Who in the world runs private “supply ships” through naval blockades?
When mass murder was rampant in Rwanda, did the “International Solidarity Movement” run supply flotillas? What would Kamal Ataturk have done if a civilian flotilla were sent to Armenia while the Turks were committing genocide there? When President John F. Kennedy blockaded Cuba, would anyone have tried running a flotilla through to Havana? If they had, what would the U.S. Navy have done if they refused to stop? Has anyone tried running a parade of boats to Guantanamo Bay to assure that America’s Gitmo prisoners are well provided for? If America ultimately maximizes sanctions against Iran, blockading Ahmadinejad’s ports, how will we respond to flotillas seeking to ram through?
Israel seems positioned as the target of every bully or wannabe-tough-guy who wishes to dabble in social justice. She is perceived as the kid with thick-framed glasses whose lunch money is easiest to steal. For left-anarchist groups like the International Solidarity Movement, Israel is the target for a radical-chic war game, perhaps to alleviate students’ residual stress from just-completed final exams. Many of them may have been unaware that the International Solidarity Movement is a front group created by Palestinian Arabs, funded by Palestinian Arabs, with direct ties to Arab terrorists. Even so, a hint of the flotilla’s unilaterally hostile agenda against Israel should have been apparent when ISM leaders refused a plea from the parents of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006, to transmit a letter and package to him if they arrived in Gaza.
Israel disappointed the naifs who were lured by ISM as window dressing for the flotilla confrontation. Israel is a real country with real people who have real hopes for happiness and real aspirations for peace. Her borders are open to tourists. Her cafes and night clubs are vibrant and safe. People in her land – even outsiders – can think what they want, say what they want, even politically mobilize as they want. They have protests running all over the country. Try that in Iran.
When three youngsters inadvertently hike into Iranian territory, they end up in prison – and they remain incarcerated there for a year and more. Two American journalists journey into North Korea, and promptly are locked up in jail, unable to leave until an American President personally flies in to beg the country’s dictator personally to free them. An American journalist travels into Pakistan to conduct an interview and is butchered by Moslem fanatics. An American innocent goes into Iraq and gets himself beheaded by Islamofascists.
As juxtaposed against the real murderous oppressors of the world, Israel seems a safe place to bring one’s Berkeley activism onto the world scene for a week on the high seas after final exams. No one tells the American activists that those “freedom songs” the ringleaders are singing in Arabic actually are lyrics about massacring Jews. Unknown to the volunteers, the “peace activists” already have armed themselves with metal pipes, baseball bats, slingshots and marbles, and firebombs for the real action they are planning for the cruise. Instead, the naïve board the flotilla, cheerfully thinking: “Let’s run through a naval blockade today – won’t that be fun?”
Well, no, that won’t be fun. Israel’s neighbors have forced her to learn to survive amid a sea of hostility, surrounded by more than twenty countries that want to destroy her. Her border problems are not illegal immigrants trying to run a porous fence from one side, while people on the other side bring in all these dimes that jam up vending machines. Rather, she is bordered by the worst gang of murderous cutthroats to have run a polity since, perhaps, Attila the Hun. For Hamas, death is an industry.
Hamas runs Gaza. They are so murderous that terrorists from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah gang have fled. The nominal “President” of the “Palestine Authority,” Mahmoud Abbas stays out of Gaza because he expects he will get butchered there if he shows up. In Gaza, the internationally outlawed Hamas terror organization rules the streets, arbitrarily tortures and takes Arab Moslem opponents off to their deaths, and rules a veritable Gangland.
Hamas came into power because Israel, in one of its idyllic moments, opted unilaterally to “take a risk for peace” and abandoned all Israeli assets and properties in Gaza, forcibly uprooted and removed all Israeli citizens resident there, even dug up deceased Jews for reburial outside Gaza, and handed Gaza to Mahmoud Abbas. He lost it soon after to the Hamas thugs, as they seized power and killed Abbas’s own terrorists. Hamas then converted the Gaza region into an armed camp.
Hamas receives international funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars and euros – and the money goes disproportionately for weapons like the rockets that Hamas incessantly shoots into Israel. To get even more weapons, Hamas has constructed a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels beneath its border with Egypt and even taxes weapons smugglers for the privilege. They need those tunnels because even Egypt has to blockade Gaza.
Israel is compelled to blockade Gaza at this time. Countries like Syria and Iran already supply deadly military weaponry to Nasrallah’s Hezbollah, along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Having shot at Israel everything they had in 2006, Hezbollah finally sued for a truce when she ran out of weapons. Israel was assured that an emergency United Nations peacekeeping force would enter the terrain, and Hezbollah would not be re-supplied. Yet, today, Hezbollah has restocked so completely, with the aid of Iran and Syria, that she is more heavily armed than she was in 2006.
Israel cannot control the borders throughout Lebanon and therefore is stymied in relying on the United Nations to do what the UN never could achieve. By contrast, Israel can prevent Gaza from being stockpiled similarly, and she is obligated to protect her citizens.. In January 2002, a cargo ship the Karin-A, sailed for Gaza, ostensibly loaded with civilian supplies – food, flowers, children’s books. When Israel’s navy boarded the ship in the Red Sea, they instead found the vessel loaded chock-full with rockets, grenades, and anti-tank missiles. That is why Israel blockades and needs to blockade Gaza.
Even so, despite nonsensical slanders against Israel, ample food supplies are evident throughout Gaza. Medical supplies get through. So do fancy restaurants and Olympic-sized swimming pools.
When college youngsters decide that it would be romantic to get out their Ché Guevara t-shirts and play “freedom fighter” – maybe even get some great cell phone photos for friends, some great tweets, and even a “How-I-Spent-My-Summer” experience to “ace” a college termpaper back home for their class in “The Politics of Liberation” – they need to understand that Israel is not on summer break.
Next time, try Darfur.
Showing posts with label abbas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abbas. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Thursday, June 4, 2009
PRESIDENT OBAMA'S GREAT PYRAMID SCHEME: The Two-State Solution as Final Solution
The Obama Administration has endeavored to move American Mideast policy away from a traditional understanding of Israel's security concerns and historic rights, towards a view that renders undue currency towards Mideast political theories that have not served America well, aimed more at appeasing terrorism than at assuring justice.
My extensive commentary on the subject may be found at: http://rabbidov.com/twostate.htm
After you have read it, you may circulate it as you wish, even reprinting the text rather than merely forwarding the link, but you are limited only by these two caveats: (i) you may not edit the text; (ii) the link must appear with any forwarding you do.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Why I Love Israel and Am Proud to Be Judged by Her Standards
Because I am Jewish, of course, I love Israel. It is my cultural patrimony, even as America, the land of my birth and that of my parents, is the country I love and to which I owe my allegiance. In fact, after I lived in Israel for two years during my 30s, I came back to America more appreciative than ever for the unique things and values that America has given me. The English language and the puns within it. The kinds of opportunities that are unique to this great land. Broad-based free enterprise.
The Yankees. The Mets. The Giants. The Jets.
The Lakers.
But, as a Jew, I am inevitably bound culturally with Israel. And – like it or not – I am judged by my fellow Americans, to one degree or another, by what Israel does. And that, too, is why I am so proud of Israel. I am so proud that people judge me – an American – by what Israel does. By what she is. And by what she does not do. And by what she is not.
In the middle of the Middle East – where modern-day terror has its birthplace and its breadbasket – Israel is an island of freedom, free speech, democracy. Anyone can say whatever he or she wants. The one country in the entire Middle East where there is freedom -- and safety in freedom.
The Jewish religion is protected there, and so are all other religions. Can you imagine a Jew being free and safe in Saudi Arabia? Heck, Jews and Christians are not even allowed to set foot in Mecca. No Mecca for us there.
In all of world history, which has seen so many countries pull free people out of Africa to enslave them, only one country ever risked its citizens’ lives in covert operations aimed at extricating African slaves from Africa to set them free as full citizens in their land: Israel. When Vietnamese “boat people” risked their very lives in rickety crafts on the high seas in a desperate effort to escape Communism and totalitarianism, Israel opened its doors and rescued survivors, who today are third generation Vietnamese Israelis.
In Israel there is hope, even though all the surrounding populations aim their weapons at her. Her northern border is not Canada but the terrorist Hezbollah who rain rockets on her. Her southern border is not Mexico but the terrorist Hamas who swear to destroy Israel. And yet, somehow, Israelis keep believing in peace. No one in her region is willing to negotiate a sincere peace with her, yet she remains a nation ever-optimistic that the terrorists someday will change course. From the Palestine Authority to Hamas to Hezbollah, the leaders of those polities manipulate their children, through corrupted kids’ television shows and summer camps and hateful school texts, to hate the Jews next door. And yet Israel teaches peace and mutual acceptance, preparing its children for the day when the others stop hating.
I am so proud to be judged by the standards that Israel has set.
The Yankees. The Mets. The Giants. The Jets.
The Lakers.
But, as a Jew, I am inevitably bound culturally with Israel. And – like it or not – I am judged by my fellow Americans, to one degree or another, by what Israel does. And that, too, is why I am so proud of Israel. I am so proud that people judge me – an American – by what Israel does. By what she is. And by what she does not do. And by what she is not.
In the middle of the Middle East – where modern-day terror has its birthplace and its breadbasket – Israel is an island of freedom, free speech, democracy. Anyone can say whatever he or she wants. The one country in the entire Middle East where there is freedom -- and safety in freedom.
The Jewish religion is protected there, and so are all other religions. Can you imagine a Jew being free and safe in Saudi Arabia? Heck, Jews and Christians are not even allowed to set foot in Mecca. No Mecca for us there.
In all of world history, which has seen so many countries pull free people out of Africa to enslave them, only one country ever risked its citizens’ lives in covert operations aimed at extricating African slaves from Africa to set them free as full citizens in their land: Israel. When Vietnamese “boat people” risked their very lives in rickety crafts on the high seas in a desperate effort to escape Communism and totalitarianism, Israel opened its doors and rescued survivors, who today are third generation Vietnamese Israelis.
In Israel there is hope, even though all the surrounding populations aim their weapons at her. Her northern border is not Canada but the terrorist Hezbollah who rain rockets on her. Her southern border is not Mexico but the terrorist Hamas who swear to destroy Israel. And yet, somehow, Israelis keep believing in peace. No one in her region is willing to negotiate a sincere peace with her, yet she remains a nation ever-optimistic that the terrorists someday will change course. From the Palestine Authority to Hamas to Hezbollah, the leaders of those polities manipulate their children, through corrupted kids’ television shows and summer camps and hateful school texts, to hate the Jews next door. And yet Israel teaches peace and mutual acceptance, preparing its children for the day when the others stop hating.
I am so proud to be judged by the standards that Israel has set.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Israel's Usual Gang of Idiots: Withdraw from Reality
February 12, 2008 11:50 a.m.
The Usual Gang of Idiots . . . We Told You So
Amid condemnation throughout the world against Israel unfairly cutting off utility services to Gaza, as Israel has done from time to time in its pathetically inadequate response to the incessant Hamas rocketing of Sderot, it is forgotten that the rocketing continues unabated. Israel gave up Gaza unilaterally, and Israel’s leaders congratulated themselves on the brilliance of their step toward peace. “What a concept!” they arrogantly boasted. “We just got up and left. And now we have no more problems from Gaza.”
Yes. And Hamas soon took Gaza from Abbas, almost as methodically and predictably as a fullback taking a hand-off from a quarterback in a straight draw play. For those who have been keeping score, the reign of terror never has rained more torrentially. The same cast of characters – when I was younger, Mad Magazine used to refer to its crew as the “usual gang of idiots,” but they knew what they were doing – left Southern Lebanon unilaterally with no safeguards to prevent Nasrallah from converting the area into a Hezbollah rocket garden. And the same characters, the usual gang of idiots, now pursue their lame “two-state solution” for Judea-Samaria as the murderous Abbas and his surrogate terrorist con men take advantage of George Bush’s desperate need to get the news focus away from the subprime mortgage crisis, the looming recession, oil prices, and stalemates in Iraq -- while also manipulating Olmert’s desperate desire to keep people focused on anything other than Olmert and his own incompetence. (With all the official governmental investigations underway against Olmert, it is amazing that anyone can con him. It’s like the movie “The Sting,” where only the Paul Newman character can out-con Robert Shaw’s Doyle Lonigan.)
So, Olmert’s plan to slowly hand over parts of Judea and Samaria to Abbas – who inexorably will be overthrown by Hamas on the next set of downs – would condemn Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to the kind of incessant rocketing from the east that Haifa now faces when Nasrallah goes on frenzy up north, and that Sderot lives under every day. When Ehud Barak – Israel’s least effective Prime Minister ever – gave up South Lebanon unilaterally, he assured that he had brought peace. “What a concept! We just got up and left. No more problems.” When Sharon gave up Gaza unilaterally, he assured that he had brought peace. “What a concept! We just got up and left. No more problems.” Both foolishly said that, if the Arabs go into the evacuated areas and turn them into terror zones, Israel simply could and would march right back in and take the land back. Nice and simple. So, nothing to worry about. What a concept!
Turns out they can’t. Israel can’t just march right back in, nice and simple, and turn back the clock. They can’t even turn off the electric. If the Leftists have an organization still named “Peace Now,” our side ought to form an organization called “We Told You So.”
We told you so.
In the world press, when the dozens of rockets land each day in Sderot, the reports pooh-pooh the event. “Twenty rockets fell, but no one was injured.” Or – “Twenty rockets fell, but no one was killed. Only two injuries are reported.” Read below to understand what it means when “only two injuries are reported.”
From the Jerusalem Post of February 11, 2008, written by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1202742131362&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
The Usual Gang of Idiots . . . We Told You So
Amid condemnation throughout the world against Israel unfairly cutting off utility services to Gaza, as Israel has done from time to time in its pathetically inadequate response to the incessant Hamas rocketing of Sderot, it is forgotten that the rocketing continues unabated. Israel gave up Gaza unilaterally, and Israel’s leaders congratulated themselves on the brilliance of their step toward peace. “What a concept!” they arrogantly boasted. “We just got up and left. And now we have no more problems from Gaza.”
Yes. And Hamas soon took Gaza from Abbas, almost as methodically and predictably as a fullback taking a hand-off from a quarterback in a straight draw play. For those who have been keeping score, the reign of terror never has rained more torrentially. The same cast of characters – when I was younger, Mad Magazine used to refer to its crew as the “usual gang of idiots,” but they knew what they were doing – left Southern Lebanon unilaterally with no safeguards to prevent Nasrallah from converting the area into a Hezbollah rocket garden. And the same characters, the usual gang of idiots, now pursue their lame “two-state solution” for Judea-Samaria as the murderous Abbas and his surrogate terrorist con men take advantage of George Bush’s desperate need to get the news focus away from the subprime mortgage crisis, the looming recession, oil prices, and stalemates in Iraq -- while also manipulating Olmert’s desperate desire to keep people focused on anything other than Olmert and his own incompetence. (With all the official governmental investigations underway against Olmert, it is amazing that anyone can con him. It’s like the movie “The Sting,” where only the Paul Newman character can out-con Robert Shaw’s Doyle Lonigan.)
So, Olmert’s plan to slowly hand over parts of Judea and Samaria to Abbas – who inexorably will be overthrown by Hamas on the next set of downs – would condemn Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to the kind of incessant rocketing from the east that Haifa now faces when Nasrallah goes on frenzy up north, and that Sderot lives under every day. When Ehud Barak – Israel’s least effective Prime Minister ever – gave up South Lebanon unilaterally, he assured that he had brought peace. “What a concept! We just got up and left. No more problems.” When Sharon gave up Gaza unilaterally, he assured that he had brought peace. “What a concept! We just got up and left. No more problems.” Both foolishly said that, if the Arabs go into the evacuated areas and turn them into terror zones, Israel simply could and would march right back in and take the land back. Nice and simple. So, nothing to worry about. What a concept!
Turns out they can’t. Israel can’t just march right back in, nice and simple, and turn back the clock. They can’t even turn off the electric. If the Leftists have an organization still named “Peace Now,” our side ought to form an organization called “We Told You So.”
We told you so.
In the world press, when the dozens of rockets land each day in Sderot, the reports pooh-pooh the event. “Twenty rockets fell, but no one was injured.” Or – “Twenty rockets fell, but no one was killed. Only two injuries are reported.” Read below to understand what it means when “only two injuries are reported.”
From the Jerusalem Post of February 11, 2008, written by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1202742131362&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
Brothers wounded by Kassam undergo more operations
Osher Twito, the eight-year-old Sderot boy who was very seriously wounded in a Kassam rocket attack over the weekend, underwent a second operation on his remaining leg at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer on Monday.
He remains intentionally anesthetized and respirated to minimize his pain.
His 19-year-old brother, Rami, was in good condition after he underwent a second operation on Monday as well. Although Rami was stable, Sheba officials said that both Osher and Rami would need to undergo more operations and rehabilitation to improve their functioning. The brothers were hurt when a Kassam rocket landed a few meters from where they were standing. They had gone out to buy a present for their father, whose birthday was on Monday.
On Sunday, Osher and Rami were transferred to Sheba on Sunday because Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, where they were first hospitalized, does not have the rehabilitation facilities that Osher requires.Sheba doctors still couldn't say on Monday whether Osher's remaining leg would have to be amputated or not, as there is always the threat of infection and the main artery in the ankle was damaged.
Meanwhile, the brothers and their parents were visited at Sheba on Monday by the Shabu family from Kiryat Shmona. The Shabus' son had lost a leg in a rocket attack in the North, and they wanted to reassure the Twitos that rehabilitation was possible even after such a traumatic event.
The family also received visits from outgoing mayor of Sderot, Eli Moyal, and former defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai. On Sunday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni visited them at Sheba.
We're Right and The Whole World Is Wrong
We're Right, the Whole World's Wrong
From The Forward (April 19, 2002)
The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.
We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration?
After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us?
Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?
The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?
The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan.
Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.
We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs.
Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?
Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.
We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.
Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what.
We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria.
Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.
Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney, is a board member of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council's Jewish Community Relations Committee and national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is the author of "General Sharon's War Against Time Magazine."
From The Forward (April 19, 2002)
"The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw. I don't think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong."At this moment in time, many Jews who love and support Israel hear the soft voice within, asking the question to which Kofi Annan recently alluded in Madrid: Can we alone be right, while the whole world around is wrong?
— Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary General, speaking in Madrid, Spain
The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.
We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration?
After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us?
Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?
The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?
The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan.
Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.
We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs.
Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?
Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.
We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.
Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what.
We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria.
Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.
Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney, is a board member of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council's Jewish Community Relations Committee and national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is the author of "General Sharon's War Against Time Magazine."
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Israel Has Only One Option
A Country With Only One Option
When the thunderous claps in Heaven jolted Orange County out of our rooms a few Sunday mornings ago, I thought of Israel. When the earth – almost simultaneously – thundered below our feet in a 3.8 earthquake, I thought of Israel. What must it be like to live in Nahariyah, Tz’fat, Ashdod, or Haifa – and be jolted out of bed all night and out of one’s home all day by incessant thunder and earthquake?
That Sunday morning’s earth-shaking rattlings in Orange County were safe thunder and earthquakes. By contrast, the storm of Hezbollah rockets shaking Israel’s population centers aims to destroy. They are the rockets that maim and wound and murder. They are aimed without target, without discrimination – just aimed at Jewish civilian population centers. They are not targeted at a military objective but are lobbed at Jewish civilian centers – small villages, mid-sized towns, and great urban centers like Haifa. That is the strange military target of the enemy – a Hitler-like objective solely to murder Jews – any Jews, wherever the rocket may land. Just to murder Jews. Regardless of political affiliation, ethnic origin, or religious identity. Whether socialist Ashkenazim in “Red Haifa,” Sephardic immigrants from Morocco living in Kiryat Shmonah, Ethiopian Jews in Ashdod, Orthodox Hassidim in Tz’fat – or even the fools of Neturei Karta. Just to murder Jews.
For Israel, there are no options in this new Arab war aimed once again at driving Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. If she relents, then the Jewish State cannot continue as a viable entity.
If Israel did not want peace with Arabs – and for the people of Lebanon -- she would not have resisted for six years the growing need to strike at Hezbollah and to stop the build-up of anti-personnel weapons amassed along her northern border. Israel waited patiently and nervously for the Government of Lebanon to rein in a growing terrorist state-within-a-state. Even the City of Los Angeles did not allow the Symbionese Liberation Army and General Cinque to operate unfettered, waging war and recruiting troops. The City of Angels obliterated the SLA.
Nor did America allow a separate army and government to establish itself in Dixie during the Lincoln Years. Tens of thousands of Americans were killed in twenty minutes at Cold Harbor. More Americans were killed in one day at Antietam than in any other day in history up to that time. More Americans died in two days at Shiloh than during any other two days. More died in three days at Gettysburg than ever before died in three days. General Sherman marched against civilians – Americans – and incinerated the South; yet, great American heroes like Lincoln and Grant accepted the human cost of war. Sherman was medaled, not court-martialed. When a country fights for her survival as a country, she fights to survive.
The Beirut Government sat by, while Hezbollah openly built its infrastructure for terror amid the women and children of South Lebanon. Even as the Palestinian Authority abided the emergence of Hamas as a bona fide force within the areas of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza on land that would become a testing grounds for Yasser Arafat to demonstrate civility. Thus, Hezbollah and Hamas armed for years, finally dispatching terrorists brazenly across internationally recognized peaceful borders into Israel.
Hezbollah now has 12,000 missiles aimed randomly at Jewish population centers in Israel. At the rate of the 100 rockets they launch against Israel every day, Hezbollah can keep the murder and terror going non-stop for the next 120 days – four months. Iran and Syria stand ready to resupply, if only they can access the bridges and highways by which to transport their tools of mass death. America would not abide such a threat from either of our borders. No country would.
Worse, Hezbollah and Hamas stage their rockets and rocket launchers amid their civilian population. And it is a willing and supportive civilian population. In Gaza, the people voted for Hamas – this is not a peaceful population whose dreams for peace and coexistence have been hijacked by cruel generals in a midnight military coup. Rather, with Jimmy Carter testifying to their volition, this is a population who freely selected Hamas as their leadership. How can
Israel remove rockets and ground missiles that literally are based in garages of homes and in condominium complexes, in hospitals and in school buildings, amid children and moms who endorse the tactic of their role as human shield for terror? Yet how can Israel dare resist the need to take out the missiles?
How tragic that a new enemy has arisen against Western civilization – from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah – posing a new threat for a new age. Terror imposed by fascists within Islam aims to destroy civilians, women, children, male non-combatants – from the World Trade Center to the vacation hotels of Bali to the centers of Western civilian population. Do they represent the essence and core of Islam as a religion? Many of us just do not know – we would like to think not, but we just don’t know. We are not studied in Islam, so we listen genuinely for the voices of peace, the spokespersons for coexistence and mutual understanding. But we do not hear the voices of reproach, condemning the hijacking of a religion. So we do not know whether the faith has been hijacked or whether the terror is part of the faith, at least in some of its denominations overseas. But we do know that, in return for abandoning parts of Judea and Samaria to Yasser Arafat, Israel was rewarded with a government-authorized press that teaches people to hate Jews, a school system that teaches children to hate Jews, street signs named for people who murdered Jews, a summer camp program that trains children to hate Jews, a mass media of television and radio and newspapers that promote the hatred of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
Similarly, in return for abandoning Gaza unilaterally to Hamas, as urged by the present Bush Administration and implemented by the Sharon Government, Israel has been rewarded with a population on her southwestern border that democratically has elected terrorists to direct their affairs of state and convert their national agenda from building infrastructure and attending to social welfare to kidnapping innocents across the border and raining katyushas on civilians vacationing in Ashdod, launching the rockets from the Jewish homes and farms that Israel abandoned. We know that, in return for Ehud Barak unilaterally abandoning the security buffer in Southern Lebanon, as urged on him by the Clinton Administration, we now have an implacable enemy on Israel’s northern border, such as Israel never quite has experienced before. An enemy entrenched in a population that refuses to relinquish the human shield it provides to terrorists who mine the land, train rockets on Israel’s urban centers, and scheme to ambush and kidnap in cross-border forays.
For Israel there is no choice. We have seen what has become of the Maronite Christian population of Lebanon, the Christian population of Sudan, the Coptic Christian population of Egypt, the Christian populations of Iraq and Syria. We have seen what Sunnis do to Shiites every day,. and what Shiites do to Sunnis every day. It is not the way of the West but the way of intolerance and destruction. From the persecution of Berbers in Algeria to the hatred against Baluchis in Iran, it is an intolerance we have not seen since the Dark Ages. And, given what the terrorists to do to Christians – and what they do to each other – Israel knows what fate she, a state of Jews, would suffer if she falters now.
She has no choice but to live. And may she have the strength, with our support, to resist external political pressures that may aim in the future at other of her Jewish communities amid the heartland of our patrimony in Eretz Yisrael.
When the thunderous claps in Heaven jolted Orange County out of our rooms a few Sunday mornings ago, I thought of Israel. When the earth – almost simultaneously – thundered below our feet in a 3.8 earthquake, I thought of Israel. What must it be like to live in Nahariyah, Tz’fat, Ashdod, or Haifa – and be jolted out of bed all night and out of one’s home all day by incessant thunder and earthquake?
That Sunday morning’s earth-shaking rattlings in Orange County were safe thunder and earthquakes. By contrast, the storm of Hezbollah rockets shaking Israel’s population centers aims to destroy. They are the rockets that maim and wound and murder. They are aimed without target, without discrimination – just aimed at Jewish civilian population centers. They are not targeted at a military objective but are lobbed at Jewish civilian centers – small villages, mid-sized towns, and great urban centers like Haifa. That is the strange military target of the enemy – a Hitler-like objective solely to murder Jews – any Jews, wherever the rocket may land. Just to murder Jews. Regardless of political affiliation, ethnic origin, or religious identity. Whether socialist Ashkenazim in “Red Haifa,” Sephardic immigrants from Morocco living in Kiryat Shmonah, Ethiopian Jews in Ashdod, Orthodox Hassidim in Tz’fat – or even the fools of Neturei Karta. Just to murder Jews.
For Israel, there are no options in this new Arab war aimed once again at driving Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. If she relents, then the Jewish State cannot continue as a viable entity.
If Israel did not want peace with Arabs – and for the people of Lebanon -- she would not have resisted for six years the growing need to strike at Hezbollah and to stop the build-up of anti-personnel weapons amassed along her northern border. Israel waited patiently and nervously for the Government of Lebanon to rein in a growing terrorist state-within-a-state. Even the City of Los Angeles did not allow the Symbionese Liberation Army and General Cinque to operate unfettered, waging war and recruiting troops. The City of Angels obliterated the SLA.
Nor did America allow a separate army and government to establish itself in Dixie during the Lincoln Years. Tens of thousands of Americans were killed in twenty minutes at Cold Harbor. More Americans were killed in one day at Antietam than in any other day in history up to that time. More Americans died in two days at Shiloh than during any other two days. More died in three days at Gettysburg than ever before died in three days. General Sherman marched against civilians – Americans – and incinerated the South; yet, great American heroes like Lincoln and Grant accepted the human cost of war. Sherman was medaled, not court-martialed. When a country fights for her survival as a country, she fights to survive.
The Beirut Government sat by, while Hezbollah openly built its infrastructure for terror amid the women and children of South Lebanon. Even as the Palestinian Authority abided the emergence of Hamas as a bona fide force within the areas of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza on land that would become a testing grounds for Yasser Arafat to demonstrate civility. Thus, Hezbollah and Hamas armed for years, finally dispatching terrorists brazenly across internationally recognized peaceful borders into Israel.
Hezbollah now has 12,000 missiles aimed randomly at Jewish population centers in Israel. At the rate of the 100 rockets they launch against Israel every day, Hezbollah can keep the murder and terror going non-stop for the next 120 days – four months. Iran and Syria stand ready to resupply, if only they can access the bridges and highways by which to transport their tools of mass death. America would not abide such a threat from either of our borders. No country would.
Worse, Hezbollah and Hamas stage their rockets and rocket launchers amid their civilian population. And it is a willing and supportive civilian population. In Gaza, the people voted for Hamas – this is not a peaceful population whose dreams for peace and coexistence have been hijacked by cruel generals in a midnight military coup. Rather, with Jimmy Carter testifying to their volition, this is a population who freely selected Hamas as their leadership. How can
Israel remove rockets and ground missiles that literally are based in garages of homes and in condominium complexes, in hospitals and in school buildings, amid children and moms who endorse the tactic of their role as human shield for terror? Yet how can Israel dare resist the need to take out the missiles?
How tragic that a new enemy has arisen against Western civilization – from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah – posing a new threat for a new age. Terror imposed by fascists within Islam aims to destroy civilians, women, children, male non-combatants – from the World Trade Center to the vacation hotels of Bali to the centers of Western civilian population. Do they represent the essence and core of Islam as a religion? Many of us just do not know – we would like to think not, but we just don’t know. We are not studied in Islam, so we listen genuinely for the voices of peace, the spokespersons for coexistence and mutual understanding. But we do not hear the voices of reproach, condemning the hijacking of a religion. So we do not know whether the faith has been hijacked or whether the terror is part of the faith, at least in some of its denominations overseas. But we do know that, in return for abandoning parts of Judea and Samaria to Yasser Arafat, Israel was rewarded with a government-authorized press that teaches people to hate Jews, a school system that teaches children to hate Jews, street signs named for people who murdered Jews, a summer camp program that trains children to hate Jews, a mass media of television and radio and newspapers that promote the hatred of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
Similarly, in return for abandoning Gaza unilaterally to Hamas, as urged by the present Bush Administration and implemented by the Sharon Government, Israel has been rewarded with a population on her southwestern border that democratically has elected terrorists to direct their affairs of state and convert their national agenda from building infrastructure and attending to social welfare to kidnapping innocents across the border and raining katyushas on civilians vacationing in Ashdod, launching the rockets from the Jewish homes and farms that Israel abandoned. We know that, in return for Ehud Barak unilaterally abandoning the security buffer in Southern Lebanon, as urged on him by the Clinton Administration, we now have an implacable enemy on Israel’s northern border, such as Israel never quite has experienced before. An enemy entrenched in a population that refuses to relinquish the human shield it provides to terrorists who mine the land, train rockets on Israel’s urban centers, and scheme to ambush and kidnap in cross-border forays.
For Israel there is no choice. We have seen what has become of the Maronite Christian population of Lebanon, the Christian population of Sudan, the Coptic Christian population of Egypt, the Christian populations of Iraq and Syria. We have seen what Sunnis do to Shiites every day,. and what Shiites do to Sunnis every day. It is not the way of the West but the way of intolerance and destruction. From the persecution of Berbers in Algeria to the hatred against Baluchis in Iran, it is an intolerance we have not seen since the Dark Ages. And, given what the terrorists to do to Christians – and what they do to each other – Israel knows what fate she, a state of Jews, would suffer if she falters now.
She has no choice but to live. And may she have the strength, with our support, to resist external political pressures that may aim in the future at other of her Jewish communities amid the heartland of our patrimony in Eretz Yisrael.
Mahmoud Abbas is Phony: Why Negotiate with Him?
No Terms of Negotiation: If he can’t control Hamas and terrorism,
what’s the point of negotiating with him?
Modified from an article published on National Review Online (June 12, 2002)
I was a big-firm business-litigation attorney for nearly a decade. My favorite case matters are those that promptly move towards a negotiated settlement between or among parties who each emerge with something constructive, resulting in a "win-win" outcome. After the parties negotiate their agreement, we attorneys document the settlement and the parties' respective concessions. Invariably, we insert into each settlement agreement a paragraph that seems so obvious, that an attorney omitting it could risk a claim of malpractice:
Which brings us to the Middle East and Mahmoud Abbas. We may leave for another day the question of whether the "Palestinian people" actually are Arabs in Judea and Samaria, Arabs in Jordan, or the Jews of Israel. Too, we may leave for another day the question of why Arabs demand "self-determination" for Abbas's followers, even as the Arabs of Algeria deny self-determination for Berbers, the Arabs of Iraq deny self-determination for Kurds, the Egyptians oppress the Copts, the Iranians repress the Bahais and Baluchis, and the Sudanese Muslims enslave Black Christians. For the focus here is more basic:
Even if Abbas were elected legitimately, even if his "people" deserve a place at a negotiation table, it remains preposterous to expect Israel to negotiate with a guy whose best excuse for being at the table is "Don't blame me for Hamas terrorism being incubated within my Authority because I cannot control it." If he is not the instigator but the victim of a structure of terrorism intricately rooted into the soul of Palestinian Arab society and uncontrollable, then there is no point negotiating peace with him. By his proponents' own words, at best he intends well but cannot deliver peace. If Abbas cannot deliver the goods, then Israel cannot reasonably be expected to offer him concessions and abandon preciously guarded rights in return for peace promises and treaties that are destined to fail ab initio because he lacks enforcement authority.
In the end, Abbas finally has maneuvered himself out of the playing field. If he cannot control the terrorism of Hamas, it is pointless to negotiate with him.
what’s the point of negotiating with him?
Modified from an article published on National Review Online (June 12, 2002)
I was a big-firm business-litigation attorney for nearly a decade. My favorite case matters are those that promptly move towards a negotiated settlement between or among parties who each emerge with something constructive, resulting in a "win-win" outcome. After the parties negotiate their agreement, we attorneys document the settlement and the parties' respective concessions. Invariably, we insert into each settlement agreement a paragraph that seems so obvious, that an attorney omitting it could risk a claim of malpractice:
In plain talk, each party to the agreement affirms that he or she has the authority to negotiate the agreement, the authority to offer concessions in return for counter-concessions, and the authority to enforce the concessions and promises he makes. This seems manifestly sensible, even obvious: Why would a party offer concessions and bargain away claimed rights if the adversary cannot deliver counter-concessions he promises?Warranty of Authority to Execute Agreement. Each person executing this Agreement on behalf of an entity or individual and/or in a specified capacity hereby warrants and represents that he or she has been granted the power and authority to make and enter into the agreements and releases contained herein for said entity or individual in the capacity set forth herein, and that this Agreement will be duly authorized, executed, and delivered by such entity or individual, and at the time of delivery will constitute legal, valid, and binding obligations of such entity or individual and does not and at the time of
delivery will not violate any provisions of any law, agreement, or judicial
order to which such entity or individual is a party or is subject.
Which brings us to the Middle East and Mahmoud Abbas. We may leave for another day the question of whether the "Palestinian people" actually are Arabs in Judea and Samaria, Arabs in Jordan, or the Jews of Israel. Too, we may leave for another day the question of why Arabs demand "self-determination" for Abbas's followers, even as the Arabs of Algeria deny self-determination for Berbers, the Arabs of Iraq deny self-determination for Kurds, the Egyptians oppress the Copts, the Iranians repress the Bahais and Baluchis, and the Sudanese Muslims enslave Black Christians. For the focus here is more basic:
Even if Abbas were elected legitimately, even if his "people" deserve a place at a negotiation table, it remains preposterous to expect Israel to negotiate with a guy whose best excuse for being at the table is "Don't blame me for Hamas terrorism being incubated within my Authority because I cannot control it." If he is not the instigator but the victim of a structure of terrorism intricately rooted into the soul of Palestinian Arab society and uncontrollable, then there is no point negotiating peace with him. By his proponents' own words, at best he intends well but cannot deliver peace. If Abbas cannot deliver the goods, then Israel cannot reasonably be expected to offer him concessions and abandon preciously guarded rights in return for peace promises and treaties that are destined to fail ab initio because he lacks enforcement authority.
In the end, Abbas finally has maneuvered himself out of the playing field. If he cannot control the terrorism of Hamas, it is pointless to negotiate with him.
Day Like Any Other:What in the World Was Going On?
A Day Like Any Other: What in the world was going on?
From National Review Online (May 15, 2002)
Sunday, May 5, 2002 -- it seemed a day like any other. The world was concerned about violence in the Middle East. Secretary of State Colin Powell opined on talk shows that Israel must negotiate new agreements with Palestine Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Arafat has served more than 30 years at the head of an international gangster movement that invented both airplane hijackings and pedestrian suicide bombings. On September 11, 19 Arab Muslim terrorists, 15 of them Saudi Arabians, synthesized Arafat's two innovations at the World Trade Center towers and at the Pentagon. Arafat did not abandon terrorism even after being enticed, in 1993, with the sovereignty embodied in his Palestinian Authority. Rather, he spent the next eight years coordinating television images, radio announcements, schoolbooks, and summer camps to train a generation of schoolchildren to aspire to human sacrifice. But on that Sunday, as on any other day, Secretary Powell spoke of Arafat's potential as peacemaker.
Attention also focused on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who arrived in Washington, D.C., to show President Bush a 103-page dossier of documents uncovered during Israel's recent Operation Defensive Shield. The dossier proves Arafat's continued central role in directing and funding terrorism. The evidence is so damning that Arafat's spinmeisters have had to resort to calling it a forgery. They can fabricate no other defense.
That Sunday, the Western world and its news media focused on Israel-Arab tensions. The United Nations Security Council continued debating the "Jenin massacre" that several prominent Western newspapers and international human-rights organizations unanimously have determined never actually happened. News bulletins flowed, throughout the day, from the Bethlehem standoff over the release of several wanted gunmen — at least two of them terrorists who murdered an American architect. The terrorists were still holding monks, nuns, and a sacred church itself hostage.
But what in the world was going on? The question is literal. That is, what was going on elsewhere in the world, on this day that seemed like any other?
In Colombia, an internecine civil war continued on that Sunday. That war is not 19 months old, not 38 months old. Rather, it is 38 years old, and 3,500 civilians are murdered in its crossfire every year. On that Sunday — while the world fretted about a group of Arafat-backed gunmen hiding in the Church of the Nativity — a group of terrified mothers, young children, and babies fled desperately from terrorists to the sanctuary of a Catholic church in Bojaya, some 58 miles south of Quibdo, capital of the Colombian state of Choco. Hot on their trail were armed rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The United Nations had "alerted" the Colombian government several weeks earlier that terrorism could erupt near Quibdo. The world may have watched Israeli soldiers maintain guard patiently through the day, but no one seems to have noticed what happened at that other church, in Bojaya. There was no Vatican negotiator. International peace activists did not rush in to protect the noncombatants. No one spoke out or noticed as FARC rebels pounded the holy shrine, firing homemade mortars into the church, murdering at least 40 civilians. In all, 108 non-combatants were slain in Colombia that day. According to Colombian President Andres Pastrana, "What happened here was genocide on the part of the FARC." Indeed, it was a "Jenin massacre" and a "Bethlehem Church nightmare" rolled into one. But not a page-one story for Monday.
Perhaps no one at CNN or the Los Angeles Times — which has a photographer in the Church of the Nativity — stopped to ask why this civil war of daily massacres gets buried daily to make room for a hapless search in Jenin for a massacre that never happened. The United Nations, however, did note the Bojaya Church Massacre. But instead of assembling a fact-finding team, it opted literally for a press statement: "It is lamentable that the government authorities ignored the early warning." As of this writing, the Security Council has not yet dispatched Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Sadako Ogata, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or Martti Ahtisaari, former head of the European Union, to investigate. Because that Sunday was like any other day.
Alternatively, Kofi Annan's fact-finders could have been sent to the Sudan-Uganda border. Instead of searching for nonexistent mass graves in Jenin, they would have found a massacre in broad daylight today. A group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been fighting for several years to replace Uganda's constitution with the Ten Commandments. Toward that end, they have massacred thousands of civilians and exiled hundreds of thousands of Ugandans from their homes. The conflict is barely reported. These Decalogue activists — many news organs refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists as "activists" — ironically have been supported through most of their insurgency by neighboring Sudan's Islamic theocracy, and they have based themselves there. However, under an agreement reached by Sudan and Uganda, on that Sunday it was the Ugandan government's turn to massacre the LRA, during a bloody incursion into Sudanese territory. In a quote that did not push Jenin off the front pages of any daily worth its newsprint, Ugandan Major Shaban Bantariza told reporters on the 5th: "We have killed these rebels. Their bodies are being picked from the bushes by our soldiers. We are counting them one by one and the number has now reached 50." Nigeria set out with greater expectations for a peaceful Sunday, marked by freedom's hallmark: democratic primary elections. Unfortunately, a disagreement arose in the city of Noj, some 200 miles northeast of the capital in Abuja — between the Yorubas of Eto-Baba in the south and the Beroms and Hausas of the north — over where to conduct the balloting. Soon, the vying factions of President Olusegun Obasanjo's ruling People's Democratic Party flooded the streets to resolve the question with knives and machetes. At least 20 civilians were slain, many charred beyond recognition, and the city's chief medical officer, Daniel Iya, spoke of "mass casualties." For his own safety, however, he refused to disclose exact casualty numbers.
Algeria also had some election fallout on that Sunday. Elections were canceled in 1992, and the disgruntled have massacred 120,000 noncombatants since then, averaging a thousand murdered civilians a month. Over the past four months alone, while the world has searched for those 500 bodies Arafat's propagandists allege repose in Jenin, 400 civilians have been massacred in the open in Algeria. On that Sunday, 31 more innocents were slaughtered there by Islamic militants. Twenty were murdered in Ksar-Chellala, near the Tiaret region, about 212 miles west of the nation's capital. Eleven were slain in Tiaret. All fingers pointed towards the Armed Islamic Group, Algeria's premier Islamic terrorist gang, but no one claimed responsibility. Perhaps the United Nations will investigate soon.
What in the world was going on that Sunday? From the State Department to the United Nations, nabobs and pundits alike debated what to do about Jenin, Sharon, and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. It was a day like any other day.
From National Review Online (May 15, 2002)
Sunday, May 5, 2002 -- it seemed a day like any other. The world was concerned about violence in the Middle East. Secretary of State Colin Powell opined on talk shows that Israel must negotiate new agreements with Palestine Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Arafat has served more than 30 years at the head of an international gangster movement that invented both airplane hijackings and pedestrian suicide bombings. On September 11, 19 Arab Muslim terrorists, 15 of them Saudi Arabians, synthesized Arafat's two innovations at the World Trade Center towers and at the Pentagon. Arafat did not abandon terrorism even after being enticed, in 1993, with the sovereignty embodied in his Palestinian Authority. Rather, he spent the next eight years coordinating television images, radio announcements, schoolbooks, and summer camps to train a generation of schoolchildren to aspire to human sacrifice. But on that Sunday, as on any other day, Secretary Powell spoke of Arafat's potential as peacemaker.
Attention also focused on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who arrived in Washington, D.C., to show President Bush a 103-page dossier of documents uncovered during Israel's recent Operation Defensive Shield. The dossier proves Arafat's continued central role in directing and funding terrorism. The evidence is so damning that Arafat's spinmeisters have had to resort to calling it a forgery. They can fabricate no other defense.
That Sunday, the Western world and its news media focused on Israel-Arab tensions. The United Nations Security Council continued debating the "Jenin massacre" that several prominent Western newspapers and international human-rights organizations unanimously have determined never actually happened. News bulletins flowed, throughout the day, from the Bethlehem standoff over the release of several wanted gunmen — at least two of them terrorists who murdered an American architect. The terrorists were still holding monks, nuns, and a sacred church itself hostage.
But what in the world was going on? The question is literal. That is, what was going on elsewhere in the world, on this day that seemed like any other?
In Colombia, an internecine civil war continued on that Sunday. That war is not 19 months old, not 38 months old. Rather, it is 38 years old, and 3,500 civilians are murdered in its crossfire every year. On that Sunday — while the world fretted about a group of Arafat-backed gunmen hiding in the Church of the Nativity — a group of terrified mothers, young children, and babies fled desperately from terrorists to the sanctuary of a Catholic church in Bojaya, some 58 miles south of Quibdo, capital of the Colombian state of Choco. Hot on their trail were armed rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The United Nations had "alerted" the Colombian government several weeks earlier that terrorism could erupt near Quibdo. The world may have watched Israeli soldiers maintain guard patiently through the day, but no one seems to have noticed what happened at that other church, in Bojaya. There was no Vatican negotiator. International peace activists did not rush in to protect the noncombatants. No one spoke out or noticed as FARC rebels pounded the holy shrine, firing homemade mortars into the church, murdering at least 40 civilians. In all, 108 non-combatants were slain in Colombia that day. According to Colombian President Andres Pastrana, "What happened here was genocide on the part of the FARC." Indeed, it was a "Jenin massacre" and a "Bethlehem Church nightmare" rolled into one. But not a page-one story for Monday.
Perhaps no one at CNN or the Los Angeles Times — which has a photographer in the Church of the Nativity — stopped to ask why this civil war of daily massacres gets buried daily to make room for a hapless search in Jenin for a massacre that never happened. The United Nations, however, did note the Bojaya Church Massacre. But instead of assembling a fact-finding team, it opted literally for a press statement: "It is lamentable that the government authorities ignored the early warning." As of this writing, the Security Council has not yet dispatched Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Sadako Ogata, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or Martti Ahtisaari, former head of the European Union, to investigate. Because that Sunday was like any other day.
Alternatively, Kofi Annan's fact-finders could have been sent to the Sudan-Uganda border. Instead of searching for nonexistent mass graves in Jenin, they would have found a massacre in broad daylight today. A group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been fighting for several years to replace Uganda's constitution with the Ten Commandments. Toward that end, they have massacred thousands of civilians and exiled hundreds of thousands of Ugandans from their homes. The conflict is barely reported. These Decalogue activists — many news organs refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists as "activists" — ironically have been supported through most of their insurgency by neighboring Sudan's Islamic theocracy, and they have based themselves there. However, under an agreement reached by Sudan and Uganda, on that Sunday it was the Ugandan government's turn to massacre the LRA, during a bloody incursion into Sudanese territory. In a quote that did not push Jenin off the front pages of any daily worth its newsprint, Ugandan Major Shaban Bantariza told reporters on the 5th: "We have killed these rebels. Their bodies are being picked from the bushes by our soldiers. We are counting them one by one and the number has now reached 50." Nigeria set out with greater expectations for a peaceful Sunday, marked by freedom's hallmark: democratic primary elections. Unfortunately, a disagreement arose in the city of Noj, some 200 miles northeast of the capital in Abuja — between the Yorubas of Eto-Baba in the south and the Beroms and Hausas of the north — over where to conduct the balloting. Soon, the vying factions of President Olusegun Obasanjo's ruling People's Democratic Party flooded the streets to resolve the question with knives and machetes. At least 20 civilians were slain, many charred beyond recognition, and the city's chief medical officer, Daniel Iya, spoke of "mass casualties." For his own safety, however, he refused to disclose exact casualty numbers.
Algeria also had some election fallout on that Sunday. Elections were canceled in 1992, and the disgruntled have massacred 120,000 noncombatants since then, averaging a thousand murdered civilians a month. Over the past four months alone, while the world has searched for those 500 bodies Arafat's propagandists allege repose in Jenin, 400 civilians have been massacred in the open in Algeria. On that Sunday, 31 more innocents were slaughtered there by Islamic militants. Twenty were murdered in Ksar-Chellala, near the Tiaret region, about 212 miles west of the nation's capital. Eleven were slain in Tiaret. All fingers pointed towards the Armed Islamic Group, Algeria's premier Islamic terrorist gang, but no one claimed responsibility. Perhaps the United Nations will investigate soon.
What in the world was going on that Sunday? From the State Department to the United Nations, nabobs and pundits alike debated what to do about Jenin, Sharon, and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. It was a day like any other day.
How Mahmoud Abbas Taught Arab Kids to Hate Jews
Sun 5/2/2004 8:56 PM
Palestinian Indoctrination to Children: Exceptionally Documented Video
http://www.isratv.com/video/filmpmwadsl.asx
I receive many e-mails of educational video clips regarding Israel. If you are as busy as I am, you probably find such clips too time-consuming and basic to justify watching them. On a typical busy day, these things are just-plain tedious. However -- one of my Shul members just sent me this 7-minute video clip from Itamar Marcus’s Palestine Media Watch, and it is an exceptional mini-documentary on what Arafat has done to a generation of Arab “Palestinian” children.
Marcus does not say so, but the conclusion I draw is that an entire generation of children has been poisoned. If there had been no Oslo Accord, and if Arafat had not been given the tools to indoctrinate a generation, there might have been a basis for hoping to make peace. But Arafat was given a nation, a national radio system, a national television system, and a national school system. With these tools, which Israel alone controlled before Oslo, he has mass-indoctrinated a generation of suicide bombers. There basically is no way to make peace with them now, nor for another 30-50 years. That is the Fruit of Oslo.
One approach is to give up and walk away, cut and run, hand Arafat the Gaza Strip and 95% of Judea and Samaria. Ariel Sharon, old and tired – or wily and cagy – opted for a wall and a plan to cut and run. The Labor Left – comprising maybe 30% of the Jews of Israel -- adopted it. As such, he passed the ball to the 60-70% of his Jewish countrymen who are perceived as the “nationalist camp.” He basically said, “Everyone in this country seems tired and ready to leave, so here is your chance to make it happen. Stop yelling at me. Our newspapers and media pundits tell me and the world that you want to give up Gaza and most of Judea and Samaria, so here it is. Unless you really want this country to hold on to Gaza and Judea and Samaria, we are cutting and running, just as the country’s newsmedia tell us you want us to do.”
He apparently convinced the White House that he had the votes to give it all up, much as Barak convinced Clinton that no one would make a big thing over East Jerusalem once Barak would decide to give it to Arafat . And today the most reliable opinion poll of all took place. It is clear that there really is an extraordinary majority among Jews in the country that is ready to draw the lessons of Oslo, long after Arafat is gone, long after Sharon is gone.
Find seven minutes and play the video clip. It is quite a thing to see. I had seen this before, in a longer version at a national banquet of Zionist organization of America; yet the seven minutes still was quite a thing to see.
Palestinian Indoctrination to Children: Exceptionally Documented Video
http://www.isratv.com/video/filmpmwadsl.asx
I receive many e-mails of educational video clips regarding Israel. If you are as busy as I am, you probably find such clips too time-consuming and basic to justify watching them. On a typical busy day, these things are just-plain tedious. However -- one of my Shul members just sent me this 7-minute video clip from Itamar Marcus’s Palestine Media Watch, and it is an exceptional mini-documentary on what Arafat has done to a generation of Arab “Palestinian” children.
Marcus does not say so, but the conclusion I draw is that an entire generation of children has been poisoned. If there had been no Oslo Accord, and if Arafat had not been given the tools to indoctrinate a generation, there might have been a basis for hoping to make peace. But Arafat was given a nation, a national radio system, a national television system, and a national school system. With these tools, which Israel alone controlled before Oslo, he has mass-indoctrinated a generation of suicide bombers. There basically is no way to make peace with them now, nor for another 30-50 years. That is the Fruit of Oslo.
One approach is to give up and walk away, cut and run, hand Arafat the Gaza Strip and 95% of Judea and Samaria. Ariel Sharon, old and tired – or wily and cagy – opted for a wall and a plan to cut and run. The Labor Left – comprising maybe 30% of the Jews of Israel -- adopted it. As such, he passed the ball to the 60-70% of his Jewish countrymen who are perceived as the “nationalist camp.” He basically said, “Everyone in this country seems tired and ready to leave, so here is your chance to make it happen. Stop yelling at me. Our newspapers and media pundits tell me and the world that you want to give up Gaza and most of Judea and Samaria, so here it is. Unless you really want this country to hold on to Gaza and Judea and Samaria, we are cutting and running, just as the country’s newsmedia tell us you want us to do.”
He apparently convinced the White House that he had the votes to give it all up, much as Barak convinced Clinton that no one would make a big thing over East Jerusalem once Barak would decide to give it to Arafat . And today the most reliable opinion poll of all took place. It is clear that there really is an extraordinary majority among Jews in the country that is ready to draw the lessons of Oslo, long after Arafat is gone, long after Sharon is gone.
Find seven minutes and play the video clip. It is quite a thing to see. I had seen this before, in a longer version at a national banquet of Zionist organization of America; yet the seven minutes still was quite a thing to see.
The Emptiness of Palestine Peace Treaties
Thu 4/25/2002 8:06 PM
Dusting Off an Historical Document
"Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, signed at Washington, D.C., on 28 September 1995," Article XIV (3), (4); Art. XXII (1), (2)
ARTICLE XIVThe Palestinian Police
1. The Council shall establish a strong police force. The duties, functions, structure, deployment and composition of the Palestinian Police, together with provisions regarding its equipment and operation, as well as rules of conduct, are set out in Annex I.
2. The Palestinian police force established under the Gaza-Jericho Agreement will be fully integrated into the Palestinian Police and will be subject to the provisions of this Agreement.
3. Except for the Palestinian Police and the Israeli military forces, no other armed forces shall be established or operate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
4. Except for the arms, ammunition and equipment of the Palestinian Police described in Annex I, and those of the Israeli military forces, no organization, group or individual in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip shall manufacture, sell, acquire, possess, import or otherwise introduce into the West Bank or the Gaza Strip any firearms, ammunition, weapons, explosives, gunpowder or any related equipment, unless otherwise provided for in Annex I.
CHAPTER 4- COOPERATION
ARTICLE XXIIRelations between Israel and the Council
1. Israel and the Council shall seek to foster mutual understanding and tolerance and shall accordingly abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other and, without derogating from the principle of freedom of expression, shall take legal measures to prevent such incitement by any organizations, groups or individuals within their jurisdiction.2. Israel and the Council will ensure that their respective educational systems contribute to the peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to peace in the entire region, and will refrain from the introduction of any motifs that could adversely affect the process of reconciliation.
Dusting Off an Historical Document
"Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, signed at Washington, D.C., on 28 September 1995," Article XIV (3), (4); Art. XXII (1), (2)
ARTICLE XIVThe Palestinian Police
1. The Council shall establish a strong police force. The duties, functions, structure, deployment and composition of the Palestinian Police, together with provisions regarding its equipment and operation, as well as rules of conduct, are set out in Annex I.
2. The Palestinian police force established under the Gaza-Jericho Agreement will be fully integrated into the Palestinian Police and will be subject to the provisions of this Agreement.
3. Except for the Palestinian Police and the Israeli military forces, no other armed forces shall be established or operate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
4. Except for the arms, ammunition and equipment of the Palestinian Police described in Annex I, and those of the Israeli military forces, no organization, group or individual in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip shall manufacture, sell, acquire, possess, import or otherwise introduce into the West Bank or the Gaza Strip any firearms, ammunition, weapons, explosives, gunpowder or any related equipment, unless otherwise provided for in Annex I.
CHAPTER 4- COOPERATION
ARTICLE XXIIRelations between Israel and the Council
1. Israel and the Council shall seek to foster mutual understanding and tolerance and shall accordingly abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other and, without derogating from the principle of freedom of expression, shall take legal measures to prevent such incitement by any organizations, groups or individuals within their jurisdiction.2. Israel and the Council will ensure that their respective educational systems contribute to the peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to peace in the entire region, and will refrain from the introduction of any motifs that could adversely affect the process of reconciliation.
Israel's Incompetent Foreign Policy: Stop Blaming Others
Friday, May 30, 2003 9:35 AM
Stop Blaming Others for Israel’s Incompetent Foreign Policy
I think there comes a time when we have to stop blaming Bush or Clinton or Carter for Israeli Government decisions that are antithetical to Israel's interests.
For 36 years since 1967, Israel continually has pulled the rug out from under the feet of her strongest supporters in America. I remember when Jack Kemp was supporting Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, even softly supporting annexation, then found himself being called for being more pro-Israel than the Israelis. When I was Likud National Director, I persuaded a very prominent and powerful Democrat Congressman in New Jersey to support Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria. I persuaded a Republican from Michigan who was active in the Christian Right. Much like James Inhofe, that wonderful United States Senator from Oklahoma. We had Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate signing letters to the President of the United States, demanding that America move her Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and demanding that America recognize that Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish People, must never be divided. Then Ehud Barak remarkably placed on the table an Israeli readiness to give up the holiest parts of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. In one swoop, he made Jerusalem's strongest supporters in Washington look foolish. They had been unwilling to concede what the Israeli Prime Minister offered to give away.
There are voices and organizations in the United States that have fought the good fight for 36 years and that have, again and again, had the wind knocked out of them by the Israeli Governments they are trying to support and defend. For those of us who have argued for 36 years that Judea and Samaria is Jewish land, who have challenged through thick and thin any effort to characterize Yesha as "occupied," the comments by Ariel Sharon this week were sabotage. It is lovely that Sharon since has back-tracked from using the term "occupation" (a Page One lead story in the Los Angeles Times and other world papers) and now claims that he was "misunderstood" (an inside, Page Three story). He now tells us that, when he said the lands are "occupied," what he really meant was that they are "disputed." Yes, and when I give my credit card number on the phone and the expiration date and the shipping address, what I really mean is "I'm not buying anything, just thinking about it." I heard the tape of Sharon's comments in the original Hebrew, and so have all the Israelis who heard those same news reports and sound bytes, and so have all the Western media who had those statements explained and translated.
When the Israeli Cabinet, a cabinet dominated by Likud and parties to her Right, and formed after a landslide national rejection of Mitzna and Peres and Oslo and Barak and Labor, voted to recognize the "right" of Arabs to create an Arab country in Judea and Samaria, they took the wind out of the sails of Israel's strongest supporters everywhere.
There is an ongoing tendency among Israeli reporters and government spokesmen to whine and whine about the lack of support and backing in America. The fact is that, at the end of the day, no one is going to fight for someone else's interests harder than the principal fights for her own interests. With national elections coming up next year in America, with a quirky economy that can go either way, with an overwhelming sense of mistrust toward the Arab world, Americans today have no interest or stomach for seeing Israel pressured by the Bush Administration. The Democrats are gearing up to challenge Bush -- already they are starting their primary warm-ups, and the field of contenders is more jammed than the last few overcrowded Kentucky Derby races -- and all of them are vying to be maximally pro-Israel and to criticize Bush at every juncture, especially when raising funds among the Jewish donors who finance the Democrats. Meanwhile, for the first time since Reagan whipped Carter, Republicans have been eyeing major gains among Jewish voters, and the Republicans have been very sympathetic to Israel. So no one of import in either political party is looking right now to pressure Israel into doing anything that she does not want to do.
There was absolutely no fundamental momentum here in America right now, and none on the horizon for the next two years, to support any substantive pressuring against Israel. Maybe some newspaper editors are looking to bother Israel, but newspapers also are on the defensive right now. After Jason Blair and the Briggs guy that just quit the New York Times, polls show that Americans do not trust newspapers. One of the great stories of the Jason Blair caper has been that certain people, while reading the New York Times, would see themselves quoted in fabricated interviews – and they would not even bother calling the paper to correct the falsehoods because they figure that no one believes the newspapers anyway. So Israel could have withstood the newspaper editorials.
To the degree that the Bush-Rice "Road Map" seeks to mollify Arabs, the European Union, the Russians, and the United Nations, the fact is that Americans are a bit disgusted with the Arab world right now, post- 9/11 and post-Iraq. Americans are disgusted with much of Europe, with a focused animus towards France and Germany, in the aftermath of the Iraq War. Americans hardly are enamored with the Russians, and they despise the United Nations. So they could care less about "The Quartet." Indeed, the average American does not even know who his own congressional representative is or where half the nifty fifty states are. So no one cares about "The Quartet."
There was no need for Israel -- absolutely no need -- to adopt a single word or provision of the "Road Map." All of Israel's supporters were geared up for the good fight against this awful “Road Map,” and the fight looked much easier than the tough ones of the past. More, there was a Likud Cabinet in place. Even Christian America was gearing up. Just last night, while channel surfing on television, I saw Pat Robertson on "The 700 Club" lambasting Ariel Sharon and saying that it is religiously forbidden by Scripture for anyone to divide the land of Israel. He sat there, quoting Tanakh – the Jewish Bible – from the Book of Joel, a lesser-know volume in the "Trei Asar" -- the 12 "Minor Prophets." He, a Christian minister representing how-many-tens-of-millions of Christian backers of the Republican Party, reminding the Prime Minister of Israel that the Good Book forbids anyone even to speak of dividing the Holy Land.
Against this backdrop, the Israeli Government agreed to the unprecedented decision to validate the "legitimacy" of an Arab "state." (Note that they call it "state" – an unassuming polity like somewhere you incorporate a business (like Delaware), or somewhere you grow wheat (like Nebraska), or somewhere you grow old (like Florida) – but they mean "country," namely a polity somewhere that you develop nuclear weapons (like North Korea), or poison gas and weapons of mass destruction (like Iran or Iraq), or somewhere you institutionally massacre hundreds of thousands (like Rwanda or Congo or Cambodia).) And the Prime Minister further called Judea and Samaria "occupied." Amid all the Israeli "cleverness" of adopting 14 points of incoherence that theoretically will make a "Palestinian State" impossible to establish, the Israeli Cabinet pulled the rug out from under all its strongest American supporters.
Now they whine. Michael Freund writes an article in the Jerusalem Post, calling on American supporters of Israel to pressure Bush. Two days later, in the article I attach below that IMRA now is circulating, Caroline Glick whines in the Jerusalem Post about "Washington's betrayal."
Well, guess what? Include me out of this one. This is not about Washington's betrayal. Washington has been a great supporter of Israel, and this particular President has in many ways been particularly supportive. He single-handedly has driven Arafat into an oblivion that 40 years of Israeli leaders could not dream of. Bush literally knocked Arafat out of stage center. He excused Israel’s incursion into Jenin and backed Israel when she barred the United Nations hatchet squad from “investigating.” Yeah, OK, so he has white-washed Mahmoud Abbas, a terrorist and Hitler apologist. OK. Bush has the real problem that, after bypassing Arafat and insisting instead on the emergence of an alternative democratically elected “Palestinian” leader who has no ties to terrorism, he has learned that finding a “Palestinian” leader who never wasted blood is like finding an American who never wasted ketchup. So the best they can find is a terrorist in a suit, an enigma like a cat in a hat, with a nickname from the butchering underground: “Abu Mazen.” There’s no such thing in American reference. What? George “Baby Face” Washington? Abie “Six Fingers” Lincoln? Willy “Machine Gun” McKinley? Franklin “Bugsy” Roosevelt? We have no such reference basis for Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas.
But none of it really has to matter, because Abbas is almost dead. In a few years, when Mahmoud Abbas dies of old age or of the Palestinian reproductive malady of premature assassination, the stage is set for the next layer of chaos. So Bush is not the bad guy here. It’s his job to pressure Israel a little bit -- he has to do what he has to do -- because, hey, he did not run for Prime Minister of Israel. He is President of the United States. That’s his job. We pay him with American dollars (legally). So, hey, he has to play the game. And, in that role, he plays the game to keep the oil flowing in from Araby while the Democrats think they are protecting the caribou (who are freezing their antlers off in Alaska while searching for some nice warm oil pipelines to thaw out the chill), and he simultaneously keeps the channels open with the Europeans, the Russians, and the U.N. So Bush has to do what Bush has to do. He has to give Tony Blair something to show the House of Commons when the Arabists want to know why Britain was fighting Bush’s war in Iraq. So he plays the game, gives Blair a “Road Map,” and that way the belly-achers stop yelling “Bully! Bully!” and belching out those awful groans when they do that BBC show that we see on cable every Sunday night.
And, while Bush made a bit of noise, it was left open for Israel to do what she has to do. This one was easy. Yet the Likud Cabinet failed. So this is not about “Washington's betrayal of Israel.” It is about the Israeli cabinet's betrayal of the people who voted against Oslo, Peres, Mitzna, Barak, and all that jazz. And it is about the Likud’s betrayal of her strongest supporters everywhere in the world, Jew and Christian alike.
The whining is not persuasive this time, as we mark the 36th anniversary of Jerusalem's unification, a day that should be celebrated as Yom Yerushalayim. There are very few people who have defended Sharon as strongly as I have over the years. Literally, I am “the guy who wrote the book on Sharon.” And if Pat Robertson is quoting Jewish Scripture, I may as well paraphrase Dickens: We defeated the Ghost of Palestine Past. We defeated the Ghost of Palestine present. But Ariel Sharon and his Likud Cabinet have presented a Ghost of Palestine Future that leaves us wondering whether these are the images of what will be or only of what might be. Sharon is humbug.
Stop Blaming Others for Israel’s Incompetent Foreign Policy
I think there comes a time when we have to stop blaming Bush or Clinton or Carter for Israeli Government decisions that are antithetical to Israel's interests.
For 36 years since 1967, Israel continually has pulled the rug out from under the feet of her strongest supporters in America. I remember when Jack Kemp was supporting Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, even softly supporting annexation, then found himself being called for being more pro-Israel than the Israelis. When I was Likud National Director, I persuaded a very prominent and powerful Democrat Congressman in New Jersey to support Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria. I persuaded a Republican from Michigan who was active in the Christian Right. Much like James Inhofe, that wonderful United States Senator from Oklahoma. We had Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate signing letters to the President of the United States, demanding that America move her Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and demanding that America recognize that Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish People, must never be divided. Then Ehud Barak remarkably placed on the table an Israeli readiness to give up the holiest parts of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. In one swoop, he made Jerusalem's strongest supporters in Washington look foolish. They had been unwilling to concede what the Israeli Prime Minister offered to give away.
There are voices and organizations in the United States that have fought the good fight for 36 years and that have, again and again, had the wind knocked out of them by the Israeli Governments they are trying to support and defend. For those of us who have argued for 36 years that Judea and Samaria is Jewish land, who have challenged through thick and thin any effort to characterize Yesha as "occupied," the comments by Ariel Sharon this week were sabotage. It is lovely that Sharon since has back-tracked from using the term "occupation" (a Page One lead story in the Los Angeles Times and other world papers) and now claims that he was "misunderstood" (an inside, Page Three story). He now tells us that, when he said the lands are "occupied," what he really meant was that they are "disputed." Yes, and when I give my credit card number on the phone and the expiration date and the shipping address, what I really mean is "I'm not buying anything, just thinking about it." I heard the tape of Sharon's comments in the original Hebrew, and so have all the Israelis who heard those same news reports and sound bytes, and so have all the Western media who had those statements explained and translated.
When the Israeli Cabinet, a cabinet dominated by Likud and parties to her Right, and formed after a landslide national rejection of Mitzna and Peres and Oslo and Barak and Labor, voted to recognize the "right" of Arabs to create an Arab country in Judea and Samaria, they took the wind out of the sails of Israel's strongest supporters everywhere.
There is an ongoing tendency among Israeli reporters and government spokesmen to whine and whine about the lack of support and backing in America. The fact is that, at the end of the day, no one is going to fight for someone else's interests harder than the principal fights for her own interests. With national elections coming up next year in America, with a quirky economy that can go either way, with an overwhelming sense of mistrust toward the Arab world, Americans today have no interest or stomach for seeing Israel pressured by the Bush Administration. The Democrats are gearing up to challenge Bush -- already they are starting their primary warm-ups, and the field of contenders is more jammed than the last few overcrowded Kentucky Derby races -- and all of them are vying to be maximally pro-Israel and to criticize Bush at every juncture, especially when raising funds among the Jewish donors who finance the Democrats. Meanwhile, for the first time since Reagan whipped Carter, Republicans have been eyeing major gains among Jewish voters, and the Republicans have been very sympathetic to Israel. So no one of import in either political party is looking right now to pressure Israel into doing anything that she does not want to do.
There was absolutely no fundamental momentum here in America right now, and none on the horizon for the next two years, to support any substantive pressuring against Israel. Maybe some newspaper editors are looking to bother Israel, but newspapers also are on the defensive right now. After Jason Blair and the Briggs guy that just quit the New York Times, polls show that Americans do not trust newspapers. One of the great stories of the Jason Blair caper has been that certain people, while reading the New York Times, would see themselves quoted in fabricated interviews – and they would not even bother calling the paper to correct the falsehoods because they figure that no one believes the newspapers anyway. So Israel could have withstood the newspaper editorials.
To the degree that the Bush-Rice "Road Map" seeks to mollify Arabs, the European Union, the Russians, and the United Nations, the fact is that Americans are a bit disgusted with the Arab world right now, post- 9/11 and post-Iraq. Americans are disgusted with much of Europe, with a focused animus towards France and Germany, in the aftermath of the Iraq War. Americans hardly are enamored with the Russians, and they despise the United Nations. So they could care less about "The Quartet." Indeed, the average American does not even know who his own congressional representative is or where half the nifty fifty states are. So no one cares about "The Quartet."
There was no need for Israel -- absolutely no need -- to adopt a single word or provision of the "Road Map." All of Israel's supporters were geared up for the good fight against this awful “Road Map,” and the fight looked much easier than the tough ones of the past. More, there was a Likud Cabinet in place. Even Christian America was gearing up. Just last night, while channel surfing on television, I saw Pat Robertson on "The 700 Club" lambasting Ariel Sharon and saying that it is religiously forbidden by Scripture for anyone to divide the land of Israel. He sat there, quoting Tanakh – the Jewish Bible – from the Book of Joel, a lesser-know volume in the "Trei Asar" -- the 12 "Minor Prophets." He, a Christian minister representing how-many-tens-of-millions of Christian backers of the Republican Party, reminding the Prime Minister of Israel that the Good Book forbids anyone even to speak of dividing the Holy Land.
Against this backdrop, the Israeli Government agreed to the unprecedented decision to validate the "legitimacy" of an Arab "state." (Note that they call it "state" – an unassuming polity like somewhere you incorporate a business (like Delaware), or somewhere you grow wheat (like Nebraska), or somewhere you grow old (like Florida) – but they mean "country," namely a polity somewhere that you develop nuclear weapons (like North Korea), or poison gas and weapons of mass destruction (like Iran or Iraq), or somewhere you institutionally massacre hundreds of thousands (like Rwanda or Congo or Cambodia).) And the Prime Minister further called Judea and Samaria "occupied." Amid all the Israeli "cleverness" of adopting 14 points of incoherence that theoretically will make a "Palestinian State" impossible to establish, the Israeli Cabinet pulled the rug out from under all its strongest American supporters.
Now they whine. Michael Freund writes an article in the Jerusalem Post, calling on American supporters of Israel to pressure Bush. Two days later, in the article I attach below that IMRA now is circulating, Caroline Glick whines in the Jerusalem Post about "Washington's betrayal."
Well, guess what? Include me out of this one. This is not about Washington's betrayal. Washington has been a great supporter of Israel, and this particular President has in many ways been particularly supportive. He single-handedly has driven Arafat into an oblivion that 40 years of Israeli leaders could not dream of. Bush literally knocked Arafat out of stage center. He excused Israel’s incursion into Jenin and backed Israel when she barred the United Nations hatchet squad from “investigating.” Yeah, OK, so he has white-washed Mahmoud Abbas, a terrorist and Hitler apologist. OK. Bush has the real problem that, after bypassing Arafat and insisting instead on the emergence of an alternative democratically elected “Palestinian” leader who has no ties to terrorism, he has learned that finding a “Palestinian” leader who never wasted blood is like finding an American who never wasted ketchup. So the best they can find is a terrorist in a suit, an enigma like a cat in a hat, with a nickname from the butchering underground: “Abu Mazen.” There’s no such thing in American reference. What? George “Baby Face” Washington? Abie “Six Fingers” Lincoln? Willy “Machine Gun” McKinley? Franklin “Bugsy” Roosevelt? We have no such reference basis for Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas.
But none of it really has to matter, because Abbas is almost dead. In a few years, when Mahmoud Abbas dies of old age or of the Palestinian reproductive malady of premature assassination, the stage is set for the next layer of chaos. So Bush is not the bad guy here. It’s his job to pressure Israel a little bit -- he has to do what he has to do -- because, hey, he did not run for Prime Minister of Israel. He is President of the United States. That’s his job. We pay him with American dollars (legally). So, hey, he has to play the game. And, in that role, he plays the game to keep the oil flowing in from Araby while the Democrats think they are protecting the caribou (who are freezing their antlers off in Alaska while searching for some nice warm oil pipelines to thaw out the chill), and he simultaneously keeps the channels open with the Europeans, the Russians, and the U.N. So Bush has to do what Bush has to do. He has to give Tony Blair something to show the House of Commons when the Arabists want to know why Britain was fighting Bush’s war in Iraq. So he plays the game, gives Blair a “Road Map,” and that way the belly-achers stop yelling “Bully! Bully!” and belching out those awful groans when they do that BBC show that we see on cable every Sunday night.
And, while Bush made a bit of noise, it was left open for Israel to do what she has to do. This one was easy. Yet the Likud Cabinet failed. So this is not about “Washington's betrayal of Israel.” It is about the Israeli cabinet's betrayal of the people who voted against Oslo, Peres, Mitzna, Barak, and all that jazz. And it is about the Likud’s betrayal of her strongest supporters everywhere in the world, Jew and Christian alike.
The whining is not persuasive this time, as we mark the 36th anniversary of Jerusalem's unification, a day that should be celebrated as Yom Yerushalayim. There are very few people who have defended Sharon as strongly as I have over the years. Literally, I am “the guy who wrote the book on Sharon.” And if Pat Robertson is quoting Jewish Scripture, I may as well paraphrase Dickens: We defeated the Ghost of Palestine Past. We defeated the Ghost of Palestine present. But Ariel Sharon and his Likud Cabinet have presented a Ghost of Palestine Future that leaves us wondering whether these are the images of what will be or only of what might be. Sharon is humbug.
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