“47 years ago the [Fatah] revolution started.  Which revolution?  The modern revolution of the Palestinian people’s history.  In fact, Palestine in its entirety is a revolution, since [Caliph] Umar came [to conquer Jerusalem, 637 CE], and continuing today, and until the End of Days.  The reliable Hadith (tradition attributed to Muhammad), [found] in the two reliable collections, Bukhari and Muslim, says: “The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews.  The Jew will hide behind stones or trees.  Then the stones or trees will call: ‘Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him…”

-PA Mufti Muhammad Hussein, PA TV (Fatah), Jan. 9, 2012

There is nothing particularly surprising about the above statement, made so recently by the Palestinian Authority (PA) funded Palestinian Mufti, who is the leading Sunni Muslim religious authority in the PA.  In fact, it is well representative of the state of current Palestinian society (which I described more fully in a previous column), with its government sponsorship of hate against Israelis and Jews, its promotion of terrorism, its production of murderous children’s television shows, and even its advocacy of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.  Unfortunately, beginning in 1994, with the removal of Israeli forces from the Palestinian areas, the governing Palestinian group Fatah received control the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, (although the Hamas terror group seized control of Gaza in 2007).

Palestinian leaders could have taken advantage of their new power to develop the economy, produce jobs, provide support for its disadvantaged, and develop an agricultural base.  Instead the Palestinian leaders cancelled democratic elections,  cracked down on free speech and  religion, tortured and killed their own people, and funneled money into personal bank accounts or into support for terrorism against Israel.

A distinction can be made between Fatah and Hamas. Fatah, subsidized by the U.S., international organizations, Europe, the Gulf States, and even Israel,  is the more secular of the two even though it continues to fund Muslim religious events demonizing Jews, and paying the salary for the anti-Semitic Palestinian Authority Mufti. Fatah continues to glorify terrorism on television, including praising vicious murderer of an Israeli family, including two children and an infant.

This ought not come as a surprise, since for forty years Fatah was the personal fiefdom of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, the man who introduced the world to airline skyjackings.  (Unholy Alliance, David Horowitz, pg.145) Arafat spent much of his diplomatic career walking away from peace deals that would have given him a viable Palestinian state, the very thing he claimed to want, when speaking to a western audience. Under their current leader, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah has continued to avoid any final settlement of the peace process. Just this month, the Abbas appointed terrorist Mahmoud Awad Damra to serve as a PA official, despite his recent release from jail for attacks which killed Israelis and Americans. Last month, Abbas pushed for a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood in the UN, in an effort to bypass bilateral peace negotiations and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

The other ruling Palestinian regime is the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Hamas is the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), which now dominates the Egyptian parliament. Hamas and the Brotherhood’s goal is to implement Sharia (Islamic law), with all of its mandated 7^th century punishments including flogging, stoning and amputation. Hamas has a strong claim of legitimacy, having defeated Fatah in Palestinian elections in 2006, and because its genocidal covenant is strongly grounded in traditional Islamic anti-Semitism and contains the exact hadith uttered by the PA‘s Mufti. In fact, it is so identified with virulent anti-Semitism that the foreign travels of its leadership have led to mass demonstrations throughout the Arab world reminiscent of the demonstrations 1930’s Nazi Germany.  Hamas is led by a triumvirate of terrorists: Khaled Mashal, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, and Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar. Mashal has praised Osama Bin Laden and condemned Bin Laden’s killing. Al-Zahar has reiterated that Hamas will “never give up its armed struggle against the Zionist enemy.” Nor is such talk likely to end, as each member of the leadership attempts to outdo the other in demonstrations of their terrorist credentials and Jew-hatred in an effort to emerge victorious in an internal Hamas power struggle.

Because of these factors, Hamas manages to be even more repressive and destructive to the hopes of a stable Palestinian society than Fatah. When the Israelis removed their settlements from the Gaza strip in 2005, it was Hamas which led the Gazans in riots to destroy the agricultural industry Israel left behind. Hamas has spent its three years cracking down on the rights of women in the Gaza Strip, harassing its tiny Christian community into exile, and suppressing free speech.  There has been some growing resentment of the authoritarian and fundamentalist Hamas among young Palestinian Muslims. As a result Hamas has resorted to conducting a “charm offensive” in Gaza to win back public support.

Recently, “President” Abbas and Khaled Meshaal met to discuss reconciliation between the two groups. They agreed to hold presidential and legislative elections by May of 2012, and to initiate some confidence-building measures. But so far negotiations have not resolved the issue of forming a unity government, nor who would lead it. Hamas remains adamant that the West Bank’s Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, popular in the West for his statements in favor of developing a more economically advanced and democratic Palestinian entity, be removed, while Abbas is pretending to support him to keep the foreign aid flowing.  If the two sides do eventually come together, it will be to produce a government which shares the values which unite the two parties, namely, terrorism against Jews, government corruption, and opposition to free speech.

Until there is a fundamental change in the nature of Palestinian society, negotiations will never succeed. All moderation will continue to be “English-only” meant to purchase western aid to facilitate corruption and terror.  Palestinian leaders will continue to compete with each other over the support of a Palestinian public, in order to show that they are the party that best represents the principle, “there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s election victory indicates strong support for Islamism and for Sharia law. Sharia law does not tolerate free speech or protests against the government, and it exploits and suppresses minorities.  Muslim Brotherhood has expressed their goal to see the newly-formed government, “evolv[e] into a rightly guided caliphate.”

This naturally alarms Israel because the Brotherhood is closely allied with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which has claimed responsibility for murdering hundreds of civilians, including Americans, in Israel. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s prime minister, has described his organization as the “jihadi movement of the Brotherhood with a Palestinian face.” Haniyeh stated recently that “our presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity.”

The parliamentary elections will soon be followed by a rewriting of the 1971 constitution which will take place prior to the presidential elections.  That will ensure that the power will reside in the Islamist-dominated parliament. In any case, most of the current presidential contenders have a similar agenda to the Brotherhood, calling for imposing Sharia law in Egypt and modifying the country’s peace treaty with Israel.

The 1979 peace treaty was negotiated by Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, and Israel is rightly concerned about whether the document will be honored.  Odds are slim, since the ruling military junta, The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) plans to put the Camp David accords on the ballot for a national referendum. The Brotherhood has vowed never to recognize Israel as legitimate.

As Islamists were swept into power throughout the Middle East, what was the White House doing? It was standing shoulder to shoulder with the Islamists. As the revolution in Egypt evoked Western fears (now proven to be prescient) of a Brotherhood rise to power, the administration dispatched Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to announce that the Islamist group was “largely secular.” The U.S. government provided election training to Egyptian Islamist parties.

The N.Y. Times reported that the Obama administration accepts the Muslim Brotherhood’s assurances that it will build a democracy that respects individual rights, free markets and free speech. On January 4, the administration began to “forge closer ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that once was received as irreconcilably opposed to U.S. interests,” the newspaper said.  The White House is giving the Brotherhood international legitimacy, based on the platitudes the latter expresses in English, while in Arabic it has demanded the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and called for preparations for war against Israel.

At the same time, the White House has represented the Egyptian military as a pro-Western and secular force which will restrain Islamist elements. In reality, the Egyptian military has used deadly force against civilian protesters. In response to a Coptic protest in the Cairo neighborhood of Maspero, SCAF unleashed armored vehicles, which deliberately ran over protestors. Protestors were assaulted and beaten as Egyptian troops yelled “Allahu akbar” at those they called “Christian sons of dogs.”

These recent attacks by the military and their Islamist allies against Coptic Christians (who make up 10 percent of the 82 million Egyptians) give us a preview of what is to come when the Islamists impose Sharia law:

“The Islamists have been unleashed,” says Nasri, a Copt pharmacist who is hoping to leave Egypt.  “You’re talking about no rights for women.  No rights for Coptic Christians.  They’ll make us more of a minority.  It will be like living centuries ago.”

Red lights are flashing and sirens are blasting, but the Obama administration does not sense the threat. That is not for lack of information. EMET predicted early-on that the Brotherhood would take power and that the Egyptian military would not stand for democracy and minority rights. Unfortunately, President Obama believes that America’s role in the world is far too aggressive and arrogant in promoting democracy. As a result, he apologizes for our supposed failure to understand others, our alleged selfishness in pursuing U.S. interests instead of global interests and showing far too much concern for U.S. independence and freedom of action.

Perhaps Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) sees the danger in Obama’s support for Egypt’s incoming government. Traditionally, Washington appropriates $1.3 billion a year to Egypt, plus additional support from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Senator Leahy has sponsored a bill in the Appropriations Committee that calls for restrictions in military aid to Egypt. Leahy also calls for funds to be earmarked to promote democracy and limit military power there. The Egyptian military has lobbied aggressively against the Leahy legislation, and it upped the ante by raiding Western pro-democracy Non-governmental organizations.  According to The Washington Post, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also opposes these restrictions, and the State Department has proposed an additional billion dollars in debt relief, to provide funds for the Egyptian government’s “transition.”

The seismic wave of change in Middle East has swept Sharia advocates into power, and the Obama Administration has been a contributor to that outcome. Now, freedoms of speech and of minority rights are threatened. So is Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, which long has stood as the only democracy in the region. The White House has settled for the democracy of “one man, one vote, one time,” thus bringing even worse regimes to power than had previously ruled in the region. Who will take a stand and promote real democratic values?

With Republican Congressman Ron Paul coming in a close third in the Iowa presidential caucus, we must look seriously at his foreign policy views, particularly on the Middle East and Israel, and ask whether such views are suitable for a commander-in-chief charged with the security of the United States during a period of conflict with a determined Islamic enemy.

Much attention has been paid, since Paul’s strong showing in Iowa, to statements issued in Rep. Paul’s newsletter publications. Many of these newsletters contain material on domestic matters (such as race relations) that may be objectionable, but one of the most troubling statements on the foreign policy front relates to credence given to a conspiracy theory blaming the Mossad for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. From an April 1993 edition of the newsletter:

It was only a matter of a few days after the World Trade Center bombing before Mohammad A. Salameh was arrested. Is he guilty? Who knows? Recall that shortly after the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended and accusations were made. Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists matters little.

This statement shows a susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking, which, while contrary to any good analysis, is particularly dangerous when considering the Middle East. The Arab world is fraught with all manner of ludicrous and delusional conspiracy theories about the Jews and Israel, and that a potential American Commander-in-Chief would give them any credence is deeply troubling. Even if, as Rep. Paul claims, he was not the author of the newsletters in question, then at the very least he hired and supervised, or failed to supervise, individuals who maintained these beliefs. Anyone who genuinely considers the possibility that Israel would intentionally bomb an American civilian building for the sole purpose of framing Islamic terrorists, cannot ever be an ally of or, indeed, even neutral in regards to Israel.

The other interesting element of the quote is the use of the word “retaliation.” The assumption that any act of terrorism committed by Muslims must be the result of U.S. behavior, and, therefore, justifiable is a hallmark of Paul’s policies and is deeply troubling. A perfect illustration occurred in Paul’s remarks during the December 15th Iowa Republican debate. “… [T]o say all Muslims are the same is dangerous talk,” he stated. “They don’t come to kill us because we are free and prosperous. Do they go to Switzerland and Sweden? I mean that’s absurd.”

Of course all Muslims are not the same. No one is suggesting that they are. Paul’s claim that Muslims want to harm us “because we are bombing them” ignores the reality that Islamists have deeply-held religious and ideological beliefs that mandate jihad against non-believers, the spread of Sharia, and the dominance of an Islamic caliphate. We know this because not just Islamic terrorists, but Muslim jurists, thinkers and policy-makers say so routinely, as evidenced by a wide collection of Arabic-language video and transcripts available from translation services like MEMRI.

Ironically the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police recognizes better than does Rep. Paul the reality of jihadist motivations, writing in a 2006 report summary, that Switzerland was both home to, and a target for, Islamist terrorists.

Furthermore, which Muslims exactly does Paul claim the United States bombed prior to the 1993 “retaliation” bombing?

Paul blames Israel for much of the faults of the Middle East and, according to former Paul staffer Eric Dondero, has privately expressed his wish that Israel not exist. Dondero writes,

He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the American taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.

Paul has attempted to create the impression that his stance on Israel is motivated not by anti-Zionism, but, rather, by a principled position on independent national sovereignty. He points to his voting against condemning Israel for the 1981 Osirak reactor bombing, and claims that our “interference” with Israel is to their detriment. Said Paul in a November presidential debate in Washington,

We interfere with them when they deal with their borders. When they want to have peace treaties, we tell them what they can do because we buy their allegiance and they sacrifice their sovereignty to us. And then they decide they want to bomb something, that’s their business, but they should, you know, suffer the consequences. When they bombed the Iraqi missile site, nuclear site, back in the ’80s, I was one of the few in Congress that said it’s none of our business and Israel should take care of themselves.

EMET believes that a close American-Israeli security alliance is to the benefit of both nations, but we understand that one could make the opposing argument that Israel is burdened by its American alliance in good faith. However Paul’s stance is disingenuous, as evidenced by his remarks on the House floor on Israel’s Operation Cast Lead invasion of Gaza that began in December 2008. Paul claimed that Hamas was “encouraged by and really started by Israel,” much as he blames the U.S. for the rise of Al Qaeda. In interviews with Iranian state television, Press TV, he described Gaza as a “concentration camp.” Far from wanting to free Israel to see to its own national security, Paul seizes upon occasions when Israel acts to ensure its security, as in Operation Cast Lead, to condemn it and, by extension, the United States.

Paul prefers pat answers that blame America and Israel to conducting serious investigation of the motivations of our self-declared enemies. Indeed Paul’s belief in American-centric grievance terrorism denies agency to other countries and cultures. He refuses to take into account any historical, cultural or political developments prior to America’s rise to superpower status. Paul’s only solution is a return to American isolationism as a foreign policy.

Paul believes that if Washington ceases to support and ally itself with the Jewish state, then a large number of America’s problems with the Muslim world will disappear. But suppose that a President Paul initiated a foreign policy in which the U.S. government didn’t defend Israel in the United Nations Security Council, recognized “Palestine” as a nation, called on Israel to negotiate with that state, and stopped the sale of American weapons or technology to the Jewish state. Would these actions prompt the Islamist or Muslim worlds to reward us with better behavior?

Certainly, there is plenty of evidence to suggest they would not, just by examining the past three years. President Barack Obama is markedly less supportive of Israel than was President George W. Bush. Obama made improved relations with the Muslim world a cornerstone of his foreign policy, as delineated in his Cairo declaration in 2009. Based on the Paul logic, positive results should come from the Muslim world, but we see no evidence of its becoming more supportive of the United States. Have the Palestinians been more willing to compromise? No. The Palestinian Authority seems to be approaching the even more extreme and radical group, Hamas, with which it now plans to merge. Also, the PA has unilaterally pushed for statehood recognition by the United Nations, an effort the Obama Administration has opposed. And has the rest of the Muslim world become more cooperative with the United States? Not at all. Pakistan hid Osama Bin Laden until we found and killed him, and it continues to support the Taliban in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia still produces textbooks and religious materials filled with anti-Christian and anti-Jewish bigotry. And Iran still pushes ahead with nuclear weapons production.

We have every reason to suspect, therefore, that the Middle East’s reaction to an even softer Ron Paul approach to diplomacy would be greater intransigence.

Paul pretends that this reality does not exist or that it does not matter. Osama bin Laden should not have been killed, under Paul’s reasoning. Iran is not trying to acquire a nuclear bomb, he claims, and if it were, that’s Teheran’s choice. “If I were an Iranian, I’d like to have a nuclear weapon, too, because you gain respect from them,” he told Iowans.

Paul’s foreign policy has a seductive attraction. If all the troubles America endures are because of her actions, then ceasing these actions is a cure-all. But this is simply not so. A retreat to some mythical isolationist foreign policy is as impossible as it is undesirable. It would cede regional hegemony to national and non-state actors who have their own innate motivations for wishing death to those they label “infidels,” and make the world, America, and Israel, infinitely more insecure.

— William Butler Yeats

By all accounts, 2011 has been a cataclysmic year in the Middle East. What began with a government official’s harassment of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, and ended in his self-immolation on December 18,2010, sparked riots that led to what has been dubbed “The Arab Spring” but that we at EMET have more appropriately entitled “The Arab Tsunami.”. The events in Tunisia resulted in a wave of protests that has shaken up the Arab and Muslim worlds, stretching all the way from Morocco to Yemen.

As anyone who has not been asleep for the greater part of this year is aware, what transpired in the region in 2011 has been more dramatic than anything to occur in the Middle East since the days after World War I, when French diplomat Francois Georges Picot, together with British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes, carved up the region for their countries.

What has happened since last December 18 has  awakened the populations throughout the region to protest their countries’ poor economic conditions and total lack of human rights, as well as corruption  within the region’s leadership. That then led, among other astonishing developments, to the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia; the end of the 33-year reign of  Yemenite President Ali Abdullah Saleh;  the overthrow and death of Libyan strongman  Muammmar Gaddafi and, most astonishingly, the end of the 30-year, iron-clad reign of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

As of now, more than 37,000 people have died in these protests, and the region is still awash with blood. What will be the final outcome of these cataclysmic events is difficult to predict. Sometimes, revolutions result in more freedom, as defined from the liberal, Western point of view. The French Revolution took decades and finally resulted in more freedoms. A revolution, however, might result in a more oppressive regime within an overarching system, such as occurred in the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the  Iranian Revolution of 1979.

We at EMET have long seen the rising tide of radical Islamism and have expressed the fear that what began with the Facebook generation by a few young, freedom-loving activists (in the Western sense of the concept) would lead to elections  ushering in Islamist regimes. That is because the people who truly have the political power and infrastructure control the mosques.

We are witnessing now, as in Germany in 1939 and in Gaza in 2006, the reality that one election does not a democracy make.

EMET has stressed throughout this year that democracy entails the chance to have second, third and fourth elections, and that the institutions that allow a person to dissent without fear of one’s very life must already be in place: a free and independent press, a free and independent judiciary, freedom of assemblage. And, as Natan Sharansky has written: the freedom to scream from the middle of the public square and criticize those in power, in the government.

So, where are we today? Just looking at this week’s headlines, I’d like to present an overview of a few hot spots in this troubled region.

Syria

More than 6,200 people have been murdered by the brutal boot of the repressive regime of Bashar al-Assad within the last several months of the uprising, including  hundreds of children. Hundreds, if not thousands, more have disappeared from the streets, perhaps languishing in jail, where God only knows the abuse to which they have been subjected, if they even remain alive.  The Syrian government claims that the uprising was orchestrated by “foreign terrorists.” As I write these words, residents of the besieged city of Homs cry out for the world to come and witness the endless bloodshed, which has killed more than 100 residents over the past few days. Videos posted throughout the Internet show blood-soaked streets in that city, with bodies lying about. Homs has been cut off from food and electricity, and, in a scene reminiscent of the film Schindler’s List, the regime’s soldiers take pot shots at people leaving their homes  during certain hours. The brave dissidents there, despite, the level of brutality that this oppressive regime has stooped to, have not given up.

EMET has been urging strong American sanctions against Syria, as well as covert or overt help for the dissidents. Replacing the Assad government has got to be better than the current situation. Furthermore, Syria is part of the Iranian constellation, and anything that weakens Teheran’s sphere of influence is a good thing.

Egypt

The results of the long-awaited second of the three rounds of parliamentary elections are finally in, and no surprises occurred. As EMET predicted, the Islamist parties received more than 75 percent of the vote. The highest percentage of votes went to Salafist parties that are even more extreme than the horrific Muslim Brotherhood. This all but paves the way for a radical Sharia state to Israel’s immediate west and the continuation of an open smuggling corridor of goods, weapons and fighters into Hamas-controlled Gaza. The eight million Coptic Christians in Egypt have long endured persecution, but since Mubarak’s overthrow, this minority has endured massacres and unspeakable abuses.

The Egyptian military that has maintained control since the ouster of Mubarak has  been exceedingly brutal, particularly in abusing female protestors, who, when arrested, have endured humiliating and painful “virginity tests,” which the army claims protects the women from the charge of prostitution.  This week, millions of viewers were stunned by the YouTube video of a female demonstrator savagely beaten by the Egyptian military; her abaya (cloak) was opened, with her bare midriff and her blue bra appearing as an Egyptian officer prepared to stomp on her with his boot.

I am certain that when the Tahrir Square demonstrations began earlier this year, none of the organizers thought it would have come to this.

Israel has no assurances that there will not be a radical, Sunni Islamic state along on its border or that Egypt will — despite public pronouncements due to diplomatic and economic factors — uphold the fragile 1979 Camp David peace treaty with Israel. In fact, both of the major Egyptian parties have stated that the treaty has to be reexamined.

Since the Camp David Accords was signed, America has elevated the Egyptian military from a C-, Soviet-equipped force to an A+, American-equipped one. EMET has been alone on Capitol Hill in arguing, ever since the demonstrations began in Tahrir Square last winter, that America should withhold further military aid until the results of the elections are known. The results show that, as predicted, Sharia has swept through the region. EMET calls for an immediate cessation of all military funding and weapon shipments to Egypt.

Palestinian Authority-Hamas

Taking a cue from the success of its Islamist brothers in Egypt, Hamas decided this week to  enter into the upcoming Palestinian parliamentary  elections in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria, if you will), which are due to take place in May. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar has expressed every confidence in winning the elections.

Beyond that, last Thursday, the Palestinian Liberation Organization — which many world bodies, including the United Nations, feels has the sole legitimacy for representing the Palestinian people — held a historic meeting in Ramallah, where an accord was reached to open up its umbrella group to “activate and reconstruct” it to include organizations that do not currently belong. This paves the way for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to join the PLO.[1]

Just as the Salafists participated in the Egyptian elections not to share power, but to dominate, Hamas is now entering into a relationship with the PLO to dominate it.

I am certain we will soon hear pundits inside the Washington Beltway saying that now is the time for Israel to make dramatic concessions for peace, to buoy Fatah’s chances of winning in the upcoming elections.

Yes, you heard it right: Israel will be asked to sacrifice her own strategic depth, once again, in this tumultuous and rapidly growing Islamist region of the world, for the sake of internal Palestinian politics and to inject a transfusion into the moribund peace process.

Or, borrowing a page from Yasser Arafat’s and Abu Mazen’s playbook, it will not take long before we begin to hear the talking heads telling us that there is a “moderate faction” to talk to in Hamas.

Do not be fooled: Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s newly dubbed foreign minister, told the Al-Quds newspaper: “Anyone who thinks Hamas has changed its positions and now accepts the PLO’s defeating political position is living under an illusion. Hamas cannot make a mistake that proved to be a failed one. … By moving toward reconciliation with the PLO, we are reconstructing the organization and reconsidering its failed program.” So as not to be misunderstood, he added: “Hamas’s goal is first and foremost the liberation of our lands from the sea to the river and achieving the right of return.”[2]

Or, as Khalil Abu Leila, another Hamas official, stated, “Hamas will not join the PLO political program. Rather, a major task of the Hamas provisional leadership will be to bring the PLO back to its correct path and the goal for which it was established, mainly, the liberation of Palestine.”[3]

Iran

Against this rising tide of Sunni Islamist fundamentalism throughout the region is the Iranian quest for hegemony and for the reclamation of the triumph of Shiite Islamism.

One particularly horrifying way Iran has engaged in this quest is through its pursuit of nuclear weapons. None of us was surprised when the International Atomic Energy Agency reported last November that Iran now has the ability to create nuclear weapons, having mastered the “critical steps involved in the process.” The report further stated that a Soviet scientist tutored the Iranians about detonation reactions, and that North Korean and Pakistani nuclear scientists were also available to lend their knowledge and expertise.

This of course totally refutes the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, which stated:

We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran  halted its nuclear weapons program. …We judge with high confidence that  the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguars Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing the international scrutiny and pressure  resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.

First lesson: Do not trust any accord signed by a despot or a dictator. One barometer of whether or not a ruler means what he says is how he treats his minorities and his dissidents. It is all directly related to an underlying premise of one’s respect for the dignity of human life and the basic rights of man.

Speaking of dissidents: There was a moment of opportunity, when the brave, young Iranian dissidents were out on the streets, en masse, and the leader of the free world, President Obama, said nothing in their support for a full two weeks, while skulls were being crushed and people were disappearing from the streets. Most people in Iran are under 30. They were born after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, despise the theocracy and are feeling suffocated by its choking stranglehold.

The Iranian prisons are bursting with such protestors.  Taking a page from the Soviet Jewry movement, in which names like Natan Sharansky became household words in the West, we should all know the names of people like 26-year-old Hossein Ronaghi Malkhi, a blogger and human rights activist, who was arrested for fomenting the demonstrations in June 2009. He was sent to the notorious Evin Prison, where he has beaten and tortured and needs a kidney operation.

The Iranian nuclear program has led to a more rigorous pursuit of nuclear weaponry within such Sunni Arab states as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They, of course, have the petro dollars to buy scientists, technology and nuclear material.

All of this adds to the destabilization of an already volatile and unpredictable region, where human rights abuses are on the rise along with Sunni and Shiite Islamism.

Lessons for 2012

This has been a traumatic year for the entire region. It is a time of chaos and instability, in which we should have learned:

1) The United States has only one stable, reliable ally in the Middle East — the State of Israel, which .should be strengthened against the rising tide of radical Islamism. It is also time we learned that, whether we like it or not, radical Islamists perceive of America as the Great Satan.  As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once warned, our projection of our values onto the world simply does not work. We must understand the sociological and tribal structure of the Middle East before we enter into any further agreements with governments of the region.

2) Appeasement and groveling to despots and dictators have not enhanced America’s standing in the region, but has weakened it immensely.  America’s outstretched hand for dialogue has not  prevented Iran from reaching its goal of nuclear capability and regional dominance one iota.

3) The United States appears like a sleeping giant that unconditionally dishes out our precious and rapidly dwindling resources — foreign aid — to unfriendly, unreliable parties in the region without any leverage, making us appear even more  embarrassingly pathetic there. This applies to our aid to Pakistan and certainly has been the case with the Palestinians. Ever since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, we ostensibly conditioned our aid to the Palestinians on very basic principles, all of which they have continuously ignored. Rather than doing away with U.S. aid to the Palestinians, we have done away with enforcing the funds’ conditionality.

4) This is the time to finally stop our military aid and weapons shipments to Egypt, or we will be forced to confront these American-made armaments’ possibly use in attacking our one ally in the region, the State of Israel, or American soldiers and sailors on the Sixth Fleet.

5) Now, in the midst of all this regional chaos, is precisely not the time to pressure Israel to take more risks for peace. The growing radical Islamism is a time for stability, at least in one tiny sliver of the region, the State of Israel.

6) We should be helping and propping up the voices of the dissidents within Iran, and those within the Iranian constellation of power, such as the brave, besieged Syrian dissidents. Not to do so will strengthen the menacing hand of Iran and is nothing short of immoral.

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid.

December 25, 2011

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, is touted — by the UN and a number of nations — as the ”sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”  As such, it is officially the organization responsible for negotiating on behalf of Palestinian Arabs: It was the PLO that negotiated with Israel with regard to the Oslo Accords.     While 10 groups (e.g., Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - PFLP) are members, it has long been heavily dominated by Fatah: Major figures in Fatah — notably Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas — have played key roles in the running of the PLO.    That situation may be changing shortly, and I see considerable significance in this possibility. On Thursday Palestinian Arab leaders representing several groups announced an “historic” agreement to “activate and reconstruct” the PLO so that organizations that do not currently belong might join.  Most significantly, this would open the door to membership by Hamas, as well as the “up-and-coming” Islamic Jihad.

As I have watched a continually shifting situation with regard to Fatah-Hamas relations and the possibility of a “reunification” agreement, it has seemed to me that one of the major prizes that Hamas was seeking was membership in the PLO.  More important than a joint government and all the rest — most of which probably will never materialize.   This is a shift from its earlier position, which was one of shunning PLO membership — a shift from having no part of this “official” organization to seeking to play from within.  And make no mistake about it: The ultimate goal of Hamas is not to belong to the PLO, but to dominate and control it.  Hamas speaking for and acting on behalf of the Palestinian Arab people.

The meeting on Thursday (ed. note: December, 22nd, 2011) took place in Cairo, with Abbas, Palestinian National Council speaker Salim Zanoun (also Fatah) and Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal in attendance. It was agreed that a committee, headed by Zanoun, would meet — in Amman, starting January 15 — to discuss ways to incorporate groups such as Hamas into the PLO.    According to Khaled Abu Toameh and Herb Keinon, writing in Friday’s JPost (ed note: December 23rd, 2011), this will pave the way for a new provisional PLO leadership that would include Hamas and other radical groups for the first time. Ultimately, this would lead to incorporation into various PLO institutions — most significantly, the Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s parliament in exile.   The Council elects the Executive Committee, the PLO’s main decision-making body.  So we can see where this may be going.

With statements by Hamas leaders over the weekend, we can see this even more clearly:   Osama Hamdan – referred to as Hamas’s “foreign minister” – in response to claims that Hamas was moderating, felt the need to clarify what is happening.  He was quoted by the Quds Press news agency:   “Anyone who thinks Hamas has changed its positions and now accepts the PLO’s defeating political program is living in an illusion.  Hamas cannot make the mistake of joining a process that has proved to be a failed one…”   By moving towards “reconciliation,” Hamas is aimed at “reconstructing the organization and reconsidering its political program.”  Hamas’s goal is “first and foremost the liberation of our lands from the sea to the river and achieving the right of return.”

Another Hamas leader, Khalil Abu Leila, cited by Abu Toameh, said that Hamas would not join the PLO’s current political program.  Rather, a major task of the provisional leadership will be to “bring the PLO back to its correct path and the goal for which it was established, namely the liberation of Palestine.”

And it’s here that I want to stop for a moment and provide important background and context.    The PLO was founded in 1964 at a summit of the Arab League, which committed to being more active in “liberating” Palestine.  A pivotal role was played by Egypt’s president Gamal Abdul Nasser, and indeed the first chair of the PLO was a Nasser protégé, Ahmad Shuqeiri.  The first meeting was held at the Intercontinental Hotel in eastern Jerusalem (then under Jordanian control) and meetings continued to be held in eastern Jerusalem until 1967.   The overriding factor of significance here is that the founding of the PLO took place BEFORE 1967, before Israel controlled Judea, Samaria and Gaza.  What it sought to “liberate” was Israel INSIDE the Green Line.  This puts the lie to all the hoopla regarding Oslo, a “two-state solution,” a Palestinian state with the ’67 line as border, etc. etc.    The original Palestinian National Charter clearly specified that there were no designs on the areas within “Palestine” that were controlled by Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (Judea and Samaria).  All that was to be “liberated” was what Israel then controlled.  This Charter was amended once, in 1968, after Israel acquired control of the land from the river to the sea.  That is, what the PLO sought to “liberate” was adjusted according to what Israel controlled — the ultimate goal being the eradication of Israel.

The complications arose with Oslo, in 1993.  As part of understandings at that time, Arafat was committed to amending the PLO Charter, removing or changing those sections that called for Israel’s destruction.  But all Arafat did was declare the intention of making required changes.  Those changes were never actually made.  A committee to explore the matter was appointed, following a vote by the PLO National Council, but the committee never met.   What followed was what I have dubbed “as if” diplomacy: nations conducting themselves “as if” something has happened, when it fact it has not. Among those celebrating the changes was then-President Bill Clinton.

The sense of the Charter, and the need for elimination or amendment of certain clauses, becomes clear from the following examples:

“Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.” (Article 2)

“The Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland and have the right to determine their destiny after achieving the liberation of their country.” (Article 3)

“…[The Palestinian] must be prepared for the armed struggle and ready to sacrifice his wealth and his life in order to win back his homeland and bring about its liberation.” {Article 7]

“Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it…” [Article 9]

“The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland…” [Article 19]:

“The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood…”  [Article 20]

“The demand of security and peace, as well as the demand of right and justice, require all states to consider Zionism an illegitimate movement, to outlaw its existence, and to ban its operations..” [Article 23]

But these clauses stand to this day.  What they represent is not significantly different from what Hamas espouses.

The entire charter can be seen at: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp

One would have to ask how it was that the Western world, over a period of almost two decades, could have anticipated a “peace process” resulting in a “two-state solution” if one of the parties to that process embraced the above principles so thoroughly inimical to true peace.   The answer, of course, is that the Western leaders (including many Israeli leaders) were imitating the three monkeys who hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

They allowed themselves to be convinced that these were not the PLO principles any longer and that its leaders were prepared to seek peace.   But since, indeed, the PLO has retained these principles, while feigning the embrace of peace in English for Western consumption, only disaster has ensued.

Now along comes a more forthright Hamas, determined to call the PLO back to honestly embracing what it was supposed to stand for in the first place.  No more subterfuge or mixed messages.   Of course, when it comes to interactions between Fatah and Hamas, everything is tentative.  And so it remains to be seen what role Hamas does ultimately play in the PLO.  But I’m not at all certain that this transition would be a bad thing: it would eliminate a very pernicious pretense and push Western leaders towards having to face the reality of the situation.   Then — as Minister of Security Affairs Moshe Ya’alon said this evening (ed. note: December 25th, 2011), when I queried him about this at a meeting — it would be important to make certain that Western nations continued to recognize the Quartet requirements.

I have been told by an Israeli official that all have been involved in acts of terrorism  and that some, no doubt, were involved in the murder and maiming of American citizens. This is beyond infuriating to me, not because American blood is any redder than Israeli blood, but because American laws for dealing with such matters have been completely ignored.

The United States’ anti-terrorism statute, passed in 1990, states that any time an American has been killed or wounded in a terrorist attack anywhere around the globe, the federal government has the right to seek out the suspect, and bring him or her to these shores to face justice.

Among the first wave of released prisoners in the Shalit deal was Ahlam Tamimi. On August 9, 2001, Ms. Tamimi planned and helped to execute the bombing of the Sbarro’s pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem. We know that at least two American citizens were killed during this attack: Judith Greenbaum, 31, from Passaic, New Jersey, and Malki Roth, 15, from Queens, New York.

In a taped interview that Ms. Tamimi gave while in prison, she confessed to the crime and said that if given the opportunity, she would not hesitate to do it again. When told that her act was responsible for the deaths of eight children, a smile of deep satisfaction came across her face.

Ms. Tamimi is currently in Jordan, where she is widely recognized as a hero and is on the lecture circuit. The United States has an extradition treaty with Jordan, and should demand her extradition.

On September 8, 2003, an emergency room doctor at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, David Applebaum, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, took his daughter Nava, out for a father-daughter dinner at Café Hillel in the capital’s trendy Emek Refaim neighborhood. The dinner was special: Nava was to be married the very next day. David was known to be a quintessential mensch, always the first to arrive in the emergency room after a disaster or suicide bombing, even when he wasn’t “on call.”  When the suicide bomber entered Café Hillel and blew himself up, everyone wondered why David hadn’t come running immediately to the emergency room to help out. That was because David and Nava were among the dead. Ibraham Dar Musa, who planned the Café Hillel bombing,  was one of those released last October.

There are approximately 54 cases of American citizens who have been killed and 83 of Americans who have been injured by Palestinian terrorists since the singing of the Oslo Accords. The United States government seems to be treating them as invisible, disposable Americans, mere pawns on a political chessboard.

On May 8, 2001, my friends Sherri and Seth Mandell, originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, suffered an unspeakable loss. Their son, Koby, and his friend, Yoseph Ishran, decided to play hooky from school. When they did not return home that evening, their families were incredibly worried. Koby’s and Yoseph’s bodies were found the next day, brutally dismembered, in a cave outside their families’ community of Tekoa, Israel. The boys had been stoned to death.

In those days, I had been working on a law to give the Justice Department primary responsibility for rendering justice on terrorists who had killed American citizens overseas. Prior to that, the State Department had handled such matters. I felt that the State Department was primarily concerned with politics and diplomacy, not justice. By changing the address, we had felt there might be a greater chance of securing justice for victims and their families that wasn’t contaminated by diplomatic or political factors.

I had called Sherri Mandell while she was sitting shiva. What do you say to a woman who has just lost her first-born son, her bechor, so brutally? So, I told her about the bill that I was working on, and asked if she would like it to be named for Koby.

I will never forget her response. In fact, her voice is still ringing in my ears. She said, with a tinge of joy, “I could just see Koby jumping up and down in heaven to have a law named after him.”

I thought to myself, “Sweetheart, it is a long way before a bill becomes a law.” I vowed to myself that I would not rest until it happened. The bill was signed into law by President George W. Bush in December 2004.

In May 2005, the Office of Victims of Overseas Terrorism was opened in the Department of Justice. The office lists on its website that it was established “to ensure that the investigation and prosecution of terrorist attacks that result in deaths and/or injuries of American citizens overseas remain a high priority within the Department of Justice.”

The office takes special credit for the seizure and indictment of an Indonesian murderer of one Christian missionary. However, when reading the law, it is clear that the legislative intent of the bill was to address a specific population of Americans who were either studying in, touring in, or living in Israel at the time, the office has not brought a single Palestinian terrorist to justice on these shores. Vicki Eisenfeld of West Hartford, Connecticut, — whose son Matthew, a Yale University graduate, was killed together with his girlfriend, Sara Drucker,  a graduate of Barnard College, on Jerusalem bus number 18 — once confided in me, “It makes me feel that my son’s blood is less American.”

I spend a great deal of time on Capitol Hill, and when I walk between the House side and the Senate side, I see the Supreme Court. Etched on top of the beautiful building are the words, “Equal Justice Under Law.”

Therein lies my profound indignation and sadness.

This article can be seen in the current edition of the Washington Jewish Week.

This past Friday, at a policy conference in Washington, Puneet Talwar, Senior Director for Iran, Iraq and the Gulf States at the White House National Security Council addressed the group. In his “on the record” remarks, Mr. Talwar calmly stated, “We have a three legged stool in our policy toward Iran: The first leg of the stool is engagement. The second is sanctions. And the third is our military option. We are keeping all of the options on the table.”

This is eerily familiar. It is precisely the same statement we had heard from then candidate Obama when he came to address the AIPAC policy conference while running for office in 2008.

Since then, almost four years have elapsed, and the centrifuges have been assiduously spinning  uranium to the highly enriched grade necessary for a nuclear bomb. It is said they now have enough enriched uranium for at least one nuclear bomb, and that they are hard at work at a delivery mechanism. As these words are written the Iranians are launching yet another atomic facility, deeply underground, beneath the mountains near the holy city of Qom.

One of the most chilling elements of the policy debate regarding the Iranian nuclear program is the bizarre time stasis in which those who oppose action against Iran exist. Warnings of an approaching nuclear deadline date back at least as far as 2004, when European experts warned Iran could be between five and six years away from a bomb. Even the widely panned and inaccurate 2007 National Intelligence Estimate which incorrectly claimed that Iran had halted production in 2003, set the earliest possible date for Iran to possess enough highly enriched Uranium for nuclear weapons at some time between 2009 and 2010. More recent assessments, such as that of Israeli military intelligence, put Iran is six months to one year away from producing a bomb. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told CNN Iran was less than a year away from being “unstoppable” in its nuclear effort. Weapons inspector David Albright put the Iranians within six months of possessing enough nuclear material if they conduct a crash program, while a more hawkish estimate placed it as low as 62 days.

Yet none of this fazed the Obama Administration, which spent a substantial amount of energy in arm-twisting Congressmen in an effort to push back implementation dates for a new round of Iranian Central Bank sanctions proposed by Senators Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) from two months (already quite a long time) to half a year.  The Obama Administration had also been seeking wider latitude and discretion in applying the proposed sanctions.

According to one report, by Reuters, the Administration has received at least some of those demands, although Sen. Mark Kirk has said the Congressional negotiators resisted “most” of the administration’s attempts to weaken sanctions. A press release from the Armed Services Committee indicates that the implementation timeline survived Administration pressure, a positive sign.

But in what bizarre dimension of time and space does this administration reside where sanctions, implemented six months from now can halt a nuclear program that could potentially be completed, or at least “unstoppable” by the time they take effect?  And yet the officials from the same administration expect to have their cake and eat it too by the claim that “all options” including the military option are on the table, as did Mr. Talwar, or as referenced by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in his speech to the Saban Center.

One must doubt very seriously that anyone in the administration believes that boilerplate response, and for certain the Iranians do not considered it a credible threat. Are the Iranians expected to believe, that an administration which refuses to recover its own downed aircraft for fear of the reaction, will take a full scale military option against it? The same “military option” that has been “on the table” for the past decade, as Iran continued to pursue its nuclear ambitions?

The reality is that while American policy, focused on its table full of options, has remained static for the past ten years, Iran has quietly, persistently marched forward. All policy options, whether they are sanctions, or military force, or even diplomacy, are perishable goods. The longer you wait, the less valuable they become.

This is not to say that the sort of covert attacks against Iranian nuclear installations which appear to be underway , are not helpful, and that they have not bought us time. They are and they have.  But however much time such actions buy, it is not all the time in the world. We must stop treating the Iranian nuclear bomb as though it is some kind of desert mirage, which remains just out of reach, regardless of how much time is spent moving towards it.

The Kirk-Menendez Amendment was a noble and bipartisan move, of the kind all too rare in Washington. It is disturbing the amount of pressure the administration was willing to bring to bear against elected legislators, in the name of NOT bringing pressure against Iranian thugs. It stands also as evidence that American legislators can still come together and produce innovative and useful policy legislation, but only if they are willing to stand up to an administration which expends momentous energy to insure that nothing effective gets done.

There is a fourth option which neither President Obama or Mr. Talwar has discussed, or used, at all, but it is worth discussing briefly.

In June of 2009, after the elections, there were thousands of brave dissidents on the streets. Most people in Iran are under age 30. They despise the mullahcracy in which they have been raised. These people were crying out for a word of support from the leader of the free world, and nothing was said in their behalf for nearly two weeks, while skulls were being crushed and people have summarily disappeared from the streets.

During the era of the Soviet dissidents, we worked with one the “refuseniks”, and everyone knew some of their names.  But few known the names of those like Sa’id Malikpur, a 35 year old web designer from Canada who went to visit his sick father in Iran in 2008, and was arrested by the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Prior to his incarceration, he had been developing a web site, which the regime says he used for posting pornographic images, but which Mr. Malikpur claims no knowledge of. He has been held in the notorious Evin prison, where he has been held in solitary confinement for over a year, and human rights groups say he has been routinely tortured. Mr. Malikpur has been sentenced to death.

It is absolutely unconscionable that we are not empowering the brave dissidents of Iran, and widely distributing these dramatic stories of human rights abuse. The window of opportunity was wide open in June of 2009. We must try, using the new technologies of the internet; Facebook and Twitter to see if we can pry open the window once again, and help these brave people overthrow this despicable regime.

And in terms of the other three options:  Despite the complacent assurances of some people in Washington, we are quickly running out of time.

Mr. Panetta said that he “believes security is dependent on a strong military, but also on diplomacy,” and he added, “Unfortunately over the past year we have seen Israel’s isolation from the traditional security partners in the region grow and the pursuit of a comprehensive Middle East peace has effectively been put on hold.”

The Secretary of Defense then demanded that Israel reach out, not only to the Palestinians, but to Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, her past traditional allies.

First of all, as has been documented in an article by Khaled Abu Toameh in this Monday’s Jerusalem Post, chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat has rejected the demand by the Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union, the UN), for direct negotiations between the two parties.

The Palestinians refuse to sit down and talk to the Israelis, man to man. Why? Because they refuse to recognize the nation for what it is: a Jewish state. How do Obama and Panetta expect the two nations to live together in a peace that will endure for generations if the Palestinians cannot even accept Israel for what it is, and call it by its name?

What’s more:  PA negotiator Saeb Erekat expressed “surprise” that State Department’s Mark Toner has even asked the Palestinians to sit down in direct face-to-face negotiations with Israel.

In his worldview, the United States is out of line to ask anything of the Palestinians. He believes it is the Palestinians alone who have the right and power to do the demanding and set the rules.

The answer lies in the history of the way this administration has coddled the Palestinians since assuming office and has not acted as an “honest broker” or a referee between the sides, but as a consistent coach and cheerleader for the Palestinians.

As soon as Obama entered office, he quickly demanded that the Netanyahu government stop construction anywhere in the territories that Israel captured in its defensive war of 1967 and retained  when attacked again in the war of 1973. Astonishingly, his demand included any building in the city of Jerusalem, the eternal capitol of the Jewish people. The actions of the President and Secretary of State gave the Palestinian Authority a new feeling of invulnerability and entitlement.  This was brought out in a now-famous interview that Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post had with P.A. Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas  shortly after President Obama assumed office.  Abbas claimed all he had to do to achieve his Palestinian state was to wait for Obama to deliver the state and the land from the Israelis.

Now, Abbas has developed such a heightened sense of entitlement that he said he will not sit down with the Israelis unless first, they deliver on everything on the Palestinian wish list, including  a return to the 1949 armistice lines, which  UN representative Abba Eban of the Labor Party had realistically dubbed “the Auschwitz” lines because they were simply indefensible.  The 1948 lines would put every single Israeli city within easy range of an Arab Kassam missile. The Arab town of Kalkilya could easily launch Kassam rockets at Ben Gurion Airport. Just one Kassam rocket launched at the airport and the entire country would be closed off from air traffic.

Right of return of all Palestinian refugees.

As far as the right of return is concerned, the Palestinians have a very creative, ingenious way of accounting. The demographic rosters have been infinitely inflated. Every time a woman in Ramallah has an appendix attack, she is listed as giving birth to a child. Any unlimited Palestinian “right of return” would be a demographic nightmare that would signal the end of Israel as both a Jewish state and a democracy.

This growing listing of Palestinian hubris runs contrary to the iron-clad assurances that American  President George W. Bush gave to the government of Israel.

In a letter dated  April 14, 2004, given to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and signed by President George W. Bush, he stated: “As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.”

What happened to these American iron-clad assurances to the Jewish state when President Obama assumed office? Do American guarantees last only until the administration that gave them is out of office? And what does that make of American credibility and trustworthiness?

Furthermore, the Secretary of Defense seems to feel that it is Israel’s responsibility to make peace with Turkey, whose Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogen refuses diplomatic ties with Israel and has called Israel  the “military threat to the region.” Or with Egypt, who just voted in an “Islamist” Parliament last week. Islamists who have historically viewed both Israel and America as adversaries. And Jordan, whose king finds himself at high risk as Islamist fever and revolution overturn both monarchies and dictators across the Middle East.

It is interesting how a great deal of attention has been given recently to the subject of bullying. We  have suddenly noticed that there are kids in the classroom and on the playground who for one reason or another are singled out as vulnerable and everyone piles on them. In the Middle Eastern playground, Israel is cast as the vulnerable child, because she is different and because she is Jewish. The Arab world has never accepted her existence; not in 1929, not in 1948, not in 1967 and not in 2011. And no one in the neighborhood wants her on their team.

We have grown to expect that sort of bullying from the Arab world. It is sad and tragic, however, to see it come from spokesman of the United States.

That is because the kids in this neighborhood play with toys that are all too lethal, and when they sense that the United States is pulling away from Israel, they feel emboldened — and the neighborhood becomes that much more dangerous.

However, a significantly more powerful pro-Israel organization was also on the Hill at the same time arguing the total antithesis — that now was the time to speed up military aid to Egypt. They based their argument on the idea that the Egyptian military is the most Western and moderating of all Egyptian institutions and that supporting the military was our way of “buying a seat at the table.”

What good is a “seat at the table” when we put masking tape over our mouths? The United States has seldom been successful in utilizing our arms shipments to exert influence or leverage over countries that have taken billions of our dollars and our weapons — just look at the U.S.’s disastrous relationship with Pakistan, whom we are currently supporting with billions of dollars in aid and extensive shipments of the most modern arms, while their military actively supports the Taliban and assists in attacks on U.S. forces.

Since the Camp David Accords were signed between Israel and Egypt in 1979, America has  rebuilt the Egyptian military from being  a Russian equipped C- army to a powerful American trained and equipped A+ army  with the most advanced and sophisticated equipment.  Now all that technology and firepower will be in the hands of radical Islamist forces who fully support Hamas and Hezbollah and seek to destabilize the remaining friends of the U.S. in the Middle East.  Behind the scenes the Muslim Brotherhood has had a long and deep relationship with the Egyptian military.  Now, if the Muslim Brotherhood comes to political power in Egypt, it will be openly embraced by the military, producing a potentially disastrous mix of a religious/political ideology and a powerful military machine.

The “seat at the table” argument did not work during the 1979 Iranian revolution when we had to immediately halt our arms shipments to Tehran, nor has it worked with the Lebanese Armed Forces which has been completely over-run by Hizballah.

Anyone with any understanding of the Middle East knows that a.) Armies also want to survive and that the way that they survive is by aligning themselves with the biggest bully in the playground; b.) The Egyptian military is a professional military, and like all professional militaries they do not create policy, but carry it out; and c.) Armies are made up of human beings who are not impervious to the influences of the street.

The revolution that swept through Tahrir Square was initiated by the young, savvy and independent, Facebook crowd, but these idealistic young people lack the deep political infrastructure of the Muslim Brotherhood, the charismatic influence of the Imams and mosques and the deep conservative religious ethos of the Egyptian populace.

Now that Egyptians have gone to the polls, the question is not whether the radical Muslim Brotherhood will win a plurality of seats in their Parliament, but by how many.  The election’s final results will probably not be known until January, but it does not look as though Jeffersonian democracy will spring up in Egypt, or anywhere else in the Muslim and Arab Middle East.

The results of the Moroccan election of November 25^th are no more promising. The Islamist Justice and Development Party, (PJD) easily trumped all the others.  Nor are the October 23^rd Tunisian election results, which shows the Ennahda party, also Islamist, winning a clear plurality of the votes.

As our people painfully learned in 1932, when Hitler came to power through the process of a democratic election and then again in 2006, when Hamas came to power through another process of democratic elections in Gaza: one election is not sufficient to create a vibrant democracy.

Democracy means the ability to have a second, a third and a fourth election.

It means that the institutions of the government are in place that protects the rights of religious and other minorities, that there is an independent judiciary and an independent press. It means, as Natan Sharansky said, “the freedom to stand in the public square and criticize those in power without fearing for one’s life.”

We are facing the beginning of a long, chilling Middle East winter, where their supporters of America will be few and far between and the rights of the individual remain an even more distant dream. The young and idealistic revolutionaries of the Facebook generation must be feeling bereft, as many of them might soon be forced to conceal their yearnings for independence behind oceans of homogeneous abayas and hijabs.

And our one fellow vibrant democracy in the Middle East, Israel, becomes further isolated in a rejectionist sea of radical Islamism.

Firstly, the commander killed was Major Gen. Hasan Moghaddam, a senior IRGC commander with responsibility for the “Self-Sufficiency” unit of the Iranian’s missile forces, in particular surface-to-surface missiles. Moghaddam is said to have been a favorite of Ayatollah Khamenei, and it strains credibility that he was engaged in such a routine activity as personally supervising the transfer of munitions when the “accident” occurred. Secondly, according to an Israeli news report, Moghaddam had close ties to assassinated Hamas arms provider Mahmoud Al–Mabhouh, which suggests that, if Moghaddam was killed by the Mossad, they may be working their way up al-Mabhouh’s list of associates, possibly using intelligence gained from the terrorist’s interrogation before he was killed.

Western intelligence sources are confident that the explosion was indeed a successful Mossad operation.  The assassination of Moghaddam is just the latest in a series of shadowy attacks against Iran, specifically related to the missile program. Explosions have also killed Iranian missile technicians, an IRGC base where Shabab missiles are stored, and convoys transporting missiles, probably intended for Hezbollah.  Numerous nuclear scientists have been assassinated in the past two years, including Russian nuclear scientists killed in a plane crash in June.

Coincidentally, the Iranians also admitted Sunday that they had suffered from another computer virus attack, called “Duqu”, which is closely related to the previous Stuxnet virus. The Iranians claim to have “neutralized” Duqu before any substantial damage was done, but considering that Duqu is primarily designed as an information-gathering device, rather than a weapon of sabotage, it seems likely that whoever injected the code into the Iranian computer systems probably already got what they came for. “Duqu” would represent the third such virus attack against Iranian systems, including Stuxnet, and another virus program which the Iranians called “Stars”.

Lest one think that Iran is some hapless victim, the Islamic Republic is active in the shadows as well. Former CIA spy Reza Kahili’s Iranian sources tell him that the operation which included the assassination plot against a Saudi Ambassador on U.S. soil, and Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington and Buenos Aires, were hatched at the direction of Iran’s supreme leader. Bahraini intelligence claims they successfully intercepted a plot to bomb Saudi targets in the small Gulf country, and destroy the causeway which connects Bahrain to Saudi Arabia. On November 3^rd, an Afghan suicide bomb team targeted a construction company in Herat, Afghanistan. The likely commander of that operation, Samihullah, has close ties to Iran’s Al-Qods force.  Iranian support for the Taliban in Afghanistan has been publicly known for some time, and is a great concern for U.S. forces. Closer to home, Iran is heavily active in Latin America, expanding Al Qods and Hezbollah forces, ties with anti-American regimes, and even drug cartels. The Iranians have also been active in promoting and cheerleading the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, in the exact same manner they did the Arab Spring protests. Iran routinely host U.S. based Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR, MPAC and MSA, on their Press TV propaganda outlet.

When we consider the on-going covert conflict with Iran, it becomes readily apparent that the two sides have vastly different objectives. The West (including Israel and the United States, and other western allies who may be assisting in intelligence activities) are almost wholly focused on the nuclear weapons issue. Targets are those actively involved in the Iranian nuclear weapons project, or increasingly, involved in the delivery systems for such weapons, meaning surface to surface missiles.  The operations against Iran are largely technocratic. The elimination of particular scientists or arms suppliers, target specific reactors and centrifuges.  Success or failure can best be measured by Iran’s progress towards nuclear weaponization.

Are we succeeding? The recently released IAEA report contained intelligence information from ten countries, all leading to the conclusion that Iran has constructed and “cold tested” all the components of a nuclear warhead, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that the up to date intelligence places Iran further ahead than would be suggested by the already alarming U.N report. And despite the skill and ingenuity displayed by Western Intelligence in attempting to disrupt Iranian nuclear efforts, such efforts are likely doomed to failure. As U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen stated in February of last year, even an overt military strike would not stop the Iranian nuclear program for good.

By contrast, the Iranian objectives appear to be primarily about spreading influence and ideology, both regional, vis-à-vis its chief competitor Saudi Arabia, but also globally, seeking to hamper U.S. interests. The Iranians are clearly willing to engage in any theater, including the U.S. capital itself. The Iranians are a revolutionary opponent, focused on the spread of their Islamic revolution. They firmly believe that any action which upsets the status quo, and which creates chaos or dissension is to their advantage. As Iranian President Ahmadinejad said, “… [Iran] builds something you can’t respond to: Ethics, decency, monotheism and justice.” In other words, Ahmadinejad views the Iranian ideology as its most powerful weapon.

Viewed in these terms, can the Iranians then said to be achieving their objectives? One would be hard pressed to argue otherwise. The new Islamist Prime Minister of Tunisia has called for a new Caliphate and hosts Hamas. The head of Tunisia’s new ruling Islamist party, Rachid Ghannouchi has publicly declared that he “quite likes” Hamas’ rocket attacks against Israel. Even a leading Saudi thinker is calling the recent upheaval in the Middle East, “The Muslim Brotherhood Spring”. Prior to Mubark’s overthrow in Egypt, Egyptian intelligence warned the U.S. of Iran’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood in June of last year, according to a Wikileaked State Department cable. In the UAE, the Crown Prince warned of the risk of elections in any country with an organized Muslim Brotherhood presence.” Despite this the U.S. says it would be “satisfied,” with a Muslim Brotherhood victory, and trains Islamists in electioneering techniques.

Arguably then, Iran is achieving its broad objectives, even as particular operations, such as the Saudi Ambassador assassination fail and their hand is publicly revealed. By contrast, the efforts by the Western covert agencies have been operationally successful, and their fingerprints largely wiped cleaned. But despite numerous operational successes, the Iranians continue on undaunted, inching ever closer towards a nuclear weapons arsenal.

The West must adopt a far broader effort if it hopes to best Iran in this shadowy conflict. While operations delaying or hampering the Iranian nuclear project are positive, (as Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said of the Iranian explosion, “May there be more like it”) but these acts are merely to buy time, they do not represent an actual strategy against Iran’s global ambitions. Nuclear weapons play a role in these ambitions, but they are not a goal in and of themselves. The goal is worldwide Islamic revolution with Iran as its leader.

The West must set as its own goal, not merely the prevention of Iran’s nuclear weapons, but the overthrow of the regime, and the defeat of Islamism as an ideological force. To do that will require a willingness to combat Iran in every sphere of endeavor, and on every continent where they are operational. The U.S. must immediately cease cooperating with Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist parties, and equip liberals and democrats with the tools and training necessary to be successful against their Islamist opposition. This idea that the U.S. must support all parties equally in the interest of a free and fair election is deeply misguided.  Refusing to intervene in our own interest means only that Iran’s preferred parties and Islamist fellow-travelers are allowed to dominate. We should instead act, as we did when CIA operations affected the outcome of the Italian election of 1948, keeping the Communists from power in Italy. Even with the opportunity of the Iranian protests in 2009 squandered by an Obama Administration at pains to keep open negotiations with Iran, we can still work within Iran with opposition parties and dissidents to undermine and eventually defeat the regime.

Until such a strategy is devised and executed, we will find that the west can succeed at all of its covert operations, and yet still lose the shadow war.