News and views on Israel, Zionism and the war on terrorism.
posted by Mike @ 9:28 PM
At the end of February, with war in Iraq looming, U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen paid a visit to Yasir Arafat in his shattered compound in Ramallah. For months, the Palestinian leader had believed the outbreak of war would work to his advantage, restoring him as a key player in peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Roed-Larsen laid it on the line: According to diplomatic sources, he told Arafat that the Palestinian leader would be "finished" unless he immediately appointed a prime minister with substantial powers--a precondition set by Ariel Sharon and the White House for restarting the peace process. Weeks later, Arafat grudgingly named his aide, Mahmoud Abbas, known by the nom de guerre Abu Mazen, to the post. Then, in dozens of phone conversations and meetings in smoke-filled rooms in Ramallah over the next two weeks, reformers from the Fatah movement, a faction within the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), persuaded key Arafat loyalists to block Arafat's bid to retain de facto control of the P.A. On March 18, the Palestinian Legislative Council rejected by an overwhelming majority Arafat's attempt to weaken the post, giving Abu Mazen total control over Cabinet appointments and other key responsibilities. "It was a democratic revolution," says Mohammed Hurani, a Fatah deputy who organized the rebellion.
. ..
Yet, even before the road map gets off the ground, it is facing withering skepticism from all sides. Despite Bush's public endorsement, according to U.N. officials, top White House officials, such as Dick Cheney, have been lukewarm toward the plan because they believe it does not make security for Israel the top priority, and they have sparred with the State Department, the key participant with the United Nations in the drafting of the document. Sharon's government has raised dozens of objections, including the plan's call for the creation of an "independent" Palestinian state. But the biggest short-term obstacle may be the very phenomenon that gave the road map momentum: the war in Iraq. ..
For the moment, Sharon is expressing cautious support for Abu Mazen. Israel once denounced him for "supporting terrorism" and vilified him as a "Holocaust denier." But the Israel Defense Forces have removed from their website excerpts from a book about Abu Mazen published in the early '80s based on his dissertation from Moscow's Oriental College in which he questioned whether the Nazis had used gas chambers and claimed that fewer than one million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust. Israeli Director of Military Intelligence Major General Aharon Ze'evi Farkash told the Israeli Cabinet last weekend that he discerns "an authentic and positive desire for change" in Abu Mazen, the only member of Arafat's inner circle who has consistently spoken out against the intifada. Sharon's top aide, Ephraim Halevy, has held at least one private meeting with the new prime minister, and one member of the diplomatic quartet that drew up the road map predicts that Sharon and Abu Mazen will have their first meeting in the coming weeks.
But the honeymoon could end quickly. Abu Mazen has begun holding talks with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in an effort to induce them to declare a cease-fire. Both Palestinians and Western diplomats, however, say that the rejectionists still have the upper hand. Disarming the militants, a key initial component of the road map, may prove to be far too ambitious a goal. "I can't see them giving up their guns," a European envoy who talks frequently to Hamas told me. The appointment of a strong Palestinian interior minister could intensify pressure on the radicals: One leading candidate is Mohammed Dahlan, the former preventive security chief in the Gaza Strip, who argued that the uprising was destroying the P.A. and who resigned his post last year. But Hamas and Islamic Jihad still enjoy strong support among Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, and any attempted crackdown against the militants is certain to backfire unless the Israeli government makes some substantial concessions of its own. "Abu Mazen has to show his people that the Israelis are freeing prisoners, withdrawing from the occupied territories, and stopping house demolitions," Roed-Larsen told me. "And he has to show Israel and the United States that there is no more terror." ...
Yet, despite such pressures--and even if the Iraq war ends quickly--most Palestinians and Israelis I talked to aren't optimistic about the prospects for peace. Sharon's requirement of a total cessation of violence before substantial negotiations can begin may be unattainable. "All you need is one idiot in Gaza, that's enough to derail the process," says Yossi Beilin, former minister of justice in Ehud Barak's government and a member of the Israeli negotiating teams at Oslo and Taba. Sharon's opposition to surrendering settlements also makes it unlikely that the road map will move beyond phase one, which calls upon Israel to take down outposts built after March 2001 and declare a settlement freeze. Even if the two sides progress past the first phase, most observers expect negotiations to bog down over the boundaries of a provisional Palestinian state. Foreign Minister Shalom said this week that Israel will give Abu Mazen one or two months to prove he can stop terrorist attacks--something that Palestinians close to the new prime minister say will be difficult. After two and a half years of suspicion and intransigence on both sides, most peace-process veterans I spoke with believe that the road map will end up like all the other peace initiatives of the last two years: a long detour to nowhere.
posted by fred @ 4:33 PM
WASHINGTON - If you want to figure out whether the administration of President George W Bush intends a crusade to remake the Middle East in the wake of Washington's presumed military victory in Iraq, watch what happens with R James Woolsey. A former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Woolsey is being pushed hard by his fellow neoconservatives in the Pentagon to play a key role in the post-Saddam Hussein US occupation.
Less well-known than his long-time associates and close friends, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the former head of the Defense Policy Board (DPB) Richard Perle, Woolsey has long believed that Washington has a mission to use its overwhelming military power and its democratic ideals to transform the Arab world. And he has pushed for war with Iraq as hard as anyone, even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
If he soon pops up in Baghdad, you can bet that the "clash of civilizations" is imminent, if it has not begun already. To Woolsey's mind, the US is already engaged in what he and many of his fellow neoconservatives call "World War IV", a struggle that pits the US and Britain against Islamist and Wahhabi extremists like al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, Iranian theocrats, and Ba'ath Party "fascists" in Syria and Iraq. In their view, the Cold War was World War III.
Their list also includes other authoritarian rulers in the Arab world, such as Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and the ruling Saud family in Saudi Arabia, whose "Faustian bargain" with the Muslim Wahhabi sect, in Woolsey's view, is responsible for al-Qaeda and much of Islamist-related terrorism throughout the world.
"We want you nervous," Woolsey told Mubarak and the Saudi monarchy in a speech to students at the University of California at Los Angeles last week. "We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, that this country and its allies are on the march, and that we are on the side of those you most fear: we're on the side of your own people." (Worth reading MORE)
posted by Ted @ 3:53 PM
posted by Soccer Dad @ 2:09 PM
ALBU MUHAWISH, Iraq - U.S. soldiers evacuated an Iraqi military compound on Sunday after tests by a mobile laboratory confirmed evidence of sarin nerve gas. More than a dozen soldiers of the Army's 101st Airborne Division had been sent earlier for chemical weapons decontamination after they exhibited symptoms of possible exposure to nerve agents.Similarly, on April 4, 2003, MSNBC posted an article entitled, "Positive test for terror toxins in Iraq - Evidence of ricin, botulinum at Islamic militants’ camp" , in which MSNBC stated:
...
U.S. soldiers found the suspect chemicals at two sites: an agricultural warehouse containing 55-gallon chemical drums and a military compound, which soldiers had begun searching on Saturday. The soldiers also found hundreds of gas masks and chemical suits at the military complex, along with large numbers of mortar and artillery rounds.
SARGAT, Iraq, April 4 — MSNBC.com tests reveal evidence of the deadly toxins ricin and botulinum at a laboratory in a remote mountain region of northern Iraq allegedly used as a terrorist training camp by Islamic militants with ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network.This evidence is over and above what even Blix found, e.g., the missiles which constituted a clear case of "banned weapons".
posted by Joseph @ 1:57 PM
Israel has been trying to get rid of Yasir Arafat for years, but it was a legitimate process, managed by the Palestinian legislature, that last month produced the first legitimate alternative: the first Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas.Now aside from the question of how legitmate the process was or if Abbas even represents much of a departure from Arafat, let's accept Friedman's premise that this is a good thing. Did it come about because the PLC simply decided that Arafat was immoral, or a terrorist or had led his people to ruin? Well no. It had everything to do with America showing resolve and telling the Palestinians that the gig was up. Arafat was not legitimate; go find someone else.
Mr. Bush should visit the West Bank. It is a cautionary tale of an occupation gone wrong. It is a miserable landscape of settlements, bypass roads, barbed wire and cement walls. Why? Because the Israeli and Palestinian mainstreams spent the last 36 years, since Israel's victory in 1967, avoiding any clear decision over how to govern this land. So those extremists who had a clear idea, like the settlers and Hamas, hijacked the situation and drove the agenda.If my math is correct 36 years brings us to 2003. It's as if 2000 never happened. Ehud Barak was the perfect Israeli PM by Friedman's standards, yet his efforts are simply forgotten by a man who pretends to be the world's greatest living expert on the Middle East.
posted by Soccer Dad @ 1:46 PM
A possible weapons of mass destruction storage site has been found near Baghdad, according to a US military official.
There are unconfirmed reports there could be Sarin - a chemical agent that causes death by suffocation -at the site south of the central Iraqi town of Hindiyah, a US military officer said. "Our detectors have indicated something," said Major Ros Coffman, public affairs officer with the US 3rd Infantry.
"We're talking about finding a site of possible WMD storage. This is an initial report, but it could be a smoking gun.
"It is not as if there is a cloud of gas hanging everywhere endangering soldiers lives. We're talking about a facility," Coffman added.
The report follows a find of a thousands of boxes containing viles of suspicious white powder and liquid on Friday at a site south of Baghdad. However, a US officer said on Saturday that initial tests suggested both substances were not chemical weapons.
Over the weekend US Marines began digging up a site where chemical weapons are suspected of being hidden at a girl's school in the town of Aziziyah.[more]
posted by fred @ 11:19 AM
As US Forces tightened their grip on Baghdad, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, along with his two sons, fled the capital three days ago for his home town of Tikrit, 175 km to the north, media reports said.
"I have been informed that once he had firm evidence that the Americans were closing in on Baghdad, he fled to his home town of Tikrit," claimed Haitham Rashid Wihaib, Saddam's former Chief of Protocol in The Mail.
The dictator who used to being ferried around in a vast fleet of heavily armoured Mercedes left by way of anonymous taxis and battered pick up trucks in a convoy which would have looked like any other group of fleeing Iraqis.
"He has taken his two sons Uday and Qusay, and a handful of key advisors still loyal to him. In Baghdad, each local commander has been told to act as he sees fit," Wihaib said.
Wihaib, who claims to have spent nearly 20 years working for Saddam, said he also got to know Saddam's doubles.
"And the Saddam Hussein we saw shaking the hands of his subjects in that extraordinary walkab out on Friday, was definitely a doppelganger, thinner than the real thing and without his rolling walk.
"This was a stunt ordered by his son Qusay in an attempt to convince the Allies that Saddam was still in Baghdad and a last ditch bid to show the Iraqi people their leader was brave and prepared to fight from the capital.
"But Saddam is not brave. He is mad and desperate and, unlike them, is readying himself for exile."
posted by fred @ 10:59 AM
posted by Ted @ 9:19 AM
The peace movement has never been known for its moral fortitude, although they have always regarded themselves as morally superior, as if the single-minded pursuit of peace at all cost is the sign of a more advanced intellect. It is in fact the opposite, as it provides a seemingly easy way out of real life dilemmas, and ignores the real life costs of pursuing peace at all cost. The lesson of the 1930's has been completely lost on them. Appeasement does not work. Sometimes the peace won in the short term begets much more serious problems in the long term, but I guess if you're a sophisticated thinker such reasoning can be shot down easily.
But that's just the charitable interpretation, as the so-called "peace" movement has a long history of serving as the useful idiots for foreign regimes guilty of horrific human rights violations. In the 1980's it was the Soviet Union, now it is the likes of Saddam who find support on the left. But these peace-movements, together with the rise in Islamic influence in Europe (see also recent experiences in Denmark) a new element has been added to the "peace" movement's canon: anti-semitism. This has been mirrored by the rise of anti-semitism in the incubators of far-left radicalism on American campuses.
In France the toxic mix of Islamofascism from the Arab immigrants and the anti-Americanism of the French governments is leading to a dangerous environment if you happen to be Jew in France, as the Washington Times reports on the latest attacks of Muslim youths on Jews there. Of course, the fact that these Jews were protesting the war too made no difference to the Arabs. As the Washington Times writes:The French government was forced to appeal for calm after protesters, some of them carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein, burned the Israeli flag and turned on Jewish students, attacking one of them with an iron bar, during a series of antiwar rallies.That last slogan really sums it up. "Vive Chirac. Stop the Jews." And what does the celebrated Chirac do? According to the Washington Times, he's keeping quiet.
Officials fear that antiwar sentiment, supported by President Jacques Chirac, may be running out of control and could ignite widespread violence. Banners at recent demonstrations have shown the Star of David intertwined with a Nazi swastika, while protesters shouted: "Vive Chirac. Stop the Jews."
To be fair, the police are setting up a new unit to investigate racist and anti-semitic crimes. It's a bit late to focus on that only now, as anti-semitic violence has been increasing in France was several years now. The article also points out the potential for civil unrest in France, where millions of unassimilated Arabs live in the vast and depressing suburbs of French cities. The embers Chirac has been fanning may yet rise up into a fire
posted by fred @ 9:17 AM
There is a history of Palestine that is extraodinarily popular on a large number of Arab and pro-Arab websites. Called The Origin of The Conflict in the Middle East (OCME), the book is Middle Eastern history as the Arabs would like it to have been. It is 37 pages long and is now in its third edition. It can be obtained in hardcopy from only one source, a post office box in Berkeley. Or it can be downloaded from many websites. It is published by a group calling itself Jews for Justice in the Middle East (JFJME). Its authors are unlisted.
This is an examination of this history text disseminated on many Arab websites and some neutral sites that provide historical documents on the Middle East. It is said to have been produced by a group of Jewish scholars, an anonymous group that calls itself Jews for Justice in the Middle East. We think it's a fraud. MORE
posted by Ted @ 9:02 AM
Beleaguered Israeli doctors now have to fend off mindless attacks from their scientific colleagues, particularly in Europe.
It's bad enough that Israeli doctors are spending their lives in emergency rooms treating Jewish and Arab victims of suicide bombers.
What really makes them heartsick these days, however, is that they also have to fend off mindless attacks from their scientific colleagues, particularly in Europe. That was the most gut-wrenching impression I returned with after a recent trip to Israel along with 70 other senior physicians from across America. We had gone to bolster the spirits of our Israeli colleagues, exhausted and bewildered from two years of the relentless experience of treating victims of terror. We arrived at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem less than 24 hours after a particularly horrific bus bombing in Jerusalem.
Hours earlier, teams of Jewish-Arab doctors had done what they've done for the past two years: jumped into action to save the lives of the critically injured.
On Israeli television the night before, the father of the homicidal bomber bragged that he was proud of his son who had attacked a busload of schoolchildren and senior citizens.
On the day we arrived, that same father suffered chest pains and was brought to Hadassah. He was seen by the same doctors who were still treating the victims of his son's madness.
The humanitarian approach to medicine of our colleagues in Israel stands in stark contrast to actions recently taken by our European colleagues.
In Britain and Norway, countries we Americans generally feel are kindred to our way of life, university professors and scientific researchers have recently refused to share research information with Israel's academics and physicians because they oppose Israel's policy toward the Palestinians.
The head of Hadassah's gene therapy institute, Dr. Eitan Galun, an Israeli Jew, has been engaged in research to cure a blood disease prevalent in the Palestinian community. He recently requested assistance from a Norwegian scientist and was refused. "Due to the present situation in the Middle East, I will not deliver any material to an Israeli university," she responded by e-mail.
By her actions, which confuse science with politics, the Palestinian population will needlessly continue to suffer from a disease that could be cured through scientific cooperation [more]
posted by fred @ 8:34 AM
CAIRO (AFP) Apr 05, 2003Suicide attacks on the US-led coalition in Iraq are "permitted under (Islamic) religious law," the sheikh of Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni Muslim spiritual authority, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, said here Saturday. "Martyr operations against the invading forces are permitted under religious law," he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency.
Tantawi described the invasion of Iraq to oust the regime of Saddam Hussein as "an unjust ggression". "Whoever attacks others, spilling blood, harming the other's honour and land is a terrorist," he added, referring to the US-led coalition. Tantawi, however, said the US-led war was not a crusade against Islam since many Christian nations and religious leaders, including Pope John Paul II, have opposed it.[more]
posted by fred @ 8:10 AM
AMMAN, Jordan, March 31 (JTA) — Aviv’s mother marvels at the way her son, perhaps one of Jordan’s only self-avowed Judeophiles, references the Bible in discussing contemporary politics in the Middle East.
“You see,” says Aviv professorially, “the borders of Israel are supposed to stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates. That is what it says in the Bible: Numbers, Chapter 2.”
Aviv, who has cat eyes and receding hair combed straight back on his head, says, “Who knows? Maybe I have Jewish blood somewhere in these veins.”
Aviv — a Christian whose family asked that his Arabic name not be used — stands in stark contrast to the prevailing sentiment in Jordan.
With the local and Arabic satellite channels searing the suffering of the Iraqi people onto Jordanians’ minds, anything American, British and especially Jewish is taboo.
Thus his courtship with Hebrew is conducted under supreme secrecy.
A crafter of mosaics who once owned a thriving arts shop near the Roman ruins in Jerash, he has developed numerous friendships with visiting Israelis who were stunned to hear his astoundingly good Hebrew.
His only formal training was a six-week course conducted at a local tourism college in Amman. The rest he picked up from tourists and long hours of studying after work.
Now his Hebrew books — Amman booksellers have since taken such texts off the racks — are stashed away under the family’s Armenian Orthodox Bible.[more]
posted by fred @ 7:57 AM
posted by fred @ 7:47 AM
The Foreign Ministry is urging the government to launch a diplomatic offensive in Europe, warning that Israel stands to lose further ground on the continent after the war in Iraq.
According to media reports, the warning is included in a new position paper that foresees European countries cranking up the pressure on Israel after the war to make concessions to the Palestinians.
One of the measures it recommends is making more conciliatory gestures toward the newly chosen Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. It also urges the government to take the initiative in involving the Europeans in peace efforts so as to avoid steps being taken behind Israel's back.
The reports of the policy paper comes amid increasing concern among members of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government about a US-backed Mideast peace plan known as the "road map" which calls for achieving Palestinian statehood by 2005.
posted by fred @ 7:42 AM
[...]"It is scary, but we know the more effective we are the more hostile they will be. Now is the most important time to stand our ground," said Joe Smith, 21, also of Evergreen College, where Corrie had also been a student.
The IDF said its bulldozers were in Rafah Sunday destroying abandoned buildings, to block a tunnel underneath used by Palestinian terrorists to smuggle weapons and explosives from Egypt to the camp, which sits on the border.
But ISM members said they believe the IDF had needlessly targeted the homes of innocent Rafah residents.
ISM spokesman Michael Shaik said that Avery was conscious and that his brain appears to be functioning normally, but that his face is heavily bandaged and he still can't speak. He has undergone one operation and is likely to have another one on Tuesday. "He can write and communicate with his hands and seems to even have a sense of humor," said Shaik.
The IDF said Avery was hit in an exchange of fire between the IDF and Palestinians. [more]
posted by fred @ 7:36 AM
[...]For now, the Pentagon, which rules the war arena and the Iraqi scene as a whole has placed a keep out sign for State Department officials bent on taking up posts in the interim administration.If Debka has got it right, that my unifying theory is wrong insofar as Bush having agreed to pacify the Arabs. And Powell is also wrong in what he has been saying. It won't be the first time for either of us. We'll have to see this one play out.
No Handouts for War Opponents
3. The governments who opposed the American war in Iraq will be barred from partaking in its fruits. They fall into two groups. The first, led by France, Germany, Russia and the other nations, is seen as having fought the United States every inch of the road to the war, placing obstacles in every international forum, including the UN and NATO, and continuing to place cogs in the war wheel. (Just what I have always maintained. Well, almost always)
The Arab governments who supported the American war effort belong to the second group of nations clamoring for a say in post-war Iraq. They are led by Saudi Arabia which, despite initial anti-war declarations, its de facto ruler, Prince Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, subsequently opened up the kingdom’s bases and air space to the passage of US troops and the staging of assaults in Iraq. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak followed the same pattern of conduct. The big military base at Cairo-West and the Suez Canal became the two principal logistical arteries carrying US personnel and supplies to the combat units into the war arena.
Post-war Iraq Key to Larger Scheme
All these demands and Tony Blair’s attempts to reconcile the diametrically opposed European, Arab and American approaches on Iraq will most likely fall on deaf ears with the US President. Bush and his team will reply that they did not set out to conquer one of the richest and most important Arab nations and expel its tyrannous regime in order to hand out plums to its adversaries – or even for private gain. Above all, the Bush administration has set out a blueprint for a new world order to rise after international terror is vanquished. Iraq’s post-war structure is meant to stand as a prototype for the next stages of this broad scheme.
That being the case, Bush will not be inclined to heed Tony Blair, Saud al Faisal, Hosni Mubarak, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Schroeder or Koffi Anan – either their views or their demands to play a significant role in the rebuilding of Iraq.
The same world leaders are just as unlikely to be afforded the lead role they seek in the diplomacy for settling the Israel-Palestinian conflict and forging a peace, a process allotted a space in the same broad scheme charted by the Bush presidency. (What have I been telling you)
DEBKAfile’s Palestinian sources report a showdown last Thursday, April 3, between Yasser Arafat and the first Palestinian prime minister-designate, Abu Mazen, attended also by the Palestinian Authority’s incumbent interior minister Hani al Hassen.
Back from a few days in the Gaza Strip, Abu Mazen asked to be relieved of the appointment. Arafat told him angrily he could not accept an historical appointment one minute and drop it the next. Sources close to Abu Mazen reveal that he has despaired of making inroads on Arafat’s powers and acquiring any real authority. And, as long as Arafat is in charge, Palestinian terrorism will continue to surge, closing the door to reform, an accommodation with Israel and any change in the fortunes of the Palestinian people.
At present, Israel lives with between 50 and 60 suicide terror alerts per day! Most are only averted by the presence of Israeli forces in very Palestinian urban center and constant round-ups, searches and surprise raids against terrorist strongholds.
Even if President Bush had decided to meet Tony Blair, the Arabs and the Europeans halfway by forcing the Quartet’s road map unamended down Israel’s throat, Arafat and his terror machine would sabotage any progress towards a settlement. (Like Abba Eban always said "Arafat never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.")
posted by Ted @ 7:35 AM
some In this time of debate on whether we should go into Iraq without UN approval, and why the French and German's are so adamant about vetoing the use of force, it's important to get the facts so we can make intelligent, informed opinions. Too many people who spiel anti-US and anti-Bush arguments are not in the habit of taking the time to research the facts. Most of them get their information in 30 second doses on TV while they are channel surfing between the "West Wing", some idiot sitcom, or the newest "reality show". Being informed at this critical juncture in history is every American's duty. More time spent researching and less time watching will benefit our society.
The following quote, from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt in 1910 should be taken to heart by everyone who has been "round-heeled" and have done nothing but critisize Pres. Bush on the Iraq debate; "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat " .
Now take some time and read the important following report.
Facts on Who Benefits From Keeping Saddam Hussein In Power by The Heritage Foundation, February 28, 2003
France:
[ 1 ] According to the CIA World Factbook, France controls over 22.5 percent of Iraq's imports.
[ 2 ] French total trade with Iraq under the oil-for-food program is the third largest, totaling $3.1 billion since 1996, according to the United Nations.
[ 3 ] In 2001 France became Iraq's largest European trading partner. Roughly 60 French companies do an estimated $1.5 billion in trade with Baghdad annually under the U.N. oil-for-food program.
[ 4 ] France's largest oil company, Total Fina Elf, has negotiated a deal to develop the Majnoon field in western Iraq. The Majnoon field purportedly contains up to 30 billion barrels of oil.
[ 5 ] Total Fina Elf also negotiated a deal for future oil exploration in Iraq's Nahr Umar field. Both the Majnoon and Nahr Umar fields are estimated to contain as much as 25 percent of the country's reserves.
[ 6 ] France's Alcatel company, a major telecom firm, is negotiating a $76 million contract to rehabilitate Iraq's telephone system.
[ 7 ] From 1981 to 2001, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), France was responsible for over 13 percent of Iraq's arms imports .
Germany
[ 8 ] Direct trade between Germany and Iraq amounts to about $350 million annually, and another $1 billion is reportedly sold through third parties.
[ 9 ] It has recently been reported that Saddam Hussein has ordered Iraqi domestic businesses to show preference to German companies as a reward for Germany's "firm positive stand in rejecting the launching of a military attack against Iraq." It was also reported that over 101 German companies were present at the Baghdad Annual exposition.
[ 10 ] During the 35th Annual Baghdad International Fair in November 2002, a German company signed a contract for $80 million for 5,000 cars and spare parts.
[11] In 2002, Daimler Chrysler was awarded over $13 million in contracts for German trucks and spare parts.
[12] German officials are investigating a German corporation accused of illegally channeling weapons to Iraq via Jordan. The equipment in question is used for boring the barrels of large cannons and is allegedly intendedfor Saddam Hussein's Al Fao Supercannon project.
Russia
[13] According to the CIA World Factbook, Russia controls roughly 5.8 percent of Iraq's annual imports.
[ 14 ] Under the U.N. oil-for-food program, Russia's total trade with Iraq was somewhere between $530 million and $1 billion for the six months ending in December of 2001.
[ 15 ] According to the Russian Ambassador to Iraq, Vladimir Titorenko, new contracts worth another $200 million under the U.N. oil-for-food program are to be signed over the next three months.
[ 16 ] Soviet-era debt of $7 billion through $8 billion was generated by arms sales to Iraq during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Russia's LUKoil negotiated a $4 billion, 23-year contract in 1997 to rehabilitate the 15 billion-barrel West Qurna field in southern Iraq. Work on the oil field was expected to commence upon cancellation of U.N. sanctions on Iraq. The deal is currently on hold.
[ 17 ] In October 2001, Salvneft, a Russian-Belarus company, negotiated a $52 million service contract to drill at the Tuba field in Southern Iraq.
[ 18 ] In April 2001, Russia's Zaruezhneft company received a service contract to drill in the Saddam, Kirkuk, and Bai Hassan fields to rehabilitate the fields and reduce water incursion. A future $40 billion Iraqi-Russian economic agreement, reportedly signed in 2002, would allow for extensive oil exploration opportunities throughout western Iraq.
[19 ] The proposal calls for 67 new projects, over a 10-year time frame, to explore and further develop fields in southern Iraq and the Western Desert, including the Suba, Luhais, West Qurna, and Rumaila projects. Additional projects added to the deal include second-phase construction of a pipeline running from southern to northern Iraq, and extensive drilling and gas projects. Work on these projects would commence upon cancellation of sanctions.
[ 20 ] Russia's Gazprom company over the past few years has signed contracts worth $18 million to repair gas stations in Iraq.
[ 21 ] The former Soviet Union was the premier supplier of Iraqi arms. From 1981 to 2001, Russia supplied Iraq with 50 percent of its arms.
China
[22] According to the CIA World Factbook, China controls roughly 5.8 percent of Iraq's annual imports.
[ 23 ] China National Oil Company, partnered with China North Industries Corp., negotiated a 22-year-long deal for future oil exploration in the Al Ahdab field in southern Iraq.
[ 24 ] In recent years, the Chinese Aero-Technology Import-Export Company (CATIC) has been contracted to sell "meteorological satellite" and "surface observation" equipment to Iraq. This contract was approved by the U.N. oil-for-food program.
[ 25 ] CATIC also won approval from the U.N. in July 2000 to sell $2 million worth of fiber optic cables. This and similar contracts approved were disguised as telecommunications gear. These cables can be used for secure data and communications links between national command and control centers and long-range search radar, targeting radar, and missile-launch units, according to U.S. officials. In addition, China National Electric Wire & Cable and China National Technical Import Telecommunications Equipment Company are believed to have sold Iraq $6 million and $15.5 million worth of communications equipment and other unspecified supplies, respectively.
[ 26 ] According to a report from SIPRI, from 1981 to 2001, China was the second largest supplier of weapons and arms to Iraq, supplying over 18 percent of Iraq's weapons imports.
Sources:
[1]Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook 2002, at
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook.
2]Jon Talton, "French Ideals and Profits in the Iraqi Triangle", The Arizona Republic, February 23, 2003.
[3]Jon Talton, "French Ideals and Profits in the Iraqi Triangle," The Arizona Republic, February 23, 2003.
4]Kenneth Katzman, Iraq: Oil-for-Food Program, International Sanctions, and Illicit Trade, Congressional Research Service, September 26, 2002.
[5]Kenneth Katzman, Iraq: Oil-for-Food Program, International Sanctions, and Illicit Trade, Congressional Research Service, September 26, 2002.
[6]Evelyn Iritani, "Hussein's Government Signs Lucrative Contracts, Especially with Nations that Oppose the U.S. Led Effort to Oust the
Regime," The Los Angeles Verdana,Arial,Helvetica, November 11, 2002.
[7]Information from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), "Arms Transfers to Iraq, 1981-2001," at http://projects.sipri.se/armstrade/IRQ_IMPORTS_1982-2001.pdf.
[8]David R. Sands, "France, Germany Protect Iraq Ties," The Washington Verdana,Arial,Helvetica, February 20, 2003.
[9]David R. Sands, "France, Germany Protect Iraq Ties," The Washington Verdana,Arial,Helvetica, February 20, 2003.
[10]"Africa Analysis-Trade Points Way to Peace", The Financial Verdana,Arial,Helvetica: Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, November 19, 2002.
[11]Faye Bowers, "Driving Forces in War-Wary Nations: The Stances of France, Germany, Russia and China Are Colored by Economic and National Interests," Christian Science Monitor, February 25, 2003.
[12]"Helping Saddam Rearm," The Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2002.
[13]Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook 2002, at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook.
[14]Testimony provided by Ariel Cohen to the House International Relations Committee, "Russia and the Axis of Evil: Money, Ambition and U.S. Interests," February 26, 2003.
[15]Nelli Sharushkina, "Russia Plays the Field in Iraq-Mixed Signals Worry Baghdad," Energy Intelligence Briefing, February 5, 2003.
[16]Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, "In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil Is Key Issue," The Washington Post, September 15, 2002.
[17]Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, "In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil Is Key Issue," The Washington Post, September 15, 2002.
[18]Scott Peterson, "Russia's Newest Tie to Iraq: Moscow Is Set to Sign a $40 billion Economic Pact with Baghdad Next Month," Christian Science Monitor, August 20, 2002.
[19]"Mideast Tensions to Delay Iraq Iraqi-Russian Signing," Energy Compass, April 19, 2002.
[20]Dmitry Zhdannikov, "Russian's Grim About Working Under Saddam," The Houston Chronicle, April 14, 2002.
[21]Information from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), "Arms Transfers to Iraq, 1981-2001," at http://projects.sipri.se/armstrade/IRQ_IMPORTS_1982-2001.pdf.
[22]Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook 2002, at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook.
[23]Trish Saywell, "Oil: The Danger of Deals with Iraq," Far Eastern Economic Review, March 6, 2003.
[24]Kenneth R. Timmerman, "Rogues Lending Hand to Saddam," Insight on the News, March 4, 2003.
[25]Kenneth R. Timmerman, "Rogues Lending Hand to Saddam," Insight on the News, March 4, 2003.
[26]Information from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), "Arms Transfers to Iraq, 1981-2001," at
http://projects.sipri.se/armstrade/IRQ_IMPORTS_1982-2001.pdf.
posted by David @ 5:23 AM
France is Not a Western Country Anymore
By Guy Milliere
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 31, 2003
French-bashing is everywhere in the American media. I am French, and I must say if Americans knew completely what's happening in France, the French-bashing would be far harsher.
Jacques Chirac has been a friend of Saddam Hussein for more than thirty years. He allowed the sale of nuclear facilities to Iraq that were destroyed just in time by Israël. He sold Iraq the planes that were been used to gas thousands of Kurds. And Saddam is not the only friend Chirac has. Chirac has never met a ruthless dictator he did not like. Worse, Chirac is unprincipled and greedy. It is common knowledge in France that he stole a lot of money when he was the mayor of Paris, and everyone knows that if he had not been re-elected in May 2002, he would be in jail now. To hear him speaking about morality or international law nauseates every decent Frenchman.
And Chirac is not the only politician of this stripe in France. These days, it is becoming hard to find a French politician ready to speak about human rights, freedom or democracy. All of them seem to have the same speechwriter or to belong to the same totalitarian political party; all of them are anti-American, anti-Israeli and "pacifists." They regard Western civilization as something filthy and abhorrent.
If you read the newspapers, it's the same. At times it seems the only difference between the Soviet Union twenty years ago and France today is that in Soviet Union you had only one Pravda, and in France you now have at least ten such propaganda outlets: Different titles, same content. Their party line is clear in reporting on the personalities found in the present Middle Eastern crisis. Saddam Hussein, the "President of Iraq"? Well, maybe he has been brutal, but you know, in "those" countries... George W. Bush? He 's a "moron" - a former alcoholic, who has become a crazy fanatic, in fact the most dangerous man on the face of earth. Ariel Sharon? A fascist who loves to kill Arabs. Arafat? A great freedom fighter. When an American general speaks, it is merely propaganda, but when Tariq Aziz pontificates, it is pure truth. Almost everyday you hear anti-Semitic remarks, to boot.
The anti-Semitism has created a threat to the physical safety for French Jews. Almost every week, some Jews get mugged, simply for being Jews. Almost nobody pays attention to it. When an anti-Semitic act is so disgusting it is impossible to hide it, journalists will speak of "confrontation between communities." When confronted with the reality that these "confrontations" are always Muslims attacking Jews, the editorial response: "Just because
there has yet to be a single documented case of a Jew attacking a Muslim yet doesn't mean it will never happen. . . ."
And Jews are not the only victims of France's new identification with radical Islam. In many French cities with a growing radical Islamist population, no teenage girl can go out in the evening, at least not without a full burqa. If she does, it will mean that "she is for everybody": in short, a whore. In the same cities, every teenage girl - regardless of religion - has to wear the Muslim veil if she does not want to be harassed or killed. Almost every month, a young woman is mugged and raped in a suburb of a big city. Gang rape has become so frequent that a new word, used by the rapists themselves to define their hideous actions, is used by everybody:
tournantes (revolving). To the rapists, the woman is nothing, a mere object to be thrown away after use. The people who speak about "revolving" seem to forget a human being is involved as the victim. Policemen do nothing. Every decent person knows the problem is Islam, but no one dares to say it. It could be dangerous. The streets are not safe.
One year ago, a French Muslim decided to create a new business: he was tired of seeing people drinking Coca-Cola - all this money going to Americans! He found a factory and started to produce Mecca Cola. On the label, he put a picture of the Al Aqsa mosque, with a large part of his profits would help to support the Palestinian cause. In some suburbs of Paris, Coca-Cola has disappeared; Mecca Cola has replaced it. A few days ago, another Muslim businessman announced he will start to sell Muslim-Up. It will have the taste of Sprite or Seven-Up, but it will be a Muslim drink - and naturally the profits will go to the Palestinian jihad, as well.
Three radio stations in France are Muslim radio stations, and if you listen to them, dedicated to broadcasting the voice of hate and racism all day long. One radio station belongs to a friend of the rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen, and curiously, if you listen to it, you will hear the same voice of hate and racism. Rightists and radical Muslims have discovered they have many things in common.
If you want to understand why all this is happening, you have to understand one
thing: thirty years ago, French governments started to have a new foreign policy. They called this new policy, "Arabian Policy." France became closer to Arab countries - all of them disgusting dictatorships. France "benefited" by doing business easily in these countries. In exchange, France had to push Europe to unknot its ties with Israël and the United States. In exchange too, "professors" came from the Arabian dictatorships to teach the Arabic language to the young Arabs living in France. The only book they used to teach the Arabic language was THE book, Al Kuran.
Now comes the time to pay the check: six million Muslims live in France, at least ten per cent of them are radical Islamists poised on the edge of violence. And these radical Muslims have allies on both the extreme Left and the extreme Right. France is not a Western country anymore, it is now the leader of the Arab/Muslim world. Israel has to know France is its main enemy. The United States has to understand they have nothing to expect from today's France except nastiness, treason, and cheating.
posted by David @ 1:37 AM
posted by Joseph @ 1:34 AM
It looked like a successful strike against Al Qaeda in Europe. Last month German police raided a suspected terrorist cell in Berlin, arresting a half-dozen men and seizing bomb-making equipment, flight-simulator software and chemicals. Now the investigation has taken an unexpected turn. GERMAN OFFICIALS SAY the terror suspects may have had a highly placed friend: a top diplomat at the Saudi Embassy in Berlin. Sources say Muhammad J. Fakihi, chief of the embassy’s Islamic-affairs branch, met frequently with the suspected terrorist cell’s leader, Ihsan Garnaoui, at Berlin’s Al Nur mosque—a notorious haven for Islamic extremists. The Germans confronted the Saudis and threatened to declare Fakihi persona non grata. “We don’t do that unless the evidence is very grave,” says a German official. Four days after the arrests, Fakihi left Germany and was supposed to have returned to Saudi Arabia. But, NEWSWEEK has learned, he never showed up. Now the Saudis want him for questioning, and officials are uncertain of his whereabouts. “There is close cooperation between the Saudi and German authorities on this matter, and we intend to get to the bottom of it,” says one Saudi official. U.S. officials were already aware of Fakihi: his business card had been found in the apartment of Mounir el-Motassadeq, who was convicted of being an accomplice of the “Hamburg cell” that committed the 9-11 attacks.
posted by fred @ 1:54 PM
[...]But the Saudi charities also facilitated the growth of Islamic militancy, subsidizing, for example, the flow of men and material to conflict areas. After the death of Abdullah Azzam in 1989, his successor, Osama bin Laden, used the charities to pay the salaries of his al Qaeda operatives around the world.
THE International Islamic Relief Organizations (IIRO), in particular, was repeatedly identified as a conduit for funding to the Abu Sayyaf organization, which fought the government in the Philippines, to al-Khattab's militia in Russia, and to terrorist networks in East Africa. In fact, IIRO payment schedules to Hamas were found by Israel. And if IIRO was involved in terrorism in each of these areas, that meant the Saudi government was involved as well.
In recent years, the connection between the Saudi government and its Wahhabi charities was graphically laid out in court testimony given in Canada by a local representative of the Muslim World League: "Let me tell you one thing. The Muslim World League, which is the mother of IIRO, is a fully government-funded organization. In other words, I work for the government of Saudi Arabia. Second, the IIRO is the relief branch of that organization, which means we are all controlled in all our activities and plans by the government of Saudi Arabia."
WHAT will be essential after Iraq is getting Saudi Arabia to change its ways.
It is not necessary to talk about regime change in Saudi Arabia. And it would be a mistake to focus on Wahhabi Islam, as its Muslim detractors insist; but it is legitimate to insist that Saudi Arabia finally address some of its more noticeable external manifestations.
First, the Saudi regime must stop using its large Wahhabi charities to fund terrorist groups, once and for all. Unfortunately, it looks like the Saudis are making a far greater effort at covering up these faults, with expensive p.r. efforts, rather than actually halting their contacts with these organizations.
It is also legitimate to expect that Saudi Arabia stop the systematic incitement of its population against the West and non-Wahhabi religious groups. Of course, Saudi Arabia is free to teach what it wants to its children, but there are consequences that result from the systematic delegitimization of other peoples by Saudi Arabia's national educational institutions.
IT was no coincidence that Osama bin Laden recruited 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers from Saudi Arabia. In the 1990s, Saudis were the largest national component brought into the al Qaeda network because they were predisposed to its message. Saudi Arabia should not continue to be a breeding ground for these groups.
Diplomats are trained to deal chiefly with classic international problems like the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It comes to them naturally to become engrossed in its details, even before the Iraqi issue is resolved. But if terrorism is to be put to an end, altering the behavior of Saudi Arabia must become a top postwar priority [more]
posted by fred @ 8:50 AM
In other news, Israel says it will unilaterally dump the international Roadmap for Middle East Peace if amendments it's demanding are rejected.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Chief of Staff Dov Weissglas made the statement prior to traveling to Washington with a list of 15 amendments demanded by Tel Aviv.
Peter Cave reports from Jerusalem.
Mr Weissglas said Israel would submit what he called remarks on the Roadmap and if a refusal of those remarks jeopardised Israel's security it would reject the Roadmap. He said Israel's concerns were mainly over the dismantling and disarming of terrorist organizations and the creation of new Palestinian security services with no links to terrorism. Israel would make no concessions on these issues and if necessary, would leave the table and come home. US President George Bush has repeatedly delayed the release of the peace plan drawn up with the United Nations, Europe and Russia. But his aides now say it will be released when a Cabinet appointed by the New Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen is in place.
posted by fred @ 8:22 AM
NINE DECADES ON, the list of broken Western promises has grown longer. But Tony Blair means to leave all that behind. The British prime minister has long argued that an Israeli-Palestinian peace is central to solving post-9-11 security worries. He angered Arabs, his own Labour Party and continental Europeans by supporting the war in Iraq. Going forward, he knows that pushing the Americans toward an Israeli-Palestinian solution could be a giant step in mending ties with all three of those camps. Hence his promise that seeking a Middle East peace will become a “central priority” once the shooting stops in Iraq.
The question is whether George W. Bush will be with him. At Camp David last month, the U.S. president claimed so. “Soon,” he said, Washington and London will release their “road map” for peace, drawn up by the so-called Quartet—the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. In Brussels last week, after every single European foreign minister mentioned how important it was that the United States backed the road map, Colin Powell declared it would be published, without amendments, when the government of the new Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen is confirmed.
Nobody’s holding their breath, however. Palestinians point out that the much-anticipated plan has already been delayed six times. By some accounts, the Israelis have already asked for 100 amendments. Skeptics say that Washington might well lack the political will to go beyond symbolic gestures. The Bush administration is busy with Iraq, and may think it safer to park the peace process until after the 2004 elections. “We are as committed to Palestinian peace as to Iraqi peace,” says a senior State Department official. But appointing a new prime minister won’t by itself ensure progress, he adds. “Security needs to be established. You have to end the violence.”
Such caveats may be too open-ended for Blair. He is determined to push the pace on the Middle East, and U.S. recalcitrance would be one of the few things that could unsettle his cozy relationship with Washington. Blair has pressed Bush at each of their recent meetings not only to release the road map as soon as possible but to cast it as part of a broader effort to engage their bruised European allies, chiefly France and Germany. According to Downing Street aides, the two leaders will discuss the issue once again at their summit in Northern Ireland this week. [more]
posted by fred @ 8:17 AM
President Chirac, whose bitter opposition to the United States-led military offensive in Iraq has won him almost universal support in France, has remained silent on the attacks...Have a good weekend.
The fears of increased anti-Semitism come only a month after the French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin allegedly told a group of centre-Right MPs that "the hawks in the US administration are in the hands of [Ariel] Sharon".
posted by Joseph @ 12:19 AM
JERUSALEM - An American peace activist working as a human shield in the West Bank was seriously wounded on Saturday when Israeli troops allegedly opened fire on him.
Brian Avery, 24, from Albuquerque, N.M., heard shots fired and came out of his apartment building in Jenin to investigate just as an armored personnel carrier rounded a corner, said Tobias Karlsson, a fellow activist from Sweden.
Both Avery and Karlsson are members of the Palestinian-backed group International Solidarity Movement.
"We had our hands up and we were wearing vests that clearly identified us as international workers when they began firing," Tobias said. "Brian was shot in the face, and it looks like he was hit by a heavy caliber bullet because of the extent of the wound."
Avery was taken to a Jenin hospital but will be transferred to an Israeli hospital. There was no immediate comment from the army.
Tobias said he, Avery and a Palestinian medical worker not with the group were approached slowly by the troops and stood with their hands up for about 10 minutes. There was no communication with the soldiers, who Tobias says fired unprovoked.
Avery was semiconscious when taken in the ambulance, Tobias said. There were few Palestinians on the streets Saturday because of a curfew Israeli troops were enforcing.
posted by Mike @ 5:10 PM
[...]Now, Eli Lake of UPI reports that the government is aware of Iranian terrorist operations inside Iraq, and there have been many stories reporting Syria’s campaign to send terrorists across the border to attack us. In truth, we didn’t need intelligence to know this was going on, because the Iranian and Syrian tyrants had announced it publicly. Assad gave an interview recently in which he proclaimed — in words that could have been taken right out of my book — that Lebanon was the model for the struggle that had to be waged in Iraq against Coalition forces. And Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave a speech a few weeks ago in which he said that the presence of American troops in Iraq would be even worse for Iran than the hated regime of Saddam Hussein.
So they are coming to kill us, which means that there is no more time for diplomatic “solutions.” We will have to deal with the terror masters, here and now. Iran, at least, offers us the possibility of a memorable victory, because the Iranian people openly loath the regime, and will enthusiastically combat it, if only the United States supports them in their just struggle. One may legitimately ask if the Iraqi people are fully prepared for the burdens of democracy after the mind-numbing years of Saddam (I think they are, mind you, but the question is fair), but there is no doubt that the Iranians are up to it. And Syria cannot stand alone against a successful democratic revolution that topples tyrannical regimes in Kabul, Tehran, and Iraq.
This is the path — the correct path — that the president has charted, despite the opposition of so many of his diplomats, and despite the near-total indifference of the Western press to the plight of the Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian people. It is the path that most fully expresses our own revolutionary tradition, and gives the peoples of the Middle East the chance to recapture their dignity by empowering them to govern their own lands. Finally, for those obsessed by the Arab-Israeli question, it is the best chance for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. President Bush has said that he will not support a Palestinian state that is governed by people hostile to democracy. Yet it is impossible for a democratic Palestine to emerge, let alone survive, so long as the dominant countries in the region are tyrannical supporters of terrorism.
If, at long last, we are going to transform the Middle East in the name of the democratic revolution, it is madness to entrust this task to a Department of State that clearly does not believe in it. State, and with it CIA, does not believe that democracy can succeed in the Middle East. That is why they have long supported a coup in Baghdad, rather than regime change. That is why they have violently opposed the Iraqi National Congress, which has fought for democracy for more than a decade, only to be repeatedly betrayed and sabotaged by the United States government. MORE
posted by Ted @ 12:30 PM
posted by Ted @ 12:13 PM
Making the world safer for us — defusing terrorism and beginning to reform a region that is a source of toxic hostility to what we stand for — happens to make the world safer for Israel as well. But the idea that Israel's interests are driving one of the most momentous shifts in America's foreign policy is simple-minded and offensive. (There is also a simple-minded and offensive flip side, which holds that opposition to the war is heavily fueled by anti-Semitism — another sweeping slander with a grain of truth in it.)A key question is, what will happen to the Israel-Palestine conflict after Iraqi liberation:
What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is — to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire — good for the Jews. Even though Israel is a likely target of Iraqi reprisals when war breaks out, it is the only country I know of where polls show overwhelming support for an invasion to oust Saddam, preferably sooner.
The administration prefers not to advertise Israel alongside Bulgaria and Spain on its marquee of allied supporters, for the same reason it has gone to tremendous lengths to keep Israel out of the coming war. No one wants to feed the dangerous idea that this is, as the jihad propagandists claim, a war of Americans and Zionists against Arabs and Islam.
There are obvious reasons that Israelis would like to rid the region of a man who trains terrorists and pays blood money to suicide bombers' families. But the deeper explanation, says Stephen Cohen, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, is profound despair over the bloody dead end in which Israeli-Palestinian politics sit. A conquest of Iraq offers the prospect that the United States will take the region in hand. It is, to many Israelis, the only hope of change for the better.
What will Mr. Bush make of this moment? If the U.S. manages to make a more benign Iraq — and perhaps a chastened Syria — the Israelis could decide to dig in their heels: Our friend Mr. Bush is here, he's on our side; we can now sit tight, wait for the Palestinians to read the handwriting on the walls of Baghdad and maybe offer them half a state.
Or the Americans could seize the opportunity to say to Ariel Sharon, who has shown no prior gift for strategic statesmanship: "We are here now — you know we won't let you down. It's time to roll back the settlements and close a deal."
posted by Mike @ 11:50 AM
posted by Ted @ 11:17 AM
[...]In the last five years or so, Zionism has come to be one of those ideas that puts up the walls. It's just accepted that, on the Left, you are against corporate control of politics, in favor of multiculturalism, against imperialism, in favor of the Palestinians. The logic seems to fit. Israel is the big, powerful member of the United States' empire; Palestine is the occupied country whose citizens are being oppressed by it. It's not that the Left is being brainwashed, exactly; it's that the vocabulary of Israel-Palestine fits so neatly into the overall liberal-Leftist grammar of justice that, of course, the Palestinians are in the right...And why the focus on Israel? How can a few crying Arab mothers on TV cause people to think that the situation in Palestine is more important than those in Tibet, Chechnya, Congo, and Kurdistan ?. Millions of Tibetans, Chechnyans, Rwandans, and Kurds have been massacred; millions of monasteries and mosques obliterated; entire villages slaughtered or gassed. France and Spain, which both ceaselessly criticize Israel, occupy the Basque territory, banning the Basque independence movements. America has yet to pay a dime of reparations either to the Africans it exiled and enslaved or to the Native Americans it slaughtered and betrayed. The Moroccans oppress the Berbers, and carry on a slave trade. The Sudanese Muslims massacre the Southern Sudanese Christians and Animists. The Hashemite minority in Jordan discriminates against the Palestinian majority. Brazilian elites and transnational corporations destroy the lands of indigenous peoples in the Amazon; global oil companies poison whole tribes in Nigeria, stealing their land and resources. Britain continues its occupation of Northern Ireland. China tortures monks and nuns. The list goes on, but the Left is fixated on a few villages on the West Bank of the Jordan, the population of which would all fit into the Bronx.[more]
posted by fred @ 8:18 AM
Akamai Technologies Inc., a U.S. Web content delivery firm, has scrapped a contract to provide services for Arabic news network al-Jazeera's Internet site, according to a published report Friday. (2) Jazeera, which has been criticized by the United States and Britain for its allegedly pro-Iraq war coverage, said on Thursday Iraq had ordered one of its reporters to leave the country and told another to stop working. (4) Perched atop a hillside road, the Khourys' red brick house in a New York suburb blends into a neighborhood that's picture-perfect Americana: green lawns, kids playing baseball and Old Glory fluttering in the wind. (7) In spite of being mostly knocked offline after a hack attack, the Web site of Arab satellite news network Al-Jazeera was among the most sought-after on the Internet last week. (3) The Web portal Lycos reported that "Al-Jazeera" and variant spellings became its top search term last week, with three times more searches than " sex. (3) The war in Iraq has piqued international interest in the site, which el-Nawawy says saw four times the expected amount of web traffic following its March 24 launch. (6) American news networks have broadcast pictures of dead Iraqi soldiers, creating what el-Nawawy sees as a double standard. (6) [click here for links]
posted by fred @ 8:03 AM
posted by fred @ 7:48 AM
JENIN, West Bank (AP) -- At a roadside cemetery in the West Bank, in the midst of thistles and pictures honoring Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the graves of 53 Iraqis stand as potent reminders of the Arab nation's involvement in the Palestinian struggle for statehood.
In Jenin, Iraqi ties run deep. In 1948 Iraqi troops rushed there to help fight off Israeli soldiers who had taken temporary control of the town. After a series of deadly battles that killed dozens of Iraqis, the town was returned to Arab control.
A more recent tie between Iraq and Jenin came last year when Saddam donated more than $2 million to families who lost homes during an 11-day standoff that destroyed pockets of the town and killed 23 Israeli troops and 52 Palestinians.
"The elders of this town all remember what the Iraqis did for us," said Fakhri Turkman, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and a local historian. "And it's clear that what is happening today in Iraq is a picture of Palestine and of our struggle."
With the U.S.-led strike against Iraq approaching its third week, residents of Jenin and other towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have rallied behind Saddam, holding mass demonstrations and blood drives for the Iraqis. On Thursday, Jenin residents commemorated the one-year anniversary of the 11-day battle with Israeli troops in the Jenin refugee camp by holding a pro-Iraq and Saddam rally.
Emotionally, many Palestinians have sided with Iraq but there is fear among some that after the war is over, their support for Saddam will come back to haunt them. [more]
posted by fred @ 7:42 AM
posted by Michael @ 10:30 PM
posted by Ted @ 8:02 PM
For too long, the citizens of the Middle East have lived in the midst of death and fear. The hatred of a few holds the hopes of many, hostage. The forces of extremism and terror are attempting to kill progress and peace by killing the innocent. And this casts a dark shadow over an entire region. For the sake of all humanity, things must change in the Middle East.
I've said in the past that nations are either with us or against us in the war on terror. To be counted on the side of peace, nations must act. Every leader actually committed to peace will end incitement to violence in official media, and publicly denounce homicide bombings. Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel -- including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. Every nation actually committed to peace must block the shipment of Iranian supplies to these groups, and oppose regimes that promote terror, like Iraq. And Syria must choose the right side in the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and expelling terrorist organizations.How much more specific can he get.
Leaders who want to be included in the peace process must show by their deeds an undivided support for peace. And as we move toward a peaceful solution, Arab states will be expected to build closer ties of diplomacy and commerce with Israel, leading to full normalization of relations between Israel and the entire Arab world.We all cheered at these remarks but focused on Israel rather than the Middle East.
We must also resolve questions concerning Jerusalem, the plight and future of Palestinian refugees, and a final peace between Israel and Lebanon, and Israel and a Syria that supports peace and fights terror.
We have reached a hopeful moment for progress toward the vision of Middle Eastern peace that I outlined last June.Those of us who vigorously oppose the Road Map and the Quartet’s involvement view these things in the context of the present Middle East. Bush on the other hand sees them in the context of a new Middle East.
[…]And the Arab states must oppose terrorism, support the emergence of a peaceful and democratic Palestine and state clearly that they will live in peace with Israel.
A communique received in Jerusalem from the American administration this week says the United States is operating with strong resolution to neutralize the Iraqi threat to Israel. After the war, the message continued, the United States will deal with other radical regimes in the region - not necessarily by military means - to moderate their activities and fight terrorism.So he makes it clear Israel is being sacrificed to appease the Arabs. This has nothing to do with rights, or blame. It just makes America's job easier .
These current and future U.S. operations will also serve Israel, the American administration says, but have caused tensions between the United States and the Arab world. Israel, the American message says, must play its part to help ease these tensions by taking action with regard to settlements in the territories.
posted by Ted @ 4:25 PM
With the Islamic connection virtually undeniable in the Asan Akbar grenade case, the question inevitably arises: Where is the Saudi money?
Akbar is the black Muslim Army sergeant who, after killing two and wounding 14 of his fellow soldiers when he hurled a grenade into a tent in Kuwait, ranted, "You guys are coming into our countries and you're going to rape our women and kill our children." So, what about the Saudi money? It's not so much a case of paranoia, as it is a realization that Saudi money has an eerie habit of popping up around Islamic extremism the world over. And in the case of Akbar, the answer is: everywhere.
Akbar grew up attending a Saudi-funded mosque in South Central Los Angeles, and later moved to a mosque dominated by a Saudi-created and -funded organization. In the military, his Muslim chaplain at Fort Campbell was trained and certified by Saudi-funded organizations set up by a Muslim activist with deep Saudi ties. It's possible that all this Saudi money produced no Islamic extremism at any of these points in Akbar's life — but empirical evidence suggests that that's unlikely.
Attending the mosque across the street from his home, the young Akbar spent a lot of time during his formative years at the Bilal Islamic Center, according to the center's imam, Abdul Karim Hasan. Hasan, in a phone interview with NRO, recalls a "reserved" and "studious" boy. But when asked about any possible Saudi connection to his mosque, Hasan — perhaps understandably defensive, in the current anti-Saudi climate — is quick to say that he does not take money from the "Saudi government," though he conceded that he receives funds from Saudi "individuals." That's not entirely true, however.
According to the website of the Islamic Development Bank — a multibillion-dollar investment outfit run by many Arab governments, but based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — Bilal Islamic Center recently received a $295,000 grant from ISD to build a new school. Considering the stated purpose of ISD — to advance Muslim communities in accordance with sharia (Islamic law) — one wonders what the center's new school will be teaching. But it's not just the money that raises questions. Bilal Islamic Center "works closely" with the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City (roughly 45 minutes from South Central LA), according to a source at the Culver City mosque — which is not just named after King Fahd, but is also funded by him. And based on the annual statement released by the House of Saud on its efforts to spread Islam throughout the world, Bilal Islamic Center is also funded by the kingdom (under the name "Bilal Mosque of Los Angeles"), although the exact amount is not specified.[more]
posted by fred @ 12:55 PM
IMRA interviewed Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine byappointed by Yasser Arafat, in Arabic, on April 2, with Michael Widlanski,lecturer at The Rothberg School of the Hebrew University, acting as
translator.
IMRA: There are reports that Iraqi forces are using the Ali Mosque inNajaf - not as a place of refuge but instead as a place from which to shootat American forces. Is there a problem, from the standpoint of Islamicreligious law, with them doing this?
Sabri: It is the American and British forces who are on the attack. Andthey have attacked the mosques and the hospitals. And they are criminals.
IMRA: So let us ask this in a general way without relating the question to this specific case. In principle can a mosque be used in battle - not for refuge but instead as a firing position.
Sabri: What you have to understand here is that they are the raiding forces, they are the criminal forces. And they are the ones who are killing the children, the women and the elderly. And it is not important whether people are being killed from the mosque or not from the mosque. The most important thing is for American and British forces to get out of Iraq.
IMRA: I understood that. I am asking a question relating to religious law in general. Forget about Iraq. Let us talk about anyplace. Just as a concept.
Sabri: You cannot deal with such a question when there are raiding partiesin Iraq. You cannot deal with whether it is permitted or not permitted. Theroot of it is that there must not be occupying raiding forces in Iraq.
When the American and British forces get out of Iraq I will answer that question.
posted by fred @ 12:40 PM
For what it's worth, I offer this perspective from the Middle East. I read Verne's and Howard's comments with great interest and yet with growing despair. They like many others in the United States and Europe are wrestling with serious ethical, legal and moral issues concerning the propriety of war as an instrument of policy.
My reaction, as an Israeli and as an American, is that the debate in which you are engaged is a kind of luxury reserved for those who experience war in the abstract or as passive spectators of a media event. I have lived in this country (Israel) for 17 years with my wife and eight children. It seems as if it has been at least two lifetimes, primarily because of the whirlwind of events in which we have been trapped, usually as victims of a deep-seated, to a Western mind, inexplicable hatred aimed at our entire existence and way of life.
I remember hiding in our sealed rooms during the 1991 Gulf War wearing gas masks and putting, gas hoods on our babies all because the Iraqi leader, then as now, Saddam Hussein, decided that it was in his country's interest to incinerate Israel so as to weaken the US - led coalition of those years. I remember the shrapnel from the Iraqi Scuds plowing into the office building in Tel Aviv where I had my law offices then and the need to dash furtively for weeks on end from meeting to meeting carrying my anti-chemical warfare kit. I remember watching my practice wither for months while we sat hostages to Saddam Hussein's insane need to bulldoze over sovereign borders, committing rape and pillage and leaving behind an ecological disaster from purposely fired oil wells the vapors from which
filled our lungs for weeks afterwards. I remember my neighbors in nearby Arab villages running out to the streets in sheer ecstasy as they watched the SCUD missiles re-enter the atmosphere leaving fiery trails on their way to targets in Haifa, Ramat Gan and Dimona.
I am now watching my 18-year old prepare himself for the mandatory three-year tour of duty in the Israel Defense Forces, ready to take his turn in the fight to keep suicide murderers away obliterating innocents in hotels, cafes, schools and synagogues. Last month alone, the radio reported today, 57 suicide bomber attempts were thwarted by our young men and women in the IDF-- none of which I am sure was reported on CNN or even Fox News. Even as I write, Israeli boys my son's age are scouring the deserts of western Iraq in search of mobile SCUD launchers together with their British and American counterparts in the hopes of saving our people from the hail of metal, poison and destruction from Iraq. Only this time we know that, if Saddam has his way, the threat of death will not come from the skies packaged in some guided missile, but rather in a suitcase or spraycan.
For us in this part of the world who are desperately trying to hold on to our Judeo-Christian values in a sea that repudiates those very values, the prospect of war and violence is not an abstraction in constitutional law or humanistic ethics -- it is an ever present reality. It is paradoxically a solution ... a promise of a better day..
When those of us in this sliver of a nation watched as the great steel and glass edifices on Manhattan's south shore disappeared into smoke and ash on September 11, we wept with you out of empathy, not pity -- empathy spawned by five decades (in my case nearly two) of having to cope with ever present terror and, yes, war. I watched with tears in my eyes as your President, my President, addressed Congress and the world in his soft-spoken declaration of war on terror. He warned us then that this war would not be like any other undertaken in modern history. It would be fought in unconventional ways, on unconventional battlefields, over long periods of time -- often far from the penetrating view of television cameras and satellite telephones. We listened to his speech in the presence of an equally brave Prime Minister of Britain and thought, "Now our friends in America and Europe will understand what they are up against, what we have been contending with for half a century."
It has been less than two years since September 11, 2001 and judging from the proliferating news reports and well-meaning letters of protest, like those of Verne and Howard, the once impenetrable consensus has begun to disintegrate, at least in American intellectual circles and certainly on the European street. The resolve to fight the terror, the evil represented by Saddam Hussein and others of his ilk has weakened and is now threatening to put an all-too premature end to, what from this speck of a vantage point, appeared to be the most courageous development in American foreign policy since the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine.
Many of us here on the periphery of the debate watching the Europeans shrink from war to cleanse our region of the cancer called Saddam in the name of peace and other lofty principles cannot help but be reminded of another epoch in the not so distant past when the same people (indirectly aided by an indifferent American public) deluded themselves into sacrificing the tiny Czechoslovaks on an altar called Munich. Then, as now, a well-intentioned, heartfelt appeal was made to avoid the temptation to go to war, to bring peace in our time. Then, as now, the European masses cheered leaders who urged patience and restraint, ignoring cries of the firebrands. But as Winston Churchill, then a lone dissenter, later wrote of those fateful days: "there is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win. These are the tormenting dilemmas upon which mankind has throughout its history been so frequently impaled." Millions of the human race paid dearly for the enlightened restraint of the West leaders of yore, among them the six million whose cremated corpses fueled the flames in which the State of Israel was forged. How easily mankind forgets.... to think it has been only 58 years.
I do not wish to delude myself into thinking that a few paltry words of an American-Israeli Jew will persuade you to reconsider the consequences of your elegantly argued philosophy of restraint. Who in his or her right mind does not crave peace? But I beg you to open your eyes to the world in which we are all living. It is a world in which all you take for granted and hold so dear is considered anathema by millions who would not hesitate for a second to send you and your families to hellish oblivion if given the opportunity, as they have tried and are trying daily to do in our small country. Your leaders in Washington have understood this and are trying to hold the line. A wake-up call was sent to you on September 11.
Please, for God's sake, do not ignore it.
Marc Zell
posted by fred @ 11:47 AM
posted by fred @ 10:27 AM
But Powell added: "Please understand that it can't just be issued and magical things happen, and it's not going to be just imposed," said the senior official, who asked not to be named.Now let me see. No one has yet said that we must accept it. Good. I hope, Also the fact that it won't be imposed is terrific. But apparently he believes that the US must do a lot of work to get both sides to implement it. What, pray tell, does that mean? How are they going to get Israel to implement it if it doesn't like it and if the Plan won't be imposed. Another question. What the hell is the Road Map. Is it just a set of principals that are not agreed to by the parties themselves. Or are they first going to force Israel to agree to it But they said they wouldn't force us. Very confusing
"It's going to take a heck of a lot of work to get the sides to implement the road map but President Bush has committed to work very hard," the official quoted Powell as saying.
Speaking in public later, Powell said the Israelis and Palestinians will have an opportunity to comment and talk to each other about the plan when they receive it.
"And we are ready to engage in a very, very comprehensive and forceful way," he told a news conference. He did not say whether the sides could amend the plan.
posted by Ted @ 8:56 AM
posted by Ted @ 8:03 AM
Some alumni donors are pressuring the president's office and the Office of Development and Alumni Relations to fire Professor Nicholas De Genova for statements he made in last week's anti-war teach-in.
In the past few days, donors have barraged the offices with emails and phone calls, informing the University that they feel that De Genova overstepped the limits of academic free speech.
In mass-mailed email messages circulated among each other, alumni have urged each other to issue an ultimatum to the University: Fire De Genova or lose our donations.
"We've gotten a lot of calls," said Thomas Gray, who is in charge of alumni giving in the Office of Development and Alumni Relations. "The people who have called have been very upset. They're proud of their college heritage, and they're very unhappy that this occurred."
CC alumnus Steve Stuart wrote an email a few days ago to over 100 alumni--whose combined "net worth," he said, is at least $250 million--asking them to express outrage to University President Lee Bollinger.
"Until he is fired, the University will suffer," Stuart said. Many of those alumni responded to Stuart's request with letters sent directly to Bollinger. Like Stuart's, nearly all of the emails issued warnings regarding the alumni's continued financial support of the University.
Frank Cicero, CC '92 and Senior Vice President of Investment Banking at Lehman Brothers, told Bollinger that he felt De Genova's presence on campus "pollutes the educational atmosphere."
That "pollution" may compel Cicero to stop contributing to the University.
"In the past, I believed that it was naive and in bad taste for alumni to withhold gifts because of the political opinions of faculty members," Cicero said in his email to Bollinger. "However, I am now considering doing just that in response to the vile and mendacious comments made by De Genova."[more]
posted by fred @ 7:24 AM
posted by Joseph @ 10:39 PM
posted by Joseph @ 6:22 PM
Israel was restrained from defending itself after the spate of suicide bombings last spring. Arafat was protected at all costs.There you have it. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a unifying theory.
The groundwork was laid for the Road Map by saying that the Palestinians `needed “hope” and by arguing the need for international observers.
The so-called Saudi Peace Plan was taken out of the drawer and released through the NY Times, which the administration did not reject out of hand.
The administration started to make speeches, which reaffirmed that the settlements were an obstacle to peace.
Bush made his June “vision speech” in which he sugar coated his vision of a Palestinian State with all kinds of safeguards for Israel, to make it easier for Israel to swallow the poison.
In September the Quartet released the first draft of the Road Map.
The Road Map is negotiated while the US attempted to get UN approval for the War. France and Germany proved intransigent but not the Arabs.
The final draft was released in December but not published ostensibly because of the Israeli elections and then until a government was formed. The administration also wanted Labour in the government of Israel so that it would be easier to get Israel to travel the Road Map. Sharon tried hard but didn’t succeed.
The Road Map was also held back as a trump card to ensure Arab support for the War which had not yet started.
As part of their bargain, the Arabs attempted to get agreement on ending the terror but didn’t succeed. No matter.
Throughout this period of time when it was negotiating with Saudi Arabia the State Department came often to the defence of Saudi Arabia describing them as a friend of the US. In fact their representative was invited to Bush’s ranch.
Much was made of the number of times Sharon met with Bush. Sharon rightly assumed great coordination of aims and often remarked that they saw “eye to eye”. But unfortunately he was blind.
As cover for the bargain, Blair became the fall guy and started pushing for a Palestinian state and the Road Map in his assigned role. In fact this was a smoke screen for the deal that had been cut with the Arabs.
The Administration made it appear that they were paying a debt to Blair to hide the deal with the Arabs.
While the whole world was rejecting the war, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt came out in support of regime change. Saudi Arabia allowed the use of the US airbase in their country and allowed over flights and safe passage for men and equipment. Kuwait was allowed everything. It was incomprehensible until now.
The US kept stalling approval of the nine billion in aid Israel was requesting so that it would have leverage to get Israel to comply.
The defection of Turkey and the rejection by France and Germany made Arab cooperation all the more important and necessary.
Then the State Department kept Saudi Arabia off the list of intolerant religious countries and put Israel on the list of abusers of human rights.
The Palestinians did their part by agreeing to reforms and even appointing Abu Mazem as PM. Never mind, he was a long time crony of Arafat’s, that he did not have full authority, that he was in favour of “resistance” and was a holocaust denier, it was good enough for the US and they started a campaign to whitewash him. He was just Arafat’s fig leaf.
Once Arab cooperation was assured and the war launched, the gloves came off of the Road Map. Nothing else can explain why the Road Map is to be released before the dust settles in Iraq.
It was irrelevant that the UN and the EU were given a role after screwing the US on the UN approval because the Road Map was a concession to the Arabs and not France.
posted by Ted @ 8:56 AM
Our friends Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson seem to do whatever they can to paint Israel in a bad light -- even when Israeli civilians are victims of suicide bombers. Compare the Post's coverage of yesterday's bombing in Netanya with that of the NY Times. First, from WaPo's story:
The continuing attacks have left emotions raw. Nihad Yassim, 33, and his wife, Fatmah, 32, an Israeli Arab couple, rushed from their table at the restaurant next door to assist a wounded soldier who was writhing in pain on the sidewalk.
"My husband tried to help the soldier, but a civilian nearby jumped on us because my husband was speaking to me in Arabic and the man suspected him of being connected to the bomber," said Fatmah, who is seven months pregnant and was having contractions at the hospital after the incident. "I was deeply hurt by this. It's as if it's not my country and I don't have the right to live in it."
Here's what James Bennet of the Times wrote:
Mr. Yassin, the Israeli Arab, said he was separated from his wife in the chaos. He rushed bottled water to wounded soldiers, he said, and then, as rescue workers arrived, went to look for her.
Once he found her, he said, he addressed her in Arabic. He said an Israeli man then accosted him, demanding to know where he was from and summoning the police.
Mr. Yassin said the policeman realized he was a victim, not a suspect, and helped him to an ambulance.
When the mayor of Netanya, Miriam Feierberg, visited Mr. Yassin at his bedside today, Mrs. Yassin told her about the incident.
"People are under pressure," Mayor Feierberg said.
"But I'm under the same pressure," Mrs. Yassin replied.
The mayor said she understood, but added, "When a terror attack happens, everyone's balance is upset, and there's nothing to be done about it."
But I guess one should expect this kind of treatment from the Post, which has a foreign editor who finds Hamas' goals to be "ambiguous."
posted by fred @ 8:38 AM
But there were many there - and these are the vast majority of the organization's activists, as anyone who has attended a few AIPAC conventions knows - who really and truly support the settlements.All together now.
When AIPAC decides to fight the road map, even those who applauded in Washington will enlist. And AIPAC should start now. After all, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is certainly not one of Israel's enemies, and did not arbitrarily release a semi-ultimatum - not to a lobby that can (almost) influence the outcome of the elections - that the "demands [of the road map] are not open to negotiation." And when such a resolute statement is made when the early cherry blossoms of the primaries are already blooming in Washington, it is a sign that the lobby fell asleep on its watch.
The analysis of a few main clauses in this map of dictates makes one ask. The implementation of the map includes two international conferences. This means the internationalization of the conflict and that Israel's bosom buddies - like the representatives of the Quartet - will act as judge in the dispute between us and the Palestinians! After all, all Israeli governments, including that of the late Yitzhak Rabin, which kept even the United States away from the Oslo talks, felt that no good could come out of international conferences.
Another such clause is the Israeli parallel to the cessation of terror - the freezing of the settlements: "The Israeli government will freeze all settlement activity, including the natural growth of the communities." It turns out, therefore, that even the U.S. has unfortunately been dragged into this outrageous and unethical equation. It is possible to oppose the settlements for ideological or other reasons, but for Jews in Israel to rejoice that a document is forced on us, equating construction and productivity - even in a disputed location - with the Palestinian terror that has murdered over 1,000 and injured thousands more in the last 30 months alone?
The "security" section of the document states that the supervising council, which includes the U.S., Egypt and Jordan, will set up the forces of the Palestinian state. Can Israel afford to repeat the bitter mistake, after the lessons of the establishment of the Palestinian force following Oslo, of putting such a critical matter in the hands of two countries that a priori and without hesitation support every Palestinian position?
Even the following words, according to Rice, are "not open to negotiation": "The arrangement will take special consideration of the Saudi initiative that was accepted at the Beirut summit." The two principles of that initiative are: 1. The full withdrawal of Israel to the 1967 lines, including from Jerusalem; and 2. The return of the Palestinians to their residences in Israel in accordance with United Nations Resolution 194. Those - the right of return and the complete withdrawal from Jerusalem - are a cause for rejoicing?
Perhaps the cause for celebration is the paragraph that calls all the territories liberated in 1967 - including Jerusalem - "occupied territory"? (American spokesmen, for instance, speak of all areas conquered in Iraq as "liberated territory," with the ultimate goal being the "liberation of Baghdad.") And what about the fact that all Israeli construction, including in Jerusalem, is an action that "undermines trust"? Journalist David Bedein of the Makor Rishon weekly magazine wanted to know whether the renovation of the Hurva synagogue (bombed by the Jordanians during the 1948 War of Independence) in Jerusalem's Old City, for example, was included in that ban.
"Any building activity in the Old City of Jerusalem," responded the American Embassy, "will be considered illegal construction as conceived by U.S. foreign policy."
Another thing, take note, which is stated in the road map: "All Israeli institutions will end incitement against the Palestinians."
The morning after the 1991 Gulf War, surely as a gesture to Israel's obedience and restraint despite being bombarded with 39 Scud missiles, then-secretary of state James Baker came to Israel and forced then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to accept an international conference, the Madrid conference that led to the Oslo disaster and to this murderous war of terror that has no end.
Unlike its predecessor, which was hostile to Israel, the current administration, which is considered friendly to Israel is for some reason in a hurry to get moving and has unsheathed its claws at the height of the war. Now Israel must respond resolutely: The milestones that are marked on this "follow the rules without question" road map are liable to lead the Jewish state into a trap that will endanger its existence. From Israel's perspective, and not that of the U.S., Rice is correct: This road map cannot be open to negotiation.
posted by Ted @ 8:29 AM
The first week of the Iraq war should give us an unforgettable lesson in how the world works in terms of information battles, elite opinion, and media behavior. The experience should shatter some decades-old assumptions.
Simply put: Things thought to apply only to Israel have now been shown to work almost equally against the United States. Problems attributed to an Israeli hasbara weakness also hold true for the mighty and competent American public relations system. Attitudes attributable to anti-Semitism are paralleled by the effects of anti-Americanism.
In short, Israel's situation is by no means unique. Deeper, systemic, problems about how governments, media, and intellectuals function and how they view the world can work against anyone, or at least anyone who deals with the Middle East.
Here are some key aspects:
* Being a democracy battling a dictatorship earns you little or no special credit, and can be an outright disadvantage. The assumption of the dominant sector in the intellectual class which runs much of academia, the media, and all verbal, opinion-forming sectors of society is that democracies lie about as much as dictatorships, especially if the dictatorship claims "progressive" credentials.
Forcing its own intellectuals and media to voice a single line makes the dictatorship sound popular abroad. Since all Iraqis or Palestinians say the same thing, it must be true. In contrast, a democracy's dissenting voices about its real or imagined shortcomings can be used to undermine its assertions.
To make matters worse, you have the claims of a "people" versus those of a "government." (You can imagine which one the opinion-making class is more likely to believe.)
In addition, since no critical information comes out of a dictatorship, the only way we know it does anything wrong is from its enemies' assertions. All the data, no matter how well-documented, from Israel on Yasser Arafat's backing of terrorism, or from the US on Saddam Hussein's repression and concealment of weapons can be dismissed as partisan.
Then there is the fair-minded "neutrality" of those who shape opinion in the media, academia, and elsewhere. "Patriotism" is identified as a right-wing belief and replaced by its opposite. To doubt, criticize, slander, or at least avoid agreeing with your country's position seems politically courageous and morally noble.
"Why should we assume the US is telling the truth? Let's give equal weight to Saddam Hussein's version."
As a result, if soldiers of a democratic state make a mistake an Israeli or US attack that inadvertently kills civilians they are denounced as something close to war criminals. But if their adversaries torture people to death, employ terrorism or do a dozen other heinous things, the response is, "How do we know it really happened?"
The democratic states must meet a higher standard. Their mistakes matter, and they are held accountable for each and every one.
NOW CONSIDER some parallels: [more]
posted by fred @ 8:24 AM
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - In an unprecedented incident, Israeli security forces uncovered an explosives laboratory run by the Islamic Jihad in an Israeli Arab town and arrested a three-member Israeli Arab cell intending to help carry out a suicide bombing in Israel, the prime minister's office said on Monday.
It is not the first terror attack involving participation by Israeli Arabs, who often have relatives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but it is the first case of the discovery of a bomb-making factory here. Because they possess a "blue" Israeli identity card, Israeli Arabs can pass easily through Israeli army checkpoints leaving the West Bank.
Muhammed Masri, who headed the cell, is an Israeli citizen from Jaljuliya. His mother is a Palestinian from the West Bank town of Tulkarm.
Late last year, Masri allegedly met Islamic Jihad militant Nimr Khalil while on a family visit to Tulkarm.
Khalil later allegedly asked Masri to help a suicide bomber infiltrate Israel and introduced him to two Islamic Jihad activists, who gave him a detailed list of bomb-making materials and 2,000 shekels (about $425) with which to purchase the goods, the prime minister's office said in a statement.
Masri made the purchase, began to assemble the items and enlisted the help of two other Israeli Arabs, Iman Abu Kishak and Fadel Abed, according to the accusations. Masri also allegedly purchased a phony Israeli ID to help the suicide attacker get into Israel.
The cell was also accused of perpetrating firebomb attacks, which caused no injuries. The three were arrested recently before they had a chance to help carry out the suicide attack, Israeli officials said.
"Masri told his investigators that he acted from ideological motives and that he had begun to become religiously observant approximately two years ago," the prime minister's office said.
"He added if it were not for his frequent visits to his mother's relatives in Tulkarm, he might not have become involved with fugitive terrorists," according to the prime minister's office.[more]
posted by fred @ 8:15 AM
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israeli troops looking for weapons-smuggling tunnels raided a Gaza refugee camp early Thursday, killing four armed Palestinians in exchanges of fire and demolishing five houses.
In the West Bank, two Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed by army fire.
In the army raid, soldiers backed by 35 tanks, four attack helicopters and more than a dozen bulldozers entered the Rafah camp near the Egyptian border. A firefight erupted. Four Palestinian gunmen were killed, including one hit by fire from an Apache helicopter, and seven were wounded.
The army said the raid was meant to uncover tunnels used for smuggling weapons from Egypt, and that four houses were razed. Palestinians put the number of demolished homes at five.
No tunnels were discovered but four soldiers were wounded when a bomb went off under a tank. The militant Islamic group Hamas, which has killed hundreds of Israelis in attacks, claimed responsibility for the tank attack, saying it was a "gift to the Iraqi people."
The Rafah camp has been a flashpoint of fighting in the past 30 months, with troops destroying dozens of home allegedly used for covering tunnels or as firing positions. The army has demolished nearly 700 houses in refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza since September 2000, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The demolitions have rendered more than 5,000 Palestinians homeless, the Red Cross said.
In the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, meanwhile, Israeli troops searching for Palestinian militants late Wednesday night shot and killed a 14-year-old Palestinian when he opened his door to look at troops outside, witnesses said. The army said the youth tried to run away from troops, and was shot after he ignored calls to stop.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli troops shot and killed a local Hamas leader early Thursday morning, the army said.
Khaled Rayyan, 28, was hiding in a relative's house with his wife and child when soldiers broke down the door, said his wife, Salam. Rayyan was killed when he tried to attack the troops with a pistol, she said.
Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian Cabinet minister, said he condemned the killings, particularly of the teenager. "I ... urge the international community not to allow Israel to continue exploiting the war with Iraq to achieve its end goal," Erekat said.
Palestinians have expressed concern that Israel would step up military strikes while the world's attention focuses on Iraq. However, there has been no sign of a significant increase in raids in the past two weeks.
In the West Bank town of Tulkarem and an adjacent refugee camp, nearly 1,000 men and teenage boys who had been questioned on Wednesday during an Israeli military sweep were being kept from returning to their homes on Thursday. The army said they were being kept out so soldiers could search homes and question other residents.
As many Palestinians waited to return to their homes, Israeli forces demolished the Tulkarem home of a Palestinian suicide bomber who blew himself up in the coastal city of Netanya two years ago. Israel routinely demolishes the homes of families of suicide bombers as a deterrent. Palestinians say it is collective punishment.
Also Thursday, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister-designate, met with political leaders in the Gaza Strip to discuss the formation of his new Cabinet, expected later this month.
posted by fred @ 8:11 AM
A senior minister in the Pakistani government blasted US sanctions imposed on the country's main nuclear research facility, saying that "agents of Jews" were behind Pakistan's negative image, the Pakistan Tribune reported.
At a press conference held in Peshawar, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, Pakistan's Minister of Information, denounced the US move against the Kahuta Research Laboratories, which reportedly supplied nuclear technology to North Korea.
"We have flatly rejected the US sanctions on Kahuta Research Laboratories," he said, adding that the sanctions would have no impact because the lab does not engage in trade with any US-based firms.
Ahmed also asserted that "agents of Jews" were behind media speculation that Pakistan might be America's next target after Iraq in the global war on terror. "Pakistan is invincible," he said.
posted by fred @ 8:06 AM
Some 10,000 Palestinians reportedly thronged the streets and alleyways of the refugee camp in the West Bank town of Jenin on Thursday, chanting for Saddam Hussein to bomb Tel Aviv and shooting at photographs of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.
The protest was held on the one year anniversary of Operation Defensive Shield in which dozens of Israeli soldiers and Palestinians died during an IDF sweep for terror suspects in the camp.
According to Israel Radio, 10,000 protesters marched through the streets, carrying signs and chanting slogans that called on Saddam Hussein to attack Tel Aviv.
The radio played the sound of the crackle of gunfire being aimed by protesters at huge posters of US President George W. Bush and British Premier Tony Blair that were held up in the town square.
Earlier this week, Palestinian officials renamed the square to honor the Iraqi suicide bomber who killed four US Marines in southern Iraq on Saturday.
posted by fred @ 8:02 AM
posted by Michael @ 4:22 PM
He had already provided a perfectly good lie on the 24th, and he didn't have to dream up a new one in London. For whatever Villepin (or Chirac for that matter) said, in London or Paris, on the 24th or whenever, the fact of the matter is that France has done everything in its power to prevent the coalition from winning this war. Indeed, France took an amazing step, whose only possible consequence was to prolong the war and to maximize casualties on both sides. That took place when France and Germany threatened the Turkish opposition parties with total excommunication from Europe if they dared vote in favor of permitting the U.S. to use Turkish bases in the liberation of Iraq.The result of that threat was to cause the US to travel thousands of miles with men and equipment to disembarque in Kuwait instead of Turkey.
posted by Ted @ 3:39 PM
LONDON, April 2 (UPI) -- A Muslim fundamentalist source claimed Wednesday that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network captured five coalition troops in Iraq.
The source who requested anonymity told United Press International by telephone that the kidnapping of four U.S. troops and a British soldier, took place last Saturday in al-Zubair region of southern Iraq, close to the Kuwaiti border.
He said the "kidnapped troops will be equally treated as al-Qaida prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay."
He said al-Qaida will soon release a videotape of the captured soldiers and will ask to swap them with al-Qaida suspects being held by the United States.
posted by fred @ 3:28 PM
posted by fred @ 1:54 PM
posted by bunuel @ 12:45 PM
posted by Ted @ 12:37 PM
EZRA LEVANT -- Calgary Sun
Allied troops are now finding out what it is like to be Israeli.
Like Israel, the Allied coalition has had little problem dispatching the Iraqi army in open combat.
Credible reports from one battle claimed that 300 Iraqi soldiers were killed without a single American casualty.
Lop-sided numbers like these are reminiscent of Israeli battles with its Arab neighbours, particularly the 1967 Six-Day War and 1982 battle over the Bekaa Valley.
Allied commanders report their chief opposition comes from Iraqi paramilitary guerrillas, often dressed as civilians, hiding in apartments, mosques and hospitals. Sometimes they pretend to surrender -- and then attack when the Allies let down their guard. There have also been several suicide attacks on Allied troops.
In the city of Basra, Saddam's Fedayeen -- the Iraqi version of Hitler's Brownshirts -- forced other Iraqi soldiers at gunpoint to fight against the Allies.
In one case, Fedayeen dressed in U.S. military uniforms, pretended to be Americans and called for Iraqi troops to surrender to them.
Those that did so were killed.
In other words, Saddam's loyalists are resorting to terrorist tactics, including terrorizing their own people.
That's been the state of affairs in Israel for decades.
Suicide bombings are a weekly event in Israel -- but they target pizza parlours and buses, not just Israeli soldiers.
Palestinian bomb-makers hide munitions factories in densely crowded Arab shanties, relying on Israelis' aversion to civilian casualties.
That's Saddam's plan in Baghdad, too.
Iraq knows that its greatest weapon is western public opinion -- and that the international media and diplomatic establishment will always give Iraq the benefit of the doubt. Iraqis are already trumping up civilian casualties to discredit Allied commanders.
As if on cue, Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the UN, accepted without question the Iraqi claim that Allied commanders are massacring civilians.
Specifically repeating one Iraqi allegation, Annan said:
"I would want to remind all belligerents that they should respect international humanitarian law to protect civilians. Besides, they are responsible for the welfare of the civilian population."
To Allied ears, it is shocking to hear Annan criticize American tactics, but not Saddam's.
What about Iraqi executions of Allied PoWs? Or Iraqi tanks hidden in the middle of hospitals?
France's reaction was even more galling.
In London last week, Dominique de Villepin, France's Foreign Minister, refused to answer a reporter's question about which side France hoped would win the war.
This perfidy is nothing new for Israel, the universal scapegoat at the UN and the European Union, and the subject of their most one-sided excoriations.
For decades, sophisticated experts have lectured us about how concepts of right and wrong don't apply to the Mideast.
They have renamed terrorists "militants" and dictators as "friends" or "allies."
They have cast democratic Israel as the aggressor.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the fictions of that world view were exposed. Terrorists cannot be negotiated with or compromised with. They are enemies who must be defeated. The word "evil", long out of fashion, has been taken out of storage. It is the only word that is accurate.
The Allies are now seeing first-hand what Israel has faced for decades.
And George Bush and Tony Blair are responding as Ariel Sharon does:
With moral clarity -- military force, combined with humanitarian compassion.
Sept. 11 turned all of us into targets. It has forced all of us to confront evil. We are all Israelis now. Ezra Levant can be reached at ezra@fightkyoto.com
Letters to the editor should be sent to callet@sunpub.com
posted by fred @ 10:47 AM
Lisa Anderson, dean of international affairs at Columbia and president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), has sent a letter to members in the current MESA Newsletter. It contains a remarkably frank indictment of the performance of Middle Eastern studies over the past decade.This correction sent me by the author:
Anderson describes how the Middle East stagnated in the 1990s, dashing the academics' hopes for democratization. "It was an ugly picture," she admits, "and, to be candid, few American scholars of the Middle East did much to advertise it."
Thousands of individually rational decisions, as my political science colleagues might observe, contributed to a collective abdication of responsibility. In the social sciences, graduate students who wanted jobs and junior faculty who wanted tenure mimicked their colleagues in other areas and looked for flickers of electoral politics and glimmers of economic privatization...and neglected the stubborn durability of the authoritarian regimes....More senior scholars, pained by the demoralization in the region and its neglect in their disciplines, suspended active research agendas in favor of administrative assignments in their universities....In the humanities, many scholars...were reluctant to jeopardize access to visas and research authorizations; in their excessive caution, they failed to speak out about the often appalling circumstances of their friends and colleagues there.
In sum, the practitioners either silenced themselves or parroted disciplinary dogmas. I made most of these points, with evidence, in the fourth chapter of my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. I'm glad to see them finally conceded, instead of denied. Anderson's own joint appearance with me on a panel in Washington in November was the first sign of perestroika in MESA. This is another.
In another part of her letter, Anderson takes an unfair stab at Campus Watch, for "claiming that half of MESA’s membership is 'of Middle Eastern origin'" and that some of these MESAns have "brought their views with them." Actually, the first flagging of the Middle Eastern origins of the members surfaced in a MESA presidential speech, delivered in 1992 by Yvonne Haddad (and quoted by me in Ivory Towers). Haddad: "Our membership has changed over the years, and possibly half is of Middle Eastern heritage." Campus Watch wasn't the first to make that estimate.
When I brought Haddad's quote, it was to dispute another claim about MESA, made by Edward Said:
During the 1980s, the formerly conservative Middle East Studies Association underwent an important ideological transformation....What happened in the Middle East Studies Association therefore was a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.
I pointed out that so total an "ideological transformation" in MESA would not have taken place had there not been a massive shift in the ethnic composition of its membership, as attested by Haddad. And on the very same page, I quoted a political scientist who noted "the widespread, if undocumentable, impression that an individual's ethnic background or political persuasion may influence hiring and tenure decisions" in Middle Eastern studies. The political scientist: Lisa Anderson.
Personally, I wouldn't care if Middle Eastern studies were comprised entirely of people of "Middle Eastern heritage." What I find objectionable is the way MESA has been transformed into "a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination." That agenda does sound like something pulled straight out of Damascus or Tehran, and it's certainly not the proper role of an American professional association. The problem with MESA is that so many of its past officers have tried to whip it into an ethnic lobby or a popular front. It's this abysmal legacy that Professor Anderson would do right to disown in her next message to the members.
Stand corrected: This is the revised version of today's posting. It now correctly attributes the 1992 MESA presidential address to Barbara Aswad
posted by fred @ 10:33 AM
Monir Mari'i, allegedly a Hamas commander in the Hebron region responsible for the deaths of numerous Israelis, was caught last night by IDF troops.
The IDF confirmed this morning that Mari'i was captured during an operation of elite units of the IDF during the night. Mari'i is believed to be responsible for the organization of the attack on the Jewish settlement Adora on April 27, 2002, in which 4 Israeli civilians were killed- inluding a 4-year-old infant.
Mari'i is a Jordanian citizen who enlisted, trained and directed terrorists that executed numerous other attacks in the area of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, including a shooting attack on June 20, 2002. Iman Jumjum, an additional member of Mari'i's terrorist cell, was also captured
posted by fred @ 10:28 AM
Agence France-Presse reports that "three US troops were wounded, one seriously, after Iraqi soldiers used a Red Crescent ambulance to stage an attack in southern Iraq." This is another case of Saddam Hussein's terrorists aping the Palestinian Arabs; an article in The Lancet (link in PDF format) describes how Palestinian terrorists use Red Crescent ambulances to smuggle weapons. And of course the State Department faults Israel because it has "obstructed the movement of and occasionally fired upon medical personal [sic] and ambulances."and see, too: Checkpoint lessons from the West Bank
posted by fred @ 10:19 AM
TULKARM, West Bank, April 2 (Reuters) - Israeli troops rounded up large numbers of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarm on Wednesday in a fresh sweep for wanted militants.
Soldiers in tanks and armoured vehicles backed by helicopters imposed a curfew and searched homes for militants before telling males aged 14 to 40 to gather in the courtyard of a local school or face punishment, residents told Reuters.
Palestinian witnesses said about 2,000 people were rounded up. The Israeli army said it was about half that number.
At least seven were identified as wanted militants and formally arrested, the army said. Identity checks continued on the others and those not on the wanted list would be quickly freed, it added. Troops were also searching houses for weapons.
It was the largest round-up of Palestinians in Tulkarm for a year and came after an Islamic militant from a nearby village blew himself up outside a cafe in the Israeli seaside town of Netanya on Sunday, wounding 30 people.
Palestinian militant groups have been waging an independence [sic!] uprising against Israel since September, 2000. Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians in the conflict, many of them in citywide dragnets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
About 4,800 remained in jail as of early March -- 1,400 serving prison sentences, 1,090 undergoing legal proceedings and some 2,400 in detention without charge, the Israeli human rights group B'tselem said, quoting army and prison figures.
U.S. URGES RESTRAINT
The United States, chief mediator in the conflict, is now preoccupied with war in Iraq and facing rising anti-American resentment in the Arab world. It has urged Israel to restrain military operations and called on Palestinians to curb attacks.[more]
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posted by fred @ 10:06 AM
WASHINGTON: Israel said on Monday it would give the Palestinian prime minister-designate, Mahmoud Abbas, one or two months to show whether his new government can stop Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
During that period, Israel expects Abbas to crack down on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the militant Islamist groups behind many of the attacks inside Israel, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom of Israel said in Washington.
If Abbas fails, then progress in any peace talks with the Palestinians will not be possible, he said. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has named Abbas, widely known as Abu Mazen, to the new post of prime minister and asked him to form a government. When the Palestinian legislature approves the government, the United States will release a long-awaited peace plan to the Israelis and Palestinians.
Shalom, speaking after lunch with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, said: “If Abu Mazen will not take the right measures against terror when he comes to office in his first or second months, he won’t be able to do it after it.
“It will be very important for him and for the future of the region that he will take those measures against the Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations when he comes to office,” Shalom said. “You have to understand that we won’t be able to go forward and to get progress unless the terror relents.”
Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians broke down in early 2001. President Bush’s peace plan, known as the “road map,” is meant to end the violence and break the negotiating deadlock.
The United States says it does not want Israelis and Palestinians to renegotiate the plan but rather to start to carry out the practical steps that the plan contains.
Shalom did not say whether Israel would seek amendments, but he endorsed the plan’s ultimate goal of a peace agreement between Israel and a new Palestinian state.
“We are adopting the vision of President Bush,” he said. “And anything that will be a genuine, accurate reflection of this vision will be something that we will be able to work with.”
Shalom spoke to the main pro-Israeli lobbying organization Sunday evening and had talks on Monday morning with Vice President Dick Cheney and White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
posted by fred @ 9:59 AM
WASHINGTON -- The United States will mount a forceful diplomatic campaign to implement an international plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians while war rages in Iraq, according to top State Department officials.
In the coming weeks, the Bush administration hopes to release the so-called "road map," a plan that lays out steps both sides should take to halt two-and-a-half years of violence. Then the administration will coax both sides to take action.
There will be "a fairly aggressive push" to implement the peace plan, which foresees an eventual Palestinian state at peace with Israel, said a senior State Department official. He was expanding on comments in recent days by Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush.
Powell was to spell out the U.S. position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an address to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the principal Jewish-American lobby, on Sunday night.
The secretary of state believes that implementing the peace plan would require difficult steps by both sides, another department official said. That idea is sometimes interpreted as insisting that Israel be prepared to remove Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Bush administration officials say several calculations are driving the renewed diplomatic attempt to end the conflict.
One is an assessment that the Palestinian Authority has made good-faith efforts toward the political and financial reforms Washington has long demanded.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat recently named Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to the post of prime minister, bowing -- at least in theory -- to demands that Arafat relinquish his monopoly on political power.
Washington has said it is waiting for Abbas to be confirmed in the position before making public the diplomatic road map, drafted by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.[more]
posted by fred @ 9:49 AM
Martin van Creveld's advice to the US marines on what lessons to draw from Israel's bloody urban battle in Jenin was precise: Forget the helicopters, invest in armoured bulldozers.
For months now, the Pentagon has been taking notes from the Israelis in preparation for what looks increasingly likely to be an arduous house by house, street by street, fight for Baghdad. Pentagon strategists have pored over videos of the Israeli military's assault on Jenin a year ago, when 150 lightly armed but determined Palestinians kept the army at bay for 11 days and killed 23 soldiers.
US officers watched Israeli tank raids into West Bank cities in February, and American soldiers have learned in the Israeli desert how to blow their way from house to house to avoid booby traps and street fighting. The Israeli insights build on years of exchanges of military technology and intelligence between the deeply intertwined armies. Among other things, the US is using Israeli-manufactured drones to scout across Iraqi lines.
But with the US army faced with fighting through Baghdad's sprawling maze of streets and alleyways, known intimately by its enemy, American technological superiority is probably worth less than the Israelis' bitter experience. And now there is the added factor of suicide bombers.
As the war with Iraq loomed, the US marines called in Mr Van Creveld, a military strategist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University with close ties to the Israeli army. At a briefing in North Carolina in September, he offered some lessons.
"There were three key things," he said. "How to clear streets house by house, particularly using bulldozers. They're very useful in this kind of war to break houses.
"How and when to use helicopters to take out snipers. And when not to, and I'd say Baghdad is one of those situations. And how to avoid civilian casualties."
Condemned
The Israeli army used giant armoured Caterpillar bulldozers and helicopter gunships to crush and rocket a square kilometre of Jenin, killing dozens of Palestinian fighters and civilians and destroying hundreds of homes. The American-made bulldozers - originally used in Vietnam - are in themselves weapons, bringing buildings crashing down on an enemy without having to engage him room by room. It was a widely condemned tactic in Jenin, which the Israelis claim saved civilian lives even though, like bombs, the killing is not selective.
But US forces have also been receiving insights into how to fight room by room if it becomes necessary. Close to 1,000 American soldiers were sent to Israel for joint manoeuvres at the beginning of the year. Some were sent to a mock Arab town in the Negev desert to draw on Israeli experience. Among other things, they were shown how Israeli soldiers avoid having to show themselves on the street by moving from inside one house to another by blowing a hole in the wall without bringing the building down. [more]
posted by fred @ 9:46 AM
In December 1969 the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 2535 B, which for the first time used the word "Palestinians" in UN resolutions. Until then they had been called ''Arab refugees.'' That resolution referred to the "inalienable rights of the Palestinians" and their right to ''self-determination.'' Subsequently, the UN reaffirmed this "right" in many more resolutions.
And so we arrive at this year's session of the Geneva-based United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), which recently debated under Item 5 of its agenda, "The right of peoples to self-determination and its application to peoples under colonial or alien domination or foreign occupation."
On the first day, even before the Item 5 deliberations, the chairperson of the UNCHR, Libyan ambassador Najat Al-Hajjaji, mentioned the Palestinians' right to self-determination in her opening speech -- a speech that she pronounced in Arabic, "In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful." When Item 5 was addressed, many Arab nations accused Israel of denying the exercise of this right to the Palestinians.
Anyone listening to the Arab delegates' passionate plea on behalf of the Palestinians might reasonably conclude that Arab countries care deeply about the Palestinians' plight. Alas, one would be wrong. The Arabs are less concerned about the lack of Palestinian self-determination than they are troubled by Israel's exercise of her right to self-determination. They simply use the Palestinians as a rhetorical weapon to attack Israel in international forums.
The history of Arab-PLO and Arab-Palestinian relations is characterized by manipulation, deceit, treason and violence. Jordan and Egypt occupied the West Bank and Gaza for almost two decades; yet, neither country granted the Palestinians the right to self-determination. Jordan expelled the PLO from Amman to Beirut in 1970 the Syrians attacked the PLO there in 1976, and when the Israelis sent the PLO packing from Lebanon in 1982, no Arab nation (with the sole exception of Syria) intervened to help the "legitimate representative of the Palestinian people." Colonel Moammar Gaddafi even called on PLO militants to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Israelis. Naturally, Arafat declined to accept the Libyan's suggestion.[more]
posted by fred @ 9:42 AM
JERUSALEM, April 1 — "The State of Palestine is a sovereign, independent republic." So — perhaps wistfully, perhaps with promise — begins the new draft of the Palestinian constitution.
It may seem paradoxical that a people without a state would have the institutions of a democracy — an elected legislature, an elected president, a constitution that has been in the works for four years. Yet the paradox runs deeper than that. It is because of their experience of statelessness that Palestinians have a chance to build a democracy, though the Bush administration now seems more intent on creating a model Arab government in Iraq. Lessons learned in the Palestinian diaspora, and from struggling against and living alongside Israelis, have made many Palestinians yearn, not just for a state, but for a democratic state ...
Palestinians also worked in Israel and watched Israeli television. They saw that, for its own citizens, the Israeli system had distinct virtues. This is not easy for even ardent Palestinian democrats to acknowledge.
Yet since 1996, Dr. Shikaki has been polling Palestinians about what governments they admire, and every year Israel has been the top performer, at times receiving more than 80 percent approval. The American system has been the next best, followed by the French and then, distantly trailing, the Jordanian and Egyptian.
In its early days, the Palestinian Authority held fourth place, with about 50 percent approval. Now, it is dead last, under 20 percent. Corruption, mismanagement and the stagnation of the Palestinian predicament have turned the culture of criticism against the Palestinian rulers.
Whatever its ultimate borders, any Palestine would be a very small place without oil wells, dependent on the good will of Western democracies that can influence Israel. That is why President Bush was able to give a mighty push to the constitution and other state-building measures last June, when he set civic reform as a condition for peace talks.
Mr. Bush wanted to sideline Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and he has since shifted his focus to reconfiguring another Arab leadership. But European nations have kept pushing here for democratic reform.
Dr. Ali Khashshan, the secretary general of the group that drafted the constitution, said he hoped for a referendum to approve it soon. "We need to guarantee our rights," he said.
Though the constitution is a work in process, secular and Christian Palestinians seem to be losing one battle: the draft declares Islam to be Palestine's "official religion," though it adds that Christianity and all other monotheistic religions shall be equally revered and respected." [more]
posted by fred @ 9:22 AM
To read the Arab press is to think that the entire Arab world is enraged with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and to some extent that's true. But here's what you don't read: underneath the rage, there is also a grudging, skeptical curiosity — a curiosity about whether the Americans will actually do what they claim and build a new, more liberal Iraq.
While they may not be able to describe it, many Arabs intuit that this U.S. invasion of Iraq is something they've never seen before — the revolutionary side of U.S. power. Let me explain: for Arabs, American culture has always been revolutionary — from blue jeans to "Baywatch" — but American power, since the cold war, has only been used to preserve the status quo here, keeping in place friendly Arab kings and autocrats.
Even after the cold war ended and America supported, and celebrated, the flowering of democracy from Eastern Europe to Latin America, the Arab world was excluded. In this neighborhood, because of America's desire for steady oil supplies and a safe Israel, America continued to support the status quo and any Arab government that preserved it. Indeed, Gulf War I simply sought to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy and the flow of oil. Once that was done, Saddam was left alone.
And that is why Gulf War II is such a shock to the Arab system, on a par with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt or the Six-Day War. But different people are shocked in different ways.
To begin with, there is the shock of Arab liberals, still a tiny minority, who can't believe that America has finally used its revolutionary power in the Arab world. They are desperate for America to succeed because they think Iraq is too big to ignore, and therefore a real election there would shake the whole Arab region.[more]
posted by fred @ 9:14 AM
.DAMASCUS April 25. Hoping to narrow its differences and broaden the possible areas of cooperation, Syria is getting set for complex negotiations with the United States.
Syrian officials here talk about "red lines" — the maximum limit to which Damascus can go to accommodate U.S. concerns. With a new dispensation emerging in Iraq, Syria has already drawn its first "red line." Apprehending that a new U.S.-backed regime in Baghdad is likely to build a cooperative relationship with Israel, Syria appears to have made up its mind that it would carry out a sustained campaign to oppose such a move.
Syria has declared its intent to oppose a possible U.S.-sponsored thaw between Iraq and Israel during recent talks with Arab countries.
Foreign Ministers of Iraq's neighbouring countries, along with Egypt and Bahrain, had recently held their first meeting in Riyadh after the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, had been unseated.
Analysts point out that Syria is likely to convey to Washington that it would want a "comprehensive" settlement of the Israel-Palestinian issue first, before considering any political realignment in the region. Sources here point out that unlike Jordan and Egypt, Syria does not want to sign a "separate peace" deal with Israel that does not include a final settlement of the Palestinian issue. Egypt and Jordan have signed separate peace accords with Israel and have normalised their relationship with Tel Aviv.
Syrian officials, however, say a separate peace deal is a bad idea.
There are two key issues involving the Israel-Palestinian issues, which concern Syria. First, the Syrians want the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967 to be returned.
Second, they are looking for a modus vivendi that would allow the return of around 300,000 Palestinian refugees that reside in Syria. Both these issues cannot be tackled unless a final settlement of the Palestinian question is reached, they say.
The officialdom in Syria is also opposed to ending Damascus' influence in Lebanon, situated along Israel's northern borders.
The perception here that if Syria's influence in Lebanon declines Israel will attempt to fill the diplomatic vacuum that such a move is likely to cause. In other words, Israel would make a fresh attempt to bring Lebanon into its political orbit. Syria, on its part, would however, have to address two of Washington and Tel Aviv's concerns — its alleged support to the Hezbollah guerillas, widely viewed as Damascus' fifth column that has been positioned along the Israel-Lebanon border and its backing of Palestinian extremist groups.
Two other issues, which might prove less intractable, are likely to be on the agenda of the forthcoming U.S.-Syria talks that are likely to commence with the upcoming visit of the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
First, the U.S. is likely to seek assurances from Syria that it would not support a potential resistance movement battling a post-war dispensation in Iraq. Washington is worried that though it has won the war in Iraq, it might lose the peace unless stability is achieved in Baghdad.
Second, Syria hopes to convince the U.S. that Washington should desist from setting the pace for its internal "democratic" reforms.
Winds of change, sources say, are already visible in Syria, but the calibration of this change will be decided in Damascus and not Washington.
posted by Ted @ 8:56 AM
As the dust settles over Iraq and the cacophony of excited voices on our television screens dies down, the Arab world has begun to stir from the confusion into which the swift fall of Baghdad had thrown it, to take a good look at itself and take stock.
The political repercussions, as ever in the Arab world, are not easy to ascertain, but the fallout for the media is all too evident. To put it bluntly: A great many journalists and media outlets have been left with egg on their face. From accepting the wild claims of Iraqi minister of information Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, to wildly predicting a jihad among the Iraqi people, very little the Arab media speculated on had, when push came to shove, anything to do with reality.
But good may come from bad, as people often say. The main subject now is as much the appalling coverage of Iraq — and by implication the serious shortcomings of the Arab media in general — as Iraq’s future after “liberation”. Does the Arab media have a future in its present form? What is certain is that the confidence of Arab readers, and the millions who tune into Arab satellite channels, has been severely undermined.
During the war, everyone in the Arab world agreed that US news networks such as Fox TV and CNN had dangerously — and not infrequently ridiculously — confused patriotism with reportage; and they were right. After the war, however, most Arabs have come to recognize that they were throwing stones while sitting in glass houses.
In the Arab media, it wasn’t so much a question of confusing patriotism with reportage as confusing news with wishful thinking. In a word, what was lacking was objectivity and critical self-analysis.
This, of course, is nothing new. For decades it has been difficult to find anything in the opinion pages of the Arabic language press that did not concern Israel. Every problem faced by Arab societies was blamed, in however obscure or far-fetched a way, on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. The issue served as a sort of lowest common denominator, satisfying many journalists who were not equipped to write about anything else as well as many of those who rule the Arab world and who would prefer Israel — rather than their own shortcomings — to be the subject of heated discussion in the “Arab street.”
It is one of the many ironies of the US-led attack in Iraq that Crown Prince Abdullah’s historic “peace with reform” initiative was marginalized, with the “pact for reforming the Arab world” being postponed for discussion by the Arab League.
In fact, in the wake of the sudden disappearance of Saddam and his Baathist regime, the political and media vacuum in the Arab world is wider than ever, and it is now that Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace with reform program would not only fill the void that gapes in the center of the Arab world, but also fill it with something tangible and workable.
The days when the Arab world could just scream “Israel”, as if that one word were sufficient answer to every question about every problem that came its way — as though saying that one word could deflect all further inquiry — are over. The time for peaceful coexistence, internal reflection and healthy, progressive thinking has come.
posted by Ted @ 8:44 AM
posted by Alyssa A. @ 12:01 AM
posted by Ted @ 7:44 PM
U.S. soldiers shot and killed at least seven Iraqi women and children yesterday after the van in which they were traveling failed to stop at an Army checkpoint near Najaf, CNN reports. Coalition troops have been increasingly vigilant in light of the Iraqi regime's use of terror-style tactics, especially a car bombing that killed four Americans.Be sure to visit the site and sign up.
"In light of recent terrorist attacks by the Iraqi regime, the soldiers exercised considerable restraint to avoid the unnecessary loss of life," says a statement from the coalition's Central Command. The soldiers fired into the van only as a "last resort."
Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say the soldiers "did the right thing." He's probably right, notwithstanding the tragic result. But this incident does open the U.S. government to charges of hypocrisy. Yesterday the State Department released its annual Human Rights Report. The section on Israel accuses Jerusalem of, among other things, using "excessive force while manning checkpoints." Of course, Israel maintains its checkpoints for the same reason the coalition does in Iraq. The only difference is that Palestinian terrorists actually pose a direct and immediate danger to Israeli civilians in their own country.
Agence France-Presse reports that "three US troops were wounded, one seriously, after Iraqi soldiers used a Red Crescent ambulance to stage an attack in southern Iraq." This is another case of Saddam Hussein's terrorists aping the Palestinian Arabs; an article in The Lancet (link in PDF format) describes how Palestinian terrorists use Red Crescent ambulances to smuggle weapons. And of course the State Department faults Israel because it has "obstructed the movement of and occasionally fired upon medical personal [sic] and ambulances." MORE
posted by Ted @ 6:53 PM
posted by bunuel @ 5:27 PM
posted by Michael @ 4:16 PM
few years ago, Edward Said was invited to give a lecture at the Freud Society in Vienna, at Berggasse 19 no less, on the subject of "Freud and the Non-European." Then he chose to enact his vocation as an intellectual by gayly throwing a rock at an Israeli guardhouse across the Lebanese border, and the Freud Society withdrew its invitation. "Freud was hounded out of Vienna because he was a Jew," Said explained to The New York Times. "Now I'm hounded out because I'm a Palestinian." It was one of the more extreme expressions of Said's compassion for himself. It put me in mind of an autobiographical lecture that he delivered at the New York Public Library in 1998, in which he preceded his recollections of his many ordeals ("When I graduated [boarding school in Massachusetts], the rank of valedictorian or salutatorian was withheld from me") with an account of the shipwrecked sailor in Conrad's story "Amy Foster," one of the most truly unfortunate figures in all of literature. Anyway, having discovered what it feels like to be a Jew on the run, Said eventually delivered his lecture at the Freud Museum of London. It has now appeared as a book, and its aim is the correction, and in a way the annulment, of Jewish identity.
Said admires Freud for two reasons. The first reason is that "Freud mobilized the non-European past in order to undermine any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular." This dissolution of Jewish identity Freud is alleged to have accomplished in Moses and Monotheism, the late work in which he proposed, as Said put it, that "the founder of Jewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian," and that "Judaism begins in the realm of Egyptian, non-Jewish monotheism." In this way Freud "undercuts Judaic originality" and "restores to their place components of the origin of Judaism that had been forgotten or denied." The second reason is that Freud displayed an admirable alienation from his own people, and exemplified "the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community." Said concludes his book with a paean to "the non-Jewish Jew," Isaac Deutscher's ancient slogan of Jewish self-erasure.
All this is intellectual violence, and nothing else. It is an assault upon the Jewish Jew, an exercise in the coercive figuration of the other that Said has made a career out of piously lamenting. I have seen nothing like it since Arthur Koestler's ridiculous attempt to relieve himself of his Jewishness by insisting upon its Khazar origins. But Koestler's coarse notion of the historical inauthenticity of the Jews had at least a certain spiritual authenticity: He was not the only Jew in modernity who was keen to be rid of the weight. Said, by contrast, is here to tell us who we really are. And his ignorance is as perfect as his temerity. He seems to know nothing about anything Jewish. He relies heavily upon Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's remarkable book Freud's Moses, which appeared in 1991, though he amusingly refers to its author as "Josef" instead of "Yosef." "Josef" has a fine exilic ring, whereas "Yosef" is so Hebrew, so housed. Said grossly simplifies Yerushalmi's account of Freud's attitude to Zionism, which was much more favorable than Said's hating mind can allow. Freud's withering rationalism did not at all wither his solidarity with his people. Yet the really risible thing about Said's construction is that it is based entirely on a fiction. Freud conceived of his work as "ein historischer Roman," a historical novel. There is no basis in Biblical scholarship or in historical scholarship for his notion that Moses was an Egyptian, or that he was murdered by the Israelites in the desert (that was the particular hallucination of a German writer named Ernst Sellin), or that Judaism was guiltily established as a "return of the repressed," and so on. Said remarks that "so much of the material [Freud] is dealing with as he chronicles the aftermath of Moses' legacy is uneven," but it is really quite even. It is evenly spurious. Freud's discussion in Moses and Monotheism is nothing like a "demonstration," as Said calls it. Freud himself concedes in his book Said does not cite these passages that "[o]bjective evidence ... has not been obtainable," and that he is "accepting what seems to us serviceable in the material presented to us and rejecting what does not suit us," and that "I use Biblical tradition here in such an autocratic and arbitrary way." Freud is not restoring anything. He is inventing everything. And Said has a political use for his inventions.
Jews are not Europeans and they are not non-Europeans. They are Jews, an autonomous people with an autonomous history that has directed them, in different times and in different places, against their will and according to their will, toward certain peoples and away from certain peoples. The autonomy of the Jews, moreover, is not the same thing as the exclusivity of the Jews. The idea that Jewish religion and Jewish culture was influenced by non-Jewish religions and non-Jewish cultures is not exactly a bolt of revisionist lightning. Jewish sameness is riddled with otherness. In the Jewish tradition, it was Abraham, and not Moses, who discovered monotheism, and Abraham was famously a Chaldean, a man who came from across the river and was therefore an ivri, a crosser, a Hebrew. The impact of the religious practices of the Egyptians upon the religious practices of the Israelites was meticulously analyzed by Maimonides in the twelfth century. So the story of the Jewish understanding of Jewish hybridity is rich and long, and it is in no way ruinous of Jewish identity. What matters, after all, is what a culture does with its heterogeneous materials. Provenance is not the measure of substance. Said assails Yerushalmi for "impl[ying] that it was the genius of Judaism to have elaborated the religion well beyond anything the Egyptians knew about," but that is precisely the point. Origins have almost nothing to do with originality.
And if the non-Jewish Jew, then why not the non-Palestinian Palestinian? Surely the blessing of cosmopolitanism, of all blessings, must be a universal one. If the Jews have been raised up by the spiritual blandishments of statelessness, then the Palestinians, too, should aspire to them. But Said likes it both ways. He enjoys the glamour of diasporism and the rectitude of nationalism. The only interesting disclosure in this insulting little volume is that its author opposes any partition of the disputed land and supports the establishment of "a bi-national state in which Israel and Palestine are parts." He knows, of course, that a bi-national state is a method of abolishing the Jewish state by demographic means. But if the Jews come to feel homeless at home, well, homelessness is what they do best, and who are they to interfere with Edward Said's representation of them?
posted by fred @ 3:42 PM
'U.S. flags are the emblem of the invading war machine in Iraq today. They are the emblem of the occupying power. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military."
Those words were spoken last week by Nicholas De Genova, a professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at Columbia University. De Genova went on, in words that will long shame his university, to call on U.S. soldiers to "frag" (i.e., murder) their officers and to wish "for a million Mogadishus," referring to the 1993 ambush in Somalia that left 18 U.S. soldiers dead and 84 wounded.
He wants 18 million dead Americans?
Columbia's administration distanced itself from De Genova (he "does not in any way represent" the university's views) and other professors criticized him - but his remarks are hardly the rude exception to the usual discourse of the faculty at that university. For one: Tom Paulin, a visiting professor at Columbia this academic year, has stated that Brooklyn-born Jews "should be shot dead" if they live on the West Bank.
More broadly, plenty of other Columbia professors share De Genova's venomous feelings for the United States, though they stop short of calling for the deaths of Americans. [more]
posted by fred @ 2:38 PM
posted by Soccer Dad @ 1:41 PM
posted by bunuel @ 1:23 PM
Of the many ways there are to look at the events over the past week in Iraq, I find that one of the most valuable is as a process of instruction and enlightenment. The war in Iraq may be many things, but it is first and foremost a process in education and illumination for the TV audiences of the U.S. and the West.
It firstly proves better than any previous events how clearly the Western Left and the so-called "peace" movement are really little more than a movement of anti-Americanism. In part, the anti-Americanism is related to a growing anti-Semitism in the West. People are willing to support the enemies of the West because they hate the Jews. There exists a broad axis of evil that allies the Western Left with Arab and Islamic fascism. The Left sees nothing inconsistent in its advocacy of lofty principles of progress and liberation while at the same time endorsing Arab terrorism and Middle East fascism.
The entente between leftism and Arab terrorism and fascism of course extends into Israel. Almost the entire Israeli Far Left has conscripted itself in solidarity with and support for Iraq against the United States. Almost all of Haaretz, Israel's main Palestinian Hebrew daily, is devoted to denouncing the U.S.-British led assault on Iraq, with columnist after columnist denouncing the "U.S. WAR For Oil," as if there would be something evil about striking Iraq in order to procure its oil.
Far Left columnist at Haaretz, Gideon Levy, an anti-Zionist extremist, wrote a few days ago that he supports all Iraqi "resistance" against the Western "invaders," evidently including the use of terror and suicide bombings and car bombs. Far Left groups have held protests and rallies, on and off Israeli campuses, to show their support for Iraq and solidarity with Saddam. And Israeli Arabs have been making little secret of their open support for Saddam, with marchers in the Israeli Arab city of Umm al-Fahm taking to the streets and screaming for Saddam to annihilate Tel Aviv. This is an Israeli Arab town that has been part of Israel since 1948, not part of the West Bank. No, Israel did not pulverize the town with artillery. Calling for Saddam to annihilate Tel Aviv is protected free speech in post-survivalist Israel.
Meanwhile, American and Western TV viewers are being led through a crash course in becoming familiar with all of the wonderful features of Arab fascism: its obsessive Orwellism, where aggressors are defenders and defenders are aggressors, where justice is injustice and injustice is justice, where war is peace and peace is war, where freedom fighters are terrorists and terrorists are freedom fighters, and with its total lack of interest in facts and truth. They learn about the treachery of Arab fascism, its use of civilians as human shields, its lies, its brutality, its murders and torture of captives and prisoners, its willingness to engage in ecological terrorism, and the near-universal support for Arab terror and barbarism by the entire Arab world and by most of the Moslem world.
And of course there is the fetish with international legalism which has long been applied to Israel, now by which the US must subordinate its national interests to the cynicism and fatuousness of minor European powers, themselves motivated in many cases by anti-Israel and anti-American sentiments. We see the Western audiences coming to the rude awakening that wars involve injustices and innocent victims and that no war can be fought even under the best of circumstances with surgical purity.
We see the West suddenly learning what Israel has known all along, that Arab fascists do not care about Arab civilians and are perfectly willing to produce the deaths of hundreds of them as a public relations ploy.
And we see the intentional denial of all reality and all truth by Arab fascists who see nothing wrong with mass terrorism and atrocities directed against civilians. We see the ready willingness of the enlightened chatterers of the West in justifying atrocities and mass murders by such people, as long as they claim to have grievances or be victims of "injustice". We see again and again the fetish of the anti-Jewish forces in the West and their insistence on capitalizing on all developments in Iraq through a wholesale assault on Israel's right to exist and to defend its population. And we see how clearly the Arab world has become the world's center of barbarism and savagery.
posted by Ted @ 12:53 PM
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Tuesday that the United States and Israel view as "very grave" the wartime aid that Syrian President Bashar Assad has given the Saddam Hussein regime, as well as recent Assad comments that Mofaz said suggested that no peace with Israel was possible.
"Bashar Assad has recently engaged in and expressed himself in two spheres that in the view of the Americans and in our view are very grave," Mofaz said on a visit to the army's central induction center near Tel Aviv.
The first is the "very fact of their granting physical aid to the Iraqis. The second is his remark about Israel, in which he says in essence that no peace agreement can be reached with Israel."
"We must follow both his remarks and his actions in a very, very thorough manner," Mofaz said.
In a front-page interview with Lebanon's as-Safir newspaper last week, Assad was asked if he believed Syria - which has led Arab opposition to the war and appears on a U.S. list of states sponsoring terrorism for supporting Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrilla group and Palestinian organizations fighting Israel - would be next on Washington's 'target list' after Iraq. "The possibility is always there," Assad replied.
"As long as Israel exists, the threat is there. As long as there is an aggression on an Arab country and a war on our borders, the danger is there...But worry does not translate to fear."
Despite American warnings, in the last few days Damascus has expedited the passage of volunteers wishing to join the Iraqis in their war against the Americans, Haaretz said Tuesday in an exclusive report, according to which thousands of volunteer, most of them Syrians, are thronging to the Mosul and Kirkuk regions in north Iraq. [more]
posted by fred @ 10:46 AM
posted by Ted @ 10:31 AM
BOCA RATON -- In a private meeting with Richard Nixon in 1990, the former president warned Bill McCollum that America's next big threat would come from Muslim extremists.
McCollum, a former Orlando-area congressman who is a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Bob Graham, recounted that conversation to a Thursday gathering of the Boca Raton Republican Club, where there was much talk of America's war with Iraq.
The club is planning a "Support America Rally" on April 10 at the South Palm Beach County Civic Center, at 16700 Jog Road west of Delray Beach. The 7 p.m. rally will show support for President Bush and the troops in Iraq, said Peter Feaman, the club president.
After singing God Bless America and dining on either salmon or rosemary chicken in the Muvico Palace 20 theaters dining room, about 75 club members listened to McCollum talk about his three-hour meeting with Nixon in a Washington hotel room.
He said the former president told him America and other Western countries would have to figure out how to raise the living standard in Third World countries to avoid bringing down living standards in the West.
And, with what McCollum said was uncanny foresight, Nixon said America would have to deal with "the rising tide of radical Muslim fundamentalism."
McCollum, who lost to Democrat Bill Nelson in a 2000 U.S. Senate race, said individual and national security will be the most important issue facing Washington for years to come.
"In this election it is going to be important that we elect a Republican from Florida," McCollum said. "We need someone who will support the president who has shown the kind of decisiveness and vision that we need as a country."
He praised President Bush for "boldly stepping forward not only in foreign policy but in domestic policy as well."
McCollum is running against U.S. Rep. Mark Foley of West Palm Beach for the GOP nomination. Mel Martinez, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, also might enter the race.
posted by fred @ 10:25 AM
[...] Along with the Iraqi ruler, the Muslim and Arab worlds view this war, the one the U.S. has dubbed "Iraqi Freedom," not as a series of military maneuvers. For them, that's practically inconsequential. For them, this war is a great clash of cultures. They pray for the destruction of Israel and the United States, their West.
If you doubt this just pick up any Arabic newspaper from Egypt to Indonesia.
For Muslims, this war epitomizes the conflict that they have with Israel and the West. The Muslim world yearns for a revolution and an ousting of Western tradition and values. They want to destroy the equality they do not approve of. They want to destroy the licentiousness they see in Western civilizations.
They want to re-impose a Caliphate Muslim religious rule and leadership and to bring about the universal resurrection of the Sha'ariya, of Muslim law. Muslims societies want to crush Zionists and Westerners, i.e. Christians, even including Syrian and Iraqi Baathists. The Baathists know this and that is why they attempted to join the Islamic fold by adding the Islamic credo "Ala Akhbar" "God is great" to their own flag in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991.
Israel and the West, in stark contrast to Islamic countries, are built on values that at their core embrace respect for one another and for difference, a value system that teaches open mindedness as a virtue. Israel and the West believe in stimulating creativity and individual and political independence. [more]
posted by fred @ 10:16 AM
Israel has emerged the first country in the region to benefit from the war on Iraq and is lined up to receive 10 billion dollars in assistance under a US emergency bill to cover costs tied to the conflict.
Iraq itself will have to wait until security improves to receive goods contracted under the UN "oil-for-food" program, the lifeline for 60 percent of the 25 million Iraqis before its suspension on March 17.
US President George W. Bush unveiled Tuesday a spending request of 74.7 billion dollars to cover the war's costs, including rewards to 19 key US allies in the Middle East and other partners in the global war on "terrorism."
If approved by Congress, Israel will receive the lion's share, with one billion dollars in military financing and additional loan guarantees of nine billion dollars.
Among the rewarded Arab states, Jordan stands to gain more than 1.1 billion dollars – 700 million to offset the economic effects of the war with neighboring Iraq and 406 million in military aid.
Jordan's economy is expected to suffer the most in the region for the duration of the war, as overland shipments of cut-price Iraqi oil stopped after war broke out on March 20, forcing the country to draw on its reserves.
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said Tuesday the kingdom would provide Jordan with oil, but "not at preferential prices."
Egypt is set to receive 300 million dollars under the US war package to assist its economy with problems caused by the US-led war on Iraq, of which a portion could be used to secure up to two billion dollars in loan guarantees.[more]
posted by fred @ 9:59 AM
During the first week of Allied military action in Iraq, attempts have abounded to draw parallels between the war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel's assumed stockpile of non-conventional weapons and that of Saddam Hussein, or what is seen as Israel's rejection of UN resolutions and Baghdad's snubbing of the international community.
Several articles have already rebuffed the above linkages, though few thus far have focused on an increasing number of very different emerging parallels between the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein's regime and Israel's battle against the terror-tainted Palestinian Authority.
On Saturday, four U.S. soldiers were killed by an Arab homicide bomber, a tactic often utilized against IDF forces both inside "Israel proper" and in the PLO-controlled territories.
Also alike is the official endorsement of such attacks by the Iraqi and Palestinian regimes as legitimate weapons against a qualitatively superior foe.
Allied forces have also witnessed enemy combatants using human shields during their attacks, hiding themselves and their weapons in civilian areas, dressing in civilian clothing, slaughtering innocent civilians seen to be "collaborating" with the enemy, and murdering POWs.
All of the above have been the norm for Israeli soldiers attempting to eliminate the threat of Palestinian terror to Israel's Jewish population.
But the parallels do not end there.[more]
posted by fred @ 9:53 AM
JERUSALEM, March 31 — As they prepared for war in Iraq, American military officers studied Israel's use of helicopters, tanks and armored bulldozers to fight in the claustrophobic quarters of Palestinian refugee camps.
But Israeli veterans and other experts said the Americans might also learn from the political dimensions of Israel's war in Lebanon and its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: how hard it can be to sift civilians for potential threats without enraging a society and alienating world opinion; how inspiring it can seem to face up to an enemy and to try to improve the lives of its victims — and how agonizing it can be to sustain, or to end, an occupation.
"We also think that we are very, very moral," Martin van Creveld, professor of military history and strategy at Hebrew University, said of Israelis. "And we wonder why they hate us so much." Professor van Creveld briefed officers of the Marine Corps in North Carolina in September.
Israeli officials who are usually quick to draw parallels between the American and Israeli experiences have been reticent to do so recently — even after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself apart and wounded dozens of people outside a cafe in an Israeli city on Sunday, the day after an Iraqi bomber killed four American soldiers at a checkpoint.
But to any Israeli — and any Palestinian — the parallels are inescapable. "I have a déjà vu feeling," said Yoni Fighel, a colonel in the Israeli reserves who served as an intelligence officer in the Lebanon war and later as a military governor in the West Bank.
He said the Iraqis also appeared to have studied the Israeli experience. "I do believe that some conclusions from Lebanon, and from the West Bank and Gaza, were adopted by the Iraqi regime," said Mr. Fighel, now a researcher at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism. He called suicide bombing and guerrilla warfare "an excellent tool to build a fence" between the American and British soldiers and the Iraqi civilians they hope to win over.
The military tactics on both sides in Iraq, and their political effects, may change quickly, as they already have. But the soldiers who are setting up checkpoints in Iraq, demanding identification, frisking men and examining even the most innocent-seeming bundles, are doing what Israeli soldiers do daily in the West Bank.[more]
posted by fred @ 9:41 AM
posted by Alyssa A. @ 1:07 AM
