Writing at Huffington Post, Sigurd Neubauer discusses Israel's booming alliances with Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus and other Balkan countries. Neubauer attributes those ties to Israel's poor relations with Turkey that have forced it to seek alternatives. At the end, he comes up with this (Hat Tip: Joshua I). While improved relations with Athens and Nicosia should be considered a significant foreign policy victory for Netanyahu, it remains unclear whether an alliance with Cyprus and the Balkan states can fully substitute for Israel's former strategic military partnership with Turkey. Given Greece's significant financial problems and Israel's own budgetary restraints, it remains also doubtful whether any of the two countries can "afford" prolonged military tensions presented by an (potentially) adversarial inclined Turkey. Additionally, unless a political solution is found to the 2010 Gaza-Flotilla, the Greek-Israeli military partnership could easily escalate into regional instability as maritime tensions in the eastern Mediterranean with Turkey could become inevitable. For those reasons, coupled with the current regional turmoil presented by the "Arab Spring," Netanyahu's diplomatic outreach to the Balkans and Cyprus should aim to maximize economic and military relations well short of establishing an "anti-Turkish" alliance.Let's get this straight: Israel's relations with Turkey are over unless and until there is a significant change in the Turkish government away from Islamism and back towards secularism. At the moment, that is most unlikely for the foreseeable future. Israel must assume that its rift with Turkey is permanent, not temporary, and it must act accordingly. If forming an anti-Turkish alliance will keep Turkey in check, then by all means, let's do it. Maybe if Greece were not under constant threat from Turkey, it would not be such an economic basket case (admittedly, cleaning up Greece's taxation system would also help).
YNet publishes a deeply disturbing article by Italian journalist Giulio Meotti on the Catholic Church's submission to political Islam. “The default positions vis-à-vis militant Islam are now unhappily reminiscent of Vatican diplomacy’s default positions vis-à-vis communism during the last 25 years of the Cold War,” writes George Weigel, a leading US writer about the Vatican. The Vatican’s new agenda seeks “to reach political accommodations with Islamic states and foreswear forceful public condemnation of Islamist and jihadist ideology.”Between 2006 and 2011, the Church has decided to avoid battles with political Islam. And guess who is paying the price....
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After Regensburg, the Vatican adopted an appeasement agenda. Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who is known for having a pro-Islam position, was appointed by the Pope as the head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
Indeed, Dialogue with Iran’s mullahs is pivotal in the new Vatican agenda. Recently, a delegation of clergy members of Iran’s Islamic Consultative Assembly visited the Vatican, meeting with top Catholic officials.
In June, the Vatican sent Archbishop Edmond Farhat, who is the official representative of Vatican politics, to Tehran to attend an “international conference on the global campaign against terrorism.” Last autumn, Vatican representatives met with Muslim leaders from around the world in Tehran for “a three-day interreligious dialogue.” In Tehran Cardinal Tauran praised Iran’s “spirit of cordiality” and “the friendly Ahmadinejad.”
Last month, the Vatican published a letter written by Tauran, addressing his “Dear Muslim friends.” In the letter, Tauran asked for Islamic help to form an alliance against atheism.
In 2008, the Vatican promoted “Love of God, Love of Neighbor,” the first three-day forum with Islamic leaders. The Pope agreed to meet one the most dangerous Islamist in the Western world, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, Tariq Ramadan - the Swiss scholar who denies Israel’s right to life and who has been banned from entering the US because of his alleged association with extremists.
Last May, Bishop Mariano Crociata, secretary general of the Italian Episcopal Conference, announced that the Vatican is in favor of building new mosques in Europe. A month later the European Bishops met with European Muslims in Turin (Cardinal Tauran was also present) to proclaim the need for the “progressive enculturation of Islam in Europe.”
In Rimini, a seaside resort on the Adriatic coast, the Comunione e Liberazione movement, one of the most powerful in the Catholic Church, holds its massive annual “meeting” that usually draws some 700,000 people. The Catholic movement last month hosted the president of Al Azhar, the most important Islamic university in Cairo, and a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the fact that for the first time the US Commission on Religious Freedom recommended that Egypt be placed on a list of the “worst of the worst” countries for persecution of Christians.
The State of Israel is easily expendable in the new pro-Islam policy. In January 2009, thousands of Muslims marched in front of Milan’s Duomo to protest against Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. They burned Israeli flags and chanted anti-Jewish slogans. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, John Paul II’s spokesman for 22 years, defended the “freedom of expression” of the Muslims who burned the Star of David.But Israel is not the only victim. The Church has remained silent in the face of Islamic persecution of Christians - and not just persecution of the Copts in Egypt.
Months later, Pope Benedict visited Bethlehem, where the Christian population has dropped from a majority to less than 20%. Benedict delivered a message of solidarity to the 1.4 million Palestinians isolated in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. He said nothing of the suffering of Gaza’s 3,000 Christians since Hamas took over that territory in 2007.
Benedict could have decried the bombings, shootings and other Islamist attacks against Gaza Christian establishments, the brutal murder of the only Bible-store owner of Gaza, or the regular intimidation and persecution of Christians there. Instead, the Pope stood beside Mahmoud Abbas as the Palestinian leader deceptively pointed to a concrete separation barrier in Bethlehem and blamed that barrier, as well as Israeli “occupation,” for the plight of Christians.
A few weeks later, the United Nations ran “Durban II” and on the first day of the conference, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the only head of state to attend, made a speech condemning Israel as “totally racist” and referred to the Holocaust as an "ambiguous and dubious question.” When Ahmadinejad began to speak against the Jews, all European Union delegates left the conference room. The Vatican delegation didn’t say a word.
Over the past several years, Christians have endured bombings, murders, assassinations, torture, imprisonment and expulsions. The very roots of the Christian heritage in the Middle East are being extirpated. When last winter Christians were killed in Egypt, Cardinal Tauran and the Vatican foreign office requested to “avoid anger” and downplayed the Islamist role in the butchering.Will the Church be silent if Europe goes Muslim too? Read the whole thing.
In the summer of 2010, Bishop Luigi Padovese, Vatican vicar for Anatolia and president of the Catholic Episcopal conference of Turkey, was slaughtered by Islamic fanatics in Iskenderun on the eve of the Pope’s trip to Cyprus. Vatican diplomacy did its part to convince the Pope to immediately and preemptively rule out the idea that this was a “political or religious” murder.
Elsewhere, the number of Christians in Turkey declined from two million to 85,000; in Syria, from half the population they have been reduced to 4%; in Jordan, from 18% to 2%; nearly two-thirds of the 500,000 Christians in Baghdad have fled or been killed; in Lebanon, Christians have dwindled to a sectarian rump, menaced by surging Shiite and Sunni populations, and in Saudi Arabia Christians have been beaten or tortured by religious police.
It’s an ethnic cleansing of monumental proportions that makes it clear why the Vatican’s submission to political Islam, along with its religious anti-Israel stance, will be remembered as one of the greatest moral failings of the 21st Century.
And now it seems as if I am standing still while the years quickly swirl round me like autumn leaves, like diamond snowflakes. As one ages, time seems to gather speed.
Paradoxically, this particular moment in history seems to be taking place in slow motion. It seems we have been here before—but really, it is always new, always happening as if for the first time.
There is every reason to be pessimistic. Truth has been banished from the historical stage, jihad is fully underway, the Four Horsemen ride again, the poisoned words, like poison darts, have already struck their mark, the rockets have been raining down on Israel, many more, based in Iran, are almost poised to strike the Middle East, Europe, and America. The Ottoman Empire is back, demanding tribute; it competes with Iran for the Caliphate.
The United Nations crowd has just roared it’s approval for the destruction of Israel. They were joined by Islamists everywhere and cheered on by educated Westerners, including Jews.
Those who view themselves as the best among us are hopeless dreamers, stuck in amber, stuck in time, they are idealists who are more committed to fighting for the rights of fundamentalists than they are committed to fighting for the survival of the West and its values.
Nevertheless, it is also the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. We are ushering in the year 5,772. The Jews have been counting time for nearly 6,000 years. I believe that we shall continue to do so.
I believe that Israel and the democracies will, once again, at great cost—always at cost--win against the forces of barbarism and evil that are seeking to wipe us out, to render the entire Muslim world “judenrein.” And also free of Christians, Hindus, Bah’ai, Buddhists, Zoroastrians—all the infidels whom are despised and endangered in Muslim lands.
As Jews and as Israelis, we must set the standard for taking the offense. Israel knows more about terrorism, more about the difficulties of asymmetrical and urban warfare, more about diabolical “Big Lie” propaganda than any other country on earth.
Israel can no longer afford to remain on defense. Now is the time for truly bold acts of sanity and truth-telling.
Israel is surrounded and Israel is alone. Therefore, appeasement is no longer an option. Illusions are far too dangerous to hold. We must, yet again, become heroes.
It only seems that Israel is alone. Yes, we are alone—but G-d is with us. We must act, we must do all that we can in order that G-d may join us.
This time: As below, so above.
Let us praise all our heroes who have been fighting for Israel’s survival and good name especially for the last eleven years. May this new year bless us with the return of both Gilad Shalit and Jonathan Pollard. May our wounded soldiers and civilians be healed, may the families of those who have fallen in battle be consoled, may all our agunot (chained wives) be freed, may our allies continue to grow.
Shana Tova u’metukah, a happy, and very sweet New Year to you.
And you never thought the New York Times would slam one of their own. Well, they have, but for the wrong reasons.A close examination of the facts leads me to conclude that the case for an actual conflict of interest is slender. But the appearance of a conflict clearly exists, and that is a problem in and of itself. The Times’s “Ethical Journalism” guidelines state that staff members “may not accept anything that could be construed as a payment for favorable coverage or as an inducement to alter or forgo unfavorable coverage.”As I noted in my original post, everyone who writes gets pitched stories. I get pitched stories and I will bet that Ethan Bronner gets pitched more stories and better stories than I do. But the standard they are espousing is unrealistic. If Bronner is not going to talk to people who do reserve duty in the army, he can't talk to anyone under the age of 45 who isn't a draft dodger. The army is part of our society. How is Bronner supposed to cover it without taking stories from our reservists?
Mr. Bronner has now severed his ties to the public relations firm. “In my view, it is all about appearances,” he told me. “I am not denying they matter. There is nothing of an actual conflict.”
The matter revolves around Mr. Bronner’s engagement, beginning in 2009, with Lone Star Communications, a firm operated by Charley Levine, a prominent public relations executive in Israel. Mr. Levine added a speakers bureau to his firm that year, and Mr. Bronner signed on to be represented by him.
The core of Mr. Blumenthal’s critique was that Mr. Levine is a figure of the Israeli right, who counsels prominent Zionists and serves as a reservist in the Israeli Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit. Mr. Blumenthal, a writing fellow at the Nation Institute, said it was improper of Mr. Bronner to have a business relationship with Mr. Levine while covering stories that Lone Star promoted.
In The Columbia Journalism Review article, Mr. Blumenthal never explicitly accused Mr. Bronner of providing favorable coverage as a quid pro quo for receiving speaking engagements from Mr. Levine’s firm. He objected that Mr. Bronner “takes paid speaking engagements from a firm that also pitches him stories.” Elsewhere in the article, he wrote: “On the one hand, it might be hard to cover Israel without stumbling across Lone Star’s many clients. On the other, however, that might be a good reason not to have a business relationship with the firm.”
Mr. Blumenthal’s article enumerated six cases in which Mr. Bronner had written about, or at least mentioned, Lone Star clients. Mr. Bronner walked me through those cases. Of the six, he said, only one involved an instance in which he had received a pitch from Lone Star and, on that basis, decided to write about it. The article concerned the Jewish National Fund and was about a fortified play area for children in the Israeli border town of Sderot.What a terrible thing - Bronner wrote a story about Sderot, which, except according to Abu Mazen and Co. is not even 'disputed territory.'
In the rest of the cases except one, he said, he did not receive a pitch from Lone Star and was unaware that the story involved a Lone Star client. The exception involved Danny Danon, a conservative member of the Israeli Parliament. Mr. Bronner said he has covered Mr. Danon but the coverage decisions were influenced not by Lone Star but by the prominence of Mr. Danon, who is deputy speaker of Parliament and chairman of World Likud.
A report in Lebanon's Naharnet claims that Israeli commandos helped a Hezbullah minister to escape to Israel last month, implying that the man was an Israeli spy.An Israeli commando force helped a top Hizbullah official escape to Israel a month ago, An Nahar said Sunday under the daily's 'Secrets of the Gods' tidbit but without saying that he is a member of the Shiite party.
“Abou Abed Ismail’s rank is similar to a Minister of Infrastructure in his party,” it said without mentioning Hizbullah. “The commando force helped him escape from Lebanon a month ago after meeting him at a border village.”
No other elaboration was made by the newspaper.
But on Friday, An Nahar quoted informed sources as saying that a man named Abou Abed Salim escaped to Israel a few days after Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech in June that CIA members at the U.S. embassy had recruited at least two Hizbullah members and the group was investigating whether the intelligence agency or another foreign agency recruited a third.
The sources said the third person is Ismail.
Could Barack Hussein Obama become the first American President since 1968 not to run for reelection? Yes, says Democratic strategist Dick Morris. As bad news piles up for the Democrats, I asked a top Democratic strategist if it were possible that President Obama might “pull a Lyndon Johnson” and soberly face the cameras, telling America that he has decided that the demands of partisan politics are interfering with his efforts to right our economy and that he has decided to withdraw to devote full time to our recovery. His answer: “Yes. It’s possible. If things continue as they are and have not turned around by January, it is certainly possible.”Hmmm.
Just looking at Michelle Obama’s unsmiling face during her husband’s recent speech to Congress triggered an insight: These folks aren’t having fun anymore.
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Obama’s historic race to the top in 2008 was animated by huge margins and turnouts among four key groups: African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and young voters. New polling data and the results of the Brooklyn-Queens Turner-Weprin elections suggest that his base is decaying, chunk by chunk.
· An analysis of the past three Fox News surveys indicates that Obama’s job approval rating among voters younger than 30 has declined to 44 percent. By combining the past three surveys, Fox News was able to accumulate data on 600 under-30 voters indicating a sharp decrease in the president’s approval from his former supporters.
· According to Gallup, Obama’s approval among Hispanics has also dropped to 44 percent. Aggregating data from recent polls, as Fox News did, Gallup concluded that the president’s ratings among Hispanics were not much higher than among the general electorate.
· The election of Republican Bob Turner in the single most Jewish district in America — one that had not gone Republican since the 1920s — shows the decay in Obama’s Jewish support. Alienated by his perceived anti-Israeli bias, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews voted in massive numbers for Turner. Results in heavily Jewish areas reflected his desertion. But even such neighborhoods as Forest Hills, Queens, populated by Reform and Conservative Jews, showed the candidates running almost even.
Only the African-Americans remain of Obama’s 2008 coalition. Surveys show his approval among blacks at higher than 80 percent, indicating no diminution of his enthusiasm there.
Yet the entire campaign strategy of the Obama people is to move to the left, fanning class warfare, to elicit strong liberal support. Rather than compensating for his loss of liberals by reaching out to independents and traditional swing voters, he just doubles down on his appeal to the left, further alienating the middle.
But the kind of enthusiasm Obama kindled in 2008 cannot be ignited easily by negative appeals. Particularly if the Republicans nominate a more moderate candidate such as Mitt Romney, Obama will not be able to rely on partisan animosity to succeed where job approval has failed. And, given all that, he might not even run.
John Mearsheimer, one of the co-authors of the notorious book The Israel Lobby, has come out of the closet and declared himself an anti-Semite. Jeffrey Goldberg is in shock. Gilad Atzmon is a jazz saxophonist who lives in London and who has a side gig disseminating the wildest sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He is an ex-Israeli and a self-proclaimed "self-hater" who traffics in Holocaust denial and all sorts of grotesque, medieval anti-Jewish calumnies. Here is a small sample of his lunatic thoughts.One of my contacts in England writes that Goldberg has given too much credit to the local BDS movement.
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Atzmon also believes that the Jews persecuted Hitler:
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He has also suggested that Jews specialize in the trafficking of body parts.
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Atzmon is quite obviously a twisted and toxic hater. His antisemitism is so blatant that activists of the so-called BDS movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions), which seeks the elimination of Israel, refuse to have anything to do with him. But Atzmon still has at least one friend among anti-Israel activists: The R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and co-author of "The Israel Lobby," John J. Mearsheimer.
Rather unbelievably (or believably, depending on where you sit) Mearsheimer has written an endorsement of Atzmon's new book, "The Wandering Who?" Here is what Mearsheimer says about Atzmon:Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism are making it incredibly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to maintain a powerful sense of their 'Jewishness.' Panicked Jewish leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon's own case demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews great anguish. The Wandering Who? Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.'In this new book, Atzmon suggests, among other things, that scholars should reopen the question of medieval blood libels leveled against Jews-- accusations that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzo, and which provoked countless massacres of Jews in many different countries.
Although Goldberg points out that the BDS movement coldshoulders Atzmon because of his antisemitism, there are elements within the UK BDS movement that have failed to do so. The Reading Palestine Solidarity Campaign website in the UK regularly links to Atzmon's articles in its sidebar - there's one on there at this moment. That PSC group has a standing link to the Redress site, where Atzmon's articles often appear - Redress is notoriously antisemitic, yet the Reading PSC (and by extension the Aberystwyth PSC, which shares its webspace) blatantly pimps it.
Former National Security Council member Elliott Abrams blasts former President Bill Clinton for reinventing history again (Hat Tip: Dan F). As he did last year, Clinton once again offered his vulgar, pop sociology explanation of Israel: “you've had all these immigrants coming in from the former Soviet Union, and they have no history in Israel proper, so the traditional claims of the Palestinians have less weight with them. The most pro-peace Israelis are the Arabs; second the Sabras, the Jewish Israelis that were born there; third, the Ashkenazi of long-standing, the European Jews who came there around the time of Israel's founding. The most anti-peace are the ultra-religious, who believe they're supposed to keep Judea and Samaria, and the settler groups, and what you might call the territorialists, the people who just showed up lately and they're not encumbered by the historical record.”
Natan Sharansky, one of those Soviet immigrants “who just showed up lately” and who Clinton presumably thinks does not want peace, said in response: “I am particularly disappointed by the president's casual use of inappropriate stereotypes about Israelis, dividing their views on peace based on ethnic origins.” Presumably, if you disagree with Clinton over the necessary preconditions for peace, you are against peace entirely—and you need to be denounced. The implication that someone like Sharansky, because he is an immigrant from the USSR, is “not encumbered by the historical record” and is indifferent to Palestinian claims requires no refutation; Clinton should be ashamed of himself. Unlike Clinton, whose most frequent foreign visitor to the White House (13 times!) was Yasser Arafat, Sharansky has stressed the importance of human rights and democracy as a prerequisite for a Palestinian state. Clinton was apparently quite ready to allow Arafat to create a terrorist satrapy.
Clinton also spouts off about the 2002 “Arab Initiative,” saying, “The King of Saudi Arabia started lining up all the Arab countries to say to the Israelis, ‘if you work it out with the Palestinians ... we will give you immediately not only recognition but a political, economic, and security partnership.’ … This is huge.... It's a heck of a deal."
That “deal” was adopted at an Arab League summit attended by only 10 of the 22 Arab leaders of the day, and among those not in attendance were the king of Jordan, the president of Egypt, and Yasser Arafat—suggesting that support for this proposal may have been quite limited. Moreover, it was a take-it-or-leave-it offer, never proffered as a basis for negotiation. This “heck of a deal” required “Complete withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the 4 June 1967 line and the territories still occupied in southern Lebanon.” In other words, go back to the indefensible 1967 borders, give up every settlement bloc, and give up every square foot of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall. Not quite as “huge” an offer as President Clinton recalls.
“The two great tragedies in modern Middle Eastern politics, which make you wonder if God wants Middle East peace or not, were Rabin’s assassination and Sharon’s stroke,” Clinton said. I can think of some others: The fact that a terrorist and thief, Yasser Arafat, led the Palestinian people for decades; the fact that he turned down Israeli peace offers at Camp David; the fact that the Palestinians turned down Ehud Olmert’s even more generous peace offers in 2008; the fact that thousands of Israelis were wounded or killed in the first and second intifadas; the fact that no Palestinian leader has ever spoken with candor to the Palestinian people about the compromises they will need to make in any peace agreement; the fact that for the last two and half years the Palestinian leadership has adamantly refused to come to the negotiating table.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally got his apology. But not from Israel. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon apologized for a violent assault on Erdogan by a UN security officer who attempted to keep the Turkish Prime Minister out of Abu Mazen's UN speech. "I'm afraid there was an unfortunate incident," the Turkish prime minister was quoted as saying by Ankara's daily newspaper Sabah. Erdogan did not elaborate on the incident, saying only that he was kept out of the General Assembly Hall during Abbas' speech by security guards.Boo hoo. The Turkish Prime Minister was not hurt.
The Turkish media underscored the fact that Ban offered his personal apology to Erdogan for the incident because his assailant was a UN Guard officer.
Minister of Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein, who witnessed the attack, described it as a "very violent incident. Like a scene out of a movie."
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