Caroline Glick :: December 2010 Archives

Peace Now's legacy

This week on the Tribal Update, the television-on-internet show produced by Latma -- the Hebrew-language media satire website I edit we have a jam packed program full of the sort of witty, biting, funny current affairs satire you have come to love!

This week's show is longer than usual. We feature Peace Now's legacy. We present the dilemmas of Israeli pilots in the south in light of the state's refusal to enforce the law against Beduin criminal gangs.

We have Halil Majnoun, the Egyptian Minister of Conspiracy Theories discussing Egypt's latest concerns about Mossad mosquito flies.

We have Jamil and Awad our favorite suicide bombers discussing Hamas cowardice and WilkiLeaks.

And much, much more.

Here's the whole program.

Here is the Peace Now clip.

Here is the Jamil and Awad clip.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

Unfortunately, for now, we can only accept donations from donors in the US. We are currently establishing an Israeli non-profit through which we will be able to accept donations from other countries. Watch this space for updates.

Meantime, enjoy the show and have a Happy New Year!

Posted on December 31, 2010 at 9:00 AM

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Hizbullah and the information war

On January 15 the UN's Special Tribunal for Lebanon is scheduled to issue indictments against a number of Hizbullah operatives for the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. All of Lebanon and much of the region is waiting in suspense that grows with each passing day.

The news that Hizbullah would be fingered by the prosecutors was first made public in July. Since then, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah has threatened repeatedly to set fire to Lebanon and perhaps Israel if Daniel Bellemare, the chief prosecutor dares to go forward. Given Hizbullah's track record of war, murder and intimidation, no one doubts that the Iranian-proxy force will keep its promise if it comes to that.

Almost immediately after Hizbullah was named as the central suspect in Hariri's assassination, Hizbullah's ally Syria began negotiating a deal with Saudi Arabia, which serves as the patron of Lebanon's Sunni community. The goal of these talks is to get Hizbullah off the hook, "in order to preserve stability."

Bellemare made clear this week that he will not be influenced by politics in dispatching his duties to the law. If he is true to his word, then Hizbullah members will certainly be indicted for assassinating Hariri next month.

What this means is that the most attractive option for Hizbullah and its allies right now is to discredit the tribunal. To this end, Hizbullah has repeatedly characterized the UN tribunal as an Israeli and American plot. Syria has insisted that the Lebanese who testified before the tribunal gave false testimony.

While these allegations may have convinced their supporters, both Syria and Hizbullah know that the only effective way to discredit the tribunal is to coerce Hariri's son, Prime Minister Saad Hariri to disavow the tribunal and withdraw Lebanese governmental support for its proceedings.

Although such a move would probably have little impact on the tribunal's ultimate judgment, it might reduce the political impact of the indictments for Hizbullah in Lebanon.

And so according to Ha'aretz, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and Saudi King Abdullah reached a deal in which Hariri Jr. will disavow the tribunal. In exchange, Hizbullah will agree not to murder him.

Hizbullah has not surprisingly announced its support for the deal. Hariri has given a series of contradictory statements that lend to the sense that he is trying to run down the clock. This week he met with Abdullah in New York where the Saudi despot is undergoing medical treatment. On Wednesday he travelled to Saudi Arabia for further talks.

In the meantime, just to underline its willingness to make good on its threats, last week Hizbullah had its affiliated trade union, the National Union for Labor Syndicates stage a protest against the government. As Hanin Ghadar at the NOW Lebanon news portal noted, in the days leading up to the terror group's coup in May 2008, it had its labor affiliates stage similar protests.

AND THAT brings us to the basic question of why is Hizbullah taking the tribunal so seriously?

What does it care if its members are indicted for murdering Hariri? This is a terror group that has always been perfectly willing to kill in order to get its way. And everyone knows it.

Hizbullah operatives killed Hariri because he was irritating Nasrallah and Assad with all his talk about Lebanese sovereignty. Then they killed parliamentarian after parliamentarian to deny Hariri Jr.'s parliamentary majority the power to form a government or do anything else without Hizbullah agreement. When even that was insufficient to force the government to slavishly do its bidding, Hizbullah carried out its bloody coup in May 2008 in order to take over effective control of the government and the Lebanese army.

So too, after the June 2009 elections, Hizbullah coerced members of Hariri's coalition to change sides and so prevented him from forming a coalition without Hizbullah receiving veto power over all government decisions.

And even if Hizbullah did care about what its fellow Lebanese think of it, the fact is that Hizbullah is not an independent actor. It is an Iranian proxy. And the Iranians have made clear that they do not care what the tribunal does. Iran's supreme dictator Ali Khamenei announced earlier this month that as far as Iran is concerned, the tribunal's judgments are null and void. In his words, "This court is a kangaroo court and every verdict it issues is rejected."

So again, why is Hizbullah so concerned about this tribunal?

Hizbullah is concerned because Hizbullah understands the power of symbols. No, its operatives will probably never be jailed for their crimes. But the tribunal is a symbol. If Bellmare dares to defy Hizbullah, then others might consider doing so.

On the other hand if Hizbullah is able to coerce Hariri to withdraw the Lebanese government's support for the tribunal and disavow its work, it will have demonstrated its strength and authority in a way that will deter others from challenging it.

Hizbullah's response to the specter of the Special Tribunal is not only interesting for what it tells us about prospects for Lebanon's future and for regional stability and peace. Hizbullah's response to the threat that its members will be exposed as Hariri's assassins teaches us interesting lessons about the nature of information warfare.

Information warfare is not simply a question of competing narratives, as it is often characterized in the West. Information war is a form of warfare whose aim is to use words, symbols and images to force people to take real action. These actions can involve everything from war to terrorism to surrender.

In closed societies, information warfare is used to cause people to rally around the side of the group conducting the information operation and to mobilize supporters to act against the chosen enemy. For instance, when its leadership is interested in inspiring terror attacks against Israel, the Palestinian Authority broadcasts around the clock incitement against Israel.

On May 8, 2001 a group of Palestinians from a village adjacent to the Israeli community of Tekoa in Gush Etzion got their hands on two Jewish children Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran from Tekoa. The two boys were bludgeoned to death with stones. The details of the butchery are unspeakable.

The question is what can make human beings butcher children? How can a person hurt a child the way that their killers hurt them?

The answer is Palestinian television.

In the weeks before the murder, PATV (funded by foreign donors) broadcast doctored footage around the clock of what they claimed were atrocities carried out by Israel. They showed doctored images of mutilated corpses and claimed that Israel had mutilated and abused them. Israel and Jews were so demonized by these false images that after awhile, the Palestinians watching these shows believed that Jews, including Jewish children, were all monsters who must be destroyed and made to pay for their imaginary crimes.

This was an act of information warfare that in the event, led Palestinians to butcher Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran.

As for information warfare aimed at Westerners, here too, the Palestinian Authority, like Hizbullah has a long track record of success. Journalists know that the PA has no compunction about kidnapping, arresting and beating up reporters. They do it to Palestinian reporters routinely. With their sure knowledge, Western reporters who come in to the PA recognize that if they want to be safe, they have to report stories that will make the PA happy.

For instance, after a television crew from Italy's Mediaset network broadcast footage of the PA police-supported lynch mob murdering and dismembering IDF reservists Vadim Nozhitz and Yosef Avrahami in Ramallah in October 2000, Ricardo Cristiani, deputy chief of Italy's RAI television network's Jerusalem bureau published an apology in the PA's newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida.

Among other things, Cristiani wrote, "We [RAI] emphasize to all of you that the events did not happen this way, because we always respect (will continue to respect) the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for (journalistic) work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work."

Fearing Palestinian revenge attacks, Mediaset was forced to shut down its offices.

This week, Swedish and Danish police announced the arrest of four Muslim terrorists who were en route to carrying out a massacre at the Jyllands Posten newspaper. The attack was supposed to avenge the newspaper's publication of cartoons of Muhammed in 2005.

A US diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks and published Monday by Sweden's Aftonbladet newspaper reported that Syria's Assad himself directed the information operation in 2006 that led to rioting against Denmark and Jyllands Posten throughout the Muslim world in 2006. Assad reportedly ordered Syria's Grand Mufti to incite his fellow imams to attack Denmark for publishing the pictures.

The Arab world's response to WikiLeaks shows just how powerful the incitement against Israel and Jews on the Arab psyche is. According to Hazem Saghiyah from the NOW Lebanon news portal, the Arab world was beset by confusion by the leaked US cables because Israel was not exposed as demonic.

As Saghiyeh put it, for Arabs who have come to believe that Israel controls the world through its satanic power, "these documents should have provided the decisive argument" against Israel.

The fact that it is the Arab leadership, rather than Israel that has been exposed as lying and two-faced, makes the Arab world writ large view the WikiLeaks operation as a huge Zionist conspiracy.

WHAT ALL of this shows is that information wars are not just about getting out the facts. Like kinetic warfare, they involve power plays, intimidation and the use of subconscious and visceral manipulation.

Israel has recently awoken to one aspect of information warfare. It has recognized the consequences of years of demonization of Israel in Europe and international organizations. But Israel has yet to awaken to the fact that it is a type of warfare and has to be countered with counter-information warfare.

Obviously this doesn't mean that Israel should begin acting like its enemies. But what it does mean is that Israel must begin using more hard-knuckle techniques to defend itself. It must begin targeting people's emotions as well has their minds.

For instance, when Israel is confronted by threats of lawsuits for acts of self-defense, it responds with defense attorneys. When the US was threatened with lawfare by Belgian courts, then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld responded by threatening to remove NATO headquarters from Belgium.

When Israel is accused of targeting Palestinian civilians, it responds by attaching legal advisors to combat units. What it should be doing instead is providing film footage of Palestinian children being trained as terrorists and exploited as human shields.

War is a dirty business. Information warfare is a dirty form of war. And if we don't want to lose, we'd better start fighting.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 31, 2010 at 7:28 AM

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The wars of 2011

On Sunday thousands of Israel haters gathered in Istanbul to welcome the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara to the harbor. Festooned with Palestinian flags, the crowd chanted "Death to Israel," "Down with Israel" and "Allah akbar" with Hizbullah-like enthusiasm.

The Turkish protesters promised to stand on the side of Hamas when it next goes to war with Israel. They may not have to wait long to keep their promise. Over the past two weeks Hamas has steeply escalated its missile war, launching over 30 missiles at Israel. Last week, a missile that narrowly missed a nursery school wounded a young girl.

Since Operation Cast Lead two years ago, Iran has helped Hamas massively increase its missile and other military capabilities. Today the terror group that rules Gaza has missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. It has advanced antitank missiles. As Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida said Saturday, "We are now stronger than before and during the war, and our silence over the past two years was only for evaluating the situation."

That evaluation has not tempered Hamas's aim of annihilating the Jews of Israel. As Obeida's colleague Ahmed Jaabari said Saturday, Israel's Jews have two choices, "death or departing Palestinian lands."

IDF commanders are taking Hamas's new brinksmanship seriously. In recent days several have said that Israel's deterrence has eroded. Another Cast Lead is just a matter of time, they warn.

In the meantime, Fatah - Hamas's sometime rival and sometime brother - is preparing its next round of political warfare with its many friends around the world. Despite some recent tactical repositioning, its goal is clearly to proceed with its plan to declare statehood with maximum international support within the next nine to 12 months.

To this end, Fatah and its allies are operating on multiple fronts. On November 24 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution to hold a Durban III conference on September 21. The first conference, held in Durban, South Africa in September 2001, is mainly remembered as a diplomatic pogrom against Israel and Jews which complemented the shooting war in Israel.

As Jews were being butchered in pizzerias in Jerusalem, Jew-haters gathered to deny that Jews have human rights. They used the UN's anti-racism banner to assert that it is not racist to kill and incite the murder of Jews. Jews were singled out and condemned as the only nation in the world whose national liberation movement - Zionism - is racist.

BUT EVEN more important than its service in glorifying suicide bombers and their political commissars just three days before the September 11 jihadist assault on the US, the Durban conference was the place where the blueprint for the political war against Israel was authored. At the NGO conference which took place as an adjunct to the governmental conference, self-proclaimed "human rights" groups from around the world agreed that their job was to criminalize the Jewish state to isolate it politically, diplomatically and economically.

As key organizers put it, the "activists'" job was to conduct a nonviolent jihad to complement the work of the "resistance fighters" massacring children and parents in Israel.

The Durban II conference last year in Geneva was supposed to reinvigorate the political war that was launched in 2001. But it was a bust. The only head of state to address the proceedings was Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He used the occasion to again call for the eradication of the Jewish state.

To prevent another flop, last month the Palestinians and their supporters agreed that the 10th anniversary conference will be held in New York during the opening of UN General Assembly. Their goal is to piggyback on that conference to get heads of state that are in New York already to join in their anti-Israel political war.

And they have every reason for optimism. Although Canada and Israel have announced their plans to boycott the conference, the Obama administration has been noticeably unwilling to distance itself from it.

Given the swank locale of Durban III, the Palestinians and their friends trust they will enjoy a reprise of the virulently anti-Jewish NGO conference of a decade ago. The resolution clearly advocates such an outcome in its call for "civil society, including NGOs to organize and support" the conference "with high visibility."

For Fatah leaders like the Palestinian Authority's unelected president Mahmoud Abbas and its unelected prime minister Salam Fayyad, the Durban III conference will be the culmination of their current campaign to delegitimize Israel.

Last week the PA announced it will ask the UN Security Council to pass an anti- Semitic resolution defining Jewish building in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem as illegal. This move dovetails nicely with Abbas's statement over the weekend that "Palestine" will be Jew-free. As he put it, "If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won't agree to the presence of one Israeli in it. When a Palestinian state is established, it would have no Israeli presence."

To date neither of these racist bids to deny Jews basic rights to their homes and land just because they are Jews has been opposed by any government or human rights group. And if the Obama administration allows the PA's anti-Semitic resolution to go forward in the Security Council, the move would be a massive victory for the political war against Israel.

That war has already won some other significant victories of late. The decision by five South American governments to recognize "Palestine" along the 1949 armistice lines, like the decision by a number of European states - following the US - to upgrade the PLO's diplomatic status are tactical gains.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled this month that the Obama administration is wholly on board Fatah's political warfare bandwagon. In her speech at the Brookings Institute on December 10, she said the Obama administration supports Fatah's plan to build facts on the ground that will make it more difficult for Israel to maintain its control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

After calling Jewish presence in the areas "illegitimate," Clinton pledged the US "will deepen our support of the Palestinians' state-building efforts."

Among other things, she pledged to continue training and deploying a Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria and pressuring Israel to withdraw the IDF from the areas.

As she put it, "As the Palestinian security forces continue to become more professional and capable, we look to Israel to facilitate their efforts. And we hope to see a significant curtailment of incursions by Israeli troops into Palestinian areas."

These then are the contours of the Palestinians' war plans for 2011. Hamas will launch an illegal missile war to provoke an IDF campaign in Gaza. Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Turkey, the UN and a vast array of NGOs and leftist governments from Norway to Brazil will support its illegal war.

Fatah will escalate its political war. Its campaign will be supported by the US, the EU, the UN and a vast array of NGOs and leftist governments.

The purpose of these two campaigns - which complement one another and which will likely culminate at the UN in September - is to weaken Israel militarily and politically with the shared purpose of destroying it in the fullness of time.

SO WHAT must Israel do? In the first instance, it must decide that its goal is not merely to weather this storm, but to win both of these wars.

In recent days we have been witness to a mildly entertaining fight between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former prime minister Ehud Olmert. Olmert accused Barak of purposely failing to defeat Hamas during Operation Cast Lead. Barak, Olmert alleged, "did everything he could to defend Hamas and to prevent its downfall in the Gaza Strip."

Barak responded to Olmert's broadside by accusing the leader who failed to defeat Hizbullah in the 2006 war of "phony Churcillianism."

Ironically, of course, both are right. Both of them led Israel in war with extreme incompetence. Both refused to put together strategies for victory.

Now as the country contemplates a reprise of Cast Lead, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must ensure that when the IDF acts, it acts decisively and emerges victorious. If this means firing Barak, then he must be fired.

The same is true in the political realm. The Palestinian offensive must be met by a counteroffensive that is informed by a strategy for victory. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman demonstrated the starting point on Sunday when he told Israel's ambassadors that peace with the Palestinians is impossible. But this is not enough.

Any strategy for victory in political warfare must begin with a clear recognition of reality. Peace is impossible because like Hamas, Fatah is the enemy. Its leaders and rank and file reject our right to exist. They are building a state that will be at war with us. They are avidly working to delegitimize us with the intention of destroying us together with their brothers in Hamas - whom they finance with US and other foreign aid.

A political war against Fatah would involve actively discrediting its members and leaders. Today Fatah is running a campaign libeling IDF soldiers and commanders as war criminals. Israel must file valid war crimes complaints against Fatah terrorists and political leaders in the international and foreign judicial bodies.

Fatah uses the UN to delegitimize us. Our delegations at all UN bodies must daily submit resolutions calling for the condemnation of the Palestinians for their efforts to criminalize us and carry out war crimes against us.

Israel must also rally its allies to its side. We must ask our friends in the US Congress to defund the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA. The PA is a terroristic and criminal syndicate that uses US taxpayer dollars to finance terrorism and pad the pockets of terror masters and

apparachiks. UNRWA, which is supposed to be a welfare organization, openly acknowledges that it employs terrorists, allows its schools and camps to be used as jihad indoctrination centers, training camps and missile launching pads. The Congressional Research Service has stated that it is impossible to claim that US funds to UNRWA do not at least indirectly finance terror groups.

At home the government must stop all tax transfers to the PA. It must prohibit the deployment of the US-trained Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria. It must rebuff US pressure to curtail IDF counterterror operations in Judea and Samaria.

The government must outlaw all organizations assisting the Palestinians in their military and political warfare operations. It should support class action lawsuits against the PA by terror victims in local courts. It should withhold diplomatic visas to representatives of countries like Britain where Israeli politicians and military personnel are barred from travelling due to Palestinian lawfare operations.

The government should implement Netanyahu's open airwaves plan and encourage the launch of a private all news network along the Fox News model.

The Palestinians clearly see the coming year as a decisive year in their war to destroy Israel. The Netanyahu government needs to muster its forces to battle. These are battles we can win. But to do so, we must commit ourselves to victory.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 28, 2010 at 12:11 AM

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Jingle Bells - The Bethlehem Version

In honor of Christmas, this week at Latma, the Hebrew-language satire site I run, we decided to do something special for our Christian friends around the world.

We produced a clip in English featuring a version of Jingle Bells that depicts the lives of Christians who live in the Muslim world as seen by Tawil Fadiha, the Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage.

Here it is. Please spread it far and wide.

And here is our entire weekly show, the Tribal Update.

Merry Christmas and best wishes from me and the whole team at Latma.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

Unfortunately, for now, we can only accept donations from donors in the US. We are currently establishing an Israeli non-profit through which we will be able to accept donations from other countries. Watch this space for updates.

Posted on December 24, 2010 at 8:33 AM

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Slouching towards Teheran

Two weeks ago, Iran scored a massive victory. Jordan, the West's most stable and loyal ally in the Arab world began slouching towards the Iranian Gomorrah.

On December 12, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei met with Jordanian King Abdullah II in Amman and extended a formal invitation from Ahmadinejad for him to pay a state visit to Iran. Abdullah accepted.

According to Iran's ISNA news agency, Mashei said that Abdullah's visit will begin a new page in bilateral relations and that, "the two countries hold massive potential to work together." Mashei added, "If Islamic states stand united, no country will be threatened."

For his part, Abdullah reportedly said that his country recognizes Iran's nuclear rights and supports its access to peaceful nuclear technology.

Abdullah was one of the first world leaders to sound the alarm on Iran. In 2004 Abdullah warned of a "Shiite crescent" extending from Iran to Iraq, through Syria to Lebanon. His words were well reported at the time. But his warning went unheeded.

In the intervening six years, reality has surpassed Abdullah's worst fears. Not only Lebanon and Syria have fallen under Iranian control. Iraq, Turkey, Qatar, Gaza and increasingly Oman, Yemen and Afghanistan are also either willing or unwilling members of the axis.

In the face of Iran's expanding web of influence and the mullahs' steady progress towards nuclear capability, Washington behaves as though there is no cause for concern. And the likes of Jordan are beside themselves.

In a WikiLeaks leaked cable from April 2009 written by US Ambassador to Jordan R. Stephen Beecroft, Jordan's frustration and concern over the Obama administration's incompetence in handling the Iranian threat was clear.

Beecroft wrote, "Jordan's leaders are careful not to be seen as dictating toward the US, but their comments betray a powerful undercurrent of doubt that the United States knows how to deal effectively with Iran."

On the one hand, Jordanian Senator Zaid Rifai beseeched US to bomb Iran's nuclear installations. Rifai said, "Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won't matter."

But on the other hand, the Jordanians recognized that the Obama administration was committed to appeasing Iran and so tried to convince the Americans to ensure that their appeasement drive didn't come at the Arabs' expense.

Beecroft reported a clear warning from Abdullah. Abdullah cautioned that if the Arabs believe that the US was appeasing Iran at their expense, "that engagement will set off a stampede of Arab states looking to get ahead of the curve and reach their own separate peace with Teheran.

"King Abdullah counseled Special Envoy George Mitchell in February [2009] that direct US engagement with Iran at this time would just deepen intra-Arab schisms and that more 'countries without a backbone' would defect to the Iranian camp."

THAT WAS then. And since then, the Obama administration did nothing after Ahmadinejad and his henchmen stole the presidential election. It did nothing as they repressed the tens of millions of Iranians who demonstrated against the election fraud. The Obama administration did nothing as Iran conducted repeated war games along the Straits of Hormuz, progressed in its nuclear program, deepened its military alliances with Turkey and Venezuela and escalated its proxy war against the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

The Americans said nothing as Iran prevented the pro-US faction that won the Iraqi election from forming a government. They did nothing as Iran forced the reinstallation of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki despite his electoral defeat.

As Washington stood idly by in the face of Iran's aggression, Jordan and the other US-allied Arab states watched as Obama harassed Israel, announced his plan to withdraw all US forces from Iraq next year, appointed a new ambassador to Syria and approved more military aid to the Iranian-controlled Lebanese army. And Abdullah and the other Arabs watch now as the US is poised to begin yet a new round of appeasement talks with Iran next month.

Unlike the previous failed rounds of talks, the next failed round of talks will take place in Turkey. Iranian officials are already exulting that Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan will act as Iran's protector in those talks, and so officially end any semblance of Iranian diplomatic isolation on the nuclear issue.

And so, just as Abdullah warned would happen, today he is leading Jordan into the ranks of "countries without a backbone," and making a separate peace with Ahmadinejad.

Jordan is a weak country. Its minority Hashemite regime has failed to dominate its Palestinian majority. And since its inception by the British in 1946, Jordan has depended on Western powers and Israel for its survival.

In acting as he is, Abdullah is following in his father's footsteps. The late King Hussein survived by watching the prevailing winds closely and always siding with the side he believed was strongest at any given time.

When Hussein believed that the West and Israel were weakening, he went with their enemies. He only rejoined the Western alliance after it defeated its foes, and so convinced him that it was stronger. Notable examples of this are his 1967 alliance with Egypt and Syria against Israel and his decision in 1990 to stand with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of Saddam's conquest of Kuwait.

IT IS often erroneously claimed that siding with the metaphorical stronger horse is primarily an Arab practice. In truth, everyone does it.

Take France for instance.

In another diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks, the US embassy in Paris reported that French President Nicolas Sarkozy thinks that the Palestinians are stronger than Israel. The report claimed that in Sarkozy's June 2009 meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, he told the Israeli leader that he must surrender to all the Palestinian demands because in his view the Palestinians are stronger than Israel is.

Before Sarkozy took office, he was considered a great supporter of Israel and a personal friend of Netanyahu's. But since taking office, he has sided with the Palestinians against Israel. He has been friendly to Syria. Most recently, he agreed to sell one hundred advanced anti-tank missiles to the Hizbullah-controlled Lebanese military.

In light of his comment to Netanyahu it is clear that what motivates Sarkozy to act as he does is his analysis of the power balance between Israel and its enemies. Happily for Israel, Sarkozy is wrong. Israel is stronger than the Palestinians and has the capacity to defend itself effectively against its enemies.

Unhappily for Israel, Sarkozy's analysis is probably based in large part on arguments he has heard from the Israeli Left under Kadima. Over the past several years, Kadima leaders have managed to convince the country's best friends that Israel has no option other than surrender.

This is due to Kadima's obsession with demography and its demented plan for extricating Israel from what it considers predetermined demographic doom.

According to the likes of Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, the fact that there are 6 million Jews and 4 million Arabs west of the Jordan River means that Israel has no option other than surrendering Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians. As far as Livni and her leftist comrades are concerned, it makes no difference that such a move will not decrease the number of Arabs west of the Jordan.

It makes no difference to the Israeli Left that the Palestinian state they hope to build will - with their consent -- bring in millions more Arabs as immigrants into the landmass west of the Jordan River and so quickly render Jews a minority, making war a foregone conclusion.

In short, through their asinine demographic argument - with which they surrender all Israeli claims to the capital city, and to strategically vital land that Israel has valid legal and historical claims to -- Livni and her colleagues tell the likes of Sarkozy that not only is Israel weaker than the Palestinians. They tell these erstwhile friends that Israel is doomed to destruction and there is no reason for them to support it.

Based on these claims, Sarkozy's decision to make a separate peace with Iran through its Palestinian, Syrian and Hizbullah proxies makes sense.

It is important to bear this in mind when one considers the reason that the campaign to delegitimize Israel is gaining momentum. Given the Israeli-fuelled sense among key governments that Israel is a lost cause, as they see it, they have no reason to defend Israel from its detractors. From their perspective, their interests are better served by either standing on the sidelines or turning on Israel the weak horse.

ALL THIS is not to say that the Left is purposely sinking the ship of state. It is simply a victim of its own success. The Left has convinced Europe and the Arabs that it is dedicated to appeasement.

The Left believed that by convincing the Arabs and the Europeans that Israel is serious about appeasing its enemies that they would make an alliance with the Jewish state. And since Europe is stronger than Israel, and the Arabs are a threat to Israel, by winning their favor, the Left believed it would strengthen Israel.

What the Left failed to recognize is that Europe and the Arabs would rather cut a deal with Iran than defend themselves against it. A surrendering Israel is of no use to them. They only like Israel when it wins.

And now that weakness has pushed Jordan over the edge.

The lesson of all of this for Israel is clear. For the past 17 years, in the throes of the Left's strategic blindness, Israel has spent its time emphasizing its weaknesses and its enemies' strengths. This practice must be reversed. Israel must now concentrate on its strengths and its enemies' weaknesses.

For instance, Israel has a stronger claim to the disputed territories that the Palestinians. And Israel is stronger than the Palestinians by every possible measuring rod.

On their side, not only are the Palestinians militarily weak, they have nothing to offer anyone. Because the Palestinian national cause has far more to do with destroying Israel than building a Palestinian state, the Palestinian track record is one of destruction not creation. And this destructive tendency expresses itself on every front.

Iran too is far less powerful than it looks. From the Stuxnet worm, to a faltering economy, from increased domestic sabotage to the continuing opposition bid to overthrow the regime, Iran's soft underbelly is exposed. And it is getting softer all the time.

In contrast, Israel has a stable government. And its economic, technological and military power is constantly growing. Israel is a force to be reckoned with.

Jordan's move into the Iranian camp is not inexorable. Nor is Lebanon's or even Syria's. True, much to the Left's dismay, Israel lacks the option of joining the "countries without a backbone."

But we have a better option. We are strong and we can get stronger. And our enemies have weaknesses and we can weaken them still further.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 24, 2010 at 8:20 AM

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A time to shout

The new campaign calling for the release of Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard from prison in the US is in many ways a curious development. Pollard was arrested in 1985 and convicted on one count of transferring classified information to Israel during his service in US Naval Intelligence. He pleaded guilty to the charge in the framework of a plea bargain in which the US attorney pledged not to request a life sentence.

Despite this, Pollard was sentenced to life. So far, he has served 25 years, much of it in solitary confinement and in maximum security prisons. His health is poor. He has repeatedly expressed remorse for his crime.

Pollard's sentence and the treatment he has received are grossly disproportionate to the sentences and treatment meted out to agents of other friendly foreign governments caught stealing classified information in the US. Their average sentence is seven years in prison. They tend to serve their sentences in minimum or medium security prisons and are routinely released after four years.

The only offenders who have received similar sentences are Soviet spies Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. While Pollard transferred documents to Israel over a period of 18 months, both Ames and Hanssen served the Soviets - the US's primary enemy - for decades. Their espionage led to the death of multiple US agents operating behind the Iron Curtain.

Pollard was given a life sentence because then secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger wrote a classified victim impact assessment to the sentencing judge in which he insinuated that he had transferred information to the Soviet Union as well as to Israel. Weinberger reportedly attributed the deaths of US agents to Pollard's activities.

Weinberger's accusations were proven false with the subsequent arrests of Hanssen and Ames. As it turned out, the damage Weinberger ascribed to Pollard was actually caused by their espionage.

OVER THE past five years, and with increased urgency over the past several months, several former senior US officials who had in depth knowledge of Pollard's activities have called for his immediate release. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey has stated that, contrary to Weinberger's allegations, none of the documents Pollard stole were transferred to the Soviets or any other country. A few months ago, former senator Dennis DeConcini, a past chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to immediately release Pollard from prison. And in October, Lawrence Korb, who served as assistant secretary of defense under Weinberger, became one of the most outspoken champions for Pollard's release. Korb currently works for the Center for American Progress, which is closely allied with the Obama White House.

The renewed interest in Pollard's plight has garnered a great deal of attention in the local media as well. After Korb's initial call for Pollard's release in an op-ed published in The Los Angeles Times in October, Ma'ariv published a cover story in its weekend news supplement about Pollard's suffering. Reporter Ben Caspit demanded that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu formally request that Obama commute Pollard's sentence and release him from prison.

Ma'ariv's article caused a spike in media coverage of Pollard in November. And this month, Pollard was back in the news when the government intervened to help his former wife Ann and her father make aliya after the consulate in New York discovered they were both ill and living in poverty.

Public pressure on Netanyahu seems to be working. Before Monday, Netanyahu refused to make any public statements regarding Pollard. At his recent meeting with Obama, he refused to deliver a letter signed by 109 of the Knesset's 120 members formally requesting Pollard's release. On the other hand, heavy public pressure caused Netanyahu to initially agree to speak at Monday's rally for Pollard's release at the Knesset. Netanyahu canceled his appearance at the last moment however, and insisted on sufficing with a private meeting with Korb and Pollard's wife Esther. Obviously more pressure can and should be applied.*

On the face of things, it seems that this is a particularly inauspicious time to renew the campaign to release Pollard. This is true first of all because of the nature of the current president who is the only one with the power to release him.

By now there is little question that Obama is the most hostile US leader Israel has faced. It is hard to imagine the circumstances in which he would agree to do something for Israel that his vastly more sympathetic predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton refused to do.

In light of Obama's attitude, at first blush it makes more sense to try to advance Pollard's case through quiet diplomacy. This is the argument that cabinet secretary Zvi Hauser made in testimony before the Knesset earlier this month. Hauser appeared before the State Control Committee to respond to State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss' recommendation that Netanyahu set up a ministerial committee to oversee a public, formal campaign calling for Pollard's release.

But on second thought, the current campaign is eminently sensible. To understand why, we must consider the relative benefits of quiet, behind the scenes diplomacy and loud, public diplomacy.

Quiet diplomacy works well when all sides share a perception of joint interests and when its exposure is likely to change that perception. For instance, Israel and its Arab neighbors perceive a shared interest in blocking Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But given the nature of Arab politics, that perception, which enables the likes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain to work with Israel on preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, disappears the moment cooperation is made public.

Likewise, Lebanon's Sunnis and Christians share an interest with Israel in defeating Hizbullah. But their ability to work with Israel on defeating Hizbullah is destroyed the moment such work becomes public.

Quiet diplomacy does not work when there is no perception of shared interests. For instance, regimes that repress human rights to maintain their grip on power have little interest in cooperating with free societies, when the latter demand that they free political dissidents from prison. Quiet diplomacy in the field of human rights between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War never succeeded, because the Soviets realized that opening up their tyranny to domestic criticism would destroy the system.

And today, as Cairo's fake parliamentary elections and Teheran's continued repression of democracy protesters shows, the Obama administration's quiet diplomacy with the Muslim world regarding human rights and democracy has utterly failed.

It is in cases like this where public, noisy diplomacy comes in handy. Public campaigns are helpful when one government wishes to persuade another to do something it doesn't want to do. Last week we received a reminder of the effectiveness of such behavior with the publication of protocols of meetings held by president Richard Nixon in the Oval Office.

One such meeting involved a conversation between Nixon and secretary of state Henry Kissinger following a meeting with prime minister Golda Meir. She had asked Nixon to support the Jackson-Vanek amendment that linked US economic assistance to the USSR to the latter's willingness to permit Jews to emigrate. Kissinger opposed the request, telling Nixon, "The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."

On the face of it, Kissinger was right. Using humanitarian considerations to weaken Soviet tyranny probably didn't help US arms control negotiators score points with Leonid Brezhnev. But on a deeper lever, he was completely wrong.

The Jackson-Vanek amendment not only forced the Soviets to permit limited emigration of Jews. It started a process of opening the Soviet system, which ended up destroying the regime just a decade later.

SINCE TAKING office, Obama has only used public diplomacy in the Middle East to convince one government to take action it believed was antithetical to its interests. Last year he waged a forceful, unrelenting public diplomacy campaign to convince Netanyahu to abrogate Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria. And it worked.

Although it harmed the sacrosanct pillar of Zionism that Jewish rights are nonnegotiable, although it weakened Netanyahu's standing with his party and voters and although it empowered the Palestinians to expand their political war against Israel on the international stage, Netanyahu gave in. The public pressure Obama exerted on him compelled him to act against his interests.

The US is not an evil empire. And it is hard to see how a clear demand for Pollard's release on humanitarian grounds will have any fundamental impact on its nature.

And that is fine. But the fact is that Obama has no interest in freeing a suffering Israeli agent who was railroaded by Weinberger and remains in prison due to the efforts of Israelhaters who wrongly insist he did untold damage to US national security. Indeed, many of Pollard's detractors are members of Obama's political camp.

Israel can't expect a lot of help on this from American Jews, although they stand to be major secondary beneficiaries if Pollard is released. The impact of his case on the US Jewish community has been debilitating. Although the US and Israel are strategic allies which share many of the same interests and fight the same enemies, Israel's detractors in the US foreign policy community use the Pollard case as an excuse for questioning the loyalty and patriotism of American Jews who serve in the US government and support Israel. His continued incarceration casts a long shadow over American Jewry.

The odds are poor that a public campaign to win Pollard's release will succeed. But if Israel is going to do anything at all, its actions should be concentrated in the public realm. As we have seen, quiet diplomacy, the strategy the Netanyahu government tried until now, will never get him out of jail.

And Israel must act. Pollard's unfair, unjustified and discriminatory sentence and treatment are a dismal symbol of Jewish vulnerability. His personal suffering is inhumane, real and unrelenting. He needs us to stand up for him.

And so we must. And so we will. The time has come, against all odds to shout that Pollard must be freed. Now.

*Tuesday afternoon Netanyahu announced he will formally request that Obama release Pollard.

Posted on December 21, 2010 at 11:51 AM

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Bringing Bibi down

Over the past week, two writers published columns in foreign newspapers. One received wall to wall coverage in Israel. The other was completely ignored. The contrasting fortunes of the articles are a key to understanding the central challenges to Israel's democratic order.

Last Friday, Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's chief peace negotiator with Israel published an op-ed in Britain's Guardian newspaper in which he declared eternal war on the Jewish state. This he did by asserting that any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that does not permit the immigration of some 7 million foreign Arabs to Israel will be "completely untenable."

So as far as the supposedly moderate chief Palestinian negotiator is concerned, a peace deal in which Israel cedes Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians as the Israeli Left desires will not be sufficient for the Palestinians. Unless Israel also agrees to commit national suicide by accepting 7 million foreign Arabs as citizens, the Palestinians will continue to wage their war. With or without a Palestinian state, as long as Israel exists, the Palestinians will continue to seek its destruction.

The second article was Tom Friedman's latest column in the New York Times. Throughout his interminable career, Friedman has identified with Israel's radical Left and so been the bane of all non-leftist governments. In his latest screed, he compared Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to someone in the throes of an LSD trip. Friedman harangued Netanyahu for failing to convince his cabinet to agree to the Obama administration's demand to abrogate Jewish property rights in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem for another 90 days. He argued that by doing so, Israel - with some help from the Palestinians - is destroying all chance of peace.

So on the one hand, the chief Palestinian negotiator declared eternal war. And on the other hand, Friedman condemned Netanyahu -- for the gazillionth time.

And characteristically, the Israeli media ignored Erekat's article and gave Friedman's screed around-the-clock coverage.

DESPITE ITS hysteria, the media has not fooled the public. The Israeli people don't need to hear about Erekat's declaration of war to know that the supposedly moderate Fatah party is just as committed to Israel's destruction as Hamas. Israelis know that the majority of terrorist attacks carried out by the Palestinians since 2000 have been conducted by Fatah. They know that the US- and EU-financed and trained Palestinian security services commanded the Palestinian jihad that began in 2000. They know that Fatah is behind much of the political warfare being carried out today against Israel throughout the world.

The disparity between the pubic and the media comes across very clearly in a poll released last week by the Brookings Institute. A mere eight percent of Israelis believe that Israel and the Palestinians will achieve a lasting peace in the next five years. 91percent of Israeli Jews and 88 percent of Israeli Arabs think either that more time is needed or that there will never be peace.

Despite the sentiments of the public, there is a class of Israeli leaders that acts as though peace is just around the corner and that the public expects them to deliver it. Not unlike Friedman, for the most part these politicians argue that the Israeli government bears either sole responsibility or the lion's share of responsibility for the absence of peace.

Consequently, they argue that all that is required to achieve peace is an Israeli leader willing to do what it takes to make it happen.

Over the weekend, opposition leader Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak were in Washington for the annual Middle East peace process conclave at the Brookings Institute's Saban Forum. In their addresses to the forum and in media interviews, both politicians followed the Israeli media's lead by ignoring Erekat and parroting Friedman.

Barak brazenly rejected the policies of the government he serves by calling for the division of Jerusalem in the framework of a final peace accord with the Palesstinians.

As for Livni, she eschewed every semblance of propriety during her stay in the US capital. During a joint appearance on ABC's "This Week," with the unelected Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, Livni viciously attacked the Netanyahu government. Livni criticized Netanyahu for not accepting the Obama administration's call to abrogate Jewish property rights. She attacked him for not forming a leftist government with Kadima and Labor. She made it clear that she doesn't believe that Netanyahu is interested in peace.

Echoing Barak's assertion at the Saban Forum that being a Zionist means supporting a Palestinian state, Livni argued that by surrendering to the Palestinians, and agreeing to every US demand, Israel is advancing its own existential interests.

On the so-called Palestinian refugee issue, while stipulating that Israel could not accept immigration of foreign Arabs to its truncated borders, she said nothing about Erekat's Guardian article. And she voiced no objection when Fayyad intimated that a Palestinian compromise on this issue is not in the offing.

From Livni's perspective, the only one acting in bad faith is Netanyahu.

Barak and Livni's behavior was not wrong simply because it is classless to attack your country's elected leadership while visiting in foreign lands. It was wrong because in behaving as they did, they showed extraordinary disrespect for the 92 percent of Israelis who do not share their professed belief that peace is just around the corner.

So what were they after in Washington? Why did they embrace the views of a mere 8 percent of the electorate while treating 92 percent of their countrymen with contempt? And why did they choose to launch their assault on the government from Washington?

IN TRUTH Barak and Livni were simply following what has become the standard operating procedure for leftist politicians over the past twenty years. They were playing to two constituencies that they prize more than they prize the public.

They were playing to the US administration and the Israeli media.

Barak is an old hand at this game. During Netanyahu's first tenure as prime minister, Barak used then president Bill Clinton to bring down Netanyahu's government and get himself elected in his place. After Barak made clear that he would be far more accommodating towards Yassir Arafat than Netanyahu was, Clinton went out of his way to demonize and isolate Netanyahu. He pressured Netanyahu's coalition partners to abandon his government. And when Netanyahu's government finally fell, Clinton dispatched his senior political strategists James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Robert Schrum to run Barak's campaign.

Since Netanyahu appointed him Defense Minister, Barak has been racking up frequent flier miles on the Tel-Aviv-Washington line. Barak travels to Washington at least once a month. Amazingly, he always happens to come home with recommendations consonant with the administration's whims.

Livni was similarly richly rewarded for her willingness to attack Netanyahu while sitting next to Fayyad on American television. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton treated Livni like the most esteemed politician in Israel. Clinton steadfastly ignored the fact that 91 percent of Israelis think Livni's views are utter nonsense. And after accusing Netanyahu of lacking the courage to embrace the cause of peace, Clinton ostentatiously hosted Livni for an hour-long private meeting.

Livni's party Kadima is a media creation. Whereas every other political party in Israel was formed by citizens who felt they needed to organize politically to empower their voices, Kadima was the brainchild of the media. The media colluded with Likud leaders who were disenchanted with their voters. The likes of Ha'aretz, Yediot Ahronot and Channel Two convinced these Likud politicians to join forces with breakaways from the Labor party, who also held their voters in contempt.

As Barak's rise to power in 1999 makes clear, the media's bid to demonize the Right and undermine Israel's alliance with the US in the hopes of restoring the Left to power is nothing new. But this week, a leading media siren was kind enough to expose the media's entire strategy for disenfranchising the public. Ha'aretz's veteran columnist Akiva Eldar performed this service in a pair of articles published Tuesday in the Guardian and Ha'aretz.

Eldar co-authored his Guardian article with his comrade Carlo Strenger. It was their response to Erekat's declaration of eternal war.

Eldar's main message to Erekat was that he should keep his plans to himself. Certainly he shouldn't be blabbing about them in a place the Israeli public was liable to see them. It could wreck the media's entire plan to discredit the government.

Eldar and Strenger scolded, "Erekat''s article is disappointing. He is not just a private citizen, but the Palestinian Authority's chief negotiator, and he knows Israel and its internal dynamics very well. He knows that raising the right of return at this moment plays into the hands of Israel's right wing: they will be able to say: 'We always told you so: the two-state solution is just a Palestinian plot to incorporate the Jewish state into the Greater State of Palestine.'"

But then again, as Eldar showed in his article in Ha'aretz, Erekat doesn't really have anything to worry about. Eldar and his comrades will keep the Israeli public in the dark about Erekat's determination to destroy Israel.

Ignoring completely what Erekat wrote, Eldar's column in Ha'aretz started where Friedman's ended. He placed all the blame for the absence of a peace process on Netanyahu's shoulders. He accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel's alliance with the US by not embracing Obama's latest request to abrogate Jewish property rights in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. He then claimed that due to Netanyahu's behavior, the Obama administration has decided to follow in the Clinton administration's footsteps and overthrow his government.

As Eldar put it, "When Clinton recently invited Kadima leader Tzipi Livni to a private meeting, this signified an unofficial announcement that Netanyahu's account in Washington has been closed."

He continued, "Twelve years ago, when Hillary Clinton's husband realized that... [Netanyahu] had no intention of honoring his signature (on the Wye River Accord with Yasser Arafat), that was Netanyahu's last stop before being sent back to his villa in Caesarea."

So this is the game. The media and the US administration are again colluding with the Israeli Left's political leadership to overthrow the Netanyahu government. They are willfully ignoring both the will of Israel's voters and the declared commitment of their favorite "moderate" Palestinians to fight Israel until it is destroyed in order to blame the absence of peace on Netanyahu.

THIS GAME can stop. But two things must happen first.

The Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment that supports it must pay a price for seeking to undermine the elected government of the US's most important strategic ally in the region. And Israeli voters - who gave Kadima more mandates in the Knesset than any other party in the last elections - must abandon Livni and her Astroturf party.

Until these things begin to happen we can expect our media to continue to collude with their American partners, and with Livni and Barak to undermine the will of the public.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 17, 2010 at 11:45 AM

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The Israeli media's great discovery

This week on The Tribal Update, the television-on-Internet show produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I lead, we explore the Israeli media's new discovery -- the public.

We also follow the geographical confusion of our two favorite suicide bombers - Jamil and Awad, present the soft underbelly of The State of Tel Aviv's support for cultural independence for Israel's Arab minority, and Flock Builder, our senior media muckraker has a nightmare.

I hope you enjoy this action packed show.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

Unfortunately, for now, we can only accept donations from donors in the US. We are currently establishing an Israeli non-profit through which we will be able to accept donations from other countries. Watch this space for updates.

Posted on December 17, 2010 at 11:35 AM

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The feminist deception

Making the rounds on YouTube these days is a film of a group of manly looking women preparing for and conducting a "flash dance" in a Philadelphia food store. The crew of ladies, dressed in tight black clothes and sequined accessories, arrives at The Fresh Grocer supermarket, breaks into a preplanned chant ordering shoppers not to buy Sabra and Tribe hummus and telling them to oppose Israeli "apartheid" and support "Palestine."

From their attire and attitude, it is fairly clear that the participants in the video would congratulate themselves on their commitment to the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth suffering under the jackboot of the powerful. They would likely all also describe themselves as feminists.

But if being a human rights activist means attacking the only country in the Middle East that defends human rights, then that means that at the very basic level, the term "human rights activist" is at best an empty term. And if being a feminist means attacking the only country in the Middle East where women enjoy freedom and equal rights, then feminism too, has become at best, a meaningless term. Indeed, if these anti-Israel female protesters are feminists, then feminism is dead.

IN 1995, then first lady Hillary Clinton spoke at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. There Clinton seemed to embrace the role of championing the rights of women and human rights worldwide when she proclaimed, "It is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights...If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all."

Yet as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton - like her fellow self-described feminists - has chosen to single Israel out for opprobrium while keeping nearly mum on the institutionalized, structural oppression of women and girls throughout the Muslim world. In so acting, Clinton is of course, loyally representing the views of the Obama administration she serves. She is also representing the views of the ideological Left in which Clinton, US President Barack Obama, the human rights and feminist movements are all deeply rooted.

Since the height of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, non-leftist women in the West and Israel have been hard-pressed to answer the question of whether or not we are feminists. Non-leftist women are opposed to the oppression of women. Certainly, we are no less opposed to the oppression of women than leftist women are.

But at its most basic level, the feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been about advancing the Left's social and political agenda against Western societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal rights and protections as "structurally" discriminatory against women in order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those societies.

That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women's rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women. So to a large degree, the feminist movement itself is a deception.

The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law. If feminism weren't a hollow term, then prominent feminists would be the leaders of the anti-jihad movement. Gloria Steinem and her sisters would be leading the call for the overthrow of the anti-female mullocracy in Iran and the end of gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia.

Instead, in 2008 Ms. Magazine, which Steinem founded and which has served as the mouthpiece of the American feminist movement, refused to run an ad featuring then foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch and then speaker of the Knesset Dalia Itzik that ran under the headline, "This is Israel." It was too partisan, the magazine claimed.

Leading feminist voices in the US and Europe remain unforgivably silent on the unspeakable oppression of women and girls in Islamic societies. And this cannot simply be attributed to a lack of interest in international affairs. Islamic subjugation and oppression of women happens in Western countries as well. Genital mutilation, forced marriage and other forms of abuse are widespread.

For instance, every year hundreds of Muslim women and girls in Western countries are brutally murdered by their male relatives in so-called "honor killings." Pamela Geller, the intrepid blogger at Atlas Shrugs website has steadfastly documented every case she has found. This year she ran an ad campaign on public buses and taxis in major US cities to raise public awareness of their plight. And for her singular efforts in championing the right to life of Muslim women and girls, she has been reviled by the Left as an anti-Islamic bigot.

Former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced to flee Holland and live surrounded by bodyguards for the past six years because she has made an issue of Islamic oppression of women and girls. The Left - including the feminist movement - has treated this remarkable former Muslim and champion of women's rights as a leper.

IF ALL the feminist community's policy of ignoring Islamic oppression of women did was keep it out of the headlines it would still be unforgivable. But the fact is that by not speaking of the central challenge to women's rights in our times, the organized feminist movement, and the Left it is a part of, are abetting Islam's unspeakable crimes against women and girls. It does so in two ways.

Tyranny unchallenged is tyranny abetted. And the first way that the organized feminist movement and the Left abet the oppression of women by Islamic authorities is by signaling to those authorities that they can get away with it. This truth is laid bare by the responses of Islamic authorities in the rare cases where their oppression of women has received Western attention.

For instance, in 2006, an Iranian Islamic court found Mohammadi-Ashtiani guilty of adultery and sentenced the ethnic Azeri kindergarten teacher and mother of two to death by stoning. She was later also found guilty of murdering her husband. Ashtiani's confessions in both cases were extracted under torture. She has already received 99 lashes for her reputed initial crime. Not a Farsi or Arabic speaker, when her adultery trial ended, Ashtiani didn't even know she was convicted or what her sentence was.

In recent years, Ashtiani's children assisted by Iranian émigré and non-leftist human rights groups launched a courageous campaign to save her life. Over the past year, the campaign was covered in the Western media and garnered the support of notables such as the French and Canadian prime ministers' wives as well as international film stars like Lindsay Lohan, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Robert Redford and Juliette Binoche.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International got on board this past summer and decried her treatment. Clinton herself gave a half sentence condemnation of Ashtiani's persecution in August. Indeed, the international attention focused on Ashtiani may have been the reason the Obama administration belatedly voiced opposition to Iran's election to the new UN women's rights council. Iran was elected by acclamation in April, but later defeated by India when a roll call vote was called.

Reeling from this criticism, Iranian authorities began backtracking. First they claimed Ashtiani's death sentence would be cancelled. Then they said she would be hanged rather than stoned. Today her fate remains unclear and her life is still in grave danger. But if pressure on Iranian authorities keeps up, there is a reasonable chance that Ashtiani's long ordeal will end in life, rather than death.

Ashtiani's case is proof that when the West makes the barbaric abuse of women an issue, the Islamic world attenuates its abuse of women. Pressure works. In contrast, an absence of pressure empowers the oppressors.

THE SECOND way that the feminists and the Left they are a part of abet Islamic oppression of women is through their animosity towards Israel. When the Shariah- besotted leaders of the Muslim world see the Western Left devote its energies to attacking Israel - the only human rights and women's rights protecting country in the Middle East - they see there is no reason for them to reconsider their willingness to tyrannize their women and girls.

Take Indonesia for example. In 2003, then Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri agreed that as part of a ceasefire agreement, the separatist Aceh province was allowed to institute Shariah law as the law of the province. In 2009, the Aceh parliament passed a law making adultery punishable by stoning. On the central squares of the province that is home to 4 million, people are routinely publicly whipped for offenses against Islam.

For example, just last Friday Anis Saputra, 24, and Kiki Hanafilia, 17 each received eight lashes in a public ceremony outside a local mosque for being caught kissing in October. The two are reportedly married to other people and they apparently were given lashes rather than stoned to death because they had yet to consummate their alleged romance.

Last year the province also forbade women and girls from wearing pants. A France 24 investigation of Shariah in Aceh showed a traumatized 14 year old girl who was beset by Islamic police on her way home from school. They cut her jeans off in the middle of the street.

Yet rather than criticize Indonesia for these appalling developments, last month Obama visited Jakarta and waxed poetic about Islamic tolerance of differences and applauded Indonesia for its commitment to democracy. And while ignoring Indonesia's repressive Shariah-ruled province where Islamic oppression is the rule not the exception, Obama devoted his criticism to attacking Israel for allowing Jews to build homes in Jerusalem.

THERE IS NO doubt that attitudes that discriminate against women exist today in Western countries as well as in Israel. Women in the free world have unique challenges to overcome because of our gender. But a sense of proportion is required here. These challenges are not overwhelming, systemic or in most cases life-threatening.

On the other hand, hundreds of millions of women and girls throughout the Islamic world are daily terrorized by everyone from their families to their judges. They have no reason to believe that if challenged their rights - even their right to life - will be protected.

The fact that the ladies in Philadelphia decided to take their stand against Israel and that that Clinton and Obama attack Israel for building homes for Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria while they all ignore the suffering of the women of Islam speaks volumes about the degradation of the West under the Left's social and political leadership. It also tells non-leftist women in the West that being pro-women's rights and being a feminist are increasingly mutually exclusive.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 14, 2010 at 3:50 AM

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Why Latin America Turned

Israelis can be excused for wondering why Brazil and Argentina unexpectedly announced they recognize an independent Palestinian state with its capital city in Israel's capital city. Israelis can be forgiven for being taken by surprise by their move and by the prospect that Uruguay, and perhaps Paraguay, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and El Salvador, will be following in their footsteps because the Israeli media have failed to report on developing trends in Latin America.

And this is not surprising. The media fail to report on almost all the developing trends impacting the world. For instance, when the Turkish government sent Hamas supporters to challenge the IDF's maritime blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza coastline, the media were surprised that Israel's ally Turkey had suddenly become Hamas's ally and Israel's enemy.

Their failure to report on Turkey's gradual transformation into an Islamic supremacist state caused the media to treat what was a culmination of a trend as a shocking new development.

The same is now happening with Latin America.

Whereas in Turkey, the media failed only to report on the significance of the singular trend of Islamization of Turkish society, the media have consistently ignored the importance for Israel of three trends that made Latin America's embrace of the Palestinians against Israel eminently predictable.

Those trends are the rise of Hugo Chavez, the regional influence of the Venezuela-Iran alliance, and the cravenness of US foreign policy towards Latin America and the Middle East. When viewed as a whole they explain why Latin American states are lining up to support the Palestinians. More importantly, they tell us something about how Israel should be acting.

OVER THE past decade Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has inherited Fidel Castro's mantel as the head of the Latin American anti-American club. He has used Venezuela's oil wealth, drug money and other illicit fortunes to draw neighboring states into his orbit and away from the US. Chavez's circle of influence now includes Cuba and Nicaragua, Bolivia, Uruguay and Ecuador as well as Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Peru. Democracies like Colombia and Chile are also taking steps in Chavez's anti-American direction.

Chavez's choice of Iran is no fluke although it seemed like one to some when the alliance first arose around 2004. Iran's footprint in Latin America has grown gradually. Beginning in the 1980s, Iran started using Latin America as a forward base of operations against the US and the West. It deployed Hizbullah and Revolutionary Guards operatives and other intelligence and terror assets along the largely ungoverned tri-border area between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. That staging ground in turn enabled Iran to bomb Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s.

Iran's presence on the continent allowed it to take advantage of Chavez's consolidation of power. Since taking office in 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has developed strategic alliances with Venezuela and Nicaragua.

With Chavez's assistance, Teheran is expanding its web of alliances throughout Latin America at the expense of the US and Israel.

On the face of it, Chavez and Ahmadinejad seem like an odd couple. One is a Marxist and the other is a messianic jihadist. But on closer inspection it makes perfect sense. They share the same obsessions with hating the US and loving power.

Chavez has demonstrated his commitment to maintaining power by crushing his opponents, taking control over the judiciary and media, amending the constitution and repeatedly stealing elections.

Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks sabotage campaign against the US gave us a first person account of the magnitude of Ahmadinejad's electoral fraud.

In a cable from the US Embassy in Turkmenistan dated 15 June 2009, or three days after Ahmadinejad stole the Iranian presidential elections, the embassy reported a conversation with an Iranian source regarding the true election results. The Iranian source referred to the poll as a "coup d'etat."

The regime declared Ahmadinejad the winner with 63% of the vote. According to the Iranian source, he received less than a fifth of that amount. As the cable put it, "based on calculations from [opponent Mir Hossain] Mousavi's campaign observers who were present at polling stations around the country and who witnessed the vote counts, Mousavi received approximately 26 million (or 61%) of the 42 million votes cast in Friday's election, followed by Mehdi Karroubi (10-12 million).... Ahmadinejad received 'a maximum of 4-5 million votes,' with the remainder going to Mohsen Rezai."

There is no fence-sitting along the Iran-Israel divide. Latin American countries that embrace Iran always do so to the detriment of their ties with Israel. Bolivia and Venezuela cut their diplomatic ties with Israel in January 2009 after siding with Hamas in Operation Cast Lead. In comments reported on the Hudson New York website, Ricardo Udler, the president of the small Bolivian Jewish community, said there is a direct correlation between Bolivia's growing ties with Iran and its animosity towards Israel. In his words, "Each time an Iranian official arrives in Bolivia there are negative comments against the State of Israel and soon after, the Bolivian authorities issue a communiqué against the Jewish state."

Udler also warned that, "there is information from international agencies that indicate that uranium from Bolivia and Venezuela is being shipped to Iran."

That was in October. With Iran it appears that if you're in for an inch you're in for a mile. This month we learned that Venezuela and Iran are jointly deploying intermediate range ballistic missiles in Venezuela that will be capable of targeting US cities.

THERE IS no doubt that the Venezuelan-Iranian alliance and its growing force in Latin America go a long way towards explaining South America's sudden urge to recognize "Palestine." But there is more to the story.

The final trend that the media in Israel have failed to notice is the impact that US foreign policy in South America and the Middle East alike has had on the positions of nations like Brazil and Argentina towards Israel. During the Bush administration, US Latin America policy was an incoherent bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, the US failed to assist Chavez's opponents overthrow him when they had a chance in 2004. The US similarly failed to support Nicaraguan democrats in their electoral fight against Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in the 2007 elections. On the other hand, the US did foster strong alliances with Colombia and Chile.

Under the Obama administration, US Latin American policy has become more straightforward. The US has turned its back on its allies and is willing to humiliate itself in pursuit of its adversaries.

In April 2009 US President Barack Obama sat through a 50-minute anti-American rant by Ortega at the Summit of the Americas. He then sought out Chavez for a photo-op. In his own address Obama distanced himself from US history, saying, "We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations."

Unfortunately, Obama's attempted appeasement hasn't done any good. Nicaragua invaded neighboring Costa Rica last month along the San Juan River. Ortega's forces are dredging the river as part of an Iranian-sponsored project to build a canal along the Isthmus of Nicaragua that will rival the Panama Canal.

Even Obama's ambassador in Managua admits that Ortega remains deeply hostile to the US. In a cable from February illicitly published by WikiLeaks, Ambassador Robert Callahan argued that Ortega's charm offensive towards the US was "unlikely to portend a new, friendly Ortega with whom we can work in the long-term."

It is not simply the US's refusal to defend itself against the likes of Chavez that provokes the likes of Brazil's President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva and Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to embrace Chavez and Iran.

They are also responding the US's signals towards Iran and Israel.

Obama's policy of engaging and sanctioning Iran has no chance of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And just like the Arabs and the Europeans, the South Americans know it. There is no doubt that at least part of Lula's reason for signing onto a nuclear deal with Ahmadinejad and Turkey's Reccip Erdogan last spring was his certainty that the US has no intention of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear arms.

From Lula's perspective, there is no reason to participate in the US charade of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. He might as well be on the winning side. And since Obama doesn't mind Iran winning, Iran will win.

THE SAME rules apply for Israel. Like the Europeans, the Arabs, the Asians and everyone else, the Latin Americans have clearly noted that Obama's only consistent foreign policy goal is his aim of forcing Israel to accept a hostile Palestinian state and surrender all the land it took control over in 1967 to the likes of PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. They see that Obama has refused to rule out the possibility of recognizing a Palestinian state even if that state is declared without a peace treaty with Israel. That is, Obama is unwilling to commit himself to not recognizing a Palestinian state that will be in a de facto state of war with Israel.

The impression that Obama is completely committed to the Palestinian cause was reinforced this week rather than weakened with the cancellation of the Netanyahu-Clinton deal regarding the banning of Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. The deal was to see Israel banning Jewish construction for an additional 90 days, in exchange for a US pledge not to ask for any further bans; to support Israel at the UN Security Council for a limited time against a Palestinian push to declare independence without peace; and to sell Israel an additional 20 F-35 fighter jets sometime in the future.

It came apart because Obama was unwilling to put Clinton's commitments - meager as they were - in writing. That is, the deal fell through because Obama wouldn't make even a minimal pledge to maintain the US's alliance with Israel.

This policy signals to the likes of Brazil and Argentina and Uruguay that they might as well go with Chavez and Iran and turn their backs on Israel. No one will thank them if they lag behind the US in their pro-Iran, anti-Israel policies. And by moving ahead of the US, they get the credit due to those who stick their fingers in Washington's eye.

When we understand the trends that led to Latin America's hostile act against Israel, we realize two things. First, while Israel might have come up with a way to delay the action, it probably couldn't have prevented it. And second, given the US policy trajectory, it is again obvious that the only one Israel can rely on to defend its interests - against Iran and the Palestinians alike - is Israel.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 10, 2010 at 9:37 AM

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Who is to blame for the fire?

In this week's episode, we channel as we explore who is to blame for the fire in the Carmel.

We also interview Brazilian President Lula Da Silva about his decision to recognize a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.

Enjoy!

Here's the full show.

And here's our take on Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

Unfortunately, for now, we can only accept donations from donors in the US. We are currently establishing an Israeli non-profit through which we will be able to accept donations from other countries. Watch this space for updates.

Posted on December 10, 2010 at 9:30 AM

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Empowering Israelis to express themselves

Imagine if 100 million Americans participated in the Tea Party movement. And then imagine that the movement had no impact on American politics. Finally imagine that in the wake of the Tea Party movement, Republicans embraced President Barack Obama's positions on spending and taxation.

These scenarios are of course, unimaginable. Anywhere from a million to ten million people participated in Tea Party protests in the US over the past year. That is, perhaps three percent of Americans.

Yet this was sufficient for the citizens' movement calling for fiscal restraint, spending and tax cuts to have a defining impact on the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. The Republican establishment is being challenged and in many cases unseated by Tea Party politicians.

Owing in large part to the Tea Party movement, just two years after Obama was elected president the American political map has been transformed. The American people are abandoning leftist socialist domestic policy formulations in favor of supply side Reaganomics.

Now look at Israel. 17 years ago, the Rabin government adopted the radical and failed policy of appeasing the PLO. Since then, around two million -- or approximately 30 percent of Israelis have participated in protests against this policy. In four of the six elections since then, the Right has won by pledging to abandon this policy. And in one of the two elections won by the Left, the Left (under Ehud Barak in 1999), won by running on a rightist platform.

The resistance Israelis have demonstrated to the government's policies towards the Palestinians is arguably unprecedented in modern history. And yet, the unimaginable scenarios for the Tea Party movement in the US have been the glum reality in Israel for 17 years.

Presently, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is implementing the Left's appeasement policy towards the Palestinians with as much enthusiasm as Shimon Peres before him. Last Monday Ron Dermer, Netanyahu's most trusted adviser told Politico that a leader is defined by the contempt he feels for his voters. As Dermer put it, "The test of leadership is doing things that are not popular with your base."

There are many explanations for what is going on. The most cited are Israel's indirect elections system in which leaders are unaccountable to voters, the weakness of Israel's politicians, and the poor quality of their advisors.

While all are true, another explanation is more compelling. In Israel the Left exerts almost complete control over the political and social discourse. Unlike the situation in the US - particularly in the era of Fox News - there are no significant communications outlets in Israel that are not controlled by the Left.

Even Yisrael Hayom, the free newspaper owned by Sheldon Adelson that has eroded the market shares of Israel's leading tabloids, is not a rightist newspaper. It senior editors, reporters and commentators are almost all leftists.

The Left's monopoly over the public discourse is not only expressed in the media. In the worlds of culture, academia and entertainment as well, all the leading figures are leftists. They cultivate one another in an elite universe that is affected neither by reality nor by the convictions of most of their countrymen.

This has led to a situation in which a small minority of Israelis behaves as if it were a large majority. They use their control over the public discourse to present the sentiments of the majority of Israelis as if they were the views of a small, fanatical minority.

This distorted presentation of the convictions of most Israelis has induced a number of pathologies within Israeli society. Most pertinently, it has caused leaders of the Right to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to win the support of the Left that despises them. And as Dermer made clear it motivates men like Netanyahu and former prime minister Ariel Sharon to betray their voters in favor of the leftist agenda they were elected to reject.

In a bid to begin contending with this dismal reality, in early 2009 I launched a Hebrew-language media satire website called Latma. Latma is an Arabic term for "slap" that has been adopted in Israeli slang.

Latma combines short, pithy blog posts ridiculing the daily media coverage of events with a weekly television show on Internet called The Tribal Update. The show parodies the broadcast media in Israel while exposing the absurdity of the leftist political and cultural narratives they trumpet.

The insight guiding Latma is that people do not fear what they laugh at. By exposing the failure of Israel's cultural elites in a humorous way, Latma empowers the majority of Israelis to express their views without fearing leftist demonization.

While Latma is only one small voice, entirely funded by charitable donations, its impact has been enormous. It is one of the most visited websites in Israel today with close to a million page views per month. Our broadcasts are eagerly awaited by tens of thousands of Israelis. Week after week, our shows become viral within hours after we post them on YouTube.

Our work is doing more than making the case for strong Zionism. It is undermining leftist stereotypes about the nature of the Israeli Right and making it cool to be Zionist again.

Latma's greatest international success to date was our clip "We Con the World," which we produced three days after the IDF takeover of the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara. We Con the World was seen by more than a million viewers in a week and has been viewed over five million times since we produced it. The song changed the tone of the media coverage of the operation. Perhaps most importantly, it empowered Israel's supporters to stand up to anti-Zionist intimidation throughout the world.

Building on that success, and subsequent successes with English language clips like "The Three Terrors," and "The Iranian Bomb Song," we are recruiting a team of English-language satirists to produce clips directed at the international audience on a regular basis.

Liberal media outlets and other cultural institutions in the US went to enormous lengths to belittle and demonize the Tea Party movement. They failed because over the past generation, American conservatives have developed alternative media outlets and cultural institutions that the general public and politicians alike pay attention to.

I believe that Latma's success must serve as a springboard for cultivating an alternative elite in Israel whose members reflect rather than demonize the convictions of the majority of Israelis.

Given the massive dimensions of the public's rejection of the Left's worldview, if these alternative media outlets and cultural bodies are properly conceived and managed, I am certain that like Latma, they will not only be rapidly successful. They will have a profound and salutary impact on the behavior of Israel's political leaders who will finally recognize that for embattled Israel, the true test of leadership is standing up to a hostile world and keeping faith with the Israeli people.

Originally published in The Jewish Press.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

Unfortunately, for now, we can only accept donations from donors in the US. We are currently establishing an Israeli non-profit through which we will be able to accept donations from other countries.

Posted on December 3, 2010 at 9:28 AM

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The WikiLeaks Challenge

Make no mistake about it, the ongoing WikiLeaks operation against the US is an act of war. It is not merely a criminal offense to publish hundreds of thousands of classified US government documents with malice aforethought. It is an act of sabotage.

Like acts of kinetic warfare on military battlefields, WikiLeaks' information warfare against the US aims to weaken the US. By exposing US government secrets, it seeks to embarrass and discredit America in a manner that makes it well neigh impossible for the US to carry out either routine diplomacy or build battlefield coalitions to defeat its enemies.

So far WikiLeaks has published more than 800,000 classified US documents. It has exposed classified information about US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and it has divulged 250,000 diplomatic cables.

One of the most distressing aspects of the WikiLeaks operation is the impotent US response to it. This operation has been going on since April. And the US had foreknowledge of the attack in the weeks and months before it began. And yet, the US has taken no effective steps to defend itself. Pathetically, the most it has been able to muster to date is the issuance of an international arrest warrant against WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange on rape charges in Sweden.

The US has not taken down the website. Aside from the US Army soldier Pfc Bradley Manning who leaked most of the documents to the website, no one has been arrested. And the US appears impotent to prevent the website from carrying through on its latest threat to publish new documents aimed at weakening the US economy next month.

Neither US President Barack Obama nor any of his top advisers has had anything relevant or useful to say about this onslaught. Defense Secretary Robert Gates assured journalists that the damage caused by publishing US operations on the battlefield, classified reports of meetings with and assessments of foreign heads of state and other highly sensitive information will have no long lasting impact on US power or status.

Ignoring the fact that the operation is aimed specifically against America, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was "an attack on the international community."

While the expressed aim of the attackers is to weaken the US, Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs called them "criminals, first and foremost." And US Attorney-General Eric Holder said he's checking the law books to figure out how to prosecute WikiLeaks personnel.

The leaked documents themselves expose a profound irony. To wit: The US is unwilling to lift a finger to defend itself against an act of information warfare which exposed to the world that the US is unwilling to lift a finger to protect itself and its allies from the most profound military threats endangering international security today.

In spite of the unanimity of the US's closest Arab allies that Iran's nuclear installations must be destroyed militarily - a unanimity confirmed by the documents revealed by WikiLeaks - the US has refused to take action. Instead it clings to a dual strategy of sanctions and engagement that everyone recognizes has failed repeatedly and has no chance of future success.

In spite of proof that North Korea is transferring advanced ballistic missiles to Iran through China, again confirmed by the illegally released documents, the US continues to push a policy of engagement based on a belief that there is value to China's vote for sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. It continues to push a policy predicated on its unfounded faith that China is interested in restraining North Korea.

In spite of the fact that US leaders including Gates recognize that Turkey is not a credible ally and that its leaders are radical Islamists, as documented in the classified documents, the US has agreed to sell Turkey a hundred F-35s. The US continues to support Turkish membership in the EU and of course embraces Turkey as a major NATO ally.

The publication of the US's true feelings about Turkey has not made a dent in its leaders' unwillingness to contend with reality. On the heels of the WikiLeaks exposure of thousands of documents from the US Embassy in Ankara discussing Turkish animosity towards America, Clinton flew to Turkey for the first leg of what The New York Times referred to as an "international contrition tour."

There she sucked up to the likes of Turkish Foreign Minister and Islamist ideologue Ahmet Davutoglu, who was kind enough to agree with Clinton's assertion that the publication of the State Department cables was "the 9/11 of diplomacy."

THE MOST important question that arises from the entire WikiLeaks disaster is why the US refuses to defend itself and its interests. What is wrong with Washington? Why is it allowing WikiLeaks to destroy its international reputation, credibility and ability to conduct international relations and military operations? And why has it refused to contend with the dangers it faces from the likes of Iran and North Korea, Turkey, Venezuela and the rest of the members of the axis of evil that even State Department officers recognize are colluding to undermine and destroy US superpower status?

The answer appears to be twofold. First, there is an issue of cowardice.

American leaders are afraid to fight their enemies. They don't want a confrontation with Iran or North Korea, or Venezuela or Turkey for that matter, because they don't want to deal with difficult situations with no easy answers or silver bullets to make problems disappear.

WikiLeaks showed that there is no Israel lobby plotting to bring the US into a war to serve Jewish interests. There is something approaching an international consensus that Iran is the head of the snake that must be cut off, as the Saudi potentate described it.

Yet that consensus opinion has fallen on deaf American ears for the past seven years. This despite the fact that both the Bush administration and the Obama administration certainly recognized that if the US were to attack Iran's nuclear installations or help Israel do so, despite all the theater of public handwringing and finger- wagging at Israel, the Arabs and the Europeans and Asians would celebrate the operation.

THE SECOND explanation for this behavior is ideological. The Obama administration will not take concerted action against WikiLeaks because doing so will compromise its adherence to leftist politically correct nostrums.

Those views assert that there is something fundamentally wrong with the assertion of US power and therefore the US has no right to defend itself. Moreover, nothing the Arabs or any other non-Western governments do is a function of their will. Rather it is a function of their response to US or Israeli aggression.

So it is that in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures that put paid the fiction that Israel is behind the fuss over Iran's nuclear weapons program, Juan Cole, the anti-Israel ideologue and conspiracy theorist favored by the Obama administration, published an article in The Guardian proclaiming that Israel is to blame for Saudis' fear of Iran. If the Arab masses weren't so worked up over Israeli aggression in Gaza, he claimed, the Saudi leadership wouldn't have been upset about Iran.

It is this sort of non sequitur that allows the Obama administration to continue pretending that the world is not a hard place and that there are no problems that cannot be solved by pressuring Israel.

So too, Fred Kaplan at Slate online magazine claimed that the leaks showed that the Obama administration's foreign policy is successful because it succeeded in getting China on board with UN sanctions against Iran. But of course, what the documents show is that China is breaching those sanctions, rendering the entire exercise at the UN worthless.

And the Left's voice of "reason," the New York Times editorial page, lauded the Obama administration for its courage in rejecting the pleas of Arab states and Israel and fiddling while Iranian centrifuges spin. According to the Times, true courage consists of defying reality, strategic necessity and allies to defend the dogmas of political correctness.

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how fecklessly the US is behaving is by comparing its actions to those of Israel, which suffered a similar, if far smaller case of data theft earlier this year.

In April, the public learned that towards the end of her IDF service, a secretary in the office of the commander of Central Command named Anat Kamm copied some 2,000 highly secret documents onto her zip drive. After leaving the army she was hired as a reporter by the far-left Walla news portal, which was then partially owned by the far-left Haaretz newspaper. Kamm gave the documents she stole to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau, who began publishing them in November 2008.

Haaretz used its considerable power to discredit the investigation of Kamm and Blau by falsely telling foreign reporters that the story was an issue of press freedom and that Kamm was being persecuted as a journalist rather than investigated for treason she committed while serving in the military.

In the face of the predictable international outcry, Israel stuck to its guns. Kamm is on trial for stealing state secrets with the intent of harming state security and Blau, who fled to London, returned to Israel with the stolen documents.

While there is much to criticize in Israel's handling of the case, there is no doubt that despite its international weakness, Israeli authorities did not shirk their duty to defend state secrets.

THE FINAL irony of the WikiLeaks scandal is the cowardice of WikiLeaks that stands at the foundation of the story. Founded in 2006, Wikileaks was supposed to serve the cause of freedom. It claimed that it would defend dissidents in China, the former Soviet Union and other places where human rights remains an empty term. But then China made life difficult for WikiLeaks and so four years later, Assange and his colleagues declared war on the US, rightly assuming that unlike China, the US would take their attacks lying down. Why take risks to defend dissidents in a police state when it's so much easier and so much more rewarding to attempt to destroy free societies?

Assange and company are hardly the first to take this course. Human Rights Watch, created to fight for those crushed under the Soviet jackboot, now spends its millions of George Soros dollars to help terrorists in their war against the US and Israel. Amnesty International forgot long ago that it was founded to help prisoners of police states and instead devotes itself to attacking the imaginary evils of the Jewish state and Western democracies.

And that brings us to the real question raised by the WikiLeaks assault on America. Can democracies today protect themselves? In the era of leftist political correctness with its founding principle that Western power is evil and that the freedom to harm democracies is inviolate, can democracies defend their security and national interests?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 3, 2010 at 9:18 AM

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Obama's advisor discusses the lessons of WikiLeaks

This week on the Tribal Update, the television-on-Internet show we produce at Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire site I lead, we interview Mr. John Zelokoreli (Itsnothappeningtome), Pres. Obama's advisor for reality perception about the WikiLeaks assault on the US. We also bring you Jamil and Awad, our resident suicide bombers for a discussion of the impact of Palestinian economic growth on their future plans.

Enjoy the show!

Production Note: We produced the show on Wednesday, before the devastating conflagration in northern Israel. Our prayers are with the families of the victims, those whose homes are still threatened and to our beautiful, suffering land and all it holds. May G-d protect and sustain Israel.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

Unfortunately, for now, we can only accept donations from donors in the US. We are currently establishing an Israeli non-profit through which we will be able to accept donations from other countries. Watch this space for updates.

Posted on December 3, 2010 at 9:08 AM

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Obama's advisor discusses the lessons of WikiLeaks

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