Tag: the Middle East

As revolution sweeps across the Middle East at a dizzying pace, cries for freedom, equality and an improved standard of living ring out, touching millions around the world and bringing hope to millions more. Finally, their voices are being heard. Progress is being made.

Weeks of turbulent Arab uprisings throughout the Middle East have dislodged dictators and inspired tens of thousands of young Muslims to dream of freedom. Swarming through streets and squares, they have demanded the end of autocratic rule.

Even for a region that has experienced more than its fair share of upheaval, the downfall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak last week was nothing less than a political earthquake.

They all warned us. The geniuses at Peace Now. The brilliant diplomats. The think tanks. Even the Arab dictators warned us. For decades now, they have been warning us that if you want "peace in the Middle East," just fix the Palestinian problem. A recent variation on this theme has been: Just get the Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to "freeze" their construction, and then, finally, Palestinian leaders might come to the table and peace might break out.

U.S. policy is not controlled by an omnipotent Israeli lobby but rather heavily influenced by an equally potent - yet much less visible - Arab lobby that is driven by ideology, oil, and arms to support Middle Eastern regimes that often oppose American values and interests.

Over the years, two Jewish journalists - Thomas Friedman and Mike Wallace - have been the subject of particularly intense vituperation in the letters and e-mails received by the Monitor, and both gentlemen have been scrutinized here on several occasions. One of the most popular columns, in terms of reader response, was a July 2002 piece on Wallace - actually, it was part of a series on Wallace the Monitor ran that summer - which looked at the possible genesis of his troubling attitude toward Israel.

After the recent U.S. election, President Barack Obama unhappily conceded that he had suffered a "shellacking." For the most part, the president was referring to an obviously firm and far-reaching rejection of his domestic policies. Nonetheless, his personal influence has now been weakened generally, including in many areas of U.S. foreign policy. It is fair to ask, therefore, whether his oft-stated preferences for a "Road Map to Peace in the Middle East" (that is, creation of a Palestinian state out of the still-living body of Israel), and also for "a world free of nuclear weapons (that is, a world in which Israel would no longer be able to deter existential attacks) are still a matter of reasonable concern.

President Obama's trip to India last week highlighted India's growing importance to the United States. Similarly, cooperation between India and Israel is expanding, as the importance of each country to the other increases.

I have written about John F. Kennedy in several Media Monitor columns over the years, focusing primarily on the media myth of Camelot that attached itself to the man and his administration almost immediately following his assassination (the term "Camelot" was never once used to describe the Kennedy presidency while Kennedy was still alive).

The creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel would be a major step in the escalation of the Arab war against Israel even if the resumption of that war is delayed for a brief time while the world celebrates the outbreak of a Potemkin peace in the Middle East, produced by the end of Israeli "occupation" of Palestinians.

Date: November 2, 2068Place: Edward Said University, Paris, Islamic Republic of Northern Gaul.Subject: Notes from the Special Guest Lecture today in the course "History of the Middle East," by visiting professor Osama bin Levy.

How desperately I would like to be more "positive" in these columns. Like my ever-faithful readers here at The Jewish Press, I would dearly welcome an opportunity - any opportunity - to discover some real evidence of genuine progress toward peace in the Middle East. But, as always, we Jews are especially obligated to look squarely at things the way they are. Recalling our history as a people, we simply should not expect that our most optimistic inclinations will somehow be wished into truth.

Last week Charles Freeman, nominated as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, was forced to withdraw from consideration because of his previous bile-ridden statements about Israel, his support for the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and his having been a leading apologist for Saudi Arabia (which is hardly surprising considering he was on the Saudis' payroll).

The multiple ironies are staggering. On December 15, 2008, just before mounting his indispensable and purposeful Gaza operation against Palestinian terrorism, Prime Minister Olmert had released 230 Palestinian terrorists. To be sure, these freed terrorists were supposedly Fatah, not Hamas, but Mr. Olmert's underlying strategic calculation was still unreasonable and wholly self-destructive.

Submitted for your amusement, a tale of two columnists, as different as it is humanly possible to be in their view of the Middle East.

It doesn't often happen that two really solid history books arrive simultaneously about almost the same subject, and at a time when so many opportunities for peace in the Middle East have been lost, both are appropriate and important reading.

For years many of us believed the Nobel Peace Prize could not possibly be debased any worse than it was when Shimon Peres and mass murderer Yasir Arafat were honored for plunging the Middle East into an endless cycle of terrorist aggression against Israel and for putting Israel's very survival in jeopardy.

Jews and justice can never be uttered in the same breath. So it is too for the Jewish State, always the individual Jew in macrocosm. Whether it wishes to acknowledge the existential danger or not, Israel's only hope for survival now lies in a well-reasoned and coherent nuclear strategy for dealing with nuclearizing enemies.

What [would be] the effect of Israel-PA agreements in bringing about a Palestinian state? Here, it is altogether probable that Israel's substantial loss of strategic depth would be recognized by Iran as a significant military liability for Tel-Aviv. Such recognition, in turn, could heat up Iranian intentions against Israel, occasioning an accelerated search for relevant capabilities and consequently a heightened risk of nuclear war initiated from Tehran.

I have written previously here about Iran's nuclearization and its accompanying intent to annihilate Israel. Still, the whole story has not yet been told, and it is now time to think more carefully and systematically about ensuring Israel's survival. The time for exclusively visceral reactions is now over. Instead, we must ask: What, precisely, does the Iranian fusion of nuclear capability and genocidal intent really mean for Israel?

Gerald Ford, who passed away last week at age 93, was considered a solid friend of Israel throughout his long Congressional career.

Blessed by newly anticipated changes in American foreign policy, certain of Israel's adversaries could soon attempt to bring the Jewish State into the eternal darkness, into fire, into ice. It is therefore essential for Israel's leadership to take immediate steps to ensure that a Baker-Hamilton [Iraq Study Group heads] engendered failure of Israeli deterrence will not occasion a regional nuclear war. Israel must continue to plan around the sound understanding that nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence remain critically interrelated.

In statements to The Jewish Press this week, Arizona Senator John McCain reacted sharply to an article earlier this month in the Israeli daily Haaretz that he said left "several serious misimpressions" regarding his views on Israel and the Middle East.

Jay Bennish, the Colorado teacher who told his class that the U.S. “is probably the single most violent nation on planet earth” and that President Bush’s State of the Union speech “sound[ed] a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler used to say,” was given a relatively free ride by the national news media.

It is just one more of those unpleasant facts of life that the anti-Israel lobbies of the planet have no real interest in the well being of the Palestinians, but are merely motivated by hostility to Jews.

1. The Arab world has never come to terms with Israel's existence within any set of borders whatsoever and is still seeking the destruction of Israel and its population.

As the Monitor reported last month, veteran "60 Minutes" hatchet man Mike Wallace has, after a brief respite, resumed his familiar role as one of the media's most consistent Jewish critics of Israel. During a number of interviews in recent months Wallace seemed to go out of his way to inject an anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian perspective into the conversation, most notably during a May 22 chat with Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.

If you thought the Monitor was finished with ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings last week, you don't know the Monitor or Peter Jennings. Throughout his career, starting with his years as a Beirut-based correspondent in the late 1960's and early 70's, Jennings has evinced a sharp pro-Palestinian bias - one that goes well beyond the ritualistic bromides mouthed by garden variety journalists who strive with all their might to attain the proper level of political correctness.

"Peter Jennings, Palestinian sympathizer first, journalist second?" is how the conservative Media Research Center (MRC) put it in its CyberAlert of Dec. 4. "Israel," the alert went on, "was the victim of a murderous terrorist attack by a terrorist group, Hamas, which claimed credit.

We refer our readers to the Jerusalem Post editorial appearing below on the topic of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech on the Middle East. But we also offer the following:

There is certainly ample basis for both the positive and negative comments on Secretary Powell's speech. On the negative side of the ledger were his support for a Palestinian state, the dispatch of "special envoys" reminiscent of the Clinton "pressure" years, the use of the term "occupation" when referring to Israel's control over Yehuda and Shomron, and his condemnation of the "settlements."