The Value of a Single Israeli Soldier

By Alan Caruba

The Talmud, a record of rabbinic discussions on Jewish law, says “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved the entire world.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)

Every Israeli soldier knows that, if captured, his nation will move mountains to secure his return. It’s not just a slogan. It’s a reality.

Since 1982 Israel has engaged in eight such swaps, the latest being the release of Gilad Shalit, kidnapped five years ago and denied the most basic rights as defined by international law. Hamas even refused to permit visits by representatives of the Red Cross.

Since 1982, more than 10,000 Palestinians serving prison sentences for terrorist and other hostile actions have been released. In 1983, more than 4,500 Palestinians prisoners were swapped for six Israeli soldiers being held in southern Lebanon. In 1985, 1,150 prisoners were exchanged for three Israelis.

The value that Israeli places on its soldiers includes even casualties of war. In 2008, it released Samir Kuntar, convicted of murdering four Israelis in 1979, plus four Hezbollah fighters in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers seized during a cross-border raid.

The swap for Shalit, also the victim of a cross-border raid, demonstrates a fundamental difference between the Israelis and their enemies. They believe that each of their soldiers is more valuable than those who war against them.

Naturally, the most recent swap evoked a wide range of views. Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum welcomed Shalit’s reunion with his family as did thousands of Israelis, but said that “joy is tempered by the bitter realities of statecraft” calling the Israeli policy “the sentimentalization of strategy.” He thought the swap “poison(ed) the future” for Israel.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu disagreed. “As a leader who sends IDF soldiers every day to defend Israeli citizens, I believe that mutual responsibility is not just a slogan, but one of the foundations of our existence here.”

Netanyahu knows that Arabs have been kidnapping and ransoming people for the whole of Islam’s 1400 years and that it was standard practice among the desert tribes where the religion first took root. Islam is based on the promise of paradise for its adherents when they die; particularly its jihadist warriors.

Hamas and Fatah indoctrinate Palestinian children to want to be suicide bombers, but Judaism is based on the premise that life is God’s greatest gift and is to be valued above all else. Former Prime Minister, Golda Meir, said, “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

Bill Levinson, writing about the swap, had perhaps the best interpretation of what occurred. He referred to the famous Chinese tract, Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”, suggesting that “Hamas might have played squarely into the hands of the Mossad and/or Shin Bet”, Israel’s highly effective and feared intelligence agencies.

“Israel might have just planted 50, 100, or even more double agents among the Palestinians who will cooperate, for example, in setting up Hamas terrorists to be killed or locating Palestinian rocket batteries for destruction whenever Israel considers this necessary.”

Sun Tzu wrote, “The enemy’s spies who have come to spy upon us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.”

Had the Israelis merely released one or a few prisoners their return would evoke suspicion, but with more than a thousand such prisoners it will prove impossible for Hamas to know which among them are double agents.

No people survive more than three thousand years against the greatest of odds and a multitude of enemies without learning a few lessons along the way. Hamas will pay the price in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

President Cliche

By Alan Caruba

“Peace is more than just the absence of war.”

“So let there be no doubt…”

“We stand at a crossroads of history.”

“There is no excuse for inaction.”

Fewer people at home and around the world are paying any attention when Barack Obama speaks. He has become President Cliché. We were all told what a great speech-maker he was and now nobody wants to listen anymore.

Ironically, in his speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, September 21, he actually said some interesting things. Too bad none of the other leaders of nations care what he has to say. At home, his popularity and approval ratings in the polls continue to plummet to new depths and to set new records for the lack thereof.

In truth, this is not good for the world or the nation. The job of President is all about leadership coupled to effective policies that address problems. In fairness, Obama arrived in the Oval Office with some of the worst problems any president has faced in the modern era. Like his predecessor, on whom he blamed everything, he continued to throw money at the financial crisis, managing to run up the nation’s debt to a historic level. Obama's economic advisors dusted off the failed policies of the New Deal and tried again. They have not worked.

The problems not only did not go away, they got worse.

The Middle East has seen the “Arab spring” in which a number of dictators were overthrown and that seems hopeful except for the fact that radical Islam is the solution that many of those same nations are likely to embrace. It doesn’t help that the U.S. President has famously demonstrated a “tilt” toward Islam as it continues to foment conflict.

The United Nations speech was a long wish list, pasted together with a lot of platitudes about how the UN has played a role in warding off World War Three. That was largely avoided because the U.S. has a couple of warehouses full of nuclear weapons and had maintained the greatest military the world had ever seen. We’re still here. The Soviet Union isn’t. Most U.S. presidents since the end of World War Two wanted to see the world abandon nuclear weapons. It didn’t. The club just kept getting bigger with China, North Korea, Pakistan, and India. Now Iran wants them as well.

The Soviet leaders weren't crazy. The Iranian ayatollahs and mullahs are.

Obama cited the UN founding Charter that called on nations to “unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.” In reality, it has always been the United States who did the heavy lifting. We fought the North Koreans and Chinese to protect South Korea. We sent arms to Israel when it was repeatedly attacked. We detoured into Vietnam and took a shellacking. After 9/11 we drove the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and we organized allies to remove Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. Most recently, we got NATO to put an end to Gaddaffi’s reign of terror.

The problem Obama has discovered is that the United Nations is composed of many of the worst dictatorships and oppressive regimes on Earth. It is an utterly corrupt institution. It will not prevent World War Three if the U.S. leaves and a large number of Americans want us to leave.

“Peace is hard. Peace is hard. Progress can be reversed. Prosperity comes slowly. Societies can split apart.” Aside from the yawning banality of this pronouncement, the President’s learning curve about the reality of life on planet Earth has been a tough one. Still, he did condemn Syria’s dictator who has been killing that nation’s people, but could not resist showing off his Islamic credentials by saying many of the victims occurred "during the holy time of Ramadan.”

Obama has discovered what presidents since the days of Harry Truman have discovered. That Palestine is not a nation and the Palestinians are a horrid group of people who refuse to live in peace with Israel. “The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own,” said the President. Guess what? The Israelis agree, but cannot get their Mamoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority to actually agree that Israel has a right to exist. Or Hamas to stop lobbing rockets into southern Israel.

In case anyone was actually listening, Obama repeated what every prior President has said, “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable. Our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring”. After spending the last two and a half years demonstrating his contempt for Israel, this comes as a real surprise and further proof that Obama will say anything to get reelected.

And then he ruined it all by saying, “To preserve our planet, we must not put off action that climate change demands. We have to tap the power of science to save those resources that are scarce. And together we must continue our work to build on the progress made in Copenhagen and Cancun.”

The major fuels of the modern world are not scarce. We live above an ocean of oil. There is enough coal in America alone to keep the lights on here for centuries. Tapping the sun and wind has proved to be a huge waste of money for two of the least productive ways to provide energy. Copenhagen and Cancun, the site of two UN climate change conferences were total failures.

President Cliché closed out saying—again—“Peace is hard, but we know it is possible. So, together, let us be resolved to see that it is defined by our hopes and not our fears.”

Our fears are what sustain peace. It is why every nation is armed to the teeth.

Obama is a national embarrassment. And he wants four more years in office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Five Wars, 63 Years of Terrorism, and Israel Survives

By Alan Caruba

The people who have given us bagels and lox, potato latkes, and chicken soup, in addition to the Old Testament, Albert Einstein, and a list of Nobel Prize winners as long as your arm, are in for yet another interesting week.

Last week, Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced that the Palestinian Authority would not make a bid for statehood at the United Nations. That may have had something to do with massive pressure from the United States, Europe, and Saudi Arabia.

You can always trust a Palestinian’s word, right? Wrong. The next day, September 15, Abbas said the PA had changed its mind and would go to the UN Security Council to ask that it grant statehood to Palestine, admitting it as a full-fledged member.

He must have gotten a call from Turkey’s Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogen, who has been spoiling for a war with Israel and has been urging the Arab League to join in. It might have something to do with Erdogen’s beef with Greece that announced that it will begin drilling for natural gas on Monday, September 19, in Cyprus’s offshore Aphrodite field. The Turkish air force has been watching the rig, owned by Houston-based Noble Energy, move from Israel to Cyprus.

This is probably as good a way to start World War Three as any. It has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the decades of bad blood between Greece and Turkey that includes a divided Cyprus.

Israel, founded in 1948, has been through five wars with its “neighbors”, endless terrorism and rocketing, and has been openly threatened with nuclear destruction by Iran.

The only thing I can guarantee you is that Israel will be blamed for whatever happens.

This week is also the occasion for the United Nations celebration of “Durban III.” It is an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel hate fest in which every other nation in the world that practices racism is ignored and Israel is identified as the lone offender; largely because the Palestinians have refused every offer of peace and statehood made to them.

To demonstrate what an obscenity the event is, one of the keynote speakers will be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president and longtime Holocaust denier. A number of nations, including U.S., Canada and Great Britain, have already made it known they will not sit through another Ahmadinejad vituperation. Israel’s PM, Bibi Netanyahu, will be on hand to offer a response.

Anyone who still thinks the United Nations is about peace needs to pay closer attention. It is about being a global central power with authority over all the nations of the world.

Durban III is about “racism.” So how does that square with a statement by Maen Arewikat, the PA Ambassador to the United States, who last week said that an independent Palestinian state would take steps to force Jews living in the West Bank to leave. In an interview with USA Today, he said it would be in the best interest of Israelis and Palestinians to “be separated.” The Nazis had a word for this, “Judenrein.”

Elliot Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council officer, told USA Today that “No civilized country would act like this.”

The United States has already made it clear that it will veto a resolution for Palestinian statehood in the UN Security Council. So far the Palestinians have rejected the Oslo Accords and every other laborious diplomatic effort to get them to settle for peaceful coexistence. They could have had statehood after the UN partitioned the former British mandate that led to Israel’s establishment, but they rejected that option in favor of trying to drive the newly minted Israelis out of their ancestral homeland.

Jordan was among those nations that lost the 1967 war. The Israelis occupied the West Bank, a name Jordan gave to the ancient Israeli provinces of Judea and Samaria. The only reason Israel has not annexed the West Bank is that asserting such a claim would add a million Arabs to its population, none of whom have any love for Israel. Meanwhile, over the years, Israeli “settlements” have grown up on the West Bank.

President Obama has made it clear that he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders. Netanyahu has made it clear that they are indefensible.

The turmoil of the “Arab spring” has altered the cold peace that had existed between Egypt and Israel. The Israeli embassy in Cairo was attacked last week and the Israelis withdrew its staff. How many times do the Egyptians have to be defeated in war before they conclude it’s a bad idea?

The Palestinian demands have Jordon on alert as well. Jordan doesn’t want to have to absorb more Palestinian refugees into its population, thus making them a majority of the Hashemite kingdom created by the British after World War One. They tried to overthrow the former king once and he drove them into Lebanon.

The Syrian despot is busy crushing a revolution. Lebanon which used to belong to the Lebanese is now controlled by Hezbollah, a Palestinian organization backed by Iran and sworn enemies of Israel.

And how do the Palestinians have a state when the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, an Iranian-backed group located in Gaza, are at each other’s throat? If it is possible, Hamas hates Israel more than the PA.

The Palestinian dilemma is that they cannot get along with each other and no other nation in the region wants to have anything to do with them.

What will happen at the United Nations this week?

What will happen if Turkey decides to attack the oil rig off the Grecian part of Cyprus?

What will happen when the Israelis who have a defense pact with the Greeks respond?

How does NATO deal with two of its member nations going to war? What affect will this have on its role in the liberation of Libya?

It’s tough enough for the Israelis and Jews around the world to deal with the growing anti-Semitism that has been spread and nurtured by Muslims, but this irrational hatred, the well spring of the Holocaust, could set off a series of events initiated by such hatred.

Having destroyed the World Trade Center towers ten years ago, World War Three would be Islam’s gift to the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Israel's Terrible Choices

By Alan Caruba

I was eleven years old when Israel declared its independence and sovereignty in 1948 with the blessing of the United Nations. World War Two and the Holocaust were over barely three years and many of Europe’s Jews needed a state of their own to rebuild their lives. Jews from throughout the Middle East were forced to flee nations in which they had lived for centuries. Over time Israel would absorb Russian Jews and others from around the world.

Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon attacked Israel days after its formal establishment. They were defeated. They would attack again in 1967 and 1973. In the course of these wars, the Arabs that had been living in Palestine, as Israel was known due to the post World War One British mandate, fled or were displaced.

They would become the world’s oldest refugee group and the only one to which a UN agency would be solely devoted, absorbing U.S. and other funding to maintain their status as opposed to helping them assimilate into neighboring Arab nations.

The Zionists, mostly secular and mostly socialist Jews from Europe and Russia who had come to Palestine earlier to prepare the path to statehood were rather surprised to find so many Arabs living there. At the time, Palestinians regarded themselves mostly as people living in southern Syria. Others were Bedouin. They were not “Palestinians”, nor had there ever been a Palestinian state.

Debating what the Israelis should do regarding the Palestinians has become a constant topic of U.S. foreign policy as well as that of most nations. It is, however, a debate that can only be decided by the Israelis and Palestinians and it is a cliché to say that one cannot achieve peace with someone who repeatedly says they want to kill you.

I have written about Israel over the years and maintained that it had a historic right to the land. After more than sixty years of ceaseless jihad—happening still—I have come to regard Palestinians as (1) intractably intent on driving out the Jews and (2) and incapable of establishing a state of their own.

Granting the Palestinians statehood when they have been denied the right to vote by their own leaders since 2005 says it all. Israel has been a true democracy since its founding. Neither the Palestinian Authority, nor Hamas, has any intention of permitting true democracy for their own people.

After reading Hirsh Goodman’s new book, “The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival”, it has made me realize the terrible choices Israel faces. The problem that confronted the original settlers of Israel still challenges its existence. Resolving the issue of the Palestinians says Goodman must be recognized IF it is at all possible.

As much as I hated and rejected the term “occupier” as applied to Israel the truth is that it has been an occupier of the West Bank as the result of wars waged against its right to exist, but an occupier nonetheless. That said, the Palestinians have always refused to accept any peace terms offered, as often as not greeting them with terror campaigns directed against Israel.

Hirsh is a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security at Tel Aviv University. Between 1986 and 1989 he was the strategic fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Born in South Africa in 1946, his family immigrated to Israel in 1965 where he has lived in Jerusalem. He’s been a journalist and, as such, has had a front row seat on the politics, the wars, the intifadas, and all other aspects of life in Israel.

The Israel he describes is one with a parliamentary government that is divided by far too many political parties, each representing competing views and agendas, and largely dysfunctional except in the unifying threat of an attack. It is a very small nation; its population largely concentrated in its major cities.

In Jerusalem, Jews went from being 74% of the population in 1967 to 64% by the end of 2010. “Today there is virtual parity between 5.7 million Jews and 5.4 million Arabs in Israel and the territories.”

In a decade the Arabs will outnumber the Jews of Israel. Hirsh's data, however, is subject to challenges. (See end note)

It is demography, the study of population increases and declines that poses a greater challenge to the future of Israel than even hostile neighbor states. It is increasingly essential to establish peace with the Palestinian Authority to provide Israel’s Arabs with a nation of their own, though many who are already Israeli citizens will likely choose to remain citizens in the only Middle Eastern nation to offer them freedoms found in no other.

Hamas in Gaza, hostile even to the PA, is a problem that will have to be dealt with later.

Hirsh puts it bluntly. “Can Israel survive? Of course it can. The question is what kind of Israel it will be and what kind of neighbors it might enjoy. How Israel tackles the internal issues of the Hareidim (ultra orthodox) and the Israeli Arabs is important, even critical.”

“But even more important, the nature of Israeli survival depends on whether it remains an occupier or a tyrannical overlord. In continued occupation lies the deepening of internal dissent between the settlers and the rest of Israel, between the Right and the left, those who claim to speak in the name of God and the rest of us. Occupation will lead to the erosion of Israel’s moral fiber.”

And Hirsh knows that “Israel is not totally the master of its own destiny. It cannot make peace by itself. It cannot alone influence, let alone control, what happens in the region.”

What is happening is the widespread movement of Arabs to rid themselves of the dictators that have run nations from the Maghreb nations where Africa meets the Mediterranean, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and others such as Syria’s Assad and even some Gulf nations like Bahrain.

How the Middle East looks after the dust settles is anyone’s guess. If history is any guide, these nations will simply replace old despots with new ones.

So long as the Palestine issue exists it conveniently provides Israel’s neighbors and others the excuse to condemn it. Until the election of President Barack Hussein Obama, the United States had always been a steadfast ally, but he has undermined that long relationship.

Thus Israel, a pariah among nations with far worse records in war, peace and human rights faces some terrible choices. One choice, its right to self defense and to exist as Jewish state is non-negotiable.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

http://www.theettingerreport.com/Demographic-Scare.aspx
Mr. Hirsh's data regarding Israel's demographic makeup is challenged by others with alternative data. -- AC

Iran Attacks Israel Using Palestinian Proxies

By Alan Caruba

If you think that the attack by Palestinians on Israelis along Egypt’s Sinai border is just another in the long history of attacks from Gaza, you’re not paying attention.

The new round of rocket attacks were planned and orchestrated out of Tehran, Iran using missiles smuggled into Gaza through a Sinai that is barely under the control of the Egyptians.

The Arab Spring is being manipulated by the Iranian ayatollahs whose goal of destroying Israel has been central to their actions since 1979. They have created proxy armies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, but there are reports that even Hamas was taken by surprise when the Iranian controlled group, Jihad Islami, perpetrated the attacks.

Palestinians have been famous for seizing defeat whenever even the possibility of peace could be achieved or statehood gained. Middle East analysts now believe that statehood is irrelevant to the Iranians for whom the Palestinians have always been their pawns. This has been true as well of the region’s Arab nations.

The Palestinians have a history of greeting Israeli efforts for peace with renewed violence. A perfect example is Gaza, a strip of land from which Israel withdrew in 2005, forcing out Jewish residents, along with those in four settlements in the northern West Bank. In return, Gaza became a launching area for 12,000 rockets directed at Israel and, after three years of extraordinary restraint, Israel responded in late December 2008 with Operation Cast Lead, a military action, to discourage further attacks. They began again last week.

As always, Israel is denounced as the aggressor, the perpetrator of violence against the Palestinians who initiated the attack. Moreover, the Palestinians are divided among themselves. In order to seize control of Gaza, Hamas forced representatives of the Palestinian Authority to retreat to Rahmallah in the West Bank.

The victims of the latest attack included an Israeli commuter bus, civilian cars, and soldiers on patrol; eight Israelis died. The Israelis retaliated, dealing out punishment against the terrorists who planned the attack and were engaged in rocketing. Caught in the fog of battle, several Egyptian soldiers were killed.

There are reports from inside Gaza that the Palestinian Authority has been talking about the need to escalate “popular protests” against Israel and, while Mahmoud Abbas, the PA leader, has said he is opposed to armed struggle, he has also “repeatedly voiced his full support for a ‘popular intifada’ in the West Bank.”

For Americans and other westerners, it is necessary to understand that when the PA and other Palestinian spokespersons say one thing, it usually means the opposite. Palestinians and those who must deal with them do not trust one another and it is pure folly for others to do so. The role of Iran only adds a new layer of deceit.

The UN has never objected to China’s occupation of Tibet, but tiny Israel has been under constant attack by the UN as the “occupier” of lands secured in the wake of the 1967 war that was initiated as Egypt made plans to attack. Joined by Jordan and Syria, both nations lost territory that included, for Jordan, the so-called West Bank. It is composed of ancient Israel's provinces of Judea and Samaria.

To achieve peace with Egypt, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula. Until the recent overthrow of the Mubarack regime there was peace. Now the Egyptian military has aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood and, thus, the prospect for war has escalated.

The bid for Palestinian statehood, as one longtime observer puts it, “is being sold as a test of legitimacy.” What legitimacy can it have when Palestinians have ceaselessly attacked Israel before and since Yasser Arafat formed the Palestinian Liberation Authority? What legitimacy can it have when Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah are sworn to the destruction of Israel?

Put simply, there never was a nation of Palestine. The areas claimed and fought over by the PA and Hamas barely function as a nation. They were Israel's. They are Israel's.

The so-called Palestinians are the oldest “refugee” group in modern history. They have been sustained by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for over six decades. It is the same UN that has organized and held several hate fests against Jews, dubbed Durban conferences. Among the speakers at the next one to be held September 22 will be Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran.

The Middle East has been in turmoil since the Tunisians overthrew their longtime dictator, followed by the Egyptian removal of Mubarack, the current effort to remove Libya’s Gadhafi, and the Syrian people’s efforts to drive out Basher Assad. The Iranians have sought to turn all these events to their own advantage and agenda.

In sum, an entire region in transition and its people seek real freedom and real justice. They won’t have it if the Iranians continue to manipulate events, the latest of which has been to provoke a war with Israel.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Epicenter of Anti-Semitism

By Alan Caruba

Anti-Semitism has a very long history.

In June, Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak, a Jewish historian, posted a section of her forthcoming book, noting that “The Roman Empire committed a genocide of the Jewish people under its occupation (63 BCE – 324 CE) of the land of Israel. From about 3,000,000 Jews in the first century CE (Common Era), about 200,000 survived until the 7th century, most of them killed or enslaved.”

How does this differ from the Arab agenda that has existed since the day that the modern state of Israel was resurrected and was immediately attacked by five Arab nations in 1948?

Islam’s exponents in Hamas and Hezbollah have always made it clear that the purpose of their existence is the destruction of Israel and both are instruments of Iran’s expressed intention to “wipe Israel from the map.”

The United Nations, despite its role in the recognition of Israel, is the epicenter of modern anti-Semitism and a facilitator of Jew-hatred.

It has provided a shameless platform for every virulent call for the destruction of Israel and the Jews. If for no other reason, the UN has no right to exist. The United States should not be a participant or party to this obscenity.

The UN’s role in the furtherance of global anti-Semitism is so manifest it is impossible to ignore. Its sponsorship of the Durban conferences, allegedly to oppose racism, has fostered the most egregious anti-Semitism. In September 2009, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the conference and repeated every tired lie about Judaism and Jews. Out of 192 UN members, only eleven got up and left. The United States and Israel had chosen not to attend.

In September 2010 Ahmadinejad used his UN invitation to New York to claim that that “segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the (9/11) attack” on behalf of “the Zionist regime”; only seven nations including the U.S. departed the General Assembly.

Simply not attending these events without a strong, vocal denunciation is a weak response.

The “tilt” of the Obama administration against Israel has only encouraged Arab states. In the two and a half years Obama has been in office, he has expressed support for a mosque within sight of Ground Zero, has openly insulted the Israeli Prime Minister on his first trip to Washington, and backed a UN investigation into the Turkish flotilla to Gaza, among other overt acts.

Most recently, the UN leadership endorsed the Iranian-sponsored “World Without Terrorism” conference on June 25-26. It was a confab attended by some of the leading actors when it comes to terrorism including Sudan and Pakistan, both of which were hosts to the late Osama bin Laden. By far the leading facilitator for terrorism is, of course, Iran. This Alice-in-Wonderland approach to the truth is typical of Arab and Persian Islamic deception and incitement.

In June, the UN General Assembly elected Iran as one of its vice presidents and Qatar as its president. Each will begin a year-long term in September. Durban III is scheduled for September 22, 2011.

The Palestinians will push for recognition as a nation-state in the General Assembly where the U.S. has no veto. Former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, noted that “General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, and that body has no authority to recognize states, although its actions can be politically powerful, as the 1975 ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution demonstrated.”

Bolton is urging Congress to make it clear that any resolution to recognize Palestinian statehood will result in a cutoff of funds to the UN, but not to separate agencies such as the World Health Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and others.

From the days of ancient Rome, to the last century’s Holocaust, to the present existence of the United Nations, anti-Semitism remains an evil component in the affairs of the world

© Alan Caruba, 2011

There is No Palestine

By Alan Caruba

Despite a very forthright speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Sunday in which the President stated his “unshakeable” support for Israel and cited evidence of it, the greatest obstacle he must overcome with American Jews in particular and the public in general is a growing distrust of anything he says.

When it comes to the Middle East, Palestine, and the long history of Israel as a nation, past and present, President Obama doesn’t seem to “get it.”

Simply stated, there is no Palestine. In an effort to obliterate the nation of Israel, the Roman emperor Hadrian ordered that its name be changed to Palestine, a Greek word for Philistine, but other than this there never was a Palestine nation, nor is there one now.

To be a nation, it has to have been founded and it has to have specific borders. It has to have a capitol, major cities, an economy and currency of its own, and a stable government. It has to be recognized as a nation by other nations. None of these factors exists for the so-called West Bank and Gaza.

If the so-called Palestinians deserve their own state, why not the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey, and many other groups that could be deemed equally deserving?

What is referred to as Palestine is the wholly-owned creation of the United Nations through its UN Relief Works Agency, a strange invention that has existed solely to maintain the Arabs in the two areas mentioned as permanent refugees for generations. Sustained by millions in “relief” after the areas in question were lost in wars perpetrated against and lost to Israel in 1948 and 1967

There is never any mention of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who, over the course of the wars against Israel, became real refugees, forced to flee to Israel from Arab nations. In 1948, 140,000 fled Algeria, 75,000 fled Egypt, 135,000 fled Iraq, and 265,000 fled Morocco, along with others from Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. They were absorbed by Israel.

The West Bank and Gaza, historically part of Israel, are myths created to regain territory lost in the wars waged against Israel by Jordan and Egypt. In the 1967 war, Jordanians were driven out of Judea/Samaria and out of Jerusalem. The Gaza Strip had been occupied by Egypt. The Golan Heights had originally been ceded to Syria by a British-French agreement and likewise was lost to Syria in war.

The suggestion that Israel “return” to its 1967 borders is ludicrous. Obama might just as well suggest that Texas, the Southwest and California be returned to Mexico. All were prizes of war. All constituted parts of the North American continent settled by British and European immigrants to the New World.

By contrast, Israel became a nation in 1321 BCE, 2,000 years before the rise of Islam. Arabs only began to refer to themselves as Palestinians in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the State of Israel. The only period in which there was Arab control followed the conquest in 635 BCE and it lasted only 22 years. For 3,300 years, Jerusalem had been the Jewish capital. It is mentioned more than 700 times in the Torah, the Jewish Holy Scriptures and not even once in the Koran.

Until recently, the Palestinian Liberation Authority and Hamas were in a state of war with one another, the PLO was the creation of Yassir Arafat and Hamas is the wholly owned creation of Iran, as is Hezbollah. They exist for no other purpose than the annihilation of Israel.

Neither “Palestinian” group has ever accepted any effort to establish a separate state for self-rule, asserting instead that Israel must be destroyed. What has Israel done? It withdrew from its occupation of southern parts of Lebanon, only to be attacked again from there in 2006. It forced Israelis to abandon their homes and businesses in Gaza, ceding the land in an effort to encourage negotiations toward a two-state solution.

There is no Palestine and there never was. The name was imposed by a Roman emperor in retribution for the resistance of Jews against Rome’s control of their land. The name was adopted by Yassir Arafat as the self-proclaimed leader of the Arabs left behind by the wars and living, as is commonly asserted, in “occupied territories.”

Not once has any representative of the so-called Palestinians ever accepted a negotiated path to separate statehood. Instead, the “Palestinians” have sent suicide bombers and rockets into Israel and storm its borders to celebrate the “Nakba”, an Arab word for catastrophe, commemorating the wars waged against and lost to Israel.

The “Palestinians” and Arabs do not want peace. Whatever peace exists between their nations is tenuous at best and the citizens of many of those nations have been in full revolt against the dictators that ran them from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria to Yemen. The only thing that “unites” them is their irrational hatred of Israel, a hatred shared by many European Union nations and, of course, the United Nations.

In just over 600 days President Obama’s regime will end. He will no doubt link arms with former President Jimmy Carter to become another huge embarrassment to the United States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Five Dead Jews

By Alan Caruba

For the same reason it is difficult to comprehend what will surely be a large loss of life following the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, it is hard to grasp that, halfway through the last century, when I was a child, Nazis killed six million Jews for being Jews.

The mind rejects such insanity. We recoil from such barbarity, but we can understand what it means when a family of five is slain in their beds while they slept. That is what happened to the Fogel family in their home last Friday in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. They were killed for being Jews.

The victims were Rabbi Udi Fogel, 36, who taught at the Itamar yeshiva; his wife, Ruth Fogel, 34. Yoav, age 11. Eldad, age 4. And tiny baby, Hadas. Eldad was stabbed in the heart. His baby sister had her throat cut. The others died in a similar fashion.

Their blood-soaked bodies were found by their sister, Tamar, age 12, when she returned home that evening and mercifully spared were Roi, age 8, and Yishai, age 2, as they slept in another room.

There is a fence around Itamar, but for whatever reason, it was scaled and when the guards, alerted by a motion detector, found no evidence of a breach, they assumed some animal had set it off. They were wrong.

The animals, the killers, were a team of Hamas murderers and, when word of the murders spread throughout Gaza, candy was given out to children there to celebrate.

This occurred in an Israel now regularly called an “apartheid” nation for seeking to defend itself against a people, the so-called Palestinians, who have refused to recognize its nationhood for more than sixty years. It is a nation isolated and under attack in the United Nations despite the fact that organization supposedly exists to peacefully resolve issues, not stoke the fires of hatred as it does.

News of the murders was given a tepid rebuke by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who denounced “violence by any quarter” without the specificity of naming Hamas.

In a phone call to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu made it clear that terrorism was not going to restructure the settlement map on the West Bank and, to back it up, Israel announced it would authorize the construction of 500 new homes in West Bank settlements, 100 for each of the murdered Fogels.

There is a particular irony in the murder of the Fogels. They had originally lived in Gaza and had moved to Itmar in 2007 when, under former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, they were among the Israelis who were forcibly removed by their own nation in order to provide Palestinians a strip of land on which to build a state of their own.

Instead, the Palestinians used Gaza as a forward line of war to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets into Israel. It took Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to dampen their enthusiasm for that. By then, Hamas had driven the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza at gunpoint.

DEBKAfile, an Israeli news agency, noted that the attack was “the first of its kind in years. Hamas websites hailed the murder as ‘heroic’, without taking any responsibility.”

The murders come at a time when Rep. Peter King is holding congressional hearings on the threat of radicalized Muslims in America who pose a threat to our lives. He has been attacked for putting the spotlight on this threat despite the fact that we are now almost a decade passed 9/11 and there have been the Fort Hood murders, as well as a series of attacks, planned, foiled, and near misses, in the past decade.

The Israelis are not so naïve, so fearful to face the truth about Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular. They are not so politically correct they will not say words like “terrorism” or “Islamic jihad.” They are not led by idiots like Obama’s National Security advisor who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is a “secular” organization.

Light a candle for the Fogels. Say a prayer for the Fogels. They are your family too.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Waiting and Watching Egypt

By Alan Caruba

Today we watch events unfold in far off places often in real time. What we lack, however, is context. Most Americans and, I suspect, others in Western nations are frequently at a loss when it comes to knowing anything about the culture and history, past and recent, of nations in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia.

What we do know about the Middle East is that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran along with the rise of al Qaeda and other jihadist organizations, things have not gone well for American and Western interests.

How different everything might have been if U.S. troops had occupied Tehran in 1979 and demanded the return of our diplomats after they had been taken hostage.

After World War One, what was once the Ottoman Empire that ruled the Middle East and areas of the Maghreb in northern Africa, the French and the British got out their maps at the Versailles conference to literally draw new lines on it and create new nations that were, in fact, colonies. They included Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and a strip of territory called the Palestinian mandate. The chief prize at stake was oil.

After World War Two was concluded many of the former British and French colonies, including India, and much of Africa declared their independence. The Saudi Royal family had already thrown in its lot with America. In Egypt, the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, was jointly owned by the British and French. The British called the shots there through its royal family.

The Egyptian defeat in the 1948 war in response to the establishment of Israel stirred discontent among its military leadership. Gamal Abed Al Nasser ultimately emerged as Egypt’s leader after a July 1952 bloodless coup against King Farouk and the royal family. In 1956 Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.

Here’s what it gets very instructive. In 1956 the British and French, with Israeli involvement, sent troops to seize the Suez Canal. That operation was quashed by President Dwight Eisenhower who made it known that the United States would not support it. The era of colonization was over.

What had been occurring, however, was an era of pent-up anger throughout the Middle East focused on the establishment of Israel and resentment of the former colonial powers. The British had earlier installed a royal family in Iraq. A new component was opposition to the dictators like Hussein who emerged to run Iraq. Another example is the fact that first the British and then the Americans had controlled Iran’s oil through its royal family. Other royal families continue to control mideast oil.

Ironically, it took George W. Bush to rid Iraq of three decades of despotic rule by Saddam Hussein. However, this has to be balanced against the fact that the U.S. has also supported the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. It was, however, Egypt, as well as Jordan, who made peace with Israel.

Arab military defeats gave way to support for the so-called Palestinians as pawns in the war against Israel. The main support of the Palestinian "refugees" is the United Nations, sixty-three years after 1948 and subsequent wars to destroy Israel. Iran has funded two Palestinian terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas.

At the heart of the turmoil in the Middle East is a movement to restore Islam to its former glory when it literally knocked on the doors of Europe. The jihadists such as Osama bin Laden dream of a worldwide Islamic caliphate. As in the early spread of Islam, it would be achieved through war, but the tactic employed would be terrorism and the fact of Islam’s expanding population worldwide.

An irony of the Islamist movement is its opposition to the monarchies ruling Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, all of whom have proven to be good allies to the United States at the same time they have funded the spread of Islam. In Egypt, under Mubarak, the jihadists known as the Muslim Brotherhood were ruthlessly suppressed. The Saudis actually exiled bin Laden.

What the world has witnessed has proven to be very bad news for the West. The 1979 Iranian revolution has given us Mamoud Ahmadinejad and a regime plotting through proxies to control Lebanon via Hezbollah and Gaza via Hamas, while it plots to control Iraq and eyes the Gulf States as well. Its closest ally these days is Syria. It has long sought to become a nuclear power. Its proclaimed goal is to destroy Israel.

Democracy has not turned out to be much help in the Middle East. Rigged elections in Egypt kept Mubarak in power for three decades. Saddam Hussein used terror and the Baath Party to achieve and hold on to power. Elections were rigged in Afghanistan. Pakistan has been mainly ruled by its military.

Lebanon was a democracy and now its prime minister comes from the ranks of Hezbollah. Turkey has had a long run of real democracy, but only because its military ensured that Islamists did not take over.

Americans have a lot at stake and, of growing concern to many, a President, Barack Hussein Obama, whose first television interview was with Al Arabia, who bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, and whose first global lengthy outing was a tour of the Middle East to demonstrate how friendly he was to their cause.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Israel Holds Its Breath

By Alan Caruba

After more than three thousand years of varying calamities, Jews have perfected survival against the odds. There is a joke they tell about “Jewish Zen”:

“Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.”

Right now, Israel and those who support the Jewish State are holding their breath, watching events in Egypt. What is happening is not inconsequential, given that Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979 after a series of wars in which it had been soundly defeated.

When the flamboyant Gamal Abed Al Nasser died, Anwar al-Sadat became Egypt’s president and, together with Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, they turned a corner toward peace. The treaty was greeted with angry demonstrations throughout the Arab world. Sadat, the peacemaker, was assassinated by Muslim zealots.

At that point Hosni Mubarak became Egypt’s president and he has held the position for three decades as the head of what is essentially a one party system. There have been a half dozen assassination attempts on his life. He is 83 years old. Like most Arab nations and other third world nations, he ran an authoritarian regime.

The peace deal included the return of the Sinai desert to Egypt by Israel. Under former Prime Minister Arial Sharon, Israelis who had lived in the Gaza strip were forced to leave and it was turned over to the Palestine Authority in a “land-for-peace” swap. The peaceloving Palestinians turned Gaza into a launch site for thousands of rockets into Israel.

Today, Egypt shares a border with Gaza which features an unknown number of tunnels used to smuggle in weapons and goods. Gaza is run by Hamas, a terrorist Palestinian organization that drove the PA out at gunpoint.

So the fate of Egypt is of importance to Israel. To Israel’s north, another terrorist group, Hezbollah, has taken over the government of Lebanon without firing a shot. Christians, Druze and Marists, along with others in Lebanon have once again lost control over their nation, formerly peacefully governed by a constitutional coalition of Christians and Muslims.

None of this bodes well for Israel as it looks around at Middle Eastern and northern African nations in which governments are being overthrown for being noxious oppressors.

Of great importance to Israel at this time is the question of what action the United States will or will not take regarding the current turmoil. Since the Egyptian uprising appears to be a genuine people’s rebellion, the question is who ends up with the reins of power there? My bet is on the military.

Meanwhile, however, yet another United Nations resolution aimed at Israel like a guided missile is making its way through the Security Council and, at this point, only the U.S. can shoot it down with a veto.

The UN resolution declares that any construction in the West Bank by Israel is illegal, even if it is in its capitol, Jerusalem.

No American administration has been able to broker peace between Israel and the so-called Palestinians, the oldest existing group of “refugees” in the world.

Following the end of a failed war against the then new state of Israel, the Arab population that fled became the sole object and purpose of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). No other refugee group in the world enjoys this status.

There is a Palestinian problem because there is a United Nations problem.

The United Nations is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of its Middle Eastern and Islamic members.

What was to be a UN emergency response in May 1950, UNWRA has cost American taxpayers billions since then. Today, UNRWA continues to operate in both the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank and the Hamas-ruled Gaza, taken from the PA in June 2007. As noted in a recent article by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, in 2007 UNRWA employed more than 29,000, all but 200 of whom were Palestinians. Its “facilities and personnel have been tied to numerous terrorist attacks on Israel.”

Sixty years of stalled and failed peace talks, as well as terror campaigns against Israel, have deligitimized Palestinian claims.

Following Israel’s operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to stop Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket attacks, the Obama administration promised $400 million for Gaza and $600 million for the West Bank.

Though not confirmed, the rumor-mill in Washington is saying that the Obama administration will not veto the latest in an endless succession of anti-Israel resolutions.

If true, President Obama would become the first U.S. President to not defend Israel’s sovereignty.

If true, it would signal to the entire Middle East and the world that America is abandoning the only true democracy in the region and its longtime ally.

The United Nations was founded in 1945 after World War Two. It has since become a cesspool of corruption and an international cancer determined to become a one-world government. The time is long overdue for the U.S. to stop funding it and, indeed, to withdraw from it.

If Obama does not veto the Security Council resolution, the U.S. will pay for that decision for decades to come. Israel will be in ever more certain peril.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

D-Day - June 6, 1944 - Then and Now

By Alan Caruba

There is a cruel calculus of war. It is the number of casualties required to win. Beyond that, it is the consequences of losing.

Sixty-six years ago, on June 6, 1944, the greatest armada of ships and men laid siege to the beaches of Normandy, France, in an invasion that would put an end to the Nazi conquest of Europe.

The invasion was divided into sectors involving U.S., Canadian, and British troops, including airborne. Conservative estimates are that the U.S. alone lost 4,696. The U.K. lost 1,043. The Canadians lost 1,204. The total is 8,443 and, in general, it is believed to have been closer to 9,000.

As the battles raged on, pushing into Germany, some American troops under the Supreme Allied Command of Dwight Eisenhower came upon the Nazi concentration camps. Eisenhower ordered all possible photos to be taken and that Germans from the surrounding villages be required to see the camps and even be made to bury the dead.



In words to this effect, Eisenhower said, “Get it all on record now, get the films, get the witnesses, because somewhere down the road of history, some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Having previously attacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan, beginning in 2003 American and allied forces engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom, invading Iraq. Between then and now, the total American losses have been just over 4,400 while the British have lost 179 and others 139 for a total of 4,720.

In seven years of combat to create a democratic government there, the losses have been half of what was lost in the D-Day invasion.

As Eisenhower predicted, in Iran and throughout the Middle East and everywhere else that Jews are hated, the Nazi Holocaust, the deliberate killing of six million Jews, is denied.

In the past week, the doyen of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, demanded the Israelis “go home, to Germany, to Poland.” She could have added that the Israelis return to the Arab nations they had to flee following the founding of Israel in 1948 or the Russian émigrés who fled persecution in the former Soviet Union. There are six million Jews who call Israel their home.

The Israelis are home. After an exile of 2,000 years, they returned to their home and restored their nation.

On September 11, 2001, the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. took approximately 3,000 American lives.

In late May, John Brennan, the Assistant to the President and Deputy Senior Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, gave a speech in which he described the people who flew commercial airliners into those buildings and who have not stopped plotting to kill more Americans as victims of “political, economic and social forces” who should not be described in “religious terms.”

He repeated the Obama administration’s assertion that the enemy is not “terrorism”, dismissing it as a “tactic” because, he said, terrorism is “a state of mind.” Then he added that the word “jihad” should not be applied to 9/11 and the subsequent attacks such as the Fort Hood murders.

Brennan described jihad is “a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community” adding “there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children.” Brennan denied the jihad that justified those murders.

Jihad has never really meant anything other than the total conquest of the world to impose Islam.

D-Day was the beginning of an epic struggle to restore and protect Western civilization against the barbarism of Nazism and every day that has passed prior to and since the establishment of Israel in 1948 has been part of this struggle, the legacy of that struggle.

Since the end of World War Two, Americans have sacrificed their lives in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, joining that struggle wherever freedom is challenged, wherever the barbarism of enslavement has asserted itself.

Does anyone think that the Israelis, on the frontlines of Western civilization in a barbaric region of the world, will not ultimately have to defend themselves against Iran?

That they are not now defending themselves against Turkey that has allied itself with the Palestinians who have no legitimate claim to Israel or Jerusalem, a city holy to Judaism and Christianity? Against a people who would dare to build a mosque within a short walk from ground zero in New York?

Does anyone think we should not have landed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944?

Does anyone think that freedom is not worth fighting for and even dying for?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Israel's Next War Begins

By Alan Caruba

As this is being written, the news is about an Israeli effort to interdict a “humanitarian” flotilla of ships that refused to dock at its port of Ashdod to have its passengers and cargo checked. When Israeli troops boarded a Turkish ship in international waters on Sunday they were met with violent resistance that led to casualties.

The Israeli navy stopped six ships ferrying 700 people and 10,000 tons of supplies toward the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave.

I don’t know what the flotilla was delivering, but it is likely that among its passengers were Hamas terrorists and that there are weapons hidden among its cargo. That is why they refused orders to proceed to the Israeli port where tons of cargo routinely docks before making its way to Gaza.

The flotilla was a deliberate provocation. Naturally, much of the world will blame Israel.

Having been in a state of war since its founding, Israel routinely has interdicted shipments of weapons to the PLO and Hamas. One of the most notable was in January 2002 when the Karine-A, a Palestinian ship, was found to have more than fifty tons of Iranian weapons and explosives.

Largely unreported are the fierce battles Egyptian Special Forces are waging in central Sinai with Bedouin tribesman smuggling weapons and fighters into Gaza on behalf of al Qaeda. As always, the Middle East is an asylum for the insane who, when not trying to kill Israelis, stay busy killing one another.

I believe that war will come again soon and will originate in Lebanon. In the end, the decision will be Iran’s, not Syria’s, its sock puppet and stalking horse. Syria has reportedly provided the Lebanon-based Hezbollah an estimated 1,000 Iranian-made rockets and missiles, all aimed at Israel.

The last time the Israelis had to deal with Hezbollah aggression from Lebanon was in 2006. The conflict lasted 34 days. It is widely agreed that the Israeli Defense Force performed poorly and, not surprisingly, the most criticism came from the Israelis themselves.

Part of the problem at the time was an indecisive Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who has since been replaced by Benyamin Netanyahu. If “Bibi” gets any intelligence regarding a pending attack, he will not wait around for it to start. On word of the confrontation with the flotilla, he cancelled a June 1 meeting with President Obama and returned to Israel.

You may recall that in March Barack Obama accorded Netanyahu one of the nastiest receptions ever given an Israeli Prime Minister. Only the Dalai Lama fared worse, being ushered out the White House back door.

One might reasonably assume that the president is no fan of Jews after having spent twenty years in the Chicago pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright say hateful things about them and about America.

Obama has many close ties with black nationalists and anti-Semites such as Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. One of his longtime associates is Palestinian apologist Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor.

There is ample reason to believe another attack on Israel is likely. The Syrians have reportedly moved the number of their army units to the Israeli border and have been supplying arms to Hezbollah ever since the last war.

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been saying ever more crazy things of late. He even lectured the United Nations on the coming of the Twelfth Imam, a Shiite spook whose return will require massive worldwide death and destruction. More recently Mahmoud got into a fight with the Russians over the proposed UN sanctions. Iran is running out of friends even if its oil is not.

The Israelis have been practicing war games that include long distance flights, the purpose of which may have something to do with dropping some very big bombs on places with Persian names.

While all this is going on, the United States is significantly building up its fighting strength in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf regions. Carrier Strike Group 10, led by the USS Harry S. Truman, pulled up anchor on May 21st and headed to the Middle East. That will put two carrier groups in the area. More vessels, including guided-missile cruisers and destroyers will be there as well.

No matter how it plays out, the Middle East is going to turn into a shooting gallery again. The Iranians, Syrians, and Palestinians in Hezbollah and Hamas are living testimony to why all those people demanding that Israel make peace with them are clueless or worse.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Futility of Seeking Peace with the Palestinians

By Alan Caruba

Here’s a notion worth considering; you cannot make peace with people that want to kill you.

It is impossible to make peace with people who will not sit down and negotiate with you on any other terms than their own.

It is beyond impossible if you are seeking peace with people who regard your existence as a “nakba”, a disaster, a catastrophe.

Several U.S. administrations have foundered in their efforts “to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” That conflict would end the minute the Palestinian entities, whether they are the Palestinian Liberation Authority and/or Hamas would accept Israel as it is in 2010 and not demand that history be erased and that it return to its 1967 borders.

How are the Israelis expected to make peace with two Palestinian factions that don’t recognize the other as legitimate? Hamas actually drove the PLO out of Gaza at gunpoint.

Making peace is hard enough when the adversary is supported by a United Nations that has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation on Earth. Now that the current U.S. administration is led by a president whose hostility to Israel is embarrassingly evident, it makes it even more impossible.

This is, after all, a president who got in a snit over the building of new housing in Jerusalem, the capitol of Israel, by Israelis.

Would you trust the U.S. as a partner in peace when it is led by a president whose first act in office was to give an interview with the Middle East television channel, al Jazeera? Who then followed it up with a tour of the Middle East and a speech in Cairo that blamed America for its “mistakes” and its alleged failure to satisfy the demands of a Middle East.

The Middle East is the same place that spawned al Qaeda and an attack on the U.S. that killed 3,000. The Palestinians celebrated 9/11 by dancing in the streets.

There is something obscene for the current administration, filled with appointees and “czars” who are openly opposed to Israel’s right to exist, to conduct negotiations of any kind, but they began on May 6 after a break of more than a year.

These negotiations can only guarantee one result. Sometime this summer Israel will be attacked, probably from the Lebanese strongholds of Hezbollah.

The Syrians, closely allied with Iran, have been shipping in all manner of new, more dangerous rockets. Neither Hezbollah, nor Hamas, both controlled by Iran, wants peace with Israel and both will do whatever is necessary to ensure it does not occur.

You can depend on the press to dredge up all the stuff about the poor Palestinian refugees who were driven out of Israel after it was initially attacked by several Arab neighboring states. No mention will be made of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who formerly lived in Arab nations that were forced to flee to Israel and no mention will be made of the Arab Christians who also found sanctuary in Israel.

The president’s envoy, George Mitchell, will shuttle back and forth between Jerusalem and Ramallah, a half hour’s drive away in the West Bank, in an effort to convince the Palestinians to sit down at the same table with the Israelis.

The Palestinians will insist on control of parts of Jerusalem as their capitol too, they will raise the refugee issue even though two generations of Palestinians have grown up in United Nations “camps” because few Arab nations in the Middle East will grant them citizenship. They will demand that the Israelis return to their 1967 borders and end their West Bank settlements. They are not “settlements.” They are Israeli towns on land won in war from Jordan.

Even Jordan made peace with Israel. Even Egypt made peace with Israel.

The Israelis have been sitting down at the table with the Palestinians for twenty years or longer. All they have gotten are more attacks on their people. All the Palestinians have gotten is the complete and utter failure of their leaders to build a separate nation that will recognize Israel.

To have peace you must make peace.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Imam says Allah Caused the Iceland Volcano

This is the seventh century mentality with which the Israelis and the West must deal.

War & Peace at the Car Wash

By Alan Caruba

I was waiting for the crew at my local car wash to finish drying my car when a young man approached and asked where he could get the US Army decal that I display on the rear window. “The Army gives them to people who have served, veterans, and I assume to active duty members as well,” I told him.

“You were in the Army?” he asked. Oh yes, a very long time ago before you were born, I replied, noticing a distinct accent. He was joined by another young man. “Did you fight in the Middle East?” No, I said, but there has never been an absence of wars for America. We have never been free to ignore the rest of the world even if we wanted to.

In a similar fashion, as much as Israel may yearn for peace, they have never been permitted to function as a normal nation. From the hour that Israeli sovereignty was proclaimed, the nation was attacked by its “neighbors” and has, for all intents and purposes, been on a war footing ever since.

The two young men talking with me said they were Palestinians. Both came to America to find peace.

I think that tells you everything you need to know about the reality of Israeli-Palestinian relations—--if one can call the one-sided determination of the Palestinian leadership to “drive the Israelis into the sea.” Or the Iranian pledge to “wipe Israel off the map.” Or the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon being re-armed by the Iranians for whom they are a proxy army against Israel.

In the course of our chat, they said they were both from Gaza and I was reminded that the Israelis, in their futile quest for peace, had forced out their own people from the Gaza strip and turned the area over to Fatah, also known as the Palestinian Liberation Authority.

What they got in return was an endless cascade of rockets from Gaza, not just for a few weeks, but for months and years. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Hamas forced Fatah to retreat to the West Bank where they could have the protection of the Israelis who continue to desperately look for anyone with whom to negotiate a real peace.

In January of last year, the Israelis initiated Operation Cast lead in which their military targeted the sources of the Gaza rockets and looked for Hamas leaders who cravenly hid in the midst the population. The rocketing has largely stopped since then, though ugly individual attacks on Israelis have continued.

The Israeli solution has been to build a very high wall between them and the Palestinians and to maintain tight control over who passes through it. To do otherwise would be to subject their people to suicide bombers and other killers.

“Would you accept peace with Israel?” I asked. I was greeted with broad smiles. Yes, Palestinians want peace I was told, but “Hamas will not permit it.”

So, there you are. It has nothing to do with Washington’s foreign policy with regard to Israel and it has everything to do with the bad intentions of those who continue to use the Palestinian people as pawns of resistance to any Western presence in what they regard as their sacred lands.

The Islamic jihad knows no boundaries, killing Jews, Christians, Hindus and even Muslims with abandon. It took President Obama a year to say out loud that the U.S. is at war with al Qaeda. It took three days to say anything about the Christmas bomber.

Israel was sacred to the Jews for two thousand years before there ever was an Islamic religion. It was sacred to Christians for a thousand years before Islam existed. Jerusalem is never mentioned even once in the Koran, but, for reasons known only to Israel’s “neighbors”, they cannot find any reason to make peace with them.

The two young Palestinians were very happy to be living and working in America. They treated me with the greatest of respect and with good will. That’s the way it should be.

Editor’s note: The photo that accompanies this post is of a young Israeli girl attending the wedding of a friend. Note the automatic rifle slung over her shoulder. Israelis, particularly members of their defense force, never go anywhere without them. Too bad that wasn't the case at Fort Hood.

Our Short-Term Memories

By Alan Caruba

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Arabs, Arab culture, or Arab history, but I do know a bit about our own as Americans. And that worries me.

While our American values are deep-seated and enduring, our short-term memories are such that we have to be severely provoked to call on them. We tend to forget the many attacks and abuses Americans have suffered at home and abroad at the hands of Arabs and others of the Muslim faith.

I was thinking about this while watching Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, greet the returning “hero” of the Lockerbie bombing that, in December 1988, killed all 259 passengers on board, many of whom were returning college students and eleven on the ground in Scotland. A large crowd showed up to cheer for Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.

As this is being written, all across the Arab world, this acknowledged Libyan intelligence officer is being portrayed as an innocent victim of the Lockerbie bombing; someone wrongly convicted of being part of the plot. That’s what the Arab press is saying. There is virtually no crime an Arab commits that cannot be explained away so long as it involves revenge for one of their long-standing grievances.

My mind went back to the images of the Palestinians who went in the streets when they heard news of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They, too, cheered.

In Somalia, in the wake of the Black Hawk helicopter that went down in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 some of our dead warriors were dragged through the streets while crowds cheered.

When news of the abuses at Abu Graib prison became known, Americans were outraged, but in prisons across the whole of the Middle East, such abuses and much worse are commonplace. American values, however, would not permit them to go unpunished.

For three decades, Saddam Hussein maintained rape rooms and executions proceeded without trials in Abu Graib and elsewhere within his prison regime. This does not excuse what a handful of American military did, but it does put it in some perspective.

By contrast, the detainees at Guantanamo have received humane treatment with the exception of those whose information served to protect and save American lives. Even our so-called “torture” methods (enhanced interrogation) do not leave those on the receiving end maimed or dead. Ironically, our pilots and other members of the military have been subjected to water-boarding in order to prepare them for this procedure if captured.

No, it is the cheers that bother me most. It is the joy that infuses Arabs and other Muslims celebrating the killing of Americans that is a reflection of some very bad values that have kept them despised for centuries. They are values embraced by those who join or support al Qaeda or the Taliban.

So, in the wake of the latest bombing in Baghdad, I was amused to see a man-in-the-street interview with an Iraqi who complained that the American soldiers had been withdrawn too soon. He wanted them and the security they provided back.

That is the case all over the world. Our military is seemingly never welcome until after they are gone and the same threats to peace in the streets and a nation occur again.

Then there is no cheering. Only pleas for our return.

The Turmoil in the Middle East

By Alan Caruba

It sometimes seems like we have been reading and hearing about turmoil in the Middle East for our entire lives, but the facts are otherwise. For most of the last century and earlier, the Middle East was a backwater of age-old Islamic repression.

Things began to change with the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. They had backed the Germans and, already in decay, it didn’t take much of a push to end it. The winners of the war, primarily England and France, met in Versailles where they took out their maps of the region and divided it between them. Nations were created, some with ancient names like Syria and Lebanon, some with new ones like Trans-Jordan. A nation called Iraq was created.

The Saudis got very little for having cast their lot with the English. They would never trust them again and when Americans came knocking with a request to search for oil, they got the nod, not the British.

It was World War Two and its aftermath that really got the pot boiling. The Middle East had not played much of a role. Initially the war had been fought in North Africa with an eye on Libya’s oil reserves and the need to protect the Suez Canal from the Germans.

Shortly after the war’s end, India declared its independence from Great Britain and, at the same time, was partitioned to create Pakistan and Bangladesh for those of its Muslim population that did not want to live with their Hindu neighbors. By 1971, Bangladesh parted company with Pakistan and declared its own independence.

Former UK colonies became independent, but with the exception of Lebanon, nations like Syria and Iraq were controlled by despots and their cronies. Turkey opted for modernity, but sheikdoms such as Saudi Arabia remained sleepy, oil-rich backwaters of the region.

The introduction of Israel into this mix, recognized as a sovereign nation in 1947, was the catalyst for some the troubles that roil the region today. Islam’s argument with Israel is that its existence invalidates Islam’s claim to be the single religion destined to rule the world, let alone the Middle East.

If one believed the ravings of its mullahs, Iran exists for no other reason than to destroy Israel and to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam, a mythical Shiite figure, through massive global death and destruction.

More than sixty years and several lost wars later, Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank have no other purpose than to destroy Israel in the name of Palestine, a non-state entity that exists only as a welfare recipient of the United Nations and other donors. Hezbollah, located in Lebanon, is a client of Iran.

Even if there were no Israel, the endless dissatisfaction of Muslims with their lot in life would ensure that there would be strife. The issue is not Israel. It is modernity and the tantalizing prospect of true democracy for a people that have never experienced it.

The real problem for the Middle East, however, was and is Islam, a political as well as social and religious entity. Until the rest of the world is prepared to admit this, we shall all be forced to pretend that Pakistan has merely been having a few problems since its founding in 1947, that the so-called Palestinians have any legitimacy, that Islam is "a religion of peace."

Similarly, the genocide taking place in the Sudan is based in Islamic intolerance. Other human rights abuses, endemic to the Middle East, exist because the United Nations has been largely captured by its Islamic bloc of member states.

When Iran experienced its Islamic Revolution in 1979, it is doubtful its ruling mullahs ever expected to see Muslims by the tens of thousands in the streets of Tehran in 2009 protesting their brutal oppression.

It took a Green Revolution in Lebanon to expel Syria from the domination of its neighbor state. Afghanistan, as the former Soviet Union learned, should be left to itself, Islamic or not, because its tribes are a friend to neither each other nor intruders of any description.

With the exception of North Korea, the world’s attention has been captured by a Middle East in turmoil, not because Islam offers a better, more just and humane way of conducting political and social affairs, but because it fails on all counts.

The rest of the world has to stand with those brave Muslims in the streets of Tehran and everywhere else they demand what the West enjoys and represents, modernity, freedom, democracy, and a chance for a better life for all who embrace it.

The World's Most Pointless Negotiations

By Alan Caruba

With yet another meeting between the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the United States, we are witnessing the world’s oldest and most pointless negotiations, the call for a Palestinian State.

As Dan Greenfield, a freelance commentator, recently pointed out, “For 17 years, Israel, America, and just about every interested party has tried to build a Palestinian state”, noting quite accurately that such a state has existed since the founding of Jordan.

Israel was supposed to be much larger when its borders were originally planned, but Winston Churchill insisted that the Hashemites, a Saudi breakaway clan, be given a big chunk of the land from Great Britain’s Palestine Mandate, a result of the Versailles Treaty after World War I.

It was this treaty that literally divided up the former Ottoman Empire into various colonies of England and France. Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and modern day Lebanon are literally geographic inventions of this treaty. Jordan exists due to the protection and support provided by both Israel and America.

The British who, via the Balfour Letter asserted that a homeland for the Jews was their policy, betrayed the early Zionists seeking a modern homeland in Israel, their ancient homeland, when it carved out a large section of their Palestinian Mandate to be ceded to Jordan.

Following the initial war in 1947 when Arab nations attacked Israel and again in 1967, a vast “refugee” problem occurred following promises by those same Arab nations that local Arabs could return to claim all of Israel.

A permanent refugee population was created by United Nations intervention that set up UNRWA, a unique and separate agency devoted entirely to maintaining the so-called Palestinians. In place since 1950, these permanently displaced people have been funded by UNRWA and through the “charity” provided by Arab nations that have used them as pawns.

The Palestinians are now the world’s oldest “refugees.” Even when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, they have never been able to create anything resembling a nation state capable of establishing a viable economy. Instead, they turned the territory into a platform for constant attacks on Israel.

There never was a Palestinian state or anything even approximating a state. It was and is a fiction. There is no historic Palestinian people, no Arab king of the Palestinians, nothing that defines them as anything other than Arabs who, in the years leading up to Israel’s founding regarded themselves largely as residents of southern Syria or Jordan.

At no time since have the alleged representatives, Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Authority and subsequently the warring factions of Fatah and Hamas, has any offer of land for peace been accepted, despite major efforts by the United States to mediate a solution.

If the United Nations was to close UNRWA, the so-called Palestinians would have to be absorbed into the existing Arab states of the Middle East, but the United Nations has proven the most hostile global institution to such a solution and to the existence of Israel.

As the years have passed, Iran’s Islamic Revolution has metastasized into a threat to Israel and the entire Middle East in its quest for nuclear weapons and regional hegemony. The Arab states fear Iran more than they do Israel and with good reason.

Israel, of course, must determine when it will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and no amount of pressure from the United States will deter that decision. It either takes action or will be subjected to a nuclear attack. Recent polls indicate that slightly more than half of all Israelis now favor an immediate attack.

The Obama administration’s outreach to Iran is either naïve or a deliberate effort to accede to Iran’s intentions.

All negotiations regarding a Palestinian state are a farce played out on the world stage because the parties to them know full well the Palestinians, led by two warring factions, never had and never will agree to anything other than the destruction of Israel.

The Israelis know this. It’s time for the rest of the world to acknowledge it and to abandon the United Nations program in order to force the Palestinians to integrate themselves into the many Middle Eastern nations that exist to absorb them.

Everybody has a Gaza Peace Plan Except Hamas

By Alan Caruba

The peace plans for the Gaza strip and its political, social and military leadership, Hamas, are coming thick and fast.

Where were these plans when Hamas was shelling southern Israel day-after-day, month-after-month? Does the latest peace plan include the return of the kidnapped Israeli soldier who has been held for some two years or more? Will Hamas agree to forego its prime purpose, the destruction of Israel and the murder of its Jews?

The Presidents of France and Egypt are very worried about the fate of the Palestinians who are dying as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), charged with the responsibility to eliminate the endless attacks on their nation, moves through the streets they once filled by the thousands while shouting “Death to Israel.”

Egypt entered into a cold peace with Israel after the 1967 war disabused them of any notion they could defeat the tiny nation. France embraced the Nazis who marched in uninvited. The lessons of history are overflowing with the simple fact that some people must simply be defeated before they reform or cease to be a threat. You cannot make deals with stone killers.

The media is full of images of dead and injured Palestinians, but where is the concern for the residents of Sderet, the Israeli city that has been under constant attack and where even the bus stops come equipped with shelters against rockets?

The United Nations, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Muslim nations, cries out against Israel, but did you know that the planning committee of the forthcoming UN Human Rights conference, scheduled for April 20 to 24, is chaired by Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya and that the vice chair is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran? The first such conference was a farce. The next one will be an obscenity.

Throughout the Middle East, the clerics are preaching that Muslims embrace death and regard death in battle as a gateway to paradise, but the Hamas leadership is in hiding throughout Gaza while their people die because they cannot seem to find a path to peace.

If there is such a thing as fighting a humane war, the Israelis have certainly perfected it. The historic subject of inhumanity through the ages and the last century’s genocide, Israelis have an aversion to subjecting even their enemies to the horrors of war. Even so, the Israelis have been compelled from the day they declared Israel a sovereign nation to fight for its existence.

I am reminded of the story of the Jew who the Romans buried up to his neck in the arena of the coliseum and, when the lions were let loose, he bit the lion that came too close. “Fight fair, Jew, fight fair” came the shout from the crowd.

That is why those who want to burnish their reputations on the international stage are quick to shout, “Fight fair, Jew” when the Israelis seek to defend themselves. The Israelis should ignore all such peace plans until they have established a peace of their own making to their own satisfaction. It may be brief, but it will be an improvement over the constant rockets coming out of Gaza.

Peace plan? The IDF is implementing one.