CAIRO , Egypt_A year ago Friday, President Barack Obama stood in Cairo and vowed “a new beginning” in a speech about how he’d change U.S. relations with the Muslim world. Egyptian vendors sold T-shirts portraying Obama in King Tut regalia, and Muslims throughout the region thrilled at his middle name: Hussein.

Well at least he brought the shirt sellers some business.

Now, many Muslims in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East say they’re dismayed that the promise of the speech has fizzled into U.S. policy-as-usual toward the region: civilian deaths in Afghanistan , an unstable Iraq , no pressure for reforms on Washington -friendly autocrats, no resolution for Guantanamo prisoners and no end in sight for the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

The Taliban inflicts intentional civilian deaths in Afghanistan. We don’t.

The instability of Iraq is not Obama’s doing, nor Bush’s. It’s the Iraqi people.

As for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the only resolution the Muslim world wants is death to Israel.

Israel’s deadly raid in international waters on an aid flotilla en route to break the siege on Gaza – and Obama’s tepid response, in comparison to the condemnation of other world leaders – cemented perceptions for many of unconditional U.S. support for Israel .

Obama was right.

Some Arab commentators and bloggers said Obama no longer deserves his Nobel Peace Prize.

“His speech at Cairo University was wonderful and raised hopes that America was on a real path to changing its policies,” said Hassan Nafaa , a political science professor at Cairo University , where Obama spoke. “But Obama’s practices afterwards guaranteed that he is weaker than he seemed during his speech.”

Ah, they’re catching on.

Barry Rubin at Pajamas Media:

The world is getting into the habit of making Obama look inept.

The U.S. sends a delegation to Damascus to wean Syria from Iran, and Syria promptly responds by inviting Iran’s president to the country and tightening the relationship. The U.S. praises Pakistan and sends billions in aid, and Pakistan responds by being less than cooperative in dealing with the Times Square bomber.

Now it’s Russia’s turn. Just hours after the Obama administration praised Russia for allegedly cooperating on sanctions against Iran — to justify pushing forward a bilateral nuclear weapons limitation agreement with Moscow — Russia eagerly responded by subverting U.S. Middle East policy.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev visited Syria and Turkey, taking a very large entourage with him to work on trade and military cooperation agreements. In effect, these meetings marked another step in the creation of an anti-American alliance in the region with Russian backing.

How do we know about this alliance? Because Turkey, Syria, and Iran are openly declaring its existence. How do we know Russia is backing it? Because Medvedev is openly claiming this.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be a “friend,” and that Iran is using its nuclear program “for civilian purposes only.” He also said that Israel, not Iran, threatens regional stability.

Syrian government newspaper al-Baa’th declared, in so many words, that the Middle East is coming together in an alliance to reject Westernization, artificial borders, America, and Israel, while embracing various anti-Western conspiracies. What countries are in this new alliance?

Syria, Iran, and Turkey, with their great peoples and their lively peoples and their rejectionist [the Syrian term for radical, anti-Israel, and anti-American] policies are moving toward brotherhood.

The comments from Iran? President Ahmadinejad declared:

[The Americans] are forced to leave the region. … [The U.S.] government has no influence [to stop] … the expansion of Iran-Syria ties, Syria-Turkey ties, and Iran-Turkey ties. God willing, Iraq too will join the circle.

In its own way, Russia is joining the circle as well. Medvedev signed deals suggesting that Russia might help Turkey and Syria build nuclear reactors. Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Russian parliamentary foreign liaison committee, called Syria “a strategic partner” with Russia.

Obviously, bringing Hamas into negotiations or melding it together with the existing Palestinian Authority would guarantee the failure of any talks, and possibly result in Hamas takeover of the West Bank, anti-American Palestinian leadership, and the renewal of war with Israel.

Why is Russia doing this? Clearly, there are commercial considerations involved. Russia is desperate for money and export markets, including the ability to sell its weapons which — being inferior to those of the United States — only have a market of countries ineligible to buy American.

Yet commerce is only part of the picture. The current Russian leadership sees the United States as a rival, is jealous of its power, and is angry about losing the Cold War. The shrinking of their country from a mighty superpower to an impoverished wreck makes them steam, and they blame their fall on U.S. machinations. Building up Russian nationalism and returning the United States to enemy status is a way to mobilize popular support for the government.

And finally, there is a genuine ambition to rebuild the old Russian/Soviet empire and spheres of influence.

The EU and US show weakness to a tyrant. (Under Bush, a cowering Gaddafi fessed up to his nuke program and destroyed it.)

Paul Belien:

March was a good month for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He received high-profile apologies from both the United States and the European Union. The apologies were at the expense of Switzerland, the country against which Gaddafi has officially declared “holy war.” Switzerland has a tradition of neutralism in international conflicts, but could not avoid a nasty conflict with Libya. Trying to remain “neutral” in the Swiss-Libyan conflict, the US and the EU grovel before the Libyan despot.

The conflict between the Alpine republic and Libya began in July 2008, when Hannibal Gaddafi, the then 31-year old son of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, savagely beat up two of his servants in the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva. The Swiss police arrested Gaddafi jr.; he was released on bail after two nights in a cell. In retaliation, Libya took two Swiss businessmen as hostages, imprisoning them for “visa violations.”

Switzerland soon dropped the charges against Gaddafi’s son, but Libya kept the businessmen under house arrest. One year later, in August 2009, Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz traveled to Tripoli. To secure the release of the hostages, he apologized to Gaddafi for the brief detention of his son. Gaddafi released one of the hostages, the Muslim Swiss citizen Rachid Hamdani, but refused to accept the Swiss apologies. Libya kept the other businessman, the ethnic Swiss Max Göldi, in prison.

The November 2009 referendum, in which 57.5% of the Swiss voters approved a ban on the construction of new minarets in Switzerland, made Libya even angrier. Libya announced a boycott of Switzerland, and called for the dissolution of the country. On February 24, 2010, Gaddafi declared jihad against the “faithless” Swiss.

In an attempt to downplay the terrible implications of Gaddafi’s appeal for unlimited violence against Switzerland, US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said that the call for jihad against Switzerland was “lots of words … and not necessarily a lot of sense.” Instead of defusing the situation with his “joke,” Crowley made matters even worse. Gaddafi took the comment as a personal insult and threatened that there would be “negative repercussions” for American oil companies in Libya. On March 10, both Crowley and the American government offered their apologies to the Libyan dictator. He accepted them, and said that Tripoli would resume relations with Washington “in a manner of mutual respect.”

The unfortunate Max Göldi, meanwhile, has been moved to a damp, smelly windowless cell in the wing of a Tripoli jail where he is imprisoned with 90 of the most dangerous criminals of Libya…

…Meanwhile, Gaddafi’s son continues to cause mayhem wherever he goes. Two weeks ago, a photographer waiting for Gaddafi at a nightclub in Istanbul was attacked by the Libyan’s bodyguards. Last December, British police had to intervene at Claridge’s, one of London’s top hotels, when Hannibal Gaddafi hit his 29-year old wife, a former model, in the face and broke her nose. The British police did not arrest him, however, but allowed him to go to the Libyan embassy. In 2005, Hannibal Gaddafi had been arrested in France after beating his pregnant girlfriend at a Paris hotel. He was later given a four-month suspended prison sentence for the assault.

Lee Smith worries that Obama’s foreign policy will leave the US with no influence in the mideast.

Last week, one of Syria’s government news organs riffed on the title of my book The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. “The American president,” Al Tharwa wrote, “was betting on the sick horse.” Instead of siding with Syria’s Hamas allies, Obama was backing the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas. From Damascus’ perspective, the description also applies to the United States’ other Arab allies, like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms, as well as to Egypt and Jordan. These states are ready to be put out to pasture, while it is Iran’s “axis of resistance,” including Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as Syria itself, that represents the rising power.

OK, maybe the regime in Damascus hasn’t actually read my book. I lifted the title from Osama Bin Laden, anyway. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” said Bin Laden, “by nature, they will like the strong horse.” But the Syrian appraisal confirms my thesis—in the Middle East, political power is the prerogative of those who take it and maintain it by both the appearance and application of force. In this instance, unfortunately, what’s good for my book is very bad for U.S. interests and allies—and for American citizens.

As it turns out, the Syrians have a point. Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest known oil reserves, and Egypt is the most populous Arab state, but they are no longer regional powerhouses, at least in the way the Arabic-speaking Middle East has typically registered power over the last 60-plus years—that is, as willingness to fight Israel. Cairo and Amman have peace treaties with Israel, the Palestinian Authority is involved in an on-again-off-again peace process, while Riyadh has opted to remain on the sidelines. This collective weakness is just the way that Washington ordained it four decades ago.

In the middle of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Henry Kissinger airlifted arms shipments to Israel in order to guarantee an Israeli victory that for a time had seemed uncertain. Kissinger’s strategic intention was to show the Arabs that as long as Washington stood behind Israel, there was no way they could ever defeat the Jewish state. If they wanted concessions from Israel, they would have to petition the Americans for it, a prerogative that made Washington not merely a great power but a power broker. By breaking the Arabs, the United States made itself the regional strong horse.

Of course, with those arms shipments, Kissinger meant to drive home another lesson as well, this one to Israel—in effect, that Washington held the power of life and death over the Jewish state and that Israeli leaders had best keep in line. This arrangement—Israeli strength and Arab weakness—secured what some have called the Pax Americana of the Middle East. After Egyptian President Anwar Sadat jumped from the Soviet side to the American one after the ‘73 war, our regional hegemony was never again seriously contested—until now.

The new catch phrase in the Middle East is strategic realignment. Broadly speaking, this means that the balance of power is shifting from the U.S.-backed regional order to the axis of resistance. Some commentators, like Robert Malley, have argued alongside the Syrians that the Obama administration should drop its old allies—the sick horse—for new friends among the axis of resistance. From a certain perspective, it appears that the White House has done just that, albeit unintentionally.

When the Obama administration promised to engage the adversaries that the Bush White House had isolated, U.S. allies followed the strong horse’s lead and also changed course. Most notably, the Saudis patched things up with the Syrians after five years of intra-Arab discord. Riyadh pushed its Lebanese allies to reconcile with Damascus, and with Beirut’s pro-democracy and pro-United States March 14 movement now all but dead, Washington no longer has a Lebanese ally. When President Barack Obama indicated that the most important thing concerning Iraq was to withdraw U.S. forces, the Syrians and Saudis found a shared interest in attacking Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Even as Maliki, his Iraqi security officials, and Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, explained that the Syrians were behind a series of mega-terror attacks in Baghdad, the White House hushed them up for fear that identifying Syria as responsible for the attacks would jeopardize its efforts to engage Damascus. It is lost on no one in the region that Washington left two allies out on their own. But it gets worse.

Some U.S. commentators have praised the Obama administration’s recent condemnation of Israel for announcing, during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit, that it intended to build 1,600 apartment units in East Jerusalem. The White House’s response, they argue, sends a strong message that Washington won’t be bullied. In the Middle East, however, there is nothing that reeks so much of weakness as beating up on an ally in public. Moreover, this tongue-lashing comes shortly after the White House swallowed the open taunts of its adversaries. At a recent Damascus banquet featuring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, and Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal, Syrian President Bashar Assad openly mocked Secretary Hillary Clinton. He joked that he had misunderstood her demands that Syria distance itself from Iran, so instead, said Assad, he was waiving visa requirements for visitors from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Ralph Peters:

Whatever planet Earth may find in short supply in 2010, violence and misrule will remain abundant, from the most-recent round of Muslim-vs.-Christian massacres in Nigeria to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s delight in unleashing his thugs on students marching for freedom.

But no region — not even sub-Saharan Africa — competes with the greater Middle East when it comes to wanton savagery, thwarted opportunities and the danger posed to innocent populations around the world. With fanatical terrorists of unprecedented brutality, Islamist extremists pursuing nuclear weapons, rogue regimes, disintegrating states and threats of genocide against Israel, the lands of heat and dust between the Nile and the Indus form a realm of deadly failure that will haunt the civilized world throughout our lifetimes.

A survey of the region’s key countries — and problems — doesn’t offer much good news for the Obama Administration’s naive foreign policy efforts:

Read on for Peters’ gloomy conclusions.

David Brooks:

Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.

Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendants have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.

No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.

Milton Friedman used to joke that Israel disproved every Jewish stereotype. People used to think Jews were good cooks, good economic managers and bad soldiers; Israel proved them wrong.

But that has changed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms, the arrival of a million Russian immigrants and the stagnation of the peace process have produced a historic shift. The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.

Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.

As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.

No doubt some Leftist will decide the new wealth created by this mix of good government policy, education and entrepreneurial spirit was somehow stolen from the less fortunate.

Claire Berlinski contributes a fascinating look at life in Instanbul in the current City-Journal:

I walk alone through almost every neighborhood of Istanbul, often at night. This is a megacity of at least 12 million people, many of whom are poor and three-quarters of whom are under 35. Income distribution is gravely unequal. I am nonetheless less afraid—much less afraid—that I will be a victim of violent crime here than I am when I walk through London, Paris, or any big American city.

Istanbul’s streets don’t feel menacing. I rarely see drunks and never see crackheads, gangs of feral youths on street corners, or tattooed louts on the subways and buses. The panhandlers inspire pity, not fear. True, in some neighborhoods, the glue-sniffing street kids are dangerous; in others, hookers attract a louche clientele; pickpockets operate near the tourist attractions. But in the four years I’ve lived here, I’ve heard few firsthand stories of violent crime. The International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS), a worldwide poll of householders’ experiences with crime, confirms my impression that Istanbul is an exceptionally safe city. But perusing the ICVS data, I noticed something so odd that I mentioned it en passant to the editor of this magazine. “According to the ICVS,” I said, “Istanbul has the lowest rate of assault in Europe . . . but the highest rate of burglary, higher even than London.” I signed off with an innocent, “I wonder what this means?”

Alas, I was about to find out. Only a few weeks later, I woke up to find my front door ajar. My desk drawers and jewelry box were open and the contents of my handbag carefully laid out on a cushion. The cash in my wallet was missing. My great-grandmother’s wedding ring was gone. The burglar, who had picked my front-door lock, had taken pains to be considerate, by Western standards of burglary. He had not harmed me; he had not woken me; he had not made a mess; he had taken only the cash and the gold and left behind, thank God, my computer, bank cards, passport, and some costume jewelry to which I’m sentimentally attached. He had slipped out again as silently as he entered.

When I told my friends what had happened, almost all replied that they or someone they knew had recently been burgled, some more than once in the past year. When I had an alarm system installed, the workmen told me that business was great. Turkey, like the rest of the world, is suffering from the global economic crisis. No one else here says that business is great. All this seemed to confirm what the ICVS suggested: that in this exceptionally safe city, burglaries are exceptionally common. But why?

…

Turkey is officially secular, but 99.8 percent of its citizens are self-identified Muslims, and almost all believe in God. Turkish culture is obsessively preoccupied with honor, and to be seen as a criminal is immensely shameful. Tantan describes the stigma attached to crime: “If you commit theft, there’s no way you can ever walk around again or show your face, even to your family or the people closest to you.” Every Turk with whom I have spoken agrees.Next, Turkish families. Only 6 percent of Turkish marriages end in divorce—as opposed to roughly 55 percent in the United States—and 90 percent of Turkish households are either nuclear, with both parents in the home, or extended by grandparents and other relatives. If the extended family doesn’t live in the same home, it usually lives nearby. Only a tiny minority of children are raised by single parents; having a child out of wedlock is shameful, and so is permitting one’s elderly parents to fend for themselves or putting them in a group home. Given what we know about the propensity of single-parent households to produce criminal offspring in the West, it’s hard to doubt the connection between Turkey’s intact families and Istanbul’s (mostly) low crime rate.

Moreover, out of both custom and economic necessity, children here tend to live with their parents until they get married. Parents consider it their right and duty to decide whether their children’s friends are suitable and to know where their children are at all times. As a consequence, unsupervised young people tend not to roam the streets at all hours. And if they are on the streets, at any time of the day, they’re sober. Alcohol is not alien to Turkish culture—old Turkish poetry is replete with references to wine—but most Turks, especially if they are pious, do not drink much. Public drunkenness, which is considered shameful, is extremely rare.

People in Istanbul watch, judge, and look out for one another in a way that people don’t, for example, in Paris, where I lived for five years without knowing my neighbors’ names. Istanbul is a city of busybodies—another reason for the rarity of violent crime. If I so much as drop a heavy dictionary on my floor, the shrieking hysteric who lives below me will be at my door in seconds to investigate.

But first, some cigarette advertising from Mike Wallace. (Yes, the same Wallace who later went after Big Tobacco.) HT to Powerline.

John Bolton runs through the choices Isreal faces against a nuclear Iran.

Whatever the outcome of Iran’s presidential election tomorrow, negotiations will not soon — if ever — put an end to its nuclear threat. And given Iran’s determination to achieve deliverable nuclear weapons, speculation about a possible Israeli attack on its nuclear program will not only persist but grow.

So what would such an attack look like? Obviously, Israel would need to consider many factors — such as its timing and scope, Iran’s increasing air defenses, the dispersion and hardening of its nuclear facilities, the potential international political costs, and Iran’s “unpredictability.” While not as menacingly irrational as North Korea, Iran’s politico-military logic hardly compares to our NATO allies. Central to any Israeli decision is Iran’s possible response.

Israel’s alternative is that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs reach fruition, leaving its very existence at the whim of its staunchest adversary. Israel has not previously accepted such risks. It destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor being built by North Koreans in 2007. One major new element in Israel’s calculus is the Obama administration’s growing distance (especially in contrast to its predecessor).

Consider the most-often mentioned Iranian responses to a possible Israeli strike:

1) Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. Often cited as Tehran’s knee-jerk answer — along with projections of astronomic oil-price spikes because of the disruption of supplies from Persian Gulf producers — this option is neither feasible nor advisable for Iran. The U.S. would quickly overwhelm any effort to close the Strait, and Iran would be risking U.S. attacks on its land-based military. Direct military conflict with Washington would turn a bad situation for Iran — disruption of its nuclear program — into a potential catastrophe for the regime. Prudent hedging by oil traders and consuming countries (though not their strong suit, historically) would minimize any price spike.

2) Iran cuts its o wn oil exports to raise world prices. An Iranian embargo of its own oil exports would complete the ruin of Iran’s domestic economy by depriving the country of hard currency. This is roughly equivalent to Thomas Jefferson’s 1807 embargo on American exports to protect U.S. shipping from British and French interference. That harmed the U.S. far more than the Europeans. Even Iran’s mullahs can see that. Another gambit with no legs.

3) Iran attacks U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Tehran hard-liners might advocate this approach, or even attacks on U.S. bases or Arab targets in the Gulf — but doing so would risk direct U.S. retaliation against Iran, as many U.S. commanders in Iraq earlier recommended. Increased violence in Iraq or Afghanistan might actually prolong the U.S. military presence in Iraq, despite President Barack Obama’s current plans for withdrawal. Moreover, taking on the U.S. military, even in an initially limited way, carries enormous risks for Iran. Tehran may believe the Obama administration’s generally apologetic international posture will protect it from U.S. escalation, but it would be highly dangerous for Iran to gamble on more weakness in the face of increased U.S. casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan.

WSJ:

One benefit of the Obama Presidency is that it is validating much of George W. Bush’s security agenda and foreign policy merely by dint of autobiographical rebranding. That was clear enough yesterday in Cairo, where President Obama advertised “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” But what he mostly offered were artfully repackaged versions of themes President Bush sounded with his freedom agenda. We mean that as a compliment, albeit with a couple of large caveats.

So there was Mr. Obama, noting that rights such as “freedom to live as you choose” and “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed” were “not just American ideas, they are human rights.” There he was insisting that “freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together,” and citing Malaysia and Dubai as economic models for other Muslim countries while promising to host a summit on entrepreneurship.

There he was too, in Laura Bush-mode, talking about the need to expand opportunities for Muslim women, particularly in education. “I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles,” he said. “But it should be their choice.”

Mr. Obama also offered a robust defense of the war in Afghanistan, calling it “a war of necessity” and promising that “America’s commitment will not weaken.” That’s an important note to sound when Mr. Obama’s left flank and some Congressional Democrats are urging an exit strategy from that supposed quagmire. On Iraq, he acknowledged that “the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein” and pledged the U.S. to the “dual responsibility” of leaving Iraq while helping the country “forge a better future.” The timeline he reiterated for U.S. withdrawal is the one Mr. Bush negotiated last year.

The President even went one better than his predecessor, with a series of implicit rebukes to much of the Muslim world. There would have been no need for him to specify that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis if Holocaust denial weren’t rampant in the Middle East, including Egypt, just as there would have been no need to name al Qaeda as the perpetrator of 9/11 if that fact were not also commonly denied throughout the Muslim world. There also would have been no need to insist that “the Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems,” if that were not the modus operandi of most Arab governments.

Melanie Phillips:

As Iran sprints towards the nuclear finishing line, the lethal and wicked isolation of Israel in the west is accelerating.

Yesterday, Amnesty called for an arms embargo against Israel based on a travesty of a report which accused Israel falsely of crimes it did not commit in Gaza – deliberately targeting civilians – while omitting the crimes Hamas did commit – using civilians as human shields. An arms embargo (of the type apparently favoured by Obama’s foreign policy guru Samantha Power) – would of course remove Israel’s ability to defend itself against an Arab and Muslim world bending every sinew for its destruction. It is therefore tantamount to calling for the destruction of Israel.

Amnesty proposes no total arms embargo on Iran, nor on any of the 22 states of the Arab league. Only on Israel, their designated victim. Oh, and on Hamas whose sole crime it says was to have fired rockets at Israel which hardly killed anyone anyway. Thus in its absurd attempt to appear even-handed Amnesty equates the victims of terror with those who would murder them. Israel alone of all the countries of the world is not to be allowed to defend itself against annihilation.

Thus also the truth of the devastating insight of Natan Sharansky who, writing of his experience – straight after last week’s London conference on antisemitism — at the hands of the BBC which purred over an Arab interviewee blaming Israel for the rise in global Jew-hatred, observes that, as on previous occasions, the Jews of Israel are being faced with this obscene choice:

Either live and be hated, or die and be loved.

Scarcely had the new items on Amnesty’s report faded away yesterday than BBC Radio Four’s Start the Week featured Alastair Crooke, the former MI6 agent who now promotes the cause of genocidal Islamists as ‘resistance’ and who was plugging his new book: Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution.

I have written repeatedly about the way Crooke promotes the cause of Hamas and Hezbollah and the way he has acted as a conduit between the EU and these terror organisations. His book, of which he has kindly sent me a copy, is a farrago of distortion, omission, recycled conspiracy theory and anti-western loathing, drawing upon such staples of revisionist and anti-western pseudo-scholarship as Karen Armstrong and Edward Said.

Thus for example, the Crusades were an attempt by the Church to ‘force a change on history through mass human action’ – no mention of the fact that they were a reaction to the Islamic conquest and colonisation of Jerusalem. Thus the American neo-cons deliberately created a fear of Islamism in order to restructure western society by eradicating liberalism and multiculturalism (I kid you not). And thus there is no mention whatever of the demented loathing of the Jews — not just of Israel – which permeates the charter of Hamas and everything they say and do, but instead this:

Resistance for Hamas therefore is both an expression of deep-seated human emotions and Islamist principles of justice…

Some of this book makes no sense by any standard of logic:

Islamist resistance is also about refusal…to allow the complexity of the past to be reassembled by archaeologists who seek to privilege one particular layer of history above others.

Read it all.

Amir Tehari:

IN his “first message to the Muslim world” Tuesday, President Obama on Al-Arabiya TV invited the Is lamic Republic in Iran to “unclench its fist” and accept his offer of “un-conditional talks.”

Wait, didn’t Obama “revise” his first debate statement to say he’d insist on preconditions? Oops.

A few hours later, after Obama had appeared on the Saudi-owned satellite-TV channel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a crowd of militants that no talks are possible unless the United States met a set of conditions.

He demanded a formal apology for unspecified US “crimes” against Iran and the Islamic world. The crucial condition, however, was that America should withdraw its troops from other countries, “taking them back to their own territory.”

The contrast couldn’t have been greater. Obama tried to be as conciliatory as possible – asking only for an “unclenching” of the Iranian fist – a change of style. Ahmadinejad asked for concrete US moves, notably a global military retreat that would leave the Middle East at Tehran’s mercy.

In the understatement of the year, Obama said: “Iran has acted in ways not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region.” He also claimed that Iran’s support for terrorists, though “not helpful,” is a thing of the past – yet Tehran was running guns to Hezbollah and Hamas even as he spoke.

ON Al-Arabiya, Obama did something more interest ing: He cast himself in the role of a bridge between America and the Muslim world, a kind of honest broker between two camps in conflict.

To hammer in the point, he recalled the Muslim part of his own family background and his childhood in Muslim Indonesia – a topic he’d carefully avoided during the campaign. He also asserted that America is a land of “Muslims, Christians, Jews” and others – making sure to mention Muslims first.

At times, Obama sounded like a marriage counselor. He said his job is to communicate to Americans that “the Muslim world is full of extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives.” On the other hand, he said, he’d also tell the Muslims that “Americans are not your enemy.”

Let’s see…we ended the genocide against Muslims in the Balkans.

We saved millions of Afghan Muslims from the tyranny of the Taliban (an ongoing project with little international support), we liberated Iraq from a dictator who murdered 400,000 Muslims. We saved thousands of Muslim lives in Pakistan and Indonesia after earthquakes and tsumanis.

We have so much to apologize for.

Obama looked to the past rather than the future to give such platitudes a tinge of political vision. He said he wanted a return “to the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”

The problem is that few people in the Muslim world will welcome his back-to-the-future approach. Thirty years ago, Obama was a teenager in Indonesia. Vice President Joseph Biden, however, was already a senator and a champion of President Jimmy Carter’s strategic retreat.

What was happening during what Obama seems to regard as the “golden age” of Carter’s leadership? US diplomats were held hostage in Tehran and daily humiliated with mock executions. Soviet troops were annexing Afghanistan to the Evil Empire. Saddam Hussein was preparing to invade Iran, starting an eight-year war that claimed a million lives. Mecca was under siege by the ideological antecedents of Osama bin Laden. Syrian troops were preparing to march into Lebanon.

OTHER features of this “golden age”: the seizure of power by mullahs in Tehran, the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the coming to power of communists in the Horn of Africa, the military coup in Turkey, the first Islamist terror attacks in Algeria, unprecedented waves of repression in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the imposition of military rule in Pakistan.

During the same period, and its immediate aftermath, dozens of Americans from many walks of life were seized as hostages and sometimes brutally murdered in several Muslim countries. The US ambassador in Sudan was murdered; the CIA station chief in Beirut abducted, taken to Tehran and killed under torture.

Fouad Ajami:

“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” President Barack Obama said in his inaugural. But in truth, the new way forward is a return to realpolitik and business as usual in America’s encounter with that Greater Middle East. As the president told Al-Arabiya television Monday, he wants a return to “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.”

Barack Obama is interviewed by Al-Arabiya television on Monday.

Say what you will about the style — and practice — of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush’s presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.

True, Mr. Bush’s diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture.

The argument that liberty springs from within and can’t be given to distant peoples is more flawed than meets the eye. In the sweep of modern history, the fortunes of liberty have been dependent on the will of the dominant power — or powers — in the order of states. The late Samuel P. Huntington made this point with telling detail. In 15 of the 29 democratic countries in 1970, democratic regimes were midwifed by foreign rule or had come into being right after independence from foreign occupation.

In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty needed the protection of great powers. The appeal of the pamphlets of Mill and Locke and Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica, and on the might of America when British power gave way. In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies.

Take that image of Saddam Hussein, flushed out of his spider hole some five years ago: Americans may have edited it out of their memory, but it shall endure for a long time in Arab consciousness. Rulers can be toppled and brought to account. No wonder the neighboring dictatorships bristled at the sight of that capture, and at his execution three years later.

The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the “parochial” man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor’s diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so.

George Handlery:

1. One reads, “Israel has lost the propaganda war” over Gaza, “sequel ‚X’”. True. However, the judgment has little to do with Israel’s responsibility and the quality of her crisis management. This defeat had been pre-programmed. That has everything to do with the proper response to the violence engaged in by a PC-protected group. (N.B. As this was written, an e-mail called attention to a poll conducted by a newscaster. On the site, one could click on the Israeli or the Palestinian flag to register their support. The score, when checked, was about 50:50.)

2. There are instances when a minority develops the notion that, in order to assert and maintain its identity, it needs to resort to extreme measures. In some cases this leads to demonstratively insulting the majority’s way of life. Furthermore, its customs that regulate beyond formal laws social relations and the public order are systematically violated. If this pattern enters into the consciousness of the majority, the consequence is its radicalization. A symptom of that is that those unwritten laws and inhibiting conventions that have protected all are cast aside. With this collapse of public life’s good manner code, the role of violence will be enhanced as a regulator of inter group relationships.

3. Criminality is, to its apologists, part of a “life-style”. Do we not have the fundamental human right to live our lives in our own way and as we please? By this standard, we arrive to a position favored by some. If the foregoing is taken seriously then, it becomes easy to claim that moving repressively against criminality amounts to “racism”. In this instance, a racist is whoever refuses to accept the right of others to act, not according to laws and customs, but according to personally defined norms. All that is needed is to claim that the disruptive comportment is a derivate of “culture”.

4. Hamas has revealed that it sees itself as waging total war. Accordingly, this organization that exercises total power in a portion of what would be the Palestinian state, does not believe in a negotiated settlement. So much is logical because of the hardly concealed aims of the outfit. Hamas’ goals are not negotiable and so they can only be imposed. This is also to be considered when Hamas’ complaints about Israeli counter measures are evaluated. The articulated position transcribes into two contradictory claims. It is their concurrent application that violates logic. However, this trifle will be unlikely to bother Hamas foreign supporters, or, to put it differently, those who are instinctively inclined to blame Israel. What Hamas insist upon is its moral right to wage total war when it dishes out blows. On humanitarian grounds, it demands a limited war when the foe strikes back. Only a fool would accept such rules for the game that is being played.

Daniel Schwammenthal in the WSJ:

…Jews around Europe are increasingly under attack since Israel decided two weeks ago to defend itself after years of rocket fire at its civilian population. There have been arson attempts on synagogues in Britain, Belgium and Germany. Police last week arrested Muslim protesters who wanted to enter the Jewish quarter in Antwerp. Several Danish schools with large Muslim student bodies say they won’t enroll Jewish kids because they can’t guarantee the children’s safety. In France, a group of teenagers attacked a 14-year-old girl last week, calling her “dirty Jew” while kicking her.

At rallies in Germany and the Netherlands over the past two weeks, protesters shouted, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas.” In Amsterdam, Socialist lawmaker Harry van Bommel and Greta Duisenberg, widow of the first European Central Bank president, marched at the front of one such “peace” demonstration. They didn’t join in the background chorus calling for another Holocaust. Instead, they chanted, “Intifada, Intifada, Free Palestine.” Mr. Van Bommel later insisted this wasn’t a call for Jewish blood but for “civil disobedience” — a laughable defense given that terrorists during the last intifada murdered more than 1,000 Israelis.

Most of the anti-Jewish violence and protests in Europe come from immigrants. In what may have been a Freudian recognition of the changing face of Europe, CNN two weeks ago used footage of anti-Israeli protesters in London in a report about the growing anger in the “Arab and Muslim world.” The mythical Arab Street now reaches deep into Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid.

After a burning car was rammed into a gate outside a synagogue in Toulouse last week, President Nicolas Sarkozy issued a statement that was as morally confused as his judgment of Israel’s Gaza offensive. Mr. Sarkozy, who condemned both Hamas terror and Israel’s attempt to stop it, also blurred the distinction between the victims and perpetrators of anti-Semitism in France.

His country “will not tolerate international tensions mutating into intercommunity violence,” he warned, suggesting that the violence in France comes not only from French Muslims but Jews as well. Mr. Sarkozy’s comments also suggest that the fighting in Gaza is the cause for attacks on Jews in France — that is, that the Mideast conflict is fueling anti-Semitism in Europe. It is exactly the other way around.

The rage against the Jews that is exploding in Europe has been carefully nurtured; it is not spontaneous sympathy for fellow Muslims in Gaza. How else to explain the silence when Muslims in other conflicts, from Darfur to Chechnya, are being killed?

The depth of anti-Semitic propaganda in Palestinian and other Muslim societies is one of the most underreported facts about the Middle East. It is this anti-Semitism that predisposes Muslims in Europe to attack Jews and fuels the Mideast conflict. The hatred predates Israel’s creation. To illustrate this point: The Palestinian leader during World War II, Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, conspired with Hitler to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Luckily, the British stopped the German troops in Africa. The Mufti spent the war years in Berlin and was later indicted for war crimes but with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood escaped to Egypt. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mark Steyn:

…Forget, for the moment, Gaza. Forget that the Palestinian people are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth. For the past sixty years they have been entrusted to the care of the United Nations, the Arab League, the PLO, Hamas and the “global community” — and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. You would have to be very hardhearted not to weep at the sight of dead Palestinian children, but you would also have to accord a measure of blame to the Hamas officials who choose to use grade schools as launch pads for Israeli-bound rockets, and to the UN refugee agency that turns a blind eye to it. And, even if you don’t deplore Fatah and Hamas for marinating their infants in a sick death cult in which martyrdom in the course of Jew-killing is the greatest goal to which a citizen can aspire, any fair-minded visitor to the West Bank or Gaza in the decade and a half in which the “Palestinian Authority” has exercised sovereign powers roughly equivalent to those of the nascent Irish Free State in 1922 would have to concede that the Palestinian “nationalist movement” has a profound shortage of nationalists interested in running a nation, or indeed capable of doing so. There is fault on both sides, of course, and Israel has few good long-term options. But, if this was a conventional ethno-nationalist dispute, it would have been over long ago.

So, as I said, forget Gaza. And instead ponder the reaction to Gaza in Scandinavia, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and golly, even Florida. As the delegitimization of Israel has metastasized, we are assured that criticism of the Jewish state is not the same as anti-Semitism. We are further assured that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which is a wee bit more of a stretch. Only Israel attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence. For the purposes of comparison, let’s take a state that came into existence at the exact same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of post-war British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift.

But, even allowing for that, what has a schoolgirl in Villiers-le-Bel to do with Israeli government policy? Just last month terrorists attacked Bombay, seized hostages, tortured them, killed them, and mutilated their bodies. The police intercepts of the phone conversations between the terrorists and their controllers make for lively reading:

“Pakistan caller 1: ‘Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims. Keep your phone switched on so that we can hear the gunfire.’

“Mumbai terrorist 2: ‘We have three foreigners, including women. From Singapore and China.’

“Pakistan caller 1: ‘Kill them.’

“(Voices of gunmen can be heard directing hostages to stand in a line, and telling two Muslims to stand aside. Sound of gunfire. Sound of cheering voices.)”

“Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims.” Tough for those Singaporean women. Yet no mosques in Singapore have been attacked. The large Hindu populations in London, Toronto, and Fort Lauderdale have not shouted “Muslims must die!” or firebombed Halal butchers or attacked hijab-clad schoolgirls. CAIR and other Muslim lobby groups’ eternal bleating about “Islamophobia” is in inverse proportion to any examples of it. Meanwhile, “moderate Muslims” in London warn the government: “I’m a peaceful fellow myself, but I can’t speak for my excitable friends. Nice little G7 advanced western democracy you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”

But why worry about European Muslims? The European political and media class essentially shares the same view of the situation — to the point where state TV stations are broadcasting fake Israeli “war crimes.” As I always say, the “oldest hatred” didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt: Once upon a time on the Continent, Jews were hated as rootless cosmopolitan figures who owed no national allegiance. So they became a conventional nation state, and now they’re hated for that. And, if Hamas get their way and destroy the Jewish state, the few who survive will be hated for something else. So it goes.

But Jew-hating has consequences for the Jew-hater, too. A few years ago the poet Nizar Qabbani wrote an ode to the intifada:

O mad people of Gaza,

a thousand greetings to the mad

The age of political reason

has long departed

so teach us madness

You can just about understand why living in Gaza would teach you madness. The enthusiastic adoption of the same pathologies by mainstream Europe is even more deranged — and in the end will prove just as self-destructive.

Public displays of antisemitism jump whenever Israel strikes back.

At reddit.com the number of links to stories of Israeli atrocities is disturbing because high ranking on the page reflects reader votes.

David Harsanyi writes in the Denver Post about the realities.

In our nation, even twisted extremists are welcome to express their opinions.

Take, for instance, the young Muslim woman in Florida who used her constitutional right to tell Jews to “go back to the oven!” last week. Or the more befuddled protester in New York who brandished a sign that read, “Death to all Juice.” (And I thought we Jews ran the country. Clearly, someone is sleeping on the job.)

These rare but revolting displays of hate do offer the “Juice” a valuable reminder that a secure Jewish state in Israel is a historic imperative.

Nevertheless, it is distressing to hear the large number of supposedly peace- loving critics of Israel in essence defend Hamas, one of the most virulently un-intellectual, illiberal, bellicose, misogynistic, hateful and violent brands of religious fanaticism on Earth.

That’s no easy trick, mind you. After all, the magnificently overused “cycle of violence” — a platitude that shrewdly spreads blame equally among the culpable and innocent — has thankfully cliched itself to death. So now, detractors have turned to a feeble argument that claims Israel is guilty of failing to deploy a “proportional” response against Hamas.

It is said that every story has two sides. In this tale, one group has a nihilistic interest in placing Jews in ovens (though Hamas, without Iran, lacks the technological capacity to construct a match, much less an oven) and the other side has a stubborn habit of postponing this fate.

For Israel, there is no choice. There is no political solution. No happy ending. The present circumstance in Gaza refutes the Left’s quixotic notion that antagonists can just, you know, hug it out for peace. It also counters the neoconservative idea that democracy will spread among people who place no value in it.

Because Gaza is free. Obviously the Palestinians cannot be placated with an independent state — a gift they never had until Israel handed them Gaza with nary a condition. But this is not a 3,000-year-old war steeped in ancient history, despite widespread perceptions. This was a 20th century battle between Jewish and Arab nationalists. It has turned into a more insidious 21st century war with Islamic fundamentalism.

by Burt Prelutsky

Just for the record, I am a non-observant Jew. That means that my mother’s father, Max Lashevsky, who kept kosher and attended an orthodox synagogue every day of his life, would probably have considered me a heathen, while Adolph Hitler would have exterminated me in a gas oven.

I want that to be perfectly clear so that when I declare my concern for Israel, nobody will simply assume it’s because I’m Jewish. I am on the side of Israel because it’s a western democracy, an ally of America, and because I regard her enemies as the scum of the world.

Israel’s foes believe in targeting women and children just so long as they’re Jewish or Christian. They are not only intolerant of the freedoms we take for granted — speech and religion — but they are polygamous, treat their women as chattel and encourage their children to achieve martyrdom as suicide bombers. Moreover, so-called honor killings are part of what passes for their culture.

In order to realize what a paternalistic society they have, you need only look at a photo of an Arab mob carting a corpse through the streets of Gaza; even when it’s the corpse of a child, I challenge you to find a woman anywhere in sight. So far as the Arabs are concerned, the mother, grandmother, aunts and sisters, are of absolutely no consequence.

Yet here in America and even more so in Europe, you will find millions of theoretically civilized people who find a moral equivalence between Israel and her sworn enemies — and even more millions who favor the Arabs.

In a recent Rasmussen Poll, 62% of Republicans in America sided with Israel, while a mere 31% of Democrats favored Israel in the current conflict.

As you may have noticed, the world’s media rarely if ever remarked about the thousands of missiles Hamas fired into Israel over the past few years. However, once Israel finally got around to announcing that enough was enough, and went on the offensive, Condoleezza Rice and the European Union didn’t waste a second before crying “Foul!” and throwing a penalty flag. 

This same pattern is followed each and every time that Israel responds to unprovoked attacks. You can invariably count on the nations of the world agreeing that Israel is out of line. While it’s nice they can agree on something, it’s a shame that “something” never seems to be Islamic terrorism, Arab barbarism or slavery in modern- day Africa.

Can you imagine anyone in his right mind 67 years ago claiming that America was over-reacting to Pearl Harbor? Would anybody but an idiot have suggested that once America had sunk an equal number of Japanese battleships or killed an equal number of Japanese soldiers and sailors that we should have ceased hostilities and turned things over to European diplomats, especially after seeing how well those fellows had kept Hitler and Mussolini in check?

The fact is, only Arabs would continue to call the human refuse of Gaza refugees. The only reason that there were any Arab refugees back in 1948 was because Egypt, Jordan and Syria, promised to exterminate the Jews and divide the spoils, not because the Israelites had exiled its Arab population. Once Israel fought off the invaders, no Arab nation would open its doors to the refugees, and to this day no Arab nation ever has.

But that was 61 years ago! Who ever heard of people being refugees for six decades? How can people who have never lived in Israel, whose fathers and mothers never lived in Israel, continue to lay claim to a place where they’ve never set foot — and which, according to Arab textbooks, doesn’t even exist? They might as well insist they have a claim to Oz, Atlantis or Brigadoon.
Frankly, I marvel at Israel’s spiritual fortitude, at her reluctance to seek Biblical retribution. Even one missile would be enough to get me riled up. To absorb 10,000 missile attacks strikes me as verging on the masochistic. I honestly think Israel continues to be far too concerned with world opinion. After 61 years of hearing one’s enemies repeating Hitler’s plans for the final solution, collateral damage would be the least of my concerns.

I understand that civilized societies are supposed to worry about the deaths of women and children. But in civilized societies, parents don’t raise their youngsters to be suicide bombers and they certainly wouldn’t dance in the street when 3,000 innocent Americans were incinerated on 9/11.

There are still people who regret the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am not one of those people. That’s because it’s estimated that if the bombs had not been dropped, if, instead, America had been forced to invade Japan, as many as a million lives — Japanese as well as American — would have been lost. Coincidentally, like the Arabs and the Muslims, the Japanese had their own version of youthful suicide bombers — the Kamikaze pilots who sacrificed their lives by crashing their planes into American ships.

One of the young sailors who was in the South Pacific at the time, on his way to the planned invasion, was later to become a dear friend of mine. Last week, he died at the age of 81. Perhaps the reason that Joe X Price got to live those additional 63 years was because when it really counted, America didn’t overly concern itself with collateral damage.

Robert Kaplan:

Israel has just embarked on a land invasion of the Gaza Strip after a week of aerial bombing. Gaza is bordered by Egypt, and was under Egyptian military control from 1949 through 1967. And yet in a startling rebuke to geography and recent history—and in testimony to the sheer power of audacity and of ideas—the mullahs in Teheran hold more sway in Gaza today than does the tired, Brezhnevite regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Gaza constitutes the western edge of Iran’s veritable new empire, cartographically akin to the ancient Persian one, that now stretches all the way to western Afghanistan, where Kabul holds no sway and which is under Iranian economic domination.

Israel’s attack on Gaza is, in effect, an attack on Iran’s empire, the first since its offensive on Iranian-backed Hezbollah in 2006. That attack failed for a number of reasons, not least of which was Israel’s poor intelligence on Hezbollah: historically, its intelligence on the Palestinians has been much better. Moreover, this attack seems more deliberately planned, with narrower, publicly stated aims – all in all, a more professional job. But there is a fundamental problem with what Israel is doing that goes to the heart of the postmodern beast that the Iranian empire represents.

To start with, Hamas does not have to win this war. It can lose and still win. As long as no other political group can replace it in power, even as some of its diehards can continue to lob missiles, however ineffectually, into Israel, it achieves a moral victory of sorts. Moreover, if Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement tries to replace Hamas in power, Fatah will forever be tagged with the label of Israeli stooge, and in the eyes of Palestinians will have little moral legitimacy. Israel’s dilemma is that it is not fighting a state but an ideology, the postmodern glue that holds together Greater Iran.

Mark Steyn:

So how was your holiday season? Over in Gaza, whether or not they’re putting the Christ back in Christmas, they’re certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al Hayat, on Dec. 23 Hamas legislators voted to introduce Sharia – Islamic law – to the Palestinian territories, including crucifixion. So next time you’re visiting what my childhood books still quaintly called “the Holy Land” the re-enactments might be especially lifelike.

The following day, Christmas Eve, Samuel Huntington died at his home at Martha’s Vineyard. A decade and a half ago, in his most famous book “The Clash Of Civilizations,” professor Huntington argued that Western elites’ view of man as homo economicuswas reductive and misleading – that cultural identity is a more profound behavioral indicator than lazy assumptions about the universal appeal of Western-style economic liberty and the benefits it brings.

Very few of us want to believe this thesis.

“The great majority of Palestinian people,” Condi Rice, the secretary of state, said to commentator Cal Thomas a couple of years back, “they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do.”

Thomas asked a sharp follow-up: “Do you think this or do you know this?”

“Well, I think I know it,” said Secretary Rice.

“You think you know it?”

“I think I know it.”

I think she knows she doesn’t know it. But in the modern world there is no diplomatic vocabulary for the kind of cultural fault line represented by the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, so even a smart thinker like Dr. Rice can only frame it as an issue of economic and educational opportunity. Of course, there are plenty of Palestinians like the ones the secretary of state described: You meet them living as doctors and lawyers in Los Angeles and Montreal and Geneva … but not, on the whole, in Gaza.

In Gaza, they don’t vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it’s to get Junior into the Saudi-funded, Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity. In 2007, as part of their attempt to recover Gaza from Hamas, Fatah seized 1,000 Qassam rockets at the university, as well as seven Iranian military trainers.

At a certain unspoken level, we understand that the Huntington thesis is right, and the Rice view is wishful thinking. After all, when French President Sarkozy and other European critics bemoan Israel’s “disproportionate” response, what really are they saying? That they expect better from the despised Jews than from Hamas. That they regard Israel as a Western society bound by civilized norms, whereas any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of “desperation.”

Gateway Pundit has much, much more, including this nugget: the Lost Angeles Times has video footage of Obama toasting Khalidi at Khalidi’s “going-away party” from Chicago to Columbia. The event has been described as a “Jew-bash,” but the Times refuses to release its video. Also, it appears that Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi are close friends and political allies–with each other, as well as with Barack Obama. Maybe this helps to explain why Iran has endorsed Obama for President.

Omar Fadhil, from Iraq the Model:

In a matter of just a few days several important developments have taken place in the Middle East, all likely to have negative repercussions on the already tense situation in the region.

The first development was the awkward prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah. Then there were the unprecedented decisions by the American administration to take part directly in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, and reportedly to resume some level of diplomatic ties with the country. Finally, we had the White House agreeing to set a “time horizon” for troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Such decisions may be viewed by many in the West as steps in the right direction since they offer more room for diplomacy in resolving outstanding issues in the Middle East. And in Iraq, this “time horizon” may be seen by the public as a reassertion of progress towards restoring full sovereignty, and by Maliki as an easy PR gain in election season.

But the regime in Tehran and its surrogates in the region view them very differently: as concessions by the enemy and as an episode of successful employment of salami tactics. Even some of the powers and politicians who are against Iran and its allies will probably read the news in the same way Iran did.

When I saw Lebanon’s president and the parliamentary majority leaders (among whom are the most outspoken rivals of Hezbollah and the staunchest figure of opposition to Iranian and Syrian influence) welcome convicted murderer Samir Quntar home, I was certain it was fear from the effect of these concessions on the balance of power that made them do that, rather than actual respect for Hezbollah.

I particularly hope that these developments will not affect the nascent move for peace talks with Israel that Syria has recently shown. Although I don’t trust the Syrian regime, I think they are now closer than ever to starting serious peace talks. And there are indicators that Assad is now considering jumping off the Iranian wagon. Assad is, after all, a young president who isn’t excited about ending up like Saddam Hussein, and doesn’t share the apocalyptic visions of Ahmadinejad and the elderly clerics of Qom. I think two factors made Assad consider taking a path different from that of Iran. First, he may have realized that Iran will be doomed if it insists on going nuclear. Also, the persistence of the international court in investigating Syria’s role in assassinations in Lebanon may have played a role. Dialogue and diplomacy can be successful with a scared young Assad. I only hope the recent sequence of “victories” does not send Syria back to Iran’s lap.

What I want to say here is that the Middle East has a different understanding of diplomacy than the West. Acceptance of demands or opening up to dialogue can very well be mistaken for weakness. On one hand, it will frighten America’s allies and those sitting on the fence. On the other hand, it will embolden Iran and will most likely lead to further more ambitious demands.

Dialogue and giving diplomacy a chance is not a bad idea, but understanding the mentality of the people sitting across the table is an important prerequisite.

A ray of light from a dark corner of the world.

Up the corniche, along a coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea.

Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10-billion university ordered up by a king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of this ultraconservative Muslim nation. When finished next year, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will offer coed classes, Western professors, a curriculum in English and other touches loathed as dangerous liberalism by Islamic fundamentalists.

…But the new university is inviting the secular West a step closer in another ideological battle between Saudi reformers led by King Abdullah and the Wahhabi sect of puritanical Islam that has resisted outside influences since the days of desert caravans.

“Saudis are beginning to realize they are not the center of the universe,” said Tariq Maeena, a writer and aviation expert. “The king hopes that a young Saudi will be in a class with an American professor. The king is jabbing the conservatives from all sides. He’s not doing it with a massive decree, but incrementally, and all the radicals can do is roll their eyes and say, ‘Uh-oh, we’re losing more power.’ ”

Amira Kashgary, a literature professor at a women’s college, said, “We are part of the global world now. Whether we like it or not, and regardless of our political and religious systems, there are changes seeping through our lives.

“The radicals ran a wicked Internet campaign against the university. They said it is another sign liberals are invading us.”

The kingdom’s huge oil reserves cannot mask Saudi Arabia’s problems: 40% of its population is younger than 18, its schools are backward and its economy is not diverse enough to compete in a high-tech future balanced between the West and the rising powers of China and India.

Suicide is against Islam, but self-induced martyrdom is fine. Uh huh. Blowing up an Israeli passenger bus is creating a republic for a few hours. If you say so.

It’s all to see on this clip from Al Jazeera TV.

Omar and Mohammed of Iraq the Model write: 

…Growing up in a traditional dictatorship in a predominantly Arab Muslim country we were told that all our problems were the result of centuries of Western colonialism, domination and later manipulation and conspiracies. By told, it means that governments, intellectuals, opposition groups and everyone with a voice tried to convince us of this claim; for different purposes of course. In order to find excuses for their failure or to distract us from domestic causes of our misery, governments blamed the West for everything from the pillaging of our natural resources by greedy colonial Europeans, to the creation of Israel, to the borders the West sketched on a piece of paper to rip apart the so called Arab homeland to even the levels of illiteracy in our remote villages, you name it!

Opposition groups and intellectuals on the other hand blamed America and Europe for our underdeveloped undemocratic conditions which they say were a result of manipulating our political systems and public opinion since the creation of the modern states of the Middle East in the early 20th century. They also blame the West for planting and toppling regimes as they pleased; they’d tell you that the West aided the Hashemite against the Ottomans once, left the monarchs to fall later, then aided the nationalists against the communists and then the Islamists against both nationalists and communists and most recently an assortment of the above groups against fascists…the list goes long.

Coming to the West, we saw that the issue here too, surfaces quite often. We hear people to the left say they’re ashamed of what the West did in the Middle East. They blame Europe and America for the mess that the Middle East is, and for two purposes. For self-flagellation and, for attacking their political rivals in the conservative right. At least this is our perception of the debate.
People to the right, are perhaps equally embarrassed by the history of Western involvement in the Middle East, if in a different way. It can be felt that they regret the fact that doing what had to be done in the past led to undesirable outcomes.

What we want to say here is that we-east and west, left and right-all acknowledge that the West has a long history of successfully manipulating the course of events in the Middle East. Let’s look at a bunch of milestones in recent Middle East history. The creation of Hashemite monarchies, the creation of Israel, the counter-Mosaddaq coup in 1953, the Iraq-Iran war, the nationalists’ rise to power, or the Soviet’s defeat at the Mujahideen’s hands. These are all facts, and the decisive role of the West in shaping the outcome of all these events and many more is also a fact.

Now some may wonder why we think this can be useful. Here’s why;

This ability of the West to influence or induce a change in the Middle East can be used to consolidate our efforts to bring about, and sustain, a change in the right direction to produce a democratic secular mass similar to that in the West. This is what America has been trying to do for a while, alas with great opposition in Europe and inside America itself.

The time is perfect to push forward with this now, especially that in the first phase of US-led democratization, Islamist powers have been tested and their shortcomings are being exposed, at least in Iraq and the Palestinian territory.

One of the key questions that usually arise is whether Islam is compatible with democracy or if there’s an inherent obstacle that makes democracy impossible in Muslim societies.

It’s a good question, but it’s also irrelevant. Let’s consider the following questions:
Is Islam compatible with nationalism? Or better, could Islam ever be compatible with godless communism!? Recent history shows that religion did not prevent nationalism or communism from taking root in the region; there were times both ideologies took turns in becoming the prevailing trends.

What many people forget is that in the Middle East, religion is only one identity, among many others, that people adhere to or use to describe themselves. I mentioned the two other identities; communist ideology and nationalistic sentiments because both were at times so strong in the Middle East. So strong that in Iraq in the late 50s and 60s the bloody competition for power was exclusively between the communists and nationalists-one is non-religious and the other is anti-religious.

Given the above points, we believe it is very possible to make the Middle East accept and endorse secular democracy, especially that this is the best among all systems of governance.

The West excelled at manipulating the course of events in the Middle East and we in the Middle East have always gone with the flow. Virtually everyone on the Middle East switched sides more than once and elder people of our parents’ generation for example knows this first hand. Pick a man from that generation, look at his path and you’ll see that he or she was a staunch supporter of the kings in the 1940s, then became a Marxist in the 1950s, then a nationalist in the 1960s and 70s, only to become an Islamist in the 80s or 90s. Some, however, were on the other side and did this course the other way around because of socioeconomic factors, location or mere personal impulses. Anyway, the former path was dominant among a majority of people.

The feeling that things have gone out of control in the region should not discourage us. Western powers have always managed to shepherd the Middle East into positions that seemed to best serve their interests. Now if the West believes that a secular democratic Middle East is in everyone’s best interest, all it has to do is push for it the same way it did at any time in the 20th century. And when we get there all it will have to do is to not rock the boat.

Mark Steyn

Almost everywhere I went last week – TV, radio, speeches – I was asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don’t recall being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which, as a general rule, is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity.

Assuming Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic fancies don’t come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks don’t fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See the Atlantic Monthly cover story: “Is Israel Finished?” Also the cover story in Canada’s leading news magazine, Maclean’s, which dispenses with the question mark: “Why Israel Can’t Survive.”

Why? By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and French colonial map makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck of the woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years – Iraq to the Thirties, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel to the Forties. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it.

Would I rather there were more countries like Israel, or more like Syria? Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (Iraq may yet prove a second), and its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than they would living under any of the kleptocrat kings and psychotic dictators who otherwise infest the region.

On a tiny strip of land narrower at its narrowest point than many American townships, Israel has built a modern economy with a GDP per capita just shy of $30,000 – and within striking distance of the European Union average. If you object that that’s because it’s uniquely blessed by Uncle Sam, well, for the past 30 years the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid has been Egypt: their GDP per capita is $5,000, and America has nothing to show for its investment other than one-time pilot Mohamed Atta coming at you through the office window.

Jewish success against the odds is nothing new. “Aaron Lazarus the Jew,” wrote Anthony Hope in his all but unknown prequel to “The Prisoner Of Zenda,” “had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but” – and for Jews there’s always a “but” – “since Jews then might hold no property … .”

Ah, right. Like the Jewish merchants in old Europe, who were tolerated as leaseholders but could never be full property owners, the Israelis are regarded as operating a uniquely conditional sovereignty. Jimmy Carter, just returned from his squalid suck-up junket to Hamas, is merely the latest Western sophisticate to pronounce triumphantly that he has secured the usual (off-the-record, highly qualified, never to be translated into Arabic and instantly denied) commitment from the Jews’ enemies, acknowledging Israel’s “right to exist.” Well, whoop-de-doo. Would you enter negotiations on such a basis?

Is Israel an historic mistake?

Richard Cohen in The Washington Post was more straightforward: “Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.”

Cohen and Parris, two famously moderate voices in the leading newspapers of two of the least anti-Israeli capital cities in the West, have nevertheless internalized the same logic as Ahmadinejad: Israel should not be where it is. Whether it’s a “stain of shame” or just a “mistake” is the merest detail.

Aaron Lazarus and every other “European Jew” of his time would have had a mirthless chuckle over Cohen’s designation. The Jews lived in Europe for centuries but without ever being accepted as “European.” To enjoy their belated acceptance as Europeans, they had to move to the Middle East. Reviled on the Continent as sinister rootless cosmopolitans with no conventional national allegiance, they built a conventional nation state, and now they’re reviled for that, too. The “oldest hatred” didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt.

Not just naive, he’s arrogant and pious, too! Powerline:

…a sucker like Jimmy Carter comes along only once or twice in a century.

There was lots not to like in Carter’s interview with Wolf Blitzer today, but let’s just focus on his version of events in the Middle East:

BLITZER: Let’s talk about foreign policy, a very sensitive issue: Your recent trip to the Middle East, your decision to meet with Hamas, a group the U.S. government brands a terrorist organization.President Bush was asked about it at his news conference. And here’s what he said. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Foreign policy and peace is undermined by Hamas in the Middle East. They’re the ones who are undermining peace. They’re the ones whose foreign policy objective is the destruction of Israel. They’re the ones who are, you know, trying to create enough violence to stop the advance of the two-party state solution.

They are a significant problem to world peace, or Middle Eastern peace. And that’s the reason I’m not talking to them. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: He was specifically asked about your decision to talk to them. Do you want to respond to what you just heard?

CARTER: Well, he’s completely mistaken. It’s obvious that he doesn’t know the policy of Hamas.

And I think that, since I met with them, I can very well say that — and I’ve talked to Hamas a number of times…

This is truly breathtaking. President Bush “doesn’t know the policy of Hamas,” apparently with regard to the destruction of Israel and the desirability of peace in the region. Let’s not take President Bush’s word for it; let’s go straight to the source: the Covenant of Hamas. From the Preamble:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.

Article 11:

The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.

Article 13:

Palestine is an Islamic land… Since this is the case, the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Moslem wherever he may be.

CIA Director Michael Hayden said Monday that the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in September would have produced enough plutonium for one or two bombs within a year of becoming operational.

U.S. intelligence and administration officials publicly disclosed last week their assessment that Syria was building a covert nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance. They said it was modeled on the shuttered North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, which produced a small amount of plutonium. The Syrian site, they said, was within weeks or months of being operational.

Edward Olshaker:

In his deranged message to the world, Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech, credited Columbine High School killers “Eric and Dylan” as his inspiration. But, to give credit where it truly is due, it was not Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but rather Yasser Arafat and his sidekick Mahmoud Abbas, who pioneered the art of targeting young students.

Ironically, the same week we mark the anniversary of these two school massacres, former president Jimmy Carter paid homage to Cho’s most accomplished predecessor when he laid a wreath of flowers on Arafat’s grave.

Significantly, he did not lay wreaths on the graves of Arafat’s victims, nor did he meet with their families. And the media failed to note the irony of an ex-president on a ”diplomatic” mission honoring the killer of diplomats Cleo A. Noel, Jr., George Curtis, and Guy Eid, whose graves Carter is also unlikely to visit.

The contrast speaks volumes. Carter, in effect, displayed a noose to the victims’ loved ones.

Palestinian officials quoted the ex-president praising Arafat as a “peace fighter and a dear friend of mine,” as well as a “partner in representing the question of justice in the world” —  an extraordinary description of the terrorist mastermind who swore that the PLO’s goal was to ensure that “the blood of every last Jew from the youngest child to the eldest elder is spilt…”

Israel has been under daily rocket attack from Gaza since they turned it over to the Palestinians. When they finally had enough and counterattacked, they got the usual thumbs down from the Euro elites.

The has already “condemned Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as disproportionate and violating international law.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned Israel in the same words. International politics has condemned both the Israelis and the Palestinians to a kind of endless war which in which an both sides are obliged to accept casualties at an EU and UN-set rate. Neither side can find a way out the conflict through victory. Not the Palestinians, who have the will but lack the strength; nor the Israelis who have the strength but lack the will.

Almost unnoticed in the course of this absurd tragedy is the assertion that third parties, like the UN and the EU, have some acquired the right to determine what is proportionate force between belligerents. In the past belligerents were free to determine what, within accepted usages, constituted a casus belli. And they approached the problem with the knowledge that if they went to war rashly or foolishly, they would pay the price of defeat and possible loss of territory. But today the right to determine when and where to fight back against aggression has been usurped by a bunch of bureaucrats in the UN and in Brussels. Aggressors all over the world are no longer so reluctant to cause trouble, secure in the knowledge that the UN will always be there to save them from a knockout count with their sacred bell.

Today nations neither suffer the consequences of aggression nor the benefits of righteous self defense. In its place the ‘International Community’ has create a perpetual limbo in which a continuous trickle of misery is considered an acceptable price to pay so that the authority of the ‘International Community’ can be upheld and its vanity embellished. Not actual peace but the protection of this perverse ‘International’ system has become the actual goal of diplomacy. In order to pay for it, Palestinians will be left abandoned to their oppressors, for employment as human shields while Israelis will be admonished to die without whimpering. Not in order to achieve a solution, but simply to turn the page of the calendar. Even the 20th century holds few examples of such political immorality and futility.

War is sometimes the price nations have to pay to win peace. But only the United Nations, and the sadly the European Union too, can create a system where war is endured only to guarantee more war — and the prerogatives of the International System. All in the name of Peace, too.