In the aftermath of World War II, with the hideous revelation that two thirds of European Jews had been systematically exterminated by the Nazis, anti-Semitism became unfashionable. But that is no longer the case. As the memory of the Holocaust fades into history, as we continue to transfer petro-wealth to our enemies; as Europe morphs into Eurabia; as dictators, despots and Islamists take control over the UN and other international bodies; and as our universities become hotbeds for virulent anti-Israel teachings and rhetoric – logic fades, facts become confused with fictions, distinctions between democracies and tyrannies become irrelevant, history becomes unimportant, and anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism become indistinguishable. Natan Sharansky uses what he terms “the 3D test” to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism, and he identifies the three categories as delegitimization, demonization and the double standard. Taking these three factors into account, one can discern that the new anti-Semitism manifests itself in many different forms and in many different forums – through divestment campaigns, international boycotts of Israeli products and entertainers (as Norway has done recently), boycotts of Israeli academics by Western universities, holding Israel to standards no other nations in the world are required to meet – not nearly, and through “Israel Apartheid Week” on Canadian and American college campuses where Israel is assigned the role of Jew among the nations of the world to be singled-out, cursed, harassed and defamed.

As Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post: “Google ‘Israel and apartheid’ and you will see that the two are linked in cyberspace despite the fact that Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of Israel’s population, have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews, and even sit in the Knesset.” Israel’s Ambassador to Finland is Arab. In May 2004, Salim Jubran was appointed to the Supreme Court of Israel. Arabic is an official language in Israel and is posted on all road signs. In 1948 there was only one Arab high school in Israel. Today there are hundreds. The fact that these anti-Israeli boycott campaigners on our campuses attack Israel as an apartheid state not only demonstrates their ignorance of what apartheid was in South Africa*, but raises the issue of why they do not propose boycotts of states that truly merit international disgust.

These protests aren’t just against Israel. They are also against the Jewish People. Israel’s Operation Cast Lead at the close of 2008 – a legitimate act of self-defense by any and all international standards – evoked universal resentment and hatred. Around the world, synagogues and Jewish graves were desecrated and anti-Semitic chants were shouted at protests. In April 2009, a swastika was found painted on a Jewish fraternity house at the University of Florida and on American campuses, and comparisons continue to be made between Israelis and Nazis, and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz.

In France, according to French Ministry of Home Affairs data, 832 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in France in 2009, as compared with 474 such incidents in 2008 – a 75 percent increase, most of which was attributed to the country’s rising Islamic population and fallout from Israel’s counter-terrorism operation (Operation Cast Lead) in Gaza. This parallels a similar finding in Canada where a B’nai B’rith study recently confirmed an 11.4 percent jump in anti-Semitic incidents in 2009 over 2008 including 32 violent attacks, 348 cases of vandalism, and 884 reports of harassment mostly in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

In all this, it is quite clear that distinctions between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are increasingly blurred. Taken in its totality, Israel not only has no right to defend itself in response to terrorist attacks, but has no right to exist – which suggests that missile attacks on Israel’s civilian population are not only justified, but desirable.

The lies perpetrated by otherwise respectable international religious, educational and political bodies against the only democracy in the Middle East are most notable in the double standards that are applied to Israel as opposed to states that have slaughtered their own peoples for decades with absolute immunity from international censure.

It is true, of course, that criticizing Israel does not make one an anti-Semite anymore than criticizing the government of France makes one anti-French. But it’s one thing to criticize France, and something else to declare the French nation illegitimate and to advocate its destruction. Martin Luther King, Jr. once referred to Israel as “one of great outposts of democracy in the world,” with an “incontestable right to exist,” but that is no longer the case.

Funny how these campus activists never seem to mention the Syrian de jure occupation of Lebanon, or Saudi funding of global jihad, or the treatment of Saudi women, or the crushing of all democratic dissent in Egypt and Iran. They have no difficulty bemoaning capital punishment in the United States, but say nothing when the Palestinians routinely execute suspected Israeli collaborators including the mothers of young children, or when Hamas throws Fatah supporters to their deaths off 15-story buildings. It is shameful that pro-Palestinian professors and students in America and Europe pretend that the only reason for the problems in the Middle East is because of Israeli obstinacy as if it is the fault of the Israelis and not the rejectionist Arab world.

Not only has every Israeli concession and every act of goodwill and compassion not changed the way Israel is portrayed – but each concession, each accommodation, each withdrawal first from Lebanon, then from Gaza has only fed the furious hatred that Islam and the international community feels for it. Today, even as Israel absorbs missiles fired indiscriminately at its civilian population by terrorists, one continues to hear the howls and hatred voiced about “The Wall” particularly those “innocent” suicide bombers who are being kept from their religious duty of self-detonating amid crowds of Jews.

Borders have nothing to do with peace in the Middle East. It is the existence of Israel as a Jewish state that offends the Arabs and their supporters. It is the history of Jews in that land stretching back over 4,000 years that offends them which accounts for their threats against Israel when it declares its intention to make the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb national historic sites with the aim of restoring them and opening them to the world.

The fact that all religions will have freedom of access to such sites is irrelevant to the Palestinians who have spent millions of dollars teaching their children that Jews came to the Land as usurpers less than a century ago, and that Abraham was a Muslim! In short, Israel could grant its enemies ever possible concession (and has), but that would not bring peace. Nothing short of Israel’s destruction will suffice.

Truth is, anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism when it reaches a certain pitch, and singling out Israel for condemnation and international sanction – out of all proportion to any other parties in the Middle East – is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is intellectually dishonest.

So let’s call it what it is for those who arrogantly hold Israel to a standard of conduct to which no other nation in this world is held. Half a million men, women and children are slaughtered in Rwanda, and there is silence. The Chinese annihilate Tibetan culture, and there is silence. Tens of thousands of civilians are slaughtered in Chechnya, and there is silence. Egypt imprisons the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world after a phony trial, and not one single student group in America calls for divestiture from Egypt.

Syria occupies Lebanon for a quarter century, chokes the life out of its democracy, assassinates its political leaders, effects a coup d’etat through its Hezbollah proxy, sends Islamic terrorists over its borders to kill Americans and Iraqis, and crushes whatever hope that country may have for a secure future, and not one single student organization on our campuses calls for divestiture from Syria.

Iran uses its paramilitary Basij thugs to beat up student demonstrators in the streets of Tehran and squeeze the life out of that county’s embryonic democratic movement, and there is silence.

Saudi Arabia denies its women the most basic human rights, and bans any other religion from being practiced publicly on its soil, and yet no student group in America calls for divestiture from Saudi Arabia.

These human rights violations and tragedies dwarf anything done by the Israelis, yet they fail to elicit the same degree of moral outrage that Israel evokes among its campus critics.

In February 2010, Israel Ambassador to the UN Michael Oren was shouted down by Hamas supporters and radical Leftists, and forced to leave the podium at the University of California Irvine, but when the university pressed charges against the students, they argued that their right to free speech was being infringed. Apparently, Ambassador Oran is not entitled to that right as well.

In Jenin, in April 2002, Israel was painted as the world’s pariah: “Nazis,” “butchers,” “conducting war crimes,” “surrounding the infant Jesus with Israeli tanks,” claims of 3,000 Palestinians being massacred, claims that Israelis poisoned the Palestinian water supply, and claims that Israel dumped Palestinian corpses into secret mass graves. A bishop in Copenhagen compared former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to King Herod. Newspapers across Europe, especially the BBC, “substantiated” these lies with reports of grisly deeds by Israeli soldiers. Palestinians went on international media networks with the active complicity of those networks in accusing Israel of murdering Palestinians for their body parts, lies later reinforced by respectable European newspapers, and even by a member of the British House of Lords in February 2010.

The problem with all this is that no massacre occurred in Jenin! Less than a hundred armed terrorists were killed in Operation Defensive Shield, and almost as many Israeli soldiers were killed because they were ordered to go from house-to-house to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible. But that was of little consequence to those in the media and on our college campuses who condemned Israel for “unspeakable war crimes.”

In Lebanon in 2006, Israel was condemned for violating Lebanese sovereignty with scant mention made of the thousands of Hezbollah missiles falling onto Israel’s civilian population centers, and Hezbollah’s use of Lebanese civilians as human shields.

The same hypocrisy held true in the conclusions reached by the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead which accepted the lies of Hamas as fact, disregarded Israeli commission findings, denied Israel’s right to defend itself, and condemned Israel for having conducted war crimes in Gaza. The Report made little mention of the 8,000 missiles fired at southern Israel, and minimized reports that Hamas had used civilians as human shields, and mosques and schools to conceal its weapons – not to mention the millions of leaflets dropped and cell phone calls made in Arabic by the Israeli military to provide warnings to Palestinians in targeted areas.

When the UN hosted the Third World Conference Against Racism in Durban, the nations of the world had an opportunity to address the hatred that afflicts hundreds of millions of people, but they only found time to dwell on Israel accusing it of genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, and apartheid while the genocides in Bosnia and the Sudan were barely mentioned. In the name of “human rights” and “justice,” these advocates and self-proclaimed “protectors of the Free World” decry any and every Israeli action and seek to punish it by conducting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel while Palestinian clerics call for the murder of Jews without eliciting any protest whatsoever.

The Saudi and Egyptian media report on Jewish conspiracies causing 9/11, and run TV programs on Ramadan alleging blood libels, but there is no outcry against them for an international boycott.

The bitter reality is that for Israel, international legal frameworks provide no protection and no hope for justice. Instead, these frameworks are used to exploit the rhetoric of human rights and morality to attack Israel. In that regard, I was asked in a recent lecture to explain why Israel was “ghettoizing” the Palestinians by constructing a security barrier in areas that served as transit points for terrorists entering the country. The questioner noted that, as a Jew, I should be more sensitive to the concept of a ghetto, and its dehumanizing effects on human beings. I responded that the security barrier was neither built for reasons of discrimination nor motivated by racism, but as a deterrent to protect the lives of Israelis from Palestinian suicide bombers and, in fact, it continues to accomplish its purpose.

But the suggestion that Israel may have had racist motivations in constructing the barrier disturbed me because it is a recurring theme among major international bodies and on college campuses, so I asked the questioner why she had decided to sort Israel out for “special treatment?” After all, the security barrier that Israel has constructed to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of its country is not unlike the security barrier constructed by the Saudis to keep the Yemeni jihadists out of their country; or the one that India has constructed along its borders with Pakistan, Kashmir and Bangladesh for the same reason; or the one that the Thais have constructed to keep the Malaysian jihadists out of their country, or the one that the U.S. is constructing to keep Mexican illegals out of our country, although I couldn’t recall the last time a Mexican self-detonated in Albuquerque, or fired missiles into Dallas or Houston.

Over the past decade, the North Korean regime has starved an estimated three million of its own people; established thousands of slave labor camps, developed nuclear weapons in violation of every agreement it has ever made, and is seeking to sell them to the highest bidder. It has lobbed ballistic missiles over Japan, threatened a nuclear war of annihilation against its southern neighbor and supports itself primarily by dealing in drugs and counterfeit currency. And yet, 60 percent of Europeans regard Israel as more threatening than either North Korea or Iran – the second largest funder of jihadism in the world next to Saudi Arabia. So, if ever there was proof that there was something sinister lying behind Europe’s constant harping on Israel, and its support of Israel’s enemies other than pure anti-Semitism, this poll now answers it.

Anti-Semitism has evolved from an irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews to an irrational hatred or jealousy of the Jewish State – Israel. Why is it that we don’t see demonstrations against Islamic dictatorships in London, Paris or Madrid? Why aren’t there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection? Why aren’t there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs by jihadists? Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of the Islamic dictatorship in Sudan? Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel? Why is there no outcry by the Europeans against jihadism? Why don’t they defend Israel’s right to exist? And finally, why are the Europeans so obsessed with the two most stable democracies on earth (the United States and Israel), rather than with the world’s worst dictatorships? So many stupid and irresponsible comments have been written about Israel, that there aren’t any accusations left to level against her.

At the same time, the press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel; the indoctrination of children or the corruption of the Palestinian leadership, and the millions of dollars in international foreign aid that have been transferred into their private bank accounts, as was exposed by a former Palestinian leader in February 2010. And when reporting about victims, why is every Palestinian casualty reported as a tragedy while every Israeli victim is reported with disdain, if at all?

This obsession with Israel represents a callous disregard for fundamental justice, and anti-Semitism cloaked as righteous indignation. For example, with the start of Ramadan (the Islamic month of fasting) in early September, Israeli forces manning West Bank check-points were instructed to avoid eating or smoking in front of Palestinians as a sign of respect, even as the Palestinians continue to use the Tomb of Joseph as a garbage dump and have urinated next to the Torah scrolls in the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Further, on any given day, Israeli prisons are hosting Red Cross representatives, journalists, lawyers, prisoners’ advocates, as well as family members of convicted Palestinian prisoners, while Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas on Israeli soil, is being held in isolation and denied any and all visitation rights from lawyers, family and even the International Red Cross in violation of his human rights and international law. So, where is the international outcry for Shalit?

And there’s more. Israel is constantly confronted with the demand that it must return Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians and the Golan Heights to Syria – areas seized during the 1967 Six-Day War. Why then do we never hear that same argument being raised against other nations? After World War II, Poland annexed 10 percent of historic Germany (East Prussia); Morocco controls the Western Sahara; Armenia has controlled 15 percent of neighboring Azerbaijan since 1994; Turkey has controlled half of Cyprus since its 1974 invasion; Russia has controlled the Kurile Islands off northern Japan since the end of World War II, and China has occupied Tibet since 1950. So, where is the international outcry demanding that these countries return lands they seized in war? Why is it that only Israel’s control over the West Bank merits international censure?

Then there’s the demand that the Palestinians be allowed a right of return to Israel proper or at least fair compensation for having been displaced as a result of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Some 750,000 Jews left behind $300 billion in assets when they were forced to flee for their lives from Arab and Persian countries after the birth of the state of Israel. So why are similar demands not being made of the Syrians, the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, and the Egyptians who displaced (or more specifically expelled) their Jews? In fact, I don’t recall any demands being made of any nation for compensation or allowing a right of return to any refugees displaced after any wars in modern times – except of course for those being made of Israel.

Czechoslovakia expelled its Sudetenland Germans from their homes after World War II; the Poles expelled millions of Germans from East Prussia and absorbed that territory into Poland in 1945; thousands of Turkish Cypriots were displaced by Greek military forces in the 1960s and early 70s while Turkish forces displaced thousands of Greek Cypriots from Northern Cyprus after their 1974-1976 war; 450,000 ethnic Chinese were expelled from Vietnam between 1978-1979; the Bangladeshis expelled over three million Hindus in 1974; 250,000 Georgians were displaced from Abkhazia between 1993 and 1998, not to mention more than 500,000 ethnic Russians in Chechnya who were displaced during the First Chechen War in 1994-1996, and more than 800,000 Kosovar Albanians were expelled from Kosovo during the Kosovo War in 1998-1999. Somehow, I must have missed offers of a right of return or any compensation package being offered to these millions upon millions of persons displaced by wars – except in the case of Israel.

And then there’s the issue relating to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza. Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of former British premier Tony Blair, entered Gaza aboard a protest boat and told Ynet News in Israel that Gaza was “the largest concentration camp in the world today” and a “humanitarian crisis on the scale of Darfur.” She was later photographed at a seemingly well-stocked grocery store in the so-called “concentration camp.” So, let’s consider how these Israeli “monsters” have behaved. Hamas has declared its intention to destroy Israel and murder every Jew residing there, and has fired over 8,000 missiles at southern Israel. In return, Israel is providing 70 percent of Gaza’s electrical power and, each week sends tons of food, fuel and humanitarian aid to an enemy whose entire rationale for existence is the extermination or subjugation of every Jew in Israel. During World War II, the Allies firebombed Dresden, obliterated German cities, and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Talk about “proportional response!” Israel feeds its enemies!

And finally, Israel has been condemned for retaliating against Hamas and Hezbollah for their missile attacks on Israel’s southern and northern civilian populations because, it is said, Israel is (and this is a direct quote from Human Rights Watch) “endangering non-combatants, using disproportionate force and committing crimes against humanity.” If Israel fired missiles into Gaza City, Sidon or Tyre, the world would be enraged, the UN Security Council would be called into Special Session, The U.S. and EU would be threatening Jerusalem, and the media would be having a field-day.

So why is it that when the Palestinians and the Lebanese fire missiles at Israeli civilians as their primary target, it is barely mentioned in the media, but when Israel retaliates against those missile sites in targeted bombings, it’s considered “disproportionate force” – all which leads to the real issue lurking behind the scenes here – our enemies’ tactical use of human shields. Why is criticism never leveled at Hamas or Hezbollah who regularly use children as human shields to protect their leaders and their weapons?

In all the condemnation being heaped on Israel by the media and the Goldstone Report for Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Gaza, and before that in Lebanon during the Second Lebanon War (and indeed any future conflict), no one ever asks how any democracy can expect to win a war without “endangering civilians” especially when the enemy uses human shields as a tactical weapon to insulate itself from military strikes? Are we not handing our enemies an enormous tactical advantage? How can any free nation ever hope to win a future war against enemies who use human shields if it is condemned for “endangering civilians”?

It is this absence of balance, this flagrant unforgivable deceit, not the criticisms of Israel that are most troubling. For those who argue that their right to “fair criticism” is being infringed, let them understand what “fair criticism” is not.

It is not “fair criticism” to portray Israel’s presence on the West Bank as an illegal occupation, yet never utter a word of objection about Chinese, Serbian, Syrian, Turkish or Russian ethnic cleansing.

It is not “fair criticism” to place the blame for Middle East violence at Israel’s doorstep while ignoring 14 centuries of Sunni-Shiite hatred, the damage done to Arab society through decades of misrule by dictators and despots, the Koranic-inspired hatred of a Jewish state existing in the midst of the Islamic umma, and the immense risks that Israel took in withdrawing from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 not to mention the sacrifices that it continues to make in its quest for peace with the Palestinians.

It is not “fair criticism” to accuse Israel of apartheid when it is the Arab world that preaches “Death to the Jews,” spreads anti-Semitic hatred from its mosques, teaches “martyrdom” in its schools and summer camps, and dances in the streets when jihadists succeed in murdering Israelis in their homes, pizza parlors, marketplaces, during their Passover Seders, and most notably in celebration of the 9/11 attacks.

Demanding that good German Aryans boycott Jewish shops in Nazi Germany in 1935 is no different in its essence from demanding that good Western universities boycott the Jewish state in 2010. Injustice in any language is still injustice. It’s all part of the same poison that feeds on the fabric of human decency. If a 5-year-old child can understand that slaughtering innocent people is wrong, then why can’t these campus student organizations, religious establishments, the UN, the international media, the Europeans, and the academics on American and British college campuses see it and voice their dissent?

If we cannot tell the difference between a democratic Israel and an apartheid South Africa, or a jihadist from a peacemaker, then we are all parties to the greatest moral failure of our time – the inability to distinguish between those who defend basic moral values and respect the sanctity of a single human life, and those who are the enemies of such values by justifying the murder of the innocent in the name of some religious or ideological cause.

We have every right to expect more from those who teach our children on the campuses of America or who preach to the faithful from their pews. Their positions of authority do not entitle them to foster anti-Semitism in the name of “justice” and “moral decency.” Until there is universal condemnation of the discriminatory double-standards applied to Israel, claims by self-righteous international organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN General Assembly, UNRWA, the European Union and the International Court of Justice are more than meaningless. They are offensive and deceitful.

Israel’s willingness to make peace has made it into a target by an international community that blames Israel for Muslim violence around the world. As their thinking goes, if Israel would just do whatever it takes to make peace, then Muslim violence would stop not just in Israel, but in Paris, London, Malmo, Brussels, Manchester, Basra, Marseilles, Lyons and Kabul. Anyone with any understanding of world events knows that this is pure, unadulterated garbage. All of this can be summarized as follows – the most dangerous threat posed to the Western world is its inability or unwillingness to stand together against those who seek to destroy our way of life.

If we do not, as a collective, take a firm stand against these defamations; if we do not stand behind Israeli democracy in its just and moral struggle against expanding jihadism; if we do not prevent this widening witch-hunt, the international arrest warrants for Israeli diplomats, the indictments against Israelis for war crimes in the Hague, the erosion in the UN, and the incitement against Israel; if we sit quietly and allow this insidious evil to flourish in our midst, then the legitimacy of the Free World’s own struggle against jihadism will most assuredly be undermined.

* Mitchell Bard notes that under apartheid in South Africa, whites and nonwhites lived in separate regions of the country. Nonwhites were prohibited from running businesses or professional practices in the white areas without permits. Nonwhites had separate amenities (i.e. beaches, buses, schools, benches, drinking fountains, restrooms). Nonwhites received inferior education, medical care, and other public services. Though they were the overwhelming majority of the population, nonwhites could not vote or become citizens.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Mark Silverberg is a foreign policy analyst for the Ariel Center for Policy Research (Israel), a Contributing Editor for the New Media Journal and a member of Hadassah’s National Academic Advisory Board. His book The Quartermasters of Terror: Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Jihad and his articles have been archived under www.marksilverberg.com and www.analyst-network.com.

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Mark Silverberg is to be highly commended for this extraordinarily powerful article on the delegitimization of the nation of Israel. Yet how many of Israel’s detractors whether from the media, the world governments, academic establishments and religious institutions would be profoundly influenced by reading Mark’s article. Solid facts matter very little to those with a hardened heart and a seared conscience.

posted by : Joe Finkelstein
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5682/pub_detail.asp

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When it comes to Iran, it is important for one to understand many things, especially considering the events of the last few months. I always think that nobody will know what our people – especially women – have gone through here in Tehran, the heart of Iran. The bitterest reality is the presence of the mullahs who have imposed their rules on us. I was lucky to see a few years less of the misery these mullahs have brought for us because I was born a few years after the beginning of their rule!

Iran has attracted the attention of the world after the righteous uprising of its people for freedom and democracy; the decisive right of the people.

What is most outstanding in this uprising is the presence of the women of my homeland – the uprising that introduced the innocence of Iranians, especially Iranian women, to the world by the name of Neda (Neda Aghasultan) and the last scenes of her life in this world.

Though my friends and I had gone to her grave for several times and cried over it, we still feel national pride for introducing such a symbol to the world because all of us, the Iranian women, are all a “Neda.”

You know that you are living under the rule of the mullahs if you walk in the streets of Tehran the way you wish to walk. When you step outside of your home, you are forced to be something else. The eyes of these criminals watch you everywhere, watch all your moves, controlling everything from the way you dress to a sudden smile that forms on your lips. Your presence is like a dagger landing in their dirty minds; they cannot bear the free presence of even one woman on the street.

Before the years when I attended university, they only controlled the color of my dress, an extra band of my hair coming out of the compulsory veil and the length of my dress. Yet now they control everything – most of all, they wish to control my thoughts!

University! Just being able to be present there as a woman and not to be afraid that I am a woman is an everyday battle. I thought when I become a student I would have some authority in society as an adult, but this was just a dream. The natural right of every human being is a dream in my country.

I witnessed one of my friends being deprived of her education – someone who tried harder than I did. I got it, despite feeling that I would probably be next. But I didn’t lose hope because I knew I wasn’t the only one.

Since the beginning of our history and especially since the rule of the mullahs, the oppression of women has been “routine.” As I studied more and became acquainted with different people, I realized it is a misogynous state.

Of course there have been a great number of women who fought in the torture chambers and prisons of this regime and made the henchmen kneel. They proved themselves despite of torture and imprisonment and it must be said that it was because of their struggle that I, as an Iranian woman, am standing at this point.

Iranian women have learned that they will never give us our freedom on a golden tray – thus we have tried to be present where ever we could. The last election presented an opportunity. We found the outlet and took to the fields. We are present everyday, we fight everyday and the war is not over yet.

During the past eight months, my friends and I have had experiences each day; from being beaten to having our arms broken to being attacked by tear gas to being arrested, to name just a few. But what is important is that we have learned how to fight back. We have learned that we must move in front of men and throw stones, as maybe this would make those who still have something of humanity left in them to stop slaughtering our brothers. We learned that we have to seize the batons of Bassijies no matter what the price; we are no less. We understood that now that we have learned martial arts, we can defend ourselves and those beside us.

I well recall that one day a dirty Bassiji hit an old mother in her leg with his baton. A boy went to defend her but he couldn’t. I approached the Bassiji from behind and by my using two martial art techniques, the scene changed. The Bassiji was shocked.

This is the reality in Iran – this glorious presence of young Iranian women shoulder to shoulder with the men in the fields of resistance. Instead of being busy with everyday house chores, Iranian women are pursuing their rights with bravery that has astonished the world. The symbols of our struggle include Neda, Taraneh (Taraneh Mosavi was raped several times by Khamenei’s henchmen after she was arrested and her body was burnt with acid to cover this crime) and others.

These days, in spite all the horror provoked by the regime, we realize we cannot just sit by and let them turn us into slaves. There have been thousands of political prisoners and those who have fallen for freedom from amongst us, like the martyrs of the massacre of political prisoners in 1988, who are all buried in Khavaran. The regime fears very much people’s gathering in Khavaran. In this cemetery, I saw mostly the names of women, very young ones who were only as old as I am now.

I ask myself: didn’t these women love life? Of course they did but what was important for them – as it is for me and other women of my country now – was the right of freedom of any human being, gaining the freedom of our homeland. What I wonder is whether the world is hearing our loud cry for freedom. Does the international society know our condition? Do they know that each day thousands of us are being crushed under the boots of these criminals, on the gallows or in torture chambers, just for reaching for freedom and nobody comes to their aid?

What I really wish from the bottom of my heart is for West, and especially the U.S., to stop their appeasement policy toward this fascist regime so that the people of Iran can uproot this demon of their history.

Contrary to what Ahmadinejad and his Supreme Leader think, the people of Iran do not have a tendency toward violence, we simply want our freedom. If this regime wanted to, it could solve the problem with by holding a free election – but we know that this is not going to happen. The only way left is uprooting this regime in its entirety.

As students and intellectuals residing in the capital, we understand the different political and social problems such as poverty, corruption, prostitution, addiction, unemployment and the pressures imposed by these problems on society. We well know that the wealth of our country is easily used by power-mongers, as atomic bombs and different terrorist acts ordered by the rulers. We are thus inspired us not to keep silent, but to be effective, our voices must be echoed.

World powers must stop supporting and appeasing this regime and must stand beside the Iranian resistance leaded by Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, its president-elect.

The women in the Students Committee in Iran demand U.S. to delist PMOI as a terrorist group; a listing that was based on the dirty policy of appeasement with this regime.

My homeland and its people are filled with the pain and suffering caused by appeasement policies with this religious fascist regime that have gone on for years. After eight months of uprising in Iran, the world must understand that Iranians defy this regime in its entirety.

Iranian women are under medieval pressures and limitations, but we will not retreat from our struggle and resistance. We all cry together that we are all a “Neda,” a “Neda” (Neda means cry for summoning) for the freedom of our homeland of Iran – and we need your support.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Sara Ahmadi is president of the Student Committee in Iran and a supporter of the PMOI.

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As reported by The Washington Post, “President Obama’s proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday.”

CNN adds, “Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.” The Post continues: “The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) and the White House (are) … both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year — a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits would never fall below 4 percent of the economy under Obama’s policies and would begin to grow rapidly after 2015.

“Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said.”

CNN adds that “By 2020 the (CBO) estimates debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90 percent of GDP. That’s up from 53 percent of GDP in 2009.”

I suspect that most Americans, if asked whether these numbers trouble the Democratic leadership and President Obama, would answer in the affirmative.

They would be wrong.

They would be wrong not because the Democratic Party or the president are economically illiterate or bad individuals, but because the Democratic Party and the president are leftists. And most Americans, including most Democrats, do not understand the left. They may understand liberalism; but President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and most Democratic representatives and senators are not liberals; they are leftists. And most Americans do not understand the difference between liberal and left. They do not realize, for example, that there is no major difference between the American Democratic Party and the leftist social democratic parties of Western Europe. They do not know that from Karl Marx to Obama, the left (as opposed to liberals) has never created wealth because it has never been interested in creating wealth; it is interested in redistributing wealth.

Therefore, unprecedented and unsustainable debt, a debt that will negatively affect most Americans’ quality of life, renders the dollar increasingly undesirable, and undermines America’s prestige and power in the world — these developments do not particularly disturb the left. They may trouble the president, the Democratic Party, and others on the left on some political level, but that pales in comparison to what the left really wants: a huge government overseeing a giant welfare state and a country with far fewer rich Americans.

Achieving those goals is far more important than preventing a decline in the American quality of life. The further left one goes, the more contempt one has for the present quality of American life in any event. The left regularly mocks many of the symbols of that life — from the three-bedroom suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence to owning an SUV (or almost any car) because Americans should be traveling on public buses, trains and bicycles.

As for the dollar, I can bear personal testimony to the decline of the dollar’s prestige. I am writing this column in Morocco. In Casablanca, my wife and I and another couple hired a Moroccan driver for the day. And when it came time to pay, the man refused to accept dollars; he wanted to be paid in either Euros or Moroccan dirhams. Yes, dirhams rather than dollars. But the demise of the dollar as the world’s currency disturbs the left as much as does America’s not getting a gold medal in curling at the Winter Olympics.

And as for America wielding less power in the world, that is a positive development for the American left. It is the world community as embodied in the United Nations that should wield power throughout the world, not an “overstretched,” “imperialist” and “militarist” United States.

I used to believe that left and right have similar goals for America, that they just differed in the means they wanted used to get there. I was mistaken. The left has a very different vision of America than those who hold the founding values of America, most especially individualism and small government. And if the price of a once in a lifetime possibility of getting to a giant welfare state dominated by the left is America’s steep financial decline, that is a price fully worth paying.

Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

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In the entire health care debate, among all the competing lawmakers, politicians, experts and pundits, there’s just one person who has seen things from both sides of the political aisle. That is Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama, who was elected as a Democrat in 2008 and was part of the House Democratic caucus until last Dec. 22, when he switched sides to become a Republican. (Republican-turned-Democrat Sen. Arlen Specter doesn’t count, because he switched parties in April 2009, before the current health care debate got underway.) Given Griffith’s unique perspective — he is also a doctor, with 30 years’ experience as an oncologist — perhaps he has some insight into why the White House and his former Democratic allies in Congress continue to press forward on a national health care bill despite widespread public opposition.

It’s gotten personal, Griffith says. “You have personalities who have bet the farm, bet their reputations, on shoving a health care bill through the Congress. It’s no longer about health care reform. It’s all about ego now. The president’s ego. Nancy Pelosi’s ego. This is about personalities, saving face, and it has very little to do with what’s good for the American people.”

Conflicts driven by personal feelings can lead to self-destructive outcomes. Ask Griffith whether Speaker Pelosi, his old leader, would accept losing Democratic control of the House as the price for passing the health care bill, and he answers quickly. “Oh yeah. This is a trophy for the speaker, it’s a trophy for several committee chairs, and it’s a trophy for the president.” It does not seem to matter that if Democrats lose the House, the speaker will no longer be speaker, the chairmen will no longer be chairmen, and the president will be significantly weakened.

As Griffith sees his former colleagues, Democratic leaders have become so consumed with the idea of achieving the historical goal of a national health care system that they are able to explain away the scores of opinion polls over the last six months that show people solidly opposed to the Democratic proposal.

Sean Hannity FREE

The polls are wrong, they say. Or the polls are contradictory. Or the polls actually show that people love the health care plan. And even if the polls are right, and people hate the plan, real leaders don’t govern by following the polls. So just pass the bill.

That’s easy for Democrats like Pelosi, who occupy safe seats. Not so for dozens of moderate House Democrats whose votes are required for passage, but who face likely defeat for it. “I don’t think there are that many moderate or conservative Democrats who want to be sacrificial representatives,” says Griffith.

Just for the record, the RealClearPolitics average of polls on the Democratic health care plan shows 51 percent opposed and 40 percent in favor. A similar compilation of surveys by Pollster.com shows the gap at 51 percent to 43 percent. There have been more opponents than supporters of the plan since last July, when Democrats first began to unveil concrete health care proposals.

Can Democrats really ignore the polls all the way to the end? Yes, but it gets a little harder with each passing day. George W. Bush couldn’t ignore public opinion when he wanted to remake Social Security and pass comprehensive immigration reform. Faced with broad opposition, Bush ultimately gave up.

And now Democratic leaders are showing signs of weakness. Why would they suddenly express interest, even feigned interest, in Republican ideas they derided for months? Why would they invite GOP lawmakers to a high-profile discussion of health care? Because they don’t have the votes to pass the bill. “If they had the votes, we wouldn’t have had the summit,” said Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn recently, referring to the day-long White House health care confab on Feb. 25.

That’s a change from the heady days of last year, when Democrats, as Griffith says, “never really wanted anyone else’s input” on health care. When a Republican offered a suggestion, “There was a polite smile and a comment like, ‘That’s very interesting, and we’ll take a look,’” Griffith recalls. Of course, they never did. Now, they make a big show of listening.

But it’s too late to make the fundamental changes that would be required to improve the bill. It’s too late to change public opinion. It’s too late to reassure nervous lawmakers. The Democratic leadership has made the decision to push the bill to the very end, and so they will.

It’s personal.

Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

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“Stop messing with Texas!” That was the message Gov. Rick Perry bellowed on election night as he celebrated his victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor. In his reference to Texas’ anti-littering slogan, Perry was making a point applicable to national as well as Texas politics and addressed to Democratic politicians as well as Republicans. His point was that the big government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders are resented and fiercely opposed not just because of their dire fiscal effects but also as an intrusion on voters’ independence and ability to make decisions for themselves.

No one would include Perry on a list of serious presidential candidates, including himself, even in the flush of victory. But in his 10 years as governor, the longest in the state’s history, Texas has been teaching some lessons to which the rest of the nation should pay heed.

They are lessons that are particularly vivid when you contrast Texas, the nation’s second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.

But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress — or lack of it — over the last decade. California has gone in for big government in a big way. Democrats hold large margins in the legislature largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.

Those Democratic majorities have obediently done the bidding of public employee unions to the point that state government faces huge budget deficits. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempt to reduce the power of the Democratic-union combine with referenda was defeated in 2005 when public employee unions poured $100 million — all originally extracted from taxpayers — into effective TV ads.

Sean Hannity FREE

Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009, the Census Bureau estimates, there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000 people from California — almost as many as the number of immigrants coming in. Population growth has not been above the national average and, for the first time in history, it appears that California will gain no House seats or electoral votes from the reapportionment following the 2010 Census.

Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes — and no state income taxes — and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared to California’s year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.

But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid less than California’s. But its test scores — and with a demographically similar school population — are higher. California’s once fabled freeways are crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In the meantime, Texas’ economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies small and large generate new jobs.

And Americans have been voting for Texas with their feet. From 2000 to 2009, some 848,000 people moved from other parts of the United States to Texas, about the same number as moved in from abroad. That inflow has continued in 2008-09, in which 143,000 Americans moved into Texas, more than double the number in any other state, at the same time as 98,000 were moving out of California. Texas is on the way to gain four additional House seats and electoral votes in the 2010 reapportionment.

This was not always so. In the two decades after World War II, California, with its pleasant weather, was the Golden State, a promised land, for most Americans, while Texas seemed a provincial rural backwater. Many saw postwar California’s expansion of universities, freeways and water systems a model for the nation. Few experts praised Texas’ low-tax, low-services government.

Now it is California’s ruinously expensive and increasingly incompetent government that seems dysfunctional, while Texas’ approach has generated more creativity and opportunity. So it’s not surprising that Texas voters preferred Perry over an opponent who has spent 16 years in Washington. What’s surprising is that Democrats in Washington are still trying to impose policies like those that have ravaged California rather than those which have proved so successful in Texas.

Copyright © 2010 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

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Another day, another stream of health care fantasy from the White House. A quick look at two health care events from yesterday, one in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and the other in Tawas City, Michigan, clearly exposes the yawing gap between the Obama administration’s health care rhetoric and cold hard legislative reality. First in Glenside, President Barack Obama turned up the volume on his already tired “final push” for health care reform. In addition to the usual litany of false claims about the legislation in Congress (in fact, you don’t get to keep your doctor, it isn’t paid for, it doesn’t reduce costs) President Obama also repeated his new line from his doctors-in-lab-coats address last week:. We have now incorporated almost every single serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising cost of health care … Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill…

But, as we pointed out last week, there is one not-so-minor difference between the Senate bill and the President’s new proposal: the Senate bill actually exists. Now, Democrats may be telling their conservative counterparts that they will have reconciliation legislative text in front of the Budget Committee by tomorrow, but don’t hold your breath. The “fixes” that the White House is promising wavering House Democrats they will make all sound easy at first glance: 1) scaling back the tax on high-end health insurance policies; 2) closing the Medicare D loophole; 3) boosting insurance subsidies; 4) increasing Medicaid payments; and 5) fixing the Cornhusker Kickback. But when you take a second look, you see that all of these “fixes” will cost more money. Just look at the Cornhusker Kickback which the President chose to address, not by taking away Nebraska’s special Medicaid payments, but by extending those extra Medicaid payments to every state! Every single item in the President’s proposal either increases spending or reduces new revenues. And he didn’t put forward any way to pay for them. If passing health reform were as easy as giving away free candy, Obamacare would be law already. Finding a way to pay for all these fixes is going to be just as difficult as every earlier effort to pay for this bill. So don’t expect any solutions anytime soon.

And we haven’t even mentioned “abortion” yet, which brings us to Tawas City where Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) hosted his own health care townhall. Now the Associated Press headline may read “Stupak: Health bill abortion fight can be resolved” but then the AP actually reports “Rep. Bart Stupak said he expects to resume talks with House leaders this week…” In other words, there is no agreement yet. And what kind of timeline is Stupak looking at for such an agreement? WJRT reports: “[Stupak]’s confident a bill will pass sometime this year.” “Sometime this year” is a bit longer of a timeframe than the White House deadline of next Thursday. But even more importantly, look at the process Stupak suggests for final passage: “According Stupak, until the House and the Senate bills and the president’s proposals become one piece of legislation, health care will remain in limbo.” Considering that everyone agrees that abortion cannot be fixed in reconciliation, Stupak’s position is a total rejection of the White House’s current plan to have the House pass the Senate bill now on the promise that the Senate might come back and try and fix it sometime in the future. Stupak clearly wants “one piece of legislation,” and the only way to accomplish that is to scrap the current Senate bill and start over.

In the meantime, legislative “limbo” has not been kind to the Senate bill. Every day seems to bring news of yet another yes vote switching to undecided or no vote. Just yesterday, former-yes votes Reps. Michael Arcuri (D-NY), Dan Maffei (D-NY), Bill Owens (D-NY) and Dan Lipinski (D-IL) all confirmed they were either now undecided or would vote no. And Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL), who voted no the first time, said he would suspend his campaign for Governor just so he could come back to Washington to vote against Obamacare again. The President can travel the country talking about an up-or-down vote for “our proposal” all he wants, but the reality is he simply doesn’t have the votes in the House for the only piece of health care legislation that actually exists.

QUICK HITS

With recipients now allowed to collect unemployment benefits for as long as 99 weeks, one may now wonder if this “temporary” relief has turned into a permanent, expensive entitlement.

The New York Times details Spain’s failed experiment with massive solar power subsidies.

State health insurance experts see huge flaws in President Obama’s health insurance price control scheme.

States with large government union pension liabilities are taking big investment risks to try and cover their huge pension liabilities.

According to a new Democracy Corps/GQR/Third Way poll, 51% of likely voters disapprove of President Obama’s decisions on interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.

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Beck knows America. He understands our great nation better than most, but he does not know very much about Europe. This occurred to me today when he called Geert Wilders a fascist, which, he explained, was the same as “far right” in the European context. What Glenn Beck fails to understand is that Geert Wilders defies categorization by European standards, which are so far to the left that they would require a dictatorship to enforce if Europeans weren’t complacent to the point of utter submission. Geert Wilders is your typical liberal in the Pat Cadell/Ron Radosh sense of the term. He believes in human rights and the rule of law, but like his hero Winston Churchill, he believes in big government, the nanny state, and enormous unsustainable entitlement programs. It would never occur to him legalize firearms or privatize the medical system. He’s more Evan Bayh than Mussolini.

Here’s the key difference between Europe and America: liberty. Europe never had it. They used to enjoy basic human rights such as relative freedom of speech and freedom of religion (which Jews and Christians no longer enjoy, as Beck is aware – watch the second video below), but never the right to bear arms and anything resembling free market capitalism. The last two probably never occurred to Wilders. He’s fighting for basic human rights — against fascism.

Human rights went out the window in Europe when, out of deference to Islamic law, thought crimes became federal cases, the EU legalized pedophilia, the UK decided to enforce the sale of teenagers into incestuous sex slavery under threat of death through the court system. Wilders is fighting to bring human decency back to Europe, not fascism.

Leaders like Geert Wilders (and Sarkozy and Berlusconi) are neither European far right (fascist) nor European far left (communist). They believe in basic human rights, protecting and defending their respective countries (which is their job), and the preservation of Western civilization, but they’re way to the left of JFK. If they must be haphazardly lumped in with other European leaders please throw them in the really tiny, dusty pile with Margaret Thatcher.

Just as Glenn Beck doesn’t get Europe, so I don’t get Glenn Beck sometimes. Just a few months ago he was concerned with the plight of Europe’s Jews, who are once again in Exodus because of Muslim immigration. He seemed to care that nihilists whose god is really the almighty State (as is the case with all leftists, be they of the Mohammedan or the Marxist persuasion) wanted to destroy everything that was good about Europe. Now considering little girls, Jews, Christians, and gays to be human beings rather than jihad fuel is “fascist.”

Next time Beck decides to talk about Europe he should bring back Stuart Varney for a little perspective. Varney gets Europe.
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/03/09/glenn-beck-really-doesnt-get-europe/#pageTitle

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Barack Obama, in his first press conference after his election, called Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons “unacceptable.” He repetitively offered Iran “engagement.” He set a deadline of year-end 2009 for Iranian compliance, now unilaterally extended another three months.

Iran contemptuously and repetitively responded that it had no intention of abandoning its nuclear program. Obama’s Iran policy is collapsing to the accompaniment of open mockery around the globe. Obama assured us that his “engagement” would make it easier to enlist other countries to stop Iran. The result is the opposite: Virtually every country Obama approached has rebuffed him. Without a credible threat of force, it is now clear that “engagement” has no chance to stop Iran’s military nuclear program. It is indisputable that Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would destabilize the Mideast and gravely threaten world peace. Let’s leave China and Russia to the end on the grounds that it may be more difficult to persuade major powers. In recent weeks, the Obama administration launched a curious charm offensive with the announced purpose of weaning Syria — Tehran’s closest ally — from Iran. Syria has been ruled by the Alawites — a despised Muslim minority considered heretical — since the French colonialists elevated them to military leadership. The country has since 1970 been the Mafia-like fiefdom of the Assad family, which murdered more than 15,000 of its own rebellious citizens in Hama in 1982.

Syria has been on the State Department’s list of terrorist countries since 1979. Syria routinely dispatched terrorists into Iraq to kill American soldiers. Syria dominates Lebanon, from which it extorts wealth through violent means, including arming the Iranian proxy terrorist forces of Hezb’allah. The U.N. authorized an interminable tribunal to investigate charges that Syria murdered Rafik Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister, in 2005. The U.S. withdrew its ambassador from Damascus in protest of the Hariri assassination. I have personal insight into this tragic killing and farcical investigation because Saad Hariri, Rafik’s son, desperately asked me in Riyadh in 1998 to pass on his fears that the Syrians would kill his father to preserve their hegemony in Lebanon. What a difference twelve years makes! Saad Hariri is now Lebanon’s prime minister. Seeing the weakness of U.S. policy, he now embraces Hezbollah and the Syrian forces who killed his father.

Appeasing Syria Provokes Mockery from Assad and Ahmadinejad

The current Obama approach to Syria includes dispatching six high-level State Department delegations, announcing that our ambassador will return to Damascus, rescinding banned shipment of aircraft parts, and deals worth several billion dollars. Secretary of State Clinton purred over this “slight opening” with Syria and expressed hope that it would lead Syria to curb support for Iran as well as Hezb’allah and Hamas.

Syrian President Bashir Assad, responding instantly following departure of the U. S. Under-Secretary of State from Damascus, invited the Iranian president to his capital. The Assad-Ahmadinjead press conference can be described most tactfully as a roast of the Obama administration. The two presidents announced removal of travel visas, meaning that Iranian terrorists are free to travel to the borders of Europe and Israel. Assad, not ordinarily known for humor, said of U.S. hopes of separating Syria from Iran that “[w]e must have understood Clinton wrong because of bad translation.” The Iranian president reliably played straight man: “The Americans are forced to leave the region, leaving their reputation, image, and power behind in order to escape. The U.S. has no influence to stop expansion of Iran-Syria, Syria-Turkey, and Iran-Turkey ties. God willing, Iraq too will join this circle.”

The failure of Obama’s appeasement was understood in the region. Editor Michael Young asked in his Beirut Star,

“Just what does Barack Obama stand for?” His answer: “The Assad regime’s abuse of its own population, Syrian involvement in myriad bombings in Iraq, support for Iraqi Baathists, and its permissiveness toward Al-Qaeda in Iraq have not made the Administration reconsider its Syrian opening. Violence works, and Obama has not proven otherwise. The Obama Administration these days provokes little confidence in its allies, and even less fear in its adversaries” [emphasis added].

Rebuffed by Lebanon, Brazil and Turkey

Syria is not a member of the U.N. Security Council. But Lebanon, Brazil, and Turkey are among the nine non-permanent members. Since Obama has unwisely delegated to the Security Council power to defend American interests, their votes are important. It is clear from what is written above that Lebanon, until recently a U.S. ally with its large but no longer dominant Christian minority, will now vote as directed by Syria and Iran.

Mrs. Clinton made a pitiful visit to Brasilia last week. It is not far-fetched to presume that Brazilian leadership contrasted the empty words of Obama with the deeds of their neighbor, President Chávez of Venezuela, who is assiduously expanding the western hemisphere bridgehead of his Iranian ally. A weekly flight from Tehran to Caracas carries unregistered passengers who can infiltrate our porous southern borders. The president of Brazil told Mrs. Clinton that his country would not “bow” to demands for sanctions against Iran. He suggested that it would be “prudent” to instead pursue negotiations. As in the Middle East, Obama “provokes little confidence” among our traditional good-neighbor allies.

Even more ruinous is the state of Obama’s relations with Turkey, a country he has fulsomely praised as a Muslim democracy, notwithstanding the apparent drive of its present government to create an Islamist police state. Last week, Obama did nothing to prevent a symbolic 23-to-22 vote in a House of Representatives committee for a resolution labeling as “genocide” Turkish massacres of Armenians during World War I. I have lobbied on this issue and understand its intractability. Most historians call the events genocide, but a minority say it occurred during the fog of a war of reciprocal massacres in which Armenians aided invading Russians. The resolution is driven by understandable pressure of Armenian-Americans on California congressmen. But analysts of U.S. foreign policy understand that passing the resolution would so alienate Turkish voters that vital U.S. interests would be undermined — e.g., supply of U.S. forces in Iraq, our air base at Incirlik, and the role of Turkish military (NATO’s second-largest) in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Ankara Decries America’s “Lack of Strategic Vision”

The Turks did not distinguish themselves by the bullying tone of their comments on the vote, and Obama may feel hamstrung by campaign promises he made — which he cannot conceivably honor — to recognize the “genocide.” Turkey has resisted sanctions against Iran because Ahmadinejad was correct when he boasted in Beirut of blossoming Turkish-Iranian ties. But if Obama thought he might get any help from Turkey, whose government he courted by visiting its capital on his first overseas trip, his inaction on the genocide resolution provoked this blast from Ankara:

This decision, which could adversely affect our co-operation on a wide common agenda with the U.S., also regrettably attests to a lack of strategic vision [emphasis supplied].

Obama’s difficulties in obtaining cooperation on sanctions from smaller countries underscore his better-known problems with veto-wielding Russia and China, whose interests are diverse from ours. These countries, in different ways, see themselves as rivals of the U.S. and have extensive commercial relations with Iran, by whom they do not feel threatened. Russia at times has indicated support for mild sanctions — rather than the “biting” sanctions aimed at energy import/export (Iran is already rationing refined petroleum), insurance, and banking — understood by many congressmen as the only method short of war to influence Iran.

There were reports at week’s end that the administration would retreat to seeking diminished sanctions that exempt China and other permanent members of the Security Council from compliance. This would confirm the complete collapse of “engagement.” One might call it “diss-engagement,” warranting the mockery of Obama’s policies echoing from Damascus, Beirut, Brasilia, and even Ankara.

Joel Sprayregen is associated with think-tanks dealing with issues of security and human rights in Washington, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Ankara.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/obamas_iran_policy_collapses_t.html at March 09, 2010 – 05:36:22 AM CST

Comment:I am sitting here in Israel reading the headlines regarding VP Biden’s arrival in Israel. He is quoted as saying, “US VP meets Peres, says “since our administration came to power Iran is more isolated”-I contrast this statement with the preceding analysis and ask how naive is the current US Administration? No, better yet how ignorant are they? Perhaps yet another question such as, how arrogantly stupid are they is more appropriate!

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Here’s today’s evidence that we are now living in Middle East 2.0 instead of the old version.

First, a definition:

Middle East 1.0: Characterized by Arab nationalist domination, competition among the stronger Arab states to lead the region and by the weaker ones trying to survive those campaigns. Arab-Israeli conflict is a real enterprise. Roughly 1952-2000 or so. International aspect: Cold War competition between the United States and USSR and, near the end, US as sole superpower. Middle East 2.0: Characterized by a battle between Arab nationalist regimes and revolutionary Islamists. An Iran-led bloc (Syria, Hamas, Hizballah, Iraqi insurgents) seeking regional hegemony. Israel and most Arab states have parallel interests; Arab states (except for Syria) put low priority on conflict. International aspect: Will the West support the moderates or appease the radicals.

The latest occasion is an interview of Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. Of course, there are the usual rhetorical flourishes about Israel but the passion and focus is clearly on Iran and various Islamist terrorists. (“There is nothing wrong with keeping the terrorists on the run,” says the prince.)

This is the same man who told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that sanctions would be too slow in stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons and the United States better do something quick. Here he says he prefers a resolution through the UN but it isn’t clear what that means.

It’s funny that in the West the region is being discussed, written about, and taught as if we were back in the 1970s. There is a particular obsession with the idea that everything is about the Arab-Israeli conflict. But if the Saudis talk like this publicly (you can imagine what they say privately) it’s a sign of how changed everything is in Middle East 2.0’s world.

Read this carefully. The prince says:

“There are no troops arrayed on the border of Israel waiting for the moment to say, ‘Attack Israel. Nobody is going to fight them and threaten their peace. But they didn’t accept that. So it makes one wonder, what does Israel want?”

Now you can take this as propaganda, and of course Israel does have a lot to worry about: Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizballah, Arab countries being overthrown by Islamist warmongers, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and agreeing to a Palestinian state that then begins phase two of an effort to destroy Israel. It also needs agreement that any peace treaty permanently end the conflict, that Palestinian refugee be resettled in Palestine, that a Palestinian state is really going to block cross-border raids, and that foeign armies (notably those of Iran and Syria) aren’t going to enter the West Bank.

Even Dowd, not known as being sympathetic to Israel, understand some of this and makes the remarkable statement: “If anyone deserves to be paranoid, of course, it’s Israel. But Israel can’t be paranoid because paranoia is the mistaken perception that people are out to get you.”

But Faisal isn’t just trying to score points. He is trying to get across the point that Saudi Arabia’s government doesn’t want a war with Israel and prefer the conflict to go away. It can’t and won’t make a formal peace but the Saudis certainly don’t think the way they did decades ago.

And when Faisal talks about “no troops arrayed on the border….Nobody is going to fight them and threaten their peace,” how does that look if one subtitutes Saudi Arabia for Israel? The Saudis and other Gulf Arab states (along with Lebanon and Iraq) are now on the front line and under threat more than Israel is right now. Faisal know it and so should we all.

*Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).

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We often look to polls for obtaining information concerning various political issues. Rasmussen has a daily poll which measures Presidential Approval. That poll is based on 500 likely voters and it contains a plus or minus error rate of 3%.

Wenzel Strategies, an independent polling firm has been contracted by WND to conduct a scientific survey to find the answer of just how many Americans have some knowledge on the Obama issue. Based on two separate polling dates, 6/16/09, 790 likely voters and 1/19/10, 823 likely voters were asked their opinion on the eligibility issue.

The results indicated 81% of likely voters were fully aware, or somewhat aware, there existed a question concerning Obama right to hold office. There were 125 million voters who turned out for the 2008 election. This 81% represents 101 million likely voters that either say yes he is, no he isn’t or the answer lay somewhere inbetween.

The 101 million isn’t the universe though. There are 175 million people who are voting age. Eighty-one percent would be 142 million adult age citizens that have some knowledge of the question.

For Robert Gibbs to state only 400,000 people, or 3/10ths of 1% of American adults believe Obama is ineligible boggles the mind. By contrast Gibbs is implying 99.7% of all adult citizens think Obama is legitimately qualified according to the Constitution.

Getting back to the Wenzel poll, they found 49.3% either said NO, Obama has not satisfied the requirements or had some question. This would say 62 million likely voters, or 86 million adult citizens would very likely be interested in getting to the bottom of this issue.

Here are some more telling findings. Fifty-two percent of all Republicans, 32% of Independents AND 15% of all Democrats say Obama is NOT eligible based on what he has produced to date.

This criminal matter isn’t a majority rule issue. When a murder occurs in this nation, we do not require 51% of the voters to decide whether an arrest and charges should be filed against a suspect. In most jurisdictions, when a person in this country presses charges, a grand jury determines whether or not probable cause exists for a matter to be forwarded to the courts.

When 86 million voting age adults have doubts, then our courts, and elected representatives owe it to the country to settle this by hearing the case based on the merits. Obama needs only provide his birth long form certificate to settle the issue. Obama needs to explain to the country how he is a Natural Born Citizen, when by his own admission his father Barack Obama sr,, a Kenyan national, was never a US citizen and therefore unable to pass on American citizenship to the Usurper sitting in the White House

http://wenzelstrategies.com/?page_id=3

Steve