A “Yes, Prime Minister” video clip is further down this page
* Walter Russell Mead: “A group more radical than al-Qaeda, better organized, better financed, commanding the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics including many with Western and even U.S. passports? And this group now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East? Welcome to President Obama’s brave new world.”
* Mead: “One wishes we had a Republican President right now if only because when a Republican is in the White House, the media and the chattering classes believe they have a solemn moral duty to categorize and analyze the failures of American strategy and policy. Today that is far from the case; few in the mainstream press seem interested in tracing the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure that dog the footsteps of the hapless Obama team in a region the White House claimed to understand. Nothing important has gone right for the small and tightly knit team that runs American Middle East policy.”
* “Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. No one, ever, will call this administration’s Middle East policies to date either competent or wise – though the usual press acolytes will continue to do what they can to spread a forgiving haze over the strategic collapse of everything this White House has attempted.”
***
* Elliott Abrams: “The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll [in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and elsewhere] is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.”
* Abrams: “How did it happen? Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam – knowledge ‘rooted in my own experience’ because ‘I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.’”
* “Despite the urgings of all his top advisers – Panetta at CIA and then Defense, Clinton at State, Petraeus at CIA, even Dempsey at the Pentagon – the president refused to give meaningful assistance to the Syrian nationalist rebels. Assistance was announced in June 2013 and then again in June 2014 but it is a minimal effort, far too small to match the presence of Hezbollah and Iranian Quds Force fighters in Syria [or to stop forcing Sunnis into the hands of militants].”
* The humanitarian result has been tragic: At least 160,000 killed in Syria, eight million displaced, more than a million in Lebanon, 1.25 m in Jordan, Poison gas back on the world scene as a tolerated weapon, with Assad using chlorine gas this year and paying no price whatsoever for this and for his repeated attacks on civilian targets…
***
You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
CONTENTS
1. Parallels between “Yes, Prime Minister” and Obama’s foreign policy?
2. “Welcome to Obama’s brave new world” (By Walter Russell Mead, American Interest, June 23, 2014)
3. “The Man who broke the Middle East” (By Elliott Abrams, Politico, June 22, 2014)
4. “Syrian woman survives 700 days of blockade” (By Diaa Hadid, Associated Press, June 11, 2014)
PARALLELS BETWEEN “YES, PRIME MINISTER” AND OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY?
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach two articles that take a hardline position on Obama’s foreign policy failings.
Not all readers to this website will agree with these articles, and in fact I think the authors (Walter Russell Mead and Elliott Abrams), both of whom I admire, might be a little too hard on Obama. I can think of one partial foreign policy success: the removal of many of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks (even though this removal was done at the price of allowing the Assad regime to continue slaughtering civilians).
This chemical weapons removal, it should be noted, has not been complete since Assad continues to hide chemical stocks, and to use chlorine gas and other outlawed substances in “barrel bombs” dropped on refugee camps and Syrian towns in recent weeks. The chemical weapons deal was forged not only by the U.S. government but also in cooperation with the Russian one. However, the removal and destruction of any chemical weapons in the hands of Assad must be viewed as some kind of success by the Obama administration.
Nevertheless, five and a half years into his presidency, the overall foreign policy record of the Obama team – whether in the Middle East, Africa, Russia or elsewhere – does not look good at all.
This clip (lasting under a minute) from the classic Britain comedy series “Yes, Prime Minister” is now doing the rounds on social media, and to many, sums up Obama’s approach.
***
I also attach a third article below, by Diaa Hadid (one of the Associated Press’ correspondents in Syria, who, like Elliott Abrams, is a subscriber to this list), “Syrian woman survives 700 days of blockade,” about Zeinat Akhras, a 65-year-old pharmacist in Homs:
“Over the course of the 700-day blockade, her world shrunk to her living room and her kitchen. She survived by eating plants and reading books. She refused to look in the mirror, because seeing her withered state might break her spirit.”
-- Tom Gross
ARTICLES
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Welcome to Obama’s brave new world
By Walter Russell Mead
The American Interest (magazine)
June 23, 2014
ISIS is bigger, badder, richer, and better organized than any jihadi threat the United States has faced thus far. Its rise represents a foreign policy disaster of the first order.
***
A group more radical than al-Qaeda, better organized, better financed, commanding the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics including many with Western and even U.S. passports? And this group now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East?
Welcome to President Obama’s brave new world. After six years in office pursuing strategies he believed would tame the terror threat and doing his best to reassure the American people that the terror situation was under control, with the “remnants” of al-Qaeda skittering into the shadows like roaches when the exterminator arrives, Obama now confronts the most powerful and hostile jihadi movement of modern times, a movement that dances on the graveyard of his hopes.
The Financial Times has rounded up some expert commentary that tries to describe exactly what kind of organization we’re up against here:
“‘They’re probably the richest jihadi organisation ever seen,’ says Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute, and an expert on extremism. ‘They get their money from trafficking weapons, kidnappings for ransom, counterfeit currencies, oil refining, smuggling artefacts that are thousands of years old and from taxes that they have for areas they are in – either on businesses, or at checkpoints or on ordinary people,’ he adds. [...]
“‘Most jihadist groups are tightly controlled, secretive and well co-ordinated, but Isis has essentially taken that to another level, with a quite impressive level of bureaucracy, extensive account keeping, and multiple channels of accountability,’ says Charles Lister, an analyst at the Brookings Doha Centre.”
***
The state ISIS hopes to construct may not endure; in periods of radical instability like this one in the Middle East, the fortunes of war can change with breathtaking speed. But the capacities it is building, the supplies it is gathering, the networks forming around it, the training it imparts, and the enormous psychological boost its current success, however fleeting, gives to the jihadi cause will remain.
One wishes we had a Republican President right now if only because when a Republican is in the White House, the media and the chattering classes believe they have a solemn moral duty to categorize and analyze the failures of American strategy and policy. Today that is far from the case; few in the mainstream press seem interested in tracing the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure that dog the footsteps of the hapless Obama team in a region the White House claimed to understand. Nothing important has gone right for the small and tightly knit team that runs American Middle East policy. Most administrations have one failure in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking; this administration has two, both distinctly more ignominious and damaging than average. The opening to the Middle East, once heralded by this administration as transformative, has long vanished; no one even talks about the President’s speeches in Cairo and Istanbul anymore, unless regional cynics are looking for punch lines for bitter jokes. The support for the “transition to democracy” in Egypt ended on as humiliating a note as the “red line” kerfuffle in Syria. The spectacular example of advancing human rights by leading from behind in Libya led to an unmitigated disaster from which not only Libya but much of north and west Africa still suffers today.
Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. No one, ever, will call this administration’s Middle East policies to date either competent or wise – though the usual press acolytes will continue to do what they can to spread a forgiving haze over the strategic collapse of everything this White House has attempted, as they talk about George W. Bush at every chance they get. (An honorable exception in the NYT today: Peter Baker has a piece examining the Administration’s failure to end American involvement in Iraq, and making the obvious but important point that the Iraq fiasco is a consequence of Administration failures in Syria. There are more dots still to connect.)
Now, from the ruins of the Obama Administration’s Middle East strategy, the most powerful and dangerous group of religious fanatics in modern history has emerged in the heart of the Middle East. The rise of ISIS is a strategic defeat of the first magnitude for the United States and its allies (as well as countries like Russia and even China). It is a perfect storm of bad policy intersecting with troubled times to create the gravest threat to U.S. and world stability since the end of the Cold War.
The mainstream press and the professional chatterboxes of the news shows need to set aside their squeamishness at poring over the details of a major strategic failure by a liberal Democrat. The rise of ISIS/ISIL is a disaster that must be examined and understood. How could the U.S. government have been caught napping by the rise of a new and hostile power in a region of vital concern? What warning signs were missed, what opportunities were lost – and why? What role did the administration’s trademark dithering and hairsplitting over aid to ISIS’s rivals in the Syrian opposition play in the rise of the radicals?
Meanwhile, as the liberal press does its earnest best to ignore the real-time collapse of a foreign policy it once cheered to the rafters, some GOP voices are doing their best to add to the confusion and further muddy the debate. The architects of the war in Iraq are claiming that this disaster somehow vindicates them, and some hope that, as the nature of the danger and the magnitude of the disaster sink in, the nation will call them back to power.
In fact, the architects of the surge and the policies that stabilized Iraq following the nadir of the war do deserve credit; Generals Petraeus and McCrystal, both driven from public service as a consequence of minor indiscretions, tower like giants over the moralistic timeservers who arrogantly and foolishly cast them aside. But if those who led the nation into Iraq want to play a positive role now, they need to embrace some humility and talk about “lessons learned.” If they want to help the United States of America in an hour of real need, they must not try to use the current situation to win personal vindication – and the more stridently they demand it the more they will place obstacles in the path of the debate that we need, marginalize their own voices and divide a people who need to unite as the dangers grow.
Some members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment are looking for ways to rescue their nation and party from the current mess. Les Gelb at the Daily Beast understands the revolutionary nature of the jihadi blitzkrieg, and argues for a new Grand Alliance of the U.S., Russia, Iran and even Assad against the new power in the Middle East. He tries to head off criticisms:
“I’m certainly not saying that Assad is a good guy and that we should abandon pursuing his eventual departure, or that we can now trust Russia and Iran. Washington has and will have serious problems with all these countries. And most certainly, the U.S. will have to stay on its guard. But the fact is that there is common ground with Moscow and Tehran to combat the biggest threat to all of us at this moment. Russia frets all the time about the jihadis in the Mideast making joint cause with Muslim extremists in Russia; it’s Moscow’s number one security issue. Iran worries greatly about the Sunni jihadis torturing and killing Shiites in Syria and Iraq. There’s nothing more frightening in the world today than these religious fanatics.”
But ultimately, even with Gelb’s many caveats, his proposal may not be practical; a number of these “allies” would be at least as interested in weakening the U.S. as in striking at ISIS – and placing the U.S. on one side of a sectarian war has big drawbacks. There is also the question of whether the earnest White House types who have piled up such a disastrous record in the Middle East could negotiate their way into a used car lot, much less handle a complex negotiation involving Russia, Iran, Assad, and a bunch of other canny operators. Even so, Gelb is right about this: The rise of ISIS, unless checked, presents a challenge big enough to change the international alignment of more than one state. We could be looking at a major geopolitical upheaval here, an earthquake whose aftershocks will be felt across the world.
From current press reports, it appears that Secretary Kerry is off to the Middle East on a mission of splitting the difference. On the one hand, he is kissing up to the Saudis: telling the Saudi backed Egyptian leader Sisi not to worry, that the aid check is in the mail, and insisting that any solution in Iraq must involve a better deal for the Sunnis. On the other hand, he is urging the Shia to make nice – to throw Maliki out and “be more inclusive” with the Sunnis in Iraq. This is the sort of counsel the U.S. always hands out in these situations; we want both sides to “rise above” their “narrow interests” and accept a compromise solution that, coincidentally, gives us what we want.
The Middle East’s leaders have heard exactly this kind of message from many Presidents and Secretaries of State in the past. They are less inspired by our logic than American policymakers think. As the region’s leaders listen to Kerry, they will be asking whether he brought anything but the usual stale platitudes in his baggage. What, specifically, does the U.S. want people to do? And what good things will happen to those who agree to support the U.S. line in this crisis, and what bad things will happen to those who don’t? One hopes the White House has given Kerry big bags full of extra-tasty carrots and intimidating sticks; otherwise, his mission this week will be no more successful than his most recent bout of Middle East peacemaking with the Israelis and Palestinians. The problem is that what Middle Eastern leaders want most from the United States is exactly what President Obama doesn’t want to give them: firm promises of significant and effective military support. The Iraqis want more than a few drone strikes, the Saudis want Iran’s ambitions blocked and the “moderate” Syrian rebels effectively helped; the Iranians want the U.S. to crush ISIS for them.
Secretary Kerry faces a tough week, especially after the Egyptians celebrated his visit by convicting three Al-Jazeera journalists on terrorism charges and giving them long prison terms. For our part, we wish him all the success in the world, and observe that any tangible successes – like the ouster of Maliki – would help to restore the credibility of an administration that desperately needs a win.
For the immediate future, there are two things to watch. First, does ISIS’s momentum carry it forward when it reaches the Shia districts of Iraq? The militias and parade groups currently marching around Baghdad and thumping their chests may not be very effective in the field, and it is not yet clear whether the Iraqi Army will fight any better on Shia home turf than it did in the north and the west. The Sunni crushed the Shia in Iraq for decades and there is no law of nature that says they can’t do it again – if they are willing to be brutal enough.
They probably are.
In any case, the fall of Baghdad and further disintegration of the fragile Shia Army would create one kind of situation; the stabilization of a military front north and west of the city or even inside it would be something quite different. Until we know how that develops on the ground, it will be difficult to think much about the future.
Second, there’s the question of the political balance within the ISIS-held territories. Tribal leaders, Baathist activists, other religious groups and their allies outnumber the true ISIS cadres by an immense factor. It is far from clear whether the rebel region in Syria and Iraq will be under one increasingly powerful and effective government or whether it falls apart into factionalism and internal power struggles. For ISIS to impose real order and authority on the population under its military control, and to build up its forces from a guerrilla army to a force capable of imposing dictatorial religious rule on a large civilian population, would be a victory as difficult and in some ways more astonishing than the triumph of its forces on the ground. The U.S. might do better to try to strengthen the non-ISIS components of the Sunni movements in Syria and Iraq than to look to Tehran and the Kremlin for help.
So the dust will have to settle before we can tell what exactly we are dealing with. But even as we wait for the new picture to emerge internationally, the American people need to come to grips with a strategic escalation of the terror threat at home. ISIS is much richer, much bigger, much better organized and much better positioned to launch attacks in the U.S. and Europe than any of its predecessors. For now, the organization appears to be focused on its local wars, where it certainly has plenty to do. But we’ve consistently underestimated the group’s capabilities, strategic intelligence, innovative planning methods, and drive to prevail. It would be most unwise to assume that a jihadi terror organization 2.0 like ISIS, richer than Osama bin Laden and better supplied with arms and supporters, is incapable of thinking one or two steps ahead. And there’s the reality that hotheads all over the world will be inspired by its success to try a little murder and mayhem on their own.
So here, alas, is where we now stand six years into the Age of Obama: The President isn’t making America safer at home, he doesn’t have the jihadis on the run, he has no idea how to bring prosperity, democracy, or religious moderation to the Middle East, he can’t pivot away from the region, and he doesn’t know what to do next. He’s the only President this country has got, and one can’t help but wish him well, but if things are going to get any better, he needs to stop digging. He probably needs to bring in some new blood, and he must certainly ask himself some tough questions about why so many of his most cherished ideas keep leading him and his country into such ugly places.
Six years into what the President and his supporters thought would be an era of liberal Democrats seizing the national security high ground from enfeebled, discredited Republicans, the outlook is much grimmer than the President’s team could have dreamed. Perhaps they should take comfort from the example of George W. Bush; at this point in his presidency things looked pretty bleak, too. Between the surge in Iraq and hard work building bridges with allies, Bush had some positive foreign policy momentum going by the time he left office. It’s not a place on Mount Rushmore, but it’s better than the alternative. Mr. Obama must now hope he can accomplish as much.
“OBAMA’S DISASTROUS SERIES OF POLICY MISTAKES”
The Man Who Broke the Middle East
By Elliott Abrams
Politico Magazine (Washington)
June 22, 2014
There’s always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story. But unfortunately for the Obama narratives, the president had about as much as to do with Tunisia’s turn toward democracy as he did with the World Cup rankings. Where administration policy has had an impact, the story is one of failure and danger.
The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.
How did it happen? Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam – knowledge “rooted in my own experience” because “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” But President Obama wasn’t speaking that day in an imaginary location called “the world of Islam;” he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power. “As a boy,” Obama told his listeners, “I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.” Nice touch, but Arab rulers were more interested in knowing whether as a man he heard the approaching sound of gunfire, saw the growing threat of al Qaeda from the Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula, and understood the ambitions of the ayatollahs as Iran moved closer and closer to a bomb.
Obama began with the view that there was no issue in the Middle East more central than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Five years later he has lost the confidence of both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and watched his second secretary of state squander endless efforts in a doomed quest for a comprehensive peace. Obama embittered relations with America’s closest ally in the region and achieved nothing whatsoever in the “peace process.” The end result in the summer of 2014 is to see the Palestinian Authority turn to a deal with Hamas for new elections that – if they are held, which admittedly is unlikely – would usher the terrorist group into a power-sharing deal. This is not progress.
The most populous Arab country is Egypt, where Obama stuck too long with Hosni Mubarak as the Arab Spring arrived, and then with the Army, and then the Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi, and now is embracing the Army again. Minor failings like the persecution of newspaper editors and leaders of American-backed NGOs, or the jailing of anyone critical of the powers-that-be at a given moment, were glossed over. When the Army removed an elected president, that was not really a “coup” – remember? And as the worm turned, we managed to offend every actor on Egypt’s political stage, from the military to the Islamists to the secular democratic activists. Who trusts us now on the Egyptian political scene? No one.
But these errors are minor when compared to those in Iraq and Syria. When the peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad was brutally crushed, Obama said Assad must go; when Assad used sarin gas, Obama said this was intolerable and crossed a red line. But behind these words there was no American power, and speeches are cheap in the Middle East. Despite the urgings of all his top advisers (using the term loosely; he seems to ignore their advice) – Panetta at CIA and then Defense, Clinton at State, Petraeus at CIA, even Dempsey at the Pentagon – the president refused to give meaningful assistance to the Syrian nationalist rebels. Assistance was announced in June 2013 and then again in June 2014 (in the president’s West Point speech) but it is a minimal effort, far too small to match the presence of Hezbollah and Iranian Quds Force fighters in Syria. Arabs see this as a proxy war with Iran, but in the White House the key desire is to put all those nasty Middle Eastern wars behind us. So in the Middle East American power became a mirage, something no one could find – something enemies did not fear and allies could not count on.
The humanitarian result has been tragic: At least 160,000 killed in Syria, perhaps eight million displaced. More than a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon (a country of four million people, before Obama added those Syrians), about a million and a quarter Syrian refugees in Jordan (population six million before Obama). Poison gas back on the world scene as a tolerated weapon, with Assad using chlorine gas systematically in “barrel bombs” this year and paying no price whatsoever for this and for his repeated attacks on civilian targets. Both of the key officials handling Syria for Obama – State Department special envoy Fred Hof and Ambassador Robert Ford – resigned in disgust when they could no longer defend Obama’s hands-off policy. Can Samantha Power be far behind, watching the mass killings and seeing her president respond to them with rhetoric?
The result in security terms is even worse: the largest gathering of jihadis we have ever seen, 12,000 now and expanding.They come from all over the world, a jihadi Arab League, a jihadi EU, a jihadi U.N. Two or three thousand are from Europe, and an estimated 70 from the United States. When they go home, some no doubt disillusioned but many committed, experienced and well trained, “home” will be Milwaukee and Manchester and Marseille – and, as we see now on the front pages, to Mosul. When Obama took office there was no such phenomenon; it is his creation, the result of his passivity in Syria while Sunnis were being slaughtered by the Assad regime.
And now they have spread back into Iraq in sufficient numbers to threaten the survival of its government. Obama has reacted, sending 300 advisers, a number that may presage further expansion of American military efforts. Perhaps they will find good targets, and be the basis for American air strikes and additional diplomatic pressure. But we had won this game, at great expense, before Obama walked away. The fiery rage of Iraqi Sunnis at the government in Baghdad had been banked by 2009. American diplomatic efforts, whose power was based in the American military role, disappeared under Obama, who just wanted out. It was his main campaign pledge. So we got out, fully, completely, cleanly – unless you ask about the real world of Iraq instead of the imaginary world of campaign speeches. We could no longer play the role we had played in greasing relations between Kurds, Shia and Sunnis, and in constraining Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s sectarian excesses. The result was an Iraq spinning downward into the kind of Sunni-Shia confrontation we had paid so dearly to stop in 2007 and 2008, and ISIS – the newest moniker for al Qaeda in Iraq – saw its chance, and took it.
So now we’re back in Iraq – or maybe not. Three hundred isn’t a very large number; it is instead reminiscent of the 600 soldiers Obama sent to Central and Eastern Europe after the Russians grabbed Crimea and started a war in Ukraine. Who is reassured by that number, 600, and who is scared by it? Same question for Iraq: Are the Gulf allies reassured by “up to 300” advisers? Is Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the dark mastermind of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, quaking now?
If there is one achievement of Obama policy in the Middle East (because Tunisia’s genuine success isn’t America’s to claim) it is to advance reconciliation between Israel and the Gulf states. This will not be celebrated by the White House, however, because they are joined mostly in fear and contempt for American policy, but it is an interesting development nonetheless. If there is one thing the Gulf Sunni kingdoms understand, it is power – in this case, the Iranian power they fear (as they once feared Saddam’s power, and were saved from it by America). The king of Jordan incautiously spoke several years ago about a “Shia crescent,” but even he must have thought it would take far longer to develop. A map that starts with Hezbollah in Beirut’s southern suburbs and traces lines through Syria and Iraq into Iran would now not be just a nightmare vision, but an actual accounting of where Iran’s forces and allies and sphere of influence lie.That’s what the Saudis, Emiratis, Kuwaitis and others see around them, growing year by year while their former protector dithers. They see one other country that “gets it,” sees the dangers the same way, understands Iran’s grasp at hegemony just as they do: Israel. Oh to be a fly on the wall at the secret chats among Sunni Gulf security officials and their Israeli counterparts, which must be taking place in London and Zurich and other safe European capitals. In the world they all inhabit the weak disappear, and the strong survive and rule. They are the ultimate realists, and they do not call what they see in Washington “realpolitik.”
From World War II, or at least from the day the British left Aden, the United States has been the dominant power in the Middle East. Harry Truman backed the Zionists and Israel came into being; we opposed Suez so the British, French and Israelis backed off; we became the key arms supplier for all our friends and kept the Soviets out; we reversed Saddam’s grabbing of Kuwait; we drove him from power; we drew a red line against chemical warfare; we said an Iranian bomb was unacceptable.
But that red line then disappeared in a last-minute reversal by the president that to this day is mentioned in every conversation about security in the Middle East, and no Arab or Israeli leader now trusts that the United States will stop the Iranian bomb. After all, we have passively watched al Qaeda become a major force in the heart of the region, and watched Iran creep closer to a nuclear weapon, and watched Iran send expeditionary forces to Syria – unopposed by any serious American pushback. Today no one in the Middle East knows what the rulebook is and whether the Americans will enforce any rules at all. No one can safely tell you what the borders of Iraq or Syria will be a few years hence. No one can tell you whether American power is to be feared, or can safely be derided.
That’s the net effect of five and a half years of Obama policy. And, to repeat, it is Obama policy: not the collective wisdom of Kerry and Clinton and Panetta and Petraeus and other “advisers,” but the very personal set of decisions by the one true policymaker, the man who came to office thinking he had a special insight into the entire world of Islam. In the Middle East today, the “call of the azaan” is as widely heard as Obama remembered from Indonesia. But when leaders look around they see clever, well-resourced challenges from Shia and Sunni extremists armed to the teeth, with endless ambitions, willing to kill and kill to grasp power – and far more powerful today than the day this president came into office. They do not see an American leader who fully understands those challenges and who realizes that power, not speeches, must be used to defend our friends and allies and interests. So there’s one other thing a lot of Israeli and Arab leaders share, as they shake their heads and compare notes in those secret meetings: an urgent wish that Jan. 20, 2017, were a lot closer.
HER WORLD SHRUNK
Syrian woman survives 700 days of blockade
By Diaa Hadid
Associated Press
June 11, 2014
HOMS, Syria (AP) – Over the course of the 700-day blockade, her world shrunk to her living room and her kitchen. She survived by eating plants and reading books. She refused to look in the mirror, because seeing her withered state might break her spirit.
Zeinat Akhras, a 65-year-old pharmacist, still bears the effects of nearly two years trapped in her home, surrounded by rebel fighters during the government’s siege on the ancient quarters of the central Syrian city of Homs. She’s still a wispy 38 kilograms (83 pounds), even after gaining four kilograms (eight pounds) since the blockade ended in early May with the fall of the rebels in the city.
“Every day, we said it will end tomorrow,” Akhras said in a recent interview with The Associated Press in her home. “If we counted the number of days, we would have given up.”
Homs’ Old City, a series of crowded neighborhoods, was under siege and bombardment in a campaign by government forces to starve out rebels. Homs had been one of the first to rise up against the rule of President Bashar Assad with protests in March 2011, turning the city into a battleground as government forces cracked down and opponents took up arms.
Government forces clamped the seal over the opposition-held districts in early 2012. Most of the tens of thousands of residents of the areas had already fled. With the siege dragging on, rebels began deserting as hunger spread, and morale collapsed in late 2013. Finally, the last few dozen fighters were evacuated in May to areas further north under a cease-fire, and government forces took full control of the city.
Akhras and her two brothers were among the few civilians who stayed until the end, in their multi-story family home in the al-Maljaa quarter, decorated like many of the area’s homes in an Arab medieval style of black-and-white geometric facades.
They stayed because they feared rebels would seize the building – the fate of other abandoned homes – or would loot the family pharmacy or clothing shop.
In the beginning, the siege was tolerable because Akhras’ family had hoarded provisions for the sometimes long lockdowns during previous gunbattles. They were well stocked with rice, beans and cracked wheat and fuel.
As the blockade deepened, Akhras rarely left the building – perhaps six times during the 700 days, she estimated.
“I used to come back sad from seeing the destruction. This area used to be full of life,” she said.
Life took on a routine.
Her brothers Anas and Ayman went out to check on their businesses and kept an eye on the nearby Mar Elia church. She cooked, kept the building tidy. She rose at dawn and slept at sunset, since there was no electricity. Over the course of the two years, at least 12 shells slammed into their home, causing damage upstairs.
“It was bothersome, because we’d hear explosions day and night. You get used to it.”
A priest asked the Akhras siblings, who are Christians, to hide valuable church property. So gradually, icons and boxes of centuries-old church records piled up in their home. Then, their pharmacy and clothes shop were looted in 2013, so the brothers brought home boxes of remaining medicines and clothes to store as well.
As the siege dragged on, rebel fighters showed up repeatedly demanding food and fuel, Akhras said. They usually came in groups, ordering Akhras to sit in the living room as they raided the kitchen and the upstairs apartments where food was kept. One young rebel snatched a jam jar that “barely had a spoonful left in it,” she recalled.
Toward the end, the fighters didn’t even bother to come with guns – they simply knocked on the door and demanded food. Finally, in mid-2013, armed rebels surrounded the building and came in, carrying away nearly the entire stock of food and fuel. The siblings were left with only cracked wheat, which ran out by January.
Still, she said her family was not harassed by the Sunni rebels for being Christian – it appeared to be because her house was the one with food.
Tragedy came in December. One of her brothers, Anas, who was suffering from cancer, left in a U.N. organized evacuation of hundreds of civilians from the Old City. He died 19 days later.
For the last months, Akhras kept her mind on daily tasks.
Without fuel, her surviving brother Ayman collected firewood. With their supplies down to only tea, oil and spices, Ayman also collected greens – dandelion, chicory and mallow, plants so unnoticed by a city-dweller that Akhras referred to them simply as “grass.” Even those became so scarce that Ayman dug for them in a church cemetery.
Akhras’ duties now included chopping wood to fuel the subya, a traditional heater-oven. She learnt to soak, boil and spice the salvaged greens.
She lost her appetite on the bitter, monotonous meals. She withered from about 127 pounds (58 kilos) when the blockade began to 75 pounds (34 kilos), shrinking as her space grew smaller.
Akhras said she didn’t want to upset herself by looking in the mirror. “I knew I had lost weight. It was like I was on a diet I never wanted.”
Only after the siege was over did she finally see her transformation – she saw herself on TV, in footage of the army’s entry. “I was smaller than a child!” she exclaimed.
In free hours trapped in her home, Akhras devoured books – the Bible and stories of saints, mostly. Neatly arranged on her coffee table stood a row of large bullet casings.
Her darkest days, she said, came after Anas died and when Ayman went to sleep in another building they own to keep away looters. She was left alone as rebels raided the building again, this time digging upstairs for more medicine and clothing.
“I missed my siblings – we are six girls and six boys. I missed my mother who died at the end of 2011,” she said.
Akhras initially didn’t know on May 9 that the blockade had been lifted and government troops had entered the neighborhood. She has no radio and did not listen to the news. In a rare outing to the well across her alleyway, she saw a man who told her, “The army is here.”
Surprised, Akhras found a soldier and asked him for bread – still unaware of how skeletal she appeared. The soldier bought her two dozen pieces of pita bread.
“I ate a whole piece of bread myself,” she said, her eyes shining. “It tasted like sweets.”
13-year-old Mohammad Karakra, killed yesterday on an outing with his father
A recent photo of kidnapped Israeli kid Naftali Fraenkel, top-center, surrounded by friends
Naftali’s uncle, Intel exec Yishai Fraenkel, displays a chart of the Joint Technology Forum, a collection of Israeli, Palestinian and American high-tech firms that are starting “to talk, to just bond.” (Photo: Richard Behar)
* Forbes magazine: “Good vs Evil: Israeli Intel exec pioneers hi-tech with Palestinians. His nephew, a U.S. citizen, is abducted by terrorists.”
* Richard Behar: “Until two days ago, I hadn’t spoken with Yishai Fraenkel since last August. I had just published a Forbes magazine cover story about Israeli-Palestinian joint ventures in high-tech (as well as efforts to bring Israeli Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews into the sector), and had interviewed Yishai for it. As the general manager of the design and development center at Intel’s headquarters in Jerusalem, the 44-year-old is spearheading those integration efforts for the company.”
* Q: Will you continue your work with Palestinians, regardless of what has happened to your nephew? Or will the initiative be affected in any way?
* Yishai Fraenkel: Of course I’ll continue, because I think this is the right thing to do.
***
You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
CONTENTS
1. Not a settler, BBC
2. Abbas condemns kidnappings: “The three young men are human beings just like us”
3. Another attack on Jews in Belgium – this time on kindergarten children
4. Fouad Ajami
5. Dan Jacobson
6. “Good vs Evil: Israeli Intel exec pioneers hi-tech with Palestinians. His nephew, a U.S. citizen, is abducted by terrorists” (By Richard Behar, Forbes magazine, June 22, 2014)
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
NOT A SETTLER, BBC
BBC World Service Radio (which is one of the biggest, if not the biggest broadcasters in the world) yesterday again gave the impression to its worldwide audience that what they called “the Israeli” killed after Syrian forces fired missiles at an Israeli car over the border, was a settler.
Here is what BBC World Service Radio listeners were NOT told in the bulletins I listened to:
The murdered Israeli was 13-year-old Mohammad Karakra, from the Galilee, who as his summer vacation began, told friends he was very excited to spend the day with his father on a trip to the Golan Heights.
But as the father-son daytrip began, their car was hit by an missile fired from Syrian government forces. Mohammad, who said he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up in order “to help people” (there are many Arab-Israeli doctors in Israel), died in his father’s arms. He was driving in an Israeli car with Israeli number plates and that was enough, it seems, for his killers to shoot a missile at it. Four other Israelis were injured in the attack.
ABBAS CONDEMNS KIDNAPPINGS: “THE THREE YOUNG MEN ARE HUMAN BEINGS JUST LIKE US”
Whereas some journalists at the BBC and various anti-Israel NGOs still can’t bring themselves to report accurately on the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers earlier this month (some BBC reports, for example, are still wrongly calling them settlers), in a rare statement to an Arab audience, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas urged the immediate release of the three kidnapped teenagers.
“Those who perpetrated this act want to destroy us [the Palestinians],” Abbas said during a visit to Saudi Arabia. “The three young men are human beings just like us and must be returned to their families.”
One of the teenagers, Naftali Frankel, is also an American citizen. “We told them that whether Israeli or American, he is a human being,” Abbas added.
***
A young Israeli-Arab, 16-year-old Mohammad Zoabi, has received threats (including threats to harm him from his father, a grandmother and an aunt) after he posted a three-minute video on YouTube expressing support for the kidnapped Israeli teens. However, his mother praised him for having “the courage to speak out”.
You can see his video, in which he delivers his message in Arabic, Hebrew and English, here:
He is the nephew of Israeli parliamentarian Hanin Zoabi, who is known for her firebrand anti-Israeli remarks and last week told on an Israeli radio station that those who kidnapped the teens were not terrorists.
ANOTHER ATTACK ON JEWS IN BELGIUM – THIS TIME ON KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN
Following the recent deadly attack on the Brussels Jewish museum, yesterday afternoon Jewish kindergarten children traveling on a bus from the Antwerp Hayder school were attacked by a gang of teenagers (who according to Belgian press reports were from the country’s Arab community).
Their school bus was surrounded by the gang who pelted rocks at it while the terrified children cowered inside.
None of the children, who were members of Antwerp’s Orthodox Jewish community, were physically injured. Police arrived on the scene and the mob dispersed.
The French and Belgian governments have stepped up security at Jewish institutions in the wake of a wave of attacks, especially in France, where beatings of Jews continue on a weekly basis. There has been a steep increase in the numbers of Jews leaving France in recent months, mostly going to Israel but others moving to Canada and elsewhere.
FOUAD AJAMI
Fouad Ajami, who was born to a Shia family in Lebanon, and who died yesterday in California of cancer, was one of the leading Middle East scholars of our time. (Many of his articles have appeared in these dispatches over the years.)
It is a measure of his greatness that the New York Times obituary of him today is so churlish and unenthusiatic, especially (as Robert Satloff points out on twitter) when one compares it to the New York Times’s glowing obituary of his contemporary Edward Said.
Said once called Ajami, who refused to support the PLO, Hizbullah and other terrorist groups, “Uncle Abdu” and other derogatory names for his supposed “collaboration” with the West.
DAN JACOBSON
I would also like to note the death last week of another subscriber to this list who I knew personally, the South African-born, British-based novelist Dan Jacobson. Many of Dan’s novels were wonderful. I also particularly appreciated his late-life memoir, Heshel’s Kingdom. In it, he writes about Heshel, his rabbi grandfather he never met in Lithuania, and charts the life and the extermination of the Jews of Lithuania.
***
Below, I attach an article by Richard Behar a Contributing Editor for Forbes magazine. (Towards the end of his article, Behar kindly links to my previous dispatch on the kidnapped Israeli teenagers.)
-- Tom Gross
Fingers of hate, mock the three kidnapped teens
Naftali Fraenkel, right, with guitar
ARTICLE
“THE LARGEST MANHUNT PERHAPS IN ISRAEL’S HISTORY IS UNDERWAY”
Good vs Evil: Israeli intel exec pioneers hi-tech with Palestinians. His nephew, a U.S. citizen, is abducted by terrorists
By Richard Behar
Forbes magazine
June 22, 2014
www.forbes.com/sites/richardbehar/2014/06/21/good-vs-evil-israeli-intel-exec-pioneers-hi-tech-with-palestinians-his-nephew-a-u-s-citizen-is-abducted-by-terrorists/
Until two days ago, I hadn’t spoken with Yishai Fraenkel since last August. I had just published a Forbes magazine cover story about Israeli-Palestinian joint ventures in high-tech (as well as efforts to bring Israeli Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews into the sector), and had interviewed Yishai for it. As the general manager of the design and development center at Intel’s headquarters in Jerusalem, the 44-year-old is spearheading those integration efforts for the company.
He gave me a tour, and made others available to speak about the initiatives. Almost instantly, I was struck by his grace, warmth and brilliance. That Intel – the world’s #1 chipmaker – is the key player, along with Cisco Systems Israel, in these programs is monumental. The company is Israel’s largest private employer (9,855), as well as the nation’s largest-single industrial exporter ($3.8 billion; a 10% market share). Intel has invested about $10 billion in Israel over the past few decades, and in April announced it would spend up to $6 billion for an upgrade of a chip-making facility in the country’s south.
But that conversation last August was a painful one for me. Many Palestinian entrepreneurs hated my cover because it crossed the border from development of their high-tech sector into politics – specifically the prospect that such Israeli-Palestinian partnerships could be the best hope for paving the road to peace. Yishai was comforting, and tried to explain why they were upset. “Please continue to cover our region,” he wrote. “As you stated, the rays of sun, even if painful, only do good.” I’ve done so, and only last month moderated a panel in Tel Aviv on Israeli-Palestinian ventures for Israel’s largest high-tech trade association. (I didn’t have a chance to see Yishai this time around, although he was initially going to be a panelist.)
Thursday’s talk, by phone, was beyond painful – it was unimaginable. I had just learned that his 16-year-old nephew Naftali, a dual Israeli-American citizen, was one of the three Israeli boys kidnapped a week before. The other youths are named Gilad Shaar, also 16, and Eyal Yifrah, age 19. None of them are soldiers, and they were all on their way home from school when they vanished. According to Israeli police, one of the boys had called a police hotline phone to whisper, “We’ve been kidnapped.”
To say that the abductions have captured and broken the hearts of the nation is to downplay what’s happening in this strip of land roughly the size of New Jersey. Israelis speak and think of little else. Their 24/7 news coverage is reminiscent of America during the 1970s Iran hostage crisis. “We are ALL now like one big family waiting for a loved one (3) to be well and safe,” writes a dear friend of mine, Ayelet Steinfeld, an education consultant for schools in Israel’s north – and a mother of three.
The largest manhunt perhaps in Israel’s history is underway. Israeli troops have poured into the West Bank, where house-to-house and cave-to-cave searches are happening. Some gun battles have erupted, rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza, and Israel has retaliated with airstrikes against Islamist training facilities. More than 330 Palestinians, most of them Hamas members, have been rounded up in the West Bank for interrogations. Some of those arrested had been released by Israel in 2011 as part of a 1,027-for-1 exchange deal to free a kidnapped IDF soldier named Gilad Shalit (sometimes spelled Schalit) from a five-year captivity by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
There’s no telling how volcanic the situation on the ground could become if the kids aren’t found by the start of Ramadan next Saturday – the timing of which the abductors may have considered as part of their plan.
The boys apparently disappeared at a hitchhiking junction in the West Bank on their way home from a religious school they attend in Gush Etzion, a cluster of 18 Israeli communities founded in 1940. Given its historical and geographical importance to Israel, it is widely accepted that in the event of a peace agreement, Israel would keep Gush Etzion – despite its location inside the “Green Line” (the 1949 armistice line between Israel and the West Bank). The land was purchased by settlers in the 1920s and 30s, but the towns destroyed by the Arab Legion before the outbreak of Israel’s 1948 war of independence. The communities were rebuilt after the 1967 Six Day War.
Gilad, one of the seized teenagers, lives in Talmon – a West Bank settlement (pop: 3,200) founded in 1989. The second teen, Eyal, lives in El’ad, a fast-growing city of 36,000 barely 16 miles from Tel Aviv. As for Naftali, he lives with his family and relatives in Nof Ayalon, a small religious town of about 5,000 people located some 25 miles from Tel Aviv (and 20 miles from Jerusalem). Naftali’s grandparents moved to Israel from Brooklyn in 1956. While he was born and raised in Israel, he’s visited close relatives in America, and he enjoys dual U.S.-Israel citizenship. He is said to be a bright student, who loves basketball and other sports, as well as a gifted musician who plays the flute and guitar. And it’s now nine days since his family has seen or heard from him.
[The interview begins…]
Q: Last we spoke, Yishai, it was about such a positive topic – your work to realize your dream of the integration of Palestinians into high-tech, including joint ventures with Israeli firms. And now you’re in a nightmare.
A: These are trying times for us. While we have moments of despair, we are trying hard to keep our optimism. Naftali is the son of my brother and sister-in-law. Not only is he my nephew, but we also live in the same neighborhood. He’s almost like a son. I see him very often. It’s very hard, ok? This is now a week. There’s a lot of suspense, a lot of tension. I don’t know his whereabouts, and I’m just gravely worried. On the one hand, the family is very uptight. On the switch side, very optimistic.
Q: Are you able to sleep?
A: With the help of sleeping pills, yes, unfortunately. It’s very hard.
[Interview continues later in this article]
***
Israel prime minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu says “it’s absolutely certain” that Hamas is behind the kidnappings, and makes it clear that his military’s mission – dubbed Operation Brother’s Keeper – has two goals: To bring back the boys, and to deal a thundering blow to Hamas. It was only 12 days ago that the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority and Gaza’s Hamas sealed a reconciliation government. Since then, Hamas’ leaders have felt comfortable raising their heads and profiles in the Bank. The group’s charter – it’s designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., EU, Canada, Japan, Jordan and (recently) Egypt – is clear about its objective of destroying Israel, as well as killing all the world’s Jews. [For a view of a Hamas summer camp for boys, see this Reuters slideshow of photos taken only two days ago: www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?articleId=USRTR3UPGL#a=1]
President Barack Obama has called the unity deal an “unhelpful step” towards peace, but would nonetheless work with and fund the new Palestinian government. In response, a bipartisan group of 88 senators sent the White House a message that they would consider halting financial aid to the Palestinians. Perhaps needless to say, by law the U.S. government may not benefit Hamas, just as it cannot benefit Al-Qaeda.
In the midst of Operation Brother’s Keeper, a State Department spokesperson urges both sides to “exercise restraint and avoid the types of situations that could destabilize the situation” – politicalspeak that means bupkis unless the words restraint and destabilization are defined.
“The abductors from Hamas came from an area under Palestinian Authority control and returned to PA-controlled territory,” Netanyahu said. “It’s important to understand the consequences of the unity with Hamas – it’s bad for Israel, bad for the Palestinians, and bad for the area. “This incident reveals the character of the terror that we are fighting. Terrorists abduct innocent Israeli children while we give medical care in our hospitals to sick Palestinian children. That is the difference between our humane policy and the murderous terror that is attacking us.” (In fact, the wife of PA president Mahmoud Abbas underwent surgery last weekend in a Tel Aviv hospital, while the mother-in-law of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was allowed into the country two weeks ago for cancer treatment.)
Netanyahu’s disgust is shared by Israel’s Consul General in New York. “Morally inexcusable and unacceptable,” Ambassador Ido Aharoni told me yesterday. “The boys were on their way home from school. Targeting teenagers is a clear indication of Hamas’ inhumanity. It is our obligation as human beings not to look the other way and keep silent, when evil transpires before our very eyes. Right now, all of our efforts are focused on the swift rescue of our boys, and their return home.”
While U.S. lawmakers from across the aisle have condemned the kidnappings, Obama has thus far remained silent. “The leaders of the world must make their voices heard loud and clear,” Israel president Shimon Peres told the parents of the abducted kids at a meeting in his home on Thursday. He promised to raise the subject with Obama during a visit next week to Washington. “I intend to echo the cries of our country against terrorism both in private and in public. This is my personal mission… there is no room for forgiveness or mercy.”
Hamas hasn’t claimed responsibility. Nor has it hasn’t issued a denial, and its leaders appear to be applauding the abductions. “We call upon our people in all parts of the West Bank to confront the occupation, whether as part of mass confrontations or privately-initiated resistance [read: operations],” wrote Hamas spokesman Hussam Badran on his Facebook page, according to MEMRI, a Middle East press-monitoring organization headquartered in Washington. “This is an opportunity to widen the circle of confrontation, and restore the West Bank to its natural status as the spearhead of the resistance.”
A second Hamas spokesman warns that if Israel expels West Bank Hamas leaders to Gaza, it would be “opening the gates of hell.”
Meanwhile, Naftali’s parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles in Israel and New York (Brooklyn and upstate) exist inside their own hell – waiting for word about the schoolboy’s fate. As does Intel, and Yishai’s Palestinian friends and colleagues. A group of American diplomats visited the Fraenkel family, as did Netanyahu yesterday. Neighbors have been told not to talk to the press, as the hunt continues.
[Interview continues…]
Q: Yishai, what can you tell Forbes about the status of the investigation?
A: We do know some things that go beyond what is public. I cannot disclose it of course. I will say that based upon the data that I see, I have strong feelings that these kids are alive. We have not seen concrete signs of life, but all the data that we do have leads us to believe that these three boys are alive. The Israeli security forces are investing tremendous efforts here. They’re doing all they can. Our prime minister, Netanyahu, our president, Peres, it’s their top agenda right now – to get these three abducted teens. Next to our houses there’s a small contingent of people keeping us updated.
Q: Israel believes Hamas operatives conducted the kidnappings. Is that the case?
A. This is what our government claims, and I trust they have their sources. And [U.S.] Secretary of State John Kerry said there are many indications that point to Hamas involvement. But I don’t know who did it or why they did it. I simply do not know.
Q: Is this especially painful for you because of all the work you do for and with Palestinians at Intel?
A: No, no, the answer is no. I’m a realist. I’ve lived in this place all my life and there are many forces trying to shape our region – positive and negative or destructive forces. And there’s no doubt that people who kidnap young kids are destructive and they hurt the Palestinian cause as equally as it’s hurting the Israeli cause. It doesn’t help anyone. Negative, negative, negative – any way you look at it. So, am I surprised? No, I’m saddened. But that’s reality. Does that mean I feel bad things about the good people I work with, among the Palestinians? No. These are good people. It’s no secret that every society has bad people. Do we not have Israeli or Jewish murders and rapists? Are they not equally bad?
***
Indeed, the Palestinians who Yishai works with in high-tech – I had the unforgettable pleasure of meeting some of them – are among the cream of the leaders that their people will require in any future state. It’s a shame they are not also in politics, where they are equally and desperately needed, but entirely understandable that they shun it.
A year ago, Intel established what it calls the Joint Technology Forum. [See photo above of Yishai holding a JTF chart.] Its first ‘meet-up’ brought 30 Palestinian and 30 Israeli entrepreneurs – an equal number intentionally – to Intel’s Jerusalem HQ from 20 companies. Among them: NDS (a large Israeli video-software firm), Asal Technologies and Exalt Technologies (two of the largest and best Palestinian high-tech companies); the Israel branches of Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and other multinationals. Purpose: “To talk, to just bond,” said Yishai. “We decided, let’s take the gospel and spread it out.” Intel’s offices in Israel display hope for what a Middle East future could look like. At “coffee corners” on some floors, Israeli and Palestinian men look interchangeable, and they mix amicably with Christians and Druse, burka-clad Arab women and wig-donning ultra-orthodox Jewish women.
Last summer, Yishai asked Ghassan Al-Jamal, an official at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv who leads the USAID technology efforts for Palestinians, where he thought that Intel-Israel ranks among Israeli companies outsourcing work to Ramallah (the business capital of the West Bank.) “With regards to your question, you rank as number ONE,” Al-Jamal wrote back.
Intel’s work with Palestinians is not about charity. “It makes economic sense,” Yishai told me during that visit. “Because they’re innovative, because they’re good. Intel does corporate responsibility, but we’re not in the philanthropy business. Intel is in to make money. One [West Bank] company we’re working with could possibly one day become an Intel branch.” He elaborated on these points: “Israeli engineers are not very cheap. Almost every project we do nowadays, we try to find strategies of lowering costs, of outsourcing some parts of these programs in lower-cost geographies. It starts with outsourcing to Palestinian companies, and then flourishing into a much deeper cooperation – of developing together, of them becoming part of the Intel ecosystem of development.”
One of Yishai’s deputies, an Israeli named Joey Edelstein, had told me that “by far” his outsourcing ventures with Palestinian firms were unrivaled: “I have done outsourcing to India, I’ve seen China. This works for us and is the best experience that I’ve seen.”
However, there’s a downside: “It goes pretty slow for a number of reasons,” Yishai had conceded. “I think we have some suspicions to overcome. The tech sector in Palestine is still fairly small, taking time for things to come up. I think the Israeli companies are not as aware. There are concerns about, ‘What happens if tomorrow morning a third intifada, a third uprising, starts? How will relationships be?’ So there are concerns, some of which are legitimate.”
***
Q: Will you continue your work with Palestinians, regardless of what has happened to your nephew? Or will the initiative be affected in any way?
A: Of course I’ll continue, because I think this is the right thing. Number one, I’m a business person, I’m a technologist. It makes business sense. It makes technology sense. And beyond that I think it makes national sense, for Palestinians, for Israelis. Every way I look at, it’s the right thing. And as you and I know very well, it’s not simple; it’s complicated, it’s touchy, it’s sensitive. But it’s the right thing to do.
Q: Yeah, I learned the hard way about the sensitivities. I learned that I should try harder to separate the growth of the Palestinian high-tech sector from the prospect that such collaborations could help lead to normalization and peace. The sector needs to grow in its own right.
A: You meant well, but through all these landmines you never know when you’re gonna step on one in this region. I have no doubt that the [Forbes magazine] piece bode well, meant well. Yes, some people may have been offended, but I think they were worried. They were worried how will this portray them, what will society think about them, “what does it imply, what does it say? Just do it in hush-hush or just do it?” It’s just the way it is.
Q: Has Intel been supportive through this family crisis?
A: Intel has been extremely supportive. The level of support has been outstanding. I’ve gotten calls from people throughout the company, across the globe. I’ve also received in the past couple of days numerous emails and phone calls from Palestinian friends and counterparts of mine who work with Intel, of course all private, but condemning this and telling me in their daily prayers they think about these three kids. It was really touching. They meant it, they really meant it from their hearts.
Q: But the messages are private. They’re not willing to step forward publicly and condemn it. Is that part of the problem here?
A: Maybe. Every society has its dynamics, and I can’t say I understand the Palestinian dynamic. I can anticipate it. I don’t hold a grudge against them. They have their issues and the way it works. In my eyes, when President Abbas said what he did on Wednesday, it meant a lot. [See excerpts below of the speech.] We’ve heard him in the past. This time he stood on a stage in Saudi Arabia. He’s the leader, the representative and spokesperson of the Palestinian people, and for me this was a very vocal, strong public statement. When he spoke, he was the mouth for my Palestinian friends, that was my feeling. He spoke for them. Hearing it from him was as if I was hearing it from my Palestinian friends.
***
EXCERPTS FROM SPEECH BY ABBAS IN JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA: “We are [working] in coordination with [Israeli security forces] in order to find these boys because they are, first and foremost, human beings, and we want to protect human lives. Even the Americans have told us that one of them is an American [Naftali Fraenkel], and we answered that, whether American or Israeli, for us he is a human being and we must look for this human being and return him to his family…The truth is that whoever committed this act wants to destroy us. Therefore, we will talk to them differently and hold a different position, whoever it was that committed this action. Because we cannot endure such actions; we cannot confront the State of Israel – neither militarily nor in any other way.”
Yishai’s acceptance of the reluctance of Palestinians to voice their outrage is admirable, especially given what can happen to those who do. While some Palestinian entrepreneurs featured in my Forbes story liked the article, others were angered or frightened that they could be personally or financially targeted.
Take the recent case of professor Mohammed Dajani, the director of the American Studies department at Al Quds University, a Palestinian college that for a decade (until last November) enjoyed a sister-institution status with Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where half the undergraduate students are Jewish. In March, he took his students on a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. He did this, he says, because the subject is not taught in Palestinian schools, and there is “a lot of ignorance of the Holocaust, denial of the Holocaust” in his community. Eleven days ago, he resigned from his post following a lengthy campaign of campus riots, as well as intimidation and death threats against him.
Arab citizens of Israel can also be vulnerable if they don’t toe the line. Three days ago, a 16-year-old Arab Israeli named Mohammad Zoabi posted a three-minute video on YouTube [click above to see it] expressing support for the kidnapped youngsters, as well as condemning the Palestinian Authority as a “terrorist organization.” While his mother praised him for having “the courage to speak” that she concedes she never possessed, Israeli police arrested three of his relatives – his father, a grandmother and an aunt – who were suspected of plotting to take him across the border to the West Bank to harm him. (Call it Operation Zoabi’s Keeper.)
“To those terrorists who have kidnapped our kids, bring them back,” Zoabi said in the video, in English, Arabic and Hebrew – an Israeli flag positioned behind him. “And you better bring them back now…To Bibi, our prime minister, and his government, wake up and stop cooperating with terrorists. The Palestinian Authority is the biggest terrorist… Our enemies don’t separate between Arabs and Jews living in Israel. For them, we are all one. For them, we are all Israelis. And you know what? I am proud about that. I’m an Israeli… Israel is here to exist, as a Jewish and as a democratic country.” Watch his inspiring video. But the BDS professors in America who are behind an academic boycott of Israel – they call it a “colonial, apartheid, racist” state – might not want to go near it.
One more example: The talented Arab Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, born in the West Bank city of Tulkarem. He has strongly condemned those who falsely smear Israel as an apartheid country, and has received threats in return. He says that those who threaten him do not dispute his reporting but simply want him to gag himself on the subject.
As for Abbas’s speech in Jeddah, he deserves applause for it. But he was initially silent after the kidnappings became known. It was only after a phone conversation with Netanyahu three days later, their first direct talk in over a year, when Abbas morphed into a mensch and stepped to the plate. The leader of the PA too often speaks with two mouths – saying in Arabic to Palestinians and the Arab media what they want to hear, while saying the politically-correct things in English to foreign officials and Western media. As Richard Chesnoff, a former executive editor of Newsweek, and a prize-winning veteran reporter, wrote in 2012: “If there were an Oscar given for doublespeak, the Palestinian political leadership would win it, hands down.”
Just since the 2010 start of the peace talks (and continuing today), a venomous stream of hate messages gets disseminated by the PA through its media, social and education systems. It’s a steady drumbeat of libels, including repeated assertions that Israel intentionally spreads AIDS, prostitution and drugs among Palestinians, and even pollutes Palestinian waters. Similar recurring themes can be found in everything from the sports pages, textbooks and children’s shows and plays, to music videos, cartoons, puppet shows, even crossword puzzles, game show quizzes and school exam questions. While campaigning for the nomination to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2007, Hillary Clinton gave a press conference in the U.S. Senate building where she insisted, “We must stop the propaganda.” She called it a “clear example of child abuse” that “profoundly poisons the minds of these children.”
I’ve written previously in Forbes about the dozens of summer camps, town squares, schools, stadiums and sports teams in the West Bank named after terrorists whose only claim to fame are having tallied up the most civilian casualties. In 2010, a town in the West Bank honored Saddam Hussein with a town square memorial. Salah Khalaf, who planned the murder of two American diplomats, on top of the killing of 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympics, has a sports stadium in his name; it was even built with U.S. funding. The PA maintains the practice of defining all of Israel as “Palestine” on maps and websites. In 2012, Abbas and six other senior PA leaders were in the audience at a packed concert when a singer from his party praised him by name – within a song that presented all of Israel as Palestinian land.
In 2011, on official PA TV, Abbas himself praised the snatching of Israeli soldier Shalit, then age 19: “Hamas kidnapped a soldier, or captured a soldier, and managed to keep him for five years – that’s a good thing, we don’t deny it.”
[Interview continues…]
Q: I agree with you that Abbas’s speech [in Saudi Arabia] was forceful, and he said it in front of Arab ministers, giving it even more force. But I think he’s often late in saying what needs to be said after such incidents – and only after he’s pressured to do so by Israel or other countries.
A: I’ll be honest, I don’t know. I’m a technology person, not a geopolitical analyst. My sense is, and also from what I hear is, that the Palestinian security apparatus is supporting this [effort to locate the boys]. The Israelis and Palestinians – we have our issues, our differences, we have our fights, let’s face it. But even when you have disagreements and even when there’s conflict, conflict has laws, conflict has rules. We have 120 years of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, give or take. Two and a half years of conflict in Syria yielded 10x the amount of casualties. It’s a very tragic conflict for both sides, I’m not trying to downplay it. But there is, I would almost say, a level of decency sometimes. There are two sides, and each one is going to have their painful points they want to make. But you don’t kidnap teens. You don’t take kids who want to come back home from school. You don’t do it… It’s unfortunate that the Kerry talks so far did not succeed, but there is this de facto status quo that includes cooperation. Good things are happening. And suddenly comes this thing, and it’s a major disruption. I read the Palestinian press sometimes, I know some Arabic, and many Palestinians are enraged by the abductions. Many of them are really angry about this thing. It hurts, it set so many things backwards.
Q: But some of the Palestinian press is supportive of the kidnappings.
A: With Hamas in Gaza, there are some voices there that are supportive. But as opposed to other cases in the past, I think the level of support, even among the most radical, is very low. People really think there’s a red line: You don’t touch kids. Try to understand the subtext of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: You don’t touch kids. Unfortunately, people die, people get hurt, there are bombs. But there are things you don’t do. You don’t touch kids. You look at the subtext of Abbas – he speaks in Arabic of the shuhada [suicide bombers], the youngsters, that there’s this cultural code, and [Abbas says] you don’t touch kids – leave them out of it.
***
As recently as four months ago, one of Abbas’ senior officials, Jibral Rajoub, said that “if Hamas wants to kidnap soldiers, let them…We encourage them.” Two days ago, Rajoub – himself released in a prisoner swap – stated that “apparently Israel understands only the language of abductions.” So while Abbas appears to draw a distinction between the seizure of teenage soldiers and non-soldiers, Rajoub evidently does not. One thing that is crystal clear: Abbas’s deputy is playing with fire with such a remark during a week when Israelis all across the country are anxious and furious. The official Palestinian daily takes the goading even further, suggesting that Israel may be behind the kidnappings.
Disturbingly and grotesquely, Hamas affiliates have launched what they call “The Three Shalits” campaign in social media – a reference to the name of the Israeli soldier who was held for five years by Hamas. They are mocking the abductees by joyously linking their plights to Gilad Shalit’s. Their Facebook pages feature dozens of photos of smiling people, especially kids, holding up the three-fingered symbol. In another case, a cartoon shows three rats wearing Jewish Stars of David while dangling on the hooks of a fishing rod, accompanied by a caption in Arabic that reads: “A Master Stroke.”
Middle East commentator Tom Gross has compiled a collection, here. Another stockpile can be viewed at a popular blog called Israellycool.com.
Also on social media, Israeli anger has boiled over. A Facebook page that calls for the murder of a Palestinian terrorist every hour until the three boys are released has more than 20,000 “likes.” [Article continues below.]
Q: The boys are believed to have been at a hitchhiking junction in the West Bank when they went missing. There’s been some criticism that they may have been hitching, and that perhaps they shouldn’t have been doing it in a potentially-dangerous area. Is that a valid criticism?
A: I’m not sure that we know the full facts. Were they actually hitchhiking, or did someone stop and take them? It’s part of the investigation and until the full details are uncovered, I’m not sure it would be a wise thing to discuss. It’s one of the open questions of the investigation. But some people do not understand exactly the picture, or, as in other cases, they have this inclination to blame the victim: “Why were they there? What were they doing there?” It overshadows, you know, that this is a terrible crime. These are three young teens wanting to come back home from school, abducted. And it hurts the Palestinian people no less than the Israelis.
Q: You’re a religious man, Yishai. How has that been over the past week, in terms of how it plays into your thoughts?
A: It’s a hard question. Being a religious man, you have faith and you have trust and you believe in the power of prayer, and it helps in these moments. I really believe in the power of prayer to transcend and to uplift and to really help speed up the resolution. Now, as a religious man, how do I treat evil? Hey, here’s a very bad thing, why did it happen to really innocent kids? It’s a question. Not different from how come a million and a half kids were murdered during the Holocaust? Once I transformed from child to adult was the day I understood that some questions do not have answers, or may take a lifetime to find the answers. How can evil things happen to good people? I don’t have answers. I know it happened. Does this mean I believe less in God? No, but these are good questions. I do not have the answers.
A special chocolate, and also a coffee, wrapper with the faces of the three kidnapped Israelis has been produced by Palestinians
U.S. and EU-funded Fatah posts a cartoon mocking kidnapped boys as rats
* As her husband’s official media glorifies kidnapping of Israeli boys with anti-Semitic cartoons, Abbas’ wife convalesces in top Tel Aviv hospital in “apartheid Israel”
* No “Bring back out boys” photo tweeted yet by Michelle Obama, regarding the kidnapped Israeli schoolboys
* Human Rights Watch head Roth struggles to condemn kidnapping of Jewish teenagers – and also appears to “understand” ISIS in Iraq
***
You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
CONTENTS
1. Teenagers, not settlers
2. U.S. and EU-funded Fatah posts cartoon mocking kidnapped boys as rats
3. Using World cup logo, more cartoons in official Palestinian paper celebrate abduction
4. A world cup joke of the kidnappings
5. A special chocolate wrapper produced to glorify child abduction
6. Palestinian university students hand out candy
7. Daily Mail: “The terrorists of tomorrow”
8. Abbas’ wife convalescing in top Tel Aviv hospital in “apartheid Israel”
9. Human Rights Watch head Roth struggles to condemn kidnapping of Jewish teenagers
10. Ken Roth and ISIS
11. International Red Cross calls for release of 3 teens
12. No more prisoner swaps, Lieberman vows in response to kidnapping
13. “New low. Even for Haaretz.”
14. Shooting attack at Paris synagogue thwarted by armed police
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
Below are some notes regarding the Hamas kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers last Thursday night.
TEENAGERS, NOT SETTLERS
Some media who are reporting this story have wrongly stated that the three were settlers. Following a wave of reader protest, The Guardian is to be commended for correcting its online reports to change “settlers” to “teenagers” – not that this would, of course, make the abduction of three teenagers by terrorists any less condemnable.
(Both Eyal Yifrach, who lives with his parents near Petah Tikva, and Naftali Frenkel who lives in Nof Ayalon near Modi’in, do not live in settlements. Gilad Shaar lives in the Talmon, which is just over the green line.)
There has yet to be reaction from President Obama regarding the Israeli schoolboys kidnapped by Islamist militants, whereas Obama and his wife Michelle have (rightly, of course) been very outspoken in calling for the release of the schoolgirls kidnapped recently by Islamist militants in Nigeria. (John Kerry has strongly condemned the kidnapping of the Israeli teens.)
On Wednesday, the day before the kidnapping, a bipartisan group of 88 U.S. senators sent a letter to President Obama, urging him to “cease any alliance with terrorist organizations such as Hamas.”
U.S. AND EU-FUNDED FATAH POSTS CARTOON MOCKING KIDNAPPED BOYS AS RATS
Here is a cartoon from the official Facebook page of Fatah, which is led by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and governs the Palestinian Authority in coalition with another extremist group, Hamas.
The cartoon shows three rats with Stars of David dangling from a fishing rod, accompanied by an Arabic caption in red reading “A Master Stroke”.
Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party regularly promotes anti-Semitism of all kinds on its official TV and other media. It receives hundreds of millions of dollars and Euros of American and European taxpayers’ money annually, and yet European and American leaders are remarkably quiet in their criticism of its anti-Semitism and general human rights abuses.
USING WORLD CUP LOGO, MORE CARTOONS IN OFFICIAL PALESTINIAN PAPER CELEBRATE ABDUCTION
In a distortion of the Brazilian (soccer) World Cup 2014 logo, an official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper yesterday printed a cartoon celebrating the kidnapping of three Israeli youths
Instead of the World Cup logo, in which three victorious hands hold the globe, representing the football trophy, the Palestinian Authority cartoon shows a “trophy” of three hands holding three people. Instead of the word “Brasil” under the “trophy,” the word “Khalil” is written – Arabic for Hebron, a city where the Israeli teens are believed to have been taken.
A WORLD CUP JOKE OF THE KIDNAPPINGS
Another image produced under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
(The caption in Arabic on the World Cup image calls the teenagers “soldiers”. It reads: “The kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers in Hebron in the Palestinian Resistance Cup”.)
A SPECIAL CHOCOLATE WRAPPER PRODUCED TO GLORIFY CHILD ABDUCTION
A special chocolate (and also a coffee) wrapper with the faces of the three kidnapped Israelis has been produced by Palestinians.
PALESTINIAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS HAND OUT CANDY
Palestinian university students have also been distributing sweets in celebration of the kidnapping.
There is a collection of such photos here.
The Israeli security forces say they have foiled over 64 kidnapping attempts in the past year, but official Palestinian-funded media and mosques continue to incite for the abduction of Israelis.
As reported on this list, last September, a Palestinian terrorist lured a young Israeli restaurant worker Tomer Hazan to a Palestinian village and murdered him.
DAILY MAIL: “THE TERRORISTS OF TOMORROW”
Most western media also do their best to avoid reporting on Palestinian incitement. One of the few cases where it is being reported was last week in the (London) Daily Mail, which carried photos of Palestinian children (some as young as 6) being taught to kill, and staging mock kidnapping of Israelis. Please see here.
Tom Gross adds: However, the Daily Mail prints as one of their top readers’ comment the preposterous lie that “There are approx. 1.5 million Palestinians that have died since Israel started occupying Palestinian land in 1948.”
ABBAS’ WIFE CONVALESCING IN TOP TEL AVIV HOSPITAL IN “APARTHEID ISRAEL”
While the New York Times and other respectable media continue to commission, publish and promote (sometimes on their front page) op-eds carrying the lie that there is apartheid in Israel, Israeli media reports that the wife of Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas is recovering from an operation – in Tel Aviv.
While the official media of her husband’s government is praising the kidnapping of Israeli teenagers by Hamas, Amina Abbas is convalescing in a leading Tel Aviv hospital after undergoing surgery, including a knee transplant.
She checked into Assuta Hospital on Thursday, and on Friday underwent a leg operation. She is, according to doctors, staying in a private room on the seventh floor of the hospital’s orthopedic neuro-surgery wing.
Israelis hospitals treat thousands of Palestinian patients per year including many hundreds from Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli doctors are some of the most skilled in the world and therefore deal with all kinds of particularly complicated operations.
For one of the previous dispatches on this, please see:
Israel’s secret doctors (& Disabled Gaza toddler lives at Israeli hospital)
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH HEAD ROTH STRUGGLES TO CONDEMN KIDNAPPING OF JEWISH TEENAGERS
As Hillel Neuer of UN Watch points out, in contrast to the UN secretary-general and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the head of Human Rights Watch is refusing to unequivocally condemn Thursday’s kidnapping of Israeli teenagers.
After repeated appeals from Twitter users for HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth to end his silence on the abductions, Roth finally responded with this carefully-constructed tweet: “Attending school at illegal settlement doesn’t legitimize apparent kidnapping of Israel teens. They should be freed.”
In cases throughout the world not related to the abduction or murder of Israelis, HRW’s standard procedure is to state that kidnapping is a violation of international law.
In other similar kidnapping cases, HRW has issued lengthy press releases and reports condemning the abductions of civilians as a war crime, citing the Geneva Conventions.
“It’s important to bear in mind that Ken Roth is today the most powerful individual in the human rights universe,” says Neuer. “As the once-mighty Amnesty International is mired by internal battles, union strife and an ever-revolving leadership, Roth controls an ascendant $228-million empire that recruits top diplomats, UN officials and journalists into its ever-expanding global staff, at the same time as it places its own officials in key positions of influence, including the senior ranks of the U.S. State Department’s human rights division.”
KEN ROTH AND ISIS
In a tweet, Roth also appeared to “understand” the ISIS terrorist group in Iraq, which in recent days as killed at least 1700 Iraqis, and have engaged in beheadings, amputations, crucifixions and mass shootings of others in Iraq and Syria.
https://mobile.twitter.com/KenRoth/status/476873438154719232
Kenneth Roth
@KenRoth
ISIS in #Iraq reportedly tried not to alienate local population, unlike PM Maliki & his violent, sectarian repression trib.al/LqfFrjZ
INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS CALLS FOR RELEASE OF 3 TEENS
Unlike HRW and J-Street, organizations that are not headed by extreme far-left Jews such as Roth and Ben-Ami, have strongly condemned the kidnapping of the teenagers.
For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross called on Sunday night for the immediate, unconditional release of the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers:
“We are very concerned by the fate of the teenagers. International humanitarian law prohibits abduction as well as the taking of hostages. They must be treated humanely, and their lives and dignity protected and respected,” Robert Mardini, head of ICRC operations in the Middle East, said in a statement.
The ICRC also offered to serve as an intermediary “on a strictly humanitarian basis” between the two sides to ensure the release of the boys.
NO MORE PRISONER SWAPS, LIEBERMAN VOWS IN RESPONSE TO KIDNAPPING
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Israel would not agree to swap convicted terrorists to gain the release of the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers, under any circumstances.
Speaking from the Ivory Coast, where he is on part of his tour of several African states, Lieberman said the kidnapping of three teenagers was partially the result of Israel’s past policy of releasing hundreds of convicted Palestinian prisoners in exchange for kidnapped Israelis, and that this had to stop.
Lieberman added: “Clearly, Mahmoud Abbas is responsible for the kidnappings because he established a unity government with Hamas. He says he has no control of the Gaza Strip…on the other hand, he lets Hamas act freely in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], and we see the results.”
“NEW LOW. EVEN FOR HAARETZ.”
As three Israeli kids were kidnapped, Haaretz ran an op-ed saying “The only way still open for the Palestinians to remind the Israelis of their existence and plight is the way of violent struggle.”
(Of course in reality they could just return to the negotiating table, recognize Israel and accept Israel’s multiple offers of statehood.)
Haaretz is once again facing a wave of condemnation from people inside and outside Israel. Among the comments: “New low. Even for Haaretz.”
Earlier this morning, I was listening to a former senior Ha’aretz journalist whom I know personally (and who is now of professor of media studies at an Israeli university) being interviewed on the BBC World Service Radio about the kidnapping. He was making such anti-Israeli remarks that the BBC interviewer (himself no friend of Israel) felt he had to cut the former Ha’aretz journalist off before the interview had ended.
SHOOTING ATTACK AT PARIS SYNAGOGUE THWARTED BY ARMED POLICE
Two men who approached a Paris synagogue during services on Saturday armed with an AK-47 and handgun, fled after being chased by police guards. The men, who escaped on a motor scooter, have not been caught.
Both France and Belgium have placed armed guards at synagogues and major Jewish institutions following last month’s multiple murders at the Brussels Jewish museum and a wave of other violent assaults on French Jews in recent weeks.
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
UPDATE
Thanks to the various websites who linked to this dispatch, for example:
* Richard Behar at Forbes magazine
* Mark Whittington at Yahoo.Com
* The American commentator Ruth King
* The campaign group HonestReporting
* The dispatch has been translated into Spanish here
* And more here
Footage released by ISIS shows them randomly shooting pedestrians and motorists as they take over cities in Iraq
* Massive Israeli army manhunt continues for three Israeli teenagers (one of whom is also an American citizen) feared kidnapped; in phone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Netanyahu says legitimization of new Abbas-led Hamas-Fatah government has encouraged radicals to step up attacks on Israeli civilians. (The new government receives U.S. and European government funding.)
* ISIS-linked organization in Hebron which has reportedly taken responsibility for the kidnapping, is a Hamas front organization.
* Kerry calls Abbas to urge him to look for the teenagers.
***
Tom Gross: Below are several articles from the American media about the ongoing situation in Iraq (with some bullet points by me first). Most subscribers to this list live outside the U.S. There have been many articles in the last 48 hours, so this is just a small selection. A dispatch on more general Middle East topics may follow tomorrow or on Monday.
***
* After posting sickening beheading videos from Mosul, ISIS now posts videos to mark start of the soccer World Cup, showing them kicking the severed heads around saying “this is our World Cup football”. (I have decided not to link to this video, it is too sickening.)
* Washington Post: “The first thing you hear is the music. It lilts and sways. Then you see the Islamist militants. They’re knocking at a policeman’s door. It’s the middle of the night, but the cop soon answers. He’s blindfolded and cuffed. They take him to the bedroom. And then, reports say, they decapitate him with a knife. Another video captures militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) herding hundreds of boys down a highway to an unknown fate. ‘Repent,’ ISIS told inhabitants of its newly conquered territory on Thursday. ‘But anyone who insists upon apostasy faces death.’”
* Washington Post: “The Koran talk of beheadings. ‘When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely; then bind the prisoners tightly,’ Sura Chapter 47 says.” (TG: Christianity also discusses beheadings but few if any Christians today engage in such practices.)
* ISIS stole $425 million in gold bars and cash, the Iraqi governor says, and became the “world’s richest terrorist group” (though one reader writes that the Palestinian Authority is richer).
* The Taliban, the New York Times reported, had a one-time annual operating budget of somewhere between $70 million and $400 million. Hizbullah has between $200 million and $500 million. FARC in Colombia had annual revenues of $80 million to $350 million. Al-Shabab in Somalia had between $70-100 million. And Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, was working with a $30 million operating budget at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
* The newfound wealth at ISIS’s disposal now makes it richer than many small nations.
* Wall Street Journal: The Obama administration signaled it is preparing to re-engage militarily in Iraq, a remarkable U-turn for a president who campaigned in 2008 on ending the war there and has cited the removal of U.S. troops as one of his top successes.
* Foreign Policy magazine: “Jihadist gains in Iraq blindside American spies: Why does America’s $50 billion intelligence community keep getting taken by surprise?”
* The CIA maintains a presence at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, but the agency has largely stopped running networks of spies inside the country since U.S. forces left Iraq in December 2011.
* If the United States has any hopes of gaining some intelligence insights into Iraq, it might look to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. “The Kurds begged the U.S. to keep a base in Kurdistan” prior to the troop withdrawal. “They would have given the U.S. whatever it wanted to have a base here. And if we did, we’d be in a much better position to monitor this situation.”
* On June 10, Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki publicly called for the establishment of popular militias in response to the latest jihadist offensives in Mosul and other areas. Yet well before this announcement, Iran’s proxies – including Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haqq – had already redeployed some of their forces fighting for Assad in Syria back to Iraq. The Iranians are now likely to send more forces into Iraq.
* Iraq’s refugee population has increased by 800,000 so far this year as the government struggles against ISIS.
* At the annual Herzliya security conference in Israel last week, the head of the Israeli military showed pictures of two long-dead diplomats. Mark Sykes, an Englishman, and François Georges-Picot, a Frenchman, secured their place in history by cutting a deal that drew the borders of the modern Middle East. The point of recalling the men: It suddenly appears those century-old borders, and the Middle Eastern states they defined, are being stretched and possibly erased.” This entire system is disintegrating like a house of cards that starts to collapse,” Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said.
Tom Wilson: “Liberals longing for Saddam: With Iraq descending into chaos once again ‘liberals’ are dusting off those old arguments and wheeling them back out in another attempt to bamboozle a public they’ve already spent over a decade misleading. Chris Maume, an editor at the UK Independent mounts the most astonishing defense of life under Saddam. Of course Maume wouldn’t be so callous as not to spare a thought for Saddam’s victims, such as the 180,000 Kurds murdered by Saddam. Nowhere in the piece does Maume give the impression that in an ideal world the Iraqis should enjoy democracy, freedom, or human rights.”
Tom Gross: If only many western policymakers would stop seeing this as a zero-sum game between Islamists and Fascistic dictators like Assad and Saddam. Hundreds of millions of Arabs want neither.
***
You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
CONTENTS
1. “ISIS, beheadings and the success of horrifying violence” (By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post, June 13, 2014)
2. “ISIS stole $425 million, becomes ‘world’s richest terrorist group’” (By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post, June 12, 2014)
3. “Islamist militants aim to redraw map of the Middle East” (By Bill Spindle and Gerald Seib, Wall St Journal, June 12, 2014)
4. “Jihadist gains in Iraq blindside American spies” (By Shane Harris, Foreign Policy, June 12, 2014)
5. “Liberals longing for Saddam” (By Tom Wilson, Commentary, June 13, 2014)
6. “Iranian proxies step up their role in Iraq” (By Philip Smyth, PolicyWatch, Washington Institute, June 13, 2014)
ARTICLES
“THE FIRST THING YOU HEAR IS THE MUSIC”
ISIS, beheadings and the success of horrifying violence
By Terrence McCoy
Washington Post
June 13, 2014
The first thing you hear is the music. It lilts and sways. Then you see the Islamist militants. They’re knocking at a policeman’s door. It’s the middle of the night, but the cop soon answers. He’s blindfolded and cuffed. They take him to the bedroom. And then, reports say, they decapitate him with a knife.
Another video captures militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) herding hundreds of boys and Iraqi soldiers down a highway to an unknown fate. “Repent,” ISIS told inhabitants of its newly conquered territory on Thursday. “But anyone who insists upon apostasy faces death.”
Death was everywhere in the sacked the city of Mosul, a strategically vital oil hub and Iraq’s largest northern city. One reporter said an Iraqi woman in Mosul claimed to have seen a “row of decapitated soldiers and policemen” on the street. Other reports spoke of “mass beheadings,” though The Washington Post was not able to confirm the tales.
But the United Nations Human Rights chief, Navi Pillay, said the summary executions “may run into the hundreds” and that she was “extremely alarmed.”
The stories, the videos, the acts of unfathomable brutality have become a defining aspect of ISIS, which controls a nation-size tract of land and has now pushed Iraq to the precipice of dissolution. Its adherents kill with such abandon that even the leader of al-Qaeda has disavowed them. “Clearly, [leader Ayman] al-Zawahiri believes that ISIS is a liability to the al-Qaeda brand,” Aaron Zelin, who analyzes jihadist movements for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Washington Post’s Liz Sly earlier this year.
But in terms of impact, the acts of terror have been wildly successful. From beheadings to summary executions to amputations to crucifixions, the terrorist group has become the most feared organization in the Middle East. That fear, evidenced in fleeing Iraqi soldiers and 500,000 Mosul residents, has played a vital role in the group’s march toward Baghdad. In many cases, police and soldiers literally ran, shedding their uniforms as they went, abandoning large caches of weapons.
“We can’t beat them,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted one soldier as saying. “We can’t.”
The commitment to shocking violence is at the heart of both ISIS’s recruitment and appeal. To radicalized Islamists across the world, there’s something enticing in ISIS. It has attracted at least 12,000 fighters – 3,000 from the West – since its inception several years ago.
“Allahu Akbar,” wrote one British jihadist in an Instagram post that showed a militant among several severed heads and a fake skeleton. “Our Brother Abu B of ISIS posing with his two trophies after the operation yesterday. The skeleton is not real :)”
“My first time!” the Brit says beside another image of a hand covered in blood.
It’s difficult to say what spawned such fealty to violence. “There is absolutely nothing in Islam that justifies cutting off a person’s head,” a professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University once told Newsday.
But just as the Bible discusses the beheading of John the Baptist, so does the Koran talk of beheadings. “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely; then bind the prisoners tightly,” Sura Chapter 47 says.
The act, despite its religious underpinnings, can be manipulated into terrorism, Timothy Furnish wrote in a 2005 Middle East Quarterly article. “The purpose of terrorism is to strike fear into the hearts of opponents in order to win political concession,” he wrote.
Islamist terrorism, he said, has gone through several phases: hijacked airlines in the 1970s and 1980s, car and suicide bombs in the 1980s and 1990s. But the “shock value” of each inevitably wore off, giving way to something new “to maximize shock and press reaction upon which they thrive,” he wrote. “What once garnered days of commentary now generates only hours. Decapitation has become the latest fashion. In many ways, it sends terrorism back to the future. Unlike hijackings and car bombs, ritual beheading has a long precedent in Islamic theology and history.”
But “increasingly,” Furnish wrote, “Islamist groups conflate ‘unbelievers,’ ‘combatants,’ and prisoners of war, which, coupled with their claim to Islamic legitimacy, provides them with a license to decapitate.”
This license is one of ISIS’s most salient traits. Twitter is awash with images of its decapitations and worse. The result: Fear has become a potent ISIS weapon, according to this Amnesty International report called “Rule of Fear.”
“I didn’t want to be taken by them … so I started running,” one former ISIS prisoner told the human rights group. “They ran after me, all masked, and captured me. I started shouting loudly to get the attention of the crowd of people: ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ I could see people looking at me, but no one said a word. They were all killed by fear.”
Indeed, in another recently-released video reported by the Associated Press, ISIS fighters capture a tribal militia commander along with his two sons. The prisoners are forced to dig their own graves. “I advise whoever is with the Sahwa to repent and quit,” the commander says into the camera. “Here I am digging my grave with my own hands…. They can get to anyone.”
Then the jihadists slit their throats.
ISIS IS NOW THE “WORLD’S RICHEST TERRORIST GROUP”
ISIS just stole $425 million, Iraqi governor says, and became the ‘world’s richest terrorist group’
By Terrence Mccoy
Washington Post
June 12, 2014
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda splinter group that has seized a huge chunk of northern Iraq, is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a relatively unknown and enigmatic figure.
Of the many stunning revelations to emerge out of the wreckage of Mosul on Wednesday – 500,000 fleeing residents, thousands of freed prisoners, unconfirmed reports of “mass beheadings” – the one that may have the most lasting impact as Iraq descends into a possible civil war is that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria just got extremely rich.
As insurgents rolled past the largest city in northern Iraq, an oil hub at the vital intersection of Syria, Iraq and Turkey, and into Tikrit, several gunmen stopped at Mosul’s central bank. An incredible amount of cash was reportedly on hand, and the group made off with 500 billion Iraqi dinars – $425 million.
The provincial governor of Nineveh, Atheel al-Nujaifi, said that the radical Islamists had lifted additional millions from numerous banks across Mosul, as well as a “large quantity of gold bullion,” according to the International Business Times, which called ISIS the “World’s Richest Terror Force.”
The declaration isn’t an easy one to fact-check. Not only is the definition of “terrorist” nebulous – are murderous but wealthy Mexican cartels terrorists? – it’s also exceedingly difficult to quantify a terrorist organization’s finances. One of the closest stabs anyone has made comes from the well-versed Money Jihad.
According to its analysis, which drew on journalistic and academic accounts, the cash seizure would make ISIS the richest terrorist organization in the world – at least for the time being.
The Taliban, the New York Times reported, had a one-time annual operating budget of somewhere between $70 million and $400 million. Hezbollah was working with between $200 million and $500 million. FARC in Colombia had annual revenues of $80 million to $350 million. Al-Shabab in Somalia had between $70 million and $100 million socked away. And Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, was working with a $30 million operating budget at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
The newfound wealth at ISIS’s disposal now makes it richer than many small nations, including Nauru, Tonga and the Marshall Islands.
For a terrorist group that operates more and more like a de facto state governing a huge swath of land spilling across Syria and Iraq, the potential impact could be huge. By nearly every measure, Iraq is embroiled in civil war. With lightning speed, not deterred by Iraqi soldiers running scared, the insurgency on Wednesday moved within 70 miles of Baghdad, which analysts say is “definitely vulnerable,” according to The Washington Post’s Liz Sly and Loveday Morris.
Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called a national state emergency and said in a televised news conference that “Iraq is undergoing a difficult stage.” He called on everyone in the government “to confront this vicious attack, which will spare no Iraqi.”
Complicating that call to action, however, is ISIS’s money. It will “buy a whole lot of Jihad,” regional analyst Brown Moses wrote on Twitter. “For example, with $425 million, ISIS could pay 60,000 fighters around $600 a month for a year.”
According to research by the intelligence consultancy Soufan Group, ISIS may not have much trouble attracting that many fighters – if it doesn’t have that many already. Soufan Group said ISIS has attracted 12,000 militants from abroad already, 3,000 of whom are from the West.
Iraqi government forces, meanwhile, appear deflated and disillusioned. “The state is weak,” one infantryman told the New York Times. “This will be an endless battle.”
Another officer conceded to the Independent that “we can’t beat them. They’re trained in street fighting and we’re not. We need a whole army to drive them out of Mosul. They’re like ghosts; they appear to hit and disappear within seconds.”
“THE DANGER FOR THE PRESIDENT IS THE U.S. IS BEING DRAWN BACK INTO THE FRAY, BUT WITH VERY FEW OPTIONS, NEVER MIND GOOD ONES”
Islamist militants aim to redraw map of the Middle East
By Bill Spindle and Gerald F. Seib
The Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2014
At an annual security conference in Israel this week, the head of the military showed pictures of two long-dead diplomats.
Mark Sykes, an Englishman, and François Georges-Picot, a Frenchman, secured their place in history by cutting a deal that drew the borders of the modern Middle East.
The point of recalling the men: It suddenly appears those century-old borders, and the Middle Eastern states they defined, are being stretched and possibly erased.
“This entire system is disintegrating like a house of cards that starts to collapse,” Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said.
A militant Islamist group that has carved out control of a swath of Syria has moved into Iraq, conquering cities and threatening the Iraqi government the U.S. helped create and support with billions of dollars in aid and thousands of American lives.
The group – known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham – isn’t a threat only to Iraq and Syria. It seeks to impose its vision of a single radical Islamist state stretching from the Mediterranean coast of Syria through modern Iraq, the region of the Islamic Caliphates established in the seventh and eighth centuries.
Governments and borders are under siege elsewhere, as well. For more than a year, Shiite militias from Lebanon have moved into Syria and operated as a virtual arm of the Syrian government. Meanwhile, so many Syrian refugees have gone in the opposite direction – fleeing into Lebanon – that Lebanon now houses more school-age Syrian children than Lebanese children.
And in Iraq, the Kurdish population has carved out a homeland in the north of the country that – with the help of Turkey and against the wishes of the Iraqi government – exports its own oil, runs its own customs and immigration operations and fields its own military, known as the Peshmerga.
The picture is difficult for the U.S., which is deeply invested in keeping the region stable, and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq is setting off alarm bells inside the Obama administration. The U.S. is weighing more direct military assistance to the government of Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki, the White House said Thursday, and officials hinted that aid might include airstrikes on militants who have edged to within a half-hour’s drive of Baghdad.
“There will be some short-term immediate things that need to be done militarily,” President Barack Obama said. “Our national security team is looking at all the options.” Mr. Obama also urged Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government to seek political paths for moderate Shiites and Sunnis to work together against jihadists. “This should be also a wake-up call for the Iraqi government,” he said.
Why are the borders of today’s Middle Eastern states suddenly so porous and ineffectual?
The militants known as ISIS wreaking havoc in Iraq are an ‘Islamist’ group. The terms ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islam’ are often used interchangeably, but there are very distinct differences between them.
In short, the conflicts unleashed in Iraq and Syria have merged to become the epicenter of a struggle between the region’s historic ethnic and religious empires: Persian-Shiite Iran, Arab-Sunni Saudi Arabia and Turkic-Sunni Muslim Turkey. Those three, each of whom has dominated the whole of the Middle East at one time or another in past millenniums, are now involved in the battle for influence from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
Saudi Arabia, for example, refuses to recognize the Shiite government of Iraq, backs an array of almost exclusively Sunni Muslim rebel groups in Syria and bitterly opposes the Shiite Hezbollah.
Iran conversely, is the biggest backer of the Shiite-linked Syrian regime, has forged deep ties to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and assures that Hezbollah, which Iran’s Revolutionary Guards nurtured from its birth in the early 1980s, remains impressively armed and trained.
The U.S. also has played a role. In the wake of 9/11, it toppled Saddam Hussein, who had no connection to the attacks, and launched an effort to remake Iraq as a first step to transform the region.
The Arab uprisings three years ago ousted more iron-fisted rulers, whose authoritarian regimes had kept ethnic and religious tensions in check. Syria’s uprising reached no resolution, and instead morphed into a festering civil war. Both sides have turned to religious and ethnic propaganda and brutality to maintain their advantage.
The U.S. straddles some of the divisions. It supports the Shiite government it helped create in Iraq, for example, while denouncing the Shiite-linked Syrian regime. Its toppling of an Iraqi leader and encouragement of sectarian rule has helped fan tensions along religious and ethnic lines. The U.S. further undermined indigenous authority with its long, troubled occupation of Iraq as it sought to rebuild the country.
Broader changes in the global power structure also have helped unleash change. For decades, the Middle East was locked in place by the Cold War and petro politics. The U.S. supported countries opposed to the Soviet Union and rich in oil – Persian Gulf monarchies, Jordan and Egypt starting in the mid-1970s – while the Soviets supported their friends – Syria, Iraq, Libya at times and South Yemen. The U.S. backed a lot of anti-democratic and despotic regimes, but the result was relative stability.
Now, though, the Cold War framework has been shattered, and the growth of new energy sources elsewhere has reduced the premium placed on stability.
The trouble for the U.S. and regional powers is that the conflict may have outrun their control, fueled by the rise of the most pernicious groups in chaotic conditions.
ISIS is a threat for both Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but its easy conquests over the past week – including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city – were made possible by governments hobbled by years of insurgency and opposition aided by those two countries and like-minded Arab Gulf residents.
Iran, for its part, has encouraged Shiite Muslim militia groups so extreme and violent, and often intent on targeting Sunni Muslims, that many Sunnis are willing to endure ISIS if it provides the protection their own government won’t.
The mess puts Mr. Obama in a box. A few weeks ago he laid out in a policy speech his rationale for staying out of the mire of such sectarian conflicts, since they seem far removed from concrete U.S. interests. Yet, he now seems to acknowledge the U.S. must do something.
The danger for the president is the U.S. is being drawn back into the fray, but with very few options, never mind good ones.
WHY DOES THE CIA KEEP GETTING IT WRONG?
Jihadist Gains in Iraq Blindside American Spies
First Crimea, now Iraq. Why does America’s $50 billion intelligence community keep getting taken by surprise?
By Shane Harris
Foreign Policy
June 12, 2014
United States intelligence agencies were caught by surprise when fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) seized two major Iraqi cities this week and sent Iraqi defense forces fleeing, current and former U.S. officials said Thursday. With U.S. troops long gone from the country, Washington didn’t have the spies on the ground or the surveillance gear in the skies necessary to predict when and where the jihadist group would strike.
The speed and ease with which well-armed and highly trained ISIS fighters took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and Tikrit, the birthplace of former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, have raised significant doubts about the ability of American intelligence agencies to know when ISIS might strike next, a troubling sign as the Islamist group advances steadily closer to Baghdad. And it harkened back to another recent intelligence miscue, in February, when U.S. spy agencies failed to predict the Russian invasion of Crimea. Both events are likely to raise questions about whether the tens of billions of dollars spent every year on monitoring the world’s hot spots is paying off – and what else the spies might be missing.
The CIA maintains a presence at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, but the agency has largely stopped running networks of spies inside the country since U.S. forces left Iraq in December 2011, current and former U.S. officials said. That’s in part because the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command had actually taken the lead on hunting down Iraq’s militants. With the JSOC commandos gone, the intelligence agencies have been forced to try to track groups like ISIS through satellite imagery and communications intercepts – methods that have proven practically useless because the militants relay messages using human couriers, rather than phone and email conversations, and move around in such small groups that they easily blend into the civilian population.
Policymakers in Washington and other allied capitals were similarly unsure of the group’s true strength or how to respond. In late May, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with defense officials from Arab countries in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where they agreed that ISIS and other Islamic fighters in Syria and Iraq posed a threat to the entire region, a senior U.S. official said. But no plan on how to counter those groups emerged from the meeting, and there’s no indication that U.S. intelligence agencies stepped up monitoring of ISIS fighters in Iraq, who also seized control of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in January.
“We got caught flat-footed. Period,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism analyst and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who studies ISIS and other al Qaeda-linked groups. Although for the past three years U.S. officials had assessed that ISIS was strong enough “to go toe-to-toe” with the Iraqi military – a fact the group demonstrated with its operations in Fallujah and Ramadi – there has been no indication that the U.S. intelligence agencies knew ISIS was about to mount a major offensive to take over two more cities simultaneously, Gartenstein-Ross said.
In the wake of this week’s attacks on Mosul and Tikrit, U.S. intelligence agencies have increased the number of high-resolution images taken from satellites, which could help find the location of ISIS forces on the ground, a U.S. official said. But it was unclear whether this information is being provided to Iraqi forces to help them plan airstrikes or other operations.
Two senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the intelligence agencies’ assessment of ISIS has been overly broad and lacked the type of specifics that could have actually helped the Iraqi military know when and where to expect an attack. But the greater concern to the Obama administration has been the strength of the Iraqi forces and their actual will to fight, they said.
“This has never been about whether we thought ISIS had the capability to launch attacks. It’s always been, do the Iraqis have the capability to defend their country?” one official said. On that score, the U.S. assessment was more on the mark. Obama administration officials have hesitated to provide Iraqi military forces with advanced weapons – including fighter jets and attack helicopters – because they’ve never shown an aptitude for using them or sufficient resolve to fight their enemies, the officials said. The Obama administration had also long feared that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite with clear antipathy towards the country’s Sunni population, would use the armaments against his own people.
The intelligence agencies’ inability to predict the latest crisis in Iraq is likely to fuel critics of the Obama administration’s management of other global crises, including in Syria and Ukraine. In the case of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, in which U.S. spies were also caught by surprise, sophisticated electronic eavesdropping systems run by the National Security Agency were of little use because Russian forces limited their time on telephones and adopted the techniques of jihadists, sending couriers back and forth between their units.
But the responsibility for failing to counter ISIS in Iraq cannot solely be placed at the feet of U.S. intelligence agencies. When American forces were stationed in the country, they built one of the most successful battlefield intelligence systems in the history of American warfare. The NSA monitored every phone call, email, or text message in Iraq, and it provided leads on the location of jihadists and insurgents to drone pilots and special operations forces, who captured or killed them. U.S. commandos working hand in hand with the CIA also developed an extensive network of human spies.
But when U.S. forces left Iraq in 2011, all that intelligence power went with them. The Iraqi government failed to secure an agreement that would have allowed the United States to maintain some physical presence in Iraq, which it needed to run the intelligence networks at full throttle. Today, that intelligence capability has withered.
“The United States has so many intelligence collection efforts occurring simultaneously. It’s especially difficult to collect in a place where we have no presence,” said Christopher Harmer, a former Navy officer and an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War. Given the lack of human spies in particular, Harmer said that the United States would be outmatched in Iraq against ISIS because of its reliance on couriers and the diligence with which it avoids phones and email, which can be tracked. “What ISIS is best at is exactly what we are worst at. We just don’t have a good human intelligence network” in Iraq, Harmer said.
If the United States has any hopes of gaining some intelligence insights into Iraq, it might look to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. “The Kurds begged the U.S. to keep a base in Kurdistan” prior to the troop withdrawal, said David Tafuri, who served as the Rule of Law Coordinator for Iraq with the State Department in 2006 and 2007, and is now a partner with the law firm Squire Patton Boggs. “They would have given the U.S. whatever it wanted to have a base here. And if we did, we’d be in a much better position to monitor this situation,” Tafuri said.
Iraqi officials have been eager to get their hands on U.S. military and intelligence equipment to assist in their struggle against jihadists. On May 8, Foreign Policy reported that the Iraqi government was actively seeking armed aerial drones from the United States to combat al Qaeda militants in the increasingly violent Anbar province, where fighters from Syria were believed to be spilling over into Iraq. And in a significant reversal, Iraqi officials said they would welcome American military drone operators back into the country to target the militants on its behalf, according to people with knowledge of the matter. But to date, the United States has only agreed to give Iraq 10 small ScanEagle drones, which are launched from a catapult and carry no weapons. Those should arrive by the end of the summer, the White House said Thursday.
Iran, the United States’ most nettlesome adversary in the entire region, is moving much faster. According to press reports, a 150-man unit of the Quds Force, the elite wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, had been sent to Iraq to bolster the Maliki government and fight ISIS. Other accounts suggest that a joint Iranian-Iraqi force has retaken all or most of Tikrit.
“We have seen reports but we cannot confirm them,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Thursday. Asked by a reporter whether the Obama administration would caution Iraq not to seek assistance from its neighbor, Carney said, “I think that this is an issue of the government of Iraq, and our view is they ought to make prudent decisions about how they deal with the [ISIS] threat in the interests of national unity.”
LIBERALS LONGING FOR SADDAM
Liberals longing for Saddam
Tom Wilson
Commentary magazine
June 13, 2014
When the invasion of Iraq took place, many left-liberal commentators – particularly those in Britain and Europe – had a curious response. Of course they detested Saddam, they assured us, but might it not be the case that Saddam – a strong man – was the only person who could govern “a place like that”? This stunning suggestion that human rights and basic freedom might not be for everyone, that some human beings are just better off under despotism, was shocking then and its shocking to consider now. But for the most part these arguments faded from discussion as a jittery democratic reality got off the ground in Iraq. What good liberal would want to consign the Iraqi people back to the dark days of Saddam? Besides, one got the impression that most of these voices weren’t actually that favorable toward the Baathist regime, they just hated the thought of the use of Western power far more.
Now, however, with Iraq descending into chaos once again – arguably as much the result of the strength of Islamism as the weakness of democracy – these “liberals” are dusting off those old arguments and wheeling them back out in another attempt to bamboozle a public they’ve already spent over a decade misleading. Yet, one voice has gone much further. Chris Maume, an editor at the UK Independent, who by all accounts spent much time in Iraq during the glory days of Saddam, not only takes this opportunity to sow doubts about the wisdom of the war in Iraq, but even does so by mounting the most astonishing defense of life under Saddam.
Whitewashing the poverty suffered by most Iraqis compared to the obscene wealth enjoyed by the Saddam’s ruling clan, Maume reflects, “Baghdad was noisy and mucky and full of building sites, but it was bustling and thriving. There wasn’t a huge amount in the shops, but people had all they needed to get by.” Perhaps they did, but you can’t imagine writers for the Independent ever insisting that the underprivileged in Western countries have long “had all they needed to get by.”
Maume writes particularly glowingly about the healthcare available in Iraq, as well as the order and stability compared to today. Back in the good old days it was “a fully functioning state in which it was possible to live a fulfilled life.” Of course Maume wouldn’t be so callous as not to spare a thought for Saddam’s victims; “If you were Kurdish, or a dissident, life wasn’t like that, and I’m not suggesting for a second that we should forget their suffering. But by and large, life was OK in Saddam’s dictatorship.” And of course to the estimated 180,000 Kurds murdered by Saddam, one should also add the oppression of the marsh Arabs. But it sounds as if Maume accepts what happened to them as the price for the “benefits” that other Iraqis enjoyed under Saddam. And yet it isn’t hard to think of other despotic regimes where, provided you weren’t the wrong ethnic group, perhaps for a time life was perfectly pleasant for everyone else.
But of course that wasn’t the case in Saddam’s Iraq. Those who point to the violence and anarchy that succeeded Saddam all too easily forget the wars and turmoil that Iraq suffered during Saddam’s rule. In addition to the terrible losses suffered in the course of the lengthy Iran-Iraq war, there was also the blood-letting and mayhem of the Shia part of the 1991 uprising. Indeed, sectarianism in Iraq was not some invention of post-Saddam era. Yet Maume wistfully recalls, “It was a secular state, and Sunnis and Shias seemed to bump along together.”
But even if Baathist Iraq had been a rather more peaceful and prosperous place than it actually was, that doesn’t get around that minor matter of liberty. Maume himself alludes to the censorship, although he doesn’t appear to think truth a necessary ingredient for Iraqi wellbeing: “True, all we had to go on was the English-language newspaper the Baghdad Observer, with its daily cover stories about Saddam’s latest visit to an adoring Kurd village…..but national misery is difficult to keep off the streets, and people seemed happy.”
Whatever one thinks of what has gone on in Iraq post-Saddam, nowhere in the piece does Maume give the impression that in an ideal world the Iraqis should enjoy democracy, freedom, or human rights. Indeed, there is a total absence of the suggestion that such things are human goods, for Iraqis or Westerners; “it was possible to live a fulfilled life” under Saddam, remember. The whole piece reads as a defense of autocracy. So long as people have order and social services, what more could they reasonably ask for? And this from a leading “liberal” newspaper.
IRANIAN PROXY MILITIAS STEP UP THEIR ROLE IN IRAQ
Iranian proxies step up their role in Iraq
By Philip Smyth
PolicyWatch, The Washington Institute
June 13, 2014
On June 10, Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki publicly called for the establishment of popular militias in response to the latest jihadist offensives in Mosul and other areas. Yet well before this announcement, Iran’s proxies – including Kataib Hezbollah (KH) and Asaib Ahl al-Haqq (AAH) – had already redeployed some of their forces fighting in Syria back to Iraq. Extensive evidence shows that these proxy groups have been recruiting fighters for Iraq, and that such recruits are working closely with the Iraqi army and Internal Security Forces (ISF).
RECRUITMENT EFFORTS
Iran’s proxies have been involved in extensive recruitment efforts for months, with KH stepping up its efforts in late April to rally fighters behind the “defense of Iraq.” One result was the establishment of a new group, Saraya al-Dafa al-Shabi (the Popular Defense Companies). In May, an official KH video announced that this force was fighting alongside the ISF. In addition, AAH and another Shiite militia group, the Badr Organization, have established numerous city-based “popular committees” since April.
As early as January, fighters from AAH and the Iranian-guided Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) announced that they had sent forces back to Iraq from Syria. Subsequently, AAH claimed that its fighters were involved in this year’s fighting in Fallujah. These redeployments and recruitment efforts also entailed major restructuring of organizations in Syria.
The group Liwa Abu Fadl al-Abbas (LAFA) and its constituent RRF (also known as Afwaj al-Kafil) are a case in point. Both forces look to Ayatollah Qasim al-Tai – a cleric who split from Muqtada al-Sadr and embraced the Iranian concept of velayat-e faqih (rule by the jurisprudent) – as their leader. Initially, these largely Iraqi-staffed forces were marketed as Syria-centric, with their military activities limited to serving as “defenders of Sayyeda Zainab,” a Shiite shrine in Damascus. The RRF, which appears to have strong links to ISF SWAT teams and to the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF), was one of the first specialized Iraqi units deployed to Syria in spring 2013.
Yet in January and again in March, LAFA and the RRF were described as “protectors of holy sites in Syria and Iraq,” including the Hadi al-Askari shrine in Samarra, Iraq. By mid-May, both groups had launched their own recruitment efforts to field fighters in Iraq. And by late May, the RRF had reportedly deployed to Abu Ghraib, an area with no prominent shrines to “protect.”
Since June 5, a multitude of Iranian-backed Shiite Islamist groups have actively promoted deployments to Samarra. The introduction of these forces to the city marks a furthering of the “shrine defense” narrative. In a June 7 document published on its social media outlets, the Badr Organization threatened any group that harmed the city’s shrines. According to reports from fighters and official webpages belonging to Iranian proxy groups, units from several organizations have been deployed to the city, including Faylaq Waad al-Sadiq, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada (KSS), Kataib Hezbollah, the Badr Organization, AAH, and Saraya Talia al-Khurasani. The leader of KSS – Falah Hasan Jassim al-Harishawi (a.k.a. Mustafa al-Khazali) – is a newly elected member of parliament from Basra and has been photographed in Samarra with Iraqi army and ISF figures.
FROM ALEPPO TO BAGHDAD
Since early this year, the Badr Organization and AAH have announced numerous deaths among their forces in Iraq. A number of these lost fighters have been photographed wearing Iraqi military insignias, including ISF and SWAT logos. Similarly, when the Badr Organization announced the “martyrdom” of Qassem Jamil al-Salami and Hassan Hadi al-Maryani, the memorial posters for the two men showed them in ISOF uniforms, with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gazing down on them.
For its part, KH posted two Iraqi death notices on its internal networks on May 2 and May 4, announcing that members Haydar Jabar Qasim al-Jabari and Falah Hassan Jasim al-Muhamadawi had been killed in Anbar. On June 10, the group reportedly flew limited forces to Mosul Airport; from there, they were deployed to join the battle in that city. That same day, KH member Akram Sami al-Fareeji was also cited as a “martyr” reputedly killed in Anbar.
Other groups and fighters have been linked to Anbar as well. On June 7, KSS announced the death of member Ali al-Asmar, who had “defended Sayyeda Zainab...Anbar, and Samarra.” And in photos released last month, Ahmed al-Fareej – a well-known Shiite Islamist militant who was listed as a member of the RRF and Liwa al-Imam al-Husayn and had been present at Sayyeda Zainab since 2013 – was shown firing a mortar in Anbar.
Muhammad Jassim Tohme is another example of a slain militant who fought in Syria and returned to Iraq. According to his “Will of Testament,” he had reportedly “participated in resisting the U.S. occupation in Iraq in several battles.” When he returned to Iraq from the war in Syria, he continued operating as a fighter associated with Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba. The organization claimed he was dismantling explosive devices north of Baghdad with the Iraqi army when he was killed.
Further demonstrating the modularity of Iran’s proxy networks is Muhammad al-Biyadh, another Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba fighter who was listed as a field commander with the group’s Ammar ibn Yasir Brigade in Aleppo. There, he gained a level of fame due to video of him singlehandedly firing a machine-gun against enemy forces near Aleppo. When he returned to Iraq, he participated in February protests against al-Sabah al-Jadeed newspaper, which had published a cartoon criticizing Ayatollah Khamenei. At the protest, Biyadh was photographed in an ISOF uniform. And in mid-April, he was photographed wearing patches belonging to Faylaq Waad al-Sadiq, a Khomeinist group that had been deployed to Aleppo at the same time he was there (though Biyadh claimed he was stationed at Abu Ghraib with Iraqi security forces at the time he was fighting in Syria). In June, online outlets affiliated with the group announced that Biyadh had been named as a commander of a newly proposed subgroup called Kataib al-Zahra. Around the same time, this new unit claimed it was deployed with Iraqi SWAT teams to Samarra, where Biyadh reportedly assisted with the dismantling of explosive devices.
In sum, many of the Shiite Islamist forces fighting in Iraq operate as part of Iranian proxy groups that have been attached to ISF and Iraqi army units. Some even operate as a direct part of these official Iraqi military forces.
IRAQ LIKELY TO RELY MORE ON IRANIAN PROXIES
On June 10, LAFA’s official Facebook page announced that Iran had mobilized elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to assist Iraq, and that Lebanese Hezbollah had sent units to fight there. Other media outlets have since reported an IRGC presence in Iraq. Although this would be a major development if confirmed, it would hardly be shocking given the many previous deployments by the IRGC and its Arab proxies in Syria. IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani reportedly went to Iraq last week to visit representatives of Iranian-backed organizations – further evidence that Tehran views the Iraq front as seriously as it does the war in Syria.
Given the difficult security situation it faces, the Iraqi government is likely to become more reliant on these Iranian proxies. The crisis has now hit the point where Iraqi Shiites rightfully view the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) as an immediate existential threat, so commands, arms, and training from Iran will most likely be accepted. Nevertheless, Washington must tread a fine line on this matter, supporting efforts to counter ISIS while actively distancing itself from and at least stating its opposition to Iran’s direct and sectarian proxy deployments in Iraq.
The Rolling Stones performing in Tel Aviv last night. Mick Jagger spoke some words in Hebrew (video below)
* Lee Smith: “By funding Hamas, Obama is dragging all Americans into a moral swamp.”
* “Some major turning points in the lives of nations announce their importance in plain sight, in front of TV cameras, while the whole world is watching: Sept. 11, the repressive violence of the Chinese Communist Party in Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the signing of the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt all come to mind. Others happen in secret. And still others try to slink away from the lights while clothed in the drab, everyday disguise of bureaucratic double-speak, as happened at a State Department press conference in Washington on Monday, at which a reporter wondered how America, once the leader of a global war on terrorism, would respond to the announcement of a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas, which the State Department has clearly and repeatedly designated as a global terrorist organization. “We intend to work with this government,” Kerry’s spokesperson Jen Psaki told the press.”
* “Hidden beneath this deliberately boring verbiage was a shocking change in American foreign policy: Instead of making war on terrorists, America would henceforth be directly funding one of the largest and most deadly terrorist armies in the world.”
* “Trading five Taliban honchos from Guantanamo for one lost American soldier in Afghanistan may be denounced by some Americans as a bad deal and applauded by others as proof of how highly we value the lives of our servicemen. But it is hard to imagine any significant number of Americans who would endorse blowing up women and children on buses, or sending shrapnel-laden suicide bombers into pizza parlors and discos, or sending volleys of rockets against kindergartens – let alone would want their tax money to wind up in the pockets of people who dream up and carry out such atrocities.”
* Arafat was a hard case. But now the United States has been outfoxed by Mahmoud Abbas, a dull 79-year-old bureaucrat who is also regularly proclaimed to be “a man of peace” but who displays little interest in any aspect of governance besides collecting tribute from Western powers and daring them to call his bluff… the Obama Administration will continue to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to whatever he proclaims to be the new Palestinian government. The White House is desperate, and so it doesn’t matter that including Hamas in a government is against the letter of U.S. law – indeed, a number of U.S. laws.”
***
* David Horovitz: “This is only the Obama administration’s latest abrogation of leadership, logic and leverage at Israel’s expense. Rather than rushing to embrace a Palestinian government in which an unreformed Hamas is a central component, what was to stop the U.S. conditioning its acceptance on a reform of Hamas? What was to stop Washington saying that it would be happy to work with Abbas’s new government, the moment its Hamas backers recognized Israel, accepted previous agreements and renounced terrorism? Not a particularly high bar. What was to stop the US making such a demand, one of tremendous importance to its ally Israel?”
* Horovitz: John Kerry’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become the very “definition of insanity…. it would have been better for the U.S. and its international allies to start working systematically, investing time, money and leverage in, among other spheres, education and media, in order to create a climate conducive to progress. Peacemaking is going to require a gradual process, grass-roots change; there is no quick fix. Every credible, peace-supporting voice on the ground here told the Americans exactly this before they set out. And was ignored. And now we all have to brace for the dangerous consequences of the all-too-predictable failure.”
* “No matter how frustrated or defensive Kerry might have been feeling, you’d think a friend of Israel would know better than to lob the toxic term “apartheid” into the public debate over Israel’s future. Israel’s embattled democracy provides equal rights for its 25 percent non-Jewish minority, who enjoy freedom of religion, assembly and press. Arabic is an official language in this country. An Israeli Arab judge sent our president to jail.”
* “You’d think a powerful ally would insist that a state (Iran) that calls for, and works toward, the destruction of Israel be denied the capacity to achieve that goal. There is simply no justification for allowing Tehran a uranium enrichment capability. It lied to the international community about its nuclear program. It built secret facilities to advance towards the bomb. It has no “right” to enrichment. The Obama administration’s curious disinclination to use its economic leverage to achieve a deal that dismantles Iran’s nuclear program leaves Israel in real danger, undermines the security of other U.S. interests in the region, and risks sparking a Middle East nuclear arms race – the very opposite of the president’s cherished vision of eventual nuclear disarmament.”
***
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CONTENTS
1. Even Obama’s fans at the NY Times seemed to have been stunned into silence
2. Australia drops “occupied” from references to Israeli settlements
3. Video of Rolling Stones performing last night in Tel Aviv
4. “12 ways the U.S. administration has failed its ally Israel” (By David Horovitz, Times of Israel, June 3, 2014)
5. “By funding Hamas, Obama is dragging all Americans into a moral swamp” (By Lee Smith, Tablet, June 3, 2014)
6. “Fatah leaders: Abbas is a dictator” (By Khaled Abu Toameh, Gatestone Institute, June 3, 2014)
EVEN OBAMA’S FANS AT THE NY TIMES SEEMED TO HAVE BEEN STUNNED INTO SILENCE
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
This dispatch chiefly concerns the Obama administration’s decision to work with a new Palestinian government that includes Hamas, in spite of the fact that Hamas is still firing rockets into Israel and attempting to carry out suicide bombings and has vowed to destroy Israel.
Of course, were Hamas to moderate and renounce terrorism and agree to make peace with Israel, all of which seem unlikely, then their inclusion in a new government would be a positive step in helping the Palestinians to meet Israelis halfway and assist in bringing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a peaceful conclusion.
But so far Hamas has clearly stated they will do nothing of the sort. And yet the Obama administration will continue to fund the new government. According to the report of the Congressional Research Service titled “U.S. aid to the Palestinians,” since the start of 2008, “annual regular-year U.S. bilateral assistance to the West Bank and Gaza Strip has averaged around $500 million.”
As the 2013 CRS report states, “No aid is permitted for a power-sharing PA government that includes Hamas as a member, or that results from an agreement with Hamas and over which Hamas exercises ‘undue influence.’” Obama and Kerry appear to have decided to ignore this provision.
Even Obama’s supporters at the New York Times seemed to have been stunned into silence. On the day after the U.S. made clear it would continue to fund the new Palestinian government to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – even though Hamas was a partner in it – and this money may help go to fund attacks on Israeli civilians, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post and had an editorial or comment piece about the new government or the administration’s endorsement of it.
Obama has also, of course, gone back on repeated promises made to Israel. For example, in the 2008 presidential campaign, he said:
“My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I said they are a terrorist organization and I’ve repeatedly condemned them. I’ve repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used some of the bluntest language yet (he is still usually more cautious and diplomatic with his words than, for example, John Kerry) telling The Associated Press on Tuesday:
“I’m deeply troubled by the announcement that the United States will work with the Palestinian government backed by Hamas, a group that has murdered countless innocent civilians.”
“All those who genuinely seek peace must reject President Abbas’ embrace of Hamas, and most especially, I think the United States must make it absolutely clear to the Palestinian president that his pact with Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s liquidation, is simply unacceptable,” Netanyahu said.
Dore Gold, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN and a foreign policy adviser to Netanyahu (and also a subscriber to this list), told the Washington Post: “I don't think that people in Washington understand the depth of Israel’s disappointment over the decision to support this government. Hamas isn’t just a terror organization. Hamas is an organization that has adopted an agenda to annihilate Jews.”
John Kerry sought to clarify the position of the United States vis-a-vis the new Palestinian unity government yesterday. Speaking during a visit to Beirut, Kerry said that the Obama administration is willing to “work with” the Palestinian government, but that “the United States does not recognize that government”.
***
On a separate note, I previously criticized New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, who is a subscriber to this list, for making it seem that only the governments of Israel and America believe that Hamas is a terrorist group (and failing to tell Times readers that dozens of European countries, as well as Canada, Japan, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand and others, categorize Hamas as a terrorist organization). See “Waiting for Godot: Abbas, the Palestinian Yitzhak Shamir” (April 25, 2014).
Earlier this week, however, Rudoren wrote that Hamas is a “militant Islamic faction that Israel and much of the West deem a terrorist organization.”
***
Below, I attach pieces by three of the more seasoned subscribers to this list, Times of Israel editor David Horovitz, the independent Washington-based commentator Lee Smith, and Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh. Horovitz and Smith are (like myself), broadly speaking, centrists. Following commentators such as Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, they are exasperated by the Obama administration’s serious missteps in the Middle East.
AUSTRALIA DROPS “OCCUPIED” FROM REFERENCES TO ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS
Countries such as Canada, Australia and the Czech Republic are now more sympathetic to Israeli political positions than the Obama administration.
The Australian Associated Press reports today as follows:
The new Australian government has ruled out using the term “occupied” when describing Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, prompting suggestions about a shift in Australia’s foreign policy. The attorney general, George Brandis, on behalf of the minister for foreign affairs, Julie Bishop, said it was “unhelpful” to refer to historic events when describing these areas, given the ongoing Middle East peace process.
“The description of East Jerusalem as ‘occupied’ East Jerusalem is a term freighted with pejorative implications which is neither appropriate nor useful,” Brandis told a Senate estimates hearing.
“It should not and will not be the practice of the Australian government to describe areas of negotiation in such judgmental language.”
VIDEO OF ROLLING STONES LAST NIGHT IN TEL AVIV, INCLUDING MICK JAGGER IN HEBREW
On a lighter note, the Rolling Stones gave a concert to 50,000 fans in Tel Aviv last night. The band defied calls to boycott Israel and said they liked the country nothing would stop them coming.
Here are two videos of Mick Jagger greeting the fans in Hebrew before the start of the show.
-- Tom Gross
ARTICLES
12 WAYS THE US ADMINISTRATION HAS FAILED ITS ALLY ISRAEL
12 ways the US administration has failed its ally Israel
* The Obama administration’s ongoing abrogation of leadership, logic and leverage
* Washington’s rush to recognize the new Hamas-backed Palestinian government is only the latest in a dismal series of missteps, failures and betrayals
By David Horovitz
The Times of Israel
June 3, 2014
www.timesofisrael.com/12-ways-the-us-administration-has-failed-its-ally-israel/
Mere hours after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas swore in a government backed by the Islamic extremist Hamas group, the US State Department legitimized the arrangement, declaring that it would work with the new government because it “does not include members affiliated with Hamas.”
What was saddest about Washington’s insistence on accepting Abbas’s paper-thin veneer over his government’s new nature – his “technocrat” ministers were all approved by Hamas – is that it represents only the Obama administration’s latest abrogation of leadership, logic and leverage at Israel’s expense. Rather than rushing to embrace a Palestinian government in which an unreformed Hamas is a central component, what was to stop the US conditioning its acceptance on a reform of Hamas? What was to stop Washington saying that it would be happy to work with Abbas’s new government, the moment its Hamas backers recognized Israel, accepted previous agreements and renounced terrorism? Not a particularly high bar. What was to stop the US making such a demand, one of tremendous importance to its ally Israel? Only its incomprehensible reluctance to do.
Unfortunately, however, such lapses and failures are not the exception when it comes to the US-Israel alliance of late. This administration has worked closely with Israel in ensuring the Jewish state maintains its vital military advantage in this treacherous neighborhood, partnering Israel in offensive and defensive initiatives, notably including missile defense. It has stood by Israel at diplomatic moments of truth. It has broadly demonstrated its friendship, as would be expected given America’s interest in promoting the well-being of the region’s sole, stable, dependable democracy. But the dash to recognize the Fatah-Hamas government was one more in a series of aberrations – words and deeds that would have been far better left unsaid or undone, misconceived strategies, minor betrayals.
1. So, yes, where Hamas is concerned, you’d think that an ally would not legitimize, as part of the Palestinian government, an organization bent on the destruction of Israel, an organization declaredly refusing to change that goal, an organization with a proven, mass-murdering track-record.
2. Going back to the start of the latest failed peace effort, you’d think an ally would listen to the advice of well-meaning experts warning that attempting to do the same thing that failed in the past in the belief that it will turn out differently – in this case, strong-arming two hostile, untrusting parties into an acutely sensitive and complex agreement in a very short period – is the definition of insanity. Rather than setting an impossible nine-month timeframe for negotiating a permanent accord, when all reasonable evidence and past experience showed that this would fail, it would have been better for the US and its international allies to start working systematically, investing time, money and leverage in, among other spheres, education and media, in order to create a climate conducive to progress. Peacemaking is going to require a gradual process, grass-roots change; there is no quick fix. Every credible, peace-supporting voice on the ground here told the Americans exactly this before they set out. And was ignored. And now we all have to brace for the dangerous consequences of the all-too-predictable failure.
3. While we’re talking about producing a more conducive climate, you’d think an ally would use its regional clout and leverage to work with partners in the region to rehouse Palestinian refugees, first of all in Gaza, where there is no Israeli military or civilian presence and no reason for the festering wound to be artificially maintained. This is humanitarian work of the highest order, to which no organization or individual genuinely committed to the well-being of the Palestinian people could object. It would be opposed only by those whose ostensible sympathy for the Palestinian plight is outweighed by their hostility to Israel.
4. You’d think an ally would have made plain to the Palestinians that their demand, as a precondition for renewing peace talks, that Israel set free terrorists who have killed large numbers of its innocent citizens was outrageous and unacceptable, certainly at the outset of negotiations. Perhaps such prisoner releases might have some justification as the concluding act of a successful process. By contrast, freezing the expansion of settlements in areas that Israel does not envisage retaining under a permanent accord is a win-win – beginning the needed process of spelling out to Israelis, to the region and to the international community Israel’s vital territorial red lines. But this, the Americans did not demand. In short, a smart and firm ally would have rejected Abbas’s demand for killers to go free rather than pressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept it, and insisted on at least a partial settlement freeze. Think you need to save us from ourselves? That’s the place to start.
5. Elaborating, you’d think an ally would want to distinguish between isolated settlements in the heart of Palestinian territory and Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. By lumping all “settlements” together, and relentlessly criticizing all building, you alienate the Israeli middle ground, which supports the retention of Jewish neighborhoods built over the pre-1967 lines in Jerusalem, on the one hand, and would relinquish most West Bank settlements in the cause of a viable peace treaty, on the other. So the lack of subtlety and nuance on the settlement issue winds up complicating America’s own efforts to broker progress.
6. Trapped in the inevitable deadlock, with that nine-month deadline fast approaching, you would think that an allied president would eschew giving an interview to the American media essentially accusing the prime minister of leading Israel to disaster at the very hour that said prime minister was on his way to a meeting at the White House. For one thing, such withering public comments are hardly likely to bolster the prime minister’s faith in the president’s judgment and solidarity – and thus are likely to undermine efforts to build his trust. For another, it’s downright rude.
7. And when it all went conclusively pear-shaped, you’d think an ally would respect its own rules about not leaking the content of the negotiations. Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly urged the two sides to keep the content of their talks confidential, yet it was his own special envoy, Martin Indyk, reportedly, who gave a lengthy briefing to Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, a respected columnist but one who is hardly empathetic to Netanyahu, which yielded an article that unsurprisingly placed overwhelming and at least somewhat unwarranted and distorted blame for the collapse of the process on the prime minister.
8. You’d think an ally would man up about its own dismal role in the frictions and misunderstandings that doomed the talks at the end of March. “The prisoners were not released by Israel on the day they were supposed to be released, and then another day passed and another day, and then 700 units were approved in Jerusalem and then poof – that was sort of the moment,” Kerry told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in early April, by way of explanation for the impasse. Actually, “the prisoners were not released on the day they were supposed to be released” because Israel opposed freeing Arab Israeli convicts, whose fate it reasonably considered not to be any of the Palestinian Authority’s business. That issue only became problematic because Kerry had earlier misled the Palestinians into thinking that Israel was prepared to set them free. Furthermore, the announcement of the reissuing of an old tender to build 700 homes in Gilo was not a critical factor in the collapse – “poof” – of the talks.
9. No matter how frustrated or defensive Kerry might have been feeling, you’d think a friend of Israel would know better than to lob the toxic term “apartheid” into the public debate over Israel’s future. Israel’s embattled democracy provides equal rights for its 25 percent non-Jewish minority, who enjoy freedom of religion, assembly and press. Arabic is an official language in this country. An Israeli Arab judge sent our president to jail. That’s only part of the story, of course: Ruling another people is already deeply corrosive; if we cannot separate from the Palestinians, if we annex the West Bank, still graver dangers await. Warning Israel privately of the threats posed to our democracy is the duty of a concerned friend. But publicly invoking the spectacularly loaded term “apartheid” in critiquing Israel is the lowest of blows – a gift to enemies who can be counted on to seize upon such comments to distort Israel’s reality and delegtimize its very existence.
10. Further afield, you’d think an ally would maintain an empathetic silence rather than repeatedly tell the world that Israel has struck weapons shipments in Syria en route to Hezbollah. This when Israel was deliberately avoiding acknowledging responsibility for such actions because of concern that President Bashar Assad would be provoked into counterattacks at Israel.
11. To the south, you’d think an ally would avoid rushing to support Islamic extremists (see a pattern here?) when they come to power in a neighboring state. The fact that the Israel-Egypt peace treaty survived the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief period of misrule in Cairo is a critical and inadequately appreciated success, achieved despite Washington’s foolish embrace of the short-lived Morsi government.
12. And finally, you’d think a powerful ally would insist that a state that calls for, and works toward, the destruction of Israel be denied the capacity to achieve that goal. There is simply no justification for allowing Tehran a uranium enrichment capability. It lied to the international community about its nuclear program. It built secret facilities to advance towards the bomb. It has no “right” to enrichment. It can receive nuclear fuel, like well over a dozen nations worldwide, from legitimate nuclear powers for its ostensibly peaceful nuclear program. The central goal of US policy in this regard should not be merely denying Iran nuclear weapons but denying Iran the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Iran can be relied upon to abuse any leniency in this regard, with immense consequent threat to Israel and others in the region. The Obama administration’s curious disinclination to use its economic leverage to achieve a deal that dismantles Iran’s nuclear program leaves Israel in real danger, undermines the security of other US interests in the region, and risks sparking a Middle East nuclear arms race – the very opposite of the president’s cherished vision of eventual nuclear disarmament.
You might think the above list is the least that Israel might reasonably expect from the US administration. But no. The peace process has collapsed and Israel is getting a disproportionate amount of the blame. Hamas, committed under its own charter to the obliteration of Israel, is now part of an internationally recognized Palestinian government. And the P5+1 nations, led by the US, are working toward a deal that will enshrine Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities. Israel may not be a perfect ally, but we deserve better than this.
“BY FUNDING HAMAS, OBAMA IS DRAGGING ALL AMERICANS INTO A MORAL SWAMP”
By funding Hamas, Obama is dragging all Americans into a moral swamp: What a unity government bringing together Hamas with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party means
By Lee Smith
Tablet
June 3, 2014
Some major turning points in the lives of nations announce their importance in plain sight, in front of TV cameras, while the whole world is watching: Sept. 11, the repressive violence of the Chinese Communist Party in Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the signing of the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt all come to mind. Others happen in secret. And still others try to slink away from the lights while clothed in the drab, everyday disguise of bureaucratic double-speak, as happened at a State Department press conference in Washington on Monday, at which a reporter wondered how America, once the leader of a global war on terrorism, would respond to the announcement of a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas, which the State Department has clearly and repeatedly designated as a global terrorist organization.
“Based on what we know now,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told the press, “we intend to work with this government,” adding that “if needed” the United States might “recalibrate our approach.” Hidden beneath this deliberately boring verbiage was a shocking change in American foreign policy: Instead of making war on terrorists, America would henceforth be directly funding one of the largest and most deadly terrorist armies in the world.
Israel denounced the United States for accepting Abbas’ government, but many of the reporters in the room found nothing all that shocking in Psaki’s announcement. That’s not entirely their fault. Generations of American diplomats working on the Arab-Israeli conflict have been motivated by the conviction that there’s nothing to be lost – and plenty to be gained – by trying to make peace between the two sides. Sure, the Israelis and Palestinians might seem far apart, the leadership of one side or another might not have the ability to sign a deal, but what harm could there be in getting the two sides in the same room to feel each other out, to explore possibilities and find common ground? Certainly that was the idea that inspired Secretary of State John Kerry, compelling him to make dozens of trips to Jerusalem and Ramallah over the past two years.
Yet Psaki’s announcement is, in fact, shocking. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ move on Monday to bring Hamas into a unity government with his own Fatah party means that U.S. taxpayers will be paying the salaries of men and women who belong to an organization sworn to the destruction of an American ally – and who repeatedly endorse and employ the murder of innocent civilians through the grim arsenal of terror as a means of achieving their goals. Trading five Taliban honchos from Guantanamo for one lost American soldier in Afghanistan may be denounced by some Americans as a bad deal and applauded by others as proof of how highly we value the lives of our servicemen. But it is hard to imagine any significant number of Americans who would endorse blowing up women and children on buses, or sending shrapnel-laden suicide bombers into pizza parlors and discos, or sending volleys of rockets against kindergartens – let alone would want their tax money to wind up in the pockets of people who dream up and carry out such atrocities.
How did this happen? After all, it was Washington that invented the Palestinian Authority, in the heady moment after the Soviet collapse had brought the Cold War – and even history itself, some said – to an end, leaving the United States as the world’s sole remaining superpower. The purpose of the PA was to placate America’s Arab partners, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while ensuring that the remaining regional troublemakers – from Saddam Hussein to the Islamic Republic of Iran – would be unable to use the Palestinian cause to their advantage. Moreover, it was believed that the easiest way to neutralize Yasser Arafat and the PLO was to suffocate him in a warm American embrace that would reward the scruffy old terrorist for good behavior, and hold out the promise of a late-life transformation into the Palestinian Nelson Mandela. It came as a shock to American policymakers that Arafat didn’t want to be Mandela; he wanted to be Saladdin, and if he couldn’t free Jerusalem with fire and blood he would rather die trying than go down in history as the traitor who relinquished the dream of a Palestinian homeland, the way that the Palestinians – not the Americans – imagined it.
Arafat was a hard case. But now the United States has been outfoxed by Mahmoud Abbas, a dull 79-year-old bureaucrat who is also regularly proclaimed to be “a man of peace” but who displays little interest in any aspect of governance besides collecting tribute from Western powers and daring them to call his bluff. In Abbas’ view, the Americans and the Israelis are not in control; he is. Without him, the White House loses control of the peace process, which is a key part of the American diplomatic patrimony in the region – an asset that the Obama Administration can ill afford to lose, especially now.
Abbas is therefore gambling that the Obama Administration will continue to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to whatever he proclaims to be the new Palestinian government. The White House is desperate, and so it doesn’t matter that including Hamas in a government is against the letter of U.S. law – indeed, a number of U.S. laws. The 2006 Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, for instance, prohibits any U.S. funds from going to Hamas, Hamas-controlled entities, or a power-sharing PA government that includes Hamas as a member, or results from an agreement with Hamas. Most recently, the 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act prohibits “assistance to Hamas or any entity effectively controlled by Hamas, any power-sharing government of which Hamas is member, or that results from an agreement with Hamas and over which Hamas exercises undue influence.”
That last clause regarding “undue influence,” say some analysts, represents a loophole the administration may try to crawl through. “The White House may argue that since Abbas is still president of the PA, and since there aren’t really that many new Hamas members in the cabinet, Hamas does not have ‘undue influence,’ “ says a senior official at a Washington-based pro-Israel organization. “But if that’s true, then why won’t the new PA cabinet disarm Hamas?”
That’s not going to happen, of course. One purpose of the deal is for Fatah to protect Hamas’ arsenal, which, so long as it’s pointed at Israel, will enhance the prestige of a PA president whose term in office was over five years ago, and who has failed at both the small-bore work of ending corruption, fixing roads, and providing real jobs for his people, as well as big-picture tasks like winning his people a state. Protecting the weapons of his rival, in other words, is all that Abbas has left to offer the Palestinians and that suits Hamas fine.
“If anyone expects Hamas to hand over its missile network to the PA, he’s making a big mistake,” said one Hamas official. The reality is that Fatah has embraced Hamas.
To be sure, neither side has forgotten about the Palestinian civil war of 2006-2007, which culminated with Hamas fighters throwing Fatah members off of roofs in Gaza. Presumably there are Fatah loyalists unhappy with the deal, most notably Abbas’ key rival Mohamed Dahlan, who led the Fatah side in the conflict with Hamas almost exactly seven years ago. As it happens, hatred for Dahlan and his faction in Fatah is one more thing that Abbas and Hamas have in common. Dahlan was poised to make a comeback earlier this spring with backing from then Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan and the man assured to be next president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. But by striking a deal with Hamas, Abbas has outflanked Dahlan, who had made an earlier play for reconciliation with Hamas and is now out in the cold.
Hamas has plenty to gain from the deal, too. Without the Iranian assistance that Hamas once enjoyed, what Gaza’s Islamic resistance needs most is some relief on the Egyptian side of the border. The Egyptians have been closing tunnels and effectively starving Gaza’s economy, and Hamas believes that the deal with Abbas will bring better days. Even if Hamas backed Sisi’s predecessor as president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, Cairo’s new ruler can afford to be magnanimous with Hamas, especially if it means he will inherit the Palestinian file in toto. Indeed, some Palestinians hope that Sisi will choose to confront Israel. In short, Palestinian reconciliation is good for everyone – except the United States and Israel.
The results for Israel are likely to be particularly unpleasant. Both Bush and Obama White Houses boasted that the security cooperation between Israel and the PA was excellent. But that seems over now since there is reportedly a clause in the Palestinian unity agreement that “criminalizes” security coordination with Israel. Perhaps, as many have feared over the last decade, those U.S.-trained Palestinian security forces will now turn their American weapons on an American ally, as they did during the second intifada. Indeed, just hours after the formal announcement of the unity government, and the State Department’s press conference, a Palestinian gunman was killed after opening fire on Israeli troops in the West Bank.
More such attacks will certainly follow, and some of them will be more successful – whether perpetrated directly by Hamas, or by Fatah, or some new terror entity in which both parties cooperate together.
Meanwhile, as crazy as it sounds, U.S. diplomats will continue searching for loopholes that allow us to fund officially designated terrorist organizations with taxpayer dollars. As Jonathan Schanzer, director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explains “there are waivers embedded in the legislation, with which the president can override stipulations for reasons of national security or national interest. The assumption,” says Schanzer, “is that Obama is going to override everything.”
The administration will also be able to cite a regional precedent for its likely next step of embracing the new Palestinian “unity government” as a “partner for peace” while claiming that America is not funding terrorism. Hamas officials boast that they are now employing the “Hezbollah model” – i.e., becoming a political party that avoids responsibility for governance, while also maintaining an independent military organization that engages in terrorism. In other words, the PA will serve as legitimate cover while the Islamic resistance continues to wage its war of liberation against Israel. After all, Washington continues to fund the Lebanese Armed Forces, even as it is common knowledge that the LAF is under Hezbollah control. So, why wouldn’t the White House fund the PA?
It is depressingly easy to imagine the State Department spokesperson making the same argument about “the Lebanese model” at her next press conference. But the difference is this: Lebanon is a sovereign state that would exist regardless of American support. The Palestinian Authority is an entity created by the United States, and it cannot exist without massive U.S. financial, political, military, and diplomatic support. Rather than finding ways around American law, the Obama Administration should be looking for ways to snap Abbas’ spine. If Kerry’s assiduous and careless peace processing was evidence of the administration’s incompetence, the decision to work with Hamas is evidence of the White House’s cravenness. The bill for this moral rot will be paid by Israelis – and by American taxpayers who will now be directly covering the salaries of thousands of card-carrying members of a terrorist organization. It’s not just Obama who will be crossing a red line by funding Hamas – he’s dragging the rest of us along with him into a political and moral swamp, in which America will combat terrorism with one hand, while paying for terror with the other.
FATAH LEADERS: ABBAS IS A DICTATOR
Fatah leaders: Abbas is a dictator
By Khaled Abu Toameh
Gatestone Institute
June 3, 2014
www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4341/fatah-abbas-dictator
Hamas’s chances of winning elections do not seem to be bad at all. Eight years after the last parliamentary election, Fatah is likely to be defeated at the ballot box once again.
***
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has finally made peace with Hamas. But will he able to extinguish the fire that has erupted in his own backyard?
Earlier this week, Abbas decided to expel five “unruly” officials from Fatah, plunging the faction into turmoil and triggering calls for a revolt against the Palestinian Authority [PA] president.
The five men – Majed Abu Shamala, Sufyan Abu Zaida, Rashid Abu Shbak, Nasser Juma’a and Abdel Hamid Masri – were expelled because of their close links to ousted Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan.
Dahlan was expelled from Fatah three years ago after falling out with Abbas and his two sons, Yasser and Tarek. Since then, Dahlan, a former security commander of the Gaza Strip and an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, has been living in the United Arab Emirates.
In the context of the ugly dispute between the two, Abbas has accused Dahlan of being responsible for the murder of six Palestinians and involvement in the “poisoning” of former PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
Abbas’s decision to expel the five Fatah officials came on the eve of the inauguration of the new Palestinian unity government with Hamas. Some Palestinians believe the decision is aimed at sending a message of warning to Fatah members against opposing the unity government with Hamas.
Others, however, believe that the expulsion of the five men is connected to preparations for holding Fatah’s seventh general conference, where the faction’s leaders are selected. The conference is expected to take place in August.
Abbas’s move is seen in the context of his efforts to “cleanse” Fatah of “unruly” officials who pose a direct challenge to his autocratic leadership. Obviously, the 79-year-old Palestinian Authority president has no plans to retire or pave the way for the emergence of new and younger leaders.
But judging from the strong reactions of the ousted Fatah officials and their supporters, it’s clear that Fatah is facing one of its worst crises in years - one that is likely to lead to a split in the faction. This, of course, will play into the hands of Hamas and improve its chances of winning the presidential and parliamentary elections, when and if they are held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The expulsion of the five officials saw Fatah activists take to the streets in some parts of the Gaza Strip, where they condemned Abbas as a “dictator.”
Responding to Abbas’s move, Dahlan told the PA president that he can “go to hell,” adding: “Fatah will never become the private fiefdom of Abbas and his sons, Yasser and Tarek.” Dahlan went on to accuse Abbas and his sons of steering Fatah toward “national and moral deviation.”
Referring to the ousted officials, Dahlan said: “These leaders did not come to Fatah from five-star hotels; rather, they come from the school of struggle and Israeli prisons. These are men who put their lives at stake while Abbas and his family were enjoying the money of Fatah and the people in Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia. We won’t allow Mahmoud [Abbas] and Tarek and Yasser to steal Fatah from us.”
Sami Mashharawi, a Fatah leader closely associated with Dahlan, also lashed out at Abbas. “Mahmoud Abbas has decided, in his capacity as Chief Executive Officer, to fire those who he believes work for his royal family. Abbas’s trivial decision shows that the man is full of hatred.”
Mashharawi also denounced Abbas for having brought “disgrace” to Fatah and all Palestinians.
Commenting on his expulsion from Fatah, Abu Zaida denounced the decision as illegal. “My relationship with Fatah and its members and cadres cannot be canceled through an illegal decision,” he said. “Apparently, this is the fate of anyone who dares to express his opinion or believes that we live in a democratic society that respects freedom of expression.”
The unprecedented verbal attacks on Abbas reflect the deepening crisis in Fatah. Dahlan and the five senior Fatah officials who were expelled by Abbas enjoy widespread support among Palestinians, particularly in the Gaza Strip. And it is obvious that Dahlan and his loyalists do not intend this time to let Abbas get away with his controversial decision.
The renewed tensions in Fatah came as Abbas announced that he has instructed the new unity government to prepare for long overdue presidential and parliamentary elections. He said he is hoping that the elections will be held within six months and that he wants Hamas to participate in the vote, as was the situation in January 2006.
In the wake of the infighting in Fatah, Hamas’s chances of winning the elections, when and if they are held, do not seem to be bad at all. In 2006, Fatah lost the parliamentary election due to internal squabbling and tensions, as well as financial and administrative corruption. Eight years later, Fatah appears to be suffering from the same problems and is likely to be defeated once again at the ballot box.
Samuel L. Jackson posted a “selfie” photograph at the Israel parade, which he tweeted to his 3.74 million Twitter followers
(This dispatch was written a couple of days ago but I was unable to send it until now. At the request of some readers, I have put some of the “lighter” items nearer the top.)
* Iranians, Turks, sentence people to brutal prison terms for daring to criticize leadership on Facebook, Twitter; Iran hangs a man for watching foreign TV by satellite; some Western diplomats, media, still claim Iran is “moderate”.
* Israeli farmers name melon after Justin Timberlake: Arab media report on this, but Western press that prefer only to run stories that cast Israel in a bad light, ignore it.
* American comedian Jay Leno, performing in Israel: “President Obama has declared the month of May Jewish American Heritage Month. He is calling it an opportunity to renew our ‘unbreakable bond with the nation of Israel.’ And he knows it’s unbreakable because he’s been trying to break it for the last five years.”
***
You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
CONTENTS
1. British woman sentenced to 20 years in prison for a Facebook comment
2. Turkish Twitter user gets 15 months prison for “humiliating religious values”
3. Samuel L. Jackson tweets 3.74m people to celebrate Israel parade
4. Israeli farmers name melon after Justin Timberlake
5. Jay Leno: “When you ask an Israeli politician what his cell number is, it has a whole other meaning”
6. British preacher praises Boko Haram’s kidnap of Nigerian schoolgirls
7. Dutch city calls Israeli towns, “cities in Palestine”
8. MSNBC host Toure apologizes for tweet about Holocaust Survivors
9. Death of Manchester United owner leads to wave of anti-Semitic hate on Twitter
10. Man banned from London district after Nazi salute and other comments
11. Assad’s forces destroy Syria’s oldest synagogue
12. It’s official: Spanish town to remove “Kill the Jews” from its name
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
BRITISH WOMAN SENTENCED TO 20 YEARS IN PRISON FOR A FACEBOOK COMMENT
A British woman has been sentenced to 20 years in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for criticizing the Iranian leadership on Facebook.
The Times of London reported this story on Saturday (albeit on Page 16). Other media didn’t even bother reporting on it, while British diplomats and papers such as the New York Times are still try to convince people in the West that Iran’s regime has somehow become “moderate”. (Arabs and Israelis are under no illusion about the true nature of the Iranian regime.)
From the Times of London (May 31 2014)
“A British woman has been sentenced to 20 years in an Iranian prison for posting a comment on Facebook that allegedly criticized the country’s leadership.
“Roya Saberi Negad Nobakht, from Stockport, Greater Manchester, was seized by Iranian authorities while visiting friends in the south-western city of Shiraz last October.
“The 47-year-old housewife has been accused of gathering crowds, putting national security at risk, and of insulting Islam after she reportedly made a comment on her Facebook page that criticised former Iranian supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 Iranian Revolution that established an Islamic republic.
“Having been detained at the notorious Evin prison in the capital city of Tehran, known for its political prisoners, she was this week handed a 20-year jail sentence.
“Ms Nobakht, who is a part-time student at Stockport College, has dual British-Iranian nationality and has been living in England with her British husband for more than six years.”
***
Tom Gross adds:
Iran executed political prisoner Gholamreza Khosravi, aged 49, early on Sunday morning. He was hanged in prison on charges of “waging a war against God”.
He had been initially arrested in 2008 after he put up a satellite dish to try and receive foreign news broadcasts, and had been imprisoned ever since. Most Western media failed to report on this.
TURKISH TWITTER USER GETS 15 MONTHS PRISON FOR “HUMILIATING RELIGIOUS VALUES”
The (London) Daily Mail, which often has more thorough reporting on these kinds of matters than The New York Times, reports (on May 30, 2014):
“A teacher in Turkey has been jailed for ‘humiliating religious values’ after he used the nickname ‘Allah C.C.’ on Twitter.
“The user, named Ertan P, was accused by prosecutors in the eastern province of Muş of ‘writing harmful content’ for including the name of God and the Prophet.
“The court rejected the defendant’s claim that his account was hacked and he was handed 15 months behind bars.
“C.C. is the abbreviation of the honorific Arabic phrase ‘Celle Celaluhu’ which means, ‘[Allah's] glory is so almighty.’ On the indictment he was charged with ‘humiliating the religious values accepted by a part of the people’, Hurriyet Daily News reported.”
***
Tom Gross adds:
In March, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to ban Twitter altogether after some users posted links suggesting government corruption. He also tried to block access to YouTube.
But the Turkish high court has overturned the bans after it ruled it was a violation of the country’s freedom of expression.
SAMUEL L. JACKSON TWEETS 3.74M PEOPLE TO CELEBRATE ISRAEL PARADE
While boycotters continue to harass celebrities from visiting or supporting Israel, many are rejecting their calls.
American actor Samuel L. Jackson, star of the cult film “Pulp Fiction” and other movies such as Jurassic Park and Die Hard, even joined the annual Celebrate Israel parade, in New York City on Sunday, and posted a “selfie” photograph of himself at the parade, which he tweeted out to his 3.74 million Twitter followers
ISRAELI FARMERS NAME MELON AFTER JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
Anti-Israel campaigners in the West (including anti-Israel Jews) are furious with pop superstar Justin Timberlake not just for performing in Israel last week, but for sending out tweets about much he enjoyed his visit to the country.
Meanwhile, Israeli farmers have named a new variety of Israeli melon in Timberlake’s honor. The “Justin” melon is known for its sweet taste and its three-week shelf life.
Israeli farmers are world leaders in developing new healthy fruits and vegetables, including in the past, the Cherry tomato.
“The farmers at Ein Yahav hope that the melon will also serve as a good-luck charm for Timberlake, bringing him a long, healthy life and continued success in his musical career,” the Jerusalem Post reported, adding that the melon will reach supermarkets soon.
What is also noteworthy is that while the western press ignores such stories because they prefer to cast Israel in a bad light, the Arab press (that as I have consistently pointed out in these dispatches, is often less hostile to Israel than some American and European papers) has reported on it, for example, here in Al Arabiya:
english.alarabiya.net/en/variety/2014/05/27/Sweet-like-Justin-Israeli-farmers-name-melon-after-Timberlake-.html
* As I noted previously, a host of pop superstars are defying boycott calls and other threats, and performing in Israel this spring and summer, including the Rolling Stones this Wednesday, June 4.
Among those who have played in Israel recently, or are performing this year: Alicia Keys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rihanna, Madonna, Depeche Mode, Moby, the Pet Shop Boys, Aerosmith, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Barbra Streisand, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and many others.
JAY LENO: “WHEN YOU ASK AN ISRAELI POLITICIAN WHAT HIS CELL NUMBER IS, IT HAS A WHOLE OTHER MEANING”
American comedian Jay Leno, the former host of “The Tonight Show,” on his first trip to Israel last week said “I’m a huge supporter of Israel and always have been. It is a democracy in the Middle East and I don’t like to see the little guy getting picked on by the big guy.”
In a performance in Israel, Leno cracked a few jokes too. According to the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, Leno drew his “biggest laughs and applause” when he said:
“President Obama has declared the month of May Jewish American Heritage Month. He is calling it an opportunity to renew our ‘unbreakable bond with the nation of Israel.’ And he knows it’s unbreakable because he’s been trying to break it for the last five years.”
Leno then added: “I’ve been doing my research. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, here in Israel the most popular boys name is Noam. The least popular boys name? John Kerry.”
Kerry is disliked by many in Israel after making several comments misrepresenting the country, most recently referring to it as an “apartheid” state.
At his performance, Leno also joked about local Israeli political scandals. Referring to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former President Moshe Katzav, Leno said: “I was stunned by how many Israeli politicians are going to prison. When you ask an Israeli politician what his cell number is, it has a whole other meaning.”
In a separate interview, Leno, who is of Italian heritage, told the Associated Press “At some point in your life, you have to sort of take sides. I tend to side with the Jewish point of view on many things, especially issues like this one. I realize how important Israel is.”
“It’s the only democracy in the Middle East. I look around the Middle East and I see people being stoned to death because they’re gay and women being not allowed to drive or not allowed to vote. And here’s this one little paradise in the Middle East where there’s a democracy, you vote people in you vote people out,” he told AP.
Leno then criticized the oil-rich Southeast Asian nation of Brunei which recently instituted a criminal code based on Islamic Sharia law, which includes death by stoning for homosexuals. Leno said: “Evil flourishes when good people do nothing, and that is pretty much what this is.”
BRITISH PREACHER PRAISES BOKO HARAM’S KIDNAP OF NIGERIAN SCHOOLGIRLS
London Imam Mizanur Rahman has been criticized after he praised the kidnapping of almost 300 schoolgirls in Nigeria by Boko Haram.
In a video posted online, Rahman praised Boko Haram, and said it was necessary to forcibly convert non-Muslims so they could see “the truth about Allah”.
The chairman of the British Home Affairs parliamentary committee, Keith Vaz, said: “I am deeply concerned by the content of the video. No child or young person should be exposed to these extreme views.”
Rahman has previously served a jail term after calling for 9/11-style terror attacks to be carried out across Europe.
DUTCH CITY CALLS ISRAELI TOWNS, “CITIES IN PALESTINE”
Authorities in the Dutch city of Eindhoven are facing criticism for describing Jerusalem, Nazareth and Tiberias – all of which are in Israel – as “cities in Palestine.”
In response, a Dutch Jewish group accused the municipality of “wiping Israel off the map.”
The street signs have been erected in the Woensel district of Eindhoven. A spokesperson from the municipality of Eindhoven declined to comment after he was asked by the Luxembourg broadcaster RTL why they had put up the signs.
MSNBC HOST TOURE APOLOGIZES FOR TWEET ABOUT HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
MSNBC television presenter Toure Neblett has apologized for a tweet in which he insulted Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
“Late last week, I foolishly got involved in a twitter exchange regarding an article about reparations,” Toure tweeted last Tuesday afternoon in a series of three tweets. “It was a dumb idea by me to debate serious and nuanced topics in 140 characters or less. In an attempt to comment on racism in post World War II America, I used a shorthand that was insensitive and wrong. I am very sorry and will make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Efraim Zuroff, a campaigner against anti-Semitism, was among those to criticize Toure’s original tweet, calling it “obviously absurd and smacks of intense and disgusting anti-Semitism. It’s reverse-racism.”
DEATH ON MANCHESTER UNITED OWNER LEADS TO WAVE OF ANTI-SEMITIC HATE ON TWITTER
A wave of anti-Semitic comments were posted on Twitter, mainly from the UK, following the death last week of Malcolm Glazer, the owner of Manchester United, one of the world’s most successful football clubs. Glazer, who also owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in America, was Jewish.
Among the comments on twitter, according to press reports: “Stupid jew finally died….. Yes thank u Lord” (sic).
Glazer was born into poverty in New York and started his business by selling watch parts out of a suitcase as a teenager. Even though under his ownership, Manchester United won five Premier League titles in England as well as the European Champions League, there has been a hate campaign against him, often tinged with anti-Semitic from United supporters.
By contrast, there has been no similar race-hate campaign against the Arab owners of the other major soccer club in Manchester, Manchester City.
MAN BANNED FROM LONDON DISTRICT AFTER NAZI SALUTE AND OTHER COMMENTS
A London court has agreed to a request by London police and banned a 33-year old Slovak man (who lives in London) from entering the Golders Greens neighborhood after he repeatedly harassed Jews in the area with comments about how they should be gassed. The man had hung around outside kosher restaurants and other places harassing customers. The police took action after he made particularly unpleasant remarks on Holocaust Remembrance Day and gave Nazi salutes.
He has been banned from the city district for one year and was sentenced to 180 hours of community service after admitting to two charges of “racially or religiously aggravated harassment” and one charge of “assault by beating”.
ASSAD’S FORCES DESTROY SYRIA’S OLDEST SYNAGOGUE
The ancient Eliyahu Hanabi Synagogue in the Damascus district of Jobar, said to be built atop a cave where the prophet Elijah once hid, was completely destroyed by the Syrian army last weekend.
The area where the synagogue once stood has been under bombardment by the forces of President Bashar Assad for months, part of his regime’s “scorched earth” policy, which includes random and violent attacks on civilian populations.
Dozens of churches and hundreds of mosques have been destroyed by the Assad regime since the start of the Syrian civil war over three years ago. Six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Syria have also been destroyed.
IT’S OFFICIAL: SPANISH TOWN TO REMOVE “KILL THE JEWS” FROM ITS NAME
This is a follow-up to an item on this in my dispatch of April 14 – a story that the New York Times finally first reported on only in May.
***
The small Spanish village named Castrillo Matajudios has voted to remove the words “Kill the Jews” from its name, after having that name for hundreds of years, since the Spanish Inquisition.
The new name will be chosen later this month.
Of the town’s 56 eligible voters, 52 cast votes in a referendum, with 29 supporting the initiative to change the name and 19 opposing it. There were four disqualified ballots.
Originally called Castrillo Motajudios, or Hill of the Jews, the words “Kill the Jews” were added at the time of the Spanish Inquisition of 1492, when the Jews of Spain and Portugal were killed or expelled following decades of forced conversions and burnings at the stake.
The campaign to change Castrillo Matajudios’ name was led by the mayor, Lorenzo Rodriguez.
Rodriguez said: “With our name, we’ve been accused of being anti-Semitic. The reality is this is a village descended from a Jewish community, where most inhabitants in this region are the descendants of forcibly converted Jews.”
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
A still from a video released by the Belgian police shows the suspect of the killings at the Brussels Jewish Museum
Mira and Emanuel Riva, the Israeli couple killed in the Brussels terror attack. They left behind two teenage daughters.
* Suicide bomber caught in Israel: Many international media ignore the story.
* American, Canadian die fighting on opposing sides in Syria.
* Karen James, a member of the 1972 Canadian Olympic Team, who witnessed the massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes: I feel sick that Ottawa taxpayers are being forced to fund an exhibit honoring the Munich terrorists.
* A note below on Haaretz’s (and the Daily Telegraph’s) shocking (yet predictable) take on the Brussels Jewish museum terror attack.
***
You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
CONTENTS
1. French citizen, trained in Syria, arrested for Brussels museum attack
2. Brussels murderer “videotaped his attack” just like Toulouse and other killers did
3. Downplaying anti-Semitism in Belgium
4. “Fifty thousand Belgian Jews can wonder who’s next”
5. Israeli police catch suicide bomber wearing bomb belt
6. One day she wasn’t there
7. U.S. officials confirm that Syria suicide bomber was American citizen
8. Canadian man, who was a senior Hizbullah commander, killed by Syrian rebels
9. Criticism in Canada of taxpayer-funded “art” tribute to Palestinian terrorists
10. Californian taxpayers funded professors’ meeting with terrorists
11. Temple University refuses to condemn professor who doubts truth of Holocaust
12. Report: Hamas pays hundreds of youths to harass Jews at temple mount
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
FRENCH CITIZEN, TRAINED IN SYRIA, ARRESTED FOR BRUSSELS MUSEUM ATTACK
French police announced today that 29-year-old French citizen, Mehdi Nemmouche, has been arrested in the southern French port city of Marseille, and charged with last weekend’s terror attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels that left four people dead.
Police sais that Nemmouche, from the northern French town of Roubaix, was captured Friday in Marseille, and had in his possession a gun, a Kalashnikov assault rifle, and a video camera, used in the Brussels attack.
Nemmouche is believed to have links to Syrian jihadists. Nemmouche last visited Syria in 2013.
Nemmouche was meant to have been under surveillance, according to intelligence sources, following his return from Syria, but as is the case with hundreds of other European jihadis returning from Syria, the surveillance is less than perfect.
Nemmouche was picked up at Marseille’s coach station on board a bus arriving from Amsterdam. He is not believed to have been acting alone.
The shooting last Saturday left four Jews dead, including a 24-year-old Belgian museum employee and a French woman who did volunteer work at the museum, both of whom were executed point blank in the head and neck, as well as an Israeli couple on a trip to Europe to celebrate their wedding anniversary.
***
DUPED BY HAARETZ?
Tom Gross adds:
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz have been accused by many in recent years of stirring things up by implying that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism barely exist.
Although the suspect has not been convicted yet, the police have a video confession by him boasting of the attack and his motives, and it in any case seemed beyond doubt from the beginning that some form of anti-Semitism was a factor in shooting up a Jewish museum. Yet Haaretz ran what many are terming a prominent conspiracy theory piece in the news pages following last week’s Brussels attack (by Amir Oren), citing “anonymous sources” saying that the attack was neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Zionist but merely a crime, that had nothing to do with prejudice against Jews.
Many western media outlets, under the impression that Haaretz is a reliable paper, repeated Haaretz’s “conspiracy theory” about the Jewish museum attack, including for example, the (London) Daily Telegraph, which ran a lengthy piece mirroring Haaretz’s conspiracy.
This is not to say that Haaretz doesn’t also have some fine writing in other respects – but it is making too many mistakes in its eagerness to suggest that the only bad people in the world are the Israelis themselves.
***
Update: In the last hour, Belgian police have conduct raids in Kortrijk, arresting two additional suspects in connection with the Brussels attack.
(This item was written by me before today’s news about the apprehension of the Brussels museum killer.)
BRUSSELS MURDERER “VIDEOTAPED HIS ATTACK” JUST LIKE TOULOUSE AND OTHER KILLERS DID
Belgian media report that the Brussels museum shooter may have videotaped last weekend’s terror attack. According to police sources involved in the investigation, the museum security cameras indicate the suspect documented the shooting with a personal GoPro camera mounted on his chest.
In recent years, recording and then broadcasting on the Internet the murders of Jews has become a favorite tactic of Muslim anti-Semites.
For example, Mohamed Merah, the French-Algerian who murdered four Jews (including three young children) at the Otzar HaTorah school in Toulouse in March 2012 (and two French soldiers in separate attacks), also recorded the killing in this way, but the tapes were never aired.
Update: The French police now say that the video that the suspect was carrying showed the attack together with a confession by the perpetrator.
DOWNPLAYING ANTI-SEMITISM IN BELGIUM
One of the most inaccurate claims made by some of the media that reported on the Brussels terror attack, is that there is little anti-Semitism in Belgium and there were no previous similar attacks in the post-war era.
In fact, only last month there was an anti-Semitic rally in Belgium which had to be broken up by riot police using water cannon, organized by the anti-Semitic Belgian MP Laurent Louis. Speakers included the notorious anti-Semitic “comedian” Dieudonné. I mentioned the rally in the dispatch of May: Item 7 here.
And among past attacks was the bombing in 1981 of an Antwerp synagogue that left three dead.
Last year a survey of 4,000 Belgian children aged between 14 and 18, found about 75 per cent of young Belgian Muslims held “ hard-core anti-Semitic beliefs.” Non-Muslim children were less anti-Semitic, according to the poll.
And more recently, a worldwide poll published last month found that 34 per cent of Belgian men, and 27 per cent of men and women combined, are anti-Semites.
***
Shira and Ayelet Riva, the two 16 and 15 year old-daughters of the Israeli couple killed in the Brussels shooting, wrote a final letter to their parents as their bodies landed in Israel, which was reprinted in an Israeli newspaper.
They wrote: “We know that you will always be in our hearts and souls. We couldn’t ask for better parents. Loving, caring and good-hearted, who most of all wanted the best for us.”
The daughters added that their parents went abroad to celebrate their 18th anniversary. “Before the trip they promised us we would do a lot of things together after they return, but they won’t come back to us.”
Belgium’s interior minister, Joelle Milquet, said that police would now guard all Jewish institutions in the country for the foreseeable future.
(This item was written before the news about the apprehension of the Brussels killer. I include it because it marks a change for the LRB to run something sympathetic to Jewish concerns.)
“FIFTY THOUSAND BELGIAN JEWS CAN WONDER WHO’S NEXT”
The London Review of Books, which is often particularly unsympathetic to Israeli or Jewish concerns, has this short piece by Glen Newey about the Brussels shootings. (extracts only):
“Sleek, complacent Brussels takes its alfresco chocolate and beer and waffles in the early summer sunshine, untroubled by the European elections or a few anti-Semitic murders. The bo-bo Sablon district, which hosts the Jewish Museum, scene of Saturday’s shootings, was thick with drinkers again twenty-four hours later; indeed, the gratification of a man interviewed by Flemish VTM Nieuws soon after the attacks remained undimmed …
“Policemen, some toting automatic weapons, were posted at either end of the partly barricaded Miniemenstraat… Knots of Jewish people, the men in yarmulkes, milled and conferred on the street … Why were they there? ‘It’s a nice evening,’ one of the (non-Jewish) men said in Flemish, with a twinkle in his eye. The women turned away…
“The Belgian police have so far failed to arrest or even (as far as is known) identify the Jewish Museum murderer. Until they do, fifty thousand Belgian Jews can wonder who’s next. They can witness the triumph of the anti-Semitic FN in neighboring France: in a tweet on Saturday, Luc Le Garsmeur, an FN candidate, described the philosopher Alain Finkelkraut as not being French ‘de souche’ – one of the weasel-phrases used to label Jews. What do you say to people when their civic status is attacked at its root?”
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/05/26/glen-newey/in-brussels-2/
ISRAELI POLICE CATCH SUICIDE BOMBER WEARING BOMB BELT
(I have included this item because many international media have completely ignored it, even though it was, naturally, the main story in the Israeli media on Friday.)
On Friday morning, Israeli border police apprehended a Palestinian man who tried to enter Israel wearing an explosive vest, thus preventing what seems almost certain to have been a major suicide bombing.
Police first became suspicious when the 20-year-old man, from Nablus, was wearing a heavy coat, despite the 35-degree-Celsius heat (95 degrees Fahrenheit). The policemen, keeping their distance, called on the man to stop, and lay down in the road.
Eventually, the suspect allowed policemen to remove his coat, revealing an explosive belt composed of 12 pipe bombs connected with electric wires strapped around his waist. Police sappers neutralized the bomb. The man was arrested (but will no doubt be released by Israel, just as previous terrorists were, after pressure from John Kerry and other Western leaders).
Israeli media reported that the attack was planned for an Israeli city. An Israeli government minister praised the alert policeman for “saving many lives.”
ONE DAY SHE WASN’T THERE
As far as I am aware, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu didn’t actually say the words in the cartoon below. However, in a press event on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl the day after the Pope’s photo-op at the security barrier on the outskirts of Bethlehem last week, Netanyahu did say the following to the Pope:
“When my son was 10 years' old, his best friend was a beautiful Ethiopian girl who sat next to him in class. One day she didn’t come; she was blown up in a bus not far from here because there was no fence. There was no wall.”
I am drawing attention to these words again because I couldn’t find a single printed or online international media outlet that bothered to report on them, despite devoting considerable coverage to the Pope’s visit to the security barrier, and despite many journalists from major Western media outlets being present when Netanyahu said them.
U.S. OFFICIALS CONFIRM THAT SYRIA SUICIDE BOMBER WAS AMERICAN CITIZEN
The U.S. State Department on Friday confirmed that an American citizen, Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha from Florida, has carried out a suicide bombing in Syria.
Abu-Salha, who used the nom de guerre Abu Hurayra al-Amriki, carried out one of four suicide bombings on May 25 in Syria’s Idlib province on behalf of Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s affiliate who are fighting to oust President Bashar Assad.
The American suicide bomber in Syria
CANADIAN MAN, WHO WAS A SENIOR HIZBULLAH COMMANDER, KILLED BY SYRIAN REBELS
Fawzi Ayoub, a naturalized Canadian citizen, was shot dead by Syrian rebel forces in Aleppo last Sunday, Lebanese media reported. Ayoub, who had previously been convicted of airline hijacking, was a senior member of the Lebanese terror group Hizbullah
The 48-year-old former Toronto supermarket employee, who became a senior Hizbullah commander, was declared a “martyr” on a Facebook page filled with photos of him in battle fatigues.
The Lebanese-Canadian had been on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist list” since 2009.
Ayoub was a longtime Hezbollah operative and former member of an elite unit headed by the late terrorist Imad Mugniyah, who died in 2008 in a mysterious explosion in Damascus.
Ayoub had previously been captured by Israel but was released in 2004 as part of prisoner swap that saw Israel release 436 Palestinians and Lebanese terrorists in exchange for one kidnapped Israeli civilian hostage.
While several Canadian jihadists have died over the past year fighting against the Assad regime, Ayoub is the first known to have lost his life fighting for Assad.
Thousands of Iranian revolutionary guards and Hizbullah operatives are fighting on behalf of Assad, and have been responsible for some of the worst atrocities against Syrian civilians in the last two years.
***
For a dispatch on how the New York Times got itself into a linguistic tizzy over the death of Imad Mugniyah, please see here.
CRITICISM IN CANADA OF TAXPAYER-FUNDED “ART” TRIBUTE TO PALESTINIAN TERRORISTS
A new art exhibit in the Canadian capital Ottawa includes a video in which the names and faces of “assassinated Palestinian figures” are flashed on screen, while an accompanying booklet explains that the images consist of “lost artists, activists, writers and leaders.”
What the leaflet and video don’t explain is that those memorialized include a number of notorious terrorists responsible for the murder of dozens of civilians.
They included Abu Iyad (also known as Salah Mesbah Khalaf) who helped masterminded the Munich Olympics massacre. Iyad’s face and name appear on the cover of the exhibit’s booklet just inches away from the City of Ottawa’s logo.
Karen James, a member of the 1972 Canadian Olympic Team, who witnessed the massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes, said she felt sick that such an exhibit honoring terrorists was being put on.
She wrote in Canada’s National Post newspaper this week: “No mention is made of Iyad’s role in Black September, let alone the slain athletes of Munich and the scores of other victims murdered by those memorialized in the exhibit. To add salt to the wound, Ottawa taxpayers will be paying a fee to Nazzal for her ‘art.’ I can only imagine the outrage that would be generated were the City to host an “art” display memorializing Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers. The Munich attacks may have been more than 40 years ago, but the passage of time does nothing to mitigate the loss of life and the pain of victims’ families.”
“We all embrace freedom of expression. Indeed, it is one of the values that make Canada the envy of much of the world. But the glorification of murderers is something that no taxpayer should be forced to subsidize, let alone host at our public institutions.”
“The others in the exhibit are members of the infamous squad of terrorists that would murder 11 athletes at the Munich Summer Games. On that evening – September 5th, 1972 – I was one of those naïve athletes who unwittingly brushed with evil.”
***
As I noted in a dispatch last year, a similar exhibit was displayed in Paris at the Jeu de Paume museum, but despite repeated protests (and despite the fact it may have contributed to an upswing in anti-Semitic attacks in France) the Minister of Culture refused to close it.
CALIFORNIAN TAXPAYERS FUNDED PROFESSORS’ MEETING WITH TERRORISTS
San Francisco State University spent thousands of dollars to send two of its professors to the West Bank and Jordan for a series of meetings with convicted Palestinian terrorists, according to documents obtained this week under the California Public Records Act, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
During the trip in January, SFSU professors Rabab Abdulhadi and Joanne Barker met with, among others, terrorist Leila Khaled, a convicted airline hijacker and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has launched dozens of terrorist attacks and is responsible for the deaths of more than 20 Americans.
They also met with Sheikh Raed Salah, who has been convicted of funding Hamas and served prison time for inciting violence.
Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with meeting the enemy, if for example, the professors were trying to convert them to renounce violence against civilians, but we have no indication that this was the purpose of their visit.
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY REFUSES TO CONDEMN PROFESSOR WHO DOUBTS TRUTH OF HOLOCAUST
Temple University has been criticized by Jewish groups for refusing to condemn one of their professors, Alessio Lerro, for his doubting whether 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and his use of anti-Semitic discourse on a secret listserv.
Other professors on the secret listserv operated by members of the Modern Language Association – which is currently campaigning to boycott Israel – also used anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Free Beacon reported.
Temple University spokesman Brandon Lausch told the Free Beacon that the university would not condemn Lerro. Questioning the Holocaust was a part of a “vigorous exchange of ideas,” Lausch claimed.
REPORT: HAMAS PAYS HUNDREDS OF YOUTHS TO HARASS JEWS AT TEMPLE MOUNT
Mahmoud Toameh, a top-ranking overseas operative of Hamas, has revealed that Hamas pays hundreds of young Israeli Arab citizens to harass Jewish worshippers at the Temple Mount area, according to press reports.
These Israeli-Arabs, who ostensibly are studying Islamic theology at the site, are paid a monthly salary of NIS 4,000 to NIS 5000 ($1,150-$1,440) to attack Jews, sometimes with rocks.
Mahmoud Toameh, a married father of eight, born in 1951, previously lived in Saudi Arabia, and is now a member of the Shura Council, the body headed by Khaled Mashaal which oversees “military” policy for Hamas. Hamas receives substantial funding from mosque networks in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
[Notes above by Tom Gross]