Moral Equivalency

Joel Mowbray sums it up nicely.

Intentionally killing civilians from America, Europe, or Asia (or almost anywhere else) makes you a terrorist—but intentionally killing innocent Jews in Israel merely makes you a "militant." At least in the eyes of the "mainstream" media.

The vocabulary makeover is part of the moral equivalency that is rampant in media coverage of Israeli-Palestinian issues.

The USA Today’s editorial page recently informed readers that "both Israeli and Palestinian leaders are captives of fanatical extremists," as if a democratically-elected government seeking to protect its citizens from mass murderers is on a par with a self-appointed dictatorship aiding and abetting those same mass murderers in the intentional slaughter of innocent civilians. But at least that’s the editorial page.

Never Support WJC Again

Jonathan Tobin relates an interview by World Jewish Congress president Edgar Bronfman with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency

[World Jewish Congress President Edgar] Bronfman dug himself an even deeper hole when he discussed the motivations for his letter [to the US President against the Israeli security fence] with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by talking about his distaste for Jews who live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Bronfman said "a more effective" tactic for the Palestinians would have been to attack only the settlements and not Jews inside pre-1967 Israel.

"If the Palestinian suicide bombers only went to the settlements … then the whole world would have had a case against Israel and there would have been a two-state solution by now," he said. "Instead, they sent them into Israel proper, which is ghastly."

Is There Ever Too High a Price to Pay?

JPost carries an insightful but frustrating article on the Sharon government reaction to the bombing of children on a Jerusalem bus.

"Israel will not be able to continue with the road map as long as the Palestinians don't fulfill their obligations," Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said.
...
"As long as the Palestinians do not act seriously and continuously against terror, there can be no progress in the diplomatic arena, despite Israel's strong desire to continue on this path as quickly as possible." Shalom said Israel would remain committed to the peace process in the long term, but at the moment there would need to be a "price to pay."
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Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Israel would remain committed to the road map for the long term.
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"There will be a reaction," said one [Defense official]. "But it won't be a major operation."

In other words, there is absolutely nothing that the Palestinian Arabs can do to derail the peace process with the Sharon government...ever.

Observations on Potential Responses to the Bombing

Amos Harel in Haaretz gives an insightful reason as to why Israel had committed to turning over control over more West Bank towns to PA control.

There are senior officers in the army who at least until Tuesday believed that it is best to speed up the handover to bring the PA leadership to a moment of truth: present Abbas and Dahlan with a real test of foiling terror while they are responsible for the territory instead of accepting a reality in which the hudna is seemingly in place but "little" attacks continually occur.

Up until Tuesday night, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz preferred the IDF's position in favor of a withdrawal over the Shin Bet security service's warnings of its dangers. Thus, Sharon and Mofaz even agreed to a withdrawal from the cities without a commitment from the PA to arrest the wanted men in the cities.

Unfortunately, it will never work. He has an even more accurate assessment of what will happen as an American and Israeli response to the bombing.

The immediate response Tuesday night was to freeze the talks about a withdrawal from the four West Bank cities of Qalqilyah, Jericho, Ramallah and Tul Karm . But there is no certainty that freeze will last for very long.

It is reasonable to assume that Israel will try to use the attack to enlist the U.S. administration to pressure Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and his Minister for Security Affairs Mohammed Dahlan to finally confront the organizations. And then, after a few days of contacts, with American mediation, the incentive for the Palestinians, in exchange for implementation of Dahlan's "90 day plan" for fighting terrorism, will be, after all, handing over the cities.

Lessons from the Israel and UN Bombings

A JPost editorial carries the following:

The objective of the terrorists is to make us think what we have done wrong, to wonder what we have done to provoke such a heinous crime. And the answer is always the same. It is not what we, the US, or the UN has done wrong, but who we are and what we have done right.

There are two simple lessons from the suicide bombings yesterday in Baghdad and Jerusalem: No one is safe and there is no turning back. Suicide terrorism is the plague of this century. It cannot be escaped, denied, or appeased. It must be defeated.

Appropriate Quote on a Terrible Day

In the NYT: "Israel cannot be the perpetual testing ground for peace proposals that the Palestinians fail to implement," said Dore Gold, an adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Being an Activist Means Always Having to Find Something New to Complain About

Declan McCullagh starts his News.com commentary with a great quote about the Greens: Being an activist means always having to find something new to complain about.

So, what are the Greens complaining about now?

For much of the past decade, environmental activists have voiced fears about bioengineered crops. Engineered crops such as soybeans, corn and canola are popular in the United States, because farmers can reduce the amount of pesticides released into the environment, but pro-environmental groups have successfully campaigned against them in Europe.

Never mind that in a major study published in 1989, the National Research Council concluded that genetically engineered products were as safe as or safer than products that are manufactured through more traditional methods. And never mind that there's no evidence that the millions of Americans who munch on engineered grain have experienced any ill effects as a result.

Some well-meaning but scientifically illiterate activists who populate environmental groups are currently targeting another emerging area: nanotechnology. (Nanotechnology refers to working with materials in the one- to 100-nanometer range, a process that promises to create useful new substances, aid medical research and accelerate microprocessors. A June estimate says research and development in nanotech is expected to surpass $3 billion in 2003.) [Emphasis mine]

So, what's their (obvious) solution?

The environmental activists want the world's governments--or better yet, a world government--to enforce the point of view that's known as the "precautionary principle," which states that when there is any risk of a major disaster, scientific progress must halt.

Declan suggests an alternative, common-sense path.

A second point of view is a more libertarian approach that weighs the cost of prohibition against the cost to human freedom and scientific progress. It recognizes that any legal prohibition on research is unlikely to be effective: Military research and development inevitably will continue, and any group that hopes to exploit the technology for ill purposes will hardly stop, just because Congress orders them to.

There's already a reasonable precedent for that point of view. It's modeled after the approach the biotechnology industry adopted in the aftermath of a series of seminal conferences in the early 1970s. Scientists developed voluntary standards backed up by common-sense regulations for government-funded research that were so well-crafted, they're still followed today.

Saudi Arabia's Overrated Oil Weapon

The Weekly Standard carries the following article that lists the common misperceptions of the Saudi leverage over the oil supply issue.
Saudi Arabia's Overrated Oil Weapon: There's no need for Washington to be deferential to Riyadh
by Max Singer | 08/18/2003, Volume 008, Issue 46

OVERESTIMATES OF ARAB OIL POWER are an important and harmful influence on policy toward the Middle East. The following myths, or outdated facts, support the world's misjudgment of the power of the Persian Gulf oil producers--especially Saudi Arabia, but also Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf states.

(1) Most of the world's oil reserves are in the Middle East. Wrong. That is only true for "conventional" oil, the stuff that flows easily. When you count "unconventional" oil, Canada has larger reserves than Saudi Arabia. There is more unconventional oil than conventional oil, and most of it is in the western hemisphere--principally Canadian oil sands and Venezuelan heavy oil.

Technological developments over the last 10 years have reduced the cost of producing unconventional oil to below $15 a barrel, so that it is being produced profitably at the price at which oil has sold for almost all of the last 30 years. We'll see later why the much lower production cost of Gulf oil gives the Gulf countries less power than people think. Already a million barrels a day of unconventional oil is being produced, and it is just as good as the black goo pumped in the old-fashioned way.

...

(2) The world can't get the increased oil supply it will need in coming years without buying a larger share from the Persian Gulf. Wrong. There are many potential sources of increased oil supply--in addition to unconventional oil. In 2020 the Gulf may supply even less than the 23 percent of the world total it provided last year.

...

(3) The low production cost of Gulf oil lets the Gulf countries determine how much of world demand they will supply. Wrong. Where the world's future oil supply comes from depends on where oil companies decide to drill wells and make other investments. Since there is much more oil available in the ground than will be needed in the next few decades, oil investors have much choice about where to get oil. Right now there is practically no investment being made in increasing--or even maintaining--oil production capacity in the Gulf region; instead, almost all drilling is being done in other parts of the world.

There are two reasons the oil industry is not investing in the Gulf. Owners, not producers, control the benefit of low production costs, so low costs in the Gulf don't necessarily give companies an incentive to invest in producing Gulf oil. And oil producers have strong incentives to avoid sources that are as politically vulnerable as the Gulf seems to be.

...

(4) The United States and other consumers need Gulf oil much more than the Gulf countries need the money paid for the oil. Wrong. Most of the Gulf countries have become very dependent on their oil income, which provides almost all their foreign currency. The oil-consuming countries get less than a quarter of their oil from the Gulf and have stockpiles of oil that could replace Gulf supply for six months or more.

...

(5) Saudi Arabia has the power to determine how much the world has to pay for oil and therefore the power to help or hurt Western economies. Mostly wrong. So long as Saudi Arabia has the ability quickly to produce more oil than it is selling, it can bring down prices in periods of tight supply. But the Saudis understand that keeping prices from going too high is in their national interest as well as ours, because they would lose more than most producers if high prices chased consumers to other energy sources.

So, what's the bottom line, then?

When American politicians realize that the new facts of the oil industry destroy the basis for the traditional American awe of Saudi oil power, they will begin to use more normal standards in thinking about Saudi-American relations. To be sure, the Saudis, with or without the other Gulf or OPEC oil countries, can create short-term difficulties for the United States and other oil importers; but such difficulties, springing from normal business bargaining, present a limited danger, comparable to that resulting from labor strikes. There is no reason to be afraid of this.

...

In other words, the Saudis' power over the United States is a house of cards that can be blown away by fresh thinking based on a realistic understanding of the current oil business.

The second conclusion is that there is no strategic imperative for the United States to reduce its "dependency" on imported oil by reducing oil consumption. We should make sure that world oil-production capacity stays comfortably ahead of world demand for oil. We should also ensure that there are large stockpiles of oil to improve the short-term balance of supply and demand. And we need to stop feeling dependent when we are not. These measures are all feasible and have moderate costs. They do not require changing our way of life or our economy.

A Lesson from Mideast Dictators

The Region: A Lesson from Mideast Dictators by Barry Rubin -- Jun. 30, 2003 | The Jerusalem Post

Years ago a perfume ad perfectly embodied one of the main features of contemporary Middle East politics. "Promise her anything," it said, "but give her Arpege."

The strategy: Pretend to comply with a request or plan, then sabotage it. Dare your adversaries to do something about your behavior, in the often correct belief that you can easily get away with it. The reasons for expecting such a method to succeed are persuasive:

Perhaps your adversaries won't be aware of the trespass. The Western media will, at least, report your denial as being equally valid as any claim that you are lying.

Perhaps they will not act at all for internal reasons because the problem is too low a priority, the risks too high, or any number of other reasons. If they complain you can ignore them, since they are bluffing.

You can then ask for still more concessions in return for delivering on a promise or deal already made. Often you will actually get more after which the whole process can be repeated. If they launch a limited attack you can mobilize international support against them. The Arabs and Europeans will come to your aid. The party that acts not the one that provoked the action will be blamed as the aggressor.

At worst, you can just wait until they get tired and go away.

Isn't this what Saddam Hussein did in confronting the United States in 1991 over Kuwait and then, with great success, for the next 12 years? Wait a minute! He's still doing it, carrying on a war of attrition from his hiding place, telling his lieutenants that the Americans will soon go home. In short, the lesson of Middle East leaders is that while deterrence may work no state is going to attack Israel or the United States pressure does not. Only on the rarest occasions can a superior power press a weaker state, even one that has just lost a war, into doing anything.

And so the region's dictators are confident that when they face economic sanctions, threats, speeches, even military pressure, they can lie, conceal and deny. They can make no concessions and wait it out, ignore the costs to their own people who can be mobilized to support them by being told that the pressure proves how evil the enemy is, and how necessary the dictator's continued leadership is.

Some brief examples:

Syria told the United States it had stopped the operation of Saddam Hussein's pipeline through its territory, but it hadn't. It claimed to have closed terrorist offices on its territory. Same thing. It says it isn't giving refuge to high-ranking Iraqi officials, or serving as a launching pad for anti-American resistance in Iraq and if it was doing such things before, it certainly isn't any more. No and no. Etc., etc.

Iran insists that it does not sponsor terrorism, is not really building nuclear weapons, and is quite ready to cooperate to prove its good faith. Teheran promises that it isn't subverting US-backed governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Etc., etc.

The Palestinian leadership has a track record going back to 1994. Yasser Arafat scoffs at the idea that he is organizing terrorism and periodically promises to stop. The Palestinian leadership is more than happy to promise frequently not to incite violence against Israel or tell its people the state should be destroyed. There is no terrorism, but if there was, they would be ready to stop it. Etc., etc.

Saudi Arabia says it has never provided aid to terrorists (even excluding attacks on Israel) and swears it is not giving them money any more. It affirms it is cooperating in the war against terrorism. And so on, and so on.

IN OTHER words, the more audacious the misrepresentation, the more stubborn the refusal to change or make concessions, the better a regime will do in retaining power. Thus goes the current regional wisdom; and with good reason, because this strategy is very often successful.

What is Israel going to do if the Palestinians refuse to make peace? Keep fighting and be blamed by the world for the conflict?

What is the US going to do if Iran builds a nuclear weapon? Attack it? Even if the invasion of Iraq seems to show one should not call America's bluff, regional regimes don't seem to be rushing toward cooperation and moderation as a result of Saddam's overthrow.

In contrast, Middle Eastern politicians scoff at the idea of there being much value in moderation. To the list that includes king Abdullah of Jordan and president Anwar Sadat of Egypt, both murdered for their pragmatism, one can add Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). Whatever his shortcomings he deserves credit for being horrified by the incompetence of Arafat's leadership, angry at the corruption of his colleagues and determined to end his people's suffering.

Had Abu Mazen kept his mouth shut, done nothing and lived quietly for a while he would probably easily have succeeded Arafat. Now, however, other Palestinians denounce him as a traitor for seeking peace.

How has working with the US helped him? Even if it forces Israel to make concessions the militants will only claim this proves their violent strategy has been successful.

More than two centuries ago Benjamin Franklin set down a poem on the folly of governments: "Look round the habitable world, how few/Know their own good, or, knowing it, pursue!" Yet the problem in the contemporary Middle East is that leaders do pursue their own good. And they understand that running against pragmatism taking risks, incurring losses, blocking progress, losing wars is a proven winning strategy for fulfilling their selfish interests.

The writer is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, part of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC). His most recent book is The Tragedy of the Middle East.

The Settlements are a Phony Problem

The Settlements are a Phony Problem
By Carl Pearlston -- FrontPageMagazine.com | August 6, 2003

If there is one item of conventional wisdom that unites most of the world’s governments, the UN, various humanitarian, civil rights, and religious organizations, and diverse academics and intellectuals, it is that Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank of the old Palestine Mandate are the only real impediment to peace between the Arabs and Jews. In this view, if only the Jewish settlers -- all 380,000 of them -- would pack up and move back to Israel proper, abandoning their neat suburban villages and planned communities to the Palestinians, peace would reign over the MidEast. This naïve article of faith, endlessly repeated by its partisans, conveniently ignores the hard fact that there were no such settlements in 1948 when nascent Israel fought the massed Arab armies intent on its destruction, nor at the time of the 1956 war, nor when the PLO was formed in 1964 pledged to the elimination of the Jewish state, nor before the 1967 war when the West Bank territories were seized from the attacking Jordanian army and Gaza from the Egyptians. If the elimination of Jewish settlements is the key to peace, then how to explain the absence of peace before there were any such settlements?

The answer is that in the Arab view there have been intrusive Jewish settlements such as Tel Aviv and Haifa since the end of WWI destroyed the Ottoman empire, and the League of Nations adopted an international policy for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Palestine Mandate under British governance. This policy encouraged Jewish settlement of the Mandate, and some settlements were established under the British administration. Such actions were fiercely opposed by the Arabs, and in 1921 the first of many Arab pogroms killed forty Jews in the coastal city of Jaffa, followed in 1929 by riots in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed in which Arabs killed and injured over 500 Jews and drove out the Hebron survivors. From 1936-1939, hundreds more were killed under the leadership of Yasser Arafat's uncle, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who met with Hitler in Germany during WWII to plan for extension of the Final Solution for the Jews of Palestine. The Arabs tried for that Solution when they rejected partition of Palestine into two states in 1948 and made war on Israel. When Jordan captured the West Bank in that war, it prohibited Jews from settlement in that area, as they had earlier been banned from Jordan itself. It was not until 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, that Jews were free to settle in the areas intended for them to settle by the Mandate policy.

It is not the settlements in any particular area to which the Arabs object, but the very fact of Jewish presence in any part of what the Arabs identify as Arab land, which is the entirety of the Palestine Mandate, encompassing Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan. Thus, rather than having a two-state solution in 1948, the then-secretary of the Arab League stated: "this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." This is still the stated policy of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah; the PLO claims to have tempered its own goals to a two-state solution, though its rhetoric and incitement belies this assertion.

Having lost five wars and failing to exterminate and drive the Jews into the sea, some of the Arabs now assure us that they will be content with Arabs and Jews living side-by-side in their own states, but not together, at least not in the Arab state. The current fashionable view is that Arabs have the right to live anywhere in the old Palestine Mandate—Gaza, Israel, West Bank, Jordan—but Jews have only the disputed right to live in Israel proper, along with the nearly one million Arab citizens of Israel, who constitute almost 20 percent of the population. These Arabs live under Israeli law, protected by the police and the army, and do not fear each day for their lives at the hands of either the government or Jewish Israelis. But in the proposed Arab state, there is to be an ethnic cleansing in which all Jews will be expelled , and their neat suburban communities turned over to the Arab refugees who have been kept languishing by their Arab masters for these past 55 years in squalid camps. The Arab demand for elimination of any Jewish presence in areas claimed by Arab is a recognition by the Palestinian Authority that it lacks both the means and the will to ensure the safety of any Jews who would choose to live under Palestinian control in a future land agreement. But just as Arabs live peacefully in Israel under Israeli law, so should Jews be able to live in the suburban communities they have established in the West Bank without the need for protection by the Israeli army. As was contemplated by the old League of Nations, Jews should be free to live in any part of the Mandate area; that they are not is a symptom of the problem’s intractable nature and the relatively primitive state of Arab political culture. Logically, this should lead to another enforced population exchange, wherein the Arabs of Israel are relocated to the West Bank as the Jews there are expelled to Israel. If ethnic cleansing is to be practiced, it should be equitably applied.

This would be, of course contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention, adopted right after WWII to prevent forced population transfers as was done in Eastern Europe before and during the war. That Convention is frequently, but erroneously, cited as proof that the Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank are “illegal,” but the Convention bans only forcible transfers or deportations from or into the occupied territories, not voluntary movement of persons into those areas as is the case with the settlements. The Convention was intended to ban ethnic cleansing, which is of course exactly what the Arabs intend to do in their new state. Further, since Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank areas in a defensive war in 1967 from countries who had illegally occupied the areas since 1948, the Convention does not even apply. It only addresses the situation where the areas in question were occupied from another nation with legitimate sovereignty over those areas, which is not the present case. There is no basis for calling the settlements illegal. But the legal niceties are irrelevant to the conventional wisdom, which plans to eventually force Israel to resettle its Gaza and West Bank population behind the Green Line, permitting the ethnic cleansing which the Convention was intended to prevent.

It is naïve to believe that removing the settlements will bring peace, since in the Arab view, all of Israel is a series of settlements on Arab land. Israel is viewed as a Crusader kingdom, which like the first, may last 200 years, but is eventually fated to fall under Arab domination, if not from armed invasion, then from natural population demographics. The Arabs take the long view of history and are in no hurry.

Still True Today

Arutz-Sheva carried this article last year, but it is worth rereading for its applicability to the current situation with the "Road Map".

The Main Problem in the Middle East
by Jihad Renee Albanee
May 28, 2002

Many political personalities and leaders accuse the Israeli army and the State of Israel for all possible ills: Massacre of the Palestinian population, destruction of Palestinian cities, genocide, war crimes - a very long list.

It is evident that all those claims, some of which may be completely sincere, evince the claimants total ignorance of the main problem in the Middle East. I am going to sum up this problem in one sentence: The will of the non-Arab minorities in the Middle East to survive.

The two principal and largest minorities in the region are the Christians and the Jews. There are two states in which these two minorities still have their full human rights: Lebanon and Israel. In Egypt, the sole Christian who had the possibility to ascend to an important post was Boutros Boutros Ghali. He had been appointed by the former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat as delegate minister for foreign affairs, a post equivalent to that of a French cabinet chief, because Egyptian law forbids Christians from acceding to the posts of full ministers. In Iraq, the only Christian who fills an important post is the Catholic Tarek Aziz, Saddam Husseins long-time friend. In both above mentioned countries, and for that matter in all Arab countries, Christian rights are almost non-existent.

In 1975, Yasser Arafat and his cohorts waged their attack against Lebanon and particularly against the Christians. They hoped that within three weeks at the maximum, the Lebanese Christians would exile themselves to the United States, Europe, Australia and Canada, allowing Arafat to create an Islamic-Palestinian state in Lebanon. The road to Jerusalem passes through Jounieh, the Palestinian leaders were saying at that time. Jounieh is a Christian town situated to the north of Beirut, that is, in the opposite direction from Jerusalem. At present, Lebanon is laboring under the Syrian yoke, a fact to which the countries that defend human rights are totally indifferent.

Since the destruction of Lebanon and its occupation by the Arabs, the latter have decided to attack the second non-Arab country in the Middle East, namely Israel. Let us recall that Israel was created in 1948. The Arab countries rejected the partition of Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab, and decided instead to throw the Jews into the sea (Nevertheless, a Palestinian state was founded, in Jordan. However, the Jordanian King regarded that state as his personal territory, though 70% of the population was Palestinian). From 1948 to 1967, the Arabs constantly preached the destruction of the State of Israel. During those years, the Jordanian King Hussein had made Jerusalem Judenrein (empty or cleansed of Jews), Jewish cemeteries were vandalized and destroyed, and some 58 synagogues were destroyed or turned into stables for Jordanian horses. It is ironic to note that during those 19 years, when Egypt ruled Gaza and Jordan ruled the West Bank, including eastern Jerusalem, no Arab country yearned to see the creation of a Palestinian state there. All that those Arab countries wanted was the destruction of the State of Israel. However, once Israel had conquered these territories and united Jerusalem, Arab countries started calling them "occupied territories," and, unable to destroy Israel directly, they began to call for the establishment of a Palestinian state on those territories. In addition, Egypt, in its aim to weaken Israel to better destroy it, requested at the Madrid conference the elimination of Israel's nuclear arsenal.

Naive Israeli personages were recruited in order to weaken the State of Israel. Among these, we will cite particularly former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He believed that by withdrawing from southern Lebanon and by betraying his Lebanese allies, he would be able to achieve peace with the Arab people of the region. What happened, however, was just the opposite. The Israeli retreat from southern Lebanon was perceived by the Arab countries as a sign of Israel's weakness. A few short months following this retreat, Yasser Arafat gave orders to attack Israeli civilians under the cover of a Palestinian revolt - Intifadah. Weapons, financed by Iran, made their way to the PLO via Syria and occupied Lebanon. Iraq paid considerable sums of money to the families of terrorists who exploded themselves in Israel, killing Israelis.

Peace movements have always been activated when Israel was undergoing murderous attacks, in order to incriminate the Israeli population and leadership. This strategy had been used in Western Europe during the Cold War. The political parties, satellites of the Soviet Union, used to demonstrate all over Western Europe or manipulate associations, which would then demand the dismantling of American nuclear arsenals located in Western Europe as well as the departure of American troops from West Germany. Yet, the aim of these two requests had been to facilitate the invasion of Western Germany and adjacent countries by troops from the USSR.

The same method has been used for many years in Israel and against Israel for the purpose of weakening it, with a view to destroying it. Dozens of Internet sites were created to request Israeli leaders to quit southern Lebanon; huge demonstrations took place before and after the signature of the so-called peace accords between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. All this was for one purpose only: The political and military weakening of Israel and the establishment on its very borders of a terror organization called the Palestinian Authority, whose sole objective is the destruction of Israel.

Despite the presence of a Palestinian State called Jordan, Israel has agreed to the creation of a second Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Yet, the Israelis have not relinquished their claim to a united Jerusalem that must remain the eternal capital of the State of Israel. However, regardless of this affinity for Jerusalem, Ehud Barak proposed to Arafat at the Camp David summit to surrender eastern Jerusalem in three stages. Yasser Arafat refused. Why? Because he does not believe in the co-existence of two neighboring states, one Palestinian and the other Jewish. History is repeating itself. Yasser Arafat had once settled in Lebanon and erected a state within a state before waging his murderous war against the Lebanese, the people who had welcomed him. Today, the same Arafat has decided to destroy the State of Israel. Regretfully, the Israelis have not learned anything from the past and have not understood that one doesn't let the wolf into the sheep pen.

Some imagine that such a Palestinian state, even were it to be established without threat to Israel, could survive on its own. They are wrong. The Palestinians are also subject to internal Islamic-Christian tensions. The Christians of this Palestine will have little choice: Either live without any rights, similar to the Christians in other Arab countries, or quit.

As for those in the West who believe that they'll make a political career by defending the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria, I would like to say to them: Before tackling problems that are beyond you, it would be more profitable to interest yourself in problems closer to your country and its honor. For instance, you might ask the French and American states to arrest the criminals who've ordered the murder of French and American citizens (civilian and military) in Lebanon. Here is a tip that might help you: In 1998, the Syrian Minister of Defense Mustapha Tlass announced publicly that it was he who, in 1983, had ordered the Hezbollah and other Moslem organizations to attack the barracks of American and French soldiers in Beirut (there were some 270 American soldiers and 85 French soldiers killed). This same minister, friend of France and the United States, had also announced that he refrained from authorizing an attack against Italian soldiers because he had a crush on Italian actress Gina Lolobrigida. How sad that neither France nor the United States had had a Lolobrigida of their own. She might have saved the lives of soldiers on a mission of peace.
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Jihad Renee Albanee is a senior official in the Guardians of the Cedars - National Lebanese Movement.

The Road Map for Gay Marriage

The Weekly Standard carries Stanley Kurtz's insightful analysis of the issue of gay marriage in Beyond Gay Marriage.

Among the likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and "polyamory" (group marriage). Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in every conceivable combination of male and female. A scare scenario? Hardly. The bottom of this slope is visible from where we stand. Advocacy of legalized polygamy is growing. A network of grass-roots organizations seeking legal recognition for group marriage already exists. The cause of legalized group marriage is championed by a powerful faction of family law specialists. Influential legal bodies in both the United States and Canada have presented radical programs of marital reform. Some of these quasi-governmental proposals go so far as to suggest the abolition of marriage. The ideas behind this movement have already achieved surprising influence with a prominent American politician.

He also covers heterosexual polygamy.

Why is state-sanctioned polygamy a problem? The deep reason is that it erodes the ethos of monogamous marriage. Despite the divorce revolution, Americans still take it for granted that marriage means monogamy. The ideal of fidelity may be breached in practice, yet adultery is clearly understood as a transgression against marriage. Legal polygamy would jeopardize that understanding, and that is why polygamy has historically been treated in the West as an offense against society itself.

In most non-Western cultures, marriage is not a union of freely choosing individuals, but an alliance of family groups. The emotional relationship between husband and wife is attenuated and subordinated to the economic and political interests of extended kin. But in our world of freely choosing individuals, extended families fall away, and love and companionship are the only surviving principles on which families can be built. From Thomas Aquinas through Richard Posner, almost every serious observer has granted the incompatibility between polygamy and Western companionate marriage.

Where polygamy works, it does so because the husband and his wives are emotionally distant. Even then, jealousy is a constant danger, averted only by strict rules of seniority or parity in the husband's economic support of his wives. Polygamy is more about those resources than about sex.

Yet in many polygamous societies, even though only 10 or 15 percent of men may actually have multiple wives, there is a widely held belief that men need multiple women. The result is that polygamists are often promiscuous--just not with their own wives. Anthropologist Philip Kilbride reports a Nigerian survey in which, among urban male polygamists, 44 percent said their most recent sexual partners were women other than their wives. For monogamous, married Nigerian men in urban areas, that figure rose to 67 percent. Even though polygamous marriage is less about sex than security, societies that permit polygamy tend to reject the idea of marital fidelity--for everyone, polygamists included.

Gay marriage will also have corrosive effects on hetersexual outlook on marriage as well.

IRONICALLY, the form of gay matrimony that may pose the greatest threat to the institution of marriage involves heterosexuals. A Brigham Young University professor, Alan J. Hawkins, suggests an all-too-likely scenario in which two heterosexuals of the same sex might marry as a way of obtaining financial benefits. Consider the plight of an underemployed and uninsured single mother in her early 30s who sees little real prospect of marriage (to a man) in her future. Suppose she has a good friend, also female and heterosexual, who is single and childless but employed with good spousal benefits. Sooner or later, friends like this are going to start contracting same-sex marriages of convenience. The single mom will get medical and governmental benefits, will share her friend's paycheck, and will gain an additional caretaker for the kids besides. Her friend will gain companionship and a family life. The marriage would obviously be sexually open. And if lightning struck and the right man came along for one of the women, they could always divorce and marry heterosexually.

In a narrow sense, the women and children in this arrangement would be better off. Yet the larger effects of such unions on the institution of marriage would be devastating. At a stroke, marriage would be severed not only from the complementarity of the sexes but also from its connection to romance and sexual exclusivity--and even from the hope of permanence. In Hawkins's words, the proliferation of such arrangements "would turn marriage into the moral equivalent of a Social Security benefit." The effect would be to further diminish the sense that a woman ought to be married to the father of her children. In the aggregate, what we now call out-of-wedlock births would increase. And the connection between marriage and sexual fidelity would be nonexistent.

Hawkins thinks gay marriages of convenience would be contracted in significant numbers--certainly enough to draw the attention of a media eager to tout such unions as the hip, postmodern marriages of the moment. Hawkins also believes that these unions of convenience could begin to undermine marriage's institutional foundations fairly quickly.

In the end, the movement for gay marriage, polygamy, polyamory, and their ilk will be a foot in the door to removing marriage from state-sponsorship to just being a contractual partnership between any number of individuals (and non-humans as well?). It will be to the detriment of both the adults and children involved as well as society in general.

Second North Korean War

James Woolsey and Thomas McInerney write in the WSJ about the best non-violent means to resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis.

The only chance for a peaceful resolution of this crisis before North Korea moves clearly into the ranks of nuclear powers is for China to move decisively. Indeed we see no alternative but for China to use its substantial economic leverage, derived from North Korea's dependence on it for fuel and food, to press, hard and immediately, for a change in regime. Kim Jong Il's regime has shown that agreements signed with it, by anyone, mean nothing. [Emphasis mine]

They propose that the alternative is a military campaign against North Korea that they claim the US and South Korea could win.

U.S. and South Korean forces have spent nearly half a century preparing to fight and win such a war. We should not be intimidated by North Korea's much-discussed artillery. Around half of North Korea's 11,000-plus artillery pieces, some of them in caves, are in position to fire on Seoul. But all are vulnerable to stealth and precision weapons--e.g., caves can be sealed by accurate munitions.

Massive air power is the key to being able both to destroy Yongbyon and to protect South Korea from attack by missile or artillery. There is a significant number of hardened air bases available in South Korea and the South Koreans have an excellent air force of approximately 550 modern tactical aircraft. The U.S. should begin planning immediately to deploy the Patriot tactical ballistic missile defense system plus Aegis ships to South Korea and Japan, and also to reinforce our tactical air forces by moving in several air wings and aircraft carrier battle groups, together with the all-important surveillance aircraft and drones.

The goal of the planning should be to be prepared on short notice both to destroy the nuclear capabilities at Yongbyon and other key North Korean facilities and to protect South Korea against attack by destroying North Korean artillery and missile sites. Our stealth aircraft, equipped with precision bombs, and cruise missiles will be crucial--these weapons can be tailored to incinerate the WMD and minimize radiation leakage.

The key point is that the base infrastructure available in the region and the accessibility of North Korea from the sea should make it possible to generate around 4,000 sorties a day compared to the 800 a day that were so effective in Iraq. When one contemplates that the vast majority of these sorties would use precision munitions, and that surveillance aircraft would permit immediate targeting of artillery pieces and ballistic missile launch sites, we believe the use of air power in such a war would be swifter and more devastating than it was in Iraq. North Korea's geriatric air defenses--both fighter aircraft and missiles--would not last long. As the Iraqis understood when facing our air power, if you fly, you die.

Marine forces deployed off both coasts of North Korea could put both Pyongyang and Wonson at risk of rapid seizure, particularly given the fact that most of North Korea's armed forces are situated along the DMZ. With over 20 of the Army's 33 combat brigades now committed it would be necessary to call up additional Reserve and National Guard units. However, the U.S. forces that would have the greatest immediate effect are Expeditionary Air Forces and Carrier Battle Groups, most of which have now been removed from the Iraqi theater.

The South Korean Army is well equipped to handle a counteroffensive into North Korea with help from perhaps two additional U.S. Army divisions, together with the above-mentioned Marine Expeditionary Force and dominant air power. We judge that the U.S. and South Korea could defeat North Korea decisively in 30 to 60 days with such a strategy. Importantly, there is "no doubt on the outcome" as the chairman of the JCS, Gen. Meyers, said at his reconfirmation hearing on July 26 to the Senate.

Anti-Semitism in Israel???

INN reports on non-Arab anti-Semitism in Israel.

There has been an alarming rise in anti-Semitic acts by full fledged, non-Arab Israeli citizens in recent years. From swastikas painted on synagogues in B’nai Brak to vandalized graves in Beit Shemesh, to countless anecdotal stories of threats and harassment all around the country, traditional anti-Semitism seems to be rearing its head – this time from a different source – non-Jewish Russian immigrants.

One man involved has proposed changed the Law of Return to deal with the situation.

He [Zalman Gilichinsky, director of the Information Center for Victims of Anti-Semitism in Israel] says he favors an immediate change to the Law of Return to prevent immigrants who are not Jewish from entering the country. “This law was created to increase the Jewish population in Israel, but today it has the opposite effect and it is increasing the numbers of non-Jews,” Gilichinsky says.

I'm sure that the Reform and Conservative Movements will cry foul over any attempt to change the law of return.

The Significance of Death

NYT article carries this great quote.

Hilary had just completed a college semester in Paris where she sampled nihilism served up with espresso at doily-size tables, and was moved to generalize about the difference between the French national mood she had experienced and the Israeli one. In France nothing matters because we will all die anyway, she said. In Israel everything matters for the same reason.