Last week's truck rampage in France and
Monday's axe attack aboard a train in Germany have raised European
concern about self-radicalised assailants who have little or no
communications with militant groups that could be intercepted by spy
agencies.
"How do you capture some signs of someone who has no contact
with any organisation, is just inspired and started expressing some kind
of allegiance? I don't know. It's a challenge," EU Counter-Terrorism
Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told Reuters on the sidelines of a
intelligence conference in Tel Aviv.
Internet companies asked to monitor their own platforms'
content for material that might flag militants had begged off, De
Kerchove said.
He said they had argued that the information was too massive
to sift through and contextualise, unlike paedophile pornography, for
which there were automatic detectors.
"So maybe a human's intervention is needed. So you cannot just
let the machine do it," De Kerchove said. But he said he hoped "we will
soon find ways to be much more automated" in sifting through social
networks.
"That is why I am here," he said of his visit to Israel. "We know Israel has developed a lot of capability in cyber."
Here's hoping that everyone who does this is located in Judea and Samaria - probably too much to wish for. But it seems to be the only alternative. Everyone else is waiting for the United States to take the lead, and that seems unlikely to happen.
While Israel's emergency laws give security
services more leeway, its intelligence minister, Yisrael Katz, called
for cooperation with Internet providers rather than state crackdowns. He
cited, for example, the encryption provided by messaging platform
WhatsApp which, he said, could be a new way for militants to communicate
and evade detection.
"We will not block these services," Katz told the conference.
"What is needed is an international organisation, preferably headed by
the United States, where shared (security) concerns need to be defined,
characterised."
If the Obama administration ever started an organization like that, it would probably include Turkey (and Iran) and exclude Israel. Remember this? Maybe someone could ask Hillary Clinton about it.
Belgian public television channel RTBF reported that the public
prosecutor’s office confirmed the deaths of two suspects and arrests of
"several" more. The station said there were no casualties among the
security forces involved and that several people had been arrested.
Federal prosecutors were quoted as saying there had been a police
operation near the center of the city of 55,000, some 70 miles from
Brussels.
Explosions and gunfire were apparently heard near the station,
according to Belgium's public broadcaster RTBF. The Belga news agency
said there were several casualties and police activity was continuing.
"An operation is under way," a source in the mayor's office told AFP without giving further details.
Another official told the agency it was "jihadist-related" and a news conference was scheduled for 8 p.m. local time.
Earlier, a Charleroi man turned himself into authorities and admitted that he had sold weapons to Amédy Coulibaly, the terrorist who murdered four Jews in a Parisian grocery store last week.
Turkey's lax border policies have enabled ISIS to finance and arm its
fighters in Syria; ISIS cells are now operating throughout Turkey.
And Turkey also helped Iran, a state sponsor of terror, evade
sanctions to the tune of billions of dollars in 2012 and 2013. Yet this
week, Turkey chaired the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum in New York.
It could be an item from The Onion — except it's not satire.
Launched in 2011 after the failure of previous multilateral groups to
tackle terrorism, the 30-country GCTF has itself become a farce — not
least because Turkey is the co-chair, along with the United States.
Turkey holds this honor because of its rare qualities: It is a Muslim country that is a trusted US and NATO ally.
But it has also become a hub for terrorist recruiting and support —
most definitely including ISIS recruiting and support, as The New York
Times has reported.
Yet the GCTF promotes Turkey as part of the solution, rather than a core part of the problem.
Nor are the problems new. In 2012, Turkey blocked Israel from joining
the GCTF, though the Jewish state has vast anti-terrorist experience and
intelligence.
Equally absurd, GCTF members include Qatar, Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan, all three of which help fund or otherwise sponsor terrorism.
What's amazing about this is not the positions that Turkey has taken (they're actually quite consistent), but rather the fact that both the US Congress and the media have mostly been silent about it.
Video: AP's Matt Lee pwn's State Department's Mark Toner for the last time this year
You all remember the AP's Matt Lee, the reporter who has pwn'ed State Department spokespersons over Jerusalem being the capital of Israel, among other things, right? Well, this time he goes after the State Department's Mark Toner (at Toner's last press briefing of the year) over the Obama administration excluding Israel from the counterterrorism conference (again). Watch the entertainment starting around the 35:42 mark until around the 41:20 mark.
So we’ve gotten the [Global Counterterrorism Forum] GCTF, which we co-formed and co-chair, to agree to
an agenda item that does not mention Israel; does not anticipate Israel
becoming a member; will not be the occasion for pushing Israel for
membership; is simply a discussion about how 163 non-member countries,
at some point in the future, might get involved in “some of the
activities” of the GCTF; and we have announced this as a success.
Last July, Rick Richman and Jonathan Tobin
noted that long after Secretary Clinton had promised to do what was
necessary to win Israel’s inclusion, forum meetings were going ahead
without the Jewish state’s presence. Well, it’s happened again.
According to CNS’s Patrick Goodenough, the State Department has acquiesced to the forum again excluding Israel. Goodenough reports,
“Six months after the Obama administration said it was ‘committed’ to
involving Israel in its flagship international counter-terrorism
initiative, there has evidently been little progress….”
The issue is not simply Israel’s exclusion, or the State Department’s
belief that more intolerant states like Lebanon and Turkey might stay
away if Israelis were at the same forum. Rather, the problem is that
these radicals believe that U.S. acquiescence to their refusal to allow
Israel’s inclusion is an implicit U.S. endorsement of their drive to
delegitimize Israel completely. Clinton’s refusal to pull the carpet out
from under the meeting by putting U.S. participation on the line not
only undercuts global counter-terrorism by signaling that terrorism
against Israel needn’t be on the table, but also convinces the Erdoğans
of the world that momentum is on their side.
But they've got our backs all the way.... Right....
What is unfolding in London is a mirror-image of the conduct of the United Nations and its organizations seeking to not hurt the” feelings” of Muslim-majority countries. In short, mass cowardice prevails over basic human rights and confronting terrorism.
Moreover, the Obama administration’s ongoing refusal to invite Israel to participate in the U.S.-sponsored Global Counterterrorism Forum is part and parcel of the soggy indifference toward Israel’s security interests, this time at the expense of placating Turkey.
In one of the most insightful commentaries on the failure of left-liberals to tackle pressing human-rights issues, the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger neatly captured in his May article a new phenomenon. He wrote that “the Liberals and Democrats who work on human-rights issues won’t like to hear this, but with the Obama presidency, human rights has completed its passage away from the political left, across the center and into its home mainly on the right — among neoconservatives and evangelical Christian activists.”
All of this helps to explain why conservatives have played a key role in the call to remember the murdered Israeli athletes and have consistently urged the Obama administration to include Israel in its Global Counterterrorism Forum.
There's a great piece by former Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar, whom, as some of you might recall, I greatly admire. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall at the Times of London, but I have managed to obtain a copy and will post a significant chunk of it below.
As a terrorism victim myself, who was fortunate to survive a car-bomb attack, I cannot understand or justify the marginalisation of other terrorist victims just for political reasons. If we extrapolate Israel's experience of slaughter to Britain, it would mean that in the past 12 years about 11,000 British citizens would have died and 60,000 would have been injured in terrorist attacks. In the case of the United States, the figures would be 65,000 dead and 300,000 injured. Israel's ordeal is far from insignificant.
It is even more poignant if one considers Israel's willingness to face up to terrorism and the practical experience that it has acquired to defeat it. Israel has much to contribute in this area and everyone else has a lot to learn if we really want to defeat the terrorists.
Fiamma Nirenstein, the vicepresident of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (and a member of the Friends of Israel Initiative) has made a proposal that is as fair as it is attractive - to hold a moment of silence at the London Olympics in memory of the 1972 massacre. Remembering is important, first, because of the victims, but also because many Europeans adopted the wrong attitude towards Palestinian terrorism after the Munich attack. The culprits who were arrested were later quietly released for fear of further attacks. And because of that initial fear the terrorists knew how to take advantage of the situation and to press for more rewards.
I have experienced terrorism at first hand. Many of my friends and some political colleagues have been killed by terrorists whose only merit was to have a hood, a gun or a bomb. Nonetheless, even in the most difficult times, I have always believed that weakness and appeasement are the wrong choices. Terrorism is not a natural phenomenon; it doesn't happen spontaneously; it's not something ethereal. It can and must be fought using all the tools provided by the law and democracy - and most importantly, it can be defeated if there is the will to defeat it. Israel has provided ample proof that it possesses that will, since its own existence is at stake.
To marginalise or isolate Israel to avoid irritating Turkey is a big mistake. All of the Middle East, from Morocco to the Gulf, is undergoing profound, although not always peaceful, change, which is yielding very disturbing results.
...
Isolation not only renders Israel weaker against its enemies, but also makes all Westerners weaker. And the practitioners of terrorism know all too well how to exploit our differences.
Remembering Munich 40 years on should be a useful reminder of our successes and failures. It should help us to enhance our collective abilities to fight terrorism. Israel is key in this fight.Israel is a part of the West. Israel is not the problem; it is part of the solution. We will become the problem if we continue to cold-shoulder Israel, the country most affected by terrorism and, possibly, the one that knows best how to defeat it.
Isn't it a pity that the feckless Obama administration won't listen? Here's hoping that a Romney administration would tell the Turks and the Arabs that if Israel isn't a party, there is no conference.
The Obama-Clinton counterterrorism forum: Even worse than you thought
Anne Bayefsky takes down the Obama-Clinton counterterrorism forum. You know, the one that is chaired by Turkey and in which Israel is not allowed to participate.
Part of what she writes is things we have seen before about how wrong it is that Israel is not a part of it, and how it shows how the Obama administration is less sympathetic than it ought to be toward Israel.
But then she comes up with this, which was new to me.
Even more disconcerting are the priorities and solutions that the front-line GCTF players have identified. The United Arab Emirates has been charged with creating one of the main “deliverables,” namely, an International Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism. In the words of a State Department Fact Sheet of June 7, 2012, the UAE center “will focus on training, research, and dialogue and collaboration, to counter violent extremism in all of its forms and manifestations.”
No wonder Ambassador Benjamin declared at the forum’s September launch that the Obama initiative would not “go through the same old rather sterile debates of what constitutes terrorism.” Every one of the “key” Muslim nations in the GCTF is a party to an international treaty called the Convention of the Organization of the Islamic Conference on Combating International Terrorism. That treaty exempts from “terrorist crimes” “armed struggle against foreign occupation, aggression, colonialism, and hegemony, aimed at liberation and self-determination.” Consequently, terrorism against Israelis, or Americans accused of being in the wrong places, will not be appearing on the center’s agenda.
On the contrary, what the UAE means by terrorism in “all its forms and manifestations” was unequivocally spelled out by its UN representative, Ali Alshemail. Speaking at the General Assembly on October 6, 2010, he said:
[We] emphasize that elimination of the danger of terrorism requires us to address all forms and manifestations of terrorism without exception, including the state terrorism which violates the right of peoples to self-determination. …
[W]e support…a clear definition of terrorism and to differentiate it from the legitimate struggle of people under foreign occupation
The terror attack in Bulgaria and Israel's exclusion from the counterterrorism forum
Yes, of course there's a connection between Wednesday's terror attack in Bulgaria and Israel's exclusion from the international counterterrorism forum when the Obama administration kowtowed to Turkey. Benny Weinthal explains.
The U.S.’s counterterrorism strategy is badly adrift. Earlier this month, U.S. Under Secretary of State Maria Otero delivered a speech at the Global Counterterrorism Forum in Madrid, in which she failed even to mention Israel as a country that has experienced terrorism.
“Last September at the official launch of the Global Counterterrorism Forum, I had the privilege to introduce the premier of a film ‘Hear their Voices,’ which tells the stories of eleven survivors of terrorist attacks from Pakistan, Jordan, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Spain, Colombia, and the United States,” she said.
When Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee asked Otero why she hadn’t mentioned the Israelis as people who have suffered from terrorism, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell momentarily tripped over his words, before responding that “I don’t have the details of the undersecretary’s speech.”
As Lee told Ventrell, Otero’s speech is posted on the State Department website. At the Global Counterterrorism Forum’s first formal meeting in Istanbul last month, the U.S. also excluded Israel and hosted countries with a history of sponsoring radical Islamic groups.
Will the Bulgarian murders within Europe force the Obama administration and its allies to take the Iranian threat more seriously?
It's very simple. Israelis are the world's leading victims of terrorism. A counterterrorism forum that excludes Israel cheapens Israeli lives and castrates the war on terrorism (yes, despite the Obama administration's protestations there still is and has to be a war on terrorism). A refusal to include Israelis as terror victims makes the problem even bigger. The only people who benefit from that are the ones who promote terrorism: Iran, Syria, Turkey, Hamas, Hezbullah and al-Qaeda, and other supporters of terror (yes, I intentionally included Turkey - what is the government-connected IHH if not a terror organization?). A weak fight against terrorism will result in more terrorism and more innocent lives being lost. Four more years of this will strengthen the terror groups immeasurably. It's time to stop them now.
In deference to the sensibilities of Arab nations there will be no moment of silence at the London Olympic Games later this summer to memorialize the Israeli athletes killed at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
Despite these instances of deference Israel continues to be targeted by terror.
Yesterday it was a tourist bus in Burga, Bulgaria. Shortly after they arrived from Israel, the bomber attacked a group of tourists boarding a bus. (Burga is a resort on the Black Sea and is about 60 miles from the border of Turkey. It will be interesting to see if proximity to Turkey played a role in this attack.)
The blast occurred in the late afternoon outside the airport in Burgas shortly after a charter flight carrying 154 people, all but three of them Israeli citizens, arrived from Tel Aviv, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said. Israeli and Bulgarian media reported that the travelers had boarded buses that were to take them to a hotel, and the Bulgarian interior minister told Bulgarian radio that explosives had been planted on the vehicle, perhaps in passengers’ luggage. The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was “working on the theory that this was a terrorist attack.” The attack threatened to escalate tensions between Israel and Iran at a time when Israel is proposing military action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and international efforts to stop the Iranians’ alleged program are faltering. The blast came five months after Israel blamed Iran for twin bombing attempts targeting Israeli Embassy personnel in India and Georgia, and it fell on the 18th anniversary of a suicide bombing at a Jewish organization in Buenos Aires. That attack, carried out by the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, killed 85 people.
No group claimed responsibility for the blast but if the Israeli accusations are confirmed, the blast would be the first successful attempt by Iranian operatives to kill Israelis in attacks abroad after a string of failed bomb plots targeting Israeli diplomats in Georgia, India and Thailand this year. Even without such confirmation, the Bulgarian explosion escalated the tensions between Israel and Iran that are already high because of the Iranian nuclear energy program, which Israel has called a guise for Iran to develop nuclear weapons despite Tehran’s repeated denials. The explosion came only a few days after a suspected operative of Hezbollah was arrested in Cyprus on suspicion of plotting to kill Israeli tourists there.
The charges, to which the New York Times referred, were made by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who charged Hezbollah working for the Iran's Revolutionary Guards as the organization behind the attack.
But others gave credence to Mr. Netanyahu’s suspicions, including some Iranian experts who have criticized his policies toward Iran. “Though no evidence has been presented, he may not be wrong. The government in Tehran is a very likely suspect,” said Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, in a column published by The Daily Beast Web site. Having failed to carry out bombings of harder Israeli targets like diplomats, Mr. Parsi wrote, “it appears that Tehran has shifted its focus to softer targets. Targeting unwitting tourists is much easier than security-conscious officials. If this is the case, the ongoing dirty war between Israel and Iran may be getting out of control.”
(It appears that a later version of this article have removed this reference to Parsi. I found the reference again using this search.)
However, if you read the article at Open Zion, Parsi's argument is exceedingly cynical. He's arguing that if the attack was indeed the responsibility of Iran or its proxies, it will give Israel the pretext it needs to attack Iran and plunge the world into war.
Since there's evidence that Iran or its agents have been planning or carrying out attacks against Israeli interests internationally, there's no reason to attach significance that yesterday's attack in Bulgaria had anything to do with the attack on Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, eighteen years ago. However Michael Rubin made some important observations related to the 1994 attack.
While Iran’s apologists say that Tehran’s problem with Israel is political, and isn’t motivated by religious hatred, the bombing in Buenos Aires targeted not the Israel embassy (which Iran had bombed two years earlier) but rather the Jewish cultural center. The target was not political; it was religious.
No Iranian authority, be they hardliner or reformer, has ever apologized for Iran’s role in hostage-taking or terrorism. That Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter embrace former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami as a genuine believer in Dialogue of Civilizations is shameful. Khatami is, to this day, an apologist for terrorism.
Iran remains a terror sponsor of global reach; no amount of dialogue during the past two decades has changed that. Perhaps the problem isn’t a regime grievance, but the regime itself.
Remember those - especially the first one - when reading news reports about yesterday's terror attack in Bulgaria.
2) Mainstreaming antisemitism
For years I'd read articles about Palestinian terror that stated or implied, "we don't agree with the methods but we understand their grievance." The PLO (and later iterations) might be seeking (or at least hoping) to destroy Israel, but that intent didn't register. Western minds couldn't comprehend such hatred, so they rationalized terror as an overreaction to a legitimate grievance. If only Israel would be reasonable - this line of thinking went - this hatred would disappear and the terrorism would stop.
Of course since 1993, Israel has ceded territory to its enemies so that over 90% of Palestinians live under the Palestinian Authority or Hamas and is fully withdrawn from southern Lebanon, but the vilification of Israel continues.
As things stand now, those who still insist on finding Israel primarily responsible for the lack of peace in the Middle East, have gotten further and further unrealistic. Israel Matzav recently observed that a writer at the Atlantic criticized Peter Beinart's Open Zion for including a writer from MondoWeiss. Israel Matzav concludes:
We call them Jewish anti-Semites. There are no worse anti-Semites around. You can tell a lot about a person by the company he keeps. Peter Beinart keeps company with the people who write Mondoweiss. Decide for yourselves what that means.
Open Zion is a section of The Daily Beast, which used to be Newsweek. Should it be shocking that what was once a mainstream publication traffics in such vile nonsense? The Daily Beast as Elder of Ziyon notes in The mainstreaming of anti-semitism: Salon partners with Mondoweiss:
Salon is one of the biggest mainstream webzines. It is outrageous that Salon is not being slammed by its own readers and supporters to immediately reverse this sickening decision. If there is anything funny about this - and this is not funny - it is that Salon's embrace of Mondoweiss directly disproves Mondoweiss' own major theme that Zionist Jews do not allow any divergent opinions to be heard in the US.
Liberals who purport to hear racist "dog whistles" in criticisms of President Obama are mostly silent about these much more overt expressions of irrational hate.
Senior security officials: US has naive view of Arab spring
Bristling at Israel's exclusion from two counterterrorism meetings to placate Turkey, senior Israeli security sources have attacked the United States' naive view of the Arab spring.
“Israel has been one of the key counterterrorism allies of the United States for 30 years,” observed Dr. Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations in an interview with The Algemeiner.
“Its absence from an American-sponsored counter-terror conference raises questions that need to be answered,” said Dr. Gold, an expert on the Persian Gulf region who was born and educated in the US.
...
Israeli officials say the Obama Administration has a naïve or even uninformed view of recent upheavals in Arab-Islamic states, particularly events in Egypt and Turkey, believing that the Erdogan government in Turkey and the new regime of Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Morsi are both forces for moderation.
...
President Obama has said that he considers Turkish leader Recep Erdogan a model of moderation, even asking him to moderate between the US and Iran on the issue of Iran’s presumed atomic bomb project, while top Obama aides have said they think Egypt’s Brotherhood is also moderate.
“Morsi says ‘I want an Islamic caliphate (empire) whose capital is Jerusalem,’ and what do they say: ‘Don’t believe him. He doesn’t really mean it.’ Well, he does mean it,” observed Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amos Gilad, in a briefing to students in Herzliya.
...
“We talk to the Americans about the ‘Arab Spring’ as if Jefferson was chosen as the head man of some village, but there is a tradition here of reactionary regimes,” said Gilad, who is director of the political wing of the Ministry of Defense.
Gilad said the US had a naïve view of the upheavals, noting that “democracy” often released “satanic forces” under which “women don’t count for anything” and where “marriages are forced on youngsters who are 14 or 15 years old—the kind of practice that in the end leads to an Islamic empire.”
Obama hasn't got Israel's back on counterterrorism
If this is what it's like before the election, imagine what it could be like - God forbid - after the election in a second Obama term.
I have mentioned previously that the Obama administration excluded Israel from the first meeting of the Global Counterterrorism Forum in Istanbul last month in order to placate President Obama's Best Friend Forever, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. On Monday, it got worse.
Israel was excluded from a meeting of the same forum in Spain, and Maria Otero, the State Department’s Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, gave a speech about 'victims of terrorism' that just happened to omit the Zionist entity from the list of victims. All of this happened despite what the Washington Free Beacon's Adam Kredo describes as 'pleas' from Senators on Capitol Hill.
Congressional sources and regional experts say that the Obama administration is intentionally downplaying Israel’s struggle with terrorism in order to appease and gain the cooperation of Arab nations that are often hostile to the Jewish state.
A congressional source told the Free Beacon Tuesday that the State Department confirmed to inquiring members of Congress that Israel was in fact excluded from the conference.
“The State Department told us that only the 29 original member countries were involved—and that means no Israel,” said the source.
During yesterday’s gathering, Israel was also excluded again from a list of nations recognized by the U.S. for their efforts to deal with terrorism.
“Last September at the official launch of the Global Counterterrorism Forum, I had the privilege to introduce the premiere of a film ‘Hear their Voices’, which tells the stories of eleven survivors of terrorist attacks from Pakistan, Jordan, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Spain, Columbia, and the United States,” Otero said before the gathering of nations.
“The film, which was produced by the Global Survivors Network, is a powerful plea for audiences around the world, especially those sympathetic to the grievances expressed by extremists, to recognize the human cost of terrorism and I am delighted that our Spanish hosts are planning on showing this film here later this afternoon,” she added.
Experts say the omission of Israel was intentional.
“When the administration promised to include Israel in the counterterrorism forum that the United States founded—after Jerusalem’s inexplicable exclusion from the initial meeting a month ago—one would think they would be true to their word,” said Josh Block, a Democratic strategist and former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Clearly someone failed here. How Israel could be excluded from another meeting of an anti-terror forum that we chair is beyond comprehension, especially one that focuses on victims of terrorism.”
“At a time when Romney is challenging the administration’s record on U.S.-Israel relations, this error stands out,” he added.
Tuesday's State Department briefing is not on video. Tuesday's briefing was given by Patrick Ventrell, who is the director of media relations. He sparred with Matthew Lee, the AP reporter who embarrassed Victorian Nuland a few months ago by asking where the capital of Israel is. Here's part of the transcript:
QUESTION: All right. And then going back to the question I raised yesterday about the Global Counterterrorism Forum --
MR. VENTRELL: Yeah.
QUESTION: -- did you get an answer on that?
MR. VENTRELL: Well, as you know, as we said at the time, Matt, that our idea with the Global Counterterrorism Forum was to bring together a limited number of traditional donors, frontline states, and emerging powers to develop a more robust yet representative counterterrorism capacity-building platform. A number of our close partners with considerable experience counting and – countering and preventing terrorism are not included among the GCTF’s founding members. We’ve discussed the GCTF and ways to involve Israel and its activities on a number of occasions, and we’re committed to making this happen.
QUESTION: Okay. That last line is exactly what was in the taken question from, I believe, June 8th. Can you say --
MR. VENTRELL: And that’s exactly where we are today.
QUESTION: Okay. What was done between then and this last meeting, which was just yesterday? There was a month span there, and I realize that diplomacy can move slowly. What did you do in the interim period there to get Israel involved? Because it’s my understanding that Israel very much wants to be involved in this and perhaps – and it certainly is a frontline state, as you said yesterday --
MR. VENTRELL: Yep.
QUESTION: -- that it has been the victim of terrorism and has been extremely successful in combating it as well, I think. So other frontline states that you mentioned who were left out – I’m not aware that they have evinced any interests – or any particular interest – in joining this group, so Israel has, so I’m just wondering what did the CT Bureau or whoever’s in charge of this do in the interim to get Israel included?
MR. VENTRELL: We continued to discuss it with the GCTF.
QUESTION: Does that mean that it’s a problem at the co-chair?
MR. VENTRELL: No. It means we’re continuing the discussion, and you know where our position is on this, and we’re working with our partners, and I don’t have anything --
QUESTION: Well, I mean, I’d just like to know what you did in the interim between June 8th and July 9th to work on this, on your commitment to getting Israel involved.
MR. VENTRELL: I imagine it was raised at a number of different levels, but let me check for you, Matt, and get back to you.
QUESTION: Okay. Because if you have done something, it suggests that there’s some opposition to them joining this, and that opposition – there’s a lot of speculation that opposition would come from the co-chair of this group, which is Turkey.
MR. VENTRELL: Well, let me find out at what levels we raised it and get back to you after the briefing, Matt.
QUESTION: Thank you.
It doesn't sound like Mr. Ventrell really wants to answer the question, does it? I wonder what will happen today.
Though Otero’s anti-terrorist sentiments were unexceptionable, the exclusion of Israel, one of the primary targets of international terrorists and among the leading experts in how to deal with the problem, was clearly intentional. As Kredo noted, the State Department spokesperson refused to answer when asked about the omission of Israel from the speech and the conference. Though the Obama administration has been touting the president as Israel’s best friend ever during the election year Jewish charm offensive that followed three years of constant fights with the Jewish state, American diplomats have not gotten with the White House’s political program.
Though Israel wisely chose not to publicly complain about the snub, reportedly it did register its views privately and some members of Congress spoke up about the issue last month. But the complaints fell on deaf ears as Otero’s speech demonstrated.
Though this is not a major issue, it is one more sign of the administration’s attitude toward the Israelis. Should the president be re-elected and get the “flexibility” that he has said he would then have to act on foreign affairs, Israel should expect a lot more of this sort of thing if not worse.
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Thursday, June 14.
1) The Comptroller and the Flotilla
Both the New York Times and Washington Post report on the State Comptroller's report that criticized the way the Netanyahu government handled the flotilla two years ago.
When the commandos reached the deck of the ship in the raid, they met with violent resistance and killed nine pro-Palestinian activists — eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent. The deaths incited international outrage and damaged Israel’s already troubled diplomatic relationship with Turkey, a former close regional ally.
Israeli commandos killed nine pro-Palestinian activists during clashes aboard the Mavi Marmara, one of six ships in the flotilla that had sailed from Turkey and attempted to breach Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. Gaza is under the control of the Islamist organization Hamas, which Israel and the United States consider to be a terrorist organization, and Israel says the blockade was necessary to prevent shipments of weapons from reaching militants. The activists said they were transporting humanitarian aid.
Note what neither account says: the commandos were attacked when they boarded. The New York Times does allow that Israel claimed self-defense, in the final paragraph. But the fact that the Israeli commandos were attacked isn't merely an Israeli claim; it is a fact verified by video (shot by the terrorists themselves) and the testimony of a sympathetic journalist Sefik Dinc. It is two years since the incident and this is a basic piece of information that was omitted from two major news stories.
Furthermore, the name "IHH" appears nowhere. IHH is the organization that arranged the flotilla and it has extensive terrorist ties. That the Turkish government apparently allowed IHH to attempt to break the blockade shows that Israeli ties with Turkey were pretty badly damaged even before the raid.
Another aspect of the reporting here that's troubling is the context in which both accounts place the comptroller's report. Here's the New York Times:
Still, the report may tarnish Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership credentials at a time when Israel insists on keeping open the possibility of a larger military operation, a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The defense minister, Ehud Barak, was also criticized in the report. Former security chiefs who worked closely with Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak have already criticized their judgment, calling into question their competence to make a decision on whether to launch a strike on Iran. In April, the recently retired chief of Israel’s internal security agency, Yuval Diskin, spoke of “a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,” and said that after observing Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak up close, “I fear very much that these are not the people I’d want at the wheel.”
The Washington Post:
Critics seized on the report as evidence that Netanyahu and Barak could not be trusted to handle Iran, whose nuclear program Israel considers an existential threat. “Today, we all have to be very concerned. The Barak-Netanyahu pair is making decisions on security affairs in a way that is not serious and not responsible,” Dov Henin, a lawmaker with the left-wing opposition party Hadash, told Israel Radio. “In the same way they made decisions regarding the Marmara, they can make decisions tomorrow regarding Iran. Therefore, this pair is dangerous.”
Admittedly, the Washington Post is more careful in this, by attributing the harsh judgments to critics of the government. However, last week the chief of staff, Gen. Benny Gantz dismissed the criticisms of the former government officials.
Both articles acknowledge that even Lindenstrauss mentioned that even if the decision making process had been ideal, the results of the raid may have been no better.
The omissions of both of these articles, though, underscores a very real problem. Regardless of what Israel does from a public relations standpoint, much of the media is willing to ignore relevant information to present Israel in a less than flattering light.
Israel Hayom presents a comprehensive summary of the comptroller's report. Simon Plosker writes of the military's failure to get information out more expeditiously. (both via Media Backspin) Elder of Ziyon faults the Foreign Ministry. Again, even if their responses had been perfect, I wonder if the relevant information would have been reported in a timely fashion. Israel Matzav has more on the Turkey / IHH collaboration.
2) Global Terrorism Forum followup
Yesterday I wrote about Israel's exclusion from the Global Counterterrorism Forum. Barry Rubin observed at the time of its founding:
Finally, among the new organization’s plans is the “first-ever multilateral training and research center focused on countering violent extremism, which would be based in the Gulf region.” Note that by siting it in the Gulf region, as opposed to all of the other places it could have been done, ensures that no Israeli will ever be an instructor or a student there. The center easily could have been put in the territory of more than twenty other non-Arab members. But there’s more. The United States is not leading this new organization alone. It has a co-director. That co-director is Turkey. Certainly, Turkey has faced terrorism in the past. While one has great sympathy for it in that battle, the Turkish government has also used methods involving death squads and human rights’ violations far worse than those methods condemned loudly by the United States when done by other countries.
So the problem is less that Israel was excluded from one or another event sponsored by this forum; it was excluded at its founding. That's a much bigger scandal; not to mention counterproductive.
Who knows if we could have saved Iran from the ayatollahs — but we didn’t even try. By the late 1970s, we were part of a new culture that got its start 20 years earlier. I’ll risk sacrificing nuance and describe this new culture as having evolved from (A) the oldest doctrine of foreign policy, which is supporting friend against foe, through (B) the newer Cold War doctrine of supporting the lesser evil against the greater evil, to (C) the latest scary doctrine of trying to achieve moral leadership by supporting foe against friend, especially nasty foe against nasty friend.
The United States blocked Israel's participation in the Global Counterterrorism Forum's (GCTF) first meeting in Istanbul on Friday, despite Israel's having one of the most extensive counterterrorism experiences in the world.
Israel was excluded from the meeting due to fierce objections by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Washington-based source told Globes news.
According the State Department’s website, the GCTF, which was established in September 2011, aims at “strengthening the global counterterrorism (CT) architecture in a manner that complements and reinforces the CT work of existing multilateral bodies.”
Twenty-nine countries are participating in the GCTF, ten of which are Arab and/or Muslim countries.
"The GCTF sought from the outset to bridge old and deep divides in the international community between Western donor nations and Muslim majority nations. And it has, I think, done that quite effectively," a top US official said at the press briefing prior to the opening session.
Republican politicians claim that since one third of the GCTF's members are Muslim countries, the Obama administration is trying to deepen ties with the Muslim world at Israel's expense, Globes noted.
If this is how Israel is treated now, imagine how we would be treated in - God forbid - a second Obama term.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
