Comments on Reads 8/31

IDF chief warns terror groups not to test Israel's strength

Gantz to terrorists: Any harm caused to Israeli citizens will bring about a harsh response • Heightened alert levels for communities located within 45 kilometers of the Gaza Strip are still pending.

FP: As Eli Wallach said in “For a fistful of dollars”, when you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk”. Israel should stop threatening and promising and start acting and, particularly, it should take the initiative rather than react. Serial empty threats by Israeli “leaders” followed by apologies (see next) is pathetic and suicidal.

SimplyJews: On the booming apology business (MUST READ!!!)

Bibi, on the other hand, instead of assuming a firm stance on the issue, zigged and zagged for almost a year before finally coming to rest at what (today) seems to be his final (?) position.
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You would expect that after a terrorist attack on a neighbor that started on Egyptian territory and proceeded unimpeded, Egyptian rulers will behave at least quietly. Surely not. Following the current fashion, Egypt demanded an apology, adding a threat of recalling their ambassador in Israel (later denied), cutting the diplomatic ties etc. And the apology by our defense minister promptly followed, later to be denied or, at least, watered down by same minister. That without waiting for the results of the official joint investigation into the circumstances that led to the death of the Egyptian security officers. This apology was issued on August 20, less than two days after the attacks, while not all the victims were buried yet and without waiting for the results of the joint inquiry.
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So, to conclude: apology is still a positive habit. Whenever the fault is yours, I strongly recommend that you do your utmost and overcome your basic instinct of sinful pride. It is good to apologize, both to clear your conscience and to make friends. And, I shall never tire to repeat the Russian proverb: A bad peace is better than a good war.
But what if your conscience is clear and the apology wouldn't make anyone friendly - just the opposite? What if the only result of that apology will be a request for another one? Questions, questions...

FP: That’s what a crisis of leadership looks like: spinelessness.
There is no ‘if’. As I keep saying, apologizing to Islamists is like waving a red sheet to a bull. But in contradistinction to the Islamists, the bull is usually killed in the end.

David Warren: The republic of anti-Israel

Imagine what the consequences would be, if Israeli citizens, acting independently, began lobbing missiles into the Palestinian territories, gratuitously at targets both civilian and military - whatever happened to be in range. And then, the Israeli authorities made no gesture to stop them. The diplomats of the world would spit up their sherry. Our peace-loving politicians would go berserk.
Yet they have nothing to say after each of many thousand Qassams comes down within Israeli borders of the strictest 1947 definition.
Take this mental exercise one step farther. What if a party in the Israeli Knesset - a party in a position to sweep any free election - announced in its very constitution that Israel's borders extend from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean, and include all deep-historical areas of Jewish settlement, including the entire West Bank. That, moreover, while Jews and perhaps a few quiet Christians are allowed to stay, all Muslims must get out. On pain of death.
Yet the reverse of this is the "final position" of Palestinian statecraft.
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If an identifiable Jew from Israel wanders, unguarded, into any part of the Palestinian territories, he is a dead man. This is a fact of life, and everyone knows it. Leftist and Islamist rhetoric about Israeli "apartheid" masks a very big truth: that more than a million Muslim Arabs live, work, and move freely around Israel, with full citizenship and protection under Israel's laws (enforced by very liberal courts). Whereas, the number of Jews enjoying this status under the Palestinian Authority is zero.

FP: The Jews should not exist in Israel and…

Manfred Gerstenfeld: ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’

Anti-Semitism is a recurrent problem in the world of soccer. Nowhere else, however, is the origin of wide-spread anti-Semitic chants in stadiums as bizarre as in the Netherlands.
Earlier this month, anti-Semitic slogans were the subject of a court case brought by BAN, an organization fighting anti-Semitism, against ADO. In March, this top league club from The Hague won a game against Ajax from Amsterdam. During the match ADO supporters frequently chanted “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas” and “Horrible Cancer Jews.”
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There is a special lesson in the development of soccer related anti-Semitism to be learned by the small Jewish community in the Netherlands. It has been demonstrated once again that Jews must anticipate problems long before they spread into society at large. This issue is yet one more illustration that Jews have to be on guard far more than other groups in Western societies.

FP: …not in Europe either. If you wait long enough, they’ll be rejected everywhere. What else is new?

Matt Taibbi: GOP Hearts End-Times Insanity

I’m submitting a memo to my bosses at Rolling Stone this morning, asking for permission to skip all coverage of the Republican primary season from this point forward. Why? Because Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann have just summed up the entire Republican storyline with perfect precision, through their respective responses to Hurricane Irene. There’s really not much left for any pundit to add, after this weekend’s quips.
Michele Bachmann says Hurricane Irene is God’s way of telling Washington that it is spending too much.
For his part, Ron Paul says hurricane relief isn’t the responsibility of the state and we should stop using tax dollars to rescue people. Apparently we should go back to our year-1900 disaster policies, which included watching 6,000 people die in a hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas.
What else does anyone need to hear? There are two powerful wings of the Republican Party heading into 2012, and these two comments sum them up perfectly.
The Ron Paul camp believes government has no role at all.
The Michele Bachmann camp also believes that government has no role at all – but she differs from Paul in that she learned this through personal communication with the Almighty.

FP: As I argued, the tragedy of a leadership crisis is that even an utter failure like Obama cannot be prevented from an even more disastruous second term because the competition is not much better and possibly worse. Declines created by and combined with leadership crises are lethal.

Claire Berlinski: Good News and Newborns

There are about a million questions you could ask about this study and the way it's being reported in USA Today, and I couldn't find the study itself. It doesn't seem to be online yet. But all political spin and typical bad science journalism aside, this part, if true, is wonderful news:
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine also participated in the study, which covers all 193 WHO member countries over 20 years.
It shows that from 1990 to 2009, annual newborn deaths decreased from 4.6 million to 3.3 million. But the study's authors say progress is too slow, especially in Africa.
Yes, progress is always too slow. Yes, the number to look at, if you want to measure progress, is not total deaths, but deaths as a percentage of births, so it's not clear what this number means. (After all, if there were zero births, there would be zero deaths.) But as I understand it the population in question is growing, not declining, so I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that a lot of babies who would have died had they been born in 1990 have a much better chance of survival now

FP: The important questions are where the babies are born and what happens to them after they are born. Europe is dying, the Arabs/Muslims multiply and experience unemployment and sexual oppression and frustration and are fodder for Jihad.

Obama’s uncle is called a fugitive (h/t PowerLine)

Obama is the second relative of the president to have defied a deportation order, reigniting debate over illegal immigration and raising questions about how a man who had lived in the United States illegally for years had managed to secure a job, a Massachusetts driver’s license, and apparently, a federal Social Security number, without being detected by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people who have been ordered deported and just ran off and nobody’s looking for them,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict controls on immigration….
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UPDATE: The Boston Herald observes today that Uncle Onyango — the Herald continues to refer him as Obama Onyango rather than Onyango Obama — “could be a beneficiary of his nephew’s new go-easy policy on foreigners facing deportation.” As I observed yesterday, one would have to guess that this story, like Aunt Zeituni’s, will have a happy ending, at least for Uncle Onyango.

FP: Obama’s policy, then, makes official the de-facto failure of the US to enforce its borders, one of the core indicators of collapse.

Comments on Reads 9/30

Caroline Glick: The Perils of a Remilitarized Sinai

Supported by the Obama administration, the Egyptians say they need to deploy forces in the Sinai in order to rein in and defeat the jihadist forces now running rampant throughout the peninsula. Aside from attacking Israel, these jihadists have openly challenged Egyptian governmental control over the territory.
So far the Israeli government has given conflicting responses to the Egyptian request. Defense Minister Ehud Barak told The Economist last week that he supports the deployment of Egyptian forces. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he would consider such deployment but that Israel should not rush into amending the peace treaty with Egypt.
Israel's Confusion over Egypt's strategic direction and interests echoes its only recently abated confusion over Turkey's strategic direction in the aftermath of the Islamist AKP Party's rise to power in 2002. Following the US's lead, despite Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's hostile rhetoric regarding Israel, Israel continued to believe that he and his government were interested in maintaining Turkey's strategic alliance with Israel. That belief began unraveling with Erdogan's embrace of Hamas in January 2006 and his willingness to turn a blind eye to Iranian use of Turkish territory to transfer arms to Hezbollah during the war in July and August 2006.
Still, due to US support for Erdogan, Israel continued to sell Turkey arms until last year. Israel only recognized that Turkey had transformed itself from a strategic ally into a strategic enemy after Erdogan sponsored the terror flotilla to Gaza in May 2010.
As was the case with Turkey under Erdogan, Israel's confusion over Egypt's intentions has nothing to do with the military rulers' behavior. Like Erdogan, the Egyptian junta isn't sending Israel mixed signals.

FP: Judging from Israel’s request to delay the UN report on the Marmara flotilla I would argue that Israel has yet to accept that Turkey is now an enemy. For quite a while Israel has refused to accept the hostility from both the Arab/Muslim world and the West. Its entire strategy is one of appeasement and wishful thinking, rather than offense to defeat its enemies. Not sustainable.

Claire Berlinski: Why the Government Shouldn't Be in the Real Estate Business

A Ricochet member posted this item on his Facebook page with an apposite comment: "Why the government shouldn't be in the real estate business: Buy high, sell low."

The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private investors--vulture funds.
These homes, which are now the property of the U.S. government, the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. citizens collectively, are going to be sold to private investor conglomerates at extraordinarily large discounts to real value.
You and I will not be allowed to participate.

FP: So much for the free market propaganda. The kleptocratic corporate welfare state in action. Robbing the taxpayer blind. After so many years of this, is there any wonder that the US is bankrupt and the big corporate shareholders filthy rich?

PowerLine: All in the family

The saga of the extended Obama family continues to amaze. In the closing days of the 2008 campaign, we met Barack Obama’s Aunt Zeituni, the woman whom he fondly recalled from his voyage to Kenya in Dreams From My Father. (Her name is Zeituni Onyango and she is the half-sister of Barack Obama, Sr.)
In the closing days of the campaign Aunt Zeituni was found, not in Kenya, but rather holed up in public housing in South Boston, living on welfare while residing illegally in the United States subject to a deportation order. Since that time, however, her immigration case has arrived at a happy ending, at least for her. She has been granted the status of a legal resident; taxpayers will continue to foot the bill for the pleasure of her company.
Now comes Aunt Zeituni’s brother, Obama Onyango — Uncle Obama, also known as Uncle Omar. Uncle Obama was apprehended for drunken driving in Framingham, Massachusetts, over the weekend when he had a near collision with a Framingham police officer outside the Chicken Bone Saloon a block from his Framingham home. “I think I will call the White House,” Uncle Obama said when the the arresging officer offered him his one phone call. He apparently hadn’t heard that his nephew was vacationing over in the Vineyard.
The Boston Herald reports that immigration authorities had been on the lookout for Uncle Obama and found him after he was busted for drunk driving. Uncle Obama too was subject to a pending deportation order. He’s currently locked up in Plymouth County Jail on an immigration warrant. He too is residing illegally in the United States, though the Herald also reports that he has possessed a valid Massachusetts driver’s license and Social Security number since at least 1992. He appears to be doing well, though the news reports have not yet identified the sources of Uncle Obama’s financial support.
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Uncle Obama is represented in his immigration case by the same lawyer who represented Aunt Zeituni. One suspects that his immigration case will also have a happy ending, at least for him. Why not?

FP: Kind of explains Obama’s immigration and welfare policy, no?

Female soldiers told to leave unit after male yeshiva students join

Four female soldiers told to leave battalion because male yeshiva students said they were not permitted to serve in the same unit with women • Female soldiers: They are disposing of us not because we are not good soldiers but because we are women

Brawl erupts between Ramat Beit Shemesh religious groups

Fight breaks out when ultra-Orthodox parents arrive at school belonging to nationalist-religious parents • Ultra-Orthodox are protesting school's decision to admit girls as it is located near ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.

FP: Israel’s own dark ages and very dangerous social future.

Comments on Reads 8/29 II

Mark Steyn: The Desperation-of-Deprivation Myth

To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt, and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, Newsnight immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is “education and jobs,” but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you’ve got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education.
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The problem for the Western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”), the ritual of work — of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life — has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR. I was talking to a trustiefundie Vermont student the other day who informed me her ambition is to “work for a non-profit.”
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The entire state of Vermont is becoming a non-profit. And so in a certain sense is an America that’s 15 trillion dollars in the hole, and still cheerfully spending away.
In between the non-profit class and the non-working class, we have diverted too much human capital into a secure and undemanding bureaucracy-for-life: President Obama has further incentivized statism as a career through his education “reforms,” under which anyone who goes into “public service” will have their college loans forgiven after ten years.

FP: True, but this obscures the root of the West’s decline, which is mainly the enormous waste on foreign aid and the corporate welfare state. In such circumstances it is impossible to leave the majority of the taxpaying public to go down the drain without violent political upheaval. It’s this reinforcing dual dynamic of kleptocracy and public spending that bankrupts the West.

Heather Mac Donald: Great Courses, Great Profits

And the company offers a treasure trove of traditional academic content that undergraduates paying $50,000 a year may find nowhere on their Club Med–like campuses. This past academic year, for example, a Bowdoin College student interested in American history courses could have taken “Black Women in Atlantic New Orleans,” “Women in American History, 1600–1900,” or “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs,” but if he wanted a course in American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War, he would have been out of luck. A Great Courses customer, by contrast, can choose from a cornucopia of American history not yet divvied up into the fiefdoms of race, gender, and sexual orientation, with multiple offerings in the American Revolution, the constitutional period, the Civil War, the Bill of Rights, and the intellectual influences on the country’s founding. There are lessons here for the academy, if it will only pay them heed.
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The most striking thing about the Great Courses’ humanities curriculum, however, is how often the same thinkers appear across a large range of courses. The canon has been “problematized” in the academy, but it is alive and well in these recordings. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Paul, Erasmus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Molière, Pope, Swift, Goethe, and others are foregrounded again and again as touchstones of our civilization.
So totalitarian is the contemporary university that professors have written to Rollins complaining that his courses are too canonical in content and do not include enough of the requisite “silenced” voices. It is not enough, apparently, that identity politics dominate college humanities departments; they must also rule outside the academy. Of course, outside the academy, theory encounters a little something called the marketplace, where it turns out that courses like “Queering the Alamo,” say, can’t compete with “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.”
But the educational market works very differently inside the academy and outside it, and the consumers of university education are largely to blame. Almost no one comparison-shops for colleges based on curricula. Parents and children select the school that will deliver the most prestigious credentials and social connections. Presumably, some of those parents are Great Courses customers themselves—discerning buyers regarding their own continuing education, but passive check writers when it comes to their children’s. Employers, too, ignore universities’ curricula when they decide where to send recruiters, focusing only on the degree of IQ-sorting that each college exercises sub rosa.

FP: The other root of Western decline: the substitution of education with vocational training and ideological indoctrination.

Niall Ferguson: In Gaddafi’s Wake

It still works. The outcome in Libya was decided by the United States and its European allies. China may have the world’s fastest-growing economy, but its leaders have been more or less irrelevant. Last week, they belatedly recognized the legitimacy of the rebels’ National Transitional Council. Doing so only after the rebels were inside Gaddafi’s compound redefines “behind the curve.”
It still works. But it’s not enough. Even as the world’s media relayed the drama of the Last Days of Gaddafi, my thoughts were elsewhere. I was asking myself about Iraq, where 70 people were killed in a single day earlier this month. I was thinking about Afghanistan, where the war against the Taliban is far from won. I was wondering about Yemen, which still teeters on the brink of anarchy. Above all, I was worrying about Somalia, where Josette Sheeran of the World Food Program warns that 2 million people could die because the Islamist militants known as Al-Shabab are preventing the distribution of emergency food supplies to the famine-stricken south of the country.
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The most obvious lesson of the Bush presidency, unfortunately, is that toppling the tyrant is the easy part. Ensuring that all those nice human rights now take root in Libya is going to be much tougher.
Since the beginning of the Arab revolutions more than six months ago, I have repeatedly warned that the chances of a happily-ever-after ending are much lower than the chances of escalating violence across the region.
Coming soon: the rebel factions in Libya get down to the serious business of fighting ... each other.

FP: How the waning West accelerated its downfall by facilitating the PostWest. And here is what the latter brings: Libya: Inside Tripoli's warehouse of horror.

AP EXCLUSIVE: US-Taliban talks were making headway

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Infuriated that Washington met secretly at least three times with a personal emissary of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Afghan government intentionally leaked details of the clandestine meetings, scuttling the talks and sending the Taliban intermediary into hiding, The Associated Press has learned.
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This is who we were talking to:
Bomb planted in child's tricycle kills 11 people in northwestern Pakistan, police say
Afghan suicide car bomb kills three children
Car bomb in southern Afghan city kills 4
Cross-border attack: Taliban militants kill 32 security personnel
Teen suicide bomber kills at least 47 in Pakistan
Taliban suicide bombers kill 8 in attack at British compound

FP: What exactly were we fighting for, again?

Egypt’s press blames Israel for Eilat terror attack
Al-Ahram, the 126-year-old government mouthpiece that has Egypt’s largest circulation, ran an editorial last week accusing Israel of planning an assault on Egyptian soldiers.

“He errs who thinks that the events in Sinai were not premeditated by Israel and by terror organizations that have been infiltrated by the Israeli security apparatuses,” it said, according to a report released this weekend by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
The editorial said peace with the Jewish state was foisted upon the Egyptian people against its will and must be overturned: “The people, which never accepted the peace with [Israel]... will not be dragged [into] a stupid [deed] or into providing Israel with free excuses to be used against Egypt. What is certain is that Israel has opened the gates of hell for itself with its own hands.”

FP: With Israel apologizing and appeasing left and right will not end well.

Comments on Reads 8/29

CAMERA: Abbas Rejects Recognizing Israel as the Jewish State

In an August 28, 2011, article, YNET reports, "the Palestinian Authority will not be recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday, adopting a belligerent tone ahead of his planned statehood bid in September."
Highlighting this ongoing rejection of the Jewish State, the YNET article goes on to report,
The Palestinian leader also criticized demands made by the International Quartet of his Authority, urging the international community to back off. "Don't order us to recognize a Jewish state," Abbas said. "We won't accept it."
Abbas, as well as, the Fatah group which he leads, are often presented as moderates. Yet, they, like Hamas, their counterpart in the unity govenment, continue to reject the basic principle of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
The international Quartet (US, Europe, Russia and the UN) set three conditions for any Palestinian government to attain international legitimacy. These basic conditions are recognizing Israel's right to exist, renouncing terrorism and violence, and accepting previous agreements and obligations. Violating all three conditions this past week, Abbas rejected the Jewish State, failed to condemn the recent terrorist attack against Israel, and continued to move forward on the bid for statehood through a UN vote, in clear violation of previous agreements.

FP: If I had to bet, I would say that the Quartet and Israel will cave yet again and waive these requirements for negotiations. And they’ll do it despite this:

'UN recognition won't stop PA demand for right of return'

Abbas tells Jordanian paper that PLO will continue fight for Palestinian refugees even if a Palestinian state is recognized on the pre-1967 lines.

Remember who predicted it first and I would be very glad to be proven wrong.

Elder of Ziyon: PA accuses Israel of stealing organs from terrorists

Palestine Today reports that PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs, Issa Qaraqe, said that Israel is the largest global hub for trafficking in human organs, and is harvesting organs of "martyrs."
He said Israel is holding the bodies of the terrorists to "avenge" them and their families, as well as to hide the "crimes" Israel did to their bodies.
It is unlikely that anyone will denounce these outrageous and libelous claims.
In June, Israel refused to hand over the bodies of some 84 terrorists after initial reports to the contrary, instead keeping them as a bargaining chip in helping to get Gilad Shalit released.

FP: They’re ready for a state, let’s give it to them.

Jan van Delft (at Martin Kramer’s Facebook)

“MERIA” ran a good article about the Islamization of Egypt – five years ago. Some highlights:

Mosques broadcast prayers (including at early dawn) over public speakers, and religious recordings have replaced popular music in most transport vehicles (taxis, buses, and minibuses) as well as in shops. It is not unusual to see Metro (subway) cars turned into preaching (proselytizing) forums by feverish zealots … At government administration offices, it is common for employees to spend most of the workday (already among the shortest in the world) performing ritual ablution and prayers. Office managers and senior directors often double as prayer leaders … The national carrier, EgyptAir, which for years has banned serving alcohol on all flights, also recites at every take-off and landing the “Invocation of Travel,” originally intended for desert trips on camelback. While alcohol is still not totally banned in the country, local authorities in the governorates have over the past several years gradually restricted its sale to “tourist” areas. This is done to feign public piety or simply to avoid possible attacks by Islamists on bars and other places where alcohol is sold.
http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2006/issue3/jv10no3a7.html

Who would want to spend his vacations in such a country?
FP: And if the MB, like the Taliban, destroys the pyramids, there will no reason whatsoever to visit. But that won’t stop the West paying jizziya; in fact, the harsher the Islamism, the more money it will pump.

PowerLine: Germany Reconsiders

Christian Wulff, Germany’s president, stunned the country last week by accusing the European Central Bank of going “far beyond its mandate” with mass purchases of Spanish and Italian debt, and warning that the Europe’s headlong rush towards fiscal union stikes at the “very core” of democracy. “Decisions have to be made in parliament in a liberal democracy. That is where legitimacy lies,” he said.

This, of course, goes to the heart of the issue. Europe’s elites have forced union, monetary and otherwise, on unwilling populations that have grown increasingly, and appropriately, surly. The European project as envisioned by the elites never has had democratic legitimacy, and a great many chickens are now coming home to roost.
Perhaps the votes will be cobbled together to go ahead with the planned bailout. But one way or another, monetary union appears to be doomed, sooner rather than later.

FP: I’ve long maintained that the EU is an anti-democratic super-structure imposed by an authoritarian European elite on the public for the purpose of exploitation and control, allied with the corporate world in the fashion of the corporate welfare state in the US. It has been destroying Europe faster than in the US (see next).

Andrew McCarthy: Losing Malmo

And Brussels, and Rome, and Amsterdam
Do you remember the jihadist terror campaign that ravaged Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city? Do you recall the bombings, the suicide-hijackings, and the random assassinations that finally coerced the city to surrender to Islamization?
No? Funny, I don’t remember them either. Yet there is no question that Malmo has surrendered. Large enclaves of the city, like similar enclaves throughout Western Europe, have earned the dread label “no-go zone.” They are unsafe for non-Muslims, particularly women who do not conform to Islamist conventions of dress and social interaction. They are especially perilous for police, firefighters, and emergency-medical technicians.
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There is a simple reason why this has happened to Malmo, and why it is happening in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, etc. The European Union forced on its member states the same approach to their swelling Muslim populations that the Obama administration is now trying to strong-arm American cities and states into adopting. It is a suicide theory, holding that the only threat to our security is “violent extremism.”
Violent extremism, the theory goes, is wanton and irrational. Therefore, it is mere coincidence that today’s violent extremists are almost uniformly Muslims. Indeed, the big thinkers settled on the antiseptic term “violent extremism” specifically to avoid the word “terrorism,”  which, owing to the inconvenience that Islamic scripture adjures Muslims to “strike terror into the hearts” of their perceived enemies, would give violent extremism an Islamic connotation that is to be studiously avoided, no matter how accurate it may be.

FP: The PostWest.

Collected Links

Vali Nasr: If the Arab Spring Turns Ugly

Bruce Riedel: Brezhnev in the Hejaz

M K Bhadrakumar: Israel turns tables on Turkey

Adi Schwartz: A Tragedy Shrouded in Silence: The Destruction of the Arab World's Jewry

Victor Davis Hanson: The Middle East Mess< Caroline Glick: Glenn Beck's revealing visit

Leonard Spector: Assad's Chemical Romance

Lee Smith: Embroiled

Gary C. Gambill: Assad Knows What He's Doing

Michael Doran: The Nexus and the Olive Tree

Harold Bloom on Literary Criticism

Comments on News and Reads 8/28

'Netanyahu asks US to delay UN 'Marmara' report 6 months'

According to the Channel 2 report, Netanyahu told the US that in six months time he expects to be stronger politically and better able to deal with the consequences of the report's publication.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced on Friday that the Palmer Report on the Marmara incident will be postponed for the third time and will be published at the beginning of next month, according to Army Radio. The report was originally to be released on May 15, but was postponed at Turkey’s request.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has asked the United States to delay publication of the UN report on last year's raid of the Mavi Marmara flotilla ship by six months, Channel 2 reported on Sunday.

FP: That would be outright stupid, particularly if he still believes that he can bring Turkey back into a beneficial relationship. But this would hardly be surprising: when it was announced that Israel would not apologize to Turkey I still expected the Netanyahu-Barak duo to look for ways to appease anyway. It’s their core strategy.

'Single strike would not halt Iran's nuclear program'

Senior defense official says Iran's nuclear program not easily derailed like Iraq or Syria: "There is no one silver bullet you can hit and that's over"; claims Iranian regime's biggest fear is US.

FP: And this is equally stupid: for the life of me I can’t figure out why should this be declared.

Abbas: Palestinians will never recognize a Jewish state

PA President: Palestinians want to fulfill their dream of a sovereign state on territories occupied in 1967 • Lieberman: Abbas's "true goal" behind September plan is "Palestinian state in place of Israel."

FP: So let’s negotiate with him … (see next)

Barak to Ashton: Palestinian UN bid counterproductive

Defense minister says negotiations only way to reach peaceful solution; EU foreign affairs chief in region in last-minute bid to restart talks.

FP: … but for what? More unreciprocated concessions, what else? As

Libyan NTC: We won't hand over Lockerbie bomber

Neighbors describe Megrahi, a man charged with orchestrating Pan Am 103 attack that killed 270, as a wealthy recluse surrounded by guards.

FP: Uhuh. What a surprise.

Vali Nasr: If the Arab Spring Turns Ugly

The specter of protracted bloody clashes, assassinations and bombings, sectarian cleansing and refugee crises from Beirut to Manama, causing instability and feeding regional rivalry, could put an end to the hopeful Arab Spring. Radical voices on both sides would gain. In Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, it is already happening.
NONE of this will benefit democracy or American interests. But seeking to defuse sectarian tensions wherever they occur would help ensure regional stability. Even if Washington has little leverage and influence in Syria, we should nevertheless work closely with our allies who do. Turkey, which is a powerful neighbor, could still pressure the Assad government not to inflame sectarian tensions. And both Turkey and Saudi Arabia could use their influence to discourage the opposition from responding to President Assad’s provocations.

FP: On the contrary: it is in the West’s interest that they exhaust themselves in fighting among themselves, rather than wage Jihad.

Gretchen Morgenson: The Rescue That Missed Main Street

If these rescues were intended to benefit everyday Americans, as Mr. Paulson contended, they have failed. Main Street is in a world of hurt, facing high unemployment, rampant foreclosures and ravaged retirement accounts.
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“During the housing bubble and the economic meltdown that the bursting bubble brought about, the interests of domestic and foreign financial institutions were much better represented than the interests of society as a whole.”
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Given the degree to which financial regulators are captured by the companies they oversee, prescriptions like Mr. Kane’s are going to be fought hard. But the battle could not be more important; if we do nothing to protect taxpayers from the symbiotic relationship between the industry and their federal minders, we are in for many more episodes like the one we are still digging out of.
…
“Bailing out firms indiscriminately hampered rather than promoted economic recovery,” Mr. Kane continued. “It evoked reckless gambles for resurrection among rescued firms and created uncertainty about who would finally bear the extravagant costs of these programs. Both effects continue to disrupt the flow of credit and real investment necessary to trigger and sustain economic recovery.”
As for making money on the deals? Only half-true, Mr. Kane said. “Thanks to the vastly subsidized terms these programs offered, most institutions were eventually able to repay the formal obligations they incurred.” But taxpayers were inadequately compensated for the help they provided, he said. We should have received returns of 15 percent to 20 percent on our money, given the nature of these rescues.

FP: It used to be that such bailouts were once per a decade. But the unbounded destructive greed of Wall Street is forcing them now 2-3 times per decade and if this is tolerated, even that will not be enough. By privatizing gambling and fraudulent profits and socializing cost, the corporate-government alliance has been irreversibly bringing America down the drain. The claim of free market is pure propaganda: it is only for Main Street, corporations and Wall Street are protected.

Comments on Reads 8/27 II

On verge of Gaza war

Hamas doesn’t want war
Officials quickly discovered that Hamas was embarrassed and confused by the fact that someone in the organization assumed responsibility for ending the lull and firing rockets at Ofakim and Beersheba that caused casualties. As it turned out, Hamas did not fire the rockets, and even sent police officers in an attempt to curb the shooters. Hamas heads directly approached the Americans and Egyptians and sought a ceasefire. Israel was aware of these inquiries virtually in real time.
Hamas chiefs did not plan or want this confrontation; not now. They were concerned about being blamed that they are pulling the rug from under Mahmoud Abbas ahead of the September independence bid. Moreover, the economic situation in Gaza is worsening. The government is having trouble paying salaries, with the amount of money pouring into the Strip at this time being a fraction of past fund transfers.
At this time, officials in the Strip need calm and support from Cairo in the contacts on the Gilad Shalit swap. Hamas also fears that Egypt would close the Rafah Crossing. Furthermore, Hamas leaders in Gaza realized that what Israel characterized as a “disproportional response” to the rocket fire was merely the groundwork for a large-scale operation.

FP: Whether it likes it or not Israel will be forced sooner or later to destroy Hamas, as despite the logic of it, the Gazans won’t do it. And what has the best chance of success at least price is precisely when Hamas does not want war!!! This is a reality that Israel keeps refusing to accept and for which it pays a heavy price in life and treasure again and again, because it permits Hamas to initiate violence whenever it wants it.

Bruce Riedel: Brezhnev in the Hejaz

Pakistan, whose own relations with Washington are deteriorating, is a long-standing ally. Islamabad has been the largest recipient of Saudi foreign aid for decades, and Saudi and Pakistani intelligence connections are extremely close. Riyadh provided sanctuary in exile to former prime minister Nawaz Sharif after the Musharraf coup in 1999 and heavily funds his political party (Sharif is favored to win the country’s next election). During the tumultuous years after the Iranian Revolution, Islamabad provided thousands of troops to defend the Kingdom, with its twenty-thousand-strong military presence deployed in Saudi Arabia as the ultimate Praetorian Guard until Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait—when King Fahd found a bigger bodyguard in the U.S. Army. Now Abdullah has turned back to Islamabad for contingency support.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former ambassador to the United States and now Saudi national-security adviser, traveled to Islamabad in late March to raise the prospect of a return engagement for the Pakistani army. Islamabad was quick to say yes. Long before the Bandar trip, a Pakistani battalion was already in Bahrain to back up the Khalifas if needed. Other Pakistani advisers or retired officers man much of the armed forces of the UAE and Oman.
Bandar also traveled to China to offer lucrative contracts in return for political support. No friend of the Arab Spring, Beijing is eager for Saudi oil and investment. Bandar secretly negotiated the first big Saudi-Chinese arms deal (for intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the 1980s) and is the Kingdom’s premier China expert. Abdullah has long been a believer in the notion that China and India are the future markets for Arabian energy. He made his first trip as king to them.
Saudi foreign policy is always pragmatic and adaptive. Despite their disappointment at Mubarak’s fall, the Saudis have reached out to the new power centers in Cairo as well. They have offered economic aid and debt relief to the transition government. The Kingdom has been a sanctuary for the Muslim Brotherhood for decades and doubtless will try to cash in on that connection in the new Egypt. Abdullah has long-standing ties to Brotherhood leaders across the Arab world.

FP: A glimpse at the beginning of the PostWest without America.

James Kirchick: Will Egypt be too busy to hate?

It would be a mistake to think that the views expressed at last week's protest are separate from the Egyptian mainstream. Anti-Semitism is the common political language in Egypt. It is the one thing on which all the major political factions can agree - from secular "liberals" to Islamists. While they'll say the most awful things about each other behind closed doors, the one group these two will happily slander in public are Jews or Israelis. For instance, two months ago, at a conference in Budapest sponsored by the Tom Lantos Institute and the Center for Democratic Transition, the vice chairman of Egypt's legendary (and ostensibly "liberal" ) Wafd party declared that "the Holocaust is a lie" and that Anne Frank's diary is a forgery. "Gas chambers and skinning them alive and all this?" he asked rhetorically. "Fanciful stories."
…
A remark like this in a Western democracy would result in the end of one's political career, if not a jail sentence. But "anti-Semitism remains the glue holding Egypt's disparate political forces together," according to the young Egyptian writers Amr Bargisi and Samuel Tadros, whose prescient article two years ago, "Why are Egypt's 'Liberals' Anti-Semitic?," caused a stir back home. In his new book, "The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East," Reuel Marc Gerecht observes that "Dinner parties with the conspiracy-afflicted Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian secularized elites, for example, can make Noam Chomsky look nice, introspective and analytically even-handed." Last week, after I stepped out of the office of a prominent liberal political figure, he asked my translator if I was a Jew.
…
After talking to a cross section of people in Egypt, I have come to the conclusion that it is naive to think that Egyptians or, as polls indicate, the Arab world writ large will ever accept the presence of a Jewish state in their midst. Gestures like the much-heralded Arab Peace Initiative are offered by unelected dictatorships; in no way do they express the actual will of the people. It's unclear if even the majority of Palestinians support a two-state solution, despite the official negotiating position of the corrupt and sclerotic Palestinian Authority. Most of those Arabs who say they support a two-state solution do so only because that is the stance of the PA; were the Palestinians to one day renounce their recognition of Israel (a recognition that does not extend to the state's Jewish identity ), then those Arabs who follow the lead of the Palestinian leadership would respond in kind. Arabs are willing to tolerate Israel, but my fear is that's the most that can ever be expected. It is with this reality in mind that Benjamin Netanyahu has been so insistent on Palestinians recognizing not only Israel's right to exist, but its right to exist as a Jewish state.
All this means that attempts by American administrations and leftist Israelis to alter Arab attitudes by hastily arranging a two-state solution, thereby falling into the trap of "linking" the Palestinian issue to a variety of regional and global problems, are a waste of time. To be sure, the Palestinians deserve justice and a state for their own sake, but the impulse to do right by them should not be animated by a desire to achieve the chimera of Arab approval. Attempts to please the "Arab street" - which will work itself into a froth of rage over Israelis mistakenly killing five Egyptian soldiers, but seems complacent at Bashar Assad killing thousands of his own people - are as fruitless as they are dangerous.
Egypt has massive domestic problems on its hands, and one would think that a wrecked economy, rising Islamism, and increasing lawlessness as the result of a gutted police force would convince most Egyptians to turn inward rather than rattle for confrontation with the Zionist entity. But massive social and political dysfunctions are nothing new in the Arab world. Indeed, they are endemic. And far from convincing elites of the need to focus on self-improvement, the backwardness of Arab societies has made the appeal of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism - blame-shifting in general - all the more appealing.

FP: The first thing I learned in graduate school was that Jew/Israel hatred was about the only unifying force for Arabs/Muslims. That they won’t accept Israel in their midst has been obvious except to those who are utter ignorants or refuse to accept reality. The real problem is the West has increasingly accepted and is actively supporting that hatred.

Rick Richman: Ready for a 'state'? (h/t Israel Matzav)

When you have an unelected “president” who rules by decree; when your “High Court” is a Potemkin one; when your president repeatedly cancels even local elections; when a terrorist group allied with Iran holds half your putative state; when you are trying to “reconcile” with the group you previously promised to dismantle; when you have been offered a state three times in the last decade, refused each offer, and won’t come to the negotiating table to receive a fourth… you just might not be ready for a state.

FP: When it comes to the Palestinians, the definition and all the requirements of a state don’t count. Nothing, and I mean nothing the Palestinians do or don’t do will stop the world from declaring it, with disregard of or hostility to Israel.

Ed Lasky on the Soros funded anti-semitism

FP: I don't remember the details, but when Soros was criticized for his financial influence on Obama administration, there were some who objected to it as anti-semitic. Obviously they either do not know the revolting amorality that is George Soros, nor that whatever he is, he is certainly no Jew. If there is a person who can be considered 'self-hating Jew', it's Soros. Most of those deemed such actually hate not themselves, but other Jews, but Soros hates the fact that he was born a Jew and one of his central drivers is to compensate for that sin.
 
Deeming him a Jew is actually anti-semitic in itself relative to real Jews. Soros is one of those born Jewish who has drawn the wrong lesson from the genocidal anti-semitism of the the Holocaust: instead of combating it he has internalized it. In his childhood in Hungary, while saved doing the rounds with a gentile adopter to rob the Jews to be deported to the camps, he promised himself he would never be again in an inferior, hated position. He hates the existence of proud, nationalistic Jews, because he fears the risk of his Jewishness being associated with them and hated and inferior again.
 
The irony of it is that he's probably the closest to the stereotype of the rich, manipulating, conspiratorial and control-freak Jew--if nominal--that is at the core of anti-semitism, and which his funded institutes are now promoting.

The Soros-supported Center for American Progress blames rich Jews for Islamophobia

The Obama-allied Center for American Progress has released a report that blames Islamophobia in America on a small group of Jews and Israel supporters in America, whose views are being backed by millions of dollars. This "network", according to the news release, have "have worked hard to push narratives that Obama might be a Muslim, that mosques are incubators of radicalization, and that "radical Islam" has infiltrated all aspects of American society -- including the conservative movement.
Who are the figures mentioned as the promoters of prejudice? Most of them are prominent Jews and supporters of Israel, such as David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson (the founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism). The eight foundations mentioned as funding this effort include are almost exclusively ones founded and funded by Jewish donors, and lest readers not be aware of this fact, the Center for American Progress lists not only the other beneficiaries of the charities and foundations (most of them having Jewish or Israel in the title) but also goes to the trouble of naming the individuals behind these charities -- not just the donors but also those who serve on the boards.

Why include this additional information except to highlight that Jewish people are behind this effort to "defame" Muslims? By "outing" the people involved, the report puts endangers them. Furthermore, this "report" relies on the conspiracy and age-old anti-Semitic trope that Jews fan prejudice towards others and promotes divisions for their own nefarious purposes (to support Israel in this case). This mindset is straight out of Mein Kampf.

The report also stokes the view that rich Jews operate behind the scenes and use their wealth to control the media and government policy (politicians are also mentioned as being ensnared in this web).

The Center for American Progress was founded by Herbert and Marion Sandler (prominent mortgage bubble billionaires who partner with George Soros in his political activities). The Center for American Progress to a great extent is funded by George Soros and his Open Society Institute. George Soros is a fierce opponent of Israel and alleges that the Israel "lobby" all but controls American foreign policy. This view is echoed by Stephen Walt who flags this report in his column at the Foreign Policy .

CAP has very close ties to the White House. It is headed by John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton's chief of staff, and headed Barack Obama's transition team. A man closely linked to the last 2 Democrat presidents is publishing this kind of material. Podesta's group remains influential with President Obama. Bloomberg News noted this relationship in its column, "Soros-funded Democratic Idea Factory Becomes Obama Policy Front." Some key administration officials have come from the CAP as well. These include such anti-Israel figures as Van Jones, who, after he was forced to leave the White House when his views became known, returned to his sinecure at the Center.

Clearly, this is a well-funded effort to chill legitimate criticism of Islamic extremism in America. There are also political motivations behind this report since it also tries to refute allegations of ties between Muslims and Barack Obama.  But what is most shameful about this "report" is that it employs classic anti-Semitic tropes, blaming conspiratorial Jews for stoking fear and hatred of Muslims.

This will work its magic in the Muslim world, a substantial fraction of which believes that "defaming" Islam is legitimately punishable by death at the hands of any righteous Muslim. By thoughtfully providing a hit list, the CAP does its part to spread fear and -- yes -- terror among the opponents of radical Islam.

Comments on Reads 8/27

James Kirchick: Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Leader Wants Reforms Across The Arab World

Dealings With Israel
RFE/RL: Do you see Hamas as an allied movement? Do you feel brotherhood with Hamas?
El-Erian: Hamas is a resistance group fighting for freedom and liberation of their lands from occupation. And the West must revise their knowledge about Hamas, [so] that war and terrorism come to an end. And mixing cards and putting Hamas and other resistance groups among terrorist groups, this was a fatal mistake of the West.
…

RFE/RL: Do you believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state?
El-Erian: All Jewish individuals have the right to live among Arab countries. And they lived for decades and centuries in safety in our countries. Existence of a state for Jews is against all rules of states all over the world.
Any state is a state of all citizens, as Egypt is a state for Muslims, Christians, and Jewish. As Morocco is for Jewish, Christians, and Muslims.
RFE/RL: There aren’t many Jews here in Egypt.
El-Erian: To push emigration from Russia, from Poland, from everywhere to be concentrated in one [state] is against any rules of any state.
RFE/RL: So you believe in a single Palestine for everyone, not as a Jewish Israel?
El-Erian: I hope it can be again the big Assyria. For all individuals, for Jordanians, for Palestinians, for Syrians, for Lebanese. You know this was before the Second World War, one state. This region, under the British.
Two states were born after the war. Jordan and Palestine and Israel. And both are still unstable. I hope the revolutions in the Arab world can change the map. All the maps can be changed. Since the Sykes-Picot [Agreement] in 1916, this map was the false one. It is not the one.

…

Spreading Reform Across The Region

RFE/RL: What is the strategy of America?
El-Erian: Support dictatorships. Having oil at low prices. Supporting Israel.
RFE/RL: And you want to see all that change?
El-Erian: This must be changed. This is the triad of war and terrorism also. And this war failed in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in south Lebanon, in Gaza, and failed even in the West. In Europe, the safety of the Europeans [is now a very big thing] and we are going to a new era of international relations.

…

RFE/RL: Do you support maintaining the peace treaty with Israel?
El-Erian: The peace treaty is maintained if both sides respect it. Mubarak during 30 years not only respected it, [he] over-respected this treaty. But during this whole period the treaty was violated by Israel. From the start, bombing [an] Iraqi nuclear factory or nuclear project. And then invading south Lebanon and keeping it under occupation for about eight years.
The main target of the peace treaty was to have two goals, first overall peace in the region, second, an independent Palestinian state. During 35 or 37 years, we have [never had] peace or a state [of peace] due to the Israelis, not the Egyptians.
So violation of the treaty came from the other side. And if Americans are keen about the treaty they must push the other side to respect it.
RFE/RL: So you’re willing to pull out of the treaty, even though it could mean billions of dollars?
El-Erian: This is a decision [for] the parliament or the cabinet.
RFE/RL: What does your party advocate?
El-Erian: We want peace, but without respect [from] the other side of the treaty, [it is] is nonsense.

FP: Let’s allow more Egyptian troops in the Sinai (see also next) and pump billions into Egypt. Particularly given this: Egyptian official rewards protester who removed Israeli embassy flag: Ahmad al-Shahat, known as "Flagman," climbed up the Israeli embassy building and removed the Israeli flag • Shahat was rewarded with new job, new home and badge of honor, Reuters reports

Greg Sheridan: Freedom Could Make Sinai the New Somalia

And the third big trend, in Inbar's view, is the decline of US power, influence and prestige in the Middle East. The Americans sacrificed a friend, in Mubarak, but took no action, not even the deployment of rhetorical enthusiasm, against a long-time enemy, Syria's Assad.
…
Hamas sees how a small terrorist attack can cause a big anti-Israel reaction in Egypt. Although it seems that Hamas was not directly involved in this terrorist attack, it can easily create front groups to carry out attacks to provoke Israel and force Israeli retaliation while avoiding clear-cut blame for itself. It would thus put maximum pressure on the Israel/Egypt peace treaty.
Some of the best Israeli analysts think Hamas might wait to do this until after the next Palestinian elections, in which, if they are free elections, Hamas could very well supplant Fatah as the dominant group in the PA. Hamas, it should be remembered, is a terrorist organisation formally pledged to the complete destruction of Israel.

FP: Let’s give more land to the Arabs.

Washington needs to wake up to the jobs crisis

·   Getting the unemployed re-employed isn't just about economic growth. There are now 6.2 million Americans (more than 44% of the unemployed) who have been out of work for more than a year -- and are dead last on any list of employers seeking to fill positions. These are people whose skills have rusted in a fast-paced global economy, along with twentysomethings who haven't even developed the habit of work. We risk losing a generation of men and women who won't be able find meaningful employment ever again.

·   Washington spends more than $18 billion a year on 47 different training programs -- spread across nine agencies. What has all that bureaucracy and money bought? Employers who complain that they can't find qualified workers -- even in this market (one out of three employers, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute survey). As many as 3 million jobs in this country are sitting unfilled. There is a sharp disconnect between the skills employers need and what unemployed workers have to offer -- and business isn't doing nearly enough to provide training to close that gap. As Nicholas Pinchuk, CEO of Snap-On Inc., aptly put it at a recent jobs forum, "Business has to enter that fray and define it."

·   Safety nets, built to protect people in trouble, are actually contributing to their long-term unemployment -- and thereby hurting their job prospects. A study by the Chicago Fed suggests people go back to work -- and unemployment drops -- when unemployment insurance is set to run out. In fact, some studies indicate that a full percentage point of today's jobless rate can be attributed to folks who are taking advantage of benefits that enable them to collect checks for nearly two years. The Social Security disability program -- intended for the chronically ill -- is morphing into a new form of welfare dependency discouraging nonelderly adults from finding jobs.

·   This isn't 1982, when unemployment topped out at 10.8% -- a bit higher than the Great Recession's October 2009 peak. There is no "Morning in America" on the horizon. All signs point to a continued struggle for people who don't have jobs for long periods of time -- leaving a deeper, more indelible mark on our nation's psyche. Recent studies show that U.S. companies will actually face a talent shortage in 10 years, even as growing numbers of teens drop out of school and millions of once-talented adults fall idle.

FP: More evidence that the US won’t be a factor in the PostWest.

Peter Worthington: Don’t hold your breath waiting for Libyan democracy

Hopes for Libya evolving into a sort of democracy seem misguided and unlikely. News videos of the rebel army entering Tripoli and celebrating by firing weapons non-stop into the air, are not reassuring for those who seek stability, responsibility, restraint.
The term “Arab Spring” is widely applied to the rebellions that have surged through the Middle East this year, as if it is the birth of Arab democracy. In fact none of the “rebels” in countries involved has ever experienced democracy: Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, etc. So the “Arab Spring” may not be what we assume it is.
Another disquieting reality of the “victory” in Libya, is how many leading members of Qaddafi’s regime have suddenly switched sides and now look to support the incoming rebel regime, without knowing what it stands for.
Among these are the second-in-command of Libya’s Intelligence Service, Gen. Khalifah Mohammed Ali, and Foreign Minister Abdelati Obeidi. Are these the sort of guys one wants to lead the “new” Libya?

FP: Looks like another Egypt to me. With added tribal fractures and … see next.

JOSHUAPUNDIT: Libyan Rebels New Commander In Tripoli Is An Al-Qaeda Fighter

To vandalize an old Who song, meet the new boss...worse than the old boss. As Rodrigo Veleda reveals, quoting from Le Parisien, Abdelhakim Belhaj, Tripoli's new military governor and a key figure in Libya's National Transitional Council, the rebel coalition is also a leader of the al-Qaeda affiliate Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. The Arabs certainly know whom he is, even if NATO and the Obama Administration remain clueless. Islamists and al-Qaeda loyalists are pervasive and well represented in the groups comprising the National Transitional Council.
Khaddaffi was a cockroach, but he had evolved into a tame, relatively harmless cockroach who only soiled his own nest. The new species that will be be ruling Libya are likely to be a much deadlier species.

FP: …al-Qaeda infiltration. To those who praised Obama for “victory” in Libya: don’t ever rush to assign Obama achievements.

Comments on Reads 8/26

Martin Kramer (on Facebook)

Essam el-Erian, the 'moderate' voice of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: "All Jewish individuals have the right to live among Arab countries. And they lived for decades and centuries in safety in our countries. But existence of a state for Jews is against all rules of states all over the world.… I hope the revolutions in the Arab world can change the map. All the maps can be changed." Is that not super-radical?

FP: And here’s Israel response: Israel to allow more Egyptian forces into Sinai, Barak says
Egyptian troops, armored vehicles, choppers to be allowed in to deal with growing terror infrastructure, but no tanks • Rivlin: Move will have to pass Knesset • Mass march planned on Israel's Cairo embassy, which is still flying an Egyptian flag.

Adi Schwartz: A Tragedy Shrouded in Silence: The Destruction of the Arab World's Jewry

Thousands of pages of similar testimony have been collecting dust in various government offices since the 1950s. Under the bureaucratic heading “Registry of the Claims of Jews from Arab Lands,” they tell of lives cut short, of individuals and entire families who found themselves suddenly homeless, persecuted, humiliated. Together they relate a tragic chapter in the history of modern Jewry, a chain of traumatic events that signaled the end of a once-glorious diaspora.
Yet for all its historical import, this chapter has been largely repressed, scarcely leaving a mark on Israel’s collective memory. The media seldom mentioned it then, and rarely do so today.
Schools do not devote comprehensive curricula to it, and academia pays it little attention. Indeed, in the past decade only one doctoral dissertation was written on the devastation of Jewish communities in Arab countries. Furthermore, of all the parties represented in Israel’s Knesset, not one has included in its platform an explicit demand for the restitution of these Jews’ property, or the recognition of their violated rights.

FP: Another major strategic blunder of Israel: failure to include the Jewish refugees, what they lost and what their integration cost from 1948 on in all negotiations with the Arabs.

Michael Rubin:Tehran’s Nuclear Endgame

Both inside and outside the State Department, Pentagon, and Old Executive Office Building, officials whisper privately what they will not state publicly: The United States is not prepared to use military force to deny Iran a nuclear weapon. Instead, the United States will rely on traditional deterrence.
Those around the administration, as well as respected analysts, agree. “I don’t think this is a suicidal regime. I don’t dismiss out of hand at all the idea that they could be deterred,” Thomas Fingar, one of the primary authors of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, told National Public Radio two years ago. Joshua Pollack, a columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and government consultant, argued on the same program that deterrence is the least bad option. “The alternatives to deterrence are what, after all?” he explained, pointing out that the costs associated with military action against Iran would be greater than those in Iraq.
…
Qaddafi’s last stand should provide a wake-up call for those who wish to tie American national security to deterrence. Placing a bet on a nuclear Islamic Republic’s desire for self-preservation discounts two important factors: The determination of the Iranian people to be free, and the ideological sincerity of the small elite whose fingers would be on the nuclear button.

FP: The West is neither willing, nor capable to address the Iranian threat and it will pay for it dearly.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Middle East Mess

The center of our Middle East policy should be to ensure vast oil revenues are not translated into subsidizing terrorism aimed at the U.S. and its allies, or used by crazed dictators to absorb other weaker nations to create some sort of Pan-Islamic caliphate or Pan-Arabic belligerent.
That would mean in a post-Saddam world thwarting Assad’s Syria and theocratic Iran, and to the extent we can, steering the third stage of some seven decades of postwar Middle East unrest away from Islamic fundamentalism toward constitutional government, while remaining a strong supporter of Israel. To accomplish those goals, a confident America would (a) have to get its financial house in order; (b) seek to limit blackmail by exploiting all of our own huge and growing fossil fuel reserves; (c) stop backbiting democratic Israel; (d) work where we can and when it is possible with petro-rich Sunni states to isolate Syria and Iran; (e) promote consensual government apart from Islamic republicanism—especially through far more vocal and stealthy support for the Syrian and Iranian protestors. (Suggesting that the Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular would not be part of the plan. Nor would apologizing for past American sins. Nor would publicly rebuking Israel. Nor would outreach to Iran and Syria.)

FP: Even if the US did that tomorrow—and it won’t—it would be too late.

LittleGreenFootballs: Proposed Amendment

Proposed Congressional Reform Act of 2011:
1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. ****The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

FP: Might have prevented the American decline if it had been included in the Constitution.

China expanding its nuclear stockpile

 The underground military facilities also are used to protect and hide command posts and communications  sites, to store weapons and equipment and to protect people.

Richard Fisher, a China military-affairs analyst, said the report is significant for listing strategic nuclear forces that show an estimated increase of up to 25 new ICBMs, some with multiple warheads, in a year, and the first references to China’s program for nationwide missile defenses.
“Taken together, a well-protected, growing ICBM force that will soon have active defenses should be of great concern to the United States,” said Mr. Fisher, of the International Assessment and Strategy Center. “China will not reveal its missile-buildup plans or its [anti-ballistic missile] plans, so this simply is not the time to be considering further cuts in the U.S. nuclear force, as is the Obama administration’s intention.”
…
In 2005, Gen. Zhu Chenghu told reporters in Beijing that if the U.S. military used conventionally armed weapons on Chinese territory, “we will have to respond with nuclear weapons.”

FP: China has nothing to worry about the US—it simply can cut its credit to bring it down without a shot. And anyway, in the PostWest America will be no factor.

IDF develops doctrine for accurate sniper fire

“The snipers could not see well and we used the Amit, which can see in all weather, to put a laser designator on the legs of the protester and then the sniper shot at the laser,” an IDF Ground Forces Command officer explained. “Our goal was not to kill people but to shoot at the legs of the violent protesters who were trying to cross into Israel. This made the shooting more accurate.”
In addition to instituting the use of the Amit, the IDF has also decided to procure new non-lethal weapons that will help disperse large demonstrations and marches that could break out in the West Bank and along Israel’s borders in the north.
Last month, the IDF decided to begin distributing throughout the infantry a new receiver for the standard-issue M-16 semi-automatic rifle that can enable it to shoot a 0.22 mm. round instead of the usual 5.56 mm. bullet. The smaller rounds are not as lethal when fired from a distance.
In addition, the IDF has purchased impact rounds for snipers for use with Remington M-24 7.62 mm. rifles. Impact rounds are usually made of non-lead materials and do not penetrate the skin but deal a painful blow.

FP: In its strategy to appease the world, rather than vanquish its enemies, I srael is sending a genocidal culture a message that it is unwilling to win, thus feeding them hope and guaranteeing the continuation and exacerbation of the conflict. All this creativity and innovation would be much more effectively be spent on defeating Hamas e.g. commando raids into Gaza, rather than preserving attackers to live for another attack.

LittleGreenFootballs: Official PA Daily Cartoon: All of Israel is 'Palestine' and there can be no compromise

[Link: www.hudson-ny.org...]

The Palestinian Authority is telling its people that peace with Israel is not a goal. Instead, the PA says that all of Israel is "Palestine," and that no compromise is acceptable because this principle is "the only red line." This message was expressed by the regular cartoonist, Muhammad Sabaaneh, in the official PA daily.

There really is nothing clever or insightful to add at this juncture in history. Along with the mass demonstrations being organized outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo and the Arab League's reminder that treaties are made to be abrogated (because let's be honest, that is both the sub- and super-text of Elaraby's statement), I am left with the assessment that in Arab relations with Israel, it is a situation of: same shit, different day.

FP: No matter how many times the Palestinians not just say, but also prove this, neither the West nor Israel are willing to accept it and act accordingly. Rather they actively support it.b

Comments on Reads 8/25 II

Daniel Greenfield: Arab Spring for Dummies

The Arab Spring succeeded in dismantling the region’s only enduring Arab-Israeli peace accord. The Camp David Accords signed by Sadat and Begin had been used as a model for regional peace for decades. But with the Obama backed overthrow of Sadat’s successor, it has become worthless.
In troubled times the Muslim world seeks unity by finding external enemies to fight. And Israel has become Egypt’s negative consensus. Egyptian presidential candidates from all sides have disavowed the Camp David Accords. It is the one thing that liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood can agree on.
Mohamed ElBaradei was Obama’s man in Cairo, a board member of Soros’ International Crisis Group and the choice of Western diplomats and reporters to replace Mubarak. But Egyptian voters weren’t biting. Desperate, ElBaradei leapfrogged Ayman Nour and other competitors who had already disavowed the Accords, by going one step further and threatening a war with Israel. ElBaradei’s warmongering bid for popularity showed how dangerous the post-Mubarak Egypt had become.
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Sacrificing the Accords that brought some stability to the region in order to score political points in their election campaigns is a measure of how wildly irresponsible Mubarak’s successors are. And how wildly irresponsible the Obama administration’s actions in Egypt were.
Obama turned on Mubarak for political advantage. And Mubarak’s successors are turning on Israel for political advantage. But all this maneuvering could easily lead to war.
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the junta currently ruling Egypt, is facing a political backlash over its suppression of liberal protesters. The Council is at its weakest in domestic policy, but at its strongest in military affairs. The easiest way for it to score points is to stage an incident with Israel. Which Egyptian activists allege is exactly what happened in the firefight between Egyptian security officers and the Israeli army.
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There is no way that this cycle of escalation can be broken as long as Egyptian politicians continue to disavow the Camp David Accords, while scoring political points by promoting regional instability. The destruction of the Camp David Accords has not only damaged relations between Israel and Egypt, it has undermined the very idea of the regional peace accord. If an accord cannot survive a change of government, then any peace treaty signed with an Arab state is worthless.
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recognized this new reality by conceding that treaties can no longer be signed with states. Instead she’s championing treaties signed with “peoples”. This proposal carries with it a whiff of her infamous fake African proverb, “It Takes a Village”. A village can’t raise a child– and an entire people can’t sign a treaty. Only where there is no father, does a child have to be raised by a village. And only where there is no stable government, does a treaty have to be signed with a people.

FP: Typical American wishful rather than strategic thinking, and no cunning whatsoever.

Raphael D. Frankel: Transforming Hamas Has Implications for Israel-Palestine

Nominally, the Qassam Brigades follows guidelines laid down by the Hamas political bureau, headquartered in Damascus. Based on those guidelines, the Brigades has broad tactical discretion, but it is not free to conduct policy on its own initiative. However it appears that this is exactly what happened when the Brigades declared an end to the ceasefire. Only afterward did the political bureau reign in the military wing, which resumed the quiet with Israel that has mostly held since January 2009.
Instances of the Hamas military wing acting contrary to the political bureau are rare, but not unprecedented. But the degree to which the Brigades so publicly and clearly embarked on its own initiative to attack Israel may be symptomatic of a drift toward hard-core radicalization in its military ranks.
The trend among Hamas fighters toward an ideology that appears more salafi and more like that of al-Qaeda, began when Ahmed al-Ja'abari and Nizar Rayan assumed leadership of the military wing in the mid-2000s. Rayan, who was assassinated by Israel in 2009, used the word kufr (unbeliever or infidel) to describe the secularists in the Palestinian Authority, a pointed departure from the language commonly used by Hamas leaders to describe other Palestinians. Al-Qaeda uses the same word for Arab regimes it seeks to destroy. Ja'abari, who is now the military chief, has stated that his aims are not political, but rather "to fight the enemies of Islam."
Relatively pragmatic voices in Hamas's political bureau have previously warned that far more extremist elements than themselves exist in Gaza, and that if Hamas was not treated as a legitimate interlocutor, the al-Qaeda types would emerge to lead the struggle of violent resistance against Israel. If this scenario were to play out within Hamas itself, the organization would become a far more dangerous threat to the Jewish state than it already is.

FP: It’s not the radicalization of Hamas, but that of Egypt that is of serious concern, because it can turn a source of attrition into an existential threat.

Egypt’s Brotherhood declares war on the bikini

"Beach tourism must take the values and norms of our society into account," Muhammad Saad Al-Katatny, secretary-general of Freedom and Justice, told Egyptian tourism officials on Monday. "We must place regulations on tourists wishing to visit Egypt, which we will announce in advance."
The call for new strictures on tourists comes as Egypt debates the role of Islam in the post-Mubarak era. Freedom and Justice is competing in elections scheduled for this autumn for parliament and opinion polls show a majority of Egyptians favor a greater use of Islamic law and mores. But a vocal minority worries that Egypt risks becoming an Islamic republic.
"This is how things began in Iran," Hani Henry, a psychology professor at the American University in Cairo, told The Media Line. "The moderate youth wanted to implement changes, but the mullah's hijacked the revolution. The same thing is now happening here in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood. It makes me sick to my stomach."

FP: Egypt is to Obama what Iran was to Carter.

Iraqi Leader Backs Syria, With a Nudge From Iran

BAGHDAD — As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.
Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

FP: This validates my early claim that Iraq was a major, possibly lethal, strategic blunder. It has accelerated the US self-inflicted bankruptcy and has wasted lives only to strengthen a mortal enemy.