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One of the thousands of rockets captured on its way from Iran to Hezbollah

News item:

Hundreds of tons of weaponry, ten times the size of the Karine A shipment of 2002, were seized in an overnight raid Tuesday by the Israeli navy, some 100 nautical miles west of Israel, officials said. Defense officials said the 140-meter long Francop, captured near Cyprus, was carrying arms sent by Iran and destined for Syria and Hizbullah.

The weapons seized on the ship, which was sailing under an Antiguan flag, included 3,000 rockets of various types… Israel Radio reported that advanced anti-aircraft platforms never before found in the region were also on board… The weapons included 107-millimeter rockets, 60-millimeter mortars, 7.62-rifle Kalashnikov-ammunition, F-1 grenades and 122-millimeter Katyusha rockets. On the side of some of the cases inside the containers the words “parts of bulldozers” was written.

[Update: See this report at The Muqata for more details, pictures and video of the 500 tons of arms carried by the ship!]

In shipping arms to Hezbollah, Iran is violating international law and UN Security Council resolutions. It will be interesting to see if there are diplomatic repercussions for Iran, but probably the UN will follow Syria’s lead, which has called Israel’s Navy ‘official pirates‘.

Those who are concerned with peace should consider the behavior of Iran. First, let’s look at some of the actions of Iran’s wholly owned terrorism subsidiary, Hezbollah, to which the following actions are generally attributed:

• The 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in which 299 members of the Multilateral Force, including 220 US Marines, were killed
• The bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut, also in 1983, in which 60 people were killed
• The 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, in which US Navy diver Robert Stethem was murdered
• All or some of the 96 hostages taken in Lebanon between 1982 and 1992, of which 10 died in captivity, some by torture
• A 1992 suicide attack at the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in which 29 died
• The 1994 bombing of the Jewish Mutual Association building, also in Buenos Aires, in which 94 people were murdered
• A war of attrition against Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon from 1982-2000, including an attack that killed seven in 1993
• Sporadic Katyusha rocket barrages from Lebanon at Israeli cities; in 1996, the amount of damage from these reached a level that provoked Israel to bombard South Lebanon (Operation Grapes of Wrath)
• A cross-border raid in 2000 in which three Israeli soldiers were abducted and killed
• A similar raid in 2006 in which seven Israelis were killed accompanied by rocket fire into Israel, which provoked the Second Lebanon War
• Attacks against coalition troops in Iraq in 2006

I may have missed some.

By arming, training and financing Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran has participated in armed aggression against one UN member state, terrorism against the citizens of several others, and antisemitic violence.

In addition, Iran continues to violate the nonproliferation treaty that it signed, pressing forward with its development of nuclear weapons.

So President Obama today, on the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran by Islamic ‘students’, the beginning of the horrific ordeal of 52 Americans for 444 days, strongly rebuked Iran for these violations and for its murderous and disruptive role in world affairs.

Oops… No he didn’t!

Here’s what he said instead:

This event [the 1979 hostage crisis] helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust and confrontation… I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.

Technorati Tags: Iran, Hezbollah, weapons, Obama

Yesterday I had the honor of meeting Barry Rubin, one of the most knowledgeable people around about the Mideast.  One of the questions I asked him was this:

FZ: We know that Syria is closely allied with Iran, receiving a large amount of weapons and other aid. We also know that Syria is helping Sunni insurgents in Iraq, who are fighting with Americans there, but who also are killing Iraqi Shiites in murderous suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. But if Iran is trying to gain influence in Iraq through the Shiites there, why does it permit (or even encourage) this?

Rubin replied, in effect, that if you understand this, you understand the Middle East.

Iran and Syria have a common goal, which is to increase their joint influence in Iraq and to hurt the US. The insurgent attacks accomplish this in several ways, including making the Iraqi government more dependent on Iran and less on the US — to whom can they turn to make the attacks stop? — and by weakening American-aligned Shiites like PM Nouri al-Maliki and strengthening those closer to Iran such as the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr.

Dead Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia? Collateral damage.

The Maliki government has accused Syria of ‘facilitating’ the massive dual bombings in Baghdad last Sunday, in which at least 155 people were killed and hundreds injured.

What's left of the Iraqi Justice Ministry after last Sunday's massive suicide bombing

One would think that the US would do everything it could to help Maliki — and incidentally protect our troops in Iraq — like put pressure on Syria to close the border. But here’s what Rubin wrote last week:

Remember that the Iraqi government has been warning about this for months, blaming Damascus for specific attacks based on evidence and interrogations. When this last happened in September, the U.S. government refused to take Baghdad’s side. Nor was there any break in the move to engage Syria. Nor was there any interruption–in fact, the exact opposite–in the European move to make a partnership agreement which would pump more money into Syria.

What are our policymakers thinking?

It’s almost as if, instead of doing what it can to ensure that Iraq will remain independent when US troops leave (I know, it’s unlikely in any event), we have accepted the idea that it will join the Iranian orbit, and are acting to ingratiate ourselves with the new regional leaders, Iraq and Syria.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, Iran, Syria, terrorism

It’s a floating weekly collection of Jewish and Israeli blog highlights called haveil havalim, this week found on Simply Jews. There’s something for everyone there, including a post of mine!

The name means “vanity of vanities”, in case you wondered.

Richard Goldstone, author of the infamous Goldstone Commission report, which accuses Israel of war crimes in Gaza, will debate Dore Gold, former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, at Brandeis University on November 5. The proceedings will be streamed live to the internet from the site.

The Goldstone report is full of inaccuracies and falsehoods (see also here as well as here), as well as making the very serious and completely unsubstantiated claim that the IDF intentionally caused civilian casualties and damage as a form of collective punishment — when of course the opposite was true.

The UN mandate of the commission was only to investigate Israel. Goldstone himself announced that it would be broadened to include anything that anyone did in the context of the war, and the report did contain a statement that Hamas “may have” committed war crimes by firing rockets at Israeli civilians — something that was ignored by the UN Human Rights Council in the wholly anti-Israel resolution by which it adopted the report.

The methods used by the commission were so biased as to be laughable:  evidence and testimony were chosen selectively. Pro-Israel testimony was discredited Even when the same person presented testimony that included anti- and pro-Israel components, the pro-Israel ones were discarded. Accusations made by Hamas or Hamas-linked groups were accepted as fact, while IDF rebuttals were deemed non-credible. Much of it was simply copied from reports published by highly anti-Israel NGOs like Human Rights Watch.

Richard Goldstone has said that “ours wasn’t an investigation, it was a fact-finding mission,”  and “if this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven.” However, at the same time he defends the process, and calls for a more ‘investigations‘ to give further prominence to the libelous charges in his report.

Dore Gold is a smart guy, and a good speaker. He will be prepared.

What should happen is that Goldstone will apologize to Gold, the state of Israel and the Jewish people, and then ceremonially disembowel himself. This is unlikely.

What will happen if it is a fair fight is that Gold will cut Goldstone to ribbons.

Caroline Glick thinks that it will not be a fair fight:

In an e-mail to a campus list-serve, Brandeis student and anti-Israel activist Jonathan Sussman called on his fellow anti-Zionists to disrupt the event that will pit the “neutral” Goldstone against Gold with his “wildly pro-Zionist message.” Sussman invited his list-serve members to join him at a meeting to “discuss a possible response.”

As the young community organizer sees it, “Possibilities include inviting Palestinian speakers to come participate, seeding the audience with people who can disrupt the Zionist narrative, protest and direct action.” He closed his missive with a plaintive call to arms: “F**k the occupation.”

The problem is that Sussman’s planned “direct action” against Gold is not an isolated incident. On college campuses throughout the US, Israelis and supporters of Israel are regularly denied the right to speak by leftist activists claiming to act on behalf of Israel’s “victims,” or in the cause of “peace.” In the name of the Palestinians or peace these radicals seek to coerce their fellow students into following their lead by demonizing and brutally silencing all voices of dissent.

I’m with Glick. Having personally experienced the tactics of the Zionophobic alliance of radical Muslims and left-wing extremists, I think that no effort will be spared to prevent this debate from taking place, and if it does to shout down or in some way silence Dore Gold.

This event will be a test case for the proposition that the constitutional guarantee of free speech is still upheld in the United States of America.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Richard Goldstone, Dore Gold, free speech, Brandeis University

News item:

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) — A newly restructured and slimmed down Union for Reform Judaism will focus on interfaith relations and the rights of Israeli Arabs at its biennial convention Nov. 4-8 in Toronto…

“The union has long held that Israel should live up to its Jewish values and its democratic values for all citizens,” said Rabbi Elliott Kleinman, director of Advancing Reform Judaism, a position created this summer to coordinate Union for Reform Judaism activities worldwide.

With all due respect, this is not an appropriate path for an American Jewish denomination to take.

There’s no doubt that there’s inequality in the treatment of the Arab minority in Israel. The average American, on hearing this, will think: it’s just like our own civil rights struggles. Israeli Arabs are like African-Americans, and the solution is just to force Israel, like Mississippi, to give them their rights.

It is nothing like that. Not at all.

For one thing, some of the perceived differences between Jewish and Arab towns may not be due to discrimination. If a road in an Arab town isn’t paved, is it because the money hasn’t been allocated or because the mayor of the Arab town has different priorities, like projects benefiting members of his own clan?

For another, Canada and Mexico are not populated by hostile cousins of our African-Americans. The US has not recently fought several major and numerous minor wars with them. Mexican and Canadian blacks are not firing rockets into our cites, kidnapping our soldiers or infiltrating our borders to blow us up.

Israeli Arabs are not descended from slaves (unless some of them were slaves of other Muslims), and they had the ability to vote from 1948,  before many American blacks did. There was no  Reconstruction and counter-Reconstruction, no Jim Crow laws, no segregated buses or lunch counters. There is no tradition of lynching Arabs who look at Jewish women — the lynching that sticks in my mind happened to Jewish reservists. And there is no long history of terrorism by African-Americans.

African-Americans are not demanding that the US change its flag or its national anthem, or that a ‘black caucus’ have a veto power over all acts of Congress. They are not demanding a change in our national identity.

There have been riots by African-Americans in our cities — after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., after the Rodney King beating, etc. It’s clear where the frustration that led to these riots came from, even if there was a criminal element that may have exploited the chaos.

There have been Arab riots, too. There was a ‘riot’ in 1834 in Tzfat, in which an entire Jewish community was destroyed. Arabs have rioted periodically in response to incitement about the al-Aqsa Mosque. This happened in 1929, when hundreds of Jews were murdered, long before there was an Israel to ‘discriminate’ against them; it happened in 2000 after Yasser Arafat threw Israel’s offer of a sovereign state back in its face; and it happened a couple of weeks ago. The politically correct view is that this happens because Arabs are ‘frustrated’ about being ‘second class citizens’, but what they are actually frustrated about is not being in possession of all of Jerusalem (and Israel).

There is plenty of tension between Jews and Arabs in Israel, but it is only to a small extent a question of civil rights. A whole lot of it has to do with a trend for Arab citizens of Israel to more and more identify as ‘Palestinians’, not just alienated from but actively hostile to the Jewish state. Unsurprisingly, the solution does not lie in — why does this seem so familiar? — forcing Israel to accept Arab demands.

It’s incredibly arrogant and insulting when Rabbi Kleinman (above) calls for Israel to “live up to its Jewish values and its democratic values for all citizens,” implying that Israel does not live up to said values.

But what word characterizes liberal American Jews better than ‘arrogant’? The J Street approach, that a bunch of ‘progressive’ American Jews can and should tell the democratically elected government of Israel how it ought to act — during a time that is probably no less perilous than any since 1948 –  is an example.

Another is the New Israel Fund, which collects money from well-meaning American Jews and uses it to support groups that are actually working to destroy the Jewish state, also in the name of ‘civil rights’.

Americans — including Jews — don’t understand Israel very well, and insist on applying American paradigms where they don’t fit. How can you discuss the relationship between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel without considering the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict, or indeed, the 100-year Arab war against Israel?

Lest they make fools of themselves and hurt Israel at the same time, I suggest to the URJ that their people concentrate their efforts on helping poor people and solving social problems here in the USA. That’s enough to keep them busy for years.

Technorati Tags: URJ, Israel, Israeli Arabs, civil rights