Saturday, April 17, 2010

Benny Morris on Iran and Obama: When Armageddon lives next door

 
When Armageddon lives next door
Obama is denying Israel the right to self-defense when it is not his, or America's, life that is on the line.
 
I take it personally: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants to murder me, my family and my people. Day in, day out, he announces the imminent demise of the "Zionist regime," by which he means Israel. And day in, day out, his scientists and technicians are advancing toward the atomic weaponry that will enable him to bring this about.
 
The Jews of Europe (and Poles, Russians, Czechs, the French, etc.) should likewise have taken personally Adolf Hitler's threats and his serial defiance of the international community from 1933 to 1939. But he was allowed, by the major powers and the League of Nations, to flex his muscles, rearm, remilitarize the Rhineland and then gobble up neighboring countries. Had he been stopped before the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, the lives of many millions, Jews and Gentiles, would have been saved. But he wasn't.
 
And it doesn't look like Ahmadinejad will be either. Not by the United States and the international community, at any rate. President Obama, when not obsessing over the fate of the ever- aggrieved Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, proposes to halt Ahmadinejad's nuclear program by means of international sanctions. But here's the paradox: The wider Obama casts his net to mobilize as many of the world's key players as he can, the weaker the sanctions and the more remote their implementation. China, it appears, will only agree to a U.N. Security Council resolution if the sanctions are diluted to the point of meaninglessness (and maybe not even then). The same appears to apply to the Russians. Meanwhile, Iran advances toward the bomb. Most of the world's intelligence agencies believe that it is only one to three years away.
 
Perhaps Obama hopes to unilaterally implement far more biting American (and, perhaps, European) sanctions. But if China and Russia (and some European Union members) don't play ball, the sanctions will remain ineffective. And Iran will continue on its deadly course.
 
At the end of 2007, the U.S. intelligence community, driven by wishful thinking, expediency and incompetence, announced that the Iranians had in 2003 halted the weaponization part of their nuclear program. Last week, Obama explicitly contradicted that assessment. At least the American administration now publicly acknowledges where it is the Iranians are headed, while not yet acknowledging what it is they are after -- primarily Israel's destruction.
 
Granted, Obama has indeed tried to mobilize the international community for sanctions. But it has been a hopeless task, given the selfishness and shortsightedness of governments and peoples. Sanctions were supposed to kick in in autumn 2009; then it was December; now it is sometime late this year. Obama is still pushing the rock up the hill -- and Ahmadinejad, understandably, has taken to publicly scoffing at the West and its "sanctions."
 
He does this because he knows that sanctions, if they are ever passed, are likely to be toothless, and because the American military option has been removed from the table. Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates -- driven by a military that feels overstretched in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and a public that has no stomach for more war -- have made this last point crystal clear.
 
But at the same time, Obama insists that Israel may not launch a preemptive military strike of its own. Give sanctions a chance, he says. (Last year he argued that diplomacy and "engagement" with Tehran should be given a chance. Tehran wasn't impressed then and isn't impressed now.) The problem is that even if severe sanctions are imposed, they likely won't have time to have serious effect before Iran succeeds at making a bomb.
 
Obama is, no doubt, well aware of this asymmetric timetable. Which makes his prohibition against an Israeli preemptive strike all the more immoral. He knows that any sanctions he manages to orchestrate will not stop the Iranians. (Indeed, Ahmadinejad last week said sanctions would only fortify Iran's resolve and consolidate its technological prowess.) Obama is effectively denying Israel the right to self-defense when it is not his, or America's, life that is on the line.
 
Perhaps Obama has privately resigned himself to Iran's nuclear ambitions and believes, or hopes, that deterrence will prevent Tehran from unleashing its nuclear arsenal. But what if deterrence won't do the trick? What if the mullahs, believing they are carrying out Allah's will and enjoy divine protection, are undeterred?
 
The American veto may ultimately consign millions of Israelis, including me and my family, to a premature death and Israel to politicide. It would then be comparable to Britain and France's veto in the fall of 1938 of the Czechs defending their territorial integrity against their rapacious Nazi neighbors. Within six months, Czechoslovakia was gobbled up by Germany.
 
But will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follow in Czech President Edvard Benes' footsteps? Will he allow an American veto to override Israel's existential interests? And can Israel go it alone, without an American green (or even yellow) light, without American political cover and overflight permissions and additional American equipment? Much depends on what the Israeli military and intelligence chiefs believe their forces -- air force, navy, commandos -- can achieve. Full destruction of the Iranian nuclear project? A long-term delay? And on how they view Israel's ability (with or without U.S. support) to weather the reaction from Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria.
 
An Israeli attack might harm U.S. interests and disrupt international oil supplies (though I doubt it would cause direct attacks on U.S. installations, troops or vessels). But, from the Israeli perspective, these are necessarily marginal considerations when compared with the mortal hurt Israel and Israelis would suffer from an Iranian nuclear attack. Netanyahu's calculations will, in the end, be governed by his perception of Israel's existential imperatives. And the clock is ticking.
 
Benny Morris is the author of many books about the Middle East conflict, including, most recently, "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War."






 
Exclusive Report March 27, 2010, 10:40 PM (GMT+02:00)

 

It glitters and it's gold in Gaza market

Foreign visitors to the Gaza Strip, most recently UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon and European Union foreign executive Catherine Ashton, depict its 1.2 million Palestinian inhabitants with great pathos as living in wretched conditions, starving and homeless - and all because of the Israeli embargo. In fact, a new Egyptian report, shows that the one-day observers were either hoodwinked or willing to be misled.

The Egyptian report's authors count more than 1,000 tunnels, some broad enough for loaded trucks, through which a large array of basic and luxury goods flow to the markets and shops of the Palestinian enclave - and have done ever since the end of 2009. The latest hit in Gaza is the new Gold Market, which has been crowded with shoppers for trinkets, ornaments and glittering gifts since it opened.

Yet Ashton, after a day in Gaza, reported: "Moving from Israel into Gaza, you go from a 21st century country to a landscape that has been disfigured. Rebuilding is impossible while Israel blocks goods from entering. People have little more at their disposal than the ruins that surround them."

And the UN secretary never tires of demanding that Israeli lift its embargo, as though the Gaza Strip's plight was unmatched anywhere in the world.
The stage props they witnessed in their fleeting visits were bolstered by the accounts of local UN Works and Relief Agency personnel who have a vested interested in presenting a picture of profound poverty - both to stimulate donations and to justify their jobs. They and the Hamas rulers share an interest in keeping this distorted impression before the world media.

The new Egyptian report finally exposes this fraudulent picture with hard facts and figures.


For instance, the oversupply of building materials has in fact depressed the market price per ton of iron from $1066 in 2008 to $533 in March 2010; cement has dropped even more steeply, from just over a thousand dollars then to $240 today, because of an overabundance. 


If the buildings damaged in Israel's operation Cast Lead in 2009 have not been rebuilt, it is not because of the ineffectual Israel embargo.

In fact, the Hamas rulers make a tidy profit from embargo: They impose duty on every item of goods "imported" via the tunnels which honeycomb the Egyptian-Gazan border area. This revenue not only keeps them in silk ties but also in power.

Their other main source of income is, unbelievably, the 200 million Israeli shekels (app. $50 m), Israel deposits in cash in Gazan banks every month. This income - which provides the oxygen for keeping Gaza's economy and financial sector afloat - is in fact spent on building more and better tunnels for more high-end goods, in order to further boost Hamas revenues - as well as weapons, which are then used for attacking Israel. The Strip is awash with every type of hardware.


Keeping Gaza's banks supplied with Israeli currency, an Israeli concession to foreign demand, fuels one of the craziest and destructive cyclical processes ever seen even in this irrational region. 

Some of those shekels are spent to upgrade the underground conduits with concrete walls and efficient lighting to resemble European highway tunnels, through which trucks and other vehicles flow. The "tunnel industry" - as it has become - employs 20-25,000 workers.

Because the markets of Gaza are swamped with an enormous variety of cheap luxury items, unavailable in many other Middle East countries, the tunnel managers have recently slowed down the traffic to support prices. As a result, Hamas' revenue from "import duty" declined by 60 percent in the first two months of 2010.

There are certainly poor people in Gaza, like anywhere else - but the obvious causes, which anywhere else would be first assigned to poor government and social malaise, never seem to occur to observers who look at this reality through the prism of their agendas.




--
Before you speak, think -Is it necessary? Is it true? Is it kind? Will it hurt anyone? Will it improve on the silence?"— Sathya Sai Baba, (1926 - )

Amnesty International favors radical Islamist, forces out whistleblower over gender issues

Please read this, and sign the peition to support Human Rights  and Gita Sahgal.
 
Gita Sahgal resigned her senior position at Amnesty International following her suspension. Sahgal is a veteran campaigner for gender rights and member of Women Against Fundamentalism. She was suspended for criticizing Amnesty's connection with Moazzam Begg, a supporter of Islamism and ex-Guantanamo inmate, and his organization Cageprisoners. In February she had written:
 

This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International's association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty's very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty International was risking its reputation by associating itself with Begg, who heads an organization, Cageprisoners, that actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals. 

Within a few hours of the article being published, Amnesty had suspended me from my job.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others? For in defending the torture standard, one of the strongest and most embedded in international human rights law, Amnesty International has sanitized the history and politics of the ex-Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg and completely failed to recognize the nature of his organisation Cageprisoners. 

The tragedy here is that the necessary defence of the torture standard has been inexcusably allied to the political legitimization of individuals and organisations belonging to the Islamic Right. 

I have always opposed the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay and during the so-called War on Terror. I have been horrified and appalled by the treatment of people like Moazzam Begg and I have personally told him so. I have vocally opposed attempts by governments to justify 'torture lite'.

The issue is not about Moazzam Begg's freedom of opinion, nor about his right to propound his views: he already exercises these rights fully as he should. The issue is a fundamental one about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights. I have raised this issue because of my firm belief in human rights for all.

I sent two memos to my management asking a series of questions about what considerations were given to the nature of the relationship with Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Cageprisoners. I have received no answer to my questions. There has been a history of warnings within Amnesty that it is inadvisable to partner with Begg. Amnesty has created the impression that Begg is not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights. Many of my highly respected colleagues, each well-regarded in their area of expertise has said so. Each has been set aside.

As a result of my speaking to the Sunday Times, Amnesty International has announced that it has launched an internal inquiry. This is the moment to press for public answers, and to demonstrate that there is already a public demand including from Amnesty International members, to restore the integrity of the organisation and remind it of its fundamental principles.

I have been a human rights campaigner for over three decades, defending the rights of women and ethnic minorities, defending religious freedom and the rights of victims of torture, and campaigning against illegal detention and state repression. I have raised the issue of the association of Amnesty International with groups such as Begg's consistently within the organisation. I have now been suspended for trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty's mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially.

Amnesty has also blatantly taken sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a matter of political position and not "rights," as it sponsored an event called "Capital Murder" about Israel's building in East Jerusalem, with a speaker who wrote the obligatory book on "Israel Apartheid." Amnesty has obviously been coopted from being a "rights" organization into being a "wrongs" organization.
 

Friday, April 16, 2010

Nonie Darwish  -  A Letter to Gaza


Posted by Nonie Darwish on Apr 15th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

I recently received an email accusing me of hating Arabs and my father. This email is typical of Arab media accusations of my views regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since most Arabs have no chance to read my book, Now They Call Me Infidel, Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror, which explains in detail my position, I will answer the email in this article. First, below is the translation of the Arabic language email which I received without a signature:

Salam to you,

With all of our pride in your father we pray that Allah will bless him with entering paradise, which is the wish of every person after this short prideful meaningless life. I want to ask you, has your father become your enemy after his death? We in the city of Gaza take pride in your father and I live on a street by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez which also has a school by the name of Shahid Moustafa Hafez. We never forgot his sacrifice, so how could you become an enemy to the tortured Palestinian people who are still suffering at the hands of Arab Zionists? I ask Allah to give you health and strength.

Awaiting your response and thank you in advance.

Here is my response:

Dear Gaza resident,

Your email touched me as sincere even though your accusations are wrong. I am not the enemy of Arabs and I assure you that I love my original culture and people. What makes me different is that I do not only love Arabs, but I also love the Jewish people. I am speaking my conscience. I respect their right to live in peace in their tiny homeland, Israel. I understand how that could be puzzling and unbelievable to many Arabs, to love both Jews and Arabs.

We Arabs have suffered from an unnatural and consistent indoctrination into Islamic supremacy and Jew hatred for over 1400 years. Thus it has become unfathomable to the Arab mind to comprehend loving both Arabs and Jews and wishing both well. Our culture has deprived us for many centuries from loving all of humanity as equals, through intense religious indoctrination resulting in self-imposed isolation and non-integration with other cultures. This isolation and jihad against non-Muslims has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Muslims everywhere are trying desperately to save face, reform Islam's image and deny the undeniable. But they also want to have their cake and eat it too. While they are telling the world Islam is a religion of peace, they still want to continue with the jihad against non-Muslim countries. While one leader says, let's kill all the Jews and take over Rome, another says to Western media that Islam is a religion of peace and we are deeply offended by the anti-Islam rhetoric. To play this sick game, Muslim culture must live a dysfunctional double life where everyone is deceived, including Muslims.

Thus to do the kind of jihad that Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Assad, Nasser, Saudi jihadists etc, do and which is dictated by Sharia, Muslims find it hard to be honest. Thus, Muslims must claim victimhood in order to justify jihad. The entire Muslim world is using your people, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, to justify their jihad against not only Israel, but also all non-Muslim countries. That includes Iran, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah.

Your people in Gaza should have realized this game a long time ago, but you refuse to see and be open about who is your true oppressor. Arab and Muslim media is using and abusing your people in order to justify their Islamic jihad around the world. That is why they never want to resolve your problem and want you to suffer and live in constant terror against Israel.

Under Islamic law, non-Muslim countries are never equal to Muslim countries and actually their sovereignty as a non-Muslim nation must always be challenged by Islamic jihad. Islamic law codified jihad as a permanent war with non-Muslims to establish the religion. Muslims thus have to use Taquiyya, lies, to legitimize their aggression on Israel and the West. That is why Muslim countries can never abandon the constant hate propaganda, lies and misinformation about Israel and the West. If that ends, their jihad ends. The UN must be constantly bombarded by complaints from Arab countries against Israel. The Arab street must be constantly bombarded with ridiculous accusations and Zionist conspiracies. Lately on Syrian TV a Syrian intellectual accused Israel of stealing human organs in Haiti while they were helping them after the earthquake. This is not something new; it started in the 7th century, when the prophet Mohammed accused the Jews of treason to justify killing and expelling them and taking over their wealth. To explain this away, he stated that Jews are worthy of this treatment since they are the descendants of apes pigs and enemies of Allah. Muslims still use the same dynamic and the world still falls for it every time.

The Arab mind was trained to never venture outside of the box of Islamic superiority, and that prevented us from treating the rest of humanity as equals. It is alien to Muslim preachers today to preach love to all of humanity and wishing non-Muslims the same human rights as Muslims. I have never heard that from a Muslim preacher. Only after 9/11 and in the West today, do we see some Muslim preachers trying to preach some Western values and engage in interfaith dialogue, in order to rehabilitate the image of Islam in the West and attract more converts.

I often get mail from secular Muslims who ask me: I can understand that you chose to leave Islam, but how can you support the Jews? I get mail like this because, in the Muslim mindset, loving, accepting and feeling good about Jews or Christians and thinking of them as equals, is unthinkable and an act of treason to Islam itself and even worse. It is as though the whole religion of Islam is dedicated to hating and killing Jews.

After centuries of this kind of education, the Muslim world produced a dysfunctional society, unable to relate to the rest of the world. While wanting to convince the world they are a religion of peace, do not be afraid of Islam, they are still hell-bent on conquering the world for Islam. That is Islam's dilemma today.

What I, and a few others, are trying to do is to bring the truth to both Muslims and non-Muslims to finally face this sick game. We want to encourage Arabs to look at Jews and others as human beings and not as enemies to conquer. What kind of God will tell his followers to kill more than half of humanity if they don't submit to Islam? The Muslim world today is a disaster waiting to happen. Ahmadinejad, who is not an Arab, wants to continue the Islamic jihad against Jews by destroying Israel. I have news to especially the Left in Europe and America: Islamic jihad will not end with Israel; you will be next.

To my email writer: in your letter to me, I have noticed that your outlook on life is pessimistic describing it as short and meaningless pride. Your views are prevalent in Muslim culture and I have heard it thousands of times when I lived in the Middle East. I remember even when we laughed and giggled as young girls, we were immediately silenced as being improper and that Allah somehow does not like us to laughing for no reason or in public. Even a heartfelt laugh to a Muslim was not going to get you friends, but critics. Your message to me and to Muslims is that life on earth will not get us happiness and the only escape from such misery is the everlasting happiness in the pleasures of Allah's paradise after dying in jihad. But why take the Jews with us? They want to live and enjoy life and to make the earth, right here, a better place.

Our rejection of life is not a coincidence: since jihad does not value life, then it must value death. The first casualty of the jihad principle is peace and that is why I never learned peace as a value in Gaza. I have never heard a peaceful song in Arabic. To think of peace with the Jews is equal to treason to Islam. Rejection of peace has detrimental consequences to the healthy functioning of the Arab personality, family, society and the whole region. It is not a coincidence that Saudis reject under the law any celebration of Valentine's Day, reject celebrating love between a man and a woman, teaching peace and compassion to their children towards the others. Just look at our Islamic law books and see the most cruel and unusual punishments ever created in any culture on earth. Only a culture that demands war and terror can promote such cruelty.

As to your question about hating my father, again I want to assure you that I adore and respect my father more than all of the people of Gaza. Actually I love him and wish him heaven not because he killed Jews, but because he was a good human being who was loved by many including the Israeli soldiers who killed him. He was known even to Israel as a cut above his peers and had integrity and honor. My father was the victim of the blood-thirsty culture of death all around him. He is one of the many thousands and even millions of victims of the jihad ideology, practiced over the last 1400 years.

Dear Gaza resident, yes, I cannot blame the Jewish people, or the government of Israel, for what you call the 'misery' of the Palestinians. I can only blame Arab and Islamic culture which used and abused you and which you allowed. I believe that this is an Arab self-inflicted crisis that has nothing to do with Israel.

Arab education has never told us the truth about the Israeli people and the story from their side and what Jerusalem means to them. We were told that Jerusalem was a Muslim city simply because Mohammed dreamt one night that he went to the farthest mosque but he never mentioned Jerusalem. The Koran never mentioned Jerusalem, which is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible as the heart and soul of the Jewish people. We as Muslims never respected other religions holy cites and always claimed them to Islam; even Spain and India are being claimed as Muslim land. It was the tradition of Muslim conquerors to convert churches and temples to mosques and that is exactly what happened to the Jewish Temple Mount when 100 years after the prophet Mohammed died, Muslim conquerors built the mosque right on top of it. Just imagine if Jews or Christians had built a temple on top of the Kaaba in Mecca. This is how Islam has treated the Jews. It is time for Muslims to seek redemption and forgiveness and to extend the hand of reconciliation and peace to the Jewish people.

Nonie Darwish

Author: Cruel and Usual Punishment; the terrifying global implications of Islamic law.

--
Before you speak, think -Is it necessary? Is it true? Is it kind? Will it hurt anyone? Will it improve on the silence?"— Sathya Sai Baba, (1926 - )

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

A Dangerous Silence

By Ed Koch


 

 

 



http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | I weep as I witness outrageous verbal attacks on Israel. What makes these verbal assaults and distortions all the more painful is that they are being orchestrated by President Obama.

For me, the situation today recalls what occurred when the Roman emperor Vespasian launched a military campaign against the Jewish nation and its ancient capital of Jerusalem. Ultimately, Masada, a rock plateau in the Judean desert became the last refuge of the Jewish people against the Roman onslaught. I have been to Jerusalem and Masada. From the top of Masada, you can still see the remains of the Roman fortifications and garrisons, and the stones and earth of the Roman siege ramp that was used to reach Masada. The Jews of Masada committed suicide rather than let themselves be taken captive by the Romans.

In Rome itself, I have seen the Arch of Titus with the sculpture showing enslaved Jews and the treasures of the Jewish Temple of Solomon with the Menorah, the symbol of the Jewish state, being carted away as booty during the sacking of Jerusalem.

Oh, you may say, that is a far fetched analogy. Please hear me out.

The most recent sacking of the old city of Jerusalem — its Jewish quarter — took place under the Jordanians in 1948 in the first war between the Jews and the Arabs, with at least five Muslim states — Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq — seeking to destroy the Jewish state. At that time, Jordan conquered East Jerusalem and the West Bank and expelled every Jew living in the Jewish quarter of the old city, destroying every building, including the synagogues in the old quarter and expelling from every part of Judea and Samaria every Jew living there so that for the first time in thousands of years, the old walled city of Jerusalem and the adjacent West Bank were "Judenrein" — a term used by the Nazis to indicate the forced removal or murder of all Jews.

Jews had lived for centuries in Hebron, the city where Abraham, the first Jew, pitched his tent and where he now lies buried, it is believed, in a tomb with his wife, Sarah, as well as other ancient Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs. I have visited that tomb and at the time asked an Israeli soldier guarding it — so that it was open to all pilgrims, Christians, Muslims and Jews — "where is the seventh step leading to the tomb of Abraham and Sarah," which was the furthest entry for Jews when the Muslims were the authority controlling the holy place? He replied, "When we retook and reunited the whole city of Jerusalem and conquered the West Bank in 1967, we removed the steps, so now everyone can enter," whereas when Muslims were in charge of the tomb, no Jew could enter it. And I did.

I am not a religious person. I am comfortable in a synagogue, but generally attend only twice a year, on the high holidays. When I entered the tomb of Abraham and Sarah, as I recall, I felt connected with my past and the traditions of my people. One is a Jew first by birth and then by religion. Those who leave their religion, remain Jews forever by virtue of their birth. If they don't think so, let them ask their neighbors, who will remind them. I recall the words of the columnist Robert Novak, who was for most of his life hostile to the Jewish state of Israel in an interview with a reporter stating that while he had converted to Catholicism, he was still a cultural Jew. I remain with pride a Jew both by religion and culture.

My support for the Jewish state has been long and steadfast. Never have I thought that I would leave the U.S. to go and live in Israel. My loyalty and love is first to the U.S. which has given me, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, so much. But, I have also long been cognizant of the fact that every night when I went to sleep in peace and safety, there were Jewish communities around the world in danger. And there was one country, Israel, that would give them sanctuary and would send its soldiers to fight for them and deliver them from evil, as Israel did at Entebbe in 1976.

I weep today because my president, Barack Obama, in a few weeks has changed the relationship between the U.S. and Israel from that of closest of allies to one in which there is an absence of trust on both sides. The contrast between how the president and his administration deals with Israel and how it has decided to deal with the Karzai administration in Afghanistan is striking.

The Karzai administration, which operates a corrupt and opium-producing state, refuses to change its corrupt ways — the president's own brother is believed by many to run the drug traffic taking place in Afghanistan — and shows the utmost contempt for the U.S. is being hailed by the Obama administration as an ally and publicly treated with dignity. Karzai recently even threatened to join the Taliban if we don't stop making demands on him. Nevertheless, Karzai is receiving a gracious thank-you letter from President Obama. The New York Times of April 10th reported, "…that Mr. Obama had sent Mr. Karzai a thank-you note expressing gratitude to the Afghan leader for dinner in Kabul. 'It was a respectful letter,' General Jones said."

On the other hand, our closest ally — the one with the special relationship with the U.S., has been demeaned and slandered, held responsible by the administration for our problems in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The plan I suspect is to so weaken the resolve of the Jewish state and its leaders that it will be much easier to impose on Israel an American plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, leaving Israel's needs for security and defensible borders in the lurch.

I believe President Obama's policy is to create a whole new relationship with the Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, and Iraq as a counter to Iran — The Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Muslim world which we are now prepared to see in possession of a nuclear weapon. If throwing Israel under the bus is needed to accomplish this alliance, so be it.

I am shocked by the lack of outrage on the part of Israel's most ardent supporters. The members of AIPAC, the chief pro-Israel lobbying organization in Washington, gave Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a standing ovation after she had carried out the instructions of President Obama and, in a 43-minute telephone call, angrily hectored Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Members of Congress in both the House and Senate have made pitifully weak statements against Obama's mistreatment of Israel, if they made any at all. The Democratic members, in particular, are weak. They are simply afraid to criticize President Obama.

What bothers me most of all is the shameful silence and lack of action by community leaders — Jew and Christian. Where are they? If this were a civil rights matter, the Jews would be in the mall in Washington protesting with and on behalf of our fellow American citizens. I asked one prominent Jewish leader why no one is preparing a march on Washington similar to the one in 1963 at which I was present and Martin Luther King's memorable speech was given? His reply was "Fifty people might come." Remember the 1930s? Few stood up. They were silent. Remember the most insightful statement of one of our greatest teachers, Rabbi Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"

We have indeed stood up for everyone else. When will we stand up for our brothers and sisters living in the Jewish state of Israel?

If Obama is seeking to build a siege ramp around Israel, the Jews of modern Israel will not commit suicide. They are willing to negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians, but they will not allow themselves to be bullied into following self-destructive policies.

To those who call me an alarmist, I reply that I'll be happy to apologize if I am proven wrong. But those who stand silently by and watch the Obama administration abandon Israel, to whom will they apologize?

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Edward I. Koch, the former mayor of New York, can be heard on Bloomberg Radio (WBBR 1130 AM) every Sunday from 9-10 am . Comment by clicking here.

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© 2010, Ed Koch



--
Before you speak, think -Is it necessary? Is it true? Is it kind? Will it hurt anyone? Will it improve on the silence?"— Sathya Sai Baba, (1926 - )

Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Politically Correct and morally bankrupt attack on Aayan Hirsi Ali

Aayan Hirsi Ali is a woman of color who dared to speak out against Muslim repression of women. For her pains, she was deported from liberal Holland, and it seems she is attacked by al-Qaeda groupies as a "racist."
 
Ami Isseroff
 
 
Paul Berman's outraged attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's attackers.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Thursday, March 25, 2010, at 10:41 AM ET
 
...
The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman's new 300-page polemic (to be published this spring), recalls these heady days in a book that is likely to provoke an intense controversy among public intellectuals. The most contentious assertion in Berman's book is that some of the most prominent of these—people who rushed to the defense of Salman Rushdie when he was threatened with death for a novel deemed blasphemously irreverent to Islam—have failed to offer wholehearted support to Muslim dissidents today, people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and Muslim apostate, whose lives are similarly threatened. This failure, this "flight of the intellectuals," Berman argues, represents a deeply troubling abandonment of Enlightenment values in the face of recurrent threats to freedom of expression.
 
Berman's book will likely provoke bouts of rage, praise, and condemnation in print and online. In doing so, his book will remind us that those old Partisan Review smack-downs raised questions that have evolved and mutated but remain unresolved: Is there a paradox at the heart of Enlightenment values? Should a belief in "tolerance" extend to the intolerant? Must Enlightenment values stop short of challenging multicultural values? Or do multicultural values sometimes entail moral relativism? One key issue, for instance, is whether Ayaan Hirsi Ali's campaign against female genital mutilation makes her—as the intellectuals Berman attacks have called her—an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," the flashpoint buzz phrase of the controversy. (Although my favorite buzz phrase is the one the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner devised for those who have sneered at Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "The racism of the anti-racists.")
 
...
In any case, Berman's portrait of the behavior of today's intellectuals when confronting the plight of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is devastating. I was going to say his portrait of certain intellectuals, because he singles out the well-respected writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for their aggressive sniping and snarking at Hirsi Ali when she was (and still is) under threat of death. But in fact the relative silence of the rest of the intelligentsia, when confronted with the threats against her, is almost more scandalous. (An exception is my colleague here at Slate Christopher Hitchens.)
 
Hirsi Ali, who described her decision to leave Islam in 2007's Infidel, was subsequently driven from her refuge in Holland by death threats that followed her from Somalia. And by the murder of her friend and supporter, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose slashed and bleeding body was found with a note that called Hirsi Ali next to die.
 
In The Flight of the Intellectuals, Berman contrasts the way intellectuals have treated Hirsi Ali—with ostensible support, in the abstract, but condescension, disdain, and nitpicking criticism in all the best intellectual venues—with the way they and others rallied unequivocally to the support of Salman Rushdie in 1989 over the Satanic Verses fatwa.
 
And so Buruma snipes at "her attitude, her style." Snarks at what he interprets as a snobbish wave of her hand in a TV clip. All but calls her "uppity." ("The racism of the anti-racists.") As Berman puts it, "[T]he Hirsi Ali who emerges from Buruma's portrait"—in his book Murder in Amsterdam—is "animated by crude ideas" that evidently lack Oxbridge sophistication, of course. Berman continues, "She's zealous, strident … arrogant, aristocratic." Doesn't know her place among Buruma and his peers. And Timothy Garton Ash chivalrically tells us that if Hirsi Ali "had been short, squat and squinting, her story and her views might not have been so closely attended to." (Note the tone of donnish disdain—the sexism of the anti-racists.)
 
It would almost be as if a Rushdie supporter back then had said, "Sure, I'm for his not having his life threatened and all, but I'm tired of all this magic realism stuff, and he seemed arrogant when I saw him interviewed on TV. Maybe he was too contemptuous of the culture of the people who want to murder him."
 
Hirsi Ali's critics argue that she represents a simpleminded allegiance to the tolerant and libertarian values of the Enlightenment, that she's an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," pretty much the moral equivalent of an Islamic fundamentalist who supports suicide bombing. Presumably because she doesn't believe in tolerating an intolerance that kills, maims, and shackles women. It was Ian Buruma who coined the oxymoronic phrase "Enlightenment fundamentalism," which was then picked up by Timothy Garton Ash.* To his credit, Garton Ash eventually publically apologized for applying the phrase to Hirsi Ali at a London debate, although he didn't seem to withdraw from a belief that the phrase might have some residual legitimacy.
 
Apology or not, Berman believes that the phrase reflects a deeper misconception among a certain set of Western intellectuals. That although "the enlightenment is one of the great achievements of Western civilization," these intellectuals "have come to look at the enlightenment as merely a set of anthropological prejudices"—to view a belief in free expression, for example, as merely a parochial Western view.
 
Which leads him to the most damning moment in his attack: "Buruma and Garton Ash had lost the ability to make the most elementary of distinctions … they could no longer tell a fanatical murderer from a rational debater" like Hirsi Ali.
 
I should note that I am not a neutral reviewer of this book. Think of this not as a review but a preview of the fireworks likely to ensue. And think of me not as a neutral observer but someone who has known Paul Berman off and on over the years and believes enough in the salience of his anger at "the flight of the intellectuals" to have urged him to restructure the 28,000-word essay from which this book grew. Indeed, I ran into Paul shortly after he published his terse 28,000-word essay, then called "Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?" And when he told me he was expanding it into a book, I presumptuously but sincerely told him I believed he had—as the journalist jargon has it—"buried the lede."
 
Most of the original essay was devoted to an almost interminable attempt to dissect the true views of the enigmatic Swiss-born Islamic scholar and spokesman Tariq Ramadan, who has become a kind of Rorschach for Western intellectuals, some of whom project on him a moderate, modernizing form of Islam.
 
Berman's essay sought to complicate this view, pointing out Ramadan's many, not very well-noticed connections to Islamic fundamentalists of the sort represented by Ramadan's grandfather Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood.
 
I told him I found this aspect of the essay bracing and enthralling, an intellectual thriller in the form of a polemic, with Inspector Berman hunting for clues inside the mind and work of Ramadan. Nonetheless I felt that he should have begun the essay with its final section, the one about Ash and Buruma and the flight of the intellectuals.
 
He didn't listen to me about restructuring the book. But he did title the book after that last section: "The Flight of the Intellectuals."
 
True, Ramadan is an important figure and has recently been the subject of an international controversy. The State Department had wanted to deny him a visa, apparently on the grounds that he had contributed to a charity that had transferred funds to Hamas nearly a decade ago. But the ban was rescinded (as I believe such bans should be) two months ago, so we are likely to be hearing more about him. (Indeed, Slate's Jacob Weisberg will moderate a panel in New York featuring Ramadan in April.)
 
Before speaking further about Tariq Ramadan, I should probably mention that I'm not sure I share Berman's sinister picture of him. Berman believes that Ramadan's self-created image as an Islamic moderate who believes Islam can coexist with Western values in Europe is a misleading mask. One that conceals an undiluted allegiance to his grandfather's fanaticism. I'm not sure I share his conviction that he knows Ramadan's mind for a certainty. (And perhaps Ramadan himself is conflicted.)
 
I should further disclose that I myself once transferred money to Ramadan. Well, a small three-figure amount I paid to his publisher, Oxford University Press, for rights to an excerpt from one of his books, which I reprinted in an anthology I edited, Those Who Forget the Past, on contemporary anti-Semitism.
 
Not as an exemplum of it but because I wanted to have an Islamic voice in the book and Ramadan was one of the rare Islamic intellectuals who had publicly disclaimed anti-Semitism—though not anti-Semites, as Berman copiously demonstrates. In the excerpt I published, Ramadan expresses a desire to share the world with other faiths, which, even if Berman believes that Ramadan speaks with a forked tongue, is not a bad message to spread around. Some might take it as sincere. I'm still not convinced that this view, or reprinting the essay, was a mistake.
 
In the original essay and the book, Berman meticulously dissects both Ramadan's claim to be a voice of moderation and the Western intellectuals' little love affair with Ramadan. For Western intellectuals, Berman explains, Ramadan solves a problem. His views allow them to believe both in Enlightenment values and a multiculturalism that can embrace an Islam that is open to the reformation of such practices as the honor killing of women.
 
The problematic nature of Ramadan's moderation can perhaps best be illustrated by his call for a "moratorium" on the stoning of women to death in Islamic societies for "honor" violations. The fact that he called for a "moratorium" at all has been hailed by Western, particularly European, intellectuals as a comforting sign for those concerned about women's rights in the growing Muslim communities of the West.
 
The fact that he did not condemn the practice outright or call for its outlawing, and instead only called for "debate" with Islamic scholars and theologians on the matter during the "moratorium," is not entirely reassuring to others.
 
For Berman, Ramadan has become a White Whale. Berman is infuriated by the blindness of intellectuals to what he believes is Ramadan's true and sinister purpose: to shield the growth of anti-Enlightenment political Islam behind a facade of modernization. Berman is particularly infuriated by an admiring profile of Ramadan that calls him a bridge to Euro-Islam modernity by Ian Buruma in the New York Times Magazine. I think Berman has a case that the effect if not the intent of Buruma's article was to whitewash Ramadan, but again it's a subjective matter. Did Buruma deliberately play down Ramadan's connections with alleged terrorist sympathizers in the article? Or was he genuinely convinced that Ramadan's more modernizing tendencies ought to be taken seriously, perhaps even on opportunistic grounds. If we in the non-Muslim West respond to this ostensibly reformist aspect of him—the fact that he's not dogmatically single-minded—it will be re-enforced. For Berman, he is single-minded but two-faced, a wolf in sheep's clothing who was using Buruma.
 
But it is Berman's final section—especially Chapter 9, the title chapter, "The Flight of the Intellectuals"—that will make this an old-fashioned "event" in the intellectual history of the question that is at the heart of so much contention: the question of whether Islamists can coexist pluralistically in Western societies.
 
By the "flight of the intellectuals," Berman means their flight from the values they espoused when defending Salman Rushdie in 1989, and their sniping, snarking, and subverting Ayaan Hirsi Ali this century. Is it just that she's not one of the boys? Berman suggests that a combination of colonial guilt and colonial superiority is at work here, that Western intellectuals fear the direct criticism of other cultures, which Hirsi does in a more direct and literal way than Rushdie's literary excursions.
 
But I think another kind of fear is at work. What made the difference between the wholehearted response to Rushdie and the cold-hearted response to Hirsi Ali? Berman may disclaim it, but I think the subtext of his critique of Ali's nitpickers is that, in the two decades since the Rushdie affair, standing up against Islamist death threats requires more physical courage than the intellectuals are willing to muster. They would rather allow pettifogging criticism to be a fig leaf, a way to distance themselves from danger.
 
But now the threat of murder, the attempted murder, and the actual murder of dissidents from Islam have all become a regular feature of the intellectual landscape of Europe. The most shocking and dramatic passages in Berman's book are those in which he recounts, often casually, his encounters with the harried and hunted figures who have offended some radical mullah or other.
 
One of the most powerful sections of the book is Berman's roll call of those dissidents—both Islamic and non—who have been threatened with death and may have to live with 24/7 security for the rest of their lives because of these threats.
 
It was not healthy for Theo van Gogh to get too close to Hirsi Ali. The Danish cartoonists are still under constant death threats, Berman reports. And Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym of another apostate, reads death threats against himself online*, while Bassam Tibi, who, Berman tells us, "pioneered the concept of Islamism as a modern totalitarianism and pioneered the concept of a liberal 'Euro-Islam' [as well] ... spent two years under twenty four hour police protection in Germany. ... [T]he Egyptian and Italian journalist Magdi Allam ...was travelling with a full complement of five bodyguards. ... The Italian journalist Fiamma Nienstein … was accompanied by her own bodyguard. … Caroline Fourest in France, the author of the first and most important extended criticism of Ramadan, had to go under police protection. ... [T]he French history professor Robert Redkeker had to go into hiding. In 2008 the police in Belgium broke up a terrorist group that had planned on assassinating, among other people Bernard Henri Levy."
 
He spends an evening in New York "... with Flemming Rose the culture editor of the Danish newspaper who was visiting New York only because at that particular moment it was too dangerous for him to remain in Denmark."
 
The list continues. Kurt Westergaard, Boulem Sansal. This is cumulatively (and individually) scandalous. The fact that we so rarely hear a peep about the cumulative terror experienced by these writers and artists from the likes of these intellectuals while they find time to sneer at Hirsi Ali is the real scandal to me. The fact that theological censorship backed by death threats has been installed on the continent of Europe with just about everyone deciding it would be wiser to keep silent about it is once again burying the lede. But to my mind, printing it at all is a service.
 
A certain kind of irreverent speech once valued in Europe since the time of Chaucer and Rabelais has been, it seems, powerfully threatened if not silenced, and the heirs to that intellectual tradition are too scared to speak out about that silence. Maybe Berman's book will start intellectuals talking, and not just about each other. Maybe some of the previously silent will begin to speak out against the death squads rather than snark about their victims and targets.
 
******
 
Correction, March 26, 2010: This piece originally stated that Timothy Garton Ash coined the phrase "Enlightenment fundamentalism." Ian Buruma coined that phrase. (Return to the corrected sentence.) It also stated that Ibn Warraq travels with security guards. In fact, Warraq reads death threats against himself online. (Return to the corrected sentence.)