – I do not recall ever considering the country of Kuwait or the Kuwaiti people for that matter with any particular emotion. To the best of my knowledge, Kuwaiti forces never participated in the Arab world’s wars against Israel, nor have the Kuwaitis overtly funded terrorism against us like the Saudis and the Iraqis.

If I had any feeling at all it came from the American in me. As an American I felt satisfied that after the US-led forces liberated Kuwait twelve years ago, the Kuwaitis retained the awareness of their vulnerability and have therefore permitted, and even welcomed, the US to base their forces in this country.

I never felt any strong emotion towards Kuwait or towards the Kuwaiti people until I arrived in the country on Sunday, March 9, only to be greeted by blistering, virulent hatred accompanied by a reign of quiet, relentless discrimination. From the moment I arrived, the Kuwaiti government sought to silence me as a writer, a journalist and an Israeli even as I was traveling as a US citizen on a valid visa.

A few hours before I was set to depart for Kuwait on a flight from Washington, DC, I began to realize that I would be in for a rough ride. I read on the internet that the Kuwaitis issued a statement telling the international press corps in Kuwait that anyone transmitting reports to the Israeli media would face criminal prosecution.

I began to panic. I was about to board a flight to Kuwait where my primary objective would be to transmit reports of the war to the Israeli media.

In a telephone conversation a half an hour later with F. David Radler, the co-owner of Hollinger Corp., which owns the Jerusalem Post, Radler assured me that the company would back me. At any rate, Radler explained, I would be covering the war for the Chicago Sun-Times, a sister paper to the Post also owned by Hollinger.

Most importantly, Radler pointed out that I didn’t need to go if I didn’t want to. Hearing that made me think about why I was going in the first place. Two images entered my mind – Israeli children in gas masks and an image of the Kuwaiti bureaucrat who wrote that directive.

I was going.

On the face of it, the Kuwaitis could have easily passed over my name and not bothered with me. I am an American citizen. I applied for my Kuwaiti visa with a letter of accreditation from the Chicago Sun-Times. For the Kuwaitis to go after me they would have to really want to.

On Monday, after the cab ride from the Crowne Plaza where I was staying by the airport, to the Kuwait Hilton on the seacoast, I realized just how determined the Kuwaitis were.

The drive from hotel to hotel lasted 25 minutes during which the taxi traversed Kuwait City. The most remarkable aspect of Kuwait City is the absence of Kuwaitis. They leave the work of running their kingdom to foreigners – Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis, Egyptians and Bangladeshis mainly. You can’t find any Palestinians in Kuwait anymore. All 250,000 of them were deported in 1991 after the coalition forces liberated Kuwait.

Kuwait City looks like a run-down version of Afula or Beersheba with one primary difference. There is nothing going on. No one is going anywhere or doing anything in Kuwait City. Whereas Israeli cities teem with life and energy, Kuwait City is lethargic, bereft of human vitality.

The opulence of the beachfront suburb was an indication that Kuwaitis actually live there. But its wealth made it no more appealing than the dead cityscape. At first glance, the villas recalled Herzliya Pituah, but upon closer examination, they lack character. The palaces stand like algae in a motionless pool.

My cab ride to the Hilton showed me that the Kuwaitis care little about cultivating their own country. My experience after arriving at the Hilton showed me that the Kuwaitis care very much about hating Israel.

The US Army’s public affairs officers were told by the Kuwaitis ahead of my arrival that they would not accredit me to work in the country. The State Department’s agreement with Kuwait stipulates that the US Army will not accredit journalists not already accredited by the Kuwaitis. For the rest of the international press corps, Kuwaiti accreditation was a formality. The information office had a table right across from the army’s public affairs counter. But for me, it was an insurmountable hurdle. And non-accreditation meant that I was stuck, prevented from doing my job.

I phoned Bret Stephens, the Post’s editor in chief, and apprised him of the situation. He in turn spoke with a number of key Pentagon officials. Radler, true to his word, worked together with Chicago Sun-Times editor Michael Cooke calling US congressmen and senators.

For their part, the Kuwaitis were moving as well, but so was I. In the late afternoon hours I sat down at a table in the Hilton lobby waiting to phone a helpful foreign service officer at the US embassy named Jim Moran. A stranger sat down at my table and said, “You’re Caroline Glick from the Chicago Jerusalem Post Sun-Times.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Yigal, Hungarian from Peruvian television.”

So I met Yigal Zur from Channel 10 – another hounded Israeli reporter hiding behind foreign press credentials. Yigal introduced me to an army officer who had been helping him. The officer told me to pack my bags and move out of my hotel room immediately. “If you stay there on your own the Kuwaitis can escort you to the airport, no problem,” he said. “And I know that is what they want to do.”

What followed was like a movie scene. Yigal and I got into a cab and drove to my hotel. He waited in the cab while I ran up and packed my gear and checked out. We then returned to the Hilton and paid in cash for a room under his name so no one would know where to find me.

In the meantime, I received a call from Jim Moran at the US embassy. The State Department had worked out a compromise. The Kuwaitis would accredit me if I signed a paper promising not to report for any Israeli media outlet while in Kuwait. I thought immediately of the negative implications. I would sign away my freedom of expression. This made me extremely angry. For the first time in my life I began to see what it is like to live in a society without basic freedoms.

I called Bret in Jerusalem and asked for his thoughts. He saw the positive implications.

“Caroline, you’ll be in Iraq soon with the greatest offensive force ever amassed. Covering that war and that force is why you are there. Sign the statement.”

The next morning, before they gave me the statement, a Kuwaiti official (born and raised in Virginia) began interrogating me. He wanted me to agree not to write for the Israeli media not only in Kuwait, but in Iraq as well.

I couldn’t believe his nerve. I replied politely that I could only discuss with the Kuwaiti government my plans while in Kuwait and that a decision where to place my articles was made by my company, not by me.

After signing the statement, I was immediately loaded on a bus with other journalists. Yigal from Peruvian television spent the next two nights in a room registered under my name waiting to go himself. I was sent to the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s first combat brigade.

I looked at the other journalists on my bus and wondered about them. Would they be angry if they knew what I had to go through in order to join them on this bus? Did they care when they saw that the Kuwaitis had put a notice on the bulletin board of the Hilton’s media center prohibiting all news organizations from publishing their reports in the Israeli media? Would it bother them if they knew that I had just spent the last night in hiding?

Not knowing the answers to any of these questions, I kept my own counsel on the bus, introducing myself as a Sun-Times reporter only.

For me, the main lesson from this odyssey is that to refer to the Middle East conflict as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to ignore the truth.

The truth is that at its root the conflict is about the Arab world’s obsession with rejecting Israel. Kuwait hates the Palestinians. The Kuwaitis kicked the Palestinians out of their country.

The way I was treated had nothing to do with Beit El or Netzarim. It has to do with Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and the Bible.

As I joined the 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion on Tuesday night, I realized that it was the first time I had felt safe in 48 hours.

On Sunday afternoon, as I felt my body melting in the oppressive desert heat and its odor – borne of five days in the heat and dust and wind without a shower – wafted into my nostrils and shocked me, I understood how I would know when peace has come.

Peace will be upon us when I can feel as safe and welcome at a five-star Kuwaiti hotel as I felt in the Kuwaiti desert with the US Army.

– March 21, 2003

WHY THEY FIGHT

NAJAF Ammunition Storage Facility – The winds and the sands of the Iraqi desert began swirling at around noon Tuesday but it didn’t seem so bad. Two hours later, the storm was still passable as we set out for the suspected chemical weapons storage facility and the largest weapons storage facility in Najaf, Iraq, to meet the army weapons inspection team that arrived in the morning to survey the site that was taken by Bravo Mechanized Infantry Company on Sunday without a fight.

By the time we arrived, navigation was reduced to following the arrows on a global positioning station. Our driver, Specialist Bobby Roberts, whose vision puts eagles to shame, could see no further than the hood of the jeep.

Ten minutes after we arrived, the sky turned an eerie orange. It was not day, it was not night. It was an earthly light that soon turned red before the sun disappeared completely and the darkness that descended upon the swirling sand was as otherworldly as the light that preceded it.

There by flashlight, Bravo mech’s infantry men surveyed the surroundings. Standing amidst row after row of AK47s, RPGS and bayonets, company executive officer Lt. Colin Hoyseth explained that the 70 Iraqi officers and soldiers who surrendered without a fight on Sunday “were not expecting to see us here so quickly and not expecting us to come from the south like we did. All their guns were pointing towards the east.”

Looking over the officers’ quarters Wednesday morning at first light and after the storm had somewhat abated, Sgt. Kettrel Baylor noted, “They had all their stuff still organized here in their rooms. They clearly weren’t expecting any company.”

It was a strange sensation standing in the personal quarters of an Iraqi colonel. On the one hand he was living the high life – especially when compared with the US troops’ current harsh living conditions. His quarters were equipped with a living room, a refrigerator, stove, private bath and toilet, and a television set. He had a stack of fresh clean uniforms and boots and a large personal stash of tobacco.

On the other hand he had no computer. All of the records were kept in notebooks – some bizarrely covered in Mickey Mouse wrapping paper – and filed in cabinets.

The colonel had ledgers of troops and equipment but no computerized or even typewritten documents. On his desk he had glued a picture of himself with his hero, Saddam Hussein, standing outside his office.

The officers’ quarters were far past a mess. Between the duststorm and the US troops’ clearing operation to defend against booby traps, the rooms abandoned only three days earlier look as though they hadn’t been touched for forty years.

The soldiers of Bravo mech company were the ones who accepted the Iraqi troops’ surrender on Sunday.

“All of these EPWS (enemy prisoners of war) tell us how much they love the US and hate Saddam,” says Pt. David Faulkner of Virginia, a 19year-old infantryman from one of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle crews.

But then we go through their stuff and see Saddam’s picture glued onto all of their notebooks. In one of the rooms we searched, for instance, this guy had carefully cut Saddam’s picture out of a newspaper and taped it into his notebook and then drew all these curlicues around it in red marker. Why would they do that if they hated him? Obviously, they are lying to us.

I spoke with Faulkner and his crewmates outside their Bradley as they fed six wild puppies Beef Teriyaki and Salsa Chicken from their combat rations on Wednesday morning.

The crew with Faulkner included David Youngston, 20, from South Carolina; Jason Shawn, 18, from Houston, Texas; Doug Glazer, 24, from Brooklyn, New York; Rickey Lewis, 23, and Ryan Bigley, 20, both from Virginia.

To describe the looks of these young men is to describe the faces of all young soldiers. They are beautiful even when the grime of the desert makes their faces black with dust. They are sweet even as they speak of war and killing. They are strong and tough...and innocent. They are young men who have chosen to be warriors and guardians of their countrymen.

US ground forces entered Iraq last Friday morning. After a brief stop some 2 km (about one and a quarter miles) inside the border, the entire 1st Brigade of the Army 3rd Infantry Division made a night journey through the desert. The 100 km (62 mile) drive, in diamond formation, was illuminated by the bright lights of the thousands of vehicles of war. The feeling was one of pure power. In all directions all one could see was this immense war machine, traveling unopposed through enemy territory, like a cavalry charge of old. Saturday afternoon the sensation of invincibility was reinforced as the forces met for the first time with civilian population lining the highway along the banks of the Euphrates, smiling and waving.

Just an hour later these civilians turn to combatants as they set an ambush for the same forces they were previously cheering.

Youngson: That first battle really reminded me of Somalia. There our troops went to help those people. We were on a peace-keeping mission. First they smiled and cheered us and then they started to kill our soldiers and drag them through the streets. It was like the Israelis in Lebanon.

Glazer: I think that the initial drive through the desert was like giving a big middle finger to the enemy. But we can’t be cocky. They may hate Saddam, although they probably don’t, but I assume that 90 percent of them hate us just as much. I don’t trust any of these people. It is clear to me that they do what we tell them to do because we are pointing our guns at them. Many of the soldiers have been troubled by the cries of the EPWS and their families. One officer commented to me on Monday, “We want them to like us.” That’s the American way. We’re good people. The problem is that probably everything they tell us about how they feel about us is a lie and we have to get used to it.

Faulkner: Some of the Iraqis came to look for their families in the EPWS camp; a few begged to be allowed in and said they would be killed by the Iraqi army if they went back to An Najaf. They kept asking us to take them to America. It was hard to take until we saw all the pictures of Saddam in these guys’ barracks. These men have been brainwashed to love that man and hate America for the past 12 years.

Glazer: I don’t allow emotions to play a role in my actions as a soldier. I make a separation. There is home and there is here. No matter what you do for these people they are going to hate us because they are jealous of what we have. These people haven’t made a decent contribution to humanity for over a thousand years. They hate us for our accomplishments.

Shawn: If you’re soft on the EPWS you’ll be killed or your buddy will be killed. I am here to fight a war. I am not here to make friends.

Glazer: And for all that look at how we treat our prisoners and look at how they treat us. We feed them our food, give them our water and let them sleep on our cots. Then they execute us and drag our bodies through the streets of Baghdad. How can anyone doubt who the good guys are in this war or who needs to win?

Bigley: The Iraqis are trying to mess with our minds and hurt our families.

Glazer: We will stop this soon enough. We just have to crush, to totally destroy his armies. Nothing can be retained.

Shawn: The EPWS we got who tell us they hate Saddam would no doubt be partying if the tables were turned. They’d be killing us.

CBG: The picture you guys paint doesn’t lend itself to an easy or quick solution to this war. You really need to believe in what you’re doing to persevere in the midst of the Iraqi hatred you described. Why do you think you are here fighting?

Youngson: A lot of people think this is a religious war but I’m a Christian and I don’t believe that. The US Army has soldiers from all religions fighting side by side. It isn’t a religious issue. We’re fighting here for the safety of our families back home. Who knows if we weren’t here that our children or our brothers wouldn’t get blown up on a public bus or a school field trip like they are in Israel? They are using terror and guerrilla tactics against us here. If we let this fester they’ll do the same thing to us back home. So I’m here to protect myself and my family back home.

Shawn: It’s our job. We chose to do it. But if we don’t put a stop to Saddam and bin Laden, they will keep bombing our buildings. The more of these people we put away, the less terror there will be.

Lewis: I’m here to make the future terror-free for my baby daughter.

Faulkner: I am here to do this job so that I can go home.

Glazer: I’m here to start and finish a job that should have been done 12 years ago and make sure that incidents like September 11 never happen again.

Shawn: That’s true for me too and also to make sure that my sons won’t have to come back here in ten years.

Glazer: I think we need to be here doing what we’re doing for another reason, too. We have to show that you can’t just bomb the US and get away with it. These guys are lucky we didn’t come here a year ago, when we should have been here after they cheered the attacks on our cities. September 11 was worse than the Pearl Harbor attack.

CBG: Have you thought about the possibility that the US could lose this war?

Bigley: The US cannot lose this war. We will win this war. If worse comes to worst and we sustain mass casualties, we’ll still do whatever it takes to win. The US can’t lose. We have too much at stake and too much pride to ever accept defeat.

I asked the men what they think of the anti-war protesters.

Shawn: I expected it. Anytime there is a war you get those people out there screaming because they are afraid.

Bigley: These people refuse to understand what would happen if we let Saddam stay out on the loose. And the thing is that it is our families who are most afraid, who sacrifice the most and they understand why we are here.

Faulkner: I think that if they could see what we see, the nasty, underhanded way this enemy fights us, then they would think differently about this war. I think the reports on the way they are treating our POWS can make it clear to a lot of protesters that this is an evil that must be defeated. I can’t imagine that they could see what is happening to our guys and still believe that this isn’t a necessary fight.

CBG: What do you guys think about the French and Russians opposing the US decision to go to war?

Glazer: Who are the French? We don’t need the French. We fight for freedom and security. They only care about their money. What is really upsetting is that the US will probably end up paying the French and the Russians whatever the Iraqis owe them to buy their support for freedom.

Bigley: They don’t seem to understand about terrorism in France. They don’t seem to understand that terrorism must end. The Russians understand this and yet they are still selling these guys arms. That has to stop. The Russians have to start thinking about the consequences of their actions.

Glazer: Not that I care, but I assume that the UN will follow us eventually. The UN members are too scared to support us up front, but everyone will join the bandwagon once we win.

CBG: How long do you think this war will last?

Shawn: I think we’ll finish it fairly quickly but that we’ll be here for a while.

Bigley: The US can’t leave the public eye in Iraq, otherwise another Saddam will take power a few weeks after we leave. These people don’t understand what freedom is. They need to understand freedom before they can begin to expect or demand it.

Youngson: It will be really hard though. I heard on the radio about all the different religious groups here. I know that whoever doesn’t end up leading here will rebel against whoever is in charge. They did that to the Turks and they will do it again. It will be very hard.

– March 28, 2003

“WE’RE GOING TO DESTROY THESE BASTARDS”

About 30 minutes after a suicide bomber killed four soldiers from the 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion, Operations Officer Maj. Rod Coffey stood before the maps lying on the table of the battalion operation tent absentmindedly but violently smashing his plastic water bottle on the table.

Coffey managed the front-rear coordination of the operation to secure the checkpoint on Highway 9 that had just been attacked and to retrieve the soldiers’ bodies. During each radio contact with the units concerned – ambulances, logistics, company commanders – Coffey would speak quietly and calmly while violently smashing the bottle on the table again and again.

This continued for ten minutes, when, at a particularly harsh smash, the bottle flew to the sandy floor with a boom. A sergeant quietly picked it up and handed it back to Coffey. Coffey took the bottle, and, realizing what had happened, gave an embarrassed glance at the soldiers and said, firmly, “We’re going to destroy these bastards.”

With that he took a sip of water, put the bottle aside, and went on managing the operation.

The scene at Saturday’s suicide bombing was almost identical to scenes of suicide bombings with which Israelis are so tragically familiar. The response of the US forces on the ground in Iraq was decidedly different.

These men are not civilians, they are soldiers engaged in a great war, and this fact was not lost on them even for a moment.

While in Israel a terror attack’s news cycle does not end until after the last of the victims is laid to rest, the battalion officers and soldiers did not interrupt their battle-planning activities even for an instant.

The battalion chaplain held a small memorial service on Sunday for the men. Soldiers and officers bowed their heads and cried for 15 minutes, and returned to their posts.

In the first ten days of the US war in Iraq it became clear that during this war, the military will sustain more combat losses than it has in any confrontation since Vietnam. Reports filtering into the field from Washington and Centcom paint a picture for the troops of politicians and generals at a loss to explain how it came to pass that American blood has been spilled again in a foreign land.

For the officers and troops in the field, the losses they have personally incurred over the past week did not catch them by surprise.

Tuesday morning, as they made their final preparations for the much-awaited push north to Baghdad, I spoke with a number of soldiers and officers in 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Combat Brigade about the losses they have absorbed – six dead over the past week.

The battalion’s air force liaison officer, M.Sgt. J.B. Bruening, compares the current situation with that in the 1991 Gulf War, in which he also fought.

The big difference between the two wars is that in the last one the Iraqis all surrendered. The mission is completely different this time. Then we fought to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqis; now we’re liberating Iraq from the Iraqis.

Anyone who thought they’d just stand down was deluding himself. I am not surprised by the Iraqi resistance.

Reflecting on the public scrutiny of the losses, Maj. Coffey says,

I never assumed we would come back home with everyone, although I never highlighted this in conversation. By placing such great emphasis on the suicide bombing they are playing into the enemy’s hand.

You let terror succeed when you focus on it. This is no time for anyone to lose their nerve.

Coffey is an intellectual. In addition to his duties as operations officer, he fills the role of battalion military historian. The blue-eyed, sandy-haired, square-jawed Rhode Islander is always on hand with a historical analogy or precedent.

On the question of the reaction to casualties, the 41-year-old Coffey sees a generational divide between the young officers and soldiers in the field and their older generals in command positions in the rear and in Washington.

The generals remember not being supported in Vietnam. That is a generational memory. We grew up in the post-Cold War era, with a huge awareness of the terrorist threat starting with the Iranian takeover of the US embassy in Teheran in 1979.

We understand terrorism, we were brought up with it, so this sort of suicide attack is not a surprise to us.

In short, he says, “Our response is, ‘OK, there was a car bombing, let’s drive on.’ To focus on it is to let Saddam succeed. We won’t let him succeed.”

Battalion commander Lt. Scott Rutter echoes these sentiments and adds another layer to their thinking:

The guys who died make it clear to the soldiers that they are fighting for each other. The soldiers now realize that death happens. This makes them even stronger in their fight for each other because our survival instinct is stronger.

S.L.A. Marshall, a journalist who covered US troops in World War II, discussed this issue in his book Men under Fire and concluded that more than mom, apple pie, or country, soldiers fight for one another.

Speaking of the politicians back in Washington, Rutter considers,

I guess they didn’t realize that we would be confronted by the combination of regular enemy forces and civilians with bombs. Obviously in this situation defining what constitutes a threat is difficult.

As for the generation gap, 40-year-old Rutter says that the older officers and politicians need to respect the soldiers’ willingness to serve.

They [the generals and politicians] are very sensitive to losses. Our generation is making sacrifices for our country and our way of life. These men all volunteered to serve. If we weren’t ready, we wouldn’t be here.

Alpha Company Commander Capt. Rob Smith commanded five of the six soldiers who died this past week. His first man fell when the Bradley fighting vehicle he was riding in plummeted 10 meters into a ditch last Thursday night. The other four were killed by the car bomb at the checkpoint on Highway 9.

Smith, at 34, is the only company commander in the battalion who also served as an enlisted infantryman. He served as a soldier for six years before going to college and becoming an officer. Smith’s colleagues speak of the stocky, apple-cheeked, brown-eyed officer with deep respect.

Alpha Company is a pure infantry company. For the war it traded a Bradley platoon for an Abrams tank platoon with another company. The four soldiers killed on Saturday were members of that platoon.

Alpha Company always moves first. The rest of the battalion follows. To this degree it is not surprising that Alpha would also be the first to suffer casualties.

Smith believes that as a commander, he fills the role of parent for his soldiers.

I realize that I have the highest responsibility for the lives of 156 sons of other parents. I take care of my guys as I would take care of my daughter. It’s that simple. That is how I stay focused.

The parents are upset by the fatalities. The American people are upset. All that I can do is give these people the peace of mind that at least the Alpha Company commander is doing his best.

When I find myself tired, hungry, and scared, I think what I would do if my daughter were under attack. This focuses the mind.

For Smith, the lives of his men who were killed this week are part of a long history of selfless sacrifice for the United States.

Being a soldier means not thinking about yourself. It is being a civil servant. Our forefathers risked execution when they rose against the British. Someone has to sacrifice for our freedom.

I think of all the late nights I’ve worked, missing dinner with my wife and daughter. I missed my daughter’s first Christmas. Hopefully, she’ll understand that America doesn’t exist because of selfishness, but because of individuals who made sacrifices for the greater good.

– April 4, 2003

COMBAT DIARY

I just finished my first “Ranger pudding.” Sitting in the back of the Bradley fighting vehicle, I followed the recipe instructions I received a few days ago from one of the guys in the battalion: “You take the cocoa powder pouch in the MREs [combat rations], add a pouch of instant coffee, fill the cocoa pouch with water, and stir.”

It was wonderful. I needed that coffee powder after spending the night stretched out on the cold metal ramp of the Bradley, freezing in a borrowed rain poncho. And this after sweating through 18 hours of continuous combat in the back of the battalion commander’s sweltering dusty Bradley.

A couple of hours ago, I saw my first dead body close up. I was eating my breakfast when one of the guys pointed him out to me. I swallowed my cheese and crackers and walked over to see. First Sgt. Benjamin Moore from Alpha Company shot him last night. It only later occurred to me to ask when exactly he engaged him. As I was looking at the already stiff, bloody corpse of the Republican Guard officer, it didn’t register that he was only 20 meters from the Bradley I had slept outside of.

Moore explained:

I saw him crouching here next to the palm trees. I saw his blue clothes – these sweat suits they wear under their uniforms and then when they see us coming, they hide their uniforms so we will think they are civilians. I saw him move to get something so I shot him.

Sounded good to me as I looked at the Republican Guard’s Medina Division’s outpost hidden among the date palms and the mucky marshland. This was a command post for the 14th Brigade. The 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion I am watching fight this war destroyed a bunker facility some 100 meters away from here Wednesday afternoon.

I returned to my breakfast, which was still waiting for me on the ramp of the vehicle – as was Sgt. Jason Trombley, the battalion commander’s gunner, who killed five Iraqi soldiers yesterday with a Bradley 25 mm main gun.

“I’m just doing my job,” he said to me. I know what he meant. I myself didn’t think there was anything strange when I called in a report to Israel’s Channel 2 while we were being shot at by RPGs and artillery shells.

Jason’s job is to kill the enemy. My job is to report on his progress.

The folks at the station seemed most interested in the weather. This seemed normal to me because the remarkable thing about the battle from where I was sitting was how hot and sticky and dusty I was.

War is a very strange thing. I know that I am being fired on. I know that my life is in at least a modicum of danger as RPG rounds and artillery shells bounce off the Bradley, but I don’t think of these things. I just trust the people around me. At the same time, even though I have never approached the level of filth and exhaustion I have reached here, I have never felt more alive or more myself.

I am the only woman in the battalion. Last night as I got ready to go to sleep on the ramp of the Bradley, three guys came by wanting to make sure that I was warm enough. Just as I was starting to fall asleep, someone looking for something groped at my leg. I pushed him away and said, “Go away” in Hebrew. He recoiled with a gasp and disappeared into the darkness.

When I realized what had happened, I couldn’t stop smiling. No one wants to hurt me or take advantage of me because I am a woman. They want to protect me.

I finished my breakfast after I saw the dead Iraqi officer. Jason Trombley and Benjamin Moore who killed yesterday teased me last night as I tried to pound out my story of what they had just done, just as they always tease me about being a woman, about being a writer, about being tiny and skinny, and I laughed and told them to leave me alone so I could write about them.

There were several donkeys lining the road by Mussaib yesterday during the battle. A white Arabian stallion raced after us for a while. This morning, the battalion commander laughed, saying he would have liked to bring it back home to Fort Stewart, Georgia.

I mentioned that the Palestinians have loaded bombs on donkey carts several times over the years and that several Israelis have been murdered by this tactic. He stopped laughing.

As the resident Israeli with the troops, I have taken on the role of terrorism adviser. It comes with the territory, I suppose. These men have deep respect for the IDF. When they discuss moving into built-up areas with large civilian populations, they tell me, “The Israelis are really good at that. You’ve done some incredible work over the years.”

When they discuss fighting against an army of terrorists, they bring up Israel’s experience and express amazement at our army’s successes and our people’s resilience.

The officers and men could not hide their disgust and fury when they heard the Palestinians named a public square after the Iraqi who killed four soldiers from this battalion in last Saturday’s car bombing. The general response was summed up most succinctly by Specialist Jennings Roberts from West Virginia:

Well, maybe when we’re done here, we’ll just have to go home by way of the West Bank. You Israelis should take care of that for us.

Company commander Capt. Rob Smith, from Cleveland, Ohio, normally a study in self-control, could barely contain his rage when he heard how his men’s killer was being honored. After pausing for a moment, he said, “They can put up all the monuments they like. We’ll have the best monument soon enough – Baghdad.”

Living with this battalion, I feel a pride in America that I have never felt before, even though America often makes me proud. But this is different. These men are all willing to fight and risk death to protect their freedom. In this and in the fact that these men from such different backgrounds, races and religions come together as one to serve a common purpose, they are living proof that America is upholding the promise of its founding.

And yet, remarkably, being here with them, I have never felt more Israeli or more attached to the Land of Israel. Perhaps this attachment has always existed, but it is only now that I have come to realize it. I never understood what it means to miss Zion until I came to Babylon. I carry the Land of Israel with me wherever I go. I see an Iraqi date palm along the Euphrates and I think of Tel Aviv and the Yarkon. I see a shrub in the desert and try to remember if I saw the same type in the Negev. I walk through the marshlands and imagine the shade of eucalyptus trees in the Hula Valley. I smell the earth and I miss the Galilee.

But what is most striking is the light. The sunlight on the sand causes an almost physical longing for Jerusalem. I look at the light and think about how the Jerusalem stones change colors throughout the day as the earth and the city revolve around the sun. The sand, the light, and the sky all remind me of Jerusalem.

I do not know what made me decide to come here. When the opportunity arose, I said yes without a second thought. But I do know what I am getting out of this experience. I have found my America. And I have discovered that I can never leave Israel. It sits inside of me, strengthens me, and comforts me to the center of my soul.

– April 4, 2003

THE BATTLE FOR BAGHDAD

Highway 8, South Baghdad – At nightfall Monday US forces had taken over footholds in large swaths of Baghdad.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade was located at the center of the city. The 3rd Brigade was located in northwest Baghdad and the Marines were located in the city’s northeast. The 1st Brigade was still securing the airport, with the exception of the 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion, which was located in southern Baghdad along Highway 8.

The 2-7 Battalion’s soldiers and commanders started the day thinking they would be able to relax and use the shower facilities in Saddam International Airport while awaiting their mission set for Tuesday – the storming of the presidential palace north of the airport.

But shortly past 10 a.m. the order came from division: the 2-7 Battalion would link up with the 2nd Brigade, whose forces had reentered Baghdad early in the morning with the aim not simply of driving through, as they had done on Saturday, but of seizing territory.

“Finally!” shouted the battalion’s operations officer, Maj. Rod Coffey. “They figured out that we don’t need four battalions to defend an already largely secured airport,” he added with no small amount of irony in his voice.

The atmosphere throughout the battalion was one of excited anticipation.

Vehicles drove hurriedly to fuel tankers as soldiers folded up the laundry they had done the night before. By 11 a.m. the entire battalion was lining up to move into travel formation. The mission was to travel up Highway 1, then turn onto Highway 8, to hook up with the 2nd Brigade’s 3-15 Battalion in its blocking position along the highway inside southern Baghdad’s industrial zone, less than a kilometer from downtown Baghdad.

Coffey left the airport before the rest of the battalion to coordinate the handoff with 3-15. The battalion led by Alpha Company commander Capt. Rob Smith moved out first, heading toward Baghdad at 11:15.

“Get out of our way, we’re going to Baghdad!” bellowed Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Scott Rutter at tanks and other vehicles blocking his forces’ move out of the airport. Shortly after moving onto Highway 1, reports came over the radio indicating it would not be an easy day.

As the battalion zipped past farmlands and buildings, loosely hidden by eucalyptus trees, reports streamed in of a battle against 2nd Brigade battalions that were moving through Baghdad to the north and east. By noon those forces had engaged and destroyed eight suicide trucks, scores of dismounted infantry, armored personnel carriers and tanks.

As information flowed in through the radio, outside visibility deteriorated as the sky turned white and a sandstorm seemed poised to blow through the city.

The unit’s mission was to secure lines of communication for the 2nd Brigade, to enable transport of troops and supplies. By 12:30 p.m. the battalion was speeding along Highway 1 toward Highway 8 in full attack formation. The remains of white pickup trucks – the Iraqi version of Japanese kamikaze planes – littered both sides of the road, blown up by 120 mm Abrams tank rounds. Then, too, the bodies of enemy infantrymen bloodied the sides of the road.

“Our mission is to secure the lines of communication by killing the enemy,” Rutter exhorted his troops. “Bad guys on our left, bad guys on our right. Any threat will be engaged immediately and destroyed!” he said.

At 12:50 p.m. the force moved off the road to bypass a minefield. Moments later the news came over the radio that there were three killed, two reporters and one soldier, in an attack on the 2nd Brigade’s Headquarters Battalion. It later emerged that the journalists and the soldier were killed by a missile.

At 1:10 p.m. the battalion reached the industrial zone in southern Baghdad.

Smith reported an ambush against his company. No one was hurt. The forces destroyed an APC.

Immediately thereafter a truck bomber attempted to attack Rutter’s Bradley. Gunner Jason Trombley destroyed the truck by firing an armor-piercing 25 mm round. From then on, the fire on the forces was continuous.

As the horizon narrowed under the weight of the swirling sands and black smoke, the Iraqi date palms lining the highway gave the scene of burning suicide trucks, nearby tanks, and Bradleys a surrealistic edge. Alpha Company reported engaging three suicide trucks and RPG rounds. All were promptly destroyed.

Moments later Coffey, who was already with the 2nd Brigade 3-15 Battalion, reported coming under heavy RPG fire. His driver then reported that Coffey was down – hit in the leg by a shrapnel blast from an RPG. Rutter called for medical evacuation as he and Alpha Company closed in on Coffey’s location.

The shooting against the forces was emanating from an eight-story apartment building just north of an overpass where the 3-15 had been located. Sniper fire and RPG rounds were also being launched from a three-story industrial complex bedecked with a portrait of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein clad in a keffiyeh, west of the underpass.

Just after Coffey and two radio operators were wounded, the 2nd Brigade reported that the enemy forces firing by the overpass were not Iraqis at all but Palestinians and Jordanians. “They executed an integrated attack,” said 2nd Brigade’s operations officer over the radio. “They utilized snipers and accurate artillery as well as suicide bombers and RPGS.”

The information on the identity of the forces was gleaned from prisoners of war caught during the fighting. It was reported later that the defense of Baghdad is largely being carried out by some 5,000 Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian troops. The Republican Guard’s units were already largely eroded, the Hammurabi unit as well as others down to 25 percent of their original numbers.

Coffey returned to his radio and continued to assist in directing combat operations, recommending the eight-story building from where he was shot be destroyed from the air.

As his gunner killed two enemy soldiers running toward his Bradley, Rutter told Coffey to move to the rear to be examined by a medic. In the meantime, airstrikes were called to destroy the apartment building. At the same time 2nd Brigade reported two soldiers killed by a suicide ambush. Later in the afternoon it was revealed that Iraqis surrendering to US forces had detonated explosive belts strapped to their bodies as the Americans approached them.

A directive went out in the evening to force all surrendering Iraqis to undress before approaching US forces to prevent a recurrence of such incidents.

For their part, the Iraqis were reporting US bombing of the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad. Attempting to understand the report, which had no basis in reality, 2nd Brigade forces assumed the Iraqis were attacking the hotel with RPG rounds in the hopes US forces would be blamed for attacking the home of the foreign press corps in Baghdad.

US forces were uncertain Monday of the status of the Iraqi government. It was unclear to commanders if there was in fact any government, as most of the fighting was being conducted by foreign and paramilitary forces. The option of capturing the Iraqi propaganda minister and accepting a surrender from him was being weighed.

In the meantime, Coffey, having been checked by medics, had limped back to the battlefield by 4 p.m.

While he was gone the apartment building had been reduced to rubble by a direct hit from an F-16 with a JDAM bomb. The building had been hit on the west side with high explosive rounds and was smoldering.

Enemy forces killed a US combat engineer, and were run over by an Abrams tank and killed.

As the battalion assumed position along Highway 8 at nightfall, the assessment was that the major threats for the night and the next day were suicide bombers, RPGS, and dismounted infantry men. Paramilitary forces gathered Monday night at the University of Baghdad along the Tigris River and threatened to attack US forces in the central and northern section of the Iraqi capital.

“If you see something move that isn’t ours, kill it,” Rutter instructed his troops after ordering Coffey to go to sleep.

– April 8, 2003

AMERICA’S GIFT FOR PASSOVER

After three weeks of intense fighting, the American military offensive against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq more or less ended last Saturday.

The military operation can be compared to smashing down pieces on a chess board by a violent hand and rearranging them according to a new guiding logic. The manner in which the pieces of the Iraqi regime were smashed down and are now being rearranged will serve as a basis for the work of politicians and an inspiration for military planners for years to come.

I was privileged to bear witness to large swathes of the chess pieces falling down. The 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion from the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade whose forces I joined in the Kuwaiti desert five weeks ago fought its way across Iraq from east to west, south to north.

Its engagements began just west of al-Nasariya and continued through a-Samwa, an-Najaf, Karbala, al-Musaaib, Baghdad International Airport and into Baghdad itself. When I parted from the troops on Sunday evening, they were resting in western Baghdad at a luxurious villa outside a presidential palace.

The battalion’s resident military strategist is operations officer Maj. Rod Coffey. Coffey, a 41-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed former actor and student of the Catholic priesthood, is an avid follower of the work of retired IDF Brig. Gen. Shimon Naveh. He believes that what the US military accomplished in its offensive has shown that as Naveh argues, the German all-out combined arms operations from World War II is not necessarily the key to winning in modern warfare.

“What we did here on an operational level has never been done before,” Coffey explains.

We showed that if your objective is to destroy a regime, you do not have to engage at every location. We made very clear to the regular Iraqi army before we invaded that it was not our target. We also signaled very clearly to the Special Republican Guard that it was our target. We rightly assumed that the Iraqi people themselves would not fight for Saddam’s regime.

All of these actions and presumptions informed our military planning and operations. We did not get bogged down. We moved straight to our objective. Our messages were received by the proper Iraqis and they behaved accordingly.

Because the US forces had a clear military objective – ending Saddam’s regime – they did not allow themselves to be diverted by pockets of resistance.

“Brute force and ignorance” is how Lt. Col. Scott Rutter termed his battalion’s offenses to his troops. “Keep moving with brute force and ignorance. Kill the enemy and move on,” he yelled repeatedly into the battalion’s radio network.

Says 25-year-old Steve Gleason, scout platoon commander:

I think one of the most significant aspects of our operation is that we never stopped moving. The battalion commander said to keep moving and we did. We drove for 18 hours straight and pissed in bottles, stopping only to refuel. The enemy could never sway us from where we wanted to go.

On a larger scale, the focus, discipline and success of the US ground offensive in Iraq has sent a clear message to terror-supporting regimes throughout the region and the world. Coffey says:

What this operation has done is to tell every regime in the world, “if you support terrorism even tangentially, we will destroy you.” No doubt the regime in Iran, Syria and even Saudi Arabia are taking note of this.

They will think twice about supporting terrorism in the wake of this operation in a way they never did before.

As for terrorism, the result of the offensive shows just how dependent on terrorism Saddam’s regime had become. While the 2-7 Battalion was the only task force to directly engage Iraqi tanks in battle, the most prevalent fighting tactic of the Iraqi forces was indiscriminate RPG fire, small arms and truck-mounted anti-aircraft artillery guns – that is, terrorist warfare.

Interestingly, Baghdad itself was defended not by the Iraqi military, but by a smattering of special Republican Guard troops bolstered by Palestinian and Syrian irregular forces. It was these terrorist elements who fought hardest for their patron Saddam, thus giving lie to the accusation that the US operation in Iraq had nothing to do with its war against global terrorism.

An important lesson of the US offensive is that it is possible to deter the use of weapons of mass destruction if one’s offensive posture is sufficiently strong. The 2-7 Battalion acted as a buffer force on the western edge of the city of Karbala as the rest of the 3rd Infantry Division bypassed the city to the battalion’s west. At the Karbala gap, a flat of land only 8.5 km (5.3 miles) wide, the Iraqis could have broken the US offensive at least temporarily if they had used chemical weapons against the troops. Two hours before the advance began, 3rd Infantry Division soldiers donned their protective rubber boots on top of their protective chemical suits.

“I believe the Iraqis were deterred by our show of force. If some Lt. Muhammad was ordered to chem us, he probably decided not to bother after he saw our tanks and Bradleys plowing through,” says Gleason.

As it was, Iraqi resistance at the Karbala gap – where US forces were most vulnerable – was negligible.

No doubt the most important and most daring aspect of the US operation in Iraq is found in its name – Iraqi freedom. The attempt to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is the first time since the end of World War II that the US has set for itself the aim of forcing freedom on a people that has never been free.

Tonight, the Jewish people begin a week of celebrating our own emergence as the first people in human history forcibly freed from bondage. We know that had it not been for Moses we would have never left Egypt. In retelling the story of the Exodus, we learn that while freedom can be won by the sword it can only be maintained in the mind.

Watching thousands of civilians looting and plundering in the streets of Baghdad, it was clear to me that the Iraqi people already have the first inklings of what freedom can be. In raiding Saddam’s storehouses, they quite clearly were saying “no more” to his tyranny. In the days since, Iraqi civilians have actively sought out US forces to point out weapons caches and suspected chemical weapons depots.

At the same time, anti-US gunmen and terrorists proliferate. The sullen faces of young men with neatly cut hair in civilian clothes are seen next to the exuberant pillagers throughout the city. If these men, Saddam’s soldiers, are not separated from positions of influence they may convince the people to return to their lives as slaves.

For Israel, the American experiment of bringing freedom to Iraq is enormously significant. The core of Arab rejection of Israel is the absence of freedom in Arab lands. Israel must be hated, otherwise our success in making our desert bloom is proof that tyranny stands at the heart of Arab backwardness and defeat. A free Iraq may be a seed for change in the mind-set of the Arab world and hence the first seed of true peace for Israel.

On the eve of the Seder, as we celebrate our freedom from bondage, we must also celebrate the possibility that the same freedom may become the lot of our neighbor to the east spreading from Baghdad to Damascus, Teheran, Beirut and Cairo.

– April 16, 2003

AMERICA’S UNHERALDED VICTORY

Fort Stewart, Georgia – I arrived at Fort Stewart, the home of the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, early this week to meet with the soldiers and officers of the 2-7 Mechanized Infantry Battalion, 1st Brigade, who had recently returned home after completing their deployment in Iraq. It was with these men that I hitched a ride through Iraq as an embedded reporter during the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The 3rd Infantry was the main combat force in Iraq from the March 19 invasion through the fall of Baghdad on April 9. After the city’s fall, the 1st Brigade took control of neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city, where the bulk of the population lives.

1st Brigade Commander Col. William Grimsley explains:

We relieved the 87th Marine Regiment of their sectors east of the Tigris River. When we arrived, we felt like we had entered the Wild West. Buildings were burning, car-jackings and looting were rampant. We had Iraqi police officers wearing military uniforms armed with AK-47s who we assumed were Iraqi military forces. We held the zones until June 5. During those two months we oversaw the transformation of the area from a chaotic environment to an ordered city.

From the soldiers’ perspective, the main US failure in Iraq to date has little to do with the situation on the ground. The main failure is the inability to transmit the reality they experienced daily to the American people.

“Our biggest mistake was letting go of the embedded media,” says 2-7 executive officer Maj. Kevin Cooney. Maj. Rod Coffey elaborates:

After the embedded reporters left, the reports coming out had no context. The reporters didn’t understand the situation. They had no sense of what was actually going on and they didn’t seem to care. They acted like ambulance chasers moving from one attack against US soldiers to the next without giving any sense of the work that was being accomplished.

That work was vast. They opened schools; they paid civil service employees; they purchased school supplies; they hired contractors to fix and build sewage, electrical and water lines; they secured vital installations; and they cultivated ties with Iraqi citizens who were capable of providing services to the citizenry and information and intelligence to the US forces.

Much of this work was conducted in the blazing summer heat when the soldiers themselves were living in substandard conditions with sporadic electricity and water supplies. In the meantime, they conducted surprise sweeps and raids in search of arms, fugitives and terrorists.

How were they able to make the transition from fighters to administrators? According to the men, the main reason was the warm welcome they received from the Iraqi people.

“Everywhere we went we were surrounded by dozens of children smiling and waving at us,” says Specialist Jennings Roberts.

Old people came out of these hovels they lived in and gave us bread and invited us into their homes.

We knew that they were giving us what they had and we understood how much they appreciated that we had liberated them from Saddam.

Grimsley notes ruefully that after the embedded reporters left, the brigade had great difficulty persuading journalists to accompany his men on their missions to report on what they were doing. He says of the reporters:

They were all living in the Palestine Hotel and did not want to leave. We had to beg them to come out with us. And on a number of occasions when they did come, and we knew that they had written up what they had seen, we found that for whatever reason, their newspapers did not publish their stories.

The sense the men share of being welcome in Iraq by the majority of Iraqis is backed up by recent opinion polling data which show that the majority of Iraqis do not want the US forces to leave. Yet largely because of the slant of the news reports about Iraq, it is hard to grasp just how far the US has come in a country where tens of thousands took to the streets on September 12, 2001, to celebrate the bombings of New York and Washington.

The men are quick to admit that liberating Iraq physically was easier than shepherding its people towards democracy and fair governance. Grimsley says:

The Iraqis who worked under the regime are incapable of exerting authority. They survived under Saddam by carrying out instructions without question and they still refuse to make a decision without receiving permission from us. We realized this when they asked us for permission to open schools. We couldn’t understand why they needed our permission to do something that seemed obvious to us, but then it sunk in that what we were seeing was the result of the perversion of a society that lived under total repression for more than 30 years.

The mind-set will doubtlessly take years to change.

Even the capture or killing of Saddam will only solve part of the problem. The other problem is that the Bush administration is not sending a message of absolute resolve, while those forces who wish the US to fail are. By targeting GIs and supporters of the Iraqi Governing Council, these forces are working to create a perception of mayhem and chaos that flies in the face of the actual progress on the ground.

The Western media isn’t helping matters. In underreporting the successes the US has achieved while overreporting the difficulties, it creates irrational expectations among the American public that Iraq should be completely rehabilitated in a matter of months.

Equally unhelpful are the so-called multilateralists within the international community, who understand that American success in turning Iraq around bodes ill for the United Nations’ bid to establish itself as the ultimate arbiter of global affairs.

Then too, the administration perhaps did not fully comprehend the magnitude of the task it was undertaking when the decision was made to go to war. Not only would Iraq have to be de-Ba’athified in the way Germany was de-Nazified, this would have to be done while some of Iraq’s neighboring states remained under the control of totalitarian, American-baiting regimes intent on reversing the results of the war.

Yet in spite of the negative publicity, the international hostility, the meddling of neighbors and the work of saboteurs, US forces are quietly succeeding in their task. The men all noted that the day that Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed by US forces, the celebration on the streets of Baghdad put Independence Day fireworks to shame.

“And yet, when the 11 p.m. curfew came around, the carnivals abruptly ended and everyone went home,” Grimsley explains. “The Iraqis have a healthy respect for power judiciously applied.” In other words, Iraqis both applaud and respect the US for deposing their oppressors.

The soldiers paid no attention to the politics in Washington while they were in Iraq. They try to avoid watching the news now that they are home. But when they do see the reports, they are troubled by the distortion. Coffey notes:

The reporters that came to see us when we returned home ignored the tremendous pride we all feel in what we accomplished while we were over there.

Coffey himself was the subject of an odd front page photograph in the New York Times three weeks ago. The photo editor lopped off his head to show a picture of his son embracing a headless torso in uniform, weighed down with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Coffey’s son was crying. (“Probably because he had just gotten into a fight with his older brother. He wasn’t crying over me, I had already been home for a week.”) The decorated chest evoked no emotion from a reader.

In a way, this bizarre photograph tells the entire story of the campaign to prevent the US from winning. If the American public is deprived of a view of its heroes, who won a war and are winning the peace, they will, sooner or later, abandon the fight.

– October 2, 2003

A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS

The Jew is the emblem of eternity.... He who has been for so long the guardian of prophecy, and who transmitted it to the rest of the world – such a nation cannot be destroyed. The Jew is everlasting as is eternity itself.

– Leo Tolstoy

I would rather opt for living here in continual battle than for becoming part of the wandering Jewish people. Any compromise will simply hasten the end.

– Yoni Netanyahu

A LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS

On Remembrance Day for fallen Israeli soldiers this week, members of the reserve infantry company that lost 13 men last Tuesday were given a day’s furlough from combat to visit the families of their fallen comrades.

Outside the home of their dead company commander, Maj. Oded Golomb, they spoke to reporters of their friends’ heroism. Capt. Ya’acov Azulay, for instance, died after running into battle to save the soldiers who were struck down in the initial ambush. Azulay, a policeman in civilian life, was wearing his blue bulletproof vest from his day job on top of his olive drab uniform.

“At first we couldn’t figure out who the guy with the blue vest was. But he yelled out he was going to save them. Then 15 minutes later, we saw the blue vest again, as his body was evacuated on a stretcher,” one of his comrades said. “It’s really amazing,” said another. “All of us are just regular people in civilian life, family men who work for a living, but the heroism we saw there was just incredible, unthinking, running in under constant heavy fire to save our wounded. It was unbelievable.”

Where does this reserve of resilience and strength come from? Israel is, after all, fighting for its life in a war against terrorism that the world is hell-bent against allowing us to wage, let alone win. The answer is that Israelis today know the truth about ourselves and that truth, quite simply, is that Israel is a great nation.

A poll conducted by Market Watch for the Independence Day Ma’ariv provides a stunning picture of Israeli society in the midst of war. While 469 Israelis have been murdered and more than 3,000 wounded over the past 18 months, 73 percent of Israelis are hopeful about the future of the country. Even as 61 percent of Israelis fear for the existence of the state, 83 percent of Israelis prefer life here to life in any other country.

We see this patriotism in our army, where manpower officers are reporting a 130 percent mobilization rate of reservists – 100 percent of the reservists called up for service reported for duty along with thousands of volunteers.

And it is not simply a matter of duty; it’s a matter of decency. The reservists, who risk their lives to protect Palestinian civilians from the terrorists who exploit them as human shields, also treat them with humility.

In Tulkarm, a group of reservists that needed to break down the wall of a Palestinian home took up a collection among themselves when they finished fighting – NIS 1,500 in total – and gave it to the family to pay for the damage.

In Bethlehem, another group of reservists gave a Palestinian family NIS 2,000 they raised among themselves after seizing three rooms in their home for 48 hours. Reservists who seized homes in Bethlehem and Ramallah insisted on mopping the floors before departing. Hundreds of reservists have added candy to their regular gear. They hand out the chocolate bars to Palestinian children to try to ease their anxiety.

When last week a priest at the Church of the Nativity, held hostage by terrorists, emerged from the church to speak on his captors’ behalf to the IDF troops, he was greeted by a soldier who dug into his pockets and pulled out an apple and a bottle of mineral water which he offered to the beleaguered clergyman.

While having such men forming the backbone of the IDF is a source of pride, it becomes a wellspring of strength and endurance when placed in the context of the forces arrayed against us today. Perhaps again, the contrast was most starkly described by the same company of reservists that lost 13 men in 25 minutes of fighting in Jenin last week. One of the men described his shell shock:

We went to the kibbutz for our commander’s funeral late that evening, and I remember standing outside a house on the kibbutz and feeling frightened a sniper would start shooting at us from the window. We were just a half an hour from Jenin, and yet it is a completely different world. There, we were fired at from every window from every house. Here, a window is a window.

As Foreign Minister Shimon Peres described the scene in the Jenin refugee camp,

There wasn’t a house that wasn’t booby-trapped, and there was no way to neutralize the danger without demolishing the structures. We also encountered booby-trapped men, Palestinians who raised their hands to surrender while wearing explosive vests, in an attempt to detonate themselves among our soldiers.

The international community has pilloried us with accusations of a “massacre” in Jenin and charged us with human rights abuses for destroying houses. Division commander Brig. Gen. Eyal Shlein angrily denied those allegations earlier this week, pointing out the difference between the IDF and the Palestinian terrorists. “There was no massacre whatsoever. If we wanted to commit a massacre, we could have taken over the camp in one day. The IDF did not use artillery or aircraft.” As for the house demolitions, Shlein was emphatic. “A balanced person does not booby-trap his house with the intent to return to it.”

In a swipe at the Palestinian propaganda machine and the international press corps that parrots its claims without comment, Shlein said,

We intend to demolish the booby-trapped buildings, because after we get everyone out, they will accuse us of leaving booby-trapped houses.

The saying goes, “A man is known by the company he keeps,” and the same is no less true of nations. Israelis today scan the international community and note the difference between our supporters and our adversaries. On the adversaries side, we have European and Arab governments who brazenly threaten us with sanctions and war. We have Kofi Annan and the UN that threaten us with international troops who will come in to stop “Israeli aggression” against innocent Palestinians, and we have urban terrorists in European cities who attack Jews, destroy Jewish property, and call for our collective destruction.

On the friends side, we have the American people and Diaspora Jewry. Israelis note that while Secretary of State Powell may have been taken in by the EU, the UN and the Saudis – the same forces doing everything in their power to scuttle the US war on terrorism – the American people are far from fooled.

We saw with gratitude and appreciation that at the mass rally in support of Israel in Washington on Monday, members of Congress from both parties, leading Christians, and African Americans stood shoulder-to-shoulder with American Jews in declaring their support of Israel and in explaining to Powell and his associates that there is no difference between Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden.

We saw that under a week after the call was put out for the rally, over 100,000 Jews from all over the US descended on Washington, where they stood for hours in the blistering sun to show their commitment to Israel.

We saw last week that a third of France’s brave and anxious Jewish community, which has suffered from an average of a dozen daily attacks since Easter and more than 400 attacks in the last year, rallied virtually alone in the streets of Paris in support of Israel.

The architects of the Oslo process promised us we were standing at the precipice of a new world order. But the terrorism and anti-Semitism, and the blind hatred that fertilizes them both, have proven the old order is still the order of the day. Although most of us would have been happier if the utopia Oslo promised had materialized, there is comfort and relief in knowing the truth.

The utopians, who promised us everlasting peace and universal brotherhood in exchange for signing our land away to a terrorist, told us it was by appeasing our enemies that Israel would fulfill its mission as “a light unto the nations.” Today, as we return to the old world order, where we are hated because our enemies like to hate us, the internal strength denied us in a decade of self-abnegation has returned.

We look at ourselves in the mirror, and we like what we see. We look at our friends, and we respect them for who they are. We look at our enemies and understand their hatred for what it is – an expression of their moral failure.

Today, we understand that being a light to the nations means setting an example of loyalty to our traditions of valor and simple human decency, with the hope that others will follow, and not attempting to appease murderers and begging for acceptance.

Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that 83 percent of Israelis wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

– April 19, 2002

A PROVIDENTIAL FRIENDSHIP

Yesterday was the Fourth of July and we Israelis celebrated US Independence Day in our hearts with a feeling of respect and kinship far deeper and closer than we ever felt before. For the past 35 years, the United States has been Israel’s closest, and often only, ally.

Yet, in spite of the closeness of our relationship, over the years there has been little reflection on what America really is or how it came to pass that the US has become Israel’s best friend. Concentrating only on the outcome of American success rather than its causes, for most Israelis, America has defined hyperbole. The US was a caricature of wealth and power – Wall Street, Hollywood, big cars, big bellies – a John D. Rockefeller who hands out dimes to shoeshine boys. Rarely did we pause to look below the surface and wonder about the firm foundation upon which this sustained success was built.

Then came the attacks of September 11, and the American response, and Israelis saw a US that we had rarely considered. Behind the self-absorbed success story, we found a thoughtful patriot. Behind the John Wayne swagger we found Gary Cooper’s humility and stubborn defiance. Behind the shell-game morality of Monica’s White House, we discovered the New York Fire Department and Rudolph Giuliani. Rather than falling apart in hysteria and finger pointing after thousands of their countrymen were murdered in a single day, we saw Americans come together in anger and defiance, united in their deep conviction of the basic goodness of America and their willingness to discriminate between good and evil.

It is common wisdom that you learn the truth about a person’s character by how he acts in times of crisis. This is no less true of nations. In times of crisis, a well-grounded person will be able to call upon reserves of strength and wisdom cultivated by generations of like-minded people who preceded him, even if, on a day-to-day basis, he rarely considers them important. So too, a moral relativist, who rejects tradition, flitting instead from fad to fad, will fall apart at crunch time.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Israel saw Americans collectively embracing ideas of human freedom and individual responsibility promulgated and defended by the Founding Fathers. History engulfed every action, both symbolic and concrete. America, the gossamer dream of fast cash and liposuction, was replaced by America the land of Special Forces and B-52 bombers. Endless debates about multiculturalism and victimology were sidelined. In their place came discussions of civilizational struggles against barbarism, the durability of the US Constitution, and the ability of an open society to defend against an enemy who exploits its freedoms to destroy freedom.

For the first time in recent memory, the foundations of the US were exposed for all to see. They were very strong.

For Israelis, America returning to its roots and acting with the collective wisdom of its history paralleled our own post-Oslo national awakening and catalyzed our newfound understanding of our friend. Although many have argued that Israel’s relations with the US reached new heights of intimacy in the 1990s, the truth is that for most of the last decade, neither Israel nor the US was capable of being true friends to each other, for they were untrue to themselves.

In the 1990s, both countries were enjoying unprecedented prosperity, the result of the hard work and vigilant defense of their security and freedom in the decades before. Both Israel and the US brazenly ignored the causes for their success and trivialized the importance of their respective traditions and histories. In so doing they ignored and so emboldened the enemies at their gates. Americans and Israelis know from their respective histories that freedom and free people will forever be the enemy and the envy of all who seek power for power’s sake, and therefore must always be vigilantly upheld and protected.

The problem is that the success of that protection causes free men and women to take their freedom for granted and object to paying the necessary price for its preservation. Understanding this phenomenon, in 1837, a young Abraham Lincoln declared,

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

In the 1990s, both Israel and the US took freedom for granted.

Here we decided that we were tired of protecting ourselves and sought shortcuts to our liberty. We turned our backs on our history, symbols, collective wisdom and ideals of Jewish continuity, responsibility and law and absurdly assumed that this self-flagellation would earn us respect and safety. The Oslophiles’ blithe sacrifice of the Temple Mount, the concrete anchor of our history and values, was the pinnacle of this folly.

In the US, American ideals of liberty and limited government were replaced by European artifices of moral relativism and political correctness. Talk of communal rights became more and more prevalent as the guiding principles of individual responsibilities and rights were summarily discarded. Lawsuits abounded, with individuals at every turn claiming that all ill they experienced was someone else’s fault. Universities were filled with talk of the end of the nation-state system and the emergence of UN-led global governance. The US, far from being exceptional and unique, was to be relegated to the role of financier as the Third World, the European Union, and the World Court were embraced as the true harbingers of a global utopia and peace that the US was too provincial to appreciate.

For Israel, the lynching of our IDF reservists in Ramallah shattered these irresponsible delusions. The naked barbarity of the act – a crowd raucously applauding a monster with bloodstained hands and then ecstatically tearing apart our human flesh on that bright afternoon in October 2000 – was the death knell of Oslo. The UN-sponsored anti-Semitic hate fest at Durban last August was its funeral.

For the US it was, of course, September 11, both for what the attack represented in itself, as well as for the fact that the same voices that previously had been heard championing political correctness were now telling us the US had more or less asked for it.

What is most revealing for Israelis about the US’s post-September 11 odyssey back to its ideological and social roots of patriotism is that the more “American” Americans become, the more understanding they are of Israel’s struggle.

For three generations, American Jews, still smarting from the wounds incurred by European chauvinism and utopian fervor, have feared the canard of dual loyalty as they feared little else. What we see today is that there is no contradiction between being an American patriot and being an Israeli patriot. As both Israel and the US return to our first principles while we fight civilization’s battle against barbarism, we learn that at our national foundations stand shared values of freedom and humility and collective defense of individual rights.

Both countries are a finger in the eye to enemies of these common values and therefore are destined to ensure their separate and joint success only by vigilantly defending themselves today and in every generation to come. Understanding this today, we Israelis realize that we are linked to the American people not by circumstance, but by providential justice. In the week of US Independence Day, under the common threat of terrorism, we embrace our American friends as brothers in arms and in peace.

– July 5, 2002

ILAN RAMON’S LEGACY

In 1981, IAF Col. Ilan Ramon flew one of the F-16 jets that blew up the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Osirak. In so doing he saved the country and perhaps the entire world from the specter of a nuclear holocaust.

For the past 16 days, as Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon again saved us. This time he was not armed with a payload of bombs on a fighter craft. This time Ramon set off for outer space on the Columbia space shuttle, armed with a picture of the earth as seen from the moon drawn by a Jewish boy in Theresienstadt concentration camp, a Torah scroll from Bergen-Belsen, a microfiche copy of the Bible, the national flag and the dreams and hopes of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Ramon saved us this time not by clearing our skies of the threat of nuclear attack, but by reminding us of who we are and of what we can accomplish if we only have faith in ourselves.

Ramon made clear at every opportunity that he went to outer space, not simply as a citizen of the State of Israel, but as a Jew. As the representative of the Jewish people he recited kiddush on Friday night. As a Jew he said Shema Yisrael as the space shuttle orbited over Jerusalem. As a Jew he insisted on eating only kosher food in outer space. And as a Jew he told the prime minister from his celestial perch,

I think it is very, very important to preserve our historical tradition, and I mean historical and religious traditions.

In so doing he showed that there is no limit to what a person can accomplish as a Jew. He said to all Jews, here in Israel and throughout the world, even as anti-Semitism again threatens us, even as Jews in Israel are being murdered just for being Jews, our enemies will never define us or tell us there are limits to what we can do.

But Ilan Ramon was not simply a Jew. He was an Israeli Jew. And, as a scientist and fighter pilot his was the face of Israeli exceptionalism. Ramon excelled in all he did. He was first in his class in high school. He was first in his class in flight school. He was first in his class in astronaut training.

Today, when mediocrity seems to be the unifying characteristic of so many of the personalities that make up our national landscape, Ramon reminded us of what we can and should aspire to. Speaking of Ramon a few months before the shuttle launch, his fellow astronauts praised his professionalism above all.

As we have been consumed for more than two years with our daily reality of terrorism and pain, Ramon reminded us that there are other sides to our lives in Israel. Our mastery of science has placed our tiny state at the cutting edge of space research. Like our friends, the Americans, we will not be limited by gravity in our quest for answers to the riddles of the universe.

Finally, Ramon was a husband to Rona and father to Assaf, Tal, Yiftach and Noa.

Our hearts go out to his family members. But we can only pray that they will take comfort in the fact that in his life, their Ilan saved both the life and the spirit of his country.

– February 1, 2003

THE BEAUTIFUL ISRAELI

Amir Drori was my hero and my friend. Since I met him ten years ago, Amir had been a rock of stability for me, as he was for anyone who was lucky enough to be close to him. Just knowing he was here, in Israel, on this planet, helped maintain my faith in the justice of the universe.

And so it was with shock and a sense of irretrievable loss that I received the news on Saturday night that he had died suddenly, at the age of 68, of a heart attack after spending the day hiking through the Negev with his wife, Tzila, and friends.

Amir Drori was a rock for me because of what his life symbolized. Amir was the personification of the iconic Israeli. It was the notion that people like Amir existed that made me decide, as a young girl in Chicago, that the only thing I wanted to be when I grew up was an Israeli.

I first met Amir in 1995. At the time, I was a captain in the army serving as negotiations coordinator in the Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. We were then leading the talks for the transfer of civil authorities in Judea and Samaria to the PLO.

The generals I served with were mainly disappointments for me. It seemed often that they measured themselves not by how they were protecting the country, but by how many hours of face time they had with Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres or Yasser Arafat. Their self-important self-absorption was destroying my naive idealism.

And then one day Amir walked through the door. Amir, the founder and director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, was the former IDF deputy chief of staff. In the Six-Day War he had been a battalion commander in the Golani Infantry Brigade. In the Yom Kippur War he commanded Golani. And in Operation Peace for the Galilee, as a major general he commanded the Northern Command. He was a living legend.

As Amir entered the room, his self-important former underlings stopped their mindless squawking. They stared at him with the expectant eyes of young officers trying to make a good impression on their revered commander. Their tone of voice changed. Amir’s mere presence sufficed to transform – if only for a moment – these wannabe globetrotters and prima donnas into salty warriors and guardians of Israel.

Amir didn’t notice the commotion he had caused. He was so modest that even when I later pointed it out to him, he refused to accept that people revered him for who he was. It had never occurred to him to try to make a good impression on anyone.

As the director of the IAA, he led the negotiations on the transfer of responsibility over archeological sites to the Palestinians. Once, when the talks were being held in Eilat, I called him up in the middle of the night. “Amir,” I said, “We have a problem here. It seems that the representative from the Ministry of Religious Affairs handed the Palestinians control of Samuel’s Tomb.”

This was a major calamity. Not only is Samuel’s Tomb one of the most significant religious sites for Jews in the country, it is located on a hilltop that controls the highway approaches to Jerusalem.

“Okay,” he responded, “I’ll be right there.”

As I staggered around the office at 6 a.m. the next day, Amir walked through the door. He had driven all night long. That afternoon, he sat down across from Arafat. The terrorist’s lip and hand shook incessantly as he peered at Amir. He recognized him as the man who threw him out of Lebanon. In a famous picture taken in Beirut, Amir had Arafat’s head in his rifle scope. After 90 minutes, the session was over. Amir restored Samuel’s Tomb to full Israeli control and gave nothing in exchange.

I went to work with Amir after I left the army at the end of 1996. Amir, who had taken a leave of absence from the IDF in the early 1960s to study archeology and participate in Yigal Yadin’s excavations of Masada, had been an amateur archeologist throughout his military career. After he retired in 1987 he turned his hobby into his profession as he took over the Antiquities Department in the Ministry of Education.

What he found there broke his heart. Israel, with over 18,000 declared archeological sites, has the highest density of ancient artifacts in the world. Yet when he arrived, robbery of antiquities and the destruction of precious archeological sites through piratical excavations and building and development activities were rampant.

Amir convinced the government that one of Israel’s most important resources – our past – was being systematically destroyed. He oversaw the legislation of the Antiquities Law that established the Israel Antiquities Authority as a statutory body tasked with safeguarding and overseeing all archeological activities in the country. He organized a special department to prevent piratical digs and theft. He ensured that all building activities on archeological sites became contingent on the carrying out of salvage digs to rescue the antiquities beneath the ground that would otherwise be lost forever.

The best part of my work with Amir was accompanying him on his weekly visits to ongoing excavations. Once, as we drove past Yokneam, Amir pointed at the rolling hills and began to tell me all the treasures of the ages hidden beneath the surface.

I looked at him in amazement. “I feel blind next to you. I stare at the hills and see the grass and the wildflowers. You look at an otherwise innocent landscape and see the entire archeological history of the spot as if you were staring at an already completed dig.”

Amir smiled sheepishly, as he sucked on his ubiquitous pipe, and then mumbled shyly, “Well, it’s not just antiquities I see. I see the defensive lines and the battles as well.”

“Back to 1947?” I asked.

“No, back to the time of the cavemen,” he smiled.

Amir’s death is a terrible blow. But for me, there is some comfort in the way he died – walking with his beloved wife in his beloved desert, still uncovering, until his dying breath, yet more of the inexhaustible secrets of the Land of Israel which he loved and defended with all his strength and heart.

Like his buried treasures, Amir too was a national treasure – proof positive that in spite of the mediocrity of many, the beautiful Israeli is not a myth. All we need to do to make our ideals reality is slip on a pair of hiking boots and a hat, fill a canteen and go and discover the beauty of our land, knowing that we are following in Amir Drori’s deep footsteps.

– March 14, 2005

A PRAYER FOR 5767

Pope Benedict XVI has become political Islam’s newest excuse for rioting. Mobs from Rawalpindi to Ramallah are burning him in effigy. Muslim leaders from Gaza to Indonesia to Qatar, from Turkey to Washington and London are attacking the pope and demanding that he apologize to Islam for what they consider to be a heinous attack against their religion.

To recap what has been exhaustively reported in recent days, the pontiff ‘s “crime” against Islam occurred in the course of a scholarly lecture at the University of Regensburg in his native Germany earlier in the month. Benedict quoted from a dialogue between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a Persian scholar of Islam circa 1391 where the emperor criticized harshly the Islamic practice of forcibly converting non-Muslims to Islam.

In the pope’s words, the Byzantine emperor, addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God,” he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.”

As Benedict explained, the harsh judgment that the Byzantine emperor rendered on Islam stemmed directly from his Christian understanding of God as a reasonable deity. According to Benedict, the reason a Christian leader was able to judge Islam, and so conduct a meaningful intercultural discussion on the merits of Islam and Christianity, was because he had a clear understanding of how his religion construed the God-created world and conceived of man’s relationship to God.

Expanding on this theme, the pope told his audience that European civilization itself is a fusion of Christian faith and Greek philosophy of reason. Europe’s current cultural drift, he argued, stems from the cultural separation between faith and reason that began with the Reformation and went on through the Enlightenment. By relegating faith to a subculture that has no place in discussions of practical human endeavors, he said, Europeans have rendered themselves incapable of understanding who they are or of defending themselves and their values in a manner that the Byzantine emperor, in the pre-scientific era, was able to do so stalwartly.

It could be said that the Islamic world’s hysterical and violent reaction to Benedict’s use of the 600-year-old dialogue only serves to reinforce the Byzantine emperor’s impression that Islam does not perceive God as being a reasoning deity. But limiting an analysis of Benedict’s lecture to the Muslim world’s hysterical reaction would ignore the pope’s central point. Benedict’s overarching message in that lecture was that to survive, a culture must be willing to embrace its identity, for if it does not, it won’t even be capable of understanding why it should survive.

While Benedict’s specific message was to his fellow Christians, the Jewish people should take heed of his general message. Today, the Jewish people, in Israel and throughout the world, find ourselves under attack from all quarters. The rise of anti-Semitism globally, and particularly in the Islamic world, finds us in a period of grave self-doubt. Like the Europeans, our ability to defend ourselves against the swelling ranks of haters is dependent on our ability as a people and as individuals to embrace our identity as Jews.

Commenting on the nature of this surge in Jew-hatred, the great (non-Jewish) Canadian pundit Mark Steyn wrote last month in the National Review,

The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without the ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are – so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they’re hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless-cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they’re hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they’d be hated for that, too.

It is crucial that all of us internalize the message that these lines convey. For in recent years, rather than recognize the prejudice of our detractors, we have devoted ourselves to attempting to understand and so justify the hatred they heap upon us.

We tell ourselves we are hated because we are too strong – or because we are too weak. We are hated because we are too religious – or because we are not religious enough. We are hated because we insist on defending Israel – or we are hated because we are willing to compromise on Israel.

Yet, as Steyn wisely notes, we are not hated because of what we do, we are hated because we are Jews. In light of this, the best way to defend ourselves, the best way to safeguard our freedom and our heritage, is to embrace and celebrate our identity as Jews. As Elie Wiesel once explained to me, the key to defending ourselves is to never allow our haters to tell us who we are. “Hatred only defines the haters,” he said.

And indeed, when we look at the manner in which Jews in Israel and throughout the world are being attacked today, we see that the attacks are based not on Jewish actions but on the fact that we are Jews.

Thus, in the midst of yet another wave of violent attacks by Muslims against Jews in Norway last month, Norway’s Jewish community warned its members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public.

Thus it is that the charter of Hamas, the movement that now controls the Palestinian Authority, calls not for compromise with Israel but for all Jews to be expelled from the Land of Israel or forcibly converted to Islam as part of the global jihad.

So it is that attacks against Jewish supporters of Israel in the West target not the substance of their arguments, but their right as Jews to lobby for Israel in their countries of citizenship.

“We Jews,” Wiesel explained, “have always defined ourselves as the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Indeed, at Mount Sinai, in our acceptance of the Ten Commandments, the Jewish people became the first nation in history to self-consciously define itself. And each subsequent generation of Jews has remade that choice. Jews do not exist, as Jean-Paul Sarte ignorantly argued, because anti-Semites exist. The leader of the existentialist movement should have understood; anti-Semites exist because anti-Semites choose to exist.

As Steyn notes, today hatred against Jews is anchored on Israel. Provoked by this new form of Jew-hatred, some Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, see Israel as a burden. This is a self-inflicted tragedy. For if we look at Israel, we see that far from being a burden, our Jewish state is one of the most stunning successes of Jewish history.

Today, Israel is the home of the largest Jewish community in the world. More Jews live in Israel today than at any time in our history. And the state in which we live is one of the most vibrant, optimistic, “happening” countries in the world. We have the highest birthrate in the West. Rates of entrepreneurship are among the highest in the world.

We are one of the most highly educated societies in the world. Over the past 15 years, more than a dozen colleges have been established in Israel and last year the government decided to allow two colleges to join Israel’s nine research universities as full-fledged, independent research universities.

Israelis are among the most patriotic citizens in the world. Our patriotism is expressed in the high level of volunteerism in all age groups. In the recent war, tens of thousands of reservists willingly left their families and jobs to take up arms and defend the country, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis volunteered to help our one million brothers and sisters whose homes were targeted by rockets, missiles and mortars.

Jewish life blossoms in Israel as it has nowhere else in our history. The rates of literacy in Jewish learning in Israel are higher than they have ever been anywhere in our history. Israel is the home of some half dozen generations of Jews whose mother tongue is the language of the Bible.

Israel’s success stems from its serving as a vehicle that allows us to express our heritage in all facets of society. And our Jewish heritage is one of the most precious heritages known to man.

The Jewish people gave humanity the concepts of God, liberty and law. Our understanding of the fallibility of mankind has prevented us from being tempted by false prophets promising us heaven on earth, and has allowed us to take practical steps toward improving our lot and our world.

All of the ideals that Israel represents, both spiritual and physical, have formed the foundations for human progress and freedom throughout the world for millennia. Our willingness to stay loyal to our identity and our heritage has been the key to our survival throughout the ages in the face of the countless foes who sought to destroy us both spiritually and physically.

Rosh Hashana marks the beginning of the Ten Days of Repentance that precede Yom Kippur. To properly atone for our sins and correct our mistakes, we must understand who we are, what we represent and what we can and should aspire to as Jews. To do this, we must reject the notion that those who hate us can tell us who we are. To do this we must embrace our Jewish identity and uphold our commitment to our collective destiny.

The fact that hatred of Jews has endured for so long says nothing about the nature of the Jewish people. What does speak volumes about that nature is the fact that through the ages our fortunes have been directly related to our ability to spurn our enemies’ distorted portraits of the Jewish people and our willingness to endure and progress as Jews in the midst of that hatred.

Pope Benedict is able to discuss Islam because, secure in his Christian identity, he has a clear basis for judging the goodness or unreasonableness of Muslim values and behavior. Whether we agree with his judgments or not, through his willingness to judge, Benedict capably defends and advances his faith.

When we embrace our moral and intellectual identity as Jews, we are then capable of meeting the challenges of our times. It is my prayer that in 5767, the Jewish people will rally around our heritage, history and culture and so pave the way for a secure, peaceful and moral future for our people and our world.

– September 22, 2006

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CAROLINE B. GLICK grew up in Chicago. She made aliyah to Israel in 1991, two weeks after receiving her BA in Political Science from Columbia University. She served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces for five and a half years and then as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1997–1998. Ms. Glick received a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in June 2000. She has written for and edited Makor Rishon newspaper (Hebrew)and the Jerusalem Post, and during Operation Iraqi Freedom was one of the only female journalists on the front lines with US forces, reporting for the Jerusalem Post, Maariv, Israel TV’s Channel 2 and the Chicago Sun Times.

Ms. Glick writes two regularly syndicated weekly columns for the Jerusalem Post. Her writings, which have also been published in the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun Times, the Washington Times, Frontpage Magazine and Moment magazine, focus on the strategic and political issues challenging Israel and the United States.

Ms Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC. In 2003, Ma’ariv named her the most prominent woman in Israel. In December 2005, she was awarded the Ben Hecht award for Middle East reporting from the Zionist Organization of America. In January 2006, she was awarded the Abramowitz Prize for Media Criticism by Israel Media Watch. Ms. Glick lives in Jerusalem.