Daniel Pipes reports on the most pressing problem and question. Can the IAF do what must be done if called upon? Pipes confirms what I have been stating - GW is probably going to follow Rice's advice and cop out by allowing Iran to achieve nuclear status so he can politically withdraw from Iran.
From a president who had all the opportunities to go down as a great one it is increasingly likely he will go down around the Carter level. Peggy Noonan may well be right.
No guts no glory! (see 1 below.)
Hamas has just about taken over Gaza. Fatah and Abbas have proven to be the disaster any sensible person could have seen them to be but the Administration and our State Department who kept pressing Israel to arm Fatah to the bitter end. Hamas came to power also because of Administration and Sate Department miscalculations. Oh well, just add these to their growing list of blunders. (See 2 below.)
Meanwhile, Syria, operating thru surrogates, has taken out another anti-Syrian, Lebanese politician along with his son and others while we stand mute. (See 3 below.)
Dick
1) Can the IAF take out Iran's nukes?
By DANIEL PIPES
Barring a "catastrophic development," reports Middle East Newsline, George W. Bush has decided not to attack Iran. An administration source explains that Washington deems Iran's cooperation "needed for a withdrawal [of US forces] from Iraq."
If correct, this implies that the Jewish state stands alone against a regime that threatens to "wipe Israel off the map" and is building nuclear weapons to do so. Israeli leaders are hinting their patience is running out; Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz warned that "diplomatic efforts should bear results by the end of 2007."
Can the Israel Defense Forces in fact disrupt Iran's nuclear program?
Top secret analyses from intelligence agencies normally do not reply to such a question. But talented outsiders, using open sources, can. Whitney Raas and Austin Long studied this problem at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published their impressive analysis, "Osirak Redux? Assessing Israeli Capabilities to Destroy Iranian Nuclear Facilities," in the journal International Security.
RAAS AND LONG focus exclusively on feasibility, not political desirability or strategic ramifications: Were the Israeli national command to decide to damage the Iranian infrastructure, could its forces accomplish this mission? The authors consider five components of a successful strike:
# Intelligence: To impede the production of fissile material requires incapacitating only three facilities of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. In ascending order of importance, these are: the heavy water plant and plutonium production reactors under construction at Arak, a uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, and a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Destroying the Natanz facility in particular, they note, "is critical to impeding Iran's progress toward nuclearization."
# Ordinance: To damage all three facilities with reasonable confidence requires - given their size and being underground, the weapons available to the Israeli forces, and other factors - 24 5,000-lb. weapons and 24 2,000-lb. weapons.
# Platforms: Noting the "odd amalgamation of technologies" available to the Iranians and the limitations of their fighter planes and ground defenses to stand up to the hi-tech Israeli air force, Raas-Long calculate the IDF needs a relatively small strike package of 25 F-15Is and 25 F-16Is.
# Routes: Israeli jets can reach their targets via three paths: Turkey to the north, Jordan and Iraq in the middle, or Saudi Arabia to the south. In terms of fuel and cargo, the distances in all three cases are manageable.
# Defense forces: Rather than predict the outcome of an Israeli-Iranian confrontation, the authors calculate, for the operation to succeed, how many out of the 50 Israeli planes would have to reach their three targets. They figure 24 planes must reach Natanz, six Isfahan, and five Arak, or 35 all together. Turned around, that means the Iranian defenders minimally must stop 16 of 50 planes, or one-third of the strike force. The authors consider this attrition rate "considerable" for Natanz and "almost unimaginable" for the other two targets.
In all, Raas-Long find relentless modernization of Israel's air force gives it "the capability to destroy even well-hardened targets in Iran with some degree of confidence." Comparing an Iranian operation to Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, which was a complete success, they find this one "would appear to be no more risky" than the earlier one.
THE GREAT question mark hanging over the operation, one which the authors do not speculate about, is whether any of the Turkish, Jordanian, American or Saudi governments would acquiesce to Israeli penetration of their air spaces. (Iraq, recall, is under American control). Unless the Israelis win advance permission to cross these territories, their jets might have to fight their way to Iran. More than any other factor, this one imperils the entire project. (The IDF could reduce this problem by flying along borders, for example, the Turkey-Syria one, permitting both countries en route to claim Israeli planes were in the other fellow's air space.)
Raas-Long imply, but do not state, the IDF could reach Kharg Island, through which over 90 percent of Iranian oil is exported, heavily damaging the Iranian economy.
That Israeli forces have "a reasonable chance of success" to unilaterally destroy key Iranian nuclear facilities could help deter Teheran from proceeding with its weapon program. The Raas-Long study, therefore, makes a diplomatic deal more likely. Its results deserve the widest possible dissemination.
2) Hamas appears close to taking over entire Gaza Strip
Hamas fighters launched a fierce offensive on Gaza City on Wednesday, attacking the main security bases and the Palestinian Authority chairman's compound with mortars and rockets and sending some of the rival Fatah forces fleeing in disarray as the Islamic group appeared close to taking over the entire Gaza Strip.
With the fighting raging on rooftops and streets in nearly all corners of Gaza, residents huddled in fear in their homes, hoping to keep their families safe from stray bullets and shrapnel.
Fayez Abu Taha, 45, a businessman in the southern town of Rafah, said he was trapped in his apartment building with his family after Hamas fighters took over a nearby rooftop and Fatah responded by taking over the roof of his building.
"I don't know what they are battling for now," he said. "I can see the bullets flying from my windows. Coming and going."
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah called the fighting "madness" and pleaded with Hamas's exiled leader for a halt to the violence. Abbas's forces - desperately trying to cling to their besieged bases in Gaza - lashed out at the president, saying he left them with no directions and no support in the fight.
Abbas and PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas issued a joint statement after nightfall, calling on all sides "to halt fighting, and to return to language of dialogue and respect of agreements," according to a statement from Abbas's office. The call was broadcast on Palestinian TV.
The two have made numerous calls for an end to the fighting in the past, to no avail.
No one was listening to the elected leaders as the focus of power passed to street militias.
Hamas gunmen neutralized recognized security forces linked to Fatah in frontal assaults on their strong points, ruling the streets and taking control of large parts Gaza in the process.
The rout of the security forces was so bad that 40 Palestinian security officers broke through the border fence in Rafah and fled into Egypt seeking safety, Egyptian police said.
"What I can I say? This is a fall, a collapse," said Col. Nasser Khaldi, a senior police official in Rafah.
In Washington, US officials condemned the fighting. "Violence certainly does not serve the interest of the Palestinian people, and it's not going to bring the peace and prosperity that they deserve," White House spokesman Tony Snow said.
At least 15 people were killed in fighting Wednesday, bringing the total in the four-day campaign to nearly 60. Among those killed Wednesday was a man shot when Hamas gunmen fired at a peaceful protest against the violence, witnesses said.
In one dramatic battle, hundreds of members of the Fatah-allied Bakr clan, which had fought fiercely for two days, surrendered to masked Hamas gunmen and were led, arms raised in the air, to a nearby mosque. Footage broadcast on Hamas' Al Aqsa TV showed some of the Bakr women trying to enter the mosque. Hamas gunmen later drove off with some of the Bakr fighters, witnesses said.
Two women from the clan tried to leave the area to take a sick girl to a hospital and were shot and killed by jittery Hamas gunmen, a clan member said.
After nightfall, Hamas militants blew up the house of one of the Bakr clan's leaders, witnesses said.
Hamas, already in control of much of northern Gaza, seized the southern town of Khan Younis on Wednesday and began a coordinated assault on the town of Rafah, security officials said.
On Wednesday afternoon, they launched attacks on the three main compounds of the Fatah-allied forces in Gaza City - the headquarters of the Preventive Security, the Intelligence Service and the National Forces - in what could usher in the final phase of the battle.
Hamas fighters, firing rockets and mortar shells, took over the rooftops in nearby houses and cut off the roads to prevent reinforcements from arriving. They called on the beleaguered Fatah forces to surrender.
Hamas gunmen in high-rise buildings also fired at Abbas' Gaza office and house and his guard force returned fire. Abbas was in the West Bank at the time of the fighting.
During the battle at the Preventive Security Service base, both sides fired wildly from high-rise rooftops.
Dr. Wael Abdel Jawad, a physician trapped in his apartment, said he heard Fatah fighters shouting at colleagues on an adjacent roof to send them more ammunition. "All of us are terrified here.
Shooting came through the windows of our apartment, children are screaming. We are hearing from a nearby mosque the call by Hamas to surrender," he said.
"Those fighters on rooftops are like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. They don't know where to shoot," he said.
Earlier Wednesday, Hamas militants surrounded a security headquarters in Khan Younis and called on everyone inside to leave or they would blow it up, witnesses said. The building was then destroyed by a bomb planted in a tunnel underneath it, said Ali Qaisi, a presidential guard spokesman.
Security forces later said they lost control of the town.
"Khan Younis is finished, but we are still holding on in Rafah," said Ziad Sarafandi, a senior security official. Soon after, Hamas militants blew up a second security building near Rafah after a long gunbattle and other battles raged in the town, said Khaldi, the senior police official.
"They are shooting at anyone and everyone who is Fatah," said Youssef Abu Siyam, a Preventive Security officer in Rafah.
Hamas and Fatah have waged a sporadic power struggle since Hamas won parliament elections last year, ending four decades of Fatah rule. But the battles have worsened in recent days as Hamas began a systematic assault on security forces to take over Gaza.
The fighting spilled into the Fatah-dominated West Bank. Hamas and Fatah gunmen exchanged fire in the city of Nablus and a nearby refugee camp after Fatah gunmen tried to storm a pro-Hamas TV production company. Hamas said 12 people of its fighters were wounded.
On Wednesday, Abbas spoke by phone with the Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal to try to stop the crisis, said Abbas aide Nimr Hamad.
"This is madness, the madness that is going on in Gaza now," Abbas told reporters.
The UN Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees, said it would curtail its operations after two of its Palestinian workers were killed by crossfire. "We are scaling back, we are not pulling back," said the agency's Gaza director, John Ging.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, said the clashes could have been avoided if Abbas had given the Hamas-led Cabinet control over the security forces, which he blamed for a wave of kidnappings, torture and violence in Gaza.
3)Beirut blast kills anti-Syrian lawmaker
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Print Subscribe Listen to this article. Powered by Odiogo.com
E-mail Toolbar
Talkbacks for this article: 10
A vocal anti-Syrian lawmaker and at least nine other people were killed when a bomb ripped through his car on Beirut's popular sea-front Wednesday in the latest assassination of a Lebanese opponent of Damascus, a heavy new blow to the stability of this conflict-torn nation.
The blast came days after the government began work putting together an international tribunal ordered by the United Nations to try suspects in the previous killings, a step strongly opposed by Syria and its allies in Lebanon.
The slain lawmaker, Walid Eido, was a prominent supporter of the tribunal. He is the seventh anti-Syrian figure killed in the past two years, starting with the February 2005 death of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a massive Beirut suicide car bombing. Many Lebanese have accused Syria of being behind the slayings, a claim Damascus denies.
Eido's supporters quickly blamed Syria in Wednesday's assassination. Hariri's son, Saad Hariri, the leader of the anti-Syrian bloc in parliament, indirectly accused Damascus, saying "agencies of evil" seeking "Lebanon's submission" carried out the blast.
Syria controlled Lebanon for 29 years until it was forced out following Hariri's assassination, and its Lebanese opponents believe it is seeking to regain domination by throwing the country into chaos.
The slaying was likely to further enflame Lebanon's bitter power struggle between the Western-backed government and its Syrian-backed opponents, led by the Hezbollah militant group - which many fear could push the polarized nation with a fragile balance of ethnic and religious groups into a new civil war.
The two sides battled in deadly street riots earlier this year, and many Lebanese have been dreading the potential that any new attack could spark another round of violence.
Wednesday's blast also came as Lebanon is dealing with a separate conflict that threatens to spiral out of control: a nearly four-week battle with al-Qaida-inspired militants barricaded inside a northern Palestinian refugee camp. More than 140 people have been killed in the Lebanese army's siege of the Nahr el-Bared camp.
The Bush administration - a top ally of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora - condemned Wednesday's bombing.
"We stand with the people of Lebanon and Prime Minister Saniora's government as they battle extremists who are trying to derail Lebanon's march to peace, prosperity and a lasting democracy," Gordon Johndroe, the National Security Council spokesman, said in Washington.
Asked if Washington saw Syria's hand in the attack, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "I can't tell you at this point, but very clearly this is the work of those who intend or want to undermine Lebanese democracy."
The bomb ripped through Eido's black Mercedes just before 6 p.m. on a narrow side street off the Beirut Corniche in Manara, a mainly Sunni Muslim sector of the capital where the 65-year-old Eido often came in the afternoons to play cards with friends. The palm tree-lined boulevard along the Mediterranean shoreline is a favorite among Beirutis for evening strolls.
The explosion gutted Eido's car and left others nearby in flames, shattering windows in nearby apartments and strewing the street with rubble. Body parts were thrown onto a soccer field in a neighboring sporting club, and the ferris wheel of a nearby amusement park towered over the carnage.
Eido's 35-year-old son, two bodyguards and six passers-by were also killed in the explosion, security officials said. A woman, screaming and covered in blood, was pulled away from the carnage by residents who rushed to help.
In Eido's home neighborhood Aisha Bakkar, a small number of his supporters burned car tires and blocked a street. "Syria is after us," one shouted to local TV cameras. Troops intervened to prevent the protest from getting out of control.
The Lebanese military and police had already imposed heavy security measures around Beirut for weeks - in reaction to a series of bomb blasts that have hit the capital since the Nahr el-Bared fighting began. Those explosions killed two people, but their perpetrators remain unknown, yet another layer of instability rattling the country.
Random army and police checkpoints have been set up around the city searching cars, and some major politicians have barricaded themselves in their homes behind heavy security.
Syria's top allies in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud and the parliament speaker Nabih Berri, condemned Wednesday's bomb blast. Hezbollah called it part of a "cycle of roaming terrorism targeting Lebanon and its stability" and urged national unity to confront it.
But Saad Hariri all but openly put the blame on Syria. In a televised speech, he called for Arab nations and the international community to boycott the "terrorist regime that is attacking Lebanon."
He also called for Lebanese to turn out en masse for funerals of Eido and the other victims appeared in a show of strength for the government's supporters against its pro-Syrian supporters. "Tomorrow Beirut will see off her son, and participation should befit the level of the martyrdom," he said.
The issue of the international tribunal has sharply divided Lebanon. The UN called for its creation months ago to try suspects in Rafik Hariri's assassination and in other killings if they proved linked. But Hezbollah and its allies blocked Lebanese approval for the tribunal, preventing parliament from meeting for months to vote on the measure.
At the same time, Hezbollah has led a constant sit-in protest in downtown Beirut demanding the ouster of Saniora's government and the creation of a national unity Cabinet giving Hezbollah and its allies more power.
With the government paralyzed, Saniora and his supporters asked the UN to impose the court's creation. Eido was among 70 pro-government lawmakers who signed a petition urging UN action. The Security Council did so with a May 30 resolution, bringing denunciations from Hezbollah and its allies. Syria has said it will not cooperate with the court.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Eventually Truth Triumphs but Not Before Liars Have Their Day Too!
In the WSJ op ed section today Abdurrahaman Wahid and Israel Lau write about the conference they are hosting in Bali pertaining to: "The Evils of Holocaust Denial."
I have said for years, and will be making a talk in October repeating what I believe, ie. When the world is falling into the anti-Semitism trap it is a pathological signal "..Something is rotten in Denmark." Blatant widespread hatred is, all too often, followed by wars and/or other type upheavals that simply bring more tragedy and suffering to a world already imploding from same.
We try to protect Europe from Iran and this drives Putin to go ballistic and provide Iran with the means of carrying out its various threats. (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile fighting in Gaza is rapidly escalating into a civil war between Palestinians. Be mindful of the fact that Israel no longer occupies any of Gaza and Lebanon and fighting between Arabs is taking place in both areas. (See 2 below.)
Excerpt of David Harris' advice to Europe vis a vis Iran. (See 3 below.)
Michael Oren writes newly released documents corrects widely held myth. Truth eventually triumphs but its delay permiots liars to have their day. (see 4 below.)
Has Hamas pushed too hard? (See 5 below.)
Dick
1) Russian president Vladimir Putin put teeth in his threats and his cynically helpful alternative suggestions regarding the deployment of US missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic.
It is ow evident the week before the G8 opened in Germany, Moscow released the long-withheld nuclear fuel for Iran’s atomic reactor in Bushehr. It was delivered 24 hours before Israel launched its new military imaging satellite Ofeq-7, bringing forward the Iranian threat to Israel. One immediate result has been the stiffening of Tehran’s negative posture, sparking what nuclear watchdog director Mohammed ElBaradei called Monday, June 11, a confrontation that needs to be urgently defused.
Alleged;ly special nuclear containers were loaded on a train in the yard of the manufacturers JSC Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant on June 2-3. They contained two types of nuclear fuel, WER-440 and WER-1000.
The special train headed out of Novosibirsk to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, 2,000 km away. There, the containers awaited loading aboard a Russian ship destined for Bandar Anzili, the Iranian military port on the Caspian shore. According to Iranian sources, a fleet of Iranian trucks was waiting at the other end outside Bandar Anzili port to transport the nuclear fuel and drive it slowly and carefully to Bushehr, a distance of 850km, arriving June 10 or 11.
The journey was interrupted by holdups ordered by the Kremlin in an episode which also laid bare the interdependence of Iran’s nuclear industry and Tehran’s program for arming Syria for war with Israel with the latest Russian munitions.
Arguments over payments due from Tehran have dogged relations with Moscow before and Putin is far from trusting.
A few days before the nuclear fuel left the Siberian factory, Tehran delivered the sum of $327m for a fresh delivery of Russian missiles to Syria. Iran pledged another $438m for further arms consignments before the fuel cargo was allowed to go forward. Putin then ordered the cargo to be loaded at Astrakhan, but await delivery in port until payment was made.
Iran duly deposited the money and the ship was permitted to set sail and cross the Caspian Sea to Iran. Putin never promised Bush Russia would deny Iran the nuclear fuel for its Bushehr reactor in perpetuity, as some administration circles in Washington have claimed in the last two years. Putin assured Washington, mainly in conversations with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he would postpone delivery as long as he could, despite Moscow’s contractual commitments to Tehran.
The Bush administration’s plan to deploy missiles in East Europe made the Russian president mad enough to set this assurance aside.
His move hits the US where it hurts most: The UN Security Council meets at the end of June to approve harsher sanctions against Iran for continuing to enrich uranium in defiance of previous resolutions. Russian fuel delivery will substantially dilute the effect of such penalties, especially when the Islamic Republic is about to clinch a deal for the acquisition of long-range ballistic missiles from North Korea.
Putin developed a complex and well thought out retaliation strategy for America’s missile deployment in East Europe.
1. A second consignment of nuclear fuel went out to India from the same Russian factory which supplied Bushehr. This was a swipe by Putin at US-Indian nuclear cooperation which it is also under attack in the US Congress. It was also meant to place Moscow at dead center of the Russian-American-Israeli contest over domination of the Indian arms market. This contest also pertains to the developing military ties between New Delhi and Tehran, which Moscow is working hard to turn to its benefit. The Kremliln has not said the last word on this contest.
2. Monday, June 4, the Russian president sent the director of the Russian Nuclear Energy Commission, Sergei Kirienko, to the Russian Interfax news agency with an announcement: “I have just visited the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant; fuel for Iran and India is ready,” he said. “It will be delivered six months before the physical launch.”
This statement has granted the Russian president six months’ leeway for jumping whichever way he finds expedient.
It is time enough for Moscow and Washington to reach terms on the Iran issue as well as the East Europe missile deployments. If the Bush administration digs its heels in on the missile defense shield, Russian engineers employed at Bushehr will be told to go ahead and activate the reactor even before December 2007. But if Washington relents, Russian personnel can always be told to go back to dragging their feet, as Moscow did on the nuclear fuel.
2) Abbas forces ordered to thwart Hamas 'coup' in Gaza
By Avi Issacharoff
Forces loyal to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah were ordered Tuesday evening to defend their positions in the Gaza Strip, and counter a "coup" by rival Hamas Islamists.
Hamas, stepping up a rapidly expanding power struggle, on Tuesday afternoon launched attacks against installations of security forces allied to Fatah, seizing a number of smaller positions and laying seige to others.
"Advance, our forces! Confront the seekers of the coup.
Defend your dignity and your military honour. Defend the
security of your people," the command of Abbas' National
Security Forces said in a statement issued in Gaza.
The statement giving the order described Hamas as a "bloody party which is launching a coup against the president and against the authority and national unity government."
Witnesses said they saw vehicles carrying members of the National Security Forces to battles in western and northern Gaza City.
Meanwhile, Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV and radio stations came under fire from Fatah forces Tuesday, employees said.
The Al-Aqsa TV station was surrounded by security forces allied with Fatah, said a station employee, Mohammed Abu Bilal.
Security officials said they received orders to stop the broadcasts of the station. Shortly after the attack, the station started playing pro-Fatah songs, a sign that the security forces had taken control of the broadcast.
But later, the television station broadcast pictures of what it said was a thwarted attack, along with pictures Hamas gunmen standing around captured security vehicles.
"Al-Aqsa is still shining," the radio station said. Witnesses said gunfire was continuing in the area.
Also Tuesday evening, two gunmen, one from Hamas and the other from Fatah, were killed in a clash in the central Gaza town of Dir el-Balah. The violence in the Strip, which erupted again Monday morning, has claimed 19 lives so far.
Fatah sources said Tuesday afternoon that they believed Hamas was trying to achieve a decisive victory in the Gaza Strip within hours.
Hamas earlier demanded that Fatah forces abandon their positions, threatening to attack those who remained in their posts.
Palestinian security officials said Tuesday afternoon that Hamas had seized three small Fatah positions in the southern town of Khan Yunis, but that Fatah remained in control of the local security headquarters. The town's streets were empty as people huddled indoors for shelter.
In the northern Gaza Strip, about 200 Hamas gunmen surrounded a compound, where some 500 Fatah fighters were holed up. Hamas fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at the building.
"They are attacking from all sides," said one of the officers, Khaled Awad.
The fighting also targeted senior officials from both sides, including the abduction of a deputy cabinet minister from Hamas. His kidnap in Ramallah hinted that the fighting could spill over into the West Bank.
Fatah's military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades, threatened for its part to expand the fighting to the West Bank by announcing it would kill Hamas officials there unless the organization ceased its attacks.
In Gaza, former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath of Fatah said Hamas gunmen ransacked his Gaza home Tuesday afternoon, and shot one of his bodyguards in the leg.
Shaath, speaking to the media by telephone, appeared shaken but said no one in his family had been hurt. He said the attackers stole many items from his home in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia.
Hamas seizes control of hospitals
On Tuesday morning, Hamas gunmen seized the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, making it the third medical center to come under Hamas control in two days. Gunmen traded fire at the institution.
Hamas then warned over a mosque loudspeaker that it would attack the headquarters of the Preventive Security Service in Gaza City, which is loyal to Fatah.
"The warning which we have given you to surrender has ended, and we will attack this position of Zionist collaborators," the warning said.
In Khan Yunis, Hamas controlled the roof of hospital and Fatah security forces took up positions nearby. The two sides traded fire. About 15 children attending a kindergarten in the compound were rushed into the main building, hospital officials said.
Haniyeh's house targeted
On Tuesday morning, gunmen attacked the home of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in a refugee camp near Gaza City, for the second time in as many days.
Hamas branded the assault with a rocket-propelled grenade an assassination attempt. Haniyeh and his family were in the house, but unhurt, in the second attack on his home in as many days.
Describing the attack, Haniyeh's son, Abdel Salam, said an RPG hit the side of the house in the Shati refugee camp, damaging it, while the family was inside. No one was hurt, he said.
Also Tuesday, Hamas said Fatah gunmen kidnapped a member of the Hamas military wing and executed him in the street. The dead man was identified as a cousin of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader assassinated by Israel in 2004.
Earlier in the day, three women and a child were killed when Hamas militants attacked the home of a senior Fatah security official with mortars and grenades, security officials said.
The gunmen seized Hassan Abu Rabi and killed his 14-year-old son and three women in the house, hospital officials said. Fatah gunmen also stormed the house of a Hamas lawmaker and burned it to the ground.
The fighting disrupted final exams for university and high school students. The three universities called off final exams set for Tuesday.
High schools were trying to move test centers to areas out of the range of fire, said Mohammed Abu Shkeir, the deputy minister of education.
and
Abbas calls for immediate truce, Fatah threatens to quit gov't
By Yoav Ribak
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas called Tuesday for an immediate end to the fighting between his Fatah movement and the rival Hamas, saying it went against Palestinian "interests."
The fighting, which erupted Monday morning after days of simmering tensions, has claimed 17 lives so far. On Tuesday afternoon, Hamas gunmen launched an attack on the headquarters of Fatah-allied security forces across the Gaza Strip.
"In order to protect the higher national interests of our people, and to try stop the bloodshed, I, in my position as the head of the Palestinian Authority and the head of all security forces call for an immediate halt to fire," Abbas said in a statement.
The statement accused "a small group of leaders," including those unhappy with a national unity deal between Abbas' Fatah movement and the ruling Hamas organization, of "taking the country into an ugly civil war."
The unity government was formed in March during a summit in Mecca, in an effort to stem a previous round of internecine violence in Gaza.
Fatah said its Central Committee would meet at 8 P.M. to decide whether to remain in the government it formed with Hamas in March in a bid to stop internal violence and ease Western sanctions.
Abbas also called for a joint meeting with Egyptian mediators to end the fighting, which has killed 80 people over the past month.
Sufyan Abu Zaida, a former Palestinian cabinet minister and a senior Fatah official, called on Abbas to involve the Arab League in a bid to stop factional violence.
"What is happening now in the Gaza Strip is different from previous cycles of violence -in terms of the number of dead, the amount of armed forces fighting each other, and in terms of rhetoric," he said. "We have stopped counting the dead and the fighting forces in the Strip - from the north to the south."
Abu Zaida made the comments at a conference for Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations in Tuscany, Italy.
But the frustrated head of the Egyptian security delegation, Major General Burhan Hamad, who has been trying to negotiate a truce, told Palestinian TV on Tuesday morning that he would call the people out onto the streets to protest if the two groups do not agree to stand down.
A cease-fire agreement brokered Monday by Egyptian officials collapsed after several hours.
Hamad said Tuesday that neither side responded to his call to hold truce talks Tuesday.
"It seems they don't want to come. We must make them ashamed of themselves. They have killed all hope. They have killed the future," said Hamad, who brokered several previous short-lived cease-fires.
Hamad said both sides were about equal in firepower. "Neither can have a decisive victory," he said. "To be decisive, they need weapons that neither side has."
He said he would call civilians out into the streets to protest if the two rivals did not agree to stand down.
Islam Shahwan, a spokesman for the Hamas militia, brushed aside the latest truce efforts.
"It's all talk. It's not serious," he said.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, an Abbas aide, said Tuesday that there no end was in sight to the fighting.
"You can see for yourself there's no taste for a cease-fire right now," he told The Associated Press by telephone, blaming Hamas.
Jordan, EU call on Palestinian factions to lay down arms
Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdelelah Al-Khatib and the European Union's Middle East envoy Marc Otte on Tuesday urged Hamas and Fatah to stop fighting and use dialogue to resolve their differences.
The call came during talks that focused on the deteriorating situation in the Palestinian territories and means of spurring efforts for ensuring a resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, an official statement said.
"The two sides expressed concern over the internal Palestinian feuds and emphasized that dialogue and exercising self-restraint represented the only way for ending the violence there," the statement said.
Al-Khatib and Otte "urged all parties to seize the opportunity now available for boosting peace and called for a real effort both on the Arab and international level to help stop the deteriorating situation and revive the peace process," the statement said.
3) In the Trenches: Europe: Tough decisions on Iran can't be delayed
By DAVID A. HARRIS
Iran is determined to achieve nuclear weapons capability. Unlike the debate surrounding Iraq in the months leading up to the 2003 war, there's no disagreement this time among the major powers on Iran's ambitions, only on the timetable for achieving them.
Impressively, the major powers agree that Iran shouldn't be allowed to realize its goals. They're in accord that an Iran with nuclear weapons would pose a grave threat to regional and global security.
While Iranian leaders have repeatedly voiced a desire to live in a world without Israel-a threat that needs to be taken at face value-the danger doesn't stop there. Friends of Israel need to underscore this fundamental point.
4) Newly de-classified documents debunk claim that Israel sought '67 War
By Michael Oren
Great wars in history eventually become great wars about history. Only a few years after the last soldier leaves the battlefield, accepted truths about the nature of a military conflict and the motivations for it invariably come under assault by revisionists and counter-revisionists whose vehemence can rival that of the original combatants.
This again becomes the case with the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War. Confronted with a harsh economic blockade, military pacts between heavily armed neighbors for the express purpose of aggression against Israel and hundreds of thousands of enemy troops actually massed on its borders, it would have been the height of irresponsibility for Israel's government not to plan for pre-emptive action. The picture that emerges is one of a country and leadership deeply fearful of military confrontation, and desperate to avoid one at almost any price.
Few of the historiographical struggles are as bitter as the one now being waged over the Arab-Israeli wars, in which a force of self-proclaimed "new historians" has laid siege to previously unassailable descriptions of the creation and survival of the Jewish state.
HISTORIANS NEW AGENDA
The unusual ferocity of the debate over Arab-Israeli history is directly related to the singularly high stakes involved. The adversaries are not merely vying for space on university bookshelves, but grappling with issues that have a profound impact on the lives of millions of people: Israel's security, the rights of Palestinian refugees, the future of Jerusalem. The new historians make no attempt to disguise their agenda.
Published by leading academic presses and widely acclaimed by reviewers, the radical interpretations by the new historians have largely supplanted traditional Zionist histories. This success would not have been possible without the diplomatic documents made available at various government archives under the 30-year declassification rule allowing access to previously classified material that is observed by most Western democracies.
Papers released by Britain's Public Record Office and the United States National Archives, for example, provide fresh insights into the diplomacy of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in relation to the Arab countries, whose archives remain closed indefinitely. But when it comes to Arab-Israeli history, no collection can rival the Israel State Archives, which in addition to the wealth of firsthand accounts it contains, is particularly liberal in its declassification policy.
These documents — tendentiously read and selectively cited — have been marshaled to substantiate the most radical of revisionist theories about the 1948 War of Independence and the 1956 Sinai Campaign. With the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War now upon us, the same methodology is again about to be applied to smashing the "myths" of 1967.
The historical controversy over 1967 is especially brutal. The belief that the Six-Day War was imposed on Israel by an alliance of Arab states bent on its destruction — and that Israel's conquest of territories was the result of its legitimate exercise of the right to defend itself in a war which it did everything in its power to avoid — has been sacrosanct for Zionists across the political spectrum. That the final disposition of those territories continues to be the focus of Israel's internal political debate and of ongoing international negotiations makes the 1967 war a hugely inviting target for radical reinterpretation.
With the revisionists' approach lauded regularly in the Israeli press, the first shots in this battle already are being fired. In the academic world, the initiative has come from the social sciences rather than history departments. According to this school, the Six-Day War erupted not as a result of Arab belligerency but in reaction to socioeconomic factors within Israel, as a tactic by the nation's leaders to distract attention from their failed domestic policies.
These authors seem to share the belief — one that is strongly implied, if not yet openly asserted — that Arab actions had little to do with the outbreak of hostilities in 1967, and that Israel not only failed to prevent war but actively courted it. The massing of Egyptian troops in the Sinai, the expulsion of the U.N. Emergency Force and the closing of the Straits of Tiran, the Arab defense pacts and public commitments to eradicate the Jewish state — all were either provoked or blown out of proportion by Israel in the interest of internal cohesion, territorial expansion or other ulterior motives.
Israeli "fear had no basis in reality," Ha'aretz journalist Tom Segev writes in his newly translated book 1967. "There was indeed no justification for the panic that preceded the war, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it."
But can these conclusions stand up to straightforward historical scrutiny? Can the assertion that Israel wanted the war, did little or nothing to avert it, or even instigated it be substantiated by Israeli declassified documents from the period, the favored weapons of the new historians?
Files from the Israel State Archives reveal a great deal about Israeli policymaking and diplomacy of the time, and about what Israel's leaders thought, feared and strove for during three weeks of intense diplomatic efforts leading up to June 5, 1967. Far from even hinting that Israel deliberately brought about the conflict, the record shows that Israel was desperate to avoid war and, up to the eve of battle, pursued every avenue in an effort to avert it — even at great strategic and economic cost to the nation.
The newly released Israeli diplomatic documents from the period leading up to June 5, 1967, offer overwhelming evidence against any suggestion that Israel sought war with the Arabs. Nor do the tens of thousands of declassified papers contain a single reference to any desire to divert public opinion from the economic situation, to overthrow Arab rulers, or to conquer and occupy the West Bank, the Sinai or the Golan Heights.
FEARFUL OF CONFRONTATION
On the contrary, the picture that emerges is one of a country and leadership deeply fearful of military confrontation, and desperate to avoid one at almost any price. The sole hope of doing so, the Israelis believed, rested with the United States. But the Johnson administration, though favorably disposed to Israel, was limited severely by domestic political constraints and its all-consuming involvement in Vietnam. These limitations prevented the Americans from taking the measures that might have restored the status-quo ante in the Sinai and the Straits of Tiran, and stemmed the momentum toward war that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had generated.
Moreover, it cannot be claimed that Israel was wrong in considering the use of force, confronted as it was by the blockade, military pacts and enemy troops. Nor can Israel be faulted for employing the threat of force to spur the United States to intervene diplomatically. The few measures Johnson did adopt — reiterating America's 1957 pledges on Tiran, the Red Sea Regatta proposal, the representations to Arab leaders — were directly attributable to those intimations by Israel.
In the final analysis, the Israelis held back from acting militarily until the very last opportunity for a diplomatic settlement had passed, even though they knew that every day they waited was costing them dearly in resources, readiness and morale, and was likely to constrict their own maneuverability if war became unavoidable.
Given the archival records, it seems the new historians face a formidable task in trying to prove that Israel had hostile intentions in 1967. But the historiographical battle over the Six-Day War has scarcely begun.
In addition to the Israeli archives, numerous other primary and secondary sources must be culled, and further controversies tackled. Researchers confront a battery of potentially explosive issues, among them the conquest of the Golan, the flight of West Bank refugees, the annexation of Jerusalem and the origins of the peace process. The conclusions reached here can only be considered preliminary — if not quite the first round in this battle, then certainly an opening shot.
5) Hamas losing support'
by Yaakov Lappin
Palestinian pollster tells Gaza clashes costing Hamas popular support. Human rights activist adds: Gazans unsure they will return if they leave their homes
The gun battles and exchanges of mortars and explosives ravaging the streets of Gaza are costing Hamas popular support among Palestinians, a leading Palestinian pollster told Ynetnews on Tuesday.
Elias Kukali, of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), based in the West Bank, said Fatah would naturally benefit from Hamas's decline.
PA Infighting
Al-Aqsa calls on members to 'fight coup' / Ali Waked and agencies
Chaos in Palestinian Authority reaches new peak: Hamas takes over Fatah bases, headquarters in all of northern Gaza Strip, conquers other wide parts of area. Palestinian president to meet with Fatah leaders to discuss possibility of quitting unity government. Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades calls on members to take to streets
Full story
"In general, Palestinians are against the fighting between the factions," Kukali said, adding that 78 percent of Palestinians were unaffiliated with either side.
With the exception of those who are partisan in favor of Hamas, "the majority of Palestinians are disappointed by Hamas, and feel that Hamas is incapable of running the government," the analyst added, citing a poll conducted by PCPO, due to be released in two days.
"For the time being, there are only two alternatives for Palestinians, and if they don't vote for Hamas, they will vote for Fatah," Kukali said.
Asked whether Hamas was trying push Fatah out of Gaza, Kukali said that such a goal was unfeasible, adding: "Every side has its support and power, and each wants more power than the other."
"There are people on both sides who benefit from the continuation of fighting," he added.
'Fighting resembles gang war'
Speaking from his mobile phone in Gaza, Jabar Washa, of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), told Ynetnews that the Hamas-Fatah war was "was more like a gang war than a battle between militants. We explicitly say that."
"I think this a factional clash motivated by self-interest," Washa said. "It's far away from the national interest. The national interest is to put an end to these clashes and to the suffering caused when militant groups attack," he added.
Washa said that the situation in Gaza has gotten so bad that the PCHR has had to close its office there.
"What concerns people here is the complete ambiguity and uncertainty, because uncertainty is more dangerous than danger," Washa said. "For the first time in the Palestinian Authority's existence we closed our office due to the curfews," he added. "People here expect the worst and they say that what we have now is bad enough," Washa said.
Asked how many people he estimated have been killed in the fighting, Washa replied that "there is no exact figure up to now because the situation is deteriorating. It's not a matter of how many, it's a matter of why. Even a single person who is killed or who is injured or victimized is a story. So I'm not in favor of counting casualties because every single human being has his her dignity should be respected."
"The most serious concern people here have is that they are uncertain that they will come back safely if they go out. So I think we are paying highly for this factionally-motivated conflict," he added.
I have said for years, and will be making a talk in October repeating what I believe, ie. When the world is falling into the anti-Semitism trap it is a pathological signal "..Something is rotten in Denmark." Blatant widespread hatred is, all too often, followed by wars and/or other type upheavals that simply bring more tragedy and suffering to a world already imploding from same.
We try to protect Europe from Iran and this drives Putin to go ballistic and provide Iran with the means of carrying out its various threats. (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile fighting in Gaza is rapidly escalating into a civil war between Palestinians. Be mindful of the fact that Israel no longer occupies any of Gaza and Lebanon and fighting between Arabs is taking place in both areas. (See 2 below.)
Excerpt of David Harris' advice to Europe vis a vis Iran. (See 3 below.)
Michael Oren writes newly released documents corrects widely held myth. Truth eventually triumphs but its delay permiots liars to have their day. (see 4 below.)
Has Hamas pushed too hard? (See 5 below.)
Dick
1) Russian president Vladimir Putin put teeth in his threats and his cynically helpful alternative suggestions regarding the deployment of US missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic.
It is ow evident the week before the G8 opened in Germany, Moscow released the long-withheld nuclear fuel for Iran’s atomic reactor in Bushehr. It was delivered 24 hours before Israel launched its new military imaging satellite Ofeq-7, bringing forward the Iranian threat to Israel. One immediate result has been the stiffening of Tehran’s negative posture, sparking what nuclear watchdog director Mohammed ElBaradei called Monday, June 11, a confrontation that needs to be urgently defused.
Alleged;ly special nuclear containers were loaded on a train in the yard of the manufacturers JSC Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant on June 2-3. They contained two types of nuclear fuel, WER-440 and WER-1000.
The special train headed out of Novosibirsk to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, 2,000 km away. There, the containers awaited loading aboard a Russian ship destined for Bandar Anzili, the Iranian military port on the Caspian shore. According to Iranian sources, a fleet of Iranian trucks was waiting at the other end outside Bandar Anzili port to transport the nuclear fuel and drive it slowly and carefully to Bushehr, a distance of 850km, arriving June 10 or 11.
The journey was interrupted by holdups ordered by the Kremlin in an episode which also laid bare the interdependence of Iran’s nuclear industry and Tehran’s program for arming Syria for war with Israel with the latest Russian munitions.
Arguments over payments due from Tehran have dogged relations with Moscow before and Putin is far from trusting.
A few days before the nuclear fuel left the Siberian factory, Tehran delivered the sum of $327m for a fresh delivery of Russian missiles to Syria. Iran pledged another $438m for further arms consignments before the fuel cargo was allowed to go forward. Putin then ordered the cargo to be loaded at Astrakhan, but await delivery in port until payment was made.
Iran duly deposited the money and the ship was permitted to set sail and cross the Caspian Sea to Iran. Putin never promised Bush Russia would deny Iran the nuclear fuel for its Bushehr reactor in perpetuity, as some administration circles in Washington have claimed in the last two years. Putin assured Washington, mainly in conversations with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he would postpone delivery as long as he could, despite Moscow’s contractual commitments to Tehran.
The Bush administration’s plan to deploy missiles in East Europe made the Russian president mad enough to set this assurance aside.
His move hits the US where it hurts most: The UN Security Council meets at the end of June to approve harsher sanctions against Iran for continuing to enrich uranium in defiance of previous resolutions. Russian fuel delivery will substantially dilute the effect of such penalties, especially when the Islamic Republic is about to clinch a deal for the acquisition of long-range ballistic missiles from North Korea.
Putin developed a complex and well thought out retaliation strategy for America’s missile deployment in East Europe.
1. A second consignment of nuclear fuel went out to India from the same Russian factory which supplied Bushehr. This was a swipe by Putin at US-Indian nuclear cooperation which it is also under attack in the US Congress. It was also meant to place Moscow at dead center of the Russian-American-Israeli contest over domination of the Indian arms market. This contest also pertains to the developing military ties between New Delhi and Tehran, which Moscow is working hard to turn to its benefit. The Kremliln has not said the last word on this contest.
2. Monday, June 4, the Russian president sent the director of the Russian Nuclear Energy Commission, Sergei Kirienko, to the Russian Interfax news agency with an announcement: “I have just visited the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant; fuel for Iran and India is ready,” he said. “It will be delivered six months before the physical launch.”
This statement has granted the Russian president six months’ leeway for jumping whichever way he finds expedient.
It is time enough for Moscow and Washington to reach terms on the Iran issue as well as the East Europe missile deployments. If the Bush administration digs its heels in on the missile defense shield, Russian engineers employed at Bushehr will be told to go ahead and activate the reactor even before December 2007. But if Washington relents, Russian personnel can always be told to go back to dragging their feet, as Moscow did on the nuclear fuel.
2) Abbas forces ordered to thwart Hamas 'coup' in Gaza
By Avi Issacharoff
Forces loyal to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah were ordered Tuesday evening to defend their positions in the Gaza Strip, and counter a "coup" by rival Hamas Islamists.
Hamas, stepping up a rapidly expanding power struggle, on Tuesday afternoon launched attacks against installations of security forces allied to Fatah, seizing a number of smaller positions and laying seige to others.
"Advance, our forces! Confront the seekers of the coup.
Defend your dignity and your military honour. Defend the
security of your people," the command of Abbas' National
Security Forces said in a statement issued in Gaza.
The statement giving the order described Hamas as a "bloody party which is launching a coup against the president and against the authority and national unity government."
Witnesses said they saw vehicles carrying members of the National Security Forces to battles in western and northern Gaza City.
Meanwhile, Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV and radio stations came under fire from Fatah forces Tuesday, employees said.
The Al-Aqsa TV station was surrounded by security forces allied with Fatah, said a station employee, Mohammed Abu Bilal.
Security officials said they received orders to stop the broadcasts of the station. Shortly after the attack, the station started playing pro-Fatah songs, a sign that the security forces had taken control of the broadcast.
But later, the television station broadcast pictures of what it said was a thwarted attack, along with pictures Hamas gunmen standing around captured security vehicles.
"Al-Aqsa is still shining," the radio station said. Witnesses said gunfire was continuing in the area.
Also Tuesday evening, two gunmen, one from Hamas and the other from Fatah, were killed in a clash in the central Gaza town of Dir el-Balah. The violence in the Strip, which erupted again Monday morning, has claimed 19 lives so far.
Fatah sources said Tuesday afternoon that they believed Hamas was trying to achieve a decisive victory in the Gaza Strip within hours.
Hamas earlier demanded that Fatah forces abandon their positions, threatening to attack those who remained in their posts.
Palestinian security officials said Tuesday afternoon that Hamas had seized three small Fatah positions in the southern town of Khan Yunis, but that Fatah remained in control of the local security headquarters. The town's streets were empty as people huddled indoors for shelter.
In the northern Gaza Strip, about 200 Hamas gunmen surrounded a compound, where some 500 Fatah fighters were holed up. Hamas fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at the building.
"They are attacking from all sides," said one of the officers, Khaled Awad.
The fighting also targeted senior officials from both sides, including the abduction of a deputy cabinet minister from Hamas. His kidnap in Ramallah hinted that the fighting could spill over into the West Bank.
Fatah's military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades, threatened for its part to expand the fighting to the West Bank by announcing it would kill Hamas officials there unless the organization ceased its attacks.
In Gaza, former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath of Fatah said Hamas gunmen ransacked his Gaza home Tuesday afternoon, and shot one of his bodyguards in the leg.
Shaath, speaking to the media by telephone, appeared shaken but said no one in his family had been hurt. He said the attackers stole many items from his home in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia.
Hamas seizes control of hospitals
On Tuesday morning, Hamas gunmen seized the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, making it the third medical center to come under Hamas control in two days. Gunmen traded fire at the institution.
Hamas then warned over a mosque loudspeaker that it would attack the headquarters of the Preventive Security Service in Gaza City, which is loyal to Fatah.
"The warning which we have given you to surrender has ended, and we will attack this position of Zionist collaborators," the warning said.
In Khan Yunis, Hamas controlled the roof of hospital and Fatah security forces took up positions nearby. The two sides traded fire. About 15 children attending a kindergarten in the compound were rushed into the main building, hospital officials said.
Haniyeh's house targeted
On Tuesday morning, gunmen attacked the home of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in a refugee camp near Gaza City, for the second time in as many days.
Hamas branded the assault with a rocket-propelled grenade an assassination attempt. Haniyeh and his family were in the house, but unhurt, in the second attack on his home in as many days.
Describing the attack, Haniyeh's son, Abdel Salam, said an RPG hit the side of the house in the Shati refugee camp, damaging it, while the family was inside. No one was hurt, he said.
Also Tuesday, Hamas said Fatah gunmen kidnapped a member of the Hamas military wing and executed him in the street. The dead man was identified as a cousin of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader assassinated by Israel in 2004.
Earlier in the day, three women and a child were killed when Hamas militants attacked the home of a senior Fatah security official with mortars and grenades, security officials said.
The gunmen seized Hassan Abu Rabi and killed his 14-year-old son and three women in the house, hospital officials said. Fatah gunmen also stormed the house of a Hamas lawmaker and burned it to the ground.
The fighting disrupted final exams for university and high school students. The three universities called off final exams set for Tuesday.
High schools were trying to move test centers to areas out of the range of fire, said Mohammed Abu Shkeir, the deputy minister of education.
and
Abbas calls for immediate truce, Fatah threatens to quit gov't
By Yoav Ribak
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas called Tuesday for an immediate end to the fighting between his Fatah movement and the rival Hamas, saying it went against Palestinian "interests."
The fighting, which erupted Monday morning after days of simmering tensions, has claimed 17 lives so far. On Tuesday afternoon, Hamas gunmen launched an attack on the headquarters of Fatah-allied security forces across the Gaza Strip.
"In order to protect the higher national interests of our people, and to try stop the bloodshed, I, in my position as the head of the Palestinian Authority and the head of all security forces call for an immediate halt to fire," Abbas said in a statement.
The statement accused "a small group of leaders," including those unhappy with a national unity deal between Abbas' Fatah movement and the ruling Hamas organization, of "taking the country into an ugly civil war."
The unity government was formed in March during a summit in Mecca, in an effort to stem a previous round of internecine violence in Gaza.
Fatah said its Central Committee would meet at 8 P.M. to decide whether to remain in the government it formed with Hamas in March in a bid to stop internal violence and ease Western sanctions.
Abbas also called for a joint meeting with Egyptian mediators to end the fighting, which has killed 80 people over the past month.
Sufyan Abu Zaida, a former Palestinian cabinet minister and a senior Fatah official, called on Abbas to involve the Arab League in a bid to stop factional violence.
"What is happening now in the Gaza Strip is different from previous cycles of violence -in terms of the number of dead, the amount of armed forces fighting each other, and in terms of rhetoric," he said. "We have stopped counting the dead and the fighting forces in the Strip - from the north to the south."
Abu Zaida made the comments at a conference for Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations in Tuscany, Italy.
But the frustrated head of the Egyptian security delegation, Major General Burhan Hamad, who has been trying to negotiate a truce, told Palestinian TV on Tuesday morning that he would call the people out onto the streets to protest if the two groups do not agree to stand down.
A cease-fire agreement brokered Monday by Egyptian officials collapsed after several hours.
Hamad said Tuesday that neither side responded to his call to hold truce talks Tuesday.
"It seems they don't want to come. We must make them ashamed of themselves. They have killed all hope. They have killed the future," said Hamad, who brokered several previous short-lived cease-fires.
Hamad said both sides were about equal in firepower. "Neither can have a decisive victory," he said. "To be decisive, they need weapons that neither side has."
He said he would call civilians out into the streets to protest if the two rivals did not agree to stand down.
Islam Shahwan, a spokesman for the Hamas militia, brushed aside the latest truce efforts.
"It's all talk. It's not serious," he said.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, an Abbas aide, said Tuesday that there no end was in sight to the fighting.
"You can see for yourself there's no taste for a cease-fire right now," he told The Associated Press by telephone, blaming Hamas.
Jordan, EU call on Palestinian factions to lay down arms
Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdelelah Al-Khatib and the European Union's Middle East envoy Marc Otte on Tuesday urged Hamas and Fatah to stop fighting and use dialogue to resolve their differences.
The call came during talks that focused on the deteriorating situation in the Palestinian territories and means of spurring efforts for ensuring a resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, an official statement said.
"The two sides expressed concern over the internal Palestinian feuds and emphasized that dialogue and exercising self-restraint represented the only way for ending the violence there," the statement said.
Al-Khatib and Otte "urged all parties to seize the opportunity now available for boosting peace and called for a real effort both on the Arab and international level to help stop the deteriorating situation and revive the peace process," the statement said.
3) In the Trenches: Europe: Tough decisions on Iran can't be delayed
By DAVID A. HARRIS
Iran is determined to achieve nuclear weapons capability. Unlike the debate surrounding Iraq in the months leading up to the 2003 war, there's no disagreement this time among the major powers on Iran's ambitions, only on the timetable for achieving them.
Impressively, the major powers agree that Iran shouldn't be allowed to realize its goals. They're in accord that an Iran with nuclear weapons would pose a grave threat to regional and global security.
While Iranian leaders have repeatedly voiced a desire to live in a world without Israel-a threat that needs to be taken at face value-the danger doesn't stop there. Friends of Israel need to underscore this fundamental point.
4) Newly de-classified documents debunk claim that Israel sought '67 War
By Michael Oren
Great wars in history eventually become great wars about history. Only a few years after the last soldier leaves the battlefield, accepted truths about the nature of a military conflict and the motivations for it invariably come under assault by revisionists and counter-revisionists whose vehemence can rival that of the original combatants.
This again becomes the case with the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War. Confronted with a harsh economic blockade, military pacts between heavily armed neighbors for the express purpose of aggression against Israel and hundreds of thousands of enemy troops actually massed on its borders, it would have been the height of irresponsibility for Israel's government not to plan for pre-emptive action. The picture that emerges is one of a country and leadership deeply fearful of military confrontation, and desperate to avoid one at almost any price.
Few of the historiographical struggles are as bitter as the one now being waged over the Arab-Israeli wars, in which a force of self-proclaimed "new historians" has laid siege to previously unassailable descriptions of the creation and survival of the Jewish state.
HISTORIANS NEW AGENDA
The unusual ferocity of the debate over Arab-Israeli history is directly related to the singularly high stakes involved. The adversaries are not merely vying for space on university bookshelves, but grappling with issues that have a profound impact on the lives of millions of people: Israel's security, the rights of Palestinian refugees, the future of Jerusalem. The new historians make no attempt to disguise their agenda.
Published by leading academic presses and widely acclaimed by reviewers, the radical interpretations by the new historians have largely supplanted traditional Zionist histories. This success would not have been possible without the diplomatic documents made available at various government archives under the 30-year declassification rule allowing access to previously classified material that is observed by most Western democracies.
Papers released by Britain's Public Record Office and the United States National Archives, for example, provide fresh insights into the diplomacy of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in relation to the Arab countries, whose archives remain closed indefinitely. But when it comes to Arab-Israeli history, no collection can rival the Israel State Archives, which in addition to the wealth of firsthand accounts it contains, is particularly liberal in its declassification policy.
These documents — tendentiously read and selectively cited — have been marshaled to substantiate the most radical of revisionist theories about the 1948 War of Independence and the 1956 Sinai Campaign. With the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War now upon us, the same methodology is again about to be applied to smashing the "myths" of 1967.
The historical controversy over 1967 is especially brutal. The belief that the Six-Day War was imposed on Israel by an alliance of Arab states bent on its destruction — and that Israel's conquest of territories was the result of its legitimate exercise of the right to defend itself in a war which it did everything in its power to avoid — has been sacrosanct for Zionists across the political spectrum. That the final disposition of those territories continues to be the focus of Israel's internal political debate and of ongoing international negotiations makes the 1967 war a hugely inviting target for radical reinterpretation.
With the revisionists' approach lauded regularly in the Israeli press, the first shots in this battle already are being fired. In the academic world, the initiative has come from the social sciences rather than history departments. According to this school, the Six-Day War erupted not as a result of Arab belligerency but in reaction to socioeconomic factors within Israel, as a tactic by the nation's leaders to distract attention from their failed domestic policies.
These authors seem to share the belief — one that is strongly implied, if not yet openly asserted — that Arab actions had little to do with the outbreak of hostilities in 1967, and that Israel not only failed to prevent war but actively courted it. The massing of Egyptian troops in the Sinai, the expulsion of the U.N. Emergency Force and the closing of the Straits of Tiran, the Arab defense pacts and public commitments to eradicate the Jewish state — all were either provoked or blown out of proportion by Israel in the interest of internal cohesion, territorial expansion or other ulterior motives.
Israeli "fear had no basis in reality," Ha'aretz journalist Tom Segev writes in his newly translated book 1967. "There was indeed no justification for the panic that preceded the war, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it."
But can these conclusions stand up to straightforward historical scrutiny? Can the assertion that Israel wanted the war, did little or nothing to avert it, or even instigated it be substantiated by Israeli declassified documents from the period, the favored weapons of the new historians?
Files from the Israel State Archives reveal a great deal about Israeli policymaking and diplomacy of the time, and about what Israel's leaders thought, feared and strove for during three weeks of intense diplomatic efforts leading up to June 5, 1967. Far from even hinting that Israel deliberately brought about the conflict, the record shows that Israel was desperate to avoid war and, up to the eve of battle, pursued every avenue in an effort to avert it — even at great strategic and economic cost to the nation.
The newly released Israeli diplomatic documents from the period leading up to June 5, 1967, offer overwhelming evidence against any suggestion that Israel sought war with the Arabs. Nor do the tens of thousands of declassified papers contain a single reference to any desire to divert public opinion from the economic situation, to overthrow Arab rulers, or to conquer and occupy the West Bank, the Sinai or the Golan Heights.
FEARFUL OF CONFRONTATION
On the contrary, the picture that emerges is one of a country and leadership deeply fearful of military confrontation, and desperate to avoid one at almost any price. The sole hope of doing so, the Israelis believed, rested with the United States. But the Johnson administration, though favorably disposed to Israel, was limited severely by domestic political constraints and its all-consuming involvement in Vietnam. These limitations prevented the Americans from taking the measures that might have restored the status-quo ante in the Sinai and the Straits of Tiran, and stemmed the momentum toward war that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had generated.
Moreover, it cannot be claimed that Israel was wrong in considering the use of force, confronted as it was by the blockade, military pacts and enemy troops. Nor can Israel be faulted for employing the threat of force to spur the United States to intervene diplomatically. The few measures Johnson did adopt — reiterating America's 1957 pledges on Tiran, the Red Sea Regatta proposal, the representations to Arab leaders — were directly attributable to those intimations by Israel.
In the final analysis, the Israelis held back from acting militarily until the very last opportunity for a diplomatic settlement had passed, even though they knew that every day they waited was costing them dearly in resources, readiness and morale, and was likely to constrict their own maneuverability if war became unavoidable.
Given the archival records, it seems the new historians face a formidable task in trying to prove that Israel had hostile intentions in 1967. But the historiographical battle over the Six-Day War has scarcely begun.
In addition to the Israeli archives, numerous other primary and secondary sources must be culled, and further controversies tackled. Researchers confront a battery of potentially explosive issues, among them the conquest of the Golan, the flight of West Bank refugees, the annexation of Jerusalem and the origins of the peace process. The conclusions reached here can only be considered preliminary — if not quite the first round in this battle, then certainly an opening shot.
5) Hamas losing support'
by Yaakov Lappin
Palestinian pollster tells Gaza clashes costing Hamas popular support. Human rights activist adds: Gazans unsure they will return if they leave their homes
The gun battles and exchanges of mortars and explosives ravaging the streets of Gaza are costing Hamas popular support among Palestinians, a leading Palestinian pollster told Ynetnews on Tuesday.
Elias Kukali, of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), based in the West Bank, said Fatah would naturally benefit from Hamas's decline.
PA Infighting
Al-Aqsa calls on members to 'fight coup' / Ali Waked and agencies
Chaos in Palestinian Authority reaches new peak: Hamas takes over Fatah bases, headquarters in all of northern Gaza Strip, conquers other wide parts of area. Palestinian president to meet with Fatah leaders to discuss possibility of quitting unity government. Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades calls on members to take to streets
Full story
"In general, Palestinians are against the fighting between the factions," Kukali said, adding that 78 percent of Palestinians were unaffiliated with either side.
With the exception of those who are partisan in favor of Hamas, "the majority of Palestinians are disappointed by Hamas, and feel that Hamas is incapable of running the government," the analyst added, citing a poll conducted by PCPO, due to be released in two days.
"For the time being, there are only two alternatives for Palestinians, and if they don't vote for Hamas, they will vote for Fatah," Kukali said.
Asked whether Hamas was trying push Fatah out of Gaza, Kukali said that such a goal was unfeasible, adding: "Every side has its support and power, and each wants more power than the other."
"There are people on both sides who benefit from the continuation of fighting," he added.
'Fighting resembles gang war'
Speaking from his mobile phone in Gaza, Jabar Washa, of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), told Ynetnews that the Hamas-Fatah war was "was more like a gang war than a battle between militants. We explicitly say that."
"I think this a factional clash motivated by self-interest," Washa said. "It's far away from the national interest. The national interest is to put an end to these clashes and to the suffering caused when militant groups attack," he added.
Washa said that the situation in Gaza has gotten so bad that the PCHR has had to close its office there.
"What concerns people here is the complete ambiguity and uncertainty, because uncertainty is more dangerous than danger," Washa said. "For the first time in the Palestinian Authority's existence we closed our office due to the curfews," he added. "People here expect the worst and they say that what we have now is bad enough," Washa said.
Asked how many people he estimated have been killed in the fighting, Washa replied that "there is no exact figure up to now because the situation is deteriorating. It's not a matter of how many, it's a matter of why. Even a single person who is killed or who is injured or victimized is a story. So I'm not in favor of counting casualties because every single human being has his her dignity should be respected."
"The most serious concern people here have is that they are uncertain that they will come back safely if they go out. So I think we are paying highly for this factionally-motivated conflict," he added.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Inconsistency rules foreign policy!
First time I ever read Tom Friedman when he did not have a solution. (see 1 below.)
If you want to see hypocrisy and the inability of this administration to respond watch HTTP://WWW.Bercasio.com/movies/dems-wmd-beforeIraq.wmv
Then if you want to see how democracy works in Syria enter : SyriaElection2007e.pps
More Israeli technology capacity. (See 2 below.)
The Dutch seek to plug hole in their leaking diplomacy. (See 3 below.)
Saudi money continues to flow and create future terrorist cells. (See 4 below.)
In my brief review Michael Oren's recent book, I pointed out the conflictual inconsistent nature of our foreign policy driven by Arabist State Department thinking, commercial oil interests and a desire by Constitutionalists to bring democracy and freedom to The Middle East. It appears, based on Caroline Glick's assessment, the administration has not/cannot form a coherent policy. (See 5 below.)
Daniel Pipes discusses legal issues in fighting terrorism. (See 6 below.)
Dore Gold questions cedeing Golan. (See 7 below.)
Finally, if you care about Democracy and freedom then watch Netanyahu tell the Brits they had better get their own act together. They did it wrong once before and are following the same Chamberlain path again. (HTTP://www.omneJerusalem.org/blog/archives/2007/05/watch benjamin.asp
Dick
1) By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Middle East has gotten itself tied into such an impossible knot that Biblical references or Shakespearian quotations simply don't suffice anymore to describe how impossibly tangled politics has become here. Shira Wolosky, a Hebrew University English scholar, suggested to me that maybe Dr. Seuss, in "The Cat in the Hat," offered the best way to sum up the Middle East today.
Then he shut the Things
in the box with the hook.
And the cat went away
With a sad kind of look.
"That is good," said the fish.
"He has gone away. Yes.
but your mother will come.
She will find this big mess!
And this mess is so big
And so deep and so tall,
we can not pick it up.
There is no way at all!"
Just look around. Gaza is turning into Mogadishu . Hamas is shelling Israel . Israel is retaliating. Iraq is a boiling pot. Iran is about to go nuclear. Lebanon is being pulled apart. Syria is being investigated for murdering Lebanon 's prime minister. I could go on. Yes, this mess is so big and so tall. Who knows where to pick it up at all?
In Israel, officials are mulling all alternatives -- from the Saudi peace initiative to negotiating with Hamas to opening talks with Syria to reoccupying Gaza to looking for a "trustee" for the West Bank -- because no one is sure anymore what to do.
That is, the Left's way -- land for peace -- was discredited by the collapse of Oslo . The Right's way, permanent Israeli occupation of all "The Land of Israel," was made impossible by Palestinian demographics and two uprisings. The third way, unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza , has been discredited by Hezbollah's attack from Lebanon and the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza .
" Israel is in a place it has never been before," said Moshe Halbertal, a Hebrew University philosophy professor. "It does not have a picture of where to go and how, so people are looking for a fourth way."
It is impossible to predict what that fourth way will be. But it is easy to identify the new realities it will have to take into account.
First is the fact that Yasir Arafat's Fatah group, which has long dominated Palestinian life, is in disarray. Fatah will not disappear, but it will never again totally dominate the Palestinian Authority. Fatah will have to share power with Hamas, which has largely wiped out Fatah in Gaza already. Sooner or later, the U.S. and Israel are going to have to drop the economic sanctions they imposed on Palestinians to pressure Hamas into recognizing Israel . "As repulsive as [Hamas] is to me as an Israeli, I don't think it's coming to the Palestinian Authority just to pay a visit -- it is here to stay," said Israeli TV's top Arab affairs reporter, Ehud Yaari.
Israel 's real choice is between dealing with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority or watching it collapse into little pieces, which Israel would have to pick up. (Think Iraq and Somalia .) West Bank and Gaza unemployment is now around 40 percent. Talking with Palestinians in Ramallah, the phrase I heard most was not "Israeli occupation" but "Palestinian disintegration."
Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki told me that as bad as things are today, his polls show most Palestinians still don't blame Hamas. They blame Israel and America for withholding funds from the Hamas government that Palestinians elected. The best way to diminish Hamas's influence, or to moderate it, is by forcing it to assume responsibility. Ask it: "Do you want Palestinians to be able to work in Israel ? Then sit down with Israel and work out the details." We need to "force Hamas through a corridor of difficult decisions," said Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein. If America can talk to Iran , Israel can talk to Hamas.
Second, Hamas says it will only offer Israel a long-term cease-fire. Fine, take it. Fact No. 1: the real history of Israeli-Arab relations is: war, lull, war, lull, war, lull -- from 1948 until today. Fact No. 2: "Since 1948," said Mr. Yaari, "the Jews have always made better use of the lulls than the Arabs." Israel doesn't need Hamas's recognition. It needs a long lull.
The third new reality is that Hamas's shelling of Israel from Gaza means Israel can never hand over the West Bank to the Palestinians, without an international trustee -- because from there Palestinians could close Israel's airport with one rocket. Only Jordan , or an international force, can be that trustee.
Bottom line: I don't know if there is a fourth way, but, if there is, it will have to include these new realities. Otherwise, this mess will get even bigger, deeper and taller.
2)Successful launch Monday of Ofeq-7 imaging satellite, Israel acquires an essential intelligence asset for any war contingency
Ofeq-7 was launched westward over the Mediterranean by the home-made Shavit three-stage solid fuel vehicle from the Palmachim aerospace base at 02:15 IT, June 11. The first images should be received by Tuesday night.
Military sources report that the launching was part of a seven-day US-Israeli air exercise taking place this week in the Negev which, though presented officially as a routine practice, reflects wide expectations of a Middle East war this summer.
Israel thus launched the 300 kg Ofeq-7 in mock war conditions, displaying a cutting-edge capability reserved to the US and Russia.
Its successful deployment in low Earth orbit was anxiously awaited as strategically essential after the failure of the Ofeq-6 test last September. Joining the ageing, five-year old Ofeq-5, the new platform fills the gap in the coverage of distant high-priority areas in the Middle East including Iran.
The military importance of the Shavit’s successful performance as a deterrent to Iran’s missile threats cannot be overstated. It means that Israeli rockets can be relied on to reach any part of Iran.
Earlier this year, as Syria and Iran built up their missile arsenals, Israel quietly accelerated its military space program with three successful launches in February and March under a news blackout. Russia too reacted by placing a new Cosmos spy satellite in an orbit for keeping a close watch on the Middle East including Israel, Iran and the Gulf.
Work is being advanced at Israel’s Air Industry on the TechSAR radar-operated all-weather platform, Ofeq-8 and a new type of satellite called only Ofeq-Next. Israeli defense officials are in talks with US Spacecom for supplementing the Amos-4 communications satellite still to be launched with military capabilities.
3) Netherlands seek larger role in resolving Mideast conflict
By Cnaan Lipshitz
Dutch foreign minister, Maxime Verhagen, will visit Israel Monday, bringing the message to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert the Hague wishes to play a more central role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Before the minister's visit to the region began, however (Monday he will be in Egypt), it took an awkward turn, as 52 senior Dutch figures demanded on Saturday their government recognize Hamas and "apply more pressure against Israel, to restore the international community's credibility."
Last week, former Dutch prime minister Dries Van Agt, who co-signed the petition, demanded that Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen "denounce not only attacks by Palestinians on Israelis, but also terrorist actions by the Israeli occupation army, which result in the death of so many Palestinians.
The signatories also include Hans van den Broek, who served as foreign minister for 11 years, before his appointment in 1993 as European commissioner for foreign relations. Both he and Van Agt belong to Verhagen's center-right ruling party, the CDA.
The petition appeared in several daily papers, and featured signatures of many other opinion shapers from across the political board. "The government must help break the impasse. With the Arab League," the petition read. In addition, the document included an implicit demand that Holland recognize Hamas: "The Netherlands must engage in dialogue with all the relevant parties."
Meanwhile, a Dutch Jewish organization last week arranged for parliament to hear two Palestinian teenagers who asked for the Netherlands to "intervene to stop the horrors of occupation." Jaap Hamburger, from "A Different Jewish Voice" (Een Ander Joods Geluid), told parliament that Israel acts as if it has "received a blank check, which it uses to violate human rights and international law."
Against this backdrop, another organization, Christians for Israel, decided to allocate $50,000 for the building of shelters in Sderot, for protection from Palestinian Qassam rockets.
4) SAUDI MONEY FINANCES MOSQUES IN N. AFRICA
Saudi Arabia has been funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to establish Wahabi mosques and schools in North Africa. Officials said Saudi princes and those close to the ruling family have been pouring money into the construction of mosques, schools and charities in such countries as Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. They said the Saudi funding, joined by those in other Gulf Cooperation Council states, was
encouraged by the government in Riyad and meant to increase the kingdom's
influence in North Africa.
"Saudi foreign policy is primarily the promotion of the Wahabi doctrine," an
official said. "It's problematic because the path from Wahabi doctrine to Al
Qaida philosophy is quite short."
Officials said the United States has been monitoring the flow of funds, but
has not relayed any protest to Saudi Arabia or other GCC states. They said
the Gulf funds aimed to establish a Wahabi network in North Africa that
would train Muslim clerics and teachers.
5) Bush administration forcing Israel to endanger itself
By Caroline B. Glick
Ahead of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's trip to the White House on June 19, the Bush administration is pressuring Israel to endanger itself on at least two fronts.
First the Americans are pressuring the Olmert government to agree to Palestinian Authority and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas's request to bring millions of bullets, thousands of Kalashnikov assault rifles, RPGs, anti-tank missiles and armored personnel carriers into Gaza from Egypt.
The government has yet to respond to the request. Those who oppose it argue that Fatah forces in Gaza are too weak and incompetent to battle Hamas forces and so any weaponry transferred to Fatah militias will likely end up in Hamas's hands.
This logic is correct, but incomplete. It is true that Fatah forces are unwilling and presumably unable to defeat Hamas forces. But it is also true that Fatah forces use their arms to attack Israel. So even if there was no chance of Hamas laying its hands on the weapons, allowing Fatah to receive them would still endanger Israel.
The same limited logic informs Israel's strenuous objection to the Pentagon's intention to sell Saudi Arabia Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite-guided "smart bombs" or JDAMS. The government claims that while it has no truck with the Saudis, it fears for the stability of the regime. If the House of Saud falls, Osama bin Laden would get the bombs.
Yet like Fatah, the Saudis aren't simply vulnerable. They are culpable. In addition to being the creators of al Qaida and Hamas's largest financial backers, the Saudis themselves directly threaten Israel.
In direct contravention of their commitment to the US, (and the US's commitment to Israel), the Saudis have deployed F-15 fighter jets at Tabuk air base located 150 km from Eilat. On May 13th, the Saudi Air Force held an air show at Tabuk for the benefit of King Abdullah and senior princes where the F-15s where ostentatiously shown.
The timing of the show was interesting. It took place the day before Abdullah hosted Vice President Richard Cheney at Tabuk.
The administration is not just asking Israel to facilitate the arming of its enemies. It is also placing restrictions on Israel's ability to arm itself. As The Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday, the Pentagon has yet to respond to Israel's request to purchase the F-22 stealth bomber. Moreover, the US seems to be torpedoing Israel's acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The Pentagon recently voiced its objection to Israel's plan to install Israeli technology in the jets that are to be supplied starting in 2014. Israel's installation of its own electronic warfare systems in its F-16s and F-15s is how it has managed to maintain the IAF's qualitative edge over Arab states that have also purchased the aircraft.
The administration's hostility towards Israel is unfortunately not an aberration. It is the result of a policy shift within the administration which occurred immediately after the Republican Party's defeat in the Congressional elections last November.
After the Republican defeat, the administration embraced former secretary of state James Baker's foreign policy paradigm which is based on the belief that it is possible and desirable to reach a stable balance of power in the Middle East. As Baker sees it, the balance can be reached by forcing Israel to shrink to its "natural" proportions and assisting supposedly moderate and stable states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to grow into their "natural" proportions. Once the states of the region (including Syria and Iran which Baker wishes to appease) have settled into their proper proportions, stability will be ensured.
Baker fleshed on his view in the Iraq Study Group's recommendations which were published immediately after the elections. Although President George W. Bush rejected the ISG's recommendations, the day after the elections he sacked defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and replaced him with Robert Gates who served on the ISG. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a disciple of Baker's ally former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.
The problem with the Baker paradigm is that it has never been borne out by reality. It collapsed during the Cold War both as the Soviet Union worked tirelessly to destabilize countries allied with the US and when the states of East-Central Europe revolted against the teetering empire and gained their freedom with its collapse.
In the 1990s, Baker's stability paradigm failed to foresee the post-nationalist movements that swept through Western Europe and the Muslim world and embraced the Soviet goal of weakening the US. Baker still denies the phenomenon and ignores its policy implications.
Today, the notion that stability is a realistic aim is even more far fetched. Specifically, the willingness of Muslim secularists to form strategic relations with jihadists and the willingness of Shiites to form strategic partnerships with Sunnis was unimaginable twenty years ago. Aside from that, the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran throws a monkey wrench into any thought of regional stability. A look around the region shows just how absurd Baker's notions truly are.
In Lebanon today, Fatah al Islam, which is apparently allied with al Qaida, is fighting the Lebanese army in a bid to bring down the Siniora government at the behest of its sponsor — the secular Ba'athist regime in Damascus. Fatah al Islam is also aligned with Hizbullah, which shares its goal of bringing down the Lebanese government and with Iran which gives the Syrians their marching orders.
This state of affairs is also the name of the game in Iraq where Iran and Syria support both Muqtada al Sadr's Shiite Mehdi army and al Qaida's Sunni death squads. It repeats itself in Afghanistan where Iran is arming the Taliban and in the Palestinian Authority.
Furthermore, the paragons of moderation and stability in Egypt and Saudi Arabia which Baker and his followers are so keen to strengthen are neither stable nor moderate. Both Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah are old men of uncertain health. To "stabilize" their regimes they wrought unholy alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahabis which are the only forces in Egyptian and Saudi societies that have not been flattened under their jackboots.
This week Channel 10 reported that the Bush administration recently informed Israel and the Gulf states that it has no intention of launching military strikes against Iran's nuclear installations. The Americans explained that they need Iranian assistance in stabilizing Iraq to pave the way for an American withdrawal from the country before Bush leaves office. Under Baker's regency, the administration apparently now subscribes to the belief that they will be better off out of Iraq with a nuclear-armed Iran than in Iraq without a nuclear-armed Iran.
For their part, the Arabs have demonstrated clearly that they do not share the administration's newfound faith that a nuclear-armed Iran will reach a stable equilibrium in a Bakeresque Middle Eastern balance of powers. Their stated aim to build nuclear reactors is a clear sign that they recognize the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran. The administration's support the Arabs' quest for nuclear reactors makes clear that it is now willing to have a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race.
This brings us back to Israel, which is situated smack in the middle of the regional chaos. How is Israel contending with this threatening state of affairs?
For its part, the IDF seems to be contending with it fairly well, at least with regard to Syria and Lebanon. The IDF's decision have television crews film IDF soldiers fighting in mock-up Syrian villages this week, like Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi's announcement that the IDF is prepared to fight on two fronts simultaneously are signs that the IDF recognizes that its only safe bet is to prepare for all contingencies. Were the IDF to complement these actions with warnings to Iran and operational plans to attack Iran's nuclear installations and distribute gas masks to the public, the General Staff would go a long way towards proving that it is adopting the only reasonable strategic posture available given the cards Israel has been dealt.
Yet not only is the IDF not warning Iran, the Olmert government is undermining the IDF's correct posture towards Syria and Lebanon. Indeed, on every front, including towards Israel itself, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has himself adopted Baker's failed paradigm.
Rather than publicly explain that in light of Syria's position as an Iranian client state in Lebanon, Iraq and Israel, there is nothing for Israel to talk to Syria about, Wednesday Olmert announced that he wishes to open negotiations on the Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights with the Syrians.
The Syrians for their part cornered Olmert Thursday by agreeing to his offer. As Karl Moor and David Rivkin explained Thursday in The Jerusalem Post, it is not true, as Olmert and his minions claim that Israel has nothing to lose by negotiating with Syria. Given Israel's perceived weakness in the wake of last summer's war and Syria's perceived strength, speaking to Syria about an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will only encourage Syrian belligerence.
And as with the Syrians, so too with the Palestinians, the Olmert government acts as Baker's water boy. Rather than waging a rational military campaign to defeat the jihadist front that has seeded itself in Gaza, Olmert issues near daily statements telling the Palestinians that Israel will cause them no harm. He defends this policy by declaiming on the importance of strengthening the "stability" of the Palestinian Authority.
Then there is the daily brown nosing Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni engage in towards the Egyptians and Saudis. Israel praises both as "moderates" while Egypt vows publicly not to take action to stop the transfer of weapons from Sinai to Gaza and the Saudis bankroll Hamas and demand that Israel implement their "peace plan" which calls for Israel's destruction.
Yet all of this incompetent bumbling pales in comparison to Israel's weakness towards Iran. Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz's assertion this week to the Post that he does not "think it is right today to talk about military options" towards Iran because he thinks that sanctions can still convince the mullahs to give up their nuclear ambitions comes dangerously close to an Israeli collapse in the face of an existential threat. The fact that Mofaz made this statement the same week that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had crossed the nuclear threshold only exacerbates the perception of Israeli strategic disarray.
Sooner or later the US will pay a price for the Bush administration's decision to embrace the delusion of stability as its strategic goal. With jihadist forces growing stronger around the globe, if the Americans leave Iraq without victory, there is no doubt that Iraq (and Iran and Syria) will come to them. But whatever the consequences of America's behavior for America, the price that Israel will pay for embracing Baker's myths of stability will be unspeakable.
6) Islamists in the Courtroom
by Daniel Pipes
The decision last week by the Islamic Society of Boston to drop its lawsuit against 17 defendants, including counterterrorism specialist Steven Emerson, gives reason to step back to consider radical Islam's legal ambitions.
The envisioned $22 million Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.
The lawsuit came about because, soon after ground was broken in November 2002 for the ISB's $22 million Islamic center, the media and several non-profits began asking questions about three main topics: why the ISB paid the city of Boston less than half the appraised value of the land it acquired; why a city of Boston employee, who is also an ISB board member, fund raised on the Boston taxpayer's tab for the center while traveling in the Middle East; and the ISB's connections to radical Islam.
Under this barrage of criticism, the ISB in May 2005 turned tables on its critics with a lawsuit accusing them of defamation and conspiring to violate its civil rights through "a concerted, well-coordinated effort to deprive the Plaintiffs … of their basic rights of free association and the free exercise of religion."
The lawsuit roiled Bostonians for two long years, and Jewish-Muslim relations in particular. The discovery process, while revealing that the defendants had engaged in routine newsgathering and political disputation, and had nothing to hide, uncovered the plaintiff's record of extremism and deception. Newly aware of its own vulnerabilities, the ISB on May 29 withdrew its lawsuit with its many complaints about "false statements," and it did so without getting a dime.
Why should this dispute matter to anyone beyond the litigants?
The Islamist movement has two wings, one violent and one lawful, which operate apart but often reinforce each other. Their effective coordination was on display in Britain last August, when the Islamist establishment seized on the Heathrow airport plot to destroy planes over the Atlantic Ocean as an opening for it to press the Blair government for changes in policy.
A similar one-two punch stifles the open discussion of Muhammad, the Koran, Islam, and Muslims. Violence causing hundreds of deaths erupted against The Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons, and Pope Benedict, creating a climate of fear that adds muscle to lawsuits such as the ISB's. As Mr. Emerson noted when the Muslim Public Affairs Council recently threatened to sue him for supposed false statements, "Legal action has become a mainstay of radical Islamist organizations seeking to intimidate and silence their critics."
Such lawsuits, including the ISB's, are often predatory, filed without serious expectations of winning, but initiated to bankrupt, distract, intimidate, and demoralize defendants. Such plaintiffs seek less to win than to wear down the researchers and analysts who, even when they win, pay heavily in time and money. Two examples:
*
Khalid bin Mahfouz v Rachel Ehrenfeld: Ehrenfeld wrote that Bin Mahfouz had financial links to Al-Qaeda and Hamas. He sued her in January 2004 in a plaintiff-friendly British court. He won by default and was awarded £30,000 and an apology.
*
Iqbal Unus v Rita Katz: His house searched in the course of a American government operation, code-named Green Quest, Unus sued Ms Katz, a non-governmental counterterrorist expert, charging in March 2004 that she was responsible for the raid. Mr. Unus lost and had to pay Ms Katz's court costs.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations began a burst of litigiousness in 2003 and announced ambitious fundraising goals for this effort. But the collapse of three lawsuits, in particular the one against Andrew Whitehead of Anti-CAIR, seems by April 2006 to have prompted a reconsideration. Frustrated in the courtroom, one CAIR staffer consoled himself that "education is superior to litigation."
This retreat notwithstanding, Islamists clearly hope, as Douglas Farah notes, that lawsuits will cause researchers and analysts to "get tired of the cost and the hassle and simply shut up." Just last month, KinderUSA sued Matthew Levitt, a specialist on terrorist funding, and two organizations, for his assertion that KinderUSA funds Hamas. One must assume that Islamists are planning future legal ordeals for their critics.
Which brings me to an announcement: The Middle East Forum is establishing a "Legal Project" to protect counterterror and anti-Islamist researchers and analysts. Their vital work must not be preempted by legal intimidation. In the event of litigation, they need to be armed with sufficient funding and the finest legal representation.
7)Before ceding the Golan: Some urgent questions before Israel folds on the Golan Heights
by Dore Gold
By starting with a statement that Israel will pay the price for peace with Syria, as reported in Friday's Yedioth Ahronoht, the Israeli leadership is strongly hinting that it is willing to withdraw completely from the Golan Heights. The Israeli public deserves answers to several critical questions before these proposals to Syria go forward.
1. Everyone knows that the Syrian regime is completely isolated and facing an international tribunal that will investigate its role in the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Syria needs these negotiations to get out the predicament it faces--in other words. Israel has a great deal of leverage, and certainly does not have to agree to full withdrawal. Under such circumstances why should Israel signal that it is willing to consider a full withdrawal.
2. Moreover, in 1975, President Gerald Ford wrote to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that the US would "give great weight to Israel remaining
מודעה
on the Golan Heights." This US commitment was repeated by Secretary of State James Baker to Prime Minsiter Yitzhak Shamir in 1991, right before the Madrid Peace conference, and by Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, right before negotiations began over Hebron. And, even if Israel wishes to test Syrian intentions through negotiations, why start with a complete collapse of Israel's negotiating position. :
3. If the government seeks to come down from the Golan Heights, is it certain that it can achieve any of the "security arrangements" suggested in the past. Remember back in October 1973, Israel deployed 177 tanks against 1400 on the Syrian side. How does Israel plan to address these kind of asymmetries that still exist? Does the government believe that it can push most of Syria's armored formations behind Damascus, from their current deployment zone between Damascus and the Golan? If the Syrians are unwilling to agree to these arrangements then the Israeli government cannot provide the alternatives to the Golan Heights that were advanced by those who advocated withdrawal in the 1990's.
4. An alternative model for security without the Golan Heights requires a huge expenditure by the US for high technology weaponry for the IDF. Has anyone checked whether the US is prepared to significant increase aid to Israel when it has been cut over the last ten years? Will the US fund peace arrangements with the country that has been aiding al-Qaeda to support the insurgency in Iraq? Do we have assurances that before the start of negotiations, Syria will stop hosting terrorist groups killing Israelis and our American allies?
5. And what is the actual line of withdrawal? Syria claims the June 4, 1967 line which gives it the northeastern shore the Kinneret. In the 1950's, when the Syrian encroached on the Kinneret shoreline, they formally claimed its waters as well. During the Barak government, the Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara hinted at his willingness to compromise this point, only to be rebuked by Hafiz al-Assad. Has somebody done his homework this time and checked?
6. Most importantly, what is driving the government to do this? Is there a demographic problem on the Golan Heights? No.
In fact, the Golan has been in Israel's hands more years than it has been in Syria's hands. In the last ten years there has been a tendency to experiment with the security of Israel though all kinds of initiatives, without any serious staff work. The results have been disastrous. It is time to be serious and stop experimenting with Israel's future.
If you want to see hypocrisy and the inability of this administration to respond watch HTTP://WWW.Bercasio.com/movies/dems-wmd-beforeIraq.wmv
Then if you want to see how democracy works in Syria enter : SyriaElection2007e.pps
More Israeli technology capacity. (See 2 below.)
The Dutch seek to plug hole in their leaking diplomacy. (See 3 below.)
Saudi money continues to flow and create future terrorist cells. (See 4 below.)
In my brief review Michael Oren's recent book, I pointed out the conflictual inconsistent nature of our foreign policy driven by Arabist State Department thinking, commercial oil interests and a desire by Constitutionalists to bring democracy and freedom to The Middle East. It appears, based on Caroline Glick's assessment, the administration has not/cannot form a coherent policy. (See 5 below.)
Daniel Pipes discusses legal issues in fighting terrorism. (See 6 below.)
Dore Gold questions cedeing Golan. (See 7 below.)
Finally, if you care about Democracy and freedom then watch Netanyahu tell the Brits they had better get their own act together. They did it wrong once before and are following the same Chamberlain path again. (HTTP://www.omneJerusalem.org/blog/archives/2007/05/watch benjamin.asp
Dick
1) By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Middle East has gotten itself tied into such an impossible knot that Biblical references or Shakespearian quotations simply don't suffice anymore to describe how impossibly tangled politics has become here. Shira Wolosky, a Hebrew University English scholar, suggested to me that maybe Dr. Seuss, in "The Cat in the Hat," offered the best way to sum up the Middle East today.
Then he shut the Things
in the box with the hook.
And the cat went away
With a sad kind of look.
"That is good," said the fish.
"He has gone away. Yes.
but your mother will come.
She will find this big mess!
And this mess is so big
And so deep and so tall,
we can not pick it up.
There is no way at all!"
Just look around. Gaza is turning into Mogadishu . Hamas is shelling Israel . Israel is retaliating. Iraq is a boiling pot. Iran is about to go nuclear. Lebanon is being pulled apart. Syria is being investigated for murdering Lebanon 's prime minister. I could go on. Yes, this mess is so big and so tall. Who knows where to pick it up at all?
In Israel, officials are mulling all alternatives -- from the Saudi peace initiative to negotiating with Hamas to opening talks with Syria to reoccupying Gaza to looking for a "trustee" for the West Bank -- because no one is sure anymore what to do.
That is, the Left's way -- land for peace -- was discredited by the collapse of Oslo . The Right's way, permanent Israeli occupation of all "The Land of Israel," was made impossible by Palestinian demographics and two uprisings. The third way, unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza , has been discredited by Hezbollah's attack from Lebanon and the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza .
" Israel is in a place it has never been before," said Moshe Halbertal, a Hebrew University philosophy professor. "It does not have a picture of where to go and how, so people are looking for a fourth way."
It is impossible to predict what that fourth way will be. But it is easy to identify the new realities it will have to take into account.
First is the fact that Yasir Arafat's Fatah group, which has long dominated Palestinian life, is in disarray. Fatah will not disappear, but it will never again totally dominate the Palestinian Authority. Fatah will have to share power with Hamas, which has largely wiped out Fatah in Gaza already. Sooner or later, the U.S. and Israel are going to have to drop the economic sanctions they imposed on Palestinians to pressure Hamas into recognizing Israel . "As repulsive as [Hamas] is to me as an Israeli, I don't think it's coming to the Palestinian Authority just to pay a visit -- it is here to stay," said Israeli TV's top Arab affairs reporter, Ehud Yaari.
Israel 's real choice is between dealing with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority or watching it collapse into little pieces, which Israel would have to pick up. (Think Iraq and Somalia .) West Bank and Gaza unemployment is now around 40 percent. Talking with Palestinians in Ramallah, the phrase I heard most was not "Israeli occupation" but "Palestinian disintegration."
Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki told me that as bad as things are today, his polls show most Palestinians still don't blame Hamas. They blame Israel and America for withholding funds from the Hamas government that Palestinians elected. The best way to diminish Hamas's influence, or to moderate it, is by forcing it to assume responsibility. Ask it: "Do you want Palestinians to be able to work in Israel ? Then sit down with Israel and work out the details." We need to "force Hamas through a corridor of difficult decisions," said Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein. If America can talk to Iran , Israel can talk to Hamas.
Second, Hamas says it will only offer Israel a long-term cease-fire. Fine, take it. Fact No. 1: the real history of Israeli-Arab relations is: war, lull, war, lull, war, lull -- from 1948 until today. Fact No. 2: "Since 1948," said Mr. Yaari, "the Jews have always made better use of the lulls than the Arabs." Israel doesn't need Hamas's recognition. It needs a long lull.
The third new reality is that Hamas's shelling of Israel from Gaza means Israel can never hand over the West Bank to the Palestinians, without an international trustee -- because from there Palestinians could close Israel's airport with one rocket. Only Jordan , or an international force, can be that trustee.
Bottom line: I don't know if there is a fourth way, but, if there is, it will have to include these new realities. Otherwise, this mess will get even bigger, deeper and taller.
2)Successful launch Monday of Ofeq-7 imaging satellite, Israel acquires an essential intelligence asset for any war contingency
Ofeq-7 was launched westward over the Mediterranean by the home-made Shavit three-stage solid fuel vehicle from the Palmachim aerospace base at 02:15 IT, June 11. The first images should be received by Tuesday night.
Military sources report that the launching was part of a seven-day US-Israeli air exercise taking place this week in the Negev which, though presented officially as a routine practice, reflects wide expectations of a Middle East war this summer.
Israel thus launched the 300 kg Ofeq-7 in mock war conditions, displaying a cutting-edge capability reserved to the US and Russia.
Its successful deployment in low Earth orbit was anxiously awaited as strategically essential after the failure of the Ofeq-6 test last September. Joining the ageing, five-year old Ofeq-5, the new platform fills the gap in the coverage of distant high-priority areas in the Middle East including Iran.
The military importance of the Shavit’s successful performance as a deterrent to Iran’s missile threats cannot be overstated. It means that Israeli rockets can be relied on to reach any part of Iran.
Earlier this year, as Syria and Iran built up their missile arsenals, Israel quietly accelerated its military space program with three successful launches in February and March under a news blackout. Russia too reacted by placing a new Cosmos spy satellite in an orbit for keeping a close watch on the Middle East including Israel, Iran and the Gulf.
Work is being advanced at Israel’s Air Industry on the TechSAR radar-operated all-weather platform, Ofeq-8 and a new type of satellite called only Ofeq-Next. Israeli defense officials are in talks with US Spacecom for supplementing the Amos-4 communications satellite still to be launched with military capabilities.
3) Netherlands seek larger role in resolving Mideast conflict
By Cnaan Lipshitz
Dutch foreign minister, Maxime Verhagen, will visit Israel Monday, bringing the message to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert the Hague wishes to play a more central role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Before the minister's visit to the region began, however (Monday he will be in Egypt), it took an awkward turn, as 52 senior Dutch figures demanded on Saturday their government recognize Hamas and "apply more pressure against Israel, to restore the international community's credibility."
Last week, former Dutch prime minister Dries Van Agt, who co-signed the petition, demanded that Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen "denounce not only attacks by Palestinians on Israelis, but also terrorist actions by the Israeli occupation army, which result in the death of so many Palestinians.
The signatories also include Hans van den Broek, who served as foreign minister for 11 years, before his appointment in 1993 as European commissioner for foreign relations. Both he and Van Agt belong to Verhagen's center-right ruling party, the CDA.
The petition appeared in several daily papers, and featured signatures of many other opinion shapers from across the political board. "The government must help break the impasse. With the Arab League," the petition read. In addition, the document included an implicit demand that Holland recognize Hamas: "The Netherlands must engage in dialogue with all the relevant parties."
Meanwhile, a Dutch Jewish organization last week arranged for parliament to hear two Palestinian teenagers who asked for the Netherlands to "intervene to stop the horrors of occupation." Jaap Hamburger, from "A Different Jewish Voice" (Een Ander Joods Geluid), told parliament that Israel acts as if it has "received a blank check, which it uses to violate human rights and international law."
Against this backdrop, another organization, Christians for Israel, decided to allocate $50,000 for the building of shelters in Sderot, for protection from Palestinian Qassam rockets.
4) SAUDI MONEY FINANCES MOSQUES IN N. AFRICA
Saudi Arabia has been funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to establish Wahabi mosques and schools in North Africa. Officials said Saudi princes and those close to the ruling family have been pouring money into the construction of mosques, schools and charities in such countries as Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. They said the Saudi funding, joined by those in other Gulf Cooperation Council states, was
encouraged by the government in Riyad and meant to increase the kingdom's
influence in North Africa.
"Saudi foreign policy is primarily the promotion of the Wahabi doctrine," an
official said. "It's problematic because the path from Wahabi doctrine to Al
Qaida philosophy is quite short."
Officials said the United States has been monitoring the flow of funds, but
has not relayed any protest to Saudi Arabia or other GCC states. They said
the Gulf funds aimed to establish a Wahabi network in North Africa that
would train Muslim clerics and teachers.
5) Bush administration forcing Israel to endanger itself
By Caroline B. Glick
Ahead of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's trip to the White House on June 19, the Bush administration is pressuring Israel to endanger itself on at least two fronts.
First the Americans are pressuring the Olmert government to agree to Palestinian Authority and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas's request to bring millions of bullets, thousands of Kalashnikov assault rifles, RPGs, anti-tank missiles and armored personnel carriers into Gaza from Egypt.
The government has yet to respond to the request. Those who oppose it argue that Fatah forces in Gaza are too weak and incompetent to battle Hamas forces and so any weaponry transferred to Fatah militias will likely end up in Hamas's hands.
This logic is correct, but incomplete. It is true that Fatah forces are unwilling and presumably unable to defeat Hamas forces. But it is also true that Fatah forces use their arms to attack Israel. So even if there was no chance of Hamas laying its hands on the weapons, allowing Fatah to receive them would still endanger Israel.
The same limited logic informs Israel's strenuous objection to the Pentagon's intention to sell Saudi Arabia Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite-guided "smart bombs" or JDAMS. The government claims that while it has no truck with the Saudis, it fears for the stability of the regime. If the House of Saud falls, Osama bin Laden would get the bombs.
Yet like Fatah, the Saudis aren't simply vulnerable. They are culpable. In addition to being the creators of al Qaida and Hamas's largest financial backers, the Saudis themselves directly threaten Israel.
In direct contravention of their commitment to the US, (and the US's commitment to Israel), the Saudis have deployed F-15 fighter jets at Tabuk air base located 150 km from Eilat. On May 13th, the Saudi Air Force held an air show at Tabuk for the benefit of King Abdullah and senior princes where the F-15s where ostentatiously shown.
The timing of the show was interesting. It took place the day before Abdullah hosted Vice President Richard Cheney at Tabuk.
The administration is not just asking Israel to facilitate the arming of its enemies. It is also placing restrictions on Israel's ability to arm itself. As The Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday, the Pentagon has yet to respond to Israel's request to purchase the F-22 stealth bomber. Moreover, the US seems to be torpedoing Israel's acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The Pentagon recently voiced its objection to Israel's plan to install Israeli technology in the jets that are to be supplied starting in 2014. Israel's installation of its own electronic warfare systems in its F-16s and F-15s is how it has managed to maintain the IAF's qualitative edge over Arab states that have also purchased the aircraft.
The administration's hostility towards Israel is unfortunately not an aberration. It is the result of a policy shift within the administration which occurred immediately after the Republican Party's defeat in the Congressional elections last November.
After the Republican defeat, the administration embraced former secretary of state James Baker's foreign policy paradigm which is based on the belief that it is possible and desirable to reach a stable balance of power in the Middle East. As Baker sees it, the balance can be reached by forcing Israel to shrink to its "natural" proportions and assisting supposedly moderate and stable states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to grow into their "natural" proportions. Once the states of the region (including Syria and Iran which Baker wishes to appease) have settled into their proper proportions, stability will be ensured.
Baker fleshed on his view in the Iraq Study Group's recommendations which were published immediately after the elections. Although President George W. Bush rejected the ISG's recommendations, the day after the elections he sacked defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and replaced him with Robert Gates who served on the ISG. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a disciple of Baker's ally former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.
The problem with the Baker paradigm is that it has never been borne out by reality. It collapsed during the Cold War both as the Soviet Union worked tirelessly to destabilize countries allied with the US and when the states of East-Central Europe revolted against the teetering empire and gained their freedom with its collapse.
In the 1990s, Baker's stability paradigm failed to foresee the post-nationalist movements that swept through Western Europe and the Muslim world and embraced the Soviet goal of weakening the US. Baker still denies the phenomenon and ignores its policy implications.
Today, the notion that stability is a realistic aim is even more far fetched. Specifically, the willingness of Muslim secularists to form strategic relations with jihadists and the willingness of Shiites to form strategic partnerships with Sunnis was unimaginable twenty years ago. Aside from that, the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran throws a monkey wrench into any thought of regional stability. A look around the region shows just how absurd Baker's notions truly are.
In Lebanon today, Fatah al Islam, which is apparently allied with al Qaida, is fighting the Lebanese army in a bid to bring down the Siniora government at the behest of its sponsor — the secular Ba'athist regime in Damascus. Fatah al Islam is also aligned with Hizbullah, which shares its goal of bringing down the Lebanese government and with Iran which gives the Syrians their marching orders.
This state of affairs is also the name of the game in Iraq where Iran and Syria support both Muqtada al Sadr's Shiite Mehdi army and al Qaida's Sunni death squads. It repeats itself in Afghanistan where Iran is arming the Taliban and in the Palestinian Authority.
Furthermore, the paragons of moderation and stability in Egypt and Saudi Arabia which Baker and his followers are so keen to strengthen are neither stable nor moderate. Both Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah are old men of uncertain health. To "stabilize" their regimes they wrought unholy alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahabis which are the only forces in Egyptian and Saudi societies that have not been flattened under their jackboots.
This week Channel 10 reported that the Bush administration recently informed Israel and the Gulf states that it has no intention of launching military strikes against Iran's nuclear installations. The Americans explained that they need Iranian assistance in stabilizing Iraq to pave the way for an American withdrawal from the country before Bush leaves office. Under Baker's regency, the administration apparently now subscribes to the belief that they will be better off out of Iraq with a nuclear-armed Iran than in Iraq without a nuclear-armed Iran.
For their part, the Arabs have demonstrated clearly that they do not share the administration's newfound faith that a nuclear-armed Iran will reach a stable equilibrium in a Bakeresque Middle Eastern balance of powers. Their stated aim to build nuclear reactors is a clear sign that they recognize the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran. The administration's support the Arabs' quest for nuclear reactors makes clear that it is now willing to have a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race.
This brings us back to Israel, which is situated smack in the middle of the regional chaos. How is Israel contending with this threatening state of affairs?
For its part, the IDF seems to be contending with it fairly well, at least with regard to Syria and Lebanon. The IDF's decision have television crews film IDF soldiers fighting in mock-up Syrian villages this week, like Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi's announcement that the IDF is prepared to fight on two fronts simultaneously are signs that the IDF recognizes that its only safe bet is to prepare for all contingencies. Were the IDF to complement these actions with warnings to Iran and operational plans to attack Iran's nuclear installations and distribute gas masks to the public, the General Staff would go a long way towards proving that it is adopting the only reasonable strategic posture available given the cards Israel has been dealt.
Yet not only is the IDF not warning Iran, the Olmert government is undermining the IDF's correct posture towards Syria and Lebanon. Indeed, on every front, including towards Israel itself, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has himself adopted Baker's failed paradigm.
Rather than publicly explain that in light of Syria's position as an Iranian client state in Lebanon, Iraq and Israel, there is nothing for Israel to talk to Syria about, Wednesday Olmert announced that he wishes to open negotiations on the Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights with the Syrians.
The Syrians for their part cornered Olmert Thursday by agreeing to his offer. As Karl Moor and David Rivkin explained Thursday in The Jerusalem Post, it is not true, as Olmert and his minions claim that Israel has nothing to lose by negotiating with Syria. Given Israel's perceived weakness in the wake of last summer's war and Syria's perceived strength, speaking to Syria about an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will only encourage Syrian belligerence.
And as with the Syrians, so too with the Palestinians, the Olmert government acts as Baker's water boy. Rather than waging a rational military campaign to defeat the jihadist front that has seeded itself in Gaza, Olmert issues near daily statements telling the Palestinians that Israel will cause them no harm. He defends this policy by declaiming on the importance of strengthening the "stability" of the Palestinian Authority.
Then there is the daily brown nosing Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni engage in towards the Egyptians and Saudis. Israel praises both as "moderates" while Egypt vows publicly not to take action to stop the transfer of weapons from Sinai to Gaza and the Saudis bankroll Hamas and demand that Israel implement their "peace plan" which calls for Israel's destruction.
Yet all of this incompetent bumbling pales in comparison to Israel's weakness towards Iran. Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz's assertion this week to the Post that he does not "think it is right today to talk about military options" towards Iran because he thinks that sanctions can still convince the mullahs to give up their nuclear ambitions comes dangerously close to an Israeli collapse in the face of an existential threat. The fact that Mofaz made this statement the same week that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had crossed the nuclear threshold only exacerbates the perception of Israeli strategic disarray.
Sooner or later the US will pay a price for the Bush administration's decision to embrace the delusion of stability as its strategic goal. With jihadist forces growing stronger around the globe, if the Americans leave Iraq without victory, there is no doubt that Iraq (and Iran and Syria) will come to them. But whatever the consequences of America's behavior for America, the price that Israel will pay for embracing Baker's myths of stability will be unspeakable.
6) Islamists in the Courtroom
by Daniel Pipes
The decision last week by the Islamic Society of Boston to drop its lawsuit against 17 defendants, including counterterrorism specialist Steven Emerson, gives reason to step back to consider radical Islam's legal ambitions.
The envisioned $22 million Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.
The lawsuit came about because, soon after ground was broken in November 2002 for the ISB's $22 million Islamic center, the media and several non-profits began asking questions about three main topics: why the ISB paid the city of Boston less than half the appraised value of the land it acquired; why a city of Boston employee, who is also an ISB board member, fund raised on the Boston taxpayer's tab for the center while traveling in the Middle East; and the ISB's connections to radical Islam.
Under this barrage of criticism, the ISB in May 2005 turned tables on its critics with a lawsuit accusing them of defamation and conspiring to violate its civil rights through "a concerted, well-coordinated effort to deprive the Plaintiffs … of their basic rights of free association and the free exercise of religion."
The lawsuit roiled Bostonians for two long years, and Jewish-Muslim relations in particular. The discovery process, while revealing that the defendants had engaged in routine newsgathering and political disputation, and had nothing to hide, uncovered the plaintiff's record of extremism and deception. Newly aware of its own vulnerabilities, the ISB on May 29 withdrew its lawsuit with its many complaints about "false statements," and it did so without getting a dime.
Why should this dispute matter to anyone beyond the litigants?
The Islamist movement has two wings, one violent and one lawful, which operate apart but often reinforce each other. Their effective coordination was on display in Britain last August, when the Islamist establishment seized on the Heathrow airport plot to destroy planes over the Atlantic Ocean as an opening for it to press the Blair government for changes in policy.
A similar one-two punch stifles the open discussion of Muhammad, the Koran, Islam, and Muslims. Violence causing hundreds of deaths erupted against The Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons, and Pope Benedict, creating a climate of fear that adds muscle to lawsuits such as the ISB's. As Mr. Emerson noted when the Muslim Public Affairs Council recently threatened to sue him for supposed false statements, "Legal action has become a mainstay of radical Islamist organizations seeking to intimidate and silence their critics."
Such lawsuits, including the ISB's, are often predatory, filed without serious expectations of winning, but initiated to bankrupt, distract, intimidate, and demoralize defendants. Such plaintiffs seek less to win than to wear down the researchers and analysts who, even when they win, pay heavily in time and money. Two examples:
*
Khalid bin Mahfouz v Rachel Ehrenfeld: Ehrenfeld wrote that Bin Mahfouz had financial links to Al-Qaeda and Hamas. He sued her in January 2004 in a plaintiff-friendly British court. He won by default and was awarded £30,000 and an apology.
*
Iqbal Unus v Rita Katz: His house searched in the course of a American government operation, code-named Green Quest, Unus sued Ms Katz, a non-governmental counterterrorist expert, charging in March 2004 that she was responsible for the raid. Mr. Unus lost and had to pay Ms Katz's court costs.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations began a burst of litigiousness in 2003 and announced ambitious fundraising goals for this effort. But the collapse of three lawsuits, in particular the one against Andrew Whitehead of Anti-CAIR, seems by April 2006 to have prompted a reconsideration. Frustrated in the courtroom, one CAIR staffer consoled himself that "education is superior to litigation."
This retreat notwithstanding, Islamists clearly hope, as Douglas Farah notes, that lawsuits will cause researchers and analysts to "get tired of the cost and the hassle and simply shut up." Just last month, KinderUSA sued Matthew Levitt, a specialist on terrorist funding, and two organizations, for his assertion that KinderUSA funds Hamas. One must assume that Islamists are planning future legal ordeals for their critics.
Which brings me to an announcement: The Middle East Forum is establishing a "Legal Project" to protect counterterror and anti-Islamist researchers and analysts. Their vital work must not be preempted by legal intimidation. In the event of litigation, they need to be armed with sufficient funding and the finest legal representation.
7)Before ceding the Golan: Some urgent questions before Israel folds on the Golan Heights
by Dore Gold
By starting with a statement that Israel will pay the price for peace with Syria, as reported in Friday's Yedioth Ahronoht, the Israeli leadership is strongly hinting that it is willing to withdraw completely from the Golan Heights. The Israeli public deserves answers to several critical questions before these proposals to Syria go forward.
1. Everyone knows that the Syrian regime is completely isolated and facing an international tribunal that will investigate its role in the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Syria needs these negotiations to get out the predicament it faces--in other words. Israel has a great deal of leverage, and certainly does not have to agree to full withdrawal. Under such circumstances why should Israel signal that it is willing to consider a full withdrawal.
2. Moreover, in 1975, President Gerald Ford wrote to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that the US would "give great weight to Israel remaining
מודעה
on the Golan Heights." This US commitment was repeated by Secretary of State James Baker to Prime Minsiter Yitzhak Shamir in 1991, right before the Madrid Peace conference, and by Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, right before negotiations began over Hebron. And, even if Israel wishes to test Syrian intentions through negotiations, why start with a complete collapse of Israel's negotiating position. :
3. If the government seeks to come down from the Golan Heights, is it certain that it can achieve any of the "security arrangements" suggested in the past. Remember back in October 1973, Israel deployed 177 tanks against 1400 on the Syrian side. How does Israel plan to address these kind of asymmetries that still exist? Does the government believe that it can push most of Syria's armored formations behind Damascus, from their current deployment zone between Damascus and the Golan? If the Syrians are unwilling to agree to these arrangements then the Israeli government cannot provide the alternatives to the Golan Heights that were advanced by those who advocated withdrawal in the 1990's.
4. An alternative model for security without the Golan Heights requires a huge expenditure by the US for high technology weaponry for the IDF. Has anyone checked whether the US is prepared to significant increase aid to Israel when it has been cut over the last ten years? Will the US fund peace arrangements with the country that has been aiding al-Qaeda to support the insurgency in Iraq? Do we have assurances that before the start of negotiations, Syria will stop hosting terrorist groups killing Israelis and our American allies?
5. And what is the actual line of withdrawal? Syria claims the June 4, 1967 line which gives it the northeastern shore the Kinneret. In the 1950's, when the Syrian encroached on the Kinneret shoreline, they formally claimed its waters as well. During the Barak government, the Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara hinted at his willingness to compromise this point, only to be rebuked by Hafiz al-Assad. Has somebody done his homework this time and checked?
6. Most importantly, what is driving the government to do this? Is there a demographic problem on the Golan Heights? No.
In fact, the Golan has been in Israel's hands more years than it has been in Syria's hands. In the last ten years there has been a tendency to experiment with the security of Israel though all kinds of initiatives, without any serious staff work. The results have been disastrous. It is time to be serious and stop experimenting with Israel's future.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Reagan's Words and Values Still Have Meaning!
David Lowe suggests , even now, Reagan's words and ideas have value for a world where things are going poorly for the "good guys." (See 1 below.)
Bully for Bulgarians! (See 2 below.)
Hamas gets tough but are repulsed by Fatah. (See 3 below.)
While IDF prepares for further conflicts with terrorists and Syria the actual intention of Assad is debated. (See 4 below.)
Barry Rubin appeals to rational thinkers and offers a message of hope. (See 5 below.) However, Caroline Glick sees Europe self-destructing and the U.S. following the European model. (See 6 below.) Perhaps the truth lies between Rubin and Glick's views but for the moment I vote with Glick.
The House goes thru its annual vote buying act but nothing will happen. Israel is the only nation in the world unable to get foreign countries to establish embassies in its capital - Jerusalem. Gutless fear of offending Arabs.
Dick
1)Freedom’s Prospects: The march has stalled, but a former president can give us hope.
By David E. Lowe
Twenty-five years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most significant speeches of his presidency. Standing before the British parliament in the historic Westminster Palace nearly a decade before the demise of the Soviet Union, he offered the vision of “a plan and a hope for the long-term — the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
Although Reagan knew that “by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens,” Communist regimes ran “against the tide of history,” he knew the struggle for both would not be easy. “Optimism,” he said, “comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.”
Today, throughout the world, political repression is once again on the rise. In its latest annual survey, Freedom House highlights a “developing freedom stagnation” that includes setbacks to freedom in the Asia Pacific region and Africa , as well as “an entrenchment of authoritarian rule in the majority of countries of the former Soviet Union .”
Take the case of Le Quoc Quan, a mild-mannered Vietnamese lawyer who came to the U.S. last year to conduct independent research on civil society as a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. Upon his return home this past March, Quan was arrested and charged with conducting “activities aimed at overthrowing the Government.”
Vietnam is a particularly revealing example. Granted Permanent Normal Trade Status by Congress late last year paving the way for its entry into the World Trade Organization, it is a test case for the idea that opening markets leads to political liberalization. But as James Mann points out in The China Fantasy, the notion that economic globalization automatically leads to liberal democracy is a mirage: “Chinese leaders are entering the globalized economy as rapidly as possible while maintaining controls on the news media. So far, they have managed to achieve both objectives at once.”
Following Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, many observers forecast a new democratic wave — coming, as the Kiev events did, in the wake of democratic upheavals in Serbia and Georgia — and hopeful signs in other regions, including 2005’s “Arab Spring.” But for many of the region’s rulers, the “colored” revolutions served merely as a wake-up call. Most notably, Vladimir Putin’s “managed” democracy has cracked down on dissent while muzzling independent media and closing independent non-governmental organizations.
Putin’s brand of authoritarianism is by no means unique. From Central Asia to the Middle East and significant parts of Africa, including countries where political space had been opened enough in previous years to allow independent voices to be heard, authoritarian leaders, sometimes working in concert, have found new means — from the crude to the imaginative — to constrict the boundaries of civil society. A prime example is the Mubarak regime in Egypt, which forced through a series of constitutional “reforms” last March that entrench the security forces’ powers to monitor private communications and send suspects to military courts. In Venezuela , President Chavez has sought to emulate his role model Fidel Castro by nationalizing industry, militarizing the government, and silencing political opposition, while in Zimbabwe , Robert Mugabe has turned peaceful demonstrations against his destructive policies into bloody police riots.
Twenty-five years ago, freedom’s prospects looked similarly bleak. Surely, few if any Soviet experts would have agreed with President Reagan that Communism’s days were numbered. What was the basis for his optimism? Can it offer any hope and guidance for the victims of repressive rule today and those of us who are concerned about them?
Three themes dominated President Reagan’s Westminster address: the instability of authoritarian regimes, the power of democratic conviction, and the importance of long-term democratic institution building.
As Natan Sharansky points out, what the experts did not appreciate about the Soviet system was that, because it was forced to devote an increasing share of energy to controlling its own people, it was — not unlike contemporary autocracies — highly vulnerable to internal decay. With the Soviet people forced to bear the burden of economic failure, the result, according to President Reagan, was a “great revolutionary crisis” that placed the system on the wrong side of history. But the Soviet system was hardly alone in fearing its own people, since “any system is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders.”
To illustrate the power of democratic conviction, President Reagan offered the example of over one million Salvadorans refusing to be intimidated by guerillas seeking to prevent them from casting their first vote in a democratic election. He might well have pointed to Czechoslovakia , one of the most repressive of the Communist regimes, where a group of dissidents had come together five years earlier under the banner of Charter 77. Currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, Charter 77 not only helped bring about the Velvet Revolution, but today serves as an inspiration for dissidents from Cuba to Burma to North Korea .
President Reagan realized that those who struggle to bring about democratic results can benefit from the support and shared experiences of those who already derive its benefits. Thus, he believed the time had come for the U.S. to become involved in the worldwide “campaign for democracy.”
The practice of international solidarity has an honorable history. One example is the American trade-union movement, which has a long tradition of assisting its international counterparts. World figures such as Garibaldi, Kossuth, and Sun Yat Sen have sought American support for their causes. President Reagan took note of the fact that the political foundations in West Germany , originally established to help rebuild post-war German democracy, had provided vital democratic assistance to counterparts abroad to help bring about peaceful and democratic progress.
In endorsing the recommendations of a study group considering ways to give the U.S. the capability to join this movement, President Reagan put his stamp on a bipartisan idea that had been percolating in Congress since the 1960s. Knowing that democracy is, above all, a long term process of institution building, he described his objective as follows:
“…to foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.”
Within a year-and-a-half, the National Endowment for Democracy would be privately incorporated with a bipartisan commitment in Congress and the support of the administration to providing funding to fulfill the vision of its founders to support democratic initiatives overseas. Twenty-five years after the Westminster address, its work is the embodiment of the idea that, as President Reagan expressed it, “freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.” Established democracies such as Britain , the Netherlands , Sweden , and Australia , as well as new democracies such as Poland , the Czech Republic , Slovakia , and Taiwan , have since developed their own democracy assistance institutions.
No one should be under any illusion that today’s dictatorships will soon give way to democracy, or that emerging democracies will be easily consolidated even where breakthroughs have occurred. If we have learned anything over the past few years, it is that the development of democratic values and institutions require patience, hard work, and environments free of ethnic and religious hatred. But committed democrats, who can be found in even the most repressive countries, fortified today by new information technology and greater access to international support networks, should take heart in the ideas articulated by an American president a quarter century ago. He was correct: they are on the right side of history.
— David E. Lowe is vice president for government and external relations at the National Endowment for Democracy.
2) A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000 Jews from the Nazi's by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats.
Very few Jews, know the story of how all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many Bulgarians of every walk of life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League flew with a delegation to Sophia to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister. He gave the Prime Minister the first Bulgarian language copy of a remarkable book, "Beyond Hitler's Grasp," written in 1998, by Michael Bar Oar, a professor at Emory University . (A Bulgarian Jew who had migrated to Israel and then to the USA ).
This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid for and shipped 30,000 copies to Bulgaria, so that the population could partake in the joy of learning about this heroic facet of their history.
This story is clearly the last great secret of the Holocaust era. The story was buried by the Bulgarian Communists, until their downfall in 1991. All records were sealed, since they didn't wish to glorify the King, or the Church, or the non
Communist parliamentarians, who at great personal risk, stood up to the Germans. And the Bulgarian Jewish Community, 45,000 of whom went to Israel after the War, were
busy building new lives, and somehow the story remained untold.
Bulgaria is a small country and at the outset of the War they had 8 million people. They aligned themselves with the Nazi's in hopes of recapturing Macedonia from Yugoslavia and Thrace from Greece.
Both provinces were stripped from them, after W.W.I. In late 1942 the Jews of Selonica were shipped north through Bulgaria , on the way to the death camps, in
sealed box cars. The news of this inhumanity was a hot topic of conversation. Then, at the beginning of 1943, the pro Nazi Bulgarian government was informe that all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews would be deported in March. The Jews had been made to wear yellow stars and were highly visible.
As the date for the deportation got closer, the agitation got greater. Forty-three ruling party members of Parliament walked out in protest. Newspapers denounced what was about to happen. In addition, the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Archbishop Krill, threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks.
Finally, King Boris III forbid the deportation. Since Bulgaria was an ally of Germany , and the Germans were stretched militarily, they had to wrestle with the problem of how much pressure they could afford to apply. They decided to pass.
Several points are noteworthy. The Bulgarian Jews were relatively unreligious and did not stand apart from the local populace by virtue of garb, or rites. They were relatively poor by comparison to Jews in other countries, and they lived in integrated neighborhoods. Additionally, the Bulgarians had many minorities, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Gypsies, in addition to Jews.
There was no concept of racism in that culture. The bottom line here is that Bulgarians saw Bulgarian-Jews as Bulgarians, and not as Jews. And, being a small country, like Denmark, where there was a closeness of community, that is often missing in larger countries. So, here was a bright spot that we can point to as example of what should have been.
The most famous of those saved was a young graduate of the Bulgarian Military Academy . When he arrived in Israel , he changed his name to Moshe Dayan.....
3) Fatah-led Presidential Guard throw back 250 Hamas fighters in major battle over Karni goods crossing Tuesday
The three-hour gunfight was the biggest assault Hamas which heads the Palestinian government has ever mounted. Casualties were heavy though not admitted. Its assault on the strategic crossing was preceded by heavy rocket, RPG and mortar fire on the Presidential Guard headed by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah.
Military sources add the scale of the battle was not far short of the running Lebanese army-Fatah al-Islam fight at the Nahr al-Bared camp near Tripoli. The Hamas Executive Force offensive failed because its chiefs decided to deploy youngsters aged 16 to 18 lacking in combat experience, which is also why they cannot overcome their Fatah rivals in round after round of factional warfare in the Gaza Strip.
Military sources add Hamas was able to field hundreds of fighters despite an IDF incursion to round up terrorist chiefs not far from the battle scene a few hours earlier. IDF military sources assert it is a mistake to allow Hamas to assemble large contingents for aggression in the Gaza Strip. Had they seized the Karni crossing, they may have surged across the border.
4)DF chief: Army bracing for escalation on Palestinian, northern fronts
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said Tuesday that the army is preparing for a deterioration on the Palestinian front as well as in the north.
During a visit to the Shizafon army base in southern Israel, Ashkenazi said the IDF is currently working at improving its preparedness for conflict while simultaneously fighting terror.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz also spoke at the base Tuesday and said that there is no indication that Syria, Israel's northern neighbor, is interested in engaging in war with Israel, as some recent reports have suggested. Peretz expressed his hopes that the verbal escalation between the two countries will not evolve into an armed conflict. "IDF is continually training and I hope the Syrians won't misinterpret that," he said.
Recently, Israeli intelligence figures have concluded that Syria's army is training its soldiers and amassing ammunition in preparation for a conflict with Israel this summer.
Military Intelligence chief Major General Amos Yadlin said Tuesday "The Syrians have a lot to lose should a war break out."
At a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting, Yadlin said "[Syrian President] Assad has a regime, he has an air force, he has an electrical network and civilian infrastructure. All these could be harmed in war."
"The Syrians saw what happened during the Second Lebanon War and our deterrence became more effective. They saw that the IDF succeeded in eliminating Hezbollah's rocket threat within hours," he said.
Yadlin added that the Syrians are "more ready for war than ever," but that doesn't mean that they are seeking a war.
Yadlin also said that Israel must prepare for Katyusha rocket fire within a range of 40 kilometers from the Gaza Strip. He said that the Palestinian Hamas organization currently have in their arsenal home-made Qassam rockets with a 13 kilometer range as well as Grad missiles with a 20 kilometer range, but the Katyusha rockets have not yet been smuggled into the Strip. Hamas has also yet to use the Grad missiles against Israel.
"Hamas in Gaza," Yadlin said, "is interested in a cease-fire because right now Hamas is losing. Half its military force has been hurt in the last two and half weeks. Hamas is demanding open passage between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because it is interested in exporting the knowledge it has gained in Gaza to the West Bank."
"Hamas is turning from a terrorist organization into a semi-military force, modeled after Hezbollah, which is organized into units and battalions and intends to fight guerilla warfare in residential areas," he added.
5) The Region: A guide to the depressed
By BARRY RUBIN
Almost daily nowadays, one sees atrocities in deeds and shamefulness in words. Friends, colleagues and readers often write or tell me how depressing it is.
Lee Harris, a brilliant American writer, has a book coming out entitled The Suicide of Reason. (I would only suggest that it didn't jump, it was pushed.) I could give lots of examples, but will let you choose your own.
Caught between the big mistakes of one's own leaders, the rampant irresponsible radicalism of a large portion of the media, and abandonment of enlightened standards in intellectual discourse, it is easy to feel down.
And yet while there is much reason to be disgusted and a good basis for worrying - especially since worrying can prompt action - I tell those who share their feelings with me that things will turn out all right. Western civilization is not on the road to collapse; the Middle East is not going to be taken over by al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on.
Agreed, it isn't enough just to assert that a happy ending is inevitable; so let's look at some key factors as to why this is so.
First, the worse things get, the more people realize that things have gotten worse. Precisely the experience of seeing how intransigent and murderous are the extremists, how efforts at negotiation fail, how past concessions are exploited to bash those who make them, how dangerous Islamism is, among other factors, forces countries to react against them, intellectuals to denounce them and public opinion to shift against them.
THIS WAS THE process followed in the crises of dealing with fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, and with communism in the 1940s and 1950s. John F. Kennedy, or at least his ghostwriter, penned a book called Why England Slept on the first of these three ordeals. Bruce Bawyer wrote a good book entitled Why Europe Slept regarding the current one. Foreign terrorists and domestic fools provide the wake-up calls.
Second, the enemy side makes big mistakes. It pushes too far, demands too much, shoots off its mouth as well as its guns. The ideological extremism, tendency toward endless splits, blatant dishonesty and inability to build alliances all take their toll. The pretenses at moderation simply cannot be kept up. The mask slips all too often.
Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran's Ahmadinejad all provide good examples of this phenomenon in the Middle East. On Western campuses, extremist academics and students horrify onlookers. Most people in the West don't hate their own countries and will be put off with those who all too obviously do.
Third, a lot of the current unpleasantness, at least in the West, is transient. It is the belated tantrum of the 1960s' generation's old radicals. This is not to deny that there are many younger imitators, but the leadership and impetus is coming from those veterans of so many dubious battles, to use novelist John Steinbeck's phrase about the 1930s.
I have found that most undergraduates just don't accept the propaganda they are being fed about the Middle East and other things. Yes, it will have a lasting impact, but some of that will be a reaction against all the nonsense.
ANOTHER FACTOR here is the hysterical hatred of President George W. Bush, or, if you prefer, the impact of that government's divisive and mistaken policies. On January 20, 2009, Bush will leave office. If his replacement is anywhere near mainstream, that person is going to follow more than 80 percent of the current US foreign policy program, Iraq being the big exception, of course.
and in Europe. The more hardcore silly people will carry on, but a lot of the support will fall away.
Finally, I am tempted to quote the saying "the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on," though that could no doubt be twisted into some politically incorrect slur. Let's just put it this way: Don't pay too much attention to op-eds, the rantings of academics (or in Britain, academic unions), and even certain newspapers that seem to resemble campus revolutionary clubs more than great metropolitan dailies.
George Orwell, one of the best guides to the current insanity given his dealings with the last round, once referred to an idea so stupid that only an intellectual would believe it. It hurts me to say it, but such people all too often lack both responsibility and a sense of the real world. They have set themselves up as a counter-force to those who govern and run the economy. Angry, jealous and dissatisfied, they believe they could do a better job.
William F. Buckley, the American conservative intellectual, once stated that he would rather be governed by people chosen randomly off the street than by the faculty of Harvard University. History has absolved him on that concept.
What better way to end than to quote a poem written by Orwell in June 1943:
I wrote in nineteen-forty that at need
I'd fight to keep the Nazis out of Britain;
And Christ! How shocked the pinks were! Two years later
I hadn't lived it down; one had the effrontery
To write three pages calling me a 'traitor,'
So black a crime it is to love one's country...
Your game is easy, and its rules are plain:
Pretend the war began in 'thirty-nine,
Don't mention China, Ethiopia, Spain,
Don't mention Poles except to say they're swine;
Cry havoc when we bomb a German city,
When Czechs get killed don't worry in the least,
Give India a perfunctory squirt of pity
But don't inquire what happens further East;
Don't mention Jews - in short, pretend the war is
Simply a racket 'got up' by the Tories.
The writer is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center at IDC Herzliya and editor of Middle East Review of International Affairs and Turkish Studies. His latest book is The Truth About Syria.
6)As Europe self-destructs
By Caroline B. Glick
The continent of Europe is committing suicide.
Wednesday's decision by Britain's University and College Union to call for a boycott of Israeli universities and colleges was not only hypocritical. It was suicidal.
It is not simply that the British prefer to boycott Israeli universities than say, Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and Jordanian universities where students are indoctrinated to seek the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of Christianity through the destruction of Western civilization.
It is not merely that they ignored the poor, brave Iranian students who just three weeks ago were brutally attacked by regime forces as they sought to hold elections for their pro-democracy campus organizations.
By calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, Britain's academic establishment is turning its back not only on Israel, but on Britain. When Britain's professoriate rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish, democratic nation-state and glorifies Palestinian society which supports global jihad and the destruction of Western civilization, they are rejecting the British state.
They are embracing a culture founded on a rejection of the culture and traditions that have formed Britain since the Magna Carta was issued in 1215. For the past 800 years, Britain has stood for individual liberty and freedom of inquiry - at least for the British themselves. In universities like Oxford and Cambridge, it was this humanist spirit and the justified national and cultural pride it nurtured which facilitated Britain's rise to international power. By boycotting Israel, which itself embodies these British ideals, the British are abrogating their own traditions of openness. Consequently, they are destroying themselves.
And Britain is not alone in its self-destruction. Britain's rush to oblivion is part of a wider trend overtaking all of Western Europe. Take Sweden for example.
Sweden is upheld by leaders of the Israeli Left like former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, (who now devotes himself to attacking the US and Israel from his academic perch in Toledo, Spain), Education Minister Yuli Tamir, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Meretz chief Yossi Beilin, and former Labor chairman Avrum Burg. They extol Sweden as a social democratic wonderland which Israel must emulate.
12.5 percent of Swedes are immigrants and around half of Sweden's immigrants are Muslims. Muslims will soon comprise the majority in many of Sweden's cities.
The intrepid Scandinavian blogger 'Fjordman' recently penned an essay, "Jihad and the collapse of the Swedish model" in the online Brussels Journal. In it he relates the significance of Sweden's Integration Act of 1997 to Sweden's national self-destruction. The act officially proclaimed Sweden "a multicultural society."
Notes to the act stated, "Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin."
As 'Fjordman' explains, the act was nothing less than national suicide. "Native Swedes have… been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have erased their own people's history and culture."
Fjordman cites authors Jonathan Friedman, Ingrid Bjorkman, Jan Elfverson and Ake Wedin who explained in their 2005 book Exit the People's Home of Sweden - The Downfall of a Model of Society, that multiculturalism, as the "dominant ideology in Sweden, which has been made dominant by powerful methods of silencing and repression, is a totalitarian ideology, where the elites oppose the national aspect of the nation state."
The authors explained that "the problem is that the ethnic group… described as Swedes implicitly are considered to be nationalists, and thereby are viewed as racists."
Like the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, multiculturalism identifies the Jews and the Americans as its chief enemies. Both must be defeated for their refusal to destroy themselves and merge into the post-national thought stream. And like their 20th century predecessors, the multiculturalists of today embrace radical Muslims who share their rejection of Judaism and Americanism.
The multiculturalists convince their societies to accept their own destruction by indoctrinating their fellow citizens through their education systems and media. A recent poll of Swedes between the ages of 15-20 showed that 90 percent had never heard of the Soviet gulag.
Needless to say, the consequences of this state of affairs are not localized to Europe. As they do towards their own people, the European elites work tirelessly to subvert American and Israeli cultural confidence and to undermine every action the two nations take to combat the forces of global jihad. Whether by condemning the US incarceration of jihadists at Guantanamo Bay, claiming that Zionism is racism, attacking the US campaign in Iraq, financing Israeli anti-Zionist pressure groups and the Palestinian Authority, or insisting that Iran should be negotiated with, the EU works to compel the US and Israel to stand down rather than defend themselves and to convince American and Israeli societies that we are unworthy of being defended.
Disturbingly, rather than face-up to Europe's self-destruction and give it a wide berth, led by our own post-national elites, Israel and the US are adopting the European model of cultural collapse.
The most recent example of the Israeli elites' subversion of their country is Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's assault on the Jewish National Fund.
Since it was chartered by Theodor Herzl in 1901, financed by donations from Jews throughout the world, the JNF has purchased land to promote settlement of the land by the Jewish people. The JNF owns some 2.5 million hectares of land.
In 1961, the JNF signed an agreement with the Israel Lands Authority which authorized the ILA to manage JNF lands in accordance with the JNF charter. In 2004, the anti-Jewish Arab Israeli pressure group Adalah petitioned the Supreme Court demanding that the ILA enable non-Jews to settle on JNF lands. Adalah alleged that by acting in accordance with the JNF charter, the ILA discriminates against Arabs.
Rather than reject Adalah's claim on its face, or at a minimum cancel the 1961 agreement and enable JNF to manage its own lands, Mazuz sided with Adalah. Last week he ordered the JNF to stop operating in accordance with its charter. That is, Mazuz effectively and with no legal authority, expropriated the property of the Jewish people.
In so doing, the Attorney General of the Jewish state essentially decided that Zionism is a form of racism and that the Jewish people have no special rights to the Land of Israel. No doubt the Swedes are proud of him.
The Olmert government has likewise embraced the European model of national collapse. Rather than defend Israel's citizens from our enemies and cultivate the Jewish character of the state, the government seeks to appease the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Egyptians and the Europeans at the expense of Israel's citizenry.
At the invitation of successive Israeli governments, Europeans forces are deployed today in Hebron, in Gaza and along Israel's northern border with Lebanon. These European forces have done nothing to prevent the Palestinians from arming, training and attacking Israel. Along the Lebanese border, since last summer's war, the Europeans have similarly done nothing to prevent Hizbullah from rebuilding its arsenals and reasserting its control over southern Lebanon.
And this is to be expected. As Europeans perceive their interests, they are better off appeasing the Arabs and the Iranians and condemning Israel and the US for every step we take to combat the forces of global jihad committed to our destruction.
Rather than acknowledge this reality and work to remove the Europeans from our midst, the Olmert government is exacerbating the problem. In recent weeks, the government has asked the Europeans to increase the size of their forces along the Gaza-Egypt border. Thursday Minister for Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman recommended that NATO forces be deployed in Gaza. Similarly, Minister Rafi Eitan and far-left Meretz MKs Zahava Gal-On and Avshalom Vilan are calling for Arab League forces to be deployed to Gaza. Gal-On and Vilan envision the Arabs and the Europeans jointly take control over Gaza. For his part, Eitan is recommending that Arab armies deploy to Judea and Samaria as well.
In the US, the situation is depressingly similar. At leading universities, professors and students who openly support Israel and the US campaign in Iraq are hounded and isolated. In keeping with the general anti-American and anti-Israel gestalt on college campuses, last year Harvard University invited former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami to speak on campus. Harvard ignored Khatami's stewardship of the Iranian nuclear program during his tenure. His role in violently quelling the student democracy movement in 1999 and 2003 was similarly overlooked.
The Bush administration's foreign policy has likewise been Europeanized. Five years after President George W. Bush placed Iran and North Korea firmly in the axis of evil, the State Department is working overtime to appease them both. In line with this policy, on Tuesday, Iran's announcement that it had arrested five US citizens and is charging them with espionage was greeted by embarrassment and paralysis in Washington. Just the day before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had dispatched the US ambassador in Baghdad to meet with his Iranian counterpart.
The US's treatment of North Korea is perhaps even more dramatic. Rather than abandon its appeasement policy towards Pyongyang after the North Koreans breached their commitment to close their nuclear facility at Yongbyon in April, the Bush administration has redoubled its efforts to placate the Stalinist dictatorship. Not only did the US have little to say about the North Korean short-range missile tests over Japan last week. It sent its emissaries to Beijing this week to attempt to buy North Korean compliance with its breached commitment by unfreezing Pyongyangs's bank accounts in Macau. The US treasury froze those accounts when it discovered that they were being used to launder profits from counterfeit US currency and drug deals.
Then there is the US's refusal to abandon pressure on Israel to appease the Palestinians. At a time when jihadists from Iraq have panned out to Lebanon and Algeria and are actively working to overthrow those countries' governments, Tuesday Rice claimed that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is "at the core of a lot of problems in the region."
During the Cold War, protected by the US military, Europeans could embrace cultural and national suicide without fearing the consequences of their actions. Now faced with those consequences, the Europeans have embraced their own destruction rather than abandon their multicultural model and its concomitant anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.
Israel and the US do not have anyone else to defend them. And in spite of the rantings of their cultural, media and academic elites, the Israeli and American people have no interest in committing national suicide. In light of this, both countries must move swiftly to end the Europeanization of their cultures and policies.
7) House of Representatives: Move US embassy to Jerusalem
by Yitzhak Benhorin
‘In six days of war, Israel reunited the city which had been artificially divided for 19 years,’ resolution says
The House of Representatives on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution calling on President George W. Bush to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, this on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War.
The senate is expected to approve a similar motion later in the day.
In the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 Congress determined that Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel and that the U.S. Embassy should be established there no later than May 31, 1999.
However, the Clinton and Bush administrations have refrained from moving the embassy for fear of riots against American embassies in
Arab countries and a possible decline in the US's status.
“The House congratulates the citizens of Israel on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War in which Israel defeated enemies aiming to destroy the Jewish State. Jerusalem has been the focal point of Jewish religious devotion and the site of a continuous Jewish presence for over three millennia, with a Jewish majority since at least 1896,” the resolution said.
“The vibrant Jewish population of the historic Old City of Jerusalem was driven out by force during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In six days of war, Israel defeated those forces seeking its destruction and reunited the city of Jerusalem which had been artificially divided for 19 years.”
Bully for Bulgarians! (See 2 below.)
Hamas gets tough but are repulsed by Fatah. (See 3 below.)
While IDF prepares for further conflicts with terrorists and Syria the actual intention of Assad is debated. (See 4 below.)
Barry Rubin appeals to rational thinkers and offers a message of hope. (See 5 below.) However, Caroline Glick sees Europe self-destructing and the U.S. following the European model. (See 6 below.) Perhaps the truth lies between Rubin and Glick's views but for the moment I vote with Glick.
The House goes thru its annual vote buying act but nothing will happen. Israel is the only nation in the world unable to get foreign countries to establish embassies in its capital - Jerusalem. Gutless fear of offending Arabs.
Dick
1)Freedom’s Prospects: The march has stalled, but a former president can give us hope.
By David E. Lowe
Twenty-five years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most significant speeches of his presidency. Standing before the British parliament in the historic Westminster Palace nearly a decade before the demise of the Soviet Union, he offered the vision of “a plan and a hope for the long-term — the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
Although Reagan knew that “by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens,” Communist regimes ran “against the tide of history,” he knew the struggle for both would not be easy. “Optimism,” he said, “comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.”
Today, throughout the world, political repression is once again on the rise. In its latest annual survey, Freedom House highlights a “developing freedom stagnation” that includes setbacks to freedom in the Asia Pacific region and Africa , as well as “an entrenchment of authoritarian rule in the majority of countries of the former Soviet Union .”
Take the case of Le Quoc Quan, a mild-mannered Vietnamese lawyer who came to the U.S. last year to conduct independent research on civil society as a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. Upon his return home this past March, Quan was arrested and charged with conducting “activities aimed at overthrowing the Government.”
Vietnam is a particularly revealing example. Granted Permanent Normal Trade Status by Congress late last year paving the way for its entry into the World Trade Organization, it is a test case for the idea that opening markets leads to political liberalization. But as James Mann points out in The China Fantasy, the notion that economic globalization automatically leads to liberal democracy is a mirage: “Chinese leaders are entering the globalized economy as rapidly as possible while maintaining controls on the news media. So far, they have managed to achieve both objectives at once.”
Following Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, many observers forecast a new democratic wave — coming, as the Kiev events did, in the wake of democratic upheavals in Serbia and Georgia — and hopeful signs in other regions, including 2005’s “Arab Spring.” But for many of the region’s rulers, the “colored” revolutions served merely as a wake-up call. Most notably, Vladimir Putin’s “managed” democracy has cracked down on dissent while muzzling independent media and closing independent non-governmental organizations.
Putin’s brand of authoritarianism is by no means unique. From Central Asia to the Middle East and significant parts of Africa, including countries where political space had been opened enough in previous years to allow independent voices to be heard, authoritarian leaders, sometimes working in concert, have found new means — from the crude to the imaginative — to constrict the boundaries of civil society. A prime example is the Mubarak regime in Egypt, which forced through a series of constitutional “reforms” last March that entrench the security forces’ powers to monitor private communications and send suspects to military courts. In Venezuela , President Chavez has sought to emulate his role model Fidel Castro by nationalizing industry, militarizing the government, and silencing political opposition, while in Zimbabwe , Robert Mugabe has turned peaceful demonstrations against his destructive policies into bloody police riots.
Twenty-five years ago, freedom’s prospects looked similarly bleak. Surely, few if any Soviet experts would have agreed with President Reagan that Communism’s days were numbered. What was the basis for his optimism? Can it offer any hope and guidance for the victims of repressive rule today and those of us who are concerned about them?
Three themes dominated President Reagan’s Westminster address: the instability of authoritarian regimes, the power of democratic conviction, and the importance of long-term democratic institution building.
As Natan Sharansky points out, what the experts did not appreciate about the Soviet system was that, because it was forced to devote an increasing share of energy to controlling its own people, it was — not unlike contemporary autocracies — highly vulnerable to internal decay. With the Soviet people forced to bear the burden of economic failure, the result, according to President Reagan, was a “great revolutionary crisis” that placed the system on the wrong side of history. But the Soviet system was hardly alone in fearing its own people, since “any system is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders.”
To illustrate the power of democratic conviction, President Reagan offered the example of over one million Salvadorans refusing to be intimidated by guerillas seeking to prevent them from casting their first vote in a democratic election. He might well have pointed to Czechoslovakia , one of the most repressive of the Communist regimes, where a group of dissidents had come together five years earlier under the banner of Charter 77. Currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, Charter 77 not only helped bring about the Velvet Revolution, but today serves as an inspiration for dissidents from Cuba to Burma to North Korea .
President Reagan realized that those who struggle to bring about democratic results can benefit from the support and shared experiences of those who already derive its benefits. Thus, he believed the time had come for the U.S. to become involved in the worldwide “campaign for democracy.”
The practice of international solidarity has an honorable history. One example is the American trade-union movement, which has a long tradition of assisting its international counterparts. World figures such as Garibaldi, Kossuth, and Sun Yat Sen have sought American support for their causes. President Reagan took note of the fact that the political foundations in West Germany , originally established to help rebuild post-war German democracy, had provided vital democratic assistance to counterparts abroad to help bring about peaceful and democratic progress.
In endorsing the recommendations of a study group considering ways to give the U.S. the capability to join this movement, President Reagan put his stamp on a bipartisan idea that had been percolating in Congress since the 1960s. Knowing that democracy is, above all, a long term process of institution building, he described his objective as follows:
“…to foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.”
Within a year-and-a-half, the National Endowment for Democracy would be privately incorporated with a bipartisan commitment in Congress and the support of the administration to providing funding to fulfill the vision of its founders to support democratic initiatives overseas. Twenty-five years after the Westminster address, its work is the embodiment of the idea that, as President Reagan expressed it, “freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.” Established democracies such as Britain , the Netherlands , Sweden , and Australia , as well as new democracies such as Poland , the Czech Republic , Slovakia , and Taiwan , have since developed their own democracy assistance institutions.
No one should be under any illusion that today’s dictatorships will soon give way to democracy, or that emerging democracies will be easily consolidated even where breakthroughs have occurred. If we have learned anything over the past few years, it is that the development of democratic values and institutions require patience, hard work, and environments free of ethnic and religious hatred. But committed democrats, who can be found in even the most repressive countries, fortified today by new information technology and greater access to international support networks, should take heart in the ideas articulated by an American president a quarter century ago. He was correct: they are on the right side of history.
— David E. Lowe is vice president for government and external relations at the National Endowment for Democracy.
2) A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000 Jews from the Nazi's by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats.
Very few Jews, know the story of how all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many Bulgarians of every walk of life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League flew with a delegation to Sophia to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister. He gave the Prime Minister the first Bulgarian language copy of a remarkable book, "Beyond Hitler's Grasp," written in 1998, by Michael Bar Oar, a professor at Emory University . (A Bulgarian Jew who had migrated to Israel and then to the USA ).
This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid for and shipped 30,000 copies to Bulgaria, so that the population could partake in the joy of learning about this heroic facet of their history.
This story is clearly the last great secret of the Holocaust era. The story was buried by the Bulgarian Communists, until their downfall in 1991. All records were sealed, since they didn't wish to glorify the King, or the Church, or the non
Communist parliamentarians, who at great personal risk, stood up to the Germans. And the Bulgarian Jewish Community, 45,000 of whom went to Israel after the War, were
busy building new lives, and somehow the story remained untold.
Bulgaria is a small country and at the outset of the War they had 8 million people. They aligned themselves with the Nazi's in hopes of recapturing Macedonia from Yugoslavia and Thrace from Greece.
Both provinces were stripped from them, after W.W.I. In late 1942 the Jews of Selonica were shipped north through Bulgaria , on the way to the death camps, in
sealed box cars. The news of this inhumanity was a hot topic of conversation. Then, at the beginning of 1943, the pro Nazi Bulgarian government was informe that all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews would be deported in March. The Jews had been made to wear yellow stars and were highly visible.
As the date for the deportation got closer, the agitation got greater. Forty-three ruling party members of Parliament walked out in protest. Newspapers denounced what was about to happen. In addition, the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Archbishop Krill, threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks.
Finally, King Boris III forbid the deportation. Since Bulgaria was an ally of Germany , and the Germans were stretched militarily, they had to wrestle with the problem of how much pressure they could afford to apply. They decided to pass.
Several points are noteworthy. The Bulgarian Jews were relatively unreligious and did not stand apart from the local populace by virtue of garb, or rites. They were relatively poor by comparison to Jews in other countries, and they lived in integrated neighborhoods. Additionally, the Bulgarians had many minorities, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Gypsies, in addition to Jews.
There was no concept of racism in that culture. The bottom line here is that Bulgarians saw Bulgarian-Jews as Bulgarians, and not as Jews. And, being a small country, like Denmark, where there was a closeness of community, that is often missing in larger countries. So, here was a bright spot that we can point to as example of what should have been.
The most famous of those saved was a young graduate of the Bulgarian Military Academy . When he arrived in Israel , he changed his name to Moshe Dayan.....
3) Fatah-led Presidential Guard throw back 250 Hamas fighters in major battle over Karni goods crossing Tuesday
The three-hour gunfight was the biggest assault Hamas which heads the Palestinian government has ever mounted. Casualties were heavy though not admitted. Its assault on the strategic crossing was preceded by heavy rocket, RPG and mortar fire on the Presidential Guard headed by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah.
Military sources add the scale of the battle was not far short of the running Lebanese army-Fatah al-Islam fight at the Nahr al-Bared camp near Tripoli. The Hamas Executive Force offensive failed because its chiefs decided to deploy youngsters aged 16 to 18 lacking in combat experience, which is also why they cannot overcome their Fatah rivals in round after round of factional warfare in the Gaza Strip.
Military sources add Hamas was able to field hundreds of fighters despite an IDF incursion to round up terrorist chiefs not far from the battle scene a few hours earlier. IDF military sources assert it is a mistake to allow Hamas to assemble large contingents for aggression in the Gaza Strip. Had they seized the Karni crossing, they may have surged across the border.
4)DF chief: Army bracing for escalation on Palestinian, northern fronts
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said Tuesday that the army is preparing for a deterioration on the Palestinian front as well as in the north.
During a visit to the Shizafon army base in southern Israel, Ashkenazi said the IDF is currently working at improving its preparedness for conflict while simultaneously fighting terror.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz also spoke at the base Tuesday and said that there is no indication that Syria, Israel's northern neighbor, is interested in engaging in war with Israel, as some recent reports have suggested. Peretz expressed his hopes that the verbal escalation between the two countries will not evolve into an armed conflict. "IDF is continually training and I hope the Syrians won't misinterpret that," he said.
Recently, Israeli intelligence figures have concluded that Syria's army is training its soldiers and amassing ammunition in preparation for a conflict with Israel this summer.
Military Intelligence chief Major General Amos Yadlin said Tuesday "The Syrians have a lot to lose should a war break out."
At a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting, Yadlin said "[Syrian President] Assad has a regime, he has an air force, he has an electrical network and civilian infrastructure. All these could be harmed in war."
"The Syrians saw what happened during the Second Lebanon War and our deterrence became more effective. They saw that the IDF succeeded in eliminating Hezbollah's rocket threat within hours," he said.
Yadlin added that the Syrians are "more ready for war than ever," but that doesn't mean that they are seeking a war.
Yadlin also said that Israel must prepare for Katyusha rocket fire within a range of 40 kilometers from the Gaza Strip. He said that the Palestinian Hamas organization currently have in their arsenal home-made Qassam rockets with a 13 kilometer range as well as Grad missiles with a 20 kilometer range, but the Katyusha rockets have not yet been smuggled into the Strip. Hamas has also yet to use the Grad missiles against Israel.
"Hamas in Gaza," Yadlin said, "is interested in a cease-fire because right now Hamas is losing. Half its military force has been hurt in the last two and half weeks. Hamas is demanding open passage between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because it is interested in exporting the knowledge it has gained in Gaza to the West Bank."
"Hamas is turning from a terrorist organization into a semi-military force, modeled after Hezbollah, which is organized into units and battalions and intends to fight guerilla warfare in residential areas," he added.
5) The Region: A guide to the depressed
By BARRY RUBIN
Almost daily nowadays, one sees atrocities in deeds and shamefulness in words. Friends, colleagues and readers often write or tell me how depressing it is.
Lee Harris, a brilliant American writer, has a book coming out entitled The Suicide of Reason. (I would only suggest that it didn't jump, it was pushed.) I could give lots of examples, but will let you choose your own.
Caught between the big mistakes of one's own leaders, the rampant irresponsible radicalism of a large portion of the media, and abandonment of enlightened standards in intellectual discourse, it is easy to feel down.
And yet while there is much reason to be disgusted and a good basis for worrying - especially since worrying can prompt action - I tell those who share their feelings with me that things will turn out all right. Western civilization is not on the road to collapse; the Middle East is not going to be taken over by al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on.
Agreed, it isn't enough just to assert that a happy ending is inevitable; so let's look at some key factors as to why this is so.
First, the worse things get, the more people realize that things have gotten worse. Precisely the experience of seeing how intransigent and murderous are the extremists, how efforts at negotiation fail, how past concessions are exploited to bash those who make them, how dangerous Islamism is, among other factors, forces countries to react against them, intellectuals to denounce them and public opinion to shift against them.
THIS WAS THE process followed in the crises of dealing with fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, and with communism in the 1940s and 1950s. John F. Kennedy, or at least his ghostwriter, penned a book called Why England Slept on the first of these three ordeals. Bruce Bawyer wrote a good book entitled Why Europe Slept regarding the current one. Foreign terrorists and domestic fools provide the wake-up calls.
Second, the enemy side makes big mistakes. It pushes too far, demands too much, shoots off its mouth as well as its guns. The ideological extremism, tendency toward endless splits, blatant dishonesty and inability to build alliances all take their toll. The pretenses at moderation simply cannot be kept up. The mask slips all too often.
Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran's Ahmadinejad all provide good examples of this phenomenon in the Middle East. On Western campuses, extremist academics and students horrify onlookers. Most people in the West don't hate their own countries and will be put off with those who all too obviously do.
Third, a lot of the current unpleasantness, at least in the West, is transient. It is the belated tantrum of the 1960s' generation's old radicals. This is not to deny that there are many younger imitators, but the leadership and impetus is coming from those veterans of so many dubious battles, to use novelist John Steinbeck's phrase about the 1930s.
I have found that most undergraduates just don't accept the propaganda they are being fed about the Middle East and other things. Yes, it will have a lasting impact, but some of that will be a reaction against all the nonsense.
ANOTHER FACTOR here is the hysterical hatred of President George W. Bush, or, if you prefer, the impact of that government's divisive and mistaken policies. On January 20, 2009, Bush will leave office. If his replacement is anywhere near mainstream, that person is going to follow more than 80 percent of the current US foreign policy program, Iraq being the big exception, of course.
and in Europe. The more hardcore silly people will carry on, but a lot of the support will fall away.
Finally, I am tempted to quote the saying "the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on," though that could no doubt be twisted into some politically incorrect slur. Let's just put it this way: Don't pay too much attention to op-eds, the rantings of academics (or in Britain, academic unions), and even certain newspapers that seem to resemble campus revolutionary clubs more than great metropolitan dailies.
George Orwell, one of the best guides to the current insanity given his dealings with the last round, once referred to an idea so stupid that only an intellectual would believe it. It hurts me to say it, but such people all too often lack both responsibility and a sense of the real world. They have set themselves up as a counter-force to those who govern and run the economy. Angry, jealous and dissatisfied, they believe they could do a better job.
William F. Buckley, the American conservative intellectual, once stated that he would rather be governed by people chosen randomly off the street than by the faculty of Harvard University. History has absolved him on that concept.
What better way to end than to quote a poem written by Orwell in June 1943:
I wrote in nineteen-forty that at need
I'd fight to keep the Nazis out of Britain;
And Christ! How shocked the pinks were! Two years later
I hadn't lived it down; one had the effrontery
To write three pages calling me a 'traitor,'
So black a crime it is to love one's country...
Your game is easy, and its rules are plain:
Pretend the war began in 'thirty-nine,
Don't mention China, Ethiopia, Spain,
Don't mention Poles except to say they're swine;
Cry havoc when we bomb a German city,
When Czechs get killed don't worry in the least,
Give India a perfunctory squirt of pity
But don't inquire what happens further East;
Don't mention Jews - in short, pretend the war is
Simply a racket 'got up' by the Tories.
The writer is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center at IDC Herzliya and editor of Middle East Review of International Affairs and Turkish Studies. His latest book is The Truth About Syria.
6)As Europe self-destructs
By Caroline B. Glick
The continent of Europe is committing suicide.
Wednesday's decision by Britain's University and College Union to call for a boycott of Israeli universities and colleges was not only hypocritical. It was suicidal.
It is not simply that the British prefer to boycott Israeli universities than say, Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and Jordanian universities where students are indoctrinated to seek the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of Christianity through the destruction of Western civilization.
It is not merely that they ignored the poor, brave Iranian students who just three weeks ago were brutally attacked by regime forces as they sought to hold elections for their pro-democracy campus organizations.
By calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, Britain's academic establishment is turning its back not only on Israel, but on Britain. When Britain's professoriate rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish, democratic nation-state and glorifies Palestinian society which supports global jihad and the destruction of Western civilization, they are rejecting the British state.
They are embracing a culture founded on a rejection of the culture and traditions that have formed Britain since the Magna Carta was issued in 1215. For the past 800 years, Britain has stood for individual liberty and freedom of inquiry - at least for the British themselves. In universities like Oxford and Cambridge, it was this humanist spirit and the justified national and cultural pride it nurtured which facilitated Britain's rise to international power. By boycotting Israel, which itself embodies these British ideals, the British are abrogating their own traditions of openness. Consequently, they are destroying themselves.
And Britain is not alone in its self-destruction. Britain's rush to oblivion is part of a wider trend overtaking all of Western Europe. Take Sweden for example.
Sweden is upheld by leaders of the Israeli Left like former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, (who now devotes himself to attacking the US and Israel from his academic perch in Toledo, Spain), Education Minister Yuli Tamir, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Meretz chief Yossi Beilin, and former Labor chairman Avrum Burg. They extol Sweden as a social democratic wonderland which Israel must emulate.
12.5 percent of Swedes are immigrants and around half of Sweden's immigrants are Muslims. Muslims will soon comprise the majority in many of Sweden's cities.
The intrepid Scandinavian blogger 'Fjordman' recently penned an essay, "Jihad and the collapse of the Swedish model" in the online Brussels Journal. In it he relates the significance of Sweden's Integration Act of 1997 to Sweden's national self-destruction. The act officially proclaimed Sweden "a multicultural society."
Notes to the act stated, "Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin."
As 'Fjordman' explains, the act was nothing less than national suicide. "Native Swedes have… been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have erased their own people's history and culture."
Fjordman cites authors Jonathan Friedman, Ingrid Bjorkman, Jan Elfverson and Ake Wedin who explained in their 2005 book Exit the People's Home of Sweden - The Downfall of a Model of Society, that multiculturalism, as the "dominant ideology in Sweden, which has been made dominant by powerful methods of silencing and repression, is a totalitarian ideology, where the elites oppose the national aspect of the nation state."
The authors explained that "the problem is that the ethnic group… described as Swedes implicitly are considered to be nationalists, and thereby are viewed as racists."
Like the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, multiculturalism identifies the Jews and the Americans as its chief enemies. Both must be defeated for their refusal to destroy themselves and merge into the post-national thought stream. And like their 20th century predecessors, the multiculturalists of today embrace radical Muslims who share their rejection of Judaism and Americanism.
The multiculturalists convince their societies to accept their own destruction by indoctrinating their fellow citizens through their education systems and media. A recent poll of Swedes between the ages of 15-20 showed that 90 percent had never heard of the Soviet gulag.
Needless to say, the consequences of this state of affairs are not localized to Europe. As they do towards their own people, the European elites work tirelessly to subvert American and Israeli cultural confidence and to undermine every action the two nations take to combat the forces of global jihad. Whether by condemning the US incarceration of jihadists at Guantanamo Bay, claiming that Zionism is racism, attacking the US campaign in Iraq, financing Israeli anti-Zionist pressure groups and the Palestinian Authority, or insisting that Iran should be negotiated with, the EU works to compel the US and Israel to stand down rather than defend themselves and to convince American and Israeli societies that we are unworthy of being defended.
Disturbingly, rather than face-up to Europe's self-destruction and give it a wide berth, led by our own post-national elites, Israel and the US are adopting the European model of cultural collapse.
The most recent example of the Israeli elites' subversion of their country is Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's assault on the Jewish National Fund.
Since it was chartered by Theodor Herzl in 1901, financed by donations from Jews throughout the world, the JNF has purchased land to promote settlement of the land by the Jewish people. The JNF owns some 2.5 million hectares of land.
In 1961, the JNF signed an agreement with the Israel Lands Authority which authorized the ILA to manage JNF lands in accordance with the JNF charter. In 2004, the anti-Jewish Arab Israeli pressure group Adalah petitioned the Supreme Court demanding that the ILA enable non-Jews to settle on JNF lands. Adalah alleged that by acting in accordance with the JNF charter, the ILA discriminates against Arabs.
Rather than reject Adalah's claim on its face, or at a minimum cancel the 1961 agreement and enable JNF to manage its own lands, Mazuz sided with Adalah. Last week he ordered the JNF to stop operating in accordance with its charter. That is, Mazuz effectively and with no legal authority, expropriated the property of the Jewish people.
In so doing, the Attorney General of the Jewish state essentially decided that Zionism is a form of racism and that the Jewish people have no special rights to the Land of Israel. No doubt the Swedes are proud of him.
The Olmert government has likewise embraced the European model of national collapse. Rather than defend Israel's citizens from our enemies and cultivate the Jewish character of the state, the government seeks to appease the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Egyptians and the Europeans at the expense of Israel's citizenry.
At the invitation of successive Israeli governments, Europeans forces are deployed today in Hebron, in Gaza and along Israel's northern border with Lebanon. These European forces have done nothing to prevent the Palestinians from arming, training and attacking Israel. Along the Lebanese border, since last summer's war, the Europeans have similarly done nothing to prevent Hizbullah from rebuilding its arsenals and reasserting its control over southern Lebanon.
And this is to be expected. As Europeans perceive their interests, they are better off appeasing the Arabs and the Iranians and condemning Israel and the US for every step we take to combat the forces of global jihad committed to our destruction.
Rather than acknowledge this reality and work to remove the Europeans from our midst, the Olmert government is exacerbating the problem. In recent weeks, the government has asked the Europeans to increase the size of their forces along the Gaza-Egypt border. Thursday Minister for Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman recommended that NATO forces be deployed in Gaza. Similarly, Minister Rafi Eitan and far-left Meretz MKs Zahava Gal-On and Avshalom Vilan are calling for Arab League forces to be deployed to Gaza. Gal-On and Vilan envision the Arabs and the Europeans jointly take control over Gaza. For his part, Eitan is recommending that Arab armies deploy to Judea and Samaria as well.
In the US, the situation is depressingly similar. At leading universities, professors and students who openly support Israel and the US campaign in Iraq are hounded and isolated. In keeping with the general anti-American and anti-Israel gestalt on college campuses, last year Harvard University invited former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami to speak on campus. Harvard ignored Khatami's stewardship of the Iranian nuclear program during his tenure. His role in violently quelling the student democracy movement in 1999 and 2003 was similarly overlooked.
The Bush administration's foreign policy has likewise been Europeanized. Five years after President George W. Bush placed Iran and North Korea firmly in the axis of evil, the State Department is working overtime to appease them both. In line with this policy, on Tuesday, Iran's announcement that it had arrested five US citizens and is charging them with espionage was greeted by embarrassment and paralysis in Washington. Just the day before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had dispatched the US ambassador in Baghdad to meet with his Iranian counterpart.
The US's treatment of North Korea is perhaps even more dramatic. Rather than abandon its appeasement policy towards Pyongyang after the North Koreans breached their commitment to close their nuclear facility at Yongbyon in April, the Bush administration has redoubled its efforts to placate the Stalinist dictatorship. Not only did the US have little to say about the North Korean short-range missile tests over Japan last week. It sent its emissaries to Beijing this week to attempt to buy North Korean compliance with its breached commitment by unfreezing Pyongyangs's bank accounts in Macau. The US treasury froze those accounts when it discovered that they were being used to launder profits from counterfeit US currency and drug deals.
Then there is the US's refusal to abandon pressure on Israel to appease the Palestinians. At a time when jihadists from Iraq have panned out to Lebanon and Algeria and are actively working to overthrow those countries' governments, Tuesday Rice claimed that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is "at the core of a lot of problems in the region."
During the Cold War, protected by the US military, Europeans could embrace cultural and national suicide without fearing the consequences of their actions. Now faced with those consequences, the Europeans have embraced their own destruction rather than abandon their multicultural model and its concomitant anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.
Israel and the US do not have anyone else to defend them. And in spite of the rantings of their cultural, media and academic elites, the Israeli and American people have no interest in committing national suicide. In light of this, both countries must move swiftly to end the Europeanization of their cultures and policies.
7) House of Representatives: Move US embassy to Jerusalem
by Yitzhak Benhorin
‘In six days of war, Israel reunited the city which had been artificially divided for 19 years,’ resolution says
The House of Representatives on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution calling on President George W. Bush to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, this on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War.
The senate is expected to approve a similar motion later in the day.
In the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 Congress determined that Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel and that the U.S. Embassy should be established there no later than May 31, 1999.
However, the Clinton and Bush administrations have refrained from moving the embassy for fear of riots against American embassies in
Arab countries and a possible decline in the US's status.
“The House congratulates the citizens of Israel on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War in which Israel defeated enemies aiming to destroy the Jewish State. Jerusalem has been the focal point of Jewish religious devotion and the site of a continuous Jewish presence for over three millennia, with a Jewish majority since at least 1896,” the resolution said.
“The vibrant Jewish population of the historic Old City of Jerusalem was driven out by force during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In six days of war, Israel defeated those forces seeking its destruction and reunited the city of Jerusalem which had been artificially divided for 19 years.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)