Dec 26, 2007 21:32 Updated Dec 27, 2007 11:34
By DANIEL PIPES
Western financial aid to the Palestinians has, I showed last week, the perverse and counterintuitive effect of increasing their rate of homicides, including terrorist ones. This week, I offer two pieces of perhaps even stranger news about the many billions of dollars and record-shattering per-capita donations from the West: First, these have rendered the Palestinians poorer. Second, Palestinian impoverishment is a long-term positive development.
(read more)
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Coal in Israel's stocking
editorials and opinion
By CLIFORD D. MAY
Scripps Howard News Service Wednesday, December 26, 2007
In this holiday season, there are journalistic conventions one comes to expect: stories lamenting the commercialism of Christmas; stories summing up the 12 months gone by and predicting the direction of the New Year; and stories blaming Israelis for the problems afflicting the Holy Land.
Reuters, the BBC, McClatchy, ABC News -- in recent days, all have run pieces in the last category. But the one that troubled me most appeared in the Wall Street Journal -- my favorite national daily newspaper -- on Dec. 24. It was written by Ken Woodward, a religion writer whose work I've long respected. But in this instance his subject was not religion but foreign affairs, and what he produced was the usual anti-Israeli dogma.
His op-ed was headlined: "The Plight of Bethlehem: Why Christians can't visit the holy
(click here to continue article)
By CLIFORD D. MAY
Scripps Howard News Service Wednesday, December 26, 2007
In this holiday season, there are journalistic conventions one comes to expect: stories lamenting the commercialism of Christmas; stories summing up the 12 months gone by and predicting the direction of the New Year; and stories blaming Israelis for the problems afflicting the Holy Land.
Reuters, the BBC, McClatchy, ABC News -- in recent days, all have run pieces in the last category. But the one that troubled me most appeared in the Wall Street Journal -- my favorite national daily newspaper -- on Dec. 24. It was written by Ken Woodward, a religion writer whose work I've long respected. But in this instance his subject was not religion but foreign affairs, and what he produced was the usual anti-Israeli dogma.
His op-ed was headlined: "The Plight of Bethlehem: Why Christians can't visit the holy
(click here to continue article)
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The Islamist war on Muslim women
Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / December 23, 2007
THE "QATIF GIRL" won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia'sKing Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges againstseven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeksearlier, Sudan's president extended a similar reprieve to GillianGibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had beensentenced to prison, but government-organize d street demonstratorswere loudly demanding her execution.
In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after adeath sentence against her was revoked. She had originally beenconvicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two othersattempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to therapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging innonmarital sex.)
The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and itwas not coincidental that each case had triggered an internationalfuror. But for every "Qatif girl" or Nazanin who is saved, there arefar too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance nevercomes.
No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whosefather was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because sherefused to wear a hijab. "She just wanted to look like everyone else,"one of Aqsa's friends told the National Post, "and I guess her dad hada problem with that."
No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdishimmigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed last yearafter she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with aman not from the family's village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked todeath with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden70 miles away.
More than 25 such "honor killings" have been confirmed in Britain'sMuslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected.
There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murderin Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi policesay that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year byIslamists; the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notesaccusing the victims of "un-Islamic behavior."
By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, andthe sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality,are unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violenceand depravity:
In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped aspunishment for her brother's supposed liaison with a woman fromanother tribe.
In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after sheuncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor ata friend's wedding.
In Tehran, a father beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because hesuspected that she had been raped; he said he acted "to defend myhonor, fame, and dignity."
In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leavinga burning building because they were not wearing headscarves andabayas; 15 of the girls died in the inferno.
The president of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, a renowned center ofIslamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in atelevision interview: "It's not really beating," Sheikh AhmadAl-Tayyeb explained on Egyptian television. "It's more like punching."
When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996, the repressionof women was among their first priorities. They issued a decreeforbidding women to leave their homes, with the result that work andschooling for women came to a halt, destroying the country'shealthcare system, civil service, and elementary education."
Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, andseven out of 10 teachers were women," Lawrence Wright observed in "TheLooming Tower," his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Al Qaeda. "Underthe Taliban, many of them would become beggars.
"Women are not the only victims of this rampant misogyny. MohammedHalim, a 46-year-old Afghan schoolteacher, was dragged from his familyand horribly murdered last year - disemboweled and then dismembered -for defying orders to stop educating girls.
All these are only examples - the tip of a dreadful iceberg that willnever be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it.As for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices.It took a worldwide outcry to spare "Qatif girl" and Nazanin. Butthere are countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is http://us.f362.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=jacoby%40globe.com.
Globe Columnist / December 23, 2007
THE "QATIF GIRL" won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia'sKing Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges againstseven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeksearlier, Sudan's president extended a similar reprieve to GillianGibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had beensentenced to prison, but government-organize d street demonstratorswere loudly demanding her execution.
In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after adeath sentence against her was revoked. She had originally beenconvicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two othersattempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to therapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging innonmarital sex.)
The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and itwas not coincidental that each case had triggered an internationalfuror. But for every "Qatif girl" or Nazanin who is saved, there arefar too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance nevercomes.
No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whosefather was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because sherefused to wear a hijab. "She just wanted to look like everyone else,"one of Aqsa's friends told the National Post, "and I guess her dad hada problem with that."
No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdishimmigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed last yearafter she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with aman not from the family's village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked todeath with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden70 miles away.
More than 25 such "honor killings" have been confirmed in Britain'sMuslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected.
There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murderin Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi policesay that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year byIslamists; the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notesaccusing the victims of "un-Islamic behavior."
By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, andthe sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality,are unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violenceand depravity:
In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped aspunishment for her brother's supposed liaison with a woman fromanother tribe.
In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after sheuncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor ata friend's wedding.
In Tehran, a father beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because hesuspected that she had been raped; he said he acted "to defend myhonor, fame, and dignity."
In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leavinga burning building because they were not wearing headscarves andabayas; 15 of the girls died in the inferno.
The president of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, a renowned center ofIslamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in atelevision interview: "It's not really beating," Sheikh AhmadAl-Tayyeb explained on Egyptian television. "It's more like punching."
When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996, the repressionof women was among their first priorities. They issued a decreeforbidding women to leave their homes, with the result that work andschooling for women came to a halt, destroying the country'shealthcare system, civil service, and elementary education."
Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, andseven out of 10 teachers were women," Lawrence Wright observed in "TheLooming Tower," his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Al Qaeda. "Underthe Taliban, many of them would become beggars.
"Women are not the only victims of this rampant misogyny. MohammedHalim, a 46-year-old Afghan schoolteacher, was dragged from his familyand horribly murdered last year - disemboweled and then dismembered -for defying orders to stop educating girls.
All these are only examples - the tip of a dreadful iceberg that willnever be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it.As for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices.It took a worldwide outcry to spare "Qatif girl" and Nazanin. Butthere are countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is http://us.f362.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=jacoby%40globe.com.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Scholar decries apathy toward Palestinian Christians
Tuesday, December 04, 2007 by Staff Writer
A leading Israeli human rights lawyer on Monday criticized Western governments and the mainstream media for largely ignoring the systematic persecution of Palestinian Arab Christians by their Muslim neighbors and rulers.Speaking at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs where he is a scholar in residence, Justus Weiner presented yet more evidence of the harassment, discrimination, intimidation, religious intolerance and physical violence Palestinian Christians in Judea and Samaria (the so-called "West Bank") are regularly subjected to.Weiner presented several specific cases of recent intimidation, physical abuse and murder of Palestinian Christians, but said those were merely the tip of the iceberg. Most of the Palestinian Christians affected by this persecution dare not open their mouths, and when they do are careful not to further upset the waters.If the situation continues, Weiner warned that in another decade there will be but a handful of Arab Christians remaining in the Holy Land. Already, the once Christian-dominated town of Bethlehem now has a population that is less than 20 percent Christian. Most of the Christian exodus from Jesus' birthplace has come after Israel handed control of Bethlehem over to the Palestinian Authority.The answer, said Weiner, is for Western "Christian" governments, the mainstream international media and human rights organizations to intervene and demand the Palestinian Authority begin protecting the rights of Christians living in areas under its control.But international concern for Palestinian Arab Christians dried up with the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1995 out of a desire to not paint that regime in a bad light and risk scuttling the process of extracting territorial and security concessions from Israel in return for "peace."
A leading Israeli human rights lawyer on Monday criticized Western governments and the mainstream media for largely ignoring the systematic persecution of Palestinian Arab Christians by their Muslim neighbors and rulers.Speaking at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs where he is a scholar in residence, Justus Weiner presented yet more evidence of the harassment, discrimination, intimidation, religious intolerance and physical violence Palestinian Christians in Judea and Samaria (the so-called "West Bank") are regularly subjected to.Weiner presented several specific cases of recent intimidation, physical abuse and murder of Palestinian Christians, but said those were merely the tip of the iceberg. Most of the Palestinian Christians affected by this persecution dare not open their mouths, and when they do are careful not to further upset the waters.If the situation continues, Weiner warned that in another decade there will be but a handful of Arab Christians remaining in the Holy Land. Already, the once Christian-dominated town of Bethlehem now has a population that is less than 20 percent Christian. Most of the Christian exodus from Jesus' birthplace has come after Israel handed control of Bethlehem over to the Palestinian Authority.The answer, said Weiner, is for Western "Christian" governments, the mainstream international media and human rights organizations to intervene and demand the Palestinian Authority begin protecting the rights of Christians living in areas under its control.But international concern for Palestinian Arab Christians dried up with the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1995 out of a desire to not paint that regime in a bad light and risk scuttling the process of extracting territorial and security concessions from Israel in return for "peace."
Monday, December 17, 2007
AT ANNAPOLIS, ISRAEL BOWED TO THE 'SOLUTION' OF THE NATIONS
In his recent speech in Annapolis the Prime Minister of Israel, Mr Ehud Olmert made the following statement:
"I believe that there is no path other than peace. I believe there is no just solution other than the solution of two national states for two peoples. I believe that there is no path which does not involve painful compromise for you Palestinians and for us Israelis. I want to thank you, President George Bush, an ally in the path of peace, for your willingness to assist in the historic process of peace and reconciliation between us and our neighbors."
This statement exposes the absolute fallacy of the policy being pursued by Israel and the Nations concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict.
When Prime Minister Olmert says - with the blind agreement of not only the nations of the world but even most of the ministers of his cabinet - that he believes there is NO path other than peace and NO just solution other than the establishment of two national states for two peoples, it is clear that he has - apparently freely - swallowed the lie and the deception that peace will come to this region and to Israel only by way of the vision first foolishly proclaimed by the president of the United States.
The opposite is true. Peace will come to the Middle East - as it came to Europe - by military victory. As the Bible so truthfully, if sadly, states: There is a time to make war, and there is a time to make peace (see Ecclesiastes 3:8).
To make peace - after the manner in which Hitler negotiated an agreement with Chamberlain in Munich in September 1938) - when the other side is going to use that very surrender for the sake of peace to destroy you, is stupidity. And it is this folly which the Western powers already fell into once in history, when they chose to believe that by ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler they would save the rest of Czechoslovakia and thus prevent a war on the European continent.
We know that the opposite happened. The surrender of the Sudetenland did not bring the longed-for peace; it encouraged Hitler and his Nazis to take all of Czechoslovakia, and then unleash their armies on all of Europe.
This is precisely what will result from the wish spelled out, again under the pressure of the Nations gathered in Annapolis: that Israel cedes her own God-given land to the Palestinians to prevent further war. Any such cession of land will achieve the reverse - it will whet the appetite of all the radical Muslim forces, from Hamas to Hizbollah, from Al Qaida to the Islamic Jihad, from Iran to Syria, the big sponsors of Islamic terror. It will cause - just like the surrender of the Sudetenland - a world war and not peace!
Mr Olmert's statement thus proves just how dreadfully off base the thinking of even the present Israeli leadership is.
At least President Edvard Benes of Czechoslovakia withstood "the wisdom" of the Western powers when they (Britain and France) pressured him to give Hitler the Sudetenland for the sake of peace.
But with Israel the outlook is even worse, as we realize reading this utterly foolish statement of its leader.
For Israel is itself admitting that this withdrawal demanded of her by the Nations - a solution that will lead to her destruction - is the only solution there is!
President Benes at least shouted in despair at the Western powers that he felt betrayed by them, and that the forced evacuation of the Sudetenland could spell the end of his courageous, sovereign Nation!
But NOT SO Israel's present leaders.
They hasten to bow before the demands of the Goyim, themselves announcing that this solution to their conflict is THE ONLY SOLUTION, thus strengthening the Nations' hand and pride in this their plan - a plan that WILL lead, just as with Czechoslovakia, to the dismantling of their sovereign Jewish State.
May God prevent it!
Jan Willem van der Hoeven, Director
International Christian Zionist Center
In his recent speech in Annapolis the Prime Minister of Israel, Mr Ehud Olmert made the following statement:
"I believe that there is no path other than peace. I believe there is no just solution other than the solution of two national states for two peoples. I believe that there is no path which does not involve painful compromise for you Palestinians and for us Israelis. I want to thank you, President George Bush, an ally in the path of peace, for your willingness to assist in the historic process of peace and reconciliation between us and our neighbors."
This statement exposes the absolute fallacy of the policy being pursued by Israel and the Nations concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict.
When Prime Minister Olmert says - with the blind agreement of not only the nations of the world but even most of the ministers of his cabinet - that he believes there is NO path other than peace and NO just solution other than the establishment of two national states for two peoples, it is clear that he has - apparently freely - swallowed the lie and the deception that peace will come to this region and to Israel only by way of the vision first foolishly proclaimed by the president of the United States.
The opposite is true. Peace will come to the Middle East - as it came to Europe - by military victory. As the Bible so truthfully, if sadly, states: There is a time to make war, and there is a time to make peace (see Ecclesiastes 3:8).
To make peace - after the manner in which Hitler negotiated an agreement with Chamberlain in Munich in September 1938) - when the other side is going to use that very surrender for the sake of peace to destroy you, is stupidity. And it is this folly which the Western powers already fell into once in history, when they chose to believe that by ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler they would save the rest of Czechoslovakia and thus prevent a war on the European continent.
We know that the opposite happened. The surrender of the Sudetenland did not bring the longed-for peace; it encouraged Hitler and his Nazis to take all of Czechoslovakia, and then unleash their armies on all of Europe.
This is precisely what will result from the wish spelled out, again under the pressure of the Nations gathered in Annapolis: that Israel cedes her own God-given land to the Palestinians to prevent further war. Any such cession of land will achieve the reverse - it will whet the appetite of all the radical Muslim forces, from Hamas to Hizbollah, from Al Qaida to the Islamic Jihad, from Iran to Syria, the big sponsors of Islamic terror. It will cause - just like the surrender of the Sudetenland - a world war and not peace!
Mr Olmert's statement thus proves just how dreadfully off base the thinking of even the present Israeli leadership is.
At least President Edvard Benes of Czechoslovakia withstood "the wisdom" of the Western powers when they (Britain and France) pressured him to give Hitler the Sudetenland for the sake of peace.
But with Israel the outlook is even worse, as we realize reading this utterly foolish statement of its leader.
For Israel is itself admitting that this withdrawal demanded of her by the Nations - a solution that will lead to her destruction - is the only solution there is!
President Benes at least shouted in despair at the Western powers that he felt betrayed by them, and that the forced evacuation of the Sudetenland could spell the end of his courageous, sovereign Nation!
But NOT SO Israel's present leaders.
They hasten to bow before the demands of the Goyim, themselves announcing that this solution to their conflict is THE ONLY SOLUTION, thus strengthening the Nations' hand and pride in this their plan - a plan that WILL lead, just as with Czechoslovakia, to the dismantling of their sovereign Jewish State.
May God prevent it!
Jan Willem van der Hoeven, Director
International Christian Zionist Center
Newt Gingrich speech - Jewish National Fund Meeting
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered the following remarks to a Jewish National Fund meeting Nov. 15 at the Selig Center.
I just want to talk to you from the heart for a few minutes and share with you where I think we are.
I think it is very stark. I don't think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for today's talk, it would be sleepwalking into a nightmare. 'Cause that's what I think we're doing.
I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Sept. 10th at which I gave an alternative history of the last six years, because the more I thought about how much we're failing, the more I concluded you couldn't just nitpick individual places and talk about individual changes because it didn't capture the scale of the disaster. And I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called Troublesome Young Men, which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain. It's a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period. And we tend to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very powerful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness, as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven. Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the world, and he was very ruthless domestically. And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into they war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Rohr, and they are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because they don't want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.
And they were severely punished and isolated by Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that's really where we are today. Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political Left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem.
Let me work back. I'm going to get to Iran since that's the topic, but I'm going to get to it eventually.
Let me work back from Pakistan. The dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a day. So we've now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for al Qaeda and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan.
And our answer is to praise Musharraf because at least he's not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan. Musharraf doesn't have full control over his own government. The odds are even money we're going to drift into a disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan. And while we worry about the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have 'em, So why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons? What's our grand strategy for that?
Then you look at Afghanistan. Here's a country that's small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs. A third of the GDP is from drugs. We haven't been able to end the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. And I know of no case historically where you defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on the West are out-bribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year, facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four generations. It's a total mismatch.
Then you come to the direct threat to the United States, which is al Qaeda. Which, by the way, we just published polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it away. I found myself in the unique position of calling Howard Dean to tell him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to both Democrats and Republicans. It is fundamentally different from the national news media. When asked the question "Do we have an obligation to defend the United States and her allies?" the answer is 85 percent yes. When asked a further question "Should we defeat our enemies?" – it's very strong language – the answer is 75% yes, 75 to 16.
The complaint about Iraq is a performance complaint, not a values complaint.
When asked whether or not al Qaeda is a threat, 89% of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can't negotiate with it. So now let's look at al Qaeda and the rise of Islamist terrorism.
And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.
Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.
So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning.
It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, "Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia."
So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.
You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy – in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, "We should wipe out Israel," he may say, "We should defeat the United States," but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?
And nobody says this is totally, utterly, absolutely unacceptable. Why is it that the number one threat in intelligence movies is the CIA?
I happened the other night to be watching an old movie, “To Live and Die in L.A.,†which is about counterfeiting. But the movie starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan from is a suicide bomber who is actually, overtly a Muslim fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you could not get that scene made in Hollywood today.
Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad person is either a Right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government agency? Go look at “The Bourne Ultimatum.†Or a movie like the one that George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it implied that if you were a reformist Arab prince, that probably the CIA would kill you. It's a total lie. We actually have SEALs protecting people all over the world. We actually risk American lives protecting reformers all over the world, and yet Hollywood can't bring itself to tell the truth, (a) because it's ideologically so opposed to the American government and the American military, and (b), because it's terrified that if it said something really openly, honestly true about Muslim terrorists, they might show up in Hollywood. And you might have somebody killed as the Dutch producer was killed.
And so we're living a life of cowardice, and in that life of cowardice we're sleepwalking into a nightmare.
And then you come to Iran. There's a terrific book. Mark Bowden is a remarkable writer who wrote “Black Hawk Down,†has enormous personal courage. He's a Philadelphia newspaper writer, actually got the money out of the Philadelphia newspaper to go to Somalia to interview the Somalian side of “Black Hawk Down.†It's a remarkable achievement. Tells a great story about getting to Somalia, paying lots of cash, having the local warlord protect him, and after about two weeks the warlord came to him and said, "You know, we've decided that we're very uncomfortable with you being here, and you should leave."
And so he goes to the hotel, where he is the only hard-currency guest, and says, "I've got to check out two weeks early because the warlord has told me that he no longer will protect me." And the hotel owner, who wants to keep his only hard-currency guest, says, "Well, why are you listening to him? He's not the government. There is no government." And Bowden says, "Well, what will I do?" And he says, "You hire a bigger warlord with more guns," which he did. But then he could only stay one week because he ran out of money.
But this is a guy with real courage. I mean, imagine trying to go out and be a journalist in that kind of world, OK? So Bowden came back and wrote “Guests of the Ayatollah,†which is the Iranian hostage of 1979, which he entitled, "The First Shots in Iran's War Against America." So in the Bowden worldview, the current Iranian dictatorship has been at war with the United States since 1979. Violated international law. Every conceivable tenet of international law was violated when they seized the American Embassy and they seized the diplomats. Killed Americans in Lebanon in the early '80s. Killed Americans at Khobar Towers in '95 and had the Clinton administration deliberately avoid revealing the information, as Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI, has said publicly, because they didn't want to have to confront the Iranian complicity.
And so you have an Iranian regime which is cited annually as the leading supporter of state terrorism in the world. Every year the State Department says that. It's an extraordinary act of lucidity on the part of an institution which seeks to avoid it as often as possible.
And you have Gen. Petraeus come to the U.S. Congress and say publicly in an open session, "The Iranians are waging a proxy war against Americans in Iraq."
I was so deeply offended by this, it's hard for me to express it without sounding irrational. I'm an Army brat. My dad served 27 years in the infantry. The idea that an American general would come to the American Congress, testify in public that our young men and women are being killed by Iran, and we have done nothing, I find absolutely abhorrent.
So I'm preparing to come and talk today. I got up this morning, and a friend had sent me yesterday's Jerusalem Post editorial, which if you haven't read, I recommend to you. It has, for example, the following quote: "On Monday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said, 'The problem of the content of the document setting out joint principles for peace-making post-Annapolis has not been resolved. One of the more pressing problems is the Zionist regime's insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined.' "
What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, "I don't recognize that you exist," you don't start a negotiation. The person says, "I literally do not recognize" and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is "Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody." And then he'll say, "Well, that's different."
We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the truth to our politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to the country. If the president of the United States, and again, we're now so bitterly partisan, we're so committed to red vs. blue hostility, that George W. Bush doesn't have the capacity to give an address from the Oval Office that has any meaning for half the country. And the anti-war Left is so strong in the Democratic primary that I think it's almost impossible for any Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth about the situation.
And so the Republicans are isolated and trying to defend incompetence. The Democrats are isolated and trying to find a way to say, "I'm really for strength as long as I can have peace, but I'd really like to have peace, except I don't want to recognize these people who aren't very peaceful."
I just want to share with you, as a grandfather, as a citizen, as a historian, as somebody who was once speaker of the House, this is a serious national crisis. This is 1935 or 1936, and it's getting worse every year.
None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, "Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me." Our enemies get up every morning and say, "We hate the West. We hate freedom." They would not allow a meeting with women in the room.
I was once interviewed by a BBC reporter, a nice young lady who was only about as anti-American as she had to be to keep her job. Since it was a live interview, I turned to her halfway through the interview and I said, "Do you like your job?" And it was summertime, and she's wearing a short-sleeve dress. And she said, "Well, yes." She was confused because I had just reversed roles. I said, "Well, then you should hope we win." She said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, if the enemy wins, you won't be allowed to be on television."
I don't know how to explain it any simpler than that.
Now what do we need?
We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy when they're winning. They understand exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we're living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who won and who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war, but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are that this happened. We had better design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes winning the argument in Europe, and it includes winning the argument in the rest of the world. And it includes being very clear, and I'll just give you one simple example because we're now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly.
Iran produces 60% of its own gasoline. It produces lots of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40% of its gasoline. The entire 60% is produced at one huge refinery.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to break the Soviet empire. He was asked, “What's your vision of the Cold War?†He said, "Four words: We win; they lose." He was clearly seen by The New York Times as an out-of-touch, reactionary, right-wing cowboy from California who had no idea what was going on in the world. And 11 years later the Soviet Union disappeared, but obviously that had nothing to do with Reagan because that would have meant he was right. So it's just a random accident the Soviet Union disappeared.
Part of the war we waged on the Soviet Union involved their natural gas supply because we wanted to cut off their hard currency. The Soviets were desperate to get better equipment for their pipeline. We managed to sell them through third parties very, very sophisticated American pipeline equipment, which they were thrilled to buy and thought they had pulled off a huge coup. Now we weren't playing fair. We did not tell them that the equipment was designed to blow up. One day in 1982, there was an explosion in Siberia so large that the initial reflection on the satellites looked like there was a tactical nuclear weapon. One part of the White House was genuinely worried, and the other part of the White House had to calm them down. They said, "No, no, that's our equipment blowing up."
In the 28 years since the Iranians declared war on us, in the six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus publicly said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to figure out how to take down one refinery. Covertly, quietly, without overt war. And we have not been able to figure out how to use the most powerful navy in the world to simply stop the tankers and say, "Look, you want to kill young Americans, you're going to walk to the battlefield, but you're not going to ride in the car because you're not going to have any gasoline."
We don't have to be stupid. The choice is not cowardice or total war. Reagan unlocked Poland without firing a shot in an alliance with the pope, with the labor unions and with the British. We have every possibility if we're prepared to be honest to shape the world. It'll be a very big project. It's much closer to World War II than it is to anything we've tried recently. It will require real effort, real intensity and real determination. We're either going to do it now, while we're still extraordinarily powerful, or we're going to do it later under much more desperate circumstances after we've lost several cities.
We had better take this seriously because we are not very many mistakes away from a second Holocaust. Three nuclear weapons is a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as they can.
I suggest we defeat our enemies and create a different situation long before they have that power.
I just want to talk to you from the heart for a few minutes and share with you where I think we are.
I think it is very stark. I don't think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for today's talk, it would be sleepwalking into a nightmare. 'Cause that's what I think we're doing.
I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Sept. 10th at which I gave an alternative history of the last six years, because the more I thought about how much we're failing, the more I concluded you couldn't just nitpick individual places and talk about individual changes because it didn't capture the scale of the disaster. And I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called Troublesome Young Men, which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain. It's a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period. And we tend to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very powerful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness, as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven. Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the world, and he was very ruthless domestically. And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into they war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Rohr, and they are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because they don't want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.
And they were severely punished and isolated by Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that's really where we are today. Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political Left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem.
Let me work back. I'm going to get to Iran since that's the topic, but I'm going to get to it eventually.
Let me work back from Pakistan. The dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a day. So we've now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for al Qaeda and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan.
And our answer is to praise Musharraf because at least he's not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan. Musharraf doesn't have full control over his own government. The odds are even money we're going to drift into a disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan. And while we worry about the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have 'em, So why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons? What's our grand strategy for that?
Then you look at Afghanistan. Here's a country that's small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs. A third of the GDP is from drugs. We haven't been able to end the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. And I know of no case historically where you defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on the West are out-bribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year, facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four generations. It's a total mismatch.
Then you come to the direct threat to the United States, which is al Qaeda. Which, by the way, we just published polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it away. I found myself in the unique position of calling Howard Dean to tell him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to both Democrats and Republicans. It is fundamentally different from the national news media. When asked the question "Do we have an obligation to defend the United States and her allies?" the answer is 85 percent yes. When asked a further question "Should we defeat our enemies?" – it's very strong language – the answer is 75% yes, 75 to 16.
The complaint about Iraq is a performance complaint, not a values complaint.
When asked whether or not al Qaeda is a threat, 89% of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can't negotiate with it. So now let's look at al Qaeda and the rise of Islamist terrorism.
And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.
Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.
So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning.
It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, "Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia."
So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.
You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy – in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, "We should wipe out Israel," he may say, "We should defeat the United States," but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?
And nobody says this is totally, utterly, absolutely unacceptable. Why is it that the number one threat in intelligence movies is the CIA?
I happened the other night to be watching an old movie, “To Live and Die in L.A.,†which is about counterfeiting. But the movie starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan from is a suicide bomber who is actually, overtly a Muslim fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you could not get that scene made in Hollywood today.
Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad person is either a Right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government agency? Go look at “The Bourne Ultimatum.†Or a movie like the one that George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it implied that if you were a reformist Arab prince, that probably the CIA would kill you. It's a total lie. We actually have SEALs protecting people all over the world. We actually risk American lives protecting reformers all over the world, and yet Hollywood can't bring itself to tell the truth, (a) because it's ideologically so opposed to the American government and the American military, and (b), because it's terrified that if it said something really openly, honestly true about Muslim terrorists, they might show up in Hollywood. And you might have somebody killed as the Dutch producer was killed.
And so we're living a life of cowardice, and in that life of cowardice we're sleepwalking into a nightmare.
And then you come to Iran. There's a terrific book. Mark Bowden is a remarkable writer who wrote “Black Hawk Down,†has enormous personal courage. He's a Philadelphia newspaper writer, actually got the money out of the Philadelphia newspaper to go to Somalia to interview the Somalian side of “Black Hawk Down.†It's a remarkable achievement. Tells a great story about getting to Somalia, paying lots of cash, having the local warlord protect him, and after about two weeks the warlord came to him and said, "You know, we've decided that we're very uncomfortable with you being here, and you should leave."
And so he goes to the hotel, where he is the only hard-currency guest, and says, "I've got to check out two weeks early because the warlord has told me that he no longer will protect me." And the hotel owner, who wants to keep his only hard-currency guest, says, "Well, why are you listening to him? He's not the government. There is no government." And Bowden says, "Well, what will I do?" And he says, "You hire a bigger warlord with more guns," which he did. But then he could only stay one week because he ran out of money.
But this is a guy with real courage. I mean, imagine trying to go out and be a journalist in that kind of world, OK? So Bowden came back and wrote “Guests of the Ayatollah,†which is the Iranian hostage of 1979, which he entitled, "The First Shots in Iran's War Against America." So in the Bowden worldview, the current Iranian dictatorship has been at war with the United States since 1979. Violated international law. Every conceivable tenet of international law was violated when they seized the American Embassy and they seized the diplomats. Killed Americans in Lebanon in the early '80s. Killed Americans at Khobar Towers in '95 and had the Clinton administration deliberately avoid revealing the information, as Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI, has said publicly, because they didn't want to have to confront the Iranian complicity.
And so you have an Iranian regime which is cited annually as the leading supporter of state terrorism in the world. Every year the State Department says that. It's an extraordinary act of lucidity on the part of an institution which seeks to avoid it as often as possible.
And you have Gen. Petraeus come to the U.S. Congress and say publicly in an open session, "The Iranians are waging a proxy war against Americans in Iraq."
I was so deeply offended by this, it's hard for me to express it without sounding irrational. I'm an Army brat. My dad served 27 years in the infantry. The idea that an American general would come to the American Congress, testify in public that our young men and women are being killed by Iran, and we have done nothing, I find absolutely abhorrent.
So I'm preparing to come and talk today. I got up this morning, and a friend had sent me yesterday's Jerusalem Post editorial, which if you haven't read, I recommend to you. It has, for example, the following quote: "On Monday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said, 'The problem of the content of the document setting out joint principles for peace-making post-Annapolis has not been resolved. One of the more pressing problems is the Zionist regime's insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined.' "
What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, "I don't recognize that you exist," you don't start a negotiation. The person says, "I literally do not recognize" and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is "Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody." And then he'll say, "Well, that's different."
We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the truth to our politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to the country. If the president of the United States, and again, we're now so bitterly partisan, we're so committed to red vs. blue hostility, that George W. Bush doesn't have the capacity to give an address from the Oval Office that has any meaning for half the country. And the anti-war Left is so strong in the Democratic primary that I think it's almost impossible for any Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth about the situation.
And so the Republicans are isolated and trying to defend incompetence. The Democrats are isolated and trying to find a way to say, "I'm really for strength as long as I can have peace, but I'd really like to have peace, except I don't want to recognize these people who aren't very peaceful."
I just want to share with you, as a grandfather, as a citizen, as a historian, as somebody who was once speaker of the House, this is a serious national crisis. This is 1935 or 1936, and it's getting worse every year.
None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, "Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me." Our enemies get up every morning and say, "We hate the West. We hate freedom." They would not allow a meeting with women in the room.
I was once interviewed by a BBC reporter, a nice young lady who was only about as anti-American as she had to be to keep her job. Since it was a live interview, I turned to her halfway through the interview and I said, "Do you like your job?" And it was summertime, and she's wearing a short-sleeve dress. And she said, "Well, yes." She was confused because I had just reversed roles. I said, "Well, then you should hope we win." She said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, if the enemy wins, you won't be allowed to be on television."
I don't know how to explain it any simpler than that.
Now what do we need?
We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy when they're winning. They understand exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we're living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who won and who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war, but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are that this happened. We had better design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes winning the argument in Europe, and it includes winning the argument in the rest of the world. And it includes being very clear, and I'll just give you one simple example because we're now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly.
Iran produces 60% of its own gasoline. It produces lots of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40% of its gasoline. The entire 60% is produced at one huge refinery.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to break the Soviet empire. He was asked, “What's your vision of the Cold War?†He said, "Four words: We win; they lose." He was clearly seen by The New York Times as an out-of-touch, reactionary, right-wing cowboy from California who had no idea what was going on in the world. And 11 years later the Soviet Union disappeared, but obviously that had nothing to do with Reagan because that would have meant he was right. So it's just a random accident the Soviet Union disappeared.
Part of the war we waged on the Soviet Union involved their natural gas supply because we wanted to cut off their hard currency. The Soviets were desperate to get better equipment for their pipeline. We managed to sell them through third parties very, very sophisticated American pipeline equipment, which they were thrilled to buy and thought they had pulled off a huge coup. Now we weren't playing fair. We did not tell them that the equipment was designed to blow up. One day in 1982, there was an explosion in Siberia so large that the initial reflection on the satellites looked like there was a tactical nuclear weapon. One part of the White House was genuinely worried, and the other part of the White House had to calm them down. They said, "No, no, that's our equipment blowing up."
In the 28 years since the Iranians declared war on us, in the six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus publicly said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to figure out how to take down one refinery. Covertly, quietly, without overt war. And we have not been able to figure out how to use the most powerful navy in the world to simply stop the tankers and say, "Look, you want to kill young Americans, you're going to walk to the battlefield, but you're not going to ride in the car because you're not going to have any gasoline."
We don't have to be stupid. The choice is not cowardice or total war. Reagan unlocked Poland without firing a shot in an alliance with the pope, with the labor unions and with the British. We have every possibility if we're prepared to be honest to shape the world. It'll be a very big project. It's much closer to World War II than it is to anything we've tried recently. It will require real effort, real intensity and real determination. We're either going to do it now, while we're still extraordinarily powerful, or we're going to do it later under much more desperate circumstances after we've lost several cities.
We had better take this seriously because we are not very many mistakes away from a second Holocaust. Three nuclear weapons is a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as they can.
I suggest we defeat our enemies and create a different situation long before they have that power.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Jews Decide Their Own Fate
Anonymous Post
We have all read the terrible stories about life in the European ghettos during the Holocaust. The Jewish population diminished with each selection and cut in rations. The leaders did their best to calm the remaining Jews as life slowly drained away. All the while, lavish weddings were celebrated in the West and most mainstream Jewish organizations, detached from the horrors of Europe, went about their business.
Then Israel was born and with it a collective Jewish spirit to fight and defend itself. One might think that we would have learned from the Holocaust, the black hole of our history, but never again seems to ring hollow in the ears of many Jews. Last weeks Annapolis Conference made it clear to me that the Jews in the end will decide their own fate. Israel's leaders attended a gathering, headlined as a global peace effort, where they had to enter through their own "service" entrance in order to respect the wishes of the Arab attendees. The Israelis conferred with people who both refused to shake their hands and removed their translation headphones when Prime Minister Olmert spoke. It is hard to imagine any self respecting African leader willingly subjecting themselves to such humiliation at the hands of white dominated countries. And for this Israel is going to pledge its strategic heartland? For this, Israel is going to squander its proud legacy and possibly the lives of its innocents? For all of this, Jews must accept the shame of betraying their own history. Why are so many Jews so consumed with their petty pursuits that they can not even imagine, once again, being consumed by their pursuers? The answer is that we choose the blissful ignorance of the day, protected in our communities while our enemies prepare for war and our leaders prepare for their next meeting.
We have all read the terrible stories about life in the European ghettos during the Holocaust. The Jewish population diminished with each selection and cut in rations. The leaders did their best to calm the remaining Jews as life slowly drained away. All the while, lavish weddings were celebrated in the West and most mainstream Jewish organizations, detached from the horrors of Europe, went about their business.
Then Israel was born and with it a collective Jewish spirit to fight and defend itself. One might think that we would have learned from the Holocaust, the black hole of our history, but never again seems to ring hollow in the ears of many Jews. Last weeks Annapolis Conference made it clear to me that the Jews in the end will decide their own fate. Israel's leaders attended a gathering, headlined as a global peace effort, where they had to enter through their own "service" entrance in order to respect the wishes of the Arab attendees. The Israelis conferred with people who both refused to shake their hands and removed their translation headphones when Prime Minister Olmert spoke. It is hard to imagine any self respecting African leader willingly subjecting themselves to such humiliation at the hands of white dominated countries. And for this Israel is going to pledge its strategic heartland? For this, Israel is going to squander its proud legacy and possibly the lives of its innocents? For all of this, Jews must accept the shame of betraying their own history. Why are so many Jews so consumed with their petty pursuits that they can not even imagine, once again, being consumed by their pursuers? The answer is that we choose the blissful ignorance of the day, protected in our communities while our enemies prepare for war and our leaders prepare for their next meeting.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Who's being rational?
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
Dec. 13, 2007
LIFE IN southern Israel is unbearable. Since last January, on average, 6.3 mortars and rockets have been fired from Gaza on southern Israel every day. As Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i warned the heads of the communities around Gaza last week, due to the improvements in the Palestinian arsenal since Israel vacated Gaza two years ago, the Palestinians now field missiles and rockets with extended ranges that place 130,000 Israelis under threat of missile attack.
Wednesday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi made clear that if Israel wishes to secure its citizens there is only one thing it can do. It can conquer Gaza.
In a speech at Tel Aviv University, Ashkenazi explained, "It is impossible to defeat a terrorist organization without eventually controlling the territory. The good situation in Judea and Samaria is the result of our control over the area and we will not be able to achieve victory in the conflict [in Gaza] simply with indirect fires and attacks from the air."
Presumably Ashkenazi made this point Wednesday morning at the security cabinet meeting. But apparently, he was no match for his competition.
Squared off against Ashkenazi was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni warned her colleagues that securing southern Israel will destroy the peace process. If Israel secures the south, the Arabs and the Bush administration will get really mad. And "moderate" Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will turn his back on the peace process and reunite his US-trained Fatah forces with the Iranian-trained Hamas forces. Livni's message was clear: The government must choose between security and the peace process.
Livni won the argument. The peace process won out against the security of southern Israel.
The Olmert government's preference for process over substance is not unique. Indeed, it is malady shared by governments throughout the free world. The philosophical foundations of this malady are similarly common ones.
THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks on the US intensified a dispute that had been brewing since the end of the Cold War about the definition of rationality. The two warring factions in the debate, which has raged throughout the free world, can be referred to as the rationalizers and the rationalists. Each side has given its own definition of rationality and those competing definitions have formed the basis of the camps' competing policy prescriptions for contending with the threat of Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors ever since.
The rationalizers include politicians like Olmert and Livni and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and security and policy apparatuses like the CIA, the State Department, the Foreign Ministry and their counterparts in Europe.
The rationalizers define rationality as susceptibility to foreign pressure and willingness to be appeased. According to this view, if your antagonist is willing to negotiate with you, then he is rational. And since he is rational, he is capable of being appeased. And since he is willing to be appeased, he isn't really your enemy.
The US intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions is a textbook example of the rationalizers' view. The NIE, which asserts that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 as the result of the program's exposure and the international scrutiny that followed, concludes that "Teheran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs." And since Iran is rational, the NIE recommends that the US and its allies make Iran an offer which entails "some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways."
The rationalizers' view of rationality is alluring for two main reasons. First, its essential argument is that the West is solely responsible for determining whether the world will enjoy peace or suffer the ravages of war. If Western states cough up a proper package of concessions, then the terrorists and their state sponsors will negotiate with them. If Western nations refuse to make the necessary concessions then the terrorists and their state sponsors will attack them and the nations of the West will have only themselves, and their obstinacy to blame.
Beyond that, since the Arab and Islamic world's rationality is solely a function of Western will, the ideology of jihad which informs terrorists and their state sponsors is immaterial. As far as rationalizers are concerned, there is no reason to close down jihadist Web sites or indoctrination centers. Indeed, there is no reason to challenge the validity of jihadist doctrines and values as all.
This view too, resonates in the NIE. The report makes no mention of the fact that Iran's regime was founded on the values of jihad. It ignores the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters believe that by fomenting Armageddon they can hasten the coming of the Shi'ite messiah and bring forth an era of Islamic global domination in a world in which the US and Israel are but bitter memories. Had the NIE taken these ideological views into account, its authors might have noted that it makes perfect sense for the ayatollahs to be pursuing nuclear weapons.
But taking the Iranian regime's ideology, values and aspirations into account would involve crossing the lines into the opposing rationalists' camp. For rationalists, it is rational for a state's policies and actions to reflect and advance its values, aspirations and beliefs. As a consequence, it is essential to understand and confront those beliefs, values and aspirations.
Just as the rationalizers' views are attractive because they place all the power to determine issues of war and peace in the hands of Western nations, so the views of the rationalists are unattractive because they assume that the free world cannot alone determine the course of events. It cannot influence a society's adherence to jihadist beliefs and aspirations. The most it can do is take actions to prevent jihadist societies from acting on their beliefs.
When Ashkenazi explained that the conquest of Gaza is the only way to secure southern Israel, he was representing the rationalist camp's view of rationality. Since the Palestinians overwhelmingly support the jihadist aim of destroying Israel, it is rational for them to attack Israel for as long as they can. Since Israel cannot change the way the Palestinians understand the world and the meaning of life, the only way it can protect its citizens from murder is by taking away the Palestinians' ability to attack.
PERHAPS THE strangest aspect of the rationalizers' disparagement of the importance of ideology is the lengths they go to in order to ignore jihadist ideology on the one hand and appease it on the other. Agents in counter-terror units of the FBI, for instance, are discouraged from studying the Koran. Their chiefs argue that only a tiny minority of Muslims in the US and worldwide ascribe to a religious-supremacist interpretation of the Koran which upholds and encourages terrorism, slaughter and war to the death against non-Muslims and therefore what the Koran says is irrelevant.
Yet if it is true that only a tiny minority of Muslims think that Islam is a supremacist political as well as religious creed, then the rationalizers should treat the actual jihadists with contempt similar to that which they exhibit towards white supremacists. After all, doing so shouldn't bother the rest of their co-religionists who reject their views. But the opposite is the case.
FBI agents undergo Islamic "sensitivity training" by people who are themselves the subjects of their counter-terror investigations. US military personnel at Guantanamo Bay are forced to wear gloves when they touch copies of the Koran belonging to their jihadist prisoners.
More disturbingly, in their rush to placate this irrelevant tiny minority of jihadists, Israeli, US and European officials willingly trounce their core values of the rule of law and freedom of expression. In Israel, Israeli Jews who build homes without permits are prosecuted to the full limit of the law and ejected from their homes. Israeli Arabs who have built entire towns illegally are ignored by authorities in the interest of avoiding diplomatic consequences or stirring up passions.
In the US, one can stand outside the White House and burn the American flag without fear of criminal charge. But if a person draws a pig on a copy of the Koran in a public library, he is liable to find himself under arrest for committing a hate crime. And in Europe, you can participate in a demonstration invoking Islam as you call for the destruction of Britain or Holland or Demark without fear of legal action, but if you publish a caricature of Muhammad in your newspaper, you may find yourself the subject of a criminal probe and forced into hiding for promoting racism.
In Israel, it is difficult to convince people that the ideology of jihad is unimportant. But the rationalizers have two other ways to convince the general public and their political base that they are right to ignore the enemy's actions and intentions and concentrate on efforts to appease. First there is the fear factor. Given the overwhelming nature of the Arab and Islamic world's hatred of Israel and the Jewish people, Israel's rationalizers defend their preference for imaginary peace processes over security by arguing that Israel cannot afford to fight a war. Far better than facing that hatred on the battlefield is the option of preemptive surrender. As the rationalizers argue, if Israel shrinks into the 1949 armistice lines, builds a big wall and hides behind it, then maybe the Arabs will forget that we're still here and leave us alone.
Politically there is the fact that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party was founded on the view that territory has no defensive value and that preemptive surrender is a reasonable national strategy. To acknowledge that territory is important or that surrendering territory to your enemy strengthens your enemy and weakens you would involve admitting that Kadima's founding principles are all wrong. So Olmert and Livni and their associates maintain the fiction, do nothing to secure southern Israel and seek to transfer Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Fatah terrorists.
Since September 11, the rationalizers have won most of their policy battles with the rationalists and the results of their victories have been both ironic and tragic. As a result of the rationalizers' control of policy, the only ones who consistently engage in the rational pursuit of their interests, values and aspirations are the jihadists and their state sponsors. For their part, the leaders of the free world seem intent on living out George Orwell's observation that "the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
Dec. 13, 2007
LIFE IN southern Israel is unbearable. Since last January, on average, 6.3 mortars and rockets have been fired from Gaza on southern Israel every day. As Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i warned the heads of the communities around Gaza last week, due to the improvements in the Palestinian arsenal since Israel vacated Gaza two years ago, the Palestinians now field missiles and rockets with extended ranges that place 130,000 Israelis under threat of missile attack.
Wednesday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi made clear that if Israel wishes to secure its citizens there is only one thing it can do. It can conquer Gaza.
In a speech at Tel Aviv University, Ashkenazi explained, "It is impossible to defeat a terrorist organization without eventually controlling the territory. The good situation in Judea and Samaria is the result of our control over the area and we will not be able to achieve victory in the conflict [in Gaza] simply with indirect fires and attacks from the air."
Presumably Ashkenazi made this point Wednesday morning at the security cabinet meeting. But apparently, he was no match for his competition.
Squared off against Ashkenazi was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni warned her colleagues that securing southern Israel will destroy the peace process. If Israel secures the south, the Arabs and the Bush administration will get really mad. And "moderate" Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will turn his back on the peace process and reunite his US-trained Fatah forces with the Iranian-trained Hamas forces. Livni's message was clear: The government must choose between security and the peace process.
Livni won the argument. The peace process won out against the security of southern Israel.
The Olmert government's preference for process over substance is not unique. Indeed, it is malady shared by governments throughout the free world. The philosophical foundations of this malady are similarly common ones.
THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks on the US intensified a dispute that had been brewing since the end of the Cold War about the definition of rationality. The two warring factions in the debate, which has raged throughout the free world, can be referred to as the rationalizers and the rationalists. Each side has given its own definition of rationality and those competing definitions have formed the basis of the camps' competing policy prescriptions for contending with the threat of Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors ever since.
The rationalizers include politicians like Olmert and Livni and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and security and policy apparatuses like the CIA, the State Department, the Foreign Ministry and their counterparts in Europe.
The rationalizers define rationality as susceptibility to foreign pressure and willingness to be appeased. According to this view, if your antagonist is willing to negotiate with you, then he is rational. And since he is rational, he is capable of being appeased. And since he is willing to be appeased, he isn't really your enemy.
The US intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions is a textbook example of the rationalizers' view. The NIE, which asserts that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 as the result of the program's exposure and the international scrutiny that followed, concludes that "Teheran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs." And since Iran is rational, the NIE recommends that the US and its allies make Iran an offer which entails "some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways."
The rationalizers' view of rationality is alluring for two main reasons. First, its essential argument is that the West is solely responsible for determining whether the world will enjoy peace or suffer the ravages of war. If Western states cough up a proper package of concessions, then the terrorists and their state sponsors will negotiate with them. If Western nations refuse to make the necessary concessions then the terrorists and their state sponsors will attack them and the nations of the West will have only themselves, and their obstinacy to blame.
Beyond that, since the Arab and Islamic world's rationality is solely a function of Western will, the ideology of jihad which informs terrorists and their state sponsors is immaterial. As far as rationalizers are concerned, there is no reason to close down jihadist Web sites or indoctrination centers. Indeed, there is no reason to challenge the validity of jihadist doctrines and values as all.
This view too, resonates in the NIE. The report makes no mention of the fact that Iran's regime was founded on the values of jihad. It ignores the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters believe that by fomenting Armageddon they can hasten the coming of the Shi'ite messiah and bring forth an era of Islamic global domination in a world in which the US and Israel are but bitter memories. Had the NIE taken these ideological views into account, its authors might have noted that it makes perfect sense for the ayatollahs to be pursuing nuclear weapons.
But taking the Iranian regime's ideology, values and aspirations into account would involve crossing the lines into the opposing rationalists' camp. For rationalists, it is rational for a state's policies and actions to reflect and advance its values, aspirations and beliefs. As a consequence, it is essential to understand and confront those beliefs, values and aspirations.
Just as the rationalizers' views are attractive because they place all the power to determine issues of war and peace in the hands of Western nations, so the views of the rationalists are unattractive because they assume that the free world cannot alone determine the course of events. It cannot influence a society's adherence to jihadist beliefs and aspirations. The most it can do is take actions to prevent jihadist societies from acting on their beliefs.
When Ashkenazi explained that the conquest of Gaza is the only way to secure southern Israel, he was representing the rationalist camp's view of rationality. Since the Palestinians overwhelmingly support the jihadist aim of destroying Israel, it is rational for them to attack Israel for as long as they can. Since Israel cannot change the way the Palestinians understand the world and the meaning of life, the only way it can protect its citizens from murder is by taking away the Palestinians' ability to attack.
PERHAPS THE strangest aspect of the rationalizers' disparagement of the importance of ideology is the lengths they go to in order to ignore jihadist ideology on the one hand and appease it on the other. Agents in counter-terror units of the FBI, for instance, are discouraged from studying the Koran. Their chiefs argue that only a tiny minority of Muslims in the US and worldwide ascribe to a religious-supremacist interpretation of the Koran which upholds and encourages terrorism, slaughter and war to the death against non-Muslims and therefore what the Koran says is irrelevant.
Yet if it is true that only a tiny minority of Muslims think that Islam is a supremacist political as well as religious creed, then the rationalizers should treat the actual jihadists with contempt similar to that which they exhibit towards white supremacists. After all, doing so shouldn't bother the rest of their co-religionists who reject their views. But the opposite is the case.
FBI agents undergo Islamic "sensitivity training" by people who are themselves the subjects of their counter-terror investigations. US military personnel at Guantanamo Bay are forced to wear gloves when they touch copies of the Koran belonging to their jihadist prisoners.
More disturbingly, in their rush to placate this irrelevant tiny minority of jihadists, Israeli, US and European officials willingly trounce their core values of the rule of law and freedom of expression. In Israel, Israeli Jews who build homes without permits are prosecuted to the full limit of the law and ejected from their homes. Israeli Arabs who have built entire towns illegally are ignored by authorities in the interest of avoiding diplomatic consequences or stirring up passions.
In the US, one can stand outside the White House and burn the American flag without fear of criminal charge. But if a person draws a pig on a copy of the Koran in a public library, he is liable to find himself under arrest for committing a hate crime. And in Europe, you can participate in a demonstration invoking Islam as you call for the destruction of Britain or Holland or Demark without fear of legal action, but if you publish a caricature of Muhammad in your newspaper, you may find yourself the subject of a criminal probe and forced into hiding for promoting racism.
In Israel, it is difficult to convince people that the ideology of jihad is unimportant. But the rationalizers have two other ways to convince the general public and their political base that they are right to ignore the enemy's actions and intentions and concentrate on efforts to appease. First there is the fear factor. Given the overwhelming nature of the Arab and Islamic world's hatred of Israel and the Jewish people, Israel's rationalizers defend their preference for imaginary peace processes over security by arguing that Israel cannot afford to fight a war. Far better than facing that hatred on the battlefield is the option of preemptive surrender. As the rationalizers argue, if Israel shrinks into the 1949 armistice lines, builds a big wall and hides behind it, then maybe the Arabs will forget that we're still here and leave us alone.
Politically there is the fact that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party was founded on the view that territory has no defensive value and that preemptive surrender is a reasonable national strategy. To acknowledge that territory is important or that surrendering territory to your enemy strengthens your enemy and weakens you would involve admitting that Kadima's founding principles are all wrong. So Olmert and Livni and their associates maintain the fiction, do nothing to secure southern Israel and seek to transfer Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Fatah terrorists.
Since September 11, the rationalizers have won most of their policy battles with the rationalists and the results of their victories have been both ironic and tragic. As a result of the rationalizers' control of policy, the only ones who consistently engage in the rational pursuit of their interests, values and aspirations are the jihadists and their state sponsors. For their part, the leaders of the free world seem intent on living out George Orwell's observation that "the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The Flaws In the Iran Report
By John R. Bolton
Thursday, December 6, 2007; A29
Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad." He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Thursday, December 6, 2007; A29
Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the "intelligence community" on issues such as Iraq's weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly.All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function.Consider these flaws in the NIE's "key judgments," which were made public even though approximately 140 pages of analysis, and reams of underlying intelligence, remain classified.First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout."The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of "intelligence."Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda.Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad." He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Defa-Matory and Out to Lunch
By Hillel Stavis
Who is J. Lorand Matory and why is he saying those terrible things about Israel and Jews? And why is he “trembling with fear” these days at Harvard University?
Mr. Matory is Professor of Anthropology and of African American and African Studies at Harvard. According to his recent oped in the Harvard Crimson, he “trembles with fear” at the power of the Israel Lobby.
For over 30 years I considered myself an “unofficial” member of the Harvard Community. I founded WordsWorth Books in 1976 and for nearly three decades our bookshop prided itself on serving the Harvard community and welcoming hundreds of authors to speak, regardless of the controversial nature of their writings. In 1989 we were scheduled as the only bookstore in America to host Salman Rushdie just before the death edict was issued against him by the Mullahs of Iran. When the publisher cancelled his appearance for security reasons, we presented a distinguished panel to discuss the state of free speech in the publishing world. We hosted Jimmy Carter twice and Tariq Ali, a voluble critic of Israel. Hardly a week went by without a Harvard graduate walking into WordsWorth thanking us for being a unique venue for ideas or recounting how they had met their future spouse in our Psychology aisle.
WordsWorth was forced to cease operations (like hundreds of other independent bookstores) primarily as a result of the onslaught of Amazon.com and the “big box” stores of Barnes & Noble and Borders.
For nearly twenty years I was a supporter of our local NPR affiliate, WBUR. In the late ‘90s I decided to stop advertising on that station because, in my opinion, the balance and objectivity so often trumpeted by them was absent when it came to one issue: The Arab Israeli conflict. After a number of meetings with the then head of WBUR, Jane Christo and the President of NPR, Kevin Klose, in which I expressed my concerns, I decided to end my relationship with the station. One particular example of the lack of fairness I cited was the complete failure to report on what has often been called “The Forgotten Exodus,” namely, the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands that occurred from 1948 to 1968. Just recently, official Arab documents have been disclosed proving collusion by their governments in the expulsion of Jewish citizens. While NPR had presented scores of stories of Arabs who fled Israel after the 1948 war (it is still a matter of debate whether most fled or were expelled), I claimed that in the network’s 30 year history not one story had been aired concerning the Jewish “forgotten refugees.” I challenged Mr. Klose to find even one story that NPR had aired on this subject. After about three weeks I received an email form him citing an interview with Andre Aciman, a distinguished man of letters and author of the memoir, “Out of Egypt”, that was aired on the Terry Gross show, “Fresh Air”. During the interview, Mr. Aciman remarked that his family had to “leave Egypt” in the 1950’s. Of course, Ms. Gross’s interview did not focus on the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands where they had built thriving communities thousands of years old. Mr. Aciman’s remark was a passing one, a small part of a discussion of his literary oeuvre.
Why am I dredging up this “ancient history” now, you might ask? Well, a few days ago, I decided to spend my lunch hour attending a lecture by Professor Matory, whose recent op ed in The Harvard Crimson stirred up so much controversy. I had never met nor even laid eyes on Professor Matory before his lecture. Imagine my surprise when halfway through his disquisition on Israel and its alleged atrocities against Palestinians, he began talking about me personally, by name, and my decision – more than six years ago - to stop supporting NPR. Professor Matory announced to his audience that I “led a highly damaging donor boycott of WBUR on the grounds that it allegedly broadcast pro-Palestinian points of view too freely.” He made no reference to the substantive and, at the time, published reasons I gave for my withdrawing my support. To my amazement, I was being demonized by the professor for exercising my right not to contribute to certain organizations.
During the Q and A period, I stood up and introduced myself to Professor Matory, who was, understandably, quite chagrined by my presence, seated next to him. I challenged him to provide evidence that I “led a highly damaging donor boycott”. He provided no evidence other than referring to a Boston Globe article which he claimed appeared in 2002. There was indeed an article in The Boston Globe that year, but it simply recounted the picketing of my store by anti-Israel activists.
My decision to stop advertising was a personal one, reluctantly undertaken by what I perceived as a betrayal of NPR’s mandatory and self-proclaimed policy of balance and fairness. I never led a boycott, nor solicited anyone else to stop funding WBUR. As to his charge that exercising my democratic right not to fund organizations I disagreed with amounted to a “highly damaging” campaign, I reminded him that NPR boasts 860 radio outlets in all 50 states, a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars a year and prides itself on reaching more than 25 million listeners a week. The lower end of the FM broadcast spectrum is reserved for NPR from coast to coast and its affiliates receive their federal licenses free of charge. Their demographics reveal their listeners to be in the top 1% of American earners, the elite of American media consumers. NPR is the “establishment” when it comes to the American university community. The notion that a single, independent bookstore can “damage” one of the largest media outlets in the country is ludicrous.
Professor Matory did not stop at slandering only me. He went on to excoriate another independent bookstore, The Harvard Bookstore, for allegedly yielding to pressure from Professor Alan Dershowitz in dis-inviting Norman Finkelstein from appearing there. Yet a casual glance at the Harvard Bookstore’s titles hostile to Israel vs. those supporting Israel will yield an enormous imbalance favoring the former. Nor would The Harvard Book Store agree to carry a book critical of Noam Chomsky; hardly the profile of a business controlled by “The Israel Lobby.”
Just last week, Harvard hosted Noam Chomsky and two passionate pro-Palestinian speakers at the Law School to an overflow crowd of cheering supporters. Rather than "trembling with fear" as Professor Matory puts it, it would seem that his point of view expresses itself whenever and wherever it wants on campus to large, approving audiences.
While decrying the purported “witch hunt” atmosphere on college campuses in general and Harvard, in particular, by “The Israel Lobby” and portraying himself as a victim of a Jewish conspiracy he revealed more than a bit of the paranoid style.
But what is most disturbing about Professor Matory’s apparent obsession with Israel and Jews (at one point he referred to “a moneyed and media connected American Israeli defense force” – I guess we can dispense with the usual coded language observation) is the unavoidable realization that for Professor Matory who was at the epicenter of ousting Larry Summers, Harvard’s President, the Israel and Jewish question was the trigger. It seems clear that for Professor Matory, Summers’ original sin was his opposition to the Harvard divestment - from - Israel campaign expressed long before his (in)famous speech on women in the sciences.
It would seem that Professor Matory has a bad case of Jews-on-the brain. He is beset by Israeli colonizers and their minions on campus: Practitioners of “character assassination, dis-invitation, and other losses of career opportunities campaign contributions, income or friends, and, above all, the damage done by fervent Zionists to the process of intellectual inquiry and debate in this university”. By dis-invitation, he was referring to the wide opposition to the Harvard English Department’s invitation to Tom Paulin, an Irish poet who has called for the murder of all Jewish settlers, including men, women and children (a postition predictably skipped over by the Professor). Continuing his breathless rant he claimed that even his teaching compensation was not off limits for the vaporous cabal: “Even my annual salary is set by officials who appear to feel threatened by my bringing up this issue.”
That a tenured professor so driven by hatred of Israel who sees sinister forces plotting against him at every turn and who spearheaded the successful campaign to unseat Larry Summers speaks volumes about power, not powerlessness. Dr. Johnson famously named “Patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel”. Were he still with us, he might want to substitute the word, “university” for “patriotism.”
Who is J. Lorand Matory and why is he saying those terrible things about Israel and Jews? And why is he “trembling with fear” these days at Harvard University?
Mr. Matory is Professor of Anthropology and of African American and African Studies at Harvard. According to his recent oped in the Harvard Crimson, he “trembles with fear” at the power of the Israel Lobby.
For over 30 years I considered myself an “unofficial” member of the Harvard Community. I founded WordsWorth Books in 1976 and for nearly three decades our bookshop prided itself on serving the Harvard community and welcoming hundreds of authors to speak, regardless of the controversial nature of their writings. In 1989 we were scheduled as the only bookstore in America to host Salman Rushdie just before the death edict was issued against him by the Mullahs of Iran. When the publisher cancelled his appearance for security reasons, we presented a distinguished panel to discuss the state of free speech in the publishing world. We hosted Jimmy Carter twice and Tariq Ali, a voluble critic of Israel. Hardly a week went by without a Harvard graduate walking into WordsWorth thanking us for being a unique venue for ideas or recounting how they had met their future spouse in our Psychology aisle.
WordsWorth was forced to cease operations (like hundreds of other independent bookstores) primarily as a result of the onslaught of Amazon.com and the “big box” stores of Barnes & Noble and Borders.
For nearly twenty years I was a supporter of our local NPR affiliate, WBUR. In the late ‘90s I decided to stop advertising on that station because, in my opinion, the balance and objectivity so often trumpeted by them was absent when it came to one issue: The Arab Israeli conflict. After a number of meetings with the then head of WBUR, Jane Christo and the President of NPR, Kevin Klose, in which I expressed my concerns, I decided to end my relationship with the station. One particular example of the lack of fairness I cited was the complete failure to report on what has often been called “The Forgotten Exodus,” namely, the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands that occurred from 1948 to 1968. Just recently, official Arab documents have been disclosed proving collusion by their governments in the expulsion of Jewish citizens. While NPR had presented scores of stories of Arabs who fled Israel after the 1948 war (it is still a matter of debate whether most fled or were expelled), I claimed that in the network’s 30 year history not one story had been aired concerning the Jewish “forgotten refugees.” I challenged Mr. Klose to find even one story that NPR had aired on this subject. After about three weeks I received an email form him citing an interview with Andre Aciman, a distinguished man of letters and author of the memoir, “Out of Egypt”, that was aired on the Terry Gross show, “Fresh Air”. During the interview, Mr. Aciman remarked that his family had to “leave Egypt” in the 1950’s. Of course, Ms. Gross’s interview did not focus on the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands where they had built thriving communities thousands of years old. Mr. Aciman’s remark was a passing one, a small part of a discussion of his literary oeuvre.
Why am I dredging up this “ancient history” now, you might ask? Well, a few days ago, I decided to spend my lunch hour attending a lecture by Professor Matory, whose recent op ed in The Harvard Crimson stirred up so much controversy. I had never met nor even laid eyes on Professor Matory before his lecture. Imagine my surprise when halfway through his disquisition on Israel and its alleged atrocities against Palestinians, he began talking about me personally, by name, and my decision – more than six years ago - to stop supporting NPR. Professor Matory announced to his audience that I “led a highly damaging donor boycott of WBUR on the grounds that it allegedly broadcast pro-Palestinian points of view too freely.” He made no reference to the substantive and, at the time, published reasons I gave for my withdrawing my support. To my amazement, I was being demonized by the professor for exercising my right not to contribute to certain organizations.
During the Q and A period, I stood up and introduced myself to Professor Matory, who was, understandably, quite chagrined by my presence, seated next to him. I challenged him to provide evidence that I “led a highly damaging donor boycott”. He provided no evidence other than referring to a Boston Globe article which he claimed appeared in 2002. There was indeed an article in The Boston Globe that year, but it simply recounted the picketing of my store by anti-Israel activists.
My decision to stop advertising was a personal one, reluctantly undertaken by what I perceived as a betrayal of NPR’s mandatory and self-proclaimed policy of balance and fairness. I never led a boycott, nor solicited anyone else to stop funding WBUR. As to his charge that exercising my democratic right not to fund organizations I disagreed with amounted to a “highly damaging” campaign, I reminded him that NPR boasts 860 radio outlets in all 50 states, a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars a year and prides itself on reaching more than 25 million listeners a week. The lower end of the FM broadcast spectrum is reserved for NPR from coast to coast and its affiliates receive their federal licenses free of charge. Their demographics reveal their listeners to be in the top 1% of American earners, the elite of American media consumers. NPR is the “establishment” when it comes to the American university community. The notion that a single, independent bookstore can “damage” one of the largest media outlets in the country is ludicrous.
Professor Matory did not stop at slandering only me. He went on to excoriate another independent bookstore, The Harvard Bookstore, for allegedly yielding to pressure from Professor Alan Dershowitz in dis-inviting Norman Finkelstein from appearing there. Yet a casual glance at the Harvard Bookstore’s titles hostile to Israel vs. those supporting Israel will yield an enormous imbalance favoring the former. Nor would The Harvard Book Store agree to carry a book critical of Noam Chomsky; hardly the profile of a business controlled by “The Israel Lobby.”
Just last week, Harvard hosted Noam Chomsky and two passionate pro-Palestinian speakers at the Law School to an overflow crowd of cheering supporters. Rather than "trembling with fear" as Professor Matory puts it, it would seem that his point of view expresses itself whenever and wherever it wants on campus to large, approving audiences.
While decrying the purported “witch hunt” atmosphere on college campuses in general and Harvard, in particular, by “The Israel Lobby” and portraying himself as a victim of a Jewish conspiracy he revealed more than a bit of the paranoid style.
But what is most disturbing about Professor Matory’s apparent obsession with Israel and Jews (at one point he referred to “a moneyed and media connected American Israeli defense force” – I guess we can dispense with the usual coded language observation) is the unavoidable realization that for Professor Matory who was at the epicenter of ousting Larry Summers, Harvard’s President, the Israel and Jewish question was the trigger. It seems clear that for Professor Matory, Summers’ original sin was his opposition to the Harvard divestment - from - Israel campaign expressed long before his (in)famous speech on women in the sciences.
It would seem that Professor Matory has a bad case of Jews-on-the brain. He is beset by Israeli colonizers and their minions on campus: Practitioners of “character assassination, dis-invitation, and other losses of career opportunities campaign contributions, income or friends, and, above all, the damage done by fervent Zionists to the process of intellectual inquiry and debate in this university”. By dis-invitation, he was referring to the wide opposition to the Harvard English Department’s invitation to Tom Paulin, an Irish poet who has called for the murder of all Jewish settlers, including men, women and children (a postition predictably skipped over by the Professor). Continuing his breathless rant he claimed that even his teaching compensation was not off limits for the vaporous cabal: “Even my annual salary is set by officials who appear to feel threatened by my bringing up this issue.”
That a tenured professor so driven by hatred of Israel who sees sinister forces plotting against him at every turn and who spearheaded the successful campaign to unseat Larry Summers speaks volumes about power, not powerlessness. Dr. Johnson famously named “Patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel”. Were he still with us, he might want to substitute the word, “university” for “patriotism.”
Monday, December 3, 2007
Our World: Our friends the Syrians
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 3, 2007
Just ahead of Sunday's Duma elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin took yet another step towards ending the post-Cold War thaw in Russia's relations with the West by signing a law suspending Russia's participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Starting next week, Russia will halt NATO countries' inspections and verifications of its military sites and will no longer be obligated to limit the number of its conventional weapons deployed west of the Urals. The signal the move sends former Soviet republics and satellites like Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Rumania is a chilling one.
Russia's hostility towards the West extends from Europe to the Middle East. During Israel's war with Hizbullah in 2006, Russian military advisors in Syria provided real-time intelligence to both Syria and Hizbullah. Hizbullah's missiles were transferred to the terrorist organization in their original packing from Syria's Ministry of Defense after they arrived from Russia. Since the war, Russia has sold massive amounts of advanced arms to both Syria and Iran. Russian arms continue to comprise the bulwark of Hizbullah's newly replenished missile stocks.
Diplomatically, Russia has acted as Syria's and Iran's shield in the UN Security Council and other international forums. It has placed obstacles on the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has prevented the Security Council from taking any consequential actions against Iran's nuclear weapons program. And it has continued its sponsorship of Iran's nuclear program by maintaining its involvement at the Bushehr nuclear reactor which it built. Just this week, the pro-Iranian IAEA approved Russia's plan to ship nuclear fuel to Bushehr.
IN THE midst of all of this, in their wisdom, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government have decided to accept Russia as the lead mediator in negotiations between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights.
According to reports in Ma'ariv, Olmert has been conducting secret talks with Assad regarding an Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights through Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov. At the Annapolis conference last week, those talks - and Russia's central role in promoting them - were brought into the open.
Olmert agreed to Israeli participation in a Russian remake of Annapolis in Moscow in January. There, Syria's demand for an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will take center stage.
According to the Ma'ariv report, Israeli officials are enthusiastic about Russia's lead role in the talks. While Syria is suspicious of the US, it trusts and respects its Russian defender Putin. By Olmert's lights, this is a good thing.
RUSSIA'S hostility towards the US and Israel and close ties to Israel's primary enemies Syria and Iran make Israel's enthusiastic embrace of Russian mediation with Syria difficult to stomach. Sickening or not, it would make sense if in exchange for Israeli legitimacy, Moscow were to mitigate its bad behavior. But there have been no signs that this has occurred.
Ma'ariv claimed that Olmert's sudden visit to the Kremlin last month was a consequence of developments in Sultanov's shuttle diplomacy.
Perhaps this is true. But coming as it did immediately after Putin returned from his state visit to Iran, where he restated his support for Iran's development of nuclear technology and pledged to complete the Bushehr reactor, Olmert's visit was perceived as an Israeli acceptance of Russia's support for Iran.
There is the off chance that the officials who spoke with Ma'ariv are correct. Perhaps under Russian mediation the Syrians will be more willing to agree to sign an agreement with Israel in which Israel commits itself to handing the Golan Heights over to Damascus than it would be under American mediation. But such an agreement would be a strategic disaster for Israel.
Given the anti-democratic nature of the Russian and the Syrian regimes, it is clear that such an agreement would not include any strong provision for Syrian political liberalization. And since only a liberalization of Syrian politics could cause Damascus to abandon its support for jihad, its strategic alliance with Iran and its development of weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that an accord with Israel would not lead to a decrease in Syrian bellicosity.
Syria's abiding hostility makes the notion of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights strategically indefensible. Without the Golan, all of northern Israel would be exposed to Syrian forces. And those forces are vastly more powerful today than they were before 1967 when they made life for the Israeli communities beneath the strategic plateau unbearable. Indeed, given Syria's advanced Russian arsenal, it would be all but impossible for Israel to re-conquer the Golan Heights and so win a future war.
IN THE meantime, simply by conducting Russian-mediated negotiations with Syria, the Olmert government is conferring undeserved legitimacy on both Damascus and Moscow. By extension, the government is eroding Israel's regional posture still further.
The Olmert government isn't alone in its embrace of Damascus. The Bush administration is following a pro-Syrian policy of its own, with similarly disastrous results.
Speaking to the New York Times of the administration's decision to invite Syria to last week's Annapolis conference, a senior administration official argued, "Look, a handful in the Arab League were saying they could not attend the conference unless Syria was put on the agenda. So we put Syria on the agenda. What did it cost us? Nothing."
Although perhaps no actual money changed hands, to say that the US paid no price for its decision to invite Syria to participate in the conference is to ignore reality. What Syrian participation at Annapolis cost the US was Lebanon.
Immediately after the conference, the anti-Syrian majority in the Lebanese parliament agreed to support Syria's candidate, General Michel Suleiman as the next Lebanese president to replace Syrian agent, former president Emil Lahoud. As Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University told the Times, "The Syrians did not want to go to Annapolis and without them the conference would have been a failure…. The Syrians traded their participation, which did not cost them anything, with a deal on the Lebanese presidency."
Just ahead of Sunday's Duma elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin took yet another step towards ending the post-Cold War thaw in Russia's relations with the West by signing a law suspending Russia's participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Starting next week, Russia will halt NATO countries' inspections and verifications of its military sites and will no longer be obligated to limit the number of its conventional weapons deployed west of the Urals. The signal the move sends former Soviet republics and satellites like Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Rumania is a chilling one.
Russia's hostility towards the West extends from Europe to the Middle East. During Israel's war with Hizbullah in 2006, Russian military advisors in Syria provided real-time intelligence to both Syria and Hizbullah. Hizbullah's missiles were transferred to the terrorist organization in their original packing from Syria's Ministry of Defense after they arrived from Russia. Since the war, Russia has sold massive amounts of advanced arms to both Syria and Iran. Russian arms continue to comprise the bulwark of Hizbullah's newly replenished missile stocks.
Diplomatically, Russia has acted as Syria's and Iran's shield in the UN Security Council and other international forums. It has placed obstacles on the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has prevented the Security Council from taking any consequential actions against Iran's nuclear weapons program. And it has continued its sponsorship of Iran's nuclear program by maintaining its involvement at the Bushehr nuclear reactor which it built. Just this week, the pro-Iranian IAEA approved Russia's plan to ship nuclear fuel to Bushehr.
IN THE midst of all of this, in their wisdom, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government have decided to accept Russia as the lead mediator in negotiations between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights.
According to reports in Ma'ariv, Olmert has been conducting secret talks with Assad regarding an Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights through Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov. At the Annapolis conference last week, those talks - and Russia's central role in promoting them - were brought into the open.
Olmert agreed to Israeli participation in a Russian remake of Annapolis in Moscow in January. There, Syria's demand for an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will take center stage.
According to the Ma'ariv report, Israeli officials are enthusiastic about Russia's lead role in the talks. While Syria is suspicious of the US, it trusts and respects its Russian defender Putin. By Olmert's lights, this is a good thing.
RUSSIA'S hostility towards the US and Israel and close ties to Israel's primary enemies Syria and Iran make Israel's enthusiastic embrace of Russian mediation with Syria difficult to stomach. Sickening or not, it would make sense if in exchange for Israeli legitimacy, Moscow were to mitigate its bad behavior. But there have been no signs that this has occurred.
Ma'ariv claimed that Olmert's sudden visit to the Kremlin last month was a consequence of developments in Sultanov's shuttle diplomacy.
Perhaps this is true. But coming as it did immediately after Putin returned from his state visit to Iran, where he restated his support for Iran's development of nuclear technology and pledged to complete the Bushehr reactor, Olmert's visit was perceived as an Israeli acceptance of Russia's support for Iran.
There is the off chance that the officials who spoke with Ma'ariv are correct. Perhaps under Russian mediation the Syrians will be more willing to agree to sign an agreement with Israel in which Israel commits itself to handing the Golan Heights over to Damascus than it would be under American mediation. But such an agreement would be a strategic disaster for Israel.
Given the anti-democratic nature of the Russian and the Syrian regimes, it is clear that such an agreement would not include any strong provision for Syrian political liberalization. And since only a liberalization of Syrian politics could cause Damascus to abandon its support for jihad, its strategic alliance with Iran and its development of weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that an accord with Israel would not lead to a decrease in Syrian bellicosity.
Syria's abiding hostility makes the notion of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights strategically indefensible. Without the Golan, all of northern Israel would be exposed to Syrian forces. And those forces are vastly more powerful today than they were before 1967 when they made life for the Israeli communities beneath the strategic plateau unbearable. Indeed, given Syria's advanced Russian arsenal, it would be all but impossible for Israel to re-conquer the Golan Heights and so win a future war.
IN THE meantime, simply by conducting Russian-mediated negotiations with Syria, the Olmert government is conferring undeserved legitimacy on both Damascus and Moscow. By extension, the government is eroding Israel's regional posture still further.
The Olmert government isn't alone in its embrace of Damascus. The Bush administration is following a pro-Syrian policy of its own, with similarly disastrous results.
Speaking to the New York Times of the administration's decision to invite Syria to last week's Annapolis conference, a senior administration official argued, "Look, a handful in the Arab League were saying they could not attend the conference unless Syria was put on the agenda. So we put Syria on the agenda. What did it cost us? Nothing."
Although perhaps no actual money changed hands, to say that the US paid no price for its decision to invite Syria to participate in the conference is to ignore reality. What Syrian participation at Annapolis cost the US was Lebanon.
Immediately after the conference, the anti-Syrian majority in the Lebanese parliament agreed to support Syria's candidate, General Michel Suleiman as the next Lebanese president to replace Syrian agent, former president Emil Lahoud. As Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University told the Times, "The Syrians did not want to go to Annapolis and without them the conference would have been a failure…. The Syrians traded their participation, which did not cost them anything, with a deal on the Lebanese presidency."
Saturday, December 1, 2007
The first Christian Zionist
Secret writings by Isaac Newton reveal his views on the Jewish return to Israel
Yaakov Lappin
The world famous 17th-century scientist Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity and revolutionarized mankind's understanding of physics, may also have been the first Christian Zionist, secret writings have revealed.
A new exhibition at the Hebrew University's Jewish National and University Library, Newton's Secrets, which display original writings, drawings, and maps dating back 300 years, reveal startling views held by Newton, which stray far from the scientifically pure image traditionally associated with him.
"Tis said that they who sleep in the dust shall rise again some to reward and some to punishment and Daniel himself in person is named for one of those who shall then rise again. At that time is also predicted the end of the King of the North, the fall of the great apostasy, the return of the Jewish captivity and the great tribulation," reads one letter by Newton.
Other diagrams show sketches of the Jerusalem Temple, which Newton believed would be rebuilt following the Jewish return to Israel.
"This is the secret side to Newton's life. The main reason why this story is so great is because no one could have imagined that Newton would be a believer in biblical prophecy. Now, for the first time, the general public is finding out about what Newton scholars have known for a couple decades," Professor Steven Snobelen, a curator of the exhibition, told Ynetnews.
Snobelen, of King's College in Halifax, Canada, is a passionate student of Newton's theological works, and gave a detailed tour of the scientist's writings on display in Jerusalem.
"Newton believed in prophecy. He thought God controls all of reality, time, and history," he said. "He believed in prophecies in the Old Testament that talked about the Jews' return to Israel… thinking the return would happen past the 17-18 th centuries.
Many Christians thought Jews would all convert to Christianity and that Jerusalem would rebuilt spiritually. Newton has more respect for the Jews, and thought they would return physically," Snobelen added.
The numerous documents produced by Newton on display included Hebrew writing complete with vowel markings. "Newton learned some Hebrew. He would be thrilled to know that his work has been translated into Hebrew and on display in Jerusalem," Snobelen said.
Newton thought the rebuilding of Jerusalem would take place in the late 19th century, and that the Temple would be rebuilt in the 20th or 21st century, Snobelen added. "History has kind of caught up with his predictions," Snobelen said, adding: "If Newton discussed how to put satellites in space and a man on the moon, why should he be wrong about this?"
Newton's radical Protestant theology and belief that a Jewish return to Israel was linked with the return of the Christian deity, Jesus, made him one of the first ever Christian Evangelical-style figures in history, Snobelen said.
Newton also believed that Islam was used by God to punish the corrupt Catholic church, which he likened to "a prostitute."
2060: Apocalypse
Using a time chart, also on display at the exhibition, visitors can see the process of how Newton reached the conclusion that world would end in 2060, in accordance with apocalyptic writings found in the New Testament. The modern Evangelical movement is also known for the importance it attaches to apocalyptic Christian verses.
"He believed in the coming battle of Armageddon and identified the target of the number 666 from the apocalypse," Snobelen said.
"This is a radically different image of Newton than what people think. Scientists are also human beings, and when you go into your laboratory you don't leave your religious beliefs behind," he said.
"Newton didn't see a barrier between science and religion. Some people want to see a barrier, but for Newton only two things existed everywhere: God and gravity," he added.
Yaakov Lappin
The world famous 17th-century scientist Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity and revolutionarized mankind's understanding of physics, may also have been the first Christian Zionist, secret writings have revealed.
A new exhibition at the Hebrew University's Jewish National and University Library, Newton's Secrets, which display original writings, drawings, and maps dating back 300 years, reveal startling views held by Newton, which stray far from the scientifically pure image traditionally associated with him.
"Tis said that they who sleep in the dust shall rise again some to reward and some to punishment and Daniel himself in person is named for one of those who shall then rise again. At that time is also predicted the end of the King of the North, the fall of the great apostasy, the return of the Jewish captivity and the great tribulation," reads one letter by Newton.
Other diagrams show sketches of the Jerusalem Temple, which Newton believed would be rebuilt following the Jewish return to Israel.
"This is the secret side to Newton's life. The main reason why this story is so great is because no one could have imagined that Newton would be a believer in biblical prophecy. Now, for the first time, the general public is finding out about what Newton scholars have known for a couple decades," Professor Steven Snobelen, a curator of the exhibition, told Ynetnews.
Snobelen, of King's College in Halifax, Canada, is a passionate student of Newton's theological works, and gave a detailed tour of the scientist's writings on display in Jerusalem.
"Newton believed in prophecy. He thought God controls all of reality, time, and history," he said. "He believed in prophecies in the Old Testament that talked about the Jews' return to Israel… thinking the return would happen past the 17-18 th centuries.
Many Christians thought Jews would all convert to Christianity and that Jerusalem would rebuilt spiritually. Newton has more respect for the Jews, and thought they would return physically," Snobelen added.
The numerous documents produced by Newton on display included Hebrew writing complete with vowel markings. "Newton learned some Hebrew. He would be thrilled to know that his work has been translated into Hebrew and on display in Jerusalem," Snobelen said.
Newton thought the rebuilding of Jerusalem would take place in the late 19th century, and that the Temple would be rebuilt in the 20th or 21st century, Snobelen added. "History has kind of caught up with his predictions," Snobelen said, adding: "If Newton discussed how to put satellites in space and a man on the moon, why should he be wrong about this?"
Newton's radical Protestant theology and belief that a Jewish return to Israel was linked with the return of the Christian deity, Jesus, made him one of the first ever Christian Evangelical-style figures in history, Snobelen said.
Newton also believed that Islam was used by God to punish the corrupt Catholic church, which he likened to "a prostitute."
2060: Apocalypse
Using a time chart, also on display at the exhibition, visitors can see the process of how Newton reached the conclusion that world would end in 2060, in accordance with apocalyptic writings found in the New Testament. The modern Evangelical movement is also known for the importance it attaches to apocalyptic Christian verses.
"He believed in the coming battle of Armageddon and identified the target of the number 666 from the apocalypse," Snobelen said.
"This is a radically different image of Newton than what people think. Scientists are also human beings, and when you go into your laboratory you don't leave your religious beliefs behind," he said.
"Newton didn't see a barrier between science and religion. Some people want to see a barrier, but for Newton only two things existed everywhere: God and gravity," he added.
What am I Doing Here?
by Zvi Koenigsberg
When a friend told me about CJUI, my immediate instinct (and action) was to join this group and do what I can to help.This, despite the fact that I generally tend to shy away from collective activities. What, then, was different in this case?
What drew me to CJUI is that, for the first time in my experience, there is an unequivocal voice which does not fear to speak the truth, unfettered by the chains of political correctness.This voice rings loud and clear about the cultural, religious, economic, and - last but not least - military struggle the Western world is waging today rather unsuccessfully against the forces of Islam.
The most vital part of solving a problem involves identifying it correctly. Twenty five years of living in Israel and being part and parcel of the struggle on an almost daily basis brought me to an understanding of this dilemma. But even in Israel, whose inhabitants are victim to countless acts of random Arab and Islamic violence and terror, not all understand the nature of what we are facing. This refusal to look reality in the face is magnified tenfold in the U.S., particularly in the mother of all red states, the People's Republic of Massachusetts.
The facts are spelled out very clearly in the blog www.solomonia.com: the city of Boston literally gave away valuable city property for the purpose of building the largest mosque in the Northeast. This, despite the fact that the bulk of the monies came from Saudi sources, the center of all Islamic extremism.... and despite the fact that the majority of the mosque's founders have been found to be either terrorists themselves, or closely linked to terror.
Joining CJUI is the least I could do to counteract the inexplicable complacency of my surroundings in the face of the greatest threat we have ever known to our way of life, a threat which uses our democratic principles and court systems against us much as it used our airplanes .
And this is a threat that fights us on many different levels. For almost three decades, I have been engaged in historical research which deals primarily with the centuries that preceded the Israelite kingdoms,(1300-1000 BCE). I was part of a team that found very strong evidence of the existence of the people of Israel in the land of Israel as early as 1250 BCE. Further we found that the Israelites had by that time developed their cult to a degree that made it recognizably distinct from other peoples of that period. More on this at my website www.thelosttemple.com.Through every step of that research, I encountered the strong resistance of the Moslem world to the fact that the Jews of today and their Bible are connected to the ancient Israelites. Ironically, the Israelites actually did exist in precisely those areas the Moslems claim as their own.
This resistance was recently highlighted by the tenure issue at Columbia University surrounding Nadia Abu El Haj. Again, Solomonia.com provides a valuable source of details on this. The bottom line is that a venerable institution is on the verge of granting tenure to a professor whose work is based not on science, but on the political rantings of an anti-Semitic cult-like movement emanating from two strange bedfellows: the extreme Left, who hate Israel with a passion, and the Moslem world, especially its Arab grouping, which shares this sentiment, and indeed acts upon it at every possible opportunity.
To counter this evil, our organization reaches out to those who share our Culture of Life, unlike our enemies, who revere a Culture of Death. The most outspoken support Israel has received is from Christians who are able to understand the struggles Israel faces. Our Christian and Jewish members share a sanctification of life and recognize the right of Israel, as a people, to prosper and flourish in Israel and elsewhere. This right was recognized by George Washington in an eloquent letter to the Jewish community of Rhode Island. Sadly, this understanding has been eroded in much of American academia, where Israel has been turned into a pariah by the lies and misrepresentations of the Left and the Arabs.
The Christians and Jews who belong to CJUI, however, are doing it not only for the sake of Israel. They are perceptive enough to realize that the difficulties that Israel faces are the difficulties that all good people around the world face, including those few brave Moslem souls who have been courageous enough to speak out against the extremes of Islam.
This is a war that must be fought on many fronts. My days as a reserve soldier in the Israeli army are over. But I can and wish to contribute on the front of ideas, especially those dealing with the recognition that the right of Israel to exist are based on a narrative that has much historical merit to it, a heritage that has laid the foundations for the Culture of Life common to Christians and Jews.
When a friend told me about CJUI, my immediate instinct (and action) was to join this group and do what I can to help.This, despite the fact that I generally tend to shy away from collective activities. What, then, was different in this case?
What drew me to CJUI is that, for the first time in my experience, there is an unequivocal voice which does not fear to speak the truth, unfettered by the chains of political correctness.This voice rings loud and clear about the cultural, religious, economic, and - last but not least - military struggle the Western world is waging today rather unsuccessfully against the forces of Islam.
The most vital part of solving a problem involves identifying it correctly. Twenty five years of living in Israel and being part and parcel of the struggle on an almost daily basis brought me to an understanding of this dilemma. But even in Israel, whose inhabitants are victim to countless acts of random Arab and Islamic violence and terror, not all understand the nature of what we are facing. This refusal to look reality in the face is magnified tenfold in the U.S., particularly in the mother of all red states, the People's Republic of Massachusetts.
The facts are spelled out very clearly in the blog www.solomonia.com: the city of Boston literally gave away valuable city property for the purpose of building the largest mosque in the Northeast. This, despite the fact that the bulk of the monies came from Saudi sources, the center of all Islamic extremism.... and despite the fact that the majority of the mosque's founders have been found to be either terrorists themselves, or closely linked to terror.
Joining CJUI is the least I could do to counteract the inexplicable complacency of my surroundings in the face of the greatest threat we have ever known to our way of life, a threat which uses our democratic principles and court systems against us much as it used our airplanes .
And this is a threat that fights us on many different levels. For almost three decades, I have been engaged in historical research which deals primarily with the centuries that preceded the Israelite kingdoms,(1300-1000 BCE). I was part of a team that found very strong evidence of the existence of the people of Israel in the land of Israel as early as 1250 BCE. Further we found that the Israelites had by that time developed their cult to a degree that made it recognizably distinct from other peoples of that period. More on this at my website www.thelosttemple.com.Through every step of that research, I encountered the strong resistance of the Moslem world to the fact that the Jews of today and their Bible are connected to the ancient Israelites. Ironically, the Israelites actually did exist in precisely those areas the Moslems claim as their own.
This resistance was recently highlighted by the tenure issue at Columbia University surrounding Nadia Abu El Haj. Again, Solomonia.com provides a valuable source of details on this. The bottom line is that a venerable institution is on the verge of granting tenure to a professor whose work is based not on science, but on the political rantings of an anti-Semitic cult-like movement emanating from two strange bedfellows: the extreme Left, who hate Israel with a passion, and the Moslem world, especially its Arab grouping, which shares this sentiment, and indeed acts upon it at every possible opportunity.
To counter this evil, our organization reaches out to those who share our Culture of Life, unlike our enemies, who revere a Culture of Death. The most outspoken support Israel has received is from Christians who are able to understand the struggles Israel faces. Our Christian and Jewish members share a sanctification of life and recognize the right of Israel, as a people, to prosper and flourish in Israel and elsewhere. This right was recognized by George Washington in an eloquent letter to the Jewish community of Rhode Island. Sadly, this understanding has been eroded in much of American academia, where Israel has been turned into a pariah by the lies and misrepresentations of the Left and the Arabs.
The Christians and Jews who belong to CJUI, however, are doing it not only for the sake of Israel. They are perceptive enough to realize that the difficulties that Israel faces are the difficulties that all good people around the world face, including those few brave Moslem souls who have been courageous enough to speak out against the extremes of Islam.
This is a war that must be fought on many fronts. My days as a reserve soldier in the Israeli army are over. But I can and wish to contribute on the front of ideas, especially those dealing with the recognition that the right of Israel to exist are based on a narrative that has much historical merit to it, a heritage that has laid the foundations for the Culture of Life common to Christians and Jews.
Comfort My People
The first Comfort My People gathering was December 2002 and was the result of Christian Renewal Church and Temple Shalom in Salem, Massachusetts extending hands of friendship toward another with the initial purpose to support Israel in the midst of the Intifada. It seemed as a miracle was developing between faith, race and gender that evening and the local newspaper coined the term, "The Bridge over Lafayette Street," as both congregations stood opposite one another on this street. During that first service the rabbi taught of the little known day of remembrance and fasting that had occurred just the day before, the tenth of Tevet, which marked the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and to which Isaiah wrote, "Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins."
We were all in awe to learn that to almost the day, separated by millennia, we were confirming the words spoken by G-d through the prophet Isaiah. And so the miracle has continued over the past five years with seven Comfort My People events occurring to date. While we have hosted local and international speakers and dignitaries, we recognize that the true miracle happens on a the personal level, where we as Jew and Christian begin to get to know each other, ask questions of one another and begin to stand confidently beside one another, especially as we seem to be facing rising opposition to biblical and democratic values we embrace for not only Israel, but for the United States as well.
With the goal of strengthening relationships between Jews and Christians, Temple Shalom and Christian Renewal Church will be hosting, Jews and Christians: A Journey Of Faith. On each evening of November 6th and 13th we will watch half of the movie, followed with table discussion of what was just seen. Please plan to join us these two nights. For more details, call Denette Abers at 978-374-6429.
http://www.comfortmypeople.org/#
We were all in awe to learn that to almost the day, separated by millennia, we were confirming the words spoken by G-d through the prophet Isaiah. And so the miracle has continued over the past five years with seven Comfort My People events occurring to date. While we have hosted local and international speakers and dignitaries, we recognize that the true miracle happens on a the personal level, where we as Jew and Christian begin to get to know each other, ask questions of one another and begin to stand confidently beside one another, especially as we seem to be facing rising opposition to biblical and democratic values we embrace for not only Israel, but for the United States as well.
With the goal of strengthening relationships between Jews and Christians, Temple Shalom and Christian Renewal Church will be hosting, Jews and Christians: A Journey Of Faith. On each evening of November 6th and 13th we will watch half of the movie, followed with table discussion of what was just seen. Please plan to join us these two nights. For more details, call Denette Abers at 978-374-6429.
http://www.comfortmypeople.org/#
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
