What does it say that this memorial was unveiled in Jerusalem while we still have a hole int he ground?  Remember which side of the ‘fence’ this was built on.

Tips to Letty Kaplan

Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe

Peace vs the ‘peace process’

October 14, 2009

Excerpts:

The local federation hosted Micah Halpern this evening at the Cox Theatre.  He is an authority on Iran and their nuclear effort.

A few random yet relevant points.

There are 3,000 FBI agents. None of them have passed the test to speak or understand Persian, the language of Iran.  Only a few dozen can speak Arabic. Translation is jobbed off to Israel.  We must job to a third party to translate the language of our biggest security threat.

The Iranians know us far far better than we know them. See above. They are much better at playing the international chess game than we are.

The Iranians have more Phd’s per capita that any country besides the US, Israel and maybe India.  Most are educated in European universities.

Natan Sharansky is a world class champion chess player, and keeps a continuous game with Kasperov.

Unlike Iraq in 1981 with a single nuclear plant above ground, Iran has at least 38 sites and many below ground.

Iran has a space program and has developed rockets to propel satellites into space. This same rocket technology can carry nuclear warheads and their satellites are critical to guide their rockets to assure accuracy. Their space program is not subject to inspection by the nuclear verification agencies.  Other components of their program sucha as triggers are also exempt.

We have no power over Iran. If we are to have any influence it must come though a third party, most likely China, which has a $100 billion dollar oil deal with them. Unfortunately we have been and are bungling our Chinese diplomatic realtionship.  We need a strong relationship with China to have any influence over Iran.

Iran’s diplomatic relationship with Venezuela is based totally on a common hatred of the U.S.

Iran will likely succeed in developing their nuclear weapons.

Read Micah  Halpern at The Micah Report . (now on recommended sites)

“Of course the Palestinian problem does play some role in the Middle Eastern anti-Americanism. It does so in some places more than others, however- in Jordon, for example, with its very large Palestinian population, where the “street” is far more anti-American than the government. However, in Iran, whose government is as anti-American and as anti-Israel as can be, its people are not anti-American at all; quite the contrary. There is an important lesson here, and it is that the bitterest anti-Americanism, which one finds in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, stems not from U.S. support for Israel but from U.S. support for the Saudi and Egyptian regimes, among others, which are so deeply unpopular. As Leslie Gelb put it, “America’s central strategic problem in the region… is that we need our corrupt, inept, and unpopular Arab allies because the likely alternative to them is far worse,” even though this need produces more anti-Americanism than anything having to do with U.S. support for Israel.”

From” Jewcentricity- why the Jews are praised, blamed, and used to explain just about everything” by Adam Garfinkle

The book focuses on the exaggerated perception of Jews and their influence, both good and bad.

As Churchill advocated taking Hitler at his written and spoken word,  Benjamin Netanyahu insists that Muslim radicals must be taken at their word.

Benjamin or ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu’s speech at the UN General Assembly contained a moral clarity that belies a depth and experience absent from other world leaders, especially our own.

Before college Netanyahu joined an elite fighting unit that was a spearhead for the IDF. He led a retaliatory raid against perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics, killing three of their leaders.  Bibi tried and failed in 1968 to capture Arafat for a 1968 mine attack of a busload of young Israelis.

He was part of a raid destroying 14 unoccupied planes at the Beirut International airport in retaliation for an attack on an El Al jet in Greece which killed an Israeli and wounded a stewardess.  In 1969 Egyptian forces were laying traps for the Israelis near the Suez Canal.  His team destroyed an Egyptian truck loaded with weapons, but a few days later Egyptian troops fired on Bibi’s rubber boat. Loaded with ammo belts he nearly drowned, until rescued by a naval commando who pulled him up by his hair.

Yoni Netanyahu

But most motivating was the loss of his brother at the Raid on Entebbe in 1976.  A crack team flew from Tel Aviv 2,500 miles to Uganda where Palestinian terrorists held 103 hostages after gentile passengers were released. The operation was an incredible success; all terrorists were killed, Uganda jets (Russian Migs) were destroyed on the ground, the Ugandan military was neutralized and all but 4 hostages were safely returned. The sole IDF casualty was Bibi’s brother, Jonathan, who was shot by a Ugandan sniper in the control tower.

Netanyahu attended high school near Philadelphia, got an undergraduate degree in architecture and a graduate degree in business management from MIT,  and worked for the Boston Consulting Group for two years. He understood supply side economics and became a political attaché for Israel in Washington during the Reagan years.

His father was a prominent historian and several of his uncles were successful in the steel business. His Uncle Zachary boasted that if he had not been born in Tel Aviv he may have become the first Jewish American President.

Netanyahu has published several books and is an authority on world terrorism. I highly recommend his website, here.

This is the depth that was displayed at the UN in clear unambivalent language. Compare this to the shallow experience and moral relativism of our president.

Netanyahu is a world leader in the mold of Winston Churchill.

most info from George Gilder’s  “The Israel Test”

The debate over the enhanced interrogation techniques is almost Orwellian.  It is torture? Of course it is.  So is listening to any number of talking head simplistic moralizers from either end of the spectrum.  It is torture and the difference is not one of definition, but one of degrees.

Is it morally justified? Well that seems kind of relevant to the situation it is used in.  Combat is filled with moral compromises. We spend a lot of money figuring out how to kill and wound people and we have justified civilian casualties by merely calling them collateral damages.  War is a very dirty business no matter how much we try to civilize it.

Water boarding is torture. So is sitting in a cold room in an uncomfortable chair for 12 hours, or being forced to listen to terrible sounds at high volume or sleep deprivation.  Interrogations have used all of these methods.  These are more humane than severe beatings, broken bones or internet broadcast beheadings. The salient point is a question of degree.

Debating their effectiveness is also somewhat irrelevant.  If you even consider effectiveness as an issue then I must assume you have come to grips with the moral compromise involved.

Once we get beyond the moralizing and name calling then we must address the nature of the act, and that is exactly what Judea Pearl calls for in “We Need a New Legal Regime to Fight the War on Terror ” in the Wall Street Journal.  Read his excellent article here.   Judea Pearl is the father of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, decapitated by Muslim terrorists for being an American and a Jew.

What Bush faced was the reality that global terrorists groups are a problem that does not fit with the solutions at hand. Bill Clinton tried treating the problems as a criminal act and while it seemed a rational idea at the time, it clearly was ineffective. Yet the groups that threaten us do not fit within the definitions of any army ruled by the Geneva conventions.

We may not like the answers, especially in light of eight years without another successful attack, but Bush did ask the question.  He may have approved a level of torture, but it was not without examining legal issues and involving Congress in the debate.  While his critics are not known for subtlety, his focus, however misguided it seems now, was to protect the country.

The debate on the degree and appropriateness of torture needs to be held, though it may never be decided.  Like any moral compromise it is hard to contain.  But our potential prosecution of many involved is damaging to our war effort. And it is a war even if the president prefers to label it an “overseas contingency operation”.

It is easier to blame and prosecute than it is to address the issue that Judea Pearl so clearly says we must. We must clarify and classify global terrorism as a crime distinct from an act of war and a mere criminal act.  This is not easy and can open up entirely new areas of abuse, but it is the right course to take.

Those who made and must continue to make the difficult decisions to protect us, morally compromised or not, effective or not, deserve no less.

One of the options for neutralizing Iran’s nuclear capability would be to deploy a missile defense system that would render their missiles worthless.  The U.S. will be testing such a system in Israel soon. See the article here in the Jerusalem Post.

While this may be preferable to a strike against Iran, there is more than one way to deliver a nuclear device.  Perhaps we should be more concerned about a Ryder truck than an incoming missile.

There is a point where disarming an assailant is adequate; and there is a point where the assailant himself must be neutralized.

“The leader of an al-Qaeda-inspired group in the Gaza Strip revealed on Sunday that his men recently tried to assassinate former US president Jimmy Carter and Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair.”

“Mahmoud Taleb, a former commander of Hamas’s armed wing, Izzadin Kassam, also threatened that his supporters were planning to launch attacks on Hamas.”

Read the rest of the story from the Jerusalem Post here.

While mindless mantras kept advocating that we are LESS safe as a result of Bush’s anti terror policies, some of us could not ignore the absence of terror attacks on our soil after 9/11.

One reason was a very deliberate and careful decision to engage the enemy is his own backyard.  Al Qaeda did not have unlimited resources, and our military engaged and eliminated thousands of them in Afghanistan and Iraq. In spite of strategic mis-steps that are always clearer in retrospect, even a bad strategy in Iraq kept Al Qaeda more focused on surviving in the streets of Iraq and the mountains of Pakistan that formatting further terror in the malls of America.

But another reason was the increased efforts of the CIA now coming under scrutiny.  While our mortal enemies were broadcasting decapitations on the internet we used enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) such as water boarding to prevent further attacks.

As reported in the Wall Street journal editorial on 8/27/09, this was not done by rogue sadists, but was done with the advice and consent from the Pentagon, the Justice Department , and with knowledge and consent of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee. Read this very important editorial, The Real CIA News here.

Some contend that these EITs were ineffective, but this belies the moral question as to whether effectiveness is even the issue.  The report identified clear results such as Binyam Muhammed, who planned to detonate a dirty bomb and previously unknown Al Qaeda members planning a second in the U.S. in California.

One of the reasons we failed to prevent the attack ON 9/11 was the crippling of our intelligence forces in the previous decades.  We struggle to find a way to defeat a murderous immoral enemy using the high moral standards we demand.  But Holder’s effort to criminalize those who had to make very difficult decisions in the wake of 9/11, in the very arduous moral gray zone few of us have to consider, will serve only to make us more vulnerable.

You cannot win a war in a court room; you can only lose it.  Denying we are at war will not change our enemies committed to defeating us.