Caroline Glick

Gay Pride and Pederasty and Arab Pride and decapitations

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 02:50:16 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update, the weekly satirical newscast produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website I run, we bring you an interview with one of the European Muslims who traveled to Syria to fight in the war there.

We also bring you an interview with a senior member of the gay community to discuss Gay Pride Week and the recent arrest of a senior member of the community on allegations of serial rape of teenage boys along with the arrests of three relatives charged with carrying out the murderous attack at Tel Aviv's Bar Noar gay youth bar.

Enjoy the show!

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Oil brings us to a better place

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 02:40:33 -0500

By all accounts, Shai Agassi, the founder and original CEO of Better Place, Israel's bankrupt electric car company, is an extremely charismatic man. His charm had politicians, venture capitalists, celebrities and non-automotive industry reporters slobbering over him. Everyone wanted to get their picture taken with the man who would transform Israel's auto industry into the first electric powered industry in the world and transform the start-up nation into the transportation hothouse for the world.

Agassi's vision was simple and easy to understand.

By 2020, half of Israel's cars would be battery powered electric cars supplied by his company, Better Place. We would replace our internal combustion engines, powered by oil produced by our worst enemies, with batteries produced by Better Place. Better Place would overcome the technological deficits of batteries that are only capable of powering a car for short distances by building battery changing stations throughout the country. Instead of filling up our tanks with gas, we would replace our battery.

And our enemies would go bankrupt.

The only ones not convinced by Agassi's plans were people who actually understand the car market generally and the Israeli car market in particular.

Automotive industry reporters warned as early as 2008 that Israeli drivers would need incentives to buy into a new technology. Cars in Israel are prohibitively expensive. The government charges 82 percent customs duties on imported cars. If electric cars could be cheap cars, then they had a chance of succeeding.

To help Better Place succeed, the government gave the company a massive discount on import taxes. Better Place, which signed a deal with Renault to produce a battery-charged model of the Fluence family car, paid only 10% import duties for the car.

Instead of passing the savings off on its customers, Better Place cars cost the same amount as regular gasoline powered cars. And that's not including the cost of the battery or the monthly subscription to Better Place battery charging services.

So there was no economic incentive to buy the car.

Many have chalked the failure of Better Place up to its poor management. And no doubt Agassi's management skills didn't hold a candle to his skill as a salesman. The company's business model was an incoherent study in overreach and hubris.

But the fact remains, the car was too expensive.

And that makes some sense. Building a whole national infrastructure for electric cars is expensive.

The only incentives Better Place gave consumers were ideological. And as it worked out, only 900 people were willing to pay full price to own a car whose actual battery life was between 100 and 120 kilometers, just to reduce their carbon footprint or to screw the Arabs.

To summarize, the government gave Better Place a massive tax break. Investors poured $840 million into the company. The media showered the company in fabulous free PR.

And in four years, it only managed to sell 900 cars.

That tells you something about economics.The iron rule of supply and demand is foolproof. If the price is too high, people won't buy your product. And if the ticket price of being the pioneers in a risky market, of having to go out of your way to get to the battery swap stations, and of swapping your battery three to four times more often than you have to fill up your gas tank is the same as the price of a normal car, then no one will want to be a pioneer. And no one did.

Indeed, according to Channel 2, more than a hundred of the 900 owners of Better Place cars worked for the company. And the majority of the other owners purchased the electric car as a second or third car.

People warn that Better Place's failure will harm the reputation of Israel's hi-tech economy. But these warnings make little sense. Better Place wasn't a hi-tech firm. It was an electric car company. And it wasn't selling new technology.

It simply packaged old failed technology in a new way.

What failed with Better Place wasn't the idea of Israeli hi-tech prowess and ingenuity. What failed - again - was the notion that there is a way to use alternative energy sources - like electricity - to replace the internal combustion engine. And there isn't. There isn't because laws of supply and demand govern the economics of the car industry even when Shai Agassi is the one selling alternative economic laws.

One of the attractive aspects of the alternative fuels market is that it allows people who care about security to partner with radical environmentalists who oppose the consumption of oil.

No other issue brings far-right security hawks together with far-left environmentalists. And while most environmentalists are unmoved by the presence of conservative hawks in their coalitions, conservatives are overjoyed at the opportunity to rub shoulders with members of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. Maybe one of the reasons that many security hawks remain enamored of alternative fuels despite their clear inability to replace oil on an open market is because they are unwilling to abandon their one common cause with the Left.

But the time has come to abandon the environmentalists.

Israel has the means to achieve energy independence and pave the way for the free world to neutralize the economic power of the Islamic world.

Unlike the situation with Better Place, economic laws of supply and demand work in favor of Israel's energy solution. The only force standing in the way is a coalition of radical environmentalists who oppose all oil consumption because they believe that the greatest threat to the world is global warming. They don't want cheap oil.

They want oil at $500/barrel. They don't want clean oil at cheap prices. They want us all to live in crowded cities, become vegetarians and travel around on mass transit or ride bicycles.

Four years ago, Israel discovered that it is sitting on top of a massive amount of oil. South of Jerusalem, in the Shfela Basin beginning around 15 km. from Kiryat Gat, Israel has an estimated 150 billion barrels of oil - or 60% of Saudi Arabia's reserve capacity. The oil is located in shale rock located 300 meters below ground. It is separated from Israel's underground aquifer by 200 meters of impermeable rock on either side.

If tapped into, Israel's domestic oil supply could provide us with energy independence for hundreds of years. At the initial stage, we could produce enough to satisfy entirely the IDF's fuel requirements - 50,000 barrels a day. And we could refine it at Ashdod without even having to expand our refining capacities. In later stages, we could produce enough oil to satisfy the entire country's consumption needs of 80 million barrels a year.

A visit with the senior executives of Israel Energy Initiatives is frustrating journey into Israel's political pathologies. IEI holds the license to develop Israel's shale oil deposit. CEO Relik Shafir, a retired air force brigadier- general, explains that due to a well-funded campaign of radical environmentalists directed by Greenpeace in Turkey, IEI has entered a "Kafkaesque regulatory universe," where a pilot project to demonstrate its technology has been held up for four years.

First through petitions to the Supreme Court spearheaded by the far-left, New Israel Fund-supported Adam Teva V'Din environmentalist movement, IEI's pilot project was delayed for a year. The pilot, which will take three years, involves demonstrating IEI's technology for oil extraction by extracting 500 barrels from a test area south of Beit Shemesh.

The Supreme Court found in favor of IEI, but required the government to rewrite the law governing oil explorations. Radical environmentalists at the Environmental Protection Ministry coupled with incompetent bureaucrats at the Ministries of Justice, Energy and Interior delayed the project for another three years by delaying the drafting process.

Now the law has passed. And all that stands between IEI and the pilot program is the Jerusalem Planning Board. The board will likely begin deliberations on the plans in the fall.

IEI's chief scientist, Harold Vinegar, worked as chief scientist for Royal Dutch Shell. There Vinegar developed the technology for shale oil extraction. To transform the shale rock into liquid crude oil, shale oil needs to be heated to 300 degrees Celsius. Heated at that temperature, in three years, the rocks melt into liquid fuel that is extracted through production wells.

Vinegar developed the means to heat the rocks inside the earth with heaters dropped 300 meters. Due to the shale rock's isolation from the aquifers, and the fact that 9 meters from the heated area, the rock temperature remains 25 degrees Celsius, IEI's technologies will have no impact on the environment, either below or above the surface.

The basic rationale of the environmentalists' campaign against IEI's pilot is to kill Israel's ability to develop its oil fields before the public realizes what is involved. Once the pilot is approved, assuming it lives up to IEI's projections that it will be able to mass produce oil at $40/barrel, public support for the initiative will be so great, and the economic logic of moving forward will be so overwhelming, that the project with be unstoppable.

Unlike Better Place, IEI won't need a charismatic salesman from Silicon Valley to sell its product.

Today Israel pays $100 per barrel for Brent crude, or NIS 2.2 per liter. Consumers pay NIS 8 per liter at the gas pump, which includes refining and transport costs and taxes. If Israel produced its own fuel, although the government would certainly continue to overtax it, and it would still need to be refined and transported, there can be little doubt that the price for consumers would be significantly lower. And most important, the supply would be guaranteed.

One of the IEI's minor investors is Australian news mogul Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is interested in IEI because there are also massive deposits of oil shale in Australia. If IEI's pilot is successful, Australia will doubtlessly follow Israel's lead in developing its own energy independence through oil shale development.

Unlike the situation with Better Place, there is no hype surrounding IEI - except the negative hype generated by the radical environmentalists.

For an oil company sitting on the license area covering an estimated 40 billion barrels of oil, IEI's appearance is shockingly modest. Whereas Better Place wasted tens of millions on glamorous offices and a huge workforce, IEI office suites are as plain as can be. President Effi Eitam, former minister of national infrastructure, works in a tiny, cluttered office and sits behind a nondescript desk on an inexpensive chair. Employees work in cubicles.

IEI has not waged a campaign to counter the environmentalist propaganda because it believes that the facts will speak for themselves. The minute IEI is able to run its pilot, it is convinced that the public will back it. Whether or not this is the proper strategy will be determined in the coming months by the Jerusalem Planning Committee.

In the meantime, due to shale oil fracking, the US has moved from net oil importer to net oil exporter in five years. In the same period, Israel has seen IEI's pilot delayed year after year as politicians and reporters have followed alternative fuel pied pipers into bankruptcy.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Speech at the Jerusalem Post Conference

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 04:40:49 -0500

Here's my speech from the J Post conference in New York that took place on April 29.

Nothing to see in Turkey and IRAN VOTES!

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:58:59 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update, the weekly satirical newscast produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website I run, we bring you an interview with Turkish Minister of Justice and Police to discuss the situation in Turkey. And we bring you a public service announcement to the Iranian voter.

Enjoy!

For donations outside the US, here is a link to the donations page for our Israeli non-profit, the Zionist Incubator. You can make credit card donations to Latma by contributing to our non-profit.

Nothing to see in Turkey and IRAN VOTES!

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:58:59 -0500

Enjoy!

For donations outside the US, here is a link to the donations page for our Israeli non-profit, the Zionist Incubator. You can make credit card donations to Latma by contributing to our non-profit.

Wounded...and dangerous

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:17:15 -0500

US Secretary of State John Kerry looks like a bit of an idiot these days. On Monday he announced that he will be returning to Israel and the Palestinian Authority and Jordan for the fifth time since he was sworn into office on February 1. That is an average of more than one visit a month.

And aside from frequent flier miles, the only thing he has to show for it is a big black eye from PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

When Kerry was here last month he unveiled a stunning plan to bring $4 billion in investment funds to the PA. If his plan actually pans out, its champions claim it will increase the PA's GDP by a mind-numbing 50 percent in three years and drop Palestinian unemployment from 21 to 8 percent.

Standing before world and regional leaders on May 26, Kerry said plaintively, "This will help build the future. Is this a fantasy? I don't think so."

Abbas and his underlings wasted no time, however, in demonstrating that indeed, Kerry's plan is fantasy. Abbas appointed Rami Hamdallah, a Fatah apparatchik with perfect English, to replace America's favorite moderate Palestinian, Salam Fayyad, as PA prime minister.

As The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh has pointedly explained, Hamdallah was appointed for two reasons. First, to facilitate Fatah's absconding with hundreds of millions of dollars in donor aid to the PA and to Palestinian development projects precisely of the type that Kerry hopes to finance with his $4b. grant. The second reason Abbas appointed Hamdallah the English professor from Nablus was because his language skills will enable him to make American and European donors feel comfortable as his colleagues in Fatah pick their taxpayer- funded pockets.

Aside from mooning Kerry in the middle of his speech in Jordan, Abbas couldn't have thought of a more graphic way to show his contempt for Kerry and the Obama administration.

But that wasn't the only thing the Palestinians did. Again, as Abu Toameh has reported, the popular Palestinian response to last week's World Economic Forum in Jordan, where Abbas and Kerry rubbed elbows with President Shimon Peres and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, was to attack the businessmen who accompanied Abbas to the conference. Their crime was meeting with Israeli businessmen who came to the conference in Peres's entourage. Led by Fatah activists, Palestinian writers, unions and others also went after Palestinian businessmen from Jenin who went to Haifa to meet with Israeli businesspeople at the invitation of Haifa's Chamber of Commerce. The "anti-normalization" crowd is calling for Palestinians to boycott Palestinian businesses that do business with Israelis.

And again, that isn't all. At the PLO's birthday celebrations this week, Abbas said that the group's 1964 charter reflects the will of the Palestinian people. That charter calls for the destruction of Israel. It was written three years before Israel took control of Judea, Samaria and northern, southern and eastern Jerusalem.

But wait, there's more. The Palestinian leadership attacked Kerry personally and his plan as an attempt to bribe them. They promised that while they will happily take the money, $4b. measly dollars won't convince them to moderate one iota. They still demand that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its jails, agree to its demographic destruction through the so-called "right of return," or unfettered immigration of millions of foreign Arabs to Israel, and the surrender of all of Judea, Samaria and northern, southern and eastern Jerusalem to the PLO as a precondition to beginning negotiations.

And for all that, Kerry responded by applauding Hamdallah's appointment and announcing he will return here next week and is planning to roll out his own comprehensive peace plan very soon.

Israeli leaders for the most part have reacted to Kerry's constant harping by rolling their eyes. He seems like a complete lunatic. Obviously he will fail and the best thing we can do is smile and nod, like you do when you are dealing with a crazy person.

Even when Kerry claimed that the reason Israelis aren't interested in peace is that we have too much money to care, we didn't take offense. Because really, why take anything he says seriously? And aside from that, they ask, what can the Obama administration do to us, at this point? Every single day it becomes more mired in scandal.

The Guardian's revelation Wednesday that the US government has been confiscating the phone records of tens of millions of Americans who use the Verizon business network since April is just the latest serious, normal-presidency destroying scandal to be exposed in the past month. And every single scandal - the IRS's unlawful harassment and discrimination of conservative organizations and individuals, the Justice Department's spying on AP journalists and attempt to criminalize the normal practice of journalism through its investigation of Fox News correspondent James Rosen - makes it more difficult for President Barack Obama to advance his agenda.

As for foreign policy, the whistle-blower testimony that exposed Obama's cover-up of the September 11, 2012, al-Qaida attack on the US Consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi has caused massive damage to Obama's credibility in foreign affairs and to the basic logic of his foreign policy.

Ambassador Chris Stevens was tortured and murdered by al-Qaida terrorists who owed their freedom of operation to the Obama administration. If it hadn't been for Obama's decision to bring down the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, who had been largely harmless to the US since he gave up his illicit nuclear weapons program in 2004, those al-Qaida forces probably wouldn't have be capable of waging an eight-hour assault on US installations and personnel in Benghazi.

With the Benghazi scandal hounding him, the Syrian civil war and, for the past week, the anti-government protests in Turkey all exposing his incompetence on a daily basis, these Israeli leaders take heart, no doubt in the belief that Obama's freedom to attack us has vastly diminished.

Although this interpretation of events is attractive, and on its face seems reasonable, it is wrong.

And it would be a devastating mistake for Israeli leaders to believe it.

Since he entered office, Obama has responded to every defeat by doubling down and radicalizing.

When in 2009 public sentiment against his plan to nationalize the US healthcare industry was so high that Republican Scott Brown was elected senator from Massachusetts for the sole purpose of blocking Obamacare's passage in the US Senate, Obama did not accept the public's verdict.

Instead he used a technicality to ram the hated legislation through without giving Brown and the Senate the chance to vote it down.

And now, as his Middle East strategy of appeasing Islamists lies in the ruins of the US Consulate in Benghazi and in the cemeteries interning the Syrians murdered in sarin gas attacks as Obama shrugged his shoulders, Obama is again doubling down. On Wednesday he announced that he is elevating the two architects of his policy to senior leadership roles in his administration.

Obama's appointments of UN Ambassador Susan Rice to serve as his national security adviser, and of former National Security Council member Samantha Power to serve as ambassador to the UN, are a finger in the eye to his critics. These women rose to national prominence through their breathless insistence that the US use force to overthrow Gaddafi in spite of clear evidence that al-Qaida was a major force in his opposition.

Power is reportedly the author of Obama's policy of apologizing to foreign countries for the actions of past administrations. Certainly she shares Obama's hostility toward Israel. And she has been outspoken in expressing her negative opinions.

In a nutshell, Power's vision for US foreign policy is a noxious brew of equal parts self-righteousness, ignorance and prejudice. And now she will be responsible for defending Israel (or not) at the most hostile international arena in the world, where Israel's very right to exist is subject to assault on a daily basis.

Obama's decision to appoint Rice and Power in the face of the mounting scandals surrounding his presidency generally and his foreign policy particularly is not the only reason Israeli leaders should not expect for his weakened political position to diminish Obama's plan to put the screws on Israel in the coming years. There is also the disturbing pattern of the abuse of power that the scandals expose.

To date, all administration officials questioned have denied that Obama was in any way involved in directing the IRS to use the tax code to intimidate with the aim of discrediting and destroying conservative organizations and donors. Likewise, they say he played no role in the Justice Department's espionage operations against American journalists, or in the intentional cover-up of the al-Qaida assault on US installations and personnel in Benghazi. But mounting circumstantial evidence indicates that this is not true.

White House visitor records show that IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman visited Obama's White House 157 times. His predecessor Mark Everson who served under president George W. Bush only visited the White House once.

So, too, as Andrew McCarthy reported last month in National Review, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney admitted that Obama spoke with then secretary of state Hillary Clinton at 10 p.m. on September 11, 2012, during the al- Qaida assault in Benghazi.

It was after that phone conversation that the administration changed its talking points about the nature of the assault, purging details on the identity of the perpetrators and blaming an unrelated Internet movie trailer for inciting the attack.

The one thing all the scandals share is a single-minded willingness to pursue radical goals to the bitter end. The IRS's targeting of conservatives was an appalling abuse of executive power, unlike anything we have seen in recent history. The passage of Obamacare in the face massive public opposition was another means to the end of destroying his opponents.

The cover-up of the Benghazi attack was a bid to hide the failure of a policy in order to double down on it - despite its failure. The only reason you would want to double down on an already failed policy is if you are ideologically committed to a larger goal that the failed policy advances.

The similarities of the pattern of behavior in all of these actions, as well as the circumstantial evidence already unearthed, indicate strongly that despite the denials, Obama was in fact involved and may have directed the actions of all of his underlings in all of the scandals now unfolding.

What this means for Israel is we cannot be lured into complacency by Kerry's buffoonery or Obama's apparent political weakness. This is a man who is most dangerous when attacked. And this is a man who is absolutely committed to his ideological agenda. We had better be ready, because if we are not, we won't know what has hit us.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Muhammad a-Dura lives and other Israeli PR victories

Fri, 24 May 2013 03:08:24 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update, the weekly satirical newscast produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism I produce, we bring you an interview with Israel's PR guru do discuss the government's decision to leap into action and defend Israel from France2's libelous report which claimed that IDF forces killed a Palestinian boy named Muhammad a-Dura in...2000.

We also bring you and interview with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his talented attorney discusses the Prime Minister's expense account. And much, much more..

Enjoy the show!

For donations outside the US, here is a link to the donations page for our Israeli non-profit, the Zionist Incubator. You can make credit card donations to Latma by contributing to our non-profit.

Thank you Hafez al-Assad

Fri, 24 May 2013 02:48:50 -0500

The threats emanating from Syria have become downright frightening. For the past several days, Home Front Defense Minister Gilad Erdan has been warning repeatedly that it is certain that Israeli population centers will be hit by Syrian ballistic missiles and that we have to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios, including Scud missile-launched chemical weapons attacks on Israel's metropolitan centers.

On Wednesday, Air Force commander Maj.- Gen. Amir Eshel spelled out Israel's concerns from a military perspective. The chance of war breaking out at any time is extremely high. Syria has a massive arsenal that includes advanced anti-aircraft missiles, anti-ship missiles and surface- to-surface missiles. Syria also has large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, advanced artillery as well as the other components of a large conventional military force.

Eshel warned, "Syria is collapsing before our eyes. If it collapses tomorrow we could find its vast arsenal dispersed and pointing at us."

In that event, Eshel said, the air force will have to operate at 100 percent of its capacity to clear a path for ground forces to operate in Syria and secure the armaments to prevent them from being dispersed, or used against Israel.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz warned that Israel could easily find itself fighting a three-front war in the near future. Presumably we would be fighting Syria, Lebanon and Iran - whose nuclear program continues to move to completion undaunted by empty US and European threats.

Syria is a mess because there are no good guys in a position to win. Syrian President Bashar Assad is one of the most dangerous leaders in the world. He is a major supporter of terrorist groups. He enabled al-Qaida and Hezbollah to use Syria as a logistical base in their war against US forces in Iraq. He is a vassal of Iran. He is allied with Hezbollah. He is a mass murderer.

Since the civil war began two years ago, Assad's complete dependence on Iran and Hezbollah - as well as on Russia - has been exposed for all to see. There is little doubt that whatever checks the US was able to exert against him before the civil war began no longer exist. And if he survives in power, he will be completely indifferent to US pressure and so will behave far more violently than he did before the war began.

And yet for all Assad's horrific behavior and the reasonable presumption that his actions will only become more violent and dangerous with each additional day he remains in power, the most telling aspect of the Syrian civil war is that Israel, the US and Europe are incapable of deciding whether he is better or worse than the alternatives.

Because standing opposed to Assad and his Hezbollah and Iranian protectors is al-Qaida.

Last week, we were regaled with news analyses and stories about how the al-Qaida forces fighting Assad are now splintering. According to breathless, detailed reports, the "moderate" al- Qaida group, the Nusra Front, is being overwhelmed by the "extremist" al-Qaida in Iraq faction. The latter has moved into Syria and is taking over operations, much to the consternation of their moderate Syrian al-Qaida brothers.

But on second thought, since both the Nusra guys and the al-Qaida in Iraq guys are loyal to al-Qaida boss Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Zawahiri told the al-Qaida in Iraq fellows to move to Syria, and since al-Qaida in Iraq formed and financed the Nusra Front, it is not at all clear that anyone is splintering off from anyone, or that anyone is upset about anything.

Aside from revealing the pathological stupidity of Western news services, the attempt to make a distinction between good and bad al-Qaida forces fighting Assad points to the futility of trying to choose sides in this horrible war, which has already seen more than 80,000 killed.

At this point, despite Assad's successful campaign to restore his control over Qusair, a strategically vital city adjacent to the Syrian-Lebanese border, most assessments indicate that the war is not nearly over. The sides may well stay bogged down fighting one another for years.

Then again, as Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said, it is also possible that it will all be over quickly.

In short then, no one knows how the war will play out in Syria. All Israeli political and military leaders know is that whatever happens, the situation in Syria is dangerous and highly flammable.

Moreover, everyone agrees that the conflict can spill out in two ways - ways which are not mutually exclusive.

First, both the government forces and their Shi'ite allies, and well as their al-Qaida opponents, could attack Israel. Both sides have a clear interest in attacking Israel, since the one thing they all agree on is that they wish to see Israel destroyed. So as is the case for the Palestinians from all parties, for both Assad and his Shi'ite allies and his Sunni opponents, attacking Israel is a surefire way to build public support.

This danger has already materialized. Assad's forces shot at an IDF jeep patrolling the border this week and rushed to get the story - and their exaggerated version of its outcome - to the media. Rebel forces have taken pot shots at Israel, and targeted UN forces along the border, accusing them of siding with Israel.

As Eshel made clear, the second danger is that the weapons in Syria will proliferate far and wide. US officials have already admitted that they have lost track of much of Syria's chemical weapons arsenal.

This week, PJ Media reported that a State Department whistle blower is about to come forward to divulge new information about the September 11, 2012, al-Qaida attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other US personnel were murdered in the attack. The whistle blower will reportedly reveal that Stevens was sent to Benghazi in a secret State Department effort to buy back anti-aircraft Stinger missiles that al-Qaida received from the State Department during the 2011 US-led NATO campaign to overthrow the regime of longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Since Gaddafi was defeated, his massive arsenal of terror weapons has spread out across the region, and particularly to Syria and Gaza. If Syrian weapons are similarly dispersed, the Libyan disaster will look like the military equivalent of a skinned knee.

The party most responsible for the barbarous, protracted Syrian civil war that will almost certainly drag Israel into a regional war with is of course the Syrians themselves. But the party second most responsible for this mess is the Obama administration.

Since the outset, the US had only one good option for intervention. It could have operated jointly with Israel to destroy Syria's missile arsenals and confiscate its weapons of mass destruction.

That is the only sure bet move the US had.

Every other action came with high risks.

Rather than take its sure bet move, at every turn, the Obama administration has opted for the most dangerous action with the smallest possible payoff.

For instance, rather than actively build an opposition army based on Syrian Army defectors, Kurds and other relatively moderate forces, Obama subcontracted the formation of the Syrian opposition to Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As Israel and others warned, Erdogan used his power as the US contractor to build an opposition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose ideology is largely indistinguishable from al-Qaida. It was the Brotherhood's domination of the Syrian opposition forces that paved the way for al-Qaida to enter and dominate opposition forces.

After Obama ensured that pro-Western forces would have no chance of taking over a post- Assad Syria, he allowed Russia to make matters worse. Rather than threaten Russian President Vladimir Putin in a credible way to prevent him from supplying S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria, Obama sat back and did nothing to block the imminent transfer of the game-changing system to Syria.

And as Eshel warned, Syria's advanced anti-aircraft batteries, which will threaten Israel's air superiority, will increase in a profound way the probability that Assad will attack Israel.

In the face of American rank incompetence, Assad has already broken all the red lines he and his father followed for more than 40 years.

He has already used chemical weapons. He has proliferated advanced weaponry to Hezbollah.

And he has already attacked Israel on the Golan Heights. Now that he has already crossed all of these red lines, the only question is how much he will escalate. Equipped with the S-300, the probability that he will escalate drastically has risen precipitously.

For all the danger emanating from Syria, Israel has one ace in the hole. We have a consensus that we must win the coming war with Syria decisively, whatever the cost. And for that consensus, we have just one man to thank: the late Hafez Assad.

During the 1990s, the Israeli Left and the Clinton administration managed to convince the Rabin, Netanyahu and Barak governments to offer to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria.

The only reason that the initiative failed was because Assad Sr. rejected Israel's repeated offers to surrender the strategic plateau in exchange for a piece of paper with a smiley face on it.

Had Assad accepted Israel's offers, we would have been facing a situation today that we would be hard pressed to contend with. On the one hand, we would be facing an all but certain war with Syria with al-Qaida or Iran controlling everything from the Jordan Valley to Haifa Bay.

On the other hand we would be facing this threat as a fractured society.

To hide their culpability for rendering Israel all but powerless to defend itself, those who supported surrendering the Golan would be pretending the dangers away. Instead of being free to discuss how to win a war in Syria, we would be bogged down in discussions of whether we have a right to fight in Syria.

In other words, if it hadn't been for Assad Sr. and his unyielding hatred for Israel, we would be facing the same situation in relation to Syria today that we faced in Lebanon in 2006 and as we have faced in Gaza since we withdrew in 2005. The lack of consensus regarding our strategic imperative to defeat our enemies in Gaza and Lebanon caused the IDF to fail to win its campaigns in both theaters.

So at this bitter juncture, as we face the all but certain prospect of war with Syria while our one ally is behaving like a drunken bull in a China shop, we have one man to thank for our continued ability to face this daunting challenge.

Thank you, Hafez Assad. Your hatred has saved us.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Obama and the "Official Truth"

Fri, 17 May 2013 03:22:17 -0500

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole. As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing.

But in Nakoula's case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn't really arrested for violating the terms of his parole.

Nakoula was arrested for producing an anti- Islam film that the Obama administration was falsely blaming for the al-Qaida assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi and the brutal murder of US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11, 2012. Obama and his associates falsely blamed Nakoula's film - and scapegoated Nakoula - for inciting the al-Qaida attack in Benghazi because they needed a fall guy to pin their cover-up of the actual circumstances of the premeditated, eminently foreseeable attack, which took place at the height of the presidential election campaign.

With the flood of scandals now inundating the White House, many are wondering if there is a connection between the cover-up of Benghazi, the IRS's prejudicial treatment of non-leftist nonprofit organizations and political donors, the Environmental Protection Agency's prejudicial treatment of non-liberal organizations, and the Justice Department's subpoenaing of phone records of up to a hundred reporters and editors from the Associated Press.

On the surface, they seem like unrelated events.

But they are not. They expose the modus operandi of the Obama administration: To establish an "official truth" about all issues and events, and use the powers of the federal government to punish all those who question or expose the fraudulence of that "official truth."

From the outset of Obama's tenure in office, his signature foreign policy has been his strategy of appeasing jihadist groups and regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran at the expense of US allies, including Israel, the Egyptian military, and longtime leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.

The administration defended its strategy in various ways. It presented the assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs as the denouement of the US war on terror. By killing the al-Qaida chief, the administration claimed, it had effectively ended the problem of jihad, which it reduced to al-Qaida generally and its founder specifically.

Just as important, it has tried to hide the very existence of the jihadist threat. To this end, the administration purged all terms relevant to the discussion of jihadist Islam from the federal lexicon and fired officials who defied the language and subject ban.

It has hidden the jihadist motive of terrorists and information relating to known jihadists from relevant governmental bodies. The Benghazi cover-up is the most blatant example of this policy of obfuscating and denying the truth. But it is far from a unique occurrence.

For instance, the administration has stubbornly denied that Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan's massacre of his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas was a jihadist attack. And in the months preceding the Tsarnaev brother's bombing of the Boston Marathon, and in its immediate aftermath, the FBI did not share its long-held information about the older brother's jihadist activities with local law enforcement agencies.

To advance its "official truth," the administration leaked information to the media about top secret operations that advanced its official narrative. For instance, top administration officials leaked the story of the Stuxnet computer virus that compromised Iranian computers used by Iran's nuclear weapons program. These stories compromised ongoing US and Israeli intelligence operations. But they advanced the administration's foreign policy narrative.

Conversely, as the AP scandal shows, the administration went on fishing expeditions to root out those who leaked stories that harmed the administration's narrative that al-Qaida is a spent force. In May 2012, AP reported that the CIA had scuttled an al-Qaida plot in Yemen to bomb a US airliner. The story damaged the credibility of Obama's claim that al-Qaida was defeated, and challenged the wisdom of Obama's support for the al-Qaida-aligned anti-regime protesters in Yemen that ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh in November 2011.

Finally, the administration has promoted its policy by demonizing as extremists and bigoted every significant voice that called that policy into question.

For example, in his satirical speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, Obama snidely - and libelously - accused Rep. Michele Bachmann of "book burning."

Bachmann is an outspoken critic of Obama's policy of appeasing Islamists at the expense of America's allies.

Bachmann is also the chairwoman of the House of Representative's Tea Party caucus. And demonizing her is just one instance of what has emerged as the administration's tool of choice in its bid to marginalize its opponents. This practice arguably began during Obama's 2008 presidential campaign when then-senator Obama referred to his opponents as "bitter" souls who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to those who aren't like them."

In the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama and his supportive media characterized the grassroots Tea Party movement for limited government as racist, selfish, extremist and uncaring.

And now we have learned that beginning in March 2010, the Internal Revenue Service instituted what can only be considered a systemic policy of discriminating against nonprofit groups dedicated to fighting Obama's domestic agenda. The IRS demanded information about the groups' donors, worldviews, reading materials and social networking accounts, and personal information about its membership and leaders that it had no right to receive. And according to USA Today, it held up approval of nonprofit status for 27 months for all groups related to the Tea Party movement. Some 500 organizations were victimized by this abuse of power.

We also learned this week that the IRS leaked information about donors to at least one nonprofit group that opposes homosexual marriage to a group that supports homosexual marriage. The latter group was led by one of Obama's reelection campaign's co-chairman. We learned that the IRS audited a university professor who wrote newspaper articles critical of fake Catholic groups that supported Obama's pro-abortion policies.

All of this aligns seamlessly with the Obama administration's demonization of conservative donors like the Koch brothers, and other stories of persecution of conservative donors that have come out over the past several years.

Last July, The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel reported that after the Obama campaign besmirched as "less-thank reputable" eight businessmen who supported political action committees associated with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, one of the donors, Frank VanderSloot, found himself subjected to an IRS audit and a Labor Department investigation.

Finally there is the administration's discriminatory treatment of pro-Israel organizations.

A day after Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS department overseeing nonprofit groups, admitted the IRS had been discriminating against groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement, we were reminded of the appalling treatment that Z Street, a new pro-Israel organization that opposes Obama's policy toward Israel, received at the hands of the IRS.

Z Street was founded in 2009 and applied for nonprofit status in December 2009. In 2010, Z Street filed a lawsuit in federal court against the IRS. According to court documents, the suit was filed after Z Street was informed by an IRS spokesperson that consideration of its application was being delayed, and could be denied because the IRS has a special policy for dealing with nonprofit applications submitted by groups related to Israel.

According to Z Street's court filings, the IRS official said that all Israel-related organizations are assigned to "a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the administration's public policies."

Around the same time that Z Street's application for nonprofit status hit a brick wall of discriminatory treatment, Commentary magazine, also a nonprofit organization, received a letter from the IRS threatening to revoke its nonprofit status because in 2008 the publication posted the transcript of a speech then Sen. Joseph Lieberman gave at a Commentary dinner in which he endorsed Sen. John McCain for president.

As John Podhoretz, Commentary's editor, wrote last week, to disprove a false charge, the magazine had to spend tens of thousands of dollars and waste "dozens upon dozens" of work hours copying two million pages of articles posted on the magazine's website in 2008 to prove that Lieberman's speech was a tiny fraction of the magazine's overall output.

Then, too, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a nonprofit where I work as the director of the Israel Security Project, was recently subjected to an IRS audit - which it also passed with flying colors.

The Freedom Center's work spans the spectrum from domestic policy to foreign policy, and like Z Street and Commentary, is generally critical of the Obama administration's policy toward Israel.

Finally, there is the administration's obsessive targeting of billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama's top political adviser David Axelrod wrote a letter to Antonio Miguel, a Socialist member of the Spanish parliament, attacking Adelson as "greedy."

Miguel leaked the letter to the media while Adelson was in Spain promoting his Las Vegas Sands casino corporation's plans to build Eurovegas, a casino in Madrid. Axelrod later sent his letter to Obama supporters in an email from the Obama presidential campaign.

Adelson is best known for his support for the US-Israel alliance, and his friendship with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. By calling Adelson "greedy," Axelrod was channeling age-old anti- Semitic imagery, and by inference engaging in it, in his assault against Adelson. In the letter in question, Adelson was the subject of this ad hominem assault due to his support for Romney in the 2012 elections.

The Tea Party movement has to date limited its scope to domestic policy - challenging the growth of the federal government on a host of issues. For its part, still smarting from the unpopularity of former president George W. Bush's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Republican Party has yet to enunciate a clear foreign policy.

The closest thing to a systematic rebuke of the Obama administration's signature foreign policy of courting Islamist movements and regimes and treating US allies in the region with hostility are organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Z Street and Commentary and wealthy donors like Adelson. Their stalwart and articulate support for a strong US alliance with Israel, and a strong and vibrant Israel, are the only coherent challenge to Obama's pro-Islamist foreign policy.

By targeting them, the Obama administration completes the circle of an overall modus operandi of punishing those who oppose and expose the failures of his policies - domestic and foreign. The underlying theme that connects Benghazi to the Tea Party, to the subpoenaing of AP phone records, to Z Street, to Nakoula is that they all have challenged the administration's "official truth."

One can only hope that Obama's thuggish creation and corrupt defense of his "official truth" will anger, disgust - and frighten - all Americans.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Channel 10's AMAZING scoop

Fri, 17 May 2013 03:15:06 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update we bring you the Israeli media's response to the scandals now flooding the White House. (In a word, the media here have completely ignored the story.)

We also bring you an interview with a senior executive of Channel 10 - a station that exists only by racking up massive debt to the government. And much, much more!

Enjoy!

For donations outside the US, here is a link to the donations page for our Israeli non-profit, the Zionist Incubator. You can make credit card donations to Latma by contributing to our non-profit.

NGOs vs. those who serve Israel

Fri, 10 May 2013 06:35:59 -0500

In 2010, Cpl. Eleanor Joseph became the first female Arab combat soldier in the IDF. Joseph, a Christian Arab told Ma'ariv that her good luck charm is a drawing of the Star of David with the caption: "I have no other land, even when my ground is burning." Her commander drew it for her.

Joseph explained, "It is a phrase that strengthens me. Every time I experience hardship, I read it. Because I was born here. The people I love live here: My parents, my friends. This is a Jewish state? Yes, it is. But it's also my country. I can't imagine living in any other place. I think every person should serve in the army. You live here? You make your home here? Then go defend your country. What does it matter that I'm an Arab?"

Joseph's story represents an incipient trend of integration among Israel's Arab community.

Among other things, this is manifest in the consistently rising number of Israeli Arab students who elect to study in Hebrew-language schools and in the rising number of Israeli Arabs who elect to serve in national service, the civilian equivalent of military service.

A poll of Arab youth carried out in late 2007 made clear how widespread this integrationist impulse has become. Seventy-five percent of Arab youth aged 16 to 22 supported voluntary national service.

And yet, despite these sentiments and developments, Arab Israelis who seek to integrate into Israeli society and reject the separatist messages of their political leaders are forced to contend with extraordinary social pressures and even coercion to prevent them from acting in accordance with their wishes.

A study completed this week by Im Tirtzu exposes the vast array of NGOs generously funded by the supposedly pro-Israel New Israel Fund as well as by foreign governments which are running a campaign to oppose Cpl. Joseph and her comrades - Arabs and Jews alike. Since 1999, these groups have been conducting a campaign to undermine Arab integration into Israeli society specifically and to demoralize and reduce the social standing of those who serve in the IDF, national service and IDF reserves generally. The campaign is being carried out on a dual track of discouraging Israeli Arabs from serving in the IDF or national service, and of opposing government benefits to IDF veterans, reservists and those who undertook national service by claiming that these benefits unjustly discriminate against Israeli Arabs.

Im Tirtzu's report argues that the dual nature of the campaign, underwritten by the same funders, shows that the goal "is to prolong irredentism or non-integration of the Arab sector in order to encourage it to act as a sector demanding national recognition and advance the aim of transforming the State of Israel from a Jewish, democratic state into a bi-national state."

As the report notes, it is common practice in many countries to give government benefits and preferential treatment to military veterans and reservists. The US government provides massive assistance to veterans in employment, education, housing and other areas. The purpose of these benefits is to raise general motivation to serve and to reward those who have because the American people believe that their personal service advances the interests of American society as a whole.

To substantiate its claims against these NIF- and foreign government-financed Israeli NGOs, Im Tirtzu's organized its report as a timeline of efforts undertaken by various NGOs to advance the goals of Arab separatism and reducing the morale and social status of IDF and national service veterans and reservists across the board.

Although the Hebrew-language report is worth reading in its entirety, a few examples will suffice to show the scope of these efforts.

In 1999, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel published a report which claimed it was discriminatory for workplaces to make military service a qualification for employment. The report went so far as to insinuate that Israel could be likened to South Africa's apartheid regime due to workplace preference for veterans.

That report was followed by a series of petitions to the High Court beginning in 2002 submitted by ACRI, Adalah and other groups to overturn laws and government decisions that give preferential treatment to IDF veterans and those who served in national service. The petitions have not led to outright court victories. But in a number of cases, the lawsuits were dropped after the government canceled the benefits under challenge.

These groups have opposed every sort of benefit, including tuition discounts for students, differential reductions on government child allotments for those who served in the military and national service and those who did not, preferential treatment in state land tenders and grants and other housing benefits.

Some of these court cases directly targeted benefits to Arab IDF veterans. For instance in 2005, Adalah petitioned the court against the Israel Lands Authority for making military service a requirement for receiving ILA land grants in Beduin villages. And in 2009, Adalah petitioned the court to revoke preferential treatment to Cirassian veterans in an ILA tender for homesteads in Kfar Kama, a Cirassian village in the Galilee.

ACRI receives nearly a million dollars every year from the NIF, and receives funding as well from the EU, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the Ford Foundation and Christian Aid.

Adalah similarly receives massive funding from the NIF, the EU, Switzerland and Scandinavian governments through their joint foreign aid organs. It also receives funding from George Soros's Open Society Institute.

Some of the organizations involved are both funders and participants. For instance, the Abraham Fund has participated in High Court petitions against benefits to those who have served.

And it is also a donor to Mossawa, an Israeli Arab group involved in the campaign. Mossawa was co-founded by NIF's Shatil organization.

According Im Tirtzu's report, active NGO campaigning against Israeli Arab national service and military service began in 2007. That year Baladna, which receives funding from the NIF, spearheaded what has become a continuous campaign to discourage Israeli Arabs from participating in national service. Baladna claims that national service is just military service in disguise.

In its words, "National service is a direct arm of the Israeli Occupation Army and of security frameworks that act and always have acted against the Arab population and the Palestinian nation generally. And so, all attempts to present the notion of civilian service as service for society are founded in a deliberate distortion directed at society generally and against the Arab sector in particular."

Following this line of reasoning, in 2010 Omar Nasser, the head of the Araba Local Council, kicked two Arab women serving in national service out of the local school. Defending his actions Nasser said, "I object in principle to the national service project because I view it as a means of paving the way for male and female volunteers to serve in the military in the future, and I strenuously object to that."

As the Im Tirtzu report indicates, the NGO-led campaign against Israeli Arab military and national service has contributed to a situation in which Israeli Arabs who support such service are subjected to physical abuse, social ostracism, humiliation and harassment.

In October 2012, the Forum for Military Service in the Christian Sector held a conference in Upper Nazareth whose purpose was to encourage Christians to serve in the IDF and national service. Three hundred people participated in the conference. One of the heads of Mosawa wrote a widely distributed article accusing the Christian leadership of collaborating with the IDF. She suggested blacklisting the communal leaders involved.

When word of the conference got out, one priest who participated was banned from the Church of the Annunciation. Another priest had his tires slashed and a blood-stained rag placed at his doorstep.

The children who participated in the conference were singled out for abuse. Their photos were disseminated on Facebook and in the Arab media. They were humiliated by their teachers and classmates.

Soldiers like Eleanor Joseph feel compelled to take off their uniforms before they return home, because when they have worn them home, they have faced harassment. One female IDF soldier reportedly was severely beaten by her neighbors.

The general campaign against benefits for IDF veterans and those who served in national service also involves a similar campaign to demoralize high school students and encourage them not to serve. For instance, in 2008, Social TV, which is supported by the NIF and the US government, broadcast a propaganda film targeting Jewish Israeli youth. Its aim was to discourage them from serving in the IDF.

In 2009, 22 self-proclaimed feminist organizations, many of which are financed by the NIF, launched a campaign to support seven members of New Profile who are under police investigation for launching websites instructing young people how to dodge the draft - a felony offense.

But the main thrust of the anti-military campaign has been to prevent and undermine Knesset and government action to provide benefits for those who serve - Jewish and non-Jewish alike. According to Im Tirtzu, the campaign has intimidated Justice Ministry officials into obstructing bills still before committee hearings.

For instance, in May 2012, at a Knesset Economics Committee hearing on a bill to provide housing benefits for IDF reservists, MK Miri Regev said the bill was being held up because the attorney-general feared legal challenges in the High Court.

This week, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill that would allow IDF soldiers to sue for libel those who wrongly accuse them of having committed war crimes during their military service. Justice Minister Tzipi Livni opposed the bill. Her opposition indicates that the bill may face a similar fate as the Knesset's attempt to provide benefits to reservists.

Military and national service are vital national institutions. Integration of the Israeli Arab community is a vital national interest. It is obscene that a handful of well-funded radicals are able to undermine them both - while paralyzing our representative institutions.

Im Tirtzu's report concludes with a list of recommendations the Knesset and government ministries should take to help those who serve the country, and to protect Israeli Arabs who serve and those who support them. While they are all correct, and should be followed, they do not go far enough. The time has come for the government and the Knesset to rein in the twin forces - the NGO sector and the legal fraternity - which in the name of "democracy" undermine our democracy.

Every election we send our representatives to the Knesset. And every election the vast majority of our elected representatives share our desire to support those who serve in the IDF and national service without reference to their religion, race or gender. We want to support them because they contribute to the general good of all of Israel.

But due to a handful of NGOs that receive their funding from outside Israel from governments and groups that do not share our values and interests, and due to the cooperation they receive from activist judges and radical Justice Ministry attorneys, the will of the people is stymied again and again and again.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

A song to Jerusalem

Fri, 10 May 2013 06:20:33 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update, the satirical newscast produced every week by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website I founded and run we bring you a song for Jerusalem "Fly your flag" in celebration of Jerusalem Day commemorating the unification of our eternal capital city 46 years ago.

We also bring you an update from the field in Judea and Samaria from our reporter Really Cool.

Enjoy!

Here's the whole show.

And here's the song as a separate clip.

For donations outside the US, here is a link to the donations page for our Israeli non-profit, the Zionist Incubator. You can make credit card donations to Latma by contributing to our non-profit.

Dershowitz and tragedy

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:44:51 -0500

There are two main reasons that many leftists who are viscerally supportive of Israel have difficulty understanding and defending the Jewish state today. First, the storyline about Israel is deeply distorted.

For instance, this week, Freedom House released its annual report on press freedom around the world. Israel's ranking was reduced from "free" to "partly free."

Freedom House gave three reasons for downgrading Israel's status: the prosecution of Haaretz reporter Uri Blau for holding stolen top-secret documents; Channel 10's difficulties getting its broadcast license renewed; and the success of the Israel Hayom newspaper. As Jonathan Tobin at Commentary noted Wednesday, all of these reasons are fraudulent.

Uri Blau received thousands of top secret documents from Anat Kamm, who stole them from the office of OC Central Command at the end of her military service. The documents were not mere intelligence analyses. They were operational plans, unit information and other highly sensitive information.

Blau lied to investigators who asked him about the documents. He fled to London for months rather than speak to investigators or return the documents.

Yet because Israel prosecuted Blau for these acts - which are felonies - Freedom House decided that Israel constrains press freedom.

Then there is Channel 10. Channel 10 is a poorly managed, unsuccessful company that has gone broke. It owes NIS 110 million which it cannot pay back, including NIS 60m. to the state.

Due to its nonpayment of its debt to the state, the Knesset was set to vote down the renewal of its broadcast license - again, in accordance with the law. To protect themselves from market forces - Channel 10's failed management and staff used their bully pulpit to deflect attention away from their failure and incompetence. They accused the Knesset of trying to silence free speech. Channel 10's allies in the media and the political Left joined their anti-government bandwagon. The Knesset folded.

Channel 10's license was renewed. And its debt to taxpayers remains unpaid.

As for Israel Hayom, Freedom House alleged that the free paper's success in gaining market shares at the expense of other tabloids is part of a nefarious plot by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his friend and Israel Hayom owner Sheldon Adelson to establish a quasi-state-controlled media. Israel Hayom is the first mass circulation Israeli newspaper not aligned with the political Left.

Freedom House's allegations against Adelson and Netanyahu and its championing of bankrupt Channel 10 are based on two guiding notions. First, non-leftist entities - the Knesset, Israel Hayom's editorial board - are inherently opposed to press freedom while the motives of leftist institutions like Haaretz and Channel 10 are as pure as the driven snow.

Second, they imply that media in Israel can only be free if not subjected to market forces or the rule of law.

Clearly both of these underlying assumptions are absurd. Yet they form the basis of Freedom House's damaging allegations against the government.

And that's the thing of it.

Over the past generation, we have been inundated by disinformation from an unlimited number of seemingly credible organizations whose aim is to discredit any development related to Israel that does not advance the positions of the Left. And due to the ubiquity of this disinformation, among wider and wider circles today the belief has taken hold that there is something fundamentally illegitimate about non-leftist Israelis and non-leftist supporters of Israel.

Since most Israelis are not leftist, and since the most outspoken supporters of Israel are not leftists, there is a widening belief - particularly among liberals - that Israelis, Israeli institutions and Israel's supporters are illegitimate.

This brings us to the second reason that it has become so difficult for Americans - and particularly liberal American Jews - who viscerally support Israel, to defend or even understand the Jewish state today.

There is a Western tendency, most pronounced on the anti-colonialist Left, to ignore the nature of the Islamic world generally and the Palestinians in particular, and concentrate their attention on Israel alone.

Case in point is Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz is rightly considered one of Israel's most outspoken defenders in the US. But like his fellow leftist ideologues, Dershowitz apparently does not think that it is important to focus on the nature of things in the Islamic world. Rather than notice current realities, he places his faith in his power to shape the future through his intellect and his willingness to compromise.

In an interview with New York Jewish Week following his participation at Sunday's Jerusalem Post's conference in New York, Dershowitz said he was astonished by both my remarks on Iran and the audience's response to my remarks.

He told the paper, "She said, 'Bombs away,' and they gave her a standing ovation."

One of the things that distinguish the Post's readers from most other news consumers is that our readers have educated themselves in the realities of Israel and the region and pay attention to those realities.

As a consequence, they are less affected by anti-Israel propaganda presented as human rights reports than the vast majority of news consumers in the US.

When I addressed the conference, I said I would limit my discussion of Iran to two words, "Bombs away." I said that because like the Post's readers, I base my analysis of Iran's nuclear weapons program on the nature of the Iranian regime.

The Iranian regime is a totalitarian regime. It has an uninterrupted record of torturing and massacring its citizens. It has threatened to annihilate Israel. It is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.

Economic sanctions are only viable against regimes that care about serving their citizenry. A regime that represses its citizens is not going to be moved from its strategic course by international sanctions that embitter the lives of its citizens. Since the Iranian regime does not care about its citizens, it cannot be diverted from its plans to acquire nuclear weapons through economic sanctions, no matter how harsh.

As for reaching an agreement with the Iranian regime that would induce it to end its nuclear weapons program, this aspiration is similarly based on a denial of the nature of the regime. The first act of the regime was to reject the foundations of the international system. The Iranian takeover of the US Embassy in 1979 was not merely an act of war against America. It was a declaration of war against the international legal system. Since then, nothing the Iranian regime has done, including emerging as the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, has brought it closer to accepting the norms of behavior expected from a member of the family of nations. As a consequence, the notion that this regime would honor any nuclear agreement it may sign with the US or any other international party is ridiculous.

Since traditional forms of statecraft that do not involve the use of force are not viable options for statecraft involving Iran, the only viable option for preventing Iran - particularly at this late stage - from becoming a nuclear power is force. If Israel is serious when it says that a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to the Jewish state then Israel must attack Iran's nuclear installations.

Because the Post's readers are informed about the nature of the Iranian regime, they appreciated the message I telegraphed in saying "Bombs away."

But Dershowitz was astonished.

Jewish Week asked Dershowitz about the Jerusalem Post conference because during a panel discussion he and I participated in about the Palestinian conflict with Israel, he angrily attacked the audience for laughing at his plan for renewing negotiations between Israel and the PLO and I angrily rebuked him for doing so.

Dershowitz told the audience that he had presented a plan to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas that involved Israel abrogating Jewish property rights in select areas of Judea and Samaria through a so-called settlement freeze. In exchange, the Palestinians would agree to suspend their efforts to delegitimize and criminalize Israel at the UN and the International Criminal Court.

In other words, Dershowitz put forth a plan - which he said Abbas responded positively to - that would require Israel to take a step not required by the agreements it already negotiated with the PLO. And in exchange, the Palestinians would temporarily suspend actions they are taking in material breach of the agreements they signed with Israel.

By advocating this "bargain," Dershowitz revealed that his conception of the Palestinians is based on willful blindness to their nature that equals his apparent blindness to the nature of the Iranian regime.

Last Saturday, Abbas gave a speech in which he said that Israel's commitment to the peace process will be measured by its willingness to release Palestinian terrorists from its jails. Last month, Abbas sent his representative to visit the families of jailed Palestinian mass murderers to express his solidarity with them and his admiration for their sons' crimes.

As Aaron Lerner from IMRA pointed out earlier this week, by insisting that all Palestinian terrorists be freed from Israeli prisons, Abbas is saying that there is nothing criminal or wrong about murdering or attempting to murder Israelis. This position alone discredits him as a peace partner.

Abbas's steadfast refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, and his unceasing political warfare against Israel - in breach of signed agreements between Israel and the PLO - are just further proof that he is not a credible partner for peace.

Then there is the nature of the Palestinian people themselves. Unlike the Iranians, who desperately wish to overthrow their regime, according the results of a new Pew survey of the Arab world, Palestinians want more tyranny.

To the extent they oppose their regime, they do so because it is too open. Among other things, 87 percent of Palestinians say a wife must always obey her husband; 89% want to be ruled by Islamic law, and 62% support the death penalty for leaving Islam.

More Palestinians support terrorism against civilians than do citizens in any other Muslim society polled.

Post readers are apparently as familiar with the nature of Palestinians society as they are with the nature of the Iranian regime. And this is why they laughed at Dershowitz's plan for restarting negotiations.

Angered at the audience's response, Dershowitz lashed out against it. He said the thousand people in the hall were irrelevant, that no one listens to them, and that it is good that no one listens to them.

Dershowitz is rightly respected by Zionists across the political spectrum for his willingness to defend Israel against its detractors. And this makes his contemptuous treatment of an audience of its supporters at the conference more tragic than infuriating.

It is the tragedy of our times that basically decent liberals like Dershowitz dismiss as marginal those who base their assessments of Israel and the Middle East on reality, rather than on policy paradigms that are the stuff of negotiations textbooks at Harvard.

It is the tragedy of our times because the people he holds in greatest contempt are the people who have been right about Israel, and about Iran and the Palestinians, time after time after time.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Obama explains his red lines

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:31:50 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update, the weekly satirical newscast brought to you by Latma the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website I run, we bring you and exclusive interview with US President Barack Obama, fresh from his brilliant performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

We also bring you an interview with a senior executive at Channel 10 in which he discusses the station's failure to notice alleged serial sexual harassment by the station's star, journalist Emmanuel Rosen.

Enjoy the show!

For donations outside the US, here is a link to the donations page for our Israeli non-profit, the Zionist Incubator. You can make credit card donations to Latma by contributing to our non-profit.

Time to confront Obama

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:50:20 -0500

The time has come for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to confront US President Barack Obama.

A short summary of events from the past three days: On Tuesday morning, the head of the IDF's Military Intelligence Analysis Division Brig. Gen.

Itay Brun revealed that the Syrian government has already used "lethal chemical weapons," against Syrian civilians and opposition forces. Brun described footage of people visibly suffering the impact of chemical agents, apparently sarin gas.

Hours later, US Secretary of State John Kerry said Netanyahu had told him on the telephone that "he was not in a position to confirm" Brun's statement.

It is hard to imagine the US was taken by surprise by Brun's statement. Just the day before, Brun briefed visiting US Defense secretary Chuck Hagel on Syria. It is not possible he failed to mention the same information.

And of course it isn't just the IDF saying that Syrian President Bashar Assad is using chemical weapons. The British and the French are also saying this.

But as a European source told Ma'ariv, the Americans don't want to know the facts. The facts will make them do something about Syria's chemical weapons. And they don't want to do anything about Syria's chemical weapons.

So they force Netanyahu to disown his own intelligence.

Thursday afternoon, in a speech in Abu Dhabi, Hagel confirmed, "with some degree of varying confidence," that Syria used chemical weapons, at least on a "small scale."

What the administration means by "some degree of varying confidence," is of course, unknowable with any degree of varying confidence.

Then there is Iran.

Also on Tuesday, the former head of IDF Military Intelligence, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, said that Iran has already crossed the red line Israel set last year. It has already stockpiled 170 kg. of medium-enriched uranium, and can quickly produce the other 80 kg. necessary to reach the 250 kg. threshold Netanyahu said will mark Iran's achievement of breakout capability where it can build a nuclear arsenal whenever it wants.

Yadlin made a half-hearted effort Wednesday to walk back his pronouncements. But his basic message remained the same: The die has been cast.

Due to American pressure on Israel not to act, and due to the White House's rejection of clearcut reports about Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium, Iran has crossed the threshold. Iran will be a nuclear power unless its uranium enrichment installations and other nuclear sites are destroyed or crippled. Now.

True, the Americans set a different red line for Iran than Israel. They say they will not allow Iran to assemble a nuclear bomb. But to believe that the US has the capacity and the will to prevent Iran from climbing the top rung on the nuclear ladder is to believe in the tooth fairy - (see, for instance, North Korea).

Iran has threatened to use it nuclear arsenal to destroy Israel. Have we now placed our survival in the hands of Tinkerbell? And yet, rather than acknowledge what Iran has done, Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon carry on with the tired act of talking about the need for a credible military option but saying that there is still time for sanctions and other non-military means to block Iran's quest for the bomb.

Perhaps our leaders are repeating these lies because they want to present a unified US-Israel front to the world. But the effect is just the opposite.

What their statements really demonstrate is that Israel has been brought to its knees by its superpower patron that has implemented a policy that has enabled Iran to become a nuclear power.

Indeed, the US has allowed Iran to cross the nuclear threshold while requiring Israel to pretend the course the US has followed is a responsible one.

The announcement that the US has agreed to sell Israel advanced weapons specifically geared towards attacking Iran should also be seen in this light. Israel reportedly spent a year negotiating this deal. But immediately after its details were published, the US started backing away from its supposed commitment to supply them. The US will not provide Israel with bunker-buster bombs.

It will not provide Israel with the bombers necessary to use the bombs Israel isn't getting. And anyway, by the time Israel gets the items the US is selling - like mid-air refuelers - it will be too late.

When, after overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the US failed to find chemical weapons in the country, then-president George W. Bush's Democratic opponents accused Bush of having politicized intelligence to justify his decision to topple Saddam. In truth, there is no evidence that Bush purposely distorted intelligence reports. Israel's intelligence agencies, and perhaps French ones, were the only allied intelligence arms that had concluded Saddam's chemical weapons - to the extent he had them - did not represent a threat.

The fact that Bush preferred US and British intelligence estimates over Israeli ones doesn't mean that he politicized intelligence.

In contrast, what Obama and his advisers are doing represents the worst case of politicizing intelligence since Stalin arrested his senior security brass rather than heed their warnings of the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Never in US history has there been a greater misuse and abuse of US intelligence agencies than there is today, under the Obama administration.

Take the Boston Marathon bombings. Each day more and more reports come out about the information US agencies had - for years - regarding the threat posed by the Boston Marathon bombers.

But how could the FBI have possibly acted on those threats? Obama has outlawed all discussion or study of jihad, Islamism, radical Islam and the Koran by US federal government agencies. The only law enforcement agency that monitors Islamic websites is the New York Police Department.

And its chief Ray Kelly has bravely maintained his policy despite massive pressure from the media and the political class to end his surveillance operations.

Everywhere else, from the Boston Police Department to the FBI and CIA, US officials are barred from discussing the threat posed by jihadists or even acknowledging they exist. People were impressed that Obama referred to the terrorist attack in Boston as a terrorist attack, because according to the administration-dictated federal lexicon, use of the word terrorism is forbidden, particularly when the act in question was perpetrated by Muslims.

Then there are the Palestinians. On Thursday, it was reported that in the midst of everything happening in the Middle East, Obama is planning to host a peace conference in Washington in June to reinstate negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

The terms of reference for the conference are reportedly the 2002 Arab League "peace plan."

Among other things, that plan requires Israel to accept millions of hostile foreign-born Arabs to whatever rump state it retains following a "peace" agreement with the PLO. In exchange for Israel agreeing to destroy itself, the Arab peace plan says the Arabs will agree to have "regular" relations with Israel. ("Regular" by the way, is a term devoid of meaning.) During his visit here last week, Kerry announced that the new US policy towards the Palestinians is to pour billions of dollars into the Palestinian economy. Among other things, the administration is going to convince US companies like Coca-Cola to open huge plants in Judea and Samaria.

Sounds fine. But as usual, there is a catch. The administration wants US firms to build their factories in Area C, the area of Judea and Samaria over which, in accordance with the agreements they signed with Israel, the Palestinians agreed Israel should hold sole control.

In essence, the policy Kerry announced is simply an American version of the EU's policy of seeking to force Israel to give up control over Area C.

Area C, of course, is where all the Israeli communities are, and almost no Palestinians live.

Those Israeli communities and the 350,000 Jews who live in them are the strongest assertion of Israeli sovereign rights to Judea and Samaria. So the EU - and now the Americans - are doing everything they can to force Israel to destroy them. The campaign to coerce Israel into surrendering its sole control over Area C is a central component of that plan.

It cannot be said often enough: The administration's focus on the Palestinian conflict with Israel in the midst of the violent disintegration of the Arab state system and the rise of jihadist forces throughout the region, coupled with Iran's steady emergence as a regional power, is only understandable in the framework of a psychiatric - rather than policy - analysis.

For the past five years, perhaps Netanyahu's greatest achievement in office has been his adroit avoidance of confrontations with Obama. With no one other than the US willing to stand with Israel in public, it is an important national interest for Jerusalem not to have any confrontations with Washington if they can possibly be avoided.

This attempt to avoid confrontations is what made Netanyahu agree to Obama's anti-Jewish demand to deny Jews their property rights in Judea and Samaria in 2010. This is undoubtedly what stood behind Netanyahu's decision to apologize to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan during Obama's visit to Israel last month. That apology constituted a moral abandonment of the IDF naval commandos who Netanyahu's government sent - virtually unarmed - to face Turkish terrorists affiliated with al-Qaida and Hamas aboard the Mavi Marmara terror ship.

To a degree, all of Netanyahu's seemingly unjustifiable actions can be justified when weighed against the need to avoid a confrontation with America.

But by now, after five years, with Iran having passed Israel's red line, and with chemical weapons already in play in Syria, the jig is up.

Obama does not have Israel's back.

Contrary to the constant, grinding rhetorical prattle of American and Israeli politicos, Obama will not lift a finger to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. He will not lift a finger to prevent chemical weapons from being transferred to the likes of al-Qaida and Hezbollah, and their colleagues in Syria, or used by the Syrian regime.

From Benghazi to Boston, from Tehran to Damascus, Obama's policy is to not fight forces of jihad, whether they are individuals, organizations or states. And his obsession with Palestinian statehood shows that he would rather coerce Israel to make concessions to Palestinian Jew-haters and terrorists than devote his time and energy into preventing Iran from becoming the jihadist North Korea or from keeping sarin, VX and mustard gas out of the hands of Iran's terrorist underlings and their Sunni competitors.

No, Israel doesn't want a confrontation with Washington. But we don't have any choice anymore.

The time has come to take matters into our own hands on Syria and Iran. In Syria, either Israel takes care of the chemical weapons, or if we can't, Netanyahu must go before the cameras and tell the world everything we know about Syria's chemical weapons and pointedly demand world - that is US - action to secure them.

As for Iran, either Israel must launch an attack without delay, or if we can't, then Netanyahu has to publicly state that the time for diplomacy is over. Either Iran is attacked or it gets the bomb.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.