File 911: Judaism, Israel and the War
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Steven Plaut, "Life in Haifa" (12/3/01). The reality of war comes home to Israel's Berkeley.
Andrew Sullivan, "Spreading the Greater Lie About Israel" (12/23/01). ". . . anti-semitism is the fundamental reason why no peace is possible in the Middle East, because it has so infected every possible Arab interlocutor that Israel simply has nobody to make peace with."
Hillel Halkin, "The Return of Anti-Semitism" (2/5/02). A once unspeakable evil is starting to become fashionable as liberal elites look for reasons to abandon Israel.
Gerald M. Steinberg, "Reality Has Finally Sunk In" (2/22/02). "For Arafat, the escalating terrorist attacks are the core of the Palestinian 'war of independence,' in which all Israelis are targets and in which the human toll on Palestinian society is irrelevant."
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky, "Give War a Chance" (3/5/02). The latest Fatah attacks show that Yasser Arafat is happy to kill any Jews, regardless of their attitude toward the Israeli state.
Charles Krauthammer, "Saudi Peace Sham" (3/6/02). The "peace plan" trumpeted by The New York Times is a transparent effort to free the PLO from American and Israeli pressure to stop promoting terrorism.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, "Losing the Middle East?" (3/8/02). Why we can't trust Egypt and Saudi Arabia as "peacemakers", with supporting quotation from a Moslem theologian.
The Wall Street Journal, "Redrawing the Map" (3/9/02). "Would Winston Churchill have sat down for negotiations with an enemy whose ultimate goal was to drive the British into the North Sea? That essentially is what is being asked of Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. . . ."
Michael Kelly, "The Phases of Arafat" (3/13/02). The "second intifada" is the natural continuation of Arafat's long-term strategy. To defeat it, Israel, too, "must pursue peace, or appear to pursue peace, as a phase in the longer war".
John Derbyshire, "Kill a Jew for Allah" (3/22/02). ". . . there is no goodwill, and no real desire on the part of Israel's enemies for a solution. Or rather, there is a widespread desire for only one solution — the extinction of Israel and the driving out, or mass killing, of the Jews."
Mark Goldblatt, "Cycle of Violence" (3/26/02). "To put the matter bluntly, it makes no sense to talk about a sovereign Palestinian state until the Palestinian people demonstrate a capacity to govern themselves in accordance with fundamental conceptions of right and wrong. To date, they have not even demonstrated the capacity to discern right from wrong."
Charles Krauthammer, "Arafat's Harvest of Hate" (3/26/02). "While Israeli leaders, both political and intellectual, were preparing their people for peace, Arafat was preparing his people for war . . . with an unrelenting campaign of anti-Semitic villification carried out by every organ of his media."
John Perazzo, "'The Jihad of Holy Death Will Continue'" (3/27/02). "There comes a time when we must, however reluctantly, face the plain truth: Yasser Arafat is engaged in open warfare against Israel, and he has no intention of stopping until the latter ceases to exist."
Binyamin Netanyahu, "End Game" (3/29/02). The former (and perhaps future) prime minister's prescription for preserving Israel.
Victor Davis Hanson, "Postmodern Palestine" (3/29/02). Anti-Israeli arguments show the same indifference to facts and logic as postmodern cultural analyses.
Fouad Ajami, "Arafat's War" (3/30/02). The head of the Palestinian Authority has consistently preferred being a terrorist rather than a statesman.
Thomas L. Friedman, "Suicidal Lies" (3/31/02). It took a long time, but The New York Times' chief Middle Eastern correspondent finally recognizes that the Palestinian Authority has no desire for reconciliation with Israel or the West. "The outcome of the war now under way between the Israelis and Palestinians is vital to the security of every American, and indeed, I believe, to all of civilization."
Michael Gove, "Spare Us From Any More Middle East Peace Plans" (4/2/02). "Any 'diplomatic settlement' wrung out of Israel as a consequence of the current terror campaign will only guarantee further terror, for it will have delivered a political yield for an investment in violence, secured a better forward base for the terrorists’ stated goal of exterminating Israel, and indicated to tyrants from Baghdad to Damascus that the West was unwilling to hold the line."
Victor Davis Hanson, "Back to the Future" (4/2/02). Would Israel's return to its pre-1967 borders bring peace? It didn't before 1967.
George Will, "War and Then a Wall" (4/3/02). "Sharon should ship Arafat to Europe, where there is much official sympathy for him. Arafat would like today's France, where he could place his phone calls by the light of burning synagogues."
The Wall Street Journal, "Bush Bends" (4/5/02). "Right now the suicide bombers think that time is on their side; the status quo will never convince them to stop. Only a seismic political change in the Middle East will show the Palestinians that they must come to terms with Israel's right to exist. A democratic pro-Western Iraq will do more for peace in Palestine than 100 trips by Colin Powell."
Mark Steyn, "Say Goodbye, Yasser Arafat" (4/5/02). The Palestinian Authority has avoided the responsibilities of a legitimate government. The time has come to eliminate it.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, "They Live to Die" (4/8/02). "Unfortunately, it is only war--not the well-intended but meaningless Tenet and Mitchell plans--that can now burn out istishhad [zeal for martyrdom] among the Palestinians. The sooner the Bush administration realizes this, the sooner the suicide bombers will cease. If the administration tries to 'negotiate' with this syndrome, it will only fuel the fire and make America, not just Israel, look weak. As Osama bin Laden should have taught us, weakness in the Middle East never goes unpunished."
Ariel Cohen, "Fighting to the Last Palestinian" (4/10/02). "Arafat is playing the role of Saddam's subcontractor for this bloody diversion, while Arab rulers, especially Prince Abdullah, and the Europeans, have become the enablers of Saddam and Arafat, with their policy of murder and human sacrifice."
Binyamin Netanyahu, "Speech to the U.S. Senate" (4/10/02). "With or without international support, the government of Israel must fight not only to defend its people, restore a dangerously eroded deterrence and secure the Jewish State, but also to ensure that the free world wins the war against terror in this pivotal arena in the heart of the Middle East."
Seth Gitell, "Turning Point" (4/10/02). How the media are trying to turn the intifada into Israel's Tet Offensive.
Claudia Rosett, "Arafatuous" (4/11/02). Lessons from George Orwell on the danger that lurks in the habit of poltical euphemism.
Wlady Pleszczynski, "Bibi Talk" (4/11/02). Undaunted, Israel's former Prime Minister campaigns for the survival of his country.
Martin Peretz, "Before There Were 'Palestinians', There Was Arafat: The Making of a 'Statesman'" (4/12/02). "Arab nationalism has become a very nasty business, defined everywhere by dictatorship. Palestinian nationalism is no different. Arafat has no grand vision of human affairs whatsoever, no desire other than territory--and territory not as the seedbed for an inspired vision of community but as a launching pad for war against the Jews."
David Brooks, "Media Blackout" (4/12/02). Where to find the news about the West Bank campaign that the American media don't bother to report.
Steven Plaut, "The Oslo Plague" (4/15/02). The world that accuses Israel of "massacres" in West Bank towns "is the same world that has never gotten around to noticing the 100,000 murdered by Islamist fascists in Algeria, and has long ago forgotten the many massacres of Arabs by Arab regimes. So much for the theory that Arab terror has something to do with Arabs being mistreated. But no one cares about those victims, because they cannot be used as bludgeons against the Jews."
Daniel Pipes & Jonathan Schanzer, "Withdrawal Won't Work" (4/15/02). The precedent of Lebanon shows that Israeli climbdowns only encourage Arab fanatics to become more violent.
Barbara Amiel, "Truth About Israeli Casualties Is Being Ignored in This War" (4/15/02). "If you are as callous and bloody-minded as the Palestinian Authority and various Arab factions which encourage women and children to kill themselves and which place their bomb factories in the middle of crowded refugee camps, there will be grandmothers and children dead. British journalists largely ignore such unhappy facts."
Michael Freund, "Under Siege: What It's Like Living in Israel" (4/15/02). A first hand account of burden of living under the daily threat of terrorism. "And so, we find ourselves alone and misunderstood, just as we have on so many other occasions throughout our long and tortured past. But this time, there is one, very crucial, difference. This time, the Jewish people will not go down without a fight."
The Wall Street Journal, "The Fate of Palestinian Moderates" (4/20/02). "After the 1993 Oslo accords gave him a statelet, Mr. Arafat quickly set about criminalizing 'collaboration'--most famously with a law making the sale of land to Jews punishable by death. But those who get a trial are the lucky ones. Seven decades of 'collaborator' killings have silenced or driven out many who would be open to coexistence with Israel. It's yet one more reason to believe there will never be peace so along as the dictator and his brownshirts run Gaza and the West Bank."
Eliot A. Cohen, "Keepers of What Peace?" (4/21/02). "Peacekeeping works best under one of two situations: when both sides want the peacekeepers to ratify a cease-fire line or boundary that both can live with almost indefinitely (as, for example, in Cyprus), or once one side has been decisively beaten (as in today's Yugoslavia)." Neither condition exists between Israel and Palestine today, making proposals for international peacekeepers simple folly.
Mick Hume, "The West Is Turning On Israel Today Because It Is Losing Confidence in Itself" (4/22/02). "A century ago the German socialist August Bebel denounced attacks on 'Jewish capitalism' as 'the socialism of fools'. By the same token, many of the criticisms of Israel today look like the anti- imperialism of idiots. Attacking the Israelis has become a way to vindicate any petty prejudice. It unites my German friend’s right-wing grandmother, who has waited 50 years for an excuse to criticise 'the Jews', with left-wing protesters who imagine that the Palestinian struggle is on a par with them vandalising a burger bar."
Paul Johnson, "Israel on the Edge" (4/24/02). Over half a century of fighting is eroding Israel's ability - and will - to resist extermination.
Robert N. Hochman, "Shifting Blame" (4/24/02). In the Jenin fighting, "it certainly appears that the ones disregarding civilian life were the Palestinians, not the Israelis. A moral outrage? Yes. But not the one you've been hearing about."
Joel Mowbray, "Arafat, Elected?" (4/25/02). Assertions that "General" Arafat is the "democratically elected leader of the Palestinian people" play fast and loose with facts.
Neill Lochery, "Arafat's Fiction Still a Western Best-Seller" (4/29/02). "[T]he problem for Israel remains Mr. Arafat and his lies. . . . Mr. Arafat . . . is an old, cranky dictator who relies on the creation of myths in order to survive politically. The Palestinian population is suffering because of the lies he invents, and the casino-style risks he takes with their lives."
Jonathan Chait, "Exploding Myths" (5/13/02). It is intellectually convenient for pundits to conceal their dislike of Israel's moral stance by invoking the argument that the war on terrorism "isn't working".
Daniel Pipes, "Hope for the Middle East" (5/21/02). Contrary to the claims of their backers, the Palestinians have neither an unlimited supply of suicide bombers nor an unquenchable desire to wage eternal war against Israel.
Jeff Jacoby, "The Message in the Palestinian Maps" (5/23/02). "The notion that Palestine equals all of Israel - and that all of Israel must be ''liberated'' to create a Palestinian Arab state - is no idiosyncracy on Arafat's part. It is an axiom of the Palestinian movement, constantly repeated in its basic documents, its domestic rhetoric, its educational curriculum - and its maps."
Steven Plaut "The Tragic Demise of DIDO" (5/31/02). "DIDO" is the author's acronym for "dash in, dash out", the strategy that Israel has been following on the West Bank. He argues that DIDO won't bring peace and that the only way to end Palestinian terror is "reoccupation and denazification".
Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Israel and the Anti-Semites" (6/1/02). Though the Moslem underclass has been the physical force behind antisemitic outbreaks in Europe, the sophisticated Left has furnished the intellectual muscle.
Evelyn Gordon, “Amnesty’s Lies” (6/4/02). By spreading falsehoolds about Israel, Amnesty International undermines the cause of human rights.
Lou Marano, “Jenin: The Israeli Reservist’s View” (6/5/02). A first-hand account of the Jenin fighting. A "human rights activist" responds with the complaint that the Israeli army destroyed too many civilian television sets and VCR's.
Jerusalem Post, “Don Quixote Diplomacy” (6/6/02). "Arafat has carved out the world's only regime-change free zone. No one talked about reforming the Taliban. No one talks about reforming Saddam Hussein. But Arafat is supposed to preside over a new regime ostensibly controlled by his equally tainted colleagues."
Evelyn Gordon, "The Problem Is With the People" (6/17/02). The departure of Yasser Arafat will not make the Palestinians into willing peace partners. It will take at least a generation of intensive effort - by schools, the media and other institutions - to eradicate this cult of hatred. And until it is eradicated, a Palestinian state can never be a safe neighbor for Israel."
The Daily Telegraph, "What Cherie Really Thinks" (6/19/02). Why the British PM's wife's sympathy for Palestinian "hopelessness" is both mistaken and dangerous.
Charles Krauthammer, "A Guarantee of More Violence" (6/20/02). "The reason innocents are dying every day is not because of the occupation but because the Palestinians believe they can get (as Hezbollah got in Lebanon) land without peace."
Ze'ev Schiff, "Back to Jenin" (7/17/02). An analysis of how unfounded rumors of a "massacre" in Jenin got their start.
HonestReporting.com, "UN Report on Jenin" (8/9/02). A survey of media reactions - some contrite, some unrepentant - to the discrediting of claims of a "massacre" at Jenin.
Andrea Levin, "BBC World Disservice" (8/12/02). "BBC reporters, as millions of listeners and viewers have come to know, are full-throated partisans in covering the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, acting as outright advocates of the Palestinian cause instead of neutral purveyers of information."
Benjamin Netanyahu, "The Speech He Couldn't Give" (9/12/02). Text of the speech that Islamofascist thugs kept the former Israeli Prime Minister from delivering at the University of Montreal. "[C]ontrary to conventional wisdom, what has destabilized the region is not Israeli action against Palestinian terror, but rather the constant pressure exerted on Israel to show restraint."
Solly Ganor, "Conversation on the Beach" (12/26/02). A Holocaust survivor living in Israel recounts a conversation with a young Arab who looks forward to the destruction of the West.
Michael Oren, "The 'USS Liberty': Case Closed" (2/2/03). Critics of Israel have persistently claimed that the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty during the Six Day War was deliberate. "Refuting this accusation was difficult if not impossible in the past, when the official records on the Liberty were designated top-secret and closed to the general public. With the recent declassification of these documents in the United States and Israel, however, researchers have gained access to a wealth of primary sources - Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and U.S. military records, Israeli diplomatic correspondence, and memoranda from both the State Department and the White House. With the aid of these materials, the attack on the Liberty can now be reconstructed virtually minute-by-minute and with remarkable detail. The picture that emerges is not one of crime at all, nor even of criminal negligence, but of a string of failed communications, human errors, unfortunate coincidences and equipment failures on both the American and Israeli sides - the kind of tragic, senseless mistake that is all too common in the thick of war."
Melanie Phillips, "The New Anti-Semitism" (3/20/03). An update on Jew-hatred's increasingly strong grip on the Left.
Craig S. Smith, "French Jews Tell of a New and Threatening Wave of Anti-Semitism" (3/22/03). The New York Times reports on "a trend that many say is gathering momentum: a resurgent European anti-Semitism, coming not from its traditional source among Europe's right-wing nationalists, but from the Continent's growing Islamic community, egged on by the political left".
