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Mitt Romney speaks in Jerusalem

So Mitt Romney compared Israel’s culture favorably to that of the Palestinian Arabs, to explain the economic success of the Jewish state (and by implication, the failure of the Arab entity). “Racism,” said Saeb Erekat, PLO negotiator. “It’s all about occupation.”

Of course the Jews in Palestine were under ‘occupation’ from about the time of Nebuchadnezzar until 1948. During the period of Turkish and British rule from about 1890 until independence, they created the institutions of a new Jewish commonwealth, everything from health funds to road-building companies to labor unions to universities to collective farms to kindergartens to newspapers to an army.

They had some help from international Jewry, but it was small potatoes. Most of what they built was bootstrapped into existence, often — as in the reclamation of previously worthless land purchased dearly — at great human cost.

The Palestinian Arabs, on the other hand, are the greatest recipients of international aid in the history of the world. Billions and billions of dollars have been showered on them to help them create economic, social and political institutions that could be a precursor to statehood. They have political autonomy — total control in Gaza, and civil self-rule over 97% of the Arab population of Judea and Samaria.

Yet they have not been able to create a functional economy in either the PA or Hamas-controlled areas. Criminality and corruption characterize their regimes. Cronies of the rulers control monopolies in telecommunications, building materials, etc.

Erekat is not entirely wrong when he says that ‘occupation’ — such things as Israeli border controls which deny Palestinian Arabs access to Israel, checkpoints on major roads within PA areas — does have a stifling effect on commerce.

But there are things that have held Israel back, too. The continuous pressure of terrorism and the need for security in every aspect of Israeli life, for one, and the periodic wars and time and energy devoted to reserve duty between them, for another.

“Just end the occupation,” would be the answer from Palestinians and their friends. “Then both sides would prosper.”

Unfortunately, that’s been tried, with Gaza. We know the result: so far this month, 23 rockets have landed in southern Israel. There is no reason to think a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would have different results (except that it would be easier to hit Israel’s population centers).

In fact, it insults the Palestinian Arabs to assume that they are lying when they tell us that their greatest desire, the goal to which they aspire every day more than any other, is to get rid of the Jews on what they believe is their land. Why shouldn’t we take them at their word?

Now we are perhaps in a position to understand Romney’s comments about culture. The Israeli Jewish culture yearned for a homeland in the land of Israel. Was this necessarily inconsistent with justice for Arabs in the region? No — but it was inconsistent with Arab culture, which has always insisted that any Jewish sovereignty is unacceptable.

This principle has become the foundation of Arab ideology. It’s been nurtured through the years by ceaseless propaganda in media, educational and religious institutions, as well as by concrete actions, such as preventing the repatriation of Arab refugees and their descendents to anywhere but ‘Palestine’.

So today there is a Palestinian culture which defines itself by opposition to Israel and Jews. Its heroes are Arabs who kill Jews (we call them terrorists) because that is the culture’s highest value. It can express itself in religious terms, as in the Hamas charter‘s inclusion of a Islamic injunction to kill Jews “wherever you find them,” or in pan-Arab or Palestinian nationalist ones.

There is also a combination of anti-Jewish tropes from the Quran with modern European Jew hatred, some of it imported directly from Nazi Germany by the Mufti of Jerusalem, that has been introduced to spice things up.

Funny that Erekat thought to call Romney’s remark ‘racist’. What could he have been thinking?

So that is what is relevant about Palestinian culture. Building an economy and a state is hard work. You can’t do it if you are mainly focused on hating and destroying someone else’s.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney, Israel, Palestinians, culture

1962 Spy vs. Spy cartoon by Antonio Prohias

A recent AP piece tells us that the CIA considers Israel its “number one counterintelligence threat” in the Middle East.

The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency’s Near East Division, the group that oversees spying across the Middle East, according to current and former officials. Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.

The article describes several incidents illustrative of the mistrust between the intelligence agencies of the two nations, including of course the cases of Jonathan Pollard and Ben-Ami Kadish.

One wonders why this article appears now. Did the story idea suddenly pop into the heads of the AP writers? I don’t think so. Someone at the CIA decided to stick it to Israel today, when Mitt Romney is going around (correctly, in my opinion) criticizing the Obama Administration for tilting against Israel.

The piece strains mightily to find an example of a case in which Israeli spying actually damaged US interests (at least, interests that the CIA is willing to publicly admit). The best it can do is point to a Syrian scientist who was working for the CIA who might have been caught because of an Israeli leak.

It’s very probable that the massive damage to US spy networks in the USSR that Jonathan Pollard was accused of causing was actually attributable to spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen:

[US Defense Secretary Caspar] Weinberger publicly stated that Pollard was the worst spy in American history: “It is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant.” Despite his plea agreement to the contrary with the government, Pollard was given the maximum sentence, life in prison. Weinberger later said that he wished Pollard had been shot.

A week after the sentencing, the Washington Times reported that the United States had identified Shabtai Kalmanovich as the Soviet spy in Israel who supposedly worked for the Mossad but was actually working for the KGB; he had betrayed American secrets to Moscow. Kalmanovich had been flying under a false flag. Washington insiders winked knowingly at one another: Pollard’s contact in Israel had been caught.

Just to make sure that Pollard was blamed, U.S. intelligence sources, several months later, leaked word to the press of the Kalmanovich connection. “A Russian mole has infiltrated the Mossad and is transmitting highly sensitive American intelligence information to the Russians,” was the report flashed around the world by United Press International on Dec. 14, 1987. Citing “American intelligence sources,” the UPI announced that the “sensitive intelligence material relayed to Israel by Jonathan Pollard had reached the KGB.”

But it was all untrue. Every bit of it. Pollard wasn’t the serial killer. The Jew didn’t do it. It was one of their own WASPs-Aldrich Ames, a drunken senior CIA official who sold the names of America’s agents to the Russians for cash. Pollard was framed for Ames’s crime, while Ames kept on drinking and spying for the Soviets for several more years. In fact, Israeli intelligence later suspected that Ames played a direct role in framing Pollard. But no one in America then knew the truth.

Ames was arrested in February 1994, and confessed to selling out American agents in the Soviet Union, but not all of them. It was only logical to assume that Pollard had betrayed the rest of them, as one former CIA official admitted shortly after Ames’s arrest. Even one life lost was too many. So Pollard continued to rot in jail. No one dreamed that yet another high-level Washington insider had sold us out to Soviet intelligence. Years passed, and eventually a Russian defector told the truth. A senior FBI official-Special Agent Robert Hanssen-had betrayed the rest of our agents. Hanssen was arrested in February 2001, and soon confessed in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

One must ask what, exactly, is the aim of Israeli spying against the US? It is certainly not — as  with Soviet and contemporary Russian espionage — to weaken us diplomatically and gain a military advantage in a possible conflict. Nor does it, as is the case with Chinese spying, also include a massive component of industrial espionage to erode America’s competitive advantage in world markets.

No, it seems to me that Israeli spies are interested in questions like these:

• What does the US know about Arab or Iranian capabilities or plans that it has not revealed?
• What are US officials saying to Israel’s enemies in private? What are they hearing from them?
• What are the capabilities of weapons the US is selling to Israel’s enemies? Is technical information available that could provide countermeasures?
• What are US plans regarding its possible actions in the event of a conflict between Israel and Arab states, Iran or terrorist proxies?
• What are agents of Israel’s enemies up to in the US? Who are they working with?

Naturally, the US doesn’t want Israel to know these things, as they constrain US actions and impinge on some conceptions of US interests. But from an Israeli point of view, it all represents information that is vital to Israel’s survival. And if you think that, from an American point of view, Israel’s continued existence is a Good Thing, you might wonder why Israel finds it necessary to spy on its great ally.

Update [1618 PDT]: The Israeli Prime Minister’s office has commented on the AP item saying “This is a false report.”

Technorati Tags: Israel, espionage, CIA, Jonathan Pollard

Cartoon shamelessly ripped off from Rubin Reports

Here are two versions of American history:

One is that the nation came into being based on the principles of the Enlightenment, in which liberty was a supreme value. Rights like freedom of speech and religion were enshrined in its Bill of Rights. About 70 years after its founding, it was torn by a remarkably bloody war in which the idea that human slavery was acceptable was soundly defeated, and that abominable institution was ended.

Thanks to its commitment to free enterprise, it expanded to both sides of the continent, providing unprecedented opportunities for prosperity and development. Great universities were established, and culture and science thrived.

During WWII, the US turned its mighty industrial power toward defeating the murderous regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  417,000 Americans died in that war. Afterwards, the US took the lead in establishing international institutions (like the UN) designed to prevent war and spread freedom and prosperity throughout the world.

After the war, the US opposed the attempts of the Soviet Union to export its totalitarian communism. Ultimately, due to a great extent to US efforts, the USSR collapsed and numerous European countries that had become satellites obtained their freedom.

The Civil Rights movement brought about the end of segregation in the south, as well as other forms of institutionalized racism against African-Americans. Laws were passed guaranteeing voting rights, fair housing, forbidding discrimination in employment, etc. on the basis of race, sex, disability, etc.

The invention of the microprocessor and the development of the computer and communications industry, arguably producing an economic revolution as important as that of the steam engine, began in the US, and innovation continues here.

Another view is that the US was built, from the beginning, on exploitation. Its early economic development was based on slave labor, and since the beginning is has ripped through the natural resources of the continent in the most greedy way possible. Anything that stood in the way of expansion — like indigenous native Americans, who were slaughtered wholesale — was destroyed.

Even after the end of slavery, African Americans were exploited for their labor while being treated abominably. Other industrial workers were paid just enough to keep them alive, and attempts at unionization were met by bullets.

At the beginning of WWII, American citizens of Japanese origin were forced into internment camps. The US was the first nation to use atomic weapons, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. After the war, the US opposed indigenous liberation movements throughout the world, using military force to defend the colonialist world order in places like Vietnam.

The US continues to exploit and oppress third-world peoples, especially where there are important resources, like oil. Racism is inseparable from our culture.

In recent years, economic inequality has soared, and inflation-adjusted middle-class income has dropped since the 1960’s while a small group of super-rich have become astronomically wealthy. Despite its overall wealth, the US has a worse health care system than most other developed nations.

Powerful interests prevent actions from being taken to reduce the emission of pollutants, greenhouse gases, etc., which foul the entire planet.

Neither of these stories is 100% correct and complete (but they are not ‘equally good’, either).

No nation is perfect, and they all have skeletons in their closets (just ask the Belgians about the Congo — and we won’t even bring up the British, upon whose exploitative empire the sun never set).

But the US does have a commitment to such things as individual rights (as expressed in the Bill of Rights), equality of opportunity, social mobility, democracy, rule of law, etc. Many other nations — perhaps most of them — don’t even pay lip service to these ideals, much less exemplify them.

Where do you start? Do you accept the idea that the US is based on fundamentally sound principles and is an overall force for good in the world? That our job is to fix the problems, but continue on the same general path laid down by the Founding Fathers?

Or do you start with the second story — I’ll call it the ‘anti-American’ one — and conclude that our country is evil, responsible for most of the misery in the world, and must be destroyed or at least completely turned upside down to save it?

Unfortunately, the anti-American story is very prevalent among university academics, and by the people they have educated in the past 35 years or so. Barry Rubin has written extensively about how his child was indoctrinated with anti-Americanism in the US public schools (see here and here).

Unsurprisingly, many of our college-educated politicians share it as well.

Where do our presidential candidates stand?

Technorati Tags: United States, anti-Americanism

Aaron David Miller, whom I quoted at length yesterday on another subject, wrote recently that

Palestinians deserve an independent state living in peace and security alongside Israel. They’ve suffered enough; their cause is just and compelling.

Is it?

Palestinian Media Watch reports,

The Palestinian Authority is against the moment of silence at the Olympics to commemorate the Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics in 1972. According to the headline in the official PA daily, “Sports are meant for peace, not for racism.”

According to Jibril Rajoub, President of the Palestinian Olympic Committee:

“Sports are meant for peace, not for racism… Sports are a bridge to love, interconnection, and spreading of peace among nations; it must not be a cause of division and spreading of racism between them [nations].”

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 25, 2012]

These words appeared in a letter sent by Rajoub to the President of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge. The letter “expressed appreciation for [Rogge’s] position, who opposed the Israeli position, which demanded a moment’s silence at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London.”

The PA daily does not refer to the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 as terror. In the article about Rajoub’s letter, the killing of the athletes is referred to as “the Munich Operation, which took place during the Munich Olympics in 1972.”

The article continues with examples of Palestinian officials — including President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad — honoring and praising the planners of the Munich massacre, Amin al-Hindi and Muhammad Daoud Oudeh (Abu Daoud).

It is not surprising that Abbas called Abu Daoud “a wonderful brother, companion, tough and stubborn, relentless fighter,” because he, Abbas, worked with him as financier of the “operation.”

In a 2002 Sports Illustrated article uncovered by Elder of Ziyon, Abu Daoud was quoted saying that Abbas financed the operation (although the writer of the article suggested that he “didn’t know” that he was financing murder):

Though he didn’t know what the money was being spent for, longtime Fatah official Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, was responsible for the financing of the Munich attack. Abu Mazen could not be reached for comment regarding Abu Daoud’s allegation. After Oslo in 1993, Abu Mazen went to the White House Rose Garden for a photo op with Arafat, President Bill Clinton and Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. “Do you think that … would have been possible if the Israelis had known that Abu Mazen was the financier of our operation?” Abu Daoud writes. “I doubt it.”

Abu Daoud is dead and Abbas isn’t telling, but even if he didn’t know about this particular mass murder, his statement in praise of Abu Daoud indicates that he approved of Daoud’s terrorist activities. The idea that Abbas “didn’t know” that the PLO he financed was responsible for worldwide terrorism is laughable.

To answer my original question, no, I don’t think that the “Palestinian Cause” — which even today has not deviated one millimeter from the cause of Yasser Arafat, and which can be summed up as “drive the Jews out of ‘Palestine’ whatever it takes” — is just.

And they prove it every day, by their own words.

Technorati Tags: Olympics, Munich massacre, Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Daoud, Palestinian Cause