Obama appoints 2 devout Muslims to homeland security

Arif Alikhan as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development

Source for announcement:

Homeland Security Press Room

"Today, I am proud to make two key personnel announcements for the U.S.. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) President Obama’s intent to nominate David Heyman as Assistant Secretary for=2 0Policy and my appointment of Arif Alikhan as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development.. Arif comes from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa’s office, where he served as Deputy Mayor for Homeland Security and Public Safety. As a key adviser to the Mayor, he has led the City’s efforts to develop homeland security, emergency management and law enforcement initiatives, including operational oversight of Los Angeles Police, Fire a nd Emergency Management departments." said Secretary Janet Napolitano The Islamic loving Obama has appointed Arif Alikhan a devout Sunni Muslim to assistant secretary for the Office of Policy Department of Homeland Security.. Mr. Alikhan was instrumental in taking down the LA Police Department's plan to monitor it's Muslim community.

Alikhan is affiliated with MPAC, the "Muslim Public Affairs Council".

"Founded in 1988, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) describes itself as "a public service agency working for the civil rights of American Muslims, for the integration of Islam into American pluralism, and for a positive, constructive relationship between American Muslims and their representatives." The organization consists of eight chapters in California, and one each in Texas, Kansas, Nevada, and Iowa."

From its inception, MPAC presented itself20as more inclusive, and more open to peaceful coexistence with Jews and Christians, than other Arab and Muslim groups, and sought to make Americans comfortable with Islam by showing how much the religion embraced core American values.

However, looking deeper into this group:

MPAC's Senior Advisor, Maher Hathout, who has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and espouses the radical brand of Islam known as Wahhabism, was invited to address the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 2000.

MPAC's centrist public image unraveled after the September 2000 launching of the Second Palestinian Intifada, when the Council severed its ties to the Jewish community and issued one-sided condemnations of Israel's response to the Arab violence.

This group actively opposed Bush's military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as his "excesses" in the war on terror. In February 2003, MPAC joined the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Muslim Council, and the American Muslim Alliance in forming a coalition to repeal and amend the Patriot Act, which these organizations depicted as an assault on the civil liberties of Americans, particularly Muslims.

MPAC claims that Islam is a religion of peace and moderation, and contends that Muslim extremists are no more numerous or dangerous than fundamentalists in any other faith.

Holding Israel entirely responsible for the "pattern of violence" in the Middle East, MPAC asserts that Hezbollah "could be called a liberation movement." The Council likens Hezbollah members to American "freedom fighters hundreds of years ago whom the British regarded as terrorists."

In a 1999 position paper, MPAC justified Hezbollah's deadly 1983 bombing of the American Marine barracks in Lebanon as a "military operation" rather than a terrorist attack. 1983 Beirutbarracks bombing, which killed=2 0299 servicemen, including 220 U.S. Marines. As Maher Hathout puts it: "Hezbollah is fighting for freedom, an organized army, limiting its operations against military people, this is a legitimate target against occupation. … this is legitimate, this is an American value -- freedom and liberty."

[]





Shora, who was born in Damascus, Syria

Kareem Shora Appointed by DHS Secretary Napolitano on Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC)

Washington, DC

June 5, 2009

www.adc.org

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is proud to announce that earlier today at a ceremony held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano swore-in ADC National Executive Director Kareem Shora as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC).

Aaron Klein, wrote about this at wnd

Napolitano adds adviser with ties to terror backers

Swears in leader of Arab group that hailed jihadists as 'heroes'

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano swore in to her official advisory council the head of an Arab American organization whose officials have labeled deadly anti-U.S. jihadists as "heroes" and opposed referring to Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC, also has close ties to anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi, whose association with President Obama – first exposed by WND – stirred controversy during last year's presidential campaign.

The ADC takes an openly anti-Israel line.

The ADC also leads the opposition to domestic anti-terrorism measures taken after the 9-11 attacks, such as watch lists, background check delays for visas and an initiative meant to more comprehensively screen visitors from select Mideast countries or specific individuals labeled as possible national security threats.

In 1994, during one of the main peaks of Hamas suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, then-ADC President Hamzi Moghrabi said, "I will not call [Hamas] a terrorist organization. I mean, I know many people in Hamas. They are very respectable. … I don't believe Hamas, as an organization, is a violent organization."

Discover the Networks notes that two years later, Moghrabi's successor, Hala Maksoud, defended the Hezbollah terrorist group.

"I find it shocking," Maksoud said, "that [one] would include Hezbollah in … [an] inventory of Middle East'terrorist'=2 0groups."

In 2000, new ADC President Hussein Ibish characterized Hezbollah as "a disciplined and responsible liberation force."

When Israel released Hezbollah prisoners in early 2004, Imad Hamad, ADC's Midwest Regional Director, openly celebrated the freedom of "the heroes."

Besides its deadly terrorism against Israel, Hezbollah distinguishes itself as second only to al-Qaida among terror groups responsib le for killing the most Americans. It's responsible for such deadly attacks as the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which killed 299 servicemen, including 220 U.S. Marines.

ADC linked to Khalidi

The ADC is linked to Columbia University's Khalidi, who spoke at several of the organization's events. At one speech, in June 2002, the New York Sun documented how Khalidi appeared to condone the killing of armed Israelis.

"Killing civilians is a war crime. It's a violation of international law. They are not soldiers. They're civilians, they're unarmed," Khalidi said in a recorded address. "The ones who are armed, the ones who are soldiers, the ones who are in occupation, that's different. That's resistance."

The ADC also has collaborated on numerous projects with the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, an organization founded by Khalidi's wife Mona, and which WND first reported received start-up funds from a nonprofit, the Woods Fund, on which Obama served as a paid director.

The AAAN, headquartered in the heart of Chicago's Palestinian immigrant community, worked on projects supporting open boarders and education for illegal aliens. Speakers at AAAN dinners and events routinely have taken an anti-Isra el line. The organization co-sponsored anti-Israel projects and exhibits.

Khalidi, an apologist for PLO terrorism, holds the position of Columbia's Edward Said professorship of Arab Studies. Said, a well-known far-leftist intellectual and apologist for Palestinian terrorism, served on an advisory counsel to the ADC.

ADC opposes anti-terrorism screening

According to the ADC charter, the organization seeks to "empower Arab Americans; defend the civil rights of all people of Arab heritage in the U.S.; pr omote civic participation; and encourage a balanced U.S.foreign policy in the Middle East."

The organization has actively lobbied against the Patriot Act and was reportedly instrumental in scaling back some of the restrictions of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System program, or NSEERS. Shora was personally involved in those efforts.

The NSEERS required persons whose nationality identifies them as a possible security risk to submit to control processes governed by the Department of Justice. NSEERS also targeted specific individuals labeled as possible national security threats, at times making them undergo fingerprinting, photographing and registration.

Last week, Napolitano swore in Damascus-born Kareem Shora, the ADC's national executive director, to a position on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, an outside-the-department group of national security experts that advises the secretary. Shora is the first Arab rights advocate on the panel.

At the ceremony in Albequrque, Shora reportedly recounted how he watched with his immigrant father Obama's address last week to the Muslim world. Shora said his father cried when he heard Obama's message of reconciliation.

Source: http://www.theodoresworld.net/

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Behind the Headlines: Easing of Restrictions in West Bank

MFA Newsletter

The government of Israel recently decided to take measures aimed at easing restrictions in Judea and Samaria, which, it is hoped, will have a positive influence on the daily lives and routines of the Palestinian population and invigorate the Palestinian economy. Some of the measures designed to ease restrictions on the Palestinian population were implemented over the past two years. However, they have been accelerated during the past three months since the new government took office.

Within the framework of the easing of security measures, the scope of activity of the Palestinian security forces was expanded. Permission was granted to open twelve new Palestinian police stations in Area B, and the scope of activity of the existing police stations was also increased. This is in addition to the permission to open 20 new Palestinian police stations that was granted last year.

In the civil-humanitarian realm, improvements include the extension of entry permits to Israel for chronic patients and their escorts for the purpose of medical treatment, as well as for medical students doing their internship in Israeli hospitals, from three months to six months.

During the last two years, but increasingly during the past three months, two thirds out of the forty-one check points have been removed. Currently, only fourteen remain in operation. For example, the A-ram checkpoint, located south of Ramallah has been removed, thus permitting free movement of vehicles and pedestrians; the Beit Iba checkpoint in Samaria was removed in March 2009. To prevent the passage of potential terrorists from Nablus, a new vehicular checkpoint was set up near Dir Sharaf village, northwest of Nablus, where only spot checks are carried out; two roadblocks, one next to Ras Karkar village, and the second near Eyn Yabrud village, were removed. The removal of these roadblocks allows free passage of vehicles between Ramallah and the villages to the east and west. The removal of the Rimonim checkpoint, located to the east of Ramallah, allows movement between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley, and the removal of the Bir-Zeyt checkpoint, located north of Ramallah, allows swift passage between Ramallah and the villages to the north. The removal of the Hableh roadblock south of Qalqilya, allowing movement between the city and the villages to the south;

Additional measures adopted include the opening of 422 crossings east of Qalqilya, to free movement of Palestinian vehicles between Qalqilya and the villages to the east, extending the working hours of the Haviot checkpoint, northwest of Nablus, to 24 hours a day, to improve the movement of Nablus area residents, extending the working hours of the Asira a-Shamalya checkpoint, north of Nablus, to 24 hours a day, opening of the Vered Yericho crossing, north of Jericho, which will allows free movement between the Jericho vicinity and the Jordan Valley for both vehicles and pedestrians, and the extension of the working hours of the Hawara checkpoint, south of Nablus, to 24 hours a day, with vehicular spot checks. The Hawara checkpoint is the main one in the Nablus vicinity and the easing of restrictions there allows swift passage from the city to all parts of Judea and Samaria.

An additional major measure adopted was aimed at improving the passage of Palestinian public figures and businessmen. Fifteen hundred permits have been issued to public officials, allowing them to pass through the Israeli crossings into Israel. This is a very significant move aimed at improving the quality of life of these individuals, who are the prime movers of the Palestinian economy in Judea and Samaria.

The aforementioned roadblock removals are in addition to about 140 roadblocks that were opened to traffic in the past year in order to increase the civilian Palestinian population's freedom of movement throughout Judea and Samaria. The decision to open checkpoints was made following an assessment of the situation by Central Command and as part of the plan to ease restrictions that was approved by the political echelon.

Today, in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley, there are 504 dirt roadblocks and 14 checkpoints. IDF will continue to act according to decisions made by the political echelon, in accordance with security assessments. These actions are meant to further ease the routine life of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria, while continuously fighting terror and maintaining the safety of the citizens of the State of Israel.

Guest Comment:Dear Friends,

With the new American administration breathing down Israel’s neck, the following article from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reveals the slackened security measures and the opening of dozens of Palestinian “police stations” in the West Bank to accommodate the Obama administration.

The free flow of traffic from hotbeds of terrorism is a ticking clock that will either fulfill the fantasies of the new administration about appeasing terrorists, or, more likely, facilitate a new round of terrorist attacks in Israel.

I imagine Israelis will do what they did the first time these peace fantasies were enacted. They will die in terrorists attacks, until such time as the Israeli government has no choice but to rescind them.

I hope I am wrong. I wish to be wrong. I hope to apologize and bless Barack Obama and the 75% of American Jews who made "easing the lives of Palestinians" the new top priority in our region.

Naomi Ragen
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/About+the+Ministry/Behind+the+Headlines/Easing-of-Restrictions-in-Judea-and-Samaria-in-2009-09-Jul-2009
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The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the causes of the Holocaust

N. Shuldig

If we could say that there was a bright spot in the gloomy and somber history of the holocaust, perhaps we could point to the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. If in all the dark and disgusting annals of recent history, when Jews were led to murder like sheep let to slaughter, when Jews were tortured for fun, it was the revolt in the Warsaw ghetto. This alone stands out as a monument to the Jewish ability to resist the Nazi onslaught. Yet I believe that it is precisely in the story of the uprising that the deeper cause of the holocaust can be seen. Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933. His plans were obvious from his speeches and his book, Mein Kampf, first published in, yet we find that the Jews did not seem to be particularly worried or anxious at that time. As Hitler became stronger and bolder and began instituting his laws against the Jews, and allowing atrocities to take place against the Jews, most German Jews felt that this would pass. After all, was not Germany an enlightened country; wasn't Germany one of the first countries to give Jews equal rights; didn't Jews serve in the German Parliament, the Bundestag, and distinguish themselves in the first World War? Jews enjoyed equal rights in Germany from the mid 1800's and participated fully in the nation's affairs.

Yet with all of this goodness bestowed upon them from the previous German governments, 1933 saw the beginning of the oppression of the Jews in Germany. Jewish stores and offices were officially boycotted; Jews were refused work and fired; Jewish children were not welcome in public schools. As the years progressed, the oppression increased. In 1938 Kristallnacht increased the persecution and began a series of wanton killing and confiscation of Jewish properties. It was not until 1941 that Auschwitz was chosen to be the first extermination camp.

* * *

Let us now look at Warsaw: Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and by October 6th the country was under German control. One year later, on October 2, 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was created. It was an area surrounded by a wall three meters high which was topped by broken glass and barbed wire. By April 1941 the ghetto population exceeded 500,000, many refugees deported by the Germans from towns in surrounding areas.

People lived in sub-human conditions. Starvation and death on the streets of homeless children was not an uncommon sight. Round ups by Germans and summary executions became common in the streets. Disease was common amidst the filth.

The uprising did not begin until January 18, 1943 when the Germans began a planned deportation of the Jews. The bulk of the rebellion took place from April 19 until May 16, 1943 when the German successfully destroyed the armed resistance movement.

Although the ghetto had been created in October of 1940, it took over two years for the Jews to begin a resistance movement against the Nazis. Although knowledge of mass murders circulated amongst the Jews, no action was taken. What caused such a long delay for Jews to begin to fight? Rumors had come into the ghetto as to the true intentions of the Nazis and the ghetto population had seen clearly with their own eyes how brutal they were treated, starved, tortured and executed, yet, resistance came late. Why?

At that time there were much divergent opinions amongst the Jews in political ideology and religious matters. Jews were Bundists, (a socialist leaning Russian workers party member) who had close links with the Polish Socialist Party. The communist Jews sympathized with Stalin who had distrusted the Polish Communist Party and ordered that it be disbanded in 1938. The left wing Zionists were basically the most militant Jewish group. They believed in fighting against the Nazi threat by organizing massive resistance. The left wing Zionists included HaShomer HaTzair, Dror and the Hekhalutz movements. Also there was the Right Poale Zion and the Left Poale Zion groups. There were the various religious groups and there were assimilated Jews. There were even Jews who had converted to Christianity but were considered Jews by the Nazis and put in the ghetto. However most Jews fell into the category of being non-affiliated – but just plain and simply Jewish - who could influence them? And then there were the criminals who would sell information or steal material just to survive.

In order to have an armed revolt it required co-operation and planning. It required trust and training. It necessitated working together and sharing resources which were indeed very few. It required a conviction that one Jew could depend upon the other.

It was March 1942 that the leaders of the Communists and the left-wing Zionist first came together in a meeting in Warsaw. They wanted to unite all the organizations to actively resist the Nazis however the Bund leaders refused to join to any group that did not have the same interests of the international Bund party. It decided to have its own fighting group and refused to co-operate with the others. In addition, there were Jews who belonged to the Nazi-run civilian administration of the ghetto and also Jewish policemen who were in the employ of the Nazis and then there were those who (generally because of desperation) believed the Nazi lies of resettlement.

The religious Audath Israel party believed that a rebellion would bring destruction to the ghetto and believed that a miracle would take place. The others argued that they were all doomed anyway; let them die fighting. The difficulty of organizing a rebellion under circumstances when cooperation was at best a minimum and mistrust from group to group instilled a desire to shun the other made a successful rebellion almost a impossible goal.

By the time the Jewish groups organized themselves it was late. Their efforts to contact other underground Polish groups were met with suspicion and sometimes anti-Semitic feelings; never the less, they tried to acquire weapons from the Polish partisan movements. The Polish underground movement was anti-Semitic and had no desire to help Jews.

It is my opinion that the animosity between the various groups especially among the Jewish groups kept them from working with one another. As one of the Bund members said as he sat down to negotiate with the representatives of the Zionists, that if it were not for the accursed ghetto conditions they should not be sitting at the same table.

The difficulty of each group accepting the other coupled with the chasm created by the differences in political and social outlook make co-operation extremely difficult. I believe that one of the greatest contributions that caused Jews to be lead to death with no resistance. It seems to me that from the side of the Jews that their inability to put aside their own petty priorities and work for the good of the general caused many more deaths than if the Jews had put down their group isolation and smug superiority and worked together from the beginning. It was not until it was too late, and too little when the various sides decided to work together, but when they did, the few determined fighters caused many casualties in the Nazi army and interfered with the carrying out of death camp deportations.

We are living in a post holocaust period. Yet the threats to the Jews living in the land of Israel are now coming from a fanatical and tyrannical Iran. Yet no one seems overly concerned. We Jews seem to be living in our wonderland, the political leaders can not seem to get together to make a stand against Ahmadinejad and the Iranian nuclear program. The Israeli parliament can't agree on any method of ending the increasing terror on its border and seems each day coming closer to giving the Palestinians their own government with out seeing any concessions from them.

Are we falling into the trap that the Jews in Europe did some sixty-seventy years earlier? Why do we not learn from history the horrors that crazy dictators like Ahmadinejad can bring?

Guest Comment:From: Harold Reisman
A fair review. But the answer to the final question is not in the present tense. The division and schisms are already there. How can 78% of the Jews in the USA who voted for Obama be left out of the mix? And some rather large percentage (even if not a majority) of ISRAELIS say the evil settlers are the cause of all the problems. There is something operating in the Jewish psyche which is aberrant; you can creat a long list of Jewish "intellectuals" and academics that wish Israel would just vanish so they could go on receiving awards for their brilliance. One can say that most Jews did not read "Mein Kampf" - sadly most Jews seem not to want to read either the Hamas Charter or the PLO Charter. They are, if anything, clearer than the Hitler version. And, oh yes, "Mein Kampf" is a best seller in the Islamic world and it is translated as "My Jihad" and "management guide":--a guide to killing Jews.

Are we falling into the trap that the Jews in Europe did some sixty-seventy years earlier?
Why do we not learn from history the horrors that crazy dictators like Ahmadinejad can bring?
Thanks to Nurit

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COP: The Road to Economic Demoralization

Larry Kudlow
Friday, July 10, 2009

There’s no question that current government policies for taxes, spending, and regulation are causing the U.S. to lose competitiveness in the global race for capital, prosperity, and growth. . Of course, China has been moving in the direction of free-market capitalism for years. To some extent, this shows the positive benefits of America’s free-trade policies and its open-mindedness in helping nurture not only China growth, but also middle-class prosperity worldwide.

But what’s particularly galling about Obamanomics is that we may well be losing our competitive edge with Europe. While Europe is ever so slightly moving toward Reagan and Thatcher, the U.S. is shifting toward an overtaxed and overregulated model that smacks of François Mitterrand. That’s something no one should want to tolerate.

Heavy government controls at home, along with an income-leveling social policy couched in economic-recovery terms, is no way to run a railroad. At the simple stroke of a computer key, world investment flows to its most hospitable destination. That includes a reliable currency. But in President Bush’s last year and President Obama’s first, the U.S. has become a less-hospitable destination for global capital. That should worry everybody.

But let’s first look to the China story.

We know that China is already our principal banker, to the tune of nearly $1 trillion. As President Obama’s record spending and borrowing continues -- he’ll be the greatest bond salesman in American history -- our financial reliance on China grows daily. But that’s not all.

Fortune magazine recently reported that the number of U.S. companies in the world’s top 500 fell to the lowest level ever, while more Chinese firms than ever made the list. Thirty-seven Chinese companies now rank in the top 500, including nine new entries. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. firms has fallen to 140, the lowest total since Fortune began the list in 1995. This is not good.

China also surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest automaker in the first half of 2009, with June sales soaring 36.5 percent from a year earlier. The Chinese registered 6.1 million car sales for the first half of the year. That way outpaced American sales, which were only 4.8 million.

And China has no capital-gains tax. It only has a 15-to-20 percent corporate tax. The U.S., on the other hand, is raising its cap-gains tax rate to 20 percent. It’s also increasing its top personal tax rates.

In fact, the scheduled income-tax hike along with a much-discussed 4 percent health-care surtax will balloon the top U.S. tax rate all the way to 51 percent. And there’s more. In order to finance so-called health-care reform, congressional Democrats are now talking about raising the tax rate on capital gains and dividends by another 1.5 percent while installing a value-added tax (VAT) that would begin at 1.5 percent.

So top tax rates in the U.S. may edge into the mid-50 percent range. Compare that to the OECD average of only 42 percent. And when those tax-hikes kick in, the top U.S. tax rate will rank above that of France, Germany, and Italy. That can’t be good.

Incidentally, our 40 percent corporate tax rate is already almost 15 percentage points higher than the corporate rates in most of Europe.

Washington’s enormous expansion of the state-, local-, and federal-government spending share of GDP to over 40 percent -- including Bailout Nation, TARP, and takeovers in numerous industries -- is eerily reminiscent of Old Europe’s old policies. And in an ironic twist, Europe seems to be moving toward a lower-tax-and-spend-and-regulate, Ronald Reagan–type approach, while the U.S. is regressing to the failed socialist model of Old Europe. This makes no sense.

Higher tax rates undermine the incentive model of growth. At the margin, investment risk and work effort become less rewarding. On top of this, Obama’s regulatory moves toward greater government control of the economy will further drown animal spirits in a sea of red tape born of bureaucratic officialdom.

Think about this in terms of the threat to nationalize heath care, which is over 15 percent of the economy. Additionally, Washington’s cap-and-trade proposals will essentially nationalize the entire energy sector -- another 15 percent of the economy -- sending long tentacles into every nook of the economy that’s impacted by energy, which is virtually everything.

And all this comes on top of the U.S. government’s takeover of auto companies, banks, AIG, Fannie, and Freddie. Instead of Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction, we’re on the road to economic demoralization.

Here’s the clincher: Year-to-date, Dow Jones stocks are off 8 percent, while China stocks are up 71 percent. The world index is up 4 percent. Emerging markets are up 25 percent. They’re all beating us. None of this is good.

We’re going the wrong way. That’s why stock markets are not voting for the United States anymore.



Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

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COP: Democrats' Health Care "Reform": The Next Job Killer

John Kline
Friday, July 10, 2009

There they go again. Democrats have controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress for less than six months, yet already their tax-and-spend ways are hurting America’s economy – and taking away jobs. Their first act of business was to pass a so-called “stimulus” package they promised would save or create 3.5 million jobs and keep the national unemployment rate below eight percent.

Instead, last week the rate jumped to 9.5 percent, its highest level in more than 25 years.

Rather than reversing course, however, Democrat leaders continued down this perilous path by forcing through the House a climate change bill that would be properly described as a “cap-and-tax” scheme. Experts say its carbon-trading rules will kill millions of jobs in an economy that desperately needs them.

Of course, this wasn’t enough to convince Democrats of the error of their ways.

Next up is health care, which is in dire need of attention. But – perhaps unsurprisingly – the projected effects of Democratic proposals on business and jobs are dismal.

Take small business, for example. It’s often called the engine of the U.S. economy because it employs approximately one out of six Americans and provides $1.7 trillion in annual wages.

If we leave it to the Democrats, that engine will break down. A national mandate on small business to provide health care would eliminate 1.6 million jobs over a five-year period according to a study by the National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation. Two out of three of those 1.6 million jobs lost in five years would be shed from small businesses.

Other studies have painted an even more troubling picture of the Democrats’ planned government takeover of our health care system. Based on a model developed by Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer, it is estimated that some 4.7 million jobs could be lost as a result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage.

Make no mistake: The Democrats’ proposal is a government-run health program and something that absorbs tax revenue rather than creates it, which will contribute to a prolonged recession.

The plan also will take away the health care plans millions of Americans already have. A June study by the independent Lewin Group found that 114 million Americans would be forced out of their current private health coverage under the House Democratic plan. So much for the President’s assurance that “if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.”

Sponsors of the Democrat plan seem all too willing to ignore the fact that we can’t pay for the government-funded health care programs we already have. Consider Medicare: Its trustees recently reported that the Great Society program’s funds will be depleted by 2017. That’s two years earlier than the date they projected last year – largely because of the recession that Democrats seem to keep fueling.

Add to that dire prediction the new spending of their government-run health care plan – not to mention the equally troubled Medicaid and Social Security systems. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in economics to see that our children and grandchildren will be paying for these programs for the rest of their lives.

Republicans have serious reservations about the Democratic health plan. And we have developed solutions we believe can get the job done.

In fact, we think we can contribute to meaningful change of our health care system in this decade just as we spearheaded welfare reform in the 1990s and the tax code in the 1980s. Some of our Republican proposals to change health care in America include:

• Creating opportunities for small businesses to pool their resources to offer higher quality coverage.

• Providing tax credits to help small businesses cover the administrative costs of establishing and maintaining health coverage.

• Giving incentives to states to redesign insurance laws to make health care coverage more affordable to their residents.

• Cutting regulations so insurance companies can compete for your business, which allows you to shop around for the best coverage and price that fits your needs.

• Allowing tax deductions to offset the cost of purchasing individual insurance.

• Fixing medical liability rules that make trial lawyers rich at the expense of patients and doctors.

These are just some of the many ideas my fellow Republicans and I have proposed to improve health care in the United States. You can check out more at www.gop.gov.

If this recession is going to end, Democrats need to focus on creating jobs – not killing them. The American people deserve no less.



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OC: Obama's Climate of Fear

Dan Kennedy
Friday, July 10, 2009

Recently I had a long lunch with an old friend. He sits on the board of one of the largest and most successful publicly traded regional banks in America. He got his seat when that regional bank acquired the very successful community bank he built from the ground up. I will not name him or this bank, but I will pass on a few things he said to me. He said, “Our bank’s leadership team and others I know at the local or regional level feel paralyzed and intimidated by the climate of fear created by the Obama administration. We believe we are targets of a very deliberate conspiracy.

“The new and proposed regulations will remove every competitive advantage of the community bank, and make every bank identical, forced to operate exactly as does Bank of America,” he explained. “Then, absent competitive opportunity, all of the independent banks will be greatly de-valued and handicapped. They’ll be vulnerable and easily rolled up into the handful of remaining giants … the small bank’s wealth made into fresh food for the insatiable hunger of the big banks’ deficits and losses. This is, I and others believe, the next step in Obama’s plan to take total control of the financial system and money supply, a requirement of dictatorship. “

What is most significant about these statements is the person making them. This is not some freak like the fellow Mel Gibson portrayed in the movie “Conspiracy Theory.”. He’s not somebody stockpiling food in a cabin hidden away in the woods, to escape to when anarchy erupts. Not anybody you would expect to hear express such thoughts. And he’s not a lone voice.

Another friend is the CEO of a mid-sized company that had been on an impressive trajectory of growth for the past three years but is now stalled. He and his advisers have reversed their viewpoint in the last few months. They are eager to sell the company if possible now rather than later. Why? They believe Obama is deliberately, systematically destroying the economy as a whole and is specifically targeting small business for extinction – because it’s too difficult to exercise dictatorial control over millions of small enterprises.

This fellow has begun the process of acquiring dual citizenship and hopes to cash out and leave the country. He said that he can only envision a growing, worsening, toxic climate of fear here – again that term – and he prefers to be away from it.

Well, liberal fruitcakes have always talked about leaving the country if a president they reviled got elected (Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon come to mind). You expect such empty-headed, empty threats from them, as you would from those on the extreme right about Obama. But if you knew this CEO, who made me swear not to mention him by name if writing about this, you would never in a million years expect to hear these thoughts from him.

A couple of weeks ago I talked to the director of marketing for a leading private aviation company, which offers fractional jet ownership, pre-paid membership packages of private jet flight, and concierge-organized private jet travel. In her 15+ years in the industry, she said, she’d never encountered as many people who would not buy and travel in this manner because they were afraid of being seen and judged harshly. Many even feared having their companies singled out for reprisal by the government. She said, “I’m doing business in a climate of fear, almost clandestinely, as if engaged in espionage rather than commerce.” She too asked not to be identified.

This is an untold story. The mainstream media would mostly refuse to report on it. But even if they wanted to, these business leaders and countless others like them would refuse to publicly talk about their views. Because they are afraid.

From free enterprise to fearful enterprise. From ambition, initiative and investment, to hoarding and inaction and exit. This the only thing Obama has actually stimulated: a climate of fear.



Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

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For Liberal Jews, Obama Is the Messiah

Abraham H. Miller , Pyjamas Media

The difference between radical Muslims and liberal American Jews is that the former seek to become martyrs, while the latter aspire to become victims. In an ironic twist of fate, radical Muslims and liberal American Jews were made for each other. This ideological symbiosis is sufficient to give pause to the presence of intelligent design. But like all things that seem to emanate from a higher power, there is a paradoxical twist. It is not themselves that liberal American Jews want to sacrifice on the altar of victimhood; it is their Israeli brethren.

Barack Hussein Obama received nearly gsdmorris@hotmail.com eighty percent of the Jewish vote and still garners strong approval among America’s Jews. In contrast, only 1 six percent of Jewish Israelis support Obama.
Even before the election, Israeli Jews, unlike their sycophantic American brethren, saw through Obama. 0 Israelis were the least supportive population anywhere in the Western world of the inexperienced politician turned presidential candidate.

To support Obama, liberal Jews had to engage in a set of incredible mental gymnastics. They had to ignore his twenty-year relationship with the anti-Semitic minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright. They had to ignore his strong personal relationship with the virulent anti-Zionist 0 Rashid Khalidi. They had to ignore his statement to the Iowa caucuses that no one has suffered 2007-11-14 12:36:28 more than the Palestinian people. They had to ignore his support of his Kenyan cousin and genocidal strongman 2007-11-15 15:06:20 Raila Odinga, an advocate of Sharia. They had to ignore 8344677fdad9460db26ec2deea3a6c68 Obama’s own Muslim heritage. They had to ignore that anti-Israel policy experts such as 1 Samantha Power (who now has her own special seat on the National Security Council), Susan Rice, and General James Jones had the real inside tract on advising Obama on the Middle East.

Since the election, Obama’s policies toward Israel have been treacherous, and the reaction of the liberal Jewish community can only be described as inconceivable. When Obama demanded a freeze on the settlements, including organic growth and building in East Jerusalem, the reformed rabbis could barely wait to support him. Even the Jewish Daily Forward editorialized on behalf of freezing settlements, as if the settlements were the obstacle to peace and prior exchanges of land for peace had actually resulted in the reign of peace rather than the rain of rockets.

Obama’s unwillingness to do what first world nation states traditionally do — honor the commitments and obligations of a prior administration — should have generated outrage from the Jewish community. After all, Obama summarily and capriciously dismissed the commitments the Bush administration made with regard to the settlements — commitments that were made, according to 0 Elliot Abrams, to secure Israel’s painful withdrawal from Gaza and Northern Samaria.If for no other reason than the inconceivable precedent that will impair all of our future international relations, liberal Jews, ever concerned about the fine points of law, should have been up in arms.

But their support for Obama was unflinching, their outrage, absent.

Obama’s Cairo speech linked Israel with the Holocaust, ignoring both 3,500 years of Jewish history and European history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The speech then went on an embarrassing rant of moral equivalence by comparing the self-imposed suffering of the Palestinians to the Holocaust.

Even so, liberal Jews did not wince.

The Obama administration’s embrace of the myth of the Israeli Defense Forces being responsible for civilian casualties in Gaza — a justification for the administration’s refusal to sell advanced helicopters to democratic Israel though they have been totally willing to sell them to the military dictatorship of Egypt — did not produce outrage. The administration’s refusal to sell advanced fighter aircraft to Israel has caused no concern among liberal Jews.

The establishment of George Mitchell in an unprecedented resident envoy post in Israel, staffed by a band of anti-Zionists, has produced not even so much as a whimper. After all, one thousand useful-idiot rabbis signed a petition authored by the infamous Brit Tzedek calling for such an envoy, although it is doubtful that even the idiot rabbis expected George Mitchell and his anti-Zionist henchmen would be staffing the operation.

Still, the Brit Tzedek signatories have not asked for their names to be withdrawn from the petition nor have they articulated any public regret.

The foreign policy theme of the Obama administration has been that George W. Bush and his neocon advisers have caused the world’s international political crises. Bush, who possesses a strong personal vision of foreign policy and an [16] IQ higher than the ever vaunted John Kerry, is caricatured as a simpleton manipulated by a Jewish cabal. Let us hasten to remember that George W. Bush would not have waited to condemn the Iranian regime as it shot demonstrators in the street nor would he have [17] stood on the side of Hugo Chavez in the Honduran coup. George W. Bush has a vision of America. Barack Obama only possesses a vision of himself. No one manipulated George Bush, and it is an anti-Semitic ploy to characterize Bush as a simpleton manipulated by Jews.

But liberal Jewish hatred of George W. Bush is so pronounced that, even at the expense of the libel of Jewish exploitation of Bush’s alleged incompetence, such images are totally compatible with liberal Jewish thinking. They are also its mainstay.

Obama’s anti-Israel stand will not find opposition in the Jewish community; it will find endorsement. Liberal American Jews embrace victimhood. The idea of a tough Israel willing to defend itself is counter to the psychological needs of the liberal American Jewish community, needs that might best be described as battered-wife syndrome. If Palestinians in Gaza launch missiles at Sderot, it is because Israel has done something wrong. “Oh, Palestinians only launch missiles and suicide bombers because they have no other way to protest. If only Israel gave them more land. If only Israel took up the road blocks. If only Israel apologized to them for causing them to blow up pizza parlors, discos, and shopping malls. If only Israel understood their culture.”

Most Jews can no more abandon their liberalism than can non-Jews. Take the liberals I have encountered in Berkeley who looked at the tragedy of 9/11 and said, “It’s our foreign policy.” They said it with all the delusional smugness that they were saying something profound and not something illustrative of a psychological deficiency or mental disease. They too needed to justify victimhood, and again with someone else actually being the victim.

Obama represents the wedge between Israelis and liberal American Jews. For the latter, Obama still garners high numbers in the polls; among the former, it is hard to find an Israeli Jew who does not understand the threat Obama presents to his very survival.

Liberal Jews are generally a secular people, but they are not a godless people, and in Barack Obama, they have certainly found their messiah.

Thanks Ted Belman

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EC: The Cap-and-Trade Bait-and-Switch

Nicolas Loris and Ben Lieberman
Heritage Foundation | Friday, July 10, 2009

The 1,500-page cap-and-trade climate legislation, also known as Waxman-Markey, passed by a narrow margin late in the day on June 26. Members of Congress added 300 of those pages early in the morning on the day of the vote. It is safe to assume that hardly any of the 435 Members of Congress read the bill in its entirety, meaning one of the costliest bills in American history was rushed through so politicians could enjoy their 4th of July recess. Cap and trade is nothing more than a massive energy tax, which is why its chief alternative is a carbon tax, and it has been sold under the following false pretenses:

* It will not cost anything;
* It will increase jobs;
* It will increase green investment; and
* It will save the environment.

A Lot More Than a Stamp a Day

A commonly quoted cost estimate of Waxman-Markey comes from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which claims that cap and trade will cost the equivalent of a postage stamp per day--$175 per household in 2020.[1]

But CBO admittedly ignores economic costs such as the decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) as a result of the bill[2] and the fact that consumers and business will change their behavior as a result of higher energy prices. This is a serious oversight that has significant economic consequences.

In The Heritage Foundation's economic analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation, the GDP loss in 2020 was $161 billion (in 2009 dollars).[3] For a family of four, that translates into $1,870--more than 10 times the size of the $175 CBO claim.Furthermore, the Heritage analysis found that for all years, the average GDP loss was $393 billion, or more than double the 2020 loss. In 2035 (the last year analyzed by Heritage), the inflation-adjusted GDP loss works out to $6,790 per family of four.

Energy-intensive industries will also suffer significant losses. For instance, farming is very energy-intensive, with fuel, chemical, electricity, and fertilizer costs; since cap and trade drives up the cost of energy prices, farmers' losses will undoubtedly outweigh any money they collect from offsets (the money businesses would pay farmers to reduce carbon emissions by either not farming or using more efficient technologies). The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis found that farm income (or the amount left over after paying all expenses) is expected to drop $8 billion in 2012, $25 billion in 2024, and over $50 billion in 2035. These are decreases of 28 percent, 60 percent, and 94 percent, respectively. The average net income lost over the 2010-2035 timeline is $23 billion--a 57 percent decrease from the baseline.

It Is a Jobs-Destroying Bill

President Obama and Democratic House leaders claimed that Waxman-Markey is a jobs bill. With the lavish subsidies for green investment placed in the bill, surely companies will hire workers to build solar panels and windmills; however, the number of "green" jobs will pale in comparison to the number of jobs lost due to higher energy prices and slower economic growth.

The goal of cap and trade is to drive up the costs of energy in order for people to use less of it. Because just about every business uses energy to produce goods and must pay their own electricity bills, the cost of production for businesses increases, and consumer demand falls for two reasons:

1. Price hikes on goods reduce demand, and
2. People have less disposable income due to higher energy prices.

Overall, production cuts and reduced consumer spending destroy jobs and slow economic growth, which further increases unemployment.

The Heritage analysis found that over the 2012-2035 timeline, job losses average over 1.1 million. By 2035, a projected 2.5 million jobs are lost below the baseline--without a cap-and-trade bill.[4] Some jobs will be lost completely, while others will move to different countries where the cost of production is cheaper. Again, these losses are on top of "green jobs" created as a result of the bill.

Less Renewable Energy

The final House bill contained many renewable energy investments in an effort to attract votes.The Waxman-Markey proposal even requires that more electricity come from so-called renewable sources, chiefly wind energy but also others like biomass and solar. Ironically, according to an analysis of the bill by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Waxman-Markey would actually result in less renewable energy produced than without the bill because of the overall decline in electricity use.[5]

Green projects do not pay for themselves; it is the taxpayers who fund the research and development of renewable energy and the cost of the subsidies that are required to make renewables competitive. Yet renewable energy still only provides a small fraction of America's energy needs, and it is more expensive per kilowatt hour than traditional, reliable sources of energy. Consumers lose doubly, paying more as taxpayers and as ratepayers.

It Will Not Save the Planet

The alleged benefit from cap and trade is that the regulations will reduce carbon dioxide emissions enough to slow warming and reduce global temperatures.

According to climatologist Chip Knappenberger, Waxman-Markey would moderate temperatures by only hundredths of a degree in 2050 and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century.[6] Even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson concurred, recently saying, "I believe the central parts of the [EPA] chart are that U.S. action alone will not impact world CO2 levels."[7]

A multilateral approach would not fare much better. In the case of international cooperation, India, China, and the rest of the developing world would have to revert to their 2000 levels of CO2 emissions by 2050. On a per-capita basis, China would backtrack to about one-tenth of what the U.S. emitted in 2000. India and most of the developing world would have to drop to even lower levels. This scenario, in addition to being highly unlikely, would de-develop the developing world.

Moving Forward

Now that the bill has passed the U.S. House of Representatives, it will likely move to the U.S. Senate this fall. It is important to remember that everything policymakers have promised this bill will do will in fact do the opposite. Cap and trade will drive up energy costs for years to come, resulting in economic pain and higher unemployment. All of these points will be equally important, if not more so, in the Senate debate.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Congressional Budget Office, "The Estimated Costs to Households from the Cap-and-Trade Provisions of H.R. 2454," June 19, 2009, at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/103xx/doc10327/06-19-CapAndTradeCosts.pdf (July 7, 2009).


[2] David Kreutzer, Karen Campbell, and Nicolas Loris, "CBO Grossly Underestimates Cost of Cap and Trade," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2503, June 24, 2009 at http://www.heritage.org/Research/
EnergyandEnvironment/wm2503.cfm.

[3] William W. Beach, David Kreutzer, Karen Campbell, and Ben Lieberman, "Son of Waxman-Markey: More Politics Makes for a More Costly Bill," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2450, May 18, 2009, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/wm2450.cfm.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Bryan Walsh, "What the Energy Bill Really Means for CO2 Emissions," Time, June 27, 2009, at http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1907
528,00.html (June 30, 2009).

[6] Chip Knappenberger, "Climate Impacts of Waxman-Markey (the IPCC-Based Arithmetic of No Gain)," MasterResource, May 6, 2009, at http://masterresource.org/?p=2355 (June 30, 2009).

[7] U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, "Jackson Confirms EPA Chart Showing No Effect on Climate Without China, India," July 7, 2009, at http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Press
Releases&ContentRecord_id=564ed42f-802a-23ad-4570-3399477b1393 (July 7, 2009).
Nicolas Loris is a Research Assistant and Ben Lieberman is Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

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Pro-Terror Group to Meet in Chicago Suburb

IPT News
July 10, 2009
http://www.investigativeproject.org/1088/pro-terror-group-to-meet-in-chicago-suburb

Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international movement seeking to re-establish an international Islamic state - or Caliphate - and to indoctrinate Muslims into supporting jihad, wants to step up its recruitment efforts in the United States. On July 19, the group, whose alumni include 9/ 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and suicide bombers, will hold a conference entitled "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam" in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in Oak Lawn, Ill, a Chicago suburb.

For decades, Hizb ut-Tahrir America (HTA) has operated covertly, holding these Khalifa (Caliphate) conferences in the United States under the name of front organizations. But that has begun to change. Last fall, the group issued a leaflet in its own name urging Muslims to boycott the U.S. elections. The group just released this video promoting the July 19 conference. According to the conference website, the program includes a question-and-answer session and two panels; one entitled "Capitalism is Doomed to Fail," the other "The Suffering Under Capitalism."

The conference initially was scheduled for the Aqsa School in Bridgeview, Ill. But the school withdrew, claiming Hizb ut-Tahrir officials "misrepresented themselves." An official said the group approached the school in late April claiming it wanted to hold a bazaar-type event in July that would involve selling traditional food and clothing. School officials said that when they learned the real purpose, they cancelled and refunded the group's deposit.

While solid numbers are difficult to come by, there is little question that Hizb ut-Tahrir's worldwide membership has grown substantially since the September 11 attacks, says Madeleine Gruen, a senior analyst with the NEFA Foundation. In 2003, estimates of HT membership ranged from 10,000 to 100,000 people worldwide. Today, by contrast, the group (currently active in more than 40 countries) has approximately 100,000 members in Indonesia alone and "many thousands" more around the world, Gruen told IPT News.

In the United States, Hizb ut-Tahrir's following is estimated at no more than a few hundred. The decision to hold this month's conference under its own name is a sign that the group is preparing to raise its profile. Once that is achieved, Gruen adds, its cadres are supposed to establish "an Islamic government and military" in order to take Hizb ut-Tahrir's message to the world.

HT seeks to fuse an ideology combining orthodox Islam, Marxist-Leninist economics, anti-Semitism and opposition to Western democracy into a political program to bring back the Caliphate. Despite its public rhetoric about nonviolence, Hizb ut-Tahrir has "precisely the same ideology and objectives" as al Qaeda, Gruen told IPT News. And HT has a much larger membership base to recruit from, she added.

While it refrains from carrying out terrorist actions itself, Hizb ut-Tahrir glorifies jihadism and excoriates the terrorist organization Hamas as being too soft on Israel. In a leaflet posted on its website July 1, HT said that if the Caliphate were in existence, all of "Palestine" would be rid of "the usurpation of the Jewish occupiers" and brought "to the fold of the Islamic state."

HT was founded in 1952 in Bayt al-Maqdis, a Jordanian-occupied suburb of Jerusalem, by Sheikh Yaqiuddin Al-Nabhani, a man whose philosophy had been shaped by the Muslim Brotherhood. After he concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood was too moderate, Al-Nabhani formed Hizb ut-Tahrir. After its involvement in failed coup attempts in Egypt and Jordan, HT was banned throughout the Middle East. It moved to Western Europe, and after the fall of Soviet Communism the group spread into Central Asia.

HT is obsessed with the purported evils of the United States, President Obama and the capitalist system. A look at its website found articles with titles like "Bailouts and bonus culture shows [sic] the corruption of democracy;" "Obama Offers Sugar-Coated Poison for the Region!" (a recap of the President's recent visit to the Middle East); and "G20 Leaders attempt to salvage the last vestiges of Capitalism." A common theme is that Muslims in Pakistan should not join with the U.S. military in fighting against the Taliban. "Fighting Muslims is a great evil, which only benefits America," reads one typical entry on the HT website.

A posting entitled "Obama's words will not hide America's ugly face of Colonialism" said of the President's speech to Muslims in Egypt last month:

"Although this appears a seemingly positive gesture towards the Muslim world, the actions of his government appear every bit as ruthless as the Bush administration. [Obama] differs only to the extent that, unlike Bush who spoke with frank hatred, he uses 'soft power' and personal charm to cover his intentions."

Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesmen have emphasized that their organization does not engage in terrorism. They claim the U.S. and Pakistani governments seek to suppress the group because they fear its advocacy of "justice" for Muslims.

Critics say the argument is a sham. "The freedom and justice HT seeks by overthrowing democracy can often only be attained through violence," said Zeyno Baran, senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Eurasian Policy in July 2008 testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In her testimony, Baran added: "HT is not likely to take up terrorism itself. Terrorist acts are simply not part of its mission. HT exists to serve as an ideological and political training ground for Islamists. And I have called them a 'conveyer belt to terrorism.' "

Terrorists who have been members of Hizb ut-Tahrir include Al Qaeda's Mohammed; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, who was originally a member in Jordan; Hambali, head of the East Asian-based terror group Jemaa Islamiya, and Asif Muhammad Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, who were recruited by Hamas to carry out suicide bombings at a Tel Aviv seafront bar. Read more about HT's record as a "conveyor belt" for producing terrorists here.

In a June 2001 article in its publication Al-Waie, Hizb-Ut-Tahrir issued a fatwa on suicide attacks which said that "all ways and means which a Muslim uses to kill unbelievers is [sic] permitted as long as the enemy unbeliever is killed." It is acceptable to "blow yourself up amongst their military encampments or blow yourself and them up with a belt of explosives."

HT has been banned in Turkey and Germany for distributing literature that includes incitement to hatred and violence against Jews. In a paper for the Manhattan Institute, Gruen pointed to one leaflet distributed by the group titled: "And Kill Them Whenever You Find Them, and Turn Them Out From Where They Have Turned You Out." It stated that:

"Jews are a people of slander. They are treacherous people who violate oaths and covenants. They lie and change words from the right places. They take the rights of the people unjustly, and kill the Prophets and the innocent."

The leaflet then encouraged martyrdom operations against Jews.

Despite the incendiary message, law enforcement's hands are tied when it comes to a group like Hizb ut-Tahrir, said Bob Blitzer, who formerly headed the FBI's counterterrorism efforts. "Preaching violence is not enough reason to arrest anyone," he said. "Law enforcement is probably aware of this group and is checking them out" to the extent that it can under the law.

The danger is that as a result of exposure to HT's extremism "someone on the edge gets radicalized and takes it to heart and commits a violent act," Blitzer said.

That doesn't mean the government is powerless. Given that Hizb ut-Tahrir conferences typically include sympathizers from numerous countries, federal homeland security officials should expect supporters of the group to try to enter the United States in order to attend the Khalifa Conference, Gruen said. The United States Code bars from the United States any alien who "endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization."

But in the past the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (the federal agency chiefly responsible for stopping foreign supporters of extremist groups from entering the United States) has been asleep at the switch when it comes to HT. In 2007, Hizb ut-Tahrir had a booth right next to the Department of Homeland Security at a conference sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America – a Muslim Brotherhood-linked organization that was an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal government's successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

Dan Vara, a former attorney for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Florida, has been at the forefront of many key enforcement matters involving counterterrorism and counterintelligence. He says ICE has ample legal authority to prevent Hizb ut-Tahrir's foreign supporters from entering the United States.

"I would rake them over the coals on these issues" related to HT's support for the Taliban and advocacy of Hamas violence, Vara said in an interview.

For example, Section 1182 of the United States Code allows consular officers or the attorney general to bar from the United States "any alien who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or support of a terrorist organization." That section also provides that "Any alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is inadmissible."

Hizb ut-Tahrir has a right to peacefully assemble and discuss whatever ideology it chooses. U.S. law enforcement, however, has a right to invoke the law and prevent foreign Islamists seeking to attend the conference from entering the United States.

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New 'Arab Street' Polls: United States Gaining Ground, Iran Losing

David Pollock
July 10, 2009

Several new polls suggest that the United States is gaining ground in the "Arab street," and that President Barack Obama's latest overtures, specifically his June 4 speech in Cairo, were well received by some important Arab constituencies. Although a great deal of skepticism remains, students of Arab public opinion would regard these numbers as surprisingly encouraging. In contrast, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad's popularity has slipped dramatically in the Arab world, with many saying that the outcome of Iran's recent presidential election will hurt the region. Approximately half of the Arabs questioned even agree that "if Iran does not accept new restrictions and more international oversight of its nuclear program, the Arabs should support stronger sanctions against Iran around the end of this year."

Polling Difficulty in the Middle East
If the Middle East were more like the United States or Europe, an overnight phone poll would provide immediate answers to important questions. The reality is that phone polls in the region are notoriously unreliable and that most individual polls, however elaborate or well intended, are inevitably suspect of government interference, social bias, or other distortions. Still, if evidence from several different pollsters can be gathered, evaluated, and compared, some reasonable and even significant judgments can be rendered. This is precisely the case today when comparatively solid (and in great measure previously unpublished) data of this kind are at hand for three key Arab societies: Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

The data in question derive from three different sources, all using in-person rather than phone or online interviews: the Washington-based Zogby International, the Ramallah-based Palestinian AWRAD Institute, and the Princeton-based Pechter Middle East Polls. This last is a new entrant on the scene, but one whose fieldwork is conducted by a very experienced, professional, and completely apolitical regional commercial survey firm -- and unlike most other polls in the region, without any government sponsorship or supervision.

The latest Zogby Arab poll was conducted in March and April, several months before Obama's speech and the Iran election, and has had more than its share of methodological problems (including heavily loaded questions) in the past. Still, it provides some context for assessing which issues resonate most in certain Arab societies, with sometimes surprising findings. More up to date and reliable was a West Bank/Gaza poll conducted June 12-14 by the nonpartisan AWRAD institute headed by Dr. Nader Said. A poll conducted from June 15 to 18 in Egypt and Jordan by Pechter Middle East Polls provides the most recent and in many respects the most interesting data.

Poll Findings
Top priorities get mixed reviews. Zogby identified three issues as today's highest priorities for changes in U.S. policy: the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison and end of torture, and improvement in U.S. treatment of Muslims in general. On these three issues, Obama's Cairo statements are rated in the new Pechter poll as "somewhat credible" by 30 to 40 percent of the Egyptian and Jordanian respondents. Obama's remarks on U.S. policy toward democracy in the region garner similar credibility: 40 percent in Egypt and 30 percent in Jordan. Among West Bank/Gaza Palestinians, as measured in the latest AWRAD poll, the president's credibility on the broadest of these issues is higher: just over half (53 percent) say he is at least "somewhat serious" in his call for "a new beginning" in U.S.-Muslim relations.

Overall U.S. ratings higher than before. More broadly, views of the United States are considerably more positive in the new Pechter poll than in others reported in recent months (especially in Egypt, possibly in part as a result of Obama's visit there). Among Egyptians, 38 percent proffer at least a somewhat favorable opinion of the United States, a very large gain of about 20 points over comparable figures last year. The current "favorable U.S. image" figure for Jordanians, at 25 percent, shows a smaller improvement, yet twice as many Jordanians (53 percent) think it is "important for Arab governments to maintain good relations with the United States." This is a revealing set of answers to the kind of practical questions that are almost never asked in other Arab polls.

Ahmadinezhad's sinking popularity, growing support for sanctions. In sharp contrast to the impression created by previous Zogby presentations, Ahmadinezhad garnered very few votes as "most admired foreign political leader" in Egypt (6 percent) and in Jordan (8 percent). Hugo Chavez, another supposed favorite in the latest Zogby poll, attracted even fewer votes -- a mere 4 percent in Egypt, and 7 percent in Jordan. By comparison, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and King Abdullah each garnered about 10 percent in Egypt, according to the Pechter poll, and lead a slew of other moderates to a combined plurality of 45 percent in this "most admired" category.

In a similar vein, an impressive two-thirds of Egyptians say that the outcome of Iran's June 12 presidential election will hurt, not help, the region. The corresponding percentage is lower in Jordan, but it is still a majority (55 percent). Forty-nine percent of Egyptians say Arabs should support more sanctions against Iran if it refuses new limits on its nuclear program in 2009, and nearly as many (42 percent) Jordanians say the same. This is a marked change from earlier polls, which generally reported Arab publics opposing international pressure on Iran.

A Window of Opportunity in the 'Arab Street'
Those polled do not belong to democracies in which public opinion could plausibly vote the ruler out of power, or even exert enough pressure on the government to alter its basic policies. But "on the margins," as President Obama phrased it in an interview shortly before his Cairo trip, shifts in popular attitudes could make a marked difference in the ability of these governments to cooperate with the United States on important issues.

In the wake of Obama's encouraging statements and the discouraging news from Iran, these latest surveys strongly suggest that Washington currently enjoys an opportunity to nudge Arab publics and policies in a desirable direction. But more surprising, and equally urgent, is that while most Arab governments are known to fear and distrust Iran, Washington now knows that most ordinary Egyptians and Jordanians, among others, share these sentiments.

With this in mind, the United States should adjust its regional diplomacy to emphasize opposition to, and not just engagement with, Iran's regime. Washington should accelerate and publicize defensive military cooperation with friendly Arab countries, including wider participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative aimed at obstructing Iran's nuclear program. The United States should also intensify its efforts to spur Arab governments to enforce stricter controls on Iranian trade and financial transactions, particularly in the Gulf. Even as Washington invites Tehran to the negotiating table, the U.S. administration should actively prepare to enlist Arab support for further sanctions against Iran, which will probably prove necessary in the coming months. In addition, Washington should encourage discreet Arab lobbying of Iran's major energy business partners in Europe and Asia. This balanced approach is the one best calculated to secure useful support from the "Arab street," as well as from the Arab elite.

David Pollock is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute and author of its 2008 Policy Focus Slippery Polls: Uses and Abuses of Opinion Surveys from Arab States.

Comment: With due respect to the author what "Arab street"? Please it is not like the "street" in the West nor is it mono-lithic-thus to base policy on possible movement in attitude rather than concrete actions is naive at best!

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Dissident Watch: Fariba Kamalabadi

Vargha Taefi and Nazila Ghanea
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2009, p. 96
http://www.meforum.org/2403/dissident-watch-fariba-kamalabadi


Fariba Kamalabadi, 47, who had been serving in a voluntary capacity on an Iranian Baha'i body known as the Yaran (The friends) since 2006, was detained at her home on May 14, 2008, and then taken to Tehran's Evin Prison. Simultaneously, five of her colleagues on the Yaran were also arrested and taken to Evin while a sixth had previously been arrested in Mashhad on March 6, 2008. Amnesty International recognizes all seven as prisoners of conscience.[1]After Kamalabadi endured months of incommunicado detention, mistreatment, and denial of heart medication,[2] Tehran's deputy prosecutor general for security affairs, Hasan Haddad, announced on February 11, 2009, that the seven would be tried on charges of espionage for Israel, insulting religious sanctities, and propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran.[3]

Then, in response to an announcement by Iranian attorney general Ayatollah Qorban-'Ali Dorri-Najafabadi that all Baha'i establishments run counter to Iranian constitutional law, the Baha'i community in March 2009 disbanded the Yaran and all other Baha'i organizations in Iran. Dorri-Najafabadi further announced that the very declaration of Baha'i belief is illegal.[4] The government requires Baha'is to declare their religion—for example when registering births, seeking inheritance, applying for business licenses, or registering for school—so this declaration puts Baha'is in a situation of having to engage in illegal activity.

When the Yaran was operational—with the full knowledge and tacit agreement of the Iranian authorities—it was recognized by Iran's three hundred thousand Baha'is as their informal organizational body. Since Baha'is do not have a clerical religious structure, this body handled all community needs.

Kamalabadi is not new to religious discrimination. She had wanted to follow in her father's footsteps and become a physician, but university entrance was denied her in the early 1980s on religious grounds—no Baha'i has completed university studies since then. When the Baha'i community in Iran established the Baha'i Institute for Higher Education in 1987, Kamalabadi was among the first group of students to graduate and later completed her postgraduate degree in education, specializing in developmental psychology.

Kamalabadi faced arrest twice in 2005: first in a raid at her home by officers of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence on May 25, 2005, after which she was held for thirty-five days, twenty-two of which she spent in solitary confinement. Later that year, she was seized while traveling and detained in Mashhad and later Evin Prison, spending nearly two months in solitary confinement. During her period of captivity since 2008, Kamalabadi has only been afforded a handful of visits with her family and has been denied access to her lawyer, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi.

While Kamalabadi is not alone in the battle for free expression in Iran, she has become a symbol for those seeking religious freedom and the right to say who they are and for what they stand.

Vargha Taefi, the son of Fariba Kamalabadi, has studied at the Baha'i Institute of Higher Education and at the University of Leicester; he is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Warwick. Nazila Ghanea is a lecturer in international human rights law at the University of Oxford and editor-in-chief of the international journal of Religion and Human Rights.

[1] Amnesty International, May 15, 2008, Aug. 6, 2008, Feb. 12, 2009.
[2] Radio Free Europe, Feb. 17, 2009.
[3] Press TV (Tehran), Feb. 15, 2009.
[4] Journalist Club, Feb. 19, 2009; Baha'i International Community to Ayatollah Qorban-Ali Dorri-Najafabadi, attorney general, Islamic Republic of Iran, Mar. 4, 2009; Baha'i World News Service, Mar. 6, 2009; Iran Press Watch, Mar. 12, 2009.

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COP:Cap-and-Tax: Government vs. America

David Limbaugh
Friday, July 10, 2009

There is still time to stop the legislative monstrosity known as the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill before the Senate approves it. But for that to happen, Americans must learn how bad it is. . Let's briefly review the basics: The bill is ostensibly designed to curb man-caused carbon emissions (presumably without outlawing breathing) to retard global warming.

Even if we accept, for purposes of argument, the assumptions of radical, hysterical leftist environmentalists that man-caused global warming will destroy the planet if evil, rich capitalists don't radically curtail their own contributions to the catastrophe, Waxman-Markey would not prevent this Armageddon.

Climate scientist Chip Knappenberger, of New Hope Environmental Services, calculates that the bill would only reduce Earth's temperature by 0.1 to 0.2 degree Celsius by 2100. The Heritage Foundation's Ben Lieberman says he's found no "decent refutation of the assertion that the temperature impact would be inconsequential."

Unfortunately, the bill's negative impact on the economy would not be inconsequential. Lieberman says the bill would cause estimated job losses averaging about 1.15 million from 2012-2030, and the cumulative projected loss in gross domestic product would be almost $10 trillion by 2035. The national debt from this bill alone, disregarding the multiple bailouts, stimulus packages and health care "reform," would increase by 2035 for a family of four by 26 percent, or $115,000.

Heritage is not alone in making these claims. The far more liberal Brookings Institution estimates the bill would cost 1.8 percent of GDP in 2035 and 2.5 percent by 2050. Heritage's "Foundry" blog concludes, "Economists from liberal think tanks, conservative think tanks, and industry associations agree that Waxman-Markey will reduce income by hundreds of billions of dollars per year."

These facts are enough to make you question why people aren't threatening a sit-in in the Senate until this recklessness stops. But there are other things about the bill you should know -- just in case you have an unusually high outrage tolerance:

--As noted, the bill contains a hidden provision establishing unemployment benefits for up to three full years for workers displaced as a result of this "job creations" bill, as well as health insurance premium subsidies and $1,500 each for job search and relocation expenses -- all at taxpayers' expense.

--The American Issues Project has exposed Section 204 of the bill, called the "Building Energy Performance Labeling Program," which gives the federal government unprecedented authority over your home. AIP says the section mandates that new homes be 30 percent more energy-efficient than the current building code on the very day the law is signed. The requirement increases to 50 percent by 2014 and continues to increase until 2030.

--The program would also affect existing properties you already own. It requires states to label residential and nonresidential buildings based on their efficiency ratings and to publicize this information. This will lead to "a number of circumstances under which the states could inspect a building," such as if you want to renovate your house in a way that requires a building permit, sell your house, or change the name of the person responsible for paying its utilities. The federal commissars, in their infinite compassion with other people's money, have also set aside a fund to help homeowners retrofit their properties. Of course, there's a formula, to be administered by the bureaucratocracy. The more radically you purify your property the more "awards" you receive -- up to $12,200. Be aware, though, that further fine print requires the property owner to pay at least half of these retrofitting costs, no matter how much their "awards" from the government. I suppose this is the Marxists' nod to self-reliance and fiscal responsibility.

--The bill is so egregiously obscene that even the strong Democratic majority in the House couldn't have passed it without bribing some recalcitrant representatives -- also with our money. To buy, er, secure Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur's vote, they offered a new federal power authority, which, according to The Washington Times, is "stocked with up to $3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states." Just swell.

--In addition to all the economic destruction the bill would cause, in the end, it is not so much about global warming as Obaman wealth redistribution. "The Foundry" says Obama's own budget "promises to raise $650 billion in revenues by selling carbon permits (which are the exact same thing as an energy tax)," only $150 billion of which will go to alternative energy production. The rest will be redistributed to people who "don't pay income taxes."

The Founding Fathers and our fathers are rolling over in their graves as this great country voluntarily abandons its dreams of equal opportunity, achievement and prosperity and sows the seeds of its own destruction.

This just cannot stand.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

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Can Israel Afford to Concede the Mountain Ridges of Judea and Samaria (West Bank)?

Straight from the Jerusalem Cloakroom #224, July 10, 2009
Yoram Ettinger

1. The Mideast context since the 7th century: The most fragmented, conflict-ridden, unstable, unpredictable, volatile region; no inter-Arab comprehensive peace, no compliance with all inter-Arab agreements, no ratification of all inter-Arab boundaries, no Arab democracy; the cradle of Islamic terrorism, homicide bombers, hijacking, Improvised Explosive Device (IED), car-bombing and modern day hate-education. 2. Judea and Samaria, the cradle of Jewish history, consists of two over-towering mountain ridges: A 3,000ft steep eastern slope above the Jordan Valley – the most effective tank barrier in the region; a 2,000ft gentle western slope – a dream platform of invasion to the 9-15 miles sliver along the Mediterranean (pre-1967 Israel). Judea and Samaria constitutes the "Golan Heights" of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the coastal plain and the 4 mile wide corridor between the coast and Jerusalem.



3. Israel's security predicament in perspective:

The width of pre-1967 Israel (without the over-towering mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria) is equal to 1/90 of the width of Texas, the distance between JFK and La Guardia airports, between Wall Street and Columbia University, between the Pentagon and Mt. Vernon, roundtrip between Kennedy Center and RFK Stadium, the length of DFW airport, less than the width of San Francisco, Miami and Washington DC, less than the distance between downtown London and Heathrow Airport, roundtrip between Albert Hall and the Tower of London and between Bois De Boulogne and La Place de la Bastille.



4. A 16 mile radius "killing zone" was established by the US Command in Bosnia, in order to safeguard the personal security of US servicemen. A 9-15 mile sliver along the Mediterranean, over-towered by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria, cannot safeguard the national security of the Jewish State.



4. A Deadly Oxymoron: Defensible borders for the Jewish State on the one hand, and a giveaway of the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria on the other hand – in the Mideast context - constitutes a deadly oxymoron.

Comment: No, we cannot concede these mountain ranges and UN 242 provides us the international legal reality to keep these under our control.

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Power of deterrence

Ari Shavit
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1099064.html

I began with the personal questions. You are short-tempered, I hurled at him; you have fits of rage. It's true that I am short-tempered, Uzi Arad replied, but I lose patience because of the importance I attach to things. Because I am not cynical. It is important for me to have a high level of professionalism in the Prime Minister's Office and for high standards to be the criterion. I am not a born elitist, but it is important to me that we have a government that sets criteria of superb achievement.

You are an advocate of brute force, I threw at him. Me? Brute force? He smiled. I thought I was actually sensitive. In national and international issues, force is also a language. But I do not like wars between Jews. I prefer to direct the brute-force energies within me at the goyim.

You are a technocrat, I lashed out. This time I hit the mark. The national security adviser was offended. Maybe so, he replied candidly, reflectively. But there are technocrats and there are technocrats. The political party I supported as a youth was Rafi [a party formed by David Ben-Gurion in 1965 after he broke with Mapai, the precursor of Labor; its members included Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres]. The Rafi ethos was security activism: to get results. On a number of matters I also did things that were innovative and constituted breakthroughs. In any event, I am a proud technocrat. I always strive to do the best for my country.
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Arad was born in 1947 in Kibbutz Zikim, just north of the Gaza Strip, and attended the Tichon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv. An outstanding student, he went to Princeton and the most important American research institutes. He served in the Mossad espionage agency for more than 20 years. Afterward he was the national security adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu during the latter's first stint as prime minister (1996-99). He initiated and managed the annual Herzliya Conference on national policy. He specialized in nuclear strategy, a subject he also taught. He was a pioneer in the realm of risk-management policy. In varied and diverse ways, he has been a player in the Israeli security and intelligence drama. A hundred days ago, Dr. Uzi Arad returned to the center of power, as national security adviser.

Arad holds tremendous power. He holds the Iranian portfolio, he conducts the sensitive dialogue with the United States and he is the closest person to the prime minister. Some observers say that Arad has become the strongman of current Israeli policy.

Arad does not say so explicitly, but he believes that his whole professional life has prepared him for this post. As a control freak, he does not rely on others. As a perfectionist, he is highly critical of the work of others. But, being very loyal to the boss, he finds no flaws in him. According to Arad, Netanyahu is a talented, efficient person; no one is better suited to be prime minister. Imbued with a deep sense of mission, Netanyahu and Arad feel they are the right people in the right place at a tough time. It is incumbent on them to be the salvation of the State of Israel.

Do you see any prospect that the conflict will come to an end in the coming years?

Regrettably, we have not so far been successful in bringing about Arab internalization of our right of existence. The Arab and Muslim refusal to recognize Israel's legitimacy is sometimes suppressed and amorphous, at other times sharp and violent, but it is all-embracing. I have not yet encountered an Arab personage who is capable of saying quietly and clearly that he or she accepts Israel's right of existence in the deep historical and conscious sense. Accordingly, it will be difficult to reach a true Israeli-Palestinian agreement that does away with the bulk of the conflict. I don't see that in the coming years it will be possible to forge that different reality which so many Israelis want.

Will a Palestinian state be established on the watch manned by you and Netanyahu?

That is a different story. I don't see among the Palestinians a process of truly drawing closer to acceptance of Israel and peace with Israel. I also do not see a Palestinian leadership or a Palestinian regime but a disorderly constellation of forces and factions. But possibly someone might come along and say I am an engineer of events; the depth doesn't interest me - I am going to produce an event. And within three years - presto - four Annapolises, two disengagements, global pyrotechnics. And then suddenly, in 2015, there is a Palestinian state. Stamps, parades, carnival. That could happen. A fragile structure, yes; an arrangement resting wholly on wobbly foundations. But it could happen. There could be a Palestinian state.

What you are saying is that there will not be true peace, but there might be an American peace event with Hollywood trappings.

Everyone with eyes to see, sees that there is a failure of Palestinian leadership. There is no Palestinian Sadat. There is no Palestinian Mandela. Abu Mazen is not vulgar like Arafat and not militant and extreme like Hamas. There could be worse than him. But even in him I do not discern the interest or the will to arrive at the end of the conflict with Israel. On the contrary, he is preserving eternal grievances against us and intensifying them.

After Olmert offers him almost everything, he says wide gaps remain. And then you reach the conclusion that there really is a receding horizon here; The more Israel moves toward the Palestinians, the more they move away. And they do that because even the moderates among them do not really want a settlement. At most, they are striving toward a settlement in order to renew the confrontation from a better position.

What you are saying is that there is no Palestinian partner for a true peace.

At the moment, there is no one on the map. There are no true peace leaders among the Palestinians. But I am not deterministic. I do not think this is part of the Palestinians' genetic makeup. I want to believe that in the future a different type of leadership will arise. I hope that a Palestinian - woman or man - will emerge who is able to recognize that there is some justice on the Israeli side, too. Because, you know, in Israel there are so many who see the justice of the Palestinians' cause and write about it and make a living from it. Read the paper you work for, for example. But true peace will come when Palestinians emerge who recognize there is also Israeli justice - that there is also a little Israeli justice. At the moment there are none.

Can peace with Syria be achieved during the Netanyahu government?

Here we have a different problem. The majority of Israel's governments insisted that Israel would stay on the Golan Heights. That is also the position of the majority of the public and most MKs. The position is that, if there is a territorial compromise, it is one that still leaves Israel on the Golan Heights and deep into the Golan Heights.

From your point of view, is that the right position to take? That this must be the essence of a settlement - a compromise deep into the Golan Heights? That even in peace we must ensure that a large part of the Golan Heights remain in our hands?

Yes

Why?

For strategic, military and land-settlement reasons. Needs of water, wine and view.

So you say unequivocally: Peace yes, Golan no?

Correct.

What about the "deposit" of Yitzhak Rabin, in which he undertook to leave the Golan Heights?

There is no such thing. In 1996, Netanyahu asked [Secretary of State] Warren Christopher to have the deposit returned to Israel, and so it was. In his letter, Christopher pledged that the deposit was not valid.

What about the concessions made by Netanyahu himself in the negotiations he held with the first President Assad at the end of the 1990s?

Netanyahu's position was that Israel should remain on the Golan Heights at a depth of a few miles. A few miles translates into a lot more kilometers. If you draw a line from Mount Hermon to Al Hama at a depth of a few miles, you will see this leaves a great deal of the Golan Heights, from the south to the north.

Is this still the position of the government today?

The government's position is readiness to resume the negotiations with no prior conditions and with each side aware of the other's position. The Syrians are certainly aware that the Netanyahu government and the majority of the public will not leave the Golan Heights.

Will the Americans accept that? Won't they try to impose a different approach?

The impression is that there are deep differences between Israel and the United States. Israel is saying, first Iran, then Palestine, whereas the United States is saying, first Palestine, then Iran.

Both cases need treatment. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and freeze one issue in order to deal with the other. From the Americans' viewpoint, the achievement that is required in the Israeli-Arab dimension is the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The achievement required in the Iranian dimension is not to allow Iran nuclear capability that will enable it to produce nuclear weapons. When Israel says that it feels a more acute need to deal with the Iranian problem, it is right on three counts. First, because the urgency there is overriding; second, because if we succeed there, it will be easier here; and third, because if we do not succeed there, we will not succeed here. If Iran goes nuclear, everything that might be achieved with the Palestinians will be swept away in a tidal wave and go down the tubes overnight.

You have not been able to persuade the Americans of this. On the Palestinian question they have appointed a high-profile senior envoy who is engaging in intensive activity. But in regard to Iran, nothing is happening. As Washington sees it, Ramallah is more urgent than Tehran; the settlements are more dangerous than the centrifuges.

Dov Weisglass [former adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] built the first stage of the Road Map well, but created catastrophes in the second and third stages. He did so because he was certain that the first stage was a dam in the face of the coming stages. But then came the disengagement which undermined the Road Map on the ground. And then Annapolis undermined the Road Map politically. Olmert and Livni acted contrary to Weisglass's logic and jumped straight to the third stage. So what we had was a series of typical Israeli makeshift exercises. Every two years they came up with a move that completely contradicted the previous move. The result, of course, was the policy debacle that Netanyahu and I had warned against. The Netanyahu government inherited scorched earth from its predecessors.

Do you feel that as a result of Israeli mistakes, the international attitude toward Israel today is extremely unfair?

Completely unfair. I say this in English openly: "extremely unfair." If you want to enforce the clauses of the Road Map, you have to enforce all of them. And security violations are more serious than building violations: Qassam rockets kill people, settlements do not. But I am a formalist. I am in favor of formalism. The thing is, that if they come to us and count every settlement, they have to apply the same indices and the same principles to the Palestinians. Anyone who does not do this is behaving unfairly, but he is also behaving unwisely. He is not advancing the Israeli-Palestinian peace that he would like to see.

Maybe the real problem is the settlements have made Washington fed up with us. Maybe the problem is that Obama and Clinton have lingering issues concerning Netanyahu, hence their chilly behavior toward him.

Isn't the alliance between Rome and Jerusalem wobbly? Don't you have the feeling that just as de Gaulle terminated a 15-year French alliance with Israel after the war in Algeria, Obama will terminate a 40-year American alliance with Israel after the war in Iraq?

Each of them has an interesting potential from our point of view. We must also strive to join NATO and to conclude a defense alliance with the United States. If there is an Israeli-Palestinian settlement that will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state, membership in NATO and a defense alliance with the United States should be part of the quid pro quo that Israel will receive.

There are some in Israel who fear such developments.

They fear the loss of Israeli freedom of action and that essential elements of [Israel] will be put at risk. But I think that just as France and Britain possess capabilities even within the NATO framework, the same can be true in regard to Israel. Membership in NATO is a logical step and can provide us with a guarantee of mutual security and even add a layer to our deterrence if the Middle East goes nuclear. It is possible that membership in NATO or a defense alliance with the United States will be a condition of a regional settlement.

Point of no return

Your main front as national security adviser will be the danger of a nuclear Iran and a nuclear Middle East. But as far as we know, Iran has already crossed the point of nuclear no-return and has enough fissionable material to assemble a first nuclear bomb.

The point of nuclear no-return was defined as the point at which Iran has the ability to complete the cycle of nuclear fuel production on its own; the point at which it has all the elements to produce fissionable material without depending on outsiders. Iran is now there. I don't know if it has mastered all the technologies, but it is more or less there. However, the term "no-return" is misleading. Even if Iran has fissionable material for one bomb, it is still at a low grade of enrichment. And if it wants to conduct a test, it will not have even one bomb. It follows that Iran is not yet nuclear and not yet operational. Serious obstacles still lie in the way. The international community still has enough time to make it stop of its own volition.

Still, looking back, we see a dramatic failure here. A red line was defined and Iran crossed it.

I told you that the Netanyahu government inherited scorched earth. That is true in any number of spheres. The tragic and heartbreaking story of Gilad Shalit is one example. It was not resolved in any way, shape or form. The same holds true for the Second Lebanon War and for Operation Cast Lead [in Gaza], which caused a great decline in our political status, particularly in Europe. Annapolis got us nowhere, nor did the disengagement. But most serious of all, by far most serious, is Iran's progress toward nuclear capability. I am not saying that nothing was done. Things were done. But if at the end of the day it turns out that Iran is drawing closer to its goal, obviously not enough was done. And what was done was too late, too little and too feeble.

What you are actually saying is that the national leadership in Israel over the past six or seven years understood about Iran and talked about Iran but did not address the Iranian issue with the prioritization, intensiveness and concentration of forces needed?

That is exactly what I am saying. In one case, because the leadership scattered its efforts and resources instead of concentrating them. It preoccupied itself with other issues, such as the disengagement and Annapolis. In a second case, because it did not home in on the main issue - Iran. I will give you an example. Look at how many speeches were delivered here about a democratic Jewish state, democratic and Jewish. The subject was discussed until it was coming out of people's ears. In contrast, look at how many moves were made to curb nuclear Iran by political and diplomatic means. There is no comparison between what the previous government devoted to the two issues. I want to tell you that Javier Solana [the European Union official in charge of foreign policy] racked up more kilometers traveling around the world to address the Iranian issue than the Israeli foreign minister did. Western statesmen did more to prevent Iran from going nuclear than their Israeli counterparts.

Are you contending that there was a monumental political failure here?

A gross failure. Between 2003 and 2007, it was far easier to contain Iran. The Iranian program was lagging behind. American power was more blatant. Various big powers were inclined to cooperate. Iran was more cautious and more vulnerable. But what preoccupied us in 2005? The disengagement. And what preoccupied us in 2007? Annapolis. We mobilized our national resources for empty moves. We wasted political assets on nothing. We talked about the red line of the point of nuclear no-return in Iran, but in practice we were committed only to the artificial red line that stipulated arbitrarily that there would be no more Jews in Gaza by the end of 2005. I tell you that if those mental resources and the determination and tenacity that were displayed in regard to the disengagement had been devoted to preventing Iran from reaching the point of nuclear no-return, Iran would not have got there.

And now that point is behind us?

Yes - in the technological sense, it has been crossed. I believe that in practice we will be able to block Iran. But the line that was termed a "red line" has been crossed.

Was there a policy eclipse here?

Certainly. The Winograd Committee exposed the functional eclipses in the Second Lebanon War. But even though it was a painful and costly event, the limited war of 2006 bore no historic significance. In regard to Iran, if history develops badly, the failure is liable to turn out to be of historic proportions.

I am confident that Netanyahu will know how to cope with the harsh reality he inherited. He is the first Israeli leader to identify and understand in depth the Iranian threat. He is the first who did not talk about a publicity campaign or about military action but about applying levers of economic pressure. Contrary to others, he did not talk about moves involving force and did not issue threats. Netanyahu understands that Iran is the great challenge of this period. He is dealing with the challenge intelligently, responsibly and with the state's interests uppermost.

Isn't it too late? Isn't it time to accept that Iran will be a nuclear power?

I am not at liberty to say what the government of Israel thinks. Nor will I tell you what the U.S. administration thinks. But I will tell you the opinion of professionals from serious research institutes in the United States and Europe. The major fear among professional circles is that a nuclear Iran will burst the dams and cause nuclear proliferation in the region. According to these experts, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey have certain capabilities. Syria, Libya and Algeria have already tried. Therefore, if Iran goes nuclear, those countries will consider following suit. There is already evidence of this. Those who understand are aware how baseless is the argument that one can extrapolate from the reality of the Cold War to the reality in the Middle East. It is wrong to say that just as we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and with a nuclear China, we will also be able to live with a nuclear Iran. The subject is not just a nuclear Iran; the subject is a multi-nuclear Middle East. A Middle East in which there are quite a few countries that resemble Pakistan.

Serious experts who are not Israelis look at the Middle East and say that if Iran is nuclear in 2015, the Middle East will be nuclear in 2020. And a multi-nuclear Middle East is a nightmare. Five or six nuclear states in a jumpy and unstable region where the world's energy resources are located will not create nuclear quiet but nuclear disquiet. A nuclear Middle East will be exactly like a pyramid that stands upside down.

It's unlikely that the Iranians will stop after the dialogue that the Americans will perhaps hold with them in the months ahead. The probability of containment without pressure is low.

Unquestionably.

If so, three possibilities remain: them with the bomb, them getting bombed or a maritime blockade.

I hear about a maritime blockade from unofficial American analysts - no one enters or leaves. Iran is very much dependent on the importation of oil distillates and on the export of unrefined oil. So an effective blockade could threaten Iran with bankruptcy within months. In that case, Iran might yield. But it might also decide to challenge those who are cutting it off. From there the road to escalation is short.

So this scenario says that the only way to prevent Iran from getting the bomb is to impose a closure on the country.

Again I want to introduce a cautionary note: what I am saying here does not reflect official Israeli policy or American policy. But there are those in the West who believe that this is the way. The prospect is to confront the Iranian government with a dilemma: Going nuclear or flourishing, going nuclear or survival of the regime. If that will be the dilemma, Tehran might conclude that regime survival is more important than the nuclear project.

What will the West do if there is no maritime blockade or if there is one that fails? In that case, will there be any choice but to prevent the bomb by bombing Iran?

Balance of terror

I was fascinated by Robert Oppenheimer, the Jew who created the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Another figure who riveted me was Henry Kissinger, one of the first nuclear strategists. But above all I was drawn to Herman Kahn, with whom I worked at the Hudson Institute.

Kahn is the original Dr. Strangelove. He was a Jewish-American genius who was a salient nuclear hawk and dealt with the planning and feasibility of nuclear wars. Kahn was a towering figure. He was a beacon of intelligence, knowledge and pioneering thought. He combined conceptual productivity, humor and informality. He attracted a group of devotees of whom I was one in the 1970s. But he also had bitter rivals who criticized him for even conceiving of the idea of a nuclear war. In the Cold War it was precisely those who talked about defense and survival who were considered nuclear hawks. The doves talked about "mutual assured destruction," which blocks any possibility of thinking about nuclear weapons. Like Kahn, I was one of the hawks. One of my projects was a paper for the Pentagon on planning a limited nuclear war in Central Europe.

On the face of it, what is the point of this? Why execute the enemy after deterrence has failed? But according to Dror, it is important to ascertain that the deterrence will work, even if you yourself have been destroyed. He sees this as a contribution to the repair of the world [tikkun olam]. When we say "never again," this entails three imperatives: never again will we be felled in mass numbers, never again will we be defenseless and never again will there be a situation in which those who harm us go unpunished.

Is the Holocaust relevant to our strategic thought in an era of a nuclear Middle East?

Look at the way memory guides people like Netanyahu, who refers time and again to the 1930s. Bernard Lewis also said a few years ago that he feels like he is in the late 1930s. What did he mean? On the one hand, an imminent threat, rapidly approaching, and on the other, complacency and conciliation and a cowering coveting of peace. When I visited Yad Vashem [the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem] not long ago, I could not bear the psychological overload and left halfway through. I don't think there is an Israeli or a Jew who can be insensitive to the Holocaust. It is a painful black hole in our consciousness.

When you look around today, what is your feeling? Are we alone?

We are always alone. Sometimes we have partners and lovers and donors of money, but no one is in our shoes.

I still remember Roosevelt and all the wise and enlightened types of the American security hierarchy in the period of Auschwitz, and I have retained the lesson. In Jewish history and fate there is a dimension of unfairness toward us. We have already been alone once, and even the good and the enlightened did not protect us. Accordingly, we must not be militant, but we must entrench our defense and security prowess and act with wisdom and restraint and caution and sangfroid. Never again.

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Travesty international

The Canadian Jewish News
Editorial
Thursday, 09 July 2009

Last week, the human rights organization Amnesty International issued a report on the war late last year in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. The 117-page document is entitled Operation "Cast Lead": 22 days of death and destruction. The title says it all. . The document, almost in its entirety, targets Israel. Of the six chapters and 117 pages in the report, one chapter - comprising 11 pages - discusses the Palestinians" role in the conflagration.

In a breathtaking dismissive sweep of the hand that typifies the human rights agency"s long-standing approach to the predicament of the Jewish state, the report states: "Amnesty International has seen no evidence that rockets were launched from residential houses or buildings [in Gaza] while civilians were in these buildings."

To be sure, Amnesty said that the rocket attacks from Gaza against Israel "constitute war crimes." But this is an easy, non-controversial statement for Amnesty to make, because there can be no denying, either in fact or in law, the plain, simple truth of deliberately launching rockets at men, women and children in their homes, schools, daycare centres and synagogues.

It is clear, however, from the layout, tone, emphasis and weight of the rest of the report that Amnesty only had Israel and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in its gun sights.
Amnesty accused the IDF of killing hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians, destroying thousands of homes, using civilians, including children, as human shields and of perpetrating random attacks on civilians, of breaching the laws of war and committing war crimes.
The IDF responded to the attack from Amnesty as it does to most attacks against the Jewish state: swiftly and with vigour.

"We find it both questionable and objectionable that a well-respected and ostensibly objective international organization such as Amnesty could produce a report on Operation Cast Lead without properly recognizing the unbearable reality of nine years of incessant and indiscriminate rocket fire on the citizens of Israel. The slant of their report indicates that the organization succumbed to the manipulations of the Hamas terror organization," the IDF said.

The IDF emphasizes a point that Amnesty tends to diminish: "The terrorists" military infrastructure was hidden in and around civilian homes and dispersed to locations scattered around the Gaza Strip, home to an estimated more than 1.4 million people, one of the most densely populated areas on earth."

The war to uproot the terrorists and their infrastructure was justified and necessary. It was, as the IDF said, conducted with great effort "to minimize as much as possible harming uninvolved, noncombatant civilians." But such was the nature of the terrorists" plan, performance and purpose that, despite the best efforts of the IDF, Palestinian civilians were indeed killed - regrettably so, terribly so, but unintentionally so.

Amnesty downplays this critical aspect of the war to the point of dismissing it. Amnesty so unfairly, so determinedly targets Israel that it makes of their report an international travesty.

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Tarek Fatah: Muslim Double Standards

National Post
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/07/09/tarek-fatah-no-muslim-outcry-over-battered-uighurs.aspx

This week, more than 100 Muslims have died and thousands more have been arrested in China. Yet not a peep of protest has been heard on the streets of Cairo, Karachi or Tehran. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it seems, is too busy imprisoning and herding Iranian Muslims to jail to hear the outcry in Xinxiang, while Egyptian religious leader, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has also ignored the persecution of the Uighurs. China, after all is the trusted ally of the Arab world.. This is not the first time the so-called ummah has shrugged off the massacre of fellow Muslims. During Kosovo’s war with Serbia, Islamists depicted Kosovar Muslims not as victims, but as American agents. More recently, the genocide of Darfuri Black Muslims at the hands of the Arab janjaweed militia and the Sudanese government has passed unnoticed by the larger Islamic world.

My friend, the Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy explained this phenomenon: “Many Muslims only pay attention when America and Israel behave badly.” If Israel invaded western China, she mused, maybe the rest of the Muslim world would wake up, cry foul and protest.

It is worth noting that on Monday, thousands of Egyptians did come out in Alexandria to protest … but not against the Chinese government. Their anger was directed at Germany, where a racist hate-monger had murdered Marwa Sherbini, an Egyptian woman (a crime that I wrote about in Wednesday’s Post).

The Muslim demonstrators in Alexandria shouted a bizarre chant to express their anger. “There is no god but God, and the Germans are the enemies of God,” they screamed. The chant is a twist on the Muslim oath and declaration of faith, “There is no god, but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

But where were these protesters when, on Dec. 30, 2005, hundreds of Egyptian riot police stormed through a makeshift refugee camp in central Cairo to clear it of 2,500 Darfuri Muslims, beating to death 28 people, among them women and children? Were those lives less valuable than the life of Marwa Sherbini?

Yesterday in the Post, I wrote that Sherbini’s “murder will prove to be manna from heaven” for the Islamists. They, I argued, would use it “as the ultimate symbol of the West’s ‘war against Islam,’ and to fuel the propaganda that Muslims are victims.”
Unfortunately, I was correct. Within hours, the tragedy was being held up as symbolic of the West’s hostility toward Muslims. The Canadian Islamic Congress led the charge, accusing the Canadian media of “intentionally” ignoring the news of Sherbini’s murder. Apparently, my commentary about the crime on this newspaper’s Editorial page — not to mention articles on the subject in The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star — wasn’t good enough for CIC president Wahida Valiante, who said that “the Canadian media are still locked into a discriminatory double standard when it comes to news events involving Muslims.”
Ms. Valiante further accused the Canadian media of abdicating its responsibility to inform Canadians of “a growing menace that has plagued Europe for centuries.”

Elsewhere, there were calls for revenge and a boycott of German goods. No one in the Middle East mentioned the fact that the German court had imposed a fine on one of its citizens for uttering racist epithets against a Muslim woman.

We Muslims need to wake up to an ethical challenge. It is immoral for us to stay silent when Muslim-on-Muslim violence takes place, but yell at the top of our lungs when the victims suffer at the hands of non-Muslims. This is a double standard that the Koran prohibits: It urges Muslims to “speak the truth” even if it hurts us.

Marwa Sherbini should not have died, but we know that the German judicial system will come down with the full force of the law on her killer.

Moreover, no one seems to be looking for the murderer of another Muslim girl. Neda Agha-Soltan was shot dead in Tehran by the Iranian government-backed militia. No one protested her death in the Muslim world outside Iran, nor asked for her killer to be brought to justice. Why? Perhaps because her killer was a fellow Muslim.

The question remains: Will Muslims come out to the streets and chant, “There is no god but God and the Iranian government is the enemy of God”?
National Post


Tarek Fatah is author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State. Currently, he is working on his second book on the roots of Jewish-Muslim friction, to be published by McClelland & Stewart in the fall of 2010. Fatah is also co-host of Strong Opinions, an afternoon talk show on CFRB 1010 in Toronto.

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Protesters Clash With Police in Iran

Demonstrators Endure Batons, Tear Gas As They Try to Mark 1999 Student Unrest
By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 10, 2009

TEHRAN, July 9 -- Thousands of anti-government demonstrators were attacked with batons and tear gas by security forces Thursday as they tried to gather around Tehran University for the first protests in about two weeks, defying warnings from the authorities that they would crush any demonstrations. . The protests were called to commemorate an attack on students at the university in 1999. The demonstrators are using such anniversaries and special occasions to rally people in public. Demonstrators and Web sites said the next possible date is the second-term inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which is expected next month. Several national and religious celebrations also are coming up in the months ahead.

At the same time, the authorities also showed their determination to prevent such protests.

An eyewitness said army conscripts carrying plastic shields and batons filled the area in front of Tehran University. Two middle-aged women reportedly walked up to the security forces, asking them mockingly whether it was already 5 p.m., the proposed start time for the demonstration. "Oh, still 20 minutes left," one woman told them. "That means that you still have time to leave," she added, laughing.

But the mood quickly changed when plainclothes security personnel started shoving people into unmarked vans with blacked-out windows. "A girl started screaming, and three men started beating her very hard with batons as she was lying on the ground, swearing at them, calling them dirtbags," an eyewitness said. When groups of people started shouting at the men, a young bearded official in civilian clothes ran toward the crowds, pulled out a revolver and started shooting in the air. "Everybody ran away into the nearby alleys," the eyewitness said.

At Ferdowsi Square, a roundabout in central Tehran, teenage members of the pro-government Basij militia stood shoulder to shoulder in a huge circle, wearing oversize black helmets and camouflage vests and carrying wooden handles of shovels and axes.

The security forces managed to prevent large crowds from gathering, by using tear gas, wielding batons and firing shots in the air. "They were constantly coming from both sides, surrounding us. We couldn't do much," a demonstrator said.

Many shouted slogans in favor of Mir Hossein Mousavi, an opposition leader who has been calling for an annulment of the disputed June 12 election in which Ahmadinejad was declared the landslide winner.

As darkness fell, more and more special riot police belonging to the Revolutionary Guard Corps -- nicknamed "robocops" because of their black protective gear -- flooded the streets. There were reports of people setting trash cans on fire in several neighborhoods.

Mousavi did not call for protests Thursday. But the capital had been abuzz with calls for a huge demonstration around Enghelab Square. On Web sites, in e-mails and in fliers, there were calls to meet up along nine routes leading to the square for what seemed to be spontaneous gatherings. The government accuses foreign governments, media and groups of organizing the protests and has asserted that people dressed as members of the Basij were beating protesters.

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FC: The Health Care Taxapalooza

Heritage Foundation

Throughout his campaign President Barack Obama repeatedly promised the American people: “If you’re a family that’s making $250,000 a year or less you will see no increase in your taxes. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your personal gains tax, not any of your taxes.” Just 15 days into office, President Obama signed a bill expanding Medicaid eligibility that was paid for with a 156% tax hike on tobacco. Since slightly more than half of today’s smokers (53%) earn less than $36,000 per year, Obama’s first effort at expanding government’s role in health care also became his first broken promise. But that first Medicaid expansion was minor league compared to the estimated $1.5 trillion health care plan Congress is considering now.


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And how does Congress plan on paying for this $1.5 trillion in new spending. Tax hikes. Some of these tax hikes even conform to Obama’s promise. They only punish our most productive workers and investors. Proposed tax hikes in this category include: 1) capping the value of itemized deductions including gifts to charities; 2) a 3% surtax on households earning more than $250,000; and 3) a millionaires tax.

But the left is beginning to figure out that you can only squeeze so much revenue from class warfare taxation. So Congress is also considering a slew of other taxes that will, again, force Obama to break his not tax hike promise. These include: 1) a tax on soda; 2) a tax on beer; 3) an increase in employer and employee payroll taxes; 4) a flat tax on health insurance companies; 5) broaden the Medicare tax on investment income; 6) an employer mandate; and 7) a value added tax on everything but food, housing, and Medicare. And we’re sure we missed some. The left sure can be creative when they are desperate to raise revenue.

What is definitely not being considered by Congress, are any measures to reduce overall health care spending. President Obama recently told the press: “And I’ve said very clearly, if any bill arrives from Congress that is not controlling costs, that’s not a bill I can support. It’s going to have to control costs. It’s going to have to be paid for.” But as Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf told the Senate this week, nothing in their current health care proposals will actually reduce health care costs. Instead, Elmendorf explained, the left’s health care plan only “puts an additional long-term burden on top of an already unsustainable path.” Elmendorf then suggested that if Congress really wanted to control costs, they would have to reform Medicare.

Our economy is already having a difficult time recovering under Obama’s current policies. Tacking on another $1.5 trillion tax burden, no matter how you structure it, isn’t going to help.

QUICK HITS
Al Qaeda’s North Africa affiliate has carried out a string of killings, bombings and other lethal attacks that have raised fears that the terrorist group may be taking a deadlier turn.

After today, big banks and other big institutions plan to stop accepting IOUs issued by the State of California.

To close their budget gap California is considering ending services to their 2.7 million illegal residents, which state officials estimate would save between $4 billion and $6 billion in costs.

Honduran business leaders are turning to Washington lobbyists to convince Congress that it should support rather than oppose the removal of President Manuel Zelaya from office.

Senate Democrats have punted climate change deeper into the fall, a delay that underscores the steep climb the White House faces in convincing Congress — and the world — to dramatically slash greenhouse gas emissions.

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PR does matter-it is vital strategy-our enemy"gets it"

IICC

Overview

1. The Palestinian Authority and Fatah have recently launched two new media outlets geared towards two distinct target audiences: 1.

The Israeli target audience: on June 15, Wafa, the official news agency of Abu Mazen's Palestinian Authority, launched a Hebrew version of its website, until then available in Arabic, English, and French. The independent Hebrew edition aims to focus on issues of interest to Israeli government officials, ordinary readers, and media. The contents produced by the website will be sent through the Internet to influential parties in Israel .
2.

The Palestinian and Arab target audience: on June 6, Fatah began test broadcasting a new satellite TV channel called Al-Filastiniyya. According to the channel's director, its broadcasts will reflect the policy of Fatah and the PLO.

2. The website and the TV channel join the Palestinian Authority's existing media, chief among which are the Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, Al-Ayyam, and Al-Quds dailies, the Palestinian Authority's official TV channel, as well as its websites and news agencies (mainly Wafa and the unofficial Ma'an news agency, which also has a website in Hebrew). The launch of Wafa's Hebrew-language website will improve to some extent the Palestinian Authority's ability to compete for Israeli public opinion, while the new TV channel may help promote its media capabilities with the Palestinian and Arab target audiences (provided it can take its place among already existing Palestinian and Arab channels).

3. Hamas's Al-Aqsa and Al-Quds TV channels, which enjoy the support of the popular Qatari channel Al-Jazeera, easily outperform Palestinian Authority and Fatah media, giving Hamas an advantage in the battle for hearts and minds among Palestinian, Arab, and even (directly and indirectly) Western target audiences. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority do have the upper hand when it comes to the Israeli target audience, seeing as Hamas's websites are published in eight languages but not in Hebrew (since the Israeli target audience is not one of Hamas's priorities in the battle for hearts and minds).

Wafa News Agency's Hebrew-language website

4. On June 15, the Palestinian Authority's Wafa News Agency 1 launched a Hebrew version of its website, until then available in Arabic, English, and French. According to Riyadh al-Hassan , Wafa's Chairman of the Board, the agency's Hebrew website will not be a translation of its Arabic-language counterpart but rather an independent website. It will focus on issues of interest to Israeli readers and media, including news, articles, and journalistic stories pertaining to all areas of Palestinian life: politics, economy, society, and culture. The website will also address Israeli Arabs, because that sector of society “plays an ever-increasing role in shaping the future of the Middle East conflict”. Riyadh al-Hassan further noted that the information on the website would be accurate and reliable, and that it would reflect the views and positions of the Palestinian government.

The Wafa News Agency offices in Ramallah
The Wafa News Agency offices in Ramallah
(Wafa Agency Hebrew website, July 2)

5. The Hebrew website is run by a team of Palestinian journalists who speak fluent Hebrew (some of them may be Israeli Arabs). The website aims to provide reliable information on the goings-on in the Palestinian Authority-administered territories and on the peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel from the Palestinian Authority's perspective. The website will particularly emphasize interviews with Palestinian personalities regarding the peace process as well as personal stories. According to the website's directors, the Hebrew version will feature articles by Palestinian personalities, speaking directly to the Israeli public with no censorship or mediation.

6. The stated purpose of the website's creation is to directly influence Israeli public opinion through the objective coverage of various events. The website's founders intend to e-mail a daily news coverage to all Israeli Knesset members, government offices, and media. The directors of the website said that they would make efforts to keep the coverage professional and reliable, with no incitement or demagogy. They further added that they counted on the intelligence of Israeli readers and their willingness to read the Hebrew edition and get the information from a primary source. The website welcomes comments from Hebrew readers, asking them to be professional, relevant, and reliable where possible, and to avoid incitement. According to the directors of the website, they trust that their Hebrew-language readers are ready for “matter-of-fact interaction”.

7. The first article appearing on the editorial page was written by Riyadh al-Hassan, Wafa's Chairman of the Board, and it is titled “Why Wafa in Hebrew?” According to the article, the question should be why it took Wafa so long to launch a Hebrew version. The author says that Wafa should have seen a long time ago that it needed to address and interact with the Israeli reader, to examine his ability to understand and study his Palestinian opponent, and to get to know him “just as the Palestinian is determined to study his Israeli opponent”.

8. A look at the website shows that it includes the following sections:

1.

Newsflashes— short newsflashes updated in real time. Most of the reports pertain to happenings in Judea and Samaria and to IDF's activities.
2.

Daily news —more detailed stories, updated in real time, about happenings in Judea and Samaria .
3.

Interview of the week— a section featuring a weekly interview with a senior Palestinian Authority figure. For now, there are no interviews in this section.
4.

Women— no stories appear in this section as of yet.
5.

Economy —articles about economy.
6.

Culture and arts —articles on culture and arts in Judea and Samaria .
7.

Sports— sports articles.
8.

Opinions— this section features opinions by various authors ( including Israelis ) on various subjects. The articles include commentary on the negotiations between Fatah and Hamas, Salam Fayyad's speech, opinions on social matters such as gunfire at weddings, and so forth.


President Mahmoud Abbas in an open letter to the Israeli readers of Wafa's Hebrew website: “We share the dream for peace and for a better future.” President Abbas expressed his hope that the two peoples would achieve the dream of living peaceful, secure, and prosperous lives (Wafa's Hebrew website, July 5).

Al-Filastiniyya, Fatah's satellite TV channel

TV channel Al-Filastiniyya
The logo of satellite TV channel Al-Filastiniyya

9. On February 18, Fatah's revolutionary committee decided to launch a satellite TV channel headed by Nabil Amr. 2Named Al-Filastiniyya , the new channel started its test broadcasts on June 6. The channel currently broadcasts three hours a day, from 7 PM to 10 PM. According to Nabil Amr, the channel's inspector general, the channel is now in its initial testing period. The full-scale test broadcasts, due to begin in several weeks, will last for three months, after which it will start broadcasting regular shows. According to Amr, the channel will be broadcasting “for unity and for the policy of Fatah and the PLO”, maintaining professionalism. He further added that the channel would recruit Palestinian college graduates and local Palestinian experts instead of relying on experts from abroad.

10. The channel broadcasts from Ramallah and has three offices in Cairo , Amman , and Beirut . It is registered in the Palestinian Authority and broadcasts through Nilesat, an Egyptian-owned communications satellite. According to channel supervisor Nabil Amr, it is funded by Fatah rather than by external funding sources.

11. Judging by the contents of the experimental channel, it appears that it broadcasts talk shows and current events shows dealing with such pertinent political issues as Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's speech, the internal Palestinian dialogue, and the situation in Jerusalem . The channel also broadcasts a daily press review called “Local Press”. Even though the channel claims to be objective, the various contents seen on it make it clear that it represents the PLO factions, mostly Fatah. The channel provides positive coverage of Palestinian Authority leaders, primarily Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The channel also broadcasts songs and video clips dedicated to Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to such mixed Jewish-Arab cities as Jaffa and Acre . At this point, there is no evidence of anything that falls in the category of incitement; however, there have been reports portraying Israel and the IDF in a negative light.

1 Founded in 1972, Wafa is the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, which is subjected to the presidency. It has its offices in Ramallah.

2 Nabil Amr, former Minister of Information and Abu Mazen's advisor. Appointed the Palestinian Authority's Ambassador to Cairo , Egypt in March 2008.

Comment: This, in part,is where your money goes. They could use the billions of dollars to improve/create infra-structure but no. This infra-structure development would create much needed jobs, provide critical income to their people but Fatah would then loose a valuable recruitment tool-despair, poverty and victimology.

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US, German intel: Al Qaeda plots multiple attacks on US-, Israel-bound airliners

Debka
July 9, 2009, 9:17 AM (GMT+02:00)

Target of new al Qaeda hijack plot

Western anti-terror agencies have warned that a large group of 15-20 al Qaeda terrorists, trained in Pakistan and Algeria to hijack and blow up airliners, deployed secretly in at least six European and Middle East countries in early July. They are standing ready to carry out multiple terrorist attacks. The terrorists are believed to have landed in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and Egypt.

The dates to watch, local authorities were warned, were July 4, July 7, the fourth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks on the British transport system in which 52 people died, and July 8-9, when the G8 summit meets in the Italian town of L'Aqila. US president Barack Obama will fly in from talks with Russian leaders in Moscow.

Al Qaeda planners, say the Western sources, know it is extremely hard to break through the massive security cordons protecting summit leaders. They are therefore planning to hijack passenger planes of airlines belonging to the targeted states and blow them up in mid-air.

DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources report the first specific red alert on Saturday, July 4, referred to the possible hijack of Turkish Airways planes taking off from Turkish airports for US destinations or Tel Aviv. Special precautionary measures were put in place at both ends of their routes.

The alert is still in force.

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A Study in Defeat

A Study in Defeat By: Jacob Laksin
City Journal | Thursday, July 09, 2009

Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, by Bruce Bawer (Doubleday, 352 pp., $24.95)

With the release of his new book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, the American writer and critic Bruce Bawer (some of whose work has appeared in City Journal) may have committed a crime in his adoptive Norway.. In 2005, Norway’s politically correct parliament passed the so-called Discrimination Act, a law that, among other curbs on free speech, criminalized “utterances” that may be “insulting” to those of certain religious beliefs. Since Surrender is a searing indictment of Western opinion makers, especially in the media, for capitulating to the rise of radical Islam in Europe, and since Islamic extremists are bound to take issue with the author’s appeal for a sterner defense of Western freedoms, it’s a real possibility that Bawer could be prosecuted for what he has written.

That it has come to this in politically progressive Norway makes Surrender urgent reading. It also serves to bolster Bawer’s chief contention: that many in Europe, and to a lesser extent in the United States, are prepared to roll back essential civil liberties in order to pacify (or so they hope) Muslim radicals. Bawer embarks on a broad offensive, counting leading political, religious, and academic figures among the defeatists. Mainly, though, he directs his rhetorical fire at the press. In their eagerness to forfeit the free-speech rights on which they depend—whether through self-censorship or through craven reporting that casts avowed Islamists as “moderates”—journalists may present the most agonizing illustration of Bawer’s theme that, for too many in the West, surrender is indeed an option.

In Bawer’s telling, the white flag first waved in 1989. That year, Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, earned him a fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. In his decree, Khomeini called on Muslims across the world to hunt down and kill Rushdie and anyone involved in the book’s publication “so that no one will dare to insult Islamic sanctities again.” The fatwa forced Rushdie into hiding and led to the murder of his Japanese translator. But while many writers rallied to Rushdie’s defense, some perversely blamed the novelist for provoking his own death sentence. Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper sneered that he “would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring Mr. Rushdie’s manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.” At the time, he writes, Bawer dismissed the Trevor-Roper view as an anomaly. Surely, he reasoned, most civilized people would defend free speech against its Islamist despisers. He was wrong.

Fast-forward to November 2004. Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo Van Gogh has just been savagely murdered on an Amsterdam street by Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri. The Dutch-born son of Moroccan immigrants, Bouyeri killed Van Gogh for the offense of making Submission, a documentary-style film highlighting the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies. If Bouyeri had hoped to silence criticism of Islam, he succeeded: the response to this deadly act of censorship was more censorship. In the most depressingly ironic instance, shortly after Van Gogh’s death, Submission was withdrawn from a festival of censored films by its producer, Gijs van de Westelaken, who feared that it would incite Muslim violence. “Does this mean I’m yielding to terror?” asked Westelaken. He candidly answered his own question: “Yes.”

Similar scenes have played out across Europe. In January 2006, Vebjørn Selbekk, the editor of the small-circulation Christian journal Magazinet, became a public enemy in Norway when he reprinted the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that had triggered an uproar in the Muslim world when they first appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in the fall of 2005. Selbekk did so in protest against what he saw as a culture of self-censorship among Western newspapers, most of which refused to publish the offending caricatures. For a time, he stood by his decision, even as everyone from his fellow editors to Norway’s foreign minister pressed him to apologize. Ultimately, Selbekk, too, gave in, lamenting that he had not understood “how wounding” his decision had been for Muslims.

Bawer also condemns the Western press for downplaying the abundant evidence of extremism in Muslim communities. Of the many examples he provides—Surrender is meticulously sourced, and Bawer includes a comprehensive list of notes and quotations—the most outrageous may be a May 2007 Pew Research Center poll on Muslim attitudes. One of the poll’s more widely publicized findings was that 80 percent of young American Muslims opposed suicide bombings, a statistic presented as proof that, as a Washington Post headline trumpeted, Muslims are “opposed to extremism.” Few in the establishment press deigned to notice the disconcerting fact that a double-digit percentage of Muslims in the U.S. supported suicide terrorism. It was a spectacular case of what journalists call burying the lead.

Bawer finds many such cases in the course of his thorough—and thoroughly disheartening—account. In Amsterdam, a series of violent attacks on gays—often in broad daylight—has destroyed the city’s reputation as one of the most tolerant in Europe. Muslim immigrants from Morocco have committed most of the attacks, but this fact is apparently too controversial to mention, leaving the press to grasp for any explanation save the obvious one. The German magazine Der Spiegel demonstrated perfectly the absurd lengths to which the press will go to evade inconvenient facts. In 2007, the magazine’s website ran a story on Amsterdam’s anti-gay violence that found any number of ways to account for the attacks—perhaps society had stigmatized the perpetrators, or they were “struggling with their own sexual identity.” That the violence could have something to do with the attackers’ Islam-inspired hostility to homosexuality never came up.

Evasiveness of this sort often coexists with another media sin: the tendency to define Muslim moderation down. Take the high-profile case of globetrotting celebrity Islamist Tariq Ramadan. Time and again, Ramadan has belied his media-made reputation as a “moderate.” For instance, he has refused to condemn outright the Islamic practice of stoning women for adultery, advocating only a “moratorium,” while at the same time defending the “right” (often forced) of Muslim women to wear the veil. But to Stéphanie Giry, an editor at Foreign Affairs, Ramadan is merely encouraging “modesty among Muslim women.” The writer Ian Buruma has been equally generous. In a New York Times Magazine profile of Ramadan, he noted approvingly that “unlike some Islamic activists, Ramadan has not expressed any hostility to Jews in general.” If this is now the standard of moderation, then Bawer is surely right to scoff that the term “moderate Muslim” has come to denote “someone who might not stone an adulteress to death himself, but who would defend to the death another Muslim’s right to do so.”

It has become unacceptable to point all of this out. If there is one thing the media like less than challenging Islamic radicals in print or pixels, it’s being called out on their cowardice. Thus Bawer decries the oft-heard admonition to marginalize extremists “on both sides,” a refrain that more often than not draws a moral equivalence between Islamic terrorists and extremists and those who speak out against them. Bawer may not be entirely disinterested here: already, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet has denounced Surrender for perpetuating “foaming-at-the-mouth racist fantasies,” notwithstanding the reviewer’s notable failure to find evidence of either racism or fantasy in the book. But the fact that Bawer may have a score to settle with some of his more unscrupulous detractors hardly justifies their attempts to equate jihadism’s critics with its practitioners.

Surrender at times treads closely on the heels of Bawer’s 2006 book, While Europe Slept. The sections on Theo Van Gogh and the assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, especially, read like summaries of his earlier work. On the other hand, given the prominent role that both men have played in the debate over extremist Islam, some repetition is inevitable, and perhaps necessary. Moreover, because Bawer pulls no punches—he spiritedly dismisses one writer for composing a “breathtakingly mendacious tissue of calumnies”—his book is a bracing and lively read.

And even his critics cannot accuse Bawer of exaggeration. If you think the book’s title overstates his case, listen to Columbia University’s Mark Lilla, who instructed his readers in 2007 “to recognize that coping [with Islam] is the order of the day, not defending high principle, and . . . our expectations should remain low. So long as a sizeable population believes in the truth of a comprehensive political theology, its full political reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected.” Doubtless some see this as an admirable expression of pragmatism. Bawer rightly recognizes it, instead, as a declaration of defeat—and he, for one, is not about to give up the fight.

Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. His e-mail is jlaksin [@] gmail.com.
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Fayyad and Syria's Regime Lie, Americans Applaud

Barry Rubin

“Palestinian prime minister: Jews would be welcome in future state,” reads the headline. Now, it is well-known that the Palestinian Authority, which the aforementioned prime minister Salam Fayyad sort of heads, has always taken the view that all Jews must be removed from any future Palestinian state. This was also known to the more informed members of the audience, but modern Western intellectuals and journalists are very polite people—if you fall into the right category.

One man at least had the courage to ask if the emperor’s clothes weren’t a bit scanty:. The Aspen Daily News, the publication of the affluent, conspicuous-consumption ski resort in Colorado, is not a major media outlet. Yet how beautifully this society sheet illustrates the spirit of an age in which self-described beautiful people applaud the ugly terrorists and dictatorships!

“Palestinian prime minister: Jews would be welcome in future state,” reads the headline. Now, it is well-known that the Palestinian Authority, which the aforementioned prime minister Salam Fayyad sort of heads, has always taken the view that all Jews must be removed from any future Palestinian state. This was also known to the more informed members of the audience, but modern Western intellectuals and journalists are very polite people—if you fall into the right category.

One man at least had the courage to ask if the emperor’s clothes weren’t a bit scanty:

“At the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival on Saturday, former CIA director James Woolsey noted that there are a million Arabs in Israel, accounting for one-sixth of the Israeli population, and...then asked PA (Palestinian Authority) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad: `If there is to be the rule of law in a Palestinian state, and if Jews want to live in someplace like Hebron, or anyplace else in a Palestinian state, for whatever reasons or historical attachments, why should they not be treated the same way Israeli Arabs are?’"

“Fayyad responded: `The kind of state that we want to have, that we aspire to have, is one that would definitely espouse high values of tolerance, co-existence, mutual respect and deference to all cultures, religions. No discrimination whatsoever, on any basis whatsoever. Jews to the extent they choose to stay and live in the state of Palestine will enjoy those rights and certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the State of Israel.’"

There is much that one can say about these two paragraphs. The Western media and academia is replete with articles about the allegedly terrible lot of Arabs in Israel. They are noticeably empty about the really terrible lot of Christians in many Muslim-majority places. (To be fair, I am not talking about the PA-ruled West Bank here.) The same applies to alleged oppression or repression in Israel and the lack of information on the very real oppression and repression where the PA rules. So already Fayyad has a head start.

What makes this especially disgusting is that leading figures in the PA recently attended a stage show at which Fatah bragged--as proof of its superiority to Hamas--of the mob murder, abetted by the PA police, of two unarmed Israeli reserve soldiers who took a wrong turn and found themselves in the middle of a PA-controlled city. The PA's response? To threaten the Italian reporter who filmed the murder.

Fayyad is lying. He knows he’s lying. The better-informed members of the audience know that he’s lying. So here’s what the audience did:

“The crowd at the Greenwald Pavilion applauded enthusiastically.”

This was followed by a fawning question by former assistant secretary of state Martin Indyk who, according to the newspaper:

“Complimented Fayyad on his plans to build up Palestinian government institutions en route to statehood, which Fayyad has set a goal of achieving in two years. He asked Fayyad if `final stage” political negotiations should also now be underway. “’

This is all pure nonsense since in fact Palestinian government institutions are a mess of corruption and incompetence while Fayyad has about as much chance of obtaining statehood in two years as (you are invited to fill in the blank with something appropriate).

“Fayyad answered that there was a risk for `this to be seen as an effort to make the occupation work better, and not to end it, and thereby doing away with any political viability that our political leadership still has.

“’What we are counting on is a meaningful political process that is capable of ending the occupation, because building the institutions of the state, by itself, is not going to end the occupation. It is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient ....Both have to work together.”

What he’s really saying is that his idea of a peace process is that the West will force Israel to pull out of the West Bank without the PA doing anything. This is what he has put forward as strategy in his main policy speech, which those in the audience should have read and digested but presumably didn’t.

And then this exchange:

“Earlier in the interview, Fayyad said that Palestinian elections set for January should definitely be held as scheduled.

“`That is an absolute right for the people,’” he said, adding that, “`it is no secret that Hamas does not want elections.’”

“`Because they think they will lose?’” asked [columnist Tom] Friedman.

“`I don’t know of what other reason they may have,” Fayyad said.

“`That’s usually a pretty good reason not to have elections,’” Friedman said.

Ha! Ha! Very funny. But in fact everyone in the audience should know—and Friedman must know—that it was Fayyad’s boss, Mahmoud Abbas, the PA’s chief executive, who cancelled elections and unilaterally extended his term.

True, the PA cannot supervise elections in the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, but Fatah which rules the PA has never even held internal elections. And some of the poll results show Hamas as being very strong in the West Bank.

The following is a true story: In the run-up to the Gaza elections which Hamas won, Fatah and PA officials approached Israel and proposed having a phony military confrontation that would give the PA an opportunity to cancel the elections. But Fayyad—who, true, was not involved in this particular incident--is allowed to get away with his supposed dedication to democracy.

Earlier in the day, Fayyad said that the way to handle Hamas—which to her credit Senator Diane Feinstein condemned at the conference--is to get Palestinians to support

“That which is done to affect a meaningful change for the better in people’s lives. I think we stand a much better chance of winning that debate than going about it in a war of words, which has typified much of the argument over the divide.”

But Fayyad knows, as should the well-informed people in the audience, that his stated policy is to make a power-sharing deal with Hamas. So if Feinstein accurately described Hamas as “a militaristic/terrorist organization that still believes Israel should be driven into the sea, that does not admit Israel’s right to exist,” why is Fayyad seeking to bring it into his government?

I know I should stop here, but it is impossible to describe the absurd credulity of the contemporary scene—Festival of Ideas, indeed!—without discussing the end of the article. Not content to apologize for one such regime, the article continues with the words of another honored speaker, Syrian ambassador to the U.S. Imad Moustapha. (The quotes were taken from an interview he just did in the Atlantic.)

Here is the representative of a vicious dictatorship, one of the world’s leading supporters of terrorism, where the state produces television series showing Jews murdering Christian children to drink their blood and helps terrorists get into Iraq to murder American soldiers (you know, working class people who don’t usually hang out in Aspen).

And what does Moustapha lecture Americans about? Why democracy, of course!

“`Democracy is an ideal state that is never attainable,’” Moustapha said,” well that’s sure true in Syria!

He goes on—a statement too priceless not to quote:

“When asked about the state of democratic freedoms in Syria, Moustapha said that U.S. policy seemed to be that the Arab people should only elect those candidates and parties supported by the U.S.” He cited the Hamas win in the Gaza Strip and the recent elections in Lebanon. Given Syria’s bloody history in Lebanon and more recent involvement in murders, this is rich, though perhaps not as rich as the Aspen audience.

In regard to U.S. policy in Syria, the Syrian ambassador said, “You need to leave us to evolve into a more democratic state from within. Don’t try to impose anything on us from without.”

Right, just let Syria go on trying to impose its interests on Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan, and Iraq “from without.”

But isn’t this what it’s all about? The United States and its friends are responsible for all the world’s problems. America should make up for its sins by either supporting its enemies, sending them checks, or at least doing nothing.

Oh, yes, did I mention applauding their lies enthusiastically?

*Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books, go to http://www.gloria-center.org

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UN: Israel Must Tear Down West Bank Barrier

July 9, 2009 | Eli E. Hertz

In many respects, the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on Israel's security barrier does not deserve to be dignified by a learned rebuttal. The Opinion deserves the same treatment as another shameful United Nations' document which Israel's ambassador to the UN, the late Haim Herzog, publicly tore up from the dais in a demonstration of protest and repugnance, after the motion was passed - the 1975 General Assembly Resolution 3379 that equated Zionism with racism. Nevertheless, the ICJ's opinion needs to be addressed not only due to the biased manner in which it weighed the 'evidence', but also due to the evidence it failed to examine - including a host of relevant UN documents. These documents are quoted selectively or totally ignored, while the Court's narrative of the conflict boldly rewrites history - recent and past, without so much as a blush.

The Opinion is so sloppy that it wants the reader to believe that the League of Nations document - the 1922 "Mandate for Palestine" that laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea - was the founding document for Palestinians' self-determination! It's not just that the members of the Court didn't do their history homework, but they didn't even bother to read the six-page legally binding "Mandate for Palestine" document, before authoritatively citing it as one of the cornerstones for Palestinian self-determination. In essence, the ICJ 'converted' the "Mandate for Palestine" from the machinery for creating a Jewish Homeland into a founding document for Palestinian Self-Determination. This single misstep of the International Court of Justice essentially rendered its own case null and void.

The Opinion is so biased that it found terrorist activities to be irrelevant in its judicial investigation. The ICJ that cites the Secretary-General's Report on the security fence as a key document and a major source of information for its opinion, skips the part of the same report where Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, cites: "After a sharp rise in Palestinian terror attacks in the spring of 2002, the [Israeli] Cabinet approved ... construction of ... [a security] Barrier." Not only does the UN Report label the Palestinian actions "terror" but it also clearly establishes, in its own words, the cause for building a security barrier.

The Advisory Opinion is so incompetent that it demonstrates a total disregard or a lack of understanding of the UN's own legal machinery by treating General Assembly Resolutions as a source of law. Highly qualified legal opinions by past members of the ICJ, including a past president of the Court, who have gone on record to underscore that General Assembly resolutions carry absolutely no 'legislative' power and cannot be used as a source of law, labeling such attempts: "illusion." Yet, this Court uses such GA resolutions to support its illusive conclusions. Professor Stephan M. Schwebel, former President of the International Court of Justice (1997-2000) has said that:

"The General Assembly of the United Nations can only, in principle, issue recommendations which are not of a binding character, according to Article 10 of the Charter of the United Nations."

Schwebel also cites the opinion of Judge Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, a former member judge of the International Court, who declared on another occasion that:

"The General Assembly has no legal power to legislate or bind its members by way of recommendation."

The Opinion is so devious that it 'found' the need to selectively quote from the 1970 GA Resolution 2625: "Emphasized that 'No territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force shall be recognized as legal.'" But the Court hides from the reader that the same Resolution subsequently clarifies that: "Nothing in the foregoing paragraphs shall be construed as enlarging or diminishing in any way the scope of the provisions of the Charter concerning cases in which the use of force is lawful." [E.E.H., such as in Self-Defence] "Furthermore, no one has taken the Court to task for the deceitful 'abridged' historical narrative they concocted which erases all references of Arab aggression during the British Mandate period (1922-1948), and through 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 as well as Israel's continuing fight of self-defence against Palestinian terrorism.

Another case of doctored use of historical documents: The Court states that Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) emphasized, among other things, the call for "withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." The ICJ misleads the readers by simply removing from this principle the need, as stated in Resolution 242, for withdrawal to "secure and recognized boundaries" that will not invite future Arab aggression.

According to the PLO's legal advisor, the ICJ consciously sought to engage: "The United States in a tango of mutual deterrence" and "chart a path for the international community to counter the United States' veto power."

The Bench allowed its chambers to become a political instrument abandoning any semblance of fairness or professionalism, for political gain. The above examples are only the tip of the iceberg. See my book "Reply" Available on line at:
http://www.mythsandfacts.org/ReplyOnlineEdition/toc.html.

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For Obama, The Honeymoon’s Over

Maale Adumim, outside Jerusalem: An illegal settlement to some; to Israelis, a “legitimate” Jewish city for “an indigenous people returning home.”

Jewish Week - 7/8/09 - by Jonathan Mark Associate Editor

It was a New York wedding like all others, and no other. The veil was about to cover the bride’s face, evoking the time Jacob was snookered, expecting Rachel, getting Leah. “What do you think?” said one guest to another. About the bride? “No, Obama.” His voice was low, conspiratorial. The joy and sport of last year’s campaign (even heated campaigns can be fun) has given way to cold calculation. The guest, who voted for Barack Obama, now feels like Jacob in the dead of night.

In The Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz writes that because of his call for a total settlement freeze many “supporters of Israel who voted for Barack Obama now suspect they may have been victims of a bait and switch ... the Obama campaign went to great lengths to assure these voters that a President Obama would be supportive of Israel. This despite his friendships with rabidly anti-Israel characters like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and historian Rashid Khalidi.”

Some critics thought Obama was taking a harder line with Israel than even Yasir Arafat did in the 1993 Oslo Accords. (According to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Oslo contained “no prohibitions on the building or expansion of settlements.”) Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl believes that “pressuring Israel made sense at first,” but went off-track when it became absolutist, including Jerusalem. “The absolutist position is a loser for three reasons,” writes Diehl. It allows Arabs to remain intransigent while waiting for the freeze; no Israeli coalition could survive an unconditional freeze; and, as at Oslo, the Arabs never asked for it. Arab negotiators, writes Diehl, had always “gone along with previous U.S.-Israeli deals by which construction was to be limited to inside the periphery of settlements near Israel — since everyone knows those areas will be annexed to Israel in a final settlement.”

In November, Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote. By May, his administration began exerting heavy public pressure on Israel alone for an unprecedented West Bank freeze on all “natural growth” — all construction and even family growth, even in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter. By June, one poll found that only 6 percent of Israelis said Obama was “pro-Israel,” according to the Jerusalem Post. This president “may be the most hostile president ever,” said the Zionist Organization of America in a recent press release.

It was a West Bank wedding like all others, and no other. But Yehudit and Yosef’s story really began almost nine years ago, when Palestinians stormed Joseph’s Tomb (Kever Yosef) and its adjacent Od Yosef Chai yeshiva. Yehudit’s father, Hillel Lieberman, then 36, hearing that the holy places were in flames, left his shul in nearby Elon Moreh, hoping to rescue the Torah scrolls. Hillel’s body, still in his tallit, was pumped full of bullets and discarded.

There are now swastikas on Joseph’s Tomb, but it’s quieted down. Elon Moreh and Yitzhar, where Hillel is buried, are two of the settlements that will surely be surrendered to the Palestinians. But, the family wonders, after these settlements are turned into Anatevka, could they ever visit Hillel’s grave, or would it be mutilated and forbidden, like Joseph’s?

Elyorah Lieberman, Hillel’s sister, a New Yorker, said in a telephone interview, that Yehudit and Yosef had been looking for an apartment in Yitzhar but there were none. Construction had slowed to a crawl. There was one apartment in Yitzhar that wasn’t quite available but wasn’t quite used. Yael, the bride’s mother, begged the landlord to have a heart. Yitzhar was a place of burial, said Yael; it should be a place of life. The owner agreed, not to a lease but for now.

Tonight, in defiance of the United States, Yehudit and Yosef will sleep in Yitzhar. The settlement’s “natural growth” has grown by two.

“Elon Moreh,” said Elyorah, “was in the [biblical] territory of Joseph, who saved the economy of the world. Meanwhile, the American economy is in shambles. Obama should remember God’s promise to Abraham, ‘Those who bless you will be blessed, and those who curse you will be cursed.’ God runs the world, not Obama.”

A serious percentage of American Jews seem to be to be tiring of it all. According to an American Jewish Committee poll last year, the number of Jews feeling “very” or “fairly distant” from Israel has grown to 31 percent, nearly one-third of American Jews.

When the poll was released, sociologist Steven Cohen told the JTA news service that the AJC numbers reflected his sense that “the intermarried and children of the intermarried are dragging down the Jewish people’s commitment to Israel,” he said. “Commitment among the in-married is as high as it ever was, but we are moving to two populations.” And yet, Rabbi Charles Sheer, in-married, Orthodox, describes himself as “somewhat on the left,” skeptical of the settlement movement. Nevertheless, he has a daughter and three grandsons on the West Bank — make that four, a new grandson, Nadav Yosef, was born in May. Efrat’s “natural growth” just grew by one.

In 2005, Rabbi Sheer, a New Yorker, had loving but passionate disagreements with his West Bank son-in-law, Avi Abelow, about the Gaza withdrawal. Abelow was the producer of “Home Game,” a highly acclaimed documentary, sympathetic to the settlers, about the last “annual” basketball tournament in Gaza’s Gush Katif; a tournament that ended with everyone losing their homes.

“Looking back, Avi was right,” said Rabbi Sheer. “Israel gained nothing. Withdrawal turned out to be a total disaster.” Rabbi Sheer says he still favors land for peace, but not land for “suicide.” Even “the most liberal left-winger has to see,” said Rabbi Sheer, “that after the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza, you’d have to be meshuga, it’s committing suicide,” for Israel to weaken itself in return for nothing but a promise, an almost messianic belief in the reversal of Arab attitudes.

The rabbi, who contributed financially to Obama’s campaign, now has mailed a letter to the White House protesting the “heavy-handed” pressure that’s “putting the screws to Israel alone.”

Rabbi Sheer now thinks Obama’s policy borders on the “abusive. I’m both disappointed and frightened by it.”

Yossi Klein Halevi never thought of himself as a “settler.” He and his wife have lived for more than 25 years, and raised three children, in the Israeli capital, the same Jerusalem that Obama always said would forever be “unified,” until he said it wasn’t.

Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, and author of “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land,” said, by telephone, that “Israelis don’t want to hear the word ‘peace’ anymore from Arab leaders. Israelis finally caught on that when Palestinians say peace they mean peace without a Jewish state.” Israel wants peace and legitimacy as a Jewish state.

“Based on his Cairo speech, Obama doesn’t have a clue why Israel is legitimate. We’re not here because of the Shoah,” the justification cited by Obama, explained Halevi. “We fight the way we fight because of the Shoah. We may bomb Iran because of the Shoah. But we’re legitimate because we’re an indigenous people returning home,” home to Jerusalem, to Elon Moreh, to Efrat, to Hebron, disputed though they may be.

“There are no more one-way Israeli concessions. That’s finished. The majority of Israelis would accept a temporary suspension of all building in the territories,” said Halevi, but “what we need in return from the Arab world are a simultaneous and tangible granting of legitimacy and normalization. What we need from Obama is to honor previous American commitments. Until Obama does that, I see no reason for Israel to honor previous commitments or to make any move, either to the Palestinians or the Americans. “The perception in Israel,” said Halevi, “is that Obama is wimping out when it comes to the world’s dictatorships, and is getting tough with only one country — and that’s us. Israelis don’t like that. There is a growing sense of contempt for Obama’s weakness,” perceived in his dealings with Iran and North Korea. “There have been some devastating cartoons in Israeli newspapers, one had Obama dressed like a scarecrow with birds shaped as missiles and rockets, laughing and sitting all over him. His slow response to what was happening in Iran was a major blow... the accumulated damage to his credibility here has been enormous. So if there’s a showdown, most of the Israeli public will stand with Netanyahu.”
______________________________



The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition

'US does not expect Israel to act unilaterally'
Jul. 7, 2009
HILARY LEILA KRIEGER JPost correspondent and herb keinon , THE JERUSALEM POST

Amid ongoing tension between the US and Israel over settlements, the Obama administration is stressing that it does not expect Israel to act alone and that Arab states must take meaningful steps in tandem with Israel.

"We're not expecting that the Israelis do something for nothing," a senior State Department official told The Jerusalem Post, following Monday's meeting between US Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, which failed to fully bridge the differences concerning settlements.

The official, who is familiar with Mitchell's thinking, gave a wide range of measures the administration was pressing the Arab states to take to reignite the peace process and reassure Israel its demands were not one-sided.

The gestures being proposed include Arab leaders taking trips to Jerusalem as well as receiving Israeli leaders in Arab capitals; Arab countries opening interest offices and increasing trade ties with the Jewish state; Arab states allowing over-flights of Israeli aircraft, which would cut down on passengers' travel time; and joint Israeli-Arab sponsorship of cultural and humanitarian projects.

Diplomatic sources noted that they were focusing these normalization efforts on North African and Gulf states they believe most amenable to improved ties with Israel, as opposed to Saudi Arabia, seen as the custodian of Islam, whose prestige and influence in the region could ultimately prove key to sealing any deal with the Palestinians.

While there is little expectation that Saudi Arabia would take such steps at this time, the sources said, the idea was that Riyadh wouldn't prevent others from making such gestures; in other words, they want to "prevent the Saudis from being hostile" and using their privileged role to sabotage the nascent peace efforts.

In that vein, the administration has focused on Morocco and Tunisia in North Africa, countries which had ties with Israel that were broken off during the early months of the intifada and never restored, and Qatar and Oman, with whom Israel has had some official relations in the past, and the United Arab Emirates.

One diplomatic official described Morocco as being in the category of "low-hanging fruit" because of its relatively moderate government and previous relationship with Israel.

As part of the American effort to coax steps from Arab states, perhaps prodding Morocco taking a leadership role, US President Barack Obama sent a letter to Morocco's King Muhammad VI this past weekend saying he hoped Morocco would "be a leader in bridging gaps between Israel and the Arab world."

According to the letter, which the Moroccans made public, Obama reiterated that Israel had to "stop settlements, dismantle outposts, and remove roadblocks," while saying the Palestinians needed to continue "to build up their security forces to confront terrorism, ending incitement, and reforming their institutions to build a Palestinian state."

While the issue of settlements was a key part of the meeting between Mitchell and Barak, both sides said other issues, including those alluded to in Obama's letter, played a role in the conversation.

The US would like to reach a point where all sides were ready to announce that they would be taking major steps on these and related issues together.

"Our expectation is that everyone is in this together and that they have to take steps together," the State Department official said.

He indicated that one potential format for a such an announcement would be an international conference, though a more low-key form of dissemination, such as press reports or diplomatic cables, could also suffice.

However, the idea of an international conference to launch a renewed and reinvigorated diplomatic process, which has been bandied about for months, has not been grasped too enthusiastically by Israel because of a lack of clarity as to what the content of such a conference would be.

In the meantime, both sides reported making inroads during the recent Mitchell-Barak meeting in London.

"We've been making progress. It's not overnight progress. We're going to continue to have conversations not just with Israel, but with the Palestinians and Arab states across the region," the official said.

Still, he stressed that when it came to the settlement issue, "Our position hasn't changed at all."

The US has been calling for a stop to all settlement activity, including natural growth, as specified in the road map peace plan. Israel, however, has maintained that such a total freeze wouldn't be possible if normal life were to continue in these communities, and have reportedly offered a few-months-long temporary freeze as a compromise.

There is a possibility that a bridging formula could be found whereby Israel's temporary freeze is accepted under the rubric of restarting talks that include final status issues, of which settlements is one.

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Ehud Barak briefed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Tuesday along with the inner cabinet, which includes Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and ministers Dan Meridor, Benny Begin and Moshe Ya'alon, on his talks with Mitchell.

While there was speculation that Mitchell will come to Israel next week and meet with Netanyahu, nothing has yet been announced or formalized.

Mitchell has also held meetings with several Arab officials, more in number and frequency than his parleys with Israel, according to his office, in an effort to revive the incipient ties that developed between Israel and more moderate Muslim states during the Oslo process in the 1990s.

Following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel developed tentative relations with some of the Persian Gulf states, opening trade offices in Qatar and Oman in 1996, and also developing trade ties with Morocco and Tunisia.

But within months of the outbreak of Palestinian violence in September 2000, Oman, Morocco and Tunisia cut ties. Israel's interest section in Qatar remained open, but at very low level and out of the public eye. In addition, both Egypt and Jordan recalled their ambassadors.

While Egypt and Jordan eventually returned their envoys, the ties with the other Arab countries were never restored, something the United States would like to rectify.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443747311&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

Guest Comment: Disappointment in Obama's stance on Israel has led many in the US Jewish community to distance themselves from him, if not overtly expressing their disappointment. In trying to show his even handedness, Obama has resorted to demonstrating that he is making demands not just on Israel, but also on the Arabs. His demands, however, are mere window dressing, requiring nothing more than gestures that can be easily reversed. How about requiring that they Arab nations, or at least the PA recognize Israel as a Jewish state? After all, those are also only words.

Obama's efforts also avoid Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Arab pact. As the article points out, the Saudis are the guardians of Islam, the implication being that they cannot be approached. In other words, Islam is inconsistent with the Jewish presence in the Middle East. How racist is that? It's not even apartheid! Aggie

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Arab Incitement Violating Roadmap Obligations

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
(Israelnationalnews.com)
A7 News

Senior Palestinian Authority clerics are still teaching Arabs that Jews are evil, that Jerusalem has no Jewish sites and that Jesus was a “Palestinian” and not a Jew. The incitement violates the American Roadmap, as noted succinctly by the Obama administration while it campaigns against Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. In a recent interview on PA television, the Authority’s chief religious justice, Tayseer Tamimi, taught Arab residents that the Koran states that Jews have been evil throughout their history, that Jerusalem has no Jewish holy sites and that the Israeli government is trying to destroy the foundations of the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount.

A research report by Palestinian Media Watch’s Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik reveals that Tamimi said on television, "Concerning the Jews, the Holy Koran says that they lack understanding, are void of wisdom, know nothing, violate agreements, etc. However, the Jews were known - it was known about them throughout history- that they make false claims, lies, forgery, slander, and fabrications, in order to justify their aggression, land theft, defilement of holy sites, appropriation of land, destruction of homes, murder of children, women, and the elderly.

"I know of Muslim and Christian holy sites in [Jerusalem]. I don't know of any Jewish holy sites in it... Israel has been excavating since 1967 in search of remains of their Temple or their fictitious Jewish history."
I know of Muslim and Christian holy sites in [Jerusalem]. I don't know of any Jewish holy sites in it.

He also alleged that Israel has injected “chemical acid” into rocks on the Temple Mount in order to dissolve the foundations of the Al Aqsa mosque, where “soil and the pillars [were moved] so the mosque is hanging in midair. There is an Israeli plan to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque and to build the Temple."

The Obama administration’s public comments on trying to convince the Palestinian Authority to return to the negotiating table with Israel generally have been constructed to call on both sides to adhere to American Roadmap obligations. U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly last week told reporters, “You have heard me say many times from this podium that we believe that all parties have to meet their obligations under the Roadmap. And of course, you know for the Israelis, that means a stop to settlements, which means a freeze of all activity, including natural growth. The Palestinians have their own obligations under the Roadmap, and that’s stopping incitement and proving that they can improve security. We also have made it clear to Arab states in the region that they should take steps towards normalization.”

However, most of the meetings by senior Obama officials, primarily U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, have been held with Defense Minister Ehud Barak over the issue of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

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Alert: Healthy doses of pork in Health care bill

Rick Moran
American Thinker

When Congress proposes spending hundreds of billions of dollars on anything, be it health care or some weapons system - there are always a few members perfectly willing to pork up the bill with totally unrelated spending.

Usually, the non-germane items are shoehorned into the bill just to assure that member's vote on the final package. And as is the usual practice, the health care bill has it's fair share of totally useless projects. Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe has read the health care bill so you don't have to:

Tucked within is a provision that could provide billions of dollars for walking paths, streetlights, jungle gyms, and even farmers' markets. The add-ons - characterized as part of a broad effort to improve the nation's health "infrastructure'' - appear in House and Senate versions of the bill.

Critics argue the provision is a thinly disguised effort to insert pork-barrel spending into a bill that has been widely portrayed to the public as dealing with expanding health coverage and cutting medical costs. A leading critic, Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, ridicules the local projects, asking: "How can Democrats justify the wasteful spending in this bill?''

But advocates, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, defend the proposed spending as a necessary way to promote healthier lives and, in the long run, cut medical costs. "These are not public works grants; they are community transformation grants,'' said Anthony Coley, a spokesman for Kennedy, chairman of the Senate health committee whose healthcare bill includes the projects.

"If improving the lighting in a playground or clearing a walking path or a bike path or restoring a park are determined as needed by a community to create more opportunities for physical activity, we should not prohibit this from happening,'' Coley said in a statement.


There is not one scintilla of evidence that lighting in a playground reduces health care costs. There is plenty of evidence, however, that the member who gets such goodies for his district can boast about it come election time.

I can't wait for Kranish and other journalists to go through this bill. This time, instead of calling it "porkolicious," let's refer to it as "Porkorama" - just so we can keep it straight in our minds.

Comment: Good grief-the spin is in full force!

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OC:Obama’s Ambitious UN Treaty Agenda

Cliff Kincaid

With Al Franken replacing Norm Coleman, Senate Democrats have another vote for the UN’s Law of the Sea Treaty, and there are strong indications that they intend to bring this controversial document up for a vote within days or weeks. Those who favor the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) believe that U.S. security lies in passing a treaty and hiring more lawyers
to defend America before an international tribunal, rather than building more ships for the Navy and Coast Guard.

The anticipated vote on the treaty follows a strong recent push for ratification from the Council on Foreign Relations and newspaper ads in favor of the treaty from the Pew Charitable Trusts, a $5 billion non-profit entity. Plus, the Obama State Department sent a document to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 11th that declared UNCLOS to be a top priority for the administration.

In fact, Obama’s submission to the Foreign Relations Committee names 17 treaties that he wants ratified. In addition to UNCLOS, they include the feminist Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the unverifiable Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the gun rights-destroying Inter-American Convention Against Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials.

President Reagan, who pursued development of a 600-ship Navy and believed in a policy of peace-through-strength, refused to sign UNCLOS. His Attorney General, Edwin Meese, now with the Heritage Foundation, says Reagan would continue to oppose it.

Senate Democrats may not listen to conservative objections to the pact, but they should pay some attention to the views of people like Newton B. Jones of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. “As recently as 1987,” he points out, “the Navy had 594 ships. At that time, we were not at war. Since then, despite growing threats from around the globe – the Middle East, Korea, China – we have built an average of only six ships a year, while decommissioning 20. The Navy’s fleet is now only 281 ships, less than half its size in 1987.”

He goes on to note that “…numerous reports recommend a fleet of 55-75 submarines, but the Navy is building only one a year. Our submarine fleet has shrunk from 100 in 1990 to 53 today. The American Shipbuilding Association estimates that at current rates, China will have twice as many submarines as the United States in only five years.”

In fact, the American Shipbuilding Association estimates that, if present trends continue, we will be down to a paltry 180 ships by 2024.

Rather than build more ships, which could produce jobs for the Boilermakers union (which endorsed Obama for president) and Americans in general, Obama and Senate liberals would prefer to facilitate the hiring of more international lawyers to handle competing claims for access and resources in the oceans of the world. The treaty comes with a financial price – a global fee or tax payable to a United Nations-sanctioned body.

Not coincidentally, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, wrote the foreword for the book, The International Judge, a favorable treatment of foreign law and foreign judges. Chapter Two, titled, “International Judges: Who Are They and How Do They Get on the Courts?,” examines such topics as “the job market.”

Lawyers get on these courts by lobbying for the jobs through the U.N. and getting more treaties passed to create more jobs. This is why groups like the American Society of International Law are in business and draw many top lawyers to their annual conventions.

We may be losing jobs in our domestic economy, but opportunities are endless in the field of international law. Passage of UNCLOS would open up some well-paying jobs in the UN’s International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

However, the largely untold story is that of corruption in the international organizations that implement and monitor these treaties. For example, the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica, another of the Law of the Sea Treaty organizations, has been racked by corruptioncharges. Yet, the Senate has never held a hearing into these charges.

Interestingly, The International Judge book includes a favorable profile of a judge on the International Criminal Court (ICC). Obama may eventually decide to sign and send the ICC treaty to the Senate for ratification. This is a court which can arrest, prosecute and imprison Americans in foreign jails, in violation of our constitutional rights.

Obama is pushing UNCLOS now, but the Law of the Sea is not a partisan issue. The Republican George W. Bush Administration also pushed hard for ratification. Susan Biniaz of the U.S. Department of State explained the rationale during a July 17, 2007, appearance at the American Enterprise Institute. She explained, “I think someone said how few ships there are compared to how many there used to be. We don’t have the capacity to be challenging every maritime claim throughout the world solely through the use of naval power. And [we] certainly can’t use the Navy to meet all the economic interests.”

So rather than build more ships, we will depend on a piece of paper from the UN to safeguard U.S. national security. Then we will hire more lawyers to represent our interests. But there has been no coherent explanation as to how a piece of paper will deter America’s enemies or the pirates who want to board our vessels or guarantee access to ocean resources.

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska should have something to say about this. But she was persuaded to endorse the treaty two years ago. She has been asked repeatedly over the last several months to take a fresh look at the evidence against ratifying the treaty. However, she remains silent, oblivious to the concerns of conservatives in her own political party.

UNCLOS is a substitute for a strong Navy and was deliberately designed as such. The people who wrote the treaty were World Federalists such as Louis B. Sohn, who co-authored World Peace Through World Law, a blueprint for world government. This international lawyer, who mentored Harold Koh, Obama’s State Department Legal Adviser, sincerely believed that lawyers could help run the world as long as the international bureaucrats had sufficient power and resources through a strengthened United Nations. Sohn, who actually believed in a world army with nuclear weapons maintained by the UN, saw UNCLOS as a stepping stone on the road to world government.

In what could be a preview of the UNCLOS battle, Koh was recently confirmed by a Senate vote of 62-35. If Senate conservatives can line up 35 votes against UNCLOS, they will defeat the pact, because it requires two-thirds, or 67 votes, for approval. However, some of the senators who voted against Koh, such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, are solidly in favor of UNCLOS.

One of the major unknowns is Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, who was for the treaty before he ran for president. As a candidate, he was critical of the document, saying it was harmful to U.S. sovereignty.

The Navy destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, named after the grandfather and father of Senator McCain, stands as evidence of American power on the high seas. But the power is dwindling and passage of UNCLOS could be the final nail in the coffin of U.S. Naval superiority.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

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US Denies Report of Compromise on Homes for Jews in Yesha

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

The U.S. State Department Wednesday denied a report in the Hebrew-language Maariv newspaper that U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell agreed to Israel’s building 2,500 new homes for Jews living in Judea and Samaria in return for a subsequent temporary freeze on further construction. . U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters at the daily press briefing in Washington that the report in Maariv of a compromise “is inaccurate.” Maariv did not cite sources for its report.

“What I can say is that Senator Mitchell and Defense Minister Barak did have good, productive discussions, but our position has not changed,” Kelly stated. “Our bottom line is the same; it has not changed, and that’s that all parties in the region have to honor their obligations. And you know what our position is regarding settlements. This activity has to stop. This is laid out in the Roadmap. So the reports aren’t accurate."

Kelly also said that no date set has been set for discussions between U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who called off a planned meeting last month because of the gap in positions between the U.S. and Israel. The Netanyahu administration rejects clamping a total freeze on building for Jews in Judea and Samaria.

Several days after the meeting was called off, Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke with Mitchell during a trip to Washington and both men met again this past Monday in London. Israel’s Hebrew-language newspapers and political leaders have reported contradictory results of the meeting. Mitchell is expected to return to Israel in the next two weeks, but Kelly said he did not know if he would meet with the Prime Minister.

If the Maariv report is true, and Israel will agree to a temporary building freeze in return for the immediate construction of 2,500 housing units, it is questionable whether the Palestinian Authority would accept it. The PA and the Arab world have made it clear that there will be no return to negotiations with Israel without total acceptance of their demands for an Israeli commitment to end a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria.

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Bin the soft words. Squeeze Iran sharply

Talk about talks with Ahmadinejad is worthless. We need sanctions and firm diplomacy
Rosemary Righter

Even before G8 planners started adding first five, then a dozen, and now double that number of governments to the guest list, the shrunken time frames and swollen agendas of G8 summits had long ceased to offer much scope for deep thinking — indeed, any thinking at all. Carefully choreographed formal proceedings traditionally oblige each leader to zip through the “to do” list — how to save the global economy, save free trade, save the planet, feed it; and, finally, ah yes, though we’re not sure how, how to stop North Korea and Iran going nuclear.

In the expanded G8+ sessions there is no way to buck convention but in the session on foreign policy with which they kick off today, eight powerful politicians should break with tradition and do some real thinking. Binning their prepared remarks, they should concentrate, with what Barack Obama loves to call “the fierce urgency of now”, on a single question.

That question is how to exert pressure on Iran’s Islamic dictatorship, now that the political landscape has been transformed by the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad electoral coup and above all by the Iranians’ refusal to take it lying down. What is happening is no “mere” popular burst of indignation, brutally suppressed. The upheaval reaches deep into the heart of the regime, pitting factions of the clerical and political establishment fiercely against each other and even calling into question the moral authority of the Supreme Guide, the keystone of rule under divine guidance.

In open defiance of Ayatollah Khamenei’s order to unite under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, groups of Iran’s most revered mullahs have denounced the new Government as “illegitimate”, and two thirds of the members of the Majlis, Iranian’s parliament, boycotted the President’s “victory” party. In the fight between two Irans, one obscurantist and belligerent, the other increasingly sophisticated, youthful and weary of isolation, Ayatollah Khamenei was never neutral. With his fateful decision to step off his pedestal and demand that heads be cracked, he can no longer even pretend to be so. A taboo has been broken.

The international interest in an Iran that behaves like a “normal” country thus coincides with Iran’s anguished national mood. Whether Mr Obama’s offer of unconditional talks with the regime ever made sense is open to question — all he got in exchange were demands that America “repent”, drop sanctions and dissociate itself from Israel. To keep that “pathway” open now would be anything but a neutral act: it would confer legitimacy on a regime that has forfeited Iranian trust, demoralise Iran’s opposition and confirm hardliners in their conviction that the Obama Administration is in retreat.

Further, and much to the point, to talk about talks now is just talk: negotiations, even were Iran to take up the offer, would not achieve the goals of ending Iran’s lethal mischief-making in Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, still less its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Carrots do not work with either Ayatollah Khamenei, or with Mr Ahmadinejad, who since stealing the election has declared the nuclear programme non-negotiable. What then? The sticks of economic sanctions are notoriously difficult to aim against elites without hurting people who, in Iran’s case, are already hard hit by unemployment, inflation, rank inequality and mismanagement. They also take time to work, and time, on the nuclear front, is short.

But increased economic pressure now would chime with the accusations, levelled at Mr Ahmadinejad by his main challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, that mismanagement and “adventurism” have led to economic misery and international disrepute. Since Iran depends on Europe for 40 per cent of its imports, mainly from Germany, Italy and France, a sharp temporary trade freeze would be devastating — particularly if it included petrol, which Iran imports for lack of refining capacity. Sanctions would hit the wealth of Revolutionary Guard commanders, who control vast tracts of the economy. They would also reveal Mr Ahmadinejad’s North Korean-style “self-sufficiency” rhetoric for the economic rubbish it is.

The Europeans, however, will not move unless they can be convinced that sanctions form part of a coherent Obama strategy. The L’Aquila summit needs at the least to convince them that the US is getting its ducks in a row.

Public diplomacy towards Iran also needs drastic overhaul. A basic Western misunderstanding has been that, 30 years after Khomeini’s revolution, Iranians are still brainwashed by his aggressively messianic message. This misconception underpinned the West’s pathetic eagerness to be seen not to “intervene” in Iran’s drama, a sacrifice of principle for no reward since the regime blamed satanic meddling anyway. Even at the height of Khomeinist fervour, the massed black-clad rallies were far from the whole story — some five million Iranians have spent time in jail since 1979 — and experience has inoculated most Iranians against permanent Islamic revolution.

Their courage has more than earned Iranians the right to be treated as adults. At least a third are plugged into the information revolution by satellite and mobiles. And they are in a mood to listen. They have been told that their nuclear programme is peaceable, and it is as such that it has massive support. Detailed evidence that the regime has lied to them is worth laying out, clearly and repeatedly, together with an explanation of the links between non-compliance and sanctions, and the rewards on offer for Iranian co-operation.

The Big Lie about the elections haunts every corner of Iranian life, colouring everything the regime now does. Pussyfooting by the West has never been more inexcusable, or truth-telling more likely to find a receptive Iranian audience.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rosemary_righter/article6662197.ece

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EC: EPA Admits Cap and Trade Will Fail

Heritage Foundation

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee began their hearings on the 1,500 page Waxman-Markey cap and trade legislation Tuesday, and ranking member Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) won a startling admission from Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson. Inhofe produced an EPA chart generated last year during the Senate’s debate of the Lieberman-Warner cap and trade legislation. The chart showed that the carbon reductions under that bill would not materially effect global carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. Inhofe then asked Jackson if she agreed with the chart’s conclusions. Jackson replied: “I believe that essential parts of the chart are that the U.S. action alone will not impact CO2 levels.”


Also at the hearing, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he did not agree with chart which is interesting since all the best science confirms Inhofe’s and Jackson’s conclusions. For example, a recent study of cap and trade by MIT concluded: “The different U.S. policies have relatively small effects on the CO2 concentration if other
regions do not follow the U.S. lead. … The Developed Only scenario cuts only about 0.5 °C of the warming from the reference, again illustrating the importance of developing country participation.”

So how is that “developing country participation” going? The New York Times reports from the Group of 8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy: “The world’s biggest developing nations, led by China and India, refused Wednesday to commit to specific goals for slashing heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting the drive to build a global consensus by the end of this year to reverse the threat of climate change.” For anyone that has been following the issue, this development should come as no surprise. On June 30th of this year India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told Bloomberg: “India will not accept any emission-reduction target — period. This is a non-negotiable stand.” China has also made it explicitly clear that they view the carbon tariffs in the Waxman-Markey bill as a violation of World Trade Organization rules.

So if other countries will not sacrifice their own economic growth to meet carbon cutting goals, then what is the economic hit Americans are taking? The left is touting a recent Congressional Budget Office study which they say shows Waxman-Markey would only cost Americans $175 a year. However, the left is seriously misrepresenting what the CBO study is. Footnote three on page four of the CBO study explicitly admits: “The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap.

The reduction in GDP would also include indirect general equilibrium effects, such as changes in the labor supply resulting from reductions in real wages and potential reductions in the productivity of capital and labor.” In other words, the CBO study is not an economic analysis at all. Instead it is a simple accounting of how energy tax revenue that Waxman-Markey collects is distributed. When the economic costs of Waxman-Markey are included, the harm to American families skyrockets. According to Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis Waxman-Markey will decrease GDP in 2020 by $161 billion (2009 dollars). For a family of four, that is $1,870 that the CBO simply ignores.

All economic pain, for no environmental gain. No wonder the Obama economy is failing.

QUICK HITS
According to USA Today, counties that supported President Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain.

U.S. authorities are eyeing North Korea as the origin of the cyber attack that overwhelmed government websites in the United States and South Korea.

He’s already banned spending city money to buy bottled water and mandated composting citywide. Now San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s latest: mandates on healthier food.

Massachusetts will challenge the constitutionality of the federal law that defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

The Obama administration announced yesterday that it will spend $18 million in additional funds to redesign the Recovery.gov Web site.

Comment: Any questions? Let not facts get in the way of truth!

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The Jewish relativity theory...and Jewish stigma...

When Paul Newman died, they said how great actor he was; they failed to mention he considered himself Jewish (born half-Jewish). When the Dame Helen Suzman (born as Helen Gavronsky in 1917 to immigrants; a native and life-long citizen of South Africa anti-apartheid activist and politician) who helped Nelson Mandela died recently, they said how great she was, but they failed to mention she was Jewish.

On the other side of the equation, when Ivan Boesky, or Andrew Fastow, or Bernie Madoff committed fraud, almost every article mentioned they were Jewish.

However, when Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Martha Stewart, Randy Cunningham, Gov. Edwards, Conrad Black, Senator Keating, Gov Ryan, and Gov Blagojevich messed up, no one reported what religion or denomination they were, because they were not Jewish.

This is a reminder of a famous Einstein quote; in 1921, Albert Einstein presented a paper on his then-infant Theory of Relativity at the Sorbonne, the prestigious French university:

"If I am proved correct," he said, "the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist." "If relativity is proven wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew."

Author unknown

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US, Israel settlement deal emerging

herb keinon and gil hoffman , THE JERUSALEM POST

Israel and the US are moving toward a compromise solution on the settlement issue that might allow both sides to claim "victory," The Jerusalem Post has learned. According to senior government officials, under this type of solution, Israel would declare a moratorium of a few months on the settlement issue, possibly half a year, while the US would give Israel a green light to complete a still-to-be-determined number of housing units in the settlements that are in advanced stages of construction.

Officials in the Prime Minister's Office would not confirm media reports that work on some 2,500 housing units in the settlements would continue.

Under this type of arrangement, US President Barack Obama would be able to claim a victory in getting Israel to agree to a moratorium on any new housing starts in the settlements, while Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu could claim that he did not agree to a complete freeze, and that housing construction would continue.

In addition, US Mideast envoy George Mitchell would continue efforts to extract normalization gestures from at least some countries in the Arab world.

A State Department spokesman on Wednesday night denied the media reports on the 2,500 housing units.

Israeli officials said that Obama was continuing pushing hard on the settlement issue because of a feeling he needed some breakthrough here to be able to go to the Arab world and build coalitions to help the US deal with mounting problems in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

Once agreement is reached on the settlement issue, and the US gets some gestures from the Arab world, the next step would possibly be an event - likely an international conference - where a "to do" list would be presented regarding what needed to be done to move the diplomatic process forward.

This "to do" list, according to one well-placed source, was shaping up as a revamped edition of the road map, with sequential phases and a stronger regional component, meaning that the Arab states would be asked to become involved in the normalization of ties in the early stages, rather than at the end, of the process.

In addition, any new road map would have take into consideration - and deal with in detail - something that did not exist when the original road map was launched in 2003: Hamas control of the Gaza Strip.

Diplomatic sources said that the US, interested in shoring up its relations with Russia, is now much more amenable than in the past to the idea of an international conference in Moscow to launch the new initiative.

The sources said the issue was discussed during Obama's recent visit to Moscow, and that it will also be raised at the G8 meeting that opened Wednesday in Italy.

According to National Security Adviser Uzi Arad, speaking at a Knesset press conference marking Netanyahu's 100th day in office, Netanyahu expects Obama to honor the agreements reached with the Bush administration on West Bank construction,

Arad revealed that ahead of Netanyahu's meeting with Obama in May, the National Security Council prepared reports that articulated the American commitments in great detail. Netanyahu also quizzed his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, in a meeting on Friday about the agreements he had reached with president George W. Bush behind the scenes.

"The problem is that Americans saw the situation from a different perspective than we did and it required convergence that we are working on now," Arad said in response to a question from The Jerusalem Post.

"The US didn't see itself obligated by the agreements. Our demand to respect previous standpoints has necessitated the dialogue with the US continuing to this very day. Israel expects agreements to be honored."

Arad said the policy review period that the Netanyahu and Obama administrations embarked on when the two new leaders took over did not end when they met in Washington and would continue until a framework is agreed on how to proceed on the diplomatic front.

Netanyahu's policy planning director Ron Dermer vowed at the press conference that no compromises would be made on Israel's insistence that a Palestinian state be demilitarized. He promised that the prime minister would never utter the words "Palestinian state" without the word "demilitarized" preceding them.

When asked why Netanyahu waited to say those words in an address at Bar-Ilan University rather than already uttering them in Washington, Dermer said that Netanyahu purposely did so in order to emphasize his conditions for a Palestinian state before committing himself to establishing it.

Channel 2 reported Wednesday night that the prime minister had told his father, 100-year-old historian Benzion Netanyahu, that he purposely set the conditions knowing that the Palestinians would never agree to them.

"He doesn't support [a Palestinian state]," the father said in a phone interview. "He set conditions that they won't ever accept. That's what he told me. He set the conditions and they won't accept even one of them."

Netanyahu's office responded by accusing Channel 2 of "maliciously tricking a 100-year-old man."

Kadima released a statement saying that the interview proved that Netanyahu did not endorse a Palestinian state in good faith.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443757019&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

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Getting Cold Feet Over Democratic Proposals

Michael Barone
Thursday, July 09, 2009

The financial system collapsed. Housing prices cratered. Unemployment is at a record high for the last quarter-century. The Democratic president has a solidly positive job rating. . And yet we Americans have not suddenly become collectivists. The economic distress of the 1930s led Americans to favor less reliance on markets and more on government. The economic distress of the 1970s led Americans to favor less reliance on government and more on markets. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect, as many political liberals have been predicting, that the economic distress of the late 2000s will produce a shift in the 1930s direction. But it doesn't seem to have happened yet.

Or so the polling evidence tells us. Last month's Washington Post-ABC poll reported that Americans favor smaller government with fewer services to larger government with more services by a 54 percent to 41 percent margin -- a slight uptick since 2004. The percentage of independents favoring small government rose to 61 percent from 52 percent in 2008. The June NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reported that, even amid recession, 58 percent worry more about keeping the budget deficit down versus 35 percent worried more about boosting the economy. A similar question in the June CBS-New York Times poll showed a 52 percent to 41 percent split.

Other polls show a resistance to specific Democratic proposals. Pollster Whit Ayres reports that 58 percent of voters agree that reforming health care, while important, should be done without raising taxes or increasing the deficit. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that 56 percent of Americans are unwilling to pay more in taxes or utility rates to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming.

It's interesting that on these issues and many others independents are responding more like Republicans than Democrats. That's the opposite of what we saw up through 2008, when independents were almost as critical of the Bush administration and Republican policies as Democrats.

This apparent recoil against big-government policies has not gone unnoticed by Americans. Gallup reported earlier this week that 39 percent of Americans say their views on political issues have grown more conservative, while only 18 say they have grown more liberal. Moderates agreed by a 33 percent to 18 percent margin.

Voters continue to think pretty highly of Barack Obama. But these numbers suggest that they are responding more negatively to Democratic proposals that have a chance at passage than they did to Democratic platform planks that were, until the 2008 election, only political rhetoric. The $787 billion stimulus package, the cap-and-trade bill's utility-rate increases, the public health insurance package -- all these seem to generate more apprehension than enthusiasm.

So does the prospect of doubling the national debt, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates, from about 40 percent of gross domestic product to about 80 percent. That's about where it ended up after World War II. Americans evidently regard our current economic situation, though negative, as not enough to justify the magnitude of deficit spending that was appropriate in an all-out world war.

I have been pleasantly (and others have been unpleasantly) surprised by our fellow citizens' unwillingness to embrace bigger government in a time of economic distress. American history -- the New Deal -- has disposed us to consider such a shift natural. But it was not universal even in the 1930s. In that decade, voters in Britain, Canada and Australia preferred parties opposed to bigger government, even as voters in the United States, France and New Zealand went the other way. And polling suggested that Americans by the late 1930s had become wary of the New Deal.

I think the shift in reliance from markets to government in the 1930s or the other way around in the 1970s was not fully completed until the next decades, when Americans saw the success of big government policies during World War II and the unexpected economic boom that resulted from low taxes in the 1980s. Those successes were also successes of American policy in the world -- the defeat of Nazism in 1945 and the fall of communism in 1989.

It's still possible for American attitudes to shift, if the Democrats' economic policies are passed and are seen to revive the economy. But it hasn't happened yet. Instead, Americans seem to be recoiling against big government when it threatens to become a reality rather than a campaign promise.



Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

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Obamanomics Supporters - Cracks in the Dike

Larry Elder
Thursday, July 09, 2009

While the media stopped to cover Michael Jackson's death, several tremors rocked the foundation of something that actually affects us all -- Obamanomics. irst, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who supported the President over his Republican rival, criticized Obama's spending, saying "we can't pay for it all." Powell said: "I'm concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs and the additional government that will be needed to execute them. ... One of the cautions that has to be given to the President -- and I've talked to some of his people about this -- is that you can't have so many things on the table that you can't absorb it all."

Second, a few days ago, respected British economist Tim Congdon dusted off a 2003 paper -- written pre-Obama spending -- by the Federal Reserve's senior economist. It warned of the nation's growing debt and deficit, calculating their impact on long-term interest rates. The Fed's conclusion? "A percentage point increase in the projected deficit-to-GDP ratio raises the 10-year bond rate expected to prevail five years into the future by 20 to 40 basis points. ... Similarly, a percentage point increase in the projected debt-to-GDP ratio raises future interest rates by about 4 to 5 basis points." In plain English, this means, as Congdon puts it, a "debt explosion." Applying the 2003 paper's calculations and assumptions to our debt and deficit numbers under Obama, Congdon sees the "horrifying" consequences of bank bailouts and increased public spending.

Third, billionaire/Obama supporter Warren Buffett warned of impending inflation caused by increased government spending. "A country that continuously expands its debt as a percentage of GDP," he said, "and raises much of the money abroad to finance that, at some point, it's going to inflate its way out of the burden of that debt. ... Every country that's denominated its debt in its own currency and has found itself with uncomfortable amounts of debt relative to the rest of the world, in the end they inflate. And that becomes a tax on everybody that has fixed dollar investments."

Fourth, the Obama-supporting/George W. Bush-hating/billionaire benefactor of hyper-liberal MoveOn.org, George Soros, predicted that the administration's spending and borrowing will trigger inflation and higher interests rates. "As markets revive," he said, "fear of inflation will drive up interest rates, which will choke off recovery." (Emphasis added.)

Our country rushes ever closer to a Canadian/European economic model, where government spends a greater and greater percentage of the nation's income -- whether on education, "bailing out" private companies, "assisting" states that have imprudently run their affairs, supplying "free" health care and health insurance, or the creation of "green jobs" to battle "global warming."

President Obama and the Democratic Party's congressional supermajority represent nothing less than a grave and gathering threat to that which made America great -- free enterprise, competition, allowing people to keep as much of their own money as possible, and the assumption that people know better how and on what to spend their money than does government.

The Republicans -- who, remember, supported the first bailout, under Bush -- are only slightly better.

The first President Bush signed into law the Americans With Disabilities Act, telling private employers under what circumstances they should hire and "accommodate" those with "special challenges." Republican Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency. The second Bush signed the prescription benefits bill for seniors. And on and on it goes.

I voted against G.W. Bush the first time because he promised greater government involvement in education, health care and other aspects of our lives. So I "threw away my vote" and voted libertarian.

I voted for Bush in '04 because of 9/11. I agree with Bush's recognition that we are at war with Islamofascism and that it represents the greatest threat to civilization. I supported and still support our intervention in Iraq. But I consider it a matter of national security, not a pretext to "spread democracy."

I opposed our intervention in Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti (all under Clinton) and Lebanon (under Reagan). Military intervention is for one thing only -- national security. So while I am incredibly saddened by the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, this is no reason for our nation to send troops. If mercenaries choose to go and fight for one side or another, that is their choice. And people and organizations can and do send supplies, workers and money for humanitarian purposes.

I believe that U.S. intervention in World War I was a mistake and that the European monarchies should have been allowed to obliterate themselves. The punitive Treaty of Versailles angered the Germans and set the stage for the rise of murderous demagogue Adolf Hitler. I once offered this WWI analysis directly to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (who wrote a blurb for my second book), and he said, "There is much in what you say."

Now we have another threat to our security. It comes from within. We must fight this one with a war of ideas. The new threat is called Obamanomics.



Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
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Easing of Restrictions in Judea and Samaria in 2009

The scope of activity of the Palestinian security forces was expanded – permission was granted to open twelve new Palestinian police stations in Area B, and the scope of activity of the existing police stations was also increased. This is in addition to the permission to open 20 new Palestinian police stations that was granted last year. 2. Improvements in the civil-humanitarian realm – extension of entry permits to Israel for chronic patients (and their escorts) for the purpose of medical treatment, as well as for medical students doing their internship in Israeli hospitals – from three months to six months.



3. Removal of the checkpoint at A-ram, south of Ramallah, which allows free movement of vehicles and pedestrians.



4. Removal of the Beit Iba checkpoint in Samaria in March 2009. In order to prevent the passage of potential terrorists from Nablus, a new vehicular checkpoint was set up near Dir Sharaf village, northwest of Nablus, where only spot checks are carried out.



5. Removal of two roadblocks, one next to Ras Karkar village, and the second near Eyn Yabrud village. Without the roadblocks, free passage for vehicles is possible between Ramallah and the villages east and west of it.



6. Removal of the Rimonim checkpoint, located east of Ramallah – allows movement between Ramallah and the Jordan Valley.



7. Removal of the Bir-Zeyt checkpoint, located north of Ramallah – allows swift passage between Ramallah and the villages to the north.



8. Improved passage of Palestinian public figures and businessmen – One thousand and five hundred permits were issued to public officials which allow them to pass through the Israeli crossings into Israel. This is a very significant move that will improve the quality of life of these individuals, who are the prime movers of the Palestinian economy in Judea and Samaria.



9. Opening of 422 crossing, east of Qalqilya, to free movement of Palestinian vehicles between Qalqilya and the villages to the east.



10. Removal of the roadblock at Hableh, south of Qalqilya, which allows movement between the city and the villages to the south.



11. Extending the working hours of the Haviot checkpoint, northwest of Nablus, to 24 hours a day, which will improve the movement of Nablus area residents.



12. Extending the working hours of the Asira a-Shamalya checkpoint, north of Nablus, to 24 hours a day.



13. Opening the Vered Yericho crossing, north of Jericho, which will allow free movement between the Jericho vicinity and the Jordan Valley for both vehicles and pedestrians.



14. Extending the working hours of the Hawara checkpoint, south of Nablus, to 24 hours a day, with vehicular spot checks. The Hawara checkpoint is the main one in the Nablus vicinity and the easing of restrictions there allows swift passage from the city to all parts of Judea and Samaria.







The aforementioned roadblock removals are in addition to about 140 roadblocks that were opened to traffic in the past year in order to increase the civilian Palestinian population's freedom of movement throughout Judea and Samaria. The decision to open checkpoints was made following an assessment of the situation by Central Command and as part of the plan to ease restrictions that was approved by the political echelon.



Today, in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley, there are 504 dirt roadblocks and 14 checkpoints. IDF will continue to act according to decisions made by the political echelon, in accordance with security assessments. These actions are meant to further ease the routine life of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria, while continuously fighting terror and maintaining the safety of the citizens of the State of Israel.





מח' מידע ואינטרנט – אגף תקשורת

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Why Israel's Left Doesn't Support Obama or a Settlement Construction Freeze

RubinReports

Barry Rubin

Aluf Benn, possibly Israel's smartest journalist, makes a fascinating point about the construction on settlement freeze issue: why is Israel's left so indifferent to it? In the past, the left (which can mean, say, Labor party through Peace Now) has eagerly rallied to U.S. efforts to press Israel for concessions, especially on the territories. Not this time, even though the concession being sought is smaller than many in the past. Benn attributes a lot of this to Obama's failure to sell his program. It is true that he has made no effort to appeal to Israelis on it but I think there's another explanation. The truth is that in the past a lot of Israelis on the left were persuaded that there was a real chance for peace and that by proving its willingness to leave the territories, Israel could persuade the Palestinians to make a deal.

Hardly anyone believes that today in Israel. People are fed up with the Palestinian leadership's bad faith and failure to deliver on commitments. They know that Hamas controls the Gaza Strip and has a big support base on the West Bank. They have no illusions about the Palestinian Authority leadership, which makes clear that its entire program is to have others pressure Israel into giving it everything it wants.

So the left's response would go something like this: We would be willing to dismantle all Jewish settlements in favor of a real and lasting peace. But do you really think freezing building on settlements will contribute to this goal? That's nonsense.

There's a secondary factor as well. Many Israelis on the moderate left--which are the overwhelming majority of those in the "left" category--support a two-state solution with some border shifts. In this concept, which is what Labor party leader and then prime minister Ehud Barak took to Camp David in 2000, Israel would retain some small areas with high Jewish (settlement) populations like Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion.

This concept was called the idea of the "settlement blocs." Israel believed that the last two U.S. presidents accepted this idea and thus agreed that Israel could continue building in these specific places. The Obama administration says that never happened.

So many Israelis on the left not only doubt the prospect of peace and blame the Palestinians for the situation and also favor the settlement blocs approach and are also made very nervous about a U.S. government that forgets past pledges to Israel and doubt Obama's willingness to be tough in opposing Iranian nuclear weapons.

That's why there's no pro-Obama bloc in Israel today, not even on the left.

Comment: "Settlements" are villages, towns and cities, inhabited by Israeli citizens living in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

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The Real Quagmire in the Middle East

Michael J. Totten

The Middle East is a hard place for idealists, especially for the Western liberal variety. My feelings of optimism for the region have been ground down over time like rocks under slow-moving glacial ice. Last time I visited Israel, at the end of the Gaza war this past January, I met Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh. He sounded no less despondent than the Israelis I spoke to. “Listen,” he said. “We must stop dreaming about the New Middle East and coexistence and harmony and turning this area into Hong Kong and Singapore...I don't see a real peace emerging over here. We should stop talking about it.”

That’s what I hear from almost everyone I speak to over there now, whether they’re Muslims, Christians, Jews, or whatever. Arabs, Israelis, Kurds – most seem to have a dim view of the future. Optimists, for the most part, parachute in for a brief time and leave. I hate it. It depresses me. But that’s how it is.

Some writers and analysts are slightly less gloomy, and I frequently ask them to cheer me up and hope their relative optimism isn’t fantasy. Jeffrey Goldberg’s work at The Atlantic occasionally qualifies as less pessimistic than mine. His outstanding book Prisoners strikes just the right balance between world-weary pessimism and hope. He’s an American Jew weaned on Socialist Zionism who became an idealistic Israeli as a young adult. He sought out friendships with individual Palestinians with whom he could forge his own separate peace, if for no other reason than to prove to himself that peace was possible. It was much harder than he expected. But he managed, with some difficultly, when he worked as an IDF prison guard at Ketziot during the first intifada to kindle a rocky but enduring friendship with his prisoner Rafiq Hijazi.

I spoke with him a few weeks ago in Washington D.C.

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Jeffrey Goldberg

MJT: You don’t seem particularly optimistic that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be resolved any time soon, but I notice from reading your work that you seem slightly less pessimistic than me.

Goldberg: (Laughs.)

MJT: My view is pretty bleak and yours is slightly less so. And I’m wondering if you can map a way out that’s realistic.

Goldberg: I think there’s a great opportunity right now for a Sunni-Jewish convergence. The Sunni Arab states and Israel have, for the first time, a common adversary. There’s some promise in that. If the Israelis are smart, they’ll exploit Arab fears of Iran. And if the Arabs are smart, they’ll exploit Israeli fears of Iran. The common fear of Iran might produce some more flexibility on both sides, even flexibility on the part of Saudi Arabia.

MJT: That’s true at the state level, but not at the street level.

Goldberg: That’s true at the state level, yes. The people of the Middle East aren’t the ones who make the decisions. But you need the people ultimately, right?

This is the central question. The settlements aren’t the central question. They’re a tragedy in part because they obscure the central question of this conflict. The only question is: can the world of Arab Islam accept the idea of Jewish national equality? That’s the question, and I don’t know the answer to that.

Naturally, I shade toward pessimism on that question. I’m recalling, among other things, that the Six Day War wasn’t started because of the settlements. If you study the history of the last one hundred years, you’ll see that this is the central animating cause of the conflict. And I don’t see much evidence that Arab Islam can assimilate this idea right now.

On the other hand, actions can create new realities. So I’m not totally immune to the idea that Israeli concessions on certain points can create a positive cycle rather than a negative cycle.

The question of Israel is the question of what happens to all minorities in the Middle East. The Arab Muslim Middle East has 300 million people. It has a very hard time treating Coptic Christians with equality, treating Maronites in Lebanon with equality, treating Southern Sudanese in an equal way, treating Kurds in an equal way, and dealing with Jews – not only in their national expression, but even as minorities within their own countries. There was never a golden era for Jews who lived in Arab countries. It wasn’t as bad as living in Poland, but that’s no great shakes.

MJT: You have talked to Hamas people. Should the Israelis or Americans talk to them?

Goldberg: I don’t know what they’d get out of it.

MJT: What did you get out of it when you did it?

Goldberg: A first-hand understanding of how they think. People in the United States find it hard to understand how people in Hamas and Hezbollah think. It’s alien. It’s alien to us. The feverish racism and conspiracy mongering, the obscurantism, the apocalyptic thinking – we can’t relate to that. Every so often, there’s an eruption of that in a place like Waco, Texas, but we’re not talking about 90 people in a compound. We’re talking about whole societies that are captive to this kind of absurdity.

So it’s very important – and you know this better than almost anyone – to go over there yourself and tape it, get it down on paper, and say “this is what they actually say.”

God Bless Hitler.jpg

MJT: It’s shocking to hear.

Goldberg: Of course it’s shocking to hear.

MJT: Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if they really even believe it or if they’re just saying it.

Goldberg: I was in Afghanistan in 1998, a week after the first fatwa to “kill all the Jews and Crusaders” came out. I was with a bunch of Americans. They were making light of it because it seemed so ridiculous. They were making light of it, I suppose, partly as a psychological mechanism to allow us to continue staying in Afghanistan.

MJT: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Goldberg: People also made fun of it because it seemed so ridiculous. But it’s not ridiculous. Just because a belief sounds ridiculous to you doesn’t mean it’s not sincerely held.

MJT: Yeah. I know it.

Goldberg: So I think it’s best to err on the side of taking people at their word. That doesn’t mean you can’t analyze it and break it down on the politics, break it down on the psychology, and break it down on the religion. But take them at their word. I believe Hamas when it says it wants to eradicate Israel. Why shouldn’t I believe them?

MJT: They act as though they’re serious.

Goldberg: Yeah. I understand their world view. I obviously don’t accept it, but I understand it. In their world view, this makes perfect sense. So, why not?

Palestinians, over the years, have proven that they’re willing to sacrifice generations of people to achieve their goal of a Jewish-free Palestine.

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Children in Gaza

I understand that. I don’t agree with the goal. It’s extremist and self-defeating and racist and everything else, but I try to put myself in their shoes, and I can understand their arguments.

There’s two stages. One, collect the documentary evidence. That’s why I hung out at Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV station for a couple of days and just listened. There’s nothing insincere about their goals and their desires. I don’t think they’re motivated by poverty. If poverty were the motivation, Zambia would be the world headquarters of terrorism. So why not believe them?

It doesn’t mean that nothing changes. I think it’s true that a moderated Hamas would no longer be Hamas. If you’re a Muslim Brotherhood organization, or if you’re Hezbollah, if you’re an arm of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and you begin to accept the idea of the presence of Israel in the Middle East, you’re no longer a part of that movement. So I don’t think the organizations are capable of changing, but individuals are capable of changing.

MJT: What percentage of the Palestinian population do you suppose might be flexible enough to change in the way you just described?

Goldberg: I assume it’s fluid like everything else. That’s what I meant when I said that new realities on the ground can shape public opinion.

MJT: We have seen some who have changed their views, and there will always be hardliners who won’t until they die.

Goldberg: Look. Another thing people here don’t understand is that it’s a hot region. It’s an emotionally hot region. Israel, too. The amount of yelling in Israel over things that don’t have to be yelled about is extraordinary. Blood runs hot. Maybe it’s the desert. I don’t know. People are governed by their emotions.

In my book, I trace this relationship I had with one particular Palestinian. When things were going relatively well during the peace process, he was against suicide bombing. When things weren’t going well, he was for suicide bombing. This is the reality.

That’s why I think there was a missed opportunity around the time of the Gaza withdrawal. To buttress the Palestinian moderates – moderates being a relative term – maybe Israel should have given them something so they’d have greater sway among the population. My point is that I don’t think we’re dealing with entirely immutable forces.

MJT: I don’t either, but it often looks that way with Hamas.

Goldberg: Yeah. (Sighs.) Do all Palestinians wish for the disappearance of Israel? Probably. But it doesn’t matter what you wish. It matters what you do.

MJT: There is a difference between wishing Israel would just go away and actively working to destroy it.

Goldberg: I have a lot of wishes, too, that I don’t act on.

MJT: A lot of Israelis wish the Palestinians would just go away.

Goldberg: Of course. Why would you want people who hate you around you? That’s fine. It’s all about what you do. And it’s about creating conditions so that people who have negative and violent impulses will be reined in.

MJT: Here, I think, is the big question: what should be done about Iran’s nuclear weapons? Would it be better to use military action – whether it’s American, Israeli, or both – or learn to live with the Iranian bomb?

Goldberg: I suspect we are going to be learning to live with the Iranian bomb.

MJT: Is that a good idea?

Goldberg: No. It’s terrible. But also striking Iran would be terrible.

This is an interesting question right now, at this moment in history. This might be a place where American interests and Israeli interests diverge somewhat. I think the Iranian nuclear weapons program does pose an existential threat to Israel. It doesn’t pose an existential threat to America. It poses a unique set of terrible challenges for America, but it doesn’t mean our existence here is in peril. So it might not be in America’s best interests right now to strike militarily – for any number of reasons, including the fact that it might not work. And if it does work, it would almost seem to justify, in a way, Iran seeking nuclear weapons. And the program might continue.

The thing we hope for is that Iran moderates itself, that the people of Iran who are more moderate than its leaders figure out a way to moderate this. The problem isn’t whether or not Iran has the bomb, it’s whether or not the mullahs have the bomb.

MJT: Sure.

Goldberg: As I wrote in a New York Times op-ed a few weeks ago, there are two Israeli strategic doctrines in confrontation right now. The first is: never do anything that harms the strategic relationship with the United States of America. The second is: prevent, at all costs, the possibility of a Second Holocaust. What if these two things come into conflict?

I tend to think that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu understands better than almost anyone else the imperative of maintaining a strong strategic relationship with the United States of America. But I also think he’s governed by his understanding of Jewish history.

If you are the de-facto leader of the Jews in a post-Holocaust world, what is the absolute worst thing you could do? Allow the formation of an existential threat to half the world’s remaining Jews. It’s a hard job.

MJT: It is. Sometimes I wonder if there’s an agreement that we’ll never hear about between the U.S. and Israel, that Israel can go ahead and take out Iran’s nuclear weapons and we’ll pretend to be upset about it. Because look: Iran can retaliate against the United States inside Iraq and Afghanistan.

Goldberg: That’s the problem.

MJT: And it’s not in our national interests to provoke that. We have over 100,000 guys in Iraq and Afghanistan who can be retaliated against.

Goldberg: And here’s the thing. Netanyahu doesn’t want to endanger the lives of American soldiers. Not because he’s so great or moral or whatever, but because he knows that’s disastrous.

MJT: It could threaten the entire American project in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Goldberg: Yes. Exactly.

I imagine that if this situation gets more dire, America will say to the Iranians, secretly, in no uncertain terms, that “if you do anything to Israel, we will destroy you.” That just seems prudent to do. “Go ahead and have your dreams and desires, but don’t even think about transferring your nuclear technology to attack Israel in some way, because we will wipe you out.”

MJT: Do you think the U.S. would actually do that?

Goldberg: It depends on the president.

MJT: I can’t see Barack Obama nuking Tehran.

Goldberg: I didn’t say he has to nuke it, I said he has to threaten to nuke it.

MJT: Sure, but the threat has to be credible.

Goldberg: Right. So you make it credible.

MJT: Bush could have done that.

Goldberg: Bring the Iranian ambassador to the Strategic Air Command and show him all the missiles that are pointing at Iran. “This one is going to go here, and this one is going to go there. You’re wiped out. You’re finished. You’re done. You are exterminated.”

Obama doesn’t have to actually do it.

We’re getting into the realm of insanity here, but if Israel is ever attacked with nuclear weapons, I think there would be quite a demand from Americans as a whole to retaliate for it.

MJT: Probably.

Goldberg: It wouldn’t really matter, though, because the Israelis would already be dead.

MJT: They can retaliate themselves anyway. They have nuclear weapons in submarines out in the Mediterranean.


Goldberg: And in the Persian Gulf. They’re German subs. History is great that way, isn’t it?

MJT: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: Jews are floating around in the Persian Gulf with nuclear weapons in German subs that are aimed at the new Hitler. If you step away from your personal feelings about it, it’s just fascinating.

MJT: Can you imagine the Israeli relationship with Palestinians evolving that much over the next 50 or 60 years?

Goldberg: If I were a Palestinian right now, I’d just wait. I’d keep the pressure up and not agree to a rump state. I’d just keep up the pressure for another few generations. They might eventually achieve it that way.

MJT: But look at how much things can change in a few generations.

Goldberg: All the leaders are ego maniacs by definition. All of them are soaked in history. Yasser Arafat wanted to be Salah ad-Din. Bibi Netanyahu wants to be Judah Maccabee. There is so much history there to exploit. These people are all measuring themselves against historical role models. And when you’re measuring yourself against a historical role model like Salah ad-Din, you wait, and you keep trying to devise new strategies to make the Jews leave, or to kill enough of them that the survivors leave.

MJT: Waiting is tricky, though. Imagine if Hitler had decided to wait a few generations to go after the Jews. Europe has changed. Hitlerism won’t fly in the Europe of 2009.

Goldberg: Now we’re really getting into the realm of hyper-speculation.

MJT: I wonder, though, if Palestinian society is really capable of evolving the way European society has in the last 60 years.

Goldberg: I don’t know. The argument is that Arab society is somewhat stagnant.

MJT: It is stagnant compared with Europe.


Goldberg: It’s more static. It’s a region of the world that lags on a lot of the usual indicators for success and progress. But hell if I know. The whole idea is just so improbable. But so was the idea that the Jews, after 2,000 years, could reclaim their ancient homeland. There was nothing in history that suggested that would be possible.

And going back to the destruction of Israel – Arabs are misreading history if they believe Israel is a temporary phenomenon. Nothing like this has ever happened in history. A dead tribe came back and seized the land it had, and did so after a devastating tragedy. Jews are also good at waiting, apparently. They’re a small group, but there’s a survival impulse that’s embedded in many Jews, and certainly in the Jews of Israel today. It says: “You want to wait? We’ll wait, too.” Jews were an ancient people already when Mohammad appeared on the Arabian peninsula.

I wonder all the time if two people just like us will be having the same conversation a hundred years from now. “Well, what do you think? Will Israel make it?”

MJT: It’s possible.

Goldberg: Anything’s possible. Anyone who acts like they’ve figured out the entire Middle East doesn’t know anything.

MJT: Yeah. It’s a humbling place.

Goldberg: People who tell you they understand and know the answer? Demagogues. They’re either idiots or demagogues. Nobody can understand this. You can’t apply rationality to it either.

This is why I’m negative about the intentions of Palestinians. If their goal were statehood, they could have had statehood. Therefore, you have to give serious credence to the idea that their goal is not statehood, that it’s more important to rid the Arab world of Jewish nationalism than it is to have a Palestinian state that would improve the lives of individual Palestinians now.

MJT: Lots of them say that explicitly. They aren’t demanding a state in the West Bank and Gaza. They want to liberate all of Palestine, so to speak, “from the river to the sea.”

Goldberg: But just because they want that doesn’t mean it can happen.

MJT: Right. But it’s clear that some of them want the whole thing and won’t accept a state in the West Bank and Gaza. From their point of view, it’s like Israel being offered Tel Aviv and the beach. It isn’t enough.

Goldberg: Ben-Gurion was smart. He took what they offered him and hoped for better. He hoped for Arab mistakes that would allow him to get more territory. The Arabs provided the mistakes, and he took the territory.

Don’t you find this debilitating after a while?

MJT: Yeah.

Goldberg: The reality in Israel is that it’s a fun place, a great place. It’s a vibrant society.

MJT: I like being there.

Goldberg: It’s not all as dreary as this. Maybe this is a story about individualism. The demand of the collective on the Palestinian side is such that it ruins the lives of millions spread over several generations.

MJT: You wrote during the Gaza war that Operation Cast Lead would probably work, but that nothing in the Middle East seems to work for very long. Why do you suppose that is? It seems to be true, but I’m not exactly sure why.


Goldberg: I don’t know.

MJT: We’ll see progress for a while, but then the progress gets erased.

Goldberg: That’s progress by our definition of progress, by people who understand the world differently.


I think there’s a long strategy. And the long strategy of some Arabs is impervious to short term interventions. Short of packing up Palestinians and bussing them to Egypt, the impulse to defeat the Jews will remain there.

The reason American minds can’t really grasp the Middle East is because our minds are trained for concepts that are at variance with the mindset of Middle Eastern fundamentalists – and by that I mean both Muslims and Jews. The importance of today, the importance of pleasure, the importance of compromise, the importance of pragmatism, the relative unimportance of land. We have a house, we sell it, and then we move to another house. We don’t build our houses on top of our fathers’ houses.

As a sort of aside, you see how settlers talk about settlement freezes. There’s a kind of Middle Easterness to it. Part of it is manipulation. “If we aren’t allowed to add to our house, our children will have to move to Tel Aviv.” They’re telling me that it’s a punishment to have to move to Israel? It’s a tiny place. Their kids will be an hour away. Or a half hour.

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Maale Adumim settlement, West Bank

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Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem, an area considered a "settlement" by the United States government

But there’s also a sincere Middle Easterness to it. According to them, it really is a sin to force their children move a half hour away when they could live right next door or in the same house. It’s as if they have imbibed the Arab love for the place of their father and their father’s father. There are so many concepts we just can’t relate to because we’re Americans. It’s a barrier to understanding.

MJT: It is. Americans also believe there is a solution to every problem.

Goldberg: Yeah. Solutionism is an American religion. That’s the most dangerous one. The other aspects of this are the misunderstandings. We can’t understand why a Palestinian would want his son to become a suicide bomber.

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Hamas

It’s because his son is not an individual in the same way Americans are. He’s a valuable instrument in the deliverance of salvation for his people. His desires, dreams, and goals are all selfishness. That’s just Western selfishness. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to work these things through for years.

There’s something admirable about Palestinian steadfastness.

MJT: We don’t have that sort of steadfastness.

Goldberg: No, we don’t.

MJT: But our society is better off without it.

Goldberg: Of course, it is! (Laughs.) What are they getting out of it? But our categories of success and failure are not their categories of success and failure.

It leads to the immorality of narcissism, that their collective need is so important that they can kill children with moral impunity. That’s one place it leads. The importance of remaining steadfast to the cause gives them license to do anything. Man, but when you’re licensed to do anything, it gives you power.

When I talk this way, when we think about it this way, I have a hard time seeing a Western-style state flourishing there over the long term in that climate.

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MJT: There’s only one that exists. Israel is the only one. None of the Arab states are. We’re over there in Iraq trying to help them build one, but I have my doubts that it’s going to happen. Lebanon is a hybrid. It’s only partly a Western-style state.

What do you think about Lebanon? The 2006 war was a disaster for everybody involved. But what if Hezbollah starts firing rockets again? What should the Israelis do? What would you do if you were prime minister?

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Hezbollah fires Katyusha rockets at Israel, July, 2006

Goldberg: If you’re the Israeli prime minister, or the leader of any country, you can’t accept conditions in which your enemy forces the depopulation of a third of your country. It’s not acceptable. It’s national suicide. And while there’s a record of national suicide in Jewish history, I don’t think the current Israeli leadership is going to acquiesce to that. So you do what you have to do.

Is that helpful? No. It will cause a lot of people in London to go demonstrate on behalf of Hezbollah. It will anger the United Nations. But what’s the choice? You’re not a serious country if you allow an enemy to fire rockets at your civilians and cause the depopulation of your territory. If you allow that to happen, you’re ceding sovereignty over whole chunks of your country.

Having Hezbollah in the Lebanese politcal process has some kind of utility in this regard. It knows full well that if it does launch some new adventure against Israel that Israel will retaliate against Lebanon as a whole. That won’t help Hezbollah’s position in Lebanese society.

But I’m not a military strategist. I don’t know how to stop the rockets.

MJT: There has been talk of shooting back at Syria instead of Lebanon. Syria has a return address. It’s a state and is therefore accountable.

Goldberg: This brings up an interesting strategic shift that might be coming in Israeli thinking, which is: forget the proxies. What is Hamas without its weapons suppliers?

MJT: Not much. And the same goes for Hezbollah.

Goldberg: So Israel says to the two states that supply Hamas and Hezbollah: “If you support these proxies, and if Hezbollah fires rockets at Haifa, we’re not going to attack Hezbollah. We’re going to attack Damascus.”

MJT: That’s what I thought they should have done back in 2006.

Goldberg: They can say “You’re the sponsors. So you either stop this or we’re going to destroy your military infrastructure.” Why have a proxy war? What do proxy wars get you other than bad publicity?

MJT: A bunch of dead people.

Goldberg: Were you there during the 2006 war?

MJT: Yeah.

Goldberg: There were a lot of dead bodies from Israeli air strikes, right?

MJT: I didn’t see any dead bodies. I was on the Israeli side of the border.

Goldberg: Right. I’m surprised we didn’t meet. I was there, too, traveling with Noah Pollak.

MJT: I was there with Noah Pollak, too, just on different days.

Goldberg: I was also there with Michael Oren.

MJT: Yep, so was I. On different days. We must have just barely missed each other.

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Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the United States, author, historian, and former Israel Defense Forces Spokesman

Goldberg: Hezbollah is a proxy army of Syria and Iran. So why aren’t Israelis fighting back against Syria and Iran?

MJT: That’s what Michael Oren thought, too, after he was no longer working as a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces. I talked to him about this during his book tour when he could say what he really believed.

You can’t defeat a guerilla army in six weeks with an air force. It’s absurd.

Goldberg: You can destroy its ability to fight.

MJT: Except the Israelis didn’t.

Goldberg: I mean, you can destroy its ability to fight by denying its weapons supplies.

MJT: Right.

Goldberg: Hezbollah can’t fight Israel without its rockets, right?

MJT: Right. I mean, they could fashion together home-made pieces of crap like Hamas used to. Hezbollah’s Katyusha rockets are much more formidable.

Goldberg: I think this is getting better now that Egypt understands the threat of Shia radicalism. And Israel can say “stop this smuggling completely, or we’ll have to do it ourselves on your territory. We won’t attack you, but you’re allowing your territory to be used as a launching pad for people who want to kill our citizens.”

I think the doctrine needs to be rewritten. Every time a rocket comes into Israel from Hamas, Israel should figure out who’s helping Hamas and deal with them.

MJT: But if Iran gets the bomb…

Goldberg: …everything changes.

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Did U.S. okay Israel construction of 2,500 settlement homes?

Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1098716.html

Israel had won agreement from the United States for the continued construction of 2,500 housing units in settlements in the West Bank, despite U.S. calls for a freeze, according to the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv. . Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said the United States and Israel have been trying to find common ground on the sensitive settlement issue, but he had no comment on the front-page report of a deal.

A U.S. embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv also had no immediate comment.

The report followed a briefing by Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his talks in London on Monday with U.S. envoy George Mitchell on ending a rift with Washington over its demand for a settlement freeze.

Western officials said the United States was moving in the direction of making allowances so Israel could finish off at least some existing projects which are close to completion or bound by private contracts that cannot be broken.

"This is a concession to avoid causing undue hardships on individuals" who have signed contracts and have already paid for work that cannot be refunded, one of the officials said, adding that discussions were still under way.

"We're talking about polishing off things that are basically done," the official said.

Israel estimates that 2,500 units are in the process of being built and cannot be stopped under Israeli law. Ma'ariv reported the units are in 700 buildings in various settlements and that Washington had agreed to their completion.

A report in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily, Israel's most popular newspaper, was more cautious, saying Israel and the United States were "close to an agreement on settlements". It also cited the same housing figures.

Barak has been seeking a deal with the United States that would include initial steps by Arab states to normalize relations with Israel in return for limiting settlement
activity.

Yedioth Ahronoth quoted unidentified cabinet ministers, who attended Barak's briefing, as saying reports a U.S.-Israeli agreement on settlement had been sealed were wishful thinking on the part of the defense chief.

Palestinian leaders have said U.S.-backed peace negotiations with Israel could not resume unless there was a complete halt to settlement activity in the West Bank, Israeli-occupied territory where they hope to establish a state.

While in London, Barak told reporters that he presented to the Americans "the scope of current construction work, which from a practical point of view can't be stopped".

Netanyahu, under U.S. pressure, has pledged not to build new settlements in the West Bank or expropriate more land. Further discussions are planned between Mitchell and Netanyahu as early as next week.

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Sociazlism in action:This says it all‏

Socialism goes against the human nature of competition and reward. An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class.

--------------------------------------------

That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.


The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan".


All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.


After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.
The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.


As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.
The second test average was a D!
No one was happy.


When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.


All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.


Could not be any simpler than that..

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Iranian Lobbying Failed

Jonathan Spyer*
http://www.gloria-center.org/Gloria/2009/06/iranian-lobbying.html

President Shimon Peres's landmark visit to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan this week represents a significant advance for Israeli ambitions in Central Asia. In the wake of the recent decision to permit Israel to open an embassy in the Turkmen capital of Ashghabad, the visit reflects the importance Jerusalem attaches to this strategically significant part of what is sometimes known as the "greater Middle East." Israel's stance reflects a series of hopes, interests and concerns. The most important of these are: the desire to contain Iranian influence, and joint opposition to radical Islam. Israeli technological expertise is of particular interest to energy-rich, rapidly developing Central Asian economies, forming the basis for growing economic relations. In turn, Azerbaijan has emerged as a major energy supplier. The country supplies just under 20 percent of Israel's oil.

Israel's desire to build strong connections with non-Arab Muslim countries in the region is of long standing and reflects an obvious strategic interest. Yet in the past, Central Asian states have preferred to keep their friendship with the Jewish state far from the spotlight.

Israel has maintained diplomatic relations with both Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan since 1992. With regard to containing Teheran, relations with Shi'ite Azerbaijan, which shares a border with Iran, are of particular significance. Azerbaijan has close ethnic links with Iran. Far more Azeris live in Iran than in Azerbaijan itself.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is an ethnic Azeri. Yet relations between Iran and Azerbaijan have grown tense over the last decade for a number of reasons. The Islamic republic, for strategic reasons of its own, tacitly supported Armenia in the Azeri-Armenian war over the province of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Teheran dislikes the secular nature of Azerbaijani politics, and has offered support and training to Azeri mullahs and organizations preaching a pro-Iranian Islamist message. Iran and Azerbaijan also have competing interests related to energy issues in the Caspian Sea.

As a result, Baku has drawn close to Jerusalem on the basis of a shared threat. Israeli defense industries have made very significant inroads. Israel played the central role in rebuilding and modernizing the Azeri military after its losses in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan has also become one of the key arenas in the ongoing silent war between Israel and Iran. Both countries are thought to possess major espionage networks on Azeri soil. Israel is reported to maintain listening and surveillance posts on the Azerbaijan-Iran border. The recent foiling of a joint Hizbullah/Iranian plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy by the authorities in Baku shows the depth of activity.

Kazakhstan, which has no border with Iran, has sought to develop strong trade and strategic relations with the Islamic republic. Part of Peres's mission was to seek a firm Kazakh commitment that it would cease the sale of uranium ore to Iran. Astana's stance appears to reflect a desire to play a part in diplomatic mediation in the region and beyond it, on the basis of its image as a moderate Muslim state.

The more diffuse threat of radical Islam offers a further natural basis for friendship. In the Shi'ite but secular-governed Azerbaijan, this threat takes the form of Iran-supported local Shi'ite Islamist parties, and the presence of Hizbullah.

In largely-Sunni Kazakhstan, meanwhile, Saudi-supported Islamic extremists and the pan-Islamic Hizb al-Tahrir party constitute a significant irritant to the authorities, making them more inclined to greater friendliness toward Israel. The response to domestic Islamic extremism has been determined and uncompromising.

Kazakhstan's commitment to purchase satellite and surveillance technology from Israel reflects the growing role of Israeli defense industries in the country - a role which was shaken in April by claims that Israel had sold faulty military hardware to Kazakhstan.

Despite the extensive cooperation and common interest, Jerusalem has been frustrated by the unwillingness of both Kazakhs and Azeris to move toward a more open and overt relationship. There has long been a sense that both countries preferred to benefit from close links with Israel in a variety of areas, while keeping the public profile of the relationship as low as possible. Such a stance reflected the desire of both countries to maintain good relations with the Arab and wider Muslim world.

Israeli officials hoped that Peres's visit would be of importance in laying the basis for changing this stance. The Iranian response to the visit suggests that Teheran shared the sense of this possibility.

The Iranians lobbied hard to have the visit to Azerbaijan called off. Iran's chief of staff visited Baku two weeks ago in an attempt to persuade the Azeris to cancel the trip. He was unsuccessful. In response to the Peres visit, Iran has recalled its ambassador for consultations. In Kazakhstan, the Iranian decision to walk out of an interfaith conference while Peres was speaking represents an additional indication of Iranian displeasure, and hence a further diplomatic point for Israel. The bottom line: Iranian lobbying failed.

Inducing Muslim countries with which Israel has shared interests and firm connections to overcome the desire to "camouflage" or downplay their relations with Israel represents a perennial challenge for Israeli diplomacy. The latest developments in Central Asia suggest that, in this region at least, real progress has begun to be made.

* Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Herzliya, Israel.

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HAMAS, THE GAZA WAR AND ACCOUNTABILITY UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

International Law and Military Operations in Practice

Colonel Richard Kemp CBE
JCPA
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=0&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=378&PID=0&IID=3026&TTL=International_Law_and_Military_Operations_in_Practice

I will examine the practicalities, challenges and difficulties faced by military forces in trying to fight within the provisions of international law against an enemy that deliberately and consistently flouts international law.

I shall focus on counter-insurgency operations from the British and to some extent the American perspective drawing on recent British experience generally and my own personal experience of operating in this environment. Soldiers from all Western armies, including Israel's and Britain's, are educated in the laws of war.

Commanders are educated to a higher level so that they can enforce the laws among their men, and take them into account during their planning.

Because the battlefield - in any kind of war - is a place of confusion and chaos, of fast-moving action the complexities of the laws of war as they apply to kinetic military operations, are distilled down into rules of engagement.

In the British forces, rules of engagement normally regulate military action to ensure that it remains well within the laws of war giving an additional safety cushion to soldiers against the possibility of war crimes prosecution.

In the most basic form these rules tell you when you can and when you cannot open fire.

In conventional military operations between states the combat is normally simpler and doesn't require complex and restrictive rules of engagement.

Your side wears one type of uniform, the enemy wears another; when you see the enemy's uniform you open fire. Of course there are complexities. The fog of war, sometimes literally fog, but always fog in the sense of chaos and confusion means that mistakes are made. You confuse your own men for the enemy.

The tragedies that have ensued from such chaos and misunderstanding are legion throughout the history of war. We call it blue on blue, friendly fire or fratricide.

And there are other complexities in conventional combat that make apparent simplicity less than simple. Civilians perhaps taking shelter or attempting to flee the battlefield can be mistaken for combatants and have sometimes been shot or blown up.

Enemy forces sometimes adopt the other side's uniforms as a deception or ruse. But in the type of conflict that the Israeli Defence Forces recently fought in Gaza and in Lebanon, and Britain and America are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, these age-old confusions and complexities are made one hundred times worse by the fighting policies and techniques of the enemy.

The insurgents that we have faced, and still face, in these conflicts are all different. Hizballah and Hamas over here, Al Qaida, Jaish al Mahdi and a range of other militant groups in Iraq. Al Qaida, the Taliban and a diversity of associated fighting groups in Afghanistan. They are different but they are linked.

They are linked by the pernicious influence, support and sometimes direction of Iran and/or by the international network of Islamist extremism.

These groups, as well as others, have learnt and continue to learn from each others' successes and failures. Tactics tried and tested on IDF soldiers in Lebanon have also killed British soldiers in Helmand Province and in Basra.

These groups are trained and equipped for warfare fought from within the civilian population.

Do these Islamist fighting groups ignore the international laws of armed conflict? They do not. It would be a grave mistake to conclude that they do. Instead, they study it carefully and they understand it well.

They know that a British or Israeli commander and his men are bound by international law and the rules of engagement that flow from it. They then do their utmost to exploit what they view as one of their enemy's main weaknesses.

Their very modus operandi is built on the, correct, assumption that Western armies will normally abide by the rules.

It is not simply that these insurgents do not adhere to the laws of war. It is that they employ a deliberate policy of operating consistently outside international law. Their entire operational doctrine is founded on this basis.

In Gaza, as in Basra, as in the towns and villages of southern Afghanistan, civilians and their property are routinely exploited by these groups, in deliberate and flagrant violation of any international laws or reasonable norms of civilised behaviour for both tactical and strategic gain.

Stripped of any moral considerations, this policy operates simply and effectively at both levels.

On the tactical level, protected buildings, mosques, schools and hospitals, are used as strongholds allowing the enemy the protection not only of stone walls but also of international law.

On the strategic level, any mistake, or in some cases legal and proportional response, by a Western army will be deliberately exploited and manipulated in order to produce international outcry and condemnation.

And in sophisticated groupings such as Hamas and Hizballah, the media will be exploited also as a critical implement of their military strategy.

Thus in April 2004 as Coalition forces fought to wrest the Iraqi town of Fallujah from Al Qaida's control the media reports screamed of a US bombardment of a mosque.

The reality of that day was that five US Marines were wounded by fire from that mosque and that the Marine commander on the ground exercised great care and restraint, only allowing fire to be directed upon the outer wall of the building.

Despite this, the damage was done and the impression that we had levelled a mosque indiscriminately was firmly established.

In Gaza, according to residents there, Hamas fighters who previously wore black or khaki uniforms, discarded them when Operation Cast Lead began, to blend in with the crowds and use them as human shields.

We have of course seen all this before, in Lebanon, in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Today, British soldiers patrolling in Helmand Province will come under sustained rocket, machine-gun and small-arms fire from within a populated village or a network of farming complexes containing local men, women and children.

The British will return fire, with as much caution as possible.

Rather than drop a 500 pound bomb onto the enemy from the air, to avoid civilian casualties, they will assault through the village, placing their own lives at greater risk. They might face booby traps or mines as they clear through.

When they get into the village there is no sign of the enemy. Instead, the same people that were shooting at them twenty minutes ago, now unrecognised by them, will be tilling the land, waving, smiling and talking cheerfully to the soldiers.

These same insurgents will mine roads used by British vehicles and tracks used by foot patrols. Many soldiers have lost their legs or their lives in such attacks.

There is of course no question of minefields being marked, as is required under international law. The idea would be preposterous, but although one of the clearest tenets of the laws of war, is rarely if ever commented on by the media.

Like Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in southern Afghanistan are masters at shielding themselves behind the civilian population and then melting in among them for protection.

Hamas of course deployed suicide attackers in Gaza, including women and children.

Women and children are trained and equipped to fight, collect intelligence and ferry arms and ammunition between battles.

I have seen it first hand in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Female suicide bombers are almost commonplace.

Schools and houses are routinely booby-trapped. Snipers shelter in houses deliberately filled with women and children. Every man captured or killed is claimed as a taxi driver or a farmer.

In Basra, the common plea from captives was that they were police officers. Unfortunately, more often than not, this particular claim proved to be true. They were only involved in terrorist operations as their shift patterns allowed!

I make light of it but the difficulties in fighting an enemy who legitimately own and use the uniforms, vehicles and weapons of a police force, established, funded and trained by us, are self evident.

The British and US armies have grappled with these problem and I hope that we are now finding some solutions. Solutions that allow us to treat those that oppose us according to the laws of war while also defeating them on the battlefield. When an enemy flouts the rules of war then we cannot shy away from hard decisions.

Let me quote from the US military counterinsurgency manual, recently produced under the direction of General Petraeus and using lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. This pretty much encapsulates the approach that we use as well as that used by the Americans.

"The principle of proportionality requires that the anticipated loss of life and damage to property incidental to attacks", that is, to non-combatants, "must not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained. Soldiers and marines may not take any actions that might knowingly harm non-combatants.

"This does not mean they cannot take risks that might put the populace in danger.

"In conventional operations, this restriction means that combatants cannot intend to harm non-combatants, though proportionality permits them to act, knowing some non-combatants may be harmed."

Under our equivalent of General Petraeus' doctrine, when necessary British forces now attack protected locations after weighing up the risk that non combatants might suffer. We respect international norms and the sanctity of holy places. However, when our troops take fire from these locations or roadside bombs stored there are used to murder the innocent, we have no choice other than to act.

British and American troops now routinely search mosques in Afghanistan and Iraq and when necessary we bring down fire on those locations. This is not done, or should not be done, in a trigger-happy or careless manner but rather in a proportionate way and always with the aim of minimising wider suffering. Obviously this kind of action is undesirable - but faced with the enemy we face, there is no alternative.

General Petraeus' manual goes further than the strict requirements of the laws of war. Let me quote again:

"The use of discriminating, proportionate force as a mindset goes beyond the adherence to the rules of engagement."

"Proportionality and discrimination applied in counter insurgency require leaders to ensure that their units employ the right tools correctly with mature discernment, good judgement and moral resolve."

This describes the use of restraint and focused violence as a positive tool in counter-insurgency, not just as humanitarian and legal moderation. It recognises the importance of winning and maintaining the support of the local population, and sometimes even the insurgent himself, perhaps over and above the priority of winning a particular engagement.

Ultimately, in counter insurgency operations the military commander must balance a series of often conflicting and very difficult judgements in addition to the other pressures he faces on any battlefield. The balance is between firstly achieving the mission by engaging and killing the enemy, secondly, avoiding civilian casualties and thirdly, the effect on hearts and minds - the support or otherwise of the civilian population.

There is a fourth judgement as well.

It is often overlooked in media and human rights groups' frenzies to expose fault among military forces fighting in the toughest conditions. The fourth is preventing or minimising casualties among your own soldiers. There will frequently be times when a military commander must make a snap judgement between the safety of his own troops and that of other people.

Human nature dictates that he will often choose his own men. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise. And there is more to it even than the commander's human nature and loyalty to his men. For soldiers to follow their commander into combat - at any level, but especially at the point of battle - they must trust him.

How many soldiers want to die, be blinded, burnt, or have their arms, legs or faces blown off? No soldier will trust, or follow, a commander who is profligate with his men's lives.

Let us not forget that these calculations, judgements and decisions are not taken in an air conditioned office or from the safety of a rearward military headquarters. The commander must weigh these things up in altogether different circumstances.

As a commander you are surrounded by your men yet totally alone. You have the military arsenal of your country or perhaps an alliance like NATO at your disposal. But the most useful weapons in the kind of close combat I am talking about are the rifle and the bayonet.

You have to kill the enemy knowing that you will then need to shake hands and win the consent of the family in the compound that he is occupying. You haven't slept for two days, you are shattered, you are wet with sweat and the chaos of battle reigns all about you.

There are no computers, on your map with your pen you must compute the locations and intentions of the enemy, your flanking forces, and your own troop positions.

You must do this immediately because the CO needs a situation report, your company need a briefing to orient them, and your Fire Support Team commander is about to bring in fast air, helicopters and mortars, and needs to know that the danger-close fire missions are not going to kill your own men. You must assess the situation and give the go in seconds to secure the initiative.

The only advantage for the commander of all this is that it makes you forget the eighty pounds on your back, the water in the ditch that is up to your waist, and the sweat and dirt that streams constantly into your eyes.

The battle manifests itself as a wall of noise that surrounds you, interspersed with the infantryman's most detested sound, incoming bullets cracking above, to the side and below your head.

Every soldier who has been in combat - whether it is Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan or Iraq - can testify to the chaos and confusion of war. According to a well-known military adage, ‘no plan ever survives contact with the enemy'.

It is difficult enough to manoeuvre large numbers of troops and vehicles across treacherous and inhospitable terrain, sometimes by night, in dust storms, rain or searing heat, in armoured vehicles with limited external vision against near-impossible time-lines and coordinating with neighbouring forces, ground attack aircraft, helicopters, artillery, engineers and logistic support.

The complexities and potential for confusion are hugely increased when the enemy is trying to prevent you from doing it by killing you and blowing up your vehicles and equipment.

Piled on top of this are the limits of reconnaissance and the frequent inaccuracy or incompleteness of the intelligence picture, sometimes brought about by the enemy's own operational security, deception and disinformation, sometimes by lack of resources or inadequacy of collection systems.

For every intelligence success, even in modern armies, there are a hundred failures. In close combat even the most technologically sophisticated weapons, surveillance systems and communications devices can, and frequently do, fail, especially when you need them most.

Messages are sometimes not transmitted, not received, or garbled. Precision-guided munitions don't always hit the target they're supposed to and sometimes explode when they shouldn't or don't explode when they should.

Especially in close infantry combat, the concept of the precise, surgical strike is more often pipe dream than practical reality. The close combat, urban or rural environment that often exists in Helmand, Gaza or Iraq can also serve to diminish the advantages of technology, frequently putting hi-tech British forces for example on an equal footing with the Taliban.

Then there is perceptual distortion, common in combat situations, which can lead a commander or soldier to comprehend events in a way that is different to reality.

The stresses and fears of battle tiredness and the body's natural chemical reactions including production of adrenalin can lead to excluding or intensifying sounds, tunnel vision, temporary paralysis, events appearing to move faster or more slowly than they actually are, loss, reduction or distortion of memory and distracting thoughts. These affect different people in different ways and can add to the confusion and chaos of battle.

Amid the disorientation, the smoke, the fire, the explosions, the ear-piercing rattle of bullets, the screams of the wounded, the incomplete intelligence picture and the failure of technology commanders and soldiers must work on to achieve their mission, no matter how hard it gets.

These realities apply to any combat situation and the challenges they add are self-evident. But they become that much harder when fighting a tough, wily, skilful enemy one minute shooting at you or setting a landmine to blow up your vehicle the next leaning on the threshold of his compound, smiling at you, dressed indistinguishably from the population.

General Stanley McChrystal, the new US commander of forces in Afghanistan, has said the reduction of unnecessary civilian casualties is one of his top priorities. It should be. That is also a high priority of British commanders in Afghanistan.

I have personally witnessed the efforts that American forces have been making for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to minimise civilian deaths. These have been impressive but of course they have not always worked in either of our armies.

In some cases because of the factors I have mentioned imperfect intelligence, technological failure, poor communications, the fog of war.

There is also another factor that we shouldn't forget. There will always be bad soldiers who deliberately or through incompetence go against orders. We have seen this in the British Army and among the Americans, in well-publicised cases in Iraq and elsewhere.

I have spoken of the considerable British and American efforts to operate within the laws of war and to reduce unnecessary civilian casualties. But what of the Israeli Defence Forces? The IDF face all the challenges that I have spoken about, and more. Not only was Hamas's military capability deliberately positioned behind the human shield of the civilian population and not only did Hamas employ the range of insurgent tactics I talked through earlier. They also ordered, forced when necessary, men, women and children , from their own population to stay put in places they knew were about to be attacked by the IDF. Fighting an enemy that is deliberately trying to sacrifice their own people. Deliberately trying to lure you in to killing their own innocent civilians.

And Hamas, like Hizballah, are also highly expert at driving the media agenda. They will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents.

Their people often have no option than to go along with the charades in front of the world's media that Hamas so frequently demand, often on pain of death.

What is the other challenge faced by the IDF that we British do not have to face to the same extent?

It is the automatic, pavlovian presumption by many in the international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights.

So what did the IDF do in Gaza to meet their obligation to operate within the laws of war? When possible the IDF gave at least four hours' notice to civilians to leave areas targeted for attack.

Attack helicopter pilots, tasked with destroying Hamas mobile weapons platforms, had total discretion to abort a strike if there was too great a risk of civilian casualties in the area. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were cancelled because of this.

During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. This sort of task is regarded by military tacticians as risky and dangerous at the best of times. To mount such operations, to deliver aid virtually into your enemy's hands, is to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable.

But the IDF took on those risks.

In the latter stages of Cast Lead the IDF unilaterally announced a daily three-hour cease fire. The IDF dropped over 900,000 leaflets warning the population of impending attacks to allow them to leave designated areas. A complete air squadron was dedicated to this task alone.

Leaflets also urged the people to phone in information to pinpoint Hamas fighters vital intelligence that could save innocent lives.

The IDF phoned over 30,000 Palestinian households in Gaza, urging them in Arabic to leave homes where Hamas might have stashed weapons or be preparing to fight. Similar messages were passed in Arabic on Israeli radio broadcasts warning the civilian population of forthcoming operations.

Despite Israel's extraordinary measures, of course innocent civilians were killed and wounded. That was due to the frictions of war that I have spoken about, and even more was an inevitable consequence of Hamas' way of fighting.

By taking these actions and many other significant measures during Operation Cast Lead the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other Army in the history of warfare.

But the IDF still did not win the war of opinions - especially in Europe. The lessons from this campaign apply to the British and American armies and to other Western forces as well as to the IDF.

We are in the era of information warfare. The kind of tactics used by Hamas and Hizballah and by the Taliban and Jaish al Mahdi work well for them. As they see it, they have no other choice. And they will continue to use it.

How do we counter it? We must not adopt the approach that because they flout the laws of war, we will do so too. Quite the reverse. We must be and remain - whiter than white.

Within the absolute requirements of operational security, and sometimes we may need to really push the boundaries of this out as far as we can, we must be as open and transparent as we can possibly be.

There are three lines of attack.

First, we must allow, encourage and facilitate the media to have every opportunity to report fairly and positively on us and on our activities. This requires positive and proactive, not defensive and reactive, engagement with the media. We should bring the media into our training, let them get to know our units before battle, bring them in whenever possible during combat.

Perhaps embed them into combat units as the British forces often do, sometimes for protracted periods, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let them see our soldiers doing their job in as complete a way as we can.

There are risks in all this, big risks which are self evident and do not need to be spelt out. But we must be brave enough to take those risks.

The benefits are great. The insurgents - Hamas in particular - put a human face on war with spectacular success. We must do the same. We must let the field soldiers speak with sand on their boots and with a sweat and dirt-covered human face.

Second, we must show the media in a way they cannot misunderstand the abuses perpetrated by the enemy. Our own units must identify such enemy abuses, and make statements about them, backed up by the hardest available evidence.

Every front line unit must be trained and equipped to collect this information in the same way as they are trained and equipped to collect intelligence on enemy operations.

This is information war.

Third, we must be proactive in preventing adverse media stories about our own units. I am not talking here about distorting the facts. We must look ahead and identify potential problem areas - preferably before they arise. We must have what the British Labour Party used to call rapid rebuttal units.

They should have the ability to establish the facts on the front line very, very quickly. Be absolutely sure of the facts, and ensure they are pushed rapidly to the media. If they are not one hundred percent sure of the facts they must say as much.

Where real problems do occur, where our troops are in the wrong, if possible we should say so as quickly as we can, driving the agenda, pre-empting the shrieks of the enemy or of the UN.

This demands a culture of openness and honesty among commanders and soldiers at all levels, so they are willing to admit their mistakes readily to their chain of command.

For any of this to work, I repeat, our people must be whiter than white. This requires the best of training and the toughest of discipline and it is sometimes even harder among conscript troops and mobilised reservists.

Here I am not just talking about serious abuses and breaches of the laws of war. I include smaller things like graffiti-ing and trashing people's homes that have been taken over, or are searched or cleared. Like being as courteous as possible to civilians. Maintaining control over soldiers who have just seen their best mates blown apart is far from easy, but it is vital.

Where there is genuine concern over our own troops' conduct or action, we must not hesitate to conduct enquiries and investigations, and if necessary bring people to justice. As far as possible, these processes should also be open and transparent.

But this involves of course yet another major complication -because we must not confuse mistakes made as a genuine consequence of the chaos and fog of war with deliberate defiance of rules of engagement and the laws of war.

Mistakes are not war crimes. We must also know how to explain this.

Most armies do some of these things already. But what we need really is a radical re-evaluation of the effort required to achieve the impact we need. This requires a mind-set that is hard to find in most armies around the world. It requires extra resources and a shift in priorities. And it significantly complicates already highly complex military operations.

It does not answer all of our problems by any means. But all the steps I have mentioned are - in my view - essential to countering the strategies and tactics of the insurgents we are faced with today -in Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

They are also I believe essential in defending our military policies and objectives -and in defending our brave servicemen and women who are prepared to put their lives on the line to defend their country.

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‘Myths, Illusions, and Peace’

July 8, 2009
‘Myths, Illusions, and Peace’
By DENNIS ROSS and DAVID MAKOVSKY

Of all the policy myths that have kept us from making real progress in the Middle East, one stands out for its impact and longevity: the idea that if only the Palestinian conflict were solved, all the other Middle East conflicts would melt away. This is the argument of “linkage. Neoconservatives have always rejected it, given their skepticism about Arab intentions and their related belief that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved. While realists have been the most determined purveyors, this myth transcends all others and has had amazing staying power here, internationally, and in the Middle East. In fact, few ideas have been as consistently and forcefully promoted – by laymen, policymakers, and leaders alike.

One need not look too far for examples of linkage’s pervasiveness. Note the words of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in early 2008 when, standing next to George W. Bush at a joint press conference following their talks in the Sinai resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh, he recounted their conversation: “I emphasize that the Palestinian question, of course, is the core of problems and conflict in the Middle East, and it is the entry to contain the crisis and tension in the region, and the best means to face what’s going on in the world, our region – I mean by that, the escalation of violence, extremism and terrorism.”

King Abdullah of Jordan made much the same argument during an interview with an American television network in 2006: “I keep saying Palestine is the core. It is linked to the extent of what’s going on in Iraq. It is linked to what’s going on in Lebanon.”

Not only Middle Eastern leaders see the Palestinian issue at the heart of all other regional problems. Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, echoed this basic point of view in an essay published in early 2007:

A Vigorously renewed effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict could fundamentally change both the dynamics in the region and the strategic calculus of key leaders. Real progress would push Iran into a more defensive posture. Hezbollah and Hamas would lose their rallying principle. American allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states would be liberated to assist in stabilizing Iraq. And Iraq would finally be seen by all as a key country that had to be set right in the pursuit of regional security.

Similarly, the Iraq Study Group, cochaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, placed special emphasis on the idea of linkage: “To put it simply, all key issues in the Middle East – the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq, Iran, the need for political and economic reforms, and extremism and terrorism – are inextricably linked.

Such bold statements are rarely qualified. In effect, they are guided by a central premise: that ending the Arab-Israeli conflict is prerequisite to addressing the maladies of the Middle East. Solve it, and in doing so conclude all other conflicts. Fail, and instability – even war – will engulf the entire region.

The major problem with this premise is that it is not true. There have been dozens of conflicts and countless coups in the Middle East since Israel’s birth in 1948, and most were completely unrelated to the Arab-Israeli conflict. For example, the Iraqi coup of 1958, the Lebanon crisis of 1958, the Yemini civil war of 1962-68 (including subsequent civil wars in the 1980s and ‘90s), the Iraqi Kurdish revolt of 1974, the Egyptian-Libyan Border War of 1977, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91 (including Iraqi Kurdish and Iraqi Shiite revolts of the same year), the Yemeni-Eritrean and Saudi-Yemeni border conflicts of the mid-1990s, and the US-Iraq War, begun in 2003.

Many of these conflicts were long, bloody, and very costly. The Iran-Iraq War along lasted eight and a half years, cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and took between six hundred thousand and one million lives. Yet this conflict, like the others listed above, would have taken place even if the Arab-Israeli conflict had been resolved.

Since the origins of so many regional tensions and rivalries are not connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is hard to see how resolving it would unlock other regional stalemates or sources of instability. Iran, for example, is not pursuing its nuclear ambitions because there is an Arab-Israeli conflict. Sectarian groups in Iraq would not suddenly put aside their internal struggles if the Palestinian issue were resolved. Like so many conflicts in the region, these struggles have their own dynamic.

In addition, as tragic as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has become, it has not spilled over to destabilize the Middle East. There have been two Palestinian Intifadas, or uprisings, including one that lasted from 2000 to 2005 and claimed the lives of 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis – but not a single Arab leader had been toppled or a single regime destabilized as a result. It has remained a local conflict, contained in a small geographical area. Yet the argument of linkage endures to this day, and with powerful promoters. Why does it persist? And why has it been accepted among top policymakers as if it is factually correct?

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from “Myths, Illusions, and Peace” by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky. Copyright © 2009 by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky..

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COP:Minimum-wage folly

Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
July 8, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/5818/minimum-wage-folly

AS IF THE RECESSION hasn't been rough enough on those near the bottom of the economic food chain, fresh bad news is on the way. Beginning July 24, the federal government will be making it more difficult for employers to hire low- and unskilled American workers. Thanks to an ill-advised law enacted with bipartisan support in 2007, the cost of providing an entry-level job to individuals with few skills or minimal experience will be going up by more than 10 percent. Those who cannot find a job paying at least $7.25 an hour will not be permitted to work.

Welcome to the latest chapter of America's minimum-wage folly.. This will mark the third time in recent years that Washington has forced up the cost of employing low-skilled workers. Last July the minimum hourly wage was increased from $5.85 to $6.55; the July before that, from $5.15 to $5.85. By the end of this month, in other words, the lowest rung on the employment ladder will be nearly 41 percent higher than it was just two years ago. Needless to say, that will put it beyond the reach of many marginal workers, leaving them without work.

Those who press for a higher minimum wage often claim that making entry-level jobs more expensive won't reduce the number of entry-level jobs. Were the government to compel a 41 percent increase in the price of gasoline or movie tickets or steel, every rational observer would expect a drop in the demand for gasoline, movie tickets, or steel. Yet when it comes to the minimum wage, politicians and journalists somehow persuade themselves that making workers more expensive won't reduce the demand for workers. Senator Edward Kennedy, for example, blithely asserts: "History clearly shows that raising the minimum wage has not had any negative impact on jobs." Activist Holly Sklar, campaigning for a $10 minimum wage, likewise insists that "raising the minimum wage does not increase unemployment in good times or bad."

But that's exactly what it does. Artificial price floors -- mandatory minimum prices set higher than what the market will bear -- generate surpluses. Minimum-wage laws are no exception. The price floor imposed by the government on the supply of low-skilled labor results in a labor surplus, which is just another way of saying higher unemployment. How much higher? Economists Joseph Sabia of American University and Richard Burkhauser of Cornell estimate that the minimum-wage hikes of the past two years will wipe out more than 390,000 jobs. According to David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine, an expert on labor force economics, the minimum-wage jump scheduled for this month "will lead to the loss of an additional 300,000 jobs among teens and young adults."

It is bad enough that Congress and the president would deliberately price so many workers out of the market. What is worse is that they claim to be helping the poor when they do so. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama backed a minimum-wage of $9.50 an hour because, his website explained, he "believes that people who work full time should not live in poverty." But if helping the poor is the goal, making it harder for them to get that crucial first job -- the one that may not pay much at first, but that gives new workers their first foothold in the job market -- is not the way to achieve it.

Politicians cannot cure poverty by raising the cost of entry-level employment any more than they can do so by waving a magic wand. After all, if aiding the needy were as easy as setting a compulsory minimum wage, why not set it at $20 an hour -- or better yet, $120 an hour -- and really help them out?

The laws of supply and demand are not optional. They weren't enacted by Congress and Congress cannot override them. Of course a higher minimum wage may benefit some low-skilled workers. But there are innumerable others whom it harms: Those who lose their jobs or can't get hired in the first place because the higher rate is more than their labor is worth. Those whose employers compensate for the wage increase by cutting employees' hours. Those whose jobs are outsourced to a market with lower labor costs.

Minimum-wage laws don't make low- and unskilled Americans more productive, more experienced, or more desirable. They merely make them more expensive -- and more likely, as a consequence, to be unemployed.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

Comment: Even those with only a basic understanding of economics know this is another hurdle for our economy. It is past time for our elected "leaders" to stop pretending they are leaders-they are damaging our ability to do business in order for them to say they are looking out for the down trodden-this is folly at its worst. What it does do is make voters dependent upon the government even more thus "assuring an increase in their voting numbers"-absolutely disgraceful!

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Blue and White Gas: Israel to be Self-Sufficient for 20 Years

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

New estimates of natural gas reserves recently discovered off the Mediterranean Coast near Haifa will allow Israel to be self-sufficient in energy for two decades, according to Yitzchak Tshuva, one of the investors in the project. “Israel today is independent – completely independent with blue and white [Israeli- energy,” said Tshuva, chief executive office of Delek Energy.The Tamar 2 drilling, 3.5 miles north of the Tamar 1 site that was discovered in April, indicates the reserves are 26 percent larger than previously estimated. Noble Energy, the largest participant in the project, said that appraisals confirmed the quality of the gas and “have reduced the uncertainty in previous resource estimates.” The gas reserves are in addition to the Dalit gas field discovered off the Hadera coast, south of Haifa, earlier this year.

"With drilling at Tamar and Dalit, we have already confirmed a very substantial amount of natural gas resources, perhaps over two decades of future supply based on projected needs,” said Charles D. Davidson, Noble's chairman and chief executive officer. “We are moving forward with development plans focused on bringing the first phase of production to the Israeli shores by 2012."

Income from the gas might reach as much as $30 billion instead of the $20 billion that was estimated in April. Development costs for bringing the gas online are projected at $1.5-$3 billion.

Self-sufficiency would significantly strengthen the shekel as well as create jobs.

Noble Energy has a 36 percent working interest in the project. Other participants are Isramco Negev 2 with 28.75 percent, Delek Drilling and Avner Oil Exploration with 15.625 percent each, and Dor Gas Exploration with the remaining four percent.

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Syria Forfeits Golan on a Silver Platter: Make it Gold

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

Foreign Minister Walid Muallem sarcastically agreed with President Shimon Peres’s statement Monday that Israel will not hand over the strategic Golan Heights to Damascus on a “silver platter.” He responded Tuesday morning that “silver” was not good enough and demanded, "We want to receive the Golan on a gold platter.”. His comments have sent the prospects of a rapprochement with Syria further back in the deep freeze as Syria increasingly hardens its stand in tandem with overtures from the Obama administration to make it part of the peace process.



U.S. President Barack Obama has sent two senior officials to Damascus this year to sound out Syria, which officially is on the American “blacklist” of countries that support terror.



Muallem said the new American position is good but took the opportunity to throw all the blame on Israel for lack of progress. “There is an opportunity to achieve peace, but Israel is dragging it out too much. We must complete the indirect talks with Israel before we get to direct talks," he said the morning after President Peres met with visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.



Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Syrian President Bashar Assad revealed last year, in almost simultaneous statements, that the two countries have been carrying on indirect talks, mediated by Turkey, for more than a year.





Indirect negotiations stopped after Olmert’s government was shaken by a long string of criminal investigations against him and the resulting instability in his government. His successor, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has gone on record several times as saying that the Golan is not negotiable, but Olmert also made the same statement as recently as three years ago.



Assad occasionally has said he was setting no pre-conditions for a peace accord with Israel but more often has stated that it is a foregone conclusion that Israel relinquish the water-rich area, where Jews comprise approximately 50 percent of the population of 40,000.

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Israel Slams EU for Claiming Settlements ‘Strangle PA Economy’

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu Gov’t Slams EU, Backs Yesha

The Foreign Ministry has strongly criticized the European Union for charging that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are “strangling the Palestinian Authority economy" and turning the PA into a welfare state. The EU’s accusations were “completely unfounded,” the Foreign Ministry said, and prompted Senior Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Rafael Barak, to summon the head of the EU delegation to Israel, Ambassador Ramiro Cibrian Uzal.

“Political statements of this nature clearly fall outside the mandate of the ECTAO office in question, which is charged with a purely technical role in the channeling of assistance,” Barak said. “Even more troubling is the technical assistant's implication that Israeli security measures in the West Bank are unnecessary and even illegal, alongside a total failure to recognize that it is the continued activity of Palestinian terrorist groups which makes such measures an unfortunate necessity.”

He pointed out the EU criticism level against Israel ignored Israel’s destruction of dozens of Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and the expulsion of more than 10,000 Jews.

“The statement also chose to ignore the recent improvements in the…economy. Recent World Bank, IMF and Palestinian Ministry of Finance data point to significant improvement of the Palestinian economy, even during the current global financial crisis,” Barak added. “Indeed, official Palestinian data indicates that the West Bank has shown economic growth rates of five to seven percent in 2008.



“Ultimately, a vibrant, stable economy will be achieved through the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the PA. In the meantime, the European technical assistant would do well to concentrate his efforts on the tasks for which he is responsible, instead of making unfounded accusations against Israel.”

The Arab economy in Judea, Samaria and Gaza grew at an unprecedented rate from 1967, when the areas were restored to Israel during the Six Day War, until the Intifada (Arab uprising), guided by the late PLO chieftain Yasser Arafat. The ensuing Oslo War, also known as the Second Intifada, further crippled the Arab economy after Jewish employers and consumers were unable to work with Arabs without facing the risk of a terrorist attack. .

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The Obama economy is failing

Heritage Foundation

Celebrating his first 100 days in office, President Barack Obama told the American people: “One hundred days ago, in the midst of the worst economic crisis in half a century, we passed the most sweeping economic recovery act in history…One hundred days later, we are already seeing results.” And he’s right, we are. Unemployment has risen to 9.5%, stocks fell to their lowest level in 10 weeks on Tuesday, and consumer credit delinquencies have hit a record high. Responding to the obvious failure of the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package, some liberals in the House and Senate are calling for a second (really the third when you count President Bush’s 2008 effort) stimulus. How big of a second stimulus? Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker told Politico: “To my mind it’s pretty obvious we need another stimulus package, probably a lot bigger than the last one.”

To be fair, the Obama administration itself is not yet ready to admit their first $787 billion stimulus package failed. Both Vice President Joe Biden and Obama Council of Economic Advisers member Austan Goolsbee recently said it was premature to discuss crafting another stimulus. But outside adviser to President Obama Laura Tyson told an audience in Singapore yesterday that the stimulus package was indeed “a bit too small” and that the administration should consider a second effort. According to Bloomberg, Tyson then stressed “The U.S. needs to communicate its determination to reduce the annual shortfall once the economy recovers.” Unfortunately the Obama administration is sending no such credible signals.

Not that Obama hasn’t tried. First he held a “fiscal responsibility summit” the week after signing the largest single-year increase in domestic federal spending since World War II. Then he ordered his cabinet to identify $100 million in budget cuts, and proposed his own $17 billion in program terminations and reductions. He has even promised to try and resurrect the completely ineffectual PAYGO rules, but made it clear they would not apply to his own health care spending. Informed observers have not bought any of these shenanigans. The numbers don’t lie, and here is the story they tell:

# Obama’s “stimulus” bill alone will create more debt (approximately $1 trillion including interest costs), than Bush’s first three years of budget deficits combined ($948 billion).
# Under Obama’s budget, the national debt will increase by more in two years than it did under President Bush in eight years.
# Obama’s spending will reach 24.5 percent of GDP, far higher than the post-war average of about 20.2 percent.

Ignoring Obama’s lofty rhetoric and focusing on the hard numbers, investors are demanding higher interest rates to soak up the tremendous flows of debt coming out of the Treasury. This will mean higher interest rates for consumer loans, mortgage loans, business loans, etc. The debt-based Obama economic stimulus plan has become a major drag on economic recovery, just as expected. Looking at Obama’s housing rescue effort the Washington Post reports today: “More recently, long-term interest rates have increased as generalized investor panic has given way to a more specific worry: that the huge U.S. budget deficit is unsustainable and may set off high inflation. In other words, rising deficits are canceling out at least some of the Fed’s efforts to keep mortgages cheap.”

The President and the Congress must realize that world investors will not be swayed by new budget rules or other posturing. They want to see the economy strengthen while the deficit comes down now, and fast. The solution is to set aside all the new spending proposals and start cutting spending fast. Otherwise we’re going to have double digit unemployment for a long time to come.

QUICK HITS
As House Democrats work to finalize their healthcare overhaul discussion draft, sources say CBO has individually scored provisions of the legislation that together approach a total of $1.5 trillion.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Tuesday ordered Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill.

Obama administration attorney Jeh Johnson told a Senate hearing yesterday that Guantanamo Bay detainees who are acquitted by civil or military courts may still be imprisoned indefinitely.

A minority report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released yesterday found that the housing bubble and financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market.

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Israel blasts EU over settlements remark

Just when you thought you had heard every accusation against Israel-the EU steps forward

Herb Keinon , THE JERUSALEM POST

Foreign Ministry Senior Deputy Director-General Rafi Barak called EU Ambassador Ramiro Cibrian Uzal on the carpet Tuesday for a statement an EU official released Monday saying settlements were strangling the Palestinian economy and, as a result, costing EU taxpayers money by fostering PA dependence on European aid.

A Foreign Ministry statement issued after Barak called the EU envoy to the Foreign Ministry to register a complaint quoted Barak as "strongly rejecting" the political allegations made by the official about the impact of Israeli security measures, such as roadblocks and settlements, on the Palestinian economy. "Political statements of this nature clearly fall outside the mandate of the European Commission Technical Assistance Office in question, which is charged with a purely technical role in the channeling of assistance," Barak said.

In addition, he said the statement made by the east Jerusalem-based official was unfounded and ignored "the fact that the issue of settlements has been agreed by the parties to be addressed in parallel with the fulfillment of other obligations - including Palestinian security obligations."

Even more troubling, the statement said, was the "implication that Israeli security measures in the West Bank are unnecessary and even illegal, alongside a total failure to recognize that it is the continued activity of Palestinian terrorist groups that makes such measures an unfortunate necessity."

The Foreign Ministry communiqué also said the EU official chose to ignore the recent improvements in the West Bank economy, with various economic data indicating that the West Bank economy grew between 5 and 7 percent in 2008.

Ultimately, according to the Foreign Ministry statement, "a vibrant, stable economy will be achieved through the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the PA. In the meantime, the European technical assistant would do well to concentrate his efforts on the tasks for which he is responsible, instead of making unfounded accusations against Israel."

The EU had no comment on the matter.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443747316&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

Comment:This is the nature of the EU leadership today. According to this Mr. Uzal the PA holds some amazing control over the entire EU-he states that the PA makes the EU give away monies to them-isn't this called theft? The fact is we would have had a final agreement long ago had the European countries stood firm and required state-like behavior rather than continue to reinforce the PA's irresponsible behavior and actions. Mr. Uzal is a poor excuse for a leader and should step down immediately.

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PA boasts of past terror attacks

Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

This week Israel approved the transfer of 1,000 AK-47 rifles to the Palestinian Authority security forces that are being trained by American Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton. This comes at the same time as former PA Minister of Prisoners, Ashraf al-Ajrami, is honoring these very same PA security forces for being the backbone of Palestinian terror during the five-year Terror War (Intifada). Defending these soldiers, whom Hamas mockingly calls "Dayton Forces," the PA minister gloated that they carried out "the greatest and most important operations [terror attacks]" in the war. Moreover, he also taunted Hamas for not immediately joining the Fatah forces in their war in 2000.

The PA takes pride in its "Intifada" in which more than 1,000 Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed by the PA (Fatah) and Hamas from 2000-2005. Depicting murder and suicide terror by the PA security forces as a sign of honor sends a clear signal to Palestinians: These PA forces, currently being trained by the US, are not to be mocked because they could be the backbone of the next war against Israel.

The following are the words of the former PA Minister of Prisoners Ashraf al-Ajrami:
"Now they [Hamas] are speaking [disparagingly] about the [PA's security forces, calling them] 'Dayton Forces.' These [security] forces paid the heavy price in the second Intifada, both as Shahids [Martyrs] and as prisoners. The greatest number of prisoners is from the security forces sector. They are the ones who bore arms and carried out the greatest and most important operations [terror attacks] against the Israeli occupation - and especially against soldiers, and some of the most famous operations [terror attacks] in the West Bank - Ein-Arik, Wadi Al-Haramiyeh, Sorda, and others. These were carried out by the heroes of the Palestinian security forces, who protected the homeland and the national interest, while Hamas merely looked on for many months before embarking [on terrorist attacks]."
[PA TV, June 29, 2009]
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Aspen's Suspension of Credibility: Fayyad and Syria's Regime Lie, Americans Applaud

RubinReports

Barry Rubin

The Aspen Daily News, the publication of the affluent, conspicuous-consumption ski resort in Colorado is not a major media outlet. Yet how beautifully this society sheet for the self-described beautiful people illustrates the spirit of the age! “Palestinian prime minister: Jews would be welcome in future state,” reads the headline. Now, it is well-known that the Palestinian Authority, which the aforementioned prime minister Salam Fayyad sort of heads, has always taken the view that all Jews must be removed from any future Palestinian state. This was also known to the more informed members of the audience, but modern Western intellectuals and journalists are very polite people—if you fall into the right category.

One man at least had the courage to ask if the emperor’s clothes weren’t a bit scanty:

“At the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival on Saturday, former CIA director James Woolsey noted that there are a million Arabs in Israel, accounting for one-sixth of the Israeli population, and...then asked PA (Palestinian Authority) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad: `If there is to be the rule of law in a Palestinian state, and if Jews want to live in someplace like Hebron, or anyplace else in a Palestinian state, for whatever reasons or historical attachments, why should they not be treated the same way Israeli Arabs are?’"

“Fayyad responded: `The kind of state that we want to have, that we aspire to have, is one that would definitely espouse high values of tolerance, co-existence, mutual respect and deference to all cultures, religions. No discrimination whatsoever, on any basis whatsoever. Jews to the extent they choose to stay and live in the state of Palestine will enjoy those rights and certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the State of Israel.’"

There is much that one can say about these two paragraphs. The Western media and academia is replete with articles about the allegedly terrible lot of Arabs in Israel. They are noticeably empty about the really terrible lot of Christians in many Muslim-majority places. (To be fair, I am not talking about the PA-ruled West Bank here.) The same applies to alleged oppression or repression in Israel and the lack of information on the very real oppression and repression where the PA rules. So already Fayyad has a head start.

What makes this especially disgusting is that leading figures in the PA recently attended a stage show at which Fatah bragged--as proof of its superiority to Hamas--of the mob murder, abetted by the PA police, of two unarmed Israeli reserve soldiers who took a wrong turn and found themselves in the middle of a PA-controlled city. The PA's response? To threaten the Italian reporter who filmed the murder.

Fayyad is lying. He knows he’s lying. The better-informed members of the audience know that he’s lying. So here’s what the audience did:

“The crowd at the Greenwald Pavilion applauded enthusiastically.”

This was followed by a fawning question by former assistant secretary of state Martin Indyk who, according to the newspaper:

“Complimented Fayyad on his plans to build up Palestinian government institutions en route to statehood, which Fayyad has set a goal of achieving in two years. He asked Fayyad if `final stage” political negotiations should also now be underway. “’

This is all pure nonsense since in fact Palestinian government institutions are a mess of corruption and incompetence while Fayyad has about as much chance of obtaining statehood in two years as (you are invited to fill in the blank with something appropriate).

“Fayyad answered that there was a risk for `this to be seen as an effort to make the occupation work better, and not to end it, and thereby doing away with any political viability that our political leadership still has.

“’What we are counting on is a meaningful political process that is capable of ending the occupation, because building the institutions of the state, by itself, is not going to end the occupation. It is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient ....Both have to work together.”

What he’s really saying is that his idea of a peace process is that the West will force Israel to pull out of the West Bank without the PA doing anything. This is what he has put forward as strategy in his main policy speech, which those in the audience should have read and digested but presumably didn’t.

And then this exchange:

“Earlier in the interview, Fayyad said that Palestinian elections set for January should definitely be held as scheduled.

“`That is an absolute right for the people,’” he said, adding that, “`it is no secret that Hamas does not want elections.’”

“`Because they think they will lose?’” asked [columnist Tom] Friedman.

“`I don’t know of what other reason they may have,” Fayyad said.

“`That’s usually a pretty good reason not to have elections,’” Friedman said.

Ha! Ha! Very funny. But in fact everyone in the audience should know—and Friedman must know—that it was Fayyad’s boss, Mahmoud Abbas, the PA’s chief executive, who cancelled elections and unilaterally extended his term.

True, the PA cannot supervise elections in the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, but Fatah which rules the PA has never even held internal elections. And some of the poll results show Hamas as being very strong in the West Bank.

The following is a true story: In the run-up to the Gaza elections which Hamas won, Fatah and PA officials approached Israel and proposed having a phony military confrontation that would give the PA an opportunity to cancel the elections. But Fayyad—who, true, was not involved in this particular incident--is allowed to get away with his supposed dedication to democracy.

Earlier in the day, Fayyad said that the way to handle Hamas—which to her credit Senator Diane Feinstein condemned at the conference--is to get Palestinians to support

“That which is done to affect a meaningful change for the better in people’s lives. I think we stand a much better chance of winning that debate than going about it in a war of words, which has typified much of the argument over the divide.”

But Fayyad knows, as should the well-informed people in the audience, that his stated policy is to make a power-sharing deal with Hamas. So if Feinstein accurately described Hamas as “a militaristic/terrorist organization that still believes Israel should be driven into the sea, that does not admit Israel’s right to exist,” why is Fayyad seeking to bring it into his government?

I know I should stop here, but it is impossible to describe the absurd credulity of the contemporary scene—Festival of Ideas, indeed!—without discussing the end of the article. Not content to apologize for one such regime, the article continues with the words of another honored speaker, Syrian ambassador to the U.S. Imad Moustapha. (The quotes were taken from an interview he just did in the Atlantic.)

Here is the representative of a vicious dictatorship, one of the world’s leading supporters of terrorism, where the state produces television series showing Jews murdering Christian children to drink their blood and helps terrorists get into Iraq to murder American soldiers (you know, working class people who don’t usually hang out in Aspen).

And what does Moustapha lecture Americans about? Why democracy, of course!

“`Democracy is an ideal state that is never attainable,’” Moustapha said,” well that’s sure true in Syria!

He goes on—a statement too priceless not to quote:

“When asked about the state of democratic freedoms in Syria, Moustapha said that U.S. policy seemed to be that the Arab people should only elect those candidates and parties supported by the U.S.” He cited the Hamas win in the Gaza Strip and the recent elections in Lebanon. Given Syria’s bloody history in Lebanon and more recent involvement in murders, this is rich, though perhaps not as rich as the Aspen audience.

In regard to U.S. policy in Syria, the Syrian ambassador said, “You need to leave us to evolve into a more democratic state from within. Don’t try to impose anything on us from without.”

Right, just let Syria go on trying to impose its interests on Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan, and Iraq “from without.”

But isn’t this what it’s all about? The United States and its friends are responsible for all the world’s problems. America should make up for its sins by either supporting its enemies, sending them checks, or at least doing nothing.

Oh, yes, did I mention applauding their lies enthusiastically?

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Dershowitz doesn't get it

Melanie Phillips

A sobering view by one of Britain's most respected columnists

Alan Dershowitz is one of the most prolific, high-profile and indefatiguable defenders of Israel and the Jewish people against the tidal wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling currently coursing through the west. So a piece by him in the Wall Street Journal giving expression to the rising anxiety being felt about Obama by American Jews naturally arouses great interest. But just like the majority of American Jews, getting on for 80 per cent of whom voted for Obama, he is a Democrat supporter who is incapable of acknowledging the truth about this President. For most American Jews, the horror of even entertaining the hypothetical possibility that they might ever in a million years have to vote for a Republican is so great they simply cannot see what is staring them in the face — that this Democratic President is lethal for both Israel and the free world. And in this article Dershowitz shows that he too is just as blind.


Acknowledging the anxiety among some American Jews about Obama's attitude to Israel, Dershowitz concludes uneasily that there isn't really a problem here because all Obama is doing is putting pressure on Israel over the settlements, which most American Jews don't support anyway. But this is totally to miss the point. The pressure over the settlements per se is not the reason for the intense concern.


It is instead, first and foremost, the fact that Obama is treating Israel as if it is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Obama thus inverts aggressor and victim, denying Israel's six-decade long victimisation and airbrushing out Arab aggression. The question remains: why has Obama chosen to pick a fight with Israel while soft-soaping Iran which is threatening it with genocide? The answer is obvious: Israel is to be used to buy off Iran just as Czechoslovakia was used at Munich. Indeed, I would say this is worse even than that, since I suspect that Obama — coming as he does from a radical leftist milieu, with vicious Israel-haters amongst his closest friends — would be doing this to Israel even if Iran was not the problem that it is.


In any event, the double standard is egregious. Obama has torn up his previous understandings with Israel over the settlements while putting no pressure at all on the Palestinians, even though since they are the regional aggressor there can be no peace unless they end their aggression and certainly not until they accept Israel as a Jewish state, which they have said explicitly they will never do. On this, Obama is totally silent. So too is Dershowitz. That's some omission.


Next, Obama is pressuring Israel to set up a Palestine state — within two years this will exist, swaggers Rahm Emanuel. But everyone knows that as soon as Israel leaves the West Bank, Hamas — or even worse — will take over. The only reason the (also appalling) Abbas is still in Ramallah, enabling Obama to pretend there is a Palestinian interlocutor for peace, is because the Israelis are keeping Hamas at bay. Yet Dershowitz writes:


There is no evidence of any weakening of American support for Israel's right to defend its children from the kind of rocket attacks candidate Obama commented on during his visit to Sderot.


So what exactly does he think would happen if Israel came out of the West Bank and the Hamas rockets were down the road from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (literally: many in the west have absolutely no idea how tiny Israel is). It's not a question of Israel's 'right to defend its children'. If Obama has his way, Israel would not be able to defend its children or anyone else, because Obama would have removed its defences by putting its enemies in charge of them. It is astounding that Dershowitz can't see this.


Then there was Obama's appalling Cairo speech in which he conspicuously refrained from committing himself to defending Zionism and the Jewish people from the attacks and incitement to genocide against them, but committed himself instead to defending their attackers against 'negative stereotyping'. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.


Worse still, by falsely asserting that the Jewish aspiration for Israel derived from the Holocaust, Obama effectively denied that the Jewish people were in Israel as of right and thus endorsed the core element of the Arab and Muslim propaganda of war and extermination. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.


Obama drew a vile — and telling — equivalence between the Nazi extermination camps and the Palestinian 'refugee' camps. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say. Obama's statement that the Palestinians 'have suffered in pursuit of a homeland' was grossly and historically untrue, and again denied Arab aggression. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say. Equally vilely, Obama equated genocidal terrorism by the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the resistance against apartheid in South Africa. On all of this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.


Dershowitz also grossly underplays the terrible harm Obama is doing to the security not just of Israel but the world through his reckless appeasement of Iran. In the last few weeks, this has actively undercut the Iranian democrats trying to oust their tyrannical regime, and has actually strengthened that regime. All the evidence suggests ever more strongly that Obama has decided America will 'live with' a nuclear Iran, whatever it does to its own people. Which leaves Israel hung out to dry.


But even here, where he is clearly most concerned, Dershowitz scuttles under his comfort blanket — Dennis Ross, who was originally supposed to have been the US special envoy to Iran but was recently announced senior director of the National Security Council and special assistant to the President for the region. It is not at all clear whether this ambiguous development represents a promotion or demotion for Ross. Either way, for Dershowitz to rest his optimism that Obama's Iran policy will be all right on the night entirely upon the figure of Dennis Ross is pathetic. Ross, a Jew who played Mr Nice to Robert Malley's Mr Nasty towards Israel in the Camp David debacle under President Clinton, is clearly being used by Obama as a human shield behind which he can bully Israel with impunity. American Jews assume that his proximity to Obama means the President's intentions towards Israel are benign. Dazzled by this vision of Ross as the guarantor of Obama's good faith, they thus ignore altogether the terrible import of the actual words coming out of the President's mouth.


The fact is that many American Jews are so ignorant of the history of the Jewish people, the centrality of Israel in its history and the legality and justice of its position that they probably saw nothing wrong in Obama saying that the Jewish aspiration for Israel came out of the Holocaust because they think this too. Nor do they see the appalling double standard in the bullying of Israel over the settlements and what that tells us about Obama's attitude towards Israel, because — as Dershowitz himself makes all too plain — they too think in much the same way, that the settlements are the principal obstacle to peace.


Many if not most American Jews have a highly sentimentalized view of Israel. They never go there, are deeply ignorant of its history and current realities, and are infinitely more concerned with their own view of themselves as social liberals, a view reflected back at themselves through voting for a Democrat President.


Whatever else he is, however, Dershowitz is certainly not ignorant. Which makes this lamentable article all the more revealing, and depressing.

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HC: Health Care-time to add this feature

Open Letter on Health Care

To the President and Congress of the United States
From Edwin Feulner, Ph.D.
President, The Heritage Foundation

Health care reform has been a central goal of The Heritage Foundation since our creation more than three decades ago, so we welcomed President Barack Obama’s call for a common effort to find the right solution to this public policy challenge. We believe that putting families, not the government, in control of the system is the key to success. We want to strengthen our health system based on that principle.. The trouble has been that, no sooner does the President call for “everybody to pitch in” and engage in the debate, than he vilifies anyone who criticizes his plans. Denigrating different views does nothing to improve the tone of the debate here in Washington, let alone achieve real reform.

Having a civil national debate will produce more lasting change; accusing opponents of engaging in “scare tactics and fear-mongering” will not.
And make no mistake: there are legitimate concerns with what the White House has proposed. Americans need to understand the implications of all of the competing proposals, whether from the White House, from Capitol Hill, from industries, from think tanks or from interest groups.

In his speech to the American Medical Association, the President said, “When you hear the naysayers claim that I’m trying to bring about government-run health care, know this: They’re not telling the truth.” Truth, however, is not a commodity over which the President has a monopoly. We not only believe that we are alerting the nation to potentially catastrophic consequences when we point out pitfalls in his plans, we think that some proposals being made by the White House are advertised on false premises.

Here are a few examples:

* If you like your health care package you can keep it: This assertion is difficult to square with the facts. The President says that a “public option”—a government plan—would just be one of many health care plans that Americans could select. In fact, a public plan will lead many employers to drop private health coverage for their workers and dump them into the public plan—just as many employers in the 1990s pushed their workers into cheaper managed care plans. According to independent analyses, as many as 119 million Americans could end up in a public plan. This is hardly letting people keep what they have. And many in Congress are eager to expand a public plan, with tight rules on what your doctor can do and how much he or she will be paid. Congress can do that because it will be both the “umpire” who sets the rules and the “team owner” of the public plan. There will be no “level-playing field.” We believe a public option will toll a death knell for private plans.
* The end goal is not a single payer system: This is another Washington euphemism that confuses people. Let us all be clear: The “single payer” here is Uncle Sam, using taxpayers’ money, and not just paying the bills but calling the shots and deciding what care every American will get—or not get. The inclusion of a public option is nothing more than a Trojan horse. The architects of the President’s proposals, and the sponsors of his proposals on Capitol Hill, know that once a government plan is in place, private insurance companies will be eventually run out of business. The government already owns a major bank and auto company; we shouldn’t hand over the medical industry as well.
* The proposals are deficit-neutral: The President also asserts that a government system will be fully financed. This is a stunning untruth. Analysts, including the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office–Congress’s own watchdog–have issued preliminary estimates that the cost could be high as $2 trillion over 10 years, with most of that borrowed money. Even squeezing Medicare payments and adding new tax revenue will not pay for the massive burden this plan would put on American families. And current congressional proposals would still leave millions without insurance. Washington always says that new costs will be paid by savings elsewhere, but these phantom savings never materialize. These new costs will be borne by American families.
* The quality of your health care will get better: One need only look at current government health programs to test this premise. Medicare has huge gaps in coverage. Medicaid’s quality is notoriously bad. They both offer substandard care compared to most private insurance plans. These persistent deficiencies are routinely overlooked in discussions of a government health plan. Rather than fixing Medicare and Medicaid, what the government proposes is to make these programs the foundations of a universal plan.

But we know opposing bad ideas is not enough. We need to fix the gaps in our health care system and lower costs for Americans. The system we need must not just protect union bosses, bureaucrats and select cartels, it must empower American families. The nation needs health care reform, not health care micromanaged by the government.

We are happy the President has joined a cause we have championed since our inception. He has recently been asking audiences across the nation “Where’s the alternative?” We at The Heritage Foundation are ready to discuss our alternative plans and help craft a bipartisan solution to America’s health care problems. That is what the country needs and what the President says he wants.

Specifically, a plan that would reform health care will need to:

* Give families control of their health care: We need to let families—not the government—control decisions so they can choose the coverage they want. For this to happen private health insurance needs to be portable—that is, owned by Americans so they can take their package from job to job. The health care system we have today was conceived in the era of World War II, when many Americans worked for the same company all their lives. As we know, that is not the case today. The President has acknowledged this. But we do not need a public plan, or mandates on businesses, to have portability. We need changes in rules and the removal of tax penalties to allow families real choice and ownership.
* Reform the tax system: For portability to become reality, we need to reform the tax system. Right now, families can get a tax break for their insurance only if they hand over control of their insurance to their boss, and leave their plan behind if they change jobs. That needs to change. We need to provide the same tax relief to families wherever they choose to get their plan. In that world of empowered families, plans would have to compete to satisfy them, not compete to cut costs for employers.
* Bring on competition: Americans will get quality health care only with the mechanism that has given us quality in all other aspects of life: competition. The way to get quality care in America is to have insurers compete to satisfy families in an insurance market, one that provides transparent information, ease of delivery and quick results, and which is fair to families and their doctors. Members of Congress pick and choose plans in such a market. The rest of America should also have that right.
* Recognize that states know better than Washington: The challenges of organizing and delivering health care vary greatly across the nation. Rural Mississippi is not the same as Midtown Manhattan. States have always been smarter than Washington at figuring out how to get the job done. To the extent that government must play a role, the states should take the lead in devising the best way to reach our national goals. The last thing we need is one-size-fits-all health care. Congress needs to let states find the best way to achieve value for money in widening coverage while bringing down costs.

A reckless, expensive and one-sided rush toward “reform” would not only be damaging to our public discourse, but it could fundamentally change our society in ways that have far-reaching consequences.

Rather than bringing in the failed central-planning approach to health care, with the government controlling who gets what, let’s ensure access to affordable health care for all Americans. Let’s use the tried and tested approach of the empowered consumer in a truly competitive market.

These are some of our remedies to our nation’s health care system. There are other free market ideas that also warrant consideration. We call on the President and Congress to widen the conversation. Let the debate truly begin.

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Blaming the Jews

Obama resorting to tried and tested ploy: Making friends at Jews’ expense

Elyakim Haetzni
YNET News

In World War II, most Europeans willingly supported the Nazis. The reason for this, which most people prefer to silence, is that Germany’s main sex appeal was its anti-Semitism.. In Western Europe, the overwhelming Jewish success in all areas of life prompted great jealousy, while in Eastern Europe the masses believed that the Jews are depriving them of the little they have. The Nazis opened the dams – the legal, religious, and social ones – that protected the Jews against these ill feelings; from that point, it was permissible to openly hate Jews, and also to harm them and damage their property.



Europeans today do not feel comfortable to contend with the fact that the “license” to hunt Jews enabled the Nazi murderers to win the hearts and minds of others.



Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is currently building a nuclear bomb and deflecting the world’s attention through Holocaust denial and threats to exterminate Israel, is also satisfying pent up sentiments. Even though one-third of them were exterminated, the Jews are again “riding high” – in the media, among the world’s billionaires, among Nobel Prize laureates, and in politics. Moreover, the cheeky Jewish state – a success story in its own right – took over Jerusalem.



Besides, the world doesn’t like to see strong and victorious Jews.



Yet how can one find an outlet for these frustrations in the shadow of the Holocaust, and with anti-Semitism no longer being fashionable? There comes Ahmadinejad, and under the guise of slamming “Israel” – a code-word understood by all – openly calls for the extermination of the Jews. Who knows how many hearts he won by utilizing this Nazi patent.



Ahmadinejad’s great success story is the US president’s intention to meet him halfway, after Obama already reached the midpoint on his own, en route to captivating the hearts of nations fed up with the “ugly American”: the Iranians, the Europeans, the South Americans, and the Arabs. And who has been left out? The Jews and their state, of course.


Settlement issue just a pretext

While seeking a way to get rid of the “friendship” that undermines America’s popularity - a friendship that Israel foolishly highlights to an unrealistic extent - Obama reached the same solution: Acquiring friends worldwide at the expense of the Jews, under the pretense of “Israel” of course.



This is good for public opinion, which blames the “Jewish” Wall Street for the economic crisis, and it’s also received well by the Europeans, who have never ceased to hate Jews and are again seeing them flourishing and taking up key posts. Mostly, this is the “Open Sesame” password aimed at those who will not believe in a “different America” until it parts ways with Israel.



Therefore, it will be naïve to think that because of some remote settlement we lost Obama’s “friendship”; the issue of settlement expansion is just a pretext, and others will follow.



Netanyahu was especially pathetic when he spoke, at the home of the US ambassador to Israel, about a sort of eternal covenant with America. After all, every such public embrace requires the embraced party to show rejection in order to shake off the nuisance.



Why aren’t they telling us the truth; the fact that even today the hatred of Jews opens doors worldwide? Because this insight embarrasses and frustrates assimilated Jews, who hope to be “forgiven” for their Jewishness as long as they smear other Jews. It also embarrasses Jews who view Zionism as a way to assimilate as a collective. Both these groups hoped, in vain, that Zionism will erase the notion of “a people dwelling alone” (Numbers 23:9). However, others view this “stain” as a sign of distinction and source of pride. For them, Obama’s distancing is not the end of the world.



The winds of Jew-hatred are again blowing across the world. Those who have roots will be able to withstand them.

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PA Chief Abbas: We Left Galilee on Our Own

Hillel Fendel Abbas Admits: We Chose to Leave
A7 News

Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas says the Arabs of the Galilee city of Tzfat left in 1948 not because they were driven out, but on their own volition.. Many biographies of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas imply that his family became “refugees” because of the War of Independence in 1948. For instance, a BBC profile on Abbas when he succeeded Yasser Arafat as PLO chairman in 2005 writes, “In the light of his origins in Safed in Galilee - in what is now northern Israel - he is said to hold strong views about the right of return of Palestinian refugees.” Answers.com states, “As a result of the Arab-Israel War of 1948, he became a refugee.” Wikipedia articles on the topic say the same – all giving the impression that the Abbas family was driven out and became homeless.

It is notable that the Abbas family moved back to Damascus, as that is likely the place where it had originated less than 90 years earlier.



However, Abbas himself – co-founder of Fatah with Arafat, and known as Abu Mazen - now tells a different story. Speaking with Al-Palestinia TV on Monday, Abbas admitted that his family was not expelled or driven out, but rather left for fear that the Jews might take revenge for the slaughter of 20 Jews in the city during the Arab pogroms of 19 years earlier.

In the words of Abbas:

“I am among those who were born in the city of Tzfat (Safed). We were a family of means. I studied in elementary school, and then came the naqba [calamity, namely, the founding of the State of Israel – ed. At night, we left by foot from Tzfat, to the Jordan River, where we remained for a month. Then we went to Damascus, and then to our relatives in Jordan, and then we settled in Damascus.

“My father had money, and he spent his money systematically, and after a year, the money ran out and we began to work.

“The people’s basic motives brought them to run away for their lives and with their property. These [motive were very important, for they feared the violence of the Zionist terrorist organizations – and especially those of us from Tzfat felt that there was an old desire for revenge from the rebellion of 1929, and this was in the memory of our families and parents.”

The “rebellion” Abbas referred to was a series of brutal Arab attacks on Jewish towns in the summer of 1929. Nearly 70 Jews were slaughtered in their homes in Hevron, 20 in Tzfat, 17 in Jerusalem, and others were murdered in Motza, Kfar Uriah and Tel Aviv.

The memory of the slaughter, Abbas said, “brought [our familie to understand that the military balance had changed, and that [ no longer had military forces in their real meaning. There were only young people who fought, and there was an initial action. They felt that the balance of power had collapsed and they therefore decided to leave. The entire city was abandoned based on this thought – the thought of their property and saving themselves.”

Return to Roots - in Damascus

It is notable that the Abbas family moved back to Damascus, as that is likely the place where it had originated less than 90 years earlier. Joan Peters, in her scholarly work “From Time Immemorial” on the Arab population of Israel, writes that in 1860, “Algerian tribes moved from Damascus en masse to Safed.” She notes that the Muslims in the city were mostly descended from Moorish settlers and from Kurds – more evidence negating the claim that the Arabs in the Land of Israel had been there “from time immemorial.”

Comment: So revisionist history speakers what say you now? We have said, using valid data points that most, not all, Arabs left on their own as stated by Mr. Abbas, Fatah leader. This puts to bed any more discussion or dispute over our acknowledgment of why Arabs left what was to become Israel proper.

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The Truth About Medicare’s Administrative Costs

Heritage Foundation

Now that Al Franken has been seated in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is now telling reporters he sees no need for the left to compromise on their demands for a government run “public option” health care plan. Proponents of the public plan, like Schumer, believe government run health care is needed “to keep the insurance companies honest” because they believe private insurance companies have higher administrative costs than a government run health care would. The explanations for why liberals believe this are as numerous as they are erroneous: government is more efficient than the private sector; private insurance companies spend too much on marketing; executive compensation is too high, private firms fight too many claims, and, of course, private health care seeks too much profit.

But like many core beliefs of the left, the claim that government run health care has lower administrative costs than private care is just plain false. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, likes to cite data showing that Medicare only spends 3% of its total outlays on administrative costs compared to 14-22% for private care. The numbers themselves are correct, but measuring administrative efficiency by a percentage of total costs is completely useless. Heritage fellow Robert Book explains:


Imagine, for a moment, that Fred and Jane each have a credit card from a different bank. Fred charges $5,000 a month, and Jane charges $1,000 a month. Suppose it costs each bank $5 to produce and send a plastic credit card when the account is opened. That $5 “administrative cost” is a much lower percentage of Fred’s monthly charges than it is of Jane’s, but that does not mean Fred’s bank is more efficient. It is purely a mathematical artifact of Fred’s charging pattern, and it would be silly to compare the efficiency of bank operations on that basis. Yet that is how many analysts compare Medicare with private insurance.


A much more accurate way of capturing each system’s true administrative costs is by a per patient basis. When this is done, government run health care’s administrative costs are routinely higher than private care. In the years from 2000 to 2005, Medicare’s administrative costs per beneficiary were consistently higher than that for private insurance, ranging from 5 to 48 percent higher, depending on the year. This is despite the fact that private-sector “administrative” costs include state health insurance premium taxes of up to 4 percent (averaging around 2 percent, depending on the state)–an expense from which Medicare is exempt–as well as the cost of non-claim health care expenses, such as disease management and on-call nurse consultation services.

Without their lower administrative cost talking point, the left knows their justification for government run health care in a time of dangerously high deficits evaporates. That is why Paul Krugman has now attacked Book’s findings twice on his personal blog. In neither effort does Krugman ever refute that per patient is the better metric nor does he cite any data to refute Book’s per patient conclusions. Read both posts. And read Book’s responses. This is one liberal myth we can put to bed.

QUICK HITS
Health care overhaul legislation from President Barack Obama’s congressional allies would create a federal insurance czar with sweeping new powers to oversee medical plans nationwide.

Bank bailouts and recession-fighting measures is exploding the debt of the world’s most affluent nations sending debt levels to at least 114 percent of gross domestic product in 2014, more than triple the 35 percent of the main emerging economies including China, the International Monetary Fund forecasts.

Fitch Ratings downgraded California’s bond rating to BBB, just above junk status.

Democrats admit that their cap and trade bill is a job killer.

According to Gallup, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed.

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Sometimes it is more essential to define the nature of evil than good

Jonathan Rosenblum

Upon his first visit to one of the liberated death camps, Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "There are those who ask what are we fighting for. Let them come here and see what we are fighting against." Eisenhower's remark contains an important insight: Sometimes it is more essential that one define the nature of evil than that one define what is good. About the latter, there will inevitably be many opinions. But they need not prevent a consensus from coalescing around the definition of evil. I was reminded of that point last week as I watched The Third Jihad, the third in a trilogy of documentaries on the threat of radical Islam produced by Raphael Shore and Wayne Kopping. Towards the end of the documentary one of the experts interviewed, former CIA intelligence officer Clare Lopez declared, "The real war is between the values of freedom and barbarism. If we are not willing to recognize the battle as one for our civilization, we might as well give up right now."

The last time the West faced such a civilizational threat, many refused to recognize the nature of the conflict. In Troublesome Young Me, Lynne Olsen offers a gripping account of the group of youthful Conservative backbenchers, who eventually ousted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain from power and brought in Winston Churchill in his place, nearly a year after the outbreak of World War II.

England entered that war totally unprepared, and lagging far behind Germany in every respect, apart from its navy. Even after Britain proclaimed war, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Chamberlain pursued it half-heartedly and dreamed of an imminent peace. Britain and France bombed only German military targets most narrowly defined. Meanwhile Luftwaffe pilots in Poland followed orders to "close [their] hearts to pity," happily machine-gunning women and girls picking potatoes, bombing churches and hospitals, and strafing toddlers being herded to safety.

The parallels between today and the earlier period are eerie. Chamberlain, like President Obama today, enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Parliament. His party whips enforced party discipline with an iron hand — think Rahm Emanuel — and backbenchers who stepped out of line put their political futures on the line.

In another interesting parallel, Chamberlain enjoyed almost across the board fawning support from the press and the BBC. That included self-imposed censorship on the information reaching the British public. After the Anschluss, British papers carried no pictures of the hundreds shot in the first days after the Nazi takeover, of the tens of thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps, or of Nazi soldiers forcing Jewish doctors, lawyers and professors to scrub the streets and clean toilets on their hands and knees. When reporters asked Chamberlain about such matters, he snapped at them for believing "Jewish-Communist propaganda," and that was the end of the matter.

The British press ignored both the massive German arms build-up prior to the War, and the pitiful state of British preparedness. Both before and after the conflict started, it suppressed mention or quotations from Hitler's speeches that would have conveyed a much different impression of his goals. As a British TV character tartly observed forty years later, "It is hard to censor the press when it wants to be free, but easy if it gives up its freedom voluntarily."

Chamberlain never read Mein Kampf, in which Hitler laid out in startling fashion both his future plans for the Jews and for German conquest. Far from viewing Hitler as an evil man, Chamberlain believed him to be a "gentleman," with whom he could do business. He was more than once shocked to find that Hitler had lied to him, even though that too was foreshadowed in Mein Kampf, Said future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, "He didn't believe people existed [who would] say one thing and do another. …It was pathetic, really."

Chamberlain, according to Olsen, "could never bring himself to believe that [Hitler and Mussolini] wanted to go to war. Clinging to the security of his ignorance, he created a peace-loving image of them that defied reality." For a decade, the English and French did nothing in response to fascist aggression in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and precious little even in the wake of the German invasion of Poland.

France and England thereby encouraged Hitler to believe they were too weak to prevail, a judgment in which he was very nearly right. That should have taught us — but did not — that those who hope to avoid war via appeasement inevitably end up fighting later on worse terms.

At no point, did Chamberlain recognize that Hitler constituted a mortal threat to Western civilization. As a consequence, he displayed far more ruthlessness fighting those within his own party who dared challenge his policies than he did in fighting Hitler.

The inability to recognize Hitler as evil incarnate is the most frightening parallel to today. President Ronald Reagan was reviled by Western elites for calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, as was President George W. Bush for grouping Iran, North Korea, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq together as the Axis of Evil.

The West still remains incapable of acknowledging evil or giving credence to the pronouncements of evil men. Ayatollah Khomeini long ago made clear that he was prepared to see Iran go up "in flames," if the worldwide rule of Islam were thereby furthered. Mutual assured destruction, says Bernard Lewis, the greatest living authority on Islam, is for Ahmadinejad, "not a deterrent but an incentive." Surveying the scene in Beslan, where Chenyan Muslims killed nearly 300 Russian schoolchildren, one of the speakers on The Third Jihad puts the point succinctly: Why should those who don't hesitate to send out their own children to be killed hesitate to kill other peoples' children?

Yet the highest wisdom in the West today is to not take seriously the threats of Ahmadinejad or the speculations of the Iranian leadership about the mathematics of a nuclear exchange with Israel. They are not madmen, we are constantly told.

President Obama has no taste for confrontation with radical Islam (only with Israel). He cannot even admit that it exists. Evil, it seems, is one of the few words that does not come trippingly off his tongue.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/jonathan/rosenblum_evil.php3?printer_friendly

Guest Comment:Sometimes it’s more essential to define
the nature of evil than good


Dear Joel,

On a number of occasions over the past year we have referred to George Santayana’s famous quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The reason Santayana’s quote is so enduring is because it goes to the very heart of why people do what they do. Ideas have consequences. Understanding that helps one understand history. Learning from history helps one to replicate successes and triumphs – and avoid failures and tragedies.

In the excellent commentary below, Jonathan Rosenblum points out the disturbing parallels between how the West, and specifically British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, dealt with Hitler prior to World War II, and how the West, and President Obama, are dealing with the evil of radical Islam today.

That President Obama, for whatever reason, has drawn the wrong conclusions from history should be a cause for deep concern for every American concerned about the threat radical Islam poses to our safety, security and liberties.

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Obama and Israel

The Administration's distancing of itself from Israel is likely to empower those who believe that American support can be degraded.

By JEFF ROBBINS
WSJ

In his new book, "One State, Two States: Resolving The Israel/Palestine Conflict," historian Benny Morris recounts the lugubrious history of Palestinian refusal to actually accept Israel as a Jewish state in the heart of the uniformly Muslim Middle East. Morris examines the widespread rejection by Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general of a two-state solution that, he points out, has been "a constant refrain of Palestinian leaders … throughout the history of the Palestinian national movement," up to and including the present.. The refusal of Palestinian politicians, academics and clerics to stipulate that they accept a permanent Jewish state existing next to a Palestinian state is, of course, at once a dirty little secret and the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to the debate over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

For over 80 years, as Morris notes, Palestinians have "persuasively demonstrated" that they do not want any Jewish state in the region, regardless of the boundaries, and regardless of the settlement policy pursued by this Israeli government or that one. The Palestinian rejection of any Jewish state has not merely been the recurring theme of the conflict, but the dominant one. Thus, in the 1930s, the Palestinians rejected a proposed two-state solution that would have created a Jewish state in less than 20 percent of Palestine. In the 1940s, the Palestinians rejected the United Nations partition plan which created a Jewish state on less than half of the arable land in Palestine. From 1948 to 1967, when Israel had no presence in Gaza, the West Bank or East Jerusalem, the Arabs created no Palestinian state. After the 1967 war, when Israel accepted the land-for-peace formulation in UN Resolution 242, the Arab world, including the Palestinians, rejected it. In 2000, when Israel supported a plan put forth by President Clinton that would have created an independent Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem comprising all of Gaza and virtually all of the West Bank, the Palestinians rejected this too, instead commencing a campaign of bombings that left 1,100 Israelis dead and, not incidentally, 4,000 Palestinians dead as well.

And in 2006, when Israel unilaterally and forcibly removed thousands of settlers from the Gaza Strip, abandoning any Jewish presence there, Palestinians responded by rocketing Israeli civilian centers, eventually leaving Israel with the unenviable choice between abandoning ever greater numbers of its civilians to daily Palestinian rocket attacks, on one hand, or entering Gaza to stop those attacks, with the inevitable harm done to civilians there, on the other. For its part, the Hamas leadership, which had assassinated many of its opponents and achieved a military takeover of Gaza, was more than content to trade hundreds of Palestinian lives in Gaza for the international criticism of Israel which Israel's efforts to protect its civilians from these rocket attacks would reliably trigger.

Recently, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told The Washington Post that the Palestinians had once again rejected a two-state solution. Former Prime Minister Olmert, Abbas told the Post, had recently offered an independent Palestinian state comprising all of Gaza, a capital in East Jerusalem and 97 percent of the West Bank - - and Abbas had flatly rejected this as well. "The gaps," Abbas said, without elaboration, "were too wide."

In the meantime, Abbas refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, telling the Post that he preferred to let the passage of time take its course, confident that American and international pressure on Israel would further weaken Israel's position. "Until then," Abbas said, "in the West Bank we have a good reality…the people are living a good life." And just last week, despite yet more stories in the western media that Hamas was at last "moderating" its position on Israel, Hamas informed former President Carter, whose credulousness on the conflict is a source of some wonderment, that as it had previously made clear, it would never recognize Israel's right to exist under any circumstances.

The problem with these facts is that they get in the way of an increasingly fashionable orthodoxy: that it is Israeli settlements on the West Bank that are the obstacle to peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Despite the record recounted so soberingly by Morris, this is a line that is advanced by Palestinian supporters in the West with great vigor, even as Palestinians have been proclaiming somewhat indiscreetly that, actually, the trouble with Israel has nothing to do with settlements and everything to do with its existence, which, three generations after Israel's founding, remains unacceptable.

Morris rather elegantly characterizes the bobbing and weaving of Palestinian spokespeople who profess moderation while continuing to reject Israel's right to exist as "elisions, disingenuousness and vagueness." It might be described less gently as mendacity. Nevertheless, the line that it is Israeli settlements that are the problem, and Prime Minister Netanyahu's reluctance to remove them that is the fundamental impediment to peace, has attained a certain gospel-like adherence in certain quarters and, increasingly, among Democrats. As Dennis Ross and David Makovsky write with understatement in their own new book, "Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East," "those on the left…tend to dismiss ideological opposition to Israel's existence."

For Democrats who voted for Barack Obama, but who regard the encirclement of Israel by well-armed fanatics pledged to its destruction with some alarm, the President's treatment of Prime Minister Netanyahu on the occasion of their first meeting has provoked a certain unease. The Obama Administration's pointed and singular focus on Israeli settlements while downplaying the underlying problem of Palestinian rejectionism, the extensive leaking aimed at letting the world know what little regard the Administration has for Israel's newly-elected leader, and Vice President Biden's ostentatious scolding of Israel's supporters at a recent AIPAC conference, can all be regarded as part of a master plan, intended to bring the Arab world into the peace process by demonstrating that American policy toward Israel has changed. Under this theory, Obama's stiff-arming of Israel might be viewed as the diplomatic equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, intended to improve the desperate situation of President Abbas and empower Abbas and other relative moderates to persuade the Arab masses to finally accept a Jewish state.

The risk, of course, is that rather than enhancing the stature of moderates and reducing the influence of those who openly pronounce that what they really seek is the disappearance of Israel, the Obama Administration's gambit will have the opposite effect. The record of Palestinians professing in the West to accept a two-state solution while assuring their own people that they refuse to accept any such solution is incontrovertible, and does not appear to have evolved to any meaningful degree, as Morris points out.

The Administration's purposeful distancing of itself from Israel is likely to empower those who have always believed, and who continue to believe, that in the fullness of time, American support for Israel can be degraded, and with it Israel's ability to survive. Those in the Arab world who have counseled that that is the case—and there are many of them—will take the Administration's insistence that it wishes to be "an honest broker" as evidence that, at long last, American support for Israel has begun to erode, and that it is only a matter of time before it is no longer necessary for them to pretend that it is a two-state solution in which they are interested. If this proves to be the case, the Obama Administration, while intending to be helpful, will have inadvertently dealt whatever prospects exist for Middle East peace a serious blow.

Mr. Robbins served as a United States Delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva during the Clinton Administration. He is an attorney at Mintz Levin in Boston.

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Israel admits to an image crisis

Jason Koutsoukis, Jerusalem
July 4, 2009 (first post)

ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's communications chief, Ron Dermer, has admitted that Israel faces a serious public relations problem.

In his first interview since the Netanyahu Government took office in March, the Prime Minister's director of policy planning and communications has told The Age that it's time Israel switched its PR strategy from defence to offence. "We have to break out of the straitjacket," Mr Dermer says. "We have to defend our own right to defend ourselves. It's not for other people to do it for us."

Despite launching a broadside at the way the foreign media and other organisations report events in Israel, Mr Dermer acknowledged that successive Israeli governments were also to blame for presenting a narrow argument.

"It is not enough for Israel to say that it wants peace. You must also say that you are not a thief. We did not steal another people's land. That is the core of this conflict," he says.

Six months after Israel launched a 22-day offensive in the besieged Gaza Strip that killed more than 1400 Palestinians, the country has faced one of the worst public relations crises in its 61-year history.

In the last week alone, Israel has been forced to defend itself against harsh criticisms in reports published by the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Revelations that French President Nicolas Sarkozy had pressured Mr Netanyahu to dump his Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, because he was an embarrassment to Israel caused more headaches.

"I could go on for another half an hour," says Yigal Palmor, spokesman for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Bar-Ilan University professor Eytan Gilboa, Israel's leading public diplomacy expert, says Israel will have to spend 10 times its current PR budget if it really wants to change international perceptions.

"We need to be spending $US100 million ($A124.7 million) a year on information campaigns abroad — primarily in Arab countries and then in Europe, where there is a complete lack of knowledge of what Israel is and what Israel does," Professor Gilboa says.

The power to persuade and shape understandings, what he calls "soft power", is a concept that Israeli governments have never properly understood.

"In terms of power, a properly organised information campaign can be worth several brigades," Professor Gilboa says.

Modern media tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, must also become part of a properly organised public diplomacy arsenal.

Others disagree, rejecting the notion that Israel's image abroad is the issue.

"I think Israel has a policy problem, not a PR problem," says Uri Dromi, who was director of Israel's Government Press Office under former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

"The biggest problem is that Israel should not be in the (occupied) West Bank in the first place. Who cares what people write about us?"

With the new Government's basic policy framework laid down, Mr Dermer, an American-born Israeli who has worked closely with Mr Netanyahu over the past decade, says his main focus will nonetheless be on what Israelis call "hasbara" — a word that roughly translates as "explanation".

In pursuing a strategy that will centralise the Israeli Government's responses to issues raised by the foreign media into a kind of war room, and make better use of public opinion research, Mr Dermer says Israel has to start shaming those countries and organisations that hold Israel to a different standard.

"(People) who get together to call for a boycott against Israel, are they also calling for a boycott against North Korea, the world's largest concentration camp? Against Iran, where they hang homosexuals?" Mr Dermer asks. "When you hold Israel to a standard that you won't hold another country to, what are you doing? You are being anti-Semitic."

Mr Dermer says the combined narratives of Israel as a Jewish state, the importance of Jerusalem to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths, and the Middle East's tremendous oil reserves make a compelling world story that Israel must try to influence.

"Within this story is this narrative that has grown much stronger in recent years that is essentially false: people who see us as colonialist invaders.

"But once the Palestinians accept that we, the Jews, are here by right, that we are not foreign colonialists and we're not invaders — even if they say it (the land) is 1 per cent yours and 99 per cent ours — then we're in real negotiations."
Comment: This blog has for years indicated it was necessary to be pro-active with regards to PR-fact isthis is what we do. finally the Israeli government has acknowledged the importance of PR-now let us see whatthey do.

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