Any residual doubt that Washington has decided to take no action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons dissipated Wednesday with the news that Undersecretary of State William Burns will be participating in EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana's negotiations with Iran's nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Geneva on Saturday.

That those negotiations will fail to end or even slow Iran's progress toward nuclear weapons capabilities is a certainty. Ahead of the talks, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated for the umpteenth time that Teheran will make no compromises on its uranium enrichment activities. And so far, Iran - as opposed to Washington - has been true to its word.

Given Iran's forthrightness, there is only one reasonable explanation for the administration's decision to send Burns to meet with Jalili: The US wants it to be absolutely clear to Teheran and everyone else that it has no intention whatsoever of attacking Iran's nuclear installations.

It makes sense that Washington considers it necessary to make this point clearly. In light of the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute to US national security interests, it would have been more reasonable to assume that America would attack the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities preemptively than to assume it would allow Iran to go forward with its goal to acquire nuclear weapons.

A nuclear-armed Iran would place the US military's hard-won victories against Iranian surrogates in Iraq and its tentative success in separating Iraq's Shi'ite leaders from Teheran in jeopardy. So, too, given Iran's increasingly active support for the Taliban, an Iranian acquisition of nuclear capabilities would cast doubt on America's ability to defeat the resurgent Taliban.

The US's economic well-being would also be endangered by a nuclear-armed Iran. Teheran has repeatedly threatened to attack Saudi oil platforms and endanger the oil shipping lanes in the Straits of Hormuz. And a nuclear arsenal would give Iran unprecedented power to dictate price-setting policies for the OPEC oil cartel.

Beyond all that, a nuclear-armed Iran would directly threaten US territory in two ways. First, there is no reason not to think that Teheran would use Hizbullah cells in the US to detonate nuclear devices in US cities. Iran has already shown a willingness to use Hizbullah to carry out terror attacks in the West - most spectacularly in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

Second, it is widely feared that Iran is developing the capacity to launch an electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack against the US mainland. An EMP attack is conducted by launching a nuclear bomb into the atmosphere above a country. It needn't actually hit the country. Simply by detonating a nuclear device at sufficiently high altitude, an EMP attack can destroy the electrical grids, communications systems and military-industrial foundations of a society. Such an attack would set the US back a hundred years.

Fears of an EMP attack against the US were sparked last week by Iran's test of an advanced version of its Shihab-3 ballistic missile. The day of the missile test, William Graham, who heads a congressionally mandated commission on the EMP threat to the US, gave testimony on the issue to the House's Armed Services Committee. Graham explained that Iran has already conducted missile tests from ships in the Caspian Sea. If it acquires nuclear weapons, it will apparently have the capacity to launch a nuclear warhead capable of carrying out an EMP attack against the US from a freighter in international waters off the US coast.

While any of these threats would be sufficient to justify a preemptive attack against Iran's nuclear installations, the US still has a reasonable excuse for not conducting such an attack: Iran has made clear that if it acquires nuclear weapons, the US will not be Teheran's first target. Israel enjoys that distinction.

And since the US is Iran's second target, the Bush administration has made clear that if Iran attacks Israel, the US will launch an attack against Iran. That is, the US will fight to ensure that Iran won't be able to attack it if America moves to the head of Iran's target list. But as long as it's only No. 2, it will take no action.

The US cannot be accused of being unfair to Israel by deciding not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. After all, defending Israel is Israel's responsibility, not America's. And on this point, news reports in recent weeks have made it clear that while the US will not attack Iran, it has given Israel a "green light" for a preemptive strike on the Islamic Republic's nuclear installations. And this is no small thing.

THE BUSH administration's willingness to stand back and allow Israel to attack Iran's nuclear installations to prevent a nuclear holocaust of the Jewish state compares well with how the administration of the president's father treated Israel in the 1991 Gulf War. At that time, Israel was under threat of Scud missile borne chemical weapons attack. Although Saddam Hussein ended up not attacking Israel with chemical weapons, the threat that he would was credible. He attacked Israel with Scud missiles almost every night for the duration of the war.

Despite this obvious casus belli, the first Bush administration not only refused to politically support Israel's right to defend itself against Iraqi aggression, it took active steps to prevent Israel from attacking Iraq's Scud missile installations. Then-president George H.W. Bush refused to provide Israel with the electronic codes that would allow Israeli and US jets to identify one another as friendly aircraft. In so doing, he left open the prospect that the US would shoot down IAF jets over Iraqi airspace if Israel dared to defend itself.

So, mindful of the precedent set by his father, President George W. Bush's decision to leave the door wide open for an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran is a positive development. But an open door is only significant if someone is willing to walk through it. And it is far from clear that the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government has any intention of doing so.

For an Israeli government to walk through that door, its leaders would have to be vested with a sense of national destiny and a modicum of responsibility and competence. But as Wednesday's bodies-for-murderers deal with Hizbullah demonstrated, the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government has no sense of national destiny and no competence to lead the country. What Wednesday's spectacle showed is that Israel's leaders' horizons are limited to the space between yesterday's news and tomorrow's headlines.

On Wednesday, Israel received the corpses of IDF hostages Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser in exchange for baby-murderer Samir Kuntar, four Hizbullah terrorists and 200 bodies of Palestinian and Lebanese murderers. Ahead of the swap, the Almagor terror victims' advocacy group published the names of 180 Israelis who were murdered by terrorists Israel released in recent years.

As the Almagor report showed, many of the terrorists Israel released - including Saleh Shehadeh, Nasser Abu Hmeid and Abdullah Kawasmeh - became senior terror commanders, responsible for building the terror infrastructure that caused the death of hundreds of Israelis. Others, such as Matzab Hashalmon, who was released in the 2004 terrorists-for-drug dealer-and-Hizbullah-spy Elhanan Tenenbaum deal, were quickly recruited as suicide bombers. Hashalmon murdered 16 Israelis when he detonated on a bus in Beersheva a couple of months after he was released.

The government knows for a fact that Wednesday's deal will lead directly to the murder of more Israelis and to the abduction and murder of more IDF soldiers. It simply doesn't care. The Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government doesn't care about protecting the public. It only cares about tomorrow's headlines. And Wednesday's deal allowed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Eli Yishai to give speeches where they waxed poetic about Israel's loyalty to its dead soldiers and to have their pictures taken as they leaned somberly over Regev's and Goldwasser's flag-draped coffins.

They looked so impressive in those photos that it was easy for the public to miss what they had just done. The public could have easily missed the fact that in their "deeply moral, and patriotic" decision to trade Samir Kuntar - who murdered four-year-old Einat Haran by crushing her skull on a rock after he executed her father Danny in front of her - for Regev's and Goldwasser's body parts, these politicians signed the death warrants of untold numbers of Israelis. And if they go forward with their pledge to release a thousand terrorists for IDF hostage Gilad Schalit, they will sign the death warrants of still more Israeli men, women and children.

THE GOVERNMENT'S devotion to its yesterday-to-tomorrow's-headlines policy horizon is fed by the local media. Disgracefully, the Israeli media's coverage of events is so mindlessly shallow that senior journalists simply refuse to make any connection between tomorrow's threats and today's decisions. That this is the case was born out in the media's grotesque treatment of Wednesday's corpses-for-murderers swap.

In the weeks leading up to the government's decision to accept this Faustian bargain, the media cast the issue as the personal affair of the Regev and Goldwasser families and ignored completely the ramifications of the deal for the Israeli people as a whole. In their puerile depiction of the story as a personal story, the media stooped to treating Kuntar as the personal enemy of the Haran family, instead of as the enemy of the Jewish people as a whole. Refusing to note the national repercussions of the deal, the media acted as though the entire story was a struggle between opposing families: the Regevs and Goldwasser on one side and the Harans on the other. Israel as a nation was nothing but an abstract, unimportant bystander.

Given the media's refusal to cover anything that they can't personalize and trivialize, the media are incapable of adequately reporting the danger that Iran's nuclear program constitutes to Israel as a whole. And since they will not concentrate on this basic reality, the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government feels no pressure to contend with the danger. It is a non-story. And non-stories produce no policies.

Aside from that, although a successful strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would win them considerable clout with the public, an unsuccessful attack would end their political careers. And their careers are the only thing Israel's leaders are concerned with.

This being the state of affairs in Israel today, all the open doors in all the world won't help Israel in its moment of crisis. Only two things can guarantee that Israel's leaders will act against Iran. Either someone will come up with a way to guarantee success - and this is not likely; or the government will fall and the nation will elect new leaders who understand their responsibility for Israel's national destiny and are capable of walking the nation through that open door.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 18, 2008 at 4:37 PM Permalink | Comments (7) | Email | De.icio.us | Digg This | Print

At the end of the week, Saeed Jalili, Iran's nuclear negotiator, is scheduled to arrive in Geneva for yet another round of talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. It is unclear what the two have to discuss.

On July 4, the Iranians sent their written response to the West's latest offer to appease them. In and of itself, the offer, made by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany and communicated to Iran by Solana, constituted a major achievement for the Iranians. It promised civilian nuclear power plants, economic assistance, new airplanes, agricultural assistance, hi-tech transfers and a freeze on the expansion of economic sanctions against the nuclear-weapons-seeking mullocracy. In exchange for all of that, the Iranians weren't even required to end their uranium enrichment activities. To get the ball of concessions rolling, all the Iranians needed to do was promise not to expand their current enrichment activities.

If Iran were ever even remotely interested in reaching a deal with the international community, this was the deal it would have taken. For the unspoken subtext of the agreement was that the international community is willing to accept a nuclear armed Iran in exchange for the mere appearance of Iranian willingness to bow to international pressure. As David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, explained to Newsweek last week, at their current, known level of uranium enrichment the Iranians are producing 1.2 kg. of enriched uranium a day. And at this enrichment level, they will be able to produce a nuclear bomb by next year. So the international community's willingness to accept continued Iranian uranium enrichment at current levels is a clear signal of the international community's willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

And yet, that offer still wasn't good enough for the Iranians. Their written response didn't even discuss the issue of uranium enrichment. They just asked for more concessions in exchange for nothing. And now they believe that their "counterproposal" should form the basis of this week's round of discussions.

As Iran submitted its response to the offer, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dispatched his foreign policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati to the media to discuss Iran's interest in accepting the West's offer. The Western media and some EU officials were so thrilled by the gesture that the immediate coverage of Iran's response lent the impression that Iran had in fact accepted the offer.

IT WAS only two days later, after those same officials sat down and read what the Iranians wrote that they realized that they had been tricked. And just to be sure that there was no residual optimism, senior Iranian leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manoushehr Mottaki stated clearly that they would never accept any deal that places limitations on their uranium enrichment.

After verbally snuffing out all hopes for an agreement, Iran proceeded to show off its military prowess by testing ballistic missiles last week and augmenting those tests with verbal threats to destroy Israel and attack all US bases in the Middle East.

And still despite all of this, Solana looks forward to his meetings this Saturday with Jalili with hope for an accommodation. After Iran rejected a deal that effectively offered it acceptance as a nuclear-armed state, he still believes that the best way to deal with Iran's clear intention to acquire and use nuclear weapons is to offer it membership in the World Trade Organization.

Solana's unshakeable faith that Iran can be appeased is to be expected. After all, Solana was on the first flight to Teheran to begin negotiating with the mullahs the minute that Iran's nuclear program was exposed five years ago. And he's been running the talks ever since - first for France, Germany and Britain, and then starting last May, for the US as well.

Solana cannot acknowledge that the talks have failed. He is too personally invested in them to admit that Iran has been using him as the diplomatic fig leaf behind which it has pushed forward with its nuclear bomb program.

SOLANA IS a perfect example of why the oft repeated policy mantra "there's never any harm in talking" is incorrect. The basic idea behind that assertion is that negotiations can never cause damage, they can only do good - by resolving a conflict without resorting to force. But they can and often do cause tremendous harm - and to the wrong side.

If Europe's initial justification for negotiating with Iran was that it wished to convince Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, over time that justification gave way to a more basic justification - to deny that the talks had failed. That is, after it became clear that the talks would not succeed in engendering a change in Iran's behavior, the parties involved changed their focus from Iran to themselves. The talks were about them. And if the talks failed, it wasn't because Iran refused to listen to reason. It was because the West hadn't given it a good enough offer. So just by engaging Iran and its ilk, these Westerners were transformed from Western representatives to the Iranian regime to advocates of the Iranian regime in the West.

As a result it has become nearly impossible to have coherent discussion about the Iranian nuclear program. For when the "experts" are called to tell us how to proceed in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, they instead exhort us to engage at ever higher levels with the Iranians in order to show them our good intentions toward them.

And of course, it isn't only Iran that is benefitting from the West's false belief in the harmlessness of negotiations. Iran's proxies in Syria and Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are also prospering thanks to the West's belief that negotiations can only do good.

THE LATEST display of this Western preference for the pomp of accommodation over the responsibility of confrontation was French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Mediterranean summit in Paris this week. The purpose of the parley, which Sarkozy has been trying to organize since entering office last May, was to project himself as a global leader in international affairs and to project France as an important country in Europe and throughout the world.

Although the summit - like the Barcelona and Madrid summits before it - was officially focused on building economic cooperation among the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea and Europe, its actual purpose was to propel France to the position of peacemaker between Israel and its neighbors, and specifically between Israel and Syria. And to do this, the success or failure of the entire conference was contingent upon Syrian President Bashar Assad's willingness to participate and sit in the same room as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

To bring Syria on board, Sarkozy was compelled to accept the Assad regime as legitimate. And to do this, he needed to ignore the nature of the new Lebanese government, Syria's role in establishing it, Syria's support for terrorism, its feudal relationship with Iran and its role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and a host of anti-Syrian Lebanese parliamentarians and journalists over the past three years.

Last Friday, just ahead of the Paris summit, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora announced that he had formed his new, Hizbullah-controlled government. Saniora was compelled to abdicate control over Lebanon to Iran's foreign legion as a result of Hizbullah's violent takeover of the country in May. And Hizbullah justified its coup by noting that Saniora's pro-democracy March 14 movement in the Lebanese parliament had failed to elect a new president to replace Emil Lahoud, who completed his term last November. Of course, Saniora only failed to elect a new president because Syria and Hizbullah had murdered so many March 14 movement members of parliament that he no longer had enough votes to elect a candidate without Hizbullah's approval.

After Saniora announced his new Iranian-controlled government, Assad was quick to announce that he would be opening a Syrian embassy in Beirut for the first time ever. Assad's announcement was greeted with glee in the Elysee Palace and throughout the West. It was perceived as Syria's first acknowledgement of Lebanese sovereignty. But this is a false perception.

Syria's announcement was not a sign of moderation by Damascus but a sign of radicalization. Syria has not accepted Lebanon's sovereignty. It has accepted Iranian dominion over Lebanon. And in accepting Iran's control of Lebanon, Assad effectively acknowledged that today Syria is nothing more than Iran's Arab vassal state.

Rather than stand up for Lebanon in its hour of need, Sarkozy joined forces with the Bush administration and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and pretended that Saniora and his pro-democracy forces are still in charge of the country. He pressured Israel to give Mt. Dov to Iranian-controlled Lebanon in spite of the fact that the territory is both vital to Israel's security and is part of the Golan Heights. And rather than boycott Syria for its role in destroying Lebanon, Sarkozy chose to embrace Assad as a peacemaker.

By doing all of this, Sarkozy argued he would place himself in a position of acting as an honest broker in talks between Israel and Syria. But of course like Solana in his constant struggle to find the right mix of concessions to convince Iran to only enrich small quantities of uranium, so Sarkozy's concessions to Syria served only to embolden Assad still further.

Assad agreed to come to Paris. But he refused to have anything to do with Olmert. And then, once he arrived in Paris, he gave an interview to Al-Jazeera explaining that he wouldn't sign a peace treaty with Israel even if it gives him the entire Golan Heights. As far as he is concerned, Israel has no right to expect him to normalize relations. And of course Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah al-Islam and all the rest of the terror groups living in Damascus are simply "resistance" groups and perfectly legitimate. And by the way, Iran, he assured us, is not developing nuclear bombs to the best of his knowledge.

So in exchange for recognizing the new Iranian-controlled regime in Lebanon and embracing Syria to the bosom of civilized nations, Sarkozy provided Assad with an international bullhorn to oppose everything that Sarkozy claims to be interested in achieving. But now that he's embraced engagement as his chosen strategy for dealing with Syria and Lebanon, he can do nothing but proceed with what he started. And so he committed himself to paying a state visit to Damascus by September.

Neither Sarkozy nor Solana are at all unique. Their associates in Europe, Olmert and his ministers, the State Department and most US political leaders support negotiating with rogue regimes that refuse to agree to anything except the West's need to make more concessions to them. And all of these leaders, at a certain point, have claimed that those negotiations mustn't be endangered by more confrontational policies that might actually have a chance of advancing their national interests.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 14, 2008 at 8:22 PM Permalink | Comments (5) | Email | De.icio.us | Digg This | Print

Exalting at her liberation by the Colombian military last week, former hostage Ingrid Betancourt exclaimed, "This is a miracle, a miracle! We have an amazing military. I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this."

Betancourt's statement made thousands of Israelis wince.

Held hostage in the Colombian jungles for six years by the narco-terror group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Betancourt, a dual Colombian-French citizen who was a Colombian senator and presidential candidate at the time she was abducted, obviously had not heard the news about the "new Israel."

Her statements were based on her memories of the "old Israel." She didn't know that the "new Israel" doesn't fight terrorists. The "new Israel" views fighting terrorists as an exercise in futility. Its leaders and military chiefs alike repeat endlessly the mantra that there is no military victory to be had, only a political accommodation.

She didn't know that the week before she was rescued, the "new Israel" made a deal with Hizbullah to release five senior Lebanese terrorists, an unknown number of Palestinian terrorists and hundreds of bodies of dead terrorists in exchange for the bodies of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, who were murdered by Hizbullah two years ago.

The "new Israel" is the Israel that maintains one-sided "cease-fires" with Hamas and is poised to make a deal with Hamas by which it will release up to a thousand Palestinian terrorists in exchange for IDF hostage Gilad Schalit.

No, Betancourt, was thinking of the "old Israel" - the Israel that electrified the world when it sent its commandos thousands of kilometers to free its hostages in Entebbe 32 years ago. It was that memory of Israeli heroism that doubtless gave hope to Betancourt and her fellow hostages as they languished in FARC captivity in the jungle, malnourished, ill-treated and terrorized. The Entebbe rescue allowed them to fantasize that one day, they too would be rescued and their tormentors would be brought to justice. And last week, their dreams came true.

Betancourt had reasons beside her plight as a hostage to associate Colombia's struggle with Israel's. At the time she was abducted, both countries faced similar political and military challenges, and at the time both countries seemed to be embarking on similar paths to surmount them.

When Betancourt was kidnapped in April 2002, Colombia had just disavowed a failed strategy of appeasing FARC. To bring FARC to the negotiating table, then-president Andres Pastrana agreed to transfer control over a swathe of Colombian territory the size of Switzerland to FARC. Rather than reciprocate this peace-offering with one of its own, FARC used the safe haven to increase its recruitment of terrorists and intensify its kidnapping campaign and drug trafficking operations.

For nearly four years, Pastrana refused to disavow the phony "peace process" in spite of repeated FARC attacks. It was only in February 2002, after FARC hijacked an airliner and kidnapped its fifth lawmaker in a year, that Pastrana finally repudiated his appeasement drive.

Similarly, in 2002, Israel was in the grips of an unprecedented Palestinian terror campaign with suicide bombings going off almost daily. Then-prime minister Ariel Sharon had been elected the previous year to replace the discredited Ehud Barak as premier after the latter's appeasement strategy at Camp David had failed and Israel's eight-year-old Oslo appeasement strategy had fallen apart. When Betancourt was taken prisoner, Sharon had just launched Operation Defensive Shield with the express purpose of defeating the Palestinian terror networks in Judea and Samaria.

WHAT BETANCOURT didn't know was that since her abduction, Israel and Colombia have gone their separate ways. Under President Alvero Uribe, who was elected after her capture, Colombia has moved steadily toward full victory over FARC. On the other hand, Israel has abandoned victory as a strategic concept for contending with its enemies.

Israel's abdication of its struggle against its terrorist enemies was as swift and unmistakable as it was inexplicable. Rather than following up Israel's military defeat of the Palestinian terror machine in Judea and Samaria in 2002 with a similar operation in Gaza or with a political offensive against the PLO that Defensive Shield exposed as the central engine behind the Palestinian terror war, Sharon opted to withdraw from the fight and return to the discredited policy of appeasement that Israeli voters had twice rejected.

First Sharon accepted the so-called road map to peace in 2003. Predicated on the false assumption that the Palestinians are interested in peace with Israel and can be appeased into accepting statehood and Israel's right to exist, the road map precludes any Israeli option for victory.

When the Palestinians refused to end their support for Israel's destruction in spite of the road map, Sharon abandoned appeasement-for-peace and opted instead for surrender-for-quiet. His unilateral surrender of Gaza demoralized Israeli society, weakened Israel's democratic institutions and propelled Hamas and Iran to power in Gaza. Rather than recognize that the move had been a strategic catastrophe that called into question Israel's ability to act as an ally in the US-led war on terror, Sharon launched Kadima as a new political party dedicated entirely to appeasement and capitulation.

After Ehud Olmert replaced Sharon as premier, he brought Kadima to victory in the March 2006 election by pledging to expand Sharon's "capitulation for quiet" strategy to Judea and Samaria. When Israel's neighbors responded to that agenda with war from Lebanon and Gaza, Olmert and his colleagues were forced to return to their previous appeasement-for-peace agenda. But their refusal to countenance the option of victory over Israel's implacable foes remains the order of the day.

In contrast, the Uribe government in Colombia has never veered from its single-minded goal of defeating FARC both militarily and politically. With US assistance, Uribe has rebuilt Colombia's military into a highly competent counterinsurgency force. His counterinsurgency has brought both defeat and demoralization to FARC's doorstep. FARC's guerrilla force, which numbered 18,000 just a few years ago, has been reduced by an estimated 50 percent. Busy with their own survival, FARC's remaining forces have been unable to conduct any sustained operations against the Uribe government or rank and file Colombians in recent years. Restored security has brought economic growth and prosperity. And both have stabilized the Uribe government.

Like the Palestinians, FARC enjoys the support of the international Left and leftist governments. In FARC's case, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has been the terror group's primary military, financial and political backer. Ecuador, led by Rafael Correa's Chavez-allied leftist government, has also become a major sponsor of FARC.

In March, Uribe risked regional war to defeat FARC by raiding a FARC base on the Ecuadorian side of the border. The raid was immensely successful. FARC's deputy commander Raul Reyes was killed and his computers - carrying massive intelligence information - were seized.

As Ecuador cut off diplomatic relations and Chavez deployed troops to his border with Colombia, Uribe stalwartly defended the raid. He defended the operation even as the French government attacked him, claiming that Reyes had been their negotiating partner in their quest to secure Betancourt's release.

Israel's governments have systematically prevented the publication of information regarding Fatah's leadership role in the terror war, and its ties to Iran and Syria. They have also refused to take any action against Israeli organizations and politicians bankrolled illegally by foreign governments. In contrast, Uribe moved quickly to use the information exposed by Reyes's computers to discredit Chavez, FARC and their Colombian and foreign sympathizers.

Reyes's files showed that neither FARC nor Chavez nor pro-Chavez Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba were negotiating Betancourt's release in good faith. Understanding that she was their most powerful bargaining chip against the Uribe government, in their internal discussions, all three attested to their opposition to her release. Uribe's release of the information decreased French pressure for a deal. Chavez was further discredited and Bogota's prosecutor opened a criminal probe against Cordoba on treason-related charges.

According to media reports, the Ecuador raid also provided the Colombian military with actionable intelligence it needed to move forward with its plans for last week's rescue mission. That is, each successful raid paved the way for the next achievement.

THE ISRAELI media's response to the Colombia rescue mission has been to inflate the "Israeli role" in the mission. Numerous reports have been published in the local press about the fact that the Colombians hired retired IDF generals Yisrael Ziv and Yossi Kupperwasser to help them build up their counterterror capabilities.

Far from obscuring the yawning gap between Colombia and Israel, these reports bring Israel's abandonment of the fight into sharp relief. They show clearly that Israel's decision to capitulate has nothing to do with an inability to fight to victory. It is a failure of will rather than a failure of capacity that has brought Israel to its current cowed and humiliated condition where its media argues over how many terrorists should be exchanged for Schalit and ignores completely the very notion that he can be rescued.

And Israel could attempt to rescue him. While success is never assured, it is a fact that just as Colombia was able to find and rescue Betancourt and her fellow hostages in the jungle, so Israel could, if it dared, conduct a competent operation aimed at rescuing Schalit in Gaza. Like Colombia it could acquire the intelligence necessary to plan and carry out such a raid. Like Colombia, its forces are competent to succeed in such an endeavor.

Until last week's raid, one of the main sources of pressure on the Uribe government was Betancourt's family. Her mother and children met frequently with Chavez and railed against Uribe in their eagerness to see her released.

Speaking of her experience and of her rescue in Paris this week, Betancourt, who over the years tried to escape five times, was clear that she preferred freedom to slavery, even if it came only in death. As French philosopher Andre Glucksmann wrote in City Journal, it was freedom, not life, that she held most sacred. And while she understood her family's actions, she clearly did not embrace their pacifism as she praised Uribe for rescuing her despite the risk that the mission would fail and she and her fellow hostages would be killed.

It is hard to imagine that as a soldier, Schalit feels any differently. Why should we assume that he prefers to live as a slave rather than to die in a quest for freedom?

It is a travesty that in their inexplicable abandonment of honorable struggle against murderous foes in favor of dangerous appeasement, Olmert and his colleagues have denied Schalit the respect due a warrior and have denied the IDF the right to fight for Israel's freedom.

Posted on July 11, 2008 at 5:26 PM Permalink | Comments (10) | Email | De.icio.us | Digg This | Print

Last Wednesday's terror attack in Jerusalem was unique. Due to the fact that Husam Taysir Dwayat bulldozed his victims outside of Jerusalem Capitol Studios where many of the foreign television networks have their offices, his was one of only two attacks to have been caught live on camera.

The only other attack which was filmed was the lynching of IDF reservists Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche at a Palestinian police station in Ramallah on October 12, 2000. That attack, which showed the mob basking in the blood of the two men, was filmed by an Italian camerawoman from the privately owned Mediaset television station. The attack last Wednesday was filmed by the BBC whose correspondent Tim Franks witnessed the carnage from the outset through his office window.

Their film documentation is not the only thing those two attacks share. The lynch in Ramallah and the attack last Wednesday are also the only attacks that elicited abject apologies by otherwise arrogant media giants. In the aftermath of the lynch, Riccardo Cristiano, Italy's state-owned RAI network's correspondent in Israel, wrote a groveling apology to the Palestinian Authority in which he went to painstaking lengths to explain that it was not his network, but his competitor that published the footage.

In the letter which the PA published in its Al Hayat al Jadida daily, Cristiano fawned, "We always respect the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for [journalistic] work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work. We thank you for your trust, and you can be sure that this is not our way of acting. We will not do such a thing."

ON FRIDAY, the BBC published an apology for broadcasting the footage of Wednesday's carnage. The film showed an unarmed, furloughed IDF commando climb onto Dwayat's bulldozer just after Dwayat murdered Batsheva Unterman by crushing her car. It showed the soldier grabbing a gun belonging to a security guard who was unsuccessfully trying to restrain Dwayat and shooting Dwayat three times in the head. The film did not show Dwayat or any of his victims dying. What it showed was the terror of the wounded, Dwayat's murderousness and the soldier's heroism.

Yet, the network declared, "It's not normally the BBC's policy to show the moment of death on screen. These are always extremely difficult decisions to make. However, on reflection, we felt that the pictures featured on Wednesday's News at Ten did not strike the right editorial balance between the demands of accuracy and the potential impact on the program's audience."

At first glance, it is not at all clear what the BBC was talking about. Its film was a journalistic achievement. Through it, tens of millions of people worldwide were able to see for themselves what a terror attack against innocents looks like from a fairly sterile angle. What did the BBC have to apologize for?

In this case, as in the case of the lynching eight years ago, the reason the BBC apologized is not because the film's images were too gruesome, but because it strayed from the accepted narratives of the Palestinian war against Israel. To maintain the narratives, "the right editorial balance between the demands of accuracy and the potential impact on the program's audience," is one that engenders the belief that Israel is either morally indistinguishable from the Palestinians, or that Israel is morally inferior to the Palestinians.

The metaphor for the first narrative is the so-called "cycle of violence." The BBC itself spelled out this narrative in the aftermath of the lynching in Ramallah. In a program called, "When Peace Died," broadcast in November 2000, the BBC explained, "Two images captured the hatred that has destroyed the peace process in the Middle East. Mohammed al-Dura, the boy from Gaza, shielded by his father but still dying under a hail of bullets fired by Israeli soldiers and the lynching and brutal murder of two Israeli reservists by a Palestinian mob."

The metaphor for the second narrative is the Holocaust. It was first used explicitly early on by Catherine Nay, a well-known news anchor from Europe1 network. In late 2000 Nay declared, "The death of Muhammad [al-Dura] cancels out, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air from the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto."

THE STORY of Muhammad al-Dura plays a central role for both narratives. On September 30, 2000, France 2 public television network's bureau chief in Israel Charles Enderlin aired a 57-second, heavily edited film which he proclaimed portrayed then 12-year-old al-Dura being killed by IDF forces at Netzarim Junction in Gaza. France 2 distributed the film for free to the global media and al-Dura's image became the icon of the Palestinian war against Israel. It directly incited anti-Jewish violence in Israel and throughout the world.

Questions about the veracity of the France 2 account arose immediately. An IDF investigation launched by then OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia proved through ballistic evidence that it was physically impossible for IDF forces to have shot - much less killed - al-Dura. Over the ensuing years, a handful of journalists and researchers produced a wealth of evidence demonstrating that Enderlin's story was false.

One of the researchers was a media critic named Philippe Karsenty. He asserted that the film was a hoax on his Web site Media Ratings and dared Enderlin and France 2 to sue him for libel while demanding that they release the 27 minutes of film they claimed they had of the September 30, 2000 incident at Netzarim Junction.

While refusing to release the footage, Enderlin and France 2 did sue Karsenty for libel. In late 2006, after receiving a letter of recommendation for Enderlin from then French president Jacques Chirac, and in spite of the reams of evidence supporting his claim that Karsenty presented at the trial, the court convicted Karsenty. Karsenty appealed the ruling.

The appellate court ordered Enderlin and France 2 to produce the unedited footage. Although he refused to show the footage in its entirety, from the 19 minutes of rushes that Enderlin did present, three things became obvious. First, the IDF could not have killed al-Dura. Second, the footage showed Palestinians staging scenes of fighting with imaginary IDF forces. And third, the footage showed no evidence that al-Dura had been shot or that he died that day at Netzarim Junction. On May 22, the appellate court overturned Karsenty's conviction.

IT MIGHT have been thought that the French, Israeli and international media which had for seven years supported Enderlin against the small band of independent investigators would finally abandon him. So too, it might have been thought that after seven years of defending an indefensible piece of journalistic malpractice Enderlin would finally own up to his misdeed. But the opposite occurred.

In Israel, leading left-wing commentators like Gideon Levy, and Tom Segev from Ha'aretz, Arad Nir from Channel 2 and Larry Derfner from The Jerusalem Post accused Karsenty and his allies of waging a witch hunt against Enderlain to advance their political agendas. In France, the media initially ignored the story.

Then, less than a week after the verdict, the Who's Who of the rather large anti-Israeli branch of the French media published a petition in the left-wing Le Nouvel Observateur decrying Karsenty's exhaustively documented dossier against the al-Dura story as a "seven-year hate-filled smear campaign." In all, some 300 reporters and hundreds more notables signed the petition. For their part, France 2 and Enderlin announced their intention to appeal the ruling to the French Supreme Court.

In her account of the court case and its aftermath in the Weekly Standard, French journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet attributes the French media's reaction to what she sees as a uniquely French practice of never apologizing for misdeeds.

There is doubtlessly some truth to this. But arrogance is not the unique trait of the French media and elite. And given the near universality of media arrogance, how can one explain the BBC's quick apology for its broadcast of its footage from the attack in Jerusalem last week? And how can one explain Cristiano's obsequious letter to the PA in 2000?

THE ANSWER of course is that arrogance alone cannot account for the media's defense of Enderlin. If Enderlin had been caught broadcasting a libelous report about the Palestinians, the media and France 2 would have cast him off immediately. But here there is more at stake than one man's reputation. Enderlin didn't create the narrative of Palestinian innocence or at least moral equivalence. In filing the clearly false story of al-Dura, Enderlin was advancing a cause that all his anti-Israel colleagues in France, Israel and worldwide have embraced. If he goes down, their indispensable narrative is liable to go down with him.

Over the past eight years of the jihad against Israel, among countless examples, three instances of open media collusion with Israel's enemies stand out for their strategic impact on the course of events. First there is the al-Dura affair. It was followed by the mythical "Jenin massacre" in April 2002. That in turn was followed by the fabricated "massacre" at Kafr Kana in Lebanon in July 2006.

The al-Dura story solidified the Palestinian narrative of victimization by Israel just months after they rejected statehood and peace at Camp David. When the so-called Jenin massacre was reported in April 2002, the IDF was in the midst of Operation Defensive Shield. Just before the Palestinians began making allegations of an Israeli massacre, IDF forces uncovered documentary evidence proving that the Palestinian war against Israel was run by the PA and Yassir Arafat. By fabricating the massacre, the PA was saved from being delegitimized as an actor in Washington. The Israeli peace camp was also resuscitated from its death throes.

As the Winograd Commission documented in its final report on the Second Lebanon War, the media reports of the fabricated massacre of Lebanese civilians by an IAF bomber in Kafr Kana in South Lebanon caused US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to end US support for an Israeli military victory over Iran's Lebanese proxy and to pressure Israel to accept a cease-fire leaving Hizbullah intact.

Even as analyses of the reports from Jenin and Kafr Kana like the reports on the al-Dura affair clearly demonstrated that the IDF had committed no atrocities, the distorted footage put out by the media made it impossible for Israel to defend itself in the court of public opinion. Like the al-Dura affair, the media's open collusion with the Palestinians in Jenin and Hizbullah in Kafr Kana prolonged false narratives predicated on Israeli aggression just as they were about to be finally laid to rest.

So it is not merely arrogance that makes Enderlin and his colleagues unwilling to come clean anymore than it was humility that made the BBC and Cristiano apologize. Depressingly, what all of this illustrates is that the media will only give us the information they wish us to have. And that information's relationship to the truth is arbitrary at best.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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