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January 31, 2011, 5:09 PM

Clueless in Washington

Egypt Islam.jpg
The Egyptian multitudes on the streets of Cairo are a stunning sight. With their banners calling for freedom and an end to the reign of President Hosni Mubarak the story these images tell is a simple one as old as time.

On the one hand we have the young, dispossessed and weak protesters. And on the other we have the old, corrupt and tyrannical Mubarak. Hans Christian Andersen taught us who to support when we were wee tots.

But does his wisdom apply in this case? 

Certainly it is true that the regime is populated by old men. Mubarak is 82 years old. It is also true that his regime is corrupt and tyrannical. Since the Muslim Brotherhood spinoff Islamic Jihad terror group murdered Mubarak's predecessor president Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been governed by emergency laws that ban democratic freedoms. Mubarak has consistently rejected US pressure to ease regime repression and enact liberal reforms in governance.

This reality has led many American commentators across the political spectrum to side enthusiastically with the rioters. A prestigious working group on Egypt formed in recent months by Middle East experts from Left and Right issued a statement over the weekend calling for the Obama administration to dump Mubarak and withdraw its support for the Egyptian regime. It recommended further that the administration force Mubarak to abdicate and his regime to fall by suspending all economic and military assistance to Egypt for the duration.

The blue ribbon panel's recommendations were applauded by its members' many friends across the political spectrum. For instance, the conservative Weekly Standard's editor William Kristol praised the panel on Sunday and wrote, "It's time for the US government to take an active role... to bring about a South Korea/Philippines/Chile-like transition in Egypt, from an American-supported dictatorship to an American-supported and popularly legitimate liberal democracy."

The problem with this recommendation is that it is based entirely on the nature of Mubarak's regime. If the regime was the biggest problem, then certainly removing US support for it would make sense. However, the character of the protesters is not liberal.

Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN's Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.

WHAT ALL of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak's military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US's greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel's peace partner will again become its gravest foe. 

Understanding this, Israeli officials and commentators have been nearly unanimous in their negative responses to what is happening in Egypt. The IDF, the national security council, all intelligence agencies and the government as well as the media have all agreed that Israel's entire regional approach will have to change dramatically in the event that Egypt's regime is overthrown.

None of the scenarios under discussion are positive.

What has most confounded Israeli officials and commentators alike has not been the strength of the anti-regime protests, but the American response to them. Outside the far Left, commentators from all major newspapers, radio and television stations have variously characterized the US response to events in Egypt as irrational, irresponsible, catastrophic, stupid, blind, treacherous, and terrifying.

They have pointed out that the Obama administration's behavior - as well as that of many of its prominent conservative critics - is liable to have disastrous consequences for the US's other authoritarian Arab allies, for Israel and for the US itself.

The question most Israelis are asking is why are the Americans behaving so destructively? Why are President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charting a course that will necessarily lead to the transformation of Egypt into the first Salafist Islamic theocracy? And why are conservative commentators and Republican politicians urging them to be even more outspoken in their support for the rioters in the streets? 

Does the US not understand what will happen in the region as a result of its actions? Does the US really fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood either forms the next regime or is the power behind the throne of the next regime in Cairo? 

Distressingly, the answer is that indeed, the US has no idea what it is doing. The reason the world's only (quickly declining) superpower is riding blind is because its leaders are trapped between two irrational, narcissistic policy paradigms and they can't see their way past them.

The first paradigm is former president George W. Bush's democracy agenda and its concomitant support for open elections.

Bush supporters and former administration officials have spent the last month since the riots began in Tunisia crowing that events prove Bush's push for democratization in the Arab world is the correct approach.

The problem is that while Bush's diagnosis of the dangers of the democracy deficit in the Arab world was correct, his antidote for solving this problem was completely wrong.

Bush was right that tyranny breeds radicalism and instability and is therefore dangerous for the US.

But his belief that free elections would solve the problem of Arab radicalism and instability was completely wrong. At base, Bush's belief was based on a narcissistic view of Western values as universal.

When, due to US pressure, the Palestinians were given the opportunity to vote in open and free elections in 2006, they voted for Hamas and its totalitarian agenda. When due to US pressure, the Egyptians were given limited freedom to choose their legislators in 2005, where they could they elected the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood to lead them.

The failure of his elections policy convinced Bush to end his support for elections in his last two years in office.

Frustratingly, Bush's push for elections was rarely criticized on its merits. Under the spell of the other policy paradigm captivating American foreign policy elites - anti-colonialism - Bush's leftist opponents never argued that the problem with his policy is that it falsely assumes that Western values are universal values. Blinded by their anti-Western dogma, they claimed that his bid for freedom was nothing more than a modern-day version of Christian missionary imperialism.

It is this anti-colonialist paradigm, with its foundational assumption that that the US has no right to criticize non-Westerners that has informed the Obama administration's foreign policy. It was the anti-colonialist paradigm that caused Obama not to support the pro-Western protesters seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime in the wake of the stolen 2009 presidential elections.

As Obama put it at the time, "It's not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the US president meddling in the Iranian elections."

And it is this anti-colonialist paradigm that has guided Obama's courtship of the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian regimes and his unwillingness to lift a hand to help the March 14 movement in Lebanon.

MOREOVER, SINCE the paradigm claims that the non-Western world's grievances towards the West are legitimate, Obama's Middle East policy is based on the view that the best way to impact the Arab world is by joining its campaign against Israel. This was the central theme of Obama's speech before an audience dominated by Muslim Brotherhood members in Cairo in June 2009.

Like the pro-democracy paradigm, the anti-colonialist paradigm is narcissistic. Whereas Western democracy champions believe that all people are born with the same Western liberal democratic values, post-colonialists believe that non-Westerners are nothing more than victims of the West. They are not responsible for any of their own pathologies because they are not actors. Only Westerners (and Israelis) are actors. Non-Westerners are objects. And like all objects, they cannot be held responsible for anything they do because they are wholly controlled by forces beyond their control.

Anti-colonialists by definition must always support the most anti-Western forces as "authentic." In light of Mubarak's 30-year alliance with the US, it makes sense that Obama's instincts would place the US president on the side of the protesters.

SO THERE we have it. The US policy towards Egypt is dictated by the irrational narcissism of two opposing sides to a policy debate that has nothing to do with reality.

Add to that Obama's electoral concern about looking like he is on the right side of justice and we have a US policy that is wholly antithetical to US interests.

This presents a daunting, perhaps insurmountable challenge for the US's remaining authoritarian Arab allies. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, until now restive publics have been fearful of opposing their leaders because the US supports them. Now that the US is abandoning its most important ally and siding with its worst enemies, the Hashemites and the Sauds don't look so powerful to their Arab streets. The same can be said for the Kuwaiti leadership and the pro-American political forces in Iraq.

As for Israel, America's behavior towards Egypt should put to rest the notion that Israel can make further territorial sacrifices in places like the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley in exchange for US security guarantees. US behavior today - and the across-the-board nature of American rejection of Mubarak - is as clear a sign as one can find that US guarantees are not credible.

As Prof. Barry Rubin wrote this week, "There is no good policy for the United States regarding the uprising in Egypt but the Obama administration may be adopting something close to the worst option."

Unfortunately, given the cluelessness of the US foreign policy debate, this situation is only likely to grow worse.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Posted on January 31, 2011 at 5:09 PM

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Interview on the Michael Graham show

This afternoon I was interviewed in the Michael Graham show in Boston about the tumult in Egypt and the US response to events there. 


After you've listened to my comments, I suggest you watch the clip below from CNN's reporter Nick Robertson in Cairo. 


Posted on January 31, 2011 at 4:14 PM

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January 28, 2011, 7:33 AM

The pragmatic fantasy

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Today the Egyptian regime faces its gravest threat since Anwar Sadat's assassination 30 years ago. As protesters take to the street for the third day in a row demanding the overthrow of 82-year old President Hosni Mubarak, it is worth considering the possible alternatives to his regime.

On Thursday afternoon, Egyptian presidential hopeful Mohammed ElBaradei, the former head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency returned to Egypt from Vienna to participate in anti-regime demonstrations. 

As IAEA head, Elbaradei shielded Iran's nuclear weapons program from the Security Council. He repeatedly ignored evidence indicating that Iran's nuclear program was a military program rather than a civilian energy program. When the evidence became too glaring to ignore, Elbaradei continued to lobby against significant UN Security Council sanctions or other actions against Iran and obscenely equated Israel's purported nuclear program to Iran's. 

His actions won him the support of the Iranian regime which he continues to defend. Just last week he dismissed the threat of a nuclear armed Iran telling the Austrian News Agency, "There's a lot of hype in this debate," and asserting that the discredited 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate that claimed Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program  in 2003 remains accurate. 

Elbaradei's support for the Iranian ayatollahs is matched by his support for the Muslim Brotherhood. This group, which forms the largest and best organized opposition movement to the Mubarak regime is the progenitor of Hamas and al Qaida. It seeks Egypt's transformation into an Islamic regime that will stand at the forefront of the global jihad. In recent years, the Muslim Brotherhood has been increasingly drawn into the Iranian nexus along with Hamas. Muslim Brotherhood attorneys represented Hizbullah terrorists arrested in Egypt in 2009 for plotting to conduct spectacular attacks aimed at destroying the regime.

Elbaradei has been a strong champion of the Muslim Brotherhood. Just this week he gave an interview to Der Spiegel defending the jihadist movement. As he put it, "We should stop demonizing the Muslim Brotherhood. ...[T]hey have not committed any acts of violence in five decades. They too want change. If we want democracy and freedom, we have to include them instead of marginalizing them."

The Muslim Brotherhood for its part has backed Elbaradei's political aspirations. On Thursday it announced it would demonstrate at ElBaradei's side the next day. 
 
Then there is the Kifaya movement. The group sprang onto the international radar screen in 2004 when it demanded open presidential elections and called on Mubarak not to run for a fifth term. As a group of intellectuals claiming to support liberal, democratic norms, Kifaya has been upheld as a model of what the future of Egypt could look like if liberal forces are given the freedom to lead. 
 
But Kifaya's roots and basic ideology are not liberal. They are anti-Semitic and anti-American. Kifaya was formed as a protest movement against Israel with the start of the Palestinian terror war in 2000. It gained force in March 2003 when it organized massive protests against the US-led invasion of Iraq. In 2006 its campaign to get a million Egyptians to sign a petition demanding the abrogation of Egypt's peace treaty with Israel received international attention. 
 
Many knowledgeable Egypt-watchers argued this week that the protesters have no chance of bringing down the Mubarak regime. Unlike this month's overthrow of Tunisia's despot Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, they say there is little chance that the Egyptian military will abandon Mubarak. 

But the same observers are quick to note that whoever Mubarak selects to succeed him will not be the beneficiary of such strong support from Egypt's security state. And as the plight of Egypt's overwhelmingly impoverished citizenry becomes ever more acute, the regime will become increasingly unstable. Indeed, its overthrow is as close to a certainty as you can get in international affairs. 

And as we now see, all of its possible secular and Islamist successors either reject outright Egypt's peace treaty with Israel or will owe their political power to the support of those who reject the peace with the Jewish state. So whether the Egyptian regime falls next week or next year or five years from now, the peace treaty is doomed. 

SINCE THE start of Israel's peace process with Egypt in 1977, supporters of peace with the Arabs have always fallen into two groups: the idealists and the pragmatists.

Led by Shimon Peres, the idealists have argued that the reason the Arabs refuse to accept Israel is because Israel took "their" land in the 1967 Six Day War. Never mind that the war was a consequence of Arab aggression or that it was simply a continuation of the Arab bid to destroy the Jewish state which officially began with Israel's formal establishment in 1948.  As the idealists see things, if Israel just gives up all the land it won in that war, the Arabs will be appeased and accept Israel as a friend and natural member of the Middle East's family of nations.

Peres was so enamored with this view that he authored The New Middle East and promised that once all the land was given away, Israel would join the Arab League. 

Given the absurdity of their claims, the idealists were never able to garner mass support for their positions. If it had just been up to them, Israel would never have gotten on the peace train. But lucky for the idealists, they have been able to rely on the unwavering support of the unromantic pragmatists to implement their program. 

Unlike the starry-eyed idealists, the so-called pragmatists have no delusions that the Arabs are motivated by anything other than hatred for Israel, or that their hatred is likely to end in the foreseeable future. But still, they argue, Israel needs to surrender. 

It is the "Arab Street's" overwhelming animosity towards Israel that causes the pragmatists to argue that Israel's best play is to cut deals with Arab dictators who rule with an iron fist. Since Israel and the Arab despots share a fear of the Arab masses, the pragmatists claim that Israel should give up all the land it took control over as a payoff to the regimes, who in exchange will sign peace treaties with it. 

This was the logic that brought Israel to surrender the strategically priceless Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for the Camp David accord that will not survive Mubarak. 

And of course, giving up the Sinai wasn't the only sacrifice Israel made for that nearly defunct document. Israel also gave up its regional monopoly on US military platforms. Israel agreed that in exchange for signing the deal, the US would begin providing massive military aid to Egypt. Indeed, it agreed to link US aid to Israel with US aid to Egypt. 

Owing to that US aid, the Egyptian military today makes the military Israel barely defeated in 1973 look like a gang of cavemen. Egypt has nearly 300 F-16s. Its main battle tank is the M1A1 which it produces in Egypt. Its navy is largest in the region. Its army is twice the size of the IDF. Its air defense force constitutes a massive threat to the IAF. And of course, the ballistic missiles and chemical weapons it has purchased from the likes of North Korea and China give it a significant stand-off mass destruction capability. 

Despite its strength, due to the depth of popular Arab hatred of Israel and Jews, the Egyptian regime was weakened by its peace treaty. Partially in a bid to placate its opponents and partially in a bid to check Israeli power, Egypt has been the undisputed leader of the political war against Israel raging at international arenas throughout the world. So too, Mubarak has permitted and even encouraged massive anti-Semitism throughout Egyptian society.

With this balance sheet at the end of the "era of peace," between Israel and Egypt, it is far from clear that Israel was right to sign the deal in the first place. In light of the relative longevity of the regime it probably made sense to have made some deal with Egypt. But it is clear that the price Israel paid was outrageously inflated and unwise.

IN CONTRAST to the Egyptian regime, as the popular outcry following Al Jazeera's publication of the Palestinian negotiations documents this week shows, the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority is as weak as can be. Yitzhak Rabin, the godfather of the pragmatist camp famously argued that Yassir Arafat and Fatah would handle the Israel-hating Palestinian Street, "without the Supreme Court and B'Tselem." 

That is, he argued that it made sense to surrender massive amounts of strategically critical land to a terrorist organization because Arafat and his associates would repress their people with an iron fist, unfettered by the rule of law and Palestinian human rights organizations. 

And yet, the fact of the matter is that Arafat commanded the terror war against Israel that began in 2000 and transformed Palestinian society into a jihadist society that popularly elected Hamas to lead it. 

The leaked Palestinian documents don't tell us much we didn't already know about the nature of negotiations between Israel and Fatah. The Palestinians demanded that the baseline of talks assume that all the disputed territories actually belong to them. And for no particular reason, Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert agreed to these historically unjustified terms of reference. 

While this was well known, in publishing the documents, Al Jazeera has still made two important contributions to the public debate. First, the PA's panicked reaction to the documents exposes the ridiculousness of the notion that the likes of Mahmoud Abbas, Saeb Erekat and Salam Fayyad are viable partners for peace. 

Not only do they lack the power to maintain a peace deal with Israel. They lack to power to sign a peace deal with Israel. All they can do is talk - far away from the cameras - about hypothetical, marginal concessions in a peace that will never, ever be achieved. The notion that Israel should pay any price for a deal with these nobodies is completely ridiculous.

The Al Jazeera papers also expose Livni's foolishness. Just as she failed to recognize the inherent weakness of the Lebanese state when she championed UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which called for the Hizbullah-dominated Lebanese army to deploy to the border with Israel at the end of the 2006 war, so Livni failed to understand the significance of the inherent weakness of Fatah as she negotiated away Gush Etzion and Har Homa. 

And she didn't need Al Jazeera's campaign against the PA to understand that she was speaking to people who represent no one. That basic fact was already proven with Hamas's victory in the 2006 elections.

THE TRUTHS exposed by the convulsive events of the past month make it abundantly clear that Israel lives in a horrible neighborhood. It is a neighborhood where popular democracy means war against Israel. 

In this neck of the woods, it is not pragmatic to surrender. It is crazy.  

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on January 28, 2011 at 7:33 AM

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The Tribal Update features Erdogan's Honor and Abu Mazen's Fabulous Concessions

This week on the Tribal Update, the television-on-internet satire show produced every week by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I founded and edit, we feature Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan in our studios explaining the nuances of Turkish hospitality and honor.

We also have a discussion of Fatah leader Abu Mazen's fabulous concessions to Israel and the world.

A bit of background on the commercial with the cheeks - this past week, another new leftist party was formed. It's campaign ad has gone a bit viral and it features leftists being slapped by the right.

All in all, it's a terrific show and I hope you enjoy it. 

Here's the entire episode.



And here is the Erdogan 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." 

We are in the final stages of registering a non-profit organization here in Israel that will be able to accept donations for Latma from outside the US. I hope it won't take more than a few weeks for me to give you the account information of the new group -- The Zionist Incubator.

Thanks again for your support for Latma and its important work in developing a public discourse in Israel that is relevant to the challenges facing our country.

Posted on January 28, 2011 at 7:22 AM

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January 27, 2011, 4:02 AM

The aim of blood libels

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For Israelis, the American Left's assault on Sarah Palin and the conservative movement in the wake of Jared Loughner's murderous attack in Tucson, Arizona was disturbingly familiar.

Just as the American leftist media and political leadership immediately sought to blame Palin, the Tea Party and conservative media personalities for Loughner's actions, so in 1995, their Israeli counterparts accused the Right - from then opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, to rabbis to the two million Israelis who protested against the so-called "peace process" with the PLO - of responsibility for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. 

Just as Palin and her fellow conservatives are accused of inciting the schizophrenic shooter to pull the trigger, so Netanyahu and his fellow rightists were accused of inciting the sociopathic Yigal Amir to plot and carry out his crime. 

And just as it doesn't matter to the American media elites that American conservatives engaged in no such incitement, and that Loughner himself seemed motivated to act by a mad obsession with grammar, so it didn't matter to their Israeli counterparts that Amir's closest associate and the man responsible for the most incendiary anti-Rabin propaganda was Avishai Raviv - a government agent. 

Palin's characterization of the Left's appalling assault on her and her fellow conservatives as a "blood libel," was entirely accurate. Moreover, as her previous use of the term "death panels," in the healthcare debate brought clarity to an issue the Left sought to obscure, so her use of the term "blood libel," exposed the nature of the Left's behavior and highlighted its intentions.

By warning about "death panels," Palin exposed the fly in the ointment of government healthcare. Government control will induce scarcity of healthcare and government rationing will necessarily follow. That rationing in turn will be undertaken by panels of government officials empowered to decide who gets what care. Her remark focused the debate on the flaws in the program in a way no other had. 

In the case of her use of the term "blood libel," Palin exposed the Left's attempt to criminalize conservatives and make it impossible for conservatives to either defend themselves or pursue their alternative policy agenda. 

A blood libel involves two things. First, it involves an imaginary crime. Second, it involves the accusation that an entire group of people is guilty of committing that crime that never occurred. 

Classically, of course, blood libels have been used against Jews. Anti-Semites accused Jews of killing Christians for ritual use of their blood. Jews had murdered no one and Judaism has no ritual involving the use of human blood. Yet repeatedly entire communities were criminalized and persecuted based on these blood libels. 

By criminalizing the entire community based on false allegations regarding a never-committed crime, anti-Semites made it impossible for Jews to go on about our lives. If we sought to deny the charges, we gave them credibility. If we ignored the charges, our silence was interpreted as an admission of guilt. And no matter what we did, the blood libel firmly attached the stench of murder to a completely innocent Jewish community.

Just as their Israeli counterparts did in the wake of Rabin's assassination, so the American Left seeks to attach a sense of criminality and violence to the American Right in order to make it socially and otherwise unpalatable to support or otherwise identify with it. 

By calling the Left out for its behavior, Palin exposed its agenda. But the logic of the blood libel remained. Trusting the public's ignorance, and the liberal Jewish community's solidarity, the leftist media in the US immediately condemned Palin for daring to use the term, hinted she was an anti-Semite for doing so, and argued that by defending herself, she was again inciting violence. 

MANY CONSERVATIVE thinkers and politicians have long viewed Palin as a liability. By remaining in the spotlight, they allege, Palin is helping the Left. They argue that the media have already destroyed her ability to communicate with non-conservatives. And since she is viewed as a conservative leader, by failing to shut up, she is making it impossible for other potential leaders who the media don't despise to connect with the swing voters they will need to unseat Obama in 2012. 

While alluring, this position does more than harm Palin. It renders the 2012 elections irrelevant. 

It doesn't matter whether these conservative thinkers support Palin. What matters is that by telling her not to defend herself from libelous attacks, they are accepting the Left's right to criminalize all conservatives. If she is not defended against a patently obscene effort to connect her to a madman's rampage in Tucson, then conservatives in the US are signalling they really don't want to control US policy. They are saying that if a Republican is elected in 2012, he or she will continue to implement Obama's radical policies.
 
In certain ways, Palin is a revolutionary leader and the Tea Party movement is a revolutionary movement. For nearly a hundred years, the Left in its various permutations has captured Western policy by controlling the elite discourse from New York and Los Angeles to London to Paris to Tel Aviv. By making it "politically incorrect," to assert claims of Western, Judeo-Christian morality or advocate robust political, economic and military policies, the Left has made it socially and professionally costly for people to think freely and believe in their countries.

What distinguishes Palin from other conservative leaders in the US and makes her an important figure worldwide is her indifference to the views of the Left's opinion makers. Her capacity to steer debate in the US in a way no other conservative politician can owes entirely to the fact that she does not seek to win over Leftist elites. She seeks to unseat them. 

The same can be said of the Tea Party. The reason it frightens the Left, and the Republican leaders who owe their positions to their willingness to accept the Left's basic agenda, is because it does not accept the Left's policy agenda. 

Today in Israel the Left is running a campaign to protect foreign-financed, anti-Zionist, Israeli registered NGOs from public scrutiny. All politicians who support an effort to publicly expose these groups' foreign funders are demonized as "anti-democratic," and "fascist." 

Fearing the Left's assault, Likud ministers Dan Meridor, Michael Eitan and Benny Begin as well as Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin have sided with these radical, anti-Zionist groups against their transparency-seeking Knesset colleagues. And all four men were congratulated for their commitment to "democracy," and "liberal norms," by the media. 

It doesn't matter that the Left's accusations against those demanding transparency are completely ridiculous and libelous. It doesn't matter that the Left's campaign exposes a deep-seated fear of the very democracy it fraudulently claims to value. What matters to these Likud politicians is that the media places them above their unwashed colleagues.

It can be argued that modern Zionism began with the 1840 Damascus blood libel. When Syrian Christians colluded with the Muslim leaders to accuse and persecute the Jewish community for the imagined crime of ritual murder, Jewish leaders in Europe and the US mobilized to the defend them. This was the first instance of modern world Jewish solidarity. And it was a necessary precursor to the Jewish national liberation movement whose first stirrings were felt at that time with mass Jewish immigration to Jerusalem. 

The Left's campaign against Palin is not just about Palin. If she is discredited for standing up to blood libels then no one in the US or anywhere else can expect to succeed in moving past the failed and dangerous leftist policy agenda. But if she is defended, then a world of possibilities opens up for all of us.  

Originally published in The Jewish Press.

Posted on January 27, 2011 at 4:02 AM

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January 21, 2011, 5:53 AM

Israel as the banana republic

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Two documents reported on this week shed a troubling light on the US government's attitude toward Israel. The first is a 27-page FBI search warrant affidavit from 2004 targeting then senior AIPAC lobbyist Steve Rosen, published Wednesday in The Washington Times. 

The second is WikiLeaks leaked secret Sate Department cable from October 2008 signed by then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice directing US officials to spy on Israel. 

Both indicate that in certain quarters of the American government Israel is viewed as at best a banana republic and at worst an enemy of the US. 

The text of the FBI affidavit directed against Rosen makes clear that the FBI had no particular reason to suspect that he was an Israeli agent or was harming US national security. Rosen's activities during his tenure as AIPAC's senior lobbyist as described in the affidavit -meeting with government officials, journalists and Israeli diplomats -- were precisely the type of activities that lobbyists in Washington routinely engage in.

Despite this the FBI followed Rosen for five years and indicted him and his AIPAC colleague Keith Weissman on felony charges under the all-but-forgotten 1917 Espionage Act. The FBI probe and subsequent trial harmed AIPAC's reputation, destroyed both men's careers, and did untold damage to the reputation of both the State of Israel and its American Jewish supporters. That it took five years for the Justice Department to drop these outrageous charges is a testament to the strength of the FBI's commitment to criminalizing American Jewish advocates of a strong US-Israel alliance. 

And then there is Rice's secret cable. Just days before the 2008 presidential elections, the secretary of state instructed US diplomats in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA to conduct a massive espionage operation against Israel. The sought for information covered all aspects of Israel's political system, society, communications infrastructures and the IDF. 

Regarding the IDF, for instance, among other things, diplomats and spies were asked to gather intelligence on planned Israeli military operations against the Palestinians, Lebanon, and Syria and probe the attitudes of military commanders. They were also told to gather information on "IDF units, equipment, maintenance levels, training, morale, and operational readiness[;] IDF tactics, techniques and procedures for conducting conventional and unconventional counterinsurgency and counterterrorist operations[; and] Israeli assessment of the impact of reserve duty in the territories on IDF readiness."

As for political leaders, among other things, Rice instructed diplomats and spies to provide detailed information about government plans; influences on politicians; how politicians decide to launch military strikes; what Israel's leaders think about the US; and much more. 

Rice also sought information about various aspects of Israeli society. Rice instructed US diplomats and spies to gather information on everything from, "Information on and motivations for any increased Israeli population emigration from Israel," to detailed information on Israeli "settlers" in Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights.

Regarding the "settlers," among other things, Rice wanted information on, "Divisions among various settlement groups[;] details on settlement-related budgets and subsidies[;] settlers' relationships with the Israeli political and military establishment including their lobbying and settlement methods."

Rice expressed deep interest as well in all details related to Israel's military and non-military communications infrastructure. For instance, she directed US officials to gather information on "Current specifications, vulnerabilities, capabilities, and planned upgrades to national telecommunications infrastructure, networks, and technologies used by government and military authorities, intelligence and security services, and the public sector."

Finally, Rice wanted personal data on Israeli leaders. She asked for "official and personal phone numbers, fax numbers, and email addresses of principal civilian and military leaders."

TAKEN SIDE-BY-SIDE, the first striking aspect of the US's fabricated Israeli spy scandal on the one hand and its massive espionage operation against Israel on the other hand is the shocking hypocrisy of it all.

But hypocrisy isn't the real issue. The real issue exposed by the documents is that the US is carrying out a deeply hostile policy against Israel in the face of massive public support for Israel in the US. That is, whereas two thirds of Americans support Israel, a minority constituency in the US government treats Israel with scorn and hatred.  

And the question that arises from this is how is this minority able to get away with it?

Part of the answer was exposed this week in the aftermath of Defense Minister Ehud Barak's move on Monday morning to break ranks with the Labor Party. To understand how the two issues are related it is important to understand the plight of Labor since the demise of the peace process with the PLO in 2000. 

Since the peace process ended with the beginning of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have viewed Labor's policies of appeasement at all cost as dangerous and wrong. That is, since 2000, Labor's policies have been the policies of the political fringe. This situation has only grown worse for Labor since Hamas's takeover of Gaza and victory in the Palestinian elections held in the wake of Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

Despite the fact that its policies are hugely unpopular, two factors have enabled Labor to continue to present itself as a mainstream ruling party. 

The first factor has been the media. As has been their practice since the birth of modern Israel, since the demise of the peace process, the media have helped the likes of Labor by demonizing the Right, and rightist politicians and particularly Likud. Working hand in glove with leftist politicians, the media have engaged in the politics of personal destruction against right wing leaders. By demonizing the likes of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, they have rendered the social cost of supporting Likud and the Right is too high for many Israelis to bear. 

At the same time, the media have colluded with the Left to present Leftist leaders as earthy, heroic, sophisticated and responsible statesmen. By keeping the content of their policies firmly out of the discussion and framing the debate instead around personal attacks and symbols, the media have successfully kept rightist leaders on the defensive and shielded leftist politicians from substantive attacks on their radical policies. 

The second reason that Labor was able to retain its mantle as a ruling party is that it has enjoyed the energetic support of the State Department and European governments which both support its radical policies. 

Until the formation of the Netanyahu government two years ago, Labor was the State Department's favorite political party. Labor leaders from Shimon Peres down were the objects of constant attention and praise. Labor's leaders in turn were happy to help the Americans and Europeans hide their basic hostility towards Israel by claiming that their anti-Israel policies were actually pro-Israel policies. 

So it was that in 2003 Labor leaders actively colluded with the State Department in drafting the so-called Roadmap plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace despite then prime minister Ariel Sharon's opposition to the plan. 

Labor's importance took a hit with the formation of Kadima in late 2005. Comprised of newly minted leftists from Likud led by Sharon and veteran leftists from Labor like Peres, Kadima inherited Labor's mantle as the Left's new ruling party. Labor was able to retain its relevance to the US by joining Olmert's coalition and advocating even more radical policies than those advocated by Olmert and Livni. 

But then Likud and the Right won the 2009 elections. Kadima, led by Livni, went into the opposition and Labor, under Barak joined the coalition.

As head of the opposition, Livni has become ever more vocal in advocating the policies of the radical Left and the Obama administration. Livni has placed the blame for the absence of the peace process and for the Obama administration's sour relations with Israel squarely and entirely on Netanyahu's shoulders. 

For his part, Barak has been stuck in an untenable situation. To justify his partnership with Netanyahu, he worked closely with the Obama administration and actively lobbied Netanyahu to adopt the US's favored positions. The Obama administration rewarded him by regularly hosting him in Washington and openly extolling him as its chosen "Israeli foreign minister." 

But given both his own party's radicalism and the Obama administration's hostility towards Netanyahu, Barak was never able to fully satisfy either his party or the Americans. He was never able to move to the Left of Livni. 

livni clinton.jpg
According to Haaretz and to Labor leaders who opposed Barak, the end of the line for Barak came early this month with Haaretz's publication of a report claiming that the Obama administration had soured on Barak due to his failure to convince Netanyahu to extend the Jewish construction ban in Judea and Samaria for an additional 90 days. Livni, Haaretz reported, had replaced Barak as the Obama administration's favorite Israeli politician.

Since the article was published, Barak could no longer maintain the contradiction between Labor's radical policies and its protestations to ruling party status. Without American support, there was no way to keep Labor together. 

This is why, when he announced his break with Labor on Monday morning, Barak explained that Labor had become a radical party that was home to post-Zionists who believe that Israel alone is to blame for the absence of peace. The post-Zionists rejected him when he lost his international support. So he had nowhere to go but into Netanyahu's waiting Zionist arms.

This is also why Livni and Kadima have so harshly attacked Barak. In an interview with Army Radio on Tuesday, Livni - whose political career owes entirely to her decision to betray Likud voters - called Barak's split from Labor "the dirtiest act," in history. More importantly, the woman who claims that Netanyahu is solely to blame for the absence of peace with the Palestinians and that he is wrong not to bow to every US demand protested, "For Barak to call whoever wants peace post-Zionist is unheard of."

THIS BRINGS us back to the FBI's anti-Israel witch hunt and Rice's spy cable. 

Barak lost his ability to serve as the puppet of the anti-Israel wing of the US government because he was unable to both serve under Netanyahu and overthrow him. By pressuring Barak to do the impossible, the anti-Israel officials in the US government inadvertently caused the demise of the Labor Party.

However, with Kadima under Livni, these officials can take heart. Their support for Livni makes her powerful. Owing to their support, Livni is able to maintain her control over the largest party in the Knesset. 

And as long as Livni remains both powerful and loyal to their agenda, those forces in the US government that despise the Jewish state will be able to rest easy. Although the majority of Americans want their government to support Israel, shielded by Kadima, these US government officials will be able to continue to implement policies that treat Israel with the contempt due to a banana republic. 

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Posted on January 21, 2011 at 5:53 AM

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Tribal Update meets the Arab street and sings of Labor's blues

This week on the Tribal Update, the television-on-internet satire show produced every week by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I founded and edit, we have a content rich extravaganza for our viewers.

We bring you to Labor Party headquarters for a muscial discourse on the challenges facing the shrunken party and we bring you an exclusive interview with Defense Minister Ehud Barak who discusses his reasons for destroying his own party.

We also interview our roving reporter who was dispatched to Tunisia to report on the revolution there and much, much more. 

I hope you enjoy the show!

Here is the full episode.

 

Here is the clip of Labor's new party anthem.

 

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." 

We are in the final stages of registering a non-profit organization here in Israel that will be able to accept donations for Latma from outside the US. I hope it won't take more than a few weeks for me to give you the account information of the new group -- The Zionist Incubator.

Thanks again for your support for Latma and its important work in developing a public discourse in Israel that is relevant to the challenges facing our country.

Posted on January 21, 2011 at 5:40 AM

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Tribal Update meets the Arab street and

Posted on January 21, 2011 at 5:40 AM

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Tribal Update with German subtitles

Thanks to our friend and volunteer translator Robert Rickler, I am happy to announce that we will now begin posting Latma's Tribal Updates with German subtitles on a regular basis.
We will post the German versions a few days after the Hebrew and English ones.

Here's last week's show.
Enjoy!


Posted on January 21, 2011 at 5:32 AM

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January 18, 2011, 4:44 AM

Tunisia's lessons for Washington

Tunisia revolution.jpg
If at the height of the anti-government protests in Tunisia last week, Israel and the Palestinians had signed a final peace deal, would the protesters have packed up their placards and gone home? 

Of course not.

So what does it tell us the nature of US Middle East policy that at the height of the anti-regime protests in Tunisia, the White House was consumed with the question of how to jump start the mordant peace process between the Palestinians and Israel? 

According to Politico, as the first popular revolution in modern Arab history was in full swing, last week the White House organized two "task forces" to produce "new ideas" for getting the Palestinians to agree to sit down with Israeli negotiators. The first task force is comprised of former Clinton and Bush national security advisers Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley.

The second is led by former US ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration Martin Indyk.

And as these experts were getting in gear, US President Barak Obama dispatched his advisor and former Middle East peace envoy under the Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2 administrations Dennis Ross to Israel to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to ask them to put out "new ideas." Amazingly, none of these task forces or meetings has come up with anything new.

Again, according to Politico, these task forces and consultations generated three possible moves for the Obama White House. First, it can put more pressure on Israel by announcing US support for a "peace plan" that would require Israel to surrender its capital city and defensible borders.

Second, the US can pressure Israel by seeking to destabilize Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government.

And third, the US can pressure Israel by pumping still more money into the coffers of the unelected Palestinian government and so raise expectations that the US supports the unelected Palestinian government's plan to declare independence without agreeing to live at peace with Israel.

So much for new ideas.

THEN THERE is the unfolding drama in Lebanon. It is hard to think of a greater slap on the face than the one Hizbullah and Syria delivered to Obama last Wednesday. Hizbullah brought down Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri's government with the open and active support of Syria while Obama was meeting with Hariri in the Oval Office.

And how did Obama respond to this slap in the face? By dispatching Ambassador Robert Ford to Damascus to take up his new post as the first US ambassador in Syria since Syria and Hizbullah colluded to assassinate Hariri's father, former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri six years ago.

Reality is crashing in on the Obama administration. But rather than face the challenges presented by reality, the Obama administration is burying its head in the sand. And it is burying it head in the sand with the firm support of the inbred US foreign policy elite.

The overthrow of Tunisian President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali last Friday is a watershed event in the Arab world. It is far too early to even venture a guess about how Tunisia will look a year from now. But it is not too early to understand that Ben Ali's regime was not the only thing destroyed last Friday. The two main foundations of "expert" Western analysis of the Middle East have also been undone.

The first foundation of what has passed as Western wisdom about the region is that the only that thing that motivates the proverbial "Arab street" to act is hatred of Israel.

For nearly a generation, successive US administrations have based their Middle East policies on the collective wisdom of the likes of Ross, Hadley, Berger, Indyk, George Mitchell, Dan Kurtzer, and Tony Blair. And for nearly a generation, these wise men have argued that Arab reform, democracy, human rights, women's rights, minority rights, religious freedom, economic development and the rule of law can only be addressed after a peace treaty is signed between Israel and the Palestinians. In their "expert" view, Arab autocrats and their repressed subjects alike are so upset by the plight of the Palestinians that they can't be bothered with their own lives.

Tunisia's revolution exposes this "wisdom," as complete and utter piffle. Like people everywhere, what most interests Arabs is their own standard of living, their relative freedom or lack thereof, and their prospects for the future.

Mohammed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian college graduate who set himself on fire last month after regime security forces destroyed his unlicensed produce cart did not act as he did because of Israel.

The Egyptian man who set himself on fire in Cairo on Monday outside the Egyptian parliament, and the Algerian man who set himself on fire in Tebessa on Sunday, did not choose to self-immolate in the public square because of their concern for the Palestinians. So too, the anti-regime demonstrators in Jordan are not demonstrating because there is no Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.

The Tunisian revolution demonstrates that "Arab unity" and commitment to "Palestinian rights," is little more than a sop for Western "experts."

The chief concern of Arab dictators is not Israel, but the prolongation of their grip on power. From their perspective, one of the keys to maintaining their iron grip on power is neutralizing US support for freedom.

By arguing that Israel is the root cause of all Arab pathologies, Arab despots put the US on the defensive. Having to defend its support for the hated Jews, the US feels less comfortable criticizing the dictators for their repression of their own people. And without the Americans breathing down their backs, Arab dictators can sleep more or less easily. Since Europe doesn't mind that they trample human rights, only the US constitutes a threat to the legitimacy of these Arab autocrats' iron fisted repression of their people.

And this brings us to the second fallacious foundation of "expert" Western analysis of the Middle East destroyed by the recent events in Tunisia. That foundation is the belief that it is possible and desirable to build a stable alliance structure on the back of dictatorships.

Tunisia's revolution exposed two basic truths about relationships with dictatorships. First, they cannot outlast the regime. Since dictators represent no one but themselves, when the dictator leaves the scene, no one will feel bound by his decisions.

The second fundamental truth exposed by Ben Ali's overthrow is that all power is fleeting. Ben Ali's day came last Friday. The day of his Arab despot brethren will also arrive. And when they are overthrown, their alliances will be overthrown with them. To a significant degree, the Obama administration's failure to understand the chronic instability of dictatorships explains its obsession with appeasing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Because the US wrongly assumes that Assad's regime is inherently stable, it misunderstands Assad's rationale for preferring Iran and Hizbullah to the US.

Assad is a member of the Alawite minority community. He fears his people not only because he represses them through state terror, but because given his Alawite identity, most Syrians do not view him as one of them.

As dictators and murderers themselves, Iran's ayatollahs and Hizbullah's terror masters support Assad's regime in a way that the US never could, even if it wished to. Indeed, as Assad sees things, given the nature of his regime, there is no chance that an alliance with the US would do anything but weaken his regime's grip on power.

US attempts to build relations with Assad tell this dictator two seemingly contradictory things at the same time. First they signal to him that his alliance with Iran and Hizbullah strengthen his regional stature. Without those alliances, the US would not be interested in appeasing him.

Second, due to the chronic instability of his tyrannical terror state, and his consequent utter fear of democracy, Assad views American attempts to draw him into the Western alliance as bids to overthrow his regime. The more the likes of Obama and Clinton seek to draw him in, the more convinced he will become that they are in league with Israel to bring him down.

ON THE face of it, the Tunisian revolution vindicates former president George W. Bush's policy of pushing democratization of the Arab world. As Bush recognized in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US is poorly served by relying on dictators who maintain their power on the backs of their people.

Bush got into trouble however by seeing a straight line between the problem and his chosen solution of elections. As the Hamas victory in the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Brotherhood's victories in Egypt's parliamentary elections on the one hand, and the undermining of pro- Western democratically elected governments in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq on the other hand made clear, elections are not the solution to authoritarianism.

The Tunisian revolution provides several lessons for US policymakers. First, by reminding us of the inherent frailty of alliances with dictatorships, Tunisia demonstrates the strategic imperative of a strong Israel. As the only stable democracy in the region, Israel is the US's only reliable ally in the Middle East. A strong, secure Israel is the only permanent guarantor of US strategic interests in the Middle East.

Second, the US should proceed with great caution as it considers its ties with the Arab world. All bets must be hedged. This means that the US must maintain close ties with as many regimes as possible so that none are viewed as irreplaceable.

Saudi Arabia has to be balanced with Iraq, and support for a new regime in Iran. Support for Egypt needs to be balanced with close relations with South Sudan, and other North African states.

As for engendering democratic alternatives, the US must ensure that it does not make any promises it has no intention of keeping. The current tragedy in Lebanon is a blow to US prestige because Washington broke its promise to stand by the March 14 movement against Hizbullah.

At the same time, the US should fund and publicly support liberal democratic movements when those emerge. It should also fund less liberal democratic movements when they emerge. So too, given the strength of Islamist media, the US should make judicious use of its Arabic-language media outlets to sell its own message of liberal democracy to the Arab world.

Tunisia's revolution is an extraordinary event. And like other extraordinary events, its repercussions are being felt far beyond its borders. Unfortunately, the behavior of the Obama administration signals that it is unwilling to acknowledge the importance of what is happening.

If the Obama administration persists in ignoring the fundamental truths exposed by the popular overthrow of Tunisia's dictator, it will not simply marginalize US power in the Middle East. It will imperil US interests in the Middle East.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Posted on January 18, 2011 at 4:44 AM

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January 14, 2011, 9:42 AM

The Tribal Update on South Sudan and a new horror film is on its way!

his week at The Tribal Update, the television-on-Internet produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I run, we discuss south Sudanese independence. We also bring you a new installment of Jamil and Awad doing jihad and the trailer for a new horror movie coming our way.

Enjoy!

Here's the whole program:



Here's the clip for Jamil and Awad:


And here's the movie trailer:



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." 

We are in the final stages of registering a non-profit organization here in Israel that will be able to accept donations for Latma from outside the US. I hope it won't take more than a few weeks for me to give you the account information of the new group -- The Zionist Incubator.

Thanks again for your support for Latma and its important work in developing a public discourse in Israel that is relevant to the challenges facing our country.

Posted on January 14, 2011 at 9:42 AM

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Exposing the puppet masters

follow the money trail.jpg
Israel is today in the throes of a powerful backlash against the Knesset's decision last week to establish a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the foreign funding of Israeli NGOs that engage in political warfare against the state. 

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni claimed on Tuesday that the commission shows that "Israel today is deteriorating and abusing the very values for which we want to fight. The way that Israel is presented by the belligerent, violent government is hindering Israel's ability to defend itself." 

As head of the opposition, over the past two months Livni has angrily opposed every initiative supported by the government as loudly as she can, regardless of its merits. So it isn't surprising that she would condemn the commission. More jarring are the statements by Likud ministers condemning the Knesset move. 

It has been known for years that European governments finance Israeli anti-Israel pressure groups. The exact amount of funding has never been determined. No one can tell the public whether or not these groups could survive without foreign funding. The Israeli public deserves to know just how Israeli these groups are and what foreign governments require them to do in exchange for receiving funding.

Some estimates place foreign funding for Israeli NGOs at NIS500 million per year. Some estimates have claimed that foreign donations make up the majority of many of the radical leftist groups' budgets. 

Take Ir Amim for instance. Ir Amim is a group dedicated to undermining Israeli sovereignty in eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem. Last year NGO Monitor reported that Ir Amim receives 67 percent of its budget directly from European governments. 

What does this mean about the nature of this group? Can it be reasonably called an Israeli organization? 

It is hard to understand why exposing this information to the public would be a cause of consternation and worry for the likes of Likud ministers Dan Meridor, Bennie Begin, Michael Eitan and Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin who have been outspoken in criticizing the formation of the Knesset panel of inquiry. 

More likely than not, what really bothered these gentlemen from Likud was that these groups are not simply being called out for the European funding they receive. They are being accused of receiving money from Arabs and assisting terror groups. 

In remarks in support of the probe proposed by his Yisrael Beitenu party, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman did not simply accuse the likes of Ir Amim, B'Tselem, Adalah, New Profile, Breaking the Silence, the Public Committee Against Torture, Human Rights Watch, Ittijah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Gisha, Moked: Center for the Defense of  the Individual, Yesh Din and Physicians for Human Rights in Israel of being on Europe's payroll. 

He said that these groups, "help terrorists, and their main aim is to weaken the IDF and its 
ability to protect the citizens of the State of Israel."

The notion that Israeli NGOs may have ties to terrorists is without a doubt political dynamite. And people get frightened by dynamite. But a new report indicates that Lieberman's accusations are an accurate depiction of reality. 

THIS WEEK Im Tirtzu, the Zionist student movement released a report that makes a convincing case that foreign Arabs are funding Israeli Jewish and Arab NGOs with the aim of criminalizing Israel and influencing Israel's political discourse in a way that constrains Israel's ability to defend itself.

Im Tirtzu's report is titled, "Support by Arab foundations and states for organizations working against the policies of the State of Israel and the IDF." It focuses on two Palestinian organizations headquartered in Ramallah: The Welfare Association, and the NGO Development Center. 

The Welfare Association was established in 1983 for the purpose of building a sustainable Palestinian society. It operates in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, Gaza, throughout Israel and in Lebanon. It receives money from the EU and the World Bank and separate European governments. It also receives money from Arab governments and Arab governmental funds from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and OPEC. Of its 2004 budget of nearly $30 million, more than half came from Arab sources. 

As the Im Tirtzu report notes, one of those contributors is particularly notable. In 2004, the Welfare Association received $796,606 from the Islamic Development Bank - al Aksa Fund - Saudi Arabia. Im Tirtzu attests that the IDB has continued to fund the Welfare Association since then as well. 

According to the IDB's own documents, cited by the Im Tirtzu report, in October 2000 at an Arab League summit in Cairo, Arab leaders decided to establish the IDB's al Aksa Fund and the Al-Quds Intifada Fund "to assert comprehensive Arab support for the Palestinian people in the face of continuous Israeli aggression." Together the two funds received $1 billion to distribute. 

According to a report by the American Center for Democracy cited by Im Tirtzu, "In 2001 alone, the IDB transferred $538 million raised publicly by Saudi and Gulf Royal telethons to support the Palestinian intifada and families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IDB has also channeled UN funds to Hamas, as documented by bank records discovered in the West Bank and Gaza."

In 2001 the Saudi Ain A-Yaqeen newspaper reported that that year the IDB transferred $2,378,072 to the families of Palestinian "martyrs," and prisoners. 

Among the many groups it funds, the Welfare Association supports Israeli Arab NGOs. These include Adalah, Balanda, Ahali, Ittijah, Mada al Carmel, and the Galilee Society. The Welfare Association also gives direct support to Israeli Arab municipal governments including Nazareth's municipal government and Kfar Kanna's local council. Its efforts are aimed at breaking the cultural and civic ties between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews. Among other things, it sponsored a campaign to block Israeli Arabs from volunteering in national service. It also buys properties for Arabs throughout the country. 

The Im Tirtzu report shows that in 2006 the Welfare Association was instrumental in forming the NGO Development Center in Ramallah. Five out of 13 members of the NDC's board of directors are also on the Welfare Association's Board of Directors. The Welfare Association also donates money to the NDC.

The NDC acts as yet another clearinghouse for donor money to Palestinian and Israeli NGOs. Aside from the money it receives from the Welfare Association, most of its annual budget of $19 million comes from European governments. 

According to the NDC's website, to receive funds from the NDC, groups must agree to "monitor, document, and report on violations by the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian human rights, as well as undertake campaigning and advocacy activities to address these violations and raise awareness about them."

Between July 2008 and December 2009, the NDC allocated $1.89 million to the following Israeli NGOs: B'Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights, the Public Committee Against Torture, Moked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, Bimkom, the Public Committee Against Housing Demolitions, Moussawa, Breaking the Silence, Gisha, Yesh Din, and Workers' Hotline. 

The largest beneficiaries were B'Tselem, which was allocated $450,000 and received $405,000 by the end of the reporting period, and Moked which received $500,000. 

While it is true that most of NDC's funds are donated by European countries, it is also true that it is a Palestinian organization. And as it funding requirements make clear, in order to receive money from the NDC, groups need to actively participate in political warfare against Israel. 

Given Im Tirtzu's limited resources, it is more than likely that its findings are merely the tip of the iceberg. And yet, even with its limited scope, the report makes a convincing case that hostile Arab governments and bodies linked with terror finance are indirectly funding Israeli Arab groups. 

It also makes a convincing case that the NDC is a Palestinian organization founded and largely controlled by another Palestinian organization, the Welfare Association, which is funded by hostile Arab governments and foundations with ties to terror funders. And in turn, the NDC is financing Israeli Jewish and Arab organizations that have agreed to conduct political warfare against Israel and the IDF.

THE PROPOSED inquiry has not only raised the hackles of Israeli politicians. It has provoked the ire of European politicians as well. During his visit here this week, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store threw diplomatic niceties to the seven winds. In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, he condemned Lieberman for sponsoring the inquiry into foreign funding of Israeli NGOs hissing, "I think it is a worrying sign," about the state of Israeli democracy.

Norway is a key funder of some of the most radical Israeli and Palestinian NGOs. It is also increasingly a major fount of anti-Semitic blood libels. Store himself endorsed one such blood libel when he wrote a blurb on the back cover of a book about Operation Cast Lead written by two radical physicians named Eric Fosse and Mads Glibert. 

The two men spent the mini-war at Shifa Hospital in Gaza which Hamas used as its command center. There they broadcast Hamas propaganda back to Norway. Then they returned home and wrote a book in which they claimed that the IDF entered Gaza with the express goal of murdering women and children. 

And Store endorsed their book. 

It is possible that Store's hostile response is just the kneejerk reaction of an anti-Semite. Or it could be that he doesn't want his Norwegian voters and the people of Europe as a whole to know about the anti-Israel political war their governments are waging with their taxes. Either way, his statements are simply more reason for the Knesset to move ahead with the probe.

Then there are the NGOs themselves. Their responses to the probe of their finances have been marked by total hysteria. They have attacked the commission's supporters as McCarthyites and fascists. If nothing else, the Im Tirtzu report makes clear that they have good reason to not want the public to know where their money is coming from. 

One of Lieberman's most incendiary claims against the radical groups the Knesset inquiry will investigate was, "We're talking about organizations whose entire goal is to deter Israeli security forces and the IDF. It is clear that these groups are not interested in human rights. These groups disseminate lies. They demonize and incite against the State of Israel and against IDF soldiers. Never have any of these organizations ever said that Israel was right. Of course we are talking about groups that assist terror, and that is all, that their goal is to weaken the IDF."

Against the backdrop of the Im Tirtzu report's finding, Lieberman's allegations seem more or less spot on. At a minimum, backed by the new data, it is obvious that the public needs to have a full picture of who and what stand behind these self-proclaimed human rights groups.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post. 

Posted on January 14, 2011 at 7:27 AM

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January 11, 2011, 4:00 AM

Sudanese crossroads

Sudan referendum.jpg
On Sunday, the southern Sudanese began voting on a referendum to secede from the Republic of Sudan and establish their own sovereign nation. By all accounts, they will soon secede from the Arab, Islamic country and form an independent African, Christian and animist state.

The consequences of their actions will reverberate around the world.

This week's referendum takes place in accordance with the US-brokered Comprehensive Peace Treaty between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement signed on January 9, 2005.

The CPT officially ended the second Sudanese Civil War that began in 1983.

The South Sudanese referendum will not settle the issue of control over all of southern Sudan. Numerous flashpoints remain. Most importantly, the disposition of the town of Abyei remains undetermined. Abyei is where most of Sudan's oil deposits are located.

Unlike the rest of the south, its population is a mix of Arabs and Africans and its residents are split over the issue of separation from Khartoum. If there is war after independence, Abyei will likely be its cause.

Abyei's residents were supposed to vote on a referendum to determine the disposition of their town at the same time as the rest of the south. But fuelled by their conflicting interests, they could not agree on how to run the poll, and so it did not take place.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is playing a contradictory role in the South Sudanese referendum. Al-Bashir has been indicted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur.

Last week he visited South Sudan's capital city Juba and pledged to support the referendum's results. As he put it, "I am going to celebrate your decision, even if your decision is secession. Even after the southern state is born, we are ready in the Khartoum government to offer any technical or logistical support and training or advice - we are ready to help."

But then, last Friday, pro-Khartoum militias attacked anti-Khartoum targets in Abyei. By Monday, 23 people had been killed. According to South Sudanese military spokesmen, militiamen captured in Abyei said they were ordered to attack by Khartoum.

MUCH OF the international discourse on southern Sudan has centered on what South Sudan's independence means for its citizens and for Africa as a whole. And this is reasonable.

In its 54-year history, Sudan has suffered from civil war between the north and south for 39 years. Some 200,000 south Sudanese were kidnapped into slavery. Two million Sudanese have died in the wars. Four million have become refugees.

But the fact is that with the West openly supporting southern Sudanese independence, a new war's consequences will not be limited to Sudan itself. Therefore it is worth considering why such a war is all but certain and what southern Sudanese independence means for the region and the world.

There were two main reasons that Bashir agreed to sign the peace treaty with the south Sudanese in 2005. First, his forces had lost the civil war. The south was already effectively independent.

The second reason Bashir agreed to a deal that would give eventual independence to the oil-rich south is because he feared the US.

In 2004, led by then president George W. Bush, the US cast a giant shadow throughout the world. The US military's lightning overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime frightened US foes and encouraged US allies. The democratic wave revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon were all fuelled by the world's belief in US's willingness to use its power to defeat its foes.

Bashir's regime is closely linked to al-Qaida, which he hosted from 1989 until 1995.

When the US demanded that he accept the south's victory, he probably didn't believe he could refuse.

Today, the US is not feared or respected as it was six years ago. And according to a recent article in the online Small Wars Journal by US Army Lt. Col. Thomas Talley, Bashir's current dim perception of the US makes war inevitable.

Talley argues that without Abyei, South Sudan will be rendered an economically nonviable failed state. South Sudan, he claims is too weak to secure Abyei from Khartoum without outside assistance.

According to Talley, the deterioration of the global perception of US power has convinced Bashir that the US will not protect Abyei for the south and so his best bet is to invade the town or at a minimum prevent the south from securing it.

As Talley notes, for Bashir, far more than oil is at stake. If Bashir agrees to cede southern Sudan without a fight, he will be discredited both by his fellow Arab leaders and by his fellow Islamic leaders.

Arab leaders as diverse as Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi and Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal have decried South Sudan's independence. Gaddafi warned that southern secession would be the beginning of a "contagious disease."

Faisal called it a "dangerous move" that no member of the Arab League should support.

THE FACT of the matter is that the Arabs have reason to be concerned about what is happening in Sudan. If South Sudan becomes an independent nation, it will be the first case of rollback of Arab imperialism since World War I.

One of the central aspects of Middle Eastern politics that is overwhelmingly ignored by scholars is Arab imperialism and the role it has played in shaping the region's politics.

Both during the post-World War I breakup of the Ottoman Empire and with the breakup of the British and French empires after World War II, British and French imperial authorities colluded with Arab imperialists to guarantee the latter's nearly uninhibited control over the Middle East.

For the Kurds, Shi'ites, Druse, Alawites, Copts, and other non-Sunni, non-Arab, or non-Muslim populations in the region, the end of Western rule meant the end of their relative freedom.

In the case of southern Sudan, during the half century of British rule, the south was administered separately from the Arab north.

But when the British withdrew in 1956, in their haste to leave, they placed the south under Arab rule. Fearing disenfranchisement and oppression, the south began the first Sudanese civil war in 1955 - the year before independence.

There were only two exceptions to Europe's collusion with Arab imperialists - Christian- majority Lebanon and the Palestine Mandate. In both these areas, Western powers allowed non-Muslims to take charge of territory claimed by Arab imperialists.

As the post-independence history of both Lebanon and Israel shows, the Europeans eventually attenuated their support for non-Arab governments. The French have pressured Lebanon's Christians fairly consistently to appease the Arabs. This pressure has caused continuous Christian emigration from Lebanon which has rendered the Christians a minority in Lebanon today. And the Lebanese Christians' attempts to appease the Arabs, opened the door for Hizbullah to take over the country for Iran.

As for Israel, in light of its failure to convince the Arabs to be appeased by its concessions and the Arabs' failure to overrun the Jewish state, since 1973 Europe has collaborated with the Arabs in recasting reality to suit the aims of Arab imperialism.

Whereas Israel was established and repeatedly defended by the Jewish national liberation movement against the wishes of Arab imperialists, with European assistance, the Arabs have inverted history. The current Arab-European claim is that the Arab imperialist war against Israel is a Jewish imperialist war against Arabs.

AGAINST THIS backdrop of Western perfidy towards the Middle East's non-Arab minorities, the West's support for South Sudanese independence is nothing short of miraculous.

Unfortunately, the West's support for South Sudan probably owes to Western ignorance rather than a newfound Western will to defy Arab imperialists. That is, it is likely that West is doing the right thing today in Sudan because it doesn't understand the ramifications of its own policy.

If the West doesn't understand its policy, then it is unlikely to understand the significance of a challenge to that policy by Khartoum and its allies. And if it fails to understand the significance of a challenge to its policy by Khartoum, then it is unlikely to defend its policy when it is challenged.

Against this backdrop, it is important to recall Lt. Col. Talley's claim that Bashir will attack Abyei because he does not believe that the US will defend South Sudanese control of the border town. The shallowness of Western support for South Sudan will lead to war.

But again, it isn't just the Arabs that will force Bashir to go to war. He also has the pan-Islamic jihadists to consider. His erstwhile friends in al-Qaida have made clear that they will not take the surrender of southern Sudan to non-Musims lying down.

Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al Zawahiri has denounced Bashir for signing the peace agreement with the south. In an article Friday in The Daily Beast, former US National Security Council official Bruce Riedel wrote that in 2009 Zawahiri called on Sudan's Muslims to fight "a long guerilla war," because "the contemporary Crusade has bared its fangs at you."

Zawahiri told Bashir, "to repent and return to the straight path of Islam and jihad."

And it is not only al-Qaida that will feel disconcerted by the south's secession. At a time when jihadist regimes and forces throughout the Arab and Islamic world are using violence to repress Christians and other non-Muslims and force the full implementation of Sharia law, the notion that the Dar el-Islam or Muslim world is shrinking in Sudan is widely perceived as unacceptable. Islamic attacks against the West for its support for southern Sudanese independence are highly likely.

None of this means that the West should end its support for South Sudan. The South Sudanese have earned their independence in a way that most nations never have.

They deserve the support of all nations that value freedom and decency.

But what it does mean is that as they move forward, South Sudan's leaders must recognize that the West is likely to abandon them at the first sign of trouble. They must weigh their options accordingly.

More importantly, the all but certain results of South Sudan's independence serve as yet another reminder to the West about the nature of power, war and friendship.

Power is inextricably linked to the perception of power. You are perceived as powerful when you show you can tell friend from foe, and stand with the former against the latter.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Posted on January 11, 2011 at 4:00 AM

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January 7, 2011, 8:32 AM

Agents of Influence

Samir Fadel.jpg
On Sunday December 19, the self-proclaimed "Israeli human rights" group B'Tselem disseminated a shocking story to the local and international media. B'Tselem claimed that the previous day Palestinian shepherd Samir Bani Fadel was peacefully herding his sheep when he was set upon by a mob of Israeli settlers. He alleged that these kippah-clad Israelis drove up in a car and chased him away. Then they torched the pasture and burned 12 pregnant ewes alive and badly burned five others. B'Tselem furnished reporters with graphic photos of the dead sheep.

While the media published the account without a shred of suspicion, the police found Fadel's account hard to believe. Observant Jews neither drive nor light fires on Saturdays. 

And indeed, when questioned by police investigators, Fadel admitted he made the whole attack up. He accidentally killed his herd himself when he set fire to a pile of bramble. Too embarrassed to admit his mistake, he decided to blame the Jews and become a local hero. B'Tselem was only too happy to spread his lies.
 
On January 3, Channel 2 aired a video produced by B'Tselem. The video purported to show residents of Yitzhar -- a community in Samaria - throwing rocks at Palestinians from the neighboring village Bureen for no reason whatsoever.  Channel 2 presented the footage as further proof - if anyone needed it -- that the Israelis who live in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem are a bunch of lawless, hate-filled, violent fanatics.

btselem.jpg

Unfortunately for B'Tselem and Channel 2, Yitzhar residents also own a video camera. And they also filmed the event. The Samaria Regional Council released the video to the media on Tuesday. 

The Yitzhar video exposes the B'Tselem video as a complete fraud. As it happened, on Monday afternoon a group of Palestinians joined by Israelis and/or foreigners descended on Yitzhar and attacked its residents with bricks and rocks of all sizes. Among the assailants was the cameraman who shot the footage presented on Channel 2. Not only did the videographer - who has blond hair - participate in the violent assault on Yitzhar. He staged the incident by alternately throwing rocks, filming, and directing his fellow attackers where to throw their rocks. 

The Jews of Yitzhar only began throwing rocks to fend off their attackers.

This past Saturday the Palestinians' invented what has all the trappings of a new blood libel against Israel. 

Every Friday Israeli anti-Zionist activists, Palestinian Authority employees, and foreign anti-Israel groups join forces at Bil'in. Together they attack IDF soldiers guarding construction of the separation barrier adjacent to Bil'in village. 

Saturday, the PA claimed that Jawaher Abu-Rahmeh, a woman from Bil'in died from tear gas inhalation at the previous day's riot. The PA's chief negotiator Saeb Erekat claimed that her death was an IDF war crime.

Erekat of course, has not distinguished himself as a paragon of truthfulness. To the contrary. He has a long track record of spreading lies about Israel on the international stage. In just one notable example, in April 2002, Erekat claimed in multiple television appearances that the IDF killed more than 500 people at Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield. He also claimed that the IDF buried some 300 people in mass graves. 

The UN later reported that during the pitched battle in Jenin refugee camp, 52 Palestinians were killed. 23 IDF soldiers were killed in the battle. 

Despite Erekat's rich history of lies, B'Tselem's Executive Director Jessica Montell joined his bandwagon immediately. As NGO Monitor documented, in a Twitter post on Saturday, Montell wrote, "Sad start to the year. Jawaher Abu Rahmeh died this morning after inhaling tear gas yesterday in Bil'in demonstration."

Her claim was echoed in similar statements from her fellow Israeli anti-Zionist pressure groups. Anarchists Against the Wall, Yesh Din, Gush Shalom, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel, and attorney Michel Sfard who is associated with Yesh Din, Al Haq and Breaking the Silence all alleged that the IDF murdered Abu Rahmah with tear gas.

As luck would have it though, eyewitnesses say that Abu Rahma didn't even participate in the weekly riot. Ilham Abu Rahma, her 19 year old cousin and neighbor told Britain's Independent that deceased was at home when the riot took place. 

For its part, the IDF has reported that the medical information it received about Abu Rahma's death are not consistent with death through overexposure to tear gas. During her hospitalization, Abu Rahma received an unusual mix of drugs that is usually only administered to treat poisoning, drug overdose or leukemia. The IDF also revealed that Abu Rahma had been recently hospitalized at a Palestinian hospital.

The easiest way to determine what caused Abu Rahma's death would of course have been to perform an autopsy. The IDF asked for one to be performed. But the PA refused the request and instead buried her in record time.

THE SAD truth is that a case can easily be made that all of this might have been avoided if B'Tselem hadn't taken it upon itself to delegitimize Israel's right to self-defense. As part of its efforts, in 2002 B'Tselem spearheaded the international campaign against Israel's right to build the separation fence to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of its major cities. 

As NGO Monitor's recent in-depth report about the lawfare campaign to use the language of law to criminalize Israel shows, B'Tselem was the first NGO to launch a campaign against the security fence. NGO Monitor recalls that in 2002 and 2003 B'Tselem "issued two lengthy position papers, which became accepted as the definitive analyses of 'the Wall' and were widely adopted."

B'Tselem's campaign against the security fence was quickly joined by other NGOs, the UN and the EU. Its allegations formed the basis of the international campaign to delegitimize Israel's right to build the barrier. 

That campaign reached a high point in 2004 with the publication of International Court of Justice's opinion on the matter. The ICJ's opinion parroted B'Tselem's charge that Israel has no right to defend itself from Palestinian aggression. So too, the "evidence" against Israel's right to defend itself submitted by the PLO was based largely on the two B'Tselem reports.

If B'Tselem hadn't launched the campaign against the fence, it is possible that Israel's decision to built it might have been greeted with the same indifference as the security fences erected by the likes of India, Spain and numerous other countries in disputed territories. That is, it might have been seen as the legitimate act of self-defense it is. 

The central role that B'Tselem and its anti-Zionist comrades in the Israeli NGO community play in the international political war being waged against Israel's right to exist first came under significant public scrutiny following the publication of the UN Human Rights Committee's Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead in 2009. 

As NGO Monitor and the Zionist student movement Im Tirtzu demonstrated last year, B'Tselem and 15 other Israeli NGOs funded by the New Israel Fund and foreign governments lobbied the UN Human Rights Council to form the Goldstone Commission with the clear agenda of criminalizing Israel and whitewashing Hamas's war crimes against the Jewish state. 

Moreover, B'Tselem and its fellow-NIF grantees, provided 92 percent of the anti-Israel allegations originating from Israeli sources. These allegations - most of which were firmly denied by the IDF - were used by Judge Richard Goldstone and his colleagues to "prove" that Israel committed war crimes in prosecuting its campaign to protect southern Israel from Hamas's illegal missile onslaught. 

Not surprisingly, when scrutinized, like the story about the scorched pregnant ewes, the Yitzhar "bullies" and the "illegality" of the fence, these allegations came apart under scrutiny. 
For instance, B'Tselem claimed that during Cast Lead the IDF killed 1,387 Gazans and only 330, or less than a quarter of them were combatants. As NGO Monitor notes, the Goldstone report's claim that "Only one of every five [Gazan] casualties was a combatant," clearly was based on B'Tselem's numbers.

The IDF - which B'Tselem and its comrades claim has no credibility - reported that of 1166 Palestinian deaths, 709 were fighters killed in combat. Goldstone dismissed the IDF data. 
Yet in November, Hamas's "Interior Minister" Fathi Hamad admitted to the London-based Al Hayat newspaper that the IDF's numbers were far more accurate than B'Tselem's. According to Hamad, 600-700 Hamas fighters were killed in Cast Lead. 

ONE OF the reasons that false stories by the likes of B'Tselem and its fellow Israeli-staffed anti-Zionist pressure groups are treated with respect by the local media and the international community alike is because they are perceived as Israeli groups. Why would Israelis lie about their own army?

Wednesday the Knesset voted to form a commission of inquiry to examine these groups' sources of funding. The rationale behind this parliamentary investigation is clear. The time has come to determine just how "Israeli" these organizations that form such an integral part of the international political war against Israel actually are. How much of their funding comes from foreign governments? And if their foreign funding is significant, then how can they claim to be Israeli groups? 

B'Tselem for instance receives funding from the British, Swiss, and Irish governments, Christian Aid, the Ford Foundation, DanChurchAid, (funded by the Danish Government), Diakonia, (funded by the Swedish and Norwegian governments and the EU), Trócaire, (funded by the Irish and UK governments),and others.

Yesh Din, which specializes in conducting domestic lawfare against the IDF is funded by the Irish, Dutch, British, German, and Norwegian governments, the EU, and George Soros' Open Society Institute.

Physicians for Human Rights- Israel, Breaking the Silence, Bimkom, Peace Now, Gush Shalom, Adalah, the Geneva Initiative, the Committee for Peace and Security and so on and so forth all receive massive funding from foreign governments. The Samaria Regional Council alleges that over the past decade, foreign governments have donated hundreds of millions of euros, dollars and shekels to these Israeli "grassroots" groups. 

The fact is that these groups' claim to grassroots' status is as credible as their allegations of Israeli criminality and Palestinian victimhood. In truth, these NGOs are local agents of foreign governments who use them to advance their anti-Israel policies. 

The Knesset's move to investigate these groups was greeted by righteous rage from the groups' leaders and sympathetic Leftist Knesset members. The Knesset's decision was castigated as "McCarthyite," and "anti-democratic." But it is clear these groups and their parliamentary allies doth protest too much.  

No one is talking about shutting them down. But the Israeli public has a right to know what these groups really are. And our political representatives have an obligation to investigate and expose subversive foreign agents. Israel and Israel's democratic system is weakened, not strengthened when the state's international reputation and domestic discourse is hijacked by foreign governments who hide behind their Israeli foot soldiers.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Posted on January 7, 2011 at 8:32 AM

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Tawil Fadiha's heroic death at Bil'in

This week at The Tribal Update, the television-on-Internet produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I run, we present Pallywood's latest smash-hit - "Warm Crimes at Bil'lin." Our co-anchor Elhanan has a nightmare, and Ronit's nightmare scenario unfolds in the studio as the historian Shaldag Borochov analyzes the Left's analogy between Israel and Nazi Germany.

Here's the entire program.


Here is the clip of Pallywood's latest hit.


Enjoy!

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." 

We are in the final stages of registering a non-profit organization here in Israel that will be able to accept donations for Latma from outside the US. I hope it won't take more than a few weeks for me to give you the account information of the new group -- The Zionist Incubator.

Thanks again for your support for Latma and its important work in developing a public discourse in Israel that is relevant to the challenges facing our country.

Posted on January 7, 2011 at 8:22 AM

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January 5, 2011, 10:08 AM

Free Jonathan Pollard

 

I say a prayer for Jonathan Pollard's freedom every Friday night when I light Shabbat candles. I understand that today he is very ill. He has suffered long enough.

Please put him in your prayers and please ask President Barack Obama to commute his sentence.

Posted on January 5, 2011 at 10:08 AM

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January 4, 2011, 4:18 PM

Why Palestinian propaganda succeeds

Below is a terrific video produced by Stand With Us at UCLA. I think it actually should make us all hopeful. The fact is that these students don't know anything, which means that if we reach them, we can teach them. 


Posted on January 4, 2011 at 4:18 PM

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Latma Wins! Latma Wins!

latma.JPG

This week we were informed that Latma has won the 2011 Media Criticism Award presented by Israel Media Watch. Latma was chosen from among a field of eminently deserving candidates in a vote open to the public. 

Not only did we win, we won by a landslide! According to Israel Media Watch President Meir Rozen, there were 4,600 votes cast online. We won and the second place contestant received just 600 votes, which means, with all due respect to our honorable competitors, that our victory is massive.

We thank the public for their support. The award ceremony will take place on February 20 at Beit Sokolov in Tel Aviv. For information about the award and the ceremony, check in with IMW's website: www.imw.org.il.

Each year IMW gives the Abrramowitz Award for Media Criticism to two winners. I won the award in 2006 for my reporting on the withdrawal and expulsion from Gaza. This year was the first year that the public chose one of the winners. The other winner was chosen by a panel of judges. The second winner this year is my friend and colleague Khaled Abu Toameh from the Jerusalem Post. Khaled is the bravest and best reporter I know. I am proud to call him a friend, and proud to share the award with him. 

khaled-abu-toameh.jpg

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." 

We are in the final stages of registering a non-profit organization here in Israel that will be able to accept donations for Latma from outside the US. I hope it won't take more than a few weeks for me to give you the account information of the new group -- The Zionist Incubator.

Thanks again for your support for Latma and its important work in developing a public discourse in Israel that is relevant to the challenges facing our country.

Posted on January 4, 2011 at 6:36 AM

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The Left's loser message

loser.jpg
The Israeli Left was once an optimistic place. But that is no longer the case. It once promised peace and happiness. But that is no longer the case.

Today the Left is marked by equal doses of doom and gloom, irrationality and delusion. It operates in a closed universe in which reality has no place and opposing views are systematically ignored.

The Left's defeatism was brought home to me last Thursday during the Ariel University Center of Samaria's conference on Law and Mass Media. There I participated in a panel entitled, "Is the idea of a 'two state solution' feasible or doomed to failure?" 

The first two speakers on the panel were Dr. Martin Sherman from Tel Aviv University and myself. Sherman explained in great detail how a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem will imperil Israel.

Without control over these areas, Israel will lack defensible borders. And given that there is no Palestinian leadership willing to accept Israel's right to exist, this strategic vulnerability will invite a war that Israel will be hard-pressed to survive.

Both Sherman and I explained at length that due to the Palestinian and the larger Arab world's rejection of Israel's right to exist, the "two-state solution" policy paradigm is delusional. It is not a policy paradigm. It is a fantasy. A debate about the two-state solution is not a policy debate, but a debate about the attractiveness of a pipe dream.

Our point was emphasized last week in an op-ed by Deputy Knesset Speaker MK Ahmad Tibi in the Washington Times. Tibi called for the Obama administration to end US support for the Jewish state. Instead of supporting Israel, Tibi asked the US to lend its support to support the partition of the land west of the Jordan River between a Jew-free Arab state of "Palestine," and a non-Jewish state in the rest of the area.

Given our arguments on the panel, and Tibi's effective international declaration of war against Israel in the name of its Arab community, one might have thought that at the Ariel conference, our fellow panelists from the Left would have been hard pressed to maintain their allegiance to the two-state formula. Then too, the fact that the PA's chief negotiator Saeb Erekat published an article in The Guardian two weeks ago in which he implicitly called for Israel's destruction, one could be forgiven for thinking Ma'ariv's former opinion editor Ben Dror Yemini and Shaul Arieli from the EU-funded Council for Peace and Security might have attenuated their support for Israeli land giveaways.

BUT ONE would be wrong for thinking that. Abiding by the Left's standard practice, rather than contend with opposing views or reality, our fellow panelists pretended we didn't exist.

I devoted most of my time to discussing a policy that is not based on fantasy. Such a policy, which I call the Stabilization Plan, (and here), involves a mix of military and law enforcement operations, a political and international law offensive, and the application of Israeli law in the Jordan Valley and the major blocs of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria. As I said in my presentation, the policy has advantages and disadvantages. But it is a policy, not a fantasy. Therefore, I argued, it represents a major step forward in Israel's national discourse.

Yemini has done good work exposing the European campaign to delegitimize Israel. He has been outspoken in condemning the New Israel Fund and J Street for their efforts to delegitimize Israel. He has angered his fellow leftists with his warnings that Fatah continues to reject Israel's right to exist. Yet despite all of this, in his remarks, Yemini ignored what I had asserted just moments before and claimed there is no alternative to the two-state solution. The international community, which is waging a political war against Israel, will accept nothing less. Surrender is the only option.

Arieli for his part said that Israel has two options. We can surrender voluntarily or we can be forced to surrender by the international community. If we want to remain part of the Western world, we'd better do it ourselves. The two-state solution, he said, is Israel's only hope.

Arieli assured his audience that Israel has no reason to worry about surrendering defensible borders because everything will work out fine. If we go with option one and voluntarily deny ourselves the means to defend what will remain of our country after we fork Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem over to the Palestinians who reject our right to statehood in what will remain of the country, we will definitely be safe.

During his remarks, Arieli repeatedly argued that his position is the same as opposition leader Tzipi Livni's. And he was correct.

tzipi livni.jpg

In her interview on Friday with the Post's Editor-in-Chief David Horovitz, Livni made also argued that Israel has no option but surrender. Israel will lose all international support, not to mention its Jewish character if we don't give the Palestinians what they want.

Livni's withering criticism of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu revolves around what she considers his insistence on placing limitations on the scope of Israeli surrenders. Livni admitted that Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas rejected former prime minister Ehud Olmert's generous offer of a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, most of Judea and Samaria, and Gaza. But she denied that his action means that the Palestinian leader isn't interested in Palestinian statehood.

Ridiculously, Livni claimed that what her own boss offered the Palestinian leader was irrelevant. Livni asserted that as Olmert's foreign minister, she was the only one empowered to make offers in Israel's name. Since she says she made no offer, as far as she is concerned, the fact that Abbas rejected her boss's offer is irrelevant.

Like Yemini and Arieli, Livni sees no option but surrender. And like them, she admits that surrender will not bring peace. As she put it, a surrender deal "would be very fragile," and "it might be accompanied by terrorism."

As she summed things up, if she gets her way and Israel gives up the store, "I have no illusions about a 'New Middle East.' I don't believe that, the moment an agreement is signed, we'll live in a fairy tale world of prosperity and happiness."

But still, as far as she is concerned, this is Israel's only choice.

AND IT is not only regarding the Palestinians that the Left feels that Israel can do nothing but surrender. The same is true regarding Hizbullah and Syria. In her interview Livni defended her role in producing UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that set the terms for ending the war with Hizbullah in 2006.

Resolution 1701 by most accounts was the single worst failure of Israeli diplomacy in recent memory. It placed Hizbullah - an illegal terrorist army run by Iran - on equal footing with Israel. It empowered the Hizbullah-dominated Lebanese government and army to prevent Hizbullah's rearmament and so paved the way not only for Hizbullah's rearmament, but for Hizbullah's takeover of the Lebanese government and military. Moreover, it enhanced the power of the Hizbullah-appeasing UN forces in south Lebanon.

All of these things made 1701 a strategic disaster for Israel. But Livni refuses to acknowledge this.

In her interview, she defended 1701 by claiming that unlike then prime minister Ehud Barak's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, 1701 gave Israel legitimacy for striking Hizbullah in the future.

As she put it, "We for the first time created a situation in which that rearmament was not legitimate, with the natural consequent options if we need to use them."

Ironically, that is precisely what Barak claimed he was doing when he pulled out in 2000. In March 2006, just four months before the war which was to see Israel demonized on virtually every diplomatic stage, Haaretz's Ari Shavit claimed that by withdrawing to the internationally recognized border with Lebanon in May 2000, "Barak built the invisible wall of international legitimacy," for future Israeli combat operations in Lebanon.

And since 2006, the international campaign to deny Israel the right to defend itself has only gained ground.

As for Syria, following the Obama administration's lead, today the Israeli Left is revving up its old push to surrender the Golan Heights. The Left contends that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is keen to abandon his strategic alliance with Iran and that by handing over Israel's defensible border in the north, Israel will convince him to do so and so weaken Iran.

But of course, reality tells an opposite tale. If Israel renders itself defenseless, it will invite war.

Moreover, Assad's growing power owes solely to his alliance with Iran. As Michael Young from Lebanon's Daily Star wrote last week, "Washington wants to engage Syria so that it will give up on alliances that the Syrians will never willingly surrender, because doing so would so weaken Damascus politically that it would defeat the very purpose of engagement."

The Americans wouldn't care about Syria if it were moderate. The US wouldn't be seeking to appease Assad if he didn't allow Hizbullah to use Syria as its logistical base, if he hadn't directed the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri or if he wasn't Iran's junior partner in its proxy war against the US in Iraq. If Assad weren't a nuclear proliferator together with Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, he would be treated with the same reproach as Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

And yet, none of this matters for the Left. In its view, Israel can completely change Syria - and Iran - by denying itself the ability to defend northern Israel.

To support this view, on Friday Haaretz's Aluf Benn wrote that outgoing IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi intends to make a name for himself in politics by championing an Israeli surrender of the Golan. Ashkenazi - who has enjoyed an intimate relationship with the Obama administration - has been the chief opponent of an IDF strike on Iran's nuclear installations. His personal mentor is Maj. Gen. (ret.) Uri Saguy. Saguy has served as the chief champion of a Golan Heights surrender for more than a decade.

UNTIL THE peace process spawned the Palestinian jihad and the surrenders of south Lebanon and Gaza brought war, the Left's message was, "Join us and we'll bring peace and prosperity."

That was an optimistic, attractive message and it won the Left a couple of elections. But now that their plans have all failed, the Left's message has become, "Join us because resistance is futile. We are doomed."

This is not an attractive message. Happily, it is also not true.

What is true is that together with the reality of the failure of the Left's delusions, its defeatist message has lost the Left the support of the public.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on January 4, 2011 at 3:00 AM

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