Aleppo, a city now in ruins thanks to Assad, Putin, Iran and Hizbullah – and some would add Obama. In what is almost the equivalent of Holocaust denial, the New York Times provided a prominent platform for Putin to claim that Assad was not responsible for the mass chemical attack that he carried out on Sunni civilians in 2013
PUTIN SAYS: NO ONE SHOULD BOMB SYRIA: “FORCE HAS PROVED INEFFECTIVE AND POINTLESS”
[Note by Tom Gross]
Not only does the New York Times often invite anti-Israeli contributors to spread dangerous propaganda on its opinion pages, but it sometimes invites other propagandists too.
As a reminder of this, I attach a piece that the New York Times asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to write three years ago about Syria in support of President Obama.
I am sending it again now, at the time that the Russian airforce, backed up by thousands of Iranian and Hizbullah ground troops, continues to pound Syria’s biggest city Aleppo on behalf of the Assad regime, indiscriminately killing civilians. They are also encouraging the Assad regime to continue to use particularly destructive barrel bombs, and chemical weapons, on civilians.
Putin’s piece effectively helped President Obama (for whom the New York Times is a virtual mouthpiece) to make his case against stopping Assad after his previous chemical attacks on women and children. At that time it would have been relatively easy to set up a no-fly zone to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians by the regime and its allies. (Isis has killed only a relatively small number of civilians in comparison to Assad, and it has killed fewer since its inception than the Russian airforce have killed in Syria this spring and summer alone.)
Obama defied almost all his senior foreign policy team, including John Kerry, when he decided not to stop Assad at that time. As a result, hundreds of thousand have been killed and injured and millions more have fled into Europe and neighboring Arab states.
(Putin’s New York Times piece appeared online on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and in the print edition the next day.)
After that I attach a new piece by Lee Smith outlining the collusion by Obama (and by his cheerleaders in the American media) with the murderous Iranian regime over Syria and much else.
And finally I attach an obituary in The Economist magazine of Qusai Abtini, sit-com star of Aleppo, who has been killed by a missile, aged 14
(The Economist runs only one obituary each week. This is the same series my late father was featured in. Or here.)
-- Tom Gross
ARTICLES
THE NEW YORK TIMES OFFERS PUTIN SPACE TO BACK UP OBAMA
A Plea for Caution From Russia
By Vladimir V. Putin
New York Times
September 11, 2013
www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html
MOSCOW – Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.
Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization – the United Nations – was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.
The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.
No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.
The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal conflict, fueled by foreign weapons supplied to the opposition, is one of the bloodiest in the world.
Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.
From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack – this time against Israel – cannot be ignored.
It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”
But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.
No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.
The world reacts by asking: if you cannot count on international law, then you must find other ways to ensure your security. Thus a growing number of countries seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This is logical: if you have the bomb, no one will touch you. We are left with talk of the need to strengthen nonproliferation, when in reality this is being eroded.
We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
A new opportunity to avoid military action has emerged in the past few days. The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction. Judging by the statements of President Obama, the United States sees this as an alternative to military action.
I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive, as we agreed to at the Group of 8 meeting in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in June, and steer the discussion back toward negotiations.
If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
(Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.)
DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
Deal with the Devil
By Lee Smith
The Weekly Standard
September 5, 2016 edition
In an interview last week for his new book The Iran Wars, Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal told Andrea Mitchell that Iran in 2013 had threatened to pull out of nuclear talks if the United States hit Bashar al-Assad’s forces over the Syrian dictator’s use of chemical weapons. The Obama administration quickly denied this. “Not true,” tweeted White House aide Ned Price.
Of course it’s true. And if it weren’t, Barack Obama would have a lot of explaining to do. Why else did he allow Assad to violate Obama’s own “red line” with impunity? Why did he jeopardize American interests and endanger allies throughout the Middle East? Why else did he allow a refugee crisis to destabilize Europe? Why has he done nothing to stop the slaughter of nearly half a million Syrians?
Obama himself publicly acknowledged that he won’t interfere with Iranian interests in Syria. In a December 2015 White House press conference, the president spoke of respecting Iranian “equities” in the Levant. That means preservation of the Assad regime, a vital Iranian interest since it serves as a supply line for Iranian weapons earmarked for Hezbollah in Lebanon. The White House was so serious about respecting this particular “equity” that it repeatedly leaked details of Israeli strikes on Iranian arms convoys. Obama wanted to show the Iranians his bona fides as a negotiating partner.
A nuclear deal with Iran has been Obama’s foreign policy priority since he first sat in the Oval Office. The agreement would pave the way for a broader realignment in the Middle East – downgrading traditional American allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia and upgrading Iran – and thus allow the United States to minimize its footprint in the region. With so much at stake, including his hunger for a personal legacy, Obama didn’t dare risk alienating Iran by targeting Assad.
The real deal that Obama made with the mullahs has been clear for some time now: They got to keep their client in Syria, and Obama got his “historic” achievement. So why not just spin the press and claim that laying off Assad was part of the price America paid for Obama’s stunning diplomatic triumph? Indeed, last we heard from Ned Price, the White House aide was bragging to the New York Times Magazine about manipulating the media. “The easiest way for the White House to shape the news,” Price explained,
is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them – “ …“And the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”
So why won’t the administration just tap its “compadres” now and get the message out? Because of Omran Daqneesh. He’s the 5-year-old Syrian boy whose bloodied and shell-shocked visage was splashed across the international media last week. He was pulled out of the rubble left by a Syrian or Russian bombing run, and then sat in an ambulance in a nearly catatonic state as photographers snapped his picture. Omran instantly embodied the senseless waste of a five-and-a-half-year war that has taken nearly half a million lives, including thousands of children just like Omran. “The babies are dying in Aleppo,” wrote the New Yorker’s Robin Wright.
Sure – they’re dying. But who is responsible? Wright left that part out. Yes, the Islamic State has killed lots of people in Syria. Reports last week, however, showed that Russia has killed more civilians than ISIS, which doesn’t use planes to kill. Either the Assad regime or its Russian allies are dropping bombs that kill babies so as to prop up Iran’s ally, the one Obama left alone to seal his deal with Tehran.
And that’s why, in this one instance, the White House has been loath to reach out to its compadres and preen about the tough real-world choices Obama made to get his nuclear deal with Iran. Because those choices were gruesome, and they undercut the image of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient as a man of reason, wisdom, courage, and compassion – an image the press coauthored.
In the narrative preferred by the administration and its media compadres, Obama heroically defied a gauntlet of warmongering Republicans who were akin to the hardliners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in their opposition to the nuclear deal. The image of a 5-year-old Syrian boy covered in the rubble left by the IRGC and its allies points to an altogether different kinship. The regime Obama accommodated is party to the slaughter of infants. The only technique the White House has at its disposal in this case is to lie and deny the facts.
No one who used a position in the press to help sell the Iran deal wants to look very closely at the consequences. But these are the facts. Obama’s national security staff advised, almost unanimously, backing the anti-Assad rebels. Obama rejected their counsel. And he did so not out of a judicious desire to keep America out of another Middle East conflict but to make nice with Tehran. He supported the side waging a campaign of sectarian cleansing. The administration shared intelligence with units of the Lebanese Army controlled by Hezbollah. It forced Syrian rebel groups that the United States had trained and armed to sign documents promising they wouldn’t attack Assad, the despot ordering the torture and murder of their families and friends. In this way, Obama protected the man who bombs 5-year-olds.
Most tellingly, Obama gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief. The policy could have been to not return the money until Iran withdrew all forces from Syria and support for Assad. Obama could have said, I don’t care if only one American penny from these billions is used to save Assad’s scalp, we won’t be complicit in the murder of innocents. Iran gets no sanctions relief until they are out of Syria. But he didn’t. No, the White House talking points hold that the tens of billions in sanctions relief, as well as the $1.7 billion in ransom money paid in exchange for American hostages, was all Iran’s money to begin with. Money to do with as it wishes.
The price Obama paid to ink an agreement with Iran continues to mount. What’s certain is that to get that agreement, Obama made his peace with Assad ruling over Syria and prosecuting a war that has claimed half a million lives so far. For the White House and its surrogates in the media, the moral reckoning for that deal is still to come.
QUSAI ABTINI, 14
Qusai Abtini, sit-com star of Aleppo, was killed on July 8th, aged 14
Obituary
The Economist
Aug 13, 2016
WHEN you saw Qusai Abtini on his TV sit-com, “Umm Abdou the Aleppan”, he appeared as the typical father-figure of a struggling Syrian household. Dressed in greasy blue overalls, he would trudge home from his workshop and throw a bag of shopping at his wife, Umm Abdou, ordering her to cook supper. More mellow afterwards, he would lounge in his white cap and dishdasha on the sofa, picking his teeth and patting his stomach while his wife served up his glass of coffee. As she carried on (for Umm Abdou, played by his 11-year-old schoolfriend Rasha, was wilful, beautiful, full of half-crazed ideas, and never stopped talking), he would keep a lordly silence, occasionally stroking an imaginary beard. Then, after an affectionate put-down, he would waddle off. Everything was exactly observed; and only the occasional too-broad bucktooth grin, or an unprofessional glance to camera, would betray the fact that patriarch Abu Abdou was a child.
He was one of around 100,000 children, roughly one-third of the population, in the eastern part of Aleppo, which for months and years has been fought over by the forces of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian rebels. Thousands have died. With the arrival of the Russians on the government side, fighting has intensified to break the rebel hold on the east of the city. Qusai was one of those for whom school had become intermittent and street football too dangerous, with days spent inside instead, watching TV when the power was on, or reading by candlelight when it went off. A lot of time was spent queuing for bread, and too much time dreading the barrel bombs that would bounce down across the blue sky. In June his house was hit by rockets, and his father badly wounded.
This war zone was the background of his sit-com, made by opposition activists and aired on the rebel channel Halab Today TV. Qusai and the other children had been recruited from the Abdulrahman Ghaafiqi school, where he had started acting in the seventh grade. All the filming took place in Aleppo’s Old Town, through ancient archways and narrow streets with cast-iron grilles. But the child-actors also scurried past piles of rubble and burned-out cars, sometimes ending at half-bombed buildings that seemed ready to fall about their ears. Abu Abdou’s “home” seemed cosy enough, with rich carpets draped on an ornate sofa and, in one episode, even fresh apples and carrots for him to gorge on. But a closer look showed wires dangling, paint peeling, the potted palms thick with dust and bullet holes in the walls. The sound of shelling, and sometimes of close explosions that made everyone jump, rumbled behind their chatter.
Qusai’s job, and Rasha’s, was to entertain Aleppans despite it all. Umm Abdou was forever complaining about the lack of power, lack of water (which meant she had to do all the washing by hand in a plastic bowl), lack of a signal for her large mobile phone, the state of the city, the Assad regime and the way no one seemed to be filming the bloodshed properly, “so that other countries can’t see what’s happening to us”. Abu Abdou was lazier and more stoical. Umm Abdou wanted to start a women’s rebel army; he deterred her by pretending to see a mouse under the sofa, reminding “you woman”, as he loftily called her, how easily terrified she was. When he briefly joined the rebels himself, he was ambushed by Assad’s men and limped home with a bandaged head — all his wife’s fault, for gossiping about his sortie to the neighbours.
THE FACE OF DEFIANCE
Qusai already had half a foot in that world. He joined his first street protests when he was eight, sitting shouting on the shoulders of his elder brother Assad. In later demonstrations he strode fearless at the front, the fresh, cheeky face of Aleppo’s defiance. Assad joined the Free Syrian Army; Qusai signed up to a first-aider course at Jerusalem hospital. His acting career included video tours lamenting the state of ruined Aleppo, and school plays in which he played a rebel soldier in full fighting gear, drawing cheers from the parents for his speeches. In one theatre show he was “killed” by a sniper outside a bar and draped by his “mother” with a Syrian flag, the proper rites for a martyr.
By this year he was getting too old to play a child playing a man. The second series of the sit-com, made in June, starred a boy called Subhi in the part of Abu Abdou instead. Qusai was getting tall, and his schoolteacher noticed that his ambitions were growing with him, to be a serious actor and a star in his own right. Offstage, he went around in camouflage trousers and a hoodie that helped to disguise how young he was. Looking in the mirror, brushing his thick hair and practising a slighter, poutier smile, he was beginning to see the face of a celebrated fighter or a juvenile lead.
It was not to be, because as the battle worsened and Aleppo fell under seige his father decided to get him out. Subhi, his replacement, had already fled to Turkey with his family. By July, only one “humanitarian route” remained open out of the city. They took it, but a shell or a missile hit the car. His father survived; he did not.
He was mourned as the “little hero” who had made Aleppo laugh. His hopes had been for much bigger things, when he was really a man.
* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia, where you can also find other items that are not in these dispatches.
“THE ARABS DO NOT SEEM BENT ON STARTING HOSTILITIES”
[Note by Tom Gross]
(This dispatch may be of interest to historians on this list.)
I attach two articles, both by Amir Oren, defense correspondent for the Israeli paper Haaretz.
The first piece, published today, reports on newly released CIA documents that detail how the agency got their predictions about the Yom Kippur War spectacularly wrong.
The CIA wrote in a briefing for the president on October 6, 1973 (the day that Israel was attacked):
“Tension along Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria has been heightened by a Soviet airlift that is in its second day… but neither side seems bent on starting hostilities… A military initiative at this time would make little sense for either Cairo or Damascus.”
Within hours (maybe minutes, considering the time gap between Washington and Jerusalem) of that report being delivered, the Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked Israel in a massive offensive from both north and south.
As Haaretz notes: “The CIA’s big secret was that it didn’t have a secret. It knew very little from covert sources. Many of the clauses that appeared in the PDB [President’s Daily Brief] were taken from ambassadors’ telegrams, leaders’ speeches and newspaper articles.”
(Tom Gross adds: The CIA has on many other occasion, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, made ill-judged predictions and assessments.)
The second piece below concerns a rare interview given in October 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, by Henry Kissinger for an Israeli television documentary called “The Avoidable War”.
Kissinger attempts to persuade Israelis that the U.S. helped save their country during the 1973 war, although many Israelis doubt this and indeed argue that Kissinger actually helped the Egyptian forces prepare for the war by, among other things, pressuring Israel not to destroy the anti-aircraft rocket launching pads which the Egyptians and Soviets set up in the Suez Canal a few days before the Egyptians invaded, and which were not supposed to be there according to the Rogers ceasefire.
By the time the war broke out, the rocket launching pads were armed and it was too late for Israel safely to do anything about it.
ARTICLES
“A MILITARY INITIATIVE AT THIS TIME WOULD MAKE LITTLE SENSE FOR EITHER CAIRO OR DAMASCUS”
Newly released CIA reports detail how agency missed portents of Yom Kippur War
The American intelligence’s daily briefings to the presidents in the 1960s and ‘70s show how far the CIA was from predicting the developments in Israel
By Amir Oren
Haaretz
Aug. 28, 2016
The CIA would be happy to bury the next lines forever. A surprise from an unexpected direction is one thing – it happens. But seeing the reality and denying the alternative that will soon take place is an embarrassment to the professionals who are supposed to serve the most important man in the world.
October 6, 1973: “Tension along Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria has been heightened by a Soviet airlift that is in its second day. Neither the Israelis nor the Arabs seem bent on starting hostilities, but in this atmosphere the risk of clashes is greater than usual. … Both the Israelis and the Arabs are becoming increasingly concerned about their adversaries’ military activities, but neither side seems bent on starting hostilities.”
This is what U.S. intelligence said a few hours, maybe minutes (considering the time gap between Washington and Jerusalem) before the opening of the combined Egyptian-Syrian attack on Sinai and the Golan Heights – two of the territories Israel had held since June 1967.
There are several mistakes in one paragraph: A causal link between the Soviet airlift and the increased tension (in fact, it was the other way around: due to the tension – that is, the Soviet knowledge that Syria and Egypt were about to act – Soviet staff families were being evacuated from Cairo and Damascus); stating that neither side seemed bent on starting hostilities (correct in the Israeli context, very wrong concerning the Arabs); and attributing the “risk of clashes” to the atmosphere rather than the covertly made plan that rolled toward implementation.
Perhaps the CIA assumed that Yom Kippur morning that the Soviets were afraid a war would break out. Alternatively, that their already bad relations with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had worsened and the tension was actually a Soviet excuse to reduce their presence in Egypt, without overly upsetting Sadat.
The report continued: “A military initiative at this time would make little sense for either Cairo or Damascus. Another round of hostilities would destroy Sadat’s painstaking efforts to invigorate Egypt’s economy and run counter to his attempts to bring the less militant, oil-rich states into a united Arab front. Syria’s cautious President [Hafez] Assad appears braced for a possible second blow from Israel rather than seeking revenge for his recent loss of 13 MIGs to Israeli fighters. Damascus radio broadcasts reflect Syrian fears.”
The intelligence failure of the Nixon administration prior to the Yom Kippur War is legendary – it provided work for commissions of inquiry and produced thousands of documents four decades after the war. But an important chapter was added Thursday from the eight-year collection of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) during the terms of presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, from January 1969 to January 1977.
The CIA and Nixon Library have released versions, albeit censored, of all the CIA’s daily briefs to the presidents. Israel doesn’t play the lead role, what with Vietnam, China, the Soviets and NATO, Cuba and others also on the scene. But it’s important enough to occupy Nixon and Ford and their respective intelligence chiefs – Richard Helms and James R. Schlesinger, William Colby and George H.W. Bush.
The PDB was intended to refine the millions of items swept into the huge vacuum cleaner of America’s intelligence agencies – spies, satellites, phone tapping, decoding – and processed by researchers and evaluators. The summary was given to the ultimate decision maker, who didn’t always have time to read the raw material. So in the final account, what’s important is mainly what boiled to the surface.
The CIA’s big secret was that it didn’t have a secret. It knew very little from covert sources. Many of the clauses that appeared in the PDB were taken from ambassadors’ telegrams, leaders’ speeches and newspaper articles. Many in Israel were seduced by the CIA legend of an octopus whose arms reached everywhere. At the time, the Israelis believed a top U.S. spy was working in Israel. According to the tales told to the president – and if he isn’t told, what’s the point in intelligence? – there was no such source here, in contrast to gossip that was passed on without verification and refuted the following day.
The PDB of October 6, which cited “Damascus radio broadcasts,” in the absence of a source with free access to Assad, was preceded by that week’s briefings. On October 1, the entire brief was censored, but its headline – Israel/Syria/Jordan – discloses its content: The warning of Jordan’s King Hussein and his intelligence chiefs (who had good Syrian sources) that the Syrian army was about to make its move. This is the warning that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir heard from King Hussein at their September 25 meeting in Glilot, and which made U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger jump and demand that Colby get more details from the Mossad and Israel’s Military Intelligence.
With all due respect to the CIA, Colby – like Military Intelligence chief Eli Ze’ira – was a senior officer but junior compared to Nixon, Kissinger and Schlesinger. Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan knew more than Ze’ira, certainly regarding policy and politics. And Nixon and Kissinger, who held secret talks, knew more than Colby. They expected him to give them an unequivocal warning about the crisis, rather than a basic evaluation.
After the PDB of October 1 and a similar one the following day, the CIA’s attentiveness decreased – only to awaken again at the end of the week. On Friday October 5, the main item dealt with Libyan ruler Muammar Gadhafi, who had resigned (the Americans believed he was serious this time).
The second item concerned Israel’s relations with Austria, following the terror attack on a train full of Soviet Jews and the threat to the Schoenau transit camp. (At her meeting with the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee a day earlier, Meir treated this event as more concerning than facing Egypt and Syria.)
Only the third item on the CIA’s briefing said: “Military drills now going on in Egypt are larger and more realistic than the previous ones, but the Israelis are not nervous.”
The tendency to trust the complacency of those who were supposed to be most concerned was also clear in the Yom Kippur briefing itself: “The Israelis’ attitude apparently has changed considerably since Monday when they, too, viewed the activity in Egypt as normal and that in Syria as defensive. Nevertheless, the Syrians’ fears could lead to a mobilization of their defenses, which in turn could alarm and galvanize the Israelis. Such a cycle of action and reaction would increase the risk of military clashes which neither side originally intended.”
According to the PDB, during the war itself the CIA reports did not excel in their analysis and understanding. If it weren’t for Kissinger’s sources, including Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Simcha Dinitz, the administration would have been operating in a dense fog of information available to any reader and viewer.
The CIA assessors were out of sync and missed important moves on both sides. Among these (although on October 8 they reported that the mood among Israeli leaders was somber), there is no mention of the panic in the Israeli leadership, Moshe Dayan and certain army officers before dawn on October 9, to the point of wanting to make preparations to take extreme action. Neither is there any mention of Meir’s decision to accept Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff David Elazar’s recommendation to seek a cease-fire with the Egyptians on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal – in fact, surrender to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
On one issue that was a matter of controversy between Military Intelligence (and the Mossad and Israel Air Force intelligence) and the CIA, the Americans had to concede later that the Israelis were right: the ground-to-ground Scud missiles that the Soviets had deployed in Egypt. On August 31, 1973, it was explained to Nixon that the Scud was “roughly comparable to the Jericho missile the Israelis are developing,” but the evidence that it had arrived in Egypt was weak. All the intelligence “collection systems” were on alert, but “attempts to photograph Nikolayev [the Russian port that shipped military goods to the Middle East] in early August to ascertain whether the equipment was still there were balked by clouds,” Nixon was told. Before the cease-fire, the Soviet operators fired those weak Scuds at the IDF bridgehead.
Among the thousands of editions of the PDB, one can discover how rarely the CIA predicted domestic developments in Israel. Two days after Nixon was sworn in on January 20, 1969, he was shown an intelligence assessment about an Israeli politician – Prime Minister Levi Eshkol (“We expect Eshkol to stay in power through 1970, at least”) – and that Yigal Allon feared closer ties between Eshkol and Dayan, the latter being much more hard-line regarding the Arabs. Eshkol, who was sick, died from a heart attack a month later, and the assessors reset the counter to zero.
On February 27, 1969: “Gen. Allon’s selection as Acting Prime Minister is clearly a stop-gap measure. … In the past few months he has not been in the good graces of the Labor Party old guard.” (In an earlier report, it was stated that Eshkol was angry over a meeting Allon arranged with President Lyndon B. Johnson after Allon became deputy prime minister.)
“The old guard … may find itself compelled to turn to a younger, more popular man to lead the party … and it would more likely be Dayan, who is unquestionably the most popular man in Israel today. He is probably the only figure who could lead Israel into a compromise settlement without a major political upheaval.” Not a word about Golda Meir.
On August 18, 1973, the PDB said the Israeli Labor Party was trying to “satisfy Defense Minister Dayan’s demands for a more activist Israeli development program in the occupied territories” and that he was in favor of providing government incentives for Israeli businessmen in the territories, due to the lack of prospects for peace. Dayan, the assessment said, was threatening to bolt the party if Golda Meir, Pinchas Sapir and Abba Eban didn’t meet his demands, but he would apparently be made to compromise.
A more up-to-date assessment then came in for Nixon: “A more active program in the occupied territories will also please the Labor Party’s traditional coalition partner, the National Religious Party, and will undercut the out-and-out annexationist policy of the right-wing opposition Gahal bloc.”
After the October war, while the CIA was copying a cable from Beirut about the willingness of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to make peace with Israel, the U.S. military attaché in Tel Aviv erred in his assessment that “the leaders of the IDF do not want a resumption of the war” (Dayan and Elazar did indeed want war; they were held back by IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Israel Tal).
The CIA’s most accurate report in the collection of presidential briefings, under the heading “Israel-Uganda,” was completely censored, leaving only the map of the flight path from Tel Aviv to Entebbe airport and the words “2,200 statute miles/3,500 kilometers.” It was given to President Ford on July 3, 1976, a few hours before the Israeli rescue aircraft landed in Uganda. Something of the preparations – in the IDF and perhaps also in Kenya – reached American intelligence. If only it had been so efficient regarding Egypt and Syria in October 1973.
“FOR ALL WE KNEW, SADAT WAS A CHARACTER OUT OF ‘AIDA’”
Kissinger wants Israel to know: The U.S. saved you during the 1973 war
Henry A. Kissinger reluctantly submits himself to a rare interview for an Israeli television documentary called ‘The Avoidable War,’ on the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.
By Amir Oren
Nov. 2, 2013
Haaretz
Henry A. Kissinger, now 90 years old and anything but retired, sat in the Manhattan offices of Kissinger Associates one morning in the summer of 2012, facing cameras and making sure his version of history came just right. He was reluctantly submitting himself to a rare interview for an Israeli television documentary called “The Avoidable War,” on the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.
The four-part series, produced by Amit Goren, aired last month on Channels 1 and 8. Whether the war could have been avoided or not may be arguable, but the grandmaster of global diplomacy and perhaps its best practitioner in the second half of the 20th century tried to avoid the interview. His friends said that he wanted neither to revisit old wounds stemming from his relationships with the Jewish-American community, nor to rehash ancient claims and counter-claims regarding credit for the American airlift that helped Israel regain its military composure after initial setbacks in the war. Let bygones be bygones – indeed, he is now even on amicable terms with the person whose subordinates tried to delay the airlift: then-Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger.
Even when he finally relented and set aside a room in his Park Avenue-at-52nd-Street suite for filming the conversation, Kissinger put his interviewer on notice, essentially reading him an improved version of his Miranda rights – warning him that anything he, Kissinger, said, could later be used against the interviewer, should the latter dare to change the meaning of any of his remarks by way of shortening or editing quotes. Kissinger also demanded to know in advance what topics would be discussed.
“In nine cases out of 10,” he said, “I have had very bad experiences” with interviews. While Kissinger was promised that this would be the 10th case, statistics notwithstanding, he set a condition quite similar to what parents used to tell their kids at the dinner table – and what was said in army mess halls – during more frugal times: Take all you want, but eat all you take. Film all you want, he said, but you must commit in writing to using my answers in full, or not at all.
Taking control of the conversation, as if still negotiating with the Chinese, the Vietnamese or those stubborn Arabs and Israelis, he wryly observes, regarding “The Avoidable War”: “It’s important to do something objective, but whatever you do, leave room for the possibility that your government acted in good faith, in the Israeli interest, at various instances.” He admits that decades ago, especially during the clashes over what the Gerald Ford administration referred to as its “reassessment” of his country’s relationship with Israel, “you can very well argue that we were hard on Israel,” but without missing a beat or pulling a punch he reminds those who would rather forget, “there was this slight problem that we saved you in ‘73, right?”
Kissinger seems to have lost none of his wit, but he is now willing to reveal a more sentimental side, too. This globetrotter, who today focuses his attention on China, seems amazed at the effort one former Israel Air Force fighter pilot and prisoner-of-war in Syria made last year to express his personal gratitude for being released in 1974. “He came all the way down from Tiberias to Jerusalem to thank me.”
He speaks fondly of his late friends – Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Simcha Dinitz – the latter two having been in constant contact with him as ambassadors to Washington when Kissinger served as national security advisor to President Richard Nixon and then as his and President Ford’s secretary of state (as well as with Rabin after he succeeded Meir as prime minister). Kissinger was unaware of the code names associated with him in Israeli internal cables and reports on conversations: “Cardinal,” then “Shaul” and finally “Naftali.”
This interview followed one with the man who was his loyal deputy at the time, retired U.S. Air Force General Brent Scowcroft (“He’s less passionate than I am, but we were a good team,” Kissinger said approvingly), and preceded another one with former White House counsel Leonard Garment, several months before Garment’s death. Dinitz used Garment as another channel to Nixon, in order not to be totally dependent on Kissinger, but the record shows that though Kissinger faithfully executed his oath of office to serve the United States’ best interests, and was not above some devious tactics – there was also no better friend in Washington for Israel, regardless of the sincerity of its other supporters on Capitol Hill.
‘INCREASING CONCERN’
Due to space constraints, the following is only a partial list of the points touched on in “The Avoidable War” by one of the two world-class strategists involved in the 1973 crisis (the other one being Egyptian President Anwar Sadat) – but with the answers virtually intact, for fear of Kissingerian wrath.
It was in that eventful year, 1973, between the start of the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam and the slippery slope of Watergate, that the Nixon administration decided it would launch an Egypt-Israel peace initiative, but only after the Knesset election scheduled for October 30 in Israel.
“For those of us who conducted foreign policy, we had a Vietnamese problem, we had a Chinese challenge, we had a cold war with Russia, and then, on top of this, the Arab-Israeli war at a moment when the president was getting under the beginning of an impeachment proceeding,” Kissinger says.
“The Watergate crisis put limitations on presidential maneuverability. But we were probably also affected by the realization that it was better to wait with the peace initiative until after the Israeli election [originally scheduled for October ‘73 but postponed until December 31 because of the war]. We took preliminary steps toward the peace initiative in two meetings with the Egyptian national security advisor [Hafez Ismail]. It’s crucial to remember that we [did not have full] diplomatic relations or contact with some Arab states.”
Could war have been averted by an agreement by Israel to withdrawal to all of the 1967 borders, as Sadat had demanded?
“We had no way of knowing whether this was a genuine proposal. We had no indication that it was shared by Syria, and we were certain that Israel would not consider this under the circumstances that then existed, with a Soviet deployment along the Suez Canal, and an invasion by Syria of Jordan. So this was just a general proposition, which we intended to turn into a counter-proposal of seeking a stage-by-stage approach, in the course of which the definition of withdrawal was still open for discussion.”
Was Nixon also waiting for the September 1973 installation of Kissinger as his secretary of state, succeeding William Rogers, who along with career State Department officers was not trusted by Golda Meir?
“Whenever Nixon wanted to act in that field, he would assign it to me, whatever the formal bureaucratic position was. [The preference for dealing with the White House and bypassing State] is not a rare Israeli position. That is something that has occurred in many administrations, and it had nothing to do with the decisions that Nixon made.”
Were Sadat’s threats not taken seriously enough?
“Sadat had made many threats over an extended period of time. It was our judgment that he did not have the military capability to execute it. It was also the judgment of Israeli intelligence, repeatedly given to us. And we had a firm plan to begin peace negotiations, which we conveyed through the national security advisor of Egypt, which the Israelis were well aware of. So, whether the timing of the peace initiative could have been advanced – that’s one of these great questions journalists can ask 40 years later.”
Several days after Kissinger added the State Department portfolio to his National Security Council job, and just as the United Nations General Assembly, which he had to attend, was about to deal with the Middle East – he was alarmed by unusual activities near the fronts.
“In the week that we began to inquire into the tactical situation [in late September and early October], it was caused by the fact that I received an intelligence report that spoke of concentration of Egyptian and Syrian forces along the dividing lines. It was natural to inquire of the CIA and Mossad what their assessment of the situation was. Their initial assessment was that these were normal maneuvers, and therefore did not represent an additional threat of war. I asked that these assessments be repeated, or that a new assessment be made, every two days, in order to be sure that we were not surprised.
“On the Friday, October 5, we were informed of an increasing concern – but not of any specific new danger – but of an increasing concern that these mobilizations which we had noticed might be something more serious. And we were asked to convey to the Arab side that Israel had no intention of launching a preemptive attack, and that therefore any military move that they might be contemplating should not be placed on the fear of an Israeli attack, and this we did. I was notified at 6:30 Saturday morning, [12:30 P.M.] Israel time. I was awakened by assistant Secretary of State Joe Sisco, [who said] that a war was imminent. We were in New York for the General Assembly, and he woke me up and said, if I started acting immediately, I probably could still avert the outbreak.”
Kissinger’s urgent calls to the Soviets and the Egyptians did not do the trick. Kissinger agrees with Meir’s belief that an Israeli attempt at preemption at this late stage would not be cost-effective.
“The Israeli decision, taken on its own volition and not at our request, not to preempt – was that a wise decision, with the [Arab attack] only a few hours away? So the first question is how effective would a preemptive attack have been at that point, on Yom Kippur, without a mobilized Israeli Air Force, and against the Soviet missile defense system along the canal, which proved later in the war as fairly effective until the canal was crossed. So I can see that it was a reasonable judgment of Golda’s, balancing the risk she had of Israel looking like the aggressor, against the real option she had, and against the actual capabilities of Israel on Yom Kippur, to launch a significant attack in the very limited time that was left.”
DIMONA DILEMMA
One of Israel’s lowest points came on October 9, when Meir asked Kissinger through Dinitz to arrange a brief, desperate secret meeting with Nixon: “My strong advice was not to have the Israeli prime minister leave Israel in the middle of a battle and come to America with a plea for help, since that would be construed by the other side as a sign of enormous weakness.”
Meir’s request brought home the urgency of fulfilling Israel’s requests for replacements for the heavy loss of weaponry on the battlefield. As for Israel’s alleged nuclear capability, Kissinger refuses to talk about the September 1969 deal Meir reportedly had – in his presence – struck with Nixon, regarding an American promise to overlook whatever was being done at Dimona in return for a pledge to keep its products out of sight. He does refer to reports that some Israelis considered breaching this understanding in this hour of peril.
“Did the Israelis on October 9 become so desperate that they threatened to employ or display ultimate weapons? If they did, it never came to my attention, and I never received, nor did Nixon receive, and I suppose anybody in our government received, any indication that this was being contemplated or that it was shown, and we would not have, we would have been very opposed to it. But that issue never arose and was never discussed with us. Wouldn’t such a display have been contrary to understandings Israel had with the United States? It certainly would have been contrary to what Israel understood our view to be on this matter. But the issue never arose. It was never discussed directly or indirectly.”
On October 12, against Kissinger’s recommendation, Israel essentially gave up, reversed its week-long opposition to a cease-fire and asked for one to be implemented. Kissinger wanted a postwar agreement, but not one achieved at the price of an obvious Israeli position of weakness. Egypt was entrenched in a strip along the east bank of the Suez Canal, in Sinai. Israel was yet to launch a counter-offensive there. It would have been a clear-cut Egyptian touchdown, had Sadat not dropped the ball.
Kissinger: “Moderation in apparent victory is the hardest thing for a statesman. And he became over-confident.”
After the Israel Defense Forces pushed westward, crossing the canal, and the tide seemed to turn, Kissinger was hastily summoned to Moscow to negotiate the political context for a cease-fire. In order to stall and give Israel more time to advance in Egypt, he wished to be perceived as a mere emissary in need of presidential approval, but, periodically, Nixon undercut the secretary of state by delegating him too much power.
“The basic difficulty during all of Watergate was how to preserve American credibility when executive authority was under unremitting assault. But we were helped by the fact that the Soviet leaders could not imagine the decline of authority within the system, what was really going on. Now, while I was on the way to Moscow, Nixon sent a message to [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev, giving me full authority to settle all issues. He might not have done that in normal circumstances, but he was under enormous pressure to demonstrate his active conduct of the diplomacy, very understandably. And one has to give Nixon enormous credit for the fortitude he displayed during all phases of that crisis. As the record shows, it was one of that few occasions when I resisted being given additional authority and called Washington to complain about it.”
In summing up, there is the sentimental Dr. Kissinger and there is the razor-sharp Mr. Decision Maker.
“Now, what lessons can one learn from that crisis? Well, one should understand that whatever one has to do ultimately, one should do when one still has a margin of decision, and one should have a clear long range of objectives. But again, I want to say, it’s a problem when you have a country with a very narrow margin of survival. There are some experiments you cannot try. I knew all these people, I knew Rabin and Golda. They had a horrible task, and it’s easy, years later, to beat up on them and say they might have done it better. It’s easy for people to say, if you go back to the ‘67 borders and then they have a country which is eight miles wide, we will give you some unspecified peace when one of the parties [Assad] isn’t even speaking to Americans, and the other one [Sadat], for all we knew, was a character out of ‘Aida.’”
* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia, where you can also find other items that are not in these dispatches.
Dani Dayan
ISRAEL’S NEW MAN IN NEW YORK
[Note by Tom Gross]
(This dispatch may be of interest to those who follow Israeli-American relations.)
Dani Dayan has just assumed the position of Israel’s new consul general in New York (his first diplomatic posting). Obviously New York is an important posting for Israel and for American Jews.
It is a somewhat controversial appointment since Dayan (a former head of the Israeli settler movement, although he is secular) does not believe that a two state solution is possible in the foreseeable future, whereas Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who appointed him) and several of Netanyahu’s senior advisors, say they believe a two state solution is possible so long as Israel’s security is guaranteed.
I have known Dani Dayan for many years, and we have often discussed Israeli-Palestinian issues. I don’t agree with all his views but he has interesting opinions that should be listened to. I think he has been unfairly maligned in the Israeli left-wing and international media, including on the BBC. I’m glad that the New York Times has decided to allow him to express himself, albeit in a piece on their website. The short interview is attached below.
***
* Among previous dispatches mentioning Dani Dayan: Australian who abused Jewish children sentenced to read Primo Levi (& “There is no Plan B”) (Dec. 17, 2014)
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
Israel’s New Man in New York
By Carol Giacomo
New York Times Online
August 18, 2016
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/israels-new-man-in-new-york
Dani Dayan is articulate and charming, a lively and provocative conversationalist. An immigrant from Argentina and a Spanish speaker, he is an Israeli settler from the West Bank, and the controversial former head of the settler movement.
Mr. Dayan is also a fervent opponent of a Palestinian state and believes Israel has a historic claim to the West Bank. That is not the position of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who says he supports two states.
Yet, Mr. Dayan, 60, is the man Mr. Netanyahu has sent to be Israel’s consul general in New York. It was the consolation prize after Brazil rejected his appointment as Israel’s ambassador to that country because of his settler background. The consul general job is an important and sensitive one, especially in a year when partisan divisions in Washington have widened over the Iran nuclear deal, which Mr. Netanyahu and the Republican-led Congress oppose. Mr. Dayan met with the Editorial Board this week to discuss his latest career challenges. Excerpts from the hour-long conversation, condensed and edited, are below:
You are not a run-of-the-mill diplomat or bureaucrat. How do you see your new job?
I really have no difficulty representing this government. It is well known that I identify with this government. I campaigned for the formation of this government. I endorsed Mr. Netanyahu in the last two elections and campaigned for him. My role is to garner support for Israel in New York. I’m a diplomat today, not a leader myself or a decision maker.
How will you deal with conflicts between AIPAC, The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is seen as supportive of Mr. Netanyahu’s policies, and J Street, a more liberal group that has often been critical of Mr. Netanyahu?
I can’t ignore it. And you know I think that any position within the Jewish community for sure, but any position that does not preclude Israel’s right to exist, is legitimate. I’m not talking about those fanatics or demagogues that, in fact, are against the existence of Israel. But all the other groups that are pro-Israel, that are empathic towards Israel – they love Israel but criticize it, sometimes strongly, and have been disenchanted with Israel on some of its policies or even most of its policies with the current government – they are not only legitimate interlocutors, in some sense they are going to be my main interlocutors in the Jewish community. Look, I didn’t come here to preach to the choir. I will allocate a disproportionate amount of my time to those that in some sense love Israel but are disappointed. The perception that Israel in some sense is becoming a partisan issue in American politics is also a matter of grave concern to me.
Are you including J Street in that outreach because you have been quoted in the press as being critical of them, suggesting they are anti-Israel?
No, I never said they are anti-Israel. There was a minor incident that I took responsibility for the phrasing. You know, English is not my native language. I had a TV interview and my opponent said that the welcome to Donald Trump at the AIPAC convention contradicts Jewish values. And I said, look, I am much more concerned about some candidates that are endorsed by J Street, which are – not J Street, the candidates – anti-Israeli, and I intended to say, you know, symmetrically, that contradicts Jewish values, and at the end I said it’s un-Jewish. And that was a mistake to say un-Jewish. I never said J Street is un-Jewish; I just said a certain position by J Street contradicts Jewish values. I have personal very good relations with J Street leadership. I don’t believe in ostracizing.
Isn’t your position on the West Bank quite different from Mr. Netanyahu’s, given that he has committed himself to a two-state solution and you say it is impossible?
Prime Minister Netanyahu is committed to establishing the Palestinian state as a way to achieve peace if it is a demilitarized Palestinian state and it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state and there are security arrangements that will prevent further attacks on Israel. I think that I do not disagree with Prime Minister Netanyahu in the perception that it is not going to happen in the near future and the reason it’s not going to happen has nothing to do with Israel or with the settlements. It’s 100 percent because of the Palestinian positions.
Do we understand correctly that Israel has plans to do outreach among Latinos in the New York region, including targeted scholarships?
Definitely I am. We identified different communities in the New York area as a priority; I will dedicate a very large amount of my time and effort to the Hispanic community, the Latino community.
Who is better for Israel, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?
Any American president is good for Israel.
Darya Safai pleads with security personnel as they threaten to remove her from an Olympics volleyball match for holding up a sign protesting the fact that women are not allowed to attend volleyball matches in Iran, during a men’s preliminary volleyball match between Egypt and Iran at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro earlier today (AP)
RISKING RETRIBUTION AGAINST HERSELF AND HER FAMILY
[Note by Tom Gross]
My brave friend Darya Safai again risked retribution from Rouhani's Iranian regime after she held up a sign at the Rio Olympics Iranian volleyball match asking that women be permitted to attend matches in Iran.
Darya has been forced to live in exile from what New York Times and BBC journalists and the Obama administration insist on calling the newly “moderate” Iran.
Darya lives in Belgium where she works as a dentist. (I have known her for some time and she is a recipient of these Mideast dispatches.)
Her request that women be allowed to attend sports events seems to me less political and more in line with basic human rights and the Olympic spirit.
***
There’s an excellent full length feature film about this issue, called “Offside,” by Jafar Panahi (who has been under house arrest in Iran since 2009). It can be watched here with English subtitles:
* For a previous dispatch on the Rio Olympics:
Syrian teen who saved 18 lives, wins Olympic heat (& Facebook snubs Israeli Olympic team)
TEHRAN HANGS TEENAGE BOY FOR BEING GAY
See also from last week’s Times of London:
Tehran hangs teenage boy for being gay
By Bel Trew
The Times
August 4 2016
Hassan Afshar, 19, was executed at Arak’s prison in Markazi province, southwest of Tehran, on July 18, Amnesty International has confirmed and Reuters reports from Teheran
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tehran-hangs-teenage-boy-for-being-gay-7t2pv97mq
“LET IRANIAN WOMEN ENTER THEIR STADIUMS”
Olympic security asks female Iranian fan to drop sign
By Janie McCauley
The Associated Press
August 13, 2016
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Olympic security personnel questioned a female Iranian volleyball fan when she showed up for a match holding a large sign and wearing a T-shirt that said “Let Iranian Women Enter Their Stadiums.”
Darya Safai, who sat in a front-row courtside seat and was briefly in tears during the ordeal, said that Olympic officials told her Saturday they would ask her to leave if she didn’t put her sign away. The International Olympic Committee bans political statements at the games.
Safai plans to try to bring her cause to Maracanazinho arena again. She wore a headband with the colors of Iran’s flag and also face paint of the flag on each cheek.
“For the next game on Monday we also have tickets and we are going to do the same,” she wrote in a text message to The Associated Press.
Based in Belgium, Safai is the founder and director of “Let Iranian Women Enter Their Stadiums!” and an activist against gender discrimination. Women have generally been banned or heavily restricted from attending all-male sports events in Iran.
Iran’s volleyball team, in its first Olympics, swept Egypt in the match 3-0 for its second victory in Rio.
In 2012, the longtime ban on women from soccer matches in Iran was extended to volleyball. Women have for years been trying to change the long-standing efforts by authorities to enforce strict interpretations of Islamic norms.
USA Volleyball chairwoman Lori Okimura has been outspoken on the issue — she even brought her own “Let Iranian Women Enter Their Stadiums” T-shirt along to Brazil — and checked in with Safai on Saturday to make sure she was OK.
“This is not a political statement. This is not a political issue,” Okimura said. “This, to me, is not about politics, it’s about gender. Volleyball has always been about equality, why now are we not sending that same consistent message?”
Women in Iran saw her efforts on TV and appreciated the solidarity, taking to social media in support of Safai.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
Above: One of several popular water parks in the Palestinian territories. Journalists such as the Gaza-obsessed Chief Middle East Correspondent for the BBC, Jeremy Bowen, never seem to report on this aspect of Palestinian life.
GAZA LIKE THE WARSAW GHETTO? FAR FROM IT, SHOWS HAMAS
[Note by Tom Gross]
For years, these Middle East dispatches have highlighted lies told about Gaza by everyone from European government funded NGOs and British politicians, to some anti-Israel reporters at the New York Times and BBC. These lies have included allegations that life in Gaza is like life in the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazis.
I have questioned the accuracy of statements such as Time magazine reporting “Please spare a thought for the starving Palestinians of Gaza. There are 1.5 million of them, most of them living hand to mouth” – or when former U.S. President and Nobel peace prize laureate Jimmy Carter says “the people in Gaza are literally starving”. (See, for example: Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size swim pools: what the media won’t report about Gaza.)
Now Hamas itself – in a video released as part of its campaign against Fatah for October’s municipal Palestinian elections – has produced this video showing the Gaza Strip under its rule, with Gazans holding up signs saying “Thank you Hamas.”
It is short and worth watching:
Being an election video aimed at Palestinians in the West Bank, naturally it doesn’t show the poor side of Gaza. (There is much poverty in Gaza too -- but there is of course also poverty in seedy parts of Paris and Rio and New York, Los Angeles and pretty much everywhere else, including in some parts of Israel.)
In any case conditions in Gaza are not, and have never been, in any way similar to a Nazi concentration camp, contrary to claims by some writers for the New York Times International edition and other prominent media, claims which have done much to stoke a revival of anti-Semitism in recent years.
-- Tom Gross
One of many swimming pools in Gaza
The Roots Club, one of many up-scale entertainment and dining venues which have opened in Gaza
A Palestinian man sells sandwiches in Gaza City during Eid al-Adha festivities. There is a Ferris wheel in the background.
* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia, where you can also find other items that are not in these dispatches.
Yusra Mardini, who helped save the lives of 18 other refugees and migrants last summer, yesterday became the first ever athlete representing a refugee team to win an Olympic heat
CONTENTS
1. Syrian teen who saved 18 lives, wins Olympic heat
2. Facebook snubs Israeli Olympic team
3. Official Olympics website: Jerusalem capital of ‘Palestine,’ not Israel (2012)
4. BBC uses London Olympics to attack Israel (2012)
5. Lebanese Olympics team stops Israeli team from boarding bus to opening ceremony
6. Saudi judo competitor forfeits her opening match, in order to avoid Israeli
7. International media repeat lies about Palestinians not having Olympic swimming pools
8. Dozens of large swimming pools in the West Bank
SYRIAN TEEN WHO SAVED 18 LIVES, WINS OLYMPIC HEAT
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
There are many wonderful athletes at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, but perhaps the most amazing is Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini, who is competing under the International Olympic Committee flag as part of a new “refugee team”.
Together with her older sister Sarah (also a remarkable swimmer), Yusra helped save the lives of 18 other refugees and migrants last summer after their dinghy (which was designed to carry only 6 people) began to sink in the Aegean sea during their crossing from Turkey to Greece.
After the motor on their boat failed, the two sisters jumped overboard into the cold waters and spent the next three hours pushing the dinghy to prevent it from capsizing before eventually making it to the Greek island of Lesbos.
Mardini, 18, now lives in Germany. Yesterday, she became the first ever athlete representing a refugee team to win an Olympic race, winning the first heat in the women’s 100-meter butterfly. She will also compete in the 100-meter freestyle.
Mardini is one of ten athletes selected for a special Olympic Refugee Team, which will compete under the Olympic flag and represent 60 million refugees worldwide.
***
Here is a short interview with her.
She was also profiled in the New York Times last weekend.
***
I also highlighted pieces such as this one, which provides striking photos of Syrians, having fled the ethnic cleansing campaign launched against Syria’s Sunni Arabs by Iran and Hizbullah last year on Assad’s behalf (after Iran was effectively given carte blanche to do so by the West as part of its ill-judged nuclear deal), have to endure once they reached Europe:
***
Among many other dispatches on this list concerning Syrian refugees:
* Israelis save Syrian refugees off Greek coast
FACEBOOK SNUBS ISRAELI OLYMPIC TEAM
The Israel Olympic Committee has sent a letter of protest to Facebook after Israel was taken out of its place on Facebook’s Olympics “Profile Frames” feature, and instead listed last of all countries in the world competing in the Rio Olympics.
All other countries were in alphabetical order, with their flags alongside them. Israel appears at the end, after Zimbabwe, without the Israeli flag, which has been replaced by Facebook with the flag of the Israeli Olympic Committee.
Israelis have repeatedly complained to Facebook that it has allowed posts praising and encouraging Palestinian suicide bombers. There are several legal actions currently ongoing against Facebook by groups representing Israeli victims of terrorism.
LONDON OLYMPICS OFFICIAL WEBSITE: JERUSALEM CAPITAL OF ‘PALESTINE,’ NOT ISRAEL
In a dispatch in 2012, I drew attention to the fact that the official website of the 2012 London Olympics portrayed Israel as a country without a capital, while Jerusalem was listed as the capital of “Palestine.”
Following the intervention by British politicians who subscribe to this email list, the London Olympics website was changed to show Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as well as the capital of “Palestine”.
Unlike dozens of other disputed territories throughout the world, such as Tibet, Kurdistan or Baluchistan, Palestine is invited to participate in the Olympics as if it were already a nation state.
BBC USES LONDON OLYMPICS TO ATTACK ISRAEL
Also in 2012, following criticism by myself and others (and a private email exchange by me with one of the most senior executives at the BBC who subscribes to this list), the BBC website changed the photograph representing Israel on its list of “country profiles page” in the run-up to the London Olympics to be in more in line with other countries.
As I wrote at the time:
The BBC has now replaced its photo of a very aggressive-looking member of the Israeli border police shouting at a Palestinian with a picture of Tel Aviv’s famed Bauhaus architecture.
Despite the fact that all these countries have been engaged in bloody crackdowns and appalling human rights abuses, the BBC has for a long time been using a picture of smiling children for its Syria country page, a mosque to represent Egypt on its country page, a storekeeper to represent Libya, and a race track to represent Bahrain. Only Israel was subjected to different treatment by the BBC.
Last week there was much criticism of the BBC after it listed the capital of every country in the world on its “BBC London Olympics 2012” webpage except one – Israel.
The anti-Israel bias is so engrained throughout the staff and culture of BBC News, the world’s biggest broadcasting network, that (as I noted in a dispatch last week) a BBC news anchor referred to last week’s deadly suicide bombing of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria as an “awful accident”. The New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune also wrote the day after the Bulgaria terror attack that it may have been an accident.
By contrast, they didn’t say that the shooting in a Colorado cinema of 12 people the following day “may have been an accident”.
LEBANESE OLYMPICS TEAM STOPS ISRAELI TEAM FROM BOARDING BUS TO OPENING CEREMONY
The Rio 2016 Olympic games began on a sour note for the Israeli delegation, when they were physically prevented from boarding the bus to the Maracana stadium on Friday, where the opening ceremony was to take place. The Olympic organizers had paired Lebanese and Israelis in the same bus. Eventually, Olympic organizers had to arrange another bus to transport the stranded Israeli athletes.
The head of the Lebanese delegation, Saleem a-Haj Nacoula, was praised in the Lebanese press and on social media as a hero yesterday.
Earlier today the Lebanese delegation chief was summoned by the Olympic Committee and given a severe warning not to repeat the discrimination against Israelis or any other athletes.
Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev called the Lebanese athletes refusal to travel on the same bus as Israelis “anti-Semitism and racism of the worst kind.”
SAUDI JUDO COMPETITOR FORFEITS HER OPENING MATCH, IN ORDER TO AVOID ISRAELI
Saudi Arabian competitor Joud Fahmy today forfeited her first-round judo match against Christianne Legentil from Mauritius at the Rio Olympics, in what is being reported in the media as a maneuver to avoid facing Israeli judo fighter Gili Cohen in the next round.
Behind the scenes, Saudi Arabia is growing much closer to Israel. Several leading Saudis that I have met at events in third countries at which Israeli government advisors were also present, have asked to join this Middle East email list.
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPEAT LIES ABOUT PALESTINIANS NOT HAVING SWIMMING POOLS FOR OLYMPICS
Several international media outlets, who have once again been fed misinformation by local Palestinian employees of international news agencies, and (as usual) failing to do the most basic fact checking, have highlighted in their general Rio Olympics coverage stories claiming that Palestinian swimmer Mary al-Atrash didn’t have access to an Olympic-size swimming pool for training because Israel didn’t let her use one.
A simple Google search would have revealed that al-Atrash was able to train in many such pools.
There are four Olympic-size pools in this resort alone in al-Atrash’s home town, Beit Sahur:
http://www.murad.ps/water-park-gardens
I have noted in these dispatches before about lies told in western media that there are no Olympic-size pools in the West Bank and Gaza.
For example, the opening of this Olympic-size pool was widely reported in Palestinian media in 2010.
DOZENS OF LARGE SWIMMING POOLS IN THE WEST BANK
There are dozens of other pools in the West Bank.
For example, Haaretz reported on several here:
W. Bank Swimming Pools Help Palestinians Brave the Heat
Lifeguard Ahmed Rajoub notes that “Swimming pools have become trendy in the West Bank.”
Haaretz reports: “Nowadays, every city in the West Bank has a pool or a recreational complex: Bethlehem has one similar to Al-Khahuf, while Ramallah has more than 10. One of Jenin’s swimming champs committed a suicide bombing at Jerusalem’s Sbarro restaurant in August 2001. Nablus has a pool reserved for women, and an Olympic pool. Another pool and recreation complex sits between Nablus and Tubas.
“Al-Khahuf draws about 2,500 people on an average weekend day, Rajoub says. Abdullah Abu-Znayid, the owner’s brother, gives us a tour of the small caves hewn into the mountainside. The first is for VIPs. ‘This is where important people come to drink coffee. Jibril Rajoub and Mustafa Barghouti have been here,’ he says.
“Despite the heat, the women are fully clothed. ‘Arabs do not allow mixed swimming,’ the owner, Abd al-Karim, explains. Most of the women are sitting near the ferris wheel, looking longingly at the bathers. Al-Karim says he would soon be opening a pool for women, by popular demand.”
***
(Since that Haaretz story was published, several other pools have opened in the West Bank.)
You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
