The 'anti-lobby' nominee

When an award-winning journalist writes an article about Barack Obama's speech to AIPAC, it is quite shocking to find some themes resembling anti-Semitism and gross distortions of facts.

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The question of Iran's intentions

The question what Iran is really up to has been passionately debated for quite some time and there is still much resistance against the conclusion that Iran's nuclear program has clear military purposes. Most people who debate this question have of course no access to classified information, and even most pundits who write about the subject ultimately form their opinions based on "common sense" - and what passes as "common sense" inevitably depends heavily on political views. There is also the very fundamental question of how well Western commentators really understand the Middle East, because even knowledgeable analysts may be tempted to look for developments that fit their broader world view. Arguably, there are two main tendencies to look at the world: one is to look for differences in foreign lands, the other is to look for similarities.

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Perception and reality

A cynic might say that it was a contest we used to win hands down: most dangerous, most disliked, most dreadful - as long as it was a poll asking people who's the worst of them all, Israel was sure to score first place. One of the most widely reported of those poll results was a European survey back in fall 2003 which ranked Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the world.

Last year, a global BBC poll showed that when asked which countries "have a mainly negative influence in the world", Israel was again ranked first, but the same poll this year ranked Israel "only" second - which means we switched places with Iran: they came in second last year; this year, they snatched the "bad-guys-award" from us...

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Ahmadinejad on Purim

It was back in October 2005, during a "conference" in Teheran that was organized to propagate the Iranian regime's cherished vision of "The world without Zionism", when the keynote speaker, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, issued a straightforward call for Israel to be "wiped off the face of the earth". The context of Ahmadinejad's speech (which can be read in full at the website of Iran Focus ) leaves no doubt whatsoever that this is exactly what he meant; yet, ever since, for more than two years, a controversy has been raging about how best to translate what Ahmadinejad said.

An illustration of the continuing controversy was provided on Saturday when The Guardian published an article in its "Face to Faith" series in which Rabbi Danny Rich interpreted Purim as "a timely reminder of past persecution of the Jews and the fragility of Israel". Referring to Ahmadinejad's "notorious speech of 2005", Rabbi Rich wrote that in this speech, Ahmadinejad "quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s statement that 'the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time'." Readers reacting to the article on the newspaper's website were quick to pick up on this formulation: one criticized that this was not really what Ahmadinejad said, while another commended Rabbi Rich for correctly quoting Ahmadinejad.

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History lessons yet to be learned

The recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities prompted many commentators to conclude that the US intelligence community was trying to learn the lessons from its failure to accurately assess Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. However, the question is of course whether the right lessons were learned - or, as the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" columnist put it bluntly: "The history of the CIA is littered with spectacular intelligence mistakes. Sometimes, the correction of one error can lead to a new error, as analysts atone for past mistakes by moving too far in the opposite direction."

This debate reminded me of the research I did for my Ph.D thesis about the work of the CIA's predecessor during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Back then, one of the issues intelligence analysts had to deal with was information about the fate of Europe's Jews. What becomes disturbingly obvious when you study how this information was evaluated and reported is that intelligence assessments are never produced in a political vacuum; instead, and perhaps inevitably, they are influenced by the political orientation of the analysts and their interpretation of the political and military context in which the intelligence would be relevant.

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