Caroline Glick :: December 2011 Archives

Obama's foreign policy spin

In recent months, a curious argument has surfaced in favor of US President Barack Obama. His supporters argue that Obama's foreign policy has been a massive success. If he had as much freedom of action in domestic affairs as he has in foreign affairs, they say, his achievements in all areas would be without peer.

Expressing this view, Karen Finney, a former Democratic spokeswoman who often defends the party in the US media, told The Huffington Post, "Look at the progress the president can make when he doesn't have Republicans obstructing him."

According to a Gallup poll from early November, the US public also believes that Obama's foreign policy has been successful. Whereas 67 percent of Americans disapproved of Obama's handling of the economy and the federal budget deficit, 63% of Americans approved of his terrorism strategy. So, too, 52% approved of his decision to remove US forces from Iraq. In general, 49% of Americans approved of Obama's handling of foreign affairs while 44% disapproved.

These support levels tell us a great deal about the insularity of the American public. For when one assesses the impact to date of Obama's foreign policy it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that if the US public was more aware of the actual consequences of his policies, his approval rating in foreign affairs would be even lower than his approval rating in domestic policy.

Indeed, a cursory examination of the impact so far of Obama's foreign policies in country after country and region after region indicates that his policies have been more damaging to US national interests than those of any president since Jimmy Carter. And unlike Obama, Americans widely recognized that Carter's foreign policies were failed and dangerous.

The failure of Obama's foreign policies has been nowhere more evident than in the Middle East.

Take Iraq for instance. Obama and his supporters claim that the withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq is one of his great accomplishments. By pulling out, Obama kept his promise to voters to end the war in "a responsible manner." And as the polling data indicate, most Americans are willing to give him credit for the move.

But the situation on the ground is dangerous and getting worse every day. Earlier this month, just ahead of the departure of the last US forces from Iraq, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited with Obama at the White House. Immediately after he returned home, the Shi'ite premier began a ruthless campaign against his Sunni coalition partners in a no-holds barred bid to transform the Iraqi government and armed forces into partisan institutions controlled by his Dawa Party.

Forces commanded by Maliki's son arrested and allegedly tortured several of the Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi's bodyguards. They forced the guards to implicate Hashimi in terror plots. Maliki subsequently issued an arrest warrant for Hashimi. So, too, he issued an arrest warrant for the Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak and fired him without permission from the Iraqi parliament.

Hashimi and Mutlak are now in hiding in Erbil. Maliki is demanding that the Kurdish regional government extradite them to Baghdad for trial.

Maliki's actions have driven Sunni leaders in the Sunni provinces of Diyala, Anbar and Salahadin to demand autonomy under Iraq's federal system. He has responded by deploying loyal forces to the provinces to fight the local militias.

The situation is so explosive that three prominent Sunni leaders, former prime minister Ayad Allawi, who heads the Iraqiya party, Parliament Speaker Osama Nujaifi and Finance Minister Rafe al-Essawi published an op-ed in The New York Times on Tuesday begging Obama to rein in Maliki in order to prevent Iraq from plunging into civil war.

THEN THERE is Egypt. Obama's decision in February to abandon then-president Hosni Mubarak, the US's most dependable ally in the Arab world, in favor of the protesters in Tahrir Square was hailed by Obama's supporters as a victory for democracy and freedom against tyranny. By supporting the protesters against the US ally, Obama argued that he was advancing US interests by showing the Muslim world the US favored the people over their leaders.

Ten months later, the Egyptian people has responded to this populist policy by giving jihadist parties a two-thirds majority in parliamentary elections. For the first time in 30 years, the strategic anchor of US power in the Arab world - the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty - is in danger. Indeed, there is no reason to believe it will survive.

According to the Gallup poll, 48% of Americans approve of Obama's handling of the war in Afghanistan and 44% disapprove. Here, too, it is far from clear what there is to approve of. Against the public entreaties of the US commanders on the ground, Obama is carrying through on his pledge to withdraw all US surge troops from Afghanistan before the US presidential election in November. In the meantime, the US is engaged in negotiations with the Taliban. The purpose of these negotiations is to reach a political agreement that would set the conditions for the Taliban to return to power after a US pullout. That is, the purpose of the talks is to set the conditions for a US defeat in Afghanistan.

The administration hails its success in overthrowing Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi without sacrificing a single US soldier. And certainly, this was a success. However, Gaddafi's opponents, who are now taking charge of the country, are arguably worse for the US than Gaddafi was. They include a significant number of al-Qaida terrorists and are dominated by jihadist forces. Attempts by the NATO-backed provisional government to convince them to disarm have failed completely.

Since Gaddafi was overthrown, large quantities of advanced weapons from his arsenal - allegedly including stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction - have gone missing. Significant quantities of Libyan shoulder-to-air missiles have made their way to Gaza since Gaddafi's overthrow.

In Syria, while the administration insists that dictator Bashar Assad's days in power are numbered, it is doing essentially nothing to support the opposition. Fearing the instability that would ensue if a civil war were to break out in Iran's Arab protectorate, the US has chosen to effectively sit on its hands and so cancel any leverage it ought to wield over the shape of things to come.

AS FOR Iran, Obama's policies have brought about a situation where the regime in Tehran does not fear a US military strike on its nuclear installations. Obama's open opposition to the prospect of an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear installations has similarly convinced the regime that it can proceed without fear in its nuclear project.

Iran's threat this week to close the Straits of Hormuz in the event that the US imposes an embargo on Iranian oil exports is being widely characterized by the US media as a sign of desperation on the part of the regime. But it is hard to see how this characterization aligns with reality. It is far more appropriate to view Iran's easy threats as a sign of contempt for Obama and for US power projection under his leadership.

If Iran's ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons are thwarted, it will be despite Obama, not because of him.

Then there is the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Due to Obama's unbridled hostility towards Israel, there is no chance whatsoever that Israel and the PLO will reach a peace deal for the foreseeable future. Instead, Fatah and Hamas have agreed to unify their forces. The only thing standing in the way of a Hamas takeover of the PLO is Congress's threat to cut off US aid to the Palestinian Authority. For his part, Obama has gone out of his way to discredit the congressional threat by serving as an indefatigable lobbyist for maintaining US financial support for the PA.

Of course, the Middle East is not the only region where the deleterious consequences of Obama's foreign policy are being felt. From Europe to Africa, from Asia to Latin America, Obama's determination to embrace US adversaries such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez has weakened pro-US forces and strengthened US foes.

So how is that that while Carter was perceived by the majority of the American public as a foreign policy failure, a large plurality of Americans views Obama's foreign policy as a success?

Obama's success in hiding his failures from the American public owes to two related factors. First, to date the US has not been forced to contend directly with the consequences of his failures.

Carter's failures were impossible to ignore because the blowback from them was immediate, unmistakable and harsh. His betrayal of the shah of Iran led directly to the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran and the hostage crisis. Carter could not spin to his advantage the daily stories about the hostages. He could not influence CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite's decision to end every broadcast by reminding viewers how many days the hostages had been in captivity.

So, too, the consequences of Carter's weakness in confronting the Soviet Union were impossible to ignore or minimize with images of Soviet tank columns invading Afghanistan dominating the news.

To date, Obama's foreign policy failures have yet to explode in a manner that can make the average American aware of them.

Then, too, Obama and his advisers have been extremely adept in presenting his tactical achievements as strategic victories. So it is that the administration has successfully cast the killing of Osama bin Laden as a strategic victory in the war on terror. Obama has upheld the mission, as well as the killing of al- Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki, as proof of his competence in securing US interests. And to a large degree, the US public has accepted his claims.

Because it is impossible to know when Obama's failures will begin to directly impact the America people, it is possible that he will not pay a political price for them in the 2012 election. Be that as it may, the Republican presidential contenders would provide an invaluable service to both themselves and the American public as a whole if they made exposing Obama's disastrous stewardship of US foreign policy a central plank of their campaigns.

At a minimum, forewarned is forearmed. And the dimensions of Obama's failures are so enormous, that it is clear that the American people will suffer their consequences for years to come.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 30, 2011 at 7:37 AM

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Latma's Crystal Ball

This week on the Tribal Update, the media satire show produced every week by Latma, we take a break from our regular program framework and give you a retrospective on 2011. Specifically, we reveal all the occasions in which Latma predicted the future.

At a time when the major media organs in Israel and throughout the Western world get all the major events wrong as a general practice, it's good to know that here in Israel, there's one little television on internet satire show, funded completely by private charitable donations, that actually gets it right, time after time.

So watch, enjoy and tell your friends that if they want to know what's what, they can turn off their television sets, tune out the distorted mainstream media, and once a week, get the truth and some good laughs from the folks at Latma.

Enjoy the show, the rest of 2011 and we'll see you next week.

Caroline and the Latma team.

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

If you live outside the US, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the US called the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to make wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

First of all, here is the link to Latma's page for donating by credit card through PayPal.

Second, here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

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Posted on December 30, 2011 at 7:28 AM

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Christmas in Eurabia - full version

We've received several hundred requests from viewers asking that we post the Christmas in Eurabia song with the accompanying introductory sketch. So here it is.

Thanks to you, the song is well on its way to becoming a viral hit in the US and Europe. Please continue to spread it far and wide.

Posted on December 26, 2011 at 4:53 PM

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Netanyahu's misleading lessons in governance

Many of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's supporters were stunned last week when IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz announced he was promoting Brig.-Gen. Nitzan Alon to major general and appointing him to serve as the next commander of the Central Command.

Alon completed a two-year tour of duty as Judea and Samaria Division Commander in October. During his tenure, Alon distinguished himself as the most radical, politically insubordinate officer to have held the position in recent memory.

In an interview with The New York Times in October, Alon openly sought to undermine and discredit declared government policy. He called for the US Congress to continue to fund the Palestinian Authority's security services despite the PA's decision to ditch the peace process.

Alon argued in favor of withdrawing completely from Judea and Samaria, insinuating that the government is wrong to believe that the Gaza withdrawal, which led to the rise of Hamas, should serve as a precedent for Judea and Samaria.

Alon opined that the IDF cannot be expected to bring security to the Israeli public if the government isn't involved in a peace process with the PLO. As he put it, "We can't do our mission only with military tools," he said. "Diplomacy and economy are very relevant."

Throughout his two years on the job, Alon went out of his way to demonize and attack Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria. Without evidence, Alon claimed continuously that acts of vandalism against Arab property in Judea and Samaria and inside of the 1949 armistice lines is the work of Jewish residents of the areas.

He referred to the hooligans responsible for the vandalism as "Jewish terrorists." He repeatedly equated these acts of vandalism, commonly referred to as "price tag" operations with Palestinian terrorism.

ALON'S MORAL equivalence between vandalism allegedly committed by Israelis and acts of terrorism actually committed by Palestinians reached its public climax with the massacre of the Fogel family in Itamar in March. At the time, Israel Radio quoted a "senior IDF source" claiming that the murder of Ruth and Ehud Fogel and their three small children Yoav, Elad, and Hadas was an act of revenge by the Palestinians angered by recent vandalism allegedly perpetrated by Israelis. A quick investigation exposed that Alon was the "senior IDF source."

In 2006, Alon's wife Mor Alon signed a petition from the pro-Palestinian pressure group Machsom Watch. Machsom Watch's goal is to destroy Israel's so-called occupation of Judea and Samaria. The job of the OC Central Command is to carry out the so-called occupation of Judea and Samaria.

In light of Alon's pubic record of radicalism and insubordination, as well as the obvious impact his political views have on his command decisions and strategic judgment, his appointment could not have gone through without Netanyahu's approval. Neither Gantz nor Defense Minister Ehud Barak would have risked promoting him to supreme commander of Judea and Samaria without Netanyahu's backing.

Netanyahu's willingness to support Alon is consistent with other actions he has taken recently that strengthen his political opponents and strike a blow at his own political supporters and the nationalist camp in general.

TAKE, FOR instance, his outspoken defense of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has been an independent arm of the government since the founding of the State of Israel. No one has ever disputed the importance of an independent judiciary for the proper functioning of the state.

The problem with Israel's court is not that it is independent. The problem is that since the mid-1990s the court has become a radicalized, activist court that has usurped the lawful powers of the Knesset and government. The radicalization of the court is not a function of its independence but rather of the political homogeneity of its self-appointed leftist justices.

Just how far the justices' political convictions and national agendas stray from mainstream opinion was made clear on December 13 by recently retired justice Ayala Procaccia. Procaccia spoke at the New Israel Fund's Human Rights Awards Ceremony which honored Attorney Hassan Jabareen, the head of the anti-Israel Arab pressure group Adalah, and Attorney Dan Yatir from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Adalah rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and openly advocates for the allocation of autonomy and extraordinary, collective legal rights to Israel's Arab minority.

Procaccia praised Adalah's mission and actions. She also professed a kinship with Jabareen and Yatir saying, "I feel as if we are old friends, by virtue of our joint efforts--each from his own direction in complex and penetrating legal, national, and human issues, and by way of the invisible thread that links people that passes from the brain to the heart, connecting them by common values and similar hopes."

In line with their voters' wishes, Netanyahu's Likud colleagues MKs Ze'ev Elkin and Yariv Levin recently introduced a bill to curb the radicalization of the Court. Their bill would have required Supreme Court nominees to present their judicial philosophies to the public through Knesset hearings. This minimal step at checking the influence of radicals on the court would have had no impact whatsoever on the Court's independence.

Rather than debate the virtues of the proposed legislation, the legal fraternity and its media flacks castigated it in just those terms. If the law passed, we were warned, Israel's democracy would be rent asunder as judicial nominees would be forced to toe the line of nefarious political forces yanking at their newly nailed on strings.

Rather than stand up to these demonstrably ridiculous allegations, or just stand aside and let the legislative process proceed, Netanyahu joined the bandwagon of the radical left and castigated the bill and its sponsors as a threat to judicial independence.

WHAT IS propelling Netanyahu to act this way? Why is he strengthening his political opponents and their institutions while discrediting his political supporters and their institutions?

The most reasonable explanation is that Netanyahu's decisions are based on the lessons he learned from the political trauma he experienced with the fall of his first government in 1999 and since.

During his first tenure in office, Netanyahu led a narrow rightist coalition government. He suffered from a poisonously hostile media environment and faced a powerful political opposition supported by the IDF's politicized General Staff and the Clinton administration.

In an attempt to appease this opposition, Netanyahu signed the 1998 Wye Plantation Memorandum with PLO chief Yasser Arafat. For his efforts, his rightist coalition partners brought down his government.

Netanyahu was replaced as Likud leader by Ariel Sharon. Sharon embraced the Left -- first by making the Labor Party the senior partner in his first government in 2001, and then in 2004 by adopting Labor's governing platform of unilateral territorial surrenders.

For his efforts Sharon enjoyed an adoring media and stable coalitions.

But then again, Sharon endangered the country, empowered Hamas, all but destroyed his own political camp and resuscitated the political Left.

Both Netanyahu's own experience and that of Sharon apparently led the premier to the conclusion that he must preside over a broad coalition in which no single party has the ability to destabilize his government. He also decided that he has to govern from the center.

On the face of it, these are reasonable goals. The problem is the way Netanyahu is applying them. Netanyahu is implementing these lessons in a manner that would have made sense in 1999, or even 2005. But a lot has changed since then.

For instance, Netanyahu is ignoring the fact that Israeli society at the end of 2011 is far more right-wing than it was in 1999. In 1999, the peace process had yet to collapse. The Palestinian terror war had yet to begin. The notion that Netanyahu was responsible for the absence of peace still sounded credible to many Israelis in 1999.

This is not the case today.

Likewise, when Sharon was incapacitated, the public was still unaware of the dimensions of the strategic folly of his withdrawal from Gaza. This lack of awareness is what enabled Sharon to present Kadima as a centrist party and his Likud opponents as ideological extremists. Today Kadima is overwhelmingly recognized as just another leftist party. Sharon's opponents in Likud are led by Netanyahu, who is popularly perceived as pragmatic and responsible.

Moreover, the ideological right is not the same as it was in 1999. Likud's largest coalition partner is Israel Beitenu. Its leader, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, did not have a problem bringing his party into then prime minister Ehud Olmert's governing coalition in 2006. For better or for worse, Israel Beitenu's rise and the corresponding collapse of the national religious parties has brought about a situation where rightist parties' ideological commitment is now tempered by political opportunism.

All of these changes do not render Netanyahu's lessons from his failure and Sharon's success incorrect. But they do indicate strongly that Netanyahu's assessment of his own options for governing within the framework of those lessons is unnecessarily constrained.

With the political center far to the right of where it was in 1999 and 2006, Netanyahu does not have to embrace the Left's agenda in order to be perceived as a centrist. To the contrary, doing so harms him. The last twelve years have not been kind to the Left. The judicial excesses of the likes of Procaccia and her colleagues have soured much of the public on the Court. Public approval of the Court has been trending downward steeply for the past decade.

THEN THERE are the so-called settlers. Whereas ahead of the 2005 expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria, the public was willing to believe that the residents were extremists and their expulsion would be good for the country, today, such demonization efforts by the media and the likes of Brig.- Gen. Alon gain little traction.

It is true that by supporting the Left's agenda, Netanyahu buys himself a modicum of support from his political and ideological enemies in the media, the legal fraternity and elsewhere. But this support is not necessary for his reelection bid. He will not face a significant challenge either from within his own party or from any other party no matter how he comes down on issues like Alon's appointment or the Court's radicalism.

While supporting the Left does Netanyahu little good, it does his party, his political camp, his agenda and the country real harm. By ignoring the significance of the changes in Israel's political and social landscape that have taken place since he was booted from office, Netanyahu has failed to take advantage of the opportunities he now holds for strengthening Israel's democracy and its security.

Instead, in an attempt to correct his own past mistakes, he is dooming the country to repeat the past mistakes of the Left while preventing his politically responsible, popular political allies from advancing an agenda that will move the country forward.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 26, 2011 at 4:20 PM

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Christmas in Eurabia! Fa la la la la la la la la!!!!!

This week on the Tribal Update, the media satire television-on-Internet brought to you every week by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website I run we produced a special song for our Christian friends celebrating Christmas on Sunday.

Here is the song.

And here is our entire show that includes an interview with a senior IDF commander about the greatest threat facing Israel today -- THE SETTLERS!

Enjoy the show and the rest of Hanukah. Shabbat shalom and Merry Christmas to the Christians.

If you are trying to figure out what to do with all the extra change in your pockets, (and stocks in your portfolios), before the end of the year, how about making a tax deductible contribution to support our work at Latma?

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

You can also send checks to: The Center for Security Policy

1901 Pennsylvania Ave., NW,

Washington, DC 20006

Thanks so much!

Posted on December 23, 2011 at 6:33 AM

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Tom Friedman's losing battle

For decades New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman balanced his substantively anti-Israel positions with repeated protestations of love for Israel.

His balancing act ended last week when he employed traditional anti-Semitic slurs to dismiss the authenticity of substantive American support for Israel.

Channeling the longstanding anti-Semitic charge that Jewish money buys support for power-hungry Jews best expressed in the forged 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in John Mearshimer's and Stephen Walt's 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Friedman denied the significance of the US Congress's overwhelming support for Israel.

As he put it, "I sure hope that Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby."

It would be nice if Friedman is forced to pay some sort of price for finally coming out of the closet as a dyed-in-the-wool Israel hater. But he probably won't. As he made clear in his column, he isn't writing for the general public, but for a very small, select group of elitist leftists. These are the only people who matter to Friedman. And they matter to him because they share his opinions and his goal of indoctrinating young people to adopt his pathologically hostile views about Israel and his contempt for the American public that supports it.

It doesn't matter to Friedman that overwhelming survey evidence, amassed over decades, show that the vast majority of the American public and the American Jewish community support Israel. It doesn't matter to him that the support shown to Netanyahu in Congress last May was a reflection of that support.

As he put it, "The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let's say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away."

Embedded in this statement are two key points. First, Friedman assesses that the prevailing view on US college campuses are his own radical views. And he is convinced that college students share his views.

As he sees it, if college students share his views, then it doesn't matter that Congress supports Israel today. Through the youth, he and his anti-Israel colleagues will own the future.

THE KEY question then is is Friedman right? Do he and his friends on the Israel bashing Left own the future? Are their efforts to convince young Americans in places like University of Wisconsin to embrace leftist dogmas, including rejection of Israel's rights working? Is support for Israel diminishing?

A plethora of data indicates that while the picture is mixed, the dominant trends do not favor Friedman's views. This is true not only in the US but in Israel as well.

For instance, last week the Washington Examiner's senior political commentator Michael Barone noted a massive deterioration of US President Barack Obama' support levels among voters under 30 years old. Whereas Obama won this demographic in the 2008 elections by a 2-1 margin, two recent surveys show that if elections were held today, he would receive the support of just over a third of young voters.

Barone hypothesized that young Americans' disenchantment has to do with their generational individualism bred of their limitless ability to express themselves through technology. This individualism has nothing in common with Obama's economic and foreign policy collectivism.

As for young American Jews, according to a study published in August 2010 by Brandeis University's Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, the ratio of young American Jews who feel attached to Israel - while lower than that of older Jews -- has remained constant over the past twenty years. Moreover, Brandeis's researchers told the Forward that "Every generation goes through a normal 'lifecycle,'...in which attachment to Israel grows as people get older."

Even more notable than the consistency of support levels over time is the fact that researchers discerned no difference in levels of support for Israel across the political spectrum. As the study reported, "We found that conservatives were no more likely than liberals to feel connected to Israel or regard Israel as central to their Jewish identities. These findings are remarkable given that liberalism is associated with reduced support for Israel in the broader American population."

So not only have Friedman and his colleagues on the far Left failed to convince the general public to give up support for Israel, they have failed to get young American Jews to give up support for Israel.

THE FAILURE of Friedman's fellow radicals to convince university students to abandon support for Israel or to water it down to the point of meaninglessness was demonstrated last month by Berkeley's Jewish Student Union.

In recent years, Berkeley's Hillel has come under withering criticism from pro-Israel activists on campus and countrywide for its leadership's willingness to accept anti-Israel groups as members of its community of sponsored organizations.

Hillel-sponsored groups like Kesher Enoshi have welcomed the virulently anti-Israel Jewish Voices for Peace group into the Hillel tent. Hillel groups have participated in Israel Apartheid Week activities and supported university divestment from Israeli-owned firms. So too, Hillel's leadership has held dances on Memorial Day for Fallen Israeli Soldiers, published fliers demeaning observant Jews and discouraged students from flying Israel's flag at demonstrations.

Last month, Berkeley's Jewish students took a step to regain control over their community from the anti-Israel radicals running Hillel. On November 16, Berkeley's JSU voted to deny membership to J Street U, the college wing of the anti-Israel lobby J Street.

Speaking to the local Jewish paper j.weekly, Jacob Lewis, co-president of the pro-Israel student group Tikvah explained, "J Street is not pro-Israel but an anti-Israel organization that, as part of the mainstream Jewish community, I could not support."

Hillel's leadership is up in arms. Rather than respect the decision of the JSU, Hillel's professional "grown-ups" are urging them to reconsider.

In a letter to Haaretz and to the j. weekly, Berkeley Hillel's board president Barbara Davis and its executive director Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman wrote, "We respect the right of the Jewish Student Union...to make its own decisions, but we encourage JSU to reconsider its vote and include J Street U as a member."

The two then pledged that despite the verdict of Berkeley's Jewish students, Hillel will continue to find J Street U's programming.

THE SITUATION on Israeli college campuses is similar. Here too, Israeli students are in revolt against post-Zionist and anti- Zionist academics. Here too, the best efforts of radical professors to convince their students to abandon Zionism seem to be faltering. A poll of young Israelis taken last year by Dahaf for the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation indicated that young Israelis are far more politically conservative than their baby boomer parents and professors. And this disparity is apparent on university campuses.

Last year the Im Tirtzu student group published a report on the state of Political Science studies in Israeli universities. In a follow-on report, it placed a spotlight on the situation at Ben Gurion University's Politics and Government Department.

Both reports were attacked by the media and by the professoriate as cheap, academically shoddy attempts to harm academic freedom.

Im Tirtzu's reports were based on an analysis of course syllabi at all university departments and they concluded that there was a clear far left ideological bias inherent in course materials. Pro-Israel and non-hostile books and research were almost entirely absent from the curricula, they alleged.

As for Ben Gurion University's Politics and Government Department, the Im Tirtzu report claimed that aside from political bias reflected in the course curricula, the department's faculty is dominated by anti-Zionists. It charged that nine out of 11 permanent faculty members were involved in "radical left-wing" political activities and that six signed a letter supporting refusal to serve in the IDF.

While the media and the professorate pilloried their reports, the group's charges caused the Council for Higher Education to form a blue ribbon committee last November comprised of seven political scientists - three from Israel and four from abroad -- to conduct a study of all of the political science departments in Israeli universities. Last month the committee presented its conclusions to the CHE. And they were devastating.

The committee's general recommendations involved requiring professors at all universities to make a distinction in their classrooms between facts and their political opinions. It also called for a more theoretical approach to political science with emphasis on research methods rather than activism and ideology. University departments were urged to use more politically balanced curricula.

As to Ben Gurion University, the commission said the Politics and Government Department needs to clean up its act or be shut down. Not only is it giving short shrift to the academic foundations of the discipline in favor of activism, its instructors use the classrooms to indoctrinate students.

So too, due to the department's academic inadequacy, the committee claimed its master's program's "value...is doubtful," and said that the faculty could not adequately educate doctoral students.

On November 29, the CHE unanimously adopted the committee's findings and recommendations. It gave Ben Gurion University until April to enact the required changes in its Politics and Government Department or shut its doors.

It will be interesting to see how events progress at Ben Gurion in the coming months, but one thing is clear enough, like Friedman and the Berkeley Hillel, its professors will no longer be able to pretend that they are fair and balanced professionals.

Their bluff was called.

On December 7 Politico's Ben Smith published a detailed report about how two of the Democratic Party's core institutions, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters are waging a concerted, continuous campaign to diminish left wing Democratic support for Israel. Media Matters official M.J. Rosenberg acknowledged that given the depth of popular support for Israel in the US, chances are remote that their efforts will pay off in Congress today. He explained that his goal is to shift the Democratic Party's position on Israel through its younger generation.

As he put it, "We're playing the long game here."

Happily, to date, they are losing the long game as well as the short game both in Israel and the US. While it is important to remain on guard against radicals like Friedman and Rosenberg and their fellow travelers on campuses, it is also important to recognize that despite their powerful positions, they remain marginal voices in both Israel and the US.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 20, 2011 at 3:37 AM

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Why I won't miss Christopher Hitchens

I have read several appreciations of Hitchens written by conservatives and neo-conservatives who knew him and appreciated his transformation from a man of the left into a man of the right since the US invasion of Iraq.

All of these essays, like the generous conservative swooning over Hitchens for the better part of the last ten years makes me uneasy. For all of his personal transformation, there is one prejudice that I don't think Hitchens every abandoned and that is his anti-Semitism.

Please read the linked essay on the subject by Benjamin Kerstein. Kerstein wrote it last December and I believe that he definitively proved that my unease at Hitchens has always been well-deserved.

The fact that so many pro-Israel conservatives are willing to overlook his underlying, and always obvious hatred for Judaism is I believe the function of a larger problem. Jews are always reluctant to admit that just because someone is good on everything other than Jews doesn't mean that we can give him a pass on hating us.

And we can't give anti-Semites a pass. They won't end their bigotry because we love them. They will see our love as justification for their hatred. After all, we must deserve to be hated if we are so willing to embrace our haters. To the best of my knowledge, Hitchens never disavowed his antipathy for Israel or his rejection of our right to define ourselves as a nation or our legal, national and moral rights to the land of Israel. And so I will never disavow my objection to him and refusal to give him a pass for his anti-Semitism.

He may have known how to hold his liquor, spin a yarn, turn a phrase and all the rest, but he was no hero in my eyes. He was a Jew hater.

Posted on December 18, 2011 at 10:40 AM

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Tom Friedman's love song to self

In the wake of Friedman's latest anti-Semitic slander of Israel and the American people who support it, and in the wake of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's decision to tell him and his paper to take a hike I think it is appropriate to repost Latma's song for Fiedman from five months back. It is as true today as it was then.

Enjoy!

If you want to go straight to the song it starts at 2:10

Posted on December 17, 2011 at 4:57 AM

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Peace Now's Hanuka Miracle and How to get ahead in Israel

This week on the Tribal Update, the weekly media satire program program produced by Latma, the Hebrew language satirical media satire website I run we bring you Peace Now's Hanuka miracle in which history is corrected and the Jews lose to the Greeks.

We also bring you updates from the field on the rampant anti-female discrimination by ultra-Orthodox Jews and much, much more.

Here's Peace Now's Hanuka Song.

Here's the entire show.

Enjoy!

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

If you live outside the US, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the US called the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to make wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

First of all, here is the link to Latma's page for donating by credit card through PayPal.

Second, here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

Branch Number: 510

Branch Name: Mevasseret Zion

BIC Code: IDBLILITXXX

Account Number (IBAN 23 digits): IL94-0115-1000-0010-4351-154

Beneficiary's Name: Zionist Incubator

Beneficiary's address: POB 841 Mevasseret Zion, Israel 90805

Posted on December 16, 2011 at 8:00 AM

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Violent rioters and media goons

On Monday night, hooligans identified with the national religious camp staged three unlawful, and in at least one case violent, protests against the IDF.

First, several dozen people surrounded by hundreds of reporters pretended to set up a new settlement along the border with Jordan. Their aim was to protest Jordan's opposition to repairing the Mugrabi Bridge through which Jews and Christians alight to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The second and third protests' declared aim was to prevent the IDF from carrying out orders to destroy Ramat Gilad, a small enclave of homes in Samaria located on land owned by rancher Moshe Zar and named for his son Gilad who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in 2001.

At one protest, rioters entered the Ephraim Brigade's base for several minutes and vandalized vehicles and spray-painted equipment.

It was the last protest that was truly violent. Hooligans allegedly stoned passing Palestinian vehicles and threw a stone at the car belonging to the deputy brigade commander and injured him.

Violent riots of this sort are virtually unheard of in the national religious sector. The community's devotion to IDF service is so strong that soldiers from the sector are overrepresented in all combat units. Over the past 15 years they have effectively replaced the kibbutz movement as the backbone of the IDF.

It was due to the community's dedication to the military that the protests against the IDF's implementation of the Sharon government's order to expel some 10,000 citizens from their homes in Gaza and Northern Samaria in August 2005 were almost entirely nonviolent.

Viewed in the context of the community's loyalty to the IDF, the unlawful, ant-IDF riots Monday night were the sort of "man bites dog" story that it was reasonable to assume the media would pounce on.

It could be reasonably assumed that a responsible media would ask how has this happened? What motivated young religious Zionists to attack IDF officers with stones? Why are they breaking the law?

But alas, in their wall-to-wall coverage of the protests, the media asked none of these questions. Rather, the media mischaracterized the riots as a "dog bites man" story and set about using the unlawful actions of these young hooligans as a means of criminalizing the entire national religious community.

In just two representative examples, while every communal political and religious leader condemned the protests, Yediot Aharonot's chief commentator Nahum Barnea blamed the protests on "incitement from rabbis in Judea and Samaria." Army Radio talk show host Razi Barkai and his guests used the riots as an excuse to demonize the national religious camp in terms not heard since the immediate aftermath of thenprime minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995.

Egged on by the media, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.- Gen. Benny Ganz visited the scene and decried the protesters. OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Avi Mizrachi told reporters, "I have not seen such hatred of Jews towards soldiers during my 30 years of service."

Also responding to media pressure, on Tuesday Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu convened the security cabinet together with senior Justice Ministry officials and IDF commanders to come up with new ways of fighting "right-wing violence."

With politicians across the political spectrum breathlessly calling the hooligans "terrorists," the meeting ended with a series of decisions to equate the investigation and treatment of these protesters to that received by Palestinian terrorists.

For instance from now on, these protesters will be tried in military courts, they will be issued administrative detention orders, they will be barred from entering Judea and Samaria, and intelligence operations against them will be ramped up.

BY THURSDAY, the media turned its guns against Netanyahu. While welcoming his draconian moves, the headlines of the tabloids excoriated him for refusing to label the protesters "terrorists."

Ma'ariv's lead story on the subject began, "Even the unprecedented rioting by far-rightwing activists at the Ephraim Brigade's base, and the injuring of the brigade commander and his deputy, didn't convince Prime Minister Netanyahu to label the rioters as 'a terrorist group.'" (Incidentally, the brigade commander was not injured.)

Aside from their proper castigation of the protesters' behavior as abominable, the media's coverage of the protests was a study in reality distortion. A competent rendering of Monday night's events would have placed them in the context of the climate of lawlessness that increasingly informs the decisions of Israel's elected leaders. Indeed, just last week the government caved in to threats of mob violence at the Temple Mount.

For many years, fear of Muslim riots on the Temple Mount caused successive governments to fail to uphold the law guaranteeing freedom of worship to all religions. Bowing to the Muslim mobs, Jews and Christians were denied the right to visit the Temple Mount or to pray there. Since 2007 access to Judaism's holiest site has been granted to Jews and Christians through the Mugrabi Bridge located at the Western Wall. But both Jews and Christians are prohibited from praying while on the Mount.

The Mugrabi Bridge is made of wood and is highly flammable. It was built as a temporary structure. In 2007, repairs on the bridge sparked violent Muslim protests.

Over the past several months, Jerusalem's municipal engineer issued repeated warnings that bridge is unsafe. The government was supposed to repair it, rebuild it or replace it with a new, permanent ramp that would allow safe access to the Temple Mount. But fearing the mob, the government failed to act.

Left with no choice, last week Jerusalem's municipal engineer took the only responsible step and closed the bridge, and so barred non-Muslim access to the Temple Mount. On Tuesday, the media reported that rather than fix the bridge, the government is considering sufficing with stationing a fire truck at the Western Wall for rapid response to bridge collapse or incineration.

As one official explained to The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, "On the one hand, the bridge has to function... so in the interests of public safety it's got to be repaired. On the other hand we're very aware of the sensitivities, and we want to do what we can to mitigate the possibility that extremists would exploit the situation."

MUSLIM RIOTERS aren't the only ones who use violence to force the government's hand. Leftist rioters routinely resort to violence to get their way as well.

When on Wednesday Netanyahu failed label the religious Zionist rioters a terrorist organization, he opted instead to liken them to the leftist anarchists. Every Friday these anarchists, supported by NGOs such as Gush Shalom, join Palestinians in violently rioting against IDF soldiers guarding construction of the security barrier in places such as Bil'in, Ni'lin, Nabi Musa and Neveh Tzuf.

These organized, planned riots have been taking place regularly since 2002. Their organizers have spent next to no time in jail. The Justice Ministry has not asked to define them as a terror group. Their members have not been tried in military courts or placed in administration detention. Little intelligence has been gathered about them.

Whereas the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, and all major leaders of the national religious community, condemned those who participated in Monday night's unlawful protests, leftist NGOs, luminaries and politicians as well as Israeli Arab politicians and religious leaders have been silent in the face of the Friday rioters' routine use of violence against IDF soldiers.

For instance, in June 2005, demonstrators led by Gush Shalom and by Arab MKs held violent protests in three villages. Protesters attacked IDF soldiers with rocks and clubs. At one such protest near Bil'in, IDF Cpl. Michael Schwartzman lost an eye. He and his comrades were stoned by Jewish and Arab protesters who called them "Hitler," and "Eichmann." None of the protesters apologized for injuring him. Indeed, in a radio interview the next week, MK Ahmed Tibi claimed Schwartzman brought his injury on himself.

The media that today devotes the lion's share of their news coverage to Monday night's riots, barely covered Schwartzman's story. Yediot buried the story on page 6. Haaretz waited a week to report the story and then said Schwartzman was to blame because he wasn't wearing protective eye gear.

In stark contrast, on Tuesday alongside its condemnation and demonization of Monday night's violent national religious protesters, Haaretz published a eulogy to Palestinian rioter Mustafa Tamimi who was killed last Friday by IDF troops at Nabi Musa as he stoned their vehicle. The article lionizing Tamimi was written by Jonathan Pollack, the head of the anti-Zionist Anarchists Against the Fence group that organizes the weekly anti-IDF riots. Violent riots against IDF soldiers at Nabi Musa are planned for this Friday as well.

Just as the government fears the Muslim rioters at the Temple Mount, so the IDF fears the anarchists and their media supporters. Due to this fear, not only has the IDF failed to complete the security barrier in the areas where it is attacked by rioters, but several officers have been removed from their commands for ordering their soldiers to defend themselves forcefully against the rioters.

Given this atmosphere of lawlessness, where violent rioters have for years successfully forced the government's hand, it is apparent why Monday night's protesters decided to use violence against the IDF. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

But not only was their behavior - like that of the Muslim and leftist rioters - morally unjustifiable, unlike the Muslims' and leftists' behavior, it was tactically self-defeating. The Muslim mobs and the leftist rioters are able to use violence to advance their aims because they receive media support for their actions. The media routinely condemns the government for "inflaming passions," when it upholds the law in Jerusalem and permits Jews freedom of worship or respects their property rights.

So, too, the media alternately ignore or glorify the leftist rioters against the security barrier. The media downplay their violence and their support for the destruction of the state. So, too, outlets such as Channel 2 and Channel 10 habitually broadcast snuff films of IDF soldiers taken by the rioters whose clear aim is to criminalize commanders for seeking to uphold the law and successfully discharge their duties.

In the case of the rioters from the national religious camp on Monday night, given the political views of the majority of the media, it should have been obvious that the media would use their actions as a means of criminalizing the entire national religious community.

And indeed, in his column in Yediot Wednesday criminalizing the national religious camp Barnea wrote, "The Right in the Knesset can't turn its eyes to the heavens and say, 'Our hands did not shed this blood.'"

The truth of course is quite different. To find it, Mr. Barnea and his colleagues should start their investigation by looking in the mirror.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 16, 2011 at 5:02 AM

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Gingrich's fresh hope

Last Friday, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, did something revolutionary. He told the truth about the Palestinians. In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an "invented" people, "who are in fact Arabs."

His statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. At the end of 1920, the "Palestinian people" was artificially carved out of the Arab population of "Greater Syria." "Greater Syria" included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago. Moreover, as Gingrich noted, the term "Palestinian people" only became widely accepted after 1977.

As Daniel Pipes chronicled in a 1989 article on the subject in The Middle East Quarterly, the local Arabs in what became Israel opted for a local nationalistic "Palestinian" identity in part due to their sense that their brethren in Syria were not sufficiently committed to the eradication of Zionism.

Since Gingrich spoke out on Friday, his factually accurate statement has been under assault from three directions. First, it has been attacked by Palestinian apologists in the postmodernist camp. Speaking to CNN, Hussein Ibish from the American Task Force on Palestine argued that Gingrich's statement was an outrage because while he was right about the Palestinians being an artificial people, in Ibish's view, Israelis were just as artificial. That is, he equated the Palestinians' 91-year-old nationalism with the Jews' 3,500-year-old nationalism.

In his words, "To call the Palestinians 'an invented people' in an obvious effort to undermine their national identity is outrageous, especially since there was no such thing as an 'Israeli' before 1948."

Ibish's nonsense is easily dispatched by a simple reading of the Hebrew Bible. As anyone semi-literate in Hebrew recognizes, the Israelis were not created in 1948. Three thousand years ago, the Israelis were led by a king named David. The Israelis had an independent commonwealth in the Land of Israel, and their capital city was Jerusalem.

The fact that 500 years ago King James renamed the Israelis "Israelites" is irrelevant to the basic truth that there is nothing new or artificial about the Israeli people. And Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, did not arise in competition with Arab nationalism. Zionism has been a central feature of Jewish identity for 3,500 years.

THE SECOND line of attack against Gingrich denies the veracity of his claim. Palestinian luminaries like the PA's unelected Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told CNN, "The Palestinian people inhabited the land since the dawn of history."

Fayyad's historically unsubstantiated claim was further expounded on by Fatah Revolutionary Council member Dmitri Diliani in an interview with CNN. "The Palestinian people [are] descended from the Canaanite tribe of the Jebusites that inhabited the ancient site of Jerusalem as early as 3200 BCE," Diliani asserted,

The Land of Israel has the greatest density of archeological sites in the world. Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan Heights and other areas of the country are packed with archeological evidence of the Jewish commonwealths. As for Jerusalem, literally every inch of the city holds physical proof of the Jewish people's historical claims to the city.

To date, no archeological or other evidence has been found linking the Palestinians to the city or the Jebusites.

From a US domestic political perspective, the third line of attack against Gingrich's factual statement has been the most significant. The attacks involve conservative Washington insiders, many of whom are outspoken supporters of Gingrich's principal rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

To date, the attackers' most outspoken representative has been Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. These insiders argue that although Gingrich spoke the truth, it was irresponsible and unstatesmanlike for him to have done so.

As Rubin put it on Monday, "Do conservatives really think it is a good idea for their nominee to reverse decades of US policy and deny there is a Palestinian national identity?"

In their view, Gingrich is an irresponsible flamethrower because he is turning his back on a 30- year bipartisan consensus. That consensus is based on ignoring the fact that the Palestinians are an artificial people whose identity sprang not from any shared historical experience, but from opposition to Jewish nationalism.

The policy goal of the consensus is to establish an independent Palestinian state west of the Jordan River that will live at peace with Israel.

This policy was obsessively advanced throughout the 1990s until it failed completely in 2000, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected then-prime minister Ehud Barak's and then US president Bill Clinton's offer of Palestinian statehood and began the Palestinian terror war against Israel.

BUT RATHER than acknowledge that the policy - and the embrace of Palestinian national identity at its heart - had failed, and consider other options, the US policy establishment in Washington clung to it for dear life. Republicans like Rubin's mentor, former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, went on to support enthusiastically Israel's surrender of Gaza in 2005, and to push for Hamas participation in the 2006 Palestinian elections. That withdrawal and those elections catapulted the jihadist terror group to power.

The consensus that Gingrich rejected by telling the truth about the artificial nature of Palestinian nationalism was based on an attempt to square popular support for Israel with the elite's penchant for appeasement. On the one hand, due to overwhelming public support for a strong US alliance with Israel, most US policy-makers have not dared to abandon Israel as a US ally.

On the other hand, American policy-makers have been historically uncomfortable having to champion Israel to their anti-Israel European colleagues and to their Arab interlocutors who share the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist.

The policy of seeking to meld an anti-Israel Arab appeasement policy with a pro-Israel anti-appeasement policy was embraced by successive US administrations until it was summarily discarded by President Barack Obama three years ago. Obama replaced the two-headed policy with one of pure Arab appeasement.

Obama was able to justify his move because the two-pronged policy had failed. There was no peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The price of oil had skyrocketed, and US interests throughout the region were increasingly threatened.

For its part, Israel was far more vulnerable to terror and war than it had been in years. And its diplomatic isolation was acute and rising.

Unfortunately for both the US and Israel, Obama's break with the consensus has destabilized the region, endangered Israel and imperiled US interests to a far greater degree than they had been under the failed dual-track policy of his predecessors. Throughout the Arab world, Islamist forces are on the rise.

Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power.

The US is no longer seen as a credible regional power as it pulls its forces out of Iraq without victory, hamstrings its forces in Afghanistan, dooming them to attrition and defeat, and abandons its allies in country after country.

The stark contrast between Obama's rejection of the failed consensus on the one hand and Gingrich's rejection of the failed consensus on the other hand indicates that Gingrich may well be the perfect foil for Obama.

Gingrich's willingness to state and defend the truth about the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the perfect response to Obama's disastrous speech "to the Muslim world" in Cairo in June 2009. It was in that speech that Obama officially abandoned the bipartisan consensus, abandoned Israel and the truth about Zionism and Jewish national rights, and embraced completely the lie of Palestinian nationalism and national rights.

Both Rubin and Abrams, as well as Romney, justified their attacks on Gingrich and their defense of the failed consensus by noting that no Israeli leaders are saying what Gingrich said. Rubin went so far as to allege that Gingrich's words of truth about the Palestinians hurt Israel.

This is of course absurd. What many Americans fail to recognize is that Israeli leaders are not as free to tell the truth about the nature of the conflict as American leaders are. Rather than look to Israel for leadership on this issue, American leaders would do well to view Israel as the equivalent of West Germany during the Cold War. With half of Berlin occupied by the Red Army and West Berlin serving as the tripwire for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, West German leaders were not as free to tell the truth about the Soviet Union as American leaders were.

Today, with Jerusalem under constant political and terror threat, with all of Israel increasingly encircled by Islamist regimes, and with the Obama administration abandoning traditional US support for Israel, it is becoming less and less reasonable to expect Israel to take the rhetorical lead in telling important and difficult truths about the nature of its neighbors.

When Romney criticized Gingrich's statement as unhelpful to Israel, Gingrich replied, "I feel quite confident that an amazing number of Israelis found it nice to have an American tell the truth about the war they are in the middle of, and the casualties they are taking and the people around them who say, 'They do not have a right to exist and we want to destroy them.'"

And he is absolutely right. It was more than nice. It was heartening.

Thirty years of pre-Obama American lying about the nature of the conflict in an attempt to balance support for Israel with appeasement of the Arabs did not make the US safer or the Middle East more peaceful. A return to that policy under a new Republican president will not be sufficient to restore stability and security to the region.

And the need for such a restoration is acute. Under Obama, the last three years of US abandonment of the truth about Israel for Palestinian lies has made the region less stable, Israel more vulnerable, the US less respected and US interests more threatened.

Gingrich's statement of truth was not an act of irresponsible flame throwing. It was the beginning of an antidote to Obama's abandonment of truth and reason in favor of lies and appeasement. And as such, it was not a cause for anger. It was a cause for hope.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 12, 2011 at 4:35 PM

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Singing refugees from Tel Aviv and Bibi's daily routine

This week on the Tribal Update, the television on internet media satire show produced weekly by Latma, we give musical consideration to the plight of residents of south Tel Aviv. There, the neighborhoods are being taken over by illegal migrants from Africa.

Here's the clip of the song.

We also bring you a behind the scenes look at an average day of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Finally, we consider the growing dissatisfaction of many Israelis with the situation here in Israel.

Here's the entire show.

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

If you live outside the US, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the US called the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to make wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

First of all, here is the link to Latma's page for donating by credit card through PayPal.

Second, here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

Branch Number: 510

Branch Name: Mevasseret Zion

BIC Code: IDBLILITXXX

Account Number (IBAN 23 digits): IL94-0115-1000-0010-4351-154

Beneficiary's Name: Zionist Incubator

Beneficiary's address: POB 841 Mevasseret Zion, Israel 90805

Posted on December 9, 2011 at 7:03 AM

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Democracy strikes back

Last Thursday, in an address before the Association for Public Law's annual conference at the Dead Sea, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch launched an unhinged attack on the Knesset and the government.

Beinisch accused Israel's elected officials of "inciting against the judges" through their proposed legislation that would place minimal constraints on judicial power.

In her words, "For the past few years a campaign has been waged that is gaining strength whose goal is to weaken the judicial system and first and foremost the Supreme Court. This is a campaign of delegitimization being led by a number of politicians, members of Knesset and even government ministers. They provide the public with incorrect and misleading information that has deteriorated into incitement directed against the court, its members and its judicial work."

Beinisch claimed that the attempts by Israel's elected leaders to curb judicial power places the country on a slippery slope whose ultimate end is to destroy the values that underpin Israeli democracy. After she stepped down from the podium, her associates briefed journalists without attribution that Beinisch believes that the bills being debated are comparable to Nazi legislation barring Jews from the public square.

Since Beinisch's professional godfather, retired Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, enacted his "judicial revolution" in the 1990s, Israel's judicial system has been without parallel in the Western world. Under Israel's judicial selection system, judges effectively appoint themselves. And since Barak's presidency of the Supreme Court, justices have used this power to ensure ideological uniformity among their ranks. Jurists opposed to judicial activism have been largely blocked from serving on the High Court, as have jurists with non-leftist politics.

Not only do Israel's judges appoint themselves, they have empowered themselves to cancel laws of the Knesset.

Under Barak's dictatorial assertion that "everything is justiciable," the Court has given standing to parties that have no direct - and often no indirect - connections to the subjects of their petitions. In so doing, the Court has managed to place itself above the government and the Knesset.

In recent years, the Court has canceled duly legislated laws of the Knesset and lawful policies of the government and the IDF. Its decisions have involved everything from denying Jews the right to build Jewish communities on Jewish land, to requiring the state to compensate Palestinians for damages they incur while fighting Israel, to changing the route of the security barrier, to barring radio broadcasts by the right-wing Arutz Sheva station.

The Knesset's efforts to pass laws that would curb the Court's now unlimited powers are simply attempts to place minimal legal checks on judicial power. One bill under discussion would require Supreme Court nominees to undergo hearings at the Knesset before their nominations are approved. Under the proposed law, the unelected Judicial Appointments Committee would remain responsible for nominating and approving justices. It's just that the public, through its representatives in the Knesset, would have the opportunity to find out a bit about who these people are before their appointments are voted on.

Another proposed law would seek to water down the legal fraternity's control over judicial appointments by making a slight change in the composition of the Judicial Appointments Committee.

If both of these laws passed tomorrow, Israel's Supreme Court would still be more powerful than any other Supreme Court in the Western world. The government would still have nearly no say in who gets appointed to the bench.

Yet Beinisch and her associates have no interest in considering the substance of the bills being debated. For them the very notion that mere politicians dare to consider placing any check on judicial power is such an outrage that they feel justified equating the initiatives with the Nuremburg Laws in Nazi Germany.

BEINISCH IS not alone in her campaign to demonize politicians who question Israel's out-sized judicial dictatorship. Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein has used his powers of office to intimidate and threaten Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his government into backing away from all the proposed bills aimed at curbing judicial power.

Speaking at a legal conference in Eilat last Tuesday, Weinstein bragged that he forced Netanyahu to table discussion of the bill that would require Knesset hearings for Supreme Court nominees. As he put it, "When the law that would institute a hearing came to my attention, I called the prime minister and told him that this bill will not pass and must be eliminated now and immediately."

After relating that Netanyahu responded that he would end discussion of the bill, Weinstein proclaimed that anyone wishing to reform the judicial system would find in him "a bitter, stubborn enemy."

This week, Weinstein struck again. On Tuesday, he sent a letter to Netanyahu in which he demanded that the premier drop discussion of a Knesset bill that would restrict foreign governmental funding of Israeli-registered political NGOs. Weinstein informed Netanyahu that he would refuse to defend the law when it is challenged before the Supreme Court because he considers it "unconstitutional."

Faced with Weinstein's threat, on Wednesday Netanyahu's office told the media that the prime minister has decided to postpone discussion of the bill. Until Wednesday, Netanyahu had openly supported one of the versions of the proposed law.

Weinstein's decision to constrain Netanyahu's governing authority is not new. In January, after the Government Appointments Committee approved Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak's decision to appoint Maj.-Gen. Yoav Galant as IDF chief of staff, and after the government approved his appointment, Weinstein informed Netanyahu that he would refuse to defend Galant's appointment before the High Court.

A previously unheard of NGO called The Green Movement had petitioned the Court demanding that it cancel Galant's appointment. Galant had wrongly used state land adjoining his homestead on Moshav Amikam. And the Green Movement claimed that this administrative infraction rendered him unfit to command the army.

It is impossible to know how the Supreme Court would have ruled on the Green Movement's petition. On its face it was fatuous given that Galant's behavior constituted an administrative offense for which one pays a fine, rather than a criminal offense for which one goes to jail.

In the event, the Court never considered the petition because Weinstein told Netanyahu that due to his own "ethical" misgivings, he would refuse to defend Galant's appointment. Left without legal defense, Netanyahu gave in to Weinstein and canceled Galant's appointment.

In openly undermining the Knesset and the government, Weinstein is behaving in a manner that is contrary to the law. Israeli law prohibits government officials from undermining the lawful functioning of both elected arms of government.

And yet, in the name of protecting democracy, or protecting the constitution, (Israel has no constitution), Weinstein openly flouts the authority and rejects the prerogatives of the people's elected representatives in the Knesset and the government.

And he is not alone. In February, the Knesset passed a law requiring NGOs to publish on their websites quarterly reports on all the contributions they receive from foreign governments. Ten months later, the law has yet to be implemented.

The delay is due to the fact that the Justice Ministry has not bothered to publish the law's accompanying regulations. Without such regulations, the law cannot be implemented.

ON THE face of it, Beinisch's and Weinstein's vociferous opposition to attempts to constrain foreign government funding of Israeli-registered anti-Israel NGOs makes little sense. Why would they stick their noses out for groups like B'Tselem or Yesh Din or Adalah that seek to delegitimize Israel's right to defend itself, or support economic and legal warfare against the country? Why are they sticking their noses out for these radical, anti-Zionist groups?

Upon consideration, however, the reason is clear. The Court's ability to dictate government policy is dependent on the existence of these political NGOs. The Court cannot constrain IDF counterterror operations if it isn't asked to intervene by NGOs. And the attorney-general cannot scuttle legislative initiatives or government policies or appointments if he cannot assume that his colleagues in the NGO sector will challenge those initiatives and policies before the Court.

Lawsuits are an expensive business. To continue their legal campaigns against the prerogatives of the government and the Knesset in the High Court these NGOs require enormous budgets. Without foreign governmental funding, the likes of Peace Now, Adalah, Ir Amim, Gush Shalom, B'Tselem and others would be forced to curtail their legal campaigns against the state.

So Beinisch's and Weinstein's attacks on politicians who introduce bills to curb foreign governmental funding of these political NGOs are perfectly reasonable. No, in protecting these groups they are not demonstrating their commitment to civil rights. They are the judicial equivalent of street toughs, protecting their territory.

It is important to note that the legal fraternity would never be able to maintain its choke-hold on the government and the Knesset without the active support of the media. Although Beinisch claimed last week that some media institutions are active participants in the politicians' supposedly nefarious propaganda war against the Supreme Court, the fact of the matter is that Israel's mainstream media is the legal fraternity's most fervent defender.

Since Barak began his judicial revolution in 1995, the media have portrayed the Supreme Court's usurpation of the powers of the Knesset and the government as acts of enlightened guardians of democracy. Radical commentators like Moshe Negbi and Dana Weiss have attacked as anti-democratic all politicians and legal experts who criticize the Court's runaway judicial activism. In recent months, the media have demonized Knesset members like Yariv Levin and Ze'ev Elkin from the Likud and Faina Kirschenbaum from Israel Beiteinu as enemies of democracy for their leadership in pushing judicial and NGO reform laws through the Knesset.

For the past decade and a half, the Court's undermining of Israel's elected leadership has weakened democracy and subverted the public's will. Over the past decade, Israeli voters have rejected overwhelmingly radical political parties like Meretz. But through the Supreme Court and the legal fraternity, their allied foreign government- funded Astroturf pressure groups, and the supportive media, the values and views advocated by Meretz have been forced down the public's throat over and over again.

And now, for the first time, in recent months our elected representatives have launched a brave and concerted effort to reinstate the sovereignty of the Knesset. Their modest initiatives are aimed at restoring the power of the people through our elected representatives to determine the course of the country and to implement policies that reflect our interests and our values.

The incendiary howls of the likes of Beinisch and Weinstein show us that these initiatives are well-placed. After years of constant attacks on our democratic system, the powerful legal fraternity is finally on the defensive.

This fight could not be more important to the well-being of this country. Now is no time for our leaders to go wobbly.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 9, 2011 at 4:18 AM

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An ally no more

With vote tallies in for Egypt's first round of parliamentary elections in it is abundantly clear that Egypt is on the fast track to becoming a totalitarian Islamic state. The first round of voting took place in Egypt's most liberal, cosmopolitan cities. And still the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists received more than 60 percent of the vote. Run-off elections for 52 seats will by all estimates increase their representation.

And then in the months to come, Egyptian voters in the far more Islamist Nile Delta and Sinai will undoubtedly provide the forces of jihadist Islam with an even greater margin of victory.

Until the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world. The Egyptian military is US-armed, US-trained and US-financed. The Suez Canal is among the most vital waterways in the world for the US Navy and the global economy. Due to Mubarak's commitment to stemming the tide of jihadist forces that threatened his regime, under his rule Egypt served as a major counter-terror hub in the US-led war against international jihad.

GIVEN EGYPT'S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration's response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for "democracy."

Rather than warn Egypt that it will face severe consequences if it completes its Islamist transformation, the Obama administration has turned its guns on the first country that will pay a price for Egypt's Islamic revolution: Israel.

Speaking at the annual policy conclave in Washington sponsored by the leftist Brookings Institute's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hammered Israel, the only real ally the US has left in the Middle East after Mubarak's fall. Clinton felt it necessary - in the name of democracy - to embrace the positions of Israel's radical Left against the majority of Israelis.

The same Secretary of State that has heralded negotiations with the violent, fanatical misogynists of the Taliban; who has extolled Saudi Arabia where women are given ten lashes for driving, and whose State Department trained female-hating Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the lead-up to the current elections in Egypt accused Israel of repressing women's rights. The only state in the region where women are given full rights and legal protections became the focus of Clinton's righteous feminist wrath.

In the IDF, as in the rest of the country, religious coercion is forbidden. Jewish law prohibits men from listening to women's voices in song. And recently, when a group of religious soldiers were presented with an IDF band that featured female vocalists, keeping faith with their Orthodox observance, they walked out of the auditorium. The vocalists were not barred from singing. They were not mistreated. They were simply not listened to.

And as far as Clinton is concerned, this is proof that women in Israel are under attack. Barred by law from forcing their soldiers to spurn their religious obligations, IDF commanders were guilty of crimes against democracy for allowing the troops to exit the hall.

Clinton didn't end her diatribe with the IDF's supposed war against women. She continued her onslaught by proclaiming that Israel is taking a knife to democracy by permitting its legislators to legislate laws that she doesn't like. The legislative initiatives that provoked the ire of the US Secretary of State are the bills now under discussion which seek to curtail the ability of foreign governments to subvert Israel's elected government by funding non-representative, anti-Israel political NGOs like B'Tselem and Peace Now.

In attacking Israel in the way she did, Clinton showed that she holds Israel to a unique standard of behavior. Whereas fellow Western democracies are within their rights when they undertake initiatives like banning Islamic headdresses from the public square, Israel is a criminal state for affording Jewish soldiers freedom of religion. Whereas the Taliban, who enslave women and girls in the most unspeakable fashion are worthy interlocutors, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which supports universal female genital mutilation is moderate, Israel is an enemy of democracy for seeking to preserve the government's ability to adopt policies that advance the country's interests.

The unique standard to which Clinton holds the Jewish state is the standard of human perfection.

And as far as she is concerned, if Israel is not perfect, then it is unworthy of support. And since Israel, as a nation of mere mortals can never be perfect, it is necessarily always guilty.

CLINTON'S ASSAULT on Israeli democracy and society came a day after Panetta attacked Israel's handling of its strategic challenges. Whereas Clinton attacked Israel's moral fiber, Panetta judged Israel responsible for every negative development in the regional landscape.

Panetta excoriated Israel for not being involved in negotiations with the Palestinians. Israel, he said must make new concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them of its good faith. If Israel makes such gestures, and the Palestinians and the larger Islamic world spurn them, then Panetta and his friends will side with Israel, he said.

Panetta failed to notice that Israel has already made repeated, unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians and that the Palestinians have pocketed those concessions and refused to negotiate. And he failed to notice that in response to the repeated spurning of its concessions by the Palestinians and the Arab world writ large, rather than stand with Israel, the US and Europe expanded their demands for further Israeli concessions.

Panetta demanded that Israel make renewed gestures as well to appease the Egyptians, Turks and Jordanians. He failed to notice that it was Turkey's Islamist government, not Israel, that took a knife to the Turkish-Israeli strategic alliance.

As for Egypt, rather than recognize the strategic implications for the US and Israel alike of Egypt's transformation into an Islamic state, the US Defense Secretary demanded that Israel ingratiate itself with Egypt's military junta. Thanks in large part to the Obama administration, that junta is now completely beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood.

As for Jordan, again thanks to the US's support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its aligned groups in Libya and Tunisia, the Hashemite regime is seeking to cut a deal with the Jordanian branch of the movement in a bid to save itself from Mubarak's fate. Under these circumstances, there is no gesture that Israel can make to its neighbor to the east that would empower King Abdullah to extol the virtues of peace with the Jewish state.

Then there is Iran, and its nuclear weapons program.

Panetta argued that an Israeli military strike against Iran would lead to regional war. But he failed to mention that a nuclear armed Iran will lead to nuclear proliferation in the Arab world and exponentially increase the prospect of a global nuclear war.

Rather than face the dangers head on, Panetta's message was that the Obama administration would rather accept a nuclear-armed Iran than support an Israeli military strike on Iran to prevent the mullocracy from becoming a nuclear-armed state.

Clinton's and Panetta's virulently anti-Israeli messages resonated in an address about European anti-Semitism given last week by the US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman. Speaking to a Jewish audience, Gutman effectively denied the existence of anti-Semitism in Europe. While attacks against European Jews and Jewish institutions have become a daily occurrence continent-wide, Gutman claimed that non-Muslim anti- Semites are essentially just all-purpose bigots who hate everyone, not just Jews.

As for the Muslims who carry out the vast majority of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe, Gutman claimed they don't have a problem with good Jews like him. They are simply angry because Israel isn't handing over land to the Palestinians quickly enough. If the Jewish state would simply get with Obama's program, according to the US ambassador, Muslim attacks on Jews in Europe would simply disappear.

Gutman of course is not a policymaker. His job is simply to implement Obama's policies and voice the president's beliefs.

But when taken together with Clinton's and Panetta's speeches, Gutman's remarks expose a distressing intellectual and moral trend that clearly dominates the Obama administration's foreign policy discourse. All three speeches share a common rejection of objective reality in favor of a fantasy.

In the administration's fantasy universe, Israel is the only actor on the world stage. Its detractors, whether in the Islamic world or Europe, are mere objects. They are bereft of judgment or responsibility for their actions.

There are two possible explanations for this state of affairs - and they are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that the Obama administration is an ideological echo chamber in which only certain positions are permitted. This prospect is likely given the White House's repeated directives prohibiting government officials from using terms like "jihad," "Islamic terrorism," "Islamist," and "jihadist," to describe jihad, Islamic terrorism, Islamists and jihadists.

Restrained by ideological thought police that outlaw critical thought about the dominant forces in the Islamic world today, US officials have little choice but to place all the blame for everything that goes wrong on the one society they are free to criticize - Israel.

The second possible explanation for the administration's treatment of Israel is that it is permeated by anti-Semitism. The outsized responsibility and culpability placed on Israel by the likes of Obama, Clinton, Panetta and Gutman is certainly of a piece with classical anti-Semitic behavior.

There is little qualitative difference between accusing Israeli society of destroying democracy for seeking to defend itself against foreign political subversion, and accusing Jews of destroying morality for failing to embrace foreign religious faiths.

So too, there is little qualitative difference between blaming Israel for its isolation in the face of the Islamist takeover of the Arab world, and blaming the Jews for the rise of anti-Semites to power in places like Russia, Germany and Norway.

In truth, from Israel's perspective, it really doesn't make a difference whether these statements and the intellectual climate they represent stem from ideological myopia or from hatred of Jews.

The end result is the same in either case: Under President Obama, the US government has become hostile to Israel's national rights and strategic imperatives. Under Obama, the US is no longer Israel's ally.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 6, 2011 at 2:11 AM

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Sen. Robert Menendez (D. NJ) rips Obama's pro-Iran policy apart

and agrees that Obama is following far behind Europe on sanctioning Iran.

This from a Democrat.

Posted on December 2, 2011 at 11:09 AM

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Good news from Berkeley!

Berkeley's Jewish Student Union denied membership to J Street U.

Great going guys. And gut shabbos!

From JWeekly.com:

U.C. Berkeley's Jewish Student Union includes groups such as Challah for Hunger, Bears for Israel and the Jewish Business Association.

J Street U will not be joining them.

At a Nov. 16 general meeting, the union voted to deny membership to the Berkeley chapter of J Street U, the college division of the left-leaning and often controversial Israel lobby. The final tally: nine for, 10 against, two abstentions.

Posted on December 2, 2011 at 10:06 AM

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Israeli media embraces pluralism and Obama's advisor embraces Arab democracy

This week on the Tribal Update, the media satire newscast produced each week by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I run, we bring you Obama's Reality Perception Advisor John Zelokoreli opining on the gifts of Arab democracy. We also present the Israeli media's embrace of pluralism and our favorite suicide bombers Jamil and Awad discuss reconciliation with Israel.

Enjoy the show.

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

If you live outside the US, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the US called the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to make wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

First of all, here is the link to Latma's page for donating by credit card through PayPal.

Second, here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

Branch Number: 510

Branch Name: Mevasseret Zion

BIC Code: IDBLILITXXX

Account Number (IBAN 23 digits): IL94-0115-1000-0010-4351-154

Beneficiary's Name: Zionist Incubator

Beneficiary's address: POB 841 Mevasseret Zion, Israel 90805

Posted on December 2, 2011 at 5:27 AM

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The real war in Iran

Something is happening in Iran. Forces are in motion. But what is happening? And who are the forces that are on the move? Since this week's bombing in Isfahan, the world media is rife with speculation that the war with Iran over its nuclear weapons program has begun. But if the war has begun, who is fighting it? What are their aims? And what are their methods and means of attack?

On Wednesday the Times of London published a much-cited article about this week's blast in Isfahan. The article referred to the bombed installation as a "uranium enrichment facility."

But there is no uranium enrichment facility at Isfahan. Rather there is a uranium conversion facility.

As the news analysis website The Missing Peace explained, a UCF is an installation where yellowcake is converted into uranium hexafluoride, or UF6. In Iran, the UF6 from Isfahan is sent to Natanz, where it is enriched.

While Isfahan's UCF may be a reasonable target in an all-out attack on Iran's nuclear program, it is not a vital installation. According to American military analyst J.E. Dyer, it would not be a priority target for Western governments whose primary goal is to neutralize Iran's nuclear weapons program.

As Dyer put it in a blog post at Hot Air, "Western governments make their targeting decisions based on criteria that would put the Isfahan UCF several notches down the list of things that need to be struck in November 2011. It's a workhorse facility in the fissile-material production network, and it's already done what needs to be done to assemble an arsenal of multiple weapons. Uranium conversion is also 'mastered technology'; Iran can reconstitute it relatively quickly."

Dyer concludes that due to the site's low value to Western governments, "It is extremely unlikely that a Western government" perpetrated the attack.

If Dyer is right, and the Isfahan site is not critical to Iran's nuclear project and was therefore not attacked by a Western government, who attacked it and why? Dr. Michael Ledeen, an Iran expert from the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote Monday at PJ Media that the attack at Isfahan, like the attacks two weeks ago at the Bidganeh Air Force base and two other Revolutionary Guards bases were conducted by members of Iran's anti-regime Green Movement. In those attacks, Revolutionary Guards Maj.-Gen. Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam was killed and some 180 Shahab 3 ballistic missiles were destroyed.

Speaking to The Missing Peace, Daniel Ashrafi, an Iranian anti-regime activist living in Canada, claimed that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was scheduled to visit the Bidganeh base at the time of the explosion, but he was delayed.

If true, this would mark the second time that a facility was bombed when one of Iran's senior leaders was scheduled to visit the site. In May, the Abadan oil refinery was bombed during a site visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Given the shroud of secrecy that covers all operations in Iran, any attempt to assess what is happening on the ground is necessarily speculative. But speculation can be useful if it is grounded in a reasoned assessment of the differing goals of various actors and the probability of their willingness to act alone or in concert with others to achieve their goals.

In the case of the Green Movement, what began as a protest movement after the regime stole the 2009 presidential elections, morphed in the ensuing months of protests and regime repression into a full-blown revolutionary movement.

No longer content to demand that Ahmadinejad step down and fair elections take place, the Green Movement began calling for and working towards the overthrow of the regime as a whole. And since last year, regime installations as well as key members of the Revolutionary Guards have been targeted on a regular basis. As The Washington Post reported last week, since 2010 there has been a fivefold increase in the number of explosions at Iranian oil pipelines and refineries. Whoever is behind the blasts is clearly targeting Iran's high value economic assets.

And now they have moved on to military installations and nuclear sites.

THIS ESCALATION in the war of sabotage against the Iranian regime provides two important lessons for Western policy-makers assessing Western options for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

It tells us the popular Western belief that a US or Israeli or coalition strike on Iran's nuclear installations would provoke the Iranian public to rally around the regime is utter nonsense. In the case of the Isfahan bombing, for instance, there are two possible scenarios for who is responsible.

First, it is possible, as Ledeen argues and Dyer infers, that the attack was the work of regime opponents acting on their own. Second, it is possible as Israeli officials quoted by the media have hinted that it was a collaborative effort between local regime opponents and foreign forces.

In either case, what is clear is that at least some Iranians are willing to target their country's nuclear installations if doing so will harm the regime.

At the height of the 2009 Green Movement protests against the regime, US President Barack Obama justified his decision not to side with the anti-regime protesters by claiming that if the US were to support them, they would lose popular credibility. In his words, it would be counterproductive for the US "to be seen as meddling" in Iran's domestic affairs, "given the history of US-Iranian relations."

And yet, what we see is that no one is rallying around the regime. The attacks on Isfahan and Bidganeh, which the regime was quick to simultaneously deny and blame on foreign governments, did not cause the people to rally to the side of the mullahs. So, too, the repeated bombings of petroleum facilities are not fomenting an upsurge in public support for the regime. To the contrary; domestic disgruntlement with the regime continues to rise as the standard of living for the average Iranian plummets.

And this brings us to the "students" who raided the British Embassy on Tuesday. On Thursday the regime released from jail all the "students" arrested for raiding and torching the embassy and briefly holding British personnel hostage.

Their release is yet further proof that the embassy attackers were neither students nor angry at Britain. Rather, as British Foreign Minister William Hague and others have alleged, they were regime goons who belong to the same Basij force that massacred, tortured and raped the anti-regime protesters from the Green Movement in 2009.

According to the official Iranian press agencies, the "students" raided the British Embassy because they were furious that Britain announced it was cutting its ties with Iran's Central Bank. If Obama were right, and Western anti-regime actions were counterproductive, then we could have expected real students, like the ones who called for the overthrow of the regime in 2009 to protest outside the British Embassy. But the fact that they stayed home while their attackers turned their truncheons on the British is clear proof that Obama simply didn't know what he was talking about.

AND AS Obama's statements in the wake of the assault on the British Embassy made clear, he still fundamentally misunderstands the situation in Iran. Responding to the attack, Obama said, "I strongly urge the Iranian government to hold those who are responsible to task."

That is, the US president opted to pretend that "those responsible," were separate from the regime, which they are not.

Obama's response is of a piece with his non-response to Iran's plan to bomb targets in Washington. It is also in line with his refusal to contemplate sanctions against Iran's Central Bank and its oil sector. Moreover, Obama's continued insistence on working through the UN Security Council to ratchet up sanctions on Iran despite the fact that Russian and Chinese support for Iran has blocked that venue make clear that he is not at all serious about using US power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Thankfully, Obama's abandonment of the traditional US role as the leader of the free world has not prevented Western governments and regional forces for freedom from acting in their common interests. Britain and France have responded to the regime assault on the British Embassy by rallying Western European nations to escalate the EU's campaign to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unlike the Obama administration, which continues to falsely characterize Iran's nuclear program as a threat to Israel alone, the Europeans are increasingly willing to acknowledge that the program and the regime constitute a grave threat to European security and to global security as a whole.

Whereas the Obama administration peevishly argues that an embargo on Iranian oil will raise world oil prices, this week the British openly called for an embargo on Iranian oil. In truth such an embargo would harm Iran far more than it would harm the global economy. Europe buys 20 to 25 percent of Iran's oil exports, but Iranian oil makes up only 5% of European oil imports. At least in the short run, Saudi Arabia could pick up the slack, thus ensuring stability in global oil prices.

In the absence of US leadership, a coalition and a strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and continuing to terrorize the West has emerged. First, we have the Iranian opposition which is apparently actively involved in sabotaging with the aim of overthrowing the regime. Second, we have Israel which is completely committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And finally we have leading European states that are increasingly determined to take practical steps to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

There are many opportunities for collaboration between these forces. In an interview with The New York Times following the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency's report exposing Iran's nuclear weapons program last month, Jean-Jaques Guillet, who published a report on Iran for the French National Assembly, said the goal of these forces should be to overthrow the regime. In his words, "If we press the regime strongly, there could be an implosion. The real objective these days should be the regime's implosion, not more talk."

Guillet suggested that France could cut off satellite service to Iran. Iran's television networks are broadcast through the French-owned Eutelsat.

Cutting off regime broadcasts, placing an embargo on Iranian oil exports, and actively assisting anti-regime forces in sabotaging regime installations, including nuclear installations, have the potential of achieving the goals of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and facilitating the empowerment of pro-Western democrats in that country.

Clearly, US participation in such a collaborative strategy would be helpful. But between the explosions in Isfahan and Bidganeh, and the surge in attacks on other regime targets; and Europe's notably robust response to Iran's attack on the British Embassy, it is possible that these goals can be accomplished even with the US following far behind.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on December 2, 2011 at 4:20 AM

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December 6, 2011, 2:11 AM

An ally no more

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Israeli media embraces pluralism and Obama's advisor embraces Arab democracy

The real war in Iran

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