Israel, Zionism and the Diaspora

Antisemitism as national policy: The US Congress shuts the borders, 1923-4

2012-01-26T18:50:00.000-08:00

Wednesday Jan 25, 2012

“Upon signing the Act, President Calvin Coolidge commented, ‘America must remain American.’ This phrase would become the rallying cry of anti-immigration sentiment until after World War II.”

Over the next months the United States will become the focus of my writing. This is not because I believe this country more antisemitic, is historically more aggressive in persecuting its Jewish citizens. The contrary. While the level of popular and institutional antisemitism in the U.S. roughly paralleled Europe before and during the years of National Socialism; and while the United States failed to live up to tradition as refuge when it came to Jews fleeing Auschwitz, neither did it actively participate in the systematic bloodletting that was Europe’s effort to achieve a Final Solution to the West’s enduring Jewish Problem. No, I discuss antisemitism in the United States because I happen by birth to be far more familiar with this country’s history: as I discuss the United States over the months it should not be seen as an example, but as a metaphor for western antisemitism. I firmly believe, and try to demonstrate in my writings, that the risk to Jews represented by the Diaspora has not diminished over the centuries: the Holocaust demonstrates that its mortal threat has exponentially increased.

Introduction: It is a matter of historical fact and common knowledge that in the years before and during the Holocaust the United States first limited, then barred entry to Jewish refugees, targets of Europe’s persecution and eventual murder campaign. According to the president American immigration law tied his hands. And while there were other options available had the will to rescue been present, technically Roosevelt was correct. In the 1920’s Congress passed legislation widely understood as targeting the Jews that would only be lifted forty years later; twenty years after Auschwitz gassed its last victims.

Jews had lived in the United States since earliest colonial times. And while they faced discrimination in the past it was not until the early 1920’s, influenced by growing antisemitism and American eugenics, that discrimination took a more ominous and, for European Jewry, fateful turn.

Henry Ford distributed the Protocols at all dealerships across the U.S. His purchase of The Dearborn Independent allowed hit to spread antisemitism beyond the showroom.

“The Immigration Restriction Leaguewas the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. Founded in 1894 by three recent Harvard University graduates, the League sought to bar what it considered inferior races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock (upper class Northerners of Anglo-Saxon heritage).”

League membership was a virtual who’s-who of academic luminaries and included, “A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College, James T. Young, director of Wharton School and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University.”

Between 1880 and 1923 approximately two and a half million Jews, mostly fleeing Russian pogroms, arrived in the United States. In deciding the year to base the demographic profile for its Federal Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 Congress chose the census of 1890, the boundary at which Jews began arriving in greater numbers. The bill, “limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890.”

If the law sounds as if written by American eugenicists, it was. It was based directly on testimony provided by the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). “Eugenics Record Office Superintendent Harry Laughlin became the anti-immigration movement's most persuasive lobbyist... [He was appointed by the chairman of the committee writing the law their] expert eugenics agent.” By deceptive data and reasoning Laughlin fed Congress what it wanted to hear, that new immigrants were polluting America’s bloodline with “feeblemindedness, insanity, criminality, and dependency.” The resulting bill “did everything eugenicists had hoped for... it restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe countries to only 9% of the total. Northern and western European countries got 86% of the quota, even though they made up the minority of immigrants in 1923.”

“Though the law's quota system targeted immigrants based on their nation of origin rather than ethnicity or religion, Jewish immigration was a central concern… The law sharply curtailed immigration from those countries that were the homelands of the vast majority of the Jews in America, almost 75% of whom came from Russia alone.Because Eastern European immigration only became substantial in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the law's use of the population of the U.S. in 1890 as the basis for calculating quotas effectively made mass migration from Eastern Europe, the home of the vast majority of the world's Jews, impossible.”

President Coolidge Signs the immigration act on the south lawn of the White House(Wikipedia)

“Upon signing the Act, President Calvin Coolidge commented, ‘America must remain American.’ This phrase would become the rallying cry of anti-immigration sentiment until after World War II.”

“When Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1924, he held up a foreign law as a model for his program of racial purification: The U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924… When the Nazis took power in 1933, they installed a program of eugenics--the attempted "improvement" of the population through forced sterilization and marriage controls--that consciously drew on the U.S. example... Small wonder that the Nazi laws led one eugenics activist in Virginia to complain, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."”

We will return in more detail to the impact of this restrictive immigration law on European Jewry when the topic turns to the Holocaust. One result not often discussed was that, beyond providing a fig leaf for the administration to hide behind as justifying inaction, the fact that the leading democracy in the west, representative of the humanistic and liberal ideals, the fact that the one country that might have provided a model of moral and ethical behavior instead set an example for other potential countries of refuge (tiny Bolivia was the exception having admitted some 30,000 Jews between 1938 and 1941) to also close their borders.

Such theatrical gestures by the administration as the Bermuda Conference and that “too little-too late” afterthought the War Refugee Board were mere window dressing intended to placate critics at home, and particularly America’s mostly impotent Jewish community themselves fearful of antisemitism sweeping the United States, even as Europe’s Jews were being murdered.

Recent writings in this Series:

1. Before Hitler the Aryan Master Race was America’s ideal

2. America redefines Zionism: The Diaspora as Jewish homeland

3. Zionism , from antisemitism to Holocaust

4. An American lynching: the Leo Max Frank Affair

Before Hitler the Aryan Master Race was America’s ideal

2012-01-24T20:13:00.000-08:00

18 January, 2012

“[T]he concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler.

The idea was created in the United States.”

"Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution": Logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference, 1921, depicting Eugenics as a tree which unites a variety of different fields (Wikipedia)

Introduction: While I will be drawing on multiple sources for this article, I recommend Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak to the reader interested in a single source for the topic of

America

’s pursuit of it’s own Aryan racial population. I will allow Mr. Black to provide the introduction:

“Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws [the first was Indiana, 1907]. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.”

Eugenics was not an “invention” of the United States, but it was enthusiastically embraced by America. Politicians, educators, social scientists of all stripes saw in genetic engineering and the resulting American racial ideal a strategic national imperative, a goal of the highest order. The following are drawn from the book, The Nazi Connection, by Stefan Kuhl: In his inaugural address, Woodrow Wilson said: “[T]he whole nation has awakened to and recognizes the extraordinary importance of the science of human heredity [eugenics], as well as its application to the ennoblement of the human family… Theodore Roosevelt expressed the fear that “inferior” segments of the population were gaining power.” Steps taken to control the danger to humanity’s “ennoblement,” to ensure that the “inferior” would not “gain power”, at least in the early years included legalization of the involuntary sterilization of the “unfit,” and laws “that prohibited marriage and sexual intercourse between blacks and whites... The Commission of the American Genetic Association… proposed that the lowest 10% of the population be sterilized. [The measure] was intended to “eradicate” the “inferior” members of the society over a time period spanning two generations.”

Without American leadership, training and support, German National Socialism would likely have still pursued the Final Solution to the West’s Jewish Problem, but the effort would have lacked the credibility of a “scientific” justification, the enthusiastic moral support of America’s elite, the funds provided by America’s wealthy.

“The Immigration Restriction League (founded in 1894) was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. The League sought to bar what it considered dysgenic members of certain races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock through procreation.” Although “eugenic ideas” were already “in the air” among America’s elite in the 19^th century (Alexander Graham Bell, married to a deaf woman, proposed sterilization as a way to eliminate “deafness” from America’s gene pool around 1881) America’s movement to genetically engineer an ideal racial stock gained general popularity only in the early 20^th century.

Contestants get ready for the Better Baby Contest at the 1931 Indiana State Fair (Wikipedia)

In 1904 the Carnegie Institution created a laboratory complex on Long Island dedicated to eugenics research. Carnegie generosity was soon matched by other far-sighted philanthropies such as the Harriman railroad fortune and the Rockefeller Foundation. “The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.” But this is getting ahead of our story.

Before describing how American eugenics was applied as social engineering in the years before Nazism it is instructive to acknowledge some of its more prominent supporters.

A short list of the founders of the American Eugenics Society (established in 1922) includes: J. P. Morgan, Jr. of U. S. Steel; Miss E. B. Scripps of Scripps-Howard and United Press International; John H. Kellogg of cereal fame; Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood.

Prominent politicians and others included: President Theodore Roosevelt; President Woodrow Wilson; Alexander Graham Bell; the Rockefellers, Harrimans, and Carnegies; Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, to name a few.

Nearly all educational institutions from Ivy League to local collages promoted eugenics as a positive model to improve the national gene pool. Positive change, according to the model, would be achieved through encouraging, “the higher classes of society to reproduce offspring.” Those outside that model, the “unfit,” would be eliminated “humanely” by forced sterilization. Euthanasia, or “negative eugenics,” was proposed as a national project, was in fact utilized by some physicians and hospital administrators, but never became, as in Germany, a national program of race improvement. One reason advanced was that Germany’s public and overuse of euthanasia made it unattractive outside of Europe.

The “Unfit” defined: Among the so-called genetic traits to be eliminated from the national Aryan gene pool was deafness, blindness, insanity, criminal tendencies and laziness. Schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and depression: mental illness in general was also slated for elimination. Some races would be allowed to survive in segregated reservations, but sexual intercourse or intermarriage, called miscegenation, would be illegal and carry severe penalties. But restrictions on racial intercourse was not unique to eugenics; its history as practiced by many states went back to the American colonies.

“In 1907 Indiana became the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals.Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.”

Eventually thirty-three states would adopt laws, backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, providing for involuntary sterilization resulting in more that 60,000 by mid-century. The last legal forced sterilization in the United States was performed thirty-six years after WWII, in Oregon in 1981.

The American model of race improvement by means of sterilizing the “unfit” would be replicated by the Third Reich. “[T]he Germans enacted compulsory sterilization laws partly based on the U.S. experience, and American eugenicists took pride in their influence on Nazi policies.

Miscegenation laws forbade sexual relations, including marriage, between white and non-whites in the

United states

from earliest colonial days until as recently as the year 2000. Penalties varied from state to state and could involve a fine, “up to $2,000 and/or prison terms of up to 10 years.” But often offenders did not face justice in court, but at the end of a rope, or worse.

At mid-20^th century approximately 30 states still had laws regarding miscegenation. One example was the Virginia Integrity Act of 1924. It prohibited marriage between a white person and anyone with a trace of blood other than Caucasian. The 1967 Supreme Court decision on Loving v. Virginia made American anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.” At the time of the Court’s decision Barack Obama was six years old.

But Virginia was not the last state to surrender its miscegenation laws. Alabama was the last hold-out and only rescinded the law in November, 2000.

Recent writings in this Series:

1. America redefines Zionism: The Diaspora as Jewish homeland

2. Zionism , from antisemitism to Holocaust

3. An American lynching: the Leo Max Frank Affair

4. Blood libel, treason, despoiler of girls: the Jew as Western stereotype

Zionism , from antisemitism to Holocaust

2012-01-04T19:22:00.001-08:00

Zionism , from antisemitism to Holocaust

“Eliminate the diaspora or the diaspora will eliminate you!” (Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Poland, 1937)

Had antisemitism remained social and political very likely most Jews, conditioned by centuries of religion-inspired discrimination, would have patiently waited for the most recent storm to pass. But following 1500 years of persecution and the dawn of political-religious reform, having tasted the promise of emancipation and acceptance represented by the Enlightenment, for some at least hope turned quickly to despair. Awareness grew that Christendom’s religion-based Jewish Problem was too deeply embedded in the in the West’s history and culture to vanish because secularism replaced religion-based society.

Jewish responses to Emancipation and continuing discrimination predated Zionism by decades. Two very different such efforts, are represented by Moses Mendelssohn, descended from a line of orthodox rabbis, and Karl Marx, the son of a Lutheran convert himself the son of a rabbinical family. Mendelssohn would ensure Jewish survival by “modernizing” religious practice while Marx’s was far more radical: Jewish identity along with Judaism would fall away, as would distinctions for all based on class, religion and nationality in proletarian revolution (pardon the obvious oversimplification). He wrote On the Jewish Question in 1843 in part in opposition to an opponent of Jewish emancipation. But the work was also a first attempt at his theory of dialectical materialism, and in it he identified the Jews symbolically with money, the West’s universally recognized stereotype. This symbolic representation of the Jews would provide a rationale for already existing antisemitism, provided a political ploy for both the left and the right, before and after the Holocaust and, when a state of the Jews appeared, included Israel and the movement whose creation it was, Zionism.

The first sparks of what would become a Zionist movement came out of Russia-Poland in the late nineteenth century. In 1882 Leon Pinsker, an assimilated Russian physician wrote Autoemancipation, a prescient work that anticipated the risk to Jewry in the twentieth century. That work, written fifty years before

Germany

voted the National Socialists into power, may even today represent the most accurate diagnosis of the condition of Jews in Christendom; of the West’s Jewish problem and its cure

Leon Pinsker (Wikipedia)

Pinsker’s preface is an impassioned Zionist challenge: Take responsibility for the fact that antisemitism is a permanent feature of the Western Diaspora; accept that the obvious Jewish response to “the terror of bloody atrocities” is self-emancipation, the creation of a Jewish national homeland.

“After the terror of the bloody atrocities [the pogroms] a moment of calm… the Western Jews have again learned to suffer the cry, "hep! hep!" [by anti-Jewish rioters, typically students, in

Germany

]… Shut your eyes and hide your head like an ostrich -- there is to be no lasting peace unless … you apply a remedy more thoroughgoing than those palliatives to which our hapless people have been turning for 2000 years.”

“But,” Pinsker continues, “the greatest impediment in the path of the Jews to an independent national existence is that [we] do not feel its need… deny its authenticity (see Jabotinsky, below).”

Pinsker was not a Marxist but a Zionist and his solution to the Jewish problem lay not in a larger social revolution but in the removal of the Jews from that danger: “This change cannot be brought about by the civil emancipation of the Jews in this or that state, but only by… the foundation of … our inalienable home, our country.” Pinsker the physician diagnosed Judeophobia a, “psychic aberration… [an incurable] disease transmitted for two thousand years… Prejudice or instinctive ill-will is not moved by rational argument (so much for educating society away from persecution), however forceful and clear.”

For several decades after the appearance of Autoemancipation young and idealistic Jews, inspired by Pinsker and prodded by pogrom, made their way to Palestine as individuals and in groups. Among the first were the Hoveivei Zion, the Lovers of Zion, who founded Rishon l’Zion, one of the first Jewish towns in Palestine. But enthusiasm alone was not enough to inspire immigration sufficient to create in a state, and another decade would pass before another, more charismatic and politically-savvy leader would appear.

Theodor Herzl in Basel, 1897 (Wikipedia)

Theodore Herzl, another assimilated Jew, was a Viennese playwright and journalist. In 1894 he was sent to Paris to cover the treason trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. “Herzl witnessed mobs shouting “Death to the Jews” in France, the home of the French Revolution, and resolved that there was only one solution: the mass immigration of Jews to a land that they could call their own.” Apparently unaware of Pinsker or Autoemancipation, Herzl came to the same conclusion regarding the risk to Jewish survival in the West. Antisemitism, he concluded, “was a stable and immutable factor in human [well, Western] society, which assimilation did not solve.”

Recall that the events described above took place before the First World War, before National Socialism was voted into power in Germany and half a century before the West embarked on its final solution to it’s Jewish problem. For the Jews, at least, the Holocaust was still unimaginable. But some among the younger generation were already sensing the coming, if indefinable, disaster. Among them was Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

Following Hitler’s electoral victory Jabotinsky crisscrossed Poland and Eastern Europe warning of the impending Final Solution. While few took the warning seriously, who beyond visionaries could imagine the unimanageable and unprecedented fate awaiting the Jews, Jabotinsky knew. On Tisha B’ Av of 1937, a traditional day of mourning on the Jewish calendar a leader accepting defeat Jabotinsky exhorted the Jewish people to expunge themselves of the Diaspora or perish:

“It is already three years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry… warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer… [you] do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spit all-consuming lava… In the name of G-d! Let anyone of you save himself, as long as there is time, and there is very little… whoever of you will escape from the catastrophe, he of she will live to see the… the rise of a Jewish state.

“Eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate you!”

Recent writings in this Series:

1. An American lynching: the Leo Max Frank Affair

2. Blood libel, treason, despoiler of girls: the Jew as Western stereotype

3. Political antisemitism in the United States, 1873-1932

4. Political antisemitism in Austria-Germany, 1919-1932

An American lynching: the Leo Max Frank Affair

2012-01-04T19:21:00.000-08:00

An American lynching: the Leo Max Frank Affair

“Ninety years ago, some of Marietta's leading citizens gathered to hang a man, Leo Frank, a Jewish superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory… [He was] murdered on a farm belonging to former Cobb County sheriff William Frey.”

Introduction: The trial and murder of Leo Frank stands in stark contrast to the outcomes of those other contemporaneous antisemitic outrages, the “trials” of Menahem Beilis and Alfred Dreyfus. In the end Russia and France, however reluctantly, recanted and their victims survived. Not so the American Jew. This incident illustrates the depth of antisemitism present in the United States for decades preceding the First World War, a level that only intensified after that war, and continued to do so through the Second World War and beyond. It was this same antipathy towards Jews, endemic to Western culture, that resulted in America violating its long tradition of refuge as last resort, at least when it came to Europe’s Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

Leo Max Frank was manager of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia. On the night of 27 April, 1913 the body of a thirteen year old employee was discovered in the factory basement. She had been raped and strangled.

“Frank was accused of the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan, a former Mariettan who worked at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta. Historians [and some police investigators at the time] believe that the state's main witness, Jim Conley, a janitor at the factory, murdered the 13-year-old girl.”

As it turned out John Conley, “who was arrested when he was seen washing red [described as “blood”] stains from a shirt,” became the state’s main witness. Conley, who had an arrest record involving alcohol and violence, “later gave at least four contradictory affidavits explaining how he had helped Frank dispose of the body. ”At one point he testified to being illiterate, a claim later contradicted when he asserted that Leo Frank had ordered him to write two notes, as if by the girl, as she lay dying. Conley also claimed that Frank paid him $200 for helping move the body but, but when asked by the police where the money was he claimed Frank had taken it back.

One of the two murder notes found near the body. (Wikipedia)

Tom Watson, publisher of the Jeffersonian newspaper, [see earlier submission] was instrumental in creating the atmosphere of antisemitism that would shape public outrage against Frank. He made cash payment to the police for access to police evidence, was accused of having removed evidence he felt favored Frank.

The grand jury investigating the case indicted Frank in the death of Mary Phagan on 24 May, 1913. On 28 May the pencil factory foreman was reported by the newspaper The Georgian to have said that he believed Conley "strangled Mary Phagan while about half drunk.” Two other witnesses against Conley were also not called to testify.

Why the grand jury chose not to pursue Conley, is not known. What is known is that following the indictment several members of the panel expressed doubts regarding Frank’s guilt, felt Conley should have been the one indicted.

Lucille and Leo Frank at Frank's trial. (Wikipedia)

Amidst controversy surrounding the police investigation, the manipulation and even disappearance of evidence; with accusations of witness badgering and even coaching by the police and prosecution, the trial ended on 26 August, 1913. Frank was convicted in the murder. Presenting evidence of jury tampering and intimidation a mistrial was demanded. And denied. Frank’s conviction was greeted with jubilation in the street.

“William Manning Smith, the attorney who initially defended Conley, reversed his position in 1914 after concluding that his own client was the guilty party.”

Appeals to both the Georgia and US Supreme Courts were unsuccessful.

Tom Watson, who in 1920 would represent Georgia in the US Senate, had little patience for the “legal wrangling” following Frank’s conviction. “If Frank's rich connections [a not subtle reference to the Jews] keep on lying about this case,SOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN!” But out of public view, “Watson let it be known to [Governor] Slaton that he would throw his support behind a Senate bid if only the governor would let Frank hang.”

Days before leaving office the governor, citing inconsistencies in evidence, commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison. Forty years later the governor would recall that he was convinced following the trial of Frank’s innocence and assumed “[it] would eventually be fully established and he would be set free”.

Responding to the governor’s decision Watson led a group of Georgia’s finest citizens to the prison, drove Frank 240 miles to , “A site at Frey's Gin, two miles east of Marietta [Mary Phagan’s home], had been prepared, complete with a rope and table supplied by former Sheriff William Frey. The following morning the self-styled “Knights of Mary Phagan” lynched Leo Frank

The lynching of Leo Frank. The man on the far right in the straw hat is Newton A. Morris, a superior court judge. (Wikipedia)

The lynch party was not a drunken polyglot of street hooligans in a rage. Frank’s murders consisted of 26 cool and calculating members of the professions, the cream of Atlanta’s elite. Among these luminaries were: former governor Joseph Mackey Brown; Superior Court Judge Newton Morris (standing near the hanging body of Leo Frank, above); Eugene Herbert Clay, son of U.S. senator Alexander S. Clay, and himself the former mayor of Marietta; John Tucker Dorsey, a lawyer and state legislator (and solicitor general for the Blue Ridge Circuit who would have been responsible for prosecuting the lynchers, had any been indicted!).

“Following the lynching a festive atmosphere prevailed, and crowds searched the site for souvenirs… A short time after the lynching of Leo Frank, thirty-three members of the group that called itself the Knights of Mary Phagan gathered on a mountaintop near Atlanta and formed the new Ku Klux Klan of Georgia.”

“On March 11, 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Frank a pardon, citing the state's failure to protect him or prosecute his killers. But neither did they exonerate him:

“Without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the State's failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the State's failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds, theState Board of Pardons and Paroles, in compliance with its Constitutional and statutory authority, hereby grants to Leo M. Frank a Pardon.

Georgia

has yet to admit to Frank’s wrongful conviction, responsibility for its miscarriage of justice.

“The names of Frank's murderers were well-known locally but were not made public until January 7, 2000, when Stephen Goldfarb, an Atlanta librarian and former history professor, published a list on his website. The Washington Post writes that it includes several prominent citizens—a former governor, the son of a senator, a Methodist minister, a state legislator, and a former state Superior Court judge—their names matching those on Marietta's street signs, office buildings, shopping centers, and law offices today.”

Recent writings in this Series:

1. Blood libel, treason, despoiler of girls: the Jew as Western stereotype

2. Political antisemitism in the United States, 1873-1932

3. Political antisemitism in Austria-Germany, 1919-1932

4. Emancipation/Reaction: Antisemitism turns political

Political antisemitism in the United States, 1873-1932

2011-12-14T18:17:00.000-08:00

You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance."

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Introduction: Over the past months I have described the development of anti-Judaism in Christian theology and its transformation into secular antisemitism with the 18^th century Enlightenment. In the 19^th century secular antisemitism quickly evolved into a political movement with an agenda aimed at excluding Jews from civil society and antisemitic parties appeared throughout the West. In Germany-Austria the political agenda changed from social exclusion to physical extermination with the goal of achieving a final solution to the West’s Jewish Problem. This week we turn to the evolution of political antisemitism in the country with the largest surviving post-Holocaust Jewish Diaspora population, the United States.

As in Europe, organized political antisemitism also appeared in the United States in the 19^th century. And, as in Europe, a movement to deny Jews legal and social rights did not just appear: it emerged from an already present antisemitic culture.

The first Jews to set foot in the New World arrived with Christopher Columbus in 1492. In 1584 Joachim Gaunse, a Jewish metallurgist who accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh to the Virginia territory, was threatened with blasphemy and forced to return to England. “In 1647, the Portuguese authorities arrested Isaac de Castro for teaching Jewish rites and customs in Portuguese controlled Brazil and sent him back to

Portugal

where the Inquisition sentenced him to death and burned him at the stake.” Seven years later twenty-three Jewish refugees fled Portuguese Brazil for the more tolerant Dutch New Amsterdam (later renamed New York under the British) where they were barred entry by the colony’s Director General, Peter Stuyvesant. “The Jews who have arrived,” he wrote the directors of the Dutch West India Company, “would nearly all like to remain here, but learning that they (with their customary usury and deceitful trading with Christians)… [we ask that] that the deceitful race -- such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ -- be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony…” The Company apparently felt the Jew’s “customary usury and deceitful trading” would be of value and ordered Stuyvesant to let them stay. As for French colonial areas, the Jews were barred until 1759; and the Spanish, like the Portuguese, planted the Inquisition in the New World and persecuted and executed their “suspect” Conversos, Catholics of Jewish descent.

While the 1789 US Constitution, following Enlightenment principles, protected citizen rights regardless of religion, the first acts of “political” antisemitism came in the form of “states rights,” which allowed states to make local laws, including a state’s relations with Jews. Anti-Jewish legislation would only be rescinded in North Carolina in 1869, while New Hampshire finally relented and allowed “non-Protestants” to hold state office in 1887. Sabbath laws, forbidding commerce on Sunday, was another form of legal antisemitism. Such discriminatory laws remained on the books well into the twentieth century. Their antisemitic intent was clearly described when, “in the 1855 California assembly debate on the topic, the speaker of the house argued that Jews ‘ought to respect the laws and opinions of the majority.’”

As for “popular antisemitism,” attitudes held by individuals: “when a Jew rose to national prominence, he would always be open to attacks based upon his Judaism.” Mordecai Noah, a diplomat to Tunis from 1813-15, was recalled from his post having been denounced as an “enemy of Christ.” And, “Uriah Phillips Levy, then the only Jewish officer in the U. S. Navy, was dropped from the officer list in 1855… after six courts martial, two dismissals, and the killing of one opponent in a duel, all over slurs against his Judaism.”

Political antisemitism: Social stress is generally associated with a rise in antisemitism. This was also true during the Long Depression of 1873 to 1896. The period gave rise to the emergence of populist political parties, most of which were short-lived. With the appearance of the Populist, or Peoples Party, things changed and antisemitism entered American party politics.

During the presidential election of 1896 no “political party was above using anti-Semitism, especially to appeal to Christian constituents, but it was the Populist Party who used anti-Semitism most distinctively.”

Watson on a 1904 People's Party campaign poster. (Wikipedia)

Tom Watson, who will reappear when we discuss the lynching of Leo Frank, was named vice presidential choice on the 1896 Populist Party presidential ticket and, in 1904, the party’s choice for president. The "Populists strengthened their cause by using religious metaphors to link money with a Jewish conspiracy [giving license to mainline parties to do the same]. Thus in 1896 Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, speaking in an idiom Protestant Fundamentalists were fully conversant with, could easily intersperse biblical imagery with economic necessity when he thundered, `You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.' The antisemitism evoked by the metaphor of the crucifixion was powerful and appealed to rural Protestants who possessed a similar religious and cultural heritage with other Americans in the South and the West," (Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, p.49-50). But when standing before a Jewish audience Bryan temporized, "We are not attacking a race, we are attacking greed and avarice, which know neither race nor religion. I do not know of any class of our people who, by reason of their history, can better sympathize with the struggling masses in this campaign than can the Hebrew race," from The First Battle, (p.581).

By the twentieth century racist antisemitism was even more open and popular, appearing in vaudeville, on the stage and even in the movies. In 1913, amidst a heated antisemitic atmosphere, an innocent Leo Frank was convicted of murder and, when the governor commuted his sentence, was dragged from his cell and lynched. One result of the lynching was the decision by B’nai Brith, of which Frank was regional director, to form the Anti-defamation League. Another was the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. By the 1920’s Henry Ford was distributing his Dearborn Independent by mail and in Ford Motor dealerships across the country. Its main contribution to the spread of antisemitism was publication, under the banner of the International Jew, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. American antisemitism was equal to that taking hold in Europe, with Jews discriminated against in housing, employment and recreation.

A 1934 edition by the Patriotic Publishing Company of Chicago (Wikipedia)

Parties specifically targeting Jews proliferated in the years leading up to the Second World War. “The era gave rise to domestic anti-Jewish bigots, such as Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith and William Dudley Pelley, the leader of the Silver Shirts. It also witnessed the rise of the German-American Bund, led by Fritz Kuhn, and the notorious anti-Jewish speech by the aviator and

hero Charles A. Lindbergh to an America First Committee rally. Especially influential in the 1930s was Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose weekly radio broadcasts containing an openly antisemitic message reached millions. Coughlin's campaign paved the way for isolationist organizations, such as the America First Committee, to attract antisemites to their banners.”

Other writings in this Series:

1. Political antisemitism in Austria-Germany, 1919-1932

2. Emancipation/Reaction: Antisemitism turns political

3. On antisemitism: 1806, The West reacts to Jewish emancipation

4. From anti-Judaism to antisemitism: The Age of Reason

Is the Diaspora Doomed, Israel abandoned? An open Response to an email responder

2011-12-06T18:30:00.000-08:00

Thank you for your email, Larry. I well remember our earlier discussion and, it appears, neither of us has much shifted in the interim! While I accept your position regarding the history of antisemitism reflected in Church/Christian policy; while I continue to accept also your distinction between us and them regarding slavery: still, beyond educating our youth to the reason we are hated, I don’t see the Zionist mission of providing for our physical salvation being advanced. My concern as I hope is reflected in all my writings is to demonstrate to the best of my abilities to my admittedly tiny audience the danger to our physical survival represented by Christendom (religion and secular); in other words, to our Diaspora.

Although not identical the threat to the state of the Jews is similar, as reflected in Bush and Iraq and, more blatantly, under the present administration. I am entirely non-(American) partisan in my comments, simply reflecting the facts as objectively as I can interpret them.

I am not so quixotic as to expect our Diaspora to rise up and leave; where to? The only other Jewish “homeland” was created under Stalin, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Siberia. And I hardly expect that to be open to mass Jewish immigration today even if we would all choose to move! Neither do I expect Israel to immediately abandon her quixotic “special relationship” with the US; after all, we are still tiny and vulnerable and dependent on the US, whatever the cost. What I am hoping to achieve is to raise doubt in the denial-prone consciousnesses of both communities as to the need to respond realistically to a very real environment. For me the enemy is not our lack of knowledge of the past, but our failure to accept its meaning for the future.

For our Diaspora “Never Again!” is an inappropriate and inadequate response to the Holocaust. The Shoah is a clear shot across our bow, the promise of things to come unless we take its implications seriously, and act. And for Israel, while our dependence on the West is real, it is long past time to begin looking outside Christendom for our next strategic alliance. China has few Christians and no culture or history of antisemitism; India, with its Moslem population, would still represent a problem so long as the state of the Jews remains in theMiddle East. Israel simply must grow beyond her neediness, our emotional dependence on a false special relationship that in reality is special for the US, and that only so long as Israel fulfills

America

’s interests. And under the present

administration that bottom-line should, by now, be crystal clear.

Obama’s mouthpiece Panetta said as much, “Israel, too, has a responsibility to pursue these shared goals – to build regional support for Israeli andUnited States’ security objectives.” For the US the bottom line is the US. That was how it was in 1940 when the US chose to ignore its “special relationship” with Britain under attack from Germany. If Britain is expendable, where does our faith come to play?

While I understand and substantially agree with your position, Larry, short of Divine Intervention (which failed to materialize in the Roman war) I fail to see how it will affect our physical survival in the real world, comes the real Final Solution to the West’s Jewish Problem?

Sounds harsh. But I know no other way to say that which I consider obvious.

Regards,

David

America's Deconstruction of the Middle East: from Bush’s Iraq to Obama’s Egypt

2011-12-05T07:23:00.000-08:00

“Neither Israel, nor any of the mainstream Arab governments accept the Obama-Panetta proposition that time will magically temper the extremism of the Islamist regimes.”

Whenever US Middle East policy fails the administration in power turns on

Israel

as ready scapegoat. This occurred in the 1980’s when Irangate, the Reagan administration criminal involvement in drug trafficking, gun-running and money laundering began appearing in the press. And if the president eventually apologized to the Jewish state, in the end his administration deftly redirected attention away from their criminality to Israel and her spy Jonathan Pollard. And when Bush’s confident victory proclamation proved premature administration insiders sought to shift blame for the war onto Israel (actually Israel, Egypt and the Saudis strongly advised againstthe war!).

Enter my vote for America’s alternative to dirty and confused politics, Barak Obama. In style and apparent philosophy Obama appeared and may well be the opposite of his predecessor. But if the recent resignations of his two key Middle East advisers George Mitchell and Dennis Ross are an indication such qualities can also produce ideological rigidity, an inability to recognize and respond to situations that may not fit preconceptions. And that certainly seems to explain President Obama’s inability to grasp the complexities of the Middle East over the past two-plus years in office. And Obama, like earlier administrations: when failure looms, blame Israel.

Although Obama cannot be personally blamed for the regional disaster represented by the invasion and withdrawal from Iraq (Bush decisions set both in motion) Obama has followed Bush in shying away from directly confronting the consequences of the invasion. Having deposed the Sunni Baath regime and replaced it with one headed by Iraq’s Shiites Bush redefined the balance of power in the region from the Arabs to the Persians. Shiite Iraq was transformed from bitter enemy to potential ally and satellite of Iran

Saddam Hussein being pulled from his hideaway in Operation Red Dawn, 13 December 2003, (Wikipedia).

Bush replaced Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates as secretary of defense. An outspoken opponent of even the threat of force against Iran, if Bush wanted to avoid confronting Iran he could have chosen no better replacement. When Obama succeeded Bush he retained Gates at defense, a clear statement of his own intentions regarding the Islamic Republic. And when Gates retired Obama replaced him with his apparent clone, Leon Panetta. Both defense secretaries and their chairmen of the US Joint Chiefs strongly supported the Bush/Obama policy of Appeasement (what better descriptive of Obama’s carrot-stick-retreat approach to Iran’s nuclear weapons program?). Obama became Ahmadinejad’s unwitting “straight-man,” something of a joke on the Arab street, and the US was losing face and credibility at an accelerating pace with regional friend and foe alike.

While Obama inherited the chronic failure of an elusive and unlikely Arab-Israel peace from a long line of predecessors; while he inherited Iraq and even the policy of Iranian Appeasement from George W. Bush, when it comes to Egypt and Libya and the much Obama-vaunted “Arab Spring” it takes little special insight or knowledge to appreciate that these are Obama’s contribution to an ongoing American retreat not only from Iraq, but as regional hegemon and protector of Middle Eastern oil.

Obama’s commitment to peace between Israel and the Palestinians was laudable, but even here his rigid “idealism” resulted only in an even deeper chasm between the sides. Obama’s idealistic commitment to regional “democracy” is again worth as an ideal, but as policy a disaster. His decision to back the Tahrir Square demonstrators and force Mubarak from office is, as a regional misstep, on par with Bush’s invasion of Iraq in terms of impact on America’s credibility in the region. And when, days before Egyptian elections and the expected landslide victory of Egypt’s Islamists Obama told the military the time arrived to turn over governance to “civilian rule.”

Mubarak on trial, (Reuters).

Iran

has always represented the primary threat to America’s regional interests. The Iranian threat also represents a rare common concern uniting Israel and the Arab states. Following Obama’s actions in deposing Mubarak the Saudis were so incensed as to refuse even to take Obama’s phone calls. The refused even to allow visits from high level US diplomats. So mistrustful of their previous protector they entered into a secret agreement to purchase and house nuclear weapons in Pakistan, announced their intention to build their own atom bomb. None of these outcomes would have resulted had US policy makers been objective in viewing events on the ground, of setting ideology aside as determinant of America’s foreign policy objectives.

Three days ago, and for the second time in just over a week, Obama’s military spokesman Panetta, disowning the devastation of a US policy gone wild and following a well-established precedent laid responsibility for American failure on its always available patsy, Israel.

“Unfortunately,” said Panetta, “over the past year, we’ve seen Israel’s isolation from its traditional security partners in the region grow, and the pursuit of a comprehensive Middle East peace has effectively been put on hold.” The “traditional partners” referred to are Turkey and Egypt, but Turkey’s regional realignment was itself a much earlier result of US weakness regarding Iran, and began long before the provocation of Mavi Marmara. And as for Egypt, the current state of relations between the two countries is again the direct outcome of misguided US policy, in this instance Obama’s decision to promote Egyptian Islamists over America’s reliable and long-time ally, President Mubarak. US policy towards Libya, Yemen,

Bahrain

…, all consistent with an ideology of Democracy. In an ironic twist of “the War against Islamist Terrorism” America now promotes Islamist rule from the Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula. In fact American aid to the Islamists has a long history, the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden, and the 1979 Khomeini revolution in Iran.

“Neither Israel, nor any of the mainstream Arab governments accept the Obama-Panetta proposition that time will magically temper the extremism of the Islamist regimes [those beneficiaries of America’s dedication to “democracy”] They have before them the example of a former Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who made the same argument 32 years ago for the West to dump the shah and welcome Khomeini's ayatollah regime.”

Had America, starting with Bush in 2003, dedicated a fraction of its military expenditure on wars in Iraq and Libya on America’s principal adversary, Russia-sponsored Iran, had Bush taken seriously the combined advice of Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Saudis regarding Iran the region might be less “democratic today. But hundreds of thousands of Arabs who died in those adventures would be alive today; tens of thousands of US servicemen would not have lost life or limb lives in a failed Iraqi vanity conflict; more than a trillion dollars (the actual cost of borrowed money needed to fund the Iraq war) would not today be hanging over the US economy as debt and interest. And certainly the price of oil would be a fraction of its present cost, and if the global recession were not averted at least it would have been minimized. But most importantly for the future of the region and a West threatened by Islamist terrorism, had the US taken on Iran before the costs of such an operation spiraled out of control the threat of a nuclear arms race in one of the most volatile places on the planet would have been averted.

And Israel today would not find herself threatened both by America-created instability in Arab states near and far, and by her policy-challenged senior partner in their “special relationship,” the true creator of Israel’s isolation.

The Republican Debate: Why the Missing Middle East?

2011-11-21T18:06:00.000-08:00

Saturday Nov 19, 2011

Beyond pledging “support” for Israel, and pledging to end the Iranian bomb project by force, the Republican aspirants to replace Obama avoided discussing the Middle East. Not a particularly strong suit for the Democrat. Why the hesitation?

In his 13 November column on Jerusalem Post Shmuel Rosner observed that, minus a few desultory comments the Republican contenders for their party’s nomination paid almost no attention to the region in their recent “foreign policy” debate. On the surface this might be surprising considering the vulnerability of the president in this area, at least among the Jewish community. So how explain the avoidance of the issue by the Republicans who, by tradition, consider themselves the party of an activist foreign policy? Perhaps the reason is less to be found in the vulnerability of the Democrat incumbent than in the record of his predecessor George W. Bush.

The Oval Office, Wikipedia

On 20 March, 2003, Bush committed the full power of the United States military to the invasion of

Iraq

. Whatever motivated the invasion, whether "oil" or those absent weapons of mass destruction (WMD), whether it was his desire to promote “democracy” in the Arab world as he later claimed; whatever History eventually defines as the actual motive what Bush did achieve was an “unintended” and unanticipated outcome by fulfilling Iran’s wildest dream. In the 1980’s Iran-Iraq war Iran suffered more than a million casualties, and failed to defeat

Iraq

. By his invasion Bush transformed

Iraq

from a barrier to Iranian ambitions across the Gulf to a potential satellite of the Islamic Republic. He replaced Iraq’s Sunni regime with one dominated by Iraq’s Shi’ites, closely related by religion and culture to

Iraq

’s neighbor to the east. No longer a barrier, Bush provided the Islamic Republic with a superhighway into the heart of those coveted Saudi oil fields.

Prior to the invasion

Iran

had been an important source of “intelligence” to the Bush administration regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Ahmadinejad even provided the White House a paid agent to substantiate the disinformation. Ahmed Chalabi was a close and trusted advisor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the darling of Bush neocons.

Boots on the ground our forces found themselves targeted by Iran-financed, trained and Revolutionary Guards-led insurgents. To date nearly 5,000 troops died, victim to progressively more sophisticated Iranian roadside bombs. That the Iranians were behind the insurgency was known to our generals from the start. But due to, “fears that taking too active a role against Iran and its assets will put U.S. military personnel at risk of Iranian retaliation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the administration chose to remain silent in word and deed. This policy of appeasement would extend also to

Iran

’s nuclear arms program. In effect, Bush encouraged by neglect the development of the Iranian bomb.

But the disaster represented by Bush’s Middle East foray extends farther than the region itself. Invading Iraq also created threat and uncertainty to Middle East oil resulting in a dramatic rise in the cost of oil. Bush chose to fund the war “off the books: “This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war (the same tax cuts for the wealthy the center of controversy today). The result: a war completely funded by borrowing.

U.S.

debt soared… As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis.”

On assuming office President Obama asked the chief architects of Bush’s hand’s off

Iran

policy to remain on the job. So avoiding the confrontation is at least a bi-partisan policy. But the fact remains that the Republicans are not only in bed with Democrats regarding

Iran

, but are the actual architects of the policy. That nearly all debaters were on board regarding a new and “tough” Iran policy, implying a change from Obama, Rosner offers the following caution: “As reassuring as this might sound, I should remind the readers that Democratic candidates made similar – and in some cases even more forceful – statements before the 2008 elections.

With this as background it is perhaps more understandable why the Republicans all but avoided discussing the Middle East. The chaos of the region was initiated by a Republican president. Under Obama things have gotten a lot worse, but it was the Bush who created the conditions for the disaster.

111119 - Israel F15I’s refueling, (photo by Reuters)

As regards Israel’s role in this faintness-of-heart US approach to Iran, the last time I was in Israel shop after shop displayed the same tee-shirt inscription, “Don’t worry, America, Israel has your back!” In this instance the United States, beyond administration protests to the opposite, has set Israel up as its patsy, to initiate the attack and take the fall for those consequences our latest SecDef advocate-of-hesitation, Leon Panetta, parroting his predecessor: 1. “it could have a serious impact on U.S. forces in the region,” and; 2. “there are going to be economic consequences to that, that could impact not just on our economy but the world economy.” And if Israel initiates the attack Israel and not its “ally,’ the American regional hegemon, then Israel, rather than the

United States

, will alone face the repercussions of a world sunk even deeper into economic misery.

But implicit in these warnings by Panetta/Gates is that somehow, 1. American forces in the region have been relegated to the role of passive reassurance to our friends and allies, not combatants, and; 2. that those “economic consequences,” grown only more severe by administration neglect and the passage of time, outweigh the consequences of a nuclear

Iran

and the likelihood of a regional nuclear arms race. And the more states in this unstable region possessing that weapon, the more likely Islamist terrorists will also go nuclear. And while Israel is at the forefront of counter-terrorism, the most likely targets for nuclear terror are Rome, Madrid, London and, yes, New York. And this is the ultimate, to borrow that over-worn Gates/Mullen dictum, the real “unintended consequence” of

America

’s policy of avoidance initiated by President Bush.

Topical writings from 2007 on the Bush Administration:

1. Is Israel’s trust in Bush warranted?

2. Nuclear Iran and the US-Israel “special relationship”

3. Bush, Condi and the Decline of US Diplomacy: Annapolis, 2007

4. George Bush and the Diplomacy of Inadvertence

5. Israel’s “special relationship,” Reality or Myth?

2011-11-21T18:04:00.000-08:00

Israel’s America Trap, Part 4: Palestinian Statehood?

“The United States has provided both a sense of direction and a mechanism. That, at its best, is what the peace process has been about. At worst, it has been little more than a slogan used to mask the marking of time.” William B. Quandt

The United States has, for decades, been actively involved in an elusive because illusive peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The tenacity of our leaders deserves recognition, but what lies behind their serial failures? Between Israel and the Arabs there have been some notable successes, and the following is a partial chronology adapted from Wikipedia:

Camp David Accords (1978): signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 17, 1978, the Accords produced two agreements. One succeeded in laying the groundwork for Anwar Sadat’s historic appearance before the Israeli Knesset followed by a treaty of peace between the two states. The second accord between the governments was intended to lead to the same result between Israel and the Palestinians. After 33 years that has yet to occur.

“We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears ... enough!” Yitzhak Rabin (Reuters)

The Oslo Accords (1993) produced the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (DOP), which provided for Arafat returning to the West Bank, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and self-rule, and made Rabin, Arafat and Peres Nobel laureates. Some sources suggest that with Rabin’s assassination peace, almost achieved, was also victim. But this optimism towards peace neglects both what preceded and followed the assassination, issues that will be discussed below.

A light moment at Camp David: Barak playfully pushes Arafat into the Laurel cabin, 11 July, 2000 (Reuters)

Camp David (2000) was, judged by the purpose of the summit, a failure. Yet it laid out a ground plan for eventual success between willing parties.

According to news reports prior to the summit Yasser Arafat agreed to attend only reluctantly. Although the agreements mediated by President Clinton were described as the most both sides could realistically expect, Arafat walked away saying, according to a Saudi journalist, that to sign would result in his assassination.

It is notable, and a lesson to would be “intermediaries,” that in the end the only two successful treaties, those between Egypt (1979) and Israel and Jordan and Israel (1994) resulted from direct and secret negotiations between the principles. In both cases, according to reports, discussions were kept secret even from the Americans. The Sadat visit, for example, resulted from Egyptian and Israeli emissaries meeting secretly in Morocco to avoid President Carter’s insistence on a Geneva Conference targeting a comprehensive regional peace which Sadat and Begin both knew would end in failure (Eisenberg and Caplan, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace, p. 42).

Basic Positions: Arab, Israel, Palestinian: In its simplest terms peace is unlikely because it means different things to the parties involved. For Israel, surrounded by hostile and threatening neighbors peace means firstly, “security.” In terms of geography that means the indefinite stationing of troops along the Rift Valley border with Jordan, and control of the airspace above any future Palestinian state. Both conditions have been repeatedly rejected out of hand by the Palestinians. For the Palestinians the single issue they seem unwilling to compromise on is the right of return of all Palestinians to their abandoned homes within Israel. At Camp David 2000, for example, Yasser Arafat reportedly told President Clinton that, “he wouldnever relinquish the Palestinian right of return.” And Mahmoud Abbas recently confirmed that, “the Palestinians will never renounce the right of return to their former homes in Israel.” Since such a condition would mean not just a potential fifth column, but a demographic time bomb eventually resulting in a “one-state solution,” the demand is a non-starter for Israel.

But the more fundamental issue is that Israel is viewed by most Arab states as an alien interloper, an extension of European imperialism, a 20^th century crusader outpost. Hamas and its patron Iran make no bones about this; but so do the Saudis and, occasionally, the Egyptian press also. And while Abbas’ Palestinian Authority maintains its posture as a “partner in peace,” maps in Palestinian school textbooks represent the territory between the river and the sea as “Palestine,” while representing Israelis in anti-Jewish terms. Not a training ground for mutual respect, acceptance of a future sovereign neighbor.

America’s Position: American efforts to bring the Palestinians and the Israelis together have been significant in number. Significant also is the regularity of their failure. All began with the optimistic and erroneous assumption that there is a rational core to the conflict which, if addressed with good will and determined mediation will result in peace and mutual trust. I suggest that the explanation for the failure of presidents since Eisenhower, despite their best efforts, is the direct result of overestimating the words of the adversaries without appreciating the evidence of their behavior. Abbas recently complained that the Arabs made a tragic mistake by rejecting the 1947 UN Partition Plan, yet he perpetuates the tragedy by almost identical demands, “Palestinian rights.” In 1947 the reference meant all the land for the Palestinians. In 2011the demand is the “right of return” of all “refugees” to their abandoned homes in Israel. Arafat had maintained this position since Oslo. Abbas repeated it recently. In practice the right of return would eventually result in a Palestinian one-state solution.

In terms of Arab thinking this is a reasonable and fair basis for “peace;” for Israel it represents national suicide. And so long as American foreign policy thinking persists in denying this fact it will continue to throw prestige, time and money at the wrong problem.

Obama and Netanyahu at White House, 20 May, 2011 (Reuters)

Obama and the “settlements precondition”: At their first meeting in the White House in May, 2009 Obama proposed that Netanyahu cease building in settlements as a way to encourage Abbas back to the negotiations he abandoned the year before in response to Israel’s brief war in Gaza (encouraged and assisted with intelligence by Abbas!). The Israeli government acceded to the presidential request in November, 2009 with a 10-month moratorium. In announcing the moratorium Netanyahu added wistfully, "We have been told by many of our friends that once Israel takes the first meaningful steps toward peace, the Palestinians and Arab states would respond."Nine months and one week later, under intense pressure from Washington Abbas agreed to face-to-face talks on condition that Israel continue the moratorium indefinitely. The talks ended on that demand. But the principle of the Americanprecondition remained in place until December, 2010.

Abbas reminds that it was not he, but Obama who created the precondition: "At first, President Obama stated in Cairo that Israel must stop all construction activities in the settlements. Could we demand less than that?" In fact Abbas had previously negotiated with seven Israeli prime minister without such a precondition.

“U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledges that the Palestinians are creating a new precondition for talks to begin. Settlements, she says, have "always been an issue within the negotiations.… There's never been a precondition." In other words the secretary is saying that the administration accepts no responsibility in the matter. But according, to Elliott Abrams, a Middle East adviser to Bush, “One has to remember the Arabs had not ever insisted on such a precondition. This was something that was added by the administration and it proved to be disastrous.” How a disaster? Clearly the “precondition” failed to result in Abbas return to negotiations. But according to Palestinian officials, Abbas has lost faith in Mr. Obama… and after four face-to-face meetings and many regular telephone calls there is now little contact between them.”It also created tension between the administration and Israel. Tension with Israel, Abbas, almost entirely dependent on American good will and largesse ignoringObama: certainly the lesson was learned?

“On May 19, in a speech at the State Department on his Middle East policy, Obama called for peace negotiations on the basis of the 1967 borders with mutually agreed upon land swaps.” Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestinians lost no time adopting this new Obama condition as another precondition for negotiations: "If Netanyahu agrees, we shall turn over a new leaf. If he doesn't, then there is no point talking about a peace process. We're saying it loud and clear."

In the meantime the newly independent Palestinian leader, proclaiming Obama’s “deadline” of September, 2011 for a Palestinian state, is taking his case directly to the United Nations. And Obama, having lost credibility and authority to persuade or coerce, can do little but try to persuade the Europeans not to vote in favor of Palestinian statehood.

A rational Middle East policy based on American interests would begin with the only reliable ally of the superpower in a region adrift, much the result of American missteps in Iraq (Bush), Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and throughout the region (Obama). Yet Israel has, over the past two years, been subjected to accusation and abuse by the White House resulting in an Israeli public highly mistrustful of Obama. And should the Palestinians achieve their UN recognition with little to show for the victory on the street; or should the Palestinian bid fail due to US-Israeli opposition, the conditions for yet another intifada may be ripe.

Last week, on 1 November, the media announced that Palestine was accepted as a member state in UNESCO, “scoring a symbolic victory in their battle for full membership of the United Nations.”

Israel’s America Trap, Part 3: When “Democracy” trumps Realpolitik

2011-11-21T17:50:00.000-08:00

Thursday Oct 27, 2011

American predictability is based on anticipated irrationality... a danger to her increasingly skeptical regional allies.

If the alternative to a repressive regime allied with and supportive of the US War on Terror is an Islamist regime likely more repressive and supportive of the enemy, why the enthusiasm in Washington for regime change?

American foreign policy has an evangelical soul. Nor is it content merely to evangelize, to bring the “good news” to those deemed less fortunate; it can also be activist in imposing regime change. It is within this context that American actions in Iraq, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya should be viewed.

The Arab Middle East typically divides between monarchies and “republics,” all to some degree authoritarian. Since there is no tradition of a “democratic” opposition the only replacement parties are either military or Islamist. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was forced underground by Mubarak following the assassination of Anwar Sadat. And today the Brotherhood’s most visible offspring are al-Qaeda and Hamas. Earlier this week an MB-inspired Islamist party in Tunisia, described by the New York Times as “moderate” although boasting a militant history, won the preliminary election in Tunisia; another MB-inspired party is likely to form the next government in Libya.

Although the Bush administration floated several rationales (sidestepping “oil”) to justify its invasion of Iraq the theme that always resurfaced was its desire to free the Iraqi people from the tyrant and bestow upon them democratic governance. Similarly when Obama identified with Cairo’s Tahrir protesters and ordered Mubarak out the intention was to replace the Egyptian tyrant with a liberal democracy. And how many Libyans died the result of the US-led allied intervention to protect them from their tyrant? And to what end, the likely successor regime a branch of the same Muslim Brotherhood?

The day following its grisly murder of Qadafi the leader of the National Transitional Council (NTC) Mustafa Jalil announced, "As a Muslim country, we have adopted theIslamic Sharia as the main source of law.” Does Obama really believe that Libya’s likely Brotherhood or al-Quaida successor regime will provide a more humane and liberal replacement Qadafi, that it will provide liberty and justice for all, for women? How will an Islamist Libya better confront Islamist terrorism than the deposed Qadafi regime, partner in America’s war against terror?

If America’s intervention in Egypt was motivated by “power to the people,” are the Egyptians and the US happy with the continuation of the military regime for which Mubarak was, after all, only the public face; would the Egyptian protesters have been better off with that other likely successor, the MB and Sharia law? In 1979 the US ousted its long-time ally the Shah of Iran in support of the student protesters of Tehran. Within four months the student leaders were murdered or imprisoned or, if lucky, had fled Iran.

Reuters June 29, 2010: President Obama meets with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in the Oval Office.

If Bush chose to ignore regional leaders warning against deposing Sadam, Obama also chose to ignore the same regarding Mubarak: “It was no coincidence that the most outspoken proponents of Mr. Mubarak’s rule were Israel and Saudi Arabia who, with Egypt, formed the backbone of American dominance in the region.” During the crisis, US officials received “daily calls from Israel, Saudi Arabia and others who feared an Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would destabilize the entire region.” Whenever they got the chance, the Saudis told the United States to avoid undermining Mubarak.

Is it even possible that Obama’s advisors, from Biden and Clinton to his professional Middle East staff, failed to understand that Tahrir Square represented a disorganized and politically inchoate social protest, that the only organized and experienced alternative to the military were the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood? But the military, in power since Nasser overthrew the monarchy in 1952, was not likely to voluntarily leave the scene, as confirmed on 15 October, 2011: “Two members of the military councilthat took power after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak said for the first time in interviews this week that they planned to retain full control of the Egyptian government even after the election of a new Parliament begins in November. The legislature will remain in a subordinate role similar to Mr. Mubarak’s former Parliament, they said, with the military council appointing the prime minister and cabinet.”

Saudi Arabia: “The Obama administration and its support for democratic change in the Middle East has been on a collision course with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other traditional monarchies of the Persian Gulf. The crunch finally came this week with a sharp break over how to deal with protest in Bahrain.” The Saudis share a border with Yemen to the south, a causeway to Bahrain off their coast to the east. Any Iranian involvement in these countries would be a concern to the Saudis, and an issue they would look to the United States to back them on. But “the administration of President Barack Obama has dismissed any link between the Shi'ite revolt in Bahrain and Iran…U.S. officials have been arguing that Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy must make political compromises to give more power to the Shiite majority there… This American enthusiasm for change has been anathema to the conservative regimes of the Gulf, and on Monday they backed Bahrain’s ruling Khalifa family with military force, marching about 2,000 troops up the causeway that links Bahrain to Saudi Arabia.”

Is the principal of yet another Iran-inspired, Shiite-dominated “democracy” on the doorstep of the Saudis worth the threat to the production and transport of oil, to America’s home port to the Fifth Fleet tasked with protecting the waterway and the Straights of Hormuz through which the oil must transit? Where is American proportionality, a sense of American priorities, material national interests over ideology?

Implications for the region and for Israel: Relations between states, and particularly within alliances, are based on known and predictable interests. American foreign policy since 2002 has been anything but predictable. A rational assessment by the Bush administration should have concluded that, as Israel, the Saudis and virtually all Arab regimes warned, the principle regional threat lay not in Iraq, but Iran. Who could have predicted that the US would defy its own self-interest and replace Sadam with an Iran-friendly Shi’ite government in Iraq? Similarly in Egypt eight years later: what rationale assessment of American regional interests could justify Obama deposing Mubarak, the lynchpin of American influence in the Arab world?

Was it rational policy that informed Obama’s decision to go nose-to-nose with the Saudis over Iranian interference in Bahrain, thereby alienating even further the region’s largest and most influential oil producer; that the president would lead an allied war against Qadafi, another supporter of US policy regarding al-Qaeda? American policy may, by now, be predictable, but that predictability is based on anticipated irrationality. America has become a danger to her increasingly more skeptical regional allies.

A decade of confused US policy has greatly emboldened Iran in its challenge to America and its regional allies. Minus a hesitant United States the only other state capable of confronting Iran is Israel. And while American abrogation of responsibility for the security of the region may, in the end, force Israel to act in its own interest, whatever the military outcome of the conflict Israel would face new existential challenges. Regardless whether the decision to attack originates in Washington or Jerusalem Iran would retaliate against US bases forcing an American response. And blame for “forcing” the US into the war would likely have very significant consequences for the so-called “special relationship.”

Israel’s America Trap, Part 2: Appeasing Iran

2011-11-21T17:47:00.000-08:00

Friday Oct 21, 2011

Attacking Iran would be costly… so appeasement became the default policy of Bush and his successor.

Why have two successive administrations avoided confronting multiple Iranian provocations against American interests in the Middle East? Why has the US refused to deal directly with Iranian funded and sometimes officered attacks on American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, against Iran-supported terrorism, its nuclear weapons program. Surely America’s leaders recognize that even the appearance of weakness emboldens Iran and erodes Arab confidence in America’s ability and resolve to stand behind its defense commitments, to defend its regional interests and allies?

Last week I discussed the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, its growing “alliance” with Ahmadinejad to limit American casualties by limiting the scope of the war. This week I turn to Obama and how the Bush policy of dependence and appeasement continues to evolve under the new administration.

Whoever ordered the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran its assurances “with confidence” that had Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 allowed Bush to abandon his cosmetic threats against Iran and “surge” his way into an “honorable” exit and allow his successor to deal with the conseq1uences of his 2011 withdrawal date. In his favor Obama inherited the Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan quagmire from Bush. But his more reasoned and less confrontational approach backed by sanctions would prove as ineffective as his predecessors bluster in dissuading Ahmadinejad from his hegemonic ambitions.

The problem with sanctions is that there is much evidence indicating they are usually ineffective. Certainly this was true for the North Korea nuclear program. And Iran is both more resourceful and has more wealth and natural resources than her far eastern predecessor. Obama’s failure was not in having tried the more reasoned approach but in not appreciating its failure. Iran and the Arabs and perhaps all other countries expected the president to eventually stop putting off his deadlines and act as promised. With each successive deadline deferred Ahmadinejad’s gravitas grew on the Arab street, and Arab leaders dependent on America’s promise of a defense shield, grew increasingly anxious.

“The problem is that Obama’s White House, like George W. Bush’s, fears that taking too active a role against Iran and its assets will put U.S. military personnel at risk of Iranian retaliation in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to some U.S. intelligence estimates, Shiite Iran is responsible for far more American deaths and injuries in America’s two Middle East combat theaters than al-Qaida or other Sunni factions… Washington’s policy of not confronting Iran about its openly aggressive behavior has created a situation in which our troops are now effectively being held hostage.”

Unable to disengage from Iraq “with face” Obama followed his predecessor’s policy of spending American lives and treasure in an obviously no-win war.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the White House meeting planning withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, 22 January, 2009. The secretary and his Joint Chiefs chairman had long opposed a military strike against Iran.. Reuters

If Iran saw the US as its gladiator against Sadam’s Iraq, it was apparent that the Bush administration needed little encouragement (table talk to that effect preceded his election to the presidency). The administration must have been eager regarding Iranian supplied intelligence, particularly as it was supported by that second source, Iran’s man in the White House Ahmed Chalabi. Doubts regarding Chalabi’s loyalties surfaced not long after the invasion began. But by then the Bush was confronting Iran-backed militias, Iraq teetering on civil war. Under the circumstance the White House apparently saw its best option as cutting a deal with the devil, the backer of the militias, Iran: if Bush could not retreat at least he could limit American losses by limiting the scope of the war.

For Iran, America was the perfect foil. Bush had eliminated their feared adversary at little cost to Iran. And the longer the Americans could be bogged down in Iraq the more freedom Iran would have to pursue its ambitions in the Arab world, and the nuclear weapons that would provide teeth to their ambitions. As for America, boots were on the Iraqi ground, it was not possible to just leave. Attacking Iran would be costly, so Bush chose to cut his losses and pay the price of reducing the loss of American lives by limiting the scope of the war. Appeasement became the default policy of Bush and his successor.

“If the only country able and willing to go after Iran’s nuclear program is Israel, the only one who is capable of stopping the Israelis, Tehran realizes, is the United States. And so Iran and the United States now find themselves in one of the Middle East’s oddest alliances, with the United States unwittingly [?] aiding Iran in its effort to get the bomb.”

The United States attacked Iraq for reasons known only to the Bush administration. Certainly the excuses advanced at the time, WMD; democracy for the Iraqis; protection of the Arab oil monarchies and Israel, etc. were, as discussed last week, fallacious. As to the war’s achievements:

In lives lost: Iraq, the country the US set out to “save from Sadam,” more than 150,000 dead, civilian and fighters, between 2003-11, and millions more refugees;

America, as of 28 May, 2010, 4,404 lives lost, and another 32,000 wounded (small compared to Vietnam over a comparable period);

Financial costs of this under-the-table funded war in dollars: according to the Department of Defense, at least $757.8 billion. But this figure does not begin to cover interest accumulating and owed on the borrowed funds, and money spent and anticipated for the care of our wounded, etc. Agreeing with an MIT study, The Washington Post recently put the real cost the war at around $4 trillion, and described the impact on the US economy:

“This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared… As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis -- and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn… The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war.”

And what has the United States achieved by “saving” the Iraqi people from their oppressive Baathist regime, by turning over the reigns of power to the formerly downtrodden Shiite masses? After eight years and four thousand America lives, four trillion dollars already spent or in the pipeline America transformed Iraq from firewall against, to vassal state of America’s principle regional enemy, Iran. And under Iranian influence that American-installed Shiite-ruled Iraqi government is showing their hapless benefactor to the exit.

In 2008 Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw all troops by 2011. But to withdraw means Iraq is easy prey for an Iranian takeover, throwing open the entire region to the Iranian threat.

JCS chairman Mike Mullen delivers a “deadline” for Iraq to permit a residual American force after withdrawal. Reuters

“An Obama administration proposal to keep a few thousand American troops here after the end of the year to train the Iraqi military is being scaled back, as the administration has concluded that the Iraqi Parliament would not give the troops legal protection.”

And if, as likely, the proposal fails the Times article continues, “they could still return next year [sic] to negotiations that would allow the return of some American personnel.” That is, after Iran is even more entrenched in the running of the “democratic” Republic of Iraq!

Perhaps more than anything else, the Bush-Obama policy of appeasement towards Iran best represents America’s failure at strategic foresight, its declining position in the world, its voluntary or not withdrawal into isolationism.

Israel’s America Trap: Collateral Damage, part 1

2011-11-21T17:34:00.000-08:00

Wednesday Oct 12, 2011

“Listen to my advice for once," [Mubarak] recalled telling Cheney in English. "You have vital interests in the Gulf region, especially oil."

On his recent visit to the Middle East ex-CIA chief and now Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta posed this question to Israel: “Is it enough to maintain a military edge if you’re isolating yourself in the diplomatic arena?” An interesting question and, if this is the case, appropriately posed by Israel’s partner in the “special relationship.” In an 5 October response Lee Smith writes, “it’s the United States—not Israel—that’s losing power in the region.” Nobody would argue that there has been a seismic shift in the Middle East. I will discuss several issues that created the conditions for that change below. But the implication of Panetta’s statement is that Israel, primarily by failing to make peace with the Palestinians, is responsible for what Panetta refers to as her isolation. I will document below that America, and not Israel, is the cause of that “seismic shift” in the region. And while it is self-evidently true that Israel would be far more secure today, if no less despised in the region, had she and the Palestinian leadership been able to negotiate the “two state solution,” in fact Israel is only one party to those discussions, the opposite party divided by two claimants to leadership, one of which opposes negotiations out of hand.

Due to material to be covered, I will divide this article in two parts, the first covering the war in Iraq and the US-Iran dialogue. The second part will look at the “Arab Spring,” and the Israel-Palestine issue.

Clockwise, starting at top left: a joint patrol in Samarra; the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square; an Iraqi Army soldier readies his rifle during an assault; a roadside bomb detonates in South Baghdad. (Wikipedia)

America invades Iraq: Lawrence Wilkerson, in 2002 a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and later chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell recalled in an interview that, "the Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy --Iran is the enemy. If you are going to destabilize the balance of power, do it against the main enemy." Wilkerson recalled that the message “was conveyed to the administration by a wide range of Israeli sources, including political figures, intelligence and private citizens.” Nor was Israel the only concerned bystander.Turkey’s prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, at a time when that country was still a strong ally of the United States and Israel and still under secular rule delivered the same message, as did the Saudis, Lebanon and Egypt.

Hosni Mubarak prophetically “told the American government that if you strike at the Iraqi people... we fear a state of disorder and chaos may prevail in the region."

As Air Force 2 approached Riyadh on the first leg of a mission to convince the Saudis and Gulf Emirates that America invading Iraq was in their interest, Dick Cheney was informed that Crown Prince Abdullah had just told ABC News, ''I do not believe it is in the United States' interests, or the interest of the region, or the world's interest, to do so… And I don't believe it will achieve the desired result.” But neither the advice of the Saudis, the Israelis and the Turks individually or collectively could deter Bush once he made up his mind.

From the beginning the logic of those warnings by America’s allies in the region should also have been obvious to America’s policy-makers. For how could anybody with any background in the region have not foreseen the pivotal role of Iraq as deterrent to Iran? But the administration was bent on following its own inner voice. Emblematic of administration ignorance, Vice President Cheney told Meet the Press that he and Bush fully expected the American invaders to “be greeted as liberators.”

“It seems like only yesterday we were marching into Baghdad, waiting to be greeted with shouts of gratitude and appreciation for saving you from the evil dictator who ruled your totalitarian state with an iron fist. Well, the surge is over and we're gonna roll pretty soon, so I just wanted to mention that it's not too late to greet us as liberators if you get the chance.” GEN. RAY ODIERNO (APT SPOOF IN ONION)

America’s informal alliance with Iran: The Iranians had fought a decade-long war with Iraq and suffered a million casualties. The Islamic Republic was not anxious to try again. They needed a proxy to topple Sadam. America’s first Gulf war stopped at the gates of Baghdad because Bush, Sr. understood Sadam’s role as deterrent. “Iran knew it could not invade Iraq and win by itself.” Iran would have to encourage the Americans to do the job for them.

“Influential people in the White House, the Pentagon and Congress saw [Ahmed Chalabi] as an Iraqi George Washington.” The MIT-educated, secular Shiite Muslim, “was the Pentagon's and Vice President Dick Cheney's candidate to lead Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.” In fact Chalabi, close confidant and major source of intelligence regarding those phantom Iraqi WMD (weapons of mass destruction and rationale to invade), was an Iranian spy who both kept Teheran informed of US planning, and provided Bush what it wanted to hear in support of its intentions: “The CIA blames him for some of the bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” And, “intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbor, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.”

Rather than the welcome as liberators of the oppressed Shia majority of Iraq the “liberators” were met by a well organized community bent on fighting the infidels. While Ahmadinejad had been baiting the American invasion the Iranian Revolutionary Guard had been organizing and training their Shia co-religionists to fight the invasion. Iran funded, provided weapons and training and, as the insurrection progressed, even officers to lead the militias. It turned out that defeating the Iraqi army and deposing Sadam was the easy part.

Iran had deftly manipulated the superpower, and would deftly continue to do so with great profit. With the US military bogged down in Iraq the administration had little appetite for yet another Muslim adventure. Although they could never acknowledge it, Bush was now dependent on Iran as a moderating force needed to keep American casualties low. When in 2007 Bush introduced his “successful” Surge, its success was dependent on Iranian cooperation. Ahmadinejad ordered the Shia Mehdi Army, highly successful in fighting the Americans, to withdraw from the streets of Baghdad.

“The US plans to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years as part of a remarkable turnaround in policy by President George Bush.” Was it mere coincidence that the Mehdi Army abandoned the streets to the US, and that Bush provided Ahmadinejad that State Department Interest Section in downtown Teheran, reversing a thirty year US policy of diplomatically isolating the Islamic Republic? But if Bush bought Iranian assistance with that Interest Section it was unnecessary. Iran would have gladly provided Bush any assistance desired, no strings attached, to encourage the Americans to leave. That had been Iranian policy from the start.

The Iranian Bomb: On its surface, based on the statements of Bush and Cheney, the US was committed to use force to stop Iran’s nuclear bomb project. But if that were really policy, why appoint a defense secretary who opposed that policy from the start; why appoint a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who saw eye-to-eye with the defense secretary? In fact American policy regarding the Iranian bomb had been bluster and inaction long before the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran provided cover by concluding, “with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

But Gates and Mullen needed no such fig leaf; they had long been on record opposing war with Iran. “In 2007, [Secretary of Defense Gates] told a private meeting of Congressmen that bombing Iran would "create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America… They will start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and they will be less secure at the end than they are now." And chairman Mullen: “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome.” What do such statements mean in context of the president who hired them? What does it say about the intentions of Bush’s successor: President Obama asked both to remain?

New York Times, 10 July, 2011: Panetta Says Iranian Arms in Iraq Are a ‘Concern’

“…Mr. Panetta is the third top American official to raise an alarm about Iranian influence in Iraq in recent days. The American ambassador to Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, said last week that the United States had “forensic” evidence that weapons and weapons parts from Iran were being used by Shiite militias against American troops. His remarks were echoed two days later in Washington by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… Iran’s motive, American officials say, is to claim credit for driving American forces out of Iraq at a time when those forces are more than halfway out the door… In April, Robert M. Gates, Mr. Panetta’s predecessor as defense secretary, all but begged the Iraqis to ask for troops to stay… On Sunday, Mr. Panetta echoed Mr. Gates.”

Obama’s Middle East Learning Curve: Any Progress?

2011-05-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

Almost exactly two years since Obama and Netanyahu first met at the White House the two reunite amid dramatically changed conditions in the Middle East, but with an apparently identical agenda. For Netanyahu the pressing strategic issue for the region was and continues the Iranian drive for regional hegemony backed by a nuclear weapon; for the president the issue was and continues Palestine and the “peace process”.

According to Reuters, not known as sympathetic or even impartial where Israel is concerned (those doctored photographs taken aboard the blockade-running Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara), Obama used the 2009 visit to publicly announce a major departure from previous American policy by urging “Netanyahu to freeze Jewish settlement building” as a precondition to kick-start the stalled “peace talks.”

Netanyahu was forced to accede to the Obama “pre-condition” and for ten months all settlement building was halted. Abbas failed to take the bait and waited until two weeks before the moratorium was to end to give in to administration pressure and agree to enter talks. But, the Palestinian, insisted, he would only talk so long as the moratorium was extended! The Obama pre-condition represented to the Palestinian that the president was on their side, would present an American plan and save the Palestinians from responsibility for compromise on such issues as borders, settlements, refugees and, ultimately, the existence of a state of the Jews in Palestine.

Not only did Obama create conditions which painted Israel as obstructionist, thereby losing credibility for the president on the Israel street (any mediator must, at the minimum, at least appear impartial), but lost also was faith in the president (who failed to deliver Israel) on the Palestinian street. Even Abbas, whose Ramleh regime is entirely dependent on the continued largesse feeding the West Bank “miracle” under the stewardship of the US-trained Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, was dismissive of the president. In a Newsweek interview that appeared on 24 April, 2011 the Palestinian lambasted the president: “It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze,” Abbas explained. “I said OK, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it.” The rest is recent history. Abbas is hoping the United Nations will provide that which the president could not or, hopefully, would not: statehood on the cheap. On 27 April Abbas spurned American financial and diplomatic aid by entering into a power-sharing agreement with its Islamist enemy and Iranian proxy, Hamas. And today it was announced that the architect of that Palestinian economic miracle, Salam Fayyad, is out as prime minister in the new “coalition.”

And American prestige and influence between the parties is at an all-time low.

And as for Iran, at their 2009 meeting, as reported by Reuters, Obama “sought to reassure Israelis wary about his overtures to Iran that he would not wait indefinitely for diplomatic progress toward curbing Tehran's nuclear ambitions.” Which, in the end, wait the president did, and did, and did. And the result is that Iranian stature in the region grew with each presidential hesitation. And while there is no way to assess whether or not the Stuxnet action against Iran’s nuclear program is an American, an Israeli, or a cooperative effort of the two; while it is impossible to determine whether the apparently successful cyber-attack was a single foray, or the leading edge of an all-out hi-tech offensive; on the Arab street American lack of resolve in the public contest between the Iranian lion and the American eagle, Iran is the unquestioned victor.

In 2011 it is impossible for even the most partisan defender of Bush to assert that his war on Sadam Hussein achieved anything beyond providing Iran a front line on the borders of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, with Syria and with Jordan. Bush’s principal adversary in Iraq was always Iran, and Ahmadinejad won. Obama failed to accept Netanyahu’s 2009 warnings (Israel and the Saudis had advised Bush in 2002 that Iran, not Iraq was the principal regional threat!) that the Iranian nuclear threat was the regional strategic imperative. And today, having managed perhaps the impossible by losing the confidence of virtually the entire Arab world by his “well intended” interventions in Egypt and Libya the United States is on the verge of losing the Middle East, lock, stock and barrel. As a result its regional failures America’s position as “leader of the Free World” is also fast coming to an end. Certainly the wild and apparently thoughtless adventurism of Bush propelled the United States down this path. Unfortunately his successor, the exact opposite of Bush, turned out to be an overly cautious amateur.

For the Saudis Obama support for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was the final straw. For the Palestinians Obama’s failure to “deliver” Israel for a peace on Palestinian terms achieved the same. For Israel… Well Israel has little choice in today’s world but to remain dedicated to the “special relationship.” So while Netanyahu can depend on the president continuing to apply pressure for yet more concessions towards the new Hamas-Fateh alliance; while Obama can be counted on to continue to provide hollow assurances regarding his resolve to contain the Iranian threat (assurances already long dismissed by the Saudis!) Israel has nowhere else to turn. Certainly not to an increasingly hostile and unsympathetic Europe with its resurgence of antisemitism both among the citizenry and within the governments.

For better or worse, as go America’s fortunes, so go Israel’s. But maybe, just maybe President Obama will surprise all, demonstrate that he does have the capacity to learn, to change. And maybe, just maybe today’s meeting between the two leaders will demonstrate that the president has grown beyond his apparently well-intended, but globally disastrous naïve idealism and achieved a grasp of realpolitik, pragmatism as the path to achieve his, and all our dreams for peace and justice for all.

Conversations with a Holocaust Denier

2010-12-08T12:42:00.000-08:00

Marc Tracy’s revue of Ruth Franklin’s new novel, Freedom appeared on Tablet on 2 December. One of the responders was a Holocaust Denier, Michael Santomauro. What follows is the entire stream of a six day exchange between us.

I only read preceding responses following my first response to the revue and my first response to him followed soon after.

Dec 2, 2010 at 4:20 PM

The Holocaust, at least for we Jews, is a very real event in our own personal history. It has meaning and consequences for our lives far more immediate than any fiction could represent. Not even historical scholarship is adequate to the event. For us understanding its lessons within the context of our Diaspora experience represents nothing less than life and death.

Fiction, regardless how effective and dramatic in recreating the events of the Holocaust is still experienced by the reader as artistic expression, a fabrication of events as filtered by the experience and imagination of the artist.

Historical interpretation is also a reflection of the same process of inspiration (in this case ideology or prejudice; sorry historians, but we all come to the Present the product of our own personal history, and this necessarily colors our understanding and biases regarding the selection of data collected to relate the historical story), but at least the historian is making the effort to relate events “factually,” aspires to a degree of objectivity. And for this reason history is understood by the reader as “non-fiction.”

I suggest that while fiction and history may serve to reinforce our understanding, that the Holocaust is more than just a tragic event in our recent history, that it is part of an historical process that is centuries-, no millennia-long; that if we are not experiencing it viscerally then we are in denial about its true significance, are thereby perpetuating our own role as victim in this dialogue which Diaspora Jews have involuntarily participated in for nearly two thousand years.

Except that in the past we had not alternative; we were victims without escape. Today there is an alternative, and our choice to remain in Diaspora is a choice to accept whatever the future of this historical process may hold.

The stream begins here:

Michael Santomauro says:

Dec 2, 2010 at 3:13 PM

Folks,

The bottom line is that the Holocaust is claimed to be a historical event like the Civil War or the New Deal and therefore writing about it should be subject to the same standards of historiography.

When Franklin says of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir that it ”underwent a process of fictionalization” she should have said that he decided to pack his rather mundane experience in the German concentration camp with a bunch of fantastic lies.

The same can be said about Elie Wiesel, who she says of his book ”Night” that its ”poetic austerity comes at the expense of literal truth”.

Not a single memoir of the Holocaust or as a matter of fact not a single historical study of the Holocaust by establishment historians can withstand the cross examinations of Revisionist historians.

If you doubt this remember what Wiesel said ”some things that never happened are true and some things that happened are not true ”.

And one more thing:

I wish to express my outrage that the Holocaust, unlike any other historical event, is not subject to critical revisionist investigation. Furthermore, I deplore the fact that many so-called democratic states have laws that criminalize public doubting of the Holocaust. It is my position that the veracity of Holocaust assertions should be determined in the marketplace of scholarly discourse and not in our legislatures bodies and courthouses.

Let’s get rid of Holocaust denial laws in Israel and 16 other nations. That have been instituted in Israel in 1986 and for the other 16 nations since 1990. Decades after the event. Why?

What sort of Truth is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

David Turner says:

Dec 2, 2010 at 4:56 PM

In defending the pursuit of historical veracity through what he describes as an unbiased inquiry into the Holocaust, Michael Santomauro fails to distinguish between Holocaust inquiry and Holocaust denial. The first is an effort to marshal available facts in service of creating as “objectively” as possible, a past event. The second is to select from the available facts and, where absent, to extrapolate “facts” in order to present a predetermined ideological outcome.

Holocaust Denial takes many forms, represents various purposes. Some use it as a form of schadenfreude, the joy of creating and seeing others suffer. Some use it as a defense of their religion from the obvious part that millennia of Christian anti-Judaism played as foundation and inspiration to the crime. But such representations are not “history,” are not valid historical enquiry. Their purpose is not to describe factually, but to promote or defend a political or social position. And this is polemic, not history.

There are many volumes relating the prehistory of the Holocaust, the event itself and its significance for the future with which I am in sharp disagreement. But I do not for that reason deny their authors the right to the study and presentation of their views. Nor are laws criminalizing Holocaust Denial or any other form of incitement against a minority directed at independent scholarship, even when the agenda is ideologically revisionist.

You reason well, Mike. But you confuse your facts with the Facts.

Michael Santomauro says:

Dec 3, 2010 at 3:20 AM

Dear David Turner,

The Holocaust narrative reads like a conspiracy not Holocaust Revisionism!

Preeminent Holocaust expert Raul Hilberg summarized his thesis in 1983 before an audience of nearly 2,700 at Avery Fischer Hall in New York City: the entire German policy for the physical destruction of the Jews was to be explained by mind reading! No document attesting to this criminal policy could be found, because no such document existed. For several years, the entire German bureaucratic machinery operated through a kind of telepathy. As Hilberg put it:

“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus — mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”

Let us note again those final words: “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus — mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”

In his 1985 “revised and definitive” edition of his book, in it, the University of Vermont professor did not use the expression “consensus” or “mind reading.” And yet he wrote:

“In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization.”

I refuse to believe that which is not believable. I refuse to believe in the incredible. I refuse to believe in what Hilberg himself calls “an incredible meeting of minds.” I refuse to believe in mind reading or telepathy, just as I refuse to believe in the intervention of the Holy Ghost or in spontaneous generation. I take exception to any historical thesis, any system of historical explanation, based on such hare-brained notions.

David Turner says:

Dec 3, 2010 at 10:17 AM

Well, Mike, whether or not there was a plan or blueprint, whether or not the bureaucrats from Himmler on down got the message via telepathy, the evidence of Buchenwald and Auschwitz remains; the roll of Jews previously resident of Germany and France and Holland and Romania and Poland who vanished during the course of the Holocaust is also evidence of the event. Your position is based on ideology, not fact. It’s a form of “wishful thinking,” perhaps not that the Jews whose fate you dismiss as fancy were indeed victims of the West’s “final,” if incomplete solution to their Jewish Problem, but perhaps the adolescent joy of discovery of a flaw, the missing blueprint, that can be exploited to demonstrate to self and other your own superior insight.

In point of fact, Hitler wrote multiple times of his desire to murder the Jews, to erase the entire people (of course he used terms like parasite, vermin and bacillus) from the planet at least as far back as writing Mein Kampf in his jail cell. Interviewed in that cell by Josef Hell he said, “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows – at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example – as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.” Of course this was 1922, before he was elected chancellor, before such primitive and time-consuming instruments of murder as the gallows was replaced by the efficient dispatch of life and remains through the application of Hitler’s idol Henry Ford’s assembly line at Auschwitz.

The evidence, the material evidence remains there, Mike.

The one piece of “evidence” you, and others of your thinking hang on is that we have not yet uncovered the “blueprint.” As if Germany would have admitted in writing that it was murdering the Jews! And who needed a roadmap or order; the Holocaust was quite content to progress “intuitively,” the blueprint already laid out by the fuehrer decades earlier. Are the battle plans for a war written in advance? The carnage proceeds at its own pace, advantages recognized and exploited or not. There is never a definitive “blueprint,” just the intention expressed by leadership to march. Why should the War Against the Jews by judged differently?

Speaking before SS officers at Poznan, Poland in 1943, Himmler stated that for which no blueprint existed: “…we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it… I am talking about the “Jewish evacuation”: the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated,” every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter.”

Michael Santomauro says:

Dec 3, 2010 at 12:01 PM

Dear David Turner,

At the end of the Second World War, the Allies confiscated a tremendous quantity of German documents dealing with Germany’s wartime Jewish policy, which was sometimes referred to as the “final solution.” But not a single German document has ever been found that orders or even refers to an extermination program. To the contrary, the documents clearly show that the German ‘final solution’ policy was one of emigration and deportation, not extermination.

Moreover, there is no documentary evidence that Adolf Hitler ever gave an order to exterminate the Jews, or that he knew of any extermination program. Instead, the record shows that the German leader wanted the Jews to leave Europe, by emigration if possible and by deportation if necessary.

Contrary to the popular propaganda image, the wartime German authorities were concerned about the high death rate in the concentration camps due to disease, and took measures to prevent deaths among the inmates. From a directive dated December 28, 1942, from the head of the SS camp administration office to all the German concentration camps, including Auschwitz. It sharply criticized the high death rate of inmates due to disease, and ordered that “camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps.” Furthermore, it ordered: “The camp doctors must supervise more often than in the past the nutrition of the prisoners and, in cooperation with the administration, submit improvement recommendations to the camp commandants …” Finally, the directive stressed, “The Reichsführer SS [Himmler] has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced.”

At one time, it was seriously claimed that the Germans exterminated Jews with electricity and steam, and that they manufactured soap from Jewish corpses. At Nuremberg, the United States charged that the Germans killed Jews at Treblinka, not in gas chambers, as is now claimed, but by steaming them to death.

These bizarre stories have also been quietly abandoned in recent years.

In April 1990, Israeli historians conceded that the Germans did not manufacture bars of soap from the bodies of murdered Jews — contrary to what had been alleged for years in countless periodicals and supposedly authoritative history texts. If this story is not true, one might reasonably ask, how then did it ever get started? Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer had a ready answer. He charged that the Nazis invented it. In fact, this particular fable was first widely circulated in 1942 by the World Jewish Congress, and especially by its president, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.

Peace.
Michael Santomauro
ReporterNotebook@gmail.com
Call anytime: 917-974-6367

What sort of TRUTH is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

David Turner says:

Dec 3, 2010 at 1:33 PM

I have already suggested, Michael, that I do not read your comments as from the more typical Holocaust Denial lunatic fringe. Indeed, you sound reasonable and well-educated… in the documents that server your pursuit. Nor do I attack your right to pursue your studies as they affirm your beliefs. Nor do I reject most of the facts you marshal in defense of your thesis. The facts are generally correct, if not viewed within the actual process of the Holocaust. While there were beastly atrocities occurring in most ghettos, several were administered by officers whose approach seem out of sync with an outcome such as extermination. In fact the record of these more humane commandants was concerned for the preserving their wards as filling a labor shortage serving German war aims. Not exactly a humanitarian gesture. Von Braun likewise made efforts to keep his Jewish slaves alive as long as possible in pursuit of developing the super weapons that, had the war lasted a bit longer, might have ended differently. And there might not a Jew around today to respond to Deniers and Revisionists.

A far as the legend of Jews turned into soap goes, again your facts are OK, but context is, again, everything. Rabbi Weiss was an ocean away, subject to rumor no less than any person a continent away. The rumor of people into soap was actually born during the First World War when, if memory serves, the British and French used the lie as a propaganda instrument against the Germans. Considering the barbarism of the Holocaust, it is no stretch to suspect that the Germans were cleaning the stench of burned Jews with soap manufactured from their ashes.

Have you read my earlier quotes by Hitler in 1922, and Himmler in 1943? Himmler openly referred to the “secret” operation to “exterminate” the Jews: “The Jewish people is being exterminated, every Party member will tell you ‘perfectly clear,’ it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, EXTERMINATING THEM, ha!, a small matter.”

Michael Santomauro says:

Dec 4, 2010 at 9:07 AM

Dear David Turner

Link for the speech in question:

http://www.codoh.com/incon/inconhh.html

Excerpt from intro:

   Reading Himmler’s speech in its entirety, rather than the usual out-of-context quotations, results in a new level of understanding. Brief, out-of-context quotations have been used to support the orthodox Holocaust story since the end of the Second World War. For example, Lucy Dawidowicz cited the Himmler speech in her book, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. She reproduced however only 197 of the more than 24,000 words and these with a translation which directly supports her thesis. Dawidowicz is not alone in the misleading use of the Posen speech. Gerald Reitlinger, in his volume, The Final Solution also quotes from the Posen speech. Reitlinger reproduces 205 of the 24,000 words.

   Carlos Porter has also provided interesting insights in his translation of the various controversial terms used by Himmler: ausrotten, ausmerzen, umbringen and totschlagen. Besides his translation of these German terms, Porter shows that all of these terms are used multiple times during the speech and that each is used at least once in a figurative sense. The less suspicious phrases in which these terms are used are never quoted in the traditional literature.

   Many of those who accept the orthodox version of the Holocaust story refuse to accept Porter’s translation of Ausrottung, and the other terms which are typically translated to mean extermination. Porter’s translation shows that there can be a benign interpretation of these words, especially when taken within the context of the entire speech.

   In 1993, Robert Wolfe, supervisory archivist for captured German records at the National Archives admitted that a more precise translation of Ausrottung would be extirpation or tearing up by the roots. Wolfe also pointed out that in Himmler’s handwritten notes for the speech, that Himmler used the term, Judenevakuierung, or evacuation of the Jews, not killing.

David Turner says:

Dec 4, 2010 at 4:50 PM

Mike, as I said earlier, I recognize that, for whatever reason, you are a serious student of the mass murder of my people on the European sub-continent. Your observations are useful as a caution to myself regarding accepting one or another translation from a foreign language. I am certainly aware of the problem in discussing Christian scripture, although while the standard of precision we might prefer can never be achieved word for word, still intent can be approximated from context. In the case of Matthew, for example, “his blood on our heads, and those of our children (from memory, not from text)” may or not have translated exactly from the original Greek or Aramaic (we can only rely on multiple rewrites over the first fifteen hundred years even for the present texts, and you know how meaning changes the original from the whisper-circle experiments. But whether or not the words are accurate, the meaning in context is suggestive. And that, and some other “original” texts have resulted in what one scholar estimates is the murder of one of every two Jews born in the past thousand years.

As regards the Himmler speech, I have read it in entirety and although some words have multiple possible meaning, the context and intent none-the-less refer to the systematic elimination of all Jews whom his soldiers were able to get their hands on. Was this originally the plan, as his words imply, or a progressive elimination of options leading to their disappearance? Does it matter? The fact is that between 1941 and 1945 roughly six million Jews ceased to exist.

You and I can quibble back and forth over ideas, something I find not without value. But we are not likely ever to agree. And the reason is that the Holocaust for you is a topic of interest, an intellectual challenge. For me the Holocaust is a stark reminder of how tenuous my existence is in a world that has murdered Jews for millenia.

The Holocaust was only the most recent attempt to solve the West’s Jewish Problem.

Michael Santomauro says:

Dec 6, 2010 at 10:08 AM

Dear David Turner,

Thank you for your input. In his 1988 book, Jewish Professor Arno Mayer calls for “excavations at the killing sites and in their immediate environs” to determine more about the gas chambers. In fact, such forensic studies have been made. The first was conducted in 1988 by American execution equipment consultant, Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. He carried out an on-site forensic examination of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek to determine if they could have been used to kill people as claimed. After a careful study of the alleged killing facilities, Leuchter concluded that the sites were not used, and could not have been used, as homicidal gas chambers. Furthermore, an analysis of samples taken by Leuchter from the walls and floors of the alleged gas chambers showed either no or minuscule traces of cyanide compound, from the active ingredient of Zyklon B, the pesticide allegedly used to murder Jews at Auschwitz.

A confidential forensic examination (and subsequent report) commissioned by the Auschwitz State Museum and conducted by Institute of Forensic Research in Krakow has confirmed Leuchter’s finding that minimal or no traces of cyanide compound can be found in the sites alleged to have been gas chambers.

The significance of this is evident when the results of the forensic examination of the alleged homicidal gas chambers are compared with the results of the examination of the Auschwitz disinfestation facilities, where Zyklon B was used to delouse mattresses and clothing. Whereas no or only trace amounts of cyanide were found in the alleged homicidal gas chambers, massive traces of cyanide were found in the walls and floor in the camp’s disinfestation gas chambers.

An aside to another responder:

David Turner says:

Dec 6, 2010 at 10:28 AM

Thank you, Leucippe. What appears above is a debate between two persons with opposite expressions (I cannot speak for Mr. Santomauro’s motives) of an issue important, perhaps central to Jewish identity and existence. I hope it helped clarify both sides of the issue for others not that familiar with the challenge to the reality of the Holocaust, the denial by some that the event ever occurred; or if it did, was greatly exaggerated, manipulated by the Jews for some purpose or other. Shades of the Protocols!

This is not the place to challenge Holocaust Denial; it takes many forms and reflects a range of motives from an effort to defend Christianity as inspiration and precedent, to the obvious provocation of the open antisemite. Neither is to be taken seriously as both, whether through subtlety born of self-deception, or willful polemic, fall well outside universally accepted norms of historical discussion. My debate with Santomauro above, his references to a missing “smoking gun,” the absence of a document by Hitler “ordering” or providing a “blueprint” for the Holocaust, while ignoring the existing record of writings, speeches and interviews precisely stating Hitler’s intentions, for example his 1922 jail cell interview, “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews!”; or Himmler’s 1943 Poznan speech to his SS officers, “every Party member will tell you, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them. Ha, a small matter!”

As regards the Himmler speech Mr. Santomauro tried blurring its obvious meaning through the subterfuge of mistranslation. Of course the speech was a translation, and of course individual words can be translated slightly differently. But the meaning comes through not by the weight of its individual words, but by its context. And by context Himmler’s meaning is as clear in 1943 as was Hitler’s in 1922.

David Turner says:

Dec 6, 2010 at 10:55 AM

Sorry Mike, raising the Zyklon B issue demeans, not promotes your efforts. The means of murder are, at best, a side issue. In fact later studies demonstrated that the results you refer to were, to be generous, in error. But again, this is a bogus issue. You fail to convince based on arguing from texts, and fail also by this detour.

Where previously I reserved judgment on your motives, perhaps a misguided history buff who joyfully “discovered” what he felt a flaw in historical process, you now emerge from the closet fully regaled. What is it about provoking Jews that motivates you? Is it the effort at getting a rise from us, or just the reaching out of the lonely to others also so for common identity and affirmation?

Michael Santomauro says:

Dec 6, 2010 at 12:17 PM

Dear David Turner,

As as I stated before:

“I refuse to believe that which is not believable. I refuse to believe in the incredible. I refuse to believe in what Hilberg himself calls “an incredible meeting of minds.” I refuse to believe in mind reading or telepathy, just as I refuse to believe in the intervention of the Holy Ghost or in spontaneous generation. I take exception to any historical thesis, any system of historical explanation, based on such hare-brained notions.”

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
ReporterNotebook@gmail.com
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
What sort of TRUTH is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

David Turner says:

Dec 6, 2010 at 7:38 PM

So why is the Holocaust the object of your disbelief? Why are we Jews so important in your life?

Michael Santomauro says:

Dec 7, 2010 at 8:00 PM

Dear David Turner,

Thank you for asking the question.

Most of us are mentally trapped to think Jewish. Actually, it is safe to say that virtually every mainstream publication or or other type of media organ is “nothing more than a screen to present chosen views.” The great battle over the last century has been a battle for the mind of the Western peoples, i.e., non-Jewish Euros. The chosen won it by acquiring control over essentially the complete mainstream news, information, education and entertainment media of every type, and using that control to infuse and disseminate their message, agenda and worldview, their way of thinking, or rather the way they want us to think. Since at least the 1960s this campaign has been effectively complete. Since then they have shaped and controlled the minds of all but a seeming few of us in varying degree with almost no opposition or competition from any alternative worldview. So now most of us are mentally trapped in the box the chosen have made for us, which we have lived in all our lives. Only a few have managed to avoid it or escape it, or to even sometimes see outside of it, and so actually “think outside of the (Jewish) box.”

The Holocaust is often treated with reverence, and as a central event of world history. For many Jews, says Rabbi Michael Goldberg, a Jewish author and religious leader, the “veneration” of the Holocaust has become a new religion. “And as with any organized church,” he adds, “this Holocaust cult has its own tenets of faith, rites, and shrines.”

Two well-known Jewish writers, Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, point ed out in their 1995 book, Jews and the New American Scene:

“During the last three decades Jews [in the United States] have made up 50 percent of the top two hundred intellectuals… 20 percent of professors at the leading universities … 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington … 59 percent of the directors, writ ers and producers.

This intimidating power is not a new phenomenon, but has long been an important factor in American life. In 1972, during a private White House meeting, President Richard Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham spoke frankly about the Jewish grip on the media. “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” said Graham, the nation’s best-known Christian evangelist. “You believe that?,” Nixon responded. “Yes, sir,” said Graham. “Oh, boy,” replied Nixon. “So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”

In 1978, Jewish American scholar Alfred M. Lilienthal wrote in his detailed study, The Zionist Connection:

“How has the Zionist will been imposed on the American people?… It is the Jewish connection, the tribal solidarity among themselves and the amazing pull on non-Jews, that has molded this unprecedented power … The Jewish connection covers all areas and reaches every level. Most Americans may not even sense this gigantic effort, but there is scarcely a Jew who is not touched by its tentacles.”

To sum up: Jews wield immense power and influence in the United States. The “Jewish lobby” is a decisive factor in US support for Israel. Jewish-Zionist interests are not identical to American interests. In fact, they often conflict.

As long as the “very powerful” Jewish lobby remains entrenched, there will be no end to the Jewish-Zionist domination of the US political system and the American media, the Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the Israeli threat to peace, and the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East.

David Turner says:

Dec 7, 2010 at 11:13 PM

Well, Mike, you’ve redeemed yourself in my mind. For a moment I thought you were quitting with that Zyklon B addendum. I appreciate you coming completely out of the closet, putting aside the non-issue of freedom of speech, since your repeated appearance in this vehicle of the (for real) Jewish media certainly provide even you a forum to air your decidedly from the start anti-Jewish point of view. You quote freely from Jewish sources to “prove” your point but, if you don’t mind my saying, you cherry pick and distort by your selections. Wiesel, who admitted the nightmare too unimaginable to present as anything than in a fictive form certainly was not saying, as you would have it, that the Holocaust was a creation of imagination. Likewise that since no specific order or blueprint has yet been discovered, that the process by which the Holocaust unfolded was as if by telepathy. Again, the closest document I, for one, am aware of was the Himmler Poznan speech, which you choose to nit-pick the translation to suit your purposes but, I suggest, any unbiased reader in the German or English translation, would have little difficult understanding as a full admission that Germany from Hitler on down was fully aware of the program as full and systematic eradication of Jewish existence, if possible.

The one piece of evidence for a “Jewish Conspiracy” that you do point at, relating to Jewish achievement in the United States again, to the eyes of a dispassionate non-Jew might evoke envy but, since the majority of graduates from the universities are non-Jews, and the institutions themselves, and particularly the “ivy leagues” are or were originally Christian in origin; well, I agree, in the 200 years since our “emancipation” Jews have proportionately contributed more artists, scientists, professors, and overall Nobel laureates than the general public, in all lands of the Diaspora. In fact, it has been assumed that had Germany not destroyed their Jews they would have won the war.

Michael Santomauro says:

Dec 8, 2010 at 11:22 AM

Dear David Turner,

Remember the New York magazine cover story: “The Jewish Brain: Are Jew’s smarter?”

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478

Oct. 19, 2005
Re: Are Jews Smarter?

Dear Ms. Senior:

Why is it okay for white Jews (Ashkenazim) to sub-divide themselves from the Sephardic lower IQ? (Forty-five percent of Israel’s population has the Sephardic IQ of 88.)

And it is not okay for other White ethnics to be able to do the same when reporting IQ scores? For example, at the very minimum, it would show Northern and Western Europeans to be comparable if not slightly higher than the Jewish-white IQ, when you eliminate the Eastern European IQ. In some categories the European-White IQ is way higher, such as in spatial reasoning, even for all White ethnics including the Eastern European. This is rarely reported in the mass media. I wonder why? It reminds me of a joke from the Jewish comedian David Steinberg, who is married to an Italian-Catholic: “Whenever I go to family gatherings, the Jewish side breaks things, and the Italian side fixes them!”

In folk psychology and folk sociology, when it comes to E. Q., even my Jewish supremacist acquaintances and friends will think they have been culturally short changed, thinking of themselves as an unhappy lot.

In aesthetics Jews “seem” to have an inferiority complex when it comes to physical aptitude, which I have argued with my Jewish friends, is absolutely uncalled for! For instance, in “folk talk,” my Jewish girlfriends believe what is often said (even by Bobby Fischer) about Jewish men in the “below the belt” department, that they have been short changed from all that inbreeding.

And what about Jewish women? Again, referring to David Steinberg’s promulgation of the joke: “What moves more Jell-O or Jewish women in bed”. The rate of Jewish men running away to marry “shiksa’s” for the under 35 age category is as high as 35-50%, depending on which data you want to embrace.

Are we to make a correlation from any of this?

The point being, it is hard to define what is a “Jewish brain” in the secular world. You mention the high percentage of Jewish Nobel Prize winners since its inception in 1901, yet about two-thirds of the Jewish winners come from inter-faith/inter-ethnic backgrounds. For centuries before 1901, the portion of Jewish contributions to the high sciences is almost void.

To refer to chess master Bobby Fischer (another one of those 1/2 Jews), is slanderous to Jews. Your readers should be aware that he hates Jews with a fervent passion, and blames virtually any bad that is happening in the world on organized Jewry.

You wrote: “Of course, there’s another side to this shining coin. Jewish cleverness has also been an enduring feature of anti-Semitic paranoia.”

The implication here for your readers misunderstanding is that anti-Semitism is the result of Jewish intellect. Historically it has been as a result of resource competition, belief in a moral and intellectual superiority and a fierce policy of non assimilation with the host countries which initially offered you admittance with friendliness. Anti-Semitism is not in any way a mental illness.

Western Civilization is a European-white accomplishment and Judaism has always been an appendage. Not the other way around.

We are a better world today because Western Civilization took the road to Athens over the road to Jerusalem.

If we had a proper scientific study involving IQ tests that are not skewed to fit one group in particular (by, for example, including musical intelligence tests that are currently excluded because some people “don’t believe in” musical intelligence) then all this Jewish intellectual narcissism would disappear up its own arsehole. Which is precisely why we will never see such a thing, for it would be truly “anti-Semitic”.

As long as we’re playing with racism and stereotypes, where do Jews rank in the greed and power scale? Or the bad landlord scale? Or the cause of social inequality, war and exploitation of lesser people scale?

One last thing, it’s too much of a reach to think that Charlemagne “lured” Jews there to lend money. Give me a break!

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
ReporterNotebook@gmail.com
917-974-6367

David Turner says:

Dec 8, 2010 at 3:10 PM

Apparently you sent me this latest in response to my observation regarding the contribution of Jews to Western society over the past century or so. I did not mean to offend or threaten; in fact mine was only an observation in response to your earlier comments. But again your facts appear, as earlier, strongly colored by your ideology. I am not aware that the skew towards Jewish recipients of the Nobel were progeny of mixed marriages. And what if they were, that still would not explain why the far superior Aryan genes contributing to their talents would not be even more powerfully expressed in marriages between two Aryans?

You ask, “Why is it okay for white Jews (Ashkenazim) to sub-divide themselves from the Sephardic lower IQ? (Forty-five percent of Israel’s population has the Sephardic IQ of 88.)”

While I agree that among the ultraorthodox in Israel there is a tendency for the two groups to maintain separate communities, this is a cultural artifact reflecting their unique histories, not the superiority or bigotry you assert. And as to that reference to “the Sephardic IQ of 88,” once again, Mike, either you, or your source, is confabulating. And don’t take this wrong, I don’t mean to provoke yet another response regarding Aryan intellectual superiority, but Israelis are a world leader in techonological innovation from health care to computers. And I suspect that does not result from a population where “Forty-five percent of Israel’s population has the Sephardic IQ of 88.´Unless, of course, you mean that the other 55% of Israelis are so intelligent as to… But I suspect that is not your conclusion.

And finally, Mike, you truly achieved a new low in referring to Jewish women. “What moves more Jell-O or Jewish women in bed”. Of course, as always, you are quoting a Jew, this time a comedian. And, as usual, out of context (we Jews are known to use ourselves as the butt of our jokes). But even here your biases confuse your conclusions. If Jewish women are such active partners, why would “[the] rate of Jewish men running away to marry “shiksa’s” for the under 35 age category [be] as high as 35-50%”? Again, I question your statistics. But your conclusions…

Mike, this all began as you protesting that somehow the “Jewish press” controls the freedom of you and others to explore and express your beliefs. That Tablet, a Jewish journal, has provided you a forum to express yourself from your historical opinions on such anti-Jewish issues as Holocaust Denial, Aryan superiority, and defamation of Jewish womanhood is clear evidence that paranoia, while sometimes justified, fails this particular test.

The non-pacifist case against attacking Iran

2010-08-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Israel should sit back and allow the Iranian threat to continue to build. In the end, faced with the prospect of losing control of the strategic Middle East and its oil the United States will be forced to act. The alternative would be to lose credibility as the last remaining global superpower. And the cost of that failure would be incalculable and irreversible for the United States.

George W. Bush launched the war to topple Sadam Hussein on 20 March, 2003. Three months later he famously and prematurely declared victory aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln positioned off the coast of Iraq. According to the president, “our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” In the end there were no Iraqi WMD and the administration was also forced to admit that Sadam had no connection to either September 11 or al-Qaeda.

Shortly before his execution Sadam was asked about the missing WMD. His interviewer reports, "The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors. Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq."

With the withdrawal of US fighting forces on 19 August, 2010 the only observable American achievement following eight years of war that cost more than four thousand American lives, untold Iraqi deaths and more that $1 trillion in treasure is regime change for Iraq; and superpower America dependent on the restraint of the Iranian mouse that roared.

Iraq went to the polls on 7 March 2010 and the result was deadlock. Five months later, as the dust of the last withdrawing US combat vehicle settled on the Kuwaiti border Iraq still had no functioning government. And by all accounts the country is today closer to a bloodier civil war than it experienced in 2003 - 2007.

In an analysis of US options in post-withdrawal Iraq George Friedman, director of Stratfor writes, “There are many who are baffled by Iranian confidence and defiance in the face of American pressure on the nuclear issue. This is the reason for that confidence: Should the United States attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, or even if the United States does not attack, Iran holds the key to the success of the American strategy in Iraq.” In fact Dr. Friedman understates the problem for the US. American troops stationed in Iraq, the Gulf Arab states and Afghanistan are all at risk from Iranian supported proxies throughout the region. In Iraq the Islamic Republic arms, trains and provides guidance and leadership to anti-American Shiite militias. In Afghanistan Iran has the same relationship with the Taliban. The US is a virtual hostage to Iranian influence. And the United States is solely responsible for this situation, having toppled the Sunni Ba’ath regime of Sadam Hussein in Iraq.

The 1980- 1988 Iran-Iraq War cost Iran more than one million lives. The lesson was clear: Iraq under Sadam Hussein was to be avoided. When George Bush replaced the minority Sunni Baath regime with one controlled by the Shiite majority he threw wide the invitation to Iranian influence.

A Sh’ia (Iran)-controlled Iraq allowed Ahmadinejad to not only threaten US forces in Iraq, but to project Iranian influence and threat throughout the region. Iraq was the military buffer protecting the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Another consequence of invading Iraq was that Bush gave the fundamentalist Iranian regime the appearance of equality with the United States in regional affairs, directly in Iraq, through its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas in the Levant and Egypt. Even in Saudi Arabia Iranian-influenced Sh’ia are the majority in the kingdom’s richest oil fields.

To return to the Friedman analysis: “The United States cannot withdraw completely without some arrangement… Iran would dominate the Persian Gulf region after the withdrawal. Thus, the United States… can stay in perpetuity and remain vulnerable to violence. It can withdraw and hand the region over to Iran. It can go to war with yet another Islamic country. Or it can negotiate with a government that it despises — and which despises it right back.”

Debka, Israel’s equivalent of Stratfor, viewing American policy from a regional perspective, draws a much bleaker vision for Iraq’s future. “According to US intelligence, [the Shiites] are preparing to capture large parts of Baghdad as well as Habaniya, Ramadi, Tikrit, Falluja and sections of Anbar Province, in order to … [force the Sunnis] to accept their loss of political influence and… the loss of more territory in the cities…The second [goal] is to crush the power bases the Saudis are building in [Sunni sectors of] Iraq at great expense. While the Saudis and the Syrians are spending money to buy off Maliki's supporters, he plans to physically destroy the Sunni power centers in which they are investing.”

And while the Sunnis and Shiites fight their own civil war, Debka continues, “the Kurds of the north… plan to exploit the anticipated armed Sunni-Shiite feud to drive south and grab parts of central Iraq up to a line some 250 kilometers north of Baghdad.”

And where does Debka see Iran in all of this? “Tehran is also eyeing rich spoils in Iraq's post-American era… the southern oilfields centering on the city of Basra, which account for about 60 percent of the country's oil output.”

So here we are, 19 August, 2010, witness to the last of American combat forces having left Iraq. What are America’s options? Having destroyed Iraqi deterrence to Iran; having allowed Iran to project threat and influence from Saudi Arabia to Egypt; having allowed through accommodation Iranian progress towards nuclear status; how will the current president respond?

To date the signs are that the US will continue the Bush-Obama diplomacy-over-war effort at accommodation. But nothing is more likely to lead to a regional loss of confidence in the United States as regional defender than the kind of indecision and avoidance that has characterized American policy towards Iran for the past eight years. And this is the reason for the rapid deterioration of American influence in the oil-rich and strategic Middle East. Absent American willingness to eliminate the Iranian threat, the Arabs feel they have no choice but to seek accommodation with the new American-created, soon to be nuclear hegemon.

During his 6 July, 2010 interview with Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic, United Arab Emirates’ Ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba said, 'We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.' [Goldberg] asked him, Do you want the U.S. to stop the Iranian nuclear program by force? And he answered: ‘Absolutely, absolutely.’" According to reliable sources both the Saudis and the Egyptians delivered the same message to the administration, “Absolutely, absolutely.”

Turkey, of course, has already made it clear that it not only views America as irresolute and undependable, it has confidently defied its erstwhile ally and protector by not only voting against America’s UN sanctions resolution, but violates those sanctions by supplying Iran with gasoline and other petroleum distillates. And to further make the point of independence and defiance, the Turks now openly support Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s proxies in the Levant. And of course there was also that Turkish blockade-busting flotilla to which the United States, characteristically, stood quietly by as observer. Only afterwards, the damage done, did the administration once again realize the mistake after the fact and try to minimize the damage.

The Saudis recently warned that, absent decisive action by the United States to eliminate the Iranian threat, that they, like Turkey, would see no choice but to also reach an accommodation with Ahmadinejad. Should that happen American influence in the region would plummet, and her only remaining island of support in the region would be Israel.

The September 11, 2001 attacks set the stage for emotion to override common sense among US decision makers. One year later and six months before the invasion, in September of 2002 CIA Director George Tenet came to Bush with reliable information provided by Iraq’s foreign minister Naji Sabri, that Iraq had no WMD. According to Sabri it was all a bluff by Sadam to keep the Iranians at bay. But, according to Tenet, the president was not interested. Tenet writes that, “the administration was already committed to invade.” Whatever his true motives, Bush invaded and set the US on a course destined to place itself in a relationship of dependence on Iran for the security of its forces, its pursuit of the war, even its ability to end the war. It is no less dependent on Iran today.

The United States has little choice but to either confront directly what all states of the region consider a mortal threat, or to fall back on the wishful possibility that maybe just one more round of diplomacy might finally convince the Iranians to abandon the bomb and become good neighbors.

Of course the US always knows it has another option. Aware that war with Iran will, as occurred in 2003, result in hyper-inflation in the price of oil, and that this would likely tilt the world into a deeper recession, or worse; knowing that attacking Iran will result in an escalation of American casualties at the hands of Iran and her proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan; does it not make better sense to avoid direct conflict, to protest loudly but leave the deed, and the fallout, to Israel? If America waits long enough then Israel is likely to attack.

And this is the point. Israel would be justified, failing American resolve to protect its own regional interests, to pre-emptively attack Iran in its own defense. But can Israel sustain the fallout from the action? If, compared to attacking Iran, such relatively minor incidents as Operation Cast Lead or the boarding of the Mavi Marmara brought such intense international ire and isolation, can Israel afford, even survive the international isolation attacking Iran would bring? Israel justifiably sees a nuclear Iran as an existential threat. Would not the fallout resulting from the attack also constitute an existential threat?

Israel has other options. The Iranian threat is regional and not just to Israel. The Iranians have to be stopped, but not by a single member of the threatened regional community. The Saudis agree to “quietly” open their airspace to Israeli fighters, great; Egypt allows Israeli warships to transit Suez, wonderful. But is that the limit of their responsibility for containing the Iranian threat? Since the threat is regional the response must likewise be regional. Absent American leadership Israel should not heroically go it alone, should insist on Arab participation, a second “Coalition of the Willing.”

The result of this coalition would be that Israel is but one of several, including the oil producers, and so not alone responsible for the global economic fallout. The coalition would also serve to create a new reality in the Middle East, an alliance consisting of Israel and the Arab states.

Absent the participation of the Saudis, the Gulf Arabs and Egypt as part of the armada Israel should sit back and allow the Iranian threat to continue to build. In the end, faced with the prospect of losing control of the strategic Middle East and its oil the United States will be forced to act. The alternative would be to lose credibility as the last remaining global superpower. And the cost of that failure would be incalculable and irreversible for the United States.

Israel beyond Zionism?

2010-07-14T17:49:00.000-07:00

“Legitimizing Haredi control over conversion is a stalking horse for that other Haredi ambition, passage of Who is a Jew. With passage of Who is a Jew, discrimination against the non-orthodox, which includes the vast majority of Diaspora Jewry, becomes law of the land.”

Herzl would have to be ambivalent about the state of the Jews one hundred years after his death. He correctly assumed that having our own state would return us to “normalcy” as nation and as individuals. We farm the land and successfully defend the land we farm. We have our own government which, with an array of parties and ideologies for the voter to choose from, is surely the most democratic in the world. We are a world leader in the fields of medical and hi-tech innovation; have for decades pioneered such now trendy “green” industries as solar and wind power, offshoot industries such as electric powered transportation. In agriculture Israel first developed sprinklers, then drip and deep root watering for arid land farming, developed domestic plants adapted to arid climates. And for decades Israel has freely shared her expertise and innovations with the hungry of third world countries.

But “normal” also means that the state of the Jews has, under constant threat and open warfare, living with the obligation and burden of military service and taxation led to Israelis gradually seeing themselves as citizens of Israel rather than the avant garde of the Jewish People in our collective Zionist enterprise. And we of the Diaspora, ourselves aware of the threats and pressures facing Israel and Israelis over the decades, have respected the boundary between state and Diaspora, have hesitated to express ourselves in most internal affairs of Israel, even those that impacted the Diaspora.

The result has been an ever-widening gulf between Diaspora Jewry and the state of the Jews, with the partnership of the Zionist Project receding as a result.

What is the Zionist Project, how does it even apply to 21st century Jewry? Zionism was born of the mid-to-late 19th century realization that our emancipation from serfdom and religious persecution did not mean we would be accepted into the newly secular states emerging in the west. Long before Herzl’s nationalist awakening during the anti-Dreyfusard riots in Paris, in his book Auto-Emancipation Leon Pinsker had decades earlier concluded that Jewish security would always be subject to the mood of the majority among whom we reside, that Jewish survival could only be assured in a Jewish homeland capable of its own defense.

But not even Pinsker and Herzl could have even imagined the degree of threat we faced mere decades in their future. Without the Holocaust, the west’s first attempt at a final solution to the Jewish Problem, Israel would likely have remained nothing but a dream among our fringe, a millennial and continuing yearning, “next year in Jerusalem!”

Israeli and Diaspora Jewry consider the creation of the State of Israel the culmination of Zionism. It is not. This was clearly understood and put into law by the first Knesset. With the ovens just cooling at Auschwitz, among the first of the Basic Laws was the definition and commitment of Israel as the instrument of Zionism. The opening line of the 1950 Law of Return states that, “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” Israel’s Zionist mission, its reason for being, is to provide every Jew in need a home of choice, a refuge in time of need. The Law specifically excludes limitations such as, “only Jews “halachically pure” need apply, even were Halacha as rigid as some among the Haredi would like us to believe it is. The full intent of the Law cannot be made more clear than its Grandchild Clause, a provision extending refuge to anyone who falls under Germany’s 1932 Nuremburg Laws. Those laws define as “Jew” and subject to murder anyone with a single Jewish grandparent.

Israel has avoided writing a formal constitution, likely because of the delicate balance between the contradictory demands of secularism and orthodoxy in the state of the Jews. Orthodoxy in Israel is estimated as less than 25% of the Jewish population, less than 10% in the United States. But the prominence of Haredi parties in the Knesset and coalition gives them a platform and impact far beyond their small numbers. The issue of Who is a Jew is raised periodically in the Knesset, and while it has so far failed to pass into law, to judge by recent efforts in more main-stream Knesset forums and public discourse, resistance to the issue, typically expressed in challenging the status of the Law of Return, is eroding.

For decades rivalry between right-wing and left-wing parties has required whichever party achieved the most votes in an election to turn to the Haredi parties to form a coalition government. This effectively meant that the secular parties were hostage to Haredi political and social demands. This leverage has given the Haredi community social and economic advantages well beyond those enjoyed by all other Israelis. Only in the demand to define as “Jew” for matters religious and civil, the Who is a Jew proposal, did Knesset and state appear to draw the line.

So it is surprising that the Knesset Constitution and Law committee under the secular chairmanship of Yisrael Beiteinu’s David Rotem is promoting a change in the conversion process which would return control of the Conversion Courts to the Chief Rabbinate, effectively providing a Haredi a veto over Who is a Jew.

At the heart of Who is a Jew is the definition of Israel as secular and democratic, and committed to the Zionist Project, or sectarian, exclusionary and, at least as regards the non-orthodox Diaspora, anti-Zionist. Should the Rotem proposal regarding conversion pass the Knesset and become law Who is a Jew will also in time grow less controversial, find less resistance among secular policy-makers. Over time Israelis will adjust to their new change of status as they adjusted to the ban on public transportation on Shabbat. But where the Diaspora is unaffected by Shabbat public transportation in Israel, Who is a Jew has an immediate impact on our Jewish identity, on our status in Israel. So Diaspora Jewry are understandably troubled by this legislation. Should Rotem become law the reaction by US Jewry would almost certainly be immediate and harmful to Israel at a time when she is in dire need our support.

But of even greater importance for the long-term survival of the Jewish people is the impact of any such Haredi-inspired law calling into question the identity of Jews, of its impact on the bedrock of Israeli Zionist obligation, the Law of Return. Limit the Law and Israel will have abandoned its reason for being. Even were a back-door compromise on the Law written in, such as suspending Who is a Jew if and when the Diaspora faces another Holocaust, Jews living in the Diaspora would long-since have grown distant from Israel, will have become accustomed to view Israel as inhospitable and anti-Jewish. At that crucial moment, when hesitation would prove fatal, our Diaspora might well hesitate. And Israel would be responsible.

Israel is the creation of the Diaspora. Even before the Holocaust we anticipated the need for refuge. The state of the Jews is not the property of its current Jewish residents. In matters of defense and taxation and Shabbat transportation Israel is free to decide. In matters of Jewish identity, issues that intimately affect the Diaspora, she is not.

Of course Israel is a sovereign country and free to pass whatever laws she deems fit. And if Israel chooses to accommodate exclusionary forces within her Haredi community over the needs and concerns of our Diaspora she certainly has the power to do so. But doing so comes with baggage. Who is a Jew is anti-Zionist in form and intent. To adopt it, or steps towards it such as Rabbinate control over conversion and identity, is anti-Diaspora in form and intent.

Legitimizing Haredi control over conversion is a stalking horse for that other Haredi ambition, passage of Who is a Jew. With passage of Who is a Jew, discrimination against the non-orthodox, which includes the vast majority of Diaspora Jewry (Israelis are already, for the most part, reconciled to the intrusion), becomes law of the land.

Israel has embarked on a treacherous path the obvious outcome being an unbridgeable breach with the Diaspora. Having abandoned her Zionist mission she will then face a hostile world alone, without even the assurance of Diaspora support.

Eyeless in Gaza: Confused Priorities and the Iranian Bomb

2010-06-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

By slightly adjusting for characters and causes, today’s Middle East situation is eerily similar to that of the 1950’s. US policy has again opened the door to a radical threat to Arabian Gulf oil producers. And, as in the 1950’s, the US is again allowing Russia to successfully challenge American prestige and power in the region.

The White House chose to turn a minor announcement by a mid-level Interior Ministry bureaucrat into a major diplomatic brouhaha during Vice President Biden’s visit to Israel. The timing of the ministry release, more likely intended to embarrass Israel’s prime minister, was interpreted by Washington as a “slight” to the vice president and the United States. According to the administration, the incident nearly derailed the opening of indirect peace talks with the Palestinians, the purported reason for the Biden visit.

Within hours of the story hitting the press Saudi King Abdullah summoned the American defense secretary to Riyadh for an explanation. Was the king concerned at the asserted slight to American prestige, to the danger to the peace talks? According to Israeli military officials the real purpose behind Biden’s trip was not Palestine but Iran. Obama wanted Israel behind his Iran policy and Netanyahu resisted. The media blitz was payback.

That Iran, not American prestige or peace with the Palestinians was the reason behind White House ire is strongly reinforced by visits to Riyadh by other high administration officials. Weeks before the Biden incident the secretary of state was dispatched to reassure the Saudis, and failed. Soon after Biden left Jerusalem the chairman of the joint chiefs made the same trip, with the same result. But most telling was the press conference called by the prime minister of a Gulf emirate on the heels of Biden’s departure. According to the prime minister, regarding Iran, Gulf Arabs and Israel “see eye-to-eye.”

So what is America’s Iran policy, and why the need to reassure the Arabs, to threaten Israel?

The most obvious reason for regional loss of confidence in American policy can be traced to the fallout resulting from the Bush ordering the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the history of American policy mistakes in the region goes back farther, at least to the 1950’s. On 26 July, 1956 Egypt’s Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. England and France decided to take it back. The European plan called for Israel to occupy the Sinai and, as it approached the waterway, the Europeans would intervene to “protect” the canal. When the Russians threatened to side with Egypt President Eisenhower ordered the three “allies” to withdraw. Eisenhower would later describe that decision a mistake. The result was that for nearly two decades Russia, through its radical nationalist proxies in Egypt and Syria, threatened the US-protected Arab oil monarchies and other US interests in the region. By the 1960’s Israel was an essential partner to the US. Natural enemy of the Russian-backed radicals Israel served as counter threat which protected the oil producers, and American interests overall.

So the hurried summons by the Saudi’s, the statement by that Gulf state prime minister are two indications of the degree of threat felt in the region. Others include Saudi Arabia spending billions on a fence, a high tech Maginot Line, intended to surround the entire country. And while the Saudis did not volunteer to join Israel in attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, months ago they quietly let it be know that they would provide Israel an air corridor to conduct the strike, an offer recently renewed.

Other indicators of America-inspired regional angst are not difficult to find. Turkey, long time ally of the United States has, in recent years, grown increasingly distant, carving out an independent Middle East policy. Some analysts attribute the shift to its Islamist government, to dreams of a return to Ottoman glory. A more immediate explanation is that US failure to deal with the Iranian bomb necessitates her neighbors find an accommodation with the Islamic Republic.

Before the overthrow of Sadam Turkey would never have defied the United States at the UN, as it recently did by voting against the US drafted Iran sanctions package. Indeed, the week before that vote the Turks succeeded where the US had failed, to “convince” Ahmadinejad to accept, six months late, Obama’s offer to ship low grade uranium overseas for reprocessing. That gesture nearly derailed the US sponsored UN resolution which would have dealt a major defeat to US diplomacy.

Turkey’s prime minister has staked out a position of support of Hamas against Israel. Since Hamas is also on the US list of terrorist organizations, by doing so Turkey is demonstrating US weakness in being not even being able control its principal Moslem ally. How credible its assurances that it can deal decisively with Iran?

The Mavi Marmara incident is another example of American regional retreat. In this instance one ally, Turkey, was involved in sending a convoy of ships to break the legal naval blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza by another ally, Israel. Lives were lost with many injured on both sides. Hailed as a “new” Nasser, Erdogan followed up by threatening to send another convoy, this one led by the Turkish navy. And now Iran, intent on not being left behind, is sending its own ships to confront the Israel navy. And American failure to control regional events, even between allies, is again demonstrated.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind down, with Iraq increasingly drawn into the Iranian orbit, with Turkey continuing its drift to the Muslim east; as the threat to the Saudis and Gulf emirates by Russia-backed radical Iran increases so also will Israel’s importance to America. The US-Israel “special relationship” was never, for the senior partner, based on sentiment but on national self-interest. And the need for a reliable ally on the ground in the Middle East will be the basis for that new special relationship. Of course this presupposes the Obama administration can overcome prejudice regarding the Jewish state, can recognize and respond to the reality of the Iranian threat, not only its regional implications, but as part of a resurgent Russian global challenge.

There are some indications that America is coming to grips with the Russian reality. US backing for Georgia in that short-lived war is one example; installing Patriot missiles in Poland, albeit after months of hesitation, is another. But America’s response to Russia in the Middle East continues muddled and ineffective, a confusion of priorities and missed opportunities. The White House seems to accept that there is no longer a question of “winning” in Iraq, but merely containing the damage. In Afghanistan CIA and US Special Forces succeeded in bringing down the Taliban regime a decade ago. But the lesson of the defeat of conventional Russian forces in that country should have been warning enough against the current intervention. Not even the US installed and backed Afghan president believes the US can prevail.

The stakes for America in the Middle East are enormous, its position as world leader is at stake. The Iranian threat inflates the price of oil worldwide, a potential tipping point that can spell global economic disaster; the region is the land bridge between north and south, east and west. The Middle East, not southwest Asia, is America’s strategic imperative, Iraq and Afghanistan mere sideshow and distraction.

America, Iran and the “Showdown in Jerusalem”

2010-03-15T06:41:00.000-07:00

According to recent news reports the controversy surrounding the visit by Vice President Joe Biden was, and would have remained, a tempest in a teapot. Only after the vice president’s hour and a half consultation with the White House the night of his state dinner with Netanyahu did the event become a high profile media fiasco.

Ramat Shlomo, topic of the controversy, is a suburb of Jerusalem previously recognized by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as part of Israel in a future peace accord. So while the timing of the Shas party’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s announcement of plans to build on the site two years in the future may be politically suspicious, the decision itself was not. Other than its timing there was nothing in the issue itself to justify the controversy.

Soon after arriving in Israel Biden began a series of meetings with Israeli leaders. While the talks touched on peace talks assumed to be the primary reason for the visit, the real conversations reportedly centered on Iran and the bomb. The substance of those discussions prompted King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to summon Defense Secretary Gates, just flying out of Afghanistan, to make an unscheduled stop in Riyadh for “urgent clarifications."

What might have so alarm the Saudi king that prompted him to issue that summons; what might have warranted Gates agreeing to the unscheduled stopover? According to Israeli military sources, the summons immediately followed "the failure of US Vice President Joe Biden's talks with Israeli leaders to resolve their differences on Iran."

That Biden was unable to convince Israeli leaders should come as no surprise since administration Iran policy to date has nothing by way of success to show for more than a year of conciliatory gestures towards the Islamic Republic.

With the departure of its director Mohamed ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) disclosed what had been widely known outside of the American intelligence community, that Iran had for years failed to comply with United Nations resolutions, had evaded inspections, and was now in an advanced stage of developing a nuclear weapon. Soon after the IAEA disclosure Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s boasted that Iran had succeeded in enriching uranium to 20%, also known as the “breakthrough level” to weapons grade uranium. A few days later President Obama announced that he was, yet again, delaying his “final deadline” for “strong” sanctions.

Israel is not the only country in the region troubled by administration reluctance to take on the Iranian nuclear threat, as the Saudi summons to Gates demonstrates. Just two weeks earlier the president dispatched Secretary of State Clinton to Riyadh with the same message Biden brought to Israel: support the Obama sanctions effort, trust administration assurances. And the Saudis reportedly gave the secretary the same reply, but without the public upheaval from Washington following Israeli skepticism. The United States, the Saudis observed, is thousands of miles and an ocean away, so might be comfortable with a long-term sanctions program. But for states in the region the Iranian threat sits across a narrow water way, only seconds distant as the rocket flies. The only assurance that would satisfy the king would be the president’s pledge to back up those sanctions with military force, something recognized and approved by more than 60% of surveyed Americans.

And, as if the message to the president needed further evidence of how its hesitancy was seen by the Arabs, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, second only to Saudi Arabia in importance, told the press that his country and Israel "see eye to eye on the Iranian issue."

What is obvious from the above is that America’s approach to Iran does not inspire confidence in her allies, including Turkey, Egypt and Jordan. That the United States is reconciled to, and willing to accept a nuclear armed Iran is something totally unacceptable to Iran's neighbors across the gulf. This being the case no amount of assurance by the president’s emissaries will serve to convince, to reassure. By their concerns expressed in the press Arab oil producers view American policy as more directed at protecting its interests in gulf oil and its transport than with the survival of the regimes producing it.

And, following seven years of chairman of Admiral Mullen’s repeated concern that an attack on Iran would result in “unintended consequences,” Israel is forced to agree with the Saudis that the Obama Administration long since concluded that an Iranian bomb is a fait accompli, that America’s Iran policy is of appeasement, containment and deterrence.

Since it is unrealistic for the administration to expect Israel and the Arabs to fall on their swords for the superpower, President Obama must choose between equally undesirable alternatives. To prioritize Afghanistan over Iran will, in the end, likely result in the loss of American influence over the region, and its oil.

Alternatively the United States can begin to behave as “the world’s only superpower,” fulfill its obligations to defend the region and its oil. But this will require Obama use the real threat of force to deter Iranian ambitions. And be prepared, should threat fail to deter, to carry through on those threats.

There is precedence for an alternative to America joining the fight. In 1957 President Eisenhower intervened to save the Egyptian president by forcing the withdrawal of England, France and Israel following the 1956 Suez War. By saving President Nasser Eisenhower unleashed a decade of radical Arab nationalism, opened wide the door to Soviet influence in the Middle East. Today, by coincidence, a resurgent Russian is supporting Iran. And those same conservative Arab oil producing monarchies, threatened forty years ago by Nasser’s radical secular Arab nationalism are today threatened by Ahmadinejad’s radical Islamic fundamentalism.

The Obama Administration expresses concern that defiance by Israel presents the United States as weak on the world stage, so places American global interests and her military forces stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan in danger. I suggest that America is judged by its actions, not by those of such mini-states as Israel and Saudi Arabia, or even Syria and Iran. That reputation is earned and, unfortunately, deserved. Let the United States act as the superpower she insists she is and no one would doubt or challenge her strength.

Today the United States is a hesitant giant. But in the fast-evolving Iranian situation hesitation is not an option. The administration’s only choice is to either lead, follow or get out of the way. In the final analysis Admiral Mullen’s mantra is correct: whichever course Obama takes will have “unintended consequences.”

Israel’s coming war with Iran

2010-03-10T18:16:00.001-08:00

When it comes to the Middle East the only apparent consistency in American policy appears to be confusion.

At least since 2006 there has been a struggle within the White House to define a clear strategy confronting the problem of Iran. Through six years of his presidency George W. Bush regularly threatened military action. But, as the war in Iraq dragged on and Iranian influence in the former Sunni state grew, Bush needed Iranian influence to contain the Shiite militancy supported and encouraged by the Islamic Republic. Even threat itself grew less frequent until, by 2006 Bush's closest advisers were warning that a US attack on a third Muslim country would harm American interests in the region.

Then, in 2007, came the appointment of Admiral Michael Mullen as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At an early news conference the admiral warned of “unforeseen dangers” should the US attack Iran. American policy was shifting from confrontation to sanctions.

When, later in 2007 the sixteen intelligence agencies contributing to National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluded “with great confidence” that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, American interest in forcing Iran into compliance seemed to evaporate completely.

Today, one year into the Obama successor administration, the zigs and zags of the Bush Administration continue. One day sanctions with hits of a military option, the next sanctions as its own end and today we learn that not only are sanctions a thing for the future, but that the administration has reverted to "secret" talks with the Iranian regime.

And America’s vice president and long-time friend of Israel Joe Biden visits Israel apparently to inaugurate the latest round in futile Israel-Palestinian peacemaking. Except, as it turns out, the real purpose of the visit is to inform Israel that beginning now the two “allies” are marching in lock-step regarding Iran, with the senior partner, dazed and confused, leading the way.

No wonder that Turkey, astride the strategic crossroads of a Russian or Iranian advance on the Middle East, long-time ally of the United States and Israel, has been increasingly friendly towards Iran and Syria, increasingly distant from Israel.

No wonder that, at their recent Damascus summit Syria, Hezbollah and the Emirate of Qatar all agreed to host Iranian Revolutionary Guards on their territory. Of course Syria and Lebanon have long-since welcomed an Iranian presence. But Qatar? The emirate is host to America’s largest airbase outside the United States, an airbase whose sole purpose is to protect Qatar and its Arab oil producing neighbors from the Iranians.

No wonder that, on her recent visit to the Middle East, the Saudi king lectured America’s Secretary of State that sanctions may or not eventually prove effective, but the Iranian threat is immediate and demands an immediate American response.

Given American confusion, its abandonment of diplomacy-backed-by-threat-of-force, an Israeli response to this American created and exacerbated problem is increasingly likely. But, while Mullen and the US are using his “unforeseen dangers” as reason not to attack, feeble as the excuse, the dangers are real; and more so for Israel, a country a fraction of the size and influence of its super power ally. So, while it is increasingly likely that Israel will at some point be forced by American complacency to act, the conditions under which she does so must be carefully weighed and orchestrated to minimize those risks.

The recent warning by Defense Minister Barak that an attack by Hezbollah would be viewed by Israel as an attack by its sponsors suggests the path Israel may follow.

The gravest threat to Israel is not in engaging Iran in a four-front war with bordering Syria, Hezbollah, Gaza behind an Iranian missile shield, but in the repercussions by a world plunged into yet a second round of economic distress due to the war. The Iraq invasion triggered an oil price spiral that eventually reached its peak in the global Great Recession. An attack on Iran will bring on a second and likely far more severe shock to the price of oil. Its impact to a global economy just beginning to emerge from recession may well tip the world into an economic depression. And the initiator of the war, not the United States but Israel, would be blamed.

In such a situation Israel would find herself isolated, not just by Europe, but by its long-time “ally,” the country most responsible for the runaway Iran crisis, the United States. Nor will that isolation end with cessation of hostilities, because the resulting financial crisis will be long-lasting, its resentments also long-lasting.

Israel isolated is Israel vulnerable, and her enemies in the region will quickly appreciate the opportunity. And those enemies, Shiite-Sunni rivalry temporarily set aside, will take advantage of the unique opportunity and strike.

Under this scenario Israel will have neither military nor diplomatic cover, just Jews against Muslims. In virtually every war Israel has been forced into or chosen, in the end she was dependent on an outside source for munitions and arms. In the 1973 Suez War Nixon authorized the massive resupply airlift only after Israel agreed to American terms regarding the outcome of the conflict. Minus that airlift Sharon would not have had the supplies to cross the Canal and surround the Egyptian Third Army. Minus that airlift it would have been Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that would have been threatened, not Cairo.

The United States today is ordering Israel into compliance. The risks involved in open defiance of the order are dire. So Israel will have to avoid the appearance of initiating the attack.

How this might be achieved was hinted at in Defense Minister Barak’s warning that an attack by Hezbollah would be considered an attack by her masters in Syria and Iran. In diplo-speak this suggests a warning to Iran to keep Hezbollah on a short leash. But where conditions are ripe, and Hezbollah or Hamas test Israel, and the test escalates? According to the rules laid out at that recent Damascus summit, should Hezbollah or Hamas or Syria find itself at war with Israel the others are sworn to join the war. An Iranian misstep in support of her allies would be a causus belli no less than when Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran in 1967. Under such a direct provocation Israel would have justification for defending herself against Iran, and the nuclear facilities become open and justifiable targets. With the onus of aggression removed, although the impact on the global economy would be the same, the onus for having initiated the war would be on Iran, not Israel.

But let's be clear that, regardless of which country initiates the conflict, once combat between Israel and Iran commences the United States will have to participate actively in defense of Gulf oil and shipping. Even today, in addition to that massive air base in Qatar there are two aircraft carrier battle groups patrolling the waters of the gulf. The United States is already involved.

Should war break out under these condition the US would be drawn into the conflict and, as a participant, would be in a position to, in the end, enter a quid-pro-quo with the ayatollahs allowing the regime to survive, but with full and verifiable compliance with International Atomic Energy Agency oversight. Israel could emerge not only victorious again, but stronger. The appearance of provocation on the world diplomatic stage could well make the difference.

America’s Iran policy: Leave it to Israel!

2010-02-11T12:50:00.000-08:00

"Let me be clear: We owe [Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates] and [President Obama] a range of options for this threat. We owe the American people our readiness," Adm. Mullen said. "But, as I have said many times, I worry a lot about the unintended consequences of any sort of military action."

"[M]ost of us believe the greater threats [than Iran and the bomb] are the trans-national non-state networks," i.e. "al-Quaeda." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is now agreeing with Israel and most western intelligence agencies that Iran, "may currently be working on ways to turn enriched uranium into a nuclear warhead, instead of having stopped several years ago. This "...contradicts an assessment by Washington [the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, NIE] that Teheran suspended such activities in 2003." According to IAEA, "...Iran managed to make a minute amount of near 20-percent enriched uranium within days of starting production from lower-enriched material."

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington suggests that, 70 percent of the work toward reaching weapons-grade uranium was achieved when Iran succeeded in enriching uranium to 3.5 %. To bring it to Ahmadinejad's announced target of 20%, the breakthrough point to weapons grade enrichment, would take the process another "15 to 20 percent of the way there." To take it to the 90%, weapons grade level, could be achieved in months. Even more dangerous, according to Albright, the final enrichment step would require a much smaller and more easily concealed facility.

By IAEA evidence, then, even Mr. Albright's challenge to the years-long multi-US intelligence assumptions regarding the time-frame for Iran to reach the breakthrough enrichment level was very wrong.

On 2 February US, defense secretary Robert Gates told a news conference in Italy that, "I believe there is still time for sanctions and pressure to work."

A few hours later Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a CNN interviewer that, "most of us believe the greater threats are [not Iran and the bomb, but] the trans-national non-state networks [al-Qaueda affiliates]." And no doubt she is correct today regarding the security of the continental United States, an ocean away from the threat. But Israel and the Arab states are mere minutes as the missile flies, and for them the danger is not abstract, something that can wait.

On 3 February Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered "work to begin on producing 20 per cent enriched uranium." And whether that process preceded his order to enrich to breakthrough level, two weeks later he announced the deed done.

Caught off-balance yet again the administration repeated its "hope" that the UN Security Council would finally agree to "tough" new sanctions. According to a senior White House official, "This [sanctions policy] is about driving them back to negotiations, "because the real goal here is to avoid war." But if war is an extension of diplomacy, what is diplomacy without the threat of war?

As regards America's strategic interests in the Middle East, most visibly Arab oil, should US inaction permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capability then options for her regional "allies" would quickly narrow. This narrowing is already evident in Turkey. A strategic US partner since the 1950's, Turkey has for several years been seeking accommodation with Iran. One example of this drift is her increasingly cool relationship with that other US regional military ally, Israel. At the same time as Turnkey distances herself from Israel her support for Hamas and her relationship with Iran's strategic partner in the region, Syria, continue to increase.

So, why America’s reluctance to take on in a more direct and serious manner the Iranian threat we need look no further than US Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen’s fears. Faced with more than a decade of American distraction in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, America's traditional defense shield over the Middle East, and particularly covering the oil-producing countries of the Arabian Peninsula has, put mildly, frayed. While the Arabs see themselves increasingly abandoned, the Iranians find the region increasingly open to their influence. And the perception of American weakness, while fueling Arab anxieties, emboldens Iranian aggressiveness.

Should Iran end up a nuclear power, surrounding states from Egypt to Afghanistan would have few choices but to accommodate Iran following the Turkish model, or try to counter the Iranian threat with nuclear weapons of their own. Either way the world would grows far more dangerous. And the increased threat to Middle East oil would will fast trigger a return to the oil price inflation attendant to Bush's invasion of Iraq. If the oil speculation frenzy following that invasion tipped the world towards the Great Recession, the response to a renewed threat to oil on a world just emerging from that recession would be catastrophic. But that's not the worst of it.

US intelligence has long warned of the interest of al-Quaeda in obtaining a nuclear capability. Whether or not Iran will, once it builds its bomb, have the technical ability to fit a nuclear warhead atop a missile, they will certainly have the technology to produce a small plutonium device, one well suited for use by terrorists. And which countries would be most vulnerable to such a weapon? Think Madrid, think London, both cities targets of more recent mass terror attacks. And, of course, the United States, a country only beginning to wake to its own home grown terrorist threat.

Israel, on most countries short list as primary target would, because of its long experience with countering local terrorism, be among the most difficult, so least likely immediate targets.

US policy is unchanged since Bush, provided the 2007 NIE “estimate,” abandoned threat of military action and turned instead to “containment” by sanctions. A serious question is, Do administration insiders even believe sanctions can work? According to the Times article quoted above, "the list of [Iranian] sanctions is [already] six pages long. But none have accomplished the central goal. "Not surprising since," the article continues, "North Korea, Cuba and Myanmar have been economically isolated for decades, with little effect."

So, if the US is anxiously searching for a way to avoid war, where does this leave Israel? Administration efforts to get the Chinese aboard the sanctions train centered on the threat that, "there is something worse than sanctioning Iran: letting war break out between Israel and Iran [and disrupting China's Iranian flow of oil]." Since sanctions without the threat of force is a known dead end, what remains is that, while the US provides a toothless sanctions bark, Israel is for Obama as she was for Bush, the US policy choice to provide the military bite. In my earlier article, "Israel, America's Shaheed?" I concluded that the risks to Israel for attacking would far outweigh even the risks of living with a nuclear-armed Iran. My conclusion remains unchanged.

Iran is, via the Iraq invasion, a made in America problem. The responsibility for its solution resides solely with that country. Only the US has the wherewithal to effectively carry out a military strike, if it comes to that, and withstand the fallout resulting from its impact on the global economy. Israel cannot afford to act as America's pawn in this matter. Her past and present position serves only to encourage the US in its efforts to evade responsibility for dealing with the problem. A public statement to the effect that "Israel stands by the United States and will support any initiative our American friends undertake to eliminate the Iranian threat, including an American led military action," would serve to put the administration on notice, would return responsibility for the solution and its consequences to the superpower and return worldwide focus back to its appropriate target.

Israel cannot place loyalty and machismo above survival. Israel is not America's shaheed.

David Turner blogs at, America, Israel and the Special Relationship and, Israel.

Israel, America’s Shaheed?

2010-01-27T17:51:00.000-08:00

Iran is a made-in-America problem with Israel being stuck with the bill. But this bill represents an existential threat to Israel at least as serious as the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Ever since 2007, when Bush abandoned his oft-repeated threat to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program by force Israel has, apparently with little thought to consequences, stepped into the gap. Where does this enthusiasm come from? Are we so needy of U.S. approval, insecure as country that we have to parade our machismo endlessly across the world stage? Is it pride that blinds us to the fact that we are being set up for a suicide mission?

While Bush Administration appetite to wage war on Iran had been fading for some time, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran (NIE) gave Bush the cover needed to bow out of his threats with some dignity. And from then until the present all threats against Iran emanating from the White House and the Joint Chiefs have directly or not pointed to Israel as designated warrior. Herb Keinon recently referred to White House Middle East expert Dennis Ross as warning the Chinese that if they did not join Obama’s most recent push for sanctions that Israel, “could bomb Iran and severely damage China's crucial Persian Gulf oil needs.” And just this week French president Sarkozy warned Lebanon’s prime minister Hariri that, “Israel might take action to prevent the Iranian regime… from obtaining a nuclear bomb.” Forget that French-built Iranian reactors continue to supply fuel for that weapons program.

Who does Israel think will stand by her when the attack on Iran produces the consequence Ross threatened China with, but on a global scale? Bush invading Iraq resulted in the price of oil skyrocketing from the mid-$20’s to more than $100 per barrel. Oil price inflation set the stage for the resulting global recession only now beginning to ease. But Iran is not Iraq, and Israel is definitely not the United States. If the U.S. has backed away from the consequences of such an attack, is Israel prepared to accept them? When the Iranians mine the Straits of Hormuz, or just threaten to do so, and a new round of oil speculation sparks yet another global economic crisis, will the United States, the country most responsible for permitting the Iranian problem to get this far, will Israel’s super power ally still support tiny Israel? Or will the U.S. distance herself while the world blames Israel for the new round of global misery?

Nor is the danger to Israel alone. According to the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Agency recently released a report concluding that, “Anti-Semitism has reached a global peak since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead… levels of Jew-hatred have not been so high since the Second World War.” If a far lesser Israeli military action with no direct impact on Israel’s critics, how much more dangerous would the reaction to an attack whose consequences directly impact those predisposed by history to blame the Jews?

How did Iran grow into the massive problem it represents today?

With the invasion of Iraq Bush replaced Sadam and his Sunni Ba’ath party with a government headed by Iraqi Shiites. By that single act Iraq was overnight transformed from mortal enemy and barrier to Iranian hegemonic ambitions into a potential ally and invasion corridor, brought the Iranian threat to the border of Saudi oil wells. Responding to the dual threat of an Iranian bomb, and an increasingly uncertain American defense umbrella, countries from Yemen in the south to Turkey in the north are forced to seek accommodation with the emerging Iranian reality.

But the 2007 NIE allowing Bush to step back from Iran contradicted most credible intelligence agencies assessments of the situation, including Israel’s Mossad, Britain’s MI6 and Germany’s BND. The soon to be released 2010 NIE reportedly concedes its 2007 “mistake.” According to government sources quoted in Newsweek, “U.S. analysts now believe that Iran may well have resumed ‘research’…but that Tehran is not… actually trying to build a weapon (my quotes).” Two “estimates” for two presidents. With that earlier NIE having insisted that Iraq possessed those missing WMD, and so justified invading Iraq, it is fair to at least question the reliability and credibility of the combined wisdom of those 16 intelligence agencies party to the “assessment.” Is US intelligence merely a rubber stamp and whitewash for White House policy? If so, what might the 2010 NIE indicate about current US policy towards Iran and the Middle East?

President Obama, unlike his predecessor, prefers diplomacy and the threat of sanctions over bluster and the threat of war. And to all early signs the 2010 NIE will provide the new administration with the “intelligence” needed to justify that policy. After all, Iranian “research” is not the same as an active program to “develop” a bomb. So the United States has the leisure to pursue its policy of diplomacy while the Iranians continue to pursue their policy of the bomb, a clear and present danger to those counties actually facing the threat on the ground.

Just how real is that threat to the Arabs, to Arab oil? As this is being written the Saudis, who share a long border with Iraq, are building a physical wall between the two states and along its coastline, an Arab Maginot Line. They are also fighting a cross-border war with Iran-backed tribesmen in Yemen. And along the Mediterranean Israel is facing Iranian proxies in Assad’s Syria, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, while down the coast Egypt is building an underground barrier to close Hamas weapons smuggling tunnels.

And to prepare Egyptians for the possibility of war by their Israeli protector against Iran, several months ago the Egypt’s press followed closely the passage of an Israeli submarine and accompanying flotilla through the Suez Canal. While Israeli military traffic through the canal is not in itself newsworthy, Egyptian press coverage is. And further evidence of this “pro-Israel” course change, Egypt’s semi-official al-Ahram newspaper last week described Israel’s Mossad chief Meir Dagan, “a hero who single handedly delayed Iran's advance on a nuclear weapon by several years."

The Saudis, in the meantime, are reported to be sharing intelligence on Iran with Israel, and have quietly given permission for Israel to pass over Saudi airspace in a future bombing run on Iran.

Iran is a made-in-America problem with Israel being stuck with the bill. But this bill represents an existential threat to Israel at least as serious as the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. At best the outcome of the attack would, according to Israeli intelligence, not end the threat but merely delay it by “a few years.” But as the lone country to launch the attack Israel alone would be held responsible by the world for the economic crisis certain to follow. Already surrounded by an Arab world hostile to her very existence Israel can ill afford to be shunned also by the rest of the world.

So where does this leave Israel? The U.S. is irresolute, preferring not to be responsible for acting, ignoring not only the risk to its oil interests but the fate of its “allies”, and the likelihood of a regional nuclear arms race. Nor was this withdrawal from responsibility an innovation of the Obama Administration. It is an American position with deep roots in the Bush Administration. Still, regardless who introduced the policy, Iran is a threat not just to Israel but to all states of the region. And while the Egyptians and Saudis are apparently willing to quietly applaud an Israeli attack, neither has publicly allied itself with the Jewish state in its own defense and self-interest.

If the United States is content to remain aloof from her responsibilities towards the defense of her allies and Arab oil, of the danger posed by a Middle East nuclear arms race, then at least take responsibility for inducting the Arab states to join Israel in fulfillment of America’s obligations. As did Bush, Sr., use that preferred diplomacy to “encourage” diplomatically America’s Arab clients to join in a renewed “coalition of the willing” against the common strategic threat.

But the more sensible course of action for Israel would be to stop enabling the US to shun its responsibilities and withdraw from the playing field. Force the administration to act on behalf of its own responsibilities and strategic interests. Better to wait out the U.S., force her superpower ally, so much better able to absorb the shock of blame for the war’s fallout, than to accept a shaheed’s death.

This article also appears in slightly different form at, http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/guest/entry/israel_america_s_shaheed_posted and, http://www.washingtontimes.com/weblogs/america-israel-and-the-special-relationship/.

Responses to my jpost article were posted after it was taken down from the front page, so I was unable to maintain a dialogue with the responders. I did, however, post my own response in case those who submitted were still following the blog.

1 flinky dinky, Thursday Jan 28, 2010
Of course, prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 military action had been heavily pushed for some time by the Israel Lobby, just as the same forces now pushes hard for military action on Iran. However, it appears the Israel Lobby has made enemies in the rank and file of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, and this takes the form of concerted resistance to any form of military action on Iran.

#1, Such confidence, but little knowledge. In fact Israel, the Saudis and the CIA all came out AGAINST Iraq, favoring the more dangerous Iran. And even there favored a diplomatic confrontation. See Bush*s CIA director Tennant*s memoir on issue.

15 Jacob - Amsterdam, Saturday Jan 30, 2010
Israel could go a long way in assuring its future if it would sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open up Dimona and any other nuclear sites to UN inspection. As things stand now, Israel wants to be excepted from international standards while insisting that others comply. Israel itself is the source of many of the problems it faces.

#15, Israel is not a member of NPT for good reason. If she has the bomb, to say so would start the nuclear arms race I suggest regarding an Iranian bomb. Israel may or not have it, but not saying so provides reassurance through ambiguity. The real question is What is Israel*s motive for an implied nuclear arsenal? She is small, isolated and vulnerable. An implicit threat provides end-game deterrence against the explicit threat of being *pushed into the sea.* In four major wars Israel never openly threatened a nuclear defense. The bomb, for Israel, is purely defensive. The Iranian bomb is not.

23 Larry xxxxx, Saturday Jan 30, 2010
Anyting Israel does will be seen as America having given it the green light, no matter what America says. SO GO AHEAD AND BOMB IRAN.

#23, Refer to my comment to #15. Ambiguity provides no hard evidence, so the world is free to interpret according to self-interest. Unless the United States is openly seen as the bringer of the global disaster likely to follow, unless it is the US that leads the attack openly, then whoever does do the deed will be seen through the prism of self-interest and predisposition. Would a Taiwan take on the US for the *possible* green light, or insignificant Israel. And what about the west and its long tradition of antisemitism? Blame the US when blaming Israel would *feel* so much more satisfying?

25 CARES1996, Saturday Jan 30, 2010
DAVID,HAVE YA GONE CRAZY MAN,WITHDRAWAL FROM THE FEILD AT WHO`S PERIL,ISRAELI DISENGAGEMENT WOULD BE GROSSLY NAIVE,THIS IS WHY SOME THINK WE NEED AN INTL. HOLIDAY,TO REMEMBER WHAT CAN HAPPEN IF CLOSE ATTENTION ISN`T PAID,THANK GOD YOUR NOT THE PRIME MINISTER. YEAH LETS ALL JUST PRETEND NOTHING`S GOING ON AND THAN NOTHING WILL HAPPEN,WHY DIDN`T SOMEBODY THINK OF THAT BEFORE,WAIT (CHAMBERLAIN)SORRY DAVE,WITHDRAWAL FROM PROBLEM NOT AN OPTION.

#25, I never said Israel should withdraw from the field, but. either sit back and let the resulting pressure of a growing Iranian threat ripen, forcing the US to accept its superpower responsibilities; or wait for the US to increase the list of its ME surrogates by inducing the Sunni Arab states to openly participate in another *coalition of the willing,* Saudi and Egyptian aircraft participation in the action. While the antisemites would still blame Israel, of course, blame would be more defuse, and Israel would not suffer global isolation, a very real existential threat to her survival.

David Turner also blogs at