Israel Matzav

The NPT resolution and the flotilla of fools

Caroline Glick explains the connection between the NPT consensus which slammed Israel 189-0 (notwithstanding Obama's later attempts to backpedal from it), and Monday's IDF action against the armed and dangerous 'peace activists' off the Mediterranean coast.

Dismally, what the US’s vote in favor of the NPT review conference’s final anti-Israel (and by default pro-Iranian) resolution makes clear is that under Obama, the US is no longer Israel’s reliable ally. Indeed, what the US’s vote shows is that the Obama administration’s ideological preferences place it on the side of the red-green alliance. No amount of backpedalling by the Obama administration can make up the damage caused by its act of belligerence.

If Israel’s leaders were better informed, they would have recognized a number of things in the lead-up to the conference. They would have realized that Obama’s anti-nuclear conference in April, his commitment to a nuclear-free world, as well as his general ambivalence – at best – to US global leadership rendered it all but inevitable that he would turn on Israel. The truth is that Egypt’s call for the denuclearization of Israel jibes with Obama’s own repeatedly statedviews both regarding Israel and the US’s own nuclear arsenal. Armed with this basic understanding of Obama’s inclinations, Israel should have taken for granted that the NPTconference would target it. Consequently, in months preceding the conference , it should have stated loudly and consistently that as currently constituted, the NPT serves as the chief enabler of nuclear proliferation rather than the central instrument for preventing nuclear proliferation. North Korea exploited its status as an NPT signatory to develop its nuclear arsenal. Today Iran exploits its status as an NPT signatory to develop nuclear weapons. Unless the NPT is fundamentally revised, it will continue to serve as the primary instrument for nuclear proliferation.

Had this been Israel’s position, it would have been able to undercut US arguments in favor of signing onto the final resolution. So too, such a position would have prepared Israel to cogently explain its rejection of the final resolution.

And that is the thing of it. The red-green alliance’s aim at the NPT conference was to discredit Israel’s deterrent capacity while delegitimizing its right to take preemptive action against Iran. Now, due to Israel’s failure to make its case against the NPT in the months leading up to theconference , as our enemies use the US-supported final resolution to claim that our opposition to Iran’s nuclear weapons program is hypocritical, we lack a cognitive framework for responding.

The fact that the government still doesn’t get the point is made clear by its response to the decision. Its denunciation of the resolution makes no mention of the fact that the NPT regime itself has become the chief enabler of nuclear proliferation. So too, disastrously, in a clear bid to pretend away Obama’s treachery, Israel actually applauded him for emptily criticizing the resolution he voted for. This response compounds the damage and ensures that the assault will continue.

AS TO the flotilla, the challenge it presented was nothing new. Israel has been confronted by suicide protesters for a decade now. The fact that these pro-Hamas activists intended to commit suicide to discredit Israel on camera was made clear by the fact that the Turkish organizers namedthe lead ship Rachel Corrie.

So too, the fact that IDF forces boarding the ships would be met by trenchant, violent opposition was knowable simply by looking at Turkey’s role in the operation. First of all, the Turkish government-supported NGO behind the operation is IHH. As the US government, the Turkish government in the 1990s, the Investigative Project on Terrorism and countless other sources have proven, IHH is a terrorist organization with direct links to al-Qaida and Hamas. Its members have been involved in terrorist warfare from Chechnya and Bosnia to Iraq and Israel. The notion that IHH organizers would behave like radical leftist anti-Israel demonstrators on university campuses is simply ridiculous.

Read the whole thing.

The next time, the IDF has to give orders to fight, not to talk.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:54 AM