Hagel: Arms Deal with Israel, Gulf States is Signal to Iran

by Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff

More than a year in the making, the deal would result in the sale of V-22 Osprey aircraft, advanced refueling tankers and anti-air defense missiles to Israel and 25 F-16 Desert Falcon jets worth nearly $5 billion to the United Arab Emirates.

If approved, the new arms deal will make Israel the first country to recieve the V-22 Osprey aircraft outside the U.S. | Photo credit: AP

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Sunday the United States and Israel see "exactly the same" threat from Iran, but differ on when it may reach the point of requiring U.S. or Israeli military action.

Hagel used his first visit to Israel as Pentagon chief to highlight his view that Israel must decide for itself whether and when to pre-emptively attack Iran.

"Israel will make the decision that Israel must make to protect itself, to defend itself," Hagel told reporters before arriving here on Sunday to begin a week-long tour of the Middle East.

Hagel acknowledged that while Israel and the U.S. share a commitment to ensuring that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon, there "may well be some differences" between the two allies on the question of when Iran's leaders might decide to go for a bomb.

He said there is "no daylight at all" between Israel and the U.S. on the central goal of preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.

But he added, "When you back down into the specifics of the timing of when and if Iran decides to pursue a nuclear weapon, there may well be some differences."

During his two-day visit to Israel, Hagel is expected to put the final touches on a U.S. arms deal that would provide Israel with missiles for its fighter aircraft, plus KC-135 refueling planes that could be used in a long-range strike on a country like Iran, as well as V-22 Osprey transport planes. He called the proposed sale a "very clear signal" to Iran.

"The bottom line is, Iran is a threat — a real threat," he said, not only for its nuclear ambitions and its stated goal of destroying Israel but also for its alleged sponsoring of terrorism.

Hagel was expected to discuss the final elements of the deal with his Israeli counterpart, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon. Hagel's focus on Israel comes in light of the criticism he drew from some in Congress who opposed his nomination as defense secretary. An unusually vigorous public campaign to block his nomination featured claims that he was "anti-Israel," a charge the former Republican senator vehemently denies.

The deal, more than a year in the making through a series of coordinated bilateral negotiations, would result in the sale of V-22 Osprey aircraft, advanced refueling tankers and anti-air defense missiles to Israel and 25 F-16 Desert Falcon jets worth nearly $5 billion to the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia also would be allowed to purchase weapons with "stand-off" capabilities, those that can be used to engage the enemy with precision at a greater distance, defense officials said.

The deal marks the first time the United States has offered to sell tilt-rotor Ospreys to another country, and the "stand-off" weapons would give Saudi Arabia and the UAE a more advanced capability than they have had in the past, said the defense officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"This is one of the most complex and carefully orchestrated arms sale packages in American history," one of the officials said. "That's not just because of the kinds of equipment that we're providing to Israel and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. It's also a reflection of intensive defense shuttle diplomacy."

The announcement comes amid mounting concerns over Iran's nuclear program, with little progress reported at talks this month between Iran and world powers. U.S. officials concede that crippling sanctions have so far failed to force concessions from Tehran, which insists its nuclear program is peaceful.

Israel has renewed warnings it reserves the right to resort to military action to stop what it says is Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

U.S. defense officials touted the arms deals as the culmination of President Barack Obama's effort to find a way to boost the military capabilities of key Arab allies in light of the threats in the region while still fulfilling the U.S. policy of maintaining Israel's military superiority.

"This not only sustains but augments Israel's qualitative military edge in the region," one of the officials said. "This package is a significant advance for Israel ... This is about giving all three partners in the region added capacity to address key threats that they may face down the road."

The announcement of the deal came as Hagel was preparing for his first trip to Middle East since taking office in February. He planned to visit Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE and was expected to continue discussions about the arms sale at stops along the way.

Defense officials said Congress had not been formally notified of the arms sale as part of the approval process. That will come once the different countries finalize their purchase decisions and submit formal letters of request.

While the arms negotiations with the different countries were carried out bilaterally, defense officials said they had been transparent with all sides about the effort to boost the military capacities of all sides to address regional threats.

Sources familiar with the arms sales plans said Israel had asked to buy five or six V-22 Ospreys, built by Boeing and Textron Inc's Bell Helicopter unit, at an estimated price of about $70 million apiece.

The UAE also is interested in purchasing the tilt-rotor aircraft, which takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane, the sources said. But that sale is likely to be included in a separate deal.

The U.S. sold Saudi Arabia 84 F-15 jets for $29 billion in 2010, planes that are now beginning to roll off the assembly line and undergo testing, officials said.

Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=8735

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

Looking for Plan B in Damascus

by Asharq Al-Awsat

Recent government successes on the battlefields around Damascus have led the rebels to re-think their strategy

 

Free Syrian Army fighters carry their weapons as they walk on rubble at the frontline in Sidi Meqdad area in the suburbs of Damascus, April 10, 2013. Picture taken April 10, 2013. 

(REUTERS/Ward Al-Keswani/Shaam News Network/Handout)

Beirut, Asharq Al-Awsat—The government of Bashar Al-Assad, once written off as doomed by some observers and journalists, has recently launched a military counter-offensive against the various groups battling to bring it down. Although it was never likely to lead to a victory so decisive as to turn the tide against the rebels and silence its critics, it has forced both the rebels to re-examine their tactics and some of their assumptions about the ongoing struggle.

Today, although the leaders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) claim to have camps a mere 500 meters away from the heart of the Syrian capital, the spokesmen of the military councils and of the FSA’s Southern Front have admitted to Asharq Al-Awsat that the decisive battle to determine the fate of Damascus remains far off. 

Instead, they aim to strengthen their control of the region known as the Ghouta, the belt of agricultural land around Damascus, and the site of some recent government attacks.

Matar Ismail, official spokesman for the Southern Front of the FSA, told Asharq Al-Awsat that rebels’ recent setbacks on the battlefield had forced them to shelve their plans to assault the capital: “The battle to decide Damascus is not weeks away as the media foretells. No one knows when it will take place . . . After the Otaiba and East Ghouta fronts were breached from the directions of Dumayr and the International Airport, the battle for Damascus will have to wait a while.”

Ismail added: “From a tactical military perspective, it is very difficult to launch an offensive on Damascus without first establishing an unbroken presence connecting the two parts of the Ghouta . . . Daraa is supposed to be the staging point for the decisive assault. However the battle for Daraa is currently being waged somewhat independently, despite the fact that liberating Daraa would expedite the offensive on the capital and increase that offensive’s chances of success. Preparations are underway but they cannot be completed as long as the road between the two Ghoutas remained closed . . . Making matters worse and further delaying the opening the road, the regime has launched a heavy, two-pronged assault on the Otaiba area: the first coming from the direction of the Damascus International Airport and the town of Harran Al-Aawamid, and the second coming from Dumayr’s military airport where regime brigades are stationed.”

Ismail explained the strategic situation from the perspective of the FSA’s leadership, emphasizing that the rebels had to secure a number of key positions to strengthen the FSA’s control of the land around Syria’s capital city as a precondition for enveloping the city. 

He said that the FSA had to establish control over a number of locations, while at the same time “the Damascus International Road should be cut off . . . This means asserting full control over the road leading to the airport, which bisects the road that connects to the eastern part of the Ghouta and allows them to mobilize troops and disrupt supply routes. All in all, the most important objective is to clamp down on the airport because it houses the military barracks.”

Abu Adel, an activist and member of the Media Bureau in Jobar, said: “The decisive battle for Damascus is very far off . . . if we consider all of the realities on the ground, we see that, yes, it is true the rebels have made ground towards Abbasid Square. But on the other hand, the regime has made advances on the Maliha Front, and is trying to flank the rebels by way of Otaiba. 

“If the regime succeeds in reinforcing its troops, it could possibly reach as far as Marj Al-Sultan and Nashibiya which are both close to Damascus International Airport . . . If it does reach these two points, it will have successfully encircled the eastern part of the Ghouta. We assume that this is what the regime seeks, but it cannot be done. It will not work, but it would prevent the rebels from launching any meaningful offensives in the near future.”

Adel added: “The regime is trying to open new fronts away from the capital, i.e. the Jobar Front, forcing the rebels to withdraw from the front line to protect their rear . . . Right now 500 meters stand between the rebels and Abbasid Square. Meanwhile a large number of rebels are heading to defend the Otaiba Front at their rear rather than push on to the front line. They fear they will be encircled, and thus the battles in Otaiba diminish the rebel presence in Jobar . . . The regime is still strong and well supplied, and receives crucial manpower from Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. 

“Most of the combatants fighting in Jobar now are Iraqis and Iranians. They are very highly trained . . . The combatants on the front line in Damascus, i.e. on the Jobar Front, are Iraqis and Iranians, while the regime army ranks rally to East Ghouta . . . This blatant encroachment on the part of Iraqis and Iranians suggests that the regime is wavering.”

The Deputy Commander of the Revolutionary Military Council of Damascus, who identified himself only as “Salim,” told Asharq Al-Awsat that the decisive battle in the capital will not take place anytime soon, “because the important areas of Damascus are fully controlled by the regime. The supporting countries are not concerned about the battle for Damascus, but rather they are focused on weakening the military might of the regime and rebels alike.” 

Salim blamed the government’s superior numbers and weapons, as well as the rebels’ own limited weapons for the situation: “Weakening [the government forces] can either be accomplished by supplying the Free Army with high-grade ordnance or by prolonging the battle. The supplies being given to the Free Army do not contain high-quality weaponry, thus although these supplies may help them persist in their war effort, they stop short of enabling them to launch meaningful offenses. So it seems that a long war of attrition awaits us.”

Salim, too, asserted that the government’s defenses were bolstered by foreign fighters, especially its key defensive positions in the Jobar district of Damascus. 

He said: “The majority of the fighters on the Jobar Front are Iranians, Indians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Hezbollah members. They are scattered about Nasreen and Jobar Streets on the front lines [in the direction of Abbasid Square] and in Otaiba, Bahriya, and Abada. There are also barricades within Damascus that all but fly Hezbollah flags . . . These warriors are the fiercest of all because their allegiance to the regime is based on doctrine . . . The videos recently posted by the Free Army show these fighters, most of whom were eliminated by the Shaam Liberation Brigade in Jobar, in addition to video clips taken from their mobile phones.”

Habib Al-Mustafa, the spokesman of a rebel brigade based based in the Ghouta told Asharq Al-Awsat via telephone from Arbeen that the area remained under control, but that “regime troops advanced to a point in Otaiba called Al-Farousiya. From where I stand a decisive battle for Damascus is not near . . . The rumors that a campaign to take Damascus is underway are unfounded; the Free Army will not be parading through Damascus carrying victory banners amid celebrations.” 

He admitted that the government has been able to create a series of fortified outposts within the city, which would make a single rebel offensive futile. Instead, the rebels would take a piecemeal approach and “liberate Damascus bit by bit . . . we will take them apart stronghold by stronghold . . . So you will not see the Sham suddenly collapse, rather it will slowly crumble neighborhood by neighborhood. Although I wouldn’t rule out a sudden collapse, there are certainly no plans for a unified attack”.

He estimated that the FSA currently controls about 25 percent of Damascus.

Media activist Abu Kinan told Asharq Al-Awsat via telephone from Darayya in the western section of the Ghouta that although the areas controlled by the FSA appear to form a cordon around Damascus, the regime is capable of continuing fighting within this ring.

He said: “Take Darayya for example. We had control over the strategic eastern region that overlooks the two main roads: the Southern Beltway and the Daraa Highway. The Free Army was only dozens of meters away from these roads. However the regime managed to drive the Free Army back into Darayya’s western region, 2 km away from the Southern Beltway and about 1 km away from the Daraa Highway. The regime has since reinforced its troops so as to protect those two roads, and thus it has taken the fight to Darayya proper.” 

He attributed the Free Army’s inability to hold its strategic positions to the fact that it lacks tanks. He said that unlike the eastern Ghouta, “The Free Army has no meaningful control over the areas of the west Ghouta . . . Darayya’s perseverance in spite of the siege is in part due to continued resistance in Jobar and Barzeh.”

As for the rebel positions in Jobar, he said that these could be maintained as long as the rebels could keep the supply lines running through the eastern Ghouta open.


Asharq Al-Awsat is the world’s premier pan-Arab daily newspaper, printed simultaneously each day on four continents in 14 cities

Source: http://www.aawsat.net/2013/04/article55299347

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

I Know why the Lame Duck Squawks

by Clarice Feldman

This has not been a good week for President Obama. I think it will not be the worst week of this year or this term, which I predict will get worse as his own personality flaws and patently partisan strategies make his lame-duck term even more impotent than is usually the case.

To begin with, he bet the farm on the passage of new gun-control legislation. Albeit the vote this week in the Senate was only on amendments to the main bill -- something his Majority Leader Reid (who won his last race as the NRA choice) insisted on, though it made passage more difficult, requiring 60, not 51 votes -- all the amendments went down in flames with numbers of his own party members abandoning him. By week's end Reid had withdrawn the main bill without even bringing it to a vote.

In defiance of reality, Obama held a petulant, unpresidential press conference, ending the effort as he began it with demagogic, partisan rhetoric. ...and a threat to accomplish by executive orders what he cannot achieve by legislation

The Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley captured my thoughts on the defeat of these proposed bills:

Barack Obama is a lame duck president. Nobody listens to what he says anymore, nobody is interested in winning  his approval and nobody much cares if he thinks they have "let the country down". This is typical for a second-term president who has lost all their leverage because they're no longer running for office and everybody is patiently waiting for the day when he quits the White House. But Obama's difficult personality has doubled the size of the challenge. Gloating in victory, adolescent in defeat -- the Prez doesn't make it easy to work with him. Why should conservative senators give him a legislative victory after he has spent four years painting them as knuckle-dragging rednecks who hate women and the poor?
Whatever your position on gun control, yesterday's events are a damning indictment of Obama's presidency -- a flash of style, lots of soaring rhetoric and, when the votes are actually counted, little [to] show for any of it. America has four more years of this lame-duck president telling them that it has let him down. If only he could tear up the Constitution and rule by diktat he might save himself a little disappointment. Alas, American democracy is a stickler for rules.

Aside from the loss of face, it's clear that much more than gun control was behind his strategic miscalculation. I believe it was directed at retaking the House so that he could once again control the levers of government which had earlier permitted the ramming through of Obamacare, a piece of legislation so outrageously unworkable that recently, Senators Baucus and Rockefeller, whose efforts made it possible, are now warning its implementation will be a disaster.

Powerline's John Hinderaker touched on the reason for the president's rage:

But why was Obama so angry? I wrote here that it was odd for Obama to make gun control the signature issue of his second term, since there has never been any chance of significant gun control legislation being enacted. It couldn't possibly get through the House. So why, today, was he so irate about its failure in the Senate?
As we have noted more than once, pretty much everything Obama does is intended to stir up the Democratic Party's base to drive turnout in 2014. Obama knows he can't do much of anything as long as the GOP holds the House, so his primary goal is to stoke outrage on the left, in hopes that 2014 will look like 2008 and 2012, and not like 2010. So no doubt he hoped that some gun control measure -- any gun control measure! -- could get through the Senate, so that pressure, probably irresistible, could be brought to force a vote on the same proposal in the House. Not so that it might pass, but so that House Republicans would be on record voting against gun control. Obama could have raised countless millions from his fervently anti-gun base to go after the more vulnerable such Republicans. Now, the issue won't even come up in the House, and Obama and the Democrats will have to find something else.

But I think it was more than stirring the base. The Daily Caller pegged it -- the president hoped that this wedge issue would deliver a Democratic House next year:

The Senate's effective rejection of President Barack Obama's post-Newtown gun control bill robs the Democratic Party of an important tool for trying to regain a majority in the House in November 2014.

"Are they serious?" a visibly angry Obama demanded of opponents of the Toomey/Manchin Senate bill. In a late-afternoon announcement outside the White House, the president added that if Congress continues not to pass a gun control bill, "the answer will have to come from the voters."

But without a Senate bill, there's little chance that vulnerable GOP House members in suburban swing-districts will face the unpleasant choice of either recording a public vote against what Obama repeatedly describes as "common-sense measures to reduce gun violence and save lives" or voting against gun rights supported by the National Rifle Association and many Americans.

The wedge issue was highlighted this morning by Obama's 2012 strategic advisor, David Axelrod.

"A bunch of suburban, swing district Republicans in House are probably deeply relieved that Senate appears poised to kill background checks," Axelrod said in a morning tweet.

"Interested to see if [Mayor Mike] Bloomberg and others who've worked hard on this issue remain active in 2014 elections, holding no votes accountable," Axelrod added at 9.43 a.m. EST.

To this end, the Administration had pulled out all the stops, schlepping around the badly wounded Gabby Giffords and some of the Sandy Hook grieving parents.

James Taranto dissected the incivility and unreason of the appeal written in her name for the New York Times -- the same could be said of the entire White House strategy respecting this legislation:

Giffords's 900-word jeremiad should be included in every textbook of logic and political rhetoric, so rife is it with examples of fallacious reasoning and demagogic appeals. Let's go through them:

• The argumentum ad passiones, or appeal to emotion.

[snip]

• The appeal to motives. Giffords claims that the senators who voted against the measures "looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby" and "made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association." She also asserts that "their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest" and on "cowardice." These characterizations are mutually inconsistent -- can a senator's decision have been based on both unreasoning fear and a cold (but erroneous!) calculation of self-interest?--and they are also entirely unsubstantiated. So is her assertion that "the status quo" is "desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation."

• Guilt by association.

[snip]

• Poisoning the well. In reality, the [Senators who voted against the legislation] didn't "do nothing"; they rejected particular legislative proposals. It does not follow, and indeed it seems unlikely and is boorish to assert, that their expressions of sympathy were not heartfelt.

• Begging the question. Giffords characterizes the proposed amendments as "common-sense legislation" that "could prevent future tragedies." She also describes them as "these most benign and practical of solutions." She pretends that the central matter in dispute -- whether the benefits would outweigh the costs or indeed whether the proposals would have yielded the benefits their advocates promised at all -- has already been settled in her side's favor.

• The no-true-Scotsman move. "[snip] She ignores the possibility that those polls are flawed and that the senators are hearing a different message from their constituents. Then she qualifies her claim of public unanimity: "I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth . . ." See what she did there? (The switcheroo to every reasonable American reminds us of a probably apocryphal tale about Adlai Stevenson. A woman is supposed to have said to him, "Governor, you have the support of every thinking American," to which he replied: "But madam, I need a majority.")

• The argumentum ad baculam, or argument from the club. [snip] This consists in attempting to persuade by making threats.

• The argumentum ad miserecordiam, or appeal to pity. "[snip] It should be obvious that this in no way speaks to the merits of the legislation or even the character of its supporters and opponents.

• The false dilemma. This is Giffords's closing gambit: "To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way."

• The appeal to authority. That would be Giffords's own authority as a former lawmaker. [snip] Perhaps her legislative experience gives her some insight into the senators' state of mind, but if so, she does not share it with readers, whom she expects to accept her conclusion unquestioningly.

She makes one other appeal to authority, writing of the senators who voted "no" that "they will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done -- trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you."
But the appeal to authority isn't always fallacious. In this case, Giffords has earned her readers' trust. The op-ed itself demonstrates her total command of how politicians talk when they want to distract

Kevin D. Williamson at NRO dismissed her appeal more tersely:

While Ms. Giffords certainly has my sympathy for the violence she suffered, it should be noted that being shot in the head by a lunatic does not give one any special grace to pronounce upon public-policy questions, nor does it give one moral license to call people "cowards" for holding public-policy views at variance with one's own. Her childish display in the New York Times is an embarrassment.

As to the repeated claim that 90% of Americans wanted this legislation and the wicked NRA was strong enough to block it, and did so by lies, the first answer is to admire the strength of the president's opponents and marvel at his own incredible impotence. On the other hand, it's more likely that claim is bunk. Charlie Martin and Tom Maguire dismantle that nonsensical excuse:
Charlie on Facebook:

Odd how something is bipartisan if 59 Democrats and 1 Republican votes for it in the face of mass public opposition in many polls (*cough* health care *cough*), but it's Republican when 5 Democrats vote against it. It's also funny how a slightly different question ("change gun control laws"/"leave them as they are") gets a substantial majority in favor of keeping them as they are: http://www.pollingreport.com/guns.htm

Tom Maguire also probed the 90% claim and found it without substance:

So when our peerless leader says that "90 percent of the American people support universal background checks" he really means that roughly 90% support the current law and a bare majority favor extending that law to family transfers. I wonder if he knows he is wrong about this?

Well. If I were giving Obama advice I would say that in the same way that the best can be the enemy of the good, the stupidest can be the enemy of the marginally plausible. The assault weapons ban was a political non-starter that labelled its supporters (including Obama) as laughably ignorant on basic gun design and basic Constitutional issues. That inclusion tends to poison the subsequent conversation.

But don't take my word for it! Here is the NY Times describing Sen. Feinstein's debacle:

Almost immediately after the murders in Newtown, gun control advocates and the Democratic leadership in the Senate decided that legislation strengthening background checks for gun purchases was their best avenue for success. (Though in a sign of how they miscalculated over all, that measure was also defeated on Wednesday, falling five votes short.)

An assault weapons ban was never going to attract senators like Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, with A ratings from the National Rifle Association, whose support would be needed for a compromise. And Democrats now privately complain that Ms. Feinstein's bill seemed to rally gun control opponents, who could point to it as Exhibit A in what they perceived as a federal conspiracy to take guns away from law-abiding citizens.

Yes it did, and broadly worded polls showed fading public support for the control effort:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A bipartisan effort to expand background checks is in deep trouble as the Senate approaches a long-awaited vote on the linchpin of the drive to curb gun violence. As the showdown draws near, an Associated Press-GfK poll shows ebbing public support for tightening gun control laws.

[snip]

Perhaps helping explain Democrats' problems, an AP-GfK poll this month showed that 49 percent of Americans support stricter gun laws. That was down from 58 percent who said so in January -- a month after the December killings of 20 children and six aides at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school propelled gun violence into a national issue.

When "stricter laws" includes fantasy and nonsense the public may lose a bit of the nuance. Add to that Obama's ongoing inability to move the needle and here we are. On to immigration reform!

CANDOR: Here is Obama using the same stale stats to make the case for expanded background checks:

All it did was extend the same background check rules that already apply to guns purchased from a dealer to guns purchased at gun shows or over the Internet. So 60 percent of guns are already purchased through a background check system.

This would have covered a lot of the guns that are currently outside that system.
I think he is impenetrable on this one, but it certainly adds irony to this:

But instead of supporting this compromise, the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.

Peter Wehner neatly wrapped up the administration's shameful efforts:

The families of the Newtown massacre are being used by the president in an effort to frame the issue this way: If you're with Obama, you're on the side of saving innocent children from mass killings -- and if you're against Obama, you have the blood of the children of Newtown on your hands. But it actually does matter if what Obama is proposing would have made any difference when it came to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And the fact that it would not have is what makes Obama's gambit so shameful and disturbing. (I say that as someone who is somewhat sympathetic to the expanded background checks.)
Mr. Obama's effort at emotional blackmail has failed, and in bitterly lashing out at those who called him out on his demagoguery, he went some distance toward confirming that he is, in fact, a demagogue.
Three months into his second term, Mr. Obama is becoming an increasingly bitter and powerless figure. When a man who views himself as a world-historic figure and our Moral Superior commands things to happen and they don't, it isn't a pretty sight. See yesterday's Rose Garden statement for more.

Now, on to the next wedge issue the Administration hoped to exploit -- immigration. This is another major issue, where a very lengthy bill has been drafted so far without hearings or debate, on an important hot-button issue.

Fate doesn't seem to be with him. The perpetrators of the Boston terror campaign seem to be recent Islamic immigrants and the citizens of Massachusetts, which has very strict gun control laws, were forced to cower inside their defenseless homes in fear.

Clarice Feldman

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/i_know_why_the_lame_duck_squawks.html

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

The New York Times vs. David Mamet

by Andrew Klavan


 

The New York Times is very good at what it does — which nowadays involves a lot of lying in service to a leftist agenda.  There are the outright lies (such as the paper’s recent distortion of a police bias trial to make the NYPD appear racist), the lies of omission (such as its lack of full reporting on the Obama administration’s fatal acts of malfeasance and dishonesty in, say, the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals), and the atmospheric lies (such as its rose-colored reporting on the disastrous economy in bluer-than-blue California).  Altogether, these lies combine to make the paper something like the Matrix: a plausible imitation of reality intended to deceive people so that their substance may be milked to feed an overweening state.

As in the 1999 sci-fi film that begat that metaphor, rebellion against the illusion results in swift retribution.  And nowhere does the Times rush to punish resistance so quickly as in the arts.  Times reviewers consistently give sympathetic treatment to leftist cultural works while attacking those of a conservative bent, often regardless of quality.

Which brings me to David Mamet.

One of the most important American playwrights of the last 40 years, Mamet, in 2008, at the age of 60, broke from the near-universal leftist conformity of the theater community and declared in an essay in the Village Voice that he was “no longer a brain-dead liberal.”  He followed this up in 2012 with a book entitled The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, which was nothing less than a conservative manifesto.

For the Times’ culture writers — and anyone else interested in preserving the left’s near-monopoly on our arts — Mamet’s political conversion presented a problem.  The Pulitzer-winner’s credentials could hardly be any more impressive.  He’s written mainstays of the modern theater like Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, and screenplays for such terrific films as The Untouchables and The Verdict.  His original mix of American tough-guy vernacular and Pinteresque allusion had a huge effect on stage writing throughout the last third of the 20th century.  He is an American master.
So the Times set out to destroy him.

The one time I met Mamet, I asked him if he had paid a price for admitting to his conservatism.  He laughed and replied that, after his Voice piece, the New York Times had given his next play not one, but two, bad reviews!  I do not believe the paper has given a new play of his a good review since.  When they praise his early plays, it is often to compare them unfavorably to his later ones.  And when his latest play, “The Anarchist,” opened on Broadway last December, they not only savaged it but celebrated its commercial failure with a nasty, slanted post-mortem.

While no one under the emotional age of 127 looks to the New York Times to set his cultural agenda, live theater is the one art form that remains somewhat dependent on the paper’s good opinion.  Manhattan is still the center of the theater universe and a review from the Times can be decisive.  So when Times chief theater critic Ben Brantley greeted “The Anarchist” with a childishly sneering, dismissive, and largely content-free pan, it was perhaps unsurprising that the play proceeded to close shortly thereafter.

The Times then followed its bad review with its subtly brutal obituary, “Behind a Flop, A Play(wright) Within a Play,” by Patrick Healy.  Healy opines that the rapid “demise of ‘The Anarchist’ raises questions about the theater business.”  These questions, according to Healy, are:  Did loyalty to Mamet and the hope of a big score lead the producers to rush the play to the stage?  Should Mamet have been allowed to direct his own work?  And — the big one, given a paragraph of its own:  “Does Mr. Mamet… still have something to say to a contemporary audience?”

Are these, in fact, the questions the play’s closing raises?  What about: “Can a Broadway dominated by musicals and revivals still support new, small, serious drama?” Or how about: “Has the Times’s politically-inspired sniping at the playwright cost him popularity?”

But no, to Healy, the questions are only:  is Mamet too influential, is he unable to direct, is he too old?

This last is a particularly vicious swipe in a culture world overeager for the young and hip — especially among Times readers, for whom the word “hip” is too often followed by the word “replacement.”  And since it often requires several decades for an artist to acquire the wisdom and courage to openly embrace conservatism, the charge that he is past his prime is usually readily available to his left wing detractors.
But never mind.  Let me try to answer Healy’s questions.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been steeped in Mamet’s latest stuff.  I watched the HBO drama Phil Spector, which Mamet wrote and directed; I attended the Los Angeles revival of “American Buffalo” at the Geffen Playhouse; and I read “The Anarchist” (a performance wasn’t available to me).

Phil Spector is a smart, entertaining bagatelle.  It’s largely worthwhile for Mamet’s superbly kinetic direction (answering one of Healy’s questions) and the brilliant speeches written for Al Pacino’s Spector.  (“Extraordinary accomplishments…  transform the grateful into an audience, and the envious into a mob.”)  It’s not a major work, but it’s a minor work by a major talent.  This and the fact that Mamet’s 2009 “Race” was a hit on Broadway despite more sneering attacks from the Times seems to answer another Healy question:  yes, Mamet can still bring it.

As for American Buffalo, it was great.  The Geffen revival is some of the best theater I’ve seen in LA (where the Los Angeles Times has also been waging an anti-Mamet campaign).  The story of three small-time thieves losing track of everything that matters in their illegal pursuit of an endangered American dream is as powerful and relevant today as it was in ’77.  The fact that a revival of this terrific play bombed on Broadway in 2008 (after another Times pan) reminds us that artistic and commercial success don’t always gibe on the Great White Way.

And what about “The Anarchist?”  My judgement here has to be provisional.  Mamet’s plays reveal themselves in performance more than on the page because…  well, because they’re plays.  All the same, I think I can safely say that this short, two-handed drama is a small but important work of the American theater.  It will be re-staged and reconsidered long after Ben Brantley, Patrick Healy and the paper they work for are all forgotten.

Like Robert Redford’s recent movie The Company We Keep, “The Anarchist” concerns a Weatherman style leftist terrorist (Cathy).  After 35-years in prison for killing two policemen during a politically motivated bank robbery, Cathy is brought before Ann, an authority figure who has the power to facilitate her parole.  Cathy claims that she has converted from Judaism to Christianity, and deserves her freedom.  Ann is suspicious.  The intellectual fencing match between the two women slowly reveals Cathy’s outlook and motivations.

Of course, it was the play’s politics that were going to get under the Times’ skin.  Redford’s movie, with its soft focus view of ‘60’s radicals, got a lukewarm but affectionate and sympathetic review from the paper, but Brantley brusquely dismissed Mamet’s tougher approach.  (“If you know Mr. Mamet’s politics… you know which way Ann leans.”)

This is not just biased, it’s dumb.  The play is informed by Mamet’s politics, sure, as Redford’s movie is informed by his, but “The Anarchist” is much more deeply informed by Mamet’s Jewish faith.  The verbal battle between Cathy and Ann is underscored by a bold critique of Christian forgiveness in light of the demands of Jewish justice.  In this, “The Anarchist” sings a sort of counterpoint to the Merchant of Venice.  Since Merchant – and much western culture — depicts Jewish justice as rigid and bloodthirsty while Christian mercy droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, to see Mamet stage the argument from a Jewish perspective is radical and bracing.

It’s powerful intellectual theater, rich, deep and provocative.  It’s no surprise it had a short run on a Broadway dominated by musicals and paltry star vehicles — especially with the Times on the leftist warpath.

But whether my judgement of the play is borne out or not, the larger point perhaps is this.  An art world with only one opinion is an art world inhospitable to the arts.  David Mamet has come roaring into the maturity of his vision.  He is a conservative.  Perhaps the lockstep guardians of our political sensibilities should get over it and give him the honest consideration he deserves.   The New York Times’ ongoing treatment of one of America’s most important artists will determine whether the paper still has anything to say to a contemporary audience.


Andrew Klavan

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-klavan/the-new-york-times-vs-david-mamet/

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

David Horowitz: My Thoughts On Boston

by David Horowitz

 

Watching the news about the Boston bombing and the Muslim fanatics who perpetrated the deed, I cannot help reflect on all the nasty attacks that liberals and progressives and Muslim activists have conducted against conservatives who have attempted to warn Americans that their enemies are religious fanatics driven by an apocalyptic hatred of us because we are Jews, Christians, atheists, democrats – in a word, infidels.

It has been said by Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and other Democrats that George Bush created the terrorists by attempting to enforce a UN Security council resolution and take down one of the monsters of the 20^th Century in Iraq.  It has been said by the late Susan Sontag and other progressive intellectuals that the heinous attacks of 9/11 were the result of American policies. The Center for American Progress and university administrators have relentlessly defamed as Islamphobes and bigots those of us who have had the temerity to talk about the Islamic roots of Islamic terror. If only we ignored the Islamic beliefs behind the terrorism and made nice to all Muslims indiscriminately, the terrorists wouldn’t hate us.

Boston has exposed this as the Big Lie and fatuous delusion that it has always been. The Boston killers were treated better in America than all but an elite among Americans born here who love their country. They were given scholarships, they were admitted to the most exclusive prep schools, they lived in a Cambridge environment where critics of Islamic terror were regarded as Islamophobes and they as a minority deserving special consideration and concern. And yet they hated us. They hated America and ordinary Americans like the victims of their mayhem, and enlisted in the army of our mortal enemies. They hated us because they were fanatical believers in the idea that Mohammed had desired them to kill infidels and purify the earth for Allah. This is the face of our enemy and the sooner the delusional liberals among us wake up to this fact, the safer all of us will be.

David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987).

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/my-thoughts-on-boston/

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

Turkey’s Regime Fails Abroad; Is World Champion at Fundamental Transformation at Home

by Barry Rubin


A Turkish friend just wrote me that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sold his soul to the Devil. That implies Erdogan is succeeding on every front, as if by magic. More accurately, however, the trick is that Erdogan’s foreign policy is failing on almost every front but he’s able to convince Turks that the situation is the exact opposite.

Let’s examine the list of developments in objective terms:

–He has made no progress on membership or integration in the European Union. Similarly, his diplomatic efforts to ease relations with neighboring Armenia have borne no fruit.

–Erdogan has thrown away the virtual alliance with Israel without gaining anything materially in the Arabic-speaking world. Although few seem to understand this point, it was not Israel that groveled in accepting Erdogan’s terms but the exact opposite.

The Syrian situation has a lot to do with this, as does—amazingly enough—a bit of U.S. pressure (see below), but also he had a new problem. As an Israeli diplomat explained:

“Turkish export routes to the east used to go through Syria, to the East and to the Gulf. That’s not possible anymore. Turkish exports are shipped to the port of Haifa, where they’re loaded onto trucks, which cross Israel and then go to Jordan, and then from Jordan, they are shipped to the Gulf and to the East. Israel has now become a [pivotal] point for Turkish exports.”

–Turkey had gained no real influence over the Palestinian Hamas and the Lebanese Hizballah groups on which he has lavished much attention.

–In Syria, despite Turkey’s good relations with the dictatorship there, he has backed a rebellion in which he seemingly had great influence. But now Erdogan is clearly having second thoughts, becoming scared that he may have produced a Frankenstein’s monster, a radical Islamist state next door which might cause troubles for Turkey.

–And now Turkey is bordered also by not one but two Kurdish “states.” While he has done well in keeping good relations with the Kurdish-governed district in northern Iraq, its flourishing existence must be worrisome to him, including its effect on Turkey’s own large Kurdish minority. And now there is a much more militant Kurdish statelet in Syria ruled by his old adversaries, the Kurdish Workers’ Party’s local branch. Erdogan does have a plan to deal with Syrian Kurdistan building on the Iraq model: good relations, regional autonomy, and no attacks from there against Turkey. Still, how certain can he be that there won’t be big problems?

–Most important of all, perhaps, is that Erdogan’s attempt to gain wider leadership in the Middle East (called “neo-Ottomanism,” recalling Turkey’s pre-World War One empire in the region) has fallen flat on its face. While Erdogan stresses his Muslim credentials, nobody who speaks Arabic has forgotten that he isn’t one of them.

–And now his love affair with President Barack Obama is on the rocks, at least temporarily. Erdogan’s level of anti-Israel and even antisemitic invective has risen so high and became so obvious that the U.S. government could no longer ignore it. For the first time, questions were raised about the great model Islamist in Washington. That was one of the key motives for the president’s effort to effect Israel-Turkey conciliation. As always, Erdogan has gone out of his way to be provocative. He told the Fifth UN Alliance of Civilizations meeting in Vienna, for example, that Zionism was a “crime against humanity.” Since such crimes should presumably be punished, this can be regarded as Erdogan calling for genocide against Israel and its residents.

“Just like Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it becomes unavoidable that Islamophobia must be regarded as a crime against humanity,” he alleged.

It is also  possible–and there is some evidence for this–that the U.S. government feels that Erdogan misled it on Syrian issues now that it has partly awakened to seeing that country about to go under radical Islamist rule. America followed Turkish advice and the result is advanced weapons in the hands of terrorists who may soon be running the country. I warned about this two years ago, but perhaps the U.S. government is a bit ticked off at being made to look like idiots and having gotten into a dangerous situation. Let’s also remember that Erdogan’s projected trip to the Gaza Strip would have disrupted U.S. “peacemaking” efforts and after talking to Obama, Erdogan backed off (but see below). And, finally, let’s remember that the whole Israel-Turkey rapprochement might still fall apart due to Erdogan and leave Obama and Kerry looking foolish.

The problem is that since Erdogan has received U.S. praise and support as he has bashed U.S. interests he then doesn’t need to respect U.S. interests. Many or most Turks today can combine two seemingly discordant views: Obama and his government love Turkey’s government and views it as a friend; they themselves increasingly hate the United States and its goals.

We will know more after Erdogan visits the White House on May 16. If that turns out to be another Obama-Erdogan love fest, more demonstration of the fact that Erdogan is Obama’s favorite Islamist, with no criticism in evidence despite all that the Turkish prime minister has done deliberately against U.S. interests, it would be safe to conclude that Erdogan owns the White House for the next three years. He will know that he can do anything he pleases.

But there are few in Turkey who understand this list of losses. On the contrary, Erdogan has successfully sold the situation to them as one of tremendous success. They can be proud of their country’s return to international power and great respect, or at least so it seems. In this view, Turkey is acting in a properly Islamic manner, the Arabs love them, America recognizes their greatness (they can do whatever they want and the United States caves in), he made Israel apologize, and so on.

On top of this, Turkey’s muscle-flexing boldness, anti-Americanism, and hostility to Israel pleases the left and the nationalist right; his Islamic policy pleases the pious. As a result, Erdogan enjoys the support of a strong majority.

Consequently, Erdogan is the world’s most successful leader in fundamentally transforming his country. Step by step, he is seizing all of the country’s institutions for Islamism. Graduates of Islamic schools, who have now been given parity with university graduates, are flooding into the state bureaucracy.

The army’s political power has been broken and Islamists are now going into the officer corps. The media has largely—but not completely—been bought up and intimidated. Only the judiciary remains. The economy is doing reasonably well.

In this context, Erdogan increasingly appears to be a dictator who is building a cult of personality. Everywhere there are signs claiming that Erdogan “gave” the people whatever public works’ project or new school exists in the vicinity. His situation is comparable to Russia’s dictator (in everything but name) Vladimir Putin.

Here’s a case study, the Israel-Turkey agreement on resolving the dispute over the Gaza flotilla.  Under pressure from President Barack Obama, Erdogan agreed to Israel’s terms while pretending that this was a great victory for himself. Yet there is increasing reason to believe that the Turkish government will NOT implement its draft agreement with Israel. There are two factors involved here. First, Erdogan, as usual, is overreaching abroad, getting nothing because he tried to get too much. Second, though, Erdogan doesn’t care because his real intended audience is domestic, using the flotilla aftermath to stir up hatred against Israel and now claiming he has forced Israel to surrender in what constitutes a great victory for Turkey. What Israel’s conciliatory behavior actually did was to expose the Turkish regime’s bad faith, showing that it is impossible to deal with it, an experience comprehended now in Washington for the first time.

Now Erdogan has vetoed Israel’s participation in NATO maneuvers and Erdogan says he won’t send back his ambassador unless Israel stops all sanctions against the Gaza Strip. He knows that this demand will kill the deal. Yet at home he can claim to be the champion of Muslims and of Palestinians. That domestic propaganda is all that counts for him. Similarly, after agreeing to postpone his provocative trip to the Gaza Strip Erdogan then merely rescheduled it for May. And on top of that, Erdogan then announced he would (for the first time) send an ambassador to Palestine even when refusing to send an ambassador back to Israel. Once again, he threw a pie in Obama’s face.

Why does this make sense? Again, because he doesn’t care about the international implications but only domestic political bragging rights. Moreover, none of his antics materially hurt Israel but–note this well–there are some interesting ways in which Erdogan is going to lose by forfeiting Israel’s cooperation.

Meanwhile, the West, especially the mass media, has not yet quite caught on to the fact that the Turkey of Kemal Ataturk, the secular republic, is gone. Massive rural migration to the cities has created a wave of traditional behavior that has been funneled and retrained as Islamism. Turkey has also become an increasingly repressive state where journalists tremble, critics may be thrown into jail on trumped-up charges, and a cultural revolution to reverse Ataturk’s reforms is far advanced. Erdogan’s greatest achievement in terms of the international scene is that by his maneuvers and Obama’s approval, he has made the world uninterested in the escalating repression in Turkey including ridiculous Stalinist-style show trials of dissidents. The latest event is the sentencing of an internationally famous Turkish concert pianist to ten months’ imprisonment for tweets “insulting” Islam and a court decision claiming a 700-year-old church was illegally run as a state museum making possible its conversion into a mosque.

Thus, Erdogan has put together a winning combination: fake victories abroad; repression, seizing institutions, and mobilizing support through patriotism and Islam at home.


Barry Rubin

Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/04/turkeys-regime-fails-abroad-is-world-champion-at-fundamental-transformation-at-home/

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

Overall, a Good Week for Iran Deterrence

by Evelyn Gordon


This week’s publication of a report effectively urging U.S. appeasement of Iran, signed by many leading lights of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, clearly undermines administration efforts to press Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. But despite the Iran Project report’s negative impact, which Jonathan aptly explained yesterday, this has been a good week overall on the Iran deterrence front, thanks mainly to the U.S. Senate.

On Tuesday, the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee passed a resolution pledging the following: “If the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.” The resolution hasn’t yet passed the full Senate, but with a whopping 79 out of 100 senators co-sponsoring it, that august body’s views aren’t in much doubt.

This matters because, contrary to the Iran Project, most experts think Iran won’t negotiate an end to its nuclear program unless it’s convinced that refusing to deal will result in devastating military strikes. And though President Obama has consistently said all options are on the table, in practice, senior administration officials have repeatedly warned that an attack on Iran would be disastrous, with the result that Iran’s leaders don’t take the U.S. threat seriously. Consequently, the only credible military threat against Iran currently comes from Israel–a fact confirmed by no less a source than Iran’s own Intelligence Ministry, which in November issued a report that dismissed the possibility of a U.S. strike but urged negotiations to avert a “Zionist” attack.

Yet anyone following the debate in Israel knows that Israel’s biggest concern about attacking Iran–even bigger than the fear of Iranian counterstrikes–is fear that U.S. support won’t be forthcoming the day after. Israel would need such support on numerous fronts: diplomatic support against the inevitable world outcry, perhaps emergency military resupply to repulse a counterattack, and above all, leadership in mobilizing the international community to maintain the sanctions regime and prevent Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program. As several Israeli experts have noted, the worst-case scenario would be to bomb Iran and then have it obtain nukes anyway because the collapse of the sanctions regime enabled it to rebuild swiftly.

With this resolution, however, the Senate has effectively told Iran that isn’t going to happen: Should Israel reach the point where it believes it has no choice but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, America will give it full “diplomatic, military, and economic support” afterward.

Then, as icing on the cake, came Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz’s blunt statement that same day: “The IDF has the capability of attacking the nuclear installations [in Iran] by itself,” Gantz declared.

A year ago, American experts were already claiming that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was at the outer limits of Israel’s capability, and since then, the job has only gotten harder, since the underground Fordow facility is now in operation. This has fed speculation that Iran’s nuclear program is already too big and too hardened for Israel to take out on its own. Now, Gantz has refuted this speculation–and the fact that he is considered a dove on the Iranian issue gives his refutation redoubled force.

In short, Israel has reaffirmed its ability to attack, and the U.S. has pledged to support it if it does. This has to make Iran’s rulers uneasy. And that should make the rest of us sleep better at night.

 

Evelyn Gordon

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/04/19/overall-a-good-week-for-iran-deterrence/

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

Remembering Warsaw By Trashing Zionism

by Jonathan S. Tobin


Today is the 70th anniversary of the start of one of the greatest acts of heroism in the history of the world. On April 19, 1943, SS forces entered the Warsaw Ghetto to begin the final “liquidation” of the enclave in which hundreds of thousands of Jews had been herded. But instead of rounding up the tens of thousands of starving Jews, they were attacked by Jewish resistance forces that stalled their advance and set off a battle that would last for weeks. Two separate groups organized the resistance. One was the ZOB—The Jewish Combat Organization—a coalition that was largely led by left-wing Zionists. The other was the ZZW—the Jewish Military Union—led by right-wing Zionists. Both fought bravely in a struggle that could not alter the fate of the Jews of Warsaw but which nevertheless reminded the world that the honor of the Jewish people had been redeemed in even the most hopeless of circumstances.

Resistance to the Nazis was expressed in many ways, and we now understand that those who stayed with the elderly and children as well as those who died with dignity in other ways deserve to be remembered just as do those few who were able to take up arms against their murderers. But we rightly remember the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and all those who were able to resist the Nazis because their efforts were a symbol of heroism that has inspired subsequent generations of Jews to stand up against those who seek to carry on the hate of Hitler and his legions. The most famous moment of the revolt was the raising by the ZZW of the flag of Poland and the blue and white banner of Zionism over Muranowski Square. This was an event that even the Germans considered of immense importance since it showed their opponents were part of a nation they could not kill–a nation that would be reborn five years later as the State of Israel.

But in a curious act of revisionism, the New York Times commemorated the Ghetto Uprising today with an article that seeks to push back against this narrative and to replace it with one that downgrades the importance of Zionism in both the story of the Warsaw revolt and its place in Jewish history.


Yale University scholar Marci Shore’s “The Jewish Hero History Forgot” focused on Marek Edelman, one leader of the ZOB who was not a supporter of Zionism. While Edelman deserves to be honored as a hero, her attempt to debunk the traditional view of the uprising tells us more about the left’s animus toward Israel than it does about the events of 1943 or the Jews of Poland. Though all those who resisted and even those who did not should be memorialized, the idea that Edelman’s distaste for the Jewish state should be the last word about the Holocaust is as offensive as it is a distortion of Jewish history.

Edelman was a member of the Bund, the Jewish Labor Party, a socialist group dedicated to preserving Jewish life and culture in Poland and which rejected Zionism. The argument between the two movements is an interesting chapter of the Jewish past, but surely not one that needs to be re-fought in light of what happened. Yet Shore argues that the Bundist position was actually reasonable:

Today, the teleological deceptions of retrospect make it seem a foregone conclusion that the Zionists would win that debate. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, the Bund’s program seemed much more grounded, sensible and realistic: a Jewish workers’ party allied with a larger labor movement, a secular Jewish culture in Yiddish, the language already spoken by most Jews, a future in the place where Jews already lived, alongside people they already knew. The Zionist idea that millions of European Jews would adopt a new language, uproot themselves en masse, and resettle in a Middle Eastern desert amid people about whom they knew nothing was far less realistic.

But the problem with this attempt to rehabilitate a failed ideology is that even in the 1930s, the idea that there was a viable Jewish future in a virulently anti-Semitic Poland set in a Europe where Nazism was on the rise was the fantasy, not the burgeoning and successful effort to rebuild Jewish life in what was then called Palestine.

As Shore notes, after the war when almost all of the survivors of the revolt found their way to Israel, Edelman stayed in Poland and served as a doctor. But his subsequent life in a Poland where those few Jews who stayed behind were subjected to a new wave of anti-Semitism from the Communist government merely demonstrated anew how wrong the Bundists had been all along. While she writes of him as someone celebrated today as a Polish hero, anti-Semitism is alive and well in contemporary Poland.

She chides Israel for not treating Edelman with the honor he deserved, but that is also a distortion of the record. It was he who disdained Israel more than it slighted him, as she indicates with her concluding quote  in which he says “a single-nation state is never a good thing.”

But it is difficult to understand how one can think about what happened in Warsaw 70 years ago as well as the rest of the Holocaust without concluding that creating a national home for the Jewish people where they could defend themselves was a good thing.

Jews of every conceivable religious and political belief lived, fought and died in Warsaw. But their plight illustrated that the Zionist idea that Jews must take their fate into their own hands was correct. What the Zionists understood in the pre-Holocaust era was that the belief that Europe could remain home to millions of Jews was an illusion. Zionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky told the Jews of Warsaw on Tisha B’Av—the date on which Jews commemorate the destruction of their ancient Temple—in 1938 that “the catastrophe is coming closer” and they and the rest of European Jewry must be evacuated. Rather than working with him to save European Jewry, the Bundists mocked Jabotinsky.

From the perspective of 2013, the Zionist critique of pre-war Jewish complacence is still compelling. Today, even the U.S. State Department has concluded that a troubling wave of anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe. In France, the largest Jewish community on the continent is under siege with many leaving for Israel. The concept that the Jews must have a state of their own where they can stand against the still-vibrant forces of hate remains irrefutable.

Contemporary leftist critics of Israel may also view the Jewish state with distaste and wish to somehow separate it from the sacred memory of Jewish resistance against the Nazis. But the attempt to replace the Zionist narrative with one in which the revolt is detached from subsequent Jewish history is utterly fraudulent. The Ghetto fighters were the forerunners of those who have fought to preserve Jewish life and sovereignty during the 65 years of Israel’s existence. For the New York Times to choose to devote its only coverage to this subject by publishing Shore’s thinly veiled critique of Zionist historiography is a disgrace.
 

Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/04/19/remembering-warsaw-by-trashing-zionism/#more-823213

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