FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

This post is not going to make me any friends. So be it; but I feel the need to explain that I am qualified to write it. My two daughters and son all served in the IDF. My son was in what is always referred to as “an elite combat unit” and came under enemy fire in southern Lebanon before the 2000 withdrawal. He is still a reserve soldier in that unit. I haven’t experienced what the Shalit family has, of course, and I am not criticizing them for doing whatever they can to get their son back. I might do the same in their circumstances.

One would think that Israel’s Prime Minister had kidnapped Gilad Schalit himself:

Demonstrators in the protest tent in Jerusalem where the Schalit family is staying to call for the release of captured IDF soldier Gilad Schalit blocked the road to the Prime Minister’s Residence on Friday.

The demonstrators yelled slogans such as “Olmert, you made a promise — now keep it!” and “We want him home, we want him now.” Many carried banners and some used whistles, hoping the sounds will reach the prime minister’s living room…

“Anything that could be done to save his life is the right thing to do,” Education Minister Yuli Tamir (Labor) told the [Jerusalem Post] last Thursday.

She spoke on the fifth day of an intensive campaign launched by Schalit’s parents, Noam and Aviva, who on Sunday pitched a tent outside the prime minister’s residence in a last-ditch effort to sway Olmert to finalize a prisoner exchange before he leaves office…

Hamas has demanded the release of 1,400 prisoners, including 450 who were involved in terrorist attacks that killed Israelis, but Israel has balked, reportedly offering to free half of the 450. — Jerusalem Post, Mar. 12 (my emphasis)

Today, I read that

Hamas toughened its stance during Egyptian-mediated negotiations for Gilad Schalit’s release, went back on understandings that were agreed upon during the past year and raised extreme demands, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement released late Monday night, following the return of Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Yuval Diskin and senior negotiator Ofer Dekel from marathon talks in Cairo over the kidnapped soldier…

According to the various accounts Monday night, Israel had agreed to release most of the prisoners on the Hamas list, with Channel 2 reporting 400 out of the 450, and the main point of contention was Israel’s demand to expel several of the prisoners to foreign countries. — Jerusalem Post, Mar. 16

Of course, even when (not ‘if’) Israel agrees to the latest demands, negotiators will find that the goalposts have moved yet again. The process seems to be as much the point as the ultimate outcome for Hamas, which enjoys twisting the knife in  countless Israelis and Jews, not least the Schalit family.

But MK Yuli Tamir is wrong. “Anything” is not the “right thing to do”.  Agreeing to the Hamas demands will

• Surely result in the death and injury of additional Israelis who will be targeted by the murderers who will be freed
• Be followed by additional kidnappings
• Establish for once and for all that Hamas, not Israel, won the war and is in control
• Open the door to international recognition of Hamas, opening the crossings, etc.

Operation Cast Lead was terminated early out of fear: fear of the Obama Administration, fear of additional IDF casualties and fear of world opinion. As a result, Hamas jumped in legitimacy, popularity and influence.

Well, world opinion could not possibly have been worse if Israel had used nuclear bombs (indeed, she was falsely accused of using depleted uranium ammunition in Gaza), and the Obama Administration will do what it thinks best for the US regardless of what Israel does. And if that is to force Israel into an agreement with the Palestinians, so much the better if this happens without Hamas!

Casualties are a true concern. But I think the question is not how high a price Israel will have to pay, but rather whether it will need to paid now or later. I believe that the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is not big enough for Israel and Hamas. Hamas will not go away without a confrontation, so the question is “when will it occur and on whose terms”.

It is still possible for Israel to rectify the error of the present government, to go back into Gaza and try to rescue Schalit, and this time destroy the Hamas leadership and its war-making capability.

Another advantage to finishing Hamas now will be to reduce the number of fronts on which Israel will have to fight after the inevitable Iran operation.

I’m sure Yuli Tamir doesn’t think so, but this is the ‘anything’ that should be tried for the sake of Schalit — and for the sake of the Jewish state.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Gilad Schalit, Hamas

Speaking on PBS, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggested that the US would not take preemptive military action except in response to a direct threat to attack our country:

Mr Gates said: “The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq] and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence.”

He said any future president would “ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago”.

He added: “I think that the barrier, first of all, will be ‘are we going to be attacked here at home?'” — BBC

Taken at face value, this means that Iran will be permitted to develop nuclear weapons as long as they are aimed only at the Middle East and Europe. It implies that Iran is free to use nuclear blackmail to take control of Middle Eastern oil resources, subvert US allies in the region, advance its Islamic revolution and proceed with its project of destroying Israel without fear of US military intervention. All that is required is that Iran does not put a warhead on a missile capable of reaching the US.

What is wrong with the Obama administration that it would allow such a signal to be sent?

Is the US abandoning  Israel and other Mideast allies on the Iranian nuclear question?

By Shalom Freedman

On March 11, 2009 American Defense Secretary Robert Gates commented that the U.S. would be especially careful before engaging in another major military intervention. In the light of the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and certainly in regard to the Iraqi WMD fiasco, his remarks make sense.

But Gates in elaborating his position went on to say that the United States would intervene against Iran only if it attains weapons which constitute a threat to continental United States. Iran now has missiles which are capable of reaching Southern Europe, but there is very small likelihood that Iran in the next few years will have a capability to reach the United States with its weapons.

However Iran is rapidly developing a nuclear option. Israeli Intelligence believes that this may come as early as in this present year. The Americans put the time somewhat later but they too understand that Iran is not more than a couple of years away from nuclear weapons capability.

So what Gates is in effect saying is that should Iran develop nuclear capability the United States would not intervene, so long as it did not also have a intercontinental ballistic missile capability. This message says to Iran quite openly that it can continue to go forward enriching uranium and preparing the weaponization process which will give it a nuclear capability. It promises that the United States is not going to stop this. It says that the United States will live with a nuclear threat to its Mideast allies, first of all Israel, then Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and also perhaps with its NATO allies in Southern Europe.

In effect it also seems to say that should Iran attack one of the American allies with those nuclear weapons the United States would not necessarily respond.

Secretary Gates is thus elaborating a policy which — instead of protecting American allies — enhances the dangers to them. He is also elaborating a no-interference policy with Iran which will lead it to the very threshold of nuclear weapons, or beyond. One consequence of this will be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and the end to all non-proliferation agreements. Another consequence is the greater likelihood of nuclear war.

It is understandable that having been widely condemned for the intervention in Iraq, the United States does not wish to take actions which would bring further global condemnation. But it does not make sense to tie your hands behind your back and allow your enemies a major strategic gain. Nor does it make sense to abandon your friends in order to try and appease, if only for a time, one of your worst enemies.

Shalom Freedman is a writer living in Jerusalem.

Technorati Tags: Robert Gates, Iran, Iranian nuclear weapons, proliferation, Middle East

The most interesting part of the debate about the nomination of Chas Freeman for head of the National Intelligence Council is not so much the anti- side — where I find myself, unsurprisingly — but the rhetoric of his defenders.

The issue itself is simple. Freeman is President of the Middle East Policy council (or was, from 1997 until just recently; the MEPC website still lists him as president), originally called the American Arab Affairs Council, an organization receiving major funding from Saudi Arabia and which promotes the Saudi viewpoint. It would not be far from the truth to call him a paid agent of the Saudi kingdom.

Freeman was also a member of the “International Advisory Board” of Chinese state oil company CNOOC from 2004 until this February 1. Both of these connections raise serious questions of conflict of interest quite unrelated to his views about Israel.

Now let’s get to his defenders. Stephen Walt, co-author of the notorious attack on American Jews and Israel “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” said

The Likudnik wing of the Israel lobby is gradually losing influence, because more and more people understand that its policies are disastrous for both Israel and the United States, and because its repeated efforts to smear people and stifle debate are deeply damaging as well as un-American. — Walt, “Have they not a shred of decency?“

Walt doesn’t mention Freeman’s Saudi and Chinese connections while he attacks his detractors for “McCarthyism” and claims that

What unites this narrow band of critics is only one thing: Freeman has dared to utter some rather mild public criticisms of Israeli policy.

Of course this is nonsense. See, for example, this letter by Congressman Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) opposing the nomination. Note that the word ‘Israel’ does not appear therein. And Wolf is not the only member of Congress expressing similar concerns; at least 10 others have done so.

Walt commits the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi (“Red herring“) by ignoring the arguments about conflict of interest and replacing them with accusations against the ‘Israel lobby’ and its undue influence. In his use of emotion-laden terms such as “McCarthyism”, “Likudnik”, “smear” and — last but definitely not least — “un-American”, Walt is guilty of the fallacy of “appeal to emotion“, the attempt to replace real arguments with emotional trigger words. In his statement that “more and more people understand…”, he commits the fallacy of “appeal to belief“, since the number of people who believe a proposition is irrelevant to its truth.

For these, plus an overall tendency to substitute ad hominem attacks for reasoning, I am giving Walt an F in Logic 101. Maybe he will do better next semester.

While Walt only hints that Freeman’s critics are motivated by their er, ‘ethnicity’, slimy M. J. Rosenberg, being Jewish himself, is allowed to say it explicitly:

…Jonathan Chait of the New Republic is an interesting case. He’s liberal on every single issue but Israel (on which he is pure neocon), not only liberal but brilliant. But when it comes to Israel, he just can’t get beyond the ethnic pull. Even worse, he does not understand that his ethnic blinders (and that is all they are) have led him to support an approach to Israel that, if it succeeds, will destroy it.

Rosenberg thinks that Freeman’s critics exposed their “ethnic” bias by opposing him because they think he will be bad for Israel, and only pretending to care about the Chinese connection (he doesn’t mention the Saudi connection).

M. J., step into my office: you have received an F. The motivations of the “usual suspects” don’t matter. Only their arguments do (argumentum circumstantial ad hominem). And the argument is that Freeman has serious conflicts of interest.

Rosenberg even admits that he, personally, supports Freeman because he thinks he will be anti-Israel (OK, he uses the phrase “honest broker”):

It’s the same reason I’m writing about Freeman. I want an honest broker. He doesn’t. The only differences between Chait and me on the issue are (1) We have diametrically opposed views about what is best for Israel (2) I know the issue and (3) I am up front about what my interest in Freeman is.

No, the difference is that he has a legitimate argument which you prefer to ignore for ideological reasons!

Richard Silverstein just lays it on in the thickest partisan terms: a “Republican pro-Israel witch-hunt” orchestrated by the “pro-Israel Right” of the Republican Jewish coalition.  He claims that one cannot be opposed to Freeman without also being opposed to Obama’s employment of advisors such as Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross because they have received money from “pro-Israel sources”.

Richard, I’m giving you a D for not understanding that ‘pro-Israel sources’ are not the same as ‘foreign governments’. And I’m reducing that to an F because a) providing advice is not the same as vetting intelligence, and b) what Obama does with Ross and Indyk is irrelevant to what he should do with Freeman.  This argument, if you can call it that, tries to be an argumentum ad hominem tu quoque (“you too”) which would be fallacious even if it were parallel, which it isn’t.

Personally, as a Jewish Likudnik Democrat neo-con (I am not exactly a neo-con, but I will accept the label if it means ‘pro-Israel’, which it seems to in this context) I dislike Freeman for a lot of reasons.

But as an American, I simply don’t want a paid Saudi or Chinese agent preparing intelligence summaries for my President.

Update [10 Mar 2009 1424 PDT]:

WASHINGTON, March 10, 2009 (AFP) – A veteran US diplomat and vocal Israel critic, Charles Freeman, has withdrawn from contention for a top US intelligence post, US intelligence director Dennis Blair announced Tuesday.

Freeman “has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed. Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret,” Blair’s office said in a statement.

Technorati Tags: Chas Freeman, logic, Saudi Arabia