Israel Matzav

The Brits favored Chamberlain's Czech policy in 1938 too

A newly-released poll shows that Americans favor the P 5+1 agreement with Iran by a 2-1 margin.

According to the Reuters/Ipsos survey, 44 percent of Americans support the interim deal reached between Iran and six world powers in Geneva, and 22 percent oppose it.
While indicating little trust among Americans toward Iranian intentions, the survey also underscored a strong desire to avoid new US military entanglements after long, costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even if the Iran deal fails, 49 percent want the United States to increase sanctions and 31 percent think it should launch further diplomacy. But only 20 percent want US military force to be used against Iran.

The survey's results suggest that a US public weary of war could help bolster Obama's push to keep Congress from approving new sanctions that would complicate the next round of negotiations for a final agreement with Iran.

The poll's conclusions are startlingly similar to British polls taken around the time of Neville Chamberlain's September 1938 agreement with Adolph Hitler over Czechoslovakia.

Public opinion in 1938 seemed reasonably in favour of Neville Chamberlain and what was later to be termed appeasement when he returned with "peace in our time" after the September 1938 Munich Agreement. Opinion polls appear to show that the majority of the nation was in support of the stance taken by Chamberlain.

"Should Britain promise assistance to Czechoslovakia if Germany acts as it did towards Austria?" (Asked March 1938)

Yes: 33%
No: 43%
No opinion: 24%

"Hitler says that he has no more territorial ambitions in Europe. Do you believe him?" (Asked October 1938)

Yes: 7%
No: 93%

"Which of these views comes closest to your views of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement?" (Asked February 1939)

1. It is a policy that will ultimately lead to a lasting peace in Europe: 28%

2. It will keep us out of war until we have time to rearm: 46%

3. It is bringing war nearer by whetting the appetite of the dictators: 24%

4. No opinion: 2%

On March 16, 1939, Hitler invaded the half of Czechoslovakia that was not ceded to him. That (finally) changed British public opinion:

Is the British government right in following a policy giving guarantees to preserve the independence of small European states? (Asked April 1939)

Yes: 83%
No: 17%

Here in Israel we have no delusions (from the first link).

In Israel, a Channel 2 poll conducted Tuesday night showed that a majority of Israelis backed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent criticism of the Obama administration’s Iranian policy, with 58% saying the criticism was justified, and 28% saying it was not.

In addition, most Israelis – 60% – said that the agreement endangered Israel, while 25% said it did not.

 What could go wrong?

Labels: Adolph Hitler, Barack Hussein Obama, Czech Republic, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli polls, Neville Chamberlain, P 5+1, polls

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:05 AM 0 comments

Peace for our time?

Insight Magazine is reporting that one of the proposals made by the Iraq Study Group, led by James "F**k the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway" Baker, is to hold a Madrid-type conference over the future of Israel, to which Israel would not be invited:

The White House has been examining a proposal by James Baker to launch a Middle East peace effort without Israel.

The peace effort would begin with a U.S.-organized conference, dubbed Madrid-2, and contain such U.S. adversaries as Iran and Syria. Officials said Madrid-2 would be promoted as a forum to discuss Iraq's future, but actually focus on Arab demands for Israel to withdraw from territories captured in the 1967 war. They said Israel would not be invited to the conference.

“As Baker sees this, the conference would provide a unique opportunity for the United States to strike a deal without Jewish pressure,” an official said. “This has become the most hottest proposal examined by the foreign policy people over the last month.”

Officials said Mr. Baker's proposal, reflected in the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, has been supported by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns and National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. The most controversial element in the proposal, they said, was Mr. Baker's recommendation for the United States to woo Iran and Syria.

...

Officials said the Baker proposal to exclude Israel from a Middle East peace conference garnered support in the wake of Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 25. They said Mr. Cheney spent most of his meetings listening to Saudi warnings that Israel, rather than Iran, is the leading cause of instability in the Middle East.

“He [Cheney] didn't even get the opportunity to seriously discuss the purpose of his visit—that the Saudis help the Iraqi government and persuade the Sunnis to stop their attacks,” another official familiar with Mr. Cheney’s visit said. “Instead, the Saudis kept saying that they wanted a U.S. initiative to stop the Israelis’ attack in Gaza and Cheney just agreed.”

...

“Baker sees his plan as containing something for everybody, except perhaps the Israelis,” the official said. “The Syrians would get back the Golan, the Iranians would get U.S. recognition and the Saudis would regain their influence, particularly with the Palestinians.”

Not everyone is against us though:

In contrast, Defense Department officials have warned against granting a role to Iran and Syria at Israel's expense. They said such a strategy would also end up undermining Arab allies of the United States such as Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.

“The regional strategy is a euphemism for throwing Free Iraq to the wolves in its neighborhood: Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia,” said the Center for Security Policy, regarded as being close to the Pentagon. “If the Baker regional strategy is adopted, we will prove to all the world that it is better to be America's enemy than its friend. Jim Baker's hostility towards the Jews is a matter of record and has endeared him to Israel's foes in the region.”

But the new Secretary of Defense is against us:

But Defense Secretary-designate Robert Gates, a former colleague of Mr. Baker on the Iraq Study Group, has expressed support for U.S. negotiations with Iran and Syria. In response to questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, which begins confirmation hearings this week, Mr. Gates compared the two U.S. adversaries to the Soviet Union.

“Even in the worst days of the Cold War, the U.S. maintained a dialogue with the Soviet Union and China, and I believe those channels of communication helped us manage many potentially difficult situations,” Mr. Gates said. “Our engagement with Syria need not be unilateral. It could, for instance, take the form of Syrian participation in a regional conference.”

For those who need a history lesson, allow me to remind you what happened at the Munich 'Conference.'

The Munich Agreement (Czech: Mnichovská zrada; German: Münchner Abkommen) was an agreement regarding the Sudetenland Crisis between the major powers of Europe after a conference held in Munich, Germany in 1938 and signed on September 29.

The Sudetenland was an area of Czechoslovakia where ethnic Germans formed a majority of the population. The Sudetenland was of immense strategic importance to Czechoslovakia, as most of its border defenses were situated there, along with a huge armament facility, the Škoda Works. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the future of Czechoslovakia, and it ended up surrendering much of that state to Nazi Germany. It is considered by many as a major example of appeasement. Because Czechoslovakia was not invited to the conference, the Munich Agreement is commonly called the Munich Dictate by Czechs and Slovaks. The phrase Munich betrayal is also frequently used, especially because of military alliances between Czechoslovakia and France and between France and Britain, that were not taken into account.

Because Adolf Hitler soon violated the terms of the agreement, it has often been cited in support of the principle that tyrants should never be appeased. Others, however, believe that starting World War II over the German-majority Sudetenland would have been foolhardy, akin to starting World War I over competing claims to part of Serbia.

Strikingly similar, isn't it? For those who don't recognize him, the picture at the top of this post is of then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin holding the paper containing the resolution to commit to peaceful methods signed by both Hitler and himself on his return from Germany in September 1938. He said:

My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.

A year later, Europe was at war.

Jeff Jacoby has more on the comparison between the Iraq Study Group recommendations and Munich 1938:

As things stand now, however, negotiating with Iran and Syria over the future of Iraq is about as promising a strategy for preventing more bloodshed as negotiating with Adolf Hitler over the future of Czechoslovakia was in 1938. There were eminent "realists" then too, many of whom were gung-ho for cutting a deal with the Fuehrer. As Neville Chamberlain set off on the diplomatic mission that would culminate in Munich, William Shirer recorded in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," Britain's poet laureate, John Masefield, composed a paean in his honor . When the negotiations were done and Czechoslovakia had been dismembered, the prime minister was hailed as a national hero. The Nobel Committee received not one, not two, but 10 nominations proposing Chamberlain for the 1939 peace prize.

Chamberlain and his admirers had been certain that Munich would bring "peace in our time." Instead it helped pave the way for war.

How many times does the lesson have to be relearned? There is no appeasing the unappeasable. When democracies engage with fanatical tyrants, the world becomes not less dangerous but more so.

That wasn't the fashionable view in 1938, however, and it isn't popular today. According to a new World Public Opinion poll, 75 percent of Americans agree that to stabilize Iraq, the United States should enter into talks with Iran and Syria. "I believe in talking to your enemies," James Baker declares. "I don't think you restrict your conversations to your friends."

But with totalitarian regimes like those in Iran and Syria, the effect of such "conversations" is usually negative. It buys time and legitimacy for the totalitarians, while deepening their conviction that the West has no stomach for a fight. No one was more pleased with Chamberlain's diplomacy than Hitler, for it proved that Germany was in the saddle, riding the democracies -- that the momentum was with Berlin, while London and Paris were flailing. The Baker panel's recommendations will bring similar satisfaction to Tehran and Damascus.

...

The war against radical Islam, of which Iraq is but one front, cannot be won so long as regimes like those in Tehran and Damascus remain in power. They are as much our enemies today as the Nazi Reich was our enemy in an earlier era. Imploring Assad and Ahmadinejad for help in Iraq can only intensify the whiff of American retreat that is already in the air. The word for that isn't realism. It's surrender.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:15 AM 7 comments

73rd anniversary of the Tiberias massacre

Sunday marked the 73rd anniversary of the massacre of 19 Jews by Arab terrorists in Tiberias. Yes, 73 years. Before there was any 'occupation' and before there was a Jewish state. But missing from many of the martyrs' lists and the Israeli public consciousness is the massacre of 19 Jews of Tiberias on October 2, 1938, in the height of the "Arab Revolt in Palestine." An organized force of Arab militiamen attacked the neighborhood from several directions.

Why is the account missing? Perhaps because of the absolute failure of British authorities and Orde Wingate's (Jewish) Special Night Squads to protect the Tiberias community. The Mandate was aflame, but virtually no one was guarding the 6,000 Jews of Tiberias. Just three weeks later, an Arab assassin gunned down the Jewish mayor of Tiberias, Zaki Alchadeff, in broad day light.

A lengthy annual report of the British Mandate, 1938, included these three sentences:

"On October 2nd there occurred a general raid on the Jewish quarter of Tiberias. It was systematically organized and savagely executed. Of the 19 Jews killed, including women and children, all save four were stabbed to death."

This is Haaretz's account from October 3, 1938.

19 Jews victims of a gruesome attack in Tiberias

7 wounded, 4 of them severely – concern of more losses.

Official announcement:
Last night at around 9 a large armed gang entered Tiberias. After cutting all phone links, they came in two platoons. One came from the direction of Saffed, through the Kiryat Shmuel quarter, and the second, from the south, through Achva neighborhood. After five minutes a whistle sound was heard from the hills around the city and shootings begun. The shots were aimed mainly at the district offices, the police station, and the residence of the British policemen. At the same time fires broke at the district offices, at the synagogue, and six houses in Achva neighborhood. The police came immediately and 25 minutes later came reinforcement of the Transjordan Frontier Force. They were shot severely near a barricade that was placed on the road near Tiberias spa. From 9 to 11 in the evening the shots continued in the city. The police and the Frontier Force repel the gang out of Tiberias at 11 in the evening.

A curfew was emplaced and the situation is now under control.

The six houses that were stricken, mostly by the bomb, are those of Ben Arye Mizrachi and Katin. In the house of Ben Arye, Yehoshua Ben Arye and his wife Shoshana were stabbed and burned to death, and his son Arye. The year and a half old child Tzadock was shot. Rebecca Leymar, age 10, Haya Leymar age 12, and Ezra Leymar age 8 which were also at the home of Ben Arye at the time of the attack were stabbed and burned. At the home of Mizrachi the killed were Rachel Mizrachi, Ezra age 12, Miryam age 5, Jocheved age 3, Shmuel age 1 and Heftziba age 2, at the house of Katin he and his sister were stabbed and burned but his wife was saved.

A man called Yechezkel Katz, age 42, was killed when the synagogue was torched. During the shooting two Jewish policemen were killed, Israel Foxman and Tzvi Chezkilevitz, also was killed Jacob Gross. Hannah Leymar age 37 was severally injured, and Rahamim Ha’Levi age 26 was lightly injured. Hannah Sabach was lightly injured by a fall.
The total number of Jews killed and wounded, according to the available information, is 19 killed and three wounded.

It’s possible that more losses will be found under the ruins. The losses among the gang during the shooting in Tiberias are unknown for the moment, bandits were killed when Jewish policemen who went to help the city from Mitzpeh met and entered into battle with a gang of armed men on the main road near Tiberias. In the battle four English rifles were caught, a German rifle, a hunting rifle and an amount of bullets. The police had no losses.

Mourning throughout the land
From 2 – 4 a cessation of work and closing of shops had been declared throughout the land to the time of the funerals of the saints of Tiberias.

So where was the 'occupation'? More here.

Labels: 1930's, Palestinian terrorism, Tiberias

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:43 AM 0 comments

69th anniversary of Kristallnacht

I have to at least mention that tonight is the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 'Night of the Broken Glass.' On this night in 1938, German 'youths' burnt over 100 Jewish synagogues to the ground in what many historians regard as the beginning of the Holocaust. My first Gemara teacher, Rabbi Isaiah Wohlgemuth Shlita (may he live long and good days), was the Rabbi of one the synagogues that was burned down, in the town of Kitzingen.

There's an excellent description of how Kristallnacht came about here.

Almost immediately upon assuming the Chancellorship of Germany, Hitler began promulgating legal actions against Germany's Jews. In 1933, he proclaimed a one-day boycott against Jewish shops, a law was passed against kosher butchering and Jewish children began experiencing restrictions in public schools. By 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship. By 1936, Jews were prohibited from participation in parliamentary elections and signs reading "Jews Not Welcome" appeared in many German cities. (Incidentally, these signs were taken down in the late summer in preparation for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin).

In the first half of 1938, numerous laws were passed restricting Jewish economic activity and occupational opportunities. In July, 1938, a law was passed (effective January 1, 1939) requiring all Jews to carry identification cards. On October 28, 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship, many of whom had been living in Germany for decades, were arrested and relocated across the Polish border. The Polish government refused to admit them so they were interned in "relocation camps" on the Polish frontier.

Among the deportees was Zindel Grynszpan, who had been born in western Poland and had moved to Hanover, where he established a small store, in 1911. On the night of October 27, Zindel Grynszpan and his family were forced out of their home by German police. His store and the family's possessions were confiscated and they were forced to move over the Polish border. Zindel Grynszpan's seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, was living with an uncle in Paris. When he received news of his family's expulsion, he went to the German embassy in Paris on November 7, intending to assassinate the German Ambassador to France. Upon discovering that the Ambassador was not in the embassy, he settled for a lesser official, Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Rath, was critically wounded and died two days later, on November 9.

The assassination provided Goebbels, Hitler's Chief of Propaganda, with the excuse he needed to launch a pogrom against German Jews. Grynszpan's attack was interpreted by Goebbels as a conspiratorial attack by "International Jewry" against the Reich and, symbolically, against the Fuehrer himself. This pogrom has come to be called Kristallnacht, "the Night of Broken Glass."

On the nights of November 9 and 10, gangs of Nazi youth roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues and looting. In all 101 synagogues were destroyed and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. 26,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, Jews were physically attacked and beaten and 91 died (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).

The official German position on these events, which were clearly orchestrated by Goebbels, was that they were spontaneous outbursts. The Fuehrer, Goebbels reported to Party officials in Munich, "has decided that such demonstrations are not to be prepared or organized by the party, but so far as they originate spontaneously, they are not to be discouraged either." (Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1983:165)

Three days later, on November 12, Goering called a meeting of the top Nazi leadership to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. Present at the meeting were Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Walter Funk and other ranking Nazi officials. The intent of this meeting was two-fold: to make the Jews responsible for Kristallnacht and to use the events of the preceding days as a rationale for promulgating a series of antisemitic laws which would, in effect, remove Jews from the German economy.

The synagogue in Kitzingen was one of those destroyed. The legend in Boston when I was growing up said that Rabbi Wohlgemuth was the youngest Rabbi in Germany to have his synagogue destroyed. He never spoke about the Holocaust to us; he was interviewed for the article about Kitzingen more than twenty years after my high school graduation.

Rabbi Wohlgemuth escaped to the United States within a relatively short while after that and moved to the Boston area. He became the Rabbi of what was then known as the Norwood Jewish Congregation in November 1940.

To shock you back to the present - and how little things change - neo-Nazis are scheduled to march through the streets of Prague tomorrow.

Saturday is the Sabbath, the day of rest for the Jewish people, but this Saturday looks like being anything but quiet, as dozens, possibly hundreds of far-right extremists from the Czech Republic and abroad are due to descend on Prague's Josefov quarter. They're threatening to march through the former ghetto on the 69th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against Germany's Jews, running the gauntlet of City Hall bans and a strong police presence.

The march is being organised by the far-right Young National Democrats, who say they will announce by Thursday a route and gathering point for participants. The group describes the march as a "protest against Czech participation in the occupation of Iraq".

It's filed request upon request to march down Maiselova street, home to a number of synagogues as well as the headquarters of the Federation of Jewish Communities and the Prague Jewish Community. The Young National Democrats want that route because they claim the Iraq war is being fought in the interests of Israel, but the night of November 9-10th is also the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The Young National Democrats deny being either neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic, describing such claims as "meaningless labels". The group's spokesman Jan Peterka says in an interview published on their website that neo-Nazi organisations are illegal in the Czech Republic and he doesn't know of any in existence here.

Later on, however, he claims the Czech Republic is under pressure from the "international Jewish lobby", pointing out that while the march was declared legal by the Czech courts, the Czech president has promised the president of the World Jewish Congress that the march wouldn't take place. "A better example of who's really pulling the strings in this country can't be found," he added.

Officially, the march has been banned. It remains to be seen whether - God forbid - these 'youths' will succeed in following in their grandparents' footsteps.

Shabbat Shalom.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:31 PM 2 comments

Samaria and the Sudentenland

Shortly after 9/11, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon managed to infuriate US President George W. Bush (who would take a little longer to emerge from his father's shell and become pro-Israel for a while) with a speech that compared Israel to 1938 Czechoslovakia.

"The enlightened democracies of Europe decided then to sacrifice Czechoslovakia in favor of a convenient temporary solution" to the demands of Germany's Adolf Hitler, Sharon said. "We will be unable to accept that. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight terrorism."

"Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense," Sharon said.

Bush, as noted, was not pleased.

"The prime minister's comments are unacceptable," [then White House spokesman Ari] Fleischer said. "Israel has no stronger friend and ally in the world than the United States. President Bush is an especially close friend of Israel."

He added: "The United States has been working for months to press the parties to end the violence and return to a political dialogue. The United States will continue to press both Israel and the Palestinians to move forward."

Earlier [that] week, an unidentified administration official leaked to the news media that Bush's security team was working on a plan for a Palestinian state and that it would keep pushing its own proposals.

In the meantime, under prodding by [then-] Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israel and the Palestinian Authority resumed security talks without waiting for a period free of terrorist attacks, as demanded by Sharon.

Fleischer responded, "The United States is not doing anything to try to appease the Arabs at Israel's expense."

The Bush administration has tried to get Arab countries to support its counterterrorism campaign against the al-Qaida terrorist network in Afghanistan.

If this all sounds familiar, it should. But there are other parallels between Israel and Czechoslovakia, aside from the World's desire to sacrifice a small, vibrant democracy in order to maintain 'World Peace.' One important parallel is between Czechoslovakia's Sudentenland and Israel's Samarian mountains. Another is the parallel between the IDF and Czechoslovakia's army. Giulio Meotti explains.

On September 29, 1938, the Czechoslovak state was truncated and deprived of defensible borders by the “Munich agreement.” Six months later, abandoned by its allies England and France, and bullied by Adolf Hitler, Czechoslovakia lay down and died. Like Israel today, the Czechs were accused of “intransigence” and of being “disturbers of the peace.” They were so disheartened that in the end they chose not to fight, but to surrender. “Peace” meant capitulation.

Czechoslovakia’s situation in 1938 is in fact similar to Israel’s in 2012. Like Israel’s IDF, the Czechs had one of the strongest armies in Europe. Like Israel, Czechoslovakia was a very young and vibrant state. Like Israel, Czechoslovakia was the only liberal democracy in Eastern Europe. And like the Obama administration’s pressing Israel to give up its settlements to the Arabs, the Nazis demanded the annexation of the Sudeten Land, settled by three million Germans. And the Sudeten mountains, like Israel’s “occupied territories,” were the only position from which the Bohemian plain, and the capital Prague, was defensible.

Like Hitler’s demand of “land for peace,” in the name of “peace” Obama is pressing Israel to give up Judea and Samaria, the final line of defense before the Coastal Plain against a hostile Iranian proxy state seated high on the hills only 12 miles from Tel Aviv and just three miles from Israel’s only international airport. That’s why Israel’s legendary diplomat Abba Eban called the borders established following the 1967 Six-Day War “Auschwitz borders.” And does anyone remember how Lord Trenchard got up in the British parliament after Munich and declared that the Czechs didn’t need the Sudeten territories for security? “The best security border,” Trenchard said, “is peace.” Sound familiar?

Read the whole thing. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Labels: 1930's, Ariel Sharon, Barack Hussein Obama, George W. Bush, Neville Chamberlain, Samaria

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:11 PM 0 comments

Israel 2012 like Czechoslovakia 1938 says...

Israelis have been comparing our position to 1938 Czechoslovakia since at least Ariel Sharon's Czechoslovakia speech in 2001. Now, the same comparison has been made by a particularly poignant analyst: The Czech Republic's ambassador to Israel.

Czech Ambassador Tomas Pojar was in the hall attending The Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference in Herzliya on Wednesday when Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman made an example of his country, saying Israel was not about to become “the second Czechoslovakia.” 

...

Pojar, in an interview afterward with The Jerusalem Post, replied with a “yes and no” when asked whether there was validity in that historical comparison.

No, he said, because the situation in 1938 in Central Europe, and in the world, was drastically different than the situation today. “The parallels are interesting, but it is not as if you can easily implement the lessons from one situation onto another, a century or half-century later.”

But still, he said, there are similarities.

“There are certain parallels in that Czechoslovakia was the only democratic country in the entire region at the time,” he said. “There are parallels about how much guarantees you can get from outside, and how much you should rely on them.”

Pojar said that in addition to his country’s tragic experiences during World War II, it also had experiences under communism.

All this had embedded in the Czechs’ “natural skepticism,” and a disinclination to believe in immediate “grandiose ideas and miraculous solutions.”

“We are the most atheistic, non-religious nation in Europe, if not in the entire world,” he asserted. “We don’t believe in miracles, and we don’t believe in political miracles and the solutions of ideologies that [posit that] something can be easily implemented and solved.”

Pojar said the Czechs realize “there are huge differences between war and peace. It is not only either war or peace... Even some interim solutions are sometimes better than crumbled expectations because of grandiose ideas.”

The ambassador said one of the lessons the Czech Republic learned from its past is that “we strongly believe that solutions cannot be imposed from the outside, because they do not work.”
That firm belief is one of the reasons why the Czech Republic, alone among the 27 EU countries, voted with Israel and seven other countries at the UN on November 29 against upgrading the Palestinian status at the UN to that of nonmember state observer.

Pojar also spoke at length about his country's vote against upgrading the status of the 'Palestinians' at the UN last month.

Read the whole thing. 
 

Labels: Adolph Hitler, Czech Republic, Neville Chamberlain, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:55 AM 1 comments

Parallels between Nazi Germany and Iran

Shavua tov - a good week to everyone.

I have often drawn parallels between the world's treatment of Nazi Germany in 1938 and the world's current treatment of Iran. In this weekend's JPost, David Horovitz publishes his notes of a conversation he had with Sir Martin Gilbert, the pre-eminent biographer of Winston Churchill (who succeeded Neville Chamberlain - pictured above - and changed Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Nazi Germany). What Gilbert has to say about the early 1930's sounds eerily familiar.

Take your enemies seriously. Because when it came to the Nazis, people didn't. And by people, Gilbert means the Allied leaders who needed to have known better.

"A grave mistake was made in the 1930s in finding all sorts of reasons for not regarding the Nazi threat as being a serious threat. Therefore, when you're working out your thoughts on the current situation, about fundamentalism, just remember that it is very easy for highly competent, educated, civilized, sophisticated people to find excuses and benign explanations for everything that happens," he says.

Compounding that failure in the 1930s, as the Nazis' rapaciousness became ever-more stark and should have become ever-less possible to explain benignly, Gilbert goes on, was the refusal nonetheless - of German Jews, of the British government, of most of the watching world - to acknowledge what was unfolding before their very eyes, and thus confront it effectively.

"The main argument towards the [Nazi] threat was: 'It must modify; these are extremes which surely will modify.' Of course, many German Jews took the same view as the British government on this... But when the dangers actually worsened, the people who had argued 'it will surely modify,' didn't say, 'Wait a minute. My premise is now destroyed.' Instead, they said, 'This can't really be that grave a threat. This can't be truly an evil force,' and, 'Well, it's not really what it seems."

...

Gilbert offers specifics from the 1930s, examples when honest internalization of what Hitler was up to should have necessitated the robust response that would have thwarted him at so reduced a price: First, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, hailed risibly in a Times of London headline as "A Chance to Rebuild." Next, the annexation of Austria, "which was seen somehow as the natural evolution" even though Austria and Germany had never been one country. Then, Hitler's assertion at Munich in 1938 that he didn't want to rule Czechs even as he was seizing the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, "which was disastrous for the survival of Czechoslovakia and the security, basically, of the West. He was taking this great industrial zone, these great industrial resources, and [destroying] Czechoslovakia's defenses."

But again, "people rationalized. They didn't acknowledge how far things had moved from 'A Chance to Rebuild.' Hitler was taking the territory of another country, and still was producing a reason for so doing which was accepted as plausible."

The ostensibly "alarmist" Churchill (who was to take over as prime minister in May 1940) had been warning all through this period that by the time the apologists woke up and belatedly recognized the need to "take a stand," the means to mount an effective fightback would be much reduced. And so it proved: When the bitter truth of Nazi ambition could no longer be apologized away, with the invasion of Poland in 1939, says Gilbert, "you'd lost your allies, you'd lost territory, you'd lost raw materials. You were in the weakest possible position."

...

Look at the German records, he says. Hitler's generals were saying in 1938 that if Britain and France declared war, "there's nothing we can do. We can't win. We don't have the resources." In this light, the historian observes with dry understatement - implying but not verbalizing a parallel dismal procrastination in the face of evil - it would be "interesting" to hear the internal Iranian discussions today. "Essentially," he goes on, "appeasement gave the Germans time to create a war machine which was virtually impregnable," and which could not be overthrown or even seriously weakened for the first three years.

Which facilitated the Holocaust?

"Which facilitated all the evils that came with the German Nazis."

I don't really need to add anything. Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:18 PM 1 comments

It's 1938 again: German rabbi faces criminal charges for performing circumcisions

A German rabbi (who is not in the picture above) is facing criminal charges for performing circumcisions in Germany. He is the first person to be charged since a German court in Cologne ruled in June that religious circumcisions constitute illegal bodily harm. This is from the first link (Hat Tip: Captain. H).

A doctor from Hesse filed a criminal complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg, who serves in the community of Hof, in Upper Franconia (northern Bavaria), according to the Juedische Allgemeine weekly newspaper. The chief prosecutor of Hof confirmed that charges had been filed against the rabbi. The charges are based on the controversial decision of a Cologne district court, which ruled in June that circumcisions for religious reasons constitute illegal bodily harm to newborn babies.

“I am shocked,” said Cologne Rabbi Yaron Engelmayer, co-chairman of the national umbrella group of Orthodox rabbis in Germany, in a first reaction to the report. This marks the first time that a court in the Federal Republic of Germany is investigating a rabbi for performing a religious ritual, Engelmayer told the paper.

Goldberg, a qualified mohel (ritual circumciser) who says he has performed more than 3,000 circumcisions, was informed about the criminal charges against him by journalists, the paper said.

Born in Jerusalem, the 64-year-old has been the rabbi of Hof since 1997. Before World War II, about 3,000 Jews lived in Hof. Today, the community counts about 400 members.

Read the whole thing.

I should probably explain the 1938 quip in the title. The Nazis - may their name be obliterated - started out by banning ritual slaughter, circumcision and other Jewish rites as being 'cruel' to someone or something. It looks like modern Germany hasn't changed a whole lot since then, has it?

I also see that Germany allows people with no standing (like a 'doctor from Hesse') to file a criminal complaint against a private party. Yet another argument for the American legal system (Israel allows people without standing to file high court appeals - search 'standing' or 'justiciability' in the archives).

And it looks like another European Jewish community ought to be making aliya....

Labels: anti-Semitism, circumcision, Germany

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:15 PM 5 comments

Game theory (liveblog)

Sitting all the way in the back (where I found a plug) listening to Nobel Prize winner Yisrael Aumann talking about game theory. This is a liveblog.

I want to add something about the previous session. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about what a job Danny Dayan did on Jeremy Ben Ami. He listed many of J Street's actions - without using J Street's name - and suggested that an organization that did each of those things had placed itself outside the pro-Israel community. The critique was devastating and all Ben Ami could do was smirk like President Obama did when he sat next to Prime Minister Netanyahu last month during that White House press availability.

Aumann says that war can be rational. We take all the ills of the world and dismiss them by calling them irrational. If they are rational, once we understand that they are, we can try to address the problem. If we dismiss them as irrational, we can't address the problem.

Economics and game theory in one word: Incentives. For example, taxes. You can lose revenue by raising taxes.

How do you apply this to peace? What brings peace? Concessions don't bring peace. Look at Munich 1938. 'Peace in our time.' No, it didn't work (Aumann says this is what Peres is promoting). Chamberlain brought war from Munich in 1938. Why didn't the concessions to Hitler work? Because Chamberlain was saying to Hitler, "We are weak. We will not respond." That was a lie but Hitler believed it. When you're strong and signal weakness, that's what brings war.

Is disarmament an incentive for peace? What made the cold war stay cold was nuclear weapons without nuclear explosions. What prevented the nuclear explosions was the presence of nuclear weapons. There were bombers in the air 365 days a year for 40 years. That's what prevented the cold war from becoming hot.

Does the Pax Romana bring peace? The Roman peace lasted for 400 years. Their motto was if you want peace, prepare for war. They were the first game theorists.

No one put it as succinctly as President Obama in his Nobel acceptance speech: The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Aumann says he deserves the prize for that sentence alone.

Aumann is viewed as a hawk but he truly wants peace. How do you get peace? Not by shouting peace, not by concessions, not by gestures and not by expelling 10,000 people from their homes like Gaza 2005. These things bring war. Hitler did not want war in 1939 - he thought the allies did not want war. The Gaza expulsion brought the Lebanon War of 2006, the bombardment of southern Israel, Operation Cast Lead and the Mavi Marmara disaster. So what should we do now? How do we get peace? You can't glue together the pieces of the Gaza expulsion.

The important thing is to convince the Arabs that we are here to stay. We have signaled that we are not here to stay and we must change that. The Arabs still think of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa as Arab territory. We have to convince them that won't happen. We must be patient. We must sit tight and expel nobody. We must avoid collective measures - they hit the wrong people. The people have no say there - we have to focus on the leadership.

We should improve life so that people are satisfied. We should respond to provocations in a predictable way.

Most important: Insist on Oslo provision calling for education for peace and tolerance. No one remembers this provision anymore and our government does not insist on it. The kids who were educated in the PA 15 years ago are now the leaders. We must try and change those goals so that their goals are not to wipe us off the map.

We are doing none of these things.

(From question and answer session) Professor Aumann is trying to discuss how we give a rational partner an incentive to make peace. He does not believe there is a rational partner today.

Our problem is that we want peace NOW. We have to start NOW, but we can't get peace now. Our problem is the way that children are taught in the territories. We have to get used to the fact that nothing is going to happen now. We made too many mistakes in the past.

Helen Thomas did us a favor by saying what everyone was thinking. Trying concessions is just making things worse. Netanyahu in Congress was great.

Would love to get a copy of Professor Aumann's slides....

Recall that Nasrallah said that if he had known how Israel would respond in 2006, he would not have started the war.

Key departments in Israeli universities overrun with people who don't agree with Obama. They think peace being desirable is enough to achieve it. Problems: These people have tenure and appoint other people like them to their departments.

Aumann complains about lack of provocative questions. Says everyone here agrees with him. Asks for provocative question.

Questioner says we shouldn't be negotiating with 'Palestinians' but with their funders: Saudis, Iraqis, Iranians - we need to hold them responsible. We have to hold the people who put Oslo together responsible. Aumann agrees. Oh well - no provocative question. Aumann says that the real people we have to address is ourselves.

End of session.

I got a ticket for the plenary session with Shimon Peres and Dennis Ross so stay tuned.

Labels: Gaza expulsion, President's Conference, Yisrael Aumann

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:54 PM 2 comments

Obama makes Chamberlain look prescient

Like many people who are concerned with nuclear proliferation in Iran, I have compared US President Barack Obama to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who famously declared that he had brought 'peace in our time' after sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938. Mark Steyn points out that with last week's 'nuclear disarmament' summit in Washington, Obama goes beyond anything Chamberlain could have dreamed about.

In years to come — assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come — scholars will look back at President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia, and Thailand . . . but not even mentioning Germany.

Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the U.N. 65 years ago — and Iran wasn’t on the agenda.

In fact, to find a real comparison to what Obama just did, says Rick Richman, you'd have to go back to 1921, to the Washington Conference on Naval Disarmament in the Pacific, described by Winston Churchill - Chamberlain's successor - in the opening chapter of his book, The Gathering Storm:

At the Washington Conference of 1921 far-reaching proposals for naval disarmament were made by the United States, and the British and American governments proceeded to sink their battleships and break up their military establishments with gusto. It was argued in odd logic that it would be immoral to disarm the vanquished unless the victors also stripped themselves of their weapons.

If that sounds familiar, it should. President Obama has argued that the United States has a special obligation to be the first to disarm, because thus far it is the only country to have used nuclear weapons on the battlefield. As if an American nuke and an Iranian nuke are comparable.

Steyn argues that nuclear disarmament is irrelevant today.

Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to “contain” it, I remember the bewildered look from a “nonproliferation expert” on a panel I was on after I suggested nonproliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War, when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it’s not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can’t? North Korea’s population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana’s, lower than Zimbabwe’s, lower than Mongolia’s. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.

Yet it’s a nuclear power.

What Steyn doesn't mention, but which should be obvious from the list of countries cited, is that the nuclear powers with the high GDP's are the ones we need to worry about. They're the non-democratic countries where the leadership is most likely to be indifferent to their population's safety. On the other hand, the big five are all rational actors even if (in the case of China and Russia), they are not entirely Western democracies.

Read the whole thing. Read this one too.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:28 AM 1 comments

'Leon Panetta is a clown'

Barry Rubin rips US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta some new body parts.

Panetta has now bashed Israel based on a premise. Here it is:

“I understand the view that this is not the time to pursue peace, and that the Arab awakening further imperils the dream of a safe and secure, Jewish and democratic Israel. But I disagree with that view.” Nevertheless, Israel needs to take risks and particularly, “The problem right now is we can’t get them to the damn table, to at least sit down and begin to discuss their differences.”

First, there is a peculiar phrase that I have not seen used even once to describe the Middle East events of 2011. How did that phrase get into Panetta’s vocabulary? Obviously, from a briefing and I don’t believe it came from anyone at the Defense Department. That phrase is “Arab awakening” instead of “Arab Spring.”

Every Middle East historian—well, every Middle East historian who knows something about the Middle East—knows that The Arab Awakening was the famous book written by George Antonius (subsidized by a U.S foundation to do so, by the way) advocating Arab nationalism and opposition to Zionism in 1938. I can’t prove it but it gives me an idea of the views of whoever wrote those talking points.

This phrase also gives Panetta’s statement a strangely contradictory tone. If The Arab Awakening began a half-century pan-Arab struggle against Israel’s creation or existence might this not give us a hint of what the new “Arab Awakening” is going to do? Oh, and 1938 marks the year when Great Britain desperately tried to sell out the Jews in order to gain Arab support (for the coming war with Germany and Italy). Within two years of Antonius’s book the form the Arab Awakening took was an alliance with Nazi Germany. One of the main allies of Berlin was the Muslim Brotherhood, now coming into power in Tunisia and Egypt.

Interesting parallels.

But there are three other major questions raised in Panetta’s silly statement.

First, does the current “Arab Awakening” imperil Israel? Yes, of course it does.

...

Second, and more interestingly, why is the above true?

The answer is as follows:

–Democracy in theory is admirable but when you have masses imbued with very radical views, strong Islamist movements, and weak moderate ones, the election winners will be extremely radical Islamists. By winning massive victories, facing a weak (even sympathetic) United States, and seeing even mor extreme forces becoming so popular (the Salafists in Egypt) the Islamists are emboldened to be even more radical in their behavior. Who’s going to stop them?

–We are thus not facing a springtime of democracy but a springtime of extremism.

–Not only is the United States not opposing this development it is supporting it. In other words, U.S. policy is intensifying the threat to Israel, not helping Israel.

Third, why are there no negotiations? As the history of the issue since January 2009 shows, it is the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to negotiate with Israel. If Panetta and the Obama Administration were either wise or honest they would acknowledge this fact. Instead, they blame Israel. Once again, U.S. policy is intensifying the threat to Israel, not helping Israel.

Consequently, Panetta’s statement that Israel has a responsibility to build regional support for Israeli and United States’ security objectives is nonsense.

Read it all.

Labels: Arab spring, Barack Hussein Obama, Barry Rubin, Leon Panetta

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:03 PM 0 comments

It's 1938 again

Bret Stephens actually titled this Wall Street Journal piece "Post-Post-9/11 Looks Just Like Pre-World War II," but to my mind, that's just another way of warning that it's 1938 again. Hence this post's title and the picture, which I hope you all recognize. Stephens makes an important point: the Obama administration's apparent desite to abandon Israel fits in with an isolationist foreign policy that involves sticking America's collective head into the sand and ignoring what is happening to its allies. This 'strategy' is bound to come back and haunt the American people.

As in the 1920s, we have emerged (if only partially), from several years of war -- scarcely anticipated, earnestly begun, bravely fought, often badly waged and, at least in the case of Iraq, ambiguously won. It was an emotionally exhausting war justified first on grounds of national survival, then for spreading democracy. The moral clarity and political unity that went with the war's beginning collapsed into political division and disillusion.

From this there has emerged under the Obama administration a new kind of moral clarity. It is founded on conciliatory tendencies, a preference for multilateral solutions, a powerful desire to be on the right side of global public opinion, and an instinct for looking away from that which we'd rather not to see. This has put some political stress on our residual post-9/11 commitments, particularly in the case of Afghanistan, while creating an overwhelming aversion to possible confrontations, particularly against revanchist Russia and millenarian Iran.

The Locarno generation felt similarly about standing in the way of Japan's invasion of Manchuria, Italy's of Abyssinia and Germany's of Czechoslovakia. In their case, as increasingly in ours, a weak foreign policy was a function of severe economic distress. But economic considerations were as often an alibi for inaction as they were a reason for it. Folklore aside, the German economy was in considerably worse shape than Britain's for most of the '30s. But while the British were timid, Hitler was willful.

Today, Russia and Iran are in a parlous economic state, but they are also keen to seek their advantage through calculated acts of provocation and aggression. They sense that the commitments the Bush administration made to the security of our allies aren't ones the Obama administration is especially eager to honor. That goes for missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic; for the independence of Georgia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics; for the status of forces agreement with Iraq; perhaps also for the security of Israel if it opts for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.

We know how this movie ends. So here's a suggestion: If we're going to squander trillions in "stimulus," let's spend more on defense. An F-22 assembly line adds just as much to employment as a few thousand more "green" workers, with the added bonus of deterring our enemies. That's a lesson the democracies learned almost too late in the dismal post-Locarno years. Why make the same mistake twice?

Of course, Stephens' point about how to spend all that money would be valid if the point of the 'stimulus' was to bring about an economic recovery. But that's not what the 'stimulus' is about. As should be clear to all of you by now, the 'stimulus' is about handing out American taxpayers' money to favored Democratic causes in a populist bid to entrench the Democrats in power for years to come. And about 'proving' Ronald Reagan wrong.

The proof that I'm right and that all that money is not going to be spent wisely? The Dow closed at 1997 levels yesterday. The markets don't care about politics: They care about making money.

On the main point of the article, I'm not sure yet whether the administration is burying its collective head in the sand about what's happening in Israel (and Iran) or whether it's just plain rank anti-Semitism. But I don't expect any help from Washington so long as Obama is in power.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:34 AM 2 comments

Will we see a speech like this later this week?

Will we see another speech like this one by President Hussein Obama's hero later this week? Is it 1938 all over again?

Let's go to the videotape.



It's really starting to look like 1938 again, isn't it?

What could go wrong?

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear threat, Neville Chamberlain

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:32 PM 0 comments

From Munich 1938 to Damascus 2013, nothing has changed

Iran isn't the only country watching the West doddle on Syria. So is Israel. Britain's backing out of a Syria strike, and Hussein Obama's obvious hesitation to do the job are going to encourage an Israeli attack on Iran.

But the Iranians are not the only ones watching.  So is Israel.  Whether or not Israel decides to act against Iran could be determined in large part by how the world acts now against Syria.  And the British parliament's vote Thursday against military action is not a great sign.

"The international stuttering and hesitancy on [a] Syria [strike], just proves once more that Israel cannot count on anyone but itself,"  Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett wrote on his Facebook page on Friday. "From Munich 1938 to Damascus 2013 nothing has changed. This is the lesson we ought to learn from the events in Syria."

And Bennett's post came even before Obama's address in which he said that the US would conduct a limited military action against Syria, but only if Congress approved it when it came back from its summer recess on September 9.  

"Trust us," the world – led by the US -- has urged Israel for years on Iran.  "We will deal with Iran, we will not allow them to get nuclear weapons. Even if they do, there is little chance they will use them. Nobody is that crazy."

Really? Syrian President Bashar Assad is that crazy, using chemical weapons in broad daylight against his own people, even though he knew he would be held culpable.

Yet the world dithers. 

...

The Iranians, watching this show, are surely calculating what action they could expect if they run at full speed to nuclear capability.  One could not blame them for concluding that the French will speak tough, the British will vote military action down in parliament. and Obama will bring the matter to Congress for a vote if Congress is in session. If not, he will wait patiently until Congress re-convenes to ask its opinion.

That kind of international dallying is not the type of behavior that will instill confidence in Israeli leaders that they can count on the world when it comes to Iran.

Besides, if this is how the world acts when some 1,429 people are gassed, how should we expect them to act if Iran just crosses the nuclear threshold, but doesn't kill anybody yet?

If gassing 1,429 people, including at least 426 children, as US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday, does not lead to a military assault, will the crossing of the nuclear threshold – when no one is killed – trigger a response?

 Read the whole thing.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Bashar al-Assad, Britain, chemical weapons, Damascus, France, Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli attack on Iran, Syria, United States

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:40 AM 0 comments

THE MIDEAST'S MUNICH

Is UN Security Council Resolution 1701 really as pivotal to the Middle East as the Munich sellout was seventy years ago? That's what Arthur Herman argued in yesterday's New York Post.

Hat Tip: Radical Ron

HISTORIANS will look back at this weekend's cease-fire agreement in Lebanon as a pivotal moment in the war on terror. It is pivotal in the same sense that the Munich agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain was pivotal in an earlier battle against the enemies of freedom. The accord in October 1938 revealed to the world that the solidarity of the Western allies was a sham, and that the balance of power had shifted to the fascist dictators.

Resolution 1701 shows that, for the time being at least, the balance has likewise shifted to the terrorists and their state sponsors. Like Munich, it marks the triumph of the principle of putting off until tomorrow what needs to be done today. Like Munich, it will mean not peace in our time, but a bigger war in our future.

In that sense, the cease-fire may be even more momentous than Munich, and a greater blunder. In 1938 Chamberlain and other appeasers had the excuse that they were trying to prevent an armed conflict no one wanted. Today, of course, that conflict is already here. Historians will conclude that by supporting U.N. Resolution 1701 and getting Israel to agree, the Bush administration has in effect declared that its global war on terror is over. We have reverted to the pre-9/11 box of tools, if not necessarily the pre-9/11 mindset. From now on, the worst Iran, Syria, and North Korea will have to worry about are serial resolutions in the United Nations. Terrorists will be busy dodging Justice Department subpoenas, not Tomahawk missiles.

Our enemies know better. They know the war is only entering a new stage, and they know who the winners and losers were last weekend.

As you might imagine, I disagree. I place the blame for last weekend's resolution with Israel and not with the United States. I do agree with his winners and losers list.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:36 PM 0 comments

Do We Now Return to the Garden of the Finzi-Continis?

Israel Matzav

Do We Now Return to the Garden of the Finzi-Continis?

While I think his praise for Sharon is overdone, his analysis of the Iranian situation and its impact on Israel and on the world is spot-on:

In 1971, the great Italian film maker, Vittorio De Sica directed The Garden of the Finzi-Continis which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival that same year. The movie was a character study of a wealthy Italian Jewish family in the town Ferrara in 1938. The Finzi-Contini family is already destroyed but do not realize it yet. The fascist government of Mussolini was not particularly energetic in their persecution of Jews but their much more powerful ally demanded that Italy at least make some attempts to aid in the "final solution." The scourge of anti-Semitism which had been in abeyance for many years in Italy was slowly gaining force and depth in 1938. The movie is a fascinating, elegiac look at wealthy, narcissistic young people who, like insects with one wing trapped in amber, do not perceive that their world is about to end.

...

The Finzi-Continis were insulated by their wealth from the realities of the world that was crashing down around them; it seems today that our liberal elites, equally insulated from the world by their wealth and success, believe if they continue to behave as if time has stopped, then they need do nothing to prevent the coming disaster. However, we are clearly approaching a pivotal moment.

Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred (in a post that should be read more widely) asks some questions that need to be addressed:

The civilized world is on trial today.

It is a simple matter, really. How we respond to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks denying the Holocaust and excoriating Jews will say a lot more about us that it will about him.

What lessons have we learned from the past? What morality have we integrated into our very being as the result of the Holocaust, directed against the Jews, by design? What morality have we integrated into ourselves as a result of that wider holocaust, the one that left 50 million dead in the span of six years?

The Palestinians have only slowed their genocidal attacks in order to turn their rage on themselves, for now, yet once the Iranians have their bomb, Israel's existence will be at risk both from the air (Iranian missiles) and from the land (Palestinian suicide bombers). Al Qaeda has taken up residence in Gaza to facilitate the mass death and destruction they hope to rain upon the hated Jews.

How will the world respond? One answer is here:

Norway's Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen is backing a planned consumer boycott of Israeli goods, contradicting the coalition government's policy.

Ms Halvorsen voiced support for a campaign of solidarity with the Palestinians, due to be launched by her Socialist Left party this month.


... Update: Kobayashi Maru is on the same wavelength with me on this; the crisis with Iran has just worsened. In Fasten Your Seatbelts: Sharon, Israel, Iran, and... he notes:

....It seems unlikely that scheduled March elections will put an end to the uncertainty that's been created literally overnight and the danger that goes with it. That scheduled Israeli elections happen to roughly coincide with the expected fulfillment of Iran's nuclear ambitions (March) should get the entire planet's attention. Whatever the rhetoric of Iran et al, and whatever the reality in actual Israeli policy changes (or lack thereof), Sharon's decline invites the wolves to circle closer. Wolves don't sit in salons and write essays and sip lattes and debate. They act. It doesn't matter whether or not we think that's civilized. It's just the way it is.

(Sorry, I don't know how to code HTML and my formatting is a bit off). Read it all!

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:07 AM 0 comments

At the UN, party like it's 1938

Claudia Rosett wonders where Obama's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, has been. It's not just the accession of Libya to the 'Human Rights Council' or Iran to the UN's commission on the status of women. It's a long list of unexplained absences from United Nations debates and committees.

[C]ozying up to the U.N. comes with responsibilities for standing up to the liars, crooks and tyrants who seize every chance to exploit the institution. These days Washington shows limp interest in oversight, despite U.S. taxpayers providing roughly one-quarter of a U.N. system-wide budget now well upward of $25 billion per year.

For instance, one of the top slots at the U.S. Mission is for an envoy for U.N. management and reform. Since Obama took office 16 months ago that post has yet to be filled. The Mission has made do with an acting ambassador, flashing a clear message that for all the U.S. "engagement," the chronic need to clean the bilges of the U.N. ranks low among Washington's priorities.

Or take another example. A few years ago, in the wake of such U.N. scandals as Oil-for-Food and the discovery of massive corruption in the U.N. procurement department, the U.S. Mission began posting detailed critiques of U.N. budgets, plus copies of U.N. internal audit reports. This helped bring a glimmer of much-needed transparency to the murky, self-serving and graft-laced inner workings of the U.N.

Under Obama, the U.S. Mission stopped updating this information. The most recent audits posted are from 2008. Interviewed by phone this week, a spokesman for the mission said the posting of U.N. internal audits has been "temporarily suspended" since early 2009, pending a redesign of the website and a review of past policy. He added that the policy has now been approved, and the backlog of U.N. internal audits omitted since late 2008 should be posted "within a matter of weeks."

Meanwhile the U.N. has been oozing signs of rot within. The Obama administration may not look kindly on Fox News, but Rice would be doing herself a service to read a series of recent articles on the U.N. by Fox News Executive Editor George Russell. He's a veteran reporter of the old gumshoe school, with a knack for digging up the kind of U.N. internal documents that the U.S. Mission has stopped posting.

Russell's recent dispatches have included the April 20 story, "U.N.'s Ballooning $732 Million Haiti Peacekeeping Budget Goes Mostly to Its Own Personnel" (not to earthquake stricken Haitians). On April 27 he reported that while the U.N. is telling the rest of the world how to behave to save the planet, an internal U.N. report has documented that the U.N.'s "own environmental housekeeping is a ‘scattered' mess"--costly, opaque, ad hoc and incoherent. In yet another article, April 16, he covered "Pricey Peacekeeping: Ban Gets Blasted for Billion-Dollar Mismanagement," based on a U.N. internal report that described waste, abuses and chronic bungling at the U.N.'s highest levels.

And where's Rice in all this? Richard Grenell, who was the spokesman for the last four American ambassadors to the UN, explained back in January:

We actually heard from Susan Rice more during the presidential campaign when she was a foreign policy adviser to then-candidate Barack Obama than we have over the last year, when she has been representing us at the UN. It has been just over one year since Rice was confirmed by the United States Senate to be the Permanent Representative to the UN and she so far has been wildly inattentive in New York. While Rice has been active in the social scene of Washington and the White House, a new study released by the uber-serious Security Council Report suggests that this past year has been the most inactive Security Council since 1991. For an Administration that promised to utilize the UN and improve our reputation around the world, its dinner-party circuit strategy isn't making America more secure.

Much of the blame for that belongs to Rice and her habitual silence. Rice has not conducted the hard negotiations nor done the sometimes unpopular work of engaging the UN on the United States' priority issues. When Rice does attend UN negotiations, she is all too willing to avoid confrontation. She has instead opted to spend time networking in Washington and making nice with her colleagues in New York. While other foreign Ambassadors speak fondly of Rice and her easy ways, she has been a weak negotiator for the American people.

...

Rice has been spending several days a week in Washington with her larger than normal DC-based staff and spending less time with the 200-plus employees who work for her in New York. While Rice launched her tenure with a glamour spread in Vogue Magazine by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz showing her kicking back in an empty Security Council Chamber, she seems to not enjoy the Chamber when it's full of diplomats. During the recent Haiti crisis, Rice was not only absent from the Security Council vote to expand the UN's peacekeeping operation but she also failed to call an emergency meeting in the immediate aftermath to request more help. In fact, 7 days after the Haiti earthquake left tens of thousands of people in the streets without food or shelter, it was UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that came to the Security Council to request more troops - the American Ambassador hadn't bothered.

Read the whole thing.

Rice will likely have to be a key player for the Security Council to pass any kind of sanctions against Iran. I guess the UN is in good hands. They're partying like it's 1938 all over again. What could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:36 PM 1 comments

EU joins 'Palestinian' threats on Annapolis

Last Wednesday, the 'good terrorists' of Fatah threatened a 'new intifadeh' if they don't get what they want at the Annapolis conference. And on Saturday, they threatened to stay home unless the 'agenda' for their gifts is worked out in advance. Now, the European Union is joining in those threats under the mantra that 'failure' is not an option.

A failure to advance the peace process at next month's conference in Annapolis could trigger worse violence than the second intifada that followed the failed Camp David talks in 2000, Neville Chamberlain Marc Otte, the EU's Special Representative to the Middle East Process, said Monday.

"The cost of failure is even bigger then in 2000," Otte told reporters in Brussels.

There were many more destabilizing elements in the Middle East now than there were seven years ago, he said.

Among those he listed were the threat of a nuclear Iran, the danger that Iraq would split, the strengthening of Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Hamas takeover of Gaza.

Otte said he agreed with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she cited a favorite quote from the movie Apollo 13: "Failure is not an option."

"We are starting on that basis," Otte said.

None of those 'destabilizing elements' has anything to do with the Fatah thugs getting what they want in Annapolis.

Iran is going nuclear because it wants to go nuclear and the West is too weakened and divided to stop it. Iran's desire has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with radical Islam's wish to spread its gospel across the globe by force. To draw a connection between Iran's nuclear program and the 'Palestinians' is absurd. Iran isn't developing nuclear weapons to 'liberate' 'Palestine.'

The splitting of Iraq (which may or may not happen and may or may not be a good thing given Iraq's ethnic makeup and the fact that it is an artificial state with artificial boundaries from the get-go) has nothing to do with Annapolis. Israel ought not to be a sacrificial lamb for US policy in Iraq regardless of whether or not US activity in Iraq works to our benefit. This is nothing other than the implementation of the discredited Iraq Study Group recommendation that Israel be made a sacrificial lamb for US policy in Iraq. It's 1938 all over again.

Hezbullah's strength in Lebanon will not decrease if Israel puts 80% of its population within range of 'Palestinian' Kassam rockets. If anything, it will increase. Hezbullah is a fundamentalist Islamic organization that will find excuses to continue to attack Israel even if the country shrinks to being the Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv. Its goals in Lebanon are to support Syria and to gain control over Lebanon. Syria will not be weakened by Israeli 'concessions' to Fatah either - it will be strengthened. After all, if the 'Palestinians' can gain concessions why can't Syria?

It may be argued that if Fatah succeeds at Annapolis, Hamas will be strengthened because it would show the 'Palestinians' that Fatah is the 'good' alternative. But any 'success' that does not include the exercise of the 'right of return' for 'Palestinian refugees' - which seems to be the only point on which corrupt Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert is not willing to concede completely - will be exploited by Hamas to Fatah's detriment. And 'success' at Annapolis will not suddenly turn Fatah into an honest organization.

On the other hand, the price of 'success' at Annapolis would be enormous for the United States and existentially threatening for Israel. The 'Palestinians' have already said that what they turned down at Camp David and Taba seven years ago is 'not enough.' 92% of Judea and Samaria is 'not enough.' Less than all of 'East Jerusalem' - and the creation of another 200,000 Israeli refugees - is 'not enough.' And any solution that does not include the 'right of return' - which is anathema to nearly all Israelis because it spells the demise of the Jewish state - is 'not enough.' The 'right of return' takes precedence over the creation of a 'Palestinian' state reichlet because the 'right of return' reflects the real goal: the destruction of the Jewish state.

But all of that is ignored by Mr. Chamberlain Otte, who is perfectly willing to lend a hand to the 'Palestinians' finishing what Adolph Hitler started in Belgium and other countries sixty-five years ago:

The main question regarding the Annapolis meeting was not why would it work this time when it failed before, but rather, "What do we lose if it does not succeed," he said.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

That provides a lot of incentive for Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to break the impasse, he said, adding that there was a "sufficient convergence of political will not to let it go this time."

Of course, Otte and all the other attendees at Annapolis expect that 'political will' to come solely from Israel. None of the forty countries attending actually expects the 'Palestinians' to concede anything.

Even a small step forward would suffice, such as the issuance of a joint statement by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, he said.

"How long has it been since an Israeli and a Palestinian leader have come to an agreement, even if they are rather vague [with details], even if it is just the parameters for solving the conflict," Otte said.

Such a statement might "look modest, but given what happened in the last six years it would be quite an achievement," he said.

Yes, of course. A phased plan for the implementation of the phased plan. For those who have forgotten, the original phased plan was the Palestinian Liberation Organization's (PLO) 1974 phased plan that declared a willingness to accept the establishment of a national authority in any part of historic Palestine as a step toward "completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory." It has never been disavowed.

There's much more I could fisk in this article, but I think this is enough to give you the flavor.

This 'conference' started out as one that would be attended by countries that, in President Bush's words, "support a two-state solution, reject violence, recognize Israel's right to exist, and commit to all previous agreements between the parties." It has evolved into an 'international conference" to which every rejectionist other than Hamas has been invited. It is going to be a gang attack on the State of Israel, with the gang protecting the interests of Fatah, which itself is promoting violence. Annapolis is Munich, 2007 is 1938 and Israel is Czechoslovakia. If Olmert had either a brain or a shot of testosterone, he would announce that Israel is staying home.

And if Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu (at a minimum) were honest with themselves and their voters, they would announce that they are leaving the coalition unless Olmert announces by next week that Israel is staying home. But don't expect that to happen either.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:31 AM 0 comments

Why don't Jews protest? UN declares Gandhi's birthday 'international day of non-violence'

The United Nations has declared October 2, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, as the 'international day of non-violence.'

The International Day of Non-Violence is marked on 2 October, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement and pioneer of the philosophy and strategy of non-violence.

According to General Assembly resolution A/RES/61/271 of 15 June 2007, which established the commemoration, the International Day is an occasion to "disseminate the message of non-violence, including through education and public awareness". The resolution reaffirms "the universal relevance of the principle of non-violence" and the desire "to secure a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence".

Introducing the resolution in the General Assembly on behalf of 140 co-sponsors, India’s Minister of State for External Affairs, Mr. Anand Sharma, said that the wide and diverse sponsorship of the resolution was a reflection of the universal respect for Mahatma Gandhi and of the enduring relevance of his philosophy. Quoting the late leader’s own words, he said: "Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man".

But most Jews either don't know or don't want to know how Gandhi felt about them and about Israel. This is because Gandhi is a liberal icon, and actually looking at what he said about the State of Israel is going to make an awful lot of Leftist Jews - whose support for Israel is in any event tenuous - uncomfortable. This is Gandhi in 1938.

But my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.

But the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For he is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which any inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter. The crime of an obviously mad but intrepid youth is being visited upon his whole race with unbelievable ferocity. If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is therefore outside my horizon or province.

But if there can be no war against Germany, even for such a crime as is being committed against the Jews, surely there can be no alliance with Germany. How can there be alliance between a nation which claims to stand for justice and democracy and one which is the declared enemy of both? Or is England drifting towards armed dictatorship and all it means?

Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism. It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its nakedness.

Can the Jews resist this organised and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect, and not to feel helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there is. No person who has faith in a living God need feel helpless or forlorn. Jehovah of the Jews is a God more personal than the God of the Christians, the Mussalmans or the Hindus, though as a matter of fact in essence, He is common to all and one without a second and beyond description. But as the Jews attribute personality to God and believe that He rules every action of theirs, they ought not to feel helpless. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

...

And now a word to the Jews in Palestine. I have no doubt that they are going about it in the wrong way. The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart. They can offer satyagraha in front of the Arabs and offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them. They will find the world opinion in their favour in their religious aspiration. There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the British bayonet. As it is, they are co-shares with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them.

I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth. Every country is their home including Palestine not by aggression but by loving service. A Jewish friend has sent me a book called The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation by Cecil Roth. It gives a record of what the Jews have done to enrich the world`s literature, art, music, drama, science, medicine, agriculture, etc. Given the will, the Jew can refuse to be treated as the outcaste of the West, to be despised or patronised. He can command the attention and respect of the world by being man, the chosen creation of God, instead of being man who is fast sinking to the brute and forsaken by God. They can add to their many contributions the surpassing contribution of non-violent action.

In other words, Gandhi advocated Jews being led to their deaths for the sake of 'non-violence.' That's a false god if I ever heard of one. 

Labels: Leftist Jews, United Nations

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:28 AM 4 comments