Endgame will be too late

January 25th, 2007

I believe that although the Wahabis, al-Qaeda, and the Mullah’s regime in Tehran are often lethally competitive with one another, they are capable of unification. Those who say that these movements will never work together because of their ideology are precisely as correct as those who in the 1930s said that the communists and the Nazis would never work together. They didn’t, until they did. — James Woolsey, at Herzliya conference.

Woolsey is a former director of the CIA. He too sees that we are at a critical juncture in world history and must take very difficult decisions in the very near future. Read Chess with Tehran.

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The mainstream media vs. Western civilization

January 25th, 2007

So when historians look back, I think they will identify the MSM’s appalling performance as one of the main sources the West’s vulnerability to Global Jihad at the beginning of this century. — Richard Landes, at Herzliya Conference.

This is not just journalism-centric exaggeration, it’s a serious argument which you must read — here. He also shows how the biased coverage of the Israeli-Arab conflict is a paradigm case of the media’s failure at this critical point in history.

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What NPR didn’t ask Carter

January 25th, 2007

Jimmy Carter was interviewed this morning on NPR. The interviewer pressed him on his use of the word ‘apartheid’, an obvious and reasonable question. However, there are a few other questions, also obvious and reasonable that were not asked. For example:

  • Do you think that you were influenced in any way by the millions of dollars you personally and the Carter Center received from Arab sources?
  • You said in your book that the Arabs must recognize Israel’s right to exist in peace. Don’t you think that it’s reasonable to expect an end to terrorism before Israeli concessions are made that compromise her security? Wouldn’t it be irresponsible for the Israeli government to give up territory while rockets are falling?
  • The thrust of your arguments is that Israel is responsible for the conflict as a result of her occupation of ‘Palestinian land’ in 1967. How do you account for the Palestinian terrorism against Israel (and the pre-state Jewish presence) since at least 1920? Don’t you think that the Arabs — both the Palestinians and Israel’s neighbor states — must bear some responsibility for the sustained terrorism and war that they’ve waged against the Jews over the years?

Update [25 Jan 1453 PST]: Read Kenneth Stein’s review of Carter’s book. Stein was Executive Director of the Carter Center from 1983 to 1986, and the Center’s Middle East Fellow until 2006, when he resigned in protest of the book.

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Hezbollah takes Lebanon to the brink…and backs off

January 24th, 2007

NasrallahHezbollah’s strike on Tuesday totally paralyzed the capital and resulted in five deaths. There’s no doubt that Nasrallah can topple the government whenever he wants. Either some external force dissuaded him, or — now that he’s shown what he can do — he prefers to get control by means of threats. You can read the details in the Lebanon Daily Star.

A Lebanon under Hezbollah control is an even greater threat to Israel than a weak Lebanon which can’t control it. Remember that the Lebanese army is supposed to prevent Hezbollah guerrillas from deploying on the border and even disarm them (according to UN resolution 1701)!

If Lebanon becomes Hezbollastan, it will be a piece of the Shiite crescent being established by Iran in the heart of the Mideast — Iran, Iraq (after the US leaves), Syria, and Lebanon. This is more or less exactly the opposite of what US policy was supposed to achieve.

Will the US and Israel permit this to happen? Can they do anything about it?

Update [25 Jan 1114 PST]: Lebanese students fight it out, two more dead.

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Mainstreaming antisemitism

January 24th, 2007

What we are facing today is nothing new. Jews are being wronged in many ways: in the political, economic, and social arenas; both as an identity as well as individually. The purpose of this is to intimidate us, to silence us so that we will not speak up. In my opinion, the British model is what the United States will experience in the near future, where there will be an increase of anti-Semitism on campuses and in societies, and what is marginally acceptable will become commonly acceptable.

We have seen many intellectual elites bitten with this cancer in Britain and worldwide, such as the revival of the Durban process to delegitimize Israel by 2009…We have seen the impact of the inflow of Saudi money into British campuses. More mosques have been built in the US in recent years, in which most of them Wahabism is taught…It is time for us to think anew as we see the marginally acceptable ideas becoming visibly accepted by the mainstream. [my emphasis] — Malcolm Hoenlein, at the Herzliya Conference

There can be no doubt that there is a deliberate plan to delegitimize Israel in part by weakening her natural suppporters, the Jews. The latent power of the antisemitic virus is so great in the West that it doesn’t take much to stimulate its flowering, and a lot of money is flowing from the twin poles of radical Islamism, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The themes adumbrated in the ‘academic’ work of Mearsheimer and Walt and the popularization of Jimmy Carter now find expression even in discussions of real estate.

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