“Political guru Charlie Cook is predicting Democrats will lose 20+ seats in the House of Representatives next year. Pollsters Zogby, Gallup, Rasmussen all show a striking downward trajectory of public approval for this administration, across almost every major demographic group. So why is this happening? It’s true that President Obama won last November because people wanted a change from Bush policies. But for many independent voters, that meant an end to dirty politics and Washington excess — promises Obama made at every stop along the campaign trail. Instead what they got is what most conservatives predicted — huge deficits, higher taxes, a ballooning federal government, and a weak, appeasement-first foreign policy. … In the end, history will likely show that when Obama started dropping in the polls, it wasn’t because ‘he took on too much at once’ or ‘because he wasted time negotiating with Chuck Grassley.’ He lost ground because his ideas were rejected by the American people, just as they were after the Carter era.” –radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham
September 10, 2009
July 18, 2009
Africa Vs. the Arab World
via: jewishworldreview
Speaking in Ghana on Saturday President Obama lectured Africans on local repression, corruption, brutality, good governance and accountability. The startling contrast to his June speech in Cairo was revealing. Stroking Muslim and Arab nations has become the hallmark of Obama’s foreign policy.
In Egypt, he chose not to utter the words “terrorism” or “genocide.” In Egypt, there was nothing “brutal” he could conjure up, no “corruption” and no “repression”.
In Ghana, with a 70% Christian population, he mentioned “good governance” seven times and added direct calls upon his audience to “make change from the bottom up.” He praised “people taking control of their destiny” and pressed “young people” to “hold your leaders accountable.”
He made no such calls for action by the people of Arab states—despite the fact that not a single Arab country is “free,” according to the latest Freedom House global survey.
Before the Muslim world Obama donned the role of apologist-in-chief. Over and over again his examples of shortfalls in the protection of rights and freedoms were American: the “prison at Guantanamo Bay,” “rules on charitable giving [that] have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation,” impediments to the “choice” of Muslim women to shroud their bodies.
Christian Africa was to be treated to no such self-flagellation. In a rare tongue-lashing for Africans from any American president, he chastised: “It’s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict … But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy … or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants … tribalism and patronage and nepotism … and … corruption.”
He might equally have said to the Arab and Muslim world: “It’s easy to scapegoat Israel and blame your problems on the presence of Jews—albeit on a fraction of 1% of the territory inhabited by the Arab world—but Israel is not responsible for poverty, illiteracy, torture, trafficking, slavery and oppression rampant across your countries.” But he did not.
In Ghana he pointed to specific heroes that had exposed human rights abuse, singling out by name a courageous investigative reporter. In Egypt, though journalists and bloggers are routinely threatened, jailed and worse, no such brave soul came to mind.
In a Christian African nation he said, “If we are honest, for far too many Africans, conflict is a part of life, as constant as the sun. There are wars over land and wars over resources. And it is still far too easy for those without conscience to manipulate whole communities into fighting among faiths and tribes.”
To the Arab and Muslim world he could have said: “Since the day of Israel’s birth Arab and Muslim countries have made conflict with Israel a part of life, warring over land and manipulating whole communities into fighting in the name of Islam to render the area Judenrein.”
Instead, he turned on the only democracy in the Middle East and said the presence of Jews on Arab-claimed territory—settlements—is an affront to be “stopped.” It didn’t matter that agreements require ultimate ownership of this territory to be determined by negotiation or that apartheid Palestine is hardly a worthy pursuit.
From Ghana he chided Africans: “No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end.”
For an Arab and Muslim audience he cooed: “America will defend itself, respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law. And we will do so in partnership with Muslim communities, which are also threatened.”
Ghanaians will likely turn the other cheek, secure enough to take it and even be grateful for the spotlight. But Obama’s double-standard is not a victimless crime. The disparity between the scolding he gave in Ghana and the love-in he held in Cairo illuminates an incoherent and dangerous agenda.
In his lofty, but empty, rhetoric in Ghana, Obama promised “we must stand up to inhumanity in our midst,” pledged “a commitment … to sanction and stop” warmongers and embraced the Zimbabwe non-governmental organization that “braved brutal repression to stand up for the principle that a person’s vote is their sacred right.”
These are devastating words for Iranians struggling valiantly to keep the hope of democracy alive but forced to bear witness to the contradiction. Betrayed, they have watched the Obama administration pledge to move forward on negotiations with illegally ensconced Iranian thugs—at the very same time their victims are being rounded up, tortured and readied for show-trials in advance of certain execution.
On Friday, Obama, and the rest of the G-8 with his blessing, announced that thinking about more sanctions on Iran can wait until September. And then we can expect yet another round of Security Council dickering over minimalist responses to more Iranian stalling tactics—until an Iranian nuclear weapon is inevitable. Though it is 2,202 days since the U.N.’s atomic energy agency first declared that Iran was violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, Obama pretends legitimizing those same nuclear-proliferating fascists makes it more likely the clock will stop ticking.
Iranians standing up for their allegedly “sacred rights” know Obama has it exactly backwards. Speechifying about “our interconnected world” and “common interests” in Ghana was cold comfort to the voices of Muslim dissidents and Jewish victims deserted in the Obama wilderness.
July 13, 2009
Avoiding Obama’s ambush
“The Soviet empire fell not because radicals like Obama called for the US to destroy its nuclear arsenal, it fell because president Ronald Reagan ignored them and vastly expanded the US’s nuclear arsenal while deploying short-range nuclear warheads in Europe and launching the US’s missile defense program while renouncing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. On Monday Obama arrived in Moscow for a round of disarmament talks with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. According to most accounts, while in Moscow Obama plans to abandon US allies Ukraine and Georgia and agree to deep cuts in US missile defense programs. In exchange, Moscow is expected to consider joining Washington in cutting back on its nuclear arsenal just as the likes of Iran and North Korea build up theirs. Of course, even if Russia doesn’t agree to scale back its nuclear arsenal, Obama has already ensured that the US will slash the size of its own by refusing to fund its modernization. In short, Obama is working to implement the precise policy he laid out as an unoriginal student conformist 26 years ago. … What Obama’s radicalism tells us is that he is not a man who is moved by rational discourse. He is not a man who is willing to be convinced that he is mistaken.” –Center for Security Policy Senior Middle East Fellow Caroline Glick
June 19, 2009
Importance of defining evil
via: jewishworldreview
Many people repeat George Santayana’s famous quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The reason Santayana’s quote is so enduring is because it goes to the very heart of why people do what they do. Ideas have consequences. Understanding that helps one understand history. Learning from history helps one to replicate successes and triumphs – and avoid failures and tragedies.
In the excellent commentary below, Jonathan Rosenblum points out the disturbing parallels between how the West, and specifically British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, dealt with Hitler prior to World War II, and how the West, and President Obama, are dealing with the evil of radical Islam today.
That President Obama, for whatever reason, has drawn the wrong conclusions from history should be a cause for deep concern for every American concerned about the threat radical Islam poses to our safety, security and liberties.
Sometimes it is more essential to define the nature of evil than good
By Jonathan Rosenblum
Upon his first visit to one of the liberated death camps, Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “There are those who ask what are we fighting for. Let them come here and see what we are fighting against.” Eisenhower’s remark contains an important insight: Sometimes it is more essential that one define the nature of evil than that one define what is good. About the latter, there will inevitably be many opinions. But they need not prevent a consensus from coalescing around the definition of evil.
I was reminded of that point last week as I watched The Third Jihad, the third in a trilogy of documentaries on the threat of radical Islam produced by Raphael Shore and Wayne Kopping. Towards the end of the documentary one of the experts interviewed, former CIA intelligence officer Clare Lopez declared, “The real war is between the values of freedom and barbarism. If we are not willing to recognize the battle as one for our civilization, we might as well give up right now.”
The last time the West faced such a civilizational threat, many refused to recognize the nature of the conflict. In Troublesome Young Me, Lynne Olsen offers a gripping account of the group of youthful Conservative backbenchers, who eventually ousted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain from power and brought in Winston Churchill in his place, nearly a year after the outbreak of World War II.
England entered that war totally unprepared, and lagging far behind Germany in every respect, apart from its navy. Even after Britain proclaimed war, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Chamberlain pursued it half-heartedly and dreamed of an imminent peace. Britain and France bombed only German military targets most narrowly defined. Meanwhile Luftwaffe pilots in Poland followed orders to “close [their] hearts to pity,” happily machine-gunning women and girls picking potatoes, bombing churches and hospitals, and strafing toddlers being herded to safety.
The parallels between today and the earlier period are eerie. Chamberlain, like President Obama today, enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Parliament. His party whips enforced party discipline with an iron hand — think Rahm Emanuel — and backbenchers who stepped out of line put their political futures on the line.
In another interesting parallel, Chamberlain enjoyed almost across the board fawning support from the press and the BBC. That included self-imposed censorship on the information reaching the British public. After the Anschluss, British papers carried no pictures of the hundreds shot in the first days after the Nazi takeover, of the tens of thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps, or of Nazi soldiers forcing Jewish doctors, lawyers and professors to scrub the streets and clean toilets on their hands and knees. When reporters asked Chamberlain about such matters, he snapped at them for believing “Jewish-Communist propaganda,” and that was the end of the matter.
The British press ignored both the massive German arms build-up prior to the War, and the pitiful state of British preparedness. Both before and after the conflict started, it suppressed mention or quotations from Hitler’s speeches that would have conveyed a much different impression of his goals. As a British TV character tartly observed forty years later, “It is hard to censor the press when it wants to be free, but easy if it gives up its freedom voluntarily.”
Chamberlain never read Mein Kampf, in which Hitler laid out in startling fashion both his future plans for the Jews and for German conquest. Far from viewing Hitler as an evil man, Chamberlain believed him to be a “gentleman,” with whom he could do business. He was more than once shocked to find that Hitler had lied to him, even though that too was foreshadowed in Mein Kampf, Said future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, “He didn’t believe people existed [who would] say one thing and do another. …It was pathetic, really.”
Chamberlain, according to Olsen, “could never bring himself to believe that [Hitler and Mussolini] wanted to go to war. Clinging to the security of his ignorance, he created a peace-loving image of them that defied reality.” For a decade, the English and French did nothing in response to fascist aggression in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and precious little even in the wake of the German invasion of Poland.
France and England thereby encouraged Hitler to believe they were too weak to prevail, a judgment in which he was very nearly right. That should have taught us — but did not — that those who hope to avoid war via appeasement inevitably end up fighting later on worse terms.
At no point, did Chamberlain recognize that Hitler constituted a mortal threat to Western civilization. As a consequence, he displayed far more ruthlessness fighting those within his own party who dared challenge his policies than he did in fighting Hitler.
The inability to recognize Hitler as evil incarnate is the most frightening parallel to today. President Ronald Reagan was reviled by Western elites for calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, as was President George W. Bush for grouping Iran, North Korea, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq together as the Axis of Evil.
The West still remains incapable of acknowledging evil or giving credence to the pronouncements of evil men. Ayatollah Khomeini long ago made clear that he was prepared to see Iran go up “in flames,” if the worldwide rule of Islam were thereby furthered. Mutual assured destruction, says Bernard Lewis, the greatest living authority on Islam, is for Ahmadinejad, “not a deterrent but an incentive.” Surveying the scene in Beslan, where Chenyan Muslims killed nearly 300 Russian schoolchildren, one of the speakers on The Third Jihad puts the point succinctly: Why should those who don’t hesitate to send out their own children to be killed hesitate to kill other peoples’ children?
Yet the highest wisdom in the West today is to not take seriously the threats of Ahmadinejad or the speculations of the Iranian leadership about the mathematics of a nuclear exchange with Israel. They are not madmen, we are constantly told.
President Obama has no taste for confrontation with radical Islam (only with Israel). He cannot even admit that it exists. Evil, it seems, is one of the few words that does not come trippingly off his tongue.
June 17, 2009
The Language of Confusion
via: jewishworldreview
60 years later, Orwell’s dystopian vision is more prophetic than ever
“That’s what I said,” the student responds, predictably. “It makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” I insist, “as you will see once you understand it.”
The student doesn’t give up without a fight. “You know what I mean,” he says. “What difference does it make how I say it?”
“It makes no sense implies that, if the material we are learning does not conform to your way of thinking, then it must be wrong. I don’t understand acknowledges the possibility that the flaw in reasoning may reside in you, rather than in the material.”
He stares back at me, trying to digest this new idea. Over the course of the year, through constant repetition, most of my students will learn never to say that makes no sense. At least not in my class.
I’ve been challenged on this many times. Is it really my job to belabor this point, to demand that my students express ideas concisely, even when the intent is clear? After all, I’m not a speech or language instructor. Why not just teach the material I’m being paid to teach?
WE THINK WHAT WE SPEAK
In his essay “The Principles of Newspeak,” the appendix to his classic novel, 1984 (published 60 years ago this month), George Orwell describes how the leaders of his totalitarian future have contrived to assure their hold on power by replacing English with Newspeak, a language containing no vocabulary for concepts contrary to the platform of the state-run Party. By controlling language, the Party controls its people’s very thoughts.
Intuition suggests that language is a product of thought: if we think clearly, automatically we will speak clearly. Orwell demonstrates the opposite, that thought is a product of language. Because we formulate our thoughts in words and sentences, incompetent use of language guarantees muddled thinking. If there are no words for rebellion, uprising, or discontent people will find it difficult to formulate and articulate the concept of overthrowing even the most corrupt and oppressive government.
Students of Orwell will shudder when applying this simple axiom to the corruption of modern language. Advertisers and politicians have known for years that the best way to manipulate public perception is by arranging words in unconventional combinations. Car dealers know that potential customers will feel better buying cars that are “pre-owned” rather than “used.” A certain former president knew that the American people would not respond to the gravity of his presidential peccadilloes if distracted by pondering what the meaning of “is” is.
But linguistic confusion became institutionalized with the rise of political correctness. By dodging frantically out of the rain of potentially offensive terms, we soak ourselves in a torrent of euphemisms for simple words the thought-police deem pejorative. When illegal aliens become “undocumented workers,” we lose all sense of the danger posed by the porous condition of our borders. When terrorists become “insurgents,” we more readily accommodate the moral equivalence that blurs the line between aggressors and defenders. When abortion becomes “reproductive freedom,” the horror over the indiscriminate murder of innocents vanishes altogether.
Similarly, when marriage is bereft by judicial fiat of the definition that has served for thousands of years, the foundations of the family structure erode like sand castles before the approaching tide. And as it becomes taboo to make any direct reference to race, class, ability or performance without fear of hurting one group’s collective feelings or another group’s collective self-esteem, the words that form our thoughts and understanding end up so fully shorn of their dictionary definitions that they cease to mean much of anything at all. In short, nothing makes sense.
CONFUSION BY DESIGN
In truth, for advertisers, politicians, special interest groups, and the politically correct, the real purpose of language is no longer to convey meaning – it is to obscure meaning, to appeal to emotions while bypassing the intellect. Their motive is obvious: it is far easier to evoke a strong emotional response than it is to present a logically developed argument. But by allowing meaning to be drained from our language and our words, we have not only denuded them of their clarity, but also of their depth.
Even worse, we are no longer allowing confusion to reign free but legislating it into the public square. Earlier this year, London decided to remove apostrophes from its street signs. King’s Heath will now become Kings Heath. What’s the reason? Apostrophes are too confusing.
According to Councilor Martin Mullaney, who heads the city’s transport scrutiny committee, “Apostrophes denote possessions that are no longer accurate, and are not needed,” he said. “More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don’t want to have an A-level (high school diploma) in English to find it.”
Linguistic laziness in both syntax and vocabulary has worn smooth the sharpness of our minds. When I say that I love my wife, and I love my car, and I love ice cream, am I not indulging a subtle self-hypnosis that affirms an equation between all three, that suggests that my feelings for my wife is no more profound than my taste for Baskin Robbins and BMW? By impoverishing our words, we impoverish our thoughts as well.
What is love? And what is honor? and loyalty? and commitment? As we strip our language of both its clarity and its nobility, these concepts become caricatures of what they once were, defined by the mass media who, like the Orwellian Party, have as their only concern the selling of their own values and their own agenda. And as much as we the people are willing to buy, they will continue to sell.
“Teachers, be careful with your words,” warns the Talmud, “lest the disciples who follow you will drink of evil waters and die.” When the waters of wisdom become polluted with confusion and contradiction, it is society’s youth who will pay the price through the erosion of moral clarity and moral principles.
Back in the classroom, my student continues to stare at me, contemplating my rebuke for a few more seconds before he responds. “What I meant to say,” he finally answers, “is that it makes no sense to me.”
I shake my head. “Don’t make it sound like what you want it to mean,” I tell him. “Just say it the way it is.”
May 22, 2009
The Jihadi Virus in Our Jails
via: jewishworldreview
President Obama’s speech on homeland security was 6,072 words long. Curiously, he chose not to spare an “a,” “and” or “uh” on the New York City terror bust that dominated headlines the morning of his Thursday address. Did the teleprompter run out of room?
After a yearlong investigation launched by the Bush administration, the feds cracked down on a ring of murder-minded black Muslim jailhouse converts preparing to bomb two Bronx synagogues and “eager to bring death to Jews.” They also planned to attack a New York National Guard air base in Newburgh, N.Y., where the suspects lived and worshiped at a local mosque.
Not one word from the president on the jihadists’ intended victims, motives or means.
No comfort for the reported targets in the Big Apple, still raw from the Scare Force One rattling that so vainly and recklessly simulated 9/11.
No condemnation for the accused plotters.
Why? Because doing so would force Obama to abandon his cottony “extremist ideology” euphemisms and confront the concrete truth. To borrow one of our obtuse president’s favorite cliches, “let me be perfectly clear” about the reality Obama won’t touch: America faces an ongoing Islamic jihad at home and abroad. Not merely “man-caused.” But Koran-inspired. Yet, Obama refuses to spell out the centuries-old roots of the war that he claims he’ll win faster, better and cleaner than any of his predecessors
Moreover, his push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons — where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity — will only make the problem worse. A brief refresher course for the left’s amnesiacs about the festering jihadi virus in our jails and overseas:
In 2005, Bush administration officials busted a terrorist plot to attack infidels at military and Jewish sites in Los Angeles on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 or the Jewish holy days. It was devised by militant Muslim converts of Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (Arabic for “Assembly of Authentic Islam”) who had sworn allegiance to violent jihad at California’s New Folsom State Prison.
Convicted terror conspirator Jose Padilla converted to Islam during a stint at a Broward County, Fla., jail and reportedly fell in with terrorist recruiters after his release.
Convicted “shoe bomber” Richard Reid converted to Islam with the help of an extremist imam in a British prison.
Aqil Collins, a self-confessed jihadist turned FBI informant, converted to Islam while doing time in a California juvenile detention center. At a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, he went on to train with one of the men accused of kidnapping and beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
In East Texas, inmates were recruited with a half-hour videotape featuring the anti-Semitic rants of California-based Imam Muhammad Abdullah, who claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were actually carried out by the Israeli and U.S. governments.
Federal corrections officials told congressional investigators during the Bush years “that convicted terrorists from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were put into their prisons’ general population, where they radicalized inmates and told them that terrorism was part of Islam.”
Despite the insistence of Obama and the Jihadi Welcome Wagon that our civilian prisons are perfectly secure, convicted terrorist aid Lynne Stewart helped jailed 1993 World Trade Center bombing/NY landmark bombing plot mastermind Omar Abdel-Rahman smuggle coded messages of Islamic violence to outside followers in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation.
As I’ve reported previously, U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling.
What’s Obama’s plan to prevent the jihadi virus from spreading? Washing hands and covering mouths won’t work for this disease.
Strip away the smiles from the Obama-Bibi press conference and we are Left with obsessive, delusional behavior
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
But Israel’s military intelligence has assessed that six months may be too long to wait. By the end of the year, Iran’s nuclear program may be unstoppable. And Iran’s successful test of its solid fuel Sejil-2 missile with a two thousand kilometer range on Wednesday merely served to show the urgency of the situation. Obviously the mullahs are not waiting for Obama to convince them of the error of their ways.
Beyond the fact that Obama’s nonbinding timeline is too long, there is his “or else.” Obama made clear that in the event that in December or January he concludes that the Iranians are not negotiating in good faith, the most radical step he will be willing to take will be to consider escalating international sanctions against Teheran. In the meantime, at his urging, Congressman Howard Berman, Chairman of the House International Affairs Committee has tabled a bill requiring sanctions against oil companies that export refined fuel into Iran.
Finally there was Obama’s contention that the best way for the US to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program is by convincing Israel to give away more land to the Palestinians. As Obama put it, “To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians — between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”
This statement encapsulates the basic lack of seriousness and fundamental mendacity of Obama’s approach to “dealing with a potential Iranian threat.” Iran has made clear that it wants Israel destroyed. The mullahs don’t care how big Israel is. Their missiles are pointing at Tel Aviv not Beit El.
As for the international community, the Russians and Chinese have not been assisting Iran’s nuclear and missile programs for the past fifteen years because there is no Palestinian state. They have been assisting Iran because they think a strong Iran weakens the US. And they are right.
The Arab states, for their part are already openly siding with Israel against Iran. The establishment of a Palestinian state will not make their support for action to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to dominate the region any more profound.
On the face of it, Obama’s obsessive push for a Palestinian state makes little sense. The Palestinians are hopelessly divided. It is not simply that Hamas rules the Gaza Strip and Fatah controls Judea and Samaria. Fatah itself is riven by division. Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s appointment of the new PA government under Salam Fayyad was overwhelmingly rejected by Fatah leaders. Quite simply, today there is no coherent Palestinian leadership that is either willing or capable of reaching an accord with Israel.
And as for the prospects for peace itself, given that there is little distinction between the anti-Semitic bilge broadcast daily in Gaza by Hamas-controlled media, and the anti-Semitic bilge broadcast daily in Judea and Samaria by the Fatah/Abbas/Fayyad-controlled media, those prospects aren’t looking particularly attractive. That across-the-board anti-Semitic incitement has engendered the current situation where Hamas and Fatah members and supporters are firmly united in their desire to see Israel destroyed. This was made clear on Thursday morning when a Fatah policeman in Kalkilya used his US-provided rifle to open fire on IDF forces engaged in a counter-terror operation in the city.
Given that the establishment of a Palestinian state will have no impact on Iran’s nuclear program, and in light of the fact that under the present circumstances any Palestinian state will be at war against Israel, and assuming that Obama is not completely ignorant of the situation on the ground, there is only one reasonable explanation for Obama’s urgent desire to force Israel support the creation of a Palestinian state and work for its establishment by expelling hundreds of thousands of Israelis from their homes. Quite simply, it is a way to divert attention away from Obama’s acquiescence to Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
By making the achievement of the unachievable goal of making peace between Israel and the Palestinians through the establishment of a Palestinian terror state the centerpiece of his Middle East agenda, Obama is able to cast Israel as the region’s villain. This aim is reflected in the administration’s intensifying pressure on Israel to destroy Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. In portraying Jews who live in mobile homes on barren hilltops in Judea and Samaria — rather than Iranian mullahs who test ballistic missile while enriching uranium and inciting genocide — as the greatest obstacle to peace, the Obama administration not only seeks to deflect attention away from its refusal to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is also setting Israel up as the fall guy who it will blamed after Iran emerges as a nuclear power.
Obama’s intention to unveil his Middle East peace plan in the course of his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, like his decision to opt out of visiting Israel in favor of visiting a Nazi death camp, make clear that he does not perceive Israel as either a vital ally or even as a partner in the peace process he wishes to initiate. Israeli officials were not consulted about his plan. Then too, from the emerging contours of his plan, it is clear that he will be offering something that no Israeli government can accept.
According to media reports, Obama’s plan will require Israel to withdraw its citizens and its military to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. It will provide for the free immigration of millions of Israel-hating Arabs to the Palestinian state. And it seeks to represent all of this as in accord with Israel’s interests by claiming that after Israel renders itself indefensible, all 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (including Iran) will “normalize” their relations with Israel. In short, Obama is using his peace plan to castigate the Netanyahu government as the chief destabilizing force in the region.
During his meeting with Obama, Netanyahu succeeded in evading the policy traps Obama set for him. Netanyahu reserved Israel’s right to act independently against Iran and he conceded nothing substantive on the Palestinian issue. While itself no small achievement, Netanyahu’s successful deflection of Obama’s provocations are not a sustainable strategy. Already on Tuesday the administration began coercing Israel to toe its line on Iran and the Palestinians by engaging it in joint “working groups.” Then too, the government’s destruction of an outpost community in Judea on Thursday was perceived as Israeli buckling to US pressure. And it doubtlessly raised expectations for further expulsions in the near future.
So what must Netanyahu do? What would a strategy to contain the Obama administration’s pressure and maintain international attention on Iran look like?
Under the present circumstances, the Netanyahu government’s best bet is to introduce its own peace plan to mitigate the impact of Obama’s plan. To blunt the impact of Obama’s speech in Cairo, Netanyahu should present his peace plan before June 4.
Such a plan should contain three stages. First, in light of the Arab world’s apparent willingness to engage with Israel, Netanyahu should call for the opening of direct talks between Israel and the Arab League or Israel and the OIC regarding the immediate normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab-Islamic world. Both Obama and Jordan’s King Abdullah claim that such normalization is in the offing. Israel should insist that it begin without delay.
This of course is necessary for peace to emerge with the Palestinians. As we saw at Camp David in 2000, the only way that Palestinian leaders will feel comfortable making peace with Israel is if the Arab world first demonstrates its acceptance of the Jewish state as a permanent feature on the Middle East’s landscape. Claims that such an Israeli demand is a mere tactic for buying time can be easily brushed off. Given Jordanian and American claims that the Arab world is willing to accept Israel, once negotiations begin, this stage could be completed in a matter of months.
The second stage of the Israeli peace plan would involve Israel and the Arab world agreeing and beginning to implement a joint program for combating terrorism. This program would involve destroying terror networks, cutting off funding for terror networks, and agreeing to arrest terrorists and extradite them to the Hague or the US for trial. It should be abundantly clear to all governments in the region that there can be no long term regional peace or stability for as long as terrorists bent on destroying Israel and overthrowing moderate Arab regimes are allowed to operate. So making the implementation of such a join program a precondition for further progress shouldn’t pose an obstacle to peace. Indeed, there is no reason for it to even be perceived as particularly controversial.
The final stage of the Israeli peace plan should be the negotiation of a final status accord with the Palestinians. Only after the Arab world has accepted Israel, and only after it has agreed to join Israel in achieving the common goal of a terror-free Middle East can there be any chance that the Palestinians will feel comfortable and free to peacefully coexist with Israel. And Israel, of course, will feel much more confident about living at peace with the Palestinians after the Arab world demonstrates its good faith and friendship to the Jewish state and its people.
Were Netanyahu to offer this plan in the next two weeks, he would be able to elude Obama’s trap on June 4 by proposing to discuss both plans with the Arab League. In so doing, he would be able to continue to make the case that Iran is the gravest danger to the region without being demonized as a destabilizing force and an enemy of peace.
Whether Netanyahu advances such a peace plan or not, what became obvious this week is that his greatest challenges in office will be to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons while preventing the Obama administration from blaming Israel for the absence of peace.
May 15, 2009
The myth of Europe curiously prevails
jewishworldreview | Israelis are wild about Europe. A poll carried out by the Konrad Adenauer foundation last month showed that a whopping 69 percent of Israelis, and 76 percent of Israeli Jews would like for Israel to join the European Union. Sixty percent to Israelis have a favorable view of the EU.This poll’s most obvious message is that as far Europe is concerned, Israelis suffer from unrequited love. A 2003 Pew survey of 15 EU countries showed that 59 percent of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace. A poll taken in Germany the following year showed that 68 percent of Germans believe that Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians and 51 percent said that there is no difference in principle between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.
And it isn’t simply Israel that they hate. They don’t like Jews very much either. In an empirical study published in 2006, Professors Edward Kaplan and Charles Small of Yale University demonstrated a direct link between hatred for Jews and extreme anti-Israel positions. A recent poll bears out the fact that levels of hostility towards Israel rise with levels of anti-Semitism.
According to a 2008 Pew survey, anti-Semitic feelings in five EU countries — Spain, England, France, Germany, and Poland — rose nearly 50 percent between 2005 and 2008. Whereas in 2005, some 21 percent of people polled acknowledged they harbor negative feelings towards Jews, by last year the percent of self-proclaimed anti-Semites in these countries had risen to 30 percent. In Spain levels of anti-Semitism more than doubled from 21 percent in 2005 to 46 percent in 2008.
Not surprisingly, increased hatred of Jews has been accompanied by increased violence against Jews. Just last week for instance, three men assaulted Israel’s ambassador in Spain Rafi Shotz as he and his wife walked home from a soccer game. They followed after him and called out, “dirty Jew,” “Jew bastard,” and “Jew murderer.” A crowd of people witnessed the assault, but no one rose to their defense.
Shotz was lucky. As Israel’s ambassador he had two policemen escorting him and so he was not physically threatened. The same was not the fate of Holocaust survivors who assembled at Mauthausen death camp in Austria last week to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by American forces. As Jewish survivors of the camp where 340,000 people were murdered mourned the dead, a gang of Austrian teenagers wearing masks taunted them screaming “Heil Hitler,” and “This way for the gas!” They opened fire with plastic rifles at French Jewish survivors, wounding one in the head and another in the neck.
And Austria is not alone. From Germany to France, Belgium, England, Holland, Sweden, Norway and beyond, Jewish kindergartens and day schools, restaurants and groceries have been firebombed and vandalized. The desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues has become an almost routine occurrence. Jewish leaders from Norway to Germany to Britain to France have warned community members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public. Rabbis have been beaten all over the continent.
There is no state sanction for anti-Jewish violence in Europe. But in many places it is either brushed off as insignificant, or justified as a natural byproduct of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. In at least one case, the official downplaying of the significance of anti-Jewish sentiments and violence has had murderous consequences.
In January 2006 Ilan Halimi, a French Jew was kidnapped by a gang of Muslim sadists. For an entire week, the police ignored the anti-Semitic nature of the attack — and hence the imminent danger to Halimi’s life — in spite of the fact that his kidnappers made threatening phone calls to Halimi’s parents where they recited verses from the Koran while Ilan was heard screaming out in pain from his torture in the background.
In the end, Halimi was tortured continuously for 20 days before he was dumped at a railhead naked, with burns and cuts over eighty percent of his battered body and died of his wounds shortly after he was found.
Some have attributed the rise in European anti-Semitism to the rapid growth of Muslim minorities throughout the continent. This explanation has much to recommend it. Levels of anti-Semitism among most Muslim minority populations in Europe are exceedingly high. According to Kaplan and Small’s study, European Muslims are eight times more likely than non-Muslims to be openly anti-Semitic. And Franco Frattini, the EU official responsible for combating anti-Semitism told the Jerusalem Post last year that some 50 percent of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe are conducted by Muslims.
But while European Muslims are a major factor in the rise of anti-Jewish violence, they are a bit player when it comes to the overall prevalence of anti-Jewish attitudes. For example, with 46 percent of Spaniards negatively disposed towards Jews, and with Muslims making up only 3-5 percent of Spaniards, we learn that nearly half of Christian Spaniards are anti-Semitic. And as the 2008 Pew survey shows, European hatred of Jews is growing at a fast clip. Indeed, it is growing two and a half times faster than European hatred of Muslims.
In all likelihood, these negative trends for Jews are only going to escalate in the coming years. Politicians interested in being elected have already begun exploiting the rise in anti-Jewish sentiments to increase their electoral prospects. In the 2005 British elections for instance, the Labor Party under Tony Blair depicted then Conservative Party leader Michael Howard as the hateful anti-Semitic icon Fagin from *Oliver Twist *in a campaign poster. Another Labor poster depicted Howard and fellow politician Oliver Letwin as flying pigs.
This state of affairs bodes ill for Israel’s future relations with Europe. In most cases, European politicians pander to the growing constituency of anti-Semites by adopting hostile policies towards Israel. These policies then serve to further justify anti-Semitic attitudes and so the number of European anti-Semites continues to grow, and in turn, European hostility to Israel increases.
All of this brings us back to Europhilic Israel. If the majority of Israelis were to get their way, and Israel joined the EU, we would find ourselves subsumed into a transnational political entity that increasingly rejects Israel’s right to exist.
No doubt recognizing the political advantage to be garnered by attacking Israel, last year Spanish investigative magistrate Judge Fernando Andreu Merellesis decided to use a specious complaint submitted by the discredited Palestinian Center for Human Rights to launch a war crimes investigation against Israel’s top political and military leaders. Against the stated will of Spain’s state prosecution, Merellesis announced last week that he is proceeding with his investigation into claims that a dozen senior Israeli leaders committed a war crime when they approved the 2002 decision to target Hamas terror master Salah Shehadah.
As a non-member of the EU, EU courts have no power to enforce their rulings against Israelis. Today the only thing Israelis need to worry about is that we will be arrested if we visit Europe. This is inconvenient, but not impossible to live with. Were Israel to join the EU however, EU laws would supersede Israeli laws. European courts could compel Israeli courts to enforce their rulings. Israel, in short would find itself subsumed in a hostile political entity that could simply adjudicate and legislate it out of existence.
So what explains Israel’s unrequited love affair with Europe?
There is no all-encompassing explanation for the EU’s popularity in Israel. It is a function of a number of complementary causes. The most important among them is the abject failure of the Israeli media to examine European anti-Semitism and its implications for European policy towards Israel in any coherent fashion. Rather than recognize that European anti-Semitism and its concomitant hostility towards Israel is the consequence of internal European dynamics, the Israeli media tend to cast both as a function of Israel’s actions. Doing so certainly makes for neat, easily digestible news stories, but it also trivializes the situation. Moreover, by acting as though Israel’s actual behavior is at all relevant to European treatment of Jews and the Jewish state, the local media effectively buy into cynical European moves to belittle the significance of anti-Jewish violence. They give credence to false European claims that the firebombing of synagogues is simply the regrettable consequence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Then there is the issue of Israel’s constant quest to end its international isolation. For many Israelis, it is tantalizing to think that we can end our international isolation by joining the EU. The EU is seen as a club of rich and cultured countries with which Israel would benefit from merging. This view again is nurtured by the media which have failed to report on the failure of the European welfare state model.
In light of the media’s refusal to tell the story of Europe’s hostility towards Jews and the Jewish state, or the story of the EU’s severe economic problems, it is not surprising that precious few Israeli politicians have a clear understanding of Europe. Successive foreign ministers — from Shimon Peres to Silvan Shalom to Tzipi Livni to Avigdor Lieberman have all voiced varying degrees of support for Israeli membership in the EU. Their statements have never been challenged in debate. Finally, there is the nostalgia that many Israelis feel towards the old pre-war Europe from their grandparents’ stories. That long gone Europe, where young women and men would walk along the promenades in Berlin, Paris, Antwerp and Prague holding hands and eating ice cream, breathing in the air of Heinrich Heine and Franz Kafka has been kept alive in the imaginations of generations of Israelis. Many of them work today as leading journalists, movie directors and actors. For many Israelis then, the myth of Europe is more familiar than the real Europe.
Looking to a future of an increasingly Jew-hating Europe it is clear that Israel and Israelis must quickly divest ourselves of our delusions about Europe. For Israel to competently contend with Europe in the coming years, it will be essential that both our political leaders and Israeli society as a whole gain a firm grasp of where Europe stands in relation to both the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
With a burgeoning and deeply anti-Semitic Muslim minority, and with a Christian majority increasingly comfortable with flaunting traditional anti-Semitic attitudes, dispensing with anti-Jewish myths ranks low on the priority list for most European leaders. In contrast, for Israel, gazing at this unfolding European state of affairs, it is clear that abandoning our adoration for a mythological Europe is one of the most urgent items on our national agenda.
March 17, 2009
‘Blaming the Jews’ doesn’t always work
It’s getting crowded under that bus where President Obama throws the discards no longer useful to him. Fortunately, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is there to offer the last rites, this time for Charles W. Freeman Jr., may peace be on him.
Mr. Freeman is the well-paid shill for the Saudis and the Chinese who was stopped just before he was to assume the chairmanship of the National Intelligence Council, where he would have directed the preparation of intelligence briefings for the president and other high government officials – an official largely responsible for what the president should know and when he should know it. The appointment does not require Senate endorsement and the White House apparently figured it could slip him past whoever was not looking.
Mr. Freeman, to put a fine point on it, does not like the Israelis very much. He comes out of the State Department, where bagels and lox are not a big breakfast favorite in the cafeteria, and was once a medium-high official at Foggy Bottom, a “principal deputy assistant secretary” to somebody who rides to the office in one of the longer limousines. (The State Department is fond of titles too long to fit on a calling card.) Mr. Freeman doesn’t like anybody who makes trouble for China very much, either, particularly if they’re demonstrating for democracy at Tiananmen Square or Tibetans struggling to get their country back.
Fortunately, it occurred to a few key Republicans and several Democrats that he was a very odd choice for the job. The Republicans were mostly Christians, the Democrats were mostly Jewish, and it’s a shame this is important but Mr. Freeman’s friends on the left are trying to make this a religious issue. It’s time to blame the Jews again, this time for ruining poor Mr. Freeman’s new career as the chef in charge of cooking the intelligence served in the Oval Office.
Mr. Freeman has had a long if not distinguished career in berating the Israelis for struggling for survival and apologizing for Chinese repression of dissidents struggling only to breathe free. In a speech in 2005 he described Israel as the aggressor in the Middle East, and two years later accused the United States of “embracing Israel’s enemies as our own.” Continue reading . . .
Disturbing D.C. developments exposed by Freeman’s appointment
Ill winds are blowing out of Washington these days. On Thursday, the Washington Post headline blared, “Intelligence Pick Blames ‘Israel Lobby’ for Withdrawal.”
The article, by Walter Pincus described how former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles “Chas” Freeman is blaming Israel’s Jewish American supporters for his resignation Tuesday from his post as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, (NIC).
In a diatribe published on Foreign Policy’s website on Wednesday, Freeman accused the alleged “Israel Lobby” of torpedoing his appointment. In his words, “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency… The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views … and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.”
He continued, “I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.”
The Post’s article quoted liberally from Freeman’s diatribe. It also identified the Jewish Americans who wrote against Freeman’s appointment, and insinuated that AIPAC — which took no stand on his appointment — actually worked behind the scenes to undermine it.
While it described in lurid detail how one anti-Freeman Jewish blogger quoted other anti-Freeman Jewish bloggers on his website, Pincus’s article failed to report what it was about Freeman that caused the Jewish cabal to criticize his appointment. Consequently, by default, Pincus effectively endorsed Freeman’s diatribe against the all-powerful “Israel Lobby.”
Pincus’s reportorial malpractice wouldn’t have been so problematic if his article had just been one of many articles in the Post about Freeman’s appointment. But, like the New York Times, the first mention the Post made of the story was on Tuesday, after Freeman announced his resignation.
The Washington Post’s news editor Douglas Jehl admitted that a conscious decision had been made to ignore the story. In an email published in the Weekly Standard Jehl wrote, “We did initially elect not to write a story about the campaign against Mr. Freeman.” Continue reading . . .
