The Egyptian government announced Sunday that it had “conclusive proof” that an al-Qaida-linked Palestinian terrorist group orchestrated the New Year’s Day bombing outside a Coptic Christian church that killed 25 worshipers and exacerbated sectarian tensions across Egypt.Interior Minister Habib Adly blamed the attack on the Army of Islam, an extremist organization based in the Gaza Strip. The naming of foreigners as the culprit may help Egyptian authorities in easing escalating tensions between Muslims and Copts, who make up about 10 percent of the nation’s population.

Adly indicated, however, that the Army of Islam recruited Egyptians in planning the bombing in Alexandria. Cairo has long accused militants in Gaza — backed either by al-Qaida or other the radical groups — of using the Palestinian territory to plot attacks across the border to upset Egypt’s tourism industry and inflame religious mistrust.

“We have conclusive proof of their heinous involvement in planning and carrying out such a villainous terrorist act,” Adly said of the Palestinian organization.

Authorities did not initially disclose what evidence they had. The state-run newspaper, Al Ahram, reported that the government had obtained confessions pointing to the Army of Islam. The Interior Ministry later identified one of the suspects arrested as a 26-year-old Egyptian university student who had traveled to Gaza and was enlisted by the militants to strike Coptic churches.

The Palestinian group has denied involvement. “Despite our praise to those who executed the attack, the Army of Islam has no connection to the Alexandria church bombing,” the group said in a statement.

No one has claimed responsibility for the bloodshed. Egypt has accused the Army of Islam of masterminding a 2009 bombing that killed a French tourist and wounded 24 in Cairo’s historic district. Authorities believe the group also was linked to the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006.

The New Year’s Day car bombing at All Saints Church in the coastal city of Alexandria stunned Christians and Muslims alike. The attack was followed nearly two weeks later by another assault on Copts when an off-duty policeman opened fire inside a train, killing a 71-year-old man and wounding five other Christians.

A week ago, Egyptian state security court sentenced a Muslim man to death for last year’s drive-by shooting on a church in southern Egypt that killed six Christians. Copts and Muslims have lived in relative peace in Egypt for generations, but Christians are accusing the government of President Hosni Mubarak of ignoring deteriorating relations and a rise in extremism.

“Our government will triumph over terror, and I will do my utmost to maintain unity between Egyptians,” Mubarak said Sunday in a televised speech during a ceremony honoring police officers. “I will not be lenient with sectarian actions from either side and will confront their perpetrators with the might and decisiveness of the law.”

By Caroline B. Glick

Over the past generation, the Left has inverted the terminology of human rights, freedom, morality, heroism, democracy and victimization

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |

The expressed aim of the flotilla’s organizers is to unlawfully provide aid and comfort to Hamas — an illegal terrorist organization. Since it seized power in Gaza three years ago, Hamas, which is openly committed to the genocide of world Jewry and the physical eradication of Israel, has transformed the Gaza Strip into a hub of the global jihad. It has been illegally holding hostage Gilad Schalit incognito for four years. And it is continuously engaged in a massive, Iranian-financed arms buildup ahead of its next assault.

Beyond providing aid to Hamas, the declared aim of the “Free Gaza” movement is to coerce Israel into providing Hamas with an outlet to the sea. This too is in contravention of international law which expressly prohibits states and non-state actors from providing any support to terrorist organizations.

IN SENDING out the latest group of ships, Turkey and its Irish, Greek and Swedish partners seek to appropriate the imagery of the Jewish pre-statehood struggle for independence from Britain. In a bid to appease Hamas’s jihadist precursors, in 1939 Britain’s Mandatory authorities broke international law and prohibited Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine. The League of Nations’ letter of mandate for Britain specifically enjoined the British to facilitate Jewish immigration to the land of Israel. Yet following the Arab terror war from 1936-1939, the British issued the White Paper that all but prohibited Jewish immigration. This move blocked the one place on Earth where European Jews were wanted from accepting them and so trapped 6 million Jews in Hitler’s Europe.

In the aftermath of the war, the British maintained their prohibition on Jewish immigration. To fight this British policy, the Zionist leadership in pre-state Israel organized the Aliya Bet program of illegal immigration. Jewish agents scoured the world for ships large enough to bring Europe’s Jewish refugees to the land of Israel.

The ship most emblematic of the era was the Exodus. The Exodus which set sail from France in July 1947 with 4,515 Jewish Holocaust survivors on board was the Zionist response to a new British policy to force illegal immigrant ships to return to Europe.

The British rammed the Exodus in Haifa. They boarded and killed three Jewish defenders. They then forced its passengers to board British prison ships that would return them to Europe. French authorities denied the ships the right to land in France, so the British sailed on to Hamburg, Germany, where the
refugees were forced to disembark.

The international outcry against Britain in the wake of the Exodus affair shamed London into cancelling its new policy. It also paved the way for Israel’s independence 10 months later.

Now the Turkish, Greek, Swedish and Irish governments are colluding with Hamas to purloin the imagery of the Exodus and the heroism of the Jewish people in the years leading up to statehood and project that imagery onto a terrorist organization that seeks to complete Hitler’s work. They further seek to invert reality by portraying Israel, which in accordance with international law is trying to contain and defeat Hamas, as a combination of the German Nazis and the British imperialists.

SO FAR, they are getting away with it. So far, for their efforts on behalf of a genocidal terrorist organization Erdogan and his ilk are being extolled as human rights champions. Barring any unexpected events, Israel will suffer yet another public relations disaster on Thursday when the ships approach Gaza.

How has this happened? How is it that we have become so overwhelmed by the Left’s propaganda that most of our political leaders and intellectual elite are incapable of even describing the evil that it being advanced against us?

Over the past generation, the Left has commandeered our language. It has inverted the terminology of human rights, freedom, morality, heroism, democracy and victimization. Its perversion of language has made it nearly impossible for members of democratic, human rights respecting, moral societies to describe the threats they face from their human rights destroying, genocidal, tyrannical enemies. Thanks to the efforts of the international Left, the latter are championed as the victims of those they seek to annihilate.

Two incidents in recent weeks make clear just how disastrous the Left’s wholesale theft of language and through it, their inversion of reality has been for Israel.

Last Monday, Noam Chomsky arrived at the Allenby Bridge and requested a visa to enter Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The police at the border refused his request. The radical leftist Israel-basher made a fuss and waited around for several hours before he went back to Jordan.

Chomsky left Jordan at the end of the week and travelled to Lebanon. For the second time in four years, on Friday Chomsky toured southern Lebanon with a Hizbullah guide. Now an official guest of Hizbullah, Chomsky is scheduled to give an address in Beirut Tuesday to celebrate the IDF’s pullout from south Lebanon 10 years ago.

As David Hornik detailed in FrontPage Magazine on Friday, the leftist-dominated Israeli media went nuts when they discovered Chomsky had been turned away at the border. Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz heralded Chomsky as a great mind and proclaimed hysterically that the refusal to allow him to enter the country marked the end of Israeli democracy and the start of a slide into fascism. The Western media quickly piled on and within hours Israel’s right to deny its avowed enemies entry was under assault.

And Chomsky is Israel’s enemy. As Hornik pointed out, Chomsky has repeatedly defended Holocaust deniers while accusing Israel of being the ideological heir of Nazi Germany. When he hasn’t been too busy championing the Khmer Rouge and Josef Stalin, and attacking the US as the Great Satan, Chomsky has devoted much time and energy to calling for Israel’s eradication and defending Palestinian and Hizbullah terrorists.

IT WAS the government’s job to point this out. But instead, faced with the leftist onslaught against its right to control its borders, the government crumpled. Instead of explaining that Chomsky is an enemy of Israel and an abettor and defender of genocide, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev apologized for the unpleasant reception Chomsky received at the Allenby Bridge. Regev also promised that if Chomsky returns, he will be granted an entry visa.

The government’s cowardly handling of the Chomsky incident is testament to the Left’s success at intimidating Western leaders to the point where instead of standing up to leftist propaganda and lies, they accept them as truth and even collaborate in disseminating them.

Probably the PMO figured no one would listen if it told the truth about Chomsky. It probably felt that defending the decision to bar Chomsky from the country would only elicit a second barrage of media attacks.

And perhaps they were right. But the fact that the Left would have remained unconvinced doesn’t excuse the government’s abject surrender of the truth about Chomsky to Israel’s enemies on the Left who portray the MIT professor as a human rights activist and a great intellectual humanitarian. As David Horowitz and Peter Collier prove in their book The Anti-Chomsky Reader, there doesn’t seem to be a tyrant that Chomsky hasn’t championed or a victim that Chomsky hasn’t demonized in the entire span of his 50-year career as a radical activist.

The government is not alone in its fear of exposing and fighting the Left’s campaign to demonize the country.

THE RADICAL left’s ability to block voices of dissent from its anti-Israel and anti-freedom positions was similarly demonstrated two weeks ago at Tel Aviv University’s annual Board of Governors meeting.

For several years, a large, vocal group of tenured professors from the university have actively participated in the international campaign to boycott Israeli universities and academics while actively supporting Hamas and Hizbullah. That is, many Tel Aviv University professors, whose salaries are paid by university donors and Israeli taxpayers, have been using their university titles to undermine the university and to advance the cause of Israel’s destruction.

This year the university’s Board of Governors bestowed an honorary doctorate on Harvard Prof. Alan Dershowitz. In his acceptance speech, Dershowitz called these professors out for their vile behavior and named three of the most vocal enemies of the university and Israel on the international stage: Profs. Anat Matar, Rachel Giora and Shlomo Sand.

The university’s tenured anti-Zionist activists were quick to retaliate. More than 80 professors signed a letter to university president Joseph Klaffter demanding that the university disassociate itself from Dershowitz’s statements.

Klaffter was quick to oblige. At the Board of Governors meeting, Klaffter silenced board member Mark Tanenbaum when he tried to put forward a resolution calling for disciplinary action against university professors who use their university titles to defame the university or Israel. Klaffter, who isn’t even a member of the Board of Governors, reportedly grabbed the microphone away from Tanenbaum and adjourned the meeting. Klaffter justified his physical denial of Tanenbaum’s freedom of speech by claiming that he was defending academic freedom.

Like the Prime Minister’s Office’s apology to Noam Chomsky, Klaffter’s action — aside from arguably being prohibited by his own university’s constitution — was further proof of the Left’s success in appropriating the language and imagery of freedom and tolerance in the service of forces that seek to destroy freedom and end tolerance.

ON THURSDAY Hamas’s maritime enablers from Europe, Turkey and beyond will arrive at our doorstep. The navy will block their entry to Gaza. Israel will be demonized by terror-abettors disguised as human rights activists and journalists worldwide. And the story will pave the way for the next assault on Israel’s right to exist.

This endless circle of demonization and aggression will continue to widen and escalate until our political leaders and our intellectual elite reclaim our language from those on the terror-abetting Left. True, our reclamation of our language will not go unopposed. But if we do not reassert our right to describe objective reality, our inability to explain why we are right and our detractors serve evil will be our undoing.

Istanbul

Last week I asked Bernard Lewis where he thought Turkey might be going. The dean of Middle East historians speculated that in a decade the secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk might more closely resemble the Islamic Republic of Iran—even as Iran transformed itself into a secular republic.

Reading the news about Turkey from afar, it’s easy to see what Prof. Lewis means. Since coming to power in 2002, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dramatically recast the traditional contours of Turkish foreign policy. Gone are the days when the country had a strategic partnership with Israel, involving close military ties and shared enemies in Syria and Iran and the sundry terrorist groups they sponsored. Gone are the days, too, when the U.S. could rely on Turkey as a bulwark against common enemies, be they the Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

View Full Image

Associated PressTurkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Today, Mr. Erdogan has excellent relations with Syrian strongman Bashar Assad, whom the prime minister affectionately calls his “brother.” He has accused Israel of “savagery” in Gaza and opened a diplomatic line to Hamas while maintaining good ties with the genocidal government of Sudan. He was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his fraudulent victory in last year’s election. He has resisted intense pressure from the Obama administration to vote for a new round of Security Council sanctions on Iran, with which Turkey has a $10 billion trade relationship. And he has sabotaged efforts by his own foreign ministry to improve ties with neighboring Armenia.

The changes in foreign policy reflect the rolling revolution in Turkey’s domestic political arrangements. The military, long the pillar of Turkish secularism, is under assault by Mr. Erdogan’s Islamist-oriented government, which has recently arrested dozens of officers on suspicion of plotting a coup. Last week the Turkish parliament voted to put a referendum to the public that would, if passed, allow the government to pack the country’s top courts, another secularist pillar, with its own people. Also under assault is the media group Dogan, which last year was slapped with a multibillion dollar tax fine.

Oh, and America’s favorability rating among Turks, at around 14% according to recent polls, is plumbing an all-time low, despite Barack Obama’s presidency and his unprecedented outreach to Muslims in general and Turks in particular. In 2004, the year of Abu Ghraib, it was 30%.

All this would seem to more than justify Prof. Lewis’s alarm. So why do so many Turks, including more than a few secularists and classical liberals, seem mostly at ease with the changes Mr. Erdogan has wrought? A possible answer may be self-delusion: Liberals were also at the forefront of the Iranian revolution before being brutally swept aside by the Ayatollah Khomeini. But that isn’t quite convincing in Turkey’s case.

More plausible is Turkey’s economic transformation under the AKP’s pro-free market stewardship. Inflation, which ran to 99% in 1997, is down to single digits. Goldman Sachs anticipates 7% growth this year, which would make the country Europe’s strongest performer—if only Europe would have it as a member. Turks now look on the EU with diminished envy and growing contempt. One time arch-rival Greece mostly earns their pity.

Chief among the beneficiaries of this transformation has been the AKP’s political base: an Islamic bourgeoisie that was long shut out of the old statist arrangements between the country’s secular political and business elites. Members of this new class want to send their daughters to universities—and insist they be allowed to do so wearing headscarves. They also insist that they be ruled by the government they elected, not by the “deep state” of unelected and often self-dealing officers, judges and bureaucrats who defended the country’s secularism at the expense of its democracy and prosperity.

The paradoxical result is that, as the country has become wealthier and (in some respects) more democratic, it has also shed some of its Western trappings. Mr. Erdogan’s infatuations with his unsavory neighbors undoubtedly stem from his own instincts, ideology and ego. But it also reflects a public sentiment that no longer wants Turkey to be a stranger in its own region, particularly when it so easily can be its leader. Some Turks call this “neo-Ottomanism,” others “Turkish-Gaullism.” Whichever way, it is bound to discomfit the West.

The more serious question is how far it all will go. Some of Mr. Erdogan’s domestic power plays smack of incipient Putinism. The estrangement from Israel is far from complete, but an Israeli attack on Iran might just do the trick. And it’s hard to see why Mr. Erdogan should buck public opinion when it comes to Turkey’s alliance with the U.S. when he’s prepared to follow public opinion in so many other matters.

Most importantly, will the Erdogan brand of Islamism remain relatively modest in its social and political ambitions, or will it become aggressive and radical? It would be wrong to pretend to know the answer. It would be insane not to worry about the possibility.

The Strategic Foundations of the US-Israel Alliance

By Caroline B. Glick

A MUST READ essay explaining why a strong Israel is essential for US national security. Its author is one of the foremost commentators on Middle East affairs.

PLEASE FORWARD this column to anybody who feels the need to defend the only democracy in the Middle East
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Israel’s status as the US’s most vital ally in the Middle East has been so widely recognized for so long that over the years, Israeli and American leaders alike have felt it unnecessary to explain what it is about the alliance that makes it so important for the US.

Today, as the Obama administration is openly distancing the US from Israel while giving the impression that Israel is a strategic impediment to the administration’s attempts to strengthen its relations with the Arab world, recalling why Israel is the US’s most important ally in the Middle East has become a matter of some urgency.

Much is made of the fact that Israel is a democracy. But we seldom consider why the fact that Israel is a representative democracy matters. The fact that Israel is a democracy means that its alliance with America reflects the will of the Israeli people. As such, it remains constant regardless of who is power in Jerusalem.

All of the US’s other alliances in the Middle East are with authoritarian regimes whose people do not share the pro-American views of their leaders. The death of leaders or other political developments are liable to bring about rapid and dramatic changes in their relations with the US.

For instance, until 1979, Iran was one of the US’s closest strategic allies in the region. Owing to the gap between the Iranian people and their leadership, the Islamic revolution put an end to the US-Iran alliance.

Egypt flipped from a bitter foe to an ally of the US when Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1969. Octogenarian President Hosni Mubarak’s encroaching death is liable to cause a similar shift in the opposite direction.

Instability in the Hashemite kingdom in Jordan and the Saudi regime could transform those countries from allies to adversaries.

Only Israel, where the government reflects the will of the people is a reliable, permanent US ally.

America reaps the benefits of its alliance with Israel every day. As the US suffers from chronic intelligence gaps, Israel remains the US’s most reliable source for accurate intelligence on the US’s enemies in the region.

Israel is the US’s only ally in the Middle East that always fights its own battles. Indeed, Israel has never asked the US for direct military assistance in time of war. Since the US and Israel share the same regional foes, when Israel is called upon to fight its enemies, its successes redound to the US’s benefit.

Here it bears recalling Israel’s June 1982 destruction of Syria’s Soviet-made anti-aircraft batteries and the Syrian air force. Those stunning Israeli achievements were the first clear demonstration of the absolute superiority of US military technology over Soviet military technology. Many have argued that it was this Israeli demonstration of Soviet technological inferiority that convinced the Reagan administration it was possible to win the Cold War.

In both military and non-military spheres, Israeli technological achievements – often developed with US support – are shared with America. The benefits the US has gained from Israeli technological advances in everything from medical equipment to microchips to pilotless aircraft are without peer worldwide.

Beyond the daily benefits the US enjoys from its close ties with Israel, the US has three fundamental, permanent, vital national security interests in the Middle East. A strong Israel is a prerequisite for securing all of these interests.

America’s three permanent strategic interests in the Middle East are as follows:

1 – Ensuring the smooth flow of affordable petroleum products from the region to global consumers through the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal.

2 – Preventing the most radical regimes, sub-state and non-state actors from acquiring the means to cause catastrophic harm.

3 – Maintaining the US’s capacity to project its power to the region.

A strong Israel is the best guarantor of all of these interests. Indeed, the stronger Israel is, the more secure these vital American interests are. Three permanent and unique aspects to Israel’s regional position dictate this state of affairs.

1 – As the first target of the most radical regimes and radical sub-state actors in the region, Israel has a permanent, existential interest in preventing these regimes and sub-state actors from acquiring the means to cause catastrophic harm.

Israel’s 1981 airstrike that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor prevented Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons. Despite US condemnation at the time, the US later acknowledged that the strike was a necessary precondition to the success of Operation Desert Storm ten years later. Richard Cheney – who served as secretary of defense during Operation Desert Storm – has stated that if Iraq had been a nuclear power in 1991, the US would have been hard pressed to eject Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army from Kuwait and so block his regime from asserting control over oil supplies in the Persian Gulf.

2 – Israel is a non-expansionist state and its neighbors know it. In its 62 year history, Israel has only controlled territory vital for its national security and territory that was legally allotted to it in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate which has never been abrogated or superseded.

Israel’s strength, which it has used only in self-defense, is inherently non-threatening. Far from destabilizing the region, a strong Israel stabilizes the Middle East by deterring the most radical actors from attacking.

In 1970, Israel blocked Syria’s bid to use the PLO to overthrow the Hashemite regime in Jordan. Israel’s threat to attack Syria not only saved the Hashemites then, it has deterred Syria from attempting to overthrow the Jordanian regime ever since.

Similarly, Israel’s neighbors understand that its purported nuclear arsenal is a weapon of national survival and hence they view it as non-threatening. This is the reason Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal has never spurred a regional nuclear arms race.

In stark contrast, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, a regional nuclear arms race will ensue immediately.

Although they will never admit it, Israel’s non-radical neighbors feel more secure when Israel is strong. On the other hand, the region’s most radical regimes and non-state actors will always seek to emasculate Israel.

3– Since as the Jewish state Israel is the regional bogeyman, no Arab state will agree to form a permanent alliance with it. Hence, Israel will never be in a position to join forces with another nation against a third nation.

In contrast, the Egyptian-Syrian United Arab Republic of the 1960s was formed to attack Israel. Today, the Syrian-Iranian alliance is an inherently aggressive alliance against Israel and the non-radical Arab states in the region. Recognizing the stabilizing force of a strong Israel, the moderate states of the region prefer for Israel to remain strong.

From the US’s perspective, far from impairing its alliance-making capabilities in the region, by providing military assistance to Israel, America isn’t just strengthening the most stabilizing force in the region. It is showing all states and non-state actors in the greater Middle East it is trustworthy.

On the other hand, every time the US seeks to attenuate its ties with Israel, it is viewed as an untrustworthy ally by the nations of the Middle East. US hostility towards Israel causes Israel’s neighbors to hedge their bets by distancing themselves from the US lest America abandon them to their neighboring adversaries.

A strong Israel empowers the relatively moderate actors in the region to stand up to the radical actors in the region because they trust Israel to keep the radicals in check. Today’s regional balance of power in which the moderates have the upper hand over the radicals is predicated on a strong Israel.

On the other hand, when Israel is weakened the radical forces are emboldened to threaten the status quo. Regional stability is thrown asunder. Wars become more likely. Attacks on oil resources increase. The most radical sub-state actors and regimes are emboldened.

To the extent that the two-state solution assumes that Israel must contract itself to within the indefensible 1949 ceasefire lines, and allow a hostile Palestinian state allied with terrorist organizations to take power in the areas it vacates, the two-state solution is predicated on making Israel weak and empowering radicals. In light of this, the two-state solution as presently constituted is antithetical to America’s most vital strategic interests in the Middle East.

When we bear in mind the foundations for the US’s alliance with Israel, it is obvious that US support for Israel over the years has been the most cost-effective national security investment in post-World War II US history.

RALLY IN SOLIDARITY WITH ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO BUILD AND LIVE IN ITS OWN COUNTRY. 

STAND FOR A UNITED JEWISH JERUSALEM, AND PROTEST THE ADMINISTRATION’S DISGRACEFUL SCAPEGOATING OF ISRAEL.

EMERGENCY RALLY

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Sponsored by Jewish Action Alliance & endorsed by many other leaders and organizations.   

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!

Contact: Jewish Action Alliance, 244 Fifth Avenue, Suite B216, New York, NY 10001 (212) 726-1124 tel http://standwithisrael.wordpress.com/           

“Where there is no leadership, step forward and lead.” 

The New York Times Makes It Official: Obama Has Shifted U.S. Policy Against Israel

By Jonathan Tobin

	Did you fall for the photo-op?

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If there were any lingering doubts in the minds of Democrats who care about Israel that the president they helped elect has fundamentally altered American foreign policy to the Jewish state’s disadvantage, they are now gone. The New York Times officially proclaimed the administration’s changed attitude in a front-page story last week that ought to send chills down the spine of anyone who believed Barack Obama when he pledged in 2008 that he would be a loyal friend of Israel.
In the view of the paper’s Washington correspondents, the moment that signaled what had already been apparent to anyone who was paying attention was the president’s declaration at a Tuesday news conference that resolving the Middle East conflict was “a vital national security interest of the United States.” Mr. Obama went on to state that the conflict is “costing us significantly in terms of blood and treasure,” thus attempting to draw a link between Israel’s attempts to defend itself with the safety of American troops who are fighting Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world. By claiming the Arab-Israeli conflict to be a “vital national security interest” that must be resolved, the “frustrated” Obama is making it clear that he will push hard to impose a solution on the parties.
The significance of this false argument is that it not only seeks to wrongly put the onus on Israel for the lack of a peace agreement but that it also now attempts to paint any Israeli refusal to accede to Obama’s demands as a betrayal in which a selfish Israel is stabbing America in the back. The response from Obama to this will be, the Times predicts, “tougher policies toward Israel,” since it is, in this view, ignoring America’s interests and even costing American lives.
The problem with this policy is that the basic premise behind it is false. Islamists may hate Israel, but that is not why they are fighting the United States. They are fighting America because they rightly see the West and its culture, values, and belief in democracy as antithetical to their own beliefs and a threat to its survival and growth as they seek to impose their medieval system everywhere they can. Americans are not dying because Israelis want to live in Jerusalem or even the West Bank or even because there is an Israel. If Israel were to disappear tomorrow, that catastrophe would certainly be cheered in the Arab and Islamic world, but it would not end the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, cause Iran to stop its nuclear program, or put al-Qaeda out of business. In fact, a defeat for a country allied with the United States would strengthen Iran and al-Qaeda.
But undeterred by the facts and the experience of a generation of failed peace plans that have always foundered not on Israeli intransigence but rather on the absolute refusal of any Palestinian leader to put his signature on a document that will legitimize a Jewish state within any borders, Obama is pushing ahead. In the view of unnamed administration officials who have helpfully explained Obama’s policies to the Times, it is now only a matter of time before the president puts forward his own peace plan. And as the debate on health care illustrated, Obama will attempt to shove his diktat down the throats of the Israelis, whether the vast majority of Americans who support Israel like it or not.

As the Times notes, there is a great irony to Obama’s blazing anger at the Israelis and the urgency with which he views the issue. It comes at a time when the overwhelming majority of Israelis have “become disillusioned with the whole idea of resolving the conflict. Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government has long been skeptical about the benefits of a peace deal with the Palestinians. But skepticism has taken root in the Israeli public as well, particularly after Israel saw little benefit from its traumatic withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.” In other words, after countless concessions made to the Arabs at Oslo, and in subsequent accords and after offers from Israel of a state comprising Gaza, the West Bank, and parts of Jerusalem were refused by the Palestinians in 2000 and 2008, most Israelis have finally figured out that the other side doesn’t want to end the conflict. And they are baffled as to why Obama and his advisers haven’t come to the same all too obvious conclusion.
But with the Obama administration now so passionately committed to hammering Israel even as it apparently neglects to take action to stop Iran’s nuclear program, the question remains what will be the response of pro-Israel Democrats. As Obama draws closer to all-out diplomatic war on Israel’s government, the obligation for principled Democrats to speak up in open opposition to these policies cannot be avoided. While many Democrats have sought to confuse the issue or avoid conflict with the president, stories such as the one on the front page of the Times makes it clear that sooner or later, pro-Israel Democrats are going to have to decide whether partisan loyalties will trump their support for the Jewish state’s survival.

I have just sat down after the fading notes of the siren have finally
disappeared.  It is another  Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen.  We have lost
22, 684 sons and daughters.  For a little country like Israel, that is an
enormous and incalculable loss.  Over the years, I have told all those ready
to listen Israel’s well-kept secret: there is no Israeli army.  There is
only my son and your daughter, and the neighbor’s kids.  Every loss is the
loss of not only an individual, but of  generations: the children who will
never be born, the grandchildren that will never snuggle in the laps of
grandparents.  It is the destruction of not only young lives full of
promise, but of their families: mothers and fathers whose lives are forever
shattered, grandparents who must bear the unthinkable, young girls who lost
their boyfriends, wives who lost their husbands, children who lost their
fathers.  Young women who died before they could experience anything of
life’s promises.
After the words and ceremonies and sad music and films of remembrance, one
comes to the conclusion that Israel itself is bereaved, and does not know
how to comfort itself.  The ongoing and seemingly neverending price for our
freedom in the land God promised us is inhumanly high.

Only yesterday Achmadinijad spoke clearly of destroying Israel, uprooting us
like a “cancer.”  The King of Jordan proclaimed there would be another war
in July.  And Syria is boldly transferring long range scud missiles once
again to Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

Only a week ago, we went through Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I remember
walking from my home to the Kotel.  And on the way back, I stepped inside
the newly rebuilt Hurva Synagogue, destroyed by the Arab Legion in 1948.  As
I stepped into the women’s section, I looked with wonder at how the once
empty, destroyed shell, was filled anew with praying, chanting Jews.  It
reminded me of  Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones rising from the dead full of
life once more.   They destroy, and we rebuild.  So it has been for every
generation of Jews.
That Europeans, who killed and tortured our families with unprecedented
barbarism, destroying one-third of the Jewish people, do not rejoice at what
we have done with our little country, but instead do all they can to see us
die again, shows me all their tears over our dead are fake, all their
Holocaust memorials empty shells.  That Americans, who did nothing to  stop
the trains to Auschwitz or to destroy the gas chambers, should ask us to
prove our desire for peace by appeasing our enemies, leading to more of our
beautiful sons and daughters being killed, shows me that America too has not
learned its history lessons.

There exists no comfort for the loss of our children as soldiers fighting
just wars.  But there is even less comfort for the loss of our children at
the hands of slaughterers, terrorists, and evil regimes.  Our young soldiers
have given their lives to save us from that.  May God bless their memories,
and comfort their families.  We owe them everything that makes our lives in
this world as Jews possible. Let’s remember that more than one day a year.

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