"The latest figures on decreased jobless claims and a huge increase in
third-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) signal a continuation of the
Clinton-Gore economic boom, according to an expert."--ScrappleFace.com,
Oct.?31
"Adding to the Democrats' challenge is a fundamental economic reality that
existed well before household and business spending soared this summer. As
much as the economy weakened in the last three years, it was coming off such a
high that it remains stronger by most measures than in the early 1990's. That
high was reached on Mr. Clinton's watch, but it could help Mr. Bush next
year."--New
York Times, Nov.?2
American anger against the French seems to have cooled somewhat since the
spring. But today's Washington Post brings us a timely reminder of why we hate
the French (and aren't wild about the Russians either). The Post reports on the
interrogation of Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's "deputy prime minister": "Aziz has
told interrogators that French and Russian intermediaries repeatedly assured
Hussein during late 2002 and early this year that they would block a U.S.-led
war through delays and vetoes at the U.N. Security Council."
Paris and Moscow may have outsmarted themselves, however:
Later, according to Aziz, Hussein concluded after private talks with French
and Russian contacts that the United States would probably wage a long air war
first, as it had done in previous conflicts. By hunkering down and putting up
a stiff defense, he might buy enough time to win a cease-fire brokered by
Paris and Moscow.
Israel has captured a Hamas terrorist who "admitted to investigators that he
planned to perpetrate a suicide bomb attack in Israel," the Jerusalem Post
reports. The Israelis searched the home of the unnamed suspect and found the
bomb belt--"underneath the bed of his baby daughter."
The Post
also reports that a 16-year-old suicide bomber blew up when Israeli troops
cornered him. "The would-be-suicide bomber's father, Kamal, said that 'he was
just a little boy and those who sent him should have left him alone.'?"
What a charming culture.
?
The damned dems' again....
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying that on his
recent trip to Iraq, a Najaf resident asked him at a town hall meeting: "What's
going to happen to us if George Bush loses the election?":
Wolfowitz didn't mention the Democrats, but he suggested the question sums
up Iraqi fears that a new team in the White House would abandon them.
Wolfowitz said he tried to assure the Iraqis, but "when they hear the
message that we might not be there next year, they get very scared."
?
Blair's political
paradox
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
|
Tony Blair stands astride British politics like a
colossus, with no credible challenger in sight. Yet this same Tony Blair has
never been in so much trouble with his electorate. He is the most important
leader in the supranational politics of Europe, which he must creep back into
with caution and skill after a period of estrangement.
These are the paradoxes that swirl
around Britain's singularly determined and moralistic prime minister.
They spring in large part from his odd
political friendship with George W. Bush and from Blair's unhesitating decision
to go to war in Iraq at America's side.
Many Britons believe that Bush would
not have invaded Iraq without Blair's support, and they resent Blair for that.
Others complain that Blair gets little from Washington in return for the
enormous risks he has taken.
These are debatable notions. What is
clear today is that U.S. influence in a changing, highly fluid Europe depends
heavily on Blair's vision, energy and political viability. He is certainly the
indispensable American ally in that sense.
At home, Blair's preeminence was
confirmed last week when the Conservatives paid him the ultimate compliment:
They tossed out their lackluster party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, in a desperate
bid to find someone who can eventually stand up to Blair. This came after Blair
convincingly faced down left-wing critics at his Labor Party's annual conference
in September.
?
But such acts of real politics do not
keep Blair from stumbling along at low levels of public approval, as the
electorate blames its supersized leader for poor railroads or public health
reforms that threaten jobs and tradition.
Such complaints are exacerbated by the
feeling that Blair spends too much time on foreign affairs -- and especially on
his connection to the deeply unpopular Bush.
"The polls show that the people want
their prime minister back," one Blair adviser says. "He has to take note of
that."
Blair will become more visibly involved
in domestic affairs, three brief visits to England over the past two months
suggest to me. But Americans and Europeans must hope that this will not lessen
Blair's commitment to international and European affairs, which has been
remarkably consistent and productive.
Blair did not join in invading Iraq to
please Bush or for immediate gains for Britain. The two men have built a good
personal relationship -- better in some ways than the one Blair enjoyed with Bill
Clinton -- but they are still on uncertain ground when it comes to working
together.
"At the end of their meetings, I think
the prime minister comes away feeling that the deal has not really been closed,
or that if there was a deal it could come undone the next day," one Blair
confidant said. "I think that is not an untypical reaction by foreign leaders
dealing with this White House, but it gets nerve-racking when you're about to go
to war together."
Blair rejects accusations that he went
into Iraq to curry favor with Washington. "It is worse than that," Blair told
rebellious Laborites last spring in a line his aides love to quote. "The truth
is I really believe in this."
There are in fact two strands behind
Blair's politically costly commitment on Iraq.
One is the view captured in a private
comment he made to a British cabinet member years ago: "In a crisis, Britain's
default position is with America."
Another associate explains that Blair
feels that "the biggest danger facing the world is an isolationist America, an
America that will not be at Britain's side or Europe's side when we need it."
But that does not mean choosing America
instead of Europe. In recent weeks Blair has resumed building bridges to France
and Germany in what one aide says is an attempt "to construct a plausible
alternative to this administration's unilateralist temptation," which will be
given free rein if France and others make obstructing U.S. power a primary
objective of the European Union.
Blair's diplomatic strategy is, for
obvious reasons, best pursued in code or in silence. But Blair has been highly
vocal on the second strand of his commitment -- his belief in humanitarian
intervention. I first heard him touch on that theme in casual conversations a
decade ago. He developed it fully in a brilliant speech delivered on April 22,
1999, to the Chicago Economic Club.
Blair's consistency both on the U.S.
connection and interventionism has been obscured by his decision to build his
prewar case on Iraq around the gathering danger of weapons of mass destruction.
Neither that misstep nor his domestic woes negates the significant strategic
contributions that Tony Blair has made -- and must continue to make -- to
transatlantic security and international justice.
?
The truth about Bush
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
|
A couple of weeks ago in this space I ran down the
strengths and weaknesses of the Democratic presidential contenders, so now, to
be "fair and balanced," let's evaluate President Bush.
?
His strongest suit is the bond he
forged with the American people immediately following the terror attack on
September 11. Mr. Bush reacted the way most Americans reacted, with anger and a
stark determination to right the wrong. And he did, he dethroned the Taliban and
sent Al Qaeda into the caves. That sequence of events provided Bush with an
emotional attachment to the folks. Only two other American presidents in my
lifetime have had that: John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
?
George W. Bush is also a strong leader.
He doesn't waffle around, and he isn't poll driven. He makes determinations and
sticks to them. Some believe this is a minus, but I think a strong leader is a
major plus in this time of terror. So the president's determination to stay the
course could very much help him win reelection if the course is deemed
successful. That's the hard part.
?
Also, Mr. Bush is seen as an honest man
who espouses traditional values. That will shore up his conservative base, and
even though he's a huge spender, the right wing will not abandon him.
?
Finally, in the plus department, the
president is helped by those who are demonizing him. The criticism is so over
the top in many quarters that legitimate questions about Bush's leadership are
sometimes lost among all the vitriol. The loony left's defamatory attacks
persuade no one; they are simply shrill notes to the choir that already despises
the president. Bush rarely responds to the grenades, wisely calculating that the
excessive venom will turn off independent-thinking Americans.
?
And now for the downside. The president
rarely shows his affable side because he distrusts his ability to communicate.
He cloisters himself behind iron gates when he should be holding town meetings
and interacting with the people. When Mr. Bush speaks from the heart, he comes
across well. When he relies on canned speeches and statements, he looks like Don
Knotts. He has good reason to distrust the press, but that doesn't mean he
should avoid it. Mr. Bush's inaccessibility is a major drawback.
?
While the economy is picking up and
will recede as a major campaign issue, the president has enormous problems in
Iraq. He must acknowledge those difficulties and explain the mistakes his
administration has made. Mr. Bush continues to run a tightly controlled, closed
shop. This will hurt him in a close election race. Americans will accept
mistakes from a president, but they will not accept uncertainty. Bush's failure
to get out in front of the administration's problems and define the payoff a
stable Iraq will deliver is the biggest weapon the Democrats have against him.
?
The president is generally disliked
overseas, and that's not good. He is portrayed in many places as an American
chauvinist with a poor frame of reference. Thus he is underestimated by prigs
like Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder. The upside is that Mr. Bush is feared
by the bad guys. Osama will not be visiting a Club Med anytime soon. But the
president should make an attempt to be conciliatory to countries that might
possibly help America down the road. He must swallow some pride, and if he
doesn't, the country will suffer.
?
All in all, George W. Bush could go
either way in the history books. If his Iraqi gamble pays off and worldwide
terrorism is kept on the defensive, he will be well remembered. If Iraq
degenerates into a fiasco, he'll sidle up alongside Lyndon Johnson. Like him or
not, the president is a man of strength and weakness. But the war on terror will
define him, and that war is still to be determined.
JWR contributor
Bill O'Reilly is host of the Fox News show, "The O'Reilly Factor," and author
of, most recently,
"Who's Looking Out for You?" Comments by clicking
here.
New Jersey's Tinton
Falls Middle School has suspended 14-year-old Scott Switzer, whose father
and stepfather are both in the military, for a week over a patriotic drawing--a
"stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter"--reports the New
York Post.
"A teacher saw the image on a computer and described it to the principal,"
the Post explains, quoting superintendent Leonard Kelpsh: "We felt it was highly
inappropriate, and we took it very seriously." Scott's mother tells the Post
that school officials described the drawing as "not the work of a normal mind."
Gloria Tillman, a psychologist who has treated Scott for attention-deficit
disorder, is a voice of common sense: "I don't attribute pathological
significance to it. I have to wonder what is expected of our children today when
1) our country is at war and 2) both his father and stepfather are out fighting
the war."
IMRA:
Rabin Center to IMRA: Peres not politician - no
politicians at Rabin
Memorial Assembly
Dr. Aaron Lerner 30 October 2003
IMRA asked Tami Shenkman, who is spokesperson for the "Main Memorial Day
Assembly marking 8 years to the assassination of Prime Minister and Minister
of Defense Yitzhak Rabin", why no one from the government is participating
in the assembly.? Shenkman explained that "we do not want the event to turn
into a political event and so politicians were not invited."
When asked by IMRA about the status of MK Shimon Peres - head of the Labor
Party, who will be a speaker at the event, Shenkman explained that "Peres is
not a politician".
?
[IMRA: Abu Mazen's cabinet was approved by the PLC on 29 April 2003 and his
resignation was received by Arafat on 6 September 2003. Israel's "swinging
barn door" policy, according to which security measures are imposed only
after terrorist attacks and then dropped after a short period of time, in
order to minimize the damage to the Palestinians of security measures,
enabled the terrorists to carry out many of the attacks.
It was reported this week that COS Moshe Ya'alon felt Israel should have
handed over more cities to the Palestinians during the course of the Abu
Mazen administration, apparently despite the refusal of the PA to actually
act against the terrorists in those areas that were under its control.
It is reasonable to assume that the list below would be several magnitudes
longer if the barn door had been opened even wider under the program Ya'alon
appears to support after the fact.]
Apr 30, 2003 - Ran Baron, 23, of Tel Aviv, Dominique Caroline Hass, 29, of
Tel Aviv, and Yanai Weiss, 46, of Holon, were murdered and about 60 people
were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a beachfront pub,
"Mike's Place," in Tel Aviv. The Fatah Tanzim and Hamas claimed
responsibility for the attack, carried out as a joint operation.
Investigation revealed that the two British Muslims involved in the suicide
bombing were dispatched to perpetrate the attack by the Hamas military
command in the Gaza Strip.
May 4, 2003 - The body of Tali Weinberg, 26, of Beit Aryeh, was discovered
in a garage in Rosh Ha'ayin with numerous stab wounds. The suspect,
Weinberg's boyfriend, arrested on June 11, a 21-year-old Arab resident of
Kafr Qasem, is believed to have carried out the murder as part of a "loyalty
test" administered by Palestinian terrorist organizations.
May 5, 2003 - Gideon Lichterman, 27, of Ahiya, was killed and two other
passengers, his six-year-old daughter Moriah and a reserve soldier, were
seriously wounded when terrorists fired shots at their vehicle near Shvut
Rachel, in Samaria. The Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades claimed
responsibility for the attack.
May 11, 2003 - Zion David, 53, of Givat Ze'ev near Jerusalem, was shot in
the head and killed by Palestinian terrorists in a roadside ambush half a
kilometer from Ofra, north of Jerusalem. Both Fatah and the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 17, 2003 - Gadi Levy and his wife Dina, aged 31 and 37, of Kiryat Arba
were killed by a suicide bomber in Hebron. Hamas claimed responsibility for
the attack.
May 18, 2003 - Seven people were killed and 20 wounded in a suicide bombing
on Egged bus no. 6 near French Hill in Jerusalem. Hamas claimed
responsibility for the attack. The victims: Olga Brenner, 52; Yitzhak Moyal,
64; Nelly Perov, 55; Marina Tsahivershvili, 44; Shimon Ustinsky, 68; and
Roni Yisraeli, 34 - all of the Pisgat Ze'ev neighborhood in Jerusalem; and
Ghalab Tawil, 42, of Shuafat.
A second suicide bomber detonated his bomb when intercepted by police in
northern Jerusalem. The terrorist was killed; no one else was injured.
May 19, 2003 - Kiryl Shremko, 22, of Afula; Hassan Ismail Tawatha, 41, of
Jisr a-Zarqa; and Avi Zerihan, 36, of Beit Shean were killed and about 70
people were wounded in a suicide bombing at the entrance to the Amakim Mall
in Afula. The Islamic Jihad and the Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades both
claimed responsibility for the attack.
June 5, 2003 - The bodies of David Shambik, 26, and Moran Menachem, 17, both
of Jerusalem, were found near Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital in Jerusalem,
brutally beaten and stabbed to death.
June 8, 2003 - Sgt. Maj. (Res.) Assaf Abergil, 23, of Eilat; Sgt. Maj.
(Res.) Udi Eilat, 38, of Eilat; Sgt. Maj. Boaz Emete, 24, of Beit She'an;
and Sgt. Maj. (Res.) Chen Engel, 32, of Ramat Gan were killed and four
reserve soldiers were wounded when Palestinian terrorists wearing IDF
uniforms opened fire on an IDF outpost near the Erez checkpoint and
industrial zone in the Gaza Strip. Three terrorists were killed by IDF
soldiers. The Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad
issued a joint statement claiming responsibility for the attack.
June 8, 2003 - St.-Sgt. Matan Gadri, 21, of Moshav Moledet was killed in
Hebron while pursuing two Palestinian gunmen who earlier had wounded a
Border Policeman on guard at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The two terrorists
were killed.
June 11, 2003 - Seventeen people were killed and over 100 wounded in a
suicide bombing on Egged bus #14A outside the Klal building on Jaffa Road in
the center of Jerusalem. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.
The victims: Sgt. Tamar Ben-Eliahu, 20, of Moshav Paran; Alan Beer, 46, of
Jerusalem; Eugenia Berman, 50, of Jerusalem; Elsa Cohen, 70, of Jerusalem;
Zvi Cohen, 39, of Jerusalem; Roi Eliraz, 22, of Mevaseret Zion; Alexander
Kazaris, 77, of Jerusalem; Yaffa Mualem, 65, of Jerusalem; Yaniv Obayed, 22,
of Herzliya; Bat-El Ohana, 21, of Kiryat Ata; Anna Orgal, 55, of Jerusalem;
Zippora Pesahovitch, 54, of Zur Hadassah; Bianca Shahrur, 62, of Jerusalem;
Malka Sultan, 67, of Jerusalem; Bertin Tita, 75, of Jerusalem. Miriam Levy,
74, of Jerusalem died of her wounds on June 12.
Haile Abraha Hawki, 56, a foreign worker from Eritrea, was positively
identified on June 24.
June 12, 2003 - Avner Maimon, 51, of Netanya, was found shot to death in his
car near Yabed in northern Samaria. The Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades
claimed responsibility for the attack.
June 13, 2003 - St.-Sgt. Mordechai Sayada, 22, of Tirat Carmel, was shot to
death in Jenin by a Palestinian sniper as his jeep patrol passed by. The
Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.
June 17, 2003 - Noam Leibowitz, 7, of Yemin Orde was killed and three
members of her family wounded in a shooting attack near the Kibbutz Eyal
junction on the Trans-Israel Highway. The terrorist fired from the outskirts
of the West Bank city of Kalkilya. The Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command claimed
responsibility for the attack.
June 19, 2003 - Avner Mordechai, 58, of Moshav Sde Trumot, was killed when a
suicide bomber blew up in his grocery on Sde Trumot, south of Beit Shean.
The suicide bomber was killed. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for
the attack.
June 20, 2003 - Zvi Goldstein, 47, of Eli, was killed when his car was fired
upon in an ambush by Palestinian terrorists near Ofra, north of Ramallah.
His parents, Eugene and Lorraine Goldstein, from New York, were seriously
wounded and his wife lightly injured. Hamas claimed responsibility for the
attack.
June 26, 2003 - Amos (Amit) Mantin, 31, of Hadera, a Bezeq employee, was
killed in a shooting attack in the Israeli Arab town of Baka al-Garbiyeh.
The shots were fired by a Palestinian teenager, who was apprehended by
police. The Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the
attack.
June 27, 2003 - Sgt. Maj. Erez Ashkenazi, 21, of Kibbutz Reshafim, an
Israeli navy commando, was killed in an operation in Gaza to capture a Hamas
cell, believed responsible for several bombings and the firing of anti-tank
missiles in the Netzarim area.
June 30, 2003 - Krastyu Radkov, 46, a construction worker from Bulgaria, was
killed in a shooting attack on the Yabed bypass road in northern Samaria,
west of Jenin, while driving a truck. The Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades
claimed responsibility for the attack, in opposition to the declared
ceasefire.
July 7, 2003 - Mazal Afari, 65, of Moshav Kfar Yavetz was killed in her home
on Monday evening and three of her grandchildren lightly wounded in a
terrorist suicide bombing. The remains of the bomber were also found in the
wreckage of the house. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the
attack.
July 15, 2003 - Amir Simhon, 24, of Bat Yam was killed when a Palestinian
armed with a long-bladed knife stabbed passersby on Tel Aviv's beachfront
promenade, after a security guard prevented him from entering the Tarabin
cafe and was wounded. The terrorist, who was shot and apprehended, is a
member of the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which claimed responsibility
for the attack.
July 21, 2003 - The body of IDF soldier Cpl. Oleg Shaichat, 20, of Upper
Nazareth, abducted and murdered on July 21 while on his way home, was found
on July 28, buried in an olive grove near Kafr Kana, an Arab village in the
Lower Galilee.
Aug 8, 2003 - Third Petty Officer Roi Oren, 20, an Israel Navy commando, was
shot in the head and killed in an assault on a Hamas bomb factory in Nablus.
Aug 10, 2003 - Haviv Dadon, 16, of Shlomi, was struck in the chest and
killed by shrapnel from an anti-aircraft shell fired by Hizbullah terrorists
in Lebanon, as he sat with friends after work. Four others were wounded.
Aug 12, 2003 - Yehezkel (Hezi) Yekutieli, 43, of Rosh Ha'ayin, was killed by
a teenaged Palestinian suicide bomber who detonated himself as Yekutieli was
shopping for his children's breakfast at his local supermarket.
Aug 12, 2003 - Erez Hershkovitz, 18, of Eilon Moreh, was killed by a
teenaged Palestinian suicide bomber who detonated himself at a bus stop
outside Ariel less than half an hour after the Rosh Ha'ayin attack. Amatzia
Nisanevitch, 22, of Nofim, died of his wounds on August 28.
Aug 19, 2003 - Twenty-three people were killed and over 130 wounded when a
Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself on a No. 2 Egged bus in
Jerusalem's Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood. Hamas claimed responsibility for the
attack.
The victims: Avraham Bar-Or, 12, of Jerusalem; Binyamin Bergman, 15, of
Jerusalem; Yaakov Binder, 50, of Jerusalem; Feiga Dushinski, 50, of
Jerusalem; Miriam Eisenstein, 20, of Bnei Brak; Lilach Kardi, 22, of
Jerusalem; Menachem Leibel, 24, of Jerusalem; Elisheva Meshulami, 16, of
Bnei Brak; Tehilla Nathanson, 3, of Zichron Ya'acov; Chava Nechama
Rechnitzer, 19, of Bnei Brak; Mordechai Reinitz, 49, and Issachar Reinitz,
9, of Netanya; Maria Antonia Reslas, 39, of the Philippines; Liba Schwartz,
54, of Jerusalem; Hanoch Segal, 65, of Bnei Brak; Goldie Taubenfeld, 43, and
Shmuel Taubenfeld, 3 months, of New Square, New York; Rabbi Eliezer
Weisfish, 42, of Jerusalem; Shmuel Wilner, 50, of Jerusalem; Shmuel Zargari,
11 months, of Jerusalem.
Fruma Rahel Weitz, 73, of Jerusalem died of her wounds on August 23.
Mordechai Laufer, 27, of Netanya died of his wounds on September 5.
Tova Lev, 37, of Bnei-Brak died of her wounds on September 12.
Aug 29, 2003 - Shalom Har-Melekh, 25, of Homesh was killed in a shooting
attack while driving northeast of Ramallah. His wife, Limor, who was seven
months pregnant, sustained moderate injuries, and gave birth to a baby girl
by Caesarean section. The Fatah al-Aqsa Brigades claimed responsibility for
the attack.
Sept 4, 2003 - St.-Sgt. Gabriel Uziel, 20, of Givat Ze'ev was shot and
mortally wounded by a terrorist sniper in Jenin; he died en route to the
hospital. The Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the Islamic Jihad claimed
responsibility for the attack.
Sept 5, 2003 - 2nd Petty Officer Ra'anan Komemi, 23, of Moshav Aminadav,
from the Naval Commandos was killed in a clash with armed Palestinians in
Nablus. A senior Hamas bomb-maker, believed to have orchestrated several
fatal suicide bombings, was also killed in the clash. Four soldiers were
wounded, one seriously.
?
Palestinians admit IDF captured healthy armed ? man
in hospital cellar (Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades member)
Palestinian National Authority and human rights groups denounced the Israeli
army raid on two hospitals in the West Bank city of Nablus saying
international law prevents military operations in medical facilities.
Israeli forces advanced into Nablus last Saturday and surrounded at the same
time Rafidiyeh and Anglican hospitals to arrest two injured Palestinians,
one in critical condition.
Cabinet minister and Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat called the raid a "a grave
development that contravenes international law."? �This is the most flagrant
violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention when hospitals are not safe," he
said.
Human rights groups condemned the raids, fearing hospitals are no longer
neutral ground in the ongoing fighting, and saying that international law
bans military operations in medical facilities.
Noam Hoffstater, a spokesman for the Israeli human rights group B'tselem,
said the group was disturbed by the raid. "A hospital is not supposed to be
a refuge or a hiding place (for militants) on the one hand, but it can't be
invaded every other day," he said
Elsewhere in Nablus, troops stormed Rafidiyeh Hospital and
arrested Jawad
Ishtayeh, 27, a member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a splinter group
with links to Fateh . The military said troops found the Ishatayeh, hiding
in the hospital's cellar and armed with a pistol. The army said the man was
healthy, and Palestinian security sources said the man was not a patient and
was apparently accompanying a patient.
?
JORDAN TIMES 28 Oct.'03:" 'US should pay to
rebuild Iraq' "
???? "Two-thirds of European Union citizens think the U.S.-led invasion of
Iraq was unjustified and the United States should pay to rebuild the
country"
?
... six months after the toppling of Saddam, a majority in
every EU country
except Denmark said the war was unjustified.
... 68 per cent of EU citizens questioned said the war was totally or rather
unjustified, while 29 per cent said it was totally or rather justified. The
biggest antiwar majorities were in Greece (96 per cent), Austria (86 per
cent), France (81 per cent) and Spain (79 per cent), even though the Spanish
government supported the war.
Asked who should finance the rebuilding of
Iraq, 65 per cent of EU citizens said the United States, 44 per cent the
United Nations, 29 per cent the Iraqi provisional government and 24 per cent
said the European Union. Multiple answers were allowed.
Asked whether they
favoured their own country's financial participation in rebuilding Iraq, 54
per cent said they were totally or partially in favour, while 45 per cent
said they were totally or partially opposed. Overall, 54 per cent opposed
sending peacekeepers from their own country while 44 per cent were in
favour.? ... detailed breakdown showed majorities for sending troops in
Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Britain. The strongest
opposition to sending peacekeepers was in Germany, Greece, Austria and
France.
?
Saudi sermon: destroy...Jews, Christians, and
atheists
FBIS Report - Friday sermons broadcast from? Saudi Arabia? on 24 October
2003:
[With thanks to www.mideastweb.org/mewnews1.htm ]
SAUDI ARABIA:
Riyadh Kingdom of Saudi Arabia TV1 in Arabic, official station of the Saudi
Government, carries at 0911 GMT a live sermon from the holy mosque in Mecca.
The imam concludes with a prayer to God to support Islam and Muslims, humble
infidelity and infidels, elevate the word of right and religion, and support
His faithful subjects. He also prays to God to preserve the king and guide
him and other Muslim rulers according to the Koran and Sunnah. He prays: "O
God, support our brother mujahidin for Your sake and religion everywhere.
O
God, support them in Palestine against the usurper Jews." He also
prays for
Islamic unity.
Riyadh Kingdom of Saudi Arabia TV2 in Arabic, official television station of
the Saudi Government, carries at 0921 GMT a live sermon from the holy mosque
in Medina.
?He prays: "O God, support
Islam and Muslims and destroy the enemies of Islam, including Jews,
Christians, and atheists. O God, whoever wishes our country or Muslim
countries evil, busy him with himself and make his plot turn against him."
He also prays: "O God, support our oppressed brothers against the usurper
Jews in Palestine. O God, deal with Jews for they are within Your power. O
God, show us the miracle of Your power on them. O God, shake the land under
their feet, instill fear in their hearts, and make them booty for Muslims
and a lesson to others. O God, free the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque from the
clutches of the Jews."
?
How's this for an offensive headline: "Attack Is a Media Coup for Iraq
Resistance, Experts Say." That appeared on the front page of yesterday's Los
Angeles Times. There's something almost obscenely decadent about a newspaper
reporting on an attack against Americans as if it were a public-relations
campaign.
Along similar lines, here's the first paragraph of a story in today's Long
Island
Newsday: "The latest rocket and bomb attacks in Baghdad are only the most
recent in a series of setbacks for the Bush administration that threaten to turn
Iraq into a political liability just as the 2004 election cycle is beginning."
Supposedly 95% or Anti-semitic attacks in
Europe are purported by Moslem. There is however widespread Anti-semitism in the
left dominated media and the universities which poison the public opinion.
GETTING
THE MESSAGE
We're Not Losing Anymore
New media give conservatives a fighting chance in the culture wars.
BY BRIAN C. ANDERSON Monday, November 3, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
The left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and
information--which long allowed liberal opinion makers to sweep aside ideas and
beliefs they disagreed with, as if they were beneath argument--is skidding to a
startlingly swift halt. The transformation has gone far beyond the rise of
conservative talk radio, which, ever since Rush Limbaugh's debut 15 years ago,
has chipped away at the power of the New York Times, the networks and the rest
of the elite media to set the terms of the nation's political and cultural
debate.
Almost overnight, three huge changes in communications have injected
conservative ideas right into the heart of that debate. Though commentators have
noted each of these changes separately, they haven't sufficiently grasped how,
taken together, they add up to a revolution. No longer can the left keep
conservative views out of the mainstream or dismiss them with bromide instead of
argument. Everything has changed.
The first and most visible of these three seismic events: the advent of cable
TV, especially Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel. Since its 1996 launch, Fox
News has provided what its visionary CEO, Roger Ailes, calls a "haven" for
viewers fed up with the liberal bias of the news media--potentially a massive
audience, since the mainstream media stand well to the American people's left.
Watch Fox for just a few hours and you encounter a conservative presence
unlike anything on TV. Where CBS and CNN would lead a news item about an
impending execution with a candlelight vigil of death-penalty protesters, for
instance, at Fox "it is de rigueur that we put in the lead why that person is
being executed," senior vice president for news John Moody noted a while back.
Fox viewers will see Republican politicians and conservative pundits sought out
for meaningful quotations, skepticism voiced about environmentalist doomsaying,
religion treated with respect, pro-life views given airtime--and much else
they'd never find on other networks.
Fox's conservatism helps it scoop competitors on stories they get wrong or
miss entirely because of liberal bias. In April 2002, for instance, the
mainstream media rushed to report an Israeli "massacre" of Palestinian civilians
in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin; Fox uniquely--and correctly,
it turned out--treated the massacre charge with complete skepticism. "We try to
avoid falling for the conventional liberal wisdom in journalistic circles--in
this case the conventional wisdom 'Israeli bad, Palestinian good,' " says
daytime anchorman David Asman. "Too often ideology shapes the tendency to jump
to a conclusion--something we try to be aware of in our own case, too."
Nowhere does Fox differ more radically from the mainstream television and
press than in its robustly pro-U.S. coverage of the war on terror. After
September 11, the American flag appeared everywhere, from the lapels of the
anchormen to the corner of the screen. Mr. Ailes himself wrote to President
Bush, urging him to strike back hard against al Qaeda. On-air personalities and
reporters freely referred to "our" troops instead of "U.S. forces," and Islamist
"terrorists" and "evildoers" instead of "militants." Such open displays of
patriotism are anathema to today's liberal journalists, who see "taking sides"
as a betrayal of journalistic objectivity.
Mr. Asman demurs. For the free media to take sides against an enemy bent on
eradicating the free society itself, he argues, isn't unfair or culturally
biased; it is the only possible logical and moral stance. And to call Osama bin
Laden a "militant," as Reuters does, is to subvert the truth, not uphold it.
"Terrorism is terrorism," Mr. Asman says crisply. "We know what it is, and we
know how to define it, just as our viewers know what it is. So we're not going
to play with them. When we see an act of terror, we're going to call it terror."
On television news, anyway, Fox alone seemed to grasp this essential point from
September 11 on. Says Mr. Asman: "CNN, MSNBC, the media generally were not
declarative enough in calling a spade a spade."
Fox's very tone conveys its difference from the networks' worldview. "Fox
News lacks the sense of out-of-touch elitism that makes many Americans, whatever
their politics, annoyed with the news media," maintains media critic Gene Veith.
"Fox reporters almost never condescend to viewers," he observes. "The other
networks do so all the time, peering down on the vulgar masses from social
height (think Peter Jennings) or deigning to enlighten the public about things
that only they understand (think Peter Arnett)."
This tone doesn't mark only Fox's populist shows, like pugnacious superstar
Bill O'Reilly's. Even when Fox goes upscale, in Brit Hume's urbane nightly
"Special Report," for example, the civility elevates rather than belittles the
viewer. For Mr. Ailes, Fox's antielitism is key. "There's a whole country that
elitists will never acknowledge," he told the New York Times Magazine. "What
people resent deeply out there are those in the 'blue' states thinking they're
smarter."
The "fair and balanced" approach that Fox trumpets in its slogan is part of
this iconoclastic tone, too. Sure, the anchor is almost always a conservative,
but it's clear he is striving to tell the truth, and there's always a liberal on
hand, too. By contrast, political consultant and Fox contributor Dick Morris
notes, "the other networks offer just one point of view, which they claim is
objective." Not only does the Fox approach make clear that there is always more
than one point of view, but it also puts the network's liberal guests in the
position of having to defend their views--something that almost never happens on
other networks.
Viewers clearly like what they see. Fox's ratings, already climbing since the
station debuted in 1996, really began to rocket upward after the terrorist
attack and blasted into orbit with Operation Iraqi Freedom. "In the Iraqi war,"
Mr. Morris explains, "the viewing audience truly saw how incredibly biased the
other networks were: 'Turkey did not let us through, the plan was flawed, we
attacked with too few troops, our supply lines weren't secure, the army would
run out of rations and ammo, the Iraqis would use poison gas, the oil wells
would go up in flames, there would be street-to-street fighting in Baghdad, the
museum lost its priceless artifacts to looters,' and now we're onto this new
theme that 'Iraq is a quagmire' and that there 'aren't any weapons of mass
destruction' and that 'Bush lied'--and all the while, thanks in part to Fox
News, Americans are seeing with their own eyes how much this is crazy spin." The
yawning gulf separating reality and the mainstream media during the war and its
aftermath, Mr. Morris believes, "will kill the other networks in the immediate
future--to Fox's benefit."
The numbers make clear just how stunning Fox's rise has been. Starting with
access to only 17 million homes (compared with CNN's 70 million) in 1996, by
2001 Fox could reach 65 million homes and had already started to turn a profit.
A year later, profits hit $70 million and are expected to double in 2003. Though
CNN founder Ted Turner once boasted he'd "squish Murdoch like a bug," Fox News
has outpaced its chief cable news rival in the ratings since September 11 and
now runs laps around it. This past June, Fox won a whopping 51% of the
prime-time cable news audience--more than CNN, CNN Headline News, and MSNBC
combined.
The station's powerhouse, "The O'Reilly Factor," averages around three
million viewers every night, and during Operation Iraqi Freedom the "No Spin
Zone" drew as many as seven million on a given night; CNN's Larry King, once the
king of cable, has slipped to 1.3 million nightly viewers. Cheery "Fox and
Friends" has even edged out CBS's "Early Show" in the ratings a few times, even
though CBS is free, while Fox is available only on cable and satellite (and not
every operator carries it). While the total viewership for nightly newscasts on
ABC, CBS and NBC--more than 25 million--still dwarfs Fox's viewers, the networks
are hemorrhaging. CBS News just suffered its lousiest ratings period ever, down
600,000 viewers; 1.1 million fewer people watch the three network news programs
today than 12 months ago.
Fox enjoys especially high numbers among advertiser-coveted 25- to
54-year-old viewers, and it is attracting even younger news junkies. As one CNN
producer admits, Fox is "more in touch with the younger age group, not just the
25-54 demo, but probably the 18-year-olds." Even more attractive to advertisers,
Fox viewers watch for 20 to 25 minutes before clicking away; CNN watchers stay
only 10 minutes. Fox's typical viewer also makes more money on average--nearly
$60,000 a year--than those of its main cable rivals.
Not only conservatives like what they see. A new Pew Research Center survey
shows that of the 22% of Americans who now get most of their news from Fox
(compared with a combined 32% for the networks), 46% call themselves
"conservative," only slightly higher than the 40% of CNN fans who do so. Fox is
thus exposing many centrists (32% of Fox's regular viewers) and liberals (18%)
to conservative ideas and opinions they would not regularly find elsewhere in
the television news--and some of those folks could be liking the conservative
worldview as well as the professionalism of the staff and veracity of the
programming.
The news isn't the only place on cable where conservatives will feel at home.
Lots of cable comedy, while not traditionally conservative, is fiercely
antiliberal, which as a practical matter often amounts nearly to the same thing.
Take "South Park," Comedy Central's hit cartoon series, whose heroes are four
crudely animated and impossibly foul-mouthed fourth-graders named Cartman,
Kenny, Kyle and Stan. Now in its seventh season, "South Park," with nearly three
million viewers per episode, is Comedy Central's highest-rated program.
Many conservatives have attacked South Park for its exuberant vulgarity,
calling it "twisted," "vile trash," a "threat to our youth." Such denunciations
are misguided. Conservative critics should pay closer attention to what "South
Park" so irreverently jeers at and mocks. As the show's co-creator, 32-year-old
Matt Stone, sums it up: "I hate conservatives, but I really f---ing hate
liberals."
Not for nothing has blogger and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan
praised the show for being "the best antidote to PC culture we have." "South
Park" sharpens the iconoclastic, anti-PC edge of earlier cartoon shows like "The
Simpsons" and "King of the Hill," and spares no sensitivity. The show's single
black kid is called Token. One episode, "Cripple Fight," concludes with a
slugfest between the boys' wheelchair-bound, cerebral-palsy-stricken friend,
Timmy, and the obnoxious Jimmy, who wants to be South Park's No. 1 "handi-capable"
citizen (in his cringe-making PC locution). In another, "Rainforest Shmainforest,"
the boys' school sends them on a field trip to Costa Rica, led by an activist
choir group, "Getting Gay with Kids," which wants to raise youth awareness about
"our vanishing rain forests." Shown San Jos?, Costa Rica's capital, the boys are
unimpressed:
Cartman: [holding his nose] Oh my God, it smells like ass out here!
Choir teacher: All right, that does it! Eric Cartman, you respect
other cultures this instant.
Cartman: I wasn't saying anything about their culture, I was just
saying their city smells like ass.
But if the city is unpleasant, the rainforest itself is a nightmare: The boys
get lost, wilt from the infernal heat, face deadly assaults from monstrous
insects and a giant snake, run afoul of revolutionary banditos,
and--worst of all--must endure the choir teacher's New-Agey gushing: "Shhh!
Children! Let's try to listen to what the rainforest tells us, and if we use our
ears, she can tell us so many things." By the horrifying trip's end, the boys
are desperate for civilization, and the choir teacher herself has come to
despise the rainforest she once worshiped: "You go right ahead and plow down
this whole f---in' thing," she tells a construction worker.
The episode concludes with the choir's new song:
Doo doo doo doo doo. Doo doo doo wa.
There's a place called the rain forest that truly sucks ass.
Let's knock it all down and get rid of it fast.
You say "save the rain forest" but what do you know?
You've never been there before.
Getting Gay with Kids is here
To tell you things you might not like to hear.
You only fight these causes 'cause caring sells.
All you activists can go f--- yourselves.
As the disclaimer before each episode states, the show is so offensive "it
should not be viewed by anyone."
One of the contemporary left's most extreme (and, to conservatives,
objectionable) strategies is its effort to draw the mantle of civil liberties
over behavior once deemed criminal, pathological or immoral, as a brilliant
"South Park" episode featuring a visit to town by the North American Man-Boy
Love Association--the ultraradical activist group advocating gay sex with
minors--satirizes:
Nambla leader: Rights? Does anybody know their rights? You see, I've
learned something today. Our forefathers came to this country because they
believed in an idea. An idea called "freedom." They wanted to live in a place
where a group couldn't be prosecuted for their beliefs. Where a person can
live the way he chooses to live. You see us as being perverted because we're
different from you. People are afraid of us, because they don't understand.
And sometimes it's easier to persecute than to understand.
Kyle: Dude. You have sex with children.
Nambla leader: We are human. Most of us didn't even choose to be
attracted to young boys. We were born that way. We can't help the way we are,
and if you all can't understand that, well, then, I guess you'll just have to
put us away.
Kyle: [slowly, for emphasis] Dude. You have sex. With children.
Stan: Yeah. You know, we believe in equality for everybody, and
tolerance, and all that gay stuff, but dude, f--- you.
Another episode--"Cherokee Hair Tampons"--ridicules multiculti sentimentality
about holistic medicine and the "wisdom" of native cultures. Kyle suffers a
potentially fatal kidney disorder, and his clueless parents try to cure it with
"natural" Native American methods, leaving their son vomiting violently and
approaching death's door:
Kyle's mom: Everything is going to be fine, Stan; we're bringing in
Kyle tomorrow to see the Native Americans personally.
Stan: Isn't it possible that these Indians don't know what they're
talking about?
Stan's mom: You watch your mouth, Stanley. The Native Americans were
raped of their land and resources by white people like us.
Stan: And that has something to do with their medicines
because . . .?
Stan's mom: Enough, Stanley!
"South Park" regularly mocks left-wing celebrities who feel entitled to
pontificate on how the nation should be run. In one of the most brutal parodies,
made in just several days during the 2000 Florida recount fiasco, loudmouth
Rosie O'Donnell sweeps into town to weigh in on a kindergarten election dispute
involving her nephew. The boys' teacher dresses her down: "People like you
preach tolerance and open-mindedness all the time, but when it comes to middle
America, you think we're all evil and stupid country yokels who need your
political enlightenment. Just because you're on TV doesn't mean you know crap
about the government."
"South Park" has satirized the 1960s counterculture (Cartman has feverish
nightmares about hippies, who "want to save the earth, but all they do is smoke
pot and smell bad"), anti-big-business zealots (a "Harbucks" coffee chain opens
in South Park, to initial resistance but eventual acclaim as everyone--including
the local coffee house's owners--admits its bean beats anything previously on
offer in the town), sex ed in school (featuring "the Sexual Harassment Panda,"
an outrageous classroom mascot), pro-choice extremists (Cartman's mother decides
she wants to abort him, even though he's eight years old, relying on the "it's
my body" argument), hate-crime legislation, antidiscrimination lawsuits, gay
scout leaders and much more. Conservatives do not escape the show's satirical
sword--gun-toting rednecks and phony patriots have been among those slashed. But
there should be no mistaking the deepest political thrust of "South Park."
That antiliberal worldview dominates other cable comedy too. Also on Comedy
Central is "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn," a new late-night chatfest where the
conversation--on race, terrorism, war and other topics--is anything but
politically correct. The Brooklyn-born Mr. Quinn, a former "Weekend Update"
anchor on "Saturday Night Live"' and a Fox News fan, can be Rumsfeldesque in his
comic riffs, like this one deriding excessive worries about avoiding civilian
casualties in Iraq: "This war is so polite," he grumbles. "We used to be 'Semper
fi.' Next, we'll be dropping comment cards over Iraq saying 'How did you hear
about us?' and 'Would you say that we're a country that goes to war sometimes,
often or never?' "
Then there's Dennis Miller, another "Saturday Night Live" alum, whose 2003
HBO stand-up comedy special "The Raw Feed" relentlessly derides liberal
shibboleths. In his stream-of-consciousness rants, whose cumulative effect gets
audiences roaring with laughter, Mr. Miller blasts the teachers unions for
opposing vouchers, complains about the sluggish work habits of government
workers ("ironically, in our highly driven culture, it would appear the only
people not interested in pushing the envelope are postal employees"), and
attacks opponents of Alaskan oil drilling for "playing the species card."
Mr. Miller, like Mr. Quinn, is unapologetically hawkish in the war on terror.
Dismissing the effectiveness of U.N. weapons inspectors in the run-up to the
Iraq war, he says: "Watching the U.N. in action makes you want to give Ritalin
to a glacier." On war opponents France and Germany, he's acid: "The French are
always reticent to surrender to the wishes of their friends and always more than
willing to surrender to the wishes of their enemies," and, "Maybe Germany didn't
want to get involved in this war because it wasn't on a grand enough scale."
Lately, he's been campaigning with President Bush, crediting W. for making him
"proud to be an American again" after the "wocka-wocka porn guitar of the
Clinton administration." Fox hired him to do weekly news commentary, and last
week CNBC gave him his own prime-time political talk show.
Why is cable and satellite TV less uniformly "Whoopi" or "West Wing" than
ABC, CBS and NBC? With long-pent-up market demand for entertainment that isn't
knee-jerk liberal in its sensibilities, cable's multiplicity of channels has
given writers and producers who don't fit the elite media mold the chance to
meet that demand profitably.
Andrew Sullivan dubs the fans of all this cable-nurtured satire "South Park
Republicans"--people who "believe we need a hard-ass foreign policy and are
extremely skeptical of political correctness" but also are socially liberal on
many issues, Sullivan explains. Such South Park Republicanism is a real trend
among younger Americans, he observes. The typical "South Park" viewer, for
instance, is an advertiser-ideal 28.
Talk to right-leaning college students, and it's clear that Mr. Sullivan is
onto something. Arizona State undergrad Eric Spratling says the definition fits
him and his Republican pals perfectly. "The label is really about rejecting the
image of conservatives as uptight squares--crusty old men or nerdy kids in blue
blazers. We might have long hair, smoke cigarettes, get drunk on weekends, have
sex before marriage, watch R-rated movies, cuss like sailors--and also happen to
be conservative, or at least libertarian." Recent Stanford grad Craig Albrecht
says most of his young Bush-supporter friends "absolutely cherish" "South
Park"-style comedy "for its illumination of hypocrisy and stupidity in all
spheres of life." It just so happens, he adds, "that most hypocrisy and
stupidity take place within the liberal camp."
Further supporting Mr. Sullivan's contention, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of
Vice--a "punk-rock-capitalist" entertainment corporation that publishes the
hipster bible Vice magazine, produces CDs and films, runs clothing stores, and
claims (plausibly) to have been "deep inside the heads of 18-30s for the past 10
years"--spots "a new trend of young people tired of being lied to for the sake
of the 'greater good.' " Especially on military matters, Mr. McInnes believes,
many 20-somethings are disgusted with the left. The knee-jerk left's days "are
numbered," McInnes tells The American Conservative. "They are slowly but surely
being replaced with a new breed of kid that isn't afraid to embrace
conservatism."
Polling data indicate that younger voters are indeed trending
rightward--supporting the Iraq war by a wider majority than their elders,
viewing school vouchers favorably, and accepting greater restrictions on
abortion, such as parental-notification laws (though more accepting of
homosexuality than older voters). Together with the Foxification of cable news,
this new attitude among the young, reflected in the hippest cable comedy (and in
cutting-edge cable dramas such as FX's "The Shield" and HBO's "The Sopranos" and
"Six Feet Under," which are unflinchingly honest about crime, race, sex, and
faith, and avoid the saccharine liberal moralizing of much network
entertainment), can only make Karl Rove happy.
What should make him positively giddy is the rise of the Internet, the second
explosive change shaking liberal media dominance. It's hard to overstate the
impact that news and opinion Web sites like the
Drudge Report,
NewsMax and OpinionJournal.com
are having on politics and culture, as are current-event "blogs"--individual or
group Web diaries--like
AndrewSullivan.com,
InstaPundit and "The
Corner" department of
National Review Online, where the editors and writers argue, joke around and
call attention to articles elsewhere on the Web. This whole universe of
Web-based discussion has been dubbed the "blogosphere."
While there are several fine left-of-center sites, the blogosphere currently
tilts right, albeit idiosyncratically, reflecting the hard-to-pigeonhole
politics of some leading bloggers. Like talk radio and Fox News, the
right-leaning sites fill a market void. "Many bloggers felt shut out by
institutions that have adopted--explicitly or implicitly--a left-wing
orthodoxy," says Erin O'Connor, whose blog,
Critical Mass, exposes
campus PC gobbledygook. The orthodox left's blame-America-first response to
September 11 has also helped tilt the blogosphere rightward. "There were damned
few noble responses to that cursed day from the 'progressive' part of the
political spectrum," avers Los Angeles-based blogger and journalist
Matt Welch, "so
untold thousands of people just started blogs, in anger," Mr. Welch among them.
"I was pushed into blogging on September 16, 2001, in direct response to reading
five days' worth of outrageous bullshit in the media from people like Noam
Chomsky and Robert Jensen."
For a frustrated citizen like Mr. Welch, it's easy to get your ideas
circulating on the Internet. Start-up costs for a blog are small, printing and
mailing costs nonexistent. Few blogs make money, though, since advertisers are
leery of the Web and no one seems willing to pay to read anything on it.
The Internet's most powerful effect has been to expand vastly the range of
opinion--especially conservative opinion--at everyone's fingertips. "The
Internet helps break up the traditional cultural gatekeepers' power to determine
a) what's important and b) the range of acceptable opinion," says former Reason
editor and libertarian blogger
Virginia
Postrel. InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of
Tennessee, agrees: "The main role of the Internet and blogosphere is to call the
judgment of elites about what is news into question."
The Drudge Report is a perfect case in point. Five years since Matt Drudge
broke the Monica Lewinsky story, his news-and-gossip site has become an
essential daily visit for political junkies, journalists, media types and--with
1.4 billion hits in 2002--seemingly anyone with an Internet connection. The site
features occasional newsworthy items investigated and written by Mr. Drudge, but
mostly it's an editorial filter, linking to stories on other small and large
news and opinion sites--a filter that crucially exhibits no bias against the
right. (Mr. Drudge, a registered Republican, calls himself "a pro-life
conservative who doesn't want the government to tax me.") The constantly updated
cornucopia of information, culled from a vast number of global sources and
e-mailed tips from across the political spectrum, says critic Camille Paglia, a
Drudge enthusiast, points up by contrast "the process of censorship that's going
on, the filtering of the news by established news organizations." Other popular
news-filter sites, including
FreeRepublic, Lucianne.com
and RealClearPolitics,
perform a similar function.
In a different register, Arts &
Letters Daily, a site devoted to intellectual journalism, is similarly
ecumenical in what it links to, posting articles from publications as diverse as
City Journal on the right to the New Left Review. When Arts & Letters ran into
financial trouble last year, both neoconservative elder Norman Podhoretz and
Nation columnist Eric Alterman rushed to its defense. Going from 300 page views
a day in 1998 to more than 70,000 in 2003, and with many left-leaning readers
(including a large number of academics), it has introduced a whole new audience
to serious conservative thought.
Though not quite in Drudge's league in readership, the top explicitly
right-leaning sites, updated daily, have generated huge followings. Andrew
Sullivan's blog, launched in the late 1990s, attracted 400,000 visitors this
July. FrontPage Magazine,
vigorously lambasting political correctness, the antiwar campaign and other
"progressive" follies, draws as many as 1.7 million visitors in a month. More
than 1.4 million visitors landed on OpinionJournal this past March, when the
liberation of Iraq began, most to read editor James Taranto's "Best
of the Web Today," an incisive guide to and commentary on the day's top
Internet stories. National Review Online, featuring scores of new articles
daily, averages slightly over one million a month--and over two million during
the war. "More people read NRO than all the conservative magazines combined,"
the site's editor-at-large, Jonah Goldberg, marvels. The Web's
interconnectivity--the fact that bloggers and news and opinion sites readily
link to one another and comment on one another's postings, forming a kind of
21st-century agora--amplifies and extends the influence of any site that catches
the heavy hitters' attention.
It's not just the large numbers of readers that these sites attract that is
so significant for the conservative cause; it's also who those readers
are. Just as Fox News is pulling in a younger viewership, who will reshape the
politics of the future, so these conservative sites are proving particularly
popular with younger readers. "They think: 'If it's not on the Web, it doesn't
exist,' " says Mr. Goldberg. FrontPage's Web traffic shoots up dramatically
during the school year, as lots of college students log on.
Equally important, these sites draw the attention of journalists. "Everyone
who deals in media--and they're not all ideologues on the left--is reading the
Internet all the time," says FrontPage editor David Horowitz. "Michael," who
co-authors the 2blowhards
culture-and-politics blog as an avocation while working full time for a major
left-leaning national news organization (he uses a pseudonym because his bosses
wouldn't like the blog's not-so-liberal opinions), reports: "I notice the
younger people on staff in particular are aware of blogs--and that a lot of
local newspapers seem to have people who stay on top of blogs, too." The
Internet's power, observes Mickey Kaus, the former New Republic writer whose
Kausfiles blog has
become indispensable reading for anyone interested in politics, "is due
primarily to its influence over professional journalists, who then influence the
public." Judges Andrew Sullivan: "I think I have just as much ability to inject
an idea or an argument into the national debate through my blog as I did through
The New Republic."
Almost daily, stories that originate on the Web make their way into print or
onto TV or radio. Fox and Rush Limbaugh, for instance, often pick up stories
from FrontPage and OpinionJournal--especially those about the antiwar left. Fox
News's Sean Hannity surfs the net up to eight hours a day, searching sites like
Drudge and the hard-right news site
WorldNetDaily for stories to cover. Phrases introduced in the blogosphere
now "percolate out into the real world with amazing rapidity," InstaPundit's
Glenn Reynolds recently noted. For example, the day after the humor blog
ScrappleFace coined
the term "Axis of Weasel" to satirize the antiwar alliance of Jacques Chirac and
Gerhard Schroeder, the New York Post used it as a headline, talk radio and CNN
and Fox News repeated it, and it soon made its way into French and German media.
The speed with which Internet sites can post new material is one source of
their influence. No sooner has the latest Paul Krugman New York Times column
attacking the Bush administration appeared, for example, than the "Krugman
Truth Squad" will post an article on NRO exposing the economist's myriad
mistakes, distortions, and evasions. Earlier this year, the Truth Squad caught
Krugman comparing the cost of President Bush's tax cuts over 10 years
with the one-year wage boost associated with the new employment it would
create, so as to make the tax reductions seem insanely large for the small
benefit they'd bring--a laughably ignorant mistake or, more likely, a deliberate
attempt to mislead in order to discredit Mr. Bush. The discomfiture Web critics
have caused Mr. Krugman has forced him to respond on his own Web site, offering
various lame rationales for his errors, and denouncing the Truth Squad's Donald
Luskin as his "stalker-in-chief."
The timeliness of Web publication also means that right from the start a
wealth of conservative opinion is circulating about any new development--often
before the New York Times and the Washington Post get a chance to weigh in. A
blog or opinion site "can have an influence on elite opinion before the
conventional wisdom among elites congeals," notes Nick Schulz, editor of
TechCentralStation.com, a site that covers technology and public policy. A
case in point is the blogosphere "storm" (a ferocious burst of online argument,
with site linking to site linking to site) that made a big issue out of the
Democrats' unseemly transformation of Senator Paul Wellstone's funeral into a
naked political rally, forcing the mainstream media to cover the story, which in
turn created outrage that ultimately may have cost the Dems Wellstone's seat in
the 2002 election. Blogosphere outrage over Sen. Trent Lott's comments that
seemed to praise segregation at onetime Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond's 100th
birthday party, led by NRO and other conservative sites keen to liberate modern
conservatism from any vestige of racism and to make the GOP a champion of black
advancement, shaped the mainstream media's coverage of that controversy,
too--helping to push Mr. Lott from his perch as majority leader.
Debunking liberal humbug is one of the Web's most powerful political effects:
bloggers call it the Internet's "bullshit detector" role. The New York Times has
been the No. 1 target of the BS detectors--especially during the reign of
deposed executive editor and liberal ideologue Howell Raines. "Only, say, five
years ago, the editors of the New York Times had much more power than they have
today," Andrew Sullivan points out. "They could spin stories with gentle liberal
bias, and only a few eyes would roll." If they made an egregious error, they
could bury the correction later. The Internet makes such bias and evasion
harder--maybe impossible--to pull off. It was the blogosphere that revealed
Enron-bashing Mr. Krugman's former ties to Enron, showed how the paper twisted
its polls to further a liberal agenda, exposed how it used its front page to
place Henry Kissinger falsely in the anti-Iraq war camp, and then, as the war
got under way, portrayed it as harshly as possible.
It's safe to say that the blogosphere cost Mr. Raines his job. When the story
broke about Times reporter and Raines favorite Jayson Blair's outrageous
fabrications in the paper's pages, Messrs. Sullivan, Kaus and Drudge, blogger-reporter
Seth Mnookin and other Web writers kept it alive, creating pressure for other
media, including television, to cover it. When disgruntled Times staffers began
to leak damning information about Mr. Raines's high-handed management style to
Jim Romenesko's influential media-news site sponsored by the Poynter Institute,
the end was near. Kausfiles' "Howell Raines-O-Meter," gauging the probability of
the editor's downfall, was up barely a day or two when Mr. Raines stepped down.
"The outcome would have been different without the Internet," Mr. Kaus says. The
Times' new ombudsman acknowledged the point: "We're not happy that blogs became
the forum for our dirty linen, but somebody had to wash it and it got washed."
But the Blair affair was more final straw than primary cause of Mr. Raines's
fall. Unremitting Internet-led criticism and mockery of the editor's front-page
partisanship had already severely tarnished the Times' reputation. It may take
the Times a while to restore readers' trust: a new Rasmussen poll shows that
less than half of Americans believe that the paper reliably conveys the truth
(while 72% find Fox News reliable); circulation is down 5% since March 2002.
Other liberal media giants have taken notice. In May, the Los Angeles Times'
top editor, John Carroll, fired an e-mail to his troops warning that the paper
was suffering from "the perception and the occasional reality that the Times is
a liberal, 'politically correct' newspaper." In the new era of heightened Web
scrutiny, Mr. Carroll was arguing, you can't just dismiss conservative views but
must take them seriously. By the recent recall vote, though, the lesson had
evaporated.
The third big change breaking the liberal media stranglehold is taking place
in book publishing. Conservative authors long had trouble getting their books
released, with only Regnery Books, the Free Press and Basic Books regularly
releasing conservative titles. But following editorial changes during the 1990s,
Basic and Free Press published far fewer conservative-leaning titles, leaving
Regnery pretty much alone.
No more. Nowadays, publishers are falling over themselves to bring
conservative books to a mainstream audience. "Between now and December,"
Publishers Weekly wrote in July, "scores of books on conservative topics will be
published by houses large and small--the most ever produced in a single season.
Already, 2003 has been a banner year for such books, with at least one and often
two conservative titles hitting PW's bestseller list each week." Joining Regnery
in releasing mass-market right-leaning books are two new imprints from
superpower publishers, Random House's Crown Forum and an as-yet-untitled Penguin
series.
These imprints will publish mostly Ann Coulter-style polemics--one of Crown
Forum's current releases, for example, is James Hirsen's "The Left Coast," a
take-no-prisoners attack on Hollywood liberals. But higher-brow conservative
books will pour forth over the next six months from Peter Collier's Encounter
Books, Ivan R. Dee (publisher of City Journal books), the Intercollegiate
Studies Institute (it's releasing Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Russia in Collapse,"
the Nobel Prize-winner's first book in English in nearly a decade), Yale
University Press, Lexington Books and Spence Books. Other top imprints--from
HarperCollins to the University of Chicago Press--are also publishing books that
flout liberal orthodoxy. And Bookspan, which runs the Book-of-the-Month Club,
has announced a new conservative book club, headed by a former National Review
literary editor.
It's no exaggeration to describe this surge of conservative publishing as a
paradigm shift. "It would have been unthinkable 10 years ago that mainstream
publishers would embrace this trend," acknowledges Doubleday editor and author
Adam Bellow, who got his start in editing in 1988 at the Free Press, where he
and his boss, the late Erwin Glikes, encountered "a tremendous amount of
marketplace and institutional resistance" in pushing conservative titles. "There
was no conspiracy," avers Crown Forum publisher Steve Ross. "We were culturally
isolated on this island of Manhattan, and people tend to publish to people of
like mind."
Ross believes that September 11 shook up the publishing world and made it
less reflexively liberal. And in fact, many new conservative titles concern the
war on terror. But what really overcame the big New York publishers' liberal
prejudices is the oodles of money Washington-based Regnery was making. "We've
had a string of bestsellers that is probably unmatched in publishing," Regnery
president Marji Ross points out. "We publish 20 to 25 titles a year, and we've
had 16 books on the New York Times bestseller list over the last four
years--including Bernard Goldberg's "Bias," which spent seven weeks at No 1."
Adds Bernadette Malone, a former Regnery editor heading up Penguin's new
conservative imprint: "The success of Regnery's books woke up the industry:
'Hello? There's 50% of the population that we're underserving, even ignoring. We
have an opportunity to talk to these people, figure out what interests them, and
put out professional-quality books on topics that haven't been sufficiently
explored.' " Mr. Bellow puts it more bluntly: "Business rationality has trumped
ideological aversion. And that's capitalism."
There's another reason that conservative books are selling: the emergence of
conservative talk radio, cable TV and the Internet. This "right-wing media
circuit," as Publishers Weekly describes it, reaches millions of potential
readers and thus makes the traditional gatekeepers of ideas--above all, the New
York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, publications that
rarely deign to review conservative titles--increasingly irrelevant in winning
an audience for a book.
Ask publisher Peter Collier. After only three years in business, his
Encounter Books will sell $3 million worth of books this year, he says--not bad
for an imprint specializing in serious works of history, culture and political
analysis aimed at both conservatives and open-minded liberals. Several Encounter
titles have sold in the 35,000 range, and a Bill Kristol-edited volume laying
out reasons for war in Iraq has sold more than 60,000 copies. Instead of
worrying about high-profile reviews in the media mainstream--"I've had
God-knows-how-many books published by now, and maybe three reviews in the New
York Times Book Review," laughs Mr. Collier--Encounter sells books by getting
its authors discussed on the Internet and interviewed on talk radio, Fox News
and C-Span's ideologically neutral "Book TV." "A Q&A on NRO sells books very,
very well," Mr. Collier explains. "It's comparable to a major newspaper review."
A bold Drudge Report headline will move far more copies than even good newspaper
reviews, claims Regnery's Marji Ross. A book discussed on AndrewSullivan.com
will briefly blast up the Amazon.com bestseller list--even hitting the top five.
Amazon itself is another boon to conservatives, since the Internet giant
betrays no ideological bias in selling books. Nor do big chain booksellers like
Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble, where Bill O'Reilly books pile up right next to
Michael Moore's latest loony-left rant. "The rise of Amazon and the chain stores
has been tremendously liberating for conservatives, because these stores are
very much product-oriented businesses," observes David Horowitz. "The
independent bookstores are all controlled by leftists, and they're
totalitarians--they will not display conservative books, or if they do, they'll
hide them in the back." Says Marji Ross: "We have experienced our books being
buried or kept in the back room when a store manager or owner opposed their
message." She's a big fan of Amazon and the chains.
Amazon's Reader Reviews feature--where readers can post their opinions on
books they've read and rate them--has helped diminish the authority of elite
cultural guardians, too, by creating a truly democratic marketplace of ideas. "I
don't think there's ever been a similar review medium--a really broad-based
consumers' guide for culture," says 2blowhards blogger Michael. "I've read some
stuff on Amazon that's been as good as anything I've read in the real press."
All these remarkable, brand-new transformations have sent the left reeling.
Fox News especially is driving liberals wild. Al Gore calls Fox a right-wing
"fifth column," and he yearns to set up a left-wing competitor, as if left-wing
media didn't already exist. Comedian and activist Al Franken's new book, "Lies
and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," is one long jeremiad against Fox. Washington
Post media critic Tom Shales calls Fox a "propaganda mill." The Columbia
Journalism School's Todd Gitlin worries that Fox "emboldens the right wing to
feel justified and confident they can promote their policies." "There's room for
conservative talk radio on television," sniffs CNN anchor Aaron Brown, the very
embodiment of the elite journalist. "But I don't think anyone ought to pretend
it's the New York Times or CNN."
But it's not just Fox. Liberals have been pooh-poohing all of these
developments. Dennis Miller used to be the hippest joker around. Now, complains
a critic in the liberal Webzine Salon, he's "uncomfortably juvenile," exhibiting
"the sort of simplistic, reactionary American stance that gives us a bad
reputation around the world." The Boston Globe's Alex Beam dismisses the
blogosphere with typical liberal hauteur: "Welcome to Blogistan, the
Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished, no
long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how
outr?, goes unpraised." And those right-wing books are a danger to society,
grouse liberals; their "bile-spewing" authors "have limited background expertise
and a great flair for adding fuel to hot issues," claims Norman Provizer, a
Rocky Mountain News columnist. "The harm is if people start thinking these
lightweights are providing heavyweight answers."
Well. The fair and balanced observer will hear in such hysterical complaint
and angry foot-stamping baffled frustration over the loss of a liberal
monoculture, which has long protected the left from debate--and from the
realization that its unexamined ideas are sadly threadbare. "The left has never
before had its point of view challenged and its arguments made fun of and shot
full of holes on the public stage," concludes social thinker Michael Novak, who
has been around long enough to recognize how dramatically things are changing.
Hoover Institute fellow Tod Lindberg agrees: "Liberals aren't prepared for real
argument," he says. "Elite opinion is no longer univocal. It engages in real
argument in real time." New York Times columnist David Brooks even sees the left
falling into despair over the new conservative media that have "cohered to form
a dazzlingly efficient delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their
ideas out."
Here's what's likely to happen in the years ahead. Think of the mainstream
liberal media as one sphere and the conservative media as another. The liberal
sphere, which less than a decade ago was still the media, is still much
bigger than the nonliberal one. But the nonliberal sphere is expanding,
encroaching into the liberal sphere, which is both shrinking and breaking up
into much smaller sectarian spheres--one for blacks, one for Hispanics, one for
feminists and so on.
It's hard to imagine that this development won't result in a broader national
debate--and a more conservative America.
Mr. Anderson is senior editor of
City Journal, in
whose Autumn issue this article appears
16-year old
bomber cornered by troops
blows up before entering Israel
A suicide bomber who was
planning to attack Israeli civilians but was hunted by security forces attacked
an army patrol Monday morning near the West Bank town of Azzoun, in the Nablus
area.
16-year-old Sabih Abu el
Sa'ud from the Rafidiyah neighborhood in Nablus was attempting to evade Israeli
security forces and make his way to a major Israeli city. An IDF force
saw the suspicious-looking Arab and called for him to stop. The terrorist began
running towards the soldiers, who fired at him - causing the explosives vest he
was wearing to explode, lightly wounding an armoured
corps tracker.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs'
Brigades, linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for
the failed attack.
Sabih left his home in the
West Bank city of Nablus Sunday morning, telling his parents he was going to
school, said his father Kamal. Instead, Sabih made his way south, trying to
infiltrate into Israel.
On Sunday evening, when he
failed to turn up for Iftar, the festive meal that ends the day's fast during
the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, his parents began to worry.
By then, Israeli
intelligence already knew that a suicide bomber was on the loose, said an army
spokeswoman, Maj. Sharon Feingold.
Sabih Abu el Sa'ud was
one of the youngest of more than 100 suicide bombers who have killed more than
450 Israelis since 2000; there's only been one other 16-year-old bomber.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of
Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed
responsibility for the failed attack .
The bomber's father, Kamal Abu Saud, slammed the
militants for sending someone so young to his death.
"He was just a little boy and those who sent him should have left him alone" he
said.
An Israeli security
official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Sabih's handlers sent him
south, to get around a security barrier Israel says it is building to keep West Bank suicide bombers out of Israel.
A section north of Nablus has already been completed.
Israeli security officials
said Sabih apparently saw the heavy security and turned back, spending
the night in nearby Ramallah.
As time wore on, Sabih's
family became increasingly concerned. Relatives realized that Sabih had taken a
picture of his uncle Nasser, a Palestinian militant who was killed during an
Israeli army operation in the West Bank in March 2002. Family members said the
boy had spoken about avenging his uncle's death.
By Monday morning, Sabih
was on the move again, heading toward the Israeli town of Rosh Ha'ayin and the
security alert shifted to Israel's central region.
A main West Bank road was
closed to traffic, Apache helicopters hovered overhead and more road blocks were
set up at the entrance to Israeli towns. Then Israeli intelligence received a
tip the boy was in the village of Azzoun, less than a kilometer from Israel.
Security forces were
searching for the suicide bomber since Sunday, and acting on intelligence
reports, an armored corps unit caught up with the him Monday morning.
"The soldiers were
carrying out searches for him when he ran toward their jeeps and blew himself
up," Feingold said. "The armor saved the soldiers."
The security alert has
since been lowered in the Rosh Ha-Ayin area, east of Tel Aviv.
Shooter turns himself in to IDF; other unreported incidents
A Palestinian man who
killed a girl and wounded three others in a shooting attack on the Trans-Israel Highway in June turned himself in to the Israel
Defense Forces on Monday. Tariq Hussein, the head on an Islamic Jihad cell in the West
Bank city of Qalqilyahadmitted to pulling the trigger in the attack in which
seven-year-old Noam Leibowitz, from Yemin Orde, was killed and members of her
family were injured.
Hussein arrived Monday afternoon at an IDF checkpoint at
the entrance to Qalqilyah and
handed himself over to the soldiers. Troops have recently searched Hussein's
house and he apparently gave himself in following pressure from his family. The
rest of the cell members involved in the shooting have been arrested over the
past two months.
Unidentified assailants threw two firebombs at an Egged bus Monday
evening that was traveling near the village of Baka al-Sharkiya located on the
Green Line boundary.
There were no injuries as a result of the attack. The bus driver continued until
he
reached a nearby IDF checkpoint, where he reported the incident to security
forces.
Palestinian gunmen opened fire Monday evening on an IDF position near
Kfar Darom in the central Gaza Strip.
Gunmen also opened fire earlier Monday on an civilian Israeli vehicle
near the Rafiah Yam settlement in Gush Katif.
There were no casualties in any of the incidents.
Earlier in the week...
A Kassam rocket landed this morning in northern
Sderot, in the western Negev. Just over the nearby Gaza fence, Palestinian
terrorists opened fire on a convoy traveling between Karni and Netzarim.
Earlier in the morning, Arabs attacked Israeli targets
with grenades on the Israeli-Egyptian border and in N'vei Dekalim. Soldiers
were also targeted in a bomb attack in Balata, near Shechem (Nablus), this
afternoon; no one was hurt.
A suicide-bomber's vest containing 10-15 kilograms of explosives was found
this morning in the Arab village of Hizme, on Jerusalem's northern border near
Pisgat Ze'ev.
Security forces, with the assistance of bomb-sniffing dogs and acting upon
intelligence warnings, found the explosives in a private home - and subsequently
blew up the building.
Permitted for publication : A double suicide
attack in Beit She'an was thwarted early last week. IDF forces arrested two
wanted terrorists, each of them with an 11-kilogram explosives vest in his
possession.
The two terrorists had been wanted for their roles in several shooting
attacks - in one of which a Bezeq worker was murdered - as well as enlisting
suicide attackers. Residents of the Jenin area in the northern Shomron, the two
are senior members of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization. The security
forces also prevented five other terrorist attacks last week.
Dr. Valery Weisbrodt of the northern Shomron community of Kadim, who was
seriously wounded in a Palestinian terrorist shooting attack yesterday afternoon
on his way home, is still listed in serious condition. His condition has
stabilized, however, after two operations by top mouth-and-jaw specialists in
Haifa's Rambam Hospital. His wife was more lightly hurt, and another passenger
was treated for shock. This was the third time terrorists have shot at Dr.
Weisbrodt's car, but a colleague of his told Arutz-7 today that the doctor was
not afraid to travel the roads. Arutz-7's morning host Amatzia Eitan noted that
the public radio stations this morning did not even mention yesterday's shooting
attack.
A similar attack occurred this afternoon near Tul Karem, east of Netanya,
against a vehicle of the Society for the Preservation of Nature in Israel.
No one was hurt in the attempted murder, though bullets hit and damaged the
car.
Arutz-7's Kobi Finkler reported this morning, in his daily security briefing,
that several Israeli cars were damaged last night on both Route 443 and the
Hevron-Gush Etzion highway in Arab rock-throwing attacks. In Shechem, an
Arab who hurled a firebomb at IDF forces was shot and killed. A Kassam
rocket landed near a kibbutz in the northern Negev, and several incidents
of shooting at IDF positions in Judea, Samaria and Gaza were recorded.
The security forces received 41 terrorist warnings today.
Despite this, 4,000 Arab workers were allowed into pre-'67 Israel, in addition
to 1,500 workers who entered Atarot, north of Jerusalem.
P.A.
Incitement And Hatred Documented Before U.S. Senators
10:42 Nov
03, '03 / 8 Cheshvan 5764
A U.S. Senate hearing this past Thursday examined whether US financial
support to the PA is helping fund hate indoctrination. PMW's Itamar Marcus and
the ZOA's Morton Klein were among those who testified.
A U.S. Senate hearing this
past Thursday examined whether US financial support to the PA is helping fund
hate indoctrination. Itamar Marcus, of the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW)
watchdog organization, and Morton A. Klein, President of the Zionist
Organization of American, were among those who testified.
Marcus, whose organization has long documented hatred and incitement
disseminated by the Palestinian Authority, described at the hearing the many
means by which the PA indoctrinates children with the "values" of hatred against
Israel, violence and suicide terrorism. The hearing opened with the screening of
a 20-minute PMW video documentary entitled "Ask for Death" - depicting how the
PA has indoctrinated its children to seek Shahada - martyrdom - through music
videos and other means. The video can be seen at
here.
The hearing was held on October 30, by the Senate
Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and
Education. The subcommittee is chaired by Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa), and
Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), who is not a subcommittee member, also took an
active part in the hearing. She requested to participate after having met with
Mr. Marcus and seeing documentation of the nature of PA indoctrination. Speaking
at the hearing, and in a subsequent conference call with reporters, Ms. Clinton
strongly denounced recent PA broadcasts featuring children praising terrorism
and declaring their desire to become martyrs.
Excerpts from Marcus' testimony before the subcommittee,
"...This incitement is advanced by the PA through the entire social-educational
structure, including sporting events and summer camps, and the media including
music videos for children and schoolbooks. Jews and Judaism are presented as
inherently evil, Israel's existence as a state is de-legitimized and denied, and
fighting Jews and Judaism is presented as justified and heroic.
"The PA Ministries of Education and Sport have turned the most abhorrent
murderers of Jews into role models and heroes for Palestinian youth. [For
instance, a] tournament for 11-year-old boys was named for Abd Al-Baset Odeh -
the terrorist who murdered 30 in the Passover Seder suicide bombing. This past
summer, during the period of the US-sponsored Road Map, numerous summer camps
were named for suicide bombers... As recently as September this year, PA
Chairman Arafat and 13 PA leaders jointly sponsored a soccer tournament honoring
arch terrorists... Each of the 24 soccer teams was named for a terrorist or
other Shahids [Martyrs], including some of the most infamous murderers like
Yichye Ayash, the first Hamas bomb engineer, who initiated the suicide
bombings...
"While music videos around the world are used to entertain children, in the PA
they are used to indoctrinate children to hatred, violence, and Shahada.
Regularly-broadcast PA music videos have actors depicting Israelis carrying out
execution-style murders of old men, women and children, or blowing up mothers
with their babies. In one music video broadcast continuously in 2003, actors
portray a woman being murdered in cold blood in front of her daughter. In
another, broadcast tens of times in 2003, the image of a young girl on a swing
turns into a flaming inferno, and a football blows up after being kicked by a
child. Children are taught through these videos not only to hate and to be
violent, but are openly encouraged to aspire to death through Shahada
[Martyrdom]. Clips designed to offset a child's natural fear of death,
portraying child Shahada as both heroic and tranquil, have appeared on PA TV
thousands of times over three years. One clip for children ends with the words:
'Ask for Death - the Life will be Given to you.' In another, a child writes a
farewell letter and goes off to die. Children who have achieved death through
suicide missions have been turned into PA heroes and role models by the PA
leaders.
"The hatred, anti-Semitism and Shahada-encouragement appear in the PA
schoolbooks as well. The poem The Shahid in a new PA schoolbook includes the
phrase: 'I see my death, but I hasten my steps toward it' [Our Beautiful
Language, grade 7, p. 97]... This education will perpetuate the conflict into
the next generation.
"It is important to note that the PA is making use of foreign funding to promote
this hatred among its children. Summer camps named for suicide bombers this
summer were funded by UNICEF. [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 22, 2003]. Renovation of
a school named for Dalal Maghrabi, a terrorist who participated in the murder of
36 including an American, was funded by USAID [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 30,
2002]. And whereas the PA announced two days later that they had changed the
name in order to receive the USAID funding, PA press reports indicated that the
name was still being used. [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, August 16, 2002].
"The following concrete steps should be taken by the PA immediately:
* Music videos promoting hatred, violence, and Shahada must never again be
broadcast on PA TV.
* The practice of naming schools, cultural events, educational programs, sport
events and trophies after terrorists and suicide bombers must cease. Educational
institutions and cultural frameworks currently named for terrorists must be
changed.
* PA children must be taught that Israel is a legitimate country with a right to
exist.
* There is no greater incitement against Israel's legitimacy as a state, than to
mark the word Palestine, or occupied Palestine, in place of Israel on all maps
in the PA. These maps must be removed from Palestinian schools, schoolbooks and
TV broadcasting and be replaced by maps that show Israel by name in Arabic...
* The hatred and anti-Semitism in the PA schoolbooks must be removed..."
The PLO/PA representative in Washington, Hassan Abdel Rahman, also testified. He
initially claimed that the PMW film's translations of PA schoolbooks and
speeches are "mistranslations." When challenged by the Senators on this point,
Rahman then claimed that even if they were not mistranslated, "they are just
expressions of religious belief, and it does not matter what they are saying, if
it's a religious belief."
ZOA President Klein's testimony refuted a number of Rahman's allegations. In one
dramatic example, in response to Rahman's claim that the PA wants to live in
peace with Israel, Klein held up a piece of Rahman's own official PA stationery,
which shows a map of all of Israel labeled "Palestine."
In response to Rahman's claim that most people in America and Israel support the
creation of a PA state, Klein cited a recent McLaughlin poll showing 71% of
Americans opposing such a state, and a recent Geocartography poll showing that
61% of Israelis opposing it.
In response to Rahman's claim that most PA Arabs oppose terrorism, Klein cited
polls showing that roughly 70% of them support suicide bombings. He also noted a
poll taken earlier this month that found that 59% of PA Arabs support continuing
violence against Israel, even if Israel surrenders all of Judea, Samaria, Gaza,
and eastern Jerusalem.
Refuting Rahman's claim that Israel had stolen Arab lands from "Palestine,"
Klein explained that there never was an independent country called Palestine,
and challenged Rahman to "name one Palestinian king or queen." Rahman did not
respond.
Arabs Celebrate Strikes on U.S. in Iraq
Nov 3, 3:51
AM (ET)
By DONNA BRYSON
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Across the Arab world, strikes
like the deadly downing of a U.S. helicopter are applauded by many as resistance
to occupation and proof that Iraqis were not completely humiliated by the ease
of the U.S.-led victory over Saddam Hussein.
The reaction is not surprising given prewar opposition
among many Arabs to the invasion of Iraq. At a meeting in Damascus Sunday,
foreign ministers from countries bordering Iraq and others in the region
repeated calls on the United States to restore order in Iraq.
In Egypt, U.S. Ambassador C. David Welch has accused
Egyptian commentators of spending too much time criticizing the United States
and too little exploring how Iraqis might benefit from the fall of Saddam.
Egyptian journalists responded by declaring a boycott of Welch.
"Iraq is now building the glory of the (Arab)
community," Mustafa Bakri, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian weekly Al-Osboa,
wrote Sunday, referring to the resistance.
Samir Ragab, editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Gomhouria,
lauded the Iraqis in his column for fighting back.
"Every citizen who lives in Iraq, be they Baathist or
anti-Baathist, whether they support or oppose Saddam, will stand up and shout at
the top of his lungs: 'We will chase the Americans and their followers until
they leave our home ashamed and defeated.'"
In Saudi Arabia, Al-Watan newspaper said last week
that U.S. war planners did not foresee that although "the Iraqi people hated
Saddam Hussein, they also hate having a foreign presence on their land."
"Even though such attacks are not welcomed because
they took innocent Iraqi souls, they have, however, delivered a strong message
to decision-makers in the White House that they are no longer in control of
security in Iraq, and that the victory in the classic war does not mean total
control over Iraq," Al-Watan said.
The comments followed one of the bloodiest weeks in
Iraq. On Oct. 26, ground-fired rockets slammed into a Baghdad hotel housing
hundreds of staffers for the coalition administration, killing one person. The
next day, three dozen people were killed in a series of suicide bombings in
Baghdad that devastated the international Red Cross headquarters and four Iraqi
police stations.
Sunday was the deadliest day for American troops in
their six-month occupation of Iraq, with a U.S. Chinook helicopter hit by a
missile and crashing west of Baghdad. At least 16 soldiers were killed and more
than 20 wounded.
Iraqi villagers displayed charred pieces of wreckage
like trophies to reporters and in nearby Fallujah, center of opposition to the
Americans, townspeople celebrated on the streets.
Some Arab observers are disturbed to see international
aid workers and Iraqis attacked along with the Americans.
The Muslimization of Europe
Posted: October 31, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Doron Kescher
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Anybody taking an objective look at Europe today - the
cradle of arts and philosophy, and the birthplace of democracy - would be sorely
disappointed.
Where once the Ottoman Empire was described as "the sick man
of Europe," now it is Europe that is the sick man. The proverbial "enemy at the
gates" is no longer at the gates, but inside.
Militant Islam has built a strong base in Europe and, rather
than fight, Europe acquiesces. The Europeans tolerate areas of their cities that
are now crime-ridden Muslim ghettos. They tolerate the fact that even the police
dare not enter these areas. They hide the fact that tournante gang rapes
are being committed with alarming frequency against white women in France,
Belgium, Denmark and Sweden. And they play along when Islamic groups hijack
their legal systems to pursue anti-Jewish vendettas.
The situation reminds me of a National Geographic documentary
I once saw about a lioness injured during a hunt. Initially, animals kept their
distance from the lame lioness, deterred by the awesome reputation of her
species. Eventually, a group of hyenas cautiously approached. As the hyenas
circled her, all that was left of her power was her menacing snarl. The hyenas
soon realized she was wounded, and the result, while distressing to watch, was
inevitable.
So it is with Europe.
Europe has the veneer of strength: economic power, democratic
institutions and thousands of men under arms. Yet, gnarled by two world wars and
burdened by history, it is paralysed by asinine concepts of non-violence and
moral relativism, and is too sick to fight a mortal enemy that now lives within
its gates.
From Marseilles to Copenhagen, and most points in between,
Europeans suicidally refuse to demand that their Muslim minorities (often making
up 10 percent of the population) adapt to European norms if they wish to live in
Europe.
Only proud Britain has shown some resistance to the Muslim
goose step across European values. Germany, whose reputation for dealing with
minorities is still fearsome, has also been less affected by the Islamic march.
As militant organizations such as al-Muhajiroun and the Arab
European League begin to demand their "rights," the stage has been set for a
showdown between Europe and Islam.
Very soon, Europeans will be faced with the same choice as
Americans and Israelis: fighting for the right to live in freedom, or buying
burqas for their wives and daughters.
Doron Kescher is an Israeli currently
based in the Asia-Pacific region working for a corporate advisory firm.
A vulnerable Jewish professor
publicly advocates the dismantling of Israel as a sovereign Jewish nation.
As columnist Charles Krauthammer recently observed: "The
world is experiencing the worst resurgence of anti-Semitism in 50 years. Its
main objective is the demonization and delegitimation of Israel, to the point
that the idea of eradicating... the world's only Jewish state becomes
respectable, indeed laudable. The psychological grounds for the final solution
are being prepared."
Party to this grim preparation is one Tony Judt, former
Oxford don and now a history professor at New York University. Accomplished in
the academy, where Israel is widely vilified, he has evidently, as a Jew,
suffered discomfiting criticism among his colleagues -- perhaps even at dinner
parties. He doesn't appreciate this, and so publicly advocates the dismantling
of Israel as a sovereign Jewish nation.
In an October 10 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times
and a longer version in the October 23 New York Review of Books, he terms
Israel an "anachronism" to be done away with. The Jewish state is "bad for the
Jews," writes Judt, explaining, "the behavior of a self-described Jewish state
affects the way everyone else looks at Jews." He opines that "non-Israeli Jews
feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable for things they
didn't do."
Not surprisingly, the professor's argument for the
abolition of the Jewish state in favor of a bi-national one shared with the
Palestinians -- an entity soon to leave Jews a minority -- is an extremist
diatribe filled with distortion.
Judt parrots Palestinian allegations, charging Israel
has, for example, "consistently and blatantly flouted UN resolutions requiring
it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war." But there is only one
currently relevant UN resolution, 242, and that requires Israel to withdraw to
negotiated "secure and recognized boundaries."
Israel has, of course, pulled back from large areas of
land, including the Sinai and southern Lebanon. On the other hand, Arab states
blatantly violate Resolution 242's demand that states in the region terminate
"belligerency," and respect the right of "every State in the area... to live in
peace within secure and recognized boundaries, free from threats or acts of
force."
Judt attacks Israel as outmoded in an age of individual
rights and multi-ethnicity because it is a Jewish state. Disregarding the 22
Muslim Arab states in which Islam and its hundreds of millions of adherents are
given privileged status, and from which in varying degrees Jews are prohibited
from owning property, praying or even setting foot, the author lambastes Israel
as "a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from
which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded." In fact, in Israel as nowhere
else in the Middle East, people of all faiths live, work, vote, worship and
prosper. Jews do enjoy unique access to citizenship under the Law of Return --
just as other democratic nations offer citizenship privileges to particular
ethnic groups. Denmark, Finland, Italy, Greece, Poland, Germany, Mexico,
Bulgaria and the Baltic and Balkan nations are just a few.
Judt is equally hypocritical about recent key events. He
complains: "Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been
thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all
the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab
recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian
state..." Literally unmentioned are the Camp David/Taba negotiations, with their
offer to dismantle settlements and return virtually to the 1967 lines -- and
Palestinian rejection of statehood in favor of terror. Thus the professor is
silent regarding Arab rejection of nationhood alongside the Jews.
Nor are the Arabs faulted for their "anachronistic"
dictatorial regimes -- while the Jewish state is to be destroyed for its
supposed imperfections.
Arafat and his associates have long advocated the "single
state" solution Judt embraces, and have made clear what that would entail.
"Every Palestinian must clearly understand that the
independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, is not the end of
the process but rather a stage on the road to a democratic state in the whole of
Palestine," Fatah ideologue and PA director of political indoctrination Othman
Abu Gharbiya stated in November, 1999. "This will be followed by a third phase,
namely Palestine's complete amalgamation in the Arab and Islamic cultural,
national, historic, and geographic environment. This is the permanent-status
solution."
In becoming a cheerleader for this solution, Judt offers
the Jews of Israel the fate of other ethnic and religious minorities in the Arab
Middle East, all of whom are beleaguered and persecuted in some degree, and in
the worst cases subjected to genocidal assault. Indeed, Palestinian leaders,
including PA religious figures, have repeatedly called for the annihilation of
Israel.
But submitting Israel's Jews to the murderous designs of
Arafat and his cronies apparently means little to Judt when weighed against the
prospect of being freed in the eyes of his academic colleagues from the "guilt"
by ethnic association with Israel's battle for survival.
Security, which almost all Iraqis say is their major concern, is far better
in both the north and south than it is in the capital. Electricity is much
more reliable outside Baghdad. There are almost no power cuts in the south, a
region that often had six or less hours of electricity a day before the war.
Schools are mostly back to normal, and commerce is booming as goods flood in
across the Turkish and Kuwaiti borders. The military presence of the U.S. in
the north and the British in the south is far less visible than are the U.S.
forces in and around Baghdad. Despite sporadic ambushes, the foreign troops
are largely tolerated by locals, who tend to view them as a necessary evil
until a viable Iraqi administration is in place.
There are many complaints--about the increase in banditry on the roads, the
slow pace of reconstruction, the rise in prices, the shortage of jobs caused
in part by the U.S. dissolution of the Iraqi government and army. But when
people in the north and the south were asked whether life has improved since
the war, the answer, in Arabic, often came automatically: "Tab'an ahsan" ("Of
course, better"). In the village of Duluiyah, in central Iraq, Abdel Fattah
al-Juburi, a longtime opponent of the Saddam regime, says of the occupation,
"It's clear we got the better of two evils."
NO HATRED has as rich and as
lethal a history as anti-Semitism--"the longest hatred," as the
historian Robert Wistrich has dubbed it. Over the millennia, anti-Semitism has
infected a multitude of peoples, religions, and civilizations, in the process
inflicting a host of terrors on its Jewish victims. But while there is no
disputing the impressive reach of the phenomenon, there is surprisingly little
agreement about its cause or causes.
Indeed, finding a single cause
would seem too daunting a task--the incidence of anti-Semitism is too frequent,
the time span too broad, the locales too numerous, the circumstances too
varied. No doubt that is why some scholars have come to regard every outbreak
as essentially unique, denying that a straight line can be drawn from the
anti-Semitism of the ancient world to that of today. Whether it is the attack
on the Jews of Alexandria in 38 C.E. or the ones that took place 200 years
earlier in ancient Jerusalem, whether it is the Dreyfus affair in 1890's France
or Kristallnacht in late-1930's Germany--each incident is seen as the outcome
of a distinctive mix of political, social, economic, cultural, and religious
forces that preclude the possibility of a deeper or recurring cause.
A less extreme version of this same
approach identifies certain patterns of anti-Semitism, but only within
individual and discrete "eras." In particular, a distinction is drawn
between the religiously based hatred of the Middle Ages and the racially based
hatred of the modern era. Responsibility for the anti-Semitic waves that
engulfed Europe from the age of Constantine to the dawn of the Enlightenment is
laid largely at the foot of the Church and its offshoots, while the convulsions
that erupted over the course of the next three centuries are viewed as the
byproduct of the rise of virulent nationalism.
Obviously, separating out incidents
or eras has its advantages, enabling researchers to focus more intensively on
specific circumstances and to examine individual outbreaks from start to
finish. But what such analyses may gain in local explanatory power they
sacrifice in comprehensiveness. Besides, if every incident or era of anti-Semitism
is largely distinct from every other, how to explain the cumulative ferocity of
the phenomenon?
As if in response to this question,
some scholars have attempted to offer more sweeping, trans-historical
explanations. Perhaps the two best known are the "scapegoat" theory,
according to which tensions within society are regulated and released by
blaming a weaker group, often the Jews, for whatever is troubling the majority,
and the "demonization" theory, according to which Jews have been cast
into the role of the "other" by the seemingly perennial need to
reject those who are ethnically, religiously, or racially different.
Clearly, in this sociological
approach, anti-Semitism emerges as a Jewish phenomenon in name only. Rather, it
is but one variant in a family of hatreds that include racism and xenophobia.
Thus, the specifically anti-Jewish violence in Russia at the turn of the 20th
century, has as much in common with the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia at the turn
of the 21st as it does with the massacres of Jews in the Ukraine in the
mid-1600's. Taken to its logical conclusion, this theory, would redefine the
Holocaust--at the hands of some scholars, it has redefined the Holocaust--as
humanity's most destructive act of racism rather than as the most murderous
campaign ever directed against the Jews.
Reacting to such universalizing
tendencies a half-century ago, Hannah Arendt cited a piece of dialogue from
"a joke which was told after the first World War":
An anti-Semite claimed that the
Jews hadcaused the war; the reply was:
Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the
Jews? asks the other.
George Orwell offered a similar
observation in 1944: "However true the scapegoat theory may be in general
terms, it does not explain why the Jews rather than some other minority group
are picked on, nor does it make clear what they are the scapegoat for."
WHATEVER THE shortcomings of these
approaches may be, I have to admit that my own track record as a theorist is
no better.
Three decades ago, as a young
dissident in the Soviet Union, I compiled underground reports on anti-Semitism
for foreign journalists and Western diplomats. At the time, I firmly believed
that the cause of the "disease" was totalitarianism, and that
democracy was the way to cure it. Once the Soviet regime came to be replaced by
democratic rule, I figured, anti-Semitism was bound to wither away. In the
struggle toward that goal, the free world, which in the aftermath of the
Holocaust appeared to have inoculated itself against a recurrence of murderous
anti-Jewish hatred, was our natural ally, the one political entity with both
the means and the will to combat the great evil.
Today I know better. This year,
following publication of a report by an Israeli government forum charged with
addressing the issue of anti-Semitism, I invited to my office the ambassadors
of the two countries that have outpaced all others in the frequency and
intensity of anti-Jewish attacks within their borders. The emissaries were from
France and Belgium--two mature democracies in the heart of Western Europe. It
was in these ostensible bastions of enlightenment and tolerance that Jewish
cemeteries were being desecrated, children assaulted, synagogues scorched.
To be sure, the anti-Semitism now
pervasive in Western Europe is very different from the anti-Semitism I
encountered a generation ago in the Soviet Union. In the latter, it was
nurtured by systematic, government-imposed discrimination against Jews. In the
former, it has largely been condemned and opposed by governments (though far
less vigilantly than it should be). But this only makes anti-Semitism in the
democracies more disturbing, shattering the illusion--which was hardly mine
alone--that representative governance is an infallible antidote to active
hatred of Jews.
Another shattered illusion is even
more pertinent to our search. Shocked by the visceral anti-Semitism he
witnessed at the Dreyfus trial in supposedly enlightened France, Theodor Herzl,
the founder of modern Zionism, became convinced that the primary cause of
anti-Semitism was the anomalous condition of the Jews: a people without a
polity of its own. In his seminal work, The Jewish State (1896), published two
years after the trial, Herzl envisioned the creation of such a Jewish polity and
predicted that a mass emigration to it of European Jews would spell the end of
anti-Semitism. Although his seemingly utopian political treatise would turn out
to be one of the 20th century's most prescient books, on this point history has
not been kind to Herzl; no one would seriously argue today that anti-Semitism
came to a halt with the founding of the state of Israel. To the contrary, this
particular illusion has come full circle: while Herzl and most Zionists after
him believed that the emergence of a Jewish state would end anti-Semitism, an
increasing number of people today, including some Jews, are convinced that
anti-Semitism will end only with the disappearance of the Jewish state.
I first encountered this idea quite
a long time ago, in the Soviet Union. In the period before, during, and after
the Six-Day war of June 1967--a time when I and many others were experiencing a
heady reawakening of our Jewish identity--the Soviet press was filled with
scathing attacks on Israel and Zionism, and a wave of official anti-Semitism
was unleashed to accompany them. To quite a few Soviet Jews who had been trying
their best to melt into Soviet life, Israel suddenly became a jarring reminder
of their true status in the "workers' paradise": trapped in a world
where they were free neither to live openly as Jews nor to escape the stigma of
their Jewishness. To these Jews, Israel came to seem part of the problem, not
(as it was for me and others) part of the solution. Expressing what was no
doubt a shared sentiment, a distant relative of mine quipped: "If only
Israel didn't exist, everything would be all right."
In the decades since, and
especially over the last three years, the notion that Israel is one of the
primary causes of anti-Semitism, if not the primary cause, has gained much
wider currency. The world, we are told by friend and foe alike, increasingly
hates Jews because it increasingly hates Israel. Surely this is what the
Belgian ambassador had in mind when he informed me during his visit that
anti-Semitism in his country would cease once Belgians no longer had to watch
pictures on television of Israeli Jews oppressing Palestinian Arabs.
OBVIOUSLY THE state of Israel
cannot be the cause of a phenomenon that predates it by over 2,000 years. But
might it be properly regarded as the cause of contemporary anti-Semitism? What
is certain is that, everywhere one looks, the Jewish state does appear to be at
the center of the anti-Semitic storm--and nowhere more so, of course, than in
the Middle East.
The rise in viciously anti-Semitic
content disseminated through state-run Arab media is quite staggering, and has
been thoroughly documented. Arab propagandists, journalists, and scholars now
regularly employ the methods and the vocabulary used to demonize European Jews
for centuries--calling Jews Christ-killers, charging them with poisoning
non-Jews, fabricating blood libels, and the like. In a region where the
Christian faith has few adherents, a lurid and time-worn Christian
anti-Semitism boasts an enormous following.
To take only one example: this past
February, the Egyptian government, formally at peace with Israel, saw fit to
broadcast on its state-run television a 41-part series based on the infamous
Czarist forgery about a global Jewish conspiracy to dominate humanity, the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To ensure the highest ratings, the show was
first aired, in prime time, just as millions of families were breaking their
traditional Ramadan fast; Arab satellite television then rebroadcast the series
to tens of millions more throughout the Middle East.
In Europe, the connection between
Israel and anti-Semitism is equally conspicuous. For one thing, the timing and
nature of the attacks on European Jews, whether physical or verbal, have all
revolved around Israel, and the anti-Semitic wave itself, which began soon
after the Palestinians launched their terrorist campaign against the Jewish
state in September 2000, reached a peak (so far) when Israel initiated
Operation Defensive Shield at the end of March 2002, a month in which 125
Israelis had been killed by terrorists.
Though most of the physical attacks
in Europe were perpetrated by Muslims, most of the verbal and cultural assaults
came from European elites. Thus, the Italian newspaper La Stampa published a
cartoon of an infant Jesus lying at the foot of an Israeli tank, pleading,
"Don't tell me they want to kill me again." The frequent comparisons
of Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler, of Israelis to Nazis, and of Palestinians to
the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were not the work of hooligans
spray-painting graffiti on the wall of a synagogue but of university educators
and sophisticated columnists. As the Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago
declared of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians: "We can compare it with
what happened at Auschwitz."
The centrality of Israel to the
revival of a more generalized anti-Semitism is also evident in the
international arena. Almost a year after the current round of Palestinian
violence began, and after hundreds of Israelis had already been killed in
buses, discos, and pizzerias, a so-called "World Conference against
Racism" was held under the auspices of the United Nations in Durban, South
Africa. It turned into an anti-Semitic circus, with the Jewish state being
accused of everything from racism and apartheid to crimes against humanity and
genocide. In this theater of the absurd, the Jews themselves were turned into
perpetrators of anti-Semitism, as Israel was denounced for its "Zionist
practices against Semitism"--the Semitism, that is to say, of the
Palestinian Arabs.
Naturally, then, in searching for
the "root cause" of anti-Semitism, the Jewish state would appear to
be the prime suspect. But Israel, it should be clear, is not guilty. The Jewish
state is no more the cause of anti-Semitism today than the absence of a Jewish
state was its cause a century ago.
To see why, we must first
appreciate that the always specious line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism
has now become completely blurred: Israel has effectively become the world's
Jew. From Middle Eastern mosques, the bloodcurdling cry is not "Death to
the Israelis," but "Death to the Jews." In more civilized
circles, a columnist for the London Observer proudly announces that he does not
read published letters in support of Israel that are signed by Jews. (That the
complaints commission for the British press found nothing amiss in this
statement only goes to show how far things have changed since Orwell wrote of
Britain in 1945 that "it is not at present possible, indeed, that anti-Semitism
should become respectable.") When discussion at fashionable European
dinner parties turns to the Middle East, the air, we have been reliably
informed, turns blue with old-fashioned anti-Semitism.
No less revealing is what might be
called the mechanics of the discussion. For centuries, a clear sign of the
anti-Semitic impulse at work has been the use of the double standard: social
behavior that in others passes without comment or with the mildest questioning
becomes, when exhibited by Jews, a pretext for wholesale group denunciation.
Such double standards are applied just as recklessly today to the Jewish state.
It is democratic Israel, not any of the dozens of tyrannies represented in the
United Nations General Assembly, that that body singles out for condemnation in
over two dozen resolutions each year; it is against Israel--not Cuba, North
Korea, China, or Iran--that the UN human-rights commission, chaired recently by
a lily-pure Libya, directs nearly a third of its official ire; it is Israel whose
alleged misbehavior provoked the only joint session ever held by the
signatories to the Geneva Convention; it is Israel, alone among nations, that
has lately been targeted by Western campaigns of divestment; it is Israel's
Magen David Adom, alone among ambulance services in the world, that is denied
membership in the International Red Cross; it is Israeli scholars, alone among
academics in the world, who are denied grants and prevented from publishing
articles in prestigious journals. The list goes on and on.
The idea that Israel has become the
world's Jew and that anti-Zionism is a substitute for anti-Semitism is
certainly not new. Years ago, Norman Podhoretz observed that the Jewish state
"has become the touchstone of attitudes toward the Jewish people, and
anti-Zionism has become the most relevant form of anti-Semitism." And well
before that, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was even more unequivocal:
You declare, my
friend, that you do not hate theJews,
you are merely "anti-Zionist." And I say, let the truth ring forth
from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green
earth; when people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth.
But if Israel is indeed nothing
more than the world's Jew, then to say that the world increasingly hates Jews
because the world increasingly hates Israel means as much, or as little, as
saying that the world hates Jews because the world hates Jews. We still need to
know: why?
THIS MAY be a good juncture to let
the anti-Semites speak for themselves.
Here is the reasoning invoked by
Haman, the infamous viceroy of Persia in the biblical book of Esther, to
convince his king to order the annihilation of the Jews:
There is a certain
people scattered and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of your
kingdom, and their laws are different from those of other peoples, and the
king's laws they do not keep, so that it is of no benefit for the king to
tolerate them. If it please the king, let it be written that they be destroyed.
[emphasis added]
This is hardly the only ancient
source pointing to the Jews' incorrigible separateness, or their rejection of
the majority's customs and moral concepts, as the reason for hostility toward
them. Centuries after Hellenistic values had spread throughout and beyond the
Mediterranean, the Roman historian Tacitus had this to say:
Among the Jews,
all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they regard as
permissible what seems to us immoral... The rest of the world they confront
with the hatred reserved for enemies. They will not feed or intermarry with
gentiles... They have introduced circumcision to show that they are
different from others... It is a crime among them to kill any newly born
infant.
Philostratus, a Greek writer who lived
a century later, offered a similar analysis:
For the Jews have
long been in revolt not only against the Romans, but against humanity; and a
race that has made its own life apart and irreconcilable, that cannot share
with the rest of mankind in the pleasures of the table, nor join in their
libations or prayers or sacrifices, are separated from ourselves by a greater
gulf than divides us from Sura or Bactra of the more distant Indies.
Did the Jews actually reject the
values that were dominant in the ancient world, or was this simply a fantasy of
their enemies? While many of the allegations leveled at Jews were
spurious--they did not ritually slaughter non-Jews, as the Greek writer Apion
claimed--some were obviously based on true facts. The Jews did oppose
intermarriage. They did refuse to sacrifice to foreign gods. And they did
emphatically consider killing a newborn infant to be a crime.
Some, perhaps many, individual Jews
in those days opted to join the (alluring) Hellenist stream; most did not. Even
more important, the Jews were the only people seriously to challenge the moral
system of the Greeks. They were not an "other" in the ancient world;
they were the "other"--an other, moreover, steadfast in the
conviction that Judaism represented not only a different way of life but, in a
word, the truth. Jewish tradition claims that Abraham was chosen as the
patriarch of what was to become the Jewish nation only after he had smashed the
idols in his father's home. His descendants would continue to defy the pagan
world around them, championing the idea of the one God and, unlike other
peoples of antiquity, refusing to subordinate their beliefs to those of their
conquerors.
THE (BY and large correct)
perception of the Jews' rejecting the prevailing value system of the ancient
world hardly justifies the anti-Semitism directed against them; but it does
take anti-Semitism out of the realm of fantasy, turning it into a genuine dash
of ideals and of values. With the arrival of Christianity on the world stage,
that same dash, based once again on the charge of Jewish rejectionism, would
intensify a thousandfold. The refusal of the people of the "old
covenant" to accept the new came to be defined as a threat to the very
legitimacy of Christianity, and one that required a mobilized response.
Branding the Jews "Christ
killers" and "sons of devils," the Church launched a systematic
campaign to denigrate Christianity's parent religion and its adherents.
Accusations of desecrating the host, ritual murder, and poisoning wells would
be added over the centuries, creating an ever larger powder keg of hatred. With
the growing power of the Church and the global spread of Christianity, these
potentially explosive sentiments were carried to the far corners of the world,
bringing anti-Semitism to places where no Jewish foot had ever trod.
According to some Christian
thinkers, persecution of the powerless Jews was justified as a kind of divine
payback for the Jewish rejection of Jesus. This heavenly stamp of approval
would be invoked many times through the centuries, especially by those who had
tried and failed to convince the Jews to acknowledge the superior truth of
Christianity. The most famous case may be that of Martin Luther: at first
extremely friendly toward Jews--as a young man he had complained about their
mistreatment by the Church--Luther turned into one of their bitterest enemies
as soon as he realized that his efforts to woo them to his new form of
Christianity would never bear fruit.
Nor was this pattern unique to the
Christian religion. Muhammad, too, had hoped to attract the Jewish communities
of Arabia, and to this end he initially incorporated elements of Judaism into
his new faith (directing prayer toward Jerusalem, fasting on Yom Kippur, and
the like). When, however, the Jews refused to accept his code of law, Muhammad
wheeled upon them with a vengeance, cursing them in words strikingly
reminiscent of the early Church fathers: "Humiliation and wretchedness
were stamped upon them, and they were visited with the wrath of Allah. That was
because they disbelieved in Allah's revelation and slew the prophets
wrongfully."
IN THESE cases, too, we might ask
whether the perception of Jewish rejectionism was accurate. Of course the Jews
did not drain the blood of children, poison wells, attempt to mutilate the body
of Christ, or commit any of the other wild crimes of which the Church accused
them. Moreover, since many teachings of Christianity and Islam stemmed directly
from Jewish ones, Jews could hardly be said to have denied them. But if
rejecting the Christian or Islamic world meant rejecting the Christian or
Islamic creed, then Jews who clung to their own separate faith and way of life
were, certainly, rejectionist.
This brings us to an apparent point
of difference between pre-modern and modern anti-Semitism. For many Jews over
the course of two millennia, there was, in theory at least, a way out of
institutionalized discrimination and persecution: the Greco-Roman, Christian,
and Muslim worlds were only too happy to embrace converts to their way of life.
In the modern era, this choice often proved illusory. Both assimilated and
non-assimilated Jews, both religious and secular Jews, were equally victimized
by pogroms, persecutions, and genocide. In fact, the terrors directed at the assimilated
Jews of Western Europe have led some to conclude that far from ending
anti-Semitism, assimilation actually contributed to arousing it.
What accounts for this? In the
pre-modern world, Jews and Gentiles were largely in agreement as to what defined
Jewish rejectionism, and therefore what would constitute a reprieve from it: it
was mostly a matter of beliefs and moral concepts, and of the social behavior
that flowed from them. In the modern world, although the question of whether a
Jew ate the food or worshiped the God of his neighbors remained relevant, it
was less relevant than before. Instead, the modern Jew was seen as being born
into a Jewish nation or race whose collective values were deeply embedded in
the very fabric of his being. Assimilation, with or without conversion to the
majority faith, might succeed in masking this bedrock taint; it could not
expunge it.
While such views were not entirely
absent in earlier periods, the burden of proof faced by the modern Jew to
convince others that he could transcend his "Jewishness" was much
greater than the one faced by his forebears. Despite the increasing secularism
and openness of European society, which should have smoothed the prospects of
assimilation, many modern Jews would find it more difficult to become real
Frenchmen or true Germans than their ancestors would have found it to become
Greeks or Romans, Christians or Muslims.
The novelty of modern anti-Semitism
is thus not that the Jews were seen as the enemies of mankind. Indeed, Hitler's
observation in Mein Kampf that "wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and
the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the
rest of humanity" sounds no different from the one penned by Philostratus
1,700 years earlier. No, the novelty of modern anti-Semitism is only that it
was far more difficult--and sometimes impossible--for the Jew to stop being an
enemy of mankind.
ON CLOSER inspection, then, modern
anti-Semitism begins to look quite continuous with pre-modern anti-Semitism, only
worse. Modern Jews may not have believed they were rejecting the prevailing
order around them, but that did not necessarily mean their enemies agreed with
them. When it came to the Jews, indeed, European nationalism of the
blood-and-soil variety only added another and even more murderous layer of
hatred to the foundation built by age-old religious prejudice. Just as in the
ancient world, the Jews in the modern world remained the other--inveterate
rejectionists, no matter how separate, no matter how assimilated.
Was there any kernel of factual
truth to this charge? It is demeaning to have to point out that, wherever and
whenever they were given the chance, most modern Jews strove to become model
citizens and showed, if anything, an exemplary talent for acculturation; the
idea that by virtue of their birth, race, or religion they were implacable
enemies of the state or nation was preposterous. So, too, with other modern
libels directed against the Jews, which displayed about as much or as little
truth content as ancient ones. The Jews did not and do not control the banks.
They did not and do not control the media of communication. They did not and do
not control governments, And they are not plotting to take over anything.
What some of them have indeed done,
in various places and under specific circumstances, is to demonstrate--with an
ardor and tenacity redolent perhaps of their long national experience--an
attachment to great causes of one stripe or another, including, at times, the
cause of their own people. This has had the effect (not everywhere, of course,
but notably in highly stratified and/or intolerant societies) of putting them
in a visibly adversary position to prevailing values or ideologies, and thereby
awakening the never dormant dragon of anti-Semitism. Particularly instructive
in this regard is the case of Soviet Jewry.
What makes the Soviet case
instructive is, in no small measure, the fact that the professed purpose of
Communism was to abolish all nations, peoples, and religions--those great engines
of exclusion--on the road to the creation of a new world and a new man. As is
well known, quite a few Jews, hoping to emancipate humanity and to
"normalize" their own condition in the process, hitched their fates
to this ideology and to the movements associated with it. After the Bolshevik
revolution, these Jews proved to be among the most devoted servants of the
Soviet regime.
Once again, however, the perception
of ineradicable Jewish otherness proved as lethal as any reality. In the eyes
of Stalin and his henchmen, the Jews, starting with the loyal Communists among
them, were always suspect--"ideological immigrants," in the telling
phrase. But the animosity went beyond Jewish Communists. The Soviet regime
declared war on the over 100 nationalities and religions under its boot; whole
peoples were deported, entire classes destroyed, millions starved to death, and
tens of millions killed. Everybody suffered, not only Jews. But, decades later,
long after Stalin's repression had given way to Khrushchev's "thaw,"
only one national language, Hebrew, was still banned in the Soviet Union; only
one group, the Jews, was not permitted to establish schools for its children;
only in the case of one group, the Jews, did the term "fifth line," referring
to the space reserved for nationality on a Soviet citizen's identification
papers, become a code for licensed discrimination.
Clearly, then, Jews were suspect in
the Soviet Union as were no other group. Try as they might to conform, it mined
out that joining the ,mainstream of humanity through the medium of the great
socialist cause in the East was no easier than joining the nation-state in the
West. But that is not the whole story, either. To scant the rest of it is not
only to do an injustice to Soviet Jews as historical actors in their own right
but to miss something essential about anti-Semitism, which, even as it operates
in accordance with its own twisted definitions and its own mad logic, proceeds
almost always by reference to some genuine quality in its chosen victims.
As it happens, although Jews were
disproportionately represented in the ranks of the early Bolsheviks, the
majority of Russian Jews were far from being Bolsheviks, or even Bolshevik
sympathizers. More importantly, Jews would also, in time, come to play a
disproportionate role in Communism's demise. In the middle of the 1960's, by
which time their overall share of the country's population had dwindled
dramatically, Soviet Jews made up a significant element in the "democratic
opposition." A visitor to the Gulag in those years would have discovered
that Jews were also prominent among political dissidents and those convicted of
so-called "economic crimes." Even more revealing, in the 1970's the
Jews were the first to challenge the Soviet regime as a national group, and to
do so publicly, en masse, with tens of thousands openly demanding to leave the
totalitarian state.
To that degree, then, the claim of
Soviet anti-Semites that "Jewish thoughts" and "Jewish
values" were in opposition to prevailing norms was not entirely unfounded.
And, to that degree, Soviet anti-Semitism partook of the essential
characteristic of all anti-Semitism. This hardly makes its expression any the
less monstrous; it merely, once again, takes it out of the realm of fantasy.
AND SO we arrive back at today, and
at the hatred that takes as its focus the state of Israel. That state--the
world's Jew--has the distinction of challenging two separate political/moral
orders simultaneously: the order of the Arab and Muslim Middle East, and the
order that prevails in Western Europe. The Middle Eastern case is the easier to
grasp; the Western European one may be the more ominous.
The values ascendant in today's
Middle East are shaped by two forces: Islamic fundamentalism and state
authoritarianism. In the eyes of the former, any non-Muslim sovereign power in
the region--for that matter, any secular Muslim power--is anathema.
Particularly galling is Jewish sovereignty in an area delineated as dar
al-Islam, the realm where Islam is destined to enjoy exclusive dominance. Such
a violation cannot be compromised with; nothing will suffice but its
extirpation.
In the eyes of the secular Arab
regimes, the Jews of Israel are similarly an affront, but not so much on
theological grounds as on account of the society they have built: free,
productive, democratic, a living rebuke to the corrupt, autocratic regimes
surrounding it. In short, the Jewish state is the ultimate freedom fighter--an
embodiment of the subversive liberties that threaten Islamic civilization and
autocratic Arab rule alike. It is for this reason that, in the state-controlled
Arab media as in the mosques, Jews have been turned into a symbol of all that
is menacing in the democratic, materialist West as a whole, and are confidently
reputed to be the insidious force manipulating the United States into a
confrontation with Islam.
The particular dynamic of
anti-Semitism in the Middle East orbit today may help explain why--unlike, as
we shall see, in Europe--there was no drop in the level of anti-Jewish
incitement in the region after the inception of the Oslo peace process. Quite
the contrary. And the reason is plain: to the degree that Oslo were to have
succeeded in bringing about a real reconciliation with Israel or in
facilitating the spread of political freedom, to that degree it would have
frustrated the overarching aim of eradicating the Jewish "evil" from
the heart of the Middle East and/or preserving the autocratic power of the Arab
regimes.
And so, while in the 1990's the
democratic world, including the democratic society of Israel, was (deludedly,
as it turned out) celebrating the promise of a new dawn in the Middle East, the
schools in Gaza, the textbooks in Ramallah, the newspapers in Egypt, and the
television channels in Saudi Arabia were projecting a truer picture of the
state of feeling in the Arab world. It should come as no surprise that, in
Egypt, pirated copies of Shimon Peres's A New Middle East, a book heralding a
messianic era of free markets and free ideas, were printed with an introduction
in Arabic claiming that what this bible of Middle East peacemaking proved was
the veracity of everything written in file Protocols of the Elders of Zion
about a Jewish plot to rule the world.
As for Western Europe, there the
reputation of Israel and of the Jews has undergone a number of ups and downs
over the decades. Before 1967, the shadow of the Holocaust and the perception
of Israel as a small state struggling for its existence in the face of Arab
aggression combined to ensure, if not the favor of the European political
classes, at least a certain dispensation from harsh criticism. But all this
changed in June 1967, when the truncated Jewish state achieved a seemingly
miraculous victory against its massed Arab enemies in the Six-Day war, and the
erstwhile victim was overnight transformed into an aggressor. A possibly
apocryphal story about Jean-Paul Sartre encapsulates the shift in the European
mood. Before the war, as Israel lay diplomatically isolated and Arab leaders
were already trumpeting its certain demise, the famous French philosopher
signed a statement in support of the Jewish state. After the war, he reproached
the man who had solicited his signature: "But you assured me they would
lose."
Decades before
"occupation" became a household word, the mood in European
chancelleries and on the Left turned decidedly hostile. There were, to be sure,
venal interests at stake, from the perceived need to curry favor with the
oil-producing nations of the Arab world to, in later years, the perceived need
to pander to the growing Muslim populations in Western Europe itself. But other
currents were also at work, as anti-Western, anti-"imperialist,"
pacifist, and pro-liberationist sentiments, fanned and often subsidized by the
USSR, took over the advanced political culture both of Europe and of
international diplomacy. Behind the new hostility to Israel lay the new
ideological orthodoxy, according to whose categories the Jewish state had
emerged on the world scene as a certified "colonial" and
"imperialist" power, a "hegemon," and an
"oppressor."
Before 1967, anti-Zionist
resolutions sponsored by the Arabs and their Soviet patrons in the United
Nations garnered little or no support among the democracies. After 1967, more
and more Western countries joined the chorus of castigation. By 1974, Yasir
Arafat, whose organization openly embraced both terrorism and the destruction
of a UN member state, was invited to address the General Assembly. The next
year, that same body passed the infamous "Zionism-is-racism"
resolution. In 1981, Israel's strike against Iraq's nuclear reactor was
condemned by the entire world, including the United States.
Then, in the 1990's, things began
to change again. Despite the constant flow of biased UN resolutions, despite
the continuing double standard, there were a number of positive developments as
well: the Zionism-is-racism resolution was repealed, and over 65 member states
either established or renewed diplomatic relations with Israel.
What had happened? Had Arab oil
dried up? Had Muslims suddenly become a less potent political force on the
European continent? Hardly. What changed was that, at Madrid and then at Oslo,
Israel had agreed, first reluctantly and later with self-induced optimism, to
conform to the ascendant ethos of international politics. Extending its hand to
a terrorist organization still committed to its destruction, Israel agreed to
the establishment of a dictatorial and repressive regime on its very doorstep,
sustaining its commitment to the so-called peace process no matter how many
innocent Jews were killed and wounded in its fraudulent name.
The rewards for thus conforming to
the template of the world's moralizers, cosmetic and temporary though they
proved to be, flowed predictably not just to Israel but to the Jewish people as
a whole. Sure enough, worldwide indices of anti-Semitism in the 1990's dropped
to their lowest point since the Holocaust. As the world's Jews benefited from
the increasing tolerance extended to the world's Jew, Western organizations
devoted to fighting the anti-Semitic scourge began cautiously to declare
victory and to refocus their efforts on other parts of the Jewish communal
agenda.
But of course it would not last. In
the summer of 2000, at Camp David, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians nearly
everything their leadership was thought to be demanding. The offer was
summarily rejected, Arafat started his '"uprising," Israel undertook
to defend itself--and Europe ceased to applaud. For many Jews at the time, this
seemed utterly incomprehensible: had not Israel taken every last step for
peace? But it was all too comprehensible. Europe was staying true to form; it
was the world's Jew, by refusing to accept its share of blame for the
"cycle of violence," that was out of line. And so were the world's
Jews, who by definition, and whether they supported Israel or not, came rapidly
to be associated with the Jewish state in its effrontery.
TO AMERICANS, the process I have
been describing may sound eerily familiar. It should: Americans, too, have had numerous
opportunities to see their nation in the dock of world opinion over recent
years for the crime of rejecting the values of the so-called international
community, and never more so than during the widespread hysteria that greeted
President Bush's announced plan to dismantle the tyrannical regime of Saddam
Hussein. In dozens of countries, protesters streamed into the streets to voice
their fury at this refusal of the United States to conform to what
"everybody" knew to be required of it. To judge from the placards on
display at these rallies, President Bush, the leader of the free world, was a
worse enemy of mankind than the butcher of Baghdad.
At first glance, this too must have
seemed incomprehensible. Saddam Hussein was one of the world's most brutal
dictators, a man who had gassed his own citizens, invaded his neighbors, defied
Security Council resolutions, and was widely believed to possess weapons of
mass destruction. But no matter: the protests were less about Iraqi virtue than
about American vice, and the grievances aired by the assorted anti-capitalists,
anti-globalists, radical environmentalists, self-styled anti-imperialists, and
many others who assembled to decry the war had little to do with the possible
drawbacks of a military operation in Iraq. They had to do, rather, with a
genuine clash of values.
Insofar as the clash is between the
United States and Europe--there is a large "European" body of opinion
within the United States as well--it has been well diagnosed by Robert Kagan in
his best-selling book, Of Paradise and Power. For our purposes, it is
sufficient to remark on how quickly the initial "why-do-they-hate-us"
debate in the wake of September 11, focusing on anti-American sentiment in the
Muslim world, came to be overtaken by a "why-do-they-hate-us" debate
centered on anti-American sentiment in "Old Europe." Generally, the
two hatreds have been seen to emanate from divergent impulses, in the one case
a perception of the threat posed by Western freedoms to Islamic civilization,
in the other a perception of the threat posed by a self-confident and powerful
America to the postmodern European idea of a world regulated not by force but
by reason, compromise, and nonjudgmentalism. In today's Europe--professedly
pacifist, postnationalist, anti-hegemonic--an expression like "axis of
evil" wins few friends, and the idea of actually confronting the axis of
evil still fewer.
Despite the differences between
them, however, anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in
Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to
anti-Semitism. It is, after all, with some reason that the United States is
loathed and feared by the despots and fundamentalists of the Islamic world as
well as by many Europeans. Like Israel, but in a much more powerful way,
America embodies a different--a nonconforming--idea of the good, and refuses to
abandon its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea or of the free
habits and institutions to which it has given birth. To the contrary, in undertaking
their war against the evil of terrorism, the American people have demonstrated
their determination not only to fight to preserve the blessings of liberty for
themselves and their posterity, but to carry them to regions of the world that
have proved most resistant to their benign influence.
IN THIS, positive sense as well,
Israel and the Jewish people share something essential with the United States.
The Jews, after all, have long held that they were chosen to play a special
role in history, to be what their prophets called "a light unto the
nations." What precisely is meant by that phrase has always been a matter
of debate, and I would be the last to deny the mischief that has sometimes been
done, including to the best interests of the Jews, by some who have raised it
as their banner. Nevertheless, over four millennia, the universal vision and
moral precepts of the Jews have not only worked to secure the survival of the
Jewish people themselves but have constituted a powerful force for good in the
world, inspiring myriads to fight for the right even as in others they have
aroused rivalry, enmity, and unappeasable resentment.
It is similar with the United
States--a nation that has long regarded itself as entrusted with a mission to
be what John Winthrop in the 17th century called a "city on a hill"
and Ronald Reagan in the 20th parsed as a "shining city on a hill."
What precisely is meant by that phrase is likewise a matter of debate, but
Americans who see their country in such terms certainly regard the advance of
American values as central to American purpose. And, though the United States
is still a very young nation, there can be no disputing that those values have
likewise constituted an immense force for good in the world--even as they have
earned America the enmity and resentment of many.
In resolving to face down enmity
and hatred, an important source of strength is the lesson to be gained from
contemplating the example of others. From Socrates to Churchill to Sakharov,
there have been individuals whose voices and whose personal heroism have
reinforced in others the resolve to stand firm for the good. But history has
also been generous enough to offer, in the Jews, the example of an ancient
people fired by the message of human freedom under God and, in the Americans,
the example of a modern people who over the past century alone, acting in
fidelity with their inmost beliefs, have confronted and defeated the greatest
tyrannies ever known to man.
Fortunately for America, and
fortunately for the world, the United States has been blessed by providence
with the power to match its ideals. The Jewish state, by contrast, is a tiny
island in an exceedingly dangerous sea, and its citizens will need every
particle of strength they can muster for the trials ahead. It is their own
people's astounding perseverance, despite centuries of suffering at the hands
of faiths, ideologies, peoples, and individuals who have hated them and set out
to do them in, that inspires one with confidence that the Jews will once again
outlast their enemies.
Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet
dissident and political prisoner, now serves in the government of Israel as
minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs. This article draws in part on
ideas presented at a conference on anti-Semitism in Paris in May and at the
World Forum of the American Enterprise Institute in June. Mr. Sharansky thanks
Ron Dermer for help in developing the arguments and in preparing the
manuscript.
The newspaper that almost missed the war in Iraq because its reporters were
in Georgia covering the membership policies of the Augusta National Golf Club
has declared another one of President George Bush's judicial nominees as "out of
the mainstream." The New York Times has proclaimed so many Bush nominees "out of
the mainstream," that the editorial calling California Supreme Court Justice
Janice Rogers Brown "out of the mainstream" was literally titled: "Out of the
Mainstream, Again."
Among Bush's "many unworthy judicial nominees," the Times said, Brown is
"among the very worst" -- more "out of the mainstream" than all the rest! Even
Teddy Kennedy, who might be well advised to withhold comment on a woman's
position relative to a moving body of water, has described Brown as "out of the
mainstream," adding, "Let's just hope this one can swim."
Liberals are hysterical about Justice Brown principally because she is black.
Nothing enrages them so much as a minority who does not spend her days saying
hosannas to liberals.
On the basis of its editorial positions, the Times seems to have called a
bunch of racist Southern election supervisors out of retirement to cover
judicial nominations for the paper. The only difference is, instead of phony
"literacy" tests, now we have phony "mainstream" tests. Amazingly, no matter how
many conservative minorities Bush sends up, the Times has not been able to find
a single one who is "qualified." The Times thinks Justice Brown should be the
maid and Miguel Estrada the pool boy.
According to the Times, Brown has "declared war on the mainstream legal
values that most Americans hold dear." What the Times means by "mainstream legal
values" is: off-the-charts unpopular positions favored by NAMBLA, the ACLU, and
The New York Times editorial page.
Thus, for example, opposition to partial birth abortion -- opposed by 70
percent of the American people -- is "out of the mainstream." Support for the
death penalty -- supported by 70 percent of the American people -- is "out of the
mainstream."
Opposition to government-sanctioned race discrimination -- which voters in the
largest state in the nation put on an initiative titled Proposition 209 and
enacted into law -- is "out of the mainstream." Opposition to gay marriage --
opposed by 60 percent of the American people -- is "out of the mainstream."
Failing to recognize that totally nude dancing is "speech" is "out of the
mainstream." Questioning whether gay Scoutmasters should be taking 14-year-old
boys on overnight sleepovers in the woods is "out of the mainstream."
I guess if your "mainstream" includes Roman Polanski, Michael Moore, Howard
Dean and Jacques Chirac, then Brown really is "out of the mainstream." This
proverbial "stream" they're constantly referring to is evidently located
somewhere in France.
Liberals are always complaining that they haven't figured out how to distill
their message to slogans and bumper stickers -- as they allege Republicans have.
Though it can't be easy to fit the entire Communist Manifesto on a bumper
sticker, I beg to differ. (Bumper sticker version of the current Democratic
platform: "Ask me about how I'm going to raise your taxes.")
The problem is, if Democrats ever dared speak coherently, the American people
would lynch them. Fortunately for liberals, soccer moms hear that a nominee is
"extreme" and "out the mainstream" and are too frightened to ask for details.
(Ironically, based on ticket sales and TV ratings, soccer is also out of the
mainstream.)
In addition to the fact that she is black and "out of the mainstream," the
first item in the Times' bill of particulars against Brown was this:
"She regularly stakes out extreme positions, often dissenting alone. In one
case, her court ordered a rental car company to stop its supervisor from calling
Hispanic employees by racial epithets. Justice Brown dissented, arguing that
doing so violated the company's free speech rights."
Despite the Times' implication that Brown was "dissenting alone" in this
case, she was not. The opinion of the California Supreme Court in the case,
Aguilar v. Avis, was as closely divided as it gets: 4-3. Among the dissenters
was Stanley Mosk, who was once described by the Los Angeles Times as "the
court's most liberal member." When Mosk died in 2001, his obituary in The New
York Times described him as "the only liberal on the seven-member court." I
suppose if the Times had mentioned that a prominent liberal jurist had agreed
with Brown in Aguilar, it would be harder to frighten silly women with that "out
of the mainstream" babble.
But the real beauty part of Brown's dissent in Aguilar is that she was
vindicating a constitutional principle that is second in importance only to
abortion for liberals: no prior restraints on speech.
In a major victory for Avis, the jury rejected almost all of the claims
against Avis by Hispanic employees, but did find that two managers -- only one of
whom still worked at Avis -- had called Hispanics names. So the lower court judge
got the idea to issue an injunction prohibiting one single Avis manager from
ever using derogatory language about Avis' Hispanic employees.
The injunction was broad enough to prevent the manager from using such
language in his home, out of earshot of his employees, in a joking or friendly
manner, as part of a hypothetical example, or even if his speech were incapable
of creating a "hostile environment" under the law. Questions were also raised
about whether he was even allowed to chuckle at the little dog in those "Yo
quiero Taco Bell" TV commercials. It was basically a bill of attainder against
this one manager (who was himself married to a Hispanic).
I note that liberals laughed at the idea that a "hostile environment" could
be created by a single incident of a governor dropping his pants and asking a
subordinate to "kiss it." But the mere speculative threat of a manager saying
"wetback" -- one time -- was such a threat to the stability of the nation that the
Times backed a prior restraint on the manager's speech.
Usually The New York Times is citing the law's antagonism to prior restraints
on speech in order to wax eloquent about the Supreme Court's "landmark decision
in the Pentagon Papers case." In a ruling that celebrated the very essence of
the First Amendment, the court ruled that the government couldn't stop the
Treason Times from publishing classified national security documents. As the
Times put it, that case had "made it clear that only a showing of concrete,
immediate risk to the nation could justify a judicial order imposing a prior
restraint on any kind of publication."
But apparently, there is one interest even more vital than preventing an
immediate risk to the nation: stopping a supervisor someplace in America from
ever using the word "spic." Anyone who disagrees is "out of the mainstream." And
any minority who is not duly grateful to liberals for supporting prior
restraints against certain words is only qualified to be the maid.
According to the United Nations, this uninhabited strip of land - 14
kilometers long and two kilometers deep - falls squarely on the Israeli side of
Blue Line dividing Israel from Lebanon. But because the farms are also on the
Golan Heights, the UN insists they properly belong to Syria.
In the language of news agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press,
that would mean the farms are in "Israeli-occupied" territory. But there's a
catch. Syria - which otherwise is so jealous of its territory that it refused
Ehud Barak's 1999 offer to return the Golan Heights minus a strip of shoreline -
does not claim the farms as its own.
Instead, in 2000 Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara informed the UN that
the farms are Lebanese. Syria claims it made a gift of them to Lebanon in 1951
as part of what one Lebanese official described as a "kind of oral agreement,"
but neither government has been able to produce any documentation proving it.
The Lebanese government has also produced some handwritten deeds for the
farms dating from the 1940s. But even if these are not forgeries, the fact that
they predate the 1951 land transfer renders them inoperative - if indeed there
was a land transfer. According to Lebanese military maps from the early 1960s,
the farms fell squarely in Syrian territory.
So why did Reuters and the Associated Press describe the farms as "disputed"
following this week's Hizbullah rocket attacks? Because, one inside source
helpfully explains, the Golan Heights are "disputed" by Israel and Syria. But in
that case, why do the news agencies otherwise describe the Heights as
"occupied"? And if they are now so sensitive to Israeli claims, why not also
describe the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as "disputed"?
The fact is, Syria and Lebanon jointly pretend the Shaba farms are Lebanese
in order to furnish Hizbullah with a pretext for continued attacks on Israeli
targets. By calling the farms "disputed," Reuters and AP only lend credibility
to what should be described as a fraud.
I EXPATIATE on this topic to make a simple point: Just because someone
disputes something - whether it's land, law, history, received opinion or
whatever - does not mean it's disputed. A controversy is not created by the act
of controverting alone.
Take a homely example: I may swan into your living room, refuse to budge and
claim your house as my own. That does not make it mine. Nor does it make it
"disputed territory," except semantically.
Still, if some camera crew were to arrive on the scene to report not on my
invasion of your property but on this "dispute" of ours, it would go a long way
toward shoring up my case. Let it go on for a month or two, and you might even
be tempted to compromise. The basement apartment, perhaps?
What goes for your house and the Shaba farms goes also for the Jewish state.
Israel's existential legitimacy has been widely assailed for years - but that
came, or comes, mainly from Arab, Islamic and Soviet corners. By contrast,
Israel's critics in the West usually confined themselves to arguing about
Israel's borders. As for the rightness of the Zionist dream itself, that was
ideological territory upon which they dared not trespass.
Now that's changed. A line has been crossed. With the media's help, Israel
has become "controversial." As usual, Israelis and Jews have blazed this
particular trail.
In August, Haaretz ran a long profile by Ari Shavit of "neo-Canaanites" Haim
Hanegbi and Meron Benvenisti, two Israelis who have come to the conclusion that
"Israel as a Jewish state can no longer exist here."
In September, former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg penned an article for
Yediot Aharonot in which he argued that "after two thousand years of struggle
for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique
which scorns and mocks law and civic morality." The article was reprinted in the
International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, The Guardian, the Suddeutsche Zeitung
and (of course!), The Forward.
All this was bound to spill over on American shores, and earlier this month
it did. In the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt, a British Jew who is a
professor of history at New York University and director of the Remarque
Institute, has announced "the depressing truth that Israel today is bad for the
Jews." Judt's article is titled "Israel: The Alternative" - the alternative
(actually, the "desirable outcome") being the binational state propounded by
Benvenisti and Hanegbi. His argument is that Zionism "arrived too late": By the
time the Jewish state was born in 1948, the world had moved beyond nationalism
to globalism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism.
Israel, however, remains a state defined by ethno-religious criteria, even as
a growing percentage of the population within its borders is not Jewish. So it
faces a dilemma: It can either retreat to borders within which it may remain
both Jewish and democratic; it can expel its non-Jewish population, meaning
primarily the Palestinians; or it can become a binational state.
Judt implies that he prefers the first alternative. Only he doesn't think
it's going to happen: "There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers,
and too many Palestinians" for the two-state solution to work. American pressure
could help, but none is forthcoming because Bush "has been reduced to a
ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line."
As for that cabinet, it is composed of extremists to whom the the fascist
label "fits better than ever." The government, Judt claims, is moving Israel in
the direction of "full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project."
Thus we arrive, with Hegelian inevitability, at history's juncture. Either
the Zionist fascists of the present government will get their way, leading to
the permanent estrangement of decent Diaspora Jewry from their fanatical cousins
in the Holy Land. Or the decent people will prevail, leading to a binational
state of which Jews everywhere, and the whole world, can be proud.
This second outcome, Judt writes, "would not be easy, though not quite as
impossible as it sounds." All that's required is "brave and relentlessly engaged
American leadership"; "international force" to guarantee "the security of Jews
and Arabs alike"; and "the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new
political class."
ABOUT JUDT'S scheme, many things can be said, the least of which is its
mind-boggling impracticality.
A binational state? Surely Judt is aware of where that path led to in
Lebanon, where the animosities and differences between Christians and Muslims
were nowhere near as deep as they are between Muslims and Jews.
A new political class? Had Palestinian Arabs had such a class in the 1930s, a
binational state may have come into being with the end of the British mandate,
for there was no shortage of Jews advocating as much at the time.
"International forces" to guarantee the mutual security of Jews and Arabs? We
know too well what such forces recently accomplished in Srebrenica and Kigali.
Then there's Judt's sense of history.
He says that Israel threatens to become the first modern democracy to engage in
ethnic cleansing. Well, no: The United States and Australia, both modern
democracies, did far worse with their aboriginal peoples.
He says that Jewish nationalism came to fruition too late. Wrong again: India
and Pakistan and Indonesia were born alongside Israel; the Indochinese states
emerged a decade later; the African states a few years after that. Should we do
away with them, too, under the auspices of "international forces"? This is a cry
for colonialism.
He says that US support for Israel has been "a disaster for American foreign
policy." (Syria, by contrast, is praised "for providing the US with critical
data on al-Qaida). In fact, what has been disastrous for US Middle East policy
has been its support for Arab and Muslim autocrats such as Hosni Mubarak of
Egypt and the Shah of Iran.
Judt is equally bad when it comes to understanding Israeli politics. He tells
us that the current Likud government is the heir to Herut and the Revisionist
Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Which is partly true, except that Sharon himself
is an old Laborite who in recent months has sidelined the true heirs to
Revisionist Zionism championed by Binyamin Netanyahu.
He says that Israel's security fence is like the Berlin Wall. But the Berlin
Wall was built to keep people in, whereas the security fence is being built to
keep people out. A better analogy for the security fence is the American border
with Mexico.
He tells us that the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank is an
option seriously being considered by Israeli decision makers. Please.
Judt's resort to classic anti-Semitic tropes should also not be overlooked.
He tells us, twice, that US policy is being conducted to suit Ariel Sharon's
convenience. This is a view that finds wide expression in Arab media.
But does Judt seriously believe that the foreign policy of a superpower is
being manipulated by its own client state? Truly it is an amazingly wily and
manipulative client who can so hoodwink its patron.
Judt tells us that Israel is bad for the Jews because the actions of the
Sharon government taint Jews by implication everywhere. What's more, he says,
they contribute to "misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at
Israel" by torching synagogues in Lyon or attacking Jews in the streets of
Berlin. But as Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic points out in a devastating
critique of Judt, "if you explain anti-Semitism as a response to Jews... you
have not understood it. You have reproduced it."
Then too, notice Judt's use of the word "misdirected." For an Algerian youth
to stab a Parisian rabbi is "misdirected." Everything the Israeli government
does is unadulterated fascism.
The fact that Judt is Jewish does not acquit him of the charge of anti-Semitism.
It aggravates it.
A gentile with little or no knowledge of classic anti-Semitic tropes may make
a comment that sounds anti-Semitic -"the Jews control Hollywood," for instance -
without recognizing it as anti-Semitic.
That's stupid, but it is not necessarily ill-intentioned. But it is
unforgivable for a man of Judt's pedigree and education to make similar kinds of
comments. Explain, please, the difference between Judt's line that Sharon plays
Bush like a "ventriloquist's dummy" and Mahathir Mohamad's remark to the
Organization of the Islamic Conference that "the Jews rule this world by proxy.
They get others to fight and die for them." I see none.
SO MUCH for Judt's arguments. They collapse on first inspection, rather like
Syrian and Lebanese claims regarding the Shaba farms.
Yet Judt remains a figure of respect. Not only was his essay allowed in the
New York Review of Books, as far as I can tell he remains a contributing editor
to The New Republic, the very magazine in which Wieseltier savaged him.
But will TNR sack Judt the way the American sports channel ESPN recently
sacked Rush Limbaugh for making an arguably derogatory comment about a black
football player? I doubt it.
No: Judt has merely exercised his right to free speech. It was a foolish
speech, perhaps, but wasn't it Jefferson who said that error of opinion may be
tolerated where freedom is left free to combat it? Instead, we will argue with
Judt, show him the error of his ideas. Ostracism is not the democratic way.
Engagement is.
Except that's not true. Polite society in the US has ruled that racist
comments, or anti-Semitic comments, or sexist comments, or comments that hint at
racism or anti-Semitism or sexism, are out of bounds. Rightly so. Especially in
a free-speech country, some things must not be said.
It is the obligation of the people who rule polite society - academics,
editors, teachers, TV producers and so on - to enforce the norms when government
will not. Fail to do so, and you take the lid off the gutter and let the sewage
run in the streets.
This is what is happening now with Israel. It does not really matter what
Judt thinks about the dummy's ventriloquist. It matters that his views are being
published in prestige magazines. It matters that his views are on this side of
acceptable discourse.
It matters that his views are a matter of controversy, not disrepute.
It will be said that I am trying to quash debate. That is exactly what I
would have done, were it still possible. It no longer is. The controversy of
Israel's borders is over. Our enemies have won. The controversy of Israel is now
upon us.
In 1962, an American historian named Roberta Wohlstetter wrote a book that is
required reading at Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. It ought to be required reading
for every foreign correspondent, too. The book, Pearl Harbor: Warning and
Decision was an effort to explain why the United States had failed to anticipate
the Japanese attack, despite quantities of intelligence indicating that an
attack was soon coming. For years, Americans had known of this failure, and that
knowledge spawned the view that Franklin Roosevelt had taken the U.S. to war
"through the back door," or, as Clare Booth Luce put it, that he had "lied us
into a war because he didn't have the courage to lead us into it."
Wohlstetter saw it differently. In the run-up to December 7, she noted, U.S.
intelligence knew not only that Hawaii was a potential target for the Japanese,
but that Siberia, the Panama Canal, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies
were, too. All this information created what she called "noise," an overwhelming
barrage of signals in which significant information tended to be drowned in
trivia?
The analysis holds good in other situations. In the spring of 1941, Stalin had
ample information that Hitler was massing troops on their shared front. In the
fall of 1973, Israel knew the movements of the Egyptian and Syrian armies. The
Soviets and Israelis were taken by surprise not because of faulty information.
The problem was one of faulty interpretation, which in turn came from faulty
assumptions about enemy motives. Stalin was convinced Hitler was maneuvering
toward negotiation, not war; Israel thought the Arabs would never launch a war
they were bound to lose.
Now fast-forward to August 3, 2000. On that day, The New York Times published a
story by reporter John Burns, headlined "Palestinian Summer Camps Offer Games at
War." "Last summer," Burns wrote, "some 27,000 Palestinian children participated
in the camps, where they receive weeks of training in guerrilla warfare,
including operation of firearms and mock kidnappings of Israeli leaders. A
common theme in the camps was preparation for armed conflict: 'slitting the
throats of Israelis' is one of the children's exercises at these camps."
To its credit, the Times ran this piece on the front page. [But] within a month
the story was pretty much forgotten. When fighting broke out on September 30
most of the news media were prepared to believe that it was Ariel Sharon who had
started it by taking a walk on the Temple Mount.
To me, Burns's reporting is of a piece with the early warnings about Pearl
Harbor. Who, reading his dispatch now, can fail to see that it foretold the
coming war? Yet with a few exceptions, everyone failed to foresee it, certainly
everyone in the foreign media. As late as September 27, two days before the
beginning of hostilities, Burns's colleague Deborah Sontag was writing that Ehud
Barak and Yasser Arafat had succeeded in "breaking the ice" over dinner, thereby
providing "fresh momentum" for negotiation.
Now consider all this in the light of Wohlstetter's analysis. During the Oslo
years, the dominant framework was roughly this:
First, Yasser Arafat, a reformed terrorist, had made a strategic decision for
peace based on the calculation that a state in Gaza and the West Bank was the
most he would ever get. Second, Yitzhak Rabin [had] concluded that the Jewish
state was more secure with the majority of Palestinians outside smaller borders
than it was with those Palestinians inside larger borders. He too wanted to cut
a deal, and the PLO was the only really credible partner for it. Third, this new
political center represented by Arafat-Rabin was threatened by Palestinian
fanatics who would not abandon their claims to Haifa and Jaffa, and by Jewish
fanatics who would not abandon theirs to Hebron and Shechem (Nablus). Fourth,
the solution lay in strengthening the center, chiefly by supporting Rabin
diplomatically and Arafat financially and militarily. Israelis would be moved to
withdraw from their territories to the East if they felt more secure in their
friendships with the West. As for Arafat, he ne! He needed guns and money to
suppress "militant" Palestinian factions and establish the institutions of
statehood.
That was the compelling logic of Oslo, and it was a logic to which most of world
media subscribed. How often did we hear it said [that] peace was threatened by
"extremists on both sides"? How much ink was expended on the question of
Arafat's personal chemistry with Rabin/Peres/Netanyahu/Barak? And how little
attention was devoted to countervailing data: for example, Arafat speeches that
reaffirmed, in Arabic, his commitment to the PLO's old "plan of stages"?
No wonder, then, that Burns's August 3 dispatch did not cause the upset is
should have. The idea that the Palestinian Authority was not part of the vital
center for peace [was] information that could not be adequately explained within
Oslo's interpretive framework.
The media was dutiful in reporting the terrorist summer camps. But it was not
dutiful in asking the necessary follow-up questions about why these camps were
there and what they betokened. Instead, we had what Thomas Schelling, in the
foreword to Wohlstetter's book, described as "a routine obsession with a few
dangers that may be familiar rather than likely"--settlers, terrorists, Sharon
and so on.
Since then, things have changed somewhat. Whereas once there was one dominant
interpretive framework, now there are three competing ones.
The first of these is the "occupation" framework. Its subscribers include all
the Arab media, most of the European media, the BBC, the Economist magazine, and
some U.S. news organizations. According to this framework, this is a conflict
that began in 1967 when Israel "conquered" Palestinian land, attempted to settle
it, and in the process dispossessed and eventually enraged the Palestinian
people. Palestinian "militancy" is a consequence of this.
Then there is the "cycle-of-violence" framework? In this view, the conflict did
not begin in 1967 or even in 1948 [but] sees Israelis and Palestinians as two
tribes caught in a kind of blood feud, with each fresh assault demanding
retribution?.
Finally, there is the "Arab rejectionism" framework. Its votaries in the media
include the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Fox
News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. This framework holds that the
conflict has its roots in the Arab world's refusal to accept a Jewish state in
its midst?
From these separate frameworks identical headlines will often emerge. But the
stories will read differently. Consider a hypothetical example: A Palestinian
suicide bomber detonates himself in a Jerusalem bus and kills 20. Hamas takes
responsibility.
A reporter from the "Occupation" school [discovers] that the bomber is from the
Dehaishe refugee camp near Bethlehem; his family was originally from Ramle; his
father used to work construction in Israel but has been unable to get to his job
due to IDF closures. As for the bomber himself, he had a talent for carpentry
but never found a job. He was recruited by Hamas after his brother was shot by
the IDF; he hoped that his own martyrdom would bring honor and money to his
parents and nine siblings.
Then there's the reporter from the "cycle of violence" school. [She notes] that
a leading Hamas spokesman had recently been killed in an IAF helicopter attack
and that the group had vowed revenge?
Finally, we have our reporter from the "Arab rejectionist" camp. He describes
the scene of the bombing, interviews the families of the bereaved, attends the
funerals. Little attention is paid to the personal circumstances of the bomber.
Perhaps it will be noted that the bomber's brother was killed by the IDF while
attempting to plant a mine on the road to a nearby settlement. Perhaps, too, the
family expects to receive money from abroad. There's a story there about Saudi
funding of terror?.
My point simply is to illustrate how different interpretive frameworks put
reporters on the trail of different sets of facts. All of these facts may be
true. The question is, which of them are significant? To a certain extent, the
answer is in the eye of the reporter. But the suicide bombings belong to a
larger narrative, and it's important that readers not be consistently misled as
to where this story might be going.
Few people anticipated the collapse of Oslo because few reporters bothered to
ask themselves whether incitement in Palestinian schools, corruption in
Palestinian officialdom, or the collusive relationship between groups like Hamas
and the PA, weren't really bigger stories than, say, new construction in Gilo.
Similarly, had a moderate Palestinian leadership taken control of events in the
past few months and stamped out terrorist groups, the Arab rejectionism camp
would have a hard time making sense of things. It might have resorted to
rationalization or conspiracy theories. By the same token, the persistence of
Palestinian terror aimed at targets in pre-'67 Israelis should put a heavy onus
on the "Occupation" camp to explain Palestinian motives. As for the
"cycle-of-violence" camp, they ought to be puzzling out why the August 19 bus
bombing in Jerusalem preceded Israel's targeted assassination of Ismael Abu
Shanab, which Palestinian spokesmen now claim was what brought the hudna to an
end.
Every reporter and editor needs at least some kind of framework to make sense of
the news. I am certainly not coy about the framework to which this newspaper
subscribes. I believe it is solidly grounded in historical fact, and I think its
predictive record has been good. Still, I admit it's a sign of media vitality
when no single framework dominates news coverage as it did in the 1990s. And I
will try, at least occasionally, to pose the sorts of questions my colleagues in
the other two camps so routinely ask. The wiser journalists among them will
return the favor.
Who Lost the Campus?
By Jonathan Tobin
Animus against Israel goes deeper than policy disagreements with Sharon
http://www.jewishworldreview.com | American Jews are very good at ignoring the
obvious, but they can at least give themselves credit for being smart enough to
understand that their house is on fire, just as the flames are starting to toast
their toes.
Case in point is the fact that lately, we have gradually come to terms with the
fact most American college campuses were hothouses for anti-Israel bigotry. That
this realization occurred long after the problem became serious is besides the
point. Incidents last year, such as the anti-Jewish violence at places like San
Francisco State University or Concordia University in Montreal, have created
enough of a stir to put this issue on the communal radar screen. That's the good
news. The bad news is that students who support Israel are still placed in the
position of a precarious and unpopular minority as anti-Zionist radicals on
faculties and in the student body make it hard to stand up for Jewish rights.
Predictably, there is division in our ranks as to what created this situation.
The picture he paints is a gloomy one, in which colleges are virtually "enemy
territory" for affiliated Jews. Even worse, he returned to Israel with the
impression that most young Jews had opted out of the struggle. Though a few were
standing up for Zionism (and a smaller minority were anti-Israel), most were on
the sidelines, afraid to speak up because to do so might damage their grades and
their academic futures, not to mention their social standing.
To Sharansky, the overwhelming majority of young American Jews are contemporary
"Jews of silence" in contrast with the more vocal Jewish activists of 20 and 30
years ago. That's a telling phrase, since it was also the title of the 1966 book
by Elie Wiesel that helped launch the movement to free Soviet Jewry. Sharansky
blames the current situation on Arab influence in the makeup of Middle East
Studies departments and effective public relations work by the Palestinians.
But to liberal activist and columnist Leonard Fein, the blame for the decline of
support for Israel has less to do with Arab propaganda than it does with
reasonable criticism of Israel's positions.
In his attack on Sharansky's position, Fein acknowledges that there are many on
campus who oppose Israel's existence under any circumstances. But he feels it is
primarily Israel's fault that young Jews won't support it. For him, "excesses in
Israel's actions" and "the real suspicions fair-minded people harbor regarding
Israel's motives and intentions," explain hostility to the Jewish state.
According to Fein, if Israel were a good liberal state, accommodating
Palestinian ambitions and not run by the likes of Ariel Sharon, then more Jews
would be behind it.
The problem with this argument is that it flies in the face of the facts of the
last decade. During this time, Israeli governments of both the left and the
right have made a string of concessions to the Palestinians. But Oslo did not
set off a wave of pro-Israel sentiment on campuses in the 1990s, nor did the
fact that Israel offered the Palestinians what they demanded in July 2000 -- and
were answered by terrorist warfare.
In fact, just the opposite has happened. As Israel moved to a point where even
Sharon has come to terms with the eventual necessity of a Palestinian state,
anti-Israel sentiment has grown by leaps and bounds. Indeed, the more it became
apparent to those who were truly fair-minded that Israel was the victim and not
the aggressor, the more intense the assault of lies about Israeli "excesses" has
become.
Instead, anti-Israel forces in the media and academia have seized upon the
conflict to heighten their abuse, and attacks on Israel's existence are now far
more commonplace than they were before Oslo.
But while Sharansky is right about the extent of the problem, his nostalgia for
campus Jewish activism of the past is a bit misplaced. As much as we need to
draw on the successes of that era, it would be a mistake to buy into the notion
that Jewish students were united behind the Soviet Jewry movement -- or any other
Jewish cause.
MYTHS ABOUT THE PAST
In fact, it was just as hard, and often just as unfashionable, for students to
support Jewish causes then as it is today. Although the majority of Jews were
supportive of the cause at the very end of the struggle for Soviet Jewry, those
who were screaming about it in the early 1970s were a tiny minority, both on and
off the campuses.
And though Israel was less unpopular then than it is today, the idea that all,
or even most Jewish students, were unified in solidarity with its struggle to
survive is also something of a myth.
The majority of Jewish students then, as is the case now, were far more
interested in the fashionable left. Their cause c?l?bre was either Vietnam, or
apartheid, not Israel or Soviet Jewry. Today, you are more likely to get Jewish
students to attend a rally opposing the war in Iraq (which toppled an
anti-Semitic dictator) than you would to hear an Israeli like Shimon Peres,
whose views conform to Fein's vision of what Israel ought to be. However,
Sharansky is on target when he notes that the structure of academic study has
changed for the worse. The rise of Middle Eastern studies as a separate
discipline has coincided with the advent of a generation of scholars who are
anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian in their orientation.
They succeeded because they were able to tap into the same vein of anti-American
leftism that transformed campuses in the 1960s. As faculties became more hostile
to those who disagreed with the left, support for Israel has become as
unfashionable and academically perilous in many instances as support for George
W. Bush.
The unavoidable truth is that college students will always find it hard to stand
against the tide of what is the conventional wisdom of the day. For most
students, being for Israel simply isn't cool. And so long as the Palestinians
are embraced by the political left -- and Israel is identified with the United
States -- Zionism will find few friends on the quad.
Changing this will require not merely more Jewish programming, but a
counter-revolution aimed at stiffening the resolve of Jewish students, striking
back against Israel's detractors and pointing out their hypocrisy and mendacity.
But until we reject the notion that Israel itself is to blame for the assaults
on its existence, we haven't a chance.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the
media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just
click here.
JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia
Jewish Exponent. In June, Mr. Tobin won first places honors in the
American Jewish Press Association's Louis Rapaport Award for Excellence in
Commentary as well as the Philadelphia Press Association's Media Award for top
weekly columnist. Both competitions were for articles written in the year 2002.
Excerpts
from "From
Prague to London
- By Barry Rubin
The Jerusalem Post"
London
is a more complicated place in this regard. The government is not so hostile to
Israel, at least less so than in the past. The media is split, though the main
television news is in practice antagonistically partisan.
Many
campuses are hysterical on this issue. The most outrageous statements can be
made with little fear of contradiction. It is open season on Israel. England
was, after all, the country where George Orwell explained that certain ideas are
so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.
Yet how
much practical effect does this widespread misrepresentation actually have? And
are things getting better or worse? These questions are hard to answer.
Of
course, much of the problem stems from a far Left desperately seeking a
post-Marxist revolutionary cause. There are many professors and journalists who
are passionate about their political engagements and far less so regarding their
professional ethics.
Yet there
are also many people with open minds who are genuinely baffled as to why the
region remains so turbulent, its problems seemingly so unsolvable. How can one
comprehend the damage done to the region by dictators deceptions and extremist
ideologies if they are merely excused by Western observers? Recently, an Israeli
colleague explained to a European audience that it overstated the ease of
solving Middle East problems. A French military official sneeringly attacked
him, making clear his detestation for anyone so foolish as to believe in the
brutal notion that force determines the course of events in the world. What is
needed, he explained, is peaceful diplomacy and the willingness to make
concessions.
Consider
the proposed deal worked out by French and other European negotiators with Iran
which was hailed in Paris as a great victory for diplomatic methods in stopping
Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. The Europeans will tightly control uranium,
but let Iran build a reactor that will produce plutonium. No doubt, Iran will
use this reactor to build more deadly plutonium bombs.
An American participant asked how, in light of this philosophy,
he explained that France had intervened 47 times with military force in Africa
without ever seeking a UN resolution. The official looked so angry that I
believe he would have punched the American in the face if he had not just made a
speech extolling pacifism.
Bush's war on chaos
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
| This week, the Pentagon announced that more American troops -- 115 --
had sacrificed their precious lives in combat since President Bush announced
major combat operations were over in Iraq on May 1 than had died in the war
between March 20 and the end of April.
The news comes as public support for the war in Iraq seems to be wavering.
The latest Harris poll found that 47 percent of Americans want to bring most
U.S. troops home from Iraq within the next year and 46 percent want to keep the
troops in Iraq until there's a stable government.
Of course support for the war is slipping -- every Democratic presidential
candidate has hurled an endless barrage of one of two messages: 1) The war in
Iraq was all wrong, or 2) the war is being done all wrong. During Sunday's
candidates' debate, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said that Bush had failed to "do
it right." Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., charged that Bush had "no plan." All
agreed that the war would be going better if only Bush had put together an
international coalition.
The Democrats have a right to criticize Bush, but the very notion that the
war would be cleaner following a different PowerPoint-detailed plan, that the
pitfalls could have been foreseen, or that there would be an end in sight to
American involvement if only there were Frenchmen fighting side by side with
U.S. soldiers, well, it reveals a naivete unbecoming of a White House hopeful.
Top Dems apparently forgot that America fought a war with a broad
international coalition in 1991 and that it ended when an eager-to-please
President George H.W. Bush dropped the ball of victory in Iraq by withdrawing
U.S. troops too soon.
Implicit in the criticism of George W. Bush is the illusion that U.S. troops
could have invaded Iraq, overthrown Saddam Hussein and worked to install a new
representative government, and that the whole agonizing ordeal wouldn't have
been as prolonged and messy -- if only there had been better planning.
Rebuilding Iraq always was going to be grueling, and so, alas, it is. There
is no efficient, low-risk way to fight an enemy who kills civilians rather than
confront an army. As Bush noted Tuesday in his press conference, "That's what
terrorists do. They commit suicide acts against innocent people and then expect
people to say, 'Well, gosh, better not try to fight you anymore.'"
That's what happened when President Clinton pulled U.S. troops from Somalia
after an al Qaeda raid left 31 Americans dead. It's what happened in 1983 in
Lebanon when President Reagan withdrew troops after a terrorist bomb killed 241
Marines. Terrorists learned that killing American soldiers paid off.
Yet the anti-war crowd argues that the best way to support American troops is
to bring them home -- even though virtual surrender would make every U.S. soldier
or sailor serving abroad a more inviting target.
If, on the other hand, American and allied efforts prevail, if a
representative government is installed, if young men in the breeding grounds of
terror see determined Iraqis survive the vicious attacks designed destroy their
ability to live, work and move freely and then go on to build their own nation,
then terrorism loses.
There's always room for improvement in how any war is waged. But when I hear
Democrats carp at Bush as if there would be markedly different results in Iraq
with better planning or more allies, well, that's where I see deliberate
deception about the war.
Victory in Iraq will not hinge on three-step proposals or international
coalitions. One quality alone will spell the difference between victory and
capitulation in Iraq: will.
Bush's foreign and domestic
successes -- do the media care?
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
| " . . . You're not going to like this, but my gut feeling is that
all media is against George, a Republican, any Republican." Former First Lady
Barbara Bush gave this assessment recently on NBC's "Dateline." For this reason,
said Mrs. Bush, she had predicted defeat for her son, George W., in his 2000
presidential run.
And why not? The piling on continues from Democratic presidential contenders
like Rep. Dick Gephardt (Missouri) and Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), both of whom
decry, for example, the administration's alleged inability to get other nations
to help finance the rebuilding of Iraq. "You remember on your report card you
had your English grade, your history grade and then it said, 'plays well
together'?" said Gephardt. "(Bush) flunked that part."
Bush dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to attempt to get other
nations and international groups to financially chip in. Many pundits predicted
disaster, with the U.S. receiving little or no economic assistance. USA Today
wrote, "Many officials say the final figure may fall below $6 billion." The Los
Angeles Times wrote, "Bathsheba Crocker, who has been studying Iraqi finances at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said she would
be surprised if participants were to pledge more than a combined $1 billion . .
. "
Well, what happened? The international community pledged $13 billion in
grants and loans, exceeding the most dire predictions. So how did the media deal
with this relatively good news?
The Los Angeles Times' front-page headline said, "Thirteen Billion for Iraq
Exceeds Expectations but Falls Short." While the New York Times headline read,
"Over $13 Billion in Aid is Pledged To Rebuild Iraq: Sum Exceeds Predictions,"
the paper duly noted that the assistance primarily consisted of loans rather
than grants: "The total surpassed what many had expected, although roughly
two-thirds of the aid appeared to be in the form of loans rather than grants,
which might complicate efforts by the Bush administration to beat back a drive
in Congress to make more American aid in the form of loans."
The Los Angeles Times threw cold water on the relatively good news. "The
aid," said the L.A. Times, "which will be combined with an expected $20 billion
in U.S. grants, was more than American officials had predicted at the beginning
of the month, but the total is less than the $56 billion needed. U.S. officials
said that some of the promises made at a two-day conference might not pan out
and some confessed disappointment that Persian Gulf states had not given more,
despite U.S. pressure."
Understand this. When the United States led a coalition to enforce U.N.
Resolution 1441 in the face of United Nations fecklessness, we did so out of a
concern for our national security interests. Many in the "international
community" still fail to see that radical Islamists, who seek to practice
terrorism, threaten civilization itself, not just the United States. But their
failure to see the enemy before them simply means that the Unites States must do
its duty and accept that -- at least in the short run -- this requires us to do
the heavy lifting.
Many nations don't get it, and perhaps never will. Despite the United
Nation's unwillingness to put muscle into Resolution 1441, terrorists attacked
the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. On Oct. 6, 2002, terrorists blew up a French
tanker. On Oct. 12, 2002, in Bali, Indonesia, terrorists bombed a nightclub. And
terrorists in Iraq recently bombed a Red Cross building.
As for President Bush, not a bad couple of weeks. First, the economy appears
to be bouncing back nicely, with unemployment compensation claims going down,
the stock market in a boom, and economic growth last quarter now pegging the
'90s boom rate of growth at a brisk 6 or 7 percent.
Congress voted for his requested $87 billion to support the troops in Iraq
and to assist in that country's reconstruction. And the United Nations
unanimously approved a resolution opening the door for the possibility of
foreign troops in Iraq as well as the discussed financial contributions.
North Korea earlier refused to discontinue a nuclear weapons program without
a formal U.S. non-aggression treaty. Now Kim Jong Il agrees to discontinue with
only a written security assurance from the United States. (But as President
Ronald Reagan warned, trust but verify. Remember, the Koreans lied to former
President Clinton.)
In Iran, after many defiant statements, the country now agrees to allow the
International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect and assure the world that it, too,
intends to discontinue its weapons program. Do you think that perhaps the
president's invasion of Iraq made the other two-thirds of the Axis of Evil just
a tad skittish? Coincidence?
Oh, well, as always, the Democratic presidential contenders can still
browbeat Bush for failing to master the pronunciation of the word "nuclear."
Why Dems are wrong on taxes
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The Bush administration's prophecy
that its tax cuts would produce an economic recovery is coming true. The New
York Times - whose editorial page tirelessly campaigns against any and all tax
cuts and sees government as our salvation from virtually every problem - carried
an item last Monday (Oct. 27) that must have caused the newspaper's editorial
staff to suffer the journalistic equivalent of shock and awe.
In a front-page story about the fastest pace of economic growth in four
years, there was this rare (for The Times) admission: "Most of that growth
stemmed from a sharp rise in consumer spending, driven largely by a continuing
boom in mortgage refinancing and checks that were mailed out as part of the
recent tax cut." (emphasis mine)
Low interest rates and tax cuts are the twin strategies of the Bush
administration for restoring the economy following the post-9/11 recession. They
appear to be working.
Millerisms
As reported in the American
Enterprise, sultan of smirk Dennis Miller recently let loose with some trademark
bits of wit.
On Bill and Hill:
"Bill and Hillary's marriage couldn't have been any more about convenience than
if they'd installed a Slim Jim rack and Slurpee machine at the base of their
bed."
On Hill's New York
residence:
"I'm convinced that Bill Clinton put her up there because he knew New York was a
community property state, vis-א-vis
divorce settlements."
On the Dixie Chicks:
"When it first happened, I thought, 'I'm never going to buy another one of their
albums.' And then I thought, 'You know what, I've never bought one of their
albums -- I don't like their music.'"
On show biz:
"Show business is a freakish break. It's an amazing confluence of events that
affords you a life for which you should hit your knees every night and thank God
that you've been blessed to be given."
On President Bush's
religious beliefs:
"In this messed-up world, I like seeing my president pray. I don't think a
person can get answers out of books anymore. This is an infinitely complex
world, and at some point one has to have faith in one's religion. I find it
endearing that President Bush prays to God and that he's not an agnostic or an
atheist. I'm glad there's someone higher that he has to answer to."
The Left Coast Report thinks
Miller's just what the comedic political field needs -- a cerebral guy with a
charismatic style who makes conservatives smile.
Bubba and the
Russian Orchestra
A new CD is
about to be released. This one is going to feature performances by Sophia Loren,
Mikhail Gorbachev and, believe or not, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton.
The unusual trio
will be narrating along to classical music that will be performed by the Russian
National Orchestra (RNO).
"I first heard
the RNO some years ago and welcomed the opportunity to collaborate artistically
with this remarkable orchestra," the legendary Loren said in a statement.
All three CD
personalities have designated charities they would like to see receive their
royalties from the project.
Loren wants the
dough to go to Magic of Music, an arts therapy program.
Gorbachev wants
the cash funneled into Green Cross International, the enviro-socialist
organization that he controls.
Clinton wants the money donated to the
International AIDS Trust.
The musical
pieces that the RNO will perform are Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" and
Jean-Pascal Beintus' "Wolf Tracks."
The Left Coast
Report wonders if, by any chance, the wolf is going to have an Arkansas accent.
U.S. VOICES ASSESSMENT OF WMD TO SYRIA
WASHINGTON [MENL] -- For the first time, the U.S. intelligence
community has released an assessment that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were
transferred to neighboring Syria in the weeks prior to the U.S.-led war against
the Saddam Hussein regime.
U.S. officials said the assessment
was based on satellite images of convoys of Iraqi trucks that poured into Syria
in February and March 2003. The officials said the intelligence community
assessed that the trucks contained missiles and WMD components banned by the
United Nations Security Council.
The U.S.
intelligence assessment was discussed publicly for the first time by the
director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in a briefing in Washington
on Tuesday. James Clapper, a retired air force general and a leading member of
the U.S. intelligence community, said he linked the disappearance of Iraqi WMD
with the huge number of Iraqi trucks that entered Syria before
and during the U.S. military campaign to topple the Saddam regime.
"I think personally that the [Iraqi] senior leadership saw what was
coming and I think they went to some extraordinary lengths to dispose of the
evidence," Clapper said. "I'll call it an educated hunch."
Christians in Islamic Countries
by Giuseppe De Rosa S.I.
How do Christians in Muslim-majority countries live? [...] We must first
highlight a seemingly rather curious fact: in all the countries of North Africa
(Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco), before the Muslim invasion and
despite incursions by vandals, there were blossoming Christian communities that
contributed to the universal Church great personalities, such as Tertullian;
Saint Ciprian, bishop of Carthage, martyred in 258; Saint Augustine, bishop of
Hippo; and Saint Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspe. But after the Arab conquest,
Christianity was absorbed by Islam to such an extent that today it has a
significant presence only in Egypt, with the Coptic Orthodox and other tiny
Christian minorities, which make up 7-10 percent of the Egyptian population.
The same can be said of the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan,
Mesopotamia), in which there were flourishing Christian areas prior to the
Islamic invasion, and where today there are only small Christian communities,
with the exception of Lebanon, where Christians make up a significant part of
the population.
As for present-day Turkey, this was in the first Christian centuries the land in
which Christianity bore its best fruits in the areas of liturgy, theology, and
monastic life. The invasion of the Seljuk Turks and the conquest of
Constantinople by Mehmet II (1453) lead to the founding of the Ottoman empire
and to the near destruction of Christianity in the Anatolian peninsula. Thus
today in Turkey Christians number approximately 100,000, among whom are a small
number of Orthodox, who live around Phanar, the see of the ecumenical
patriarchate of Constantinople, who has the primacy of honor in the Orthodox
world and who holds communion with eight patriarchs and many autocephalous
Churches in both East and West, with approximately 180 million faithful.
In conclusion, we may state in historical terms that in all the places where
Islam imposed itself by military force, which has few historical parallels for
its rapidity and breadth, Christianity, which had been extraordinarily vigorous
and rooted for centuries, practically disappeared or was reduced to tiny islands
in an endless Islamic sea. It is not easy to explain how that could have
happened. [...]
In reality, the reduction of Christianity to a small minority was not due to
violent religious persecution, but to the conditions in which Christians were
forced to live in the organization of the Islamic state. [...]
THE WARRIOR FACE OF ISLAM: "JIHAD"
According to Islamic law, the world is divided into three parts: dar al-harb
(the house of war), dar al-islam (the house of Islam), and dar al-`ahd (the
house of accord); that is, the countries with which a treaty was stipulated.
[...]
As for the countries belonging to the "house of war," Islamic canon law
recognizes no relations with them other than "holy war" (jihad), which signifies
an "effort" in the way of Allah and has two meanings, both of which are equally
essential and must not be dissociated, as if one could exist without the other.
In its primary meaning, jihad indicates the "effort" that the Muslim must
undertake to be faithful to the precepts of the Koran and so improve his
"submission" (islam) to Allah; in the second, it indicates the "effort" that the
Muslim must undertake to "fight in the way of Allah," which means fighting
against the infidels and spreading Islam throughout the world. Jihad is a
precept of the highest importance, so much so that it is sometimes counted among
the fundamental precepts of Islam, as its sixth "pillar."
Obedience to the precept of the "holy war" explains why the history of Islam is
one of unending warfare for the conquest of infidel lands. [...] In particular,
all of Islamic history is dominated by the idea of the conquest of the Christian
lands of Western Europe and of the Eastern Roman Empire, whose capital was
Constantinople. Thus, through many centuries, Islam and Christianity faced each
other in terrible battles, which led on one side to the conquest of
Constantinople (1453), Bulgaria, and Greece, and on the other, to the defeat of
the Ottoman empire in the naval battle of Lepanto (1571).
But the conquering spirit of Islam did not die after Lepanto. The Islamic
advance into Europe was definitively halted only in 1683, when Vienna was
liberated from the Ottoman siege by the Christian armies under the command of
John III Sobieski, the king of Poland. [...] In reality, for almost a thousand
years Europe was under constant threat from Islam, which twice put its survival
in serious danger.
Thus, in all of its history, Islam has shown a warlike face and a conquering
spirit for the glory of Allah. [...] against the "idolaters" who must be given a
choice: convert to Islam, or be killed. [...] As for the "people of the Book"
(Christians, Jews, and "Sabeans"), Muslims must "fight them until their members
pay tribute, one by one, humiliated" (Koran, Sura 9:29). [...]
THE REGIME OF THE "DHIMMA"
According to Muslim law, Christians, Jews, and the followers of other religions
assimilated to Christianity and Judaism (the "Sabeans") who live in a Muslim
state belong to an inferior social order, in spite of their eventually belonging
to the same race, language, and descent. Islamic law does not recognize the
concepts of nation and citizenship, but only the umma, the one Islamic
community, for which reason a Muslim, as he is part of the umma, may live in any
Islamic country as he would in his homeland: he is subject to the same laws,
finds the same customs, and enjoys the same consideration.
But those belonging to the "people of the Book" are subject to the dhimma, which
is a kind of bilateral treaty consisting in the fact that the Islamic state
authorizes the "people of the Book" to inhabit its lands, tolerates its
religion, and guarantees the "protection" of its persons and goods and its
defense from external enemies. Thus the "people of the Book" (Ahl al-Kitab)
becomes the "protected people" (Ahl al-dhimma). In exchange for this
"protection," the "people of the Book" must pay a tax (jizya) to the Islamic
state, which is imposed only upon able-bodied free men, excluding women,
children, and the old and infirm, and pay a tribute, called the haram, on the
lands in its possession.
As for the freedom of worship, the dhimmi are prohibited only from external
manifestations of worship, such as the ringing of bells, processions with the
cross, solemn funerals, and the public sale of religious objects or other
articles prohibited for Muslims. A Muslim man who marries a Christian or a Jew
must leave her free to practice her religion and also to consume the foods
permitted by her religion, even if they are forbidden for Muslims, such as pork
or wine. The dhimmi may maintain or repair the churches or synagogues they
already have, but, unless there is a treaty permitting them to own land, they
may not build new places of worship, because to do this they would need to
occupy Muslim land, which can never be ceded to anyone, having become, through
Muslim conquest, land "sacred" to Allah.
In Sura 9:29 the Koran affirms that the "people of the Book," apart from being
constrained to pay the two taxes mentioned above, must be placed under certain
restrictions, such as dressing in a special way and not being allowed to bear
arms or ride on horseback. Furthermore, the dhimmi may not serve in the army, be
functionaries of the state, be witnesses in trials between Muslims, take the
daughters of Muslims as their wives, be the guardians of underage Muslims, or
keep Muslim slaves. They may not inherit from Muslims, nor Muslims from them,
but legacies are permitted.
The release of the dhimma came about above all through conversion of the "people
of the Book" to islam; but Muslims, especially in the early centuries, did not
look favorably upon such conversions, because they represented a grave loss to
the treasury, which flourished in direct proportion to the number of the dhimmi,
who paid both the personal tax and the land tax. The dissolution of dhimma
status could also take place through failure to observe the "treaty"; that is,
if the dhimmi took up arms against Muslims, refused to remain subject or to pay
tribute, abducted a Muslim woman, blasphemed or offended the prophet Mohammed
and the Islamic religion, or if they drew a Muslim away from Islam, converting
him to their own religion. According to the gravity of each case, the penalty
could be the confiscation of goods, reduction to slavery, or death - unless the
person who had committed the crimes converted to Islam. In that case, all
penalties were waived.
CONSEQUENCE: THE EROSION OF CHRISTIANITY
It is evident that the condition of the dhimmi, prolonged through centuries, has
led slowly but inexorably to the near extinction of Christianity in Muslim
lands: the condition of civil inferiority, which prevented Christians from
attaining public offices, and the condition of religious inferiority, which
closed them in an asphyxiated religious life and practice with no possibility of
development, put the Christians to the necessity of emigrating, or, more
frequently, to the temptation of converting to Islam. There was also the fact
that a Christian could not marry a Muslim woman without converting to Islam, in
part because her children had to be educated in that faith. Furthermore, a
Christian who became Muslim could divorce very easily, whereas Christianity
prohibited divorce. And apart from all this, the Christians in Muslim
territories were seriously divided among themselves - and frequently even
enemies - because they belonged to Churches that were different by confession (Chalcedonian
and non-Chalcedonian Churches) and by rite (Syro-oriental, Antiochian, Maronite,
Coptic-Alexandrian, Armenian, Byzantine). Thus mutual assistance was almost
impossible.
The regime of the dhimma lasted for over a millennium, even if not always and
everywhere in the harsh form called "the conditions of `Umar," according to
which Christians not only did not have the right to construct new churches and
restore existing ones, even if they fell into ruins (and, if they had the
permission to construct through the good will of the Muslim governor, the
churches could not be of large dimensions: the building must be more modest than
all the religious buildings around it); but the largest and most beautiful
churches had to be transformed into mosques. That transformation made it
impossible for the church-mosques ever to be restored to the Christian
community, because a place that has become a mosque cannot be put to another
use.
The consequence of the dhimma regime was the "erosion" of the Christian
communities and the conversion of many Christians to Islam for economic, social,
and political motives: to find a better job, enjoy a better social status,
participate in administrative, political, and military life, and in order not to
live in a condition of perpetual discrimination.
In recent centuries, the dhimma system has undergone some modifications, in part
because the ideas of citizenship and the equality of all citizens before the
state have gained a foothold even in Muslim countries. Nevertheless, in
practice, the traditional conception is still present. [...] The Christian,
whether he wish it or not, is brought back in spite of himself to the concept of
the dhimmi, even if the term no longer appears in the present-day laws of a good
number of Muslim-majority countries.
To understand the present condition of these Christians, we must refer back to
the history of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the Ottoman empire of the 19th
century, where the millet system was in force, the tanzimat, "regulations" of a
liberal character, were introduced. [...] From the second half of the 19th
century to the end of the first World War, there was a "Reawakening" (Nahda)
movement in the Arab world, under Western influence, in the fields of
literature, language, and thought. Many intellectuals were conquered by liberal
ideas.
On another front, the Christians created strong ties with the Western powers -
France and Great Britain in particular - which, after the dissolution of the
Ottoman empire, obtained the protectorate of the countries that had belonged to
the empire. This permitted the Christians both greater civil and religious
liberty and cultural advancement. Moreover, during the first half of the 20th
century various political parties of nationalist and socialist, and thus
secularist, tendencies were born, such as the Ba'th, the Socialist Party of the
Arab Renewal, founded at the end of the 1930's in Damascus by Syrian professor
Michel `Aflaz, a Greek Orthodox. In 1953 this party was united with the Syrian
Popular Party, founded in 1932 by Antun Sa'ada, a Greek Orthodox from Lebanon.
In brief, political regimes inspired by the liberal and secular principles of
Western Europe rose up in various Islamic countries.
THE BIRTH OF RADICAL ISLAM
These events provoked a harsh reaction in the Islamic world, due to fears that
the secularist ideas and "corrupt" customs of the Western world, identified with
Christianity, would endanger the purity of Islam and constitute a deadly threat
to its very existence. This reaction was fed by strong resentment against the
Western powers, which had dared to impose their political rule upon Islam, "the
greatest nation ever raised up by Allah among men" (Koran, s. 3:110), and
against their customs "despised" by the "nation (umma) that urges to goodness,
promotes justice, and restrains iniquity" (ibid, s. 3:104).
Thus was born "radical Islam," which set itself up as the interpreter of the
frustrations of the Muslim masses. Hasan al Banna, Sayyd Qutb, Abd al-Qadir `Uda
in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood; Abu l-A`li al-Mawdudi in Pakistan, and the
Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran are its most significant witnesses, and their
followers have spread from Dakar to Kuala Lumpur. [...]
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF CHRISTIANS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
Radical Islam, which proposes that shari'a law be instituted in every Islamic
state, is gaining ground in many Muslim countries, in which groups of Christians
are also present. It is evident that the institution of shari'a would render the
lives of Christians rather difficult, and their very existence would be
constantly in danger. This is the cause of the mass emigration of Christians
from Islamic countries to Western countries: Europe, the United States, Canada,
and Australia. [...] The estimated number of Arab Christians who have emigrated
from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel in the last
decade hovers around three million, which is from 26.5 to 34.1 percent of the
estimated number of Christians currently living in the Middle East.
Furthermore, we must not underestimate grave recent actions against Christians
in some Muslim-majority countries. In Algeria, the bishop of Orano, P. Claverie
(1996), seven Trappist monks from Tibehirini (1999), four White Fathers (1994),
and six sisters from various religious congregations have been brutally killed
by Islamic fundamentalists, although the murders were condemned by numerous
Muslim authorities. In Pakistan, which numbers 3,800,000 Christians among a
population of 156,000,000 (96 percent Muslim), on October 28, 2001, some Muslims
entered the Church of St. Dominic in Bahawalpur and gunned down 18 Christians.
On May 6, 1998, Catholic bishop John Joseph killed himself for protesting
against the blasphemy law, which punishes with death anyone who offends
Mohammed, even only "by speaking words, or by actions and through allusions,
directly or indirectly." For example, by saying that Jesus Christ is the Son of
God, one offends Mohammed, who affirmed that Jesus is not the Son of God, but
his "servant." With this kind of law, Christians are in constant danger of
death.
In Nigeria - where 13 states have introduced shari'a as state law - several
thousand Christians have been the victims of incidents. Serious incidents are
taking place in the south of the Philippines and in Indonesia, which, with its
212 million inhabitants, is the most populous Muslim country in the world, to
the harm of the Christians of Java, East Timor, and the Moluccas. But the most
tragic situation - and, unfortunately, forgotten by the Western world! - is that
of Sudan, where the North is Arab and Muslim, and the South black and Christian,
and in part, animist. Since the time of president G.M. Nimeiry, there has been a
state of civil war between the North, which has proclaimed shari'a and intends
to impose it with fierce violence on the rest of the country, and the South,
which aims to preserve and defend its Christian identity. The North makes use of
all of its military power - financed by oil exports to the West - to destroy
Christian villages; prevent the arrival of humanitarian aid; kill the cattle,
which are the means of sustenance for many South Sudanese; and carry out raids,
for Christian girls in particular, who are brought to the North, raped, and sold
as slaves or concubines to rich, older Sudanese men. According to the 2001
report of Amnesty International, "at the end of 2000, the civil war, which
started again in 1983, had cost the lives of almost two million persons and had
caused the forced evacuation of 4,500,000 more. Tens of thousands of persons
have been compelled by terror to leave their homes in the upper Nile region,
which is rich in oil, after aerial bombardments, mass executions, and torture."
We must, finally, recall a fact that is often forgotten because Saudi Arabia is
the largest provider of oil to the Western world, and the latter therefore has
an interest in not disturbing relations with that country. In reality, in Saudi
Arabia, where wahhabism is in force, not only is it impossible to build a church
or even a tiny place of worship, but any act of Christian worship or any sign of
Christian faith is severely prohibited with the harshest penalties. Thus about a
million Christians working in Saudi Arabia are deprived by violence of any
Christian practice or sign. They may participate in mass or in other Christian
practices - and even then with the serious danger of losing their jobs - only on
the property of the foreign oil companies. And yet, Saudi Arabia spends billions
of petrodollars, not for the benefit of its poor citizens or of poor Muslims in
other Muslim countries, but to construct mosques and madrasas in Europe and to
finance the imams of the mosques in all the Western countries. We recall that
the Roman mosque of Monte Antenne, constructed on land donated by the Italian
government, was principally financed by Saudi Arabia and was built to be the
largest mosque in Europe,
in the very heart of Christianity.
__________
A link to the historic magazine of the Jesuits in Rome:
The following is an interview published in the latest edition of "Il Regno," the
biweekly of the Sacred Heart congregation of Bologna. The man interviewed is a
Coptic Orthodox Christian, the director of a Cairo weekly. The picture he paints
of the condition of Christians in Egypt - usually classified among the
"moderate" Arab countries - fully confirms what was more generally described by
"La Civilt? Cattolica":
Christians in Egypt.
The Humiliation Continues
An interview with Youssef Sidhom, director of "Watani"
CAIRO
- Youssef Sidhom is the director of the weekly "Watani" ("My Homeland"). Founded
in 1958 by his father, Antoun Sidhom, it has always published news and
commentary on the Church and Christianity, themes completely overlooked by all
the other Egyptian newspapers. Many believe it to be a newspaper of the Coptic
Orthodox Church, but that's not true. It is independent, and has no particular
relationship with that Church, nor does it receive financial support from it.
[...]
What are the main problems of the Christians in Egypt?
"The most striking problem is the extreme difficulty in receiving permission to
build a church. Current legislation offers all of the incentives for the
construction of mosques, but it poses almost insurmountable obstacles to the
construction of churches. In 1934, the undersecretary for the minister of the
interior, Muhammad al-`Azabi, made ten conditions for giving permission for the
construction of a church, and those conditions are still valid. Let's cite a few
of them: a church must not be built on farm land; it must not be close to a
mosque or monument; if it is to be constructed in a zone in which Muslims also
live, one must first obtain their permission; there must be a sufficient number
of Christians in the area; there must not be other churches nearby; police
permission must be obtained if there are bridges or canals of the Nile near or
if there is a railroad; the signature of the president of the republic must be
obtained. All these conditions cause insurmountable difficulties. In fact, more
than ten years can go by while waiting for police permission, and in the
meantime mosques are hurriedly erected in the vicinity of the area where the
church was meant to be, and the project stumbles against another prohibition.
Moreover, it is not specified how many Christians there must be for them to have
the right to a church. If, for example, there are 1,500, the government can say
that that's not a sufficient number, when a hundred would be enough to fill one
of our churches."
But hasn't President Mubarak facilitated the granting of these permissions by
delegating the matter to the provincial prefects?
"Yes, he allowed the permits to be given by the provincial prefects, and a year
later he ruled that they can also be given by the territory's local authority.
But this delegated authority only regards the permits to repair and restructure
the churches. The permission to construct a new church is still the sole
prerogative of the president of the republic. [...] This discrimination in the
matter of the construction of churches leads Christians to the bitter conviction
that the state considers them second-class citizens. For the state, a Christian
is a kafir, an infidel, he doesn't know the true religion or have the true
faith, so it's not worth it to listen to him. In Egypt we live with humiliating
discrimination on religious grounds." [...]
Does the discrimination regard only the construction of churches, or other
aspects of social life for Christians in Egypt as well?
"It regards our entire life. There's discrimination in state offices. According
to the constitution, the president must be a Muslim. The Islamic religion is the
foundation of Egyptian legislation. Today, no Christian can be prime minister,
even though there have been Christian prime ministers in the past. Of the
thirty-two ministers, only two are Christians: the finance minister and the
minister of the environment. No city or village mayor can be a Christian. The
high posts in the military, the police, and the presidential guard are filled
only with Muslims. There are hundreds of persons in the diplomatic corps, but
only two or three Christians. No Christian can attain high office in the
tribunals. According to the law, two witnesses are necessary to justify a
sentence, but if one of them is Christian, the judge may refuse his testimony
because it comes from an infidel. The rectors of the universities must be
Muslim. [...] In any office, the career of a Muslim who has just arrived will
advance beyond that of a Christian who has been in his post for years. In the
2000 elections, the al-Watani party, which dominates politics in the country,
listed only three Christians among 888 candidates. A Christian may not teach
Arabic, because this material is linked to the teaching of the Islamic religion.
Discrimination is at work even on our identity card, where the religion of one's
father is shown."
And in case of divorce?
"The law provides that the children should remain with their mother. But if the
father wants to divorce because he has become a Muslim, which happens
frequently, the judge rules that the children should remain on the side that has
the true faith, meaning the father. So children born to Christians grow up in a
completely Muslim family."
"Is changing religions permitted?"
"Anyone who becomes Muslim is welcomed with big parties. They change his
identity card very quickly; he is helped in his job, with his house, etc. But if
a Muslim wants to become Christian, they not only seek to dissuade him by any
means, but his very life is in danger. I believe that every day there are
Egyptians who change religions, but it's impossible to know how many. Al-Ahzar
would willingly publish the statistics, which would be a sign of victory and
glory, but the Church could never make a choice like this, because it would
bring about many tragedies. In any case, there is a ruling by the tribunal that
establishes that if an Egyptian is born non-Muslim, becomes Muslim, and then
wants to return to his original faith, he may do it. But a Muslim by birth may
never change religions, on pain of exclusion from his inheritance and from the
society to which he belongs - with danger to his own safety."
(Interview by Camillo Ballin and Francesco Strazzari)
__________
The complete text of the interview is in the September 15, 2003 edition of > "Il Regno"
A
link to the Cairo weekly directed by Youssef Sidhom, with articles in English:
On
this site, on the confrontation being played out in the leadership of the
Catholic Church over relations with Islam and the manner of treating conversions
from Islam to Christianity:
> My Friend, Islam: The "Dialogue At All Costs" of Pope Wojtyla
(8.9.2003)
The Commerce
Department, part and parcel of the Bush junta, and likely populated by Enron
criminals, announces very "good" growth during the previous quarter. To many
unsophisticated, non-Princeton employed observers, the economy's troubles are
magically over, and there will be kittens and rainbows and beautiful lollipop
flavored unicorns and so forth. And the administration's supporters claim that
the economy's turnaround validates its policies.
That's what
happened 18 months ago, when a preliminary estimate put first-quarter 2002
growth at 5.8 percent. That was later revised down to 5.0, which is an 0.8
percent reverse over a basis of 5.8 percent, which barely covered the weekend
line at Harrahs. More important, growth in the next quarter slumped and
staggered to 1.3 percent, reeling and spinning and then embarrassingly putting
on a lampshade and singing "Put Some Sugar On Me" by Def Leppard before passing
out in the guest toilet. We now know that the economy wasn't really on the mend,
and that the Bush plan to revive the totally wasted economy by putting its
finger in a warm glass of tax cuts would cause it to pee 600,000 jobs all over
the guest bed.
The same story
unfolded in the third quarter of 2002, when growth rose to 4 percent, and the
economy actually gained 200,000 jobs. But growth slipped back down to 1.4
percent, and job losses resumed. Up and down, up and down.
My purpose is
not to denigrate the impressive wild-ass guess of 7.2 percent growth rate for
the third quarter of 2003. It is, rather, to stress the obvious: we've had our
hopes dashed in the past, hoping against hope for a $50,000 no-show consulting
gig or maybe an all-expense paid trip to Indonesia, like in the golden era of
Clinton's internet economic Camelot. Rotsa ruck, naive hope-boy.
The weakness
of that spurt 18 months ago was obvious to those who bothered to look at it
closely and administer strict Olympic doping tests. Half the growth came simply
because businesses, having set fire to their inventories in the previous quarter
possibly to cover a nasty alimony settlement, were forced to ramp up production
by "The Outfit" to keep the whole thing quiet-like, kapeesh?. This time around
growth has a much better foundation: final demand -- demand excluding changes in
inventories less Napster dowloads divided by predepreciation spoilage --
actually grew even faster than G.D.P.
But -- you
knew there would be a but -- and you probably also knew there would be a
hyphenated clause following the but -- but you were probably not expecting the
previous hyphenated clause -- there are still some reasons to wonder whether the
economy has really turned the corner or merely stopped at Stuckeys for a Pecan
Log and hillbilly souvenirs.
First, while
there was a significant pickup in business investment, the bulk of last
quarter's growth came from a huge surge in consumer spending. This clearly
indicates mass insanity, as I have long noted that consumers are best advised to
revert to subsistence practices -- gathering their own wool, feeding on stray
animals and so forth -- until the long illegal Bush nightmare ends in 2004. Yet
the idiots are wasting money on cars and houses and spitting Kristal like some
Eastside Gangsta on MTV Cribs. Christ, you people are nuts.
This can't go
on -- in the long run, consumer spending can't outpace the growth in consumer
income. Soon the repo man will put the smackdown on the Bentley and the Virage
and the Escalade with the phly-ass Latrell spinner dubs. Your baby's momma be
all over you ass for child support. You be drinkin' away all that Courvoisier in
you Sub Zero. Fitty, he stop returning you cell calls. Your crew drop you like a
punk. Then you be all sad ass joke, like MC Hammer, doin' infomercials and
Hollywood Squares and shit.
The big
question, of course, is jobs. Despite all that growth in the third quarter, the
number of jobs actually fell. And the leading academic phrenologists see little
hope for either reduced unemployment claims or a new "special someone" in your
life. (By the way, for the last month there's been a peculiar pattern: each
week, people are all happy and excited on Friday, the following Monday their
mood has been revised significantly downward, and the apparent optimism decline
disappears.)
Still, it's
possible that we really have reached a turning point. If so, does it validate
the Bush economic program? Well, no. Duhhhh.
Stimulating
the economy in the short run is supposed to be easy. All you need to do is
invite the economy out -- if it's reluctant, just say it's "completely like a
platonic friendship thing" -- and then drop a few taxcut "Roofies" in the
economy's drink at the PhiDelt Friday smoker. Then drag the economy back to the
dorm, put a sock on the doorknob, and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. The trick is to
do this without incurring debt, and still make it to your 8am section of Macro
Econ.
To put it more
bluntly: President Bush totally sucks.
October 31, 2003, 8:40 a.m.
"Those Jews"
Victor Davis Hason NRO
If only Israel and its supporters would disappear.
There are
certain predictable symptoms to watch when a widespread amorality begins to
infect a postmodern society: cultural relativism, atheism, socialism, utopian
pacifism. Another sign, of course, is fashionable anti-Semitism among the
educated, or the idea that some imaginary cabal, or some stealthy agenda --
certainly not our own weakness -- is conspiring to threaten our good life.
Well apart from the spooky placards (stars of David juxtaposed with
swastikas, posters calling for the West Bank to be expanded to "the sea") that
we are accustomed to seeing at the marches of the supposedly ethical antiwar
movement, we have also heard some examples of Jew-baiting and hissing in the
last two weeks that had nothing to do with the old crazies. Indeed, such is the
nature of the new anti-Semitism that everyone can now play at it -- as long as it
is cloaked in third-world chauvinism, progressive thinking, and identity
politics.
The latest lunatic rantings from Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad
are nothing new, and we should not be surprised by his mindless blabbering about
Jews and his fourth-grade understanding of World War II and the present Middle
East. But what was fascinating was the reaction to his madness: silence from the
Arab intelligentsia, praise from Middle Eastern leaders ("A brilliant speech,"
gushed Iran's "president" Mohammad Khatami), and worry from France and Greece
about an EU proclamation against the slander. Most American pundits were far
more concerned about the private, over-the-top comments of Gen. Boykin than
about the public viciousness of a head of state. Paul Krugman, for example,
expressed the general mushiness of the Left when he wrote a column trying to put
Mahathir Mohamad's hatred in a sympathetic context, something he would never do
for a Christian zealot who slurred Muslims.
Much has been written about the usually circumspect Greg Easterbrook's
bizarre ranting about "Jewish executives" who profit from Quentin Tarantino's
latest bloody production. But, again, the problem is not so much the initial
slips and slurs as it is the more calculated and measured "explanation."
Easterbrook's mea culpa cited his prior criticism of Mel Gibson, as if the
supposed hypocrisy of a devout and public Christian's having trafficked in
filmed violence were commensurate with the dealings of two ordinary businessmen
who do not publicly embrace religion. Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein simply
happen to be movie executives, with no stake in producing Jewish movies or
public-morality films, but -- like most in Hollywood -- with a stake in making
money from films. That they are Jewish has absolutely no bearing on their
purported lack of morality -- unless, of course, one seeks to invent some wider
pathology, evoking historical paranoia about profiteering, cabals, and "the
Jews."
Recently, Joseph Lieberman was hissed by an Arab-American audience in
Dearborn, Mich. when he briefly explained Israel's defensive wall in terms not
unlike those used by Howard Dean and other candidates. What earned him the
special public rebuke not accorded to others was apparently nothing other than
being Jewish -- the problem was not what he said, but who he was. No real
apology followed, and the usually judicious and sober David Broder wrote an
interesting column praising the new political acumen of the Arab-American
community.
Tony Judt,
writing in The New York Review of Books,
has published one of the most valuable and revealing articles about the Middle
East to appear in the last 20 years. There has always been the suspicion that
European intellectuals favored the dismantling of Israel as we know it through
the merging of this uniquely democratic and liberal state with West Bank
neighbors who have a horrific record of human-rights abuses, autocracy, and mass
murder. After all, for all too many Europeans, how else but with the end of
present-day Israel will the messy Middle East and its attendant problems -- oil,
terrorism, anti-Semitism, worries over unassimilated Muslim populations in
Europe, anti-Americanism, and postcolonial guilt -- become less bothersome?
Moreover, who now knows or cares much about what happened to Jews residing under
Arab governments -- the over half-million or so who, in the last half-century,
have been ethnically cleansed from (and sometimes murdered in) Baghdad, Cairo,
Damascus, and almost every Jewish community in the Arab Middle East?
And what is the value of the only democratic government in a sea of autocracy
if its existence butts up against notions of third-world victimhood and causes
so much difficulty for the Western intelligentsia? Still, few intellectuals were
silly enough to dress up that insane idea under the pretext of a serious
argument (an unhinged Vidal, Chomsky, or Said does not count). Judt did, and now
he has confirmed what most of us knew for years -- namely, that there is an
entrenched and ever-bolder school of European thought that favors the de facto
elimination of what is now a democratic Jewish state.
What links all these people -- a Muslim head of state, a rude crowd in
Michigan, an experienced magazine contributor, and a European public
intellectual -- besides their having articulated a spreading anger against the
"Jews"? Perhaps a growing unease with hard questions that won't go away and thus
beg for easy, cheap answers.
A Malaysian official and his apologists must realize that gender apartheid,
statism, tribalism, and the anti-democratic tendencies of the Middle East cause
its poverty and frustration despite a plethora of natural resources (far more
impressive assets than the non-petroleum-bearing rocks beneath parched Israel).
But why call for introspection when the one-syllable slur "Jews" suffices
instead?
And why would an Arab-American audience -- itself composed of many who fled
the tyranny and economic stagnation of Arab societies for the freedom and
opportunity of a liberal United States -- wish to hear a reasoned explanation of
the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian war when it was so much easier to
hiss and moan, especially when mainstream observers would ignore their
anti-Semitism and be impressed instead with the cadre of candidates who flock to
Michigan?
How do you explain to an audience that Quentin Tarantino appeals both to
teens and to empty-headed critics precisely because something is terribly amiss
in America, when affluent and leisured suburbanites are drawn to scenes of raw
killing as long as it is dressed up with "art" and "meaning"?
How could a Tony Judt write a reasoned and balanced account of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict when to do so would either alienate or bore the
literati?
So they all, whether by design or laxity, take the easier way out --
especially when slurring "Israel" or "the Jews" involves none of the risks of
incurring progressive odium that similarly clumsy attacks against blacks, women,
Palestinians, or homosexuals might draw, requires no real thinking, and seems to
find an increasingly receptive audience.
You see, in our mixed-up world those Jewish are not a "people of color." And
if there really is such a mythical monolithic entity in America as the "Jews,"
they (much like the Cubans) are not easily stereotyped as impoverished victims
needing largesse or condescension, and much less are they eligible under any of
the current myriad of rubrics that count for public support. Israel is a
successful Western state, not a failed third-world despotism. Against terrible
oppression and overt anti-Semitism, the Jewish community here and abroad found
success -- proof that hard work, character, education, and personal discipline
can trump both natural and human adversity. In short, the story of American
Jewry and Israel resonates not at all with the heartstrings of a modern
therapeutic society, which is quick to show envy for the successful and cheap
concern for the struggling.
This fashionable anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism -- especially among
purported intellectuals of the Left -- reveals a deep-seated, scary pathology
that is growing geometrically both in and outside the West. For a Europe that is
disarmed, plagued by a demographic nightmare of negative population growth and
unsustainable entitlements, filled with unassimilated immigrants, and deeply
angry about the power and presence of the United States, the Jews and their
Israel provide momentary relief on the cheap. So expect that more crazy thoughts
of Israel's destruction dressed up as peace plans will be as common as
gravestone and synagogue smashing.
For the Muslim world that must confront the power of the patriarch, mullah,
tribe, and autocrat if it is ever to share the freedom and prosperity of the
rest of the world, the Jews offer a much easier target. So expect even more
raving madness as the misery of Islamic society grows and its state-run media
hunker down amid widespread unrest. Anticipate, also, more sick posters at
C-SPAN broadcast marches, more slips by reasonable writers, and more
anti-Israeli denunciations from the "liberals."
These are weird, weird times, and before we win this messy war against
Islamic fascism and its sponsors, count on things to get even uglier. Don't
expect any reasoned military analysis that puts the post-9/11 destruction of the
Taliban and Saddam Hussein's evil regime, along with the liberation of 50
million at the cost of 300 American lives, in any sort of historical context.
After all, in the current presidential race, a retired general now caricatures
U.S. efforts in Iraq and quotes Al Sharpton.
Do not look for the Islamic community here to acknowledge that the United
States, in little over a decade, freed Kuwait, saved most of the Bosnians and
Kosovars, tried to feed Somalis, urged the Russians not to kill Chechnyans,
belatedly ensured that no longer were Shiites and Kurds to be slaughtered in
Iraq, spoke out against Kuwait's ethnic cleansing of a third of a million
Palestinians -- and now is spending $87 billion to make Iraqis free.
That the Arab world would appreciate billions of dollars in past American aid
to Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, or thank America for its help
in Kuwait and Kosovo, or be grateful to America for freeing Iraq -- all this is
about as plausible as the idea that Western Europeans would acknowledge their
past salvation from Nazism and Soviet Communism, or be grateful for the role the
United States plays to promote democracy in Panama, Haiti, the Balkans, or the
Middle East.
No, in this depressing age, the real problem is apparently our support for
democratic Israel and all those pesky Jews worldwide, who seem to crop up
everywhere as sly war makers, grasping film executives, conspiratorial
politicians, and greedy colonialists, and thus make life so difficult for the
rest of us.
HEY NPR...THERE'S A THIRD
ALTERNATIVE By Gerald A. Honigman October 22, 2003
I was driving home from work on October
20th when I was treated to some more National Public Radio wisdom. Keep in mind,
the American taxpayer funds much of this programming.
The show was about the
Arab-Israeli conflict and reflected NPR's usual anti-Israel slant. This time the
topic was about growing frustration on the Arab side regarding the improbability
of another viable Arab state in Palestine arising any time
soon. Of course, no mention was given to why that second state would not likely
emerge: the rejectionist mentality of the Arab side for a viable Jewish
neighbor.
So the issue of an alternative solution became the focus
of the program. Since Arabs could not get everything that they want in this
proposed second Arab state (compromise is evidently not in the Arab vocabulary),
the focus of the show turned to a discussion of the creation of one binational
state for Jews and Arabs instead. At no time did the fact that Arabs had
rejected a solution a few years earlier which would have given them almost
everything they claim they wanted short of Israel agreeing to slit its own
throat come out in the program.
The discussion went like this:
Since the sole miniscule state of the Jews (my own description) won't consent to
giving up on its own minimal security needs (most nations demand far more) so
that a 23rd Arab nation can be born, the soaring Arab birth rate would insure
that the Jews would be overwhelmed in any democratic binational endeavor. Jews
were then interviewed about their own feelings regarding this proposed
alternative, and Israel, of course, was the
"heavy" for not consenting to allowing Arabs to have all that they want in the
disputed territories.
Now what I'm about to say next is really nothing new.
Indeed, not much "new" has been written about this conflict for decades...just
rehashed old arguments and positions.
What was missing from NPR's program, to no real
surprise, was the obvious third alternative. The producers at NPR are not
dummies, so the omission was deliberate....and so far worse.
After the Paris Peace Conference
closing World War I, Great Britain was
awarded its share of the spoils of the former Ottoman Turkish Empire. The Turks
had ruled the Middle East and North Africa for some four centuries. The Brits'
share largely consisted of Mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia. The borders
of Palestine Britain received on April 25, 1920 included lands which are now
Israel, Jordan, and all unapportioned territories in between as well.
But these were complex times of
multiple promises to competing national groups.
Britain's chief allies in the area were the Hashemites of Arabia, Sheriff
Hussein and his sons, Emirs Abdullah and Feisal (remember the movie Lawrence of
Arabia?). The Hashemites were in the process of getting their own derrieres
booted out of the Arabian Peninsula by the rival clan of Ibn Saud...hence, Saudi
Arabia today.
The French were also grabbing
their share of the spoils. Their moves into Syria
and Lebanon cut into the Hashemites' "Greater Syria" schemes. So now, to appease
the Hashemites, the British backed off of promises to the Kurds in oil rich
Mesopotamia--Hashemite Arab Iraq being created instead--and, in 1922, handed
over some 80% of Mandatory Palestine to another Hashemite prince, creating the
purely Arab Emirate of Transjordan and making it totally off limits to Jews.
While mention is often made to the
largely "Palestinian" Arab population of
Jordan, the hows and whys of this fact seldom seem to register with journalists
and others involved in such discussions.
And so, the third alternative...
It's obvious that in the small
area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan
River, there's not a heck of a lot of room. The Jordan River was the obvious
natural boundary of the Jewish State if Palestine was to be divided between
Jewish and Arab nationalisms and Arabs had already received the lion's share of
the original 1920 borders...all the land east of the River. When arriving at
other such compromise solutions, such as that which created Hindu India and
Muslim Pakistan, population exchanges were frequently part of the package...not
a "perfect" solution by any means, but one which allowed each party an honorable
outcome. For every Arab who eventually became a refugee because of the Arabs'
own total rejection of a Jewish state regardless of size, there was a Jewish
refugee who fled Arab lands...but without the choice of some two dozen other
potential states to choose from.
So, for Israel to remain viable in
the face of a totally rejectionist enemy whose idea of "peace," in the Arabs'
own words, is only a temporary "Trojan Horse" truce designed to further a
"destruction in stages" agenda, Israel cannot cave in to all the demands Arabs
make regarding the disputed territories. Those lands were not lands apportioned
solely to Arabs by the Mandate...so a compromise solution must be found whereby
Israel gains a bit more essential strategic high ground depth
while not ruling over millions of Arabs. It will never return to its former
9-mile wide, armistice/Auschwitz line existence.
Thus, the proposed 23rd Arab state
and second Arab one in Palestine will have to be very
small. It's desires cannot displace the needs of the sole state of the Jews it
seeks to replace, not live side by side with.
The real solution, once popular
but now never mentioned, lies with Jordan, since the latter
encompasses 80% of the original land to begin with, and the majority population
is already "Palestinian" (however you define it...many Arabs entered the Mandate
from other surrounding states). So, if a compromise with Israel was to occur
regarding the West Bank/Judea and Samaria with Jordan, the latter emergent
Jordanian-Palestinian State would still be a much larger entity while granting
Israel the minimal security adjustments it needs in the area as well.
This, of course, is never brought
up these days--certainly not on NPR-- for fear of destabilizing the Hashemite
rulers, who have indeed proven to be reasonable neighbors of late to
Israel. It's worth recalling that it was Israel who saved Jordan
from a joint Syrian-PLO attempt at the overthrow of the Hashemites in 1970.
But isn't it interesting (no,
sickening) that NPR would pursue the binational alternative in its program
regarding Arabs and Jews, but totally ignore the far more sensible creation of a
binational Arab-Arab state in Jordan/Palestine. It's thus "legitimate" to
discuss undermining the sole state of a millennially-persecuted people who
finally lived to see the resurrection of their nation, but not so to discuss a
solution which would merely bring together different elements within the same
Arab family. Israel's Jews also come from
many different lands, but that didn't mean that they expected the creation of
dozens of individual Jewish states...and at the expense of everyone else.
NPR...know who not to send your
money to.
Poll controversy as Israel and US labelled
biggest threats to World peace
EUOBSERVER /
BRUSSELS - Over half of Europeans think that Israel now presents the biggest
threat to world peace according to a controversial poll requested by the
European Commission.
According to the same
survey, Europeans believe the
United States contributes the most to
world instability along with Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
The specially
commissioned poll which asked citizens 15 questions on "the reconstruction of
Iraq, the conflict in the Middle East and World peace", has caused controversy
in Brussels.
The European
Commission is coming under fire for publishing the results of a number of
questions - relating to Iraqi reconstruction - while failing to publish the
results which revealed the extent of mistrust of Israel and the United
States in Europe.
A Commission
spokesperson today (30 October) denied that the decision to withhold some of the
results until next Monday was politically motivated, adding that some of the
results not yet published are still "unstable".
He did, however, add
that a decision was made to publish a preview of the questions pertaining to the
reconstruction of
Iraq, to coincide with the Iraqi donors
conference in Madrid, which took place at the end of last week.
This admission has
raised questions about whether the Commission sought to suppress the results
which would have came at a particularly sensitive moment.
One pollster involved
in the survey told the EUobserver that some questions being raised about the
poll were unfounded.
"The questions were
decided upon by both the polling organisations and the European Commission", the
source said.
Israeli
officials dismissed the results of the poll as propaganda.
According to El Pais, a massive 59 percent of Europeans said they believed that
Israel is the biggest obstacle to world peace.
The poll, conducted by
Taylor Nelson Sofres/ EOS Gallup Europe, was conducted between 8 and 16 of
October.
By Lawrence Marzouk in Barnet and Potters Bar TIMES
The media bias against Israel and the Jewish community
is at pre-Second World War levels, a leading Jewish journalist has warned.
Melanie Phillips, who is an author and columnist for the Daily
Mail, made the remarks at a debate last Sunday on the Media and the Middle East at The New North
London Synagogue in Finchley, hosted by Michael Gove, assistant editor of The
Times.
Both hacks lambasted the British media, branding it
dysfunctional, and attacked it for its pro-Palestinian slant on the coverage of
Middle Eastern affairs.
Ms Phillips, who is a member of
the synagogue, said: "9/11 brought a type of dysfunctionality and corruption of
the British media. It is not just the gullible, but the majority of the country,
who have formed a very strong view over Iraq and believe that it is not so much
a rogue state as Israel.
What the public will be seeing of the state of Israel
is not objective and not equal."
When asked whether the world today is similar to that of the
1930's, Ms Phillips said: "This is more than an etching of the 1930's. We are
not facing the same thing but I do think it is extremely similar. I do not think
opinions would change until there is a September 11 here. But if we have a
significant attack [on a Jewish target] I do not think that we will alter
people. People will simply say they had it coming."
Both journalists claimed the press cherry-picked evidence to
distort stories on the Middle East, and many other issues. The lack of ethics shown by journalists
in terms of cross-checking Palestinian versions of events was also criticised,
and the paucity of balanced reporting bemoaned.
The BBC was also condemned for its policy to seek balance rather
than objectivity in reporting. Mr Gove urged people to respond to any bias with
a a specific complaint to the public company, providing full details of where
factual errors were made.
Ms Phillips said: "I would read the full report of the Hutton
Inquiry and then the BBC coverage. To read the press coverage the next day, it
was like being in two different universes."
Mr Gove said: "I do not know how newspapers can get away with it.
You can have criticism of the state of Israel but it is entirely
different to say it shouldn't exist. It is applying to the Jew a different
standard than you apply to anyone else." "It is Israel which is called into
question, because criticising Israel is far easier than for other countries."
"The most scandalous [reporting] was of events in Jenin. The word
massacre was branded around. When the UN investigated, it discovered that the
number was around 60 from both sides.
"Robin Cook said it was wrong that we are fighting to enforce UN
resolutions in Iraq but
not in Israel. But he knew that they were under a different charter of UN
resolutions. Robin Cook must have known the difference after the time he spent
in the Foreign Office."
Ms Phillips also blamed Israel for losing the PR game,
saying while the Palestinian authorities fawn to foreign journalists, the
Israeli government does not provide journalists or news agencies with any help.
"They [Israeli government] say that if you have the right foreign
policy it will talk for itself -- well it doesn't. They say they do not have any
friends -- apart from the
US. When you say there is a crisis in Britain and Europe with Jewish attacks,
they answer 'what would you expect from the Europeans,'" she said.
Muslim Medicine
Tonight, on our local NPR station in the Bay Area, the guest
speaker at the "Forum for International Affairs" was Dr. Nabil Shaath, the
political adviser to none other than Yasser Arafat.
This intrigued me because I really wanted to hear what he had to
say for an hour - I wanted to understand what on earth he could possibly say
which could justify the unleashing of the culture of death in the form known as
"The Intifada". This is a name to which I am completely in opposition, mind you,
as the word "Intifada" means "uprising" in Arabic and, as we all know by now, it
is not an uprising but an attempt at Genocide.
I must admit, he spoke very well. Too well, in fact. All he could
mention were "the good years" of the Oslo process in which he
described only three "bombing incidents", failing to recognize that this was
entirely demonstrative of the rotten core of the beliefs of his own people
bubbling to the surface far too early in their plans for the attempted total
destruction of the Jewish State. But there he was, criticizing both sides for
opportunities missed, and how to return to the path of peace for a dual
coexistence.
He mentioned the words "ending the incitement" twice in his
critique of the Palestinian side. This was refreshing. At least he recognizes
that there is such a thing - never mind that the Left doesn't even recognize
this facet at all in the reality of the situation.
But he entirely dismissed it as something which should be done in
parallel with Israeli "steps" towards peace. Meaning: Palestinians should end
incitement during the negotiations to peace, and not as a prerequisite.
This abortion of a concept is absolutely insane.
Think about it for a moment. Just think about it. The
Palestinians see the public declarations to murder all the Jews in the world as
a step equal to, say, ending the construction of a house on absolutely barren
land. Their view that calling for Genocide, and acting it out, is no different
than the will of a Jewish family to return to a city from which Jews were
forcibly expelled during the riots of the late 1920's. Their wish for the West
to understand their point of view is for us to accept the notion that the
driving force behind Mein Kampf was merely the product of a legitimate claim of
grievance; that the extermination of a people can be dealt with on a political
level, and not a moral one because it is merely the product of a legitimate
situation of "oppression".
This is, naturally, exactly what the Muslim world sees as just.
They say it openly, proudly, without any hesitation or excuses, and they don't
really hide it. They count on the denials of the Left to hide it for them. After
all, how many people in
America really know what goes on in Palestinian and Arab media? How many
Americans and Europeans know exactly what the Arabs are calling for in specific
terms? Most Americans I know have no knowledge of this in the slightest way
whatsoever. Either that or they shrug it off as rhetoric.
Of course, it isn't mere rhetoric since it is being carried out
each day, bomb after bomb and bullet after bullet.
The mere acceptance that the call for Genocide is an equal step
to a road map of peace requires us to abandon any notion that we have about who
is right and who is wrong. If we accept that this is a legitimate response in
any way, then Bin Laden, of course, was merely responding to legitimate
grievances of his own - something which most Americans are loathe to accept
because it goes against all common sense in our own culture and runs completely
against our own values as a people.
The Muslims know this. They understand this. Their wish is for us
to finally concede that point. When we accept that calls for Genocide will stop
in parallel with Israeli and American concessions, we accept the current
legitimacy of their hatred towards us. We start to recognize that everything is
just another debatable point of view and that truth is completely relative.
There are no moral boundaries. In that vein, Hitler was somebody who could be
negotiated with merely because his truth was an equal one to ours. If that were
the case, we should have made peace with him and his termination of
concentration camps would merely have been another step on the long road towards
mutual understanding between Nazis and the Allies.
Such is not the case, however, and we all know it. Yet they
persist in this insistence because they know that if we do concede, they can
negotiate us out of everything else. The driving force behind their entire
campaign over the last century has been to make us concede on their moral
ground. Everything they say reeks of this tactic. Is there a single Arab leader
or spokesman out there who does not use the word "...but..." when confronted on
the issue of condemning terrorism? Is there a single Arab representative who
condemns all suicide bombings completely when they occur? Their world has become
filled with "buts" and their condemnations as shifting as the sands of their own
desert wastes.
Israel should never - ever -
accept the notion that calls for Genocide be part of a negotiation process.
After all, there is no Israeli media which bombards Israelis every day with the
idea that all Muslims and Arabs should be killed to satisfy a higher purpose.
These words matter. These words produce reactions which we can see in our
newspapers and on our televisions every day of the week. After all, Hitler only
started with words and we all understand the result of them.
All the Arabs have is that hatred. The sad truth is that they
produce nothing else with which to negotiate. If one only has hatred with which
to deal, then the position is clear: that side is in the wrong. It is exactly
like the schoolyard bully beating up on another kid and "negotiating" for an end
to the violence if that kid just gives up the money in his pocket - money to
which the bully never had any rights in the first place. Yet the typical Leftist
now looks at the bully to try to see what makes him tick, forgetting that he is
a bully. Too long they look into the enemy's mind to try to understand it and
they have become overwhelmed with the idea that this is just another person with
yet another point of view, forgetting the original crime because they have lost
their own perspective and can only now see from the eyes of that bully.
This is exactly the position expressed by the Arabs and Muslims
of the world: they have nothing else but their hatred to negotiate with us. They
know that as soon as they stop the calls to violence, and let things simmer down
for a while, their cause is lost. They understand that if they didn't
continuously call for Genocide, their people would start minding their own
business and call for real reform because they will have lost interest in the
entire affair. This notion of negotiating these calls for murder should be so
clear to all that their cause is not just and never was.
And so it is fairly clear why we see the dividing lines which
have emerged. The reason is simple: Leftists want to always look from the point
of view of others, starting with the notion that everyone is equal and since
people make morality, every morality is just as equal as well. Whereas we also
have the stolid Christians and Jews of conservative backgrounds whom, while they
deeply believe and act out in the name of charities to try to reform the bullies
of the world, also understand that without their moralities, without their
viewpoints, these reforms would never take place. The Fundamentalist Christians,
much as I disagree with some of their views, are people who know exactly what
they are about. These Southern Baptists and others who stand by Israel do so because they
understand that their values are the same as the values of Jews. They are the
true Christians in so many ways. Conservatives as well have a deep streak of
knowing themselves and knowing what works for them, questioning the need for
some changes over others, they understand that not all points of view are
necessarily good or needed. It is so clear to see why the dividing lines are
thus. They recognize that and understand it, which is something the Left doesn't
even understand about itself.
This is extremely disturbing. Not only because the Left is now
justifying the calls for Genocide as a legitimate claim to a grievance, but
because a society needs both sides to function properly. One cannot merely exist
in one state or the other to build a healthy society which questions itself, but
only in moderate steps. Here, questioning is not the problem, but the
rationalization of every single opposing view as an equal partner in the
process, losing sight of exactly where it is that one started from. Clearly the
Left has lost it's way and the Right has remained where it has always been:
solidly behind it's morality and values.
This is the fundamental issue and just as important a fight in
winning this war against the scourge of the Islamic world. It is not enough to
stand fast against our enemies abroad, but also against the enemies here, to
make them understand where they have lost their place, and how stupid they have
become as tools of the real evils of the world in the guise of understanding.
That fact is becoming lost even on us because of the dance of words being woven
in front of our eyes by both our enemies and the Left around the world and, in
particular, this country and Europe.
This is a huge problem because we will now be charged with
rebuilding our own liberal society after the war is won - if it ever is. Europe is already in moral decay
and we see the results before our very eyes in what they would term a "political
process" to eradicate the very things they once treasured and give up all their
rights to the laws of Sha'ria. Because of their incessant questioning for fifty
years, they have accepted that every point of view is legitimate and that even
those who call for Genocide are only satisfying some deeper need to a legitimate
claim, regardless that the claim might actually be the Genocide itself. All the
rashes of anti-Semitism which have sprouted up in the European world today are
of no real surprise. After all, there was another time in which Europe also
questioned all of her values - the time between World War I and World War II. We
all know the result of that incredible failure to try to understand all
moralities as equal. We have history as a lesson to this way of thinking and
dealing with problems. The Arabs have understood this history as well. Look at
Iraq and understand that it is of no mere coincidence that the Leftists and
Arabs themselves are trying to portray that particular fight as another Vietnam.
Why?
Because during that time we ended up questioning all of our
values as well, and it nearly led us to ruin.
Which are the related scenarios that they wish to impress upon
Israelis? They use the scenario which led to the retreat from Lebanon - another Vietnam
reference - and apply it to the West Bank, because they know that Israel's time
in Lebanon made it question all of her values, and it was that, and not the
actual war itself, which nearly made her lose her very existence as a nation.
And which conflict does Bin Laden refer to when claiming that
victory is possible over the United States? None other than
Afghanistan, the Soviet Vietnam. And that particular conflict did finally end up
destroying the Soviets, and we all know it. This is not to mean that the Soviets
didn't need tumbling, but that the tactic which was used was so successful that
it can be applied to any people of the world, including ourselves.
So what do we have? We have a good dose of hatred for everything
we stand for, for our people, for our religions and morals. They can never win
militarily, and so force never was a negotiation point with them. Instead, it is
our very existence which they seek to negotiate, until we concede not only every
inch of land, but our own souls as well. The very fact that we can negotiate the
legitimacy of Genocide resounds volumes in their world as being part of their
final solution.
Some would argue that these words matter little, but this is not
so. Already the U.S. Government has included the calls for Genocide to end as a
parallel to steps which
Israel must take to appease the terrorists. Already they have legitimized these
calls as a political point, and not singled them out as the inherent weakness in
the Muslim argument: that they are bent on hatred and have nothing else to
offer.
This call has been the driving force and entire point of the
Muslim perspective for far too long. It is time for this questionable point of
view to end, to call a spade a spade, for us to take a stand against the call
for Genocide as a natural political expression, and to end the madness once and
for all.
Homepage (index page)Listen to streaming music from my desktop (not always on) Why did I start this blog?
It was during the Iraq War that I became interested in politics, and I found myself on the conservative / republican side of the map. I have a hard time reading /watching most media due to it's left leaning tendencies. I avoid reading the NY Slimes (NYtimes) I don't watch Communist News Network (CNN) nor even come near the hated Baathist/Bolshevic Broadcast Corp (BBC) or National Palestinian Radio (NPR).
You are invited to take a look at my Op Iraqi Freedom page and my Weasels page which were created during the war. I should soon (time allowing) make a separate Israeli focused page and dip my pen into writing some essays / commentaries. I am revolted with most media's reporting on the Mideast conflict and it's gullible at best but in fact intentionally malicious rendering of Arab propaganda. Very similarly , the "righteous", leftist, underdog-rooting, revolution-monger reporting was felt during the Iraq war when the media almost hoped for some defeat of the coalition forces, more casualties and a prolonged war. (link to follow)
Following are articles which I recently read or my own commentaries. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do...
All the isms," an English wag once said, "are wasms." Well, not quite. In the 20th century, fascism came and went. Communism came and went. Socialism came and waned. But today several virulent "isms" inhabit the world still. Among the most pernicious are an atavistic anti-Semitism and its 20th-century version, anti-Zionism. These "isms" are graffiti on the wall of history, emblems of a poison still potent and raw, evidenced, most recently, by the remarks of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who said, "Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
Mahathir's words were widely condemned. But such comments obscure a deeper truth about this new strain of anti-Semitism, which is not that it is directed at individual Jews or even at Judaism itself. It is directed, rather, against the Jewish collective, the modern State of Israel. Just as historic anti-Semitism has denied individual Jews the right to live as equal members of society, anti-Zionism would deny the collective expression of the Jewish people, the State of Israel, the right to live as an equal member of the family of nations. Israel's policies are thus subjected to criticism that causes it to be singled out when others in similar circumstances escape any criticism at all. Surely if any other country were bleeding from terrorism as Israel is today, there would be no question of its right to defend itself. But Israel's efforts merely to protect its own citizens are routinely portrayed as aggression. To complain that such portrayals are unfair and illogical is not to dismiss all criticism of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic. A democracy must welcome critics, and Israel surely has its critics in spades--just look at the spirited Israeli press. "Jews," as one commentator put it, "are gold medalists in the art of self-criticism." But for many, recent criticism of Israel has become so perverse, so persistent, so divorced from reality that it can be seen only as emotional anti-Semitism hiding behind the insidious political mask of anti-Zionism. The new anti-Semitism transcends boundaries, nationalities, politics, and social systems. Israel has become the object of envy and resentment in much the same way that the individual Jew was once the object of envy and resentment. Israel, in effect, is emerging as the collective Jew among nations. After more than half a century of Holocaust education, hundreds of courses in high schools and colleges, and thousands of books dedicated to exposing its evils, traditional anti-Semitism as a domestic issue had all but disappeared in much of the world. "The Jewish problem" was no longer defined by what happened to the Jews of Germany or France or Poland or Russia. Instead, in Europe and the Muslim world--even in Asia--traditional anti-Semitism has lately re-emerged as anti-Zionism, focused on the Jews of Israel, the role of Israel, and, for some, on Jews in the United States who support Israel. This phenomenon has its origins in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Since then, the image of the Jew has been transformed. Shylock, suddenly, has been replaced by a new Jew, cartooned as an aggressive, all-powerful collective called Israel. "Rambo Jew," as the writer Daniel Goldhagen put it, "has largely supplanted Shylock in the anti-Semitic imagination." With the territories seized at the end of the war, the "plucky little Jewish state" was no more. In the years since, as it responded again and again to Arab attacks, sympathy for Israel eroded further still as the world's TVs broadcast images not of terrorists but of armed Israelis responding to terrorism. Only somehow the word "responding" too often got lost in the chaos. The TV pictures seemed to imply that the Israelis were guilty of a disproportionate use of force, for they were rarely accompanied by an understanding that a country with just 6 million in a sea of over 120 million Arabs could never fight a war of equal attrition. But no matter. It is as if the world somehow believes Israel must win the "moral man of the year" award in defending itself--as if responding to those who seek its destruction is morally wrong. Is there really no difference, then, between the violence of murderers who target innocents and the indispensable violence of lawful authorities? Are the arsonist and the firefighter truly moral equivalents? Is Israel's approach, which seeks to minimize civilian casualties, the same as that of the terrorists, who seek to maximize it?
Such questions are prompted by an unprecedented reversal of history: Arab terrorists, incredibly, have managed to inspire more sympathy than their victims. The Jews, having experienced the genocide of Europe, today stand accused of perpetrating genocide on the hard ground of the West Bank and Gaza. The vocabulary of the accusations presents the Jews as Nazis and their Arab enemies as helpless Jews. The worst crimes of anti-Semites in the past--racist and ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, crimes against humanity--are now increasingly ascribed to Jews and to the Jewish state. The argument has become, if you are against Nazism, you must oppose Israel. Thus has Israeli self-defense been transmogrified as aggression. As a consequence, the era of reconciliation that obtained between Israel and the world after the Holocaust is, tragically, no more. In much of the world's news media and in its elite communities, as a result, there is a pattern of delegitimization of Israel.
AMERICANS, WHO HAVE COME to take for granted the scurrilous anti-Semitism that routinely appears in the Arab press, might be amazed by what now appears in the sophisticated European press. In England, the guardian wrote that "Israel has no right to exist." The observer described Israeli settlements in the West Bank as "an affront to civilization." The New Statesman ran a story titled "A Kosher Conspiracy," illustrated by a cover showing the gold Star of David piercing the Union Jack. The story implies that a Zionist-Jewish cabal is attempting to sway the British press to the cause of Israel. In France, the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur published an extraordinary libel alleging that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women so that their relatives would kill them to preserve family honor. In Italy, the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano spoke of Israel's "aggression that's turning into extermination," while the daily La Stampa ran a Page 1 cartoon of a tank emblazoned with the Jewish star pointing its big gun at the infant Jesus, who cries out, "Surely they don't want to kill me again." Across Europe, the result has been not just verbal violence but physical. A report issued last year by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, titled "Fire and Broken Glass," describes the assaults on Jews and people presumed to be Jewish across Europe. Attackers, shouting racist slogans, throw stones at schoolchildren, at worshipers attending religious services, at rabbis. Jewish homes, schools, and synagogues are firebombed. Windows are smashed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated with anti-Jewish slogans. In just a few weeks in the spring of last year, French synagogues and Jewish schools, students, and homes were attacked and firebombed. A synagogue in Marseilles was burned to the ground. In Paris, Jews were attacked by groups of hooded men. According to police, metropolitan Paris saw something like a dozen anti-Jewish incidents a day in the first several months after Easter.
AND THE VIOLENCE CONTINUES. In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish workers and assaulted the director of a Jewish school. In Holland, demonstrators carrying swastikas and photos of Israel chanted "Sieg heil!" and "Jews into the sea!" In Salonika, the Holocaust Memorial was defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti. In Slovakia, Jewish cemeteries were firebombed. In Berlin, Jews were assaulted, swastikas daubed on Jewish memorials, and a synagogue spray-painted with the words "six million is not enough."
In the Muslim world, a culture of hatred of Jews permeates all forms of public communications --newspapers , videocassettes ,sermons , books, the Internet,television and radio. The intensity of the anti-Jewish invective equals or surpasses that of Nazi Germany in its heyday. The public rhetoric combines the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with cockeyed Nazi conspiracy theories that echo the famous forgery, the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," and the fanciful notion of a Jewish drive for world dominion. Throughout the Islamic world, one finds slanderous quotations about Jews as the sons of apes and donkeys. A leading Saudi newspaper has Jews using the blood of Christian and Muslim children to make their hamantaschen pastry for Purim and their matzo, the unleavened bread of Passover. In this fundamentalist religious culture, America and Israel are seen as twin Satanic forces, "The Great Satan" and "The Little Satan," as Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini used to refer to them. The linkage of the two Satans has been emphasized even more intently since the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, in September 2000, and the attacks of September 11. Ever hear the story of the 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center being told to not show up for work on the morning of September 11? The story was planted on the Internet by Hezbollah under the cover of a Lebanese TV station. This urban legend has now taken root among Muslims the world over, calling to mind the words of W. B. Yeats: "We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart's grown brutal from the fare." Islamists see the fingerprints of their enemy everywhere--the fantasy that a secret and all-powerful Zionist lobby drains the lifeblood of Arabs and Muslims and incites Washington to war against Iraq, all the while carrying out its sinister plans for global control. In Egypt, a 41-part TV series was broadcast across the Arab world during Ramadan entitled Horseman Without a Horse. The theme of the series was that the Zionists have controlled the world of politics since the dawn of history and seek to control the Middle East-- a fantasy, as Prof. Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University pointed out, imported from the Germany of the 1930s. It is difficult for westerners, unmarked by the searing memories of Jewish history, to realize the extent to which the survival of Israel remains an issue for Jews, who cannot dismiss the overheated Arab rhetoric that seeks to justify terrorism against innocent civilians by describing Israel's existence as illegitimate. That rhetoric is the product of a careful calculation by Arab political leaders who recognized the popular appeal of scapegoating Israel for their failure to provide for their own people while legitimizing their regimes. Not all Arab politicians, happily, indulge in such cynical calculations. Back in February, I participated in a remarkable meeting convened by President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. The group, which met in the city of Almaty, included the presidents from the central Asian republics of Kirgizstan and Tajikistan, the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, and the deputy foreign minister of Turkey. The meeting was titled the Conference on Order and Tolerance. As we exchanged views, I found myself listening raptly to statesmen who spoke with feeling of their support for a dialogue between Muslims and Jews in an atmosphere of religious tolerance and understanding while denouncing in explicit terms extremism and terrorism. If one takes the number of Muslims among the countries represented in Almaty and adds the number of Muslims in moderate countries like India, the result is a huge swath of the Muslim world that rejects the extremism of the Arab leadership among Israel's neighbors.
Ties That Really Bind
America is a notable exception to the new anti-Semitism. How has it escaped?
Well, for one thing, ours is a pluralistic society, the product of the Enlightenment, with a tradition of separation of church and state. Because there was no official state religion, Jews could emerge as first-class citizens unburdened by the stigma of not belonging to the "right" church. A nation of immigrants, America accepted all comers. Jews may have arrived as the eternal strangers, but they found a home in a place where all came as strangers. Finally, we have no ferocious obsession with religion. Here, if you want to hate people, there are plenty of reasons to do so, but religion certainly isn't at the top of the list. In America, race, not religion, is far more likely to be the cause of animus.
Then, of course, there's the fact that America is a meritocracy. With achievement judged far more important than almost anything else, Jewish success was not nearly so much resented here as it has been elsewhere. Indeed, Jews became a model of what an ethnic group could accomplish in conditions of freedom. Thus it is that Jews here became a core element of American society, not so much a minority seeking rights but a part of the community conferring them. Which is not to say that anti-Jewish sentiment can't be found here. It is simply that when it does manifest itself, anti-Semitism is less often directed from the top of society down than it has been, say, in Europe, from government, employers, or other powerful institutions. When it occurs here, anti-Semitism typically comes from below, from marginal elements of society.
Similarities. America is a place where many ethnic groups identify with the country from which they emigrated. It's no accident that we refer to such communities in hyphenated terms: Italian-American, Irish-American, Mexican-American. It is largely because of this habit of identification that concern within the Jewish community for the welfare of Israel seems to provoke no more anxiety over dual loyalties than that of, say, Greek-Americans for Greece.
All these factors coalesce in terms of the support America extends to Israel. It was, after all, Harry Truman who first recognized the Jewish state. Americans easily identify with a country and a people who fled oppression, for, after all, that's also a part of America's story. America identified with a country that was itself an extension of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in terms of its recognition of religion. America, most remarkably, identified with a country that boasts a vibrant democracy. And America, most of all, identified with a country that, like America, was a pickup nation, founded on ideals and built by hard-working immigrants confident of their aims and abilities.
Most recently, of course, Americans have had to grapple with the effect of terrorism on the nation's civil life. As a result, in part, we have come to understand better Israel's dilemma in dealing with a terrorism that has at its root a religious fanaticism not at all unlike that of the adherents of Osama bin Laden. But that's just the most recent chapter. Why America has avoided the poisonous mind-set of the new anti-Semitism is better explained by the shared traditions of these two up-by-the-bootstraps democracies than by terrorists so threatened by the values both nations hold most dear.
Mortimer B. Zuckerman
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Such tolerance, sadly, is not to be found in the world body created to foster universal values and human ideals--the United Nations. Tragically, the growth of international hostility to Israel has found its most prominent expression in the operations of the U.N. It has, in fact, come a long way from the legitimization and legalization of the existence of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to have their own state on their own land through its 1947 resolution proposing and approving a two-state solution. Since then, the U.N. has adopted an almost reflexively anti-Israeli stance canted to the anti-Israeli majority of its membership. The U.N. today is a regular forum for vicious anti-Israel attacks, conferring on the spurious and the hateful the false cloak of reason and legitimacy, and thus has become an organization for the conservation, not the reduction, of the Middle East conflict. Some U.N. actions simply defy belief. At the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, Israel--the only democracy in the Middle East committed to civil rights, the rule of law, and Arab participation in democratic government--was attacked by Arab and Third World nations and accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Then there is the Fourth Geneva Convention, drafted originally in response to the atrocities of the Nazi regime, to protect people like diplomats and visitors subjected to a military occupation. Last year, U.N. conferees met and, for the first time in the 52 years since its adoption, excoriated one country--Israel--for alleged violations. Not Cambodia and Rwanda, with their well-documented records of genocide. Not Zimbabwe, with its racist economic policies. Not the Balkan states, with their ethnic cleansing. Not even China, with its dismal record on Tibet. Only Israel was singled out. Similarly, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, chaired on occasions by such notably enlightened states as Libya, has followed this same pattern, devoting much of its time, energy, and efforts to attacking Israel. The commission went so far as to affirm, last April 15, the legitimacy of suicide bombing against Israelis, or in judgment-free U.N.-speak, "all available means, including armed struggle."
IN THE ARAB WORLD, Zionism is portrayed not as the Jewish response to a history of anti-Semitism in a world that culminated in the Holocaust but as a hyperaggressive variant of colonialism. But since this new anti-Semitism manifests itself so clearly now as political rejection of the Jewish state, it is worth examining the historical record for a moment. Fact: The majority of Jews came to Israel in the late 19th century and early 20th century not as conquering Europeans backed by a national army and treasury but as the wretched of the earth in search of respite from ceaseless persecution. They were not wealthy; they were young, poor, and desperate. The notion that the traditional position of the Arabs in Palestine was jeopardized by Jewish settlements is belied by another fact: that when the Jews arrived, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and wildly neglected land of sandy deserts and malarial marshes. Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, described it as a "desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds--a silent, mournful expanse. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."
Even people unsympathetic to the Zionist cause believed that Jewish immigrants had improved the condition of Palestinian Arabs. Consider the words of Sharif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic holy places in Arabia, in 1918: "One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1,000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine. . . . They knew that the country was for its original sons. The return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren." Hussein understood then, as so many refuse to see now, that the regeneration of Palestine and the growth of its population came only after the Jews returned in significant numbers. As Winston Churchill, then the British colonial secretary, pointed out: "The land was not being taken away from the Arabs. The Arabs sold land to Jews only if they chose to do so." The hope was that the Arabs would accept Israelis as their neighbors and, finally, recognize them as such. That hope died aborning. Even war, that grim final arbiter of international relations, has made no difference. The Arabs resisted from the outset a Jewish presence in the region. They expanded their war against Israel into an attack on the very idea of Israel. Zionism, the Jewish claim to a land of their own, was declared racist because the Arabs said it deprived them of their land. They substituted the homeless Palestinian for the homeless Jew. The Arabs, having rendered the Palestinians homeless by refusing to accept partition in 1948 and having kept many of the Palestinians who fled the battle homeless in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan by refusing to resettle them in their lands, now blame this homelessness on the Jews. They have consistently charged that it was the Jews who had driven the Arabs out of Palestine. But as the eminent Arabist Bernard Lewis has written, "the great majority, like countless millions of refugees elsewhere, left their homes amid the confusion of and panic of invasion and war--one more unhappy part of the vast movement of population which occurred in the aftermath of World War II." Even the foreign press, in regular contact with all sides during the conflict of 1948, wrote nothing to suggest that the flight of the Palestinians was not voluntary. Nor did Arab spokesmen, such as the Palestinian representative to the U.N., Jamal Husseini, or the secretary general of the Arab League, blame the Jews contemporaneously with the 1948 war for the flight of Arabs and Palestinians. In fact, those who fled were urged to do so by other Arabs. As then Prime Minister of Iraq Nuri Said put it, "the Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down." One Arab who fled encapsulated this thinking in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Difaa: "The Arab governments told us, `Get out so that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in." And a bad situation, impossibly, was allowed to get worse. Arabs and Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war were resettled in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the only such agency established for any refugee group since the massive dislocations of World War II. The partition of India occurred at the same time as the conflict in Palestine, and millions of Hindus and Muslims were uprooted, but virtually nothing was done for them. Nothing was done in response to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, where a long-standing religious, social, and political culture was virtually destroyed.
Yet 55 years after they were first established, the Arab refugee camps still exist. With the exception of Jordan, the Arab governments home to these camps have refused to grant citizenship to the refugees and opposed their resettlement. In Lebanon, 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property, or even improve their housing stock. Three generations later, they continue to serve as political pawns of the Arab states, still hopeful of reversing the events of 1948. "The return of the refugees," as President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt said years later, "will mean the end of Israel." The U.N., through its administration of the camps, has made a complicated problem infinitely more so. How? U.N. officials define refugees in the Middle East to include the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. In other parts of the world, descendants of refugees are not defined as refugees. The result of this unique treatment has been to increase the numbers of Arab refugees from roughly 700,000 to over 4 million, by including children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. As a former prime minister of Syria, Khaled al Azm, wrote in his memoirs, "It is we who demanded the return of the refugees while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon them. [We] exploited them in executing crimes of murder and throwing bombs. All this in the service of political purposes." And so it goes, to this very day. At the time of the founding of the State of Israel, 900,000 Jewish refugees were forced out of neighboring Arab states in a coordinated effort. These refugees were absorbed into the new Israel. Yet the world was, and still is, untroubled by the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
TO SINGLE OUT ISRAEL as the only state that must restore a refugee population is to hold the Jewish state to a different standard. Or, perhaps, the more accurate term is double standard. Against such a backdrop, with a history so cynically manipulated by its enemies, the distortions and outright untruths that characterize more recent relations between Israel and the Palestinians should probably come as no surprise. There are virtually countless examples from which to choose, but last year's "massacre" by Israeli forces at the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin is particularly illustrative.
A Palestinian suicide bomber, on Passover eve, killed 29 people and injured 140 in the Israeli city of Netanya. It was the sixth terrorist bombing that week. The Israelis responded by sending troops into the West Bank, including the refugee camp at Jenin, the principal home of the bomb makers. A 10-day battle ensued. The Palestinians, with support from U.N. representatives, alleged that the Israelis had massacred hundreds of innocents, carried out summary executions, refrigerated the corpses, and removed them. Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian spokesman, reiterated the claim of many hundreds killed . The media accepted his version. But subsequent news reports, and even Palestinian testimony and writings recently collated, established the fact that groups like Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad used women and children as shields during the fighting . The reports showed, conclusively, that there was no massacre of Palestinian civilians and documented that the Israelis exercised great restraint during the battle to minimize civilian casualties while suffering an inordinately high number of their own as a result. Distortions and untruths, unsurprisingly, characterize the Palestinians' political dealings with Israel, as well. A critical moment in the relationship was the Oslo agreement of 1993. There, the negotiating principle was land for peace. What Israel received was no peace in return for its offer of land. The most generous Israeli offer of land for peace came at Camp David three years ago. Then Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The Camp David offer was not only rejected by Arafat but used as a provocation to launch a campaign of violence and terrorism that continues to this day. The notion of land for peace bears exploring. If it is taken to mean that Israel must turn over more land until peace is achieved and Arab belligerence ended, the incurious may be left with the conclusion that the lack of peace must be the result of Israel's failure to yield sufficient land. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been thousands of terrorist attacks since the second intifada began, three years ago. The only way Israel has been able to reduce the number of suicide bombers is eliminating their sanctuary by controlling the West Bank through occupation and sealing off Gaza. But the story is not one of occupation of the West Bank by Israel. If the term "occupation" had any relevance at all, it was lost three years ago with Arafat's rejection of Barak's proposal for a Palestinian state. The issue is Palestinian refusal to grant Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state. Israel's battle is not the battle of Jew against Muslim. It is a battle against the hatred of the Jews and their connection to the land of Israel. How else to comprehend the Palestinian rejection of Jerusalem as the sacred city of the Jews and the Western Wall as the Second Temple, except as a rejection of the Jewish presence there? "There was no temple in Jerusalem," Arafat said at Camp David. "It was only an obelisk." To question the core of the Jewish faith is hardly an indication of readiness to resolve the conflict. Quite the contrary, the spiraling Palestinian violence evidences a single-minded determination to continue the conflict. The insight of Amos Oz, the liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he said, by the observation that before the Holocaust, European graffiti read, "Jews to Palestine," while today it has been changed, to "Jews out of Palestine." The message to Jews, Oz says, is simple: "Don't be here, and don't be there. That is, don't be."
Excerpts from A muslim telling it like it is by Dr Farrukh Saleem, an Islamabad-basedfreelance columnist (farrukh15@hotmail.com)
Conclusions At least 70 percent of Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) members are Authoritarian Regimes, Totalitarian Regimes or Restricted Democratic Practices.
At least 93 percent of OIC members are either `Not Free' or `Partially Free'.
Here are some other rather depressing facts: OIC has in it more than 1.3 billion people, one-fifth of humanity. Within the OIC are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, UAE and Kuwait that among them possess 700 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. All the 1.3 billion put together have an annual GDP of less than $1.5 trillion. There are only 290 million Americans and their annual GDP is $10.4 trillion. France is at $1.54 trillion, Germany $2 trillion, UK $1.52 trillion and Italy, long the sick man of Europe, $1.4 trillion.
Kuwait, UAE and Brunei are the only OIC members where per capita income exceeds $10,000 a year. At least fifty OIC members have per capita incomes of under $5,000 a year. Forty-five OIC members have per capita incomes of under $1,000 a year.
Of the 1.3 billion OIC Muslims more than 800 million continue to be absolutely illiterate. Of the 290 million Americans 227 are Nobel Laureates (India has 4).
Of the 1.3 billion Muslims less than 300,000 qualify as `scientists'. That converts to a ratio of 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The United States of America has 1.1 million scientists; Japan has 700,000.
Among them, fifty-six OIC countries have an average of ten universities each for a total of less than 600 universities for 1.3 billion people. India has 8,407 universities, the US has 5,758.
The planet's poorest countries include Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Mozambique. At least six of the poorest of the poor are OIC members.
Is the Ummah listening? We are trapped in a vicious cycle of illiteracy, poverty and violence. We continue to blame non-Muslims for all our failures. Salman Rushdie is convinced that America's `war on terrorism' is all about Islam. Rushdie says what we have is a "paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, `infidels' for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity.... this is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world." Rushdie goes to add that "if Islam is to be reconciled with modernity ... the restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticisation, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the terrorists is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned on its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream."
The discussion involves the Tendentious "education" booklet "Media and Communication Skills." put out by the Palestine Academic Society For the Study of Academic Affairs (PASSIA) with taxpayer money funding from the U.S. Aid For International Development (USAID).
"In order to influence the general policy in one way or another, all CSOs should know how to influence the media. The best known way to do this is to come up with a hidden agenda (italics mine), and deciding on the most suitable time to release information to the media in order to direct the media towards a predetermined slogan, a defined demand. The best method for exerting pressure, is to transform a problem into a public opinion issue, using the media."
Readers are told by Eric Weiner, of National Public Radio (NPR) that, "being balanced, according to their mandate, can be frustrating" and urges the audience/reader "to present your stories on a human level and not rely on the facts." Present tear-jerkers in which Israelis "have to justify their existence, which makes it easier to get through to us."
Ms. Lyse Doucete of the BBC, who refers to homicide bombers as "honor" killers, believes "her job is to translate" rather than simply report the news, because "Israel is led by a Prime Minister who believes that it is not Israel's policy that is wrong, just that they have to explain it better." And so she admonishes the Palestinians, "if you want to beat the Israelis, you have to beat them at their own game." Thereupon follows eight pages of clear instruction on how the Palestinians can manipulate the press to their own advantage.
Weiner again: "The fact that you have 1,000,000 pounds from the British government is not particularly interesting. But, if you explain why it is going to make such a difference by saying, `Did you know that since the closure was imposed we haven't been able to get paper through to Bethlehem?' . . . we are far more likely to be interested."
And still more from Doucet: "You should also know how to pick your target. Always be smart about where you pitch your story, and pitch it at the right time . . . It is true that Israel is treated with kid gloves and not held to the same standards as Iraq when it comes to UN resolutions."
Crossposted @ Israpundit.comThere I encourage readers to write protest letters and I enclosed my own letter addressed to NPR. Enjoy!
People complain about the leftwing media. People deny there's a leftwing media. Here's an example from yesterday's presidential press conference of how the White House press snipes at the President's efforts to fight the terrorist enemy. Just imagine the press corps asking a parallel question say about why the United States continues to compel Israel to negotiate with the terrorist Palestine Authority whose suicide bombing methods are now being used against Americans in Iraq, and judge for yourself whether there is a balanced press in Washington looking out for American interests: Mr. President, your policies on the Middle East seem so far to have produced pretty meager results, as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians continues. And as you heard last week from Muslim leaders in Indonesia, your policies are seen as biased toward Israel and I'd like to ask you about that. The government of Israel continues to build settlements in occupied territories and it continues to build the security fence which Palestinians see as stealing their land. You've criticized these moves mildly a couple of times, but you've never taken any concrete action to back up your words on that. Will you?
Let's dissect the question step by step:
Mr. President, your policies on the Middle East seem so far to have produced pretty meager results, as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians continues.
Two false assumptions:
[1] That Bush's Mid-East policy is somehow to blame for failing to stop the Palestinians from terrorizing Israel with suicide bombings. The people who must be blamed for the horrifying violence that is being perpetrated against Israeli citizens are, well, aside from how politically incorrect it is to say this in today's political climate: the people who are perpetrating the violence - the suicide bombers and the terrorists who organize and arm them , and tell them they're going to heaven if they blow up innocents, and make them national heroes.
[2] That there is some kind of equivalent "violence" going on "between" Israelis and Palestinians. The language of relativism here infers that there are two sides who refuse to stop hurting each other, and who are engaged in similar kinds of warfare. This is what other appeasers said about Hitler during the Blitz. This war began in 1948 when 100 million Arabs declared war on 1 million Jews. Since 1948, the Israelis have been offering to live in peace with their neighbours. If Arabs never attacked Israel in an effort to extinguish it, as happened in the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, Israel would have never raised a martial finger against anyone. If there were no suicide bombings or other forms of terrorism directed at Israelis, there would be no Israeli "violence", since there would be no need of it.
In 2000 at Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 95% of their negotiating demands. He offered them their own sovereign state in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of the West Bank, and a capital in Jerusalem. But Arafat rejected the stunningly generous proposal. His counter proposal was to set the terrorists loose, initiate the suicide-bombing intifada and ignite a full-scale terror war against Jews.
And as you heard last week from Muslim leaders in Indonesia, your policies are seen as biased toward Israel and I'd like to ask you about that.
False assumption: Were these Muslim leaders among those from 57 countries who applauded the statement made by the Malaysian Prime Minister the previoius week that Jews controlled the world? Does what nameless Muslim leaders think about American policies toward Israel represent reality and should it serve as a basis for American foreign policy -- particularly if those Muslim leaders like 40% of the Muslim world think Osama Bin Laden is a hero?.
The government of Israel continues to build settlements in occupied territories. . . .
False assumption: The territories were occupied by Israel in the course of repelling an armed aggression by Arab states whose expressed purpose was to obliterate Israel, erase it from the map. The "occupation" is necessary because the Arab aggressors have refused to sign a peace treaty with Israel for 55 years and are still intent on "liberating Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the sea." By all rights of international law, Israel could have annexed the entire West Bank and made it part of Israel. That is what Poland did to Prussia after the Second World War as punishment for the Nazi aggression. What do the settlements have to do with peace -- except in the eye of the aggressor? Why shouldn't Jews live in the West Bank? There are more than a million Arabs living in Israel? The answer is that the Arabs are Jew-haters who refuse to live alongside of Jews. Why isn't the White House reporter asking about this little problem?
. . . .and it continues to build the security fence which Palestinians see as stealing their land.
False assumption: How touching. Throughout the "Road Map To Peace," Palestinians keep straying over the border into Israel to blow up Jewish families and do so with the encouragement and support of the Palestine Authority. In desperation the Jews start building a fence to protect themsleves. The Palestinians call this "stealing their land." And a White House correspondent lends credibility to the claim. As a matter of fact, the fence that already surrounds the Gaza strip has resulted in the fact that not a single suicide bomber has carried out his mission from Gaza.
How come no one at the press conference asked this question:
Mr. President, how can we expect any kind of realistic peace talks to emerge in this conflict if the Palestinian Authority refuses to first dismantle its own terrorist infrastructure, and to shut down the terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, that operate so freely, with such bloody consequences, under its wing? Mr. President, how come America gets the right to go into Afghanistan and Iraq to root out the terrorists and Israel is denied the same right of self-defense?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev's Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
Why Muslim terrorists are so quick to commit suicide:
"No Jesus, No Christmas. No television, No cheerleaders, No baseball, No football, No basketball, No hockey, No golf, No tailgate parties, No Wal-Mart, No Home Depot, No pork BBQ, No hot dogs, No burgers, No chocolate chip cookies. No lobster, No shellfish, or even frozen fish sticks, No gumbo, No jambalaya.
Rags for clothes and towels for hats.
Constant wailing from the guy next-door because he's sick and there are no doctors.
Constant wailing from the guy in the tower (lol).
More than one wife.
You can't shave.
Your wives can't shave.
You can't shower to wash off the smell of donkey cooked over burning camel dung.
The women have to wear baggy dresses and veils at all times.
Your bride is picked by someone else. She smells just like your donkey. But your donkey has a better disposition.
Then they tell you that when you die it all gets better!
Great humor at the expense of the Hollywood actors' peace-making trip to the Mideast. Warmly recommended.... laugh the whole thing off :)
Where presidents and prime ministers have failed, Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt and wife Jennifer Anniston hope their star power will work wonders in new roles as Middle East peace envoys. They will team up with other actors such as Edward Norton, Jason Alexander and Danny DeVito on a private mission to help resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict. The problem with Hollywood stars is that they don't understand that their popularity comes from speaking words written by other people while being filmed by other people on projects that are financed by other people. Playing a doctor on television does not qualify one to perform brain surgery, even if you can say, "I need that Fleeber retracter stat!" Even DeVito, who produces and directs and therefore understands a bit more about the illusory nature of the entertainment industry (and thus should really know better) gets into the act. And when I say "gets into the act," I mean that quite literally.
And how will these constellations beam their little rays of sunshine into the drab and dreary lives of Israelis and Palestinians and achieve peace?
London's Sunday Telegraph said it was not clear how the stars intended to stop the escalating violence but their strategy was to appeal to the man in the street. Pitt and Aniston believe the region's war-weary inhabitants want a negotiated settlement and they think direct appeals to 'ordinary folk' can bring the warring parties together, the paper said. One problem Aniston & Co may encounter is that 75% of 'ordinary' Palestinians like seeing 'ordinary' Israelis blown up in restaurants and on buses. Aniston's smile might melt hearts in America, but they've likely never heard of her:
For some, the prospect of DeVito talking peace with Hamas militants over a cup of tea, or Pitt breaking bread at a Sabbath dinner with hardline Jewish settlers, is ridiculous, the Telegraph said. Israeli sociologist Oz Almog told the paper: 'Many Palestinians do not even have television sets. What's more, for the past three years here, no one has listened to anyone. So what makes these people think they will listen to Danny DeVito?'
Well, Oz, come on ... I mean, this is Danny DeVito. Dude. For real.
While organisers admit that none of the actors has any experience of the Middle East or of conflict resolution, they say this may help as they will be considered non-partisan. Or it may indicate that they're really unqualified to speak on the subject. I don't know a damned thing about directing a movie, but I'd like DeVito to let me helm his next $80 million film. How do you think that'll work out?
Mr Mohammed Darawse, the Palestinian regional coordinator of the project, is convinced they can make a difference. He told the Telegraph: 'They asked intelligent questions when we met and they clearly know the big picture.' Uh, let's see. Israel exists on territory that the Palestinians think belongs to them, and they want to push the Israelis into the Mediterranean, sans lifejackets. The Israelis don't want that, and would like to be able to eat pizza or ride buses without teenagers wearing bomb bras blowing them up. How's that for the big picture? Or, from Mr Darawse's point of view, the Palestinians' land was stolen by the evil Zionists who are descended from apes and pigs, and since these yahoods refuse to go away, the Palestinians have the right to attack them until they leave. Any better? No?
How about this, then: the Palestinians, who had possession of half of the territory known collectively as Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip in 1948, refused to recognize Israel's right to exist and allowed five Arab armies to pass through their territory to annihilate the Israelis. The Israelis won. The Palestinians did the same thing in 1967, and the Israelis won again, and this time decided that they were tired of Palestinians attacking them from the east, and took over the territories. The Palestinians are pissed off because they've had the world's worst leadership; this was confirmed after Oslo, when after being offered 95% of what they claim to want, decided instead to launch the intifada instead of accepting. Better? No?
Okay, I give up -- apparently, it takes someone with the genius of Jason Alexander to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I suppose he could force both sides to watch "Bob Patterson" episodes until they crack. Oh, the horror! (via Strange Women Lying in Ponds)
The PA's anti-US message
Excerpts: " America will fall, may it be Allah's will, just as Rome fell."
Ibrahim Madiras recently called the US "the foremost enemy of the Muslim nation," comparable to the evil Pharaoh of the Bible (PA TV February 21, 2003)
Iraq's land will be a graveyard for the American soldiers..." (Al-Hayat al-Jadida, Dec. 19, 2002).
During the war, the PA actively endorsed killing Americans and even produced a music video celebrating the deaths of US soldiers, which was broadcast repeatedly on its TV.
I have just returned at the beginning of the month from my annual visit to Israel. Wrote a pictorial essay: Eilat 2003 ( https://trafael.tripod.com/eilat.html ). Most pics are not mine but they show the beauty of the country.
Subject: Landmark Survey of Israelis, Israeli-Arabs & Palestinians: Profound Palestinian Distrust of and Dislike for America
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FOR MORE INFORMATION: October 22, 2003 Ben Clarke 703-358-0080
Landmark Survey of Israelis, Israeli-Arabs & Palestinians: Profound Palestinian Distrust of and Dislike for America
An overwhelming 95% of Jews in Israel support the United States in the War on Iraq; 74% of Palestinians support Saddam Hussein
In perhaps the most comprehensive comparative study of Israelis, Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians to date, it is distinctly clear that they have vastly divergent views on issues ranging from 9/11 to the War on Iraq to the current Roadmap for Peace.
Consider the following key findings:
- 96% of Jews in Israel believe that the people who flew planes into New York's World Trade Center were terrorists; a mere 37% of Palestinians share that view; in addition, 26% of Palestinians believe Israelis planned the 9/11 attacks.
- 42% of Palestinians and 61% of Israeli-Arabs stated that they 'support' the people who are attacking American troops in Iraq right now. Zero percent of Israeli Jews hold that view.
- 36% of Palestinians believe that the United States poses the greatest threat to world peace; 51% stated that Israel poses the greatest threat to world peace.
The survey was released today by Itamar Marcus, founder of Palestinian Media Watch (www.pmw.org.il), written by pollster Frank Luntz and conducted by PORI (The Public Opinion Research of Israel) and The Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. The survey consisted of interviews with 600 Israeli Jews, 400 Israeli Arabs and 607 Palestinians and was fielded between the dates of September 21st and September 27th. Israel has approximately six million Jewish citizens and more than one million citizens who are Arabs.
"There are those in America who urge Washington to take what they call 'a balanced approach' to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict," said pollster Frank Luntz. "The problem is, there is absolutely no balance between Palestinians and Israelis when it comes to their views of the United States. The American people are not going to be happy, and will certainly not want a balanced approach, when they learn that more than 40% of Palestinians support the people attacking and killing American soldiers in Iraq."
"These results are a product of the Palestinians being taught for years by their leaders to see the US as an archenemy to be loathed and fought," says Itamar Marcus, of Palestinian Media Watch who sponsored the poll. "While PA officials are accepted in Washington as colleagues and even allies, the PA's message in Arabic is to hate and kill Americans. The Americans were murdered in Gaza by Palestinians fulfilling their role to wage war against Americans, as they have openly been taught by their leaders."
Although Israelis, Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians live side-by-side, their attitudes, opinions and most basic beliefs are often diametrically opposed.
For example:
- 75% of Israeli Jews and 71% of Israeli-Arabs, but only 41% of Palestinians "strongly agree" that "men and women are equal and society should treat mean and women exactly the same."
- 83% of Israelis "strongly agree" that "terrorism is NEVER justified under any circumstances." By comparison, only 58% of Israeli-Arabs and 34% of Palestinians hold a similar view.
- Fully 90% of Jews in Israel strongly agree that Hamas is "a terrorist group," compared to only 16% of Israeli-Arabs and 5% of Palestinians.
"Palestinian support for terrorism is a direct result of their government teaching that violence and terror are valid tools to achieve political goals," explains Marcus. "Even the so-called moderates of PA leaders, Hanan Ashrawi and Sari Nusseibeh, hold this view, as they explicitly stated a year ago. In the PA, all agree that the killing of Israelis civilians is valid if it would further their political goals. The debate between the "moderates" and the masses has only been about whether it has been productive."
The survey also cast grave doubts on the prospects for a lasting peace in the region. Although an equal 40% of Jews in Israel and 40% of Palestinians see a possibility for peace, the two sides are still quite divided in their priorities. For example:
- 99% of Israelis consider bombings of Israeli buses and restaurants to be acts of terrorism, while only 10% of Palestinians would agree.
- 47% of Jewish Israelis rank "peace" as their highest value. By comparison, only 23% of Palestinians choose peace first.
- 46% of Palestinians characterize Israelis as the 'enemy' and 31% believe that Allah wants Muslims to fight Jews. Moreover, 59% of Palestinians feel Hamas and Islamic Jihad should NOT give up their armed struggle against Israel even if Israel were to leave all territories, including East Jerusalem, and grant statehood to the Palestinians.
"This poll shows that the United States needs to continue - in fact, greatly expand - its public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East, including among Palestinian Arabs," said Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA). "The prospects for peace in the region will greatly improve if attitudes change."
"We need to strip away the public fictions about the Palestinian government," former Ambassador Richard Carlson went on to say. "These polling figures reflect the years of political incitement and indoctrination of the Palestinian people, not just the hateful drumbeat against Israel but against America, equally." Carlson currently serves as Vice Chairman for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Palestinians, Israeli-Arabs and Jewish Israelis all overwhelmingly believe that democracy is the best form of government. However, each group defines "democracy" differently. Nearly 8 in 10 Jews in Israel believe that their political system should be a 'democratic regime in which all the political ideas are represented.' When asked exactly the same question, only 33% of Palestinians agreed. In fact, one in five Palestinians support the establishment of an Islamic single-party government.
"What's truly unique about this survey is that it asks either identical or parallel questions of the three populations," said Luntz. "This offers observers of the Middle East a perfect opportunity to analyze beliefs and opinions across the full spectrum of participants."
"In reading the results," Luntz added, "it is clear that for peace to happen, the culture of hate that causes Palestinians to accept terrorism will have to be replaced by educating for peace. I am pessimistic about the prospects for peace. The divide between the populations is just too great, even in the definition of the words used. A terrorist that kills 20 Israeli women and children is a 'freedom fighter' to half of the Palestinian population. How can you have peace under these circumstances?" Luntz concluded.
SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE SUMMARY FOLLOWS
PORI Public Opinion & marketing Research of Israel, 2000 Ltd. Middle East Survey (Media Summary)
N = 600 Israeli Jews - 400 Israeli Arabs - 607 Palestinians Margin of Error (600 Sample +/- 4%) (400 Sample +/- 4.9%) September 2003
1. First, in your opinion, which nation or people is the single greatest threat to WORLD peace? I need you to pick only one nation or people you think is the single greatest threat to WORLD peace. Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians IRAN 52%/ 3%/ 1%/ PALESTINIANS 8%/ 5%/ 1% IRAQ 7%/ 1%/ 1% MOSLEMS IN GENERAL 6%/ ------/ ------ UNITED STATES 4%/ 40%/ 36% SYRIA 3%/ ------/ ------ SAUDI ARABIA 3%/ ------/ 1% NORTH KOREA 2%/ 1%/ 1% ISRAEL 2%/ 26%/ 51% ALL ARAB COUNTRIES 2%/ ------/ ------ CHINA 1%/ 1%/ 1% OTHER 4%/ 4%/ 2% DON'T KNOW/REFUSED 9%/ 22%/ 7%
2. In the war between the United States and Saddam Hussein, whom did you support? Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
STRONGLY HUSSEIN ------/ 21%/ 50% MOSTLY HUSSEIN ------/ 17%/ 24% MOSTLY UNITED STATES 22%/ 10%/ 6% STRONGLY UNITED STATES 73%/ 9%/ 4% DON'T KNOW 5%/ 44%/ 16%
3. And in general, do you . the people who are attacking American troops in Iraq right now. Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
4. In your opinion, were the people who flew planes into New York's World Trade Center . ? Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians TERRORISTS 96%/ 41%/ 37% MARTYRS 3%/ 8%/ 22% FREEDOM FIGHTERS ------/ 25%/ 14% DON'T KNOW 1%/ 27%/ 27%
5. And who do you believe planned the 9/11 attacks against the United States? Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians OSAMA BIN LADEN 91%/ 34%/ 46% SADDAM HUSSEIN 2%/ 1%/ 4% THE UNITED STATES 1%/ 13%/ 6% ISRAEL ------/ 11%/ 26% SOMEONE ELSE 2%/ 2%/ 1% DON'T KNOW 5%/ 39%/ 18%
6. Terrorism is NEVER justified under any circumstances. Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
8. [Last year the Tulkarm Shahids Memorial Soccer Championship For Children was named After Abd Al-Al Baset Odeh, who killed 30 Israelis in a suicide bombing. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?] Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
A GOOD THING ------/ [15%] [71%] A BAD THING ------/ [70%] [13%] DON'T KNOW ------/ [15%] [17%]
9. If the Ministry of Education wanted to name a youth soccer tournament after Baruch Goldstein, who killed unarmed Palestinians in an attack, would that be a good ting or bad thing? Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians GOOD THING 11%/ 4%/ ------ BAD THING 83%/ 91%/ ------ DON'T KNOW 7%/ 5%/ ------
10. Do you consider Palestinian bombings of Israeli buses and restaurants to be acts of terrorism? Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
11. When Palestinian leaders refer to "occupied territories," do you think they mean . Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
ALL OF THE WEST BANK AND 17%/ 64%/ 48% GAZA STRIP
ALL OF THE WEST BANK, GAZA 78%/ 25%/ 37% STRIP AND ISRAEL
SOMETHING ELSE 5% 11%/ 15%
12. Do you believe God wants Jews to fight Muslims? [Do you believe Allah wants Muslims to fight Jews?]
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
YES 12%/ [31%] / [31%] NO 64%/ [52%] / [47%] DON'T KNOW 18%/ [15%] / [22%] DON'T BELIVE IN GOD / [ALLAH] 7%/ [2%] / [------]
13. If the Palestinians were to stop the terrorist attacks and give up the right of return, should Israel withdraw from all the territories, including East Jerusalem, and grant them statehood? Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
14. [If Israel were to leave all the territories, including East Jerusalem, and grant statehood to the Palestinians, should Palestinians give up the right of return?] Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
15. [And if Israel were to leave all territories, including East Jerusalem, and grant statehood to the Palestinians, should Hamas and Islamic Jihad give up their armed struggle against Israel?] Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
All three surveys were written and coordinated by Frank Luntz. Interviews were conducted by PORI among the three populations:
Israeli Jews:
PORI - Public Opinion Research of Israel conducted this survey by telephone (CATI) among a sample of 600 Adults (18+) Israeli Jews. The survey was in the field September 23rd and 24th . The margin of error is +/- 4%.
Israeli Arabs:
PORI - Public Opinion Research of Israel conducted this survey by telephone (CATI) among a sample of 400 Adults (18+) Israeli Arabs. The survey was in the field September 24th and 25th . The margin of error is +/- 4.9%.
Palestinians:
PORI - Public Opinion Research of Israel coordinated this survey of face-to-face interviews among a sample of 607 Palestinians. The interviews were conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. The survey was in the field between the dates of September 21st and September 27th and has a margin of error of +/- 4%.
PORI, founded in 1966, is one of the senior research institutes in Israel. The firm has conducted numerous research projects for overseas governments including the U.S. Department of State, media and academic clients that include The Pew Research Center and the BBC, as well as international corporate work for companies that include Boeing and IBM.
Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, founded in 1994, has overseas clients including U.S. Department of State, Gallup International and the UN Development Program.
Tour of U.S. Schools Reveals Why Zionism Is Flunking on Campus
By Natan Sharansky Forward Magazine October 24, 2003
When I got to Rutgers University in New Jersey last month, I almost forgot I was on a college campus. The atmosphere was far from the cool, button-down academic reserve typical of such institutions. It was more reminiscent of a battlefield.
My arrival was greeted by a noisy demonstration of Palestinian and Jewish students holding signs reading "Racist Israel" and "War Criminals," together with black-coated Neturei Karta members calling for the destruction of the blasphemous Zionist entity. Faculty members, predictably led by a former Israeli professor, had sent out e-mails protesting the granting of a platform to a representative of the "Nazi, war-criminal" state. Of course, there was the famous pie incident in which a member of a campus Jewish anti-occupation group made his way past my security guards and plastered me in the face with a cream pie while shouting "End the Occupation."
Opposed to them were hundreds of no less rowdy Jewish students, full of motivation to defend Israel and give the protesters back as good as they got. After the pie incident, when I returned to the hall and mounted the stage, the atmosphere was so electric, so full of adrenalin, that the Palestinians and their supporters who had come to disrupt the event had no choice but to abandon their plans for provocation.
Things were not much calmer at Boston University: An anonymous bomb threat brought swarms of police to the lecture hall and almost forced a cancellation of my appearance. But here, too, some good resulted when the bomb threat caused the lecture to be moved to a larger hall, which was quickly filled with some 600 listeners who were unwilling to accept the violent silencing of pro-Israel views.
These moments -- the pie throwing, the bomb threat, the demonstration -- as raucous, threatening and contentious as they were, are among the more pleasant memories from my 13-campus tour of the United States. Perhaps it is because at these moments I felt that there was some point to my trip, perhaps because the violent hostility had stirred the students and motivated them to want to fight and win -- which I, of course, was delighted to see.
There were other moments during my tour, difficult moments when I felt fear, sadness and worry. During a frank and friendly conversation with a group of Jewish students at Harvard University, one student admitted to me that she was afraid -- afraid to express support for Israel, afraid to take part in pro-Israel organizations, afraid to be identified. The mood on campus had turned so anti-Israel that she was afraid that her open identification could cost her, damaging her grades and her academic future. That her professors, who control her final grades, were likely to view such activism unkindly, and that the risk was too great.
Having grown up in the communist Soviet Union, I am very familiar with this fear to express one's opinions, with the need to hold the "correct opinions" in order to get ahead, with the reality that expressing support for Israel is a blot on one's resume. But to find all these things at Harvard Business School? In a place that was supposed to be open, liberal, professional? At first I thought this must be an individual case, particular to this student. I thought her fears were exaggerated. But my conversations with other students at various universities made it clear that her feelings are widespread, that the situation on campuses in the United States and Canada is more serious than we think. And this is truly frightening.
To most Israelis, what happens on the world's campuses hardly seems a life-and-death concern. The world is against us in any case. And as for Jewish students, why should we care? They've got troubles? Let them move to Israel. In my own view, however, this is a fateful issue for the State of Israel and the Jewish people.
Israel has few strategic assets as critical as American Jewry. The fact that the world's leading superpower is a steadfast ally of Israel is due in large measure to this proud and activist community. But nobody can guarantee that the current state of affairs will continue indefinitely. I have been in close contact with the American Jewish community for more than 30 years, and its leadership is largely unchanged. I entered a Russian prison, I got out, I moved to Israel, I became a Cabinet minister and the people I work with are mostly the same people. The leadership is getting old, and the younger generation is not stepping forward.
The continuing support of American Jewry depends on this younger generation. If it chooses to affiliate actively with the Jewish people, if it supports Israel and acts on its behalf, then we will continue to have a strong backbone of support in a world that is turning more and more hostile. But if this younger generation were to disappear -- whether through assimilation or an unwillingness to be identified -- Israel would find within a very few years that it faces an entirely different United States.
This younger generation is growing up on the university campus. That is where the core of future administrations is taking shape. The students I met at Princeton, Columbia and Harvard will be the decision-makers of the coming decades. Will they be as pro-Israel as today's decision-makers? Will they stand up fearlessly for Israel? Given the level of anti-Israel sentiment on today's campuses, where being "in" means being hostile or at least apathetic toward Israel, I have grave doubts.
The transformation of campuses into hothouses of anti-Israel opinion did not happen by itself, nor did it occur overnight. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the mood on campus was completely different. Jewish students then were at the center of student activism, leading movements for human rights, including the Soviet Jewry freedom movement. Demonstrations, hunger strikes, mass rallies -- all this combined to form a massive army that was largely made up, as the Soviet secret police used to put it sneeringly, of "students and housewives." These struggles were an inseparable part of the Jewish identities of those young people. They were certain of themselves, certain of the justice of their cause and certain that they were on the side of the angels. The goal was clear, the enemy was defined and their pride in themselves, their Jewishness and Israel was boundless.
When I sat for Sabbath dinner with 300 Jewish students at Columbia University in New York -- together with Glenn Richter, who in 1964 at the university launched the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry -- and I told them about those days, the events seemed to them all but unimaginable. Today, when Jewish activity on campus is directed almost entirely inward, when Jewish student organizations feel like walled fortresses in enemy territory, when pro-Israel students hardly dream of taking leadership positions in campus struggles for human rights, those days seem like a distant dream.
Years of massive investments of money and effort by Arab states and the Palestinians have changed the picture. One after the other, departments of Middle Eastern studies have been set up on university campuses, with generous Saudi funding -- departments that worked to establish pseudo-scientific theories, presenting Israel as the last colonial state, a state whose very existence is immoral regardless of borders, a state that should not exist. Differing views are as a matter of course not tolerated. When Jewish community leaders decided in the last few years to begin investing funds to create chairs in Israel studies, they discovered there is no one to teach them. There are no experts, no writers. The field has been abandoned.
Not only in the intellectual arena have we abandoned the field. In the public relations field, too, the Palestinians have learned, unlike the Israelis, to appreciate the importance of the university as the shaper of the next generation, and to concentrate their efforts there. Articulate, effective speakers have been dispatched to campuses to mobilize the idealistic students for their own political interests.
They have been sent to explain that despite the fact that in the Arab nations, as in the autonomous areas of the Palestinian Authority, there are no rights for women, minorities, gays or nearly anyone else, that despite all this they are the true bearers of the banner of human rights; that all true seekers of justice should act on their behalf, and against Israel's.
The absurdity cries out to the heavens, but no one seems to notice. The banner of human rights, once identified to a great degree with Jews, has become a weapon against them. Liberal and democratic discourse on human rights serves mainly as a vehicle for attacks against Israel, and increasingly against Jews.
In the last three years the process has greatly intensified. Students, young, idealistic and naturally tending to see the world in black and white, have been greatly influenced by daily media reports about "human rights violations" carried out by Israel, by pictures of Palestinian children, by unbalanced reportage. Lacking a serious "other side," lacking any real information about the roots of the conflict, lacking any serious Israeli public relations effort, the campuses have become more and more hostile.
When I assumed my current position as minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs, it was clear to me that this issue of campuses as centers of anti-Israelism and their influence on the young Jews of the world must be at the center of my agenda. It is a matter of critical importance for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. And so I decided to travel, to learn the facts first-hand and to try to begin a process of change.
Before I left Israel my daughter said to me, "Dad, if they throw eggs at you, duck." My other daughter countered: "Why duck? Catch them and throw them back." You may laugh, but that is how I felt. After ducking for so long, while Israel was under constant attack for supposedly being a "war criminal," a "Nazi state" and the "embodiment of evil," I felt the time had come to throw back a few eggs. Especially on campuses, especially on the topic of human rights. Not to apologize, but to try to show the true picture -- who is the only democracy in the Middle East and who are the dictatorships, where are human rights honored and where are they trampled.
I wanted to show that even during a cruel war against terrorism, Israel was showing great sensitivity to human rights -- certainly in comparison to other democracies at war: the United States in Afghanistan, NATO in Yugoslavia, Russia in Chechnya. I talked about the battle of Jenin, when we decided not to use airplanes that could hurt the Palestinian civilian population, and instead sent our soldiers hunting house to house for weapons and terrorists.
I wanted, as someone who had spent a considerable part of his life struggling for human rights, to bring the human rights struggle back to its proper context. To return it to its true owners. To explain that support for terrorists and dictators like Yasser Arafat and his gang cannot be considered support for human rights.
For six days I traveled across the United States. I did not meet with administration officials or do any politicking. Just campuses. Meeting students, instructors, Jewish and non-Jewish activists. A marathon of 13 campuses in six days. I discovered an enormous thirst for knowledge, for straight answers about these supposed "human rights violations" and "war crimes." I learned that combining human rights, a popular, burning issue among students, and Israel, a very unpopular issue, works to Israel's advantage, because even the most pro-Palestinian students, including Arab students, had to back down when the discussion centered squarely and honestly on human rights and democracy.
But I also learned that every such victory was a limited one, like capturing a single hill in enemy territory. The overall picture is deeply worrying. On every campus I visited, Jewish students make up between 10% and 20% of the population, but no more than a tenth of them, by my estimate, take part in Jewish or pro-Israel activity. Another tiny but outspoken fraction serves as the spearhead of anti-Israel activity, for there is no better cover for hiding the racist nature of causes like an anti-Israel boycott than a Jewish professor or student eager to prove that he is holier than the pope. And the rest? The rest are simply silent. They are not identified, not active, not risk-takers. Nearly 90% of our students are Jews of silence.
To the credit of the activists, it must be said that they do impressive work. But they are few, and many are tired and discouraged. One student who was active in pro-Israel organizations told us that at a certain point he could no longer stand the peer pressure of those around him who viewed him as a pro-Israel obsessive. He now pours his idealistic energies into an organic farm he started. Now that he is involved in environmental activism everyone is happy with him. Having myself grown up in a place where those around me barely tolerated my Jewish involvements, I know that this sort of peer pressure will drive most people to flee, just as we -- most of us -- in Russia tried to run away from our Jewishness to the ivory towers of science or the arts. We thought that scientific excellence would save us from the mark of Cain on our foreheads.
Can the trends be reversed? Can we recapture the campus? I believe we can. But it will require a concentrated effort and a genuine change of consciousness and direction in Israel's informational efforts. We in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world must combine our efforts and work together. In the United States things have begun to stir, and various organizations are active on campus. Now it is time for Israel to do its share.
This article first appeared in Ma'ariv and is reprinted with permission. Translated by J.J. Goldberg.
* Find this article at: http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.10.24/oped1.html
"One of the chief arguments against coalition intervention in Iraq was that military action there would 'destabilize the region,' " notes Jerry Bowyer on TechCentralStation.com. Bowyer applies a market test to this argument and finds it wanting:
Looking at the countries with readily available [stock] market indices--Israel TA-100, Turkish ISE National-100, Pakistani Karachi 100, Egyptian CMA--we find that every one of those indices has risen over the time period, from George Bush's ultimatum on March 17th to now. Egypt is up 19.3%; Israel is up 29.3%; Turkey is up 45.1%; and the-powder-keg-known-as-Pakistan is up an astonishing 67.5%!
"The U.S. command said Thursday crime rates in Iraq dropped significantly in the past two weeks as Iraqi police tightened their control on security," United Press International reports from Baghdad:
U.S. Gen. Mike Hazelink, who is in charge of security in the Iraqi capital, said car thefts dropped by 50 percent, homicide by 65 percent and armed robberies by 30 percent, according to the latest statistics tabulated by coalition forces.
And the BBC reports that "Afghanistan is to compete in a beauty contest for the first time in more than 30 years and almost two years after the fall of the oppressive Taleban regime":
Vida Samadzai, 25, who has lived in the United States since 1996, will compete alongside 60 other women from across the world for the Miss Earth title in Manila, the Philippines, contest organisers said.
Ms Samadzai, or Miss Afghanistan as she will be known in the competition, will take part in all sections of the contest, including the swimsuit section.
The Hindustan Times has a nice collection of photos of the Afghan beauty.
Weasel Watch
"A top Iraqi official attending an international conference on raising funds to rebuild Iraq warned Thursday that France and Germany's limited donations would not be forgotten," CNN reports from Madrid:
Ayad Allawi, the current head of Iraq's U.S.-appointed governing council, said he hoped German and French officials would reconsider their decision not to boost their contributions beyond funds already pledged through the European Union.
"As far as Germany and France are concerned, really, this was a regrettable position they had," Allawi said. "I don't think the Iraqis are going to forget easily that in the hour of need, those countries wanted to neglect Iraq."
Chris Patten, external affairs commissioner for the European Union, tells the Washington Post: "You can't expect European taxpayers who felt particularly hostile to military intervention to feel hugely enthusiastic about spending a large amount of money in Iraq." Maybe, but you can expect European leaders to show a little leadership for a change.
The Post adds that Arab countries, with the exception of Kuwait, also are refusing to pony up:
"Yes, they are balking," one U.S. official said of the Arab states, as the American side continued to press hard for a breakthrough. Without Saudi participation, he said, it would be difficult to create a "snowball effect" among Arab donors. The Saudis are the " 'big brother' of the Gulf, [but] they have not helped in a constructive fashion," the official said.
This is hardly surprising, since a stable Iraq moving toward democracy would be an enormous threat to nearby Arab dictators' hold on power.
Not everyone is trying to stiff Iraq, though: "Poor yet sympathetic to Iraq's postwar plight, the ex-communist countries of the 'New Europe' that deployed small contingents of peacekeeping troops are now sending food, medicine and other goods in lieu of cash," reports the Associated Press.
Arab Apartheid
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a branch of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, "distributed leaflets in Jerusalem on Wednesday threatening to execute Palestinians who sell their property to Jews or act as intermediaries in such deals," the Jerusalem Post reports:
"The Aksa Martyrs Brigades warn those thieves and traitors who are selling [Arab-owned] lands through Israeli real estate agents," said the leaflets, some of which were distributed on the Temple Mount.
This refutes the anti-Semitic lie that Israel is an "apartheid state." Whereas Israel has perhaps a million Arab citizens, Palestinian Arabs are willing to murder fellow Arabs in an attempt to ensure that the disputed territories are Judenrein.
And some FUN! : 'I Hate Moderates'
Cheers to blogger "Frank J." for this delightful bon mot (ellipsis in original):
There is now a Centrist Coalition blog. I hate moderates . . . much more than even liberals. I bet Satan is a moderate; the best way to get evil accepted is to package it with some good. That's what moderates do; they're always like, "Oh! I'm so special because I don't take a firm stance on issues, and I see value in everyone's viewpoints." I bet right now a moderate is reading this and partially agreeing with it. Damn you!
Fair and Balanced? PBS sees only the left-wing side of "complex topics."
Friday, October 24, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
In polite company, it is now well known that the Fox slogan "fair and balanced" is not to be uttered unless accompanied by a knowing roll of the eyes or some ironic inflection of the voice. But judging from an education initiative offered by WNET New York, public television has fairness issues of its own. And they make Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes look positively mainstream.
The exhibit here is "Human Rights 101." A "multimedia human rights initiative" aimed at students, it was launched earlier this month by WNET's Educational Resources Center. The package offers kids "insight into such complex topics such as tolerance, racism, women's rights, refugees, and religious freedom," with the goal of leaving them "equipped for life with knowledge that will help them effect change."
On one thing we agree: These are indeed "complex topics." But a review of the listed human-rights organizations yields little hint of complexity. To the contrary, with the exception of Freedom House, the resources students will find here are pretty much those you might expect to be given by, well, the Democratic National Committee. That might not be surprising: WNET is the same station that a few years back was embarrassed when it was found swapping mailing lists with the DNC and a host of other, mainly Democratic groups.
Human Rights 101 evinces similar ideological predilections. A student who clicks onto Environmental Defense will find out how to oppose drilling in the Arctic. The American Friends Service Committee lists a "press availability" for explaining how "Bush's Arm-twisting Victories in Congress and U.N. Will Deepen Quagmire in Iraq, Budget Crisis at Home." Equality Now, dedicated to women's rights, cites a "global campaign against sexual exploitation of women by US military forces in South Korea and around the world." Madre, another women's group, is today hosting "the Patriot Act Un-birthday Bash." And so it goes down the line, on everything from abortion to globalization.
If you believe that there may be other sides to these issues, you certainly won't learn where to find them from this list. On religious freedom, for example, where is the Acton Institute for Religious Liberty or the Becket Fund or even the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom? On trade and globalization, wouldn't students benefit hearing from, say, the Cato Institute, or seeing a reference to The Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation annual Index of Economic Freedom, which underscores the critical role of free markets and property rights for poor people in developing nations? The same gaping hole runs through almost every issue. On the environment, where's PERC, the Montana-based green group dedicated to private stewardship? And what about Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, which has done yeoman's work on behalf of prisoner rights and rehabilitation? Come to think of it, though the Web site for Human Rights 101 includes virtually every United Nations rights declaration, what about steering American students to something really radical: say, a discourse about James Madison and the Bill of Rights?
Remember, the people who think this WNET list provides an objective overview of the subject are the same people who can't keep their brie down when the subject turns to the conservative domination of Fox News or talk radio. But whatever the direction private broadcasters may take, they at least do it on their own dime. With the General Accounting Office now in the midst of the first review of funding for public broadcasting in nearly two decades, that's something Congress might want to consider before cutting its next check.
This article hits it right on the spot. I feel the same regarding NPR [National Palestinian(!) radio] as follows from the following email which i wrote the day before:
Dear Sir,
It is truly revolting to read the headlines of your station's reports, let alone listen to your anti-Israeli bias. A simple glance at your headlines in the past days and weeks, shows Israel to constantly be the aggressor while the PAlestinians are the victims. Your coverage of the Israeli opinion is not only laconic but in that short time you tend to interview Israelis from the far left or human rights activists. Daily terror attacks against Israelis go uncovered, while you give ample time to Palestinian voices of grief. It is such a recurring pattern that I won't even bother proving it. Just take a close look at the transcript of ANY of your reports.
I think that National PAlestinian radio (NPR) is a more fitting name to your station. Shame on you for using public dollars for such biased reports.
Another Holocaust? from: Pakistan Today!!!! wow!
By: Daniel Pipes
The prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, informed the world last week, among other things, that "Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." In reaction, Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. national security adviser, described Mahathir's comments as "hateful, they are outrageous." She then added, "I don't think they are emblematic of the Muslim world." If only she were right about that.
In fact, Mahathir's views are precisely emblematic of Muslim discourse about Jews - symbolized by the standing ovation his speech received from an all-Muslim audience of leaders representing 57 states. Then, a Saudi newspaper reports, when Western leaders criticized Mahathir, "Muslim leaders closed ranks" around him with words of praise ("very correct," "a very, very wise assessment").
Although anti-Jewish sentiments among Muslims go back centuries, today's hostility results from two main developments: Jewish success in modern times and the establishment of Israel. Until about 1970, however, Muslim resentment and fear of Jewish power, remained relatively quiet.
This changed in the 1970s, when a further political radicalization combined with an oil boom gave states like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Libya the will and the means to sponsor anti-Jewish ideas worldwide. With barely a Muslim voice to counter ever-more outlandish theories, these multiplied and deepened. For the first time, the Muslim world became the main locus of anti-Jewish theories.
By now, notes Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, "Hatred of Jews is widespread throughout the Muslim world. It is taught in the schools and preached in the mosques. Cartoons in Muslim newspapers routinely portray Jews in blatantly anti-Semitic terms."
Indeed, Mahathir is hardly the only Muslim ruler to make anti-Jewish statements. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria said in 2001 that Israelis try "to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ." The Iranian ayatollahs and Saudi princes have a rich history of anti-Jewish venom, as of course do Egyptian television programs and Palestinian textbooks.
Of the many examples, one stands out for me: a June 2002 interview with a 3-year-old girl named Basmallah on Saudi television, made available by the Middle East Media and Research Institute:
Anchor: Basmallah, are you familiar with the Jews? Basmallah: Yes. Anchor: Do you like them? Basmallah: No. Anchor: Why don't you like them? Basmallah: Because... Anchor: Because they are what? Basmallah: They're apes and pigs. Anchor: Because they are apes and pigs. Who said they are so? Basmallah: Our God. Anchor: Where did he say this? Basmallah: In the Koran.
The little girl is wrong, but her words show that, contrary to Condoleezza Rice's analysis. Muslim antisemitism extends even to the youngest children. That Mahathir himself is no Islamist but (in the words of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman) "about as forward-looking a Muslim leader as we're likely to find" also points to the pervasiveness of anti-Jewish bias.
In its attitudes toward Jews, the Muslim world today resembles Germany of the 1930s - a time when insults, caricatures, conspiracy theories, and sporadic violence prepared Germans for the mass murder that followed.
The same might be happening today. Wild accusatory comments like Mahathir's have become banal. Against Israelis, violence has already reached a rate approaching one death per day over the past three years. Outside Israel, violence against Jews is also persistent: a Jewish building blown up in Argentina, Daniel Pearl's murder in Pakistan, stabbings in France, the Brooklyn Bridge and LAX killings in the United States.
These episodes, plus calling Jews "apes and pigs" could serve as the psychological preparation that one day leads to assaulting Israel with weapons of mass destruction. Armaments chemical, biological, and nuclear would be the successors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. Millions of Jews would perish in another Holocaust.
As in the 1930s, the world at large - including the U.S. government - again seems not to note the deadliness of processes now underway. Anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence are decried, to be sure, but with little sense of urgency and even less of their cumulative impact.
Condoleezza Rice and other top-ranking officials need to recognize the power and reach of the anti-Jewish ideology among Muslims, then develop active ways to combat it. This evil has already taken innocent lives; unless combated it could take many more.
(Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America (W.W. Norton).)
The following is a LANDMARK ARTICLE. MUST READ despite it's length!
