233 Goldstone "collaborating with Israel's enemies" - Isi Leibler

Goldstone "collaborating with Israel's enemies" - Isi Leibler

Why the concerted compaign against the Goldstone Report? Because it could lead the UN to decide that Israel committed War Crimes - thus undoing the Victim image so carefully cultivated. And losing the moral edge.

(1) Goldstone "collaborating with Israel's enemies" - Isi Leibler
(2) Multiculturalism needed in Australia, but not for Israel - Isi Leibler
(3) Students arrested for heckling Israeli Ambassador at UC Irvine
(4) AP pulls Iran Nukes story after Antiwar.com exposé
(5) Gaza fuel runs out
(6) Tony Blair admits Israel a major reason for Iraq War - Stephen M. Walt
(7) The lobby boasts of its  power yet attacks those who call attention to it - Walt
(8) More silly arguments about Iran's bomb - Stephen M. Walt
(9) Philip Weiss: apartheid in Israel is wrecking Jewish culture & intelligence

(1) Goldstone "collaborating with Israel's enemies" - Isi Leibler

From: Josef Schwanzer <donauschwob@optusnet.com.au> Date: 11.02.2010 10:19 AM

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=168265

February 11, 2010 Thursday 27 Shevat 5770 13:16 IST

Confronting Jews who defame Jews

BY ISI LEIBLER

09/02/2010

The time has come to draw red lines between legitimate criticism and initiatives seeking to demonize Israel.

Richard Goldstone's infamous role as the token head of the UNHRC report accusing the IDF of war crimes is only one example of prominent Jews who exploit their origins as a way to defame their people. In fact, until recently, Goldstone was considered a respectable Jew, even a Zionist. He was blinded by hubris and ego, and allowed himself to be seduced by the bitterest enemies of his people into providing legitimization for a blood libel against the Jewish state.

Unlike Goldstone, most Jewish renegades were driven by desperation to unburden themselves from what they regarded as their repressive ethnic and cultural roots. Historian Jacob Talmon described such deviant behavior as “a Jewish neurosis” in response to centuries of oppression and pariah status.

The purported commitment of these Jews to universal and humanitarian values was usually belied by extreme attacks on their own people and association with sponsors who were outright anti-Semites.

Streams of such Jews emerged during the 19th century in the wake of emancipation. A classic example was Karl Marx, whose anti-Semitic diatribes were reflected in outbursts like “money is the jealous god of Israel, by the side of which no other god may exist... The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”

In czarist Russia, some Jewish social revolutionaries even endorsed pogroms against their own kinsmen, hoping that by venting their frustrations on Jews, the masses would ultimately turn on the czar.

Their successors, the Yevsektsiya, the notorious Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party, became the most vicious persecutors of their own people, frenziedly suppressing all manifestations of Jewish cultural and religious life. Ultimately they too were liquidated in Stalin's anti-Semitic campaigns.

Many Jews outside the Soviet Union joined the Communist Party out of a mistaken conviction that it represented the most effective way to combat Nazism. But once in the party, they became brainwashed, and applauded as the evil Soviet regime executed their kinsmen and institutionalized state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

AFTER THE Holocaust and the struggle to create the State of Israel, most Jewish anti-Semites hibernated. As the plight of Soviet Jewry became a rallying call uniting Jews throughout the world, the few remaining Jewish communists were marginalized.

Modern Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, a genuine social democrat, appreciated the dangers posed by left-wing nihilists. He strove strenuously to neutralize the extremists and post-Zionists, who only became influential after his retirement and the end of Mapai-Labor Party hegemony.

Today, despite representing a small fringe, the disproportionate influence of anti-Zionist Jewish extremists in global campaigns demonizing Israel has reached an all-time high.

Ironically, the worst elements emanate from Israel.

There is the frenzied agitation by Israeli academics who abuse academic freedom by utilizing their universities as launching pads to delegitimize their own country. Neve Gordon, a political science lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and a typical Jewish defamer of Zion, published an opinion piece last year in The Los Angeles Times calling on the international community to boycott Israel. He and others like him, funded by the Israeli government and philanthropic Diaspora Zionists, exploit their academic positions to support those seeking to destroy us.

A recent study by Im Tirtzu claims that over 90% of the false allegations of Israeli war crimes originating from Israel cited in the Goldstone  Report were provided by 16 NGOs who received close to $8 million from the New Israel Fund, an organization purporting to promote social integration and welfare in Israel, headed by former Meretz MK Naomi Chazan. The NIF also sponsors Arab-Israeli groups promoting a bi-national state and US lecture tours by Arab Israelis on Israel Independence Day promoting the Nakba.

Last year Haaretz highlighted reports accusing the IDF of war crimes which were subsequently proven false. These received massive global media exposure and made a major contribution toward creating the hostile anti-Israeli climate preceding the Goldstone report.

THE ROT extends to the Diaspora, where as a matter of course anti-Israeli groups now employ Jewish spokesmen to cover up their bias and double standards. In the US, the demonizers of Zion are exploiting the eroding relationship between the Obama administration and Israel. Former American Jewish Congress director Henry Siegman described Israel as “the only apartheid regime in the Western world.” Jewish students at campuses are increasingly bombarded with anti-Israel diatribes by Jewish academics such as Norman Finkelstein, who supports Iranians and terrorists, even exploiting the Holocaust suffering of his parents to delegitimize Israel.

In the UK, Jewish parliamentarian Gerald Kaufman compares Hamas to Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, disregarding the Hamas Charter which declares that the Day of Judgment will not come until all Jews are killed.

In Belgium, a Jewish playwright scripted a play in which the Philistines assume the role of Israelis and Samson emerges as a heroic Palestinian using a dynamite-loaded vest to blow up his oppressors.

Shlomo Sand, a political science lecturer at Tel Aviv University, achieved celebrity status in Europe by publishing a book titled The Invention of the Jewish People, a farrago of utter nonsense promoting the thesis that being the descendents of the Khazars from the Black Sea region who converted to Judaism in the eighth century, Jews have no historical affinity with the Land of Israel.

This was endorsed in a recent UK Financial Times article by Tony Judt, an American historian who regards the creation of Israel as a mistake and favors a binational state. Under the title “Israel must unpick its ethnic mix,” Judt expressed the hope that American Jews would detach themselves from Israel, as Irish-Americans did from Ireland.

The time has come for action – not to suppress freedom of expression, but to draw red lines between legitimate criticism of government policies and initiatives seeking to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. The first step must be to deny tenure in government-sponsored educational institutions to academics who brazenly collaborate with our enemies.

It is gratifying that opposition Kadima MKs are now calling for what will hopefully become a bipartisan investigation into the activities and sources of funding for the NIF and other NGOs.

Whenever criticized, those who call for boycotts of their own country and demonize the IDF as war criminals have the chutzpah to try to defame their critics as McCarthyites and fascists, and threaten libel proceedings. It is their behavior which is morally reprehensible, and we must not be intimidated by such hypocritical tactics.

Israelis and the global Jewish community should be under no illusions. The damage inflicted by Jews collaborating with Israel's enemies to demonize or delegitimize their country is immense. The only way to neutralize the impact of these renegade groups is to expose and confront them.

ileibler@netvision.net.il

(2) Multiculturalism needed in Australia, but not for Israel - Isi Leibler

Multiculturalism not for Israel - Leibler

By John Masanauskas

Herald Sun, Melbourne

September 27, 2000

http://boards.history.com/topic/Middle-East/Multiculturalism-Not-For/600015536

Melbourne - Jewish leader Isi Leibler, a staunch defender of Australian multiculturalism, says the policy has no place in Israel.

"This is a country which was set up and created as a Jewish country for the Jews," he told a Jerusalem newspaper.

Mr. Leibler has previously said that multiculturalism in Australia was something that "we are all proud being part and parcel of."

The founder of Jetset Travel moved to Israel two years ago as chairman of the World Jewish Congress. He recently published an essay arguing that Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, was under threat in Israel by "post-Zionists".

"A post-Zionist is someone who actually looks positively towards the end of the Jewish people in ethnocentric terms, as a national group, and no longer sees the Jewish people as one united people," he told the Jerusalem Post.

Mr. Leibler said post-Zionists were pushing a universalist agenda in schools aimed at eliminating Jewish nationalism and creating a multicultural state.

But Mr. Leibler, 65, has the opposite view of multiculturalism in Australia.

During the Pauline Hanson debate in 1993, he warned that multiculturalism was under threat by extremists.

"There is a need to sit together and establish a way in which Australians can recapture that spirit of multiculturalism which I think we are all proud being part and parcel of, and which is really under threat," Mr. Leibler said.

(3) Students arrested for heckling Israeli Ambassador at UC Irvine

From: WVNS <ummyakoub@yahoo.com> Date: 11.02.2010 11:03 AM

February 9, 2010

http://jta.org/news/article/2010/02/09/1010535/oren-heckled-by-arab-students-in-la

The video:

http://blogs.jta.org/telegraph/article/2010/02/09/1010542/oren-at-irvine

NEW YORK (JTA) -- At least 11 students were arrested for interrupting a lecture by Israel's U.S. ambassador at a California university.
Michael Oren was interrupted repeatedly during his speech Monday night at the University of California, Irvine, which for years has been at the center of campus wars over Israel.

Oren was removed from the stage for a period because of the outbursts, prompting a university faculty member to take the podium and admonish the crowd, calling the incident "embarrassing."
Oren returned to finish his speech but did not take questions from the audience, as was scheduled, Haaretz reported.

In a statement received by the Orange County Register, the university's Muslim Student Union said, "We condemn and oppose the presence of Michael Oren, the ambassador of Israel to the United States, on our campus today."

The University of California, Irvine has long been a flashpoint for the Israel wars on American campuses, with both sides leveling accusations of intimidation. The Zionist Organization of America complained about the situation to the U.S. Department of Education, which concluded there was insufficient evidence that the university had failed to adequately respond to complaints of harassment.

More recently, the ZOA called on the Department of Justice to probe alleged fund-raising activities on behalf of Hamas by Irvine students.

(4) AP pulls Iran Nukes story after Antiwar.com exposé

From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: 11.02.2010 12:02 AM

via Antiwar.com Blog by Eric Garris on 2/9/10

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/02/09/ap-pulls-iran-nukes-story-after-antiwar-com-expos/

Associated Press issued a story yesterday (Monday) entitled “Iran moves closer to nuke warhead capacity.” <news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100209/ap_on_re_us/iran_nuclear >

It was full of inaccurate and misleading information implying that Iran had admitted trying to enrich weapons-grade nuclear material. 

The story appeared on a wide variety of media.

Last night, Antiwar.com news editor Jason Ditz issued a story refuting the AP story. <http://news.antiwar.com/2010/02/08/ap-article-fuels-iran-war-hysteria/>

This morning, Associated Press recalled the story without explanation and replaced it with another, much less inflamatory story written by a different author.

It is important to question the mainstream media and not let them get away with helping the warmongers with their agenda.

(5) Gaza fuel runs out

From: WVNS <ummyakoub@yahoo.com> Date: 11.02.2010 01:05 AM

Power cut to about 50% of Gazans as fuel runs out
Sun, 07 Feb 2010
PressTV

Children play near Gaza's only power plant.

One of the two generators of Gaza's only power plant has been shut down due to a shortage of fuel, cutting power to around 50 percent of the residents of the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Energy Authority announced on Saturday that the remaining amount of fuel is enough to operate the other generator until Sunday morning.

The capacity of Gaza's only power plant has been curtailed to 30 megawatts, and power may have to be cut to another 10 percent of the residents of the Gaza Strip if bad weather continues since it causes electrical malfunctioning, the energy authority added.

The fuel for the plant is purchased from and delivered by Israel, via trucks through the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Gaza.

The Gaza Energy Authority has called on international parties, Arab states, and members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference to end Gaza's power crisis by holding the Ramallah-based Ministry of Finance responsible for decreasing the fuel allowance into Gaza, which it said mirrored Israel's blockade policy on the Strip.

A European Union contract paying for fuel shipments expired on November 30, 2009, Kan'an Obeid, the deputy manager of the Gaza Energy Authority, said on Thursday.

While the EU had been providing the service after the contract expired, EU officials recently notified the Gaza Energy Authority that they would no longer pay for the fuel shipments unless the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah drafted a new agreement and payment scheme.

(6) Tony Blair admits Israel a major reason for Iraq War - Stephen M. Walt
From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: 11.02.2010 06:41 PM

I don't mean to say I told you so, but...

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Monday, February 8, 2010 - 4:24 PM

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/08/i_dont_mean_to_say_i_told_you_so_but

Probably the most controversial claim in my work with John Mearsheimer on the Israel lobby is our argument that it played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Even some readers who were generally sympathetic to our overall position found that claim hard to accept, and some left-wing critics accused us of letting Bush and Cheney off the hook or of ignoring the importance of other interests, especially oil. Of course, Israel's defenders in the lobby took issue even more strenuously, usually by mischaracterizing our arguments and ignoring most (if not all) of the evidence we presented.

So I hope readers will forgive me if I indulge today in a bit of self-promotion, or more precisely, self-defense. This week, yet another piece of evidence surfaced that suggests we were right all along (HT to Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman and J. Glatzer at Mondoweiss). In his testimony to the Iraq war commission in the U.K., former Prime Minister Tony Blair offered the following account of his discussions with Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. Blair reveals that concerns about Israel were part of the equation and that Israel officials were involved in those discussions.

Take it away, Tony:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this."

Notice that Blair is not saying that Israel dreamed up the idea of attacking Iraq or that Bush was bent on war solely to benefit Israel or even to appease the Israel lobby here at home. But Blair is acknowledging that concerns about Israel were part of the equation, and that the Israeli government was being actively consulted in the planning for the war.

Blair's comments fit neatly with the argument we make about the lobby and Iraq. Specifically, Professor Mearsheimer and I made it clear in our article and especially in our book that the idea of invading Iraq originated in the United States with the neoconservatives, and not with the Israeli government. But as the neoconservative pundit Max Boot once put it, steadfast support for Israel is "a key tenet of neoconservatism." Prominent neo-conservatives occupied important positions in the Bush administration, and in the aftermath of 9/11, they played a major role in persuading Bush and Cheney to back a war against Iraq, which they had been advocating since the late 1990s. We also pointed out that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other Israeli officials were initially skeptical of this scheme, because they wanted the U.S. to focus on Iran, not Iraq. However, they became enthusiastic supporters of the idea of invading Iraq once the Bush administration made it clear to them that Iraq was just the first step in a broader campaign of "regional transformation" that would eventually include Iran.

At that point top Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum became cheerleaders for the invasion, and they played a prominent role in helping to sell the war here in the United States. Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington, DC in April 2002 and spoke in the U.S. Senate, telling his audience "the urgent need to topple Saddam is paramount," and that the campaign "deserves the unconditional support of all sane governments." (It sure sounds like he was well aware of the discussions in Crawford, doesn't it?) In May, foreign minister Shimon Peres said on CNN that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and that the United States "cannot sit and wait." A month later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recommending that the Bush administration "should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein."

This chorus continued through the summer and fall, with Barak and Netanyahu writing additional op-eds in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, each calling for military action to topple Saddam. Netanyahu's piece was titled "The Case for Toppling Saddam" and said that "nothing less than dismantling his regime will do." Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's official spokesman, Ra'anan Gissen, offered similar statements during this period as well, and Sharon himself told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee in August 2002 that Iraq was "the greatest danger facing Israel." According to an Aug. 16 article by Aluf Benn in Ha'aretz, Sharon reportedly told the Bush administration that putting off an attack would "only give [Saddam] more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of WMD." Foreign Minister Peres reiterated his own warnings as well, and told reporters in September 2002 that "the campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must." (For sources, see pp. 233-38).

If that's not enough evidence of where Israel's leaders were in the run-up to the war, consider that former President Bill Clinton told an audience at an Aspen Institute meeting in 2006 that "every Israeli politician I knew" (and he knows a lot of them) believed that Saddam Hussein was so great a threat that he should be removed even if he did not have WMD. Nor is this testimony at all surprising, given that we are talking about the leader who had fired Scud missiles into Israel during the first Gulf War in 1991 and had been giving money to the families of suicide bombers. If the Bush administration was bent on taking him out and then turning its gun-sights on Syria and Iran, one can easily understand why Israelis would welcome it.

Now, what about key groups in the lobby itself? If the neoconservatives deserve the blame for dreaming up the idea of invading Iraq, key groups and individuals in the lobby played an important role in selling it on Capitol Hill and to the public at large. AIPAC head Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003 that one of the organization's "success stories" over the previous year was "quietly lobbying Congress" to approve the resolution authorizing the use of force, a fact confirmed by journalists such as Nathan Guttman of the Forward, Michelle Goldberg of Salon.com, John B. Judis of the New Republic, and even Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker (see p. 242). Pundits at pro-Israel think tanks like the Brookings Institutions's Saban Center were openly backing war by the fall of 2002, with Martin Indyk, the head of the center, and Kenneth Pollack, its director of research, playing especially prominent roles.

Moreover, in this same period both the Jewish Council on Public Affairs and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations voted to endorse the use of force "as a last resort." Mortimer Zuckerman, a well-connected businessman and publisher who was then the chairman of the Conference of Presidents, was especially convinced about the futility of U.N. inspections and the need to topple Saddam, and wrote several editorials making that case in his magazine (U.S. News and World Report).

Still skeptical? Consider the following passage from an article by Matthew Berger of the Jewish Telegraph Agency, published just after President Bush's September 2002 appearance at the United Nations, where he threatened military action if Iraq did not comply with U.N. resolutions:

 Despite their caution and without specifying a formal policy, Jewish leaders predominantly expressed support for Bush's words at the United Nations.

 They said he detailed a strong case that Saddam has consistently ignored U.N. resolutions, that he was seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam has shown a propensity towards using them.

 "Iraq is the single most important threat right now to world peace and to our safety," said Dr. Mandell Ganchrow, executive vice president of the Orthodox Religious Zionists of America. He described Saddam as a "maniac" who "has proven that he will gas his own people."

 "The fanaticism that exists throughout the Middle East is best addressed by first dealing with Iraq," agreed Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Reform movement's Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

 Many American Jewish leaders expressed the fear that Saddam has not been quiet for the past decade because of a loss of will, but because he has been using the time to garner weapons for an eventual attack on U.S. interests and allies.

 "Do we have to wait until a target is hit, and the world says, 'Ah, yes, he did have weapons of mass destruction,'" asked David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee."

Not to be outdone, the editor of Jewish Week, Gary Rosenblatt, wrote an editorial in mid-December 2002 saying that "Washington's imminent war on Saddam Hussein is ... an opportunity to rid the world of a dangerous tyrant who present a particularly horrific threat Israel." He went on to say "the Torah instructs that when you enemy seeks to kill you kill him first. Self-defense is not permitted; it is commanded." Even the relatively liberal Rabbi David Saperstein of the Union of Reform Judaism's Religious Action Center told journalist Michelle Goldberg that "the Jewish community would want to see a forceful resolution to the threat that Saddam Hussein poses." "Forceful resolution" means war, and Saperstein also offered comparisons to the Bosnian conflict and the Nazi era to reinforce his call for military action.

Finally, consider the following passage from an editorial in the Jewish newspaper Forward, published in 2004:

As President Bush attempted to sell the war .. in Iraq, America's most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Some groups went even further, arguing that that the removal of the Iraqi leaders would represent a significant step toward bringing peace to the Middle East and winning America's war on terrorism"

The editorial also noted that "concern for Israel's safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups."

The Forward, it is worth noting, is well-connected and has a well-deserved reputation for probity in its reporting on the American Jewish community. It is hard to see how its editors could be mistaken about such an important issue or why they would lie about it. And they never issued a retraction. We can therefore assume that the writers of this editorial knew what they were talking about: key groups in the lobby supported the war. Reasonable people can disagree about how important their influence was, of course, but at a minimum these groups reinforced the Bush administration's resolve and made it less likely that other politicians or commentators would conduct a serious debate about the wisdom of the invasion.

Finally, it bears reiterating that I am talking about key groups and individuals in the Israel lobby, and not about the American Jewish community in toto. Indeed, my co-author and I have repeatedly pointed to surveys showing that American Jews were less supportive of the decision to invade Iraq than the American population as a whole, and we have emphasized that it would be a cardinal error (as well as dangerous) to try to "blame the Jews" for the war. Rather, blame should be reserved for Bush and Cheney (who made the ultimate decision for war), for the neoconservatives who dreamed up this foolish idea, and for the various groups and individuals -- including those in the lobby -- who helped sell it.

Nor am I suggesting that these individuals advocated this course because they thought it would be good for Israel but bad for the United States. Rather, they unwisely believed it would be good for both countries. And as we all know, they were tragically wrong.

That misconception helps us understand why the Israelis and their American friends who promoted the Iraq war didn't do a better job of covering their tracks and obscuring their enthusiasm for the endeavor. I suspect it is because they genuinely believed that the war would be easy and would bring great benefits for both Israel and the United States. If the war was a smashing success, then they would reap the credit and no one would spend that much time probing the war's origins. And even if someone did, its proponents would be hailed as strategic geniuses who had conceived and planned a stunning victory. Once the war went south, however, and numerous people began to probe how this disaster came about, an extensive dust-kicking operation to veil the role of Israel and the lobby was set in motion.

This campaign won't work, however, because too many people already know that Israel and the lobby were cheerleaders for the war and with the passage of time, more and more evidence of their influence on the decision for war will leak out. The situation is analogous to what happened with the events surrounding the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964. The Johnson administration could dissemble and cover its tracks for a few years, but eventually the real story got out, as will happen with Iraq. Indeed, Blair's testimony is evidence of that process at work.

For sure, many Israelis and their friends in the United States will continue to maintain that the Sharon government actually tried to stop the march to war and that groups in the lobby - including AIPAC -- stayed on the sideline and did not push for war. But these post hoc fairy tales will be increasingly hard to sell to the American people, not only because there is a growing body of evidence which directly contradicts them (see pp. 261-262) , but also because the internet and the blogosphere is allowing the word to spread. Thankfully, we no longer have to rely on the mainstream media to get the story straight.

Finally, let's not forget that while the Iraq war has been a disaster for the United States, it has also been very bad for Israel, not just because its principal patron has been stuck in a quagmire in Iraq, but also because the biggest winner from the war was Iran, which is the country that Israel fears most. All of this shows that despite the lobby's openly-stated commitment to promoting policies that it thinks will benefit Israel, it did not work out that way with the Iraq war. Nor is it working out that way with its unyielding support of Israel's self-destructive drive to colonize the Occupied Territories, a process that is turning Israel into an apartheid state. And the same warning applies to its efforts to keep all options-including the use of force -- "on the table" vis-à-vis Iran.

Given all the problems that the lobby's prescriptions have produced in recent years, you'd think U.S. leaders would have learned to ignore its advice. But there's little sign of that so far, which means that these past errors are likely to be repeated. Don't say I didn't warn you.

(7) The lobby boasts of its  power yet attacks those who call attention to it - Walt

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/blog/2072

How much more evidence does one need?

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - 8:01 AM

Two and half years ago, two political scientists published a book that said (p. 188):

Anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy stands a good chance of getting labeled an anti-Semite. In fact, anyone who says that there is an Israel lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism, even though AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents are hardly bashful about describing their influence. ... In effect, the lobby both boasts of its own power and frequently attacks those who call attention to it."

Over at The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier has provided the latest example of this all-too-familiar tactic, in the form of an incoherent and unwarranted smear of Andrew Sullivan. Yglesias, Larison, and DeLong offer telling rebuttals.

(8) More silly arguments about Iran's bomb - Stephen M. Walt

More silly arguments about Iran's bomb (this time from the other side)

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - 12:11 PM

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/09/more_silly_arguments_about_irans_bomb_this_time_from_the_other_side

Regular readers here know that I think a military attack on Iran would be a huge mistake, and I was sharply critical of a recent NYT op-ed by Alan Kuperman that advocated this course. This morning, the Times's pendulum swung nearly as far the other way, offering up an equally unconvincing op-ed suggesting that there might be hidden strategic benefits for the United States if Iran did in fact cross the threshold to a nuclear weapons capability.

To be specific, the author of the piece, a defense analyst named Adam B. Lawther, suggests that Iran's acquisition of a bomb would 1) encourage threatened Arab governments to get serious about the al Qaeda threat, 2) allow the United States to "break OPEC," 3) cause Israelis and Palestinians to get serious about peace and bury the hatchet, 4) boost the U.S. defense industry (thereby enabling us to get ready for a rising China), and 5) enable the U.S. to "stem the flow of dollars" to Arab petro-states, get them to ante up for the war on terror, and allow us to save the money we are now spending on counterinsurgency operations.

Well, gee, if an Iranian bomb would produce all these benefits, maybe we ought to just skip the whole dispute over enrichment and just give them a few warheads from our own arsenal. But the more you look at these arguments, the less convincing they are. Arab governments like Saudi Arabia are already serious about al Qaeda, because it is a direct threat to their rule. Iran's bomb won't help us "break OPEC," because oil exporters need the revenue. It's not going to lead to Israeli-Palestinian peace, both because the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel have been overblown and because the obstacles to a workable piece have little to do with Iran. The U.S. defense budget doesn't need a further boost right now, and we are already spending at least five times more than China anyway. Finally, the way to stem the flow of money to Arab petrostates and to get out of the counterinsurgency business is to consume less oil and gas and wean ourselves from our futile efforts at social engineering in societies we do not understand. The answer is not to encourage an Iranian bomb.

More generally, this piece makes the same sort of error that advocates of preventive war routinely make, but in the opposite direction. In particular, it assumes that acquisition of a nuclear weapon by Iran (or anybody else) will have enormous, far-reaching, and maybe even revolutionary effects on that state's global position and international influence. Hawks claim that an Iranian bomb would lead to all sorts of horrible bad things; now Lawther is suggesting that it will actually produce an equally impressive number of pretty good results.

In fact, history suggests that an Iranian bomb would have a far more modest impact than either side of this debate is now suggesting. Getting the bomb didn't transform Red China or North Korea into great world powers overnight; it was economic modernization that did the trick for Beijing, while North Korea remains a basket case with virtually no global influence. The mighty Soviet Union couldn't blackmail anyone despite having tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and having a few hundred nuclear weapons doesn't enable Israel to simply dictate to its neighbors either. You may have also noticed that America's own nuclear arsenal hasn't given Washington the capacity to compel everyone to do its bidding either.

As Kenneth Waltz once put, if a state like Iran does get the bomb someday, it will "cramp our style." In other words, it would make a direct military attacks on Iran a riskier proposition, though it would hardly prevent us from resisting Iranian aggression against vital U.S. interests. Contrary to Lawther's pollyannish views, an Iranian bomb would not be a good thing and the United States and its allies are correct in trying to discourage Tehran from developing one. (Of course, by continuing to threaten Iran, the United States and its allies are merely increasing Iran's incentive to get an actual deterrent.) But it's not going to be the end of the world if Iran does get a weapon one day, and I expect Iran's neighbors (including Israel) would get used to it rather quickly. (Note: Lawther eventually makes this point too and here he is on firmer ground, except that it undercuts all of his other claims.)

Bottom line: silly arguments in favor of proliferation are not a good response to silly arguments in favor of preventive war.

(9) Philip Weiss: apartheid in Israel is wrecking Jewish culture & intelligence
From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: 11.02.2010 07:52 PM

Jews aren't smarter (I lift my curse, and yours)

by PHILIP WEISS on FEBRUARY 10, 2010 · 23 COMMENTS

http://mondoweiss.net/2010/02/jews-arent-smarter-i-lift-my-curse-and-yours.html

A few years ago when she was working for a home magazine, my wife got a feng shui expert into our house to rejigger our energy and when the expert saw me in my office, she said the assignment was about fixing me, my life was out of control. Catherine did my chart and we sat down to go over my problems. She said a big one was that I had no community. She was going to work on that. She wanted me against a northwest wall, facing out. And other stuff too.

She was right about that problem: I'd lost my community. It was about the time that this blog got axed at the New York Observer, so I was no longer working for a Jewish friend I'd worked with since college who I love. And meantime, my Jewish editor at a big publishing house who I also love was not interested in a Jewish book I was writing, saying I didn't understand Jewish history. And many many other statusy Jewish friends I'd had since college were sailing off over my horizon. For the simple reason that I was beginning to criticize the Israel lobby every day as a threat to the American interest and Jewish life, and my Jewish community didn't like that.

My wife was upset about it on social/psychological/professional grounds. I'm not that connected to the world anyway, and she felt I had cut all tethers. It disturbed her and not just because she was bringing home the bacon: she wanted me grounded in a community.

And I realize now that I was in grief–which is why I emphasize that I love those friends of mine.

Looking back on it, part of the deal with being inside the Jewish community was a few great modern covenants. They come with the territory, believe me. We are smarter, we have been persecuted, we are exceptional. I believed all these things. I genuinely believed them in my bones. And these covenants/beliefs worked for the Jewish individual on a very practical level. Jews were – and this is objective/factual—predominant in many elite callings, from media to finance to politics, and if you were in the gang, more power to you. I have written about Jewish kinship networks. There can be little question that one of the reasons I got ahead in life was because I'd met so many smart and accomplished Jewish friends in college. They gave me opportunities, for instance in the network of the New Republic, even when my writing was (as Mike Kinsley told me, with the gift of straightforwardness) murky and incoherent. They believed in me and I believed in them, and a big part of it was ethnic discrimination. Stay Jewish, one of my editors once said to me when I was beginning to doubt the rightness of Jewish ethnocentric identity. We all knew each others' jokes, cadences, ironies– the mental patterns. In Hollywood I understand there is prejudice against non-Jews, and I've seen it in New York circles too.

But this discrimination, isn't it meritocratic? Aren't Jews smarter? Commentary (stacks of which I grew up surrounded by in an academic household) says it all the time. IQ. Nobel Prizes. And I have said that on this site many a time. Because I still believed it. I believed that Jews are smarter. And this was another part of my grief; I felt that I had gotten off the smart team and on to the dumb team.

Most important, I am hardly the only one who believed it. Everyone in the American power structure came to believe it. And the belief was persuasive. WASPs believed it; they were stunned by the passionate killer bees of the Jewish meritocracy and that is one reason they yielded place. They accepted the idea that Jews are smarter. My wife tells me that she believed it (even as she was studying Freud and going to Jewish therapists and working for only Jews). I bet many Muslims believed it. Many second-rate Jewish writers believed it; and that belief allowed them to elevate their game.

In retrospect I see that as a kind of curse; we were all laboring under a belief that some wise people had cast, and whether false or not is not the question, the belief was governing everyone's behavior.

This post is prompted by the fact that yesterday morning I ran into my wife's office to tell her about something I was writing, and when she said, Who told you that? I mentioned the two people who had helped me, and one was an Asian-American Christian, the other an Asian-American Muslim. And I realized that they are dear colleagues of mine in the space that you are in right now, the internet between your ears, and they are both wicked smart, creative (and yes privileged) thinkers, and as Jewish as Paris Hilton.

As I spoke to my wife, it occurred to me that I no longer actually believe that Jews are smarter. I think a ton of people are smart. And god knows I am meeting a lot of them; and having lost my community of mutual enforcing belief, I have found another, by ending that belief inside myself.

OK, so if Jews aren't smarter, what is this Jewish moment? Why do Jews so predominate in so many professions? It can't be all discrimination, honey. And no it isn't. I think it is sociocultural. That given our incredible history of the book, we were specially prepared for what Slezkine called the Jewish Century, when an era of princes and peasants gave way to one of priests and merchants. We carried our knowledge in our head, as Raoul Felder once told my wife, and when bookishness and symbol-analysis became everything to success we were there. Herzl saw the beginning of it over 100 years ago when he said that an “intellectual proletariat” of dissatisfied Jews was forming in the cities of central Europe, over-educated, vital to the new disciplines of law and journalism and science, but hitting a glass ceiling of anti-Semitism. And Kafka saw it a few years later when he read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and lamented, “From early on [Jews] have forced upon Germany things that she might have arrived at slowly and in her own way, but which she was opposed to because they stemmed from strangers. What a terribly barren preoccupation anti-Semitism is, everything that goes with it, and Germany owes that to her Jews.”

Kafka and Herzl died before the true horror of the anti-Semitic reaction. But fast forward and my generation was the climax of the Jewish century, when Jews swarmed the Ivy Leagues, and then the most philosemitic administration in history, Clinton, (per David Frum) was surpassed by the more philosemitic Bush administration and the even more philosemitic Obama administration, where the two men closest to his office, in two boxlike offices, guarding the national security, are Jews, Ax and Rahm.

I say the Jewish century is coming to an end for a bunch of reasons. Because most Jews in leadership have committed themselves to a false idea– that apartheid is alright– and this belief is a wrecking-ball to Jewish culture and intelligence. Bad thinking is all over the rabbinate and the leadership and the journals, and one of the most majestic minds to which I was exposed, my college prof Michael Walzer, is reduced to parochial legalistic defenses of behavior he knows is wrong. And very smart people like Marty Peretz, Leon Wieseltier, David Frum, Alan Dershowitz—they are all the pantaloons of the Jewish state. Trouble ahead, trouble behind, don't you know that Jews just lost their minds.

It is over because we have power, and power is never conducive to free thinking. It is over because the Jewish century has to end, like all moments in history. It is over most of all because we have shared our great cultural gifts with Americans and others have learned them, because cultural gifts truly are transferable–from our psychological openness to our matriarchy to our worship of education. It is over because others have become Jewish.

I have said this kind of thing before, but I never really believed it. I continued to believe that Jews were born smarter. I continued to believe that I had lost a superior community and gained a lesser one. I no longer actually believe that. And I have many smart friends to show for it.