IRIS Blog

The two Fatah terrorists who struck the high school on Thursday as part of a simultaneous attack that left one dead and four wounded had been released only a week earlier as part of a "goodwill gesture":

Fatah terrorists murdered a 20-year-old Jew in northern Jerusalem, and wounded four others during an infiltration at a school in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, in simultaneous attacks north and south of Jerusalem on Thursday evening.

Yesterday it emerged that the two terrorists who attacked the high school in Kfar Etzion had both been released from an Israeli jail last week as part of "goodwill" gestures towards the Palestinian Authority forced upon Israel by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Here was my prediction, in an entry titled Hundreds of Attempted Murderers Set for Release:

How many Jews (and Arabs) has Olmert just consigned to be murdered?

Of course they learned the technique from the Palestinian jihad:

Al-Qaeda is using children as suicide bombers in Iraq, with at least two attacks in the past week committed by 15-year-olds, a US military commander claimed on Sunday.

“We are not sure whether one of these children even knew he was being used to deliver a bomb,” Rear Admiral Gregory Smith told a news conference in Baghdad.

One attack was carried out at a funeral ceremony near Tikrit, executed dictator Saddam Hussein’s home town 180 kilometres north of Baghdad and the other was at a school in the northern city of Mosul, Smith said.

He gave no details of the two bombings. Iraqi police said 17 people died in a January 21 suicide blast at the funeral ceremony near Tikrit for relatives of an Iraqi police colonel.

“Al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to brainwash children with hate and death... they seek to create a culture of violence, hate and despair,” said Smith.

“(They) are sending 15-year-old boys on suicide missions to spread death and helplessness.”

A positive development, but still a stall tactic nonetheless to delay implementing the desire of the overwhelming majority of Shas voters:

The Council of Torah Sages of the Shas party, headed by former Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, has decided: Once government representatives start talking with the PA about splitting Jerusalem, Shas leaves the government coalition.

The right-wing camp and many Shas supporters have long awaited this decision, and especially over the past two weeks since Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) left the government. Yisrael Beiteinu chief Avigdor Lieberman announced on Jan. 16 that he was resigning his position as Minister for Strategic Affairs and leading his party out of the government coalition in protest of the start of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority over so-called "core issues." Those issues include Jerusalem, final status borders and the so-called 'right of return' of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and their descendants to Israel.

The Shas decision was made Sunday afternoon at a Torah Sages Council meeting in the home of Rabbi Yosef in Har Nof, Jerusalem. Shas leader Eli Yishai, Minister of Industry and Trade, was also present, briefing the rabbis on the planned timetable of the talks with the PA.

At present, the government coalition headed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert numbers 66 Knesset Members - a majority of the Israeli Parliament's 120 members. If and when Shas and its 11 MKs quit, Olmert will head a minority government vulnerable to a simple no-confidence motion in the Knesset.

One of the things we like the most here at IRIS is a bold contrarian thesis. Here is an intriguing one, summarized by Daniel Pipes:

Why is the Middle East so at odds with modern life, laggard in everything from literacy to standard of living, from military prowess to political development? A profound new book by Philip Carl Salzman, professor at McGill University, with the deceptively plain title Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, offers a bold and original interpretation of Middle Eastern problems.

An anthropologist, Salzman begins by sketching out the two patterns of rule that historically have dominated the Middle East: tribal autonomy and tyrannical centralism. The former pattern, he argues, is distinctive to the region and key to understanding it. Tribal self-rule is based on what Salzman calls balanced opposition, a mechanism whereby those Middle Easterners living in deserts, mountains, and steppes protect life and limb by relying on their extended families.

This immensely intricate and subtle system boils down to (1) each person counting on paternal relatives (called agnates) for protection and (2) equal-sized units of agnates confronting each other. Thus, a nuclear family faces off against another nuclear family, a clan faces a clan, and so on, up to the meta-tribal level. As the well-known Middle Eastern adage sums up these confrontations, "I against my brother, I and my brothers against my cousins, I and my brothers and my cousins against the world."

On the positive side, affiliation solidarity allows for a dignified independence from repressive states. Negatively, it implies unending conflict; each group has multiple sworn enemies and feuds often carry on for generations.

Tribal autonomy has driven Middle Eastern history, as the great historian Ibn Khaldun observed over six centuries ago. When a government faltered, large tribal confederations would form, leave their arid badlands and seize control of the cities and agricultural lands. Having seized the state, tribes exploited their power unabashedly to forward their own interests, cruelly exploiting their subject population, until they in turn faltered and the cycle started anew.

Read the whole thing...

The anti-Semitism of Leftist-dominated universities is accelerating, as Tom Gross notes:

Tomorrow (Tuesday) at the Oxford Union, four academics who all support a boycott of Israel, will debate the motion "This House Believes That The State of Israel has a Right to Exist."

American revisionist "historian" Norman Finkelstein along with Prof. Ted Honderich will be speaking for the motion while opposing them will be Exeter University academics Ghada Karmi and Ilan Pappe, a former Israeli Jew who has made a career out of slandering the country where he was born and grew up.

MOST VILE

It is harder to know which of these four is the most vile.

Just last week, Finkelstein reprinted on his website an article from the Israeli paper Ha'aretz about worrying signs of failures in Holocaust education among German youth, and added the mock headline: "To reverse declining German interest in Holocaust, Britney Spears to play Anne Frank in new Holo-porn video."

Making fun of Holocaust survivors has been a frequent feature of Finkelstein's work (even though he is himself the son of survivors) and it is not surprising that so many regard him (as was the case with former chess champion Bobby Fischer who died last week) as a highly disturbed Jewish self-hater.

What is surprising – and dangerous – however, is Oxford's behavior.

Do the university authorities think it is ok to honor (and indeed pay a fee to) a man who thinks it is fun to call child Holocaust victim Anne Frank a porn star?

Jeff Jacoby eloquently articulates what IRIS has noted regularly. The high point of this administration--the Bush Doctrine--has been lain to rest at the altar of the Palestinians. As reprehensible as Bush's enabling the Palestinian jihad has been, the Democratic alternatives both promise more of the same:

THE Bush Doctrine - born on Sept. 20, 2001, when President Bush bluntly warned the sponsors of violent jihad: "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists" - is dead. Its demise was announced by Condoleezza Rice last Friday.

The secretary of state was speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route with the president to Kuwait from Israel. She was explaining why the administration had abandoned the most fundamental condition of its support for Palestinian statehood - an end to Palestinian terror. Rice's explanation, recounted here by The Washington Times, was as striking for its candor as for its moral blindness:

"The 'road map' for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the 'core issues': the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel's border, and the future of Jerusalem.

"The reason that we haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status," Rice said. . . . What the US-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was "break that tight sequentiality. . . You don't want people to get hung up on settlement activity or the fact that the Palestinians haven't fully been able to deal with the terrorist infrastructure. . ."

Thus the president who once insisted that a "Palestinian state will never be created by terror" now insists that a Palestinian state be created regardless of terror. Once the Bush administration championed a "road map" whose first and foremost requirement was that the Palestinians "declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism" and shut down "all official . . . incitement against Israel." Now the administration says that Palestinian terrorism and incitement are nothing "to get hung up on."

Whatever happened to the moral clarity that informed the president's worldview in the wake of 9/11? Whatever happened to the conviction that was at the core of the Bush Doctrine: that terrorists must be anathematized and defeated, and the fever-swamps that breed them drained and detoxified?

Read the whole thing...

Here is a must-read by an associate of Bin Laden's lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri:

What occupies the mind of a jihad-driven Muslim? How is such fervor planted in young and impressionable believers? Where does it originate? How did I - once an innocent child who grew up in a liberal, moderate and educated household - find myself a member of a radical Islamic group? These questions go to the root of Islamic violence and must be addressed if free societies are to combat radical Islam. To further this aim, I will explore the psychological development of a jihadi's mind through my own firsthand experience as a former member of a Muslim terrorist organization.

I was born in Cairo to a secular Muslim family. My father was an orthopedic surgeon and an agnostic at heart; my mother was a French teacher and a liberal. Both considered Islam to be, primarily, an integral part of our culture. With the exception of my father, we would fast on Ramadan. Even though my father was not religious, he understood our need to fit into the community and never forced his secular views on us. He espoused diverse philosophical ideas but encouraged us to follow our own convictions. Most importantly, he taught my brother and me to think critically rather than to learn by rote.

I never had any doubt, however, that we were Muslim - that Allah was our creator, Muhammad his messenger and the Koran our book. I believed that if I performed good deeds, I would be admitted to paradise where I could satisfy all my personal desires. I also knew, alternatively, that my transgressions would be punished by eternal torture in hell. I absorbed these beliefs largely from the surrounding environment rather than from my parents; they were shared by most children around me.

I attended the private Al-Rahebat primary school in the area of Dumiat, which is about 200 kilometers north of Cairo, when I was six years old. Though managed by Christian nuns, the school was supervised by the Egyptian government and required its Muslim students to attend classes on Islam.

Before each Islamic lesson began, the teacher would dismiss the Christian students, who were then obliged to linger outside the room until the lesson was over. Adding salt to the Christian children's wounds, many Muslim pupils would tease them for their faith - telling them that they would burn in hell eternally because they ate pork and were "infidels." This made a strong impression on me. I felt sorry for the Christians, sensing that they must be hurt by being treated as an inferior minority in an Islamic society.

Read the whole thing...

Olmert's response to the constant stream of missiles from Gaza (50 counted yesterday) into the city of Sderot has been to send in a crack team of psychologists and social workers. the last line quoted below says it all:

After seven years of rocket barrages by Palestinians in Gaza, 28% of adults and 30% of children in Sderot have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a study by Natal, the Israel Center for Victims of Terror and War. Some 75-94% of Sderot children aged 4-18 exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress, such as problems sleeping and concentrating. Dalia Yosef, director of Sderot's Hosen trauma center, asks, "How do you treat and prevent post-traumatic stress when it is not 'post'"?

This is reminiscent of Woody Allen's Bananas, where a mistatement caused a crack team from the UJA (instead of the intended CIA) was sent into the midst of civil unrest:

Of course, if they're foolish enough to try to overthrow, then I have made a deal for reinforcements with the UJA. You mean the CIA, Excellency. The UJA is the United Jewish Appeal.

The United Jewish Appeal?

Meanwhile, Olmert's popularity ratings, sometimes indistinguishable from zero given the poll's margin of error, have plummeted. 61% have a lower opinion of him than the did one month ago.

Eilat Mazar of the 'do-nothing' Shalem Center has done it again, adding another archeological confirmation of the Bible:

A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday.

The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name "Temech" engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig.

According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

The family was among those who later returned to Jerusalem, the Bible recounts....

Under this scene are three Hebrew letters spelling Temech, Mazar said.

The Bible refers to the Temech family: "These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city." [Nehemiah 7:6]... "The Nethinim [7:46]"... The children of Temech." [7:55]....

The seal of one of the members of the Temech family was discovered just dozens of meters away from the Opel area, where the servants of the Temple, or "Nethinim," lived in the time of Nehemiah, Mazar said.

"The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible," she said. "One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find."

The results of this poll are even more shocking than the article presents. No less than 28% of the Americans who trusted the news media four years ago no longer do (unless you don't believe the article is telling the truth.)

There is only one logical explanation for this--blogs (and the talk radio shows that popularize blog research) have exposed the pervasive bias that average citizens never had the time to research themselves.

A Sacred Heart University Poll found significantly declining percentages of Americans saying they believe all or most of media news reporting. In the current national poll, just 19.6% of those surveyed could say they believe all or most news media reporting. This is down from 27.4% in 2003. Just under one-quarter, 23.9%, in 2007 said they believe little or none of reporting while 55.3% suggested they believe some media news reporting.

“The fact that an astonishing percentage of Americans see biases and partisanship in their mainstream news sources suggests an active and critical consumer of information in the U.S.” stated James Castonguay, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of SHU’s Department of Media Studies & Digital Culture. “The availability of alternative viewpoints and news sources through the Internet no doubt contributes to the increased skepticism about the objectivity of profit-driven news outlets owned by large conglomerates,” he continued.

The perception is growing among Americans that the news media attempts to influence public opinion – from 79.3% strongly or somewhat agreeing in 2003 to 87.6% in 2007.

And, 86.0% agreed (strongly or somewhat) that the news media attempts to influence public policies – up from 76.7% in 2003.

Americans surveyed provided poor ratings for the national news media on six different characteristics measured. The average overall positive rating across all six characteristics measured was 33.4%. The highest positive rating, 40.7%, was recorded for quality of reporting followed by accuracy of reporting at 36.9% and keeping any personal bias out of stories (33.3%).

Other low positive ratings included: fairness (31.3%), presenting an even balance of views (30.4%) and presenting negative and positive news equally (27.5%).

Most pro-Israel Jews are flabbergasted by Olmert's 'insane' policies of arming Israel's sworn enemies, who repeatedly use those weapons in terror attacks. Additionally, no matter how 'insane' the appeasement, no outraged counterreaction materializes.

Perhaps there is a reasonable explanation that explains both phenomena. Olmert represents the extreme Left, who believes the Arab narrative of a Jewish 'original sin of 'occupying Arab land.'

Olmert's political opponents are those who are pro-Israel. As the following opinion piece suggests, however, supporters of Israel (including Israelis themselves) are simply withdrawing political involvement from Israel as a whole after each Olmert outrage. So Olmert may be the only elected leader in the world who actually gains power from antagonizing his people:

Should US Jews back pro-Israel presidential candidate?

As the United States presidential primary season heats up, I am often asked whether Jews have the obligation to work to get a pro-Israel candidate elected. Not necessarily, I find myself thinking. Maybe domestic issues affecting Jews should take priority.

But then I ask myself whether I still really care about Israel. Actually, I have been asking myself this is a question a lot lately. Well, intellectually, of course, I care about Israel—my wife and children have Israeli citizenship and my wife's entire family lives there. In addition, I love the land and I visit whenever I can. In fact, we have a family trip planned for next month.

But I have less passion than I once did for all things Israeli. When Olmert says that he plans on giving half of the Holy City of Jerusalem to the sworn enemies of his own country, I am unmoved and just skip over and move on to the next article.

When I hear that President Bush is going to Israel to pressure them to do things that are clearly against their own national interest, I don't feel concerned at all. My lack of care for Israel and what it does has been bothering me recently.

It all started with disengagement

I have traced my ambivalence about the affairs of the State of Israel back to the unilateral disengagement that took place under Ariel Sharon's government. Watching the Israeli army forcefully evict my Jewish brothers and sisters from their homes in Gaza instead of continuing to protect them from the murderous and virulently anti-Semitic Palestinians caused me intense disillusionment.

The disengagement made me realize that the government of Ariel Sharon cared less for its citizens than I did. If I had lost all trust in the Israeli government, however, at the time I still believed in the Israeli people. My rationale was that Ariel Sharon was elected as a hawk who would be tough on security issues but who changed his policies once elected.

However, when Israelis elected Olmert on a platform of additional unilateral disengagements and thus further forced evictions of Jews from their homes, it became clear to me that the average Israeli was on a mission toward national suicide. It seemed that most Israelis either cared little about the perils of further unilateral disengagement or were blind to them.

As time progressed, rockets began flying from Gaza into nearby Israeli towns and people were getting killed and the Israeli government did little to protect the poor inhabitants of Sederot. The conclusion became inescapable. If Israel was unwilling to protect Jews within their own country from attack, then how could it be trusted to protect us Jews who lived in the Diaspora?

Sitting ducks

The popular notion that Jews around the world should support Israel because it is our insurance policy against another holocaust has become redundant. What, then, was the point of the Zionist enterprise? To gather all Jews into one place so that they should be sitting ducks for an attack by our enemies? Add to this the corruption that pervades the country from Olmert downward and the question just grows stronger.

So is it important for us to support a pro-Israel candidate? Sadly, my answer is no, because the experience of the last eight years has shown that Israel will continue along the path of self-destruction irrespective of whether the US president is pro-Israel or not. Ironically what Israel really needs is an Israeli prime minister and government that is truly pro-Israel: without that a pro-Israeli president of the United States will make no difference.

Ultimately, I want to care as passionately about Israel as I once did, but I need Israelis to lead the way and show me how.

The root cause of Israel's afflictions is ideology. In this eye-opening survey, approximately twice as many Israelis self-identify as 'socialist' over those who define themselves as 'capitalist.' In the United States, by comparison, it would be unlikely to find any significant support for socialism.

Unfortunately, the media, academic and cultural elites largely censure any non-Leftist opinions, which prevents the mass of empirical evidence debunking socialism to be heard.

Nearly every time the Left makes a prediction about the future, the opposite comes true, because their worldview is 180 degrees out of phase with reality:

Israel's image in the international media deteriorated after the pullout from Gaza, despite Israeli expectations that the unilateral withdrawal would boost support for its policies, according to a Hebrew University study released Thursday.

Researchers found that Israel was represented in a more negative light in both U.S. and UK media after the 2005 Gaza withdrawal, compared to the period that preceded it, and that the improvement in Israel's image occurred only during the disengagement itself.

We "found that the demands from Israel for territorial concessions in the territories not only were not lessened following the disengagement, but actually became stronger," said Hebrew University political scientist Dr. Tamir Sheafer.

The study was based on thousands of on-line articles that appeared in the UK and U.S. media, as well as on statements by American and British leaders.

After nearly every Muslim attack on American civilians, immediate calls are made to dismiss the possibility of jihadist motives. Here is the first time US intelligence has earned its nomenclature on this score:

Sympathy for al-Qaeda has produced "sudden jihad syndrome" in domestic terror cells unaffiliated with foreign terrorists and people seeking to carry out attacks in the U.S., a law-enforcement intelligence analysis says.

The Dec. 6 report by the Texas Public Safety Department's Bureau of Information Analysis warns officials not to dismiss homegrown terror cells as "wannabes," saying they pose a credible threat to homeland security.