ZOA
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is shocked and appalled that President Obama once again omitted Israel in his list of countries suffering from terrorist attacks. In the talking points issued by the Obama Administration for the forthcoming tenth anniversary of the Al-Qaeda September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C, Israel is ignored as one of the targets of terrorism.
In the talking points provided by officials in several government agencies to the New York Times, the following statement appears, “As we commemorate the citizens of over 90 countries who perished in the 9/11 attacks, we honor all victims of terrorism, in every nation around the world … We honor and celebrate the resilience of individuals, families, and communities on every continent, whether in New York or Nairobi, Bali or Belfast, Mumbai or Manila, or Lahore or London” (Thom Shanker & Eric Schmitt, ‘White House Issues Guides on Sept. 11 Observances,’ New York Times, August 29, 2011). This is not the first time that President Barack Obama has omitted mention of Israel as a target of terrorist groups. When running for President, then-Senator Obama said in his Berlin speech, “we can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks that have struck in Madrid and Amman; in London and Bali; in Washington and New York” (‘Obama Speech Transcript: Remarks of Senator Barack Obama (as prepared for delivery) “A World that Stands as One,” Berlin, Germany, July 24, 2008).
Also, President Obama conspicuously omitted mention of Israel’s extraordinary contribution to relief efforts in the wake of Haiti’s terrible January 2010 earthquake. Although Israel’s relief efforts were exceptional, only matched by those of the United States, and were in fact singled out for praise by former President Bill Clinton, President Obama omitted any mention of Israel, saying instead that “help continues to flow in, not just from the United States but from Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others” (‘President Obama's Remarks After His Call with Haitian President Préval,’ White House Blog, January 15, 2010).
ZOA Board Chairman Dr. Michael Goldblatt said, “The ZOA is appalled that President Obama refuses to include Israel as a country that has suffered from Islamic terrorism. He cites country after country that has endured far less terrorism than Israel. This is the third time President Obama has ignored Israel in an important citation. It seems impossible to believe that this could be anything less than intentional.
“Israel has been a primary target of Islamist and Arab terrorist organizations for decades, with special intensity in the past eleven years. Almost 2,000 Israelis have been murdered by terrorists in this period and over 10,000 more wounded and maimed. Eight more Israelis were murdered only last week in a terrorist missile attack. In fact, in per capita terms, far more Israelis have been murdered by terrorists than Americans were murdered in 9/11. The scenes of repeated terrorist carnage on Israeli streets are, tragically, all too familiar to all of us. It is therefore hard to believe that President Obama’s omission of an Israeli city when referring to cities around the world that have been targeted by terrorists in recent years was coincidental, especially when he has omitted mention of Israel in comparable contexts in the past.
“As we saw in the earlier examples cited, President Obama will avoid mentioning Israel in a favorable or sympathetic context even when such an omission is glaring. Sadly, it would seem that President Obama is willing to exclude Israel from the common concern of mankind in confronting and memorializing the terrorism of which he speaks. Worse, such omission implies that those who murder and maim Israelis are not really terrorists. We urge President Obama to publicly explain this omission and correct it.”
Friday, September 02, 2011
PSC Turns Proms Audience pro-Israel
Jonathan Hoffman
September 2, 2011
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign - which consorts with homophobes, misogynists, supremacists and antisemites - managed to turn an entire audience pro-Israel at the Royal Albert Hall last night. I was there. So was Ed Vaizey, Culture Minister, who tweeted "Demonstrators seem to have turned entire audience pro-Israel".
The PSC morons included all the usual suspects who picket Ahava in Monmouth Street every fortnight. Deborah Fink was there in disguise, presumably because she thought she is so infamous that security would spot her - she had her hair swept back and dyed grey. Bruce Levy - who has been banned by the police from Monmouth Street where Ahava is located, for his loutish behaviour - also attempted to disguise himself, by growing a beard. (Finkler Jew Levy famously said that Gilad Shalit should be dug up and then reburied). The PSC morons tried to stop me doing an interview with the BBC outside the Hall after the concert, by yelling and screaming. If you can't win an argument try censorship - that's the way these Stalinists operate. The applause at the end of the Bruch Violin Concerto - before the interval - was tumultuous and soloist Gil Shaham even played an encore. I was told that the applause at the end of the concert was every bit as enthusiastic.
Whata shame that the audience's enthusiasm for the IPO could not include the waving of Israeli flags - which had been banned by the Hall, along with all leaflets and other flags. (I waved a flag at the cultural morons of the PSC but was asked to leave).
Presumably this ban applies to all flags including Union Jacks at the Last Night - it cannot just be Israel which is being singled out for a flag ban ....
Well done to all who stood up for Israel outside the Hall, most especially our much loved Christian supporters
September 2, 2011
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign - which consorts with homophobes, misogynists, supremacists and antisemites - managed to turn an entire audience pro-Israel at the Royal Albert Hall last night. I was there. So was Ed Vaizey, Culture Minister, who tweeted "Demonstrators seem to have turned entire audience pro-Israel".
The PSC morons included all the usual suspects who picket Ahava in Monmouth Street every fortnight. Deborah Fink was there in disguise, presumably because she thought she is so infamous that security would spot her - she had her hair swept back and dyed grey. Bruce Levy - who has been banned by the police from Monmouth Street where Ahava is located, for his loutish behaviour - also attempted to disguise himself, by growing a beard. (Finkler Jew Levy famously said that Gilad Shalit should be dug up and then reburied). The PSC morons tried to stop me doing an interview with the BBC outside the Hall after the concert, by yelling and screaming. If you can't win an argument try censorship - that's the way these Stalinists operate. The applause at the end of the Bruch Violin Concerto - before the interval - was tumultuous and soloist Gil Shaham even played an encore. I was told that the applause at the end of the concert was every bit as enthusiastic.
Whata shame that the audience's enthusiasm for the IPO could not include the waving of Israeli flags - which had been banned by the Hall, along with all leaflets and other flags. (I waved a flag at the cultural morons of the PSC but was asked to leave).
Presumably this ban applies to all flags including Union Jacks at the Last Night - it cannot just be Israel which is being singled out for a flag ban ....
Well done to all who stood up for Israel outside the Hall, most especially our much loved Christian supporters
What the West Doesn’t Understand About the 'Arab Spring Surprise'
Barry Rubin
Police Inspector Praline (investigating health claims against a candy company): ”What’s this one, ‘Spring Surprise’?”
Milton (owner of Whizzo Chocolate Company): “Ah–now, that’s our specialty! It’s covered with darkest creamy chocolate. When you pop it in your mouth steel bolts spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks.”
–Monty Python’s Flying Circus “Crunchy Frog” sketch
In effect, the Middle East is serving up the “Arab Spring Surprise.” Western observers see the dark, creamy chocolate covering. But it’s the steel bolts through the cheeks they’re going to get.
Consider the statement of an Egyptian anchorman (Sayyed Ali) on a television station (al-Mehwar). He isn’t an important person nor is his channel a big one. But it’s a normative piece of contemporary Arab political rhetoric. Thank MEMRI for videoing and translating and give them a donation. He begins:
The Egypt of today is very different from the Egypt of before January 25.
The Western narrative sees Egypt, Yemen, or Libya as akin to Central Europe’s rebellions: inoculated against dictatorship by harsh experience; eager to smell liberty’s sweet air. In Central Europe, though, nationalism meant cultural revival and freedom from (real) Soviet domination; religion signified the ability to go to church without punishment. For Egypt, though, authenticity, not liberty, is the key concept. In the mainstream view, it wasn’t so much that President Husni Mubarak’s regime stopped people from enjoying private property or free speech but that it stopped Egypt from being Egypt. After all, there’s no real chance of getting rich; no money for nice housing; no prospect for lots of jobs; no resources for a strong industrial base. The only hope is to be virtuous, display pride, and jealously guard one’s honor through nationalist assertion; morality through religious piety.
And thus the definition of the proper Egypt, held by 90 percent of the Sunni Muslim population, is that of a highly religious, highly nationalistic country that has a chip on its shoulder toward the West. We are talking about a revolution leading to more — not less — extremism and enforced conformity.
Western democratic revolutions were rebellions against tradition. In practice, the revolution in Egypt — like the 1979 Iranian revolution — is a revolution for tradition. It might be better called a counterrevolution against modernity. Sure, there are 10, 20, and perhaps even 30 percent of Egyptians who want a more pragmatic, moderate state. But that’s precisely the point: in a democratic vote they will lose.
Today, if you asked 86 million Egyptians if they would be willing to fight and be martyred for the sake of their honor, not one would hesitate….Egypt in its entirety…is ready to be martyred [to avenge] the blood of the Egyptian martyrs.
That’s rhetorical exaggeration, of course, and one shouldn’t believe literally that Egypt will launch a suicidal war, but this kind of talk will be standard as to what Egypt (and Arabs and Muslims) ought to do if they behaved properly. Even most of the “moderates” talk that way, like the April 6 Youth Movement leader (i.e., Facebook Kid), who explained that Egyptians cannot stand passively by while “genocide” is committed by Israel against the Palestinians next door. This kind of thing is already standard Palestinian rhetoric, both under Fatah and Hamas. The result is to make real peace impossible even if it doesn’t make war inevitable.
Egypt’s revolution is thus also against pragmatism, which is seen as immoral. That’s what the “evil” Mubarak did, and President Anwar al-Sadat did before him. Pragmatism dictates that if you cannot defeat foreigners, you must accommodate to them. Yet pragmatism — starting with an honest view of reality; doing what works; avoiding what doesn’t; not being mired down into an ideological preconception or romantic martyrdom fantasy overriding results and experience — is the very foundation of Western success.
Israel kicked up a fuss over an insignificant soldier called Gilad Shalit. Israel invaded Lebanon, killing and humiliating people, because of another insignificant Israeli soldier.
Actually, in the case of Lebanon it was three soldiers. Yet this kind of narrative misses a key point. The Israeli approach, like the American approach, derives from placing a high value on the individual. Freedom and democracy must begin with the exaltation of individual rights, though of course within a wider social context.
In contrast, the dominant Arab and Muslim-majority society narrative (which corresponds to traditional, pre-democratic Western ones) is the exaltation of the state and “race”: “Egyptian blood will never be cheap.” There is no focus on the specific soldiers killed (“Gilad Shalit” versus “Egyptian blood”) and certainly not on the context of events.
Evidence and facts are not important in that anti-pragmatic worldview. Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from Israeli soil by a Hamas operation aiming to grab a soldier. The three Israelis were patrolling in Israel along the border with Lebanon. They were kidnapped (and probably killed) by an operation deliberately designed to do so.
In the Egyptian case, the soldiers were killed accidentally because an Israeli helicopter pilot thought they were terrorists who had just attacked Israeli civilians and murdered seven people. And why did he think that? Because the terrorists had come from Egypt and were wearing Egyptian army uniforms.
This indifference to the difference between a regrettable but understandable mistake and deliberate acts of aggression and terrorism means that the West and the Arab world are speaking different languages, and not just in the obvious sense of that word.
There is also an important difference between reprisal and revenge. A reprisal is a carefully formulated effort to reduce a threat in the future. A reprisal against a terrorist attack is a limited action seeking to ensure there won’t be more terrorist attacks. Revenge, however, is an endless process whose goal is to make those hitting their adversaries feel better.
Things will not be as they were before. No more negotiations, no more bargaining, no more subservience to the U.S., and no more of the accursed U.S. aid, which makes the blood of 86 million Egyptian cheap.
Intransigence is portrayed as the highest virtue, the proper solution. In the hysteria whipped up — and we have seen this several times in history — the Arab discourse can persuade people that a heroic victory is possible even where the balance of forces shows a disastrous defeat to be far more likely. Foreign aid that could be used to develop and raise living standards is instead seen as humiliating chains of slavery. The money is used not productively but to buy off the masses with subsidies and the elite with loot. Thus, too, the West gains no gratitude from its massive aid to Egyptians or Palestinians since aid is seen as both mandatory reparations and subversive imperialism.
Ali says that Egyptians are “demanding” that Israel’s ambassador be expelled, “and that the Israeli flag be removed and replaced by the Palestinian flag, as Iran did in the past.”
The peace treaty with Israel should be thrown out and only Palestine recognized — no two-state solution here. There is no regard for the benefits brought to Egypt by the peace treaty with Israel. It would be too dangerous for anyone in Egypt to recall in public the return of the Sinai, the opening of the Suez Canal and oilfields, the benefits of the U.S. alliance and aid.
Israel and the U.S. must know that the Egyptian people has been freed from subservience to them.
The main complaint about the Mubarak government is not its handling of the economy, or denial of equality to women, or stand on gay rights or abortion, or kowtowing to religious fundamentalists, but its alleged subservience to Zionist-imperialist domination. Post-Mubarak governments will go out of their way to prove they defy such influences. That will not be good for Western interests or regional peace and stability.
Yet Islamists in Sinai who called for “the establishment of the Islamic Emirate there are trying to take Sinai away from us….[Israel] want[s] to transfer the Palestinians to Sinai, creating facts on the ground,” said Ali.
Crazy conspiracy theories, always a major feature of Egyptian (and Arab) discourse, are now in the mainstream and may soon direct state policy. You don’t criticize rivals by saying they wouldn’t manage the economy well but by accusing them of being Zionist agents — not a good omen for democracy, tolerance, and compromise inside Egypt.
The broader problem is that the Obamas of the West aren’t listening to the Sayyed Alis of the East. Obama thinks that the bad old era is over, with the overthrow of evil pro-American dictatorships and the dawn of a new democratic age:
Too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills….Antagonism toward Israel became the only acceptable outlet for political expression. Divisions of tribe, ethnicity and religious sect were manipulated as a means of holding on to power, or taking it away from somebody else. But the events of the past six months show us that strategies of repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore. –President Barack Hussein Obama, May 2011
Yet tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims have a different view:
No more negotiations, no more bargaining, no more subservience to the U.S., and no more of the accursed U.S. aid, which makes the blood of 86 million Egyptian cheap.—Sayyed Ali, August 2011.
Obama hears, “We want freedom and peace! Democracy is the solution!” The dominant voices in much of the Middle East are saying, “Down with America! Kill the Jews! Islam (or militant nationalism) is the solution!” The voices in the Middle East will keep getting louder until someone in the West starts listening.
Or, as Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, once put it: “There’s a battle outside raging. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls….You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.”
Police Inspector Praline (investigating health claims against a candy company): ”What’s this one, ‘Spring Surprise’?”
Milton (owner of Whizzo Chocolate Company): “Ah–now, that’s our specialty! It’s covered with darkest creamy chocolate. When you pop it in your mouth steel bolts spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks.”
–Monty Python’s Flying Circus “Crunchy Frog” sketch
In effect, the Middle East is serving up the “Arab Spring Surprise.” Western observers see the dark, creamy chocolate covering. But it’s the steel bolts through the cheeks they’re going to get.
Consider the statement of an Egyptian anchorman (Sayyed Ali) on a television station (al-Mehwar). He isn’t an important person nor is his channel a big one. But it’s a normative piece of contemporary Arab political rhetoric. Thank MEMRI for videoing and translating and give them a donation. He begins:
The Egypt of today is very different from the Egypt of before January 25.
The Western narrative sees Egypt, Yemen, or Libya as akin to Central Europe’s rebellions: inoculated against dictatorship by harsh experience; eager to smell liberty’s sweet air. In Central Europe, though, nationalism meant cultural revival and freedom from (real) Soviet domination; religion signified the ability to go to church without punishment. For Egypt, though, authenticity, not liberty, is the key concept. In the mainstream view, it wasn’t so much that President Husni Mubarak’s regime stopped people from enjoying private property or free speech but that it stopped Egypt from being Egypt. After all, there’s no real chance of getting rich; no money for nice housing; no prospect for lots of jobs; no resources for a strong industrial base. The only hope is to be virtuous, display pride, and jealously guard one’s honor through nationalist assertion; morality through religious piety.
And thus the definition of the proper Egypt, held by 90 percent of the Sunni Muslim population, is that of a highly religious, highly nationalistic country that has a chip on its shoulder toward the West. We are talking about a revolution leading to more — not less — extremism and enforced conformity.
Western democratic revolutions were rebellions against tradition. In practice, the revolution in Egypt — like the 1979 Iranian revolution — is a revolution for tradition. It might be better called a counterrevolution against modernity. Sure, there are 10, 20, and perhaps even 30 percent of Egyptians who want a more pragmatic, moderate state. But that’s precisely the point: in a democratic vote they will lose.
Today, if you asked 86 million Egyptians if they would be willing to fight and be martyred for the sake of their honor, not one would hesitate….Egypt in its entirety…is ready to be martyred [to avenge] the blood of the Egyptian martyrs.
That’s rhetorical exaggeration, of course, and one shouldn’t believe literally that Egypt will launch a suicidal war, but this kind of talk will be standard as to what Egypt (and Arabs and Muslims) ought to do if they behaved properly. Even most of the “moderates” talk that way, like the April 6 Youth Movement leader (i.e., Facebook Kid), who explained that Egyptians cannot stand passively by while “genocide” is committed by Israel against the Palestinians next door. This kind of thing is already standard Palestinian rhetoric, both under Fatah and Hamas. The result is to make real peace impossible even if it doesn’t make war inevitable.
Egypt’s revolution is thus also against pragmatism, which is seen as immoral. That’s what the “evil” Mubarak did, and President Anwar al-Sadat did before him. Pragmatism dictates that if you cannot defeat foreigners, you must accommodate to them. Yet pragmatism — starting with an honest view of reality; doing what works; avoiding what doesn’t; not being mired down into an ideological preconception or romantic martyrdom fantasy overriding results and experience — is the very foundation of Western success.
Israel kicked up a fuss over an insignificant soldier called Gilad Shalit. Israel invaded Lebanon, killing and humiliating people, because of another insignificant Israeli soldier.
Actually, in the case of Lebanon it was three soldiers. Yet this kind of narrative misses a key point. The Israeli approach, like the American approach, derives from placing a high value on the individual. Freedom and democracy must begin with the exaltation of individual rights, though of course within a wider social context.
In contrast, the dominant Arab and Muslim-majority society narrative (which corresponds to traditional, pre-democratic Western ones) is the exaltation of the state and “race”: “Egyptian blood will never be cheap.” There is no focus on the specific soldiers killed (“Gilad Shalit” versus “Egyptian blood”) and certainly not on the context of events.
Evidence and facts are not important in that anti-pragmatic worldview. Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from Israeli soil by a Hamas operation aiming to grab a soldier. The three Israelis were patrolling in Israel along the border with Lebanon. They were kidnapped (and probably killed) by an operation deliberately designed to do so.
In the Egyptian case, the soldiers were killed accidentally because an Israeli helicopter pilot thought they were terrorists who had just attacked Israeli civilians and murdered seven people. And why did he think that? Because the terrorists had come from Egypt and were wearing Egyptian army uniforms.
This indifference to the difference between a regrettable but understandable mistake and deliberate acts of aggression and terrorism means that the West and the Arab world are speaking different languages, and not just in the obvious sense of that word.
There is also an important difference between reprisal and revenge. A reprisal is a carefully formulated effort to reduce a threat in the future. A reprisal against a terrorist attack is a limited action seeking to ensure there won’t be more terrorist attacks. Revenge, however, is an endless process whose goal is to make those hitting their adversaries feel better.
Things will not be as they were before. No more negotiations, no more bargaining, no more subservience to the U.S., and no more of the accursed U.S. aid, which makes the blood of 86 million Egyptian cheap.
Intransigence is portrayed as the highest virtue, the proper solution. In the hysteria whipped up — and we have seen this several times in history — the Arab discourse can persuade people that a heroic victory is possible even where the balance of forces shows a disastrous defeat to be far more likely. Foreign aid that could be used to develop and raise living standards is instead seen as humiliating chains of slavery. The money is used not productively but to buy off the masses with subsidies and the elite with loot. Thus, too, the West gains no gratitude from its massive aid to Egyptians or Palestinians since aid is seen as both mandatory reparations and subversive imperialism.
Ali says that Egyptians are “demanding” that Israel’s ambassador be expelled, “and that the Israeli flag be removed and replaced by the Palestinian flag, as Iran did in the past.”
The peace treaty with Israel should be thrown out and only Palestine recognized — no two-state solution here. There is no regard for the benefits brought to Egypt by the peace treaty with Israel. It would be too dangerous for anyone in Egypt to recall in public the return of the Sinai, the opening of the Suez Canal and oilfields, the benefits of the U.S. alliance and aid.
Israel and the U.S. must know that the Egyptian people has been freed from subservience to them.
The main complaint about the Mubarak government is not its handling of the economy, or denial of equality to women, or stand on gay rights or abortion, or kowtowing to religious fundamentalists, but its alleged subservience to Zionist-imperialist domination. Post-Mubarak governments will go out of their way to prove they defy such influences. That will not be good for Western interests or regional peace and stability.
Yet Islamists in Sinai who called for “the establishment of the Islamic Emirate there are trying to take Sinai away from us….[Israel] want[s] to transfer the Palestinians to Sinai, creating facts on the ground,” said Ali.
Crazy conspiracy theories, always a major feature of Egyptian (and Arab) discourse, are now in the mainstream and may soon direct state policy. You don’t criticize rivals by saying they wouldn’t manage the economy well but by accusing them of being Zionist agents — not a good omen for democracy, tolerance, and compromise inside Egypt.
The broader problem is that the Obamas of the West aren’t listening to the Sayyed Alis of the East. Obama thinks that the bad old era is over, with the overthrow of evil pro-American dictatorships and the dawn of a new democratic age:
Too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills….Antagonism toward Israel became the only acceptable outlet for political expression. Divisions of tribe, ethnicity and religious sect were manipulated as a means of holding on to power, or taking it away from somebody else. But the events of the past six months show us that strategies of repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore. –President Barack Hussein Obama, May 2011
Yet tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims have a different view:
No more negotiations, no more bargaining, no more subservience to the U.S., and no more of the accursed U.S. aid, which makes the blood of 86 million Egyptian cheap.—Sayyed Ali, August 2011.
Obama hears, “We want freedom and peace! Democracy is the solution!” The dominant voices in much of the Middle East are saying, “Down with America! Kill the Jews! Islam (or militant nationalism) is the solution!” The voices in the Middle East will keep getting louder until someone in the West starts listening.
Or, as Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, once put it: “There’s a battle outside raging. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls….You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.”
Land for peace? Mideast rules must change
Op-ed: Land for peace formula dead, Israel must adopt doctrine based on equality
Guy Bechor
Israel Opinion
Ever since the Six-Day War we’ve been hearing, like a mantra, the buzz about “land for peace.” The tiny Israel, a small dot on the globe, shall give up “land,” and in exchange it shall receive “peace” from the Arab side.
This mantra was so absolute that it was accepted here as an unqualified truth that cannot be denied; we even went as far as to convince the world that this is good for us. However, in the wake of the shocks experienced by the Arab world in recent months, there is no escaping the assertion that this mantra is no longer valid. While Israel paid with hard, irreversible currency when it handed over land to the Arab side, the Arabs paid with soft, completely reversible currency - that is, words and agreements. Now we are hearing claims that these deals were made with the regimes rather than with the “people”; that is, they lack any legitimacy.
In Egypt there are many voices, including among presidential candidates, declaring that the Camp David Accord with Israel must be annulled or at least changed. That is, change the aspects that pertain to “peace” with Israel. Yet if the Egyptians wish to annul the Camp David Accord, will they return the Sinai desert to Israel? After all, they received this territory through the peace treaty between the two states, after failing to secure it through war. Yet for some reason, this is unthinkable for them.
The peace treaty with Egypt is undergoing changes rather casually at this time in respect t to the deployment of Egyptian troops in the Sinai, an issue that was a major element in the agreement. This shows how easily one can change agreements or understandings and possibly annul them altogether.
Slowly, Egypt is returning its army to the northern Sinai, a move that may prompt harsh implications for the ties with Israel. Yet did anything change about the land? Did Israel again annex Taba? Of course not. And why does the tiny Israel have to pay with land? After all, the Arab countries around it hold huge territories. Why wouldn’t they pay with land, while Israel gives them peace?
Golden opportunity
Now we are seeing how blatantly unequal this formula is; what’s more, it also hints at ostensible Israeli guilt, while the Arab side is seemingly doing Israel a favor. When adopting a diplomatic formula that involves feelings – that is, elements of guilt or doing one a favor – this necessarily ends badly. The new formula must be premised on substantive interests that would last.
The absence of equality between the two parts of this equation should have rang warning bells in Israel a while ago. Now, the time has come to adopt a formula based on equality, as is common among the nations of the world, where no side is doing a favor to the other: Either land in exchange for land, or peace in exchange for peace.
Paradoxically, the equal models last longer, because of their equality: It is impossible to take away land without the other side doing the same, and mutual deterrence is therefore created. Similarly, undermining the “peace” would prompt a parallel move – for example, downgrading diplomatic relations. Words in exchange for words, land in exchange for land, and interests in exchange for interests.
The waves of violence in the Arab world and the threat on the status quo, as well as the Palestinian Authority’s defiance in the face of all agreements with Israel, require new, fresh thinking around here, without naïve illusions that have already collapsed. This new thinking should be presented to the world as an up-to-date Israeli position premised on reciprocity, equality and mutual respect.
This is a golden opportunity for Israel to reexamine its strategic doctrine vis-à-vis the Arab world, thereby making a genuine contribution to the better management of the conflict with the Arab side, a conflict that has lasted for too long.
Guy Bechor
Israel Opinion
Ever since the Six-Day War we’ve been hearing, like a mantra, the buzz about “land for peace.” The tiny Israel, a small dot on the globe, shall give up “land,” and in exchange it shall receive “peace” from the Arab side.
This mantra was so absolute that it was accepted here as an unqualified truth that cannot be denied; we even went as far as to convince the world that this is good for us. However, in the wake of the shocks experienced by the Arab world in recent months, there is no escaping the assertion that this mantra is no longer valid. While Israel paid with hard, irreversible currency when it handed over land to the Arab side, the Arabs paid with soft, completely reversible currency - that is, words and agreements. Now we are hearing claims that these deals were made with the regimes rather than with the “people”; that is, they lack any legitimacy.
In Egypt there are many voices, including among presidential candidates, declaring that the Camp David Accord with Israel must be annulled or at least changed. That is, change the aspects that pertain to “peace” with Israel. Yet if the Egyptians wish to annul the Camp David Accord, will they return the Sinai desert to Israel? After all, they received this territory through the peace treaty between the two states, after failing to secure it through war. Yet for some reason, this is unthinkable for them.
The peace treaty with Egypt is undergoing changes rather casually at this time in respect t to the deployment of Egyptian troops in the Sinai, an issue that was a major element in the agreement. This shows how easily one can change agreements or understandings and possibly annul them altogether.
Slowly, Egypt is returning its army to the northern Sinai, a move that may prompt harsh implications for the ties with Israel. Yet did anything change about the land? Did Israel again annex Taba? Of course not. And why does the tiny Israel have to pay with land? After all, the Arab countries around it hold huge territories. Why wouldn’t they pay with land, while Israel gives them peace?
Golden opportunity
Now we are seeing how blatantly unequal this formula is; what’s more, it also hints at ostensible Israeli guilt, while the Arab side is seemingly doing Israel a favor. When adopting a diplomatic formula that involves feelings – that is, elements of guilt or doing one a favor – this necessarily ends badly. The new formula must be premised on substantive interests that would last.
The absence of equality between the two parts of this equation should have rang warning bells in Israel a while ago. Now, the time has come to adopt a formula based on equality, as is common among the nations of the world, where no side is doing a favor to the other: Either land in exchange for land, or peace in exchange for peace.
Paradoxically, the equal models last longer, because of their equality: It is impossible to take away land without the other side doing the same, and mutual deterrence is therefore created. Similarly, undermining the “peace” would prompt a parallel move – for example, downgrading diplomatic relations. Words in exchange for words, land in exchange for land, and interests in exchange for interests.
The waves of violence in the Arab world and the threat on the status quo, as well as the Palestinian Authority’s defiance in the face of all agreements with Israel, require new, fresh thinking around here, without naïve illusions that have already collapsed. This new thinking should be presented to the world as an up-to-date Israeli position premised on reciprocity, equality and mutual respect.
This is a golden opportunity for Israel to reexamine its strategic doctrine vis-à-vis the Arab world, thereby making a genuine contribution to the better management of the conflict with the Arab side, a conflict that has lasted for too long.
US State Dept Slams Congress Funding Block of PA at UN
Chana Ya'ar
The U.S. State Department has slammed a Florida lawmaker for trying to block the Palestinian Authority from seeking recognition as a new country and membership in the United Nations in September.
U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen announced Tuesday she had advanced a measure to block U.S. funding to any U.N. member or group that supports an upgrade to the PA's diplomatic status next month. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters the Republican Congresswoman's proposed measure would “seriously undermine our international standing and dangerously weaken the U.N. as an instrument to advance U.S. national security goals.”
The measure is actually a clause folded into a larger proposed bill that would transform the U.S. portion of United Nations funding into a voluntary contribution, one conditional upon American agreement on each funding target.
“We believe in U.N. reform,” added Nuland, “[but] we just don't think that this is the right way to go about it.” The Obama administration warned long before Ros-Lehtinen submitted her proposal that the president would oppose it, according to the Reuters news agency.
The Congresswoman said her efforts were aimed not only at preventing the PA from gaining recognition as a new country, but also at stopping the entity from achieving a second option in lieu of the first – upgrading its current status from that of a U.N. observer to a non-member state.
The U.S. State Department has slammed a Florida lawmaker for trying to block the Palestinian Authority from seeking recognition as a new country and membership in the United Nations in September.
U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen announced Tuesday she had advanced a measure to block U.S. funding to any U.N. member or group that supports an upgrade to the PA's diplomatic status next month. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters the Republican Congresswoman's proposed measure would “seriously undermine our international standing and dangerously weaken the U.N. as an instrument to advance U.S. national security goals.”
The measure is actually a clause folded into a larger proposed bill that would transform the U.S. portion of United Nations funding into a voluntary contribution, one conditional upon American agreement on each funding target.
“We believe in U.N. reform,” added Nuland, “[but] we just don't think that this is the right way to go about it.” The Obama administration warned long before Ros-Lehtinen submitted her proposal that the president would oppose it, according to the Reuters news agency.
The Congresswoman said her efforts were aimed not only at preventing the PA from gaining recognition as a new country, but also at stopping the entity from achieving a second option in lieu of the first – upgrading its current status from that of a U.N. observer to a non-member state.
Israel is Sorry – An Apology to Turkey
Rabbi Kaufman
Shalom, Salaam, blessings be upon our friends the Turkish people.
We in Israel are sorry for what occurred in regard to the episode of the Free Gaza Flotilla.
We are sorry that lives were lost because militants on board attacked the Israeli soldiers whom they knew would board and whom they meticulously planned to attack.
We are sorry that soldiers were forced to defend their comrades who were being attacked by supposed peace activists and that some people died. We are sorry that militants bent on violence were allowed by the Turkish government to board ships which the Turkish government knew aimed to violate Israel’s legal blockade of Gaza, endangering the lives of the hundreds of innocents on board the vessels as well as the soldiers who boarded the vessels legally and expected to meet little resistance from peace activists.
We are sorry that the Turkish government in an act of brinkmanship based in machismo has decided to jeopardize the future security and prosperity of the Turkish people, whose concerns are not well represented by this government, by refusing to admit any fault on the part of the participants in the flotilla, nor of the Turkish government for allowing it to sail, nor of the Turkish government from supporting aggressive action against its long-time ally Israel.
We are sorry that the honorable and freedom loving Turkish people are being manipulated into believing that Israelis–who have long worked in cooperation with Turks in defense of freedom and would love to do so going forward–as opposed to radical Islamists who seek to take their freedom away are the enemies of the Turkish people.
We are sorry that the Turkish government has decided to jeopardize not only its relationship with Israel, but its relationship with NATO, America specifically, and the West in general in support of opening supply routes to Hamas and other terrorist organizations located in Gaza for use against the civilian population in Israel and potentially against the Palestinian Authority.
We are indeed sorry to have to make this apology; these events should never have been allowed to happen.
David Jay Kaufman
Rabbi
Temple B'nai Jeshurun
Des Moines, Iowa
www.templebnaijeshurun.org
www.rabbikaufman.blogspot.com
515-274-4679
dkaufman@aol.com
Shalom, Salaam, blessings be upon our friends the Turkish people.
We in Israel are sorry for what occurred in regard to the episode of the Free Gaza Flotilla.
We are sorry that lives were lost because militants on board attacked the Israeli soldiers whom they knew would board and whom they meticulously planned to attack.
We are sorry that soldiers were forced to defend their comrades who were being attacked by supposed peace activists and that some people died. We are sorry that militants bent on violence were allowed by the Turkish government to board ships which the Turkish government knew aimed to violate Israel’s legal blockade of Gaza, endangering the lives of the hundreds of innocents on board the vessels as well as the soldiers who boarded the vessels legally and expected to meet little resistance from peace activists.
We are sorry that the Turkish government in an act of brinkmanship based in machismo has decided to jeopardize the future security and prosperity of the Turkish people, whose concerns are not well represented by this government, by refusing to admit any fault on the part of the participants in the flotilla, nor of the Turkish government for allowing it to sail, nor of the Turkish government from supporting aggressive action against its long-time ally Israel.
We are sorry that the honorable and freedom loving Turkish people are being manipulated into believing that Israelis–who have long worked in cooperation with Turks in defense of freedom and would love to do so going forward–as opposed to radical Islamists who seek to take their freedom away are the enemies of the Turkish people.
We are sorry that the Turkish government has decided to jeopardize not only its relationship with Israel, but its relationship with NATO, America specifically, and the West in general in support of opening supply routes to Hamas and other terrorist organizations located in Gaza for use against the civilian population in Israel and potentially against the Palestinian Authority.
We are indeed sorry to have to make this apology; these events should never have been allowed to happen.
David Jay Kaufman
Rabbi
Temple B'nai Jeshurun
Des Moines, Iowa
www.templebnaijeshurun.org
www.rabbikaufman.blogspot.com
515-274-4679
dkaufman@aol.com
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Spanish Town Becoming "New Mecca of the Most Radical Islamism"
Soeren Kern
September 1, 2011
The municipality of Salt, a town near Barcelona where Muslim immigrants now make up 40% of the population, has approved a one-year ban on the construction of new mosques. It is the first ban of its kind in Spain.
The moratorium follows public outrage over plans to build a massive Salafi mosque that is being financed by Saudi Arabia. Salafism is a branch of revivalist Islam that calls for restoring past Muslim glory by forcibly re-establishing an Islamic empire (Caliphate) across the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Europe such as Spain, which Salafists view as a Muslim state that must be reconquered for Islam.
Much of Spain was ruled by Muslim conquerors from 711 and 1492; Salafists believe that the territories the Muslims lost during the Spanish Reconquista still belong to them, and that they have a right to return and establish their rule there – a belief based on the Islamic precept that territories once occupied by Muslims must forever remain under Muslim domination. Sacrificing common sense on the altar of multiculturalism, the previous Socialist government in Salt secretly gave permission to the Salafi Muslims to build the mega-mosque, which, with four stories comprising 1,000 square meters (11,000 square feet) accompanied by towering minarets, would be the largest Salafi mosque in Europe.
The secret deal was only discovered after the Socialists were ejected from power in May 2011. Angry natives began pressuring the new town council – now ruled by the center-right Convergència i Unió (CiU) party – to prevent the mosque from being built. On August 24, the council approved the one-year ban on the building of new mosques in order to provide "some time for reflection."
The Salafi mega-mosque may still be built, however, because the construction permit was issued before the non-retroactive moratorium took effect. The building permit, which is valid for a period of six months, expires at the end of September 2011.
Muslim radicals associated with two Spain-based Salafi groups, Al Hilal Islamic Cultural Association and Magrebins per la Pau Association, are now asking groups in Saudi Arabia to advance the funds needed to begin construction of the mosque within the next few weeks, before the building permit expires.
The Catalan nationalist party Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) – which opposes not only the mosques but also Muslim immigration – attempted to hold an anti-mosque protest in Salt on August 27. PxC spokeswoman María Osuna said the party, which has some 70,000 active members, did not want Salt to become "the new Mecca of the most radical Islamism."
But provincial law enforcement authorities banned the PxC demonstration after learning that Muslims from across Spain were organizing a counter-demonstration in the town on the same day. Fearing the risk of violence, the provincial interior ministry issued a statement saying that the anti-mosque demonstration would be banned because it could "hurt the religious feelings of the majority of Muslims in Salt." Around 12,000 of Salt's 30,000 inhabitants are Muslim immigrants.
Salt and other towns in the north-eastern region of Catalonia have become ground zero for Salafi Islam in Spain. The movement is based in the Catalonian city of Tarragona, but Salafi Islam also has a major presence in the municipalities of Badalona, Calafell, Cunit, El Vendrel, Lleida, Mataró, Reus, Roda de Bara, Rubí, Salt, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Sant Boi, Torredembarra, Valls, and Vilanova, not to mention Barcelona, which hosts five Salafi mosques.
Salafi preachers in Catalonia teach that Islamic Sharia law is above Spanish civil law. They also promote the establishment of a parallel Muslim society in Spain. Salafi imams have set up Sharia tribunals to judge the conduct of both practicing and non-practicing Muslims in Spain and to punish those who fail to comply.
The leaders of Salafi Islam in Salt are the "Caliph" Mohammed Attaouil and his right hand man, the cleric Rachid Menda. They are two of the most effective anti-Western propagandists in Spain, and have been able to create a Salafi stronghold in Catalonia by employing the twin strategies of spreading fear and proselytizing.
In December 2009, for example, nine Salafists kidnapped a woman, tried her for adultery based on Sharia law, and condemned her to death. The woman just barely escaped execution by fleeing to a local police station.
In January 2010, a Salafi imam in Tarragona was arrested for forcing a 31-year-old Moroccan woman to wear a hijab head covering. The imam had threatened to burn down the woman's house for being and "infidel" because she works outside of the home, drives an automobile and has non-Muslim friends. Bowing to political pressure to prevent "a social conflict," a court in Tarragona on August 2 absolved the imam of all wrongdoing.
Much of the Salafi proselytizing occurs by means of conferences which are attended by thousands of followers, many of whom also provide the movement with an important source of financial support. Speakers at the conferences often include Salafi luminaries from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as well as from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. As many of the latter have European passports, they do not require visas to enter Spain and are free to move about the country as they please.
Salafi conferences in Spain are almost always scheduled during Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter with the objective of directly challenging the majority culture. Conference attendees are warned that Muslims should not integrate into the "corrupt" Western society.
The Madrid-based ABC newspaper estimates that there are more than 100 Salafi mosques in Spain where radical imams preach to the faithful each Friday. The newspaper says some imams have established religious police that harass and attack those who do not comply with Islamic law. ABC also reports that during 2010, more than 10 Salafi conferences were held in Spain, compared to only one in 2008.
From Catalonia, Salafists are planting roots in other parts of Spain, including the Basque Country, Madrid, and Valladolid as well as all along the Mediterranean coast. In Guadalajara in central Spain, hooded Salafists have assaulted at least six native Spaniards with rocks since July. Local citizens' groups are protesting the opening of a Salafi mosque in the city.
The mayor of Salt, Jaume Torramadé, says Muslim immigrants in his town have become noticeably more radicalized in recent years. In an interview with RAC1 radio, Torramadé told listeners: "A few years ago, the Maghreb women were more westernized, but nowadays one sees much less of that. The large numbers of Muslim immigrants in Salt have attracted imams who are enforcing conduct and dress codes. Muslim women used to wear blue jeans, but now they cover their hair. These imams are not promoting coexistence."
September 1, 2011
The municipality of Salt, a town near Barcelona where Muslim immigrants now make up 40% of the population, has approved a one-year ban on the construction of new mosques. It is the first ban of its kind in Spain.
The moratorium follows public outrage over plans to build a massive Salafi mosque that is being financed by Saudi Arabia. Salafism is a branch of revivalist Islam that calls for restoring past Muslim glory by forcibly re-establishing an Islamic empire (Caliphate) across the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Europe such as Spain, which Salafists view as a Muslim state that must be reconquered for Islam.
Much of Spain was ruled by Muslim conquerors from 711 and 1492; Salafists believe that the territories the Muslims lost during the Spanish Reconquista still belong to them, and that they have a right to return and establish their rule there – a belief based on the Islamic precept that territories once occupied by Muslims must forever remain under Muslim domination. Sacrificing common sense on the altar of multiculturalism, the previous Socialist government in Salt secretly gave permission to the Salafi Muslims to build the mega-mosque, which, with four stories comprising 1,000 square meters (11,000 square feet) accompanied by towering minarets, would be the largest Salafi mosque in Europe.
The secret deal was only discovered after the Socialists were ejected from power in May 2011. Angry natives began pressuring the new town council – now ruled by the center-right Convergència i Unió (CiU) party – to prevent the mosque from being built. On August 24, the council approved the one-year ban on the building of new mosques in order to provide "some time for reflection."
The Salafi mega-mosque may still be built, however, because the construction permit was issued before the non-retroactive moratorium took effect. The building permit, which is valid for a period of six months, expires at the end of September 2011.
Muslim radicals associated with two Spain-based Salafi groups, Al Hilal Islamic Cultural Association and Magrebins per la Pau Association, are now asking groups in Saudi Arabia to advance the funds needed to begin construction of the mosque within the next few weeks, before the building permit expires.
The Catalan nationalist party Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) – which opposes not only the mosques but also Muslim immigration – attempted to hold an anti-mosque protest in Salt on August 27. PxC spokeswoman María Osuna said the party, which has some 70,000 active members, did not want Salt to become "the new Mecca of the most radical Islamism."
But provincial law enforcement authorities banned the PxC demonstration after learning that Muslims from across Spain were organizing a counter-demonstration in the town on the same day. Fearing the risk of violence, the provincial interior ministry issued a statement saying that the anti-mosque demonstration would be banned because it could "hurt the religious feelings of the majority of Muslims in Salt." Around 12,000 of Salt's 30,000 inhabitants are Muslim immigrants.
Salt and other towns in the north-eastern region of Catalonia have become ground zero for Salafi Islam in Spain. The movement is based in the Catalonian city of Tarragona, but Salafi Islam also has a major presence in the municipalities of Badalona, Calafell, Cunit, El Vendrel, Lleida, Mataró, Reus, Roda de Bara, Rubí, Salt, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Sant Boi, Torredembarra, Valls, and Vilanova, not to mention Barcelona, which hosts five Salafi mosques.
Salafi preachers in Catalonia teach that Islamic Sharia law is above Spanish civil law. They also promote the establishment of a parallel Muslim society in Spain. Salafi imams have set up Sharia tribunals to judge the conduct of both practicing and non-practicing Muslims in Spain and to punish those who fail to comply.
The leaders of Salafi Islam in Salt are the "Caliph" Mohammed Attaouil and his right hand man, the cleric Rachid Menda. They are two of the most effective anti-Western propagandists in Spain, and have been able to create a Salafi stronghold in Catalonia by employing the twin strategies of spreading fear and proselytizing.
In December 2009, for example, nine Salafists kidnapped a woman, tried her for adultery based on Sharia law, and condemned her to death. The woman just barely escaped execution by fleeing to a local police station.
In January 2010, a Salafi imam in Tarragona was arrested for forcing a 31-year-old Moroccan woman to wear a hijab head covering. The imam had threatened to burn down the woman's house for being and "infidel" because she works outside of the home, drives an automobile and has non-Muslim friends. Bowing to political pressure to prevent "a social conflict," a court in Tarragona on August 2 absolved the imam of all wrongdoing.
Much of the Salafi proselytizing occurs by means of conferences which are attended by thousands of followers, many of whom also provide the movement with an important source of financial support. Speakers at the conferences often include Salafi luminaries from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as well as from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. As many of the latter have European passports, they do not require visas to enter Spain and are free to move about the country as they please.
Salafi conferences in Spain are almost always scheduled during Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter with the objective of directly challenging the majority culture. Conference attendees are warned that Muslims should not integrate into the "corrupt" Western society.
The Madrid-based ABC newspaper estimates that there are more than 100 Salafi mosques in Spain where radical imams preach to the faithful each Friday. The newspaper says some imams have established religious police that harass and attack those who do not comply with Islamic law. ABC also reports that during 2010, more than 10 Salafi conferences were held in Spain, compared to only one in 2008.
From Catalonia, Salafists are planting roots in other parts of Spain, including the Basque Country, Madrid, and Valladolid as well as all along the Mediterranean coast. In Guadalajara in central Spain, hooded Salafists have assaulted at least six native Spaniards with rocks since July. Local citizens' groups are protesting the opening of a Salafi mosque in the city.
The mayor of Salt, Jaume Torramadé, says Muslim immigrants in his town have become noticeably more radicalized in recent years. In an interview with RAC1 radio, Torramadé told listeners: "A few years ago, the Maghreb women were more westernized, but nowadays one sees much less of that. The large numbers of Muslim immigrants in Salt have attracted imams who are enforcing conduct and dress codes. Muslim women used to wear blue jeans, but now they cover their hair. These imams are not promoting coexistence."
Reflections on the First Day of School in Israel
Barry Rubin
I ask my son how the first day of his elementary school (sixth grade) went. He tells me that the number of guards has been upped from two to five, and now they have metal-detector wands. One of the guards, as before, carries a .38 caliber pistol. For good measure he adds that the guard at the nearby clothing store is now carrying a G36C fully automatic Hechler & Koch (Daniel’s an expert on small arms and has a high opinion of this weapon, one of his many hobbies).
hey are not carrying this equipment because of concern over random trespassers or shoplifters. I often reflect that if terrorists were to attack the elementary school successfully they would be regarded as heroes in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and among millions of Arabs and Muslims.
In contrast, of course, Palestinian schools, stores, and malls do not have to fear attack. On the contrary, certainly in the Gaza Strip and to a lesser extent on the West Bank, they are being taught in textbooks that it is proper and virtuous to slay Israelis wherever they find them. Would all this change overnight if there were an internationally recognized Palestinian state? Of course not.
And incidentally, in high school my daughter did a course on comparative religion, including a fair and accurate study of Islam. In the schooling of both children there has never been the slightest demonization of Arabs or Muslims and this has gone along with a genuine effort to understand (without apologizing for or advocating) the viewpoint of those peoples.
Whatever the real shortcomings of the Israeli school system (don’t get me started!), my son isn’t subjected to the very conscious indoctrination that he faced during a stint in an American public school. (Long-time readers of my blog know the details.)
In both schools there is some bullying and low-level violence among students, but in the American school all of the teachers were so pious about how wonderfully tolerant everyone was that they refused to recognize it. Indeed, between all of the multicultural lessons, students were slinging racial epithets at each other to a far greater extent than when I was attening a similar public school back in the “dark ages” of supposed intolerance.
These are not “right-wing” observations but statements of fact that nowadays are understood by the great majority of left-of-center Israelis. We would all like things to be different, want to believe that the conflict can be quickly and fully settled with more concessions. But experience has taught us that it just isn’t true.
In general, this is the point that the mass media in the West keeps from its readers. In 2011 the situation is not a matter of “right-wing” Israelis wanting to hold onto the West Bank forever (and it was a “right-wing” government that pulled out of the Gaza Strip and removed all of the Jewish settlements there).
It is a knowledge that more concessions will not be met by real peace based on such things as: the withdrawals from southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip; the experience of the 1990s’ peace process with both the Palestinian Authority and Syria; and now the undoing of the Egypt-Israel peace agreement.
To a large extent, there is a deliberate effort to obscure these realities by misinforming people that Israeli strategy is based on greed for territory, ideological preconceptions, or silly shortsightedness compared to the supposed great wisdom of those in Western capitals.
Or as I sometimes remark, when tired or frustrated by such people: Why should we die just because you haven’t been paying attention.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pessimistic. Good security defenses are the best protection against threats. Moreover, terrorism is inevitably a smaller threat than the high levels of ordinary criminality elsewhere. Our daughter goes out until 3 AM in Tel Aviv, while we would be nervous if she was out at 9 PM in the United States.
I’d rather be around people who know what they are doing and use good judgment, in a place where the proportion of armed people ready to defend the law is higher than those with guns who are intent on breaking it. In many American cities, as the police are well aware, the criminals are better armed than they are.
In this context, I’m amused by Americans who fear visiting Israel. Two Israeli friends–including one of the toughest men I’ve ever known who acted as my bodyguard in some rough situations–were mugged in Washington DC; two other friends were also mugged; a man was murdered in front of the apartment building where I lived; my car was broken into frequently; and a newspaper reporter was murdered a few blocks from where I grew up in the early evening. Now that’s a scary place! It’s also the capital of the United States.
In precisely the same way, I’d rather bet my future on a country governed by people who have learned from experience and who have no choice but to let reality guide their behavior rather than relying on lack of knowledge, Political Correctness (rather than Factual Correctness), and wishful thinking.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
I ask my son how the first day of his elementary school (sixth grade) went. He tells me that the number of guards has been upped from two to five, and now they have metal-detector wands. One of the guards, as before, carries a .38 caliber pistol. For good measure he adds that the guard at the nearby clothing store is now carrying a G36C fully automatic Hechler & Koch (Daniel’s an expert on small arms and has a high opinion of this weapon, one of his many hobbies).
hey are not carrying this equipment because of concern over random trespassers or shoplifters. I often reflect that if terrorists were to attack the elementary school successfully they would be regarded as heroes in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and among millions of Arabs and Muslims.
In contrast, of course, Palestinian schools, stores, and malls do not have to fear attack. On the contrary, certainly in the Gaza Strip and to a lesser extent on the West Bank, they are being taught in textbooks that it is proper and virtuous to slay Israelis wherever they find them. Would all this change overnight if there were an internationally recognized Palestinian state? Of course not.
And incidentally, in high school my daughter did a course on comparative religion, including a fair and accurate study of Islam. In the schooling of both children there has never been the slightest demonization of Arabs or Muslims and this has gone along with a genuine effort to understand (without apologizing for or advocating) the viewpoint of those peoples.
Whatever the real shortcomings of the Israeli school system (don’t get me started!), my son isn’t subjected to the very conscious indoctrination that he faced during a stint in an American public school. (Long-time readers of my blog know the details.)
In both schools there is some bullying and low-level violence among students, but in the American school all of the teachers were so pious about how wonderfully tolerant everyone was that they refused to recognize it. Indeed, between all of the multicultural lessons, students were slinging racial epithets at each other to a far greater extent than when I was attening a similar public school back in the “dark ages” of supposed intolerance.
These are not “right-wing” observations but statements of fact that nowadays are understood by the great majority of left-of-center Israelis. We would all like things to be different, want to believe that the conflict can be quickly and fully settled with more concessions. But experience has taught us that it just isn’t true.
In general, this is the point that the mass media in the West keeps from its readers. In 2011 the situation is not a matter of “right-wing” Israelis wanting to hold onto the West Bank forever (and it was a “right-wing” government that pulled out of the Gaza Strip and removed all of the Jewish settlements there).
It is a knowledge that more concessions will not be met by real peace based on such things as: the withdrawals from southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip; the experience of the 1990s’ peace process with both the Palestinian Authority and Syria; and now the undoing of the Egypt-Israel peace agreement.
To a large extent, there is a deliberate effort to obscure these realities by misinforming people that Israeli strategy is based on greed for territory, ideological preconceptions, or silly shortsightedness compared to the supposed great wisdom of those in Western capitals.
Or as I sometimes remark, when tired or frustrated by such people: Why should we die just because you haven’t been paying attention.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pessimistic. Good security defenses are the best protection against threats. Moreover, terrorism is inevitably a smaller threat than the high levels of ordinary criminality elsewhere. Our daughter goes out until 3 AM in Tel Aviv, while we would be nervous if she was out at 9 PM in the United States.
I’d rather be around people who know what they are doing and use good judgment, in a place where the proportion of armed people ready to defend the law is higher than those with guns who are intent on breaking it. In many American cities, as the police are well aware, the criminals are better armed than they are.
In this context, I’m amused by Americans who fear visiting Israel. Two Israeli friends–including one of the toughest men I’ve ever known who acted as my bodyguard in some rough situations–were mugged in Washington DC; two other friends were also mugged; a man was murdered in front of the apartment building where I lived; my car was broken into frequently; and a newspaper reporter was murdered a few blocks from where I grew up in the early evening. Now that’s a scary place! It’s also the capital of the United States.
In precisely the same way, I’d rather bet my future on a country governed by people who have learned from experience and who have no choice but to let reality guide their behavior rather than relying on lack of knowledge, Political Correctness (rather than Factual Correctness), and wishful thinking.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
Food Regulators Out of Control
Ericka Andersen
First Lady Michelle Obama’s obsession with “childhood obesity” has bothered many since it began two years ago, especially those who think that White House nagging of parents should be reserved for more pressing issues. Now it is getting more serious, with food regulators starting to infringe on the free speech rights of advertisers.
In the latest upset, four federal agencies known as the Interagency Working Group (IWG) have delivered a plan to drastically censor food advertisers with products deemed to be “too high” in sodium, sugar, or fat that cater to any viewing audience between the ages of two and 11. These advertisers would lose key slots during some of America’s most popular shows, like American Idol, America’s Got Talent, and Glee—simply because the nanny state is “uncomfortable” with what they are selling.
The IWG, formed within the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act to study childhood obesity and offer possible solutions, has gone far beyond their descriptive reach. Now, perfectly reasonable companies may be penalized severely.The regulators plan to get away with this by disguising their rules as “voluntary guidelines.” In reality, the guidelines are anything but optional, according to food manufacturers affected by them.
As Heritage’s Diane Katz explains:
The restrictions are voluntary in name only. Food manufacturers can hardly ignore “recommendations” from the very federal agencies that exercise regulatory authority over their every move. It is akin to a cop asking for ID or to search one’s vehicle: While the law treats such citizen cooperation as voluntary, most individuals would not view it as such, nor would the police look kindly on anyone who denies their requests.
It’s not just Twinkies and cookies that will be affected, either. Anything deemed to have a little too much sodium or fat will be tested under the new rules, including foods whose very production requires a high sodium content (like pickles) and those that are naturally high fat (like peanuts).
As Katz wrote, “Nutritional staples such as Cheerios, peanut butter, and yogurt are verboten under the proposed standards, which effectively constitute a government-regulated grocery list.”
The regulations hit traditional favorites where it hurts. In turn, the free market and consumer choice is manipulated to fit a misplaced government agenda that doesn’t solve the problem.
Even if the feds are well-intentioned, their action plan isn’t grounded in reliable research. The whole point of the regulations is to curb the growing epidemic of childhood obesity—but the Institute of Medicine found no link between advertisements and children’s food choices.
According to Katz, children have seen about 50 percent less food advertising in the last six years than before that time—yet obesity rates continue to climb. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark McClellan attributes the obesity problem to “physical inactivity”—not caloric intake. In fact, McClellan noted that children’s calorie intake has remained about the same for the last 20 years.
Not only do regulations hinder the market and censor speech; they hurt the businesses behind the labels. Sara Lee CEO Christopher J. Fraleigh recently spoke on the overextended regulations, which will hurt his business in particular:
A turkey sandwich made with Sara Lee fat-free lean turkey meat, we would not be able to advertise that on venues, be it the Superbowl or anything that would have a significant child audience, because the product is a little bit too high in sodium…. Current regulation of advertising toward children is a perfect example of regulation that just goes way too far.
The Obama Administration’s food regulators think that if you give them an inch, they can take a mile. But when free speech is on the cutting board, they will certainly hear from the people, and the people will not stand for it.
Quick Hits:
* President Obama agreed to move his jobs speech to a Joint Session of Congress to next Thursday, instead of Wednesday during the GOP presidential debate.
* Jim Tipple, mayor of Wasau, Wisconsin, declared that a labor group planning to exclude Republican lawmakers from their Labor Day parade will be required to fund the $2,000 event.
* After the death of al-Qaeda’s number two leader last week, White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan praised U.S. action in Pakistan as the reason no active terror plots have been discovered in advance 9/11 this year.
* A new CNN/ORD poll reveals 65 percent of respondents disapprove of President Obama’s handling of the economy.
* Americans recently rated Ronald Reagan as the nation’s greatest President. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) emulates the timeless principles that Reagan represented in his own leadership role.
First Lady Michelle Obama’s obsession with “childhood obesity” has bothered many since it began two years ago, especially those who think that White House nagging of parents should be reserved for more pressing issues. Now it is getting more serious, with food regulators starting to infringe on the free speech rights of advertisers.
In the latest upset, four federal agencies known as the Interagency Working Group (IWG) have delivered a plan to drastically censor food advertisers with products deemed to be “too high” in sodium, sugar, or fat that cater to any viewing audience between the ages of two and 11. These advertisers would lose key slots during some of America’s most popular shows, like American Idol, America’s Got Talent, and Glee—simply because the nanny state is “uncomfortable” with what they are selling.
The IWG, formed within the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act to study childhood obesity and offer possible solutions, has gone far beyond their descriptive reach. Now, perfectly reasonable companies may be penalized severely.The regulators plan to get away with this by disguising their rules as “voluntary guidelines.” In reality, the guidelines are anything but optional, according to food manufacturers affected by them.
As Heritage’s Diane Katz explains:
The restrictions are voluntary in name only. Food manufacturers can hardly ignore “recommendations” from the very federal agencies that exercise regulatory authority over their every move. It is akin to a cop asking for ID or to search one’s vehicle: While the law treats such citizen cooperation as voluntary, most individuals would not view it as such, nor would the police look kindly on anyone who denies their requests.
It’s not just Twinkies and cookies that will be affected, either. Anything deemed to have a little too much sodium or fat will be tested under the new rules, including foods whose very production requires a high sodium content (like pickles) and those that are naturally high fat (like peanuts).
As Katz wrote, “Nutritional staples such as Cheerios, peanut butter, and yogurt are verboten under the proposed standards, which effectively constitute a government-regulated grocery list.”
The regulations hit traditional favorites where it hurts. In turn, the free market and consumer choice is manipulated to fit a misplaced government agenda that doesn’t solve the problem.
Even if the feds are well-intentioned, their action plan isn’t grounded in reliable research. The whole point of the regulations is to curb the growing epidemic of childhood obesity—but the Institute of Medicine found no link between advertisements and children’s food choices.
According to Katz, children have seen about 50 percent less food advertising in the last six years than before that time—yet obesity rates continue to climb. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark McClellan attributes the obesity problem to “physical inactivity”—not caloric intake. In fact, McClellan noted that children’s calorie intake has remained about the same for the last 20 years.
Not only do regulations hinder the market and censor speech; they hurt the businesses behind the labels. Sara Lee CEO Christopher J. Fraleigh recently spoke on the overextended regulations, which will hurt his business in particular:
A turkey sandwich made with Sara Lee fat-free lean turkey meat, we would not be able to advertise that on venues, be it the Superbowl or anything that would have a significant child audience, because the product is a little bit too high in sodium…. Current regulation of advertising toward children is a perfect example of regulation that just goes way too far.
The Obama Administration’s food regulators think that if you give them an inch, they can take a mile. But when free speech is on the cutting board, they will certainly hear from the people, and the people will not stand for it.
Quick Hits:
* President Obama agreed to move his jobs speech to a Joint Session of Congress to next Thursday, instead of Wednesday during the GOP presidential debate.
* Jim Tipple, mayor of Wasau, Wisconsin, declared that a labor group planning to exclude Republican lawmakers from their Labor Day parade will be required to fund the $2,000 event.
* After the death of al-Qaeda’s number two leader last week, White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan praised U.S. action in Pakistan as the reason no active terror plots have been discovered in advance 9/11 this year.
* A new CNN/ORD poll reveals 65 percent of respondents disapprove of President Obama’s handling of the economy.
* Americans recently rated Ronald Reagan as the nation’s greatest President. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) emulates the timeless principles that Reagan represented in his own leadership role.
The USA Needs Israel as Much as Israel Needs the USA
Straight from the Jerusalem Boardroom #156, September 1, 2011
Yoram Ettinger, "Second Thought: US-Israel Initiative"
1. Four Israeli universities are included among the top 30 computer science universities in the world (US – 20 universities, Canada – 2, UK – 2, Switzerland – 1, Hong Kong – 1), according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), commonly known as the Shanghai ranking, a publication compiled by the Shanghai Jiaotong University - one of the three most influential rankings.
2. George Gilder, Chairman of the Great Barrington, MA-based Gilder Fund Management and Gilder Cremers Fund, author of "The Israel Test": "Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package…in an array of leading-edge technologies. It is the global master of microchip design, network algorithms and medical instruments Israel is incontestably the world leader in water recycling and desalinization… Israel is also making major advances in longer-range missile defense, robotic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicles that can stay aloft for days… It raised its exports 19.9% in 2010's fourth quarter and 27.3% in the first quarter of 2011. Israelis supply Intel with many of its advanced microprocessors, from the Pentium and Sandbridge, to the Atom and Centrino. Israeli companies endow Cisco with new core router designs and real-time programmable network processors for its next-generation systems. They supply Apple with robust miniaturized solid state memory systems for its iPhones, iPods and iPads, and Microsoft with critical user interface designs for the OS7 product line and the Kinect gaming motion-sensor interface, the fastest rising consumer electronic product in history…
U.S. defense and prosperity increasingly depend on the ever-growing economic and technological power of Israel. If we stand together we can deter or defeat any foe… We need Israel as much as it needs us (Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2011).
3. The $1.25BN West Lake Village, CA-based ValueClick acquired Israel's Dotomi for $295MN (Globes, Aug. 4). The $2.5BN Boston-based Great Hill Partners acquired Israel's Plimus for $115MN (Globes, Aug. 9).
4. The Baltimore-based JMI Equity, Bloomberg Capital, the San Francisco-based First Round Capital, ComCast's VC fund, Genacast and the Menlo Park-based Institutional Venture Partners participated in a $33MN 3rd round of private placement by Israel's DoubleVerify (Globes, August 31). Denmark's Saxo Bank acquired 25% of Israel's online broker's solutions company, Leverate, for $12.5MN (Globes, July 29). Japan's Fujitso Fund and FinTech Fund participated in a $12MN round by Israel's Asocs. Additional investors are expected to follow George Gilder's Gilder Cremers, which participated in the previous round (Globes, August 31). The Palo Alto-based Greylock Ventures and the Menlo Park-based Opus Capital participated in a 2nd round by Israel's Wanova (Globes, Aug. 24). The Menlo Park-based Sequoia Capital and Deutsche Telekom's T-Venture led a $9.5MN 3rd round by Israel's Innovid (Globes, August 31). The Menlo Park US Venture Partners, Santa Clara-based Webb Investment, San Francisco-based WI Harper and Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors invested $4MN in Israel's Quixey. Schmidt also invested in Israel's Gogo-Boots, EyeView and AnyDo (Globes, August 30). Johnson & Johnson invested a few million dollars in a 3rd round by Israel's LifeBond (Globes, Aug. 9). The Munich-based Atlantic Capital Partners invested $2.2MN in the 2nd round of Israel's GreenSql (Globes, August 11).
Yoram Ettinger, "Second Thought: US-Israel Initiative"
1. Four Israeli universities are included among the top 30 computer science universities in the world (US – 20 universities, Canada – 2, UK – 2, Switzerland – 1, Hong Kong – 1), according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), commonly known as the Shanghai ranking, a publication compiled by the Shanghai Jiaotong University - one of the three most influential rankings.
2. George Gilder, Chairman of the Great Barrington, MA-based Gilder Fund Management and Gilder Cremers Fund, author of "The Israel Test": "Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package…in an array of leading-edge technologies. It is the global master of microchip design, network algorithms and medical instruments Israel is incontestably the world leader in water recycling and desalinization… Israel is also making major advances in longer-range missile defense, robotic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicles that can stay aloft for days… It raised its exports 19.9% in 2010's fourth quarter and 27.3% in the first quarter of 2011. Israelis supply Intel with many of its advanced microprocessors, from the Pentium and Sandbridge, to the Atom and Centrino. Israeli companies endow Cisco with new core router designs and real-time programmable network processors for its next-generation systems. They supply Apple with robust miniaturized solid state memory systems for its iPhones, iPods and iPads, and Microsoft with critical user interface designs for the OS7 product line and the Kinect gaming motion-sensor interface, the fastest rising consumer electronic product in history…
U.S. defense and prosperity increasingly depend on the ever-growing economic and technological power of Israel. If we stand together we can deter or defeat any foe… We need Israel as much as it needs us (Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2011).
3. The $1.25BN West Lake Village, CA-based ValueClick acquired Israel's Dotomi for $295MN (Globes, Aug. 4). The $2.5BN Boston-based Great Hill Partners acquired Israel's Plimus for $115MN (Globes, Aug. 9).
4. The Baltimore-based JMI Equity, Bloomberg Capital, the San Francisco-based First Round Capital, ComCast's VC fund, Genacast and the Menlo Park-based Institutional Venture Partners participated in a $33MN 3rd round of private placement by Israel's DoubleVerify (Globes, August 31). Denmark's Saxo Bank acquired 25% of Israel's online broker's solutions company, Leverate, for $12.5MN (Globes, July 29). Japan's Fujitso Fund and FinTech Fund participated in a $12MN round by Israel's Asocs. Additional investors are expected to follow George Gilder's Gilder Cremers, which participated in the previous round (Globes, August 31). The Palo Alto-based Greylock Ventures and the Menlo Park-based Opus Capital participated in a 2nd round by Israel's Wanova (Globes, Aug. 24). The Menlo Park-based Sequoia Capital and Deutsche Telekom's T-Venture led a $9.5MN 3rd round by Israel's Innovid (Globes, August 31). The Menlo Park US Venture Partners, Santa Clara-based Webb Investment, San Francisco-based WI Harper and Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors invested $4MN in Israel's Quixey. Schmidt also invested in Israel's Gogo-Boots, EyeView and AnyDo (Globes, August 30). Johnson & Johnson invested a few million dollars in a 3rd round by Israel's LifeBond (Globes, Aug. 9). The Munich-based Atlantic Capital Partners invested $2.2MN in the 2nd round of Israel's GreenSql (Globes, August 11).
Iraq: Turkey makes a move
theoptimisticconservative | September 1, 2011
Turkey’s efforts around Iraq are multidimensional and aimed at more than merely suppressing the Kurdish separatist group PKK. The activity that has been in the news in August, of course, is the bombing of Kurdish targets in northern Iraq. Early in the August campaign, the Turks announced their decision to establish a more permanent military presence in northern Iraq, a move that will obviously affect strategic calculations in the region.
Baghdad has been largely silent about the incursions on Iraqi territory, although the Turkish ambassador was summoned last week to hear a complaint from the Iraqi foreign ministry. Iraq’s position is difficult: both Turkey and Iran are bound to be concerned about the Kurds’ use of northern Iraq as a redoubt for their different factional campaigns against Iraq’s neighbors. Iran began attacking Kurdish targets across the border as early as July (see here and here), and with the emerging regional rivalry heating up between Ankara and Tehran, Turkey’s strategic interest in the real estate of northern Iraq was guaranteed to assume a more complex, and even a more urgent, character. If Iraq can’t control the Kurds’ use of her territory, Nouri al-Maliki knows there is a limit to either neighbor’s willingness to refrain from intervention.The US posture in the area is a question mark: the quality of our military power hasn’t changed, but the amount of it has, while our policy stance has grown flaccid. Even two years ago, Turkey would have expected pushback from Washington if she proposed to establish permanent, significantly enlarged military bases in northern Iraq. It is clear now that Erdogan is justified in assuming there will be no pushback.
The move in the south
In this context, Turkey’s latest move has about it the aura of wasting no time. Down at the other end of Iraq, on the al-Faw peninsula, which runs down the west side of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway as it courses into the Persian Gulf, the Iraqis are finally on the verge of building the major new port they have been planning since 2005. Kick-starting the investment consortium in late August 2011? Three Turkish companies.
Mouth of the Shatt-al-Arab
It’s not any direct conflict with an Iranian commercial interest that makes this a pointed strategic move; it’s the location and the tactic. The Shatt-al-Arab waterway, representing the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as they empty into the Persian Gulf, has long been disputed between Iran and Iraq, for reasons that reach back centuries. Iran occupied the al-Faw peninsula for a period of time during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s; Saddam’s nominal pretext for launching the war was his repudiation of the 1975 accord on the Shatt-al-Arab signed between Iraq and the Shah.
The area is one of Iran’s (and Iraq’s) most sensitive. As the link above outlines, it is also the subject of a bitter dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over port development. Kuwait is already building a rival port on Bubiyan Island, less than a mile off the al-Faw peninsula (and disputed with Iraq until a settlement was achievedon a UN demarcation line in 1994). Iraq is strenuously opposed to Kuwait’s port plans; Kuwait naturally sees no reason to relinquish them.
The threats issued by Hizballah Kataib, the Hizballah group operating in Iraq, against Hyundai and other South Korean firms building the Kuwaiti port have suggested that Iran is opposed to Kuwait’s project as well. Tension between Iran and Kuwait has been fed this year by Kuwait’s discovery in March of an Iranian spy ring inside her borders, along with Kuwaiti accusations that Iran is trespassing in Kuwait’s waters to conduct seismic exploration. Kuwait closed ranks with Saudi Arabia on the issue of suppressing the protests in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, a policy that sat poorly with Iran, which backed some (not all) of the factions seeking to overthrow the Bahraini emir.
Iran’s general attitude toward the Shatt-al-Arab region is conveyed most effectively in this summary by a British analyst of Iranian political and military activities there. Basically, it’s a throbbing vulnerability for Iran over which her leaders prefer to exert as much positive control as possible. Development of a Kuwaiti port at its mouth promises to set up an uncontrollable condition, whereas promoting an Iraqi port there would enable Iran to keep a finger on what happens. Since Iran has her own ports and free-trade zone on the Shatt-al-Arab, it has suited her interests well for Iraq’s port plans to languish, and for Kuwait’s to be subject to threat.
Given these factors, Erdogan’s approach is informative. One option for stymieing Iran would have been simply backing the Kuwaiti port. Already under construction, likely to be completed on time and operated well, it has much to recommend it.
But backing it would not be a way of supplanting Iran as a strategic patron of Iraq. Nor would supporting the Iraqi port politically but remaining in the background. With this month’s move, the Turks have done for the Iraqis’ port aspirations what the Iranians have been no help with: they have come up with money and organization. From a Persian Gulf PR standpoint, the message of Turkish effectiveness is certainly amplified by her naval port visit to the Emirate of Abu Dhabi – the “first one in centuries” – in June 2011.
From Turkey’s perspective, it would be intolerable to have both Syria and Iraq acting under the sway of Iran. There is a defensive reason for Turkey’s actions. But two things must be noted. One is that the catalyst for Ankara’s current activism is not a fear of growing Iranian strength. Iran’s regional power arrangements are actually under threat from multiple sources at the moment, and much of her strategy is being executed in reactionary mode, not from confident assertiveness. What Turkey sees is opportunity, and what created it is the disorder and passivity of US policy. There is a vacuum, and Erdogan is filling it.
Meanwhile, back in the West: “We were here, are here, and will always be here”
The second observation is that Turkey containing Iran isn’t likely to turn out a lot better than Hitler containing Stalin. It sounds clever, but its hazards outweigh the potential benefits. Sooner or later, Erdogan’s objectives are going to collide with the interests of others in the Middle East, with those of NATO, and with at least one of the great powers of Asia.
One of the early flashpoints may be over on Turkey’s other flank, in the Balkans, where Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu helped Bosnian Muslims celebrate Eid in Sarajevo on 30 August. In language guaranteed to alarm Bosnia’s non-Muslim population, Davutoglu and the Grand Mufti pretty much laid it on the table:
Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric welcomed Davutoğlu, telling worshippers that “today is a day we waited for centuries” in Sarajevo. “Today is a day to cherish because the Turkish foreign minister is with us,” he said.
Davutoğlu said Ceric’s sermon was “emotional” and added: “We were here, are here and we will always be here.”
Ceric further commended Davutoğlu after his sermon at the mosque, saying “Allah created him to make history.” Calling Davutoğlu’s Eid prayer at Gazi Husrev Bey Mosque a “historic moment,” Ceric said it symbolized the “rebirth of a new politics and new realities in the Balkans, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
Davutoğlu said after the prayer that he was honored to be in Sarajevo, calling the city as “home.” He said: “In our traditions, we celebrate Eid at home. This is what I am doing, I celebrate the Eid with my family in Sarajevo. Bosnia is our home and Bosnians are our family members.”
As Today’s Zaman demurely puts it, however:
Davutoğlu rejected [the] “neo-Ottoman” label for his government’s foreign policy and said such a label stemmed from the uneasiness some have felt in the face of Turkey’s growing influence in the region.
J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at Hot Air’s Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, and The Weekly Standard online.
The Shawarma Republics are Burning
Sultan Knish
Syria is burning, not because of the Arab Spring or Tyranny or Twitter, or any of the other popular explanations. The fire in Syria is the same firestorm burning in Iraq, in Turkey, in Lebanon and throughout much of the Muslim world. It has nothing to do with human rights or democracy. There is no revolution here. Only the eternal civil war.
Most people accept countries with ancient names like Egypt, Jordan and Syria as a given. If they think about it at all they assume that they were always around, or were restored after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But actually the countries of the Middle East are mostly artificial creations borrowing a history that is not their own.
When Mohammed unleashed a fanatical round of conquests and crusades, he began by wrecking the cultures and religions of his native region. And his followers went on to do the same throughout the region and across the world.
Entire peoples lost their history, their past, their religion and their way of life. This cultural genocide was worst in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe. But the Middle Eastern peoples lost much of their heritage as well.
The Muslim conquerors made a special point of persecuting and exterminating the native beliefs and indigenous inhabitants they dominated. Israeli Jews, Assyrian Christians and Persian Zoroastrians faced special persecution.
Conquered peoples were expected to become Muslims. Those who resisted were repressed as Dhimmis. But those who submitted and became Muslims suffered a much worse fate, losing major portions of their traditions and history. They were expected to define themselves as Muslims first and look back to the great day when their conquerors subjugated them as the beginning of their history. Their pre-Islamic history faded into the mists of the ignorant past.
But Islam did not lead to a unified region, only to a prison of nations. The Caliphates, like the USSR, held sway over a divided empire through repression and force. Many of those peoples had lost a clear sense of themselves, but they still maintained differences that they expressed by modifying Islam to accommodate their existing beliefs and customs.
Islamic authorities viewed this as nothing short of heresy. It was against some such heresies that the Wahhabi movement was born. But these attempts to force the peoples of the region into one mold were doomed to fail.
Islam came about to stamp out all differences, to reduce all men to one, to blend state and mosque into one monstrous law for all. And it did succeed to some extent. Many cultures and beliefs were driven nearly to extinction. Jews, Christians and others struggled to survive in the walls of a hostile civilization. But Islam could not remain united and the divisions resurfaced in other ways.
Muslim armies did succeed in conquering much of the world in a frenzy of plunder and death. But they quickly turned on each other. Rather than conquering the world, they went on to fight over the plunder and the power. Nothing has really changed since then.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire brought in the Europeans to reconstruct the Middle East. The modern states are the work of their hands. A clumsy mismatch of borders and warring peoples. The USSR came after with its own line of coups and Arab Socialist dictatorships. Now the third wave of Islamist tyrannies is on the march. But none of them can solve the basic problems of the region.
Syria is burning not because of human rights, but because it's a collection of different peoples with different variants of Islam who don't get along. A handful are descended from the original natives. The rest are foreign Arab invaders, some more recent than others. The story repeats itself across the region. And across the world.
Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon are just some examples of countries permanently divided by such a mismatch of peoples. Agreements and elections come to nothing because no group believes that they will be treated as equals if they aren't in power. And they're right. Equality doesn't just come from open elections, but from a cultural acceptance of differences. This simply does not exist in the Muslim world where gender differences mean you're a force of corruption or a slave, ethnic differences mean you are the son of a dog, and religious differences mean you're an enemy.
Had the forces of Islam not turned the Middle East upside down, the nation state might have evolved out of individual cultures, rather than as a strange hybrid of feudalism and Great Powers colonialism. For all their bluster and viciousness, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon are abandoned colonies. The Gulf states are even worse, backward clans of cutthroat merchants who are parasitically feeding off the West, even as they try to destroy it.
The rulers invariably marry Western women or women with a large dose of Western blood. Both Sadat married the daughter of an English woman. Mubarak married the daughter of a Welsh woman. For all that the Hashemites tout their descent from Mohammed, Queen Noor is more Anglo-Saxon than Arab. And the current Jordanian King's mother was originally known as Toni Gardner. Even when they do marry Arab women, they are usually Christian Arabs and British educated.
There's something pathetic about the sight of the post-colonial Arab leadership trying to gain some psychological legitimacy by intermarrying with their former rulers. As if pumping enough English blood into the veins of their offspring will somehow make them as capable as the Empire that ruled them and then left to attend to its own affairs.
But not nearly as pathetic as half of them claiming descent from Mohammed. Both reveal the underlying historical instability of their rule. These aren't nation states, they're hopelessly dysfunctional geographical divisions bristling with Western weapons and money, with interpretations of the Koran and texts on Arab Socialism, where everyone is a philosopher and a scholar-- but no government lasts longer than it takes to overthrow it.
Every colonel and general dreams of empire, and every cleric in his flea ridden robes theorizes on the Islamic state, but none of them can do anything but act out the same murderous dramas. Building their house of cards and then watching it tumble down.
Had Western shenanigans not raised the price of bread, while providing support to local leftists from wealthy families, the Arab Spring would not exist. Now that it has, it's only another excuse for locals to fight their civil wars and then erect another ramshackle regime on the ruins of the old.
This isn't 1848 as some have theorized. It's 848, over and over again. Worse still, it's 748.
When you don't have a nation, but you do have an army, then what you have is not a state, but a Shawarma Republic. To keep the army from overthrowing the leader, he must find internal or external enemies. When a downturn occurs, and the mobs gather, either the army massacres the mob or overthrows the ruler. Or the rebels cut a deal with some internal elements and wipe out the loyalists.
This is an old regional narrative that has nothing to do with democracy, human rights, Twitter or any of the other nonsense flowing through New York Times columns faster than the sewers of Cairo.
The modern Shawarma Republic has some royal or military ruler at the top who receives money from the West or from its enemies to hold up his end of the bargain. Which to him means stowing the money into foreign bank accounts, sending his trophy wife on shopping trips to Paris and striking a fine balancing between wiping out his enemies and buying them off.
Naturally he carries on the ritualistic chant of "Death to Israel", and if Israel ever looks weak enough, or his new Chinese or Iranian allies kick in the money for a full fledged invasion, he may even take a whack at it. But mostly the chants of "Death to Israel" are a convenient way of executing his enemies for collaborating with Israel.
In Syria, Assad's Shawarma Republic (officially the Syrian Arab Republic, formerly the United Arab Republic, after a bunch of coups and one kingdom, the privately owned fiefdom of the dumbest scion of the clan) is on fire. Because the enemies of the regime, and some of its former allies, got around to exploiting Bashar Assad's weakness.
For now Assad's armies backed by his Iranian allies are in control of the Shawarma Republic of Syria but that might change. Especially now that Turkey and much of the Arab world have stepped into the anti-Assad camp. And when the fireworks die down, and the corpses are cleaned up off the streets, there will be another Shawarma Republic. This one may not be run by the Alawites. But it will be run by someone, and it won't be the people.
The irony is that after turning Lebanon into its puppet, Syria got the same treatment from Iran. And if a revolt succeeds, then it might get the same treatment from Turkey. The big dog bites the little dog, and the bigger dog bites it.
The process can't be stopped, because the Islamic conquests that wrecked the region, the Caliphates that tried to make it static, and the colonial mapmakers who turned it into a ridiculous puzzle of fake countries filled with people who hate each other-- make it impossible.
There was a brief window after the war when the exit of empires and the presence of a large Western educated class seemed as if they might lead to working societies. Instead they led to the pathetic imitations of the worst of the West, dress up generals and scholars cranking out monograms explaining how everything could be made right with their theory. Now it's leading back to Islamism and the bloody clashes in the desert that led to this permanent state of dysfunction.
The Islamic Caliphate as a panacea for the problems caused by Islamic caliphates is about as good an idea as pouring gasoline on a fire. Which is exactly what the Islamists financed by Gulf royals, who can't help cutting throats even when it's their own, are doing.
You can't build a country out of sand and a book. Nor out of armies and billions of dollars. The last 70 years testify to that. The reason that Israel works and the Arab world doesn't is very simple. The Jews retained their identity and their humanity. The perpetrators and victims of Islam who surround them have no roots. Only the sword in their hand and the shifting sand underneath their feet.
20% of Muslims in U.S. admit knowing of support for jihadists within Muslim community
Jihad Watch
Yikes! Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacist groups constantly tell us that there is no support for jihadists, absolutely none, among Muslims in the U.S. So how could this be? Surely Hamas-linked CAIR and the others aren't...lying, are they? And why aren't these twenty percent turning in the "extremists" to law enforcement?
Oh yeah: "One in five US Muslims knows of extremist support in community," by Jon Swaine in the Telegraph, August 31 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
One in five American Muslims knows of support for extremism in their community, new research has found, despite Muslims being far happier about the state of the US than other groups.
As the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, 21 per cent of respondents told a study they had detected "a great deal" or "a fair deal" of support for extremism in their areas.
While the vast majority said that suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians to protect Islam were never justified, 19 per cent of respondents did not agree with this statement....
However more than half of Muslims said they felt singled out for terrorist surveillance, and 43 per cent said they had personally experienced harassment in the past year.
Iran’s Ominous Red Sea Move
P. David Hornik
Both Israel and Iran have sent warships into waters south of Israel. FoxNews reported on Wednesday that Israel had deployed two more warships to its Red Sea border with Egypt; Israel already has an unspecified naval presence in the area. Iran, for its part, was dispatching its 15th fleet to the Red Sea.
An earlier report on Ynet noted that Iran’s 15th fleet comprises a submarine and several warships.
Although it’s an uncertain call, the reports give the impression that Israel’s move came first and Iran’s is a response. As Ynet also reports:
Israeli security sources told the Associated Press on Tuesday that two additional warships have been dispatched…. Another source said that the operation was routine, telling Reuters that “two naval craft have been sent to the Red Sea. This is not unusual.”
As for Iran’s navy commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, he told Iranian TV that the Iranian fleet was being deployed for routine patrols and preventing pirate attacks. Or as he put it: “The presence of Iran’s army in the high seas will convey the message of peace and friendship to all countries.”
Israel’s dual message to AP and Reuters sounds calculated to emphasize its move without unduly, one might say, ruffling the waters. As for Admiral Sayyari’s fraternal tidings, they’re certain not to be read literally in Israel.
With or without an Iranian move, Israel has already been on a special footing since Monday when its chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz ordered a heightened alert throughout southern Israel and particularly near the Israeli-Egyptian border. Civilian roads have been closed and forces stationed at the border in a deployment that has been called unprecedented.
What prompted this full-blown alert was earlier intelligence about a squad of about ten Islamic Jihad terrorists making their way through Egyptian Sinai from Gaza. They were seen as aiming to infiltrate the Israeli-Egyptian border and carry out a terror attack even larger than the one on August 18, when terrorists from another Gaza-based organization, the Popular Resistance Committees, crossed the border and killed eight Israelis.
As DEBKAfile points out, since that attack Israel has been engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the Gaza terror haven. It was at dawn on August 24 that the Israeli air force killed Ismail al-Asmar, an Islamic Jihad commander, in a missile strike—one of a string of assassinations of Gaza terror leaders that were aimed at restoring Israel’s deterrence after the August 18 attack.
And it was later that day that the Islamic Jihad squad in question set out from Gaza—“turning this equation on its head,” claims DEBKA, “by demonstrating that Israeli attacks on Palestinian terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip bring forth Palestinian reprisals from Sinai.”
Where’s Egypt in all this? Israel has been trying to get Egypt to clamp down—to an extent still constrained by the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty—on the growing chaos and terror threat in Sinai. Reports in the Egyptian media say the Egyptian military has started operating against the terror hubs there.
DEBKA, for its part, claims such accounts are “pure fiction” and that “the Egyptian army…is sitting on its hands as the jihadists take up assault positions on its side of the Sinai border”—which is exactly what the Egyptian army did at the time of the August 18 attack.
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Israel still hopes post-Mubarak Egypt won’t turn into another “Iran.” As for the Iran that already exists, it’s not about, at this point, to get involved on the tactical level should a border skirmish between Israeli forces and Islamic Jihad (a direct Iranian creation and proxy) break out. But its Red Sea naval presence is a reminder to Israel that Iran is the patron of Gaza terror and that the conflict is ultimately on the strategic level with Israel’s survival as the stakes.
The “Arab spring” has already erupted in a hot summer for Israel. With Egypt almost certain to get even less friendly and cooperative, and so long as neither the U.S. nor Israel is prepared to confront Iran as the strategic problem that it is, the fall augurs no relief.
How to Topple Iran; Hamas Moving to Cairo?
Anna Mahjar-Barducci
The Hamas government in Gaza failed to pay the salaries to its 40,000 employees of public and security services last July. Hamas leaders then promised full payments in August, but even this month, not all employees received their wages. Reuters reports that Hamas has denied that the movement is undergoing a financial crisis but says that "it faces liquidity problems stemming from inconsistent revenues from tax collection in the Gaza Strip and foreign aid". However, according to Arab media outlets, the reasons behind the lack of liquidity lie in the deterioration of its relations with Iran.
According to diplomatic sources, Iran has allegedly suspended aid to Gaza, primarily in retaliation for Hamas's silence about the uprising in Syria, Iran's staunchest ally. "Iran has cut back or even stopped its funding of Hamas after the Islamist movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, failed to show public support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad," Reuters reported.. Hamas's leadership has not made any statement either in support of Assad or against the protestors, mainly because the Syrian regime recently extended its brutality to a Palestinian refugee camp near the port city of Latakia. Syrian forces opened fire on the camp, causing an undisclosed number of victims and obliging 10.000 refugees to flee. The Jerusalem-based Media Line reported that Basem Ezbidi, a Syrian political scientist at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, said that Hamas is facing the "greatest dilemma," as Hamas is findin difficulties to reconcile its conflicting interests: "On the one hand, Hamas does not want the Syrian regime to disappear," Ezbidi told The Media Line; "but on the other hand, how can it justify its strategic alliance with a state that kills Palestinians?"
Further, in April, the Saudi daily Al-Hayat wrote that Hamas's political leadership were ordered to leave Syria following its neutral stance towards the popular uprising. According to the report, Qatar agreed to host Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashal. Hamas denies the allegations, however, and its political leadership remained in Damascus. Nevertheless, according to reports, there are rumors that Hamas might shift its political bureau from Damascus to Cairo
There are also rumors that Iran has started to finance a Salafist groups in Gaza. These most extreme fringes, however, although plentiful in the Gaza Strip, seem to be fragmented and, for the moment at least, with little or no central coordination -- of course that could change. Hamas has a contradictory relation with Salafist groups: at times it represses them, and at times it uses them to achieve its own goals. Political analysts seem to agree that these movements do not have a serious chance to take over Gaza, which will remain, in the foreseeable future, under the grip of Hamas.
Media Line also reported that Ayman Shaheen, a political scientist at Gaza's Al-Azhar University, said that Hamas will be flexible in adapting to the new political reality in the Middle East: "Hamas is wise. It will create a new set of alliances to replace the Teheran-Damascus-Gaza axis," Shaheen said. "Qatar is always open to Hamas, and there is rapprochement with Egypt as well." Hamas's finances cannot be sustained without external support. Last year Hamas's budget was $540 million; with taxes on merchants and goods from Israel only accounting for $55 million. Apart from donations received from different countries in the region, the rest of the funds needed have so far beenr provided by Iran, whose annual aid is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Iran, however, has another reason for cutting financial aid to Gaza: The Iranian government itself is at the moment experiencing a financial crisis partly due to sanctions, but above all due to difficulties in keeping up with oil production. As indicated by the Financial Times, "[Iran] produces 3.7 million barrels of oil a day. After years of insufficient investment in infrastructure, however, that output is threatened. Iran's deputy oil minister, Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr, said that the country will have to invest at least $32 billion to maintain its production capacity. If it does not do so, output will fall to 2.7 million barrels per day by 2015."
All indications are that at a moment when the Syrian regime might be toppled, Iran is neithet politically nor economically in the best position to defend its vital ally, Syria. Political analysts consider Syria Iran's Trojan Horse in the citadel of the Arab world. Without Syria, Iran will never be able accomplish its dream of a renewed Persian Empire spanning up to the Mediterranean, with Israel wiped off the map.
The West woiuld do well to realize that such favorable conditions will be be difficult to meet; it should therefore push harder for the fall of the Syrian regime. Irs collapse would be a deadly blow to the hegemonic aspiration of the Ayatollahs, and might even lay down the condition for its fall. All that is necessary would be to show half the political and military determination displayed against former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
The Hamas government in Gaza failed to pay the salaries to its 40,000 employees of public and security services last July. Hamas leaders then promised full payments in August, but even this month, not all employees received their wages. Reuters reports that Hamas has denied that the movement is undergoing a financial crisis but says that "it faces liquidity problems stemming from inconsistent revenues from tax collection in the Gaza Strip and foreign aid". However, according to Arab media outlets, the reasons behind the lack of liquidity lie in the deterioration of its relations with Iran.
According to diplomatic sources, Iran has allegedly suspended aid to Gaza, primarily in retaliation for Hamas's silence about the uprising in Syria, Iran's staunchest ally. "Iran has cut back or even stopped its funding of Hamas after the Islamist movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, failed to show public support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad," Reuters reported.. Hamas's leadership has not made any statement either in support of Assad or against the protestors, mainly because the Syrian regime recently extended its brutality to a Palestinian refugee camp near the port city of Latakia. Syrian forces opened fire on the camp, causing an undisclosed number of victims and obliging 10.000 refugees to flee. The Jerusalem-based Media Line reported that Basem Ezbidi, a Syrian political scientist at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, said that Hamas is facing the "greatest dilemma," as Hamas is findin difficulties to reconcile its conflicting interests: "On the one hand, Hamas does not want the Syrian regime to disappear," Ezbidi told The Media Line; "but on the other hand, how can it justify its strategic alliance with a state that kills Palestinians?"
Further, in April, the Saudi daily Al-Hayat wrote that Hamas's political leadership were ordered to leave Syria following its neutral stance towards the popular uprising. According to the report, Qatar agreed to host Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashal. Hamas denies the allegations, however, and its political leadership remained in Damascus. Nevertheless, according to reports, there are rumors that Hamas might shift its political bureau from Damascus to Cairo
There are also rumors that Iran has started to finance a Salafist groups in Gaza. These most extreme fringes, however, although plentiful in the Gaza Strip, seem to be fragmented and, for the moment at least, with little or no central coordination -- of course that could change. Hamas has a contradictory relation with Salafist groups: at times it represses them, and at times it uses them to achieve its own goals. Political analysts seem to agree that these movements do not have a serious chance to take over Gaza, which will remain, in the foreseeable future, under the grip of Hamas.
Media Line also reported that Ayman Shaheen, a political scientist at Gaza's Al-Azhar University, said that Hamas will be flexible in adapting to the new political reality in the Middle East: "Hamas is wise. It will create a new set of alliances to replace the Teheran-Damascus-Gaza axis," Shaheen said. "Qatar is always open to Hamas, and there is rapprochement with Egypt as well." Hamas's finances cannot be sustained without external support. Last year Hamas's budget was $540 million; with taxes on merchants and goods from Israel only accounting for $55 million. Apart from donations received from different countries in the region, the rest of the funds needed have so far beenr provided by Iran, whose annual aid is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Iran, however, has another reason for cutting financial aid to Gaza: The Iranian government itself is at the moment experiencing a financial crisis partly due to sanctions, but above all due to difficulties in keeping up with oil production. As indicated by the Financial Times, "[Iran] produces 3.7 million barrels of oil a day. After years of insufficient investment in infrastructure, however, that output is threatened. Iran's deputy oil minister, Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr, said that the country will have to invest at least $32 billion to maintain its production capacity. If it does not do so, output will fall to 2.7 million barrels per day by 2015."
All indications are that at a moment when the Syrian regime might be toppled, Iran is neithet politically nor economically in the best position to defend its vital ally, Syria. Political analysts consider Syria Iran's Trojan Horse in the citadel of the Arab world. Without Syria, Iran will never be able accomplish its dream of a renewed Persian Empire spanning up to the Mediterranean, with Israel wiped off the map.
The West woiuld do well to realize that such favorable conditions will be be difficult to meet; it should therefore push harder for the fall of the Syrian regime. Irs collapse would be a deadly blow to the hegemonic aspiration of the Ayatollahs, and might even lay down the condition for its fall. All that is necessary would be to show half the political and military determination displayed against former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Obama Ignores Israel's Daily Hurricanes
Lauri B. Regan
The day before Hurricane Irene swept through New York, I received a concerned email from a cousin in Israel asking if we were properly prepared to weather the storm. I responded that I was not too concerned and thought the media and politicians were a bit over the top with the evacuations, warnings, and coverage. The next night, as Americans up and down the east coast remained hunkered down in the safety of their homes, a Palestinian terrorist stole a taxi, ran over two individuals, and then stabbed a number of others outside of a Tel Aviv night club. I emailed my cousin and explained that this is the exact reason that I cannot get excited over a storm -- an act of God. My cousin agreed, saying, "Yes, these are our day to day hurricanes here..."
Israel's day-to-day hurricanes are not caused by acts of God. They are caused by acts of man -- hostile, dangerous, and irrational men (and women). And while humans cannot control the weather, they can erect structures that can withstand wind and rain, hurricanes and tornados; they can build satellites that predict and track weather patterns, providing warning systems to escape the upcoming danger; and they can prevent loss of life. On the other hand, there is not much that Israel can do to protect herself from the unpredictable acts of crazed lunatics who wish her and her people complete annihilation. And the few steps that she has taken have been attacked by the international community which treats Israel and her citizens as terrorists should be in a sane world. From the barrier erected to protect Israeli citizens from suicide bombers (which has been quite successful) to retaliatory strikes aimed at terrorists rather than full Arab civilian populations (despite the fact that terrorists hide both themselves and their weapons among their populations), Israel is continually demonized at the United Nations, in the international press, and on streets and college campuses across the globe.
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has turned a blind and biased eye to the storms that Israel confronts daily. The New York Times recently reported on the White House guidelines issued to government officials across the world instructing them how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. One of the themes in the document is not only to recognize that the attacks are not "just about us," but also that "Americans must be prepared for another attack -- and must, in response, be resilient in recovering from the loss."
As we commemorate the citizens of over 90 countries who perished in the 9/11 attacks, we honor all victims of terrorism, in every nation around the world[.] ... We honor and celebrate the resilience of individuals, families, and communities on every continent, whether in New York or Nairobi, Bali or Belfast, Mumbai or Manila, or Lahore or London.
Conspicuously absent from this official White House policy statement is our ally, Israel. This is appalling. While all of these other countries have faced terrorism, Israel is the one country in the world that faces it daily from all sides -- including its border with its former friend Egypt thanks to the Mideast policies of the Obama administration. It is the one country that is threatened with annihilation on a regular basis. It is the one country that this administration has bullied and threatened over and over again since Obama entered the White House. And to issue guidelines recognizing the resilience of individuals from a litany of countries that specifically excludes Israel is simply a disgrace.
As the United States' most important strategic ally, Israel has provided our country's military with invaluable knowledge in the asymmetrical warfare that our troops abroad regularly face in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israelis have obtained this knowledge not only from the multiple wars of aggression against her since her founding but because of the resilience that the Jewish people have acquired from millennia of attacks. It is the Jewish people in general, and Israelis in particular in the latter part of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, who have taught the world what resilience is and how to survive the never-ending perfect storms of violence and aggression. To ignore this reality is not only to ignore the lessons of history, but it is cause for real concern over just how out of touch the Obama administration is.
Barack Obama has proven to be an abomination at leading this country. Conservatives and liberals alike agree that the failure of leadership from the White House is leading America down the road to demise. Were it not so sad, it would be amusing that Obama chose to use an act of God for his first attempt at real leadership. But taking the helm at the FEMA offices prior to Hurricane Irene is not leadership -- it was a simple covering-his-butt political stunt.
Leadership is what we see every time that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu speaks both here in the US and abroad. He does not need two giant teleprompters for a three-minute speech announcing his selection for a new member of his administration. Netanyahu understands storms and the need for his citizens to be resilient because he and all Israelis live in the path of a hurricane daily and it is his responsibility to ensure that his people survive each and every storm.
Leadership is also what House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen exhibited when she unveiled her U.N. reform bill on Tuesday. In the lead up to the Palestinian bid at the UN for a unilateral declaration of independence, Ros-Lehtinen has introduced a bill to cut off U.S. funding of any U.N. agency that recognizes a Palestinian state prior to resolution of the Mideast peace process (the bill also would cut off U.S. funds to UNRWA and the U.N. Human Rights Council). It is no surprise that the White House has reflexively come out in opposition to this bill. As Jonathan Tobin recognized:
Obama's "don't worry, be happy" approach to the UN has done nothing to convince its members to stop trying to kill the peace process by voting to recognize an independent Palestinian state without first requiring it to make peace with Israel. Nor has the administration used its supposedly weighty influence at Turtle Bay to transform UNRWA or the Human Rights Council, both of which exist primarily in order to perpetuate the Arab war against Israel.
September is hurricane season here in the U.S. For Israel, every day is hurricane season; however, September may present her with another perfect storm. In response to intelligence indicating that there is another viable terror threat on her border with Egypt, the Israeli navy has moved two warships to that border. At the same time, Iran has just announced that it is moving a fleet of ships to the area. The ceasefire with Gaza will last only until one of Hamas' crazed lunatics decides to once again begin firing rockets into Israel. And these same people will turn to the U.N. in the hopes that its member-states will approve a unilateral declaration of statehood for the Palestinian people.
Israelis have built effective defensive weapons systems but they cannot build a bomb-proof bubble over their entire country. They have built satellites and drones that can detect and shoot down some of the missiles aimed at their country and citizens but they cannot destroy every fanatic firing at them from his local mosque or schoolyard. They can attempt to prevent loss of life but without leadership from allies and the civilized world, when a hurricane approaches, Israelis can only pray that an act of God will save them.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/08/obama_ignores_israels_daily_hurricanes.html at August 31, 2011 - 11:23:18 PM CDT
The day before Hurricane Irene swept through New York, I received a concerned email from a cousin in Israel asking if we were properly prepared to weather the storm. I responded that I was not too concerned and thought the media and politicians were a bit over the top with the evacuations, warnings, and coverage. The next night, as Americans up and down the east coast remained hunkered down in the safety of their homes, a Palestinian terrorist stole a taxi, ran over two individuals, and then stabbed a number of others outside of a Tel Aviv night club. I emailed my cousin and explained that this is the exact reason that I cannot get excited over a storm -- an act of God. My cousin agreed, saying, "Yes, these are our day to day hurricanes here..."
Israel's day-to-day hurricanes are not caused by acts of God. They are caused by acts of man -- hostile, dangerous, and irrational men (and women). And while humans cannot control the weather, they can erect structures that can withstand wind and rain, hurricanes and tornados; they can build satellites that predict and track weather patterns, providing warning systems to escape the upcoming danger; and they can prevent loss of life. On the other hand, there is not much that Israel can do to protect herself from the unpredictable acts of crazed lunatics who wish her and her people complete annihilation. And the few steps that she has taken have been attacked by the international community which treats Israel and her citizens as terrorists should be in a sane world. From the barrier erected to protect Israeli citizens from suicide bombers (which has been quite successful) to retaliatory strikes aimed at terrorists rather than full Arab civilian populations (despite the fact that terrorists hide both themselves and their weapons among their populations), Israel is continually demonized at the United Nations, in the international press, and on streets and college campuses across the globe.
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has turned a blind and biased eye to the storms that Israel confronts daily. The New York Times recently reported on the White House guidelines issued to government officials across the world instructing them how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. One of the themes in the document is not only to recognize that the attacks are not "just about us," but also that "Americans must be prepared for another attack -- and must, in response, be resilient in recovering from the loss."
As we commemorate the citizens of over 90 countries who perished in the 9/11 attacks, we honor all victims of terrorism, in every nation around the world[.] ... We honor and celebrate the resilience of individuals, families, and communities on every continent, whether in New York or Nairobi, Bali or Belfast, Mumbai or Manila, or Lahore or London.
Conspicuously absent from this official White House policy statement is our ally, Israel. This is appalling. While all of these other countries have faced terrorism, Israel is the one country in the world that faces it daily from all sides -- including its border with its former friend Egypt thanks to the Mideast policies of the Obama administration. It is the one country that is threatened with annihilation on a regular basis. It is the one country that this administration has bullied and threatened over and over again since Obama entered the White House. And to issue guidelines recognizing the resilience of individuals from a litany of countries that specifically excludes Israel is simply a disgrace.
As the United States' most important strategic ally, Israel has provided our country's military with invaluable knowledge in the asymmetrical warfare that our troops abroad regularly face in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israelis have obtained this knowledge not only from the multiple wars of aggression against her since her founding but because of the resilience that the Jewish people have acquired from millennia of attacks. It is the Jewish people in general, and Israelis in particular in the latter part of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, who have taught the world what resilience is and how to survive the never-ending perfect storms of violence and aggression. To ignore this reality is not only to ignore the lessons of history, but it is cause for real concern over just how out of touch the Obama administration is.
Barack Obama has proven to be an abomination at leading this country. Conservatives and liberals alike agree that the failure of leadership from the White House is leading America down the road to demise. Were it not so sad, it would be amusing that Obama chose to use an act of God for his first attempt at real leadership. But taking the helm at the FEMA offices prior to Hurricane Irene is not leadership -- it was a simple covering-his-butt political stunt.
Leadership is what we see every time that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu speaks both here in the US and abroad. He does not need two giant teleprompters for a three-minute speech announcing his selection for a new member of his administration. Netanyahu understands storms and the need for his citizens to be resilient because he and all Israelis live in the path of a hurricane daily and it is his responsibility to ensure that his people survive each and every storm.
Leadership is also what House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen exhibited when she unveiled her U.N. reform bill on Tuesday. In the lead up to the Palestinian bid at the UN for a unilateral declaration of independence, Ros-Lehtinen has introduced a bill to cut off U.S. funding of any U.N. agency that recognizes a Palestinian state prior to resolution of the Mideast peace process (the bill also would cut off U.S. funds to UNRWA and the U.N. Human Rights Council). It is no surprise that the White House has reflexively come out in opposition to this bill. As Jonathan Tobin recognized:
Obama's "don't worry, be happy" approach to the UN has done nothing to convince its members to stop trying to kill the peace process by voting to recognize an independent Palestinian state without first requiring it to make peace with Israel. Nor has the administration used its supposedly weighty influence at Turtle Bay to transform UNRWA or the Human Rights Council, both of which exist primarily in order to perpetuate the Arab war against Israel.
September is hurricane season here in the U.S. For Israel, every day is hurricane season; however, September may present her with another perfect storm. In response to intelligence indicating that there is another viable terror threat on her border with Egypt, the Israeli navy has moved two warships to that border. At the same time, Iran has just announced that it is moving a fleet of ships to the area. The ceasefire with Gaza will last only until one of Hamas' crazed lunatics decides to once again begin firing rockets into Israel. And these same people will turn to the U.N. in the hopes that its member-states will approve a unilateral declaration of statehood for the Palestinian people.
Israelis have built effective defensive weapons systems but they cannot build a bomb-proof bubble over their entire country. They have built satellites and drones that can detect and shoot down some of the missiles aimed at their country and citizens but they cannot destroy every fanatic firing at them from his local mosque or schoolyard. They can attempt to prevent loss of life but without leadership from allies and the civilized world, when a hurricane approaches, Israelis can only pray that an act of God will save them.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/08/obama_ignores_israels_daily_hurricanes.html at August 31, 2011 - 11:23:18 PM CDT
How Saif Gaddafi and Friends Fooled the Euro-Left
Richard Pollock
On Monday, Moammar Gaddafi’s wife and three adult children surfaced in Algeria, and some expect Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam to join them. The country is not a signatory of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court — in June, the ICC issued arrests warrants for Gaddafi, Saif, and Gaddafi’s intelligence chief.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the entire family would be held accountable:
We want to see justice and accountability for Gaddafi and those members of his family with blood on their hands and those members of his regime with blood on their hands.
For decades, this was not the sentiment towards the Gaddafi family in Washington and other Western capitals. The Gaddafi extended family, particularly the children, were feted throughout Europe and in the United States — indeed, over the past decade other family members of Arab dictators have been glamorized in Western fashion magazines, by UN bodies, and by academic institutions.
Less than a year ago Saif freely mingled with Western high society, popping up in London and Monte Carlo or on a yacht off Monaco. He was considered a playboy as well as a reformer. For Saif it wasn’t about sex or money, however: as is now clear, he was mining Europe’s naive social and political leadership to advance his family’s 40-year-old dynasty. Saif is not unique, yet he is the poster child for a kind of “softer” face of the Arab political aristocracy. He is identified as the next generation of young, super-rich Middle Eastern family members who have tried to re-brand themselves as caring, compassionate Westernized Muslims. It has been lost in the American press, but until he issued his televised “rivers of blood” speech from Tripoli in February, Saif was the darling of Europe’s political establishment. He socialized with members of the House of Lords, Tony Blair’s cabinet, Prince Andrew, and well-heeled environmental activists. Saif had seduced Europe’s intelligentsia and the Continent’s left-leaning cognoscenti.
“The political class in this country have courted him,” said Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski, chairman of a British parliamentary group on Libya, in an interview with the UK’s Guardian.
He didn’t only trick blue-blooded royalty. Saif became close friends with famous Jewish European families, including the Rothschilds. In 2009, Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild threw a birthday party for Saif at the Rothschild home in Buckinghamshire, Waddesdon Manor. Saif also joined the Rothschild family at their private villa in Corfu. In 2008, Lord Rothschild’s other son Nat threw a party for Saifat his chic New York townhouse in Greenwich Village.
He bestowed the London School of Economics with a $2 million gift just as he was applying for a Ph.D. His thesis was titled “The role of civil society in the democratisation of global governance institutions: from ‘soft power’ to collective decision-making?” It was later revealed that all of the 40 interviews were conducted by outside consultants, and that most of the thesis was ghostwritten or plagiarized. Saif later followed up with another $2 million donation to the LSE to “train” Libya’s government civil servants and professionals. The revelations about Saif forced the resignation of LSE’s director, Howard Davies.
Gaddafi’s money also entered the United States. As reported previously by PJMedia, Boston-based PR firm The Monitor Group received a lucrative $3 million contract to promote Saif as the new “progressive” face of Libya and the Arab world. The firm of Harvard faculty members introduced Saif and his international charity — the Gaddafi International Foundation for Charity Associations – to Washington’s political and military establishment. They recruited Francis Fukuyama and anti-Western author Benjamin Barber to endorse Saif and Libya as a forward-looking country. Clinton White House insider Joseph Nye was a cheerleader for Saif: Nye is accused of helping Saif with his Ph.D thesis — he is a proponent of the idea of using “soft power” over military force.
Republicans represented Saif in Washington, too. Former Rep. Bob Livingston’s lobbying agency, the Livingston Group, escorted Saif around Washington, meeting members of Congress, American diplomats, and human rights activists. Livingston dropped Saif in September 2009.
But the most audacious plan Saif dreamed up was to capture the hearts and minds of Europe’s environmentalists. He claimed he was interested in transforming Libya into a environmental oasis, a new “green” paradise. This promise enchanted Euro-environmentalists. Here was a progressive Mideasterner, a member of the 30-something generation who would bring environmental nirvana to a North African state.
Saif commissioned British architect Lord Foster to oversee the development of the “Green Mountain” area of Libya, near Benghazi. He invited Robert Adam, Prince Charles’ favorite architect, to attend the inauguration in 2007. It had the feel of a lavish Cannes film festival in the desert — few of the environmentalists seemed to express misgivings about the rather large carbon footprint.
Adam later told the Guardian:
They laid on a dinner, a tented hotel, flights in private jets, the works.
It was hailed by environmentalists as the “world’s largest sustainable development.” Lord Foster told the attendees about the project:
This is one of the most beautiful and little-known landscapes on Earth. We’ve been give a unique challenge: to establish a sustainable blueprint for future development which will be sensitive to the history of the Green Mountain and to its conservation.
The heart of the environmentally sustainable complex was to be a series of exclusive hotels.
The attendees at the environmental gala seemed oblivious that while they partied in excess, 40% of Libya’s people lived below the poverty line. And half of Libya’s young are unemployed. This for a nation with the largest oil reserves in Africa.
Saif wasn’t the only Gaddafi sibling to deceive the West and to receive plaudits for work on behalf of humanity. Until the Arab Spring erupted, his sister Aisha Gaddafi had been an official goodwill ambassador for the UN Development Program. Aisha and her brothers Muhammed and Hannibal were the ones who surfaced in Algeria on Monday.
Hannibal was the bad boy in the family. He was nicknamed “Hannibal the Cannibal” because of his repeated acts of violence and ruthlessness against his staff and his model wife. Still, he remained a big hit throughout Europe, throwing parties with such stars as Beyonce, Mariah Carey, and Usher. He was best-known for driving his Ferrari 90 mph the wrong way on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. As with other problems with the authorities, he invoked diplomatic immunity.
Then there are the wives and daughters of Arab leaders. A month after Vogue profiled Syria’s first lady in a glowing article, Asma Assad proclaimed Syria the “safest country” in the Middle East. As my colleague Claudia Rosett wrote earlier this week in PJMedia: “It’s just six months since the first lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad, was on a roll as the plushly accessorized human face of Syria’s Assad regime.” Asma, the wife of Syria’s Bashar Assad, has disappeared from the society circuit since her husband began gunning down his own citizens. Slate cattily calls Asma “the Marie Antionette of the Middle East.” A 2009 Huffington Post slide show also put out a puff piece on Asma titled: “Asma Al Assad: Syria’s First Lady and All-Natural Beauty.”
There is Jordan’s cosmopolitan Queen Rania al-Abdullah. She was Glamour‘s woman of the year in 2010, and named in Vanity Fair‘s Best-Dressed International Hall of Fame. As Slate’s Noreen Malone notes, Rania is unfavorably compared by Jordan’s tribes to the “unapologetically spendy Leila Trabelsi, wife of deposed Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and the so-called ‘Imelda Marcos of the Arab world.’”
Princess of Qatar, Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, is one of the wives of the emir of Qatar. According to the Sunlight Foundation: “The UN recognizes Sheikha Mozah as a special envoy of its UNESCO Celebrity Advocates.” The left-wing American PR firm Fenton Communications once represented Mozah.
For decades the Eurosocialist political leadership and liberal American activists convinced themselves that by mouthing the right words and dressing right and appearing to identify with Western culture, the next generation of Arabs were moving toward reform.
Now we know many were frauds. Will it make any difference?
On Monday, Moammar Gaddafi’s wife and three adult children surfaced in Algeria, and some expect Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam to join them. The country is not a signatory of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court — in June, the ICC issued arrests warrants for Gaddafi, Saif, and Gaddafi’s intelligence chief.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the entire family would be held accountable:
We want to see justice and accountability for Gaddafi and those members of his family with blood on their hands and those members of his regime with blood on their hands.
For decades, this was not the sentiment towards the Gaddafi family in Washington and other Western capitals. The Gaddafi extended family, particularly the children, were feted throughout Europe and in the United States — indeed, over the past decade other family members of Arab dictators have been glamorized in Western fashion magazines, by UN bodies, and by academic institutions.
Less than a year ago Saif freely mingled with Western high society, popping up in London and Monte Carlo or on a yacht off Monaco. He was considered a playboy as well as a reformer. For Saif it wasn’t about sex or money, however: as is now clear, he was mining Europe’s naive social and political leadership to advance his family’s 40-year-old dynasty. Saif is not unique, yet he is the poster child for a kind of “softer” face of the Arab political aristocracy. He is identified as the next generation of young, super-rich Middle Eastern family members who have tried to re-brand themselves as caring, compassionate Westernized Muslims. It has been lost in the American press, but until he issued his televised “rivers of blood” speech from Tripoli in February, Saif was the darling of Europe’s political establishment. He socialized with members of the House of Lords, Tony Blair’s cabinet, Prince Andrew, and well-heeled environmental activists. Saif had seduced Europe’s intelligentsia and the Continent’s left-leaning cognoscenti.
“The political class in this country have courted him,” said Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski, chairman of a British parliamentary group on Libya, in an interview with the UK’s Guardian.
He didn’t only trick blue-blooded royalty. Saif became close friends with famous Jewish European families, including the Rothschilds. In 2009, Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild threw a birthday party for Saif at the Rothschild home in Buckinghamshire, Waddesdon Manor. Saif also joined the Rothschild family at their private villa in Corfu. In 2008, Lord Rothschild’s other son Nat threw a party for Saifat his chic New York townhouse in Greenwich Village.
He bestowed the London School of Economics with a $2 million gift just as he was applying for a Ph.D. His thesis was titled “The role of civil society in the democratisation of global governance institutions: from ‘soft power’ to collective decision-making?” It was later revealed that all of the 40 interviews were conducted by outside consultants, and that most of the thesis was ghostwritten or plagiarized. Saif later followed up with another $2 million donation to the LSE to “train” Libya’s government civil servants and professionals. The revelations about Saif forced the resignation of LSE’s director, Howard Davies.
Gaddafi’s money also entered the United States. As reported previously by PJMedia, Boston-based PR firm The Monitor Group received a lucrative $3 million contract to promote Saif as the new “progressive” face of Libya and the Arab world. The firm of Harvard faculty members introduced Saif and his international charity — the Gaddafi International Foundation for Charity Associations – to Washington’s political and military establishment. They recruited Francis Fukuyama and anti-Western author Benjamin Barber to endorse Saif and Libya as a forward-looking country. Clinton White House insider Joseph Nye was a cheerleader for Saif: Nye is accused of helping Saif with his Ph.D thesis — he is a proponent of the idea of using “soft power” over military force.
Republicans represented Saif in Washington, too. Former Rep. Bob Livingston’s lobbying agency, the Livingston Group, escorted Saif around Washington, meeting members of Congress, American diplomats, and human rights activists. Livingston dropped Saif in September 2009.
But the most audacious plan Saif dreamed up was to capture the hearts and minds of Europe’s environmentalists. He claimed he was interested in transforming Libya into a environmental oasis, a new “green” paradise. This promise enchanted Euro-environmentalists. Here was a progressive Mideasterner, a member of the 30-something generation who would bring environmental nirvana to a North African state.
Saif commissioned British architect Lord Foster to oversee the development of the “Green Mountain” area of Libya, near Benghazi. He invited Robert Adam, Prince Charles’ favorite architect, to attend the inauguration in 2007. It had the feel of a lavish Cannes film festival in the desert — few of the environmentalists seemed to express misgivings about the rather large carbon footprint.
Adam later told the Guardian:
They laid on a dinner, a tented hotel, flights in private jets, the works.
It was hailed by environmentalists as the “world’s largest sustainable development.” Lord Foster told the attendees about the project:
This is one of the most beautiful and little-known landscapes on Earth. We’ve been give a unique challenge: to establish a sustainable blueprint for future development which will be sensitive to the history of the Green Mountain and to its conservation.
The heart of the environmentally sustainable complex was to be a series of exclusive hotels.
The attendees at the environmental gala seemed oblivious that while they partied in excess, 40% of Libya’s people lived below the poverty line. And half of Libya’s young are unemployed. This for a nation with the largest oil reserves in Africa.
Saif wasn’t the only Gaddafi sibling to deceive the West and to receive plaudits for work on behalf of humanity. Until the Arab Spring erupted, his sister Aisha Gaddafi had been an official goodwill ambassador for the UN Development Program. Aisha and her brothers Muhammed and Hannibal were the ones who surfaced in Algeria on Monday.
Hannibal was the bad boy in the family. He was nicknamed “Hannibal the Cannibal” because of his repeated acts of violence and ruthlessness against his staff and his model wife. Still, he remained a big hit throughout Europe, throwing parties with such stars as Beyonce, Mariah Carey, and Usher. He was best-known for driving his Ferrari 90 mph the wrong way on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. As with other problems with the authorities, he invoked diplomatic immunity.
Then there are the wives and daughters of Arab leaders. A month after Vogue profiled Syria’s first lady in a glowing article, Asma Assad proclaimed Syria the “safest country” in the Middle East. As my colleague Claudia Rosett wrote earlier this week in PJMedia: “It’s just six months since the first lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad, was on a roll as the plushly accessorized human face of Syria’s Assad regime.” Asma, the wife of Syria’s Bashar Assad, has disappeared from the society circuit since her husband began gunning down his own citizens. Slate cattily calls Asma “the Marie Antionette of the Middle East.” A 2009 Huffington Post slide show also put out a puff piece on Asma titled: “Asma Al Assad: Syria’s First Lady and All-Natural Beauty.”
There is Jordan’s cosmopolitan Queen Rania al-Abdullah. She was Glamour‘s woman of the year in 2010, and named in Vanity Fair‘s Best-Dressed International Hall of Fame. As Slate’s Noreen Malone notes, Rania is unfavorably compared by Jordan’s tribes to the “unapologetically spendy Leila Trabelsi, wife of deposed Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and the so-called ‘Imelda Marcos of the Arab world.’”
Princess of Qatar, Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, is one of the wives of the emir of Qatar. According to the Sunlight Foundation: “The UN recognizes Sheikha Mozah as a special envoy of its UNESCO Celebrity Advocates.” The left-wing American PR firm Fenton Communications once represented Mozah.
For decades the Eurosocialist political leadership and liberal American activists convinced themselves that by mouthing the right words and dressing right and appearing to identify with Western culture, the next generation of Arabs were moving toward reform.
Now we know many were frauds. Will it make any difference?
PA Seeking Relief from the General Assembly
Eli E. Hertz
The Palestinian Authority is expected to seek recognition as an independent sovereign state in the coming General Assembly of 2011, but it will not find the law to support such a move via the General Assembly. The UN Charter does not grant the General Assembly or the International Court of Justice (ICJ) the authority to enact or amend international law.
Professor, Judge Schwebel,[1] former President of the International Court of Justice stated:
"The General Assembly of the United Nations can only, in principle, issue 'recommendations' which are not of a binding character, according to Article 10 [see below] of the Charter of the United Nations"
He also cited Judge Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, a former member judge of the International Court, who stated:
"The paramount rule of the Charter is that the General Assembly has no legal power to legislate or bind its members by way of recommendation'"
Yet another former ICJ judge, Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, was as resolved in rejecting the "illusion" that a General Assembly resolution can have "legislative effect."[2] Referencing Professor Arangio-Ruiz's work "The Normative Role of the General Assembly of the United Nations and the Declaration of Principles of Friendly Relations," Professor Julius Stone called it "perhaps the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatise on this matter." He [Professor Arangio-Ruiz] is led to conclude that the General Assembly lacks legal authority either to enact or to "declare" or "determine" or "interpret" international law so as legally to bind states by such acts, whether these states be members of the United Nations or not, and whether these states voted for or against or abstained from the relevant vote or did not take part in it. [3]
Articles of the Charter of the United Nations
UN Article 10
"The General Assembly may discuss any questions or any matters within the scope of the present Charter or relating to the powers and functions of any organs provided for in the present Charter, and, except as provided in Article 12, may make recommendations to the Members of the United Nations or to the Security Council or to both on any such questions or matters."
UN Article 12
"While the Security Council is exercising in respect of any dispute or situation the functions assigned to it in the present Charter, the General Assembly shall not make any recommendation with regard to that dispute or situation unless the Security Council so requests.
"The Secretary-General, with the consent of the Security Council, shall notify the General Assembly at each session of any matters relative to the maintenance of international peace and security which are being dealt with by the Security Council and shall similarly notify the General Assembly, or the Members of the United Nations if the General Assembly is not in session, immediately the Security Council ceases to deal with such matters."
[1] "Justice in International Law" selected writings of Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, Cambridge University Press 1994.
[2] Cited in "Israel and Palestine, Assault on the law of nations," Professor Julius Stone, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. p. 29
[3] Ibid. p. 40
The Palestinian Authority is expected to seek recognition as an independent sovereign state in the coming General Assembly of 2011, but it will not find the law to support such a move via the General Assembly. The UN Charter does not grant the General Assembly or the International Court of Justice (ICJ) the authority to enact or amend international law.
Professor, Judge Schwebel,[1] former President of the International Court of Justice stated:
"The General Assembly of the United Nations can only, in principle, issue 'recommendations' which are not of a binding character, according to Article 10 [see below] of the Charter of the United Nations"
He also cited Judge Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, a former member judge of the International Court, who stated:
"The paramount rule of the Charter is that the General Assembly has no legal power to legislate or bind its members by way of recommendation'"
Yet another former ICJ judge, Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, was as resolved in rejecting the "illusion" that a General Assembly resolution can have "legislative effect."[2] Referencing Professor Arangio-Ruiz's work "The Normative Role of the General Assembly of the United Nations and the Declaration of Principles of Friendly Relations," Professor Julius Stone called it "perhaps the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatise on this matter." He [Professor Arangio-Ruiz] is led to conclude that the General Assembly lacks legal authority either to enact or to "declare" or "determine" or "interpret" international law so as legally to bind states by such acts, whether these states be members of the United Nations or not, and whether these states voted for or against or abstained from the relevant vote or did not take part in it. [3]
Articles of the Charter of the United Nations
UN Article 10
"The General Assembly may discuss any questions or any matters within the scope of the present Charter or relating to the powers and functions of any organs provided for in the present Charter, and, except as provided in Article 12, may make recommendations to the Members of the United Nations or to the Security Council or to both on any such questions or matters."
UN Article 12
"While the Security Council is exercising in respect of any dispute or situation the functions assigned to it in the present Charter, the General Assembly shall not make any recommendation with regard to that dispute or situation unless the Security Council so requests.
"The Secretary-General, with the consent of the Security Council, shall notify the General Assembly at each session of any matters relative to the maintenance of international peace and security which are being dealt with by the Security Council and shall similarly notify the General Assembly, or the Members of the United Nations if the General Assembly is not in session, immediately the Security Council ceases to deal with such matters."
[1] "Justice in International Law" selected writings of Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, Cambridge University Press 1994.
[2] Cited in "Israel and Palestine, Assault on the law of nations," Professor Julius Stone, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. p. 29
[3] Ibid. p. 40
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