Palestinian Leaders Do It Again! Throw Away Opportunity Obama is Giving Them and Poke Him in the Eye.

by Barry Rubin

With their unerring skill at erring, Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders are throwing away still another opportunity President Barack Obama is giving them. If Obama is the most pro-Palestinian president in history, his counterparts don't seem to appreciate it very much. It is the Palestinian leadership, not Israel, that will ultimately make Obama look like and be a failure in all of his peace process efforts.

Brief history:

--Last spring, PA leader Mahmoud Abbas in his first visit to Washington made it clear he wasn't interested in a negotiated solution but just planned to wait for the West to force Israel to give him everything he wanted.

--In September, Abbas stood nearby as Obama said he wanted serious final negotiations within two months, then refused while Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was ready to talk right away.

--Shortly thereafter, Obama asked Abbas not to push the Goldstone report as a sponsor in the UN. Abbas agreed, then broke his word within 48 hours under internal pressure.

--At the end of last October, Obama's Administration made a deal in which Israel would stop all construction on West Bank settlements though it could continue in east Jerusalem. While Obama hoped this would get talks going, Abbas demanded an end to construction in Jerusalem, too, which he knew Israel would not accept. Indeed, he demanded it precisely because he knew Israel wouldn't accept it.

--Finally, Abbas agreed to indirect talks but was "saved" when suddenly the U.S. government accepted the PA's position on Jerusalem construction. Yet even that has not been enough to make the PA support Obama's policy despite the fact that it was so slanted in their favor.

Of course, the U.S. criticism of Israel and the crisis following the announcement of some future Jerusalem construction have been the main news. But that's because the Obama Administration is ready (sometimes it seems, eager) to criticize Israel but did not ever criticize the PA during its own first fifteen months in office. This last point--which I have repeatedly pointed out--has become so embarassingly obvious that finally the State Department made a small peep. [See note at end of article.]

So it is easy to miss the fact that by their behavior the Palestinian leadership has lost any possible material gain from the administration's attitude.

Now, here we are in the biggest crisis of U.S.-Israel relations in more than a quarter-century, arguably the biggest crisis in a half-century, since the Eisenhower Administration pressured Israel to withdraw from Sinai in 1957. Not only is the administration really angry at Israel, but it is considering a plan--though this might never happen--to try to impose a solution.

So what's the PA stance? To denounce the idea of an imposed solution! Such a plan according to press reports would give them a lot of what they want--1967 borders, a quick state, minimal conditions, all of pre-1967 Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. Not bad, eh? But the Palestinians would have to make some concessions, like settling refugees in the state of Palestine rather than flooding Israel with Palestinian Arabs in an effort to paralyze and destroy its society.

On the PA's radio, chief negotiator Saib Arikat (choose your transliteration) said--what a delicious Freudian slip this is--that the Palestinians "don't want new ideas." His proposal is that the United States just recognizes Palestine as a state immediately and urges the UN to accept it as such, followed no doubt by huge international pressure for an immediate unconditional Israeli withdrawal from everywhere in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

This isn't going to happen, of course. But once again it signals U.S. officials, if they bothered to look, that they will get no cooperation, not even the tiniest concession, and the barest minimum of kind words from the PA. This also makes clear why a solution is impossible and why it would not solve all U.S. problems in the Middle East.

Because even if--this is just for the sake of explanation--the Obama Administration were to give the Palestinian leadership 99 percent of what it wants, it would still have to force it to concede 1 percent. Also it would forecolose--at least in theory--wiping Israel off the map.  That would lead to the political settlement being denounced by all Islamists, all militant Arab nationalists, and many Arab governments. 

I'm not even sure if the Egyptian and Jordanian media would applaud Obama. The latest Palestinian poll (Palestinian Public Opinion Poll no. 40, Center for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies at An-Najah National University, pril 8-10, 2010) asked:

"Do you accept the creation of a Palestinian state on the area of the 1967 borders as a final solution for the Palestinian problem?"

Of those polled, 44.7 percent (and this is after 17 years of supposed moderate policies by the PLO following the Oslo agreement) said "no." While 51.7 percent said "yes," remember that they were almost certainly assuming the Palestinians would get the precise pre-1967 borders plus the right to move to Israel for almost anyone who wanted to do so.

And so if Obama were to implement any conceivable negotiated solution--even an extremely pro-Palestinian one by Western standards--he'd be labelled as the man who sold out the Palestinians and go down in history as a betrayer and Zionist imperialist. I'd bet money on being able to collect a considerably large set of clippings denouncing him as worse--more "anti-Muslim" and "anti-Arab"--than George W. Bush! And if you think that isn't likely then, forgive me for saying so, you don't really understand how Middle East politics work.

The United States would not be portrayed as a hero because it created Palestine but a villain because it robbed the Arabs of getting everything some day. Terrorism against American targets would go up, as it would argued that the Americans had forever destroyed the chance of wiping Israel off the map. Of course, terrorism against any Palestinian leaders who agreed to such terms would also break out. Abbas's knowing this is one of the reasons he will say "no" to everything.

And don't ever forget that little detail: If Palestine is proclaimed a state, presumably Hamas is the legal government of about half of it, despite the fact that it is a terrorist, antisemitic, genocide-seeking client of Iran which won't even accept the agreement that makes Palestine a state. Here's one example of the ridiculous situation that would prevail: If the Hamas government wanted to import long-range missiles from Iran and Israel tried to stop it by intercepting them with its navy, would the UN then be able to accuse Israel of an act of aggression against a sovereign state?

Again, nothing is going to happen, not because of Israel but because the PA will torpedo any U.S. effort to solve the issue no matter how bad the terms seem for Israel. Meanwhile U.S. policymakers will pretend this isn't happening, that the United States isn't constantly being insulted by the PA.

Unless you understand the above, the whole story of the Arab-Israeli and Israel-Palestinian conflict makes no sense.

Question 1: During the four years of the Obama Administration's term in office, will his officials ever publicly criticize the PA for anything it does, including honoring terrorists who killed Americans? Prediction: No it won't.

Question 2:  During the four years of the Obama Administration's term in office, will the Palestinians make any material gain due to his being so supportive of them? Prediction: No they won't because the extremist goals and intransigence of their leadership will prevent thus.

Note: At last the State Department issues a very mild criticism of the PA, after ignoring for almost two weeks the issue in question. On April 8, it made the following statement:

"Regarding the Middle East, we are disturbed by comments of Palestinian Authority officials regarding reconstruction and refurbishing of Jewish sites in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. Remarks by the Palestinian ministry of information denying Jewish heritage in and links to Jerusalem undermine the trust and confidence needed for substantive and productive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. We also strongly condemn the glorification of terrorists honoring terrorists who have murdered innocent civilians either by official statements or by the dedication of public places hurts peace efforts and must end. We will continue to hold Palestinian leaders accountable for incitement. "

But this isolated statement seems to have been made for form's sake and when compared to the administration's outrage at Israel looks quite limited. I predict we won't be hearing about any follow-up to these issues.

What makes this particularly ridiculous is that the PA named a square in honor of a terrorist who murdered both Israelis and Americans--for more on this issue see HERE--during Vice-President Joe Biden's visit yet there was no talk about the United States being insulted nor was there any major crisis with the PA declared by the U.S. government. Indeed, well after the affair happened, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was insisting that the deed had been done by Hamas, an absurd error which--to my knowledge--has never been formally corrected by her office.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

If You Shoot at a King You Must Kill Him.

 

by Michael J. Totten

Last week I spoke with Reza Kahlili, a man who during the 1980s and 1990s worked for the CIA under the code name "Wally" inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. He wrote a terrific book about his experience as an American agent called A Time to Betray, and today he's issuing a serious warning about his former Iranian masters: they mean what they say, and the West had better start taking them seriously.

He thinks President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei fully intend to use nuclear weapons if they acquire them, either by exploding them in enemy cities or holding the Middle East and the world's energy resources hostage. It's hard, to be sure, for even a well-placed expert to know this for certain. Perhaps not even the leadership knows exactly what it will do with the bomb once it gets the chance. (Either way, a nuclear-armed Iran won't suddenly play well with others.) What happens in the region over the next couple of years may depend in large part on whether the Israelis are willing to chance it.

We should not, Kahlili says, expect Iran's people to applaud an Israeli attack on the weapons facilities. "People in Iran do not sympathize with Israel the way they sympathize with the U.S.," he told me. "They're looking for help, right? But they're not looking for the same kind of help from Israel. So if Israel bombs the facilities in Iran, don't expect people to come out into the streets to celebrate or confront the government forces. That's not going to happen. They're just going to sit at home and pray this thing doesn't get out of hand."

A military attack against Iran should be rolled out only if every conceivable peaceful solution fails first. Striking Iran would, in all likelihood, ignite several Middle Eastern wars all at once. Hamas and Hezbollah would bombard Israel with missile attacks. Lebanon and Gaza would both come under massive counterbattery fire. The war could easily spill over into Iraq and put American soldiers at risk.

The above scenario may sound like the worst, short of nuclear war, but it isn't. The worst-case scenario is a regional war that fails to stop Iran's nuclear program while keeping the regime in place. If the Israelis decide to use force, the nuclear facilities should not be the target. The government should be the target. And the U.S. should back Israel's play and even assist it, no matter how enraged American officials might be. The last thing any of us needs is a bloodied Iranian government with delusions of invincibility that later acquires the weapons of genocide and then sets out for revenge. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, "If you shoot at a king you must kill him."

"If any power takes on the Revolutionary Guards," Kahlili says, "they will find sympathy from the Iranian people. Even Israel. Iranian people do not hate Israel like they do in Arab countries. We aren't Arabs. Persians are very different from Arabs."

Some may find it hard to believe Iranians might thank Israelis for ridding them of their government, but I don't. Not if civilian casualties are low and there's no occupation.

There are precedents.

In 1982, South Lebanon's Shias welcomed the Israel Defense Forces as liberators when they crossed border to oust Palestinian militias from the area. The Shia community in Lebanon didn't turn against Israel until after the long occupation set in. Most Iraqi Shias likewise hailed Americans as liberators in 2003. About half turned against the United States later, but not until after Americans stayed on as occupiers.

Some may be tempted to dismiss Kahlili as an Iranian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress who told self-serving tales to U.S. intelligence agents before the Iraq war. That, I believe, would be a mistake. Kahlili isn't angling for a position after regime change like Chalabi did. And he's hardly written or said anything that hasn't also been written or said by other Iranians. If he's wrong, he isn't alone. And he isn't lying. He's speculating. His speculation is worth a hearing because he knows both the regime and his countrymen from experience on the inside.

I know Chalabi slightly, as I had dinner last year at his house. He's a charming host who serves the best Iraqi food I've ever had, and he said all kinds of fascinating things that only an insider could know, but he still comes across as a manipulative yarn-spinner. I doubt I would have believed him even if his record were spotless, and for that reason I chose not to publish the interview.

I don't get the sense — at all — that Kahlili and Chalabi are anything like each other after having spoken with both of them. I don't know if Kahlili is right, but he does have more experience with Tehran's authorities than most of the rest of us currently holding forth on the subject.

 

Michael J. Totten is a freelance writer and blogger who has reported from Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Cyprus, Turkey, and Israel. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Reason, and numerous other publications.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

The current dimention of Anti-Semitism.

 

FRANCE

Anti-Semitism in France is strongly on the rise, according to the 2009 annual report released late last week by the Jewish Community Protection Service (SPCJ). The organization reported that 832 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in France in 2009, as compared with 474 such incidents in 2008 - a 75% increase.

The statistics were gleaned from records in the organization's Aid to Victims Department, which cross-checked the figures with data published by the French Ministry of Home Affairs. Included were "statistics, comments, analyses and extracts from sentences handed out by courts in cases involving anti-Semitism," according to the Council Representing Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF).

At least part of the reason for the hatred may have been due to the corresponding rise in the country's Islamic population.

As of 2003, there were an estimated five to six million Muslims living in France, according to a report issued by the country's Interior Ministry. However, by 2007, that number had climbed to an estimated eight million, according to Odile Jacob's Intégrer l'Islam.

 

 

CANADA

According to the report, 1,264 anti-Semitic incidents took place in Canada in 2009. These included 32 violent attacks, 348 cases of vandalism and 884 reports of harassment. The majority of the incidents took place in the province of Ontario.

In the greater Toronto area, incidents dropped by 11 percent, but rose elsewhere in the province by nearly 50 percent. In the French-speaking Quebec province, there was a 52.5 percent rise over the 2008 data, and in the city of Montreal, where a large Jewish population resides, there was a 58.7 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents.

The figures are higher than those reported for 2008, but it is the distribution that has changed, rather than the numbers themselves. A total of 1,135 incidents were reported in that year.

The organization noted there has been a five-fold increase in anti-Semitic incidents in Canada over the past decade. As happened in France, the highest number of attacks to take place in one month, 209, occurred last January, during Israel's counter-terrorism operation in Gaza.

According to the Toronto Muslims website, Muslims living in Canada today number more than 750,000, with some 61 percent of those residing in Ontario, where the majority of the anti-Semitic incidents occurred. "Since the September 11 terrorist attacks many Muslims have begun to look to Canada as an alternative to the United States... This is especially true with international students who have come to Canada in much larger numbers since 9/11," the site noted.

 

GERMANY

And its not like Germany is chock full of Jews these days - only about 118,000 out of a population of nearly 82 million. It takes a bit of effort for someone to find a Jew to oppress in Germany, but still, there is anti-Semitism, particularly within their growing Muslim population.  Germany's Jewish community on Monday April 4, 2010 warned of an "alarming" rise in anti-Semitic violence by Arab and Turkish immigrants after Berlin police reported two unrelated attacks against Jews at the weekend.

 

SWEDEN

January 27, 2010 Yes, Sweden is finished. When Jews flee, the patient is dead. And not because the Jews are so gosh darn special. But they are, sadly enough, the best indicator of the health and freedom of any society. Look at any country in history.

Swedish Mayor: Ilmar Reepalu: 'Arab self determination is fine',  'it's Jewish self determination that I object to'.  Reepalu goes further to elucidate his true views on Israel, which basically follows the thinking in the Islamic world, that Jews are not allowed a national movement of their own.

 

NORWAY

April 17, 2010 Hostility to Jews in Scandinavia is becoming ever more menacing with the swelling of the Muslim population there (PI reported). Only around 1,300 Norwegians are of Jewish faith (in contrast to 150,000 Muslims), however they are seen as the root of all evil, and therefore they are mortally threatened, as even the report on Deutschlandfunk now reveals. Above all, Jewish schoolchildren are becoming victims of discrimination, racism, threats, harassments and mobbing.

Here is what Jewish parents report about their daily routine - not far away or somewhere in the Middle East, but right in the middle of the streets of Oslo:

"My son was on the way to the school to meet a friend there. A few Muslims stopped him and asked, are you Jewish, which he confirmed. With that the seized him and wanted to hang him. Somehow though, he was able to tear himself away from them - to this day he doesn't know how - he then ran home and cried out of panic. That was the starting point of the nightmare.".

"My child received death threats; his schoolmates say that he is a Jewish pig and should be shot down.

"There is a notorious denunciation of Jews - from jokes all the way to public death threats." .

"Many immigrants bring antisemitism with them from their homelands. The embarrassing thing is that there is nobody here who will stand against them."

The open hostility against Jews in Norway can now no longer be covered with the fig leaf of "Israel criticism." The discrimination against Jews just because they are Jews is too visible. Nobody is really resisting it as well. Politicians don't want to know anything about antisemitism in Norwegian society and disavow themselves of any common blame.

That fact that Norwegian politicians have belonged precisely to the sharpest international critics of Israeli policy pertaining to the Palestinians has nothing to do with the intimidation of Norwegian Jews. Such connections are repudiated by (Education Minister) Kristin Halvorsen who occupies the direction of the Socialist People's Party while at the same time is considered as one of the central stakeholders in the Norwegian government, and in the past had already called for a boycott of Israeli goods.

Finally, the Muslims are a blessing, and Battle against Israel is Battle against the Right™, and therefore hostility against Jews is apparently OK in the reckoning of the Education Minister, even if she wouldn't openly admit to this.

 

 

No American Troops Should Die Protecting Israel.

 

by Marty Peretz

Almost before the celebrants at Barack Obama's inauguration had gotten over their hangovers some 15 months ago, the president designated George Mitchell as his special envoy in the Middle East. I wrote then and several times since that he would be a flop, poor man. After all, it's not the case that he had been a great success in any of his other high-minded missions, including the investigation into steroid use by baseball heroes. In his latest tussle with the now-almost-ancient struggle between Jews and Arabs over Palestine, he was also shackled by his boss's stubbornly defective history of the region, which, of course, morphed into equally stubborn and defective formulae for fixing that history.

My guess is that this could be Mitchell's final voyage to the Holy Land, and he may begin saying his goodbyes. Unless he is such a glutton for punishment that he can't bear to leave. Senator, better take my advice. God bless and good riddance.

Maybe the Palestinian Authority will yet agree to participate in the "proximity talks" on which the president has staked so much. You need to keep in mind that it is the Palestinians--not the Israelis--who are rejecting these low-status negotiations. And not because they want higher-status talks. But because they want to extract concessions from Jerusalem as a precondition for participating even in this remote model for contact between the parties. Then, of course, they'll try to extract more substantial concessions for attending direct talks. Maybe this is Obama's plan as well.

But even he may be tiring of these prevaricative tactics. So, pushed by his (what should be) desolating failure even to get indirect contacts going, Obama may be tempted to spring his more-or-less detailed peace plan upon the world. As you surely have grasped, I am far from convinced that any such design will succeed. And it is not, as many in the media seem to assume, because Israel is intransigent. For that matter, I do not think one should blame the ongoing failures of diplomacy on the intransigence of the Palestinians, obstinate though they are. The real impediment to successful Israeli-Palestinians talks, even to unsuccessful talks, is that Palestine is a failed society.

In fact, it is really just another (and more inchoate) instance of other Arab societies stretching from the Maghreb to the borders of Iran. Palestinian factions are organized for pillage ... but pillage with ideological facades and theological tropes. It is true that there are refined and cultured elements in Palestinian society, elements with a normal range of political opinions and social habits. Many of these are inner exiles, as there were and are inner exiles in every public, however violent and corrupt its essences are. Among these inner exiles are men and women of great talent and subtle sensibilities. They will be the real victims of whatever kind of sovereignty and independence Palestine achieves. In a Gaza ruled by Hamas and smaller competing gangs of thugs, however, civil society has already come to an end. Whatever supplies Israel will be euchred into allowing past the blockade into the Strip (Egypt is permitted for raisons d'etat of its own to maintain an even more draconian closure) actually strengthens the rule of disorder, the parties of corruption (including UNRWA, another United Nations fraud, and other ideologically high strung NGOs) being the distributors of these supplies.

The outlines of Obama's design for peace are known, and there are not likely to be many surprises. The armistice lines of 1949 (that's what is meant by the "1967 borders") are the template from which various deviations will be permitted. The big settlement blocs cleaving to these lines but not within them, will remain in Israel, as will the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem about which the administration has made such an enormous fuss. Yes, even Ramat Shlomo, which the Israeli government made into a disastrously impolitic controversy, for which the Obami seemed to have been waiting and planning, will be on the Israeli side of the map. There are a few areas of the West Bank that are of special significance to Jews, and, for these, other creative designs will be required. This is what you call ingenuity in a tight spot. Like the transfer of this or that to Israel for a bit of the Negev to Palestine.

We won't really know, of course, until we know. And then will come the wrangling. After all, Obama's design will not be accepted supinely by either the Palestinians or Israel. The symbolic lynchpin is Jerusalem.

Frankly, as a Jew and a Zionist, I would want as many Palestinians as possible living in their own Jerusalem. And as many Jewish Israelis in their own Jerusalem, too. But the hard facts on the ground wreak havoc with the lines that would be the abstract cartography of peace. If a "unified" Jerusalem will not be a peaceful city, so also will a divided Jerusalem not be a peaceful city. The city's demographic spread is like interlaced fingers. There are no straight lines dividing the population. Just as Israelis move into Arab neighborhoods, Arabs move into Jewish neighborhoods. This is a tell-tale sign that many Palestinians--patriotic Palestinians and all that--do not under any circumstances want to live under Palestinian rule. In fact, they would rather live in a Jewish state than in an Arab state.

A great part of Palestinian hatred for Israel is that the Jewish state is actually more civilized than any imaginable Palestine. And, to be sure, more prosperous. One element of the infatuation with the "one-state solution" among some Arabs is that it would rapidly become a politically Arab state. But there is also the fantasy that the one-state solution would quickly solve the problem of Palestinian backwardness, that the Arabs would suddenly inherit the results of more than a century of Jewish imagination, toil, and courage. This prospect, as you might grasp, does not enchant the Israelis.

Since it's a non-starter, it also doesn't appeal to the United States. So America remains committed to a two-state solution. But, as everyone knows by now, you can't just draw a map and assume that no one will cross its lines. Or that the pre-conditions and conditions of peace will axiomatically be honored. The lessons of the Gaza disengagement and the Lebanon withdrawal tell us just the opposite. In Gaza, the Palestinians sent rockets into Israel even before the Israeli settlers had found new beds in which to sleep. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has been violating the terms of Security Council Resolution 170--patched together by Condoleezza Rice and Tzipi Livni--ever since it was passed by the Security Council. So much for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which has been an interim failure since 1978 and now appears to be the prototype for Obama's design to keep the peace.

This actually means keeping the Jordan River as a barrier between the kingdom and Palestine. But most of Jordan's population is Palestinian. If, for example, the monarchy is overthrown (it almost happened before until Israel rescued the king's royal backside), you will have more than four million Palestinians on both sides of the river, agitated for reunion and for revenge. Revenge against whom? Israel, of course.

One doesn't have to wait for turbulence in Amman to worry about turmoil from the West Bank. The president cannot assure that a Palestine of whatever dimensions will preserve the peace of its borders. Who will deny that, within a day or a week, rocket fire and missilery will be launched against the dense population centers of Israel, against its airport, against its industrial and scientific centers, against its military installations? Aren't such acts the very pleasures of revenge, almost its incitement? Revenge is the lingua franca of the Palestinian nation.

Obama surely wouldn't put any of this remotely in my terms. But he knows deep inside that Palestine will not be easily pacified. That is why he has the UNIFIL model in mind, the pathetically ineffective but internationally sanctioned keeper of the peace. All right, maybe it will be NATO or the European Union. And then what happens when there are casualties? When national budgets are tight? Will Spanish soldiers really defend Israel and Israelis? Or holier-than-thou Swedes? Or will German soldiers actually shoot at Israelis? And what about American soldiers?

The very premise of Zionism was that the safety of Jews would no longer rest with the good will of the gentiles, the caprice of the princes. Jewish history is written in the blood of their deceit. I do not believe that American servicemen and servicewomen should die or be in danger because of a threat to the life of Israel and the lives of Israelis. Al Qaeda has already made substantial gains in Gaza, in a Gaza altogether empty of Jews. The U.S. has Al Qaeda in its gunsights in Iraq and Yemen and various other homelands of the jihadist communion. Let Israel take care of its own enemies.

 

by Marty Peretz

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

South America - widespread and rarely explored.

 

by  Klaus Hart

Anti-Semitism in South Amerika is an area that is still not sufficiently researched. All the more welcome is a recently published Brazilian anthology* that describes the phenomenon in its frightening dimensions, mainly in Latin America.

Many Latin Americans carry official first names like Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann. In the phonebook of Sao Paulo one can find, in all seriousness, the name 'Himmler Hitler Göring Ferreira Santos.' Again and again synagogues are attacked; the number of anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites has increased alarmingly; Jewish personalities often receive death threats. For the first time now, an anthology of 740 pages is available, in which experts approach the phenomenon of hatred against Jews in North and South America from different angles. Editor and co-contributor of the anthology is Latin America's leading anti-Semitism researcher, Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, who has already published numerous books on the topic. Carneiro teaches at the University of Sao Paulo and is currently building a virtual archive about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in cooperation with the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. In addition, she develops urgently needed educational materials for Brazil's teachers - materials that should have been available for decades.

The anthology describes anti-Semitism in Canada and the United States as insignificant and hardly threatening, hence it is considered in relative brevity, quite unlike the giant country of Brazil and its neighbor, Argentina, that have the largest Jewish communities in Latin America and are increasingly exposed to neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism. One can't help being reminded of the bomb attack on the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which 85 people were killed. This attack and other incidents lead to harsh security measures at synagogues, also in Brazil. Brazilian rabbis insist that the Iberian culture is still marked by strong anti-Semitism, and that Spain and Portugal who colonized the Latin American countries, deeply instilled Christian anti-Judaism as well as racist anti-Semitism, with all its stereotypes and prejudices in South American society.

 

A Luxury Edition of 'Mein Kampf'

Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro states that today, anti-Semitism in Brazil and other North and South American countries usually disguises itself as anti-Zionism, as hatred of Israel. "But if one looks closely, it goes against the Jews, it is nothing else but deep-seated, traditional anti-Semitism." Especially in Brazil, Argentina and Chile, the anti-Jewish mentality is strong and articulates itself politically. Anti-Semitic concoctions from the Nazi era are appearing in new editions. In Brazil itself the translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf in a luxury edition is selling out quickly. Since the 19th Century the major racial theories from Germany and France were adopted in Brazil by government circles and propagated by renowned intellectuals. "One wanted a pure race - white, Catholic and non-Jewish."

The anthology contains an astonishing study by the historian Silvia Cortez Silva about an icon of Brazilian culture, the writer Gilberto Freyre, whose 100th Birthday in 2000 had been celebrated with official pomp. In his lifetime Freyre had already been honored by many great universities of the world - although in his classic Casa-Grande & Senzala, ['The Mansion and the Slavehut'] he had spread the most evil prejudices against Jews. Silva writes that Gilberto Freyre never concealed what he was thinking about the Jews. "The way he describes the profile and identity of Jews could not be more anti-Semitic." He uses expressions and attributes such as blood sucker, parasite, exploiter, ruthlessness, cunning, Jewish nose, vulture-face - to name only a few. Silva underlined as particularly interesting that such writing passed unheeded in the long years of its reception.

Anti-Semitic views are still popular in Latin America. In some Brazilian dictionaries of foreign words the word 'Jew' is, in all seriousness, translated as 'bad person.' Even officially, the dictator and hater of Jews, Getúlio Vargas, is still celebrated as the greatest statesman in the national history of Brazil, though, since 1936, he had outlawed the issuance of entry visas to persecuted Jews by secret decree. "We know of about 10 000 rejected visa applications - and there are still a lot more," states Carneiro. But even worse, many Brazilian Jews were deported to Nazi-Germany.

 

Klaus Hart     

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

 

The jihad against Britain's Jews.

 

by Melanie Philips

I am hearing ever more alarming accounts of the deepening attrition against British Jews in the wake of the incitement against Israel provoked by the war in Gaza. In addition to the record number of attacks upon Jewish individuals and institutions and murderous incitement displayed on the anti-Israel demonstrations and riots as reported by the Community Security Trust, Jewish parents report that their children - some as young as eight - are now running a gauntlet of attack from their Muslim classmates at school who accuse them of 'killing Palestinian children'. Comments by adults about 'Jews controlling all the money/the media/the BBC' (yes, really! All because it allowed Israel's spokesman to put the case for Israel from time to time) are now commonplace in both private and public discourse. Today's Jewish Chronicle reports that a 12 year-old Birmingham schoolgirl was terrorised by a mob of 20 youths chanting 'Kill all Jews' and 'Death to Jews' on her way home from school last week:

She said: 'One of my friends said an Asian girl from the year above asked her why she was talking to me because I am Jewish. I asked the girl in a friendly manner if she had a problem with me being Jewish. She said "yeah, I do". I managed to punch her before she hit me but then she grabbed me by the hair and swung me around shouting "f****** Jews, I hate Jews". But then another Asian girl rounded up a whole gang. They were all in school uniform and they came running towards me shouting "death to Jews" and "kill all Jews."'

A reader has sent me the following account of what happened to him when, travelling on the Tube in London, he started to read a copy of The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz:

After a time, I became aware that a man sitting diagonally in front of me near the doors at the end of the carriage was looking a bit agitated and had a disgruntled expression on his face. However, he didn't meet my eye, so I thought nothing more of it and continued reading as before...When the train reached St Paul's, the man I had noticed stood up to get off. But instead of leaving by the end doors, he made to pass me. In the process of doing so, he deliberately shoved into me and made to crush me against the side of the carriage and the passengers sitting behind me. Despite already knowing exactly what had actuated this behaviour, I asked the question anyway - and received the following response: 'You shouldn't be reading that, you f***ing [indecipherable].'...The whole confrontation had taken place in the time it took for the tube doors to wheeze open and shut.

Other than in the Jewish press, such incidents are barely being reported. Last week, for example, there was virtually no coverage of the violent demonstration organised by the Stop the War coalition which prevented the deputy commander of Israel's Gaza operation from speaking at London's Jewish student centre, Hillel House, when a crowd of about 60-80 students attempted to storm the building.

One of the most troubling developments is the way in which the universities have become an extension of the Middle East conflict, with a simulacrum of the aggression, intimidation and violence from which Israel is under attack by the Arabs being directed at Jewish students on British campuses, who now routinely run a gauntlet of intimidation and abuse from Arab and Muslim students. But even more worryingly, some universities are spinelessly choosing to give in to such bullying.

Throughout last week, after the cease-fire was declared in Gaza, there was a series of anti-Israel sit-ins and demonstrations organised by the STWC at some 17 universities: in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London School of Economics, Queen Mary College and King's College, as well as at Bradford, Sheffield Hallam, Warwick, Leeds, Oxford, Cambridge, Sussex, Essex, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan and Strathclyde. Some of these protests led to criminal damage and forced the universities to pay thousands of pounds to deal with the disruption, rearrange lectures, hire extra security guards and repair the damage.

The demonstrators took control of lecture halls and made a series of demands: that the universities should issue a statement condemning Israel's actions in Gaza; offer scholarships to Palestinian students; send surplus educational materials to help rebuild Gaza (presumably its Islamic University, said by Israel to be a fount of terror); dedicate some of their time to fund-raising for Gaza; and take no action against the demonstrators.

Some of these universities responded robustly to such disorder and intimidation. Manchester Metropolitan, Birmingham, Nottingham and, after some delay, Leeds and Cambridge reportedly refused to accept any of these demands.  At Nottingham and Sheffield Hallam, the demonstrators were forcibly evicted.

But the LSE, King's College London, SOAS, Bradford, Strathclyde and Oxford reportedly gave in to some or all of these demands. According to the JC, the LSE agreed to waive application fees for Gaza and West Bank students 'directly affected by the conflict', while Bradford agreed to investigate the 'ethical background' of food and drink served on campus, and promised to 'explore the feasibility of a twinning link with the Islamic University of Gaza'.
 

Strathclyde agreed among other things to cancel a contract with an Israeli water-cooler company.  Oxford - which fined each demonstrator the princely sum of £20 - nevertheless started negotiations with them with indecent haste, and a mere few hours later had agreed to pretty well everything. In a craven letter to colleagues the Vice-Chancellor, John Hood, having stated that unlawful action of this kind cannot be condoned proceeded to reward it by giving the perpetrators what they had demanded.

The Oxford demonstrators also demanded that the title of the series of lectures on 'world peace' at Balliol, recently inaugurated by Israeli President Shimon Peres and named in his honour, be changed; the Senior Proctor, Professor Donald Fraser -- who oversees disciplinary matters and who recommended 'a relatively lenient course of action against the demonstrators '--  duly wrote to Balliol drawing its attention to the students' concerns.

Thus the trahison des clercs as they crumble in the face of criminality, violence and intimidation.

And so now at British universities --which should be the most protected of all environments for free discourse and inquiry -- British Jews no longer feel safe. At Nottingham, one such student said:

The sit-in has created an atmosphere where we do not feel comfortable going into shared buildings on campus.

At King's, another Jewish student said:

Someone from my course wrote 'kill the Jews' on my Facebook profile. Later he said he didn't know I was Jewish. In public someone said to me, 'I think all the Israelis are crazy and so are the f***ing Jews'.

And at Oxford, the JC reports:

One University Reader reportedly told a meeting that 'within five years, Oxford will be a Jew-free zone'

and a student wrote to Professor Fraser warning that

for Jewish students, the university and the city have developed a toxic atmosphere in which I and many others feel increasingly alienated and unwelcome.

Meanwhile, of course, as Sky's Tim Marshall pointed out the other day on his blog, the government of Sri Lanka is also attempting to eradicate terrorism by a military campaign in which, according to the UN, 'many civilians are being killed', thousands made homeless, hundreds of thousands trapped, and to which, as food shortages grow, the government refuses to allow access to journalists. Yet there are no sit-ins on campus against the Sri Lankans, no violent riots outside its High Commission, no calls to boycott Orange Pekoe tea. As Marshall observed:

And yet somehow the lives of the 1,300 Palestinians killed by the Israelis causes far more outrage, in certain quarters, than the 2 million dead in Congo, the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Sunni and Shia terrorists, or the growing number of Sri Lankan dead to add to the 70,000 killed over the past 25 years (far more than the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the same period).

Of course - because the protests in Britain have nothing to do with humanitarian concerns for the innocent. They are part of the jihad against the Jews - and those in the universities and other parts of the establishment who are capitulating to or even endorsing this are accomplices to a great evil that is now consuming British public life.

 

Melanie Philips

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

A Nuclear Iran Could Become the First 'Suicide State'.

by Professor Louis Rene Beres

 

President Obama's naive belief in rationality could turn Israeli cities into cemeteries

President Barack Obama--this week launched a special nuclear security summit in Washington--finally acknowledges that Iranian threats to annihilate Israel are serious. Still, Obama fails to understand that applying so-called economic sanctions to Iran will be ineffectual. Somehow, despite very good reasons to the contrary, the president is now insisting that Israel learn to "live" with a nuclear Iran.

Obama confidently assumes that Tehran could be dealt with using the normally-compelling dynamics of nuclear deterrence. The problem with such threat-based optimism, however, is the always-underlying presumption of enemy rationality. Without rationality, deterrence will fail.

No system of nuclear deterrence can operate unless all of the involved countries value their own physical survival more highly than anything else. Significantly, Tehran's new nuclear status could coincide with an unshakable leadership belief in the Shi'ite apocalypse. Here, Israel would face not only more Palestinian suicide-bombers (President Obama's recycled Road Map toward a "Two-State Solution" will only encourage Palestinian terrorism), but also a "suicide state."

Barack Obama stubbornly fails to recognize something critical. This is the unspeakable goal of all Israel's Islamist enemies, which remains Jewish extermination. Oddly, this expressly genocidal goal is unhidden. In the bitterest of ironies, an ancient nation that was ingathered in 1948 precisely to prevent another Holocaust has become the fevered focus of another Final Solution.

The goal of all Israel's enemies, especially Iran and the soon-to-be-born (and Obama-favored) Palestinian state, is to be left standing while Israel is made to disappear. For these refractory enemies, there can be no coexistence with Israel. At the end of the day, this is because their own survival is believed to demand Israel's extinction.

Pressured by President Obama to exchange land for nothing, Israel is being pushed to collaborate in its own disappearance. Israel's prime minister should take notice. It would be a fatal mistake for Binyamin Netanyahu to embrace Obama's cheery belief that reason and rationality govern the world, a belief implicit, for example, in the president's hope for "a world free of nuclear weapons."

Barack Obama will not save Israel. Once Iran had decided to launch nuclear missiles at Israel, perhaps a plausible prospect in just a few years, Washington's best assistance would be confined to help bury the dead. Even for this "assistance," whole Israeli cities would first have to be converted into cemeteries.

Whether in Gaza, West Bank (Judea/Samaria) or Tehran, Israel's Jihadist enemies wish to kill Jews because every such homicide is a deeply felt and genuinely sacred obligation. For them, killing Jews remains a praiseworthy expression of religious sacrifice. President Obama should bear in mind that such killing is expected to confer upon the perpetrators immunity from personal death. Could there ever be a more compelling expectation?

In the Islamic Middle East, power over death always trumps all other forms of power. There is no greater power in the Dar al Islam (the World of Islam) than the religiously-authoritative promise of immortality, and this promise is always linked to total war against "unbelievers."

The core idea of death as a zero-sum commodity--"I kill you; I therefore remain alive forever"--has already been explained in certain literatures, and in psychology. It is captured perfectly in philosopher Ernest Becker's paraphrase of Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti: "Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."

Just to stay alive, Israel must understand what Freud inner-circle member Otto Rank once called a general principle of psychology: "The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed."

Israel's enemies, to remain standing, and to prevent Israel from standing up, seek to sacrifice the Jewish state on a joyously bloodstained altar of protracted war and terror.

This planned destruction of Israel is not about geopolitics. It is integrally part of a system of religious worship that is directed toward the conquest of personal death.

True peace in the Middle East will never be brought about by political cliches and empty witticisms. Real wisdom is necessary, and this insight will need to be based upon a true awareness of jihadist goals and capabilities. For Barack Obama, this calls for a much deeper understanding of the interpenetrating and existential threats to Israel posed by Iran and "Palestine."

 

 

PROFESSOR LOUIS RENE BERES, Professor of Political Science at Purdue, was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). Born in Zurich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, he is the author of many major books, monographs and articles dealing with international law, strategic theory, Israeli nuclear policy, and regional nuclear war. In Israel, where he served as Chair of Project Daniel, his work is known to selected military and intelligence communities.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

The Solace of Poor U.S.-Israel Relations

 

by Daniel Pipes

April 13, 2010

Things are not always as simple as they seem; the current crisis in U.S.-Israel relations has a silver lining.

Four observations, all derived from historical patterns, prompt this conclusion:

First, the "peace process" is in actuality a "war process." Diplomatic negotiations through the 1990s led to a parade of Israeli retreats that had the perverse effect of turning the middling-bad situation of 1993 into the awful one of 2000. Painful Israeli concessions, we now know, stimulate not reciprocal Palestinian goodwill but rather irredentism, ambition, fury, and violence.

Second, Israeli concessions to the Arabs are effectively forever while relations with Washington fluctuate. Once the Israelis left south Lebanon and Gaza, they did so for good, as would be the case with the Golan Heights or eastern Jerusalem. Undoing these steps would be prohibitively costly. In contrast, U.S.-Israel tensions depend on personalities and circumstances, so they go up and down and the stakes are relatively lower. Each president or prime minister can refute his predecessor's views and tone. Problems can be repaired quickly.

More broadly, the U.S.-Israel bond has strengths that go far beyond politicians and issues of the moment. Nothing on earth resembles this bilateral, "the most special" of special relationships and "the family relationship of international politics." Like any family tie, it has high points (Israel ranks second, behind only the United States, in number of companies listed on NASDAQ) and low ones (the Jonathan Pollard espionage affair continues to rankle a quarter century after it broke). The tie has a unique intensity when it comes to strategic cooperation, economic connections, intellectual ties, shared values, United Nations voting records, religious commonalities, and even mutual interference in each other's internal affairs.

From Israel's perspective, then, political relations with the Arabs are freighted but those with Washington have a lightness and flexibility.

Third, when Israeli leaders enjoy strong, trusting relations with Washington, they give more to the Arabs. Golda Meir made concessions to Richard Nixon, Menachem Begin to Jimmy Carter, Yitzhak Rabin, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak to Bill Clinton, and Ariel Sharon to George W. Bush.

Buildings in Ramat Shlomo, a former no man's land in Jerusalem, where Barack Obama opposes new Israeli construction.

Conversely, mistrust of Washington tightens Israelis and closes the willingness to take chances. That was the case with George H.W. Bush and is even more so with Barack Obama. The current unease began even before Obama reached the Oval Office, given his public association with prominent Israel-haters (e.g., Ali Abunimah, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Jeremiah Wright). Relations degenerated in March, when his administration simulated outrage on the 9^th over an announcement of routine construction work in Jerusalem, followed by a brutal telephone call from the secretary of state on the 12^th and a tense White House summit meeting on the 23^rd.

Dennis Ross (right): too solicitous of Binyamin Netanyahu (left)?

To make matters worse, the Obama administration figure most identified with maintaining good U.S.-Israel relations, Dennis Ross, was anonymously accused by a colleague on March 28 of being "far more sensitive to Netanyahu's coalition politics than to U.S. interests." A prominent foreign policy analyst used this to raise questions about Ross having a "dual loyalty" to Israel, impugning Ross' policy advice.

These ugly and virtually unprecedented tensions have had a predictable effect on the Israeli public, making it mistrustful of Obama, resistant to U.S. pressure, while inspiring usually squabbling politicians to work together to resist his policies.

Fourth, U.S.-Israel tensions increase Palestinian intransigence and demands. Israel in bad standing empowers their leaders; and if the tensions arise from U.S. pressure for concessions to the Palestinians, the latter sit back and enjoy the show. This happened in mid-2009, when Mahmoud Abbas instructed Americans what to extract from Jerusalem. Conversely, when U.S.-Israel relations flourish, Palestinian leaders feel pressure to meet Israelis, pretend to negotiate, and sign documents.

Combining these four presumptions results in a counterintuitive conclusion: Strong U.S.-Israel ties induce irreversible Israeli mistakes. Poor U.S.-Israel ties abort this process. Obama may expect that picking a fight with Israel will produce negotiations but it will have the opposite effect. He may think he is approaching a diplomatic breakthrough but, in fact, he is rendering that less likely. Those who fear more "war process" can thus take some solace in the administration's blunders.

The complexity of U.S.-Israel relations leaves much room for paradox and inadvertency. A look beyond a worrisome turn of events suggests that good may come of it.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.