Two short takes

October 16th, 2009

Palestinian Rocket Science

News item:

A weapons lab containing explosives and pipes that were apparently meant to be used to assemble rockets was discovered in a joint Border Police-IDF-Shin Bet [Israel Security Agency] operation last month in Abu Dis, next to Ma’aleh Adumim, security officials announced Friday. Three Palestinians were arrested.

Abu Dis is about 4.2 km (2.6 miles) from the center of Jerusalem. This is well within the range of Qassam missiles; at an estimated speed of 200 m/sec, such a weapon would land in about 21 seconds after launching. Of course rockets made in Abu Dis could be moved anywhere in the territories. Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport is about 10 km (50 seconds) from the Green Line, which puts it  just within range of the latest Qassams.

The reports do not indicate which terrorist group the three Palestinians belonged to.

***

Turkish drama

News item:

Following the recent slump in Jerusalem-Ankara relations caused by last week’s cancellation of a joint military drill and Tuesday’s airing of an anti-Israeli drama on a government-controlled TV channel, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc downplayed the apparent tensions.

“Relations between Israel and Turkey have always been strong, and we’re entirely sure that they will remain strong,” Arinc told local reporters on Friday.”

Referring to the TV drama Ayrilik – which variously depicted IDF soldiers shooting a fleeing Palestinian boy in the back, killing a sweetly smiling Palestinian girl at point-blank range and lining up Palestinian detainees before an IDF firing squad – Arinc that “there are no political motives to the television drama that annoyed Israel.”

The ‘television drama’ is so disgusting that I’m not going to embed the YouTube video here. But you can see it at the source linked above.

Daily anti-Israel incitement is a fact of life in most Arab and Muslim countries. During the Gaza war, Al Jazeera showed almost continuous ‘news’ reports, which were visible everywhere — in homes, stores, public places.  Here’s how Eric Calderwood described them (in a not particularly pro-Israel article which you should read in full):

Their broadcasts routinely feature mutilated corpses being pulled from the scene of an explosion, or hospital interviews with maimed children, who bemoan the loss of their siblings or their parents – often killed in front of their eyes. Al-Jazeera splices archival footage into the live shots, weaving interviews and expertly produced montages into a devastating narrative you can follow from the comfort of your own home.

This is news without even the pretense of impartiality. After several days of following the Al-Jazeera coverage of Gaza, I’ve never seen a live interview with an Israeli, neither a politician nor a civilian. In the Al-Jazeera version, the Gaza conflict has only two participants: the Israeli army – an impersonal force represented as tanks and planes on the map – and the Palestinian civilians, often shown entering the hospital on makeshift stretchers. There are few Hamas rockets and no Israeli families. It’s not hard to see why Al-Jazeera is accused of deliberately inflaming regional enmity and instability.

Is there any wonder that the absurdly biased Goldstone report was taken seriously in so many venues? Indeed, I’m surprised that as many as 6 members of the UNHRC out of 47 saw clearly enough to vote against its adoption (25 in favor, 11 abstentions, 5 declined to vote, 6 opposed. No, I don’t understand the difference between abstaining and declining to vote!)

Speaking of Turkey, Caroline Glick has a good piece on “How Turkey was lost” today. Although there are obviously good political reasons that the Islamist government of Recip Tayyip Erdogan is moving the nation out of the Western orbit and into that of Iran and Syria, is it not also the case that a relationship with Israel, no matter how advantageous, cannot be maintained in an atmosphere where everyone believes that Israel behaves like — is — the Devil?

After all, both ordinary citizens and politicians watch television.

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Reset again

October 15th, 2009

Time to hit the reset button (again), Mr. President.

You made solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the centerpiece of your foreign-policy efforts both during the campaign and after your election.

You didn’t know too much about the Middle East, having concentrated on Chicago up until now, but your advisers — smart people like Zbig Brzezinski, Samantha Power and Rob Malley — told you that you could squeeze Israel back to pre-1967 borders and make the Arab world happy, and maybe get yourself a Nobel Prize for finally solving the conflict that had gone on for 61 years (actually, it’s been much longer than that).

All you had to do was force Israel to get out of the territories and allow the PLO to declare a state there. Hamas-dominated Gaza was a problem, but you could deal with that, er, somehow.

Well, they did give you the Nobel, for good intentions — it certainly couldn’t have been for dousing the conflict, which is burning as brightly as ever.

Even before your inauguration, you pressured Israel to end the war in Gaza with Hamas still standing. You failed to understand that the ability of the PLO to maintain a radical, no-compromise position rests on the implied threat that the alternative is something worse, Hamas.

You insisted on a freeze on all construction in the territories and East Jerusalem. Oops — didn’t you realize that no Israeli government could accept a limitation on sovereignty in its own capital, or a prohibition on building homes inside areas that would have become part of Israel under any imaginable peace deal?

To add insult to injury, your ‘friends’ in the Arab world that you tried so hard to ingratiate yourself with wouldn’t even make symbolic concessions to Israel in return!

And when you finally understood this and relaxed the demand for a freeze, you found out the hard way that legitimacy in Palestinian politics does not leave room for compromise. The PLO stabbed you in the back by refusing to talk without the impossible freeze.

This lesson was reinforced when you pulled Mahmoud Abbas’ string to get him to withdraw his insistence on bringing the Goldstone report to the Security Council, only to see him do a 180 a few days later.  What did you expect? As a result, your guy lost whatever standing he had among the Palestinians, with Hamas the gainer.

Finally, with your efforts to bring about a deal struggling on the ropes, Hamas moved in with a solid uppercut to the jaw, delivered by its surrogate the Islamic Movement in Israel — which is doing its best to incite a third intifada by spreading lies about an imminent Jewish ‘attack’ on the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

So what did you accomplish? Less than nothing.

Meanwhile, the real threats to peace — Hezbollah and Hamas –  are daily becoming stronger and more dangerous.

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Understanding J Street

October 13th, 2009

I really have to take a vacation from J Street, the “pro-Israel” lobby that takes money from Iranian and Saudi sources. But I can’t stop feeling that I need to understand them.

Recently, the Israeli embassy in the US criticized J Street for “advocating policies that could impair Israel’s interests”. Today its director, Jeremy Ben Ami, published a letter to Israel’s Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren:

In just two weeks, over 1,000 people – most of them American Jews – will gather in Washington to give voice to a burgeoning movement that loves Israel, cares about its future, and believes only peaceful and immediate resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can secure Israel’s future as the democratic home of the Jewish people.

I hope that he and the other 999 people will think twice about this, because a “peaceful and immediate resolution” of the conflict will not happen, not in this world, not when the Palestinian leadership consists of the PLO and Hamas. Anyone who knows anything about the Mideast understands this.

But I don’t think this is the important argument. The real thrust of the letter is to play to the insecurities of  some American Jews, not to relate to the objective situation in the Mideast:

We will come together as pro-Israel activists to discuss the best path forward for Israel and the United States in troubling circumstances, balancing a desire for security and for peace and a commitment to the values we bring to the table as Jews and as Americans.

Ben Ami is suggesting that there is a conflict between Israel’s security and our values as Jews and Americans. In this he outdoes Mearsheimer and Walt, who don’t mention Jewish values, but simply suggest that the conflict is between American and Israeli interests. It’s a very strange conception of “Jewish values” that doesn’t support a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, but of course Ben Ami claims that he does. Here’s more in this direction:

The excitement that J Street has generated and its rapid early growth indicates that there is a thirst in the progressive Jewish community – and among young liberal Jews – to find a way to relate to, to talk about and, yes, to advocate for Israel that is consistent with progressive Jewish values. We are only one facet of a new and growing movement in American Jewry that is attracting hundreds of thousands of progressive Jews into study, communal service and non-traditional observance.

Judging by the policies advocated by J Street, one can assume that this progressive Jewish way to relate to Israel includes denying it the right to self-defense — J Street called for an immediate cease-fire on the first day of the Gaza war — and opposing sanctions on Iran. Try as I might, I can’t find the Jewish value in Iranian atomic bombs.

But of course what he really means is to find a way to oppose Zionism, like most of today’s ‘progressives’, without having to admit that one wants to see the Jewish state disappear.

Some have suggested that maybe J Street, as an American organization, should not assume that it knows better how to assure the survival of Israel than the government democratically elected by the people that live there, the people who will have to live with the outcome; and that even though it might disagree with some of the actions of that government, as a ‘pro-Israel’ group it should at least support the broad outlines of Israeli policy — such as strong diplomatic action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. But Ben-Ami sets them straight in no uncertain terms:

Public comments by your spokesman last week indicate that you have “concerns over certain policies [of J Street’s] that could impair Israel’s interests.” I’m sure you also have concerns and disagreements over policies advocated by certain political parties and their leaders in Israel. That’s democracy – and it is fitting that there would be deep disagreements at moments of important communal decision.

We too have our own serious concerns over the policies of the present Israeli government and its impact not just on Israel’s interests but on our interests as Americans and as American Jews. As Jews who care about Israel, we fear that, on Israel’s present path, we will see our shared dream of a Jewish, democratic home in the state of Israel slip through our fingers.

As Americans, we worry about the impact of Israeli policies on vital US interests in the Middle East and around the world.

Finally, as American Jews, we worry that the health and vitality of our community will be deeply affected by what happens in the region, how the world perceives Israel and by how our community here at home deals with increasingly complex conversations around Israel.

This is incredible.

First of all, it’s not a question of ‘democracy’. J Streeters in the US do not have to worry about Hamas and Hezbollah rockets, or sending their sons and daughters to fight wars, or — at least for a while — getting vaporized by Iranian nukes. Does he seriously suggest that taking decisions about dealing with these threats is ‘communal’ and should include J Street?

Second, this is at least the third time Ben Ami plays the ‘American interests’ card. What interests in particular is he talking about? Cheap oil? Or is he just trying to raise the spectre of ‘dual loyalty’ accusations against Jews?

And third… this is the best one. What are the “increasingly complex conversations” that he refers to?

Are they the conversations that ‘progressive’ Jews have with their ‘progressive’ friends when Israel keeps embarrassing them by not committing suicide? The Left’s adoption of Zionophobia as an integral part of its world view  is a long-established fact, and this may give rise to a feeling of being left out for Jews who haven’t yet purged themselves of their ‘bourgeois Zionism’. Is Ben Ami suggesting that the lack of courage to hold an unpopular position is a virtue?

Or maybe I misunderstood. Maybe he means that the US Jewish community better be careful, because they don’t want to become associated with those hated Israelis, lest it give rise to a new wave of antisemitism in the US. So when they come to beat you up or worse, you can tell them that you are a real American, not one of those Zionists.

You know what? It’s just too hard to answer all of these questions. Is J Street’s ‘progressive’ Jewish sensibility a manifestation of the old ghetto self-protection instinct to not stand out, not make waves? Or is Jeremy Ben Ami just another guy paid to screw Israel, like Jimmy Carter or Chas Freeman?

You decide.

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What the hell has happened to us?

October 11th, 2009

Read the following truly shocking piece all the way through, and then try to answer this question:

What the hell has happened to us?

As Obama Advisor Courts Radical Islamists by Agreeing with Them, Obama Administration Cuts Off Funds to Human Rights Monitoring Group

By Barry Rubin

“It has been reliably reported that Mohammad-Reza Ali-Zamani, a 37-year-old Iranian, was sentenced to death on Monday.” There are three things that make this sentence of great significance.

Read the rest here

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Reality Inversion Alerts are back!

October 11th, 2009

We haven’t issued a Reality Inversion Alert in some time, so I’ll repeat the definition:

Reality inversion alerts will be issued by FresnoZionism.org whenever Israel’s enemies or their lackeys are caught using their favorite propaganda technique, which is to turn the truth upside down by falsely accusing Israel of doing exactly what they themselves do or try to do.

So, for example, when lackey of apartheid Saudi Arabia Jimmy Carter accuses Israel of being an “apartheid state”, or when the genocidal Hamas movement accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians, reality inversion is taking place.

Today we have two Reality Inversions to report.

First, Saudi Arabia and Syria, two serial reality inverters if there ever were such, issued a joint communiqué last week after the visit of Saudi King Abdullah to Syria. In part,

The communiqué urged joint Arab and Islamic action to stop the continuous Israeli aggression on the Palestinians. The two sides stressed the need to lift the Israeli siege on Al-Aqsa Mosque and confront the measures taken by Israel to Judaize Jerusalem, it added.

So now it’s an ‘Israeli siege’ on the Temple Mount?

The reality is the opposite: the recent attempt to spark violence there are a result of a struggle between Hamas and Fatah for influence in an area which they believe will soon be wrested from Israeli hands by the US. By spreading rumors of an intended ‘takeover’ of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by radical Jewish ‘settlers’, and calling for Arabs to ‘defend’ it, Sheik Raed Salah of the the Islamic Movement is trying to get recruits and money for his organization, which serves as a surrogate for Hamas in Jerusalem.

Nothing helps the Palestinian cause more than violent confrontations, so that Israel’s responses to keep order and protect her citizens can be played as ‘aggression’. Salah and Hamas would love to see a ‘third intifada’, and lacking a Sharon visit to the Temple Mount as a pretext, they are doing their best to create one.

And second, Israel is finally calling out J Street, whose declaration that they are “pro-Israel” is itself a Reality Inversion:

WASHINGTON – The Israeli Embassy informed J Street of its concern that the new lobbying group advocates policies that could “impair Israel’s interests,” an embassy spokesman has told The Jerusalem Post…

J Street has taken several positions at odds with the Israeli government in recent months, including arguing against the immediate imposition of additional sanctions on Iran even as Israel pushes for greater action, and backing US President Barack Obama’s call for a complete settlement freeze in the face of Israeli opposition.

And that isn’t the half of it. J Street, the left-wing Jewish lobbying group which claims that it more accurately represents the position of American Jews than AIPAC (and ‘proves’ it with misleading polls),

…called for an immediate cease-fire on the first day of the Gaza war, believes that negotiations with Iran should be carried out without threat of sanctions, opposed — lobbied against — a congressional initiative asking the President to encourage Arab nations to normalize relations with Israel, called for a complete freeze on construction inside settlements, approved of President Obama’s granting the Medal of Freedom to  Mary Robinson (who as UN Commissioner for Human Rights presided over the 2001 Durban conference), favored an American performance of the antisemitic play Seven Jewish Children, calls for negotiations with Hamas, and is funded not only by the dollars of liberal Jews, but those of known supporters of Arab and Iranian causes…  — FresnoZionism, “The fresh, young, ignorant faces of J Street“

Freedom of speech demands that there be room for yet another anti-Israel lobby, to join the multitude of Saudi- and Iranian-funded ones, and I suppose even one composed of Jews, albeit ignorant ones. But respect for language, logic and decency demands that they don’t invert reality and lie about their goals.

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