Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Hamas and the Washington establishment

To date, the Republican presidential primary race has been the only place to have generated any useful contributions to America’s collective understanding of current events in the Middle East. Last month, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became the first major political figure in more than a generation to pour cold water over the Palestinian myth of indigenous peoplehood by stating the truth, that the Palestinians are an "invented people."
As Gingrich explained, their invention came in response to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement. Since they were created somewhere around 1920, the Palestinians’ main purpose has not been the establishment of a Palestinian state but the obliteration of the Jewish state.
For his truth telling, Gingrich was attacked by fellow politicians and policy hands on both sides of the ideological divide. To his credit, Gingrich has not backed away from the truth he spoke. Rather he has repeated it in two subsequent Republican candidates’ debates.
The second important contribution that Republican presidential candidates have made to the discourse on the Middle East was undertaken by Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a candidates’ debate in South Carolina on January 17, shortly before he pulled out of the race. When asked about Turkey, Perry said that country "is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists." He went on to say that the US ought to be having a debate about whether Turkey should continue to serve as a member of NATO.
Like Gingrich, Perry was pilloried by all right thinking people in the US foreign policy elite. And like Gingrich, Perry was right. The hoopla his statement generated showed just how destructive so much of America’s received wisdom about the Middle East has become. Moreover, it demonstrated the extent to which the US has adopted Middle East policies that are inimical to its national interests.
After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Turkey was the first country to invite Hamas’s terror master Khaled Mashal to Ankara. Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s move provoked criticism from the Bush administration. But Erdogan just shrugged it off. And he was right to do so. By 2006, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had come to view Erdogan as the US’s indispensable ally in the Muslim world. As she saw it, he was proof that Islamist parties could be democratic and moderate.
The fact that Erdogan embraced Hamas could not get in the way of Rice’s optimistic assessment. So, too, the fact that Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to stifle press freedom, curb judicial independence and imprison his political critics in the media and the military could not move Rice from her view that Erdogan personified her belief that moderate jihadists exist and ought to be embraced by the US.
Rice’s starry-eyed view of Erdogan set the stage of US President Barack Obama’s even stronger embrace of the increasingly tyrannical Turkish Islamist. Since Obama took office, not only has Ankara stepped up its support of Hamas, and ended even the pretense of a continued strategic alliance with Israel that it maintained during the Bush years. Turkey began serving as Iran’s chief diplomatic protector while vastly expanding its own strategic and economic ties with Tehran.
In the face of Turkey’s openly anti-American behavior and actions, Obama clings to Erdogan even more strongly than Rice did. Obama reportedly views Erdogan as his most trusted foreign adviser. According to the media, Obama speaks with Erdogan more often than he speaks to any other foreign leader. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Obama listed Erdogan as one of the key foreign leaders with whom he has formed a friendship based on trust.
Over the past few weeks, Turkey has emerged as Hamas’s largest financier. During an official visit in Turkey, Hamas’s terror master in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh received a hero’s welcome. Erdogan pledged to finance the jihadist movement to the tune of $300 million per year.
COMMENTATORS CLAIM that Turkey’s sponsorship of Hamas was necessitated by Iran’s abandonment of the terror group. Iran, it is claimed, cut Hamas off in August due to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s refusal to actively assist Iran’s other Arab client – Syrian President Bashar Assad – in massacring his domestic opponents.
These analyses are problematic for two reasons. First, it is far from clear that Iran cut Hamas off. Iran’s rulers have invited Haniyeh to Tehran for an official visit. This alone indicates that the mullahs remain committed to maintaining their relationship with the jihadist movement that controls the Gaza Strip.
And why would they want to cut off that relationship? 
By serving as Hamas’s chief sponsor since 2006, Iran has won enormous credibility in the Arab world. This credibility has bought Tehran influence with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and beyond. Particularly now, with the Brotherhood taking over Egypt and much of the Arab world, Iran would only stand to lose by cutting off Hamas.
The second problem with these assessments is that it makes little sense to believe that Turkey has replaced Iran as Hamas’s main state sponsor since Iran and Turkey are not necessarily competing over Hamas. Given the interests shared by Tehran and Ankara, it is far more reasonable to assume that they are coordinating their moves regarding Hamas.
Iran became Hamas’s chief financier and weapons supplier the same year that Erdogan emerged as Hamas’s most important political supporter. And in the six years since then, Iran and Turkey have become strategic allies. Even with regards to Syria, the fact that Assad remains in power today is due in no small measure to the fact that Erdogan has used his influence over Obama to ensure that the US has remained on the sidelines and so effectively supported Assad’s survival.
In light of Erdogan’s enormous influence over leaders in both US parties, it is little wonder that Perry’s factual statement about the nature of the Turkish government and the need for the US to reassess its strategic alliance with Turkey provoked such an across the board outcry. Erdogan’s close relationship with Obama – like his previously close relationship with Rice – renders it well nigh impossible for US government officials and inside-the Beltway "experts" to make the kind of commonsense assessments of Turkey’s counterproductive regional role that an outsider like Perry was able to make from his perch in Austin, Texas.
CONTRARY TO what several leading commentators have argued since the onset of the Syrian popular rebellion against Assad, Hamas has not been seriously damaged by the events. True, its leaders are looking for a new place to station their headquarters. But there is no law that requires terrorist organizations to have one central office. The families of Hamas’s leadership have decamped to Jordan. Hamas leaders have close relations with the Qataris – who remain major funders – as well as with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Sudanese regime.
In addition to these state supporters, through its relations with Turkey and Fatah, Hamas has Washington as well. To understand how Washington acts as Hamas’s protector, it is necessary to consider not only the corrosive impact of Washington’s relations with Turkey, but also the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
Since its inception in 1993, the peace process has been predicated on Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. To the extent that Israel makes concessions, the peace process is seen as advancing. To the extent that Israel fails to make concessions, the peace process is seen as collapsing. True, at certain times, the Bush administration blamed the Palestinians for the failure of the peace process, but the blame owed to the fact that Palestinian terrorism made Israel less amenable to concession making.
Palestinian terrorism was not in and of itself blamed for the demise of the peace process. Rather it was perceived as the means through which Israel avoided making more concessions. And at certain times, the US supported Israel’s avoidance of concession making.
Since Israeli concessions to the Palestinians are the only tangible component of the peace process, the US, as the chief sponsor of the peace process, requires the Palestinian Authority – run by Fatah – to be accepted as a credible repository for Israeli concessions regardless of its actual nature. Consequently, despite Fatah’s two unity deals with Hamas, its sponsorship of terrorism, its incitement of terrorism, its refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, its adoption of negotiating positions that presuppose Israel’s demise, and its conduct of political warfare against Israel, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration ever showed the slightest willingness to consider ending their support for the PA. 
If Israel has no peace partner, then it can’t make concessions. And if it can’t make concessions, there is no peace process. And that is something that neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration was willing to countenance.
It is true that under Obama the US has become far more hostile towards Israel than it was under Bush. The most important distinction between the two is that whereas George W. Bush sought to broker a compromise deal between the two sides, Obama has adopted Fatah’s negotiating positions against Israel. As a consequence of Obama’s actions, the peace process has been derailed completely. Fatah has no reason to compromise since the US will blame Israel no matter what. And Israel has no reason to make concessions since the US will deem them insufficient.
Noting this distinction, Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin wrote this week that for the benefit of the peace process, it is important for a Republican administration to be elected to replace Obama in November. As she put it, "If history is any guide, progress is made in the ‘peace process’ when the Israeli prime minister operates from a position of strength and has the full support of the US president. We might get there, albeit not until 2013."
The problem with her analysis is that it is of a piece with the insiders’ attacks on Gingrich and Romney alike. That is, it is based on the false assumptions of the peace process and the generally accepted wisdom embraced by the American foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle that the PA is a reasonable repository for Israeli concessions.
Here it is worth noting that this week Fatah-controlled PA TV aired a sequence venerating the murderers of the Fogel family. Udi and Ruth Fogel and their children Yoav, Elad and Hadas were brutally murdered in their home last March.
Fatah’s glorification of their murderers is yet further proof that the foundations of the peace process are false. Peace cannot be based on appeasing societies that uphold mass murderers as role models. It can only be based on empowering free societies to defeat societies that embrace murder, terror and in the case of Hamas, genocide.
And this brings us back to the Republican primaries and Gingrich’s and Perry’s statements. For the US to secure its interests in the Middle East, it requires leaders who are willing to reassess what passes for common wisdom on both sides of the aisle.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Free Speech – For Some

According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), there is a grave threat to America that must be suppressed at all costs.  The threat is that Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin might be allowed to exercise his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.

This proposition is bizarre on multiple levels.  For one, General Boykin, who is a friend and greatly admired colleague of mine, is one of the United States’ most accomplished and decorated military heroes.  He served in and led our most elite special forces units for decades, including in many of our most dangerous recent combat operations.  He also held a number of senior positions in the intelligence community, including as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

For another, Jerry Boykin is also an ordained minister.  And the sorts of events CAIR has lately insisted he must not address include prayer sessions convened by the mayor of Ocean City, Maryland and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

What makes the suppression of General Boykin’s right to express himself – and, for that matter, to enjoy freedom of religion – all the more outrageous is the nature of the organization demanding that he be silenced.  Four federal judges have affirmed that CAIR is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and was spawned by one of its American affiliates – the Islamic Association for Palestine.  Indeed, we know from wiretapped conversations at the time of its founding that CAIR was established by Muslim Brotherhood operatives as a political arm and fundraising mechanism for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization and the Brotherhood’s franchise in “Palestine.”

Unfortunately, CAIR and its fellow Muslim Brotherhood fronts are not simply trying to muzzle Jerry Boykin.  They have gone after a number of other truth-tellers about the doctrine the Brothers seek to insinuate into this country – the totalitarian, supremacist politico-military-legal program the Islamists call shariah. 

For example, another colleague, former Congressman Fred Grandy, was removed from his position as one of Washington’s most popular talk radio show hosts when he refused to allow Muslim critics to dictate who could appear on his program and what they could say.

Last fall, Stephen Coughlin – one of the nation’s foremost non-Muslim experts on shariah – was similarly subjected to a CAIR-led effort to deny his ability to speak.  In that case, he was denied by the Obama administration the opportunity to provide training to Central Intelligence Agency personnel about what impels our enemies to engage in murderous and stealthy forms of jihad, namely shariah.

More recently, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been subjected to a campaign of vilification by CAIR and its friends.  His offense?  Mr. Kelly gave an interview to the makers of a superb documentary, “The Third Jihad,” and allowed that film to be used in training his officers.

CAIR’s desire to suppress this film is not hard to understand.  After all, The Third Jihad brilliantly exposes what it and other Muslim Brotherhood fronts are up to in this country.  In the words of the Brotherhood’s own strategic plan, that is “a kind of grand jihad…in destroying and eliminating the Western civilization from within” by our own hands.

The movie’s narrator and central figure is Zuhdi Jasser.  Dr. Jasser happens to be one of the most prominent and courageous of American Muslims who oppose political Islam and its use of shariah to justify the subversion and destruction of our Constitution, form of government and society. 

Obviously, it is difficult to pillory Zuhdi Jasser the way CAIR et.al. attack such non-Muslims as Messrs. Boykin, Grandy, Coughlin and Kelly, namely as “Islamophobic.”  The Brotherhood and its official, multinational counterpart – the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – brandish this term as a means of intimidating, smearing and silencing those who understand what they are about and oppose them effectively.  In fact, the more effective the opposition, the more intense are the Islamists’ efforts to silence those mounting it.

Dr. Jasser’s right to free expression is being subjected to a similar kind of suppression.  As he put it recently in the New York Post, “One of the chief ways that radical Islamists across the globe silence anti-Islamist Muslims is to publicly push them outside of Islam, to declare them non-Muslims, not part of the community (ummah), and so subject them to takfir (declaring them apostates). That is what the vicious distortions about this film do to my work and the work of so many others within the House of Islam who are trying to publicly take on the American Islamist establishment.”

Of particular concern is the fact that the U.S. government is now effectively encouraging what amounts to free speech for some – and abetting it.  Team Obama has begun according Islamophobia the status of a serious problem.  Worse yet, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined forces with the OIC in trying to find ways to suppress this fictitious problem by treating instances of what should be protected free speech as prosecutable “incitement.”   

To paraphrase the famous German pastor, Martin Niemöller, first they are coming for the “Islamophobes” and for Muslims who oppose shariah’s political agenda.  How soon will they decide that you have no right to speak freely, either?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

America and the Arab Spring

A year ago this week, on January 25, 2011, the ground began to crumble under then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s feet. One year later, Mubarak and his sons are in prison, and standing trial. 

This week, the final vote tally from Egypt’s parliamentary elections was published. The Islamist parties have won 72 percent of the seats in the lower house.

The photogenic, Western-looking youth from Tahrir Square the Western media were thrilled to dub the Facebook revolutionaries were disgraced at the polls and exposed as an insignificant social and political force.

As for the military junta, it has made its peace with the Muslim Brotherhood. The generals and the jihadists are negotiating a power-sharing agreement. According to details of the agreement that have made their way to the media, the generals will remain the West’s go-to guys for foreign affairs. The Muslim Brotherhood (and its fellow jihadists in the Salafist al-Nour party) will control Egypt’s internal affairs.

This is bad news for women and for non-Muslims. Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been under continuous attack by Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist supporters since Mubarak was deposed. Their churches, homes and businesses have been burned, looted and destroyed. Their wives and daughters have been raped. The military massacred them when they dared to protest their persecution.

As for women, their main claim to fame since Mubarak’s overthrow has been their sexual victimization at the hands of soldiers who stripped female protesters and performed "virginity tests" on them. Out of nearly five hundred seats in parliament, only 10 will be filled by women.

The Western media are centering their attention on what the next Egyptian constitution will look like and whether it will guarantee rights for women and minorities. What they fail to recognize is that the Islamic fundamentalists now in charge of Egypt don’t need a constitution to implement their tyranny. All they require is what they already have – a public awareness of their political power and their partnership with the military.

The same literalist approach that has prevented Western observers from reading the writing on the walls in terms of the Islamists’ domestic empowerment has blinded them to the impact of Egypt’s political transformation on the country’s foreign policy posture. US officials forcefully proclaim that they will not abide by an Egyptian move to formally abrogate its peace treaty with Israel. What they fail to recognize is that whether or not the treaty is formally abrogated is irrelevant. The situation on the ground in which the new regime allows Sinai to be used as a launching ground for attacks against Israel, and as a highway for weapons and terror personnel to flow freely into Gaza, are clear signs that the peace with Israel is already dead – treaty or no treaty.

EGYPT’S TRANSFORMATION is not an isolated event. The disgraced former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh arrived in the US this week. Yemen is supposed to elect his successor next month. The deteriorating security situation in that strategically vital land which borders the Arabian and Red Seas has decreased the likelihood that the election will take place as planned.

Yemen is falling apart at the seams. Al-Qaida forces have been advancing in the south. Last spring they took over Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province. In recent weeks they captured Radda, a city 160 km. south of the capital of Sana.

Radda’s capture underscored American fears that the political upheaval in Yemen will provide al- Qaida with a foothold near shipping routes through the Red Sea and so enable the group to spread its influence to neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Al-Qaida forces were also prominent in the NATO-backed Libyan opposition forces that with NATO’s help overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in October. Although the situation on the ground is far from clear, it appears that radical Islamic political forces are intimidating their way into power in post-Gaddafi Libya.

Take for instance last weekend’s riots in Benghazi. On Saturday protesters laid siege to the National Transitional Council offices in the city while Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the head of the NTC, hid inside. In an attempt to quell the protesters’ anger, Jalil fired six secular members of the NTC. He then appointed a council of religious leaders to investigate corruption charges and identify people with links to the Gaddafi regime.

In Bahrain, the Iranian-supported Shi’ite majority continues to mount political protests against the Sunni monarchy. Security forces killed two young Shi’ite protesters over the past week and a half, and opened fired at Shi’ites who sought to hold a protest march after attending the funeral of one of them.

As supporters of Bahrain’s Shi’ites have maintained since the unrest spread to the kingdom last year, Bahrain’s Shi’ites are not Iranian proxies. But then, until the US pulled its troops out of Iraq last month, neither were Iraq’s Shi’ites. What happened immediately after the US pullout is another story completely.

Extolling Iraq’s swift deterioration into an Iranian satrapy, last Wednesday, Brig.-Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps Jerusalem Brigade, bragged, "In reality, in south Lebanon and Iraq, the people are under the effect of the Islamic Republic’s way of practice and thinking."

While Suleimani probably exaggerated the situation, there is no doubt that Iran’s increased influence in Iraq is being felt around the region. Iraq has come to the aid of Iran’s Syrian client Bashar Assad who is now embroiled in a civil war. The rise of Iran in Iraq holds dire implications for the Hashemite regime in Jordan which is currently hanging on by a thread, challenged from within and without by the rising force of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Much has been written since the fall of Mubarak about the impact on Israel of the misnamed Arab Spring. Events like September’s mob assault on Israel’s embassy in Cairo and the murderous cross-border attack on motorists traveling on the road to Eilat by terrorists operating out of Sinai give force to the assessment that Israel is more imperiled than ever by the revolutionary events engulfing the region.

But the truth is that while on balance Israel’s regional posture has taken a hit, particularly from the overthrow of Mubarak and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists in Egypt, Israel is not the primary loser in the so-called Arab Spring.

Israel never had many assets in the Arab world to begin with. The Western-aligned autocracies were not Israel’s allies. To the extent the likes of Mubarak and others have cooperated with Israel on various issues over the years, their cooperation was due not to any sense of comity with Jewish state. They worked with Israel because they believed it served their interests to do so. And at the same time Mubarak reined in the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas because they threatened him, he waged political war against Israel on every international stage and allowed anti-Semitic poison to be broadcast daily on his regime-controlled television stations.

Since Israel’s stake in the Arab power game has always been limited, its losses as a consequence of the fall of anti-Israel secular dictatorships and their replacement by anti-Israel Islamist regimes have been marginal. The US, on the other hand, has seen its interests massively harmed. Indeed, the US is the greatest loser of the pan-Arab revolutions.

TO UNDERSTAND the depth and breadth of America’s losses, consider that on January 25, 2011, most Arab states were US allies to a greater or lesser degree. Mubarak was a strategic ally. Saleh was willing to collaborate with the US in combating al- Qaida and other jihadist forces in his country.

Gaddafi was a neutered former enemy who had posed no threat to the US since 2004. Iraq was a protectorate. Jordan and Morocco were stable US clients.

One year later, the elements of the US’s alliance structure have either been destroyed or seriously weakened. US allies like Saudi Arabia, which have yet to be seriously threatened by the revolutionary violence, no longer trust the US. As the recently revealed nuclear cooperation between the Saudis and the Chinese makes clear, the Saudis are looking to other global powers to replace the US as their superpower protector.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect to the US’s spectacular loss of influence and power in the Arab world is that most of its strategic collapse has been due to its own actions. In Egypt and Libya the US intervened prominently to bring down a US ally and a dictator who constituted no threat to its interests. Indeed, it went to war to bring Gaddafi down.

Moreover, the US acted to bring about their fall at the same time it knew that they would be replaced by forces inimical to American national security interests. In Egypt, it was clear that the Muslim Brotherhood would emerge as the strongest political force in the country. In Libya, it was clear at the outset of the NATO campaign against Gaddafi that al-Qaida was prominently represented in the anti-regime coalition. And just as the Islamists won the Egyptian election, shortly after Gaddafi was overthrown, al-Qaida forces raised their flag over Benghazi’s courthouse.

US actions from Yemen to Bahrain and beyond have followed a similar pattern.

In sharp contrast to his active interventionism against US-allied regimes, President Barack Obama has prominently refused to intervene in Syria, where the fate of a US foe hangs in the balance.

Obama has sat back as Turkey has fashioned a Syrian opposition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Arab League has intervened in a manner that increases the prospect that Syria will descend into chaos in the event that the Assad regime is overthrown.

Obama continues to speak grandly about his vision for the Middle East and his dedication to America’s regional allies. And his supporters in the media continue to applaud his great success in foreign policy. But outside of their echo chamber, he and the country he leads are looked upon with increasing contempt and disgust throughout the Arab world.

Obama’s behavior since last January 25 has made clear to US friend and foe alike that under Obama, the US is more likely to attack you if you display weakness towards it than if you adopt a confrontational posture against it. As Assad survives to kill another day; as Iran expands its spheres of influence and gallops towards the nuclear bomb; as al- Qaida and its allies rise from the Gulf of Aden to the Suez Canal; and as Mubarak continues to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher, the US’s rapid fall from regional power is everywhere in evidence.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

 

The Audacity of Deceit: Notes on the State of the Union

Knowing President Obama’s Alinskyite proclivities, his third State of the Union address – coming as it did amidst a reelection campaign – could have been predicted to be filled with lofting, sometimes inspiring but routinely bait-and-switch rhetoric.  Even so, his exploitation of the U.S. military for nakedly political purposes translates into an extreme plumbing of what might be called his audacity of deceit.

If the President had been simply paying homage to the amazing men and women in uniform and extolling their courage, patriotism and selflessness, that would have been one thing.  It would have been understandable, even commendable, to have cited such qualities in a call for legislators to come together as our troops do to accomplish the difficult missions at hand.

The fact that Mr. Obama wrapped such comments – literally as the opening and closing bookends for his speech – around so many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about our national security situation, however, transforms what might have been a welcome presidential paean to the armed forces into a further betrayal of our troops.

Let’s start with his portrayal of the “end of the war in Iraq.”  This antiseptic, no-fault characterization of what he has done must not be allowed to obscure the reality:  President Obama simply quit that front in the larger war we are in.  I call it the War for the Free World.

That doesn’t mean the battle for Iraq is over, let alone the war won.  Instead, we have simply surrendered the strategic territory over which we had shed so much blood and spent so much treasure.

In Iraq, as elsewhere, that is translating into a vacuum of power.  It is being filled by enemies of our country and setting the stage for this war’s next, likely still-more-horrific phase.

The same can be said of the President’s profoundly misleading description of the “isolation” of Iran, his “decisive blows” against al Qaeda and the prospects for an Afghanistan that will, in the aftermath of his cutting and running there and his negotiating our surrender terms with the Taliban, somehow “never again [be] a source of attacks against America.”

Some have described such remarks as delusional.  They are worse.  They are designed to delude us.

Ditto one of the President’s bigger applause lines:  “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”  No objective analysis – of our contracting military presence around the world, of our retreat from leadership on the ground and in space, of our military now in the process of being hollowed out, of the condition of our fraying alliances or the emboldening of our increasingly assertive enemies – would support his contention.

To the contrary, the facts indicate that, under his post-American policies, the “fundamental transformation of America” that he promised on the eve of his election has moved forward inexorably: our transformation from an unrivaled superpower, to a nation that no longer is a reliable ally and no longer a feared adversary.

It doesn’t have to be that way – and we dare not let it continue in this fashion.  But the first step towards turning around a perilous trend is to recognize what is happening.  And speeches that are not simply pollyannish, but fraudulent, will not do that.  To the contrary, they are certain to have the effect of making such a turn-around unlikely until it is still harder, if not as a practical matter impossible, to effect.

Unfortunately, given the nature of the man delivering such a skewed portrayal of the State of the Union, we can only conclude that his remarks were calculated to have that effect – a prime example of his audacity of deceit.

Mainstreaming anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism may not yet be a litmus test for social acceptability in the US, but it has certainly become acceptable.

Proof of this dismal state of affairs came this week with the publication of a supportive profile of University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer in The Atlantic Monthly written by the magazine’s in-house foreign policy guru Robert Kaplan.

Mearsheimer is the author, together with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government’s Prof. Stephen Walt, of the infamous 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Since the book’s publication, Mearsheimer has become one of the most high-profile anti-Semites in America.

Kaplan’s article was a clear bid to rehabilitate Mearsheimer in order to advance his pre-Israel Lobby theory of realism in international affairs. Mearsheimer’s realist theory argues that the international arena exists in a state of perpetual anarchy. As a consequence, the factor motivating states’ actions in international affairs is their national interests. Morality, he claims, has no place in international affairs.

This theory’s considerable intellectual underpinning rendered Mearsheimer one of the most prominent political scientists in America during the 1990s. As a realist himself, particularly in relation to the rise of China as a superpower, Kaplan perhaps believed that by rehabilitating Mearsheimer, he would advance his goal of convincing US policy-makers to adopt a realist approach to China.

But whatever his motivations for writing the profile, and whatever its eventual impact on US policy towards China, Kaplan’s profile of Mearsheimer served to mainstream a Jew-hater and in so doing, to give credibility to his bigotry.

It has become necessary to rehabilitate Mearsheimer because in the years since he and Walt published their conspiracy theory against Israel and its American supporters, Mearsheimer has actively embraced fringe elements in the US and the world in order to advance his campaign to discredit Israel and its supporters. As Alan Dershowitz highlighted in November, Mearsheimer wrote an enthusiastic endorsement of a psychotically anti-Semitic book written by British jazz musician and prolific anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon.

The book, titled The Wandering Who? is replete with Holocaust denial, claims that Jews control the world and America, characterizations of the Jewish God as evil and corrupt, and claims that Israel is worse than Nazi Germany.

In his endorsement, Mearsheimer called the book "fascinating," and said it "should be read widely by Jews and non-Jews alike."

As far as Kaplan was concerned, Mearsheimer’s embrace of Atzmon was a simple mistake. But it wasn’t. It was part of an apparent decision on Mearsheimer’s part to use his own celebrity to legitimize his anti-Semitic views.

In a speech to the Palestine Center in April 2010, for example, Mearsheimer distinguished between "righteous" Jews and "New Afrikaner" Jews. The former are Jews who oppose and attack Israel and the latter are Jews who support and defend Israel. By sanitizing Mearsheimer’s bigotry in his sympathetic profile, Kaplan mainstreamed his hatred.

And Kaplan is not alone.

KAPLAN’S PROFILE of Mearsheimer is part of a larger trend in US letters, politics and culture in which anti-Semitism is becoming more and more acceptable. As Adam Kirsch noted in an article in Tablet online magazine this week, The Israel Lobby’s central contention, that a cabal of disloyal Jews and sympathizers has forced the US to adopt a pro-Israel policy against its national interests, has found recent expression in the writings of mainstream journalists including New York Times‘ columnist Tom Friedman and Time’s Joe Klein.

Last week, The Washington Post-owned online magazine Foreign Policy – which publishes a regular blog by Stephen Walt, published an article by Mark Perry claiming that in 2007 and 2008 Mossad agents posed as CIA agents in a false-flag operation whose aim was to build a cooperative relationship with the Pakistani/Iranian Baluchi anti-regime Jundallah terror group.

Perry’s report was based solely on anonymous sources. Its obvious purpose was to discredit the very notion of Israeli-US intelligence cooperation on Iran.

Following the publication of Perry’s article, Israel abandoned its general policy of never commenting on intelligence issues. The Foreign Ministry denounced his report as "utter nonsense."

What Foreign Policy failed to tell its readers is that Perry is not an objective reporter. He is a former adviser to Yassir Arafat and an advocate of US engagement with Hamas and Hezbollah. By failing to mention his biases, Foreign Policy became an accessory to the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism. Like The Israel Lobby, Perry’s report in Foreign Policy adds to the legitimacy of the attitude that there is something fundamentally wrong with having a close relationship with the Jewish state.

Perhaps if Mearsheimer and Walt had published their updated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1997 instead of 2007 they would have been received in the same manner.

That is, they would have sat in the mainstream doghouse for a few years but then gradually acceptance and support for their bigotry would have moved from the margins to the mainstream. And within five years they would have been rehabilitated by the establishment. But in all likelihood, that wouldn’t have been the case.

It is a fact that since the turn of the century, and particularly in the wake of the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 2000 – a collapse precipitated by Arafat’s rejection of Palestinian statehood; and in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the US, anti-Semitism has become far more acceptable in the US and throughout the world. The volume of attacks against Jews has skyrocketed and the intellectual war against Israel and its Jewish supporters has grown ever more virulent.

The rise of anti-Semitism in the US has many causes, but three parallel developments stand out. First, the development of Arab satellite stations like Al Jazeera has brought the open Jew-hatred of the Arab world into the Western discourse.

True, most Westerners reject the Arab annihilationist form of anti-Semitic propaganda as crude and wrong. But the Jew-hatred propounded by these broadcasts has had a corrosive impact on the Western discourse. It has deadened observers to the lies at the heart of the propaganda.

That is, whereas they may reject the daily calls to destroy the Jews, Westerners have increasingly internalized the basic claim that Jews deserve to be hated. Take for instance a Washington Post story last week on Egypt’s decision to bar Jewish worshipers from making their annual visit to the grave of Torah sage Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira.

The story claimed that the Egyptians oppose Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians and because the Egyptian cross-border terror attack on Israel last August "led to the killing of at least five Egyptian border guards as Israeli troops pursued alleged militants."

That is, according to the Washington Post, just as the pan-Arab media claims, Israel is entirely responsible for Arab hatred of Jews.

THEN OF course there is the European media.

This week, the Dutch Christian newspaper Trouw published an article about prenatal care in Israel written by Ilse van Heusden. Van Heusden wrote of the superior medical care she received in Israel where she lived temporarily and where she gave birth to a healthy son.

Rather than extol the dedicated care she received, van Heusden attacked it. She claimed that Israel’s world class prenatal medicine is a product of its embrace of eugenics and its similarity to Nazi Germany. As she put it, "To be pregnant in Israel is comparable to a military operation. Countless ultrasounds and blood tests should produce the perfect baby, nothing can be left to the luck of the draw. The state demands healthy babies and a lot of them too."

Trouw’s decision to publish van Heusden’s anti-Semitic assault is of a piece with countless articles published in the European media portraying Israelis as evil Jews intent on using science and every other means at their disposal to advance the Jews’ malign goals of global domination, genocide, apartheid, and general evil. When Israel dares to complain about these attacks, European politicians and media celebrities are quick to stand up and defend their right to freedom of expression.

So it was that Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt – who barred all the Muhammad cartoons from being published in the Swedish media – stood by Sweden’s leading tabloid Aftonbladet when in 2009 it published an article accusing IDF soldiers of killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. In the mind of the anti-Semites, by trying to object to the blood libel, Israel was proving that it seeks to control the media.

The European media’s lies about Israel have been translated into official government policies of lying about Israel. So it is that the French National Assembly published a report last month about the geopolitics of water that included a 20-page diatribe claiming that Israel uses water as a weapon of apartheid against the Palestinians.

To write the report, the French legislators had to ignore not only the content of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement on water in the 1995 Interim Agreement. They had to ignore the basic fact that Israel gives the PA far more water than the agreement requires it to give, and to associate malign intent to the Israeli government. That is, they had to embrace the irrationality of anti-Semitism.

Parallel to the penetration of Arab anti-Semitism into the Western discourse through the pan- Arabic media, and the embrace of overt anti-Semitism by the European media and political class, over the past decade, we have witnessed the development of an alliance between the West’s political Left and Islamist movements.

The international Left’s embrace of the likes of Hamas, the Taliban, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood has increased leftist and isolationist American policy-makers’ comfort level in adopting hostile postures towards Israel. So it is that at the same time that the Obama administration is assiduously courting the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime, according to Channel 2, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has refused to meet with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman during his upcoming trip to Washington. Channel 2 reported that senior US officials said that "Lieberman is an obstacle to peace. We don’t want our pictures taken with him and with what he represents."

ANTI-SEMITISM IS a prejudice that is based on a rejection of reason. To fight it, it is not sufficient to disprove the contentions of the likes of Mearsheimer. He and his colleagues must be discredited and their enablers must be shamed.

But before this can happen, world Jewry and Israelis alike need to recognize what is happening.

Anti-Semitism is back in style. Its new justification is not race or religion. It is nationalism. Today’s anti-Semitism is predicated on preferring Palestinian and pan-Arab nationalism to Jewish nationalism.

And like its racist and religious predecessors, its aim is to deny the right of Jews to be free.

In the face of this onslaught the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora have two choices. We can either succumb to our enemies, or we can fight back.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

 

No-kidding red lines

“Don’t do it.”  That is the message American officials, from President Obama on down, are delivering to their Israeli counterparts in the hope of dissuading the Jewish State from taking a fateful step: attacking Iran to prevent the mullahs’ imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons.

This week, the nation’s top military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, will visit Israel to convey the same message in person.  If recent reports of other U.S. demarches are any guide, the General will deliver an insistent warning that Israel must give sanctions more time to work and refrain from acting unilaterally.

Such warnings have become more shrill as evidence accumulates that Israel is getting ready to move beyond what is widely believed to be a series of successful – but insufficient – covert actions against the Iranian nuclear program, missile forces and associated personnel.

Some U.S. officials reportedly think the Israelis are just posturing.  As one put it, they are playing out a “hold me back” gambit – perhaps hoping the Americans will do the job themselves, or at least to be rewarded for their restraint.

Others point, however, to evidence that the Israelis are concealing key military movements from our intelligence assets as an indicator that they are going for it – and want to keep us from interfering.  At a minimum, Jerusalem would have to worry that an American administration that is holding secret negotiations with Tehran in Turkey at the level of Deputy Secretary of State William Burns would seek to curry favor with the mullahs by compromising any information it obtains about Israel’sintentions.

At the end of the day, the fundamental difference between the U.S. and Israel is that the Israelis have laid down “red lines” with respect to the Iranian nuclear enterprise.  One of them was crossed two weeks ago when the Iranians announced that they had started enriching uranium in a hardened, and heavily defended, underground facility near the city of Qom.  Even the International Atomic Energy Agency – an organization that, under its previous management, incessantly obscured the true weapons purpose and steady progress of the Iranian nuclear program – views this step as ominous.

To be sure, the United States says it has red lines, too.  It was only last week that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta pronounced two:  Iran would not be allowed either to acquire nuclear arms or to close the world’s energy pipeline that flows through the entrance to the Persian Gulf: the Strait of Hormuz.

The difference between American and Israeli red line, of course, is that the latter may actually take seriously the breaching of theirs.  Presumably, that would be because the government of Israel has drawn them so as to define existential threats to the state, not simply as a matter of rhetorical posturing intended mostly for domestic political consumption.

By contrast, we know that at least some Obama administration officials are persuaded the United States can live with a nuclear Iran.  They are said to be working up plans to contain, or at least, accommodate themselves to such a prospect.

It is less clear whether Team Obama actually thinks it can tolerate the mullahs’ closure of the Strait.  After all, the oil and natural gas that flows through it from much of the Gulf’s littoral states would be severely affected.  The effect would be dire for energy prices, U.S. allies and the world economy.

So far, though, in what may be seen from Tehran – whether rightly or wrongly – as submission to the new, Iranian-dictated order of things, we have chosen to remove all carrier battle groups from the Gulf.  We have also yet to challenge Iranian assertions that our capital ships will be attacked if they try to return without Tehran’s permission.

Worse yet, even if President Obama actually wanted to enforce his administration’s red lines, he has further compromised America’s ability to do so with his  wholesale abandonment of Iraq, draconian defense budget cuts and the emasculated national security strategy he claims is all we can afford.

Thus, the Israelis could reasonably view the United States as less-than-serious about the threats posed by Iran and as wholly unreliable when it comes to keepingthem from metastasizing further.  Under such circumstances, if the Jewish State feels it has no choice but to be deadly serious with respect to its red-lines, its leaders must be expected to act as Iran violates them.

The likelihood for such action can only have grown as a result of the contempt with which President Obama has treated Israel, our most important regional ally.  Dissing its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is one thing.  Allowing our own red-lines to be flouted with impunity, signals that Israel is on its own and must proceed accordingly.

If we are going to stop the nightmare of a messianic regime armed with nuclearmissiles, somebody better do it soon – and with something more effective than sanctions.  America should take the lead.  But, if the Obama administration won’t, it should get out of the Israelis’ way.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Obama’s defeatist ‘strategy’

Listening to Barack Obama laying out what he calls his new defense strategy, my first reaction was, "Here we go again."  Having basically written off the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Obama is falling prey to a temptation several of his predecessors found irresistible in peacetime: Cut defense expenditures. Shrink the military. And hope the rest of the world will neither notice nor take advantage of our weakness.

Something is decidedly different, however.  This is the first time in memory that a president has voluntarily eviscerated the armed forces of the United States and redeployed what remains so as to create acute vacuums of power in time of war.  Unfortunately, I am referring not just to the war in Afghanistan that we continue to be engaged in, for the time being at least.

There is also the war now developing as what might best be described as "Shariah Spring" metastasizes into grave new perils for America’s allies and interests in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.  All other things being equal, "beyond" may include: the Far East, where China and North Korea are responding to domestic turmoil with outward truculence; Russia, where Vladimir Putin has already blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for demonstrations against his kleptocracy; and our own hemisphere, where a dying Venezuelan dictator blames us for his cancer and is working feverishly with our adversaries in Latin America and the rest of the world to turn our front-yard into a staging area for a greatly expanded "axis of evil."

Under such circumstances Mr. Obama’s "revised defense strategy" is a formula for disaster.  If even the defense reductions, downsizing and disengagement that it envisions come to pass – let alone those in prospect if the cuts associated with the pending sequestration legislation are imposed, the United States will not simply expose its people, allies and vital interests to attack.  It will invite such attack.

While the details of the Obama unilateral disarmament program remain to be fully fleshed out, the broad outlines are bad enough:

Our military will be cut sharply in size.

It will be denied vital modernization programs – the absence of which ensures the remaining force will be ill-equipped to contend with present dangers, letalone those in the offing.

The retrofitting of existing equipment, much of it badly degraded in the course of a decade of war, will be stretched out or abandoned altogether.  This willexacerbate the risks associated with the Obama failure to modernize the armed forces’ kit.

The United States will no longer be present in the places and/or numbers necessary to safeguard our interests around the world.  It is predictable that the resulting power vacuums will be filled as such "peace dividend"-induced vacuums have in the past: at our expense and to our detriment.

The administration risks breaking faith with the men and women in uniform by reneging on commitments made in the way of health care, pensions and other benefits.  When combined with other assaults on the culture of the military, pursued in furtherance of the administration’s domestic political agenda (and without regard for the impact on readiness, recruitment or retention), these changes may make a continuedreliance on an all-volunteer force unsustainable.

The nation’s nuclear forces will be allowed to atrophy further through 1) a failure to modernize, test and properly maintain them and 2) as a result of further cuts in their numbers.  The latter will probably include the elimination of an entire "leg" of the Strategic Triad.  The result will be not the President’s publicly stated goal, namely of "ridding the world of nuclear weapons."  Rather, it will simply be to rid the United States of its deterrent forces at a time when they are likely to be more needed than ever.

This potentially disastrous aspect of the Obama program for unilateral disarmament is being compounded by one other phenomenon: the President’s continuing and deeply ideological hostility towards missile defenses that might mitigate the danger posed by ballistic missiles now proliferating among states – and even terrorist groups like Hezbollah – that are virulently hostile to this country and our friends.  Worse yet, the administration is reportedly determined to flout a statute governing the sharing of missile defense-related information and technology with the Russians.  In the process, Team Obama will almost surely compromise what little there is of our capabilities to provide defenses against missiles delivering electro-magnetic and other weapons of mass destruction.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves.  We can walk away from conflicts, but that does not mean they are over.  We can hollow out our military but that does not mean that others won’t see it as an invitation to pursue their interests – at our expense.

In the past, our so-called "peace dividends" have proven illusory.  And we paid not just in national treasure but lives.  We literally can’t afford to do that again.

The American people and their elected representatives – and those who seek to represent them – must categorically reject the plan for unilateral U.S. disarmament espoused last week by President Obama.  If ever there were a time for "peace through strength," this is it.

Center calls for a return to ‘Peace through Strength,’ rejection of Obama’s defeatist ‘strategy’

The Center for Security Policy calls on the American people and their elected representatives – and those who seek to represent them – categorically to reject the plan for unilateral U.S. disarmament espoused yesterday by President Obama.

Mr. Obama’s so-called “revised defense strategy” is a formula for disaster. If even the defense reductions, downsizing and disengagement that it envisions come to pass – let alone those in prospect if the cuts associated with the pending sequestration legislation are imposed – the United States will not simply expose its people, allies and vital interests to attack.  It will invite such an attack.

While the details of the Obama unilateral disarmament program remain to be fully fleshed out, the broad outlines are bad enough:

  • Our military will be cut sharply in size.
  • It will be denied vital modernization programs – the absence of which ensures the remaining force will be ill-equipped to contend with present dangers, let alone those in the offing.
  • The retrofitting of existing equipment, much of it badly degraded in the course of a decade of war, will be stretched out or abandoned altogether.  This will exacerbate the risks associated with the Obama failure to modernize the armed forces’ kit.
  • The United States will no longer be present in the places and/or numbers necessary to safeguard our interests around the world.  Coming as such disengagement does – at the very moment that dangers to those interests in regions from the Middle East to North Africa to Central, South and East Asia to the Western hemisphere, the administration must be held accountable for creating (whether intentionally or simply as a practical matter) dangerous vacuums of power.  These predictably will be filled as such “peace dividend”-induced vacuums have in the past: at our expense and to our detriment.
  • The administration risks breaking faith with the men and women in uniform by reneging on commitments made in the way of health care, pensions and other benefits.  When combined with other assaults on the culture of the military, pursued in furtherance of the administration’s domestic political agenda (and without regard for the impact on readiness, recruitment or retention), these changes may make a continued reliance on an all-volunteer force unsustainable.
  • The nation’s nuclear forces will be allowed to atrophy further through: a failure to modernize, test and properly maintain them and further cuts in their numbers – including in all likelihood the elimination of an entire “leg” of the Strategic Triad.  The result will be not the President’s stated goal, namely of “ridding the world of nuclear weapons.”  Rather, it will simply be to rid the United States of its deterrent forces at a time when they are likely to be more needed than ever.
  • This potentially disastrous aspect of the Obama program for unilateral disarmament is being compounded by the President’s continuing hostility towards missile defenses that might mitigate, at least somewhat, the danger posed by ballistic missiles now proliferating among states and even terrorist groups like Hezbollah that are virulently hostile to this country and our friends.  Worse yet, the administration is reportedly determined to flout a statute governing the sharing of missile defense-related information and technology with the Russians.  In the process, Team Obama will almost surely compromise what little there is of our capabilities to provide defenses against missiles delivering electro-magnetic and other weapons of mass destruction.

Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., who formerly acted as an Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan – who, as president, was an exemplary practitioner of the philosophy he called “peace through strength” – said:

Here we go again. Having basically written off the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Obama is falling prey to a temptation several of his predecessors found irresistible:  Cut defense expenditures. Shrink the military. And hope the rest of the world will neither notice nor take advantage of our weakness.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves.  We can walk away from conflicts, but that doesn’t mean they are over.  We can hollow out our military but that doesn’t mean that others won’t see it as an invitation to pursue their interests — at our expense.

In the past, our so-called “peace dividends” have proven illusory.  And we paid not just in national treasure but lives.  We literally can’t afford to do that again.

Mr. Gaffney also responded to the proposed military cuts in his nationally syndicated Secure Freedom Minute.  The audio is located here.  

The Center for Security Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan national security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions, and resource needs that are vital to American security and then ensures that such issues are the subject of both focused, principled examination and effective action by recognized policy experts, appropriate officials, opinion leaders, and the general public. For more information visit www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org.  

The Center for Security Policy sponsors the Coalition for the Common Defense, an alliance of like-minded individuals and organizations who believe that without provision for the “common defense,” as articulated by the Founders, the freedom that has allowed unprecedented opportunity and prosperity to flourish in this country would soon be imperiled. In this new age of budgetary cuts, the Coalition rejects the false choice between military strength and economic health contending that economic prosperity depends on a strong national defense. Through a series of events and strategic partnerships, the coalition is calling on elected officials, candidates for office and others who share our commitment to the common defense to uphold these principles.  We must return the United States to sensible fiscal principles without sacrificing our national security.   A full statement of principles can be located here.

The Coalition of the Common Defense can be found online at www.forthecommondefense.org. 

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Warfare’s new financial face

American capitalism – led by and caricatured as the financial industry centered on Wall Street – is predicated on the notion that the market is driven by fundamentally economic motives.  To its admirers, that means its dynamics are dictated by profit motivation.  Wall Street’s critics call it greed.

The rules and regulations that govern our stock transactions largely reflect this assumption.  We discourage undesirable behavior primarily by levying fines and otherwise making it costly to engage in it.

Forgive the obviousness of this question but, what if actors who are interested in affecting our stock market and economy more generally are motivated, not by making money, but by some larger strategic interest?  In that case, financial disincentives are likely to prove completely ineffectual.

For example, would our present Maginot line of financial defenses – much of them constructed by legislators bearing names like Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley – protect us if avowed enemies of this country sought to inflict a major, and possibly decisive, blow against us, and didn’t care if they lost money in the process?

This proposition is explored in a riveting book that will be published later this month by one of my colleagues, Kevin D. Freeman, a Senior Fellow of the Center for Security Policy.  In fact, as the title of Secret Weapon: How Economic Terrorism Brought Down the U.S. Stock Market and Why It Can Happen Again suggests, Freeman’s thesis is that it has already occurred, with devastating effect.  And that worse may yet be in the offing.

By training a certified financial analyst who worked for a decade with one of the giants of modern finance, investment maven Sir John Templeton, the author knows his stuff.  Among other things, Freeman reminds us that U.S. enemies – potential and actual – have repeatedly served notice that they understand our market’s vulnerabilities to attack. 

For instance, in 1999, two senior Chinese colonels wrote an officially sanctioned book entitled Unrestricted Warfare.  It identified "bear raids" on stocks to trigger a market collapse as the first in a long list of unconventional weapons that could devastate America.

Another threat of financial warfare was issued by the late leader of al Qaeda.  Osama bin Laden boasted that his jihadists were as "aware of the cracks in the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their own hands." That from a man who selected the World Trade Center as a target for the 9/11 attacks so as to do massive economic harm to the United States. It was not lost on bin Laden – or America’s other enemies – that when the U.S. economy declines, calls intensify for cutting back spending on America’s defenses.

No less troubling should be the fact that a very-much-alive spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has described the use of proceeds from shariah-compliant finance as "jihad with money."

Worse, Qaradawi is a top shariah authority for the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar.  That position and his preeminence in Islamic jurisprudence world-wide (thanks in part to his popular jihadist program broadcast by al Jazeera Arabic TV) has helped make Qaradawi a driving force in what is now said to be a trillion-dollar "Islamic finance" industry.  Under his influence, Islamists have successfully enlisted Western capitalists to help them exploit free markets as a strategic tool for promoting and insinuating their toxic, supremacist politico-military-legal doctrine throughout the Free World, including the United States. 

(Incredibly, this stealth jihadist is the man the Obama administration has reportedly tapped to help broker peace talks with the Taliban on Afghanistan.  Presumably, it is no accident that the latter have chosen to set up their new diplomatic mission in Qaradawi’s adopted home town, the Qatari capital of Doha.)

Is it a coincidence that, as the Wall Street Journal reported in August 2007, shariah authorities gave their blessing to the practice of "short selling" just as the stock market was peaking?

As even former Obama economic guru and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summer has observed, sovereign wealth funds (SWF) serve the interests of the sovereign first, and profit second.  Freeman believes we face a particular danger from the fact that most of the world’s SWF sovereigns are in China and the Middle East – the latter, increasingly governed by the dictates of shariah-compliant finance.

I have accompanied Kevin Freeman in briefings he has conducted at senior levels in official Washington and with top financial players in New York, Dallas and Houston.   Those of his interlocutors in the national security community seemed, without exception, to accept that economic threats to the United States could come from quarters not interested in monetary returns. Unfortunately, such folks typically lack Freeman’s deep understanding of financial markets, their vulnerabilities and how they could be exploited.

By contrast, when Kevin Freeman has presented his findings to financial market participants, they rarely get it.  Typically, they fall back on the traditional assumption that anyone who buys Credit Default Swaps, stocks or bonds has an exclusively economic motive. The idea that these instruments could be used as weapons is so foreign to them that they often push back angrily, denying the obvious.

Yet, despite willful blindness and blistering attack, Freeman’s warnings stand up to scrutiny.  His Secret Weapon should receive it at the highest levels of both the national security and financial security communities, and at once.

Is Israeli society unraveling?

On balance, Israeli society is extremely healthy.

Unemployment is at record lows. At a time of global recession, the Israeli economy is growing steadily.

Israeli Jewish women have the highest fertility rate in the Western world with an average of three children per woman. Education levels have risen dramatically across the board over the past decade with dozens of private colleges opening their doors to more and more sectors of the population.

Israel’s diverse Jewish population is becoming more integrated. Sephardic and Ashkenazi intermarriage has long been a norm. Secular Jews are becoming more religious. A new educational trend that received significant media attention in recent months involves secular parents who send their children to national religious schools to ensure that they receive strong educational grounding in Judaism.

And as secular Jews become more religious, both the national religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors are becoming increasingly integrated in nonreligious neighborhoods and institutions. Ultra-Orthodox conscription rates have increased seven-fold in the past four years. In 2010, 50 percent of ultra-Orthodox male high school graduates were conscripted.

The IDF assesses that by 2015, the rate of conscription will rise to 65%.

While this is still below the general conscription rate of 75% among male 18-year-olds, the rapid rise in ultra-Orthodox military service is a revolutionary development for the sector.

With military service comes entrée to the job market. The trail towards employment integration was blazed by ultra-Orthodox women. Over the past decade, ultra-Orthodox women have matriculated en masse in vocational schools that have trained them in hi-tech and other marketable professions and so enabled them to raise their families out of poverty.

These ultra-Orthodox women, who are now being followed by their IDF veteran husbands, are part of a general trend that has seen women fully integrated in almost every sector of society and the economy. The fact that women make up the senior leadership echelons in both business and government is not a fluke. Rather it is a product of the largely egalitarian nature of Israeli society.

True, as is the case everywhere, Israeli women suffer from male chauvinism. And like the rest of the world, Israel has its share of sexual abusers, rapists, and criminal and social misogynists. But imperfection does not detract from the fact that women in Israel are free, educated, empowered and advancing on all fronts.

As for the national religious community, its youth remain committed to serving as pioneers in strengthening Israel as a Jewish democracy. Not content to limit themselves to national religious communities in Judea and Samaria, more and more young national religious families are moving to poor towns and communities from Dimona to Ramle to Kiryat Shmona to strengthen their educational, economic and social underpinnings.

Modern Orthodox women are taking on expanded roles in religious councils, synagogues, religious courts and other bodies. Soldiers from the national religious sector remain overrepresented in all IDF combat units and in the officer corps.

Israel’s growing social cohesion and prosperity is all the more notable as we witness neighboring states aflame with rebellion and revolution; extremist Islamist forces voted to power from Morocco to Egypt; and economic forecasts promising mass privation.

And in the Age of Obama, with cleavages between liberals and conservatives growing ever wider in America, and with the future of the European Union hanging in the balance as the euro zone teeters on the edge of an abyss, the fact that Israeli society is becoming increasingly fortified is simply extraordinary.

In light of these integrationist trends, the media circus in recent weeks that has portrayed Israeli society as frayed through and through has been startling. With women in Israel presented as underprivileged victims, national religious youth presented as terrorists and the ultra-Orthodox community presented as a gang of misogynist, violent crazies set to transform Israel – in the words of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – into another Iran, an average news consumer can be forgiven for wondering how he missed his country’s demise.

What explains this sudden flood of gloom and doom stories? Certainly it is true that in a highly competitive news environment, media coverage tends to over represent marginal social forces. Sensational stories make for banner headlines. And it is at the margins of society that a reporter is most likely to find sensational stories.

So it is that when reporters wish to push a socialist agenda, they descend on urban slums and talk to people hanging out on the street doing nothing. As a rule, these stories will not feature visits to vocational training schools that are educating poor people out of poverty.

Just as poor, uneducated single mothers in Lod can be depended on to blame their troubles on an insensitive government, so groups of ultra-Orthodox extremists in Beit Shemesh, whose own communities decry them, can be trusted to treat nonreligious women poorly.

None of this is to say that we should stand by and allow poor single moms and their children to go hungry or that we should accept abuse of women by ultra-Orthodox bullies. The former is an issue for social services. The latter is an issue for law enforcement bodies. And to the extent that these institutions are failing in their missions, they should be required to improve their performance.

But just as the majority of single mothers, who are not impoverished, don’t deserve to be placed in the victim column, so, too, the majority of ultra-Orthodox Israelis do not deserve to have their reputation besmirched because of the bad behavior of a small, vocal and easily provoked minority.

ALL OF this brings us to the issue at hand. Stories highlighting the deviant behaviors of marginal social forces tend to be simplistic and misleading, and to serve identifiable political forces. And so, with our national discourse suddenly dominated by stories describing the demise of Israeli democracy, women’s rights and the rule of law at the hands of modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, we need to consider who benefits from the stories.

It is notable that the seam lines being opened by all of the stories, which are again, about deviations from the norm of Israel’s social cohesion, all fall within the governing coalition. Stories of "Jewish terrorists" set the security hawks against the ideological hawks. They set the likes of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his supporters against the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and their representatives in the Likud, Israel Beiteinu, Habayit Hayehudi and other coalition parties.

Stories about ultra-Orthodox misogynists make it politically costly for the Likud and Israel Beiteinu to sit in the same government as ultra-Orthodox parties such as Shas and United Torah Judaism. They also serve to weaken Shas among its non-ultra-Orthodox voters. The fact that the ultra-Orthodox bus lines were inaugurated with the support of the Kadima government in 2007 is beside the point. It is the Likud that is now being blamed for their existence.

The current media-supported outcries against the national religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors follow the pattern of last summer’s social justice protests in Tel Aviv. The purpose of those protests was to discredit the government in the eyes of working class voters and young people.

The current protests also follow in the footsteps of the protests of 1998 and 1999 that brought down Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first government. Those protests pitted his Russian immigrant coalition members against Shas. They pitted secular Israelis against his ultra-Orthodox coalition members. They alienated young voters from his leadership. They set his socialist partners against his capitalist partners.

The cleavages wrought in Netanyahu’s coalition made members of his own party as well as his coalition partners fear the electoral cost of maintaining their membership in his government. And so one by one, they bolted his government until it finally fell.

Notably, many of the same forces – from the New Israel Fund to various political consultants who work for the Israeli Left to European NGOs – who were active in the protests in 1999 and in the social justice protests last summer are also playing a role in the current protests. The New Israel Fund raised NIS 200,000 in "emergency funds" to pay for buses to transport protesters to Beit Shemesh last week.

It also paid for two rallies in Jerusalem attacking religious bans on female vocalists earlier last month.

Last summer, Israel’s New Left movement led by leftist political consultant Eldad Yaniv took credit for organizing the anti-free market protests. Yaniv and his colleagues were assisted in conceptualizing the protests by US Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who was also the architect of the social protests in 1998-99.

Indications of how the political Left has been impacted by the current wave of demonstrations are mixed. A Shvakim Panorama poll from last week, which posited the existence of a new anti-religious party led by popular television personality Yair Lapid and a new anti-capitalist Sephardic party led by former Shas leader Arye Deri, indicated that the Left as a whole has been strengthened against the Right. While Kadima would lose most of its Knesset seats to Lapid’s party, it is Deri who would be the undoing of the Right.

The poll claimed that Deri, who since his release from prison has strengthened his bonafides as a secular-friendly political dove, would win seven mandates. Shas would drop from its current 11 seats to five. Deri’s rise would decrease the political Right in all its various forms from its current 67-seat majority in the 120 seat Knesset to a minority of 57.

The media have trumpeted this poll as the first harbinger of spring for Israel’s political Left. And certainly it provides some reason for celebration among leftist political forces. Like the protests in the late 1990s, and like last summer’s anti-capitalist protests, the current batch of anti-religious campaigns serves to turn Israeli against Israeli by feeding on and inflaming sectoral envies and insecurities. And given their success, we can certainly expect them to continue.

For the good of society as a whole, we must hope that the basic health and cohesion of Israeli society that has grown so miraculously over the past decade will prevail in the current contest. We have far more that unites us than separates us. If we focus on this, there is no force either within or without our society that can defeat us.

But if we give in to the forces of contention and chaos, we risk endangering everything we hold dear.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.