No longer all that's fit to print!

More bias from New York Times Reporter. (See 1 below.)

After briefing the Security Council on his latest report, Serge Brammertz said Wednesday: “We have a clearer idea of the political context in which the crime occurred (referring to the Harri assassination.). We believe the motive. most likely, is linked to Hariri's political activities.” Asked if he was suggesting the former Lebanese prime minister was killed because he represented a growing threat to Syria, the UN investigator replied that it would be up to a tribunal to determine who was guilty.

Is Quisling alive and well and still living in Norway in the guise of Raymond Johnson? (See 2 below.)

Who said Farrakhan is dying. (See 3 below.)

Who runs the country is determined by who reads what newspaper. H.L. Mencken coined the phrase: "Boobus Americanus." (See 4 below.)

Dick



1)Former NY Times Editor Reveals his Bias in Anti-Israel Magazine

The New York Review of Books has been described as "the premier journal of the American intellectual elite." It’s also been said to have an "ingrained distrust of Israel."

Unfortunately, these two often go hand in hand. While there’s no inherent relationship between progressive thought and Israel-bashing, one-sided attacks on Israel and its legitimacy are a staple of some self-styled "progressive" publications.

The New York Review, for example, was cited in Alvin Rosenfeld’s essay implicating "segments of the intellectual left," including some Jews who call themselves "progressive," as sharing with the far right and radical Islam an "emphatic dislike" of Israel. Rosenfeld, a professor of English and Jewish studies at Indiana University, was referring specifically to an article by Tony Judt, whose "emphatic dislike" drove him to call for the end to the Jewish state.

It is both shocking and telling that, well before Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his infamous call to "wipe Israel off the map," it was Judt and the New York Review encouraging an end to the Jewish state.

But delegitimization of Israel is sometimes less overt and direct. In the current issue of the biweekly magazine, Joseph Lelyveld, the former executive editor of the New York Times, takes a slightly more roundabout route. His review of Jimmy Carter’s widely criticized new book, Palestine Peace not Apartheid, emphasized two main problems. One is merely a complaint about style: "The former president’s peculiar combination of rectitude and starchy pride can be a little irritating," he says. The other complaint is much more striking, especially coming from someone who was until recently at the helm of one of America’s most influential newspapers. According to Lelyveld, Carter’s book doesn’t go nearly far enough with its apartheid analogy.

It’s not easy to establish yourself as more extreme an Israel-basher than Jimmy Carter, but Lelyveld does so by borrowing from the former president his main techniques of argumentation: distortions, lies, and ignoring or minimizing Israel’s legitimate security concerns.

• Lelyveld writes:

Obviously, apartheid had plenty to do with racism but land was also at the heart of the South African struggle. ... Under the Group Areas Act, for instance, more than two million blacks and other nonwhites were forcibly moved from what were sometimes called "black spots" in areas designated as "white" to remote settlements and tribal reserves that were rebranded as "homelands." In the process, their lands and homes were confiscated. Finally the denizens of the homelands were told they were citizens of sovereign states, that they were no longer South Africans. All this was in service of apartheid's grand design.

With adjustments for the large differences in population size and land mass, it might be argued that land confiscation on the West Bank approaches the scale of these apartheid-era expropriations in South Africa. Jimmy Carter is well aware of the pattern of land confiscation there; he quotes Meron Benvenisti at length on the subject. But since he thinks apartheid in South Africa was all about race and not about land, he fails to see that it's precisely in their systematic and stealthy grabbing of Arab land that the Israeli authorities and settlers most closely emulate the South African ancien régime.

Apparently aware that a straightforward comparison of Israeli policy in the West Bank to the race-centric policies of apartheid South Africa would fail to convince most readers that the two have much in common, Lelyveld instead resorts to a highly misleading juxtaposition. He sets up the comparison by discussing the forcible transfers of blacks into "homelands" and the revoking of these residents’ South African citizenship. But why? He makes no such claims about the West Bank, and for good reason — nothing of the sort has happened there. Unable to accuse Israel of these apartheid practices, Lelyveld apparently is trying to attribute to Israel guilt by juxtaposition.

Moreover, if land was "at the heart of the South African struggle," as the article asserts, it was so only to the extent that land and race issues overlapped. Nonetheless, Lelyveld disingenuously unlinks South Africa’s apartheid land policies from its racist ideology in order to compare supposed Israeli land confiscation to that of the apartheid regime. (This would be akin to saying that laws of eminent domain in the United States have much in common with apartheid policy because both involve taking land.)

Lelyveld misleads further on the issue of confiscation. Here, from Carter’s book, is Lelyveld’s evidence that Israeli authorities "closely emulate" the South African regime:

Later I received a briefing from Meron Benvenisti .... With maps and charts, he explained that the Israelis acquired Palestinian lands in a number of different ways: by direct purchase; through seizure "for security purposes for the duration of the occupation"; by claiming state control of areas formerly held by the Jordanian government; by "taking" under some carefully selected Arabic customs or ancient laws; and by claiming as state land all that was not cultivated or specifically registered as owned by a Palestinian family.

So Lelyveld’s evidence that Israel "confiscates" land in a manner similar to apartheid South Africa includes the fact that Israelis purchased land and retained Jordanian, British and Ottoman law relating to West Bank land as per Israel’s obligations under international law. (See here for details about the Hague Regulations of 1907 and Ottoman law about state land.)

Details aside, the article has it backward on the most basic of levels. Blacks were forcibly removed from their homes so that a region could be exclusively white. If there is any parallel in the West Bank, it is in the Palestinian insistence that their future state be Judenrein, despite Jewish historic, cultural and religious ties to the land. (Lelyveld apparently has no problem with the ethnic cleansing of Jews from land on which they have lived for millennia.)

• Elaborating on "other similarities [to apartheid] of which Carter seems to be unaware," Lelyveld asserts:

Israel has proven that it’s not at all dependent on imported cheap labor from the territories, that it can get along just fine with Thais, Filipinos, and Romanians. It has thus gone beyond South Africa’s apartheid theorists who dreamed of a day when they could do without black labor but never got close.

The argument absurdly conflates race with citizenship, and racism with security. Arab citizens of Israel can, and of course do, work in the country, often alongside Jewish workers. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, however, are not citizens of Israel but rather residents of an area from which a brutal war against Israeli civilians was launched only a few years ago. It was as a result of this war that the number of Palestinians working inside Israel was reduced. One can call Israelis’ apparent preference to hire workers from countries with peaceful relations many things; but a parallel to apartheid it is not.

• More evidence of Israel’s supposed similarity to apartheid South Africa can be seen, according to Lelyveld, in the fact that "there’s a much bigger and more obvious military presence in the occupied territories than normally existed in the black townships and ‘homelands’ of the apartheid state." By that logic, the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II were also like apartheid with their vast armaments, bases and manpower.

• Lelyveld repeats the disproved canard about a supposed "network of roads for the exclusive use of the [West Bank Jewish] settlers and the Israel Defense Forces." (See here and here for rebuttals to this common error.)

• Lelyveld mischaracterizes United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, saying that it calls for an Israeli withdrawal from "the territories." This a particularly striking error, since he is well aware that the resolution makes no such call. During Lelyveld’s tenure at the New York Times, the newspaper on three separate occasions incorrectly described Resolution 242 as calling for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines. Each time, the errors were acknowledged with corrections, such as the one published on September 8, 2000:

An article on Wednesday about the Middle East peace talks referred incorrectly to United Nations resolutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict. While Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 Middle East War, calls for Israel’s armed forces to withdraw "from territories occupied in the recent conflict," no resolution calls for Israeli withdrawal from all territory, including East Jerusalem, occupied in the war.

It is precisely because 242's drafters did not believe Israel should withdraw to the precarious 1949 lines that they insisted the resolution call for an Israeli withdrawal "from territories" rather than "from the territories" or from "all the" territories.

Lelyveld clearly understood the content and meaning of Resolution 242, and clearly understood that by repeatedly getting it wrong the New York Times was harming its own credibility. After the third correction, he convened his staff and said to them: "Three times in recent months we've had to run corrections on the actual provisions of UN Resolution 242, providing great cheer and sustenance to those readers who are convinced we are opinionated and not well informed on Middle East issues."

But he apparently realized the New York Review of Books doesn’t hold itself to such journalistic standards. Not only does the former Times editor let Carter’s fallacious characterizations of Resolution 242 pass without comment, but himself mis-describes 242 by inserting what the resolution’s drafter’s intentionally left out — the definite article "the."

• Lelyveld echoes the partisan Palestinian line that the security situation became more dangerous "pretty much as a direct result" of the growth of Israeli settlements, ignoring the fact that anti-Israel violence by Palestinians preceded not only the settlements, but the occupation itself, and ignoring the fact that groups that perpetrate violence against Israelis continuously make clear they are fighting not against settlements, but against Israel’s very existence.

• Lelyveld minimizes the success of Israel’s security barrier (which he, of course, calls a "separation wall"), claiming a Hamas declaration that it would not bomb inside Israel was "as much or even more" responsible for a decline in attacks than the barrier itself.

Even Ramadan Shalah, a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror organization, seems more willing than Lelyveld to unequivocally credit the fence for thwarting attacks. On Hezbollah’s al-Manar television station, he admitted the barrier is "an obstacle to the resistance, and if it were not there the situation would be entirely different."

• He suggests that U.S. support for Israel’s reaction last summer to Hezbollah’s attacks is evidence of American "bias" for Israel.

Lelyveld’s polemic is extreme, but it is hardly the only example of radical anti-Israel rhetoric in the pages of the New York Review of Books and other supposedly "progressive" magazines—as if there is anything progressive about closed-minded, distorted and error-filled delegitimization of Israel.

2) Norway's dash for Gaza
By ALEXANDER ZVIELLI


Why was Raymond Johansen, the Norwegian deputy foreign minister, in such a hurry to be the first European representative to meet Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the new Palestinian unity government in Gaza?

What was the hurry? He certainly read Haniyeh's March 17 speech in which the Hamas chief outlined the Fatah/Hamas government program. Haniyeh said: "The government affirms that resistance is a legitimate right of the Palestinian people." And he knows what Haniyeh means by "resistance" - suicide bombings of cafes and buses, drive-by shootings, rocket launchings.

He knows the new government demands the "right of return" to pre-1967 Israel for millions of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents. He knows that means that killing Israel demographically.

Johansen knows that the Fatah/Hamas government does not renounce violence; that it will not honor previous agreements signed by the PLO, and that it will never recognize the right of a sovereign Jewish state to exist anywhere in the Middle East.

So, I asked myself, again, just what was Johansen's rush? Now, I recall that Johansen was quoted back in March 2001 (by the Norwegian news agency NTB) as saying that international law gave the Palestinians the right to fight an "occupier," but he later said that he'd been misquoted.

So the more I thought about Johansen's rush to embrace Hamas, the more baffled I was.

I admit that I know very little about Norway. All I remember is that this faraway country enjoys beautiful fjords and other wonders of nature. As a matter of fact, I have never met a single Norwegian.

So I consulted my old files in our archives to see whether they would help me fathom Norway's rush to Gaza.

Here's what I came upon.

It was Norway that, during World War II, produced the original Quisling - Vidkun Quisling.

When Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, Quisling announced a pro-Nazi coup. He thus betrayed his king and his country to collaborate with the invading German forces.

The very name "Quisling" still stands for a betrayal. And then I recalled that after World War II was over, the Norwegian government announced that it would agree to re-absorb, within its great land, precisely the same number of Jews as had been living in Norway before 1939 and had been murdered in the Holocaust.

But not a single Jew more.

THIS WAS at a time when tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors were in refugee camps in Germany desperate to get out of Germany and re-build their lives. The Norwegian government decision was certainly a logical one. No one, save for the Palestinian Jewish community, had any interest in all those "undesirable" survivors.

But I imagine that there was some satisfaction in Norway, when those survivors finally found sanctuary - in what would become the Jewish state.

Do today's Norwegians recall that once this refugee problem had been solved, Israel had to conquer the desert, absorb a million more Jews exiled by the Arab countries and fight war after war for its survival?

And perhaps in order to bring some order and peace to the Middle East, in 1993, it was the Norwegian government that helped foist the Oslo agreement on us.

Now, after over 2,000 Israelis perished or were maimed by the Palestinian terror which came in the wake of Oslo, the very name "Oslo" has became anathema to most Israelis.

And how do Oslo's own citizens react to the violence unleased by the accords named after their capital?

They probably say that we Israelis anyway agreed to it - forgetting the manipulations and dirty tricks that made our Knesset's acquiescence possible.

Besides, Norwegians probably tell themselves, they were not the only European country to push the agreement down our throats.

And so, thanks to Oslo, we turned over most of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. We brought Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and the entire enemy command and control from exile in Tunis and set them up in Ramallah.

More recently, we even pulled out entirely the small Jewish communities from Gaza.

Still, our Arab enemies lost no opportunity to work hard, not for for the sake of two independent states, Israel and Palestine, as envisaged in the agreements signed so far, but for a single country, where only those Jews who lived in Palestine before 1918 would be eligible for citizenship.

The whole problem can today be summarized in a few words: There will be no peace as long as the Arabs believe that Israel can be destroyed - and sitting with Hamas reinforces this belief.

As long as Europe allows the Arabs to fantasize about "the right of return" there can be no end to this conflict.

But this message has failed to reach the consciences of the Norwegian government.

So let me appeal to the people of Norway: Tell your government that Israel has a right to live in peace and security. And that to do so, the Palestinian government must recognize the agreements signed between Israel and the PLO; must renounce the threat and use of terrorism against Israelis; and must recognize the right of the Jewish people to live as a sovereign nation in the Middle East

3) Nation of Islam' Leader Farrakhan Declares Support for Iran's Nuclear Program, Says Because U.S. Ignored His Warnings, 'The Time for the Chastisement of Allah is Here'

The following are excerpts from an interview with Louis Farrakhan, leader of the "Nation of Islam", which aired on Al-Jazeera.

"The Time for Warnings is Up"

Louis Farrakhan: "I believe that my teacher, Elijah Muhammad, came as a warning to America, on account of the evils that it committed for 400 years, against millions of black slaves. He came as a warning to America that its policies around the world will bring upon it the fate of ancient Egypt, Sodom and Gomorrah, ancient Babylon, and ancient Rome - that this was coming to America. I am an extension of Elijah Muhammad.

"When I said my time is up, I meant that warnings can't go on forever. I have warned President Bush, I have warned his government, I have warned his people, and I have warned my own people. The time for warnings is up, and the time for the chastisement of Allah is here."

[...]

Interviewer: "Mr. Farrakhan, are you still being accused of being antisemitic, and if that's so, by whom and why?"

Farrakhan: "Are you a Semite?"

Interviewer: "Yes, I'm Arab."

Farrakhan: "Am I against you? Am I against Muslims? No. Are the Jews that came out of Europe Semitic? Who are the Sephardic Jews? Are they Semitic? Am I against them? Who has segregated them and the Ethiopian Jews? Is it not the Europeans? The real antisemites are those who came out of Europe and settled in Palestine, and now they call themselves the true Jews, when in fact, they converted to Judaism."

[...]

Saddam Was No Threat to His Neighbors

Farrakhan: "Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. He was no threat to his neighbors. If he were a lion, he had no teeth. His paws had no claws. He never shot down one American or British plane, which flew all over Iraq for twelve years. Iraq had lost its power to protect its own sovereign airspace. So when America went to war with Iraq, and called it 'Shock and Awe,' and used all these weapons against Iraq, it was committing murder, in order to get the oil of Iraq, to establish a democracy - that's lying and murder."

[...]

No Muslim Who Studies the Koran Would Bomb a Mosque - Where is the Hand of the Mossad and CIA?

Farrakhan: "It is anti-Islamic to bomb a mosque, so what Muslim who studies the Koran would bomb a mosque, whether he is Shi'ite, or Sunni, or Sufi, or Hanafi, or Hanbali? No Muslim would destroy even a synagogue, a monastery, or a church, much less bomb another mosque. Where is the hand of the Mossad in all of this? Where is the hand of the CIA in all of this? I didn’t mis-describe the administration of the United States. They are liars, and they are murderers, and they are guilty of heinous crimes, and they should be removed, for they have violated the constitution of the United States of America, and have violated the peoples of the world."

[...]

"Iran Should Not Be Denied Human Right" to "Atomic Knowledge"; If It "Believes in the Power of Allah, It Can't be Frightened by America"

Farrakhan: "Iran should not be denied the human right to knowledge. Atomic knowledge should be in the arsenal of knowledge of every nation, and if Iran wants to use atomic knowledge for peaceful purposes, she's in accord with international law. But the fear of America is Iran's attitude to Israel, and the cornerstone of America's foreign policy is the protection of Israel. So they don't want Iran to have atomic knowledge. But Iran is saying: 'I'm going to get that knowledge. I'm going to use that knowledge, so that we will no longer be dependent on oil.' Now, America, of course, is a powerful bully. I heard Vice-President Cheney say that all options are on the table. They're not frightening Iran. If Iran believes in Allah, and if Iran believes in the power of Allah, Iran can't be frightened by America. You can't frighten a true Muslim."

4)he Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.


USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country - if they could find the time, and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country! and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions: if the leaders are handicapped, minority, feminist, atheist, dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided, of course, that they are not conservatives.

The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

And, finally, the country IS run by someone who cannot read any newspapers at all.

Peace at any price - Bernard Lewis would disagree!

Is it unreasonable to expect truth in Palestinian textbooks? Particularly from those with whom you are negotiating peace? (See 1 below.)

Apparently there are those who think it does not matter as long as you negotiate and give in to the opposition. Peace at any price! (See 2 below.)

Certainly we can depend upon the media to mis-characterize facts. (See 3 below.)

According to some experts we left one Cold War and are now entering another. (See 4 below.)

More on Sec. Rice's trip and our State Department's approach. (See 5 below.)

Professor Bernard Lewis, a man still worth listening to. (See 6 below.)

Dick







1) Melchior: Raise PA textbooks with Abbas
By HAVIV RETTIG


"You can't have agreements while this kind of hatred is inculcated in the children," Knesset Education Committee Chairman Michael Melchior (Labor-Meimad) said on Tuesday after seeing new 12th-grade textbooks published by the Palestinian Authority late last year.

"I intend to demand from Prime Minister [Ehud Olmert] that he present the findings [of a new report on the textbooks] to Abu Mazen [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] at their next meeting," Melchior said.

Melchior's statements at the Knesset followed the presentation of Palestinian Media Watch saying that Palestinian 12th grade textbooks teach that hating Israel and pursuing its destruction are religious duties.

PMW director Itamar Marcus told the Education Committee it was the first time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been depicted in Palestinian schoolbooks as a religious, rather than a territorial, conflict.

"According to these books," Marcus told the MKs, "the war over this land is a war for Muslim land, and will end only with the resurrection of the dead." The books teach that "recognition of Israel is forbidden by religion," he said.

Committee members promised to pressure international donors, particularly Belgium, whose contributions receive specific mention in the textbooks, to suspend their aid as long as such incitement continues in PA textbooks.

According to the report, the schoolbooks, the products of the official education arm of the PA, written by Fatah-appointed officials at the Center for Developing the Palestinian Curricula and published by the PA Ministry of Higher Education, are also used by schools in east Jerusalem that are under the jurisdiction of - and receive funding from - Israel's Education Ministry.

Shlomo Alon, deputy head of the Pedagogic Secretariat in the Education Ministry, told the lawmakers the ministry would investigate whether the books were distributed in east Jerusalem schools and would cut funding for schools found using them.

According to Melchior, the report's findings indicate a trend from "a conflict over land, which can be resolved by partition, to an existential religious conflict that cannot be resolved."

MK Zeev Elkin (Kadima) called on the government to put in place "sanctions against the PA for such violations [of the Oslo Accords]," which he called "more dangerous than security violations in the long run."

2) An imaginary announcement
By GERSHON BASKIN


Israeli cabinet statement, March 25, 2007 regarding the Arab summit in Riyadh:

'The government of Israel convened this morning in regular session. The prime minister presented to the members of the government a new Israeli peace initiative - "The Ten Points Plan."

"The government debated the initiative and then voted overwhelmingly in favor, with only th e Yisrael Beitenu faction voting against the decision. Minister Lieberman submitted his resignation following the vote. His resignation will come into effect in 48 hours.

"The Government of Israel (GOI) calls for direct face-to-face negotiations with the governments of the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Lebanon in order to bring an end to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

"The GOI asserts that a full peace agreement with diplomatic and normal relations between all states in the region is the ultimate goal of the Israeli peace initiative.

"Israel recognizes that the convening of direct bilateral negotiations for peace constitutes explicit recognition of Israel's right to exist in peace with secure and recognize boundaries. Israel calls on the Palestinian Authority to undertake the utmost efforts to ensure that all acts of aggression will cease once the negotiations have ensued. On its part, Israel will continue to adhere to the cease-fire in Gaza and will extend the cease-fire to the West Bank.

"The GOI recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to have an independent sovereign state of their own living side-by-side with Israel in peace and in mutual security.

"While recognizing the need for mutually-agreed adjustment to the boundaries between Israel and the future State of Palestine, Israel recognizes that the basis for negotiations over boundaries is the Green Line armistice agreement of 1949.

"While Israel rejects the resettlement of Palestinian refugees within the territory of the State of Israel, the GOI recognizes that the refugee issue is one of the most important and sensitive issues for both sides and is committed to negotiating in good faith with the Palestinian leadership to find the most just and agreed-upon solution possible that will put an end to the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, wherever they are.

"The GOI is committed to resolving all of the other outstanding permanent status issues with the Palestinians including the future of Jerusalem, borders, water and economic issues, and mutual security arrangements.

The GOI is prepared to return to negotiations on all fronts based on understanding reached in previous rounds of negotiations.

"Israel has no conflicts with the other states and peoples in the region and calls upon all of the leaders of those states to assist in the process of reaching agreements toward full peace in the region, including supporting constructive ideas and steps regarding the sensitive issues of Jerusalem and of refugees.

"The GOI welcomes the assistance of the Quartet and others in helping to bring about a speedy and successful conclusion to negotiations. The GOI recognizes that substantial financial assistance will be required to provide for security and stability in the region, and calls upon the international community to actively engage in the process of rebuilding the Palestinian economy and the infrastructure of the West Bank and Gaza."

THE ABOVE does not have to be an imaginary report. Everything written above is acceptable to almost all of the ministers of the Israeli government.

While Yisrael Beitenu would probably quit the government, Ehud Olmert could rest assured that Meretz and the Arab parties would support the plan even without joining the coalition. Olmert's popularity would take a sudden surge, but this is not the reason why he should adopt this 10-point plan.

Every prime minister promises his people that he will do the utmost to ensure the stability and security. Like most other prime ministers, Olmert has done almost nothing to fulfill this promise. According to all forecasts and analyses, he does not have much time left in office to even try.

But the urgency facing Olmert is not solely one of Israeli domestic politics. The clock is ticking rapidly on the very viability of the two-state solution.

The correct reading of the preceding sentence should be that the clock is rapidly running out on the viability and the feasibility of the Zionist enterprise. Without fulfilling the two-state solution, there will be no Jewish State of Israel.

The ticking clock is not solely because of the physical realities on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza, which impede the possibility of creating a Palestinian state there. The main factor accelerating the clock is the rapid movement of Palestinian intellectuals away from the idea of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. It was the Palestinian intellectuals who led their national movement to support this solution from the 1970s onward, and it is today the Palestinian intellectuals who are the driving force toward adoption of the South Africa model for Palestine.

Should the Palestinian masses reject the solution of two states in favor of one democratic state from the river to the sea, it is only a matter of time before the entire international community comes to their support, and then the end of the Zionist dream is in sight. If the Palestinian masses adopt the one-state democratic solution, Israel cannot win that battle. And although an unimaginable amount of blood would be spilled, in the end Israel would no longer be the state of the Jewish people.

Those Israeli nationalists and their supporters abroad - Jews and non-Jews alike, who reject peace with our neighbors - are nothing less that suicide bombers aiming to destroy Israel. This may seem to some to be a gross exaggeration, but it is not. Those who reject the risks of making peace are guaranteeing the demise of Israel by their blindness and failure to understand that time is not in our favor.

Arguing about the virtues of recognizing the new Palestinian government is a waste of time. Wasting time now is criminal. Now is the time for an Israeli peace initiative.

Olmert, kadima! - forward. Your time is running out.

3) The Palestinian Government: "All Forms of Resistance"

Some of the international media attempts to whitewash the new Palestinan unity government.

Palestinian PM Haniyeh has stated that the new Palestinian unity government will support "all forms of resistance". Only days after the establishment of the unity government, Hamas has demonstrated exactly what this means.

The terror organization has claimed responsibility for a shooting attack which wounded an Israeli near the Karni border crossing. On the same day, the Egyptians have arrested a would-be Hamas suicide bomber next to the Israeli border awaiting instructions to carry out a terror attack inside Israel.

It is becoming apparent that Hamas intends to continue advocating terror, violence and the refusal to recognize Israel. Some of the international media had, however, fallen over itself in whitewashing the new Palestinian unity government.

Credit to CNN, which refreshingly includes some important context:

Historically, Haniya's Hamas party's use of the term "occupation" does not only refer to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and, previously, Gaza. The group uses the term to characterize Israel's existence, contending that the Jewish state occupies the Palestinian territories.

Compare this with the BBC, which in typical fashion analyzes the Palestinian PM's comments:

The BBC's Matthew Price says that while Mr Haniya's speech will not go far enough for Israel, it is important that a senior member of Hamas has again called for the establishment of a Palestinian state on land occupied by Israel since 1967.

Our correspondent says that some see this as an implicit recognition of Israel's existence.

AFP refers to US reaction to the unity government as "hardline":

The United States on Sunday said it will deal with the new Palestinian government only if it agrees to forgo violence and fully recognize Israel.

US national security adviser Stephen Hadley laid down that hard line [emphasis added] in remarks on US television, after Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, in a speech to parliament, insisted on his new government's right to all forms of resistance, rejecting a key international condition for acceptance.

"This government needs to renounce terror and violence," Hadley told CNN.

Does the AFP regard a call to renounce terror and violence as "hardline"? What would the AFP consider to be moderation? Why are Hadley's comments, which reflect the position of the Quartet, regarded as such while Haniyeh's do not merit any similar judgment? After all, the demands of the Quartet that the Palestinian government renounce violence, abide by previous agreements and recognize Israel can hardly be considered to be extreme in the lexicon of international diplomacy.

Please ask the AFP why it disagrees - http://www.afp.com/english/afp/?pid=contact - and send us any feedback you may receive.

Media outlets are not representing the reality of the new Palestinian unity

4) 'Islamic world in cold war'
by Yaakov Lappin
Israeli experts: Shiite-Sunni conflict dramatically escalated in recent months, Sunnis obsessed with Iranian threat




The Islamic world is entering a cold war period as the divide between Shiites and Sunnis escalates, Israeli experts said during a conference at Tel Aviv University on Tuesday afternoon.



Dr. Uzi Rabi, of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, said both Iran and Sunni nations were sending envoys to battle it out in Iraq.



"There are many reports of Saudi Arabia indirectly supporting al-Qaeda, in order to prevent a Shiite takeover of Baghdad," Rabi said.



"There is a cold war going on in the Middle East between the agents of Iran and Sunni states," he argued, adding: "pragmatic Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the small Gulf states, have recently joined into a bloc aimed at checking the Shiite phenomenon sweeping the Middle East."



He added that for the first time in Israel's history, there was a possibility for the country to "partially join this Sunni strategic alliance."



Rabi cited Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who said in a speech that Shiites that live in Arab states were disloyal to their home countries, and saved their allegiances for Iran. "Jordan has also warned of the Shiite axis stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean that could split the Arab Muslim heart of the area," Rabi noted.



He stressed a massive growth of anti-Shiite reports in the Sunni media, and an "obsessive" level of coverage on the alleged attempt by Shiites to convert Sunnis to Shiism. "I am amazed by the volume of reports on this," Rabi said.



"There is a sea of articles on the Shiite danger. Sunni states have called for collective action to stop the Shiites, and may even begin nuclear programs to counter the Iranian threat," he added.



Rabi said the Sunni states also used the pretext of a Shiite threat to crack down on radical Sunni opposition groups at home.



"The conflict between Shiites and Sunnis is not a passing phenomenon. This conflict has crossed the borders of Iraq," he concluded.



Iran seeking access to border with Israel

Earlier, Professor David Menshari, an expert on Iran at Tel Aviv University, said
the Islamic Republic was seeking to spread its influence to any area in the Middle East that was not strong enough to repel it, with the Palestinian Authority being a prime example of such a region. "Hamas can help Iran link up to the border with Israel," Menshari said. "Wherever the ground gives way, Iran can be found. They go after the soft targets, such as Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, but stay away from the strong countries," he stressed.



Menshari added that "to believe that there was homogenous body of Shiites, a unified axis, would be doing ourselves an injustice."



He cited many voices within Iran that were opposed to the government of the ayatollahs, saying: "There is a series of religious leaders in Iran opposed to clerical control of the state."

5) Rice's ME trip approaches amidst diplomatic questions

US State Department supports decision to meet with non-Hamas ministers in PA government, while some Congress members objects.

The United States government indicated Tuesday that it is unwilling to sever ties with Palestinian officials with whom it has a history of contact, and unlike Israel, will not shun non-Hamas ministers in the new Palestinian unity government. But some Congress members have expressed support for a harder-line policy.



In response to a question about a recent meeting between Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad and the US consul-general , State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that the US has "settled on what we thought was an appropriate and right contact policy. I know the Israeli Government has a different view in this regard."



Nonetheless, he emphasized that "we and the Israelis are absolutely on the same page on the need to fight terror and the principles that any Palestinian government with which the rest of the world and the Israelis could work need to meet the Quartet principles. Everybody agrees on that."



Meanwhile, leading members of the House and Senate are circulating letters urging the United States and its European allies not to relax their standards and to adhere to the three basic conditions demanded of a Palestinian government.



The House letter urges the European Union not to give aid or grant recognition to the Palestinian Authority until the PA recognizes Israel, renounces violence and accepts past Israel-Palestinian agreements. The Senate letter urges Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to resist pressure from other countries to grant aid and recognition to the PA before it meets the three international conditions.



Rice coming for another visit

In this midst of these diplomatic decisions, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's is scheduled to visit on Friday Egypt, Israel, the West Bank and Jordan in an effort to make progress on Middle East peace.


The trip's timing appears less than ideal given Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's announcement that he plans to shun the entire Palestinian unity government because it has not fully accepted three international conditions.


While the government pledged to respect past peace deals, it has not recognized Israel or renounced violence, the two other conditions set by the Quartet (the European Union, Russia, the United States and the United Nations) for lifting a Western aid embargo imposed after Hamas won elections last year.



McCormack told reporters Rice's trip would begin with a stop in the southern Egyptian city of Aswan, where she will meet ministers from the so-called Arab "quartet" of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.



She will then travel to Jerusalem and Ramallah, to Amman for talks with Jordan's King Abdullah, and then back to Israel for more contacts with Israeli and Palestinian officials. The spokesman said she plans to return to Washington on March 27.

6)The 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture by Bernard Lewis.

Introductory remarks by Christopher DeMuth, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and James Q. Wilson


Thank you, Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, ladies and gentlemen. As you have been told, I have studied a number of languages, but I cannot find words in any of them adequate to express my feeling of gratitude for the honor and appreciation which I have been shown this evening. All I can say is thank you.

My topic this evening is Europe and Islam. But let me begin with a word of personal explanation. You are accustomed for the most part to hearing from people with direct practical involvement in military and intelligence matters. I cannot offer you that. My direct involvement with military and intelligence matters ended quite a long time ago--to be precise, on 31 August 1945, when I left His Majesty's Service and returned to the university to join with colleagues in trying to cope with a six-year backlog of battle-scarred undergraduates.

What I would like to try and offer you this evening is something of the lessons of history. Here I must begin with a second disavowal. It is sometimes forgotten that the content of history, the business of the historian, is the past, not the future. I remember being at an international meeting of historians in Rome during which a group of us were sitting and discussing the question: should historians attempt to predict the future? We batted this back and forth. This was in the days when the Soviet Union was still alive and well. One of our Soviet colleagues finally intervened and said, "In the Soviet Union, the most difficult task of the historian is to predict the past."

I do not intend to offer any predictions of the future in Europe or the Middle East, but one thing can legitimately be expected of the historian, and that is to identify trends and processes - to look at the trends in the past, at what is continuing in the present, and therefore to see the possibilities and choices which will face us in the future.

One other introductory word. A favorite theme of the historian, as I am sure you know, is periodization--dividing history into periods. Periodization is mostly a convenience of the historian for purposes of writing or teaching. Nevertheless, there are times in the long history of the human adventure when we have a real turning point, a major change--the end of an era, the beginning of a new era. I am becoming more and more convinced that we are in such an age at the present time--a change in history comparable with such events as the fall of Rome, the discovery of America, and the like. I will try to explain that.

Conventionally, the modern history of the Middle East begins at the end of the 18th century, when a small French expeditionary force commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte was able to conquer Egypt and rule it with impunity. It was a terrible shock that one of the heartlands of Islam could be invaded, occupied, and ruled with virtually no effective resistance.

The second shock came a few years later with the departure of the French, which was brought about not by the Egyptians nor by their suzerains, the Turks, but by a small squadron of the Royal Navy commanded by a young admiral called Horatio Nelson, who drove the French out and back to France.

This is of symbolic importance. That was, as I said, at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. From then onward, the heartlands of Islam were no longer wholly controlled by the rulers of Islam. They were under direct or indirect influence or control from outside.

The dominating forces in the Islamic world were now outside forces. What shaped their lives was Western influence. What gave them choices was Western rivalries. The political game that they could play--the only one that was open to them--was to try and profit from the rivalries between the outside powers, to try to use them against one another. We see that again and again in the course of the 19th and 20th and even into the beginning of the 21st century. We see, for example, in the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, how Middle Eastern governments or leaders tried to play this game with varying degrees of success.

That game is now over. The era that was inaugurated by Napoleon and Nelson was terminated by Reagan and Gorbachev. The Middle East is no longer ruled or dominated by outside powers. These nations are having some difficulty adjusting to this new situation, to taking responsibility for their own actions and their consequences, and so on. But they are beginning to do so, and this change has been expressed with his usual clarity and eloquence by Osama bin Laden.

We see with the ending of the era of outside domination, the reemergence of certain older trends and deeper currents in Middle Eastern history, which had been submerged or at least obscured during the centuries of Western domination. Now they are coming back again. One of them I would call the internal struggles--ethnic, sectarian, regional--between different forces within the Middle East. These have of course continued, but were of less importance in the imperialist era. They are coming out again now and gaining force, as we see for example from the current clash between Sunni and Shia Islam--something without precedent for centuries.

The other thing more directly relevant to my theme this evening is the signs of a return among Muslims to what they perceive as the cosmic struggle for world domination between the two main faiths--Christianity and Islam. There are many religions in the world, but as far as I know there are only two that have claimed that their truths are not only universal--all religions claim that--but also exclusive; that they--the Christians in the one case, the Muslims in the other--are the fortunate recipients of God's final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves--like the Jews or the Hindus--but to bring to the rest of humanity, removing whatever obstacles there may be on the way. This self-perception, shared between Christendom and Islam, led to the long struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries and which is now entering a new phase. In the Christian world, now at the beginning of the 21st century of its era, this triumphalist attitude no longer prevails, and is confined to a few minority groups. In the world of Islam, now in its early 15th century, triumphalism is still a significant force, and has found expression in new militant movements.

It is interesting that both sides for quite a long time refused to recognize this struggle. For example, both sides named each other by non-religious terms. The Christian world called the Muslims Moors, Saracens, Tartars, and Turks. Even a convert was said to have turned Turk. The Muslims for their part called the Christian world Romans, Franks, Slavs, and the like. It was only slowly and reluctantly that they began to give each other religious designations and then these were for the most part demeaning and inaccurate. In the West, it was customary to call Muslims Mohammadans, which they never called themselves, based on the totally false assumption that Muslims worship Muhammad in the way that Christians worship Christ. The Muslim term for Christians was Nazarene--nasrani--implying the local cult of a place called Nazareth.

The declaration of war begins at the very beginning of Islam. There are certain letters purported to have been written by the Prophet Muhammad to the Christian Byzantine emperor, the emperor of Persia, and various other rulers, saying, "I have now brought God's final message. Your time has passed. Your beliefs are superseded. Accept my mission and my faith or resign or submit--you are finished." The authenticity of these prophetic letters is doubted, but the message is clear and authentic in the sense that it does represent the long dominant view of the Islamic world.

A little later we have hard evidence--and I mean hard in the most literal sense--inscriptions. Many of you, I should think, have been to Jerusalem. You have probably visited that remarkable building, the Dome of the Rock. It is very significant. It is built on a place sacred to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Its architectural style is that of the earliest Christian churches. It dates from the end of the 7th century and was built by one of the early caliphs, the oldest Muslim religious building outside Arabia. What is significant is the message in the inscriptions inside the Dome: "He is God, He is one, He has no companion, He does not beget, He is not begotten." (cf. Qur'an, IX, 31-3; CXII, 1-3) This is clearly a direct challenge to certain central principles of the Christian faith.

Interestingly, they put the same thing on a new gold coinage. Until then, striking gold coins had been an exclusive Roman privilege. The Islamic caliph for the first time struck gold coins, breaching the immemorial privilege of Rome, and putting the same inscription on them. As I said, a challenge.

The Muslim attack on Christendom and the resulting conflict, which arose more from their resemblances than from their differences, has gone through three phases. The first dates from the very beginning of Islam, when the new faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the Middle East and beyond. It was then that they conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa--all at that time part of the Christian world--and went beyond into Europe, conquering a sizable part of southwestern Europe, including Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, all of which became part of the Islamic world, and even crossing the Pyrenees into France and occupying for a while parts of France.

After a long and bitter struggle, the Christians managed to retake part but not all of the territory they had lost. They succeeded in Europe, and in a sense Europe was defined by the limits of that success. They failed to retake North Africa or the Middle East, which were lost to Christendom. Notably, they failed to recapture the Holy Land, in the series of campaigns known as the Crusades.

That was not the end of the matter. In the meantime the Islamic world, having failed the first time, was bracing for the second attack, this time conducted not by Arabs and Moors but by Turks and Tartars. In the mid-thirteenth century the Mongol conquerors of Russia were converted to Islam. The Turks, who had already conquered Anatolia, advanced into Europe and in 1453 they captured the ancient Christian citadel of Constantinople. They conquered a large part of the Balkans, and for a while ruled half of Hungary. Twice they reached as far as Vienna, to which they laid siege in 1529 and again in 1683. Barbary corsairs from North Africa--well-known to historians of the United States--were raiding Western Europe. They went to Iceland--the uttermost limit--and to several places in Western Europe, including notably a raid on Baltimore (the original one, in Ireland) in 1631. In a contemporary document, we have a list of 107 captives who were taken from Baltimore to Algiers, including a man called Cheney.

Again, Europe counterattacked, this time more successfully and more rapidly. They succeeded in recovering Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, and in advancing further into the Islamic lands, chasing their former rulers whence they had come. For this phase of European counterattack, a new term was invented: imperialism. When the peoples of Asia and Africa invaded Europe, this was not imperialism. When Europe attacked Asia and Africa, it was.

This European counterattack began a new phase which brought the European attack into the very heart of the Middle East. In our own time, we have seen the end of the resulting domination.

Osama bin Laden, in some very interesting proclamations and declarations, has this to say about the war in Afghanistan which, you will remember, led to the defeat and retreat of the Red Army and the collapse of the Soviet Union. We tend to see that as a Western victory, more specifically an American victory, in the Cold War against the Soviets. For Osama bin Laden, it was nothing of the kind. It is a Muslim victory in a jihad. If one looks at what happened in Afghanistan and what followed, this is, I think one must say, a not implausible interpretation.

As Osama bin Laden saw it, Islam had reached the ultimate humiliation in this long struggle after World War I, when the last of the great Muslim empires--the Ottoman Empire--was broken up and most of its territories divided between the victorious allies; when the caliphate was suppressed and abolished, and the last caliph driven into exile. This seemed to be the lowest point in Muslim history. From there they went upwards.

In his perception, the millennial struggle between the true believers and the unbelievers had gone through successive phases, in which the latter were led by the various imperial European powers that had succeeded the Romans in the leadership of the world of the infidels--the Christian Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the British and French and Russian empires. In this final phase, he says, the world of the infidels was divided and disputed between two rival superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In his perception, the Muslims have met, defeated, and destroyed the more dangerous and the more deadly of the two infidel superpowers. Dealing with the soft, pampered and effeminate Americans would be an easy matter.

This belief was confirmed in the 1990s when we saw one attack after another on American bases and installations with virtually no effective response of any kind--only angry words and expensive missiles dispatched to remote and uninhabited places. The lessons of Vietnam and Beirut were confirmed by Mogadishu. "Hit them, and they'll run." This was the perceived sequence leading up to 9/11. That attack was clearly intended to be the completion of the first sequence and the beginning of the new one, taking the war into the heart of the enemy camp.

In the eyes of a fanatical and resolute minority of Muslims, the third wave of attack on Europe has clearly begun. We should not delude ourselves as to what it is and what it means. This time it is taking different forms and two in particular: terror and migration.

The subject of terror has been frequently discussed and in great detail, and I do not need to say very much about that now. What I do want to talk about is the other aspect of more particular relevance to Europe, and that is the question of migration.

In earlier times, it was inconceivable that a Muslim would voluntarily move to a non-Muslim country. The jurists discuss this subject at great length in the textbooks and manuals of shari`a, but in a different form: is it permissible for a Muslim to live in or even visit a non-Muslim country? And if so, if he does, what must he do? Generally speaking, this was considered under certain specific headings.

A captive or a prisoner of war obviously has no choice, but he must preserve his faith and get home as soon as possible.

The second case is that of an unbeliever in the land of the unbelievers who sees the light and embraces the true faith--in other words, becomes a Muslim. He must leave as soon as possible and go to a Muslim country.

The third case is that of a visitor. For long, the only purpose that was considered legitimate was to ransom captives. This was later expanded into diplomatic and commercial missions. With the advance of the European counterattack, there was a new issue in this ongoing debate. What is the position of a Muslim if his country is conquered by infidels? May he stay or must he leave?

We have some interesting documents from the late 15th century, when the reconquest of Spain was completed and Moroccan jurists were discussing this question. They asked if Muslims could stay. The general answer was no, it is not permissible. The question was asked: May they stay if the Christian government that takes over is tolerant? This proved to be a purely hypothetical question, of course. The answer was no; even then they may not stay, because the temptation to apostasy would be even greater. They must leave and hope that in God's good time they will be able to reconquer their homelands and restore the true faith.

This was the line taken by most jurists. There were some, at first a minority, later a more important group, who said it is permissible for Muslims to stay provided that certain conditions are met, mainly that they are allowed to practice their faith. This raises another question which I will come back to in a moment: what is meant by practicing their faith? Here I would remind you that we are dealing not only with a different religion but also with a different concept of what religion is about, referring especially to what Muslims call the shari`a, the holy law of Islam, covering a wide range of matters regarded as secular in the Christian world even during the medieval period, but certainly in what some call the post-Christian era of the Western world.

There are obviously now many attractions which draw Muslims to Europe including the opportunities offered, particularly in view of the growing economic impoverishment of much of the Muslim world, and the attractions of European welfare as well as employment. They also have freedom of expression and education which they lack at home. This is a great incentive to the terrorists who migrate. Terrorists have far greater freedom of preparation and operation in Europe--and to a degree also in America--than they do in most Islamic lands.

I would like to draw your attention to some other factors of importance in the situation at this moment. One is the new radicalism in the Islamic world, which comes in several kinds: Sunni, especially Wahhabi, and Iranian Shiite, dating from the Iranian revolution. Both of these are becoming enormously important factors. We have the strange paradox that the danger of Islamic radicalism or of radical terrorism is far greater in Europe and America than it is in the Middle East and North Africa, where they are much better at controlling their extremists than we are.

The Sunni kind is mainly Wahhabi and has benefited from the prestige and influence and power of the House of Saud as controllers of the holy places of Islam and of the annual pilgrimage, and the enormous oil wealth at their disposal. The Iranian revolution is something different. The term revolution is much used in the Middle East. It is virtually the only generally accepted title of legitimacy. But the Iranian revolution is a real revolution in the sense in which we use that term of the French or Russian revolutions. Like the French and Russian revolutions in their day, it has had an enormous impact in the whole area with which the Iranians share a common universe of discourse--that is to say, the Islamic world.

Let me turn to the question of assimilation, which is much discussed nowadays. How far is it possible for Muslim migrants who have settled in Europe, in North America, and elsewhere, to become part of those countries in which they settle, in the way that so many other waves of immigrants have done? I think there are several points which need to be made.

One of them is the basic differences in what precisely is meant by assimilation and acceptance. Here there is an immediate and obvious difference between the European and the American situations. For an immigrant to become an American means a change of political allegiance. For an immigrant to become a Frenchman or a German means a change of ethnic identity. Changing political allegiance is certainly very much easier and more practical than changing ethnic identity, either in one's own feelings or in one's measure of acceptance. England had it both ways. If you were naturalized, you became British but you did not become English.

I mentioned earlier the important difference in what one means by religion. For Muslims, it covers a whole range of different things--marriage, divorce, and inheritance are the most obvious examples. Since antiquity in the Western world, the Christian world, these have been secular matters. The distinction of church and state, spiritual and temporal, lay and ecclesiastical is a Christian distinction which has no place in Islamic history and therefore is difficult to explain to Muslims, even in the present day. Until very recently they did not even have a vocabulary to express it. They have one now.

What are the European responses to this situation? In Europe, as in the United States, a frequent response is what is variously known as multiculturalism and political correctness. In the Muslim world there are no such inhibitions. They are very conscious of their identity. They know who they are and what they are and what they want, a quality which we seem to have lost to a very large extent. This is a source of strength in the one, of weakness in the other.

A term sometimes used is constructive engagement. Let's talk to them, let's get together and see what we can do. Constructive engagement has a long tradition. When Saladin re-conquered Jerusalem and other places in the holy land, he allowed the Christian merchants from Europe to stay in the seaports. He apparently felt the need to justify this, and he wrote a letter to the caliph in Baghdad explaining his action. I would like to quote it to you. The merchants were useful since "there is not one among them that does not bring and sell us weapons of war, to their detriment and to our advantage." This continued during the Crusades. It continued after. It continued during the Ottoman advance into Europe, when they could always find European merchants willing to sell them weapons they needed and European bankers willing to finance their purchases. Constructive engagement has a long history.

One also finds a rather startling modern version of it. We have seen in our own day the extraordinary spectacle of a pope apologizing to the Muslims for the Crusades. I would not wish to defend the behavior of the Crusaders, which was in many respects atrocious. But let us have a little sense of proportion. We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The first papal call for a crusade occurred in 846 C.E., when an Arab expedition from Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St. Peter's Rome. A synod in France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against "the enemies of Christ," and the Pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad--an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up.

Here is another more recent example of multiculturalism. On October 8, 2002--I insist on giving the date because you may want to look it up--the then French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who I am told is a staunch Roman Catholic, was making a speech in the French National Assembly and talking about the situation in Iraq. Speaking of Saddam Hussein, he remarked that one of Saddam Hussein's heroes was his compatriot Saladin, who came from the same Iraqi town of Tikrit. In case the members of the Assembly were not aware of Saladin's identity, M. Raffarin explained to them that it was he who was able "to defeat the Crusaders and liberate Jerusalem." Yes. When a French prime minister describes Saladin's capture of Jerusalem from the largely French Crusaders as an act of liberation, this would seem to indicate a rather extreme case of realignment of loyalties.

I was told this, and I didn't believe it. So I checked it in the parliamentary record. When M. Raffarin used the word "liberate," a member--the name was not given--called out, "Libérer?" He just went straight on. That was the only interruption, and as far as I was aware there was no comment afterwards.

The Islamic radicals have even been able to find some allies in Europe. In describing them I shall have to use the terms left and right, terms which are becoming increasingly misleading. The seating arrangements in the first French National Assembly after the revolution are not the laws of nature, but we have become accustomed to using them. They are difficult when applied to the West nowadays. They are utter nonsense when applied to different brands of Islam. But as I say, they are what people use, so let us put it this way.

They have a left-wing appeal to the anti-U.S. elements in Europe, for whom they have so-to-speak replaced the Soviets. They have a right-wing appeal to the anti-Jewish elements in Europe, replacing the Axis. They have been able to win considerable support under both headings. For some in Europe, their hatreds apparently outweigh their loyalties.

There is an interesting exception to that in Germany, where the Muslims are mostly Turkish. There they have often tended to equate themselves with the Jews, to see themselves as having succeeded the Jews as the victims of German racism and persecution. I remember a meeting in Berlin convened to discuss the new Muslim minorities in Europe. In the evening I was asked by a Muslim group of Turks to join them and hear what they had to say about it, which was very interesting. The phrase which sticks most vividly in my mind from one of them was, "In a thousand years they (the Germans) were unable to accept 400,000 Jews. What hope is there that they will accept two million Turks?" They used this very skillfully in playing on German feelings of guilt in order to inhibit any effective German measures to protect German identity, which I would say like others in Europe is becoming endangered.

My time is running out so I think I'll leave other points that I wanted to make. [Shouts to go on.] You don't mind a bit more?

I want to say something about the question of tolerance. You will recall that at the end of the first phase of the Christian reconquest, after Spain and Portugal and Sicily, Muslims--who by that time were very numerous in the reconquered lands--were given a choice: baptism, exile, or death. In the former Ottoman lands in southeastern Europe, the leaders of what you might call the reconquest were somewhat more tolerant but not a great deal more. Some Muslim minorities remained in some Balkan countries, with troubles still going on at the present day. If I say names like Kosovo or Bosnia, you will know what I am talking about.

Nevertheless, I mention this point because of the very sharp contrast with the treatment of Christians and other non-Muslims in the Islamic lands at that time. When Muslims came to Europe they had a certain expectation of tolerance, feeling that they were entitled to at least the degree of tolerance which they had accorded to non-Muslims in the great Muslim empires of the past. Both their expectations and their experience were very different.

Coming to European countries, they got both more and less than they had expected: More in the sense that they got in theory and often in practice equal political rights, equal access to the professions, all the benefits of the welfare state, freedom of expression, and so on and so forth.

But they also got significantly less than they had given in traditional Islamic states. In the Ottoman Empire and other states before that--I mention the Ottoman Empire as the most recent--the non-Muslim communities had separate organizations and ran their own affairs. They collected their own taxes and enforced their own laws. There were several Christian communities, each living under its own leadership, recognized by the state. These communities were running their own schools, their own education systems, administering their own laws in such matters as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the like. The Jews did the same.

So you had a situation in which three men living in the same street could die and their estates would be distributed under three different legal systems if one happened to be Jewish, one Christian, and one Muslim. A Jew could be punished by a rabbinical court and jailed for violating the Sabbath or eating on Yom Kippur. A Christian could be arrested and imprisoned for taking a second wife. Bigamy is a Christian offense; it was not an Islamic or an Ottoman offense.

They do not have that degree of independence in their own social and legal life in the modern state. It is quite unrealistic for them to expect it, given the nature of the modern state, but that is not how they see it. They feel that they are entitled to receive what they gave. As one Muslim friend of mine in Europe put it, "We allowed you to practice monogamy, why should you not allow us to practice polygamy?"

Such questions--polygamy, in particular--raise important issues of a more practical nature. Isn't an immigrant who is permitted to come to France or Germany entitled to bring his family with him? But what exactly does his family consist of? They are increasingly demanding and getting permission to bring plural wives. The same is also applying more and more to welfare payments and so on. On the other hand, the enforcement of shari`a is a little more difficult. This has become an extremely sensitive issue.

Another extremely sensitive issue, closely related to this, is the position of women, which is of course very different between Christendom and Islam. This has indeed been one of the major differences between the two societies.

Where do we stand now? Is it third time lucky? It is not impossible. They have certain clear advantages. They have fervor and conviction, which in most Western countries are either weak or lacking. They are self-assured of the rightness of their cause, whereas we spend most of our time in self-denigration and self-abasement. They have loyalty and discipline, and perhaps most important of all, they have demography, the combination of natural increase and migration producing major population changes, which could lead within the foreseeable future to significant majorities in at least some European cities or even countries.

But we also have some advantages, the most important of which are knowledge and freedom. The appeal of genuine modern knowledge in a society which, in the more distant past, had a long record of scientific and scholarly achievement is obvious. They are keenly and painfully aware of their relative backwardness and welcome the opportunity to rectify it.

Less obvious but also powerful is the appeal of freedom. In the past, in the Islamic world the word freedom was not used in a political sense. Freedom was a legal concept. You were free if you were not a slave. The institution of slavery existed. Free meant not slave. Unlike the West, they did not use freedom and slavery as a metaphor for good and bad government, as we have done for a long time in the Western world. The terms they used to denote good and bad government are justice and injustice. A good government is a just government, one in which the Holy Law, including its limitations on sovereign authority, is strictly enforced. The Islamic tradition, in theory and, until the onset of modernization, to a large degree in practice, emphatically rejects despotic and arbitrary government. Living under justice is the nearest approach to what we would call freedom.

But the idea of freedom in its Western interpretation is making headway. It is becoming more and more understood, more and more appreciated and more and more desired. It is perhaps in the long run our best hope, perhaps even our only hope, of surviving this developing struggle. Thank you.

Going in The Wrong Direction- Speed No Help!

Barry Rubin's article reminds me of what Sen. Phil Gramm used to say. "When going in the wrong direction speeding up will still not get you there." (See 1 below.)

Sec. Rice heads for the Middle East again and the squeeze on both the U.S. and Israel will increase. the Saudis are pressing the U.S. to recognize Abbas' Unity Government as a quid pro quo for helping stabilize the situation in Iraq. The Saudis expect the U.S. to pressure Israel to begin negotiations for a final settlement. The Saudis, in return, have committed the Arab world to recognize Israel. The Saudis have stated that Hamas has bent by agreeing to honor past agreements which, the Saudis say, is tantamount to recognition of Israel. The initial demands called for by TRM would thus be finessed.

Olmert finds himself, or will shortly, on the horns of a dilemma because balking leaves the U.S. in a difficult position and agreeing leaves Israel vulnerable to further terrorist attacks and a less defensible position militarily.

As I pointed out several days ago, the complete destruction of Israel would not serve "moderate" Arab interests because Israel has been a convenient whipping boy. However,an Israel incapable of defending itself, against a surreptitious nuclear attack by radical Islamists, would no longer be deemed a threat.

Norway has already made contact with the Unity Government.

Tiny nations, dependent upon larger ones, have little leverage when their larger allies are, themselves, in deep "doo doo" as the current administration finds itself. Even moral commitments have a way of fading.

Perhaps I am too pessimistic but the West has a history of caving in to Arabs and is on the edge of doing so again. Score another one for Hamas and the terrorists.

Even Assad has joined in by casting aspersions on the U.S. by calling it the cog in the wheel to peace in the region. Assad is no fool and knows by blaming us we have no defenders. The fact that he and his thugs go around assassinating Lebanese somehow will escape our Alies.(See 2 below.)

But then, the Unity Government could fall apart because unity is a term foreign to Arabs. (See 3 and 4 below.)

Seems like an overreach to me. (See 5 below.)

Dick




1) The Region: Putting the impossible first
By BARRY RUBIN


Whether or not the Middle East is beyond redemption, it certainly seems to be beyond satire. The attempt to turn radicals into moderates, terrorism into resistance, serial political murderers into negotiating partners, and situations of total anarchy into great opportunities for diplomatic progress never ends.
But here is one of my favorites in this genre, quoted from Newsweek, where it was published without any hint of irony:

"'The Supreme Leader [of Iran, Sayyid Ali Khamenei] was deeply suspicious of the American government,' says a Khameini aide whose position does not allow him to be named. 'But [he] was repulsed by these terrorist acts [of September 11] and was truly sad about the loss of the civilian lives in America. For two weeks, worshipers at Friday prayers even stopped chanting 'Death to America.'"

Two whole weeks! Is that holding out the hand of friendship, or what?

At any rate, this reveals one of the main problems of the Middle East, at least as far as Western involvement is concerned. Far too much of the quality time of leaders, policymakers, and diplomats is spent on the impossible - or at least highly improbable.

HERE ARE the four things which, aside from Iraq, take up the most time on the agenda of Western leaders regarding the Middle East. All of them are doomed to fail, which makes one wonder about this set of priorities and manner of thinking:

Making friends with Iran while trying to persuade it, through relatively mild measures, to stop working on nuclear weapons.

The fact is that Iran is not going to abandon its drive to get atomic bombs and the missiles to deliver them on target, certainly not unless subjected to the toughest possible diplomacy. Everyone should know this by now. Yet the pretense is that watered-down diplomatic wrist-slaps are going to make some difference.

This doesn't mean that someone needs to attack Iran - though the threat of attack, even as a bluff, is a key pressure - but it does mean Teheran's leaders have to conclude that the cost of proceeding is too high and too dangerous. And that is a long way from happening yet.

As for reconciling Iran, the nature of the regime - not just of the president, but of the whole ruling establishment - is just not going to make that possible. On the one hand, there is ideology. Iran's leaders believe what they say and have their own goals of regional hegemony. On the other hand, reinforcing this strategy is what the regime needs to do to survive, which requires having the US, the West and Israel as scapegoats for failures and justifications for repression.

Making friends with Syria to get it to stop using terrorism to take over Lebanon, and terrorism against Iraq and Israel.

As with Iran, however, the regime in Damascus is not just a blank slate or a government asking for the redress of reasonable grievances. Here, too, there is a whole set of other problems: the nature of the dictatorship as well as its ideology, ambitions and requirements for survival.

Consider the tale of the night-vision goggles.
US forces in Iraq discovered that Syria had given the terrorist insurgents there night-vision goggles. Israeli forces in Lebanon found that Syria had given Hizbullah night-vision goggles. European governments are now considering Syrian requests for even more night-vision goggles, supposedly to be used to block arms-smuggling to its own clients - smuggling which the Syrian government itself is doing.

Here is what Dina Ezzat, a reporter from the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram who investigated the issue, concluded about what Israel would get if it gave the Golan Heights, and the West gave Lebanon, to Syria.

Their first alleged reward would be "the stability of the regime" in Damascus. In other words, they would get the pleasure of having President Bashar Assad still in power. Second, Damascus would be willing to curtail "its facilitation of the arming of Hizbullah, while decreasing its assistance and accommodation of Palestinian and Iraqi militant resistance groups." Third, it would be willing to reduce "its intelligence cooperation with Iran."
That's it. Not real peace, just a 20-percent reduction in covert war.

Trying to moderate Hamas. Like Syria and Iran, Hamas does not want to be moderate. Unlike them, it hardly pretends otherwise. It continues to make clear its virulent anti-Semitism and goal of destroying Israel. To their credit, the Europeans are by and large holding the line. But again, a huge amount of time and energy is going into this dead-end effort at moderating Hamas.

Suddenly, at the worst possible moment in history for success, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become the top priority for many governments. Fatah has collapsed; Hamas is extremist and believes time is on its side, and every Israeli concession has inspired escalation by the Palestinians and others.

EVERY LESSON of the last 14 years has pointed at the intractability of the conflict. True, efforts can be justified by saying, "We have to try," or the belief that pretending to do so will make Arabs and Muslims happy. Yet now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is pinning her reputation on making progress. Why tie your future to an inevitable failure?

I could add two other points: thinking it possible to "solve" the internal situation in Iraq, and expecting that radical Islamists can be reconciled to Western interests.

What do all these things have in common? Not looking at how the interests and ideas of extremists direct them; wishful thinking that concessions and empathy can resolve real conflicts, and so on.

Now ask yourself this question: With so much effort going into guaranteed failures, is it surprising that there are so few successes?

2) Report: Assad says expects little progress in peace talks in next two years


Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an interview published Monday that he does not expect movement on the peace process in the next two years, calling the United States the main obstacle to a Middle East peace.

Assad's remarks dampen hopes that a summit of Arab leaders set for March 28-29 in the Saudi capital can build momentum for reviving the peace process between Israel and Arab nations.

The summit is expected to relaunch a Saudi peace plan adopted by the Arab League in 2002. At the same time, Arab countries are pushing Washington to deal with a new Palestinian Authority unity government that includes the Hamas movement.

In an interview with the Saudi newspaper Al-Jazira, Assad said "the main obstacle, in my opinion, regarding the peace process, is the ... American administration's rejection of the peace process."

"There's an American administration without a vision, and the U.S. administration, unfortunately, is central to all peace processes in the region," he said, according to the paper.

Assad said that international envoys have shuttled between Syria and Israel, carrying each country's point of view regarding peace to the other. But he said nothing concrete has happened on the ground especially since "the current Israeli government is the weakest in Israel's history."

"They [envoys] openly said, quoting [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert, that the decision is in Washington," said Assad, according to the newspaper.

Assad said he hasn't lost hope that peace would prevail, but he said prospects for that in the next two years do not look rosy.

"The issue of peace in at least the next two years doesn't call for optimism unless there are unexpected changes," said Assad, warning that delay in resolving the conflict would increase tensions and tensions will increase extremism.

U.S. allies Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have increasingly warned Washington that militancy in the Middle East will grow unless progress is made in the peace process.

Israel suggested earlier this month that it could accept the 2002 Arab peace initiative if some changes were made in it, particularly over its call for the return of Palestinian refugees. That has sparked a debate among Arab governments over whether to amend the peace plan, though change appears unlikely.

The initiative is a set of principles that offers Israel full recognition and peace with all Arabs in return for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 boundaries and an agreed, just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem in accordance with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948.

3) Hamas slams Abbas' decision to appoint Dahlan as security chief


Hamas, in its first public rift with Fatah since forming a Palestinian unity government, accused Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Monday of illegally appointing one of the Islamist group's long-time foes as his national security adviser.

"Hamas sees the step by President Mahmoud Abbas to appoint
Mohammed Dahlan, a lawmaker, as his adviser for the national security as a violation of Palestinian law," Hamas said in a statement. "We urge President Abbas to go back to the law and to examine the decision accordingly."

Dahlan was appointed to lead the newly re-established Palestinian National Security Council, which is intended in theory to oversee all security services in the Palestinian territories.

Abbas' decision to create the PNSC and appoint Dahlan as national security adviser are seen as an attempt by the PA chair to tighten his control over the various Palestinian security forces.

Dahlan said Sunday that the move was aimed at achieving a united force that would carry out the strategy set by the council. He hinted that there are no plans to dismantle the Executive Force Hamas created in Gaza. "We will start with the most pressing issues," Dahlan said. "As long as the Executive Force is not acting illegally, we will examine our priorities."

As Gaza security chief in the 1990s, Dahlan led a crackdown on Islamists. In recent months, Hamas activists accused him of trying to assassinate Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and of unofficially commanding pro-Fatah forces in the factional fighting.

4) Hamas: We didn’t sell out
by Ali Waked

After establishing unity government with Fatah, Hamas launches campaign to clarify that group is not surrendering hard-line principles; ‘Any Hamas leader who ever recognizes Israel will be kicked out,’ declares Hamas lawmaker




While Israel and most of the international community refuse to recognize the new Palestinian coalition, Hamas is planning a massive public relations campaign to clarify that the group is not capitulating its principles despites its cooperation with Fatah.


Hamas stressed that the basic doctrine of the new Hamas-Fatah Palestinian government, which was sworn in Saturday, does not constitute a retreat from the movement's historical principles.
Terror Attack
Officials: Karni shooting shows Hamas’ true colors / Ronny Sofer
Senior diplomatic officials say Monday’s shooting attack which Hamas claimed responsibility for is ‘Hamas’ answer to those who think we should talk to new Palestinian unity government'
Full Story



The Palestinian press, however, is reporting serious disagreements within the group regarding the new government ’s basic doctrine.



Outgoing Foreign Minister Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar launched an assault on the new government’s principles during a speech Monday calling them weak and insufficient.



'No fissures'

Hamas faction member Mushir al-Masri however insisted that there were no disagreements or fissures within the party. He said Hamas’ principles had not changed in any way.



The government’s platform, he explained, constitutes common basic principles that are meant to unite all the Palestinian factions but do not necessarily express all aspects of Hamas’ stance.


“There isn’t a chance any Hamas leader will ever recognize Israel,” said outgoing Interior Minister Said Siam. “We will not betray our values and we will not betray our land. We will leave this world as shahids (martyrs) without recognizing Israel.”


Siam further noted that if any Hamas member dared recognize Israel, he would be swiftly ejected from the movement. Siam did not deny, however, that considering Hamas’ values the current unity government was not ideal. However, the deadly intra-Palestinian conflicts necessitated certain concessions, he noted.


Hamas spokesperson Dr. Ismail Radwan also declared that Hamas’ values had not changed. Hamas considers resistance operations to be a strategic option to respond to the enemy’s crimes, Radwan declared.



Unity not for everyone

The comments by senior Hamas leaders indicate that there was indeed resistance within the movement during the process of establishing the unity government, especially regarding signing basic principles which do not entirely reflect their views.


Many militant Islamic groups severely criticized Hamas for “selling out their principles.”


Al-Qaeda second-in-command Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri slammed Hamas on numerous occasions, including in a tape broadcast on al-Jazzeera in which he consoles the Muslim world for the death of Hamas as a fighting Islamic group. Hamas sold out their principles for a few seats in the Palestinian government, al-Zawahiri charged.



Meanwhile, in an official statement Hamas denied reports that the appointment of Mahammad Dahlan as national security advisor was in cooperation with PA President Mahmoud Abbas.



Hamas criticized the appointment Monday morning saying Dahlan was not a unifying figure and his appointment was steeped in controversy. Fatah however said Hamas’ statement was not justified as the appointment was made with the agreement of both sides.

5)Bush and Ahmadinejad's Game of Chicken
By Ian Bremmer & Willis Sparks

At first glance, George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad couldn't be more different.

Bush is the Ivy League-educated son of a former president. Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith, rose to power from relative obscurity following a brief stint as Tehran's mayor. For many around the world, Bush is the living symbol of American military might. Ahmadinejad relishes his role as underdog president of an underdog nation.

But they also have a lot in common. Similarities in their temperaments and domestic political positions reveal why the standoff over Iran's nuclear program may eventually lead to military action.
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Each president now faces considerable heat at home. Bush has taken hits over the war in Iraq from some who believe it should never have been waged and others who insist that poor planning cost him an opportunity to remake the politics of the Middle East. The botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina, a growing federal budget deficit, and doubts over the administration's credibility and competence have added to his headaches. Bush hasn't enjoyed majority public approval in more than two years, the longest such stretch for any U.S. president in more than half a century. Can he live with a legacy that includes a nuclear Iran?

Ahmadinejad faces sharp criticism for his handling of Iran's rusting economy. The relative unknown swept to victory in June 2005 on promises to create jobs, lift millions from poverty and curb inflation. More than a year and half later, unemployment and the gap between rich and poor remain steady. Inflation has actually risen. Conservative pragmatists charge that Ahmadinejad's incendiary rhetoric allows foreigners to portray Iran's government as irrational and dangerous. His heavy-handed social policies invite derision from reformists. But resolute support for the nuclear program buoys his domestic popularity and helps him change the political subject.

Iran's ruling clerics, not the president, have ultimate responsibility for the country's foreign policy. But Ahmadinejad is now the public face of Iran's determination to join the nuclear club. The mullahs may not always approve of his belligerence, but pushing aside an elected president would come at a political cost.

Both presidents held relatively strong domestic political positions before their allies took heavy losses in recent elections. In November, Bush's party lost majority control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. Many fellow Republicans have distanced themselves from their president, particularly over the war in Iraq.

In December, divisions among Iranian hardliners ensured that Ahmadinejad's allies took a stunning beating in municipal elections, the first national balloting since Ahmadinejad won the presidency.

But the most crucial similarity between the two men is that, when it comes to foreign policy, both are temperamentally ill-suited to play anything but offense. Anyone who thought Bush would interpret the Republican election defeat and growing turmoil in Iraq as signs he should shy from a head-on fight with Tehran are surely startled that he has turned up the rhetorical heat on Iran's involvement in Iraq and its nuclear ambitions.

Iranian media coverage of Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, increasingly includes criticism of his handling of both the economy and foreign policy. An influential adviser to Iran's parliament has publicly charged that the president spends Iran's oil revenues "unreservedly and without much consideration."

Conservative official newspapers accuse him of pursuing an unnecessarily belligerent and reckless approach to relations with the West. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reportedly did not meet with Ahmadinejad for more than two months late last year. All this in a country where the elite likes to keep its political disputes behind closed doors.

But those who expected a chastened Iranian president as the deadline approached for Iran's compliance with the latest U.N. Security Council resolution have ignored his history. Instead of calls for consultation and hints of compromise -- even if only to strengthen Iran's diplomatic hand -- Ahmadinejad offered only more defiance. Nuclear development in Iran "has no brakes," he has insisted. "The Iranian people ... will defend their rights. . . . They will resist the oppressors and will not concede one iota," he has added for emphasis.

On the nuclear issue, both men have raised the political cost of backing down. If Iran is the "world's primary state sponsor of terror," as Bush says, how can he allow the country to go nuclear? He promises to seek a diplomatic solution, but his insistence that a nuclear Iran is "unacceptable" leaves U.S. negotiators with little to offer. If Iran will not concede one iota to its "oppressors," as Ahmadinejad has pledged, why should his government ever accept an internationally brokered compromise?

Politicians, even those as strong-willed as Bush and Ahmadinejad, sometimes reverse themselves. But the importance each has publicly attached to this issue ensures that he who blinks first will forfeit plenty of precious political capital.

In addition, both presidents have antagonized the very international actors, Russia and China, that might help forge a deal. The Bush administration has asked both countries to support coercive diplomacy aimed at forcing Iran to back down after ignoring their objections to war with Iraq and pointedly criticizing their foreign and domestic policies.

Ahmadinejad continues to provoke Israel and the United States, making it more difficult for Russia, China and others to defend Iran's right to a nuclear program. Why, Russian and Chinese diplomats must wonder, won't Ahmadinejad keep quiet and make their work a little easier?

We're left with a game of chicken. Bush and Ahmadinejad continue to drive toward a collision. Bush places his hands on the windshield to show the world he has no intention of turning. Ahmadinejad throws his steering wheel out the window.

The U.S. Congress may try to restrain Bush's drive toward confrontation, but its ability to prevent him from ordering air strikes is clearly limited. Iran's mullahs may eventually sideline Ahmadinejad, unless they calculate that a U.S. or Israeli air attack would rally Iranians to their government just as a sinking economy threatens the country's entire ruling class.

The best defense is a good offense? Not when offense is all you play.

And not when the international stakes are so high. Both men will give their diplomats time to work, but only to strengthen their positions for the moment when push may finally come to shove.