Tag Archives: Lebanon

Appeasing child killers

We were not supposed to see Shlomo Nativ’s name in the newspapers. At least, we weren’t supposed to know who he was for several years. He was just a 13-year-old boy. He was loved by his family and friends. He had brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents. His life was not our business. And, to a certain extent, now that it is over, it still shouldn’t concern us.

What should concern us is his death. Nativ was murdered last Thursday at the hands of a Palestinian ax murderer just a few meters from his home in Bat Ayin. And his death should interest us for what it teaches us, first of all about the nature of the Middle East and Israel’s place in it.

The mainstream media in Europe and the US and even here maintain that Nativ’s death tells us little we didn’t already "know" if we are right-thinking people. By this view of things, the cold-blooded terrorist murder of civilians – even of children – is to be expected when the victims in question are Israeli Jews who live beyond the 1949 armistice lines. It isn’t nice. It isn’t pleasant to say. But as far as the right-thinking people of the Western media are concerned, Israeli Jews like Nativ, who live in Gush Etzion in Judea, are simply asking to be murdered.

Today, the media’s view is shared by both European governments and the Obama administration. For years now the Europeans have accepted the legally unsupportable Arab claim that all Jewish presence in areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines is illegal. Since 1993, supported by the Israeli Left, the US government has gradually moved toward adopting this view. And today this view stands at the center of President Barack Obama’s emerging policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.

At base, this view assumes two things. First, it assumes that the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the absence of Palestinian statehood, and therefore the solution is the establishment of a Palestinian state. The second thing it assumes is that the Palestinian demand that any territory that Israel transfers to Palestinian control must first be ethnically cleansed of all Jewish presence is completely innocent and acceptable.

OBAMA MADE clear that this is the view of his administration on two occasions in the past week. First, at a news conference before he departed for his European tour, he announced that as far as his administration is concerned, the only way of contending with the Arab conflict with Israel is by establishing a Palestinian state. In his words, "It is critical for us to advance a two-state solution."

And second, last Thursday in London, Obama made clear that he supports the mass expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (as well as the Golan Heights), when he announced his support for the so-called Saudi peace plan.

The Saudi plan, issued as a propaganda stunt by Saudi King Abdullah during a meeting with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 2002, calls for Israel to commit national suicide by removing itself to within the indefensible 1949 lines and accepting millions of hostile foreign Arabs as citizens in its rump state in exchange for "regular" relations with the Arab world.

Shlomo Nativ’s murder shows clearly that Obama and his supporters are viewing the Arab conflict with Israel through a distorted lens. Their interpretation of both the nature of the conflict and its likely resolution are wrong.

IT TAKES A CERTAIN type of person to hack a child to death with an ax. In the case at hand, Nativ’s murderer actually tried to kill seven-year-old Yair Gamliel as well. But unlike Nativ, the first grader managed to escape with a fractured skull.

Nativ of course was not the first child to be brutally murdered by Palestinian terrorists. Kobi Mandell and Yosef Ish-Ran were also 13 when they were stoned to death by a mob as they gathered wood for a bonfire in 2001. In 2003 five-month-old Shaked Avraham was shot in her crib by a Palestinian terrorist who pushed his way into her home. In 2002 five-year-old Matan Ohayon, four-year-old Noam Ohayon and their mother Revital Ohayon were murdered in their home in Kibbutz Metzer.

And the list goes on and on and on.

It takes a special type of person to murder a child. And it takes a special type of society to support such behavior. Palestinian society is a special society. It has become routine, indeed it has become expected that in the aftermath of successful murders of Israelis – including children – Palestinians distribute candy in public celebrations.

In 2002 for instance, when word got out about the terrorist who barged into Nina Kardashov’s bat mitzva party in Hadera and massacred six people, the masses took to the streets in neighboring Tulkarm to celebrate. That particular attack was carried out by a Fatah terrorist employed by the US-trained Palestinian Authority security forces. The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and the IDF now reportedly believe that Nativ was also murdered by a Fatah terrorist.

TO CELEBRATE the terrorist murder of children and to glorify child murderers as heroes is to celebrate and glorify the nullification of life – or at least the life of the target society. This is the case because at the most basic philosophical level, children represent the notion that life is intrinsically valuable. Since children haven’t yet had the chance to accomplish great and lasting things for humanity, all they can give us is the promise of a future.

The fact that Palestinian terrorists target children specifically – both inside and outside the 1949 lines – and that Palestinian society celebrates their murder tells us that the two foundational assumptions upon which Obama and his supporters base their policies toward Israel and the Middle East are false. It is not the absence of a Palestinian state that stands at the root of the conflict, and it is not the presence of Israeli communities, or "settlements," beyond the 1949 armistice lines that renders the conflict intractable.

Instead, the root of the conflict is the Arab world’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist – regardless of its size. And the reason the conflict is intractable is because hatred of Israel and Jews is so deep and endemic in both Palestinian society and the wider Arab world that they view the very existence of Jews – including Jewish children – in Israel as an unacceptable affront to their sensibilities. Indeed, the Jewish presence both within and beyond the 1949 armistice lines is so unacceptable that murdering Jews at every opportunity is perceived as an acceptable and indeed heroic undertaking.

THIS BEING the case, the question necessarily arises, why are these basic facts so assiduously ignored by people like Obama who should know better? Why did Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, say in late February, "Nothing will do more to make clear our seriousness about turning the page [in US relations with the Arab world] than demonstrating – with actions rather than words – that we are serious about Israel’s freezing settlement activity in the West Bank?"

Why did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attack Israel during her visit last month for lawfully destroying illegal Arab houses in Jerusalem?

Why are Obama’s supporters from Peace Now to the Arab League to The Washington Post and Haaretz editorial boards urging him to coerce the Netanyahu government to accept a complete halt to all building activities for Jews in Judea and Samaria?

The answer unfortunately is that in their actions, Obama, his colleagues and supporters are not motivated by facts. Instead they are motivated by a desire to ignore the facts. They wish to believe that the existence of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria is a primary obstacle to peace because doing so allows them to ignore the fact that the reason there is no peace is because Palestinians and their Arab and Iranian brethren refuse to peacefully coexist with Israel regardless of its size. Accepting such bitter realities would make it impossible for them to move forward with their agenda of appeasing the Arab world because it would force them to acknowledge that the Arab world is unappeasable.

And that’s the thing of it. At base, the so-called settlements are nothing but an excuse for appeasers to curry favor with the Arabs by blaming Israel for the absence of peace while ignoring the Arabs’ bigotry, hatred and aggression. What these Israeli communities represent is nothing more than an assertion of Israeli rights to land – whether that land is within or beyond the 1949 armistice lines. If these communities didn’t exist – as they no longer exist in Gaza – then a surrogate, such as the IDF which protects other Israeli land, would be found to replace them.

And if the IDF weren’t around – as it isn’t in Gaza or in southern Lebanon – then the appeasers would blame another surrogate, such as the Israeli naval quarantine of Gaza, or Israel’s control over the town of Ghajar along the Lebanese border for the Arabs’ bigotry, hatred and aggression against it.

Here it should be noted that there is no difference in principle between the way the likes of the Obama administration and its supporters treat Israel and the way they treat the US and its non-Israeli allies. When on Sunday Obama responded to North Korea’s launch of a long-range ballistic missile by announcing that he wishes to all but disarm the US of its nuclear arsenal, he was effectively arguing that US strength is to blame for North Korea’s aggression. He did what amounts to the same thing when he apologized to the Iranian regime for supposed US arrogance. By Obama’s lights, now that the US is humble, the Iranians may one day stop calling for its destruction, waging war against it in Iraq and Afghanistan and building a nuclear arsenal.

Then too, when Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reportedly agreed to apologize to the Islamic world for Denmark’s independent Jyllands-Postens 2005 publication of cartoons of Muhammad in exchange for Turkish support for his candidacy for NATO secretary-general, he was accepting that it is Western civilization – with its freedom of speech – that is to blame for Islamic aggression and intolerance.

In the end then, the truth exposed by Shlomo Nativ’s brutal murder on Thursday in Bat Ayin is twofold. First, it demonstrated that the so-called settlements have no relevance whatsoever to the intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict. When your enemy hates you so much that he hacks your children to pieces, there is nothing you can do, short of committing suicide, that will appease him.

Second, it reminded us of what appeasement places at risk. By attempting to appease the unappeasable, all that successive Israeli, American and European governments have done is strengthen our enemies at the expense of our security and freedom.

 Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Remembering Olmert’s true record

Last week’s reports that during Operation Cast Lead Israel bombed truck convoys in Sudan transporting medium-ranged Fajr-3 missiles to Gaza from Iran couldn’t have come at a better time for outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Even as defense officials were following standard practice of neither confirming nor denying the reports, Olmert was bragging like a teenage boy.

In an address at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya last Thursday Olmert crowed, "We are operating in every area in which terrorist infrastructures can be struck. We are operating in locations near and far and attack in a way that strengthens and increases deterrence. It is true in the north and in the south. There is no point in elaborating. Everyone can use their imagination. Whoever needs to know, knows."

Unfortunately, Olmert’s bravado doesn’t stand up to even the flimsiest scrutiny. What about the weapons smugglers along the Philadelphi corridor? More than Sudan, Philadelphi – Gaza’s international border with Egypt – is the choke point of weapons transfers from Iran to Gaza. And along that border, during his three years and two months in office, Olmert has failed to even temporarily cut off the flow of Iranian arms entering Gaza. Throughout his tenure as prime minister, Israel never once launched a sustained operation aimed at blocking Hamas, Fatah and their sister organizations in Gaza from transporting ever more lethal weapons systems into the area through its border with Egypt.

THIS WEEK EHUD OLMERT will finally leave office. Ironically, the cause for his early departure from power – the multiple criminal probes being conducted against him – has nothing to do with his actual performance as prime minister. That is, the failures that brought him down were not his failures in office, but his private failings which predated his rise to power.

Israel’s political memory is notoriously short. In the space of a few short years, politicians’ past failures in office are frequently forgotten by their parties and the public. Consequently, Olmert can easily assume that if he is able to fend off the multiple felony indictments awaiting him on his return to private life, he many one day soon return to lead us.

It is due first and foremost to the prospect of Olmert one day returning to politics that it is critical to consider his actual record of service as prime minister. Only by understanding what he has done over the past three years and two months can we ensure that he will be properly remembered for what he is: the worst prime minister Israel has experienced to date. Only by recognizing his tenure in office as an unmitigated disaster for the country will we be able to avert the danger that he may one day return to office.

Olmert’s failure to stop weapons smuggling into Gaza at the Philadelphi corridor and his attempt to obfuscate this failure by exaggerating the strategic significance of the reported IAF strikes in Sudan are his stock in trade. Olmert, as the only prime minister to have led the country in two wars in one term of office, does not hesitate to use force to project an image of fearless manliness to the public. And as the only prime minister to have led Israel to defeat in war – and indeed, in his case, in two wars – Olmert is the only prime minister to have wielded the sword with utter strategic incompetence.

OLMERT ENTERED office in January 2006 pledged to unilaterally surrender Judea, Samaria and large areas of Jerusalem to the Fatah terrorist organization. Olmert was both politically and ideologically committed to the Left’s belief that wars are unwinnable and consequently enemies need to be appeased rather than defeated.

In light of his political predisposition, both Lebanese and Palestinian aggression presented Olmert with a difficult political challenge. In both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel had previously adopted his strategy of preemptive appeasement by unilaterally surrendering territory to its enemies. Hizbullah’s and Fatah/Hamas’s post-surrender aggression exposed Olmert’s political platform as both wrongheaded and dangerous.

Beyond the political embarrassment Olmert suffered in the wake of both Hizbullah’s 2006 aggression and Gaza’s post-withdrawal transformation into an Iranian-controlled jihadist hub, he had to contend with the public outcry against their unprovoked and unrelenting attacks. In both July 2006 and in December 2008, the public demanded that Olmert defend the country by using force to defeat our enemies. Yet even in the face of the public outcry, Olmert remained ideologically committed to the belief that war is inherently futile.

Olmert’s ideologically driven political and strategic mind-sets caused him to prosecute both wars as little more than mindless, violent engagements with enemy forces. In Lebanon, IDF units were sent into tactical battles that lacked any operational objectives.

The strategic aims that Olmert announced at various stages of the war in Lebanon – first to defeat Hizbullah and, later on, to "send Hizbullah a message" – were strategically illogical since they lacked any connection to the manner in which IDF forces were deployed. Absent an order to conquer southern Lebanon and defeat Hizbullah as a fighting force, the IDF could not hope to defeat Hizbullah.

Given Hizbullah’s commitment to Israel’s destruction and its complete subservience to Iran, there is no way for Israel to deter the group. As a result, the only "message" Israel conveyed was one of military incompetence and ideological weakness.

Although the public responded to Olmert’s performance in outrage, for Olmert the outcome of the war in Lebanon was the best of all possible worlds. By failing to accomplish any strategic objectives through fighting, Olmert was able to continue to argue for preemptive appeasement in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem as well as on the Golan Heights.

Olmert brushed aside the public’s demand for his resignation by emptily, arrogantly and repeatedly pledging to correct his own mistakes. But of course, given his political and ideological blinders, he was incapable and unwilling to do so.

The IDF’s improved tactical performance in Gaza two years later showed that to the extent it was able, it did learn from its mistakes in Lebanon. In contrast, Olmert’s strategic leadership of Operation Cast Lead demonstrated that he remained committed to the same wrongheaded and dangerous strategic outlook with which he had led the country to ignominious defeat in Lebanon.

DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITIES UNDER Olmert were motivated by the same ideological dictates as its military engagements. Consequently, their results were equally disastrous.

By any objective measure, Israel’s greatest diplomatic challenge for the past three years and two months has been to build an international consensus around the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And yet, contending with Iran was nowhere near the top of our diplomatic agenda under Olmert. Indeed, Olmert and his deputy and successor as leader of the Kadima party outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni never developed any coherent position on Iran at all.

Instead of concentrating diplomatic efforts on convincing the nations of the world to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to destroy the Jewish state and to dominate the region and the oil economy, Olmert concentrated his diplomatic efforts on strengthening the Fatah terrorist organization against the Hamas terrorist organization.

This goal – which is the central component of Olmert’s appeasement-based mind-set – required him to lead his colleagues and subordinates in ignoring certain basic facts about Fatah. Israel needed to ignore the fact that Fatah rejects its right to exist and openly calls for its destruction. Israel needed to ignore Fatah’s continued direct involvement in terror attacks against it and its complicity with and support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks. Israel had to ignore Fatah’s cozy ties with Hizbullah, Syria and Iran and the leadership role Fatah occupies in the international diplomatic offensive and political war against the Jewish state.

Due to Olmert’s willingness to turn a blind eye to Fatah’s belligerence, the effect of his diplomatic efforts has been the legitimization not only of Fatah but of all of Fatah’s allies and supporters. That is, the effect has been to legitimize all of our enemies and encourage them to maintain and expand their campaigns on every front.

In the case of Fatah for instance, by refusing for three years and two months to confront it on its involvement in terror, Olmert paved the way for its current campaign to prosecute IDF soldiers as war criminals in international tribunals. Moreover, due to Olmert’s refusal to acknowledge Fatah’s lead role in terrorism, he paved the way for the current state of affairs where Fatah forces are now being trained and armed by the US military.

BY DESTROYING the IDF’s international reputation as a world-class fighting force by twice committing it to war and twice refusing to allow it to fight to victory, and by transforming the Foreign Ministry into a mouthpiece for Fatah and the PLO while ordering it to ignore Iran, Olmert wrecked Israel’s reputation as a steady and reliable strategic ally in Washington. Moreover, he weakened its supporters both in the US capital and throughout the world by effectively accepting the lie that Israel itself is responsible for the radicalization of the Arab and Islamic worlds and that only by cutting it down to size will the West be able to moderate the behavior of jihadists from Teheran to Karachi to Baghdad to London.

Olmert’s massive incompetence has had another victim: the country’s social fabric. Not only has his studied inability to defend the country attenuated many Israelis’ faith in the state’s ability to defend them, Olmert’s refusal to countenance the public’s demand that he resign after the war in Lebanon and his insistent postwar attempts to give away Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Fatah while wrecking the strategic alliance with the US have sown confusion and discord. This discord has led to a deepening of social and political fissures at a time when – due to the rising Iranian threat which he studiously ignored, and the steady delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist that he engendered – we need to be united as never before.

To sum up then, Olmert’s ideological and political commitment to appeasement, his personal arrogance and his contempt for his countrymen have made his tenure an unrelenting and unmitigated disaster for the country. Today, rather than acknowledge his failure, Olmert is using the disclosure of IAF attacks in Sudan as yet a new way to obfuscate the fact that for three years and two months he has failed to adequately protect the state.

It is in light of this that it is imperative that the public understand his record. For in the final analysis, it is not simply our ability to ensure that Olmert never returns to lead us that stands in the balance. Our wherewithal to survive with the strategic wreckage he has laid before us depends on our capacity to understand and remember the dimensions of Olmert’s incompetence.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Wrecking operation: Our enemies perceive exploitable weakness

President Obama’s stewardship of the national security portfolio to date amounts to a wrecking operation, a set of policies he must understand will not only weaken the United States but embolden our foes. After all, the Communist agitator Saul Alinsky, a formative influence in Mr. Obama’s early years as a “community organizer,” made Rule Number One in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” 

According to this logic, the various steps Barack Obama is taking with respect to the armed forces, the foreign battlefields in which they are engaged, our allies as well as our adversaries will not only diminish our power.  They will encourage our enemies to perceive us as less powerful – with ominous implications.  Consider some illustrative examples:

  • The Obama administration is cutting the defense budget by 10%.  The result will be to preclude much, if not virtually all, of the modernization that will be required to prepare the U.S. military to contend with tomorrow’s wars.  Most of what the Pentagon spends goes to fixed – and growing – personnel-related costs (pay, bonuses, health care, etc.) and operations.  As a result, at Obama funding levels, there will not be much available even to “reset” today’s forces by refurbishing the equipment they have been using up in present conflicts.
  • The President is on a path to denuclearizing the United States by refusing to modernize the arsenal or even to fund fully the steps necessary to assure the viability of the weapons we have.  He hopes to dress up this act of unilateral disarmament by seeking to resume arms control negotiations with Russia, as though such throw-backs to the old Cold War and its bipolar power structure apply today – let alone that there are grounds for believing the Kremlin will adhere to new treaties any better than the previous ones it systematically violated.
  • For good measure, Mr. Obama is mounting a frontal assault on the armed forces themselves.  The President plans to repeal the law prohibiting homosexuals from serving in the military.  It is absolutely predictable that significant numbers of servicemen and women – including many of the most experienced commissioned and non-commissioned officers – will retire rather than serve in conditions of forced intimacy with individuals who may find them sexually attractive.  The effect will be to break the all-volunteer force.
  • Then there are the Obama initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The President’s adoption of a deadline for withdrawing most U.S. forces from the former and his signaling that – despite a near-term 17,000 troop “surge” – he is preparing to turn the latter over to the oxymoronic-dubbed “moderate” Taliban are conveying unmistakable messages to friends and foes alike: Under Barack Obama, it is better to be a foe of America than one of its friends.

This message is, of course, being strongly reinforced by the treatment he is doling out to nations in each category. 

  • Friends like the Poles and Czechs have been left in the lurch as the Obama administration intimates that the United States now thinks Europe does not need after all to be defended against Iranian nuclear-armed missile threats.  Not since Jimmy Carter abandoned the NATO deployment of so-called “neutron bombs” has a President conveyed such a devastating message of weakness and irresolution in the face of hostile threats to our European alliance partners.
  • Other allies have not fared much better. Israel is on notice that its security interests are going to be sacrificed to the Obama administration’s pursuit of a Palestinian state – even one ruled by a terrorist organization like Hamas (or, for that matter, Fatah) committed to Israel’s destruction. Britain has been told it neither deserves nor has a “special” relationship with the United States.
  • Meanwhile virtually every enemy of the United States is the object of assiduous cultivation and overtures for rapprochement by the Obama administration.  It will reward IranSyria can expect the Golan Heights and removal from the terrorism list even as it pursues nuclear arms, renews its overtly colonial hold on Lebanon, supports the terrorists of Hezbollah and helps its abiding master, Iran, destabilize Iraq. for “going nuclear” with normalized relations.
  • As mentioned above, Russia gets to be treated like a superpower again while it arms Iran, inserts bombers and naval units into our hemisphere, wields its energy leverage against our friends in Europe, Ukraine and Georgia and squeezes our supply lines into Afghanisan.  There are no repercussions for China as it makes a mockery of the administration’s beloved Law of the Sea Treaty by threatening an unarmed U.S. naval vessel in its Exclusive Economic Zone.
  • Last but hardly least, a “respectful” Obama administration seems keen to embrace those in the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded Islamist organizations who seek to impose the toxic theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls Shariah on distant populations – and insinuate it into our country.

Can there be any doubt what America’s adversaries make of all this?  Great grief will come our way if they conclude, as Alinsky surely would, that our power is waning, and that they can exercise theirs with impunity against our interests – and those of whatever friends we have left. 

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

 

Elliott Abrams predicts Obama, Bibi faceoff

Elliott Abrams, former deputy national security advisor to President Bush, speaking Saturday morning in Fort Lauderdale at the winter meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said he thinks the Obama administration may be able to successfully employ sanctions against Iran now that oil prices have dropped, especially if President Obama is able to secure cooperation from China and Russia.

However, Abrams predicted friction between Obama and Netanyahu on the issue of Israeli settlements. And he said that if sanctions fail to arrest Iran’s march toward nuclear capability, both Obama and Netanyahu will face a historic decision as to whether to allow “this regime whose stated intention is to destroy Israel” to acquire nuclear weapons.

Abrams, senior fellow for middle eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said President Obama has a better chance of effectively employing sanctions against Iran than President Bush did due to two factors: the drop in cost of oil and the possibility of increased cooperation from Russia and China.

During the Bush years, high oil prices offset the sanctions’ effect. But now that oil prices have significantly dropped, sanctions could be more effective in halting Iran’s progress toward nuclear capability, according to Abrams.

“Our sanctions [during the Bush years] were having an impact but weren’t overcoming the money Iran was getting from selling oil,” according to Abrams. “In the course of this year, though, sanctions could work.”

The second factor in making sanctions effective would be greater international cooperation. If President Obama can garner more cooperation from China and Russia than President Bush was able to, then that cooperation, combined with reduced oil prices, might mean the U.S. could effectively squeeze Iran’s leadership, Abrams believes.

If sanctions fail, and should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, “then we’d be forcing the hand of Arabs in the region also to acquire nuclear weapons …then the possibility of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon becomes five or ten times as great,” he said.

In terms of a military option to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capability, Abrams said two questions on the table for both Obama and Netanyahu are whether they can successfully target Iran’s nuclear facilities, and if they do so, how far it will set Iran back.

“‘The question is, ‘How much can you destroy?’” he said. “It’s not like Osirak, they’ve spread things around. Also, what about the secret plant we’ve never heard about?

“How far can you set them back? If it’s five months, it won’t be worth it. But if it’s ten years? [The U.S.] has a larger air force and better capability than Israel. We could do a better job.”

Abrams also questioned the conventional wisdom that a military strike against Iran would provoke a nationalistic response from the Iranian people.

Most Iran experts say in the event of a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iranians
“would immediately rally, there will be a nationalistic reaction and you will see solidarity and support,” said Abrams. But, he reflected, in the aftermath of the Israeli attack on Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981, it would appear Saddam Hussein did not react by rebuilding his nuclear facility, and there was not a widespread nationalistic response. Similarly, he cited the lack of response on the part of Syria to a 2008 U.S. military attack against terror suspects crossing from Iraq into Syria.

If the U.S. attacked Iran’s nuclear facility, Abrams questioned, “Would the Iranian people rally behind the regime, or would they say… ‘How did we get into this?’ I’m not sure what most Iran experts [predict would happen] would be true.”

Abrams critiqued the appeal President Obama delivered Friday to Iran for providing reassurance to Iran’s leadership.

““It was a speech to the Iranian people … combined with a message of reassurance to [the mullahs who] we should not be reassuring,” he said. “If you were an Iranian dissident I think you’d have been disappointed with what you heard yesterday.”

On the subject of Israel, Abrams predicts some friction in the near term between Obama and Netanyahu because the Obama administration believes that the main problem in brokering an Israeli/Palestinian final status agreement is Israel’s settlement expansion. This, according to Abrams, is false.

“I can illustrate why [this is false] very simply,” said Abrams. “Look at what [Ehud] Barak proposed ten years ago. Look at what Olmert offered recently. Olmert offered more.”

In other words, what has repeatedly made a final status agreement between Israelis and Palestinians impossible is Palestinians’ refusal to accept a deal, not settlement expansion, since the latter has coincided with more generous offers of land for peace, according to Abrams.

Abrams said he is unsure how much friction there will be between Obama and Netanyahu on the issue of settlements. Nonetheless, he predicts American Jewish organizations will side with Obama in political battles.

“I hope I’m wrong, but I think [Jewish and other security-minded organizations] will have a tough time making the case for what Netanyahu wants to do,” he said.

Abrams also talked about media coverage of the incoming Netanyahu government, saying The New York Times has already begun a “campaign to de-legitimize” the incoming Israeli government before it even takes power, “as if there is something illicit about democratically electing a right-of-center government.” This campaign has taken the form of interviewing IDF forces about alleged improprieties in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, according to Abrams, who characterized this reporting as highly questionable.

“You’ll notice these IDF officers are never saying, ‘I did it,’ or ‘I saw it,’” said Abrams, but "’I heard about it.’”

Asked by an audience member whether there is any hope for recognition by the Obama administration and the world that the lack of Arab states’ acceptance of Israel is the major obstacle to peace in the Mideast, Abrams responded by saying, “We are decades away but [acceptance of Israel’s right to exist] could happen.”

While some governments like that of Iran still institutionalize hatred of Israel, others have shifted toward acceptance, he believes. But he maintains the “Arab street” is still far from accepting.

“The governments of Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia don’t want to destroy Israel [but] they can’t bring their own people along [to accept Israel],” Abrams said. “For decades, as a means of distracting their own people from the lack of freedom and democracy, they have instilled massive propaganda against Israel,” and now that it may no longer be in their interests to whip up hatred against Israel, they can’t easily undo it.

The anti-Israel prejudice is exacerbated, Abrams believes, by Al Jazeera and a worldwide surge of Islamism, which he believes has reached its apex and will probably start to wane in its virulence, but will take several decades to do so.

 

Israel’s balance of delusion

A balance of delusion exists in Israeli politics between Left and Right. On the Left, we have leaders who, when given the facts about strategic options, decide they don’t like the facts and make new ones up that suit them better. And on the Right, we have leaders who, when given the facts about their political options, decide they don’t like the facts and make up new ones that suit them better.

The Left’s latest fantasy is its enthusiasm for a deal with Hamas that would free Gilad Schalit. By Tuesday night, Israelis should know whether or not our outgoing leftist government will agree to release between 450 and 1,000 Palestinian terrorists – including mass murderers serving multiple life sentences – in exchange for Schalit whom Hamas and it sister terror groups have held hostage since June 2006.

Schalit’s plight presents two stark choices. We can surrender to all of Hamas’s demands and reunite Schalit with his suffering family, or we can keep a stiff upper lip, refuse to negotiate with terrorists and wait until we receive actionable intelligence on his whereabouts and attempt to rescue him. We know what will happen in both cases.

If we surrender to Hamas’s demands, we will ensure more families will suffer the same plight as Gilad Schalit’s family. We know that this will happen because we have been through this process repeatedly. Every single time we have released terrorists for hostages, the result has been more murdered Israelis and more hostages. As before, the only thing we still don’t know is the names of the next victims. They could be any of us. And so, in a very real sense, they are all of us.

If on the other hand the outgoing government opted for the stiff upper lip approach, we know that we would increase the chance that Schalit will be murdered. Hamas can kill him at any time. And in the event that the IDF stages a rescue raid, there is a good chance that both Schalit and his rescuers will return to their families in wooden boxes. Then again, we also know that by not negotiating with terrorists, and by keeping jailed terrorists in prison, we stand a better chance of protecting the lives of the rest of us.

Both choices, of course, are miserable ones. But they are the only choices. We can surrender or we can fight. There is no third option.

In keeping though with the Left’s penchant for dreaming up imaginary choices, the Kadima-Labor government decided to negotiate Schalit’s release with Hamas, but to pretend that in doing so, it is doing something other than surrendering. Rather than admit that by agreeing to release hundreds of murderers from jail he is placing every single family in the country at risk, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert describes his urgent pleadings to Hamas as a noble gesture towards the Schalit family, a gesture which supposedly gives expression to Judaism’s commitment to Jewish captives. That is, he has moved the discussion of the terrorist release from the realm of reality to the realm of metaphysics.

Much to his discredit, Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu has refused to criticize the outgoing government’s surrender to Hamas. There is some justification for his silence. The media is so adamant about moving forward with the release of mass murderers that were he to speak out, he would set the media against him even before he is sworn in to office. But then again, the overwhelmingly leftist media will treat Netanyahu with hostility regardless of what he does. So it seems unreasonable that he has maintained his silence on this issue.

THE ONE POLITICIAN who has been outspoken in opposing the mass release of terrorists has been MK Ya’acov (Ketzeleh) Katz, the leader of the National Union party. Together with the families of terror victims who oppose the government’s intention to release their relatives’ murderers, Katz has been the loudest voice in politics stridently opposing the deal. He has made clear that it will endanger the country and guarantee the murder and abduction of still more Israelis.

Katz and the National Union have it right on this issue. Indeed, they have it right on just about every major strategic issue they have championed. From their opposition to the failed Oslo process to their opposition to the failed Camp David summit, from their opposition to the withdrawal from south Lebanon and Gaza to their opposition to the failed road map peace process and the failed Annapolis peace process, the National Union has been right all along. It has always stayed true to its principles.

One might think that given the National Union’s consistent track record that it would be the largest party in the Knesset. Surely voters would reward it for its wisdom. But one of course would be wrong.

The National Union received four seats in the Knesset. Its sister party, Habayit Hayehudi won three mandates. The two parties ran separately despite their ideological and cultural affinity because their members simply couldn’t get along. They couldn’t compromise on who would appear where on the party list.

And this is the beginning of the story.

FOR ALL of its strategic wisdom and clearheadedness, the National Union is a political home for delusional politicians. In all of its various incarnations – from Tehiya to Herut to Moledet to the National Union – the party has never been able to understand what it means to govern. It has never been able to recognize that politics is the art of compromise.

In 1992, angry that Likud under prime minister Yitzhak Shamir bowed to US pressure and participated in the Madrid peace conference, Tehiya brought down his government. In so doing, it brought in Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and brought the country the Oslo process and Yasser Arafat in Ramallah.

In 1999, angry at Netanyahu for bowing to US pressure and agreeing to the Wye Plantation accords, the National Union brought down his government. In so doing, it brought in Ehud Barak and Yossi Beilin, the withdrawal from Lebanon and the Camp David summit.

In all, the total of Israelis who have been killed due to Oslo, the withdrawal from Lebanon and the Palestinian terror war which followed Camp David comes to around 2,000. The country’s weakened position today in the US and Europe as well as in the Arab world, would have been inconceivable in 1992.

In both 1992 and 1999, the National Union and its predecessors were faced with two choices. They could remain ideologically pure by bringing down their own government and so risk empowering the Left, or they could recognize that governance is the art of compromise, keep a stiff upper lip and work from within the government to mitigate the strategic damage that in their view Shamir and Netanyahu caused by bowing to American pressure.

And in both cases, the National Union rejected its real choices in favor of an imaginary one. Both in 1992 and 1999 it chose to leave the government while pretending that there was no difference between Likud and Labor. By choosing this route, it effectively committed itself to strategic as well as political blindness since it was forced to claim – wrongly – that there was no difference between Madrid and Oslo or between Wye Plantation and Camp David.

Last Friday it was disclosed that on Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu had reopened coalition talks with Kadima leader Tzipi Livni. Those talks had ended weeks ago after Livni demanded that Netanyahu agree to share the premiership with her through a rotation agreement, give her full control over strategy for dealing with the Palestinians and adopt the establishment of a Palestinian state as the primary goal of his government. All of Livni’s demands were nonnegotiable and all of them, both separately and together, were unacceptable for Netanyahu. And so, he rejected them and for the past two and a half weeks has been concentrating his efforts on building a governing coalition with the right wing and religious parties.

AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN’s Israel Beiteinu with its 15 Knesset seats is set to be Likud’s main coalition partner. Lieberman has been the most outspoken champion of a Likud-Kadima-Israel Beiteinu coalition. This makes sense from his perspective. Lieberman is viewed both by the West and by much of the country’s leftist elite as a racist. Due both to his legal worries and to the fact that his actual policy preferences of surrendering the Galilee and the Negev to the Arabs are far left of center, Lieberman cares deeply about what the Left thinks of him. In his view, the only way to be accepted as legitimate in leftist circles is to compel Likud to move to the left by bringing Kadima into the government.

In part to satisfy Lieberman – without whom he cannot form a government – and in part because he remembers that it was the National Union which brought down his government 10 years ago, Netanyahu began his coalition building talks with Kadima. They collapsed only because Livni made demands that he could not meet.

In the current round of talks, Livni has reportedly maintained her demands, but now Netanyahu is reportedly accepting them – at least partially. The question that needs to be asked is what has changed in three weeks? Why has Netanyahu decided that Livni’s previously unacceptable demands are now acceptable? The only reasonable answer is the National Union. Last week Katz scuttled negotiations with Likud because it refused his demand for the Construction and Housing Ministry. On Thursday, he joined hands with Habayit Hayehudi chairman MK Daniel Herschkowitz and announced that neither of the two parties would join Netanyahu’s government if he doesn’t meet all of their demands, including the Ministry of Education for Herschkowitz. Without the two parties, Netanyahu lacks a parliamentary majority.

It is possible that Katz and Herschkowitz are bluffing. In fact, it is likely that they are. But what their behavior shows clearly is that Netanyahu is correct when he says that a coalition that relies on them is inherently unstable. And so, he has moved back into Kadima’s orbit.

If the Olmert-Livni-Barak government goes ahead with its plans to spring hundreds of mass murderers from prison in its last days in office, the threat they will unleash will just be added to the long list of serious threats that our strategically delusional leftist government has created and expanded during its tenure in office. It would be the height of irony – and tragedy – if due to the Right’s proven political incompetence, the same political Left remains in power as the main partners in the Netanyahu government and so is given yet another opportunity to ruin the country.

Correction: In my Friday column, "Intelligence and the anti-Israel lobby" I misidentified Douglas Jehl as a Washington Post editor. Jehl is an editor at The New York Times.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Islamic terrorism in Latin America

Over the years, there has been disturbing information about the presence of radical Islamic terrorist groups in Latin America.  The Americas Report has published several articles regarding this subject including a recent article on how terrorists have and could use fake or doctored passports to enter the United States to carry out attacks.[1] In light of this information, it is important to know which Islamic terror groups are present in the region and the threat they could pose to regional security.

Active Islamic Terror groups in Latin America and the Caribbean:

 

The "Jamaat al Muslimeen" (JAM)

The "Jamaat al Muslimeen" is a Sunni terrorist organization that operates in Trinidad and Tobago. So far, it has been the only subversive group in the region to attempt a coup d’ Etat to install a sharia-based government. In 1990, over a six-day period, JAM’s leader Yasin Abu Bakr held members of the government including then-Prime Minister Arthur Napoleon Raymond Robinson, hostage while chaos and looting broke out in the streets of the capital city, Port of Spain.

The coup failed and subsequently, the JAM aligned itself with the United National Congress (before the 1995 general elections) and later with the People’s National Movement (PNM); the party which forms the current government. Bakr continues to lead the Jamaat al Muslimeen and authorities have re-arrested him on several occasions over the years. Bakr is currently being prosecuted with conspiracy to murder several of the group’s former members who had spoken out publicly against the Jamaat al Muslimeen and its practices.[2]

In March 2007, three members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen confessed to kidnapping, raping, and murdering of an Indo-Trinidadian businesswoman, Vindra Naipaul – Coolman. According to a U.S. undercover agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Bakr’s group shipped heroin from Afghanistan to the U.S. via Trinidad. In June of that same year, a joint Guyanese/Trinidadian/FBI investigation culminated in the arrest of four men who plotted to blow up gas lines leading to the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. The individuals were American, Guyanese, and Trinidadian. One of the plot leader’s, Abdul Kadir, is an acquaintance of Abu Bakr in Trinidad. Members of the group allegedly met with JAM members to obtain support for their plot. Kadir is a former Guyanese parliament member. The JAM is currently under surveillance by the local National Security Agency as well as by the CIA for suspected terrorist relations with the Middle East.[3]

 

Hezbollah

Hezbollah has had a presence in Latin America since the late 1980’s, particularly in the Tri-Border Region, where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet. Approximately 50,000 individuals of Arab descent live in three key cities in the 40 square kilometer triangle that forms this area. Most tri-border Arabs are of Lebanese origin and are heavily represented in commerce. Many of them moved to the area in the wake of the turmoil of the Lebanese civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. Of those that adhere to Islam, approximately two-thirds are Sunni, while the remaining are Shia. The area hosts several Islamic schools or "madrassas" and various Arab – language television channels.[4]

It is common to find young men on the streets of Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, one of the two major cities that make up the TBA, with Hezbollah tee shirts. From this area, cells of Hezbollah with the help of the Iranian government planned the 1992 and 1994 bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA). The infamous Imad Mugniyah, who was in charge of the group’s foreign operations, coordinated the first bombing. In March 2003, after a nine-year old investigation plagued by irregularities, an Argentinean judge indicted four Iranian officials in connection with the bombing. The suspects included the former head of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the former cultural attaché at the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires. In another incident that many attribute also to Hezbollah, that occurred on July 19, 1992, a Lebanese suicide bomber boarded a commuter flight in Colón, Panama, and detonated a bomb, killing all 21 people aboard, including 12 Jewish and Israeli businessmen, and three U.S. citizens. The bomber carried a fake U.S. passport.[5] 

Hezbollah activities are financed mainly by drug trafficking, money laundering and terrorism. The group also engages in fund-raising, recruitment and receives logistical support from Iranian intelligence officials assigned to Iranian embassies in the region. Local businessman, Assad Ahmad Barakat, was the leader and chief financier of Hezbollah in the TBA until 2002 when he was arrested. He is now in jail in Paraguay for tax evasion. He lived and worked in the area with his brother Hattem. He also has businesses in Iquique, Chile. His brother took over until he too was arrested in Paraguay for document fraud. Assad Barakat has another brother who is a sheikh at a Hezbollah mosque in Lebanon. Paraguayan authorities found numerous documents when they arrested him including a letter from Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, thanking Assad for the money he sent (U$3,535,149) to the "martyrs program."  Meanwhile, authorities have also linked Barakat to al Qaeda by claiming he owned the "Mondial Engineering and Construction Company" suspected of having made contributions to bin Laden’s group. The tri-border remittances to Hezbollah totaled $60 million since 1995.[6]

In 2004, authorities in Paraguay arrested Lebanese businessman, Ali Khalil Mehri, for selling millions of dollars worth of pirated software and illegally sending the profits to Hezbollah. Mehri fled Paraguay before he could be prosecuted.[7]

Paraguayan authorities have accused Mohamed Tarabain Chamas, a Hezbollah member and manager of a five-story commercial building in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay (part of the TBA), of being responsible for counter-intelligence operations for Hezbollah in the TBA.[8]

 

Hezbollah Latin America

Hezbollah Latin America has two cells: one in Venezuela and the other in Argentina. Its connection with Hezbollah is unclear but the group claims solidarity with Hezbollah, Iran, and the Islamist revolution. In Venezuela, the majority of its members are from the Wayuu tribe, a small indigenous group that converted to Islam a few years ago under their leader, Teodoro Darnott. In 2006, Venezuelan officials found explosive devises in Caracas near the U.S. Embassy, which did not detonate, but contained pro-Hezbollah pamphlets. Venezuela Hezbollah took responsibility for the bombs and threatened further attacks. Authorities subsequently arrested and convicted Darnott. It is not known who took over.[9]

In Argentina, the group has direct ties to Iran through the Arab Argentine Home and the Argentine-Islamic Association-ASAI of La Plata, which cooperate and are financed by the Iranian Representation in Buenos Aires.

 

Al Qaeda

Osama bin Laden operative and 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, spent nearly 20 days in Brazil in 1995 to visit members of the Muslim community there. While there, authorities claim that Mohammed founded a charity to help finance Osama bin Laden and reportedly was hosted by Khalid Rezk El Sayed Take El Din, the mentor of the "Holy Land Foundation" in the Tri-border area. He remains in the region. U.S. Treasury officials have designated "The Holy Land Foundation" as a terrorist supporter, frozen its assets, stating that the Foundation was sending funds to Hamas.[10]

In 1996, the Brazilian police reportedly discovered that Marwan al Safadi, an explosives expert accused of having participated in the first attack on the U.S. World Trade Center in 1993, was living in the Tri-border area. In January 1997, Paraguayan authorities learned that Islamic groups in the Tri-border region were planning to blow up the American Embassy in Paraguay to coincide with the first anniversary of the bombing of the Saudi National Guard headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Police raided Safadi’s apartment in Ciudad Del Este and found it filled with explosives, pistols equipped with silencers, double-barreled rifles, false Canadian and American passports, and a large amount of cash. Brazilian authorities captured Safadi and extradited him to the United States. Although sentenced to 18 months in prison, U.S. authorities extradited him to Canada, where he received a nine-year jail sentence for drug trafficking. Safadi escaped from prison three times, finally fleeing back to South America with a false passport.[11]

Adnan el Shukrijumah, currently on the U.S. FBI’s BOLO (Be on the Look Out For) is an al Qaeda operative. He was in Panama in April 2001 surveying the Panama Canal for a possible attack. When Khalid Sheik Mohammed was captured by U.S. forces in March 2003, he confirmed Shukrijuma was an Al Qaeda member. Shukrijuma has American, Guyanese, and Trinidadian passports. On June 30 2004, the Honduran Security Ministry said that el Shukrijumah had been in Honduras just in May meeting with members of the Mara Salvatrucha street gang.  His whereabouts remain unknown.[12]

In 2002, Ali Nizar Darhough was arrested in Paraguay. He is the nephew of Mohammad Dahrough, a well-known Sunni leader in the Tri-border area. The Paraguayan police said that Ali Nizar and his uncle were the al Qaeda point men for the TBA. Mohammad Dahrough’s name was found in an address book belonging to Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al-Qaeda official captured by the U.S. Mohammad escaped the TBA in September 1998 and has since joined al Qaeda. A report claims that Ali Nizar sent $10 million in 2000-2001 from the TBA to U.S. dummy corporations that al-Qaeda and HAMAS used as fronts. Ali Nizar was convicted in Paraguay in 2003 of tax evasion and he received a five-year sentence. There is no information on whether he was released.

Al Qaeda follower and Islamic cleric, Jamaican Sheikh Abdullah el Faisal, was convicted in Britain in 2003. He was found guilty of encouraging murder and fueling racial hatred. During his trial, tapes of his sermons were played where he ordered his listeners to "kill Hindus and Jews and other non Muslims, like cockroaches." During his four-week trial, followers watched as the court heard el-Faisal’s voice exhorting young Muslims to accept the deaths of women and children as "collateral damage" and to "learn to fly planes, drive tanks… load your guns and to use missiles."

On July 19, 2004, Farida Goolam Mohamed Ahmed was arrested at McAllen Miller International Airport. She was headed to New York. Ahmed had a South African passport with no U.S. entry stamps. Ahmed later confessed to investigators that she entered the country illegally by crossing the Rio Grande River from Mexico. Ahmed was carrying travel itineraries showing a July 8 flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, to London. Six days later, Ahmed traveled from London to Mexico City before attempting to travel from McAllen to New York. It was revealed in court that she was on a watch list and had entered the U.S. possibly as many as 250 times.

 

Al-Gama’ at Islamiyya

Al-Gama’ at Islamiyya is an Egyptian Islamic movement linked to Al-Qaeda that has been operating in Brazil since 1995. Mohammed Ali Hassan Mokhles, a group member, left Egypt in 1993 and established residency in Foz do Iguacu, Brazil. Authorities claim that Mokhles was sent to the TBA to collect funds for the Middle East and to conduct logistic support activities such as forging passports or other documents for Islamic jihadists. Mokhles reportedly attended a training camp in Khost, Afghanistan. An investigative expose claims that Mokhles was involved in the first World Trade Center explosion in New York. Uruguayan officials arrested Mokhles in 1999 while he was trying to cross the border from Brazil with false documents. In 2003 Mokhles was extradited from Uruguay to Egypt. Authorities claim he was involved in planning a terrorist attack that killed 58 tourists in Luxor, Egypt in 1997.

Mohamed Abed Abdel Aal, another leader of Gama’ at Islamiyya, was arrested in Colombia after arriving from Ecuador by bus in October 1998. He had been in Italy under "surveillance." Abdel Aal was wanted by Egyptian authorities for his involvement in two terrorist massacres: the attack in Luxor, Egypt; and an incident in which terrorists killed 20 Greek tourists outside their Cairo hotel on April 18th 1996. He was subsequently deported to Ecuador. It is believed that Aal may have been trying to contact the leftist Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC). He was later turned over to Egyptian authorities.

In 2002, Brazilian authorities broke up an al-Gama’ at al Islamiyya cell and detained Sunni extremist, Mohammed Ali Soliman, also wanted by Egypt for his involvement in the Luxor attacks. According to Brazilian press reports, he too was trained in camps in Afghanistan and is associated with Mokhles. Brazilian officials released Soliman in September 2002 claiming that Egyptian officials failed to provide sufficient evidence of Soliman’s involvement in the Luxor attacks. He lives in Brazil.

 

Jammat al Fuqra

Two Trinidad and Tobago citizens, Barry Adams, a.k.a. ‘Tyrone Cole’ and Wali Muhammad, a.k.a. ‘Robert Johnson,’ members of the Jammat al Fuqra, a militant Pakistan-based terrorist group, were arrested in Canada in 1994 for conspiring to set off bombs in a Hindu temple and a cinema in Toronto. Prosecutors claim that the men had lived in Texas using aliases for several years before attempting to carry out their plan. They served their full sentences without parole and Canada deported them to Pakistan upon their release.

This information shows that it is imperative for nations in the hemisphere to be vigilant against Islamic terror activities and their possible association with local subversive groups such as the FARC, the criminal cartels in Mexico and the Mara Salvatrucha gangs in Central America. There is also the possibility that these different groups could collaborate with each other since the Shia – Sunni divisions are less pronounced in the Tri-border area. What is extremely dangerous are the routes for drug and human smuggling from Mexico that many of these groups could take advantage of to enter the U.S. to carry out attacks. Another major problem is the availability of stolen forged passports used to bypass authorities. It is imperative for the region’s leaders to understand the terrorist threat that seems to be growing and to act accordingly. There is a question, however, how vigilant certain countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua will be since they have a strong connection to the Iranian government.

 

Nicole M. Ferrand is a research analyst and editor of "The Americas Report" of the Menges Hemispheric Security Project. She is a graduate of Columbia University in Economics and Political Science with a background in Law from Peruvian University, UNIFE and in Corporate Finance from Georgetown University.

 

[1] The Americas Reports": "Latin American Radical Grassroots Part I and Part II from March 29, 2007 and April 18, 2007; Terrorists using Latin American passports to enter the United States from January 29, 2009.

[2] Spotlight on Trinidad and Tobago’s Jamaat al-Muslimeen. June 21, 2007. The Jamestown Foundation.

[3] Ibid.

[4]Hezbollah’s External Support Network in West Africa and Latin America. August 4, 2006. International Assessment and Strategy Center.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Islamic Terrorist Activities in Latin America: Why the Region and the US Should be concerned. July 1, 2008. US Southern Command.

[10] Moving Beyond the 9/11 Staff report on Terrorist Travel. September 2005. Center for Immigration Studies.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

Sudan, terror & jihad

Though it has received a great deal of attention in the media and from Hollywood celebrities, the issue of Sudan is not entirely clear to many Americans. Many do not realize how Sudan is ruled and the nation’s role in Jihadist terrorism. 

Over the past few years, the Islamic Republic of Sudan has been justifiably targeted by a grassroots divestment movement for the genocide that it has committed against its own people.

Unlike famine and drought, genocide does not simply happen due to forces of nature. Genocide is committed.

And it is no accident that the regime which has committed this genocide is also on the US government’s list of terrorist-sponsoring nations and is thus under US economic and political sanctions.

Sudan has committed genocide over a period of many years in an effort by the Islamist government in Khartoum to impose Shariah (a brutal theo-legal-political system practiced in the Islamic world) on its entire population.

Genocide first occurred in southern Sudan over a period of years in which the Arab Islamist government systematically killed hundreds of thousands of innocent black Christian and animist civilians. There are documented cases in which hundreds of defenseless civilians lined up at aid stations operated by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were gunned down by Sudanese Air Force helicopter gunships.

More recently, the genocidal Arab Islamist regime has turned its sights on fellow Muslims-non-Arab blacks-in the Darfur region. These black Muslims do not subscribe to the same brand of militant Islam that the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Arab Islamist regime subscribes to, thus they are being attacked in a manner similar to that which occurred in the south of Sudan.

Many Americans are asking, "There are brutal regimes in many areas of the world. Why should I care particularly about Sudan?"

The answer is that Sudan is a terrorist-sponsoring nation that has been involved with terrorist groups that have killed Americans.

Sudan is ruled by a Jihadist regime that has hosted Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas and allowed those terrorist groups to train and recruit within Sudan’s borders. Sudan has been on the US government’s list of terrorist-sponsoring nations since 1993 and the United Nations imposed sanctions on Sudan in 1996 due to it allowing terrorist groups to operate from its territory.

 

Sudan and Al Qaeda

Sudan hosted Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda from 1991 to 1996. It is now known that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were involved in attacks on US peacekeeping troops in Somalia in 1993 and that these attacks were coordinated from Bin Laden’s base of operations in nearby Sudan.

Though Bin Laden was deposed from Sudan in 1996 under US and Saudi pressure, there is evidence that Al Qaeda was still at work in Sudan after Bin Laden’s departure. In March 2006, United Nations envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, reported that Al Qaeda was "entrenched" in Sudan.

But the most stark indication of Sudanese sponsorship of Al Qaeda involves the murder of Americans.

On October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda attacked the US Navy destroyer USS Cole in a suicide bomb attack in Aden harbor in Yemen.   Seventeen American sailors were killed in the attack and 39 others wounded.

On March 14, 2007, US Federal Judge Robert Doumar ruled in a lawsuit filed by the families of the dead sailors that the Sudanese government was liable for the bombing as the attack was planned in Sudan and the plotters trained and transited from there. On July 25, 2007, Judge Doumar ordered the Sudanese government to pay the families the sum of $8 million.

 

Sudan and Hezbollah

Hezbollah, or Party of God, is the Iranian-backed Jihadist terrorist organization that bombed the US embassy annex and the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983. 241 American servicemen were killed in the Marine Barracks attack alone.

Sudan has harbored Hezbollah terrorists and allowed the organization to operate training camps inside of its territory.

Sudan hosted a meeting of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah leaders in 1994 which resulted in a cooperative training agreement between these two deadly Jihadist terrorist groups in which Hezbollah trained Al Qaeda operatives in explosives.

 

Sudan and Hamas

Hamas is the violent Jihadist Palestinian terrorist organization that seeks to push Israeli Jews into the sea and replace Israel with an Islamist theocracy along the lines of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The Sudanese regime has openly declared its support for Hamas and has harbored Hamas terrorists within its borders. In fact, Hamas has a business infrastructure in Sudan to support its operations and has nearly the equivalent of diplomatic facilities there.

 

Sudan and Iran

Sudan’s partner in terror is Iran, though Iran is Shiite and Sudan’s regime is Sunni, with its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. Sudan is one of the few nations on earth, besides Syria and Venezuela, that has openly aligned itself with Iran.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have operated terrorist training camps in Sudan for years and Sudan and Iran have entered into significant agreements that indicate cooperation on Jihadist terrorism.

In January 2007, Iran and Sudan exchanged military delegations in which it was formally announced that Iran had offered to help train the Sudanese military to quell violence in Darfur. At the outset of the exchange, both delegations indicated that Iran and Sudan would expand military cooperation and Sudan expressed interest in Iranian-made weaponry, including missiles. At the end of the exchange, both sides agreed to "exchange expert delegations" on a regular basis to promote "mutual technical and educational cooperation" on military matters.

 

Conclusion

Sudan’s genocide in Darfur is a humanitarian atrocity that is deserving of condemnation in as many ways as possible. Moreover, it must be recognized that this genocide is born from the militant Jihadist doctrine that underpins the regime in Khartoum and compels it to sponsor the terrorist groups who are America’s enemies in the war on terror.

 

Kadima’s strategy for success

Provoked by the Palestinians’ escalating missile campaign, on Sunday evening the Ashkelon Parents Association voted not to send their children to school on Monday.

Ever since the outgoing Kadima government ended Operation Cast Lead in Gaza on January 20, the Palestinians have steadily stepped-up their missile war against Israel. Over the weekend the IDF acknowledged that six weeks later, daily Palestinian missile barrages against Israel have returned to pre-Operation Cast Lead levels. Moreover, the IDF warned that over the past six weeks, Hamas and its sister terror groups have rebuilt their missile arsenals both through imports of Iranian arms from Egypt and through local production lines. They have also brought in fairly advanced anti-aircraft missiles capable of shooting down IAF helicopters.

The proximate cause for the decision to close down schools was the weekend missile strike against a high school in Ashkelon. The direct hit caused massive damage both to the school and to surrounding apartments. IDF inspectors assessed that the Grad missile the Palestinians used in the attack had been locally upgraded. Its warhead was two and a half times bigger than usual.

As Ashkelon’s children settled into their living rooms instead of their classrooms on Monday morning, a few hundred kilometers to the south representatives from 80 countries and international organizations convened in Sharm el-Sheikh to pledge billions of dollars in aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza. The US, represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pledged $900 million in assistance.

Also on Monday, The Jerusalem Post reported that the US is curtailing its military aid to Israel. Under new Pentagon guidelines, the Ministry of Defense must give a detailed accounting of how it uses every item it purchases with US aid money. As a consequence, the Defense Ministry issued new instructions to the IDF that from now Israel’s purchases from the US will be limited to defensive armaments and systems aimed at preserving its "qualitative edge" against its enemies.

TO UNDERSTAND HOW it came to pass that six weeks after Operation Cast Lead, the US has joined the nations of the world in funding Hamas and is curtailing its military assistance to Israel, it is necessary to understand Israel’s domestic politics. Specifically, since as Israel’s leaders during Operation Cast Lead Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are responsible for Israel’s current predicament, it is necessary to understand their Kadima party’s operating rationale.

The main rule of politics that has guided Kadima since its founding in November 2005 is never be perceived as failing. For the past three years, with the active collusion of the local media, Kadima has managed to control the flow of information to the public and so successfully covered up the abject failures of its strategic policies. Its success in last month’s elections is testament to its extraordinary capacity to spin and obfuscate information.

THIS KADIMA PRACTICE was first implemented in the lead-up to the 2006 elections. At the time, the media worked with Kadima to suppress information about the strategic significance of Hamas’s electoral victory in the January 2006 Palestinian Authority elections. They also blocked reportage and public discussion of the massive build-up of Iranian-supplied arms in Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal from the area in September 2005, and the transformation of Gaza’s disparate terror cells into Hizbullah-trained and styled paramilitary brigades.

The need for the cover-up was obvious: An open discussion of post-withdrawal developments in Gaza would have demonstrated to the public that Kadima’s signature policy of unconditionally surrendering land to the Palestinians was, to put it mildly, insane.

Both the Palestinian cross-border operation in June 2006 that led to the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Schalit to Gaza, and Hizbullah’s similar raid in July 2006 that fomented the summer war in Lebanon demonstrated the dire consequences of Israeli land giveaways. Neither the onslaught from Gaza nor the war from Lebanon would have happened if Israel hadn’t left Gaza in 2005 and Lebanon in 2000.

For Kadima it was clear that to survive the events of the summer of 2006, it needed to develop a story line to hide the truth. In Lebanon, hiding the truth meant choosing defeat over victory.

For anyone with even a vague notion about strategy, it was clear at the time that the only way to protect northern Israel from Hizbullah was to deny Hizbullah the use of southern Lebanon as a base of operations. To do that, Israel needed to conquer and maintain control over southern Lebanon. Nothing else could end the Iranian proxy’s ability to rain its missiles down on Israel. And given the jihadist nature and foreign command of Hizbullah, Israel has no capacity to deter the paramilitary force.

For Kadima’s leaders however, a reconquest of south Lebanon would involve recognizing that their land surrender strategy was wrong. Their governing rationale would be discredited.

So instead they opted for defeat. Rather than fight Hizbullah to victory, they attacked their domestic political opponents by claiming that only warmongers would support a reconquest of south Lebanon. In so doing, they discredited the only viable strategy for victory while sending IDF forces to Lebanon to fight battles whose sole purpose was to run down the clock until the US stepped in and negotiated a truce with the terror army.

The US-mediated ceasefire, which legitimized Hizbullah as a political force and paved the way for its rearmament and takeover of the Lebanese government, was a disaster for Israel. But for Kadima it was a great success. Livni spun the ceasefire as a massive diplomatic accomplishment for herself and Kadima. The willing media went along with the fiction.

Although all the spinning in the world couldn’t convince the public to support Kadima’s planned unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, Kadima was able to salvage the gist of its defeatist strategy. By pretending that Israel hadn’t failed in Lebanon, and defending the view that victory isn’t an option, Kadima deftly replaced its unilateral surrender strategy with as strategy of surrendering land in the framework of a "peace process" with the pro-terror, corrupt, unpopular, and anti-Israel Fatah-led PA in Ramallah. That "peace process" in turn kept the land surrender policy on the table by asserting that the main obstacle to peace is Israel’s unwillingness to give its land to the Palestinians.

A SIMILAR PATTERN unfolded with Kadima’s handling of Operation Cast Lead. Here too it was clear to any semi-sentient observer that the only way to defend southern Israel is to reconquer Gaza. For as long as Hamas controls territory it will use it to fight Israel. And given Hamas’s subservience to Iran, its jihadist ideology and its Syrian-based leadership’s distance from the front, it is obvious that Israel has no capacity to deter Hamas.

But for Kadima, which owes its existence to its leaders’ execution of Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza, acknowledging that Israel has no option other than reasserting control over Gaza was not an option. Then too, a reconquest of Gaza would discredit Kadima’s new-old signature issue of giving away Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

And so, rather than fight to win, Kadima again fought for US intervention. Livni and Olmert claimed again that only warmongering extremists supported reconquering Gaza, and announced that Israel’s goal was to deter Hamas. For its part, the media blocked all discussion of whether or not it is possible for Israel to deter Hamas and cooperated in demonizing anyone with the temerity to note that the only way to secure southern Israel is to control Gaza.

Then, as elections approached, Kadima declared that deterrence had been achieved and pulled IDF forces from Gaza. They told us that the continued Palestinian missile offensive against the south was nothing more than the last gasps of a defeated foe. And the media went along with them.

In the lead-up to the elections, the international diplomatic backlash against Israel was underplayed and the strategic meaning of Hamas’s continued missile war was widely ignored by both Kadima and the media.

NOW, AS THE LIKUD-LED rightist bloc is forming the next government, information about Israel’s actual situation is finally being reported. Not only did Israel not deter Hamas, the inconclusive end of the campaign has paved the way for a massive diplomatic onslaught against Israel and a diplomatic campaign to legitimize Hamas.

Today Israel is being blamed for Hamas’s war against it.

Kadima’s favorite Palestinian "peace" partners in Fatah are leading an international campaign to indict IDF commanders as war criminals.

While last weekend’s bombing of yet another Israeli school was met with international indifference, international leaders lined up to have their photographs taken outside the UNRWA school in Gaza that the IDF attacked in January after Hamas combatants used the building as a missile launching pad against Israeli civilians.

Then there is the US-backed international campaign to force Israel to surrender control over its borders with Gaza to Hamas. Last week Clinton joined her European counterparts in demanding that Israel permit cement, aluminum tubes and other missile components to enter Gaza in order to alleviate the "humanitarian suffering" of the poor Gazans. Furthermore, like Europe, the Obama administration supports the establishment of a Hamas-Fatah government.

IN THE MEANTIME, Kadima pretends that there is nothing to worry about. As The Jerusalem Post reported on Friday, both Livni and Olmert refuse to actively oppose the international campaign to criminalize IDF commanders because doing so would involve criticizing Fatah leaders with whom they claim to have such wonderful ties. Similarly, the Obama administration cannot be criticized because that would mean that Kadima has failed to maintain US support for Israel.

And that’s the point. With its policy of never acknowledging failure, Kadima’s strategy for dealing with the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead has been on the one hand to ignore what has happened, and on the other hand, to blame Likud for what is transpiring.

Rather than attack Hamas and Fatah in international forums and so defend Ashkelon’s schoolchildren at least diplomatically, Livni devotes herself to attacking Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu for refusing to back Palestinian statehood.

Netanyahu’s view is clear. Surrendering control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians will endanger Israel. For as long as that remains the case, it is impossible to support Palestinian statehood.

Likud’s position is indisputable. But it is also a denunciation of Kadima’s governing strategy. So Livni denies the truth to advance her party’s interests and condemns Likud for recognizing reality.

In so doing, she has paved the way for an international boycott of the Likud-led government. The Palestinians and their allies throughout the world are already arguing that there is no difference between Likud and Hamas since both of them reject the so-called "two-state solution." Clinton is expected to demand that Netanyahu publically endorse Palestinian statehood during her visit here.

As we absorb the spectacle of world leaders lining up to give their money to Gaza while Israeli schoolchildren are forced to stay home from school, we must understand how we got here. We are here because Kadima has placed its political success above Israel’s security.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Entrapping Netanyahu

Negotiations between Likud and its coalition partners toward the formation of Israel’s next government have only just begun. But the campaign to undermine the government-in-formation’s ability to determine Israel’s future course is already well underway.

Incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu must understand the traps being set for him and their sources. And as he builds his government, he must appoint ministers capable of working with him to extricate Israel from those traps and discredit their sources.

On Thursday, US President Barack Obama’s Middle East envoy George Mitchell arrived in Israel for his second visit. Whereas Mitchell’s last visit – which took place in the last days of the electoral campaign – was touted as a "listening tour," Mitchell made clear that during his current stay, he intends to begin calling shots.

His first order of business, we are told, is to pressure the outgoing government to destroy the so-called outpost communities in Judea and Samaria and expel the hundreds of Israeli families who live in them. To defend this call for intra-Israeli instability and violence, Mitchell notes that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave his word to former president George W. Bush that he would destroy these communities.

Lest Israelis believe that Mitchell will drop this demand once Olmert leaves office, he has made clear that as far as he is concerned, Olmert’s pledge was not his own – but Israel’s. In Mitchell’s view, it binds Netanyahu no less than Olmert. So if Olmert leaves office without having sent IDF soldiers to throw women and children from their homes, Mitchell, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will feel free to pressure Netanyahu to take on the task, and to punish him if he refuses.

If the Obama administration believes that the presence of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is the primary obstacle to peace, then the Hamas regime in Gaza is the second greatest obstacle to peace. As long as Hamas, a recognized terror group, is in charge, the administration will be hard-pressed to push Israel to accept a Palestinian state.

To remedy this situation, the Obama administration has opted for a political fiction. The president and his aides have decided that a Hamas-Fatah government will moderate Hamas, and that therefore such a government will not only be legitimate, it is desirable. Whereas when the first Hamas-Fatah government formed in March 2007, the Bush administration refused to have anything to do with it, today the Obama administration is actively backing its reestablishment.

As the Obama administration apparently sees it, a Hamas-Fatah government will provide cover for stepped up pressure on Israel to surrender land to the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, because Israel will no longer be able to claim that it has no Palestinian partner. A Hamas-Fatah government will also allow the US to directly support the Palestinians in Gaza, by coercing Israel to transfer full control over its borders with Gaza to Hamas (which will be represented by Fatah), and by enabling the US to provide direct aid to Palestinian Authority agencies in Gaza.

To advance the administration’s efforts to legitimize Hamas, Clinton will begin her first visit to the region at a conference in Cairo on Monday that seeks to raise some $2.8 billion for Gaza. She will pledge nearly a third of that amount – $900 million – in the name of US taxpayers.

The administration claims that none of this money, which it plans to funnel through UNRWA, will go toward funding Hamas. But this contention is demonstrably false.

UNRWA openly collaborates with Hamas. Its workers double as Hamas combatants. Its refugee camps and schools are used as Hamas training bases and missile launch sites. Its mosques are used as recruiting grounds. And as UNRWA’s willingness to transfer a letter from Hamas to US Sen. John Kerry during his visit to Gaza last week demonstrated, the UN agency is also willing to act as Hamas’s surrogate.

While it makes sense for Hamas to agree to join a unity government that will leave it in charge of Gaza and expand its control to Judea and Samaria as well, on the surface it makes little sense for Fatah to agree to a deal that would subordinate it to the same forces who brutally removed it from power in Gaza in 2007. But Fatah has several good reasons to be enthusiastic about the deal.

First, by joining Hamas, Fatah will be able to get its hands on a considerable portion of the international aid money expected to pour into Gaza. Second, by joining Hamas, Fatah neutralizes – at least in the short term – Hamas’s interest in destroying it as a political force in Palestinian society. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas’s term in office as PA chairman expired last month. Were elections to be held today, he would lose a bid for reelection to Hamas’s candidate by a wide margin. By joining a Hamas government, he will probably avoid the need to stand for reelection anytime soon.

For Israel, a US-supported Hamas-Fatah government is a hellish prospect. The political support such a government will lend to the terror war against Israel will be enormous. But beyond that, such a government, supported by the US, will likely cause Israel security nightmares.

As a goodwill gesture ahead of the opening of unity talks this week in Cairo, Fatah released the Hamas operatives its US-trained forces had arrested. Due to US pressure, over the past year, Israel allowed those forces to deploy in Jenin and Hebron, and in recent months they took some significant actions against Hamas operatives in those areas. Based on this record of achievement, Clinton and Mitchell have been pressuring Israel to transfer security control over all the Palestinian cities in Judea and Samaria to these forces.

But now that Fatah and Hamas are acting in concert, any such transfers of authority to Fatah will constitute a surrender of control to Hamas. While no Israeli government could accept such a demand, the Obama administration, which supports the Hamas-Fatah government, is likely to view Israel’s refusal to continue to cooperate with Fatah as a reason to criticize Israel.

THE OBAMA administration’s ability to disregard the will of the Israeli voters and the prerogatives of the incoming government owes a great debt to the legacy that the outgoing Olmert-Livni-Barak government is leaving behind.

The outgoing government set the conditions for the Obama administration’s policies in three ways. First, by not defeating Hamas in Operation Cast Lead, and then agreeing to negotiate a cease-fire with the terror group, the government paved the way for Hamas’s acceptance by the US and Europe as a legitimate political force.

Just as its willingness to conduct negotiations with Syria paved the way for the administration’s current courtship of Iran’s Arab client state, and its willingness to accept UN Security Council Resolution 1701placed Hizbullah on equal footing with Israel at the end of the Second Lebanon War, so, too, the outgoing government’s willingness to negotiate with Hamas has facilitated the current US and European drive to accept the Iranian proxy as a legitimate political force in Palestinian society.

Second, since Hamas’s electoral victory in January 2006, the outgoing government accepted the false narrative that the Palestinian people in Gaza, who freely voted Hamas into power and have supported its regime ever since, bear no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This false distinction between Hamas’s supporters and Hamas tied Israel’s hands each time it was compelled to defend itself against Hamas’s aggression. After all, if Gazans are all innocent, then Israel’s primary responsibility should be to make sure that they are safe. And since its counterterror operations necessarily place them at risk, those operations are fair game for international condemnation.

Moreover, at the same time that Israel accepted the dishonest distinction between Hamas and its supporters, it willingly took on responsibility for the welfare of Gaza residents. As Hamas shelled Sderot and Ashkelon and surrounding communities, Israel bowed to international pressure to supply its enemy and its enemy’s supporters with food, medicine, fuel, water and anything else that Hamas and the West could reasonable or unreasonably claim fell under the rubric of humanitarian aid. Had Israel not accepted responsibility for a population that freely chose to be led by a group dedicated to its annihilation, today Clinton would be hard pressed to pressure Israel to open its border crossings into Gaza, or to justify giving $900m. to Gaza.

Finally, through its unlimited support for Fatah, the outgoing government has made it enormously difficult for the incoming government to explain its objections to the Obama administration’s policies, either to the Israeli people or to the Americans themselves. By supporting Fatah, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government set up a false distinction between supposed moderates and supposed extremists. That distinction ignored and so legitimized Fatah’s continued involvement in terrorism, its political war against Israel and its refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist.

If Fatah is legitimate despite its bad behavior and bellicose ideology, then two things must be true. First, abstaining from terror can no longer be viewed as a precondition for receiving international legitimacy. And second, there is no reason not to accept Hamas. Based on the latter conclusion, many European leaders and Israeli leftists now openly call for conducting negotiations with Hamas. And based on the former conclusion, the Obama administration feels comfortable escalating its demands that Israel give land, security powers and money to Fatah, even as it unifies its forces with Hamas and so expands Hamas’s power from Gaza to Judea and Samaria.

DUE TO the Olmert-Livni-Barak government’s legacy, when it enters office the Netanyahu government will lack the vocabulary it needs to abandon Israel’s current self-defeating course with the Palestinians and defend its actions to the international community in the face of the Obama administration’s use of dishonest terms like "peace processes" and "moderates" and "humanitarian aid" to constrain Israel’s ability to defend itself. To surmount these challenges, Netanyahu must move immediately to change the terms of debate on the Palestinian issue.

Despite his great rhetorical gifts, Netanyahu cannot change the terms of international debate by himself. He needs two seasoned public figures who understand the nature of these challenges at his side. If Netanyahu appoints Natan Sharansky foreign minister and Moshe "Bogie" Ya’alon defense minister, he will have the top-level support he needs to overcome his predecessors’ legacy and change the nature of contemporary discourse on the Palestinians and on Israel’s strategic significance to the West in the face of staunch opposition from Washington.

Like Netanyahu, Sharansky and Ya’alon understand the basic dishonesty of the current international conversation relating to the Palestinians. Both men have come out publicly against the false policy paradigms that have guided both the outgoing government and the US and Europe. Both are capable of working with Netanyahu to free Israel from the policy trap being set for him.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Obama, the appeaser?

President Obama’s broad scheme for foreign policy has been something of a puzzle, short on specifics and long on talk about forging alliances, extending hands and "engaging."

In his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday evening, Obama offered a further hint–repeating the gist of the argument with which, as one of his first acts in office, he ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay: "Living our values doesn’t make us weaker. It makes us safer, and it makes us stronger."

So far, there’s not much reason to feel safer. If anything, the world seems to be getting less safe, at speed. On Wednesday, just hours after Obama delivered his speech, Iran began its first test-run of the nuclear reactor built with Russian help at Bushehr.

Barring forcible intervention of some kind, it’s highly likely Iran will fire up this reactor in earnest later this year–and start cranking out, on an industrial scale, spent fuel that can be processed into plutonium for nuclear bombs. That’s in addition to Iran’s uranium enrichment, another route along which Iran, according to U.N. officials, has now traveled far enough to have the makings of a bomb.

The Bushehr test run follows a month, post-Inauguration, in which Iran has launched a satellite, underscoring its interest in long-range missile capability. North Korea in short order announced its aim to soon do the same. Russia has been flexing its muscles in its continuing bid to reassert hegemony in what Moscow considers the "near abroad."

Pakistan released from house arrest the godfather of its nuclear program and chief broker-dealer of its proliferation networks, A.Q. Khan. The International Atomic Energy Agency released a report confirming the finding last year of unexplained "uranium particles" at the site of Syria’s secret nuclear reactor.

Syria has just replied by denying the reactor’s existence, but telling diplomats that the site now hosts a missile launching facility. On a related note, rockets hit Israel again this week, out of both Hamas-controlled Gaza and Hezbollah-infested Lebanon.

So what are the values with which Obama plans to address this landscape?

Are they the values now on display in U.S. policy toward Gaza, run by the terrorist group Hamas? There, despite overwhelming evidence of the Iranian-backed terror nest that Gaza has become, the U.S. seems less interested in ending the terrorist reign of Hamas than in bankrolling its territorial base.

Reports earlier this week, citing an unnamed U.S. official, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton plans to attend a funding conference in Cairo next week where she will pledge $900 million in U.S. aid for Gaza. At a Tuesday press briefing, a State Department spokesman confirmed that while details, including the exact amount, are still being worked out, a whopping pledge is indeed in the offing: "It’ll be, you know, several hundred million."

Or does Obama have in mind the values articulated by Clinton when she sidelined human rights during her visit last week to China? There, our prematurely jaded new Secretary told reporters that America and China already know each other’s stands on human rights, so needn’t bother with ritual recitations; and in any event, such issues as human rights "can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and security crises."

Will we be living by the values implied in the Obama administration’s decision to "engage" in preparations for the United Nations Durban II conference scheduled this April in Geneva. This conference, convened in the name of fighting "racism," is actually an exercise in censorship and condemnation directed at the free world, starting with Israel.

Durban II is a pet project of the despotic lobbying bloc that controls the 192-member UN General Assembly, which is led most of the time by the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, or OIC (headquartered in Saudi Arabia), which overlaps with the 130-member Group of 77 (currently chaired by Sudan). The Durban II conference preparations were captured from the start by such nations as Libya, Iran and Pakistan (on behalf of the OIC).

The Durban II conference is already configured to savage Israel and endorse a global gag-order on free speech about Islam. It is styled as a "review" of the U.N.’s 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa. That played out as such a bacchanal of bigotry that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.S. delegation to walk out.

Under President Bush, America declined to legitimize Durban II by taking part in the plans. Obama this month reversed that decision and sent a delegation to a planning session in Geneva. Now is the moment that the U.S. might usefully mount a boycott and invite other decent governments to join. Instead, Obama’s administration has been coy–which suggests he’s going to lend a U.S. stamp of legitimacy to the sordid doings of Durban II.

And then there are the values implicitly endorsed by Obama’s new Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke. He’s been talking about Iran’s reach into Afghanistan not as part of the problem, but as part of the solution. Despite allegations, some by NATO officials, that Iran has been helping Taliban "extremists"– as Obama labels the terror-dedicated Taliban — Holbrooke opined recently on an Afghan TV station that Iran (yes, the same Iran run by the totalitarian mullahs who applaud Palestinian suicide-bombers, jail and torture dissident bloggers, and execute children and homosexuals) has a "legitimate role to play in this region, as do all of Afghanistan’s neighbors."

Or will America be living the values suggested by Obama’s plan to appoint as head of the National Intelligence Council, crafting the influential National Intelligence Estimates, Charles "Chas" Freeman, sharp critic of democratic Israel and head of a Washington think-tank endowed by the King of Unfree Saudi Arabia. Freeman is also a critic of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, in which Chinese demonstrators built their own Statue of Liberty–or, as they called it, Goddess of Democracy.

Writing in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Gabriel Schoenfeld quotes a 2006 posting on a confidential Internet site, in which Freeman offered his view of "the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities"–which apparently was not the decision by China’s despots to order in China’s own army to shoot China’s own people–but "the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud."

For that matter, will America be engaging abroad on the terms of the values displayed by Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, who from his high national pulpit recently denounced America as "a nation of cowards"–with no public rebuke from Obama.

Holder was speaking about race in a speech to a domestic audience. But is anyone in the Obama administration paying attention to how such talk might feed the aggressive ambitions of America’s enemies abroad? For that matter, in appointing Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, despite the tax-cheat scandal, has Obama considered what kind of signal that sends not only to Americans but beyond our shores, regarding the value placed by the current White House on integrity in financial dealings?

What are we to make of the values involved in Obama’s signing, with fanfare, an order to shut down Guantanamo Bay, our holding tank for alleged terrorists–while holding out olive branches to assorted despotisms that specialize in consigning democratic dissidents to some of the world’s worst dungeons?

If the world is one, and Obama is a citizen, how do we reconcile the showmanship over Guantanamo with the sidelining of issues that lead to the doors of Syria’s horrific Tadmor Prison, Iran’s Evin Prison, Libya’s Abu Salim or the labor and death camps of North Korea?

On two fronts, Obama has displayed sharp concern for "values" over realpolitik–or whatever we might call the above mix. Guantanamo, as just mentioned, and Darfur, on which Obama and Vice President Biden recently held an evening pow-wow in the White House with actor George Clooney.

These are not equivalent issues. What they do have in common, however, is that, unlike the dissidents of Iran and Syria, the vanished dissenters of North Korea, the smothered voices of democracy in China, they are favorite causes of the American media and Hollywood.

Obama has been described, at least in his speech delivery, as Reaganesque. But had Ronald Reagan lived by such values, it’s a good bet he never would have delivered the mortal blows he did to the Soviet Union and its satrapies, summed up in his 1987 demand in West Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Instead, we might have heard something like "We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not always lived up to our best intentions"… Oh, wait! We did hear that, not so long ago. That was Obama, speaking last July, in Berlin.

It is one thing to tear down a wall that imprisons people within a tyranny. It is another to tear down distinctions between democratic and despotic governments, ignoring profound differences of principle in the hope that appeasing and engaging, with maybe some cash thrown in, will bring peace.

In Obama’s defense, it might be said that no government is entirely consistent in such matters. The world is too complex for that. Reagan stood up to the Soviets but flinched when Iran-backed Hezbollah bombed the marine barracks in Beirut.

George W. Bush talked big about democracy, and wrestled it through to where it stands a chance in Iraq, but otherwise tilted heavily in his second term toward engagement–negotiating with North Korea, hosting Syria at Annapolis, attending the Beijing Olympics and largely turning over the urgent matter of Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the feckless care of the European Union and the UN. If America’s values are freedom, democracy, individual liberty and justice for all, then every presidency has come freighted with some big exceptions.

But by lights of American values, the Obama presidency at its outset is charting a course in which such exceptions look more like the rule. To the great benefit of both the wider world and its own people, America has stood and prospered for a long time as a beacon of freedom. Is the future as bright with America transforming itself into a beacon of "engagement"?

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.com.