Islamist Perfidy and Western Naivety : Which Is More Lethal?

 

by Raymond Ibrahim

In a blog entry for Islamist Watch, David J. Rusin shows how the word "jihad" continues to be euphemized in the West. Despite Islamic law's unequivocal portrayal of it as a military endeavor to empower Islam, jihad is still being peddled as "nothing more than a student laboring to pass algebra, a mom driving her kids to soccer practice, or, in the words of the Cambridge study, a civic-minded person engaged in 'lobbying, activism, and writing' — a community organizer of sorts." Rusin concludes by observing: "Why Islamists peddle such specious definitions should be clear. More baffling and disturbing is why they gain traction among so many Westerners."

 

Indeed, therein lies the irony: Islamist perfidy is only to be expected; Western naivety, on the other hand, which, if anything, should have begun to dissipate in our post-9/11 world, has burgeoned to the point of nearly making the former unnecessary. For while there is no doubt that Islamists (and their misguided Western cronies) distort the meaning of jihad, increasingly, even when the true meaning is in plain sight, America's leaders and media still fail to discern it. In other words, apathy — or willful blindness — regarding jihad has become so deep-seated in the West that Islamists need no longer actively dissemble.

 

Consider: When President Barack Hussein Obama addressed the Islamic world from Cairo on June 4, 2009, he said: "As the Holy Koran tells us, 'Be conscious of God and speak always the truth' [Sura 9:119]. That is what I will try to do — to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us." Let us for the moment put aside the fact that Sura 9, from whence Obama quotes, contains the most violent and intolerant exhortations in all the Koran (which is saying something). The problem here is that the original Arabic text of Sura 9:119 says absolutely nothing about "speaking the truth." The word "speaking" is nowhere in the text, and "truth," as an abstract, is a wrong translation for sadiqin, which refers to people. The verse most literally translates as "fear Allah and be with the truthful." In other words, Muslims should stand firm with fellow Muslims ("truthful" serving as a Koranic epithet for "Muslims" the same way "believers" often does). It is, as ever, a call for divisiveness — of Muslims (the "truthful") versus infidels (the "false").

 

Had Obama or his Mideast advisors and speechwriters simply bothered to read this verse in context — verse 9:111, a jihadi all-time favorite, looms just above, promising believers paradise in exchange for their killing and being killed — or if they had bothered consulting mainstream Muslim exegeses, they might have known that this verse is part of a Koranic segment that deals exclusively with fighting infidels: Muhammad and several Muslims were preparing to invade Byzantine territory; some Muslims wanted to stay behind. It was then that Allah/Muhammad threatened them with this verse to "fear Allah and be with the truthful" (i.e., join ranks with your fellow Muslims on the warpath). Sentences later, this exhortation culminates in one of the most famous calls to violence in all the Koran, regularly evoked by modern-day jihadis: "O you who believe, fight those infidels who dwell around you, and let them find harshness in you!" [9:123].

 

Incidentally, the infidels mentioned here are the Christians of Byzantium (or in Arabic, al-Rum, "the Romans"). That modern-day jihadis, such as Osama bin Laden, often liken the United States to Byzantium, which for long thwarted the caliphate's expansionist designs into Christendom, makes Obama's choice of verse — "be[ing] with the truthful" — further ironic.

 

Speaking of infidels and irony, here is a more recent, a more comical, anecdote: On September 11, 2009, NPR ran a story called "For NYC Muslims, a New Kind of Police Attention," which tells of how "the NYPD hosts an annual Ramadan program, during which the police get to know members of the Muslim community and Muslims are free to speak their minds." Lest the theme of this story eludes you, words such as "outreach," "diversity," and "building bridges" predominate.

 

Here's the problem (first brought to my attention by the Washington Times' Diana West): In the audio version of this report (around 0:25-0:50), the NPR narrator says that "there was not an empty seat to be had at the NYPD's auditorium at One Police Plaza.

 

NYPD brass, Muslim clerics, and community members all stood and listened to the cadences of the call to prayer from the NYPD's imam," Khalid Latif. While this is being said, you can hear part of the imam's Arabic recitation from the Koran in the background.

The narrator's enthusiastic talk of NYPD brass standing in awe of the "cadences of the call" makes it difficult to discern exactly which verse is being recited. Only the last few words — qawm al-kaffirin, "nation of infidels" — are crystal clear, raising red flags. Thanks to my trusty Arabic-Koranic concordance, I have placed this phrase as part of Koran 2:286, which supplicates Allah "to make us [Muslims] victorious over the nation of infidels." Bear in mind that, from an Islamist point of view, the United States is the "nation of infidels" par excellence.

 

And there it is: From an American president who publicly defines his mission by quoting a jihadi-related verse, to American-Muslim leaders who publicly pray for the subjugation of non-Muslims (in the middle of an NYPD auditorium, no less), it is clear that the ultimate threat comes more from Western carelessness and indifference — in a word, naivety — than it does from active Islamist machinations. In short, Islamists peddling misleading interpretations for the word "jihad" is but the very tip of the iceberg.

 

 

Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum and the author of The Al Qaeda Reader, translations of religious texts and propaganda.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Is a Palestinian State even Possible?

 

by  Sultan Knish

 

Last week Obama phoned Abbas, the chairman of the PLO terrorist organization and of the US taxpayer subsidized Palestinian Authority, which is run by the PLO. Obama's first phone call to a foreign leader after taking office had been to Abbas, and his latest phone call was meant to reassure the terrorist leader that despite the complete lack of progress, he was still committed to creating a Palestinian state.

 

There is of course no question that the United States is deeply committed to creating a Palestinian state. The United States has provided billions to the PLO's Palestinian Authority through USAID alone, and billions more through various other channels, including the UNRWA and a collection of other agencies. The first Bush Administration forced Israel to negotiate directly with the PLO. The Clinton Administration created the Palestinian Authority inside Israel, armed and trained its terrorist militias and funded them from top to bottom. Four Presidents have made creating a Palestinian state a major priority of their administrations. More so than freeing Tibet or creating a country for any particular group, not counting the Clinton Administration's war on behalf of a Muslim Kosovar Albanian state, who rewarded us with slave trafficking, terrorism and burning down every church they could find.

The question now however is whether a Palestinian state is even possible? For one thing there is no longer a single Palestinian state, but two states, one run by Hamas in Gaza, and a second run by Abbas in the West Bank, despite the fact that his term in office legally ended around the time Obama was sworn in. The Obama Administration nevertheless continues to fund Abbas, even though under the rules that the US helped set up, he has no right to hold office without an election.

For another thing, both the West Bank and Gaza are run by dueling militias composed of PLO and Hamas terrorists. Iran and Syria fund the Hamas militias, while the US and the EU fund the PLO militias. While Iran is more open about simply calling them terrorists, the US State Department calls them "police" and provides them with weapons and training. The militias work for whichever faction or sub-faction is paying them at the moment. In between they do "odd jobs" such as drug dealing, kidnapping and the old protection racket-- a major reason why all the plans for outside investment in the PA quickly collapsed into nothing.

As of last year, the PA requested 7 billion dollars to "overhaul" its security forces to a mere 50,000 men at a rate of 23 "police" for each thousand Palestinian Arabs. That is 6 times the ratio of the NYPD. Since Oslo, the numbers have fluctuated from 40,000 to 80,000 under 14 separate police forces, which are individually loyal to different sub-factions within the PLO. And with all that "security", there is no actual law or order to be found. That is because "Palestinian Police" was how the various PLO affiliated terrorist militias were rebranded by the Clinton Administration. Most continued to operate as terrorists carrying out attacks against Israel. The rest function as the private police of various officials within the Palestinian Authority. And much as the State Department might like to pretend otherwise, all the PA police forces are not loyal to any laws, but only to those officials who pay them and give them orders.

There is no constitutional rule of law within the PA. There isn't even a legally elected head of the Palestinian Authority. There isn't even a single government ruling over Gaza and the West Bank. There is no economy. As much as 25 to 50 percent of the Palestinian adult male population is employed by the Palestinian Authority, which is its own biggest employer with as many as 200,000 people out of a population of barely 2 million in the West Bank. That's one PA employee to 10 Palestinian Arab men, women and children. It means that with 42 percent of the population under 14, virtually every Palestinian Arab family has a member who is officially employed by the Palestinian Authority. Some more than one.

And guess who pays for all this? The Palestinian Authority has never been self-supporting, it could not survive for 5 seconds without money from the United States and the European Union. The billions of dollars pumped into the PA's coffers go down the line to various officials and their families, as well as the terrorist militias who keep them in power. Often the money has a way of vanishing, as it did in 1997 when the PA reported that 40 percent of its budget just went "missing". The PA employment racket is not simply a bureaucratic blank check though. Jobs are given in exchange for support. The "employees" may not ever actually show up for work, but they are expected to use their tribal and family influence to back the PA leadership. And the remainder of that money goes to the tens of thousands of terrorists officially described as the police.

But we aren't done yet, because while the largest employer in the PA may be the authority itself, the second largest employer is the UNRWA, with a 95 percent Palestinian Arab staff. The UNRWA is dedicated only to aiding Palestinian Arabs and the vast majority of its budget comes from the US and Europe. Again. The UNRWA's employees not only overlap with those of the PLO and Hamas, but it is rife with waste spending more on Palestinian Arabs than the UNHCR does on other refugees in the world.

As for the rest of the PA economy... you just saw it. With over 50 percent unemployment in a part of the world where single income families are the norm and nearly 50 percent of the population is underage, the Palestinian economy is the American and European taxpayer. The few exceptions for the most part work in the same settlements that the world keeps demanding that Israel tear down, or across the Green Line in Israel, resulting in an unemployment spike every time there is a terrorist attack and Israel has to shut down its inner borders. There is no other economy, despite the billions invested by governments and individuals in everything from industrial parks to ready to use greenhouses, there has been no other economy, and there will be no other economy. Which should be obvious when the Palestinian Authority lists Olive-Wood Carvings and Mother-of-Pearl Souvenirs as two of its major industries. When you're listing not just souvenirs, but a very specific type of souvenir as a major industry, you really have no economic plan except to ask other people for money.

Unlike countries like Egypt, Jordan, Israel or Turkey whom the US provides some assistance that comes out to a fraction of their budget-- the United States and Europe provide all the assistance for the Palestinian Authority. That is because the PA is a sham that has done nothing but carry out terrorist attacks, deposit hundreds of millions of dollars in the Swiss bank accounts of terrorist leaders such as Yasser Arafat, and radically destabilize the region. The Palestinian Authority is not just a failure, it's a bloody and dangerous failure, and it is time for its State Department and EU backers to finally admit the truth.

There can be no Palestinian state. And there is no future for a Palestinian state. The entire idea was created as a fallback position by the USSR after its Arab allies failed to destroy Israel in a series of wars, and transformed into a key player in international Soviet backed terrorism. With the collapse of the USSR, the US and Europe perversely embraced the idea of creating a Palestinian state and amped up the pressure on Israel to make it happen. Huge amounts of amount were spent and many lives were list in the process. Israel's survival has been drastically undermined and the regional balance has been tilted toward the terrorists.

 

After the fall of the USSR, the formerly Marxist PLO has tried to make the transition to an Islamist terrorist group, but Hamas overtook it in the terrorism department. The PLO's PA still controls the Wesr Bank propped up by US assistance, until the day that Hamas tries to take it from them. Hamas pays lip service to the propaganda of a Palestinian State, but as an Islamist group it has never really subscribed to the idea of Palestinian nationalism. Its Islamist ideology is not interested in a Two State Solution or even one state built only on the ashes of Israel... but only as a means to building a larger superstate that would include overthrowing the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and a takeover of Lebanon too, and then perhaps merge that into a Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt for the nucleus of a regional Islamic Caliphate.

To Hamas, Gaza and the West Bank are what the Rhineland was to Hitler-- territory they want only as a starting point for a much larger expansion. To the PLO, it's a chance to create mischief and profit by it through foreign aid. Both talk a great deal about a Palestinian State, but neither care very much about it except as a propaganda tool to convince gullible Westerners to rubber stamp their demands, and convince their own people to kill themselves to restore their lost honor. The cynical game would long ago have ended if the United States and Europe stopped forcing everyone to keep playing in the hopes that all this impossible mess will somehow rearrange itself into a workable state. After 17 long years of tyranny, terror and death-- maybe it's time to finally put down the pieces and end the game.

 

Sultan Knish

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Don't Take Netanyahu to the Woodshed.

 

by Steven J. Rosen

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Washington on Sunday following weeks of speculation about whether he would be met by U.S. President Barack Obama during the visit. When his plane took off, there was still with no word from the White House. Finally, at the last minute, the president's staff confirmed that there would a brief meeting late Monday night.

 

With Obama's "trust" ratings among the Israeli public sunk below 10 percent, compared with ratings in the 70 to 80 percent range for past presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, one might have thought that Obama would seize the opportunity of Netanyahu's visit as a chance to warm the relationship with the country he describes as the United States' No. 1 ally in the region. Instead, the delayed response and brief Monday meeting were quickly deemed in the Israeli press as a full-fledged snub.

 

Obama is reluctant to get too close because of the roiled state of U.S. relations with the Palestinian side. After Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's trip to the region last week, there was widespread criticism that her fumbling about settlements had undermined Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's position, perhaps even precipitating his decision not to stand as a candidate again if presidential elections are held in January. Moreover, the far-left cohort of Obama's advisors, rallied by Mideast special envoy George Mitchell's deputy Mara Rudman, are furious at Netanyahu for what they depict as a fiendishly clever strategy that undermined Obama's diplomacy, and they want to punish, not reward, him when he comes to Washington.

 

Meanwhile, the center-left, pragmatic wing of the Obama team recognizes that the administration's early decision to confront Netanyahu publicly over settlements, making absolutist demands that no Israeli prime minister could accept, was a mistake, and this fumble had the added effect of hardening rather than softening Abbas's position, too.

 

It is a matter of record that Mahmoud Abbas participated in 18 years of direct negotiations with seven Israeli governments, all without the settlements freeze that he now insists is an absolute precondition to begin even low-level talks. Obama campaigned on a promise that he would renew U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, but what he has actually achieved so far is to return to the pre-Madrid situation in 1991 in which Palestinians refused to meet with Israelis and spoke of abandoning the two-state solution and returning to armed struggle. By comparison, a much-chastised George W. Bush, who supposedly did little for the region, presided over the 2005 removal of all Israeli soldiers and settlers from Gaza. During his watch, Abbas met with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for talks in 2007 and 2008 that Abbas himself characterized as among the most productive ever held.

 

If Obama wants to get a fresh start -- and how could he not? -- he has an opportunity staring him right in the face. Netanyahu is here in Washington. He is begging for a serious meeting, and he has every reason to want this one to be more positive than his benighted first bilateral with the new president on May 18.

 

Some on the U.S. side may want to use the opportunity to take Netanyahu to the woodshed, to say to the Palestinians, "See, we are being tough with Israel." That would be a profound mistake, one that would convince Israelis that their original fear that Obama is allied with the Arabs and not with Israel was correct. And it would reinforce the belief among many on the Arab side that what is needed is American diktats to Israel, not direct negotiations.

 

If the president wants to avoid the appearance that a positive meeting with Netanyahu means he is deaf to Palestinian concerns, a solution is close at hand. The meeting, or at least the public diplomacy about the meeting, should be primarily about Iran, not the Israeli-Palestinian morass. Nothing is going to happen on the Palestinian front until their crisis of legitimacy reaches some kind of new equilibrium in January with presidential elections anyway. The Iranian issue, by contrast, is at an urgent moment and cannot long be ignored.

 

If Obama were to emerge from a meeting with Netanyahu with their partnership on Iran restored, all the friendly governments in the Mideast would be gratified -- from Riyadh to Cairo to the Mukata in Ramallah, not to mention the people of Israel. Renewing real U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation on the Iranian crisis is a necessity and an opportunity for Obama to undo some of the harm of past mistakes and get back on a track that may actually produce progress in the Middle East.

 

 

Steven J. Rosen served for 23 years as foreign-policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and was a defendant in the recently dismissed AIPAC case. He is now director of the Washington Project at the Middle East Forum and a consultant to the Council for World Jewry.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Getting it started.

by Clifford D. May

People forget how small Israel is. Its entire population is a little over 7 million - smaller than Lima, Peru. Its land area is about 8,000 square miles, smaller than New Jersey. By comparison, Jordan, its neighbor to the east, occupies 35,000 square miles; Egypt, to the west, covers 386,000 square miles.

There are more than 20 Arab states with a combined population of 325 million and more than 50 majority-Muslim states with a combined population of well over a billion. By contrast, Israel is the world's only Jewish-majority state - and 20 percent of its population is Arab, most of them Muslim.

So why is so much attention - and firepower - focused on this tiny nation? Israel's critics say it is because the Jewish state has deprived Palestinians of a homeland. But Jordan, situated on the three-quarters of historic Palestine lying east of the River Jordan, from which the country took its name when it was created in the 1920s, is populated, not surprisingly, mostly by Palestinians.

Palestinians also inhabit Gaza, from which Israel withdrew every settler four years ago. And, under various peace proposals, Israel has offered to remove its citizens from more than 90 percent of the West Bank, a territory occupied in 1967 at the end of a war with Egypt, from which it took Gaza, Jordan, from which it took the West Bank, and other Arab neighbors whose stated goal was Israel's eradication.

Defenders of Israel argue that it is despised for different reasons, not least because it is an outpost of Western values in a region, the broader Middle East, engaged in a long-term project of religious and ethnic cleansing. One country after another has become inhospitable toward its minorities. As a result, Jews, Christians, Baha'i's and Zoroastrians are among the minority groups that have been eliminated, decimated or compelled to flee to more tolerant corners of the world.

There also is the fact that, economically, Israel punches way above its weight. As Dan Senor and Saul Singer describe and document in "Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle," the "greatest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the world today" is found in the Jewish state: a higher percentage of GDP devoted to research and development than anywhere else in the world; more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other country; 80 times as much venture capital investment per capita as in China; more companies on NASDAQ than all of Europe combined.

What's more, Mr. Senor and Mr. Singer believe the conventional and sometimes stereotypical explanations for this success - e.g., Jews work hard, Jews are smart - are either wrong or insufficient.

A key factor, they theorize, is that virtually all Israelis serve in the military where a specific set of skills and values are pounded into them. They learn, for example, "that you must complete your mission, but that the only way to do that is as a team. The battle cry is 'After me': there is no leadership without personal example and without inspiring your team to charge together and with you." The Israeli military encourages a kind of entrepreneurship: the assumption of both responsibility and risk at a young age, coupled with on-the-job experience making life-and-death decisions.

In recent years, American military men and women have been facing and overcoming daunting challenges. Mr. Senor and Mr. Singer suggest that upon return to civilian life they should not "deemphasize their military experience when applying for jobs" and that employers should recognize the skills and habits that young Americans are now acquiring while fighting for their country.

That is not an argument in favor of war. But war has been both declared against us and thrust upon us. Those who believe otherwise indulge a dangerous delusion. What's more, the inconvenient truth is that war, not peace, has been the norm throughout history. And reports of history's death have been exaggerated.

Israel may be a "start-up nation," but it also is an upstart nation. It defies the "international community" by daring to defend itself, and it prospers even while under attack. For much of the world, such behavior is unforgivable.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Another Tack: In awe and esteem.

 

by Sarah Honig

Extreme acts are sometimes exonerated by history. When we view the world through our insular prism, we can easily lose perspective. Things may be swiftly magnified to grotesque proportions, like our trepidation of world censure, for instance. Frantically exaggerated anxieties then send us into a panic of self-reproach. Most often our self-inflicted alarm is unwarranted. Occasionally exploits sure to get Israel into hot water internationally may be the right thing to do. Losing our collective head isn't only unnecessary, it's downright harmful.

This was true even before our state was born, before we could be painted as an ogre imperialist Goliath, when we were history's most helpless underdogs. The world hardly empathized with us then either.

Exactly on this date 65 years ago - November 6, 1944 - two young Lehi fighters, 19-year-old Eliahu Hakim of Haifa and 22-year-old Tel Avivian Eliahu Beit-Zuri, assassinated Walter Edward Guinness, first Baron Moyne, in Cairo. He was the British minister resident in the Middle East. While the Holocaust was still ongoing, world opinion managed to expend more outrage on the two Eliahus, as they came to be known, than it did on their victim's appalling record.

The Labor-led Zionist establishment in pre-state Israel lost no time or vehemence in denouncing the assassination and launching what came to be dubbed the saison (the "hunting season" in which Lehi and Irgun members were pursued and turned over to the British). On November 20, 1944 David Ben-Gurion addressed the Histadrut convention and ordered the expulsion of "all Revisionists from all workplaces - be they in an office, factory or grove... the same goes for students in higher or secondary education, or any other school."

YET, INCREDIBLE as it sounds - given the strident anti-Israel incitement of Cairo's current state-run media under Hosni Mubarak's aegis - the Eliahus evoked widespread sympathy among Egyptians. Students demonstrated for them in the streets and rallied against sentencing them to death. Prominent Egyptian lawyers volunteered to represent them, adhered to the political defense decreed by the Eliahus and avidly espoused their nationalist Jewish sentiments.

Hakim set the tone: "We are the accusers at this trial. We accuse Lord Moyne and the government he represented of murdering hundreds of thousands of our brethren and usurping our homeland... Where is the law that would hold them answerable for their crimes? Though absent from the books, it is engraved in our hearts. Hence we had no alternative but to take justice into our own hands."

Like him, Beit-Zuri told the court: "Thousands of my people drowned in a sea of blood and tears. Nevertheless the British captain denied them haven. He stood on his deck and watched with equanimity how my people drown. And if, despite all, some managed to reach the boat and hang on to its sides, he - the British skipper - shoved them back down to make sure they sink into the abyss... For us, resident in our homeland, who witness all this, only one choice exists - surrender or fight. We choose to fight."

Lord Moyne had blood on his hands. He was personally responsible for inducing the Turks to tug the unseaworthy makeshift immigrant ship Struma - a pitiful rusty sardine-can of an antiquated Danube River barge - from Istanbul harbor on February 24, 1942. He thereby condemned nearly 800 Jewish refugees on board (including 103 children and babies) to a certain death. The disabled Struma was left paralyzed, without a motor, provisions or a drop of fuel, to drift precariously on the Black Sea. The Soviet torpedo that later struck it inadvertently was nothing but a coup de grace.

But there was more. On May 15, 1944 Budapest Jew Joel Brand was dispatched to Turkey by Adolf Eichmann (probably at Heinrich Himmler's behest) to propose exchanging a million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 trucks. It may well have been a cruel subterfuge, but the British treated the unfortunate Brand unconscionably. He was deceived, arrested and taken to Cairo where he was imprisoned for four-and-a-half months.

In his 1958 autobiography Advocate for the Dead, Brand described being interrogated by a British official, who he later learned was Lord Moyne himself. When told that the lives of as many as a million Jews might be at stake, Moyne retorted: "'What shall I do with those million Jews?' I couldn't bear to listen to him any further," Brand recounts. "I got up. If there's no place for us on this Earth, then Jews are forced into the gas chambers." At the 1961 Eichmann trial Brand repeated, under oath, his contention that the above dastardly remark was uttered by none other than Lord Moyne.

With the British pulling vassal Egypt's strings and agitating for capital punishment, the Eliahus stood no chance. They were sentenced to die by hanging. Hakim mounted the gallows first on March 22, 1945, singing "Hatikva" to his last breath. Beit-Zuri did the same half an hour later. Haider-Pasha, director-general of Egyptian prisons, who witnessed the executions, commented: "Today I saw two young lions die."

But despite the political purge, which the assassination facilitated, the Eliahus didn't remain vilified villains. Mainstream consensus is ever-mutable. The imperiously imposed axioms of the powers-that-be were eventually set aside.

Already in 1962, none other than Ben-Gurion wrote Lehi veteran Geula Cohen: "I bow down my head in awe and esteem for the heroic deaths of the two Eliahus in Cairo."

THEN CAME the post-Yom Kippur War negotiations with Egypt, when Israel officially requested the two Eliahus' remains. On June 26, 1975 they were accorded a state funeral in Jerusalem. On hand were prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, foreign minister Yigal Allon and other Labor stalwarts, some of them, like Rabin (as distinct from Allon), keen saison collaborators.

More than three decades after the executions, the British government seethed with fury. The Foreign Office, via British ambassador Sir Bernhard Ledwidge, shrilly protested "that an act of terrorism should be honored this way." The Rabin government rebuffed the petulant complaints. However, it stopped short of arguing that instead of demanding censure and collective contrition from Israelis for the assassination, London might express contrition for its policy of denying asylum to those who desperately tried to flee Hitler's hell.

After all, 1975 wasn't a good year. We weren't popular then, as we aren't now. Israel was indeed close to its current pariah status. It was shortly before the UN (ironically then headed by Nazi Kurt Waldheim) equated Zionism with racism (on November 10, 1975). Jerusalem didn't relish incurring more wrath.

Like now. The UN, EU, Barack Obama's US, all dislike us (to put it mildly) but, as the two Eliahus' epilogue illustrates, ill winds blow over if we keep calm and don't forget the fundamental justice of our cause. No need for us to lose our head because we fear inclement conditions.

Sarah Honig

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Hezbollah and the Tent.

by Tariq Alhomayed

(Nice allegory)

Hezbollah issued a statement condemning the decision to suspend the broadcast of Iranian Al-Alam [news] channel on satellite operators Arabsat and Nilesat. In this statement, the [Lebanese] party said "Hezbollah declares its solidarity with the Al-Alam channel and considers this [the channel's suspension] to be a violation of the freedom of speech and opinion, and calls for this issue to be treated immediately in order to ensure the preservation of public freedoms."

Hezbollah talking about freedom reminded me of a funny story that I received once in an e-mail.

A philosopher and an illiterate decided to travel to the desert and spend a day there. They erected their tent, and after a long day decided to go to sleep in the tent. After they both fell asleep, the illiterate woke up, he then woke up his philosopher friend and asked him "Look up and tell me what you see."

The philosopher looked up and said "I see stars, an innumerable number of them."

The illiterate asked him "And what does that mean?"

The philosopher said "This is evidence of the Creator's ability which can be seen here in the magnificence of this star-studded sky, and in fact if you like I can tell you what time it is now, and even what the weather will be like tomorrow."

The philosopher then turned to his illiterate friend and asked "Very well, tell me what you see."

The illiterate answered "I see that our tent has been stolen, idiot!"

This story is applicable to what Hezbollah is saying about the violation of the freedom of speech and opinion, and the necessity of preserving public freedoms. This is because Hezbollah is lecturing us about freedom that it itself is exploiting to serve the goals of establishing sectarian division and in order to threaten the preservation of Arab society. Hezbollah is arguing for freedom today, however the first thing that Hezbollah did following the 7 May Beirut coup – during which Hezbollah took control of Sunni areas in Beirut – was to use weaponry to attack the media organizations that opposed Hezbollah, not to mention intimidate Lebanese journalists.

It is strange that Hezbollah announced its support and defense of the Iranian Al-Alam [news] channel on behalf of the freedoms of speech and opinion however we did not hear one word from the group about the newspapers that are being closed down every day in Iran. This is something that has been happening for years, and more than 200 newspapers have been shut down in Iran, not to mention the persecution and imprisonment of journalists in Tehran who – reflecting the demands of half of Iranian society – called for reform. This is contrary to the demands of a small group [of Iranian society] or groups who are affiliated to foreign countries, such as Hezbollah. The Al-Alam [news] channel wants to convince us that it is concerned with the Arab world, whilst all that it is doing is supporting the separatists [in our region] and their armed movement against our security and stability.

The Iranian Al-Alam [news] channel incites sectarianism, and is not a television station which follows the principles of professional media. The same applies to the Al-Manar television channel that belongs to Hezbollah. Both of these television stations serve as examples of media organizations that mobilize sectarianism, and this is something contrary to the concept of freedom of speech and opinion. The first condition of this – freedom – is responsibility, and this principle is based on the understanding that your freedom ends when it begins to usurp the freedom of others.

Therefore Hezbollah shedding crocodile tears about the suspension of the broadcast of Al-Alam television is similar to the talk of the philosopher under the tent. Those sympathetic to Iran's agents [in our region] are making the same mistake, and are not paying attention to the fact that the tent of stability in our region is at risk because of Iran and its agents.

Tariq Alhomayed is the Editor-in-Chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, the youngest person to be appointed that position. Mr. Alhomayed has an acclaimed and distinguished career as a Journalist and has held many key positions in the field.

 

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

At Brandeis, Israel's guilt and innocence on display.

by Jeff Jacoby

TO BRANDEIS University last night, South African jurist Richard Goldstone brought his international reputation as a legal scholar, a human rights advocate, and the former chief prosecutor of the United Nations tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, brought facts and figures, maps and photographs, and audio and video in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.

The two men were at Brandeis to discuss Goldstone’s highly controversial UN report on Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli attack in Gaza last winter. The report, written after a fact-finding mission with which Israel refused to cooperate, accuses the Jewish state of committing war crimes by using “disproportionate force’’ to inflict widespread destruction on Palestinian civilians - a policy that amounted to “collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip.’’ Last night’s encounter marked the first time since the report was issued that Goldstone publicly debated the report’s merits with a leading Israeli figure. It would not surprise me to learn that he is in no hurry for a second.

That is not to say that Goldstone didn’t speak well, even eloquently, in defending his own integrity and his chagrin at Israel’s refusal to have anything to do with his commission’s inquiry. Nor was there any mistaking his sincere outrage when he itemized the physical devastation he viewed in Gaza - 5,000 homes destroyed, 200 factories disabled, water systems wrecked, poultry farms demolished - or when he denounced the bombing of a mosque during prayers. “If that isn’t collective punishment, what is?’’ Goldstone asked. Such attacks, he said, “scream out’’ for investigation by Israel.

But Goldstone spent much of the time talking about himself - he recounted his dealings with the chairman of the UN Human Rights Council, his nightmares about being kidnapped by Hamas, his pleased discovery that ordinary Palestinians were “just like’’ ordinary Israelis - while his interlocutor focused relentlessly on facts and evidence. Gold played video of Israelis under Hamas rocket attack, and noted that such attacks had increased 500 percent after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. He displayed aerial photographs of Hamas military installations located amid schools and mosques. He described Israel’s extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and showed Palestinian TV broadcasts confirming those efforts. He presented images of weapons caches inside Palestinian mosques and homes.

It was a powerful presentation - so powerful, in fact, that Goldstone regretted not having seen it earlier. “The sort of information shown to us by Ambassador Gold,’’ he said, “should have been shown to us during the [UN] investigation.’’

Yet to my mind, what was most striking of all was Goldstone’s inability to give a clear answer to an essential question: What should a law-abiding country do to defend itself against relentless terrorist attacks?

In one form or another, that question came up repeatedly. In his welcoming remarks, Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz observed that we live in a “new age of warfare,’’ in which civilized nations confront terrorists able to “mix and melt’’ into the civilian population. Asked Gold, after describing the thousands of rockets launched by Hamas at Israeli communities: “What would you do if your population was facing repeated attacks for eight years?’’ During the question-and-answer period, a student asked Goldstone - who had condemned Israel’s “disproportionate’’ attacks - what he would have considered a “proportionate’’ response.

But the judge, astonishingly, had no answer. He responded that that was a decision for the Israelis to make. He said it was a question that had given him “many sleepless nights.’’ He mused that perhaps undercover “commando attacks’’ would have been more appropriate. (“Gee, why didn’t the Israelis think of that?’’ murmured a voice in the audience.) He even suggested that it might make a good subject for a Brandeis research paper.

Judge Goldstone uses his international platform to pronounce Israel guilty, in other words, but will not say how Israel could have avoided such a verdict.

For the truth is, no other verdict was possible. Where the UN is involved, the guilt of the Jewish state is always taken for granted. The eminence of its chairman notwithstanding, the Goldstone Commission was a sham, and its bottom line was foreordained. The mystery isn’t why the Goldstone Report has been so widely denounced, but why Goldstone agreed to write it in the first place.

 

Jeff Jacoby
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