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Resolution 242 is the cornerstone for what it calls “a just and lasting peace.” It calls for a negotiated solution based on “secure and recognized boundaries” – recognizing the flaws in Israel’s previous temporary borders – the 1948 Armistice lines or the “Green Line” – by not calling upon Israel to withdraw from ‘all occupied territories,’ but rather “from territories occupied.”
The United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242 in 1967 following the Six-Day War. It followed Israel ’s takeover of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt , the Golan Heights from Syria , and the West Bank from Jordan Israel
Resolution 242 was adopted on November 22, 1967, more than five months after the war. Although Israel launched a pre-emptive and surprise strike at Egypt on June 5, 1967, this was a response to months of belligerent declarations and actions by its Arab neighbors that triggered the war: 465,000 enemy troops, more than 2,880 tanks and 810 aircrafts, preparing for war, surrounded Israel in the weeks leading up to June 5, 1967. In addition, Egypt had imposed an illegal blockade against Israeli shipping by closing the Straits of Tiran, the Israeli outlet to the Red Sea and Israel ’s only supply route to Asia – an act of aggression – in total violation of international law. In legal parlance, those hostile acts are recognized by the Law of Nations as a casus belli [Latin: Justification for acts of war].
The Arab measures went beyond mere power projection. Arab states did not plan merely to attack Israel to dominate it or grab territory; their objective was to destroy Israel
§ “We intend to open a general assault against Israel Israel
§ “The sole method we shall apply against Israel
§ “I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.” (Syrian Defense Minister Hafez al-Assad, May 20, 1967)
§ “The existence of Israel Israel
Arab declarations about destroying Israel were made preceding the war when control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as Sinai and the Golan Heights, were not in Israel’s hands, and no so-called Israeli occupation existed.
That is why the UN Security Council recognized that Israel had acquired the territory from Egypt , Jordan , and Syria
Although Resolution 242 refers to “the inadmissibility” of acquiring territory by force, a statement used in nearly all UN resolutions relating to Israel, Professor, Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, former President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, explains that the principle of “acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible” must be read together with other principles:
“Namely, that no legal right shall spring from a wrong, and the Charter principle that the Members of the United Nations shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”
Resolution 242 immediately follows to emphasize the “need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security.”
While Resolution 242 may call upon Israel to withdraw from territory it captured during the war, the UN recognized that Israel cannot return to the non-secure borders existing before the Six-Day War that invited aggression – frontiers that the usually mild-mannered and eloquent former Israeli diplomat, the late Abba Eban, branded “Auschwitz borders.”
The Meaning of the Words “All” & “The”
As noted above, the UN adopted Resolution 242 in late November 1967, five months after the Six-Day War ended. It took that long because intense and deliberate negotiations were needed to carefully craft a document that met the Arabs’ demand for a return of land, and Israel’s requirement that the Arabs recognize Israel’s legitimacy, to make a lasting peace.
It also took that long because each word in the resolution was deliberately chosen and certain words were deliberately omitted, according to negotiators who drafted the resolution.
So although Arab officials claim Resolution 242 requires Israel
The wording of UN Resolution 242 clearly reflects the contention that none of the territories were occupied territories taken by force in an unjust war.
Because the Arabs were clearly the aggressors, nowhere in UN Security Council Resolutions 242 is Israel
The minutes of the six month ‘debate’ over the wording of Resolution 242, as noted above, showing that draft resolutions attempted to brand Israel an aggressor and illegal occupier as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War, were all defeated by either the UN General Assembly or the Security Council.
Professor Eugene Rostow, then U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, went on record in 1991 to make this clear:
“Resolution 242, which as undersecretary of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969 I helped produce, calls on the parties to make peace and allows Israel to administer the territories it occupied in 1967 until ‘a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’ is achieved. When such a peace is made, Israel is required to withdraw its armed forces ‘from territories’ it occupied during the Six-Day War - not from ‘the’ territories nor from ‘all’ the territories, but from some of the territories, which included the Sinai Desert, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.”
Professor Rostow continues and describes:
“Five-and-a-half months of vehement public diplomacy in 1967 made it perfectly clear what the missing definite article in Resolution 242 means. Ingeniously drafted resolutions calling for withdrawals from ‘all’ the territories were defeated in the Security Council and the General Assembly. Speaker after speaker made it explicit that Israel
Lord Caradon, then the United Kingdom
“We knew that the boundaries of ’67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers; they were a cease-fire line of a couple decades earlier. We did not say the ’67 boundaries must be forever.”
Referring to Resolution 242, Lord Caradon added:
“The essential phrase which is not sufficiently recognized is that withdrawal should take place to secure and recognized boundaries, and these words were very carefully chosen: they have to be secure and they have to be recognized. They will not be secure unless they are recognized. And that is why one has to work for agreement. This is essential. I would defend absolutely what we did. It was not for us to lay down exactly where the border should be. I know the 1967 border very well. It is not a satisfactory border, it is where troops had to stop in 1947, just where they happened to be that night, that is not a permanent boundary ...”
In a 1974 statement he said:
“It would have been wrong to demand that Israel
It is true, as Arab leaders correctly note, that certain suggested drafts of Resolution 242 exist that contain that tiny controversial “the” in reference to territories. Arab leaders say this proves that Israel
Arthur J. Goldberg, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN in 1967 and a key draftee of Resolution 242, stated:
“The notable omissions in language used to refer to withdrawal are the words the, all, and the June 5, 1967 lines. I refer to the English text of the resolution. The French and Soviet texts differ from the English in this respect, but the English text was voted on by the Security Council, and thus it is determinative. In other words, there is lacking a declaration requiring Israel
Political figures and international jurists have discussed the existence of “permissible” or “legal occupations.” In a seminal article on this question, entitled What Weight to Conquest,Professor, Judge Schwebel wrote:
“A state [Israel
“As between Israel, acting defensively in 1948 and 1967, on the one hand, and her Arab neighbors, acting aggressively, in 1948 and 1967, on the other, Israel has the better title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem, than do Jordan and Egypt.”
Professor Julius Stone, a leading authority on the Law of Nations, has concurred, further clarifying:
“Territorial rights under International Law. ... By their [Arab countries] armed attacks against the State of Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973, and by various acts of belligerency throughout this period, these Arab states flouted their basic obligations as United Nations members to refrain from threat or use of force against Israel
The Drafting History of 242 Shows it Pertains to all Refugees – Jewish and Arab
Lastly, Resolution 242 speaks of “a just settlement of the refugee problem,” not ‘the Palestinian or Arab refugee problem.’ The history of the resolution shows that it was intentional and reflected recognition that the Arab-Israeli conflict created two refugee populations, not one. Parallel to the estimated 600,000 Arabs who left Israel , more than 899,000 Jews fled from Arab countries in the aftermath of the 1948 war – 650,000 of them finding asylum in Israel
A history of the behind-the-scenes work drafting the resolution shows that the former Soviet Union Ambassador Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kuznetsov sought to restrict the term ‘just settlement’ to Palestinian refugees only. But former U.S. Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, the American Ambassador to the UN who played a key role in the ultimate language adopted, pointed out:
“A notable omission in 242 is any reference to Palestinians, a Palestinian state on the West Bank or the PLO. The resolution addresses the objective of ‘achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.’ This language presumably refers both to Arab and Jewish refugees, for about an equal number of each abandoned their homes as a result of the several wars.”
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Wiedemer to Moneynews: Brace for ‘Big Dip’ in Stocks if Obama Re-elected
Stocks have been falling hard during the last couple of days, as companies have been missing their third-quarter earnings, though more unsettling is that revenues have been coming in lower than expected, which reflects a cooling global economy.
An Obama win could make things worse on Wall Street.
“I think there will be a bounce if Romney gets elected. I think it could be a significant bounce. If Obama gets re-elected, that’s a big dip,” Wiedemer told Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview.
“Whether it’s the Vegas odds or if it’s the word on the street, I think people are assuming that Obama is the likely one to win re-election. So I wouldn’t expect any type of bounce there. Obviously Wall Street is not a big fan of Obama, so you might even see a decline,” added Wiedemer, a managing director of Absolute Investment Management, an investment-advisory firm for individuals with more than $200 million under management.
“If you see Romney win, there will be a bounce. The question is how long will it last.”
The third-quarter earnings season is under way, and big companies like DuPont and 3M have missed revenue expectations.
Declining sales reflects a slowing global economy, and further downward revisions to year-end earnings that have hit the wire as of late have rattled nerves even more, sending stock indices plunging.
“Revenue growth was over 10 percent for the S&P 500 a year ago, and now we are probably going to head into negative revenue growth,” he said.
“This is a trend and it’s been trending down each quarter, so I think we are going to see that people are starting to wake up and see that there are some real problems in the world economy and in the U.S. economy, and that’s going to reflect to some degree on earnings now. But those revenue misses will definitely reflect earnings problems going forward.”
Turning to reports that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke might step down after his term ends in January 2014, Wiedemer said such a decision would come while the Fed could be battling major inflationary pressures.
The Fed has announced it will spend $40 billion a month buying mortgage-backed securities from banks to pump liquidity into the financial system in a way that pushes down interest rates across the broader economy to spur recovery, a monetary policy measure known as quantitative easing.
Side effects to such a policy tool include a weaker dollar, rising stock and commodity prices and mounting inflationary pressures.
The move comes in the wake of two previous rounds of quantitative easing rolled out under Bernanke that pumped a combined $2.3 trillion in inflation-fueling liquidity into the economy.
“I have always joked a little bit with people that the Fed pretty soon — within a few of years — is going to be between a rock and a hard place, where trying to keep interest rates down means printing a lot of money,” Wiedemer noted.
“That is going to create inflation, forcing interest rates up. The only way to beat that inflation is to basically pull that money back out of the system, which will raise interest rates,” he added. “Either way you are dead, you are between a rock and a hard place. Either inflation will push them up, or the Fed will have to push them up to kill inflation.”
So where should investors hide their money?
For those who think companies will bounce back at least for now, high-dividend stocks are a good place. For those who are a little more pessimistic, a mix of high-dividend stocks and gold make a good refuge.
“If you assume there is going to be a bounce back, the high-dividend stocks are not a bad place to be. I certainly like those,” Wiedemer said.
“If you think it is going to go slower, which is more like myself, I’d also hedge with a little bit of gold and maybe some high-dividend stocks. I can’t say the market is down for the count now.”
About Robert Wiedemer
Robert Wiedemer is a managing director of Absolute Investment Management, an investment-advisory firm for individuals with more than $200 million under management. He is a regular contributor to Financial Intelligence Report, the flagship investment newsletter of Newsmax Media. Click Here to read more of his articles. Discover more about his book, "Aftershock," by Clicking Here Now.
© 2012 Moneynews. All rights reserved.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)-The Unilateral Withdrawal Syndrome
Moshe Arens - Haaretz, June 5th, 2012
It seems that some of our military men turned politicians are suffering from the unilateral withdrawal syndrome. It may be typical of the military mindset: Get it over with! Finish the job! Do something! Do anything! Actually, on some occasion that may be the correct strategy. It usually comes under the heading of “Cut your losses”. But often it may be the wrong way to go.
Two of our illustrious military leaders seem to have been afflicted by this syndrome. One was Ariel Sharon, who peremptorily decided on the unilateral withdrawal from Gush Katif and the forceful uprooting of 8000 Israeli citizens from their homes, in the expectation that that move would ease Israel’s defense problems and advance the peace process. The other is the present Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, who has a long record of espousing unilateral withdrawals in the expectation that therein lay the solution to our problems, or else that that was the way to evade an oncoming Tsunami which he thought he saw approaching on the horizon.
His first opportunity came in 2000, when as Prime Minister and Defense Minister (he insisted on holding both positions), he decided on the unilateral withdrawal from the south Lebanon security zone, abandoning Israel’s ally, the South Lebanon Army, and bringing the Hezbollah terrorists up to the border fence in the north. He expected that this move would transform Hezbollah from a terrorist organization into a Lebanese political party which would abandon its policy of launching attacks against Israel, or alternately that Israel, after the retreat would be able to deter Hezbollah from continuing its terror attacks against Israel. It didn’t work. But that mistake did not lead him to change course. Switching to the “territories for peace” paradigm he continued by offering the Syrians the Golan Heights in the expectation that they would then rein in Hezbollah in Lebanon. We can today consider ourselves fortunate that that plan was not brought to completion. Trading territories for peace simply did not work, nor did deterrence work against terrorists. Hezbollah celebrated the Israeli withdrawal, strengthened its hold on Lebanon and amassed a vast arsenal of rockets that could reach a good part of Israel. These rockets came down on Israel’s civilian population during the Second Lebanon War, which was a direct outcome of the unilateral withdrawal from the south Lebanon security zone. Hezbollah rockets are today in far larger numbers poised to threaten Israel’s civilian population in all of the country. We may want to believe that we are capable of deterring them from launching these rockets, but just to be sure we in the meantime are investing tremendous resources in preparing the civilian population for such an attack. Unless these rockets are removed they are going to be launched against Israel’s civilian population at a time chosen by Iran, Hezbollah, or both.
But Barak cannot get unilateral withdrawal out of his mind. Now he suggests that we consider staging a unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, thus putting the central population areas of Israel in the range of Kassam rockets to be launched from there.
Over the years, slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, Israel’s civilian population has been brought to the front line alongside the armed forces in time of war. Ben-Gurion’s strategy of securing their safety in case of war has been abandoned. This happened first in the border areas of the Galilee, then in the areas surrounding the Gaza Strip, then in all southern Israel. At present all of Israel’s civilians have been allowed to become the first victims in case of terrorist rocket attacks or outright war.
During the First Lebanon War Israel decided to defeat the terrorists and brought about the expulsion of Yasir Arafat and his PLO forces from Lebanon. During the Second Intifada, in operation “Defensive Shield” Israel chose to defeat the terrorists in Judea and Samaria. Even though it has been demonstrated that terrorists can be defeated, nevertheless, deterrence, unilateral withdrawals, and “territories for peace”, have become the strategy of choice, despite their proven shortcomings. These strategies are carried out on the back of the civilian population. They have now become equal partners with the IDF in the war against Israel’s enemies. That is not the way it was supposed to be.
3a)'One state' means no state
Zalman Shova
The next round of Israeli-Palestinian talks is in the offing, but it will probably turn out to be as futile as the last one. At least as long as the Palestinian leadership persists in its unrealistic preconditions, i.e. Israel to accept a priori the 1967 armistice line as the border of the proposed Palestinian state, and stopping all construction beyond that line, including in Jerusalem.
Students of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can without difficulty rattle off a list of failed international, mostly though not exclusively American, as well as Israeli peace initiatives (including MK Shaul Mofaz’s recent hodgepodge of hastily dusted off ideas – as reported in The Jerusalem Post). However, it might be more fruitful at this point to come to grips with the underlying reality behind this ongoing failure, namely the fact that the Palestinian body-politic has over the decades persistently shirked any peace plan or formula predicated by the acceptance of Israel as the rightful nation-state of the Jewish people, never giving up hope that one day it would disappear.
The Arabs’ rejection of the 1947 UN partition plan and the ensuing military aggression by seven Arab armies were a clear signal of this, as was their refusal to accept UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 in the sense that they were phrased, i.e. permanent peace based on secure and mutually recognized borders. One could go on and mention Arafat’s walkout at President Clinton’s Camp David or Mahmoud Abbas’ rejection of Olmert’s and Livni’s wholesale concessions. Nor can one ignore the on-and-off attempts to reverse the course of history by resorting to force of arms and terrorism.
The 1967 war was an Egyptian-Syrian-Jordanian effort to strangle Israel, while in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Egyptian army commander General Murtagee exhorted his troops to “conquer the land which had been stolen from the Arabs in Palestine.”
Though Israel’s enemies may have grasped by now the impossibility of destroying Israel by military force or terrorist acts, because of Israel’s overall military superiority and its strategic alliance with the US, many of them haven’t given up hope of ultimately achieving the same result by other means. Economic boycotts were tried, and failed, but destabilizing Israel from within by flooding it with “returning refugees” has not been taken off the table. Then there is always the subterfuge to forgo negotiations altogether if those might lead to acquiescing to Israel’s permanent existence, by going to the UN.
The latest, though not necessarily the last, Palestinian stratagem is the so-called “one-state solution.” The former Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, a.k.a. Abu-Ala, has endorsed this move and even his antagonist Abbas has, albeit halfheartedly, raised it from time to time, and according to press reports, he now intends to “warn” Israel’s prime minister that “if the two-state solution dies” – he would press for adopting the onestate way.
The Washington Post’s former Jerusalem correspondent, Joel Greenberg, a few months ago wrote about a network of “young Palestinian activists” who see the creation of a Palestinian state in the areas occupied by Israel in 1967 as inadequate, calling instead for the creation of one state “that would also include the area of Israel, with equal rights for Jews [and] Arabs, and Palestinian refugees allowed to return.” In other words, finis the Jewish State!
NONE OTHER than Harvard University’s Kennedy School (Harvard’s motto is “Veritas,” Truth…) has recently sponsored a “One-State Conference” jointly with several pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic groups with the clear aim, as one observer described it, of giving “an academic seal of approval to the de-legitimization of Israel,” among other things, pairing “apartheid” and “Israel” and refuting the Jewish people’s very existence as a national entity under international law.
Not surprisingly, there are those on the anti-Semitic Left and Right who support a one-state solution, confidently expecting that this would result not only in the destruction of the Zionist dream, but also in a situation where the continued existence of the remnants of the Jewish population there would be tolerated, at best, as second-class citizens.
But strange as it may seem, there are also some on the Israeli patriotic Right who delusionally support the one-state concept, though, of course, for opposite reasons. The very idea of giving up parts of the Land of Israel is anathema to them, outweighing any reference to potential matters of demography or democracy.
Some of them quote Jabotinsky to bolster their stance, forgetting that his perception was of an Arab minority living in a Jewish majority state in which, after renouncing their extremism, they would enjoy equal, civil and national rights.
He even believed that Arabs should then be given the opportunity to appoint a deputy to a Jewish prime minister – and vice versa, eventually an Arab prime minister with a Jewish number two (the more skeptical Ben-Gurion never entertained such ideas).
By any stretch of the imagination, also considering what’s happening around us, can such a scenario seriously be considered today? Palestinian separate statehood may or may not be the ideal solution to the Palestinian problem. There may be different ones, some of which were considered and perhaps too rashly shelved in the past, and there may be others still on the drawing boards. Even Israeli-initiated unilateral steps may have their day again. But the one-state idea, whether raised by the Left or the Right, is not one of them. This, by the way, is the view not only of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, but also of most Israelis.
The writer is a former member of Knesset and Israel’s past ambassador to the U.S. and serves at present as a Special Envoy for the Prime Minister.
3b)Netanyahu: Palestinians have not chosen path of peace
Palestinians have decided not to embrace the path of peace, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Wednesday at a ceremony marking the 63rd anniversary of the Knesset.
“We said they need to choose between the path of Hamas and the path of peace,” he said, but concluded that Palestinians had chosen to embrace “terrorist organizations that call for Israel's destruction.”
Every country has extremists, Netanyahu continued, but the question is how the government reacts to them. Israel responded swiftly and harshly to extremist agendas such as women's exclusion, he said.
“I know that there are those that argue that Israel's democracy is in danger. I disagree with them,” he said, touting Israel's protection of minority rights without regard to race, sex and religion.
Looking outward, Netanyahu argued that Israel had never succumbed to limiting privacy rights the way the United States and United Kingdom had in times of war. Closer to home, Netanyahu addressed the nascent democracies of the Arab Spring, emphasizing that “real democracy is about what happens between elections.”
“We all hope that real democracies will arise” in neighboring Arab countries, he said, “not one-time democracy.”
It is still too early to tell if “serious, respectable instutions will arise to maintain democracy,” Netanyahu said.
Peres: Iranian people are not our enemies
President Shimon Peres also spoke at the event, calling for a renewal of the peace process with the Palestinians.
Peres stated, “We must answer the question of what kind of country do we want? A Jewish state within safe and recognized borders next to a separate and independent Palestinian state, or a country without borders that will turn into a binational state?”
The president also adressed the Iranian issue, saying that “a combination of discretion and valor” is required to deal with the threat that Tehran poses to Israel.
Peres stated that Iran, which seeks regional hegemony and has imperialist aims, “constitutes a real threat to all of humanity.”
The president added, however, that the Iranian regime is the problem and that the people of Iran are not Israel's enemies.
“We were not born enemies and there is no reason we should live as enemies. The Iranian people must know that they will not remain alone if they choose freedom and peace.”
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4)--The bombed Sudanese factory produced Iranian Shehab missiles
Complex of military plants near Khartoum, which was bombed five minutes after midnight Wednesday, Oct. 24, by four fighter-bombers, recently went into manufacturing Iranian ballistic surface-to-surface Shehab missiles under license from Tehran, military and intelligence sources disclose. Western intelligence sources have not revealed what types of Shehab were being turned out in Sudan but they believe the Yarmouk’s output was intended to serve as Tehran’s strategic reserve stock in case Iran’s ballistic arsenal was hit by Israeli bombers.
The Israeli Air Force has a long record of pre-emptive attacks for destroying an enemy’s long-range missiles in the early stages of a conflict. In June 2006, for instance, the IAF destroyed 90 percent of Hizballah’s long-range missiles in the first hours of the Lebanon war.
Videos of the explosions caused in the air raid over Sudan showed large quantities of phosphorus flares in the sky suggesting that a large stockpile was demolished along with the manufacturing equipment.
Western sources did not divulge information about the comings and goings of Iranian missile specialists or whether the Bashir government had given Tehran permission to stage attacks from Sudan against Middle East targets, in return for the allotment of a number of missiles to the Sudanese army. All they would say is that the complex's structures had been completely leveled by the aerial bombardment and subsequent fire.
Sudan accused Israel of the attack and stated it reserved the right to respond at a time and circumstances of its choosing. Israeli officials declined to comment in answer to questions.
If Indeed Israel was responsible for the bombing raid, it is possible to postulate the following objectives:
If Indeed Israel was responsible for the bombing raid, it is possible to postulate the following objectives:
1. Its air force flew 1,800-1,900 kilometers to reach the Sudanese arms factory, a distance longer than the 1,600 kilometers to the Iranian underground enrichment site of Fordo. This operation may have been intended to show Tehran that distance presents no obstacles to an Israeli strike on its nuclear program.
2. The IAF has an efficient in-flight refueling capability.
3. The raid would have degraded Iran’s ability to retaliate for a potential Israel or US attack.
If it was conducted by Israel, it would add a third item to the list of backdoor assaults in which Iran and Israel appear to be engaged in the past three months.
On August 17, the power lines to Fordo were sabotaged, interrupting the work of enrichment taking place there and causing some of the advanced centrifuges to catch fire.
On Oct. 6, an Iranian stealth drone was launched from Lebanon into Israeli air space and photographed its most sensitive military sites as well as the Dimona nuclear reactor before Israel brought it down.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5) The Islamic Schoolyard-Bully and Obama's America
by Raymond Ibrahim
In an era of high education and specialty degrees—from psychology to political science—perhaps it was inevitable for simple common sense to fall by the wayside. The embassy attacks across the Muslim world, especially the most savage in Egypt and Libya, are a testimony to this: U.S. policy towards these countries fundamentally exacerbated their wild reactions. To understand all this, one need only turn to the classic "schoolyard bully" paradigm, that any child can understand.
Not especially large or strong, the schoolyard bully—generally a prickly, nasty fellow—picks on two groups: 1) those who are obviously weaker than him and 2) those who, while larger or stronger than him, willingly give in to him—willingly appease. Bullying the first group, the weak, is an easy matter for the bully. As for the second group, whose capacities and responses are unclear, these he must first determine through a few bully trial-runs—to see whether they will fight back, or whether they will give in. He begins small—a shove and harsh word here and there—and takes it from there, always seeing how far he can go.
The bully will receive one of two responses from the second group, those not smaller or weaker than him: either appeasement and giving in, or a punch to the nose. If he receives the former, he continually ups the bullying to see how much more he can get away with: harsh words and shoves become demands for lunch money and stolen jackets. His work becomes complete with the absolute subordination of his victim.
As for the one who does not put up with his bullying—who gives him a swift punch to the nose—not only does the bully leave him be, he even begins to respect if not befriend him.
For centuries, people from all walks of life knew this—from experience if not common sense. Children knew it.
Now consider how the schoolyard bully paradigm helps explain America's relationship to the Muslim world, especially in the last four years, culminating with the U.S. embassy debacles in the Muslim world.
To set the stage, here are the main characters: the Muslim world represents the bully and the international arena is the schoolyard where his shoves and demands are made; the Muslim world's religious minorities, Christian and otherwise, represent the weak—they who are bullied incessantly because there is nothing they can do about it, and whose plight is a testimony to the bullying mentality of the Muslim world; the U.S. represents the ostensibly strong figure in the international-schoolyard, whose response to the bully is not wholly known and needs to be tested.
Soon after taking office, Barrack Obama made it clear in numerous ways that he was intent on appeasing the Muslim world—whether by bowing to the Wahabbi King, commanding NASA to make Muslims feel better about themselves, censoring security language deemed insulting to Muslims, or giving terrorist Osama bin Laden an Islamic funeral. No American president has been more appeasing to the Muslim world than Barrack Obama.
Of course, much of this may not be naïve appeasement; it may be something much worse. But the Muslim masses interpret it as appeasement.
Obama's most recent concessions were unprecedented: he betrayed America's longtime secular allies—whose existence was fundamental to U.S. interests, not to mention the interests of the secular and non-Muslim segments of their societies—to appease the Islamists of the world, those groups that share the same ideology, if not always tactics, of the terrorists who struck the U.S. on 9/11; those groups that are fundamentally hostile to the U.S.; those groups renowned for bullying the weak in their midst.
Of all Middle East nations, it was his policies in Egypt and Libya that were especially appeasing to the Islamists. In Egypt, he threw Hosni Mubarak—a staunch 30-year-ally of the U.S.—under the bus and helped empower the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis; in Libya, he provided military aid to the al-Qaeda-affiliated "rebels" who overthrew Gaddafi.
And what thanks did America receive from Egypt and Libya? More bullying, more demands. Like the proverbial schoolyard bully used to getting what he wants, during the embassy riots and protests across the Muslim world, it was the Islamists of Egypt and Libya—precisely those two groups which Obama did so much for, the al-Qaeda affiliated rebels in Libya and the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis—who went on the most violent sprees, made bolder demands (including the release of the Blind Sheikh or else), stormed and terrorized embassies, burned American flags, and murdered and raped American diplomats.
Thus, as all the talking heads analyze how and why the embassy attacks occurred, the greater lesson is obvious for those with common sense: nothing short of a punch to the nose—or at this very late date, when the image of an appeasing America is so ingrained, several punches—will ever cease the bullying and earn some respect for the United States.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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