Demeaning Jewish victims of terrorism

Following the terrorist attack in Jerusalem on Wednesday which killed at least 3 Israelis and injured approximately 50 others, discredited academic Norman Finkelstein sunk to a new low--which is saying something for a man who has trivialized the Holocaust, defended the use terrorism, and claimed that Libya had nothing to do with the downing of Pan Am 103. On his website he carries the following faked news story, which he attributes to the New York Times writer who covered the terrorist attack in Jerusalem. 

Times Exclusive: Deranged Arab in bulldozer attacks NY Times's Isabel Kershner at her pedicure. Reporting live from the scene still in her curlers and with her beautician at her side, Kershner gives a minute by minute account of the horrifying moment when the bulldozer crashed through the pedicure's windowfront crushing the nail on her little toe. "My friends in the Catskills just won't believe it," she said. "A smashed toenail. How can Israelis live with so much anxiety?"

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Questions for Walt and Mearsheimer

Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have been invited to speak at Hebrew University. They will continue to pedal their bigoted drivel about the iron grip, the Jewish lobby - which they call the "Israel Lobby," in capital letters - holds over American foreign policy. They will claim, as they did in their previous writings, that Israel's birth was an original sin and crime, that Israel holds the moral low ground, and that if the cause of Israel were in any way deserving of American support, it would not need a lobby. They don't make similar claims about the powerful Saudi lobby or the numerous other lobbies that have been part of America since the days of Thomas Jefferson. If just causes did not need lobbies, then it would follow that the causes of civil rights, civil liberties, gay rights, environmental rights, the rights of the elderly, etc. would all be unjust since each of them has high-powered and effective lobbies. 

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Hamas has declared war on Israel - how should Israel respond?

Article 51 of the United Nations Charter guarantees its members "the inherent right to...individual self defense" against "an armed attack." In January 2006, Hamas was elected to govern the Palestinian Authority. After Israel ended its occupation of Gaza and removed all of its settlers, Hamas threw the Palestinian Authority out of the Gaza and assumed de facto as well as de jure control over the entire Gaza Strip. Its leaders then instructed its military wing to direct rockets at civilian targets in southern Israel. At first these rockets were Kassams with a relatively short range. Now they include Katyushas, which can reach Israel's large cities, including Ashkelon, with its population of 120,000 civilians. Hamas has officially declared that its policy is to develop or smuggle even longer range missiles capable of reaching Israel's largest city Tel Aviv and its lifeblood, Ben Gurion Airport. It has promised to keep aiming its missiles at civilian targets until the Jewish state is finally destroyed.

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British intelligence smarter than US' - and than Gary Hart

Anyone who doubts that Iran is determined to develop deliverable nuclear weapons should not be in position of decision making or influence.  The evidence is as clear as can be, despite the "fog of peace" artificially constructed by the recent National Intelligence Estimate issued by our government's collective intelligence agencies. It may be true, as the estimate concludes, that in 2003 the Iranian shifted from a single track approach to a duel track approach - from taking direct steps toward building the bomb to taking indirect steps that have both civilian and military applications. But it does not follow that either the goal of the program, or even its schedule, has changed significantly. 

As I demonstrated in a previous blog, nothing has really changed with regard to the Iranian nuclear threat since 2003 except that Iran is closer today than it was then to developing a nuclear bomb. 

Yet our intelligence community seems to have fallen for Iran’s version of two-card monte. Either that, or they are deliberately trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public in order to discourage what they believed was a drum-beat for a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

One prominent public figure who seems entirely willing to pull the wool over his own eyes, and those of his readers, is former senator and former presidential hopeful Gary Hart. 

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Hizbullah's genocidal threat

The leader of Hizbullah Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has now called for revenge against Israelis and Jews around the world, for the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, which he claims was done by Israel.  It does not matter, of course, who actually pulled off the assassination. Israel and the Jews would be blamed by Hizbullah even if Syria had been responsible. Blame Israel and the Jews for everything is what Hizbullah always does. In the past, Hizbullah has taken revenge against what it claimed to be Israeli actions by murdering Jewish schoolchildren in Argentina. Once again it is threatening to attack innocent Jews around the world. 

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Targeting Mugniyeh was the right thing

If Imad Mugniyeh - the Hizbullah terrorist mastermind who was responsible for hundreds if not thousands of murders - was indeed successfully targeted for assassination, his untimely death should be cause for celebration. I say untimely, because if he had been killed years ago, many innocent lives would have been saved. 

At the time of this writing, no one can be sure whether Imad Mugniyeh is really dead, whether if he is dead he was killed by a car bomb, and who is responsible for his killing.  But his targeting makes the strongest case for the appropriateness of targeted killing of terrorists who are being harbored by states that support terrorism. 

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Who's making these Nazi-like statements?

Here is a multiple choice quiz:  

1. Who made the following statement?  "We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that culture of violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

A) A person named "Hitler",

B) A person named "Stalin"

C) A person named "Gandhi"? 

2.  Who described the establishment of the state of Israel as a "historical, moral, political calamity," blames the existence of Israel for putting the entire world in "peril" and condemns "American Jews" for the "shame" of failing to denounce Israel?  

A) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

B) The Hamas Charter 

C) Award-winning American playwright Tony Kushner

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Oxford Union gives new meaning to the word 'debate'

In October of 2007 I wrote an obituary for the Oxford Union. This student-run group purports to be one of the most distinguished debating societies in the world. Yet its debates have become more one-sided, more absurd, and more trivial than most bar room brawls. 

The scheduled debate that led me to write the October obituary was supposed to be on the following proposition:  "This house believes that one state is the only solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict." Nothing wrong with that (other than that no one would dream of proposing a similar topic with regard to India-Pakistan-Bangladesh or any of the other divided states in the world today). The problem was with the debaters selected by the Oxford Union to defend the two-state solution, which is synonymous with Israel's right to exist.

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The int'l media's silence on targeted killings

Sometimes what the international press does not cover reveals as much about its biases as what it does cover. When Israel was engaged in a campaign of targeted killings against Gaza terrorists during the height of the Palestinian Intifada, the press eagerly reported on every civilian casualty.  Human rights organizations had a field day criticizing Israel for its failure to pinpoint legitimate military targets and the large number of collateral deaths its campaign of targeted killings was producing. In those days, especially in 2002-2003, approximately half of the people killed by Israeli missiles were civilians. The other half were terrorists who were engaged in trying to kill as many civilians as possible.

Sometimes the civilian casualties exceeded the legitimate military killings. The most notorious such case was the targeted killing of Salah Shehadeh, a terrorist commander who was responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths and who was actively involved in planning hundreds, perhaps thousands, more.  After several failed attempts, a targeted rocket attack managed to kill him and few tears were shed over his well-deserved demise.  But in the process of killing him, his wife and daughter were also killed along with 13 other civilians. This caused an enormous outcry, not only in the international press, but among Israelis as well. Even though Shehadeh's death may well have prevented the deaths of many more Israeli civilians, still the cost in Palestinian civilian casualties was too high for most Israelis to accept and for the international media to tolerate. 

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