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He may or may not be aware of it, but our President has reached one of those crystal-clear moral choice points. Today it’s possible to make a decision that will either put him squarely on the side of the angels, or … the other side.

Today the president can show that America stands up for the truth (and incidentally for Western civilization), he can equivocate and temporize, or even take the dark side. What will he do?

There are reports, which the White House denies, that the Administration intends to support an international investigation of Israel’s actions in intercepting the ships of the “Free Gaza Flotilla.”

The facts of the case  are about as black and white as anything could possibly be. The information is out there for the world to see even without the massive resources of the US intelligence services at the president’s disposal. And this information shows that Israel’s naval commandos were caught in a surprise ambush by a group of organized thugs connected to the Turkish IHH organization, and needed to fight their way out to avoid being killed or taken hostage.

This is not a complicated issue where there is prima facie evidence on both sides of an issue. This is not a question about which people of good will who have the facts can differ. It’s not a question of policy, it’s simply one of what happened aboard that ship on the morning of May 31, 2010.

And that information is available in the form of videos of the boarding itself and of the preparations made by the thugs, testimonies taken from  the captain and first officer of the ship, and testimonies of the Israeli commandos. Look at these videos and conduct your own investigation.

What will the president do? Will he support the next pseudo-forensic lynching of Israel that is being plotted by the UN ‘Human Rights’ Council? Will he support some other ‘international’ investigation which will blame Israel? Or will he issue a statement like this:

The US calls for an impartial investigation of the attack on Israeli Navy personnel on May 31. The investigation should be charged to determine how the attackers were allowed to board the ship with inadequate or no security checks, who organized, trained and paid them, who commanded them during their vicious attack, and whether elements in the Turkish regime knew about the plan in advance or even initiated it. We must not shrink from asking, “What did ErdoÄŸan know and when did he know it?”

And he could add something like this:

The Hamas occupation of the Gaza Strip is unsustainable and should be terminated immediately. Hamas violently overthrew the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, killing members of the opposition. It committed and continues to commit murderous aggression against Israel, a UN member state. Hamas is a terror organization, dedicated to genocide, which violates civilized norms by its anti-democratic, racist and misogynist policies. I condemn those who support or supply the Hamas regime and call on all the civilized nations of the world to work to end this regime.

Today we are in the midst of a struggle between the West and the forces of radical Islamism, led by Iran. Their short and medium-term goals are to destroy Israel, to remove all US influence from the Mideast, to take control of much of the world’s oil resources, and to establish a new Caliphate in the region which will challenge the democratic nations of the world for leadership. Their long-term goal, quite seriously, is to bring about a world entirely dominated by radical Islamism.

Israel, almost surrounded by Iranian proxies, is on the front line of this struggle. This incident represents Turkey’s entrance into the fray on the side of Iran, in an attempt to hand a double victory to Hamas — a tactical victory by forcing Israel to weaken its blockade, and a diplomatic one by legitimizing Hamas in the eyes of the world.

Which side is our president on?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Gaza Flotilla investigation, Hamas, President Obama

The last 10 days have surprised me.

I thought I was cynical about the way humans are capable of believing things that are contradicted by what they see with their own eyes, but apparently I was naive.

I realized that the phenomenon of ideologues only hearing the voices of their own side was much more extensive than I’d thought.

I saw that the amount of ignorance, stupidity and viciousness in the world, especially the supposedly better-educated part of it, was far, far greater than than I had imagined in my worst nightmares.

I saw that a form of atavistic hatred that I had thought was dying out in ‘civilized’ society was alive and breathing heavily.

I saw some ‘critics of Israeli policy’ drop their masks, because it has now become acceptable to admit that the real problem, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, is “Those Troublesome Jews“.

When Helen Thomas dropped hers (OK, maybe it had been slipping for some time), she was greeted with some official condemnation and massive grass-roots support. Rabbi David Nesenoff, who taped her telling Israeli Jews to “go home, to Poland and Germany,” has received over 25,000 hate mails, some of which can be seen on his website.

There’s a Security Council “Presidential Statement,” a vicious Human Rights Council resolution, demonstrations and rallies against Israel all over the world — even in Fresno, California — a surge of antisemitic incidents in France and other places, threats from Turkey, Iran and Syria, and suggestions from Barack Obama that Israel’s policies are ‘unsustainable’ and must change in the direction of concessions to Hamas.

What precipitated the explosion was that a group of violent Turkish Islamists, in an operation probably planned and certainly supported by the ErdoÄŸan regime, mobbed and beat Israeli soldiers in an attempt to take hostages, resulting in the serious injury of several soldiers and the death of 9 of the Turks.

Hardly a legitimate reason for the worldwide explosion of anti-Israel hatred, or the diplomatic pressure being applied to Israel by friends and enemies alike.

Compare Israel’s actions in enforcing a blockade against the remarkably vile Hamas with the behavior of the Iranian regime last year, when the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei regime stole the election and then beat, murdered, arrested, tortured and raped dissidents who pointed this out.

World reaction then, and especially the response from the Obama administration, was tepid. Many similar comparisons can be made.

Several members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors have introduced a resolution condemning Israel and calling for the president to work toward “ending the siege” of Hamas-ruled Gaza. San Francisco, the gay capital of the world, is being asked to support Hamas — I know they would not put it this way, but that’s what it is about — which advocates the death penalty for homosexuality. Indeed, gay Palestinians do their best to escape both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, to Israel, one of the few places that a gay Arab can live in peace.

My wife would explain this by saying “there must be something in the water,” but if so, it’s in the water all around the world.

Here’s how one observer explains it:

…in the last two decades especially, the Left has made anti-Semitism respectable in intellectual circles. The fascistic nature of various Palestinian liberation groups was forgotten, as the “occupied” Palestinians grafted their cause onto that of American blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Asian-Americans. Slurring post-Holocaust Jews was still infra dig, but damning the nation-state of Israel as imperialistic and oppressive was considered principled. No one ever cared to ask: Why Israel and not other, far more egregious examples? In other words, one could now focus inordinately on the Jews by emphasizing that one’s criticism was predicated on cosmic issues of human rights and justice. And by defaming Israel the nation, one could vent one’s dislike of Jews without being stuck with the traditional boorish label of anti-Semite.

So an anti-Semitic bigot like Helen Thomas could navigate perfectly well among the top echelons of Washington society spouting off her hatred of Israel, since her animus was supposedly against Israeli policies rather than those who made them. Only an inadvertent remark finally caught up with her to reveal that what she felt was not anger growing out of a territorial dispute, but furor about the nature of an entire people who should be deported to the sites of the Holocaust. — Victor Davis Hanson, “Helen Thomas, Turkey, and the Liberation of Israel”

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, Gaza blockade

Washington Post:

The Obama administration said Wednesday that it had warned Israel’s government repeatedly to use “caution and restraint” with half a dozen aid boats bound for the Gaza Strip before Israeli commandos raided the flotilla this week in an operation that killed nine people.

“We communicated with Israel through multiple channels many times regarding the flotilla,” P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement issued in response to a question from The Washington Post. “We emphasized caution and restraint given the anticipated presence of civilians, including American citizens.”

“Don’t use anything more lethal than paintball guns,” the Israelis were warned. “Think how bad it would look if you accidentally shot some Nobel laureates or members of the European Parliament among the humanitarian peace activists on board.”

OK, I made the last part up. But doesn’t it seem that the US is micro-managing Israeli policy more than ever lately?  And not for the better, if you believe, for example, that pressure from the incoming Obama Administration aborted Operation Cast Lead before the final push that would have overthrown Hamas. Or if you think that forbidding Jewish building in Jerusalem is bad for Israel’s sovereignty in its capital. Or if you worry about a radar installation on Israeli soil that is supposed to protect Israel, but which Israelis are forbidden to enter.

Obama Administration officials and advisors are starting to say that close relations with Israel are a liability to US policy.

Well, guess what? It appears that the reverse is true.

Remember when the Bush I Administration told Israel to hold still while Saddam Hussein dropped his Scuds on Tel Aviv? Today we have the ‘red light’ against an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities (possibly such an attack would be impractical, but a red light nevertheless).

Here is my idea for how the US could promote peace in the Mideast: simply get out of the way and let Israel defend itself. Israel is not expansionist. There’s no downside except that the Arabs and Iran will dislike the US. But they do that already.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Obama Administration

I know I promised not to write more about this, but it will not go away.

Speaking to CNN’s Larry King [last week], Obama said, “You’ve got loss of life that was unnecessary. So we are calling for an effective investigation of everything that happened. I think the Israelis are going to agree to that — an investigation of international standards — because they recognize that this can’t be good for Israel’s long-term security.  — YNet

I don’t know what he means by ‘of international standards’, but I agree that there absolutely needs to be an investigation.

However — and I say this in all seriousness — it is not Israel which should be investigated. It’s quite clear what Israel did (you can watch the video if you haven’t already), and why it was done.

What needs to be investigated is the vicious attack on the boarding party: who financed and organized the perpetrators, how they got on the ship, and what their connection was to the Turkish regime.

Here are some facts:

1. An initial analysis of statements taken from passengers aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara after it was towed to the port of Ashdod show that operatives belonging to the radical Islamic Turkish IHH led the violent confrontation with the IDF.

2. The statements confirmed that the violence met by the IDF soldiers was not spontaneous but rather an organized, premeditated action carried out by a hard core of 40 IHH operatives (among the 500 passengers). The operatives, who acted according to a clearly-defined internal hierarchy, boarded the ship in the port of Istanbul without undergoing a security inspection (as opposed to the other passengers, who boarded in Antalya after a full inspection).

3. The IHH operatives’ preparations included handing out walkie-talkies as they boarded the ship, taking over the upper deck, setting up a situation room for communications, and a briefing given to the operatives two hours before the confrontation by IHH head Bülent Yildirim, who was on board the ship and commanded his men. IHH operatives wore ceramic vests and gas masks, and were armed with large quantities of cold weapons which they had prepared from equipment found on board (knives, axes, metal cables, metal pipes used as clubs, wrenches, etc.). They were also equipped with box cutters which had been prepared on the upper deck in advance.

4. The passengers, including the IHH operatives, stated that there were close relations between the organization and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip ErdoÄŸan and that the Turkish government was involved in preparations for the flotilla. The statements reinforce the original assessment that the objective of the flotilla was not merely to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, but focused on provocation and a violent confrontation with Israel.

5. According to statements from the passengers, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip ErdoÄŸan maintains close contacts with IHH. The flotilla set sail with the full knowledge and agreement of ErdoÄŸan, who expressed personal interest in its success and his intention to exploit it promote his status in Turkey and the Arab-Muslim world. Passengers said that before the flotilla set sail, Prime Minister ErdoÄŸan constructed a scenario based on a possible confrontation with Israel which he could use to further his own needs. The statements were supported by descriptions found in files on laptop computers belonging to the passengers.

There’s much more. I think that only a thorough, impartial international investigation can determine the facts. And if it is determined that elements of the Turkish regime were responsible or even knew about the plan in advance, they should be held to account — perhaps by the International Criminal Court.

But even this may not be the worst of it. Barry Rubin, who has excellent connections in Turkey, writes,

There is a widespread story, which cannot yet be verified but seems to be more than a rumor, for why this tragedy might have happened. People ask: Why did the Israeli soldiers land on a ship where they should have expected to be received with a violent attack?

According to some people who are in a position to know, here’s the reason: ErdoÄŸan assured Israel that the ship’s passengers were peaceful and there would be no violence. That’s why Israel approached taking and diverting the ship in the manner it did.

Keep in mind that ErdoÄŸan went into a full-bore diplomatic and propaganda attack immediately after the incident. If this report turns out to be true, then this affair will make its mark in the annals of diplomatic treachery.

Turkish PM ErdoÄŸan explains his motives.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Gaza flotilla, ErdoÄŸan, IHH, treachery

I had a discussion with a friend the other day in which we talked about one-state and two-state solutions. She didn’t see how a two-state solution could work (neither do I), but a one-state solution is worse. What to do? My usual response is “do nothing and wait for the Arabs to change,” which is kind of unsatisfying, I admit.

Backing up a bit, the two-state solution won’t work mainly because the major Palestinian factions – roughly divided into the Arafatists and Hamas – don’t want it. Neither group can swallow a sovereign Jewish state of any size, although their ideas of the kind of Arab state that they would replace it with and their strategies for getting there may differ.

The Obama plan envisions either somehow getting the Palestinian factions together or having the Arafatists crush Hamas. In either case the resultant will continue to ‘resist’ the ‘occupation’ which began with the Zionist aliyah of the 1880’s. Either the administration is naïve, or it just doesn’t care about the result once it has discharged its obligation to create ‘Palestine’.

The fundamental problem is that the Palestinians think that they can win if they resist persistently enough. They like to use the example of the 200-year occupation of the Holy Land by the crusaders.

This is why the Oslo accord failed. The agreements proposed at Camp David and Taba called for an actual end to the conflict and did not include a ‘return’ of Arab refugees to Israel. In other words, they left the Jewish state standing. But Arafat thought that with more patience and sacrifice, he could reach his goal of no Jewish state.

Daniel Pipes explained this in one of the most widely (and deliberately) misunderstood remarks anyone has made about the conflict. He said that the Palestinians had to be beaten and humiliated, they had to lose hope on a large scale before there could be peace. He was accused of everything from Islamophobia to advocating genocide, but all he meant was that they had to stop believing that they could win everything before they would consider a compromise in which both sides would have something.

As long as the Palestinians continue to believe that the destruction of Israel is just around the corner – or at least inevitable – there will be no peaceful solution to the conflict.

They are encouraged in their intransigence by the international Left, which makes a huge amount of noise in their favor, and by Western governments that see some advantage in supporting them. And hatred of Israel has become a religious issue – a brand new ‘pillar of Islam’ – for many Muslims.

Recently the anti-Israel forces have a new primary patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran has changed the military balance of power in the region by arming Israel’s traditional enemy, Syria, by installing its Hizballah proxy in Lebanon, by arming and financing Hamas, and most of all, by developing nuclear weapons.

A very troubling sign is the movement of Turkey away from the West and Israel and toward the Iran-Syria-Hizballah-Hamas bloc. Nothing made this more evident than last week’s Mavi Marmara incident.

The Palestinians see all this as vindication of their patient strategy and are positively salivating over the thought – voiced by Ahmadinejad this week – that Israel’s destruction is at hand. The hope that feeds Palestinian extremism is coming from Iran.

The Obama administration thinks that by forcing Israel to acquiesce to the creation of a Palestinian state it will reduce extremism and make it easier to deal with Iranian ambitions (this is called ‘linkage’). But as we’ve seen, weakening Israel only exacerbates extremism. And Iran is driving the Palestinians, not the reverse!

Most observers believe that the buildup of arms on Israel’s northern border, as well as in Gaza, will certainly lead to war at some point. Are they just going to pile up all of those rockets and not use them? It’s not likely.

Ahmadinejad and his new ally ErdoÄŸan seem to enjoy predicting war and hinting that it will lead to big changes (by which they mean the end of Israel). But this can work both ways.

When war comes, there will be an opportunity to change the equation which has stymied all attempts at a solution of the conflict. This will require Israel to frame its war goals as not simply to repel the attackers and punish them enough to deter future attacks (for a while, anyway), but to fundamentally shift the balance of power in the region. But Israel can’t do this alone.

The most important goal must be to neutralize Iran as a destabilizing force. At the very least this implies that its nuclear weapons development capability must be destroyed. At the most it must include forcing a regime change. Iran must not be able to continue its role as ‘the arsenal of rejectionism’.

The Syrian missile arsenal, especially its non-conventional weapons, must be eliminated.

Hizballah and Hamas must be removed as military threats, and their leadership wiped out as well. Israel could have finished Hamas in 2008-9, but was prevented from doing so by US pressure. This simply can’t be allowed to happen again.

This is a massive task even for a major military power, which Israel is definitely not. Too bad that the Obama administration doesn’t realize that a humbled Iran would be the best thing that could happen for US interests.

Israel is only a sideshow for Iran, whose main goal is to kick US influence out of the Middle East so that it can control the oil supply and build its Caliphate. Indeed, one of the main reasons Iran is hostile to Israel is that it sees it as an American base (of course another reason is that to be the leader of the Muslim world, you have to be the biggest enemy of Israel, a lesson Turkish PM ErdoÄŸan has taken to heart).

The Obama approach seems to be to withdraw from the Mideast while doing his best not to step on the toes of Iran and the Muslim world so that when the nuclear, oil-rich Caliphate becomes a major world power, it will let us alone. This of course misses the point that for religious-ideological reasons, it won’t let us alone.

But the US has the ability to set the Iranian nuclear project back a generation, or end it altogether, although there is a very small window of time within which this is possible.

Meanwhile, Israel could bring down Hizballah, which has been called Iran’s Foreign Legion, and which is one of Iran’s main tools for striking against the West. It would also be happy to neutralize Syria and Hamas.

By cooperating with Israel, an ally both practically and ideologically, the US has a chance to resist and even reverse Iran’s progress, and perhaps change the course of world history. And at the same time, by removing the driving force behind Palestinian extremism, Obama could actually achieve what he has promised to do: end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What a deal!

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Iran