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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Seth Mandel</title>
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		<title>Putin and the Slimmer, Sleeker, Slimier Soviet State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/putin-and-the-slimmer-sleeker-slimier-soviet-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=putin-and-the-slimmer-sleeker-slimier-soviet-state</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/putin-and-the-slimmer-sleeker-slimier-soviet-state/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Jul 2011 04:14:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=97911</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The head thug-in-charge prepares to retake the presidency.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/vladimir_putin_01.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-97931" title="vladimir_putin_01" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/vladimir_putin_01.jpg" alt="" width="428" height="283" /></a></p>
<p>In Vladimir Sorokin’s dark new novel, set in the year 2028, Russia has traversed the slippery slope from Putinism back to czarism. The main character, Andrei Danilovich Komiaga, a member of the <em>oprichnina</em>—the czar’s elite federal enforcers—catches one of his men reading a banned book and reprimands him. “You understand, you idiot, we’re guards. We have to keep our minds cold and our hearts pure.”</p>
<p>Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton who is writing a book on Stalin, immediately recognized that the more you follow Putin’s Russia, the less ridiculous the book, called <em>Day of the Oprichnik</em>, sounds.</p>
<p>“So it is in Putin’s Russia, where a gang of police officials, the siloviki, lord over not just the richest private citizens but also other parts of the state,” Kotkin wrote in the New York Times Book Review. “Sorokin’s imaginative diagnosis of Putinism further grasps that the officials’ looting is driven not by profiteering alone, but by their conviction that they are defending Russian interests. Everything Sorokin’s oprichniks do is a transaction, but their love of country runs deep. They may give in to temptation and tune in to foreign radio (‘enemy voices’), but these moments of weakness vitiate neither their pride in their work nor their code of honor. They have ideals.”</p>
<p>This is all worth keeping in mind as Putin prepares to retake the presidency. Most analysts agree that Putin is really in control now despite Dmitry Medvedev’s position as head of state. There aren’t many practical reasons, therefore, for Putin to lift the curtain on his puppeteer act and reveal the farcical nature of his premiership during Medvedev’s presidency.</p>
<p>It also doesn’t make much sense to stop attempting to fool NGOs and proponents of <em>demokratizatsiya</em> by so boldly rebuking the accepted social norms of modern statecraft, an essential element of which, for postcommunist states, is to pretend your people are much freer than they actually are.</p>
<p>But it makes perfect sense if you understand the importance of national identity. Putin’s decision to return to full power is mostly a symbolic one—but that symbolism, like the photograph of Putin after he supposedly shot a charging tiger with a tranquilizer gun, saving an entire camera crew, is an essential element of the projection of power for the state, not just its leadership. Medvedev may be something of a reformer, but those reforms are not only modest but also irrelevant if they must be acquired through the depletion of national pride. Putin recognizes this, and understands that if he can provide stability and security, the rest won’t matter.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Unprecedented Politicization of Justice and the Foreign Service</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/obama%e2%80%99s-unprecedented-politicization-of-justice-and-the-foreign-service/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama%25e2%2580%2599s-unprecedented-politicization-of-justice-and-the-foreign-service</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Jul 2011 04:30:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=97821</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Among the most glaring of the President's hypocrisies,]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Obama_Justice.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-97929" title="Obama_Justice" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Obama_Justice.jpg" alt="" width="390" height="285" /></a></p>
<p>It’s almost impossible not to appreciate the irony of the recent congressional suit against President Obama for allegedly violating the War Powers Act by continuing American involvement (and in many ways, leadership) in the war against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi without congressional approval.</p>
<p>Voters were warned repeatedly in 2008 that a John McCain presidency would be a third George W. Bush term. Yet in many ways Obama has not only continued Bush policies but expanded on them in ways that have drawn criticism from both the left and the right. He can’t win.</p>
<p>{{{*}}}</p>
<p>He has angered the Tea Party folks by continuing and extending the bailouts begun by Bush. At the first Republican presidential debate, Michele Bachmann boasted of having opposed Bush’s TARP program, and Mitt Romney even criticized Bush by name, saying that instead of a managed bankruptcy, “the Bush administration and the Obama administration wrote checks to the auto industry.”</p>
<p>Similarly, the Obama administration’s troop surge in Afghanistan upset the antiwar left, and his increased use of drone attacks and the war in Libya have made pacifists and opponents of expanded executive power cringe.</p>
<p>Overall, the hypocrisy charge is perhaps the most effective one here, since many of those national security policies have been successful and the continuity from one administration to the next in this partisan atmosphere can even be comforting (especially to the troops). But the fact remains that Obama campaigned by mostly criticizing Bush on these and other issues, and the media joined him in slamming what became an easy target and forgetting about the supposed principles of the matter once a Democrat was in office.</p>
<p>Among the most glaring of these hypocrisies, however, has been the charge of politicizing government, especially the Justice Department. The last few weeks have demonstrated that if that were true, Obama has far exceeded what Bush supposedly did. The most recent example came from Politico, which amplified a report from the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News that two and a half years into the Obama administration, the number of large donors and fundraisers known as “bundlers” that received administration jobs has already equaled that of the entire Bush administration’s eight years in office. In the case of the Obama administration, some of those bundlers even benefited from government contracts won after the election, such as Level 3 Communications vice president Donald H. Gips.</p>
<p>“After the election, Gips was put in charge of hiring in the Obama White House, helping to place loyalists and fundraisers in many key positions,” Politico reported. “Then, in mid-2009, Obama named him ambassador to South Africa. Meanwhile, Level 3 Communications, in which Gips retained stock, received millions of dollars of government stimulus contracts for broadband projects in six states — though Gips said he had been ‘completely unaware’ that the company had received the contracts.</p>
<p>“More than two years after Obama took office vowing to banish ‘special interests’ from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events, an investigation by iWatch News has found.”</p>
<p>The investigation also revealed that of Obama’s ambassadorial nominations, 36 percent were “political” in nature. Jake Tapper reported that this was 6 percent higher than Bush.</p>
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		<title>Back to the Future with Bibi and the Clintons</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/back-to-the-future-with-bibi-and-the-clintons/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=back-to-the-future-with-bibi-and-the-clintons</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/back-to-the-future-with-bibi-and-the-clintons/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Jul 2011 04:09:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=97589</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Netanyahu’s peace efforts have been thwarted for a decade and a half.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/net.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-97593" title="net" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/net.jpg" alt="" width="267" height="189" /></a></p>
<p>The headline itself was unremarkable: “Clinton cautions Netanyahu not to antagonize Palestinians.” The text of the story wouldn’t raise any eyebrows either—Clinton tells Netanyahu that he shouldn’t hold up tax payments to the Palestinian leadership despite their support for terrorism, and there is an implicit sense of disapproval on Clinton’s part for the building of Jewish housing in Jerusalem because it would supposedly violate a settlement freeze.</p>
<p>It’s the date of the story that is notable. It is an Associated Press dispatch from August 7, 1997. The Clinton in this story is President Bill, not Secretary Hillary. The Jewish housing the U.S. is upset about is in Har Homa, and the Palestinian leader is Yasser Arafat.</p>
<p>To the casual observer, the story is just another example that the more things change, the more they stay the same. But the truth is it highlights something else: that Binyamin Netanyahu’s efforts to make progress on the peace process have been thwarted now for a decade and a half, mostly because whoever happened to be the sitting American president during this time had different ideas of how to reach the same goal.</p>
<p>For example, on March 16, 1997, the Associated Press reported that diplomats from the U.S., Russia, European Union, Japan, Norway, Jordan, and Egypt met for four hours with Arafat (the Israelis were excluded, of course) to help brainstorm ways to keep the peace process moving. One idea that was not discussed, according to the AP, was a proposal from Netanyahu for a land swap, in which Israel would keep some West Bank settlements but provide the Palestinians with Israeli land to make up for it.</p>
<p>The idea was way ahead of its time. In fact, as Dore Gold recently <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/land-swaps-and-1967-lines_574942.html?page=2">pointed out</a> in <em>The Weekly Standard</em>, support for land swaps has always been tenuous at best, and the recent popularity of the idea (such as it is) is mostly a historical aberration. Netanyahu risked his popularity fourteen years ago with the land swap proposal, and it was roundly ignored by the U.S., EU and other negotiating partners.</p>
<p>Netanyahu was always more reasonable than the media made him out to be. This time around, the Israeli public seems to clearly appreciate this fact. Historian Yaacov Lozowick, writing after Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress, noted that Netanyahu has actually broken new ground.</p>
<p>“We&#8217;ve come a long way from Golda Meir saying ‘there is no Palestinian nation’, and indeed, we&#8217;ve come a long way from the positions of Yitzchak Rabin, remembered worldwide as a brave Israeli leader seeking peace: Rabin never said there&#8217;d be a sovereign Palestine, he never intended to move back to the lines of 1967, and he never would have dreamed of dividing Jerusalem,” Lozowick <a href="http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/2011/05/timing.html">wrote</a>. “On the first two, Netanyahu, for all his verbal gymnastics, is to Rabin&#8217;s left. Moreover, the assumption all over Israel&#8217;s media today is that he enjoys broad support in the Israeli electorate for his positions.”</p>
<p>I’ll go a step further: On Jerusalem, too, he is to Rabin’s left—and to the left of some notable peaceniks. Here is Oslo architect Yossi Beilin in June 1997: “Any solution should be based on a unified Jerusalem and a demilitarized Palestinian state, not far from the 1967 borders.”</p>
<p>And Thomas Friedman was certainly on the same page, writing in September of that year: “The issue today is not whether Jerusalem will remain the unified capital of Israel, but whether it will be the habitable capital of Israel. Anyone who has visited Jerusalem lately knows Israel&#8217;s hold over the city is unchallenged, and I&#8217;m glad it is.”</p>
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		<title>Treating Israelis Like Rational People, Not Pawns</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/treating-israelis-like-rational-people-not-pawns-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=treating-israelis-like-rational-people-not-pawns-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/treating-israelis-like-rational-people-not-pawns-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jun 2011 04:29:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=97183</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The author of a new book on Israeli counter-terrorism learns something he didn't want to.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Picture-4.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-97187" title="Picture-4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Picture-4.gif" alt="" width="375" height="259" /></a></p>
<p>It is a sad element of Middle East reality that the more the international community has in common with Israel—at least from the perspective of security—the more it means they have failed to learn the lessons from Israel’s many battles with Islamic terrorism.</p>
<p>Almost every allied head of state has said it at one time or another: “Israel is on the front lines.” Here in the U.S., senators, congressmen, and even governors travel to Israel, stand near a playground, school, or police station in Sderot, and proclaim it.</p>
<p>But how often do Americans, let alone Europeans, truly attempt to understand what Israel is facing and the lessons to learn from its many successes and its smattering of failures?</p>
<p>It was this dynamic that led Daniel Byman, Brookings Institution fellow and professor at Georgetown University, to begin research for his new book, <em>A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism</em>, released this month. Byman and Lt. Gen. (ret.) Gabi Ashkenazi, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, discussed the book’s conclusions and implications at the Brookings Institution June 22.</p>
<p>Byman began by noting the general progression of security challenges, such as airplane hijackings and suicide bombings: “These were seen as Israeli problems, and then they became global problems.”</p>
<p>“During the second intifada,” he added, “it was hard for Americans to understand the scale and the regularity of the violence.” He suggested the audience remember how disruptive the “Beltway Sniper” was to Washington, D.C.’s routine in 2002, yet at its height the intifada gave Israel an average of one successful suicide bombing per week.</p>
<p>Byman began studying Israel’s responses to the attacks, and learned some things he expected to find—such as the fact that “many of the most effective [counterterrorism measures] are also the most disruptive”—as well as some things he admitted he didn’t want to learn. The book itself is comprehensive, measured, thorough, and well worth a full read. But I’d like to concentrate on Byman’s remarks concerning the lessons he didn’t want to learn, and his recommendations based on those same lessons.</p>
<p>Byman’s prescriptions—and one suspects he knows this—do not match the evidence he provides for them. It’s a distant cousin of the battle over hearts and minds—the battle <em>between</em> heart and mind. It is the struggle to reconcile the facts with where you’d like them to lead you.</p>
<p>Peace, Byman said, is the most effective form of counterterrorism; a country’s external security mechanisms will never be as effective “as a country’s ability to protect itself.” That is why, he said, the occupation of the West Bank must end, and the Palestinians must be called on to police their own population. But he also said that “Gaza is better governed than it has been in its entire history.”</p>
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		<title>The End of the Peace Process… Again?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/the-end-of-the-peace-process%e2%80%a6-again/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-end-of-the-peace-process%25e2%2580%25a6-again</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/the-end-of-the-peace-process%e2%80%a6-again/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jun 2011 04:25:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=96257</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Facing the truth of what's really behind the UN statehood gambit.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/end.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-96286" title="Palestinians hold a sign depicting a swastika during clashes at Qalandiya checkpoint" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/end.jpg" alt="" width="427" height="285" /></a></p>
<p>A year ago, veteran American Mideast negotiator Aaron David Miller wrote a much-talked about article for <em>Foreign Policy</em> magazine in which he disavowed any hope for the Arab-Israeli peace process. Called “The False Religion of Mideast Peace: And Why I’m No Longer a Believer,” the piece detailed his disillusionment with what began with the Clinton administration’s Mideast peacemaking, of which he was a participant, in the 1990s. The main casualty of the failure of the administration’s efforts throughout that decade, Miller had written, was hope. “And that has been the story line ever since: more process than peace.”</p>
<p>But that line, buried 3,000 words into the 5,000-word cover story, should have been featured more prominently. It’s the point. Because if there’s one thing that has been proven time and again in the course of Arab-Israeli negotiations, it’s that you cannot have both peace and the process; it’s one or the other.</p>
<p>Just in time for the first anniversary of the FP story, Miller has another one striking similar themes. The main difference this time is that Miller now exhorts President Obama to join him in hopelessness. Called “The Virtues of Folding,” Miller’s message is simple: give up—at least for now.</p>
<p>“Thirty months in, a self-styled transformative president with big ideas and ambitions as a peacemaker finds himself with no negotiations, no peace process, no relationship with an Israeli prime minister, no traction with Palestinians, and no strategy to achieve a breakthrough,” Miller writes.</p>
<p>To be sure, the process of which Miller was a part caused so much damage to the lives of Israeli Arabs and Jews that we should be perfectly content to let him retire without protest. But Miller has still—unbelievably—refused to learn the primary lesson from all his years of failure: the peace process was over before Miller ever got involved.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean that neither side wants peace. Most Israelis have always wanted peace, and if the polls are accurate many Palestinians want peace as well. It’s the process that has always stood as the principal hindrance to peace. The process allows the Palestinian leadership to soak up foreign money. It allows the United Nations—via its Relief and Works Agency—to keep generations of Palestinian families mired in poverty by assigning them a nonsensical “refugee” status that encourages the Arab leaders of their country of residence—Syria, Lebanon, Jordan—to preserve their identities as second-class citizens. And it forces Israel to make tangible concessions in return for promises.</p>
<p>Contrary to popular mythology, the peace process didn’t begin with the Paris peace conference and the Oslo accords; that’s where it ended. Here is Yitzhak Rabin—the symbol of the peace process for many, especially on the left—speaking to the Knesset in 1992: “From this moment on, the concept of a ‘peace process’ is irrelevant. From now on we shall speak not of a ‘process’ but of making peace.”</p>
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		<title>The Future of the Middle East</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/the-future-of-the-middle-east/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-future-of-the-middle-east</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jun 2011 04:45:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=95527</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The horror that will follow if revolutionary Islamism takes over the region. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/future.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-95529" title="future" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/future.jpg" alt="" width="380" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>In recent weeks, the emerging Middle East has given pause to the early optimists of the Arab Spring. Egypt reopened its border with Gaza, Amr Moussa seems poised to win the presidency there, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been ruthlessly cracking down on anti-regime protests, Yemen has descended into something close to civil war, and a Hamas-Fatah unity government is set to call for a vote at the UN General Assembly on unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.</p>
<p>To get a sense of where these and other issues in the region are headed, I spoke with Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor and publisher of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. He is the author of more than a dozen books on the Middle East.</p>
<p><strong>Seth Mandel:</strong> What are the major events to watch for, and what are their most likely consequences?</p>
<p><strong>Barry Rubin: </strong>First, on June 12, Turkey will have an election. That election will probably be won by the government, whether or not it gets a two-thirds majority. The current rulers are going to take this as a signal to take a much tougher line toward Israel and the United States. It is possible that the extent of the increase of Turkey’s enmity toward Israel after that election will astonish the world.</p>
<p>If the governing AK party gets a two-thirds’ majority, that means it will have control of rewriting the Turkish constitution.  They will try to create a presidential regime, Erdogan will run for president, and we will see Turkey moving into an increasingly visible alliance with Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah. That’s not alarmism, that’s a serious analysis.</p>
<p>Number two. The Palestinian effort at the UN to gain unilateral recognition for a Palestinian state will fail; the U.S. will veto. But it’s going to be a mess, and it’s a mess created by the incompetence of the Obama administration, which could have prevented this.</p>
<p>Number three—the big one: Egyptian parliamentary elections in September. As of now, the moderate democrats have not organized any serious party.  The only serious parties organized are Islamist parties—not only the Muslim Brotherhood but others—and left-wing parties or radical nationalist ones.</p>
<p>I do not know whether there will be an Islamist majority, but there will be a radical anti-American majority in parliament. I have no doubt of that. It literally can’t be any other way. So this is going to have to be covered in the media.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to try to predict what the headlines will look like in the New York Times the day after the election. How will they spin this? What will they say? What can they say about this? This is very, very serious. At that point it should be clear that the Obama policy has been a catastrophe. He helped bring down the Egyptian regime and the result is a radical anti-American regime that’s ready to go into conflict with Israel.</p>
<p><strong>SM: </strong>What is the significance of the opening of Egypt’s border with Gaza?</p>
<p><strong>BR:</strong> The opening of the Gaza border is one step in that direction [of conflict with Israel]. So what does it mean that they’re opening the border, even if not now but when a new elected president and parliament take office? It means that weapons, terrorists, and money will flow freely into Gaza.</p>
<p>And what does that mean? It means that Hamas will become bolder. And at some point, let’s say in the next year, it will attack Israel with rockets and mortars. And Israel will have to respond militarily.</p>
<p>But at that point we are all going to have to ask the question, What will Egypt do? What will the Egyptian government do? If Amr Moussa is president with a radical parliament or even an Islamist parliament they could send troops. It could become an Egypt-Israel war.</p>
<p>But there are other possibilities. Perhaps they will simply let thousands of Egyptian volunteers go into Gaza to fight. Perhaps it will allow, or not be able to stop, or not try too hard to stop, attacks across the Egypt-Israel border.  Again, this is not some alarmist fantasy but realistic scenarios that must be prepared for.</p>
<p>If Amr Moussa is elected president, he is not an Islamist and not a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood. But is he going to resist pressure from parliament and the masses for a tough stance? Won’t he try to take advantage of this to promote his own interests and anti-Israel beliefs? This is especially true as Egypt’s terrible economic situation does not permit him to offer the masses a better life or even food at current prices.</p>
<p>Now one can say: Don’t worry, they won’t do anything because the Egyptian military wants to keep getting American aid money. Now that is an argument. But is that enough? Can we base our entire Middle East strategy on that hope?</p>
<p>We have seen cases where countries and governments have been willing to throw away American aid for political goals. Remember that the Iranian revolution threw away all the American aid and military sales. So merely to maintain that everything will be OK because of that money issue is not a satisfactory argument. In addition to that, keep in mind that Egypt is going to face a major economic problem for which there is no solution, and no amount of U.S. aid is going to resolve that problem. The price of food is going to continue to go up.</p>
<p>They are not going to be able to build new housing. They are not going to be able to handle the problem of unemployment. They&#8217;re not going to be able to create jobs. This is the reality. So what happens when, as is fully predictable, Egypt’s government is unable to deliver on its promises and the country will go into crisis? What’s going to happen?</p>
<p><strong>SM: </strong>What’s your impression of the West’s reaction to these changes taking place in the region?</p>
<p><strong>BR: </strong>The things that I’m talking about are totally predicable things. And yes, they are being ignored in the media. Now the new line is that the Muslim Brotherhood are good guys and moderates, the problem is these radical jihadist Salafi groups.  Muslim Brotherhood is good; jihadists are bad. But the Muslim Brotherhood is a jihadist group and is in an alliance with these groups. It’s ridiculous to make this distinction.</p>
<p>So basically we are going into a series of totally predictable crises in which there is no serious analysis of the problems, much less the solutions, by the U.S. government, media, experts, and the public debate generally.</p>
<p>And even those three crises leave aside other issues. It’s now June but the U.S. government has still not done anything on Syria at all. Sanctions on Iran are leaking, and we know the three main reasons why they are leaking—it’s China, Russia, and Turkey. And the U.S. government is doing nothing about that. In fact, it’s consciously permitting leaks to continue.</p>
<p>So we are facing a serious crisis of what I might call the return to the 1970s with Islamists in place of Arab nationalists. And again all of this is totally predictable.</p>
<p><strong>SM: </strong>How should we be approaching these issues?</p>
<p><strong>BR:</strong> What is needed is a strategy that recognizes that the principle regional problem is the challenge of revolutionary Islamism, and what is needed is for the United States to take the lead in developing an alignment that brings together the U.S., the Europeans, the relatively moderate Arab regimes, and Israel, a strategy that supports the oppositions in Turkey, Iran and Lebanon, that recognizes the enemies are Iran and Syria and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood and Iraqi insurgents, and then deal with that in the manner that the Soviet Union and its allies were dealt with in the Cold War. It’s very simple, and of course you have to get into the details but they are not going to do it.</p>
<p><strong>SM: </strong>How should Israel respond?</p>
<p><strong>BR: </strong>There are options in dealing with these threats. Israel can deal with this to a large extent successfully or as successfully as possible. The first thing, which is already happening, is the need to rebuild what in Israel is called the Southern Front, which is the defense along the border with Egypt. And that is going to cost a lot of money and people are going to have to do more reserve days, but it can be done.</p>
<p>Israel is going to have to deal with the flotilla, which arrives in mid-June. And Israel is going to have to deal with any attempts of people to cross its border. And what Israel does or doesn’t offer the PA in negotiation is pretty much one of the least important issues for Israel now.  I mean it is not a central issue. It’s not an important issue.</p>
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		<title>Canada: Israel’s Greatest Friend in the World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/canada-israel%e2%80%99s-greatest-friend-in-the-world/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=canada-israel%25e2%2580%2599s-greatest-friend-in-the-world</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jun 2011 04:17:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=95056</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Prime Minister Steven Harper’s Israel advocacy getting its due.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/harper13.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-95059" title="harper13" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/harper13.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>The sharp-witted Jewish leader-turned-columnist Isi Leibler wrote a piece in November 2010 praising Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s emerging pro-Israel leadership. But Leibler’s article contained two statements that should have served as a wake-up call to President Obama. They didn’t, and tensions continue to rise between the American president and the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.</p>
<p>The first statement was delivered early in the article: “Prime Minister Stephen Harper has unquestionably emerged as Israel’s greatest friend in the world, effectively assuming the role previously occupied by former Australian prime minister John Howard.”</p>
<p>The latter part of that sentence was a sharp rebuke to the White House. It wasn’t surprising that Leibler would acknowledge Harper’s new role as the head of state that was Israel’s most reliable advocate. But Leibler was actually claiming that Harper had taken the spot not of the American president, but of the Australian prime minister.</p>
<p>Later in the article, Leibler notes that Canada’s bid for a seat on the Security Council was defeated after Harper criticized the UN’s record on Israel. “For some,” Leibler wrote, “Canada’s defeat under such circumstances will be viewed as a badge of honor. But what made Canada’s defeat even more outrageous was the role of the US. According to Richard Grenfell, a former press officer with the US mission to the UN, ‘US State Department insiders say that US Ambassador Susan Rice not only didn’t campaign for Canada’s election but instructed American diplomats to not get involved in the weekend leading up to the heated contest.’… The US betrayal of its neighbor and long-standing ally is a chilling indication of the depths to which the Obama administration has stooped in its efforts to ‘engage’ and appease Islamic and Third World rogue states.”</p>
<p>This set the stage, rather predictably, for how both countries would react to Obama’s suggestion that Israeli-Palestinian final-status negotiations begin with, and then build upon, the 1967 ceasefire lines. After Obama made the suggestion in a speech May 19, members of Congress from both parties criticized the president, as did Netanyahu and pro-Israel groups. Obama responded by doubling down on the concept in his speech to the annual America-Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference the following Sunday.</p>
<p>Obama’s language on the conflict was roundly criticized again by both parties, and the president took his Mideast plan to last week’s meeting of the G-8 countries—the United States, Russia, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada—where he submitted it for approval by the group. Worried that a public statement by the G-8 countries would reinforce international pressure on Israel to withdraw to the 1967 lines, Netanyahu called Harper, according to <em>Haaretz</em> (a Harper spokesman denied any orchestration between the two leaders). The Israeli daily reported that every G-8 country aside from Canada approved of the 1967 language; Harper responded by insisting the language be omitted from the final statement.</p>
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		<title>The Mideast History Lesson Obama So Desperately Needs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/the-next-mideast-history-lesson-obama-so-desperately-needs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-next-mideast-history-lesson-obama-so-desperately-needs</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 May 2011 04:12:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=94385</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Netanyahu taught Mideast History 101 to the President; now it's time for 102.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama-expression.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-94506" title="obama-expression" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama-expression.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="369" /></a></p>
<p>After President Obama surprised Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last week with a now-infamous statement of principle about the 1967 lines, Netanyahu responded with what news outlets characterized as a “history lecture.”</p>
<p>Though the outlets—ranging from the French Press Agency to the Chicago Sun-Times—meant the phrase derisively, a history lesson on the 1967 lines was exactly what the moment called for. And a lesson on the Israel-Egypt peace treaty and the early negotiations that led to the Oslo process would, for instance, enlighten the president on just why his strategy for Mideast peace is backwards, and doomed to fail.</p>
<p>Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem to address the Israeli Knesset in 1977 immediately entered the history books as a moment of triumph for political courage and for the power of diplomacy. It held the promise of a Middle East where Israel’s existence is a recognized reality, and it offered a glimpse of what Arab statesmanship could accomplish. Grand gestures weren’t meaningless after all.</p>
<p>But there was one prominent American who disagreed. After the Egyptian president’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem U.S. President Jimmy Carter said, “a separate peace agreement between Egypt and Israel is not desirable.”</p>
<p>In retrospect, of course, it has been very “desirable” for Carter’s otherwise dismal foreign policy record. Historian Arthur Herman explained in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> in 2009 how that came to be:</p>
<p>“But by the autumn of 1978, the rest of Mr. Carter’s foreign policy had crumbled,” Herman wrote. “He had pushed through an unpopular giveaway of the Panama Canal, allowed the Sandinistas to take power in Nicaragua as proxies of Cuba, and stood by while chaos grew in the Shah’s Iran. Desperate for some kind of foreign policy success in order to bolster his chances for re-election in 1980, Mr. Carter finally decided to elbow his way into the game by setting up a meeting between Sadat and Begin at Camp David.”</p>
<p>When it became inevitable, Carter took the credit. It should be noted that there is much value in a White House reception for such a deal. It communicates the notion that American moral and physical power stand behind the agreement, giving it extra weight in the international arena. But the fact remains that because Carter wanted a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, he actually opposed the Egypt-Israel deal.  Against it before he was for it, so to speak.</p>
<p>The agreement was the result of diplomacy and negotiation undertaken by the Israelis and the Egyptian government. Only after it became a formality did the U.S. get involved.</p>
<p>A similar path took shape on its way to the Bill Clinton-endorsed Oslo process—the declaration of principles of which were signed at the White House in 1993. As Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin write in <em>Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography</em>, what became the Oslo process began in earnest in 1991, when Israeli scholars Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak met with Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi in Ramallah to discuss Israeli-Palestinian economic cooperation. Ashrawi suggested the Israelis meet with PLO economist Ahmad Qurei in London in December of that year. Arafat approved.</p>
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		<title>Inside the Mind of the Mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/inside-the-mind-of-the-mastermind-khalid-shaikh-mohammed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=inside-the-mind-of-the-mastermind-khalid-shaikh-mohammed</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 24 May 2011 04:35:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=93954</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A man whose visions of mayhem gave pause to even Osama bin Laden. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Picture-9.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-94074" title="Picture-9" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Picture-9.gif" alt="" width="375" height="280" /></a></p>
<p>The killing of Osama bin Laden, and the ensuing nationwide expressions of joy and relief, stand in stark contrast to the reaction to the 2003 capture of “superterrorist” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. A simple thought experiment, says Richard Miniter, should correct that imbalance: imagine bin Laden were the one caught in 2003 instead of KSM, as he is known.</p>
<p>“KSM is different than bin Laden in that he can dream up major attacks, and while running the organization he would have access to its resources, its trained personnel—we would have seen many more 9/11-style attacks. I don’t mean the same technique, but the same lethality,” Miniter said in an interview this week. Miniter is the author of the new book <em>Mastermind: The Many Faces of the 9/11 Architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed</em>.</p>
<p>In speaking to analysts, Miniter said, KSM’s capture was always referred to as a war-winning moment—former House intelligence chairman and later CIA chief Porter Goss even compared it to the liberation of Paris in World War II.</p>
<p>“I don’t think the public really sees the value in capturing KSM, that’s one of the reasons why I wrote this book,” he said.</p>
<p>Indeed, in the book Miniter recounts the first meeting between KSM and bin Laden. “After the small talk, KSM presented a battery of outrageous ideas to bin Laden: another plan to kill the pope, this time in Africa; a plan to hijack planes and fly them into buildings on America’s two most populous coasts; plans for London, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong, and on and on…. After a few hours, bin Laden politely declined to back any of KSM’s plans but asked him to join Al Qaeda and move his family from the Baluch region of Iran to Kandahar, Afghanistan.”</p>
<p>KSM actually declined that invitation, but it gave bin Laden a preview of what it was going to be like eventually working with a man who was both ruthless and tactically brilliant. One plan that bin Laden actually liked was KSM’s idea to recruit a Saudi air force pilot to commandeer a fighter jet and strafe the Israeli port/resort city of Eilat, possibly killing hundreds.</p>
<p>“And that plot was relatively uncomplicated, and would’ve succeeded and it would’ve been devastating and generated headlines throughout the world,” Miniter said.</p>
<p>The book spends considerable time on an important but often overlooked part of KSM’s life—his childhood in Kuwait and college education in America. What may surprise readers is the fact that much of KSM’s radicalization took place in North Carolina, first at Chowan University and then at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in the mid-1980s. KSM was actually already inclined toward the most severe interpretations of Islamic law (he wouldn’t even allow himself to be photographed), but his lack of English skills and the universities’ nonexistent attitude toward cultural integration led to his alienation from his fellow students. He spent most of his free time with other Arab immigrants and encouraged the school’s Muslims to follow his strict version of Islam. He and his friends were known as “the Mullahs.”</p>
<p>“He may have not known the term at the time, but when he arrived in America he was a Salafi,” Miniter said. “And so that’s why he felt very comfortable policing the other foreign students, so they didn’t violate obscure religious rules.”</p>
<p>He also had a God complex, a lack of interest in any serious philosophical or political discussions, and a growing resentment toward the Americans who admired Israel. “He thought he had the truth. And if you were smart you’d listen to him and if you were not smart he’d kill you—that kind of approach.”</p>
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		<title>George Mitchell’s Mideast Failure</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/george-mitchell%e2%80%99s-mideast-failure/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=george-mitchell%25e2%2580%2599s-mideast-failure</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 May 2011 04:25:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=93693</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Three lessons to learn from a fiasco.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/george-mitchell.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-93699" title="george-mitchell" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/george-mitchell.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Now that Mideast envoy George Mitchell has officially left the position, it is a fitting time for officials to learn the three key reasons he failed.</p>
<p>The first is that success in one context not only doesn’t guarantee success in another situation, but it often guarantees failure. Some thought Mitchell was the right choice to lead Israeli-Palestinian peace talks because of his experience negotiating the 1998 Good Friday agreement between the British and the Irish. But the truth is, Mitchell’s success in Ireland doomed him to failure in the Middle East.</p>
<p>That’s because Mitchell was bound to try and translate his work in Ireland to negotiations with the Israelis and Palestinians. Walter Russell Mead has a typically thoughtful and comprehensive rundown at <em>The American Interest</em> of why the peace processes are so unlike each other, but it basically boils down to four major differences: territorial maximalists in Ireland were few and far between compared to the Arab-Israeli conflict; there were effective governments and institutions on both sides—something the Palestinians have yet to produce; all indications are that anti-Israel violence will continue no matter what; and the international community was willing to play a constructive role in the Irish situation.</p>
<p>On that last point, it is worth quoting Mead at length: “The Irish weren’t secretly funding radical and rejectionist nationalist terror groups.  Iceland and Denmark weren’t funding Irish terrorists to advance their own agendas.  France wasn’t encouraging the IRA to fight on as a way of containing Britain.  Catholics around the world weren’t demonstrating and raising money for Irish annexation of Ulster; the Pope wasn’t issuing encyclicals affirming the religious duty of Catholics to fight to kick the heretics out.  (A few grizzled US-based Irish emigrants raised money for the IRA, but this is nothing compared to what groups like Hamas get from abroad.)  The European Union wasn’t condemning British war crimes in Ulster and passing resolutions in favor of Irish grievances.”</p>
<p>In September, the <em>Washington Post</em>’s Jackson Diehl had already heard enough of Mitchell’s constant references to his past. Israelis and Palestinians, Diehl said, “appear to be doomed to listen to Mitchell draw parallels between their conflict and that of the Irish at every possible opportunity. ‘I have in the past referred to my experience in Northern Ireland,’ Mitchell said at a press conference in Jerusalem on Wednesday, following the latest round of talks between Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. No kidding. Mitchell has brought up his previous experience as broker in virtually every media briefing he has conducted since his appointment by President Obama in January 2009.”</p>
<p>The argument that Mitchell was trying to make—that he can get anyone to strike a deal because he once got two sides to strike a deal—was “alarmingly reductionist,” Diehl said.</p>
<p>And reductionist thinking is the opposite of what is needed in the Middle East. That’s because of the second lesson this and future administrations must learn from Mitchell’s failure: Negotiating this conflict, as President Obama said while thanking Mitchell for his efforts, is &#8220;the toughest job imaginable.” This is, unfortunately, the opposite of the attitude most negotiators bring to the table.</p>
<p>Diplomats believe the outline of a deal is clear: borders along the June 1967 lines with land swaps, the division of Jerusalem, and the return of a symbolic number of the descendents of those who may have once qualified for refugee status in 1948.</p>
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		<title>Supreme Court Will Rule on Constitutionality of ‘Jerusalem, Israel’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/supreme-court-will-rule-on-constitutionality-of-%e2%80%98jerusalem-israel%e2%80%99/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=supreme-court-will-rule-on-constitutionality-of-%25e2%2580%2598jerusalem-israel%25e2%2580%2599</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 May 2011 04:03:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=93301</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[8-year-old Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky would like his American birth certificate and passport to say that he was born in Jerusalem, Israel.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Jerusalem.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-93397" title="Jerusalem" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Jerusalem.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="311" /></a></p>
<p>“Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided,” Barack Obama told the audience at the 2008 annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).</p>
<p>But now as president, Obama is put in the uncomfortable position of insisting on the enforcement of what has been American policy on the city: that it is not only not recognized as the capital of Israel, but is effectively not considered to be part of Israel at all, as far as official records are concerned. That policy—and its seeming irreconcilability with what presidents say when they are candidates—will now come before the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>Just as surprising, perhaps, is that the government will be up against an 8-year-old boy in the case.</p>
<p>The issue began when the American parents of Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky, a young boy born in Jerusalem, petitioned the State Department to have Menachem’s passport say “Jerusalem, Israel”—as would be the case if the American government recognized as a political and practical reality that Jerusalem is the capital city of the sovereign state of Israel.</p>
<p>As the <em>Washington Post</em> reported: “ ‘The status of Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive and long-standing disputes in the Arab-Israeli conflict,’ the government said in its brief to the court. It is not one in which the United States has been willing to choose sides.”</p>
<p>But in actuality, the United States has in fact been willing to choose sides. The Palestinians have argued that they should get to sign off on any recognition of the city’s sovereignty. American diplomats prefer this side of the argument, and presidents have as well. In 2002, Congress passed a provision in a larger foreign relations bill that cleared the way for families like the Zivotofskys to request that “Israel” be put on their passports in situations like Menachem’s. President George W. Bush affixed a signing statement reiterating that American policy toward Jerusalem has not changed.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court case then will center on the question of executive versus congressional power on such an issue, according to John O. McGinnis, professor of constitutional law at Northwestern University who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice from 1987-1991.</p>
<p>The court, McGinnis said, will first determine whether it is a political question, i.e. whether the court should decide who should decide such a question. If they rule that it is a political fight between the executive and legislative branches, they will leave them to that fight.</p>
<p>“Congress has its weapons—refusing to confirm people, not funding certain things—to force the executive to comply,” McGinnis said. “The executive can resist.”</p>
<p>In such a case, the plaintiff will “lose” in that the court will not even make the decision, and the president’s standoff with Congress will continue. But the second possibility is that the court will rule that it is, in fact, a constitutional issue and thus that they can decide who is right.</p>
<p>McGinnis laid out the basics of the two arguments. The executive branch will argue that “the Constitution has a clause saying the president shall receive ambassadors. And from that, some might interpret, it’s really up to the president to decide recognition of nations. And you might say well, in deciding recognition of nations you’ve got to decide what those nations are and what their borders are. When you receive an ambassador from somewhere, you decide, well: where is that somewhere?”</p>
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		<title>Bin Laden’s Death and the Russian Insurgency</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 May 2011 04:21:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=92587</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Islamist threat emanating from the Russian frontier.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/militants.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92600" title="militants" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/militants.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="290" /></a></p>
<p>In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, Russian leaders congratulated the United States and stressed the shared mission of the two countries in fighting Islamist terrorism. It would be easy to write this off as opportunistic justification for Russia’s anti-terror tactics—often rightly criticized by human rights groups for their heavy-handed nature, collateral damage, and lack of transparency—and the chance to conflate their cause with the West’s.</p>
<p>&#8220;Part of the reason Russian leaders have been so effusive in praising the US operation to kill bin Laden is because it looks to them just like one of our Russian actions,” Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist for the Moscow liberal daily Kommersant, told the Christian Science Monitor. &#8220;We&#8217;ve been dealing with our own bin Ladens using targeted killings for quite some time.”</p>
<p>But the Russian response shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Though Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov’s rule has been marked by brutal suppression and rampant corruption—both sanctioned by the Kremlin—Russian officials are not inventing the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus. If anything, they downplay the threat so as to give the impression they are in control of the volatile region.</p>
<p>Consider this: In 2010, 440 Russian security, military, and police forces were killed in the Caucasus—the same number of American forces killed in action in Afghanistan. And, though it was a decade and a half ago, the Russians were the last authorities to have Ayman al-Zawahiri—the man expected to take over for Osama bin Laden—in custody.</p>
<p>That was after Zawahiri traveled to Dagestan to see if he could re-establish Islamic Jihad there and use the Caucasus as headquarters. Instead, Zawahiri was arrested, and when freed (most likely after bribing officials there) fled to Jalalabad, Afghanistan.</p>
<p>It was no surprise, then, that the situation in Chechnya (which quickly spread to neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia) continued to show similarities with Afghanistan. When I reported on this story in 2009, Yossef Bodansky, former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the U.S. House of Representatives, told me that Chechen fighters had shown up in Afghanistan to help attack coalition forces there. Money was also pouring into the Caucasus from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states for the Chechen jihad. Svante Cornell, research director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, warned of the “Afghan-ization” of the Caucasus conflict—the moment at which violence reaches a level it is unlikely to drop below.</p>
<p>And Russians were reminded of the reach of the Caucasus Emirate—the breakaway Islamist authority in the region—when in January terrorists bombed Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, killing more than 30.</p>
<p>Russian authorities also used bin Laden’s death to call attention to their own successes in the war on terror. A spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry said he wanted to emphasize that “this is a natural result: Bin Laden, Basayev and others like them sooner or later catch up with what they have done.” The Moscow News called it a “Basayev moment.” Shamil Basayev was second-in-command to Aslan Mashkadov, elected Chechen president after the first Chechen war. Basayev soon quit the government and declared his movement was no longer solely about Chechen independence but was part of the global jihad. There is evidence that Basayev received funding from bin Laden himself during this time. (The timeline fits as well, since Basayev’s decision to challenge Mashkadov for the presidency was made the same month Zawahiri made his trip to the Caucasus, establishing links he would take with him to Afghanistan.)</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Old Senate Seat Is Haunting Him</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/obama%e2%80%99s-old-senate-seat-is-haunting-him-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama%25e2%2580%2599s-old-senate-seat-is-haunting-him-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 May 2011 04:25:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Sen. Mark Kirk puts the president's anti-Israelism in its place. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama_incompetent13.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-92494" title="obama_incompetent1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama_incompetent13.gif" alt="" width="375" height="282" /></a></p>
<p>Republicans frustrated on Election Night 2010 that the GOP was unable to win Vice President Joe Biden’s old Senate seat in Delaware were heartened later in the night when they won a more symbolic and consequential seat: President Barack Obama’s seat in Illinois.</p>
<p>But it turned out that the victory was more than symbolic. The new senator from Illinois, former Rep. Mark Kirk, has been perhaps the president’s most knowledgeable and substantive critic in Congress on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The president’s old seat then, far from being just another statistic in the Republican election wave, has been haunting him, doggedly pursuing him as he navigates the challenge of Mideast peace.</p>
<p>There are two facets to the effectiveness of Kirk’s criticisms: timing and issue depth.</p>
<p>The day Hamas and Fatah announced they had reached a unity deal, Kirk tweeted almost immediately: “Hamas+Fatah=probable suspension of US aid to Palestinian Authority&#8230;Hamas supports terror, killed 26 American citizens.”</p>
<p>Kirk’s rapid response gives him credibility on the issue—he doesn’t have to convene focus group to test its popularity or call together his advisers to find out what it all means. This would be a tremendous detriment if he was wrong, but he wasn’t. He has a strong enough grasp of American law and of Palestinian politics to know right away the implications of major developments in the region.</p>
<p>In March, we saw the brutal murders of the Fogel family (including three children) by Palestinian terrorists in the Jewish village of Itamar. While the Western media gave it scant attention and some news outlets portrayed the Fogel family as deserving of their fate for living in disputed territory, Israeli officials recognized the culprit: A Palestinian media that dehumanizes Jews to the point where slitting the throat of a young child becomes something less than barbaric.</p>
<p>Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told me a couple days after the murders that such events don’t happen in a vacuum, and that the incitement must end. Mark Kirk was one of the few in the U.S. to draw the same conclusion, and he led the writing of a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pressing her to take a more forceful tack with Mahmoud Abbas on the issue. The letter, which garnered the signatures of more than a quarter of the Senate, read in part:</p>
<p>“Although President Abbas has expressed his sorrow over the Itamar massacre, the Palestinian Authority must take unequivocal steps to condemn the incident and stop allowing the incitement that leads to such crimes. Educating people toward peace is critical to establishing the conditions to a secure and lasting peace.</p>
<p>“The Itamar massacre was a sobering reminder that words matter, and that Palestinian incitement against Jews and Israel can lead to violence and terror.  We urge you to redouble your efforts to impress upon the Palestinian leadership that continuing to condone incitement is not tolerable.  We also urge you to consider focusing adequate training and educational programs in the West Bank and Gaza that promote peaceful coexistence with Israel.”</p>
<p>The letter, importantly, also includes other recent instances of official Palestinian incitement to back up its claims.</p>
<p>This is nothing new for Kirk. About a year ago, when the Israeli housing minister announced plans for more homes in a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem while Biden was visiting, administration officials berated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, though it was clear at the time that Netanyahu didn’t know the announcement was coming either. Kirk and Pennsylvania Democrat Christopher Carney wrote to Obama asking him to keep his eye on the ball.</p>
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		<title>As Next Flotilla Nears Launch&#8230;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/as-next-flotilla-nears-launch/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=as-next-flotilla-nears-launch</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 May 2011 04:24:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Israel ponders strategy for Round II.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/GazaIsraelFlotilla1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91936" title="GazaIsraelFlotilla1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/GazaIsraelFlotilla1.jpg" alt="" width="399" height="267" /></a></p>
<p>On December 15, 2010 a ceremony was held in Gaza to commemorate the reconstruction of a building in Jabaliya that was destroyed during Operation Cast Lead—and thus the rebuilding was considered a symbolic victory of sorts for Hamas.</p>
<p>The keynote speech at the ceremony was delivered by Muhammad Kaya, a Turkish national. He brought the house down with the following remarks:</p>
<p>“We represent Turkey, and our interest and goal is not to feed the Palestinian people and bring them food, but to help them stand on their feet in face of the occupation’s oppression and support them in confronting their enemies. We are certain that if the force on this land submitted to imperialist dictates money would flow in from every side, but this force refused and stood firm in the face of challenges… the day will come when Palestinians will build their houses in Jaffa, Tel Aviv and Haifa.”</p>
<p>This was par for the course for speeches given under Hamas auspices, but the speaker in this case, Kaya, was actually a representative from the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights, Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief—better known as the IHH, the terrorist organization behind last year’s deadly “flotilla” that attempted to break the naval blockade of Gaza to help Hamas. The incident turned violent when the Israel Defense Forces boarded one ship, the <em>Mavi Marmara</em>, and were attacked by armed men.</p>
<p>And the IHH is behind a new flotilla, preparing to set sail for Gaza in May, in time for the one-year anniversary of the first.</p>
<p>“The Leader of the IHH is Bulent Yildirim, who said they are getting the flotilla ready and that there will be a ship from every country in Europe,” reported Voice of America. “Yildirim said the ‘Mavi Marmara’ from Turkey will be part of it, and until the blockade is lifted on Gaza, the intifada will continue by land, by sea and by air.”</p>
<p>The question, then, is this: If the IHH and its partners will behave exactly the same as last year, how will Israel respond?</p>
<p>“The Israelis will use different methods to bring the flotilla under control, or at least at minimum to prevent it from making it all the way to Gaza,” said James Colbert, policy director at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, in Washington, D.C.</p>
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		<title>Efraim Karsh Set to Take Over for Daniel Pipes</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/efraim-karsh-set-to-take-over-for-daniel-pipes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=efraim-karsh-set-to-take-over-for-daniel-pipes</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Apr 2011 04:28:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=90794</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[After 17 years of leading the Mideast-focused think tank, the founder is stepping aside.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/daniel_pipes.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90800" title="daniel_pipes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/daniel_pipes.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="270" /></a></p>
<p>After 17 years of leading the Mideast-focused think tank he founded, Daniel Pipes will be stepping aside as director. Efraim Karsh will take over the directorship of the Middle East Forum in June.</p>
<p>“Obviously it’s a big challenge to get into such big boots,” Karsh told me about taking over for Pipes. “And Daniel has made the forum, in my view, one of the foremost centers on the Middle East in the United States.”</p>
<p>Pipes, who will remain at the forum as president, has long been considered one of the most knowledgeable scholars on the Middle East and Islam. He established the forum in 1994, along with the <em>Middle East Quarterly</em>, the center’s journal of Mideast affairs, of which Karsh is currently editor. The forum has since added the Legal Project, to aid targets of Islamist “lawfare,” as well as campus programs.</p>
<p>Karsh is a research professor at King’s College London, and is the author of a bevy of books on the Middle East, including his most recent <em>Palestine Betrayed</em>, about the origins of Palestinian rejectionism of the two-state solution. Karsh spoke with me about the current state of affairs in the Middle East.</p>
<p>On the issue of the impending vote on the establishment or recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly in September, Karsh said it is important to place this current bid for statehood in its proper context. “The story really begins in Oslo,” he said.</p>
<p>The Oslo agreements set the Palestinians on the path to statehood, which was the end goal of the process. “But then it turned out that Arafat was not interested in peace,” Karsh said, adding that the process continued on its course—negotiations with the Palestinians, despite the fact that Arafat never intended to put his name on a compromise.</p>
<p>That process has been derailed by the Obama administration, Karsh said, which has enabled the Palestinians to avoid negotiations entirely.</p>
<p>“Now since Obama came to power, and he began to put pressure on Israel, so he made life easier for the Palestinian leadership—which in the first instance was not interested in negotiations,” Karsh said. “And basically he allowed them to disengage. Since Obama came to power the Palestinians haven’t negotiated with the Israelis—something they continued to do over the past seventeen years even though they didn’t intend to reach a solution, but at least they were forced to negotiate. Now they are not.”</p>
<p>This is an important point, because the seeming futility of negotiations between the two parties often gives the impression that there are no benefits to the actual talks. As Karsh shows, there is something worse than circular and frustrating negotiations. “Why should they negotiate if they can get what they want without giving basically anything in return?” he said.</p>
<p>The Israeli strategy, then, should revolve around convincing the U.S. and much of the free world of the value of negotiations, that “the only way to peace is through negotiating between the two sides and agreeing on something, and then abiding by what they agreed.”</p>
<p>That’s on the diplomatic front. On the security front, Karsh expects Israel to continue to show restraint in the face of rocket attacks from Gaza, including the anti-tank missile that hit a school bus recently, killing a teenager. It’s one way the Palestinian threat of unilateral declaration ties Israel’s hands.</p>
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		<title>British Muslims for Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/british-muslims-for-israel-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=british-muslims-for-israel-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Apr 2011 04:40:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Pro-Israel groups in Europe step up their efforts to combat the anti-Israel establishment.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/israel.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90039" title="israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/israel.jpg" alt="" width="420" height="311" /></a></p>
<p>To Hasan Afzal, the reaction to his new pro-Israel group may demonstrate just why the organization is necessary.</p>
<p>“I’ve been really overwhelmed just by how shocked people have been that there’s been a group called British Muslims for Israel,” Afzal said.</p>
<p>That surprise isn’t surprising. The debate over Israel and the broader Middle East conflict has become so tense and toxic that a group calling itself British Muslims for Israel inspires a mix of suspicion and fascination. But Afzal’s group is real. Formed by young Muslim professionals in Britain in January under the umbrella group Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, it really took off after Afzal was interviewed by Israel’s Channel 10. Their Web site (BritishMuslimsForIsrael.com) received thousands of hits and the group began receiving letters of all kinds, from “thank you for what you said” to “how can we help?” One writer offered to help jazz up their Web site, and several spoke admiringly of the group’s bravery.</p>
<p>“Although I never for one second thought I was being brave, I just thought I was being obvious in what I was saying,” Afzal told me. “We were worried that the dialogue, when it comes to the Middle East and especially Israel, had in the past five or six years moved from how do Muslims build an independent Palestinian state and coexist with Israel, to nonsense questions like should Israel even exist, or should the Jews even have a homeland,” Afzal said. “And we found that disturbing for two reasons: first is, it’s a completely delusional question to even ask if Israel should even exist.”</p>
<p>Afzal likes to pose the following hypothetical to anyone willing to discuss Israel’s right to exist: Suppose the argument was about India-Pakistan, and Afzal said to his interlocutor, “you know, I really support India’s right to exist”—how silly would he sound? In addition, Afzal knows where such a question, with respect to Israel, would lead. Once you start asking if Israel has a right to exist, Afzal said, “that is almost like a back door Trojan horse entry to some pretty dark aspects of Islamism.”</p>
<p>The media environment in Britain can be downright hostile to the Jewish state. Part of Afzal’s work is countering the misinformation in British media. “I’m sure you know that the UK has an infamous leftwing newspaper which can’t help itself but print editorials or op-eds linked to members of Hamas. And I’m talking about the <em>Guardian</em> here.”</p>
<p>Afzal points to the coverage of the massacre of the Israeli family in Itamar. It was mostly ignored in British media, he said, and when the BBC finally covered it, they did so in a “dehumanizing and insulting way,” insinuating that since the family lived in the West Bank, they got what they deserved.</p>
<p>Jonathan Weckerle knows what Afzal is dealing with. Weckerle is chair of the Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin and spokesman for STOP THE BOMB, two German organizations that advocate for Israel and against the Iranian nuclear program and Germany’s economic, cultural, and political ties to Iran. Weckerle told me that the debate over Israel in the German media and among German intellectuals is mostly one-sided, and his groups seek to correct that.</p>
<p>“We try to get some new ideas into the German discourse on Israel and the conflict and the region,” Weckerle said. “The public and also the think tanks and the press here are partly against Israel, but nearly all of them really lack an understanding of the situation of Israel, for example its strategic threats by radical Islam.”</p>
<p>Weckerle said their work, as expected, is an uphill battle.</p>
<p>“It’s very hard work for us,” he said. “But this is also because what we are doing is really something new.” He said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel travels to Israel and reaffirms the special relationship between Germany and Israel, but “that doesn’t reflect the mood of the country.”</p>
<p>Weckerle’s group, to change this, organizes debates between pro-Israel commentators (largely from abroad) and German intellectuals. From there, pro-Israel groups get a sense of the most effective arguments in Israel’s favor.</p>
<p>“What you learn from the media is that Israel is building the settlements and that this is the main and even the only obstacle to peace,” Weckerle said. “And what Palestinian leaders are doing and saying and what the goals of organizations like Hamas are, what’s happening in Arab and Palestinian media—if you tell people these things a couple of them start to see things another way.”</p>
<p>Weckerle said they educate the public on Germany’s common interests with Israel, and the threats they both face. He said Germany does have a unique obligation to help Israel, especially considering the Nazi-like rhetoric used by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—but that argument only gets you so far.</p>
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		<title>The Next Declaration of Palestinian Statehood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/the-next-declaration-of-palestinian-statehood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-next-declaration-of-palestinian-statehood</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Apr 2011 04:45:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How the Palestinians pit the U.S., Europe, and Israel against each other—and how to stop it.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Palestinian-state.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90312" title="Palestinian state" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Palestinian-state.jpg" alt="" width="355" height="199" /></a></p>
<p>On Tuesday, the United Nations published a report by its Middle East coordinator claiming that the Palestinian Authority is prepared to govern a state of its own, and that any challenges it faces would be the fault of the continued Israeli “occupation.”</p>
<p>The report is another step toward the declaration of a Palestinian state with the imprimatur of the United Nations. Just a few months ago the Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad were threatening unilateral declaration through the UN Security Council, though that would be subject to an almost certain veto by the U.S. This time, the Palestinians are seriously floating a plan to call for a vote on statehood by the full General Assembly this coming September.</p>
<p>But as University of San Diego law professor Abraham Bell pointed out, this would not enable the Palestinians to avoid the American veto.</p>
<p>“Member states have to be recommended by the Security Council, and then after the Security Council recommends them, the General Assembly can then vote by two-thirds majority to accept them,” Bell said.</p>
<p>Bell said that if the U.S. vetoes the resolution at the Security Council, the Palestinian Authority would be denied statehood, but that in the General Assembly the Palestinians would likely have the votes for a supermajority. If the Palestinians get only the supermajority vote in the General Assembly, their status would not change one iota under international law. “It doesn’t make something that wasn’t a state into a state. And failure to win the vote, doesn’t make what is a state, not a state.”</p>
<p>But that doesn’t mean the Palestinians would gain nothing from the vote, even if the resulting resolution is nonbinding. The Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer, author of <em>ConUNdrum: The Limits of the United Nations and the Search for Alternatives</em>, said that the Palestinians could still open certain legal doors with such a vote, and would certainly reap some diplomatic benefit from it.</p>
<p>“It’s obviously a political coup for the Palestinians, because what it does is it signals widespread recognition of them as an independent state,” Schaefer said. “It could lead to diplomatic recognition individually among states in increasing numbers. And it does give them more leverage over certain things including, potentially, joining the International Criminal Court, as a participant in that. That’s a double-edged sword. One ramification of that, should it happen, would be that any attacks that Israel launches on Palestinian territory could be subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC. However, the Palestinians themselves would also be subject to that jurisdiction. I think that the Palestinians would want to think long and hard about whether they’d want to subject themselves and the actions of Hamas, who operate in their territory, to that type of jurisdiction.”</p>
<p>Ironically, Bell said it is Hamas in Gaza that possess the legal prerequisites to form a state—not Fatah, which controls the West Bank and runs the PA.</p>
<p>“Hamas in Gaza has the legal ingredients, which are territory, a population, government, and a capacity to carry on foreign relations,” Bell said. “So if they declare themselves to be a state, I think they are a state. They don’t apparently have any interest. And then you have Fatah, which controls some authority in the West Bank, though under Israel, and I don’t think they have the ingredients. Do they have territory? It’s doubtful; they don’t really control exclusively any territory. Do they have a government? Yes, but it’s subordinate to Israel under the agreements. They have a population; they have the capacity to carry on foreign relations. So I think they’re missing ingredients. The General Assembly voting to say that they’re a state doesn’t make them actually one if they’re missing legal ingredients. And they’re the ones who are going to be pressing for this vote.”</p>
<p>Both Bell and Schaefer agreed that the vote would be designed to put diplomatic pressure on Israel. Bell referenced the vote the PLO called for in 1988, which was intended to pressure Israel into unilaterally relinquishing territory that UN member states now recognized as part of “Palestine.”</p>
<p>Amir Mizroch, former executive editor of the Jerusalem <em>Post</em>, believes it would accomplish just that—if the Palestinians invoked UNGA Resolution 377, also known as the “uniting for peace” resolution. It states that the General Assembly may take matters into its own hands if the Security Council fails to uphold its responsibilities to maintain peace. If the Palestinians won a GA vote after invoking 377, Mizroch wrote on his website, it would put Israel in an exceedingly difficult situation diplomatically.</p>
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		<title>The Nazi-Inspired Jew-Hate of the Muslim Brotherhood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/the-nazi-inspired-jew-hate-of-the-muslim-brotherhood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-nazi-inspired-jew-hate-of-the-muslim-brotherhood</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/the-nazi-inspired-jew-hate-of-the-muslim-brotherhood/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Apr 2011 04:15:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=89868</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[German scholar Matthias Küntzel points to a pernicious cancer in the Muslim world that continues to be ignored.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/yusuf.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-89869" title="yusuf" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/yusuf.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="233" /></a></p>
<p>The revolutions in the Arab world that began earlier this year were noticeably low on anti-Jewish propaganda, leading many scholars to express the hope that the West had less to lose from the overthrow of men like Hosni Mubarak than previously thought. But if German scholar Matthias Küntzel is correct, one incident should adjust the expectations that the Muslim Brotherhood—who expect to perform well in Egypt’s upcoming parliamentary elections—can be a moderating force in Egyptian politics.</p>
<p>That one incident was the return and reception of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the leading Brotherhood theologian who has praised Hitler and endorsed the Islamic acceptance of terrorism against Israel.</p>
<p>“It was no accident that Ahmadinejad, after the first time he [expressed] his Holocaust denial—a kind of propaganda coup—the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were the first to applaud,” Küntzel, author of <em>Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11</em>, told me in an interview this week. “And also his promise to destroy Israel was of course very welcomed by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. So I think that anti-Semitism is a central part of their ideology.”</p>
<p>But the Brotherhood is taking part in a democratic process, and they are seemingly pushing a reformist political agenda, which is leading to a debate over whether their history and ideology can be separated from their role in day-to-day politics. Küntzel warns against this. “On the one hand they are of course reformists as far as their political strategy is concerned,” Küntzel said. “So they want to participate in democratic elections. But that does not change their program. And we had the same in Germany. Adolf Hitler tried it with a putsch for the fist time in 1923, and later his Nazi party changed the approach and tried the parliamentary way… via the democratic way.”</p>
<p>The question we must ask, Küntzel said, is what the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood are, rather than how they attempt to gain power. “And as far as foreign policy is concerned, they want to destroy Israel, definitely. There is no differentiation between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. … This is their program. You can see their program realized in the Gaza Strip today.”</p>
<p>Küntzel’s groundbreaking work exposing the strain of Nazi ideology present in the Islamist world and how it got there earned him the Anti-Defamation League’s Paul Ehrlich-Gunther K. Schwerin Human Rights Award in February—an honor usually given to politicians or other public servants.</p>
<p>“This was a big surprise for me,” Küntzel said, adding that the award was received with great appreciation not just from Küntzel himself, but from other researchers and writers in the field.</p>
<p>“Matthias Küntzel has a long and distinguished record in speaking out against anti-Semitism and warning his readers in his native Germany and elsewhere about the dangers posed by this age-old virus that has no known cure,” ADL Director Abe Foxman said at the award ceremony. “His work has been sorely under-appreciated in this country.  With this recognition, we hope to acknowledge his ongoing efforts and also let the American public know of the implications of this disturbing trend.”</p>
<p>I asked Küntzel how important individual players, such as Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who was the mufti of Jerusalem during WWII and struck up an alliance with the Nazis, were to the successful transmission of Nazi anti-Semitism to the Muslim world.</p>
<p>Very important, was the answer—especially in light of what was essentially a partnership in Jew-hatred between the two.</p>
<p>“He made the suggestion to the Nazis in the thirties that he they should use this type of radio propaganda against the Jews, so it went both ways,” he said. “At the time, only the Italian fascists used the tool.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, he noted, al-Husseini wasn’t well known or popular in Iran during that time, so there was a limit to how far the mufti could spread the propaganda. In the case of Iran, the Nazis used a popular radio host who could spread their ideology in a way that was localized to Iranian issues and Persian culture.</p>
<p>“The most important thing is the concept on the whole that you sell anti-Semitism in a way which fits to the people’s customs,” Küntzel said. This meant recognizing that the Arab-Israeli conflict was a much more salient issue among Arabs than in Iran. “The Nazis were smart enough to make this differentiation.”</p>
<p>Küntzel is very disappointed with the response by Western leaders to the naked anti-Semitism and the presence of Nazi ideology in public statements by influential clerics like Qaradawi, such as when he praised the Holocaust.</p>
<p>“If the pope would do something like this, or some of those surrounding the pope in Rome, there would be an outcry throughout the world,” Küntzel said. “But if this kind of very important Muslim speaker does the same, there is silence. And the reason is that people underestimate and don’t know much about the roots of this anti-Semitism. The traditional way to analyze this is to say, well this is the result of the Middle East conflict so if Israel and Zionism would behave more correctly and we can finish with the conflict, then we can finish with anti-Semitism as well.”</p>
<p>This is what Küntzel calls the filter that exists between actual events and their interpretation. Anti-Semitism, or at least a certain strain of it, was imported into the Middle East, and is now being exported from it.</p>
<p>“We are just at the beginning of a change in the analysis of the roots of the anti-Semitism in the Middle East,” Küntzel said. “And I consider this a very important task also to educate Western governments that this is not just the outcome of a conflict caused by Jews who immigrated to Palestine, but that this is something very similar to Nazi anti-Semitism and has to be taken as seriously as the Nazi anti-Semitism was taken.”</p>
<p>Küntzel said he is trying to dispel the false assumption that anti-Semitism has anything to do with Jewish behavior—it doesn’t. Anti-Semitism stems from the mind of the anti-Semite, not with anything the Jews do. So to couch it in terms of a Jewish issue, he said, is completely backwards. It is the province of non-Jews, and therefore must be dealt with by non-Jews as well, not ignored. The Jews, he said, can’t do anything about anti-Semitism if it is not dealt with by society at large.</p>
<p>And it’s the job of researchers and educators not the fall into this trap, and to be willing to reassess and reevaluate preconceived notions such as this, when they are so clearly an obstacle to an accurate understanding of the issue.</p>
<p>“This is an ongoing struggle in the academic world,” Küntzel said.</p>
<p><strong>Seth Mandel is a writer specializing in Middle Eastern politics and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Horowitz Freedom Center. </strong></p>
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		<title>The Jerusalem Terrorist Attack in Perspective: It’s Not Just the Palestinians Who Need to Recognize Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/the-jerusalem-terrorist-attack-in-perspective-it%e2%80%99s-not-just-the-palestinians-who-need-to-recognize-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-jerusalem-terrorist-attack-in-perspective-it%25e2%2580%2599s-not-just-the-palestinians-who-need-to-recognize-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:22:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Right to Exist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[feature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media Bias]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.newsrealblog.com/?p=125026</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“I would ask them, if the Jewish state is fundamentally illegitimate in your eyes, that you’re never willing to accept its legitimacy, what sort of peace are you offering me?"]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a class="highslide" onclick="return vz.expand(this)" href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/bus74.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-125029" title="bus74" src="http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/bus74.jpg" alt="" width="433" height="294" /></a></p>
<p>Actions only speak louder than words when the two conflict. In the Middle East, they work in concert, representing two fronts in the war against Israel.</p>
<p>And so, despite legal proof to the contrary, Israel’s stewardship of Judea and Samaria became an illegal “occupation.” And oh by the way Judea and Samaria had already become the West Bank, a name made up on the fly when Jordan illegally occupied the territory between 1949 and 1967.</p>
<p>And the Jews who lived in this disputed territory became “settlers,” while their Arab neighbors were “residents.” And the part of the Geneva Conventions Israel’s enemies used to attempt to prove the settlements’ illegality was constructed with the express purpose of stopping Nazi population transfer. The Israel=Nazis implication was clear.</p>
<p><span id="more-125026"></span>The word Palestinians, once used disparagingly by Arabs in pre-state Israel to describe the Jews there, now meant Arabs who live in the disputed territories.</p>
<p>And these Palestinians needed a state, to one day be called Palestine. Once again, it was the media to the rescue; <em>The Economist</em> has found a solution. Here’s a line from their recent editorial: “[Obama] pushed for peace in Palestine, but retreated at the first whiff of domestic opposition.”</p>
<p>Leave aside the obvious reference to the Israel lobby, <em>The Economist</em> now speaks as though there is no such country as Israel. It has gone back to calling the entire area “Palestine.” Israel is still responsible for the lack of peace, but apparently the Jews—with a democratic government and a pluralistic society with equal rights for minorities—now constitute the insurgents, the terrorists, the disruptive presence in an otherwise serene land.</p>
<p>So now we’ve come full circle, all thanks to words speaking far louder than actions. It shouldn’t surprise, then, that when the Washington Post <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/bomb-explodes-in-jerusalem-wounding-25-authorities-say/2011/03/23/ABPuVnIB_story.html">reported</a> the terrorist bombing in Jerusalem this morning, the report led with the following sentence: “A bomb exploded at a crowded bus stop Wednesday in central Jerusalem, wounding at least 25 people in what appeared to be the first militant attack in the city in several years.”</p>
<p>Relax everyone, there’s been no terrorist attack. Just “militant” acts. Militant, of course, is an irredeemably inexact word to use for such an event. As a former newspaper editor, I would never have allowed it—not on ideological grounds, but on the grounds that newspaper reporting has a responsibility to be as clear as possible.</p>
<p>But that’s the point here, isn’t it? The media is intentionally muddling the coverage, because the truth puts Israel in a morally superior position.</p>
<p>This is all doing more damage to the beloved “peace process.” How can the Palestinians be expected to recognize Israel if <em>The Economist</em> doesn’t?</p>
<p>Let’s return to that question in a bit. Early on in our trip to Israel last week with Act for Israel, we met with Mark Regev, spokesman for the prime minister. This is what he said about the need for a change in attitude and language from the Palestinian side:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I would ask them, if the Jewish state is fundamentally illegitimate in your eyes, that you’re never willing to accept its legitimacy, what sort of peace are you offering me? Maybe you’re offering me a ceasefire. OK, let’s talk about a ceasefire. But you said you want peace. A ceasefire you pay less for than you pay for a peace treaty, right?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And he continued by asking rhetorically what Israel needs for peace. This was his answer:</p>
<blockquote><p>“One, security, and two, legitimacy. Without those two elements there is no peace.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He is absolutely right. Because—and Regev said this himself—you must be able to protect the peace. You simply cannot do that effectively if major elements of the Palestinian side do not accept Israel’s legitimacy. Regev put it this way:</p>
<blockquote><p>“If tomorrow, the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian president signed a peace treaty, we know there would be an escalation of violence straightaway.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That is a sad state of affairs. But Regev is right again. A peace deal that leads to more violence isn’t a peace deal at all. And true peace needs not just security, but the affirmation of Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist.</p>
<p>When Palestinian terrorists bombed locations in Tel Aviv, such as the Dolphinarium, they did so because Israeli governance of Tel Aviv is illegitimate in their eyes. There is no Israel on their maps, so they speak often of “liberating” Haifa. And Israel’s evacuation of Jews from the Gaza Strip has been met with nonstop rocket attacks on the Negev, because Israel’s borders are irrelevant to them. There are only two borders that matter in their mind: the river and the sea.</p>
<p>As rockets continue to rain down on defenseless Israeli children, and a terrorist strikes at the heart of Jerusalem, those responsible must be held to account. But the rest of the world can play a productive role here, if they’re willing, because a change in the debate must take place immediately.</p>
<p>After all, how can the Palestinians be expected to recognize Israel if <em>The Economist</em> doesn’t?</p>
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		<title>David Remnick’s Article Telling Us to Support Haaretz Reveals Why We Don’t Need Haaretz</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/seth-mandel/david-remnick%e2%80%99s-article-telling-us-to-support-haaretz-reveals-why-we-don%e2%80%99t-need-haaretz/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=david-remnick%25e2%2580%2599s-article-telling-us-to-support-haaretz-reveals-why-we-don%25e2%2580%2599t-need-haaretz</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:32:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Seth Mandel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Right to Exist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[righttoexist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.newsrealblog.com/?p=121640</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New Yorker editor David Remnick has a 10,000-word piece on Haaretz in the magazine’s current issue, echoing the fantasy that the leftist newspaper is integral to the country’s intellectual and political health.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a class="highslide" onclick="return vz.expand(this)" href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/newyorker.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-121642" title="newyorker" src="http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/newyorker.jpg" alt="" width="353" height="308" /></a></p>
<p>New Yorker editor David Remnick has a 10,000-word <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/28/110228fa_fact_remnick">piece</a> on Haaretz in the magazine’s current issue, echoing the fantasy that the leftist Israeli newspaper is integral to the country’s intellectual and political health.</p>
<p>The first hefty chunk of Remnick’s story gushes over Haaretz’s coverage of the uprising in Egypt. But read beyond that and you get to Remnick’s descriptions of the people who make Haaretz what it is. For example, he starts with publisher/owner Amos Schocken. He quotes Schocken complaining about the Israeli national anthem: “How can an Arab citizen identify with such an anthem?” It’s time to change the anthem, Schocken believes, and Remnick quotes Schocken’s editorial on the subject:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Hasn’t the time come to recognize that the establishment of Israel is not just the story of the Jewish people, of Zionism, of the heroism of the Israel Defense Forces and of bereavement? That it is also the story of the reflection of Zionism and the heroism of IDF soldiers in the lives of the Arabs: the <em>Nakba</em>—the Palestinian ‘Catastrophe,’ as the Arabs call the events of 1948—the loss, the families that were split up, the disruption of lives, the property that was taken away, the life under military government and other elements of the history shared by Jews and Arabs, which are presented on Independence Day, and now only on that day, in an entirely one-sided way.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span id="more-121640"></span>This is, of course, an argument for changing more than the anthem. There is no reason to object to a Jewish anthem for a Jewish state—unless you object to both. Thus, we get a peek inside the mind that publishes Haaretz. It is a mind that is indifferent to the idea of Israel as a Jewish state.</p>
<p>Next Remnick moves on to columnist Gideon Levy, who castigates the Israeli government’s settlement policy and its counteroffensive in Gaza as criminal—just about everything the Israeli government does, to Levy, is criminal (one can imagine Remnick smiling and nodding throughout Levy’s diatribe). Haaretz’s most authoritative voice on the op-ed pages has this to say about Israel, a country whose right to exist is constantly called into question and which is subject to a continuing war of annihilation waged by the enemies on its borders: “We are more spoiled than any state in the world.”</p>
<p>How’s that for perspective!</p>
<p>Remnick’s next subject is the one and only Amira Hass. Hass goes back and forth between Gaza and Ramallah, posing as an intrepid reporter. But in reality she is a mouthpiece for the Palestinians. Her parents were communists, she tells Remnick, and she never quite felt at home in Israel (was it the absence of bread lines?). Remnick would like to categorize Hass as a Zionist anyway, but she will have none of it. “My tribe is leftists, not liberal Zionists,” she says.</p>
<p>But you begin to better understand Hass’s status as integral to Haaretz’s reporting when you read this exchange between Remnick and Schocken:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Apart from the settlers, Israelis rarely go to the territories, unless they have the obligations of a soldier or a journalist. When I asked Amos Schocken, Amira Hass’s greatest supporter on the paper, when he had last visited Ramallah, which is a fifteen-minute drive from Jerusalem, he said, ‘I’ve <em>never</em> been there.’</p>
<p>‘Why not?’ I asked. Ramallah is, in a sense, the capital of his outrage.</p>
<p>Schocken smiled. ‘I read about it in <em>Haaretz</em>,’ he said.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How did Schocken come to those deeply held convictions about how the Palestinians are treated? Amira Hass told him.</p>
<p>But wait, that’s problematic. As Remnick then mentions, Hass was almost fired a few years ago:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Editors at the paper had told me that she had started to file less frequently and that her reports were getting less fact-rich and more commentary-heavy, which was not her strength.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s a kind way of saying her stories were opinion pieces dressed up as news reports—which is both unethical and was ruining whatever credibility the paper had left. Hass then took a leave of absence to illegally enter Gaza on a flotilla organized by British parliamentarians. She’s a reporter—just the facts.</p>
<p>But life isn’t so easy for someone like Hass. She isn’t accepted fully by the Palestinians, and she completely rejects the Israelis. She’s embarrassed, she says, to tell her Palestinian friends she’s going to the doctor in Tel Aviv (why doesn’t she get a doctor in Ramallah?). And on Yom Hashoah, she is especially lonely:</p>
<blockquote><p>“On that day, a memorial siren goes off in the Jewish settlement of Beit El, nearby. But I cannot be with them. I cannot join them to commemorate the day, I just cannot. And here in Ramallah the siren doesn’t mean much.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Later on in the article, Remnick mentions the hiring of David Landau as editor. He notes that Landau felt out of place in the Haaretz newsroom because, though he was a committed left-winger, he also wore a yarmulke—something foreign to the newsroom at Haaretz.</p>
<p>But the section on Landau is written from an alternate universe. How could Remnick exclude what was by far the most famous and telling <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124729">moment</a> of Landau’s career at Haaretz? In 2007, Landau told Condoleezza Rice that Israel wanted “to be raped” by the U.S. into submission. The Jewish Week’s Gary Rosenblatt tried to defend Landau by suggesting the quote was taken out of context. Nope, said Landau:</p>
<blockquote><p>“I did say that in general, Israel wants to be raped — I did use that word — by the U.S., and I myself have long felt Israel needed more vigorous U.S. intervention in the affairs of the Middle East.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Landau also used far more crass—if you can believe it—language to describe what he believed Israel “wanted”—language I do not feel comfortable even repeating here. Landau later admitted to sitting on damning information about then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert because he thought the two sides were closer to a peace agreement and he wanted the corrupt Olmert to stay in office long enough to see the process through.</p>
<p>Neither of these incidents is even mentioned in Remnick’s piece, which agonizes over Haaretz’s prospects for survival.</p>
<p>What will be the future of Haaretz? It’s unclear. Ironically, what Remnick loves about the paper is actually depleting Haaretz’s bottom line. The democratization of the news through blogs and social networking makes opinion and advocacy journalism ubiquitous. What’s missing is agenda-free journalism.</p>
<p>The Israeli public is growing less enamored of “reporters” filing news stories just before boarding a flotilla to Gaza designed to strengthen Hamas and weaken Israel’s security. They simply aren’t as interested as they used to be in a newspaper that continues to push thinly sourced stories that are then <a href="http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/16/haaretz_notwithstanding_cordoba_house_still_moving_forward">debunked</a> for all the world to read. Haaretz is continually referred to as Israel’s New York Times. But Israelis can read the New York Times online, so why would they need their own version?</p>
<p>Israelis are getting more serious about their news. That’s bad news for Remnick and Haaretz.</p>
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