Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
TIME Magazine’s Latest Blood Libel About Israel
By Prof. Phyllis Chesler re: TIME's Anti-Israel Blood Libel
Prof. Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City University of New York. She also is an author and appears often in international media interviews. She lives in New York City.
The September 13, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine arrived yesterday. The cover story is titled “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace” and is illustrated by a large Jewish star composed of daisies. Yes, daises—as in “counting daisies, don’t have a care in the world.”
This is precisely the point of Karl Vick’s article. He writes:
Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter [of peace with the Palestinians]. They’re otherwise engaged: They’re making money; they’re enjoying the rays of the late summer … they have moved on.
Vick quotes an Israeli real estate agent in Ashdod, one Eli, who tells him:
People are indifferent. They don’t care if there’s going to be war. They don’t care if there’s going to be peace. They don’t care. They live in the day.
According to Vick, Israelis don’t care about peace, peace negotiations, or about the Palestinians because they are simply having too good a time: sunbathing, swimming, café-hopping, profiting from start-up companies, and, according to polls cited by Vick, utterly disconnected from “politics;” indeed Vick suggests that Israelis resemble Californians more than they resemble Egyptians. These are all points which scream: Israel does not fit in; if Israelis were only more impoverished, more indolent, and paradoxically, even more “laid back,” they might be recognizable as indigenous to the region, a true part of the Middle East.
These are Vick’s thoughts, not mine.
Of course, Jews are the original Palestinians and the most indigenous of the region’s inhabitants; yes, there are many impoverished Israelis, both Jews and non-Jews; and, let’s not forget that there are even some Israelis who remain permanently on high alert for the next terrorist attack, permanently scarred by the last ones. For a moment, let’s forget about all that. Allow me to ask: Why doesn’t Vick also point out that Palestinians are leading the high life on the West Bank and in sumptuous villas on both the West Bank and in Gaza; that they, too, are sunbathing, swimming, shopping, dining out, and relaxing at the beach—at least as much as the Islamist thugs who run the lives of Palestinians will allow it?
Vick and his editors at TIME seem to think that showing six photos of Israelis at leisure: blowing smoke on a beach chair, lounging on a beach chair, resting in an army uniform on the beach without a chair, playing with one’s baby in a stroller, sitting at a café—are proof that Israelis are engaging in activities which are not admirable, are, in fact, “proof” that they are not suffering but rather, proof that Israelis simply don’t care about peace with the Palestinians. And Vick brings in polls as well as expert and person-in-the-street opinions to back up this claim.
Vick writes that real estate is booming, as is business in general, Israeli “brainiacs” have helped their nation avoid the economic disasters that have plunged Europe and America into a recession. He literally writes this. “Israel avoided the debt traps that dragged the U.S. and Europe into recession. It is known as a start-up nation—second only to the U.S. companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange.”
Is Vick aware that, consciously or not, intentionally or not, he is counting on the world’s long-held resentment about Jewish creativity, genius, and scientific and economic success—counting on the world’s willingness to scapegoat Israel once again for crimes that it has not committed? Or because Jews seem to “know something,” maybe they are channeling God directly and thus, the deck is stacked against non-Jews. Vick presents Israel’s “success” as somehow unseemly, because it makes other nations look bad. Does he harbor the suspicion that Jewish prosperity has been “stolen” from non-Jews or is he merely advertising that Jewish gold is there, ripe for the taking?
Buried—but really buried-- in Vick’s four page cover piece are snippets of true facts: That the Israelis are weary of peace negotiations which never succeed because the Palestinians do not want peace; that Arabs and Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state and as many Jews as possible.
But Vick fails to convey that negotiations cannot work as long as the ultra-Nazified Arab Islamic propaganda against Jews and Israel continues to turn out children who hate Jews and who become human homicide bombs, snipers, kidnappers, kassam rocket throwers, etc.
Here is what Vick utterly fails to comprehend, namely, that the Israelis are not merely tired, disenchanted, living in la-la land a la southern Californians (hence, the Jewish star made of daisies on the cover). The Israelis are actually showing the entire world how to embrace life, even as they live, trembling, in the shadow of death. They are teaching the world how to “love life more than they fear death.” A new and wonderful book A New Shoah. The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism by Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, which is not yet out, makes precisely this point.
Pictured: Prof. Phyllis Chesler The Jewish insistence on life may be the key to our survival as a people despite ceaseless persecution. It might be the lesson, the model, for all humanity in an era of genocides, civil wars, torture chambers, tyrannies, and totalitarian regimes. Why is TIME turning things on their head and refusing to recognize the courage and the heroism of Jewish Israelis who choose to live in the moment when the moment is all they have? Against all odds, the Jews simply refuse to give up. As Meotti writes of the numerous victims of terrorism during the ongoing Intifada of 2000, “Israel teaches the world love of life, not in the sense of a banal joie de vivre, but as a solemn celebration.”
Meotti begins where I began in early 2004, when I wrote about a new Holocaust in the pages of The Jewish Press, a Holocaust which is now based in Israel. At the time, I was not heard beyond a small circle. I did what Meotti now does in his opening pages. Meotti fully understands that Israel is the “first country ever to experience suicide terrorism on a mass scale: that more than 150 suicide attacks have been carried out plus 500 have been prevented." According to Meotti, there have been “1,723 people (murdered) and 10,000 injured” in Israel. Meotti does what I did: He converts these numbers into the demographic equivalent of attacks on Americans. When I did so there were somewhat fewer people in both categories. Thus, Meotti writes that in American population terms, this means that “74,000 Americans” would have been killed and “400,000 injured.”
Vick does not factor this grave reality into his article. Nor does he seem to know how high the Jewish population growth was in the DP camps right after the Holocaust. Can he comprehend that permanently endangered Jews—a people that has survived as a people for nearly six thousand years—the Chosen People—have always chosen life in the moment, have chosen to seize life with both hands, even as they memorialize their dead and make sense of their persecution in a way that illuminates this particular Hell for all humanity?
What Meotti is doing is remembering the lives and the deaths of the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism during the last decade. I have only read the first few chapters but cannot put it down. These are unknown stories, unnamed victims, whose mortal remains have often evaporated, disintegrated as surely as those Jews who literally went up in smoke during the Nazi Holocaust. His stories are mainly of victims who were unarmed and helpless and who, it turns out, were actually exceptionally kind to others, often to the very Arab Palestinians who shot them down, bludgeoned them to death, or blew them up into unrecognizable bone fragments, drops of blood, perhaps a few teeth.
I look forward to completing Meotti’s book. I hope that people more fully understand that TIME Magazine as well as countless other media in the Western world, can no longer be trusted to tell the truth.
Prof. Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City University of New York. She also is an author and appears often in international media interviews. She lives in New York City.
The September 13, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine arrived yesterday. The cover story is titled “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace” and is illustrated by a large Jewish star composed of daisies. Yes, daises—as in “counting daisies, don’t have a care in the world.”
This is precisely the point of Karl Vick’s article. He writes:
Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter [of peace with the Palestinians]. They’re otherwise engaged: They’re making money; they’re enjoying the rays of the late summer … they have moved on.
Vick quotes an Israeli real estate agent in Ashdod, one Eli, who tells him:
People are indifferent. They don’t care if there’s going to be war. They don’t care if there’s going to be peace. They don’t care. They live in the day.
According to Vick, Israelis don’t care about peace, peace negotiations, or about the Palestinians because they are simply having too good a time: sunbathing, swimming, café-hopping, profiting from start-up companies, and, according to polls cited by Vick, utterly disconnected from “politics;” indeed Vick suggests that Israelis resemble Californians more than they resemble Egyptians. These are all points which scream: Israel does not fit in; if Israelis were only more impoverished, more indolent, and paradoxically, even more “laid back,” they might be recognizable as indigenous to the region, a true part of the Middle East.
These are Vick’s thoughts, not mine.
Of course, Jews are the original Palestinians and the most indigenous of the region’s inhabitants; yes, there are many impoverished Israelis, both Jews and non-Jews; and, let’s not forget that there are even some Israelis who remain permanently on high alert for the next terrorist attack, permanently scarred by the last ones. For a moment, let’s forget about all that. Allow me to ask: Why doesn’t Vick also point out that Palestinians are leading the high life on the West Bank and in sumptuous villas on both the West Bank and in Gaza; that they, too, are sunbathing, swimming, shopping, dining out, and relaxing at the beach—at least as much as the Islamist thugs who run the lives of Palestinians will allow it?
Vick and his editors at TIME seem to think that showing six photos of Israelis at leisure: blowing smoke on a beach chair, lounging on a beach chair, resting in an army uniform on the beach without a chair, playing with one’s baby in a stroller, sitting at a café—are proof that Israelis are engaging in activities which are not admirable, are, in fact, “proof” that they are not suffering but rather, proof that Israelis simply don’t care about peace with the Palestinians. And Vick brings in polls as well as expert and person-in-the-street opinions to back up this claim.
Vick writes that real estate is booming, as is business in general, Israeli “brainiacs” have helped their nation avoid the economic disasters that have plunged Europe and America into a recession. He literally writes this. “Israel avoided the debt traps that dragged the U.S. and Europe into recession. It is known as a start-up nation—second only to the U.S. companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange.”
Is Vick aware that, consciously or not, intentionally or not, he is counting on the world’s long-held resentment about Jewish creativity, genius, and scientific and economic success—counting on the world’s willingness to scapegoat Israel once again for crimes that it has not committed? Or because Jews seem to “know something,” maybe they are channeling God directly and thus, the deck is stacked against non-Jews. Vick presents Israel’s “success” as somehow unseemly, because it makes other nations look bad. Does he harbor the suspicion that Jewish prosperity has been “stolen” from non-Jews or is he merely advertising that Jewish gold is there, ripe for the taking?
Buried—but really buried-- in Vick’s four page cover piece are snippets of true facts: That the Israelis are weary of peace negotiations which never succeed because the Palestinians do not want peace; that Arabs and Palestinians want to destroy the Jewish state and as many Jews as possible.
But Vick fails to convey that negotiations cannot work as long as the ultra-Nazified Arab Islamic propaganda against Jews and Israel continues to turn out children who hate Jews and who become human homicide bombs, snipers, kidnappers, kassam rocket throwers, etc.
Here is what Vick utterly fails to comprehend, namely, that the Israelis are not merely tired, disenchanted, living in la-la land a la southern Californians (hence, the Jewish star made of daisies on the cover). The Israelis are actually showing the entire world how to embrace life, even as they live, trembling, in the shadow of death. They are teaching the world how to “love life more than they fear death.” A new and wonderful book A New Shoah. The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism by Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, which is not yet out, makes precisely this point.
Pictured: Prof. Phyllis Chesler The Jewish insistence on life may be the key to our survival as a people despite ceaseless persecution. It might be the lesson, the model, for all humanity in an era of genocides, civil wars, torture chambers, tyrannies, and totalitarian regimes. Why is TIME turning things on their head and refusing to recognize the courage and the heroism of Jewish Israelis who choose to live in the moment when the moment is all they have? Against all odds, the Jews simply refuse to give up. As Meotti writes of the numerous victims of terrorism during the ongoing Intifada of 2000, “Israel teaches the world love of life, not in the sense of a banal joie de vivre, but as a solemn celebration.”
Meotti begins where I began in early 2004, when I wrote about a new Holocaust in the pages of The Jewish Press, a Holocaust which is now based in Israel. At the time, I was not heard beyond a small circle. I did what Meotti now does in his opening pages. Meotti fully understands that Israel is the “first country ever to experience suicide terrorism on a mass scale: that more than 150 suicide attacks have been carried out plus 500 have been prevented." According to Meotti, there have been “1,723 people (murdered) and 10,000 injured” in Israel. Meotti does what I did: He converts these numbers into the demographic equivalent of attacks on Americans. When I did so there were somewhat fewer people in both categories. Thus, Meotti writes that in American population terms, this means that “74,000 Americans” would have been killed and “400,000 injured.”
Vick does not factor this grave reality into his article. Nor does he seem to know how high the Jewish population growth was in the DP camps right after the Holocaust. Can he comprehend that permanently endangered Jews—a people that has survived as a people for nearly six thousand years—the Chosen People—have always chosen life in the moment, have chosen to seize life with both hands, even as they memorialize their dead and make sense of their persecution in a way that illuminates this particular Hell for all humanity?
What Meotti is doing is remembering the lives and the deaths of the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism during the last decade. I have only read the first few chapters but cannot put it down. These are unknown stories, unnamed victims, whose mortal remains have often evaporated, disintegrated as surely as those Jews who literally went up in smoke during the Nazi Holocaust. His stories are mainly of victims who were unarmed and helpless and who, it turns out, were actually exceptionally kind to others, often to the very Arab Palestinians who shot them down, bludgeoned them to death, or blew them up into unrecognizable bone fragments, drops of blood, perhaps a few teeth.
I look forward to completing Meotti’s book. I hope that people more fully understand that TIME Magazine as well as countless other media in the Western world, can no longer be trusted to tell the truth.
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
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