Caroline Glick :: May 2010 Archives

May 2010 Archives

May 31, 2010, 4:21 PM

Ending Israel's losing streak

These words are being written before the dust has had a chance to settle on Monday night's naval commando raid of the Gaza-bound Turkish flotilla of terror supporters. The raid's full range of operational failures still cannot be known. Obviously the fact that the mission ended with at least six soldiers wounded and at least ten Hamas supporters dead makes clear that there were significant failures in both the IDF's training for and execution of the mission.

The Navy and other relevant bodies will no doubt study these failures. But they point to a larger strategic failure that has crippled Israel's capacity to contend with the information war being waged against it. Until this failure is remedied, no after-action investigation, no enhanced training, no new electronic warfare doodad will make a significant impact on Israel's ability to contend with the next Hamas flotilla that sets sail for Gaza.

In the space of four days, Israel has suffered two massive defeats. A straight line runs between the anti-Israel resolution passed last Friday at the UN's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference and the Hamas flotilla. And in both cases, Israeli officials voiced "surprise," at these defeats.

Given the months-long build-up to the NPT review conference, and the weeks-long build-up to the Turkish-Hamas flotilla, that surprise cannot be attributed to a lack of information. What it points to rather is a cognitive failure of Israel's leaders - from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu down - to understand the nature of the war being waged against us. And it is this fundamental failure of cognition that has landed six soldiers in the hospital, Israel's international reputation in tatters and Israeli spokesmen - from Netanyahu down - searching for a way to describe a reality they do not understand and explain how they will cope with challenges that confound them.

The reality is simple and stark. Israel is the target of a massive information war that is unprecedented in scale and scope. This war is being waged primarily by a massive consortium of the international Left and the Arab and Islamic worlds. The staggering scale of the forces aligned against Israel is demonstrated by two things.

The Hamas abetting Free Gaza website published a list of some 222 organizations that endorsed the terror-supporting flotilla. The listed organizations hail from the four corners of the earth. They include Jewish anti-Israel groups as well as Christian, Islamic and non-religious anti-Israel groups. It is hard to think of any cause other than Israel-bashing that could unite such disparate forces.

The second indicator of the scope of the war against Israel is far more devastating than the list of groups that endorsed the pro-Hamas flotilla. That indicator is the fact that at the UN on Friday, 189 governments of 189 countries came together as one to savage Israel. There is no other issue that commands such unanimity. The NPT review conference demonstrated that the only way the international community will agree on anything is if its members are agreeing that Israel has no right to defend itself. The NPT review conference's campaign against Israel shows that the 222 organizations supporting Hamas are a reflection of the will of the majority - not a minority - of the nations of the world.

This war against Israel is nothing new. It has been going on since the dawn of modern Zionism 150 years ago. In many ways, it is just the current iteration of the eternal war against the Jewish people.

The Red-Green alliance's aims are twofold. It seeks to delegitimize Israel's right to exist and it seeks to make it impossible for Israel to defend itself. If these aims are met, Israel's destruction will become an historic inevitability.

Until US President Barack Obama took office, Israel's one steady asset in this war was the US. Until last year, the US consistently refused to join the Red-Green alliance because its leaders recognized that the alliance's campaign against Israel was part and parcel of the Red-Green campaign against US superpower status in the Middle East and throughout the world. Indeed, some US leaders recognized that the Red-Green alliance's animus towards Israel stemmed from the same source as its rejection of American exceptionalism.

Dismally, what the US's vote in favor of the NPT review conference's final anti-Israel and by default pro-Iranian resolution makes clear is that under President Barack Obama, the US is no longer Israel's reliable ally. Indeed, what the US's vote shows is that the Obama administration's ideological preferences place it on the side of the Red-Green alliance against Israel. No amount of backpedalling by the Obama administration can make up the damage caused by its act of belligerence against Israel at the NPT review conference.

If Israel's leaders were better informed, in the lead-up to the NPT conference they would have recognized a number of things. They would have realized that Obama's anti-nuclear conference in April, his commitment to a nuclear-free world, as well as his general ambivalence - at best - to US global leadership rendered it all but inevitable that he would turn on Israel at the NPT review conference. The truth is that Egypt's call for the denuclearization of Israel jibes with Obama's own repeatedly held views both regarding Israel and regarding the US's own nuclear arsenal.

Armed with this basic understanding of Obama's inclinations, Israel should have taken for granted that the NPT conference would target Israel. Consequently, in months preceding the conference, Israel should have stated loudly and consistently that as currently constituted the NPT serves as the chief enabler of nuclear proliferation rather than the central instrument for preventing nuclear proliferation it was supposed to be. North Korea exploited its status as an NPT signatory to develop its nuclear arsenal. Today Iran exploits its status as an NPT signatory to develop nuclear weapons. Unless the NPT is fundamentally revised it will continue to serve as the primary instrument for nuclear proliferation.

Had this been Israel's position, it would have been able to undercut US arguments in favor of signing onto the anti-Israel final resolution. So too, such a position would have prepared Israel to cogently explain its rejection of the final resolution without sounding hypocritical.

And that is the thing of it. The Red-Green alliance's aim at the NPT conference was to discredit Israel's deterrent capacity while delegitimizing its right to take preemptive action against Iran's nuclear facilities. Now, due to Israel's failure to make its case against the NPT in the months leading up to the conference, as Israel's enemies use the US-supported final resolution to claim that Israel's opposition to Iran's nuclear weapons program is hypocritical, Israel lacks a cognitive framework for responding.

The fact that Israel still doesn't get the point is made clear by the government's response to the decision. Israel's denunciation of the resolution makes no mention of the fact that the NPT regime itself has become the chief institutional enabler of nuclear proliferation today. So too, disastrously, in a clear bid to pretend away Obama's treachery, Israel actually applauded Obama for emptily criticizing the resolution he voted for. This Israeli response compounds the damage and ensures that the assault will continue and grow stronger.

As to the flotilla, the challenge it presented Israel was nothing new. Israel has been confronted by suicide protestors for a decade now. The fact that these pro-Hamas activists intended to commit suicide in order to discredit Israel on camera was made clear by the fact that the Turkish organizers named the lead ship Rachel Corrie - after the most famous pro-Hamas suicide protestor.

So too, the fact that Israeli forces boarding the ships would be met by trenchant, violent opposition was knowable simply by looking at Turkey's role in the operation. First of all, the Turkish government-supported NGO behind the operation is IHH. As the US government, the Turkish government in the 1990s, the Investigative Project on Terrorism and countless other sources have proven, the IHH is a terrorist organization. It has direct links to al Qaida and Hamas. Its members have been involved in terrorist warfare from Chechnya and Bosnia to Iraq and Israel. The notion that IHH organizers would behave like radical leftist anti-Israel demonstrators on university campuses is simply ridiculous.

Moreover, there is Turkey's behavior to consider. Since Obama took office, Turkey's gradual slide into the Iranian axis has sped up considerably. Turkey's leading role in the flotilla, and the Erdogan government's ostentatious embrace of IHH which just a decade ago Turkey banned from earthquake relief efforts in light of its violent, jihadist mission made clear that the Erdogan regime would use the violence on board the ships as a way to strike a strategic blow at Israel's international standing.

In view of all of this, it is clear that Israel's information strategy for contending with the flotilla was ill-conceived. Rather than attack Turkey for its facilitation of terrorism, and openly prepare charge sheets against the flotilla's organizers, crew and passengers for their facilitation of terrorism in breach of both Israeli domestic law and international law, Israel's information efforts were largely concentrated on irrelevancies. Israeli officials detailed all the humanitarian assistance Israel has provided Hamas-controlled Gaza. They spoke of the Navy's commitment to use non-lethal force to take over the ships.

And now, in the aftermath of the lethal takeover of the flotilla, Israel's leaders stammer. Rather than demand an apology from the Turkish government for its support for these terrorists, Defense Minister Ehud Barak called his Turkish counterpart to talk over what happened. Rather than demand restitution for the terrorist assault against Israeli troops, Israel has defended its troops' moral training in non-violent crowd control.

These efforts are worse than worthless. They make Israel appear whiny rather than indignant. And more depressingly, they expose a dangerous lack of basic comprehension about what has just occurred and a concomitant inability to prepare for what will most certainly follow.

Israel is the target of a massive information war. For Israel to win this war it needs to counter its enemies' lies with the truth.

The NPT has been subverted by the very forces it was created to prevent from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization ideologically indistinguishable from al Qaida. International law requires all states and non-state actors to take active measures to defeat it.

Israel is the frontline of the free world. Its ability to defend itself and deter its foes is the single most important guarantee of international peace and security in the world. A strong Israel is also the most potent and reliable guarantor of the US's continued ability to project its power in the Middle East.

This is the unvarnished truth. It is also the beginning of a successful Israel campaign to defang and neutralize the massive coalition of nuclear proliferation- and terrorism- abettors aligned against it. But until our leaders finally recognize the nature of the war being waged against our country, these basic facts will remain ignored as Israel moves from one stunning defeat to the next.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 31, 2010 at 4:21 PM

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May 28, 2010, 9:54 AM

Netanyahu, Obama's newest prop

The Democratic Party is feeling the heat for US President Barack Obama's hostility towards Israel. In an interview with Channel 10 earlier this month, Democratic Party mega-donor Haim Saban characterized the Obama administration as ideologically aligned with the radical Left and harshly criticized its treatment of Israel.

Both Ma'ariv and Yediot Aharonot reported this week that Democratic congressmen and senators are deeply concerned that the administration's harsh treatment of Israel has convinced many American Jews not to contribute to their campaigns or to the Democratic Party ahead of November 2's mid-term elections. They also fear that American Jews will vote for Republican challengers in large numbers.

It is these concerns, rather than a decision to alter his positions on Israel specifically and the Middle East generally, that now drive Obama's relentless courtship of the American Jewish community. His latest move in this sphere was his sudden invitation to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to visit him at the White House for a "warm reception" in front of television cameras next Tuesday.

It is clear that electoral worries rather than policy concerns are behind what the White House has described as a "charm offensive," because since launching this offensive a few weeks ago, Obama not changed any of his policies towards Israel and the wider Middle East. In fact, he has ratcheted up these policies to Israel's detriment.

TAKE HIS goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. On Friday, the UN's monthlong Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is scheduled to adopt a consensual resolution before adjourning. According to multiple media reports, Israel is set to be the focus of the draft resolution that will likely be adopted.

The draft resolutions being circulated by both Egypt and the US adopt Egypt's demand for a nuclear-free Middle East. They call for a conference involving all countries in the region to discuss denuclearization. The only difference between the Egyptian draft and the US draft on the issue is that the Egyptians call for the conference to be held in 2011 while the US calls for the convening of the conference in 2012-2013. The draft resolution also calls for all states that are not members of the NPT - Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea - to join the NPT as non-nuclear powers.

So while Iran is not mentioned in the draft resolution - which must be adopted by consensus - in two separate places, Israel's purported nuclear arsenal is the target of an international diplomatic stampede.

In 2005, Egypt circulated a draft resolution that was substantively identical to its current draft. But in stark contrast to today's conclave, the NPT review conference in 2005 ended without agreement, because the Bush administration refused to go along with Egypt's assault on Israel.

Particularly in light of Iran's nuclear weapons program and the Iranian regime's expressed goal of destroying Israel, the Bush administration preferred to scuttle the conference rather than give any credence to the view that Israel's purported nuclear arsenal is a greater threat to global security than Iran's nuclear program - which, as in today's draft, wasn't mentioned in Egypt's resolution five years ago. The Obama administration has no problem going along with Cairo.

Obama's willingness to place Israel's nuclear program on the international agenda next to Iran's is par for the course of his utterly failed policy for contending with Iran's nuclear program. After his diplomatic open hand policy towards Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was met with a clenched fist, Obama's attempt to convince the UN Security Council to pass "smart sanctions" against Iran has been checkmated by Iran's nuclear deal with its newest strategic allies, Turkey and Brazil.

That deal, which facilitates rather than impedes Teheran's nuclear weapons program, has ended any prospect that the Security Council will pass an additional sanctions resolution against Iran in the near future. But then, in order to secure the now weakened Russian support for his sanctions resolution, Obama exempted Russia from the sanctions and turned a blind eye to continued Russian and Chinese nuclear proliferation activities in Syria, Turkey and Pakistan. Furthermore, Obama agreed to make most of the remaining provisions non-binding.

In the meantime, and in spite of the fact that his sanctions bid is in shambles, Obama has asked congressional Democrats to stall their sanctions bills for another month. So, too, Obama prevailed on his Democratic colleagues in Congress to exempt Russia and China from their sanctions bills.

AS PART of the administration's attempt to woo American Jews back into the Democratic Party fold despite its anti-Israel policies, last week a group of pre-selected pro-Obama rabbis was invited to the White House for talks with Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and with Dan Shapiro and Dennis Ross, who hold the Palestinian and Iran dossiers on Obama's National Security Council, respectively. According to a report of the meeting by Rabbi Jack Moline that has not been refuted by the White House, the three men told the Democratic rabbis that the administration has three priorities in the Middle East. First Obama seeks to isolate Iran. Second, he seeks to significantly reduce the US military presence in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. And third, he seeks to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

These priorities are disturbing for a number of reasons. First, isolating Iran is not the same as preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. By characterizing its goal as "isolating" Iran, the administration makes clear that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is not its goal. Moreover, as Iran's deal with Brazil and Turkey makes abundantly clear, Iran is not isolated. Indeed, its foreign relations have prospered since Obama took office.

In his write-up of the meeting, Moline indicated that Ross and Emanuel view Obama's rejection of Israel's right to build homes for Jews in Jerusalem as motivated by his goal of isolating Iran. So in the view of Obama's Jewish advisers, his preferred method of isolating Iran is to attack Israel.

Add that to his third priority of establishing a Palestinian state by the end of next year and you have a US president for whom bashing Israel is his first and third priority in the Middle East.

When one factors in his willingness to put Israel's purported nuclear arsenal on the international chopping block, it is clear that there is no precedent for Obama's hostility towards Israel in the history of US-Israel relations.

THIS BRINGS us to Obama's meeting next Tuesday with Netanyahu. Obama's continued commitment to his anti-Israel policies indicates that there are two possible scenarios for next week's meeting. In the best case, the meeting will have no substance whatsoever. It will be nothing more than a public display of presidential affection for the Israeli premier.

The more likely scenario is that Obama will use the meeting as an opportunity to pressure Netanyahu not to attack Iran's nuclear installations; not to attack Hizbullah's and Syria's missile depots, launchers and silos; and to extend the prohibition on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria beyond its September deadline and expand the prohibition to Jewish home construction in Jerusalem.

Regarding the latter scenario, it can only be hoped that Netanyahu has learned from his previous experiences with Obama. In December, in the hopes of alleviating US pressure, Netanyahu announced an unprecedented 10-month ban on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria. For his efforts, Netanyahu was rewarded with an escalation of American pressure against Israel.

After he pocketed Netanyahu's concession on Judea and Samaria, Obama immediately launched his poisonous assault on Israeli rights to Jerusalem.

Likewise, Netanyahu's willingness to outwardly support both Obama's effort to appease Iran and his efforts to pass anti-Iran sanctions in the Security Council gained Obama a year and a half of quiet from Jerusalem. During that time, Iran has moved within months of the bomb and the US has abandoned its goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This experience has one clear lesson: If Obama seeks policy concessions from Israel during their meeting, Netanyahu must reject his entreaties. In fact, it may even be counterproductive for Netanyahu to abstain from responding in the hopes of buying time.

If on the other hand, Obama avoids discussion of substantive issues and devotes his meeting with Netanyahu to a discussion of Michelle Obama's war on obesity, Netanyahu should consider what Obama did to the family of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl while the president signed the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act last week.

Pearl was decapitated in 2002 by jihadists in Pakistan. Among other things, his killers claimed he had no right to live because he was Jewish. At the ceremony, Obama barred Pearl's father, Judea Pearl, from speaking. In so doing Obama reduced Daniel Pearl's family to the status of mere props as Obama vapidly and reprehensibly proclaimed, "Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world's imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is."

This appropriation of Pearl's murder and denial of what it represented served Obama's purpose of pretending that there is no jihad and that radical Islam is not a threat to the US. And by silencing Pearl's father, the president turned him into an unwilling accomplice.

Netanyahu should take two lessons from Obama's behavior at the ceremony. First, Netanyahu must do everything he can to avoid being used as a prop. This means that he should insist on having a joint press briefing with Obama. He must also insist on having a say regarding which journalists will be included in the press pool and who will be permitted to ask the two leaders questions.

Second, Netanyahu must not become Obama's spokesman. As part of his unsuccessful bid to convince Obama to change his policies towards Israel, Netanyahu and his advisers have gone on record praising Obama for his support for Israel. These statements have stymied attempts by Israel's US supporters to pressure Obama to change those policies.

The Israeli official who has been most outspoken in his praise for Obama and his denial that Obama's policies are hostile towards Israel has been Ambassador Michael Oren. Oren has repeatedly praised Obama for his supposedly firm support for Israel and commitment to Israel's security - most recently in an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday. Moreover, according to eyewitness reports, in a recent closed-door meeting with American Jews, Oren criticized the Republican Party for attacking Obama for his animosity towards Israel.

This quite simply has to end. As foreign officials, Israeli diplomats should not be involved in US partisan politics. Not only should Israeli officials not give Obama undeserved praise, they should not give Republicans undeserved criticism.

At the end of the day, American Jews have the luxury of choosing between their loyalty to the Democratic Party and their support for Israel. And in the coming months, they will choose.

The government of Israel has no such luxury. The government's only duty is to secure Israel and advance Israel's national interests in every way possible. Netanyahu must not permit Obama's public relations campaign to divert him from this mission.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 28, 2010 at 9:54 AM

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The Tribal Update hosts Brazil's President Lula and Ehud Barak

In this week's Tribal Update from Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I edit, we interview Brazilian President Lula da Silva about his recent nuclear pact with Iran. Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak also paid a visit to our studio to discuss how his decision to remove IDF forces from southern Lebanon has paid off.

Enjoy!

Caroline

Posted on May 28, 2010 at 9:41 AM

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May 25, 2010, 2:24 AM

Reclaiming our language from the Left

Courtesy of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Thursday Israel will again be the target of a jihadist-leftist propaganda assault. A flotilla of nine ships which set sail for Gaza from Cyprus earlier this week is scheduled to arrive at our doorstep.

The expressed aim of the flotilla's organizers is to unlawfully provide aid and comfort to Hamas - an illegal terrorist organization. Since it seized power in Gaza three years ago, Hamas, which is openly committed to the genocide of world Jewry and the physical eradication of Israel, has transformed the Gaza Strip into a hub of the global jihad. It has been illegally holding hostage Gilad Schalit incommunicado for four years. And it is continuously engaged in a massive, Iranian-financed arms buildup ahead of its next assault.

Beyond providing aid to Hamas, the declared aim of the "Free Gaza" movement is to coerce Israel into providing Hamas with an outlet to the sea. This too is in contravention of international law which expressly prohibits states and non-state actors from providing any support to terrorist organizations.

IN SENDING out the latest group of ships, Turkey and its Irish, Greek and Swedish partners seek to appropriate the imagery of the Jewish pre-statehood struggle for independence from Britain. In a bid to appease Hamas's jihadist precursors, in 1939 Britain's Mandatory authorities broke international law and prohibited Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine.

The League of Nations' letter of mandate for Britain specifically enjoined the British to facilitate Jewish immigration to the land of Israel. Yet following the Arab terror war from 1936-1939, the British issued the White Paper that all but prohibited Jewish immigration. This move blocked the one place on Earth where European Jews were wanted from accepting them and so trapped 6 million Jews in Hitler's Europe.

In the aftermath of the war, the British maintained their prohibition on Jewish immigration. To fight this British policy, the Zionist leadership in pre-state Israel organized the Aliya Bet program of illegal immigration. Jewish agents scoured the world for ships large enough to bring Europe's Jewish refugees to the land of Israel.

The ship most emblematic of the era was the Exodus. The Exodus which set sail from France in July 1947 with 4,515 Jewish Holocaust survivors on board was the Zionist response to a new British policy to force illegal immigrant ships to return to Europe.

The British rammed the Exodus in Haifa. They boarded and killed three Jewish defenders. They then forced its passengers to board British prison ships that would return them to Europe. French authorities denied the ships the right to land in France, so the British sailed on to Hamburg, Germany, where the refugees were forced to disembark.

The international outcry against Britain in the wake of the Exodus affair shamed London into cancelling its new policy. It also paved the way for Israel's independence 10 months later.

Now the Turkish, Greek, Swedish and Irish governments are colluding with Hamas to purloin the imagery of the Exodus and the heroism of the Jewish people in the years leading up to statehood and project that imagery onto a terrorist organization that seeks to complete Hitler's work. They further seek to invert reality by portraying Israel, which in accordance with international law is trying to contain and defeat Hamas, as a combination of the German Nazis and the British imperialists.

SO FAR, they are getting away with it. So far, for their efforts on behalf of a genocidal terrorist organization Erdogan and his ilk are being extolled as human rights champions. Barring any unexpected events, Israel will suffer yet another public relations disaster on Thursday when the ships approach Gaza.

How has this happened? How is it that we have become so overwhelmed by the Left's propaganda that most of our political leaders and intellectual elite are incapable of even describing the evil that is being advanced against us?

Over the past generation, the Left has commandeered our language. It has inverted the terminology of human rights, freedom, morality, heroism, democracy and victimization. Its perversion of language has made it nearly impossible for members of democratic, human rights respecting, moral societies to describe the threats they face from their human rights destroying, genocidal, tyrannical enemies. Thanks to the efforts of the international Left, the latter are championed as the victims of those they seek to annihilate.

Two incidents in recent weeks make clear just how disastrous the Left's wholesale theft of language and through it, their inversion of reality has been for Israel.

Last Monday, Noam Chomsky arrived at the Allenby Bridge and requested a visa to enter Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The police at the border refused his request. The radical leftist Israel-basher made a fuss and waited around for several hours before he went back to Jordan.

Chomsky left Jordan at the end of the week and travelled to Lebanon. For the second time in four years, on Friday Chomsky toured southern Lebanon with a Hizbullah guide. Now an official guest of Hizbullah, Chomsky is scheduled to give an address in Beirut Tuesday to celebrate the IDF's pullout from south Lebanon 10 years ago.

As David Hornik detailed in FrontPage Magazine on Friday, the leftist-dominated Israeli media went nuts when they discovered Chomsky had been turned away at the border. Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz heralded Chomsky as a great mind and proclaimed hysterically that the refusal to allow him to enter the country marked the end of Israeli democracy and the start of a slide into fascism. The Western media quickly piled on and within hours Israel's right to deny its avowed enemies entry was under assault.

And Chomsky is Israel's enemy. As Hornik pointed out, Chomsky has repeatedly defended Holocaust deniers while accusing Israel of being the ideological heir of Nazi Germany. When he hasn't been too busy championing the Khmer Rouge and Josef Stalin, and attacking the US as the Great Satan, Chomsky has devoted much time and energy to calling for Israel's eradication and defending Palestinian and Hizbullah terrorists.

IT WAS the government's job to point this out. But instead, faced with the leftist onslaught against its right to control its borders, the government crumpled. Instead of explaining that Chomsky is an enemy of Israel and an abettor and defender of genocide, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev apologized for the unpleasant reception Chomsky received at the Allenby Bridge. Regev also promised that if Chomsky returns, he will be granted an entry visa.

The government's cowardly handling of the Chomsky incident is testament to the Left's success at intimidating Western leaders to the point where instead of standing up to leftist propaganda and lies, they accept them as truth and even collaborate in disseminating them.

Probably the folks in the Prime Minister's Office figured no one would listen if they told the truth about Chomsky. They probably felt that defending the decision to bar Chomsky from the country would only elicit a second barrage of media attacks.

And perhaps they were right. But the fact that the Left would have remained unconvinced doesn't excuse the government's abject surrender of the truth about Chomsky to Israel's enemies on the Left who portray the MIT professor as a human rights activist and a great intellectual humanitarian. As David Horowitz and Peter Collier prove in their book The Anti-Chomsky Reader, there doesn't seem to be a tyrant that Chomsky hasn't championed or a victim that Chomsky hasn't demonized in the entire span of his 50-year career as a radical activist.

The government is not alone in its fear of exposing and fighting the Left's campaign to demonize the country.

THE RADICAL Left's ability to block voices of dissent from its anti-Israel and anti-freedom positions was similarly demonstrated two weeks ago at Tel Aviv University's annual Board of Governors meeting.

For several years, a large, vocal group of tenured professors from the university have actively participated in the international campaign to boycott Israeli universities and academics while actively supporting Hamas and Hizbullah. That is, many Tel Aviv University professors, whose salaries are paid by university donors and Israeli taxpayers, have been using their university titles to undermine the university and to advance the cause of Israel's destruction.

This year the university's Board of Governors bestowed an honorary doctorate on Harvard Prof. Alan Dershowitz. In his acceptance speech, Dershowitz called these professors out for their vile behavior and named three of the most vocal enemies of the university and Israel on the international stage: Profs. Anat Matar, Rachel Giora and Shlomo Sand.

The university's tenured anti-Zionist activists were quick to retaliate. Forty-six professors signed a letter to university president Joseph Klaffter demanding that the university disassociate itself from Dershowitz's statements.

Klaffter was quick to oblige. At the Board of Governors meeting, Klaffter silenced board member Mark Tanenbaum when he tried to put forward a resolution calling for disciplinary action against university professors who use their university titles to defame the university or Israel. Klaffter, who isn't even a member of the Board of Governors, reportedly grabbed the microphone away from Tanenbaum and adjourned the meeting. Klaffter justified his physical denial of Tanenbaum's freedom of speech by claiming that he was defending academic freedom.

Like the Prime Minister's Office's apology to Noam Chomsky, Klaffter's action - aside from arguably being prohibited by his own university's constitution - was further proof of the Left's success in appropriating the language and imagery of freedom and tolerance in the service of forces that seek to destroy freedom and end tolerance.

ON THURSDAY Hamas's maritime enablers from Europe, Turkey and beyond will arrive at our doorstep. The navy will block their entry to Gaza. Israel will be demonized by terror-abettors disguised as human rights activists and journalists worldwide. And the story will pave the way for the next assault on Israel's right to exist.

This endless circle of demonization and aggression will continue to widen and escalate until our political leaders and our intellectual elite reclaim our language from those on the terror-abetting Left. True, our reclamation of our language will not go unopposed. But if we do not reassert our right to describe objective reality, our inability to explain why we are right and our detractors serve evil will be our undoing.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 25, 2010 at 2:24 AM

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May 21, 2010, 12:36 PM

The Tribal Update exposes Right-wingers anonymous

In this week's Tribal Update from Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website that I edit, our anchors Ronit and Elhanan discuss Holland's "abandonment" of Israel, Elvis Costello's decision to cancel his concert in Israel and much much more. They also exposed a new organization RA or Aight-wingers anonymous and get an update on what's new in the Israeli children's book market this summer.

Enjoy!

Posted on May 21, 2010 at 12:36 PM

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South Korea, North Korea, Israel and Iran

On Thursday the South Korean government did something important. It told the truth about North Korean aggression. On March 26, a North Korean submarine attacked a South Korean naval corvette with a torpedo. Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed in the unprovoked attack. And on May 20, the South Koreans ended all ambiguity about the nature of the attack and placed the blame where it belongs.

In its write-up of South Korea's statement, The Los Angeles Times assessed that South Korea's acknowledgment of North Korea's murderous aggression will return the region to the days of the Cold War. The paper quoted Prof. Kim Keun-sik from Kyungnam University outside Seoul claiming that in the period to come, North Korea and China will face off against South Korea and the US.

Sadly for South Korea, while China can be depended upon to block the passage of effective sanctions against North Korea in the UN Security Council and to take any other necessary action to protect the North Korean regime, South Korea cannot expect the US to take action to rein in North Korean aggression. For while the South Korean government acknowledged reality on Thursday morning, the US under President Barack Obama remains in reality denial mode.

It is true that on Thursday Obama released a statement saying that the "act of aggression is one more instance of North Korea's unacceptable behavior and defiance of international law." And it is true that the international media is pointing to the White House announcement as an indication that the US will stand with South Korea.

But the Obama administration's relations with China on the one hand, and its emasculation of the US Navy on the other demonstrate that the US will not defend South Korea against North Korean aggression. The administration's actions in the days leading up to South Korean President Lee Myung-bak announcement make this clear.

Lee reportedly told Obama on Tuesday that his government's investigation of the attack proved beyond a shred of doubt that North Korea had attacked the ship. Wednesday the State Department announced that next week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be making a weeklong visit to Asia.

Clinton's trip includes one day in Japan, one day in South Korea and five days in China. Clinton's trip to China will center on advancing the US's aim of ensuring that China continues to finance the US's national debt. Given the US's priorities, it is impossible to imagine the White House taking any forthright action against Pyongyang.

IN A related matter, the Obama administration spent the better part of the week congratulating itself for convincing China and Russia to back another sanctions resolution against North Korea's ally Iran. In what the administration is presenting as a great diplomatic victory, Beijing and Moscow agreed to back a sanctions resolution against Iran in the UN Security Council for its refusal to end its illicit uranium enrichment.

Unfortunately, Obama's great achievement will have no impact on Iran. If they are even passed the sanctions outlined in the draft resolution include little in the way of binding provisions. If they are passed, they will have a negligible impact on Iran's economy and no impact on its nuclear weapons program.

Moreover, Brazil's and Turkey's deal to enrich uranium for Iran wrecks any chance that the US will gain its sought-for unanimity in the Security Council against Iran. Even if the sanctions resolution passes, it will be Pyrrhic victory for the US which will have destroyed its credibility as a negotiator with its allies and its enemies alike.

Beyond all that, Thursday we learned that as a payoff for China's support for its toothless sanctions resolution, the Obama administration has made a deal that enables nuclear proliferation. According to the Washington Post, in exchange for China's support for the resolution, the Obama administration has turned a blind eye to Beijing's continued nuclear proliferation activities to Pakistan.

Pakistan has been a major source of nuclear and ballistic missile technologies to Iran and North Korea. Yet the administration has reportedly opted not to oppose China's decision to build two more nuclear reactors in Pakistan.

In its frenetic bid to court China whose dollars it needs to finance its massive increase in federal spending, the Obama administration has downplayed not only China's nuclear proliferation but North Korea's nuclear proliferation as well. Last week North Korea announced that it conducted a successful fusion experiment. That is, it announced that it is developing a hydrogen bomb. Rather than condemn the move, the administration dismissed the danger claiming that North Korea was lying.

And just as it makes light of the threat emanating from North Korea, so the US has continued to downplay the threat Iran's nuclear program poses to US and global security. Due to the US's failure to end Iran's uranium enrichment, according to the most optimistic Western assessments, Iran will have enough enriched uranium to produce atomic bombs at will in a matter of months.

If the Turkish-Brazilian uranium enrichment deal with Iran goes through, the timeline will be cut by half. Given the new deal's similarity to the offer Obama made the Iranians last year, the administration will have great difficulty discrediting it or even providing a coherent explanation for its opposition to the deal.

AS FOREIGN Minister Avigdor Lieberman noted in his trip to Japan earlier in the month, North Korea does not only threaten its immediate neighbors. Through its proliferation activities, and particularly through its close ties to Iran and its Syrian, Hizbullah and Hamas clients, North Korea constitutes a threat to the Middle East and indeed to global security as a whole. It is important for the US's spurned allies in Tokyo, Seoul and beyond to join forces with Israel to contend with the threats we share - threats which the Obama administration's diplomatic bungling has only exacerbated.

But while it is true that North Korea's proliferation activities threaten global security, it is also true that there is a qualitative difference between the regimes in Pyongyang and Teheran. The regime in Pyongyang is evil, but it is mainly motivated by its desire to survive. In contrast, Iran's regime is openly revolutionary. Its stated aim is to destroy the global order, annihilate Israel and the US and usher in a Shiite messianic era in which Iran will rule the world in the name of Islam.

Depressingly, just as the Iranian threat is greater than the North Korean threat, so the Obama administration's denial of the nature of the Iranian threat is greater than its denial of the North Korean threat. Quite simply, the Obama administration refuses to believe the ideology which informs the actions of Iran's rulers is what they say it is.

In its latest demonstration of its deep denial of the nature of the threat it faces, this week John Brennan, Obama's chief advisor for counterterrorism and homeland security said that the US must court what he referred to as "moderate elements," in Hizbullah.

Brennan argued that since in addition to its Iranian commanded and supplied military organization and its Iranian commanded and trained international terror network, Hizbullah also has members in the Lebanese government and parliament, it is a group that the Obama administration can do business with.

To the extent that Brennan's statement echoes the Obama administration's analysis of Hizbullah, it is simply terrifying.

Hizbullah was established by Iran in 1981. It has a dual mission of serving as the advance guard of Iran's global Islamic revolution and of spreading the Iranian revolution to Lebanon. Hizbullah's participation in Lebanese politics is consonant with this mission. It does not in any way indicate a moderation of the organization. Had Brennan looked, he would not have found a single statement by Hizbullah parliamentarians or government ministers that in any way contradicts Hizbullah's Iranian-dictated missions.

But then, Brennan's asinine position on Hizbullah is part and parcel of his overall denial of the threat radical Islam poses to the US and to the rest of the world. In a speech at New York University last August, Brennan gave a stirring defense of Islam as a religion of peace. He eschewed any connection between the likes of al Qaida and the Iranian mullahs and Islam and claimed that jihad is a great and good thing.

In his words, "Using the legitimate term jihad, which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal [to describe the cause for which Islamic terrorists fight], risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve."

What Brennan's statements show is that Obama, who picked Brennan to serve as his chief counterterrorism advisor, is ideologically committed to the notion that Iran and its fellow jihadists are not an inherent threat to the US and its allies. That is, Obama is ideologically committed to the notion that there is no reason to take any action against Iran that could actually prevent the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah from developing and deploying nuclear weapons.

SINCE OBAMA took office nearly a year and a half ago, Israel has agreed to Obama's demand that it allow him to take the lead on international efforts to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Israel stood back as he wasted a year trying to woo Ahmadinejad often at Israel's own expense as he linked Iran's nuclear weapons program to the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Israel has stood back since then as he pushed forward UN sanctions.

And now, a year and a half later, Obama's sanctions gambit is revealed as a dangerous joke. Iran is months away from the bomb. Hizbullah has an arsenal of guided missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv and beyond. Iran's diplomatic stature has soared to unprecedented heights as it runs diplomatic circles around Obama and his advisors. And Brennan wants to make a deal with Hizbullah.

South Korea's acknowledgment of North Korea's aggression places it on a collision course with the Obama administration which prefers to court Beijing for dollars than deal effectively with Pyongyang's aggression. Israel has been on a collision course with Washington for a year and a half now as it insists in the face of US opposition that Iran's nuclear program is the greatest threat to global security today.

Sadly, the US's ridiculous sanctions resolution and its general diplomatic incompetence make clear is that it is time for Israel to risk escalating its crisis with Obama still further. It is time for Israel to take the lead in the international campaign to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 21, 2010 at 11:24 AM

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May 17, 2010, 4:27 PM

Hizbullah on the homefront

Last week Lebanese commentator Tony Badran published an article on the Now Lebanon Web site discussing the Iranian way of war. In "The shape of things to come," he discussed the significance of the breakup of a Hizbullah cell in Kuwait and the deportation of Hizbullah agents from Bahrain. Badran explained that like the Hizbullah ring arrested last year in Egypt, the Hizbullah cells in Persian Gulf states demonstrate how Iran uses Hizbullah to extend its regional power.

Badran noted that Iran's cultivation of fifth columnists in target countries through Hizbullah puts paid to the notion that it will be possible to contain a nuclear Iran. Armed with both nuclear weapons and armed agents in states throughout the region, Iran will be well positioned to bend all regional states to its will.

US security guarantees will be worthless. Living under the threat of the Iranian bomb, neighboring states will be unable to take steps to curb Iranian agents subverting their governments from within their sovereign territory.

For Israel, the threat is obviously more acute. Whereas states like Kuwait and Bahrain will be able to suffer through an Iranian Middle Eastern hegemony, Israel will have no such luxury. Iran has made clear that in an Iranian-ruled Middle East, there will be no room for Israel. And so Israel must act soon to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

But then there is the homefront.

With each passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that as is the case in Kuwait, Bahrain and Egypt, through Hizbullah, Iran has established cells of sympathizers among Israeli Arabs. This means that as Israel prepares to strike Iran, it must minimize Iran's ability to retaliate from fifth column bases inside the country.

According to Badran, among the Hizbullah agents rounded up in Kuwait were several officers in the Kuwaiti military. This means that Iran/Hizbullah is not operating at the margins of Kuwaiti society. They are part of the Kuwaiti mainstream.

ISRAEL FACES a similar situation. Indeed, in many ways it is worse. Here Hizbullah agents are found in the top echelons of Israeli Arab society. Last week's announcement that Ameer Makhoul and Omar Said Abdo are under arrest for allegedly serving as Hizbullah agents is a case in point.

Until his arrest, Makhoul served as head of Ittijah, the umbrella organization of Israeli Arab NGOs. His brother Issam Makhoul is a former member of Knesset. Abdo is a professional organizer for the Balad political party. These men are not just leading members of the local Arab hierarchy. They are tightly connected to the Israeli and international Left as well.

Makhoul and Abdo are not unique. Former MK and Balad leader Azmi Bishara fled the country in 2007 to avoid being arrested for serving as a Hizbullah spy in the 2006 war. Bishara is suspected of transferring targeting information to Hizbullah officers.

Since the Second Lebanon War, a number of Israeli Arabs have been arrested and convicted of spying for Hizbullah. All of them were accomplished individuals from respected families.

Last month Rawi Sultani, the son of a prominent Israeli Arab attorney, was convicted of collecting intelligence information for Hizbullah concerning the whereabouts of Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. Sultani was a member of Ashkenazi's health club in Kfar Saba.

Sultani was drafted into the service of Hizbullah while he participated in a pan-Arab youth conference in Morocco organized by Balad.

Khaled Kashkoush was a student in Germany who promised his Hizbullah handler that he would get a job at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. Kashkoush's plan was to develop relations with wounded soldiers hospitalized there and transfer information he gained to Hizbullah.

In 2008 Sgt.-Maj. Louai Balut, the first Christian Arab tracker to serve in the IDF, was sentenced to 11 years in jail for transferring information about troop deployments in the North to Hizbullah.

Earlier this month, MK Massoud Ghanem of the United Arab-Ta'al party gave an interview to the Nazareth newspaper Kul el-Arab in which he expressed his hope to one day see Israel destroyed and replaced with an Islamic caliphate.

Ghanem also said that in the event of war between Israel and the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah-Hamas axis, he would side with the axis. As he put it, "The Iran-Hizbullah-Syria axis represents the line of resistance and refusal to surrender, and naturally, I support this axis."

Hizbullah's popularity among Israeli Arabs has grown immensely since the Second Lebanon War. Whereas before the war, one would rarely see public displays of support, since the war Hizbullah flags are routinely flown at Israeli Arab political events and protests. Hizbullah's growing popularity goes hand in hand with a deep radicalization of Israeli Arab society that has gone largely unaddressed by state authorities.

OVER THE weekend, thousands of Israeli Arabs participated in so-called Nakba rallies. The Nakba, or "catastrophe," is how the Arab world refers to Israel's establishment on May 15, 1948.

Until the onset of the Oslo peace process with the PLO in 1993, May 15 was generally overlooked by Israeli Arabs. But since then, each year, commemorations of the so-called Nakba have steadily increased in scope and radicalism.

This year, the central demonstration was held in Kafr Kanna, the same Galilee town Abdo calls home. The keynote speaker at the event was Islamic Movement leader Raed Salah. His speech could easily have been given by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

Speaking to a crowd of thousands, Salah threatened Israel with war if it dares to take action against Arabs like Abdo and Makhoul. In his words, "If you think that with this arrest you will take revenge against political groups in our society like Balad, you are wrong. Balad, the Islamic Movement, Hadash and the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee - all share one hope, one pain, one future, and one present. Those who go against one of us, go against everyone. We are all Omar Said, we are all Ameer Makhoul."

He went on to promise that all the descendents of Arabs who left in 1948 would return. He called Israeli communities "cancers" that will be removed.

Finally, Salah called on Fatah and Hamas to unite in war against Israel: "From here, from the Galilee, we call on you to unite against the occupation until the state of Palestine is established with Jerusalem as its capital."

Ahead of his Nakba day diatribe, last week Salah was acquitted of rioting charges. The indictment was filed against him in 2007 following a speech he gave at a demonstration in Jerusalem in which he accused Israel of seeking to destroy the Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount.

As he waved a Syrian flag, in that speech Salah proclaimed "it is now the duty of every Arab and Muslim to launch an intifada from one end to another to save Jerusalem and the Aksa Mosque. We are not the ones who allowed ourselves to eat a meal of bread and cheese soaked in children's blood."

He was acquitted due to what Jerusalem District Court claimed were contradictions in the prosecution's testimony.

Salah's statements, like those of his colleagues in Israeli Arab leadership echelons invariably provoke angry responses from politicians. Indeed, in response to Salah's Nakba speech, on Sunday Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz called for his citizenship to be revoked.

But headline-generating statements aside, politicians and the rest of the country's leadership - including the police and the courts - have refused to actually do anything. Our leaders have failed to adopt any consistent measures to counteract the fact that today there are no Israeli Arab leaders who do not routinely make statements either rejecting the country's right to exist or inciting treason against the state, or both. Similarly, they have taken no effective measures against reports of massive arms caches in Arab villages.

In March, the sensationalist Debkafile Web site published a hair-raising report claiming that Hizbullah has raised five brigades - all trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps - whose mission is to invade northern Israel in the next war. According to the report, one of the brigades is tasked with invading three Arab villages along the Acre-Safed highway and using them as a bridgehead to spark an armed insurrection in Arab towns throughout the North.

Debkafile's report was not sourced and was widely ignored as a consequence. But in recent weeks, several IDF sources have confirmed the gist of the story.

Over the weekend Channel 1 military correspondent Yoav Limor reported that heightened concern about war has brought near unanimity in the defense community that Israel should make a last ditch effort to negotiate the surrender of the Golan Heights to Syria in the hope of cajoling it out of the Iranian axis. If true, this position indicates that the top echelons of the security establishment are in a state of panic.

If Limor's report is accurate, our leaders need to get a hold of themselves. The times are dire, but they are not hopeless. There is no reason for anyone to lose his head.

To prevail, our leaders and security authorities need to stop talking and start acting. They need to move now to break up enemy organizations like Balad and the Islamic Movement, arrest their leaders and seize their assets. There are laws already on the books to enact such policies.

So too, the police, with assistance from the IDF if necessary, needs to uncover and seize illegal arms caches. Hostile villages like Kafr Kanna and Umm el-Fahm, and border towns like Deir el-Asad and Majd el-Kurum should be rigorously patrolled.

There is very little good news coming out of neighboring states these days. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Syria last week raised the threat level against Israel to soaring heights amid reports that he has agreed to sell massive quantities of advanced weapons to Iran's Arab client state.

But Israel can handle this situation. We just need to start acting and stop talking.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 17, 2010 at 4:27 PM

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May 14, 2010, 9:32 AM

Making Israel's Case

FORTY-THREE years after the Jewish people liberated Jerusalem, our capital has never been under greater assault. But it has also never been more energetically defended by an indignant Jewish people - in Israel and throughout the world.

Last week Makor Rishon reported that US diplomats have been "showing interest" in all Jewish construction plans in the capital. Ambassador James Cunningham and Jerusalem Consul- General Daniel Rubinstein have met repeatedly with relevant government ministers to express US opposition to all construction in Jewish neighborhoods built since 1967. Bowing to this shocking US assault on Israel's sovereignty, the government reportedly cancelled construction plans that had already been approved for 2,500 apartments in Ramot, Pisgat Ze'ev, Neve Ya'acov, Gilo and Har Homa.

The US is also demanding that Israel take no action against illegal Arab construction in the capital. That is, the US is acting to undermine the rule of law in Israel twice. First, it seeks to deny Jewish Jerusalemites their property rights, and second, it is calling for Israel not to enforce its laws against Arab criminals.

The Obama administration's attempt to weaken Israel's sovereignty in Jerusalem is part of a larger move by the international Left to support the Islamic campaign to eject Israel from Jerusalem by denying Jewish rights to the city. The EU is so committed to subverting Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem that even in the midst of its financial crisis, with EU economies seemingly collapsing like dominoes, sources say that the EU mission to Israel has just pledged at least a million euro to Ir Amim.

Ir Amim is an NGO whose mission is to undermine Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. According to NGO Monitor, two thirds of Ir Amim's budget comes from the EU and from the Norwegian, Swedish and Czech governments.

In their bid to undermine Israel's sovereignty, US President Barack Obama and the Europeans are assisted by leftist, increasingly anti-Zionist Jews. Following the lead of the US pro-Palestinian lobby J-Street, earlier this month, prominent French Jewish intellectuals Bernard Henri-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut published a manifesto signed by hundreds of their cohorts attacking Israel for the absence of peace in the region and calling on the EU and the US to pressure Israel to surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians.

On US campuses, far left Jewish students have taken a prominent role in undermining recognition of Israel's right to exist. At University of California Berkeley and on other campuses, Jewish students have collaborated with Muslim groups in their campaign to divest the university's holdings in companies that invest in Israel.

At Brandeis, Jewish students organized a campaign to disinvite Ambassador Michael Oren from this year's commencement ceremonies.

Not surprisingly, like other Jewish anti-Israel initiatives before, these moves in France and in the US have garnered significant media coverage and support. What received less coverage is the popular backlash in the European and Jewish communities against these initiatives.

After belatedly awakening to the threat of divestment from Israel, Jews at Berkeley and the surrounding community organized a massive and for now successful campaign to block the divestment drive.

At Brandeis, thousands of students, faculty and alumni signed a petition supporting the university's invitation to Oren.

And in Europe, Italian parliament member Fiamma Nirenstein responded to the anti-Israel manifesto with a counter petition. Nirenstein's petition notes that in their anti-Israel diatribe, Levy and Finkielkraut ignore the fact that the absence of Middle East peace is due not to Israel's size but to the Arab world's refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. She further noted that by attacking Israel now, the signatories of their anti-Israel screed have diverted the public's attention away from Iran's nuclear program which today threatens not only Israel, but Europe.

Nirenstein's position was echoed in a sister petition published by French Jewish leader Prof. Shmuel Trigano. Together, the Italian and French petitions garnered twice the number of signatures as the Levy-Finkielkraut declaration.

IT IS NOT just that the overwhelming majority of Jews in Israel and worldwide supports Israel and opposes any attempt to delegitimize Israel and Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. Jewish activists are responding to false denunciations of Israel's rights by asserting the Jewish people's rights to Israel generally and to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria specifically.

For instance, last month the European Coalition for Israel partnered with Canadians for Israel's Legal Rights and hosted a conference in San Remo, Italy. There they commemorated the 90th anniversary of the San Remo Conference which determined the legal status of the Ottoman Empire after its break-up in World War I. In 1920, the San Remo Conference determined that the legal title to the Land of Israel - including Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria belonged to the Jewish people. The San Remo resolutions were incorporated into international law through the mandates issued by the League of Nations and their legal force has never been cancelled or superseded by any subsequent treaty or binding international resolution.

The participants at the conference came from Europe, Israel and North America. Their message was clear. It is long past time for Israel and the Jewish people to begin asserting our rights to our capital city and our land. Our attempts to square circles by agreeing to compromise on our rights in exchange for promises of support and peace have brought us to the point where Israel's very legitimacy is being called into question throughout the world.

Disturbingly, instead of supporting efforts like the San Remo commemoration conference, and embracing staunch supporters of Israel from Rome to San Francisco to Jerusalem itself, the government is sitting on the fence. On the one hand, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declares daily that Jerusalem will remain Israel's undivided capital and that he will make no concessions in relation to the city. On the other hand, the government's actions bespeak a willingness to make massive concessions on Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.

Take the Temple Mount. The cradle of Jewish civilization is not mentioned in the government's list of Jewish heritage sites. So too, despite the government's protestations of devotion to Jerusalem, it has not lifted the bar on Jewish worship on the Temple Mount. Jews remain the only religious group that does not enjoy full freedom of worship in the city.

In announcing the start of the so-called peace negotiations between the US and Israel and the US and the Fatah branch of the Palestinian Authority, the State Department claimed last week that the Netanyahu government has agreed to block Jewish construction in Ramat Shlomo for several years. The government has not disputed this claim.

In truth, the government's very willingness to participate in the Obama administration's phony peace process undermines Israel's control over Jerusalem. Given the Obama administration's obvious commitment to repartitioning the city, it is clear that the talks can only weaken Israel's control over our capital city.

THE GOVERNMENT'S weakness on Jerusalem is a reflection of a wider unwillingness of Israeli diplomats to stand by Israel's supporters and against Israel's detractors worldwide. More often than not, the groups that receive the most enthusiastic support from Israeli embassies are those that seek to undermine Israel's rights.

The behavior of the embassy in London is case in point. This week the embassy sent out an announcement to its mailing list urging the public to attend a lecture by former Peace Now director Gavri Bargil at the London School of Economics.

On the other hand, the embassy chose not to publicize a lecture by Minister-without-Portfolio Benny Begin on Yom Yerushalayim. Begin's speech was sponsored by several major Jewish organizations. It is unclear who sponsored Bargil's talk.

Late last year, Akiva Tor, Israel's Consul-General in San Francisco opposed a resolution put before the Jewish Federation board to boycott all groups that support boycotts and divestment from Israel. The resolution was put forward after the Federation-supported Jewish Film Festival hosted Rachel Corrie's mother and screened a pro-Hamas propaganda film lionizing Corrie who was inadvertently run over by an IDF bulldozer while attempting to block IDF counter-terror operations in Gaza.

In a letter to the local Jewish paper, Tor claimed that Corrie's mother was no different from "an Israeli terror victim."

In Los Angeles, Consul-General Ya'akov Dayan was interviewed last year on a local radio show. He was unable to explain the legal basis for Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. It took a local area Jewish activist who called into the station to explain Israel's rights under the League of Nations Mandate.

The only government representative who attended the San Remo conference was Likud MK Danny Danon.

The government's failure to take the lead in strengthening Israel and Jewish communities worldwide is not a new phenomenon. On Wednesday night, on Yom Yerushalayim in Ir David, the historic site of King David's palace, the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism was given to three extraordinary leaders: Anita Tucker, Rabbi Yoel Schwartz and Brig. Gen. (ret) Dr. Aharon Davidi. All of them have strengthened Israel and the Jewish people through their pioneering work, often in spite of government opposition.

Tucker was among the founders of Netzer Hazani in Gush Katif in 1975. The community, built on Gaza's barren sand dunes was one of the most successful agricultural communities in the world until it was destroyed by the government in 2005. Rather than breaking apart after her life's work was destroyed, Tucker has been a central force in rebuilding Netzer Hazani and the 20 other communities of Gush Katif.

Rabbi Yoel Schwartz is the spiritual leader of the IDF's Nahal Haredi unit. Schwartz bucked opposition from both the IDF and the ultra-Orthodox establishment and founded the crucial unit which brings ultra-Orthodox youths into the IDF in large numbers for the first time.

In the early 1980s, Brig. Gen Davidi completed a military service that began in 1944 and brought him to command positions in some of the post pivotal battles in the nation's history.

After retirement, Davidi decided that something had to be done to make Diaspora Jewry feel it was a part of the IDF. So in 1983 he established Sar-El which brings foreigners to Israel to volunteer on IDF bases. Since its founding Sar-El has brought more than 100,000 volunteers from 30 countries to Israel.

Tucker, Schwartz and Davidi are extraordinary individuals. But their success owes to the fact that they believe in Israel and the Jewish people. They understand that the Jews who seek to undermine the state are a tiny minority. Rather than try to appease them, they work with the vast majority to strengthen the country and its people.

It is impossible to reconcile the rights of the Jewish people and the demands of the Obama administration and the alliance of the international Left and the Islamic world it leads in their common campaign to undermine Israeli control over Jerusalem.

The government must stop trying to play both sides of the aisle. Instead it should follow the lead of its extraordinary citizens and of Jews throughout the world in asserting the rights of the Jewish people to our capital and our country.

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Posted on May 14, 2010 at 9:32 AM

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The Tribal Update marks Jerusalem Day with Judge Goldstone

In this week's Tribal Update from Latma, the Hebrew-language Hebrew satire website that I run, Elhanan and Ronit interviewed Marir Katan, (Little Bitter Man), our Correspondent for Cynicism Facilitation and asked him about his thoughts as we marked Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day on Wednesday. They also hosted Judge Richard Goldstone in our studio and discussed with him the latest revelations that as a judge in apartheid South Aftrica, he sentenced dozens of blacks to death.

For your viewing pleasure and posting ease, we have posted a separate version of our interview with Marir Katan.

If we post a separate version of our interview with Goldstone, I'll add it to this posting in a later update.

By the way, because we have become one of the most popular youtube channels in Israel, google has made us a partner website which means that they now advertise on our videos. Do us a favor and click on the ads!

Enjoy!

Posted on May 14, 2010 at 9:16 AM

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May 13, 2010, 4:51 AM

Jihad on US campuses

In the following clip, you see David Horowitz from the Freedom Center asking a Muslim student activist at UC San Diego if she supports Hizbullah's aim of eradicating Jewry from the face of the planet. And this smooth-talking human upholstery board - sporting a drapery and a tablecloth - said yes.

So there you have it.

Add that to the Muslim student assault on Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks at Uppsala University in Sweden - to the ringing calls of Allau Akhbar.

When I watched this video yesterday my concern was that given Sweden's leftist deathwish, the people who will end up getting punished for this assault are the policemen who tried to restrain the Muslim students from killing Vilks.

Posted on May 13, 2010 at 4:51 AM

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May 11, 2010, 4:12 AM

Hizbullah's media champions

Hizbullah at border.jpg

A few weeks shy of the tenth anniversary of Israel's May 24, 2000 unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon, last Friday mass-circulation daily Yediot Ahronot chose to devote its weekend news supplement to a retrospective on the event. The retrospective included a fawning five-page interview with Defense Minister Ehud Barak who ordered the withdrawal during his tenure as prime minister and defense minister. It also included a two-page spread featuring interviews with the IDF commanders who carried out the withdrawal recalling their adrenalin rushes as they retreated their forces across the border.

Nearly hidden between the two puff pieces was a little article titled "We told you so."

It featured an interview with retired far-left Knesset member Yossi Sarid who opposed the withdrawal. Sarid told Yediot that in hindsight, he's glad the withdrawal went through even though it led directly to the wars that followed. Following Sarid's self-congratulatory modesty, Yediot gave former defense minister Moshe Arens and Infrastructures Minister Uzi Landau a sound bite apiece to lash out at the withdrawal. That base covered, the paper dismissed them both as "right-wingers."

ALTHOUGH UPSETTING, Yediot's treatment of the Lebanon withdrawal was not surprising. The unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon -- which was a failure on every rational level -- was a strategy concocted and championed for the better part of a decade by Yediot and its media colleagues at Israel Radio. The paper's decision to publish a ten-year anniversary retrospective two weeks early was undoubtedly an attempt to preempt and prevent any further discussion of the withdrawal.

Yediot praised the retreat as a work of operational genius because no one was wounded, kidnapped or killed during the 48-hour operation. Of course, by presenting force protection as the IDF's highest goal, the paper ignored basic strategic realities.

The fact is that the withdrawal was an operational fiasco. In its rush to the border, the IDF left behind huge quantities of sensitive equipment that Hizbullah commandeered. Israel abandoned thousands of loyal allies from the South Lebanon Army and their families to the tender mercies of Hizbullah. These were men who had fought shoulder to shoulder with the IDF since 1982. Those that managed to escape to Israel before the gates were locked were treated as unwanted dead-weight by Barak and his media flacks who couldn't be bothered with the treachery at the heart of the operation.

The withdrawal was a military defeat. It weakened Israel and strengthened Hizbullah. Without the security zone, Israel had no buffer between its civilian population and Hizbullah. For its part, Hizbullah set itself up in the IDF's abandoned fortifications and imposed its full control over south Lebanon.

Israel's strategic incoherence and incompetence in the wake of the withdrawal was showcased just four months later. When Hizbullah forces penetrated Mt. Dov and kidnapped IDF solders Benny Avraham, Omar Sawayid and Adi Avitan, Barak had no idea what to do. So he did nothing.
The soldiers were killed and Israel released hundreds of terrorists from its prisons to secure the return of their bodies four years later. Interestingly, the names Avraham, Sawayid and Avitan didn't make it into Yediot's ten year-anniversary retrospective.

The withdrawal was a regional failure. Immediately after the withdrawal, Palestinian Authority chairman Yassir Arafat ordered Fatah chief Marwan Barghouti to prepare for war. Acting on Arafat's orders, Barghouti formed the Aksa Brigades terror cells comprised of Fatah members and the Popular Resistance Committee terror network that combined Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror cells.

Four months later, after Arafat rejected Barak's offer of Palestinian statehood at Camp David in July 2000, he ordered his forces to launch the Palestinian Jihad.

Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon showed Arafat that Hizbullah commander Hassan Nasrallah was right to liken Israel to a spider web that would collapse at the slightest provocation. Lebanon taught Arafat that there was no reason to negotiate a peace with Israel. If pressed, Israel would lose the will to fight and surrender.

The withdrawal was a political failure. To justify his decision to surrender south Lebanon to Iran's Lebanese proxy force, Barak and his media flacks repeatedly presented the false claim that Hizbullah only fought Israel because Israel was in Lebanon. If the IDF were to pick up its marbles and go home, Hizbullah would naturally disband.

This historically false, intuitively nutty assertion gave credence to the false Arab-Leftist narrative which argues that Israel's size, rather than the Arab world's refusal to accept a Jewish state in the Levant, is the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

AS HIZBULLAH'S subsequent build-up, continued aggression and eventual de facto takeover of the Lebanese government all showed, Hizbullah was not an Israeli creation. It was formed by Teheran to serve the needs of the ayatollahs. Its continued existence, strength and aggression are dictated not by Israeli actions but by Iranian interests.

So too, the wider Arab conflict with Israel predated the 1967 Six Day War and it won't end if Israel shrinks into the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. It won't end until either Israel is destroyed or the Arabs decide that they are finally willing to accept a Jewish state in their midst.

The withdrawal from Lebanon set the conditions for the 2006 war. It provided Hizbullah with the political cache in Lebanon and regionally to rearm. And it gave Shiite, non-Arab Iran unprecedented popularity among the Sunni Arab masses. Even more devastatingly, the withdrawal -- which set the course for the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the Olmert government's plan to unilaterally withdraw from Judea and Samaria -- discredited the one strategy that could have brought Israel a strategic victory in 2006: reassertion of Israeli control over the border area in south Lebanon.

For ten years Israel has been paying the price for the withdrawal from Lebanon. And yet even now, with Hizbullah fielding guided missiles capable of hitting Dimona and in control of Lebanese government whose military receives advanced weapons from the US, the Israeli media, led by Yediot are still presenting the withdrawal as an act of strategic genius and political courage.

CONSIDER THE following representative extract from the paper's interview with Barak.

Q: The most significant argument [against the withdrawal] is that the withdrawal is what built-up Hizbullah. That we are responsible for its increased strength.

A: That is...completely incorrect. When we left Hizbullah already had 7,000 rockets, which is nearly twice what they fired during the second Lebanon war. [In 2000] they already had rockets with sufficient range to hit the power station in Hadera. Hizbullah didn't exist when we went in [in 1982]. It was formed because we were there. Hizbullah's build-up is not a consequence of our withdrawal from Lebanon, it is the consequence of our stay in Lebanon....

"Hizbullah's biggest build-up happened six years after the withdrawal, after the Second Lebanon War. Paradoxically, that war, that hurt them badly and created a type of deterrence, after it ended Hizbullah's buildup escalated in a major way. They had 14,000 rockets in the Second Lebanon War. They fired some of them. And now they have 45,000 that cover the entire country.

"I suggest that we set aside the comforting story we tell ourselves that we supposedly built them up. We didn't build them up and there's no reason in the world to think, from everything I know about reality, that if we were in Lebanon now they would have less rockets."

So we built them up but we have to set aside the comforting fable that we built them up. They were formed because we were in Lebanon and the fact that we're not in Lebanon has no impact on their build-up.

And how did Yediot respond to Barak's pearls of strategic wisdom?

Q: You never stop talking about leadership and making courageous decisions. But you're not a commentator. You are Defense Minister and one of the most important people in the Israeli government. Ten years after the withdrawal and four years after the Second Lebanon War we again hear talk about an inevitable new round of war in the summer. Until when [will we have to fight]?"

This exchange - which is in no way unique - makes two things clear. First, Barak would rather say foolish things than acknowledge the harsh truth of his strategic misstep. Second, led by Yediot, the media prefer to portray Barak's buffoonery as courageous statecraft than acknowledge the massive cost of his failure.

THE QUESTION is why are they acting this way? From Barak's perspective, the answer is clear. Telling the truth would force him to acknowledge that his tenure as prime minister was a disaster for the country. Moreover, if Barak were ever courageous enough to acknowledge his failure, rather than listen to what he had to say, the media would shove him into the right-wing ghetto with Arens and Landau. He would lose his status as a brilliant strategist and be castigated as an ideologue.

The media's commitment to prolonging the fiction that the withdrawal was a stroke of brilliance and blocking all debate on issue stems from the fact that the withdrawal from Lebanon was a media initiative. The media introduced the foolish notion that Hizbullah only existed because Israel was in south Lebanon.

Yediot, Israel Radio and other major news organs championed the cause of an Israeli pullout from Lebanon for a decade. They portrayed EU-financed straw organizations like Four Mothers which called for the withdrawal as mass movements. They demonized IDF commanders for opposing their withdrawal plan. They stifled all voices in the North opposing the move. They castigated all politicians opposing the retreat as right-wing warmongers or conversely in the case of Sarid, as hopeless doves. And they catapulted Barak to power in 1999 after he promised them that if elected he would withdraw the IDF from Lebanon within a year of taking office.

Since the withdrawal, the media have ignored its military consequences. They pretended Hizbullah's abduction of Sawayid, Avitan and Avraham, its cross border attack in Shlomi in 2002, and its military build-up were unrelated to the withdrawal. So too, as far as the media are concerned, Hizbullah's electoral and extra-electoral takeover of the Lebanese government and its decision to initiate the Second Lebanon War were all wholly unconnected to the IDF's withdrawal.

The media have ignored the withdrawal's regional consequences. They preferred to give credence to Arafat's claim that the Palestinian terror was a popular Palestinian response to Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 over considering the connection between Hizbullah/Iran/Syria and the Palestinians.

They ignored the political consequences of the withdrawal. They opted to support the Arab-Leftist narrative that if Israel contracts to the 1949 armistice lines, the Palestinians will make peace. And they continued to advance this lie even after Hamas took over Gaza in the wake of the 2005 withdrawal.

When people wonder why Israel continues to blunder from defeat to retreat and can't figure out a way to assert its interests militarily or politically, they need to look no further than Yediot's ten-year anniversary celebration of the withdrawal from Lebanon. So long as the media continue to portray their ideological fantasies as journalism, no politician will dare to embrace strategic rationality.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 11, 2010 at 4:12 AM

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May 7, 2010, 7:05 AM

Tribal Update goes to New York

This week's Tribal Update from Latma, the Hebrew-language satire website I run through the Center for Security Policy features Tawil Fadiha, the Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage visiting New York in the aftermath of the failed Time Square bombing.

We also host "historian" Shaldag Borochov discussing Theodor Herzl's legacy on the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Enjoy!

Posted on May 7, 2010 at 7:05 AM

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Time to plan for war

So much for US President Barack Obama's famed powers of persuasion. At the UN's Nuclear Non-Poliferation Treaty review conference which opened this week, the Obama administration managed to lose control over the agenda before the conference even started.

Obama administration officials said they intended to use the conference as a platform to mount international pressure on Iran to stop its illicit nuclear proliferation activities. But even before the conference began, with a little prodding from Egypt, the administration agreed that instead of focusing on Iran, the conference would adopt Iran's chosen agenda: attacking Israel for its alleged nuclear arsenal.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that US officials were conducting negotiations with Egypt about Egypt's demand that the NPT review conference call for sanctions against Israel for refusing to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state. The Journal quoted a senior administration official involved in the discussions saying, "We've made a proposal to them [Egypt] that goes beyond what the U.S. has been willing to do before."

Among other possibilities, that proposal may have included a US agreement to appoint a UN envoy responsible for organizing a UN conference calling for the Greater Middle East to become a nuclear-free zone. In diplomatese, "Middle East nuclear-free zone" is a well-accepted euphemism for stripping Israel of its purported nuclear capability while turning a blind eye to Iranian, Syrian and other Islamic nuclear weapons programs. Egypt's demand, which it convinced more than a hundred members of the Non-Aligned bloc to sign onto, is for Israel to open its nuclear installations to international inspectors as a first step towards unilateral nuclear disarmament.

On Wednesday the US joined the other four permanent members of the Security Council in signing a statement calling for a nuclear-free Middle East and urging Israel, Pakistan and India to accede to the NPT as non-nuclear states. Following the US's lead, on Thursday Yukiya Amano, the new Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency wrote a letter to IAEA member states asking for their suggestions for how to convince Israel to sign the NPT.

So as Iran -- an NPT signatory -- makes a mockery of the treaty by building nuclear weapons in contempt of its treaty obligations, the US has actively supported Iran's bid to use the NPT review conference as yet another UN forum for bashing Israel.

It bears recalling that the primary goal of the NPT is to prevent nuclear proliferation. From the amount of attention Israel is receiving at the NPT review conference, you could easily get the impression that Israel's purported nuclear arsenal is the gravest proliferation threat in the world today. But history shows that this is nonsense.

Israel's alleged nuclear arsenal, which it has reportedly fielded for four decades, has not led to a regional nuclear arms race. Notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary, Israel's neighbors fully recognize that the purpose of Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal is to guarantee Israel's survival and consequently only threatens those who would attack the Jewish state with the intention of annihilating it. This is why although it is four decades old; Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal has never caused a regional nuclear arms race. It has never harmed or called into question the relevance or usefulness of the NPT's international non-proliferation agenda. Moreover, as a non-signatory to the NPT, Israel has the right to develop a nuclear program.

Iran on the other hand gave up that right when it joined the NPT regime. So too, in sharp contrast to Israel's alleged program, it is clear that Iran's nuclear project is aggressive rather than defensive. Consequently, it is universally recognized that if Iran becomes a nuclear power, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other states will begin developing their own nuclear arsenals in short order. That is, it is absolutely clear that if the NPT is to have any relevance in the coming years, if there is to be any hope that counter-proliferation regimes can be useful; preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons must be its signatories' chief aim.

But due to the Obama administration's diplomatic fecklessness and ideological blinders, administration officials were incapable of making these points. And so, instead through its actions, the administration has advanced the cause of nuclear proliferation. The US has now joined the ranks of fools who claim that nuclear weapons in the hands of states like the US and Israel are as problematic as nuclear weapons in the hands of states like Iran and North Korea.

BUT THEN, in the end it makes no difference that the US has followed Iran's lead at the NPT conference. Even if the administration had managed to make Iran's nuclear weapons program the focus of debate, it wouldn't have mattered because diplomacy is no longer a relevant tool for preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Appeasement has failed. Sanctions are dead in the water in the Security Council.

And even if the Security Council passes a sanctions resolution, they will have no impact on Iran's behavior. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made that much clear in his speech on Monday and in subsequent remarks to the media. As he put it, "While we do not welcome sanctions, we do not fear them either. Sanctions cannot stop the Iranian nation."

What all of this demonstrates is that the diplomatic track - from appeasement to sanctions - is irrelevant for contending with Iran's nuclear program. The only way to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs is to use military force to destroy or severely damage its nuclear installations.

And this of course is something Obama will not do. His begging-to-shake-hands policy towards Iran and the one hand and his iron fist policy towards Israel on the other makes it absolutely clear that Obama will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Rather than correct his abysmal failures, Obama seeks to hide them by minimizing the seriousness of the threat.

In remarks to the media this week, a White House official downplayed the Iranian threat. He told the Financial Times that Iran's "nuclear clock has slowed down. They are not making dramatic technical progress given the difficulties they are facing in their [uranium] enrichment program and the fact that their efforts to build secret facilities have been disclosed."

The fact that the US's published intelligence estimates of Iran's nuclear program contradict this claim didn't seem to faze the official.

The US's abdication of its responsibility as the leader of the free world to prevent the most dangerous regimes from acquiring the most dangerous weapons means that the responsibility for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons has fallen on Israel's shoulders. Only Israel has the means and the will to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. And the message the NPT follies convey is that Israel must develop contingency plans for attacking Iran as quickly as possible.

Daily reports of weapons build-ups and military exercises in Iran and among Iran's clients Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas expose the contours of their war plans.

Syria and Iran have armed Hizbullah with some 40,000 missiles and rockets, including hundreds of Scud missiles and guided surface-to-surface solid fuel M600 missiles with a 250 km range and. This week Hizbullah threatened to attack Israel with non-conventional weapons. Syria itself has a formidable chemical and biological arsenal as well as a massive artillery and missile force at its disposal.

As for Hamas, since Operation Cast Lead Iran's Palestinian proxy Hamas has expanded its own missile arsenal. Today it reportedly has projectiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and beyond.

As for Iran, as its seemingly endless military exercises make clear, the mullocracy has the capacity to use conventional weapons to imperil global oil shipments from the Persian Gulf. So too, this week's report that Osama Bin Laden may have decamped to Iran in 2003 merely served to underline Iran's ability to utilize jihadist terror forces throughout the world.

From the open preparations for war that Iran and its clients have undertaken, it is clear that if they initiate the next round of fighting they will fight a four front war against Israel. That war will be dominated by missile attacks against the entire country aimed at breaking the will of the Israeli people while forcing the IDF to divert vital resources away from Israel's primary target - Iran's nuclear installations - to contend with Iran's proxies' missile stores.

AS THEY CONSIDER Israel's options going forward, Israel's political and military leaders have to take two considerations into account. First, the side that initiates the conflict will be the side that controls the battle space. And second, there is a real possibility that the Obama administration will refuse to resupply Israel with vital weapons systems in the course of the war. The fact that Israel will be roundly condemned by the UN and its component parts is a certainty regardless of who initiates the conflict and therefore is irrelevant for operational planning.

Armed with these understandings, it is apparent that Israeli contingency plans for war must have limited goals and should be guided by the overarching aim of beginning and ending the war quickly. Luckily, Israel excels at limited, swift campaigns.

Responding to one of Syrian President Bashar Assad's recent threats, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman promised last month that if Assad attacks Israel, Israel will bring down his regime. While bringing about the utter defeat of Iran's regional proxies is a reasonable goal, it cannot be Israel's goal in the coming war.

In the coming war, Israel will have only one goal: to destroy or seriously damage Iran's nuclear installations. Every resource turned against Iran's proxies must be aimed at facilitating that goal. That is, the only thing Israel should seek to accomplish in contending with Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas is to prevent them from diverting Israeli resources away from attacking Iran's nuclear installations.

This means that Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Hizbullah's missiles and missile launchers, Syria's missiles, artillery and launchers, and Hamas's missiles and launchers. As for their short-range rockets, Israel should do its best to intercept them and otherwise hunker down to weather the storm of Katyushas and Qassams. Life of the homefront won't be easy. But it won't be impossible either, as we saw in 2006.

Almost every assessment of a possible Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear installations has assumed that Israel will use its air force to strike. All that can be said of that analysis is that, just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so there is more than one way to destroy Iran's nuclear installations. An Israeli strike should utilize all of them to keep the Iranians off balance and on the defensive.

These are dangerous times. Iran, which seeks to position itself as a regional superpower, has been emboldened by the Obama administration's abdication of US global leadership. Only Israel can prevent Iran from endangering the world. But time is of the essence.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 7, 2010 at 6:19 AM

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May 4, 2010, 3:57 AM

Convenient moral blindness

Moral blindness in the face of evil is depravity. But in the upside-down moral universe of our world today, moral blindness has become a badge of honor. If you refuse to call evil by its name, then you are a moderate. And if you stand up to evil, you are yourself an extremist.

The embrace of moral blindness as an emblem of sophistication is nowhere more apparent than among American Jews. Take recent events on US college campuses. This week the Washington Times reported that a large and vocal group of Brandeis University students are organizing to protest the university's decision to invite Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren to give this year's commencement address.

In a Facebook initiative led by a student named Jonathan Sussman, several hundred students have joined the demand to disinvite Oren. Sussman claims that by inviting him, Brandeis is siding with "a rogue state apologist, a defender of (among other things) the war crimes and human rights abuses of the war on Gaza."

Sussman gained notoriety earlier this year when he sought to organize students to disrupt former UN ambassador Dore Gold in a debate the university hosted between Gold and Richard Goldstone. Sussman, a self-proclaimed Communist is a member of the anti-American Students for Democratic Society.

For their part, pro-Israel students have defended the administration's decision to invite Oren on technical grounds. In a dedicated Facebook page, Brandeis student Nathan Mizrachi wrote that protesting Oren is a "waste of time." While allowing that Oren is controversial, Mizrachi argued against protesting his speech by claiming, "anyone who is consistently contributing to our worldview in a dignified, widely respected manner - instead of idiots like Michael Moore or Fox News - is someone who merits our attention."

Mizrachi couldn't bring himself to argue that Brandeis was right to invite Oren. He couldn't be bothered to note that everything Sussman wrote is a lie. The most ringing endorsement of Oren's appearance that Mizrachi could muster in response to Sussman's latest attack was to say that it was a waste of time to protest his appearance and that it "would truly be a disgrace to our university," if protesters were to shout Oren down at commencement.

No offense to Mizrachi but his Facebook counteroffensive is not exactly what most people would call a particularly heroic defense of Oren, Brandeis or Israel.

Unfortunately, this is more often than not what passes as a pro-Israel message these days in the US Jewish circles. Following the example communicated by the US Jewish leadership, supporters of Israel often act as if shouting down Israel advocates is wrong only because doing so is an assault on freedom of speech. It isn't that Israel is in the right and the Palestinians are in the wrong. It isn't that Israel is a just and moral society. It isn't that the IDF fights justly and morally and only in self-defense. It isn't that the Palestinians have taken all the lands Israel has given them and transformed them into terrorist enclaves or that they democratically elected Hamas - a genocidal terrorist organization -- to lead them. It isn't that there is not now and never was a Palestinian leadership willing to accept Israel's right to exist.

It's just that it isn't right to silence Israel advocates. It's against the First Amendment. Zionists have a right to express themselves too.

But then, not all Zionists. And not too many of them. Take the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh for example. Abu Toameh was scheduled to speak at Tufts University last month. His talk, sponsored by Honest Reporting and CAMERA, was supposed to be held under the auspices of Tufts Friends of Israel. At the last minute, Friends of Israel cancelled his lecture. Abu Toameh was informed that the pro-Israel student group cancelled his talk as a preemptive move to avoid criticism from campus Arab groups. Tufts Hillel Director Rabbi Jeffrey Summit later wrote him claiming that the talk was cancelled due to an overabundance of pro-Israel speakers on campus.

The situation at Tufts and Brandeis, where pro-Israel students can't figure out why Israel should be defended and don't want to overload themselves with too many speakers defending Israel is downright wonderful in comparison to the situation at Berkeley. There Jewish students and faculty were galvanizing forces behind the divestment from Israel drive that passed overwhelmingly in the Berkeley student senate in March.

The divestment initiative, which called on the university administration to divest from General Electric and United Technologies for their joint projects with the IDF, was vetoed by the senate president. His veto was narrowly sustained in a later vote last week. In the meantime, the divestment drive has expanded to UC San Diego.

In an article published last month on the American Thinker website, UC Santa Cruz and UCLA professors Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith wrote that the divestment campaigns and the overwhelmingly anti-Israel atmosphere on campuses has made life extremely difficult and often frightening for Jewish students on campuses.

And yet, there has been no divestment of major Jewish donors from these institutions. There has been no demand that Hillel replace ineffective or anti-Israel administrators. There has been no demand that campuses fire professors like Berkeley Hebrew Professor Ruth Adler or Talmud Professor Daniel Boyarin who force their students to undergo anti-Zionist indoctrination in their classrooms.

Again and again, the official Jewish community and pro-Israel students' response to anti-Israel campaigns and often violent onslaughts is to mumble out a protest against their infringement on the freedom of expression. That is, for many US Jewish leaders and Jewish campus activists, the biggest problem with the Red-Green alliance of leftists and Muslims is that they deny pro-Israel students and speakers the right to express themselves.

The mendacity of the Red-Green alliance's claims against Israel, the bigotry of their increasingly open calls for Israel's destruction, their denial of the Jewish people's right to self-determination or even our right to define ourselves as a people all goes unopposed.

This is not a sustainable line of defense. This is not even the beginning of a defense - of Israel or of the rights of American Jews. But this state of affairs does explain very well why according to recent polling data, a half of American Jews under 35 would be okay with a world without Israel.

Some argue that what happens on the campuses is not important. What really matters is what happens in the grown-up world. Unfortunately, today we see that the depraved moral blindness of the classroom has brought about a situation where political leaders cannot recognize the moral depravity of the international community. And sophisticated grownups - and particularly American Jewish grownups -- cannot or will not make their leaders pay a price for their depraved support for evil.

Take Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's decision to travel to New York this week to participate in the UN's Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. It is clear that Ahmadinejad's purpose in travelling to New York is to ensure that the conference is a circus. Ahmadinejad means to make certain that to the extent a distinction is made between Iran's nuclear weapons program and Israel's purported nuclear arsenal, the distinction will claim that whereas Israel's alleged nuclear arsenal needs to be destroyed, Iran's interest in nuclear weapons is a justified response to Israeli badness.

Apparently anticipating his move, according to the Wall Street Journal US President Barack Obama has been discussing Israel's alleged nuclear arsenal with Egypt. According to the newspaper's account, the US is discussing Egypt's demand that the Middle East become a nuclear-free zone. A senior US official claimed, "We've made a proposal to them [Egypt] that goes beyond what the US has been willing to do before."

Some US Jewish groups have called for a protest of Ahmadinejad outside the UN building. Others have called on state delegations to stage a mass walkout during his speech.

But none have attacked the administration for agreeing to the false moral equivalence between Iran's nuclear program and Israel's nuclear program. None have condemned Obama for discussing Israel's purported nuclear program at a time when Iran -- that has declared its intention to destroy Israel -- is racing towards the nuclear finish line.

Then too, the American Jewish community is silent as Obama strong arms Israel into indirect, Obama administration-mediated talks with the Palestinians. It is silent even as it is widely reported that Obama has threatened Israel that if the Jewish state builds homes for Jews in Jerusalem or refuses to accept a Palestinians state by next year, Obama will impose his own "peace plan," on Israel. That is, the American Jewish community is all but mute as Obama does to Israel what Berkeley is doing to Israel.

The fact of the matter is that defending Israel against its enemies isn't a freedom of speech issue. It is an issue of right vs. wrong. Israel is the state of the Jewish people. It is a great ally of the US. Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem were legally allocated to the Jewish people by the League of Nations Mandate in 1922 and that allocation has never been cancelled or superseded. Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and neighborhoods in united Jerusalem are not illegal. The IDF did not commit war crimes in Gaza or anywhere else. Arabs are full citizens in Israel. When Israel fights, it fights to defend itself from aggression.

The aggression launched against Israel is conducted by societies and states that refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist. It is launched by societies and states that ignore the laws of war, that refuse to respect even the most basic human rights of their own citizens let alone of Israelis. The Palestinians have yet to find even one leader who is willing to accept Israel's right to exist or the Jewish people's right to self-determination in our land.

This is the truth. This is where the defense of Israel begins. And it is the absence of this truth and this defense from the lexicon of Jewish American students and community leaders in recent years that has brought about a situation where the only reason not to attack Israel is because it is "a waste of time."

It is the absence of this truth and this defense that has enabled a situation where the President of the United States can maintain the support of the American Jewish community while allowing others to equate Israel's alleged nuclear arsenal with Iran's nuclear program, and while treating Israel as if it were the root of all the pathologies of the Arab world.

And if the truth about Israel continues to be ignored by American Jews, not only will Israel be imperiled. The sustainability of their own community -- that has embraced moral blindness in the name of moderation and sophistication -- will be called into question.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 4, 2010 at 3:57 AM

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Ending Israel's losing streak

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Tribal Update goes to New York

Time to plan for war

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Convenient moral blindness

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