War crimes propaganda
When some 500 civilians die, when non-military targets are attacked and cluster bombs are used and yet, the conclusion is that there is "no evidence of war crimes", you can be sure of one thing: Israel wasn't involved. Indeed, the quote here is from a report on NATO's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia ten years ago. It is important to remember that the NATO campaign back then was officially justified as a humanitarian intervention designed to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian aggression. Yet, in the course of NATO's campaign, civilian infrastructure was deliberately targeted and destroyed; cluster bombs were used, causing the death of an estimated 90-150 civilians; and, according to the report cited above, "inventory shortages and cost considerations" led to the replacement of precision-guided weapons with "dumb" bombs. UNRWA in the spotlightIt's not just because of the recent fighting in Gaza that UNRWA has recently been the subject of several articles: the UN agency that was founded to support the Palestinian refugees created during the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948 will mark the 60th anniversary of its establishment at the end of this year. It is arguably a very special anniversary of a very special agency: at a time when millions of destitute refugees all over the world struggled to cope with their fate, UNRWA was set up in December 1949 to just care for one group of refugees - and six decades later, UNRWA is the biggest UN agency with a staff of over 29.000, most of them (99 percent) Palestinians, and it is still devoted to supporting millions of Palestinians that remain classified as "refugees", even though they may live in the same place where they, and indeed their parents, were born, and even though they may have citizenship where they live. The elections and Israel's image
In his recent "Editor's Notes", David Horovitz offers a grim assessment of the challenges facing Israel as the country prepares for elections this week. Horovitz focuses in particular on the "relentless process of delegitimization" that Israel has been exposed to for quite some time now and he suggests that this process will likely intensify if the Likud wins the elections, because Israel's critics would interpret this as a sign that Israel has "turned its back on peacemaking." However, Horovitz also makes clear that what Israel does or doesn't do matters very little to those who are eager to delegitimize the Jewish state. Indeed, recent events have shown once more that there is a chorus of indignation whenever Israel moves to defend its citizens - such unfathomable chutzpah will naturally result in comments like: "Israel's international reputation slumped to its lowest point for two decades yesterday, amid condemnation in Britain and Europe of the Israeli army's behaviour ... There were calls for a United Nations-led inquiry into allegations that the Israeli army carried out a massacre and that its soldiers were guilty of war crimes." This may sound like a very recent condemnation of the fighting in Gaza, but it's actually from April 2002: that's how the Guardian - and indeed many other news media around the world - reported about the Jenin "massacre" that never happened. Pragmatism, Hamas-styleWhile the New York Times has Libya's Muammar Qaddafi laying out the case for "Isratine", the Guardian has taken to offering various Hamas leaders and spokesmen a platform to try themselves as op-ed writers. Apparently, the editors are confident that a majority of the paper's readers won't mind to have this ostensible legitimacy bestowed on the leaders of a group that has been busy in recent weeks with killing, torturing and maiming their political opponents - indeed, the author of one of the recent offerings, Mousa Abu Marzook, confirmed just shortly before his piece was published that Hamas had executed "collaborators", whose crime was according to Marzook that they were Fatah members who "had taken to the streets to blow kisses at IAF planes and handed out candies as they attacked Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip." Human rights at 60
As many of the commentaries written to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10th have highlighted, the document was drafted at a time when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II were still a fresh trauma. Back then, it was perhaps hard to imagine that human rights would once be cynically employed to play politics. But six decades on, it's even fashionable in some political circles to downplay the most deadly conflict since World War II and argue that, instead of wasting time and effort to address the humanitarian crisis in Congo - where war and violence have claimed more than 5 million lives since 1988 and as many as 45,000 people still die every month of war-related causes - the international community should rather focus on the suffering that Israel is supposedly imposing on Gaza. The 'clash of civilizations'According to a poll released earlier this year, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah is the most admired leader in the Arab world. The second most popular Arab leader is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the third most popular leader among Arabs is, surprisingly, no Arab - it is Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Given this line-up, one thing is obvious: an Arab leader who wants to win the hearts and minds of his (no need for /her) fellow Arabs doesn't have to govern well and doesn't have worry about the economy, jobs, health care, education, civil liberties or human rights - instead, what counts is that an Arab leader is perceived as standing up to the West, in particular the US and Israel. 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... 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 Khomeinis 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. 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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