Friday, August 27, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
US President Barack Obama’s warm endorsement of the plan to build a mosque by the ruins of the World Trade Center tells Israel – and its enemies – eve
Our World: Standing on a landmine
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
17/08/2010
Speaking during a Ramadan fast breaking meal at the White House to an audience of people affiliated with various Muslim Brotherhood- related groups in the US, Obama couched his support for the mosque at Ground Zero in constitutional terms.
In his words, “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. Our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.”
Of course, none of those who have voiced opposition to the mosque project at Ground Zero have claimed that the Islamic group behind the mosque project is acting unlawfully in seeking to construct a mosque. The nearly 70 percent of Americans who oppose building a mosque at Ground Zero oppose the mosque because they believe it is wrong to build a mosque at the site where less than a decade ago Muslims acting in the name of Islam murdered nearly 3,000 people in an act of war against the US and an act of terror against the American people.
Obama has been pilloried by his opponents for his position. And his fellow Democrats, facing the likelihood of massive defeats in the Congressional elections in three months, are reportedly deeply frustrated by his statements. Indeed, the uproar Obama’s pro-mosque remarks has unleashed has been so harsh it raises the question of why he made it.
THERE ARE two possible explanations for Obama’s move. Either he was motivated by politics or he was motivated by ideology. The view that Obama was motivated by politics is easily dismissed. With more than two-thirds of Americans telling pollsters they oppose the Ground Zero mosque project, it makes no political sense for a politician to strike out a position in favor of the mosque. Indeed, major Democrats have either refused to state a position on the issue or, like New York Governor David Paterson, they have recommended that the mosque builders construct their mosque elsewhere.
Perhaps Obama thought he could he could get away with making his statement. However, with his polling numbers consistently eroding, it is hard to imagine Obama’s advisers would have told him that was a realistic view.
This leaves ideology. But what ideology motivates Obama to embrace such an unpopular initiative at such an explosive political juncture? Obama and his supporters would like us to believe this is a civil rights issue. In his defense of the Ground Zero mosque, Obama claimed his position was based on the American values such as, “The laws that we apply without regard to race, or religion, or wealth, or status. Our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect towards those who are different from us.”
But if Obama is motivated by a belief in civil rights that is so strong it propels him to take on deeply unpopular causes in an election season, then one could reasonably expect that his support for civil rights would be absolute. That is, one could expect him to use the same yardstick for all groups, in all places and at all times.
But for Obama, there are some groups who must be denied the same civil rights he upholds as absolute in his defense of the plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero. As Obama has made clear since his first days in office, he believes that Jews should be denied the right to their property in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria simply because they are Jews.
OBAMA IS so firm in his belief that Jews should be denied civil rights in Israel’s capital and in the heartland of Jewish history that he has provoked multiple crises in his relations with Israel to advance this bigoted view. Almost from his first day in office Obama has struck out a radical position in which he has insisted that Jews must be prohibited from building anything – synagogues, homes, nurseries, schools – in Judea, Jerusalem and Samaria on land they own. Jews – Israeli and non-Israeli – should be barred from exercising their property rights even if their construction plans have already been approved “in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”
At the same time, Obama has insisted that Israel take no action to enforce its “local laws and ordinances” against illegal structures built by Arabs in Jerusalem, Judea, or Samaria.
Next month the deeply discriminatory and legally dubious 10-month moratorium on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria that Obama coerced Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into instituting is set to end. So now Obama is putting the full weight of the White House on Israel to again coerce Netanyahu into prolonging the discriminatory ban that denies the civil rights and property rights of Jews simply because they are Jewish.
Obama claims to be embracing the nullification of Jewish civil right in the interests of peace. In his stated view, to forge peace in the Middle East it is necessary for the Palestinians to achieve statehood. But it hard to see how the establishment of a Palestinian state squares with Obama’s purported dedication to civil rights.
In a briefing with the Egyptian media last week Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told reporters that no Jews will be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. He also said that while he would agree to allow NATO forces to deploy in the future Palestinian state, he would not permit any Jewish soldiers to serve in the NATO units stationed on the territory of such a state. As he put it, “I will not agree that there will be Jews among NATO forces and I will not allow even one Israeli to live amongst us on the Palestinian soil.”
The notion that an inherently anti-Semitic Palestinian state, predicated on Jew hatred that strong, could possibly live at peace with Israel is simply ridiculous. But tellingly, in all the American pressure that has been placed on Abbas to begin direct negotiations with Israel, at no time has the administration been reported to have insisted that Abbas abandon his anti-Semitism. Obama has made no statement addressing the fact that the Palestinians demand that Jews be barred from living in the future Palestinian state. He has certainly not objected to this position although it squares with none of the American values of tolerance and property rights he upheld so strongly in his remarks on the Ground Zero mosque.
SO THE ideology Obama holds so strongly that it provokes him to take positions antithetical to the political interests of his party during an election season is not civil rights. Rather it has to do with his commitment to advancing the interests of a specific group or groups over the interests of other specific groups. In the case of the Ground Zero mosque he prefers the rights of Muslims over the values of the overwhelming majority of Americans. In the case of the Palestinians, he prefers their anti-Semitic nationalism over the civil rights of Jews.
Obama’s behavior tells Israel’s leaders something very important about how they should think about their relations with the Obama administration. It tells them that Obama is so wed to his ideology that he will push it regardless of political conditions. This means that for Israel, dealing with Obama is like standing on a landmine. Just as a landmine can explode at any minute, Obama can attack Israel at any moment. He is so ideologically bound to the Palestinian cause against Israel that he is liable to provoke a crisis when it is least politically advantageous – from his perspective – for him to do so.
This lesson is particularly urgent on the eve of yet another round of direct negotiations with the Palestinians and as the freeze on Jewish property rights is about to expire. Obama’s ideological fanaticism means that nothing Israel does in the upcoming talks will help us.
As Obama’s media surrogates like Tony Karon at Time magazine have made clear in recent weeks, the anti-Israel narrative has already coalesced. Everything that happens regarding those negotiations is Israel’s fault. It is Israel’s fault that they haven’t begun. It will be Israel’s fault when they falter. It will be Israel’s fault when they fail. And if they succeed, Israel will still be blameworthy.
Facing this US President and his radical ideology, Netanyahu and his deputies must understand that they cannot appease him. They cannot convince him of Israel’s good intentions.
The US leader who has rejected the expressed views of 68 percent of his fellow citizens in favor of the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero is not going to be moved by reason. The American president who defends the Ground Zero mosque builders even though their leader refuses to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization and has claimed that the US had the Sept. 11 attacks coming to it; and the American president who upholds the Palestinian cause even though it is virulently, and often genocidally anti-Semitic is not going to be appeased by Israeli building freezes and other confidence building gestures.
What this means is that Netanyahu and his deputies must concentrate on defending Israel and advancing its national interests. It is in Israel’s national interests to guarantee the civil rights and property rights of Jews. It is in Israel’s national interests to forthrightly set out and defend Israel’s legal rights in Judea and Samaria and its sovereignty in united Jerusalem. It is in Israel’s national interest to enforce its laws without prejudice towards all its citizens and expect all its citizens to respect its laws.
We are dealing with a self-consciously radical President who intends to remake the US relationship with the Muslim world. We will find no understanding from him.
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
17/08/2010
Speaking during a Ramadan fast breaking meal at the White House to an audience of people affiliated with various Muslim Brotherhood- related groups in the US, Obama couched his support for the mosque at Ground Zero in constitutional terms.
In his words, “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. Our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.”
Of course, none of those who have voiced opposition to the mosque project at Ground Zero have claimed that the Islamic group behind the mosque project is acting unlawfully in seeking to construct a mosque. The nearly 70 percent of Americans who oppose building a mosque at Ground Zero oppose the mosque because they believe it is wrong to build a mosque at the site where less than a decade ago Muslims acting in the name of Islam murdered nearly 3,000 people in an act of war against the US and an act of terror against the American people.
Obama has been pilloried by his opponents for his position. And his fellow Democrats, facing the likelihood of massive defeats in the Congressional elections in three months, are reportedly deeply frustrated by his statements. Indeed, the uproar Obama’s pro-mosque remarks has unleashed has been so harsh it raises the question of why he made it.
THERE ARE two possible explanations for Obama’s move. Either he was motivated by politics or he was motivated by ideology. The view that Obama was motivated by politics is easily dismissed. With more than two-thirds of Americans telling pollsters they oppose the Ground Zero mosque project, it makes no political sense for a politician to strike out a position in favor of the mosque. Indeed, major Democrats have either refused to state a position on the issue or, like New York Governor David Paterson, they have recommended that the mosque builders construct their mosque elsewhere.
Perhaps Obama thought he could he could get away with making his statement. However, with his polling numbers consistently eroding, it is hard to imagine Obama’s advisers would have told him that was a realistic view.
This leaves ideology. But what ideology motivates Obama to embrace such an unpopular initiative at such an explosive political juncture? Obama and his supporters would like us to believe this is a civil rights issue. In his defense of the Ground Zero mosque, Obama claimed his position was based on the American values such as, “The laws that we apply without regard to race, or religion, or wealth, or status. Our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect towards those who are different from us.”
But if Obama is motivated by a belief in civil rights that is so strong it propels him to take on deeply unpopular causes in an election season, then one could reasonably expect that his support for civil rights would be absolute. That is, one could expect him to use the same yardstick for all groups, in all places and at all times.
But for Obama, there are some groups who must be denied the same civil rights he upholds as absolute in his defense of the plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero. As Obama has made clear since his first days in office, he believes that Jews should be denied the right to their property in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria simply because they are Jews.
OBAMA IS so firm in his belief that Jews should be denied civil rights in Israel’s capital and in the heartland of Jewish history that he has provoked multiple crises in his relations with Israel to advance this bigoted view. Almost from his first day in office Obama has struck out a radical position in which he has insisted that Jews must be prohibited from building anything – synagogues, homes, nurseries, schools – in Judea, Jerusalem and Samaria on land they own. Jews – Israeli and non-Israeli – should be barred from exercising their property rights even if their construction plans have already been approved “in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”
At the same time, Obama has insisted that Israel take no action to enforce its “local laws and ordinances” against illegal structures built by Arabs in Jerusalem, Judea, or Samaria.
Next month the deeply discriminatory and legally dubious 10-month moratorium on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria that Obama coerced Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into instituting is set to end. So now Obama is putting the full weight of the White House on Israel to again coerce Netanyahu into prolonging the discriminatory ban that denies the civil rights and property rights of Jews simply because they are Jewish.
Obama claims to be embracing the nullification of Jewish civil right in the interests of peace. In his stated view, to forge peace in the Middle East it is necessary for the Palestinians to achieve statehood. But it hard to see how the establishment of a Palestinian state squares with Obama’s purported dedication to civil rights.
In a briefing with the Egyptian media last week Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told reporters that no Jews will be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. He also said that while he would agree to allow NATO forces to deploy in the future Palestinian state, he would not permit any Jewish soldiers to serve in the NATO units stationed on the territory of such a state. As he put it, “I will not agree that there will be Jews among NATO forces and I will not allow even one Israeli to live amongst us on the Palestinian soil.”
The notion that an inherently anti-Semitic Palestinian state, predicated on Jew hatred that strong, could possibly live at peace with Israel is simply ridiculous. But tellingly, in all the American pressure that has been placed on Abbas to begin direct negotiations with Israel, at no time has the administration been reported to have insisted that Abbas abandon his anti-Semitism. Obama has made no statement addressing the fact that the Palestinians demand that Jews be barred from living in the future Palestinian state. He has certainly not objected to this position although it squares with none of the American values of tolerance and property rights he upheld so strongly in his remarks on the Ground Zero mosque.
SO THE ideology Obama holds so strongly that it provokes him to take positions antithetical to the political interests of his party during an election season is not civil rights. Rather it has to do with his commitment to advancing the interests of a specific group or groups over the interests of other specific groups. In the case of the Ground Zero mosque he prefers the rights of Muslims over the values of the overwhelming majority of Americans. In the case of the Palestinians, he prefers their anti-Semitic nationalism over the civil rights of Jews.
Obama’s behavior tells Israel’s leaders something very important about how they should think about their relations with the Obama administration. It tells them that Obama is so wed to his ideology that he will push it regardless of political conditions. This means that for Israel, dealing with Obama is like standing on a landmine. Just as a landmine can explode at any minute, Obama can attack Israel at any moment. He is so ideologically bound to the Palestinian cause against Israel that he is liable to provoke a crisis when it is least politically advantageous – from his perspective – for him to do so.
This lesson is particularly urgent on the eve of yet another round of direct negotiations with the Palestinians and as the freeze on Jewish property rights is about to expire. Obama’s ideological fanaticism means that nothing Israel does in the upcoming talks will help us.
As Obama’s media surrogates like Tony Karon at Time magazine have made clear in recent weeks, the anti-Israel narrative has already coalesced. Everything that happens regarding those negotiations is Israel’s fault. It is Israel’s fault that they haven’t begun. It will be Israel’s fault when they falter. It will be Israel’s fault when they fail. And if they succeed, Israel will still be blameworthy.
Facing this US President and his radical ideology, Netanyahu and his deputies must understand that they cannot appease him. They cannot convince him of Israel’s good intentions.
The US leader who has rejected the expressed views of 68 percent of his fellow citizens in favor of the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero is not going to be moved by reason. The American president who defends the Ground Zero mosque builders even though their leader refuses to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization and has claimed that the US had the Sept. 11 attacks coming to it; and the American president who upholds the Palestinian cause even though it is virulently, and often genocidally anti-Semitic is not going to be appeased by Israeli building freezes and other confidence building gestures.
What this means is that Netanyahu and his deputies must concentrate on defending Israel and advancing its national interests. It is in Israel’s national interests to guarantee the civil rights and property rights of Jews. It is in Israel’s national interests to forthrightly set out and defend Israel’s legal rights in Judea and Samaria and its sovereignty in united Jerusalem. It is in Israel’s national interest to enforce its laws without prejudice towards all its citizens and expect all its citizens to respect its laws.
We are dealing with a self-consciously radical President who intends to remake the US relationship with the Muslim world. We will find no understanding from him.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Four-fold Threat
By LESLIE SUSSER, in The Jerusalem Report 07/27/2010 16:21
Presenting a harrowing report on Tehran’s crimes at home and abroad, Irwin Cotler presses for effective sanctions to bring Ahmadinejad’s Iran to its knees.
FOR THE PAST SEVERAL years Irwin Cotler has been going around the world single-mindedly making the case against “Ahmadinejad’s Iran,” a term he uses to distinguish Iran’s regime from its people.
In recent weeks, Cotler, a Liberal member of the Canadian Parliament and a former attorney general and minister of justice, met with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, as well as with government leaders and parliamentarians in the US, Germany, Austria, Israel and several other countries, to advocate stronger action against the Iranian regime’s continuing violations of international law and human rights in four key areas: its nuclear weapons program, its links to international terror, its incitement to genocide and its violent domestic repression.
Last year, in the Canadian Parliament, Cotler initiated detailed parliamentary hearings on the Iranian violations. In parallel, he organized “The Responsibility to Prevent Coalition,” a group of like-minded academics, politicians and freedom activists. The result, a 134-page document entitled “The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition,” which is largely based on the parliamentary hearings and is endorsed by some 100 international law scholars, human rights advocates, former government leaders, parliamentarians and Iranian freedom activists.
This is probably the most up-to-date and comprehensive public report on Iranian violations in all four areas. Presented by Cotler at a news conference in Jerusalem in mid-July, the 134-page report contains new and disturbing witness testimony, and calls on states and international bodies to heed their legal obligations to hold Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account.
In Cotler’s view, time is fast running out and things are not getting any better. On the contrary, he says, since Ahmadinejad’s return to power after the rigged June 2009 presidential election, there has been a dramatic deterioration, especially in two of the four areas of concern: Iran’s nuclear weapons drive has been accelerated, and the post-election crackdown on domestic dissent increased the rate and the scope of beatings, incarcerations, tortures and executions.
IN PRESENTING THE REPORT, Cotler argues that one of the cardinal mistakes the international community is making is to focus exclusively on Iran’s illicit nuclear program. This deflects attention from and “sanitizes” the other major Iranian violations, and ignores the link between the various threats, for example, between Iran’s potential possession of a nuclear bomb and its incitement to genocide against Israel.
“We need a comprehensive set of remedies and sanctions to combat the four-fold critical mass of threat,” he declares.
Another major problem, in Cotler’s view, is that so far sanctions “have been honored more in the breach than in the observance.”
For example, between 1999 and 2009, the US awarded $107 billion in contracts to firms trading with Iran while sanctions were in place, $15 billion of which went to firms in the oil industry. The aim, therefore, is to get much stiffer sanctions in place, strictly enforced by all participating countries, and directed specifically at each of the four threats. If all these conditions pertain, Cotler believes Ahmadinejad’s Iran can be stopped without the West having to resort to force.
But will sanctions be enough to prevent a determined fundamentalist Iranian regime bent on regional hegemony from producing a nuclear bomb? What more can the international community do short of force against the fourfold Iranian threat? And, given the ruthless, repressive nature of the regime, what chance does the opposition Green Movement, spawned by last year’s vote rigging, have of effecting regime change from below? The “Responsibility to Prevent” report catalogues a long list of Iranian abuses in all four areas. On the nuclear threat, it argues that Iran is well on the way to producing a bomb which would further its hegemonic ambitions and destabilize the region. With a bomb, even if it didn’t use it, Iran would be able to extend its influence, engage in political blackmail, interfere in the internal affairs of neighboring oil countries and prevent the resolution of conflicts.
According to Bassem Eid, founder and executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, the Iranians are already playing a major spoiler role on the Israeli-Palestinian front through their Hamas proxies in Gaza. For example, he maintains that when Israel and Hamas were just a hairsbreadth away from a deal to free captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Iran stepped in to torpedo it.
Moreover, he says, Iran is preventing Egypt from achieving reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas that could pave the way for more meaningful peace talks with Israel. “Iran will never ever allow anyone from the Hamas government – not [Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled] Mashal, [Hamas Gaza leader Ismail] Haniyeh or [senior Hamas official Mahmoud] A-Zahar – to reach any kind of reconciliation with Fatah,” Eid, a signatory to the Responsibility to Prevent report, asserts at the Jerusalem news conference. If Iran were to have a bomb, that kind of subversive influence would be even more difficult to counter.
On the terror front, the report highlights the fact that the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was behind the bombing of the Jewish AMIA Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which 85 people were killed and 300 wounded, and cites this as another reason for international sanctions against the IRGC and its leaders. The report also notes that Ahmad Vahidi, then head of the IRGC, is now Iran’s defense minister, and in charge of its nuclear weapons program. This raises a chilling question: If Iran were to develop nuclear weaponry, would Vahidi keep terrorists from acquiring a “dirty bomb?”
ACCORDING TO COTLER, WHO as minister of justice and attorney general of Canada prosecuted Rwandans for genocidal incitement, the state-sanctioned incitement to genocide against Israel in Ahmadinejad’s Iran is stronger. Moreover, he says, it comes not “just from a bunch of extremists, it comes from the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it comes from Ahmadinejad, and it comes from the Revolutionary Guards.” In his view, the international community has singularly failed to address the problem, with potentially horrific consequences. “The enduring lesson of the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur is that these genocides occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide… The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words. And we are not paying attention to this state-sanctioned incitement to genocide and to these words,” he insists.
In its incitement to genocide, the Iranian regime has gone through the full gamut of impugning Israel’s legitimacy as a state and that of the Jews as a nation. Ahmadinejad has denigrated Israel as “a false regime,” and Israelis as “an invented people.” Israel has been disparaged by Iranian leaders as “a cancerous tumor” and Jews as “a filthy germ.” In other words, Israel has been delegitimized and Jews dehumanized to justify their destruction.
Ever since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, Iranian leaders have kept up a persistent barrage of threatening, genocidal language. Two striking examples: “There is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state,” Iran’s spiritual leader Ali Khamenei declared in January 2001, and at the “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran in October 2005, Ahmadinejad insisted that “the occupying [Israeli] regime must be wiped off the map.”
The leadership’s aggressive tone is often echoed in the Iranian press: “The nation of Muslims must prepare for the great war, so as to completely wipe out the Zionist regime and remove this cancerous growth. As the Imam Khomeini said, Israel must collapse,” the pro-regime Resalat newspaper wrote in an editorial in October 2006. And in February of this year, Khamenei warned that Israel’s “obliteration is certain,” and Ahmadinejad threatened that Israel will be “finished off… once and for all.” In Cotler’s mind, there is no doubt that Iran has already committed the crime of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Moreover, he points out that state parties to the 1948 convention are obligated to take action against Iran for doing so. “It is not optional,” he says at the news conference.
“Yet not one state party to the genocide convention, not the US, not my country Canada, not any EU country, has undertaken any of the mandated legal remedies under the convention to combat or prevent this threat,” he complains.
The closest anyone came to taking legal action was through an initiative launched in 2006 by Israel’s former UN ambassador, Dore Gold, and a group of retired diplomats.
They prepared a detailed indictment against Ahmadinejad on charges of incitement to genocide and set about getting state support for its submission to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
Significantly, a February 2007 conference they organized in the British House of Commons was attended by then-Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and in its wake 67 members of Parliament supported an early day motion calling on the British government to press through the UN Security Council for Ahmadinejad’s indictment for incitement to commit genocide. A similar event at the New York Bar Association received the endorsement of then-senator Hillary Clinton. There was also some sporadic support from Australia and Canada. But in late 2007, a resolution passed earlier by the US House of Representatives urging Ahmadinejad’s indictment by the Security Council got stuck in the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, and the initiative seemed to peter out. “Still, if the Israeli government were to take up the matter today, there are a number of islands of support in the West it could build on,” Gold tells The Report.
Only a country or group of countries can initiate a prosecution at the International Court of Justice, and some argue Israel would be ill advised to do so because it would open itself to similar treatment by its enemies. Gold disagrees. “The forces of delegitimization are out there anyway, looking for every opportunity to go after the State of Israel. It can’t get worse,” he argues.
In Gold’s view, the effort against Iran has to be multidimensional. That means pressing hard on every possible pressure point.
Sanctions are not enough. Legal and diplomatic moves have to be included in the mix.
“You have got to convince the Iranians that they have indeed put themselves in the position of a pariah state. You have to create a calculus in the minds of the Iranian elite where someone goes to the supreme leader and says, ‘We are in deep trouble,’” he concludes.
THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PREVENT report paints a horrific picture of systematic and widespread human rights violations in Iran, especially after last year’s rigged presidential election.
According to the report, Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old woman seen all around the world on YouTube shot dead by a member of the Basij militia during a demonstration, was not the only such random victim. Others were even more cruelly murdered. For example, in testimony to the Canadian Parliament, Payan Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill University, claimed that: “Amir Javadifar, a 24-year-old youth who was arrested for being in the protests, had his corpse delivered to his mother with a fractured skull and a crushed eyeball, while all his fingernails and toenails had been extracted.” Since the 1979 revolution, there have been an estimated 120,000 political executions. In the eight weeks following the June 12th election in 2009, there were 115 executions. The regime reports that 6,000 dissidents are currently under arrest; dissidents say the figure is much higher.
According to Cotler, Iran has executed more people in recent times than any other country in the world, except China, and it has executed more juveniles than any other country, including China. Between 2005 and 2009, 29 minors were executed; and, according to Stop Child Executions, an NGO that monitors the situation in Iran, there are currently over 140 minors on death row.
Iran has also imprisoned more journalists than any other country, blocks the signals of Persian language broadcasts from abroad, does not allow foreign NGOs or journalists to enter Iran and cracks down on local NGO activists. In addition, students, academics, human rights lawyers, women’s rights activists, labor leaders and cyber dissidents are all systematically targeted and intimidated.
After his arrest at a student demonstration in July 1999, Ahmad Batebi, a human rights activist, says he was kept in solitary confinement in a tiny cell for 17 months. On one occasion, he recalls being blindfolded and led away with two other prisoners for what he thought would be his execution.
“They blindfolded us and forced us to stand on top of a chair, as if to hang us. They pulled my blindfold aside a bit so I could see what was happening to the other two. These were people who were imprisoned next to me in small cells. I saw their execution,” he testified to the Canadian Parliament.
In addition to political dissidents, the fundamentalist Shi’ite Iranian regime persecutes religious and ethnic minorities. In May this year, five Kurds were executed after trials that lasted around seven minutes and in which the defendants and their lawyers were not allowed to speak. Hundreds of Baluchis are on death row and dozens of Azeris have been arrested for promoting their language.
The Bahai, the largest religious minority in Iran with some 300,000 members, is not recognized as a legitimate religious group and its members are systematically persecuted as “unprotected infidels.” Seven Bahai leaders have been incarcerated in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran since early 2008, charged with insulting Islam. Rank and file Bahais are regularly harassed and imprisoned, and sometimes released in return for surrendering their business licenses.
Bahais are often prevented from working for a living and are barred from higher education.
In late June, houses belonging to 50 Bahai families in the remote northern village of Ivel were destroyed.
CLEARLY, THE RUTHLESS, REPRESSIVE nature of the regime will make it extremely difficult for the large dissident Green Movement to topple it. “After the election, three million people took to the streets and demonstrated. Soon the three million became a hundred thousand, and then ten thousand, and lately not even one thousand,” Menashe Amir, former head of Israel Radio’s Farsi service and a leading Israeli expert on Iranian internal affairs, tells The Report. “The regime not only controls all the centers of power, but they are people imbued with a sense of divine mission.
There are also major economic interests at stake. Today the Revolutionary Guards are the economic giant of Iran, controlling all the most lucrative economic sectors. All this makes them ruthless in their determination to hold onto power and makes it very difficult for their opponents to bring them down.”
Another factor militating against a major uprising is the moderate nature of the Green Movement’s leaders, presidential candidate Ali Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.
Indeed, Amir maintains that one of the main reasons the regime has not targeted them is because they serve as a kind of safety valve for much deeper Iranian grievances.
Nevertheless, despite all the seemingly insurmountable difficulties, Amir is convinced that conditions for a major uprising are ripening. He points to the internal struggle within the regime over presidential powers, the widespread popular opposition seething under the surface, and the growing international pressure on the Iranian economy.
But for an uprising to occur, he says sanctions will have to be much stiffer. They would have to cripple the Iranian economy and paralyze the country, by targeting the Iranian oil industry, stopping all shipping and flights to and from Iran, banning imports and exports, encouraging Iranian workers to strike and finding ways to fund them and their families when they do. “In the late 1970s, when Khomeini gave the order to the oil, electricity and water workers to go on strike, he saw to it that the strikers got money to support their families.
The West should do the same,” he exhorts.
Cotler compares the Green Movement in Iran to the Prague Spring in 1968, the precursor of the democratizing Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic 20 years later. He points out that 70 percent of Iranians are under the age of 30, influenced by what they read on the Internet and emboldened by the solidarity on their behalf. “I just hope it won’t take 20 years,” he says.
COTLER AGREES WITH AMIR that the current sanctions against Iran do not go far enough.
Although the latest, fourth round of UN backed sanctions adopted by the Security Council on June 9 are significantly stiffer than before, they still leave many loopholes.
For example, according to Cotler, they blacklist three elements of Iran’s national shipping line, but stop short of blacklisting it altogether; they deny Iran key financial services, but do not ban its Central Bank or bond market; they ban the sale of conventional weapons to Iran, but do not order suspension of its ballistic missiles program.
Although the US, with its Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009 signed into law by President Barak Obama on July 1, and the EU, with its specific targeting of the Iranian energy industry, go further, Cotler insists that still more can and must be done.
The Responsibility to Prevent report’s 18- point “Road Map for Action” spells out a broader, multidimensional approach. On the legal front, it proposes taking Iran to court for state-sponsored incitement to genocide; and on the diplomatic front, to put Iranian human rights violations on every relevant agenda and to impose personal travel bans and asset freezes on Iranian leaders responsible for nuclear terror, genocidal incitement or human rights violations. It also suggests using the UN General Assembly Resolution of March 26, calling for an end to Iran’s domestic repression, as a lever for sanctions, for example, against corporations that provide the Iranian regime with the surveillance equipment it uses against the dissidents.
As for economic sanctions, the road map makes several far-reaching proposals, including:
● Targeting imports of gasoline and other refined petroleum imports
● Imposing sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank
● Banning the export to Iran of dual-use technologies
● Blocking the inflow of sensitive materials
● Targeting the Revolutionary Guard, which controls an estimated 80 percent of Iran’s foreign commerce, as well as its construction, banking and communications sectors, and which Cotler describes as “the epicenter of all four threats”
● Imposing a broad arms embargo on Iran and ordering a complete suspension of its ballistic missile program * Denying landing permission to Iranian ships and planes
● Requiring disclosure of all business dealings with Iran Even the more limited sanctions now in place are starting to bite, says Cotler. Iran is facing serious capitalization problems and dozens of leading firms have been pulling out of the country after being given a choice between trading with Washington or Tehran, not both. “There was even a report a few days ago that the Iranian banks are losing their capacity to finance the nuclear program. So sanctions are hurting, but we still need to do much more to bring Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account,” Cotler concludes.
Presenting a harrowing report on Tehran’s crimes at home and abroad, Irwin Cotler presses for effective sanctions to bring Ahmadinejad’s Iran to its knees.
FOR THE PAST SEVERAL years Irwin Cotler has been going around the world single-mindedly making the case against “Ahmadinejad’s Iran,” a term he uses to distinguish Iran’s regime from its people.
In recent weeks, Cotler, a Liberal member of the Canadian Parliament and a former attorney general and minister of justice, met with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, as well as with government leaders and parliamentarians in the US, Germany, Austria, Israel and several other countries, to advocate stronger action against the Iranian regime’s continuing violations of international law and human rights in four key areas: its nuclear weapons program, its links to international terror, its incitement to genocide and its violent domestic repression.
Last year, in the Canadian Parliament, Cotler initiated detailed parliamentary hearings on the Iranian violations. In parallel, he organized “The Responsibility to Prevent Coalition,” a group of like-minded academics, politicians and freedom activists. The result, a 134-page document entitled “The Danger of a Nuclear, Genocidal and Rights-Violating Iran: The Responsibility to Prevent Petition,” which is largely based on the parliamentary hearings and is endorsed by some 100 international law scholars, human rights advocates, former government leaders, parliamentarians and Iranian freedom activists.
This is probably the most up-to-date and comprehensive public report on Iranian violations in all four areas. Presented by Cotler at a news conference in Jerusalem in mid-July, the 134-page report contains new and disturbing witness testimony, and calls on states and international bodies to heed their legal obligations to hold Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account.
In Cotler’s view, time is fast running out and things are not getting any better. On the contrary, he says, since Ahmadinejad’s return to power after the rigged June 2009 presidential election, there has been a dramatic deterioration, especially in two of the four areas of concern: Iran’s nuclear weapons drive has been accelerated, and the post-election crackdown on domestic dissent increased the rate and the scope of beatings, incarcerations, tortures and executions.
IN PRESENTING THE REPORT, Cotler argues that one of the cardinal mistakes the international community is making is to focus exclusively on Iran’s illicit nuclear program. This deflects attention from and “sanitizes” the other major Iranian violations, and ignores the link between the various threats, for example, between Iran’s potential possession of a nuclear bomb and its incitement to genocide against Israel.
“We need a comprehensive set of remedies and sanctions to combat the four-fold critical mass of threat,” he declares.
Another major problem, in Cotler’s view, is that so far sanctions “have been honored more in the breach than in the observance.”
For example, between 1999 and 2009, the US awarded $107 billion in contracts to firms trading with Iran while sanctions were in place, $15 billion of which went to firms in the oil industry. The aim, therefore, is to get much stiffer sanctions in place, strictly enforced by all participating countries, and directed specifically at each of the four threats. If all these conditions pertain, Cotler believes Ahmadinejad’s Iran can be stopped without the West having to resort to force.
But will sanctions be enough to prevent a determined fundamentalist Iranian regime bent on regional hegemony from producing a nuclear bomb? What more can the international community do short of force against the fourfold Iranian threat? And, given the ruthless, repressive nature of the regime, what chance does the opposition Green Movement, spawned by last year’s vote rigging, have of effecting regime change from below? The “Responsibility to Prevent” report catalogues a long list of Iranian abuses in all four areas. On the nuclear threat, it argues that Iran is well on the way to producing a bomb which would further its hegemonic ambitions and destabilize the region. With a bomb, even if it didn’t use it, Iran would be able to extend its influence, engage in political blackmail, interfere in the internal affairs of neighboring oil countries and prevent the resolution of conflicts.
According to Bassem Eid, founder and executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, the Iranians are already playing a major spoiler role on the Israeli-Palestinian front through their Hamas proxies in Gaza. For example, he maintains that when Israel and Hamas were just a hairsbreadth away from a deal to free captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Iran stepped in to torpedo it.
Moreover, he says, Iran is preventing Egypt from achieving reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas that could pave the way for more meaningful peace talks with Israel. “Iran will never ever allow anyone from the Hamas government – not [Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled] Mashal, [Hamas Gaza leader Ismail] Haniyeh or [senior Hamas official Mahmoud] A-Zahar – to reach any kind of reconciliation with Fatah,” Eid, a signatory to the Responsibility to Prevent report, asserts at the Jerusalem news conference. If Iran were to have a bomb, that kind of subversive influence would be even more difficult to counter.
On the terror front, the report highlights the fact that the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was behind the bombing of the Jewish AMIA Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which 85 people were killed and 300 wounded, and cites this as another reason for international sanctions against the IRGC and its leaders. The report also notes that Ahmad Vahidi, then head of the IRGC, is now Iran’s defense minister, and in charge of its nuclear weapons program. This raises a chilling question: If Iran were to develop nuclear weaponry, would Vahidi keep terrorists from acquiring a “dirty bomb?”
ACCORDING TO COTLER, WHO as minister of justice and attorney general of Canada prosecuted Rwandans for genocidal incitement, the state-sanctioned incitement to genocide against Israel in Ahmadinejad’s Iran is stronger. Moreover, he says, it comes not “just from a bunch of extremists, it comes from the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it comes from Ahmadinejad, and it comes from the Revolutionary Guards.” In his view, the international community has singularly failed to address the problem, with potentially horrific consequences. “The enduring lesson of the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur is that these genocides occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide… The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words. And we are not paying attention to this state-sanctioned incitement to genocide and to these words,” he insists.
In its incitement to genocide, the Iranian regime has gone through the full gamut of impugning Israel’s legitimacy as a state and that of the Jews as a nation. Ahmadinejad has denigrated Israel as “a false regime,” and Israelis as “an invented people.” Israel has been disparaged by Iranian leaders as “a cancerous tumor” and Jews as “a filthy germ.” In other words, Israel has been delegitimized and Jews dehumanized to justify their destruction.
Ever since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, Iranian leaders have kept up a persistent barrage of threatening, genocidal language. Two striking examples: “There is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state,” Iran’s spiritual leader Ali Khamenei declared in January 2001, and at the “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran in October 2005, Ahmadinejad insisted that “the occupying [Israeli] regime must be wiped off the map.”
The leadership’s aggressive tone is often echoed in the Iranian press: “The nation of Muslims must prepare for the great war, so as to completely wipe out the Zionist regime and remove this cancerous growth. As the Imam Khomeini said, Israel must collapse,” the pro-regime Resalat newspaper wrote in an editorial in October 2006. And in February of this year, Khamenei warned that Israel’s “obliteration is certain,” and Ahmadinejad threatened that Israel will be “finished off… once and for all.” In Cotler’s mind, there is no doubt that Iran has already committed the crime of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Moreover, he points out that state parties to the 1948 convention are obligated to take action against Iran for doing so. “It is not optional,” he says at the news conference.
“Yet not one state party to the genocide convention, not the US, not my country Canada, not any EU country, has undertaken any of the mandated legal remedies under the convention to combat or prevent this threat,” he complains.
The closest anyone came to taking legal action was through an initiative launched in 2006 by Israel’s former UN ambassador, Dore Gold, and a group of retired diplomats.
They prepared a detailed indictment against Ahmadinejad on charges of incitement to genocide and set about getting state support for its submission to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
Significantly, a February 2007 conference they organized in the British House of Commons was attended by then-Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and in its wake 67 members of Parliament supported an early day motion calling on the British government to press through the UN Security Council for Ahmadinejad’s indictment for incitement to commit genocide. A similar event at the New York Bar Association received the endorsement of then-senator Hillary Clinton. There was also some sporadic support from Australia and Canada. But in late 2007, a resolution passed earlier by the US House of Representatives urging Ahmadinejad’s indictment by the Security Council got stuck in the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, and the initiative seemed to peter out. “Still, if the Israeli government were to take up the matter today, there are a number of islands of support in the West it could build on,” Gold tells The Report.
Only a country or group of countries can initiate a prosecution at the International Court of Justice, and some argue Israel would be ill advised to do so because it would open itself to similar treatment by its enemies. Gold disagrees. “The forces of delegitimization are out there anyway, looking for every opportunity to go after the State of Israel. It can’t get worse,” he argues.
In Gold’s view, the effort against Iran has to be multidimensional. That means pressing hard on every possible pressure point.
Sanctions are not enough. Legal and diplomatic moves have to be included in the mix.
“You have got to convince the Iranians that they have indeed put themselves in the position of a pariah state. You have to create a calculus in the minds of the Iranian elite where someone goes to the supreme leader and says, ‘We are in deep trouble,’” he concludes.
THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PREVENT report paints a horrific picture of systematic and widespread human rights violations in Iran, especially after last year’s rigged presidential election.
According to the report, Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old woman seen all around the world on YouTube shot dead by a member of the Basij militia during a demonstration, was not the only such random victim. Others were even more cruelly murdered. For example, in testimony to the Canadian Parliament, Payan Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill University, claimed that: “Amir Javadifar, a 24-year-old youth who was arrested for being in the protests, had his corpse delivered to his mother with a fractured skull and a crushed eyeball, while all his fingernails and toenails had been extracted.” Since the 1979 revolution, there have been an estimated 120,000 political executions. In the eight weeks following the June 12th election in 2009, there were 115 executions. The regime reports that 6,000 dissidents are currently under arrest; dissidents say the figure is much higher.
According to Cotler, Iran has executed more people in recent times than any other country in the world, except China, and it has executed more juveniles than any other country, including China. Between 2005 and 2009, 29 minors were executed; and, according to Stop Child Executions, an NGO that monitors the situation in Iran, there are currently over 140 minors on death row.
Iran has also imprisoned more journalists than any other country, blocks the signals of Persian language broadcasts from abroad, does not allow foreign NGOs or journalists to enter Iran and cracks down on local NGO activists. In addition, students, academics, human rights lawyers, women’s rights activists, labor leaders and cyber dissidents are all systematically targeted and intimidated.
After his arrest at a student demonstration in July 1999, Ahmad Batebi, a human rights activist, says he was kept in solitary confinement in a tiny cell for 17 months. On one occasion, he recalls being blindfolded and led away with two other prisoners for what he thought would be his execution.
“They blindfolded us and forced us to stand on top of a chair, as if to hang us. They pulled my blindfold aside a bit so I could see what was happening to the other two. These were people who were imprisoned next to me in small cells. I saw their execution,” he testified to the Canadian Parliament.
In addition to political dissidents, the fundamentalist Shi’ite Iranian regime persecutes religious and ethnic minorities. In May this year, five Kurds were executed after trials that lasted around seven minutes and in which the defendants and their lawyers were not allowed to speak. Hundreds of Baluchis are on death row and dozens of Azeris have been arrested for promoting their language.
The Bahai, the largest religious minority in Iran with some 300,000 members, is not recognized as a legitimate religious group and its members are systematically persecuted as “unprotected infidels.” Seven Bahai leaders have been incarcerated in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran since early 2008, charged with insulting Islam. Rank and file Bahais are regularly harassed and imprisoned, and sometimes released in return for surrendering their business licenses.
Bahais are often prevented from working for a living and are barred from higher education.
In late June, houses belonging to 50 Bahai families in the remote northern village of Ivel were destroyed.
CLEARLY, THE RUTHLESS, REPRESSIVE nature of the regime will make it extremely difficult for the large dissident Green Movement to topple it. “After the election, three million people took to the streets and demonstrated. Soon the three million became a hundred thousand, and then ten thousand, and lately not even one thousand,” Menashe Amir, former head of Israel Radio’s Farsi service and a leading Israeli expert on Iranian internal affairs, tells The Report. “The regime not only controls all the centers of power, but they are people imbued with a sense of divine mission.
There are also major economic interests at stake. Today the Revolutionary Guards are the economic giant of Iran, controlling all the most lucrative economic sectors. All this makes them ruthless in their determination to hold onto power and makes it very difficult for their opponents to bring them down.”
Another factor militating against a major uprising is the moderate nature of the Green Movement’s leaders, presidential candidate Ali Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.
Indeed, Amir maintains that one of the main reasons the regime has not targeted them is because they serve as a kind of safety valve for much deeper Iranian grievances.
Nevertheless, despite all the seemingly insurmountable difficulties, Amir is convinced that conditions for a major uprising are ripening. He points to the internal struggle within the regime over presidential powers, the widespread popular opposition seething under the surface, and the growing international pressure on the Iranian economy.
But for an uprising to occur, he says sanctions will have to be much stiffer. They would have to cripple the Iranian economy and paralyze the country, by targeting the Iranian oil industry, stopping all shipping and flights to and from Iran, banning imports and exports, encouraging Iranian workers to strike and finding ways to fund them and their families when they do. “In the late 1970s, when Khomeini gave the order to the oil, electricity and water workers to go on strike, he saw to it that the strikers got money to support their families.
The West should do the same,” he exhorts.
Cotler compares the Green Movement in Iran to the Prague Spring in 1968, the precursor of the democratizing Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic 20 years later. He points out that 70 percent of Iranians are under the age of 30, influenced by what they read on the Internet and emboldened by the solidarity on their behalf. “I just hope it won’t take 20 years,” he says.
COTLER AGREES WITH AMIR that the current sanctions against Iran do not go far enough.
Although the latest, fourth round of UN backed sanctions adopted by the Security Council on June 9 are significantly stiffer than before, they still leave many loopholes.
For example, according to Cotler, they blacklist three elements of Iran’s national shipping line, but stop short of blacklisting it altogether; they deny Iran key financial services, but do not ban its Central Bank or bond market; they ban the sale of conventional weapons to Iran, but do not order suspension of its ballistic missiles program.
Although the US, with its Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009 signed into law by President Barak Obama on July 1, and the EU, with its specific targeting of the Iranian energy industry, go further, Cotler insists that still more can and must be done.
The Responsibility to Prevent report’s 18- point “Road Map for Action” spells out a broader, multidimensional approach. On the legal front, it proposes taking Iran to court for state-sponsored incitement to genocide; and on the diplomatic front, to put Iranian human rights violations on every relevant agenda and to impose personal travel bans and asset freezes on Iranian leaders responsible for nuclear terror, genocidal incitement or human rights violations. It also suggests using the UN General Assembly Resolution of March 26, calling for an end to Iran’s domestic repression, as a lever for sanctions, for example, against corporations that provide the Iranian regime with the surveillance equipment it uses against the dissidents.
As for economic sanctions, the road map makes several far-reaching proposals, including:
● Targeting imports of gasoline and other refined petroleum imports
● Imposing sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank
● Banning the export to Iran of dual-use technologies
● Blocking the inflow of sensitive materials
● Targeting the Revolutionary Guard, which controls an estimated 80 percent of Iran’s foreign commerce, as well as its construction, banking and communications sectors, and which Cotler describes as “the epicenter of all four threats”
● Imposing a broad arms embargo on Iran and ordering a complete suspension of its ballistic missile program * Denying landing permission to Iranian ships and planes
● Requiring disclosure of all business dealings with Iran Even the more limited sanctions now in place are starting to bite, says Cotler. Iran is facing serious capitalization problems and dozens of leading firms have been pulling out of the country after being given a choice between trading with Washington or Tehran, not both. “There was even a report a few days ago that the Iranian banks are losing their capacity to finance the nuclear program. So sanctions are hurting, but we still need to do much more to bring Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account,” Cotler concludes.
Politics of resentment live in West Bank
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2010/08/06/14944096.html
SALIM MANSUR – Sun Media Saturday, August 7, 2010
RAMALLAH — I am struck by the construction boom across the city as I visit Ramallah, the legislative and political centre of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Just about everywhere, high towers of office and apartment complexes rise above the squalor of old houses, refugee camps, crowded markets and narrow streets of what was once a small town some 10 km north of Jerusalem.
I spent the better part of a day walking the streets of Ramallah; had a surprising encounter with the mayor, a Palestinian-Christian woman of much dignity and warmth; made the required visit to Yasser Arafat’s tomb; and enjoyed the hospitality of simple folks.
There is money here, plenty of it, and those who have it are not hesitant to flaunt it.
New cars, beautiful residences, fancy stores and restaurants will startle any outsider arriving here with his head filled by the mainstream media in the West about the misery of the West Bank occupation by Israelis.
There is also poverty, Israeli checkpoints, the fence or wall separating Palestinian territories from Israel and the Israeli settlements.
And there’s the politics of resentment that spill over any conversation with ordinary Palestinians fed on a diet of half-truths and endless lies by their leaders.
But visiting with Palestinians is also an invitation to hear their bitterness about Arab leaders, and of their experience with discrimination and violence in places such as Lebanon and Kuwait.They speak of how the Palestinian leadership resembles Ali Baba and his 40 thieves robbing the people of the money that has poured in as aid from the West. The term limit of the president and the legislative assembly has expired, and no new elections are scheduled to provide Palestinians with any say on how they are being governed.
In effect those in authority have no mandate, and their fear that Hamas will likely win an election whenever held underscores the contempt of ordinary Palestinians for Mahmoud Abbas — the president of the Palestinian Authority – and the men around him.
There is irony in the fact that there are two Palestinian entities between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. If it were not for Israel in the middle, the war of words between these two Palestinian entities, or putative states, would become a ghastly shootout between the Iranian proxy in Gaza and mafia dons receiving protection money from the West and its Arab allies in the West Bank.
I have lived among, travelled and spoken with countless number of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and have learned to be cautious about the disconnect between their words, their thinking, the reality around them and the record of their history.
As I sit among Palestinians in Ramallah, or visit with them in Bethlehem or Hebron, I listen to them patiently while avoiding disagreements by not offering my thoughts.
But when they insist on hearing my views I remind them gently of the verse from the Qur’an that God does not change the condition of people unless they change what is in their hearts.
Then there is silence and the distress of not knowing how to unpack half-truths and lies — in part of their own making — to become a responsible, free and independent nation.
SALIM MANSUR – Sun Media Saturday, August 7, 2010
RAMALLAH — I am struck by the construction boom across the city as I visit Ramallah, the legislative and political centre of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Just about everywhere, high towers of office and apartment complexes rise above the squalor of old houses, refugee camps, crowded markets and narrow streets of what was once a small town some 10 km north of Jerusalem.
I spent the better part of a day walking the streets of Ramallah; had a surprising encounter with the mayor, a Palestinian-Christian woman of much dignity and warmth; made the required visit to Yasser Arafat’s tomb; and enjoyed the hospitality of simple folks.
There is money here, plenty of it, and those who have it are not hesitant to flaunt it.
New cars, beautiful residences, fancy stores and restaurants will startle any outsider arriving here with his head filled by the mainstream media in the West about the misery of the West Bank occupation by Israelis.
There is also poverty, Israeli checkpoints, the fence or wall separating Palestinian territories from Israel and the Israeli settlements.
And there’s the politics of resentment that spill over any conversation with ordinary Palestinians fed on a diet of half-truths and endless lies by their leaders.
But visiting with Palestinians is also an invitation to hear their bitterness about Arab leaders, and of their experience with discrimination and violence in places such as Lebanon and Kuwait.They speak of how the Palestinian leadership resembles Ali Baba and his 40 thieves robbing the people of the money that has poured in as aid from the West. The term limit of the president and the legislative assembly has expired, and no new elections are scheduled to provide Palestinians with any say on how they are being governed.
In effect those in authority have no mandate, and their fear that Hamas will likely win an election whenever held underscores the contempt of ordinary Palestinians for Mahmoud Abbas — the president of the Palestinian Authority – and the men around him.
There is irony in the fact that there are two Palestinian entities between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. If it were not for Israel in the middle, the war of words between these two Palestinian entities, or putative states, would become a ghastly shootout between the Iranian proxy in Gaza and mafia dons receiving protection money from the West and its Arab allies in the West Bank.
I have lived among, travelled and spoken with countless number of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and have learned to be cautious about the disconnect between their words, their thinking, the reality around them and the record of their history.
As I sit among Palestinians in Ramallah, or visit with them in Bethlehem or Hebron, I listen to them patiently while avoiding disagreements by not offering my thoughts.
But when they insist on hearing my views I remind them gently of the verse from the Qur’an that God does not change the condition of people unless they change what is in their hearts.
Then there is silence and the distress of not knowing how to unpack half-truths and lies — in part of their own making — to become a responsible, free and independent nation.
Friday, August 6, 2010
A New Excuse For Killing Jews
National Post editorial board August 4, 2010 – 2:17 pm
Now that Israel has withdrawn from Gaza and Lebanon, and taken down many of the roadblocks in the economically booming West Bank, its Arab enemies are running out of pretexts for attacking the Jewish state. Tuesday brought a particularly absurd episode: A Lebanese sniper shot and killed an Israeli officer for the crime of … pruning bushes on the Israeli side of the border.
At first, details of the event were sketchy, with both sides claiming that the other had initiated the hostilities. But on Wednesday, the United Nations peacekeeping force in South Lebanon, Unifil, confirmed that the Israeli workers and the foliage they were pruning were on their own side of the UN-recognized Blue Line, separating the two countries. Only after the Lebanese sniper had killed his victim did Israel return fire, killing four.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the story is the fact that uniformed Arab troops now seem to be openly copying the cowardly terroristic tactics of Hezbollah and other “militant” groups. At one point during Tuesday’s fighting, the Lebanese side asked the Israelis to hold their fire so that the Lebanese troops could be evacuated. Shortly after the Israelis complied with this request, the Lebanese fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an Israeli tank.
Not surprisingly, the event is being used as a rallying point to try to unite Lebanese disparate factions against Israel. Even in the West, many of the usual suspects are simply ignoring the UN-stipulated facts and blaming Israel for what we now know was a Lebanese act of murder. From Jenin to Gaza to Lebanon, this pattern is always the same: Never let the truth get in the way of stirring up hate against the Jewish state.
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/08/04/national-post-editorial-board-a-new-excuse-for-killing-jews/#ixzz0vrC4odsZ
Now that Israel has withdrawn from Gaza and Lebanon, and taken down many of the roadblocks in the economically booming West Bank, its Arab enemies are running out of pretexts for attacking the Jewish state. Tuesday brought a particularly absurd episode: A Lebanese sniper shot and killed an Israeli officer for the crime of … pruning bushes on the Israeli side of the border.
At first, details of the event were sketchy, with both sides claiming that the other had initiated the hostilities. But on Wednesday, the United Nations peacekeeping force in South Lebanon, Unifil, confirmed that the Israeli workers and the foliage they were pruning were on their own side of the UN-recognized Blue Line, separating the two countries. Only after the Lebanese sniper had killed his victim did Israel return fire, killing four.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the story is the fact that uniformed Arab troops now seem to be openly copying the cowardly terroristic tactics of Hezbollah and other “militant” groups. At one point during Tuesday’s fighting, the Lebanese side asked the Israelis to hold their fire so that the Lebanese troops could be evacuated. Shortly after the Israelis complied with this request, the Lebanese fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an Israeli tank.
Not surprisingly, the event is being used as a rallying point to try to unite Lebanese disparate factions against Israel. Even in the West, many of the usual suspects are simply ignoring the UN-stipulated facts and blaming Israel for what we now know was a Lebanese act of murder. From Jenin to Gaza to Lebanon, this pattern is always the same: Never let the truth get in the way of stirring up hate against the Jewish state.
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/08/04/national-post-editorial-board-a-new-excuse-for-killing-jews/#ixzz0vrC4odsZ
Israel threatens to destroy hostile Lebanese border positions
Israel has handed Lebanon an ultimatum. Before a line can be drawn on the Lebanese-Israeli clash which flared Tuesday, Aug. 3, the Lebanese Army 9th Brigade commander responsible for sending snipers to shoot at Israeli troops clearing brush on their side of the border and killing Lt. Col. (Res.) Dov Harari, must be dismissed or court-martialed, debkafile's military sources report.
This burst of Lebanese sniper fire triggered the clash.
The ultimatum was delivered at a three-way meeting at UNIFIL headquarters in Naqura on Wednesday night, August 4, attended by UN, IDF and Lebanese Army officers, after Israel learned that the guilty Lebanese officer is a Shiite who hangs out with Hizballah commanders in South Lebanon. The possibility is not precluded that his Hizballah friends tipped him off to the presence of high Israeli officers within firing distance from the Lebanese border.
This information runs contrary to the IDF's official line on the incident, which absolved Hizballah of involvement in the clash and claimed the Shiite terrorists were taken by surprise no less than the Israeli military
UNIFIL carried a warning to Beirut that if the Lebanese army failed to punish the officer, Israel would deem it an enemy force and feel free to destroy its military positions along their border.
Our military sources reveal that the Naqura conference was also attended unofficially by the American, French and German military attachés stationed at their embassies in Beirut. They were sent to apply the brakes on any further escalation of the Israeli-Lebanese military showdown.
A UNIFIL spokesman announced early Thursday morning, August 5 that Israel and Lebanon had both pledged to work with the UN to avoid violent incidents in the future. However, on the quiet, our sources report the UN peacekeepers agreed to convey the Israeli ultimatum and warning to Beirut with their own recommendation to remove the Lebanese officer responsible for the outbreak from the South in the interests of restoring calm.
The ultimatum did not give the Lebanese army a deadline for punishing the officer or say what action Israel would take if it was not met, but the Israeli officers at Naqura presented a tough and unyielding front. Jerusalem will not let the death of a high officer go unpunished.
The Lebanese high command and Hizballah were reminded of Israel's reprisal Saturday Aug. 1 against Hamas, for firing a Grad missile at Ashkelon on July 30: Israeli Air Force bombers struck a number of targets across the Gaza Strip, one of which killed the high-ranking Hamas commander, Issa Batran, commander of the organization's missile batteries.
It was to avenge his death that Hamas' military wing, Izzedin al-Qassam, launched half a dozen Grad missiles from Sinai against Eilat on Monday, August 2. (In the event, they missed their aim and hit Aqaba, killing one Jordanian.)
Far from winding down the Lebanese-Israel border crisis, the Israeli ultimatum looks more like the opening move for the next round. The Beirut government is not expected in Jerusalem, Washington or Naqura to punish the Shiite 9th Brigade officer lest Hizballah throw its weight behind him and canonize him as a national Shiite hero. Israel will then feel free to exercise its options for the Lebanese act of aggression.
The state of play between Israel and Lebanon was described by high Israeli military sources Thursday, Aug. 5, as fluid and incendiary. A single tree or rocket could blow up into a major conflagration and spread across the Middle East.
Time is rushing toward another flashpoint: Hizballah's secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, has threatened to pass the buck for the five-year old assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri to Israel to ease the pressure of guilt preying on his own organization. He promises to present "proof" of Israeli secret service complicity at a press conference on Monday, August 9.
Western military and intelligence circles in the Middle East agreed Thursday that Israel cannot afford to let a second casus belli from Lebanon go unanswered after the unprovoked death of its officer.
A tense Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the scene Thursday night with his first ever videotaped speech that was broadcast on three Israeli TV channels.
He held Hamas and the Lebanese government responsible for three cross-border attacks in as many days. While the third was staged by Lebanon, Netanyahu placed the Grad attacks on Ashkelon and Eilat squarely at the door of the Palestinian Hamas.
He made it clear that Israel would make both answerable when he said: "Don’t test our resolve to defend our citizens."
-Debka File
This burst of Lebanese sniper fire triggered the clash.
The ultimatum was delivered at a three-way meeting at UNIFIL headquarters in Naqura on Wednesday night, August 4, attended by UN, IDF and Lebanese Army officers, after Israel learned that the guilty Lebanese officer is a Shiite who hangs out with Hizballah commanders in South Lebanon. The possibility is not precluded that his Hizballah friends tipped him off to the presence of high Israeli officers within firing distance from the Lebanese border.
This information runs contrary to the IDF's official line on the incident, which absolved Hizballah of involvement in the clash and claimed the Shiite terrorists were taken by surprise no less than the Israeli military
UNIFIL carried a warning to Beirut that if the Lebanese army failed to punish the officer, Israel would deem it an enemy force and feel free to destroy its military positions along their border.
Our military sources reveal that the Naqura conference was also attended unofficially by the American, French and German military attachés stationed at their embassies in Beirut. They were sent to apply the brakes on any further escalation of the Israeli-Lebanese military showdown.
A UNIFIL spokesman announced early Thursday morning, August 5 that Israel and Lebanon had both pledged to work with the UN to avoid violent incidents in the future. However, on the quiet, our sources report the UN peacekeepers agreed to convey the Israeli ultimatum and warning to Beirut with their own recommendation to remove the Lebanese officer responsible for the outbreak from the South in the interests of restoring calm.
The ultimatum did not give the Lebanese army a deadline for punishing the officer or say what action Israel would take if it was not met, but the Israeli officers at Naqura presented a tough and unyielding front. Jerusalem will not let the death of a high officer go unpunished.
The Lebanese high command and Hizballah were reminded of Israel's reprisal Saturday Aug. 1 against Hamas, for firing a Grad missile at Ashkelon on July 30: Israeli Air Force bombers struck a number of targets across the Gaza Strip, one of which killed the high-ranking Hamas commander, Issa Batran, commander of the organization's missile batteries.
It was to avenge his death that Hamas' military wing, Izzedin al-Qassam, launched half a dozen Grad missiles from Sinai against Eilat on Monday, August 2. (In the event, they missed their aim and hit Aqaba, killing one Jordanian.)
Far from winding down the Lebanese-Israel border crisis, the Israeli ultimatum looks more like the opening move for the next round. The Beirut government is not expected in Jerusalem, Washington or Naqura to punish the Shiite 9th Brigade officer lest Hizballah throw its weight behind him and canonize him as a national Shiite hero. Israel will then feel free to exercise its options for the Lebanese act of aggression.
The state of play between Israel and Lebanon was described by high Israeli military sources Thursday, Aug. 5, as fluid and incendiary. A single tree or rocket could blow up into a major conflagration and spread across the Middle East.
Time is rushing toward another flashpoint: Hizballah's secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, has threatened to pass the buck for the five-year old assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri to Israel to ease the pressure of guilt preying on his own organization. He promises to present "proof" of Israeli secret service complicity at a press conference on Monday, August 9.
Western military and intelligence circles in the Middle East agreed Thursday that Israel cannot afford to let a second casus belli from Lebanon go unanswered after the unprovoked death of its officer.
A tense Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the scene Thursday night with his first ever videotaped speech that was broadcast on three Israeli TV channels.
He held Hamas and the Lebanese government responsible for three cross-border attacks in as many days. While the third was staged by Lebanon, Netanyahu placed the Grad attacks on Ashkelon and Eilat squarely at the door of the Palestinian Hamas.
He made it clear that Israel would make both answerable when he said: "Don’t test our resolve to defend our citizens."
-Debka File
Boat trip is exercise in Israel bashing
Article via The Calgary Herald - July 19, 2010
Charity is supposed to be fuelled by a selfless desire to help others, but it's hard to see any such motivation in the plans advanced by members of Gaza Freedom March (GFM) to charter a boat and sail to the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the idea reeks of self-aggrandizement and narcissism, along with the usual helping of contempt for Israel.
Canadian activists belonging to the group launched fund-raising efforts last week with the aim of mustering $300,000 to hire and staff a vessel in an all-Canadian effort to sail to Gaza despite the Israeli blockade. The trek's primary aim is "to bring attention to the suffering of the people of Gaza," presumably without going into much detail as to why Israel believes its security requires it to take a stand against Gaza's Hamasrun government, which still refuses to accept the Jewish state's right to exist.
Whether the boat will actually carry any goods on its supposed mission of mercy or sail empty has yet to be decided. This might reflect the fact that Israel has largely lifted the blockade, allowing in most consumer goods, or it might be a tacit admission that the trip is more about egoism than compassion. Why spend money on supplies when the goal is swift, efficient martyrdom? What these activists seek is a self-serving stint in Israeli custody, which amounts to both a badge of honour and a battle scar.
The GFM has talked vaguely of using an empty vessel to transport Palestinian goods abroad for export, but they are undoubtedly aware that regardless of whether they arrive with their holds bulging or yawning, Israel will not permit them to make landfall. The fate of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which was halted in May and resulted in the deaths of nine activists aboard a Turkish vessel during a struggle with Israel special forces, is surely very much on the Canadians' minds.
The GFM has been quick to proclaim that its mission will be peaceful, and doubtless the Israeli response will be similar after the fiasco in May, but all this careful talk on the activists' part fails to mask their other goal, shared by the earlier convoy: putting on a show meant to prompt the rest of the world to heap obloquy on Israel.
As a liberal democracy in the Middle East in a region awash in authoritarian regimes and militant puritanism, Israel has had to fight for its survival right from its inception.
Despite being a beneficiary of the very same freedoms Israel is defending, the GFM is anxious to lend its support to the other side in a struggle half a world away. These activists could do with a little less selfishness and a lot more self-reflection.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Boat+trip+exercise+Israel+bashing/3294452/story.html#ixzz0vr8ELQTd
Charity is supposed to be fuelled by a selfless desire to help others, but it's hard to see any such motivation in the plans advanced by members of Gaza Freedom March (GFM) to charter a boat and sail to the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the idea reeks of self-aggrandizement and narcissism, along with the usual helping of contempt for Israel.
Canadian activists belonging to the group launched fund-raising efforts last week with the aim of mustering $300,000 to hire and staff a vessel in an all-Canadian effort to sail to Gaza despite the Israeli blockade. The trek's primary aim is "to bring attention to the suffering of the people of Gaza," presumably without going into much detail as to why Israel believes its security requires it to take a stand against Gaza's Hamasrun government, which still refuses to accept the Jewish state's right to exist.
Whether the boat will actually carry any goods on its supposed mission of mercy or sail empty has yet to be decided. This might reflect the fact that Israel has largely lifted the blockade, allowing in most consumer goods, or it might be a tacit admission that the trip is more about egoism than compassion. Why spend money on supplies when the goal is swift, efficient martyrdom? What these activists seek is a self-serving stint in Israeli custody, which amounts to both a badge of honour and a battle scar.
The GFM has talked vaguely of using an empty vessel to transport Palestinian goods abroad for export, but they are undoubtedly aware that regardless of whether they arrive with their holds bulging or yawning, Israel will not permit them to make landfall. The fate of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which was halted in May and resulted in the deaths of nine activists aboard a Turkish vessel during a struggle with Israel special forces, is surely very much on the Canadians' minds.
The GFM has been quick to proclaim that its mission will be peaceful, and doubtless the Israeli response will be similar after the fiasco in May, but all this careful talk on the activists' part fails to mask their other goal, shared by the earlier convoy: putting on a show meant to prompt the rest of the world to heap obloquy on Israel.
As a liberal democracy in the Middle East in a region awash in authoritarian regimes and militant puritanism, Israel has had to fight for its survival right from its inception.
Despite being a beneficiary of the very same freedoms Israel is defending, the GFM is anxious to lend its support to the other side in a struggle half a world away. These activists could do with a little less selfishness and a lot more self-reflection.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Boat+trip+exercise+Israel+bashing/3294452/story.html#ixzz0vr8ELQTd
Thursday, August 5, 2010
We Owe The Jews
Written By Andrew Roberts, National Post · Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2010What follows is an edited version of a speech delivered by historian Andrew Roberts to the Friends of Israel Initiative in the British House of Commons on July 19, 2010.
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From Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to Aden, the 5.25 million square miles of territory belonging to members of the Arab League is home to over 330 million people, whereas Israel covers only 8,000 square miles, and is home to seven million citizens, one-fifth of whom are Arabs. The Jews of the Holy Land are thus surrounded by hostile states 650 times their size in territory and 60 times their population; yet their last, best hope of ending two millennia of international persecution -- the State of Israel -- has somehow survived. When during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery. Today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted 20 times as long.
Jerusalem is the site of the Temple of Solomon and Herod. The stones of a palace erected by King David himself are even now being unearthed just outside the walls of Jerusalem. Everything that makes a nation state legitimate -- blood shed, soil tilled, international agreements -- argues for Israel's right to exist, yet that is still denied by the Arab League. For many of their governments, which are rich enough to have economically solved the Palestinian refugee problem decades ago, it is useful to have Israel as a scapegoat to divert attention from the tyranny, failure and corruption of their own regimes.
The tragic truth is that it suits Arab states very well to have the Palestinians endure permanent refugee status; whenever Israel puts forward workable solutions they are stymied by those whose interests put the destruction of Israel before the genuine well-being of the Palestinians. Both King Abdullah I of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt were assassinated when they attempted to come to some kind of accommodation with a country that most sane people now accept is not going away.
"We owe to the Jews," wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, "a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together." Although they make up less than half of 1% of the world's population, between 1901 and 1950 Jews won 14% of all the Nobel Prizes awarded for literature and science, and between 1951 and 2000 Jews won 32% of the Nobel Prizes for medicine, 32% for physics, 39% for economics and 29% for science. This, despite so many of their greatest intellects dying in the gas chambers. Yet we tend to treat Israel like a leper on the international scene, threatening her with academic boycotts if she builds a separation wall that has so far reduced suicide bombings by 95% over three years.
Her Majesty the Queen has been on the throne for 57 years and in that time has undertaken 250 official visits to 129 countries, yet has not yet set foot in Israel. She has visited 14 Arab countries, so it cannot have been that she wasn't in the region.
After the Holocaust, the Jewish people recognized that they must have their own state, a homeland where they could forever be safe from a repetition of such horrors. Since then, Israel has had to fight five major wars for her existence. Radical Islam is never going to accept the concept of an Israeli State, so the struggle is likely to continue for another 60 years, but the Jews know that that is less dangerous than entrusting their security to anyone else.
I recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Walking along a line of huts and the railway siding, where their forebears had been worked and starved and beaten and frozen and gassed to death, were a group of Jewish schoolchildren, one of whom was carrying over his shoulder the Israeli flag. It was a moving sight, for it was the sovereign independence represented by that flag which guarantees that the obscenity of genocide will never again befall the Jewish people.
No people in history have needed the right to self-defence and legitimacy more than the Jews of Israel, and that is what we in the Friends of Israel Initiative demand here today.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/Jews/3352058/story.html#ixzz0vkn7RQzP
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Time To Wake Up
This is in New York City on Madison Avenue, not in
France or the Middle East or Yemen or Kenya.
This is an accurate picture of every Friday afternoon in several
locations throughout NYC where there are mosques with a large
number of Muslims that cannot fit into the mosque - They fill the
surrounding streets, facing east for a couple of hours between
about 2 & 4 p.m. - Besides this one at 42nd St & Madison Ave,
there is another, even larger group, at 94th St & 3rd Ave, etc.,
etc. - Also, I presume, you are aware of the dispute over building
another "high rise" Mosque a few blocks from "ground zero" -
With regard to that one, the "Imam" refuses to disclose where the
$110 million dollars to build it is coming from and there is a lawsuit
filed to force disclosure of that information.
Is there a message here???? Yes, there is: Muslims are
claiming North America for Allah.
If we don't wake up soon, we are going to "politically correct"
ourselves right out of our own country!
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