… according to Mideast expert Micah Halpern

Excerpt

This explosion was so powerful and out of control it was designed to kill, maim and damage in a wide circumference around the bomb. This was not the work of a Western intelligence force, it was not even the work of a Western assassin. Israel has perfected the art of destroying their target and their target only - a car and the people in the car, nothing else at all. Israel goes the extra mile to make sure the damage is restricted and does not injure people or property around the explosion site.

This explosion was the work of others, it was not the work of Israel and neither was it the work of the United States.

Find out who Micah believes is responsible here.

Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe

Peace vs the ‘peace process’

October 14, 2009

Excerpts:

The Tehran Times complains that Israel has too many friends on the internet. Read the story here.

It is hard to make this stuff up.

When the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and the Berlin Wall came down, it was a momentous time. We expected peace in our time. Without two superpowers deterred by mutually assured destruction (MAD) the threat of a nuclear holocaust became distant.

The United States was the sole modern army and no army could dare challenge us, but the first irony of modern war is that technological superiority begat a primitive counter offense that technology could not address. Instead of politics and power wars became about “blood and faith” to borrow from Ralph Peters’ book of that name. As Peters also noted, “suicide bombers trump microchips.” This we learned on 9/11.

Commitment without power will trump power without commitment. Americans are an impatient people and we want our wars quick and cheap; yet we fight an enemy committed to win without a timeline. We learned in Viet Nam that the one thing the North Vietnamese could control in spite of inferior firepower was the duration of the war. The second irony is that in order for a war not to last forever we must be committed as though it will. Our impatience is our Achilles heel; and our enemies know how to exploit it.

With on the ground technology our soldiers have become adept at minimizing civilian casualties. The third irony is that the concept of a humane war increases the duration of the conflict. Wars used to be fought to exhaustion, and that included the civilian population. Now we take out the combatants with relatively minimal civilian collateral damage, but the wars never end. Hamas and Palestinian radicals rise up from the very population that was spared by their humane opponents. Wars may now be measured in centuries.

The fourth irony is that broader media coverage may also increase the ferocity of battle. Facing media outcry, a warring force may need to sacrifice humanity for speed to avoid the backlash from the media. No military leader wants to see his victory on the battlefield undermined by a global media that values headlines more than understanding. Yet short term ferocity may be the more humane strategy.

While the UN seemed unmoved by the 9,700 rockets launched intentionally by Hamas at Israeli civilians, they can not condemn Israel quickly enough for finally responding after three years. The UN never seemed to mind that Hamas violated almost every code of the Geneva Convention by intentionally placing their civilians in harm’s way, by intentionally targeting civilians, or by training children to become suicide bombers.

There is only one Jewish state surrounded by 22 Muslim states, yet it is Israel that is charged with using disproportionate force. Terrorist sycophants like Jimmy Carter seem to find no terrorist act that is unforgivable or unjustifiable and no Israeli response that is not disproportionate.

It is ironic that the Jews, a learned people, can be so victorious on the field of battle and do so badly in the field of public opinion. There is a reason they have to have victory quickly; the world will not tolerate a sustained Israeli offensive even if it is to remove an existential threat.

Israel is an open society, with equal rights for women, religious tolerance, a free press and even tolerance for gays. Israel is an educated society with more museums per capita than any country and is second only to the United States in patents.

Their enemy is misogynous, brutal to their own as well as the Jewish devils and intolerant of basic human rights. Yet our most misguided liberals at our universities and the streets and press of Europe protest too often, siding with the very people who would be most intolerant of their rights and views.

This final irony is one of the most difficult to understand but it is one of the oldest and most persistent, especially in Europe.

“.. we have been talking to the Iranians, almost non stop, for 30 years. There isn’t an American president from Jimmy Carter to the present who has not authorized negotiations with Iran. The classic case occurred during the Clinton administration. We ended all kinds of sanctions against Iran, let all kinds of Iranians into the U.S. for the first time since the 1970’s, had sporting matches with the Iranians, hosted Iranian cultural events, and unfroze Iranian bank accounts. Then President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeline Albright started publicly apologizing to Iran for this and that. (HO comment- we did have much to apologize for- see this posting). But when all was said and done, Ali Khamenei reminded everyone that Iran is in a state of war with the U.S., and that was the end of negotiations.”

from Understanding Iran by Michael Ledeen in Hillsdale’s Imprimis.

HKO comment- while we arrogantly discuss our preconditions to negotiate with Iran, the more pertinent question is what are their preconditions to negotiate with us.

Sunnis believe that we know the succession of Mohammed therefore religious leaders should function in government.

Shiites believe that the rightful successor to Mohamemd is yet to come and therefore no religious leader should sit in a positon of government power. This is why Shiite leaders in Iraq do not participate in Parliament.

But this Shiite position broke down in Iran when Khomeini took over in 1979. He not only thought religious leaders should be allowed to govern, he considered it mandatory.

While they have a theological disagreement the Sunnis and Shiites have been able to work together since the beginning of the Iranian Revolution. Arafat was a Sunni and trained the early Iranian Revolutionary Guard which is largely Shiite. The two groups also worked together to overthrow the Shah.

Those who claim that Sunnis and Shias can not work togther ignore the reality on the ground.

Info above paraphrased from “Understanding Iran” by Michale Ledeen written int the Hillsdale College - Imprimis.

The greatest proponents for a pro Israel policy are the evangelical Christians and the Jews, in that order. It is a given that the evangelicals will have little influence in an Obama administration. The Jewish leverage is at risk if they do not support Obama and he wins. Many would question how much influence they would have if they supported him and he did win.

Carter wrote off his Jewish support early in his campaign. In this old article from Jason Maoz , Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem, he spoke of the politics and Carter’s disdain for the Jewish voters.

Excerpts:

Speechwriter Bob Shrum quit the Carter campaign after just a few weeks, disgusted with what he described as Carter’s penchant for fudging the truth. He also related that Carter, convinced the Jewish vote in the Democratic primaries would go to Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, had instructed his staff not to issue any more statements on the Middle East.

“Jackson has all the Jews anyway,” Shrum quoted Carter as saying. “We get the Christians.”

Relations between Carter and Israel were tense from the outset of the Carter presidency. Carter’s hostility was evident to Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan, who in his memoir Breakthrough described a July 1977 White House meeting between Carter and Israeli officials. “You are more stubborn than the Arabs, and you put obstacles on the path to peace,’’ an angry Carter scolded Dayan and his colleagues.

“Our talk,” Dayan wrote, “lasted more than an hour and was most unpleasant. President Carter … launched charge after charge against Israel.”

Former New York mayor Ed Koch, in his 1984 bestseller Mayor, recounted a conversation he had shortly before the 1980 election with Cyrus Vance, who’d recently resigned as Carter’s secretary of state. Koch told Vance that many Jews would not be voting for Carter because they feared “that if he is reelected he will sell them out.”

“Vance,” recalled Koch, “nodded and said, ‘He will.’ ”

In Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn revealed that during a March 1980 meeting with his senior political advisers, Carter, discussing his fading reelection prospects and his sinking approval rating in the Jewish community, snapped, “If I get back in, I’m going to [expletive] the Jews.”

Carter – such was the country’s good fortune – did not get back in. But as evidenced by his years of pro-Palestinian advocacy, reams of anti-Israel op-ed articles, and the release last week of his latest book/screed, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, he’s been trying to [expletive] the Jews ever since.

HKO comments- There is no assurance that Obama will be another Jimmy Carter, but given the number of advisors who hold similar views to Carter it not hard to understand Jewish reluctance if it occurs.

It is also worth noting that Carter got overwhelming support from the Jews for his first term , but substantially fewer Jewish votes for the attempt at his second. In 1976 Carter got 71% of the Jewish vote. In 1980 he got 45%; Reagan received 39% and Independent Party John Anderson got 14%. Go here for a history of Jewish voting patterns. Carter got the worst Jewish support of any Democratic nominee since the Depression.

Triple Cross: How Britain Created the Arab-Israel Conflict
By Rachel Neuwirth

in American Thinker.

Rachel writes a wonderful article about the incredible hypocrisy of the British media and academics constantly condemning Israel when the British themselves were monumentally repsonsible for creating the mess in the Middle East to begin with. Her article is a great brief history of the British rape of Palestine and its consequences.

excerpts

Outside of the Muslim countries, no press in the world is as biased, as unfair, and as dishonest and vindictive towards Israel as the British press. The BBC and the newspapers The Guardian and The Independent take the lead in relentlessly vilifying the Jewish state, but Sky News, Reuters, The Economist and numerous other major media outlets do not lag far behind them in their race to see which can defame and malign Israel the most. Israel is incessantly castigated as an imperialist and colonialist power whose people stole their country from its “indigenous” and rightful owners, the “Palestinians.”

That the press of a country that at one time or another conquered a substantial chunk of the entire world by the most ruthless and deceitful means imaginable (consider, for example, Sir Walter Raleigh’s frank account of the murderous treachery that he employed to seize Trinidad from the Spanish, or Sir Francis Drake’s ruthless plundering of the Spanish colonies) should castigate as colonialist, imperialist and racist a country that, even including the “occupied” territories, is only the size of Wales — which, by the way, is yet another country that England conquered in a series of brutal wars — is hard to fathom. So is the British press’s outrage at Israel’s “undemocratic” rule over perhaps a million and a half Arabs, when Britain ruled for centuries in the most autocratic manner hundreds of millions of subjects, many more people than lived in Britain itself, to whom it gave no democratic rights whatsoever. Britain only surrendered this Empire when it was bankrupt after two world wars, and no longer had the means to hold onto it. Even then, she surrendered it only under intense prodding from the United States, whose help she absolutely needed to rebuild her shattered economy and defend herself.

Yet the press and government of this nation that ruled vast territories thousands of miles from its own shores, countries that posed no threat whatsoever to Britain, have the gall to condemn Israel for maintaining a few checkpoints in the “Palestinian” territories, located only a few miles or in some cases only a few yards from her major population centers, in order to prevent terrorists from bringing bombs into these population centers and using them to murder thousands of Israelis. And they have the gall to call these checkpoints an “occupation,” even after Israel unilaterally handed over most populated areas of the “occupied” territories (whose total size, in any case, is only equal to that of the English suburban county of Sussex) to her enemies, in a vain attempt to make peace with them.

The call for an excess profits tax on our oil companies is economically ignorant and dangerous. This was last tried under our worst president ever, Jimmy Carter, and it led to higher prices, and gas lines.

While we all feel the pain of higher gas prices, we at least have plenty of supply. Imagine what happens when building supplies and groceries do not get delivered because fuel is unavailable.

An excess profits tax inevitably becomes a confiscatory MARGINAL tax on the next gallon sold. When the next gallon sold is taxed heavily it will not be produced and distributed. Government economists are notoriously ignornant of the difference between marginal tax rates and average tax rates. Carter was the poster boy for the economically retarded on this issue. Schumer and Reid seek to revive Carter’s worst energy policies.

At a time when ethanol and bio fuels are becoming poor substitues we need to increase domestic production, not punish the very people we need to increase that production. The same morons who want to punish the oil producers have refused to allow any new refineries, or drilling on domestic properties, or the construction of nuclear plants, or any sensible policy that could easily reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

These vapid political hacks have no problem withe excess profits made by Microsoft or Warren Buffet or the high profits now being earned by farmers because of high food prices. But oil is the scapegoat for their decades of stupid policies that have handicapped domestic energy production.

There no problem we have that can not be made worse by these fools.

CBS’s 60 minutes ran an informative piece on the Israeli Airforce, the IAF. See the complete video from the show at CBSnews.com here.

Unlike other nations where the airforce fighter pilots are selected from a group of volunteers,the IAF get first dibs from the entire pool of Israeli draftees. Only 1 in 40 who are selected make it through fighter training. In Israel these selectees are rock stars.

Israel responds to $50 home made rockets fired from Gaza with $50,000 rockets that are precision guided to avoid civilian casualties. Even under these conditions the pilots spoke of the moral dilemmma of having to kill civilians to hit their targets. I doubt that any moral dilemma is faced by the Hamas who willingly fires on civilian targets.

But the IAF pilots are ordinary citizens who if not for their situation would be school teachers, postmen, truck drivers, shop keepers and doctors or nurses: true citizen soldiers. They remind me of what our WWII forces must have been like: ordinary citizens who if needed would become efficient trained killers.

The broadcast noted a framed picture given to pilots of IAF jets flying over Auschwitz. The message is clear; that Israel can not and will not entrust its security to anyone but themselves. All Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tour Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, as the final step in their training. The message is clear: this is what happens if you lose. They are a motivated fighting force.

During my two recent trips to Israel I still observed that the Israelis are very American in their culture and in their lives. Americans, Jewish or not, would feel at home there.

tips to Deborah Adler for alerting me to the broadcast