The press and media have a hand in stirring the porridge. (See 1a below.)
Is there a way out of the anti-Semitic trap for Israel? (See 1b below.)
Is America's interest in The Middle East waning as we become less dependent on the region's resoucres and other areas become more important globally speaking? (See 1c below.)
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Fraudulent voting is alive and well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-uKdEmBGfs
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Dick
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1)
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| The global demonization of Israel and the Jewish people is gathering terrifying pace and ferocity, not least on university campuses. During last summer’s war in Gaza, the Western media uncritically promulgated as truth the inflammatory Hamas lie that Israel was willfully killing Palestinian children and most of Gaza’s war casualties were civilians. The result was an eruption of hatred and violence against Diaspora Jews in Britain and Europe. Galvanized by this rout of reason, Palestinians have felt emboldened to ratchet up their incitement against Israel. So Mahmoud Abbas has been inflaming the violence and rioting that has been escalating in Jerusalem by making false and incendiary claims that Israel was attempting to desecrate the Aksa Mosque. On Western university campuses, the demonization of Israel and intimidation of Jewish students has similarly shifted onto an even more intense and vicious level. According to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, more than 75 anti-Israel events have been reported on US college and university campuses this autumn, more than twice as many as last year and accelerating after Operation Protective Edge. In the last few days, it was revealed that 15 Jewish and education advocacy groups have written to the presidents of more than 100 American universities which have Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, to warn them of an SJP strategy for disrupting pro-Israel events and ostracizing, harassing and silencing Jewish students. Dozens of Jewish and pro-Israel students’ events were being disrupted, they wrote, and Jewish and pro-Israel students were being harassed, intimidated, and “stripped of their constitutionally protected freedom of expression and association.” There is a veritable tsunami of such attacks swamping Jewish university life. Last August a Jewish student at Temple University in Philadelphia, who approached the SJP table at a campus activities fair to challenge their false claims, was punched in the face. Anti-Israel student activists at the University of Michigan hurled death threats at Jewish student council members and called them “dirty Jew” and “kike.” At the University of California, Berkeley, a Jewish girl holding an “Israel Wants Peace” sign was rammed with a shopping cart by an SJP activist. At Harvard, the Palestine Security Committee frightened Jewish students by placing mock eviction notices on their dormitory rooms. At Northeastern University in Boston, SJP activists vandalized a menorah and disrupted Jewish events. At San Francisco State University, the General Union of Palestine Students hosted an all-day event where participants could make posters and T-shirts that said, “My Heroes Have Always Killed Colonizers.” Similar outrages are taking place on Canadian campuses. At Ryerson University, a student who approached the Muslim Students Association table at Clubs Day was called a f***ing Zionist and other similar epithets. At York University, known for its radicalism, a large poster in the glass-walled student center visible to all the students passing by glorifies terrorism by depicting a Palestinian with a rock behind his back facing an IDF machine gun. Earlier this year Hen Mazzig, a former IDF commander who tours campuses speaking to students, described how Boycott Divestment and Sanctions organizers target students who know nothing about the Middle East with emotive and inflammatory BDS campaigns libeling Israel as a human rights abuser. Such campus motions obviously cannot hurt Israel economically; the real aim is to demonize Israel and intimidate Jewish students. After University of Windsor students voted to support the BDS movement last March, the vice president of academic affairs for the university’s student alliance found his “Support Our Troops” banner spray-painted in blue with the Star of David and the word “Zionist.” Crucially, such intimidation is not confined to the student body but is rooted in similar activities by university lecturers. The campaigner against campus anti-Semitism, Tammy Rossman Benjamin, has pointed out that faculty members have advanced lies and distortions about Zionism, Israel and Jews and advocated the elimination of the Jewish state. The effect on those whose minds they have a duty to open has been devastating. Jewish students have reported feeling emotionally and intellectually harassed and intimidated by their professors, to the point that they afraid to express a view that is not anti-Israel. Those who have tried to expose the abuse they are experiencing have been vilified and attacked. At a University of California, Davis, anti-Israel “occupation” rally last November, a student who expressed concern about the anti-Semitic banners on display was assaulted by a protester who screamed in his face, “You are racist and you should die in hell.” The supposed crucible of knowledge, reason and enlightenment has turned into an incubator of hatred and bigotry, falsehoods and incitement, intellectual terrorism and physical violence. What we are seeing is an academic intifada. Yet in the face of this monstrous onslaught on Jewish students and perversion of scholarship to poison young minds against Israel, the leadership of Diaspora Jewry has done precious little. Campaigners like Benjamin or groups such as Stand- WithUs (at whose meeting I spoke in Toronto this week) have been doing invaluable work countering the lies and helping support the beleaguered Jewish students. But they are doing it virtually alone and unaided. Given the nature and scale of what is going on, the silence from the Jewish community as a whole is quite astonishing. Jewish leaders should be shouting from the rafters about what is happening on campus. They should be naming and shaming these bigoted lecturers for the hatred and lies they are spreading. They should be calling to account the university vice chancellors for failing to protect their Jewish students. They should be taking legal action against them for betraying their duty of care or allowing incitement of hatred, intimidation and discrimination on their watch. They should be jumping up and down over the way states such as Qatar or Saudi Arabia have twisted university curricula into hate-fueled or extremist propaganda outlets by pouring funds into university coffers. But Jewish leaders aren’t doing any of this. Too timid to rock the boat, or maybe because they themselves don’t know enough to realize just how heinous are the lies being told about Israel, their instinct is instead often to try to marginalize, isolate or shut down some of these heroic folk trying to combat the falsehoods and intimidation on campus. This is shameful. A huge effort is needed to counter this evil with the hardest of home truths. Time our leaders woke up and smelled the coffee. 1a) Anti-Semitism: Now They Notice In September, the New York Times published on its front page a lengthy and detailed story with the headline “Europe’s Anti-Semitism Comes Out of the Shadows.” The article contained no breaking news, no revelations, no surprising analyses, and no startling perspectives. Its statistics, anecdotes, and lamentations were sadly familiar not only to Jews but to all friends and allies of the Jewish state.
After all, we do not need the Times to tell us that the murder and assault of European Jews, the destruction of their property, the banning of their religious practices, and the demonization of their communities have become routine. “Synagogues,” said one man in the story, “are burning again in Germany in the night.”
What made the article noteworthy was its very existence. The resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe is a trend so noticeable, so flagrant, and so disturbing, that not even the mainstream media can miss it. “Anti-Semitism Row Shines Light on Fractured French Society,” reports CNN. “A ‘New Anti-Semitism’ Rising in France,” notes the Washington Post. “Anti-Semitism Flares in Europe amid Gaza War,” writes USA Today.
Missing from these earnest and well-intentioned pieces, however, was any acknowledgment of the role the media themselves have played in creating the conditions under which anti-Semitism flourishes. The media do not grasp, the media refuse to see, the relation between the biased and hostile coverage of Israel they produce every day and the anti-Semitism on which they report.
That relation should be apparent to any close reader of the “anti-Semitism is back” articles. They all have a similar structure. The problem is introduced: A pro-Nazi salute has become fashionable among soccer players; an anti-Semitic comedian is a sensation in France; protestors in European capitals chant “Death to Jews.” Explanations are offered: Muslim immigrants to Europe carry Jew-hatred in their luggage; Arab, Turkish, and African minorities, poor and alienated from mainstream European society, direct their anger not at French or German or British elites but at the Jewish people; and, inevitably, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is held responsible for the incitement of European publics.
Israel. Always Israel. Its self-defense inspires fury, terror, and resentment in a way that Muslim violence—global terrorism, the Syrian civil war, the Islamic State’s slaughter of heretics and apostates, Iran’s financing of sectarian bloodshed—does not. Israel is the totem, the representation of the Jewish people toward which inchoate rage is articulated and directed. Denunciation of Israel, of its government, of its policies, of its stubborn existence, acts as a sort of gateway drug. It is neither condoned nor castigated. On the contrary: Such ugliness is tacitly accepted, even encouraged, as an outlet for destructive energies.
But Israel’s most devoted critics have a habit of going beyond mere policy disputes. What starts as holding Israel to a standard that one would not think of applying to any other country (except possibly the United States) turns into a “rethinking” of the Zionist project, of Israel’s right to exist on its own terms, of the loyalties of diaspora Jews, of the historical reality of the Holocaust, of the role that the Jewish people, two-tenths of 1 percent of the world population, have played in whatever is going badly in one’s life today.
Zionism is not racism. But anti-Zionism is a precursor to, and a form of, anti-Semitism.
“Supporters of Hamas aren’t interested in this policy or that, these borders or those,” wrote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in an October Wall Street Journal essay. “They are committed as a matter of principle, stated in their charter, to the complete destruction of the Jewish state.” Hamas’s fellow travelers in politics and media are the enablers of that annihilationist ideology.
And as Europe and America and the world come to accept Hamas propaganda at face value, to adopt its account of the modern Middle East; as they become more comfortable slandering and demonizing Israel; as their elites tolerate or participate, knowingly or unknowingly, in single-minded attacks on Israel that until recently were confined to the political fringe, the easier it becomes for anti-Semitism to manifest itself. Anti-Semitism proliferates when it is defined down so as to exclude contempt for, abhorrence of, and attempts to delegitimize the Jewish state.
Consider the appearance in the New York Times of the article about European anti-Semitism. Here is a paper that during Israel’s recent war with Hamas published nothing but images, day after day, of ruined Palestinian buildings and mourning Palestinian children. Its Jerusalem bureau chief is infamous for her anti-Israel biases and misstatements of fact. Its editorial and op-ed pages are filled with one-sided and misleading attacks on the Israeli government and military. In the span of 48 hours in August, it published (1) an article on a Dutchman who rescued Jews during the Second World War but who, now at the age of 91, protested last summer’s Operation Protective Edge and returned to Israel a medal recognizing him as a righteous Gentile; and (2) an in-depth report on Israel’s supposed role in illegal organ-trafficking.
So devoted is the Times to reminding its readers every day of Israeli actions it judges to be inhumane that a Reform rabbi recently announced, in a very public way, that he was canceling his subscription. “My chronic irritation finally morphed into alienation and then to visceral disgust this summer,” wrote David Block, “after Hamas renewed its terrorist assaults upon Israel and the Times launched what can only be described as a campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state.” And yet, having contributed to such an atmosphere of hostility and reprobation, the Times then turned around and published its feature on anti-Semitism. Where do the editors think this animus came from? The sky?
I do not mean to single out the New York Times. Shifts in elite opinion and in the partisan composition of the media have made pro-Israel news outlets rare indeed. In 2012, the Democratic Party, the party to which the overwhelming majority of journalists belong, attempted to remove from its platform references to God and to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Over the summer, as Israel defended itself against Hamas’s rockets, tunnels, kidnappings, and murders, influential liberals such as Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and Roger Cohen self-righteously announced their disillusionment with the Jewish state, condemning its tactics and flouting their superior virtue.
State-owned media such as the Kremlin’s RT and Qatar’s Al Jazeera, despite low ratings, broadcast anti-Israel and anti-American distortions unimpeded, shaping journalistic attitudes through hires and marketing. Throw a dart, and it will land on a publication or media company whose feelings toward Israel are, in a word, bellicose. The Independent, the Guardian, the Economist, the BBC, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, theAtlantic Monthly, Vox, NPR, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, Time, Newsweek, the Lancet—they all portray Israel as rapacious and the Palestinians as helpless victims of Jewish sadism. Their fixation on Israel becomes a fixation on Jews that creates a noxious climate of opinion, breeding conspiracy theories, accusations of dual loyalties, intimidation, even violence. And when these fumes come “out of the shadows,” and make contact with an environment in which anti-Zionists and anti-Semites reside, the hazards, as we see in the Middle East and in Europe, are real. And they are deadly.
1b) The Enemy of My Enemy…
by Gabriel Scheinmann
Moment Magazine
At the United Nations in early fall, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that "a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world" could not only help defeat the twin threats of a nuclear Iran and Sunni jihadism but could also help "facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace." Given the perceived regional dominance of Sunni Arabs, such an approach appears tempting. After all, in the Middle East, the Arabs are king—in some cases literally, as with the royal families of Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. All but five modern Middle Eastern states have Sunni Arab majorities. Historic opportunities for collaboration do certainly exist.
However, to the extent these states cooperate with Israel, it's not out of admiration but out of desperation. Unable to defeat it on the battlefield, these regimes value Israel's help in keeping Iran and ISIS at bay. Nevertheless, radical Islamism and its inherent anti-Semitism remain deeply rooted in Arab societies, which are typically even more anti-Israel than their regimes. Just as peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan did not change popular attitudes toward Israel, neither will "a broader rapprochement" with Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. Over the long term, how does Israel navigate a region whose hostility to its existence is so ingrained?
A closer look at the region's demographics reveals one possible answer. There may be more countries with Sunni Arab majorities, but Sunnis are not an overall majority. From Turkish Alevis to Egyptian Copts to Iraqi Kurds, Middle Eastern minorities are, in total, the Middle East's majority, accounting for slightly more than half its population. Iran, Turkey and Iraq, none of which are Sunni Arab-led, are three of the four largest Middle Eastern states. Thirty or forty million Kurds are spread across four states.
By looking beyond the region's Sunni Arab core, Israel could pave a more indirect path to peace, establishing greater political and military leverage in order to reach an accommodation on favorable terms. By forging alliances with other minority groups—a worthwhile end in itself—Israel could contain and reduce outsize Arab political power. This might pressure Arab regimes into a more agreeable posture.
Indeed, Israel has flirted with this approach in the past, for instance with the group most prominent among these non-Arab minorities, the Kurds. Freed from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, the Kurds have built a state in all but name in northern Iraq. In neighboring Syria, the civil war has similarly loosened the regime's control of the Kurdish areas in the northeast, leading to the creation of an autonomous Kurdish canton. Even Turkey, which fears a Kurdish state, has allied itself with Iraqi Kurds and is cutting a deal that allows for far greater expression of Kurdish identity within Turkey (though the military imbroglio over aid to the border town of Kobani scrambled much of this careful groundwork, at least for now.) While the road to true independence will be difficult, a Kurdish statelet could be in the offing.
For Israel, renewed Kurdish autonomy has reinvigorated ties that go back to the Ben-Gurion era but were cut off in the 1970s. Kurdish leader and Iraqi president Jalal Talabani publicly shook hands with then-Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak in 2008. When American delegations visit Erbil, Kurdish leaders talk openly about how Israel is the model for their own political future: a flourishing minority in a hostile region with close ties to the resident superpower. On the heels of the first Kurdish oil exports to Israel in June, Prime Minister Netanyahu became the first regional leader to support publicly Kurdish statehood.
Even within Israel, minorities are reaching out to the Jewish state as never before. Israel, as one headline put it, has experienced a "Christian Awakening," as Christian Arabs seek to distinguish themselves from their Muslim brethren through closer ties to the Jewish majority. A minority within a minority, Christian Arabs were recognized this year as a distinct Israeli minority group for the first time, and the Israel Defense Forces has begun sending them voluntary conscription papers, reversing a decades-old policy. Although they number only 150,000, Israeli Christian Arabs, much like Israeli Druze, are beginning to recognize the immense benefits of cooperating with Israel.
The defeat of the current Iranian regime, though a long shot, could unlock even more opportunities for minority cooperation between non-Sunni-Arabs and Israel, hints of which are already apparent. In late May, Lebanese Cardinal Bechara Rai—head of Lebanon's largest Christian denomination, the Maronite Catholic church—joined the Pope's pilgrimage to Israel, the first Lebanese religious leader to do so since 1948. Similarly, Israel is anti-Bashar al-Assad but not necessarily anti-Alawite, the ethnic group to which Assad belongs; were the Assad regime to fall, cooperation between Alawites and Jews could occur at some point in the future. In preparation for such a scenario, the IDF Chief of Staff has even publicly offered sanctuary to Syrian Alawites. Without Iran, minority groups may well look to Israel for support against radical Sunni groups.
Today's Middle East is a paradox. On the one hand, radical Islamism seems to be homogenizing a once-eclectic region through ethnic cleansing. On the other hand, the shock waves of the Arab revolts have aroused more vocal expressions of minority identities and spawned budding relationships among marginalized groups. From North African Berbers to Christian Arabs to Kurds, new and revived opportunities for Israeli outreach have emerged. While Israel may indeed need the cooperation of conservative Arab states to deal with Iran and ISIS, it should think beyond them.
Analysis
By Robert D. Kaplan
Because geopolitics is based on the eternal verities of geography, relatively little in geopolitics comes to an end. The Warsaw Pact may have dissolved following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but Russia is still big and it still lies next door to Central and Eastern Europe, so a Russian threat to Europe still exists. Japan may have been defeated and flattened by the U.S. military in World War II, but its dynamic population -- the gift of a temperate zone climate -- still projects power in the Pacific Basin and may do so even more in the years to come. The United States may have committed one blunder after another in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, yet through all of these misbegotten wars the United States remains by a yawning margin the greatest military power on earth -- the gift, ultimately, of America being a virtual island nation of continental proportions, as well as the last resource-rich swath of the temperate zone to be settled at the time of the European Enlightenment. So we come to the Middle East, which, despite all its changes and upheavals in the course of the decades and all the prognostications of a U.S. "pivot" to the Pacific, remains vital to the United States. Israel is a de facto strategic ally of the United States and for over six decades now has remained embattled, necessitating American protection. The Persian Gulf region is still the hydrocarbon capital of the world and thus a premier American interest. Certainly, officials in Washington would like to shift focus to the Pacific, but the Middle East simply won't allow that to happen. And yet there is an ongoing evolution in America's relationship with the region, and attrition of the same can add up to big change. For decades the Persian Gulf represented a primary American interest: a place that was crucial to the well-being of the American economy. The American economy is the great oil and automotive economy of the modern age, with interstate highways the principal transport link for an entire continent. And Persian Gulf oil was a key to that enterprise. But increasingly the Persian Gulf represents only a secondary interest to the United States: a region important to the well-being of American allies, to be sure, and to world trade and the world economic system in general, but not specifically crucial to America itself, the war to defeat the Islamic State notwithstanding. However much oil the United States is still importing from the Persian Gulf, the fact is that America will have more energy alternatives at home and abroad in future decades. Indeed, the United States is on the brink of being, in some sense, energy self-sufficient within Greater North America, from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the oil fields of Venezuela. U.S. President Barack Obama may veto the Keystone Pipeline System that would bring oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, but industry experts believe that the future will in any case see continued cooperation between the United States and Canada in the energy sector. There is, too, the vast exploitation of shale gas in Texas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. U.S. companies will, in addition, probably be investing more in the Mexican and (eventually) Venezuelan energy industries in the future, following increasing economic liberalization in Mexico City and the possible, eventual passing of the Chavista era in Caracas. All this serves to separate the United States from the Middle East. While the United States will have less and less need of Middle East hydrocarbons, the Middle East will for years to come be consumed by internal political chaos that itself exposes the limits of American power. In the era of strong authoritarian Arab states, American power was easy to project. It was just a matter of U.S. diplomats brokering peace treaties, separation of forces agreements, secret understandings, and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and some of its neighbors. After all, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and other Arab countries all had just one phone number to call -- that of the dictator or monarch in charge. But whom do you phone now in Tripoli or Sanaa or Damascus (even if Cairo is temporarily back under military dictatorship)? With no one really in charge, it is harder to bring American pressure to bear. Chaos in and of itself stymies U.S. power. The United States remains a global behemoth. And U.S. power, particularly military power, can accomplish many things. The United States can defend Japan and Taiwan against China, South Korea against North Korea, Poland against Russia, and ultimately Israel against Iran. But one thing American power cannot accomplish, as a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan showed, is to rebuild complex Islamic societies from within. And rebuilding societies from within will be the fundamental challenge faced by the Arab world for at least the next half-decade. Thus, America, in spite of its latest military intervention, becomes less relevant to the region even as the region itself no longer represents quite the primary interest to America that it used to. We should keep this in mind now that the war against the Islamic State threatens to distract us from other theaters. So in the glacial changes that often define geopolitics, the United States (that is, Greater North America) is moving away from the Middle East. This occurs as the Middle East itself slowly dissolves into a Greater Indian Ocean world. For as the United States requires fewer and fewer hydrocarbons from the Middle East, China and India require more and more. Their economies may have slowed, but they are still growing. The Persian Gulf can -- in the final analysis -- erupt into a nuclear firestorm and America will survive well, thank you. But China and India will have the greater problem. China does not have a foreign policy so much as a resource-acquisition policy. Not only is it increasingly involved in energy deals with Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, but China is currently trying to build, run or help finance container ports in Tanzania and Pakistan in order to eventually transport both commercial goods from the western rim of the Indian Ocean to the eastern rim and on into China itself. And while all this is happening, Oman, for example, plans to build routes and pipelines from outside the Strait of Hormuz to countries inside the strait, even as China and India have visionary plans to link energy-rich and landlocked Central Asia by pipeline to both western China and the Indian Ocean. In this evolving strategic geography of the early- and mid-21st century, the Middle East slowly becomes a world defined less by its own conflict and trading system and more by a conflict and trading system that spans the whole navigable southern rim land of the Eurasian super continent, with tentacles reaching north into Central Asia. The Indian Ocean thus emerges as the global hydrocarbon interstate linking the oil and gas fields of the Persian Gulf with the urban middle class concentrations of the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. In such a scenario, the United States does not desert the Middle East, just as China and India do not greatly infiltrate it. But there is movement -- especially psychological -- away from one reality and toward another. And in the process, the Middle East as a clearly defined region of 20th century area studies means less than it used to. Boiled down to the current newspaper headlines, Obama has not been irresponsible by refusing to get more involved than he has in the sectarian chaos of Syria and deciding for so long to withhold military action against Iran's nuclear facilities. His presidency is simply a sign of the times: a sign of the limits of U.S. power and of the more limited interests the United States has in the Middle East, terrorism excepted. The opening to Iran, as demonstrated by the interim agreement concerning Tehran's nuclear program, is part of this shift. The United States is trying to put its house in order in the Middle East through a rapprochement of sorts with the mullahs so that it can devote more time to other regions. Of course, this has been upended by the war against the Islamic State. But it will remain an overriding American goal nevertheless. |
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