size matters

The total for all the 22 Arab League countries is 6,145,389 square miles (SM). By comparison, all 50 states of the United States have a total of 3,787,318 SM. Israel has 8,463 SM, about one-sixth of that of the State of Michigan. Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim but not Arab and are not included.
World Arab population: 300 million; World Jewish population: 13.6 million; Israel's Jewish population: 5.4 million. (reference: Dr. Wilbert Simkovitz,
http://dehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/apr04/ 0223.htmldehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/ apr04/0223.html)

Chicago ZOA meet Sept 22

Time
Thursday, September 22 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location
2127 Lincolnwood dr Evanston Il 847 331 3584
Created By
Jonathan Ginsburg
More Info
Get updates and discuss
1. How best to stop Iran's bomb 2. peace prospects with the Palestinians
3. fighting antisemitism 4. planning upcoming ZOA events
Share:PostLinkPhotoVideo


Jonathan Ginsburg
Hope you can join us. ZOA "The ZOA is the most credible advocate for Israel on the American Jewish scene today." The Wall Street Journal

Ally? Turkey now an enemy

Our World: Ankara’s chosen scapegoat
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
09/05/2011 21:48

Turkey harassed Israeli businessmen in Istanbul in order to gain popularity in the Muslim world generally and Arab world specifically.

Talkbacks (41)
Monday morning, Turkey took its anti-Israel campaign to a new level. Beyond downgrading diplomatic relations with Israel; beyond suspending military agreements; beyond threatening naval war; beyond threatening to foment an irredentist insurrection of Israeli Arabs; the Turks decided to terrorize Israeli tourists landing in Istanbul airport.

Forty Israeli passengers, mainly businessmen who had landed in Istanbul on a Turkish Airlines flight from Tel Aviv, were separated from the rest of the flight passengers. Their passports were confiscated.

They were placed in interrogation rooms and stripped down to their underwear. Their carry-on bags were checked. And then they were lined up against a wall, forbidden to sit down or use the washroom.

Passengers who contacted the Foreign Ministry said they felt frightened and intimidated.

The ordeal went on for 90 minutes, until Turkish authorities returned their Israeli passports and permitted them to pick up their suitcases and exit the airport.

What were the Turks trying to accomplish by terrifying the Israeli tourists? They didn’t need to threaten trade ties. Their Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu already took care of that over the weekend.

The victimized Israelis said the Turkish airport authorities wouldn’t even answer their questions.

Any time we asked them a question, the tourists said, the Turks ignored us.

It was as if they weren’t even there.

And that’s the thing of it. The Turks didn’t harass the Israeli tourists in order to send a message to Israel. They have nothing more to say to us. We are non-entities to them. We’re only good for attacking.

No, Israel wasn’t the target audience the Turks were playing to on Monday. Their target audience was the Islamic world generally and the Arab world specifically. Turkey’s influence in these arenas skyrocketed in January 2009 after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused President Shimon Peres and Israel of mass murder as the leaders shared a stage at the Davos Conference.

Similarly Erdogan’s domestic and pan-Islamic support levels increased steeply in the aftermath of the Turkish-supported pro-Hamas flotilla to Gaza in 2010. After nine Turkish government-supported IHH terrorists were killed aboard the Mavi Marmara when they tried to murder IDF naval commandos who had lawfully boarded the ship, the Arabs hailed Erdogan as a hero for bravely attacking Israel.

Given how well scapegoating Israel has served him, Erdogan clearly believes it is a no-risk strategy for raising his star from Cairo to Algiers.

Leftist Israeli commentators refuse to accept what is happening. Writing in Haaretz on Sunday, Shlomo Avineri recommended that Israel compensate the nine IHH members whom IDF commandos killed in self-defense on the Mavi Marmara. Avineri argued that by refusing to do so, Israel was playing into the hands of hardliners. True, “it won’t be easy, but we need to grit our teeth and do the right thing,” he wrote.

Others have argued that Israel may be able to rebuild its strategic relations with Turkey by selling Ankara more drones with which to kill Iraqi and Turkish Kurds. The Turkish military claimed it killed 100 Kurdish fighters in its attacks last month in Iraq and along the Turkish-Iraqi border. Israeli UAVs reportedly played a key role in the bombing. But Turkey needs more. If we sell them more, the argument goes, maybe they will see how useful we are and stop attacking us.

Aside from being morally reprehensible, these arguments fail to recognize the basic reality that Turkey has no interest whatsoever in rebuilding its ties with Israel. The once-important strategic alliance is over and gone, and Israel cannot do anything about it. All Turkey sees us as today is a scapegoat.

It has been argued by commentators on the Right that Turkey’s abandonment of Israel is part and parcel of its abandonment of the US. But this is a mischaracterization of Turkey’s policy toward the US.

Since 2003, Turkey has undertaken a series of actions that have harmed US strategic interests. The first, of course, was Erdogan’s decision on the eve of the Iraq War to deny the US military the right to invade northern Iraq from Turkey.

The latest action was arguably Turkey’s joint air exercises with the Chinese Air Force last September.

Chinese jets en route to Turkey refueled in Iran. The exercise was a clear signal that NATO member Turkey intends to exploit its alliance with the US to build ties with the US’s chief geostrategic competitor.

Yet at the same time that Turkey has harmed the US, it has also taken steps to assist it. Most recently, last week, Erdogan belatedly agreed to station the high-powered US X-Band radar on its territory as part of a missile defense system to protect NATO allies against the threat of Iranian long-range missiles.

Turkey’s mixed policies toward the US reveal that unlike its position on Israel, Turkey believes that it has an interest in maintaining its alliance with the US. Its hostile behavior is more a function of perceived US weakness than anything else. That is, Turkey is willing to risk angering the US by undercutting it because it does not fear US retribution.

Turkey’s aggressive behavior might end if the US made Turkey pay a price for it.

To its credit, the Netanyahu government has not accepted the advice of the Left and has refused to apologize to Turkey or pay compensation to the families of those killed aboard the Marmara. Moreover, the government has wisely used Turkey’s behavior as a means of building strong bilateral ties with other victims of Turkish aggression. Over the past two years, Israel has strongly upgraded is strategic ties with Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania. Israel should add to these accomplishments by strengthening its ties to Armenia and to the Kurds of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

With newspapers running groundless stories about prospects for reconstituting relations with Turkey, we need to recognize that what we are experiencing now is the beginning, not the end, of Turkey’s slide into the enemy camp. Erdogan is openly taking steps to transform Turkey into an Islamic state along the lines of Iran. And the further he goes down his chosen path, the more harshly and aggressively he will lash out at Israel.

Given that scapegoating Israel is not a momentary lapse of reason on Turkey’s part but a central aspect of a long-term regional strategy, it is clear that Israel needs to meet Turkish aggression with more than momentary courage in the face of intimidation and threats. Israel needs to build on its already successful policy of forming a ring of alliances around Turkey and develop a long-term military and diplomatic strategy for containing and weakening it.

caroline@carolineglick.com





www.rabbijonathanginsburg.org
www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com
www.rabbijonathanginsburg.info
www.rabbijonathanginsburg.blogspot.com

Egyptian Blood Libel from powerline blog rabbi Jonathan ginsburg

onnecting the Dots In Egypt
Posted: 05 Sep 2011 01:01 PM PDT
News story number one: On Al-Nas TV, described as an Egyptian religious channel, Egyptian cleric Salem Abu Al-Futouh explains things to his co-religionists:
Brothers and sisters, in 1114, in England, an extremely grave thing was discovered: The Jews would abduct children, slaughter them, collect the blood in a vessel, and consume it at Passover.
The Jews have two holidays: Passover and another one. What is the Passover, you ask? This holiday is a kind of. . . The Jews celebrate this holiday by eating sandwiches. . . Rather, they eat matzos. What are these matzos made of, you may ask? Concentrate now. They are made of flour and, instead of water, of blood.
A fundamental condition is that the blood be of non-Jews, and especially of Muslims and Arabs.
It goes on and on, in the same vein: the same nonsense that we have heard a thousand times before. News story number two: Egypt builds wall around Israeli embassy. This is the same embassy which, as we noted here, was attacked by a mob two weeks ago. One of the rioters, cheered on by the crowd, climbed to the top of the embassy and tore down the Israeli flag. So it is easy to see why Egyptian authorities saw the need to protect the embassy. Apparently, however, it isn’t so easy for them to explain to their populace:
The Egyptian authorities are erecting a wall around the Israeli embassy in Cairo as relations between the two neighbours who signed a peace treaty in 1979 are at a delicate phase. …
Outraged Egyptians last month staged huge protests outside the embassy and called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador over the border deaths of Egyptian policemen killed as Israel hunted militants.
Let’s pause there. First, they weren’t “militants,” they were terrorists. Second, the Israeli forces weren’t merely “hunting” them, they were in hot pursuit after the terrorists had crossed the border from Egypt and murdered at least eight Israelis. Third, some of the terrorists turned out to be Egyptians, and the circumstances under which the Egyptian policemen were killed are still under investigation. This would seem to be important context, but AFP doesn’t consider it necessary to mention. Now on to the main point:
Egyptian officials quoted by the local media have meanwhile stressed that the wall being erected around the embassy was aimed at protecting residents of nearby buildings.
Ali Abdel Rahman, the governor of Giza district where the embassy is located, told Al-Gumhuriyya newspaper the wall “has nothing to do with the protection of the Israeli embassy” but is for the protection of private citizens.
It remains unclear what sort of regime will ultimately emerge in Egypt, but with respect to these stories, the new boss is very much like the old bosses, all across the region. Due to a combination of cowardice and complicity, Arab governments either permit or encourage the vilest (and stupidest) slanders against Jews, and then, when they have to deal with the inevitable consequences of this endless propaganda, they are either unable or unwilling to tell their citizens anything like the truth. Maybe the vaunted “Arab spring” will amount to something someday; maybe it won’t. But as long as this same old script keeps being replayed, we will know that not much has really changed.

Libya will go jihadist -Daily Aert

Jihadists Plot to Take over Libya - Bill Gertz (Washington Times)
Jihadists among the Libyan rebels revealed plans last week on the Internet to subvert the post-Gaddafi government and create an Islamist state, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.
A government report circulated Tuesday said extremists were observed "strategizing" on Internet forums about how to set up an Islamist state in Libya.

Turkey is now in Islamic camp

See also Deciphering Israel's Behavior - Omer Taspinar
Why did Israel decide not to apologize to Turkey? Tel Aviv decided that the apology would not solve problems with Turkey. According to the strategic assessment in Israel, it seemed that the relationship with Turkey was broken beyond repair.

Get behind this bill now!! re the UN

Photo by: courtesy
Column One: Cliché-based foreign policy
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
09/02/2011 16:58

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill shows that the foreign policy debate in US is now a fight between those who trust facts and those who trust clichés.

US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, kicked up a political storm this week. On Tuesday, Ros-Lehtinen introduced the United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act. If passed into law it would place stringent restrictions on US funding of the UN’s budget.

The US currently funds 22 percent of the UN’s general budget. That budget is passed by the General Assembly with no oversight by the US. America’s 22% share of the budget is nonvoluntary, meaning the US may exert no influence over how its taxpayers’ funds are spent.

If Ros-Lehtinen’s act is passed into law, the UN will have two years to enact budgetary reforms that would render a minimum of 80% of its budget financing voluntary. If the UN does not make the required reforms, the US government will be enjoined to withhold 50% of its nonvoluntary UN budget allocations.

Beyond this overarching demand for UN budgetary reform, the act contains several specific actions that are directed against UN institutions that advance anti-American and anti-Israel agendas.

Ros-Lehtinen’s act would defund the UN Human Rights Committee until such time as it repeals its permanent anti-Israel resolution, and prohibits countries that support terror and are under UN Security Council sanctions from serving as its members. It would also prohibit the US from serving as a member of the UNHRC until such reforms are enacted.

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill defunds all UN activities related to the libelous Goldstone Report, and the anti- Semitic Durban process. It vastly curtails and conditions US funding of UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency permeated by members of terrorist organizations. UNRWA’s facilities are routinely used to plan, execute and incite terrorism against Israel and to indoctrinate Palestinians to seek Israel’s destruction.

The bill pays special attention to the Palestinian Authority’s plan to have the UN Security Council and General Assembly vote in favor of Palestinian statehood later this month. The bill would cut off US funding to any UN agency or organization that upgrades the Palestinian mission to the UN in any way in the aftermath of a General Assembly vote in favor of such an upgrade in representation.

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill, which has 57 co-sponsors, provides detailed explanations for how the targeted UN agencies and activities harm US interests. It notes that the US’s membership since 2009 in the UN Human Rights Council has had no impact whatsoever on the UNHRC’s anti-Israel and anti- American agenda. The US has been unable to temper in any way the UNHRC’s actions and resolutions, including its decisions to form the Goldstone Committee and to endorse the findings of the Goldstone Report, and its continued support and organization of the anti-Semitic Durban conferences in which Israel is attacked and libeled as an illegitimate, racist state.

The bill notes that despite US efforts to extend oversight over UNRWA’s hiring process, UNRWA continues to hire members of terrorist organizations. The bill provides a long list of UNRWA employees who have perpetrated terrorist attacks.

Ignoring its fact-based assessment of UN failings, the Obama administration has rejected the Ros- Lehtinen bill out of hand. Speaking to Politico, an administration source panned the bill, claiming, “This draft legislation is dated, tired and frankly unresponsive to the positive role being played by the UN.”

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland attacked the bill, saying it would “seriously undermine our international standing and dangerously weaken the UN as an instrument to advance US national security goals.”

Since taking office, Barack Obama has taken concerted steps to place cooperation with the UN at the top of his foreign policy agenda. Through word and deed, Obama has shown that he believes that the US should minimize the extent to which it operates independently of the UN on the global stage.

Obama and his advisers give four arguments to support their view that the UN should effectively replace the US as the global leader. First, they say that the US cannot operate unilaterally on the global stage.

Second, they insinuate that operations undertaken outside the UN umbrella are somehow illegitimate.

To support this contention, they intimate that the reason the US was bogged down in Iraq following its 2003 invasion was because it did not receive specific Security Council permission to invade. In contrast, they point to the current Security Council-sanctioned military operation in Libya and the 1991 Security Council-sanctioned Persian Gulf War as success stories. And they attribute those missions’ successes to their conduct under the UN aegis.

The third argument, which comes across clearly in Nuland’s statement, is that to have credibility in global affairs, the US must not throw its weight around at the UN. If it objects too strenuously to the way things are done, or makes its support for the UN conditional on UN actions, then all the other UN members will be offended and refuse to cooperate with the US.

The final argument they make is reflected in the statement the unnamed administration source gave to Politico. Quite simply, in their view, trying to hold the UN accountable for its actions is old fashioned. In today’s world, accountability is out. And anyone who doesn’t understand that is simply out of touch, “dated, tired.”

All of these arguments are false. In the first instance, it is simply untrue that the US is incapable of operating unilaterally. Aside from Saudi Arabia in 1991 and Kuwait in 2003, the US did not need its partners in Iraq. Of all the non-American participants in the US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, only Britain made an impact on fighting. And frankly, the US would have secured Saudi, Kuwaiti and British cooperation without ever involving the UN.

Indeed, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, the US has frequently acted successfully outside the UN framework. In 1999, the Clinton administration could not get UN Security Council agreement to fight in Kosovo, and so it ignored the UN and fought alongside its NATO allies.

The US had 21 allied militaries fighting alongside its forces in Iraq, despite the fact that the operation was conducted outside the UN Security Council umbrella.

The US-initiated Proliferation Security Initiative founded in 2003 is arguably the US’s most successful multilateral effort to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Operating completely outside the UN framework, the PSI has 98 members.

As for the two major US military operations that have been carried out in recent memory by force of UN Security Council resolutions, the jury is still out on both. Due to the Security Council’s restrictions on the mission of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the US permitted Saddam Hussein to remain in power after removing his invasion forces from Kuwait.

In the 12 years between that war and the 2003 Iraq war, Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who – at US urging – tried to overthrow him. He exploited the Security Council sanctions to starve his people for propaganda purposes while he and his cronies enriched themselves through corrupt UN oil-for-food contracts.

Had Saddam been overthrow in 1991, his replacement by a pro-Western successor regime could have been enacted more smoothly and at far smaller cost to the US and the Iraqi people.

As for Libya, reports from Tripoli indicate that critics of the UN mission were correct. In overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi, the US has apparently enabled a situation in which any successor regime will likely be dominated by al-Qaida-aligned political and military forces allied with Iran.

The claim that the US will lose influence in international affairs if it is perceived as bossy by its fellow UN nation states is similarly groundless. The hard truth is that no one goes along with the UN simply because it is the UN. States are reasonably and consistently opportunistic in their cooperation with the UN. They support the UN when it supports their interests and they ignore the UN when it opposes their interests.

States do not oppose the US at the UN because they consider it bossy. They oppose the US at the UN because they believe it serves their national interests to oppose the US and its interests.

It is due to clashing interests, not the comportment of US representatives, that the Obama administration to fail to exert any influence over the UNHRC’s agenda despite its commitment to “engagement.”

Clashing national interests are the reason the Obama administration has failed to secure Security Council support for anything approaching effective measures against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The final administration argument – that it is déclassé to demand that the UN stop advancing the causes of America’s enemies – is not simply peevish and insulting. It is indicative of the culture that motivates the administration to cling to its UN-centered agenda despite its obvious and repeated failure.

As the easy refutation of all the administration’s arguments makes clear, the agenda is not a product of rational thought. It is the product of the groupthink that is endemic at the universities whence Obama and his advisers have emerged. This groupthink is directed by unquestioned clichés that are passed off as sophisticated reasoning. These include such pearls of wisdom as “global governance,” “Twitter revolution,” “multilateralism” and “interdependence.”

These clichés have become articles of faith that are impermeable to fact and reality. As a consequence, those who adhere to them will never acknowledge their failure to deliver on their utopian promises. Instead they attack anyone who points out their failure as “dated,” and as “tired” old fogies who are too unsophisticated to understand the world.


We see this attitude at work in all aspects of Obama’s foreign policy. For instance, Obama came into office with the view that the reason all efforts to date to successfully complete a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians failed because the Palestinians didn’t trust the US to “deliver” Israel. To remedy this perceived problem, Obama has consistently sought to “put daylight” between the US and Israel. This policy has failed abysmally, as the PA’s current UN statehood bid shows. And yet the administration continues to cling to it, because acknowledging its failure would involve renouncing a cliché.

So, too, the administration’s policy of engaging Iran has brought the mullocracy to the brink of a nuclear arsenal, empowered it to violently repress pro-American democracy protesters, expand its influence in Iraq and Afghanistan, take over Lebanon, and make inroads in Egypt, Libya and beyond. And yet, despite all of this, the administration refuses to admit its policy is wrong and adopt a more effective one, because doing so would involve acknowledging that “engagement” is not the panacea it was cracked up to be.

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill is expected to be blocked in the Democrat-controlled Senate before Obama has the opportunity to veto it. This is a pity not simply because the bill would advance US interests and the cause of freedom. It is a pity because it shows that the foreign policy debate in the US is now a fight between those who trust facts and those who trust clichés.

caroline@carolineglick.com
Download JPost's iPhone application