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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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
by Gerald M. Steinberg Jerusalem Post - Feb. 11, 2006
The ascendance of Hamas in the Palestinian legislative elections has highlighted the difficulties resulting from the massive "development" funding provided by foreign donors. For years, the international community has been funneling vast sums to the Palestinian Authority, hoping for a magical transformation leading to economic growth, self-sufficiency and even peace. While the European Union has kept the findings of its report on this issue a secret, it is clear that the aid has fueled corruption and terror, but very little development.
In response, a new system was devised, and the donors forced the Palestinian Authority to appoint an independent finance minister, but the changes were limited. The funds kept flowing - in part due to the fear of the reactions if the tap were suddenly turned off.
But the victory of Hamas has raised new dilemmas for the main funders - Europe, the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and the World Bank. Many donor countries have demanded that Hamas renounce violence and accept Israel's right to exist as a condition for continued aid. These terms were rejected by Hamas leaders who realize that many of the donors are reluctant to implement their conditions.
Even the Israeli government is hesitant about cutting the flow of funds, fearing that economic desperation would fuel terror. After some flip-flops, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that the tax funds collected by Israel would go to the Palestinian Authority until Hamas officials took office. But this merely delays the difficult decisions.
In the face of this dilemma, some European diplomats have begun discussing the option of routing development funds through the network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) involved in human rights and humanitarian work.
Unfortunately, this solution is based on wishful thinking, rather than careful analysis. The hundreds of NGOs that function in the region and work with the Palestinians are part of the problem. They have become parties to the conflict, and not neutral engines of development and peacemakers.
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