IRIS Blog

The encirclement of Israel by the Global Jihad continues. The south has Hamas' Gaza and Lebanon is now ruled by Hezbollah. Olmert is engaged in talks with Syria to give the northeastern wall (the Golan) to Syria and the eastern high ground (the West Bank) to Fatah.

The maddening thing is that there is very little clarity about the horrendous development in Lebanon, and the US officials could even talk about it as a "positive step:"

May 21, 2008, is a date--like December 7 (1941) and September 11 (2001)--that should now live in infamy. Yet who will notice, mourn, or act the wiser for it?

On that day, the Beirut spring was buried under the reign of Hizballah.

Speaking on October 5, 1938, after Britain and France effectively turned Czechoslovakia over to Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill said, "What everybody would like to ignore or forget must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat...."[1]

In contrast, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch said that the agreement over Lebanon was, "A necessary and positive step." At least when one sells out a country one should recognize this has happened rather than pretend otherwise. But this is precisely what took place at Munich, when the deal made was proclaimed as a concession that brought peace and resolved Germany's last territorial demand in the region.

Churchill knew better and his words perfectly suit the situation in Lebanon today:

"The utmost [Western diplomacy] has been able to gain for Czechoslovakia...has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching the victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course."

Yes, that's it exactly. On every point, Hizballah, Iran, and Syria, got all they wanted from Lebanon's government: its surrender of sovereignty. They have veto power over the government; one-third of the cabinet; election changes to ensure victory in the next balloting; and they will have their candidate installed as president.

The majority side is not giving up but is trying to comfort itself on small mercies. The best arguments it can come up with are that now everyone knows Hizballah is not patriotic, treats other Lebanese as enemies, and cannot seize areas held by Christian and Druze militias. It isn't much to cheer about.

Nevertheless, as in 1938, a lot of the media is proclaiming it as a victory of some kind, securing peace and stability in Lebanon.

Not so. If Syria murders more Lebanese journalists, judges, or politicians, no one will investigate. No one dare diminish Hizballah's de facto rule over large parts of the country. No one dare stop weapons pouring over the border from Syria and Iran. In fact, why should they continue to be smuggled in secretly? No one dare interfere if and when Hizballah, under Syrian and Iranian guidance, decide it is time for another war with Israel.

Here's a vignette on why the Muslim World is mired in so much misery. Israel has been providing life-saving heart surgeries at no charge to hundreds of Iraqi children. Some prefer to watch their children die, and some accept the offers in secret because of fear of violent retaliation.

Hostility towards the Jewish state in Iraq is so strong that many parents refuse to travel to Tel Aviv for free life-saving hole-in-the-heart surgery...."My only fear, which spoils my joy at my son’s escape from death, is the revenge my family can expect when we go back to Iraq."

By the way I changed the title of this story. The UK Times Online headlined it "Iraqi mothers deny their sick children Israeli heart operations," unaware of how ludicrous is the notion that Muslim mothers typically have any say over such things.

The Israeli checkpoints that the Bush administration keeps pressuring Israel to dismantle in Fatah-controlled territory just saved more lives:

A 20-year-old Palestinian terrorist was killed by IDF soldiers Monday at the Hawara checkpoint south of Nablus.

The IDF said that the Palestinian approached the checkpoint behaving in a suspicious manner and set off a metal detector numerous times, even when asked to remove objects from his person.

According to the army's account, the soldiers subsequently ordered the Palestinian to remain still.

However, the man slowly moved his hands in the direction of an explosive belt and consequently, the troops shot and killed him, said the army.

A Zionist hero passed from this earth today, who forcefully articulated the need for Israel to make its case to the world, and who was its best practitioner in writing in this generation. Here is a tribute to him written several years ago:

Shmuel Katz, who celebrates his 90th birthday in December, was the inspiration for the establishment of Americans for a Safe Israel thirty-three years ago.

Underground leader, member of the first Knesset, publisher, historian, biographer, essayist, Shmuel Katz is above all the most trenchant political thinker modern Israel has produced. His career has also been marked by a selfless political integrity. Indifferent to personal advantage, Katz has sought only the good of Israel and the Jewish people.

In 1936, at the age of 22, Katz came to Palestine from South Africa, and retains to this day the accent of his native land. A disciple (as he would remain throughout his life) of Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky, at his request Katz went to London in 1940 to start and edit a Zionist weekly. After the war he returned to Palestine where he rejoined the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi, becoming a member of its high command under Menachem Begin. With Israel's independence, Katz became a Knesset member for Begin's Herut Party, but left after a single term, unhappy with Begin's failure, as he saw it, to reach out beyond his narrow constituency. Katz abandoned party politics to run a publishing house for many years.

In 1977 when Begin finally upset the Labor Party's long monopoly on power, Katz returned briefly to public life, initially as Begin's personal representative to the United States. When Begin disavowed his commitment to put Katz in charge of Israeli information abroad (Katz had seized on the opportunity to transform Israel's miserable efforts in this area) and threw aside his ideological principles to achieve a paper peace with Anwar Sadat, Katz resigned. To the astonishment of Begin, who tried to buy him off with an offer he was convinced could not be refused -- the high prestige post of UN ambassador -- Katz refused.

Katz is best known as a writer and almost all his books are landmarks in their own way. Days of Fire remains the best book about the Irgun. Battleground is the best single history of the Arab-Israel conflict over Palestine. Less well known but equally trenchant, The Hollow Peace is a devastating account of how Begin, beginning with his unaccountable decision to install Labor leader Moshe Dayan (whose failures in 1973 had discredited him with the Israeli public) as his Foreign Minister, squandered the opportunity to implement Jabotinsky's vision. Lone Wolf is the definitive biography of Jabotinsky.

But above all Shmuel Katz is a prophet in his own time. When Katz was only 22, Jabotinsky said of his articles: "I must very earnestly congratulate you on the perfect clarity, the forcible simplicity, the sachlichkeit [matter of fact, to the point] with which you present the most complicated situations." To this day, Katz in his essays has continued to lay out, with that same perfect clarity, the situation confronting Israel, the consequences of the actions her leaders take, and the alternative path that should be taken. Katz saw the opportunities her victory in the Six Day War opened for Israel. He became a leader of the Land of Israel Movement which recognized that Israel could be a geopolitical factor in the region, with the historic heartland of Judea and Samaria restored to the Jewish people, strategic depth and oil from the Sinai, the high ground on the Golan Heights a deterrent to Syria.

Like prophets generally, Katz has been ignored, sidelined, heard by many, hearkened to by few. History will pay tribute to his prescience. We, his disciples in Americans for a Safe Israel, are proud to pay tribute to him now.

Things are looking very grim for Ehud Olmert in the latest investigation of his corruption. If Olmert is convicted, I predict that he will be pardoned by Shimon Peres as a quid pro quo for Olmert's championing of Peres' pet project--the ceding of Israeli territory to its jihadist enemies.

A few bloggers have picked up on Shimon Peres' "stupid" quote:

I did not imagine that we would leave Gaza and they would fire Qassams from there; I did not imagine that Hamas would show so strongly in the elections.

I haven't seen anyone comment on how this is far deeper than a personal lack of intelligence. This goes to the heart of what it means to be on the Left vs. the Right. To do so, it would be helpful to review what I wrote prior to the 2005 disengagement from Gaza:

According to the left, terrorism is fueled by grievance. Eliminate the "occupation" and terrorism will lose its appeal. According to the right, terrorism is a tactic in an overall strategy of winning a war. Show that terrorism pays and the tactic will be used more. If anything, it is in the Palestinians' interest to temporarily minimize attacks until the retreat from Gaza is complete. Terror could cause a swing in public opinion and therefore possibly derail the withdrawal.

Mark my words and check back in a year. If Palestinian terror subsides now that Israel has given up Gaza (and Sinai a couple of times, and Taba, and Lebanon) I'll admit I was wrong and change my opinion. That's what makes me a conservative and that's what makes conservative predictions so much more reliable. Leftists just fight harder to impose their vision on the world.

The purpose of this blog is to help our society succeed through policy driven by an accurate understanding of the world. The Gaza disengagement was an excellent scientific test of a clear hypothesis--do concessions to eliminate the articulated grievances of the enemies of Israel (and the West) obviate or accelerate their aggression?

Unfortunately, the Left, as I predicted, would not change their wrong-headed belief in the face of incontrovertible evidence. (Here is one notable exception, a must-read.) Leftism is as reliably wrong as George Costanza.

If we would only let the outcome of these experiments drive our policies we would be able to defeat our enemies with ease.

It doesn't appear that the international "disarmament force" has done much to slow down the Lebanese jihad, fueled by Ehud Barak's retreat. Hezbollah has apparently just conquered West Beirut:

Gunmen from the Shiite Hezbollah movement seized control of several downtown Beirut neighborhoods Friday as the number of people killed in three days of fighting rose to at least 11.

Hezbollah militants, some carrying assault rifles or rocket-propelled grenade launchers, patrolled outside Starbucks and other shops in the mostly deserted commercial strips of neighborhoods normally controlled by Sunnis loyal to the U.S.-backed Lebanese government. Masked armed men in civilian clothes set up checkpoints and asked passersby for their identity cards, and Hezbollah forces briefly surrounded the homes of Saad Hariri, Lebanon's top Sunnni lawmaker, and Walid Jumblatt, his Druse ally.

Although government troops soon arrived to guard the politicians' residences, and the Hezbollah gunmen stood down, the Associated Press reported that a satellite television station affiliated with Hariri was forced off the air, and the office of his party's newspaper was set on fire.

We wish all of our readers a happy 60th! Here is some excellent perspective:

A few weeks after the birth of the State of Israel 60 years ago, journalist Robert St. John interviewed Israel's first foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. The conversation took place as Egyptian planes were bombing Tel Aviv. Mr. Sharett told Mr. St. John about plans to absorb 1 million immigrants over the coming 10 years (Israel's Jewish population at that was 800,000 people). The minister's projection was on the low side and Israel's population now stands at more than 7 million, 80 percent of it Jewish.

What is even more significant in both historical and moral terms is that the rebirth of the Jewish state, against extreme odds, was perhaps the greatest victory of the human spirit over adversity. After being driven out of their country, Palestine, Jews almost everywhere suffered persecution, discrimination and physical threats — culminating in history's greatest crime, the Holocaust — in which 6 million Jews, one-third of the Jewish nation, including 1 million children, were murdered. Objectively, Israel's chances of surviving even the first year of its existence were low. On the very day it declared independence, Israel was invaded by seven Arab armies while it had no regular army, air force or navy — with all the major powers — sadly including the United States, clamping an arms embargo on a people fighting for its life.

In spite of it all, Israel did survive, though it had to fight five more wars; indeed it is still fighting, as its enemies (presently led by a genocidal Iran that is quickly going nuclear) still dream that maybe "next time" they will be successful in exterminating the Jewish state.

No less troubling is that anti-Israel incitement in Arab and Muslim communities is often abetted by anti-Semitic, and leftist, circles in Europe and in parts of American academia which question Israel's very right to exist. The hatred towards Israel is exacerbated by the fact that it is viewed as America's close ally — embodying all those values and principles which are anathema to many Arabs and Muslims: democracy and human rights (and especially women's rights) as well as freedom of speech and respect for the rule of law.

Israel's triumph should not be seen primarily in terms of victories over its enemies. Instead, it should be considered in light of its achievements. Without natural resources, without any substantial foreign aid during the first 20 years of its existence, and in spite of its ongoing security concerns it has created a thriving economy. Israel is a leader in high technology, medicine and related fields, and is a major cultural center.

As Israeli academic Dan Ben-David recently reminded his readers, "the Jews in Palestine, even before the founding of the State, had a vision — on the top of Jerusalem's Mount Scopus, on the slopes of Mount Carmel and between the orchards of Rehovot, it created the foundations of Israel's higher education system. Within two decades of the country's birth, there were already seven research universities."

Meanwhile, Zionist pioneers turned the land (which, as a result of Arab and Ottoman neglect and deforestation, had become desert and swamps) into the flourishing garden it once was. Israel also successfully absorbed and integrated millions of often-destitute newcomers, including 1 million people from the former Soviet Union and hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries (in contrast to the much smaller number of Arab refugees who left Israel and are still languishing in ramshackle camps in Arab countries).

Read the whole thing...

Here is an absolute must-read about how the Arabs really came to leave Israel during the formation of the state. It's a rare article that is worthwhile no matter how extensive your background.

In this case the adage that "there are two sides to every story and the truth is somewhere in the middle" is dead wrong:

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.

This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950’s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.

The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paint a much more definitive picture of the historical record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.

Read the whole thing...

Here is a list of incidents of bad guys using the burqa as the ultimate disguise. In today's news, a police officer was killed in a bank robbery involving a burqa:

Philadelphia police said a veteran police officer was shot and killed in the Port Richmond section of the city on Saturday. Steven Liczbinski, 40, a 12-year veteran who had just been promoted to sergeant, was shot by at least two men shortly before 11:30 a.m. Saturday, authorities said.

He was responding to a robbery at a Bank of America branch inside the ShopRite at Castor and Aramingo. The men fled, and Liczbinski confronted them at Almond and Schiller streets about 15 minutes later. was shot multiple times with a high-powered rifle, police said. ....

Police originally described a man and a woman in Muslim-type garb and a man wearing a white hospital mask. The masked man had shoulder-length dreadlocks, but Officer Tanya Little said that could be wig. Ramsey said one of those suspects had been killed, but he did not know which one.

Here is an pessimistic analysis on Ehud Olmert's future in light of recent revelations about the latest police investigation. On the other hand, as Aaron Lerner comments, there is the possible "etrog" effect. Given that the "branja" that controls Israel is so fixated on land concessions to the Arabs, Olmert can protect himself like an etrog on the holiday of Sukkot by making sweeping offers in the "peace process."

When a supporter of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Saturday "That's it, it's over," it was not clear whether he was asking a question or stating a fact. This was a statement repeated in different words over and over during the weekend - by ministers, MKs and political allies. Like everyone else, they were all in the dark, driven by rumors, hints, innuendos, flying through the cellular telephony at tremendous speeds.

Even the more experienced among them, the veterans of past affairs and the two Winograd Committee reports, are sounding defeated. They did not know how to defend themselves against this enormous tidal wave. On the one hand, the law enforcement and the prosecution were leaking that it was a most serious affair that would bring an end to Olmert's tenure as PM; on the other hand, the court is preventing the man under investigation to talk and present his version of the story.

Those on the right who wish for Olmert's fall also found it difficult to come to terms with this upsetting decision. Would an American court prevent president Clinton from responding to the allegations against him in the Lewinsky case? Or president Nixon on Watergate? Olmert had been waiting eagerly for May 2008, a month that would be filled with positive headlines, pomp and ceremony: Independence Day festivities, and then the visit of President George W. Bush, followed by the visits of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and other leaders. Since the Second Lebanon War he did not have it so good. He believed that the worst was behind him: that nothing would come of the probes against him, and that he would make progress in talks with the Palestinians, or would have some surprising result on the Syrian track.

He was already feeling as though "he had emerged from the grave," a source close to him said. And then the skies fell and the earth split open. All over again. This is the fifth investigation in two years. This could be the critical mass that will break even an experienced survivor like Olmert.

The worst-case scenario for Olmert is this: when the gag order is lifted, the details of the case will be revealed, and there will be a public and media outcry that will soon be taken up by the politicians. He will lose his support in Kadima and Ehud Barak will announce that Labor cannot remain in a coalition headed by a man with such terrible stigma. From that point to Olmert's fall or resignation, the path will be short, painful and embarrassing.