Reagan's Words and Values Still Have Meaning!

David Lowe suggests , even now, Reagan's words and ideas have value for a world where things are going poorly for the "good guys." (See 1 below.)

Bully for Bulgarians! (See 2 below.)

Hamas gets tough but are repulsed by Fatah. (See 3 below.)

While IDF prepares for further conflicts with terrorists and Syria the actual intention of Assad is debated. (See 4 below.)

Barry Rubin appeals to rational thinkers and offers a message of hope. (See 5 below.) However, Caroline Glick sees Europe self-destructing and the U.S. following the European model. (See 6 below.) Perhaps the truth lies between Rubin and Glick's views but for the moment I vote with Glick.

The House goes thru its annual vote buying act but nothing will happen. Israel is the only nation in the world unable to get foreign countries to establish embassies in its capital - Jerusalem. Gutless fear of offending Arabs.


Dick



1)Freedom’s Prospects: The march has stalled, but a former president can give us hope.
By David E. Lowe

Twenty-five years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most significant speeches of his presidency. Standing before the British parliament in the historic Westminster Palace nearly a decade before the demise of the Soviet Union, he offered the vision of “a plan and a hope for the long-term — the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

Although Reagan knew that “by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens,” Communist regimes ran “against the tide of history,” he knew the struggle for both would not be easy. “Optimism,” he said, “comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.”

Today, throughout the world, political repression is once again on the rise. In its latest annual survey, Freedom House highlights a “developing freedom stagnation” that includes setbacks to freedom in the Asia Pacific region and Africa , as well as “an entrenchment of authoritarian rule in the majority of countries of the former Soviet Union .”

Take the case of Le Quoc Quan, a mild-mannered Vietnamese lawyer who came to the U.S. last year to conduct independent research on civil society as a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. Upon his return home this past March, Quan was arrested and charged with conducting “activities aimed at overthrowing the Government.”

Vietnam is a particularly revealing example. Granted Permanent Normal Trade Status by Congress late last year paving the way for its entry into the World Trade Organization, it is a test case for the idea that opening markets leads to political liberalization. But as James Mann points out in The China Fantasy, the notion that economic globalization automatically leads to liberal democracy is a mirage: “Chinese leaders are entering the globalized economy as rapidly as possible while maintaining controls on the news media. So far, they have managed to achieve both objectives at once.”

Following Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, many observers forecast a new democratic wave — coming, as the Kiev events did, in the wake of democratic upheavals in Serbia and Georgia — and hopeful signs in other regions, including 2005’s “Arab Spring.” But for many of the region’s rulers, the “colored” revolutions served merely as a wake-up call. Most notably, Vladimir Putin’s “managed” democracy has cracked down on dissent while muzzling independent media and closing independent non-governmental organizations.

Putin’s brand of authoritarianism is by no means unique. From Central Asia to the Middle East and significant parts of Africa, including countries where political space had been opened enough in previous years to allow independent voices to be heard, authoritarian leaders, sometimes working in concert, have found new means — from the crude to the imaginative — to constrict the boundaries of civil society. A prime example is the Mubarak regime in Egypt, which forced through a series of constitutional “reforms” last March that entrench the security forces’ powers to monitor private communications and send suspects to military courts. In Venezuela , President Chavez has sought to emulate his role model Fidel Castro by nationalizing industry, militarizing the government, and silencing political opposition, while in Zimbabwe , Robert Mugabe has turned peaceful demonstrations against his destructive policies into bloody police riots.

Twenty-five years ago, freedom’s prospects looked similarly bleak. Surely, few if any Soviet experts would have agreed with President Reagan that Communism’s days were numbered. What was the basis for his optimism? Can it offer any hope and guidance for the victims of repressive rule today and those of us who are concerned about them?

Three themes dominated President Reagan’s Westminster address: the instability of authoritarian regimes, the power of democratic conviction, and the importance of long-term democratic institution building.

As Natan Sharansky points out, what the experts did not appreciate about the Soviet system was that, because it was forced to devote an increasing share of energy to controlling its own people, it was — not unlike contemporary autocracies — highly vulnerable to internal decay. With the Soviet people forced to bear the burden of economic failure, the result, according to President Reagan, was a “great revolutionary crisis” that placed the system on the wrong side of history. But the Soviet system was hardly alone in fearing its own people, since “any system is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders.”

To illustrate the power of democratic conviction, President Reagan offered the example of over one million Salvadorans refusing to be intimidated by guerillas seeking to prevent them from casting their first vote in a democratic election. He might well have pointed to Czechoslovakia , one of the most repressive of the Communist regimes, where a group of dissidents had come together five years earlier under the banner of Charter 77. Currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, Charter 77 not only helped bring about the Velvet Revolution, but today serves as an inspiration for dissidents from Cuba to Burma to North Korea .

President Reagan realized that those who struggle to bring about democratic results can benefit from the support and shared experiences of those who already derive its benefits. Thus, he believed the time had come for the U.S. to become involved in the worldwide “campaign for democracy.”

The practice of international solidarity has an honorable history. One example is the American trade-union movement, which has a long tradition of assisting its international counterparts. World figures such as Garibaldi, Kossuth, and Sun Yat Sen have sought American support for their causes. President Reagan took note of the fact that the political foundations in West Germany , originally established to help rebuild post-war German democracy, had provided vital democratic assistance to counterparts abroad to help bring about peaceful and democratic progress.

In endorsing the recommendations of a study group considering ways to give the U.S. the capability to join this movement, President Reagan put his stamp on a bipartisan idea that had been percolating in Congress since the 1960s. Knowing that democracy is, above all, a long term process of institution building, he described his objective as follows:

“…to foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.”

Within a year-and-a-half, the National Endowment for Democracy would be privately incorporated with a bipartisan commitment in Congress and the support of the administration to providing funding to fulfill the vision of its founders to support democratic initiatives overseas. Twenty-five years after the Westminster address, its work is the embodiment of the idea that, as President Reagan expressed it, “freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.” Established democracies such as Britain , the Netherlands , Sweden , and Australia , as well as new democracies such as Poland , the Czech Republic , Slovakia , and Taiwan , have since developed their own democracy assistance institutions.

No one should be under any illusion that today’s dictatorships will soon give way to democracy, or that emerging democracies will be easily consolidated even where breakthroughs have occurred. If we have learned anything over the past few years, it is that the development of democratic values and institutions require patience, hard work, and environments free of ethnic and religious hatred. But committed democrats, who can be found in even the most repressive countries, fortified today by new information technology and greater access to international support networks, should take heart in the ideas articulated by an American president a quarter century ago. He was correct: they are on the right side of history.

— David E. Lowe is vice president for government and external relations at the National Endowment for Democracy.

2) A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000 Jews from the Nazi's by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats.

Very few Jews, know the story of how all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many Bulgarians of every walk of life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League flew with a delegation to Sophia to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister. He gave the Prime Minister the first Bulgarian language copy of a remarkable book, "Beyond Hitler's Grasp," written in 1998, by Michael Bar Oar, a professor at Emory University . (A Bulgarian Jew who had migrated to Israel and then to the USA ).

This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid for and shipped 30,000 copies to Bulgaria, so that the population could partake in the joy of learning about this heroic facet of their history.


This story is clearly the last great secret of the Holocaust era. The story was buried by the Bulgarian Communists, until their downfall in 1991. All records were sealed, since they didn't wish to glorify the King, or the Church, or the non
Communist parliamentarians, who at great personal risk, stood up to the Germans. And the Bulgarian Jewish Community, 45,000 of whom went to Israel after the War, were
busy building new lives, and somehow the story remained untold.

Bulgaria is a small country and at the outset of the War they had 8 million people. They aligned themselves with the Nazi's in hopes of recapturing Macedonia from Yugoslavia and Thrace from Greece.

Both provinces were stripped from them, after W.W.I. In late 1942 the Jews of Selonica were shipped north through Bulgaria , on the way to the death camps, in
sealed box cars. The news of this inhumanity was a hot topic of conversation. Then, at the beginning of 1943, the pro Nazi Bulgarian government was informe that all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews would be deported in March. The Jews had been made to wear yellow stars and were highly visible.

As the date for the deportation got closer, the agitation got greater. Forty-three ruling party members of Parliament walked out in protest. Newspapers denounced what was about to happen. In addition, the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Archbishop Krill, threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks.

Finally, King Boris III forbid the deportation. Since Bulgaria was an ally of Germany , and the Germans were stretched militarily, they had to wrestle with the problem of how much pressure they could afford to apply. They decided to pass.


Several points are noteworthy. The Bulgarian Jews were relatively unreligious and did not stand apart from the local populace by virtue of garb, or rites. They were relatively poor by comparison to Jews in other countries, and they lived in integrated neighborhoods. Additionally, the Bulgarians had many minorities, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Gypsies, in addition to Jews.


There was no concept of racism in that culture. The bottom line here is that Bulgarians saw Bulgarian-Jews as Bulgarians, and not as Jews. And, being a small country, like Denmark, where there was a closeness of community, that is often missing in larger countries. So, here was a bright spot that we can point to as example of what should have been.

The most famous of those saved was a young graduate of the Bulgarian Military Academy . When he arrived in Israel , he changed his name to Moshe Dayan.....

3) Fatah-led Presidential Guard throw back 250 Hamas fighters in major battle over Karni goods crossing Tuesday

The three-hour gunfight was the biggest assault Hamas which heads the Palestinian government has ever mounted. Casualties were heavy though not admitted. Its assault on the strategic crossing was preceded by heavy rocket, RPG and mortar fire on the Presidential Guard headed by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah.

Military sources add the scale of the battle was not far short of the running Lebanese army-Fatah al-Islam fight at the Nahr al-Bared camp near Tripoli. The Hamas Executive Force offensive failed because its chiefs decided to deploy youngsters aged 16 to 18 lacking in combat experience, which is also why they cannot overcome their Fatah rivals in round after round of factional warfare in the Gaza Strip.

Military sources add Hamas was able to field hundreds of fighters despite an IDF incursion to round up terrorist chiefs not far from the battle scene a few hours earlier. IDF military sources assert it is a mistake to allow Hamas to assemble large contingents for aggression in the Gaza Strip. Had they seized the Karni crossing, they may have surged across the border.

4)DF chief: Army bracing for escalation on Palestinian, northern fronts


Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said Tuesday that the army is preparing for a deterioration on the Palestinian front as well as in the north.

During a visit to the Shizafon army base in southern Israel, Ashkenazi said the IDF is currently working at improving its preparedness for conflict while simultaneously fighting terror.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz also spoke at the base Tuesday and said that there is no indication that Syria, Israel's northern neighbor, is interested in engaging in war with Israel, as some recent reports have suggested. Peretz expressed his hopes that the verbal escalation between the two countries will not evolve into an armed conflict. "IDF is continually training and I hope the Syrians won't misinterpret that," he said.

Recently, Israeli intelligence figures have concluded that Syria's army is training its soldiers and amassing ammunition in preparation for a conflict with Israel this summer.

Military Intelligence chief Major General Amos Yadlin said Tuesday "The Syrians have a lot to lose should a war break out."

At a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting, Yadlin said "[Syrian President] Assad has a regime, he has an air force, he has an electrical network and civilian infrastructure. All these could be harmed in war."

"The Syrians saw what happened during the Second Lebanon War and our deterrence became more effective. They saw that the IDF succeeded in eliminating Hezbollah's rocket threat within hours," he said.

Yadlin added that the Syrians are "more ready for war than ever," but that doesn't mean that they are seeking a war.

Yadlin also said that Israel must prepare for Katyusha rocket fire within a range of 40 kilometers from the Gaza Strip. He said that the Palestinian Hamas organization currently have in their arsenal home-made Qassam rockets with a 13 kilometer range as well as Grad missiles with a 20 kilometer range, but the Katyusha rockets have not yet been smuggled into the Strip. Hamas has also yet to use the Grad missiles against Israel.

"Hamas in Gaza," Yadlin said, "is interested in a cease-fire because right now Hamas is losing. Half its military force has been hurt in the last two and half weeks. Hamas is demanding open passage between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because it is interested in exporting the knowledge it has gained in Gaza to the West Bank."

"Hamas is turning from a terrorist organization into a semi-military force, modeled after Hezbollah, which is organized into units and battalions and intends to fight guerilla warfare in residential areas," he added.

5) The Region: A guide to the depressed
By BARRY RUBIN

Almost daily nowadays, one sees atrocities in deeds and shamefulness in words. Friends, colleagues and readers often write or tell me how depressing it is.

Lee Harris, a brilliant American writer, has a book coming out entitled The Suicide of Reason. (I would only suggest that it didn't jump, it was pushed.) I could give lots of examples, but will let you choose your own.

Caught between the big mistakes of one's own leaders, the rampant irresponsible radicalism of a large portion of the media, and abandonment of enlightened standards in intellectual discourse, it is easy to feel down.

And yet while there is much reason to be disgusted and a good basis for worrying - especially since worrying can prompt action - I tell those who share their feelings with me that things will turn out all right. Western civilization is not on the road to collapse; the Middle East is not going to be taken over by al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on.

Agreed, it isn't enough just to assert that a happy ending is inevitable; so let's look at some key factors as to why this is so.

First, the worse things get, the more people realize that things have gotten worse. Precisely the experience of seeing how intransigent and murderous are the extremists, how efforts at negotiation fail, how past concessions are exploited to bash those who make them, how dangerous Islamism is, among other factors, forces countries to react against them, intellectuals to denounce them and public opinion to shift against them.

THIS WAS THE process followed in the crises of dealing with fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, and with communism in the 1940s and 1950s. John F. Kennedy, or at least his ghostwriter, penned a book called Why England Slept on the first of these three ordeals. Bruce Bawyer wrote a good book entitled Why Europe Slept regarding the current one. Foreign terrorists and domestic fools provide the wake-up calls.

Second, the enemy side makes big mistakes. It pushes too far, demands too much, shoots off its mouth as well as its guns. The ideological extremism, tendency toward endless splits, blatant dishonesty and inability to build alliances all take their toll. The pretenses at moderation simply cannot be kept up. The mask slips all too often.

Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran's Ahmadinejad all provide good examples of this phenomenon in the Middle East. On Western campuses, extremist academics and students horrify onlookers. Most people in the West don't hate their own countries and will be put off with those who all too obviously do.

Third, a lot of the current unpleasantness, at least in the West, is transient. It is the belated tantrum of the 1960s' generation's old radicals. This is not to deny that there are many younger imitators, but the leadership and impetus is coming from those veterans of so many dubious battles, to use novelist John Steinbeck's phrase about the 1930s.

I have found that most undergraduates just don't accept the propaganda they are being fed about the Middle East and other things. Yes, it will have a lasting impact, but some of that will be a reaction against all the nonsense.

ANOTHER FACTOR here is the hysterical hatred of President George W. Bush, or, if you prefer, the impact of that government's divisive and mistaken policies. On January 20, 2009, Bush will leave office. If his replacement is anywhere near mainstream, that person is going to follow more than 80 percent of the current US foreign policy program, Iraq being the big exception, of course.

and in Europe. The more hardcore silly people will carry on, but a lot of the support will fall away.

Finally, I am tempted to quote the saying "the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on," though that could no doubt be twisted into some politically incorrect slur. Let's just put it this way: Don't pay too much attention to op-eds, the rantings of academics (or in Britain, academic unions), and even certain newspapers that seem to resemble campus revolutionary clubs more than great metropolitan dailies.

George Orwell, one of the best guides to the current insanity given his dealings with the last round, once referred to an idea so stupid that only an intellectual would believe it. It hurts me to say it, but such people all too often lack both responsibility and a sense of the real world. They have set themselves up as a counter-force to those who govern and run the economy. Angry, jealous and dissatisfied, they believe they could do a better job.

William F. Buckley, the American conservative intellectual, once stated that he would rather be governed by people chosen randomly off the street than by the faculty of Harvard University. History has absolved him on that concept.

What better way to end than to quote a poem written by Orwell in June 1943:

I wrote in nineteen-forty that at need
I'd fight to keep the Nazis out of Britain;
And Christ! How shocked the pinks were! Two years later
I hadn't lived it down; one had the effrontery
To write three pages calling me a 'traitor,'
So black a crime it is to love one's country...
Your game is easy, and its rules are plain:
Pretend the war began in 'thirty-nine,
Don't mention China, Ethiopia, Spain,
Don't mention Poles except to say they're swine;
Cry havoc when we bomb a German city,
When Czechs get killed don't worry in the least,
Give India a perfunctory squirt of pity
But don't inquire what happens further East;
Don't mention Jews - in short, pretend the war is
Simply a racket 'got up' by the Tories.

The writer is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center at IDC Herzliya and editor of Middle East Review of International Affairs and Turkish Studies. His latest book is The Truth About Syria.

6)As Europe self-destructs

By Caroline B. Glick



The continent of Europe is committing suicide.

Wednesday's decision by Britain's University and College Union to call for a boycott of Israeli universities and colleges was not only hypocritical. It was suicidal.

It is not simply that the British prefer to boycott Israeli universities than say, Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and Jordanian universities where students are indoctrinated to seek the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of Christianity through the destruction of Western civilization.

It is not merely that they ignored the poor, brave Iranian students who just three weeks ago were brutally attacked by regime forces as they sought to hold elections for their pro-democracy campus organizations.

By calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, Britain's academic establishment is turning its back not only on Israel, but on Britain. When Britain's professoriate rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish, democratic nation-state and glorifies Palestinian society which supports global jihad and the destruction of Western civilization, they are rejecting the British state.

They are embracing a culture founded on a rejection of the culture and traditions that have formed Britain since the Magna Carta was issued in 1215. For the past 800 years, Britain has stood for individual liberty and freedom of inquiry - at least for the British themselves. In universities like Oxford and Cambridge, it was this humanist spirit and the justified national and cultural pride it nurtured which facilitated Britain's rise to international power. By boycotting Israel, which itself embodies these British ideals, the British are abrogating their own traditions of openness. Consequently, they are destroying themselves.

And Britain is not alone in its self-destruction. Britain's rush to oblivion is part of a wider trend overtaking all of Western Europe. Take Sweden for example.

Sweden is upheld by leaders of the Israeli Left like former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, (who now devotes himself to attacking the US and Israel from his academic perch in Toledo, Spain), Education Minister Yuli Tamir, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Meretz chief Yossi Beilin, and former Labor chairman Avrum Burg. They extol Sweden as a social democratic wonderland which Israel must emulate.

12.5 percent of Swedes are immigrants and around half of Sweden's immigrants are Muslims. Muslims will soon comprise the majority in many of Sweden's cities.

The intrepid Scandinavian blogger 'Fjordman' recently penned an essay, "Jihad and the collapse of the Swedish model" in the online Brussels Journal. In it he relates the significance of Sweden's Integration Act of 1997 to Sweden's national self-destruction. The act officially proclaimed Sweden "a multicultural society."

Notes to the act stated, "Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin."

As 'Fjordman' explains, the act was nothing less than national suicide. "Native Swedes have… been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have erased their own people's history and culture."

Fjordman cites authors Jonathan Friedman, Ingrid Bjorkman, Jan Elfverson and Ake Wedin who explained in their 2005 book Exit the People's Home of Sweden - The Downfall of a Model of Society, that multiculturalism, as the "dominant ideology in Sweden, which has been made dominant by powerful methods of silencing and repression, is a totalitarian ideology, where the elites oppose the national aspect of the nation state."

The authors explained that "the problem is that the ethnic group… described as Swedes implicitly are considered to be nationalists, and thereby are viewed as racists."

Like the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, multiculturalism identifies the Jews and the Americans as its chief enemies. Both must be defeated for their refusal to destroy themselves and merge into the post-national thought stream. And like their 20th century predecessors, the multiculturalists of today embrace radical Muslims who share their rejection of Judaism and Americanism.

The multiculturalists convince their societies to accept their own destruction by indoctrinating their fellow citizens through their education systems and media. A recent poll of Swedes between the ages of 15-20 showed that 90 percent had never heard of the Soviet gulag.

Needless to say, the consequences of this state of affairs are not localized to Europe. As they do towards their own people, the European elites work tirelessly to subvert American and Israeli cultural confidence and to undermine every action the two nations take to combat the forces of global jihad. Whether by condemning the US incarceration of jihadists at Guantanamo Bay, claiming that Zionism is racism, attacking the US campaign in Iraq, financing Israeli anti-Zionist pressure groups and the Palestinian Authority, or insisting that Iran should be negotiated with, the EU works to compel the US and Israel to stand down rather than defend themselves and to convince American and Israeli societies that we are unworthy of being defended.

Disturbingly, rather than face-up to Europe's self-destruction and give it a wide berth, led by our own post-national elites, Israel and the US are adopting the European model of cultural collapse.

The most recent example of the Israeli elites' subversion of their country is Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's assault on the Jewish National Fund.

Since it was chartered by Theodor Herzl in 1901, financed by donations from Jews throughout the world, the JNF has purchased land to promote settlement of the land by the Jewish people. The JNF owns some 2.5 million hectares of land.

In 1961, the JNF signed an agreement with the Israel Lands Authority which authorized the ILA to manage JNF lands in accordance with the JNF charter. In 2004, the anti-Jewish Arab Israeli pressure group Adalah petitioned the Supreme Court demanding that the ILA enable non-Jews to settle on JNF lands. Adalah alleged that by acting in accordance with the JNF charter, the ILA discriminates against Arabs.

Rather than reject Adalah's claim on its face, or at a minimum cancel the 1961 agreement and enable JNF to manage its own lands, Mazuz sided with Adalah. Last week he ordered the JNF to stop operating in accordance with its charter. That is, Mazuz effectively and with no legal authority, expropriated the property of the Jewish people.

In so doing, the Attorney General of the Jewish state essentially decided that Zionism is a form of racism and that the Jewish people have no special rights to the Land of Israel. No doubt the Swedes are proud of him.

The Olmert government has likewise embraced the European model of national collapse. Rather than defend Israel's citizens from our enemies and cultivate the Jewish character of the state, the government seeks to appease the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Egyptians and the Europeans at the expense of Israel's citizenry.

At the invitation of successive Israeli governments, Europeans forces are deployed today in Hebron, in Gaza and along Israel's northern border with Lebanon. These European forces have done nothing to prevent the Palestinians from arming, training and attacking Israel. Along the Lebanese border, since last summer's war, the Europeans have similarly done nothing to prevent Hizbullah from rebuilding its arsenals and reasserting its control over southern Lebanon.

And this is to be expected. As Europeans perceive their interests, they are better off appeasing the Arabs and the Iranians and condemning Israel and the US for every step we take to combat the forces of global jihad committed to our destruction.

Rather than acknowledge this reality and work to remove the Europeans from our midst, the Olmert government is exacerbating the problem. In recent weeks, the government has asked the Europeans to increase the size of their forces along the Gaza-Egypt border. Thursday Minister for Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman recommended that NATO forces be deployed in Gaza. Similarly, Minister Rafi Eitan and far-left Meretz MKs Zahava Gal-On and Avshalom Vilan are calling for Arab League forces to be deployed to Gaza. Gal-On and Vilan envision the Arabs and the Europeans jointly take control over Gaza. For his part, Eitan is recommending that Arab armies deploy to Judea and Samaria as well.

In the US, the situation is depressingly similar. At leading universities, professors and students who openly support Israel and the US campaign in Iraq are hounded and isolated. In keeping with the general anti-American and anti-Israel gestalt on college campuses, last year Harvard University invited former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami to speak on campus. Harvard ignored Khatami's stewardship of the Iranian nuclear program during his tenure. His role in violently quelling the student democracy movement in 1999 and 2003 was similarly overlooked.

The Bush administration's foreign policy has likewise been Europeanized. Five years after President George W. Bush placed Iran and North Korea firmly in the axis of evil, the State Department is working overtime to appease them both. In line with this policy, on Tuesday, Iran's announcement that it had arrested five US citizens and is charging them with espionage was greeted by embarrassment and paralysis in Washington. Just the day before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had dispatched the US ambassador in Baghdad to meet with his Iranian counterpart.

The US's treatment of North Korea is perhaps even more dramatic. Rather than abandon its appeasement policy towards Pyongyang after the North Koreans breached their commitment to close their nuclear facility at Yongbyon in April, the Bush administration has redoubled its efforts to placate the Stalinist dictatorship. Not only did the US have little to say about the North Korean short-range missile tests over Japan last week. It sent its emissaries to Beijing this week to attempt to buy North Korean compliance with its breached commitment by unfreezing Pyongyangs's bank accounts in Macau. The US treasury froze those accounts when it discovered that they were being used to launder profits from counterfeit US currency and drug deals.

Then there is the US's refusal to abandon pressure on Israel to appease the Palestinians. At a time when jihadists from Iraq have panned out to Lebanon and Algeria and are actively working to overthrow those countries' governments, Tuesday Rice claimed that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is "at the core of a lot of problems in the region."

During the Cold War, protected by the US military, Europeans could embrace cultural and national suicide without fearing the consequences of their actions. Now faced with those consequences, the Europeans have embraced their own destruction rather than abandon their multicultural model and its concomitant anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.

Israel and the US do not have anyone else to defend them. And in spite of the rantings of their cultural, media and academic elites, the Israeli and American people have no interest in committing national suicide. In light of this, both countries must move swiftly to end the Europeanization of their cultures and policies.

7) House of Representatives: Move US embassy to Jerusalem
by Yitzhak Benhorin
‘In six days of war, Israel reunited the city which had been artificially divided for 19 years,’ resolution says


The House of Representatives on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution calling on President George W. Bush to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, this on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War.


The senate is expected to approve a similar motion later in the day.



In the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 Congress determined that Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel and that the U.S. Embassy should be established there no later than May 31, 1999.



However, the Clinton and Bush administrations have refrained from moving the embassy for fear of riots against American embassies in
Arab countries and a possible decline in the US's status.


“The House congratulates the citizens of Israel on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War in which Israel defeated enemies aiming to destroy the Jewish State. Jerusalem has been the focal point of Jewish religious devotion and the site of a continuous Jewish presence for over three millennia, with a Jewish majority since at least 1896,” the resolution said.


“The vibrant Jewish population of the historic Old City of Jerusalem was driven out by force during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In six days of war, Israel defeated those forces seeking its destruction and reunited the city of Jerusalem which had been artificially divided for 19 years.”