FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

You’ve probably heard about the huge wildfire presently burning out of control in northern Israel. The Muqata blog has been providing continuous updates here.

At least 42 people [updated 3 Dec] are dead, more than 15,000 evacuated and damage in the millions. This is the worst fire in Israel’s history and one of its worst natural disasters. In a particularly horrible incident, a bus carrying prison service officers on their way to assist in the evacuation of the Damon prison was trapped by the flames, and 40 of them burned to death.

Remains of Prison Service bus in which 40 died

You can see a live Google Map of the area of the fire (in Hebrew) here.

Media have been quiet about the cause. There are unconfirmed reports that the fire started simultaneously in several locations. I don’t have to tell you what this means, if true.

The UK, Greece, France, Cyprus, Croatia, Azerbaijan, even Turkey are among countries sending planes, chemicals and equipment to fight the fire.

According to the NY Times, Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad “expressed his condolences to the people of Israel on behalf of the Palestinian people.”  There are also reports of less friendly expressions from some Arabs — again, unconfirmed.

Firefighters are presently trying to contain the fire and evacuate those in its path. Efforts to put it out won’t begin until daylight. We’ll know more in a few hours.

Fire in the Carmel area (AFP)

Update [3 Dec 0802 PST]: Two suspects have been arrested trying to start additional fires with Molotov cocktails. There is also some evidence of arson at the sources of the three major blazes. The Muqata’s live account is here.

Meanwhile, here is video of a Turkish fire-fighting aircraft landing in Israel. Remarkable, given the recent political climate. Jordan has also sent equipment, and Russia and Bulgaria as well.

Another interesting report from Elder of Ziyon here. See also the Jerusalem Post here.

Technorati Tags: Israel, wildfire, Haifa, Carmel

The main thing I’ve learned from the WikiLeaks documents is that I was wrong about Barack Obama. I’d thought that he was putting the screws to Israel in order to appease the Arab world, particularly the Saudis. Apparently not. David Horowitz puts it very well:

The Obama administration, it is now clear for all to see, was not pressing a reluctant Netanyahu to make settlement-freeze and other concessions to the Palestinians in part because it truly believed this would be helpful in generating wider support for tackling Iran.

Not at all. The United States, we now know courtesy of WikiLeaks, was being repeatedly urged by a succession of Arab leaders to smash an Iranian nuclear program they feared would destabilize the entire region and put their regimes at risk. Their priority was, and is, battering Ahmadinejad, not bolstering Abbas.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in 2008, had not urged the US to chivvy those recalcitrant Israelis toward concessions to the Palestinians as a pre-condition for grudging Saudi support for a firmer US-led position against Iran. Anything but. Never mind the Palestinians, the king simply implored Washington to “cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake.”

Likewise, with minor variations in the course of the following year, the rulers of Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.

We are now starting to hear, courtesy of WikiLeaks, what Jordan and Egypt had to say on the matter too.

So, one asks, if Obama was not doing the Arabs’ bidding, why did he base his entire Mideast policy on the obviously false ‘linkage’ theory that asserts that ‘solving the Palestinian problem’ is a prerequisite to stabilizing the Middle East, and in particular, to dealing with Iranian expansionism?

Apparently he honestly thinks that the world will be a better place with Israel forced back to non-defensible borders, and with yet another undemocratic, economically non-viable Arab state in the Mideast.

Indeed, given the present strategic situation of Israel, targeted by the extremely dangerous missile forces of Iranian proxies Hizballah and Syria (as well as the less significant but still deadly rockets of Hamas), a withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights would be suicidal, regardless of US ‘guarantees’. The fact that Obama wants to impose such a ‘solution’ means that Israel’s security is simply not a concern for him.

Keep in mind that a strong Israel is a deterrent to Iranian plans. So by weakening Israel and prioritizing the Palestinian issue above that of Iran, Obama is both aiding Iran’s effort to extend its regional influence through the activities of Hizballah and giving it more time and freedom to progress its nuclear program.

This is detrimental to US interests as well as those of its Arab allies.

In other words, for ideological reasons — not for oil or anything else — Obama is pushing a policy to hurt Israel and help the radical forces in the region.

Obama has shown a remarkable coolness toward Israel. As President, he hasn’t visited Israel, although he has gone to numerous Arab countries. He was particularly unfriendly to PM Netanyahu when the latter visited Washington in March, and announced a policy turn away from Israel in April. After a short respite due to the upcoming midterm elections, he quickly went back to pressing Israel for concessions. And now he has floated a trial balloon via J Street for an imposed agreement to create ‘Palestine’.

This is not the realpolitik of a George H. W. Bush or a Henry Kissinger. This is the man who insulted the British in 2009 by returning a bust of  Winston Churchill, because Churchill suppressed the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in 1952 (yes, the bust was on loan, but they offered to extend the loan and Obama said ‘no’).

My guess is that Obama’s worldview is infused with the sophomoric anti-colonialism of present-day academe, and he sees Israel — despite the fact that it was the Jews that kicked the British out of Palestine — as a colonial power, and the Palestinian Arabs as an oppressed indigenous people (despite the fact that they are not so indigenous).

This is stupid enough when you hear it from college students, but it’s downright frightening when it distorts the policy of the most powerful nation on earth!

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, WikiLeaks, Israel

“Let’s see you explain this,” say my friends:

The Israel Democracy Institute released the results of its Israeli Democracy Ranking and poll on Tuesday, revealing that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis say the government should encourage [Israeli] Arabs to emigrate from Israel, and only 51% believe Jews and Arabs should have equal rights. — Jerusalem Post (the poll data is here)

Well, I’m going to try. The usual suspects will claim that this shows that Israeli Jews are racists. But there’s other information in the poll that indicates otherwise. For example,

We … posed the question: “Would it bother you to have as your neighbor: immigrants from the Former Soviet Union; ultra-Orthodox Jews; former settlers; a homosexual couple; foreign workers; an Arab family (asked of Jews)/a Jewish family (asked of Arabs); mentally retarded individuals; Ethiopian immigrants; mentally ill individuals in community treatment; people who do not observe Sabbath or holidays?” … For all groups cited, more than half the Jewish respondents answered that having such a neighbor would not bother them (the average of those who responded that they would be bothered is 23%).

That doesn’t sound very racist to me. But there is one kind of question about Arabs that Jews responded in a uniformly negative way: 70% of Jews disagreed with the statement “In your opinion, should more Arabs be appointed to senior positions in Israel?” 86% of Jews think that a Jewish majority should be required for decisions “fateful to the state,” and 62% that “as long as Israel is in a state of conflict with the Palestinians, the views of Arab citizens of Israel should not be taken into account on security issues.”

What is going on here seems to be that many Israeli Jews have come to believe believe that Arab citizens of Israel do not have the best interests of the Jewish state at heart.  Consider that one Israeli Arab member of the Knesset (Azmi Bishara) recently fled the country to escape prosecution for, among other things, providing targeting information to Hizballah during the 2006 war, and another  (MK Haneen Zouabi) — sailed on the Mavi Marmara and calls for the dismantling of the Jewish state.

In recent years the degree to which the ‘Israeli Arabs’ (who prefer now to be called ‘Palestinian citizens of Israel’) identify with Israel’s enemies has sharply increased. Sometimes this is expressed violently and sometimes not, sometimes politically — as in Zouabi’s calls for Israel to be ‘de-Zionized’ — and sometimes in the form of criminal activity.

But apparently the periodic riots and other expressions of anti-Zionism have convinced the Jewish public that the experiment in coexistence that is today’s Israel, in which 20% of the population is Arab, is not working as well as Ben-Gurion hoped it would.

In other words: Israeli Jews aren’t racists, they’re just sick of Arab bad behavior.

Technorati Tags: Israel Democracy Institute, Israeli Arabs

I am going to quote something which most Americans know by heart and even think is unexceptional:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. — The First Amendment to the US Constitution

It is, however, very exceptional. For example, there is no corresponding freedom of speech in liberal, democratic Europe. There, the European Parliament reserves the right to determine what kind of speech is acceptable and to jail anyone that speaks in an unacceptable way.

Now, you might say that Holocaust denial, for example, is very bad and should not be permitted, not to mention the huge amount of truly vicious racist material available on the Internet. But as Madison and Jefferson realized, laws are blunt instruments and have to be applied with human discretion. All you need is the wrong human and what was intended to protect individuals can be turned to oppress them.

Europe’s response to the racist policies of the Nazis was to criminalize certain kinds of speech. But ironically, the forces that are taking advantage of this are the ones whose intent most closely parallels that of the Nazis — radical Islamists.

In 2008, the EU adopted a ‘Framework Decision‘ to reconcile the treatment of speech-crimes (my phrase) by its various members in regard to “racism and xenophobia.” It went into effect yesterday. In part, it says

1. Each Member State shall take the measures necessary to ensure that the following intentional conduct is punishable:

(a) publicly inciting to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin;

(b) the commission of an act referred to in point (a) by public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material;

(c) publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in Articles 6, 7 and 8 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin when the conduct is carried out in a manner likely to incite to violence or hatred against such a group or a member of such a group;

…

2. For the purpose of paragraph 1, Member States may choose to punish only conduct which is either carried out in a manner likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting.

3. For the purpose of paragraph 1, the reference to religion is intended to cover, at least, conduct which is a pretext for directing acts against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.

Now consider what this could mean in practice. Take the Goldstone Report, which concluded — by a combination of falsehoods and unsound reasoning — that the IDF committed war crimes in Gaza, deliberately harming Palestinian Arab civilians in order to ‘collectively punish’ them for supporting Hamas. Although the report itself is simply a badly-done slander produced by the most Israel-hostile circles in the UN and NGOs, it was officially adopted by the UN Human Rights Council.

So the Goldstone Report can be used as ‘evidence’ that publicly defending Israel is a crime under 1(c) above!

Further, a literal reading of the EU decision implies that speech that is ‘insulting’ to a religious group may be ‘inciting to hatred’ and therefore unlawful. Unlike the criterion of inciting to violence, which is somewhat objective, something can be said to be ‘insulting’ if the ‘victim’ of the speech-crime claims to be insulted.

There is no doubt that many Muslims found the famous Danish cartoons insulting, so it appears that the cartoonist and publisher would have also committed a crime. Is there any doubt that they would be prosecuted today?

Note that the truth or falsity of the speech is irrelevant here. If it is construed to be ‘insulting’ or ‘abusive’ then it doesn’t matter.

Europeans sometimes comment on the ‘obsession with individual freedom’ that characterizes the US. I remind them that Fascism was invented there.

Technorati Tags: EU, freedom of speech

Here is a quick calculation by Dana Milbank (h/t: IsraelMatzav):

El Al, Israel’s national carrier, reported spending $107,828,000 on security in 2009 for the 1.9 million passengers it carried. That works out to about $56.75 per passenger. The United States, by contrast, spent $5.33 billion on aviation security in fiscal 2010, and the air travel system handled 769.6 million passengers in 2009 (a low year), according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. That amounts to $6.93 per passenger.

Hmm, you get what you pay for, apparently. Milbank’s point is that the overall cost would be astronomical, while IsraelMatzav says that passengers could simply be asked to pay an extra $50 or so per ticket. Two ways of looking at the same number.

While our government is capable of throwing a large amount of money and other people’s inconvenience (for an absolutely incredible example, watch the video below) at the problem, it can’t be solved by the present system.

The TSA employs standard procedures that are applied to everyone “by the book.” Officers are obviously not encouraged or permitted to exercise initiative with respect to the procedures that are documented. The terrorist, on the other hand, has no difficulty in learning exactly what these procedures are and has complete freedom to think creatively about how to circumvent them.

It’s no contest. Humans dominated the earth’s ecosystems by using their large, creative brains. A rule book, no matter how carefully crafted, can’t possibly compete with a human brain.

The Israeli system — profiling in many dimensions, using screeners who talk to the passengers and look for behavioral clues to escalate the degree of scrutiny, multiple levels of security, methods that are not disclosed, etc. — is designed to pit intelligence against intelligence.

Milbank suggests that we cannot use the Israeli system because of the cost. But I don’t think that’s the major obstacle. As IsraelMatzav suggested, there ways to pay for it. I think the problem is that we’ve developed a culture in which anything discriminatory is taboo (and invites lawsuits). And the discrimination need not be racial or ethnic — you are simply not allowed to single anyone out, ever, for anything, unless it’s done by a legal proceeding.

The Israeli system is inherently discriminatory, because only by discriminating in some way is it possible to focus enough to have a good chance of detecting an actual terrorist. Apparently our government thinks that it’s easier to break the taboo on strangers touching your genitals than the one against discrimination. Which might be true, but it’s still ineffective.

Airport security is a much larger issue in microcosm: the difficulty of fighting an asymmetric war. Airline terrorism is only a small part of the war between the West and radical Islam. What’s important about it is that it may be giving rise to the first time the larger society in the US has actually had to deal with explicitly giving something up as a result of the war.

Some of the confusion is due to the fact that our government hasn’t faced the reality, named the enemy, acknowledged the need for sacrifice, and taken steps to spread it around in a more equal way. Until we begin to see the struggle we are in clearly, we are going to continue to be frustrated and angry — and we won’t prevail.

I promised a video. Take some people who not paid very well to do a job  that they know is impossible with the tools they are given. Tell them that a byproduct of the Sisyphean task they are charged with is  that their ‘clients’ are likely to also be frustrated, annoyed and hostile. Here’s the result:

Technorati Tags: airport security, TSA, Israeli system