* On the fifth anniversary of his kidnapping in Israel, the Red Cross in Gaza finally ask Hamas to show signs that Gilad Shalit remains alive; Palestinian mob attack Red Cross HQ in response.
* After four years renting 15 rooms for his entourage in five-star luxury at EU taxpayers’ expense, Tony Blair is moving out of the American Colony Hotel into a purpose-built seven-storey building now under construction in Sheikh Jarrah: the millionaires’ row of East Jerusalem.
* The Irish Independent: “What is it about Israel that prompts such a widespread departure from common sense, reason and moral reality? As another insane flotilla prepares to butt across the Mediterranean bringing ‘aid’ to the ‘beleaguered’ people of Gaza?”
* The New York Times: “Two luxury hotels are opening in Gaza this month. Thousands of new cars are plying the roads. A second shopping mall – with escalators imported from Israel – will open next month. Hundreds of homes and two dozen schools are about to go up.”
* “We have 100 percent vaccination; no polio, measles, diphtheria or AIDS,” said Mahmoud Daher, the World Health Organization representative in Gaza. “We’ve never had a cholera outbreak.”
* This website contained a world exclusive last year, revealing the opening of a luxury shopping mall in Gaza (and shortly before that of an Olympic-size swimming pool and a water park) at a time when virtually the entire world media was alleging that there were no construction materials (or water) and hence no new buildings and goods in Gaza. Since then, one by one, most media (with the notable exception of the BBC) have dropped their previous misreporting and acknowledged that life in Gaza is better than most places in the world, and substantially better than many other places in the Arab world. Yesterday’s New York Times cover story (attached below) is the latest such example. (It is also on the cover of today’s International Herald Tribune.)
Among last year’s photo dispatches revealing a different picture of Gaza than that which many Western journalists were determined to show, please see here and here.
Here is a new video showing the situation in Gaza as not described by the BBC:
***
This dispatch is split in two for space reasons. The other part can be read here: “How could the Left not fall for the Arab-lesbian-blogger hoax?”
I attach nine articles of interest. Among the writers of these articles, Mark Steyn, Ethan Bronner, Benny Morris, Kevin Myers, Matthew Kalman and Kelly McParland are all subscribers to this email list
CONTENTS
1. In rare move, BBC apologizes for anti-Israel dog story
2. “Cost-cutting exercise sees Blair move – into millionaires’ row” (By Matthew Kalman, UK Independent, June 27, 2011)
3. “How can do-gooders possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in Middle East?” (By Kevin Myers, Irish Independent, June 24 2011)
4. “A construction boom in Gaza’s lingering ruins” (By Ethan Bronner, NY Times, June 25, 2011)
5. “Palestinians pelt Gaza Red Cross office with eggs” (Agence France Presse, June 24, 2011)
IN RARE MOVE, BBC APOLOGIZES FOR ANTI-ISRAEL DOG STORY
By Tom Gross
In a rare move, the BBC News website has apologized for running an entirely fake story about Israel on June 18, under the headline “Jerusalem rabbis ‘condemn dog to death by stoning’”.
The BBC acknowledged that they had made “grave errors” and added “We failed to make the right checks. We should never have written the article and apologise for any offence caused.”
In its apology, the BBC blamed sensationalist elements in the Israeli media for the story.
(It can be read here: www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2011/06/story_removal.html, accompanied by many readers’ comments.)
What the BBC (and other media) didn’t acknowledge is that day after day, in their eagerness to discredit Israel, they repeat anti-Israeli stories, often by far left journalists in Ha’aretz, or by Israeli tabloid papers, neither of which represent a fair and balanced portrayal of Israel.
It is as if CNN scoured British publications like The New Statesman and The Daily Star for “accurate and representative” stories about Britain.
***
Among past dispatches on the BBC, please see:
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/BBC.htm
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/BBCDiscoversTerrorism.html
ARTICLES
[Tom Gross adds: Along with Britain and Sweden, Ireland has one of the most anti-Israel governments and media in the European Union, so this piece stands out.]
HOW CAN DO-GOODERS POSSIBLY THINK THAT GAZA IS THE PRIMARY CENTRE OF INJUSTICE IN MIDDLE EAST?
How can do-gooders possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in Middle East? By Kevin Myers
The Irish Independent
June 24 2011
www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-how-can-dogooders-possibly-think-that-gaza-is-the-primary-centre-of-injustice-in-middle-east-2804748.html
What is it about Israel that prompts such a widespread departure from common sense, reason and moral reality? As another insane flotilla prepares to butt across the Mediterranean bringing “aid” to the “beleaguered” people of Gaza, in its midst travelling the MV Saoirse, does it never occur to all the hysterical anti-Israeli activists in Ireland that this is like worrying about the steaks being burnt on the barbecue, as a forest fire sweeps towards your back garden?
I took part in a discussion about the Middle East last weekend in the Dalkey Books Festival. It was surreal. Not merely was I the only pro-Israeli person in the panel of four, but the chairwoman of the session, Olivia O’Leary, also felt obliged to throw in her three-ha’pence worth.
Israeli settlers on the West Bank were on stolen land, she sniffed. Palestinians in their refugee camps had title deeds to the ancient properties. The UN had repeatedly condemned Israel. Brian Keenan, who was held hostage by Arab terrorists for four years, then detailed Israeli human-rights abuses, to loud cheers.
Israel – and its sole defender on the panel (is mise) – were then roundly attacked by members of the audience. But what was most striking about the audience’s contributions was the raw emotion: they seemed to loathe Israel.
But how can anyone possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in the Middle East? According to Mathilde Redmatn, deputy director of the International Red Cross in Gaza, there is in fact no humanitarian crisis there at all. But by God, there is one in Syria, where possibly thousands have died in the past month.
However, I notice that none of the Irish do-gooders are sending an aid-ship to Latakia. Why? Is it because they know that the Syrians do not deal with dissenting vessels by lads with truncheons abseiling down from helicopters, but with belt-fed machine guns, right from the start?
What about a humanitarian ship to Libya? Surely no-one on the MV Saoirse could possible maintain that life under Gaddafi qualified it as a civilised state. Not merely did it murder opponents by the bucketload at home and abroad, it kept the IRA campaign going for 20 years, and it also – a minor point, this, I know – brought down the Pan Am flight at Lockerbie. Yet no Irish boat to Libya. Only the other way round.
And then there’s Iraq. Throughout the decades of Saddam Hussein, whose regime caused the deaths of well over a million people, there wasn’t a breath of liberal protest against him. Gassing the Kurds? Not a whimper. Invading Kuwait? Not one single angry placard-bearing European liberal outside an Iraqi embassy.
Destroying the drainage systems of the Marsh Arabs? Silence. Manipulating UN oil-for-food programme so that thousands died? Nothing.
Next, Saudi Arabia, whose revolting practices cannot be called medieval without doing a grave injustice to the Middle Ages. It is led by savages who have studiously turned their backs on knowledge – even as they sip their Krug and their Bollinger in their €100m apartments in Belgravia. They behead and behand, they torture and they mutilate, and they have spent billions on their foul madrasahs teaching young Muslims right across the world to hate us kaffirs. But what demonstrations are there outside Saudi embassies? What flotillas to defend the human rights of the millions of immigrant serfs, who toil without any rights in Saudi homes and in the oil industry?
There isn’t a single Arab country, not one, with the constitutional protection that Israel confers on all its citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation. And no, I don’t like the settlements on the West Bank, but really, by any decent measure, it is simply not possible to gaze upon the entire region, reaching from Casablanca to Yemen, and then to point indignantly and say: “Ah yes, Gaza: that’s where the one great injustice lies.”
The last ‘aid flotilla’ to Gaza carried a large number of Islamists who wanted to provoke: and aided by some quite astounding Israeli stupidity, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Now another convoy is under way, and again with an utterly disingenuous plan to bring “assistance” to the “beleaguered Gazans”, some of who, funnily enough, can now cross into Egypt any time they like, and buy their explosives and their Kalashnikovs in the local arms-bazaar.
And as for human-rights abuses: why, nothing that Israel has done in the 63 years of its existence can possibly compare with the mass-murders of Fatah members by Hamas firing-squads over the past five years.
The colossal western intellectual dissonance between evidence and perception on the subject of Israel at this point in history can perhaps only be explained by anthropologists.
This dissonance is perhaps at its most acute in Ireland, where no empirical proof seems capable of changing people’s minds. Israel, just about the only country in the entire region where Arabs are not rising up against their rulers, is also the only country that the Irish chattering classes unite in condemning. Rather pathetic, really.
COST-CUTTING EXERCISE SEES BLAIR ON MOVE – INTO MILLIONAIRES’ ROW
Cost-cutting exercise sees Blair on move – into millionaires’ row
By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem
The Independent (London)
June 27, 2011
After four years in five-star luxury, Tony Blair is moving out of the American Colony Hotel into a purpose-built seven-storey building now under construction in Sheikh Jarrah: the millionaires’ row of East Jerusalem.
The new building will replace the 15 rooms Mr Blair’s team rents at the American Colony for more than £1m each year. Since he was appointed as representative of the Middle East Quartet in 2007, his office and accommodation for his dozen-strong staff have been located on the fourth floor of Jerusalem’s best known hotel.
The former prime minister’s departure will remove a steady source of income from the American Colony just as hotel bookings in the region begin to plummet in response to the wave of unrest sweeping the Middle East.
The lease at the hotel originally expired on 30 June, but has been extended to the middle of the month to allow the completion of building work at the new location on Nablus Road.
When The Independent visited the new building on Sunday it was still under construction. Workers were hanging off the outside of the building fitting aluminium window frames. The site is screened by a high metal fence and at least five CCTV cameras, suggesting that Mr Blair’s team have already installed some of the watertight security systems necessary to protect the former prime minister.
The Quartet will lease the new building from the influential Nashashibi family, who have constructed the block from local sandstone and smoked glass on land owned for decades by their family. Mr Blair and his team spend about one week in four in Jerusalem. He spends the rest of his time working for his foundation, and on commercial activities.
Officials say the move is intended to reduce costs and simplify security, though with a lease costing the Quartet about £750,000 a year, the new building will not be cheap. Sub-tenants from carefully-vetted organisations will occupy some of the space in order to offset the cost of the lease.
A spokesman said: “Yes, the Office of the Quartet Representative will be moving out of the American Colony Hotel, to an office building elsewhere in East Jerusalem this summer. This will reduce our office costs and provide more suitable office accommodation.”
The move also suggests Mr Blair and the Quartet are digging in for a long haul and may be expanding their operations.
The building will house sleeping accommodation for Mr Blair and his travelling advisers, including the 24-hour security detail provided by the Scotland Yard diplomatic protection unit, but it is not clear who will provide housekeeping and laundry services.
A CONSTRUCTION BOOM IN GAZA
Tom Gross adds: Since there is little new news here, Ethan Bronner comments on the ups and downs of the local economy, carefully gauging how different parties will spin his reporting. One wishes he would just report what he found and leave it at that.
Although Bronner doesn’t say so explicitly, it is clear from his piece that Hamas is largely to blame for the “lingering” problems.
***
A Construction Boom in Gaza’s Lingering Ruins
By Ethan Bronner
The New York Times
June 25, 2011
GAZA — Two luxury hotels are opening in Gaza this month. Thousands of new cars are plying the roads. A second shopping mall – with escalators imported from Israel – will open next month. Hundreds of homes and two dozen schools are about to go up. A Hamas-run farm where Jewish settlements once stood is producing enough fruit that Israeli imports are tapering off.
As pro-Palestinian activists prepare to set sail aboard a flotilla aimed at maintaining an international spotlight on Gaza and pressure on Israel, this isolated Palestinian coastal enclave is experiencing its first real period of economic growth since the siege they are protesting began in 2007.
“Things are better than a year ago,” said Jamal El-Khoudary, chairman of the board of the Islamic University, who has led Gaza’s Popular Committee Against the Siege. “The siege on goods is now 60 to 70 percent over.”
Ala al-Rafati, the economy minister for Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, said in an interview that nearly 1,000 factories are operating here, and he estimated unemployment at no more than 25 percent after a sharp drop in jobless levels in the first quarter of this year. “Yesterday alone, the Gaza municipality launched 12 projects for paving roads, digging wells and making gardens,” he said.
So is that the news from Gaza in mid-2011? Yes, but so is this: Thousands of homes that were destroyed in the Israeli antirocket invasion two and a half years ago have not been rebuilt. Hospitals have canceled elective surgery for lack of supplies. Electricity remains maddeningly irregular. The much-publicized opening of the Egyptian border has fizzled, so people remain trapped here. The number of residents living on less than $1.60 a day has tripled in four years. Three-quarters of the population rely on food aid.
Areas with as contested a history as this one can choose among anniversaries to commemorate. It has been four years since Hamas took over, prompting Israel and Egypt to impose a blockade on people and most goods. It is a year since a Turkish flotilla challenged the siege and Israeli commandos killed nine activists aboard the ships, leading to international outrage and an easing of conditions. And it is five years since an Israeli soldier, Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, was abducted and held in captivity without even visits from the Red Cross.
In assessing the condition of the 1.6 million people who live in Gaza, there are issues of where to draw the baseline and – often – what motivates the discussion. It has never been among the world’s poorest places. There is near universal literacy and relatively low infant mortality, and health conditions remain better than across much of the developing world.
“We have 100 percent vaccination; no polio, measles, diphtheria or AIDS,” said Mahmoud Daher, a World Health Organization official here. “We’ve never had a cholera outbreak.”
The Israeli government and its defenders use such data to portray Gaza as doing just fine and Israeli policy as humane and appropriate: no flotillas need set sail.
Israel’s critics say the fact that the conditions in Gaza do not rival the problems in sub-Saharan Africa only makes the political and human rights crisis here all the more tragic – and solvable. Israel, they note, still controls access to sea, air and most land routes, and its security policies have consciously strangled development opportunities for an educated and potentially high-achieving population that is trapped with no horizon. Pressure needs to be maintained to end the siege entirely, they say, and talk of improvement is counterproductive.
The recent changes stem from a combination of Israeli policy shifts and the chaos in Egypt. The new Egyptian border policy has made little difference, but Egypt’s revolution and its reduced policing in the Sinai have had a profound effect.
For the past year, Israel has allowed most everything into Gaza but cement, steel and other construction material – other than for internationally supervised projects – because they are worried that such supplies can be used by Hamas for bunkers and bombs. A number of international projects are proceeding, but there is an urgent need for housing, street paving, schools, factories and public works projects, all under Hamas or the private sector, and Israel’s policy bans access to the goods to move those forward.
So in recent months, tunnels under the southern border that were used to bring in consumer goods have become almost fully devoted to smuggling in building materials.
Sacks of cement and piles of gravel, Turkish in origin and bought legally in Egypt, are smuggled through the hundreds of tunnels in double shifts, day and night, totaling some 3,000 tons a day. Since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian security authorities no longer stop the smugglers. Streets are being paved and buildings constructed.
“Mubarak was crushing us before,” said Mahmoud Mohammad, a subcontractor whose 10-man crew in Gaza City was unloading steel bars that were carried through the tunnels and were destined for a new restaurant. “Last year we were sitting at home. The contractor I work for has three major projects going.”
Nearby, Amer Selmi was supervising the building of a three-story, $2 million wedding hall. Most of his materials come from the tunnels.
Karim Gharbawi is an architect and building designer with 10 projects under way, all of them eight- and nine-story residential properties. He said there were some 130 engineering and design firms in Gaza. Two years ago, none were working. Today, he said, all of them are.
Another result of the regional changes is the many new cars here. Israel allows in 20 a week, but that does not meet the need. Hundreds of BMWs, pickup trucks and other vehicles have arrived in recent months from Libya, driven through Egypt and sold via the unmonitored tunnels. Dozens of white Kia Sportage models, ubiquitous on the street, are widely thought to have come from the same dealership in Benghazi, Libya, that was looted after the uprising there began.
Hamas’s control of Gaza appears firmer than ever, and the looser tunnel patrols in Egypt mean greater access to weapons as well. But opinion surveys show that its more secular rival, Fatah, is more popular. That may explain why an attempt at political unity with Fatah is moving slowly: the Hamas leaders here are likely to lose their jobs. The hospital supply crisis is a direct result of tensions with Fatah in the West Bank, which has kept the supplies from being shipped here.
Efforts by fringe Islamist groups to challenge Hamas have had little effect. And it has been a year since the government unsuccessfully sought to impose tighter religious restrictions by banning women from smoking water pipes in public. On a recent afternoon in the new Carino’s restaurant – with billiards, enormous flat-screen televisions, buttery-soft chairs – women without head coverings were smoking freely.
But such places and people represent a wafer-thin slice of Gazan society, and focusing on them distorts the broader and grimmer picture.
Samah Saleh is a 21-year-old medical student who lives in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Her father, an electrician, is adding a second story to their house now that material is available from the tunnels. Ms. Saleh will get her own room for the first time in her life, but she views her good fortune in context.
“For the vast majority in Gaza, things are not improving,” she said. “Most people in Gaza remain forgotten.”
PALESTINIANS PELT GAZA RED CROSS OFFICE WITH EGGS, ROCKS
Palestinians pelt Gaza Red Cross office with eggs
Agence France Presse
June 24, 2011
news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110623/wl_mideast_afp/israelpalestiniansprisonershalitanniversaryicrc_20110623165342
GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories (AFP) – Palestinians today threw eggs at the international Red Cross office in Gaza to protest against a call for Hamas to show signs a captured Israeli soldier was still alive.
Dozens of angry protesters also chanted slogans against the International Committee of the Red Cross and ripped down and destroyed the Red Cross sign over the office.
They were protesting over a call earlier on Thursday by the ICRC, demanding that Gaza rulers show proof that Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured five years ago, is alive.
Hamas, while not directly rejecting the Red Cross call, said Shalit would be freed only once Israel released Palestinian prisoners.
“We will only consider resolving the Shalit issue if the issue of Palestinian prisoners in the occupation’s prisons is resolved,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri.
Indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas for a deal that would see 1,000 Palestinians, including 450 with Israeli blood on their hands, released in exchange for Shalit have been stalled for over a year.
Shalit was 19 when he was captured on June 25, 2006, by three armed groups, including Hamas, along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. He has been held ever since at a secret location in the Palestinian territory.
He has not been allowed visits by the Red Cross, and the last sign of life was in October 2009 when Hamas released a video of him calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do everything to free him.
“The total absence of information concerning Mr Shalit is completely unacceptable,” said Yves Daccord, the ICRC’s director general.
“The Shalit family have the right under international humanitarian law to be in contact with their son.”
But the protest, organized by a Palestinian prisoners organization, said the Red Cross should focus on the plight of the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails.
“The world and its Red Cross cry for one Israeli prisoner and try to forget thousands of Palestinian prisoners,” one banner said.
The Red Cross has regular access to all Palestinian prisoners.
Israel has accused the Red Cross of not doing enough to secure access to Shalit.
The non-existent Amina Arraf
* The Washington Post: “Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the male bloggers realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.”
* A “Free Amina!” Facebook page sprang up. “The Obama Administration must speak about this,” declared Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic. “This woman is a hero.”
* On June 7th the State Department announced that it was looking into Amina’s “kidnapping.”
* Mark Steyn: “Now consider it from Assad’s point of view. Unlike ‘Amina,’ ‘Rania,’ and the ‘three armed men in their early 20s’ who ‘hustled Amina into a red Dacia Logan,’ you have the disadvantage of actually existing. You’re the dictator of Syria. You’ve killed more demonstrators than those losers Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Gaddafi combined, and the Americans have barely uttered a peep. Suddenly Hillary Clinton, who was hailing you as a ‘reformer’ only 20 minutes ago, wants to give you a hard time over some lesbian blogger.”
* Steyn: “From CNN to the Guardian to Bianca Jagger to legions of Tweeters, Western liberalism fell for a ludicrous hoax. Why? You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. ‘Amina Arraf’ was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. That’s because the liberal worldview is a fiction.”
***
* French Newspaper Le Figaro: Hizbullah moves hundreds of missiles from its Syria storage sites to eastern Lebanon, fearing Assad could fall.
* The 8-year-old girl suicide bomber.
* Benny Morris accosted outside the London School of Economics.
CONTENTS
1. “How could the Left not fall for the Arab-lesbian-blogger hoax?” (By Mark Steyn, NRO, June 18, 2011)
2. “Dog days in the Hate Israel industry” (By Kelly McParland, National Post, June 23, 2011
3. “U.S. defends participation in Syrian-organized tour” (Associated Press, June 22, 2011)
4. “Hezbollah moving arms from Syria, fearing Assad’s fall” (Ha’aretz, June 26, 2011)
5. “Afghan girl tricked into carrying bomb” (By Alissa Rubin, NY Times, June 26, 2011)
6. “Accosted on Kingsway” (By Benny Morris, The National Interest, June 20, 2011)
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach nine articles of interest split across two dispatches today. Among the writers of these articles, Mark Steyn, Ethan Bronner, Benny Morris, Kevin Myers, Matthew Kalman and Kelly McParland are all subscribers to this email list.
The other part can be read here: BBC apologizes for anti-Israel dog story (& Gaza Red Cross office attacked). It includes a new video showing “the situation in Gaza” as not described by the BBC.
ARTICLES
FLORENCE OF ARABIA
How could the Left not fall for the Arab-lesbian-blogger hoax?
By Mark Steyn
The National Review
June 18, 2011
Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet — coming out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men.
On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, “Miss Brooks” and “Miss Arraf” were colleagues. “Amina” had posted at LezGetReal before starting “A Gay Girl In Damascus.” As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:
“Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.”
Who knows what romance might have blossomed had not “Amina” been arrested by a squad of Baath Party goons dispatched by Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Tom MacMaster then created “Rania,” a fake cousin for his fake lesbian, to try to rouse the world to take up the plight of the nonexistent Amina’s nonexistent detention.
A “Free Amina!” Facebook page sprang up.
“The Obama Administration must speak about this,” declared Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic. “This woman is a hero.”
On June 7th the State Department announced that it was looking into the “kidnapping.”
Now consider it from Assad’s point of view. Unlike “Amina,” “Rania,” and the “three armed men in their early 20s” who “hustled Amina into a red Dacia Logan,” you have the disadvantage of actually existing. You’re the dictator of Syria. You’ve killed more demonstrators than those losers Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Gaddafi combined, and the Americans have barely uttered a peep. Suddenly Hillary Clinton, who was hailing you as a “reformer” only 20 minutes ago, wants to give you a hard time over some lesbian blogger. Any moment now Sarkozy or Cameron or some other Europoseur will demand anti-homophobic NATO bombing missions over your presidential palace. On CNN Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper will be interviewing each other back and forth all day long about the Gay Spring sweeping the Arab world. You’ll be the first Middle East strongman brought down by lesbianism. You’ll be a laughing stock at Arab League Where-Are-They-Now? nights.
Who needs it? “Release the lesbian bloggers!” commands Assad.
“Er, what lesbian bloggers?” says his vizier. “This is Damascus, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” And he spends another sleepless night wondering if this is the most devilish CIA dirty trick of all, or if one of their satellite drones merely misinterpreted the grainy footage from the Colonel Gaddafi Lookalike round of Syrian Idol.
The pretty young lesbian Muslim was exposed as a portly 40-year-old male infidel at the University of Edinburgh with the help of “Paula Brooks,” shortly before “Paula” was exposed as a 58-year-old male construction worker from Ohio. “He would have got away with it if I hadn’t been such a stand-up guy,” the second phony lesbian said of the first phony lesbian. As to why stand-up guys are posing as sit-down lesbians, “Paula” told the Associated Press that “he felt he would not be taken seriously as a straight man.”
“He got that one right,” sneered the Toronto gay magazine Xtra.
Indeed. A century ago, a British Army officer went to the Levant and reinvented himself as Lawrence of Arabia. Now a middle-aged American male college student goes to the Internet and reinvents himself as Florence of Arabia. We have become familiar in recent years with the booming literary genre of the fake memoir, to which Oprah’s late Book Club was distressingly partial. Greg Mortensen’s now discredited Three Cups Of Tea took it to the next level, not just near mandatory in the usual circles (grade schools and sentimental punditry) but also compulsory in the Pentagon for commanders en route to Afghanistan. After centuries of disdain for the preferred beverage of imperialists, American officers in the Hindu Kush now drink more tea than the Brits, and they don’t even like it. But a charlatan told them to do it, so the tea allowance now consumes 23 percent of the Pentagon budget.
Yet Tom MacMaster topped even that. He took an actual, live, mass popular uprising and made an entirely unrepresentative and, indeed, nonexistent person its poster “girl.” From CNN to the Guardian to Bianca Jagger to legions of Tweeters, Western liberalism fell for a ludicrous hoax. Why?
Because they wanted to. It would be nice if “Amina Arraf” existed. As niche constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a fiction — a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at Number 29 and gambol and frolic in admiration of each other’s diversity. They will proffer cheery greetings over the picket fence, the one admiring the other’s attractive buttock-hugging leather shorts for that day’s Gay Pride parade as he prepares to take his daughter to the clitoridectomy clinic.
Yes, yes, I stereotype. But stereotypes become stereotypes because they’re grounded in observable reality. “Amina Arraf” is grounded in nothing more than a fetish fantasy as preposterous as those lipstick lesbians in porn movies who can’t wait for some hot straight guy to jump in and make it a threesome.
It would be statistically improbable for there to be no women attracted to other women in Damascus. But “Amina Arraf” is nothing more than the projection of parochial obsessions on to distant lands Western liberals are too lazy to try to figure out. In 2007 in The Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan, not yet mired up Sarah Palin’s birth canal without a paddle peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about the maternity of her youngest child, announced that, never mind his policies, Barack Obama’s visage alone would be “the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.” As he explained:
It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees this man — Barack Hussein Obama — is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. . . . If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.
For crying out loud. The assumption that “a young Pakistani Muslim” in Lahore or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the most feeble kind of projection even by the standards of Western liberal navel-gazing. If doting progressives stopped gazing longingly into “Obama’s face” for just a moment, they might notice that in Benghazi “democracy activists” have been rounding up Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. In Bahrain “democracy activists” have attacked hundreds of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, ripping the tongue out of one muezzin and leaving him brain damaged. What’s so “multicultural” about the pampered middle-aged narcissists of the West’s leisurely “activist” varsity pretending that the entire planet is just like them?
You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. “Amina Arraf” was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. That’s because the liberal worldview is a fiction.
“THEY’RE BEING KILLED BECAUSE THEY’D LIKE TO BE MORE LIKE ISRAEL”
Dog days in the Hate Israel industry
By Kelly McParland
The National Post (Canada)
June 23, 2011
Things must be getting tougher in the Hate Israel industry these days, what with Arab leaders slaughtering their own people everywhere you look, in order to hold onto their jobs.
People were killed in Egypt, people were killed in Tunisia and Bahrain, people are still being killed in Yemen, Libya and especially Syria. They’re being killed because they’d like to change the government, which you can do in Israel just by turning up to vote. They’re being killed because they’d like to be more like Israel. How can you focus the world’s attention on the despicable state of affairs in apartheid Israel when the people in neighbouring countries insist on giving up their lives in hopes of winning similar rights to those Israel already offers? It’s almost like the protesters in all those places didn’t realize that the source of all their troubles lies in Jerusalem, not in their own countries.
Hate Israel people aren’t easy to persuade, though, so they’re persevering despite the headwinds. The folks behind the Canadian boat to Gaza sent their little contingent off on the weekend to join the heroic struggle to break the murderous Israeli blockade of Gaza and bring life-saving supplies to its besieged people. The people of Gaza aren’t really besieged, and it’s not really that hard to send them supplies, if that’s your intention, but admitting as much would spoil all the drama and self-serving bombast of the Hate Israel folks, so they’re pretending otherwise. If they’re really lucky, Israel will try to turn back the boat and they can try to provoke a confrontation, enabling them to get a ton of international publicity for themselves, which is what they live for. It might be a bit more difficult than in the past, though, since Israel may be reluctant to play along, and since the blockade has already been eased. And Turkey, which has been supportive of the flotillas, has its hands full trying to deal with the flood of civilians fleeing Syria to escape the government’s murderous campaign to put down a popular revolt. (Syria is one of those countries that kills people who challenge the government, a state of affairs the Hate Israel people have to studiously ignore.)
The United Church of Canada, or a faction within it, is also keeping up its campaign to pretend Israel is worse than the countries that want to annihilate it. A “task force” within the church which has all of 15 members is trying to drum up support for a boycott of firms that do business in Israel. The campaign, as reported by the National Posts’ Charles Lewis, seems a little unfocused. It hasn’t been endorsed by the Church’s national body, “but it hasn’t unendorsed it either,” says Brian McIntosh, a reverend, pastor and spokesman for the campaigners. (The U.S. Senate hasn’t unendorsed it either, so I guess they must also be on board. Kind of a surprise, but there you go.)
Rev. McIntosh acknowledges that the group hasn’t called for boycotts against any of the many oppressive regimes in Africa or the Middle East, or China, where government critics get chucked in jail and members of many religious faiths may be persecuted. So why Israel?
No. 1, because Israel purports to be a democracy. No. 2, they are in violation of international law and even the UN has tried to call Israel to account. So what is left for people who want to see international law enforced? Libya just happened and the U.S. jumped to take on the presumed responsibility to protect civilians; they jumped in with all kinds of force. But they won’t do that against Israel ever because Israel purports to be a democracy.
“Purports to be”, like, they have elections and stuff. Which they don’t bother with in Syria or Libya or Bahrain. They just shoot people, which is evidently cleaner and more effective. One of the companies Rev. McIntosh wants boycotted is Indigo books, because owners Heather Reisman and Gerald Schwartz personally support a foundation that provides scholarships to Israeli soldiers. They do it on their own, but Rev. McIntosh figures they get their money from Indigo, though a quick Google search would show that Mr. Schwartz actually has one or two other business interests as well. So why pick Indigo? Rev. McIntosh doesn’t really have an answer, just as the Hate Israel people don’t really have an answer for why they hate Israel and not its murderous, repressive, anti-democratic neighbours.
They just do.
U.S. DEFENDS PARTICIPATION IN SYRIAN-ORGANIZED TOUR
U.S. defends participation in Syrian-organized tour
By Bradley Klapper
The Associated Press
June 22, 2011
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110621/ap_on_re_us/us_us_syria_3
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration struggled Tuesday to explain why its ambassador to Syria participated in a sanitized trip to the country’s restive north that was sponsored by President Bashar Assad’s regime to attempt to justify its military crackdown.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Monday’s trip to the abandoned town of Jisr al-Shughour allowed Ambassador Robert Ford to “see for himself the results of the Syrian government’s brutality.”
Yet it was unclear how Ford would have gathered such evidence on the government-organized tour. The sight of deserted streets and buildings, in and of themselves, wouldn’t prove the existence of a foreign conspiracy to destabilize Syria, as the government claims, or mass atrocities, as some Western governments and human rights groups allege.
Assad’s government hoped the trip to the restive Idlib province near the Turkish border would lend credence to its claim that criminals are behind the country’s growing unrest. They brought 70 Western and Arab diplomats along to see the town. Authorities claim armed groups killed 120 security personnel there two weeks ago.
Nuland said journalists and foreign diplomats saw an “empty town with significant damage.”
But she acknowledged that no residents were around to offer an opposing view from the one presented by Syrian government officials. And she couldn’t say if Ford asked to see graves or anything that might substantiate allegations of widespread abuses.
“This is a government that has not allowed ... any of the domestic press, any of the foreign press into its country,” she told reporters in Washington. “This is a government that has closed off the Internet and tried to keep its own people from speaking out. So to go north to bear witness, to see with our own eyes what the results of this awful encounter were, has been valuable for us.”
Nuland said Ford was debriefed by Syrian military intelligence, but that he would have resisted any attempts to portray the Syrian yearnings for reform as the work of foreign instigators. Ford’s conclusion was that he saw a “desperate, sad situation of a completely deserted town,” and that he would be sending a full report soon.
Clashes erupted almost two weeks ago in Jisr al-Shughour. Activists say army mutineers refused to participate in the crackdown on demonstrators calling for Assad’s ouster and then clashed with loyalist troops.
Government forces retook the town more than a week ago, but the U.N. refugee agency says more than 10,000 Syrians were forced to flee to Turkey. They are being sheltered in four camps across the border.
Ford’s trip comes after months of criticism from Republican lawmakers who’ve derided the administration for sending an ambassador to Damascus. Ford took up his post in January as part of the Obama administration’s attempt, now in limbo, to thaw chilly relations with Assad’s Syria and improve chances that Syria might be helpful in brokering Arab peace with Israel.
The United States had left the Damascus ambassadorial post unfilled for five years in protest of alleged Syrian involvement in the assassination of a Lebanese politician who had criticized Syrian domination of his country.
Shortly after Ford arrived, unrest spread across Syria. Assad has balanced promises of reform with brutal repression of pro-democracy demonstrators. More than 1,400 Syrians have been killed and 10,000 detained in three months of unrest, according to opposition groups.
For the administration, resisting the idea that Ford’s recess appointment amounted to an unwarranted reward to Assad’s often pro-Iran and anti-U.S. government, has been difficult. U.S. officials have been unable to point to any concrete accomplishments under his tenure. And they acknowledge that Ford has been rebuffed in several attempts to speak directly with senior Syrian officials to press the American disapproval of the government’s actions.
Nuland defended Ford’s work.
“The fact that we have an ambassador there, the fact that we have somebody of such seniority, gives us the chance to make the point again and again,” Nuland said. “We stand with the side of those who want change in Syria.”
She said Ford is meeting with a broad group of Syrians and that he is not subject to travel restrictions, even if insecurity hampers his ability to meet people. The crackdown also leaves it unclear how many Syrian opposition figures are able to travel safely to the U.S. embassy in Damascus to speak with the ambassador.
NOTE: The Le Figaro report by Georges Malbrunot, “Le Hezbollah rapatrie son arsenal de Syrie,” is posted here [access requires payment]
HEZBOLLAH MOVING ARMS FROM SYRIA TO LEBANON, FEARING ASSAD’S FALL
Report: Hezbollah moving arms from Syria to Lebanon, fearing Assad’s fall
By Barak Ravid and Amos Harel
Ha’aretz
June 26, 2011
In recent weeks Hezbollah has moved hundreds of missiles from storage sites in Syria to bases in eastern Lebanon, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported yesterday. According to the report, Hezbollah moved the missiles over fears that a successor to the failing regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad could sever ties with the organization.
The French daily cites a Western expert who the paper said closely follows relations among Hezbollah and Iran and Syria. The expert is quoted as calling Syria the backyard through which Iran sends weapons to Hezbollah, and said efforts have been made to send as much weaponry as possible to Lebanon before the fall of the Assad regime.
According to the report, Western intelligence agencies in recent weeks have identified wide-scale movement of trucks over the Syrian-Lebanese border in the Bekaa region carrying rockets and missiles from storage facilities on the Syrian side. Le Figaro said the operation included sophisticated efforts at camouflage and that the United States and Israel have recently stepped up their monitoring of Iranian weapons smuggling.
The report quoted a “Western expert” as saying that intelligence agencies have monitored the movement of trucks from the Syrian border to Lebanon’s Bekaa region containing long-range Iranian-produced Zilzal, Fajr-3 and Fajr-4 missiles.
Hezbollah had been storing these missiles in depots in Syria. Some of the depots are secured by Hezbollah personnel while others are located on Syrian military bases. According to the report, the movement of the missiles has been problematic, particularly due to concerns that Israel and other nations are monitoring the trucks with spy satellites.
“Hezbollah fears Israel will bomb the convoys,” Le Figaro reported.
The paper added that Hezbollah has moved the missiles using means of camouflage more sophisticated than it has used before.
The report also noted that Syrian intelligence and the Al-Quds force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard recently established a joint operations room at the international airport in Damascus. This step was taken as a result of the lessons learned when an Iranian arms plane was intercepted in Turkey in March. According to the report, the plane, which was on its way from Iran to Syria, was forced to land in Turkey due to a tip American intelligence passed to Turkey. A search of the plane uncovered missiles, mortars and other weapons.
SECRET VISIT
Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, director of Military Intelligence, secretly visited Washington and New York about three weeks ago to meet with White House officials and ambassadors from United Nations Security Council member states over developments in Syria and Lebanon. A knowledgeable Western diplomat said Kochavi warned of the danger of Syrian armaments reaching Hezbollah in the event Assad’s regime fell.
Last year Ha’aretz reported on Hezbollah rocket training over the Syrian border. Now the organization seems to believe its weapons are more secure in Lebanon than in Syria, due to the unrest there.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak has recently said on several occasions that Assad’s regime would not survive for more than a few more months. Senior Israeli officials told Ha’aretz last week that Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards have an active role in putting down Syrian unrest.
According to international media reports, on several occasions in the past three years Israel has considered attacking convoys transporting weapons from Syria to Lebanon.
Barak has repeatedly said that Israel would take a grave view of arms transfers into Lebanon and would consider taking action against such moves. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed after the Second Lebanon War, barred weapons smuggling from Syria to Lebanon but the international community has done little to address the issue.
THE 8-YEAR-OLD GIRL SUICIDE BOMBER
Afghan girl tricked into carrying bomb, officials say
By Alissa Rubin
The New York Times
June 26, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan — Insurgents tricked an 8-year-old girl in a remote area of central Afghanistan into carrying a bomb wrapped in cloth that they detonated remotely when she was close to a police vehicle, the Afghan authorities said Sunday.
Only the girl was killed in the blast, which occurred Sunday morning in the village of Uwshi in the Char Chino District, said Fazal Ahmad Shirzad, the police chief of Oruzgan Province.
Mr. Shirzad said he believed the girl was unaware that the bag she had been given by Taliban insurgents held a bomb. Her body was “taken to a nearby security check post, and the police called her relatives,” he said.
Meanwhile, in Logar Province in southeastern Afghanistan, the death toll rose to 37 after a bombing on Saturday at a small-town hospital, said Dr. Mohammad Zaref Nayebkhail, the director of public health for the province. He said that at least 53 people had been wounded.
But, he said, the actual number of casualties was probably much higher. “Local villagers rushed to the hospital right after the explosion and took the bodies of their relatives to their own villages,” he said.
In other parts of the country, four NATO soldiers were killed. Two of them were Spanish soldiers who died when an improvised explosive device detonated in Badghis Province in western Afghanistan, the Spanish Defense Ministry said. The other two soldiers died in separate episodes in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to a NATO statement.
Afghan radio stations also reported that rocket fire from Pakistan over the last week had led President Hamid Karzai to register a former complaint with the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, at a regional terrorism meeting in Iran on Saturday. Mr. Zardari promised to investigate, said Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar.
The unexplained rocket fire will be a topic of discussion when senior government figures from the two countries meet this week, Mr. Omar said. The Afghan National Security Council discussed the matter on Sunday.
According to Mr. Omar, President Zardari and the Pakistani Interior Ministry said the rockets, which hit Kunar and Nangarhar Provinces, were not fired by the Pakistani Army.
Mr. Omar said 470 rockets had been fired, killing at least 18 people and wounding 17. Since Pakistan’s tribal areas border eastern Afghanistan and are largely outside the Pakistani government’s control, it is possible that insurgent groups are responsible. But some Pakistani insurgents have set up bases in Kunar and Nuristan Provinces in Afghanistan to carry out attacks in Pakistan, raising the possibility that the rockets may have been fired by the Pakistani security forces.
“We want this resolved peacefully,” Mr. Omar said. He added that if the Pakistani government was not responsible, it should say so publicly and find and stop the attackers.
General Mohammed Zahir Azimi said that Afghan military forces were “ready to retaliate” if instructed to do so. A NATO spokesman said coalition officials were not aware of the rocket fire because they did not have troops in the areas where it occurred.
ATTACKED OUTSIDE THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
Accosted on Kingsway
By Prof. Benny Morris
The National Interest
June 20, 2011
nationalinterest.org/commentary/curbing-muslim-intimidation-5496
Last week I had a rather ambivalent experience at the London School of Economics which may point to something beyond the personal – indeed, about where Britain, and possibly Western Europe as a whole, are heading.
I was invited to lecture on the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A few hours earlier, a fire had broken out in a nearby building and Kingsway was sealed off, so the taxi dropped me off a few blocks away. As I walked down Kingsway, a major London thoroughfare, a small mob – I don’t think any other word is appropriate – of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards as I advanced towards the building where the lecture was to take place, raucously harangued and bated me with cries of “fascist,” “racist,” “England should never have allowed you in,” “you shouldn’t be allowed to speak.” Several spoke in broken, obviously newly acquired, English. Violence was thick in the air though none was actually used. Passersby looked on in astonishment, and perhaps shame, but it seemed the sight of angry bearded, caftaned Muslims was sufficient to deter any intervention. To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin – though on Kingsway no one, to the best of my recall, screamed the word “Jew.”
In the lecture hall, after a cup of tea, the session, with an audience of some 350 students and others, passed remarkably smoothly. Entry required tickets, which were freely dispensed upon the provision of name and address. The LSE had beefed up security and several bobbies stood outside the building confronting the dozen or so demonstrators who held aloft placards stating “Benni Morris is a Fascist,” “Go home,” etc. Inside, in the lecture hall, surprisingly, there was absolute silence during my talk; you could have heard a pin drop. The Q and A session afterwards was by and large civilized, though several Muslim participants, including girls with scarves, displayed anger and dismissiveness. One asserted: “You are not an historian”; another, more delicately, suggested that the lecturer “professes to be a serious historian.” However, the overwhleming majority of the audience was respectful and, in my view, appreciative (to judge by the volume of clapping at the end of the lecture and at the end of the Q and A), but a small minority jeered and clapped loudly when anti-Zionist questions or points were raised.
The manner of our exit from the lecture hall was also noteworthy. The chairman asked the audience to stay in their seats until the group on stage departed. I was ushered by the security team down an elevator and through a narrow basement passage full of kitchen stores and out a side entrance. Like an American president in a B-rated thriller.
Another disconcerting element in what went on in the lecture hall was the hosting LSE professor’s brief introductory remarks, which failed completely to note the harrassment and intimidation (of which he had been made fully aware) of the lecturer on Kingsway, or to criticize them in any way. My assumption was that some were LSE students.
There was a sense that the chairman was deliberately displaying caution in view of the world in which he lives. Which brings me back to what happened on Kingsway.
Uncurbed, Muslim intimidation in the public domain of people they see as disagreeing with them is palpable and palpably affecting the British Christian majority among whom they live, indeed, cowing them into silence. One senses real fear (perhaps a corner was turned with the Muslim reactions around the world to the “Mohammed cartoons” and the responses in the West to these reactions.) Which, if true, is a sad indication of what is happening in the historic mother of democracies and may point to what is happening, and will increasingly happen, in Western Europe in general in the coming decades. (A video of the LSE talk is on the website. A Muslim cameraman also made a video of the mob scene on Kingsway and posted it on the web – but appears to have thought better of it and subsequently removed it.)
* George Gilder: “During the era of Israeli ‘occupation’ that ran from after the war of 1967 to 1993, the number of Arabs in the territories tripled to some 3 million, with the creation of some 261 new towns, a tripling of Arab per capita incomes, and a rise in life expectancy from 52 to 73 years. Meanwhile, the number of Israeli settlers in this area stripped of Jews by Jordan rose only to 250,000. Again, far from effecting any displacement of Arabs, the Jewish settlements [and the greatly improved economic and educational development and world class healthcare they introduced into the area] enabled a huge increase in both the number and wealth of the Palestinian Arabs.”
* Gilder: The cause of the subsequent disaster was intervention from the West under the so-called Peace Process of the early 1990s. Foreign aid poured in at a rate of close to $4 billion per year, and the result was a 40 percent decline in per capita income.
* The spurious ideology of Palestinian victimization by Israel blinds nearly all observers to the actual facts of economic life in the region. The Palestinians continued to benefit heavily from Israeli enterprise and prospered mightily compared to Arabs in other countries in the region.
* Tom Gross: “Is it not time that the international community stopped regarding Jewish settlers merely as a political problem, people to be forcibly removed from their homes, and started thinking in creative ways about how they can economically and politically be part of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”
Palestinian children in Jenin
THE ECONOMICS OF SETTLEMENT
[Note by Tom Gross]
I have always thought that Jews have the right to live in Hebron and other important Jewish sites in Judea and Samaria (an area which in recent decades has been given the artificial political name “the West Bank”), just as Arabs should have the right to live in Haifa and Jaffa, or indeed in London and Paris.
However, I am not, and have never been, a supporter of the settlement project in the nationalistic and occasionally fervent way it has developed.
But now to remove all Jews from these areas – as virtually every single Western politician and media commentator seems to suggest – would not only be politically and morally problematic, it would be unwise economically too.
Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria have been so vilified by the international community and the Western media, that certain truths have become obscured, in particular the extent to which the Palestinian economy has been greatly boosted by Jewish presence in the area.
In the piece below, from the current edition of The American Spectator, the author George Gilder, explains why (in his words) “settlers are good for the Palestinians”.
This is a long piece, worth reading in full if you have time. But for those that don’t, I attach a summary first, of some of his key points.
SUMMARY
WHY THE REMOVAL OF JEWS WOULD IN MANY WAYS BE DETRIMENTAL TO THE ARABS
* In the mid-19th century, before the arrival of the first groups of Jewish settlers, Arabs living in what became the mandate territory of Palestine numbered between 200,000 and 300,000. Their population density and longevity resembled today’s conditions in parched and depopulated Saharan Chad. The fact that some 5.5 million Arabs now live in the former British Mandate, with a life expectancy of more than 70 years, is mainly attributable, for better or worse, to the work of those Jewish settlers.
* In draining swamps, leaching saline soils, redeeming dunes into orchards and poultry farms, in planting millions of trees on rocky hills, in constructing elaborate water works and terraces on the hills, in digging 548 wells and supporting canals in little more than a decade and irrigating thousands of acres of land, establishing industries, hospitals, clinics, and schools, the 500,000 Jewish settlers who arrived before the creation of Israel massively expanded the very absorptive dimensions and capacity of the country. It was these advances that made possible the fivefold 20th-century surge of the Arab population by 1940.
* The new opportunities in Palestine attracted hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and the desert. By 1948, the Arab population in the Mandate area had grown to some 1.35 million, an increase of 60% since the 1930s. With wages for Arab workers double or more the wages in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, in 1936, a British Royal Commission could report: “The whole range of public services has steadily developed to the benefit of the [Arab] fellaheen... the revenue for those services having been largely provided by the Jews.”
* The spurious ideology of Palestinian victimization by Israel blinds nearly all observers to the actual facts of economic life in the region. Following 1948, the Palestinians continued to benefit heavily from Israeli enterprise and prospered mightily compared to Arabs in other countries in the region. During the era of Israeli “occupation” from 1967 to 1993, the number of Arabs in the territories tripled to some 3 million, with the creation of some 261 new towns, a tripling of Arab per capita incomes, and a rise in life expectancy from 52 to 73 years.
* Far from effecting any displacement of Arabs, the Jewish settlements enabled a huge increase in both the number and wealth of the Palestinian Arabs.
* Nowhere in the world outside of the United States have Arabs performed as well economically as have Arabs in Israel.
* Any income gap between the Jewish and Arab populations of Israel is clearly attributable to the prowess of Jewish entrepreneurs and other professionals, whose excellence produces similar gaps in every free country on earth with significant numbers of Jews. Jews, for example, outearn other Caucasians in the United States by an even larger margin than they outearn Arabs in Israel.
* On April 9, 2011, the PLO’s chief representative in the U.S., Maen Areikat, told the Jewish Forward: “Palestinians are not after improving their condition of living. Our real problem is ending the occupation” – getting rid of those dastardly settlers!
* With Hamas now joining with the Palestinian Authority and with $4 billion in new foreign aid, including $900 million directly from the U.S. pouring into Gaza and the West Bank, the immediate prospects are grim. Nonetheless, Israel’s current administration, under the business-savvy leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, is committed to the economics of collaboration and prosperity. As the abatement of violence permits, he is resolutely opening up new opportunities for Palestinian entrepreneurship and growth.
* A few simple statistics suggest that the Israeli “settlers” (and to the PLO all Israelis are settlers) once again are the solution rather than the problem in the region. Since the foundation of the State of Israel in a land that is half desert with no rain for six months of the year, the population has risen tenfold. While the amount of land under cultivation has nearly tripled, agricultural production has increased sixteenfold, producing some $800 million worth of Israeli farm exports last year. At the same time, industrial output has surged fiftyfold. Meanwhile, Israeli use of water has decreased by 10 percent.
* Israelis now purify and recycle some 95 percent of the nation’s sewage, including imports of sewage from the West Bank and Gaza – “They sell us sewage and we give them potable water,” said one Israeli official.
* As George Will acerbically noted in a one of a series of particularly brilliant columns last year, “Turkey was claiming to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, a land with higher incomes and longevity than Turkey itself.”
(You can read one of Will’s pieces here.)
FULL ARTICLE
“HOW THE ARAB ANNUAL POPULATION GROWTH RATE OF 16.2 PERCENT BECAME THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD”
The Economics of Settlement
The American Spectator
June 2011 issue
By George Gilder
The root cause of Middle Eastern turmoil, according to a broad consensus of the international media and the considered cerebrations of the deepest-thinking movie stars, is Israeli settlers in what are described as the “occupied territories” on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Even such celebrated and fervent supporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lévy put the settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies. Remove the settlers, according to these sage analyses of the scene, and the problems of the region become remediable at last.
Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute adds to these political concerns a coming environmental catastrophe, also presumably aggravated by the Israeli settlers and their hydrophilic irrigation projects. He sees the Middle East as severely threatened by the growth of population and the exhaustion of water resources. The Institute explains: “Since one ton of grain represents 1,000 tons of water, [importing grain] becomes the most efficient way to import water. Last year, Iran imported 7 million tons of wheat, eclipsing Japan to become the world’s leading wheat importer. This year, Egypt is also projected to move ahead of Japan. The water required to produce the grain and other foodstuffs imported into [the region] last year was roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River.”
Although these two concerns might seem unrelated, they converge in the history of Israel, created by several generations of settlers and constrained at every point by the dearth of water in a mostly desert land. In the mid-19th century, before the arrival of the first groups of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms in Russia, Arabs living in what became the mandate territory of Palestine – now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza – numbered between 200,000 and 300,000. Their population density and longevity resembled today’s conditions in parched and depopulated Saharan Chad. Although Worldwatch might prefer to see the Middle East returned to these more earth-friendly, organic, and sustainable demographics, the fact that some 5.5 million Arabs now live in the former British Mandate, with a life expectancy of more than 70 years, is mainly attributable, for better or worse, to the work of those Jewish settlers.
CHRONICLING THE ORIGINS of this Jewish feat in 1939, nine years before the creation of the modern state of Israel, was one of the little-known heroes of the 20th century, Walter Clay Lowdermilk. An American expert on land usage, he formulated and popularized the best techniques of soil reclamation and watershed management around the globe. Today the agricultural school at Technion bears the lapidary name of this American-born Christian, and the world-leading feats of Israeli water conservation attest in part to his influence.
A Rhodes scholar at Oxford who earned his Berkeley doctorate in forestry, Lowdermilk focused his career on “reading the land” for its tales of human civilization. Married to a Christian missionary, he moved early in his career to northern China to find remedies for the great famine there in 1920 and 1921. Rejecting the prevailing view that the crisis was caused by climate change, Lowdermilk and his team identified the real problem as the huge load of silt borne down the Yellow River every year and deposited in the lowlands of the river, causing floods and depleting the up-country of soils. “In the presence of such tragic scenes,” he wrote, “I resolved to devote my lifetime to [the] study of ways to conserve the lands on which mankind depends.”
Becoming assistant chief in charge of research for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (now part of the Department of Agriculture), he embarked in 1938 on a global mission to determine how the experience of older civilizations could guide the U.S. in surmounting its own agricultural crises of the Dust Bowl and Southern erosion. This 25,000-mile peregrination ended in Palestine, where he confronted the question of how the “land of milk and honey” described in the Bible had become a wasteland.
In ancient times, as he knew, Palestine was largely self-sufficient, with a population of millions. Replete with forests, teeming with sheep and goats, full of farms and wineries, the landscape evoked a European plenitude. By 1939, however, when Lowdermilk arrived in the area, it was largely an environmental disaster. As he recounted in his 1944 book, Palestine, Land of Promise, “when Jewish colonists first began their work in 1882... the soils were eroded off the uplands to bedrock over fully one half the hills; streams across the coastal plain were choked with erosional debris from the hills to form pestilential marshes infested with dreaded malaria; the fair cities and elaborate works of ancient times were left in doleful ruins.” In the late 19th century around the current Tel Aviv, Lowdermilk was told, “no more than 100 miserable families lived in huts.” Jericho, once luxuriantly shaded by balsams, was treeless.
What amazed Lowdermilk, though – and changed his life – was not the 1,000 years of deterioration but the some 50 years of reclamation of both the highlands and the lowlands by relatively small groups of Jewish settlers. As one of many examples of valley reclamation, he tells the story of the settlement of Petah Tikva, established by Jews from Jerusalem in 1878, in defiance of warnings from physicians who saw the area outside what is now Tel Aviv as hopelessly infested with malarial mosquitoes. After initial failures and retreats, Petah Tikva became “the first settlement to conquer the deadly foe of malaria,” by “planting Eucalyptus [locally known as ‘Jew trees’] in the swamps to absorb the moisture,” draining other swamps, importing large quantities of quinine, and developing rich agriculture and citriculture. By the time of Lowdermilk’s visit, Petah Tikva had become the largest of the Jewish rural settlements,” supporting 20,000 people “where there were only 400 fever-ridden fellaheen sixty years ago.” (Today it is at the center of Israel’s high-tech industry.)
In the gouged and gullied hills near Jerusalem, reclamation by settlers was epitomized by Kiriath Anavim. Founded in 1920 among thorn bushes, dwarfed trees, and a desolate rubble of rocks, the settlement by the time of Lowdermilk’s trip boasted elaborate terraced lands, orchards, and vineyards, with plum, peach, and apricot trees, honey, and poultry, together with prosperous dairies producing milk for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
In draining swamps, leaching saline soils, redeeming dunes into orchards and poultry farms, in planting millions of trees on rocky hills, in constructing elaborate water works and terraces on the hills, in digging 548 wells and supporting canals in little more than a decade and irrigating thousands of acres of land, establishing industries, hospitals, clinics, and schools, the 500,000 Jewish settlers who arrived before the creation of Israel massively expanded the very absorptive dimensions and capacity of the country. It was these advances that made possible the fivefold 20th-century surge of the Arab population by 1940.
AS LOWDERMILK recounted in his book, in the 21 years between 1921 and 1942, the Jews increased the number of enterprises four-fold, the number of jobs more than ten-fold, and total invested capital from a few hundred thousand dollars to the equivalent of $70 million in 1942 dollars. Particularly significant in Lowdermilk’s view were the purchases of large expanses of unused Arab land by Jewish settlers, many of whom had earned the necessary funds by their own hard work on the arid soils. On most occasions, the settlers bought only a small proportion of an individual Arab’s holding and paid three or four times what similar plots sold for in Syria (and far more even than in Southern California). Thus the Jewish purchases provided capital for Arab farms, allowing a dramatic expansion of their production. “In cases where the land belongs to absentee owners and tenants are forced to move...I found that the Jewish purchasers had provided compensation to enable the tenants to lease other property.”
Lowdermilk reported that many Arab landowners had already begun to resist the agricultural advances and resented the success of the Jews, while the British in the area “are imbued with old colonial traditions and befriend feudal leaders.” European diplomats often enjoyed going native by mimicking Arab grandees (who in turn were learning European ethnic prejudices and disdain for “men in trade”). Together they smeared these fully beneficial transactions with anti-Semitic slurs and caricatures. However, the results of the purchases were clear: “During the last 25 years (before 1939), Jews have acquired just six percent of Palestine’s 6.5 million acres or 400 thousand acres, less than one quarter of which was previously cultivated by Arabs.”
These new opportunities in Palestine attracted hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and the desert. With wages for Arab workers double or more the wages in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, in 1936, a British Royal Commission could report: “The whole range of public services has steadily developed to the benefit of the [Arab] fellaheen...the revenue for those services having been largely provided by the Jews.”
Lowdermilk clinched his argument by a sophisticated comparison with conditions in Jordan. A country almost four times larger than Palestine (including Sinai), Jordan partakes of the same mountain fold of mesozoic limestone, the same rich river plains, the same Rift Valley and highlands, the same mineral resources, the same climate, and a several times larger population in ancient times. But at the time of Lowdermilk’s visit, its agricultural output and per capita consumption of imports was one-fifth that of Palestine and its population density was one-tenth Palestine’s.
Without Jewish settlements, Jordan was suffering heavy emigration (mostly to America and Palestine) while Palestine attracted increasing flows of immigrants, mostly clustering around the Jewish settlements. With Jewish advances in food production and in medicine and public hygiene, Arab health statistics increasingly converged with those of the Jewish settlers. While the Arab birth rate actually dropped by 10 percent, the death rate fell by one-third and infant mortality dropped 37 percent. The net result was an Arab annual population growth rate of 16.2 percent, the highest in the world (exclusive of immigration). Lowdermilk summed it up: “Rural Palestine is becoming less and less like Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq and more like Denmark, Holland, and parts of the United States [Southern California].”
AGAINST ALL THESE heroics of advancement, however, a European-originated countercurrent was flowing. As widely reported by Lowdermilk and others on the scene, during the previous decade, “Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were very active in fomenting Arab discontents.” A spearhead was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the most notable Palestinian leader, who became a fervent supporter of the Holocaust, soon enlisted in Hitler’s cause, and spent the war at his headquarters in Berlin. “All Jewish immigration should be prohibited,” the Mufti said, “since the country could not even absorb the Jews who were already there.” They would have to be removed by a process “kindly or painful as the case might be.”
Lowdermilk pointed to a portentous precedent in Iraq. When the British relinquished their mandate, Iraqi leaders promised solemnly to protect the Assyrians – the Christian minority in the country. “Instead, the Assyrian Christians were slaughtered by Arabs of the Mufti’s ilk who did not wish to ‘assimilate or digest them.’ “
Lowdermilk predicted that “Arab rule in Palestine would...put an abrupt end to the reclamation work now being carried on so splendidly.” Under Arab rule, Palestine has always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic 20th-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is not a nation but a naqba.
Many people imagine that the new and larger influx of Jewish settlers after World War II perpetrated an injustice on the Arabs. What they did, in fact, was to continue the heroic and ingenious pattern of development depicted by Lowdermilk in 1939. With the Arab population growing apace with the Jewish population in most neighborhoods, and indeed faster in some, there could not possibly have been any significant displacement. The demographic numbers discredit as simply mythological or mendacious all the literature of Palestinian grievance and eviction from the likes of Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim Rashid Khalidi, and the other divas of the naqba narrative.
By 1948, the Arab population in the Mandate area had grown to some 1.35 million, an increase of 60 percent since the 1930s, and up by a factor of seven since the arrival of the creative, far-seeing cohort of pioneering Jews from Russia in the 1880s. Mostly concentrated in neighborhoods abutting the Zionist settlements, this Arab population was the largest in the entire history of Palestine. Only the 1948 invasion by five Arab armies – and a desperate and courageous Israeli self-defense – drove out many of the Arabs, some 700,000. These Palestinian Arabs were evicted or urged to flee by Arab leaders in 1948 in a war that the Jews neither sought nor invited. But the creation of the State of Israel and its growing economy accelerated a renewed immigration into the area to today’s level of some 5.5 million Arabs.
The only real Palestinian naqba came not in 1948 at the hands of Zionists, but rather in 1949, at the hands of foreign aid bureaucrats in the form of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). In a desire to compensate the Palestinians for their alleged victimization by the creation of the State of Israel, the international bureaucracies perpetrated and created a genuine and permanent victimization among the 1.4 million refugees who live in UNRWA’s 59 camps and the millions more who reside in the surrounding ghettoes.
Financed by the U.S. and the European Union, as Michael S. Bernstam of Stanford’s Hoover Institution explained in Commentary in December of 2010, UNRWA perpetuates the notion of a “right of return” to the land. Yet this land scarcely existed as an asset before the Jews reclaimed it and made it valuable and capable of supporting life. “This is not the right of return,” writes Bernstam, “it is a claim of the right to retake...” or more accurately to seize the land outright from its lawful owners. A typical harvest of misconceived foreign aid, this tragic error extends the Palestinian grievance beyond Gaza and the West Bank into countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon that also host Palestinian camps.
The spurious ideology of Palestinian victimization by Israel blinds nearly all observers to the actual facts of economic life in the region. No one reading the current literature could have any idea that throughout most of the three roughly 20-year economic eras following 1948, the Palestinians continued to benefit heavily from Israeli enterprise and prospered mightily compared to Arabs in other countries in the region.
During the era of Israeli “occupation” that ran from after the war of 1967 to 1993, for example, the number of Arabs in the territories tripled to some 3 million, with the creation of some 261 new towns, a tripling of Arab per capita incomes, and a rise in life expectancy from 52 to 73 years. Meanwhile, the number of Israeli settlers in this area stripped of Jews by Jordan rose only to 250,000. Again, far from effecting any displacement of Arabs, the Jewish settlements enabled a huge increase in both the number and wealth of the Palestinian Arabs.
THE CAUSE OF the subsequent disaster was intervention from the West under the so-called Peace Process of the early 1990s. Foreign aid poured in at a rate of close to $4 billion per year, and the PLO under Yassir Arafat and his predatory gang of rabid anti-Semites was brought in from Tunisia to manage the bonanza. The result was a 40 percent decline in per capita income together with mounting terrorism and anti-Semitic animus. In this environment, Palestinian entrepreneurship collapsed amid much talk of the “humiliation” of Palestinians working for Jews.
The test of a civilization is what it accomplishes in advancing the human cause – what it creates rather than what it claims. From the outset early in the 20th century, Palestinian nationalism itself was an artificial construct characterized by hostility toward Jews, as well as toward capitalism. Palestinian political behavior was so obnoxious that their leaders were rejected by every Arab state in which they sought refuge, including the contiguous and predominantly Palestinian state of Jordan when it ruled the West Bank between 1948 and 1967. But after 1967, and under Israeli rule, the Palestinians proved that by focusing on enterprise complementing the Israeli economy they could become prosperous.
The most revealing gauge of the impact of the Israeli economy on Arabs – as opposed to the self-inflicted disruption of terrorism – is the performance of the one-fifth of Palestinian Arabs who live in Israel as citizens. A recent thicket of sociology was planted on the subject by UN economist Raja Khalidi in the Journal of Palestine Studies published by the University of California Press in Berkeley, California, and edited by Khalidi’s brother Rashid. Rashid Khalidi became briefly famous during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 for his “consistent reminders to me,” as the presidential candidate said, “of my own blind spots and my own biases” relating to Palestinian suffering. In his article, Raja Khalidi’s view “pits a discriminatory and hegemonic Jewish state (and economy) against an ethno-national minority unable to access its fair share of national resources.”
The “natural resources” denied to Arabs in Israel, according to Raja Khalidi, turn out to be resources of land. After they sold it to Jewish settlers, they suffered sellers’ remorse. Apparently, they did not anticipate that the land could yield the region’s most fertile farms or could give birth to skyscrapers and high-technology factories. Why didn’t anyone tell them? Now they want it back, along with the skyscrapers and factories.
Raja Khalidi’s entire argument itself suffers from a huge gap – namely, the absence of evidence that Arabs anywhere in the world outside of the United States have performed as well economically as have Arabs in Israel. The average Arab annual per capita income in Israel is $600 per month (i.e., an annual household income of $14,400 for a family of four). This compares with an average annual income of $9,400 for a family of four in sparsely populated Jordan, which roughly matches the average across the Arab world. Moreover, while Palestinians in the disputed territories have undergone a catastrophic 40 percent drop in income since the PLO’s resurgence, the income gap between Israel’s Palestinian Arab population and Jewish population has, in fact, been declining.
Any income gap between the Jewish and Arab populations of Israel is clearly attributable to the prowess of Jewish entrepreneurs and other professionals, whose excellence produces similar gaps in every free country on earth with significant numbers of Jews. Jews, for example, outearn other Caucasians in the United States by an even larger margin than they outearn Arabs in Israel. This probably reflects the fact that the United States, until recently, had a freer economy, by most standards, than Israel.
The problem is Khalidi’s own attitude, which echoes the view of Arab leader Musa Alami, meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1934. When Ben-Gurion told him that Zionism “would bring a blessing to the Arabs of Palestine, and they have no good cause to oppose us,” Alami retorted, “I would prefer that the country remain impoverished and barren for another hundred years, until we ourselves are able to develop it on our own.” This sentiment continues today under Hamas. In 2005, when Israelis actually relinquished their advanced greenhouses and irrigation equipment in Gaza, the leaders of Hamas ordered many of these facilities destroyed. Some things never change. On April 9, 2011, the PLO’s chief representative in the U.S., Maen Areikat, told the Jewish Forward: “Palestinians are not after improving their condition of living. Our real problem is ending the occupation” – getting rid of those dastardly settlers!
With Hamas now joining with the Palestinian Authority and with $4 billion in new foreign aid, including $900 million directly from the U.S. pouring into Gaza and the West Bank, the immediate prospects are grim. Nonetheless, Israel’s current administration, under the business-savvy leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, is committed to the economics of collaboration and prosperity. As the abatement of violence permits, he is resolutely opening up new opportunities for Palestinian entrepreneurship and growth.
The choice for the Palestinians is clear, as always, between the ascent of capitalism and freedom and the economics of dependency and national socialism.
SO WHAT DOES THIS history have to do with the Worldwatch alarms about a rising threat of water exhaustion in the Middle East? A few simple statistics suggest that the Israeli “settlers” (and to the PLO all Israelis are settlers) once again are the solution rather than the problem in the region. Since the foundation of the State of Israel in a land that is half desert with no rain for six months of the year, the population has risen tenfold. While the amount of land under cultivation has nearly tripled, agricultural production has increased sixteenfold, producing some $800 million worth of Israeli farm exports last year. At the same time, industrial output has surged fiftyfold. Meanwhile, Israeli use of water has decreased by 10 percent.
Israelis now purify and recycle some 95 percent of the nation’s sewage, including imports of sewage from the West Bank and Gaza – “They sell us sewage and we give them potable water,” said one Israeli official. Israel is pioneering ever more efficient forms of drip irrigation and gains some 50 percent of its water from world-leading desalinization plants. With an array of new hydrological innovations, Israel provides the crucial answers to the acute water crisis that afflicts the Middle East and much of the rest of the world. Just as the Israeli settlers enabled the emergence of an economy in Palestine, so they offer the prospect of saving the entire region from water exhaustion and poverty after the oil boom ends.
America’s enemies in the Middle East well understand that no American military goals or resources in the Middle East are as remotely as important to the region as is Israel, with its ever-growing panoply of technical, economic, moral, and military assets. Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter, with nary a deficit or “stimulus plan” and with an ascendant shekel, while increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies, from microchip design, network algorithms, medical instruments, and water recycling to missile defense, robotic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicles. As the incomparable Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post reports, the latest economic data show Israel’s economy growing 7.8 percent in the last quarter of 2010, with exports up 19.9 percent, accelerating to a 27.3 percent rise in the first quarter of 2011. So much for talk of boycotts.
Meanwhile, contrary to all the floods of mendacious propaganda purveyed by an ever-gullible mainstream media, Netanyahu’s bold economic and humanitarian policies in the West Bank and Gaza have succeeded in fostering a brisk economic revival in the territories, with a recovery rate of near 10 percent in Gaza alone. As George Will acerbically noted in a particularly brilliant column, “Turkey was claiming to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, a land with higher incomes and longevity than Turkey itself.”
Israel’s unparalleled achievements in industry and intellect have fanned the familiar anti-Semitic frenzies among all the economically and morally failed societies of the socialist and Islamist Third World from Iran to Venezuela. They all imagine that by delegitimizing, demoralizing, defeating, and, ultimately, destroying Israel, they will take an enormous step toward bringing down the entire capitalist West.
To most sophisticated Westerners, the jihadist focus on the annihilation of Israel may appear bizarre and counterproductive. But on the central importance of Israel, the jihadists have it right. Untethered from what had been the paramount American goal of deterring an attack on Israel and defending it against the common enemy, U.S. strategy has slid into total incoherence, drifting from a futile and deadly funambulism among the tribes of Afghanistan to propping up the Lebanese Army (i.e., Hezbollah) with sophisticated night-fighting gear to be used against no other target than Israel, and enhancing the Palestinian police forces with $100 million in new equipment and training assistance, all the while pretending to the overwhelmingly pro-Israel American electorate that it is, in fact, guaranteeing the military superiority of Israel. This feckless and reckless attempt at a “fairness doctrine” balancing act places the United States and the entire Middle East on a path that can only lead to a new war that such a Janus-faced policy, in which America arms both sides, will make at once more likely and more lethal.
Acting on the facts of life and history would make peace a far more likely prospect than does the Obama administration’s return to a “Peace Process” that chiefly focuses on uprooting Israeli settlers.
This is the tenth in a series of “Video dispatches”. This Israeli invention – soon to be exported, and already being widely used in Israel – could revolutionize the way we drive, and also change the world of journalism.
-- Tom Gross
MAKING DRIVING EASIER
I have long pointed out the truly extraordinary contribution and ground-breaking scientific advances made in the small state of Israel, for example, developing the technology that helps power instant messaging, the I-phone, laptop and desktop computers, as well as life-saving medical devices. Even Arab leaders, such as King Abdullah of Jordan, have noticed that Israel is at the forefront of these achievements.
Now finally some British journalists are waking up to it too. The following video is the first of three reports due to be broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4 News on Israeli technological successes, and how are they being exported around the world.
There is not a single mention of human rights or war or occupation in this news clip.
(In the past, Channel 4 News has been particularly harsh in its attacks on Israel. It has been at least as bad as its rival, BBC News, possibly even worse. Channel 4 is also infamous for having invited Iranian despot broadcast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver a seven-minute “Christmas message” to the British people in place of the English Queen on Christmas Eve 2008. Since then, various senior staff at Channel 4 News have subscribed to this email list/website.)
The other two reports on Channel 4 News on Israeli technology success will be placed on this website once they have been broadcast. They are due to be broadcast later this month or early next month.
It is interesting to see reporters like Benjamin Cohen make videos like this without, a senior Channel 4 producer tells me, any interference from organized “pro-Israel” pressure groups in Britain, whose work, Channel 4 says, is often counter-productive and hinders news reports like this being made.
UPDATE, July 2, 2011
The second of the reports on Channel 4 News examining how Israeli technological innovations – from computer memory sticks to the invention of online chat – are being used across the world, was broadcast this evening.
Here it is:
Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:
* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6
* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad
* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)
* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”
* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal
* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Cheering Bin Laden in London)
* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (not Israeli and U.S. ones)
* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”
* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology
* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria
* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...
* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)
* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”
* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”
* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”
* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?
* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?
* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.
* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon
* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring
* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)
* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv
* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict
* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)
* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)
* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill
* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)
* Fouad Ajami: Only in Syria does your neighbor go to work in the morning and return 11 years later. Only in Syria does a child enter prison before entering school. Only in Syria does a man go to jail for 20 years without being charged and is then asked to write a letter thanking the authorities upon his release.
* Syria rides with the Iranian theocracy and provides it access to the Mediterranean. It is a patron of Hamas and Hizbullah, organizations that orchestrated wave after wave of attacks on Israeli civilians. Damascus made a mockery of Lebanon’s sovereignty, murdered its leaders at will. And still it managed to convince naive politicians in the West for decades that it was a potentially moderate government.
* President Bashar Assad and his younger brother Maher, commander of the Republican Guard, are determined to subdue this new rebellion as their father did in Hama – one murder at a time. In today’s world it’s harder to turn off the lights and keep tales of repression behind closed doors, but the Assads know no other way. Massacre is a family tradition.
* Tom Gross: Yet instead of reporting about Assad’s scorched earth policies which partially destroyed a region of Syria yesterday, the British publicly-funded, government-controlled BBC (the world’s largest news broadcaster) ran reports all morning today on its World Service radio slandering Israel, even though nothing of significance happened in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute yesterday. Meanwhile the BBC’s total silence about the daily killings by British and allied forces of Libyans, Afghans and others, continues.
* No surprise: Arab spring meets Arab silence from the Arab League.
* Leading Arab-American group drops prominent Syrian-American musician from performing at its annual convention after he wants to sing a song that mentions the word “freedom”.
* Syria’s ally Hizbullah dominates the new Lebanese government formed yesterday. The new foreign minister, Adnan Mansour, is a former ambassador to Iran, which along with Syria is a major backer of Hizbullah.
CONTENTS
1. “Fighters shoot protesters at a Palestinian camp in Syria” (By Isabel Kershner, NY Times, June 7, 2011)
2. “Arab-American group blocks musician over ‘freedom’ song” (By Ben Smith, Politico, June 8, 2011)
3. The banned song
4. “Syrian protesters turn on Iran and Hizbullah” (By Sarra Grira, France 24, June 6, 2011)
5. “Syria: Where massacre is a family tradition” (By Fouad Ajami, WSJ, June 13, 2011)
6. “Iran reportedly aiding Syrian crackdown” (By Joby Warrick, Wash. Post, May 27, 2011)
7. “Arab Spring meets Arab silence” (By Aline Sara, Now Lebanon, June 6, 2011)
8. “Hizbullah dominates new Lebanon government” (Agence France Presse, June 13, 2011)
I attach a number of news stories and comment pieces related to Syria, below.
-- Tom Gross
Among previous recent dispatches on Syria, please see:
* This article of mine, which was published in The National Post (Canada) and The Australian
* They couldn’t even muster a press statement (& The Syria Lobby)
* As Syria slaughters hundreds, its ambassador gets wedding invite denied to Blair and Brown
For videos from the Syrian uprising, please see:
* Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (Not Israeli and U.S. ones)
PALESTINIANS WHO DARED TO PROTEST ABOUT BEING USED AS PAWNS BY ASSAD, ARE MURDERED BY OTHER PALESTINIANS
This story illustrates the complexities of the Mideast. (I sent it to some people on this list on the day it was published.) -- Tom
Fighters shoot protesters at a Palestinian camp in Syria
By Isabel Kershner
The New York Times
June 7, 2011
www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/world/middleeast/08damascus.html
Gunmen from a pro-Syrian Palestinian organization shot and killed as many as 14 people during a protest at a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus on Monday, WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency, reported on Tuesday.
According to WAFA and other reports, the fighters from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which is backed by Syria, clashed with mourners in the Yarmouk refugee camp after funerals for Palestinian protesters who were killed on Sunday at the border between Syria and the Israeli-held Golan Heights.
The shootings on Monday took place after mourners accused the organization of sacrificing Palestinian lives by encouraging protesters to demonstrate at the Golan Heights, Reuters reported. Reports also referred to divisions in the camp between those who support the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and those who sympathize with the Syrian opposition, which is seeking expanded democratic rights.
The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank on Tuesday condemned what it called the “crime” committed in the Yarmouk refugee camp by what it called “armed groups” of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. The leadership said in a statement published by the Palestinian news agency that the Popular Front’s fighters had fired live ammunition into crowds of young demonstrators at the camp.
On Tuesday, Syrian police and plainclothes security officers ringed the headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in the Yarmouk camp and anger at the group ran high.
Witnesses said that mourners had marched to the headquarters on Monday after burying seven people killed in the border protest on Sunday. Mohamed Rashdan, 25, a shopkeeper who lives nearby, said the crowd began to throw stones at the organization’s headquarters. Then, he said, “the building guards began to shoot at us.”
“They were all Palestinians — no Syrian security men shot at us,” Mr. Rashdan said. “That made us so angry.”
Mr. Rashdan said he believed the demonstration at the border was organized to serve the interests of President Assad, and that the protest had nothing to do with seeking justice for Palestinian refugees and displaced Syrian residents of the Golan Heights.
He said that many camp residents blamed the Popular Front for organizing the border protest “to help Syria run away from its local crisis.”
“They got us involved in Syria’s local crisis,” Mr. Rashdan said, “and that is why we were so angry at the killing of our brothers and sons.” The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which is led by Ahmed Jibril, has been bitterly at odds with the mainstream Palestinian organizations for decades and is defined as a terrorist organization by the United States.
Both Israel and the United States have suggested that the Syrian government orchestrated the confrontation at the border on Sunday, or at least did nothing to prevent it, to divert attention from its bloody crackdown on the antigovernment uprising in Syria.
A State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said in Washington, “It’s clear that such behavior will not distract international attention from the Syrian governments’ condemnable behavior on its own citizens.”
The Syrian government said that 23 Syrian and Palestinian protesters were killed by Israeli fire as they tried to rush the border fence on Sunday. The Israeli military said that 10 of the protesters died after their firebombs set off landmines on the Syrian side of the border.
The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank hinted that it, too, viewed the Popular Front as having used the protests at the Golan Heights for its own political goals.
The leadership affirmed in its statement that the demand by the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants for a right of return to their former homes in what is now Israel “remained a sacred goal not to be exploited for any political purposes,” adding that the blood of those who were killed on Sunday at the border was not to be “exploited or traded for private interests.”
ARAB-AMERICAN GROUP BLOCKS MUSICIAN OVER “FREEDOM” SONG
Arab-American group blocks musician over “freedom” song
By Ben Smith
Politico (a leading Washington website)
June 8, 2011
www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0611/ArabAmerican_group_blocks_singer.html
A leading Arab American group dropped a prominent Syrian-American musician from performing at their annual convention in a dispute over a freedom-tinged song that he was set to perform.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a longtime Washington civil rights group, repeatedly asked the German-born Syrian composer and pianist Malek Jandali to reconsider his piece choice, Jandali told POLITICO. When he refused, Jandali was told today that he couldn’t perform at this weekend’s event.
Jandali’s “Watani Ana: I am my Homeland” doesn’t specifically mention Syria or the broader Arab Spring uprisings, but is heavy on the themes of freedom and liberty. Jandali calls it a “humanitarian song.” But lyrics include “oh my homeland, when will I see you free” and “When the land is watered with the blood of martyrs and the brave/ And all the people shout: Freedom to mankind.”
Jandali himself declined to speculate why he wasn’t allowed to perform “Watani Ana,” and an official at the ADC, Nabil Mohamad, refused to explain its decision.
“Is is it the words? The scale of the music? Was the rhythm too slow? Did the melody maybe bother them?” Jandali asked POLITICO. “I really would love to hear their answer. It would have been a perfect song.”
“It doesn’t mention the word ‘Arab’ or ‘Syria’ or anything,” he said. “It’s a humanitarian song.”
However other observers speculated that the song’s implications might have troubled the Syrian government, which is in the midst of a bloody crackdown on its citizens, or its allies. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has defied international calls to end the crackdown and ordered security forces into the streets to quell unrest. He has also ratcheted up tensions with neighboring Israel, allowing Palestinian and Syrian protesters to approach the sealed Syrian-Israeli boarder. Twenty-three of those demonstrators were later killed by Israeli forces after they tried to rush the border.
“We are just saddened by the atrocities and the killing of innocent children,” Jandali, an American citizen who was born in Germany but raised in Syria, said.
The chairman of the ADC board, gynecologist Safa Rifka, is aligned with Syria’s ambassador to the United States Imad Moustapha. In a blog post, Moustapha called Rifka one of his three “best friends” in Washington D.C. The ADC describes itself as the largest Arab-American grassroots advocacy group and vows to end “discrimination and bias against Arab Americans wherever it is practiced.”
“I have nothing to say on that,” said ADC Vice President Nabil Mohamad on charges that politics were the reason. The ADC cited logistical problems in canceling Jandali’s performance. “You should get the facts,” said Muhamad in a brief interview with POLITICO before declining to comment further.
THE BANNED SONG
A video of “I am my Homeland” (complete with English subtitles):
FINALLY SOME WESTERN MEDIA REPORT ON ANTI-IRAN, ANTI-HIZBULLAH DEMOS IN SYRIA
[I sent this note to some people last week – TG]
I have noted in various past dispatches that demonstrators in Syria have been burning the flags of Hezbollah and Iran, and pictures of their leaders (see, for example, the first video here from May 22.)
I am glad that some mainstream media are now reporting this. The example below is from the French state-funded English, French and Arabic language station, France 24.
Predictably, I haven’t seen any reports of this in media such as The New York Times and BBC.
The only addendum I would make to the piece below is where France 24 states that “Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general is a widely respected figure throughout the Middle East” one might add “Yes, but primarily in the imagination of certain Western journalists and academics”.
Incidentally, pictures of Nasrallah were also burned in Iran in the anti-government demonstrations of 2009.
-- Tom Gross
Syrian protesters turn on Iran and Hezbollah
By Sarra Grira
France 24
June 6, 2011
observers.france24.com/content/20110603-angry-syrian-protesters-turn-iran-hezbollah
Syrian opposition protesters are not just calling for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad: they have recently begun directing their anger against his regional allies, Iran and Hezbollah. Our Observer says this is a new and unexpected turn of events.
Videos of recent protests in Syria show demonstrators chanting slogans against Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s Islamic revolution, as well as the Hezbollah, an Islamist political party from Lebanon with a powerful armed wing. Even more surprising has been footage of protesters burning posters of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general and a widely respected figure throughout the Middle East.
Their anger is a result of Tehran’s and Hezbollah’s unwavering support for the Syrian government, even as it ruthlessly crushes its own people’s calls for more democracy. The last straw for Syrian protesters was a speech pronounced by Hassan Nasrallah on May 25, in which he assured Assad of his “everlasting friendship and support”.
The recent anti-Hezbollah protests have mainly taken place in the town of Douma, not far from the Syrian capital Damascus, and in Homs, Syria’s culture capital and third-largest city.
Video filmed in Douma, near Damascus, on May 28. The person setting fire to a poster of Nasrallah says: “Here is the answer of the people of Douma to Nasrallah’s speech!”
Nobody in Syria was actually surprised that Iran and Hezbollah would support the Syrian regime: we all know that those three power circles have traditionally been close. But Hassan Nasrallah’s public statement of support got protesters really angry, and new anti-Hezbollah slogans began making their way into demonstrations.
This is a new and striking phenomenon: up until now, Nasrallah was worshipped in the Arab world. He was seen as a hero of anti-Israeli resistance, especially after he freed South Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000.
Today, Nasrallah has chosen the Syrian regime over the Syrian people. His main argument is the Assad family’s firm anti-Israeli stance and support of Hezbollah as it was branded a terrorist organization by the West. What’s more, the regime accuses protesters of being traitors manipulated by Israel and foreign powers as a way of discrediting the protest movement. By pitching Bashar al-Assad as the defender of the Arab cause, Damascus ensured itself of Nasrallah’s support.
These renewed tensions risk turning into religious divergences between Shiites and Sunnis. Just because Hezbollah is a mainly Shiite movement doesn’t mean that these news slogans are directed against Syria’s Shiite minority (about 10% of the population). The government plays on Sunni-Shiite / Arab-Kurd difference to divide the population, but we have to remain united. I think protesters understand this: one of their main slogans is ‘all together, hand in hand!”
THE LEGEND OF MODERATION
Syria: Where massacre is a family tradition
By Fouad Ajami
The Wall Street Journal
June 13, 2011
Pity the Syrians as they face the Assad regime’s tanks and artillery and snipers. Unlike in Libya, there is no Arab or international “mandate” to protect them. Grant Syria’s rulers their due: Their country rides with the Iranian theocracy and provides it access to the Mediterranean. It is a patron of Hamas and Hezbollah. And still they managed to sell the outside world on the legend of their moderation.
True, Damascus was at one time or another at odds with all its neighbors – Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Israel – but it managed to remain in the good graces of the international community. It had made a mockery of Lebanon’s sovereignty, murdered its leaders at will. Yet for all the brutality and audacity of the Syrian reign of terror and plunder in Lebanon, the Syrians were able to convince powers beyond that their writ was still preferable to the chaos that would engulf Lebanon were they to leave.
In the same vein, Damascus was able to pull off an astonishing feat: Syria was at once the “frontline” state that had remained true to the struggle against Israel, and the country that kept the most tranquil border with the Jewish state. (As easily as Syria’s rulers kept the peace of that border, they were able to shatter it recently, sending Palestinian refugees to storm the border across the Golan Heights.)
It was the writer Daniel Pipes who rightly said that Syria’s leaders perennially wanted the “peace process” but not peace itself. Their modus operandi was thus: Keep the American envoys coming, hold out the promise of accommodation with Israel, tempt successive U.S. administrations with a grand bargain, while your proxies in Lebanon set ablaze the Lebanese-Israeli border and your capital houses Hamas and all the terrible Palestinian rejectionists.
Syria could have it both ways: ideological and rhetorical belligerence combined with unsentimental diplomacy and skullduggery. The Iranians wanted access to Lebanon and its border with Israel. The Syrians sold it to them at a price. They were unapologetic about it before other Arabs, but they kept alive the dream that they could be “peeled off” from Iran, that theirs was a modern, secular nation that looked with a jaundiced eye on the ways of theocracies.
Syria’s rulers were Alawites, schismatics, to the Sunni purists a heresy. Yet as America battled to put a new order in Iraq in place, Syria was the point of transit for Sunni jihadists from other Arab lands keen to make their way there to kill and be killed. The American project there was being bloodied, and this gave the Syrians a reprieve, for they feared they would be next if Washington looked beyond Iraq for other targets.
It was that sordid game that finally convinced George W. Bush that the Syrians had to pay a price for their duplicity. The American support for the 2005 “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon then followed, and the Syrians made a hasty retreat. In time they would experience a seller’s remorse, and they would try to regain what they had given up under duress.
Barack Obama provided the Syrian dictatorship with a diplomatic lifeline. He was keen to “engage” Tehran and Damascus, he was sure that Syrian radicalism had been a response to the heavy hand of the Bush administration. An American ambassador was dispatched to Damascus, and an influential figure in the Democratic Party, Sen. John Kerry, made it his calling to argue that the young Syrian ruler was, at heart, a “reformer” eager to sever his relations with Iran and Hezbollah.
The Arab Spring upended all that. It arrived late in Syria, three months after it had made its way to Tunisia and Egypt, one month after Libya’s revolt. A group of young boys in the town of Deraa, near the border with Jordan, had committed the cardinal sin of scribbling antiregime graffiti. A brittle regime with a primitive personality cult and a deadly fault-line between its Alawite rulers and Sunni majority responded with heavy-handed official terror. The floodgates were thrown open, the Syrian people discovered within themselves new reservoirs of courage, and the rulers were hell-bent on frightening the population into their old state of submission.
Until the Arab Spring, nothing had stirred in Syria in nearly three decades. President Hafez al-Assad and his murderous younger brother Rifaat had made an example of Hama in 1982 when they stamped out a popular uprising by leveling much of the city and slaughtering thousands. Now, the circle is closed. President Bashar al-Assad and his younger brother Maher, commander of the Republican Guard, are determined to subdue this new rebellion as their father did in Hama – one murder at a time. In today’s world it’s harder to turn off the lights and keep tales of repression behind closed doors, but the Assads know no other way. Massacre is a family tradition.
It took time for the diplomacy of the West to catch up with Syria’s horrors. In Washington, they were waiting for Godot as the Damascus regime brutalized its children. In his much-trumpeted May 19 speech from the State Department – “Cairo II,” it was dubbed – President Obama gave the Syrian ruler a choice. He could lead the transition toward democracy or “get out of the way.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has since used the same language.
But one senses this newfound bravado is too little too late. With fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and now Libya, few leaders in the U.S. or Europe want to see the Assad regime for what it truly is. Yet the truth is there for all who wish to see. Ask the Syrians deserting their homes and spilling across the Turkish border about the ways of Bashar and his killer squads and vigilantes with their dirty tricks. They will tell us volumes about the big prison that the regime maintains.
Arab bloggers with a turn of phrase, playing off the expression of “only in Syria,” have given voice to the truth about this dreadful regime. Only in Syria, goes one formulation, does your neighbor go to work in the morning and return 11 years later. Only in Syria does a child enter prison before entering school. Only in Syria does a man go to jail for 20 years without being charged and is then asked to write a letter thanking the authorities upon his release. The list goes on. At last, in Damascus, the mask of this regime has fallen, so late in the hour.
AFTER YEARS OF EXPERIENCE DOING THE SAME, IRAN TEACHES ITS ALLY HOW TO MURDER ITS OWN CITIZENS
Iran reportedly aiding Syrian crackdown
By Joby Warrick
The Washington Post
May 27, 2011
U. S. officials say Iran is dispatching increasing numbers of trainers and advisers — including members of its elite Quds Force – into Syria to help crush anti-government demonstrations that are threatening to topple Iran’s most important ally in the region.
The influx of Iranian manpower is adding to a steady stream of aid from Tehran that includes not only weapons and riot gear but also sophisticated surveillance equipment that is helping Syrian authorities track down opponents through their Facebook and Twitter accounts, the sources said. Iranian-assisted computer surveillance is believed to have led to the arrests of hundreds of Syrians seized from their homes in recent weeks.
The United States and its allies long have accused Iran of supporting repressive or violent regimes in the region, including Syria’s government, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Many previous reports, mostly provided by Western officials, have described Iranian technical help in providing Syria with riot helmets, batons and other implements of crowd control during 10 weeks of demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad.
The new assertions – provided by two U.S. officials and a diplomat from an allied nation, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence – are clearly aimed at suggesting deepening involvement of Iranian military personnel in Syria’s brutal crackdown against anti-Assad demonstrators.There was no response on Friday to requests for comment left with the Syrian Embassy and Iranian interests section in Washington.
In the account provided by the diplomat and the U.S. officials, the Iranian military trainers were being brought to Damascus to instruct Syrians in techniques Iran used against the nation’s “Green Movement’’ in 2009, the diplomat said. The Iranians were brutally effective in crushing those protests.
Officers from Iran’s notorious Quds Force have played a key role in Syria’s crackdown since at least mid-April, said the U.S. and allied officials. They said U.S. sanctions imposed against the Quds Force in April were implicitly intended as a warning to Iran to halt the practice.
The Quds Force is a unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for operations outside the country. It has helped fund and train Hezbollah and Hamas militants and supported anti-U.S. insurgents inside Iraq.
While the size of the Iranian contingent in Syria is not known, the numbers of advisers has grown steadily in recent weeks despite U.S. warnings, according to the U.S. and allied officials.
The Obama administration mentioned the role of the Quds Forces in announcing two sets of sanctions imposed against Syrian government officials in the past month. A White House executive order last week that targeted Assad and six other top government officials also included a little-noticed reference to Mohsen Chizari, an Iranian military officer who is the No. 3 leader in the Quds Force in charge of training.
The naming of Chizari – who in 2006 was arrested but later released by U.S. forces in Iraq for allegedly supplying arms to insurgents there – suggests that officials possess evidence of his role in assisting Syria’s crackdown on protesters, said Michael Singh, a former senior director for Middle East affairs for the National Security Council during George W. Bush’s administration.
“There’s a deeply integrated relationship here that involves not only support for terrorism but a whole gamut of activities to ensure Assad’s survival,” Singh said.
It is not unusual for governments to draw on foreign assistance during times of unrest, as Western-allied governments in Bahrain and Egypt did when protests were building in those countries.
Iran’s increasing engagement in the Syrian crackdown reflects anxiety in Tehran about the prospects for Assad, who has failed to end the protests despite rising brutality that human rights groups say has left more than 800 people dead and perhaps 10,000 in prison. While managing to hold on to power, Assad has been severely weakened after months of Syrian unrest, according to current and former U.S. officials and Middle East experts.
“Iran is focused intently on how things are evolving in Syria,” said Mona Yacoubian, a former Middle East expert with the State Department’s intelligence division and who is a special adviser to the U.S. Institute of Peace. “The two countries have a long-standing alliance of 30 years-plus. Syria is Iran’s most important inroad into the Arab world, and its perch on the front line with Israel.”
Assad, whose army is stretched across dozens of cities in an unprecedented domestic deployment, increasingly needs help to survive, Yacoubian said. And Iran desperately needs Assad. “If they lose the Syrian regime, it would constitute a huge setback,” Yacoubian said.
Iran, a longtime supplier of military aid to Syria, has been helping Dasmascus battle the current wave of civil unrest since at least mid-March, said the U.S. and allied officials. The emergence of Syria’s first true mass protests – with tens of thousands of demonstrators pouring into the streets demanding Assad’s ouster – initially flummoxed the country’s security leaders, who had little experience with such phenomena.
On March 23, Turkish officials seized light weapons – including assault rifles and grenade launchers – on an Iranian cargo plane bound for Syria. Whether the shipment was intended to help suppress the uprising is unclear, but around the same time, Syria received other Iranian shipments that included riot control gear and computer equipment for Internet surveillance, the U.S. and allied sources said.
Just before the shipments, Assad announced with great fanfare that he was lifting the country’s ban on the use of social media such as Facebook and YouTube. While widely hailed at the time, the move gave Assad’s security police an Iranian-inspired tool for tracking down leaders of the protest movement, said Andrew Tabler, a former Syria-based journalist who is a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“Lifting the ban on Facebook helped the regime pinpoint where the [activists] were coming from,” Tabler said in an phone interview from Lebanon, where he remains in contact with opposition figures. “It was not about being magnanimous; it was a way to allow more surveillance, leading to thousands of arrests.”
NO SURPRISE: ARAB SPRING MEETS ARAB SILENCE FROM THE ARAB LEAGUE
Arab Spring meets Arab silence
By Aline Sara
Now Lebanon
June 6, 2011
As people in the Arab world continue to voice opposition to dictatorial regimes, their leaders remain mostly silent. Though formerly quiet members of the international community have spoken out against the violence in Syria, the latest country to witness a significant anti-regime uprising and subsequent security crackdown, the Arab League has remained silent.
Turkey is positioning itself as a mediator between the Syrian government and the protesters, hosting opposition activists for The Conference for Change in Syria this week, and the EU and US have passed sanctions against the Syrian leadership. Many however, are left wondering why the Arab states, which condemned the government crackdown against dissenters in Libya and kicked the country out of the Arab League, are keeping mum on the Assad regime.
According to Dr. Hilal Khashan, professor of Political Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Arab League is not an autonomous entity, and thus never acts on its own. “It intervened on Libya because of Western pressure, because NATO and the US needed to legitimatize their intervention against [Colonel Muammar] Qaddafi,” he said. But the West doesn’t seem very keen on repeating the action, he added, especially not in Syria.
To Egyptian activist and executive director of Cairo-based Arab Forum for Alternatives Mohammad Agati, the question isn’t about Arab silence, but rather its intervention in Libya in the first place. “A typical Arab League does not take any stances,” he said. “If anything, they usually bolster regimes.”
Most experts NOW Lebanon spoke with confirmed that view. Because the majority of the region’s regimes are autocracies, few leaders want to see any of their counterparts get toppled.
“In addition to [their fear of a] domino effect, Syria is regarded as an anchor state and microcosm of the entire Arab East,” explained Khashan. “An authoritarian leadership, a business class, a divisive society, as well as religious and ethnic divisions; if Syria goes down, the entire region will be affected… No one in the Arab League is willing to see Assad go,” he said. When asked whether the Arab states are hoping the Assad regime will tame the protests, no matter how many people are killed, he said, “I hate to agree, but that is the case.”
In the meantime, the death toll continues to rise, with over 1,000 killed since the uprising began two months ago.
“Everyone is in a wait-and-see situation,” said Dr. Imad Salameh, Political Science professor at the Lebanese-American University. If Syria distances itself from its main ally, Iran, the Arab states, mainly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, will tolerate the status quo, which for them is safer than the unknown, he added. “The players do not see how the alternative can benefit their agenda in the region, and Turks are especially concerned about another Iraq,” he said, alluding to the common fear of a post-Assad wave of Sunni extremism spreading to neighboring states.
Another fear is that while he is still in power, if provoked enough, Assad could intentionally try to destabilize other regional states to put pressure on them. Though Salameh does not believe Assad has the leverage to unleash a wave of violence in neighboring countries, Khashan said he could use the Kurds of Syria as a destabilizing power. “[Iraqi President] Jalal Talabani, who influences Kurds in Syria, told them to take it easy on Assad. They know the regime can contribute to the resumption of the insurgency in Iraq,” he said.
Agati, on the other hand, said the Syrian regime is beginning to feel cornered and would be wise to avoid aggravating its neighbors.
“Relations with Assad and the [other regional] regimes are not as bad as it seems… so it would be stupid of Assad to anger his counterparts,” he said.
While in late April, Human Rights Watch urged Arab countries – especially Egypt and Tunisia, which had their own revolutions – to join international efforts and inquire into the “Syrian government’s use of lethal force against peaceful protesters,” some analysts believe the call was unrealistic.
“Egypt is going through a transitional phase; I don’t think they are seeking confrontation with anyone at the moment,” said Salameh, a thought that was echoed by Agati, who noted that foreign policy had its limits, and that Egypt is currently not in a position to take a stand.
“To expect something from the Arab League is like expecting me to swim from one side of the Atlantic to the other,” added Khashan.
Despite a seeming stalemate on the horizon, Salameh voiced optimism. “At this point, the movement in Syria is indigenous… by Syrians, for Syrians, and this is what makes it stronger,” he said. “Day by day, it’s showing itself not supported or driven by foreign forces, which makes more and more Syrians believe in their cause.”
Though the international community, and especially the Arab League, does not seem willing to intervene, non-government groups from across the world should stand up for the human rights of the Syrian people, he said. “It will help them maintain their opposition.”
HIZBULLAH DOMINATES NEW LEBANON GOVERNMENT
Hizbullah dominates new Lebanon government
Agence France Presse
June 13, 2011
www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=396381
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AFP) – Nearly five months after his appointment, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Monday announced the formation of a 30-member cabinet in which Hizbullah and its allies hold a majority.
Mikati, a billionaire Sunni businessman, announced his line-up following arduous negotiations over key portfolios including the justice and telecommunications ministries, now controlled by the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hizbullah alliance.
“This government is a government for all Lebanese, no matter what party they support, be it the majority or the opposition,” 56-year-old Mikati told a news conference at the presidential palace.
But Lebanon’s pro-Western opposition bloc, led by former premier Saad Hariri, has boycotted the new cabinet which it has slammed as a “Hizbullah government.”
Mikati’s cabinet – which does not include any women – has 19 ministers representing the Shiite militant group Hizbullah and its allies.
The remaining 11 were chosen by Mikati, President Michel Sleiman and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.
The government must now be approved by at least half of the members of Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament, in which the Hizbullah-led alliance has a small majority.
In a sign of simmering discord between Mikati and the Hizbullah alliance, Druze MP Talal Arslan immediately resigned from his post as state minister in the new cabinet, accusing the premier of being a “liar” and of seeking to deprive the minority Druze of key cabinet posts.
One of the main challenges facing the new cabinet will be how to deal with a UN-backed investigation into the 2005 assassination of ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.
Hizbullah forced the collapse of the previous government headed by Hariri’s son after he refused to disavow the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
The Netherlands-based court is widely expected to indict Hizbullah operatives in the killing, a move the militant group has repeatedly warned against.
Since his appointment in January with Hizbullah’s blessing, Mikati has declined to spell out whether his government will cease all cooperation with the court.
In a clear sign that he does not expect a smooth road ahead, Mikati on Monday urged the Lebanese people to judge his government by its actions and not its individual members or the parties they represent.
“This government is fully aware that the future is not all rosy and that it will face obstacles, challenges and traps,” he said.
A major point of contention in the negotiations over the new line-up was the interior ministry, which will now be headed by retired army general Marwan Charbel, considered close to the president.
The new foreign minister, Adnan Mansour, is a former ambassador to Iran which along with Syria is a major backer of Hizbullah.
The defense ministry is now in the hands of Hizbullah’s Christian allies.
Mikati’s appointment in January sparked the ire of Lebanon’s Sunnis, who are largely loyal to Hariri and saw the move as a bid by Hizbullah to sideline their community.
But Mikati has endeavored to portray himself as an independent politician and not a Hizbullah puppet.
Under Lebanon’s complex power-sharing system, the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, the president a Maronite Christian and the speaker of parliament a Shiite Muslim.
The first head of state to congratulate Lebanon on the new government’s formation was Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.
Damascus was forced to pull its troops out of its smaller neighbor after Hariri’s assassination, ending 29 years of military and political domination.
The UN special coordinator for Lebanon, Michael Williams, congratulated Mikati on the new government and said he hoped it uphold “its... commitment to Lebanon’s international obligations” in a statement released by Williams’ office.
The United States, a major donor to the Lebanese army which blacklists Hizbullah as a terrorist organization, has warned that the formation of a government led by the militant group is likely to affect ties.
I attach a two-part article, titled “A tale of two cities: Istanbul vs. Jerusalem,” published on June 2 and 7, in the Turkish paper Hurriyet Daily News.
This analysis by Turkish journalist and commentator Burak Bekdil displays the kind of honest account of history that is extremely difficult to find in the Arab media – or indeed in much of the rest of the Turkish media.
In the first part of his article, Bekdil visits Jerusalem in June 1967. In the second part, he takes us to Istanbul in June 2011 (a city that was, of course, Constantinople until 1930).
Burak Bekdil was previously sentenced to an 18-month suspended prison term in Turkey, after he was found guilty of “insulting the judiciary” for exposing corruption within the judiciary. That sentence was widely criticized in the West.
(Above, protesters burn a Star of David during a demonstration outside the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul last year.)
SUMMARY
WOULD TURKEY AGREE TO GREEK DEMANDS TO RETURN TO THE 1923 BORDERS?
For those who don’t have time to read his article in full, here, in summary, are a few of the points made in Hurriyet Daily News:
* “Let’s try to rid ourselves from the chains of religious ideology and try to be fair. The return to the 1967 borders means a no-loss bet, an oxymoron. It’s tantamount to betting money on a game, losing it and making a scene at the bet shop to take back the money. In warfare terms, this would be similar to Greeks proposing Turkey a return to the pre-1923 borders: They attacked, they lost, and they, unlike the Arabs, have no intention to capture central Anatolia in the 21st century.”
* “Would the United Arabia today agree to return to the 1967 borders if their glorious eight-nation united force had succeeded to annihilate Israel four decades ago?”
* “Although the opening of the Rafah crossing into Gaza [last month] has apparently made any aid flotilla meaningless, İHH’s president, Bülent Yıldırım, said the new mission is not aid but ‘justice.’ But which justice?”
“IF JERUSALEM SHOULD BE THE CAPITAL OF ‘FREE PALESTINE,’ WHY SHOULD ISTANBUL NOT BECOME THE CAPITAL OF ‘FREER GREECE?’”
* “Wisdom would ask our [Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet] Davutoğlu to perhaps encourage the İHH to send a flotilla to Latakia to break the blockade on protestors and stop the Syrian police killing them. The Syrian death count is already over 1,000, or 111 times bigger than the death toll on the Mavi Marmara, excluding over 10,000 missing or detained for torture and future death.”
* “Alternatively, if the foreign minister is so keen on the idea of freedom flotillas against illegal blockades, he can think of Varosha in Cyprus, which has remained a ghost town after the Turkish army fenced it off in 1974.”
* “The foreign minister often talks about his dream to ‘pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestinian Jerusalem.’ One wonders, though, if he would have kept his sympathetic smile if a foreign minister spoke of his dream to visit Diyarbakır as the capital of Kurdistan. I think we can guess.”
* “If we are talking about universal justice and legality, why are the conquests of Istanbul, Trabzon and Anatolia by the Turks, and of Jerusalem by Ayyubi good; but the repatriation of Jerusalem to Israel by re-conquest bad? Especially when the re-conquest was the result of self-defense in the face of eight enemy armies who attack to annihilate a legitimate state. If Jerusalem should be the capital of ‘free Palestine,’ why should Istanbul not become the capital of ‘freer Greece?’”
FULL ARTICLE
“OH SIR, I’LL MEET YOU FOR LUNCH IN TEL AVIV”
A tale of two cities: Istanbul vs Jerusalem (Part I)
By Burak Bekdil
Hurriyet Daily News - Turkey
Thursday, June 2, 2011
www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=a-tale-of-two-cities-istanbul-v.-jerusalem-i--2011-06-02
Recently there has been a good deal of talk on a return to the 1967 Arab-Israeli borders, including a fluid note by President Barack Obama. The first part of this mini series will visit Jerusalem in 1967, and return to Istanbul in 2011. First, a chronological anatomy of the events that led to the Six-Day War of 1967, and how the war was fought:
- Egypt’s charismatic leader Gamal Abdel Nasser is the darling of the Arabs. He is dreaming of a pan-Arab state, but, he thinks, the major obstacle standing in his way is Israel. Nasser died of heart attack three years after the six-day war. His friends said he died with a broken heart.
- Israel’s not-so-charismatic Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, is not anyone’s darling, especially during the diplomatic crisis, which led to the 1967 war. Many Israelis doubted his ability to run a country that was heading to war on multiple fronts. He, too, had a dream. It was not a pan-Israeli state, nor the conquest of Jerusalem. He dreamed of peace. And he, too, died with a broken heart, according to his wife.
- In the spring of 1967, Syria was harboring and training Palestinian militants who declared their holy cause as the “annihilation of the state of Israel.” In one incident, Israeli and Syrian fighter jets clash, and Prime Minister Eshkol issued a mild warning to Damascus.
- The Kremlin takes Eshkol’s warning seriously. In 1967, Egypt, like Syria, is on the Soviet camp. In the spring of 1967, Soviets secretly give startling news to Egypt’s parliament speaker, Anwar Sadat: In one week, Israel is poised to attack Syria. Sadat speeds the news to Nasser.
- Cairo orders four divisions to the Sinai border. It also calls thousands of reserve soldiers. Finally, 40,000 soldiers, more than 300 Soviet-made tanks, artillery and personnel carriers cross into the Sinai. Arab nations cheerfully support the Egyptian build-up on the border.
- Soviet intelligence proves to be a hoax. Israel does not attack Syria. But Nasser cannot step back from the idea of finishing off Israel militarily. He is under pressure from his own top brass, his own nation and the Arab world.
- Meanwhile, as Israel celebrates the 19th anniversary of its foundation, the war cabinet mobilizes one brigade, 3,000 men, and calls up reserves. Israel’s population is 2.5 million.
- A United Nation buffer zone manned with a few thousand soldiers separate enemy troops. The peacekeeping mission has been there for over 10 years. On May 16, Nasser orders the U.N. Force Commander Indar Jit Rykhye to evacuate his force within 48 hours. When Rykhye asks one Egyptian commander if Egypt was aware of the consequences, the commander replies: “Oh sir, I’ll meet you for lunch in Tel Aviv.” The force leaves, and Egypt and Israel are left alone.
- On May 22, Nasser closes the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, virtually a declaration of war. The move electrifies the Arab world, especially the Palestinians in East Jerusalem who had been displaced in 1948. Nasser talks about a return to the pre-1948 borders, meaning no Israel.
- U.N. Secretary General U Thant arrives in Cairo but fails to convince Nasser who tells him privately that he is afraid of a coup or assassination. The Egyptian generals want war, Nasser says.
- Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban goes to Washington, but fails to secure United States help as President Lyndon Johnson does not commit the U.S. to help if Israel is attacked.
- There is excitement and support in the Arab world for the coming war. Kuwait pledges its army to the United Command along with Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal joins the coalition, and says, “We want to see the extermination of Israel.”
- On May 30 Jordan’s King Hussein flies to Cairo to sign a defense pact with Nasser. The Jordanian army will now be commanded by an Egyptian general.
- CIA tells Israel’s chief spy, Meir Amit, “We don’t plan to do anything if Israel is attacked.”
- At 7:50 a.m. on June 5, the Israeli Air Force takes off to hit every air base in Egypt simultaneously. In three hours, the Egyptian air force is totally destroyed, having lost 280 modern fighters and bombers. It takes two more hours to destroy the Syrian Air Force and minutes to destroy Jordan’s.
- Arabs dance on the streets as Radio Cairo broadcasts great victories against Israel. Israel orders total radio silence. Since Israel has destroyed Jordan’s communications lines, Jordan gets war news from Radio Cairo. In a telephone conversation, Nasser tells King Hussein that Egyptian planes are over Israeli skies. Encouraged with the (fake) news Jordan shells Israeli cities.
- The Battle for Jerusalem begins. Israel sends paratroopers to Jerusalem. In five hours, Jordanian resistance is broken.
- Nasser’s telephone conversation with Hussein is intercepted, in which the two argue whether they should blame the U.S. or the U.S. and Britain for the humiliating defeat. Both, they agree.
- At U.N. negotiations, Egypt and Syria refuse ceasefire and land for peace an agreement.
- The Egyptian army withdraws from the Sinai. Israel takes tens of thousands of prisoners whom it later releases.
- In four days, Israel defeats Egypt and Syria and controls all of Jerusalem. But Syrian shelling begins. On the fifth day, Israel attacks Syria and captures the Golan Heights. This time, at the U.N., Syria wants ceasefire but Israel resists. Israeli army forwards as close to as 40 miles from Damascus. Then Israel calls a halt and agrees to ceasefire.
- The Six-Day War is over. Israel now controls 3.5 times more land than it had six days ago, including Jerusalem. It offers to give back Sinai and the Golan Heights in return for peace. It is willing to negotiate over the West Bank but insists on keeping all of Jerusalem.
- One month after the war Arab leaders convene in Khartoum. Nasser is still the undisputed leader of the Arab world. Arab leaders refuse a joint U.S.-Soviet proposal for land for peace. The convention ends with four notes: No recognition of Israel; no peace; no negotiations; and all Arab states are to prepare for military action.
Let’s try to rid ourselves from the chains of religious ideology or just ideology and try to be fair. The return to the 1967 borders means a no-loss bet, an oxymoron. It’s tantamount to betting money on a game, losing it and making a scene at the bet shop to take back the money. In warfare terms, this would be similar to Greeks proposing Turkey a return to the pre-1923 borders: They attacked, they lost, and they, unlike the Arabs, have no intention to capture central Anatolia in the 21st century.
Here, the question is simple: Would the United Arabia today agree to return to the 1967 borders if their glorious eight-nation united force had succeeded to annihilate Israel four decades ago? The Arabs should be able to understand that they can always enjoy lunch in Tel Aviv, like Israel’s peaceful Arab citizens do, once they overcome their religious and ideological hatred of the “Jooos” and make peace with them.
PART II
A tale of two cities: Istanbul vs Jerusalem (Part I)
By Burak Bekdil
Hurriyet Daily News - Turkey
June 7, 2011
www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=a-tale-of-two-cities-istanbul-vs.-jerusalem-ii--2011-06-07
The first part of this mini series visited Jerusalem in June 1967. (Available at www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=a-tale-of-two-cities-istanbul-v.-jerusalem-i--2011-06-02.) This sequel takes the mini series to Istanbul in June 2011, aboard the Mavi Marmara.
The organizers of the Gaza flotilla, a Turkish Islamist charity with dubious United Nation recognition, the İHH, have pledged to send a second flotilla later this month after the first one faced a deadly Israeli commando attack last year. Although the opening, and brief closure, of the Rafah crossing into Gaza has apparently made any aid flotilla meaningless, İHH’s president, Bülent Yıldırım, said the new mission is not aid but “justice.” But which justice?
The day after the Israeli raid that killed nine people aboard the Mavi Marmara, Mr Yıldırım explained his understanding of justice: “Last night everything in the world changed, and everything is progressing toward Islam. Anyone who does not stand alongside Palestine, his throne will be toppled.”
And in response to U.N., American and Israeli calls, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said governments cannot stop their citizens launching another flotilla to Gaza, and Ankara would not prevent private challenges to an illegal blockade.
Wisdom would ask Mr Davutoğlu to perhaps encourage the İHH to send a flotilla to Latakia to break the blockade on protestors and stop the Syrian police killing them. The Syrian death count is already over 1,000, or 111 times bigger than the death toll on the Mavi Marmara, excluding over 10,000 missing or detained for torture and future death.
Alternatively, if the foreign minister is so keen on the idea of freedom flotillas against illegal blockades, he can think of Varosha in Cyprus, which has remained a ghost town after the Turkish army fenced it off in 1974. But Mr Davutoğlu has other, preferred, responsibilities.
For example, the foreign minister often talks about his dream to “pray at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestinian [Muslim] Jerusalem.” He does not hide his ambition to see Jerusalem as the capital of a free Palestinian state. One wonders, though, if he would have kept his sympathetic smile if a foreign minister spoke of his dream to visit Diyarbakır as the capital of Kurdistan. I think we can guess. But he is not the only Islamist who habitually boasts multiple standards of indecent choice, all for the advance of political Islam.
Last week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed a local crowd in Diyarbakır, saying that: “We are the grandchildren of Saladin Ayyubi’s army [soldiers] that conquered Jerusalem.” So, says the prime minister, the ancient capital of Judaism had been conquered by Muslims.
But, then, why would something taken by force from someone else belong to its occupier? Why is Jerusalem Palestinian if it had been conquered from its ancient possessors? And why should we be proud to be the grandchildren of someone whose army conquered other people’s territories?
A few days earlier, Mr Erdoğan, this time in Trabzon, reminded his party’s supporters that on May 29 “We proudly celebrated the 558th anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul.” And, he said, without the conquest of Trabzon, the conquest of Anatolia would have been incomplete.
It is not a coincidence that Fatih (conqueror) is a very common male name in Turkish. The Turks are proud to be the evlad-i fatihan (the descendants of conquerors). They are too happy to be living in the territories that once belonged to other nations. But all that is understandable since they are not the only nation which does so, with or without the others naming their children “conqueror.” All the same, there is a problem with the Turkish/Islamist case.
If we are talking about universal justice and legality, why are the conquests of Istanbul, Trabzon and Anatolia by the Turks, and of Jerusalem by Ayyubi good; but the repatriation of Jerusalem to Israel by re-conquest bad? Especially when the re-conquest was the result of self-defense in the face of eight enemy armies who attack to annihilate a legitimate state.
More questions. If Jerusalem should be the capital of “free Palestine,” why should Istanbul not become the capital of “freer Greece?” Why is Nicosia a divided capital? What were the Turks doing at the gates of Vienna in 1683? Was Süleyman the Magnificent’s army there to distribute humanitarian aid to the Viennese, like the İHH claims its Gaza mission is?
Forty-four years ago, the Arabs dreamed of “having lunch in Tel Aviv.” The dream cost them a major humiliation and Jerusalem, and the Middle East, peace. Today, the Turkish leaders dream of praying in the “Palestinian capital” Jerusalem while denying the Orthodox Patriarch of Istanbul his ecumenical designation. Luckily, the Turks, unlike Arabs, are the grandchildren of conquerors.
Keeping the ancient capital of Orthodoxy as the biggest Turkish city is fine. But please, Mssrs Erdoğan and Davutoğlu, at least try not to make too much noise in commemorating the day when we took it by force from another nation. And remember, gentlemen, claiming that Istanbul is a Turkish city by origin and Jerusalem is Palestinian sounds like too-dark black humor.
* Among other recent dispatches on Turkey, please see:
* Sign up here for the next Gaza flotilla.
For pictures, please see here and here.
And for cartoons, please see here.
(This is the ninth in a series of “Video dispatches”.)
CONTENTS
1. Teaching schoolgirls, Egyptian-style
2. Two Syrian men are savagely beaten by Assad’s security forces
3. British Muslims for Israel
4. Too repulsive to show
5. “The one state solution for a better Middle East: let the Jews run the whole place”
6. “We are the people, freedom for Palestine”
7. Ethiopian Jew sings Arabic song on Israeli TV talent show
8. Israel’s indefensible borders
9. Iranian commandos attack...
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
TEACHING SCHOOLGIRLS, EGYPTIAN-STYLE
An Egyptian teacher has a not so subtle way of encouraging students to do their homework.
The video gets worse as it progresses.
Please note how the girls are subjected to more brutality than the boys.
Tom Gross adds:
A female Egyptian journalist narrowly survived being gang-raped while covering a demonstration two days ago on Cairo’s central Tahrir Square against the new Egyptian military government, local media reported.
The journalist was interviewing participants in Friday’s rally when a quarrel broke out between them. The attackers had torn the journalist’s clothes to pieces before a police officer managed to intervene. That police office was then attacked by the mob and doctors say his condition is now critical.
In March, in a similar incident close by the same location, a female American journalist was gang-raped.
TWO SYRIAN MEN ARE SAVAGELY BEATEN BY ASSAD’S SECURITY FORCES
Here is another video from Syria, showing two men being beaten up by Assad’s security forces. The beating gets increasingly worse as the video continues. The brave person filming this on his or her cellphone also risked torture and possible death in doing so.
Among past recent video dispatches on Syria, please see here and here.
Of course, there is nothing new in such violence by the Assad family dictatorship. It has been the daily diet of Syrian citizens for over 48 years: children being tortured, women shot at close range, kidnappings and detentions en masse, and so on.
It is just that resource-rich news media like The New York Times and the BBC have refused to cover this properly, and their Middle East correspondents and op-ed page columnists and leader writers have been much more interested in dragging Israel through the mud instead.
None of this has been unknown to these journalists. For example, as I pointed out again in a recent article (Syria’s Assad is worse than Gaddafi in many ways), the U.S. State Department’s most recent report on Syria (2009) says the regime was responsible for the “arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life” and “enforced disappearances” and the vanishing of “an estimated 17,000 persons.”
The State Department report described the methods of torture inflicted on those unfortunate to find themselves in Syria’s prisons: “Electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; burning genitalia; forcing objects into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim was suspended from the ceiling; other times on the soles of the feet.”
And all this was a regular occurrence before the present uprising when the situation got even worse, with the arrest and torture of tens of thousands of people, and the murder of at least 1200 civilians so far.
BRITISH MUSLIMS FOR ISRAEL
Of course, while many BBC and Guardian-types in Britain claim that all Muslims oppose Israel, there are a sizable number that support her.
Below is a recent interview with Hasan Afzal, a spokesman for “British Muslims for Israel”.
Hasan Afzal (who is a subscriber to this email list) is interviewed here on Israel’s Channel 10 news. One has to watch this British citizen on Israeli TV because it is highly unlikely that he would ever be allowed to express his views freely on the British-taxpayer funded BBC, given their prejudices. (Indeed over the years, I too have been interviewed about the Middle East on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NPR and elsewhere, but the world’s biggest news organization, the BBC, from my home country, has never allowed me on air to speak about the Middle East.)
TOO REPULSIVE TO SHOW
I have watched the video showing the tortured, mutilated remains of the 13-year-old Syrian schoolboy Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. But I have chosen not to post it, because it is too gruesome to watch and out of respect for Hamza. The boy lies on a plastic sheet, the eyes of his bruised and swollen, purple face clenched shut. The rest of his young body is a mass of bloated flesh, scarred by welts and cigarette burns, slashes and bullet holes. His knees and elbows are broken. His penis has been cut off.
This is President Assad’s security forces at work on their own children.
And in the meantime the British, French and other governments haven’t even summoned Assad’s ambassadors to complain, let alone expelled them.
Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, 13, had his penis cut off and was then tortured to death by the Syrian security forces
“THE ONE STATE SOLUTION FOR A BETTER MIDDLE EAST: LET THE JEWS RUN THE WHOLE PLACE”
Although this video is largely tongue-in-cheek, it does contain various serious points. (The narrator is the American author and screenwriter of “tough-guy” mysteries, Andrew Klavan.)
“WE ARE THE PEOPLE, FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE”
One might expect politically idiotic pop stars to be duped into becoming involved in a slick piece of propaganda like this new video (below), replete with lies and stereotypes (among those reportedly promoting the video are the British band Coldplay) but perhaps more shocking is that this seems to have been partially funded by European taxpayers. Among those “charities” behind this video appear to have been War on Want, which receives funding from the EU, the U.K. Government Department for International Development, Irish Aid and others. (Among several past related dispatches, please see War on Want wages War on Israel.)
Freedom for Palestine. Nothing, apparently, about real apartheid states like Bahrain, or prison states like Syria, or for that matter, the Malvinas Islands, or Ceuta and Melilla, or Nagorno-Karabakh or hundreds of other disputed territories around the world. Only Palestine commands the attention of British celebrities.
ETHIOPIAN JEW SINGS ARABIC SONG ON ISRAELI TV TALENT SHOW
New Israeli singing sensation Hagit Yasu
21-year old Hagit Yasu, an Israeli Ethiopian Jew, gave a highly popular performance last weekend on Israel’s “A Star is Born” talent show.
She is singing a song in Arabic, called “From the day you left”, which I am told was written by Shim’on Busqila and composed by Idan Reichel, both Israeli Jews. Hagit is from the Israeli town of Sderot which has been subjected to more rocket attacks on civilians than any other town on the planet in recent years.
But those attacks, celebrated in the Arab world, haven’t stopped Israelis celebrating Arab language and culture.
ISRAEL’S INDEFENSIBLE BORDERS
This video, by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, explains why most political parties in Israel from left to right, would never countenance a return to the 1967 armistice lines, lines from which Israel cannot defend itself.
IRANIAN COMMANDOS ATTACK...
Iranian commandos attack...
...satellite dishes
This was filmed last week (on May 27) as the regime in Tehran once again tries to stop people tuning in to news broadcasts from abroad.
For my own recent interview with Iranian opposition media, please see here.
Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:
* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6
* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad
* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)
* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”
* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal
* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Cheering Bin Laden in London)
* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (not Israeli and U.S. ones)
* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”
* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology
* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria
* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...
* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)
* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”
* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”
* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”
* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?
* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?
* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.
* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon
* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring
* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)
* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv
* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict
* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)
* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)
* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill
* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)
* Controversial Ofer brothers ship that docked in Iran “was carrying Israel Air Force Blackhawk helicopters, hidden in modified containers, with Israeli commandos on board”
***
* Lebanese-born scholar Fouad Ajami: “[While Israel has had a series of compromising leaders] sadly, the Palestinian national movement has known a different kind of leadership, unique in its mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement, in its refusal to accept what can and can’t be had in the world of nations. Leadership is often about luck, the kind of individuals a people’s history brings forth. It was the distinct misfortune of the Palestinians that for nearly four decades, they were led by Yasser Arafat … Arafat was neither a Ben-Gurion leading his people to statehood, nor an Anwar Sadat accepting the logic of peace and compromise.”
* “Palestine has become a great Arab shame. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. No leader has had the courage to tell those who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination… They were no more likely to find political satisfaction than the Jews who had been banished from Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo, and Casablanca and Fez. (Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of the Beirut of my boyhood, is now a Hezbollah stronghold, and no narrative exalts or recalls that old presence.)”
* “The 1947 vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn’t the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition.” The UN can’t deliver a Palestinian state; first the Palestinians need to do the hard work of building a state and taking responsibility for their own economy.
***
* Charles Krauthammer: “The status quo is unsustainable,” declared Obama, “and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.” Israel too? Exactly what bold steps for peace have the Palestinians taken? Israel made three radically conciliatory offers to establish a Palestinian state, withdrew from Gaza and has been trying to renew negotiations for more than two years. Meanwhile, the Gaza Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israeli towns and villages. And on the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas turns down then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer, walks out of negotiations with Binyamin Netanyahu and now defies the U.S. by seeking not peace talks but instant statehood – without peace, without recognizing Israel – at the UN. And to make unmistakable this spurning of any peace process, Abbas agrees to join the openly genocidal Hamas in a unity government, which even Obama acknowledges makes negotiations impossible.
***
* Elliott Abrams: Missing from the Bibi vs. Barack drama in Washington was the man who really torpedoed the peace process, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is 76 and will retire from politics next year, having announced that he will not seek reelection. A man without charisma or great political courage, he was never a serious candidate to make the difficult compromises that a peace deal with Israel would require and then defend himself against charges of treason and betrayal. To the generous peace offer made by Ehud Olmert in 2008, Abbas responded with silence.
* Obama’s mistreatment of the visiting Netanyahu can only have deepened the latter’s belief that Obama was irretrievably hostile. Obama gave a major Middle East speech the day before Netanyahu arrived. The message was clear: I have no interest in what you are saying and will make my views plain even before we exchange one word.
* Worse yet was the lack of any advance notice. The Israelis had been told days before that the Obama speech would cover the Arab Spring and say little about them, and were given only a couple of hours’ notice that, on the contrary, the president would make a significant policy statement that contradicted Israeli views. They felt – and they were – blindsided.
* In the Clinton and Bush administrations such major policy statements were preceded by weeks of consultations, and when a president breaks that pattern it is a deliberate and powerful message. This is the explanation for the brief tutorial in Israeli security concerns that Netanyahu held Friday in the Oval Office: The gloves were off, but it was Obama who took them off first.
Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, 13, had his penis cut off and was then tortured to death by the Syrian security forces
(You can comment on this dispatch here: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia. You first have to press “Like” on that page.)
CONTENTS
1. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if The New York Times reported properly on Syria?
2. Australian FM: “Assad should stand trial for human rights abuses”
3. Extra note: “Ofer ships in Iran carried Blackhawk helicopters”
4. “The UN can’t deliver a Palestinian state” (By Fouad Ajami, Wall St Journal, June 1, 2011)
4. “The Third Man” (By Elliott Abrams, The Weekly Standard, Edition of June 6, 2011)
6. “What Obama did to Israel” (By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, May 26, 2011)
[Note by Tom Gross]
WOULDN’T IT BE FANTASTIC IF THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTED PROPERLY ON SYRIA?
From the London Daily Mail (and countless other papers):
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if The New York Times, and its global counterpart the International Herald Tribune, also reported properly on Syria? If they could devote even 10 percent of the space they give to their columnists, editorials and news reporters to drag Israel through the mud, to covering Syria, they might finally be able to claim they were actually a “paper of record”.
(Of course, The New York Times has a long history of failing to report properly on the crimes of dictators, most notably covering up for Stalin in the 1930s and for Hitler in the 1940s.)
***
Australian FM: “Assad should stand trial for human rights abuses”
If only Obama would say something similar.
***
I attach articles below by Fouad Ajami (a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies), Elliott Abrams (a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and formerly deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration), and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. All three writers are subscribers to this email list.
-- Tom Gross
***
For more on Abbas: www.tomgrossmedia.com/MahmoudAbbas.html
For more on Arafat: www.tomgrossmedia.com/ArafatArticles.html
Abbas succeeded Yasser Arafat, his boss of 40 years
EXTRA NOTE: “OFER SHIPS IN IRAN CARRIED BLACKHAWK HELICOPTERS”
There has been a great deal of controversy and negative publicity in recent days in newspapers such as The Financial Times, about Israel’s richest family, the Ofer family, after the U.S. State Department imposed sanctions on Tanker Pacific Ltd., owned by the Ofers, for selling a tanker to an Iranian company in breach of sanctions against Iran.
Sources indicate that the wave of negative publicity against the Ofers may be unjustified. The ships owned by the Ofer brothers that docked in Iran may have carried Israel Air Force Blackhawk helicopters with Israeli commandos on board, enabling Israelis to conduct reconnaissance missions against Iran’s nuclear sites without arousing suspicion.
(For more details of alleged Israeli actions to slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program, please see here.)
ARTICLES
FIRST THE PALESTINIANS NEED TO DO SOME HARD WORK
The UN can’t deliver a Palestinian state
The General Assembly vote that created Israel was the culmination of decades of hard work on the ground.
By Fouad Ajami
The Wall Street Journal
June 1, 2011
It had been quite a scramble, the prelude to the vote on Nov. 29, 1947, on the question of the partition of Palestine. The United Nations itself was only two years old and had just 56 member states; the Cold War was gathering force, and no one was exactly sure how the two pre-eminent powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would vote. The Arab and Muslim states were of course unalterably opposed, for partition was a warrant for a Jewish state.
In the end, the vote broke for partition, the U.S. backed the resolution, and two days later the Soviet Union followed suit. It was a close call: 10 states had abstained, 13 had voted against, 33 were in favor, only two votes over the required two-thirds majority.
Now, some six decades later, the Palestinians are calling for a vote in the next session of the General Assembly, in September, to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. In part, this is an appropriation by the Palestinians of the narrative of Zionism. The vote in 1947 was viewed as Israel’s basic title to independence and statehood. The Palestinians and the Arab powers had rejected partition and chosen the path of war. Their choice was to prove calamitous.
By the time the guns had fallen silent, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, had held its ground against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Its forces stood on the shores of the Red Sea in the south, and at the foot of the Golan Heights in the north. Palestinian society had collapsed under the pressure of war. The elites had made their way to neighboring lands. Rural communities had been left atomized and leaderless. The cities had fought, and fallen, alone.
Palestine had become a great Arab shame. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination.
Some had taken the keys to their houses with them to Syria and Lebanon and across the river to Jordan. They were no more likely to find political satisfaction than the Jews who had been banished from Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo, and Casablanca and Fez, but the idea of return, enshrined into a “right of return,” would persist. (Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of the Beirut of my boyhood, is now a Hezbollah stronghold, and no narrative exalts or recalls that old presence.)
History hadn’t stood still. The world was remade. In 1947-48, when the Zionists had secured their statehood, empires were coming apart, borders were fluid, the international system of states as we know it quite new. India and Pakistan had emerged as independent, hostile states out of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and Israel had secured its place in the order of nations a year later. Many of the Arab states were still in their infancy.
But the world is a vastly different place today. The odds might favor the Palestinians in the General Assembly, but any victory would be hollow.
The Palestinians have misread what transpired at the General Assembly in 1947. True, the cause of Jewish statehood had been served by the vote on partition, but the Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground. Jewish statehood was a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. All the ingredients had been secured by Labor Zionism. There was a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies, there were political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them, who knew what can be had in the world of nations.
The vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn’t the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition. Realism had guided the Zionist project. We will take a state even if it is the size of a tablecloth, said Chaim Weizmann, one of the founding fathers of the Zionist endeavor.
Sadly, the Palestinian national movement has known a different kind of leadership, unique in its mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement, in its refusal to accept what can and can’t be had in the world of nations. Leadership is often about luck, the kind of individuals a people’s history brings forth. It was the distinct misfortune of the Palestinians that when it truly mattered, and for nearly four decades, they were led by a juggler, Yasser Arafat, a man fated to waste his people’s chances.
Arafat was neither a Ben-Gurion leading his people to statehood, nor an Anwar Sadat accepting the logic of peace and compromise. He had been an enemy of Israel, but Israel had reached an accord with him in 1993, made room for him, and for a regime of his choice in Gaza. He had warred against the United States, but American diplomacy had fallen under his spell, and the years of the Clinton presidency were devoted to the delusion that the man could summon the courage to accept a practical peace.
But Arafat would do nothing of the kind. Until his death in 2004, he refrained from telling the Palestinians the harsh truths they needed to hear about the urgency of practicality and compromise. Instead, he held out the illusion that the Palestinians can have it all, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. His real constituents were in the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and among the Palestinians in Kuwait. So he peddled the dream that history’s verdict could be overturned, that the “right of return” was theirs.
There was hope that the Arafat legacy would go with him to the grave. The new Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had been a lieutenant of Arafat’s, but there were hints of a break with the Arafat legacy. The alliance between Fatah and Hamas that Mr. Abbas has opted for put these hopes to rest. And the illusion that the U.N. can break the stalemate in the Holy Land is vintage Arafat. It was Arafat who turned up at the General Assembly in 1974 with a holster on his hip, and who proclaimed that he had come bearing a freedom fighter’s gun and an olive branch, and that it was up to the U.N. not to let the olive branch fall from his hand.
For the Palestinians there can be no escape from negotiations with Israel. The other Arabs shall not redeem Palestinian rights. They have their own burdens to bear. In this Arab Spring, this season of popular uprisings, little has been said in Tunis and Cairo and Damascus and Sanaa about Palestine.
The General Assembly may, in September, vote to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. But true Palestinian statehood requires convincing a decisive Israeli majority that statehood is a herald for normalcy in that contested land, for Arabs and Jews alike.
THE MAN WHO REALLY TORPEDOED THE PEACE PROCESS
The Third Man
Missing from the Bibi vs. Barack drama in Washington was the man who really torpedoed the peace process, Mahmoud Abbas
By Elliott Abrams
The Weekly Standard
Edition of June 6, 2011
The week of dueling speeches by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu was great political drama, but a key character was missing from the scene: Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. While Abbas was absent, it was in fact his creation on April 27 of a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas that provided the backdrop for what we saw in Washington. So an analysis of what happened last week must begin not with Bibi’s calculations or Obama’s, but those of Abbas.
Mahmoud Abbas is 76 years old and will retire from politics next year, having announced that he will not seek reelection. His tenure as chairman of both the Fatah movement and the PLO (which began when Arafat died in late 2004) has been disastrous, for he lost first the 2006 elections and then control of Gaza to Hamas. A man without charisma or great political courage, he was never a serious candidate to make the difficult compromises that a peace deal with Israel would require and then defend himself against charges of treason and betrayal. To the generous peace offer made by Ehud Olmert in 2008, Abbas responded with silence. It is true that life on the West Bank has improved considerably during his tenure as Palestinian Authority president, but he never cared much about wearing that third hat; he left such mundane matters to PA prime minister Salam Fayyad while he jetted around the world seeking support for the Great Cause.
Abbas thought his ship had come in when Barack Obama became president: Surely this man, so diffident about Israel, would deliver the Israeli diplomatic collapse the PLO needed. And sure enough, Obama’s tenure began with the hiring of George Mitchell (on Obama’s second day in office) and the demand for a total construction freeze by Israel-not only in the settlements but even in Jerusalem. Now, two years later, Mitchell is gone and Abbas has given up on Obama. In a remarkably bitter interview with Newsweek, Abbas vented his disillusionment: “It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze. I said okay, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it.”
Unwilling to make far-reaching compromises himself, and now convinced Obama would not force deep concessions on the Israelis, Abbas decided to secure his legacy a different way: through a façade of national unity. Sure, he lost the elections to Hamas and they have Gaza, but with this unity deal there would be new elections next year and-on paper, anyway-the split would be over and the Palestinian family together again. And he would deliver more: United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state through a vote to admit it to membership. So Abbas would leave office with honor. To be sure, he would always be a transitional figure between Arafat and whatever came next, and neither peace nor real statehood would be any closer. But in the realm of symbolism and rhetoric where Palestinian political life has always been lived, he could say he had never yielded an inch to the Zionists.
These developments left both Netanyahu and Obama high and dry. For Netanyahu, the Hamas deal not only meant that no negotiations were possible but also endangered the existing cooperation with the Palestinian Authority. The West Bank economy had (with some Israeli help) improved steadily in the last few years, and the new American-trained PA police worked closely with Israel against terrorism-and especially against Hamas. It was possible to see some ways forward: handing control of more West Bank territory to the PA, strengthening PA security forces, watching a Palestinian state develop on the ground under Fayyad’s pragmatic leadership. Now that approach was gone.
And so was Obama’s push for a negotiation. The incoherence of U.S. policy is summed up in this passage from Obama’s AIPAC speech: “We know that peace demands a partner-which is why I said that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Palestinians who do not recognize its right to exist....But the march to isolate Israel internationally-and the impulse of the Palestinians to abandon negotiations-will continue to gain momentum in the absence of a credible peace process and alternative.” So Israel cannot be expected to negotiate and it must start negotiating.
That is where the president stands after two years of involvement in Middle East peacemaking, and his problems are largely of his own making. Israel and the Palestinians had been at the table together for decades until the Obama/Mitchell/Rahm Emanuel decision to demand a total end to Israeli construction froze not the settlements but the diplomacy. Previous presidents-both Clinton and George W. Bush-had managed to gain the confidence of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, while Obama is now mistrusted on all sides.
We would not be where we are had all three men-Abbas, Netanyahu, Obama-not given up on each other, a striking failure in American diplomacy. The president’s inability to get it right was visible this past week. The pair of speeches must have been the products of intense effort at the White House, yet the errors made in his Thursday speech at the State Department required quick fixes on Sunday at AIPAC. He forgot on Thursday to mention the three “Quartet Principles” that are the preconditions for Hamas participation in government and in negotiations: abandon violence, acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, respect all previous Israel-PLO agreements. So those were added to the Sunday speech. His Thursday formulation suggested that the “1967 lines” would be Israel’s new border with some swaps agreed to by the Palestinians. Owing to protests, he had to add in his Sunday AIPAC speech that the parties “will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967” - while complaining that he had been deliberately misunderstood.
Meanwhile his mistreatment of the visiting Netanyahu can only have deepened the latter’s belief that Obama was irretrievably hostile. While the diplomatic niceties were observed this time (Netanyahu got to stay in Blair House, and there were plenty of photos and a TV session in the Oval Office), the fact remains that Obama gave a major Middle East speech the day before Netanyahu arrived. The message was clear: I have no interest in what you are saying and will make my views plain even before we exchange one word. Worse yet was the lack of any advance notice. The Israelis had been told days before that the Obama speech would cover the Arab Spring and say little about them, and were given only a couple of hours’ notice that, on the contrary, the president would make a significant policy statement that contradicted Israeli views. They felt-and they were-blindsided. In the Clinton and Bush administrations such major policy statements were preceded by weeks of consultations, and when a president breaks that pattern it is a deliberate and powerful message. This is the explanation for the brief tutorial in Israeli security concerns that Netanyahu held Friday in the Oval Office: The gloves were off, but it was Obama who took them off first.
The president jetted off to Europe after his AIPAC speech, and after his own speech to Congress Netanyahu went home. Washington is celebrating Memorial Day weekend, entering the summer, and watching the Republicans begin to figure out who will be their candidate in 2012. But now what? After the four dueling speeches, is there an American policy? What remains of the “peace process”?
For Abbas, the path forward seems clear. Get the U.N. vote in September; hold local elections this fall; hold parliamentary and presidential elections next year; and then retire. This requires holding the Hamas-Fatah deal together, no easy task: The last such deal, in 2007, failed in a few months and led to the Hamas coup in Gaza. But this one may last longer because it is less ambitious. It is an agreement to have an election next year, while Hamas keeps Gaza and Fatah keeps the West Bank for the interim. Fatah and Hamas hate each other no less today than they did yesterday. Their leaders have decided that the right formula for the coming year is patriotic speeches plus a U.N. vote plus an election, and in part this is their reaction to the “Arab Spring.” They need to have elections because every Arab state seems to be doing so now, and they need to keep public dissatisfaction focused on Israel lest people decide that their own rulers are the problem.
But Abbas is in fact creating a very dangerous situation with these maneuvers. As noted, they bring into question the growing security cooperation in the West Bank. Will a PA leadership now doing deals with Hamas be willing to continue acting against it on the ground? What is to become of the American-trained police forces when Prime Minister Fayyad, who has provided leadership to them, leaves office this summer in accordance with the Hamas-Fatah agreement?
Moreover, the deal with Hamas will allow it to enter next year’s internal elections in the PLO, the body responsible for negotiating with Israel, while it also enters the PA parliamentary and presidential elections. Hamas victories would mean permanent confrontation with Israel. Once again-as with the emergence of Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s and Yasser Arafat in the 1960s-Palestinians would be led by extremists and any hope of peace would be gone. Hamas and Fatah, moreover, are likely to agree on the immediate tactic of “nonviolent demonstrations” on Israel’s borders after the U.N. vote, and these could deteriorate quickly into violent confrontations. Abbas will retire happily to Amman or Doha (where he keeps homes) next year, but his true legacy to his people may be disaster.
As for President Obama, his two speeches leave one wondering about his true intentions this year and next. Perhaps the speeches were meant to set up a certain distance from Israel and enable easier negotiations with the Europeans over the coming U.N. vote. Perhaps the president has concluded that nothing good will happen in the coming year, so he meant to say his piece, stake out what he no doubt viewed as a balanced, middle-of-the-road position, and park the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a year and a half until he can get himself reelected. Surely the president knows that at least until after the Palestinian elections no negotiations are possible, but perhaps he hopes that by 2013 Hamas might have been defeated-or Netanyahu might have been ousted in Israel’s elections. Obama’s brief experiment in laying out an American position-”The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps”-brought him immediate trouble and necessitated a partial retraction, but may nevertheless be a foretaste of what is to come after reelection. He may lay out an American plan and push the parties to accept it or at least negotiate from it. If the Israelis refuse, the bitterness in today’s relations between the White House and the prime minister’s office will only deepen in an Obama second term.
All of this makes life harder for Israel and in a way easier for Prime Minister Netanyahu. When a deeply sympathetic American president asks for concessions and compromises and appears able to cajole some from the Palestinians, which was the Clinton/Rabin and Bush/Sharon combination, Israel must respond. When a president most Israelis regard as hostile pushes them while the PLO leadership turns to Hamas, most Israelis will back Netanyahu’s tough response. “The Palestinian Authority must choose either peace with Israel or peace with Hamas. There is no possibility for peace with both,” Netanyahu said after the Hamas-Fatah deal was announced. Few Israelis will disagree. Netanyahu’s plans for the coming year and a half may include an early election, to capitalize on popular support for his tough defense of Israeli security in his Washington speeches. With the future of Egypt and Syria uncertain, rumblings in Jordan, and Hamas entering the PA and PLO elections next year, a policy of hanging tough may be Bibi’s best bet-and Israel’s as well. In addition to the considerable danger that Palestinian demonstrations after the September U.N. vote will turn violent, that vote may also bring further energy to the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement in Europe-perhaps even a greater danger to an Israel dependent on its export economy.
What strengthens Bibi’s hand is not that the prospects Israel faces are good, but that no alternatives appear real to most Israelis. Negotiations are out for now, and unilateral concessions in the West Bank cannot be made when the future roles of Hamas and the PA security forces are unknown. Anyway, Israelis will think, who knows what the future will bring? Maybe Obama will not be reelected. Maybe Hamas will lose the election, or the unity deal will collapse. Maybe Syria’s Assad will fall. Maybe events in Egypt or Jordan will change the American outlook. Israel faced worse situations in 1948 and ‘56 and ‘67 and ‘73, and it survived. On May 19, while Netanyahu visited Washington, Jews there and throughout the world read the Torah portion completing the book of Leviticus and, according to tradition, stood and chanted the words from the book of Joshua: “Be strong and of good courage.” That may sum up Israeli policy for 2011 and 2012.
If there was a symbolic moment that epitomized the events of this past week and the months that preceded it, it was not the president’s partial retractions before AIPAC. Nor was it Netanyahu’s superb speech to and rapturous reception by a joint session of Congress while the president was absent from the city. It was instead in Austin, Texas, where Salam Fayyad attended his son’s graduation from the University of Texas. While there, Fayyad suffered a mild heart attack. Well might his heart fail as he watched the direction of Palestinian politics and the continuing policy failures in Washington. Fayyad served as finance minister for the PA after 2002 and has served as prime minister since 2007, but will now be leaving office. Whether the institutions he helped build and the practices he imposed-from police forces fighting terror to public finances free of corruption-will survive is much in doubt. It is not hard to picture him in a hospital room in Texas, wondering if the effort to build a decent Palestinian state from the ground up was now to be wasted.
WHAT OBAMA DID TO ISRAEL
What Obama did to Israel
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post
May 26, 2011
Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The long-standing American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.
It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, President George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel absorbing major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.
For 2 and a half years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves – Israelis and Palestinians – will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.
It means nothing of the sort. “Mutually” means both parties have to agree. And if one side doesn’t? Then, by definition, you’re back to the 1967 lines.
Nor is this merely a theoretical proposition. Three times the Palestinians have been offered exactly that formula, 1967 plus swaps – at Camp David 2000, Taba 2001, and the 2008 Olmert-Abbas negotiations. Every time, the Palestinians said no and walked away.
And that remains their position today: The 1967 lines. Period. Indeed, in September the Palestinians are going to the United Nations to get the world to ratify precisely that – a Palestinian state on the ‘67 lines. No swaps.
Note how Obama has undermined Israel’s negotiating position. He is demanding that Israel go into peace talks having already forfeited its claim to the territory won in the ‘67 war – its only bargaining chip. Remember: That ‘67 line runs right through Jerusalem. Thus the starting point of negotiations would be that the Western Wall and even Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter are Palestinian – alien territory for which Israel must now bargain.
The very idea that Judaism’s holiest shrine is alien or that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter is rightfully or historically or demographically Arab is an absurdity. And the idea that, in order to retain them, Israel has to give up parts of itself is a travesty.
Obama didn’t just move the goal posts on borders. He also did so on the so-called right of return. Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs would destroy the world’s only Jewish state while creating a 23rd Arab state and a second Palestinian state – not exactly what we mean when we speak of a “two-state solution.” That’s why it has been the policy of the United States to adamantly oppose this “right.”
Yet in his State Department speech, Obama refused to simply restate this position – and refused again in a supposedly corrective speech three days later. Instead, he told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory. Bargaining with what, pray tell?
No matter. “The status quo is unsustainable,” declared Obama, “and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.”
Israel too? Exactly what bold steps for peace have the Palestinians taken? Israel made three radically conciliatory offers to establish a Palestinian state, withdrew from Gaza and has been trying to renew negotiations for more than two years. Meanwhile, the Gaza Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israeli towns and villages. And on the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas turns down then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer, walks out of negotiations with Binyamin Netanyahu and now defies the United States by seeking not peace talks but instant statehood – without peace, without recognizing Israel – at the United Nations. And to make unmistakable this spurning of any peace process, Abbas agrees to join the openly genocidal Hamas in a unity government, which even Obama acknowledges makes negotiations impossible.
Obama’s response to this relentless Palestinian intransigence? To reward it – by abandoning the Bush assurances, legitimizing the ‘67 borders and refusing to reaffirm America’s rejection of the right of return.
The only remaining question is whether this perverse and ultimately self-defeating policy is born of genuine antipathy toward Israel or of the arrogance of a blundering amateur who refuses to see that he is undermining not just peace but the very possibility of negotiations.