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The NIF-sponsored declaration about the Tuba Zanghariya incident, signed by 1000 rabbis, makes it clear that they oppose bad behavior by Israelis:

We condemn those in Israel who exacerbate conflict and strife, and who insist that only one people or religion belongs to this land. (my emphasis)

But why do you think those two boldfaced words are there?

Perhaps the NIF didn’t want to contradict the official Palestinian Authority (PA) TV station which, shortly after Mahmoud Abbas’ appeal to the UN for statehood, broadcast this map, showing all of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean (except the Golan Heights) wrapped in a Palestinian flag (the key symbolizes Palestinian Arab ownership of the land they were ‘expelled’ from in 1948).

Statements like this one are crafted very carefully. I do not believe that those two words are there by accident. They are there to tell us that the statement does not condemn those outside of Israel — which includes all of the Palestinian leadership, the PLO and Hamas — who think that only the Arabs “belong to the land” (a strange locution in itself).

This isn’t surprising in light of the Wikileaks cable which quotes an NIF official as saying that “the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.”

I wonder if any of the liberal American rabbis (some of whom I know) who signed the statement noticed this?

Technorati Tags: NIF, Israel, Palestinian Authority

The words "price tag" written in charcoal on the vandalized mosque in Tuba Zanghariya

Israeli police have arrested a yeshiva student for setting fire to a mosque in the Israeli Arab (Bedouin) village of Tuba Zanghariya. This was one of a group of “price tag” revenge attacks carried out by… idiots.

When I first heard about it I hoped that it was a false flag operation carried out by Arabs as a provocation. I am still hoping that the police are wrong (it wouldn’t be the first time).

The attack was condemned by Jewish political and religious figures of every stripe, including the Chief Rabbis of Israel. The head Sepharadi rabbi, Rabbi Shlomo Amar said,

We must cry out against this deed, it is a hilul Hashem [desecration of God’s name]. All leaders should speak against this act of terror and hate…

We remember as Jews when other people burned our synagogues and burned our Torah scrolls. We cannot accept such acts against other religions … A church, mosque, temple or synagogue are embassies of God and you cannot harm such places. We strongly protest such actions.

In addition to the fact that the act was morally wrong, it was unbelievably stupid. There is still a gag order on details of the case, but I’m sure that when we find them out, we will see that the perpetrator is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

The “price tag” attacks are supposed to deter Arabs from vandalism, terrorism and even murder by making them pay a ‘price’. This can’t possibly work, since it simply motivates the Arabs to respond in kind, something they are overjoyed to have an excuse to do.

So the strategy is both wrong and ineffective.

But there’s more:  it’s a huge gift to our enemies in the information war. It provides the grain of truth needed to validate the exaggerations and outright lies that will be told in order to establish that ‘both sides’ are at fault, even that ‘both sides engage in terrorism’.

This particular one is even worse. Tuba Zanghariya is (or was) a relatively friendly village. Its people fought on the Jewish side in the War of Independence, and many serve in the IDF today. There is even a monument to 13 of their sons who fell in Israel’s wars. This is simply the most inappropriate possible place to retaliate for Arab terrorism.

Naturally the Israeli Left is having a field day denouncing the ‘religious fanatics’ or ‘extremist settlers’ that did this. The anti-Zionist US-based New Israel Fund (NIF) is making sure that no one will ever forget this outrage, even when the murder of Asher Palmer and his tiny baby (supposedly the motivation for the mosque attack) is long forgotten:

Washington, DC/Jerusalem, October 6: In only 24 hours, almost 1000 rabbis from around the world have signed a statement condemning the burning of the mosque in Tuba-Zangariya earlier this week. The statement was initiated by the New Israel Fund and was presented today to the Imam of the village of Tuba-Zangariya by dozens of rabbis and other activists participating in a solidarity convoy to the village…

The Brit Choshech Legaresh (“Banish the Darkness”) coalition, which is financially supported by NIF, led the convoy to Tuba-Zangariya. The coalition was established after the publication of the controversial and inciting book Torat Hamelech (“The King’s Torah”) in September 2009, mobilizing a forceful public response to the book, which argues that Jewish law permits and even encourages the murder of Gentiles. The members of the coalition are religious and secular organizations fighting to garner public opposition to religious racism as a desecration of God’s name and a distortion of Judaism. In addition, Brit Choshech Legaresh struggles daily against all incidents of racism in Israel. — NIF press release

There are already pledges of donations to rebuild the mosque several times over. The police have acted quickly, and in fact recently created a special unit to arrest those involved in “price tag” vandalism. Some perspective is needed — this is teenage stupidity, after all, not a major terrorist movement.

The NIF found many words to condemn the truly despicable burning of a mosque. But a mosque is a building that will be rebuilt. Asher Palmer and his son will never come back, and the NIF did not issue a press release or mobilize 1000 rabbis when they were viciously murdered.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Tuba Zangharaya, Mosque burning, Asher Palmer, Jonathan Palmer, terrorism, NIF

A cornered beast speaks:

“If a crazy measure is taken against Damascus, I will need not more than 6 hours to transfer hundreds of rockets and missiles to the Golan Heights to fire them at Tel Aviv,” [Syrian President Bashar] Assad said after [Turkish FM] Davutoglu conveyed the United States’ warning message to him.

He also reiterated that Damascus will also call on Hezbollah in Lebanon to launch such an intensive rocket and missile attack on Israel that the Israeli spy agencies could never imagine.

“All these events will happen in three hours, but in the second three hours, Iran will attack the US warships in the Persian Gulf and the US and European interests will be targeted simultaneously,” Assad said. — FARS News Service, Iran

Israel is reported to have warned Assad earlier this year that if he attacked Israel, it would respond by personally targeting him. This is an appropriate response to a gangster. Israel certainly has no interest in killing (other) Syrians, who are not responsible for wild beast Assad’s actions.

I mention this threat to make a point that I’ve made before, but that bears repeating by everyone who tries to explain the Israeli-Arab conflict:

It is not primarily about the Palestinian Arabs, although they often represent the violent interface of it. The overall problem facing Israel is that the Arab world, plus Iran and now Turkey, wants to destroy Israel. One of their greatest weapons, in the war on the ground, in the information war and in the diplomatic war — all three are being waged simultaneously — is the Palestinian Arabs. But it isn’t about them, any more than what used to be called ‘the war on terrorism’ was about terrorism.

Most of the anti-Israel propaganda we see is devoted to obscuring this fact. It deals with Palestinian rights, ‘occupation’, incidents involving Palestinians, settlements, etc. It never mentions the Iranian nuclear threat, Hizballah’s 40,000 rockets, Hamas’ constantly improving military capabilities, Syrian chemical weapons, the possibility that Egypt will become a confrontation state again, the new-found belligerence of Turkey, etc.

Whenever Arab or Iranian hostility to Israel is mentioned, it is said to be a consequence of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. But we can see that this can’t be the case, both from the fact that the Arab countries treat Palestinians worse than Israel and because of the antisemitic and religious nature of the hatred for Israel that is commonly expressed by officials of the Arab and Iranian regimes, their media and their religious leaders.

The conflict is mis-described in so many ways. Even the Palestinian part of it is often explained as soluble by a territorial compromise leading to a ‘two-state solution’. Of course we know that for the Palestinians, this ‘solution’ includes a ‘right of return’ and no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which transforms the territorial conflict into an existential one.

The overall situation in the Middle East is quite complicated, with Sunni-Shiite tension, the competing ambitions of Iran, Turkey and Egypt for leadership of the region, the struggles between Islamists, nationalists and even a few democrats to dominate the states where long-time dictators are being deposed, the contest to control Mediterranean natural gas, the instability in Saudi Arabia, the coming food crisis, etc. The situation changes as time passes — Iran was locked in war with Iraq for more than a decade, which kept it from expressing its greater regional ambitions, for example — but superimposed on all of it has always been the imperative to reject and destroy Israel.

These conflicts are independent, in a way. If Israel disappeared the rest of it would continue, and if all the Arabs, Turkey and Iran found a way to make a comprehensive peace between themselves, they would still want to destroy Israel.

Just keep repeating this: it’s not about Palestine, it’s about Israel.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Israeli-Arab conflict, Middle East, Bashar al-Assad

NY Times, Sept. 30:

One of the rabbis asked why Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy convicted in 1986, was still in prison. Mr. Biden, on a mission to shore up support for President Obama, replied forcefully, according to several people at the meeting.

“President Obama was considering clemency, but I told him, ‘Over my dead body are we going to let him out before his time,’ ” Mr. Biden said. “If it were up to me, he would stay in jail for life.”

Biden is delivering a message for the administration. In part the message is the obvious political one that Obama isn’t the bad guy and that Jews should vote for him. But there is more to it than that.

Pollard’s hugely disproportionate sentence — Pollard is the only American who has been given a life sentence for spying for an ally — the government’s reneging on his plea bargain, his treatment in prison, far worse than that of Soviet spy Aldrich Ames, for whose crimes Pollard may have been blamed, and the continued lack of an acceptable rationale from the government, tell us that there is something ‘special’ about this case.

Let me quote what Ma’ariv writer Ben Caspit asked Biden recently:

Is it possible, Mr. Biden, that you know something that James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, and Dennis DeConcini, former chairman of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, do not? Because both of them are both in favor of releasing him. Do you know something that Henry Kissinger, George Shultz or John McCain don’t? All of them, esteemed American patriots, are in favor of clemency.

How about former US Attorney-General Michael Mukasey? Do you know something he doesn’t? Have you got intelligence that Lawrence Korb, assistant defense secretary under Casper Weinberger, was not privy to? Korb was there, in real time, but Korb, an honest and decent man, felt his conscience claw at him, and today he leads the call to free Pollard, who next month will mark his twenty-sixth year in American prison…

…I ask that you examine your own conscience. Ask yourself, Mr. Biden, why Pollard has been in prison for 26 years for a crime that generally receives a two-to-four year sentence in America.

Ask yourself why spies who have committed far graver sins, betrayals that led to the killing of American agents on foreign soil, received far lesser sentences? Ask yourself why it is that the blood libel of attributing those murders to Pollard was circulated so widely. Ask yourself why, once those allegations were proven to be false, his sentence was not commuted. Ask yourself why the United States of America, a society governed by law and order, did not honor its plea bargain with Pollard.

Good questions, all of them. Something is definitely special here, and it is not some dark issue of national security, as Caspit’s list of insiders who favor releasing Pollard proves.

Let’s ask ourselves what else is special. One of the most special things in the the American consciousness, to our great misfortune, seems to be the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Here are just a few entirely random examples:

• The perceived importance of American Jews in our forthcoming Presidential election, although we are actually about 1.7% of the US population.
• The disproportionate media attention, mostly unfavorable, to Israel.
• The US government’s obsession with the Israel-Palestinian conflict at a time when there are massive changes and instability throughout the Middle East.
• The alleged power of the “Israel Lobby” in a land of many, many lobbies, and where the Saudi lobby is much more effective in getting what it wants.
• The abnormal concentration by the academic and media Left on Israel and the Palestinians.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

My hypothesis is that a large number of those in what Barry Rubin called the MUG complex (Media-University-Government) distrust and fear Jews and the realization of their national aspirations, Israel. They chose to make an example of Pollard, to serve as an object lesson to other Jews who might be tempted to allow their loyalty to the Jewish state to take precedence over their obligations to America — because they see this as a real threat.

For this purpose, it is not necessary that Pollard actually be guilty of damaging US interests (read what he actually did here). His job is to be a symbol of the disloyal Jew, and a warning to others.

It is also establishes the administration as tough, not easily pushed around by lobbies — although it did support freeing the Lockerbie bomber, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, on compassionate grounds (and incidentally to facilitate a huge oil deal for BP).  By the way, Megrahi is still alive in Libya.

While Obama should simply pardon Pollard, compassionate release would be welcome. But he’s only a poor Jew, unrelated to oil deals.

Update [1530 PDT]: The relatively left-wing Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has called for Pollard’s release. Anything they do is likely coordinated with the White House. It’s possible that Obama will take this opportunity to free Pollard, thus scoring many points with Jews. Yes, it’s cynical, but anything that gets him out is OK with me!

Technorati Tags: Jonathan Pollard, Joe Biden