Roni Sofer
Teachers who are forced to return to class via Labor Court injunctions would be a very bad thing for Israeli education. Education crisis threatens Israel’s future, but top officials only care about money
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On, and Education Minister Yuli Tamir know this too – this is why they want to reach an agreement. However, that would be a forced agreement, or just like the godfather once said, an offer you can’t refuse: The kids will go back to school and the teachers will go back to teaching classes of more than 40 students with their tail between their legs.
As it turns out, money blinds ministers. True, education costs plenty of money. Teachers need to be paid, and paid well, and the children must learn in the best possible conditions. After all, the why we look is based on our education system. Cheap education has high costs, and this isn’t a cliché. Look at the results of international comparative tests ever since our teachers have been paid the same salaries as those who serve tea at the high-tech industry.
Israel’s education keeps deteriorating and all those who came up with reforms can read the writing on the wall. Everyone can still read around here, thank God.
Olmert, Bar-On and Tamir have been quarreling with the teachers as if they are bargaining at the bazaar; As if we’re talking about the balance sheets of a commercial company. You give us so and so hours, they tell the teachers, and we’ll give you so and so more money. You will give us more hours of instructions and receive fewer benefits. You will give us more work, for less money. They were treating the teachers like an American capitalist treats hungry workers at a Third World shoe factory. Instead of glorifying those entrusted with one of the few natural resources Israel has, they were dragging them back to class with a court order.
We cannot complain about Olmert and Bar-On, who were never suspected of subscribing to a socialist worldview. When they say they are concerned about breaching salary agreements we are not surprised, because we are familiar with their worldview. However, we are surprised to see them backed by the education minister. She is supposed to take care of our young generation using any means available to her, yet she went to court to drag the teachers back to class. She, who knows more than anyone the worth of government pledges.
Yuli Tamir, who is supposed to side with the teachers, was dragging them back to class instead of demanding that Bar-On and Olmert earmark to education another part of the government reserve of 7.7 billion shekels (roughly $2 billion) reported last week.
This story is all about money
Yet Olmert, Bar-On and Tamir dare say that there is no money now for what is needed to upgrade the education system and its teachers. When we ask the man in charge of the Treasury, Bar-On, he makes it clear that he must safeguard the government reserve for tough days ahead. “Look at the costs of the Second Lebanon War,” he would say.
Bar-On’s and Olmert’s view is that we should mortgage the future of our children for the sake of our future wars. However, through this flawed perception, we won’t have any soldiers who learned our right for this country at school. They would regrettably prefer a safer future in a country where rampant capitalism and privatization were invented.
The teachers’ strike placed a mirror in front of Israeli society. It made it clear to all those who care about the future of Israel that the education crisis is more threatening than the threats of Iran, Syria and Hamas put together.
All parents here sense intuitively that their children do not get what they deserve. In a country that makes pretenses to be a global knowledge superpower, education is being quantified into shekels and shekels are being quantified into working hours. Those who are currently privatizing the future of our children are indeed speaking highly about education, but are unwilling to pay teachers in this country what they deserve. This story is all about money.
Roni Sofer is a Ynet reporter
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
More dangerous than Iran
Roni Sofer
Teachers who are forced to return to class via Labor Court injunctions would be a very bad thing for Israeli education. Education crisis threatens Israel’s future, but top officials only care about money
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On, and Education Minister Yuli Tamir know this too – this is why they want to reach an agreement. However, that would be a forced agreement, or just like the godfather once said, an offer you can’t refuse: The kids will go back to school and the teachers will go back to teaching classes of more than 40 students with their tail between their legs.
As it turns out, money blinds ministers. True, education costs plenty of money. Teachers need to be paid, and paid well, and the children must learn in the best possible conditions. After all, the why we look is based on our education system. Cheap education has high costs, and this isn’t a cliché. Look at the results of international comparative tests ever since our teachers have been paid the same salaries as those who serve tea at the high-tech industry.
Israel’s education keeps deteriorating and all those who came up with reforms can read the writing on the wall. Everyone can still read around here, thank God.
Olmert, Bar-On and Tamir have been quarreling with the teachers as if they are bargaining at the bazaar; As if we’re talking about the balance sheets of a commercial company. You give us so and so hours, they tell the teachers, and we’ll give you so and so more money. You will give us more hours of instructions and receive fewer benefits. You will give us more work, for less money. They were treating the teachers like an American capitalist treats hungry workers at a Third World shoe factory. Instead of glorifying those entrusted with one of the few natural resources Israel has, they were dragging them back to class with a court order.
We cannot complain about Olmert and Bar-On, who were never suspected of subscribing to a socialist worldview. When they say they are concerned about breaching salary agreements we are not surprised, because we are familiar with their worldview. However, we are surprised to see them backed by the education minister. She is supposed to take care of our young generation using any means available to her, yet she went to court to drag the teachers back to class. She, who knows more than anyone the worth of government pledges.
Yuli Tamir, who is supposed to side with the teachers, was dragging them back to class instead of demanding that Bar-On and Olmert earmark to education another part of the government reserve of 7.7 billion shekels (roughly $2 billion) reported last week.
This story is all about money
Yet Olmert, Bar-On and Tamir dare say that there is no money now for what is needed to upgrade the education system and its teachers. When we ask the man in charge of the Treasury, Bar-On, he makes it clear that he must safeguard the government reserve for tough days ahead. “Look at the costs of the Second Lebanon War,” he would say.
Bar-On’s and Olmert’s view is that we should mortgage the future of our children for the sake of our future wars. However, through this flawed perception, we won’t have any soldiers who learned our right for this country at school. They would regrettably prefer a safer future in a country where rampant capitalism and privatization were invented.
The teachers’ strike placed a mirror in front of Israeli society. It made it clear to all those who care about the future of Israel that the education crisis is more threatening than the threats of Iran, Syria and Hamas put together.
All parents here sense intuitively that their children do not get what they deserve. In a country that makes pretenses to be a global knowledge superpower, education is being quantified into shekels and shekels are being quantified into working hours. Those who are currently privatizing the future of our children are indeed speaking highly about education, but are unwilling to pay teachers in this country what they deserve. This story is all about money.
Roni Sofer is a Ynet reporter
Teachers who are forced to return to class via Labor Court injunctions would be a very bad thing for Israeli education. Education crisis threatens Israel’s future, but top officials only care about money
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Finance Minister Ronnie Bar-On, and Education Minister Yuli Tamir know this too – this is why they want to reach an agreement. However, that would be a forced agreement, or just like the godfather once said, an offer you can’t refuse: The kids will go back to school and the teachers will go back to teaching classes of more than 40 students with their tail between their legs.
As it turns out, money blinds ministers. True, education costs plenty of money. Teachers need to be paid, and paid well, and the children must learn in the best possible conditions. After all, the why we look is based on our education system. Cheap education has high costs, and this isn’t a cliché. Look at the results of international comparative tests ever since our teachers have been paid the same salaries as those who serve tea at the high-tech industry.
Israel’s education keeps deteriorating and all those who came up with reforms can read the writing on the wall. Everyone can still read around here, thank God.
Olmert, Bar-On and Tamir have been quarreling with the teachers as if they are bargaining at the bazaar; As if we’re talking about the balance sheets of a commercial company. You give us so and so hours, they tell the teachers, and we’ll give you so and so more money. You will give us more hours of instructions and receive fewer benefits. You will give us more work, for less money. They were treating the teachers like an American capitalist treats hungry workers at a Third World shoe factory. Instead of glorifying those entrusted with one of the few natural resources Israel has, they were dragging them back to class with a court order.
We cannot complain about Olmert and Bar-On, who were never suspected of subscribing to a socialist worldview. When they say they are concerned about breaching salary agreements we are not surprised, because we are familiar with their worldview. However, we are surprised to see them backed by the education minister. She is supposed to take care of our young generation using any means available to her, yet she went to court to drag the teachers back to class. She, who knows more than anyone the worth of government pledges.
Yuli Tamir, who is supposed to side with the teachers, was dragging them back to class instead of demanding that Bar-On and Olmert earmark to education another part of the government reserve of 7.7 billion shekels (roughly $2 billion) reported last week.
This story is all about money
Yet Olmert, Bar-On and Tamir dare say that there is no money now for what is needed to upgrade the education system and its teachers. When we ask the man in charge of the Treasury, Bar-On, he makes it clear that he must safeguard the government reserve for tough days ahead. “Look at the costs of the Second Lebanon War,” he would say.
Bar-On’s and Olmert’s view is that we should mortgage the future of our children for the sake of our future wars. However, through this flawed perception, we won’t have any soldiers who learned our right for this country at school. They would regrettably prefer a safer future in a country where rampant capitalism and privatization were invented.
The teachers’ strike placed a mirror in front of Israeli society. It made it clear to all those who care about the future of Israel that the education crisis is more threatening than the threats of Iran, Syria and Hamas put together.
All parents here sense intuitively that their children do not get what they deserve. In a country that makes pretenses to be a global knowledge superpower, education is being quantified into shekels and shekels are being quantified into working hours. Those who are currently privatizing the future of our children are indeed speaking highly about education, but are unwilling to pay teachers in this country what they deserve. This story is all about money.
Roni Sofer is a Ynet reporter
OpEd From defenders to defamers
Gerald M. Steinberg
Published in the Jerusalem Post, December 9th 2007
Monday, December 10 is International Human Rights Day - commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the members of the United Nations in 1948. Following the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, the signatories pledged to protect the "inherent dignity" and the "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family."
But like other promises made during this period, this one was also soon violated.
In much of the world, human rights, including the basic right to life, are given short shrift. The watchdogs, both in the United Nations itself, and in the accompanying network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that claim to promote morality and human rights, have become a major part of the problem. The words that expressed revulsion at the crimes committed against the Jewish people - "war crimes," "collective punishment," "indiscriminate mass killing," "violations of international law," and so on - have become weapons in the political war accompanying the terror campaigns against Israel.
The "reformed" United Nations Human Rights Council, which is charged with implementing the 1948 Declaration, is run by many of the worst violators of human rights. Its reports are written by " experts" who are obsessed with attacking Israel. In 2001, the UN held a conference in Durban attended by thousands of delegates, ostensibly to combat racism and xenophobia . Following a preparatory conference in Iran, led by Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, this exercise became a vehicle for hatred and anti-Semitism.
Many of the NGO "superpowers" are guilty of aiding and abetting this disgraceful process. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Paris-based FIDH (International Federation of Human Rights), and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva, routinely exploit these norms to pursue their own narrow ideological agendas. They participated in the NGO Forum of the 2001 Durban Conference, which was even worse than the diplomatic session. Like the UN, the NGO reports focus obsessively on Israel , and erase the context of terrorism in order to make false and frequent accusations. In 2002, an Amnesty official was quoted on the BBC confirming the false reports of a massacre in Jenin. In 2006, HRW published hundreds of pages attacking Israeli responses to Hizbullah attacks, and glossing over Hizbullah's aggression and use of human shields.
Similarly, Israel-based NGOs such as B'tselem, Bimkom, and Gisha, which claim to support universal human rights, use double standards to falsely and systematically portray Israeli responses to terror as violations of these moral norms.
The halo effect enjoyed by the UN and NGO human rights network two or three decades ago has also been eroded by reports which make headlines, but are later shown to be fabricated or unverifiable. Essentially lacking their own research capabilities, HRW and Amnesty rely on "local eyewitnesses" for evidence. These "eyewitnesses" know that their reports, regardless of the lack of evidence or context, will be used to promote boycotts, demonization and other political campaigns. In this way, human rights have become a vehicle to promote incitement, hatred and terror - the antithesis of the objectives proclaimed in 1948.
IN ORDER to change this dismal state of affairs, and restore the moral foundation and universality of human rights, the structure of the international diplomatic and NGO mechanisms must be overhauled . Kenneth Roth, who has headed Human Rights Watch since 1993, and Irene Khan, who has controlled Amnesty International since 2001, have been in power for far too long. The donors and members of these organizations must also act responsibility to ensure that their support is not abused. Donors to NGOs are like directors of corporations who are accountable for transgressions committed by the officers of their firms.
The Ford Foundation, which was threatened with investigation by the US Congress after funding the most virulent participants in the 2001 Durban NGO Forum, adopted guidelines to prevent a repetition. Some donors to HRW and the New Israel Fund (which funds B'tselem, Machsom Watch, Gisha, Bimkom, Adalah, and others) have cut or conditioned their donations on an end to the double standards , and some members and officials of Amnesty have resigned in protest. These are all steps in the right direction.
In the Spring of 2009, the UN Human Rights Council has scheduled a follow up to the infamous Durban conference. This provides a rare opportunity for the governments that actually care about human rights, as well as the NGO community, to reverse course, and demonstrate that the lessons have been learned. If they succeed, this will mark an important step in the restoration of the values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But if they fail, the Declaration, and the foundation of an international moral code based on a single universal standard, may never recover.
The writer is the chair of the Political Studies department at Bar Ilan University, and Executive Director of NGO Monitor.
Published in the Jerusalem Post, December 9th 2007
Monday, December 10 is International Human Rights Day - commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the members of the United Nations in 1948. Following the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, the signatories pledged to protect the "inherent dignity" and the "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family."
But like other promises made during this period, this one was also soon violated.
In much of the world, human rights, including the basic right to life, are given short shrift. The watchdogs, both in the United Nations itself, and in the accompanying network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that claim to promote morality and human rights, have become a major part of the problem. The words that expressed revulsion at the crimes committed against the Jewish people - "war crimes," "collective punishment," "indiscriminate mass killing," "violations of international law," and so on - have become weapons in the political war accompanying the terror campaigns against Israel.
The "reformed" United Nations Human Rights Council, which is charged with implementing the 1948 Declaration, is run by many of the worst violators of human rights. Its reports are written by " experts" who are obsessed with attacking Israel. In 2001, the UN held a conference in Durban attended by thousands of delegates, ostensibly to combat racism and xenophobia . Following a preparatory conference in Iran, led by Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, this exercise became a vehicle for hatred and anti-Semitism.
Many of the NGO "superpowers" are guilty of aiding and abetting this disgraceful process. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Paris-based FIDH (International Federation of Human Rights), and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva, routinely exploit these norms to pursue their own narrow ideological agendas. They participated in the NGO Forum of the 2001 Durban Conference, which was even worse than the diplomatic session. Like the UN, the NGO reports focus obsessively on Israel , and erase the context of terrorism in order to make false and frequent accusations. In 2002, an Amnesty official was quoted on the BBC confirming the false reports of a massacre in Jenin. In 2006, HRW published hundreds of pages attacking Israeli responses to Hizbullah attacks, and glossing over Hizbullah's aggression and use of human shields.
Similarly, Israel-based NGOs such as B'tselem, Bimkom, and Gisha, which claim to support universal human rights, use double standards to falsely and systematically portray Israeli responses to terror as violations of these moral norms.
The halo effect enjoyed by the UN and NGO human rights network two or three decades ago has also been eroded by reports which make headlines, but are later shown to be fabricated or unverifiable. Essentially lacking their own research capabilities, HRW and Amnesty rely on "local eyewitnesses" for evidence. These "eyewitnesses" know that their reports, regardless of the lack of evidence or context, will be used to promote boycotts, demonization and other political campaigns. In this way, human rights have become a vehicle to promote incitement, hatred and terror - the antithesis of the objectives proclaimed in 1948.
IN ORDER to change this dismal state of affairs, and restore the moral foundation and universality of human rights, the structure of the international diplomatic and NGO mechanisms must be overhauled . Kenneth Roth, who has headed Human Rights Watch since 1993, and Irene Khan, who has controlled Amnesty International since 2001, have been in power for far too long. The donors and members of these organizations must also act responsibility to ensure that their support is not abused. Donors to NGOs are like directors of corporations who are accountable for transgressions committed by the officers of their firms.
The Ford Foundation, which was threatened with investigation by the US Congress after funding the most virulent participants in the 2001 Durban NGO Forum, adopted guidelines to prevent a repetition. Some donors to HRW and the New Israel Fund (which funds B'tselem, Machsom Watch, Gisha, Bimkom, Adalah, and others) have cut or conditioned their donations on an end to the double standards , and some members and officials of Amnesty have resigned in protest. These are all steps in the right direction.
In the Spring of 2009, the UN Human Rights Council has scheduled a follow up to the infamous Durban conference. This provides a rare opportunity for the governments that actually care about human rights, as well as the NGO community, to reverse course, and demonstrate that the lessons have been learned. If they succeed, this will mark an important step in the restoration of the values embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But if they fail, the Declaration, and the foundation of an international moral code based on a single universal standard, may never recover.
The writer is the chair of the Political Studies department at Bar Ilan University, and Executive Director of NGO Monitor.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
United States: State Sponsor of Judeophobia
A terrible line was crossed at Annapolis. Last week, a line was crossed. A terrible line was crossed at Annapolis. With the world looking on, the President of the United States sponsored Judeophobia. Jew-hatred was okay, understandable even.
Under the auspices of a global "peace" conference, the White House sanctioned Jew-hatred. The Jew is contemptible, inferior, ignorant, politically and socially disenfranchised: separate entrance ways, service entrances for the Jews, refusal to touch or shake hands with a Jew, refusal of audience members to wear the translation earphones when Ehud Olmert spoke.
"Saud Al-Faisel's ears, underneath his red keffiyah, were left bare. And no, it wasn't because he understood Hebrew. It was the Saudi method of demonstrating their relationship to the State of Israel. Even as the Israeli Prime Minister was greeting him and speaking of peace, they were refusing to listen. For a minute I thought I was wrong that maybe there was a technical problem. But then I saw his aide next to him - also leaving his ears demonstrably naked."
Then, as Olmert's speech ended, and the audience applauded: "The Saudi representative also brought his palms together in order to appear polite. Only someone who sat very close to him could see that the never touched. The little game that the Saudis were playing was just one contradiction - the least noticeable one - in a day full of contradictions." ...(Read more here.)
Submitting to Saudi demands, the Americans prohibited Israeli representatives from
entering the hall through the same door as the Arabs. Vile - all of it; sanctioned and institutionalized by the President of the United States. I thought George Bush was a Christian, a man of faith. Shocking. He has squandered his second term and has not acted in good faith. We did not elect him to carry Condi's water.
It is unfathomable to consider this with any other race, creed or color. Imagine separate entrances for the leader of an African nation because a "white" leader refused to walk through the same door as the black man, because it would be unclean?
And Israel took it like the ghetto Jew. They should have walked out like any self-respecting human would have done. But no, they lowered the bar yet again. Offering all and getting nothing. Sheba Farms, Golan, Jerusalem - all of it in play. The post-Oslo Jew has returned to the pre-Holocaust mentality of the "ghetto Jew." The Jew who doesn't want to be noticed, the Jew who will do anything to appease those who hate us, just to live in peace. Instead of asserting our rights, our will, that we have a right, that we are the rightful heirs of Israel and Jerusalem, we are acting as if we have no rights. Instead, we are begging - begging - our enemies to recognize us and accept us!" Behaving like beggars! And the silence of American Jews - well, it's the ghetto mentality mixed with those who have assimilated into American culture: the "let's not rock the boat" crowd.
Continuing this tragedy, Condoleezza Rice later proclaimed, "I know what it's like as a Palestinian." Such willful stupidity is unacceptable in a US Secretary of State. Rice knows little about the history of the Middle East, the politics, the Koran, the Jews - none of it. This ignorant remark says it all. The Palestinians are not the blacks of the Civil Rights movement or era; Abbas is not the great non-violent civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King (what an insult to even think this!); and Dr. King was a Zionist, a lover of Israel and the Jewish people's right to it. The Jews are not the KKK or the police with the dogs, either; this is not the old South, this the very violent, blood-lusting Middle East.
She doesn't know what it means to be a Jew, to watch innocent people, babies, children, the old, the young, the tourist be blown to bits; shards of flesh flying in every direction, blood, guts strewn everywhere, missing body parts, and the survivors, with nails, nuts and bolts throughout their bodies, marred for life. My dear friend Wolf nailed it when she she said Rice doesn't know what it's like to have monsters throwing rocks at your car as you drive, to have bombs thrown at you, to live under constant mortar fire and have to spend the night in a bomb shelter. She doesn't know the feeling of the parents who lost their sons when the boys went on a hike near where they lived, only to be brutally murdered by barbarians who had bashed in their heads beyond all recognition. They were left to be discovered in a cave. She knows rien, nothing.
A line in the sand was crossed last week. And anyone who claims that Annapolis was a big yawn and that nothing would come of it is living in the land of unicorns and moonbeams. The Jew as dhimmi was made official and the world was there to bear witness. Moreover, Israel laid down. Sheba Farms, Golan, Jerusalem - all were thrown on the table like so many marbles.
Bat Yeor was dead right in her reply when I asked her what had become of the people of Israel: "Israel is unworthy of her ancestors."
Under the auspices of a global "peace" conference, the White House sanctioned Jew-hatred. The Jew is contemptible, inferior, ignorant, politically and socially disenfranchised: separate entrance ways, service entrances for the Jews, refusal to touch or shake hands with a Jew, refusal of audience members to wear the translation earphones when Ehud Olmert spoke.
"Saud Al-Faisel's ears, underneath his red keffiyah, were left bare. And no, it wasn't because he understood Hebrew. It was the Saudi method of demonstrating their relationship to the State of Israel. Even as the Israeli Prime Minister was greeting him and speaking of peace, they were refusing to listen. For a minute I thought I was wrong that maybe there was a technical problem. But then I saw his aide next to him - also leaving his ears demonstrably naked."
Then, as Olmert's speech ended, and the audience applauded: "The Saudi representative also brought his palms together in order to appear polite. Only someone who sat very close to him could see that the never touched. The little game that the Saudis were playing was just one contradiction - the least noticeable one - in a day full of contradictions." ...(Read more here.)
Submitting to Saudi demands, the Americans prohibited Israeli representatives from
entering the hall through the same door as the Arabs. Vile - all of it; sanctioned and institutionalized by the President of the United States. I thought George Bush was a Christian, a man of faith. Shocking. He has squandered his second term and has not acted in good faith. We did not elect him to carry Condi's water.
It is unfathomable to consider this with any other race, creed or color. Imagine separate entrances for the leader of an African nation because a "white" leader refused to walk through the same door as the black man, because it would be unclean?
And Israel took it like the ghetto Jew. They should have walked out like any self-respecting human would have done. But no, they lowered the bar yet again. Offering all and getting nothing. Sheba Farms, Golan, Jerusalem - all of it in play. The post-Oslo Jew has returned to the pre-Holocaust mentality of the "ghetto Jew." The Jew who doesn't want to be noticed, the Jew who will do anything to appease those who hate us, just to live in peace. Instead of asserting our rights, our will, that we have a right, that we are the rightful heirs of Israel and Jerusalem, we are acting as if we have no rights. Instead, we are begging - begging - our enemies to recognize us and accept us!" Behaving like beggars! And the silence of American Jews - well, it's the ghetto mentality mixed with those who have assimilated into American culture: the "let's not rock the boat" crowd.
Continuing this tragedy, Condoleezza Rice later proclaimed, "I know what it's like as a Palestinian." Such willful stupidity is unacceptable in a US Secretary of State. Rice knows little about the history of the Middle East, the politics, the Koran, the Jews - none of it. This ignorant remark says it all. The Palestinians are not the blacks of the Civil Rights movement or era; Abbas is not the great non-violent civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King (what an insult to even think this!); and Dr. King was a Zionist, a lover of Israel and the Jewish people's right to it. The Jews are not the KKK or the police with the dogs, either; this is not the old South, this the very violent, blood-lusting Middle East.
She doesn't know what it means to be a Jew, to watch innocent people, babies, children, the old, the young, the tourist be blown to bits; shards of flesh flying in every direction, blood, guts strewn everywhere, missing body parts, and the survivors, with nails, nuts and bolts throughout their bodies, marred for life. My dear friend Wolf nailed it when she she said Rice doesn't know what it's like to have monsters throwing rocks at your car as you drive, to have bombs thrown at you, to live under constant mortar fire and have to spend the night in a bomb shelter. She doesn't know the feeling of the parents who lost their sons when the boys went on a hike near where they lived, only to be brutally murdered by barbarians who had bashed in their heads beyond all recognition. They were left to be discovered in a cave. She knows rien, nothing.
A line in the sand was crossed last week. And anyone who claims that Annapolis was a big yawn and that nothing would come of it is living in the land of unicorns and moonbeams. The Jew as dhimmi was made official and the world was there to bear witness. Moreover, Israel laid down. Sheba Farms, Golan, Jerusalem - all were thrown on the table like so many marbles.
Bat Yeor was dead right in her reply when I asked her what had become of the people of Israel: "Israel is unworthy of her ancestors."
Jihadism, Liberalism and Perversion
Stephen Rittenberg, MD
American Thinker
Our frequent exposure to the exhibitionistic snuff porn of Jihadis has prompted numerous attempts at psychological explanation. Clinicians know how comforting it is to have a diagnostic label. Correct diagnosis can be the first step to cure.
There are problems, however, with psychological diagnosis. In totalitarian states, dissidents are often locked up in ‘mental hospitals' for their ‘crazy' behavior. They are diagnosed as ‘sociopaths' and ‘narcissists', interested in individual freedom rather than behaving like ‘normal' conformists to the system. Shrinkwrapped (Sophisticated Diagnosis) has commented on the various problems with psychiatric diagnosis in our own culture, including its tendency to relieve the ‘sick' person of responsibility for his actions.
Psychological explanations offered for Islamic savagery are useful, as far as they go. However, they can be overly generalized and undynamic when applied as labels to Jihadis. Writers like Dr. Sanity and the Sanity Squad have highlighted the narcissistic insecurities of Islamic males and their defensive need to control women to shore up their own masculinity.
However, clinical experience tells us that many men suffer from the same narcissistic insecurities and don't resort to violence to assuage their deficiencies. Only Islamic clerics sanction the murder of women who have been raped. Only Islamic clerics issue murderous fatwas, celebrate murder of artists, and mobilize sword-wielding men to demand death for a female teacher who allowed children to name a teddy bear 'Mohammed'. Only Islam proudly exhibits videos of throat-cutters torturing helpless victims.
It is the intense pleasure derived from religiously sanctioned murderous lust that makes the jihadis so dangerous. The degree of narcissism matters little; these are not people who can be 'treated' by shoring up their narcissism, and bolstering their self-esteem. It is our very civilized, therapeutic culture that makes us flinch from taking the necessary measures needed to deal with such foes. In truth, it may be our own narcissism -- the need to reassure ourselves of our superior civilized nature -- that causes us to obsess about whether necessary measures for waging war, like water boarding, and Guantanamo constitute 'torture'.
In our politically correct age, the word ‘perversion' has been banished from the circles of multicultural academia, literary and journalistic usage. It is, we are instructed, ‘judgmental', tends to unfairly ‘normalize' heterosexuality and is, like the ‘N-word', insulting. It creates hierarchical differences and that is illiberal.
Nevertheless, despite the efforts to remove it from the language and/or because of that effort, it still carries an emotional charge. In a time when gleeful murderous terrorists blow themselves up daily, it behooves us to face the reality that militant Islamic jihadism is a perversion and its practitioners derive a gratification that is more than simply defensive against feeling of inadequacy. It is the pleasurable charge that comes from throwing off all inhibitions on the discharge of murderous rage.
The late Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was a French psychoanalyst and holocaust survivor who devoted her clinical efforts to understanding sexual perversions*. She realized there was a connection between individual sexual pathology and political movements.
Her intuitive insight was that Nazism's appeal, on both the individual and mass psychological level, derived from its power as psycho-sexual perversion. (See, for instance, Cabaret and Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood.) Having seen and survived what happened in the heart of civilized Europe, she discovered, through her clinical work, that perversions were not just the sexual kinkiness of a small minority.
She realized that perversions were not even merely ‘sexual' in the narrow behavioral meaning of the word, but that erotic pleasure could be intensified by the discharge of aggressive wishes, including the inflicting of, and submitting to, pain up to the point of death. She broadened our understanding of perversions to include, not just behavior but modes of thinking.
What she found was that perversions are an essential way in which the human mind and psyche rebel against and seek to evade reality. That reality is rooted in biology: the male-female difference. The intolerance and fear of such differences can result in the practices of Wahabbi Islam, wherein women are so feared that they must be hidden and brutalized like beasts of the field. Muslim men's terror of women is undoubtedly accompanied by a high incidence of hidden (not so hidden when they travel to the Riviera) perverse sexuality.
Long before there was a Norman Mailer proclaiming his artistic right to transgress bourgeois laws constraining sex and aggression, there was the Marquis de Sade. Chasseguet-Smirgel wrote about the celebrated French author, and pointed out that in his fantastical world of perversion, (see Mailer's preoccupation with ‘buggery') the incest taboo is violated, and thus the generational boundaries are breached.
Sade celebrates non-genital sex which is celebrated as an outlet for violence (sadism); bodies are dismembered, children are the targets of violent sexual discharge, humans and animals copulate and all differences are obliterated. Sade's work was designed to overturn the biblical injunction against perversion, but also to overturn the differences laid down at the beginning of the Old Testament, between the sexes, the animals, in fact between differentiated life and inanimate chaos.
God brought order out of chaos and Sade wishes to return to chaos. For Sade, the elimination of God means all sexual and aggressive behavior is permitted, including mass murder. Love is repeatedly mocked and dismissed. The release of all constraint on aggression maximizes pleasure.
The most intense Sadean pleasure is sexual murder, since no need exists to protect the object of sexual desire from aggression. Love cannot exist in the Sadean world because it puts limits on the pleasurable indulgence of murderous wishes. Perversion aims at destruction, destruction of difference, of the living order of the universe and its replacement with chaos and deadness. Long before Hitler put Sade's ideas into practice, Sade celebrated mass murder and the erotic pleasure to be gotten from torturing victims.
Chasseguet-Smirgel's insight revealed that, besides perverse behavior there are perverse modes of thinking, with the same aim of erasing distinctions and eliminating systematic thought itself. Thus, for example, Post-Modernism represents perverse thinking in its denial of the difference between truth and falsehood, good and evil, superior and inferior cultures. When it argues that ‘male' and ‘female' are ‘constructed' identities, it argues against the immutable differences imposed by biological reality.
Socialism is similarly perverse in its radical egalitarianism, denying differences of talent, intelligence, motivation, skill. Liberalism's affirmative action is perverse in its effort to impose an egalitarianism that is unattainable. It seeks to correct the "socially constructed" discriminatory differences. (Under its strictures shouldn't there be affirmative action for white basketball players?) This is perverse thinking. Modern politically correct liberalism is shot through with perversion. Renouncing her early socialist utopianism, Chasseguet-Smirgel became a conservative.
Ideas are perverse when they seek to undermine distinctions that are necessary for thought itself to exist. When such distinctions are eliminated, anything goes. When liberalism asserts that al Qaeda and America are equal threats to the world, it is being perverse. In fact, when liberals argue that modern Christianity and Islam are both ‘religions of peace' they are being perverse.
When language is debased by perverse thinking war becomes peace and all distinctions are rendered meaningless. Socialism embraces perverse thinking when it argues for a utopian egalitarianism that constitutes an assault on human differences, the differences that exist -- of talent, motivation, achievement, skill, and worth. It is perverse in ultimately reducing the vitality of difference in favor of deadening sameness.
Ideas do have consequences. Mass murder, idealized by Sade, became mass murder carried out by Hitler. Civilization is a fragile thing, and once perversion rules, there are no limits to the human imagination. We thought Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were the worst, but now we see Islamic Jihadis strapping bombs to babies and blowing them up. Once again, we are in a struggle between civilization and perversion. Some remain puzzled by the alliance between modern day left-liberalism and jihadism. Perversion explains the puzzle.
To the perverse jihadis who constitute large numbers of Muslims, the existence of the female sex is threatening, hence women are treated as little more than cattle, with fewer rights than some lower animals. Why do Western feminists keep their mouths shut? Because many are themselves leftist utopian perverts, who also cannot tolerate the existence of two sexes and secretly long to submit to the appealing sadism of the jihadis.
One of the great fascinations of the Marquis de Sade was with child murder. In Justine he offers a lengthy argument for why parents should sexually assault, then murder their children. The most primal human bonds exist to be destroyed to the accompaniment of erotic pleasure. Deriving pleasure from sexual assault on and murder of children is the ultimate denial of God, the moral distinction between good and evil, and the distinction between humans and animals. It is ultimately the assertion that man is no different from the lowest form of matter.
What Sade imagined and longed for has come to pass.
In recent years, since the exhibitionistic torture and beheading of Daniel Pearl, the world has been exposed to depravities that would delight the Marquis. Palestinian (Let's give them a state!) children are repeatedly celebrated as little jihadis ready to blow themselves up while murdering Jews.
They are indoctrinated in the erotic pleasures instantly available to mass murderers: all those eager virgins. There has been a strangely muted reaction from the civilized world. We have heard repeated calls for restraint on our part, warnings against "Islamophobia", and we take pride in minimizing casualties when fighting the Sadean jihadis.
Why is it that our media are so reluctant to report such occurrences as the recent successful effort by a jihadi in Pakistan to turn his year old infant into a bomb, killing more than 100 innocent bystanders? Readers of the New York Times would not have known of this ‘martyrdom'. You would have to turn to the Pakistan Tribune to learn the following:
"KARACHI: The Oct 19 bombing on Benazir Bhutto's procession in Karachi which killed over 170 people, was carried out by a person who used a one-year-old child strapped with fatal bombs..."
The very idea of making a living, breathing baby into an inanimate object, a bomb to slaughter hundreds, is straight out of the Sadean universe and the religious system that justifies it is properly called ‘perverse'.
The reason we hear so little condemnation, much less military resolve to annihilate these savage perverts, is Western culture's thralldom to contemporary, politically correct liberalism, which is itself perverse. Post-modern Liberalism shares the mindset of the jihadis and unconsciously enjoys their enactment of liberal fantasies.
Civilization has been built painstakingly on difference: male and female, yes and no, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. There are rules, laws, customs, hard-won scientific knowledge. Civilization is a fragile guardian of reality, which must be defended from the onslaught of barbarians wishing to abolish rules and differences.
In each of our psyches the perverse temptation must be fought, if civilization is to survive. The more advanced the civilization, the more intense the appeal to throw off constraints. Often individual rebels are rewarded with the title of ‘artist', but Sade was an artist whose ideas were realized in Nazism.
When the discharge of polymorphous perversion is united with murderous aggression we get Jihadism. Such perverse ideologies could be more easily fought if not for the politically correct liberal urge to submit to them in their crudest totalitarian form.
American Thinker
Our frequent exposure to the exhibitionistic snuff porn of Jihadis has prompted numerous attempts at psychological explanation. Clinicians know how comforting it is to have a diagnostic label. Correct diagnosis can be the first step to cure.
There are problems, however, with psychological diagnosis. In totalitarian states, dissidents are often locked up in ‘mental hospitals' for their ‘crazy' behavior. They are diagnosed as ‘sociopaths' and ‘narcissists', interested in individual freedom rather than behaving like ‘normal' conformists to the system. Shrinkwrapped (Sophisticated Diagnosis) has commented on the various problems with psychiatric diagnosis in our own culture, including its tendency to relieve the ‘sick' person of responsibility for his actions.
Psychological explanations offered for Islamic savagery are useful, as far as they go. However, they can be overly generalized and undynamic when applied as labels to Jihadis. Writers like Dr. Sanity and the Sanity Squad have highlighted the narcissistic insecurities of Islamic males and their defensive need to control women to shore up their own masculinity.
However, clinical experience tells us that many men suffer from the same narcissistic insecurities and don't resort to violence to assuage their deficiencies. Only Islamic clerics sanction the murder of women who have been raped. Only Islamic clerics issue murderous fatwas, celebrate murder of artists, and mobilize sword-wielding men to demand death for a female teacher who allowed children to name a teddy bear 'Mohammed'. Only Islam proudly exhibits videos of throat-cutters torturing helpless victims.
It is the intense pleasure derived from religiously sanctioned murderous lust that makes the jihadis so dangerous. The degree of narcissism matters little; these are not people who can be 'treated' by shoring up their narcissism, and bolstering their self-esteem. It is our very civilized, therapeutic culture that makes us flinch from taking the necessary measures needed to deal with such foes. In truth, it may be our own narcissism -- the need to reassure ourselves of our superior civilized nature -- that causes us to obsess about whether necessary measures for waging war, like water boarding, and Guantanamo constitute 'torture'.
In our politically correct age, the word ‘perversion' has been banished from the circles of multicultural academia, literary and journalistic usage. It is, we are instructed, ‘judgmental', tends to unfairly ‘normalize' heterosexuality and is, like the ‘N-word', insulting. It creates hierarchical differences and that is illiberal.
Nevertheless, despite the efforts to remove it from the language and/or because of that effort, it still carries an emotional charge. In a time when gleeful murderous terrorists blow themselves up daily, it behooves us to face the reality that militant Islamic jihadism is a perversion and its practitioners derive a gratification that is more than simply defensive against feeling of inadequacy. It is the pleasurable charge that comes from throwing off all inhibitions on the discharge of murderous rage.
The late Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel was a French psychoanalyst and holocaust survivor who devoted her clinical efforts to understanding sexual perversions*. She realized there was a connection between individual sexual pathology and political movements.
Her intuitive insight was that Nazism's appeal, on both the individual and mass psychological level, derived from its power as psycho-sexual perversion. (See, for instance, Cabaret and Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood.) Having seen and survived what happened in the heart of civilized Europe, she discovered, through her clinical work, that perversions were not just the sexual kinkiness of a small minority.
She realized that perversions were not even merely ‘sexual' in the narrow behavioral meaning of the word, but that erotic pleasure could be intensified by the discharge of aggressive wishes, including the inflicting of, and submitting to, pain up to the point of death. She broadened our understanding of perversions to include, not just behavior but modes of thinking.
What she found was that perversions are an essential way in which the human mind and psyche rebel against and seek to evade reality. That reality is rooted in biology: the male-female difference. The intolerance and fear of such differences can result in the practices of Wahabbi Islam, wherein women are so feared that they must be hidden and brutalized like beasts of the field. Muslim men's terror of women is undoubtedly accompanied by a high incidence of hidden (not so hidden when they travel to the Riviera) perverse sexuality.
Long before there was a Norman Mailer proclaiming his artistic right to transgress bourgeois laws constraining sex and aggression, there was the Marquis de Sade. Chasseguet-Smirgel wrote about the celebrated French author, and pointed out that in his fantastical world of perversion, (see Mailer's preoccupation with ‘buggery') the incest taboo is violated, and thus the generational boundaries are breached.
Sade celebrates non-genital sex which is celebrated as an outlet for violence (sadism); bodies are dismembered, children are the targets of violent sexual discharge, humans and animals copulate and all differences are obliterated. Sade's work was designed to overturn the biblical injunction against perversion, but also to overturn the differences laid down at the beginning of the Old Testament, between the sexes, the animals, in fact between differentiated life and inanimate chaos.
God brought order out of chaos and Sade wishes to return to chaos. For Sade, the elimination of God means all sexual and aggressive behavior is permitted, including mass murder. Love is repeatedly mocked and dismissed. The release of all constraint on aggression maximizes pleasure.
The most intense Sadean pleasure is sexual murder, since no need exists to protect the object of sexual desire from aggression. Love cannot exist in the Sadean world because it puts limits on the pleasurable indulgence of murderous wishes. Perversion aims at destruction, destruction of difference, of the living order of the universe and its replacement with chaos and deadness. Long before Hitler put Sade's ideas into practice, Sade celebrated mass murder and the erotic pleasure to be gotten from torturing victims.
Chasseguet-Smirgel's insight revealed that, besides perverse behavior there are perverse modes of thinking, with the same aim of erasing distinctions and eliminating systematic thought itself. Thus, for example, Post-Modernism represents perverse thinking in its denial of the difference between truth and falsehood, good and evil, superior and inferior cultures. When it argues that ‘male' and ‘female' are ‘constructed' identities, it argues against the immutable differences imposed by biological reality.
Socialism is similarly perverse in its radical egalitarianism, denying differences of talent, intelligence, motivation, skill. Liberalism's affirmative action is perverse in its effort to impose an egalitarianism that is unattainable. It seeks to correct the "socially constructed" discriminatory differences. (Under its strictures shouldn't there be affirmative action for white basketball players?) This is perverse thinking. Modern politically correct liberalism is shot through with perversion. Renouncing her early socialist utopianism, Chasseguet-Smirgel became a conservative.
Ideas are perverse when they seek to undermine distinctions that are necessary for thought itself to exist. When such distinctions are eliminated, anything goes. When liberalism asserts that al Qaeda and America are equal threats to the world, it is being perverse. In fact, when liberals argue that modern Christianity and Islam are both ‘religions of peace' they are being perverse.
When language is debased by perverse thinking war becomes peace and all distinctions are rendered meaningless. Socialism embraces perverse thinking when it argues for a utopian egalitarianism that constitutes an assault on human differences, the differences that exist -- of talent, motivation, achievement, skill, and worth. It is perverse in ultimately reducing the vitality of difference in favor of deadening sameness.
Ideas do have consequences. Mass murder, idealized by Sade, became mass murder carried out by Hitler. Civilization is a fragile thing, and once perversion rules, there are no limits to the human imagination. We thought Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were the worst, but now we see Islamic Jihadis strapping bombs to babies and blowing them up. Once again, we are in a struggle between civilization and perversion. Some remain puzzled by the alliance between modern day left-liberalism and jihadism. Perversion explains the puzzle.
To the perverse jihadis who constitute large numbers of Muslims, the existence of the female sex is threatening, hence women are treated as little more than cattle, with fewer rights than some lower animals. Why do Western feminists keep their mouths shut? Because many are themselves leftist utopian perverts, who also cannot tolerate the existence of two sexes and secretly long to submit to the appealing sadism of the jihadis.
One of the great fascinations of the Marquis de Sade was with child murder. In Justine he offers a lengthy argument for why parents should sexually assault, then murder their children. The most primal human bonds exist to be destroyed to the accompaniment of erotic pleasure. Deriving pleasure from sexual assault on and murder of children is the ultimate denial of God, the moral distinction between good and evil, and the distinction between humans and animals. It is ultimately the assertion that man is no different from the lowest form of matter.
What Sade imagined and longed for has come to pass.
In recent years, since the exhibitionistic torture and beheading of Daniel Pearl, the world has been exposed to depravities that would delight the Marquis. Palestinian (Let's give them a state!) children are repeatedly celebrated as little jihadis ready to blow themselves up while murdering Jews.
They are indoctrinated in the erotic pleasures instantly available to mass murderers: all those eager virgins. There has been a strangely muted reaction from the civilized world. We have heard repeated calls for restraint on our part, warnings against "Islamophobia", and we take pride in minimizing casualties when fighting the Sadean jihadis.
Why is it that our media are so reluctant to report such occurrences as the recent successful effort by a jihadi in Pakistan to turn his year old infant into a bomb, killing more than 100 innocent bystanders? Readers of the New York Times would not have known of this ‘martyrdom'. You would have to turn to the Pakistan Tribune to learn the following:
"KARACHI: The Oct 19 bombing on Benazir Bhutto's procession in Karachi which killed over 170 people, was carried out by a person who used a one-year-old child strapped with fatal bombs..."
The very idea of making a living, breathing baby into an inanimate object, a bomb to slaughter hundreds, is straight out of the Sadean universe and the religious system that justifies it is properly called ‘perverse'.
The reason we hear so little condemnation, much less military resolve to annihilate these savage perverts, is Western culture's thralldom to contemporary, politically correct liberalism, which is itself perverse. Post-modern Liberalism shares the mindset of the jihadis and unconsciously enjoys their enactment of liberal fantasies.
Civilization has been built painstakingly on difference: male and female, yes and no, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. There are rules, laws, customs, hard-won scientific knowledge. Civilization is a fragile guardian of reality, which must be defended from the onslaught of barbarians wishing to abolish rules and differences.
In each of our psyches the perverse temptation must be fought, if civilization is to survive. The more advanced the civilization, the more intense the appeal to throw off constraints. Often individual rebels are rewarded with the title of ‘artist', but Sade was an artist whose ideas were realized in Nazism.
When the discharge of polymorphous perversion is united with murderous aggression we get Jihadism. Such perverse ideologies could be more easily fought if not for the politically correct liberal urge to submit to them in their crudest totalitarian form.
Arabs are to blame
Yitzhak Levy
The Association for Civil Rights’ poll, which showed a high incidence of racism within Israeli society, accurately reflects the attitude of the majority of the public to Israel’s Arabs. However, the reason for it does not stem from a racist attitude on the part of the Jews, but rather, it stems from security-based hostility and political disagreements. When Arabs convey the message that they do not accept us here as a majority in a Jewish state and in control of the Land of Israel, this is the result.
In order to understand why we, the Jews, are no friends of the Arabs, we can look into several examples of Arab conduct: For example, Israeli Arab annually mark Nakba Day – for them, Israel’s Independence Day is a catastrophe, which leads us to understand that in their view we are unwanted here, and if we go away they’ll be satisfied.
A document recently published by leading Arab Israeli groups also proved that they do not accept the Jewish character of the country and do not recognize it. Meanwhile, the Arab decision to refrain from performing national service instead of military service stems from a desire for separatism, rather than a wish to constitute a part of Israeli society.
The Arab political leadership here completely identifies with the Palestinians and their objectives. It is not fully clear whether this leadership represents the entire Arab Israeli community, but if we assume it does, the fact that they travel to enemy states and take part in Palestinian events premised on anti-Israel hatred leads the Jewish public to perceive them as supporters of the Palestinian cause even at a time of conflict.
The phenomenon that today only applies to very few in the Arab community – engaging in ties and partnerships with terror groups, and offering assistance in arms smuggling and the driving of terrorists – may or may not grow. There are also Jews who have done that. Yet the public Arab attitude conveys a message of “we don’t accept you here; we identify with our neighboring countries, but not with you.”
In my view, in recent years efforts have been made to invest in Arab communities, as opposed to the days of the military rule imposed during the country’s early days. Indeed, there is still a large gap between the services the State provides to Arabs compared to Jews, yet the Knesset is legislating affirmative action laws. For example, we have a law that requires Arab representation in government jobs and companies, as well as in municipal governments. Clearly, the Knesset has recognized the Arabs as a community that requires affirmative action.
Arabs boycotted Knesset ceremony
We must understand that this “racism” is in fact an Israeli reaction to developments and perceptions conveyed by the Arabs, as well as their conduct. Had Israeli Arabs accepted their minority status and refrained from cooperating with the Palestinians and with enemy countries, the situation would be completely different. The solution to the problem also has to do with the conduct of the Arabs. They must clearly declare that they are truly interested in cooperating with us and openly accept Israel as a Jewish state.
However, it appears the road ahead is still long. Even when it came to the recent ceremony to mark the United Nation’s Partition Plan decision, Arab Knesset members chose to boycott it. I am not too happy about the Partition Plan myself, yet I arrived at the Knesset nonetheless. They, on the other hand, boycotted this session just like they do every session that has to do with Zionism.
Arab Knesset members also pushed themselves out when they boycotted Knesset sessions called to discuss the drafting of a constitution. Nobody expects them to be Zionist, but fundamental respect is required. This is how minority representatives conduct themselves in other countries.
We may not be doing enough to achieve equality between the Jewish and Arab communities, but at least we can see a desire for change, as well as awareness and an attempt to correct the problem. Meanwhile, the Arabs have not changed a thing when it comes to their policy of rejection. As such, the mood expressed by the poll could certainly be understood.
Former Education Minister Yitzhak Levy serves as a Knesset member on behalf of the National Union-NRP
The Association for Civil Rights’ poll, which showed a high incidence of racism within Israeli society, accurately reflects the attitude of the majority of the public to Israel’s Arabs. However, the reason for it does not stem from a racist attitude on the part of the Jews, but rather, it stems from security-based hostility and political disagreements. When Arabs convey the message that they do not accept us here as a majority in a Jewish state and in control of the Land of Israel, this is the result.
In order to understand why we, the Jews, are no friends of the Arabs, we can look into several examples of Arab conduct: For example, Israeli Arab annually mark Nakba Day – for them, Israel’s Independence Day is a catastrophe, which leads us to understand that in their view we are unwanted here, and if we go away they’ll be satisfied.
A document recently published by leading Arab Israeli groups also proved that they do not accept the Jewish character of the country and do not recognize it. Meanwhile, the Arab decision to refrain from performing national service instead of military service stems from a desire for separatism, rather than a wish to constitute a part of Israeli society.
The Arab political leadership here completely identifies with the Palestinians and their objectives. It is not fully clear whether this leadership represents the entire Arab Israeli community, but if we assume it does, the fact that they travel to enemy states and take part in Palestinian events premised on anti-Israel hatred leads the Jewish public to perceive them as supporters of the Palestinian cause even at a time of conflict.
The phenomenon that today only applies to very few in the Arab community – engaging in ties and partnerships with terror groups, and offering assistance in arms smuggling and the driving of terrorists – may or may not grow. There are also Jews who have done that. Yet the public Arab attitude conveys a message of “we don’t accept you here; we identify with our neighboring countries, but not with you.”
In my view, in recent years efforts have been made to invest in Arab communities, as opposed to the days of the military rule imposed during the country’s early days. Indeed, there is still a large gap between the services the State provides to Arabs compared to Jews, yet the Knesset is legislating affirmative action laws. For example, we have a law that requires Arab representation in government jobs and companies, as well as in municipal governments. Clearly, the Knesset has recognized the Arabs as a community that requires affirmative action.
Arabs boycotted Knesset ceremony
We must understand that this “racism” is in fact an Israeli reaction to developments and perceptions conveyed by the Arabs, as well as their conduct. Had Israeli Arabs accepted their minority status and refrained from cooperating with the Palestinians and with enemy countries, the situation would be completely different. The solution to the problem also has to do with the conduct of the Arabs. They must clearly declare that they are truly interested in cooperating with us and openly accept Israel as a Jewish state.
However, it appears the road ahead is still long. Even when it came to the recent ceremony to mark the United Nation’s Partition Plan decision, Arab Knesset members chose to boycott it. I am not too happy about the Partition Plan myself, yet I arrived at the Knesset nonetheless. They, on the other hand, boycotted this session just like they do every session that has to do with Zionism.
Arab Knesset members also pushed themselves out when they boycotted Knesset sessions called to discuss the drafting of a constitution. Nobody expects them to be Zionist, but fundamental respect is required. This is how minority representatives conduct themselves in other countries.
We may not be doing enough to achieve equality between the Jewish and Arab communities, but at least we can see a desire for change, as well as awareness and an attempt to correct the problem. Meanwhile, the Arabs have not changed a thing when it comes to their policy of rejection. As such, the mood expressed by the poll could certainly be understood.
Former Education Minister Yitzhak Levy serves as a Knesset member on behalf of the National Union-NRP
Annapolis will lead to Dhimmi status for Israel
Ted Belman
Everything I read about the negotiations leading up to Annapolis and the event itself suggests that a deal has been cut whereby Israel assumes its rightful (according to Islam) role as a Dhimmi in exchange for Saudi acceptance of the existence of Israel.
To understand what this role or status is, I recommend you read this synopsis distilled from Bat Yeor’s seminal book The Dhimmi.
It is unthinkable for Muslims that conquered peoples should rise up and throw off the yoke of Islam or that land once in the domain of Islam should ever be lost to that domain. According to Islamic thinking, once a region has been conquered for Islam, it is always Islamic and must be re-conquered from the infidel, regardless of the passage of time.
They were doomed to remain second-class citizens, living, it seemed, for the sole purpose of demonstrating to all, the superiority of Islam over conquered religions.
This is the core of the conflict. Palestine “must be re-conquered from the infidel, regardless of the passage of time”. Israel submit to Islam. Muslims have been waging Jihad against Israel, both before and after its creation. They employ all tools at their disposal; economic boycotts, propaganda aimed at demonizing and deligitimating Israel just as the Nazis did, propaganda aimed at revising facts both past and present and finally armed struggle.
As Andrew G Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, noted in Passover and the Ignored Liberation
These uniquely Islamic systems—jihad and its corollary institution, dhimmitude—have shaped events in historical Palestine—modern Israel, Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Jordan—from 634, through the present, setting in place archetypal patterns still quite evident today.
He goes on to discuss the central role of both Jihad and Dhimmitude in Islam.
In my article The Conspiracy to Shrink Israel I quoted Kissinger’s remarks to an Iraqi diplomat in 1975,
“We don’t need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world
“We can’t negotiate about the existence of Israel but we can reduce its size to historical proportions.
“I don’t agree Israel is a permanent threat. How can a nation of three million be a permanent threat? They have a technical advantage now. But it is inconceivable that peoples with wealth and skill and the tradition of the Arabs won’t develop the capacity that is needed. So I think in ten to fifteen years Israel will be like Lebanon–struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world.”
dhimmitude2.jpgEssentially Kissinger was assuring him that Israel’s dominance would be short lived and the US would help to bring this about. The Arabs couldn’t stand the idea of being dominated by Israel or Jews.
Thus the nature of the negotiations heretofore is that Israel must submit to Arab demands. Thus no negotiations at all at least not on the basics. Master and supplicant do not negotiate, The master dictates.
One of these basics is the Temple Mount. It is inconceivable that Islam, as represented by the Al Aqsa Mosque, be subject to Jewish sovereignty. It must be the other way around.
Israel must be so weakened that Arab dominance and Israel inferiority in security matters must be palpable. Israel must appear to exist under Islamic sufferance.
Dhimmis are also inferior to Muslims and thus are accorded no rights or respect. This was demonstrated at Annapolis by requiring Israeli delegates to enter through the “servant’s door” and by the refusal by the Arab delegates to shake Livni’s hand. This is more than petty; it is a demonstration of dominance and the US enabled such treatment thereby showing its own dhimmi status.
Bat Yeor observed, that jihad remained,
…the main cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since Israelis are to be regarded, perforce, only as a religious community, their national characteristics – a geographical territory related to a past history, a system of legislation, a specific language and culture – are consequently denied. The “Arab” character of the Palestinian territory is inherent in the logic of jihad. Having become fay territory by conquest (i.e. “taken from an infidel people”), it must remain within the dar al-Islam. The State of Israel, established on this fay territory, is consequently illegal.
And she concluded,
…Israel represents the successful national liberation of a dhimmi civilization. On a territory formerly Arabized by the jihad and the dhimma, a pre-Islamic language, culture, topographical geography, and national institutions have been restored to life. This reversed the process of centuries in which the cultural, social and political structures of the indigenous population of Palestine were destroyed. In 1974, Abu Iyad, second-in-command to Arafat in the Fatah hierarchy, announced: “We intend to struggle so that our Palestinian homeland does not become a new Andalusia.” The comparison of Andalusia to Palestine was not fortuitous since both countries were Arabized, and then de-Arabized by a pre-Arabic culture.
The Arabs realize that they cannot at this point wipe Israel off the map and so they are prepared to live with a greatly truncated and humiliated Israel, temporarily. But we must understand that Islamic “peace” and Israel are mutually exclusive. Israel is only postponing the day it will have to fight for its existence.
Since the West is accepting Dhimmi status even before it is conquered why shouldn’t it demand Israel do likewise.
Islam is a religion defined by the precepts in its important writings like the Immutable, Perfect Koran, the Hadith and the Sunna.
Islam, as a social and political movement is defined by its documented history, traditions and evolution of its body of law called Sharia.
As a matter of fact, all religions are defined by their holy books and the past and current acts of their leaders and people.
If you chose to learn about Islam and what its major leaders promote and demand, you may find yourself in some shock.
There are only a few scholars in the world to compare to Bat Yeor (a Jewish woman who was born and lived in Egypt) whose books are cited below.
The many Muslims who want to lead a "modern" life, and all the rest of us infidels, should heed the facts she shares to our benefits and freedoms. Ignore what is offered at your own peril.
We are very much on the defensive today and unless we re-adapt our game plan, we will be amongst the submissive.
Everything I read about the negotiations leading up to Annapolis and the event itself suggests that a deal has been cut whereby Israel assumes its rightful (according to Islam) role as a Dhimmi in exchange for Saudi acceptance of the existence of Israel.
To understand what this role or status is, I recommend you read this synopsis distilled from Bat Yeor’s seminal book The Dhimmi.
It is unthinkable for Muslims that conquered peoples should rise up and throw off the yoke of Islam or that land once in the domain of Islam should ever be lost to that domain. According to Islamic thinking, once a region has been conquered for Islam, it is always Islamic and must be re-conquered from the infidel, regardless of the passage of time.
They were doomed to remain second-class citizens, living, it seemed, for the sole purpose of demonstrating to all, the superiority of Islam over conquered religions.
This is the core of the conflict. Palestine “must be re-conquered from the infidel, regardless of the passage of time”. Israel submit to Islam. Muslims have been waging Jihad against Israel, both before and after its creation. They employ all tools at their disposal; economic boycotts, propaganda aimed at demonizing and deligitimating Israel just as the Nazis did, propaganda aimed at revising facts both past and present and finally armed struggle.
As Andrew G Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, noted in Passover and the Ignored Liberation
These uniquely Islamic systems—jihad and its corollary institution, dhimmitude—have shaped events in historical Palestine—modern Israel, Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Jordan—from 634, through the present, setting in place archetypal patterns still quite evident today.
He goes on to discuss the central role of both Jihad and Dhimmitude in Islam.
In my article The Conspiracy to Shrink Israel I quoted Kissinger’s remarks to an Iraqi diplomat in 1975,
“We don’t need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world
“We can’t negotiate about the existence of Israel but we can reduce its size to historical proportions.
“I don’t agree Israel is a permanent threat. How can a nation of three million be a permanent threat? They have a technical advantage now. But it is inconceivable that peoples with wealth and skill and the tradition of the Arabs won’t develop the capacity that is needed. So I think in ten to fifteen years Israel will be like Lebanon–struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world.”
dhimmitude2.jpgEssentially Kissinger was assuring him that Israel’s dominance would be short lived and the US would help to bring this about. The Arabs couldn’t stand the idea of being dominated by Israel or Jews.
Thus the nature of the negotiations heretofore is that Israel must submit to Arab demands. Thus no negotiations at all at least not on the basics. Master and supplicant do not negotiate, The master dictates.
One of these basics is the Temple Mount. It is inconceivable that Islam, as represented by the Al Aqsa Mosque, be subject to Jewish sovereignty. It must be the other way around.
Israel must be so weakened that Arab dominance and Israel inferiority in security matters must be palpable. Israel must appear to exist under Islamic sufferance.
Dhimmis are also inferior to Muslims and thus are accorded no rights or respect. This was demonstrated at Annapolis by requiring Israeli delegates to enter through the “servant’s door” and by the refusal by the Arab delegates to shake Livni’s hand. This is more than petty; it is a demonstration of dominance and the US enabled such treatment thereby showing its own dhimmi status.
Bat Yeor observed, that jihad remained,
…the main cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since Israelis are to be regarded, perforce, only as a religious community, their national characteristics – a geographical territory related to a past history, a system of legislation, a specific language and culture – are consequently denied. The “Arab” character of the Palestinian territory is inherent in the logic of jihad. Having become fay territory by conquest (i.e. “taken from an infidel people”), it must remain within the dar al-Islam. The State of Israel, established on this fay territory, is consequently illegal.
And she concluded,
…Israel represents the successful national liberation of a dhimmi civilization. On a territory formerly Arabized by the jihad and the dhimma, a pre-Islamic language, culture, topographical geography, and national institutions have been restored to life. This reversed the process of centuries in which the cultural, social and political structures of the indigenous population of Palestine were destroyed. In 1974, Abu Iyad, second-in-command to Arafat in the Fatah hierarchy, announced: “We intend to struggle so that our Palestinian homeland does not become a new Andalusia.” The comparison of Andalusia to Palestine was not fortuitous since both countries were Arabized, and then de-Arabized by a pre-Arabic culture.
The Arabs realize that they cannot at this point wipe Israel off the map and so they are prepared to live with a greatly truncated and humiliated Israel, temporarily. But we must understand that Islamic “peace” and Israel are mutually exclusive. Israel is only postponing the day it will have to fight for its existence.
Since the West is accepting Dhimmi status even before it is conquered why shouldn’t it demand Israel do likewise.
Islam is a religion defined by the precepts in its important writings like the Immutable, Perfect Koran, the Hadith and the Sunna.
Islam, as a social and political movement is defined by its documented history, traditions and evolution of its body of law called Sharia.
As a matter of fact, all religions are defined by their holy books and the past and current acts of their leaders and people.
If you chose to learn about Islam and what its major leaders promote and demand, you may find yourself in some shock.
There are only a few scholars in the world to compare to Bat Yeor (a Jewish woman who was born and lived in Egypt) whose books are cited below.
The many Muslims who want to lead a "modern" life, and all the rest of us infidels, should heed the facts she shares to our benefits and freedoms. Ignore what is offered at your own peril.
We are very much on the defensive today and unless we re-adapt our game plan, we will be amongst the submissive.
Dear President Bush
As an American and a Republican who has consistently supported your courageous fight against terrorism I am appalled that your administration has deviated from its course.Instead of supporting the most stable country in the Middle East, the only country in the region that is willing to stand up to Iran, Secretary of State Rice has interfered in the workings of sovereign Israel, makes unjustified demands of that country, criticizes when it does not fulfill her demands - all to the delight of emboldened enemies of Israel that have sworn to destroy her.
Mr. President, Secretary of State Rice has opened the door to more violent terrorism; Israel is bombarded by Kassam rockets daily. She has been instrumental in causing this
and it destroying your legacy. History will record this as a blight on your administration.
It is imperative, sir, that you redirect your energy to your courageous stand following 9/11/2001 - that which brought you much praise. Fulfill your demands that Abbas' terrorists be disarmed, that violence stop, that education be directed towards peaceful co-existence and regional cooperation. This would be a bulwark against terrorism.
Respectfully,
Mr. President, Secretary of State Rice has opened the door to more violent terrorism; Israel is bombarded by Kassam rockets daily. She has been instrumental in causing this
and it destroying your legacy. History will record this as a blight on your administration.
It is imperative, sir, that you redirect your energy to your courageous stand following 9/11/2001 - that which brought you much praise. Fulfill your demands that Abbas' terrorists be disarmed, that violence stop, that education be directed towards peaceful co-existence and regional cooperation. This would be a bulwark against terrorism.
Respectfully,
Did you forget what you once believed?
Olmert, 1994: Jerusalem, Hevron Under Full Israeli Sovereignty! In honor of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's participation in the Annapolis summit, the Hevron Jewish Community has released a video of a speech Olmert gave at a gathering for Hevron 13 years ago.
Olmert spoke then, just a year after the signing of the Oslo Agreement, of the need to stand together against those who offer to give away parts of the Land of Israel, "because those who say now that we should give away some parts and keep others, will in the end give away the others as well."
Olmert apparently plans to promise to give away parts of Jerusalem and most of Judea and Samaria in the negotiations being launched at the summit.
A video clip of the speech (in Hebrew), delivered at the Binyanei HaUmah Convention Center in Jerusalem, can be viewed here. Excerpts:
"There are those who say that there are some parts of the Land of Israel that cannot be given up, and others that can. [They say] with the same light-headedness that they are willing to give up some. They will also propose, at some time in the future, giving up the others.
"I have come here this evening with my deputies from the Jerusalem municipality to say in the name of the large majority of the residents of Jerusalem that Hevron and Jerusalem are together in the struggle for the Land of Israel. Whoever fights for the integrity of Jerusalem and our sole sovereignty there, must also fight for Jewish Hevron under Israeli sovereignty.
"On the day that we decide - [pause] - not us; someone else decides - that Hevron is not ours, he is at the same time decreeing the beginning of concessions in Jerusalem. We must not allow anyone this option. We must not allow any government this chance.
"Together, Hevron and Jerusalem, the Land of Israel. We are not fighting here for geography, though that is something very important. We are not fighting here for territory, though that is something very important. We are fighting for history, faith, tradition, and the rights of our forefathers. We are fighting for the unbreakable bonds between the Nation of Israel and the Land of Israel, and between the past and the future for ourselves and for our children who will come after us in this land..."
Olmert then predicted that the days of the government then in power, headed by the late Yitzchak Rabin, were numbered. He said that those in power "should know that the result of all their great hopes and fancy ceremonies and great fantasies, will be nothing but piles of ruins of a lost way, of blurred conceptions, and lack of thought."
Olmert spoke then, just a year after the signing of the Oslo Agreement, of the need to stand together against those who offer to give away parts of the Land of Israel, "because those who say now that we should give away some parts and keep others, will in the end give away the others as well."
Olmert apparently plans to promise to give away parts of Jerusalem and most of Judea and Samaria in the negotiations being launched at the summit.
A video clip of the speech (in Hebrew), delivered at the Binyanei HaUmah Convention Center in Jerusalem, can be viewed here. Excerpts:
"There are those who say that there are some parts of the Land of Israel that cannot be given up, and others that can. [They say] with the same light-headedness that they are willing to give up some. They will also propose, at some time in the future, giving up the others.
"I have come here this evening with my deputies from the Jerusalem municipality to say in the name of the large majority of the residents of Jerusalem that Hevron and Jerusalem are together in the struggle for the Land of Israel. Whoever fights for the integrity of Jerusalem and our sole sovereignty there, must also fight for Jewish Hevron under Israeli sovereignty.
"On the day that we decide - [pause] - not us; someone else decides - that Hevron is not ours, he is at the same time decreeing the beginning of concessions in Jerusalem. We must not allow anyone this option. We must not allow any government this chance.
"Together, Hevron and Jerusalem, the Land of Israel. We are not fighting here for geography, though that is something very important. We are not fighting here for territory, though that is something very important. We are fighting for history, faith, tradition, and the rights of our forefathers. We are fighting for the unbreakable bonds between the Nation of Israel and the Land of Israel, and between the past and the future for ourselves and for our children who will come after us in this land..."
Olmert then predicted that the days of the government then in power, headed by the late Yitzchak Rabin, were numbered. He said that those in power "should know that the result of all their great hopes and fancy ceremonies and great fantasies, will be nothing but piles of ruins of a lost way, of blurred conceptions, and lack of thought."
Monday, December 10, 2007
Israel's fight is your fight
Here are 18 different ways you can help Israel and make yourself feel good too!. Take at least 5 minutes from your schedule and devote it to Israel. Here is an opportunity for you to get involved and assist Israel in their effort to protect our Jewish homeland.
* Attend pro-Israel rallies: Get involved. Do something. Demonstrate your solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel. Initiate, plan and attend Israel educational forums wherever they are -- synagogues, JCCs, college campuses, etc. Encourage your friends and family to attend rallies. Show the world that you support Israel's right to exist.
* Educate yourself & your children: Take classes, attend lectures and give your children a good Jewish education. Our college students are constantly barraged with anti-Israel information. Go to http://www.camera.org for important information on how your children can respond to these attacks. Only through Jewish education can you understand your heritage and why Israel is so important to the Jewish people.
* Stay informed, follow the news: Every 15 minutes www.FloridaJewish.com reports breaking news from Israel and the Middle East. Read the Israeli newspapers in English or Hebrew. Read the Arab news publications in English including a critical analysis of what they tell their people. Live radio broadcasts from Israel in English and Hebrew are also available.
* Spread the word: Go to www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Lebanon_Myths_and_Facts.asp for the myths and facts about the Lebanese war. Learn about Hezbollah and Hamas. Communicate your knowledge with family, friends and acquaintances. Send e-mails to everyone on your mailing list. Write letters/articles to newspaper editors. Call in to talk- radio programs.
* Contact news media & publications: Many of the TV networks and national/international newspaper organizations are not giving a balanced view of the present situation. The "left wing" broadcasters and publications draw a moral equivalency between the Jews and the Arabs. Much of the reporting is pro-Arab. Go to www.honestreporting.com/ and learn how you can monitor and respond to the media, especially to the smaller outlets or radio shows.
* Get political: Write letters, make phone calls, send e-mails and faxes in support of Israel's right to defend itself. Letters should be sent to President Bush, the Secretary of State and members of Congress. Click here for a listing of your public officials.
* Give to Jewish charities and non-profits: Support organizations that provide relief for the Israeli victims of this war. There is a comprehensive listing of charitable and nonprofit organizations in the Israeli Tzedakah Mall (www.floridajewish.com/israeli_mitzvah_mall.asp). Contribute to the Israeli Emergency Fund at your local Jewish Federation.
* Buy Israeli products and services: Take a virtual shopping spree, Israel-style. Visit the Israeli Merchandise Mall for an extensive listing of Israeli companies. Buy Israeli-made products at your local retail stores and food markets. Remember, every time you buy an Israeli product, you put food on a family's table and deliver hope to them.
* Make Simcha contributions: When hosting a simcha, include a card with the invitation. Ask your invitees that, at this crucial time, in lieu of a gift, please contribute to a specific Israeli charity. We can provide you with a list of worthwhile organizations. Everyone benefits; the invitee feels good for contributing to Israel, you, the host/hostess, are pleased that you could assist in raising much need money. Above all, the Israeli people will greatly benefit from your kindness. It is a win-win-win situation!
In addition to doing the physical mitzvot of attending a rally, writing a letter, and giving charity, Judaism has a strong spiritual connection to fighting a war. Historically, not only were Jews on the battleground, but there were Jews who prayed for our survival. It must have worked since we are still here and our previous enemies have disappeared. There is no logical or rational explanation to explain our survival so there must be a spiritual connection. Select something that you can do spiritually to help.
* Do random acts of kindness: Show kindness to those you know and those you do not know. A smile, a hello, holding open a door, or simply extending a helping hand to someone who needs it. Give of yourself to assist someone in need. You will really feel good about it! Go to www.traditionofkindness.org -- to show people of all religions that Jewish kindness is demonstrated daily in every country, every city, and every town.
* Make up a personal prayer: Say a prayer for all the soldiers of the Israel Defense Force and for all residents of Israel. Psalms 20, 83 & 130 are traditionally said in times of distress. The Almighty accepts any prayer given with sincerity and from the heart.
* Make time to study Torah: Become more knowledgeable about your Jewish heritage. Go to Aish to see the Shabbat Shalom Weekly for a contemporary explanation of the Torah portions.
* Contribute Tzedakah: Keep a Tzedakah box (pushka) in your home and office and put a coin in it each day, except on Shabbos. Give each child/grandchild their own Tzedakah box and teach them the importance of giving to those in need! Go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzedakah to learn more about the meaning and importance of Tzedakah.
* Put on Tefillin: If you already put on tefillin every day, encourage a friend to do so. If you haven't yet, now is a good time to start! Need a reason? Consider the spiritual connection. Jews throughout the world have been performing this ritual for over 3,000 years. By taking part, you become a link in a chain of Jews past, present and future. Go to www.chabad.org/generic.asp?AID=102436 to learn more about teffilin.
* Check your Mezuzah: The mezuzah is the written parchment, not the casing. Get one now! If you already have one, it may be time to check it to ensure that the words have not faded. Go to www.chabad.org/generic.asp?AID=278476 here to learn more about the mezuzah. Contact your rabbi for the name of a sofer -- scribe -- to check your parchment.
* Call family and friends in Israel: Call often with positive conversations, not about the war. Your calls tell them that you are supportive and that they are not alone. These phone calls will lift their spirit and yours too. Plan what you are giving to say and give them good news from home. Send a "care" package with items you think will bring some joy to their lives. Go to www.tel3advantage.com/signup2.aspx?Plan=29&AgentNumber=728293 for the best telephone rates to Israel.
* Visit Israel: Show your solidarity and courage. Join a mission or go to Israel with family or friends. Israel needs not only your financial support but it needs your physical presence too! Contact us and we will give you organizations sponsoring Israel trips.
* Involve your children and grandchildren: Your children and grandchildren learn from you by example. Teach and involve them in these activities. Encourage them to do these mitzvahs on their own and they will make a personal connection with Israel. Their involvement may be the most important action all of us can take for ourselves, for our future and for the future of Israel.
It is up to you! Are you remaining on the sidelines or are you ready to help and make a difference? When you think about it, we need Israel as much as Israel needs us! ISRAEL, if not now, when?
PLEASE ACT NOW!
* Attend pro-Israel rallies: Get involved. Do something. Demonstrate your solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel. Initiate, plan and attend Israel educational forums wherever they are -- synagogues, JCCs, college campuses, etc. Encourage your friends and family to attend rallies. Show the world that you support Israel's right to exist.
* Educate yourself & your children: Take classes, attend lectures and give your children a good Jewish education. Our college students are constantly barraged with anti-Israel information. Go to http://www.camera.org for important information on how your children can respond to these attacks. Only through Jewish education can you understand your heritage and why Israel is so important to the Jewish people.
* Stay informed, follow the news: Every 15 minutes www.FloridaJewish.com reports breaking news from Israel and the Middle East. Read the Israeli newspapers in English or Hebrew. Read the Arab news publications in English including a critical analysis of what they tell their people. Live radio broadcasts from Israel in English and Hebrew are also available.
* Spread the word: Go to www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Lebanon_Myths_and_Facts.asp for the myths and facts about the Lebanese war. Learn about Hezbollah and Hamas. Communicate your knowledge with family, friends and acquaintances. Send e-mails to everyone on your mailing list. Write letters/articles to newspaper editors. Call in to talk- radio programs.
* Contact news media & publications: Many of the TV networks and national/international newspaper organizations are not giving a balanced view of the present situation. The "left wing" broadcasters and publications draw a moral equivalency between the Jews and the Arabs. Much of the reporting is pro-Arab. Go to www.honestreporting.com/ and learn how you can monitor and respond to the media, especially to the smaller outlets or radio shows.
* Get political: Write letters, make phone calls, send e-mails and faxes in support of Israel's right to defend itself. Letters should be sent to President Bush, the Secretary of State and members of Congress. Click here for a listing of your public officials.
* Give to Jewish charities and non-profits: Support organizations that provide relief for the Israeli victims of this war. There is a comprehensive listing of charitable and nonprofit organizations in the Israeli Tzedakah Mall (www.floridajewish.com/israeli_mitzvah_mall.asp). Contribute to the Israeli Emergency Fund at your local Jewish Federation.
* Buy Israeli products and services: Take a virtual shopping spree, Israel-style. Visit the Israeli Merchandise Mall for an extensive listing of Israeli companies. Buy Israeli-made products at your local retail stores and food markets. Remember, every time you buy an Israeli product, you put food on a family's table and deliver hope to them.
* Make Simcha contributions: When hosting a simcha, include a card with the invitation. Ask your invitees that, at this crucial time, in lieu of a gift, please contribute to a specific Israeli charity. We can provide you with a list of worthwhile organizations. Everyone benefits; the invitee feels good for contributing to Israel, you, the host/hostess, are pleased that you could assist in raising much need money. Above all, the Israeli people will greatly benefit from your kindness. It is a win-win-win situation!
In addition to doing the physical mitzvot of attending a rally, writing a letter, and giving charity, Judaism has a strong spiritual connection to fighting a war. Historically, not only were Jews on the battleground, but there were Jews who prayed for our survival. It must have worked since we are still here and our previous enemies have disappeared. There is no logical or rational explanation to explain our survival so there must be a spiritual connection. Select something that you can do spiritually to help.
* Do random acts of kindness: Show kindness to those you know and those you do not know. A smile, a hello, holding open a door, or simply extending a helping hand to someone who needs it. Give of yourself to assist someone in need. You will really feel good about it! Go to www.traditionofkindness.org -- to show people of all religions that Jewish kindness is demonstrated daily in every country, every city, and every town.
* Make up a personal prayer: Say a prayer for all the soldiers of the Israel Defense Force and for all residents of Israel. Psalms 20, 83 & 130 are traditionally said in times of distress. The Almighty accepts any prayer given with sincerity and from the heart.
* Make time to study Torah: Become more knowledgeable about your Jewish heritage. Go to Aish to see the Shabbat Shalom Weekly for a contemporary explanation of the Torah portions.
* Contribute Tzedakah: Keep a Tzedakah box (pushka) in your home and office and put a coin in it each day, except on Shabbos. Give each child/grandchild their own Tzedakah box and teach them the importance of giving to those in need! Go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzedakah to learn more about the meaning and importance of Tzedakah.
* Put on Tefillin: If you already put on tefillin every day, encourage a friend to do so. If you haven't yet, now is a good time to start! Need a reason? Consider the spiritual connection. Jews throughout the world have been performing this ritual for over 3,000 years. By taking part, you become a link in a chain of Jews past, present and future. Go to www.chabad.org/generic.asp?AID=102436 to learn more about teffilin.
* Check your Mezuzah: The mezuzah is the written parchment, not the casing. Get one now! If you already have one, it may be time to check it to ensure that the words have not faded. Go to www.chabad.org/generic.asp?AID=278476 here to learn more about the mezuzah. Contact your rabbi for the name of a sofer -- scribe -- to check your parchment.
* Call family and friends in Israel: Call often with positive conversations, not about the war. Your calls tell them that you are supportive and that they are not alone. These phone calls will lift their spirit and yours too. Plan what you are giving to say and give them good news from home. Send a "care" package with items you think will bring some joy to their lives. Go to www.tel3advantage.com/signup2.aspx?Plan=29&AgentNumber=728293 for the best telephone rates to Israel.
* Visit Israel: Show your solidarity and courage. Join a mission or go to Israel with family or friends. Israel needs not only your financial support but it needs your physical presence too! Contact us and we will give you organizations sponsoring Israel trips.
* Involve your children and grandchildren: Your children and grandchildren learn from you by example. Teach and involve them in these activities. Encourage them to do these mitzvahs on their own and they will make a personal connection with Israel. Their involvement may be the most important action all of us can take for ourselves, for our future and for the future of Israel.
It is up to you! Are you remaining on the sidelines or are you ready to help and make a difference? When you think about it, we need Israel as much as Israel needs us! ISRAEL, if not now, when?
PLEASE ACT NOW!
U.S. Splits Proposed $20B Mideast Arms Sale
WILLIAM MATTHEWS
www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=3236174&C=mideast
In the face of strong congressional opposition to a proposed $20 billion sale of weapons to six Middle Eastern countries, the U.S. State Department has decided to break the sale into smaller pieces, a U.S. official said Dec. 6.
The department notified Congress on Dec. 4 of proposed sales of missile defense systems to Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and upgrades to UAE radar planes. In all, the sales would be worth about $10.8 billion.
A State Department official said the department has postponed the more controversial sale of satellite-guided bomb kits to Saudi Arabia. News of that possible sale last July prompted nearly 250 members of Congress to sign
two letters to U.S. President George W. Bush opposing the sale.
Some expressed concern that the precision bombs could be used against U.S. troops in the Middle East or against Israel. Others accused Saudi Arabia of supplying suicide bombers and insurgents to the war in Iraq.
More than a dozen lawmakers vowed to introduce a resolution of disapproval to block the sale as soon as they were officially notified of it. Official notification of the Saudi sale was expected in August, but it was postponed
several times and now has been put off until 2008, a State Department official said.
The Dec. 4 notification came from the State Department's Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), which announced "a possible foreign military sale" of Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-3 missiles to the United Arab
Emirates, and PAC-3 missiles and PAC-2 missile upgrades to Kuwait. PAC-3s are designed to shoot down theater ballistic missiles. Upgraded PAC-2s are intended for use against theater ballistic missiles and low-altitude cruise missiles.
The United Arab Emirates would receive 288 PAC-3s and 216 enhanced guidance systems for PAC-2s. The deal would include phased-array radars, engagement control systems, antennas, radios, generators and other equipment. In all,
it would be worth $9 billion.
The proposed sale to Kuwait would include 80 PAC-3 missiles, 60 PAC-2 guidance system upgrades, radar upgrades and communications equipment. It would be worth almost $1.4 billion.
At the same time, the DSCA announced the possible sale to the United Arab Emirates of "upgrades and refurbishments" to E-2C airborne early warning and control aircraft. That sale would be worth as much as $437 million.
Separating the missile defense system sales and the E-2 upgrades from the precision bomb kits probably increases their chance for congressional approval. So does the timing of the notification. Once formal notification
occurs, lawmakers in both houses have 30 days to pass resolutions of disapproval; otherwise, the sale goes forward. Congress is expected to be in
recess for Christmas and New Year's during most of the 30-day period.
Objections to the full $20 billion arms deal focused almost solely on plans to sell Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) to Saudi Arabia. JDAMs are kits that, when attached to bombs, use GPS satellite signals to guide them to targets.
Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike opposed the sale of precision-guided bomb kits and denounced Saudi Arabia for having "not been a true ally in the war on terror or furthering the United States' interests in
the Middle East."
In a joint statement, Reps. Anthony Weiner and Jerrold Nadler, both New York Democrats, accused Saudi Arabia of supplying "the majority of suicide bombers" and nearly half of all foreign fighters in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Reps. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Christopher Carney, D-Pa., warned Bush that satellite guidance kits sold to Saudi Arabia could fall into the wrong hands and be used against U.S. troops in the Middle East and against Israel.
"We want to make sure that any sale of advanced weapons does not represent a
danger to the United States and our allies," Kirk said in an interview.
Details of the $20 billion sale were never officially disclosed, but it was believed to include air-to-air missiles, missile defense systems, fighter
aircraft upgrades and patrol ships. The potential buyers were the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=3236174&C=mideast
In the face of strong congressional opposition to a proposed $20 billion sale of weapons to six Middle Eastern countries, the U.S. State Department has decided to break the sale into smaller pieces, a U.S. official said Dec. 6.
The department notified Congress on Dec. 4 of proposed sales of missile defense systems to Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and upgrades to UAE radar planes. In all, the sales would be worth about $10.8 billion.
A State Department official said the department has postponed the more controversial sale of satellite-guided bomb kits to Saudi Arabia. News of that possible sale last July prompted nearly 250 members of Congress to sign
two letters to U.S. President George W. Bush opposing the sale.
Some expressed concern that the precision bombs could be used against U.S. troops in the Middle East or against Israel. Others accused Saudi Arabia of supplying suicide bombers and insurgents to the war in Iraq.
More than a dozen lawmakers vowed to introduce a resolution of disapproval to block the sale as soon as they were officially notified of it. Official notification of the Saudi sale was expected in August, but it was postponed
several times and now has been put off until 2008, a State Department official said.
The Dec. 4 notification came from the State Department's Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), which announced "a possible foreign military sale" of Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-3 missiles to the United Arab
Emirates, and PAC-3 missiles and PAC-2 missile upgrades to Kuwait. PAC-3s are designed to shoot down theater ballistic missiles. Upgraded PAC-2s are intended for use against theater ballistic missiles and low-altitude cruise missiles.
The United Arab Emirates would receive 288 PAC-3s and 216 enhanced guidance systems for PAC-2s. The deal would include phased-array radars, engagement control systems, antennas, radios, generators and other equipment. In all,
it would be worth $9 billion.
The proposed sale to Kuwait would include 80 PAC-3 missiles, 60 PAC-2 guidance system upgrades, radar upgrades and communications equipment. It would be worth almost $1.4 billion.
At the same time, the DSCA announced the possible sale to the United Arab Emirates of "upgrades and refurbishments" to E-2C airborne early warning and control aircraft. That sale would be worth as much as $437 million.
Separating the missile defense system sales and the E-2 upgrades from the precision bomb kits probably increases their chance for congressional approval. So does the timing of the notification. Once formal notification
occurs, lawmakers in both houses have 30 days to pass resolutions of disapproval; otherwise, the sale goes forward. Congress is expected to be in
recess for Christmas and New Year's during most of the 30-day period.
Objections to the full $20 billion arms deal focused almost solely on plans to sell Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) to Saudi Arabia. JDAMs are kits that, when attached to bombs, use GPS satellite signals to guide them to targets.
Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike opposed the sale of precision-guided bomb kits and denounced Saudi Arabia for having "not been a true ally in the war on terror or furthering the United States' interests in
the Middle East."
In a joint statement, Reps. Anthony Weiner and Jerrold Nadler, both New York Democrats, accused Saudi Arabia of supplying "the majority of suicide bombers" and nearly half of all foreign fighters in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Reps. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Christopher Carney, D-Pa., warned Bush that satellite guidance kits sold to Saudi Arabia could fall into the wrong hands and be used against U.S. troops in the Middle East and against Israel.
"We want to make sure that any sale of advanced weapons does not represent a
danger to the United States and our allies," Kirk said in an interview.
Details of the $20 billion sale were never officially disclosed, but it was believed to include air-to-air missiles, missile defense systems, fighter
aircraft upgrades and patrol ships. The potential buyers were the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
Can reporters really be without borders?
Dan Izenberg
THE JERUSALEM POST
The law is perfectly clear about the restrictions on Israelis wishing to visit enemy countries. According to the Law to Prevent Infiltration, Israeli citizens must ask permission from the Interior Ministry if they wish to visit countries which the government has officially determined to be "dangerous." The maximum punishment for violating the law is four years in jail.
Today, eight countries appear on the list, including both Lebanon and Syria, where three Israeli journalists currently under investigation reported from.
On the face of it, the police and prosecution are obviously within their rights to call the three journalists to order. For one reason or another, none of them asked permission from the government for their trips.
Dalia Dorner, who is head of the Press Council and an outspoken champion of freedom of speech, is also a former judge whose job it was for many decades to enforce the law. In an interview with Israeli Radio on Thursday, she did not seem to overly sympathize with the three.
Asked whether the Press Council would defend them, Dorner said, "If a reporter breaks the law, we cannot intervene. I understand that it is possible to receive a permit. They entered enemy countries without asking for one. I can understand that if an Israeli deliberately enters an enemy country with a foreign passport and gets caught, it can create serious problems."
But the issue is not as black and white as it may seem. One of the key questions that each of the reporters would have had to ask themselves before deciding to break the law is what would have happened had he or she asked the Interior Ministry for permission to go. It is more than likely that they would have been turned down.
If that were so, what should the reporter have done? Accepted the state's prohibition and stayed at home? Or gone anyway in the belief that he/ she was fulfilling his professional duty to report.
This is not a far-fetched belief, since Israelis receive virtually all their news from the Arab world either second-hand, mainly based on reports from the Arab media, or from the international press, which many Israelis do not trust. There is certainly something to be said for receiving reports from Arab lands from Israeli journalists who share the same concerns as their audience and look for developments in the Arab world that are significant for Israelis.
Dorner said she understood the need for the law requiring Israeli citizens to obtain permits because an Israeli captured by an enemy country could cause problems for Israel. The obvious problem is that the reporter will be used as a bargaining chip for the return of terrorists held in Israel.
But it could be argued that the government should not allow itself to be blackmailed in that way. It is one thing when a soldier, who has been ordered by the state to serve in the army, is taken captive. Obviously, the state is responsible for the soldier's well-being. But what if an Israeli endangers himself voluntarily? It is not at all obvious that the state is obliged to extricate him.
Whatever the theoretical issues involved in this affair, it is hard to imagine that the state will prosecute the reporters, who are by no means criminals in the conventional sense. Dorner said she hoped their arrest was meant as a warning to other Israeli reporters not to visit enemy countries without permission in the future.
THE JERUSALEM POST
The law is perfectly clear about the restrictions on Israelis wishing to visit enemy countries. According to the Law to Prevent Infiltration, Israeli citizens must ask permission from the Interior Ministry if they wish to visit countries which the government has officially determined to be "dangerous." The maximum punishment for violating the law is four years in jail.
Today, eight countries appear on the list, including both Lebanon and Syria, where three Israeli journalists currently under investigation reported from.
On the face of it, the police and prosecution are obviously within their rights to call the three journalists to order. For one reason or another, none of them asked permission from the government for their trips.
Dalia Dorner, who is head of the Press Council and an outspoken champion of freedom of speech, is also a former judge whose job it was for many decades to enforce the law. In an interview with Israeli Radio on Thursday, she did not seem to overly sympathize with the three.
Asked whether the Press Council would defend them, Dorner said, "If a reporter breaks the law, we cannot intervene. I understand that it is possible to receive a permit. They entered enemy countries without asking for one. I can understand that if an Israeli deliberately enters an enemy country with a foreign passport and gets caught, it can create serious problems."
But the issue is not as black and white as it may seem. One of the key questions that each of the reporters would have had to ask themselves before deciding to break the law is what would have happened had he or she asked the Interior Ministry for permission to go. It is more than likely that they would have been turned down.
If that were so, what should the reporter have done? Accepted the state's prohibition and stayed at home? Or gone anyway in the belief that he/ she was fulfilling his professional duty to report.
This is not a far-fetched belief, since Israelis receive virtually all their news from the Arab world either second-hand, mainly based on reports from the Arab media, or from the international press, which many Israelis do not trust. There is certainly something to be said for receiving reports from Arab lands from Israeli journalists who share the same concerns as their audience and look for developments in the Arab world that are significant for Israelis.
Dorner said she understood the need for the law requiring Israeli citizens to obtain permits because an Israeli captured by an enemy country could cause problems for Israel. The obvious problem is that the reporter will be used as a bargaining chip for the return of terrorists held in Israel.
But it could be argued that the government should not allow itself to be blackmailed in that way. It is one thing when a soldier, who has been ordered by the state to serve in the army, is taken captive. Obviously, the state is responsible for the soldier's well-being. But what if an Israeli endangers himself voluntarily? It is not at all obvious that the state is obliged to extricate him.
Whatever the theoretical issues involved in this affair, it is hard to imagine that the state will prosecute the reporters, who are by no means criminals in the conventional sense. Dorner said she hoped their arrest was meant as a warning to other Israeli reporters not to visit enemy countries without permission in the future.
Iran and USA-what's going on?
Raghida Dergham
Al-Hayat
NEW YORK- After the surprise issuing of the National Intelligence Estimate, which found that Tehran halted its secret nuclear program in 2003, one must ask: What has happened between the US and the Islamic Republic of Iran? Is it the beginning of a big deal between the two countries to divide up influence in Iraq and use the new relationship to contain the Arabs when needed? Is it an internal coup d'état against US President George W Bush, to halt his march toward war? After all, it was expected that such a blow would have been directed at the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or was the NIE just business as usual, as part of the truce between the US and Iran and as part of the historical relationship between Persians and Jews, such that no war will take place between these two powers under any circumstances?
These are likely possibilities, and the events of the coming weeks and months might even raise the level of the commotion, whether as part of the strategy or as one of its consequences. But it has become clear, and logical, that the military option is no longer on the US president's table, as long as Iran doesn't make a serious mistake against US forces in Iraq. It's become clear that the American "establishment" has taken an implicit decision to coexist with the Iranian regime and has halted attempts to topple it, in return for a price whose details will be revealed later.
On the surface, this price is Iraq, and what is taking place there. Realistically, the Iraq war has made Iran the partner of Israel in terms of regional superiority; the NIE report by 16 US intelligence agencies cements Iranian superiority and lifts the specter of war and the burden of sanctions from the minds of the clerics in Tehran.
In any case, withdrawing or neutralizing the military option is something that chills the heart of many people, not only Americans and Europeans, but also Arabs, especially since Arab states are paying the costs of US wars in the region, in terms of stability or money. However, cementing Iran's superiority in "victories" led by the Iranian president could be reflected in Iran's regional aspirations, which have the air of hegemony, unless the big deal involves Iran's halting its intervention in Palestine and Lebanon, stopping its financial and weapons support to Hamas and Hizbulah, working with Arab Gulf states as partners, and leaving behind issues such as "exporting the revolution" and the qualitative aspect of Iranian rule.
In any case, Arab leaders must think deeply about the meaning of what has happened, when the US decided to reveal the NIE instead of keeping it secret. American leaders both inside and outside the administration should think long and hard about the gap in US credibility and the cementing of the country's reputation of leaving behind friends under the astonishment of deception and abandonment, even with the impression (even if a passing one) that the NIE has perhaps officially put the administration in the category of lame duck, since it has removed the available options. Merely containing information to the effect that Iran has given up its nuclear military program and is not active today on this front might make it nearly impossible for Bush to direct a military strike against Iran. This estimate has perhaps destroyed every step by the administration to prepare the US public for such a war.
The administration has made efforts over the last few weeks and months to shed light on the Iranian role against US forces in Iraq, without focusing on the nuclear aspect, which indicates that it was expecting the conclusion of the NIE. Or perhaps the administration consoled to friends and allies that the operational preparations for a military strike against the infrastructure of the Iranian regime had entered the stand-by phase, while awaiting the US president's decision to go ahead. The US informed its allies, at the highest levels, that the aircraft carriers in the Gulf were not there for a picnic; this would also give the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Dr. Mohammed El-Baradei, an opportunity to make the final diplomatic effort and use of sanctions to convince Iran to abandon its rejection of suspending uranium enrichment, which was a unanimous wish expressed by the members of the United Nations Security Council.
Some believe that the strategy of the war option remains in place, and that the "nuclear" aspect has been separated on purpose from the justifications for military action because of the link in people's minds between weapons of mass destruction and the inability to find them after the invasion of Iraq. Justifications for military action have been based on a reaction to the actions of the Iranian regime in Iraq, which kill US personnel; Iran's efforts to wreck the peace process that was launched in Annapolis, via the Hamas movement; and Iran's determination to turn Lebanon into an Iranian base via Hizbullah. This is possible.
Nothing can be completely ruled out during the current phase of developments. It was very interesting to see the US administration take the decision to publicly reveal the NIE and it is truly interesting to see the US intelligence community's excessive finding that Iran is innocent of currently working on nuclear weapons, while the IAEA is saying: wait a minute, such a decisive conclusion isn't necessary.
Of course, El-Baradei feels that the NIE backs what he has always said about his institution's lack of evidence that Iran has embarked upon a secret nuclear military program. However, the NIE weakens the IAEA's own hand: there is a focus on the same conclusion that Tehran abandoned its secret program in 2003, which could weaken international determination to strengthen sanctions, if Iran does not live up to its commitments before the IAEA and offer complete cooperation. In other words, the celebration of seeing the IAEA's opinion triumph and its defeat of the attacks against it, along with the exclusion of the military option and the strengthening of sanctions, means that the IAEA will pay the price, since it will be alone and without international momentum behind it as it negotiates with Iran in Vienna, far away from the Security Council.
Thus, it might be in the interest of the IAEA to not push hard toward removing the Iranian nuclear issue from the Security Council and not engineer the dismantling of the Security Council's resolution that demands the suspension of uranium enrichment as a prior condition for the handful of temptations offered by the five permanent Security Council members and Germany to Iran, which include dialogue. If it's true that Iran frozen or halted its secret nuclear program in 2003, we must remember that this date coincides with the countdown to, and implementation of, the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The politically-savvy Tehran perhaps concluded that it might be faced with military action and thus halted its program. But there is another interesting theory. All of the indications at the time pointed to the pro-Iraq war group - from neoconservatives to those advocating the unleashing of what they called the "Shiite force" - all worked on the basis that the enemy were only Sunnis, who produced terrorism and the 11 September 2001 attack on the US. The basic idea for these people was Iraq, and its president, Saddam Hussein, constituted the "ideal" cover to justify a strike at the country, on the pretext of WMD. They said that the oil-rich Arab lands were inhabited by Arab Shiites, and that the best way to create an oil belt (a "Petrolistan") is to produce chaos in these areas. Then, it would be able to create a Shiite extension of influence in the Arab Gulf for Iran, and via the special Syrian-Israeli relationship, one could link to Israel via Syria and Lebanon.
This line of thinking - supported by measures for dividing Iraq on the pretext of liberating it - was probably behind the Iranian leadership's decision to freeze nuclear military activity, and could prove to be correct if military pressure (via the war in Iraq) and the diplomatic efforts (via sanctions) are what prompted the leadership to take this decision.
If history proves that the real reasons for the Iraq war involved a desire to divide the country, since such a move would serve the interests of both Israel and Iran in the minds of war advocates, then the real reason for halting Iran's secret nuclear military program in 2003 was wisdom. It was useless, as long as the US was waging war against the biggest Arab enemy of Iran and Israel; the Saddam Hussein regime had a nuclear capability that could fight back against these capabilities and the dividing of Iraq, with both Arab financing and assistance.
It was very intriguing that the US president said, during his news conference following the release of the NIE, that there had been an understanding with the ruling Iranian establishment in Tehran. This was done away with by the election of Ahmadinejad as president.
In this column I have often said that Ahmadinejad's election was a pleasant surprise for the neoconservatives, who had a close relationship with people promoting a Shiite force to gain revenge for the domination by Sunni Arabs. I mentioned that Ahmadinejad was a wheel in the spokes of this plan, since he spoke about Israel in an unacceptable way that did away, temporarily, with the neoconservatives' plans to contain and whittle down the Arabs and take away areas of oil resources as dictated by the clerics in Iran, such as the ambitious and wealthy Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Ali Khameini.
These two were behaving with patience and skill as they played the country's strategic cards, despite the "obstacle" represented by a person named Ahmadinejad. They played the strategic card and acted with strategic wisdom by abandoning, temporarily, Iran's nuclear aspirations.
What these men can deliver in a big deal - if such a thing has truly taken place - is a strategic partnership with the US and Israel in containing the Arabs. They offer considerable influence in controlling things in Iraq, provided that Iraq is "Iranian." Iraq is the big prize for Iran: an Iraq free of nuclear weapons-making capacity and cowed, unable to be independent… and Iraq subject to Iranian influence, representing a launching-point for influence in the Gulf state, in the name of Shiite leadership, even though it is in fact Persian influence to exercise hegemony over the Arabs.
What will the United States gain in return for this, from recognizing Iran as the de facto force to offering a status of superiority par excellence to the clergymen and Islamic revolutionaries? This is the big question, which is difficult to answer definitively speaking right now.
Logic requires us to consider the natural elements of such a deal, in terms of the US administration's insistence on seeing the Iranian leadership abandon Hamas and Hizbullah. Giving up Hamas is relatively easy compared to the other group. Despite the grandstanding against the Palestinian Authority and exploitation of the Palestinians' sufferings under occupation, the Palestinian issue is not a vital matter for Iran. It is a bargaining chip and not an Iranian responsibility, for sectarian and ideological reasons. Thus, Iran can abandon it.
The matter is different when we talk about Hizbullah in Lebanon. Iran has a vital, strategic and tactical relationship with the party. This doesn't mean that the mullahs in Iran consider the leader of Hizbullah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a priority ahead of the strategic relationship with the US. But it does mean that Hizbullah and Lebanon are subject to give and take as part of the formulas of relationships among the US, Iran and Isarel, passing through Syria.
The wheel in the spokes of this relationship is the International Court to try the perpetrators of political assassinations in Lebanon. One of the most important Syrian demands is to freeze or prevent the formation of this court, for very obvious reasons. Damascus' insistence on abolishing this court is testimony to its likely involvement in these terrorist crimes, according to the Security Council's definition of them. Neither Israel, the US nor France (with which relations have deteriorated in the era of its new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, from a favored standing of the first order to an element of deal-making, of the second order) will be able to give guarantees to Damascus regarding the elimination of the court. The court is now out of the hands of these individuals and bargains and deals won't be able to contain the investigation and its conclusions, or stop the court.
Therefore, we should ask how - if a big deal has been struck between the US and Iran - the role of Syria in Lebanon and the International Court for those who planned and carried out political assassinations is being dealt with. Some are quick to say that the Americans "sold out" Lebanon and the court. But this is a bit hasty and excessive and jumps over several items, such as Bush himself and his view of public positions and personal commitments regarding Lebanon. Perhaps the man has knuckled under to pressure from the ruling American "establishment" and bowed his head, avoiding and withdrawing from his commitments to Lebanon. There is no proof as to whether this is what actually happened, while a development in the Iranian nuclear issue might lead to his speaking out loudly to say to Tehran and Damascus: Enough. Keep your hands off Lebanon.
Because this phase is one of confusion and drift, and searching for what is happening behind the sudden and hidden decisions, it is necessary to wait until events have played themselves out. These include movement by the leaders of some Arab states in surprising directions and visits. One example is the sudden visit by King Abdullah II of Jordan to Syria and the later visits by high-ranking Jordanian officials. Another is the precedent of Ahmadinejad's attendance at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Doha. It's not clear if a policy of "splitting off" countries is behind these movements, i.e. separating Syria from Iran, or vice versa.
In other words, it's still not clear if the truce between the US and Iran has launched similar moves by Arab countries toward Iran and Israel, to start a qualitatively new chapter in the entire Middle East. The smell of deals is getting stronger and the timing is intriguing, especially in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon - three issues that distinguish regional and international relations. The preparations are underway to create a US military base in Iraq, by virtue of the understanding and agreement governing bilateral US-Iraqi ties, and this requires an understanding with Iran, according to the analysts. Thus, the history of "failure" in the Iraq war has perhaps led to the intelligence agencies working to regain their dignity and reputation, which suffered in the justifications and pretexts for the Iraq war. Thus, we are talking about the future of these common interests, as represented in the need by the US and Iran to avoid a war and work instead on arranging the division of influence in Iraq and using a new strategic partnership for influence of another kind in the Middle East.
All of this could be overturned by surprises. Just as Ahmadinejad appeared on the scene to upset the arrangements that had been made by the US and Iranian governments, as Bush confirmed in his statements this week, a surprise might try the patience of the man in the White House and see the lame duck "kick," in a bid to regain the momentum. But today, the US president appears to be the victim of an internal coup against him and it's not clear whether the establishment has carried this out in order to rein him in, or whether he was convinced of the step for deeper and wider reasons, which remain secret.
http://www.raghidadergham.com/
Al-Hayat
NEW YORK- After the surprise issuing of the National Intelligence Estimate, which found that Tehran halted its secret nuclear program in 2003, one must ask: What has happened between the US and the Islamic Republic of Iran? Is it the beginning of a big deal between the two countries to divide up influence in Iraq and use the new relationship to contain the Arabs when needed? Is it an internal coup d'état against US President George W Bush, to halt his march toward war? After all, it was expected that such a blow would have been directed at the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or was the NIE just business as usual, as part of the truce between the US and Iran and as part of the historical relationship between Persians and Jews, such that no war will take place between these two powers under any circumstances?
These are likely possibilities, and the events of the coming weeks and months might even raise the level of the commotion, whether as part of the strategy or as one of its consequences. But it has become clear, and logical, that the military option is no longer on the US president's table, as long as Iran doesn't make a serious mistake against US forces in Iraq. It's become clear that the American "establishment" has taken an implicit decision to coexist with the Iranian regime and has halted attempts to topple it, in return for a price whose details will be revealed later.
On the surface, this price is Iraq, and what is taking place there. Realistically, the Iraq war has made Iran the partner of Israel in terms of regional superiority; the NIE report by 16 US intelligence agencies cements Iranian superiority and lifts the specter of war and the burden of sanctions from the minds of the clerics in Tehran.
In any case, withdrawing or neutralizing the military option is something that chills the heart of many people, not only Americans and Europeans, but also Arabs, especially since Arab states are paying the costs of US wars in the region, in terms of stability or money. However, cementing Iran's superiority in "victories" led by the Iranian president could be reflected in Iran's regional aspirations, which have the air of hegemony, unless the big deal involves Iran's halting its intervention in Palestine and Lebanon, stopping its financial and weapons support to Hamas and Hizbulah, working with Arab Gulf states as partners, and leaving behind issues such as "exporting the revolution" and the qualitative aspect of Iranian rule.
In any case, Arab leaders must think deeply about the meaning of what has happened, when the US decided to reveal the NIE instead of keeping it secret. American leaders both inside and outside the administration should think long and hard about the gap in US credibility and the cementing of the country's reputation of leaving behind friends under the astonishment of deception and abandonment, even with the impression (even if a passing one) that the NIE has perhaps officially put the administration in the category of lame duck, since it has removed the available options. Merely containing information to the effect that Iran has given up its nuclear military program and is not active today on this front might make it nearly impossible for Bush to direct a military strike against Iran. This estimate has perhaps destroyed every step by the administration to prepare the US public for such a war.
The administration has made efforts over the last few weeks and months to shed light on the Iranian role against US forces in Iraq, without focusing on the nuclear aspect, which indicates that it was expecting the conclusion of the NIE. Or perhaps the administration consoled to friends and allies that the operational preparations for a military strike against the infrastructure of the Iranian regime had entered the stand-by phase, while awaiting the US president's decision to go ahead. The US informed its allies, at the highest levels, that the aircraft carriers in the Gulf were not there for a picnic; this would also give the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Dr. Mohammed El-Baradei, an opportunity to make the final diplomatic effort and use of sanctions to convince Iran to abandon its rejection of suspending uranium enrichment, which was a unanimous wish expressed by the members of the United Nations Security Council.
Some believe that the strategy of the war option remains in place, and that the "nuclear" aspect has been separated on purpose from the justifications for military action because of the link in people's minds between weapons of mass destruction and the inability to find them after the invasion of Iraq. Justifications for military action have been based on a reaction to the actions of the Iranian regime in Iraq, which kill US personnel; Iran's efforts to wreck the peace process that was launched in Annapolis, via the Hamas movement; and Iran's determination to turn Lebanon into an Iranian base via Hizbullah. This is possible.
Nothing can be completely ruled out during the current phase of developments. It was very interesting to see the US administration take the decision to publicly reveal the NIE and it is truly interesting to see the US intelligence community's excessive finding that Iran is innocent of currently working on nuclear weapons, while the IAEA is saying: wait a minute, such a decisive conclusion isn't necessary.
Of course, El-Baradei feels that the NIE backs what he has always said about his institution's lack of evidence that Iran has embarked upon a secret nuclear military program. However, the NIE weakens the IAEA's own hand: there is a focus on the same conclusion that Tehran abandoned its secret program in 2003, which could weaken international determination to strengthen sanctions, if Iran does not live up to its commitments before the IAEA and offer complete cooperation. In other words, the celebration of seeing the IAEA's opinion triumph and its defeat of the attacks against it, along with the exclusion of the military option and the strengthening of sanctions, means that the IAEA will pay the price, since it will be alone and without international momentum behind it as it negotiates with Iran in Vienna, far away from the Security Council.
Thus, it might be in the interest of the IAEA to not push hard toward removing the Iranian nuclear issue from the Security Council and not engineer the dismantling of the Security Council's resolution that demands the suspension of uranium enrichment as a prior condition for the handful of temptations offered by the five permanent Security Council members and Germany to Iran, which include dialogue. If it's true that Iran frozen or halted its secret nuclear program in 2003, we must remember that this date coincides with the countdown to, and implementation of, the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The politically-savvy Tehran perhaps concluded that it might be faced with military action and thus halted its program. But there is another interesting theory. All of the indications at the time pointed to the pro-Iraq war group - from neoconservatives to those advocating the unleashing of what they called the "Shiite force" - all worked on the basis that the enemy were only Sunnis, who produced terrorism and the 11 September 2001 attack on the US. The basic idea for these people was Iraq, and its president, Saddam Hussein, constituted the "ideal" cover to justify a strike at the country, on the pretext of WMD. They said that the oil-rich Arab lands were inhabited by Arab Shiites, and that the best way to create an oil belt (a "Petrolistan") is to produce chaos in these areas. Then, it would be able to create a Shiite extension of influence in the Arab Gulf for Iran, and via the special Syrian-Israeli relationship, one could link to Israel via Syria and Lebanon.
This line of thinking - supported by measures for dividing Iraq on the pretext of liberating it - was probably behind the Iranian leadership's decision to freeze nuclear military activity, and could prove to be correct if military pressure (via the war in Iraq) and the diplomatic efforts (via sanctions) are what prompted the leadership to take this decision.
If history proves that the real reasons for the Iraq war involved a desire to divide the country, since such a move would serve the interests of both Israel and Iran in the minds of war advocates, then the real reason for halting Iran's secret nuclear military program in 2003 was wisdom. It was useless, as long as the US was waging war against the biggest Arab enemy of Iran and Israel; the Saddam Hussein regime had a nuclear capability that could fight back against these capabilities and the dividing of Iraq, with both Arab financing and assistance.
It was very intriguing that the US president said, during his news conference following the release of the NIE, that there had been an understanding with the ruling Iranian establishment in Tehran. This was done away with by the election of Ahmadinejad as president.
In this column I have often said that Ahmadinejad's election was a pleasant surprise for the neoconservatives, who had a close relationship with people promoting a Shiite force to gain revenge for the domination by Sunni Arabs. I mentioned that Ahmadinejad was a wheel in the spokes of this plan, since he spoke about Israel in an unacceptable way that did away, temporarily, with the neoconservatives' plans to contain and whittle down the Arabs and take away areas of oil resources as dictated by the clerics in Iran, such as the ambitious and wealthy Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Ali Khameini.
These two were behaving with patience and skill as they played the country's strategic cards, despite the "obstacle" represented by a person named Ahmadinejad. They played the strategic card and acted with strategic wisdom by abandoning, temporarily, Iran's nuclear aspirations.
What these men can deliver in a big deal - if such a thing has truly taken place - is a strategic partnership with the US and Israel in containing the Arabs. They offer considerable influence in controlling things in Iraq, provided that Iraq is "Iranian." Iraq is the big prize for Iran: an Iraq free of nuclear weapons-making capacity and cowed, unable to be independent… and Iraq subject to Iranian influence, representing a launching-point for influence in the Gulf state, in the name of Shiite leadership, even though it is in fact Persian influence to exercise hegemony over the Arabs.
What will the United States gain in return for this, from recognizing Iran as the de facto force to offering a status of superiority par excellence to the clergymen and Islamic revolutionaries? This is the big question, which is difficult to answer definitively speaking right now.
Logic requires us to consider the natural elements of such a deal, in terms of the US administration's insistence on seeing the Iranian leadership abandon Hamas and Hizbullah. Giving up Hamas is relatively easy compared to the other group. Despite the grandstanding against the Palestinian Authority and exploitation of the Palestinians' sufferings under occupation, the Palestinian issue is not a vital matter for Iran. It is a bargaining chip and not an Iranian responsibility, for sectarian and ideological reasons. Thus, Iran can abandon it.
The matter is different when we talk about Hizbullah in Lebanon. Iran has a vital, strategic and tactical relationship with the party. This doesn't mean that the mullahs in Iran consider the leader of Hizbullah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a priority ahead of the strategic relationship with the US. But it does mean that Hizbullah and Lebanon are subject to give and take as part of the formulas of relationships among the US, Iran and Isarel, passing through Syria.
The wheel in the spokes of this relationship is the International Court to try the perpetrators of political assassinations in Lebanon. One of the most important Syrian demands is to freeze or prevent the formation of this court, for very obvious reasons. Damascus' insistence on abolishing this court is testimony to its likely involvement in these terrorist crimes, according to the Security Council's definition of them. Neither Israel, the US nor France (with which relations have deteriorated in the era of its new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, from a favored standing of the first order to an element of deal-making, of the second order) will be able to give guarantees to Damascus regarding the elimination of the court. The court is now out of the hands of these individuals and bargains and deals won't be able to contain the investigation and its conclusions, or stop the court.
Therefore, we should ask how - if a big deal has been struck between the US and Iran - the role of Syria in Lebanon and the International Court for those who planned and carried out political assassinations is being dealt with. Some are quick to say that the Americans "sold out" Lebanon and the court. But this is a bit hasty and excessive and jumps over several items, such as Bush himself and his view of public positions and personal commitments regarding Lebanon. Perhaps the man has knuckled under to pressure from the ruling American "establishment" and bowed his head, avoiding and withdrawing from his commitments to Lebanon. There is no proof as to whether this is what actually happened, while a development in the Iranian nuclear issue might lead to his speaking out loudly to say to Tehran and Damascus: Enough. Keep your hands off Lebanon.
Because this phase is one of confusion and drift, and searching for what is happening behind the sudden and hidden decisions, it is necessary to wait until events have played themselves out. These include movement by the leaders of some Arab states in surprising directions and visits. One example is the sudden visit by King Abdullah II of Jordan to Syria and the later visits by high-ranking Jordanian officials. Another is the precedent of Ahmadinejad's attendance at the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Doha. It's not clear if a policy of "splitting off" countries is behind these movements, i.e. separating Syria from Iran, or vice versa.
In other words, it's still not clear if the truce between the US and Iran has launched similar moves by Arab countries toward Iran and Israel, to start a qualitatively new chapter in the entire Middle East. The smell of deals is getting stronger and the timing is intriguing, especially in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon - three issues that distinguish regional and international relations. The preparations are underway to create a US military base in Iraq, by virtue of the understanding and agreement governing bilateral US-Iraqi ties, and this requires an understanding with Iran, according to the analysts. Thus, the history of "failure" in the Iraq war has perhaps led to the intelligence agencies working to regain their dignity and reputation, which suffered in the justifications and pretexts for the Iraq war. Thus, we are talking about the future of these common interests, as represented in the need by the US and Iran to avoid a war and work instead on arranging the division of influence in Iraq and using a new strategic partnership for influence of another kind in the Middle East.
All of this could be overturned by surprises. Just as Ahmadinejad appeared on the scene to upset the arrangements that had been made by the US and Iranian governments, as Bush confirmed in his statements this week, a surprise might try the patience of the man in the White House and see the lame duck "kick," in a bid to regain the momentum. But today, the US president appears to be the victim of an internal coup against him and it's not clear whether the establishment has carried this out in order to rein him in, or whether he was convinced of the step for deeper and wider reasons, which remain secret.
http://www.raghidadergham.com/
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Energy Victory
Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/21/2007
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Zubrin, the president of Pioneer Astronautics and also president of the Mars Society. For many years he worked as a senior engineer for Lockheed Martin. In addition, he is the author of the critically acclaimed nonfiction books The Case for Mars, Entering Space, Mars on Earth; the science fiction novels The Holy Land and First Landing; and articles in Scientific American, The New Atlantis, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mechanical Engineering, and The American Enterprise. He has appeared on major media including CNN, CSPAN, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, NBC, ABC, and NPR. He is the author of the new book, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil.
FP: Robert Zubrin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Zubrin: Thank you for inviting me.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Zubrin: For the past two decades, I have devoted most of my engineering work towards advancing the space program. However the events of September 11, 2001 caused me to give pause and think about what I might be able to do to help out here on Earth. Then, as I researched the problem, it because very apparent that the terror cult was being promoted by Middle eastern tyrannies using oil money, which is to say our money, and that this is what had to be addressed if the war on terror was to be won.
You know there is an old aphorism, "there are three things necessary to wage war: money, money, and yet more money." Well, the same is true of jihad. So consider the following. In 1972, the USA paid out $4 billion for oil imports, an amount equal to 1.2% of our defense budget at that time. Last year, we paid $260 billion - which was half of what we paid for national defense! Over the same period, Saudi oil revenues have grown in direct parallel from $2.7 billion in 1972 to $200 billion in 2006, and this year are likely to exceed $300 billion. And if something isn't done to break the oil cartel, the situation is likely to get much worse, because with China and India industrializing, world demand for fuel is going up, and OPEC is in position to exploit this to effect further radical price hikes -- in fact they've raised prices 50% this year alone. We are financing a war against ourselves, and the way things are going, we will soon be paying the enemy more than we are paying our own military.
Furthermore, the situation is even worse, because as a result of our dependence on enemy oil, we cannot effectively strike back at them. Take the Iranian nuclear bomb program, for example. We could shut it down in an afternoon just by striking their very vulnerable oil export terminal at Kharg Island. No oil exports = no cash = no nuclear bomb program. But we can't do that right now because of the effect on the world economy of a shutdown of Persian Gulf oil. The same is true in our dealing with the Saudis. In effect, they are using their own fragility as a shield against us, saying "you can't hit us because we have a glass jaw." And, given our dependence on them, the ploy works. But take away that dependence, and we can dictate terms to them.
So the battle for energy security is the decisive front in the war on terror. And that is an area where I, as an engineer, believe I have something to contribute.
FP: Expand for us on how Americans are funding radical Islam by buying gas.
Zubrin: Saudi Arabia is the largest recipient of international oil revenues, over two trillion dollars in the past three decades, and, as documented by numerous sources cited in my book, they have used a substantial fraction of this cash to finance a global effort to spread Wahhabi totalitarian cult ideology. They have funded a whole alphabet soup of front organizations such as the MWL, the WAMY, and the IIRO, for this purpose, as well as to directly fund terrorist groups, and have set up over 20,000 madrasses outside of Saudi Arabia to teach millions of young boys that the way to paradise is to kill Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, animists, humanists, etc. It was the graduates of this indoctrination effort who killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, and thousands of our troops in Iraq in the period since. But they've killed plenty of other people too, in countries ranging from Biafra and the Sudan, to former Soviet central Asia, to Indonesia and the Philippines, where vicious attacks on Buddhists and Christians are ongoing.
Then there is Iran, a terror state which receives the majority of its income from oil. It is oil money that is funding Hezbollah, an Iranian terror asset which is now setting up bases in Latin America, by the way. It is oil money that is funding the Iranian nuclear bomb program, which could give those Hezbollah operatives the weapon they need to inflict mass destruction on their potential victims- which will soon include not only Israeli or European cities, but targets in the Western Hemisphere as well.
When we pay for oil, we are paying for our own destruction.
FP: So how can we reduce U.S. dependence on oil? Is it really possible to make oil obsolete? Tell us exactly what energy security entails and how it serves as a potential cure to our dilemma.
Zubrin: The key thing is to break the oil cartel, which is the instrument that the enemy has used to fix prices and fabulously multiply their profits, and thus their power. This cannot be done through US conservation, for two reasons; first because with demand growing elsewhere, no conceivable conservation effort here could effect the global oil price. Secondly, even if we could hypothetically somehow create global conservation, the OPEC could deal with it simply by cutting production to match.
However there is a way to break OPEC, and it is surprisingly simple. What is needed is for the US congress to pass a law mandating that all new cars SOLD (not made, but sold) in the USA be flex fueled -- which is to say able to run on any combination of alcohol or gasoline fuel. These cars are existing technology -- in fact about 24 different models of flex fuel cars are being produced by the Detroit big three this year, and they only cost about $100 more than the same car in a gasoline-only version. But they only command about 3% of the new car market, because there is little upside to a consumer in owning one, since alcohol fuel pumps (such as E85, a fuel mix that is 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) are nearly are rare as unicorns. And the reason, of course, why E85 pumps are not to be found is that gas station owners don't want to dedicate one of their pumps to a kind of fuel that only a few percent of the cars can use. But if we had a flex fuel mandate, then within three years of enactment there would be 50 million cars on the road in the USA capable of running on high-alcohol fuels, and under those conditions, E85 and M50 (a 50% methanol, 50% gasoline fuel mix -- flex fuel cars can use any alcohol, including methanol) pumps would start appearing everywhere.
But most importantly, this would not just be happening here in the USA, but worldwide, since by mandating that all new cars sold here had to be flex fuelled, we would be forcing all the foreign car manufacturers to switch their lines to flex fuel as well, effectively making flex fuel the international standard. So not only would there 50 million cars in the USA within 3 years capable of running on alcohol, there would be hundreds of millions worldwide, forcing gasoline to compete everywhere against alcohol fuels that can be produced from numerous sources. This would effectively break the vertical monopoly that the oil cartel currently holds on the world's fuel supply, constraining prices to the ~$50/barrel range, because that is where alcohol fuels become competitive. It would also create a market that would mobilize tens of billions of dollars of private investment into areas such as cellulosic ethanol and other advanced alcohol production techniques that will cheapen alcohols further and radically expand their potential resource base (although methanol already can be produced from any kind of biomass, without exception, as well as coal, natural gas, and urban trash.)
Then, with such a production and distribution infrastructure in place, we could proceed to not merely contain the petrotyrranies, but wipe them out by implementing tax and tariff policies that favor alcohols over petroleum. Effectively we could take over a trillion dollars a year that is now going to the oil cartel, and direct it towards the world agricultural sector instead. This would not only be of great benefit to farmers here, but an enormous boon to the third world, which otherwise faces brutal looting through the extremely regressive tax imposed on them by continued unconstrained OPEC price hikes. Thus there is not just a strategic and economic case for breaking OPEC, but a very strong humanitarian case as well. Instead of financing terrorism, we could be funding world development. Instead of selling blocks of CNN to Saudi princes, we could be selling tractors to Africa. This is the way to win the war on terror.
FP: Robert Zubrin, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Zubrin: It's been a pleasure, and an honor. Keep up the great work.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of 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. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/21/2007
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Zubrin, the president of Pioneer Astronautics and also president of the Mars Society. For many years he worked as a senior engineer for Lockheed Martin. In addition, he is the author of the critically acclaimed nonfiction books The Case for Mars, Entering Space, Mars on Earth; the science fiction novels The Holy Land and First Landing; and articles in Scientific American, The New Atlantis, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mechanical Engineering, and The American Enterprise. He has appeared on major media including CNN, CSPAN, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, NBC, ABC, and NPR. He is the author of the new book, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil.
FP: Robert Zubrin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Zubrin: Thank you for inviting me.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Zubrin: For the past two decades, I have devoted most of my engineering work towards advancing the space program. However the events of September 11, 2001 caused me to give pause and think about what I might be able to do to help out here on Earth. Then, as I researched the problem, it because very apparent that the terror cult was being promoted by Middle eastern tyrannies using oil money, which is to say our money, and that this is what had to be addressed if the war on terror was to be won.
You know there is an old aphorism, "there are three things necessary to wage war: money, money, and yet more money." Well, the same is true of jihad. So consider the following. In 1972, the USA paid out $4 billion for oil imports, an amount equal to 1.2% of our defense budget at that time. Last year, we paid $260 billion - which was half of what we paid for national defense! Over the same period, Saudi oil revenues have grown in direct parallel from $2.7 billion in 1972 to $200 billion in 2006, and this year are likely to exceed $300 billion. And if something isn't done to break the oil cartel, the situation is likely to get much worse, because with China and India industrializing, world demand for fuel is going up, and OPEC is in position to exploit this to effect further radical price hikes -- in fact they've raised prices 50% this year alone. We are financing a war against ourselves, and the way things are going, we will soon be paying the enemy more than we are paying our own military.
Furthermore, the situation is even worse, because as a result of our dependence on enemy oil, we cannot effectively strike back at them. Take the Iranian nuclear bomb program, for example. We could shut it down in an afternoon just by striking their very vulnerable oil export terminal at Kharg Island. No oil exports = no cash = no nuclear bomb program. But we can't do that right now because of the effect on the world economy of a shutdown of Persian Gulf oil. The same is true in our dealing with the Saudis. In effect, they are using their own fragility as a shield against us, saying "you can't hit us because we have a glass jaw." And, given our dependence on them, the ploy works. But take away that dependence, and we can dictate terms to them.
So the battle for energy security is the decisive front in the war on terror. And that is an area where I, as an engineer, believe I have something to contribute.
FP: Expand for us on how Americans are funding radical Islam by buying gas.
Zubrin: Saudi Arabia is the largest recipient of international oil revenues, over two trillion dollars in the past three decades, and, as documented by numerous sources cited in my book, they have used a substantial fraction of this cash to finance a global effort to spread Wahhabi totalitarian cult ideology. They have funded a whole alphabet soup of front organizations such as the MWL, the WAMY, and the IIRO, for this purpose, as well as to directly fund terrorist groups, and have set up over 20,000 madrasses outside of Saudi Arabia to teach millions of young boys that the way to paradise is to kill Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, animists, humanists, etc. It was the graduates of this indoctrination effort who killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, and thousands of our troops in Iraq in the period since. But they've killed plenty of other people too, in countries ranging from Biafra and the Sudan, to former Soviet central Asia, to Indonesia and the Philippines, where vicious attacks on Buddhists and Christians are ongoing.
Then there is Iran, a terror state which receives the majority of its income from oil. It is oil money that is funding Hezbollah, an Iranian terror asset which is now setting up bases in Latin America, by the way. It is oil money that is funding the Iranian nuclear bomb program, which could give those Hezbollah operatives the weapon they need to inflict mass destruction on their potential victims- which will soon include not only Israeli or European cities, but targets in the Western Hemisphere as well.
When we pay for oil, we are paying for our own destruction.
FP: So how can we reduce U.S. dependence on oil? Is it really possible to make oil obsolete? Tell us exactly what energy security entails and how it serves as a potential cure to our dilemma.
Zubrin: The key thing is to break the oil cartel, which is the instrument that the enemy has used to fix prices and fabulously multiply their profits, and thus their power. This cannot be done through US conservation, for two reasons; first because with demand growing elsewhere, no conceivable conservation effort here could effect the global oil price. Secondly, even if we could hypothetically somehow create global conservation, the OPEC could deal with it simply by cutting production to match.
However there is a way to break OPEC, and it is surprisingly simple. What is needed is for the US congress to pass a law mandating that all new cars SOLD (not made, but sold) in the USA be flex fueled -- which is to say able to run on any combination of alcohol or gasoline fuel. These cars are existing technology -- in fact about 24 different models of flex fuel cars are being produced by the Detroit big three this year, and they only cost about $100 more than the same car in a gasoline-only version. But they only command about 3% of the new car market, because there is little upside to a consumer in owning one, since alcohol fuel pumps (such as E85, a fuel mix that is 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) are nearly are rare as unicorns. And the reason, of course, why E85 pumps are not to be found is that gas station owners don't want to dedicate one of their pumps to a kind of fuel that only a few percent of the cars can use. But if we had a flex fuel mandate, then within three years of enactment there would be 50 million cars on the road in the USA capable of running on high-alcohol fuels, and under those conditions, E85 and M50 (a 50% methanol, 50% gasoline fuel mix -- flex fuel cars can use any alcohol, including methanol) pumps would start appearing everywhere.
But most importantly, this would not just be happening here in the USA, but worldwide, since by mandating that all new cars sold here had to be flex fuelled, we would be forcing all the foreign car manufacturers to switch their lines to flex fuel as well, effectively making flex fuel the international standard. So not only would there 50 million cars in the USA within 3 years capable of running on alcohol, there would be hundreds of millions worldwide, forcing gasoline to compete everywhere against alcohol fuels that can be produced from numerous sources. This would effectively break the vertical monopoly that the oil cartel currently holds on the world's fuel supply, constraining prices to the ~$50/barrel range, because that is where alcohol fuels become competitive. It would also create a market that would mobilize tens of billions of dollars of private investment into areas such as cellulosic ethanol and other advanced alcohol production techniques that will cheapen alcohols further and radically expand their potential resource base (although methanol already can be produced from any kind of biomass, without exception, as well as coal, natural gas, and urban trash.)
Then, with such a production and distribution infrastructure in place, we could proceed to not merely contain the petrotyrranies, but wipe them out by implementing tax and tariff policies that favor alcohols over petroleum. Effectively we could take over a trillion dollars a year that is now going to the oil cartel, and direct it towards the world agricultural sector instead. This would not only be of great benefit to farmers here, but an enormous boon to the third world, which otherwise faces brutal looting through the extremely regressive tax imposed on them by continued unconstrained OPEC price hikes. Thus there is not just a strategic and economic case for breaking OPEC, but a very strong humanitarian case as well. Instead of financing terrorism, we could be funding world development. Instead of selling blocks of CNN to Saudi princes, we could be selling tractors to Africa. This is the way to win the war on terror.
FP: Robert Zubrin, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Zubrin: It's been a pleasure, and an honor. Keep up the great work.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of 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. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
BBC bias comes through again
Elder of ZiyonElder of Ziyon
Here’s a classic example of how the BBC pretends to be objective but proves its bias, mostly by what it doesn’t bother to mention:
Israel has protested to Egypt over the opening of a border crossing to allow Muslim pilgrims from Gaza to make their way through Egypt to Saudi Arabia.
The Israelis say they are concerned that militants may leave Gaza and go for training in Iran. …
It is the first time Palestinians in Gaza have been allowed to cross directly into Egypt since June.
Now let’s look at what the BBC didn’t say:
* Israel is not only “concerned” that terrorists are crossing the border; they identified up to two dozen of them.
* While Egypt might not have allowed Gazans to leave before today, they did allow some 85 terrorists to re-enter Gaza in late September and 30 more in October. This is pretty relevant to the story rather than just saying that Israel is “concerned.”
* By Egypt allowing Rafah to be opened, they are breaking existing agreements with Israel.
* Israel and the PA had created a mechanism for pilgrims to go to Hajj through Israel; the BBC implies that the Hajj pilgrims had no choice but to go through Rafah for their religious duties.
* Egypt’s opening of Rafah legitimizes Hamas as the leader of Gaza Palestinians; they ignored the wishes of Abbas and the PA, let alone Israel.
* Rafah is only supposed to be opened by the PA in the presence of EU observers who have all but abdicated their responsibilities - and the EU Rafah observers include some from Britain.
All of these facts would have made the BBC piece more objective and accurate. By strange coincidence, they would also have made Israel’s “concerns” look much more valid and Egypt’s role much more insidious.
.
Here’s a classic example of how the BBC pretends to be objective but proves its bias, mostly by what it doesn’t bother to mention:
Israel has protested to Egypt over the opening of a border crossing to allow Muslim pilgrims from Gaza to make their way through Egypt to Saudi Arabia.
The Israelis say they are concerned that militants may leave Gaza and go for training in Iran. …
It is the first time Palestinians in Gaza have been allowed to cross directly into Egypt since June.
Now let’s look at what the BBC didn’t say:
* Israel is not only “concerned” that terrorists are crossing the border; they identified up to two dozen of them.
* While Egypt might not have allowed Gazans to leave before today, they did allow some 85 terrorists to re-enter Gaza in late September and 30 more in October. This is pretty relevant to the story rather than just saying that Israel is “concerned.”
* By Egypt allowing Rafah to be opened, they are breaking existing agreements with Israel.
* Israel and the PA had created a mechanism for pilgrims to go to Hajj through Israel; the BBC implies that the Hajj pilgrims had no choice but to go through Rafah for their religious duties.
* Egypt’s opening of Rafah legitimizes Hamas as the leader of Gaza Palestinians; they ignored the wishes of Abbas and the PA, let alone Israel.
* Rafah is only supposed to be opened by the PA in the presence of EU observers who have all but abdicated their responsibilities - and the EU Rafah observers include some from Britain.
All of these facts would have made the BBC piece more objective and accurate. By strange coincidence, they would also have made Israel’s “concerns” look much more valid and Egypt’s role much more insidious.
.
EYEontheUN ALERT - DURBAN WATCH
On November 28, 2007 the Third Committee of the General Assembly adopted a resolution of crucial importance to all those concerned about Durban II ( L.65/Rev.1). Even the European Union voted against this Durban follow-up resolution in the General Assembly - a first since the original conference. . The battle lines have been drawn over who will pay for Durban II and the growing apparatus of preparatory committees, conferences, and trips by selected UN special procedures, NGOs and others from developing countries.
The battle itself has now moved to the budget apparatus of the UN, and in particular the General Assembly's Fifth (budget) Committee. Just prior to the adoption of the resolution in the Third Committee, the Secretariat announced a preliminary figure of approximately 7.2 million dollars from the coffers of the UN's regular budget for parts of Durban II. (L.90) This would mean the vast majority of funding would come from Western states through mandatory UN contributions and 22% from the United States.
The question, therefore, is this -- will the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union agree to pay for Durban II and its preparation even though they voted against one or the other of the two resolutions relating to the planning or the substance of the conference? Will they pay for what is bound to become a clash with Islamic states and a feeding ground for xenophobia including antisemitism , knowing that they do not have the numbers to prevail and ensure that universality will trump racial and religious intolerance?
Over the next week the UN Secretariat will prepare a detailed breakdown of the costs of Durban II to which the follow-up resolution (so far) commits member states. At the 11th hour on November 28th Pakistan (speaking on behalf of the Group of 77 and China) made oral revisions to the resolution. As a consequence of (temporarily) dropping some of the more expensive features, the 7.2 million preliminary figure will likely be revised downwards. Nevertheless, this stage will mean a commitment on the part of member states to approve Durban II spending as part of the UN's 2008-9 biennium budget.
The usual procedure is for the Fifth Committee to operate by consensus – so it will be exceptional if the U.S. or the European Union were to refuse consensus now. But the hypocrisy of paying for Durban II threatens to make a mockery of Western democracies and their professed values trumpeted regularly across the UN.
The European Union has said openly they were double-crossed and had joined consensus on previous Durban resolutions on the strength of promises that the G-77 never kept. Stung by a treachery visible to anyone else a mile away, they told the Third Committee on November 28th:
"At this point, we ask ourselves whether it is worth for all delegations to make all such efforts [sic] to reach compromises if they can be so easily broken. We also reiterate our doubts about whether some of the main players in this process are genuinely interested in keeping the Durban follow-up process on a consensus basis which includes all regions of the world."
Doubts? This is a snow-job if there ever was one. And actually the votes against from the United States and Israel (in addition to walking out of the conference), as well as abstentions from others, have denied consensus to Durban I and Durban follow-up from the beginning.
The United States explained its vote against the resolution by specifically objecting to the costs as well as the merits of Durban II, stating in part: "[ T]he outcomes of the [World] conference [held in Durban in 2001] were deeply flawed and divisive. The resolution now before us endorses that flawed outcome and is therefore itself seriously problematic… Durban follow-up activities are duplicative…[W]e do not support the continuation of such duplicative work…[W]e do not believe that the Human Rights Council should act as a preparatory committee for the Durban Review Conference…[T]he Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights should provide for more substantial programming…rather than put its valuable resources into more conferences."
Are these states now going to approve the costs of Durban II from the regular budget of the UN – a cost which rebounds directly onto the backs of their own taxpayers?
In its last minute amendments the G-77 agreed to continue talking about "the allocation of funding from the regular budget of the UN for the Durban Review Conference." Still, the resolution decides to use regular budget funding for some aspects of its preparation. This is on top of using the regular budget of the Office of the High Commissioner to pay for all the meetings of the Human Rights Council acting as the preparatory committee for the conference.
__________________________________
Action Needed
The United States should object to the funding of Durban II from the UN's regular budget. This means calling for the vote in the Fifth Committee on the financing of Durban II and voting against. The vote is expected to take place within the next 2-3 weeks. Though the outcome of the funding vote would mirror the vote on the follow-up resolution itself (119 for, 45 against, 6 abstentions), it would send a clear and consistent message about the pernicious nature of Durban, its aftermath and its reincarnation. It would also set the stage for a concerted effort to resist the hijacking of the anti-racism agenda of the UN by the least tolerant members of the human family.
###
EYEontheUN is an independent UN monitor headquartered in New York and is dedicated to making transparent the UN's record on its fundamental promise-to identify, condemn, and protect against human rights violations and confront and respond to threats to international peace and security. Anne Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN, is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust
______________________________________________
Dear Friends,
This is serious, we need everyone's help !
We have a small window of opportunity, only a few days, to try and stop Durban II from occurring . Please forward this email to friends far and wide especially in other countries.
We need a great many letters sent to STOP Durban II. Canadians should send letters to their Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister – (see email addresses and prepared letter below).
If you live in another country MODIFY the prepared letter – if you live in the US, write to your two Senators and your member of House of Representatives and Tom Lantos, Chairman of the House of Foreign Affairs . It is important that ALL countries which voted 'no' instruct their UN Ambassadors to vote against the coming resolution.
Make sure that your letters state 1) call for the vote, 2) VOTE NO
_______________________________________________
Write to :
Prime Minister Harper - pm@pm.gc.ca
Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier – maxime.bernier@international.gc.ca
Prepared letter: Canadians can copy and paste the following letter as is into a New Document. Copy and paste email addresses to the Prime Minister with a CC to FM Bernier - you can add a BRIEF sentence at the beginning and end. Other countries, change the letter to apply to your country.
Please forward me a copy of your letter or send me a Bcc – Instructions to create a Bcc are at the very bottom. Shirley Anne Haber" < sahaber@bellnet.ca>
-----
Dear Prime Minister Harper and Foreign Minister Bernier,
Please make sure to instruct our Ambassador to the UN to call for the vote and then vote against the resolution requesting funding for Durban II and its preparation. Canada must vote against the coming vote in the Fifth Committee of the UN General Assembly on the program budget implications of resolution A/C.3/62/L.65/Rev.1 as orally amended.
Canada is already on record as voting against the substance and now must follow through and vote against the principal and refuse to pay for this conference. This conference would be a highly racist, hate-filled conference modeled after Durban I held in August 2001.
As well, Canada is in a position to influence and support all countries which are on record as having voted against the substance to now refuse to pay ! In addition, Canada should try to influence other countries to vote against the resolution which were in favour – they should refuse to pay for this hate-fest.
Sincerely,
Sign your name and address showing that you are a resident.
The battle itself has now moved to the budget apparatus of the UN, and in particular the General Assembly's Fifth (budget) Committee. Just prior to the adoption of the resolution in the Third Committee, the Secretariat announced a preliminary figure of approximately 7.2 million dollars from the coffers of the UN's regular budget for parts of Durban II. (L.90) This would mean the vast majority of funding would come from Western states through mandatory UN contributions and 22% from the United States.
The question, therefore, is this -- will the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union agree to pay for Durban II and its preparation even though they voted against one or the other of the two resolutions relating to the planning or the substance of the conference? Will they pay for what is bound to become a clash with Islamic states and a feeding ground for xenophobia including antisemitism , knowing that they do not have the numbers to prevail and ensure that universality will trump racial and religious intolerance?
Over the next week the UN Secretariat will prepare a detailed breakdown of the costs of Durban II to which the follow-up resolution (so far) commits member states. At the 11th hour on November 28th Pakistan (speaking on behalf of the Group of 77 and China) made oral revisions to the resolution. As a consequence of (temporarily) dropping some of the more expensive features, the 7.2 million preliminary figure will likely be revised downwards. Nevertheless, this stage will mean a commitment on the part of member states to approve Durban II spending as part of the UN's 2008-9 biennium budget.
The usual procedure is for the Fifth Committee to operate by consensus – so it will be exceptional if the U.S. or the European Union were to refuse consensus now. But the hypocrisy of paying for Durban II threatens to make a mockery of Western democracies and their professed values trumpeted regularly across the UN.
The European Union has said openly they were double-crossed and had joined consensus on previous Durban resolutions on the strength of promises that the G-77 never kept. Stung by a treachery visible to anyone else a mile away, they told the Third Committee on November 28th:
"At this point, we ask ourselves whether it is worth for all delegations to make all such efforts [sic] to reach compromises if they can be so easily broken. We also reiterate our doubts about whether some of the main players in this process are genuinely interested in keeping the Durban follow-up process on a consensus basis which includes all regions of the world."
Doubts? This is a snow-job if there ever was one. And actually the votes against from the United States and Israel (in addition to walking out of the conference), as well as abstentions from others, have denied consensus to Durban I and Durban follow-up from the beginning.
The United States explained its vote against the resolution by specifically objecting to the costs as well as the merits of Durban II, stating in part: "[ T]he outcomes of the [World] conference [held in Durban in 2001] were deeply flawed and divisive. The resolution now before us endorses that flawed outcome and is therefore itself seriously problematic… Durban follow-up activities are duplicative…[W]e do not support the continuation of such duplicative work…[W]e do not believe that the Human Rights Council should act as a preparatory committee for the Durban Review Conference…[T]he Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights should provide for more substantial programming…rather than put its valuable resources into more conferences."
Are these states now going to approve the costs of Durban II from the regular budget of the UN – a cost which rebounds directly onto the backs of their own taxpayers?
In its last minute amendments the G-77 agreed to continue talking about "the allocation of funding from the regular budget of the UN for the Durban Review Conference." Still, the resolution decides to use regular budget funding for some aspects of its preparation. This is on top of using the regular budget of the Office of the High Commissioner to pay for all the meetings of the Human Rights Council acting as the preparatory committee for the conference.
__________________________________
Action Needed
The United States should object to the funding of Durban II from the UN's regular budget. This means calling for the vote in the Fifth Committee on the financing of Durban II and voting against. The vote is expected to take place within the next 2-3 weeks. Though the outcome of the funding vote would mirror the vote on the follow-up resolution itself (119 for, 45 against, 6 abstentions), it would send a clear and consistent message about the pernicious nature of Durban, its aftermath and its reincarnation. It would also set the stage for a concerted effort to resist the hijacking of the anti-racism agenda of the UN by the least tolerant members of the human family.
###
EYEontheUN is an independent UN monitor headquartered in New York and is dedicated to making transparent the UN's record on its fundamental promise-to identify, condemn, and protect against human rights violations and confront and respond to threats to international peace and security. Anne Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN, is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust
______________________________________________
Dear Friends,
This is serious, we need everyone's help !
We have a small window of opportunity, only a few days, to try and stop Durban II from occurring . Please forward this email to friends far and wide especially in other countries.
We need a great many letters sent to STOP Durban II. Canadians should send letters to their Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister – (see email addresses and prepared letter below).
If you live in another country MODIFY the prepared letter – if you live in the US, write to your two Senators and your member of House of Representatives and Tom Lantos, Chairman of the House of Foreign Affairs . It is important that ALL countries which voted 'no' instruct their UN Ambassadors to vote against the coming resolution.
Make sure that your letters state 1) call for the vote, 2) VOTE NO
_______________________________________________
Write to :
Prime Minister Harper - pm@pm.gc.ca
Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier – maxime.bernier@international.gc.ca
Prepared letter: Canadians can copy and paste the following letter as is into a New Document. Copy and paste email addresses to the Prime Minister with a CC to FM Bernier - you can add a BRIEF sentence at the beginning and end. Other countries, change the letter to apply to your country.
Please forward me a copy of your letter or send me a Bcc – Instructions to create a Bcc are at the very bottom. Shirley Anne Haber" < sahaber@bellnet.ca>
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Dear Prime Minister Harper and Foreign Minister Bernier,
Please make sure to instruct our Ambassador to the UN to call for the vote and then vote against the resolution requesting funding for Durban II and its preparation. Canada must vote against the coming vote in the Fifth Committee of the UN General Assembly on the program budget implications of resolution A/C.3/62/L.65/Rev.1 as orally amended.
Canada is already on record as voting against the substance and now must follow through and vote against the principal and refuse to pay for this conference. This conference would be a highly racist, hate-filled conference modeled after Durban I held in August 2001.
As well, Canada is in a position to influence and support all countries which are on record as having voted against the substance to now refuse to pay ! In addition, Canada should try to influence other countries to vote against the resolution which were in favour – they should refuse to pay for this hate-fest.
Sincerely,
Sign your name and address showing that you are a resident.
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