News and Views

August 22 - Does Iran Have Something In Store?

by Bernard Lewis
Wall Street Journal - Aug. 8, 2006

During the Cold War, both sides possessed weapons of mass destruction, but neither side used them, deterred by what was known as MAD, mutual assured destruction. Similar constraints have no doubt prevented their use in the confrontation between India and Pakistan. In our own day a new such confrontation seems to be looming between a nuclear-armed Iran and its favorite enemies, named by the late Ayatollah Khomeini as the Great Satan and the Little Satan, i.e., the United States and Israel. Against the U.S. the bombs might be delivered by terrorists, a method having the advantage of bearing no return address. Against Israel, the target is small enough to attempt obliteration by direct bombardment.

It seems increasingly likely that the Iranians either have or very soon will have nuclear weapons at their disposal, thanks to their own researches (which began some 15 years ago), to some of their obliging neighbors, and to the ever-helpful rulers of North Korea. The language used by Iranian President Ahmadinejad would seem to indicate the reality and indeed the imminence of this threat.

Would the same constraints, the same fear of mutual assured destruction, restrain a nuclear-armed Iran from using such weapons against the U.S. or against Israel?

Annan's Libel

Editorial
Jerusalem Post - July 26, 2006

It is difficult at times, and perhaps today impossible, to fathom how UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan assesses events involving Israel. On Tuesday, four members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) were killed when their position was hit by IDF fire. Annan reacted by declaring that the incident was "an apparent deliberate targeting by the Israeli Defense Forces of a UN observer post."

Yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert conveyed to Annan Israel's "deep regret" over the incident, as well his "reservations" over Annan's "inconceivable" decision to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting UN forces.

Reservations? Perhaps Olmert had to be polite, but outrage would be a more appropriate sentiment.

Just yesterday, Israel paid another terrible price in its soldiers' lives in the fight against Hizbullah. They died defending their country, but they also died, in effect, implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demands the disarming of Hizbullah.

Israel has already apologized for, and pledged to investigate, the deaths of the UNIFIL soldiers. Where is Kofi Annan's apology for insulting Israel, and his investigation of how UNIFIL came to be so inseparable from Hizbullah that it has been almost impossible to target the later without inadvertently hitting the former? Where is his gratitude for Israel's implementation, with the blood of its children, of a UN resolution?

Hamas in Charge

Editorial
Wall Street Journal - April 22, 2006

Twenty-nine-year-old David Shaulov was among the nine murdered victims of Monday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. His wife, Varda, is nine months pregnant with their third child. Another victim, Marcelle Cohen, 75, a French citizen, was on a Passover visit with Israeli relatives. Then there was Binyamin Hafuta, 47, the security guard who blocked suicide bomber Sami Hamad from entering the crowded falafel restaurant that was the target, thereby saving possibly a dozen lives.

The bombing was only the third such attack this year. That's a testament to Israel's counterterrorism prowess and to its security barrier, which the U.N.'s International Court of Justice has deemed "contrary to international law." Remind us of that ruling the next time Secretary-General Kofi Annan speaks of the U.N.'s "unique legitimacy."

The relative paucity of terrorist atrocities is not a testament to Palestinian restraint. The Hamas-led government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh defended the bombing as a legitimate act of Palestinian self-defense. When President Mahmoud Abbas described the bombing as "despicable," masked Palestinian gunmen held a press conference in Gaza to demand his apology.

Hamas says won't arrest militants behind attacks

by Nidal al-Mughrabi
Reuters - Mar. 23, 2006

Incoming Palestinian interior minister Saeed Seyam, chosen by Hamas to oversee three security services, said on Thursday he will not order the arrest of militants carrying out attacks against Israel.

"The day will never come when any Palestinian would be arrested because of his political affiliation or because of resisting the occupation," Seyam told Reuters in an interview. "The file of political detention must be closed."

Hamas, whose charter officially calls for Israel's destruction, swept to victory in a January 25 election and plans to present its cabinet line-up to a Hamas-dominated parliament for a vote next week.

The militant group has selected Hamas loyalists like Seyam to fill almost all of the 24-member cabinet after President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction and other moderate parties refused to join a coalition with Hamas.

The West Must Refuse Aid to Palestinians

by David Warren
RealClearPolitics.com - Mar. 22, 2006

No one has made much of an argument for the Palestinians lately, but if someone should try, point at Jericho. The Israel Defence Forces were put this week to the trouble of surrounding a prison there, and extracting its inmates, after the Palestinian Authority announced it would release them. The prison housed men wanted for the murder of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001. The PA had signed the most watertight international agreement to keep those men in jail, but it meant nothing to them. No international agreement they have signed has ever been kept. How do you negotiate with that?

Our mainstream media insinuate that Israel's new prime minister, Ehud Olmert, ordered the capture of these "militants" (the current euphemism for terrorists) because he was sinking in the polls, a fortnight before a general election. The operation certainly helped him, and the Kadima Party he inherited from Ariel Sharon, but the suggestion is nonsense. Any Israeli party of Left or Right would have sent in the IDF to secure those prisoners. No government of Israel can afford to let the murder of a cabinet minister go unpunished.

Moreover, regardless of the result of the Israeli election (which Kadima should win with, most likely, Likud in second place despite its leader Binyamin Netanyahu's increasing unpopularity), no Israeli government will listen to Palestinian demands. The "peace process" ended when the Palestinians elected Hamas. The entire Israeli electorate knows that.

According to the World Bank, if Israel and the West withhold their aid money from the Palestinian Authority, unemployment in the West Bank and Gaza will climb from just below one-quarter to two-fifths of the workforce, and the proportion of Palestinians living in dire poverty will grow to nearly two-thirds. The PA's alternative sources of revenue, being the same sources in Iran and Saudi Arabia that are the primary funders of international terrorism, give money for arms but not for food or economic development.

There is already a shriek for humanitarian assistance, which is what the West provides. But as in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, such aid will be diverted from the intended recipients, and used to free up other revenue for weapons.

Palestinians might hypothetically argue their only choice was between two fanatic Islamist parties -- so why punish them for choosing the one that was more honest about its goal of annihilating Israel?

But the destruction of Palestinian society, and its replacement with a satanic order in which mothers raise children to be suicide bombers, goes deeper into history. So great has been the success of psychopathic thugs, from Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini (who banked on Hitler), through Yasser Arafat (who banked on Saddam), to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's political progeny (who now bank on Iran's murderous ayatollahs), that Palestinians today have openly embraced clinical paranoia. Most actually think all of their problems were externally caused. They are thus beyond arguing with. They have become, in effect, four million inmates in the world's most incompetently-administered lunatic asylum.

Kalb Upbraids Harvard Dean Over Israel

by Meghan Clyne
New York Sun - Mar. 21, 2006

The furor over a paper co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about what is described as the far-reaching influence of an "Israel lobby" intensified yesterday, as it drew sharp criticism from a prominent Kennedy School scholar, President Clinton's special coordinator for the Middle East negotiations, and figures identified in the paper as members of the "lobby."

The paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," was written by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and a political science professor and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, and published by the Kennedy School.

In the 83-page "working paper," the professors allege that a vast network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Components of the purported network include nine major publications, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; "Christian evangelicals" including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson; top-ranking officials in the Bush administration, and scholars at nine think tanks, including the Brookings Institution.

The paper has won praise from anti-Semite and white supremacist David Duke, is being distributed by the Palestine Liberation Organization's mission to Washington, and has been lauded by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.

Less thrilled with the Harvard dean's work is one of his colleagues, Marvin Kalb, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School and a senior fellow and founding director at the school's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

"I do not regard this as a Kennedy School Research Paper, because it clearly does not meet the academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper," Mr. Kalb, who is also the faculty chair for the Kennedy School's Washington programs, told The New York Sun in an e-mail yesterday after reading the paper.

"It is a rather sensational example of 'realist' journalism," he continued. "My sense is that Dean Walt would be better advised to stick to scholarship and leave journalism to journalists, who generally check their 'facts' before publishing them."

Also critical of the paper's academic quality was one of the figures mentioned in it as part of the "lobby," President Clinton's special Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, who said the authors displayed "a woeful lack of knowledge on the subject."

"The part I've read I find remarkable for its lack of seriousness," Mr. Ross told the Sun yesterday. "It is basically a series of assertions. They quote only those people who basically have this point of view and don't take a serious look at anything in a more profound way. It is masquerading as scholarship.

"I would say this is an effort to take a point of view and give it academic legitimacy," he continued.

Duke 1, Harvard 0

by James Taranto
Wall Street Journal - Mar. 20, 2006

With Yale struggling to control the damage owing to its admission of an unrepentant onetime Talib as a student, Harvard now finds itself in a similarly embarrassing situation. It's the sort of Ivy League rivalry that causes "prominent alumni" of third-tier Western universities to break into a slightly guilty smile. The New York Sun reports on the latest trouble in Cambridge:

A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an "Israel lobby" is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.

The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.

But the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby. The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New York Times, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, "pro-Israel" senior officials in the executive branch, and "neoconservative gentiles" including columnist George Will.

Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper "a great step forward," but he said he was "surprised" that the Kennedy School would publish the report.

Now of course, just because Duke endorses Walt and Mearsheimer doesn't mean they endorse him. Indeed, we suspect they're as mortified by this praise as Yale is by the criticism it has received over Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi. Yet without ascribing to them any invidious motives, it seems fair to say that their views dovetail disturbingly with those of unquestioned anti-Semites.

Walt and Mearsheimer argue that "neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel," and therefore the only possible explanation is "the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby." The premise is plainly false; the "Israel Lobby" in fact makes many strategic and moral arguments in its own favor. Walt and Mearsheimer merely disagree with them, and they spend the opening paragraphs of the paper explaining why.

Key Hamas cabinet posts go to hard-liners

by Ilene Prusher
Christian Science Monitor - Mar. 20, 2006

Hamas introduced a cabinet Sunday that creates a hard-line Palestinian government - lacking moderate forces and led by some of the Islamic organization's most militant actors. It's a signal, say analysts, that the Palestinian leadership appears willing to forgo much of the funding it has been receiving from Western nations.

The crucial diplomatic position of foreign minister, for example, went to Mahmoud Zahar, who is adamantly opposed to any softening of Hamas's position that Israel should be destroyed. Dr. Zahar is known for his fiery rhetoric and vocal support for the organization's use of suicide bombings.

"The international community has to respect the choice of the Palestinian people," says Ahmed Abdel-Aziz Mubarek, a newly elected Hamas legislator from Ramallah. "The majority of the Palestinian people gave their votes to Hamas to establish the new government, so the world has to deal with this reality."

The world's response, however, is an increasingly complicated matter. Countries that have in the past been actively engaged in the now-dormant peace process and in giving aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) are facing a difficult choice: how to withhold political support for Hamas without turning off humanitarian aid, especially at a time of increased instability. It is not clear how much of the estimated $1 billion a year the Palestinians get in foreign aid might be withheld. Hamas has vowed to replace it with funds from Iran and other Muslim states.

Russia and Turkey, a moderate Muslim country, recently hosted Hamas delegations in the wake of the January election landslide. But Israel, the US, and the European Union have shunned any political contacts with Hamas unless it meets several criteria outlined by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in January: recognize Israel, respect previously signed peace accords, and forswear violence.

Zahar, a physician, has risen to become one of the organization's most senior members, particularly since several others in the uppermost echelons of the Islamic organization were assassinated by Israel over the past few years. Zahar, too, has been the target of at least two Israeli attempts to kill him, making it unlikely, say analysts, that he or his Israeli counterparts will soon sit at the same negotiating table.

How I Learned to Love the Wall

by Irshad Manji
New York Times - March 18, 2006

On March 28, Israelis will elect a new prime minister to replace the ailing Ariel Sharon. But I'd bet my last shekel that I'll continue to hear the phrase "Ariel Sharon's apartheid wall." It's a phrase spoken — make that spewed — on almost every university campus I visit in North America and Europe.

Among a new generation of Muslims, this is what Mr. Sharon will be known for long after he leaves office: unilaterally erecting a barrier, most of it a fence, some of it a wall, that cuts Arab villages in half, chokes the movement of ordinary Palestinians, cripples local economies and, ultimately, separates human beings.

The critics have a point — up to a point.

They're right that Palestinians are virtually wailing at "the wall." When I went to see its towering cement slabs in the West Bank town of Abu Dis last year, an Arab man approached me to unload his sadness. "It's no good," he said. "It's hard."

"Why do you think they built it?" I asked.

The man shook his head and repeated, "It's hard." After some silence, he added, "We are not two people. We are one."

"How do you explain that to suicide bombers?" I wondered aloud.

The man smiled. "No understand," he replied. "No English. Thank you. Goodbye."

Was it something I said? Maybe my impolite mention of Palestinian martyrs? Then again, how could I not mention them?

Islam’s Coming Crusade

by Martin Kramer
Jerusalem Report - Mar. 20, 2006

The Crusades began with a rumor of defilement. In 1095, Pope Urban II denounced the Muslims as "a race utterly alienated from God." Among their many offenses, Muslims had seized the churches of Jerusalem: "They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcisions they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font." Such false rumors were already widespread in Christendom. Urban tapped them to launch the First Crusade.

Almost a millennium later, Muslim leaders and clerics are using the same language to stir the Muslim masses. They accuse the godless West of defiling the Prophet of God. Khaled Mashal, the leader of Hamas abroad, has demanded that Europe repent for the Danish cartoons. "Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. . . . Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good. . . . Since God is greater, and He supports us, we will be victorious." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad struck the same note, in a speech marking the 27th anniversary of Iran's revolution: "The Iranian nation is telling you now that although you have Mammon, you do not have God. But God is with us."

"A race utterly alienated from God" -- this is how Pope Urban II demonized the Muslims in the 11th century. This is exactly how Islam's leaders are demonizing the West in the 21st. The secular West had flattered itself, believing it had pulled the Muslim world into modernity. Yes, Islam has sent forth suicide bombers and terrorist insurgents. But they and their sympathizers were in the minority -- so the pollsters and analysts told us: "Don't judge Islam by the acts of a misguided few." This faith in the pragmatic Muslim majority has underpinned every Western policy, from the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" to the Bush administration's democracy promotion. The Muslim masses, the assumption goes, will choose peace and freedom, if given the chance. But they haven't. 9/11 could be attributed to a fanatic minority. Not so the Danish cartoon protests: Millions have taken part.