Absolute Must-Read

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 an absolute must-read editorial from the Investor's Business Daily:

The Islamist Head Fake

When dealing with Muslim leaders, Washington should borrow a page from Ronald Reagan’s Soviet playbook: Trust, but verify. Many aim to deceive us, court evidence shows.

The article is about to give shocking wolf-in-sheep's-clothing revelations regarding Muslim leaders. Yet, in order to maintain their own "moderate" image, the editorialists still call for the benefit of the doubt to be given them until law enforcement can catch them in secret discussing their plans for jihad.

It’s now believed that several leaders of the Muslim establishment in America last decade conspired to infiltrate the U.S. political system, change Middle East policy and gradually Islamize America. At the same time, they hatched a plot to fund overseas terrorists.

Of course, they couldn’t do this out in the open. So they set up benign-sounding nonprofits and charities to “camouflage” their traitorous activities, say U.S. prosecutors who cite wiretap transcripts and other documents uncovered in a criminal probe of the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Muslim charity in America.

During a secret meeting at a Philadelphia hotel, the charity’s president and other prominent Muslim leaders were recorded allegedly plotting ways to disguise payments to Hamas terrorists as charity.

“I swear by Allah that war is deception,” said Shukri Abu-Baker, now on trial in the federal terror-funding case. “We are fighting our enemy with a kind heart. . . . Deceive, camouflage, pretend that you’re leaving while you’re walking that way. Deceive your enemy.”

Another participant at the Hamas summit was the founder of the Council on American Islamic-Relations, or CAIR, the largest Muslim civil-rights group in the country and an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror-funding case.

Adding to Abu-Baker’s point, Omar Ahmad compared the deception needed to fool the infidels with the head fake in basketball. “He makes a player believe that he is doing this while he does something else,” Ahmad said. “I agree with you. . . . Politics is a completion of war.”

The Islamist head fake has worked all too well over the past decade. Blind acceptance and validation of Muslim leaders with questionable loyalties hardly missed a beat in Washington even after 9/11.

Many were invited to the White House and Congress. The head of the FBI spoke at their conferences, calling them “mainstream” and “moderate.” Many naive officials still confer legitimacy on them.

But what Muslim leaders tell us and what they tell Muslim audiences are often two entirely different things. The deception is astonishing. They’ve really played us for suckers.

Okay, the Investor's Business Daily isn't so mainstream, given that it is conservative-leaning. But it's one bright spot.

There is a deperate need for an ideological counterweight to the constant media propaganda on the war in Iraq. Here it is, an excellent synopsis of Norman Podhoretz's tour de force World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

In 1983, Norman Podhoretz published "Why We Were in Vietnam" -- a review of the arguments surrounding a war that had by then become a symbol of strategic overreach and moral failure.

In the conventional wisdom, our defeat had been well-deserved: we had acted as imperialists and counter-revolutionaries, had engaged in an ideological foreign policy (an anti-Communist "crusade"), and had an "inordinate fear" of Communism.

The elite consensus was thus that the Vietnam War had been both strategically unnecessary and morally degrading -- reflecting American arrogance and an abuse of power typified by the war crime at My Lai, with a military that had allegedly regularly acted in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Kahn.

Podhoretz wrote his 1983 book to reopen the debate, to investigate whether the Vietnam War had in fact reflected "the intellectual and moral poverty" charged by Jimmy Carter, or had been the "noble cause" that Ronald Reagan had called it (in a comment widely reported in the media as a "gaffe") -- an effort to protect millions of people from a totalitarian society and to maintain America's strategy of containing Communist expansion.

The book was written with the courage and clarity that has always been Podhoretz's literary trademark, and it contributed to a restored confidence in America's national purpose and a renewed belief in the morality of its cause -- two essential elements in the ultimate victory in the Cold War.

Podhoretz now refers to the Cold War as "World War III," because it was a global ideological conflict, with hot wars in Korea and Vietnam and a nuclear confrontation in Cuba, proxy contests in Angola and elsewhere, and continuous tests of will from Berlin to Taiwan -- all pitting the forces of freedom against an armed totalitarian ideology whose global intentions had been made clear.

The current conflict, in Podhoretz's view, is thus "World War IV" -- a similar worldwide conflict with ideological roots that, like World War III, will take three or four decades to win, and which likewise cannot be won absent domestic confidence in America's purpose and the morality of its cause. He defends the Iraq War against all comers (and there are a lot of comers -- Democrats, realists, paleoconservatives, former liberal hawks, and others), but the goal of his book is not simply a defense of that battle. Instead, it is a more ambitious attempt to place that conflict in the framework of what he believes will be a multi-decade world war.

Read the whole thing.