Caroline Glick

On the eve of Biden's visit

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:40:37 -0500

The Israeli media sported banner headlines this morning proclaiming that VIce President Joe Biden's goal during his visit here this week will be to force Prime MInister Netanyahu to stand down on Iran.

I just spent the evening at Netnayhu's father, Prof. Benzion Netanyahu's 100th birthday party. Prof. Netanyahu ended the evening with a short address in which he stated that he is certain that Israel will stand up to Iran and win. The Prime Minister very ostentatiously went over his father's speech with him before he gave it and walked him up and down the steps to the stage at the Begin Center where the event was held.

I certainly emerged from the evening with a strengthened belief that our leader will not bow to the Obama administration.

Biden's lost cause

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:18:19 -0500

US Vice President Joseph Biden's job is about to stop being easy. Indeed, it is about to become impossible.

On Monday Biden will arrive in Israel for a three-day visit. Biden, who will meet with Israel's leaders, will be the most senior official in the cavalcade of senior US officials that have descended on Israel in recent weeks. Biden will replace Senator John Kerry, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who was here this week. Kerry himself replaced Adm. Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was here two weeks ago.

In his press conference in Jerusalem on Monday, Kerry explained the purpose of these visits. As he put it, "...I am here and other people were here and Vice President Biden is coming shortly... to make sure we are all on the same page and that we are all clear about [Iran]."

Although Biden is just the latest senior US official to visit Israel to try to coerce the government not to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, his visit is novel in one respect. In addition to his meetings with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of Israel's senior officials, Biden intends to make a case for the Obama administration's policies towards Iran, the Palestinians and Israel directly to the Israeli public. During his trip he will give what is being billed as a major policy speech at Tel Aviv University.

In light of the gaping disparity between the Obama administration's policies and those of the Israeli government, the apparent goal of Biden's address is to shore up the position of the Israeli Left as an alternative to Netanyahu. Apparently, the picture emerging from all of the senior US officials' meetings with Netanyahu is that Israel's leader still feels comfortable defying them. Presumably, they now believe that the only way to force him to toe their line is by making him believe that the price of defiance will be his premiership.

This of course is a difficult task. The Left after all was roundly defeated in last year's elections. Making it a credible alternative is no mean task.

The Israeli Left for its part is doing its best to tie its own fortunes to the administration. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni placed herself squarely in the Obama camp this week during her confrontation with Netanyahu at the Knesset. Belittling the results of last month's Gallup poll which showed that Israel enjoys the support of two-thirds of Americans, (and 80 percent of Republicans vs. 53 percent of Democrats), Livni blamed the premier for Israel's international standing. By not bowing to Obama's demands and ending all Jewish construction in Jerusalem and accepting the radical peace proposals she and former prime minister Ehud Olmert made to the Palestinians during their tenure in office, Livni claimed that Netanyahu is ruining Israel's diplomatic position in the US and throughout the world.

There is nothing new or surprising about Livni's use of the Obama administration's animosity towards the government as a means of positioning herself as an alternative to the government. And on the surface it makes sense for her to use it. After all, it was by building a partnership with the Clinton administration against Netanyahu the last time he was in power that the Israeli Left was able to bring down his government and win the 1999 elections.

The Left's hope of forming a coalition with Obama against Netanyahu was given its most explicit expression last July in an op-ed by Ha'aretz's editor-at-large Aluf Benn in the New York Times. After expressing his support for Obama's policies, Benn bemoaned the fact that due to Obama's low approval ratings among Israeli Jews, (at the time they stood at 6 percent and later plunged to 4 percent), it would be hard for him to convince the Israeli public to abandon its support for Netanyahu in favor of Obama's - that is the Israeli Left's - policies. To improve this dismal state of affairs, Benn suggested that Obama simply needs to make his case to the Israeli public, which "will surely listen," to him.

As far as Benn - and his fellow leftists were concerned - Obama's credibility problems redounded not to his policies, which the Left supports. Instead they owed to his failure to dazzle the Israeli people with the same rhetorical magic he used on the Arabs and the Europeans. It was Obama's tone, not his programs that needed to be improved.

In arguing thus, Benn, like Livni and their colleagues on the Left are acting on their memories of their glory days with the Clinton administration. As president, Bill Clinton was able to simultaneously embrace Yassir Arafat, and take down Netanyahu without anyone ever questioning his undying love for Israel and the Jews. And because of this, he became the hero of the Israeli Left which he swept back into power in 1999.

As the Left sees it, Clinton retained his reputation as the greatest friend Israel ever had in the White House, despite the fact that his policies were the most hostile policies the US had ever adopted towards Israel, because he knew how to charm the Israeli electorate. His frequent visits to Israel and his saccharine, lip-biting declarations of love for Rabin and Israel were all it took in their view to convince the public to reject the Right. If Obama would just repeat Clinton's practices, he too could bring down Netanyahu and convince the Israeli public to trust him.

When Benn's article was published his recommendation was shrugged off by the administration. So too, the White House rejected repeated requests from the local media for interviews with the President. Now however, with Obama's approval rates slipping and his Iran policy in tatters, the White House apparently decided that it needs to embark on a charm offensive in Israel to make Netanyahu more vulnerable to coercion.

Biden was selected as the man for the job because he is widely perceived as the most pro-Israel senior member of the administration. The fact that before becoming Vice President Biden had one of the most pro-Iran voting records in the Senate has done nothing to mitigate this perception. Indeed, despite the fact that Biden voted repeatedly against sanctions on Iran, claimed that Iran's quest for nuclear bombs was understandable and called for the US to sign a non-aggression pact with the mullocracy while threatening to move for George W. Bush's impeachment if he were to order a military strike against Iran's nuclear weapons programs, Biden continues to be viewed as a solid supporter of Israel.

And indeed, in line with this perception, he can be expected to declare his undying love for the Jewish state several times during his speech. Yet still, and sadly for the Israeli Left and for the Obama administration, his charm offensive will fail to get the girl. The most his visit is likely to yield is a momentary rise in support among Israelis that will quickly recede. And there are four reasons this is the case.

First, Obama himself is far weaker than Clinton was. His obsequious attempts to curry favor with the Arabs and Iran have been even more disturbing to Israelis than his refusal to visit the country. Moreover, unlike Clinton, who was popular with Israelis even before he was elected, Obama has never been popular in Israel. Part of this can perhaps be chalked up to timing. Clinton of course succeeded George H.W. Bush who was deeply unpopular in Israel. Obama replaced his son - who was regarded as a great friend of Israel.

Given Obama's weakness, it is hard to see how he can convince the Israeli public that he will be capable of protecting the country from a nuclear-armed Iran or that he can force the Palestinians and the Syrians to end their support of terror in the event of an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria or the Golan Heights.

Second, the Netanyahu Obama faces is not the Netanyahu Clinton faced in the 1990s. Today the premier leads a far broader coalition than he did in his previous government. It is also more stable. Labor Party chief Defense Minister Ehud Barak knows he cannot unseat Netanyahu. Indeed, he knows he can't even trust his party to continue supporting him if he leaves Netanyahu's government. As for opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the latest polls show her trailing far behind Netanyahu as the people's choice for prime minister. Her party's popularity rates are decreasing, Likud's are growing.

Third, there is the fact that today the Left does not control public opinion to the degree it did the last time Netanyahu was in power. During his first government, due in large part to the media's delegitimization of the Right in the wake of Rabin's assassination, the media was able to market the PLO as a credible peace partner for Israel. Yassir Arafat himself was portrayed by a popular television show as a sweet, peace loving sock puppet who only wanted to make peace with the craven, war mongering Netanyahu. Consequently it became socially unacceptable in polite circles for Israelis to admit that Arafat and the Palestinians were less than devoted to the notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel or that Netanyahu was right not to give up the store. So too, it was socially unacceptable in certain quarters to criticize Clinton who presented himself as Rabin's greatest friend. Today, people are far less embarrassed to make these claims.

This is the case of course, for the fourth reason that Biden will fail in his mission. In the 11 years since Netanyahu was forced from office, the Left's political platform has been discredited by events. Since 1999 the Palestinians - as well as the Lebanese - have demonstrated that the Left's appeasement policies are disastrous. The 1,500 Israelis who have been killed since then by the Palestinians and Hizbullah, the transformation of post-Israeli withdrawal southern Lebanon and Gaza into jihadist enclaves, the rise of Iran, and Fatah's open rejection of Israel's right to exist have all made the Left's policies unacceptable to a wide majority of Israelis.

The public's rejection of the Left's policies is so overwhelming that it has even rejected the Left's current central claim - namely that Israel will lose its Jewish majority if it abstains from surrendering Judea and Samaria. By a 53-28 percent margin, a Ha'aretz poll last month showed that Israelis do not believe that Israel's continued presence in the areas will lead to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.

What all of this shows of course is that it will take much more than a change in tone for the Obama administration to win over the Israeli public. Indeed, Obama's open hostility towards Netanyahu has probably been a significant factor in shoring up the public's approval of his performance in office.

The Israeli public is not interested in a change of tone - from Obama or from the Israeli Left. It is interested in a change of policy. Until it gets it, the public will in all likelihood remain loyal to Netanyahu.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Tribal Update investigates the Islamic invention of history

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:11:40 -0500

This week's Tribal Update from my Hebrew language media satire site Latma discusses how Muslims have invented and destroyed history at the same time. We also delved into the depressing world if Israeli natural disaster correspondents.

I hope you enjoy the show and spread it far and wide.

The Tribal Update investigates Mossad hit in Shushan

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:02:26 -0500

Latma's Tribal Update this week discusses among other things, the Mossad hit against Haman in Shushan.

The second sketch is a parody of a television personality here in Israel who does a lot of commercials. You may or may not understand it. Also some of the news briefs are inside baseball. But you'll get the drift.

The sound quality this week isn't great and we apologize for that. Our studios were broken into hours before we shot the show and most of our equipment was stolen so our producer Ofir Shteinbaum had to rent everything at the last minute.

Hope you enjoy the show!

The new American Dream

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:55:11 -0500

When rhetoric rules the roost

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:45:17 -0500

There is something pathetic about what passes as European foreign policy these days. Quite simply, more often than not, the concerted positions of the EU member nations have nothing to do with any of their national interests.

Take the EU's initial response to the killing of Hamas terror-master Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 19. A senior terrorist engaging in the illegal purchase of illicit arms from Iran for Hamas-controlled Gaza is killed in his hotel room. The same Dubai authorities who had no problem with hosting a wanted international terrorist worked themselves into a frenzy condemning his killing. And of course, despite the fact that any number of governments, (Egypt and Jordan come to mind), and rival terrorist organizations, (Fatah, anyone?) had ample reason to wish to see Mabhouh dead, Dubai's police chief Lt.-Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim blamed Israel.

Not only did he blame Israel, to substantiate his claims, Tamim released what he said was video footage of alleged Mossad operatives who entered Dubai with European and Australian passports.

Relying only on Tamim's allegations, EU leaders went into high dudgeon. Ignoring the nature of the operation, the basic lack of credibility of the source of information, and the interests of Europe in defeating jihadist terrorism in the Middle East and worldwide, the chanceries of Europe squawked indignantly and threatened to cut off intelligence cooperation with Israel.

In Britain for instance, Foreign Office sources told the Daily Telegraph, "If the Israelis were responsible for the assassination in Dubai, they are seriously jeopardizing the important intelligence-sharing arrangement that currently exists between Britain and Israel."

It reportedly took the intervention of the highest echelons of Europe's intelligence agencies to get their hysterical politicians and diplomats to stop blaming and threatening Israel. After being dressed down, on Monday, the chastened EU foreign ministers abstained from mentioning Israel by name in their joint condemnation of the alleged use of European passports by the alleged operatives who allegedly killed the terrorist Mabhouh.

And lucky they held their tongues. Because on Tuesday, Tamim claimed that after the hit, at least two of the alleged members of the alleged assassination team departed Dubai for Iran. It's hard to imagine Mossad officers feeling safer in Iran than in Dubai at any time and certainly it is hard to see why they would flee to Iran after killing an Iranian-sponsored terrorist.

What the initial European reaction to Tamim's allegations shows is that blaming Israel has become Europe's default foreign policy. It apparently never occurred to the Europeans that Israel might not be responsible for the hit. And it certainly never occurred to them that cutting off intelligence ties with Israel will harm them more than Israel.

They didn't think of the latter, of course, because Europe has no idea of what its interests are. All it knows is how to sound off authoritatively.

THIS HAS not always been the case. It was after all Europe that brought the world the art of rational statecraft. Once upon a time, Europe's leaders understood that a nation's foreign policy was supposed to be based on its national interests. To advance their nation's interests, governments would adopt certain policies. And to facilitate the success of those policies they developed rhetorical arguments to explain and defend them.

Contemporary European statecraft stands this traditional foreign policy model on its head. Today, rhetoric rules the roost. If actions are taken at all, they are adopted in the service of rhetoric. As for national interests, well, the Lisbon Treaty that effectively bars EU member states from adopting independent foreign policies took care of those.

With national interests subordinated to the whims of bureaucrats in Brussels, Europe does little of value in the international arena. As for its rhetoric, as the EU's rush to threaten Israel for allegedly killing a terrorist shows, it is cowardly, ineffectual and self-defeating.

If the Mossad did in fact kill Mabhouh, then the operation was an instance in which Israel distinguished itself from its European detractors by acting, rather than preening.

Unfortunately, such instances are increasingly the exception rather than the rule. Over the past 16 years or so, Israel largely descended into the European statecraft abyss. Rather than use rhetoric to explain policies adopted to advance its national interests, successive Israeli governments have adopted policies geared toward strengthening their rhetoric that itself stands in opposition to Israel's national interests.

Take Israel's positions on Iran and the Palestinians, for instance. Regarding the Iranians, Israel's national interest is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Today, the only way to secure this interest is to use force to destroy Iran's nuclear installations.

Given Iran's leaders' absolute commitment to developing nuclear weapons, no sanctions - regardless of how "crippling" they are supposed to be - will convince them to curtail their efforts to build and deploy their nuclear arsenal.

Beyond that, and far less important, the Russians and the Chinese will refuse to implement "crippling sanctions," against Iran.

IN LIGHT of these facts, it is distressing that Israel's leaders have made building an international coalition in support of "crippling" sanctions against Iran their chief aim. And this is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Over the past several weeks and months, Israel's top leaders have devoted themselves to lobbying foreign governments to support sanctions against Iran.

Last week Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu went to Moscow to gin up support for sanctions from the Russian government. This week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak traveled to the UN and the State Department and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon flew off to Beijing just to lobby senior officials to support sanctions.

It isn't simply that this behavior doesn't contribute anything to Israel's ability to destroy Iran's nuclear installations. It harms Israel's ability to do so, if only by diverting our leaders' focus from where it should be: preparing the IDF to strike and preparing the country to withstand whatever the aftereffects of such a strike would be. Moreover, by calling for sanctions, Israel contributes to the delusion that sanctions are sufficient to block Iran's race to the nuclear finish line.

As for the Palestinian issue, it is fairly clear that at a minimum, Israel's interest is to secure its control over the areas of Judea and Samaria that it requires to protect its Jewish heritage and its national security. But it is hard to think of anything the government has done in its year in office to advance that basic interest.

It is argued that Israel's interest in maintaining good relations with the US administration trumps its interest in strengthening its control over areas in Judea and Samaria that it deems vital. The problem with this argument is that it takes for granted that Israel can determine the status of its relations with the US administration. In the case of the Obama administration, it is abundantly clear that this is not the case.

President Barack Obama and his senior advisers have demonstrated repeatedly that they are interested in weakening - not strengthening - the US alliance with Israel. This week the administration condemned Israel for defining the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem as national heritage sites. The fact that they are national heritage sites is so obvious that even President Shimon Peres defended the move.

Moreover, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated for the millionth time this week that he opposes military strikes against Iran's nuclear installations. That is, for the millionth time, the top US military officer effectively said that he prefers a nuclear armed Iran to an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear installations.

In the interest of strengthening Israel's ties with a hostile administration, the Netanyahu government has adopted rhetoric on the Palestinian issue that is harmful to Israel's national interests. It declared its support for a Palestinian state, despite the fact that such a state will define itself through its devotion to Israel's destruction.

It has outlawed Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, despite the fact that the move simply legitimizes the Palestinians' bigoted demand that Jews be barred from living in Judea and Samaria.

And it has advocated on behalf of Palestinian leaders like Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad who refuse to accept Israel's right to exist.

Indeed, if Israel were to reject the current European model and craft a foreign policy that advanced its national interests, one of its first acts would be to point out that the unelected Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad is not a man of peace.

Just this week, Fayyad threatened to respond with a religious war to Israel's classification of the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb as national heritage sites. Last Friday he joined rioters at Bil'in to attack Israel's security fence. Fayyad has taken a lead role in the campaign to implement an international boycott of Israeli products. Over the past couple of years he has sought to take control over the PA's security forces not to fight terror, but to prevent Israel from fighting terror. Finally, since the Hamas victory in the PA legislative elections in 2006, he has overseen the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas.

In short, Fayyad, a former World Bank employee, is not a "moderate," as his supporters in the US and Europe claim. He is a fiscally sound terror financier and sponsor, actively waging war against Israel.

RECENT REPORTS indicate that IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi - who strangely received a nice medal from Mullen two years ago - is the main opponent of an Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear installations. If this is true, then Ashkenazi must either be forced to change his position or lose his job. The Iranian threat is too great to place in the hands of a commander the US reportedly views as its "friend" in Israel's decision-making circles.

As for the Palestinians, the situation will not be remedied simply by firing a few incompetent office holders. For 16 years, in the interest of enhancing the country's ties with Europe, and to a lesser degree with the US, successive Israeli governments have ignored Israel's vital national interest in maintaining its control over Judea and Samaria. Indeed, they have preferred Euro-friendly, and Israel-unfriendly rhetoric to the sober-minded pursuit of Israel's national interest.

Yet as Europe's immediate response to the Dubai operation makes clear, Europe itself has abandoned the sober-minded pursuit of its own interests, in favor of cowardly, feckless, self-defeating rhetoric. Obviously Europe should favor Israel over a Hamas terrorist. But in its current state of strategic imbecility, no European leader can acknowledge this basic fact. Consequently, Europe may well be doomed.

To avoid Europe's encroaching fate, Israel must abandon its current course. The purpose of rhetoric is to support policies adopted in the pursuit of a nation's interests. And Israel has interests in need of urgent advancement.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Fatah fairy tale

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:46:33 -0500

Fahmi Shabaneh is an odd candidate for dissident status. Shabaneh is a Jerusalemite who

joined the Palestinian Authority's General Intelligence Service in 1994.

Working for PA head Mahmoud Abbas and GIS commander Tawfik Tirawi, Shabaneh was

tasked with investigating Arab Jerusalemites suspected of selling land to Jews. Such sales

are a capital offense in the PA. Since 1994 scores of Arabs have been the victims of

extrajudicial executions after having been fingered by the likes of Shabaneh.

A few years ago, Abbas and Tirawi gave Shabaneh a new assignment. They put him in

charge of a unit responsible for investigating corrupt activities carried out by PA officials.

They probably assumed a team player like Shabaneh understood what he was supposed

to do.

Just as Abbas's predecessor, Yasser Arafat, reportedly had full dossiers on all of his

underlings and used damning information to keep them loyal to him, so Abbas probably

believed that Shabaneh's information was his to use or ignore as he saw fit.

For a while, Abbas's faith was well-placed. Shabaneh collected massive amounts of

information on senior PA officials detailing their illegal activities. These activities included

the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid; illegal seizure of land and

homes; and monetary and sexual extortion of their fellow Palestinians.

Over time, Shabaneh became disillusioned with his boss. Abbas appointed him to his job

around the time he was elected PA head in 2005. Abbas ran on an anti-corruption platform.

Shabaneh's information demonstrated that Abbas presided over a criminal syndicate

posing as a government. And yet rather than arrest his corrupt, criminal associates,

Abbas promoted them.

Abbas continued promoting his corrupt colleagues even after Hamas's 2006 electoral

victory. That win owed to a significant degree to the widespread public revulsion with

Fatah's rampant corruption.

With Israel and the US lining up to support him after the Hamas victory, Abbas continued

to turn a blind eye to his colleagues' criminality. Protected by his new status as the irreplaceable moderate," he allowed his advisers and colleagues to continue enriching themselves with the international donor funds that skyrocketed after Hamas's victory.

Since 2006, despite the billions of dollars in international aid showered on Fatah, Hamas has

consistently led Fatah in opinion polls. Rather than clean up their act, Abbas and his Fatah

colleagues have sought to ingratiate themselves with their public by ratcheting up their

incitement against Israel. And since Abbas has been deemed irreplaceable, the same West

that turns a blind eye to his corruption, refuses to criticize his encouragement of terrorism.

And this makes sense. How can the West question the only thing standing in the way of a

Hamas takeover of Judea and Samaria?

Recently, Shabaneh decided he had had enough. The time had come to expose what he knows.

But he ran into an unanticipated difficulty. No one wanted to know. As he put it, Arab and

Western journalists wouldn't touch his story for fear of being "punished" by the PA.

In his words, Western journalists "don't want to hear negative things about Fatah and Abbas."

Lacking other options, Shabaneh brought his information to The Jerusalem Post's Khaled

Abu Toameh.

On January 29, the Post published Abu Toameh's interview with Shabaneh on our front page.

Among other impressive scoops, Shabaneh related that Abbas's associates purloined

$3.2 million in cash that the US gave Abbas ahead of the 2006 elections. He told Abu Toameh how PA officials who were almost penniless in 1994 now have tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in their private accounts. He related how he watched in horror as Abbas promoted the very officials he reported on. And he showed Abu Toameh a video

of Abbas's chief of staff Rafik Husseini naked in the bedroom of a Christian woman who sought employment with the PA.

If Shabaneh's stories were about Israeli or Western officials, there is no doubt that they would

have been picked up by every self-respecting news organization in the world. If he had been

talking about Israelis, officials from Washington to Brussels to the UN would be loudly calling

for official investigations. But since he was talking about the Palestinians, no one cared.

The State Department had nothing to say. The EU had nothing to say. The New York Times

acted as if his revelations were about nothing more than a sex scandal.

As for Abbas and his cronies, they were quick to blame the Jews. They accused Shabaneh

- their trusted henchman when it came to land sales to Jews - of being an Israeli agent. And

when Channel 10 announced it was broadcasting Husseini's romp in the sack, Abbas demanded that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu bar the broadcast, (apparently forgetting that unlike is PA-controlled media, Israel's media organs are free).

SHABANEH'S ODYSSEY from PA regime loyalist to dissident is an interesting tale. But what is more noteworthy than his personal journey is the world's indifference to his revelations.

Just as the mountains of evidence that Fatah officials - including Shabaneh's boss Tirawi - have been actively involved in terrorist attacks against Israel have been systematically ignored by successive US administrations, Israeli governments and EU foreign policy chiefs, so no one wants to think about the fact that Fatah is a criminal syndicate. The implications are too

devastating.

Since at least 1994, successive US administrations goaded by the EU have made supporting

Fatah and the PA the centerpiece of their Middle East policy. They want to receive proof that

Fatah is a terrorist organization that operates like a criminal organization like they want

- in the immortal words of former EU Middle East envoy Christopher Patten - "a hole in

[their] head."

As for the Western media, their lack of interest in Shabaneh's revelations serves as a reminder of just how mendacious much of the reportage about the Palestinians and Israel is. For 16 years, the American and European media have turned blind eyes to Palestinian misbehavior while expansively reporting every allegation against Israel - no matter how flimsy or obviously false. When the history of the media's coverage of the Middle East is written it will constitute one of the darkest chapters in Western media history.

But while the American and European allegiance to the fable of Fatah as the anchor of the

two-state solution accounts for the indifference of both to Shabaneh's disclosures, what

accounts for the Netanyahu government's behavior in this matter?

Shortly after the Post first published Shabaneh's story, the PA issued an arrest warrant

against him. He was charged among other things with "harming the national interests" of

the Palestinians.

But Abbas's henchmen couldn't put their hands on him.

Israel had already arrested him.

Shabaneh was booked for among other things, illegally working for the PA. It is indeed illegal for Israeli residents to work for the PA. But oddly, although Israeli authorities have known whom Shabaneh worked for since 1994, until his disclosures were made public, they never saw any pressing need to arrest or prosecute him.

Official Israel has nothing to say about Shabaneh's information. Rather, in the wake of his

disclosures, everyone from Netanyahu to Defense Minister Ehud Barak has continued to

proclaim daily their dedication to reaching a peace accord with Abbas. This even as Abbas

and his cronies accuse Israel of using the "traitorous" Shabaneh to pressure Abbas into

negotiating with Israel.

There are two explanations for Israel's behavior. First, there is the fact that the presence of

Barak and his Labor Party in the government makes it impossible for Netanyahu and his

Likud Party to abandon the failed two-state paradigm of dealing the PA. If Netanyahu and

his colleagues were to point out that the PA is a kleptocracy and its senior officials enable

terror and escalate incitement to deflect their public's attention away from their criminality,

(as well as because they want to destroy Israel), then Labor may bolt the coalition.

Beyond that, there is no doubt that an Israeli denunciation of Abbas and his mafia would

enrage the US and EU. Apparently, Netanyahu - who to please President Barack Obama

accepted the two-state paradigm in spite of the fact that he opposes it, and suspended Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria despite the fact that he knows doing this is wrong - is loathe to pick a fight by pointing out the obvious fact that the PA is a corrupt band of oppressive thieves.

Shabaneh argues that due to PA corruption, Hamas remains the preferred alternative for

Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. In his view, the only reason Hamas has yet to take over

Judea and Samaria is the IDF presence in the areas.

The strategic implications of his statement are clear. Far from being a bulwark against Hamas, Abbas empowers the Iranian-backed jihadist force. The only bulwark against Hamas is Israel.

WHAT THIS means is that Israel must end its support for Abbas. Every day he remains in power, Abbas perpetuates a myth of Palestinian moderation. As a supposed moderate, he claims that Israel should curtail its counterterror operations and let his own "moderate" forces take over.

To strengthen Abbas, the US pressures Israel to curtail its counterterror operations in Judea

and Samaria. To please the US, Israel in turn cuts back its operations.

Abbas's men fight Hamas, but they also terrorize journalists, merchants and plain civilians who fall in their path, and so strengthen Hamas. To ratchet up public support for Fatah, Abbas

escalates PA incitement against Israel. This then encourages his own forces to attack Israelis -- as happened last week when one of his security officers murdered IDF St.-Sgt. Maj. Ihab Khatib. And so it goes.

It is clear that Barak will threaten to bolt the coalition if Netanyahu decides to cut off Abbas. But if he left, where would he go? Barak has nowhere to go. He will not be reelected to lead his party. And if Labor leaves the coalition, Netanyahu would still be far from losing his majority in Knesset.

As for angering the White House, the fact of the matter is that by pointing out that Abbas is not a credible leader, Israel will make it more difficult for Obama and his advisers to coerce Israel into making further concessions that will only further empower Hamas.

Shabaneh told the Post that he fully expects the PA to try to kill him. But in a way, the yawns that greeted his story are his best life insurance policy. Until the world stops believing that Fatah is indispensable, no one will listen to the Shabanehs of the world and so the PA has no reason to kill him.

Just as the Post was the only media organ that would publish his story, so the Israeli government is the only government that can force the rest of the world to recognize that Abbas is not an ally. But to do that, the government itself must finally break with the fairy tale of Fatah moderation.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Tribal Update

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:32:14 -0500

This week's show from my Hebrew language media satire website latma.co.il discusses among other things the sorry tale of Uri Korb, the Assistant District Attorney in Jerusalem. Korb, who serves as the chief prosecutor in Ehud Olmert's upcoming trial was forced to take a leave of absence this week.

In his spare time Korb teaches law and a student of his who is suspected of having ties to Olmert's defense team taped him joking with his class about the Supreme Court justices. He criticized Supreme Court President Dorit Benisch for claiming among other things that former President Moshe Katzav must be tried for rape because he is guilty and referred to the justices as "donkeys."

Yediot Ahronot, whose owner Noni Mozes is friends with Olmert reported the story in a banner headline in its weekend paper last Friday. Benisch responded immediately saying that Korb must be barred from appearing before courts.

If you have trouble understanding the second sketch, you can refer to my column on the subject of the New Israel Fund from a few weeks ago. Naomi Chazan is the head of the New Israel Fund.

So now, without further ado, here's this week's Tribal Update.

The Hurt Locker - so bad it hurts

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:41:08 -0500

I am going to depart from my area of expertise to discuss a film. The Hurt Locker has been hailed by conservatives and liberals and everyone in between as the best movie about the war in Iraq to date. I just saw it. It literally made me sick. I think that it is one of the worst movies I have ever seen.

In truth, I don't see many movies. I don't recall seeing any movies about Iraq. I watched this one because I happened to be visiting relatives who happened to have rented it. If this is what passes as a good movie about Iraq, then I am relieved that I haven't seen any other Hollywood movies about Iraq. Aside from that, the plaudits it has received tell me that people have some horribly low standards.

The Hurt Locker is a film about a bomb disposal unit deployed to Iraq at the height of the insurgency in 2004. Its hero is Staff Sgt. Will James, (played expertly by Jeremy Renner) who leads a bomb disposal squad. In scene after scene he dismantles IEDs. And that's the problem. There is no plot. We don't know anything about these soldiers. We don't know why they joined the US Army. We don't know how they feel about Iraq. We don't know what they think of Iraqis who are nothing more than background noise in the movie, except for an apropos of nothing Iraqi boy who simply reenacted the role of a South Korean boy from MASH.

When the movie starts we are told they are going home in a few weeks and that builds suspense about the possibility of them getting killed. Each new scene of defusing bombs is yet one day closer to home. But we don't care about the soldiers who we are never given the opportunity to know -- lest we relate to them. All we are given are GI Joes who defuse bombs. Supposedly by watching them, we are supposed to achieve some deeper understanding of the war. But really all we see is context-free violence which teaches us nothing about war. Supposedly James is a hero. But we don't have any idea what he's fighting for. So why should we care about him? Indeed, how can we care about him? The only thing we can feel for him is fear.

My sense is at The Hurt Locker was made with two target audiences in mind: teenage boys and radical leftists. Teenage boys are everyone's target audience because they pay money to watch movies in theaters and then buy the DVDs and any merchandise related to films. Teenage boys love violence - the more gratuitous, the better. And The Hurt Locker has lots and lots of violence. In fact all it is is violence interrupted periodically by gratuitous, generic cute kid scenes.

As for radical leftists, The Hurt Locker works for them because its post modern, context-free rendering of the war is a picture perfect far left portrayal of war. No, the Americans aren't terrible, they are nothings. And anyway, their nature is irrelevant. War is futile. There is no purpose to war except staying alive. There is no greater good. Therefore, war is wrong because there is nothing worth fighting for What could be a better war message than that for the far left?

I'm no film critic. But I know soldiers and I know war. And soldiers aren't two-dimensional and war isn't about nothing. And the war in Iraq is neither futile nor meaningless.

The Hurt Locker was a two-dimensional film about a meaningless war and nothing soldiers. If it weren't up against the anti-American, anti-Israeli 3-D allegory Avatar, I would say it was a sure bet to win the best picture.

Latma researches the history of "youth" and a breakthrough in Syrian-Israeli relations

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:53:32 -0500

This week at Latma we translated our weekly videocast "The Tribal Update" into English. It is our intention to translate all of our videos into English from now on and I will post them here as well.

Enjoy!

Sarah Palin's Friendship

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:40:59 -0500

US President Barack Obama is an inept, incompetent leader. More than his failure to pass his domestic agenda on health care and global warming despite his Democratic Party's control over both houses of Congress, Iran's announcement on Thursday that it is a nuclear power and has the capacity to produce weapons-grade uranium is a testament to Obama's feckless incompetence. Even his most ardent supporters are admitting this.

Take The New York Times. In a news analysis Thursday of Obama's failure to prevent Iran from advancing with its nuclear program, David Sanger wrote that for the US president, the last year has been "a year in which little in his dealings with Iran has gone the way that the White House expected."

Since Obama first announced his wish to sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at a Democratic presidential candidates' debate in the spring of 2008, the 44th US president's only strategy for dealing with Iran has been to appease its leaders. And as of Tuesday, he still believes that ingratiating himself with the regime is his best bet.

At his press conference Tuesday, Obama wouldn't admit that appeasement has failed, even as all of Iran's top leaders said they were expanding their illicit uranium enrichment activities. The most he would do was acknowledge that the regime's leaders "have made their choice so far, although the door is still open."

As for sanctions, well, Obama said it will take "several weeks" to put those together at the UN.

The distressing truth is that Obama's aim has never been to prevent Teheran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. His whole "sanctions-if-engagement-fails" strategy is just a ruse. The Obama administration has never intended to place serious sanctions on Iran. As one senior administration official told The New York Times, the purpose of the sanctions talk is to get the Iranians to agree to negotiate. As he put it, "This is about driving them back to negotiations, because the real goal here is to avoid war."

Got that? As far as Obama is concerned, Iran with nuclear weapons isn't the main concern. Israel using force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is the main concern.

US PRESIDENTS have a far freer hand in foreign policy than they have in domestic affairs. A president's ability to implement his domestic agenda is constrained by Congress. Congress has much less of a say in foreign policy. But the main constraining factor for a US president in both domestic and foreign affairs is public opinion.

Over the past year, Obama failed to pass his domestic agenda even though he enjoyed governing majorities in both houses of Congress, because the public opposed his agenda. So, too, if the public is able to express its opposition to his foreign policy, particularly as it relates to Israel and Iran, he will be unable to sustain it.

To date, in light of his sinking approval ratings, the main thing Obama has had going for him is that since the presidential election, his political opponents have lacked a leader capable of uniting his opponents around an alternative path. Over the past week, that leader may have emerged.

On Saturday, former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin gave the keynote address at the Tea Party Movement convention in Nashville, Tennessee. As she did in the presidential campaign, Palin electrified her audience in Nashville by credibly channeling the populist impulses of American voters. In her signature line she asked, "So how's that hopey changey stuff working out for ya?"

Palin excoriated Obama on his handling of US foreign policy. Among other things, she noted that a year into his quest to appease dictators, America's international standing is in shambles. "Israel, a friend and a critical ally, now questions the strength of our support," she added.

Palin bellowed that on issues of foreign policy, there is no room for self-delusion. As she put it, "National security, that's the one place where you've got to call it like it is." And then, "We need a foreign policy that distinguishes America's friends from her enemies and recognizes the true nature of the threats that we face."

If her address wasn't enough to convince Americans - and specifically American Jews - that Palin thinks supporting Israel and standing up to Iran are the keys to US national security, then there was her interview on Fox News Sunday. Asked how Obama can win reelection in 2012, Palin responded, "Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided really to come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do."

And if that still isn't enough, there is her lapel pin. The politician who leads the populist opposition to Obama decided to make her most important speech since the 2008 election wearing a pin featuring the US flag and the Israeli flag.

Palin, who is considering a run in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, is using her public platforms to reassemble the coalition of security hawks, social conservatives and blue collar workers that propelled Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. Her support for Israel serves her in building support among both security hawks and social conservatives.

Unlike Obama's empty protestations of support for Israel, Palin's support is obviously heartfelt and therefore will not diminish while Obama remains in office. And as Palin becomes stronger, her ability to influence the US debate in a manner that constrains Obama's freedom to intimidate Israel into allowing Iran to become a nuclear power will rise.

DISTURBINGLY, IN spite of Palin's extraordinary support for Israel, the American Jewish community overwhelmingly rejects her. As Jennifer Rubin noted in her article, "Why Jews hate Palin," in Commentary magazine, Jews disapproved of Sen. John McCain's choice of Palin as his running-mate by a 54 to 37 percent majority. The sneering broadsides published against Palin by leading American Jewish writers are legion.

In her article, Rubin gives a number of reasons for American Jews' rejection of Palin.

On the one hand, American Jews, who overwhelmingly self-identify as Democrats and disproportionately identify as liberals, oppose Palin for the same reason they oppose all social-conservative Republicans - because she isn't a liberal Democrat. What makes American Jews' rejection of Palin unique is its emotional potency. Rubin argues that the visceral hatred that many American Jews express towards Palin is effectively an issue of class hatred, or snobbery. They are four generations removed from the sweatshops where their great grandparents labored on New York's Lower East Side. And they don't like this woman with a funny accent who went to University of Idaho, guts fish and shoots moose.

This may be true. But if it is, American Jews might want to rethink their loyalty to their social class. As the demonstrations against Ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine, against former prime minister Ehud Olmert at University of Chicago, against Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon at Oxford, as well as the disinvitation of Prof. Benny Morris at Cambridge and the celebrity of Harvard's anti-Semitic Prof. Steve Walt show clearly, the bastions of intellectual elitism where American Jews feel most at home have become the repositories of the most virulent hatred of Jews in America and the West today. Liberal standard bearers like Hollywood have had no compunction about giving prestigious awards to movies like Paradise Now, which glorified murderers of Jews in a manner unmatched since the days of Leni Riefenstahl. Elite media outlets like The Atlantic Monthly are only too happy to publish the rantings of newly fashionable haters like Andrew Sullivan.

Liberal Democratic Jewish voices, like Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic, are aware that there is a problem with the rampant anti-Semitism in their camp. And they fear that as a consequence, American Jews may take a second look at Palin with her Israeli flag lapel pin. As Wieseltier wrote this week, "A day does not go by when I do not do my humble part to prevent such a transformation [of American Jewry from liberals to conservatives] from coming to pass."

THE FACT of the matter is that for Israel's sake such a transformation can't happen quickly enough. It isn't that American Jews have to change their social agenda, but they must recognize that today, sadly, there is not meaningful bipartisan support for Israel in the US Congress. The 54 lawmakers who wrote Obama a letter last month asking him to force Israel to open up Gaza's borders were all Democrats. Opposition to passing sanctions against Iran, and opposition to an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear installations, are only politically significant among Democrats.

In her speech at the Tea Party Conference, Palin said, "We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern."

The fact of the matter is that Obama came to many of his anti-Israel sensibilities through his professor friends - Rashid Khalidi, John Mearshimer, Samantha Power, William Ayres, Bernadine Dohrn and, of course, the late Edward Said. Americans interested in national security - and particularly American Jews who support Israel - should be the first ones to second Palin's statement.

Sarah Palin's emergence as the mouthpiece of populist opposition to Obama presents Israel's supporters - and particularly Israel's Jewish supporters - with an extraordinary opportunity and an extraordinary challenge. Palin's coupling of support for Israel with her populist domestic agenda marks the first time that support for Israel has been treated as a core, populist issue. The opportunity this presents for American Jews who care about Israel is without precedent.

But of course, to make the best use of this opportunity, American Jews who support Israel have to disappoint Wieseltier. They have to acknowledge that the Left has rejected their cause and increasingly, rejects them.

Obama's failure to prevent Iran from moving forward with its nuclear program, and his stubborn refusal to support an Israeli move to deny Iran the ability to threaten Israel and global security as a whole, place Israel and core US national security interests in unprecedented jeopardy. His fellow Democrats' willingness to support him as he maintains this perilous course means that the Democratic ship has abandoned Israel, and strategic sanity.

Palin's future in politics is unknowable. But what is clear enough is that today hers is the strongest single American voice opposing Obama's foreign policy and the loudest advocate for supporting Israel and denying Iran nuclear weapons. For this she deserves the thanks and support of American Jewry.

The New Israel Fund and the next war

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:41:28 -0500

A regional war may well be approaching. The actions and statements of Iran and its Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian proxies over the past week or so indicate that this is what Israel's enemies are gunning for.

In preparing for this growing threat, Israel's leaders need to consider more than just the military challenges it faces. They must consider the political actors at home and abroad that limit the IDF's ability to fight to victory and develop strategies for neutralizing those actors.

The latest developments are menacing. Last Saturday, Iran's unelected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened to open up a new round of hostilities on February 11. Then Wednesday, Iran launched a new missile into space. Israeli and US missile experts claim that the missile launch signals that Iran is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles and building the capacity to launch nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles.

Following the missile launch, Syria's president and foreign minister issued incendiary comments threatening Israel with war. Notably, they did so the same day the US informed Syria of its intention to send an ambassador to Damascus for the first time in five years.

Hamas, for its part, sent barrels of explosives drifting to the Israeli coastline - exposing new ways it can kill us. And Fatah, for its part, decided to kiss Hamas's ring this week. Senior Fatah official Nabil Shaath's obsequious visit to Gaza Wednesday was a graphic demonstration of Hamas's preeminence in Palestinian society.

Then there is Hizbullah. In a speech on January 15, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah pledged that the next war will "change the face of the region."

This may not be an exaggeration. It isn't simply that under the blind eye of UN peacekeepers Hizbullah has replenished and expanded its arsenal to include long-range missiles. It isn't simply that in the three and half years since the war Hizbullah has taken control over the Lebanese government. Hizbullah has also built up a formidable ground force. In the event of war, these forces may be deployed as an expeditionary force inside northern Israel.

And if the precedent of former MK Azmi Bishara - who fled Israel after learning that he was about to be indicted for serving as a Hizbullah agent in the 2006 war - is any indication of Hizbullah's modus operandi, Israel may also face Israeli Arab fifth columnists assisting Hizbullah forces inside the country.

Assuming for the moment that the IDF and the government are prepared to contend with these mounting military threats, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues must take the necessary steps to withstand and minimize the effectiveness of the far left's expected political warfare against Israel. As the past decade has made clear, the aim of that warfare is to delegitimize Israel's right to defend itself in order to make it impossible for Israel to pursue the war to military and political victory.

As in the military arena, so in the political arena, Israel's foes have grown from nuisances into strategic threats over the past decade. The UN-sponsored Goldstone Report, which effectively denies Israel's right to defend itself and criminalizes its military efforts to secure its citizenry and its territory, is evidence of the gravity of the threat Israel faces as our leaders plan for the coming war.

ON THIS latter plane, the past week has been an eventful and hopeful one. The latest developments offer guidance for how the government must proceed as the winds of war blow ever stronger. Late last week, the Zionist student movement Im Tirzu published a detailed report demonstrating that 16 anti-Zionist NGOs funded by the post-Zionist New Israel Fund worked hand in glove with the UN Human Rights Council and Richard Goldstone to bring about the establishment of the Goldstone committee and give credibility to its allegations that Israel committed war crimes during Operation Cast Lead. According to the Im Tirtzu report, 92 percent of Israeli allegations that Israel committed war crimes in its campaign against Hamas came from these 16 NIF-funded organizations.

Im Tirtzu's report was prominently covered by Ma'ariv last weekend. The media coverage provoked calls in the Knesset this week to investigate the NIF and its operational arms in Israel, both through regular committee hearings and perhaps through a parliamentary investigative panel.

These calls are extraordinary because they represent the first time in a decade that the legitimacy of these NGOs has been seriously scrutinized.

Since the Palestinians began their terror war against Israel in September 2000, NIF-sponsored groups have worked steadily to intimidate political leaders, law enforcement officials and military commanders to toe their anti-Zionist line. In the wake of the PLO-incited riots in the Israeli Arab sector in October 2000, the overtly anti-Zionist NIF-funded Adalah group agitated for the formation of the Orr Commission. Charged with investigating the police who quelled the rioting rather than the rioters whose violence forced the prolonged closure of major highways to Jewish traffic throughout the country, the Orr Commission had a devastating impact on the police's morale and organizational culture.

Adalah successfully cowed the Barak government into agreeing to rules of inquiry for the commission that denied police officers even minimal rights of due process. They were not allowed to confront or question their accusers. In the aftermath of the commission's public hearings - which amounted to little more than show trials - the careers of several dedicated officers were destroyed. As a consequence, police commanders began curtailing their law enforcement activities in Arab villages. Everything from illegal building to livestock theft to incitement to war against Israel has gone uninvestigated and unpunished.

Furthermore, the Adalah-instigated and orchestrated Orr Commission empowered the most radical voices in Israeli Arab society. Supported by Arab political leaders, Adalah published a manifesto calling for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Bishara's suspected espionage for Hizbullah, and the legal establishment's self-evident fear of prosecuting him for treason, are also the direct consequence of the Orr Commission.

As for the IDF, NIF-funded organizations have played a key role in organizing the weekly riots at flashpoints like Ni'ilin and Bi'ilin and in the recent expansion of these riots to other places in Judea and Samaria like Neveh Tzuf. Supported by anti-Israel activists from Europe and the US, these riots have had a devastating impact on the IDF's morale and its ability to defend Israeli communities.

The NIF-funded pro-Palestinian group B'Tselem provides the rioters with video cameras with which they regularly shoot distorted footage. Their canned films portray Israeli civilians seeking to defend themselves from the rioters as attackers. They portray IDF soldiers trying to keep order and protect Israeli civilians as violent bullies. B'Tselem gives these films to its supporters in the Israel media, which broadcast them as credible footage and demand that the IDF open investigations against its officers for carrying out lawful orders.

On the defensive, the IDF is compelled to curtail its operations and Israeli civilians, now demonized, are viewed as legitimate targets for terror attacks. One recent film of the rioting outside Neveh Tzuf posted on YouTube shows border policemen simply fleeing the scene and leaving the residents of the community to fend for themselves.

Im Tirtzu's offensive against the NIF sparked outraged protest among the NIF's supporters on the far left in Israel and in the US. Everyone from Ma'ariv's in-house anti-Zionist reporters Maya Bengal and Meirav David to J Street have piled on, attacking Im Tirtzu's financial backers and seeking to demonize the organization by referring to it as extremist, far right, racist, fascist, out-of-the-mainstream and all the other routine far-left terms used to demonize Zionists.

What is most encouraging about the aftershocks of the Im Tirtzu report is that the Left's attempts to demonize it have so far failed. Indeed, the loudest voices calling for an investigation of NIF and its sponsored organizations have been MKs from Kadima.

THE HARSH truth is that the main cause of Israel's poor performance in Cast Lead and the Second Lebanon War was the Olmert government's ideological dependence on the far left and its central contention that it is Israel's presence in contested areas rather than our enemies' commitment to Israel's destruction that causes wars. Owing to their allegiance to this falsehood, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni were unable to prosecute the wars to victory militarily, justify the limited steps they did take to defend Israel diplomatically, or discredit the rising chorus of Israeli NGOs arguing that Israel had no right to defend itself politically.

Since Cast Lead, however, two important things have happened. First Kadima was replaced by the Likud. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rightly recognized the Goldstone Report as a strategic attack against Israel. If Israel has no right to defend itself; if its moves to do constitute war crimes, then Israel cannot fight, cannot win and will be destroyed. Rather than give credence to the report, Netanyahu has made discrediting it one his primary aims in office. And to counteract its force, among other things, for the first time since the start of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, Israel's government is asserting the Jewish people's right to Judea and Samaria.

Beyond that, Kadima itself has changed its tune. Now in the opposition, Kadima no longer needs to defend its rejected plan to unilaterally withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Mahmoud Abbas's refusal of Olmert's offers to withdraw Israelis civilians and military personnel from nearly all of Judea and Samaria and to cede sovereignty in Jerusalem discredited the notion that it is possible to make peace with the Palestinians. Most importantly, the fact that Goldstone castigates Livni and Olmert as war criminals requires Kadima to fight all forces - including the far left it previously supported - that give credibility to Goldstone.

These developments clear the way for the Netanyahu government to take steps to neutralize the potency of these groups. The government should move swiftly to order the police and the IDF to enforce the law against these groups and their allies. It must also provide the political support to police and military commanders in the field to empower them fulfill their orders without fear that they will be persecuted for doing their jobs.

If the government seizes the opportunity to weaken these subversive groups, not only will it be making it clear that the political open season on Israel is over. It will be clearing the way for any future war to end not only in military victory, but in political victory for Israel as well.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Keeping Zionism's Promise

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:07:31 -0500

"Never again!"

So declared Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as he spoke at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Wednesday, the 65th anniversary of its liberation.

Netanyahu used his speech at the notorious death camp to nudge what he referred to as "the enlightened nations of the world" to recognize that "murderous evil" has to be stopped as early as possible to prevent it from achieving its aims. Unfortunately, the events of the past week show clearly that evil is on the march, and "the enlightened nations of the world" are on a coffee break from enlightenment.

As Netanyahu addressed the world from the site of the most prolific genocide factory in human history, at the place where over a million Jews were gassed, starved, beaten, raped, frozen, shot and hanged and then burned in ovens, Iran's leaders were declaring loudly that they intend to finish what the Nazis started. They will destroy the Jewish people.

Iran's dictator supremo Ali Khamenei used a photo-op with Mauritania's President Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz - who cut his own country's diplomatic ties with Israel last January - to renew his pledge to commit yet another Holocaust. As he put it, "Surely, the day will come when the nations of the region will witness the destruction of the Zionist regime... When the destruction happens will depend on how the Islamic nations approach the issue."

And as he spoke, the ability of "the enlightened nations of the world" to deny that the Iranian regime is building a nuclear arsenal was finally and utterly wiped away. On Monday, Germany's Der Speigel reported that evidence gleaned from document intercepts and from the testimony of two senior Iranian defectors who were involved in the Islamic Republic's nuclear program, proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Iran's nuclear program is not a peaceful one. The Iranians are designing and building nuclear warheads for their Shihab-3 ballistic missiles. According to a summary of the findings now circulating through the halls of power, Teheran will have the wherewithal to build nuclear warheads by 2012.

So the Der Spiegel report showed that Iran is developing the capacity to carry out a second Holocaust in under a hundred years. And yet, in the face of their sure knowledge that evil is on the march, as they did 70 years ago, the "enlightened nations" of Europe are siding with evil against its would-be victims.

On a popular level, as Sunday's release of the Jewish Agency's annual report on global anti-Semitism documented, there were more anti-Semitic attacks in Europe in 2009 than there had been in any single year since the Holocaust. The report stated that the attacks were carried out by Jew-haters on both the Left and the Right.

Europe's anti-Semites wasted no time in proving the report was accurate. On Monday, Polish Catholic Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek said that Jews have "expropriated" the Holocaust as "a propaganda weapon." Jews, he claimed, "enjoy good press because they have powerful financial means behind them, enormous power and the unconditional backing of the United States, and this favors a certain arrogance that I find unbearable."

Then we have the political alliance of leftist anti-Semites with Muslim anti-Semites. Together they not only attack Jews, they provide political cover for expanding those attacks by rejecting Israel's right to exist and justifying violent attacks against Jews outside Israel as the logical outcome of their politically correct anger at Israel for refusing to destroy itself. Case in point is Ilmar Reepalu, the mayor of Malmo, Sweden.

Malmo is one of the most dangerous places for Jews in Europe. The city's small Jewish population is fleeing. The situation in Malmo was graphically demonstrated last March when Israel's tennis stars Amir Haddad and Andy Ram faced off against Swedish rivals at a Davis Cup tie in Malmo and Swedish authorities closed their game to the public. Malmo's Muslim residents and their post-Christian partners on the Left threatened to attack them. Malmo's authorities didn't think it was their responsibility to protect their Israeli guests. So Haddad and Ram were forced to play in an empty stadium.

Interviewed in a local paper this week about the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in his city, Reepalu blamed Israel. In his view, the violence against Jews in Malmo by the far Left and Muslims, "spilled over from Gaza."

By his lights the Jewish national liberation movement is just as bad as the Jewish annihilation movement. As he put it, "We accept neither Zionism nor anti-Semitism. They are extremes that place themselves above other groups they think are less important."

Reepalu then blamed Malmo's Jews for their victimization by his fellow leftists and his Muslim comrades. As far as he is concerned, the Jews brought the violence on themselves last March when they responded to Haddad and Ram's treatment by holding a demonstration supporting Israel. In his view, Malmo's Jews need to separate themselves away from Israel, not support it.

Since the Holocaust, old-style right-wing anti-Semites in Europe have had a hard time getting political traction for their desire to see Jews suffer. But by conflating Jews with Israel, their colleagues on the Left have made sticking it to the Jews, our state and our supporters the easiest way to score political points. So it was that in her first speech as the EU's new foreign policy chief, Britain's Catherine Ashton went out of her way to condemn Israel for building in Jerusalem, closing its border with Hamas-controlled Gaza and defending itself from Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria.

AS FOR Israel's friends, they are hounded, driven out of Europe and where possible placed on trial. Dutch MP Geert Wilders, the head of the Netherland's Freedom Party, is one of Israel's greatest supporters in Europe. Today Wilders is on trial for publicly criticizing what he views as the endemic anti-Semitism of the Koran.

Against the backdrop of the persistence of right-wing Jew hatred, and the politically ascendant Red-Green alliance of anti-Semites, it makes sense that Europe will not raise a finger to prevent another Holocaust.

And so, not surprisingly, in the wake of the Der Spiegel report, the EU's foreign ministers got together and decided not to support any new sanctions against Iran - unless they are passed by the UN Security Council. Since Europe's foreign ministers all know full well the Security Council will not pass sanctions against Iran because China has announced that it will veto any sanctions against Iran, this week the EU's foreign ministers got together and essentially said they're okay with another Holocaust.

With Europe out, and with "enlightened" Asian, African and South American countries never really in the game, the only "enlightened" country that might be expected to stop murderous evil before it can carry out its aims is the United States. But unfortunately, like the Europeans, the Americans don't feel like being responsible. President Barack Obama, his administration and many of his fellow Democrats would rather take on Israel.

This week 54 Democratic members of Congress wrote Obama a letter asking him to apply pressure on Israel to remove its restrictions on the import of goods - including dual use goods like construction materials - to Hamas-controlled Gaza. Never mind that under US law it is legally problematic to provide any aid, (including the $300 million Obama has pledged) to Gaza in light of the fact that it is controlled by a terrorist organization.

For its part, the administration apparently believes that there is no reason to seek the overthrow of Hamas simply because the US is required by US law and binding UN Security Council resolutions to do so. The US Treasury Department has reportedly just removed all but one Hamas official from its list of known terrorists and so paved the way for Hamas to receive funding from Europe.

As for Israel, during his trip here this week, Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell came up with a revolutionary new idea. In the face of Palestinian intransigence, Mitchell introduced the earthshaking concept of pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.

This week Mitchell asked Israel to stop all of its counterterror operations in Judea and Samaria, and allow Palestinian forces to operate not only in the Palestinian areas, but in predominantly Israeli areas as well. Specifically, Mitchell asked Israel to allow Palestinian forces to deploy in what the arguably defunct Oslo agreements refer to as Area C, where the Palestinian Authority has no security authority whatsoever.

When it comes to Iran, the Obama administration behaves as though the jury is still out on whether the mullahs are even seeking nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last Thursday that Iran might face some tough statements from the world if it continues to refuse to be appeased by the Obama White House, although she couldn't say whether any actual steps would be taken to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, which she wouldn't acknowledge the mullahs are developing.

And in his State of the Union address on Wednesday, Obama himself made clear that the US will do nothing to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. As far as Obama is concerned, the nuclear arsenal in most urgent need of evisceration is the US's nuclear arsenal.

ALL OF this just goes to show that at the end of the day, now when the chips are down, there is only one "enlightened" nation in the world that may actually do something to prevent the advance of murderous evil. And Israel unfortunately is of two minds on the issue.

On the one hand, we have Netanyahu, who is clearly focused on preventing another Holocaust of Jewry. But on the other hand, we have Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who on Tuesday claimed that the absence of peace with the Palestinians - not Iran - is the greatest threat that Israel faces today. As he put it, "The lack of defined boundaries within Israel, and not an Iranian bomb, is the greatest threat to our future."

Barak's outrageous pronouncement is a succinct encapsulation of the great aspiration of the Israeli Left. If he could only be right, then Israel would be able to singlehandedly solve all the problems of the region and be immediately adored by the likes of the EU and the Obama administration just by making itself smaller.

So with the scourge of moral and strategic blindness rampant not only in Europe and America, but within his own government, Netanyahu rapidly approaches his moment of truth.

In what will undoubtedly be the most fateful decision of his life, he will have to decide whether Iran will become a nuclear power, or whether Israel, standing alone, will prevent it from becoming a nuclear power.

Was his declaration of "Never Again," at Auschwitz just the bloviating of yet another "enlightened" leader who lacks the courage of his convictions? Or was it a solemn vow that Zionism's promise will be kept?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

The perils of presidential failure

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:28:12 -0500

US President Barack Obama is feeling the heat. His response to the current crisis threatening to sink his one-year-old presidency is telling for what it says about the future of both his domestic and foreign policies. Israel should take heed of his responses.

Obama's Democratic Party, and indeed the US political establishment as a whole, received a jolt on Tuesday when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts seat in the US Senate that had been held by the Democratic Kennedy dynasty since 1952. The question now on everyone's lips is whether Brown's stunning victory will cause Obama to change his course and moderate his policies.

The Massachusetts Senate race was a real world example of what opinion polling data has shown. Since last summer, a consistently growing number of US voters oppose Obama's policies.

Brown's victory was nationally significant because it removed the Democrats' filibuster proof, 60-man super-majority in the Senate. With Brown as the 41st Republican senator, the minority party can now muster the votes to block legislation from being called to a vote before the full Senate and so prevent laws from being passed.

In addition to its immediate legislative significance, the larger political importance of the Massachusetts election rests in what it signals for House and Senate Democrats who will face reelection in November. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers are reportedly now veering into full-blown panics about their prospects in those elections. As Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh put it, "If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call, there's no hope of waking up."

Tellingly, Obama and his White House advisers are refusing to "wake up." Obama responded to Brown's win as he has to many of his setbacks since assuming office a year ago this week. He blamed his predecessor, George W. Bush.

In an interview on Wednesday with ABC News, Obama said, "People are angry, they are frustrated. Not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years."

Obama argued that the growing unpopularity of his programs is due not to substance, but to style. As he put it, "We were so busy just getting stuff done... that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values."

Even as Democratic lawmakers are openly expressing misgivings with moving forward in implementing Obama's radical plan to reform the US health care industry, Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod told the media that abandoning the initiative is "not an option."

Rather than accept that Massachusetts voters elected Brown because Brown repudiated Obama's agenda - on both domestic and foreign policy - the Obama White House has argued that Brown's victory was simply the consequence of poor electioneering by the Democratic candidate and poor planning by the national Democratic Party apparatus.

Obama's imperiousness is even more apparent when compared to the behavior of his predecessors in office. When in 2006 the Republicans lost control of Congress, George W. Bush responded by embracing the Democrats' policies on everything from Iran to mortgage banks. When the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, Bill Clinton adopted the Republicans' "Contract with America" as his own.

What Obama's refusal to hear Tuesday's "wake-up call" from Massachusetts shows is that his chief concern is not listening to what the public says. It is not even remaining in office. Rather, his behavior in the wake of the Brown victory shows that Obama's top concern is enacting his radical political agenda. He is an ideologue first and a party leader second.

While his fellow Democrats in Congress say that Brown's election means that Obama's plan to nationalize one-sixth of the US economy through his health care plan is dead in the water, Obama claims the time to move forward is now. As he sees things, he has 11 months left to effect the radical change he seeks for America.

Obama believes that plowing ahead is the only thing that will save the Democrats. As he has put it, "I... know what happens once we get... [health care reform] done. The American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like."

Far from slowing down, he will redouble his efforts to ram his agenda down the throats of an unwilling populace.

ELECTIONS ARE blunt instruments, not precise readings. Voters cast their ballots for specific politicians and their political parties based on their wide perceptions of general trends rather than on specific policies related to specific issues. Candidates in turn emphasize specific issues because of what those issues symbolize about the general state of affairs.

In the US today, there is a widespread public perception that Obama and his party colleagues in the House and Senate have gone on a spending spree when what the deepening economic recession requires is frugality. Obama's plan to spend up to a trillion dollars on nationalized health care in this economic environment is emblematic of the public sense that the national leadership is behaving irresponsibly.

A similar view pervades with respect to Obama's foreign policy.

Speaking to National Review, Brown's chief political strategist Eric Fehrnstrom said that "terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants" was a "more potent issue" for Massachusetts voters than health care. If health care is emblematic of the growing perception that Obama and his fellow Democrats are irresponsible on the domestic policy front, so "terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants" are emblematic of the public perception that Obama's foreign policy is too weak.

The administration's failure to detect, prevent or adequately characterize the jihadist massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, like its failure to detect, prevent or adequately handle the aftermath of the attempted airline bombing on Christmas day by a Nigerian jihadist, are viewed by Americans as proof that Obama's foreign policy is weak and dangerous.

As with his domestic agenda, in foreign affairs as well, the clear antidote to Obama's political woes would be to change course and moderate his policies. Were Obama interested in ensuring that the public supported and trusted his handling of American foreign policy, he would repudiate his plan to transfer terrorists now jailed at Guantanamo Bay to Yemen and cancel his plan to try senior terrorists like September 11 architect Khaled Sheikh Muhammad in civilian trials.

But rather than do so, Obama has responded to the public's opposition to his foreign policies by doubling down. In the face of massive criticism over his administration's decision to try the September 11 mastermind in a civilian courtroom in New York, the administration opted to treat the Christmas bomber as a criminal defendant as well. Indeed, as its top counterterror officials made clear in Senate testimony on Wednesday, the administration never considered treating the terrorist as an illegal enemy combatant.

In a related matter, on Wednesday the State Department announced that the US has dropped its opposition to permitting Islamist leader Tariq Ramadan from entering the US. Ramadan - whose grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood which spawned the likes of al-Qaida and Hamas - is a hero of the far Left in the US and Europe. He was barred from entering the US since 2004 due in part to his personal contributions to Hamas.

In short then, rather than respond to the public's rejection of his posture of weakness abroad by replacing that posture with one of strength, Obama has ratcheted up his policy of weakness. What this shows is that like his domestic agenda, Obama's foreign policy - including his national security policy - is the product of his firmly held beliefs and ideological commitments. Obama is weak on foreign affairs because he chooses to be weak. Through both his actions and his words he demonstrates his belief that the US must adopt a posture of contrition to make up for its past global leadership. His goal is to weaken America's position in the international arena, because he doesn't believe that America has a moral right to be stronger than anyone else.

Given the congressional backlash to the Massachusetts election, it is possible that Obama will be compelled to put aside his domestic initiatives, or at least to repackage them. US presidents have only a limited capacity to unilaterally implement massive changes on the domestic front. Congressional support is required for most major endeavors. Today, it seems likely that many Democratic lawmakers will refuse to fall on their swords for Obama. So his health care initiative, like his environmental and immigration agendas, may well be buried in committee.

On the other hand, the US Constitution gives the president a much freer hand in foreign affairs. And here we are likely to see a full-court presidential press to force through his radical agenda on everything from nuclear weapons to counterterrorism to appeasement of the Islamic world. Given the prominence Obama has already given to his anti-Israel posture, it can be assumed that Israel will be the focus of even more intense pressure from the White House in the months and years to come.

All of this should concentrate the minds of Israel's leaders. They should assume that Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell will intensify his pressure - and escalate his threats - on Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians. Indeed, given Mitchell's trip this week to Lebanon and Syria and Obama's refusal to end his appeasement overtures towards Iran, Israel should expect the US to expand its pressure on Israel to agree to imperil itself on all fronts.

SINCE TAKING office on March 31, the Netanyahu government has adopted two distinct policies for dealing with Obama. Until September, the government's policy was to politely delay as long as possible its ultimate polite refusal to accept US demands for more concessions to Palestinians.

After Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's meeting with Obama at the UN in September, however, he adopted a new policy of caving in to US pressure. First he announced his support for Palestinian statehood. Then he agreed to bar Jews from receiving construction permits in Judea and Samaria. Apparently, Netanyahu was led to believe that his concessions would cause Obama to ease his pressure on Israel.

But as the White House's escalating threats and demands for new Israeli concessions in the wake of Netanyahu's change of course demonstrates, Israel's policy shift was counterproductive. And given Obama's current political trajectory, Israel will be best served by a return to the government's initial policy. Rather than seeking to placate Obama, Israel should try to wait him out. And at the same time, the government should robustly advance Israel's national interests, both by unapologetically defending those interests in the diplomatic arena, and more importantly by adopting policies and taking action to secure and strengthen the country.

The political winds in America are blowing against Obama. Even with his relatively free hand in foreign affairs, the ill winds will necessarily slow him down. Israel should do nothing to smooth his path forward.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Latma interviews Egyptian Minister of Conspiracy Theories

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:55:58 -0500

Egypt's Minister of Conspiracy Theories, Mr. Halil Majnoun visited Latma's studio to discuss why Israel is trying to take over the world.