News and Views

Israel Lobby

by Ruth R. Wisse
Wall Street Journal - Mar. 22, 2006

In Boston in the early 1980s, I was asked by an Irish cab driver what language I had been speaking with a fellow passenger we had just dropped off. When I told him, Hebrew, the language of Israel, the man exclaimed: "Israel! That's America's fighting front line! Israel fights our battles better than we could fight them ourselves."

Now Professors Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago would have us believe that the Boston cabbie was a dupe of the "unmatched power of the Israel Lobby." Their essay in the latest London Review of Books -- based on a longer working paper on the Kennedy Center Web site -- contends that the U.S. government and most of its citizens are fatally in thrall to a "coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." Though not all members of said "coalition" are Jews, and though not all Jews are members, the major schemers are such key organizations as the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, joined by neoconservatives, think tanks, and a large network of accomplices including (they will learn to their surprise) The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

The Israel Conspiracy

by Brett Stephens
Wall Street Journal - Mar. 25, 2006

Imagine a conspiracy so vast the only person not in on it is you. In 1998, Hollywood indulged that conceit in "The Truman Show," a film about a reality show so all-encompassing that its unwitting hero, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), has no idea the very world he inhabits is a stage. Now imagine a conspiracy that makes Trumans of us all. According to professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, it's called "The Israel Lobby."

The professors make their case in an extensively footnoted "working paper" from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a revised version of which is published in the current issue of the London Review of Books. Their premise is that Israel is a huge strategic liability for the U.S., which wrecks our reputation in the Arab world, complicates our diplomacy at the U.N., inspires Islamic fanaticism and terror, goads us into misbegotten wars and makes us complicit in Israeli human-rights abuses, all the while costing some $3 billion a year.

But here's a puzzle: If Israel is so damaging to U.S. interests, why do consistent and broad majorities of Americans support it? A Gallup poll from last month shows that Americans are more sympathetic to Israelis than to Palestinians by 59% to 15%. Among Americans who claim to follow world affairs "very closely," Israel's favorable ratings rise to 66%. I went back over polling data since the mid-1970s, and the percentages hold roughly constant. Americans also tell pollsters that Israel deserves support even if it puts the U.S. at greater risk of oil boycotts or terrorist attacks.

Because They Hate

by Bridgette Gabrielle
FrontPageMagazine.com - Feb. 20, 2006

We gather here today to share information and knowledge. Intelligence is not merely cold hard data about numerical strength or armament or disposition of military forces. The most important element of intelligence has to be understanding the mindset and intention of the enemy. The West has been wallowing in a state of ignorance and denial for thirty years as Muslim extremist perpetrated evil against innocent victims in the name of Allah.

I was ten years old when my home exploded around me, burying me under the rubble and leaving me to drink my blood to survive, as the perpetrators shouted “Allah Akbar!” My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. At 10 years old, I learned the meaning of the word "infidel."

I had a crash course in survival. Not in the Girl Scouts, but in a bomb shelter where I lived for seven years in pitch darkness, freezing cold, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. At the age of 13 I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends--killed by Muslims. We were not Americans living in New York, or Britons in London. We were Arab Christians living in Lebanon.

As a victim of Islamic terror, I was amazed when I saw Americans waking up on September 12, 2001, and asking themselves "Why do they hate us?" The psychoanalyst experts were coming up with all sort of excuses as to what did we do to offend the Muslim World. But if America and the West were paying attention to the Middle East they would not have had to ask the question. Simply put, they hate us because we are defined in their eyes by one simple word: "infidels."

A Failure of the Press

By William J. Bennett and Alan M. Dershowitz
Washington Post - Feb. 23, 2006

There was a time when the press was the strongest guardian of free expression in this democracy. Stories and celebrations of intrepid and courageous reporters are many within the press corps. Cases such as New York Times v. Sullivan in the 1960s were litigated so that the press could report on and examine public officials with the unfettered reporting a free people deserved. In the 1970s the Pentagon Papers case reaffirmed the proposition that issues of public importance were fully protected by the First Amendment.

The mass media that backed the plaintiffs in these cases understood that not only did a free press have a right to report on critical issues and people of the day but that citizens had a right to know about those issues and people. The mass media understood another thing: They had more than a right; they had a duty to report.

We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree: Over the past few weeks, the press has betrayed not only its duties but its responsibilities. To our knowledge, only three print newspapers have followed their true calling: the Austin American-Statesman, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Sun. What have they done? They simply printed cartoons that were at the center of widespread turmoil among Muslims over depictions of the prophet Muhammad. These papers did their duty.

When fear cows the media

by Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe - Feb. 19, 2006

THE PHOENIX is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of brash, pull-no-punches weekly that might have been expected to print without hesitation the Mohammed cartoons that Islamists have been using to incite rage and riots across the Muslim world. Its willingness to push the envelope was memorably demonstrated in 2002, when it broke with most media to publish a grisly photograph of Daniel Pearl's severed head, and supplied a link on its website to the sickening video of the Wall Street Journal reporter's beheading.

But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and in a brutally candid editorial it explained why.

''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, is ''fear of retaliation from . . . bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do . . . Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history."

Curse of the Moderates

by Charle Krauthammer
Washington Post - Feb. 10, 2006

As much of the Islamic world erupts in a studied frenzy over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, there are voices of reason being heard on both sides. Some Islamic leaders and organizations, while endorsing the demonstrators' sense of grievance and sharing their outrage, speak out against using violence as a vehicle of expression. Their Western counterparts -- intellectuals, including most of the major newspapers in the United States -- are similarly balanced: While, of course, endorsing the principle of free expression, they criticize the Danish newspaper for abusing that right by publishing offensive cartoons, and they declare themselves opposed, in the name of religious sensitivity, to doing the same.

God save us from the voices of reason.

What passes for moderation in the Islamic community -- "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy" -- is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.

Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? The Syrian prime-time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentile boy to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part (!) series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic czarist forgery (and inspiration of the Nazis), "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?

A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

When Pictures Lie

A TV report that helped fuel the deadly Palestinian intifada appears to be false. So how is truth supposed to compete with a video fraud?
by David Gelernter
Los Angeles Times - Sept. 9, 2005
(See also: Myth, Fact, and the al-Dura Affair - Commentary and Who Killed Muhammad Al-Dura? - JCPA)

A 55-second video report, produced in 2000 by a French TV station and distributed free of charge around the world, has caused untold injury and grief to Israeli civilians. This month, the French author Nidra Poller analyzes the evidence in Commentary magazine and shows that the video is a fraud — "an almost perfect media crime," the retired French journalist Luc Rosenzweig calls it. That Poller's piece is conclusive is merely my own judgment, of course. But we are all required to make such judgments, in the light of such reports.

There is a wider story here also. We are vulnerable to video lies. Against purposeful lies, truth has never been so helpless, so weakly defended.

Be consistent in identifying 'terrorists'

"Whether suicide bombers and others deliberately blow up children and their parents in Oklahoma City, New York, Baghdad, London, Netanya in Israel or Sharm el-Sheik in Egypt, at that horrific moment the perpetrators become terrorists, wiping away all complexity and nuance regarding their cause."
by Kate Parry
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune Reader's Representative - August 7, 2005

The Bush administration recently took a look at whether its definition of terrorism had grown inadequate to describe the current challenge.

North American Muslim religious leaders issued a joint fatwa in July condemning all terrorism against civilians.

The Star Tribune should undertake a similar clarifying exercise about the language the newspaper uses to describe terrorism. The current approach is inconsistent. A fresh look is needed.

This would open a big can of worms.

To reconsider the newspaper's style and practice, the system intended to make language use consistent, would raise questions about when to use the words terrorist, insurgent or militant -- all charged with subtle meanings.

The Star Tribune has taken considerable heat over this language. "This issue has come up countless times over the past several years, and we've had an ongoing conversation with our staff about the use of language in sensitive stories involving acts of violence, war and terrorism. We believe our policy is consistent with all other major newspapers and wire services," said managing editor Scott Gillespie.

But the current approach ultimately doesn't treat all countries equally when they are victims of virtually identical terrorist violence. I disagree with Gillespie and think the newspaper needs to go another round in this debate to strive for a style and policy that is fairer and more consistent.

Arafat-mania

"There have been few more nauseating sights than the French fawning over the coffin of Yasser Arafat."
by Tom Gross
Jerusalem Post - November 14, 2004

For the Guardian, Yasser Arafat was to be compared to "Moses." On CNN, he was described as a "revolutionary romantic figure comparable to Ho Chi Minh and Nelson Mandela."

For USA Today, he "embraced" "sorrow and hope."

South Africa's City Press described him as a leader who "marshalled freedom fighters."

And in the Toronto Sun we were told he was "murdered" by Israel.

If anyone is still in any doubt that much of the Western media has been taken in by the Stalin-like cult of personality Arafat nurtured for himself over the past 40 years, they shouldn't be any more – not after hearing or reading the lies, half-truths and distortions that were served up in the 48 hours of virtually nonstop coverage on international news networks following the announcement of Arafat's death last Thursday.

A New Page in Brutality

"How is it that no popular protest movement has arisen among religious Muslims against those who have hijacked Islam - with its glorious past - and harnessed it for nefarious purposes?"
by Amnon Rubenstein
Jerusaslem Post - November 16, 2004

On November 11 the The Times of London reported that US-led Iraqi forces said they had "found 'hostage slaughterhouses' in Fallujah, used by Islamic militants to kill foreign captives."

Several weeks earlier, on October 7, Muslim zealots murdered 32 vacationers in twin terror attacks in Sinai at Taba and the resort area of Ras a-Satan. That same day their ideological brethren butchered Kenneth Bigley, a 62-year-old British citizen.

They beheaded him with a sword, recorded the murder on video as usual, and sent it, maybe by satellite, to an Abu Dhabi television station even as his family in Liverpool, and his wife in Thailand, were praying for his well-being.