News and Views

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.

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.

What Israelis Are Talking About

by Martin Peretz
New Republic Online - Mar. 1, 2006

Israelis are truth seekers, not because they are better than other peoples but because the circumstances of their lives have imposed upon them a certain respect for brutal facts. And the most brutal fact is that the Palestinians, their neighbors, still live with the illusion, shared with some other Arabs and with Iran, that Israel is an epiphenomenon that will somehow come undone. Not by itself but by the force of Palestinian resistance against it. (Are the Palestinians still convinced that their fellow believers will also sacrifice themselves for Al Quds?) If one looks hard at this pretension it is actually laughable. Still, the fertile Arab imagination of endless humiliation and endless revenge--a trope which, if we judge from the sanguinary riots against the Danish cartoons in the world of Islam, Palestinians share with many Muslims--is nonetheless a peril to Israel. This peril is not about life and death for the state but about the ongoing anxiety over the shedding of Jewish blood which Palestinians generally believe is natural and justified. For many Palestinians, and perhaps even most, the murder of Jews is a routine, and should be. For the Israelis, it cannot be so. It was, finally, during Ariel Sharon's late tenure as prime minister, that this anxiety began to lift--but not, of course, before the bloodletting was stopped in its regular flow. Israel's military and security agencies, which once fought successful wars against tanks and fighter jets, now have learned how to combat terror, an ancient and ugly art, magnified in body count during the last decades by the "God is great" folk. But there are no final victories over terror, at least in this neighborhood. Like waiting for the coming of the messiah, it is steady work, but very dangerous.

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."

We were brought up to hate - and we do

By Nonie Darwish
The Telegraph UK - Feb. 12, 2006

The controversy regarding the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed completely misses the point. Of course, the cartoons are offensive to Muslims, but newspaper cartoons do not warrant the burning of buildings and the killing of innocent people. The cartoons did not cause the disease of hate that we are seeing in the Muslim world on our television screens at night - they are only a symptom of a far greater disease.

I was born and raised as a Muslim in Cairo, Egypt and in the Gaza Strip. In the 1950s, my father was sent by Egypt's President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to head the Egyptian military intelligence in Gaza and the Sinai where he founded the Palestinian Fedayeen, or "armed resistance". They made cross-border attacks into Israel, killing 400 Israelis and wounding more than 900 others.

My father was killed as a result of the Fedayeen operations when I was eight years old. He was hailed by Nasser as a national hero and was considered a shaheed, or martyr. In his speech announcing the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Nasser vowed that all of Egypt would take revenge for my father's death. My siblings and I were asked by Nasser: "Which one of you will avenge your father's death by killing Jews?" We looked at each other speechless, unable to answer.

In school in Gaza, I learned hate, vengeance and retaliation. Peace was never an option, as it was considered a sign of defeat and weakness. At school we sang songs with verses calling Jews "dogs" (in Arab culture, dogs are considered unclean).

HIJACKING ISLAM

by Amir Taheri
New York Post - Feb. 12, 2006

'GOD? What about him?" the sheik asked with a frown.

We were in a London mosque, discussing the ser mons the sheik delivers at Friday congregations. I had asked why God almost never featured in (or, at best, got a cameo role) in sermons that focused almost exclusively on political issues.

For the sheik, what mattered was "the sufferings of our brethren under occupation." In other words: In our Islam, we don't do God — we do Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq!

Here we have a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb.

How did this neo-Islam — a political movement masquerading as religion — come into being, and how can those who know little about Islam distinguish it from the mainstream of the faith?